Beyond thick walls of stone, along the edges of the woods, Gatherers hurried to their camps, worried about beastmen. They could not sleep. Some of them wished for the return of that vivid girl from the riverbank.
Miles away through the forest a prince unsheathed his sword and felled monsters, shouting the name of his father, his house, his teacher, and then a name new to his lips, that of a young woman, a woman who had confirmed his wildest suspicions about the life of mystery within the Expanse.
That prince’s teacher stood in the woods far to the south, shaping stone with magic, careful to replicate what details he could remember of the design in Auralia’s colors so he could contemplate the work.
There were so many more, a world of people whose lives were strangely changed by this frail girl huddled against a liquor barrel backed up to a massive column of stone and earth in the cellars of House Abascar.
Stricia stood still. She looked at this little creature in rags, this ugly girl who had just spoken the name she had come to despise.
She felt wounded, as though in her weakest moment this one whom she hated had appeared in calculated malice.
And yet the chill prickled beneath her skin, and a possibility flowered in her mind. She could give the gown and mask to Auralia. She could bring all the threads of blame together.
“Auralia,” Stricia laughed. “Of course, dear little Gatherer girl. The prince…he speaks so highly of you.”
“Prince Cal-raven?”
“And he would want you to have this.” Stricia lifted the wedding gown and held it into the lamplight.
But as Auralia reached out to receive the gift, Stricia glimpsed an emerjade ring circling her thumb.
She recognized it and staggered back. Her feet tangled in the train of the wedding gown, wresting it from her hands as she fell to the ground.
The lantern flew out of her hand and smashed into jagged shards across the stony ground, its oil pouring out, shocked into flame.
Auralia stared into the dance of brilliant color. “Where is the ale boy?” she asked.
“You?” Stricia asked, shivering. “The prince has given you his ring of protection?”
Around her, sparks flared and rose high toward the chasm’s distant ceilings. She thought to run. But the wraith that had its claws in her whispered a different idea—a solution to all her woes.
Stricia was surprised at the absence of emotion as she considered this possibility.
Sparks from the burning oil settled along the damp ground like constellations. She watched, as some of the flames spread in crooked lines, consuming droplets and puddles of the powerful liquors that had leaked down the corridors. Here and there it caught at strands of dry grass. The flames licked hungrily at Auralia’s cord of garments. The fire coiled about the strand, sank into it, swelled and intensified. It paused as though awaiting permission and then surged, eagerly working its way in both directions along the bound line.
Stricia did not watch the fire traveling up the corridor the way Auralia had come, nor did she see it leap in a line like a shooting star across the bridge, sparks spraying outward and falling away.
She was transfixed, hypnotized by the growing flames that gathered in a half circle around the strange, dazed girl.
Auralia showed no signs of pain at the rising heat. She seemed asleep, almost thankful, fingering the prince’s stone ring around her thumb. Smiling, she said, “I think it’s time at last to sing the Evening Verse.” And she began, indeed, to sing it.
Stricia could not reach Auralia. The heat had become searing. She was at once horrified by what was about to happen and yet unwilling to interfere. The heaving breath of the Underkeep seethed within her. As if to defend herself from darkness and flame, she reached into her skirt and unsheathed her father’s dagger.
There was a sudden roar as the dry wood of an old marrowwood ladder propped against the wall caught fire and became a pillar of flame.
Panic shattered her trance. She turned to flee and screamed. Her escape was cut off. She looked down the long row of barrels. Smoke blackened the air around her.
She cried out for her father.
Stricia looked at Auralia, a shadow now behind a wall of flame. She held out a hand, timidly approaching, but the heat repelled her. There was nothing she could do but shout. “The fire! Auralia, quick! Get up! That’s hajka in those barrels. We’ve got to find a way out.”
Without waiting, Stricia stepped onto a precarious ledge that led to a lower level of the Underkeep. The chasm opened out, dark and measureless. She would be safer the deeper she went.
Before descending, she looked back once more.
Translucent shapes moved in a crowd through the smoke, encircling Auralia while the tunnel filled with heat and light. The barrel behind Auralia caught fire, its top bursting open in a rush of flame. And then the one next to it exploded. Behind it, the massive pillar of stone, twenty trees wide, cracked, split, groaned as a wedge-shaped section crumbled into rubble and dust. It leaned toward the abyss, breaking under the weight of the ground above.
In rapid succession, the remaining barrels blasted fire at all that surrounded them, erasing walls, collapsing ceilings, tearing open earth, and destroying the central supports that held the foundation for Abascar’s palace.
Maugam was faint from blood loss. For breaking the law and freeing a prisoner, he had condemned himself to shame. For digging an escape and making sure her shackles were loose, he cursed himself as a criminal.
But the king had not condemned him. The king had demanded he bring Auralia back from the Hole.
“I used a shovel,” Maugam admitted again. “I have ended her suffering. And sent her on her way.”
He had gathered his sharpened tools about him. He had made a message out of arms and legs, ears and eyes, crafting himself into a testament for the next jailer. The demands of justice were satisfied. His name would be remembered. Maugam: the artist of the dungeons.
