When the yarn ran out, she borrowed treasures from these forgotten bins. She tied them end to end and left them strewn along the floor behind her.
26
THE UNDERKEEP OPENS
O nce, on a day of great occasion, the king had tousled Stricia’s hair. He had dropped to one knee and smiled at her. No doubt his favor shone upon her because of something her father had accomplished. She didn’t remember the details; it was the honor that impressed her.
“Your father,” Cal-marcus had said, “is as fine a man as there is. No doubt his daughter is made of the same stuff. Serve the law, Stricia kai Ark-robin, and the law will serve you. The secrets of the palace could be yours someday.”
She was ten years old then, speechless in the attention of this giant. Laughing, her father had hoisted her up with his arm, the last time he would lift her like a child, and they had all remarked on her wide-eyed awe. As she had looked down from his shoulders, she had glimpsed her life’s true purpose.
But here, she was caught in the thrall of a darker revelation. She had served the law. It had served her, but only so far. Not far enough.
Silently, the invisible beast—that nameless Underkeep menace—rose from the ground and coiled about her. She felt its cold, unnatural presence. For a moment she was terrified. But then she felt something else. A strange and compelling strength. A tantalizing confidence.
She could pass unseen, plant the lie, and let it take root.
She took a deep breath and ran, surprised that she felt no fear. At the end of the corridor that opened onto an immeasurable chasm, across which she could see myriad paths, stairways, and bridges, she stood in plain view, and no one took notice. She was invisible to them. Whatever she had consented to receive was hiding her from guards who stood at every entrance and from workers who moved across bridges and scuttled like beetles down long, winding staircases.
Even the guard standing beside her failed to see her, although she jumped and shied away when she saw him. He was lost in some daydream, smoking a pipe that smelled of cinnamon.
She tiptoed past him and hurried down a rugged stair, taking care not to step too close to the edge or to look down into the whispering void. She passed three entryways, felt drawn into the fourth, and ran down a long tunnel lit by golden lanterns, her footsteps muffled by the soft grass spread across the floor.
It was coming back to her now, a memory of her father giving her a tour. “And here,” he had said, “is where we keep our family’s history, the things we have surrendered for the glory of the palace.”
Beside one of the sparking lanterns, a den was carved into the clay. Within it, piles of garments—capes, dresses, shawls, stockings. Her mother had commissioned an entire wardrobe for her future as a princess. There were older things, faded treasures. A man’s red tunics, rich burgundy and green capes, smart blue trousers. She could see these sleeping colors by the wavering light of the wall lantern, a glimmering sacrifice sealed away in the name of honor and obedience. She wanted to touch them all.
A gate, barred and locked, refused her, holding these things almost out of reach.
Almost.
She set the wedding gown down in the dry grass. She would not try it on. There was no time. But why not take one of those long, dark, elegant robes? Silken and slight, they had the allure of scandalous rumors, dark magnetism.
She shed the white gown she had worn into the palace and let it fall. Naked, she paused, pinching the flesh on her arms and wrists, puzzled by a strange deadness, as if she might shed her skin.
Shivering, she reached through the cage door and groped, grinding her teeth, her fingers almost stretching out of their joints. The metal cut into her shoulder. One fingernail hooked the edge of a nightgown; she carefully worked it into her grasp. When she had drawn it out, she wrapped it around her neck and breathed through it, soaking up tears she hadn’t known she was crying. Then she drew it over her head and let it fall weightless around her. The corridor seemed to darken as she was draped in its silky shadows. This pleased her, although she found it difficult to move. How would a woman walk with such a long, clinging dress trailing about her feet? It did not matter. This was what it felt like to be a queen.
Through her tears, she saw a shadow cross the corridor down an adjoining trail, momentarily eclipsing light from a distant lantern.
She froze. A soldier. Coming to light the torches or check for burglars. She would be found out. It was over.
