The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1)

by J. C. Staudt

  As ever, Bastille’s skull was grinding like a rock in a tumbler. She rubbed at her forehead, winced, and realized that most of the blood wasn’t Adeleine’s. It was hers. The scratches and gouges Adeleine was examining along her arms were the only damage Bastille had been able to do before the soldiers grabbed her.

  “I told you that old woman was crazy,” Kugh said. “What’s taking Dashel so long? I’m about to let loose on this stupid bitch.”

  “Do it, then. Filthy heathen,” said Bastille, still struggling in vain to free herself from Reed’s grasp.

  “You need a new hobby, lady,” said Kugh. “I think the smell down here is going to your head.”

  Bastille licked the blood off her lips and spat. Kugh stepped out of the way.

  “Shit man, she’s bleeding on me,” Reed said.

  “Let her go. I got her,” said Trim, gun trained.

  Reed eased up, and Bastille pulled free of him. She scooped up the towel, folded it to a clean side, and reapplied it to her forehead.

  “Try anything like that again, and he’s gonna shoot you this time,” said Kugh, pointing at Trim and his gun. “I don’t care how much noise it makes, I’ll allow it. Swear to Infernal, I will. I’ll mow down every last Mouther in this place if that’s what it takes to shut you up.”

  “Manners,” Bastille said.

  “Yeah, what about ‘em?”

  “You have none. I suppose they didn’t teach you any when they were training you to be a meathead.”

  “Keep it up, lady.”

  The door opened, and in came Sister Jeanette with Mortial in tow. Jeanette was pale, still recovering from the same sickness that had rendered her bedridden for the last several days.

  Mortial was dazed, as though he’d just seen something he would sooner have avoided. It was almost the same look he’d had after coming back from the lavatory that day during Bastille’s class. His brow darkened when he looked around. “What happened in here?”

  “Nothing,” Adeleine said. “Everything’s fine.” She crossed the room and hugged Sister Jeanette, then took her by the hands. The two women began to speak in hushed tones.

  Bastille felt a wave of jealousy. Sister Adeleine was like a chair Bastille had sat on until it broke. Now she was bruised, sitting over splinters on the cold stone floor. “I forbid you to leave,” she said. “Any of you. You were all three inducted into the Order with lifelong vows. If you wish to ask for release, go before the Most Highly Esteemed and request it. But I won’t let you just leave.”

  Bastille knew that the Most Highly Esteemed never let priests leave the Order. The ones who tried became food for the hogs and the Cypriests. Her entire crop of new students was in this room. If they all left, she would have to start over.

  “I don’t want anything to do with this ridiculous cult,” said Mortial. “I got sent here to spy on you. Now that my work is done, I’m never coming back. I won’t speak for these two ladies, but whatever pretense they had for joining is obviously not strong enough to keep them here either. It’s best for everyone involved if Sister Jeanette comes with us. The fact that she wants to come is even better. If Adeleine wants out as well, I’m happy to bring her. That goes for you too, Sister Bastille. Just say the word. The city north is safe. It’s successful. There are laws there. Real, actual laws that people have to live by, for everyone’s benefit. It’s the furthest thing from the anarchy that’s so commonplace across the rest of the Aionach. Who knows, you might even like it there more than here.”

  Bastille’s heart jumped at the thought of leaving. If she went to the city north, maybe she could find this healer the soldiers had spoken of. It sounded like they knew him well. Surely the healer offered a more promising hope than did standing in line for a Nexus. But there were things besides the Nexus keeping her here. The moment slipped away from her, and she knew she had to stay. “There is no anarchy in this basilica, Mortial,” she said, “and this is no cult. The Order is the counterpoint to everything that’s wrong and unkind in the Aionach. It’s a solitary point of light in this darkest of worlds. To live for the Most High Infernal Mouth demands a higher calling; a calling for which you have clearly never found inspiration. The three of you have been misguided, and I pity your undevoured souls for the torment that awaits you when you leave.”

