The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3)

by H. Anthe Davis

  “Erm,” said Vrallek, still staring, then shook himself. “Just looking for Presh. It's form-up and he's not here.”

  “Scryer Yrsian is asleep, I think,” said Sarovy, and brushed by, pretending he did not need a hand on the doorjamb for balance. “Come, we'll wake her and find our missing mage.”

  “Yessir. Uh, sir, are you—“

  A knife of terror slid into Sarovy through the right ear, and he flinched into Vrallek, who was doing the same thing. Instantly the fear became noise: a penetrating, drawn-out scream from the earhook, followed by a babble of confused voices. One of them forced its way through by dint of volume.

  '—is Shield One, garrison, this is Shield One, alert, alert, we are engaging hostiles on scene. Half the floor is gone—pikes—the lieutenant fell in, I can't see Voorkei or section two, section three... Can anyone hear me? Garrison, garrison—'

  Shield-Sergeant Rallant.

  The other voices cut off, and Scryer Mako's was there, tremulous: 'Acknowledged, Shield One. Captain, captain?'

  “Yes, here,” said Sarovy, pushing himself down the hallway toward the assembly room. All around the garrison, voices rose in alarm: the other officers who had caught the transmission. “Shield One, are you still at the assigned warehouse? West Ridge, Potter's Row five?”

  'Yes sir,' came Rallant's tense voice. 'I'm with sections one and four, bottled up in the first basement. We have a single mage-light, sir. Lieutenant Gellart is gone, Voorkei is gone. The enemy can't reach us but the floor is broken and there are armored things—'

  Sarovy flashed on the false statues that had attacked his old team in the Bahlaeran underground. “Metal elementals, sergeant. Be warned. Do you see cultists?” Already the assembly hall was behind him, the stairs underfoot. He heard a door bang open up above.

  'No sir, but we've seen militiamen. Some below us, some in the hall beyond the missing floor. They've got crossbows and—shit, what are those? Shields! Knock 'em in the hole!'

  “I have Voorkei off-hook,” Scryer Mako said from the top of the stairs and he looked up to see her at the banister, hair in disarray and nightgown rumpled, two portal-stakes in her fists. Her eyes were wild and he realized it had been her fear to hit them all—the shock of waking up connected to a battle. “Get reinforcements to the yard, I'll open the way.”

  He nodded and ran the rest of the stairs, almost flinging his key at his office door. The roster spun through his mind. The archer platoon was winding down its shift, the lancer and second shield platoons were asleep, and the specialists had just woken up. “Lieutenant Arlin?”

  'Sir.'

  “Wake your men and gear them for watch. Houndmaster-Lieutenant Vrallek, sections one and two to the yard, three on watch, scouts prepared for dispersal. Lieutenant Sengith, sections one, three and four in the yard, two on watch. Lieutenant Lin— Lieutenant Benson, wake your men and gear them for dispersal. Understood?”

  The chorus of agreement buoyed him into his office and stabilized his shaking fingers as he pulled his armor from the stand. He had known this would happen. He had tried to stop it. But now he was out of options.

  Chapter 17 – Mettle

  Gonna gut that idiot Tonner, 'garrison commander' or not, thought Enforcer Ardent as she forcibly separated the eiyets from the corpse they were gnawing. They could not really eat it—they had no stomachs, no true substance—but their hunger was cursedly persistent.

  They would not bite her. She bore the blood of Shadow. Still, it was a risk to interfere with them.

  The body beneath had been a big man, a lieutenant according to the crest of his helm. Now he was a horror, the skin of his face gone in strips and patches, and as she pulled the blood-slicked helmet off, a flutter of eiyets escaped through the big hole in his throat like bats taking flight. She swore at them absently, and they tittered and melded into the eiyenbridge around her.

  She had formed the bridge specifically to reach this body. The others taken by the Dark bite were gone into its limitless depths, but this one had what she needed: the thin arc of silver that curved around his right ear. She pulled it off with a flat smile.

