[story] city of light
May. 31st, 2009 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ib_archiveauthor: h bright (Dreamwidth)
"Yes," said the merchant pointedly, "but what is it?"
His would–be customer scowled in a way that made him glance nervously at the sword hanging from her belt. She'd be mad to pull a weapon in the commercial district – the guards would be on her in seconds – but he couldn't help thinking that the guards wouldn't be much comfort to him if he was already skewered like a cave scull. Still, she didn't look like a troublemaker so much as tough and uncompromising – in fact, were it not for the way she was dressed, he'd have assumed she was one of the guards. As it was, she clearly hailed from the lower levels, and the straps, clasps, and holsters slung about her person marked her as a mercenary, a scavenger, or both. Probably both. You had to be able to defend yourself if you were going to bring in a living from the abandoned sectors, and most scavengers doubled as swords–for–hire.
The woman looked at him as though he were very simple.
"It's an Arc," she said. "I was under the impression you were familiar with them."
"I don't know where you heard that," he replied primly, "but I'm a dealer in antiquities, not Arcana."
Which was, of course, not entirely true, but he didn't like the fact that she'd sought him out. With most of his contacts, it was the other way around. Not to mention that the collection of Arcana she'd produced looked like nothing he'd ever seen before. He was currently examining a bracelet of incredibly high workmanship, studded with crystals; one of them was pulsing with a faint glow in time to every word they spoke. If it weren't for that giveaway, he'd have thought it was just a valuable piece of jewellery, and probably been willing to pay a good price for it. As it was, the thing was clearly full of magic, and the woman had admitted she didn't know what it did. He put the Arc back with the others, and folded his arms.
"Besides, it could be dangerous."
The woman snorted.
"We've tested it," she said, and he wondered who exactly 'we' were. "I've even worn it. It's harmless – I just don't know what it does. It could be a fascinating project for a scholar of Arcana."
He could almost hear the quote marks around the last part, the sort of glib phrase you heard at auctions when someone was trying to sell you a pretty piece of junk. He'd used it himself, as a matter of fact, passing off broken Arcs and fragments of crystal to naive buyers. The sarcasm in her voice made him uncomfortable.
All the same, it was tempting. He'd only seen a fully working Arc once or twice, and never at this level of sophistication. The things were bought and sold on the black market for exorbitant rates; only the scraps and leftovers came the way of a small–time curio dealer like himself. That in itself made him wary – why would she be selling it to him, when she was clearly no amateur? He wasn't about to throw money away on an item that could be an ancient booby–trap, or something illegal. He put the question as delicately as he was able.
"No buyers for this sort of thing," was her candid reply. "They're too obscure. Unique. The kind of thing your clients would like."
He wondered what she thought she knew about his clients, but his mind was already made up.
"No," he said firmly, "I'm not interested. Thank you."
She looked at him for a long space of seconds, grey eyes narrowed, and he did wonder, just briefly, if maybe she didn't give a damn about the guards, or the consequences, and whether she was as quick with that sword as her poised movements suggested.
Then she shrugged, collected up the assorted Arcs, and turned to go without another word.
"If you bring me something useful," he called after her, feeling obscurely like she'd had the last word, "I'd definitely be interested."
She paused at the door to cast a cool look over her shoulder, past a ragged fall of blonde hair.
"I've no shortage of buyers for those," she replied. "It's only the luxuries that the lower levels can't afford."
She was gone before he could find a counter to the scorn in her voice.
By the time she'd visited the last of her possible buyers – and come away empty–handed – Skye was tired, hot, and frustrated. They kept the upper parts of the city warmer than the deep levels. She was used to the cold of empty tunnels and the eerie breezes that slithered around corners and under doors. Up here it felt stuffy and oppressive: claustrophobic, though to use the term in Vanrillion was laughable. Ironic, that the supposedly more desirable areas of residence should be so uncomfortable, but the inhabitants seemed to like it well enough. It was probably arranged to suit their fashions, she thought, as a pair of men in floating garments wafted by. She scowled at them when they looked askance at her worn but sturdy trousers and leather jacket.
Her sweaty hair was in her eyes again; she thrust it back, jostling the bag slung over her shoulder and grimacing when it clanked softly. Gods, she'd have thought someone in the upper markets would be interested in the damn things as at least a curiosity, but they were all too cautious, or too miserly, or just plain didn't like the way she looked.
Skye was getting a lot of that today. As she turned down a wide boulevard with a high ceiling, lit by tall white lamps with carefully cultivated greenery at their feet, she was aware of more glances and expressions of distaste. Any citizen was, in theory, free to pass through any public sector of the city – but to do so wearing the wrong clothes, or on the wrong business, was to find yourself obstructed and scorned at every turn.
She had to wait in a crowd for the next express elevator, and that made her even hotter, and itchy with the need to get her back against a wall. She didn't know where that instinct had come from, but it was hard to suppress. So was the urge to shoulder her way through the milling passersby with the arrogance of authority. That one had got her into trouble more than once. It was generally best, in her line of work, not to draw undue attention.
Especially when your memory only went back five years.
The elevator operator scrutinised her ticket for an obnoxiously long time, casting dubious glances at her sword and attire before he let her on board.
It was almost a relief when she emerged, some hundred levels later, into the chaos of the Lower Concourse. The noise hit her like a wave as she stepped out of the elevator. It was busy at any hour – a seething crowd perpetually pushed and hurried their way beneath the neon billboards – but Skye found it positively relaxing after being in the upper levels all day. At least here she was invisible; no–one cared to notice as she made her way home.
When Skye keyed open the door to the res, she was greeted by the sound of quiet singing drifting from the direction of the garden. She paused inside the threshold, letting the door swoosh shut behind her, and listened for a moment. It sounded like nonsense, both the words and the music, just going any old where up and down the scale, stringing together sounds that were pleasing. That was a good sign. Popular music usually indicated that Linette was having one of her bad days, mind scatterslipped all over the place and echoing the world around her. The hymns of the old gods heralded a retreat into the dark places of memory that could take days to coax her out of. Nonsense was good. Skye liked it better when Linette didn't make sense.
Skye dropped her bag on the counter, shrugged out of her jacket, and made her way down the central corridor. The door to the garden was open, which was a waste of climate control, but Skye wasn't in the mood to scold Linette for it. She was kneeling by one of the planters, dirt smudged on her arms and face, very pale in the harsh light of the sunlamps embedded in the ceiling. A small, sad pile of dead flowers was by her side, but those that remained looked healthy enough, their silvery blooms turned towards Linette in that disconcerting way of theirs. Skye had once joked that it was because Linette reflected more light than the average person, but honestly, she had no idea what caused the phenomenon. As far as she was aware, Linette's attunements were stone and water, not wood – but then, with Linette, it was hard to put things in neat boxes.
"How are you feeling?" Skye asked, leaning against the door frame.
"That's a strange and difficult question," Linette replied. Then, "I think we need nutrients for the hydroponics."
Skye wandered over to check the readings on the lines of tanks on the other side of the garden room. They looked okay to her, but Linette was generally right about these things, and it waould be annoying to lose a crop because the worn–out mechanisms hadn't buzzed up an alert in time. The dense weeds looked like they'd be ready to harvest in a few more days, which would be nice. Skye was getting rather sick of the unexpected bumper crop of carrots they'd been living on this month. She moved to stand by Linette, and pressed the back of one hand briefly against her paper–white forehead. The fever seemed to be gone.
"Did you sell any of them?" Linette asked, squinting up at her.
"No, though not for lack of trying." Skye lowered her hand to offer it as support. "Come inside, you need to watch your skin."
"It's all right," Linette replied, taking Skye's hand with a smile that was only half for her. "Today I'm alabaster."
"You'll be terracotta if you sit here much longer," Skye muttered, and Linette laughed her silvery laugh as she allowed herself to be shepherded back into the main part of the res.
After Skye had double–checked Linette's temperature and quizzed her about whether she'd eaten lunch (the empty plates were no proof of anything), she busied herself in the kitchen while Linette curled up among the cushions on the other side of the living space. She seemed as normal as she ever was. The doctor had said she would recover fast once the fever broke; Skye supposed he'd been worth the fee after all.
"Pace left a message while you were out," Linette said, out of the blue. "He wants to meet, the day after tomorrow."
"Where? The usual place?"
"No, he said to start from the hostel in the north quadrant of one–eight–three, and use fire."
Skye stopped mid–slice, staring at the carrot without seeing it, a small frown on her face. They usually met with Pace in a crowded eatery off in the side streets of one of the lower markets. He very rarely required more secrecy from them than basic precautions against being tailed.
"You're sure it was fire?"
"Yes."
Skye pushed the chopping board aside, and walked to the battered old comm unit in its alcove on the back wall. The message, when she called it up, contained little more than what Linette had reported, but Pace's voice and expression told her a lot. He sounded interested and excited, so whatever it was, it didn't mean trouble. Or at least, he didn't think it meant trouble. The two were not always the same.
"We'd better prep the Seeker," Skye said, turning away from the screen. "Fire always takes longer to charge."
"I already started." Linette gestured at the altar in an alcove on one side of the room. Sure enough, there was a small, battered bronze object, reminiscent of an old–fashioned tobacco pipe, sitting in the middle of a cluster of candles and focusing crystals. "But I need you to draw the runes."
Skye crossed over to the altar, picked up the stick of chalk Linette had left there, and quickly sketched out the sequence of symbols that would imbue the Seeker with the essence of fire. They were sure there must have been another way of activating it, once – the whole point of Arcs was to allow you to use magic without ritual – but Linette had been unable to find the key even with her innate sense of the workings of metal and crystal. Still, it was useful enough to be worth the hassle. Skye finished her drawing, wiped the chalk dust from her fingers, and headed back to the kitchen.
"Do you think you'll be well enough to go?"
"Oh, yes," replied Linette serenely. "I was never really sick to begin with, you know. Just under siege."
"Wish you'd told me that before I sat up all night working the healing charms," Skye muttered. "I could have just used my sword."
"You did," Linette replied.
Skye had no more idea what she meant by that than she did of a lot of what Linette said, and had long given up being worried by it; but the way Linette looked at her, as if she could see Skye as more than a blur, unsettled her.
"I wish he'd chosen something other than fire," Skye managed to pant as they dashed around another corner. "It always goes too damn fast."
"I think that's why did he choose it." Linette, as usual, didn't seem at all out of breath, moving in her odd, gliding way that nonetheless kept pace with Skye's best speed. "Harder to catch."
"Yes, but it doesn't do us much good if we can't catch up with – oh, you have to be kidding me."
The little bright spot they were following had paused, bobbing, in front of a set of double doors marked as access to a stairwell; it promptly dived through the metal, and Skye thought, darkly, that if Pace had ensconced himself fifty levels up, she was going to have to reconsider their business relationship.
