“I know. I do not mean it to be. I have laid my ghosts that way since you and Federo first showed me the rite of the two candles.” Or tried to lay them, I thought.
We went looking for a wax chandler. The gods had said little enough to me. Perhaps my ghosts would say more. I wanted myself calm before I had to face them.
Half an hour later, the Dancing Mistress and I knelt together in a little grove of bay laurels in a plot of land near an old minehead incongruously located in the Velviere District. I carried lucifer matches with me, but was still quite glad that the sun was out. Autumn was at hand, but this was one of the pleasant days with which the Stone Coast could be blessed at the passing of summer.
I set out twelve black candles and twelve white. The Dancing Mistress had made no further comment at the purchase. I could not be sure how many women and girls had died in the Factor’s house. Probably no one knew to tell me. This number felt right.
One by one I lit them. They burned fitfully in the little breeze, but the trees gave us sufficient shelter to keep them alight. The candles gleamed and spat. I did not have a speaking in mind, but words came to me unbidden.
“We all bent to the whims of a master we could not withstand,” I said. “I meant to set myself free, thinking that would free us all.” I passed my hands over the black and the white. The candles warmed my palms. “I am sorry for what became of you, each and every one.”
The air swirled close. For a moment I thought the Lily Goddess was upon me, but it was just the wind rising and snatching away the flames. Then I realized I was done.
“When will we go before the Interim Council?” I asked her.
“Soon. Word will come, perhaps as early as tomorrow.”
“I would take a good meal and rest my feet. We can go Below this afternoon or this evening, as you see best.”
“Come,” she said. “I know where to find stewed rabbits with corn and peppers.”
I followed her to a meal I was more than pleased to eat.
At dusk we clambered the high wall that blocked the minehead and its tailings from the view of the wealthy who populated the Velviere District. Within the brambled, jumbled space we located the shaft entrance and descended Below by a long creaking ladder.
Once down, we didn’t run as in the old days. We walked carefully with weapons loose in hand, coldfire pressed tight between our fingers. I understood this-we would not draw attention. It seemed a false economy. People saw best with their eyes. Most of what lived Below saw with noses and ears and stranger senses.
The Dancing Mistress did not lead with purpose, either. She murmured occasional warnings, guiding me onward.
I let my senses explore the dark. It was noisy here, in a way I had not remembered from the Below of my earlier days. Kalimpura was loud beneath the stones, but that was more a matter of Below there being a sewer system and thus well supplied with inlets serving to conduct sound. Given our climb down that ladder, we were a good fifty feet beneath the streets. Far beneath the sewers and into the mine galleries.
Old machines loomed, something else I had not encountered before. Rust and corrosion and the faint whiff of stale oil hung heavy in the air. My nose also found stone, of course, and standing water. Wood long gone to rot. Stray breezes. Flesh, but not nearby. My ears echoed with footfalls and odd clatters, but they were directionless phantoms. Threat was everywhere and nowhere.
I thought I had seen the Factor. Was he present in his persona as the Duke as well? The dead ruler had been more like an actor with two roles than a man with two homes. I was not even sure who knew of their commonality.
What of his agents? There had been other undying beneath the Duke’s spell. I’d met two the day I slew him. Not to mention all the guards and functionaries.
We continued to move slowly. My sense of threat was almost overwhelming now. More than generalized dread-I was under attack. I let my pace fade and risked a whisper. “What is it?”
“I do not know,” the Dancing Mistress answered quietly. The edge of fear in her voice chilled my blood.
“Not a ghost…” My words were cut off as something immediately before me shrieked with all the pain of a demon-culled soul.
I swung my blade wide even as my ears flooded with something hot and viscous. The edge caught on nothing. My hearing was blocked, which frightened me immensely. I opened my left hand with its small scoop of coldfire and nearly screamed.
The Dancing Mistress was sliding past me on my off side, away from my blade. She faced even farther left, as if she expected something to burst out of the dark there. Directly before me was a very tall imperfectly shaped man who had no skin. I saw bone and glistening fat and the strange marbled stripes of muscles. His eye sockets were empty, but even so his face was pointed directly at me.
Worst of all, my knife should have touched him.
I swung again. The knife passed through without intersecting his body. A bony muscle-wrapped hand caught me hard in the left temple.
Spinning back on my right heel, I had a moment to think how unfair this was, that he could hit me but I could not hit him, when the Dancing Mistress let fly a screeching cry of her own. All I saw between the shifting shadows and the tears of pain clouding my eyes was a leaping shape. Then I heard a horrid, tearing thump.
She’d attacked him bare-handed, I realized. This one could not be touched with weapons.
My hands lacked claws, but I could still use them well enough. I dropped my knife and charged head-down into the fight. When I hit, the feeling was like striking an open wound. Just grease and thick, slow blood, and nothing to grab on to.
My eyes were not filled with tears, I realized. I was being blinded by a flow of blood from my eyelids and nostrils. No sight, no smell, no hearing, except through a bubbling distance that did nothing to disguise the Dancing Mistress’ shriek of enraged pain.
I head-butted again. This time something cracked. We had finally met one of the “worse things” the Dancing Mistress had promised me so long ago.
Strength, I prayed in a single syllable, then lunged once more. Blinded by darkness and blood, I clawed at the cold mess of this creature until my fingers snagged on bone. I threw my weight backwards and yanked hard as I could.
The piece I gripped stretched away, then snapped back. Our attacker gave another great shriek. I heard the Dancing Mistress’ muffled shout of my name, then utter silence.
I stood with legs spread for a balanced stance, my hands high and ready for a strike.
Nothing.
Spitting blood, I listened with my mouth open. An old trick.
Nothing.
Carefully I lowered my left hand and touched my face. No blood. My hearing cleared with a faint popping noise. No blood there, either. Only my hands were sticky with the ichor of that shambling horror.
I listened until I ached.
Nothing.
The thing was gone, and the Dancing Mistress gone with it. Or dead .
My coldfire had been wiped out of my left hand with the fight, all but the faintest smear. I lowered myself to the ground and carefully felt across mossy stone until I found my blade. I then turned around and scraped back and forth in the dark until I found walls on both sides of me. Open space stretched in front of me.
There was nothing here.
Frustration boiled into anger. I opened my mouth to shriek, and nearly passed out. Lying on the stones gasping, I realized this was the feeling that came after a wound had bled too much. Yet I was whole.
The thing has forced my blood from me, then fed on it.
That realization made me retch. I’d prefer an honest slash to this rape.
Light flickered ahead. The pale gleam of coldfire in someone’s hand. Staggering to my feet, I held my blade behind me so it would not shine. I half closed my eyes for the same reason.
Whoever came moved slowly and breathed loudly. I waited patient as stone. They approached with care, until I could see they were human, or at least human shaped. My breathing was so shallow, it had virtually paused.