Wrayth to-3

by Philippa Ballantine

  He would have given anything to have Aachon, or Merrick, or most especially Sorcha at his back.

  “Instead all I have is you,” he impotently whispered to the Rossin, “and a rather piss-poor companion you are.”

  The minute he spoke, Raed realized that it had been a bad choice to do so. His voice slithered and echoed in these corridors for far too long. He came to a halt, his heart racing in his chest until the reverberations stopped. Only then did he move, treading as fast and silently as he could.

  Reaching a dead-end corridor Raed paused—but now in confusion. He could still hear the laughter, but there was no door or window it could be coming through. Dropping to his knees he discerned that there was a grate in the floor, where the faint breeze and the laughter emanated from. The Rossin sensed something else though. It was not any sound that caused the beast in his head to rage; it was a smell.

  Kill them. Break them. Take what is theirs.

  The words sounded so loud in his skull that Raed had to stop and draw in several long deep breaths with the kind of concentration that probably only should have belonged to a Deacon. Then, slotting his fingers into the grate, he pulled it loose and stared down into the vent. It was going to be a tight fit.

  He was not frightened of narrow spaces—years of living on a ship saw to that—but he was a little nervous about being down there if the Rossin should break loose. Still, it was not like he had a choice. Luckily, months of harsh travel had whittled his frame down considerably, and he was able, with a significant amount of wriggling, to get himself into the shaft.

  This was the most curious of palaces for a Pretender to the throne to find himself. The air was warm and uncomfortable as he tried his best to keep his breathing low and quiet. Raed passed three junctions, and at each of them paused to listen for the sound of laughter. It didn’t take long to locate the source.

  It was Fraine, but she was most definitely not alone. Raed peered down through a grate into another level of the fortress and saw a most strangely beautiful scene. Below, three women were lounging on reclined benches, while another three stood nearby. He recognized two of them immediately—his sister and his old friend Tangyre Greene. His instant reaction was to feel a flare of unreasonable happiness, though both of them had passed him into the hands of a geistlord that wanted to kill both him and the Rossin. Hastily, he quashed those feelings. He reminded himself that they had also ordered the destruction of the small portion of his crew that had followed him. The Young Pretender forced himself to recall the hard look in his sister’s eyes when she had done it.

  Yet all his struggles to get from Orinthal to here were suddenly worth it. Raed had, in truth, feared that he would never find them. They looked to be well, and no different from when he had last seen them, as he was held in the sand and his crew was massacred.

  Next he examined the other women in the room with his sister. The Shin women were creatures of beauty—Raed had read about that before—but nothing had prepared him for the aura of strange lethargy around two of them. He was, however, the only one to remain calm; the Rossin was almost apoplectic with rage on seeing them. The Beast flooded the Young Pretender’s brain with images of slaughter.

  It was, perhaps, because the women were still laughing. Certainly their appearance would have been enjoyed by a huge number of men in the Empire, even if the geistlord was raging about it.

  The pair reclining were pale to the point of eeriness, their white hair spread out on their couch. The hair was however the only covering they wore. Their breasts were exposed, nipples painted with ocher, and around their waists were looped strings of pearls and lapis lazuli. It had been months since Raed had seen any kind of naked woman, but he found no excitement stirring in his trousers. He had seen napeth users in the islands, and those empty-eyed beauties left him as cold as these Shin women.

  Sorcha, all flame and passion, leapt up in his recollection in contrast to these chill beauties.

  Behind the supine two were another pair, also white blonde in coloring, but they were more clothed. Flowing silks were bunched around their waists, but their breasts were bare, and there was nothing lethargic about them; they had the coiled power of a jungle cat, and they paced backward and forward. These were the two that the Rossin was focused on, particularly when he noticed their nails. Curved sheaths of bronze extended them out far beyond normal length, and gave them the unsettling appearance of claws. Upon seeing these two, the Rossin flooded the Young Pretender’s brain with images of slaughter.

