Ruins (36 page)

Nale heaved open the manhole. He wore the gauntlet he’d taken from Malika and Nicholas eyed it warily until Nale hopped down into the tunnel. Nicholas saw a flash of blue light followed by the sound of angry grunting. Something heavy hit the ground.

“Clear.” Nale’s voice sounded through the hole and Nicholas went first, the Hunter helping him down. Isabel gripped his shoulder, but he barely felt her claws needling his flesh as he scanned his whereabouts. His body hummed, prepared for danger.

“Mind them,” Nale grunted, gesturing at two bodies slumped to the dirt floor. The Harvesters who had been guarding the entrance. They probably hadn’t known what hit them when the giant dropped into their space.

There were no lamps in this section of the warren. When they were all in, Nale drew the manhole closed. The tunnels were almost pitch black and the smell of dank was accompanied by a peculiar chill. Nicholas shivered. He felt something edging at the corner of his mind; a subtle nudge that he was getting used to.

It meant danger.

“Something’s wrong,” he said quietly. His voice resounded back to him in the enclosed space. “The oblituss.”

Were they too late? Had it already been opened?

Nale used a flashlight to illuminate the way forward. The others did the same with their phones and their eerie lights darted over the walls.

It couldn’t be anything else but the oblituss. The unnatural cold crept through the tunnels and curled around Nicholas’s bones. He could see his breath in the gloom.

Nale went ahead ahead with Zeus. Nicholas followed, Merlyn at his side, while Harry took up the rear. Nicholas’s shoulders ached and he realised he was already tensed against whatever might confront them in the darkness.

“Wicked dagger,” Merlyn hissed at his side.

“Cheers.”

“I’m more of a chain-lover,” the other boy said, showing Nicholas his weapon; a heavy-looking chain attached to a short staff. He whirled it at his side and it buzzed. “Medieval but it does the job.”

“You done this before?” Nicholas asked.

“Loads of times.” Merlyn’s eyes flashed at him. “We’ve pretty much jumped from the frying pan into the fire, y’know.”

Nicholas nodded. “Try not to get burned.”

Isabel’s fur brushed his cheek. “The air is foul,” she commented sourly.

They trudged on through the dank tomb, the coldness intensifying as they pressed on. When they reached another passageway, Nicholas realised Nale had stopped abruptly.

“Listen,” Isabel whispered, tensing on Nicholas’s shoulder.

A crackle of blue energy zagged through the air, smashing into a wall. Dust and chunks of charred brick blasted into them.

“Harvesters!” Nale bellowed.

Figures swarmed through the dust cloud and the next few moments were a choking, noisy confusion. Nale put himself between the Harvesters and Nicholas. Merlyn and Harry darted fearlessly ahead and Nicholas felt like a liability. He had to do something.

Blue lights flashed and bricks exploded. He coughed, the dust catching in his throat. Through watering eyes, he saw Nale pummel each Harvester that emerged. Bodies dropped limply at his feet, but there were always more forms jabbing into view.

“Nicholas, back!” Nale barked.

“No!” Nicholas yelled.

“The girl! We must find the girl,” Isabel urged. “Let them fight.”

Begrudgingly, Nicholas hovered where he was. Clenching the Drujblade, he determined to count to ten and then go after them.

Gunshots rang over the din of detonating brickwork.

“Merlyn!” Nicholas called, his voice getting sucked into the void ahead. “Nale!”

He couldn’t wait any longer, he had to help.

“Boy!” Isabel yowled, but he didn’t listen. He hurried forward, immediately crashing into somebody. A tall young man, barely older than him. The Harvester leered, raising a gauntlet. Before he had a chance to use it, though, the Harvester’s eyes glazed over and he thudded to the ground.

Merlyn appeared behind him.

“Come on,” he urged, but then he grunted as a figure bowled into him from behind. A Harvester clung to his back, a blade raised, ready to strike.

“No!” Nicholas cried, hurtling forward. Esmerelda’s face loomed large in his mind and he balked momentarily at the thought of sticking the dagger into somebody else. Knowing he didn’t have a choice, he thrust the blade into the Harvester’s throat and then quickly removed it. The Harvester collapsed to the ground.

“Cheers,” Merlyn grunted. Then he was gone again, swallowed by the dust. Coughing, Nicholas plunged into the flashes of blue light, trailing his free hand along the wall as he went. Gradually, the air began to clear, and he found himself in a new tunnel.

A door stood open at the end of it. It was the same door he had passed with Sam the previous night.

“The oblituss,” Isabel growled.

It stood open.

The cat hopped down onto the floor, her whispers twitching.

Icy waves pulsed from it and an impenetrable darkness seethed beyond the doorframe. Nicholas frowned, squeezing his eyes shut. There was something else. The buzzy nagging in his head returned and he breathed through it, attempted to embrace it rather than push it away.

Rae. She steps into the oblituss. Laurent watches her enter, then turns to a pair of Harvesters, ordering them to keep watch.

His chest tightened.

“Rae’s in there,” he said. The guards were gone, though. They must have joined the fracas, leaving the oblituss untended.

“Nicholas!”

Merlyn staggered toward him, covered in debris and blood, a cut on his forehead. Nale and Harry weren’t far behind.

“Goddammit,” Harry cursed, staring fearfully at the doorway. “What’s he done?”

“Rae’s already in there.”

Another flash of light blasted into the tunnel and a portion of the wall erupted in a hail of crumbled bricks. Merlyn, Harry and Nale rushed to confront a fresh wave of Harvesters, pouring into the tunnel and, knowing it was now or never, Nicholas hurried to the open door.

“Nicholas,” Isabel cried. “Nicholas, no!”

Taking a breath, he entered the oblituss.

