15
VORATH
KINGFISHER
“I SWEAR ON all four winds, I didn’t want to help him. He made me do it!”
Carrion had caught up with the vault breaker quickly. The other man wasn’t in peak physical condition, it turned out, and Swift was light on his feet.
“You know Eric,” Vorath Shah said, holding his hands aloft. “He can be pretty persuasive when he wants to be.”
If Carrion didn’t ease off, he was either going to snap the human’s neck or cut off his airway until he passed out. I placed a hand on Swift’s shoulder, raising my eyebrows when he looked at me.
“You can tell him what a bad man he is later. Find out where the silver is.”
We were inside the human’s shop. It turned out he wasn’t just a vault breaker. He was a merchant, too. A purveyor of all kinds of bizarre and interesting goods. There were tiny heads in jars on his shelves. A vast array of powders and crushed herbs in small glass containers. Bones strung onto rope and knotted in strange shapes that looked almost like runes. Everything was covered in a fine layer of sand.
The air was thick with the smell of unfamiliar—but not unpleasant—spices. I paid little attention to the details of our surroundings. Beyond knowing how many entrances the shop had and where they were, the rest was unimportant.
The silver was all that mattered.
For the fifth time in as many minutes, Shah’s dark eyes darted to find me.
He was wary of me, that much was clear. The reason for his interest was less clear.
“I don’t know where Eric took it all,” Shah rushed out. “He’s paranoid. You know he’d never let anyone else know where he was planning on housing that much capital.”
“Ugh.” Carrion huffed. “I’m so bored of this conversation already. Eric is the laziest, most arrogant person in the Third. He would never have transported those trunks by himself. That kind of grunt work is beneath him. And he wouldn’t have brought anyone else in to deal with it, because you’re right, he is paranoid. Which means he got you to shift it all. That also means that this,” he said, waving a hand at the human, pinned against the counter of his own store, “is pointless, and you are wasting my time. Where’s my money, Vorath?”
Again, Shah glanced at me and flinched.
I was wearing armor, but he couldn’t see that. I was glamored. He was looking at me strangely for some other reason, and that had piqued my interest.
“If I tell you where he is, I’m siding with you,” Shah gasped. “If I don’t tell you where he is, I’m siding with him. You’re both out of your godscursed minds.
How am I supposed to decide which one of you to piss off?”
“Oh, you should definitely piss off the one who isn’t here,” Carrion suggested. “Or the one who is here will rip out your fingernails.”
“I—Yes, I can see the wisdom in that,” the human said. He squeezed his eyes shut when Carrion strengthened the grip he had on his throat. “I don’t mean to complain, Carrion, but your elbow is digging into my rib cage.”
Shah wasn’t as afraid as he needed to be. He knew there might be some pain along the path that stretched before him, but he wasn’t concerned about any real consequences. Not from Carrion. But I was an unknown entity. “Just kill him and have done with it,” I said, affecting an air of boredom.
The vault breaker began thrashing his arms and legs. “No! No, you don’t need to do that. I-I’ll tell you. It’s fine. You just have to understand, the Third
isn’t the kind of place you can just double-cross someone and walk away.”
Shah had double-crossed plenty of people in his time. My gut instincts were rarely wrong. There was something untrustworthy about the human. He was cleverer than he was making out to be. His mind was working a mile a minute.
“I can’t tell you where Eric’s taken your money, but I can show you,” he said.
“And why the hell would I want you tagging along on this adventure? It’s already zero percent fun,” Carrion said, shooting a none-toosubtle look in my direction.
“Because I’m useful. Because I want to make it up—” He coughed, struggling to swallow around the forearm Carrion was pressing into his windpipe. “Up to you for running just now. You know how it is. I panicked. I’m sorry, Carrion.
Come on. We’re friends.”
This man had no friends.
If I was right about him, then he had a barrow where he dumped the bodies of his victims, but I kept my thoughts to myself.
Carrion pulled back, easing the pressure from Shah’s throat a little. His pale blue eyes went to me. “Well? Are we letting him escort us to the goods or what?”
“I say we torture the location out of him and then dispose of him.”
Thum.
Thum.
Thum.
Shah’s pulse was as lazy as could be. It didn’t spike at all, as he pretended to panic again. “No! Eric’s laid out traps. You’ll need me if you want to get past them!”
Why did he want to come with us so badly? I supposed there was only one way to find out. “All right. Fine. He can come. But he’s your pet, Swift. Make sure you keep him on a short leash.”
It was morning now. At least I thought it was. It was impossible to tell. I “borrowed” an oversized gray scarf from the human and used it to shield my head from the suns and the Third’s prying eyes as we made our way through the
ward, silently hating the sensation of the sweat running down my back.
Carrion kept his head down, moving with the flow of the crowded streets.
