The Queen of Lies (21 page)

The cellar was completely dark, so he brought a small flame to his finger, no more than a candle. If the people who ran this place had any notion of fire safety, it didn’t show. Laid out on shelves were a cornucopia of dry flammable materials: bedding, grain—hells, even lamp oil—to say nothing of the cobweb-encrusted shelves they rested on.

Sword swatted at his shoulder, and his fingers brushed against something small and foreign. He snatched it in his hand and brought it in front of him. A hairy spider crawled slowly across his palm.

Memories returned of his time in the lightless oubliettes in the deep earth. Things crawling over his shivering, naked body, through his hair. Centipedes, spiders
…Fucking spiders! What do spiders even have to eat so far underground?
The arachnid reared up, its legs retracting from the rising heat in Sword’s palm.

The spider started fervently in each direction, desperate to escape the slowly growing heat. Sword smiled as smoke rose from its body. It flipped over in its final death throes, its tiny legs flailing up at the sky. Sword maintained the rippling heat at a low, even rate until the body was still and crispy.

He relished the taste as he popped the creature into his mouth and crunched it between his teeth. There was a trick to getting them to that perfect level of smoky flavor.

“Mmmmph!” a woman’s muffled voice said.

Sword cast about the cellar until he found a sac of webbing he’d mistaken for a pile of sheets. It was roughly woman shaped—and a hefty woman at that. A single blue eye peered desperately from the strands of spider silk.

He pulled out his blade and ran it against the cocoon. It was tougher than silk should have been, but he could cut through the enchantment. Hands and limbs burst from the silk and frantically grabbed at the strands, shredding them now that the spell had been broken.

The woman looked to be middle-aged, with corn-silk-blond hair and a haunted expression. She blubbered, “Please, please, please…don’t kill me! I have a grandson and a good-for-nothing husband and a lousy job, but I don’t deserve to die here.”

“Run,” Sword said.

She picked herself off the ground, hands brushing furiously at the sticky webbing. “You’re not one of them?”

Sword peered at her and raised his blade to her neck. “Are you?”

“No!” Her eyes were wet with tears.

Sword indicated the door with his head.

“Thank you.”

“Wait.”

She froze.

He reached out his hand and pulled a spider out of her hair with his seal. The thing floated helplessly above his palm. “Now you can go.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. The whole situation was probably too much, and Sword wasn’t going to make it any better by eating another fried spider in front of her. But he wasn’t used to eating regularly, and the first one had whetted his appetite.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he scolded.

“Is it safe?” Suddenly overwhelmed with worry, she glanced up the stairs to the pantry.

“You’re ten feet from the exit, you stupid…” Sword sighed and handed her his blade. “Look, just take this and leave it outside when you’re clear of this place. I’ll be able to find it. And if you have any mind to keep it…don’t.”

She took it in her hands and raised it in front of her. “Thank you,” she whispered as she fled up the steps.

Sword cooked the spider, ate it, and went back to work. He willed the pitch barrel to the center of the room and, with his mind, brought forth long tentacles of sap to caress every flammable surface in sight.

Absently he brushed another spider off his shoulder and saw two more on his hand. They burned to ash instantly, but a carpet of swarming arachnids poured out from the ceiling and the cracks in the basement foundation. He felt a hot sting of agony as one bit his neck.

As if on cue, he heard Heath’s muffled shouts from upstairs. It was a shrill string of panicked expletives consistent with one being covered in venomous spiders.

He sifted through the memories of his borrowed life. He thought back to those sunny spring days in the Lyceum courtyard, sketching with his fellow Scholars. He wanted to be an engineer, to use his Seal of Fire to power the steam engines of Rivern’s great industry. He remembered setting his first fire…and his last. It wasn’t a lot as far as happy memories went.

He lit the blaze.

An effulgent conflagration blinded him as tendrils of flame raced over everything in sight. The heat scorched his skin. He was immune to the flames he emanated but not fire that burned its own fuel. That’s why they had kept him naked, why they had fed him soggy slop, why they had imprisoned him in that cold dank cell.

The crackling fire ate mercilessly at the wood and fed gluttonously on the pitch as the licks of fire climbed higher and the scent of smoke filled the wavering air. The roar and crackle spread through the house. Spiders died in droves, emitting high-pitched, tormented screams as the blaze consumed their bodies. His own agony was an afterthought.

Sword cackled maniacally as he turned his fire on full blast, pulling at the weakened support of the building with his other seal.
Heath will be fine.
His skin crawled with raw anguish, but the paralytic in the spider venom provided a buffer that kept him from completely shutting down. He worked at the support beam until it broke, bringing tons of flaming timber and ash on top of him.

And the tortured soul finally would be delivered to the embrace of his lifelong love.

S
WORD WATCHED THE
blaze from behind a barrel in the alley.

She smacked her forehead. “I told you to just leave it, you stupid…” As she sifted through the recent memories, it became apparent that she had recognized the monetary value of the blade and wanted to do the noble thing by returning it to the man who had saved her, even though every second she remained had terrified her half to death.

