CHAPTER 90

The short, slippery flight of steps is unlit. Where magical fire used to burn there are now empty sconces illuminated by the light from the larger corridor outside. I stop at the top of the stairs, gazing into the full, oily darkness, suppressing a building shiver.

Something is wrong.

Medrein senses it too. I feel him tense behind me, a small intake of breath in preparation for suggesting a wiser course of action.

“Don’t,” I say. “I have to know if she’s all right.”

“Then let’s hurry,” he answers. “I saw a servant heading for the Godtouched.”

He takes the first few steps down the stairs. I fumble with Amelia’s dagger before raising it up and Creating Fire on the blade’s tip. Flickering lights dance down the passage, throwing Medrein’s shadow in front of him. As a last ditch safety net, I throw in a Hunch.

Cautiously, step by step, we descend. My father walks with purpose, shoulder dragging against the smooth rock, ears perked for movement above and below.

There’s nothing. Nothing at all but the festive boom echoing down the hallway, muted by the heavy stones into a distant moan. The absence of danger makes my breath pick up. My eyes swivel from shadow to shadow, searching for something to worry about. Anything material, anything that doesn’t spring from fear and imagination.

Medrein reaches the bottom step and peeks out. He turns back to me with a frown and a shake of his head.

“Here,” I say, passing him Amelia’s fiery dagger.

Medrien takes it without a word and steps out into the corridor. I follow wit Rue at the ready, shaped into a longer, thinner blade.

The corridor is empty. Devoid of light, devoid of life. No sound makes its way to us, all the humming of rituals, the banging of metals, the incantations, the activity I’d grown to associate with each private room, silenced.

“Something is wrong,” I whisper. “It’s never this silent.”

Medrein turns to me, a question in his broken face. Before he asks it, his expression changes, grows resigned.

“Which one is hers?”

I point. We move.

Hilde’s room is silent, but that has been so since Meriana ordered her to stay put and left her rune scratched behind on the wood. Ever so cautiously, I press my ear against the door and hold my breath.

Nothing.

Nothing.

And then… a rustle.

Yes.

I look back at Medrein and nod. Guiding Rue into a lockpick shape is easier this time. My heart drums rapidly as I work the simple lock by instinct alone, but when I turn Rue, hear the click explode in the silent corridor, nothing happens. The door remains stuck fast.

“It’s blocked,” I whisper. “I can’t—”

I feel the movement before I see it. Medrein steps back and raises a foot just as the faintest sound travels to me from beyond the door. The next moment it crashes inward, the crack of splintering wood bursting like thunder in the silence, sending the bolt-lock flying into the room.

The door breaks open and light streams out. Hilde’s room is illuminated by a couple glittering candle, and in the center someone waits with a dagger raised.

I lock eyes with them. A familiar face, one I’d seen following me through the keep, openly or in the shadows. One of Teryon’s guards. The dagger flashes at the same time that Medrein pushes me to the side, but I’m in no danger. I watch as the metal plunges into the guard’s neck, dragging a fountain of blood and the weak, pathetic cry of a dying body.

With armor re-reddened and dead, wide-open eyes, the guard falls to the flagstones and blood travels in a stream from her neck to the edge of the room.

“Hells,” Medrein hisses through clenched teeth. “Why?”

“To warn them,” I say.

Realization dawns. Valkas sent people into the places I was most likely to visit if I remained in the keep. Medrein’s cell. Hilde’s room.

“They were to kill themselves to reform somewhere they could signal Valkas.”

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But what did they do to Hilde? What would they have done to Medrein?

Possibilities list themselves before my mind’s eye. Disused rooms, Valkas’ office, places I’ve never even seen or now about. Behind them all, lies the enormity of another realization: it doesn’t matter. I don’t have the time to find her, not now when Valkas knows where I am.

I look up at Medrein. His face says everything that I’m thinking. I’m vaguely surprised that he doesn’t press the issue, doesn’t force me to take the only decision.

There are steps above. People approaching, burdened by armor.

“We should leave,” I say.

The relief is plain in Medrein’s eyes. I reach out to touch his arm as I turn the amulet around, the mysterious phrase showing bright against the gold.

“Carmynae Escamut duam Dael Nodrimu,” the nonsense syllables stumble hesitatingly from my lips.

I’m sorry, Hilde.

“Hollow House.”

I close my eyes in preparation for the green flash and wait for the sudden lurch. Medrein tenses to my side, alert, expectant.

And then nothing. I open my eyes. We’re still in the cell. My father shoots me a worried look.

“It’s… It’s supposed to work – it worked before!” I say. “Carmynae. Escamut duam. Dael Nodrimu! Hollow House!”

The space around us remains constant, unchanged. Only the noise travelling down to us, people running, metal clinking, grows closer, more urgent.