His shoulders were relaxed, his gait unhurried and easy, but his eyes skipped over the faces of the humans who passed us. His hand rested casually at his side, but his fingers brushed his hip, where I knew a dagger was strapped to his side,
concealed beneath his shirt.
He was ready.
If we had to run, he wouldn’t need telling twice. If we had to fight, that steel would be in his hand in a heartbeat, and he wouldn’t be afraid to use it.
A little ruefully, I squirreled away the observation to process later.
Shah was twitchy as a ferret. Ten feet ahead of us, he wove through the press of bodies like a minnow swimming upstream. I kept an eye on the back of his head, determined not to let him give us the slip among the crowds.
“What are all these people doing out here?” I muttered. “Don’t they have homes? Work?”
Next to me, Carrion laughed bitterly down his nose. “They’re on their way to the ward gate to claim their water ration for the day. If they don’t get there early, there’ll be none left, and they’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
It was one thing, knowing that Madra kept her people under the heel of her boot by keeping them thirsty. Seeing it in action was another thing entirely.
The humans who shuffled toward the ward’s entrance were dirty, their clothes worn. Many of them were rail thin, eyes sunken in their sockets. But . . . there were smiles on their faces. They laughed and catcalled at one another as they made their way to collect just enough water to keep them going until tomorrow. Their homes were little more than crumbling shells. They were beaten and oppressed at every turn. They barely had enough food to feed their children, and it had become normal. They had accepted it. Found a way to cope with it. In the face of abject misery, they had built lives for themselves, and community. They weren’t yet broken.
As we approached the wall that separated the Third from its neighboring
wards, Vorath Shah hooked a hard left and ducked between a short, squat building and a tall tower of some kind. The gap between the two buildings was barely enough to accommodate the width of my shoulders. As I entered the narrow corridor, following after him, I was sure I would see him sprinting away, but no. Shah was right there, waiting for us, just a couple of feet into the alleyway.
“There’s a door up ahead, in the wall. You’ll need to open it, Carrion.”
Swift squeezed past me, not even remotely concerned about stepping on my feet. “You can crack a vault, Vorath. Why do you need me to open a simple door?”
“Because it’s not a simple door. You’ll see for yourself. You’ll see.”
Moments later, we were standing in front of said door, and Shah’s issue became apparent. There was no door handle. There was no keyhole. There was no lock. In fact, the wall was so smooth and free of defining features that it was almost impossible to tell there was a door there at all. If it weren’t for the thin, oblong seam in the sandstone, even I would have missed it. Shah held out his hands in a universal See what I mean? kind of gesture.
Carrion frowned, running a hand along the seam. “How did you get in here when you were with Eric?”
“He has a special key. He holds it against the wall and sweeps it to the left. It opens without a sound.” The awe in Shah’s tone was there for anybody to hear.
“I don’t know how he has access to charmed objects. All I know is that he didn’t get it from me.”
Did Carrion know that this magic trick of Eric’s wasn’t magic at all? From the way he snorted, reaching for the dagger beneath his shirt, it seemed that he did.
“Give me some space,” he murmured. The blade flashed as he drew it and held it against the wall. He angled his body, blocking his movements from Shah.
“What are you doing?” The vault breaker stood on his tiptoes, trying to peer over Carrion’s shoulder.
Carrion’s eyes met mine. There was a question there: Should I tell him? I shrugged, not caring either way.
“It isn’t magic, Shah. It’s just a really big magnet.” Carrion swept his dagger along the middle of the door, grinning with satisfaction when the metal caught the metal on the other side, and he began dragging it to the left. Surprising, really. The dagger was made of Fae steel. The iron had been refined out of it, and it had been tempered with other alloys to make it strong. Turned out that
Fae steel was highly magnetic, though.
“What’s a magnet?” Shah asked.
“I’ll tell you later. No time for that now. We have silver to collect.”
As Carrion spoke, the huge sandstone block popped out and swung open, revealing a darkened passageway beyond.
“The bell tower is the highest point in the Third. There’s a ladder bolted to the outside of it but no door,” Shah prattled. “My whole life, I always assumed it was a solid structure, but no. Look at all this. Rooms and rooms. All empty, but still.
I asked Eric how he found out about all of this, but he wouldn’t say.”
He led us up the internal spiral staircase that wound up the center of the bell tower. Without any windows, the interior of the building was pitch-black, but Shah had come prepared. He had handed out small vials filled with a glowing green substance that looked an awful lot like liquified concentrated evenlight.
All three of us held the vials aloft as we climbed, using them to light the way. I could see perfectly well in the dark. I suspected Carrion could, too, since this darkness wasn’t caused by my shadows—I would have to remember to ask him about that later—but we still carried the vials for appearances’ sake. The light painted the walls a sickly color, illuminating thick cobwebs and the bones of small rodents that littered the stairs.
When we were what I assumed to be halfway up the stairs, Vorath advised, “Watch your step here.” A skeleton lay sprawled out on the steps, the bones
pitted with age. At first glance, I assumed it was the remains of a human, but then I realized my mistake. The corpse’s canines were far too long to have belonged to a human.
