Master of One

by Jaida Jones

  He whipped around.

  Didn’t sound like Morien, but the sorcerer had a way of showing up silently and when Rags least expected it.

  Still alone. He hadn’t opened the door yet and he hadn’t given Morien the signal.

  Rags shook his head like a wet dog, like he could clear his thoughts as easily as drying himself off. Then he went back to his examination of the doors, drew his fingertips over the etched head of the figure who’d wound up in the hilly countryside.

  “He buried fae treasure, all silver and blood.” The voice singsonged like wind through a crack. It cut Rags cold. “Deep in the earth, where sleeping things grow.”

  Was it coming from beyond this door?

  “Time to move on,” Rags told himself, speaking out loud to hear what a real voice sounded like. To drown out the fake stuff. He gave the second door a little push to test it, then stepped sideways to the next.

  “Measure by measure comes Oberon’s flood,” the voice started up again, this time before Rags had the chance to put his hand to stone. It seemed to be coming from everywhere, with no single point of origin. It melted from the walls and through the seven doors, slithering into Rags’s ears. “More precious than gold, so final the blow.”

  It was his voice, he realized, but a younger version, warped by reflection or recollection. The laugh that burbled after it was softer, fainter. Familiar somehow, though that didn’t matter.

  This was more underhanded fae nonsense meant to dissuade and disarm him.

  They wanted to get into his head because they didn’t want him to think clearly.

  “You’re already buried.” The whispers crackled louder, like fire roaring in a steel drum. “Who will look for you in this place? Dirty little thief in the halls of legends. Dane might have cared. But Dane is gone.”

  Dane. It was Dane’s laugh. A memory that throbbed like a bad tooth if Rags probed too near it.

  “Shut up,” he said. “You don’t know anything. You’re a door.”

  “And you don’t belong here.” The whispers swelled to raucous howls. Rags flinched as they echoed, distorting in his ears. “You don’t belong anywhere. You don’t belong.”

  “Enough!”

  He couldn’t examine the door like this. Shoulders hunched defensively, Rags rummaged in his pockets, touching the broken beetle before finding Morien’s magicked blindfold. He tied it around his head like a ribbon, covering his ears instead of his eyes.

  The effect was immediate, like plunging his head underwater. The world of sound receded, leaving him in total quiet.

  Rags gave himself to the count of ten to steady his shaking fingers. Then, using only his eyes and his hands, he set to studying, feeling, the etchings in the seven doors.

  One of them was the right one. Those voices had been sent to distract him from discovering the truth, to drive him mad before he looked closely enough to solve the puzzle. They hadn’t counted on Morien and his sorcerous cloths.

  Rags searched in silence until he found one inconsistency, barely the size of an eyelash, the slightest crescent at the base of the sixth door counting from Rags’s left. It sat tucked into the door’s keystone, like a falling star.

  None of the other doors had one. All had identical, unblemished arches, smooth as clean sheets.

  “You,” Rags said.

  He held his breath, stuck his nail into the crescent, and turned.

  Nothing but an open hall awaited him. It was almost a letdown.

  The nineteenth door was peaceful, or deceptively so. Plain black wood, with bark that flaked and glinted the way the trees in the forest had, as though the chamber had a beam of sunlight trapped inside its stuffy darkness. Rags checked the walls, crawled on his hands and knees over the floor searching for secret traps that would set off explosions, swinging blades, a host of treasure defenders that were just mouths with claws dropping from the ceiling.

  But there was nothing.

  “Safe,” Rags called into his Morien-summoning mirror after removing his Morien-summoned blindfold. This was only a room. The door ahead had a proper knob, shaped like a sun crowned by its beams.

  Rags squinted at it.

  “I don’t trust you,” he muttered.

  Morien coalesced out of the surprisingly fresh air. “Your mistrust of everything may have been the key to your survival to this point.”

  Rags grinned despite himself. It wasn’t flattery. It was the truth. Morien had told him the rooms in this place didn’t exist until the doors opened. Rags would be a fool to trust something that well hidden.

