Mortal Rites

by Melissa McShane

  You can visit her at www.melissamcshanewrites.com for more information on other books.

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  Sneak Peek: Shifting Loyalties (Company of Strangers, Book Four)

  Cold magical light reflected dully off the black stones of the corridor, as if they were made of something that sucked the light in and held tightly to it. Moisture slicked the walls, but despite the warmth and wetness, nothing grew on them. Sienne heard water dripping, somewhere in the distance. The noise came at irregular intervals, probably from more than one source. Knowing that didn’t make the sound grate any less on her nerves. A regular plink, she could have ignored, but the erratic tap-tap, tap, taptaptap kept her on edge, listening for the next one. The smell of old stone, sour and damp, filled the air. It was like being inside the digestive tract of some oddly angular beast.

  The stone swallowed up the sound of her footsteps and that of her companions just as it did the light. It was a strange corridor, as wide as it was high and seeming without end. Sienne pinched her nose against a sneeze and summoned another couple of magic lights. Their light banished the darkness a few paces, but didn’t illuminate the corridor more than about ten feet away. She sent the new ones flying ahead and heard Dianthe curse. “Too bright,” her friend exclaimed.

  “Sorry. This place has me on edge. No lanterns, no torches, not even brackets to hold lanterns or torches.” She shifted her spellbook to a more comfortable position.

  “Nobody’s been down here but us for decades, maybe centuries,” Alaric said without turning around. “There’s nothing to be worried about.”

  Sienne eyed the giant Sassaven’s broad back. “Then why are you tense?”

  “Because I could be wrong, and someone’s already retrieved the salvage from this place.”

  “Am I the only one who believes this corridor has gone on forever?” Perrin said. “With no discernable landmarks, I cannot imagine how we could tell if that were true.”

  “I have marked the walls,” Kalanath said, demonstrating by drawing the steel tip of his staff with a skree across a stone at head height. “But there is no turn, or door, so it does not matter.”

  “It relieves my mind,” Perrin said. “Pray, do not stop.”

  “The corridor turns here,” Dianthe said, “and there’s a door up ahead.” She vanished into the darkness. Sienne came around the corner to see her examine the thumb latch, then try it. “Not locked.”

  “That could be bad,” Alaric said. “Let’s see what we have.”

  Dianthe pushed the door open and waited for Sienne to send her lights through before entering. Sienne followed Alaric and moved to the side to allow Perrin and Kalanath to enter. The sour smell was stronger in this room, which was vast enough Sienne’s lights, clustered around the door, didn’t illuminate the far end. Chairs with disintegrating cushions stood in groups here and there throughout the cavernous room. Damp, rotting tapestries whose subjects were lost to time hung from the walls, which for once bore patches of moss. They seemed the only healthy, thriving thing in what Sienne was increasingly inclined to call a lair. The ceiling was unexpectedly low, though no lower than it had been in the hall. In this vast room it felt as if it were poised to fall and crush them. Sienne shivered and stepped closer to Alaric.

  “It’s empty,” she said. “Should it be this empty?”

  “Reva Nocenti was killed before she could retreat with her possessions,” Perrin said. “But there are records enough of her underground palace that other scrappers may have looted it in the hundred-odd years since her defeat.”

  “This was an entrance,” Kalanath said, prodding one of the cushions with the tip of his staff. “A place for people who wish a thing to come.”

  “An antechamber,” Sienne said. “That makes sense. Though not much else about this does. Why would a wizard care about ruling a dukedom? Particularly a wizard who was as interested in research as Nocenti was?”

  “Power does strange things to people,” Alaric said. “Why would someone spend three fortunes building an underground palace when an aboveground palace is half as expensive, and has windows?”

  “There are two doors,” Dianthe said. She’d crossed the room, trailing a light, and the far wall was now visible. “Anyone have a preference?”

  “You sound like you’re in a hurry,” Alaric said.

  “Aren’t you? This place gives me hives. See, I’m scratching.” Dianthe rubbed her forearm. “Let’s find this salvage and get out.”

