Chapter 7 - Skeir

‘Fear is a question. What are you afraid of?’

- Ochena Corbianus, First Loceid of the Ordo Amaranthine

Fighting a Latent centered on two things: timing and stealth.

His teachers at Reikscourt had always said that magic was a weapon in the strategist’s arsenal. It could be drawn and employed against one’s enemies, and in the right circumstances it was quite devastating. In a fair fight, a Latent could defeat a man, or even an army.

A real battle, Skeir had learned, wasn’t about fighting fair. It was struggle and will. It was also moving in the night with a knife so your enemy didn’t see you coming.

He, like countless thousands, had the Four-Throne War to thank for that lesson. It wasn’t something the Queen’s finest could have ever taught them.

That didn’t mean Skeir had forgotten the academy: the afternoons spent poring over war games in the Iron Gallery, dawn runs through the woods of Farald’s Fane outside the campus grounds, wondering at the honour rolls in the library.

They’d remembered how to smile then, looking forward to a future of service. For Helkoran, and the House of Ortenberg.

His friends. The shades in the Pit. He still remembered all of their names.

Leda. Manegold. Brand.

If he could go back, he asked himself, would he have done anything differently?

No. He knew, deep down, they would have carried on the same way. It was the burden of the young to know better than fate.

That time of his life had passed, but that didn’t mean he had forgotten the very next thing the Reikscourt marshals had drilled into his class about practitioners.

The first important tip to fighting a Latent: never give them time to cast. A prepared mage was a powerful mage, no matter the specialization. Their Workings were as varied as they were, but the one thing they had in common was that the more of their precious Primalities they altered, the more complex the ritual.

On a battlefield, that took precious time… time which a skilled soldier could use to find and eliminate the caster. Preferably with a longbow from a hundred paces.

Unfortunately, Skeir thought as he and Issa came face to face with their first trap, that particular piece of wisdom would not be all that helpful here.

At the end of the tunnel, they’d found a circular room about ten feet in diameter. Ahead of them were a trio of archways. There were no doors: the negative space was filled with more smooth stone, the only sign of a way forward the slight seams around the edges of each arch.

In front of each archway, the floor rose slightly. In the soft ruby glow of their lantern, Skeir recognized the telltale signs of pressure plates.

“Not ideal,” he grunted.

Veclere wasn’t just a Latent. He was a mazeid: a practitioner who specialized in warping the Primality of Mass. Their Workings were all about creating and destroying matter, usually limited to inanimate objects. Something about the way Mass worked made it hard to work on living things, at least that’s what he’d learned.

He’d suspected Veclere’s specialty when they’d first found the odd shape of the entry tunnel, but this all but confirmed it.

He’d faced enough mazeids on the battlefield to know how much of a pain they could be. Summoning artillery barrages above enemy lines. Creating walls seemingly out of thin air. And - yes, excavating labyrinthine passages that would take teams of tunnelers weeks to dig.

Of course, in the war the Helkorps had faced down entire schools of Latents. This was just one man. The leader of Undertow had built this place with his Workings… and if Wren had been telling the truth, he’d done it all on his own.

He had also very likely left these sorts of traps for exactly this type of scenario. If someone was working with his crew, they’d already know which door to activate.

“One of these has to be the right one,” replied Issa, as though listening to his thoughts. “No way they’re all Latents, so there must be a safe passage forward that anyone can access. It’s not a shell game, at least; we have a one in three chance of being right.”

Those weren’t great odds. He’d faced worse, certainly, but neither of them were under any illusions that this would be the last threshold. Once more, he regretted how things had turned out at the Mess. Wren hadn’t mentioned having to run a fucking gauntlet.

Skeir walked up to the right-most arch, taking great care not to step on any of the plates or actually touch anything. He leaned in close to the seam to see if he could hear anything from beyond. With one hand, he indicated that Issa should do the same with the relief opposite.

“Anything?”

“No,” she hesitated, her back to him.

“Not here,” the not-dockworker elaborated. “I can hear something strung behind the door. It’s like whistling, wind catching on something taut. It’s trapped, I’m sure of it.”

Damned odd. Try as he might, he heard nothing.

However, Skeir had no intention of stepping on the last plate yet. Calling Issa over to check both of the other arches, he took a step back, ostensibly to check his gear. In truth, he was watching the woman closely out of the corner of his eye.

