Chapter 12: Chapter 12 - The Key Was Always There
Chapter 12 - The Key Was Always There
Mistress Ashara taught me Shadow Walk in a cold alley behind the Crooked Nail. I'd failed for days because my head was too full. Too many thoughts, too much noise, too much of me in the way. Then one night, alone, stripped to nothing because she had kicked me out, I'd finally let go and the shadows had taken me in like I'd always belonged there.
The trick was letting go. You stopped trying. You stopped being a person with a name and a body and opinions about girls and let the darkness do the work. It liked you better when you brought less.
I was naked in an evil fortress with a sacrificial blade. I had never brought less in my life.
I set the Tome against the wall. The eye looked up at me, half-lidded, barely tracking.
"Stay with her," I said. "I'll be back."
"I am not a lapdog," the Tome said. "I am also not going anywhere under my own power at present, so the instruction is both insulting and unnecessary."
I turned to Kaniz. Something in her expression had shifted. She looked tight, worried in a way I hadn't seen yet.
"You're leaving," she said.
"I'm clearing the way. You'll slow me down."
"I know the layout."
"You told me the layout. Now wait."
"Master." Her voice caught on something. "Come back."
I looked over my shoulder. She was standing next to the grimoire with her arms wrapped around it, and for the first time all night she looked like what she was. A girl in a collar in an evil fortress, watching the only good thing that had happened to her walk away.
"I'll be back," I said.
Then I let go.
The shadows took me and everything got quiet. The bond in my chest went from a warm constant pull to something I could ignore if I tried. The girl watching me leave, the Tome judging my every move, all of it dropped away. Just me and the dark and a blade and corridors to climb. First breathing room I'd had since Malkor hit the pit.
Here's the thing about Shadow Walk. The bond had been sitting in my chest like a second heartbeat since the ritual went sideways, warm and wrong and constant, and the second I dissolved into shadow it went quiet. It muted, like I'd walked into another room and shut the door. The relief was bigger than I wanted to admit. I'd spent the last half hour getting looked at, touched, claimed, knelt to, and called master by a girl who was clingy and insane and had the best tits I'd ever seen. None of that was simple. The dark was simple. The dark didn't want anything from me.
I thought about her standing down there with her arms wrapped around the Tome, waiting. She was hot and crazy and she'd kissed me like she meant it, and I was coming back because I wasn't blind and I wasn't done thinking about any of it. But right now I could breathe without someone staring at me like I'd solved all her problems just by existing.
I pushed the thought away. One thing at a time.
The first corridor was the ramp we'd come down. I moved up it silent and weightless and the shadows were thick here, no torches, the stone sweating moisture that ran in slow fingers down the walls. The smell arrived before the light. Blood and rot and that sweet chemical stink I'd learned was Malkor's particular recipe of wrong. Old blood on the walls, dried brown-crimson like rust on old weapons. Symbols carved into the stone pulsing with a faint greenish glow that made my skin crawl even in Shadow Walk, where nothing was supposed to reach me.
The corpse machinery was worse the second time.
On the way in, I'd been running on adrenaline and fear, too wired to properly register what I was passing. Now I was gliding through it slow and silent and I had nowhere to look but at it.
The first body: a man split down the middle. Ribcage pulled open like double doors, gears and tubes where his organs had been. The tubes still pulsed with something faintly luminous. He'd been someone. He'd had a name and a life and maybe someone who'd stopped waiting for him, and now he was a machine built into a wall in a corridor that smelled like death.
The second: skull cracked open, glass dome replacing the top. Brain tissue floating in clear liquid. Every so often, sparks.
The third: stretched impossibly tall, extra bones grafted on, copper needles piercing papery skin at regular intervals. Chains running from the needles into the stone like he was plugged into the wall. He looked like he'd been screaming when it happened. His mouth was still open.
I moved past all three. The blade was warm in my grip. A ritual blade, meant for cutting palms and drawing circles. I was about to repurpose it.
The first guard was at the top of the ramp.
Leaning against the wall, torch guttering beside him, the look of a man who'd been posted here for hours and nothing had happened and nothing was going to happen and the warlock's fortress was boring when nobody was screaming.
I came out of the shadow behind him.
I moved quick. The blade went across his throat and he made a sound that was mostly air and then he was on the floor and I was standing over him, and he was roughly my size. First useful thing anyone in this fortress had done for me all night.
