Those Who Fear the Darkness (BloodRunes: Book 2) (8 page)

She bit her lip in frustration. She liked
plans that were carefully thought out, but there simply was no
time. She took a deep breath and climbed into the hole, one slow
step after another.

Once below, her eyes adjusted to the darkness
and she glanced around. The cellar was only still open because two
beams had fallen together to create a triangle onto which the rest
of the house had fallen. The weight of the entire house was far too
much for them to support, however, and even now Katya could see
them strain under the weight.

She focused on the baby's crying and soon
spotted it, crumpled in the corner wrapped in blankets. Its crib
lay around it in pieces, the volume of blankets piled around it had
obviously saved the baby's life by cushioning its fall.

She unwrapped the blankets so that she could
take a cursory look for possible injuries. She saw nothing obvious,
so she gently picked it up and held it close to her. Its crying
eased and it snuggled into her, a rush of an odd emotion came over
her momentarily distracting her. Katya brushed off, tearing her
eyes away from the infant. She looked back at the opening where
rays of lights were shining down into the hole, and prepared to
climb back up.

She hastily raised a hand to cover the baby
and crouched in a defensive position as one of the beams let out a
thunderous snap, and a gigantic splinter of wood flew out, catching
her in the shoulder. She let out a hiss of pain and burst into
motion, climbing one handed as fast as she could, debris falling
out from under her as her feet left them.

Behind her she heard the house crumbling in
on itself and above her she heard the woman howling in fear. The
edge of the opening was in view, but nothing was left to hold onto,
so Katya balled her leg muscles beneath her and gave a tremendous
leap through the opening, rolling onto the floor above, carefully
shielding the baby as the hole disappeared into a cloud of
dust.

The woman was upon her the second she stood,
and Katya yielded the baby to her. The woman took it gingerly and
showered it with kisses, crooning at it while methodically checking
every inch for injury.

Once assured that the baby was fine, the
woman turned her attention to Katya and thanked her profusely.
Katya tried to tell her that it was nothing and back away, already
uneasy that so many people had seen her face and she got a chill
down her spine as the woman said gratefully, “I'll never forget
you, and what you did for me and my baby, thank you so much.”

Watching the woman hold her child made
Katya’s heart seem to beat straight out of her chest, and the
feeling of relief for the baby’s safety was so profound that
Katya’s muscles ached with the need to express it somehow.
What
the blazes?
Alarm spread through her and she had the urge to
flee. She nodded at the woman shortly and walked fast towards the
exit.

Outside the shock had worn off and people
were running in all directions, calling for loved ones, or
gathering up their belongings before someone else took them. But,
with no where to put them safely, it was a futile effort. Small
fires had sprung up around the city, and waterlines were being
attempted. Without proper buckets and with half of the water
troughs emptied, their efforts were mostly in vain.

She was about to slip into the shadows when
she noticed a change in the atmosphere. Her senses told her that
the wind had just shifted, the hairs on her arms noticing the
slight change in movement. She looked back over her shoulder at the
fires and swore under her breath. She immediately regretted her
memory which had forced her to be aware that this change in wind
would put the miraculously unharmed grain storehouses directly in
the path of the fires. Grain would be essential in the next few
months of chaos that was sure to follow in the wake of a natural
disaster of such magnitude and the destruction of this important
food source would be devastating.

Logic told her it wasn’t her problem and she
should just go back to the gardens. But an overwhelming sense of
compassion washed over her as her eyes swept across the people,
causing them to blur as she watched a young man pitifully pick up
ruined wares that had been thrown harshly to the ground as his cart
toppled over. She shook her head to clear it of the annoying
emotions. She sighed and resigned herself to moving out in the open
once more and sped over to the grain-houses.

She carefully looked over the path that the
fire was taking and looked around for something to stall or divert
the firewall from devouring the grain. She hesitated in the
shadows, cursing her collar from forbidding use of magic without
express consent from her owner when on a job. She growled her
frustration and sprinted towards a group of people milling about
dumbly. “We need to start fires here, here and there,” she ordered
them but they stared at her without comprehension.

“Why would we start fires?” asked one man, at
least bright enough to find his voice.

Impatiently, Katya explained. “That big wall
of fire over there is coming this way, and in order to save the
grain we have to burn out the area around it so that the bigger
fire has nothing to feed it to get to the storehouses, now go!”

The man proved to be smarter than the rest of
the group and he jumped into action, comprehension dawning on his
face, and he urged the others to help as well. Katya oversaw the
placement of the fires and made sure that they were being
controlled so that they would not turn on them and take the grain
themselves.

Once she was satisfied that the grain was
safe, Katya focused on the rest of the crisis at hand, putting her
mind to work on the best solution to this problem before her. All
too soon, the work started becoming more morbid, when rescue
efforts turned to digging out corpses to be laid out in the streets
for loved ones to identify. The panicked screams grew fewer while
the mournful wailing grew louder, spreading across the city like a
fog.

The sun was setting and the city took on an
eerie and sorrowful feel. Even the weather after such a horrible
disaster was calm, adding to the stillness around them in the sad
city. It was getting late, and Katya picked up her pace to return
to the gardens, a heavy feeling of grief settling over her. It was
a miracle that her owner had not called her back yet, hopefully
having been too busy dealing with the chaos at the manor to notice
her absence. When she returned, however, she felt his nauseating
presence even before she leaped silently over the wall. She
carefully controlled her breathing so that it was not obvious that
she had just sprinted back, and assumed her mask of
indifference.

She stepped out onto the path far enough in
front of him so that he would not be too startled by her sudden
presence but still he glared at her.

“Where in the blazes have you been?” he
demanded, “I have been calling for you for at least ten
minutes.”