But as her eyes discerned the shadow, she saw a small person in rags, oblivious to her, staggering through the illuminated crossing. The figure stopped and looked directly at her but did not see her. The sensation thrilled Stricia. Then the shape turned down another branch of the forking tunnels. Behind it trailed a rope made of knotted stretches of cloth.
A thief?
Stricia was drawn to the train of color. Even as the frail shadow passed from view, the winding line of garments shifted, rolled, and writhed along the floor. She picked up the wedding gown, pinched it to ensure Scharr ben Fray’s mask was still folded within it, and then followed.
The trail of bound cloth stretched out of sight in one direction and then fell over the edge of an opening in the floor. The wanderer had descended a ladder to the next level.
Fascinated, Stricia moved to the edge, stared down, felt the shudder of strength beyond her own—the strength of that dark wraith that had somehow fused with her anger and grief.
Like a flutterbird snatched by a hound, Merya shrieked, clutching at the hand that dragged her by the hair, kicking so defiantly that her feet dug through the damp to drier ground and scuffed dust into the torchlight.
Ark-robin ignored the shouts of protest from the other Gatherers, who had been on their way home from the day’s labor. He blinked as his captive flung dirt across his face. Then he calmly turned, released the woman, and clubbed her on the back of the head with a bonewood stick the size of his forearm.
Merya slumped to the dirt and went still.
The captain looped the strap of his club back into his belt, then removed long leather strands from a pocket inside the folds of his dramatic blue cape. He lifted Merya from where she had fallen, pressed her forehead against the bark of the tree, and lashed her wrists together behind her back. Then he hauled Merya up by the back of her grassweave gown and showed her limp form to the glowering gallery of observers.
“This woman was named by one of your own as an accomplice in a planned desertion. That man, Radegan the Dog, now lies in the Underkeep after attempting to steal from King Cal-marcus’s treasure. Fortunately for the rest of you,” he shouted, his gaze sweeping across the Gatherers, “Radegan named no one else. Merya will serve time in the dungeon. But as she has a husband here, she shall eventually be returned to you. If he is a husband of any merit, I expect he will have his own punishment to deliver upon their reunion.”
Corvah was not present among the Gatherers here, but the worried glances they exchanged confirmed he would not be pleased.
The captain cleared his throat and threw Merya over his shoulder. “You have been sentenced to hard labor outside the protection of Abascar’s walls for a reason. To learn something. And until you learn it, you will not come back inside. Radegan did not learn.”
“You speak of him as though he’s a thing of the past,” came a disgruntled voice.
Ark-robin smiled, searching their faces. “Ahh. A good listener. Excellent. Then I have your attention.” His gaze connected with one whose broad shoulders were hunched forward as though he was poised for a charge. Haggard, the captain remembered—simpleminded, fond of drink, and a bully when his temper was kindled.
Ark-robin moved toward him, unblinking, until he could smell the faint trace of the evening’s indulgence on the man’s bristling mustache. “Now,” he continued, challenging that fiery stare, “any self-respecting creature, animal or man, will keep his mouth shut until my officers and I have hauled this wench into the dungeons.”
He turned and tosse
d Merya across the back of his silver-scaled vawn. The long black curtain of her hair hung down by a stirrup. The vawn raised its tubular snout from the mud, cast a baleful look back at its master, and then returned to snuffle at the soil for beetles. The worst is over, Ark-robin sighed, climbing back into his saddle. The evening can only get better from here.
Though there were three duty officers on vawnback monitoring the laborers, Ark-robin was glad of the eight soldiers he had brought, keenly aware of the agitated mood among the Gatherers. Since the riot, he had known the possibility of an uprising was too dangerous to ignore.
So when old, crooked Warney stalked forward like an angry crow, Ark-robin feigned indifference, but his hand hung loosely beside his sheath.
“Get back in line!” barked a nervous duty officer. “Old man, stand back!”