  Kugh gave a loud sigh, checked the chamber of his rifle, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Can we coffing get out of here already? I don’t understand a word of what this lady is saying.”

  “Yeah, we’re going,” said Mortial. “But Sister Bastille, don’t forget what I said about Soleil. He isn’t a person to be trifled with. The Order will never attain that flawless purity you seem to be so determined to find. There will always be priests who carry their depravities through the labyrinth’s halls, and acolytes who bring the secrets of their past lives with them through those gates. The Order is not what you think it is. You may not realize it yet, but you’re more lost than you know. If there’s any shred of doubt in you, any part of you that wants to leave this all behind, now’s the time to listen to it. I can only guarantee your admittance to the city north while I’m with you. I’m never coming back here. You won’t get another chance.”

  Bastille wanted to weep. Her mentor was a degenerate. Her pupils had chosen to follow a doomed path. Her chance at inheriting a Nexus would elude her for years yet to come. And still, this quiet life of solitude, of study and devotion and higher thought—it was what she wanted. The past two years had been better for her than any life she’d known outside these walls. Even if there was nothing she could do about Brother Soleil, she could be content with carrying on as though none of this had ever happened. She was comfortable here, with or without a chair to sit on.

  Bastille put a hand to her chest. When she felt the iron star hanging there between her breasts, a sense of calm came over her. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t be coming with you. But I do thank you for your advice, however misguided it may be. I have no way to summon the Cypriests or the Esteemed without leaving the room. As much as I wish you all were staying to live out your vows, I have no choice but to let you go.”

  Kugh muttered a curse about something that had finally happened. He stormed to the door and pried it open, waving a hand to get the others moving.

  There go my two last hopes, thought Bastille, as she watched them exit the room. Adeleine, my last hope of passing down the rites; and Jeanette, my last hope of ridding the Order of Soleil and his corruptions. Or maybe not. There was still the body rotting in the nook beside the east tower. Brother Froderic’s body. Or someone else’s. But Mortial’s warning was enough to make Bastille hesitate before she thought of tampering with it again.

  The three soldiers and the three former acolytes left the room and shut the door behind them. Bastille didn’t follow them to see which labyrinth entrance they’d used to access the cellars. Instead, she took a roll of gauze from a supply shelf and dressed the wound on her forehead. I must look rather a fright, she thought. I’ll need an explanation for this.

  When she was done, she hung up her robe, hid the iron key in a pocket, and returned to the woman’s corpse to resume the sacrificial rites. There would be no students in Sister Bastille’s class today.

  CHAPTER 36

  Visited

  When Daxin’s eyes opened, he was looking down into a pool of brown water. The floods had engulfed the cave floor while he slept, and the water had risen until it was no more than half a fathom below him. The far-off sound of the rain pounding the desert outside was like a layer of static over the plip-plip-plip of thousands of tiny droplets from the cavern ceiling.

  The ripples on the water’s glassy surface made the ceiling’s reflection tremble like a mirage. The cave smelled of soured mud, and the stone pathway at the entrance was awash with snaking trails of residue. They were trapped in here until the rain let up and allowed the cave to drain—unless they wanted to suffer burns and rashes for the next week—and the water m
ight rise higher still.

  Daxin’s mare was already learning that the hard way. The skin on her lower legs was pink and inflamed, the hair falling out in patches. He cursed himself for not tying her off, and the horse gave him a belligerent snort from across the pond as if to scold him for it.

  Ellicia lay tucked further in on the ledge, her breathing slow and deep. She opened her eyes when Daxin stirred, smiling when she saw him looking at her. Daxin turned away without smiling back. He pulled himself to the edge of their little cubbyhole and sat with his legs dangling over the side.

  “Sleep well?” came Ellicia’s voice from behind him.

  Daxin felt her hand on his lower back. He hadn’t planned for the two of them to be isolated from everyone else, but after she’d climbed up the ladder to join him, everybody else who passed by their little rocky cleft had taken one look and gone off to find another. Not that Daxin could blame them; it wasn’t as if there was a soul in Dryhollow Split who hadn’t noticed them together.

