The Hidden City (50 page)

As if this were his life, truly his life; as if all fighting had already been done, and everything lost in the attempt.

She'd heard the word “broken” before, even heard it used to refer to people, but she'd never seen it so clearly. Not even Lefty, who jumped at the sight of his own shadow, was broken like this; he still had fear to drive him.

And Arann to care for him.

Not even the fact that she didn't have to talk him out from under the bed was a comfort, here. The mirror that she looked into—and away from—was contained in the prominent bones of his cheeks, the squareness of his jaw; a dim little voice said,
this could have been me
.

She didn't even try to argue with it.

“We have to leave,” she told him.

He nodded.

“We have to leave now.”

He nodded again. When she left the room, he followed, moving slowly and carefully, avoiding eye contact with anything that wasn't the floor.

She looked across the hall, saw Carver emerge, dragging someone by the arm. A boy. Another boy. His hair was the color of dark carrots, and his face, pale, showed freckles, but no bruises. He looked bewildered, but not afraid. New here, she thought. Too new.

But why were they all boys?

Before she could ask, Carver said, “How many more, Jay?” And he looked down the hall. A man was reloading a crossbow. And cursing. In fact, a lot of men were cursing.

Without thinking, she answered the question. “Just one.” And then stopped, as thought caught up with her mouth. Her eyes narrowed. But Carver was without guile; he had asked because he expected her to know.

He was pale, and he had his dagger firmly in the hand that wasn't dragging out the room's occupant. But he wasn't ready to run. She thought, then, that her Oma would have liked this strange boy.

Carver took him to Arann; Jewel's silent charge followed without a word. But Carver's? He looked down the hall, his green-brown eyes widening.
He
had flight in him.

“One more where?” Carver asked, and looked down the hall. There were six doors; they could probably reach two of them without risking limbs to the swordplay.

Jewel had reached Arann's side. She now turned to the first boy, the one Finch had rescued. “Which room is Duster in?” she asked him quietly.

“None of these,” he replied.

The silent boy, the boy who had guttered eyes, seemed to hear the words at last, and he flinched.

Jewel had no right to judge him. And had she
time,
she would have let him be. He'd suffered enough.

But he had the answer, and she needed it.

“Where?” she asked him, more brusquely than she'd intended.

“Up,” he whispered. And as he did, he pointed.

Down the hall. Toward the thick of the fighting. Jewel followed the direction and her eyes came to rest, briefly, on the two men who stood sentinel there, smiling in the face of Rath and Harald and their men.

She forgot how to breathe for a moment, and almost took a step back. But she forced herself to stand her ground, to say
nothing
. Because she was aware that all eyes were on her, and some of those eyes were almost vacant; she couldn't afford to fill them with fear.

Or terror.

She could not go through the men. None of them could. “Finch.”

Finch was white. But she nodded. And pulled the boy's arm down, so that it rested, again, at his side. He didn't flinch when she touched him; he made no attempt to free his hand. And Finch, the smallest person here, held that hand as tightly as if it were all the money—or food—she possessed in a very unfriendly world. She had been so terrified of returning, she could barely take steps, but here, at last, she had found something that was worth holding onto. Someone who needed her.

It surprised Jay, and even above the din and her own growing agitation, it was a good surprise. A welcome surprise.

“There's another floor?”

“I think so.”

“Okay. This is a big place. That can't possibly be the only way up.” She turned to Arann. “I want you to wait downstairs,” she told him. “With the others.”

“And you?”

“Carver and I are going to find a different way up.” She turned and headed down the stairs.

“Aren't you going the wrong way?”

“No.”

“But—”

“There won't be more stairs from here,” Jewel replied. “And we won't reach those ones alive. But I've got a couple of ideas.”

The redhead turned to her. “Good ideas?” he asked dubiously.

“Compared to going through the fighting? Yes.”

“Jay—the door—”

She shook her head. “It's closed,” she told Arann firmly. “And I don't want you touching it until I tell you to.”

“But—”

“What?” She tried not to grind her teeth. And tried to breathe.
What in the Hells am I doing here?
But she had an answer to that. And it was a good answer, shorn of defiance but not determination. “It's magicked,” she snapped. “There's a mage here. At least one. I don't know what will happen if you try—but it doesn't look safe.”

“How can you tell? Hey!” Arann had stepped firmly on Lefty's foot before grabbing him by the arm. He all but dragged poor Lefty down the stairs.

 

They huddled in the foyer. Jewel tapped Carver on the shoulder, and Carver nodded. “The rest of you stay here. Unless the wrong people come down the stairs.”

“What are we supposed to do if—”

“Go through the windows in that room; they've already been broken.”

Arann nodded. The cluster surrounding him moved toward the open door of the room she'd pointed out. But one of them broke away, and came toward Jewel and Carver.

Finch.

She was shaking, but her hands were balled fists. “I'll go,” she whispered. “I'll go with you.”

“There's no point,” Jewel told her. “You don't know this building well enough to be useful. And it's safer—”

“I know Duster.”

Jewel wanted to argue, but the words wouldn't come. Truth often had that effect on her tongue. And Finch had talked one boy out from under a bed when Jewel herself couldn't manage. She nodded.

Together, they went toward the doors at the far end of the foyer. They were a dark-stained wood, and looked very fine—far finer than the carpets on which they walked, or the faded patina of the walls. There was a mirror here—it seemed to be a theme—but this one hung across the hall like a painting.

This, Jewel thought bitterly, was where customers came. This was supposed to pass for wealth.

And it did, and Jewel despised utterly all men with power and money. She wished, for just that second, that she had come at night—at night, when there were customers who could see them, be terrified with them, and join the dead who lay like afterthought in the long hall above.

