First Blood

by K. Gorman

  A glance back told her that Yena and Caracel were still with the party, lingering at the edge with Caracel’s sword drawn and his larger body hovering protectively at her back.

  She turned her attention back to Nales. “Library?”

  “This way.”

  The fight had blown any attempt at stealth they had. They raced up the hall, strides long and fast, their own armor flapping and rustling. They ran into another two guards around the corner, and the prince engaged immediately, sidestepping into a controlled lunge that swung his sword into his opponent’s foot and pivoted into an upward stroke on the rebound. A blast of fire cracked into the demon’s chest just as the sword made its second connection, piercing evenly through a gap in the armor.

  She took the narrow angle and caught the second guard as he rushed in to help, a mirror of what she and Nales had done in the last fight. With his back to her, it was easy to swing her blade into his neck.

  She hugged him to her, used her knee and hip for leverage, and pulled back until her blades cut through his spine and his head fell off, bumping her arm on the way down.

  They killed three more guards in similar ways, Matteo jumping in with his firearm to assist. His shots chewed through skin and bone, some of it decorating her face and armor as she charged in, trusting him to stop shooting if her attack messed up his targeting. Her hands were wet and tacky with blood, and she could feel the stickiness on the hilts of her blades, no matter how much she tried to wipe it off. Sweat pricked her skin, mixing with the blood and dirt and gore.

  The next few halls were a race of hallways. Air caught at her skin. Her bloody hands brushed the hair out of her face until it stuck with the rest of her. She smelled the wet scent of copper and rust in her nose, tasted it dripping in through her lips as she ran, the edge of sulfur making the back of her tongue squirm.

  She wetted her lips and spat in one corner. It didn’t get rid of the foul taste.

  Then, after another corner, Nales’ body snapped upright. He slowed under a crystal, sweat and blood gleaming on his skin in the light, eyes alert and calculating.

  With a quick veer, he darted ahead and through a small, nondescript door.

  The library washed over her in a hushed dimness, walls and supported arching high into the ceiling shadows.

  When her eyes adjusted, two goat-headed demons were staring at her and Nales, dressed in flowing beige robes. What she guessed was a surprised expression froze on their faces, eyes wide and mouth agape. One dropped the book it had been holding.

  Blades rising, she lunged for the closest one.

  “No!” Nales threw out a hand, fingers splayed, breathing hard. “Hold!”

  She stopped. Barely. Her blade lay inches from the demon’s furry neck.

  She gritted her teeth against the strain in her muscles from the sudden stop and waited.

  “They’re a different sect, not controlled by the greater demon,” Nales said between breaths, sagging as the exertion caught up with him. “Let me talk to them.”

  She grunted. “Then talk, Prince.”

  It was somewhat amusing that he had taken the time to explain it—and ask her permission for it—when less than half an hour ago, he’d been threatening her with the Undersworn Pledge. Nothing had changed. She was still under his command. But he was treating her as more of an equal.

  Tarris wouldn’t have done that. To him, the rnari were tools to use—his soldiers. Some of them, he’d befriend, but there was something divinely broken in their system that left a foul taste in the back of her mouth. She had just kept her head down until it had slapped her in the face.

  Stupid.

  She never took her eyes from the demon. It stood stock-still, only the faint tremble of its shallow breaths and the shift of its pupils any indication that it was alive. It stared at her, as intent on her as she was on it—likely more so, considering it was at the business end of a blade and she was not.

  Nales hesitated once. In her peripheral vision, she saw him glance over, his blood and dirt-smeared face stark in the crystal light. Then, he turned to the other demon.

  As the rentac spilled into the air, low and guttural, she eased her stance, never taking her blade from the demon.

  Nales paused. After a small hesitation, the other demon replied. His tone was uncertain, then strident, pleading.

  At her back, she felt the others come into the room. Yena and Caracel came forward, the priestess a hushed presence in the air. The demon she threatened tensed and drew in a deeper, ragged breath, its irises shifting and eyes widening even further at the appearance of the fey.

