The City Under the Mountain (The Seven Signs Book 4)

by D. W. Hawkins

  The stone floated in midair. A low, golden light emanated from its center. There was metal worked into its surface, a complicated design hinting at an unknown purpose. D’Jenn rose, stumbling as his legs threatened to go limp. He approached the dais with cautious steps, alert for any changes in his Kai.

  With nervous hands, he reached out and grabbed the source.

  His body filled with energy and heat, his limbs going as warm as if he’d sat in a hot bath. The tension in his shoulders subsided, his muscles relaxed. Power flowed into his Kai from the stone, a gentle river that filled him like water filling a cup. D’Jenn spent a moment enjoying the sensation, reveling in the invigorating energy.

  He held the stone to his eyes, peered into its glowing depths. The gem was milky and smooth to the touch. He could sense the stone burning like a disembodied flame. There were currents inside, constant revolutions of power moving to an unknown internal harmony. D’Jenn stood for a moment, mesmerized, before tearing his eyes from the source.

  Clutching the stone in his left hand, he ran for the upper chambers of the temple. When he reached the room with the statue and the stunning illusion, he found it dark and silent. The woman was once again made of stone, and she remained still when he came into the room. D’Jenn gave her a wide berth, nonetheless, and left through the door leading toward the summit.

  Outside, the howls of Garthorin echoed in the city.

  My spell has burned out. The wall is down.

  If the beasts were in the city, they were between D’Jenn and his friends. He cursed to himself, eyes darting around, seeking another path. The toppled silhouettes of buildings stood in the distance, illuminated by the crimson flashes of leftover magical energy. If the streets were full of Garthorin, there was only one way to avoid them.

  Clutching the source tight his hand, D’Jenn ran for the rooftops.

  ***

  Bethany’s stomach spasmed with hunger.

  It was always like that if she went a few days without eating. The hunger would coil inside her like a hungry snake biting the inside of her stomach. She had gotten used to being hungry. It was her constant companion, the only thing in her life she could predict.

  A dim, dripping landscape surrounded her. A web-work of wooden bridges blotted out the sun, built upon the stone skeleton of an ever-sinking ruin. Bethany trudged through ankle-deep water, her nose full of the stink of this place. There had always been a special kind of stench down here. It was a physical presence in Bethany’s nose. The air was always humid, and the constant drip from the bridges above made a light drizzle. The Gutters was the only district in the city with its own weather.

  It’s just nasty down here, and that’s all there is to it.

  She passed huddled forms as she walked, forgotten beggars who had crawled down into the muck to die, or people who sought this place for other reasons—darker reasons. She always had to be careful down here. Never stop moving, never get backed into a corner—the thought came to Bethany’s mind in the voice of a young boy. It was there and gone in a flash, leaving a strange bittersweet sensation in Bethany’s chest.

  The soggy, dim corridors of the Gutters were a labyrinth. No one from the upper levels came down here if they could help it, and Bethany couldn’t blame them. She hated it down here—from the first day, she had hated it down here.

  Bethany spotted a robed figure following her. It slinked down a side corridor just as her eyes fell upon it. She was filled with terror, charged with a burning need to run, so she took off as fast as her legs could carry her.

  Bethany fled deeper into the maze, turning at random intersections in an effort to lose the robed figure behind her. She rounded the corner between a moldy stone foundation and an arrangement of thick wooden supports, feet splashing over the flooded stone underfoot. She ran past a building that was out of place, sandwiched between two crumbling stone pillars. It was a large, unadorned tenement encircled by an iron fence. The fence looked like it belonged in a dungeon somewhere.

  It’s an orphanage.

  The building filled her with a sense of foreboding and a twisted mix of emotions she couldn’t unravel. She paused only a moment, shooting a look over her shoulder. The shadowed form moved through the darkness behind her, so Bethany ran on.

  The next building appeared on her other side, and brought Bethany stumbling to a halt.