  He couldn’t deny that being with her was a comfort, but being alone with her was a temptation. He missed Vicky, all the more because he’d had to dredge up old stories about their life together to fill in the details of his lies. He missed Savannah, his baby girl. He wondered whether Toler had already begun to poison her against him. Daxin even missed his brother, as strange as that made him feel to realize. Being alone had been easy at first, but loneliness had been wearing away at him for so long that he’d begun to crave the affection he’d once known. Four years was a long time. Sometimes it felt like so long ago that it was almost as if Victaria had come to him in some dream, or some other life. Ellicia is a replacement, he reminded himself. A gratuitous, ill-fitted replacement. No one could ever mean what Vicky meant to me. Not Ellicia—not anyone.

  It would be easy to have Ellicia if Daxin wanted. He knew how she felt about him; he knew she didn’t have the slightest reservation. He could turn to her now, take her in his arms, and make love to her. She would let him do whatever he liked. The thought made his pulse quicken. Vicky left you, he heard Toler’s voice say. Let her go. Vicky made her choice. The memory of his shame was enough to stifle Daxin’s desire like a torch beneath a river. There was a stubborn hope wrapped up in it too. Fool that he was, he was still holding onto the belief that one day he would find Victaria and she would realize that she had been wrong to leave him.

  He’d spent so many long evenings lying awake as his despair drove him mad, that he had convinced himself he no longer cared whether Victaria loved him. They’d pledged themselves to one another until death. Not until they stopped loving each other, or until they lived under different roofs, or until he fell in love with another woman. Death. He would keep that pledge as long as he lived, until he knew the truth, or died finding it.

  “Yeah, I slept pretty well,” he told Ellicia, sliding further down the ledge to escape the reach of her hand.

  She crawled over and sat next to him. “What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

  “I’m just getting cabin fever, being cooped up in here like this.”

  She gave him a gentle prod with her shoulder. “What’s the matter, you don’t enjoy my company?”

  “I’m just sore, and I want to stand up straight and walk around.” He hadn’t meant to sound irritated, but he was, and it came out that way.

  Ellicia bit the corner of her mouth, and when she turned away from him, her eyes were welling with tears. It’s just as well that I distance myself from her now, Daxin reassured himself. He’d be leaving Dryhollow Split when the rains stopped, and he’d made plenty of unwise decisions already; decisions that had brought him dangerously close to being found out. Now he was trapped in a hole in the ground while the above-world went by without him. He stared out over the water, watching the ceiling’s reflection waver. It was like the veil of a dream; it relaxed him, and it made him remember.

  The saddle. The one Toler loved.

  The one he always kept in the house, even though it smelled like horse. It was Toler’s prized possession, the thing the nomads had brought with them the day they had carried the bodies of Lyle and Priella Glaive back to Bradsleigh. Before he was old enough to ride, Toler would set the saddle on the living room floor and play make-believe in his pajamas, reliving their parents’ glory days on the wastes. He never let that saddle out of his sight. It was the talisman of their father’s spirit, and as Toler grew, it had become his as well.

  “Pchhh. Pchhh. I sooted the duns and tilled all the bad dways,” he would shout. “Wahoooo! Dassin! Dassin! My hoasey wunned weally fast!”

  Daxin and Toler had made an uneasy truce a few months after their big falling out. They’d done it for Savvy’s sake more than anything else, but things hadn’t been the same between them since.

  The saddle had been resting in its usual place, laid over the old wooden bench in the foyer, where Toler always kept it when he came to visit. He never stayed long enough to call the Glaive compound anything but a vacation home anymore; he was too busy making a name for himself at Vantanible, Inc., spending his time in Unterberg whenever he wasn’t crisscrossing the Inner East on every trade route from Tristol to Southcape.

  Savannah loved when Uncle Toler came to visit. They’d grown up close; being only six years apart, Daxin and Victaria had raised them like siblings. Savannah loved to hear Toler’s stories of danger and exploit. Every time he visited, she would ask him if he’d found a girlfriend yet, and every time his answer would be the same: ‘I’ve got plenty of girlfriends, Savvy. One in every town, at least.’ Daxin would frown and sigh and shake his head while Toler and Savvy laughed at him.

