The Hour of Dust and Ashes (23 page)

He stumbled one step backward and Carreg used the momentum to turn Matsul away from him, grabbed his head, and snapped his neck, wrenching the head free from the body in a blur of speed that left me stunned, the sound of breaking bone echoing in my ears.

“Oh God.” I turned away and grabbed my stomach, forcing the bile back down my throat. “What the hell are you doing?” I gasped. “He was our witness!”

Carreg turned to me. “You believe the truth will matter to the House of Abaddon, Charlie?”

Panic and frustration formed a combustible mix inside me. I didn’t know what to do next, how to fix this, how to explain, how to—A hand landed on my shoulder. Warmth spread from my mark through my torso, dimming some of the panic.

“He’s right,” Hank said, as though somehow understanding Carreg’s sudden and gruesome action.

A lump welled in my throat as I turned on him. “I don’t—What just—How am I supposed to fix this?” I asked in a high, hopeless voice. Totally rhetorical question on my part. We were screwed.

“How
you
fix it isn’t important,” Carreg said
evenly, totally unaffected by having just decapitated someone with his bare hands.

I spun on him with a disbelieving laugh. “Oh, it’s not? We’ve got two bodies—Brim, no!” Oh God. The hellhound was sniffing the headless neck of Matsul. Rex groaned sickly and managed to whistle him off. My stomach did a nasty roll. I turned away as quickly as possible, back to Carreg. “Everyone saw us come in here …”

“And they won’t see you leave.” Carreg crossed the distance until we were face-to-face.

I froze. “What are you saying?” I asked slowly.

The sardonic tilt of his mouth deepened. “I’m saying that I will be a hero.” Before I could blink, his hand shot out, delved into my jacket, and snatched my Nitro-gun.

Then the Astarot noble shot himself in the gut.

Immediately the nitro went to work, spreading through his organs and freezing everything in its path quicker than my ability to process what he’d just done.

Carreg’s jaw tightened. His nostrils flared. Pain swept across his face. “I will say that your bounty was in the room, but as a weak human, she did not have the power to kill the Father. The spirit of Solomon jumped into Matsul for the kill. Matsul killed the Father. I, in turn, killed him, but not before Solomon was able to jump back into your human and fled, shooting me in the process. And you went after him …”

Carreg fell to his knees. He grimaced and let out a long, controlled breath of pain. “After the shock
wears off, they will question it, but with me as their only witness and corroborating Solomon’s possession, they will accept it long enough for you to escape and get back to your city. Be prepared, as they will come to you all for questioning. Make sure your story never wavers … or I will kill you myself.”

He tipped forward, palms bracing against the marble floor. His head hung low between his arms.

I bent down. “All this to be a hero?”

He lifted his gaze, black hair falling over his brow. Intensity brightened the silver flecks in his eyes. “All this … to be …
king
.” His head dropped. He gasped. “Main chamber. Wall relief. Warrior. Press the jewel in the hilt …”

Carreg fell onto his side.

I couldn’t move.

“Go!” Carreg hissed.

Spurred, I swiped my gun from the floor, took Bryn’s shackled hands, and pushed her quickly toward the main chamber. Solomon couldn’t jump from person to person. He was stuck inside of Bryn until she died, or an exorcist pulled him out, but the nobles didn’t know that, and they didn’t know what he was capable of. Carreg’s story might actually hold water for a little while. But not long.

We hurried into the main chamber to the wall reliefs I’d seen earlier. The black marble was covered in identical warriors, line after line of them. Way too many of them. Shit. “Start pressing hilts.”

I forced Bryn to the wall and started pushing on
the small marble jewels of sword hilts. My hands were shaking. I repeated this several times, my desperation building until I thought I might scream.

“I got it!” Rex whispered loudly.