Ark-robin smiled and cautioned the officer to allow the confrontation. But all Warney managed to do was open his trembling, sticky lips, shake a gnarled fist, and glare from the one good eye inside his hood. “Radegan was a thief and liar. But why do you hold Auralia, who knew no better than to play like a child? Bring her back to live with those who have cared for her. We’re not plotting against anyone. So why spoil our spirits and answer our efforts with cruelty? Krawg’s sick as a rat and can hardly climb out of bed. If Auralia comes back, he’ll get well again. But the king must show us fairness, or…”
“Or what?” Ark-robin signaled with a turn of his hand. The soldier next to him closed his fingers around a club. If Warney’s next words were in any way vulgar, the old fool would pay.
Warney backed away. “I’m gonna climb up on the roof of my hut and call down great-grandfather’s most powerful curse! I’m gonna knock Abascar’s walls right down, I tell you!”
“And you can bet I’ll be sittin’ there beside him,” rasped a voice. It was Krawg, leaning heavily on a crutch, hobbling from the trees to stand by Warney’s side.
Ark-robin shook his head. “Very well. For your treasonous remarks, I hereby—”
A shower of leaves and then a broken branch fell from the boughs above. Ark-robin and the Gatherers jumped back, and the vawns clomped several steps away. A man fell from the sky, standing on a plank of wood suspended by two ropes. A duty officer in green concealment garb. He stepped down off the lift, straight and officious, and bowed to the captain.
“Signal from northwest,” he said without hesitation.
Ark-robin growled, shifting his attention from the Gatherers’ disturbance to the interruption. “What is it, Everin?” He had not grown used to the presence of Cal-raven’s highwatches, but they had been a useful invention. With watchmen on these platforms, simple news could be relayed across the forest with efficiency and clarity. “What is the news?”
“It’s Cal-raven, sir. He’s reporting from the trouble at the dig. His riders intercepted a company of beastmen that were on their way to the battle. Twenty, maybe thirty of the monsters. His riders are driving them away, and they’ve changed course. The beastmen are fleeing in this direction. The riders are going to steer them toward Abascar’s western wall, trusting you to set an ambush.”
“We will trap them against the wall.”
“Cal-raven calls for an alarm to draw all Gatherers back into their camps. These beastmen will probably try to pass right by Abascar. But I suspect they’re in too much of a hurry to stop and make any mischief. They’ll head for their dens to the south.”
“Captain, we’ve done what we came to do.” Wolftooth, Ark-robin’s second in command, could not conceal his excitement. “Let’s set an ambush for those bushpigs.”
Ark-robin held up his hand for silence. He looked back at Wolftooth, as though listening. The leaves rustled.
“What will you do, sir?” the duty officer asked.
Ark-robin drummed his fingers on Merya’s back. “Tell them to drive the beastmen between the ridge and Abascar’s western wall. We’ll wait on the ridge. When we descend upon them, they’ll have no choice but to fight us on one side or be picked off by arrows from the wall on the other. If Cal-raven’s pursuit is strong, we will not lose. We can make something memorable here.”
He turned and pointed at Warney. “Why don’t you try using your great-grandfather’s curse on something that deserves it. And while you’re at it, you’re responsible to lead these wretches back to the camp.”
Then the captain turned and pointed to a cowering figure hiding behind the Gatherers’ harvest barrel. “Ale boy! Shouldn’t you be inside the walls? The Evening Verse is about to be sung.”
Ark-robin lifted the unconscious Merya from the vawn’s back and tossed her as though she were a folded blanket. Haggard caught her. “I’ll be back for her,” Ark-robin warned, wiping his gloved hands against the neck of his vawn as though he had just touched a diseased rodent. “And she’d better not mysteriously disappear before my return, or you’ll all end up in the dungeons.”
He seized the startled ale boy and lifted him onto the mount. “No time to take you back to the gates, boy. I guess you’re going to experience your first ambush. Just hang on to the vawn’s mane. Don’t let go. And don’t worry. If a beastman gets close enough for you to see his eyes, he’ll already be dead at the end of my sword.”