She was quite… resourceful. Though he’d known her less than the span of a full evening, the Helkorite could already tell that she was more than she seemed. She’d found him of her own accord, had proven quite shrewd back at the monument, and was now somehow able to discern the presence of the kind of trap designed to stay hidden. Though he hadn’t seen any weapons on her, that didn’t mean she was harmless.

Who was Issa, really? And who was she looking for, that she’d felt the need to insert herself into his business?

The first thought, naturally, was some kind of covert agent. She had the mien of a Collier from the Gulf or perhaps a Medean, though she spoke with an accent he couldn’t place. Issa was certainly an alias. She could be anybody.

He supposed as long as she didn’t interfere, it didn’t matter who she was.

“It’s this one,” Issa called out, pointing to the right arch. “I don’t hear anything behind it. Whatever mechanisms Veclere left behind the other two aren’t present here.”

Well, she seemed sure. And whatever her identity, the woman didn’t strike him as someone who gambled carelessly with her life.

The pressure plate slid into the floor, and as it did the stone between the arch began to slide out of the way with a muted rumbling. Skeir saw a landing on the other side of the portal.

So far, so good.

Beyond the landing, the thin passage transformed into a much larger chamber. Gone was the smoothed out masonry, the fresh-delved stone that smacked of sorcery. Instead, their lone light revealed an arcade of half-crumbled columns, each standing at least twenty paces tall. The floor was uneven, innumerable scratched grooves and indentations betraying its age. Skeir picked up the faint smell of rot as he took a step forward, and his boot produced a crack he knew well.

Ahead of them, strewn carelessly throughout the space, were shards of worn out rock and bone. Scattered remains were bedded down in hollowed out caskets, amidst rotted clothes and stone tools and weapons, shell beads and jewelry, and the petrified forms of hunting dogs and horses.

The catacombs of Equinox. The ancient burial grounds of Haedralia, in the days when the island had been little more than a fortress and a jetty for a sovereign. If half the stories he’d heard of this place were true, these ruins were haunted by royalty. Like practically every child who grew up in the empire’s shadow, Skeir had heard of the tragedy of Empress Mathea and the ending of the House of Albius.

It was the epilogue of Rhona’s War - one of several predecessors to the civil war that had just ended. In the aftermath of the Banquet of Blades, the conspirators had walled up the prince’s surviving family, or so the legend went. Wives, children, even their pets. They’d sealed off all entrances to the tunnels, burying the evidence so deep in the rock that all those ghosts would never be able to escape.

The entire Albian line, ended in a single day. They’d let their guard down, and it was their undoing. All because they believed themselves victorious. They had deluded themselves into thinking they’d defeated all of their enemies.

The most dangerous foe is the one you dismiss.

“At least we’ll have company down here,” he heard Issa murmur as she gestured to a mostly-intact skeleton in the depths of a nearby sarcophagus. By the looks of it, someone had pushed off its lid to ransack the remains.

“Keep on the lookout, I’ll watch behind us.” A sound enough arrangement to him.

The arcade continued, never in a straight line. They ascended stairs and passed around alcoves, all dug at odd angles. Twice Skeir pointed out side passages that twisted away and out of sight. Sometimes old stone, sometimes new, but none of them looked well-traveled and all left the pair prone to an ambush, so they stayed in the central thoroughfare. By the looks of it, these halls could have extended forever through the -

The sliding of a wall panel to the right was Skeir’s only warning before the ballista bolt came hurtling across the room. As he ducked for cover, he could feel the projectile cleave the air where his body had just been.

The bolt’s iron head embedded itself in the stone column with a deafening ring, the echo carrying throughout the space.

In the moment it took to catch his breath, Skeir heard the distant clamor of voices. His head snapped up, locating the source down one of the adjacent tunnels. Left, at least three.

Stealth had been the second lesson his instructors had tried to impart when fighting a Latent. Even the cleverest of mages could not stop what they could not detect. Therefore, if one could not catch a practitioner while they were still preparing their workings - such as, for instance, if one were attempting to infiltrate the lair of a mazeid - then their chances would be good so long as they stayed hidden.

It really was too bad, he thought as he reached for the hilt at his back, that he wasn’t still at Reikscourt.

“Do you have a weapon on - ” he looked to Issa and stopped, for the woman had vanished from sight. He held up the lantern to scan the hall, but there was no sign of her.

