The Hidden City (42 page)

Finch nodded, then, and showed that her diminutive spine must be made—as they often said—of steel; she bent slightly, shoulders hunching, head down, and then she built up as much speed as the short distance would allow. Her knees were off in her first attempt, and she only barely made the other edge; she foundered there for a moment, her arms cartwheeling as she found—and fought—the fear of falling, the truth of gravity.

Jewel did not touch the rope; she was afraid to grip it too tightly, to unbalance the edge upon which Finch teetered. But she saw that Carver's hands were steady, and that he had eyes for Finch. If she fell, he'd be ready.

Jewel was counting on him.

And that surprised her. She'd known him for a few hours, and the first thing he'd done was to pull a dagger on her. But he hadn't used it. Not yet. That was as much as she could hope for.

That, and that if Finch fell, his weight would somehow manage to balance hers. But Finch managed to throw herself forward, and she fell there, heavily, the thin lip of rock tinkling in small pieces into the abyss below. Jewel held the magestone. She hated to part with it.

But in the struggle between hate and necessity, there wasn't much doubt about outcome; she waited until Finch was across the divide and on her hands and knees. “Can you untie it?” she asked.

Finch nodded.

It was sort of true; it took agonizing minutes, and a few Torra phrases that were on the outer edge of earwhackingly rude, and then the rope unwound itself. But Finch was still crouched on the ground.

“I'm next,” she told Carver, as he pulled the rope in and she tried not to notice the way it slid first out of sight, into the darkness. “Finch?”

“I'm okay.”

“Good. Catch the magelight. If it rolls, it won't be hard to find.” And she threw it. Throwing the stone was easy. Finch, as aware of its value as any poor orphan could be, scrambled after it, still on hands and knees; only when it was in her hands did she rise. Holding it carefully, but not cupping it, she approached the opposite edge of the fissure.

Jewel took the rope and repeated the process of wrapping it around a waist. But it was hers, and her hands shook. She'd not yet mentioned to Rath how much heights terrified her, because she was always wary of his incredulity, and the derision it implied. He was afraid of nothing. She wanted to be like him.

Especially now.

It's not height if you can't see the bottom
, she told herself. She backed up to the same distance Finch had, and then said to Carver, looking across the divide, “I'm heavier. And clumsier.”

And then she ran. Her knees bent at the right moment, and she leaped, trailing rope, her eyes closed at the last possible instant. Finch caught her hand as she, too, teetered. Finch pulled her down.

Jewel nodded at Carver. She caught the rope around her waist, just as he had done, moving back a foot from the edge. Two feet. Three. Finch joined her, placing the stone safely on the ground, where its light could still be seen, but couldn't so easily be lost. Her hands were slight, small, and utterly still as she grabbed the rope.

“Now,” Jewel told Carver. Carver nodded, and picked up the empty pack, which Jewel had entirely forgotten.

He leaped with ease across the distance. Envy might have made her snap something at any other time—but not this one.

He untied the knot at the same time she managed the same feat at its other end, and they shoved the rope back into the pack.

“Let's go.”

Jewel almost missed the intersection. In fact, she did, and had walked ten yards before she felt the wrongness of the direction. She didn't put it into words; no point. Instead, she retraced the steps in a hurry, and found a small opening in a wall. It was just that, no more; no archway announced its presence, no stone frame formed its mouth. But this was where they had to go.

“I don't know what the ground is like,” she told him softly. “But we're close to the City, now.”

“And the Common?”

She nodded. There was a lot of prayer in the single motion, but none given voice. “These are like the first tunnels we took.”

Carver nodded again.

They began to walk. Where there was room, Finch walked by her side, wanting—drawn to—the comfort of light. But there wasn't always that much room; they walked single file, and even ducked or crouched, as the tunnel began its slow incline.

“Where is this going to come out? Storeroom?”

“I don't know.”

“Will there be people there?”

“I don't know.”

He stopped asking questions.

“You're going to have to wear something besides that dress,” Jewel told Finch, when Finch tripped on its hem for the fourth time.

Finch nodded. But her expression made clear that that something wasn't something she owned. The tunnel ended suddenly in something that looked like a door. It made Jewel nervous.

But Carver approached it, examined it, and shook his head. “Not used,” he told her.

“How can you tell?”

“The lock's rusted.”

“Great. Can you get it open?”

“Depends on how rusted.”

She waited. Finch waited with her. After he struggled for a moment, Jewel gave up and pushed him out of the way. Took pins from her hair that weren't actually of any other use, and began to work her way through; it wasn't a difficult lock. Well, the parts that
were
lock.

She thought she heard a click. It could have been a snap. Shaking her head, she put a shoulder to the door, and Carver tapped her. “Hinges,” he said, pointing.

“What about them?”

“Wrong side.”

Reversing direction, she tried to tug. Was surprised when it opened; surprised enough to fall over.

Finch came to the open door, light in her hand, and they went through into more tunnel. But this time, the ceiling seemed slightly different. Jewel began to look for the telltale sign of board or hole. She found it. “There,” she told Carver.

Carver nodded. “Me first, or you?”

“You go. You're taller.”

He gripped the edge; some of it crumbled, but he just adjusted his handhold. Then he swung his legs up, and disappeared. His head reappeared. “A basement, I think. You coming?” And he offered them a hand.

She sent Finch up next, but not before throwing Carver the light. She followed.

The basement—and it was that—was dark and somewhat musty; there wasn't much in it. Wood. She looked to the side and saw it then: a chute. It was a relief.

“We go up that way,” she told him.

He nodded.

