“And I prefer to keep it that way!” cried Hendon Tolly, who leaped forward and drove his sword into his brother’s stomach. Gailon grunted in pain, then he and the girl both tumbled to the floor, pulling the sword from Hendon’s hand.
Briony saw her chance and dove toward Hendon Tolly, but he turned just in time to see her coming and managed to deflect her thrust with his hand so that her sword bloodied his palm but otherwise slid harmlessly past him. She stumbled and lost her balance; Hendon shoved her so that she took a couple of helpless steps and fell against the wall by the doorway. By the time she was able to right herself and turn around, sword at the ready, Hendon Tolly had vanished.
She was in the doorway leading to the outer vault, and Hendon hadn’t gone past her. There was only one place he could have disappeared so swiftly, she realized, and that was into some deeper vault. She glanced briefly at Elan M’Cory as the woman wept and struggled to pull the blade out of Gailon.
“Get out of here now,” she told Elan, then began examining the mossy walls where Hendon had disappeared. As she probed into one of the shadowy corners with her sword, the blade slid far deeper than she expected, encountering no resistance at all when it should have found unyielding stone. She stepped a little nearer and found an opening in the stone where two walls did not come directly together, a space wide enough for a slender man—or a woman—to slip through.
She considered waiting until Eneas arrived, but she had no idea when that might be. If this hidden passage led somewhere else in the castle—if, even worse, it was one of the tunnels made by Chert’s Funderling people—Tolly could be out of their reach forever in a short time. The monster and murderer would escape…
She thrust her sword into the opening in the wall and poked wildly into the darkness beyond until she was assured no one hid there to ambush her. She wiped the blood off her dagger and slipped it into her belt, then went back and took a torch from the sconce.
Even more vaults waited behind the inner vault, or at least more underground chambers, half a dozen or more. As far as she could tell they had never been used for anything, let alone been finished like the family tomb: the walls were rough and the stone floors raw and uneven. But more worryingly, each new chamber led to another farther down.
Underneath us, behind us, everywhere around us… Briony had thought she lived on solid ground—what a bitter jest that had become! Seeing Gailon, whom she and everyone else had believed long dead, had shaken her badly, and finding these passages hidden below the family vault only made things worse. Nothing seemed entirely firm or real anymore.
After some little while spent carefully exploring each chamber in turn, she stepped out of the last one and found herself at the head of a path. The light of the torch revealed that on the path’s far side the earth fell away into a dark abyss the torch couldn’t illuminate past the first dozen yards. The path itself wound down and away for farther than she could see, with the chasm on one side and an unworked stone wall on the other, like the steps that spiraled around the inside of Wolfstooth Spire. How far down did this passage stretch? And where did it lead? For that matter, where had Hendon gone… ?
Just as she had that thought, Tolly dropped down on her from above, where he had been clinging to the wall like a spider. He almost shoved her off the path and into the black nothingness beside it, but Briony managed to twist and fall onto the stone of the edge. Then she struggled back toward the middle of the path, though she dropped the torch to the ground and lost her sword into the pit.
Hendon yanked Briony onto her back and knelt on top of her, his full weight on her arms as he set the cold length of his dagger against her throat.
“I have wasted a great deal of time on you, girl.” Tolly’s sweat dripped down onto her face. “So I’ll just get on with slitting your throat.”
He could hear almost nothing else but the soothing voice; its wordless approval, or sometimes disapproval, helped him to find his way, steering his steps through the dark. He felt as though he had been walking for days, but could that be? He struggled to remember where he had been before; it was slow in coming. Strange faces, strange smells, the murmur of unfamiliar tongues spoken by even more unfamiliar creatures. That was it—he had been among the fairy folk. But where was he now? And why was it so very difficult to think?
Chaven Makaros. That is my name. I am Chaven the physician… the royal physician… ! Those names and titles were all he had of himself, so why did they seem so unimportant?
The wordless voice urged him to go faster, a directive he could feel in his bones and organs. Faster, yes. He had to go faster. He was needed. Nothing could happen without him, and then he would be rewarded.
But why couldn’t he remember what his reward was going to be? Or who it was that would reward him?
While the fighting had raged in the Maze, Chaven had made his escape. In truth, it had been a relief to leave Barrick and the bright-eyed Qar behind. Too many questions. Too many curious glances. They were not human, that was certain, and to be truthful, neither was Prince Barrick anymore. There were moments when Chaven had felt quite naked, certain that everyone who passed him could see straight through to his hidden allegiance.
It was strange to think that only a year ago or a little more his life had been ordinary. Then he had found the mirror during some trip to a faraway market, one of the trips he made several times a year, although he had no memory now of bringing it back. Over the following days, as he had cleaned it and wondered over it, his love for an interesting old thing had turned into something more. Chaven had begun to spend long stretches of time with it, polishing the bowed glass and staring into its alluring, sometimes slightly confusing depths. And although he could not remember it happening, one day he discovered he could see all the way though. To the other side.
And then… And then… And then he could not remember what had happened. Not all of it, anyway: sometimes life had still proceeded as normal, of course, the mirror nothing more than an uncomfortable shadow at the back of his thoughts, like a hidden stain. But other times it had made things… happen. He had found himself in strange places or situations with little memory of how he had gotten there. The Kernios statue had been one of those things that just happened. He had discovered it in the center of his table one day, and although a visit to the castle archives had helped him to discover what it was, he hadn’t remembered anything of how it had made its way to him until that Skimmer man had come to his door asking for money—for the gold Chaven had promised him and his kin for bringing the statue up from the deep bay waters along the outwall near the East Lagoon. The Skimmer swore by his water god that Chaven himself had told them where to dive.
Frightened by this, the physician had sent the pop-eyed man away with a token payment and a promise of more, but then pushed it from his mind as something too disturbing to contemplate. Other gaps had begun to open in his waking life, more and more of them. Now he was trudging through the deeps with this cursed Kernios statue, not knowing where he was bound or why he was carrying it.
But Chaven could not turn back any more than he could leave his skin and become someone else. First the mirror, now the statue—whatever moved him to acquire these things had only tightened its hold, gripping him so surely now it did not even bother to fog his thoughts. He was a tool, he realized. A weapon. He belonged to someone and could no longer pretend otherwise, but he didn’t know who his master was.