Reckless (Free Preview) (21 page)

"Since
when are you dumb enough to drink Larks' Water?"

"Dammit,
Fox, it was dark!"
 
His heart was
still beating wildly.

"Larks' Water?"
 
Clara didn't look at him.
 
Her
hands were shaking as she pushed the hair from her face.
 
She did not look at him.

"Yes.
 
Awful."
 
Valiant gave her a theatrical smile of sympathy.
 
"Once you've drunk from it, you happily
jump on even the ugliest girl.
 
Doesn't really work on Dwarfs.
 
Pity it was he, not I," he added with a
sardonic glance at Jacob.

"How long
will it last?"
 
Clara's voice was
barely audible.

"Some say
it wears off after one attack.
 
But there
are those who believe it lasts for months.
 
The Witches" — Valiant gave Jacob a salacious smile — "believe
it only brings out what's already in your heart."

"You seem
to know a lot about Larks' Water.
 
Do you
bottle the stuff and sell it?
"
Jacob barked at
the Dwarf.

Valiant
shrugged regretfully.
 
"It doesn't
keep.
 
And the effect is too
unpredictable.
 
Shame.
 
Can you imagine what a fantastic business
that would be?"

Jacob felt
Clara's eyes on him, but she turned her head away when he looked at her.
 
He still felt her skin under his fingers.

Stop it, Jacob.

"Did you
find the entrance?" he asked Fox.

"Yes."
 
She turned her back on him.
 
"It reeks of death."

"Nonsense."
 
Valiant waved his hand dismissively.
 
"It's a natural tunnel that leads to one of their underground
roads.
 
Most of them are well guarded
these days, but this one's fairly safe."

"Fairly safe?"
 
Jacob could feel the scars on his back.
 
"And how do you know about it?"

Valiant rolled
his eyes, despairing of such distrust.
 
"Their King has banned the trade in a number of very popular
semiprecious stones.
 
Fortunately, some
of his subjects are still as interested as I in a healthy trade."

"I'm
telling you, it smells of death."
 
Fox's voice sounded even more hoarse than usual.

"You're
welcome to try the main entrance!
"
Valiant
sneered.
 
"Maybe Jacob Reckless can
become the first human to saunter into the King's fortress without ending up
cast in amber."

Clara
his her
hands behind her back as if she could make them
forget whom they'd touched.

Jacob avoided
looking at her.
 
He reloaded his pistol
and fetched a few things from his saddlebags: the snuffbox, the green glass
vial, the looking glass, and Chanute's knife.
 
Then he filled his pockets with bullets.

Fox was
sitting under the bushes.
 
As Jacob approached
her, she cowered, as she'd done when he first found her caught in the trap.

"Keep a
lookout for Goyl patrols," he said.
 
"Better hide the horses between the rocks.
 
And if I'm not back by tomorrow evening, you
take her back to the tower."

Her.
 
He didn't even
dare say her name.

"I don't
want to stay with her."

"Please,
Fox."

"You
won't come back.
 
Not this time."

She bared her
fangs, but she didn't bite.
 
Her bites
had always carried love.

"Reckless."
 
The Dwarf poked him impatiently in the back with
the butt of his rifle.
 
"I thought
you were in a hurry."

Valiant had
refashioned the rifle into a rather bizarre weapon.
 
There were rumors that in Dwarf hands, metal
could even grow roots.

Jacob got up.

Clara was till
standing by the stream.
 
She turned away
as he approached, but Jacob pulled her with him.
 
Away from the Dwarf.
 
Away from Fox and her
anger.

"Look at
me."

She wanted to
free herself, but he held on to her, even though it set his heart racing once
again.

"It meant
nothing, Clara!
 
Nothing!"

Her eyes were
dark with shame.

"You love
Will.
 
Do you hear me?
 
If you forget that, we can't help him.
 
Nobody can."

She nodded,
but in her eyes he saw the same madness he still felt himself.
 
How long would it last?

He took her
hands.
 
"You wanted to know what I'm
planning to do.
 
I'm going to find the
Dark Fairy and get her to give Will his skin back."

He saw the
shock in her eyes and put his finger on her lips.
 
"Fox can't know about this," he
whispered.
 
"She'll just try to
follow me.
 
But I swear to you, I will
find her, you will wake Will, and everything will be okay."

He wanted to
hold her.
 
He'd never wanted anything so
badly.
 
But he let go.

Jacob didn't
look back as he followed the Dwarf into the night.
 
And Fox did not come after him.

35

In The Earth's Womb

Fox had been
right.
 
The cave Valiant led Jacob to
smelled
of death, and you didn't need a vixen's delicate
nose to detect it.
 
Jacob took just one
glance inside and knew immediately what creature dwelled there.
 
The floor was littered with bones.
 
Ogres dwelled surrounded by their leftovers
and, contrary to popular belief, not only ate humans but also gorged themselves
on Dwarfs and Goyl.
 
Items strewn among
the bones hinted at the people who had died here; a pocket watch; the torn
sleeve of a dress; a child's shoe, heart-wrenchingly small; a notebook, the
writing rendered illegible by dried blood.

Jacob's first
instinct was to return and warn Clara, but Valiant made him go on.
 
"Don't worry," he whispered.
 
"The Goyl took care of all the Ogres
around here a long time ago.
 
But, lucky
for us, they never found this tunnel."

The crack in
the rock through which Valiant disappeared was wide enough for a Dwarf, but
Jacob had to squeeze himself through it.
 