  It was a small, square building built from ancient, cracked bricks, though it had been well maintained. It had a single arched doorway in the center of the front wall, with two windows facing what would have been a street, if there were streets in this place. Someone had painted the windowsills a rich green, and flowers spilled from pots sitting in the windows. Curtains of the same rich green color hung in the openings. A singing voice drifted through the windows.

  Bethany felt a pang of sorrow so deep it almost brought her to her knees. Something about this place beckoned to her, resonated with her. The voice filtering through the window brought tears to Bethany’s eyes. The song was light and cheerful, though the woman singing it had trouble finding the tune. Her voice was beautiful, nonetheless, and Bethany found herself drifting toward the building before she knew what she was doing.

  She looked over her shoulder for the cloaked figure, but he was nowhere to be seen. There was only the twisting, flooded corridors stretching into the shadowed distance. Bethany turned back toward the building and moved for the door.

  It was small on the inside, consisting of a single room. There was a long table built into the wall on Bethany’s left, which had different things scattered over its surface—a set of tools, a bowl full of bread loaves, and a set of cooking implements. An iron stove, complete with a pipe running through the ceiling, sat in the left corner next to the window. There was a fire burning in the stove, emitting a pleasant warmth. The other side of the room was hidden behind a blanket hanging from the ceiling.

  The singing voice hovered in the room, but there was no one inside.

  Bethany’s heart was full of sorrow. She reached up to touch the blanket, the sensation of the fabric bringing tears to her eyes. With cautious steps, she pushed the blanket aside and ducked into the other side of the room.

  A bed was pushed against the wall under the open window, simple but sturdy. The mattress looked rumpled, but the bed was made. The sheets were the same deep green painted over the windowsills. Bethany walked to the bed and touched the blanket, lingering over the fabric.

  Beside the bed was a smaller piece of furniture—a wide, circular basket made of wicker. There was a cushion inside the basket made of something fluffy and white. Bethany was struck with the urge to crawl onto the cushion and curl up around her knees, to hide in its fluffy white depths. She rushed to the basket, gripped the edge in tight, dirty hands. Something was stuffed into the folds of the cushion, and Bethany reached for it before she could stop herself.

  Her fingers closed around something soft and lumpy. She pulled it from the cushion and held it up to the light. It was a doll made of stuffed wool, shaped to resemble a little girl in a blue dress. She had hair made of brown yarn, which poked out in every direction, and a tiny mouth sewn into a frown. Her arms and legs were shapeless lumps, but her eyes had been made from tiny gemstones. Bethany didn't know what kind, and even as she turned the doll in the light, the little stones shifted in color, going from orange to blue to green and back again.

  Bethany’s hands shook. She tried to hold back the sobs, but they came anyway. Tears streamed down her face and she sniffled. She made to put the doll back onto the cushion, but noticed something before she laid it down.

  The doll was crying, too. Diminutive tears formed at the edge of the gemstones and leaked down the side of the doll’s face. Bethany’s own tears subsided, but she still felt a deep, aching sadness.

  The singing voice went silent.

  The warm little room suddenly felt cold. Fear blossomed in Bethany’s chest, filling her body with tension. She moved through the blanket and back into the main pa
rt of the room, stopping in her tracks when she came in sight of the door.

  The robed man stood in the opening.

  His face was hidden in shadow, as was most of his body. The fabric of his robe crawled into the room, moving over the floor like liquid darkness. He took a step forward, the wooden floor rotting as his foot touched its surface. The man said something, but his voice came out as an unintelligible whisper. He raised his shadowed arms and flames erupted from the walls.

  Bethany screamed and shuffled away from the creeping darkness, toward the bed under the window. The fire crawled across the table and down over the floor. It licked at the ceiling and consumed the blanket dividing the bedroom from the rest of the home. The room filled with black, choking smoke.

  Bethany screamed as the fire chased her toward the bed. She had an urge to save the doll from the inferno, and dove for the wicker basket beside the bed. The doll was lying on the cushion, gemstone eyes still leaking tears. Her face had changed. Where before there had been a little frown sewn into her woolen features, now her expression was twisted with anger.