A slight hiss of air sounded. I scanned the chamber and saw a small, narrow opening in the marble. Hank snagged two ceremonial short swords from one of the walls and shoved them through his belt loop, one at each hip.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We filed into the tunnel. Once inside I searched for a mechanism to close the door, knowing there had to be one. I found a small, round knob nearby and pushed it in. The door slid closed, leaving us in pitch black, surrounded by black marble.

Rex cursed. Our movements were quick but careful as we started at a fast clip through the narrow tunnel. At least the floor was smooth and the walls kept us going in one direction. Our footsteps, heavy breaths, and Brim’s claws echoed in the space.

I lost all sense of time, so focused was I on moving, getting away.

We didn’t stop until Rex’s face came into contact with a door, his whispered curses filling the passageway. I put out my hand to steady Bryn as she bumped up against Rex’s back.

“I’ll feel for a lever or a button,” Hank spoke up from behind me, so close my hair moved with his words. “Be ready. We don’t know what this will open up to.”

Or if Carreg had set us up.

I pulled my gun.

The sound of stone cracking told me Hank had found the release mechanism. Rex whispered a command to Brim. “Brim goes first,” he whispered. Light filled the tunnel, blinding us for a moment, but it didn’t take long to acclimate and see that the light was actually dim and gray.

Brim stepped out slowly, alert for signs of danger. Rex went next. Then me with Bryn, and Hank behind us.

“Holy shit,” Rex breathed. “Is this going to hold us?”

We’d come out on a small ledge in the rock that supported the nobles’ city above. I glanced up and saw the sheer walls of palaces shooting into the air. Below us was Telmath, but just a very small edge of it, since we were facing away from the city and toward one of the rock walls of the cavernous city. Hank searched for a way to shut the door, found the depression, and pushed. The door slid closed.

Rex inched closer to one side, his back flat against the rock, and glanced down. “Looks like … some steps … oh, hell no …” He straightened, eyes wide, turning his head toward us. After a steadying breath, he attempted a nonchalant shrug. “Well, if we were a bunch of Munchkins going down the yellow brick road, this would be a piece of cake.”

“Tiny steps or not,” I said, trying not to look straight down, “we need to keep going and I don’t see another way down. Let’s move and try to be careful.”
I gripped Bryn tighter lest Solomon try to throw her off the rock and “release” himself that way. She’d been oddly compliant so far and it made me wonder if Solomon had exhausted his strength escaping from the cold cell, traveling—however the hell he’d done it—to Telmath, and getting inside of the nobles’ city … Or he could be lulling us into a false sense of security or resting up for another suicide attempt later.

Whatever the case, we needed to get as far away from the city as possible.

We started moving, falling back into our focused silence, going one by one down the small footholds carved into the rock.

Step after step, story after story. And I knew far above us, they had to know by now. Carreg was probably being healed and telling his tale. Sweat trickled down the sides of my face. My clothes were damp, and I longed to take off my jacket. I would’ve given anything for a gust of cool air or a drink of cold water. But we were close to the bottom. The scents and sounds of the city grew heavier and heavier.

Finally we reached the end and took a path which curved around the enormous base of the rock toward the dark streets of Telmath.

“If I never see another step in my lifetime, I’ll be happy,” Rex muttered.

“Me, too.” I stopped before the path led us behind a house and into what looked liked the dead end of a street. “So I think it’s safe to say they know by now.”

“And the terminal is out,” Hank said, echoing my own thoughts. Going back to the terminal meant the possibility of being detained. If I didn’t have the sylph timeline breathing down my neck, it might be a different story. But as it was, I needed to get home ASAP.

“All right, Rex,” I said, turning to him. “Time to put your jinn memories to work. How do we get back home?” The gates might be the current and law-abiding mode of travel, but in ancient times it was well-known that the jinn had ways of travelling to our world.

He frowned and then scratched his stubbly jaw. “Let me think …” After a long moment he said, “There used to be a jinn temple outside of Tel-math. The Temple of the Moon. There was a portal there …”

“You’re talking thousands of years ago,” Hank said.