The tunnel was so low that he could barely walk upright through the
first few yards, and soon it descended quite steeply.
 
Jacob had trouble breathing in the confined
space and was very relieved when they finally came upon one of the underground
roads that connected the Goyl fortresses.
 
It was as wide as a human road and paved with fluorescent stones, which
glowed when Valiant shone the flashlight on them.
 
Jacob thought he could hear machines and a
constant hum, like the sound of a swarm of wasps in an orchard.

"What is
that?" he asked the Dwarf, in a lowered voice.

"Insects.
 
They
clean the Goyls' sewage.
 
Goyl cities
smell much better than ours.
"
  
Valiant pulled a pen from his
pocket.
 
"Bend down!
 
It's time for your slave mark.
 
P for Prussan," he whispered, drawing
the Goyl letter onto Jacob's forehead.
 
"That's your owner's name, should anybody ask you.
 
He's a merchant I do business with.
 
Come to think of it, Prussan's slaves are
much cleaner than you, and they definitely don't wear weapons belts.
 
You'd better give that to me."

"No, thanks," Jacob hissed back, buttoning his coat over
the belt.
 
"If they stop me,
I'd rather not have to rely on you."

The next road
they came to was as wide as the grand boulevards of the Empress's capital.
 
This one, however, was lined not with trees
but with walls of solid rock.
 
As Valiant
pointed the flashlight at them, faces emerged from the darkness.
 
Jacob had always thought it was a myth that
the Goyl honored their heroes by cutting off their heads and building them into
the walls of their cities.
 
But like all
such stories, this one clearly had a grain of very dark truth to it.
 
Staring down at them were hundreds of heads, set
side by side, like monstrous flagstones.
 
The faces were, as with all Goyl, unchanged by death, except that the
decayed eyes had been replaced with golden topaz.

Valiant didn't
stay on the Boulevard of the Dead for long.
 
Instead, he chose tunnels that were narrow, like mountain roads, and
that led farther into the depths.
 
More
and more often, Jacob saw dim lights at the end of some passage.
 
He felt the activity of machinery like a
subtle vibration on his skin.
 
A few
times they heard the sound of hooves or wheels approaching, but they always
found dark nooks where they could hide in thickets of stalagmites or behind
curtains of dripstone.

The sound of
dripping water was everywhere, constant and inescapable, and the darkness
revealed the miracles it had formed over thousands of years:
 
waterfalls of petrified chalk-white froth,
forests of stony needles hanging above them from the ceilings, and crystal
flowers blossoming in the dark.
 
In some
caves, there was barely a trace of the Goyl — just a straight path leading
through the thickets of stone, or a few perfectly square tunnel openings.
 
Other caves had stone façades and mosaics that
seemed to originate from earlier times, ruins among the columns that water had
grown from the rock.

Jacob felt as
if they had been traveling for days through this underground world, when they
reached a cave with a lake.
 
The walls
were covered with plants that needed no sun, and across the water spanned an
endless bridge that was barely more than a stone arch reinforced with
steel.
 
Every step rang out treacherously
loud through the wide cave and sent clouds of shrieking bats swooping from the
ceiling.
 
When the pair had crossed the
bridge halfway, Valiant stopped so abruptly that Jacob nearly stumbled over
him.

The body that
was blocking their path wasn't Goyl; it was human.
 
The sign of the King was tattooed on his
forehead, and his wrists were raw from manacles.
 
There were gaping wounds in his throat and
chest.

"A prisoner of war.
 
They use them as slave labor."
 
Valiant stared apprehensively at the cave ceiling.

Jacob drew his
pistol.
 
"What killed him?"

The Dwarf let
the beam of the flashlight wander over the stalactites above.
 
"The Guardians," he whispered.
 
"The Goyl breed them to defend the outer
tunnels and roads.
 
They come out only
when they scent something that isn't Goyl.
 
I never had any trouble with them on this route before!
 
Wait!"

The flashlight
found a row of worryingly large holes in the cave's ceiling, and Valiant
muttered a curse.

A chirping
sound cut through the silence — sharp, like a warning cry.

"Run!"
 
The Dwarf leaped over the body, grabbing
Jacob's arm and pulling him along.
 
The
air was suddenly filled with the flutter of leathery wings.
 
The Guardians of the Goyl dove out from the
stalactites like birds of prey, pale and almost humanlike creatures.
 
Their wings tapered into sharp talons.
 
Their eyes were milky and blind, but clearly
their ears guided them quite reliably.
 
Jacob shot two in midflight, and Valiant killed one that was digging its
claws into Jacob's back, but three more were already crawling out of the holes
directly above them.
 
One tried to swipe
the pistol from Jacob's hand, but he slammed his head into the pale face and
hacked off one of its wings with his saber.
 
The creature screamed so loudly that he was sure it would alert dozens
more of its brethren, but fortunately not all of the holes seemed to be inhabited.

The Guardians
were clumsy attackers, but at the end of the bridge one of them still managed
to take Valiant down
.
The bared fangs were already at
the Dwarf's throat when Jacob rammed his saber between the wrinkled wings.
 
Up close it looked like a human embryo, and
even the body was childlike.
 
Jacob felt
nauseated, as though he'd never killed before.

They escaped
into the next tunnel, their arms and shoulders torn, but fortunately none of
the wounds were deep, and the Dwarf was too upset to notice the iodine Jacob
dripped onto his bleeding hand.