Fortunately, the wisp only led them up two flights of stairs before darting back out into a quiet corridor that looked like it was part of a storage section. Skye and Linette jogged (well, Skye jogged) after it, following it through a series of junctions that Skye committed to memory, before it stopped in front of a big door marked with a warehouse code. It looked locked, but appearances could be deceiving. As Skye tried the handle, the wisp slipped through the heavy metal as though it were air, and the door opened without protest.
Inside were a number of crates and cartons, on one of which Pace was sitting, reading a dossier of some kind. At their entrance, he looked up and raised a hand in greeting. The bright red–gold wisp hovered over his head, making little darting rushes at him, and the direction of his hand changed mid–motion. He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a similar palm–sized instrument, and clicked it open. The wisp dived in, its glow vanishing, and Pace pocketed the device and grinned at them. His face was eerily lit by the faint backglow from his visor. There didn't seem to be much light in the storage compartment apart from that.
"I do apologise for the insalubrious quarters," he said, reaching up to deactivate the visor. The glow vanished, and it slid back into his headset, revealing pale eyes and a sheepish tilt of the brows. "I didn't want to discuss this in public, and I thought bringing you to the upper levels might be unwise."
"You thought right," Skye replied wryly; at least they had him somewhat trained by now. She started to cross the room, and stopped as the door slid shut behind them, plunging them into darkness except for the faint emergency lights around the walls. "I don't suppose you brought a torch?"
"Oh. No, it didn't occur to me..."
Skye heard the faint sounds of Linette walking across the room with the confidence of one who rarely relied on sight in the first place. Skye muttered something uncomplimentary about the blind leading the blind, flipped open a thigh holster, and drew out the slim copper cylinder of a cyclone lantern. A gentle press of her fingertips to the right spot caused its blades to fan out and begin to spin. After a few seconds, the glow around them was noticeable; a minute after that, the lamp was bright enough to show Skye that Linette had perched herself on a crate next to Pace, who was blinking in the sudden illumination. He had the unkempt look about him, she could see now, that suggested it had been a while since he had remembered to leave the research centre.
"So, what have you got for us?" Skye left the lantern hovering in mid–air, pulled up her own crate and took a seat. "If it's another disused waste disposal system, we're not interested."
"I have apologised for that," Pace replied. He flipped open the dossier and held it out to Skye. "No, I've double–checked the location, and I'm almost positive it's part of a power substation."
"How almost is almost?"
"... eight–seven percent?"
"I suppose that'll have to do." Skye looked over the maps Pace was indicating, noting the areas that were unlabelled or dotted with question marks. "What do you think we're looking for?"
"I'm really not sure." Pace sounded thrilled by that fact, which seemed to be just one of the many traits that marked scientists apart from normal people. "The readings for the whole area are very strong, but it's hard to tell if they are discrete or dispersed..."
"In other words, we could be looking at a stack of smaller Arcs, or one really big, powerful one?"
"Precisely."
"Hmm."
Skye glanced at the written documents, but they were obviously Pace's notes on the energy fluctuations he'd picked up, and largely impenetrable. Besides, the plans were the important thing. There was an awful lot of uncertainty there – only one or two parts of the complex seemed to have been firmly identified, and Skye didn't like the look of the layout. It didn't seem right for an industrial facility, somehow. There was a familiarity nagging at the back of her memory, but that was something she had just learned to live with; the times when those hunches turned into anything useful were so few and far between that there was no point in dwelling too much on them. It only reminded her of how little she knew about herself.
"Where is this?" she asked. "It must be pretty deep... below two–nine–four, at least."
"Actually, it's quite the opposite," Pace replied. "It's on level twelve."
Linette made a startled noise, and Skye raised her head to stare at Pace in disbelief.
"Are you serious? Level twelve? That's... it's well out of bounds, even for us."
"I know, I know." Pace nibbled at his lower lip, hands gesturing as he spoke. "But that's why I can't get an official permit, you see, even though the facility is well away from the central shafts and the surface access tunnels. I've checked and double checked the maps, and you can get to it without ever coming near the most dangerous parts. You'll need to be a little creative going from level twenty to level nineteen, but..."
"We're going to have to be more than 'a little creative' to get through thirteen levels without getting caught."
Skye scowled at the plans, that nagging feeling of unease only deepening. Level twelve? There'd been exactly two occasions on which she and Linette had ventured into the interdiction zone above level twenty–five; neither had been successful, and the first time had come damn near to getting them arrested.
The second time had come damn near to getting them killed.
"I don't know, Pace," she said. In the dim light, she saw his face fall, but much as she might like him, he was still a client, and some risks just didn't pay off. "We might have to pass on this one."
"There's... there's one more thing." Pace looked like he hated himself for what he was saying, and the back of Skye's neck prickled. "Did you note the subsection to the north–east of the complex?"
Skye paged back through the blueprints until she found the part he meant. It was self–contained, a series of chambers connected to the rest of the plan by a single corridor with what looked like a security or safety check point halfway along.
"What about it?"
"I think..." Pace glanced at Linette, hesitated, and then forged ahead with guilty determination. "I have some reason to believe that it might have been a medical facility."
Gods, I hate you sometimes, Skye thought.
"Obviously I, I need to study anything you find," he went on, stumbling over his words, "but if there's anything that could help either of you, I'd consider that part of your payment."
"Oh," said Linette, softly; she lifted her head to gaze at Skye, and the way the red in her irises caught the lamplight made her look, for a second, like her eyes were bleeding. "Skye...?"
"How much reason?" Skye demanded.
"I beg your pardon?"
"How much 'reason to believe' do you have?"
Pace put his hand up to his temple, flicking the switch that activated his visor. It slid near–soundlessly over his eyes, and he stared at whatever calculations or citations were flickering down the screen only he could see.
"I've... found some old records that I believe relate to the facility," he admitted at last. "They're incomplete, and the information on the main area is sketchy at best, but there is a relatively intact file that goes into some detail about what appears to have been a mid–level treatment and quarantine centre for those exposed to harmful conditions within the complex."
"Why didn't you mention that in the first place?" demanded Skye. "I want to see that file."
"That's why I didn't mention it," Pace said. "There's no way I can get it out of the system. Even accessing it without tripping half a dozen alarms took me three weeks. I couldn't copy it or even keep it open for long – I had to make notes as I read. You'll have to take my word for it."
Skye stared blankly at the file in her hands. It was too great a gamble, that was obvious. It wasn't that she didn't trust Pace. She believed in his integrity and she knew he would never deliberately endanger them, but his information wasn't always accurate. How could it be, when the areas he sent them to had been sealed off for hundreds of years, the records about them locked up behind Directorate security codes and buried in generations of paranoia? Pace was a genuine seeker of knowledge. For him, any risk was worth it for the chance that maybe, just maybe, they would learn something new. On the rare occasions Skye had turned him down, he had accepted her decision without argument, but she knew it had left him frustrated and disappointed.
That wasn't enough of a reason to take a risky job. But that extra temptation he'd offered them... a genuinely intact medical facility? Not just a first aid station, not a general clinic, but an advanced centre that would have dealt with industrial injuries? Could they afford to pass that up?
Linette was still watching her, or at least, watching the blur of light and shadow that, to her, made up most of the world. It wasn't inconceivable that they might retrieve an Arc that could repair or augment her sight; the equivalent of Pace's visor, without the insurmountable running costs that put such tech out of the reach of the common citizens of Vanrillion.
It wasn't inconceivable that they might find something that could reverse Skye's amnesia.
"Show me the route you've calculated through the levels," Skye said at last. "If it's really as far from the access tunnels as you say, we'll think about it."
"No," murmured Linette, to herself and almost too quiet to hear, "I don't think we'll think about it. I think we'll feel about it – which is really far more dangerous."
The transition between levels nineteen and twenty, as it turned out, required not just creativity, but a solid hour's work with Linette's tool kit to get into the ventilation system. Linette did most of it, leaving Skye to fidget and fret, glancing down the dimly lit corridors as if she expected armed guards or nameless horrors to emerge from the darkness at any moment. Which, to be fair, was not an unreasonable possibility. There were plenty of dangers in exploring the abandoned parts of Vanrillion. There were neglected infrastructures that had become deadly traps; there were passages that led to pits that led to nowhere. There were gas leaks and radiation leaks and long–forgotten conduits of power. There were cave scutters and rot vermin and the scaled dragonets that haunted thermal vents and power stations, and there were the stinging scorpids that colonised damp faults in the rock.
And there were things in the deep places that were hostile to intruders from the world of light; things that had been part of the darkness and the silence and the deep rock since before Skye's race had had a name.
Scrambling up ventilation shafts wasn't much fun, but at least it gave Skye something to focus on other than her own nerves. Linette had a lot of difficulty with the climb, even with the assistance of the harness; she could see next to nothing in the gloom, and the disorientation of an unfamiliar place threw off her uncanny sense of her surroundings. By the time they emerged onto level nineteen, Skye was wondering if they should call the whole thing off.
Her unease only increased when she got a good look at their surroundings. Up until now, the levels they'd passed through had been silent and lit only by the dim green of emergency lighting, but apart from a layer of dust that rose to choke Skye with every step, they had not been in especial disrepair. The corridor they now stood in was different; in places, the wall panels had buckled, and their metal showed the telltale signs of water damage. The lighting here was barely working. There was a faint green glow from around a corner, but when Skye swept the lantern in that direction, it illuminated cracked light fittings along the walls, and debris cluttered on the floor. There was the scuttle of something small and scaly just out of reach of the light.
Linette had plastered herself against the wall as soon as she'd emerged. Her instincts were almost as strident as Skye's when it came to having something at her back, but in Linette's case, the actual contact with metal or stone was important. Even as Skye was wishing they had two or three more lanterns, and possibly a shovel, Linette seemed to regain her confidence, and stepped out calmly in the direction of the faint glow.
"Careful," Skye began needlessly. Linette stepped over a mound of debris without even seeming to notice it was there. "Are you sure you're..."
"It's okay, I can feel it." Linette had stretched out a hand to trail loosely along the wall. Skye had no elemental attunement that she knew of, but Linette had often described what she sensed from the metal and rock in terms of taste, sound, or smell, and Skye had an idea of what it was she was following. "There's been danger here, but it's very old. We can keep going."
Skye found she was almost disappointed, but she nodded, and steeled herself for the rest of the journey.