In the shifting tides of pain from his self-inflicted punishments, he watched the world waver before him, illusory.
The strand of hanging chains began to rattle and squeak inside the pit nearby.
Had Auralia slipped free of her chains? Had she found the tunnel he had opened for her?
Suddenly he had to know.
Burying all fear, he leaned over the edge of the pit and reached to grab the chains.
They swung lightly, freely, clanking against each other. He felt relief, and he smiled. “Very good. You are free.”
But now the ground shook beneath him. Dust and rubble began to rain down. The chains writhed in his hands like snakes.
The explosion flaming through the Underkeep was so sudden and so great, he did not have time to move before the fire rushed up through the Hole, reducing him to wisps of smoke driven by the rising flames.
27
THE QUAKE
T aut as the strings on their ready arrowcasters, invisible as held breath, the Abascar troop waited in the thick stand of high trees. Their captain gazed eastward over the orchard slope, across the wildgrass span, to the stone foundation and Abascar’s long and winding wall, to the bold towers beyond.
The towers. High, golden, encircled by grand balconies. Soon, the wedding would open them, and Ark-robin would escort his wife up and away from their past to chambers that had once belonged to the queen. They would wake to see the sunrise bathing the mountainous stonelands of the east in colors brighter than the tedious sights of labor and law. The wind would course through the windows, carrying the sounds of birdsong rather than the grumble of vawns, the snarl of dogs, the Housefolk chatter, the markets.
He wondered if Say-ressa had lit the bedcandles. She was probably sipping redtwig tea and surrendering to the scratch of the cat at the door. She would begin her yearly conference with the palace doctors soon and probably teach them a thing or two. Had Stricia ever fallen ill under her mother’s care?
The ale boy slid from side to side on the vawn, not nearly old enough t
o sit comfortably for hours on such a large animal. Ark-robin smiled, watching him tangle and untangle his fingers in the black mane in search of a firm grip.
The captain had often promised himself he would someday teach a boy of his own. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that he might at last revise this promise—grandsons. Royal grandsons. Princes. Ark-robin would see his dreams walking the corridors of the palace, and they would have famous names and reputations. They would be so much more fit for service than this orphan, who had inherited so little of his father’s strength and stature.
“Must be quite a thrill for you, ale boy. Better than collecting berries, eh? Just think, now you’re a part of something important.”
The boy turned and stunned the captain with a scowl born of something deeper than displeasure. The boy did not like him. Did not even seem to admire him.
The captain frowned, tightened his own grip on the reins. Radegan, Aug-anstern, the Gatherers…He was surrounded by animosity these days.
But Ark-robin had no chance to pursue the matter. For there, winging low from north to south, barely visible as night’s flood rose to pool over the wildgrass, were three black birds, gliding without a single stroke of their wings, cruising expertly together as though joined at the wingtips and steered by kitestrings. Which they were, in a sense.
“Brascles,” Wolftooth remarked to his comrades. “Navigating for the monsters that run beneath them.”
“The birds are not looking for us,” Ark-robin added. “They have no reason to suspect we’re here.”
“Won’t the birds see us coming?”
“When they do, it will be too late. The beastmen can’t climb the wall. If they turn back, they’ll run into Cal-raven’s riders. Ready?”
The sound of a stamp from each vawn signaled that the men were prepared.
Ark-robin leaned forward. “Hang on, ale boy. You will thank me when this is over.”
He dug in his heels and clicked his tongue, and the vawns were off as one body.
Once they entered the orchards, the wide boughs of the fruit trees dimmed the evening light. The riders bent low, occasionally sliding off the saddles to grasp the sides of their mounts and duck beneath branches that would have otherwise beheaded them.
Directed by an almost imperceptible whistle from the captain, the vawns entered an open field and turned with impossible precision to become a single-file parade, flanking the unseen foes.
The beastmen would soon burst out into the open, running like wildcats, down on all fours.
Ark-robin put his hand to his sword hilt, pulled his vawn ahead of the rest of the company, and leaned forward. “Here we go,” he growled into the ale boy’s ear.
And then something altogether unplanned happened.
The earth moved like an ocean wave.
It caught and raised the orchard. Then brought it down again.
Trees twisted, broke, and fell against each other in a deafening clamor.
Vawns lost their footing and stumbled on the heaving ground. Trees, uprooted by an impossible force, crashed down the slope toward and around them. Ark-robin’s vawn bellowed, unable to dodge the tree that was crashing toward them.
Ark-robin wrapped his arms around the ale boy, and both were flung into the air. A branch struck the side of his helmet. He landed on his back and felt the impact cast the boy away. He was in the air again and came down hard on his belly, lights flashing through his head, blood in his throat.
In the next several moments, or hours—he was not certain—the world was a strange and dreamlike cloud. As pain racked his body inside and out, he thought the beastmen were upon him with whips and clubs. He could not distinguish the sound of dying men from the roars of trees splitting, stones cracking, and earth tearing.
He found himself staggering around the tree-blasted landscape in the dulling blue dusk, climbing across the twisted carcasses of trees toward the ale boy who was crawling in a patch of tangled wildgrass. The boy was so blackened by earth that he resembled an unfinished sculpture. The vawn’s body, or a good part of it, lay behind the boy. The rest of it hung suspended on the sharp stump of a broken tree.
