She’d never liked tunnels. They made her feel caged, as if the walls had enveloped her and were growing smaller with each bend and twist. Half of it, she knew, was in her head—she just wasn’t accustomed to them, not the way a dark elf would be. She was used to having a tree canopy above her, or the high-ceilinged corridors of the Raidt palace and training grounds. Fresh, free-flowing air, or at least something close to it.
This was too like the paths to the second armory, or the winter storerooms, neither of which she liked—and they didn’t have floors cut by sharp, jagged, ankle-twisting outcroppings of stone.
Temdin, she thought as her foot slipped down yet another awkward slope, slapping a hand to the wall awkwardly for balance. When I find Nales, I may hit him for making me come in here.
“So,” Doneil said, breaking the several minutes’ silence. “Do you think demonic fortresses keep their dungeons upward or downward?”
She grunted. “Nales is the demon expert. We can ask him when we find him.”
“Given that he likely lied through his teeth to get the demon to set you free, I doubt we’ll need to ask that when we find him—he’ll already be in it.”
“Hopefully intact,” she said, her breath hitching as she climbed around another outcrop of rock, a jagged part of it digging into the hollow of her hip as she passed. “Your runes can’t regrow limbs.”
Ahead, Caracel paused and gave them a strange look, his expression firm and rippling with a frown. His dark eyes slipped from her to Doneil, and back.
Black humor, she surmised, was not a fey trait. Either that, or the language barrier hadn’t translated the joke well.
Temdin, he looked good, though. Like a god descended, or a hero from one of the Raidt foundational epics. Ghostly and ethereal. Every so often, the mercari on his armor would catch in the glow of her light stick and flash like a school of fish underwater. And, every so often, his power shivered in the air.
He used magic the way most people breathed.
“Perhaps your priestess and our prince will be together,” Doneil said, switching into the Common Fey-Elven mix they’d been using and lifting his voice for it to carry. “They are royal hostages, after all.”
The fey’s face rippled. “The blatspel demon will need Lady Yena for the gate. Its maintenance and guardianship are part of her sacred duty.”
“He’ll want her alive, then,” she said. “That’s encouraging.”
“Yes,” he replied. “Although, she doesn’t need all of her limbs to maintain the gates.”
Without a glance back, he vanished around the next corner.
She cringed.
No, that humor definitely hadn’t carried over. She grunted as her foot slid down a short incline, jarring against the broken rock.
Perhaps she needed to do a stint with the dark elves. See how they worked with their caving. It wouldn’t help untangle the fuzz her woodcraft was currently in—it still jangled, wriggling in her brain as a series of messy, half-finished, discordant sketches. Hells, it even hurt, presenting like a low-key headache—but it would at least help her footing.
“Having some trouble there, Twelfth?”
Behind her, Doneil was apparently regarding her with some amusement. Though his tone seemed strained, and he was definitely picking at the pathway more carefully than he would have usually, he hadn’t yet managed the scrapes and slides she had.
“Oh, shut it.”
Temdin, I hate caves.
Gritting her teeth, she scraped around another outcrop—and almost ran right into Caracel.
She jerked to a stop, narrowly avoiding a collision, and snapped her attention to the end of the craggy passage.
A faint green glow shone from ahead.
She dropped her voice to a small whisper. “What is it?”
He made a noise in his throat, unsettled. “This is crystal light.”
Crystal light? Unconsciously, her eyebrows lifted. That’s what the fey used to illuminate their castles and cities. The Raidt still had some, in the inner sanctum of the main temple.
What was it doing in a demonic fortress?
She made to move forward, but he stopped her, suddenly catching her arm. She jumped, visions of Volaon’s steel-handed grip cracking through her mind.
Her free hand flew to her blade as he turned toward her, but she stopped herself from drawing it.
Barely.
She forced her shoulders to relax. “Yes?”
His claws scraped over the leather as he adjusted his grasp, examining the tattooed script visible under her armor. “You summon Kodanh through mercari, yes?”
She remembered to breathe. “Yes.”
“Do you have other spells?”
“Yes.”
“Do they work?”
She frowned. This time, when she answered, she put a question in her tone. “Yes?”
“What are they?”
Her eyebrows lifted. Asking about some spells was quite private, given that more than a few families had spells sourced through their lineage. Her first one, for example, had been the tree-growing one passed down from her mother’s line.
Plus, it was embarrassing to admit she only had basic wind-calling.
“Wind calling, first level, and a matrilineal growth spell for a specific subspecies of Dogwood.”