  His only consolation was that it had to be getting on Morien’s nerves worse than his. An all-powerful sorcerer depending on a Cheapside prowler to escort him to the ribbon at the end of the race. It would’ve been a great story, if that Cheapside prowler had been anyone other than Rags himself.

  He ate another magic apple as he cased the door, flattening his ear against it, listening for noise on the other side. Hearing deathly silence.

  The start of a feeling in his heart—around the shard, which he’d come to accept he’d always sense, a pinprick with every breath—thrilling bolts of excitement through his arms, down his legs, to his toes. One of his hands was shaking. Not with fear, but with excitement.

  That was unusual.

  Feelings meant nothing. Instinct, experience, and wariness were his only true friends.

  Rags couldn’t shake the shiver that jittered down the length of his spine, jerky motions like a spider’s weight vibrating a cast thread. It filled him with breathless fire that honestly scared him. He didn’t have the right name to call it, although it felt dangerously close to hope.

  “Whatever.” For himself, not for the sorcerer. Louder, he added, “Stand back. I have a good feeling about this one.”

  Could the fae leave a spell behind that would inspire false optimism in whoever entered this room? Again: It was just their twisted style.

  Rags grabbed the doorknob and turned, fully expecting the mechanism to catch and hold, the doorknob to sprout rows of teeth and gnaw his hand off, anything to stanch the flow of excitement echoing outward from the center of his chest.

  It didn’t. The knob turned. The door sighed, a wise, old sound, and creaked slowly but inward.

  “We’ll await your signal,” Morien said.

  Rags made a rude hand gesture where Morien couldn’t see it.

  He stepped into the waiting chamber, and the door swung shut behind him with a whoosh that stirred the grime on the floor. The click of a lock.

  What came next was bound to be bad.

  12

  Rags

  Only it wasn’t.

  Rags’s eyes adjusted to the dark. There was a light somewhere close. He was in another tunnel, not a room—and he wasn’t in full control of his legs. His steps quickened without his permission until he was practically running, stumbling as he went. Something drew him forward with the same magnetic insistence as the first corpse’s bony arms snapping back where they belonged, re-forming the whole out of its forcibly separated parts. Though his feet dragged leaden and sluggish, he couldn’t feel the impact when they hit the ground.

  The light in front of him grew, resolving itself into a shape like the lid of a coffin. As he drew closer, he realized it was a coffin, made of glass.

  Rags stopped in front of it, feet scraping to a halt. He was staring down at another murky reflection of himself.

  Only it was too tall, too broad in the shoulders. The coffin wasn’t actually mirrored—the top was like a windowpane, and Rags was looking at another person within it, their figure distorted through the sheet of nearly liquid glass. Over their chest, a fist-sized hole had been melted through the lid.

  A quick glance upward showed a hole in the ceiling about the same size.

  How deep down was he? Had something living burrowed its way in from the surface?

  Rags longed to take a step away but couldn’t. His gaze slid back to the coffin. Radiating rolling heat like forge fir
e, the shape inside undefined, warped and wavering. Rags didn’t trust that touching it wouldn’t sear his hand off at the wrist and leave him with an oozing stump.

  But how much he did want to touch it outweighed all rational fear.

  He couldn’t explain it. Both hands went up, discovering the same shapes on the surface as on the first door. Handprints.

  “Daring as ravens, rich as magpies,” Rags whispered, reciting the old Clave prayer for luck, and set his palms against the handprints in the glass, meeting the figure’s hands below it fingertip to fingertip.

  Rags’s hands fit perfectly into each groove. He discovered that the surface itself wasn’t burning hot, or, like the rest of the fae technology in the ruins, it reacted to his presence, his touch. The glass began to cool, and as it cooled, it hardened.

  As it hardened, it began to crack.

  One fissure ran straight down the center, between Rags’s fingertips. He was vaguely aware of the coffin shattering open, of its shattered pieces burying themselves in his palms, though no pain accompanied the fact, only mild amazement. One fragment sliced his cheek, another his chin. But instead of blowing him backward with the final force of its destruction, it sucked him inward, so that he met the figure within chest to chest.

