Chapter 28 - Mother Mayaz

The basement smelled of stale blood and worse. I feared for the girls until I saw the hanging carcasses of pigs draining onto the runnels in the floor, and realized this basement must connect with the butcher’s across the alley. Had we known that we could have just come that way. What I wouldn’t give to be a seeker skilled in the suit of ways.

A single, low oil lamp lit the room, and the runnels through the floor ran to a central drain that must have emptied out into the undercity.

Mithra, Lenise, and the others were tied up, bindings cast over the same rails holding the pigs. It forced them to stand, which they must have been doing for hours while we sat in the pub waiting for it to get darker. I cursed at that dalliance. But we’d needed the web wizard to weaken under the light of the dragon ghosts. Nothing to be done now but get on with it.

I moved to Mithra first, who mumbled down at me through the gag forced between her teeth. Her wrists were chafed and bloody where the ropes had bit into them. I sliced through them with my knife, and the tall plane-touched woman collapsed to her knees, rubbing her wrists. I knelt down and pulled the gag from her mouth.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“What does it look like?” I asked, incredulous.

I moved to Lenise and got her sorted. I pulled the five of knaves from her dress and added it back into my deck, but between the beating it had taken and the three of dragons being skewered, the deck really needed some love. Annalisa freed two more of the girls, as well as a male elf that must have been mistaken for Lenise.

“We have to go,” said Mithra.

“I know,” I said. “The Mayazians will be here any second. We’ll be out the butcher’s and back to Barrowdown.”

“It’s not them, it’s—“

My deck rumbled within my pocket. I felt it reach out and steal a bit of my will. It shook within my coat, and a single card sprang out. I stared at it. Mithra stared at it. The Planes, inverted. Danger, wrong turns. Our eyes met. The deck had just performed some sort of auto-reading. I’d never heard of such a thing. Then again, maybe it only happened to those seekers in mortal danger.

I reached down to pick it up, palm down on the floor.

Scrape, scrape.

I jerked my hand away. What in the hells below had that been? But I didn’t have time to consider it. Heavy boots began pounding down the steps, both from the hideout and the butcher’s shop opposite. I pulled my knife out and put my back to Annalisa. A half-dozen of the Mayazian cutthroats fanned out on either side of us, looking a bit like the wrapped corpses themselves as they stood between the pigs in thick, sailcloth coats. But they weren’t the worst of it. Not by half.

The light from the oil lantern dimmed even further, seeming to flee in its little glass enclosure. I heard heeled footfalls on the stairs. These were sharper and more measured than the mad stomps of knife-men in a hurry. And the rustle of fine cloth accompanied them.

The cutthroats parted for a tall figure emerging into the light. She was tall, taller than an elf or a plane touched. She wore a wide-brimmed hat that kept her face in shadows, but I could see the slit pupils that betrayed drakkyn blood somewhere in her line. Her nails had been laquered black and filed to points, and she used them to sweep a curtain of black hair back behind slim shoulders laid bare by a black, ragged dress out of fashion by five years or more. A crown of four cards burned above her brow, but all of them were shrouded, as if seen through murky brine. I couldn’t read her at all!

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Annalisa didn’t hesitate She launched herself at the woman who could only be Mother Mayaz.

So much for being in the upper city.

Mother Mayaz flicked her fingers, and a deck of cards fanned out in front of her. A wave of force blew through the room. I knew that spell. The four of spears! Mother Mayaz was a Soul Seeker! Annalisa was tossed away, and several of the pig carcasses tore free from their hooks, showering us with blood and bone. I took a nasty cut just below my eye that stung as the bone chip tore into flesh. I landed on the side of my face, blood spraying onto the tunnels in the floor. The light of the wane dragons wouldn’t diminish her magic if it came from the Deck of Wills. We’d made a terrible error.

Mother Mayaz spread her hands out, touching two separate cards. Her shadow from the light of the oil lamp took on a life of its own, sliding across the wall, down the floor, and locking us to the floor where it touched. I tried to pull away to regain my feet, but the surface of the shadow held fast to whatever it touched—including my face. Pushing my hand against it only resulted in that becoming trapped as well. I looked into that inky, black shadow and regretted it immediately. It started to whisper to me in languages I couldn’t begin to describe.

A pair of her scaled thugs brought a beaten and battered Gron and tossed him bodily to the floor.

With her shadow diverted, Mother Mayaz stepped into the dim light. What I’d taken for drakkyn blood was something else entirely, something stranger. Her large watery eyes and sallow flesh gave way to an even further progressed skin shingles, and striations on her long neck gave the impression of gills, of all things. There’s a lot of different races that make up Dragonmaw. From the noble races that hail from the Crooked Spine Bastard Vomiting, to more exotic peoples borne across the salt sea on trading ships. But this was something I’d never seen before.

“My, my, what flies has our little web caught?” she asked. “Who should be so bold as to challenge me in Hollowdown?” She loomed over the four of us. This close, I could see the ritual scars that covered her skin. Annalisa still struggled against the shadow, tail whipping furiously through the air. “The boxer? Hmm? Well, we shall—”

She noticed me. In a flash she was down on all fours, face shoved close, and inhaling deeply. “What are you, my pet? Gods below, I can smell the fel witch on you!”

I tried to pull away as her tongue flicked out, dragging across my face. It was long and thin, like a snake’s. And it burned, as though her spit was venomous. She pulled back, stiffened as if shocked by a drakkyn’s living lightning. But a wide smile of sharp teeth split her face. Her eyes unfocused. “After all these years,” she hissed. “I’d almost forgotten what she felt like.”

My blood ran cold. There could only be one person she meant: Margot Bethane. The dread witch of Dragonmaw, dead these three years.

Mother Mayaz writhed in ecstasy. I wished I could shed my skin. I felt dirty, tainted by the blood of the villainess. That some trace of her still persisted… it was unconscionable.

One of her goons stepped up. “What do you want done with ‘em?” the woman asked.

Mother Mayaz shook herself out of her reverie. She rose to her feet with a queer, boneless grace. “Hang them up. No sense wasting good meat.”

“Devilborn make for bitter meals,” complained the lieutenant. But she moved to comply, jerking Annalisa’s arm free and wrapping it with a binding.

Mother Mayaz pointed at me and did a reading with her own deck. I could feel her will slither into the cards in a way that was both alien and repulsive. She pointed a finger with a sharp-filed nail at me. “That one comes with us. Whatever his connection to Lady Bethane, I must know it. The convergence is near, and he has a part to play.”

“What’s she on about?” mumbled Gron.

“No idea,” I lied. But I could hear her voice in my head. Feel her fingertips searing my skin. Name thyself. Her voice was as clear in my head now as the day she’d carved it into my memory. Just thinking about it made my heart want to hammer its way out of my chest.

Some of the goons moved to pull me from the shadow trap. But as they did, I felt that peculiar scrape scrape through the floor. Both Mithra and Annalisa started to thrash and shout.

Mother Mayaz cursed. “Control them!”

But I was looking down. Down through the drain in the middle of the floor where my blood dripped. A mouth had opened on the opposite side, and my blood dribbled onto a fat, black tongue. I stared. A fetid, acidic belch rumbled up through the grate, making my eyes water and bringing silence in the cellar as everyone in the room looked down to the source of the sound. The mouth disappeared, replaced by an eye the size of my fist that focused on me, and then slid to the others. It settled on the elf, Lenise.

The floor of the cellar rumbled.