Principles of Angels (42 page)
Read Principles of Angels Online
Authors: Jaine Fenn
And now she was in hell. The only light beyond the circle of torchlight came from the sudden snapping fires. Pits like gaping black mouths peppered the floor as they went down, ever down, and sudden drafts of cold or warm air whooshed from side-passages or holes in the ceiling. Yes, this was hell, a place of punishment and damnation. She felt herself slipping into the merciful oblivion of madness, accepting her fate, whatever it might be. After all, if this was hell, she was already damned. Soon they would reach the ultimate pit and the scream within her would be released.
Suddenly Scarrion, walking a couple of paces ahead, stopped. Salik, his whisper loud in the gloom, said, ‘I heard that too. Go.’
The assassin nodded and slipped back past them.
Taro suspected this passage might not’ve been the best choice. There appeared to be more holes than floor, some no more than dips - though still enough to trip him up if he wasn’t paying attention - while others were wide and deep enough that the only way past them was to edge along the wall. He thought momentarily about taking a side-passage, but then he’d get even more lost. Perhaps he should start leaving some sort of marker to show where he’d already been - but what? He had his flecks, but he wasn’t going to throw away his only weapons. He might be able to use them to carve marks on the wall, but that would take time - and he remembered the Minister’s advice about not touching anything. He would just have to keep to the leftmost path, and hope.
It looked like things opened up a bit ahead, where rock pillars stood in a slightly larger cavern. There were still too many pits for comfort, but perhaps he might be able to get a clearer view from there, maybe even see the flashlight again if he was lucky. If not, he’d try going back to the junction to see if the curtain had gone, then try the other way.
Two steps into the cavern he stopped dead.
The rock pillars that supported the roof here were all sorts of shapes. In the weird-shit way of this place, the one ahead and to the left was thinner at the base and wider near the roof. Something stuck out from the base of the pillar, something shaped exactly like the toe of a boot.
He edged back into the passage and drew both flecks. A glance at the rock pillar showed that the boot-tip had gone, which probably meant Scarrion - it had to be Scarrion - had heard him. But he still had a couple of advantages.
Firstly, he could see far better than the Screamer; secondly, though the hem of Nual’s cloak had been shredded when he fell, it was still good enough to hide behind. Ignoring the protest from his shoulder, he raised the left-hand side of the cloak like a shield in front of his face. Scarrion shouldn’t be able to see him until he dropped the cloak and hit out with his right hand. Only thing was, though the cloak would hide him, it meant he couldn’t see where he was going either.
He advanced slowly, ears straining to hear above the ever-present buzz from the fire curtains, eyes focused on the ground just ahead of his toes.
When he glimpsed the base of the rock pillar beneath the ragged hem of the cloak he tensed, breath frozen in his throat. The next half-step showed something black. Scarrion’s foot. Before he could lose his nerve he dropped the cloak and stabbed for the Screamer’s throat.
Scarrion was fast. Though he could only have seen the threat at the very last moment, his left hand flew up to deflect the blow. The fleck missed his neck and grazed his forehead. He slammed Taro’s hand into the pillar and pain exploded in his wrist. Taro dropped the fleck and through a mist of agony heard the blade skitter away.
He staggered back, hugging his arm to his chest. Scarrion’s face swam before him, feral and inhuman. Without the element of surprise, and with what felt like a broken wrist, Taro stood very little chance. But he was done running.
He crouched low, extended his remaining fleck in his left hand and met the assassin’s eyes.
With the bodyguard gone Elarn felt some of her composure return. Most of the effects of the drug Salik had given her had faded, leaving her with shaking limbs and a splitting headache. The roaring not-quite-sound that hovered at the edge of her consciousness was nothing to do with the drug, it was the precursor of the scream, a sign that the barriers holding it back were badly damaged.
She knew what she was now: the Sidhe’s tool, nothing more. And Salik was their agent.
She had been running to him, thinking he was her saviour, when all the time he was her enemy and she should have been running like hell in the other direction.
She stopped. Salik pulled on her arm, then, realising she was no longer following, frowned over his shoulder at her.
‘I have to know something,’ she said. Her voice was swallowed by the walls, drowned in the rush of on-coming destruction.
Salik turned to face her and said, ‘What is it, Elarn?’ He spoke as though to a child, or an idiot.
‘Did you ever, at any point, care for me at all?’
Without waiting for an answer, Elarn brought her heel down hard on his foot. When he let go of her arm with a grunt of pain, she snatched the torch out of his hand and ran down the passage.
‘You little fucker,’ said Scarrion, more offended than angry. ‘I’d say you’re pretty much screwed now. Only question is, do I burst your organs with my song or gut you with my knife?’
Taro had already spotted the Screamer’s third weapon: the slender muzzle of Malia’s gun showed above his shoulder. Even the Screamer wouldn’t be stupid enough to use a weapon like that in here.
‘How about neither?’ Taro snarled, slashing with his remaining fleck. His blade was shorter than the flesher’s knife in Scarrion’s hand and both his hand and shoulder were damaged already. The blow went well wide.
‘Oh,’ said Scarrion, ‘knives it is.’ He darted forward, his blade flashing like a spurt of blood in the eerie light. The blood from his cut forehead must’ve thrown his aim. He missed too.
