Ilesa must have been really pissed at Bekra Cy, because she was the first one down into the pit. She’d never before struck Shadrak as the type to put herself in harm’s way, especially not when she could have sent him or Nils ahead of her. When she hesitated at the mouth of the tunnel to wait for Nils to jump down next, it looked like her instinct for self-preservation had reasserted itself.
“Don’t let me stop you,” Shadrak said, dropping lightly to the floor of the pit.
Ilesa bit her lip then shot him a look of fury. “Fine,” she said, as she ducked her head into the opening.
A spike of warning stabbed at the base of Shadrak’s skull. “Wait!” he cried, and Ilesa froze.
“What is it?” Nils asked.
Shadrak held up a hand for silence. He needed to concentrate. He’d had warning feelings before, but nothing like this. It was as if the stabbing pain in his head had pierced him to the core, beyond the repository of his perfect memory, and tapped into something buried deeper. Deeper than his earliest experiences, he began to suspect. Something in his blood. Something innate.
“It’s a trap,” he said.
Ilesa pulled back from the opening. “How do you know?”
“No idea,” Shadrak said. “I just do.”
“What kind of trap?” Nils asked.
“Trickery. Deception.”
“Homunculus stuff?” Ilesa gave Shadrak a knowing look, as if she thought they shared a common heritage, just because she’d shape-shifted into a homunculus woman in order to dupe him.
But she’d guessed right. Something in the tunnel had the feel of Gehenna about it. There was a whiff of homunculi lore, possibly stolen, likely unleashed by Bekra Cy—a creature of Blightey’s. It was common knowledge the Lich Lord had terrorized Gehenna on more than one occasion, and he’d no doubt picked up a few tricks along the way.
“What should we do?” Nils asked.
Shadrak pointed at the book the cretin was carrying under one arm. “You wait here and read like your life depends on it. I want anything we can use against Bekra Cy when we catch up with her. Anything, you understand?”
Nils couldn’t have looked more relieved. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the pit and began to leaf through the pages.
“And me?” Ilesa said.
“Just wait here.” Shadrak took out his Ancient-tech goggles and slipped them on. “Make sure idiot boy doesn’t slack.”
Starting with the night vision setting, he peered into the mouth of the tunnel. He could make out rubble limned in green, and bones—rodents and pigeons by the looks of them. There was a hairline crack in the ceiling, through which moisture seeped. Other than that, nothing.
He adjusted the lenses until they picked out heat, made out the blurry red haze of a rat scurrying about. He continued to rotate the lenses, passing through their whole array of settings. A violet sheen fell over his vision, then golden, and finally silver. And it was then that he saw something he’d never seen before, yet felt deep down in his bones was intimately familiar: wispy threads of darkness crisscrossing the length and breadth of the tunnel. There were gaps between them a child could have passed through, if they were extremely agile and careful. A child or a homunculus.
He thought about offering Ilesa the goggles and seeing if she’d be able to use them if she changed into something small, like an insect. Maybe the goggles would shrink with her. Maybe they wouldn’t. He decided there was no point in asking. This wasn’t about what she could do, it was about what she would do, what she had the guts to do.
“There’s a network of sorcerous strands we need to pass through,” he said.
“Strands?” Nils looked up from the book. Ilesa slapped him on the back of the head and he went back to his reading.
“What happens if we touch them?” Ilesa asked.
Shadrak gestured toward the tunnel. “Why don’t you find out?”
In that instant, one of the scampering rats ran into a strand. The entire web of tendrils blinked out of existence. On the ground twenty feet along the tunnel, a multi-faceted gemstone appeared, ghosting in and out of reality. Nebulous strands like those that had just disappeared extended from the faces of the gemstone, detached themselves, and bounced from the ceiling, walls, and floor at different angles. Within seconds, they stabilized in a new pattern, and the gemstone shimmered and vanished, leaving the rat just another rodent skeleton littering the tunnel floor.
“No need,” Shadrak said. “I’ve had my demonstration.”