  A rough hand grabbed Bethany from behind, tangling in her shirt. She screamed and kicked, fighting to get away. The hand spun her around, revealing a pale man with a scarred face. He grabbed Bethany by the shoulders and picked her up, lifting her from the cushion. Bethany screamed, clawed, kicked, and thrashed as much as she could, but no matter how hard she swung, she couldn’t do any damage. The man’s pallid arms were like iron.

  The pale man looked down at her with sad eyes, and Bethany realized he wasn’t the robed figure. The man glanced over his shoulder and rushed her to the window as the fire engulfed the rest of the room. Bethany dropped her doll as he carried her toward the opening, and she screamed as she saw it eaten by the flames. The pale, scarred man was oblivious to her protests. He lifted her again and put her into the window. Bethany grabbed on with her hands and planted her feet on the windowsill, knocking the potted plants into the street.

  The robed figure stood in the back of the room, staring at her with murder in his eyes. Behind him, the fire consumed everything. The scarred man held her for a moment and fixed her with an intense look.

  “Run, girl!” His eyes were rimmed with sadness. “Never stop running!”

  With that, he pushed her out the window. Bethany fell into an endless darkness, the burning home disappearing above. The noise of the destruction faded, leaving only the echoes of the singing voice to haunt her fall.

  Bethany didn’t hit the bottom so much as stop falling. At some point, she realized she could put her feet down. They fetched up against something hard and invisible in the darkness, though Bethany had no idea what it was. Endless shadow stretched around her, and it seemed the dark was made from the substance of silence itself.

  She could hear her own breathing, as if the shadows were a blanket stretched over her face. The noise didn’t echo, but hovered close to her instead, as if the sound was afraid to venture into the dark. Bethany concentrated, tried to still her breathing. She ran through the exercises Dormael and D’Jenn had taught her—the calm pool inside her chest, and the silence under the water. Her Kai sang deep in the pool, but it was muted in this dark, shadowy place. Bethany resisted the urge to reach for it—what she needed now was stillness. Her magic had been a storm since the first night she’d touched it.

  “Bethany.”

  A stab of pain went through Bethany’s heart at the sound of the voice. She couldn’t say why, not really, but something about the tone crawled through her chest and stabbed her in the heart. Fear rushed to the surface of her mind, filling Bethany with an overwhelming urge to curl up and shut her eyes.

  No! It’s not true! I don’t want to see it!

  “Bethany.”

  Her body trembled. Her hands went to her eyes, tried to cover her face. She crouched in the darkness, hugging her knees to her chest.

  Please! I don’t want to see it! I don’t want to —

  A finger trailed through a strand of her hair, flipping it back along her head. She jumped and scrambled away, throwing her hands up to fend off the touch. She froze at the sound of laughter and opened her eyes.

  A wan light shone from somewhere above, though Bethany couldn’t see the source. The ground was a flat, shiny film, only visible because it reflected the light like the surface of dark water. Before her stood a shadowy form, barely visible against the empty dark. It was thicker than the shadows around it, as if pure darkness had been compressed into a person.

  The shadow took a step forward, reaching a hand toward Bethany. Bethany shot to her feet and skipped away from the thing, keeping it in sight. She looked around for somewhere to run, but there was nothing but the endless dark.

  “Why do you run from me?”

  Bethany stared at the shadow. “What are you?”

  “You know who I am, Bethany.” The shadow came forward another step. “I've been with you for a long time. Don’t you remember?”

  “No.” Bethany’s heart beat in her ears. “I don’t want to remember! Just leave me alone!”

  Laughter echoed from the darkness.

  “Leave you alone?” The shadow made a derisive noise. “What would have happened had I left you alone to starve in the cold? There is no you, Bethany. There is no I. There is us, and we are never alone.”

  “No.” Bethany’s voice cracked. “It’s not true!”

