The Hidden City (51 page)

But Jewel hopped back down the stairs, grabbed her arm, and drew her up them; the soles of Finch's shoes, half unattached to their uppers, flapped and made uncomfortable noise as she struggled just to keep up. She didn't let go until they reached the last door; it was at the top of the thin flight, and it was closed.

It was also, to Jewel's eye, old. The handle was almost black with the tarnish of age and neglect—if it had ever been anything but neglected. She had a feeling that the powerful didn't often take these stairs, either up or down.

“Locked?” Carver asked, as she stood there, catching her breath. It was silent again. She twisted the knob, and shook her head.

“We're waiting for an invitation?”

Jewel gave him a look, and he laughed. There was fear in the sound, but most of it was pure defiance.

“That looks like an old lady glare,” he told her, as the sound faded. She was surprised at how much better it made her feel, because she had never quite heard a laugh like it. Certainly not from her Oma, whose laughter, when it had come, had come most often with barbs and bitterness.

Your Oma came from a harsher place than this,
Jewel's mother used to say, in the days when that laughter had bothered Jewel.
And kindness was frowned upon by her gods
.

Jewel wondered about that as she pulled the door open. How much harsher could a place be, and still have gods at all?

Rath had time to draw the second dagger, but only barely; he certainly didn't have time to wield it. The fire that was now consuming the man he had fought continued to burn—but the fire that suddenly shot toward him in a swirling orange-and-yellow beam had nothing to do with the weapon.

If he had wondered—briefly—whether or not he faced mages, he stopped then. He almost stopped breathing, and had it not been for the sudden impact of one of Harald's men, he would have been a pyre.

Instead, the fire stove in a wall. About nine feet of it, as if it were a fist.

Rath had time to see the wreckage that might have been him; he had time to turn his gaze in the direction from which the flame had sprouted. He did not have time to attack the creature, and the dagger he carried was so ridiculously designed that he didn't risk a throw; it wouldn't have gone far, and he wasn't about to be parted from the only weapon he had that he was certain would work.

The man whose palms were still cloaked in flame had eyes that were black; if there had ever been whites there, they were lost. The fire devoured his clothing, deformed his armor, washing away all signs and symbols of things that were merely mortal.

What was left in the fire's wake, what walked at its heart, was something entirely different.

Rath could speak the Northern tongue to a lesser degree; he understood approximately half of what Harald shouted.

The important half. He was sounding the retreat in his deep and resonant tones.

The creature—there was no other word for it—looked at Rath, and only Rath, as he and Harald began to back their way down the wide hall, watching the fire burn. Almost casually, it peeled away some section of that flame and threw it.

Rath lifted his dagger almost automatically—damn fool thing to do—and the fire parted as it sheared the edge; the edge was glowing, faintly, like sunlight.

But what that fire struck, it burned, and flame, not wood or plaster or paper, was the shape of the building that contained them all.

“Harald!” Rath shouted, still wielding the dagger, “get the kids—get them out!” And he continued to back away. His weaponsmasters had always said that the difference between a retreat and a rout was the difference between living and dying. The creature watched him, and began to walk slowly toward them all, keeping the distance between the moving Northerners and himself static.

Chapter Fifteen

THE DOOR OPENED into a dark hall. If there was sunlight in the rainy season, none of it reached this place; not even through the gaps between doors and floor. The hall was a narrow thing, with floors that would have creaked at the weight of a mouse; they groaned as Jewel stepped on the boards. She reached into her pouch and pulled out the magestone that was her prized possession. Passed a shaking hand over it, speaking words of illumination. It brightened.

And the sounds from below drifted up through the floor, muted but unmistakable.

She stopped; Carver stopped as well, although he did it by once again running into her back. “Jay?” Quiet voice now, shorn of humor.

“It's started,” she said. “We don't have much time.”

They looked down a hall packed with small doors; each one could have opened into a closet. She counted twelve; the hall wasn't long. At the other end, however, was a door.

She ran toward it, ignoring all the others, and heard the floor's evidence that her companions were following. The door wasn't locked, which was good; it was stuck, which was bad. In this weather, old doors and warped frames seldom went together well.

She tugged on it for a while, and then Carver shouldered her aside. Which would have been more comforting had he Arann's brawn behind him. As it was, he strained at the door for a moment, and then Jewel tried to add her weight to his.

When it did open, they all fell over—because Finch was literally right behind them.

It was helpful, because while they were disentangling themselves and finding their feet, the other side of the door didn't seem as threatening. But when they stood, they hovered in the frame for a moment, because in its fashion, it was.

It opened, not into another hall, but into a vast room; the room had rails in the center, and odd diagrams on the wall. They might have looked like paintings, but they had no frames; they were drawn on heavy parchment, something that might have once been attached to a very large cow. They covered the wall opposite the door, and in front of those drawings was a single long table with no chairs to gird it. To her left—east, west, north, and south had been swallowed—were other doors.

There was carpet here, but it was the same faded carpet that adorned the hall from the foyer. A few more footprints weren't going to make much difference.

“Jay,” Carver said sharply, as she walked toward the far wall with its lines and its unframed drawings, squinting, waiting to see what they resolved themselves into. She gave him a quick glance. “Time?” He said, the single word urgent.