The next five or six levels were in similar states of disrepair, but after that, strangely, things began to look more tidy again. The lighting on fourteen was fully functional, and there was barely any debris. The section they had to walk through to get to the next set of stairs had evidently been residential, and the wide, empty boulevards and closed doors, with their neat numbers, unnerved Skye almost more than the gaping doorways on the lower levels. They could have been walking through one of the abandoned districts that scattered the inhabited parts of Vanrillion, with the hustle and bustle of daily life occurring just the other side of the wall. Except, Linette said, that with every level they climbed, the weight of rock above them lessened, until she felt like she would float away. Skye had to take her word for it, but nonetheless, there was something different about these empty corridors and plazas – maybe it was her imagination, but she thought she could almost feel the power, the fundamental energies that were Vanrillion's life blood, running through the walls.
They emerged onto level twelve with exaggerated caution, although Skye had gained confidence that Pace's route was as uneventful (she hesitated to use the word 'safe') as he had promised. The fact that they were exactly where he'd said they'd be – in the hub of a series of warehouses – went further to reassure her.
"So far, so good," she murmured to Linette, more to hear the sound of her own voice than anything.
"I don't like it." Linette was hanging back, reluctant to step out of the doorway. Open spaces were harder for her to read than enclosed ones. "Can't you smell it? Something's wrong with the air."
Skye took a good sniff, but it smelled the same here as in any of the abandoned parts of the city: dusty, old, and stale. There was a faint breeze, one of those mysterious currents of air that blew through the tunnels of Vanrillion from no guessable source, but it was nothing that triggered any alarm bells. Still, she felt in her pack for the device Linette had dubbed the Canary, pulled it out, and activated it with a deft twist. The smooth, metal egg split into six segments, opening out like a flower, and revealing a series of small coloured gems embedded in each 'petal'. These began to glow softly; after a few seconds, the Canary chimed several times, and most of the gems went dark.
Skye frowned at the remainder. They had worked out the system mostly by trial and error: she knew that the results signalled no harmful gases, chemicals, or radiation in their surroundings. The set of glowing gems in various shades of pale green seemed to indicate breathable air – Skye had never seen them dark, at any rate. Pace had hypothesised that the colours represented the component gases, and would have liked to have taken it away for further study, but while Skye trusted him, she had no faith in the institution he worked for, or the likelihood that she would ever see the Canary again if she handed it over. A certain amount of basic experimentation had identified the majority of the markers, but there were several that remained a mystery.
One of these was lit now: it glowed a soft, pure white that Skye had never seen before. It was on the same section as the indicators for air, but separated from them by two unlit gems that were likewise unidentified.
"Well?" Linette queried anxiously.
"There's nothing bad," Skye replied slowly, staring at that one anomalous light. "I think."
"What do you mean?"
Skye held the Canary up close to Linette's face. Linette narrowed her eyes – Skye wasn't sure if it did anything to improve her limited vision, or if it was just a habit – and then blinked twice.
"White," she said. "White should be good. Shouldn't it?"
"Hmm." Skye stared at the Canary for a few more seconds, then exerted a slight pressure on the open segments to cause them to fold up. She weighed it thoughtfully in her hand before slipping it back into her bag. "What do you think? Should we call it off?"
She was inclined to press on, herself, after the effort they'd gone through getting here, but she waited for Linette's answer. Linette had closed her eyes; one hand was trailing up and down the wall, as if stroking the metal.
"I don't like it," she said again, "but I don't know why. There's something wrong, but... I don't know if it's dangerous." She opened her eyes and stepped away from the wall. "I think we should go on."
"Okay." Skye cast her mind over the level map she'd memorised, and headed for one of the exits. "Shout if it gets worse."
"I'm pretty sure," replied Linette, not at all reassuringly, "that shouting would be a bad idea."
"I don't think it's a substation," Skye said when they reached their destination.
The light thrown by the lantern showed her a secure entrance area: high counters with metal grilles above them. Heavy doors to either side were marked AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY and NO ENTRY: they were clearly operated from behind the security desk. Not only that, but when Skye nudged the lantern up higher, she could see the tell–tale pits and grooves of deterrence weaponry in the ceiling. No, definitely not a power station: even these days she wouldn't expect more than a couple of guards and an ID check for one of those.
"We're going to have to find a manual override," Skye told Linette, after she'd summed up what she could see. "Pace didn't mention this sort of security."
Linette started walking slowly along the wall, trailing a hand over the metal, while Skye made her way to the security desk. She tugged at one of the transfer drawers below the window. It didn't budge – either it was jammed from years of disuse, or it could only be opened from the other side.
"There's something here," Linette called out.
The wall under her hand looked smooth, but Skye wasn't about to trust that impression. On her finger she was wearing a large signet ring set with a dark gem. Pace thought it had once been a security override of some kind, but Linette had worked on it obsessively until she'd turned it into a sort of skeleton key. Skye brought it up to the wall and ran the gem carefully over the area Linette had indicated.
There was a distinct click, and then a section of panelling suddenly moved inwards and aside, revealing a series of old–fashioned dials and switches. Skye gave them one long, careful look, then stepped aside to let Linette get at the mechanism.
"Try not to trigger anything lethal."
Linette nodded absently, fingertips already tracing the controls, and Skye figured that was as much reassurance as she was going to get. She stalked across the room to study one of the doors. It had the heavy, forbidding look of something that was not meant to be opened without extremely good reason. At the same time, the security wasn't high enough for it to have been a detention centre or similar. It could have been military, she supposed, but she didn't think it was. No logical reason for that – call it instinct. Or one of those elusive almost–memories from before.
"Ah," said Linette. Skye jumped as a crashing of gears sounded from inside the wall, and then the door began to slowly, painfully inch open. There was a faint screeeeeeee of worn metal. "Is it open?"
"Just about." Skye backed off, hand on her sword for no other reason than that it made her feel better. Beyond the door lay darkness. "Hold on, I'm going to check the Canary again."
She kept half an eye on the doorway as she operated the device. The little crystals went dark, one by one, finally leaving only the green air indicators... and that same white one at the bottom. It seemed brighter now. In fact... Skye squinted at the gems. No, it wasn't her imagination – the indicator above the white one was also glowing very faintly, a tiny point of light in the crystal depths. She decided not to mention that to Linette.
"Ready?"
"Mmm." Linette had come up silently behind her. Her wands were in her hands; she didn't trust the darkness that lay behind closed doors any more than Skye did. "I wonder what it is, if it's not a power station?"
"I guess we're about to find out," Skye replied, and stepped over the threshold.
As they moved from room to room, the mystery only deepened. This was clearly not an industrial complex; the workstations and individual rooms leant themselves more to research or teaching, but the overall layout and feel of the place was wrong. The nagging feeling of familiarity was back in Skye's mind, but no matter how she tugged at it, she couldn't find where it was coming from. There was a common area, dusty and cluttered with abandoned items – utensils, tools, piles of unrecognisable things. They appeared untouched by time and the dry, windless air of the underground city, but when Skye brushed against a pile of what might have been papers, they crumbled into a cloud of choking dust that set her coughing for a full five minutes.
It sounded awfully, terrifyingly loud in the silence of the empty rooms. Skye glanced at Linette, who was tense and poised to flee, and resolved to be more careful what she touched.
They found the turning that led to what Pace thought was the medical facility. The door opened easily enough with the skeleton key; the light of their lantern showed them a wide passageway with a security checkpoint halfway along, and another, identical door at the far end. A breeze unexpectedly touched the back of Skye's neck, and she shivered.
"There's definitely something here," Linette murmured. "It's like the way the power conduits buzz."
Power conduits, to Skye's knowledge, did not buzz, but she nodded anyway.
The second door took longer to react to the key. It opened inward, and when it finally began to move, it was with the excruciating slowness of a mechanism fighting against immense weight.
A gust of cool air rushed past them as the door swung open, as if it had been pent up and waiting to escape. Both Skye and Linette froze. Skye didn't know what Linette was sensing, but her own instincts – rooted in gods knew what – had gone from a muted murmur to a scream of warning.
"Back," she snapped. "Now. This isn't––"
The glow from the lantern suddenly flickered, and then vanished as if it had been blown out. Skye heard it hit the floor with a deafening clatter, and roll away somewhere. The air was moving all around them, like restless water, and there was a damp smell in it that hit the back of Skye's throat and made her want to retch.
The door behind them slammed shut.
"Skye!"
"Don't move!" Skye drew her sword, turned in a quarter circle, and backed up until she felt cool metal at her back. "Can you tell where I am?"
"Yes."
"Come here."
There was the brush of fabric against her sleeve, and then Linette looped one arm into hers. Skye gripped her sword; there was no sense in swinging it about blindly, but she was ready to put it to use at the slightest sound or movement in their vicinity. Gusts of wind buffeted them like the storms she'd seen on vids, then slowly ebbed away.
And then that nagging familiarity at the back of her mind snapped like a dull ache blossoming into sharp pain, and fragments of knowledge jabbed out of deep–buried memory and into the forefront of her mind.
She swore, briefly but vehemently.
"I know where we are."
"It's not a power station, is it?"
Skye shook her head, realised that Linette couldn't see the motion, and made a wordless, verbal negative. She strained her eyes against the darkness, but it was absolute, and only made her head ache.
"Can we get out?"
"That depends," Skye said grimly, "on what's in here with us." She drew a steadying breath, and began to inch back the way they had come, Linette in tow. "Do you know much about the light trees?"
"I heard there was one for sale, once, somewhere in the deep markets." Linette's voice had an unmistakeable, distant note in it. "We tried to find it, but we never did – maybe it was sold, and someone hid it away, to keep the light for themselves..."
"I mean the real light trees," Skye snapped. "Not the ones you - the Order of the Eye worship. The ones on the surface."
She'd been swinging her foot in wide arcs as she moved; it struck something metallic, and with a swift, cautious motion, Skye ducked down to retrieve the lantern. Something papery ghosted over her hand. She managed not to jump too hard. Debris had probably been blown out of the rooms ahead when they'd opened the door.
The lantern didn't respond when Skye tried to activate it. She passed it to Linette, then stood silent, listening past their breathing. Nothing. It wasn't reassuring.
Linette hummed something wordless and coaxing, and a small glow sprang up at Skye's side. The lantern's blades were spinning slowly, and its light was dim, but it was enough to see Linette's face, and a few paces either way of the corridor.
Enough to see a figure on the very edge of the shadows, indistinct and with the stillness of sudden cessation of movement.
Skye's sword was up in a second. She shoved Linette behind her. That moved the light, of course, and suddenly she couldn't see the figure any more. She snatched the lantern from Linette's hand and held it out ahead of her. Two steps forward to throw the lantern light further showed her nothing more than dust and shadows.
"What is it?"
"Nothing good." Skye edged a few more steps and still saw nothing. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. "I think there's some sort of access to the surface in here."
"Oh."