Katya was about to answer truthfully that she
had not felt her collar tugging, but caught herself, quickly
realizing the ramifications of this interesting news and her mind
raced to find a suitable alternative which would result in the
least amount of punishment. “My apologizes, Owner, but I had
assumed that you would not need my services whilst you took stock
of your own damage and thought that it would be prudent of me to go
and scout out the destruction in the city. If you act quickly
enough you could use this disaster as a cover for some of my
activities. Therefore, I was quite a distance away when you
called.”

He did not answer right away, and he narrowed
his eyes at her. She inwardly cringed, hoping that he would buy
into this story without asking details of what she had found out.
Apparently, she had distracted him with this idea of taking
advantage of the chaos, and finally he said to her, “Well, that's
obviously what I was calling you for. You should know better than
to be anywhere other than where I tell you to be.” He gave her a
stern look and she shaped her expression into one of humbling
subservience, relieved that this hand-slapping was all the
punishment he seemed inclined to dole out to her tonight. “I have
another job for you.”

Once again he went on about his latest plan
to get rid of someone he now thought was doing him harm. Katya let
one part of her mind record the important information while the
rest contemplated the relevance of her collar. The more she thought
about it, the more she was able to suddenly think more clearly and
much to her disgust found that if she concentrated hard enough on
the man in front of her the more she found herself knowing about
him.

Suddenly she was drawn into a whirlwind of
thoughts and memories, twisting about her in a violent storm of a
lifetime of experiences thrust upon her at once. She hastily yanked
her mind-self from touching her owner's being and fought hard to
control the wave of nausea that threatened to overcome her from the
vileness of being so close to such a creature. Even in her
carefully controlled state she felt her lip twitch and she licked
it to cover the movement.

Her owner didn't seem to have noticed the
intrusion, yet another piece of evidence showing his ineptitude.
She fought down a shudder and set to work sorting through the
barrage of information that she had just obtained from her brief
contact. Most of it was an incoherent jumble that she could make no
sense of, but there were other tidbits that had her aching to know
more. But she would never, ever touch such a filthy mind again if
she could help it and she resigned herself to the half-information.
The more she sorted it all out, the more inflamed she became. She
had to resort to clenching and unclenching her fists to keep from
attacking him.

From her stolen memories she had been able to
gather that her owner was part of some sort of secret organization
that felt as though they were the guardians of mankind and
therefore it was their duty to produce a perfect human by
controlled breeding of a seeded stock that had been created by the
Dark King. However, Katya apparently was part of a group of these
marked which was being tested upon to experiment methods of control
via the collar that she wore. The collar itself, as she had known,
had not been made by her owner, but entrusted to him to use and
report back on its effectiveness. It was designed to increase her
already heightened senses and overall super-humanness, while
dulling her mind to certain specific pathways such as escape.

There were many clues to what was going on
and Katya could remember starting down a particular thought train
only to find herself distracted. Now that she knew the reason for
it she hated him, and them, even more for the intrusion into her
mind. Her enslavement was even worse than she had imagined; it had
penetrated into her very psyche.

She could feel her face growing hot and hoped
that he would not realize how angry she was. As much as she would
dearly love to attack him now, the time was not right, but still
she had to fight hard to contain the urge. She would need to bide
her time until such a moment when her escape would be
paramount.

He finished his ill-thought-out plan and
headed back into the manor to continue his supervision of the house
servants in cleaning up after the quake. Katya allowed her eyes to
shrink to the merest of slits and she sent daggers with her eyes
into his withdrawing back.

She also knew from her stolen memories that
he was not authorized to use her in the particular manner that he
was and sending her on his own little errands; a piece of
information that could prove very useful given the extremist nature
of his peers, especially with the newest identity of her target.
Her bonds were gone, but now she would lie in wait for the perfect
opportunity, and when it came...she smiled.

*

King Nathair listened silently to the list of
damages that the country had suffered during the earthquake, and
inwardly nursed his own wounds that the powerful wave of
simultaneous power had caused. The earthquake had apparently been
the result of the magical barrier between Gelendan and Treymayne
disappearing. His mages had explained it like a dam being torn
down, suddenly all the power that had been trapped inside it was
released back into the watershed of the world in a huge rush of
power, causing the power wave and the physical effects as well.

The border was tantalizingly gone, but now he
had the wake of devastation caused by the quakes to deal with
before he could act upon it.

“Also, in the town of Cartham they report
that the quake unearthed a ruin that was previously unknown to
exist. We currently have no resources to explore this, but in the
future I'm sure that the scholars will be drooling over the
prospect of finding more clues into the past.”

Nathair looked up at the man at this comment.
A new ruin held the promise of new information. He tapped his
finger in excitement, formulating a plan to organize the heads of
the guilds to rebuild the city while he took a little trip
himself.

Once the man was finished reciting the
damages, Nathair gave his orders, entrusting much of the details to
the council, and more importantly the heads of each of the guilds.
I wouldn't want the city to suffer if anything unfortunate
happened to any of the council members
.

It would keep the remaining council members
busy and out of his way while he explored this new avenue.
Who
knows what treasures of knowledge there may be previously lost in
the ruin. There is no time to waste, I don't want someone else to
get to it before I do
.

He hurried back to his suite after dismissing
the meeting and made his way down into the secret passage.

He had gathered several of the stones of
power in a circle and prepared to make the journey when the sound
of a moan gave him pause. He stole a glance at his masterpiece, and
saw in delight that the surge of power must have caused a jolt in
her process. She had jumped ahead in progress, apparently enough so
that she was regaining consciousness. He felt a touch of annoyance
that she should awake just as he had important business elsewhere,
but nevertheless chose to spare a moment to witness her waking.