Matthias clutched his robe around his chest and hurried past the closed and locked offices, past the ivory busts of previous Rocaans, past the gilt-framed portraits that hung from the corridor walls. One of the Auds, a small, balding man he didn’t recognize, grabbed him by the arm, oblivious to the breach of etiquette.
“Please, Respected Sir, we need palace guards here. Only they can save us.”
The man’s grip was strong. It rooted Matthias into place. He glanced down at the hands on his arm. They were bare, in accordance with an Aud’s disdain for ornamentation, the fingers thick and blunt, the nails bitten through. Matthias slowly brought his gaze to the Aud’s face.
“The only one who can save us,” Matthias said slowly, “is the Holy One carrying our prayers to God.”
Matthias shook free and continued down the corridor, not waiting for the Aud’s response. More servants ran past him, carrying sticks and bits for firewood. One large man in chefs white lugged a large sacred sword ripped from the Servants’ Chapel door. Matthias bit back a reprimand. The man could wait for discipline if he survived the day.
Which, Matthias was fairly certain, none of them would.
He took a deep breath to calm himself. He had never seen such fighting. It had begun shortly after he’d sent the Danites to the King. People were slaughtered all over the streets by Fey with swords. Then this latest group of Fey arrived, and with a simple touch, they could flay a man alive. Matthias had watched three such killings from the Rocaan’s windows before he’d realized deep in his soul that the pain and suffering were real—that neither the Holy One nor Roca himself would swoop down from the heavens to protect the true believers.
Although, so far, they had protected the Tabernacle.
But that wouldn’t last long.
Finally he reached the bend in the corridor that attached the newest wing of the Tabernacle to the earlier kirk. There the stone was older and flaking, the carpets threadbare, the lighting simple candles placed in tiny gold holders. He grabbed one of the candles, then shoved a key into the lock of a small wooden door.
The key turned slowly and the lock itself groaned at the use. For a moment he was afraid it wouldn’t open at all. Then he felt the mechanism give. He pushed the door open and coughed at the dust that floated out to greet him.
He glanced over his shoulder. No one was in the corridor. He stuck the candle in first, then followed it, closing the door behind himself.
The candlelight was meager. It illuminated only his hand and arm and small patches of the surrounding wall. He couldn’t see the stairs, didn’t know if they had rotted away from disuse. The air was stale and dust-filled. He took a step, using the toe of his leather shoe as a guide to find the edge of the stair. He found it and stepped down gingerly.
Something caught in his hair, and he muffled a cry, flailing with his left hand until his fingers tangled in the sticky strands of a spider’s web. He grimaced but made himself move forward, hand extended outward in front of his face to prevent any of that gooey stuff from touching him again.
By the Blessed Sword, he had never envisioned himself doing this when he had awakened that morning. He had expected to go through his routine, to finish negotiating with the Rocaan over the land south of Killeny’s Bridge for the Auds, to speak with the King’s son Nicholas about his lack of faith, to sup with the Rocaan. Matthias had never imagined that by evening the world as they knew it might be gone.
But no one had envisioned this, and even if they had, they hadn’t known how to prepare for it. They had no soldiers, only guards who had trained on stories of peasant battles generations old. The sea and the rocks had guarded Blue Isle. Until now.
The deeper beneath the Tabernacle he went, the colder the air grew. The chill had a dampness to it. Water dripped somewhere ahead of him. There was a rank smell down there of swamplike decay, and he didn’t want to think what manner of creatures he might find as he went forward.
The stairs twisted into the darkness. Matthias leaned on the rotted railing, counting the landings, two, three, four. On the fifth he stopped, holding his candle forward in the vain hope that he would be able to see the bottom.
And he froze. The edge of the landing had fallen away. The stairs were gone. These passages were not the answer. He had hoped to hide the Rocaan down here. But not even a young man would survive the jump to the bottom.
He swallowed. His throat was dry. He had never realized how much being alone terrified him. He clutched at the sword around his neck more from habit than any desire to call upon the Holy One. He had to get back upstairs and find another solution.
But he didn’t want to go back to the chaos. He wanted to wake up and discover this was all a nightmare, that he would be warm in his bed, and the rain would still be beating outside, marking the continuation of the unnatural summer. He wanted to start the day all over again, not visit the Rocaan’s hellhole, not see those ghostly masts on the Cardidas, not feel that frisson of terror rising in his stomach.
The drip-drip-drip of the water was fading behind him. His meager candle was burning low, the wax warm as it melted across his fingers. He didn’t move very quickly, afraid of being alone in the darkness, but the force of his imaginings kept him moving. He knew, in the rational part of his mind, that he would go upstairs to find things still the same: the Auds and servants panicked, the Danites prepared, the Officiates blocking the door to the Rocaan’s suite, but the part of his mind that held dreams and terrors had locked on to the images of death it had seen that morning.
He didn’t want to die that way.
