Shadowheart (90 page)

He quickly forced her back, but instead of letting her get to the door of the inner vault, he kept her moving until he was backing her toward his own guard, but even as Briony realized this she heard a shout of surprise and pain. She risked a swift glance, enough to see that Elan M’Cory had leaped onto the soldier’s back and was scratching at his face with her nails. The guard shouted and cursed as he tried to throw her off.

The distraction gave Briony time to avoid Hendon’s thrust and keep backing past them, around the outside of the six-sided vault, doing her best to keep Hendon on the other side of the lead coffin that lay in the center of the room. Briony realized that he had forced her into a losing game, and that Elan M’Cory was about to be overpowered by the soldier in Tolly’s boar-and-spears livery. Then the odds would be two to one. She feinted twice, then took a wild, swinging blow at Hendon’s head that he dodged easily, but did not let herself be carried so far that his following stroke could find her unprotected belly. As Hendon took a step back to set himself once more, Briony suddenly turned and lunged in an unexpected direction herself, slashing Hendon’s guardsman across his face. As he dropped his blade and reached up to his bleeding cheeks and mouth, she plucked her long Yisti dagger from her belt and stabbed at him, piercing his mail and sinking the slim blade deep into his belly.

The man stumbled, gurgling, then fell across the lead coffin.

“There’s your bloody sacrifice or whatever you were planning, Hendon,” she said, keeping the corpse between them as she circled and tried to catch her breath. “Now I’ll be happy to send you off to Kernios after him.”

Tolly’s face was set hard. “You have learned a few things.” He feinted, then lunged, then lunged again, the second one actually meant to strike her. It nearly did. She was weary already, but Hendon was not even breathing hard. He was not a big man, but he was very strong, with muscles like braided whipcord. “Was it Shaso who taught you so well, or your new lover, Eneas?” he asked. “I was the one who had Shaso killed, you know. It was by my order that nest of black traitors in Landers Port was burned to the ground. Too bad you weren’t roasted with the other birds in that same oven. ...”

Don’t listen,
she told herself even as she wanted to weep with rage.
Don’t listen.
She dodged another one of his attacks, then a moment later caught a second one on her blade and just ducked under it, but she felt the sharp tip of Tolly’s steel pierce her surcoat and for an instant even slide along her neck before she spun away. She was tiring badly; the effort made her lose her balance and almost fall. Hendon saw his advantage and leaped after her, raining strokes on her like a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, so that Briony could do nothing except try to keep her steel between Hendon’s sword and her flesh.

Suddenly Elan M’Cory screamed, a shriek of genuine terror that made even Hendon Tolly take a step back from Briony to look. A dark shape blocked the doorway between the vaults, and now took a shaky step forward into the inner vault.

At first, Briony thought one of the dead out of her family’s tomb had risen to stand swaying on the edge of the darkness, its filthy, tattered cloak like a shroud, its deathly face hidden deep in a hood. It reached toward them with hands that looked like ragged claws in the flickering torchlight, still wrapped in the cerements of the grave.

It spoke, but its voice was an inaudible, scraping hiss. The hairs on Briony’s neck rose and her heart, already speeding, threatened to burst from her breast.

“B-B-Brothers protect us!” Briony said.

The apparition tried again to speak, and at last words could be heard—ragged, gasping words nearly as painful to hear as they must have been to form.
“Briony ...!”
the thing scraped.
“I have . . . come back ... from Death’s lands ...”

Her breath caught in her throat as the hooded shape took another staggering step into the vault. “Zoria’s mercy,” she gasped, “is that you, Shaso? Gods preserve us, is that
you
?” But even as she said it, even as superstitious terror gripped her, something seemed wrong.

Even stranger was Tolly’s reaction: the lord protector’s eyes bulged and his hands lifted as if in hopeless defense against this phantom, the sword he held in one fist all but forgotten. “You . . . ! But . . . but you’re
dead
!”