For the first time, Linette sounded frightened, and that wasn't a good sign. Nor was the way that Skye's heart was still pounding, her breathing too quick. This was danger neither of them knew except from old stories. Skye's training and instincts protected them from mundane attack or accident; Linette knew the spells and the bindings for the hauntings of the deep places. But if they had found, somehow, a breach that had not been sealed – if there was a point of entry here, a route to the outside – they might as well have left their weapons at the door.
Speaking of the door... Skye started back down the corridor, Linette a second shadow at her heels. The door they'd come through was shut fast, and didn't respond to the skeleton key this time.
"Are we locked in?"
Linette touched the door gingerly, as if she were afraid it would burn her. Then her face brightened.
"No – I think it's just jammed. I can get it open."
"Good. Do it. I'll keep watch."
There was a silence, and then Linette said, very quietly, "We'll let it out."
"What?"
"If we open the door."
Skye eyed the darkness at the other end of the corridor and wondered if she was imagining the faint susurration from within it.
"We'll shut it behind us," she said.
Linette just looked at her. Her pupils were enormous in the dim light, and that dark–eyed stare unnerved Skye almost more than whatever was in the rooms ahead.
"Tell me about the light trees."
Skye shot another uneasy look down the corridor.
"Now?"
Linette nodded. Skye sighed, adjusted her grip on her sword, and wondered if she stood any chance of breaking into Pace's res to throttle him in his sleep. Probably not. He probably had lasers or something.
"You know the basics, right? They weren't actually trees, no matter what the High Priestess says."
Linette nodded again, although Skye wasn't convinced she was so much accepting the statement as ignoring it for the time being.
"You know what they did?"
"They brought light in darkness." Linette's voice took on the singsong lilt of a nursery rhyme. "The crowning glory of the city of light."
"They were lightning rods," Skye corrected her. "They were used to draw power from Dyne's Storm to run the city, and, yes, they generated light to make the surface habitable. The point is, they went down deep, really deep, much further than the primary access tunnels. I think this must have been one of the control centres. Which means there's probably a direct shaft to the surface right over our heads." Skye sighed. "That's what Pace was picking up, wasn't it? It's not an Arc. It's storm taint."
"So there's a way in." Linette touched the door. "And if we open this, there's a way out."
Skye swore softly and continuously for a few minutes. The problem was, she was right. They couldn't guarantee sealing this place up again the way it had been when they'd found it. Which meant that they had to find that opening to the surface, and close it somehow.
(Or they could just run, dive deep back down into Vanrillion's shelter, hope that nothing followed them, hope the taint never spread, but the thought occurred to Skye only for a half–second, and then under the heading of things that were not an option.)
"Can you get the door unstuck so we can get out if we need to?"
"Yes."
"Okay, you'd better do that then." Skye swung her pack around and began to feel in one of its compartments. "We're going to need more light..."
The little glow–balls were tech, not Arcs, and Skye kept them as a last resort; they were expensive and didn't last all that long. Still, whatever was affecting the lantern apparently held no sway over their filaments and circuits; the first one she activated lit up so brightly it hurt her eyes.
She rolled it through the doorway into the first of the rooms. The shadows danced over the walls, leaping into strange and nightmarish shapes that made Skye want to grab her sword, but the only thing that moved of its own volition was a medium–sized spider that scuttled out of sight with lightning speed.
The ball came to a stop in the centre of the room, lighting it eerily. It seemed Pace had been right about one thing, at least. This looked like every medical facility Skye had ever been in. There was even a discarded stretcher on the far side of the room, right by a set of double doors that were hanging off their hinges. The darkness beyond yawned greedily, and the ever–present breeze stirred the ancient signs and posters drooping from the walls.
"Clear," Skye said, and they edged into the room together.
Pace's map had suggested those double doors led to the main treatment facilities, including the surgery and intensive care wards; it had been Skye's primary target for abandoned Arcs. She approached them cautiously, another glow–ball in her hand.
This one revealed a wide corridor and a number of doors leading off it, before colliding with a large, scaly lizard that had been sleeping in the middle of the floor. It jumped, mouth opening to emit a disgruntled noise, enormous eyes unshuttering to stare blankly in Skye's direction. Skye froze. It was almost as long as she was tall, but had no teeth that she could see. It started to shift towards her, uncoiling into a low–slung form with six legs, but Skye, struck by an inspiration, stamped her foot several times, causing it to check. A long tongue darted out, tasting the air, and then the lizard slunk away from the light globe, shouldering past a damaged door panel and disappearing into one of the rooms of the corridor.
"What was it?" whispered Linette.
"Not sure, but I think it was a Stoneskin Lizard," Skye replied. She took a few steps down the corridor and used the tip of her sword to nudge the glow–ball into rolling a few more metres. "They're only dangerous if they take you by surprise. I've never seen one before – you don't get them below the interdiction zone. I think someone brought a couple down to study, once, but they died in captivity."
"Did Pace tell you that?"
"No..." Skye said slowly. "I don't know how I know it. It must be from before."
"Why did they die?"
"They're not cave dwellers naturally. They need some sort of connection to the surface. Even just a wisp of air or light..."
Skye trailed off. She reached into her pack and pulled out the Canary, quieting Linette when she would have asked a question. The indicators once more showed green, but this time there were two white lights, one brighter than the other.
"We can use this to find the breach," Skye said. "Stay close."
When they finally did run into something hostile, there wasn't much they could do about it.
It took the form of a gale. The door they'd just come through slammed open and shut repeatedly in the shrieking wind, then tore off and flung itself across the room at them. Skye pulled Linette aside just in time, got them both into a corner, and braced against the attack.
"Must be a storm daé," Skye shouted over the wind. That was actually a good thing. Daé were troublesome, especially when their primary elemental force was something so chaotic, but they tended not to be actively malevolent. Just dangerous to anyone who came across them. "Do you think we could seal it?"
"Maybe." They'd contained or destroyed daé before, but those had been stone or shadow, the more common dangers of Vanrillion's depths. Storm was a new one, and Skye wasn't entirely sure it obeyed the same rules. Linette sounded like she was thinking the same thing. "I can try, anyway."
"There's another door over there. I think that's where it's coming from."
The daé, or whatever it was, clearly didn't want them to go through that door; it flung most of the contents of the room at them when they tried. Skye deflected two chairs and half a desk, wincing as her sword rang with the impact and the runes for strength lit up white–hot on the blade, but Linette had started her wands spinning in each hand, and whatever she was chanting under her breath seemed to calm the wind a little. Skye ducked through first, tossing in a glow–ball and scanning the room for any more danger. This place was badly damaged: the walls were stained with water, and there was rubble on the floor, spilling out from a deep crack in one corner that seemed to be pumping cold air and that damp smell into the room. Skye was loath even to go near it.
The wind raged around the room, something desperate in its whine, and Skye felt a moment's pang for it. It was trapped here, far underground and alone, separated from the great storm that had birthed it. She couldn't really blame it for lashing out.
Linette was walking with more confidence, spinning her wands so fast now that Skye knew she would be able to hear their low hum if the wind hadn't been so loud. She said something Skye didn't catch.
"What?"
"We need to wall off the breach," Linette shouted. "With rock and metal, so the seal will take."
"Great," muttered Skye, ducked a flying piece of splintered wood, and steeled herself to approach the dark crack in the wall.
The next few minutes were a struggle of wills. Linette's wands were doing something, and Skye could feel the building momentum of the seal she was spinning around them, but the trapped storm was fighting them with everything it had. Every movement Skye made was a battle against the wind, and the very air she was breathing seemed hostile as she manhandled loose chunks of rock to fill the gap. The air here was so cold it hurt her hands, and she expected an attack any second. The fact that she had no clear idea what form it would take only made her jumpier.
Behind her, Linette said something, a long, low rattle of words, and suddenly the wind died to something more manageable, although it was still tossing pieces of debris around the room. Skye had almost filled the crack with rocks now; she started picking up smaller pieces to wedge in the gaps. It wasn't the physical obstruction that mattered, of course, so much as the symbolic barrier of metal and stone, but it made her feel better.
Linette gave a soft cry of surprise.
Skye spun around, to find her staring at something on the other side of the room. Skye followed her gaze, and felt her skin prickle. There was someone there – just out of the range of the lantern, almost part of the shadows – but a human outline, a man. He made no move towards them; Skye could just make out the faint sheen of a pair of eyes, watching. It was hard to tell in the dimness, but Skye thought that the occasional scraps of wood or paper that blew his way passed through him.
"Skye..."
"I know." Ghosts were rare in Vanrillion. The funeral rituals were performed meticulously. "Finish the sealing."
After a moment's hesitation, Linette carried on. Skye kept her eyes on the man – ghost – spirit – whatever it was. It didn't move; she might have taken it for a statue had it not wavered faintly now and then, like smoke.
Linette's circle flared bright, the dull red of rust and the cool silver of mercury, a globe of lines of light that expanded outwards from her still–spinning wands. Skye felt the room warm up perceptibly. The wind gave one last fading gust, and died away. Behind her, she heard rock shifting and bonding, but she didn't look away from the figure in the darkness.
The figure stirred – Skye couldn't quite see the movement, wasn't sure if it had lifted a hand, or taken a step – and then, to her shock, it spoke.
Whatever it said, it was in a language Skye had never heard. On the last syllable, the ghost disappeared like a candle going out. Linette's circle flickered once, and faded. The glow–bulb suddenly brightened, but there was nothing now in the shadows except dust and debris. The turbulent air had stilled, and the silence pressed in on them like a shroud.
"Come on," muttered Skye. "Let's get out of here."
Later – after they'd closed every door they could, and made the long trek (empty–handed) down through the interdiction zone, and worked their way through the levels of the city on a suitably circuitous route that, if anybody had noted their transgression, they'd find it hard to track them – after Skye had pulled food randomly out of the cupboards and made sure Linette ate it and then left an extremely sarcastic message for Pace on the vidphone – after they'd washed the dust and the taint from their bodies, and Skye had brushed Linette's hair – Linette finally said, "I wonder why he said that."
Skye was oiling her sword, thinking about the Stoneskin Lizard and the formless violence of the storm, and replied absently.
"Who said what?"
"The ghost."
Skye turned to look at her, frowning. Linette was curled into her favourite cushioned alcove, playing one of her wands through her fingers over and over.
"He didn't say anything I could understand."
Linette raised surprised eyes in Skye's direction.
"But he spoke quite clearly. Didn't you hear?"
"No." Skye set aside the sword. "What did he say?"
Linette frowned, fingers stilling on the wand. She had dressed in the loose robes she favoured for relaxation, her pale hair unbound; without the ribbons and braids, she looked older. Skye remembered her caught in the fever, and the things she had seemed to see, and wondered, not for the first time, if they had really been no more than hallucinations.
When Linette spoke, it sent a shiver down Skye's spine.
