“The passages, then.”
“It will be a risk,” Alis said. “Prince Robert is alone among men in that he knows of the passages and can remember them. But—”
“But he thinks you are dead,” Erren said. “I understand. It is a weapon you can use only once, really.”
“Exactly,” Alis replied.
“Have a care,” Erren said. “There are things in the dungeons of Eslen that should have died a very long time ago. Do not think them impotent.”
“I will help her, Erren,” Alis said.
“You will,” Erren agreed.
“I cannot replace you, I know. But I will do my best.”
“My best wasn’t good enough. Be better.”
A chill passed through Alis, and the voice was gone.
Her head was suddenly filled with the stench of putrefying flesh, and as her senses returned, she could feel ribs digging into her back. The hand on her cheek was still there. She touched it; it was wet and slimy and mostly bone.
Robert had lied to Muriele. He’d put her in the Dare crypt, all right, but not in William’s tomb; she was in the same sarcophagus as Erren.
On top of her. His little joke or a coincidence?
Maybe his mistake.
She lay there a long moment, shivering, garnering her strength, and then pushed at the stone above her. It was heavy, too heavy, but she searched deep, found more resolve, and shoved enough to make it budge a bit. She rested, then pushed it again. This time a sliver appeared in the darkness.
She relaxed, letting fresh air flow in to strengthen her. Bracing hands and feet, she shoved with all the might her slight frame would allow.
The lid scraped another fingersbreadth open.
She heard a distant bell and realized it was ringing the noon hour. The world of the quick, of sunlight and sweet air, was suddenly real to her again. She redoubled her efforts, but she was very, very weak.
It was six bells later—Vespers—before she managed to unseat the lid and crawl off the rotting body of her predecessor.
A little light was coming through from the atrium, but Alis did not look back at her host, nor did she at present have the energy to replace the lid. She could only hope that no one had reason to come here before she had managed to regain it or find help.
Feeling as frail and light as a broomstraw, Alis Berrye made her way out of the crypt into Eslen-of-Shadows, the dark sister to the living city on the hill high above it. Looking up at Eslen’s spire and walls, for a moment she felt more daunted and alone than she ever had before. The task she had chosen—that she had promised a ghost she would carry outseemed altogether beyond her.
Then, with a wry laugh, she remembered that not only had she survived one of the deadliest toxins in the world, but she had vanished from beneath the very eye of the usurper Robert Dare. Thinking himself careful, he had made himself careless.
She would make that mistake into a dagger with which she would strike at his heart and loose whatever strange blood rotted in it.
Part II
The Venom in the Roots
1
Among Them
Stephen wasn’t sure how long he fought against the slinders, but he knew he had no strength left in him. His muscles were limp bands wracked by occasional painful spasms. Even his bones seemed to ache.
Oddly, after he stopped struggling, the hands gripping him became strangely gentle, as if he were like the stray cat he once had removed from his fathers solar. When the cat struggled, it had to be held tightly, even a bit roughly, but once it calmed down, he could afford to loosen his hold, stroke it, let it know that he’d never intended it any harm.
“They haven’t eaten us,” he heard a voice observe.
It was only then that he realized that one of the hands clutching him belonged to Ehawk. He remembered the Watau boy’s face in the first moments of confusion, when he’d been dragged roughly across the forest floor. Now he was being carried faceup, cradled in interlocked arms and held at the wrists by eight of the slinders. Ehawk was being carried similarly, but his right hand had latched firmly onto Stephen’s.
“No, they haven’t,” Stephen agreed. He raised his voice. “Can’t any of you speak?”
None of his bearers answered.
“Maybe they’re going to cook us first,” Ehawk said.
“Maybe. If so, they’ve changed their habits since Aspar saw them last. He said they ate their prey alive and raw.”
“Yah. That’s what I saw when they killed Sir Oneu. This bunch, they’re different. This is all different.”
“Did you see what happened to Aspar and the rest?” Stephen asked.
“I think all the slinders attacking the tree came with us,” Ehawk said. “They didn’t keep after the others.”
“But why would they only want the two of us?” Stephen wondered.
“They didn’t,” Ehawk said. “They only wanted you. It was only after I grabbed on to you that they started carrying me along, as well.”
Then why would they want me? Stephen wondered. What could the Briar King want with me?
He tried to turn more toward Ehawk, but their conversation seemed to have upset the slinders, and one of them struck Ehawk’s wrist so hard that the boy gasped and let go. They began carrying the lad away from Stephen.
“Ehawk!” Stephen shouted, trying to summon the energy to fight again. “You leave him alone, you hear me? Or by the saints… Ehawk!”
But fighting just made his bearers tighten their grip again, and Ehawk didn’t answer. Eventually Stephen’s voice grew hoarse, and he sank glumly into his own thoughts.
He’d made many odd journeys in the past year, and though this wasn’t the strangest of them, it certainly earned a place in his Observations Quaint & Curious.
He’d never traveled anywhere looking mostly up, for instance. Without the occasional glance at the ground, lacking the feel of his feet against it or the mass of a horse between his thighs, he felt disconnected, like a zephyr wafting along. The passing branches and dark gray sky were his landscape, and when it began to snow, the entire universe constricted to a tunnel of gyring flakes. Then he was no longer wind but white smoke drifting through the wold.
Finally, when night took all sight from him, he felt like a wave borne along by the deep. He dozed, possibly, and when his perception sharpened again, there was a hollowness to the clatter of their passage, as if the sea that swept him along had poured down a crevice and become an underground river.
A faintly orange sky appeared. At first he thought it was already sunrise, but then he realized the clouds weren’t clouds at all but a ceiling of irregular stone, and the light born of a huge fire was punching great fists of flame toward the cavern roof. The cave itself was large enough that the light faded before striking any limits except the immediate roof and floor.
Crowded about the great hollow were countless slinders, stretched asleep or sitting awake, walking or standing, staring seemingly into nothing. So thick were their numbers that it hardly seemed as if there was a floor at all. Besides the omnipresent astringent smoke, the air was filthy with the stink of ammonia, the sour musk of sweat, and the sweet pungent rot of human feces. He’d believed the sewers of Ralegh stank as much of human waste as any place could, but he was here proved wrong. The damp, clammy air seemed to coat his skin with the stench so thoroughly, he reckoned it would take days of bathing to feel clean again.