Carrion saw the dead Fae’s teeth, too. He glanced back over his shoulder at me, raising an eyebrow, his profile washed in pale green.
An unsettled feeling solidified in my stomach. As we rose higher up the bell tower, that feeling grew heavier, weightier, settling like a stone inside me.
There once had been a time when I might have chalked up a feeling like this to paranoia or being overly cautious, but I’d learned my lesson in the maze. My weapons were sharp, but my intuition was sharper. It had never led me astray.
My nerves were screaming by the time I made out the open archway at the top of the stairs.
I stopped dead, reaching for my daggers and a handful of shadow. “Carrion.”
Up ahead, the smuggler was only a couple of steps behind Shah. The shorter human waited at the dark archway, dramatic shadows from the vial of green light twisting his features into a hideous mask as he turned back to face us. “It’s
just through here,” he said.
“Carrion,” I growled.
The smuggler stopped on the second to last step, twisting to look back at
me. “What is it?”
“We’re done here,” I told him.
“Uhh, no, we’re not?” He sounded incredulous. “We haven’t got what we
came for.”
“We’ll find the silver another way.”
“What are you talking about? This is my money. These are my goods. I have a right to claim them. Why would we make things harder for ourselves?”
“If you walk into that room, Swift,” I said calmly, “you won’t be walking out
again.”
“What do you me—”
But the vault breaker didn’t give him the opportunity to change his mind;
he grabbed Carrion by the arm and pulled him up the last step. “Sorry, Carrion,” he said. “I am your friend . . . but he’s still hungry.”
“Who’s hungry?” Swift tripped on the top step, falling forward, past Shah, who moved out of Carrion’s way, pressing his back against the archway.
Carrion’s hands slapped down onto the ground, his torso crossing the boundary
into the room beyond . . . . . . and nothing happened.
Swift cursed roundly, glowering up at Shah. “The hell is wrong with you,
Vorath?”
The sound came softly at first.
Then it became a hum.
“What is that?” Carrion asked, his eyes roving upward into the dark.
Then it became a roar.
“He said it was the only way,” Shah inched away from Carrion. “I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”
“Vorath?” Carrion went to get up, but as he tried to stand, he realized that he couldn’t. “Why are my hands glued to the floor?”
Gods a-fucking-live. Sighing, I trudged up the last few steps, already regretting the fact that I hadn’t just turned and left. “It’s a demon’s trap,” I said, peering down at the ground in front of Carrion. I couldn’t see anything marking the floor of the empty room beyond. Not until I kicked away the glowing vial Carrion had dropped when he’d fallen and tossed the one Vorath had given me over my shoulder, too. As soon as the green glow was gone, the marks flared to life, brilliant and white. They were everywhere: runes, scrawled messily into a layer of centuries-old dust, interlocking, hundreds of them. Thousands. The walls of the room at the top of the stairs were covered in them. The ceiling. The floor, too. And Carrion had just slapped his hands down right in the middle of them.
“What the hell is a demon trap?” Carrion asked in an oddly calm voice.
I crouched down beside him, squinting at the runes. They were Gilarian
maybe. Ancient Gilarian? Or . . . Ahh. Shit. No. It wasn’t Gilarian.
“Why is your face doing that?” Carrion tugged hard, trying to free his hands from the floor without any success. “And why’s that rushing sound getting louder?”
“You might as well stop,” I grumbled, getting to my feet. “You could cut your hands off and you’d still be fucked. A demon trap is old magic. Alchimeran magic. And it’s exactly what it sounds like. A trap that catches demons.”
“Then why the hell has it trapped me?” he demanded.
“Because magic this old is powerful, yes, but it does deteriorate over time.
Not enough to be broken altogether. But it can be manipulated. The beast that was imprisoned here is using the trap like a spider’s web now, isn’t it, Shah? The beast is using it so that it can eat.”
The vault breaker’s eyes sparkled with an unhinged delight. This was who he was—the version of himself that he had been hiding. “My master does have a prodigious appetite,” he said.
“What is it?” I demanded. “Arrangoth? Noltick? Bresheth?” It couldn’t have been Morthil; Morthil had been trapped in the maze with me for the past century. I couldn’t remember the names of any of the other lost demons.
From the mad excitement on Vorath Shah’s face, I knew that whatever he was about to say was going to be bad. “His holy name is Joshin. Lord of the Desert. King of the Dark Dream.”
Aaaaand I was right. It was bad. Really, really, really bad. “Fuck.”
“Will someone please tell me what that sound is!” Carrion bellowed.
Drawing my hands together, I called on my primary and my secondary magic, gritting my teeth as the sword—a replica of Nimerelle, cast in silver— formed in my hands.
“Scorpions, Carrion. That is the sound of a million fucking scorpions.”