Where had she gone? Was she planning on betraying him to Veclere? How could…

It didn’t matter. The voices were getting louder, and he could hear footsteps now. Undertow was coming, and he was standing in the middle of a kill-box. If he wanted to retreat, there was only one way out - right back where he’d come from.

Fuck that. He hadn’t traveled hundreds of leagues just to flee now.

The first of the men to push through to the chamber didn’t see Skeir lurking behind one of the columns, and so he died with a highblade in his midsection.

He wasted no time waiting for the dead man’s friends to get a clean shot, moving close and putting one hand on the corpse’s shoulder, spinning the body around just in time for its back to sprout a pair of bolts.

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Four more figures emerged from the darkness. The two in front already had weapons drawn - one a large bearded man with a warhammer, the smaller one wielding a set of long knives - while the archers behind were busy reloading their arbalests. One of them, a middle-aged woman with cauliflower ears and a crooked nose, gave the front two a sharp nod and they advanced.

Those bolts had barbed heads, he knew from experience. Getting hit with one would not be pleasant. He needed to end this before they could reload, or he was as good as dead.

The Helkorite used the momentum to push the corpse forward, throwing its weight towards the closest of the smugglers. The bearded man on the left was the slower, so Skeir angled the body in his direction as he yanked out his greatsword at the last moment.

As he’d hoped, the man failed to get out of the way in time, and was dragged down to the catacomb floor in a tangle of limbs.

Skeir was already bringing up the flat edge of the highblade to block the first knife blow. The smaller weapon glanced off with a tinny shriek, and then he came out with a wide swing. His foe danced back, getting just out of the arc before coming in with a lunge.

Or at least, that’d been what it was meant to look like. At the last second, the man’s positioning changed and he cut left; a feint, to overextend him and leave him an open target to the arbalesters.

But this wasn’t Skeir’s first fight. Instead of going right like the man was clearly expecting, he dove left. A swift kick to the knee knocked the knife-wielder off balance, which gave him enough time to come about with one last cut. His opponent’s head went one way, the rest of his body another.

He didn’t have a chance to recover, as the larger of the two was already swinging his warhammer. He took a step back, towards the middle of the hall where he’d left the lantern to draw the team out. This was not a weapon he could block. He needed to outmaneuver him, get him where his weapon's superior reach could decide the matter.

But looking behind the second fighter, Skeir saw that he was out of time. Both of the archers had already finished reloading. As they took aim, they called for their ally to step away.

He was right in the open, standing right next to the only light source in the room. In other words, a perfect target with nowhere to go.

No. This couldn’t be his end. It would not.

He exploded forward, legs burning as he launched himself at the trio. The man in front had his hammer in a high guard for a block, while the other two raised their arbalests. He wasn’t going to make it, he could already see.

A shadow stepped out from behind the crooked nosed archer and slit her throat.

The first of the bolts went wide. Even as she fell screaming, the shadow went to work on her partner. Try as he might to swing the arbalest around, the second archer wasn’t fast enough to avoid being gutted by the very same knife.

The shadow wore Issa’s face. Yet as he looked further, Skeir saw that she did not have a proper body. His companion no longer moved as a single object of flesh and blood. Instead, she ebbed and pooled, some kind of ephemeral essence spilling out from a single point in space. Save the hint of a brow and narrow lips, there was no telling where Issa began and ended.

What the…

Not yet. There was still one more of these bastards to deal with.

Thankfully, the bearded man’s cry of surprise and subsequent turn left him vulnerable. Skeir punished his inattention with a low sweep to the legs. The highblade tore through the joint of his right knee and kept going at a downward angle, sharp edge hacking into his other ankle.

He toppled over like a tree - though trees didn’t tend to bleed, he supposed, so really it was a shit comparison.

Then it was over, save a bit of screaming. The shadow turned towards him, shrinking into nothingness, and from it emerged the same muscular woman that had accosted him outside a tavern earlier this evening.

“Do you have any more elixirs on you?” Issa strode to the prone survivor, kicking away his weapon and pulling up a trouser leg to inspect the wound.

“Aye,” he said, “but not enough.” A lie, that. He had at least four more vials in his bag, but he wasn’t about to waste one of them on a smuggler’s lackey.

“Pity,” she said, and he heard emptiness there. She ended the man’s suffering with one swift cut, wiping the dagger clean on his body. Then the blade disappeared, Virtues knew where. It was in her hand one second and gone the next.