And then Elan M’Cory came crawling across the ground, weeping and praying, and Briony was convinced that the chaotic air of Midsummer had driven everyone around her mad.

The bandaged hands came up and slowly tugged back the hood. At first Briony could make no sense of what she saw—the milky, damaged eyes and the oozing, pale skin worthy of any corpse, blotched all over with what looked like black earth. But then, as the ruined face turned slowly from her to Hendon Tolly, she suddenly knew what she was seeing—
who
she was seeing.

“Gailon,” she breathed. “Gailon Tolly.”

The thing pointed at Hendon. “
You
,” it rasped, each word an agony. “You killed me.”

“What is this madness?” But the bluster had gone from the lord protector’s voice. “Is this some trick? You were dead, brother. Shot with a dozen arrows. But you are no ghost, that I would swear—you are flesh and blood ...”

“Your men . . . shot me, brother, then . . . buried me with my servants and friends.”
Each word came a little easier now, but he still spoke with a halting and ruined voice. “They were not very good shots, as you can see.” He bared his teeth in a terrible grin. “Hours, days, I lay wounded in the dark earth with the corpses of my companions, too weak to move . . . but unable to die. I was a stranger in Death’s estate and Death did not want me. When I realized I was still alive, I dug my way out of what you meant to be my grave, Hendon, then came back to tell Briony of your treachery.” He turned his nearly sightless eyes toward Briony. “But I see you learned too late what my brother is—the rottenest fruit of my father’s loins. Now all I can do to atone for my mistake . . . is to end his life.”

He took a few uneven steps toward Hendon, who seemed stunned by what was happening. Then the slender, dark shape of Elan M’Cory scrabbled across the ground and grabbed Gailon Tolly’s legs.

“No!” she wept. “Don’t leave me again, Gailon! Not again!”

“Let go, sweet Elan,” the ragged figure said, his voice still the doomful scrape of an unquiet spirit, but he did not immediately pull away, and even seemed for the first time to show something like human emotion. “I cannot . . . I am no longer of your world. ...”

“And I prefer to keep it that way!” cried Hendon Tolly, who leaped forward and drove his sword into his brother’s stomach. Gailon grunted in pain, then he and the girl both tumbled to the floor, pulling the sword from Hendon’s hand.

Briony saw her chance and dove toward Hendon Tolly, but he turned just in time to see her coming and managed to deflect her thrust with his hand so that her sword bloodied his palm but otherwise slid harmlessly past him. She stumbled and lost her balance; Hendon shoved her so that she took a couple of helpless steps and fell against the wall by the doorway. By the time she was able to right herself and turn around, sword at the ready, Hendon Tolly had vanished.

She was in the doorway leading to the outer vault, and Hendon hadn’t gone past her. There was only one place he could have disappeared so swiftly, she realized, and that was into some deeper vault. She glanced briefly at Elan M’Cory as the woman wept and struggled to pull the blade out of Gailon.

“Get out of here now,” she told Elan, then began examining the mossy walls where Hendon had disappeared. As she probed into one of the shadowy corners with her sword, the blade slid far deeper than she expected, encountering no resistance at all when it should have found unyielding stone. She stepped a little nearer and found an opening in the stone where two walls did not come directly together, a space wide enough for a slender man—or a woman—to slip through.

She considered waiting until Eneas arrived, but she had no idea when that might be. If this hidden passage led somewhere else in the castle—if, even worse, it was one of the tunnels made by Chert’s Funderling people—Tolly could be out of their reach forever in a short time. The monster and murderer would escape . . .

She thrust her sword into the opening in the wall and poked wildly into the darkness beyond until she was assured no one hid there to ambush her. She wiped the blood off her dagger and slipped it into her belt, then went back and took a torch from the sconce.

Even more vaults waited behind the inner vault, or at least more underground chambers, half a dozen or more. As far as she could tell they had never been used for anything, let alone been finished like the family tomb: the walls were rough and the stone floors raw and uneven. But more worryingly, each new chamber led to another farther down.