I stripped him fast. Rough wool tunic, boiled leather vest, trousers, belt, boots. The boots were half a size too big. I could work with that. He had a short club on his belt that I left on the floor. Everything else I took.
I want to tell you something about wearing clothes after being naked for six hours in an evil fortress. It was the second-best feeling I'd had all night. The best had been in a storeroom with a girl who'd subsequently drugged me, so the bar was admittedly unusual. The boots were warm and the leather vest had actual pockets and I nearly made a sound about the boots that would have compromised the entire operation.
Shadow Walk was harder with clothes. It was harder with boots on. But the dark knew me by now and it made allowances.
The laboratory was on the next level. I smelled it before I reached it: toxic green vapors, the chemical reek of things that shouldn't be mixed, and underneath it the sweet-sick smell of things preserved in jars that should have been buried. I passed the open doorway and caught a glimpse of the shelves. The three-eyed rat. The scaled hand frozen mid-grasp. The thing that looked like a baby with tiny horns and a forked tongue. Still there. Still floating. Still watching with whatever was left of them.
I kept moving.
The east corridor was wider, better lit. Torches every twenty feet with patches of usable shadow between them. Two levels up, Kaniz had said. Past the guards' quarters.
The second guard was sitting in a chair with his feet up and a cup of something in his hand. He heard something, or thought he did, because he turned his head toward the shadow I was in and squinted.
"Kev?"
I let him finish the word. Then I was behind the chair and the blade went in at the base of his skull and he dropped the cup and that was it. The cup didn't break. Landed on his boot and rolled to the wall. I watched it come to rest.
Kev was probably the first guard. I had a moment of thinking about that. Two men who knew each other's names, posted in a corridor in an evil fortress, and I'd killed both of them inside of ten minutes. They'd staffed this place. They'd watched women get dragged to Malkor's chamber and listened to the sounds that came out of it and gone back to their posts and had their cup of whatever that was. I was not conflicted about this. I wiped the blade on his tunic and kept going.
Three men dead. I was going to feel something about that later. Right now I felt clean. I felt lighter. The way you feel after you've been holding your breath for a long time and someone tells you to stop. Ashara would have called it operational clarity. I called it not having to think about whether they deserved it, because they did, and that made the blade simple.
The third guard was the problem.
Far end of the east corridor, directly in front of a heavy wooden door with iron bands across it. Bigger than the first two. Awake. Alert. Short sword with a notched edge, and he stood with the posture of a man who'd been told to stand there and was taking it seriously.
The corridor was straight and the torchlight was even and there were no shadows deep enough to hide what I needed to do. So I stepped out of Shadow Walk and walked toward him in a dead guard's clothes, blood-sticky blade behind my thigh.
He saw me and squinted.
"The fuck are you doing down here?"
"Shift change," I said.
"Nobody told me about a shift change."
"Nobody tells you anything." I closed the distance in two steps and put the blade through his throat before the short sword came around.
This one was heavier going down. The sword hit the stone floor with a clang that echoed both directions, and I stood there breathing hard with blood on my hand and waited for the echo to die.
I waited. The corridor stayed empty.
The cell door had a lock. Beside the lock, on an iron hook driven into the stone, hung a key.
I stared at it.
Just hanging there on a hook beside the door, in plain sight. Because nobody got this far. Because the women inside couldn't reach it and the guards outside had no reason to touch it and no prisoner in the history of Blackrock Hold had survived the Pit, the corridors, the corpse machinery, and the locked door to stand where I was standing.
The key was always there.
I took it off the hook and put it in the lock and turned it.
The door swung inward. The smell hit first. Sweat and blood and rot and unwashed bodies and the particular smell of people who have been locked in a room for a long time and stopped expecting the door to open. Dim light from a tiny barred window near the ceiling. Shapes along the walls. Women, mostly, huddled against each other, filthy garments torn and stained. Bruises and dried blood on every bit of skin I could see. Some flinched when the door opened. Some didn't move at all.
I counted. Seventeen on their feet or close to it.
Two against the back wall who were not.
The blonde girl was near the front. I recognized her from before, when they'd thrown me in here. Tangled hair, tear-streaked, the dress that had been fine by village standards hanging in rags. Bruises circling her wrists. She looked at me with eyes that didn't quite believe what they were seeing.
"Oakhaven?" I said.