Scarrion saw Taro glance at the wound and his expression of cold amusement changed. Taro had hurt him. That wasn’t allowed. It was against the natural order; he was a giver of pain, not a receiver. Before Taro could react to the change from arrogance to anger, Scarrion charged.
Taro staggered back and realised, not for the first time today, that he’d run out of ground. His right leg dropped, then hit rock. He toppled backwards. He flailed his arms, reeling back as he tried to adjust to the new direction of gravity, but he was already off-balance and by the time a fizz and a pop announced the arrival of a fire-curtain above him, he was half-rolling, half-falling down a hole.
She could hear Salik shouting behind her, but she kept running. She had to leap over holes and dodge pillars of rock and at one point she found her feet dragging as gravity doubled in a couple of steps. But she kept running, swerving down a side-passage as a curtain of red sprang into life across the corridor in front of her.
Only when her heart threatened to burst and she could no longer catch her breath did she stop. She heard no immediate sounds of pursuit, though she doubted she would hear much over the roaring in her head. She bent over to try to clear the stitch eating into her side, then set off more slowly.
Without his own light to see by, Salik would have to move slowly. Maybe she had lost him.
A faint skittering sounded ahead, ahead and above. She played the torch across the ceiling, her shaking hand making the beam waver. The torch revealed a patch of darkness, and a fraction of a second later something small dropped out of the hole. She took a tentative step towards the object, shining the torch onto it. It was a knife, a jagged blade made of a dull grey material. She picked it up by the rag-wrapped handle.
There was a shout from above, followed by a scatter of stones. She stepped back, dropping the knife into the pocket of her jacket.
A couple of seconds later a scrawny downsider youth tumbled out of the hole and landed in a crouch in front of her, so close she could have reached out and touched him. Her first instinct was to run, but he was blocking the passage. She shone the light in his face and he threw up his arms. In his bandaged left hand he held a knife like the one which had preceded him down the hole, though he wasn’t making any threatening moves with it. Quite the contrary; he appeared as disorientated as she was. She lowered the light.
For several heartbeats, they just stared at each other. Finally he uncurled, stood upright and said, ‘Now I don’t mean to be rude but who the fuck are you and what the fuck you doin’ down ’ere?’
‘My name is Elarn Reen. And who the . . . Who are you?’
He grinned. ‘I’m Taro sanMalia. Yer Elarn Reen? Nual went to find you. Where is she?’
‘Nual? Yes, she did. I . . . I’m not sure what happened to her. I think she may be dead.’
From the expression that flickered across the boy’s face, Elarn guessed he cared for Lia - for Nual. She wondered who he was - and why he wasn’t more surprised to see her here. She might have assumed he was a hallucination, except the blade had felt real enough when she picked it up and she doubted her subconscious could fill in this level of detail, right down to the smell.
The downsider gulped and said, more suspiciously, ‘And what’re you doin’ down here, Medame Reen?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she answered honestly, adding, ‘Well, right now I’m running away from Consul Vidoran.’
He nodded, and pushed past her back up the passage. ‘If yer runnin’ away from him, then you won’t mind if I kill him.’
She pressed herself into the wall to let him pass. ‘Kill—I . . . No. I mean yes, kill him. But his bodyguard—’
‘Is just up there’ - he nodded back at the hole he had fallen through - ‘so we’d best not be standin’ here when that fire-curtain goes off again.’ He began to stride up the passage.
There was something compelling about the youth’s certainty. Elarn started after him. ‘Listen, Taro. You obviously have some sort of unfinished business with Consul Vidoran, but I just want to get out of here, and preferably off Vellern altogether, though I’m not sure I can . . . Anyway, if you could tell me the best way out, I’ll leave you to do . . . what you’re here to do.’
‘Sorry, medame, I’m lost meself.’ The downsider’s longer stride meant he was already pulling ahead of her. He didn’t seem to need a flashlight to see where he was going either.
‘You don’t understand,’ she said, a little plaintively. ‘I can’t go back to Salik. He tricked me. I think he means to kill me down here.
Taro stopped and turned slowly. ‘Yer sayin’ he brought you down here to kill ya?’
‘Yes! At least that’s what I think. I don’t know - all I know is that he’s been deceiving me all along so he could get me into this place, and that he means me harm.’
‘Oh shit!’ Taro stared at her as though she was about to explode. ‘Shit and blood!’ He glanced at the knife in his hand, then back at her, and for a moment Elarn thought he was about to attack her. Then he grimaced and said, ‘You know, yer so right, Medame Reen. It’d be a real smoky deal fer you to run into Salik Vidoran. Or Scarrion. Or anyone. Aye, leavin’ the City would be a prime idea. Leavin’ right fuckin’ now.’ He looked around him, his dirty face serious with fear. ‘The tunnel forks ahead. You came that way; d’you remember which fork yer came down?’
‘The right, I think.’
‘C’mon.’ He started to run and Elarn followed. They stopped at the fork; the tunnels looked identical and Elarn was no longer so sure where she had come from. Taro checked down both tunnels and said, ‘I need t’go left to get to the throne room, so if you keep goin’ right you should get back to the surface.’
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