Now he just had a couple of questions to answer before he went and did something he’d live to regret—or not. How much did he want the Witch Queen’s ring? How badly did he need the Stygian’s money?
He thought of the flintlocks he’d given to Bolos, the empty cartridge rammed into the handle of the thundershot. Thought of the crossbow he needed to replace his guns, the months and months of scraping out a living taking jobs a journeyman would have turned his nose up at, just so he could eat. He thought of the contract the Senate had out on him, and of being kept from the city and his only real chance of making a decent living. Last of all, and most persuasively, he thought of the bore-grubs Arecagen had implanted in his belly, and of the fact he had just under a week left until they ate their way out. It didn’t seem like he had all that much choice.
He needed to reach the gemstone, some innate sense told him. In spite of it no longer being visible, he’d seen enough: his perfect memory could easily plot the course through the tendrils. Then what? What would he do when he reached it? No answer this time, but something told him he’d know once he got there. Maybe. It all depended on how much his homunculus nature was prepared to reveal, not to mention how much it could be trusted.
He took out a weedstick laced with somnificus, lit it with a match, and took a long drag.
“That’s it?” Ilesa said. “You’ve given up? You’re just going to get stoned and do nothing?”
Shadrak took another draw on the weedstick, taking the smoke deep into his lungs. Anxiety drained away from him in an instant, and at the same time the sorcerous network in the tunnel felt even more familiar to him, an overused trick even a child could disarm.
He held up the still-burning weedstick, half-tempted to stub it out in Ilesa’s face. Only, he couldn’t reach. He dropped it on the floor and trod it underfoot. Then he removed his cloak, his baldrics, and his belt with its pouches—anything that might accidentally touch one of the tendrils. He removed his never-full bag and placed all his possessions inside it then crammed it into the top of his boot. There was no way he was leaving his stuff for Ilesa and Nils to rifle through. And with that, guided by the vision of the goggles, he moved gingerly into the tunnel.
The first tendril was easy—head height to a homunculus and running from wall to wall. He ducked under it then stepped over the next, which was half a foot above the floor. He had to crawl beneath the base of a cross formed by two diagonals. As he inched his way forward, the obstacles formed by the tendrils grew more difficult, the spaces between them narrower. He contorted his body into awkward positions, posting on one hand, twisting his torso, scissoring his legs, always careful to land in perfect balance. One slip, and he’d never get another chance.
A little further along and his heart sank. A succession of six horizontal tendrils stacked one on top of the other—a fence of deadly sorcery as high as Shadrak was tall, and with gaps between them even a rat would have trouble passing through. The pile of bones on the floor was testament to just how many had tried. Beyond the fence, only a few more feet of tendrils before he reached the heart of the network and the invisible gemstone that projected it.
He ran through the goggles’ settings once more until he could see the tunnel walls clearly, limned in green. He could have climbed a wall easily, they were so rough and poorly mortared, but when he altered the goggles’ vision again, he noticed three more tendrils crossing the tunnel just beneath the ceiling, leaving a gap of barely two feet between them and the stacked tendrils rising from the floor.
A part of him just wanted to lay down and give up in despair, but another part—the part unleashed by the weedstick—urged him into a new and unfamiliar recklessness. He fought against it with his old safeguards, the obsessive carefulness that had kept him alive all this time. But it was a losing battle when he knew that doing nothing, not taking a risk, would lead even more certainly to a painful death at the hands of Arecagen and his bore-grubs.
He sprinted at the tunnel wall, hit it running, and launched himself into a corkscrewing flip over the fence of tendrils. He winced as chill air touched his back—from where he must have passed within a hair’s breadth of the strands above. He landed on the balls of his feet, rolled beneath a horizontal thread, and hopped over another.
He froze, at the eye of the trap, surrounded by tendrils at different heights and angles. And without knowing why, he chuckled.
