Solace Arisen (20 page)

“Once, I thought I could serve you as a Solacian. Then I dared hoped being a wife would be noble. I was foolish, hoping that despite everything, Nan loved me as I love him. My stubborn heart is your gift to me, but I keep using it to cling to those things that bring me sorrow. It won’t let Nan go. Forgive me for trying last night to make my time with him something it wasn’t. I must be grateful for what he is—courageous. Is there nothing he fears? I know he won’t leave me to this task alone. He is no Payter or Allasan, and it gives me peace, faith, to know that your goodness exists not just in death, but here among us. It is why I loved him from the start.”

Degarius threw aside the curtain. Arms swinging, he plowed through the tittering boys, hardly noting how they jumped from his path. Her confession was reverberating in his head. He slumped against a pillar and turned his gaze to the vast blue ceiling. He knew exactly how she was meant to serve the Maker. Why had he given her the ring through a servant? Why hadn’t he told her the truth last night or this morning? For the same damn reason he couldn’t tell her now. He wasn’t courageous.

When Ari rejoined him, she brought one of the oil lamps the penitents used to light incense. He peeled from the pillar. She wasn’t teary-eyed. Holding up the lamp, she said with a strange lightness in her voice, “Maker forgive me, I pilfered it. I thought we’d need it.” She nodded to a row of low arches on the other side of the Worship Hall. “Lina said it’s the door under the dove window.”

“You
are
good.”

“For taking a lamp?” A false note of humor sounded in her voice.

“You could have had nothing to confess. You are good.”

She lowered the lamp. Her eyes glinted with its light, and in the same tenuous yet playful voice she said, “You don’t know me.”

His heart lurched. Through her onionskin-thin layer of mirth, he saw that she was trying not to be afraid. He half smiled. “I know you well enough.”

“I wish there were more people,” she said. “We are obvious standing here. The dove door?”

He bowed and motioned her to lead.

They reached the room without seeming to attract notice. He put his hand upon the knob and held his breath that it wasn’t locked.

It turned.

Lina had written that the clerics used the room to store incense and vestments. This room was an office, richly furnished with dark, heavy furniture and a rabian rug. But, just as Lina described, Gherian words were carved into a waist-height band of lighter-colored stone that ran around the room. Perhaps it was foolish to imagine the room wouldn’t have changed purpose in the passing years.

They began to look for the word
descend
.

“Is this it?” Miss Nazar pointed to the set of symbols she’d memorized. It was on the panel behind the desk. She set the lantern down, laid her palm flat against the word, and pushed. A section of the wall pivoted open. The hatch was wooden but cleverly veneered with thin plates of stone to match the wall. It opened to a dark space.

The door to the room creaked.

D
egarius bowed to the cleric, who by his ermine-trimmed robes was high-ranking. “Venerated sir, I wished a private word with the lady. It’s impossible in the hall.”

The cleric’s chin disappeared into his thick, pink neck. “This isn’t a public room.” His voice was high and thin for a portly man. “It’s my office.”

Ari had straightened. She was trying to nudge the door to the tunnel closed with her foot.

The cleric shifted his bulk under his robes and glanced to the lamp and Ari. His eyelids slitted over his bulging eyes. He saw the open door to the tunnel. He began to draw his hulking chest up, as if to gather breath to bellow for the guards.

Degarius slipped his hand into his coat for his knife. Ari noted. Good. He gave the tiniest nod to the lamp.
Just pick it up, Ari. Distract him.
She bent to pick up the lamp. The cleric’s lips parted. Degarius drew his knife, darted behind him, and held the edge to his neck. “Don’t yell.”

The cleric’s neck jiggled against the blade as he shook his head. Degarius debated killing him now or using him to lead them in the tunnels. The clerics had blindfolded Lina when they brought her through. There could be an endless underground maze beneath the Forbidden Fortress for all he knew. In the cleric’s ear, Degarius said in Gherian, “Take us to the atrium, and I’ll spare you.”

The cleric trembled. “Why?”

“Yes or no. I don’t mind killing you.” Degarius lightly drew the blade across the cleric’s sagging chin. “Ari, turn around. I don’t want you to see this.”

“I’ll take you,” the cleric gasped.

Degarius drew his sword and held it to the cleric’s back. “Try anything and I run you through.” To Ari he said in Anglish, “Take my knife and the lantern.”

Hearing the Anglish, the cleric looked pleadingly to Ari and said in Anglish so she’d understand, “I’m a holy man.”

“Then you’ll help us,” Ari said.

Degarius pushed him toward the stair. “Go on, holy man.”

They descended a steep narrow stair to a passageway that smelled of dank soil. It snaked for long a distance, the length of the Worship Hall grounds, Degarius guessed, without exits or converging corridors. He counted another 358 paces until they reached two openings to the left and one going right. “Where do they lead?”

The cleric pointed to the right tunnel. “That one goes to the armory and farther along, the docks. The first left goes to the queen’s house, the second to the Lily Girl dormitory and the palace.”

The explanation seemed to match Lina’s description of the Forbidden Fortress’s layout. Degarius pointed his sword to the second left. The atrium was in the palace.