*

He regretted it immediately. This desolate part of the underground warren was far older. It was so dark he could barely see, but as his sight adjusted, he shuddered at the tortured roots groping from the rocky ceiling, as if curious about who had intruded upon their isolation. The craggy walls, hewn roughly from the rocky earth, bore painted symbols. Crosses and a bearded man with a halo. Winged soldiers, swords drawn, flaming blades pointing towards whatever evil was incarcerated in this part of the tunnels.

Nicholas noticed words, too. A Latin prayer or warning placed there by the priests. He saw the word Tortor inscribed alongside others he didn’t understand.

“They mean business,” Nicholas murmured.

Whatever they had hidden down here centuries ago had clearly terrified them to extreme measures.

He shivered. His arm ached inside the cast, as if nervous of what awaited him. And it was so quiet, he realised. He couldn’t hear anything, not even the sounds of Merlyn, Harry and Nale fighting, though they were only footsteps away on the other side of the door.

Whatever resided down here had blanketed everything in an unnatural calm; a deadly drowsiness. It was a place to forget and be forgotten.

Rae
, Nicholas reminded himself. He started tentatively down the tunnel. What if he was too late? What if something had already happened to her? He’d never forgive himself. Though he was new to the Sentinel ways, he was sure he knew more about them than Rae, which made it his responsibility to keep her away from the kind of things that were imprisoned here. In that, he had failed.

He entered a small cave. Little white rocks glowed sombrely, embedded in the walls; a constellation of lights that beckoned. He raised a hand to one of the rocks and it brightened when he drew closer to it. When he moved away, it dimmed. Intrigued, Nicholas waved his hand back and forth, captivated as the light ebbed and flashed.

Wait
.

Wasn’t he here for something? He scrutinised the glowing rock, as if it held the answer, and found he couldn’t look away. The pulsing light drew him in and he felt his eyelids drooping.

Rae
.

The name shattered the spell.

Nicholas staggered away, repulsed. The caves wanted to trick him. They wanted him to forget. He squeezed the Drujblade and shook himself, attempted to untangle himself from the spell. His head clearing, he noticed another tunnel and hurried down it.

The next cave was littered with bodies.

Neither human, nor animal, they were small, cat-sized, but spindly. Long, vicious-looking legs were singed and bulbous bodies had exploded, spilling their filthy contents across the ground.

Nicholas noticed the walls were blackened and the stench of burnt flesh flooded his nostrils.

She did this
, he realised. This was why Laurent had chosen Rae. She could protect herself from whatever the caves threw at her.

“Coward,” Nicholas spat. He continued on.

The next cave was similarly destroyed, a series of booby traps lying in ruin.

The next, though, was almost empty. Large boulders communed in a circle and the ceiling was remarkably high. Nicholas thought he glimpsed eyes watching him from above, but it could just be his imagination. Or another trick.

He paused. Something definitely wasn’t right.

The air had become charged. The hairs on Nicholas’s arms bristled and he felt clammy with fear.

Impulsively, he hurled himself behind a rock and crouched low, listening as feather-light footsteps approached. He tensed against the boulder, the electricity in the air unnerving him. He daren’t breathe in case it gave him away. The footsteps continued.

Somebody was in the cave with him.

Some
thing
.

Overpowered by curiosity, Nicholas chanced a look over the rock – and froze.

A figure glided through the darkness, moving with elegant, unhurried steps. A man in a bowler hat and a black suit, a bamboo cane poised in one foppish hand.

Nicholas felt ill. The seeing glass had shown him this figure. For a horrible moment, reality and unreality collided and Nicholas didn’t know where he was. If he was even awake.

His head started buzzing and he realised he was definitely awake. He grit his teeth against the pain and his heart hammered as he watched the man in the bowler hat.

The figure paused, turned slowly toward him, and Nicholas only just caught the scream in his throat.

The man didn’t have a face.

There was nothing but smooth, pearly flesh. A gaunt mask that betrayed no emotion, no humanity.

It wasn’t a man at all. It was something else. And it was responsible for this unnatural cold, the charged air, the twisting fear that had gripped Nicholas even before he’d caught sight of the pale, repulsive face.

Nicholas clung to the rock with his good hand, not daring to breathe in case the scream escaped.

The hideous, eyeless visage seemed to look right at him, but the figure didn’t move in his direction. It paused. Cocked its head to one side. Listened; appearing to contemplate its surroundings. Then it was moving again, gliding the way Nicholas had come and disappearing from sight.

Isabel
, Nicholas thought.
Merlyn
.

Before he knew why, he was on his feet and tearing in the opposite direction, away from the faceless man. He had to get as far away from that thing as possible. Some primitive instinct seized hold of his body and he ran, ran,
ran
, his broken arm throbbing painfully from the exertion.

It didn’t matter how loud he was now, as long as he kept going. He stumbled over small rocks, swatting away limply-hanging roots, plunging further downward until it seemed he was about to reach the earth’s own pumping heart.

Finally, he saw a light ahead. Flickering candlelight.

“Rae?” he called.

His echo taunted him, returning elongated and alien. It was the only reply he received.

Cautiously, he skirted around the wall and peered into a dingy cave. At first he didn’t understand what he was looking at, but then he realised that the warped metal had once been the bars of a makeshift jail cell. It had been destroyed; broken apart. Beside the cell sat two grinning, cobwebby skeletons in clerical dress. Priests, still guarding whatever it was that had been in the cell.

Except whatever had been in there was gone, and something had replaced it. Rae was in the cell, crumpled to the floor.

“Rae,” he said breathlessly, climbing in with her. She didn’t seem to hear him. She was peering down at her hands. “Are you okay?” he asked.

She whirled to face him and he saw that she had been crying.