Wasteland King (17 page)

T
he Ragged plunged clatterfoot down the hall, something behind her snorting heavily, its foul breath brushing her nape. It wore rags of raspberry cloth, and its horned turtle-head had been barely glimpsed before Robin fled its stamping approach. It wasn't a true minotaur, of course, the survivors of those horned creatures were of Unseelie and rarely left their blackgrass pastures near the Great Howe. It had only one stubby horn, and that was on its chin, but its eerie darting speed reminded her of an illustration of the great bull-creatures from a vast leatherbound tome in Summer's library, its painted lines moving with almost-animal grace.

This thing bellowed in a deep agonized voice, its new-grown hooves stamping heavily, and the pixies darted before Robin, beckoning. Whether they knew what she was after or simply meant to help her escape she didn't know, because the same tug of instinct that had brought her down into this nasty hole was shrieking at her to
run
, for the love of Stone and Throne, and not look back.

It gibbered and slavered behind her, and the pixies lighted on Robin's hair and arms, plucking at black velvet as if to help her along. She resisted the urge to put her head down—that was a good way to get trapped in a hall-end box
or
run straight into a wall and daze herself. The pixies pointed left and she took that turning, and there was a door at the end of the new hall. Screams echoed from either side, and one of the doors burst open, a small, frail woman with a shock of white hair staggering out. Long sleeves flapped at the end of her skinny arms, and for a moment Robin thought she had grown tentacles before she recognized a straitjacket.

There was no time to wonder how the old woman had burst free; Robin almost knocked her over in her headlong rush. The woman's face, distorted with a never-ending scream—did she even need to
breathe?
—flashed past and was gone, and Robin skidded, the light frantic tattoo of her footstops almost lost in the din.

“
NOT MAD!
” the old woman yelled, and a bright violet flash filled the hall. Robin fumbled at the door, scraping her fingers on thick, cracked paint as she tried to push the lever down.

“
KEPT ME HERE, NOT MAD NOT MAD!
” the woman yelled again, and the beast chasing Robin roared. There was a
thump
and a wet sticky snapping sound, and the pixies darted for the door-lock, chiming in the Old Language. The lock yielded happily, Robin yanked on the door—which
still
refused to budge before she figured out she had to
push
instead and tumbled into a dim, malodorous stairwell, slamming the door and fumbling at the lock from this side. She found the syllables she wanted, spat them, and a golden spark crackled from her lips.

That's never happened before either.
She didn't have time to worry about it, though.

These stairs only went down, into the basement below.

Robin let out a harsh half sob. A titanic impact on the other side of the door broke the safety glass in its narrow vertical window, and the thing's bleeding snout jammed against the chickenwire that held the shards in. Robin flinched aside, groping for the banister. It was sticky, almost damp, and the stitch in her side was a vicious claw.

Nowhere to go but down. The thing at the door scrabbled for purchase, its snorting and heaving eclipsing any other noise. Pixies, their indigo light-globes brightening to summersky blue, whirled around her sunwise-deosil, and she could see the end of the linoleum, the stairs turning to ancient, crumbling wood. Sweat poked and prickled under her arms, along her ribs.

Robin pitched herself forward, hoping none of the stairs would break and force her to leap into the darkness, trusting the chantment on her heels.

I shall give thee hooves that will not falter
, Morische the Cobbler had said, and he'd wrought well. Still, they couldn't grant her flight.

The stairs turned and she turned with them, the pixies giving her enough light to avoid stumbling, hopping nimbly over the holes of missing steps. The almost-minotaur hit the door again, and dust pattered down, fine as sand.

Let's hope it holds
. She followed the pixies' urging, their tiny faces pictures of astonished excitement. They settled in her hair again, along her sleeves, darted before her, swirling above her head in a complicated almost-pattern.

She found the bottom with a jolt, a cavern opening around her, and stumbled on sterile earth that had not seen sunlight in many a year before her shoes sent tingles up her calves, righting and steadying her. Pixies arrowed forward, pointing, and it was
cold
. Her breath didn't plume in the freeze; it was a different branch of chill than Unwinter's. Robin shivered, heard splintering overhead.

The pixies halted over a piece of dirt, no different than the rest. Robin glanced around, the darkness pressing close. The mortals didn't store anything down here, they'd simply built upward. Pixies darted down, shifting tiny handfuls of dirt, Robin fell to her knees and began to claw at the dry-crumbling powder. Small stones rattled aside, she spoke a word in the Old Language and flinched as another golden spark popped from her lips. It didn't
hurt
, but it was downright disconcerting.

Maybe, instead of breaking her voice, she'd just frayed whatever rein she had on it? She was able to speak without letting it loose, but how long would that last? Ending up mute by default, afraid to say anything because the massive destructive music might burst free—

Worry about that later. Right now, dig
. The dirt all but jumped away from her hands, chantment behaving with unaccustomed force, and her fingertips struck something strange.

A wooden box, its top so rotten it crumbled to dust as she scrabbled around it. Inside, fraying gossamer silksheen wrapped around a thin curved shape, sidhe fabric of an unfamiliar pattern.

The shape all but leapt toward her hands. Had it been rising from wherever Puck Goodfellow buried it? It
had
to have been deeper than this, and the accretion of time and earth should have just shoved it down further with every passing mortal year. And yet, the mad mortals overhead might have worked their own chantment, and a piece of a great wyrm would be drawn to the hot scent of prey.

Or—and this caused another shudder—maybe it rose through the dirt because the daughter of the one who had buried it was near?