  Hmm. Interesting.

  Nales spoke again, this time in Janessi.

  “They’ve agreed to help us,” he said. “Let that one go.”

  Her eyebrows twitched. “You sure?”

  “Yes. Trust me.”

  She didn’t want to. But she realized she was out of her depth.

  Demons were an entirely different world to her—one that Nales had, apparently, studied.

  Slowly, she eased her blade from the demon’s neck and stepped back.

  The demon visibly relaxed. There was a distinct clatter of teeth. Then, as if all the movements it had wanted to do in the last thirty seconds came to it at once, it skittered back several steps, hooves clattering on the stones, and stumbled into a table. Its clawed hands grasped at its edge and ruffled the papers and ink bottles.

  Outside, the sounds of running guards echoed through the hall. More troops, heading for the forest lord.

  Nales grimaced, glancing at the door, then at their small party gathered just inside.

  “Guard the door,” he told Catrin, backing away.

  Both he and the other demon ran into the nearest aisle, the pale light of the demon’s crystal lamp casting over stacks of thick, leather-bound tomes and neatly rolled scrolls.

  She gave their retreating figures a flat stare, an eyebrow arching into her forehead.

  I can’t believe we’re actually doing this. We’re massively outnumbered. We should be trying to get out of here, not pillaging Grobitzsnak’s library—and most definitely not trying to steal his power orb from him.

  But the fey had agreed to this. Had, in fact, insisted. Her gaze slid over to Yena and Caracel. Caracel stood, still as a statue, a silent, glowering sentinel. Yena held a similar expression, though without his careful control. The anger and the determination on her face were plain as a sunburn, and, like before, the priestess seemed to glow with power. Her presence pulled at the air to snag Catrin’s attention.

  She tightened her grip on the hilt of her blades, caught Matteo’s attention, and gave a nod toward the open doorway. He nodded back, melting into the shadows and squatting down to lower his profile.

  She settled in against the wall just over a pace from the doorway.

  Nothing happened for a few minutes. Some hushed murmurs and conversation came from further into the library, and she recognized Nales’ voice when it lifted. The glow of the goat demon’s light fell farther back, its light catching a few of the ceiling struts. She watched it, watched the shadows lengthen and stretch as they moved.

  More sounds came from outside. Another squad. She held her breath as it went by outside, the soldiers running in an apparent hurry, listening to the tramp and stomp of their boots and the flap and jangle of their armor. Her stomach flipped when she realized that only a few of them were still breathing.

  They paused on the corner for one heart-stopping moment, all the movement coming to a halt. Voices came, sharp and quick—a question and answer.

  The squad began to move off again.

  But one pair of feet ran toward her.

  The demon called out when he came through the door. His sword was out, waving side to side as he ran, but he held it by the backhand, close to his body.

  His speech trailed off at the expression on the goat demon’s face.

  And, more likely, the sense that he was in sudden and immediate danger.

  S
ome people called it a sixth or seventh sense. In her experience, it was more intelligent than that.

  She cut through his throat before he knew she was there and kept pulling until her blade sliced through his spinal cord. The sword clattered to the ground, his head and body thudding after it.

  The goat demon let out a cry of fear and shot back, scrambling past a table of stacked parchment.

  She wiped the blood off on a soft part of his armor, slid back into the shadows by the door, and settled back in. Ten paces behind her, the red light from Matteo’s gun glowed steadily, hidden from the door by the splay of his hand.

  Nales and the other goat demon came out of the stacks a few minutes later, muttering a fast and hushed conversation in rentac. Their pace faltered when they saw the dead demon on the floor.

  There was a book in Nales’ hands, several inches thick and about the width of a dinner plate.

  She eyed it. So far, it didn’t look worth hauling around. Unfortunately, Doneil was already approaching them, holding out a cloth sack that he’d pulled from his belt pouch.