"He said, 'It's not as dark outside as you think.'"
the end
"Yes," said the merchant pointedly, "but what is it?"
His would–be customer scowled in a way that made him glance nervously at the sword hanging from her belt. She'd be mad to pull a weapon in the commercial district – the guards would be on her in seconds – but he couldn't help thinking that the guards wouldn't be much comfort to him if he was already skewered like a cave scull. Still, she didn't look like a troublemaker so much as tough and uncompromising – in fact, were it not for the way she was dressed, he'd have assumed she was one of the guards. As it was, she clearly hailed from the lower levels, and the straps, clasps, and holsters slung about her person marked her as a mercenary, a scavenger, or both. Probably both. You had to be able to defend yourself if you were going to bring in a living from the abandoned sectors, and most scavengers doubled as swords–for–hire.
The woman looked at him as though he were very simple.
"It's an Arc," she said. "I was under the impression you were familiar with them."
"I don't know where you heard that," he replied primly, "but I'm a dealer in antiquities, not Arcana."
Which was, of course, not entirely true, but he didn't like the fact that she'd sought him out. With most of his contacts, it was the other way around. Not to mention that the collection of Arcana she'd produced looked like nothing he'd ever seen before. He was currently examining a bracelet of incredibly high workmanship, studded with crystals; one of them was pulsing with a faint glow in time to every word they spoke. If it weren't for that giveaway, he'd have thought it was just a valuable piece of jewellery, and probably been willing to pay a good price for it. As it was, the thing was clearly full of magic, and the woman had admitted she didn't know what it did. He put the Arc back with the others, and folded his arms.
"Besides, it could be dangerous."
The woman snorted.
"We've tested it," she said, and he wondered who exactly 'we' were. "I've even worn it. It's harmless – I just don't know what it does. It could be a fascinating project for a scholar of Arcana."
He could almost hear the quote marks around the last part, the sort of glib phrase you heard at auctions when someone was trying to sell you a pretty piece of junk. He'd used it himself, as a matter of fact, passing off broken Arcs and fragments of crystal to naive buyers. The sarcasm in her voice made him uncomfortable.
All the same, it was tempting. He'd only seen a fully working Arc once or twice, and never at this level of sophistication. The things were bought and sold on the black market for exorbitant rates; only the scraps and leftovers came the way of a small–time curio dealer like himself. That in itself made him wary – why would she be selling it to him, when she was clearly no amateur? He wasn't about to throw money away on an item that could be an ancient booby–trap, or something illegal. He put the question as delicately as he was able.
"No buyers for this sort of thing," was her candid reply. "They're too obscure. Unique. The kind of thing your clients would like."
He wondered what she thought she knew about his clients, but his mind was already made up.
"No," he said firmly, "I'm not interested. Thank you."
She looked at him for a long space of seconds, grey eyes narrowed, and he did wonder, just briefly, if maybe she didn't give a damn about the guards, or the consequences, and whether she was as quick with that sword as her poised movements suggested.
Then she shrugged, collected up the assorted Arcs, and turned to go without another word.
"If you bring me something useful," he called after her, feeling obscurely like she'd had the last word, "I'd definitely be interested."
She paused at the door to cast a cool look over her shoulder, past a ragged fall of blonde hair.
"I've no shortage of buyers for those," she replied. "It's only the luxuries that the lower levels can't afford."
She was gone before he could find a counter to the scorn in her voice.
By the time she'd visited the last of her possible buyers – and come away empty–handed – Skye was tired, hot, and frustrated. They kept the upper parts of the city warmer than the deep levels. She was used to the cold of empty tunnels and the eerie breezes that slithered around corners and under doors. Up here it felt stuffy and oppressive: claustrophobic, though to use the term in Vanrillion was laughable. Ironic, that the supposedly more desirable areas of residence should be so uncomfortable, but the inhabitants seemed to like it well enough. It was probably arranged to suit their fashions, she thought, as a pair of men in floating garments wafted by. She scowled at them when they looked askance at her worn but sturdy trousers and leather jacket.
Her sweaty hair was in her eyes again; she thrust it back, jostling the bag slung over her shoulder and grimacing when it clanked softly. Gods, she'd have thought someone in the upper markets would be interested in the damn things as at least a curiosity, but they were all too cautious, or too miserly, or just plain didn't like the way she looked.
Skye was getting a lot of that today. As she turned down a wide boulevard with a high ceiling, lit by tall white lamps with carefully cultivated greenery at their feet, she was aware of more glances and expressions of distaste. Any citizen was, in theory, free to pass through any public sector of the city – but to do so wearing the wrong clothes, or on the wrong business, was to find yourself obstructed and scorned at every turn.
She had to wait in a crowd for the next express elevator, and that made her even hotter, and itchy with the need to get her back against a wall. She didn't know where that instinct had come from, but it was hard to suppress. So was the urge to shoulder her way through the milling passersby with the arrogance of authority. That one had got her into trouble more than once. It was generally best, in her line of work, not to draw undue attention.
Especially when your memory only went back five years.
The elevator operator scrutinised her ticket for an obnoxiously long time, casting dubious glances at her sword and attire before he let her on board.
It was almost a relief when she emerged, some hundred levels later, into the chaos of the Lower Concourse. The noise hit her like a wave as she stepped out of the elevator. It was busy at any hour – a seething crowd perpetually pushed and hurried their way beneath the neon billboards – but Skye found it positively relaxing after being in the upper levels all day. At least here she was invisible; no–one cared to notice as she made her way home.
When Skye keyed open the door to the res, she was greeted by the sound of quiet singing drifting from the direction of the garden. She paused inside the threshold, letting the door swoosh shut behind her, and listened for a moment. It sounded like nonsense, both the words and the music, just going any old where up and down the scale, stringing together sounds that were pleasing. That was a good sign. Popular music usually indicated that Linette was having one of her bad days, mind scatterslipped all over the place and echoing the world around her. The hymns of the old gods heralded a retreat into the dark places of memory that could take days to coax her out of. Nonsense was good. Skye liked it better when Linette didn't make sense.
Skye dropped her bag on the counter, shrugged out of her jacket, and made her way down the central corridor. The door to the garden was open, which was a waste of climate control, but Skye wasn't in the mood to scold Linette for it. She was kneeling by one of the planters, dirt smudged on her arms and face, very pale in the harsh light of the sunlamps embedded in the ceiling. A small, sad pile of dead flowers was by her side, but those that remained looked healthy enough, their silvery blooms turned towards Linette in that disconcerting way of theirs. Skye had once joked that it was because Linette reflected more light than the average person, but honestly, she had no idea what caused the phenomenon. As far as she was aware, Linette's attunements were stone and water, not wood – but then, with Linette, it was hard to put things in neat boxes.
"How are you feeling?" Skye asked, leaning against the door frame.
"That's a strange and difficult question," Linette replied. Then, "I think we need nutrients for the hydroponics."
Skye wandered over to check the readings on the lines of tanks on the other side of the garden room. They looked okay to her, but Linette was generally right about these things, and it waould be annoying to lose a crop because the worn–out mechanisms hadn't buzzed up an alert in time. The dense weeds looked like they'd be ready to harvest in a few more days, which would be nice. Skye was getting rather sick of the unexpected bumper crop of carrots they'd been living on this month. She moved to stand by Linette, and pressed the back of one hand briefly against her paper–white forehead. The fever seemed to be gone.
"Did you sell any of them?" Linette asked, squinting up at her.
"No, though not for lack of trying." Skye lowered her hand to offer it as support. "Come inside, you need to watch your skin."
"It's all right," Linette replied, taking Skye's hand with a smile that was only half for her. "Today I'm alabaster."
"You'll be terracotta if you sit here much longer," Skye muttered, and Linette laughed her silvery laugh as she allowed herself to be shepherded back into the main part of the res.
After Skye had double–checked Linette's temperature and quizzed her about whether she'd eaten lunch (the empty plates were no proof of anything), she busied herself in the kitchen while Linette curled up among the cushions on the other side of the living space. She seemed as normal as she ever was. The doctor had said she would recover fast once the fever broke; Skye supposed he'd been worth the fee after all.
"Pace left a message while you were out," Linette said, out of the blue. "He wants to meet, the day after tomorrow."
"Where? The usual place?"
"No, he said to start from the hostel in the north quadrant of one–eight–three, and use fire."
Skye stopped mid–slice, staring at the carrot without seeing it, a small frown on her face. They usually met with Pace in a crowded eatery off in the side streets of one of the lower markets. He very rarely required more secrecy from them than basic precautions against being tailed.
"You're sure it was fire?"
"Yes."
Skye pushed the chopping board aside, and walked to the battered old comm unit in its alcove on the back wall. The message, when she called it up, contained little more than what Linette had reported, but Pace's voice and expression told her a lot. He sounded interested and excited, so whatever it was, it didn't mean trouble. Or at least, he didn't think it meant trouble. The two were not always the same.
"We'd better prep the Seeker," Skye said, turning away from the screen. "Fire always takes longer to charge."
"I already started." Linette gestured at the altar in an alcove on one side of the room. Sure enough, there was a small, battered bronze object, reminiscent of an old–fashioned tobacco pipe, sitting in the middle of a cluster of candles and focusing crystals. "But I need you to draw the runes."
Skye crossed over to the altar, picked up the stick of chalk Linette had left there, and quickly sketched out the sequence of symbols that would imbue the Seeker with the essence of fire. They were sure there must have been another way of activating it, once – the whole point of Arcs was to allow you to use magic without ritual – but Linette had been unable to find the key even with her innate sense of the workings of metal and crystal. Still, it was useful enough to be worth the hassle. Skye finished her drawing, wiped the chalk dust from her fingers, and headed back to the kitchen.
"Do you think you'll be well enough to go?"
"Oh, yes," replied Linette serenely. "I was never really sick to begin with, you know. Just under siege."
"Wish you'd told me that before I sat up all night working the healing charms," Skye muttered. "I could have just used my sword."
"You did," Linette replied.
Skye had no more idea what she meant by that than she did of a lot of what Linette said, and had long given up being worried by it; but the way Linette looked at her, as if she could see Skye as more than a blur, unsettled her.
"I wish he'd chosen something other than fire," Skye managed to pant as they dashed around another corner. "It always goes too damn fast."
"I think that's why did he choose it." Linette, as usual, didn't seem at all out of breath, moving in her odd, gliding way that nonetheless kept pace with Skye's best speed. "Harder to catch."
"Yes, but it doesn't do us much good if we can't catch up with – oh, you have to be kidding me."
The little bright spot they were following had paused, bobbing, in front of a set of double doors marked as access to a stairwell; it promptly dived through the metal, and Skye thought, darkly, that if Pace had ensconced himself fifty levels up, she was going to have to reconsider their business relationship.
