by Martha Carr
“It’s our duty,” the first orc growled, his hairless brow scrunching together. While it was almost impossible for an orc to close their mouth around the huge tusks protruding from their lips, this one almost looked like he was gaping in surprise. “We are pledged to the O’gúl Crown and nothing else.”
“I’m not the Crown, okay?” Cheyenne spread her arms and let out a wry laugh. “How many of you were in the Heart yesterday when all that went down?”
The orcs stared at her, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. All of them nodded.
“Okay, then I don’t get what’s so hard to grasp. Persh’al Tenishi is your Crown, okay? Blue troll. Kinda hard to miss. Not me.”
“You turned the Cycle, Black Fla—”
“Cheyenne. My name is Cheyenne. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Cheyenne.” Her name whispered through the orc’s thick tusks. “You turned the Cycle. The Spider is erased from this world. Persh’al Tenishi did not do this.”
“Yeah, but I gave him the throne. You saw him take the oath.”
“But you swore it with him.”
Cheyenne sighed heavily. “Sure, you got me on a technicality. But seriously, I’m not here to rule, and I’m not going to be the Black Flame and have everybody argue with me about who’s got what job.”
“There is no argument.” An orc with a puckered wad of scarred flesh where his left eye used to be pounded his chest again. “We answer to you.”
“I appreciate that. Really. Okay, I’m ordering you to call me Cheyenne, not the Black Flame. And I’ll order you not to bring this up again if I happen to stumble into your little meeting in this…” She turned toward Ember. “Where are we?”
“Where’s Venga?” Ember stared around the room. “Where’s all his stuff? He was here yesterday.”
“The necromancer relocated.” The one-eyed orc narrowed his eye at the fae. “What do you want with the scaleback?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Whoa. Okay.” Cheyenne wrapped her arm around Ember’s shoulder and all but pushed her friend across the circular room toward the other side. “We’re passing through, soldiers. As you were. Or whatever.”
The first orc snarled at Ember. “If you’re friends with the necromancer, tell him he has more than enough to answer for. Exile does not forgive.”
“I wouldn’t call us friends.” Ember looked at the orc over her shoulder. “And I don’t know why you’re snarling at me, okay?”
“All right!” Cheyenne waved at the door, and it opened for both of them. “Maybe you guys didn’t pick up on this. Fae Nós Aní over here, okay? Mine. So just dial it down a notch.”
The gathering of orcs looked at each other, scowls and snarling forgotten, and all dropped to one knee to thump fists on chests again. “Forgive us.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re good.” Cheyenne pulled Ember through the open doors and nodded at the kneeling guards. “Come on, guys. Just act normal, huh? Everything’s fine.”
The one-eyed guard looked at her in confusion, like he didn’t understand what the phrase “Everything’s fine” meant.
A short, mottled gray-green orc thrust his fist in the air and shouted, “Blood and honor, Cheyenne!”
“Ha! Yeah, okay. I can get behind that one. Blood and honor.”
The other orcs’ shouts of the same erupted behind her even as she waved the door closed again. She looked at Ember, shaking her head.
“You know, I almost preferred it when everyone hated me because I walked through this place with L’zar. I can handle dirty looks, but the bowing is awkward.”
“He moved his whole setup and didn’t even bother to tell me.” Ember stared down the next hall stretching ahead of them and gritted her teeth. “If he wants my fucking help, the least he can do is let me know he’s not where he said he’d be.”
“I mean, he sent us a map.”
“That’s not the point.” Ember glared up at her. “I said I knew how to find him, and this is fucking embarrassing.”
Cheyenne pressed her lips together and nodded. If anyone knows feeling pissed-off and betrayed, I sure as hell do. Here’s another reason to work on keeping my own shit in check. “I know, Em. Not your fault.”
“He would’ve told you if he was moving.”
“Nah, I doubt it. Nobody tells me anything, and I don’t think Venga likes me.”
“Why not?”