  “I apologize for not being able to direct us more, ah, directly,” Perrin said.

  “You got us this far. And figured out there was something here at all. I call that more than enough help,” Alaric said.

  Sienne brought a light closer to the door nearest her, the one on the left. It was nearly as tall as the ten foot high ceiling and half that wide, carved all over with scenes of a beautiful noblewoman dressed in the style of a century past, passing judgment on groups of people—merchants, peasants, even other nobles. “I think we should take this one.”

  “Why is that?” Perrin said.

  “Because it probably leads somewhere interesting. That other one is plain and I bet it leads to the storage room.”

  “She has a point,” Dianthe said.

  Alaric nodded. “Then left it is.”

  The room beyond the carved door was as cavernous and claustrophobic as the first. More rotting tapestries hung on the walls, more mossy growth gleamed verdantly in the white light. Directly ahead, on a dais reached by three shallow steps, stood a throne carved of black marble, unrelieved by cushions. The wall behind the throne was carved in a bas-relief whose details Sienne couldn’t make out at that distance. She crossed the room to look up at it. It showed the same woman with her hands held out in a pose like the Mercy card in a hazard deck, water overflowing her cupped hands.

  “I sense a theme,” Perrin said.

  “We already knew Nocenti was arrogant,” Alaric said. “Though this certainly proves the point. Dianthe?”

  “I see no signs of any concealed doors or rooms,” Dianthe said. “But I’m not sure she’d want her treasury where so many outsiders go, even if it’s well-hidden. The only exit is that archway over there.” She pointed.

  “I think perhaps we should be certain we are not leaving anything behind,” Perrin said, removing his riffle of blessings from inside his vest. “Not to disparage your abilities, Dianthe, but Averran sees better than we do, and if the wizard Nocenti knew the seeming spell, it might be beyond all of us to find what she hid. I have several of these today, and I daresay that is a hint I should use them.” He tore a purple-smudged square of rice paper from the little bundle and held it high, bowing his head and murmuring an invocation. Purple fire consumed the paper, and a bright violet light outlined all the stones of the walls, turning the moss a dusty gray color. When it faded, Perrin said, “Nothing.”

  Alaric was already headed for the archway, in which drifted shreds of a filmy curtain that might once have been red. “Between the two of you, I think we have an excellent chance of finding the lost treasury.”

  Sienne took up her place in the middle, cradling her spellbook in the crook of her left arm. “I hope nobody else found it first. It’s so disappointing when we make a find and it’s been cleaned out already.”

  Once again, the walls of this corridor were clean of moss. She wondered what made the difference. Nothing obvious, at any rate.

  “My augury blessing suggests strongly that whatever is here is worth our time,” Perrin said. “I, for my part, hope it is a non-magical treasury. Selling off gold and silver is much easier than haggling over artifacts, however more potentially valuable the artifacts are.”

  “There’s a door ahead, and the corridor branches right before it,” Dianthe said. “The door’s not locked. More specifically, it can’t be locked.”

  “We might as well check it fi
rst,” Alaric said.

  The room beyond was clearly a barracks, with three rows of bunks devoid of mattresses or bedding filling the space. “Nothing worth looking at here,” Dianthe said. She crossed the room to the door on the other side and reached for the latch, only to snatch her hand back as if she’d been burned. “Somebody trapped this door. Recently.”

  “How recently?” Alaric said, joining her at the door.

  “Not recently by our standards. A year or so.”

  “That’s recent.” Alaric glared at the door as if that would disarm the trap by itself. “Can you disable it?”

  “I could, but it will take time. We’re probably better off seeing if there’s a way around it. Though the fact that there’s a trap there tells me somebody found something worth hiding.”

  “Or they intend to deceive other scrappers,” Perrin said.

  “Or that. In either case—”

  “We move on,” Alaric said.

  They backtracked and took the second corridor, which ended in a T-junction where they went right. The next room they found was an armory, stripped bare of all but a few rusted swords and armor stands. Sienne examined the walls of the corridor outside the armory. “Strange,” she said. “There’s moss growing here where there isn’t any just ten feet on in the cross-corridor.” She leaned close and sniffed the moss. It smelled reassuringly green.