As though to spread their own rumors about the beastmen, the trees moaned with sudden wind, bending. Birds flitted through the clearing with calls of alarm and disappeared. Ark-robin watched them and scratched his thick beard with his three-fingered hand. What a marvelous evening, he thought.
The captain of the guard drove his company eastward from the woods by Deep Lake and up the rising ground. At the top of a deeply forested ridge, they could look down the slope and up again to the long line of House Abascar’s sun-painted wall.
To the east, the edge of darkness approached on the backs of the massing nightbirds.
Auralia walked from cage to cage, yearning for the buried colors, wanting to gather them into her arms like abandoned children. Every time she reached a cage of forbidden, castoff belongings, she wanted to unlock it. She wanted to climb ropes and chains and open the doors above to let in daylight, to give the Housefolk back what belonged to them.
Auralia smiled to see the long line of garments she had managed to pull from the cages. Perhaps they would instead lead someone to find her, lost in the labyrinth. The prince had vowed her protection. Surely he would come to the prison and discover she was missing. Surely he would find her here.
She could not stay underground. It was difficult to breathe here, so unlike her caves beside the lake, which opened to water, starlight, and the voice of the woods. This maze did not end. It circled back upon itself. With no sun, moon, or stars, time became meaningless.
What was left for her to do without the colors she had brought to this house?
“I’m not a Northchild. I’m a Gatherer,” she repeated to herself. The word Gatherer spoken here seemed a comfort. She closed her eyes, struggled to remember. “Nella Bye. Haggard. Krawg. Warney.” She laughed. “Wenjee.” Perhaps she could find her way to them. She had paid the price for what she had done. Now she could enjoy a return to the small things. The simple gifts.
She resumed her pursuit of a mystery, passing over a narrow stone bridge, leaving the long rows of cages and caves. Her hands worked busily with a bundle of sheets and scarves, knotting them together into a record of her journey. The walls fell away, the ceiling disappeared into the dark, and an immeasurable mine shaft yawned beneath the bridge. She inched forward, with a strange sense that her steps had been laid for her.
Something with wings flapped past her head.
On the other side of the bridge, she entered a huge cavern where rows of stacked barrels, six high, stretched into invisibility. There were no lanterns here, only mirrors that caught and cast light from lanterns somewhere else. There was just enough light to continue, and as she did, the air turned thick and sweet.
“Ale boy?” She turned suddenly.
But she was still alone, standing
in the distilleries, the ale boy’s fragrant home.
She gazed about with new understanding. These would be the chambers where he worked every day. The king’s breweries, the cellars of liquors, ales, wine, hajka. Perhaps the boy was near. Perhaps he could help.
With one hand, she leaned against a barrel; with the other, she clutched the end of her garment-rope.
Suddenly the mirrors flashed and brightened. Someone was approaching with light and color. A flare of red behind her. A lantern. She turned, almost calling Cal-raven’s name.
At first Auralia thought the figure stepping across the bridge was a ghost. She smiled and whispered, “Beautiful.” The woman was dressed like a queen, wearing a dark and elegant nightgown. She held the lantern in one hand and clutched a colorful bundle of cloth with the other.
Auralia squinted into the lanternlight, trying to discern the face of her visitor. As she did, dizziness swept over her.
“Who are you?” came a small, angry voice.
Auralia remembered now that she was an escapee, a fugitive. Perhaps this one had come to drag her back to the Hole. But dressed like this? Unlikely.
She slumped against a barrel, pulled her dirty, scratched knees up to her chin. She sighed once, opened her hands, let go of the cord of colors. “I’m Auralia,” she answered.
Auralia’s path at last converged with the journey of the captain’s daughter.
Above them, Housefolk slept, exhausted from their work, troubled without hope of a better day ahead.
Above the weary Housefolk, a despairing and defeated king climbed the steps of his tower slowly, as though he might not reach his chamber.