AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Before she could spit a retort at the Elder, Corayne did it for her. “Clearly there’s some kind of tunnel,” she said softly. Her eyes darted to the Konrada, then the palace. “There’s more below us. In the Old Cor ruins.”
“Yes,” Sorasa replied stiffly.
She glanced at the girl, looking her over again. In Lemarta, Corayne had seemed unremarkable, another daughter of the Long Sea, with a sun-kissed face and salt-tangled hair.Smart, curious. Restless, maybe, but what girl of seventeen is not?There’d been only a flicker of something in her. It burned now, a candle catching light. And Sorasa could not say what it meant.
“There used to be a stadium here, where the Cors raced their chariots on sand, or staged navy battles on the flooded grounds,” Sorasa explained in a low voice. “Only a sliver remains, at the east end of the palace. But the foundation, below us—below the canals, even—it’s a maze of tunnels, some decades old, some two thousand. Many burned when the Old Palace fell; others have collapsed or flooded since the days of Old Cor. But not all.”
Corayne narrowed her eyes at the Konrada again, looking to its roots rather than its pinnacle. The wall dedicated to Immor faced them head on. The great god of time and memory held the moon and sun in his hands at equal height, with the stars like a halo behind his head. In his chest was a rose window, burning with blue and green light. A doorway arched between his feet, one of twenty, spilling the sound of evening worship.
Sorasa beckoned them both toward the cathedral, a smile on her lips. “The Konrada vaults hold nothing of value anymore, but they do go deep.”
“That will suffice,” Dom said grimly.
Corayne could only nod. Her eyes went wide again, and she seemed once more the girl in Lemarta, not the daughter of a dead prince, with the realm’s fate laid between her hands.
“I think the tunnels smell worse than the streets,” Corayne said, her voice muffled. She drew her shirt up over her nose and mouth, leaving only her black eyes visible. She glared at the walls and the dirt floor, searching for faults. Her eyes seemed to eat the meager light.
Dom’s growl echoed. “I did not realize that was even possible. And yet here we are.”
“Funny, the Elder legends don’t mention howfussyyour kind is,” Sorasa snapped, though she had to agree. The tunnel air was somehow both sour and stale. The canal ran above them, and clearly the walls were perpetually wet, covered in moss that gleamed by the weak light of her torch.
The Elder muttered a retort in his own language. It echoed down the tunnel, passing away into the blackness. The Konrada vaults were behind them now, occupied only by a gray priest who would regain consciousness sometime around dawn.
The memories came with each step. Her first contract behind the walls of the New Palace was fifteen years ago, the last only four. Both ended with men dead in their chambers, missing ears and fingers, contracts fulfilled and messages relayed. She took no pride in them nor satisfaction. Duty was done for its own sake—at least, it was then.
Beneath Ascal, in the chilling damp, Sorasa had never felt farther from the Amhara and the citadel. She chewed her cheek, the air cold through her clothing, like a touch of sickness.
After a long while, the tunnel began to slope upward. Dom brushed the back of his hand over the wall, feeling the stone. “We’re out from under the river,” he said, his knuckles coming away dry. “We must be under the palace now.”
“Oh, good,” Corayne said. Her voice held the edge of panic. “Now I can stop worrying about being drowned and focus entirely on being crushed.”
A rare chuckle passed through Sorasa’s teeth. “It’s not so bad,” she replied. “Protect your skull and ribs. You’ll be all right.”
The girl blinked at her. “You’re a very strange person, Sorasa Sarn.”
“It’s a strange world out there,” Sorasa said. Her eyes met Dom’s as he brought up the rear of their trio. He fell into his constant scowl. “And growing stranger by the second.”
The Elder opened his grim mouth but stopped himself, squinting, his immortal eyes seeing farther than her own could. There was something in the darkness.
Corayne glanced at him, worrying out of her skin. “What is it?” she hissed, dropping her voice. One hand stole to her boot, where she kept a small and useless knife.
Someone should teach her how to use that,Sorasa thought, noting the girl’s poor grip.
Dom only raised his chin. “You’ll see.”
The gate came, barring the passage. It was good, old iron, with no lock and no hinges, welded into plates on either side of the tunnel. This was meant to stop anyone who stumbled this way, from either direction.
“Is this new?” Corayne offered, searching for answers as was her way. “Or do you have a trick around it?”
“I’d wager this is near two hundred years old,” Sorasa sighed, eyeing the ironwork. “And yes, I have a trick. He is quite large and quite annoying,” she added, looking pointedly at Dom.
He sneered down at her. The torchlight turned his golden hair to fire and cast shadows along the sharp lines of his stern face. Darkness pooled in his scars.
“I’mannoying?” His green eyes burned like the embers. “Youbrought us to a locked gate.”
Sorasa looked over his broad hands and wide-set shoulders with a sniff of indifference. She remembered the bull in Byllskos, tossed and toppled by the immortal.
“I brought you to a locked gate about to be knocked open. There’s a difference,” she said.
