Scholar of Decay (21 page)

The air in the kitchen tasted of rust and other, less savory things. Fungus grew in a thick, oblong pile along the base of one wall, but Aurek had no interest in what lay rotting beneath it. He had to go deeper still.

Constructed of stone, the stairs to the cellars had survived remarkably intact. Keeping a wary eye out for webs, Aurek began a careful descent. About halfway to the bottom, he paused. A trail of slime, glistening in the wizard-light, began at a rat hole gnawed through the outer wall, slid down each subsequent step, and continued across the cellar floor to a closed door at the back of the subterranean room. After thoroughly inspecting the ceiling, Aurek followed the trail, crouching to study the passage under the door. By reading the pattern of the slime, he was fairly certain the creature secreting it had spread out enough to move through a space no more than an inch high.

“Fascinating.” Shaking his head in amazement, he straightened. “I thought they were extinct,” he told the silence. There’d been no reported attacks by black puddings in decades. In fact, a number of the younger scholars and adventurers he’d been in contact with had expressed scornful doubts that such a creature ever existed. Once he freed Natalia, there were obviously a number of things
worth studying in the ruins of Pont-a-Museau. For now, however, he needed to head toward the front of the house, toward the street. The opportunities for scholarship lurking behind that door would have to wait.

Bringing out the zombie’s finger bone, he followed its pull to an open trapdoor beside a pile of decaying furniture, crushed and broken fungus clearly indicating it had recently been moved. It makes sense, Aurek mused, relieved he wouldn’t have to dig his way through the foundations of the house. The zombies could no more walk through stone than he could. In order to follow the amulet out of the sewers, they needed to find an actual exit.

A rattling noise behind him spun Aurek around, thumbs together, fingers spread, trying desperately to remember the words of his last truly offensive spell.

In the far corner, a pile of human bones stirred. A kneecap, pale green with mold, rolled off the top of the pile and bounced to a halt some three feet away. Eyes squinted nearly shut in the unaccustomed light, a rat heaved itself up and out of its nest, glared at Aurek, and disappeared through a crack in the wall.

Aurek let his hands fall back to his sides. Rats, he thought, releasing a breath he couldn’t remember holding. I can cope with rats, but I’m not sure I’m up to another encounter with the undead.

Well aware that one rat could easily mean hundreds more lurking in the shadows, and that numbers could more than make up for lack of size, he sent one of his three lights through the trapdoor so he could see his way. Rusty steel rungs had been set into the damp stone of the sewer wall. In spite of the rust, they seemed solid.

Seemed solid.

There was only one way to be certain.

Sitting on the edge of the hole, Aurek felt for the first rung with the toe of his boot. As much as caution seemed to be called for, he
had to move quickly. He’d seen nothing waiting for him below, but that could as easily mean he’d seen nothing as that there was nothing there to see. While he climbed to the lower level, he’d be as vulnerable as he’d been at any time since he’d entered the Narrows.

His mind focused on freeing Natalia—leaving no room for fear—he trusted his weight to the ancient ladder. It protested but held. The curve of the sewer wall forced him to descend at an awkward angle, pack dragging at his shoulders, sharp flakes of rust chewing into his palms. It wasn’t a pleasant climb, but as he’d foolishly forgotten to bring a rope, he was glad to be making it. The ledge running just below the widest point of the curve was slick when he finally reached it, and the stink coming up from the brown, turgid water nearly made him sick.

The bone continued to drag at his finger.

Apparently the sewers of Pont-a-Museau had more than one level.

He took one last look up at the circle of darkness that marked the open trapdoor in the arc of the ceiling—locking its location in memory, for to be lost in these sewers was to die in these sewers—then began to search for the way down. It was a surprisingly short search.

The zombies had left the steel door leading to the catacombs ajar.

A closer examination determined that the surrounding piles of rubble had not been pushed aside by the opening door. They’d been removed, one at a time, from in front of the threshold. Someone had gone down into the lower levels shortly before the zombies had come up.

The cousin Louise Renier claimed had found the artifact?

Perhaps.

It wasn’t important.

Finding the workshop was important. Freeing Natalia was important. The rest he’d deal with as circumstances forced him to. Not before.

Although the zombies had nearly taken it from him with the amulet, he held on tightly to a strong belief in his ability to deal with anything.

Louise Renier lifted her head, her ears pricked forward as she heard the sound of booted feet against stone. The tread was too heavy to be that of another goblin, and none of the family ever descended into the catacombs in skin form. It had to be Aurek Nuikin.