  As seldom as Toler came home anymore, he never forgot to bring Savvy some trinket from a faraway place. First, it was a flowered hairpin from Yellow Harbor. Then he’d brought her an old make-up kit he’d picked up in Lottimer, traded off a ship from somewhere across the Tideguine. There were lipstick cases and decorative candles and earrings and statuettes, a burlap doll with cotton stuffing, and a silver teaspoon with the symbol of the Ambassador’s flag from Beywarden.

  Savannah was never as excited when Daxin came home. She always worried about him, but she also knew he was off somewhere in search of her mother. He would trudge in the door, brooding and silent and sweat-stained, and she would know the result had been the same as each time before. It was always the elephant in the room, and in the ensuing years, the subject of Victaria became a rift between father and daughter. The more distant and rebellious Savannah got, the more Daxin closed himself off from her and everyone else, and the more often he left Bradsleigh to search for his wife. He’d convinced himself that finding Vicky would make his daughter happy again, but his motives had been selfish. He’d been wrong about everything. He was still wrong, though he only admitted it in those rare moments when he swallowed his pride long enough to be honest with himself. If he’d spent time nourishing his relationship with Savannah instead of chasing shadows, he might have repaired the damage.

  Daxin’s first mistake that day had been going through Toler’s belongings. He’d noticed the saddle and the open saddlebag beside it while he was walking through the living room, nursing a cup of stale coffee. Toler hadn’t been around; he’d probably been downstairs catching up with his niece. Inside the saddlebag, Daxin had found the usual traveling man’s fare: trail food, cooking utensils, waterskins, and a good bit of hardware. He’d been making plenty of money working for Vantanible, by the looks of it. Then Daxin had seen the rolled piece of parchment poking its neck above the other items. He knew he could slip it out and have a look without touching anything else. He had a moment of hesitation, where he heard that little voice that always told him when he was being a jackass. Sometimes he wished he’d listened to that voice.

  The parchment unfurled into a detailed map of the Inner East. Vantanible trade routes were sketched out between every town and city and colony and settlement. The page was entitled UPDATED CARAVAN SCHEDULE, and at the bottom was a list of each caravan, fol
lowed by the dates they were scheduled to arrive at each stop. He’d found a summary of Nichel Vantanible’s entire business. Toler must be moving up in the world to be trusted with this kind of information, Daxin remembered thinking. Someone in possession of a piece of paper like this could ruin Vantanible, given the right resources.

  In the confines of his study that day, Daxin had found a blank sheet of parchment and begun to sketch.

  Somewhere in the cave, a woman screamed.

  Daxin’s mare bellowed, rearing up and plodding sideways into the standing water as if she no longer minded the irritation it caused. Two adult sanddragons came slinking into the cavern, their slender scaled bellies dragging in the muck. They fought for position, snapping at one another as if racing toward some invisible finish line. Daxin’s mare floundered in the pool, the water halfway up her legs and the whites of her eyes gleaming. There was no doubt that the tarragons could smell the horse’s fear; their red-orange eyes were colder than death, and they spoke of hunger.

  When the head of a third sanddragon came around the bend, Daxin knew his decoy had been a failure. He thought of the bag hanging from the tree, the amputated leg inside, and how the thirsty ground had swallowed the blood. Carrying Duffy’s venom-infused leg through the scrubs was akin to spraying perfume in a corner and carrying the bottle across the room. Every hungry sanddragon for horizons around would be on its way here, following the perfume trail.

  Daxin watched the great lizards wriggle through the opening, clawed feet at the end of powerful legs scraping trails in the mud and over each other’s backs. He counted eleven of them before there were so many he lost track. Some looked like they could’ve been twice as long as a man. They dispersed and began to prowl, pacing the crescent-shaped fragment of land along the cave’s edge, licking the air with forked tongues, hanging back from the water as if aware of its taint.