“I mean, if everyone else credits me for wiping Ba’rael off the face of this plane, at least, he definitely blames me for screwing up his revenge plot.”
“Huh.” Floating away from the halfling, Ember stared at the light-colored walls around them and shrugged. “So, he’s a douche.”
“Yeah, I figured that out the second L’zar opened the guy’s sensory-deprivation cell. Necromancy and douchebaggery go hand in hand, don’t you think?”
“I guess.” Ember blinked, then stared blankly at the wall for five seconds before nodding. “Okay, I pulled up the new map.”
“Great.”
“Wanna try again?”
“We have been summoned, after all.”
Ember snorted and nodded down the hall. “Then keep up.”
Chapter Fifteen
Cheyenne had pulled the map up with her activator just in case and decided not to say anything about it. By the time they reached the end of the corridor and the last turn leading to Venga’s new workshop, the hair on the back of her neck prickled and started to rise. “This feels familiar.”
“I was starting to think the same thing.” Ember turned around to look back the way they’d come and wrinkled her nose. “Why?”
“Beats me, Em. I can’t tell a single part of this place from the next, except for the courtyard. And yeah, I’m pretty sure I’d recognize it if we ended up in the basement torture chamber again.”
They turned the corner and stared down the next long hall. At the end were two huge reinforced metal doors, and those Cheyenne definitely recognized. “No way.”
Ember clenched her fists. “He took the fucking black-goo room?”
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Well, what the hell else would you call it? Another torture chamber? The magic-stealing room? A mad scientist’s murder lab? We watched those magicals die in that shit, Cheyenne, and that fucking four-armed lizard thinks it’s funny to take over and play ‘bad necromancer turned not-so-bad and trying to save the world’ in there? No. Uh-uh.” Ember floated at a furious speed down the hallway, purple light flashing around her clenched fists.
Cheyenne silently followed her. I can only imagine how much it would suck right now not to be able to stomp down this hall.
Ember flung her hands toward the double doors and smashed them with a burst of purple light. The doors crashed open and swung back into place a second after the two slipped inside.
That would’ve felt good.
“What the hell are you thinking?” Ember shouted. “You summon us, and don’t say a word about having moved!”
“I sent you a map,” Venga growled.
“You can’t work in here!” Ember floated toward a workbench built into the wall and started grabbing handfuls of vials and bottles and tubes to shove them into a metal crate on the far end. “This whole room needs to be destroyed. Wiped off the map. Taken out of the fortress. I’ll fucking blow it up.”
Venga fixed Cheyenne with wide eyes, his scaly lips pulled back in a snarl. “Do something.”
The halfling folded her arms. “Yeah, you definitely did.”
With a growl, the four-armed scaleback stomped across the room toward Ember. “Put that down, fae. No one told you to pack for me.”
“No one told you it was okay to set up blight-experiment shop in here, either!” Ember stopped her angry packing when Venga snatched her wrist with one arm and removed the half-packed crate with two more to get it out of her reach.
“This is the only room in the whole fell-damn city with even a modicum of usefulness to me, and I s
till don’t have what I need.”
She jerked her wrist out of his scaly, black-clawed grasp. “Well, maybe you’d find what you need if you weren’t working in a death chamber.”
“Death?” Venga stepped back, cradling the crate under one arm, and scratched his head with the second arm on the same side. He looked around the room, then chuckled darkly. “You think it’s wise to lecture me on death?”
“Just because that’s the kind of magic you use, it doesn’t mean it’s all fun and games for everyone else.” Ember glared at the necromancer and tossed a hand toward Cheyenne. “Come on, tell him.”
“What? I’m not part of this.”
“Cheyenne!”
The halfling stuck her hands in her pockets and shrugged. “I mean, yeah. It’s kinda like taking a shit on someone else’s grave.”
Ember whirled and glared at her. “That’s how you back me up?”
Cheyenne glanced at her friend and then the now-clearly-amused necromancer. “It just came out, Em. I didn’t know we were ganging up on him together.”