  'What next, commander?' came her agent Ticuo's voice from the mouths of the eiyets around her. He was in another bridge, overlooking the fight that had broken out in the Potter's Row warehouse—not her idea. In fact, she'd first heard of it when Ticuo came charging into her chamber under the city, swearing up and down about the folly of the militia.

  “I'm coming out,” she said, and hooked the silver object around her ear. It tingled slightly, its magic striving to connect but stymied by the Shadow Realm. She had wanted one of these things since her agents discovered their existence—what better way to eavesdrop?—but even with it, she wasn't sure she should have called up the Dark bite.

  Blame Tonner, she told herself, but she had caught at least ten men in the bite. She couldn't lay that at the old man's feet.

  With a gesture and a hiss, she collapsed the eiyenbridge around herself, the corpse disappearing beneath the swarm of shadow-creatures. A pressure, a floundering like trying to swim in sentient gel, and then she dropped out to one of the black platforms her agents had built along the umbral wall. They anchored half a dozen eiyenbridges, all leading into the shadows of the Potter's Row warehouse, all stocked to the proverbial rafters with Enforcers ready to fight.

  She looked at her glove, covered in the lieutenant's blood, and hoped she'd chosen right.

  Crossing into the eiyenbridge, she rejoined Ticuo's portion of her staff. They were staring up at the ceiling, through which militiamen could be seen from below as if walking on smoked glass: the crates and barrels making geometric patterns against the image, the movement of people a dim blur. Above them, light shone around a score of Imperial soldiers trapped on a section of flooring that the Hungry Dark had not managed to bite through. Militiamen lurked beneath that ragged ledge, attempting to break the two columns that supported it with mallets and axes; others fired upon the Imperials from various vantages.

  The next floor up, several metal elementals were preparing to drop down upon the Imperials. A few had already tried and been bounced off the ledge into the second basement. More gathered in the doorways that had led into the first basement before the floor got eaten.

  To the left, she could see another eiyenbridge connected to this one, where Zhahri and her agents watched the ogre-blood mage and his escorts from the shadows of another hallway. The mage was creating a portal, its light constricting Zhahri's bridge, but at a glance Ardent saw a dark room above his position: a ground floor office.

  “I'm going up there. No action until I command it,” she told Ticuo, and he gave a quick nod. Stepping back into the substance of the bridge, she let the eiyets pull her through darkness and compress her against the thin membrane of the physical word until it split. Her boots hit dusty floorboards, her cloak of eiyets hissing at the slats of light that came through the boarded windows. The silver earhook vibrated, then abruptly spoke in the voice of one of the Imperial officers: steady and calm, giving orders in a tone like steel.

  That would be the captain.

  Ardent didn't want this fight. She'd been content to undermine the Imperials from within, to buy them to her side or snatch them one by one. Easy, bloodless. But Tonner had taken advantage of her transparency toward the city and set up an ambush in one of the warehouses she'd stocked with sacrificial trash, and now that idiot had blown all their covers. He'd even involved the elementals! She'd nearly lost her first team when the Imperials surprised them in the middle of extracting the old bastard against his will.

  Summoning the teeth of the Hungry Dark had been her only option.

  No shadowblood made an opening for the Dark unless it was an emergency. It was always there, lurking beneath the Shadow Realm like the black sea around a ship, and like the sea it could be volatile—treacherous—deadly even to those who had dwelt upon it all their lives. It flowed into every gap offered it, chewing up all that it could reach, and if not
for the Shadow Realm and the umbral wall, it would long since have drowned the world.

  She had opened a path for it only briefly, and yet it had swallowed at least ten lives and a huge spherical section of masonry, woodwork, crates and pipes at the heart of the building, leaving clean-sheared edges and bloody fragments. She knew by experience that such offerings only whetted its hunger. Any puncture they made through the umbral wall would have to be precise, surgical, or they would risk losing the whole warehouse. Maybe the whole block.

  “Why don't you pikers ever listen?” she muttered as she considered the office floor. Below, through only a few feet of earth and wood, the mage wove his portal. There was shadow enough in this office for her eiyets' teeth, and they had more uses than murder.

