Chapter 12 - The Key Was Always There

Mistress Ashara taught me Shadow Dance in a cold alley behind the Crooked Nail. I’d failed for days because my head was too full of thoughts. That changed one night when, alone and stripped to nothing because she had kicked me out, I’d finally let go and the shadows had taken me in.

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 am not a lapdog,” the Tome said from against the wall. “I am also not going anywhere under my own power at present, so the instruction is both insulting and unnecessary.”

I turned to Kaniz. She was frowning and chewing her lip.

“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 cracked. “Come back.”

I turned for the corridor, then looked back over my shoulder. She was standing next to the grimoire with her arms wrapped around herself, and for the first time all night she looked like what she was. A girl in a collar, watching the only good thing that had happened to her walk away.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

Closing my eyes, I let go.

The shadows took me and everything got quiet. The girl watching me leave, the Tome judging my every move, all of it dropped away. I had the dark and a blade, and a long climb ahead. It was the first breathing room I’d had since Malkor hit the pit.

Here’s the thing about Shadow Dance. The bond had been throbbing in my chest since the ritual went sideways, warm and wrong and constant, and the second I dissolved into shadow 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 didn’t want anything from me.

I thought about her standing down there, waiting. She was hot, and she’d kissed me like she meant it. I was coming back because I wasn’t blind and I wasn’t done thinking about any of it.

I made myself stop thinking about her tits. One thing at a time.

The first corridor was the ramp we’d come down. I moved up it silent and weightless. The shadows were thick here, with no torches, and the stone sweated moisture that ran down the walls in thin streaks. The smell arrived before the light: blood and rot, mixed with that sweet chemical stink I’d learned meant Malkor had been working. Old blood had dried brown-crimson on the walls. Symbols carved into the stone pulsed with a faint greenish glow that made my skin crawl even in Shadow Dance, 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 let any of it sink in. Now I was gliding through it slow and silent, with nowhere to look but at it.

The first body: a man split down the middle. His ribcage was pulled open wide, with gears and tubes where his organs had been. The tubes still pulsed with a faint glow. He’d had a name once, and maybe somebody who’d stopped waiting for him, and now he was a machine built into a wall.

The second: skull cracked open, glass dome replacing the top. Brain tissue floated in clear liquid, and I tried not to look and looked anyway. Every so often, sparks.

The third: stretched impossibly tall, extra bones grafted on, copper needles piercing papery skin at regular intervals. Chains ran from the needles into the stone. He looked like he’d been screaming when it happened. His mouth was still open.

I passed all three. The blade was warm in my grip. A ritual blade, meant for cutting palms and drawing circles. I was about to cut throats with it.

The first guard was at the top of the ramp.

He was leaning against the wall with a torch guttering beside him, bored out of his skull. He’d probably been posted there for hours, nothing had happened, and nothing was going to, because the warlock’s fortress got dull when nobody was screaming.

I came out of the shadow behind him.

The blade went across his throat and he made a sound that was mostly air. He ended up on the floor, roughly my size. That was the first useful thing anyone in this fortress had done for me.

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 behind. Everything else I took.

I want to tell you something about wearing clothes after being naked for hours. 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. I nearly made a sound about the boots that would have compromised the entire operation.

Shadow Dance was harder with clothes and boots on, but the dark knew me by now and 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 was still there, and so was the scaled hand frozen mid-grasp, and the thing that looked like a baby with tiny horns and a forked tongue. They were all still floating where I’d left them.

I kept moving.

The east corridor was wider, better lit. Torches burned every twenty feet with patches of usable shadow between them. Kaniz had said the cells were two levels up, off the main corridor going east.

The second guard was sitting in a chair with his feet up and a cup of something in his hand. He heard me, or thought he did, because he turned his head toward the shadow I was in and squinted.

“Kev?”

I let him finish the word, and by the time he’d closed his mouth 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. It landed on his boot and rolled to the wall. I watched it come to rest.

