She hadn’t remembered her father’s instruction to always trust the right hand until she had passed the second or third turn. Doubling back had made her situation worse since she wasn’t sure which way she had first gone. She was nervous and worried and wasn’t paying attention to her predicament.
She walked a bit farther and came across dusty chambers with old junk cluttering the floor. There, she found an armory, a granary, and a few storerooms. No one was around, and there were no signs anyone had been for some time. She was just about to turn back when she heard a boot scraping stone. Voices echoed in the passage.
The sound came from behind her, so she scurried forward to find a place to hide. Another intersection. She turned left. The voices grew louder, and she could make out bits of their conversation with words such as squealed, templar, and blood. The chatter made little sense, but it was ominous all the same. A few paces later, she found a door. She tested it by pushing against its smooth surface. It swung open. Her candlelight flowed over a huddled form lying on the floor. It was a cell. If it was, why wasn’t it locked? The sounds grew louder. There was no place else to hide, so she stepped inside the small room and behind the door so when it opened, no one would see her. She nudged the unlocked door closed with her foot.
“I tell you, Pesh. I’m not wild about holding a templar,” said the voice in the hall.
Pakka noticed her candle was still lit. She pinched the wick with her fingers.
“Hey, you leave a candle burning in there?” said a second voice.
“Nawp,” said the first. “You see something?”
There was a scraping sound. One drew a weapon from a scabbard, Pakka guessed. She held herself still. The door opened.
“Are you kidding me? Maken, who was the last guard on duty?”
“Geng. Why?”
“The door’s unlocked.”
“Aw, crap. Is the mighty templar still there?”
“Can’t tell. Give me your torch.” Light shone into the room followed by acrid smoke. A sigh. “No. He’s still here.”
“Is he alive?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. You’re right. Templars make bad prisoners. Boss should kill him and get him off our hands. Let’s go. And lock the door this time damn it.”
The door swung shut, and it rattled a few times as the guard secured it with what Pakka guessed was giant-hair rope.
The guards and their voices moved off. Pakka breathed in relief. They had left the torch in the hall outside or had lit another one. Light leaked through the small window high in the door.
The figure stirred. A hand appeared out from under the black cloth covering it and laid palm down on the floor.
Pakka cringed and pulled her knife.
The hand pushed the body upright. It paused then lifted its head. When it did, Pakka gasped.
It was a man, but he had been abused. His face was cut and bruised, oozing blood and drool; the black stubble on his chin was caked with filth.
He tried to speak, to form words with his damaged mouth.
Pakka approached.
“I …” he said.
“Yes?” she said, her voice faint.
“I don’t suppose you brought any water?”
Melech stumbled after the halfling. His head spun, his face throbbed, and he could see from the expressions he encountered that he looked frightful. His pain and appearance, though, were the last things on his mind. And he worked for Torston. The elf was the very same slaver that Melech had sworn to kill. He felt both excited to find him and frustrated he would not be able to touch him so long as he was chummy with Torston.
What was the connection? He wasn’t one of the gang. Melech knew every pickpocket and second-story man in the crime boss’s employ. He was someone outside the organization, and Melech wasn’t sure why his master would climb in bed with an outsider. It wasn’t like him. He didn’t make alliances. People worked for him or were victimized by him.
They hadn’t walked far before Kep turned down a dead-end alley. Melech followed. As he walked, he shook out his arms and rolled his head to loosen up his shoulders. He had to focus. He couldn’t let distractions—no matter how important—affect him. Melech needed Torston and his first priority was getting back into his master’s good graces.
Kep disappeared through a curtain leading into the dreaming den, a smoke-filled hovel where Tyr’s dregs could while away their days and nights inhaling smoke from burning pakla paste. Melech had never used the stuff. He heard there was nothing better for carrying away all the pains and worries. The templars had used it to control slaves. They handed out sticky blocks to the laborers at the end of their shift, giving them just enough to get a taste for the stuff. Addiction was just as good as loyalty.
Smoke filled the air. The few lit candles created blobby light in the haze. Melech saw dreamers lying on the floor or in bunks, little more than shelves. Humans, muls, dwarves, and even a few thri-kreen lay torpid and dull eyed, deep in the drug’s grasp. As Melech moved by them, he could see the old slave tattoos on their faces and arms. They may be free, but the templars’ gifts enslaved them still.
The mist swirled as a pale dwarf stepped forward in greeting. He wore a red tabard. Vomit stained the neck.
Kep gave a signal. The dwarf bowed, turned, and led them into the place. They followed him through a curtain and into a room where some toughs sat at tables playing tiles. Scarred faces grimly watched them move toward the stone staircase. It led down. Torches stuck out from holes drilled into the stone. They gave enough light to see the steps went down quite a ways. The dwarf handed Melech and Kep several unlit brands and gestured for them to descend.
Few people knew it, but Tyr was not the first city to stand on its foundations. There were at least two previous cities, victims of conquest, the latest of which was Kalak the Merciless. Rather than repair the destruction, he had the defeated people rebuild overtop the old. As new streets and new buildings rose from the ruins, they buried their culture, their lives, and their freedom for all time.
