Battle: The House War: Book Five

by Michelle West

  Jewel followed and stopped at the doorjamb, lifting one hand to the frame to steady herself.

  “Jay?”

  She laughed. It was an uneven laugh, an expression not of mirth, but surprise. Or shock, or outrage. “Carver, come here.”

  “What is it?”

  “You tell me. Tell me what you see.”

  He came to join her, but didn’t laugh; he swore, instead. Jewel lowered her arm, and Carver moved past her, just as the Chosen had done, walking single file down the hall that led from the door because it wasn’t wide enough for two. It wasn’t wide enough for the swords the Chosen carried, either; it was wide enough for Carver’s daggers. Or Jewel’s, although she was not, at this moment, wearing them.

  “Terafin?” Torvan asked, the word drifting back to where she stood.

  “It’s the thirty-fifth holding,” she said, forcing strength into the words. “It’s an apartment in the thirty-fifth holding.”

  Torvan didn’t argue. Carver, who’d ducked into the tiny kitchen to the right, reappeared and entered the room to the left. She thought she should stop him, because she knew that these rooms, this apartment, could not possibly be as they appeared. Instead, she drifted into the hall herself. The door did not slam shut behind them.

  Carver came out after a brief moment, met her eyes, and once again moved down the hall. He went to the next door on the left. Jewel herself followed him, but diverged at the door on the right. Torvan and the Chosen had opened all of the doors, even this one, in some confusion. She could well understand why. If they had not expected the sudden, grandiose transformations of the library or the small, personal office, it was of a piece with the sudden appearance of the Common’s fabled trees in their backyard; it meshed with the existence of three voluble, giant, winged cats, a silent white stag, and the demons who had assassinated The Terafin, and had failed—by a hair—to assassinate Jewel.

  This?

  It was of inferior workmanship. The ceilings were low, the halls narrow; the planking on the floor was old enough that it creaked no matter who walked across it. The rugs, where they existed, were threadbare and patchy, the cupboards scarred and slightly warped. There were few windows, and little light, and the windows were at the height of the short walls. They were barred, of course, and the bars were excellent—and new.

  In the room at the right end of the hall was a familiar desk, a familiar table, and a familiar set of shelves on the wall. The shelves should have been empty, but they weren’t. She hesitated, and then knelt by the bed-side.

  “Jay?” Carver’s voice was slightly muffled by the bed. “This is—”

  “Yes,” she said, knowing her voice would sound muffled in the same way. “It’s Rath’s. It’s Rath’s last home.” She pulled a small chest from under the bed, and dusted the skirts of her dress off as she rose. “There’s a chest at the end of the bed,” she said. “That probably contained most of his clothing, his makeup, and his wigs.”

  “You speak of Ararath Handernesse?” Torvan asked softly.

  Jewel assumed that the Chosen knew almost as much as their Lord. “Yes. This is where I lived, for a few short years. This is where—” She shook her head. As it was for Torvan, the unexplained majesty of the shifting architecture of manse and gardens had almost become the norm; if she could not predict what she would see—or find—she expected things ancient, wild, and unknown.

  Not this. She could look at the floor and see where the scuffs and scrapes were, because she’d traced them with her eyes so often while Rath lectured her on the names of the Houses, the names of the important merchant families, the lineage of Kings. She could see the faded patches of color on the wall, and knew which of the floor boards were so thinned with weight they were almost loose. She knew where the grate was, knew where the lamp stand was, and knew that the magestone holder would be tucked to one side of the top of the desk.

  There was paper, and ink, a blotter. There was sealing wax and the seals, as well, of different families, which Rath could use when necessary. There were letters of note, some assigning him a specific role in relation to a specific merchant house. Rath had not troubled to remain within the bounds of legality.

  “The room?” she asked, voice faint.

  “It’s the sparring room,” Carver replied.

  “The exact room?”

  “It looks the same, to me. The wooden swords are there,” he added.

  She touched nothing, took nothing. The magestone holder was empty. Rising, she left the room, and walked the length of hall to the room she’d been given when Rath had first moved here. She’d been ill, then, feverish and uncertain of her surroundings. There’d been no bed for her—but a bed had arrived, and indeed, it stood by the wall farthest from the door. It was made, its sheets pulled tight. There were bedrolls against the wall. Finch’s. Teller’s. Duster’s.

  She closed her eyes. The air was thick with dust—dust, she thought, just dust. But she couldn’t breathe for one long moment, and didn’t even try.

  Chapter Fourteen

  SHE ALLOWED HERSELF only that minute, and during it, she wrestled with the severe disorientation of stepping back in time. She was still attired as The Terafin; her clothing was worthy of the High Market, although it came from the Common. She wore the House ring. She was Jewel Markess ATerafin—The Terafin of record.

  But she was surprised at how much this hurt her.

  She closed her eyes as Carver approached the bedroom; he didn’t speak, didn’t touch her. Instead, he waited until she opened her eyes; waited a little longer, until she turned. His expression was grave and silent; had he been Jester, he would have said or done something ridiculous at this point. He wasn’t, and didn’t.

  “The last door?” she asked softly.

  “I asked the captain not to open it yet.”