“Ah,” he said, as if she’d just told him something he’d expected. “They are different, then.”
He released her arm and moved forward.
She waited. When he didn’t continue, she slid her gaze briefly toward the ceiling and, putting a false sweetness into every syllable, started after him. “And this is important how, exactly?”
“Calling spells require connection. The other spells do not.” He looked back, a perfect eyebrow rising back at her. “If you want to call on Kodanh’s power, you need access to the fey world. Now that it is shut, you have to wait for the gate to open.”
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Understanding dawned. Her mouth opened, brain working to process it.
That light on the mountain, the shock wave of magic—it had been gate flare.
Somewhere in this mountain was a world gate.
That’s why she’d made the sudden connection to Kodanh. And why his power had vanished with the fading light. And that was also why Caracel had been so concerned about his priestess’s gate-maintenance ability.
She’d thought it an odd comment at the time, but now, it made sense—Grobitzsnak had a gate in his basement, and he could use the priestess to work it.
And the relocation of the demon fortress suddenly made a lot more sense. It sat right where Ulchris used to be.
The two had likely just changed places.
Why they would do that was beyond her. She had only the basest recollection of gates.
But it did, at least, explain some of her magic. Spells that relied solely on this world were fine. Anything that relied on a connection to the fey world was out—until someone opened the gate.
She couldn’t rely on Kodanh.
“Thank you,” she said. “That is useful to know.”
He gave a nod and continued on, moving like a ghost.
Hearing Doneil and Matteo catch up around the corner, she tossed her light stick back for them to use—Doneil caught it with a swear, as she knew he would—and resumed picking her way up the increasingly jagged and awkward path.
The soft, eerie glow turned into a bridgeway bearing the ruins of an old road. She hesitated when her fingers hit the top. She’d expected crude paving stones, but the quality and ornamentation of the path surprised her. A thick, woven pattern was engraved deep on the inside ledge of the bridgeway, cracked and chipped by age and wear, along with several others next to a broken support column that had fallen across a caved-in door that cut off access toward the left, and several carved statues snarled out from an alcove in the wall, bristling with stone weapons. She eyed them, noting the intricacy of the work.
She climbed up slowly, casting a wary eye down the new pathway.
Nales’ words from earlier came to mind.
‘Demons aren’t just evil, mindless thugs, Catrin. They are a multifaceted series of races with their own minds, ideas, and structures.’
She’d been wrong to think of demons as simple, evil things. Whatever ignorance had led her to that line of thinking had done her a disservice, one she was now paying for.
The Cizeks had subjugated her entire kingdom, rnari and all, with a demonic sword. She’d assumed it was raw power that had brought the surrender, but, logically, one would need more than simple power to craft a weapon like that, and a lot more than a normal level craftsmanship to lock its use into a bloodline.
Temdin, she was out of her depths here.
As Matteo and Doneil scrambled up next to her, Doneil helping the human up the straight, slippery slope, she crept away, drawing a blade. She gave the shadowy, arched ceiling a suspicious look, more than a little reminded of the arched ceiling in the terrace at Pemberlin, then turned her attention to the walls, where a series of deeply-etched stone reliefs faced the statuary nooks on the opposite side.
The first clusters of crystals lay embedded in a carved stone frame about shoulder height on the wall. Reliefs of guardian statues and script work shaped the wall under them, much of the lettering bearing enough of a resemblance to the mercari adorning both her skin and armor that a small jolt ran through her and she had to do a double-take.
She stepped back with a frown and took in the rest of the hallway. “Is this fey?”
It sure looked it. Old fey, perhaps, but definitely fey. Never mind that she recognized the script as rentac, the demon language—the way it was carved here, and the way the stones were put together, had a definite fey influence.
Caracel didn’t immediately answer. When she peered up, her heart stopped.
Gods, he looked like a deity—perfectly balanced and composed, his body lean with muscle under the perfect fit of his armor, the mercari embedded into it catching the light with a quicksilver gleam. The air seemed to shape around him, the way it did with the Raidt’s more-powerful magic users.
For one long second, their eyes met.
He was quiet for a moment, his gaze sliding along the wall. He didn’t tense, exactly, but he certainly wasn’t relaxed. The carvings discomforted him as much as they did her. When he spoke, she detected a slight strain to his voice.
“Yes. You are correct. It does resemble old fey relics. Pre-rending.”