  “This place has mold growing all over it,” Alaric said. “There’s probably some quality of the walls that encourages it, or inhibits it.”

  “Probably,” Sienne said.

  Far in the distance, something went thunk. Sienne froze. “What was that?”

  Alaric raised his head like a pointer scenting game. “I don’t know. It didn’t sound like something falling. Did you knock something over?” he called to the three still in the armory.

  “No,” Dianthe said, and a moment later she joined them at the door. “It sounded like a door slamming, or a portcullis dropping.”

  “Huh,” Alaric said. “Did you find anything hidden?”

  “No, and Perrin’s blessing didn’t either. Let’s move on.”

  “Aren’t we worried about that noise?” Sienne asked.

  “There’s nothing we can do about whatever it is,” Alaric said. “We’ll just have to hope it’s not some gate trapping us in here.”

  Sienne shivered. “You could have kept that thought to yourself.”

  Turning left at the T-junction led them down a winding corridor to a dead end. “I guess we’ll have to tackle that trap, after all,” Dianthe said as they turned and headed back.

  “We’re not in a hurry,” Alaric said, “and I don’t—what’s that smell?”

  Sienne sniffed. A breeze brought the scent of something rotting to her nose. Something rotting, tinged with the burning, acrid odor of a strong acid. Her heart pounded faster. “Could there be ghouls down here?”

  “Nothing for them to eat,” Alaric said. “I don’t think anything could live down here except bugs and rats.”

  Dianthe stopped at the corner leading to the T-junction. “You know,” she said in a too-casual voice, “we haven’t seen any rats down here at all. Or beetles, or spiders.”

  Sienne drew closer to Alaric. “What does that mean?”

  “It means we might be in for a fight,” Alaric said. “Let’s not be carried away by our imaginations, all right? Lack of vermin doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  Sienne realized she was shaking and clutched her spellbook tighter. She was being ridiculous. She and her companions could defeat anything this lair could throw at them. She couldn’t stop shaking. Her arms and legs vibrated with it. Just as she realized the vibration was coming from outside her, Alaric said, “Something’s coming. Something big.”

  They had nearly reached the T-junction. Sienne’s lights illuminated the short corridor clearly. No one was there. The vibration had grown to the point that it was audible as a low hum that sang through Sienne’s bones and teeth, rattling her skull. She stepped in front of Alaric and opened her spellbook to fury. It sounded big, and anything this big needed more than one force bolt. She wasn’t taking chances.

  Behind her, she heard the rasp of Alaric’s sword sliding free from its sheath. The sound comforted her. She held up a hand, reminding them to stay silent. It was possible whoever this was didn’t know they were there.

  The lights danced in the air, caught in the vibration. The smell of rot and acid was so strong Sienne could taste it. She swallowed hard and clenched her teeth together, blinked away tears from the stinging, acidic air, and focused hard on the T-junction corner.

  The air rippled, and two of Sienne’s lights went out.

  She blinked. The rippling in the air didn’t stop. Something was there, something almost invisible in the now-dim light. She made more lights and flung them down the corridor. As they sailed into the junction, they vanished.

  “Kitane’s eyes, look at that,” Dianthe breathed. A rat danced—danced!—into view, reared up on its hind legs. Its fur was almost gone, and bone shone through in places. Sienne covered her mouth to hold back a shriek. She still had nightmares about undead monsters, and maybe this rat wasn’t big enough to hurt anyone, but it still horrified her.

  She brought up her spellbook and flipped back to burn. Force had no effect on the undead. But as she began to read, Perrin said, “Dear Averran, it is floating. There is something there, carrying it.”

  Sienne took another look. The air before them shimmered, and as another light went out, Sienne realized the rat wasn’t moving its limbs. Perrin was right—something was carrying it, something nearly invisible that moved slowly into the T-junction. “What is that thing?” she exclaimed. Now that she was looking more closely, she could see other things embedded in the field, or mass, or whatever it was: tiny stones, wisps of what might once have been moss, more small furry bodies nearly eaten away, the twisted remnants of a lantern bracket.