Much of the older city, however, survived. Under-Tyr, as the city’s rogues called it, was the thieves’ highway. Old broken streets led to every district, connecting the Warrens to the Brickyards, the Noble Quarters to the Golden City. People with money—nobles, merchants, and templars, for the most part—went to great lengths to seal off the hidden routes, sometimes bricking them up, other times filling them with rubble from cave-ins. If those methods failed, the king had just sent his templars in to sweep the ruins. They shooed out the squatters and the thieves. For a few days, weeks, maybe even a month, the tunnels stood empty. People returned in time and it became business as usual all over again.
Melech followed Kep down the stairs. In the flickering torchlight, Melech spied crude graffiti scrawled on the walls. Some depicted old Kalak engaged in lewd behavior with a great many different creatures. More recent markings had King Tithian doing the same in Kalak’s place or doing unthinkable things with Kalak himself. At another time, Melech might have added his own artistic talent to the mix, but not at the moment.
The tunnel grew darker the deeper they descended. Kep lit his torch from one of the last few brands lit on the wall. It sputtered, dropping cinders to the ground.
The staircase twisted and turned, wandering with little rhyme or reason. The walls ended as the steps wound down through the ceiling of a massive chamber. Melech marveled at its enormity. He could tell, even with the feeble torchlight, the chamber had once been a plaza. Buildings, some with columns still intact, supported the ceiling overhead. Where no serviceable structures remained, square struts, perhaps a thousand years old, held up the streets above. Kep’s torch flung light across the vast chamber. Shadows danced in answer. Melech could imagine things hiding in the gloom, pale, eyeless creatures thirsty for blood. It was so frightening an image, he almost forgot the elf slaver lurking in his thoughts.
Kep continued and took them one step at a time, testing each to ascertain its strength before p
utting any weight on the stone. The steps were narrow and cracked. Dust spilled from the sides to vanish into the shadows below. As Melech maintained Kep’s pace, he could see the old rock had given way in places, and as they neared the bottom, he could see their shattered remains littering the floor.
Stepping off the final step, Melech could not help but tremble. He lit his torch from Kep’s and moved off a little to examine one of the structures. The nearest one was a blocky tower. A black cavity led into its interior, and dark slits pocked its face. Burn marks and pits marred its surface. A weird symbol stood over what Melech guessed was a door. It was a snake eating its own tail.
“Melech,” said Kep. “Let’s go.”
Melech stared at the darkness, wondering who built the tower, what the people were like. The damage and the brittle bones lying all over the floor suggested something terrible had happened there. He turned away and found the halfling across the chamber. Kep walked down what used to be a road. To Melech’s eyes the light carried by the tiny figure seemed an intrusion to the mausoleum’s perfect darkness.
Alaeda had no trouble following the human and his halfling companion. She kept her distance, staying back just far enough so she could blend in to the crowds but close enough to follow. It was not long after the two left the Rat’s Nest when they picked up two more tails in front of Alaeda. Two hideous mul bruisers had stepped away from a terrified human merchant peddling smallclothes when the man, a young man, walked by. There was no mistaking the thugs’ intentions. Alaeda could see them craning their necks to watch the thief and the halfling. They hurried to keep up as they made their way through the Warrens. They were brutes good for one thing: killing.
Melech and the halfling entered a dreaming den. The muls had the common sense to wait a few minutes before following. Alaeda, far more accustomed to that sort of thing, waited for a weedy young man to stumble down the same alley to piss against the wall. When he had concluded his business, she took his arm, whispered something filthy, and escorted him inside. She dumped him off a few moments later with a pipe and a pouch of bits to pay for his smoke.
Her blade changed the dwarf proprietor’s mind about being helpful, and with the sword at his neck, he pointed out a staircase headed down. “Under-Tyr,” he said in a voice thick with pakla smoke. “Busy day for the old city.”
She had slipped him a silver coin and whispered in his ear, “Take the coin but don’t spend it right away. Look at it, treasure it, and forget where you got it. Don’t make me come back and kill you.”
A nod slight enough to keep him from pricking his skin on her blade’s point got him released from her grip, and he supplied her with torches so she could see in the under-city.
She followed the muls. There was no reason to stay too close. They made enough noise, she could have followed them if she were blind. They stumbled into every pile of bricks they happened upon, jostling each other and throwing stones into the dark as they walked. It was almost as if they wanted the human and halfling to know they were there. Maybe they did. Alaeda was certain they were there to kill them. She did not care about the thief. She wasn’t in Tyr’s bowels to save some boy with bad luck. No, she was there to see what they were up to, if they were up to anything. It might just be a lure to trap the thieves, and if so, she would lose an hour or two at most and could then go back to her business of sorting out her own house’s plots.
Alaeda was more and more certain the elf Galadan was behind the assassin’s attempt on her life. He knew where she was. He had separated her from her personal guard. But why? She knew too much. She had set up the meeting with House Shom. She had insinuated herself with House Vordon through Talara Vordon, and Alaeda had no doubts people knew she had saved Talara’s life. Furthermore, Galadan saw her as a threat. She was Stel, after all, and had every right to take over the operation in the city. She should have put the elf in his place at the Kank. But he caught her by surprise. Fatigue and confusion had left her unprepared for Galadan’s power grab. Once she determined what the thief and halfling were doing, she would head back up and have a chat with the elf. She touched her sword’s pommel.