  Now the Rossin’s rage crystallized into actual words.

  Enemies. Blood drinker. The Wrayth. Kill them all.

  Raed let his breath out slowly and carefully. Yet the Rossin’s constantly running thoughts were bleeding into his own. It was warm in this narrow space and he could not afford to panic now.

  “So, Fraine Rossin,” one of the standing women said, taking a seat at the feet of her supine companion, “have you had a chance to consider our terms?”

  Raed’s stomach clenched. It appeared he was too late. The Empire was about to come undone.

  Below, his sister shifted on her chair, and glanced up at the silent Tangyre. “Lady Iuhmee, if you join our rebellion there will be plenty of benefits to the Shin and Ensomn itself. I don’t understand why you need—”

  “If you don’t understand,” the second woman broke in, “then our business is done here. Your rebellion will founder without us and you know that very well.”

  Above, in the vent, Raed frowned. He knew the Shin were influential among the Princes, but not so that they could have such a deciding vote.

  They have moved while you slept, foolish mortal. They are more stealthy than you can possibly imagine.

  Raed was beginning to feel his own anger rise. He had most certainly not been sleeping while tracking down his sister. Also he was suspicious that the great Beast in him knew something it was not yet sharing. Raed had only felt rage this great twice before, in the ossuary and in the desert of Chioma. He could only conclude one thing: the Shin were in league with a geistlord.

  His sister glanced back at Tangyre. “I will not become your peon.” She waved her hand at the pale-haired women, still reclining on the couch and about as noticed as a piece of furniture.

  Iuhmee’s gaze remained fixed on Fraine while those sharp bronze fingers danced along the girl’s pale skin, causing her breathing to come in tiny gasps, before one flicked at her throat. The thin line of blood oozed from the cut, shockingly red against her almost chalky flesh, before Iuhmee bent and licked it clean. Both drinker and supplier let out the slightest of groans: the kind that might be heard from a contented lover after long hours of play.

  The Rossin, for once, had been speaking literally. Blood drinkers indeed. Summoning geists through from the Otherside, luring them with the spilling of blood in terrible ways, was something that only the mad and the foolish dared.

  If ever he had seen a threat demonstrated more clearly, Raed could not think of it. Fraine blanched, and Tangyre’s hand went to the younger woman’s shoulder. “You have made your point,” the captain said, actually stepping between the Shin and her companion, “but that does not mean Her Grace will be tying herself to you as a peon. How dare you! She is of the greatest line of nobility in Arkaym!”

  The Lady Iuhmee lifted herself from the peon’s throat, and wiped delicately at her mouth, for all the world like some aristocrat at a state banquet. “If she were a peon, she would hardly make a decent leader for the rebellion, would she? No, that is not what we ask.” She snapped her fingers, and a fourth slave appeared from out of the shadows of the room. She was carrying a tray with a curved silver bowl on it, from his position it was impossible to make out the nature of the symbols carved into it, but he did catch the gleam of tiny weirstones embellishing the rim. Not good.

  Get out. The Rossin growled, angry and frustrated by the inability to take shape in the narrow stone confines of the shaft they were in. Get out of this place now!

 
However Raed was too transfixed to move. He wondered if his ancestors had known this about the Shin, or if this was a recent development. The west had always been a place of terrible legends and wildness—but he had never heard of anything like this. Blood drinking was the ultimate dark path to power, and had been one of the first things the Order of the Eye and the Fist had stamped out. How could they have missed all of this?

  Now here was Fraine about to indulge in it. From all the threats he had faced in the ossuary under Vermillion and the temple of the false goddess Hatipai, Raed Rossin knew the power of his blood. The blood he shared with Fraine. He cast about for a way to get down there quickly, but the vent was made of stone, and all his shoving against it didn’t move it any discernible amount. The restrictions of the shaft meant he couldn’t swing his sword or anything else.

  Fool! I cannot protect you forever. Get out!

