darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,124
I’d been willing. The gates locked behind us, and we would need the key just as much going the other way. No matter what happened, I would come to the end of its magic soon. I could feel it in my heart where the finger’s failing powers thrummed and fluttered continually now, like the beating of a trapped dragonfly’s wings.
Here goes nothing, I sent to Triss as I pressed the bezel to the lock.
The fluttering in my heart briefly became a burning, gnawing pain, as though ants were biting it from the inside. Then a sharp click sounded and the gate pivoted aside. I held my breath, but no darkling band emerged from beneath the ring and the pain in my heart receded to the featherlight touch of phantom wings.
And we win another round. I breathed a gentle sigh. But as I went to tuck the ring away, the tip of the finger broke off and fell away. Shit!
I really didn’t want Faran to see that.
I’ve got it, sent Triss. Shadow swirled in front of me and the bit of rotting flesh vanished into the darkness at the same time that I slipped through the gate. Your secret is safe for a little bit longer.
That’s all I need, really. Kelos said this was the last gate. The finger just has to hold together for another half hour or so and then it won’t matter.
What!? Triss’s mental voice split the difference between furious and horrified.
Sorry, Triss. That didn’t come out right. I mean that the secret won’t matter. I do intend to live through this . . . well, I hope to anyway.
You’d damned well better!
The current had reversed once again, and the level was slowly rising, having come up maybe two inches in the last quarter of an hour. Faran followed me through the gate. Kelos was in the process of joining us when a pair of risen came a-slithering through the water. Faran and I were able to dispatch them easily enough in the shallows, bringing our total for the venture up to ten. Whether it was because the Son of Heaven preferred not to taint the water he himself had to drink—Faran’s theory—or simply because he wasn’t worried about the aqueducts as a serious possibility for invasion, there just weren’t that many risen down here.
“So, what now?” I asked.
Kelos had been very tight with information thus far, a fact that made me nervous. Without him to lead us we would have been utterly lost in the labyrinthine aqueduct. With the water rising again that was an ugly thought. We had passed a number of wells that we might be able to climb out of, but that would be the same as abandoning the mission.
He waved a hand ahead. “We walk up that way about seventy feet and duck around the corner. That will take us beneath the courtyard in front of the Son of Heaven’s apartments.”
I remembered it well, a huge area enclosed under a staggeringly expensive roof of the finest and clearest glass, which allowed for a very fair counterfeit of the Celestial City and the True Heaven itself. The paths—surfaced with chips of ivory and fragments of pearl—danced in and out through a garden filled with tropical rarities that had no business surviving in this part of the world. Jade tiles faced the walls of the buildings surrounding the courtyard as well as the gold-roofed pavilion that centered it. Even the fishpond was floored with fragments of precious stone.
“And then?” I asked.
“The pond,” said Kelos. “There aren’t any man-sized wells within the courtyard, but there is a ceramic pipe with a small bucket-chain pump in it for filling the pond. It’s not big enough for a man either, but we can yank it out, and that’ll give us a way up to the surface that doesn’t require blasting a giant and noisy hole in anything. It’ll be a damned tight fit for me, but a bit of grease and some luck should make it workable. I’ll be going last, of course, in case I get wedged.”
We were able to accomplish our demolition in relative silence by dint of getting Malthiss to send the pins that held the pump and most of the piping into the everdark. Soon we had a rough hole in the ceiling. Faran wanted to go first, claiming the right as the smallest, but I nixed that idea on the grounds that she didn’t know the layout above and I did.