“Fuck!” I yell. “No, no!” I check the diamond, which shines with clear, steady light, still bright and strong. “It’s charged up! I don’t know… I don’t know!”

Cursing, Medrein rushes out into the corridor and I run after him. To our left, the stairs are suddenly alive with whispered orders. To our right, the corridor remains empty, calm, unaware of the tragedy that’s about to develop.

Father has taken up a fighting stance. In his state, I don’t think he could withstand a single Godtouched, let alone how many are charging down the steps.

Malco? Rue. Should we kill them?

I’m scared. I pull Father’s arm and run to the farthest end of the corridor, heart slamming against my ribcage. He follows with heavy steps.

“Here,” I say. “I have a room here, a laboratory. Like Mother’s…”

My laboratory is one of the last doors. It has a lock. It has ingredients. Maybe I can…

I can…

There’s no exit, dummy. They’ll catch you here, even if there isn’t a guard inside waiting to jump you the second you open that door.

I hesitate, hand on the latch. I give the door a little push and it begins to swing inwards. A moment later, a cold spike pierces the back of my head – or that’s what it feels like as Hunch activates. I jump back, pushing Medrein against the wall, and an arc of pure darkness passes between me and the laboratory door and cuts a length off the wall at the end of the corridor.

At the bottom of the stairs, swinging the Black Sword up and levelling it for a sideways cut, is Valkas. His white smile shines in the half-darkness. A couple of armored people pile up behind him, Teryon among them.

“Malco!” Valkas says jovially. “Glad I caught you. And Medrein as well! Did something terrible happen to dear Meriana, I wonder?”

“Get ready,” Medrein says under his breath.

“Ready?”

“Something I’ll find out shortly,” Valkas continues as neither of us replies. “Come on. Come quietly, Challenger of mine, and you’ll both be spared.”

“Ready!” Medrein hisses.

“Father…”

I want to say we should do as Valkas says. We should surrender. We should go quietly. We’ve gone as far as we can, and we’re trapped.

One look at Medrein’s face is enough to wipe the thoughts from my mind. There is no going back here. No universe in which my father turns tail.

Instead, he turns to face Valkas.

The guildleader’s smile winks closed. More people are piling on behind them, a whole host of guardspeople. Some carry torches; others’ hands are aglow with spells being readied. I catch sneers and dirty looks. I suddenly realize that power doesn’t matter. Strength doesn’t matter, and levels don’t matter either. This is what it feels to face Godtouched. To look upon the face of your enemies and know that not a single one of them is the least worried about consequences, least of which their leader.

Valkas strides forward, detaching himself from the group and holding the Black Sword up at an angle.

“I said come quietly, Malco. Lay down your weapons.”

“I’m not going with you,” I say. I don’t know if the courage is mine of my father’s, but it’s there, a warm and steady furnace. “I’m not your Challenger.”

“Malco, Malco,” Valkas says. “We talked about this. Challengers without a Challenge are only Champions, aren’t they? And we all know what I think about Cham—”

“Go fuck yourself!”

I say it loud, almost shouting, so Valkas’ lackeys hear it. Because this way, I cease to be a scared little boy trying his best to free his father. I become the one thing that Valkas cannot tolerate. Something existing outside of his authority.

To my side, Medrein rumbles in approval.

If we’re doing this, we might as well do it properly.

I raise Rue, pointed and sharp. A giddiness pervades me now. As if, after a long and twisting road, I could finally see the end.

A horrible end. But an end still.

And Valkas knows it too. His face is set, his jaw fixed. And then it begins. The Black Sword descends. The oily black smile slices through the air.

I lower myself to the ground, feet ready to throw me aside, but feel Medrein’s unexpected hand on my shoulder. His strength is irresistible, the push might have come from a charging ox. I’m thrown to the side, crash into the laboratory’s half-open door and roll on the floor, dizzy.

A cry pierces through my daze. When I look up, Amelia’s dagger, still afire, is lying on the floor, out on the corridor. Lit from underneath, Medrein’s expression is a mask of pain. He grips his arm, from where more blood has flown to join the rivers he has already bled.

No.

The second arc of darkness cuts deep into his leg. I scramble to my feet, armor bending with my limbs like a second skin. I reach out for my father, screaming.

The third arc is thinner, more precise. It flashes before my eyes, passing in front of the lab’s open doorway like a swallow in flight.

It leaves a strange grimace in Father’s face. His eyes are fixed on mine. His mouth a little open, as if surprised.

Very slowly, his head tumbles from his shoulders, slaps the stone floors, rolls until it’s facing down, like my father is attempting to hide some secret shame.

I do not know what sounds I make. They mix too profoundly with Valkas’ steps, approaching. And coming from far away, growing larger and closer, the roar and boom and groaning and straining of all the amassed Godtouched envelops me like a cocoon.