Then, in the second it took him to blink, she was right next to him. He could feel something about her touching the flesh beneath his bones: a chill, an absence. There were twin voids in her eye sockets.

“Is that your definition of looking out? Raising the fucking alarm?” She shoved him in the chest, though he didn’t budge.

“It was bound to happen eventually,” Skeir bit back. “The Latent’s had too much time to prepare his ground. If not this trap, then another. Now they’re down four fighters, and we’ve got more leverage when we find Veclere.”

“The plan was to negotiate with him, you half-wit.” She threw up her hands. “You really think he’ll treat with us now we’ve started cutting up his crew?”

He leaned forward. “It was a thin chance from the start he’d deal without Wren anyways. This way, we get him to the table a bit weaker, maybe force his hand. We may have to do a bit more cutting, but it looks like you’re not shit at that.”

As they stood close, Skeir saw something about her stare change. The eyes looked normal again, human. He no longer felt quite so cold standing next to her.

“You’d better be right. You’re gambling more than just our lives on it now.” Issa turned on her heels, heading down the passage the four Undertow members had emerged from. “Come on.”

He grabbed the lantern and followed, having apparently been relegated to rear guard.

They continued in less-than-companionable silence for less than a minute before Skeir asked the question he’d had since Issa saved his life.

“So what kind of Latent are you?”

The olive-skinned killer didn’t even flinch. “What difference does it make to you? If I stopped to explain it, would you even understand?” She snorted in open derision.

“You’re just a brute, a blunt instrument that someone forged during the war. Now you’ve no hand to wield you, so you’ve decided the best way to live is to break everything that ever hurt you. Am I close?”

He let the rage flare through him and fade away. No way he was taking such obvious bait.

“Not so blunt I can’t recognize someone dodging a question.”

“That wasn’t a no. Anyway, what I am isn’t your business. We agreed we’d work together to get what we need out of Veclere. That bargain doesn’t include me satisfying your curiosity.”

“No,” Skeir pressed on, “but since we’ll be getting into more fights, knowing your capabilities would be helpful. For tactics. You know, that thing a brute wouldn’t give two shits about?”

In the dim red light, he caught the barest hint of a smile. “All you need to know is that I’m the best friend you could have in the dark. I can put people down like you, only quicker and quieter.”

Skeir didn’t have a response to that, and so they carried on.

----------------------------------------

In the end, it took three more surprises and nearly twice as many dead ends.

Mazeid fuckery, Skeir groused as the two of them rounded the latest bend to find yet another fortification in their path. By the looks of it, this one was even more heavily reinforced than the others. A gate was embedded into its center, this one a set of double doors set with iron bars.

He’d seen gates like this before - on castles. It would take a team and battering ram the better part of an evening to knock it down, and that was without the possibility of another ambush. And if the members of the gang weren’t already lying in wait, the racket they’d make would certainly alert just about everyone as to what they were doing.

He swore to the Host Below, that mage was going to suffer.

The room he and Issa stepped into was irregular in shape, worn down markings on the cavern walls indicating this had once been part of the natural catacombs as well. There were two pillars flanking the gate itself, both rising from ground to ceiling.

Not making the same mistake as last time, Skeir made sure to give the floor a proper scouring, only creeping forward when he was sure there were no more pressure plates nearby.

“What are you doing?”, he heard Issa ask from behind.

“Checking for another way in,” he rasped. They hadn’t heard or run into any more Undertow members since their first encounter. Assuming the rest of the crew was still down here, they’d probably retreated to safety. That way, the non-combatants could stay out of danger, or their fighters could overwhelm them with greater numbers on a battlefield of their choosing.

It was a good strategy, he had to concede. It was also incredibly fucking annoying.

“Rats don’t live in these places without proper escape tunnels,” he said quietly over his back, “so the rat king would dig them.”

He hadn’t been so sure at first. The collapsing hallways, trick doors, and endless godsdamned traps had dispelled any doubts that Veclere was an amateur. If it came down to it, Skeir figured the Latent could probably just dig another way out.

But what about the rest of them? Like Issa had said, there was no way that all of Undertow had access to Workings. He’d likely left at least a few escape routes for his people in case of emergency.

Therefore, it was possible that Skeir would find one such passage.

He didn’t hear any sound, yet when he made it to the closest pillar and turned to block the lantern light, Issa had already made it to the one on the other side. Her dagger was out again, held close to her. There was something familiar about her stance: forty-five degree angle to the arm, blade parallel to the body.