“Well, I don’t see you offering anything,” Rex shot back.

“Could you find it again?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, it was a couple hours east of Telmath, through the sand flats. The portal was underground and was kept secret from the nobles … If the temple is still there, the portal might be, too. Those things, once they’re created, are near impossible to destroy.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “Okay, so first we need to find out if the temple still exists. We’ll find out
along the way. If it does, then we’ll try it. Agreed? And as soon as we can, we steal a cloak for Bryn to cover the blood and the gag.”

Rex shrugged and readjusted the axe strapped to his back.

I turned to Hank to find he was staring at me. He pulled the hood over his head. The stark intensity in his gaze had darkened the color of his eyes until they appeared nearly black in the dim light. “Hank?”

“We only have one day. If we’re not back in one day, the sylphs’ ‘gifts’ …”

“Will kill me,” I finished for him quietly. “I know.”

It wasn’t hard to lift a cloak from one of the houses near the dead-end street. It was dark, quiet, and Hank had taken five minutes tops between the time he drifted into the shadows until he returned with something to cover Bryn. Once that was done, we started toward the mouth of Telmath’s cavern.

The smoky, shadowed streets of the city reminded me of the congested atmosphere on Solomon Street back home in Atlanta, only on a grander, darker, otherworldly scale that stretched for miles.

I could easily imagine that I was walking through the crowded streets of some ancient civilization—the sunlight replaced with the dim violet glow of typanum running through the “sky,” the sunbaked houses replaced with gray stone and timbers, and the humans replaced with hulking jinn warriors strutting
around, cloaked ghouls peering beneath their hoods, darkling fae weaving effortlessly through the narrow streets …

As we moved through narrow alleys and busy marketplaces, over bridges that spanned rivers and gaping black chasms in the ground, our passage was either ignored or met with curious frowns that passed over us quickly and then were forgotten. I saw humans—more than I’d expected to see—shopping, touring, engaged in dark pursuits. Black crafting was allowed here. So were gambling and prostitution …

In one of the busiest corners we passed, Rex ducked into a storefront that sold what looked to be antiques and artifacts and came back out with a nod. “The temple is still there. In ruins. But there.”

I had no idea what was happening far up on the plateau or if guards had begun searching. But if they were, they were slowed by the vastness of the city, the crowds, and the darkness. Still, I turned and glanced up even though the plateau was too high to see anything.

“Charlie,” Hank said, making me jump.

He stepped aside. I gripped Bryn’s arm tighter and nudged her forward, following Rex and Brim through the dense streets of Telmath as Hank fell in behind us. All the sights, sounds, and scents filled in around us, but we moved as though we were in a bubble of silence. Isolated.

* * *

The closer we came to the gaping twenty-story-high mouth of the cavern, the scents slowly changed from tar and earth to dry wood and sand. The humidity disappeared, the air turning arid and hot. Several lonely-looking paths, carrying one or two dusty travelers, led into and out of the city.

All the action was behind us, and in front of us, framed by the massive cavern mouth, was wide-open Charbydon sky. Inky blue and lit with stars. As beautiful as it was, a shiver crept down my spine. Despite the danger back in Telmath, the cavern had provided a sense of insulation and protection. Out here, in the wild … God only knew what awaited us.

As we passed into open air, our strides lengthened and our pace increased, all of us wanting to get as far away from Telmath as possible. Several minutes passed before my fears of getting caught finally eased and I was able to really notice the environment.

A dim, moonlight-like glow bathed the landscape. Everyone called the giant orb hanging in the sky a moon, but it was really a white dwarf star, one that was slowly dying out. Once this “moon” set below the horizon it was blacker than black, and when it rose again it was dim and not nearly—so I’d heard—as bright as in older days. Ahead of us stretched a barren land of shrubs, rocky outcroppings, clumps of stubborn trees, and patches of small flowers in blues and whites.