She nodded, but she walked in the wrong direction: instead of the doors that led elsewhere, which were much wider and much finer than the one they'd entered, she continued to approach the drawings. And frowned. “They're . . . maps,” she said at last.

“What?”

“Maps. They're supposed to be pictures that tell you where things are.”

“What things?”

“Streets. Stuff like that.”

He frowned. “You can read that?”

She started to nod, and then stopped. Because, she realized, she
couldn't
. She could see that there were street lines, and could even see where names had been written in dark ink beneath them; she could see the squares and ovals that must have been buildings, and they, too, contained words. What she couldn't do was read them.

But she could recognize, in their shape and form, some of the letters that she had seen on the few items Rath had chosen to show her. “Carver, give me that knife,” she told him.

“You've got one—”

“Sorry. I forgot.” She drew the knife Rath had given her, the knife she wasn't accustomed to wielding, and took a closer look at just how these drawings were fixed to the wall. Nails. Several in each.

“We need these,” she told him firmly.

“What, all of them?”

She nodded. “There are only three.”

“They're not small.”

“Just shut up and cut them down, okay?
Don't
cut the lines, whatever you do; just cut around the nails.”

He looked as if he would argue, which would have been bad. But he didn't. Instead, while Jewel worked, he chose the map farthest from her and began his own work as well. He was better with the knife, even if hers was sharper; either that or his map hadn't required so many nails to hold it in place.

They met across the third one, moving toward each other in a frenzy. It was hard to get the knife under and around the topmost nails; their flat metal heads were high above the ground.

Carver had dropped the first map, just as Jewel had done, in a heap on the floor. When the last one came down, Jewel caught it, and noticed that Finch was on her knees, rolling the other two carefully into what looked like thin carpets.

“Heavy?” Jewel asked carefully.

Finch shook her head. “Not too heavy. I can carry them.” When Jewel opened her mouth, she added, “And I can't wield a knife.”

Carver said, “She's got a point. Do we really need those?”

Jewel looked at them, hanging over Finch's slender arms as she cradled them. “I think so,” she said at last, hesitantly. “I don't always have the answers, Carver. I don't always know.”

“But you—”

“I don't always get them
in time
.” He wasn't stupid. But he held her gaze for just a little longer, and something dangerously close to pity seemed to flicker in his eyes. “But—I hate to see them burn.”

“Better them than us,” he muttered, his expression becoming one she was more familiar with. She felt a pang of something like gratitude.

She had to agree with that. And being agreeable took a bit of work, most days. “Doors,” she said abruptly, and looked toward them. Two doors, side-by-side, wood gleaming like something new. Brass handles, as well—and they were either new or well-tended; she suspected the former. No one seemed to take much care with this place.

Carver approached the doors first; they were rectangular, and a little tall. Then again, the frames that held them were tall; those, she suspected, were as old as the house. Wood trim trailed out from either side of the doors in a thin, dark line.

She pushed them open, and they opened outward, into a larger hall.

Carver frowned as he joined her. “You smell it?” He asked.

She nodded. Smoke. The not-distant-enough scent of wood burning. “Finch, stay with us. Don't get lost. And don't let those doors close.”

They entered the hall quickly. This far from the fire—and Jewel
knew
, for a moment, where it burned—the smoke hadn't yet managed to reach them. The hall looked clear; were it not for the smell, she could have pretended they were imagining things.

But pretense took time, and she'd wasted enough of it. There were two doors in the hall, and each was tall and wide. Jewel approached the nearest door, and twisted the handle; it stuck. She knelt instantly beside it, and pulled out the finer tools of Rath's less savory trade: lockpicks.

Carver watched her as she worked. She wished—for just a minute—that it were Rath, instead, because she made no mistakes; she worked quickly, but everything fell into place as she did, and that almost never happened.

She'd have to be grateful for the lessons; Rath wouldn't see the results. She heard the mechanisms inside the door click, and she stood. “Ready?” she whispered, almost to herself.

She pushed the door open.

The room was a much larger room, and perhaps, in a different life, it had been a very fine one; what remained was in no way fine. There was a large bed, yes, and a large standing cupboard—what had Rath called them?—on one wall; there was a window with real glass, and with equally real bars, through which gray light poured. There were curtains, but they were tasseled, held back.

And there was a girl.

She wasn't on the bed, or even under it; she sat against the far wall. Her hair was long and dark; it was also matted; some of it clung to her face, and some to her shirt. Her eyes were the bruised of beating, not lack of sleep, and her lip was split. Her wrists were also cut, but not deeply.

She looked up as they entered, and her eyes were the same color as Jewel's—the brown of Southern descent. They were not flat and lifeless; she hadn't withdrawn. She was dressed, but the clothing was tattered.

She frowned, seeing Jewel, seeing Carver. The frown thinned as she saw Finch, and her eyelids closed over that dark black-brown as her head sagged forward into her arms.

But Finch said, “We've come to get you out.” She spoke in Torra.

The eyes flickered open.

“And we don't have much time,” Jewel added, speaking in Torra as well. She looked over her shoulder. “They've set fire to the damn building, and it's going to burn quickly.”

The girl's grin was a lopsided, bitter thing—if it weren't for the curve of her lips, Jewel wouldn't have identified it as a smile. “You brought an ax or a pry bar?”