He didn’t want to know that nothing lived beyond the grave, that Rocaanism was the vision of a crazed, charismatic man who had managed to collect believers all over the Isle centuries ago. Matthias paused and rubbed his free hand over his face. In times of trouble the true believers were turning to their God, and he—scholar, leader, rational thinker—had nothing to turn to at all.
Even though he had tried to believe. He had tried to believe, since he was born the second son in a land-owning family, the son who would live in his brother’s shadow or make a shadow so large in the Tabernacle that no one—not even his brother—could ignore it. The moral part of him had thought it wrong that he was using the Church for personal gain, and that part was crying the loudest now, telling him that this fix he was in was his fault for denying the power of the Words Written and Unwritten.
He climbed the stairs two at a time, clinging to the rotting railing for support. The candle’s flame guttered; in a moment it would go out entirely. His fear of the darkness won over his fear of the real world—he pushed the door open with a strength he didn’t know he had—
—Only to feel the door open a few inches and then jam. Light poured in as his candle flickered out. Voices, shouting in a language he didn’t recognize, echoed through the corridor, followed by screams and thuds. For one crazy moment he thought of running back down the stairs, but knew he couldn’t. He had a duty to the Rocaan—a duty he valued as much as his life. He couldn’t forsake the old man now.
Matthias shoved on the door again, this time opening it far enough to stick his head through. To his great relief the corridor was empty except for the prone body of an Aud blocking the door.
God. They were inside now.
The terror he had felt below rose like bile in his throat. He shoved again, a strength born of panic coursing through him. The Aud’s body slid to the side and he got out, slamming the door behind him. Blood was spattered all over the stone walls and was running down the door.
He had to get upstairs. He had to see.
The screams and clangs were coming from the direction he had originally come from. He would have to go through the servants’ wing.
Matthias stepped over the body of the Aud and ran down the corridor. The shouts grew fainter as he moved. There were signs of turmoil everywhere: candles knocked on the floor, tables overturned. Someone had slashed a portrait of the Tenth Rocaan, the canvas curling forward, ch
ips of paint scattered on the floor.
Matthias had rounded the final corner past the Servants’ Chapel when he saw them. A band of twenty Fey, tall, slender, and frightening in their dark leather. They were standing over the body of another Aud and arguing in that guttural language. A deep laugh interrupted them, and a shorter Fey, wearing a red cap, his features gnarled, reached down to the Aud, took long, dripping strips from the body, and stuck them into a bag around his waist.
It took a moment before Matthias realized the strips were the man’s skin.
He couldn’t repress the groan of shocked horror that left his throat. The Fey turned in unison, and Matthias’s gaze met all of theirs, their eyes equally dark, bleak, and empty.
The little man took a step forward, and that broke Matthias’s paralysis. He screamed as he turned, unwilling to die as the Aud had but knowing that he probably would. If he ran down the corridor from which he’d come, they would catch him, and flay him, leaving his blood to drip down the walls. He had nothing to defend himself. He would be helpless before them.
Instead he turned toward the Servants’ Chapel, thinking he would grab one of the ceremonial swords. They were the right size, and Roca would not mind if his symbol was used to save one of his faithful’s life.
If Roca existed.
If Matthias was considered faithful.
Still, at this moment, his soul was less precious than his life.
He pushed open the double doors into the chapel, placing his palms on the empty spot where the sacred sword had been. His feet slipped on the slick stone. Someone had kicked the carpet aside and spilled liquid on the floor. It took a moment before he realized that the wetness was blood.
The pews were overturned and bodies were everywhere, most of the feet bare and intact. Danites, Auds, servants, all dead. But he couldn’t stop to absorb the destruction. He had to keep moving, to find a weapon that would save his own life.
He scurried up to the altar. The podium was on its side and shattered. A dead servant lay across the sacrificial table, the skin on his face half-gone as if someone had been trying to carve him up there, on the holy place. The entire chapel smelled of blood. And all ceremonial swords were gone.
Matthias whirled on his feet, trapped. If he left by the back way, he would be in the front of the building, and if he left the way he’d come, he would encounter the Fey.
As if they heard his thought, they charged in both doors. The group had split in half and they were running at him, hands chillingly empty of any weapons at all.
He would not die like this. He would not let them kill him there. He pushed the body of the servant, looking for his weapon, but finding nothing. Then he saw the glittering vials of holy water the Rocaan had blessed the night before for Midnight Sacrament. The vials were made of heavy, thick glass. Perhaps they would stop the Fey while Matthias thought of something else.
Matthias grabbed vial after vial and flung them at the Fey, at the group before him, then at the group to his right. The first glass hit the stone and shattered, and the Fey screamed in pain. Then the next glass shattered. Matthias kept throwing until he realized that the Fey were no longer advancing.
The stench in the room had grown. It smelled as if something was burning. It took a moment for him to realize that all of the Fey were clutching their legs and screaming. They had fallen to the ground and were rolling in the blood. He glanced behind him. He had thrown maybe ten bottles, certainly not enough glass to cut that many men.