Sword stood and brushed her hair back, raised her blade in front of her, and walked toward the inferno. The screams were a mixture of human and inhuman. An upper-story window encrusted with swarming spiders slowly revealed the blaze within as the creatures died off one by one. But nothing came through the pantry except smoke and the hot ripple of air.

Absently she noted, from a memory that seemed almost too distant to recall, that the windows probably would blow out at any moment. The fire somehow was still accelerated by seal magic, which normally wasn’t possible, but sometimes seals worked better than they were intended.

She headed toward the front. Broken glass from an exploding window sprayed into the alley, just missing her.

Heath lay in the muddy street, one leg angled painfully beneath his prone body. His hands were pressed against this chest, softly glowing, as dual pinpricks of Light sparkled across this skin like twinkling stars in a night sky, sealing shut hundreds of spider bites. He didn’t look happy.

A flaming figure hurled itself from the window—a child in a night-robe flailing wildly. She struck the ground beside them with a thud, and the body disintegrated into a swarm of spiders. The fire clung to their carapaces as they curled, juddered, and burned to a crisp.

“It’s not like you to land badly, love,” Sword said cheekily as she stuck her hand in the rain.

Heath healed his shattered leg with the last flicker of his Light and dragged himself to his feet. “Sword?”

“Name’s Catherine,” she said. “To the locals anyway. Not Cathy or Cath or Katrina or Kate or Caitlin or Kitty or Kay…and most certainly not Sword if I’m to be your cover story about why you’re out here, dressed in assassin’s clothes in front of a burning home for abandoned children.

“Also…I’m forty eight, a proud grandmother, raising my deceased daughter’s son, and please don’t ask who the father is. I work as a knife sharpener because my lousy husband is too much of a drunk to keep a job, and he’s too busy whoring around to notice that I was detained by an evil spider cult in the basement of an orphanage and to alert the proper authorities…who likely could have handled this whole thing without calling in a pair of witch-hunters, thank you very much.”

Someone yelled, “Fire!” in the distance.

“Ah. That would be Henry,” Catherine explained. “Bit of a busybody since he lost his leg. Spends most of his time looking out his window and most definitely saw the whole thing. Given that you’re the only black man who’d set foot within a ten-mile radius of this backwater, it’s a fair wager he’ll have a good physical description when the guard comes running.”

Heath shook his head. “I don’t feel good about any of this.”

“Nonsense, love,” Sword reassured him. “I’m a pillar of this community and a regular fixture at church events. I’m a volunteer in the fire brigade even…Now if that’s not ironic, I don’t know what is, given my previous situation. We haven’t had a fire in Reda in years.”

Expressionless, Heath stared at the fire. “No. I don’t feel good about what we do. You didn’t see what I saw up there. Those children—they turned them into unholy things. And all I could think was that I can make triple the bounty fetching artifacts. This is bullshit.”

“Been saying that for years,” Sword said, “although I did just rescue myself, so…I may have a different perspective on the work we do.”

“Daphne could have sent anyone.” Heath’s gaze didn’t leave the fire. “This nest was a cakewalk. She sent me because she thinks I’m weak—that because I prefer to talk my way out of things, I won’t make hard choices.”

“She’s grooming you to take her place, love,” Sword said, admiring the blaze. “Bloodthirsty zealots are a dime a dozen these days. Give them a license to kill and they’re happy, but the best soldiers don’t always make the best generals…unless you’re Patrean—then it’s all the same.”

“I don’t want her position.”

A crowd of villagers was gathering at one end of the road. Some carried buckets, others weapons. There was shouting. A few of the town guard came running to the front, including their portly Patrean constable.

“You know what the real tragedy is?” Sword mused. “Besides the obvious, of course, it’s that most of those kids had parents living here,
in this very town
, who were too ashamed to raise bastards. Hell of a thing. Well, that’s what Harrowers do, I suppose. They show us at our absolute worst. Hold up…Who’s that?”

Sword peered at a figure standing against one of the buildings. She didn’t recognize him, and she knew pretty much everyone in town.
Someone’s father perhaps?
He was gaunt and ancient, leaning on a crooked staff like a shepherd might carry. An odd thing to see in a Lowland fishing village. And his eyes were so cloudy they were nearly white, yet they were somehow familiar.

Heath grunted. “You think he’s a warlock?”

Sword shrugged. More people were spilling onto the street, huddled in their oiled cloaks against the rain as they jockeyed to see the source of the commotion.

“Halt!” the constable yelled to Heath and Sword, waving a blade. He was trotting quickly for a man of his impressive girth. Some of the village men behind him were literally carrying pitchforks, bless their little hearts.

“Evening, Barney.” Sword sighed as she cracked her knuckles. It felt good to finally be the one doing all the talking.

TODAY…

“Evening, Barney,” Heath muttered as Sword’s memories disintegrated and he found himself lying on the docks.