Kev was probably the guard from the top of the ramp. I thought about that for a second. Two men who knew each other’s names, posted in a corridor, 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 wiped the blade on his tunic and kept going.

Three men were dead, counting Malkor. I was going to feel sick about that later. Right now I felt clean and lighter. 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 easy.

The third guard was the problem.

He stood at the far end of the east corridor, directly in front of a heavy wooden door with iron bands across it. He was bigger than the first two, and awake and alert. He held a short sword with a notched edge, and I figured he’d been told to stand there and was taking it seriously.

The corridor was straight, the torchlight was even, and no shadow was deep enough to hide what I needed to do. So I stepped out of Shadow Dance and walked toward him in a dead guard’s clothes, blood-sticky blade behind my thigh.

He saw me.

“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 breathed hard with blood on my hand and waited for the echo to die.

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.

The key hung there in plain sight, because nobody got this far. The women inside couldn’t reach it and the guards outside never thought twice about it. I’d bet that in the history of Blackrock Hold, no prisoner 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. It was sweat, blood, rot, unwashed bodies, and the stale stink of a room that had been shut up for weeks. Dim light fell from a tiny barred window near the ceiling onto shapes along the walls. They were women, huddled against each other in filthy garments torn and stained. Bruises and dried blood covered every bit of skin I could see. Some flinched when the door opened. Some didn’t move at all, and my stomach turned over.

I counted seventeen on their feet or close to it.

The two against the back wall were not.

The blonde girl was near the front. I recognized her from before, when they’d thrown me in here. Her hair was tangled, her face tear-streaked, and the dress that had been fine by village standards hung in rags. Bruises circled her wrists. She stared at me and didn’t blink.

“Oakhaven?” I asked.

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. One was a dark-haired woman curled on her side, her hand still reaching toward the girl beside her. The girl was stiff. They’d been dead for a while.

I stood over them longer than I should have.

Bending, I pulled a blanket from the floor and covered them both and turned back to the living. “Stay close. 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, a slave girl, a sentient grimoire with opinions about my performance, three dead guards, and two dead women I couldn’t save, 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 two dead guards. Some of them looked at the bodies. Most didn’t. The older woman stepped over the one at the cell door without breaking stride, and I decided right then that I liked her.

We went down, past the laboratory door, which I closed because nobody needed to see those jars. We went through the blood-painted corridor with the corpse machinery, which I couldn’t close or hide and couldn’t do a single thing about. Behind me a girl started crying, 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. She was sitting on the floor beside the Tome, arms around her knees. When I came around the corner into the lamplight she was on her feet before I’d taken three steps, and I wasn’t ready for her face. Her eyes were red and wet, and her chin was shaking.

She crossed the distance in four steps, dropped to one knee, and pressed her forehead to my thigh. It was 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, and her next words went into the dead guard’s trousers, quieter: “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, the way you pat down something you thought you’d lost. She found my hands and held them. She lifted them and kissed my knuckles, quick and warm, the same way she’d done with the brooch.

“How many?” she asked.

“Three.”

“Good.” 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, even as her hands slid under the hem of the tunic, palms flat on my stomach, and she closed her eyes for a second.

“We’re in the middle of an evacuation,” I said.

“I know, master.” She didn’t move her hands, and my dick took an interest I did not have time for.

“There are seventeen women standing behind me.”

“I know.” She opened her eyes. She smiled, the real one, wide and completely unhinged. “I just needed to check.”

She pulled her hands back and stepped to the side, half a step behind me and ready to move.

This girl was going to be a situation. The bond was warm in my chest and she was warm against it. She’d dropped to one knee the moment I appeared, kissed my bloody knuckles, slipped her hands under my shirt in front of all of them, and called me master twice in thirty seconds. She was hot and 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, just not tonight, and 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 right away. “Seventeen walked out and two are dead in the cell. That’s 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. It was still heavy and 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.”