  “Did he listen?”

  “It was a request, not an order. Jay—” he glanced at the floor and the very tidy bedrolls, and he knew what she remembered and fell silent again.

  “I’m not that girl,” Jewel told him softly. “But . . . I am.” She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To the basement, Carver. Let’s see where it leads us now.”

  * * *

  The Chosen had, as Carver requested, waited; the door was closed. Jewel approached them.

  “It’s locked,” one of the Captains of her Chosen told her. She almost laughed, and gestured—briefly—at Carver, who rolled his eyes.

  “Yes, he used to lock the front door and this one.” They were the only ways to enter the apartment.

  “The key?”

  She hadn’t had one for a decade or more, but it didn’t matter; she knew where a key could be found. She entered Rath’s room, approached the desk, and opened a drawer; she pulled the fitted, false bottom up. She was not at all surprised to see two keys nestled beneath its flat surface, and didn’t hesitate to take them both.

  The end of the hall was very crowded as she slid between the Chosen. Carver, as usual, stood back.

  She considered handing Torvan the keys, and decided against it, unlocking the door while he looked on. She did not, however, open the door. “Rath didn’t need the keys,” she told Torvan. After a brief pause she added, “By the end of our stay here, neither did I. We did, on the other hand, need light.”

  She glanced at Carver, and he smiled; it was sly and bold and brief. He drew a hand out of a jacket pocket, and she saw that he carried a magestone. Just one, but that was all he needed—it was all the den had really needed as well. He whispered it to a bright, steady glow—the halls themselves were shadowed by the lack of windows. He lifted his arm, raising the light, and Torvan opened the door.

  She wasn’t certain what she’d expected. Given the details of the apartment itself, the door should have opened up into a storeroom, and from there, into a basement, a subbasement, and tunnels. Those tunnels had been unmade shortly after Jewel’s arrival at the Terafin
manse—but the apartment had been ransacked as well, drawers overturned, the contents of the chest spread across the room, books torn from their shelves. Her last sight of Rath’s home had been entirely unlike this one: everything was in its place, even the clothing habitually strewn—with some care—over the backs of chairs and chests.

  There were stairs, but they were not stairs that Jewel had ever seen in this apartment; they were of carved stone, and although they were narrow where the door met the landing, they widened considerably as they disappeared into the darkness below. “Not the back halls,” she said.

  The Chosen entered before her, and Carver pulled up the rear. The grandeur that had been entirely lacking in the apartment itself was in evidence in the stairs. They were rough, the way hewn stone can be, but it was a deliberate roughness, a texture. At the left and right edges of the steps, there were small engravings; they looked like letters, to Jewel’s eye—although they didn’t look like Weston, Torra, or even the Old Weston that she had sometimes seen in the undercity.

  “How far down do they go?” Carver asked softly. He whispered the magelight to its full brightness.

  “They end just ahead,” Torvan replied. His voice was oddly muted; the stone deadened it. The Chosen could now fan out across the stairs; they drew swords as they continued their descent.

  Jewel turned to Carver. He carried the magelight in one hand, and in the other—a dagger. She reached out and offered him her upturned palm, and he placed the light into it. She had no daggers to draw. Carver then descended, walking beneath the light. Jewel started to follow him.

  Her legs locked. Her knees. The light dimmed as both hands became involuntary fists.

  “Captain,” she said, as Torvan cleared the last step.

  He turned.

  “That’s enough. I know where this leads now.”

  Carver gestured.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “It leads to the undercity—but not the one we knew.” She was cold, felt cold; the hair on the back of her neck must have been standing on end.

  “You think—you think this is what the entrances used to look like?”

  “I think they weren’t always underground,” she replied. “But yes. I think this is what they must have looked like. These stairs. That arch—and beyond it, cloisters. The streets might even be the same length, the same general shape—but we won’t be walking over rubble.”

  Carver started down the stairs again and she caught his arm with her left hand. “No,” she said, no hand free for signing. “We’ve lost enough to that city.”

  “Jay, the apartment’s not real. The undercity here—it’s probably like your library.”

  But she shook her head. “Not yet, Carver. If we come here—at all—we bring the cats, Celleriant, Meralonne.”

  “Why?”

  She said nothing for a long moment.

  And Carver, because he was Carver, acquiesced. The Chosen returned to her in silence. As a group, they retreated up the stairs, to the perfect replica of Rath’s apartment.

  Did I build this? she thought, as she glanced through the now open door of his room.

  Avandar was standing in the frame of the apartment’s entrance. Jewel. He glanced down the hall, his brows furrowing. “This is not the usual workmanship one expects of House Terafin.”

  She laughed. It was too wild; she brought it under control as she saw his expression shift. “No,” she told him. “This is, however, the architecture commonly seen in the thirty-fifth holding.”

  “It was not, if I am not mistaken, part of these rooms.”

  She nodded.

  “Why is it here, Jewel?” His voice was softer, but it was a deceptive softness; his eyes were bright.

  “I . . . don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “Yes, Terafin, it does. You are at the heart of your domain, in this place.” The ceilings were so low here he appeared to have gained a foot’s worth of height. “If you are not careful, if you are not deliberate, no ground where you stand, sleep, or dream will be solid.” He frowned. “You said the thirty-fifth holding?”