Ah. Score one for the elf. She let herself relax again. Pre-rending, if she remembered her history correctly, was before the purported world split, when the four realms—fey, demon, goblin, and Gaia—synchronized as one.
She’d thought it a fictional telling, but she was beginning to question that.
Four worlds, one path. That was the fey belief.
But that was history. Ancient history.
The worlds didn’t work like that anymore.
Of course, given what she’d seen in the forest, and with this place, it seemed as though they might have all crashed back together—and left the fey out of it.
Was that the demons’ motivation? To overcorrect a long-lost power imbalance, except in their favor?
One thing was for sure—this was bigger than the Cizeks. Bigger than the Raidt, too.
She shifted, moving farther along, a hand tracing over the carvings in the walls. The rentac was illegible to her, but its form preyed on her senses with its familiarity, the designs looking like a close cousin to the mercari runes that made her armor.
She shook her head, detaching the thought. Now was not the time to wonder. She had a job to do. And a lot of demons to get through in order to do it.
“We should hurry.” She grimaced, wincing at the way her woodcraft slid and split in her mind. For a second, the scent of rot and sulfur intensified, almost overwhelming her senses. “With that racket at the entrance, they’ll definitely know where we are. Doneil, could you…”
She stopped, frowning. There was a new sound above her, a rippling noise, like leather on paper. She whirled, hands racing to her blades and head snapping up.
Something big and flapping fell on her.
“Look out!” Caracel shouted, drawing his sword.
Skin and bone engulfed her in a tight wrap. She jerked back, shoved an arm up, blocking the jaws that snapped close to her neck. A sharp claw scratched over the pauldron next to her throat, slashing down and over, catching on her chestplate. She stumbled into the wall with a yell, eyes stinging as the scent of rot and sulfur and stinking hair smothered her face. A thick, rough membrane pressed into her elbow, tendons flexing as the demon screeched.
Then, Caracel was there.
A cut with his sword sliced a wound in its wing membrane. Light appeared. It flinched back. He slashed it on the second swipe, his blade cutting a neat slice through its front left leg, movements quick and snappish, like a striking cobra.
She shoved hard and threw the thing off her. It ripped away from her and slammed into the opposite wall. Caracel chased it, slashing at it with his sword.
She stumbled against the carved relief, gulping in air, heat flooding her as she recognized the demon, its spindly legs and coarse, wiry hair a neat replica of the one she and Nales had fought on the terrace at Abiermar.
Temi demon. Second Circle. Venom barb on its tail.
Her eyes tracked up, finding its distorted, bat-like mouth, the rows of teeth that flashed in the green light. The scent of blood rose in her memory. Then, anger. Her body began to shake.
Before she could recognize what she was doing, she was moving.
Caracel made a small noise of surprise as she roared past him. Her blades cut hard into the demon’s torso, one sinking up to the hilt. She dragged on it. The demon bucked and twisted. Its scream pierced her ears like a train whistle. Blood poured over her hands, slicking her fingers. Spatter sprayed over her face.
It tried to buck her, jerk her to the side. She resisted the motion, felt Caracel try to parry behind her, heard him yelling something. Above her, the demon’s slashed and bloodied wings flared, as if it could fly away.
She screamed and shoved it against the wall.
Finally, Caracel found a way in.
His sword arced through the air and found the demon’s neck. Its shriek cut off with a gurgle. Its head rolled forward, thudded wetly down her back armor, and hit the ground.
Suddenly, everything went limp.
She jerked her blades out as the demon fell.
The tunnel grew quiet. All that moved was her and Caracel, breathing hard next to each other, the scent of blood and adrenaline thick in the air.
The demon lay in a crumpled heap in front of them, limbs bent and awkward like a dead spider. Its head sat a yard to her right, the snarling maw relaxed in death.
Slowly, she stepped away. A glance to the side took in Caracel’s concentrated face. In the green glow, his black eyes gleamed, partly reflecting the demon kill.
Farther back, Doneil and Matteo were openly gawking. The light on Matteo’s gun had flared to life again, though he kept it pointed at the ground. Doneil had half-drawn one blade, his stance clearly having stopped himself from leaping into battle.
“Stars, Catrin. Do you need to work off some anger?”
“Always,” she said. She attempted to wipe her blades off on her armored thigh and grimaced when it only smeared on the blood and dirt already there. She shoved them back into the sheaths, making a mental note to unsheathe them before it dried too much. She wiped her hands off on the nearest rock face, then picked up a jog. “We’re moving fast, right? Let’s go.”