The muls disappeared behind more ruins. She tracked them by the light shining above the broken walls. Alaeda followed.
“You hear that?” asked Melech.
Kep shrugged. “Lots of bad stuff down here. Snake-men and such.”
“Snake-men?” Melech almost laughed. He had heard the old stories but chalked them up to cautionary tales intended to keep children from exploring the tunnels. “Yeah. Sure. Thieves? Yep. Murderers? Uh-huh. Snake-men? Right.”
Kep frowned. “Snake-men. If we’re lucky, we won’t see any, but I, too, hear sounds. Could be them.”
Melech chuckled, though he heard his nervousness. Thieves used the paths all the time. Some team on some errand. Nothing to worry about.
They had been walking for an hour, and each turn revealed more and more of the ruined old city. Melech had never gone too far through the city’s underworld. Torston kept him in the markets and businesses, where his particular talents proved more useful.
They walked for some time. Each turn took them deeper into the ruins, and Melech was surprised by what he found. Evidenced from the intricate carvings and delicate architecture, a thriving community once lived there, lives, hopes, and dreams all dashed by a conqueror’s ambition. All those people, all those lives sealed up in a tomb, lost and forgotten almost as if they never were there at all.
He shook himself out of the dark thoughts and whispered, “Tell me about the halfling, Kep.”
Kep flinched but otherwise ignored the question. He searched the darkness as they picked their way across the uneven ground. He was following the thief signs scrawled on the walls, a code many of Tyr’s criminals used to pass along messages, such as “watch your step here,” or directions and indicators as to what was overhead. The last marking told them they were under the Noble Quarters, which meant they were close to the city’s outer wall.
After almost thirty minutes of walking, they reached the ancient city’s edges, where the ceiling had, at some point in the past, caved in, finishing the task Kalak started centuries earlier. Melech guessed many collapses in the area were recent since the nobles were more guarded about letting thieves enter their homes through the cellars. Such efforts were never sufficient. A man with pockets as deep as Torston’s could keep the pathways clear.
They left the ruins down a small corridor. Not long after, the passage opened onto a small chamber. A broken fountain stood in its center. The basin had cracked into three pieces, and an incomplete statue stood in the middle. As they neared it, Melech could see it was once white marble. Grime, mold, and dust obscured what must have been fine stone.
Kep wedged his torch in a crack in the floor and sat. “Rest. Food,” he said.
Melech’s face hurt but he wasn’t tired yet, so he snooped around the fountain. He was surprised to find water still pooled at the bottom. A pale vine with long, barbed thorns grew up from the murky liquid. Little teardrop fruits hung from the vine. They looked exquisite. He almost reached out to pluck one but then realized what he was doing. There was no telling what was in the fruit. He suspected they were poisonous. Why had he wanted one? Some queer influence from the plant. He abandoned the fountain and sat next to Kep, casting one last look at the plant.
The halfling fished a haunch of meat from his backpack. Melech could smell it was spoiled. He fought down his revulsion when Kep, after picking off a few maggots, set into it.
Between mouthfuls, Kep talked, every now and then wiping grease from his chin. “Watari is a traitor. A renegade. He is un-peopled.”
“Un-peopled? I don’t understand,” said Melech, surprised to get an answer to a question he fielded a quarter hour past.
“Means he’s no longer us.” He cocked a thumb toward his chest.
“So he pissed your people off? What could he have done?”
“He ate the elder.”
“Ate the
elder?”
Kep nodded. “He also defiled the sacred grove.”
“I see. Let’s get back to the elder business. You’re saying he ate the elder.”
Kep took another bite.
“I didn’t think eating people was such a big deal.”
Kep shrugged. He threw the bone across the room, where it clattered in the dark. He clambered to his feet as he wiped his hands on his breeches. When he was done, he retrieved his torch. “Come. We move.”
“Hey, wait,” said Melech.
The halfling stopped and looked at him.
“I’m … I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. About the templar.”
The halfling smiled. “It is fine. We all have secrets.” He headed off toward the edges of the ruined city, where Tembo’s Teeth waited, where they would finish the task Torston set for them.
Rocks shifted somewhere behind them. Melech spun and drew his bone knife. He held his torch high to save his eyes and peered into the gloom. There was nothing. No movement. No more sounds. Snake-men, he thought. Heh.
“Be quiet!” said the mul Melech had named Ugly.
The second, whom Melech called Uglier, spread his arms in apology.
“He almost sees us, fool.”
The second scratched his lumpy chin. “Shame ’bout Melech. Like him.”
Ugly nodded. “Me too. Funny. Torston boss though, so we do what he says.”
“Me know, me know. We but pawns in big game of life,” said Uglier.
“You make noise?” asked Ugly. He knew there were snake-men in the tunnels, had even killed a few for sport. They were mean and had poisonous fangs.
Death Mark Page 21
