The Masked City (36 page)

But when they reached it, there weren’t even any obvious windows or grilles penetrating its interior. Irene walked around it, holding the pendant out hopefully, but while it indicated the pillar from every direction, it didn’t favour any particular place to start.

‘I could try commanding it,’ she said dubiously. ‘Telling it to open or something?’ It should work, but it might also open every other closed door within range of her voice. And she really didn’t want to meet the other prisoners here.

‘Let me examine it first,’ Vale snapped. He was all alertness now, tense and focused. He dropped to his knees in front of the column, leaning in till his nose was half an inch from the floor. There, he shuffled along on all fours, squinting at it mysteriously. After what seemed an age, he sprang to his feet, running his fingers up the seam between two of the blocks of stone. ‘I - yes, I believe I have it. Here.’ His voice was quiet, but as tense as a tuned violin string. He tapped at a particular point, at approximately eye level. ‘Winters, I believe there is a lock of some sort here, which would normally require a key, but under the circumstances …’

Irene nodded. She stepped next to him and leaned in until her lips were nearly touching the stone.
‘Lock, open,’
she murmured.

The seam in the column parted, and one of the blocks of stone swung inwards to reveal a short, dark passageway with an open space just visible beyond. It was entirely silent as they both crept inside.

The room at the centre of the pillar was cold and dim, lit by thin shards of light, which fell from slits in the walls high above. And there Kai was at last, chained against the far wall.

It would have been dignified to stand back and make a clever remark, but Irene was past dignity. She threw her arms around Kai, heedless of whether there might be any traps, and simply hugged him for a long moment.

He was in shirt and trousers that had seen better days, with his waistcoat hanging loose, and bruises showed livid on his face. A heavy dark collar circled his neck, with no visible lock, and thick shackles of iron bound his wrists to the wall. He looked at Irene and Vale as if they were an impossibility, as if they might not really be here at all.

Irene took a deep breath. Her eyes burned, and for a moment she thought she was going to sniffle embarrassingly. ‘I am very unimpressed with these lodgings,’ she said, pushing herself away from Kai with an effort. He was alive - something that she’d doubted in her darkest moments. She slipped the pendant over her head again. ‘Vale, do you think you can pick those locks?’

Seemingly lost for words, Vale clasped Kai’s shoulder for a moment - probably the closest he could come to Irene’s own hug - and then turned to examine the iron cuffs on Kai’s wrists. ‘If they were normal locks, I am certain that I could,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, I suspect that they have Fae enchantments on them. Can you give me any information about them, Strongrock?’

Kai opened his mouth, then shut it, then opened it again. ‘Irene … Vale …’ His voice was rusty and dry. He looked between them desperately. ‘You are real, aren’t you? Not some sort of illusion? If I told you to pinch me, then would you pinch me?’

‘Yes,’ Irene said sharply. ‘I would. And I would pinch you so hard you’d wish you’d never asked. Kai, we are here - you aren’t hallucinating. We came.’ She hugged him again, trying to convince him. ‘And we’re probably running out of time. I’ll answer questions later. Do you know anything about those shackles?’

‘The collar’s enchanted, to keep me in this form and bind my powers,’ Kai said, then stopped, shaking his head. His voice shook. ‘I’m sorry. I still can’t … I don’t know about the others. Maybe if Irene uses the Language - how did you
get
here? We’re down in
the far end of chaos.’

‘We are in the ancient prison of a particularly corrupt group of Fae, whose world bears a resemblance to a romantic seventeenth-century Venice,’ Vale said, stepping back and almost visibly withdrawing himself from emotional displays. ‘We arrived by train. Winters, you may deal with the chains. It’s impossible for me to open those locks.’

Irene wished she could be that short on detail when reporting to Coppelia. Of course reporting to Coppelia implied that she would get out of here alive … ‘Hmm,’ she said, bending in close and staring at the chains. ‘My abilities don’t allow me to sense anything specific about these. Vale, we may want to stand back. I’ll try the collar first.’