  His mind ran to the weirstone bullets he had taken off a bounty hunter in his travels across the west. Made by the scarlet witches, they were thought to be most useful against geists who had taken flesh. The bounty hunter had thought to use them on the Rossin. Now they could be put to better use. With frenzied wriggling, Raed was able to pull out the pistol and slide it between the grating. He knew what the consequences would be, but he could not merely watch as his sister aligned herself with these blood drinkers.

  Raed pulled the trigger. His aim was off, thanks to the tight confines of the shaft, and the limitations that the grate afforded him. The bullet instead of striking Iuhmee, punched a neat hole through her reclining peon’s head.

  The Princess of Ensomn screamed however, as if it had been she that had been struck. At least he presumed she was screaming, since the retort of the pistol had set his ears to ringing. She collapsed to her knees, and when she turned her face upward in his direction, it was a totally different one, with burning eyes and a mouth full of fangs.

  She pointed at Fraine who was looking as pale as a Shin peon. While Raed yelled through the grate, since stealth was now abandoned, three slaves appeared and wrestled his sister to the ground. Two held her, while the third slid Fraine’s sleeve back, and sliced the softest part of her forearm. Her blood seemed to drip into the bowl the peon held beneath for a very long time.

  When he had been a young man, Raed had seen his little sister do many foolish things, but coming to this nest of evil was an awful kind of grown-up idiocy. However she was no longer a little child he could warn away from open flames and sharp objects. The worst bit was that Captain Tangyre, supposedly her friend, stood by as she was forced into giving up her blood.

  Finally it was done and Tangyre handed Fraine a towel to staunch the flow. She held it tight for the younger woman and whispered something soothing to her. Anger toward his once friend was catching up with Raed. He blamed all of his sister’s missteps and foolish dreams on that poisonous captain. She’d been dripping lies into the sheltered girl’s ear for years. He would make her pay for that disservice.

  His ears were clearing, and he saw Iuhmee climb to her feet. Her momentary outrage at her peon’s death was replaced with a cruel smile, aimed in his direction. Raed knew he should move, and yet he found he could not. Dimly he could hear the Rossin howling at him to flee rapidly.

  Raed made to wriggle away from the vent when his sister stood and drew his attention back to the activities below.

  Fraine was visibly shaken, but she stood before the Lady Iuhmee. “So we have our pact?”

  The Shin woman took the bowl from the slave and peered down into it. Her face was alight with avarice, so that even Raed could see, so much so it was as if she was holding a bowl of priceless gems. That made him even more sure that his sister had done something terribly wrong.

  In his head the Rossin had gone silent, but the man could feel him watching with infinite cunning. Raed found that far more disturbing than when the Beast was roaring in his head.

  Iuhmee smiled at her, a smile that made Raed’s skin crawl, and should have, if Tangyre was looking after Fraine’s best interests, caused the other captain to yank her charge out of the room immediately. Then, the Shin lady raised the bowl and drank deeply. The sound of her gulps turned Raed’s stomach.

  However, the Young Pretender was not able to see her expression after that, because pain flared white-hot deep in his core. All he felt was his body screaming in pain. His throat clenched around a howl while his fingers spasmed tight on the vent. Nothing else mattered but this instant.

  When it retreated he was left gasping and nauseous in its wake.

  Too late. The Rossin snarled in outrage. Too late for anything.

  In the room below, Tangyre was helping Fraine to her feet. Apparently both siblings of the Imperial line had experienced the excruciating pain. Lady Iuhmee was grinning like a wolf as she placed the bowl, quite empty of anything, upside down on a nearby table.

  “Now we have an accord,” she said conversationally. “We shall give you our support for your rebellion, and once you have overturned Kaleva, you will turn out all the other western Princes, and give their kingdoms to us. We will make this coast our playground.”

  Fraine nodded. She nodded, and then let herself be gathered into Tangyre’s arms like a complete child.