  The figure sat up, then slumped forward. Rags caught it in his arms, but it was dead heavy, an anchor dragging him to the floor. He managed to slow the fall, to soften the impact. His bloody hands smeared red stains along its bare forearms, a bare chest. Long black hair, save one silver-white shock, tumbled everywhere. The body sagged down, down, and Rags fell back, pinned under its weight.

  Then the body began to scream.

  13

  Rags

  While the screaming continued, too loud and too close and drawing on a depthless well of emotion beyond human comprehension, Rags remained stunned. He spiraled in and out of the scream’s pain with dizzying speed, no room left for thoughts in his head, only the echo of the noise.

  At the point when Rags suspected his head might split apart at the straining seams like an overstuffed moneybag, the screaming stopped.

  The silence in its wake proved worse, leaving Rags empty and adrift. His palms began to sting. Blood dripped down his fingertips. The weight of the other body pinned him to the ground. Gusts of trembling, cool breath stirred his hair.

  Something round rolled across the floor.

  The body moved. Jerky, awkward movements from limbs trying to remember how they worked, what their purposes were. The weight—thankfully—lifted. Rags stayed put, flat on the floor and staring upward. He watched the body relearn itself, watched it hold up its hands and spread its tattooed fingers apart and stretch each in turn. Strong, tawny arms, with black bones tattooed on the skin. Everywhere on the skin. That long hair reminded Rags of the first fae corpse. It fell over the body’s face, hid it in endless shadow, until suddenly the body’s large hands pushed it back and all its features were revealed.

  Looking not entirely majestic.

  The face over Rags’s was baffled. Bewilderment stamped on majesty, a contradiction amazing enough to make Rags attempt a weary laugh.

  “I am awake,” the bow-curved lips parted to say. At the corners of the mouth sat twin black X’s. No, they were crossbones. The rest of the face was golden skin unmarked by black ink. Big, silver eyes without whites; a nose that reminded Rags of an eagle, or pictures of eagles, which were all he’d seen.

  “Yes.” Rags’s voice emerged in an ugly croak. “The screaming made that obvious.”

  “A side effect of the Sleep.” The fae—because he was fae, had to be fae, looking everything and nothing like a person, like so much more than a human could hope to be—bent over Rags again. The intensity of his fae gaze burned. Rags flinched. The fae noticed the blood on Rags, squinting at it until recognition crossed his features. “You are injured.”

  “Yes,” Rags said again. “That happened when the, uh, glass exploded.”

  “Your touch awakened me.” The fae sketched a formal, if cramped, bow with an impossible combination of near-liquid agility and steel-hard strength in his shoulders. The awkwardness he’d suffered at first was nowhere to be found. He’d rediscovered his mobility quickly and was already a master of it. Graceful, beautiful, powerful. Part of a vanished race of superintelligent beings obsessed with their superiority.

  The same beings who’d created an obstacle course that had nearly killed Rags to get through. The same beings who’d been declared enemy forces by a queen dead for centuries before Rags ever slipped out of his mother’s womb. Humans and fae didn’t mix.

  This obstacle course might still kill him.

  “Okay,” Rags said.

  Was this the part where he got turned on a spit and roasted for breakfast?

  From the shimmering pool of broken glass, the fae extracted a shirt. Or Rags thought it was a shirt. The garment was spun from a fabric so light, it hovered in the air between them, delicate as spider silk and practically transparent. The fae pulled it on over his head. Once on, it clung to his form like it had been made for that purpose.

  Maybe it had been. Who was Rags to comment on fae fashion?

  Dressed, the fae took one of Rags’s hands, his touch startlingly cold. At once, feeling rushed back into Rags’s fingertips. He yelped, cursed. His hands were all that stood between him and starvation. If these cuts got infected, if they ran deep enough to sever muscle or affect sensation, he was fucked, he was so fucked—

  His thoughts devolved into cursing after that, so deeply private and pained that he didn’t realize he was speaking them out loud.