Fortunately, the wisp only led them up two flights of stairs before darting back out into a quiet corridor that looked like it was part of a storage section. Skye and Linette jogged (well, Skye jogged) after it, following it through a series of junctions that Skye committed to memory, before it stopped in front of a big door marked with a warehouse code. It looked locked, but appearances could be deceiving. As Skye tried the handle, the wisp slipped through the heavy metal as though it were air, and the door opened without protest.
Inside were a number of crates and cartons, on one of which Pace was sitting, reading a dossier of some kind. At their entrance, he looked up and raised a hand in greeting. The bright red–gold wisp hovered over his head, making little darting rushes at him, and the direction of his hand changed mid–motion. He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a similar palm–sized instrument, and clicked it open. The wisp dived in, its glow vanishing, and Pace pocketed the device and grinned at them. His face was eerily lit by the faint backglow from his visor. There didn't seem to be much light in the storage compartment apart from that.
"I do apologise for the insalubrious quarters," he said, reaching up to deactivate the visor. The glow vanished, and it slid back into his headset, revealing pale eyes and a sheepish tilt of the brows. "I didn't want to discuss this in public, and I thought bringing you to the upper levels might be unwise."
"You thought right," Skye replied wryly; at least they had him somewhat trained by now. She started to cross the room, and stopped as the door slid shut behind them, plunging them into darkness except for the faint emergency lights around the walls. "I don't suppose you brought a torch?"
"Oh. No, it didn't occur to me..."
Skye heard the faint sounds of Linette walking across the room with the confidence of one who rarely relied on sight in the first place. Skye muttered something uncomplimentary about the blind leading the blind, flipped open a thigh holster, and drew out the slim copper cylinder of a cyclone lantern. A gentle press of her fingertips to the right spot caused its blades to fan out and begin to spin. After a few seconds, the glow around them was noticeable; a minute after that, the lamp was bright enough to show Skye that Linette had perched herself on a crate next to Pace, who was blinking in the sudden illumination. He had the unkempt look about him, she could see now, that suggested it had been a while since he had remembered to leave the research centre.
"So, what have you got for us?" Skye left the lantern hovering in mid–air, pulled up her own crate and took a seat. "If it's another disused waste disposal system, we're not interested."
"I have apologised for that," Pace replied. He flipped open the dossier and held it out to Skye. "No, I've double–checked the location, and I'm almost positive it's part of a power substation."
"How almost is almost?"
"... eight–seven percent?"
"I suppose that'll have to do." Skye looked over the maps Pace was indicating, noting the areas that were unlabelled or dotted with question marks. "What do you think we're looking for?"
"I'm really not sure." Pace sounded thrilled by that fact, which seemed to be just one of the many traits that marked scientists apart from normal people. "The readings for the whole area are very strong, but it's hard to tell if they are discrete or dispersed..."
"In other words, we could be looking at a stack of smaller Arcs, or one really big, powerful one?"
"Precisely."
"Hmm."
Skye glanced at the written documents, but they were obviously Pace's notes on the energy fluctuations he'd picked up, and largely impenetrable. Besides, the plans were the important thing. There was an awful lot of uncertainty there – only one or two parts of the complex seemed to have been firmly identified, and Skye didn't like the look of the layout. It didn't seem right for an industrial facility, somehow. There was a familiarity nagging at the back of her memory, but that was something she had just learned to live with; the times when those hunches turned into anything useful were so few and far between that there was no point in dwelling too much on them. It only reminded her of how little she knew about herself.
"Where is this?" she asked. "It must be pretty deep... below two–nine–four, at least."
"Actually, it's quite the opposite," Pace replied. "It's on level twelve."
Linette made a startled noise, and Skye raised her head to stare at Pace in disbelief.
"Are you serious? Level twelve? That's... it's well out of bounds, even for us."
"I know, I know." Pace nibbled at his lower lip, hands gesturing as he spoke. "But that's why I can't get an official permit, you see, even though the facility is well away from the central shafts and the surface access tunnels. I've checked and double checked the maps, and you can get to it without ever coming near the most dangerous parts. You'll need to be a little creative going from level twenty to level nineteen, but..."
"We're going to have to be more than 'a little creative' to get through thirteen levels without getting caught."
Skye scowled at the plans, that nagging feeling of unease only deepening. Level twelve? There'd been exactly two occasions on which she and Linette had ventured into the interdiction zone above level twenty–five; neither had been successful, and the first time had come damn near to getting them arrested.
The second time had come damn near to getting them killed.
"I don't know, Pace," she said. In the dim light, she saw his face fall, but much as she might like him, he was still a client, and some risks just didn't pay off. "We might have to pass on this one."
"There's... there's one more thing." Pace looked like he hated himself for what he was saying, and the back of Skye's neck prickled. "Did you note the subsection to the north–east of the complex?"
Skye paged back through the blueprints until she found the part he meant. It was self–contained, a series of chambers connected to the rest of the plan by a single corridor with what looked like a security or safety check point halfway along.
"What about it?"
"I think..." Pace glanced at Linette, hesitated, and then forged ahead with guilty determination. "I have some reason to believe that it might have been a medical facility."
Gods, I hate you sometimes, Skye thought.
"Obviously I, I need to study anything you find," he went on, stumbling over his words, "but if there's anything that could help either of you, I'd consider that part of your payment."
"Oh," said Linette, softly; she lifted her head to gaze at Skye, and the way the red in her irises caught the lamplight made her look, for a second, like her eyes were bleeding. "Skye...?"
"How much reason?" Skye demanded.
"I beg your pardon?"
"How much 'reason to believe' do you have?"
Pace put his hand up to his temple, flicking the switch that activated his visor. It slid near–soundlessly over his eyes, and he stared at whatever calculations or citations were flickering down the screen only he could see.
"I've... found some old records that I believe relate to the facility," he admitted at last. "They're incomplete, and the information on the main area is sketchy at best, but there is a relatively intact file that goes into some detail about what appears to have been a mid–level treatment and quarantine centre for those exposed to harmful conditions within the complex."
"Why didn't you mention that in the first place?" demanded Skye. "I want to see that file."
"That's why I didn't mention it," Pace said. "There's no way I can get it out of the system. Even accessing it without tripping half a dozen alarms took me three weeks. I couldn't copy it or even keep it open for long – I had to make notes as I read. You'll have to take my word for it."
Skye stared blankly at the file in her hands. It was too great a gamble, that was obvious. It wasn't that she didn't trust Pace. She believed in his integrity and she knew he would never deliberately endanger them, but his information wasn't always accurate. How could it be, when the areas he sent them to had been sealed off for hundreds of years, the records about them locked up behind Directorate security codes and buried in generations of paranoia? Pace was a genuine seeker of knowledge. For him, any risk was worth it for the chance that maybe, just maybe, they would learn something new. On the rare occasions Skye had turned him down, he had accepted her decision without argument, but she knew it had left him frustrated and disappointed.
That wasn't enough of a reason to take a risky job. But that extra temptation he'd offered them... a genuinely intact medical facility? Not just a first aid station, not a general clinic, but an advanced centre that would have dealt with industrial injuries? Could they afford to pass that up?
Linette was still watching her, or at least, watching the blur of light and shadow that, to her, made up most of the world. It wasn't inconceivable that they might retrieve an Arc that could repair or augment her sight; the equivalent of Pace's visor, without the insurmountable running costs that put such tech out of the reach of the common citizens of Vanrillion.
It wasn't inconceivable that they might find something that could reverse Skye's amnesia.
"Show me the route you've calculated through the levels," Skye said at last. "If it's really as far from the access tunnels as you say, we'll think about it."
"No," murmured Linette, to herself and almost too quiet to hear, "I don't think we'll think about it. I think we'll feel about it – which is really far more dangerous."
The transition between levels nineteen and twenty, as it turned out, required not just creativity, but a solid hour's work with Linette's tool kit to get into the ventilation system. Linette did most of it, leaving Skye to fidget and fret, glancing down the dimly lit corridors as if she expected armed guards or nameless horrors to emerge from the darkness at any moment. Which, to be fair, was not an unreasonable possibility. There were plenty of dangers in exploring the abandoned parts of Vanrillion. There were neglected infrastructures that had become deadly traps; there were passages that led to pits that led to nowhere. There were gas leaks and radiation leaks and long–forgotten conduits of power. There were cave scutters and rot vermin and the scaled dragonets that haunted thermal vents and power stations, and there were the stinging scorpids that colonised damp faults in the rock.
And there were things in the deep places that were hostile to intruders from the world of light; things that had been part of the darkness and the silence and the deep rock since before Skye's race had had a name.
Scrambling up ventilation shafts wasn't much fun, but at least it gave Skye something to focus on other than her own nerves. Linette had a lot of difficulty with the climb, even with the assistance of the harness; she could see next to nothing in the gloom, and the disorientation of an unfamiliar place threw off her uncanny sense of her surroundings. By the time they emerged onto level nineteen, Skye was wondering if they should call the whole thing off.
Her unease only increased when she got a good look at their surroundings. Up until now, the levels they'd passed through had been silent and lit only by the dim green of emergency lighting, but apart from a layer of dust that rose to choke Skye with every step, they had not been in especial disrepair. The corridor they now stood in was different; in places, the wall panels had buckled, and their metal showed the telltale signs of water damage. The lighting here was barely working. There was a faint green glow from around a corner, but when Skye swept the lantern in that direction, it illuminated cracked light fittings along the walls, and debris cluttered on the floor. There was the scuttle of something small and scaly just out of reach of the light.
Linette had plastered herself against the wall as soon as she'd emerged. Her instincts were almost as strident as Skye's when it came to having something at her back, but in Linette's case, the actual contact with metal or stone was important. Even as Skye was wishing they had two or three more lanterns, and possibly a shovel, Linette seemed to regain her confidence, and stepped out calmly in the direction of the faint glow.
"Careful," Skye began needlessly. Linette stepped over a mound of debris without even seeming to notice it was there. "Are you sure you're..."
"It's okay, I can feel it." Linette had stretched out a hand to trail loosely along the wall. Skye had no elemental attunement that she knew of, but Linette had often described what she sensed from the metal and rock in terms of taste, sound, or smell, and Skye had an idea of what it was she was following. "There's been danger here, but it's very old. We can keep going."
Skye found she was almost disappointed, but she nodded, and steeled herself for the rest of the journey.