Slowly, he crouched down and pulled his never-full bag from the top of his boot. Even this mysterious bag, which he’d carried with him for so long, seemed suddenly familiar, a plaything for children. He’d found it in the planeship he’d used to cross the worlds from Urddynoor to Aethir. The bag had been perfect for smuggling—he’d even trafficked a dozen husks across the border by shoving them inside. It was bottomless. Infinite in its capacity, or so it seemed. There was nothing it couldn’t hold, and to his mind nothing that could harm it. Whatever fabric it was made from was unnatural; it belonged neither to Urddynoor nor Aethir. For all he knew, it could have been woven from the very stuff of the Abyss.
He opened up the bag and carefully removed his cloak, belt, and baldrics, setting them on the floor. He reached around inside the bag’s depths for a while longer, in case there was something he’d left inside, then he inside-outed the fabric, drawing it over his hand and arm like a glove. He chuckled again: it wasn’t infinite, as he might have expected: only its capacity was. As if anything he placed inside were stored someplace else, and the bag itself was only a conduit or a doorway.
With his hand covered by the dark and almost liquid material of the bag’s interior, Shadrak got down on his knees and reached for the empty space he’d seen the tendrils extend from. Where bag met tendril, the tendril snuffed out. One after the other, the strands disappeared, swallowed by whatever Void-stuff comprised the bag. And then Shadrak felt through the fabric the hard-edged solidity of the gemstone. He made a fist around it, and the entire network of tendrils winked out. With a sigh of relief, he turned the bag right side out and removed his hand, leaving the gemstone inside. He took off the goggles and added them to the unfathomable depths.
“You can come on in now,” he called down the tunnel.
He folded the bag and put it back in its pouch, then put on his belt, baldrics, and cloak.
Ilesa and Nils were a long time coming, as if they still feared a trap. Nils was wittering on about how Bekra Cy’s power was in her tattoos—he’d obviously read the bit Magwitch had pointed out.
“Thing is, how’d you remove tattoos?” Nils asked.
“You don’t,” Ilesa said. “So you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Nils said. “I got a notion—”
“Course you have.”
“You two scuts finished?” Shadrak said. “Thought your boyfriend was waiting outside the city walls with horses.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Yeah, right!” Nils said.
They followed the tunnel for another hundred yards or so until it began to angle upwards at a steady gradient, finally ending in a wall of solid granite.
“Shogging great,” Nils grumbled. “Must be the inside of one of the buttresses. Now what?”
Ilesa looked at Shadrak, who couldn’t help chuckling again. The oldest trick in the book, it suddenly seemed to him. And it wasn’t just his intuition this time: he’d seen the same sort of thing before, in the tunnels beneath the dwarf city of Arx Gravis. Ghost Wall, they called it.
With a swagger, Shadrak walked straight through the buttress and out into the shadow of the Cyclopean Walls. The suns were high in the sky, doing their erratic dance above the crop fields outlying the city. In the near distance, leaning against a boundary fence, blood-stained bandage around his wounded leg, horse either side of him chewing up the grass, was Jebediah Skayne.
“Well, at least one of you ain’t a complete waste of space,” Shadrak said.
The Maresman saluted as the trio left the shelter of the walls and ran toward him.
“You there!” a guard yelled down from the battlements, but the challenge lacked conviction. “Ah, shog it,” the man cursed. He might just as well have added, “Not my problem.” Cutbacks had a direct effect on caliber, it seemed. For once Shadrak owed the Senate a debt of gratitude.
“You see anything?” Ilesa asked breathlessly as she reached Jeb.
“Bekra was long gone by the time I got here. Not even a footprint to follow. What we need’s a bird’s-eye view.”
Ilesa nodded, then flew off in the form of an eagle. After a matter of minutes she returned, and with a flutter of wings resumed her human form.
“She’s traveling alone and on foot, but at one hell of a pace. We’re going to need those horses.”
“Which way?” Shadrak asked.
Ilesa turned and pointed north, where a haze was coming off the Origo River.
“Carys Woods?” Nils asked. A well-known drop-off point for smugglers.
“I don’t think so,” Ilesa said. She glanced at Jeb, a barely concealed grimace on her face. “I think she’s heading for my home town. I think she’s going to Portis.”