She nodded. Her mouth moved, but the words wouldn't come.
"I'm getting you out. All of you. Right now."
The older woman with the scabbed gash across her forehead was the first to stand. She looked at me, at the dead guard's clothes, at the blood on my hands and the blade at my belt, and she said: "How many of them are left?"
"Less than there were."
She nodded like that was enough and started pulling women to their feet.
I went to the two against the back wall. A dark-haired woman curled on her side, hand still reaching toward the girl beside her. The girl beside her was stiff. They'd been dead for a while. The dark-haired one had died reaching for someone already gone, and nobody in this room had been able to do anything but sit there and watch it happen.
I stood over them longer than I should have.
Then I pulled a blanket from the floor and covered them both and turned back to the living.
"Stay close," I said. "Stay quiet. We're going down before we go up."
Marcus Blackthorn had sent me here to stop a warlock and rescue kidnapped girls. It was supposed to be a simple contract. The grimoire was a bonus, something Blackthorn had dangled and Ashara had demanded I bring back. The pay was not great. His words, not mine. For a tentacle pit and a slave girl and a sentient grimoire with opinions about my performance and three dead guards and two dead women I couldn't save and an egg I couldn't explain, the pay was not great. I was going to have a conversation with that man when I got back.
I led seventeen women through the east corridor past three dead guards. Some of them looked at the bodies. Most didn't. The older woman stepped over the third one without breaking stride.
We went down. Past the laboratory door, which I closed because nobody needed to see those jars. Through the blood-painted corridor with the corpse machinery, which I could not close or hide or do a single thing about, and behind me a girl made a small, broken sound and I kept walking because stopping wouldn't help.
The ramp to the Tome's level felt like going backward. Every step away from the exit was a step I'd have to climb again.
Kaniz was exactly where I'd left her. Sitting on the floor beside the Tome, arms around her knees. When I came around the corner into the torchlight she was on her feet before I'd taken three steps, and her face did something I wasn't ready for. Relief and something rawer underneath it, the face of someone who'd been running the numbers on whether I was coming back and the math hadn't been good.
She crossed the distance in four steps, dropped to her knees, and pressed her forehead to my thigh. The same thing she'd done in the Tome chamber. Her hands found my hips and gripped like I was the only solid thing in the building.
"Master," she said. Then, quieter, into the dead guard's trousers: "You came back."
"I told you I would. Get up."
She got up. She didn't let go. Her hands moved from my hips to my chest to my face, checking, cataloging, the way you pat down something you thought you'd lost. She found the blood on my hands. Held them. Looked at it. Then pressed her lips to my knuckles, quick and warm, the same way she'd done with the brooch.
"Three?" she said.
"Three."
"Good." She didn't hesitate. Didn't flinch. The girl who'd drugged me and strapped me to a board looked at my bloody hands and said good like I'd brought her flowers.
"You smell different," she said.
"I'm wearing clothes."
"I noticed." She sounded genuinely aggrieved about it. Then her hands found the hem of the tunic and slipped under it, palms flat on my stomach, and she closed her eyes for a second like she was resetting something.
"We're in the middle of an evacuation," I said.
"I know, master." She didn't move her hands.
"There are seventeen women standing behind me."
"I know." She opened her eyes. Smiled. The real one, wide and bright and completely unhinged. "I just needed to check."
She pulled her hands back and stepped to the side. Half a step behind. Ready to move.
This girl was going to be a situation. The bond was warm in my chest and she was warm against it and she'd been waiting in the dark on the floor with her arms around her knees and she'd dropped to her knees the second I appeared and kissed my bloody knuckles and slipped her hands under my shirt in front of seventeen people and called me master twice in thirty seconds. She was hot and she was clingy and she was absolutely, certifiably insane, and she'd had sex with me exactly once and was already behaving like I'd hung the moon. I was going to need to figure her out. Not tonight. But soon. Definitely before we got to Ashbourne, because I lived in a single room at the Crooked Nail and it barely fit me.
The Tome, from the floor, said: "I counted twenty through the door when they locked it."
I didn't answer that.
"Two in the cell," I said. "One short."
The Tome's eye moved to mine. It said nothing more. That was worse than whatever it would have said.
I picked it up. Still heavy, still cold. The eye looked up at me from under my arm, half-closed and trusting, and I didn't know what to do with that so I carried it.
"One stop," I said. "Then we're out."