And it’s certainly about time, she snarled to herself.

The goblin, bleeding from a number of not-quite-fatal wounds, struggled weakly under her front paws. Adjusting her grip, Louise considered what she should do with it. In spite of what it obviously feared, she wasn’t going to eat it. Although her twin insisted goblins were an acquired taste, she found them bitter and containing far more gristle than should be anatomically possible. Old boots were less chewy and significantly tastier.

The footsteps came cautiously closer.

Louise shrugged furred shoulders, braced her haunches against the wall, and rolled the goblin off the ledge into the water. Its remaining eye opened wide with terror and, had it not earlier lost its tongue, it would have screamed. It gurgled once and sank without a trace. Just before she tucked herself away out of sight, Louise batted its tongue in after it.

Aurek followed the pull of the zombie bone along the narrow ledge, the trio of lights maintaining their distance around his
head. After he passed, the lichen—obviously phosphorescent—glowed with a greater intensity. Unfortunately, the effect created new shadows rather than banishing the old ones.

With every sense warning him he wasn’t alone and suggesting greater speed, he continued to move methodically forward. He had every confidence he could survive an attack, regardless of type or direction, but doubted he’d last a heartbeat if he slipped and fell into the water.

His caution was justified when he reached the place where the ledge had crumbled. Looking like nothing so much as a large bite taken out of the stone—a resemblance Aurek sincerely hoped was coincidence—the ledge tapered inward to the curve of the wall, disappeared completely for a full twelve inches, then tapered out again.

Not trusting masonry clearly older than the rest of the city, he decided not to creep out onto the damaged stone even though a good eighteen inches remained, wide enough to hold him before the ledge disappeared. He’d jump over the damaged areas—from solid stone to solid stone. Or what he assumed was solid stone.

Scuffing his boots, clearing the place he’d launch himself from, he reasoned that if he kept his feet apart and his weight on the forward foot, he’d slide along the ledge rather than across it when he landed.

The quiet sound of water lapping against the gap nearly stopped his heart. As far as he could tell, these lower sewers had no currents. What, then, had moved the water?

Drawing in several deep breaths, his nose having become nearly numb to the stench, he shook himself loose and got ready. He couldn’t hesitate. It would have to be one smooth, powerful movement.

“One, two,” he murmured; then he stopped and shook his head.
“I’m an idiot,” he told the catacombs at large, slipped his hand into his pocket and his thumb into the leather loop.

Up above, tucked into the arc of the vaulted ceiling, a foul smelling mist—its stink lost in a hundred other putrescent odors—drifted along the dripping stones. Although its edges were translucent and marked by eddies as air currents lightly touched its diaphanous perimeter, the center seemed, at times, almost opaque.

Aurek, now across the gap and back on his own two feet, never even noticed the mist as he paused to identify a series of scratches in the wall at about waist level. Goblin. He didn’t know what the marks meant, but they could’ve been directions, warnings, or love letters for all he cared.

With a contemptuous smile, he kept walking. Goblins were unworthy of his attention unless they were waving short swords in his face and barely worthy of it even then.

Can you possibly be as good as you think you are? Louise wondered from her hiding place, the contemptuous smile irritating her more than she’d thought possible. Or are you merely too arrogantly stupid to be afraid? Had it been Dmitri she watched, she would have assumed the latter but, though Aurek Nuikin and his younger brother were similar in a great many ways, this was not necessarily one of them. Aurek had years of living Dmitri didn’t have. Aurek had confirmed power Dmitri didn’t have. And if he was as good as he seemed to think he was, Aurek would have uses Dmitri didn’t have.

When the ledge spread out onto a broad platform, two body lengths wide and at least twice that long, Aurek felt the hair lift off
the back of his neck. This close, he could sense the power trickling through the ancient shields.

“This is it, Natalia,” he whispered. “I know it is.”

Slowly, he crossed to the foot of the stairs. The ruined carvings almost seemed to writhe in the multiple shadows thrown by the wizard-lights. Holding out his hand, he watched the zombie bone rise until it angled against gravity and pointed directly up the stairs.

Moistening his lips, he put the bone away; he wouldn’t need it anymore. The longer he stood at the bottom of the stairs, strangely reluctant to begin the climb, the more the emissions spreading down from the archway made his skin crawl. It felt as if a thousand ants scurried about beneath his clothes.