His optics flashed back on.
He saw Zweil ahead of him. The old ayatani was trailing a hand behind him, trying to lead Domor as he groped blindly along the wall.
Domor reached out and tucked Zweil’s arm under his.
‘I can see, father,’ he whispered. ‘Move with me.’
‘There’s something down here,’ Zweil said very quietly, cocking his head and trying to sense Domor in the darkness.
‘It’s just the lights,’ whispered Domor. ‘The lights have failed.’ He knew he was lying. He knew the sound he’d heard.
‘No, son,’ said Zweil. ‘It’s just the darkness.’
The Scion Relf had a stablight slotted on the under-barrel rail of her weapon. When she turned it on, the light made Merity jump.
‘Nice and calm now,’ Relf said. There was a glass-squeak edge to her voice that undermined her reassurance. She brought her weapon up to her cheek, and aimed ahead. The weapon was a short-form lascarbine that had been strapped to her back from the moment Merity met her. It wasn’t a battlefield weapon, but its compact length made it ideal for close-quarter protection duties in interior spaces.
‘Feth nice and calm,’ Merity said. ‘It’s just a power-out.’
Now there was light, the hard stripe beaming from Relf’s weapon, Merity’s anxiety dropped. What had it been about the darkness? The suddenness of it? No. The thickness, the density of it. The lights hadn’t just cut. An airless darkness had swallowed them.
Relf’s beam picked up the waste water extending towards them. In the wobbling oval of light, it looked like blood. Merity could hear it gurgling. It was a sound she’d heard before in the infirmary, and in the aftermath of hot contacts on Salvation’s Reach. Blood leaking from wounds, the steady, hideous trickle of life leaking away. She looked at the black water slopping towards them and swallowed hard. It looked like blood. It looked as though the ancient bowels of the palace were bleeding out.
‘Come on,’ said Relf. She turned, tweaking the stablight in different directions.
Merity heard her curse. It seemed like an odd sign of weakness.
‘Scion?’
‘Where are the stairs?’ Relf asked.
‘What?’
‘The stairs, missy. We just came down the stairs…’
She panned the light right and left. The smooth, whitewashed walls looked like snow-covered ground.
‘And the billets…’ Relf said.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Merity.
Relf swung the light behind them and then forward again fast. Merity glimpsed the encroaching water.
‘We came down the stairs,’ Relf said, as if rationalising it to herself. ‘Came down, turned, walked along. The flood was ahead of us.’
She twitched the stablight back and forth again.
‘Flood there, stairs there. And archways… through to the billets, there.’
The disc of light hovered on glacial whitewash.
‘I understand what you’re saying,’ said Merity. ‘I just don’t understand what you mean.’
Relf snapped around, tilting the light so it underlit their faces. She looked hurt, as if she’d been slapped for no reason.
‘The stairs have gone. The access to the billets has gone. Where have they gone?’
‘You’re mistaken,’ said Merity. ‘We must be confused. The steps were behind us.’
She moved into the darkness, hands raised, expecting to catch her toe on the bottom step. Relf reached to stop her, but there was no need. Merity had come to a halt, her hands pressed flat against stone wall.
‘That’s just fething impossible,’ she said.
Relf grabbed her arm. ‘With me,’ she said, pulling Merity after her. She was heading for the water, the light-beam bobbing.
‘What? Where to? The water’s that way–’
‘I know, I know,’ said Relf. Merity could smell the woman’s sour fear-breath. ‘But somehow we’re in a… in a dead end. The water’s rising fast, so we can’t stay put.’
They were already sloshing into the spilling tide of water. It rose around their boots like a stream that had burst its banks after a rainstorm.
‘Relf? Scion?’
‘Just walk,’ Relf said, pulling her arm. ‘You’re right. We’re just confused. The dark confused us. There will be an exit. Just nearby.’
The water was shin-deep and flowing hard. Merity thought – no, she knew as an awful certainty – that Relf was wrong. Something had happened. Something had changed in the darkness. Things had shifted like the walls and faces in the stress nightmares that had haunted her as a child.
All of which was impossible. She wondered if it was still pitch dark and this was all some imagined nonsense. Maybe her concussion was worse than the medicaes had said. Maybe she was hallucinating. Her head ached. She had a rasping itch in her ears. But the water around her knees, her thighs, was not impossible. It was soberingly cold. In fact, everything had suddenly become much colder.
‘Scion, stop.’
Relf wouldn’t. She pulled at Merity, then she froze. They had both heard it.
A quick, purring buzz. A whine, as though someone nearby was squeeze-testing a drill or a powered saw. It came again, twice, like an insect droning past their ears.
‘What was that?’ Relf asked.
‘Hello?’ Merity called out. They’d heard voices from the billet spaces when they’d first come down. There had to be people close by. Why was it so quiet?
‘Shut up!’ Relf snapped. ‘Shut up, shut up.’
There was a tremor in the light beam. The Scion’s hands were shaking. Merity could hear Relf’s rapid, shallow breathing.
The lights came back on, stark and over-bright. It made them wince. Then they died back down to a filament glow and went out again. While the light lasted, Merity saw the cellar hallway, thigh deep in gleaming black water, and an archway ahead to the left.
‘That way!’ she hissed. ‘That way!’
The lights came back on, along with a brief chirrup of faulty alarms. They lasted two seconds, long enough for Merity to see that there was no archway ahead to the left.
Not any more.
Merity didn’t have time to mentally process that. The cellar lights began to flash on and off like an intermittent strobe. The lights came on for half a second then off for two or three seconds, then back on. The rapid, erratic blinking made Merity feel nauseous. She reached out to hold onto Relf.
But Relf wasn’t there.
In darkness, she gasped the Scion’s name.
The light fluttered on and off again. In the third flash, she saw Relf on the far side of the tunnel, clawing at the wall. In the fourth flash, Relf had vanished.
In the fifth flash, Merity saw a figure standing directly ahead of her, its back to her. A figure standing nearly waist deep in the blood-black water. A figure waiting, still and upright, her hands at her sides. A simple smock dress. Head shaved.
Blackness.
‘Yoncy?’ Merity called out.
A saw buzzed somewhere in the darkness.
In the sixth flash, nothing.
Blackness.
In the seventh, a heartbeat later, the figure was there again, its back to her still. But it was closer. Three metres closer.
Blackness.
In the eighth flash, Yoncy was still there, and she was starting to turn. Starting to turn slowly to face Merity.
Blackness.
An angry warble of damaged alarms.
Abrupt las-fire ripped across the hallway in the dark. Merity flinched. She saw the searing bolts of energy, heard the close-by shriek of the carbine. One shot passed her head so close it crisped the downy hairs on her neck. She could smell the hot ozone as it went by, cooking the chill air. Scalding steam erupted where the las bolts hit the water.