  The shadow came forward again. “You do not remember what you are. You have locked it away behind walls of weakness, chained the door with locks of denial.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  Bethany couldn’t find the courage to run. The shadow stepped closer, its form solidifying into a young girl. Her skin was gray with the pallor of death, her too-blue eyes rimmed with dark circles. She had limp blond hair plastered to her head with wetness. It dripped into the faded dress she wore and pattered around her bare feet. The girl cocked her head to the side and smiled.

  Bethany knew her face.

  “No!” Bethany came to her feet. “You’re not her! You’re not real, you’re just wearing her face! This is just a dream!”

  The girl smiled even wider. “You know this face, Bethany. You remember.”

  “No.” Bethany shook her head. “I don’t.”

  One moment the girl was standing a short distance from Bethany, and the next, she was pressed close. Her cold, moist hands grabbed Bethany by the sides of her head, fingers pressing into her skull. Bethany screamed, reached up to fight those terrible hands away, but touching them was like plunging her hands into an icy stream. The girl’s empty blue eyes looked deep into Bethany’s.

  “Remember!”

  Images rushed into Bethany’s mind, each one more shattering than the next. She saw the little home burning, the flames reflected in the beady eyes of the little cloth doll. She saw the smiling face of the blue-eyed blond girl, laughing at a shared secret beneath a ratty orphanage blanket. There was an image of her running, her hand clutched tight in the grip of that same smiling girl as other children ran screaming in every direction, trying to escape shadowed forms moving through a burning room.

  She saw the dripping landscape of moldy stone walls, standing water, and bridges blocking the light from above. Bethany paused at one of the images—a laughing group of children, as mismatched in looks as they were in age, sharing a meager meal inside a decrepit room. The blond girl was there, as were other faces who sent pangs through Bethany’s heart. She wanted to stay in that place, wanted to inhabit that frozen image forever, but the next one came on without pause.

  The last vision was a memory frozen in time. Bethany saw her own reaching hand, outstretched before her toward the blond girl and another face from the dream. A rough hand held Bethany around the torso, and she could feel her legs kicking in midair. The smell of steel oil and leather filled her nose, and the sound of her own screams was all she could hear.

  A pair of burly, armored men held her two friends captive, smiling as they drew daggers fr
om their belts. They stabbed her friends—No! It can't be! Not them!—and tossed their bodies aside with nothing but curses for the trouble. The blond girl mouthed Bethany’s name as the rain turned her blood to rusty pools on the stone. Something was tied over Bethany’s eyes, and the storm of images came to an end.

  “You remember.” The shadow still wore the face of Bethany’s friend. “Yes. Now you see.”

  Bethany screamed and pushed the cold hands of the shadow away. She stumbled to the side, feet splashing on the odd liquid surface beneath her. The shadow laughed.

  “You cannot hide, Bethany. You cannot run. The truth finds you no matter what you do to escape.”

  “I’m not hiding!”

  “No? Have you told your new father about your history with the cloaked man? Have you told your friends who you really are? What about the street urchins who came before them, or the orphans at Duchess Cole’s?”

  “Shut up!”

  “You’ve always known he was there, that he was after you, but you didn’t warn any of them. You kept the secret because you’ve always kept it, and now they’re all dead. Your father will die, too.”

  “He won’t!”

  “What do you think he will say when he learns the truth? He will cast you aside when he discovers what follows you.”

  “The cloaked man is dead!” Bethany found strength in the words. “My father killed him. He’s buried in the earth!”

  The shadow laughed. “Do you believe that? Every time you thought you were safe, he came.”

  “But I saw him—”

  “You’re nothing but a danger to everyone you’ve ever loved. You bring nothing but pain, Bethany. You killed your parents, you killed your friends, and you’ll keep killing as long as you live.”

  Bethany clenched her fists. “It wasn’t my fault!”

  “Not your fault?”

  “No!” Bethany took a step toward the shadow and squared her shoulders. “And I’m not afraid of you anymore.”