  She wanted this done clean; she wanted the captain; she wanted to leave the city in one piece. But she had to play the cards she was dealt, and if she could snag another mage...

  At her command, the eiyets began to chew.

  *****

  Scryer Mako struggled to concentrate on the portal stakes, sunk point-down into the hard earth of the training yard. Her head buzzed with voices, her magic all that kept Blaze Company's spread-out earhooks connected. Normally it was no burden, but between hosting the hooks, keeping direct mental contact with Voorkei and Tanvolthene, searching for Presh, and trying to activate a portal, she really wished the lot of them would shut up.

  'We'll be with you shortly, sergeant,' she heard the captain say, and grimaced. That insufferable man. He would want to know why the portal was not already active, and then she would have to shout at him, and that would waste precious time, especially because she had been feeling a good shout building for a while now. Him with his peculiar psychic blocks, his stubborn resistance to her aid, his thoughtquakes...

  Something was seriously wrong in there, but she was a stickler for professional ethics. Else she would have broken into his mind a month ago.

  Scowling, she pushed the babble to the back of her mind and concentrated on the stakes. Voorkei must have been having issues, because his extending tether was unsteady; she could feel it being buffeted like silk in the wind. If she had been given the chance to scry, it might have been easier, but that would have meant the bowl and the water or a mirror or various other tools she didn't have time to assemble.

  All around, the training yard buzzed with unease, the men shifting on their feet or adjusting buckles and straps, talking in low voices but thinking loudly. Mako ground her teeth. She should have had them wait in the assembly hall, or in their rooms. Anything beside lurking around emoting at her.

  She could really use another mentalist as backup.

  The connection stretched closer. Too agitated to wait, she poured her own energy through the portal stakes and watched her side of the pathway race out to envelop Voorkei's strand. His relief radiated through their mental link, and then the stakes kicked in. The world doubled, folded, then smoothed to normal, leaving a door cut into space.

  She looked up into Voorkei's tusky grin and flashed her own.

  “Is it prepared?” said Captain Sarovy behind her. She gave him a withering stare, but it had no effect on his pale, rigid mien.

  “Yes, but don't you dare tell me you're going,” she said as she rose.

  He did not deign to answer, just started shouting at the soldiers. They pushed off from the walls to form a ragged line, donning helms and flicking furtive cheroot-stubs into the dirt. “How many can cross?” he said, scanning the crowd.

  She grimaced. On the other side, she could feel Voorkei pouring energy into the portal but knew his attention was split too, and her own burden frayed at her control. “Just send them. I'll say when to stop.”

  Sarovy gave a curt nod and stepped forward. From somewhere in the crowd, she heard Linciard shout, “Sir! Curse it, sir, we need you on this side!”

  And then he was across, already stepping out of sight.

  'Status, Sergeant Rallant,' she heard him demand as the soldiers followed his lead. Each crossing sapped a bit of strength from her, but fortunately the portal stakes tapped their own supply, and as she watched threads of ice spread from them through the dirt, she focused on drawing more power from the air. Bare-handed, bare-headed, it was not difficult. The winter chill intensified around her but her skin warmed as she gathered ambient energies.

  'Fending off assaults from all sides, captain,' came Rallant's response. 'Above, below, several points across. Nowhere to go but down, and down is full of metal things. Think we're headed there soon anyway.'

  'Count?'

  'Twelve metals on the ground, three in doorways. Eight or so militia shooting, unknown number down below—at least five. I have eighteen men, some injured. No doors nearby.'

  'Abide. We'll get you.'

  Mako left off concentrating on the portal; it would sustain itself by sipping at her energies. As the men kept crowding through, she focused on her other tasks: the networked earhooks and the search for Presh.

  Curse that man too. She had let him wander off, and now he'd been mage-napped. It was the only explanation. Their constant mental link had let her build a bastion in his head to protect him from other mentalists, and if he had been killed, she would have sensed its collapse. Alive, she should have been able to locate him even if he was comatose.

  But she couldn't, so he was out of range. In the Shadow Realm, perhaps.

  She owed the cultists some pain.