The next five or six levels were in similar states of disrepair, but after that, strangely, things began to look more tidy again. The lighting on fourteen was fully functional, and there was barely any debris. The section they had to walk through to get to the next set of stairs had evidently been residential, and the wide, empty boulevards and closed doors, with their neat numbers, unnerved Skye almost more than the gaping doorways on the lower levels. They could have been walking through one of the abandoned districts that scattered the inhabited parts of Vanrillion, with the hustle and bustle of daily life occurring just the other side of the wall. Except, Linette said, that with every level they climbed, the weight of rock above them lessened, until she felt like she would float away. Skye had to take her word for it, but nonetheless, there was something different about these empty corridors and plazas – maybe it was her imagination, but she thought she could almost feel the power, the fundamental energies that were Vanrillion's life blood, running through the walls.
They emerged onto level twelve with exaggerated caution, although Skye had gained confidence that Pace's route was as uneventful (she hesitated to use the word 'safe') as he had promised. The fact that they were exactly where he'd said they'd be – in the hub of a series of warehouses – went further to reassure her.
"So far, so good," she murmured to Linette, more to hear the sound of her own voice than anything.
"I don't like it." Linette was hanging back, reluctant to step out of the doorway. Open spaces were harder for her to read than enclosed ones. "Can't you smell it? Something's wrong with the air."
Skye took a good sniff, but it smelled the same here as in any of the abandoned parts of the city: dusty, old, and stale. There was a faint breeze, one of those mysterious currents of air that blew through the tunnels of Vanrillion from no guessable source, but it was nothing that triggered any alarm bells. Still, she felt in her pack for the device Linette had dubbed the Canary, pulled it out, and activated it with a deft twist. The smooth, metal egg split into six segments, opening out like a flower, and revealing a series of small coloured gems embedded in each 'petal'. These began to glow softly; after a few seconds, the Canary chimed several times, and most of the gems went dark.
Skye frowned at the remainder. They had worked out the system mostly by trial and error: she knew that the results signalled no harmful gases, chemicals, or radiation in their surroundings. The set of glowing gems in various shades of pale green seemed to indicate breathable air – Skye had never seen them dark, at any rate. Pace had hypothesised that the colours represented the component gases, and would have liked to have taken it away for further study, but while Skye trusted him, she had no faith in the institution he worked for, or the likelihood that she would ever see the Canary again if she handed it over. A certain amount of basic experimentation had identified the majority of the markers, but there were several that remained a mystery.
One of these was lit now: it glowed a soft, pure white that Skye had never seen before. It was on the same section as the indicators for air, but separated from them by two unlit gems that were likewise unidentified.
"Well?" Linette queried anxiously.
"There's nothing bad," Skye replied slowly, staring at that one anomalous light. "I think."
"What do you mean?"
Skye held the Canary up close to Linette's face. Linette narrowed her eyes – Skye wasn't sure if it did anything to improve her limited vision, or if it was just a habit – and then blinked twice.
"White," she said. "White should be good. Shouldn't it?"
"Hmm." Skye stared at the Canary for a few more seconds, then exerted a slight pressure on the open segments to cause them to fold up. She weighed it thoughtfully in her hand before slipping it back into her bag. "What do you think? Should we call it off?"
She was inclined to press on, herself, after the effort they'd gone through getting here, but she waited for Linette's answer. Linette had closed her eyes; one hand was trailing up and down the wall, as if stroking the metal.
"I don't like it," she said again, "but I don't know why. There's something wrong, but... I don't know if it's dangerous." She opened her eyes and stepped away from the wall. "I think we should go on."
"Okay." Skye cast her mind over the level map she'd memorised, and headed for one of the exits. "Shout if it gets worse."
"I'm pretty sure," replied Linette, not at all reassuringly, "that shouting would be a bad idea."
"I don't think it's a substation," Skye said when they reached their destination.
The light thrown by the lantern showed her a secure entrance area: high counters with metal grilles above them. Heavy doors to either side were marked AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY and NO ENTRY: they were clearly operated from behind the security desk. Not only that, but when Skye nudged the lantern up higher, she could see the tell–tale pits and grooves of deterrence weaponry in the ceiling. No, definitely not a power station: even these days she wouldn't expect more than a couple of guards and an ID check for one of those.
"We're going to have to find a manual override," Skye told Linette, after she'd summed up what she could see. "Pace didn't mention this sort of security."
Linette started walking slowly along the wall, trailing a hand over the metal, while Skye made her way to the security desk. She tugged at one of the transfer drawers below the window. It didn't budge – either it was jammed from years of disuse, or it could only be opened from the other side.
"There's something here," Linette called out.
The wall under her hand looked smooth, but Skye wasn't about to trust that impression. On her finger she was wearing a large signet ring set with a dark gem. Pace thought it had once been a security override of some kind, but Linette had worked on it obsessively until she'd turned it into a sort of skeleton key. Skye brought it up to the wall and ran the gem carefully over the area Linette had indicated.
There was a distinct click, and then a section of panelling suddenly moved inwards and aside, revealing a series of old–fashioned dials and switches. Skye gave them one long, careful look, then stepped aside to let Linette get at the mechanism.
"Try not to trigger anything lethal."
Linette nodded absently, fingertips already tracing the controls, and Skye figured that was as much reassurance as she was going to get. She stalked across the room to study one of the doors. It had the heavy, forbidding look of something that was not meant to be opened without extremely good reason. At the same time, the security wasn't high enough for it to have been a detention centre or similar. It could have been military, she supposed, but she didn't think it was. No logical reason for that – call it instinct. Or one of those elusive almost–memories from before.
"Ah," said Linette. Skye jumped as a crashing of gears sounded from inside the wall, and then the door began to slowly, painfully inch open. There was a faint screeeeeeee of worn metal. "Is it open?"
"Just about." Skye backed off, hand on her sword for no other reason than that it made her feel better. Beyond the door lay darkness. "Hold on, I'm going to check the Canary again."
She kept half an eye on the doorway as she operated the device. The little crystals went dark, one by one, finally leaving only the green air indicators... and that same white one at the bottom. It seemed brighter now. In fact... Skye squinted at the gems. No, it wasn't her imagination – the indicator above the white one was also glowing very faintly, a tiny point of light in the crystal depths. She decided not to mention that to Linette.
"Ready?"
"Mmm." Linette had come up silently behind her. Her wands were in her hands; she didn't trust the darkness that lay behind closed doors any more than Skye did. "I wonder what it is, if it's not a power station?"
"I guess we're about to find out," Skye replied, and stepped over the threshold.
As they moved from room to room, the mystery only deepened. This was clearly not an industrial complex; the workstations and individual rooms leant themselves more to research or teaching, but the overall layout and feel of the place was wrong. The nagging feeling of familiarity was back in Skye's mind, but no matter how she tugged at it, she couldn't find where it was coming from. There was a common area, dusty and cluttered with abandoned items – utensils, tools, piles of unrecognisable things. They appeared untouched by time and the dry, windless air of the underground city, but when Skye brushed against a pile of what might have been papers, they crumbled into a cloud of choking dust that set her coughing for a full five minutes.
It sounded awfully, terrifyingly loud in the silence of the empty rooms. Skye glanced at Linette, who was tense and poised to flee, and resolved to be more careful what she touched.
They found the turning that led to what Pace thought was the medical facility. The door opened easily enough with the skeleton key; the light of their lantern showed them a wide passageway with a security checkpoint halfway along, and another, identical door at the far end. A breeze unexpectedly touched the back of Skye's neck, and she shivered.
"There's definitely something here," Linette murmured. "It's like the way the power conduits buzz."
Power conduits, to Skye's knowledge, did not buzz, but she nodded anyway.
The second door took longer to react to the key. It opened inward, and when it finally began to move, it was with the excruciating slowness of a mechanism fighting against immense weight.
A gust of cool air rushed past them as the door swung open, as if it had been pent up and waiting to escape. Both Skye and Linette froze. Skye didn't know what Linette was sensing, but her own instincts – rooted in gods knew what – had gone from a muted murmur to a scream of warning.
"Back," she snapped. "Now. This isn't––"
The glow from the lantern suddenly flickered, and then vanished as if it had been blown out. Skye heard it hit the floor with a deafening clatter, and roll away somewhere. The air was moving all around them, like restless water, and there was a damp smell in it that hit the back of Skye's throat and made her want to retch.
The door behind them slammed shut.
"Skye!"
"Don't move!" Skye drew her sword, turned in a quarter circle, and backed up until she felt cool metal at her back. "Can you tell where I am?"
"Yes."
"Come here."
There was the brush of fabric against her sleeve, and then Linette looped one arm into hers. Skye gripped her sword; there was no sense in swinging it about blindly, but she was ready to put it to use at the slightest sound or movement in their vicinity. Gusts of wind buffeted them like the storms she'd seen on vids, then slowly ebbed away.
And then that nagging familiarity at the back of her mind snapped like a dull ache blossoming into sharp pain, and fragments of knowledge jabbed out of deep–buried memory and into the forefront of her mind.
She swore, briefly but vehemently.
"I know where we are."
"It's not a power station, is it?"
Skye shook her head, realised that Linette couldn't see the motion, and made a wordless, verbal negative. She strained her eyes against the darkness, but it was absolute, and only made her head ache.
"Can we get out?"
"That depends," Skye said grimly, "on what's in here with us." She drew a steadying breath, and began to inch back the way they had come, Linette in tow. "Do you know much about the light trees?"
"I heard there was one for sale, once, somewhere in the deep markets." Linette's voice had an unmistakeable, distant note in it. "We tried to find it, but we never did – maybe it was sold, and someone hid it away, to keep the light for themselves..."
"I mean the real light trees," Skye snapped. "Not the ones you - the Order of the Eye worship. The ones on the surface."
She'd been swinging her foot in wide arcs as she moved; it struck something metallic, and with a swift, cautious motion, Skye ducked down to retrieve the lantern. Something papery ghosted over her hand. She managed not to jump too hard. Debris had probably been blown out of the rooms ahead when they'd opened the door.
The lantern didn't respond when Skye tried to activate it. She passed it to Linette, then stood silent, listening past their breathing. Nothing. It wasn't reassuring.
Linette hummed something wordless and coaxing, and a small glow sprang up at Skye's side. The lantern's blades were spinning slowly, and its light was dim, but it was enough to see Linette's face, and a few paces either way of the corridor.
Enough to see a figure on the very edge of the shadows, indistinct and with the stillness of sudden cessation of movement.
Skye's sword was up in a second. She shoved Linette behind her. That moved the light, of course, and suddenly she couldn't see the figure any more. She snatched the lantern from Linette's hand and held it out ahead of her. Two steps forward to throw the lantern light further showed her nothing more than dust and shadows.
"What is it?"
"Nothing good." Skye edged a few more steps and still saw nothing. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. "I think there's some sort of access to the surface in here."
"Oh."