The cloth crumbled too, turning to cobwebs so old they lacked stickiness. Robin stared at a plain wooden hilt wrapped with age-darkened, oiled thongs. The sheath was of stamped leather too fine-grained to be animal
or
human hide.

Sidhe-skin clothed this blade. She turned it in her hands, carefully, in case it wanted to slip loose. A small tug on the hilt, and an inch of crystalline glitter stung her dark-adapted eyes. Pixies cowered, chiming in alarm, and she hurriedly shoved the blade back into its home.

Great. Now she just had to find a way
out
with her prize. The thumping from overhead had ominously ceased.

“Out,” she whispered. “A way out.”

Pixies scattered, then clustered her again, drawing her on. The only other sidhe she'd seen them display this amount of care for…

… Had been Puck Goodfellow.

Well, that answered that. Maybe, with the Fatherless dead or Twisted past recovery, they were paying attention to his bloodline now. Robin shuddered at the thought, following their soft urgings.

Ah.
The ground sloped up, and she glanced overhead. Almost tripped again, her toe striking something light but unexpected, and she sidled like a horse, staring at the black mass in front of her.

Coal. This was a coal cellar. There's a chute.

The pixies pointed, jingling, and there was a final massive noise overhead, accompanied by splintering and cracking.

Robin thrust the knife into one of her velvet robe's larger pockets, and scrambled to climb the forgotten hill of black rock with fire in its heart.

T
hey sang about how elfhorses were an easy ride, so smooth you barely realized how fast you were going.

They
lied
. Crenn held on, hunching over a sleek white neck and feeling every step with a jolt in his teeth, hips, shoulders. His savagely clamped hands were knotted in reins hung with silver bells that almost managed to cover the sound of hunting-cries behind and on either side. The Sluagh were curving around their prey; if they managed to make both ends meet they could strangle any hope of escape. The entire city lay blanketed in a choking fog thick as Marrowdowne's worst stagnation, without the breath of salt from the Dreaming Sea or the fecund reek of rotting vegetation to flavor it. Instead, this mist smelled of flat copper with an undertone of bowel-reek, and a brassy sicksweet note that was easy enough to place, once you'd smelled it before.

Death.

The elfhorses galloped, fractious when they scented the fog. Braghn Moran kept them from melting back through the Veil, the fullblood able to override their urge to protect themselves by vanishing. It was a handy trick, but even a highborn Summer knight couldn't force them to go faster. Hooves hit pavement in a chiming tattoo, and their white shapes flickered. A few of the mortal onlookers would see white horses; the rest would find it easier to see chrome-and-cream motorcycles, low-slung and belching silver flame from their shining exhausts. Crenn glimpsed flickers of pale faces pressed against the inside of car windows, the elfhorse heaving into a leap and its hooves stamping on thin metal, hissing neighs of displeasure as mortal iron made silver shoes smoke and steam. They crossed a main artery, a sound of crumpling and tearing as a mortal accident unfolded, and plunged into a warehouse district, Braghn Moran evidently thinking to lunge for the edge of town. In the wilderness, there might be fewer pockets of concentrated deathly hatred to bloom into pale vapor and scream those chilling high notes.

Gallow yelled something, the wind whipping syllables out of his mouth. Crenn leaned in the saddle, his knees clamped home, and his right-hand blade flickered, passing through a streak of mist as it stretched long, rancid fingers after Gallow's horse. Braghn Moran shouted another few syllables in the Old Language, and Crenn's skin was alive with adrenaline and the sharp insect prickles of terror.

Jeremiah screamed again, waving his left arm madly, and for a moment Crenn thought another band of mist had snagged him. The hoofbeats rose to a cacophony, and Braghn Moran aimed the horses at a stone wall and bent over his mount's neck, urging them on. Gallow's arm thrashed even more desperately, but his horse followed, and their leaps were marvels of delicate, fluid authority.

Crenn's own elfhorse, however, squealed with terror and balked, and the world turned over. He tumbled free, barely able to instinctively curl his left arm over his head, and he hit the wall with a sickening crunch.

A brief burst of starry darkness swallowed him whole.
How bad? How bad did I hit? Oh God how bad did I hit—

Then the pain came.

He'd felt something like this once before, when a mortal bullet nestled next to his spine and burning pitch ate his clothes and devoured his skin. His teeth clenched, splintering-hard.
Don't cry out. Don't say a word.

Tiny little trickle-footsteps, soft silvery sneakings, and the cries gathered around him. He'd helped its prey, and gotten in its way, and the Sluagh was about to feast on him. Gallow would be long gone by the time they finished, and Crenn would be only a rag of sidhe bones and torn flesh, frozen to whatever patch of earth had seen his agonizing demise.

The next time the Sluagh rose, his maddened, hungry ghost would join it.

Don't scream. Don't let them win.

He couldn't have anyway, because all the breath had left him. Alastair's body flopped, uselessly, against the wall. Somehow he was sitting, and he had not lost his right-hand blade.

They clustered around him, shawls and scarves of steamsmoke outlining shattered skulls, wasted arms, twisted legs, muscle-meat torn and bones gone spongy with rot. Ruined faces described only by the mist licking their features leered, their hungry mouths clacking and clicking with tiny sharp sounds.

The vengeful dead drew closer, and Crenn inhaled. Broken ribs stabbed his sides, and though he had set himself not to make a sound, his traitorous breath escaped in a low moan.

“
Robiiiiin,
” he exhaled, the pain a giant red beast with its teeth in his flesh, and forced his broken arm to lift the sword.