There was a wooden hatch over the chute. It was rotten, and it was nailed down; clearly, this wasn't used. But she had some leverage, now, and with Carver at her side, she managed to push it up, sticking her dagger between two nails and using it like a pry bar. Rath would have been grinding his teeth, if he were here.

But as it popped open, she froze.

She could hear voices.

One of them was Rath's. That one didn't bother her. But the other two? Like the man at Taverson's,
everything
was wrong with their voices. Everything. And there were two. And Rath was tiring.

 

He fought his way down the small alley, bleeding from a dozen insignificant cuts. Tallied, they were not as insignificant as he would have liked, but they bothered him less than the certainty that they were meant to tire, not to kill; killing him should have been simple. His blade had connected with something any number of times; he couldn't see the damage he caused—if any—but he could hear a brief snarl, some hint of annoyance.

Had the alley been wider, he would have drawn sword, but it wasn't, and he had been taught to let the terrain dictate the fight. Not that his teacher had ever chosen to cover this particular example; he had, like Rath, assumed that his attackers would be visible.

Rath took a step back, listening. Straining to hear motion, something across the ground, something scraping the walls to either side—any hint, any clue, of where his attacker was, and from where he might choose to strike.

What he heard instead was a shout:

“Left, now!”

And he recognized the voice instantly, obeyed it instinctively, flattening himself against the left wall.

She came up behind him, making far more noise than either of his attackers, her shoes slapping the stone and wood to either side. He would have shouted at her, would have given some warning, would have told her to run—but she spoke again. “Dagger, Rath, low right!”

She could
see
them.

She could see them, and had figured out—somehow—that he couldn't. She held a dagger in either hand as she moved just at the periphery of his vision, her arms too thin and too lacking in strength to do real damage.

But too thin or not, here she was, her head barely brushing his shoulder as she moved forward into an alley that could not safely contain two people standing abreast.

 

They were two men, tall men, dark-haired and dressed in torn clothing that might once have been finer; it was hard to tell. They weren't wearing armor, so they weren't guards; they weren't wearing anything that made them part of any organization Jewel knew. Then again, she wasn't Rath, she knew damn few.

Her hands gripped dagger hilts as if they were rope and she were in danger of plummeting. No, as if they were rope, and someone at the other end was depending on her ability to
hold on
. Her hair was in her eyes, but she barely noticed; she couldn't take her eyes from the men for an instant.

Because she
knew
they didn't want to kill Rath. And that they were perfectly willing to kill
her
.

They didn't seem to be bleeding as Rath was, but he'd hit them, no doubt. They were only as wide as Rath, but they had chosen to enter the alley in single file. She could see the second at a distance, a body's fall, no more. He was watching her intently. He was smiling.

They were
both
shimmering, as if she could see them through a curtain of orange and gray. She hoped that Carver and Finch had stayed put, because she didn't give much for their odds. Or hers, if it came to that.

She twisted to the right, bending slightly, as the man who had been attacking Rath drove his blade toward her vitals. He moved so fast, she hadn't seen him strike, but her body was already contorting, and her dagger struck him in the bend of elbow before he could pivot to take advantage of her odd position.

Had she been stronger, she'd have cut off his arm.

As it was, he snarled some and withdrew, but not much. And she saw that whatever she'd managed to do, it wasn't quite enough to make him bleed. Wondered if, in fact, he bled at all. It wasn't a comforting thought.

It was all the thought she had time for.

She lost sight of Rath, and of the man attacking her; she had a glimpse of the alley, of the things that lay beyond it, of her hair in her eyes, the folds of her tunic, things that she
could
see when she was moving, and moving again, in something that was too awkward to be a dance, and far less graceful.

But each time, she avoided being skewered; avoided losing fingers or hand, avoided losing an eye. Everything Rath had taught her had vanished; she was Jewel Markess, and she relied entirely on instinct, on the things that came so quickly, she had no words for them.

She wanted to tell Rath to run.

Rath moved instead, his blade coming in where hers did, and striking in a different place. All of her blows were awkward, and she couldn't see what Rath was doing clearly enough to judge his—but his had a force behind them that years of training would never give her.

And even that—it wasn't enough. Whatever it was the men hid behind, it seemed to protect them.

She could do this for a while. Longer than she could have before she'd met Rath; she'd had food, and shelter, and warmth to strengthen her, to give her endurance. But not long enough. The men didn't even look tired. But why would they? They had the advantage of—of—she paused. It almost killed her.

Light saved her life.

Strange light, a different color, something that fell from the heights like grains of shining sand, like solid rain. She heard words follow in its wake, and she looked up as Rath shoved her roughly to the side; she could see, at the height of three stories, someone looking down.

The words he had spoken were haunting because she could hear them clearly, and would never be able to repeat them; they lingered in the air as the light trickled out—from his hands. His hands, palm down, shining palely.

The rest of him was dark as night—darker, really; the light that he had cast out did nothing to illuminate him. But granular, those specks of light began to eat away at the gray-and-orange nimbus that surrounded the two would-be killers, until neither color remained.

Jewel could see the men as clearly as she had before—but now that the orange-gray curtain was gone, Rath could see them as well. She started to speak; the men themselves paused as they realized that they were suddenly no longer protected. They both carried long knives, heavy belts, wrist guards; they both wore boots that seemed too light for the season. They hadn't bothered with dark clothing, although in this light the exact colors they'd chosen were muted; Jewel tried to place the style of dress, and failed.

One looked up, and Jewel looked with him; the man upon the building to the right leaped down into the alley, his hand grazing the building's side for the whole of his descent, as if he weighed nothing, less than nothing, and air was a chute he could follow. He landed in perfect silence, and in his hands, she could see weapons. They were daggers, but they were oddly shaped, things that she might have expected to find below ground, where all ancient things lay.