For the first time, Linette sounded frightened, and that wasn't a good sign. Nor was the way that Skye's heart was still pounding, her breathing too quick. This was danger neither of them knew except from old stories. Skye's training and instincts protected them from mundane attack or accident; Linette knew the spells and the bindings for the hauntings of the deep places. But if they had found, somehow, a breach that had not been sealed – if there was a point of entry here, a route to the outside – they might as well have left their weapons at the door.
Speaking of the door... Skye started back down the corridor, Linette a second shadow at her heels. The door they'd come through was shut fast, and didn't respond to the skeleton key this time.
"Are we locked in?"
Linette touched the door gingerly, as if she were afraid it would burn her. Then her face brightened.
"No – I think it's just jammed. I can get it open."
"Good. Do it. I'll keep watch."
There was a silence, and then Linette said, very quietly, "We'll let it out."
"What?"
"If we open the door."
Skye eyed the darkness at the other end of the corridor and wondered if she was imagining the faint susurration from within it.
"We'll shut it behind us," she said.
Linette just looked at her. Her pupils were enormous in the dim light, and that dark–eyed stare unnerved Skye almost more than whatever was in the rooms ahead.
"Tell me about the light trees."
Skye shot another uneasy look down the corridor.
"Now?"
Linette nodded. Skye sighed, adjusted her grip on her sword, and wondered if she stood any chance of breaking into Pace's res to throttle him in his sleep. Probably not. He probably had lasers or something.
"You know the basics, right? They weren't actually trees, no matter what the High Priestess says."
Linette nodded again, although Skye wasn't convinced she was so much accepting the statement as ignoring it for the time being.
"You know what they did?"
"They brought light in darkness." Linette's voice took on the singsong lilt of a nursery rhyme. "The crowning glory of the city of light."
"They were lightning rods," Skye corrected her. "They were used to draw power from Dyne's Storm to run the city, and, yes, they generated light to make the surface habitable. The point is, they went down deep, really deep, much further than the primary access tunnels. I think this must have been one of the control centres. Which means there's probably a direct shaft to the surface right over our heads." Skye sighed. "That's what Pace was picking up, wasn't it? It's not an Arc. It's storm taint."
"So there's a way in." Linette touched the door. "And if we open this, there's a way out."
Skye swore softly and continuously for a few minutes. The problem was, she was right. They couldn't guarantee sealing this place up again the way it had been when they'd found it. Which meant that they had to find that opening to the surface, and close it somehow.
(Or they could just run, dive deep back down into Vanrillion's shelter, hope that nothing followed them, hope the taint never spread, but the thought occurred to Skye only for a half–second, and then under the heading of things that were not an option.)
"Can you get the door unstuck so we can get out if we need to?"
"Yes."
"Okay, you'd better do that then." Skye swung her pack around and began to feel in one of its compartments. "We're going to need more light..."
The little glow–balls were tech, not Arcs, and Skye kept them as a last resort; they were expensive and didn't last all that long. Still, whatever was affecting the lantern apparently held no sway over their filaments and circuits; the first one she activated lit up so brightly it hurt her eyes.
She rolled it through the doorway into the first of the rooms. The shadows danced over the walls, leaping into strange and nightmarish shapes that made Skye want to grab her sword, but the only thing that moved of its own volition was a medium–sized spider that scuttled out of sight with lightning speed.
The ball came to a stop in the centre of the room, lighting it eerily. It seemed Pace had been right about one thing, at least. This looked like every medical facility Skye had ever been in. There was even a discarded stretcher on the far side of the room, right by a set of double doors that were hanging off their hinges. The darkness beyond yawned greedily, and the ever–present breeze stirred the ancient signs and posters drooping from the walls.
"Clear," Skye said, and they edged into the room together.
Pace's map had suggested those double doors led to the main treatment facilities, including the surgery and intensive care wards; it had been Skye's primary target for abandoned Arcs. She approached them cautiously, another glow–ball in her hand.
This one revealed a wide corridor and a number of doors leading off it, before colliding with a large, scaly lizard that had been sleeping in the middle of the floor. It jumped, mouth opening to emit a disgruntled noise, enormous eyes unshuttering to stare blankly in Skye's direction. Skye froze. It was almost as long as she was tall, but had no teeth that she could see. It started to shift towards her, uncoiling into a low–slung form with six legs, but Skye, struck by an inspiration, stamped her foot several times, causing it to check. A long tongue darted out, tasting the air, and then the lizard slunk away from the light globe, shouldering past a damaged door panel and disappearing into one of the rooms of the corridor.
"What was it?" whispered Linette.
"Not sure, but I think it was a Stoneskin Lizard," Skye replied. She took a few steps down the corridor and used the tip of her sword to nudge the glow–ball into rolling a few more metres. "They're only dangerous if they take you by surprise. I've never seen one before – you don't get them below the interdiction zone. I think someone brought a couple down to study, once, but they died in captivity."
"Did Pace tell you that?"
"No..." Skye said slowly. "I don't know how I know it. It must be from before."
"Why did they die?"
"They're not cave dwellers naturally. They need some sort of connection to the surface. Even just a wisp of air or light..."
Skye trailed off. She reached into her pack and pulled out the Canary, quieting Linette when she would have asked a question. The indicators once more showed green, but this time there were two white lights, one brighter than the other.
"We can use this to find the breach," Skye said. "Stay close."
When they finally did run into something hostile, there wasn't much they could do about it.
It took the form of a gale. The door they'd just come through slammed open and shut repeatedly in the shrieking wind, then tore off and flung itself across the room at them. Skye pulled Linette aside just in time, got them both into a corner, and braced against the attack.
"Must be a storm daé," Skye shouted over the wind. That was actually a good thing. Daé were troublesome, especially when their primary elemental force was something so chaotic, but they tended not to be actively malevolent. Just dangerous to anyone who came across them. "Do you think we could seal it?"
"Maybe." They'd contained or destroyed daé before, but those had been stone or shadow, the more common dangers of Vanrillion's depths. Storm was a new one, and Skye wasn't entirely sure it obeyed the same rules. Linette sounded like she was thinking the same thing. "I can try, anyway."
"There's another door over there. I think that's where it's coming from."
The daé, or whatever it was, clearly didn't want them to go through that door; it flung most of the contents of the room at them when they tried. Skye deflected two chairs and half a desk, wincing as her sword rang with the impact and the runes for strength lit up white–hot on the blade, but Linette had started her wands spinning in each hand, and whatever she was chanting under her breath seemed to calm the wind a little. Skye ducked through first, tossing in a glow–ball and scanning the room for any more danger. This place was badly damaged: the walls were stained with water, and there was rubble on the floor, spilling out from a deep crack in one corner that seemed to be pumping cold air and that damp smell into the room. Skye was loath even to go near it.
The wind raged around the room, something desperate in its whine, and Skye felt a moment's pang for it. It was trapped here, far underground and alone, separated from the great storm that had birthed it. She couldn't really blame it for lashing out.
Linette was walking with more confidence, spinning her wands so fast now that Skye knew she would be able to hear their low hum if the wind hadn't been so loud. She said something Skye didn't catch.
"What?"
"We need to wall off the breach," Linette shouted. "With rock and metal, so the seal will take."
"Great," muttered Skye, ducked a flying piece of splintered wood, and steeled herself to approach the dark crack in the wall.
The next few minutes were a struggle of wills. Linette's wands were doing something, and Skye could feel the building momentum of the seal she was spinning around them, but the trapped storm was fighting them with everything it had. Every movement Skye made was a battle against the wind, and the very air she was breathing seemed hostile as she manhandled loose chunks of rock to fill the gap. The air here was so cold it hurt her hands, and she expected an attack any second. The fact that she had no clear idea what form it would take only made her jumpier.
Behind her, Linette said something, a long, low rattle of words, and suddenly the wind died to something more manageable, although it was still tossing pieces of debris around the room. Skye had almost filled the crack with rocks now; she started picking up smaller pieces to wedge in the gaps. It wasn't the physical obstruction that mattered, of course, so much as the symbolic barrier of metal and stone, but it made her feel better.
Linette gave a soft cry of surprise.
Skye spun around, to find her staring at something on the other side of the room. Skye followed her gaze, and felt her skin prickle. There was someone there – just out of the range of the lantern, almost part of the shadows – but a human outline, a man. He made no move towards them; Skye could just make out the faint sheen of a pair of eyes, watching. It was hard to tell in the dimness, but Skye thought that the occasional scraps of wood or paper that blew his way passed through him.
"Skye..."
"I know." Ghosts were rare in Vanrillion. The funeral rituals were performed meticulously. "Finish the sealing."
After a moment's hesitation, Linette carried on. Skye kept her eyes on the man – ghost – spirit – whatever it was. It didn't move; she might have taken it for a statue had it not wavered faintly now and then, like smoke.
Linette's circle flared bright, the dull red of rust and the cool silver of mercury, a globe of lines of light that expanded outwards from her still–spinning wands. Skye felt the room warm up perceptibly. The wind gave one last fading gust, and died away. Behind her, she heard rock shifting and bonding, but she didn't look away from the figure in the darkness.
The figure stirred – Skye couldn't quite see the movement, wasn't sure if it had lifted a hand, or taken a step – and then, to her shock, it spoke.
Whatever it said, it was in a language Skye had never heard. On the last syllable, the ghost disappeared like a candle going out. Linette's circle flickered once, and faded. The glow–bulb suddenly brightened, but there was nothing now in the shadows except dust and debris. The turbulent air had stilled, and the silence pressed in on them like a shroud.
"Come on," muttered Skye. "Let's get out of here."
Later – after they'd closed every door they could, and made the long trek (empty–handed) down through the interdiction zone, and worked their way through the levels of the city on a suitably circuitous route that, if anybody had noted their transgression, they'd find it hard to track them – after Skye had pulled food randomly out of the cupboards and made sure Linette ate it and then left an extremely sarcastic message for Pace on the vidphone – after they'd washed the dust and the taint from their bodies, and Skye had brushed Linette's hair – Linette finally said, "I wonder why he said that."
Skye was oiling her sword, thinking about the Stoneskin Lizard and the formless violence of the storm, and replied absently.
"Who said what?"
"The ghost."
Skye turned to look at her, frowning. Linette was curled into her favourite cushioned alcove, playing one of her wands through her fingers over and over.
"He didn't say anything I could understand."
Linette raised surprised eyes in Skye's direction.
"But he spoke quite clearly. Didn't you hear?"
"No." Skye set aside the sword. "What did he say?"
Linette frowned, fingers stilling on the wand. She had dressed in the loose robes she favoured for relaxation, her pale hair unbound; without the ribbons and braids, she looked older. Skye remembered her caught in the fever, and the things she had seemed to see, and wondered, not for the first time, if they had really been no more than hallucinations.
When Linette spoke, it sent a shiver down Skye's spine.
"He said, 'It's not as dark outside as you think.'"
the end
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