  The earhook network buzzed with chatter as more soldiers crossed through. Only the captain, his lieutenants and the sergeants wore them, but that was still eleven men blathering in her head at any given time.

  Eleven...

  She frowned. She only felt ten connections, but that made sense; Presh was a sergeant, and had left his earhook with her before he went off for his private time.

  But what had Sergeant Rallant said about his lieutenant?

  Focusing, she touched the silver web. Plucking a mental strand would send an impulse down to that earhook and spark a psychic echo, an imprint of the wearer. She could already tell the identities of a few of them because they would not stop talking, but a few were silent.

  She plucked one, and felt Shield-Sergeant Kirvanik's startlement echo back.

  Another: Lancer-Lieutenant Benson.

  A third: Archer-Sergeant Korr.

  A fourth...

  Female. Unfamiliar. Eavesdropping.

  Mako saw red. Not enough that they stole Presh. No, they had to hijack her good work, use her magic against her team.

  That would not stand.

  *****

  The eiyets chewed through the floor like acid, spitting debris back into the dim confines of the office. Ardent sat before the growing hole, head tilted, trying to glean something useful from the Imperial chatter. So far it was curt, dry: their portal was active and their reinforcements storming the halls, seeking entry into the ruins where their comrades were cornered.

  But they were not finding conflicts. Her agents whispered from the walls, reporting on the militiamen's movements, and it seemed that the ones who could withdraw had done so, while the ones trapped by the damage of the Dark bite continued taking potshots from their vantages or begged for rescue from the Kheri.

  She allowed it. Her people were here to extract Tonner's men, no matter her ire—

  The silver hook sparked on her ear and she hissed at the sharp pain. The eiyets on her shoulders recoiled from it, chittering. “It's fine, it's fine,” she murmured in Talishan, not that they understood. They had their own language, eiyenriu, and little use for those of others.

  Or else they did understand and just preferred to disobey.

  The hook sparked again, and she cursed as a queasy spike went through her head. Pulling the object off, she squinted at it for damage. Perhaps an eiyet had nipped it while they were tearing apart its wearer, thus causing misfires?

  But the metal was smooth, unmarred. And the spike in her head became a drill.

  'Numbers. Distributio
n,' said a stranger's voice in her mind. An image sprang to the fore: the view from the eiyenbridge, with her lurking agents and the metal elementals, the militiamen.

  “No,” she said, closing her eyes before she could see the hole in front of her. Something was digging at her brain, churning up the recent past: a mentalist. She knew about them but had never been in contact with one before. Still, she had taken steps to prepare.

  'You. Who are you? Where is Presh?' said the voice, and the name triggered images. The brothel room, the man sprawled on the bed, the scars. Surprise rang through her at the sight—not her own—then a pressure mounted in her skull. 'You took him. You will bring him back.'

  Ardent could have laughed. This must be the female mage, Makoura Yrsian. Scryer, portaller, mind-rapist. But even as the screws dug deeper, she knew no fear.

  No, she thought back.

  'Bitch.'

  Really? Not that I expected much, but...

  The mind compressed around hers like a hand, trying to squeeze her thoughts out, and she let one go freely. The black chamber where Presh was being kept: just like Cayer's, no entrance or exit not born of shadow-stuff, no way out of the realm. No light, no air that the Kheri did not provide, and nothing to power his magic.

  The mentalist's grip relaxed.

  So you see, not a good idea to threaten me, she thought.

  'I will find you. I will bleed you—'

  For the sake of a foreigner? A non-believer? The doubt she projected was real. Presh had approached the Empire, true, but the Empire had no reason to protect or retrieve him. Ardent had not even considered using him as a bargaining chip until right now.

  'He is mine and I will have him back.'

  Would you like to make a deal?

  A snarl. A clenching in her mind, and she felt her lungs lock, no longer under her control.

  That was a bit much.

  She let go of the eiyets' reins, and the mass of them separated from her for an instant, alarmed, then flowed in to engulf her. The barrier between the physical realm and Ticuo's eiyenbridge split. She fell through and felt the drill vanish, saw the world close up behind a screen of smoke, and gasped a harsh breath as her lungs became hers again.