  Iuhmee curled the fingers of one hand together: the brass of the fingernail guards rattling together like the unpleasant skittering of some many-legged insect. “But first, we shall have to deal with our little vermin problem.” Her eyes darted upward, and Raed realized with a start that she had not forgotten the shooting of her peon—she had merely had more pressing matters. The other Shin, and even his little sister Fraine, followed suit.

  He understood now that an enemy who could be so calm and focused when being shot at, was not someone to be taken lightly. He frantically wriggled and pushed with his knees and elbows out of sight of the vent and away down the shaft. He comforted himself that once beyond that, the Shin would not be able to locate him—though there was a sharp knot in his stomach that insisted he was perhaps being a little optimistic.

  The Rossin’s growl felt as though it was rumbling in his own chest.

  I cannot help you here. Get free of these narrow places. Let me run free!

  “Doing my best,” Raed hissed. His muscles were protesting at this unwelcome and unnatural form of locomotion, and it was damnably hot in here. Sweat ran down his back and along his neck. The worst of it was he couldn’t easily wipe it from his face. It stung his eyes and obscured his vision.

  However he also soon realized that the Shin were not done with him—not by a very long mark. Something was behind him in the ventilation system of this mad fortress. It didn’t sound like whoever his pursuer might be was having nearly as tough a time of it as he was. It sounded instead as though they were running, like animals in hot pursuit.

  Raed turned himself around in the confined space and managed with more than a little swearing to work his pistol once more out from his side. Primitive fears of being chased and trapped were beginning to rise, and he could hear his own heartbeat in his head—louder, even, than the Rossin’s thoughts.

  Holding the pistol trained between his thighs in the direction of the ominous sounds, Raed pushed with his legs, sliding on his back farther away from the pursuit. It was slow going, and he was wondering what exactly he was going to do with the pistol. If he fired it in this position, he ran a good chance of shooting himself in the thigh, as well as blowing his own ears out.

  Either, however, seemed preferable to facing whatever was closing rapidly on his position.

  “By the Blood, I’m not dying like this,” he hissed, all the time working his way in some unknown direction. The Rossin, impotent in this particular, unexpected turn of events, was silent.

  He smiled grimly, though his legs ached, and he could barely see with his sweat-blinded vision. “Not exactly what you planned is it, my old friend? I think you’ve become just a little cocky after gobbling up that Hatipai.”

  If the beast made a reply, Raed w
as too occupied to notice, because his pursuer was actually visible, only feet away, and coming at him through the gloom of the shaft.

  She must have once been human. The face was a wreck of former beauty twisted in rage. Lips, that could have been full and lovely, were held back from sharpened teeth, and eyes under perfect brows were now bloodred and bulging. Beyond that however, the creature had no resemblance to anything human. Long, jointed legs braced it in the tight space, and carried it forward much faster than Raed could manage. He could not get a good look at the rest, but had the impression of a thorax and segmented body similar to a scorpion. The odor of it, this close up, was almost choking. It smelled like it had bathed in blood and guts—and perhaps it had done that very thing.

  It was a transformation, but only halfway—so unlike the one he had to endure on a regular basis. Raed was abruptly glad that he had never had to experience a terrible in-between state like that.

  Apparently however, his sympathy to it meant nothing. The creature surged forward, hissing like a snake. The Young Pretender didn’t want to find out if the creature bore poisoned fangs. He fired his pistol between his knees and directly into the onrushing thing’s face.

  The scream it let out was most likely terrifying, but Raed couldn’t hear any of it because the retort of the gun in such a tight space set his head buzzing. Everything developed a murky strangeness to it after that. Through the smoke he could make out the shape of the Shin monstrosity, twisting and flailing around. So it seemed a gunshot to the face was at least painful.

  Not planning to linger and find out, Raed dropped the pistol onto his chest, and kicked out with his feet and hands even more furiously in a scramble to get away. He passed a junction where three shafts met the one he’d been traveling in. Craning his neck from side to side, Raed determined two things: the passage to his left was the only one that tickled his face with the possibility of fresh air, and the others brought him only the sound of more skittering pursuit.