The floor sloped steadily upward, but the ceiling didn’t. By the time they came to a door sealing the tunnel, they were crouching. Lina said there’d be a door. The cleric opened it. The tunnels were emergency escapes so they were kept unlocked. Clerics escorted the Lily Girls everywhere; there was no danger of them escaping.

Degarius paused to listen for footsteps in this more frequented section of the tunnel. It was quiet.

The cleric waved them along. “There.” He pointed to a ladder. “It goes to the pump room for the fountains in the atrium.”

Degarius stopped to consider. Lina said there was a ladder to the atrium. Her maps showed it being farther from the door, though. Maybe she hadn’t drawn the map quite to scale. “I’m going to look. Ari, keep the knife on our holy man.” He climbed the short ladder to an overhead door. He nudged open the hatch. The room above was dark and quiet. He opened the hatch, climbed through, then knelt with his sword pointed at the cleric’s neck as the cleric scaled the ladder. Ari followed with the light. Tubing and pumps filled the small room. “Why aren’t they manned and running?”

“Not during the Solemnity,” answered the cleric.

Degarius cracked the door to the atrium ajar. In floated a snowflake. What in all hell? This wasn’t the atrium.

“Spies!” the cleric screeched.

A hard blow hit Degarius in the center of the back. He flew forward through the door and landed facedown in the snow. He looked up. Everything in the distance was a blur. His glasses were gone.

Moaning, low and deep, as if it came from the very earth, resonated through his ears and body.

Ari screamed.

A boot smashed into the wrist of Degarius’s sword hand. Two Gherian guards stood over him. A half dozen more were steps away.

The cleric grabbed Arvana’s arms and shoved her backward into the pump-house wall. His weight pinned her hands and the knife behind her back. She twisted against him, but he was too heavy. She arched her back and freed her hand with the knife, but he caught it, slammed it to the wall, and pressed harder against her. “You said you were a holy man,” she pleaded.

“I am.” With his free hand, he raked the front of her dress. His fingers caught on the Blue Eye, and he pulled. Her neck burned as the chain dug into her flesh before it snapped.

The cleric spat into her face, and in heavily accented Anglish said, “Sovereign Alenius promised me this. Thank you for bringing it straight to me. I will be his holy Judge.” He laughed.

As his belly heaved, she ripped her knife hand free and plunged the blade into his neck.

The cleric reeled backward, the knife still in his throat. He ran into a pump and pitched over it.

She lunged for his hand, for the Blue Eye, but a soldier jumped before her. Another came at her from the side and threw his arms around her. She thrashed wildly against him, but he lifted her from her feet and carried her from the pump house.

Every time Degarius tried to get to his knees, the soldiers kicked him down. He didn’t feel their boots. He had to get up. A black boot flashed toward his face. He squeezed his eyes closed and curled his head between his arms. The boot caught his shoulder.

“Stop,” a voice yelled. “Get up.”

Degarius got to all fours and looked up. A blade, Assaea, was pointed right between his eyes. Some bastard had it. As Degarius slowly unbent and came to his feet, another soldier grabbed his arms, locked his elbows behind his back, and pushed him toward a Gherian Fortress Guard commander. The commander’s breath steamed over Degarius’s face as he asked, “A spy, are you? I’m a gracious man. I’ll show you what you came here to see.” He cracked an ugly smile and nodded to his left. “And some things you didn’t come here to see.”

Degarius looked to where the commander nodded. Two soldiers held Ari.

The earth rumbled again. The soldiers holding him tensed and glanced to their commander.

“Megreth doesn’t like you and neither do I,” the commander said. He walked to Ari and shoved his hand under her coat. “But I like her.”

“Don’t touch her,” Degarius growled.

The commander ran his hand up her bodice to her chest. She wrenched against her captors, but they pulled her arms tighter. The commander curled his fingers up under Degarius’s mother’s necklace. “This looks worth my trouble.” He ripped it from her neck.

Degarius squinted. Where was the Blue Eye? Had the damn cleric taken it from her?

The commander threw the necklace to a soldier, then curtly turned away from Ari and signaled the soldiers to follow him.

They were in some kind of garden. Snow filled in the fountain and covered brown tangles of vines that crawled the high walls. The soldiers led them around a row of white cedars to what appeared to have once been a huge reflecting pool. A grid of metal bars crisscrossed the pool’s surface and an elaborate pulley system was rigged to open a trap-door-style hatch. Heat waves distorted the air over the pool and melted the snow midair. No snow stuck to the ground around the pool.

A soldier opened a hamper and lugged out a man’s head. Another worked the pulley to open the hatch.

“Watch closely,” the commander, said. “Alenius will order the same to be your fate.”

The soldiers pushed them to the edge of the pool. It had been dug out. At the bottom of the pit was the draeden that had destroyed Solace.

The commander shouted, “Wakeup, wakeup,” at the creature. “Time for a snack.”

The draeden’s eyelids peeled opened. Its irises were a pulsing red, as if gushing with blood. Instead of going for the man’s head, it beat its constrained wings against the grate roof and stone sides of the grotto. Its snout rammed the bars closest to the soldier keeping Assaea. Did it sense his sword?