Sorcery.
Ark-robin tried to speak, but his speech slurred. In the fall, his breastplate had been shoved upward, the edge nearly shattering his jaw, smashing his teeth together. He spat a gob of blood against a fallen tree.
“Wizardry!” came a voice nearby, and he thought it might be his own. But it was Wolftooth, crawling forward and out from under a tree. “What in the name of Great Tammos Raak—”
“Kramm, the whole land’s exploded,” came an answering cry.
“I see that, you sheepskull.” All about him pieces of the hillside rose and fell, as though a giant had thrown fistfuls of forest upon them. Small birds flung from the trees in the quake settled on the broken ground, pecking at grubs that had been thrust into the air. He trembled. “Beastmen don’t have the power to rain trees down upon us!”
“Then what does?” asked Wolftooth, gripping his sword as a walking stick, his face twisted by the snarl that uncannily suited his name.
“I smell smoke,” the ale boy groaned.
Two of the three duty officers were in sight, alive, one of them still sitting unfazed on his vawn. But two of his men lay to the side impaled by the same blade. The strangest fates men found…to die in the midst of certain victory by chancing to fall upon one’s own sword. Six men climbed over the husks of trees leaning askew all about. One wept.
“Wait.”
He looked toward Abascar’s wall.
There was no wall.
Ark-robin turned a slow circle, checked his direction. He saw only sky.
Wolftooth realized the same thing. “Are we off course?”
“The mage.” Ark-robin pulled his helmet off and wiped the blood that was spilling down his face. “That kramming mage. He’s done this. He’s besieged the house…”
“Captain! Fire!” One of the surviving officers was waving, frantic and terrified, pointing toward the house. “And the wall has come down!”
It was not night that had plunged the world into darkness. It was smoke. Black, billowing smoke.
“The ale boy’s right.” Captain Ark-robin grabbed the branches of a fallen cloudgrasper and pulled himself up onto its trunk to try to get a glimpse of the palace.
Ruination.
Parts of the palace wall were standing, but they were broken or crooked, their foundations tilting, gleaming domes blackening as flames stormed upward. Many things were missing, most noticeably…the palace itself. A massive column of cloud had replaced the towers, looming high enough to catch the red glow of sunset. The earth was swallowing Abascar.
“The Underkeep’s caved in.”
The words made a terrible kind of sense, but he regretted saying them because they robbed him of any focus for his rage.
“Sir,” murmured Wolftooth. “The beastmen.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t see them here.”
Ark-robin reached for the hilt of his sword. It was there, as it should be, but that brought little relief. “We’ll go in,” he choked, holding his throat. “Beastmen. They’ve probably gone in.” Was the earth still shifting beneath his feet? “It is my duty to find and defend the king.” He brushed tufts of grass from the edges of his leg guards. Poise. Posture. He needed to regain his composure.
But only three of his men and the ale boy remained. The others were running, either away from the destruction or into it. Two who stayed with him were fine archers but only passable swordsmen. The third, a stolid, stalwart fellow, could fight with the best.
With Abascar collapsing, there would be no refuge. There would be only the run, the race to salvage what one could. Perhaps he could save his wife. Or his daughter. Or the king.
It had begun with tremors, then the full quake, quickly followed by claims that the Underkeep was burning. Chaos spread through House Abascar.
Flames had rus
hed through the breweries, and burning debris had plunged down through layers of the labyrinth until they found the dark, slumbering inventions of war that Kings Gere-baron and Har-baron had hidden away. When touched by the fire, these barrels of strange oils and concentrated poison turned volcanic. Calamitous fires raged, thundered through the Underkeep, sending jets of light and smoke up through the floors of the Housefolk homes.
King Cal-marcus had seen this, standing at his window, staring out at his quaking house, watching smoke rise from all around.
As he gripped the empty bottle of hajka, his blurred reason convinced him this was a vision, a prophecy or punishment set before him as his own mind caved in.
Housefolk homes burnt like haystacks, one after the other. The sound of his name rang through the streets in panic. Somehow this was his doing.
“Come away.” A touch on his shoulder. “Come away. It’s beginning.”
Earlier, the news had been good—Cal-raven had sent a large number of beastmen scrambling south toward an ambush and certain defeat. But then, not an hour later, another message. The dig had fallen. Cent Regus monsters were in the tunnels. Tunnels that would lead them to the Underkeep.
Cal-marcus had felt his heartbeat stumble out of step, and in that very moment, a quake had shaken his chamber.
Now the tower tilted with the moving earth, and his view of the forest became a view of the night sky. Smoke billowed and soared in the air like ink in water.
And yet the shadow had shape and purpose, a looming figure like a fallen piece of moon, soaring over the house, watchful and intent. He saw all this and knew, as sparks caught in the curtains framing his window.
“Now?” he asked.
The shadows prodded him, found loose threads, unstitched him.
Buffeted by wind, the curtains flared into brilliant colors, fell, wrapped themselves around his remnant, and embered in his ashes.