She wanted them to be afraid.

She wanted them to be trapped here, like they were.

She wanted them to burn—

She almost stopped walking as Carver pushed the doors wide. He ran into her back, nearly knocking her off her feet.

“Fire,” she whispered. She turned to look at them, at Carver and the very surprising Finch.

Finch couldn't get any paler. Carver could, and did.

“Where?” he asked.

“Here,” she replied, her eyes wide, “Everywhere. They're going to burn the house down.”

“It would take a lot of fire to burn
this
place down.”

“Not that much,” she told him. “Not to start.” And then she pulled herself together, took a deep breath, and ran. The hall behind the closed grand doors was narrower than the hallway above. It was also a good deal shorter, and it ended in a T, bracketed at either end by doors.

“This is why we have to hurry?” Carver asked her.

She nodded.

And he waited, again, as if she knew what she was doing. She hated it; it was a burden she didn't want. But without it, she doubted that he would follow at all.

“Right,” she said softly.

Carver nodded, and began to run down the hall. Finch followed Jewel. The door at the end wasn't locked, but it was a pathetic excuse for a door.

It opened into the kitchen.

As kitchens went, this was probably cockroach heaven. The water that lay in the buckets to one side of the counter that covered the wall to their left seemed brackish or slimy. Not that she wanted to drink it. There were plates on that counter, piled in a precarious heap; there were—of course—cockroaches crawling across their dirty surface. The counter itself was a thick, warped wood.

Insects scurried when Jewel and Carver raced by. Jewel didn't stop to think; there were three doors into the kitchen, but one of them they'd already passed through, and the other went in the wrong direction; probably to some fancy room meant just for eating.

She led them to the other door, the far door, and paused there.

“Safe?” Carver whispered, crouching slightly, his dagger in his hand.

She nodded, and pushed the door open. It made a lot of noise, and it wasn't easy—but she could see why; a mop and a bucket were pressed against that door. As if they had ever been used. She kicked the bucket aside. Beyond the kitchen were stairs; they went both down and up. They couldn't compare to the foyer's grand spiral; they were narrow and dingy, and what light there was came through the cracks of shutters more warped than the counter.

No glass here, she thought. No carpet. Just stairs with a railing that looked suspiciously rotten. She stuck to the walls and began to mount them, hoping they didn't come out anywhere near the second floor.

At least they were visible. Had they been otherwise prepared, Rath would have lost Harald in the first few seconds; as it was, Harald chose to be cautious. Where cautious was abandoning, for the moment, the overhead swing for which he was so famed. It always had momentum and strength behind it, but it left him open, both at beginning and end.

Harald liked to play the part of a berserker; had he actually
been
one, Rath would have assiduously avoided him. Then again, had he, it was likely he would have been dead ten years ago. Anger, in combat, was almost never your friend.

It wasn't Rath's.

Because Harald chose to be cautious, because he chose a conservative stance and a thrust that would give him room to maneuver should he require it, he survived the shock of having his sword almost bounce. He managed to bring it up in time to parry, and the parry sent him back two steps; although the blow itself looked like an exploratory thrust, it was anything but.

Whoever these two were—
whatever
they were—they were good. At least as good, Rath thought, as Rath himself. But Rath had had the money and prestige of an old House behind him when he had begun his long years of lessons; he wasn't so certain that these men had that advantage. They didn't need it.

Rath, having fought them once, didn't waste his throwing knives; he didn't waste his swordplay either. He moved carefully, fighting defensively because defense was the only way he would survive. Survival was almost everything.

But in this case, it wasn't everything. He hadn't come here to die; he hadn't come to flee. Flight, given his previous experience, was a very poor option. He let fear show; he let it guide the muscles around his mouth, his eyes, the creases in his forehead; he let it be, for a moment, exactly what it was.

He made a play of swordsmanship, in the wide halls, sun streaming just out of reach through the long, long windows that had been rebuilt. These men seemed to cast no shadow, or rather, it seemed part of them, inseparable from them—something that would have existed in the absence of light.

It was a few minutes' work, to seem good enough, and frightened enough, to draw them out, to make them step forward and retake ground that their dead companions had surrendered.

He ignored the voices of the men at his back; ignored Harald. Concentrated instead on two things: the man he was fighting, and his own dagger, unsheathed, on his belt. One of two, it had been a gift from Andrei, and on short notice, it had probably been a very costly gift.

With Andrei, the cost was written afterward.

Rath fought as if there might never be one.

But when the moment came—and it did—and the man to his front deflected a blow in such a way that it pushed Rath's sword wide, exposing his chest before Rath could step back, Rath pulled a dagger in his off hand, and drove it into his adversary's chest. It helped that his enemy didn't even bother to make the attempt to get out of its way.

But this blade—this one, small, ornate, incredibly ugly to Rath's more cultured sense of aesthetics—bit. Rath let it go, and swung his sword in, and this time, it, too, cut.

They weren't invulnerable, these men, these unwelcome strangers.

But when the fire started, Rath noted where: at the opening of the wound the dagger had made.

The steps didn't open up as they reached the top of the second set; they continued higher, but a door was closed and contained by wall. Jewel looked at it. “Second floor,” she muttered, and Carver, who was seconds behind her, nodded. They looked at the door for a minute, and then left it, racing up the last of the stairs. Or the last two flights; the ceilings here were high.

They stopped only once: When a roar shook the building. It was short, but loud, a thing of fury and pain. Finch had plastered herself against the wall, and she raised shaking hands to her ears. Had it gone on forever, she might have remained where she was standing.