She thought for a moment and then, using as much precision as she could, she said,
‘Collar around the dragon’s neck, unlock and part and open.’

Her voice sank through the air like ink into water, as the Language echoed in the room. She had meant to speak quietly, but something made the air tremble like a stifled drumbeat. She felt Vale recoil and step backwards, and Kai gasped in pain, his back arching as the collar tightened around his throat.

Irene had a moment to think
I’ve killed Kai,
in a heartbeat that seemed to stretch out into eternity.
‘COLLAR, OPEN!’
she screamed, throwing all the weight and focus she could into the words.

The collar shuddered, its surface rippling and shimmering like watered silk, and then flew apart. The fragments whirred outwards, a couple of them slicing Kai’s upstretched arms, and buried themselves into the stone walls and floor. Kai collapsed, hanging from the chains on his wrists, coughing and gasping. A fresh red band of pressure showed vividly around his throat.

Completely drained, Irene put a hand out to balance herself against the wall, swaying as she stood there. She was conscious of Vale dashing forward to check Kai’s pulse and mutter to him, but for the moment she could only concentrate on breathing and staying upright. There had been a purpose in that collar, and it had taken a lot of her strength to break it.

‘Irene?’ Kai’s voice. Ragged, but functional.

‘Let me take a look at those cuffs,’ she said, pulling herself together and walking over to join Vale and Kai. She hoped it didn’t look too much like a stagger.

‘Let’s hope they were meant to hold Fae,’ Vale observed. ‘If so, they should be less effective at holding Strongrock.’

‘For holding Fae?’ Kai said, looking at his wrists in disgust.

‘This is a Fae prison,’ Irene said. ‘You’re not the usual sort of inhabitant. All right. Let’s do this.’

It was an anticlimax when the cuffs came away without drama, after a single phrase from the Language. Kai fell forward onto his knees, but quickly dragged himself up, rubbing at his wrists where the metal had cut into his skin.

There was something else in the room now. It was linked to the growing anger in Kai’s eyes and the way he held himself. It was the same pressure that Irene had felt when Kai’s uncle had turned his full attention on her, only more raw, more dangerous and more likely to explode at any moment.
They imprisoned a dragon. What happens when the dragon gets free?
She thought she could hear a distant rumbling outside.

She had to keep him focused. ‘Kai,’ she said. ‘Stay with us. We have a plan to get out of here, but there are men on our trail. We need to get back through Venice to reach the Fae Train, our route in and out of there, but I don’t think you can tolerate that world in your proper form.’

Kai looked at her, his eyes suddenly all black. For a moment the fern-patterns of scales were visible on the skin of his cheeks and hands, and the lines of his face were something inhuman and terrifying.

Irene returned his stare. ‘Pull yourself together,’ she said. It would have been easier to take him by the shoulders and ask him to be the man she had come to trust. But it would have been treating him as a human, and at the moment he was a very long way from that.

‘You have no idea what you are asking of me,’ Kai whispered. There was an undertone to his voice, deep and resonant, like the leashed boom of distant waves.

Irene was conscious of Vale taking a step back, but she would not look away from Kai, would not break their eye contact. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I expect you to do it, in any case.’

Kai took a long gasping breath of air - and then something snapped and he was all human again, staggering forward to throw his arms around her shoulders and lean on her, his whole body shaking. Thunder shook the air outside, closer now. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, barely audible. ‘I’m sorry, Irene, I wanted to believe that someone would come, but I thought there was no way anyone could reach me here.’

The ground trembled under their feet. A slow, booming wave beat through the stone like a pulse or, Irene realized, like an alarm.

‘We have no time for this,’ Vale said curtly, a second before she could. ‘Can you walk, Strongrock?’

Kai pulled himself away from Irene, his breathing slowing. She patted him on the back, trying to be reassuring and mentor-like, rather than showing just how much she cared. ‘I think we’ve triggered an alert,’ she said.

‘Then we had better hurry,’ Vale said.