Then he realized that they weren’t bleeding, but their clothes were peeling from them as if trying to get away. He stood for a moment, his hand over his mouth. They were lying in the water, and every time it touched part of their bodies, they screamed. The little man was already dead, his eyes rolled back in his crushed face.
Matthias’s hands were shaking—the entire thing had left him terrified—but he had to know. He had to know. The glass couldn’t have killed them, so the water must have.
The holy water.
Matthias took a vial and walked down the steps, his heart pounding so fiercely he felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He uncorked the bottle and waited until he saw the Fey who had looked at him first. The creature was still alive, his legs and hands a mass of burns, his clothing ripped and tattered.
His gaze met Matthias’s, his skin pale and his dark almond-shaped eyes wide with shock. “What have you done?” the Fey asked in accented Nye.
The words startled Matthias, made him wonder if they were faking, if that was how they had caught all the others. He tossed the water forward, and it landed on the Fey’s perfect features. The creature screamed until his lips melted over his mouth. Matthias stood, riveted, tears in his own eyes, watching the creature—the man—flail as the flesh melted over his nostrils and his body could no longer get air.
The other Fey were still moaning, oblivious to their leader’s death. But Matthias watched for what seemed like forever as the leader clawed at his featureless face with his misshapen hands. At long last the body stopped moving.
Matthias staggered back up the stairs. The screams in the chapel were drowning the screams from elsewhere in the Tabernacle. But here and in the other chapels scattered through the building, he had the power to stop it all.
Quickly he tied the hem of his robe around his waist, making a giant pouch, which he filled with holy-water vials. Then he took as many as he could carry.
He carefully skirted the wounded and dying Fey and made his way to the double doors of the chapel. He had to move slowly, but it was a small price to pay for his own survival.
THIRTEEN
He had blood on his lips. Scavenger wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, but that only made the problem worse. The sticky substance smeared across his skin. He hated this part of his job. He smelled of iron and death, and would for the next few days.
Scavenger staggered down the road between the buildings, bodies spread around him. When he had followed the Foot Soldiers up this road toward the palace, he had thought the area reeked of fish. Now he could smell only himself.
Ahead of him, the warehouses and docks covered the rocky shoreline. The dark-brown water of the Cardidas glittered beyond them, empty of ships. Only a small, odd Circle of Light indicated that ships were in Shadowlands. In the bright sunlight the Circle was nearly invisible. Still, he glanced at it, reassured by the closeness of everything familiar.
The area near the docks was as empty as the river. The bridge, which had been filled with panicked horses and screaming Islanders a few hours before, was bare except for a few bodies hanging off the sides. He couldn’t see any Red Caps working up there, but Red Caps were short and probably weren’t easily visible over the stone wall. Good pickings, and so close to the Shadowlands. If only he were so lucky.
He had walked for what felt like miles to return to the warehouse. The sun was growing warm, and the mud was slick. He felt twice as heavy as usual with his cargo hanging from the pouches secured to his belt. Made from sheep bladders and spelled by the finest Domestics, these pouches kept even the slimiest material safely wrapped inside. He had seen a Red Cap with bad pouches once; the poor man had dribbled blood all the way to the camp, only to be slapped by one of the Warders for leaving a trail.
Scavenger was cautious not to leave a trail. All his life he had been careful not to make any mistakes. Still, it had got him nowhere. Red Caps were victims of their birth: short, squat, magickless, they had no function at all outside of war. In peacetime the Caps had settlements outside the Fey areas so that “real” Fey wouldn’t need to be reminded that not all of their race grew tall and slender and beautiful.
Still, he missed the peace. During the last year his hands had been clean, and he hadn’t been covered with filth. He didn’t have to take orders from Foot Soldiers and hold strips of some poor person’s skin in his hands.
Scavenger swallowed and licked his lips, wincing at the blood taste. Then he took a step down the incline leading to the warehouses, lost his
footing, and slipped along the side of the path, holding himself up with one hand so the pouches around his waist wouldn’t burst. By the time he reached the bottom, the blood on his palm was his own. He wiped it against his pants and hurried into the Warders’ new den.
They had chosen the largest warehouse near the river as the place to set up their quarters. The doors were made of gray, weathered wood, splintered in some places. A few Islander bodies were scattered outside, and more lay on the shoreline, most killed by Infantry instead of Foot Soldiers. The bloodletting would occur later, if at all.
Scavenger hurried up the wooden ramp and pulled the doors open. The building smelled of rotted fish and stale water. He sneezed, glad for a different stink to wash the blood from his nostrils. Already someone had made Fey Lamps and left them along the wooden floor, the trapped souls inside beating against the glass, the light fresh and strong and lovely. Scavenger stopped and stared into one of the lamps. A slender man hovered inside, his tiny face wrinkled with confusion. The Islanders had probably never seen Fey Lamps before, and that poor man probably had no idea that he was trapped inside one, destined to remain until his soul gave up. He probably didn’t even remember his capture. The Wisps usually worked very quickly, aided by the Domestics.
Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey Page 10