  “What does it mean?” the fae asked, beginning to diligently clean the blood from Rags’s right palm with his hair. “‘Pissing balls of fucking fire’? Is it your name?”

  Rags tried to laugh but choked instead. His hands hurt, his back hurt, his face hurt, and he wished his name was Pissing Balls of Fucking Fire. It would suit the mood he was in.

  “That’s not—no. It’s not my name. That’s some other guy.”

  “My apologies to have confused you for someone else.” Rags searched the fae’s tone for signs of sarcasm but found none. “You who have awakened me have my respect and my loyalty. I would know you. What is it that you are named?”

  Rags swallowed. “Uh.” This was going to be embarrassing. “Call me Rags.”

  Instead of laughing—could fae laugh?—the fae simply nodded. “A short name, but one that is strong. In return, know me. I am Shining Talon of Vengeance Drawn in Westward Strike, and I am honored to be met by you.”

  “Shining what of huh?” Rags pulled his hand back, alarmed by the way the fae’s touch had begun to numb it. He shook it out, winced as feeling and pain returned, then began to study the slices and gashes with grim focus.

  “Shining Talon of Vengeance Drawn in Westward Strike, my lord Rags.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  Somber resignation momentarily tugged the X’s tattooed at the corners of the fae’s mouth. He bowed his head. “It is all. I am young and have not yet proven myself.”

  Rags sucked at a particularly deep gouge in his thumb, tasting blood. In the pause that followed, he levered himself up onto one elbow in order to look over the fae’s broad shoulder. He was met with the sight of cracked glass, the jagged remains of the coffin, its glow dulled by its collapse, and a small, grave-sized hollow in the wall. No chamber beyond. No further challenges, from the looks of it. No more doors.

  No treasure.

  Rags worked a chunk of glass free from his flesh with his teeth and spat it, stained pink, onto the floor at his side. Although his body tingled at the edges, a fuzzy feeling of uncertainty at the boundaries of his own skin, he got to his feet. The fae moved aside but watched him as he went. Rags swayed but managed to stay upright, lurching toward the thing that had rolled free of the coffin. Maybe it was a diamond. A big, not very sparkly, mostly dirty diamond.

  He scooped the lumpy thing up in his hand. Because that was what
it was. A lump of twisted ore, like raw silver before a silversmith got hold of it. Worth something, sure. There was never a shortage of men and women who wanted swords, and people who needed the materials to make them.

  But it was hardly treasure.

  Trying to shake off his growing despair, Rags turned and wobbled toward the spot where the fae had been resting—how long? Rags was no scholar, but he tallied something like a couple hundred years, before Rags showed up and busted the guy loose. Accidentally.

  Rags poked his head inside the coffin’s alcove anyway, figuring there had to be a hidden compartment somewhere. Maybe this test was the hardest yet, the most baffling. And maybe the fae would kill him if he failed it. He’d said You who have awakened me have my respect and my loyalty, but legend had it that the fae were known to lie like anyone else, probably the only thing all races had in common. Rags had never met an Ancient One, but he suspected that if they too could talk, they too must have lied plenty.

  “What do you seek?” The fae’s voice was closer than it should have been. He’d crept up on Rags in complete silence. Rags jerked back at the realization and slammed into the fae’s extremely solid chest, practically dislocating his elbow in the process.

  Rags cursed. The fae closed both hands over Rags’s biceps to steady him, which felt more like a trap than anything else, and Rags thrashed, knowing those hands were too strong and he’d never pry himself free. That didn’t stop him from trying.

  The fae let go of him the moment his panic manifested. He took a step away, leaving Rags to sway precariously, caught in the channels of his own wild momentum without anything to steady him.

  He was alive. Maybe the fae thought he was too scrawny to bother with, not worth the stains his blood would make.

  The fae observed him the entire time with blank eyes and slightly parted lips. His expressions were too foreign, the color of his eyes too unchanging, to translate.

  Rags sagged against the nearest wall in order to remain upright. “Don’t just grab someone like that!”

  The fae bowed. “I will not just grab someone like that as you have requested.”