They stepped outside, and suddenly it became clear that the thunder in the air and the pulse through the rock hadn’t been some small atmospheric curiosity. Being inside the pillar had shielded them from the oppressive storm-wind that was now sweeping through the place. Tremors shook the ground. Irene had disliked the sterile quietness before, but this new brewing tempest was not an improvement. She quickly closed the cell door with the Language to cover their tracks, sparing a vengeful moment to hope that Lord Guantes would be shocked to find the cell empty.

Rocks fell in the far distance, and their hollow booming rang out across the landscape of bridges and arches like distant cannons. It felt as if the shaking was getting closer to them. No, she wasn’t imagining it. The shaking
was
getting closer to them.

‘We’d better run,’ she said, and they did.

Vale gave Kai a quick briefing on the last couple of days as they made the long trip back to the prison’s entrance. Irene put in a word here or there, but on the whole she saved her breath for running. It also gave her a better chance to scrutinize Kai. He seemed in reasonable physical health, with no serious injuries. His bruises didn’t look worse than a thug’s casual beating (something that had happened to Irene once or twice) - apart from the livid mark left by the collar around his neck. But he was still diminished. He lacked his usual self-assurance, his unthinking certainty that he was the most powerful thing in the vicinity.
Possibly good for his health in the long term, but still … I wish it hadn’t happened. And I don’t know how he’ll hold up in a fight.

As they descended the flight of stairs, Kai spotted something. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Can we pause for a moment?’

Irene followed his gaze. There was nothing there except a still pool of water. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was intensely ominous, probably full of things with too many tentacles and too many teeth. Although nothing had tried to eat them
yet
.

‘Only a moment.’ Vale frowned; the rockfalls were getting closer. ‘The guards we bested will certainly have raised the alarm by now. And that noise, whatever it is—’

‘Either it’s an alarm,’ Irene said, ‘and we’re being pursued. Or I’ve fundamentally damaged this place’s nature by using the Language - so it’s tearing itself apart and the ceiling’s falling down. I’m not sure that’s much better.’

Kai knelt by the edge of the pool and cupped water in his hands, pouring it over his head. It ran down over his hair and in trickles down his shirt, plastering it to his body. He sighed in relief, closing his eyes and splashing his face. ‘It’s safe enough,’ he said, turning back to Vale and Irene as he rose to his feet. ‘I just needed to clean myself. There’s nothing alive in those waters.’

‘Or anywhere else in this place,’ Vale said. ‘Except for the prisoners, I fear. Do you think they could get free, Winters?’

‘It’d be stupid to have an alarm system that let all the prisoners loose when it went off,’ Irene said. A spatter of dust drifted down from the spur of an arch above them, and the pool’s surface shifted in long dark ripples. The instability was getting much closer. ‘Run now, talk later?’ she suggested.

The ground shuddered under them as they began running again. Pieces of the upper bridgework and pillars began to tumble from above, crashing to the ground in great explosions of sound and sprays of marble shards. It was like the slow unfolding of a nightmare, where the falling rocks and rising wind were always just behind them, forcing them to stumble onwards, their muscles aching, panting for breath, not allowing them to rest. They couldn’t afford to stop. Stonework was giving way less than a hundred yards behind them now, dropping pieces into the huge chasms. Distant shrieking came through the howling of the wind, as unseen prisoners cried their rage into the storm. All Irene could focus on was running, putting one foot in front of another, and on the exit ahead. They had to get out before the destruction caught up with them, or they were all lost. There should be only a couple of bridges now between them and the exit, and if they could just make it in time …

Then a cold realization spiked through her mind.
We’re not escaping, we’re being driven like panicked rabbits. And where you have a hunter driving rabbits, there’s a snare at the other end.

She forced herself to look up and around, scanning the horizon rather than the path to the bridge directly ahead. And that was how she caught the glint of light on the gun. With an effort that made her legs scream in pain, she pushed herself forward and slammed into Vale, knocking him down as the bullet ricocheted only a few inches from his head.