  So, he was volunteering to be a mule.

  She sighed. That would keep Nales’ hands free for swordwork, at least.

  The goat demon’s eyes bugged out, and an appalled expression made his entire body flinch back. He held out a hand—three-fingered, with hoof-like nails at the end that tapered like a normal goat—and, after a small amount of hesitation and a slightly louder, pleading tone in rentac, Nales handed the book over.

  He walked to the nearest table with it, grabbed some parchment that gleamed with a wax coating, and set about folding the book into it.

  She gaped as he offered it back, protected in its parchment wrapping, with a tight knot of sinew holding it in place.

  Doneil took it and, with some help from the demon, slid it into his sack and affixed it into place on his back.

  The demon gave a small bow to Nales and waved at the rest of them. As a group, they filed out of the door.

  About halfway down the next hall, Catrin’s brain caught up with her.

  “Did the demon just gift-wrap that book for you?”

  Nales’ smile was quick and thin, a small tug on his lips. He didn’t look at her, but she saw his eyes spark. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” A shrug rolled off his shoulders. “We got to talking. He’s a nice fellow. Top of his class at—” He said something in rentac that slipped right through her mental grasp.

  “What’s…” She hesitated.

  He said the name again, the end of it going up in tone to form a question. This time, he did look at her. Under the blood and dirt, he was smiling.

  “Yes,” she said. “That.”

  “It’s one of four main universities in the demonic world. Yantil, the demon I was speaking to, holds several grades in one of their scholarly research levels.”

  Scholarly… research levels?

  She stared. “Did he know you were stealing it?”

  “Oh, yes. He agreed it was better served in my hands than in Grobitzsnak’s. In the demonic world, scholars are a separate sect. They exist independently of the warlord governments and bloodlines and abide by their own ethics and codes of conduct.”

  Like the rnari were supposed to be, in theory. Except with books instead of blades.

  “I also had a knife to his friend’s throat,” she said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “That helped. Quite a bit.” He turned his gaze ahead again, the smile still brimming on his lips. “You should really learn rentac, Catrin. It’s an incredibly useful dead language.”

  She eyed him. He was, she thought, very pleased with himself—jovial, even. Odd, given that they were all likely going to die in the next couple of hours.

  “Doneil,” she said, her tone light. “Did you give our prince any of that rnari tonic?”

  There was a small hesitation. Then,

  “Yes.”

  She sighed and clapped a hand down on Nales’ shoulder. “Don’t worry. It affects humans a little different. The euphoria will pass. Soon, you’ll be back to screaming terror and bloodlust like the rest of us.”

  He glanced up at her, alarm in his eyes. “What?”

  She ignored him and moved on, gliding up to Yena’s side.

  “All right, Your Grace. Where is this orb?”

  Chapter 26

  The only reason they were still able to move in relative ease, unchallenged, was because Grobitzsnak had not realized they were there.

  Considering he’d found them pretty quickly in the forest, she wasn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed them wandering about his castle, but perhaps the encounter in the forest had been blind luck. Less than an hour had passed since the jailbreak and, as far as she could tell, there had been no magical signal that told him his prisoners were free, and no sudden alarm that the demon dragging Nales hadn’t returned. By Nales’ own concession, he had been a gift for the demon to torture, a reward for something the minion had done well. The demon hadn’t been expected to return that night.

  Their distraction, the giant magical bird they’d set loose, could also be seen as a coincidence rather than something intentional. The seal they’d broken had been slapdash, hurried. New. And it was more than plausible that a shot from the gate flare that had obliterated Caracel’s glamour spell earlier could have loosened the seal enough for the bird to break through.

  The castle lay calm and still. Quiet, now that they had left the section with the bird in it. Yena’s senses had sent them upward, and, with the bird in the far distance, she’d taken the risk, re-applied the glamour spell, and they’d slunk through the many, many hallways like a band of ghosts.

  Gods, this place was big.