  Kalanath stepped forward, his staff extended. Its steel tip prodded the thing. “It feels like a jelly,” he said. The thing reached the wall and stopped. Kalanath pressed harder, then yanked his staff back as the wood below the steel cap began to smoke. “That is fire-hardened oak,” he said. “It is a powerful acid, whatever it is.”

  Sienne summoned more lights. “But what is it for?”

  Alaric chuckled. “I think we just met the cleaning staff. Look—Sienne, shine a light up high there. It’s exactly the same shape as the corridor.”

  Sienne did as he directed. With a dozen lights shining on it, it was visible as a cube of some thick, clear liquid, its skin shimmering with oily rainbows. It was almost pretty.

  The vibration began again. Kalanath took another step back. “Ah,” he said, “it is moving again. Toward us.”

  “It’s not that fast. We can stay out of its way,” Alaric said. Then a peculiar look crossed his face. “But this is a blind corridor.”

  They all looked at each other. “I think we should back up,” Dianthe said.

  They retreated around the corner, all the way back to the blind end. “Sienne, can you get us out of here?” Alaric said.

  “I can get some of us out of here,” Sienne said. Her palms were sweaty, and she surreptitiously wiped them on her trousers. “Moving all of us with ferry takes all my reserves, and I’ve already cast spells today, to get us in here. But I can try force-blasting it.”

  “We can fit two of us across the corridor,” Alaric said. “Maybe if we hit it hard enough, we can get it to reverse its course.”

  They ran back down the twisting corridor. The cube hadn’t advanced very far, though it had consumed more of Sienne’s lights. Sienne opened her spellbook and read off the evocation force. The syllables of the spell were hard and etched with acid, burning her mouth the way the acid in the air burned her eyes. She kept from blinking until the spell shot away from her in a tremendous burst of force.

  It splashed against the cube and vanished.

  “Burn it,” Alaric said. S
ienne flipped pages and read again, tears trickling down her cheeks from the burning sensation. Scorch would be more powerful, but it would also burn everyone in the area, so she stuck with its lesser cousin burn. Dark blue fire shot away from her to strike the cube, flickering across its surface.

  This time, she got the thing’s attention. A high, wavering scream joined the low hum, creating a discordant melody that felt like needles being stabbed into her ears. Alaric grabbed her and pulled her back as the cube accelerated toward them. It still wasn’t moving faster than a brisk walk, but the way it just kept coming, inexorable and ponderous, made Sienne want to flee.

  Alaric squared up to the thing and swung his massive sword in a great two-handed blow. It struck the cube, which made no effort to get out of the way. The sword sliced through the membrane of its skin, and a thick, clear liquid spurted out, striking Alaric in the chest. He shouted and sprang backward, swiping at himself. The stench of acid redoubled. Sienne stepped in front of him and read off burn again. The blue fire struck the cube, turning it a translucent sapphire color briefly. It sped up again. Sienne saw no other indication that her spell had affected it.

  Sienne turned to Alaric and nearly screamed at the sight of his chest, the jerkin and shirt burned away, raw red burns covering his chest and stomach. Alaric was paler than usual and grimacing with pain. “You need to get out of here,” he panted. “Take Dianthe.”

  “I’m not leaving you. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Sienne—”

  They’d backed almost all the way to the dead end. Hands grabbed Sienne and pulled her away from the oncoming juggernaut. Then Perrin said, “O Lord, have patience in your crankiness, and grant me this blessing.” A pearly gray wall went up between them and the cube, which was now only ten feet away and closing fast.

  “Smart,” Alaric said. “But will it last long enough?”

  “I have no idea. We did not see this thing earlier, so perhaps once it reaches the end of its route, it will return to wherever it lurks when it is not on duty.” Perrin stepped forward to the edge of the gray barrier. “Unless it does not consider itself finished until it touches the wall behind us.”