She wasn’t watching him, though. Her eyes were doing the midnight thing, welling up with dark.

“There’s conversation on the other side of the door,” she said suddenly. “They’re talking about striking camp, about moving.”

So she could see through walls, too, Skeir noted. That must have been how she’d known which door to pick. Best friend in the dark is right.

“At least another three… no, four. One of them is giving orders; that’s Veclere. He’s saying - ” her head snapped around to face him.

“We’re about to have company. Get ready.”

Skeir didn’t wait to hear any more, as he placed the lantern back on the nearby ground and grasped the hilt of his sword with both hands.

“How long?”

But the doors were already starting to swing inward. Beyond it, he glimpsed torchlight and a host of drawn weapons. Skeir’s knuckles tightened. This was it.

A new voice - bass, honey-sweet - cut through the red haze.

“You’re late. Normally such a breach in manners would warrant a penalty, but we have more pressing matters to deal with this evening.”

Skeir looked at Issa, and her right back at him. One second passed, then two. The confusion on her face matched his own. When they did not move, the voice let out an audible sigh.

“Come out from behind there, would you? I gave your employer my word: no harm will come to you here, as long as our arrangement holds.”

This was another trap, a trick. It had to be. Skeir began to raise his highblade, but Issa had already stepped into the open, her dagger disappearing once more.

“Thank you for understanding,” the shadow-woman reported with no hint of faltering. “As we didn’t see any of your people on the way in, we assumed something had gone wrong.”

What was she doing? This wasn’t the plan. She wasn't Ninth Company, she couldn't possibly be in on any of this. It wouldn't make any sense if she were - why lure him here, just to get him into a scrap with these cowards?

His eyes widened slightly. She was just making this shit up as she went along, wasn't she? She had no clue what Veclere would say, was trying to keep the man on-side by pretending to be one of them. He grimaced. Issa apparently throwing out the script had just committed them to talks, and to contradict her now would mean an immediate fight against the kind of enemy he wasn’t sure he could defeat.

The last tip that the Reikscourt had given his class about fighting Latents? Don’t.

So, reluctantly, Skeir lowered his guard and rounded the pillar.

The gate - now completely ajar - revealed a large chamber beyond. Much like the rest of the areas they’d seen, Skeir noted the presence of grand, winding carvings and newer, more utilitarian construction. He spotted at least two staircases, several inner walls and even what looked like some kind of moat. Unlike the rest of the rooms they’d passed through, however, this one was filled near to the brim with stacks of crates, barrels, and other packages.

Undertow’s lair at last, for it could be nothing else.

But Skeir’s attention was rather more focused on the veritable arsenal pointed at he and Issa, the men and women wielding them, and the figure who stood near the back of the crowd.

Veclere was not an overly large man, neither tall nor broad in the shoulders, yet when he approached the ranks of his crew parted without the need for a word. He wore a quilted vest of burgundy over a cream-coloured tunic, and dark trousers that flowed easily with each step. His boots clicked softly on the stone. Up close, he could see expressive hazel eyes set in a face that was all sharp lines; a high brow, noble nose, and cheekbones sharper than his fucking sword.

This man was far, far too pretty to be a gang leader, Skeir concluded. He looked like he was about to go to a Middenmas ball, for shit’s sake. He didn’t even have a single scar on him!

Somehow, that struck him as more deeply wrong than anything he’d seen tonight.

He felt a sudden, visceral urge to mar Veclere in that moment. The soldier could already tell he was going to be grappling with that as long as they were down here. A man like this, he knew, kept his hands clean while he sent these poor fucks to die for him. All because he could break the natural order with a bit of magic.

As far as Skeir was concerned, that made him the same as every shit officer in every shit army on this shit continent.

“Something has gone wrong,” announced the smuggler when he stood less than an arm’s length from them. “Someone’s sworn the Pale Oath on your last shipment. She is being hunted.”

The silence that followed was a deep and yawning thing.

“Are they here?” Issa’s eyes betrayed the same thing he saw had already found a home in the drawn and trembling weapons, the glances between those gathered here, the quiet in the ranks. It was panic. Pure, simple, animal.

Veclere nodded grimly, the gesture of a man offering heartfelt condolences.

“A full veil has already entered the tunnels. Il Coru are coming for Maugrim Nameless.”