“So, you don’t think there’s a serious issue with setting up a workshop for healing the blight in the same room where this asshole’s magic stole the power from innocent O’gúleesh and killed them?”
“No, yeah. Serious issue.”
“There.” Ember folded her arms and returned to glaring at Venga. “You heard it from the Black Flame herself. Move your shit out of here, then I’m ripping this room out by the walls.”
“Em.”
“What?”
“You just gave a command for me.”
“No, I didn’t. You said…” Ember clenched her jaw and closed her eyes. “Shit.”
“I mean, I get it. You’re pissed, and you have every right to be. We were all pissed the last time we walked through these doors. Or charged through what was left of them, anyway.” Cheyenne looked over her shoulder at the perfectly intact doors. “Which seem to have put themselves back together pretty well. But whatever. Maybe we should give Venga a chance to explain why this has to be done here. Might be a good idea to hear all the facts before we start the demolition, right?”
Ember looked at the necromancer and scowled. “Why are you smiling at me?”
The scaleback blinked at her and set the metal crate back down on the workbench. “You can tell it’s a smile, can you? Most O’gúleesh think this is the expression I make when I’m ready to tear them limb from limb.”
“You’re not building a very strong case for yourself.”
“I am not under any obligation to explain myself to you, fae. If you wish to return with the Ironbreak at your side so he can order me to pack my things, by all means. Try.”
The room fell awkwardly silent, then Ember lifted her chin toward the necromancer and muttered, “So, why this room?”
Venga turned from the right-hand wall and headed across the room toward the other side. Ember stared after him, and Cheyenne stood there with her hands in her pockets. That was a lot.
“This is where I created the blight.” Venga reached the workbench on the opposite side and started unpacking the vials and tubes and ingredients, his four arms pumping up and down as he rearranged his supplies. One arm lifted to point straight up at the glass bubble suspended from the hole in the center of the ceiling, though his gaze never left his work. “I created that chamber specifically to channel the procedures Ba’rael wished to perform in this place.”
“You mean, torture and siphoning magic and murdering her victims.”
“You keep speaking about death, angry little fae.”
“Yeah, because that’s what happened.” Ember slapped a hand on the metal walls of the pool that was once filled with black sludge and magicals in cages but was now empty and dry. The clang echoed around the room. “Right here. That bitch chained them up and sucked the magic right out of them while they screamed and begged for it to stop.”
“You have quite the imagination.” Venga chuckled. “Those chambers were built to siphon magic, yes, but not at that capacity.”
“How would you know? You’ve been locked in a tank for the last five years.”
The necromancer whirled around and hissed at her, his four arms spread wide with a different implement clenched in each hand. “Because I designed it!”
“Hey!” Both the fae and the scaleback turned to look at Cheyenne. “Let’s cut it out with the arguing for just a second, ‘cause I don’t think we’re all on the same page. We saw it with our own eyes, Venga. The day L’zar and I showed up to turn the new Cycle with my coin on the altar. We came right through this room, and believe me, those pools were full of the same sludge running in rivers through the Outers.”
“Impossible.” Venga slowly shook his head. “This wasn’t built to siphon magic at that capacity.”
“Yeah, you said that already.” Cheyenne nodded at the ceiling. “That little bubble thing wasn’t meant to hold magic at that capacity, either. Neither was the city, and it almost blew itself up after how much the Spider overloaded it. No bullshit, Venga. She filled those pools with the blight and used them as dunk tanks for magicals who didn’t deserve to die the way they did. No one does.”
“Except for the Spider,” Ember muttered. “Let’s be honest.”
Cheyenne ignored her friend’s anger and raised an eyebrow at the necromancer.
“I did not build this place to take life, Cheyenne,” he growled. “Merely to offer an alternative.”
“An alternative to life?” Ember scoffed. “Yeah, that’s called death, genius, and I watched those magicals die in cages. Right here.”
Venga’s scaly upper lip curled up in a warning snarl, but the confidence had seeped out of him. When his all-black eyes flickered toward Cheyenne and he turned his head her way, she nodded.