  She nodded.

  “Your previous domicile was in the twenty-fifth holding, if I recall your history correctly.”

  “It was.”

  “And this?”

  “It was my first home without my family.” She opened the door to her bedroom. “This was my room. I shared it, in the end, with Teller, Finch, and Duster. Before Duster came, Lefty would sleep here sometimes.”

  Avandar was silent as he entered the room. He touched nothing, and to her surprise, he stayed by her side. “The bed?”

  “Rath bought it. For me,” she added, as if it were necessary.

  “What was at the end of the hall?”

  Her throat was dry. She swallowed. “When I lived with Rath—when we lived here—it was an entrance into the subbasement. And that led to the undercity.”

  He turned toward the hall. “And now?”

  “It leads to—” she shook her head.

  “Terafin.”

  “It leads to the undercity—but not the one I knew.”

  “How, then, do you know this?”

  “I just know,” was her almost inaudible reply.

  “Do you fear the Kialli?”

  Anyone sane did. But she understood the question. She couldn’t answer it for a long moment, because no answer came. On a visceral level, she did. She was afraid to enter that city, because the undercity had taken so much from her and she had sworn she would never enter it again. But that was the wrong answer. It wasn’t the Kialli she feared. It wasn’t even their Lord—although their Lord had found entrance to her world in the heart of what remained of the ancient city.

  He was not there now. His demons were not there.

  What do you fear, Jewel?

  She had no answer to give. She lingered for a moment in the room that had once been hers, her domicis—no part of that early life—by her side.

  “What will you do with this apartment?” he finally asked.

  “Leave it,” she replied, stepping out of the room. “I have the key.”

  “The only key?”

  “Yes—but I have a suspicion that several of us won’t need it.”

  Carver, waiting for her in the conference room, said, “Why Rath’s place?”

  “I don’t know.” It was not her first home. It was not the den’s first home, not in any real sense. It was Rath’s home. But in Rath’s home, for a while, they had found safety—safety, that beguiling illusion, that fevered dream, that child’s hope. After a pause, she said, “it was the only place we lived that had a basement we could access.”

  “You’re worried.”

  “I am. And about the wrong thing. If the two meetings on the morrow don’t go well, it won’t matter. And if we don’t have answers for the Master of the Household Staff . . .”

  “You’ll wish the meeting with the Kings had gone badly?”

  “Something like that.” She squared her shoulders. “There are no other doors here that I can see.”

  Carver nodded.

  “And none in the bedroom?”

  “There weren’t any, before.”

  “Might as well start there, then. There’s another room, and the baths. Nearer to the office, there used to be the small dining room, for The Terafin’s more intimate acquaintances.”

  “Did she have any?”

  Jewel snorted. Avandar frowned at that; she let him. She wasn’t cursing, and the only witness was Carver. “Near the personal office is the small dining room. There’s the rooftop.” She stopped. “I don’t know if the rooftop remains as it was.”

  “Let’s check the baths and the bedchamber.”

  * * *

  The baths were, to Jewel’s profound relief, normal. The bedchamber had undergone some changes, but those were changes she had forced on it in her desperate attempt to wake up. The corners of the ceiling were, for instance, corniced, but not in a way that was consistent with the rest of the cornice
s within the manse, where they existed at all. The ceiling was taller. The height of the ceiling rounded in a way that matched the decorative flourishes, but not the previous shape of the roof. The bed was materially unaltered, as were the sheets; the closets were standing in pretty much the same place, as was the dresser with its ornate, oval mirror. Ellerson’s working additions of brushes, combs, and clips were reflected there, as was Jewel’s instinctive grimace.

  Carver entered the closet closest to the doors. Jewel, not much taken by prayer, spared one anyway. It was ridiculous, and she knew it: one servant could not be weighed in balance against mages, Kings, and gods.

  “We can eat her.”

  She looked up. Shadow was standing in the door, his wings folded across his back.

  “Unless you can clean every room in this mansion, feed every person who lives—or works in it—and tend to every guest of any significance whatsoever in an entirely invisible and appropriate way, no, you can’t.”

  “We can eat the guests.”

  “Only if they’re entirely uninvited. Or trying to kill me. I let you eat the demon.”

  Shadow hissed, but entered the room, where he bumped against Jewel’s arm until she scratched the top of his head. His purr was a self-satisfied rumble. When Carver emerged from the closet, the cat tilted his head, as if he needed to position his ears to listen.

  “Carver?”

  “No. It’s a big damn closet,” he added.

  “Bigger than it should be?”

  Carver didn’t reply. Instead he headed for the second closet.

  “What is he looking for?” Shadow asked.

  “A way into these rooms. For the servants,” she added.

  “In the closet?”

  Jewel did not particularly relish attempting an explanation of the back halls to Shadow. They made sense to her because they had existed for her entire life in the manse; they made sense because they existed in other grand mansions across the Isle—and in the larger homes of moneyed merchants on the mainland. She compromised. “They’re usually tucked away out of obvious sight.”