  Finally, though, they appeared to select the correct hall—one that shifted away from the dwarf-like carved stonework of the inner mountain with the cave surface rippling in the shadows between support arches and shifted into a hand-carried masonic style that reminded her more of the older caverns under the Raidt.

  The hall was quiet. Subdued. As if each bump and scrape sent a ripple like water shivering through the air. The ceiling was lower here, the walls more close-knit, cast in bright crystal light that shivered and undulated.

  After five minutes, the hall stopped and dead-ended into a small chamber. Catrin sidled against the wall and leaned out, checking it over. A hushed presence at her side announced that Yena had decided to join her. The priestess’ small hand lifted to rest on Catrin’s bracers, fingers curving over the leather heedless of the blood.

  “It’s up ahead,” Yena said. “I can feel it.”

  Catrin took another look at the corridor, following Yena’s focused gaze. The walls cupped into a staircase on the left, one side going up, the other leading down. She risked opening her woodcraft just a sliver, cringing as pressure crashed down through her head and her mental image of the walls began to slide. Power pulsed above then, low and gentle. She caught a mental image of an ocean glimmering under sunlight, its waters wrinkled like an un-ironed sheet.

  Was this the orb of destruction?

  It didn’t feel very destructive. But it did feel familiar—like the floating crystals they’d passed.

  Pushing her woodcraft aside with a mental blink, she followed the arch of the ceiling. It curved upward to the left, following the stairs.

  A tower?

  With the shape of the staircase—circular, and tight in its curve—and the way the ceiling sloped up into a point over the supporting arches, that was her best guess. If the fortress had folded back into the mountain again, she expected they would have simply drilled back. Solid rock was stronger and more easily maintained than the cubes of weathered stonework around her. Why waste the protection?

  She eyed the tight stairs. Single file only. It would really suck to be caught up there.

  Yena nodded upward toward the orb.

  “There’s someone up there. Magic user. You should let me deal with him.” She hesitated, her head
tilting to the side, like a bird when it’s trying to see something. “He knows I’m here.”

  Fantastic.

  “Will Grobitzsnak know we’re here, once we take the orb?”

  “Yes.” The response was immediate, accompanied by a short nod. “It’s feeding him power.”

  Even more fantastic.

  Her back molars ground together. Catrin hadn’t felt anything, but she did not doubt the fey. Their senses, especially magical, were better than hers. She sighed, and looked back down the corridor. It was the only exit. If it filled with soldiers, she wasn’t sure how well any glamour spell would hide them.

  A demon had already seen through it once, which meant it wasn’t infallible.

  “We’ll need to be quick. Doneil, you bring up the rear with Matteo. I’ll be ahead of you. We’ll let the fey go first.” She cringed at her word use—one didn’t let the fey do anything; they simply did it, much like some princes she knew—and turned to Nales. “You, stick with me.”

  His eyes sparked, and the quick tug of his mouth told her he hadn’t missed the order—and that the rnari tonic was still affecting him. But when they moved, he fell in behind her. Caracel slipped past, and she felt the glamour spell buzz against her skin with proximity.

  She unsheathed a blade and followed the fey.

  The second she stepped foot on the stairs, she knew there was power.

  It had felt like an ocean before—and, in a way, it still was. But now, instead of the light, wrinkled sea she’d seen before, the very stones around her seemed to hum with a swell.

  Less than three feet of water would knock the average elf of their feet if it had a current. This felt like fathoms.

  She struggled to breathe. The air turned to syrup, energy buzzing against her teeth like the fey’s glamour spell. She could feel it in her bones. Parts of her skin had gone numb. It felt like her eyes were going to buzz right out of her skull. She resisted the urge to squint as the sensation rolled over her.

  By her side, Nales tripped once, his sword making a sharp chink sound where it struck the stone with its point. He held it the same way the demon in the library had, on the backhand with the point trailing low to the ground like the tip of a walking stick.