“We all saw it. General Hi’et can confirm that story if you feel like you need a second opinion.”
The necromancer trembled, his face twitching in rage. Then he let out a startling roar and whirled around, hurling his glass implements against the wall of shelving beside the back wall of the room that had also repaired itself in the last two weeks. Shards of glass flew in every direction and pelted his stash of instruments. Cheyenne raised a shimmering black shield in front of Ember and another in front of herself, shattered glass and small pieces of metal pinging off them before clattering to the floor. She left the necromancer to fend for himself.
Venga hissed and ducked when a piece of glass whipped across his face and lodged beneath the scales of his cheek. More fragments rained off his hunched shoulders as he picked gingerly at the glass shard and removed it with more dexterity than his thick black claws looked like they could handle. “I wish you had not disposed of the Spider as quickly as you did, drow.”
“Yeah, I know.” Cheyenne waved down the shields. “You wanted to make her pay. So did I, honestly, and now neither of us has the satisfaction of having done that. Her son gets the credit for that part.”
“You fought her in the Heart.”
“And almost died.” She gave him a weak smile and pointed at her opposite shoulder and the still unhealed wound from her aunt’s poisoned magical darts. “Although you could’ve stuck me a million other times with shattered glass, I’m gonna thank you for the darktongue serum. It works. Sort of. Now the three of us need to work together to figure out how to get this shit out of my body so I don’t have to go through the rest of this as a walking wound or a host for whatever new strain of the blight Ba’rael had in her magic.”
Venga grunted and turned slowly toward Ember before flicking the shard of glass across the room, where it pinged against the wall. “You told her about that.”
“We tell each other everything, yeah.”
“And the serum hasn’t alleviated the issue?”
“They’re definitely an issue,” Cheyenne said. “But let’s call them what they are, huh? Unhealable wounds, which I’ve dealt with before, but these ones are about to make me permanently dependent on that dark
tongue serum if we don’t find something that works.”
“I may have discovered a solution.” Venga turned toward the shelves along the back wall, the contents of which were now scattered. He swept a pile of shattered glass onto the floor and picked through his supplies.
“I mean, if I have to keep injecting myself a few times a day so I won’t get worse, fine.” Cheyenne took one step across the glass-littered floor and peered at the shelving. “We haven’t found a way to keep the blight from spreading any closer to Hangivol or the rest of the major cities here. That’s more important to stop first.”
“The solutions to your poisoned wounds and this poisoned land are one and the same.” Venga lifted a vial each in two of his hands, one of dark-green glass and the other clear with a blood-red liquid inside, and turned toward the workbench again. “You will heal first, Cheyenne. Then we’ll heal the sickness of the Spider’s dark web.”
“Cool.”
Ember watched them both with a clenched jaw. “You still haven’t told us why we need to do this here.”
Venga snorted and busied himself with mixing the ingredients he’d selected, his four arms moving quickly to uncork more vials and take pinches of powdered substances from small boxes. “Did it ever occur to you to ask why Hangivol was built here, in this part of Ambar’ogúl?”
“I don’t know.” Ember shrugged. “Undeveloped real estate?”
Cheyenne snorted and smiled sheepishly when Ember frowned at her. “Totally something I would’ve said.”
“Hangivol rests atop a major vein of lifeforce magic flowing through Ambar’ogúl. The first drow knew this, though most have forgotten.”
“Sylra Nightflame,” Cheyenne muttered. “Yeah, we know what he did.”
“Then you know why I built my study here centuries ago and not anywhere else.” Venga kept working, the sounds of metal clicking and liquids being poured and vials being uncorked filling the room. “The Nimlothar within the heart grew from a sapling, already tapped into that lifeforce vein. That may be the only reason it still stands after everything the Spider thrust upon it. And a stronger convergence runs beneath our feet.” He pointed again toward the glass bubble. “Straight up and down through the center of Ambar’ogúl, with the Heart and the Nimlothar just on the other side of this wall.”