Underneath us, behind us, everywhere around us . . .
Briony had thought she lived on solid ground—what a bitter jest that had become! Seeing Gailon, whom she and everyone else had believed long dead, had shaken her badly, and finding these passages hidden below the family vault only made things worse. Nothing seemed entirely firm or real anymore.

After some little while spent carefully exploring each chamber in turn, she stepped out of the last one and found herself at the head of a path. The light of the torch revealed that on the path’s far side the earth fell away into a dark abyss the torch couldn’t illuminate past the first dozen yards. The path itself wound down and away for farther than she could see, with the chasm on one side and an unworked stone wall on the other, like the steps that spiraled around the inside of Wolfstooth Spire. How far down did this passage stretch? And where did it lead? For that matter, where had Hendon gone . . . ?

Just as she had that thought, Tolly dropped down on her from above, where he had been clinging to the wall like a spider. He almost shoved her off the path and into the black nothingness beside it, but Briony managed to twist and fall onto the stone of the edge. Then she struggled back toward the middle of the path, though she dropped the torch to the ground and lost her sword into the pit.

Hendon yanked Briony onto her back and knelt on top of her, his full weight on her arms as he set the cold length of his dagger against her throat.

“I have wasted a great deal of time on you, girl.” Tolly’s sweat dripped down onto her face. “So I’ll just get on with slitting your throat.”

He could hear almost nothing else but the soothing voice; its wordless approval, or sometimes disapproval, helped him to find his way, steering his steps through the dark. He felt as though he had been walking for days, but could that be? He struggled to remember where he had been before; it was slow in coming. Strange faces, strange smells, the murmur of unfamiliar tongues spoken by even more unfamiliar creatures. That was it—he had been among the fairy folk. But where was he now? And why was it so very difficult to think?

Chaven Makaros. That is my name. I am Chaven the physician . . . the royal physician . . . !
Those names and titles were all he had of himself, so why did they seem so unimportant?

The wordless voice urged him to go faster, a directive he could feel in his bones and organs. Faster, yes. He had to go faster. He was needed. Nothing could happen without him, and then he would be rewarded.

But why couldn’t he remember what his reward was going to be? Or who it was that would reward him?

 

While the fighting had raged in the Maze, Chaven had made his escape. In truth, it had been a relief to leave Barrick and the bright-eyed Qar behind. Too many questions. Too many curious glances. They were not human, that was certain, and to be truthful, neither was Prince Barrick anymore. There were moments when Chaven had felt quite naked, certain that everyone who passed him could see straight through to his hidden allegiance.

It was strange to think that only a year ago or a little more his life had been ordinary. Then he had found the mirror during some trip to a faraway market, one of the trips he made several times a year, although he had no memory now of bringing it back. Over the following days, as he had cleaned it and wondered over it, his love for an interesting old thing had turned into something more. Chaven had begun to spend long stretches of time with it, polishing the bowed glass and staring into its alluring, sometimes slightly confusing depths. And although he could not remember it happening, one day he discovered he could see all the way though. To the
other side
.

And then . . . And then . . . And then he could not remember what had happened. Not all of it, anyway: sometimes life had still proceeded as normal, of course, the mirror nothing more than an uncomfortable shadow at the back of his thoughts, like a hidden stain. But other times it had made things . . . happen. He had found himself in strange places or situations with little memory of how he had gotten there. The Kernios statue had been one of those things that just happened. He had discovered it in the center of his table one day, and although a visit to the castle archives had helped him to discover what it was, he hadn’t remembered anything of how it had made its way to him until that Skimmer man had come to his door asking for money—for the gold Chaven had promised him and his kin for bringing the statue up from the deep bay waters along the outwall near the East Lagoon. The Skimmer swore by his water god that Chaven himself had told them where to dive.