“No…” Delia said. “I went down below. Lured falsely. By a captain of the Oldenbrook guard-”
A new voice cut her off. “Sten?” Liannora staggered forward, speaking for the first time in a long while. Her voice sounded half-crazed. “Where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
Delia seemed to finally note the Oldenbrook’s Hand, dressed in her snowy best. Kathryn noted the flash of fire in Delia’s eyes.
Liannora did not. She came up to Delia, reaching out a hand.
Delia shoved off the table to face her. Kathryn knew something was amiss. Especially when the calm, levelheaded Delia balled up a fist.
“What happened to Sten?”
As answer, Delia swung from the hip and slammed her fist straight into the Hand’s face. Liannora’s head snapped back with a crack of bone. Her body followed, stumbling into one of the mapwork shelves. Her legs went out from under her, and she slumped to the ground, her nose crooked and seeping blood from both sides.
All eyes turned to Delia. Had she been ilked, possessed by some madness?
Delia swiped a loose strand of her hair into place. A bit of color had returned to her cheeks from the effort. Still, she almost fell as she faced them, catching herself with a hand on the table.
“Liannora sent one of her guards to break my neck,” Delia said. “Came near to doing it, if it hadn’t been for Master Orquell.”
The name roused Hesharian. “Did you say Master Orquell?”
Delia ignored him. “But Orquell is not what he appears to be. He is rub-aki.”
“What?” Hesharian yelped. A palm pressed his sweated brow. “Oh, sweet aether, how I treated him-an acolyte of the rub-aki.” He groaned in distress, as if the slight were even more dire than the fall of Tashijan.
Kathryn turned her back on him. “Tell us what happened.”
She did in fast words, concluding with a small bit of hope. “And he burnt Mirra. I don’t know how badly. But hopefully enough to weaken her, perhaps make her act rashly.”
Argent looked upon his daughter with a glint of pride. “Let’s hope rashly serves us better than the cold calculation of that witch.” A thin grin rose to his lips. “Still, to know she was burnt, that does give us hope. What can be harmed…”
“…can be killed,” Delia finished with a sober nod.
At that moment, Kathryn recognized that the family resemblance went beyond the shape of eye and cleft of chin. Perhaps Argent saw that, too. He had stepped to his daughter’s side.
“I’ll get one of the healers to see to your head.”
“I’ll mend,” she said sourly, waving his worry away.
Gerrod stepped to her other side. “Orquell-he’s headed down into the cellars?”
Delia nodded.
“Why? Where?”
“Down to Mirra’s lair. That’s all he said.”
Though Gerrod’s expression remained hidden, Kathryn recognized the worry in the set of his shoulder. “What is it?” she asked him.
“I can guess what he will attempt,” Gerrod mumbled.
“And?” Argent asked.
Gerrod turned to the warden. “The danger to-”
His words were cut off by a blaring blast of a horn, so loud it finally quieted the bullhound above. A battle horn. But its resound echoed not from the picket line above.
“The call comes from below,” Gerrod said.
Delia nodded. “The witch is rising up.”
“Stay close.”
Orquell led the way down the narrow staircase. He held a torch that flickered with a strange crimson flame. He had dipped the end of his oiled brand into a pile of powder that he spent a long fraction of a bell mixing on the top step. The resulting fire cast no smoke but still somehow shed an odor that reminded Laurelle of freshly hewn hay and something sweet.
She followed with a lamp, as did Kytt. He kept to their rear, glancing often over a shoulder. They had traveled far below. Laurelle could feel the press of rock above her. The steps here were small, barely cut into stone. It had been some time since they’d even seen a cross-passage.
Laurelle wondered if they should have heeded the guards who had warned them against entering. In truth, they had been refused entry. Upon the warden’s orders. But Orquell had whispered something in each of their ears. Whatever was said widened their eyes. Their gazes flicked to the crimson mark on his forehead. Some portent, some secret, some threat-she never found out, but they quickly winched the gate up far enough for them to crawl under. Once past, the guards just as quickly closed it.
Plainly they weren’t convinced that the witch had already escaped.
Laurelle was similarly worried. “What if she comes back, to nurse her burns? Or what if she senses we’re down here?”
“Then we’ll most likely die,” Orquell answered without a measure of humor. It was stated simply and certainly. “So we’d best be quick.”
As he said this, his torch, held before him at arm’s length, flared brightly. Laurelle could have sworn she heard a small scream, but maybe that was her own inner self. A sudden waft of corruption passed over them, as if they trod upon a corpse bloated in the sun.
“Awful,” said Orquell. But it wasn’t the smell that upset him. “A Serpentknot Ward. If we’d blundered into that, we’d be dropping dead on our faces.”
He continued down the stairs, thrusting his torch out farther.
Around they went, another two wards flared and burnt under his torch. The last flared high enough to dance flames along the stone roof. Laurelle noted that the ceiling was streaked with wide bands of rock that bore a glassy sheen.
“Flowstone,” Orquell said, noting her reaching toward one. “It forms when molten stone is exposed to raw Gloom. Such veins can be found in deep places under the ground, but rarely are they discovered by man. All this will have to be purified if we survive.”
“Purified?” Laurelle asked. “How?”
Orquell leaned his torch near a glassy vein. The fire seared the rock. It smoked, again raising a smell of corruption. When he lifted the torch away, the spot was scarred white. “It’s possible to burn the Gloom out of the rock with special alchemical fires.”
They continued past the ward and entered a chamber that seemed to be formed as a bubble in a giant vein of flowstone.
Kytt gaped. “You’ll need much fire to cleanse this,” he mumbled, turning in a slow circle.
Orquell looked ill, too. “There must have been some storm of Gloom long ago to churn up this much flowstone. What we are seeing is a splash of the naether into this world, possibly cast when the gods first fell here after the Sundering.”
Laurelle circled the room’s only structure. It rose from floor to ceiling, as if the flowstone above had melted and sagged, dripping down into this tortured and twisted column. As Orquell’s light played across it, she was sure she saw faces in the stone, screaming, melted faces. Then the torch would shift and the visages would vanish.
“Her throne,” Orquell said, stopping before a niche just large enough for someone to sit within. “To commune with those that swim the naether.”
Off to the side, Kytt began to lower to a lip of flowstone against one wall. Without turning from the throne, Orquell waved him away with his free hand.
“Not there, my young tracker,” the master said. “That’s a black altar. Can you not smell the blood?”
Kytt scrambled back, stumbling a bit in his haste. “I don’t scent anything beyond those burnt wards.”
Orquell nodded. “Maybe it’s not so much a scent in the air. It’s more like walking across a field where an ancient battle was once waged. The grass may be green, but if you stand very still, you can still sense the blood, an echo of pain.”
Kytt glanced to Laurelle. They moved closer together, away from the walls, but not too close to the throne. Laurelle fought an urge to run from the room.
