House War - The Hidden City Part 47

"I think so."

"Okay. This is a big place. That can't possibly be the only way up." She turned to Arann. "I want you to wait downstairs," she told him. "With the others."

"And you?"

"Carver and I are going to find a different way up." She turned and headed down the stairs.

"Aren't you going the wrong way?"

"No."

"But-"

"There won't be more stairs from here," Jewel replied. "And we won't reach those ones alive. But I've got a couple of ideas."

The redhead turned to her. "Good ideas?" he asked dubiously.

"Compared to going through the fighting? Yes."

"Jay-the door-"

She shook her head. "It's closed," she told Arann firmly. "And I don't want you touching it until I tell you to."

"But-"

"What?" She tried not to grind her teeth. And tried to breathe. What in the h.e.l.ls am I doing here? But she had an answer to that. And it was a good answer, shorn of defiance but not determination. "It's magicked," she snapped. "There's a mage here. At least one. I don't know what will happen if you try-but it doesn't look safe."

"How can you tell? Hey!" Arann had stepped firmly on Lefty's foot before grabbing him by the arm. He all but dragged poor Lefty down the stairs.

They huddled in the foyer. Jewel tapped Carver on the shoulder, and Carver nodded. "The rest of you stay here. Unless the wrong people come down the stairs."

"What are we supposed to do if-"

"Go through the windows in that room; they've already been broken."

Arann nodded. The cl.u.s.ter surrounding him moved toward the open door of the room she'd pointed out. But one of them broke away, and came toward Jewel and Carver.

Finch.

She was shaking, but her hands were balled fists. "I'll go," she whispered. "I'll go with you."

"There's no point," Jewel told her. "You don't know this building well enough to be useful. And it's safer-"

"I know Duster."

Jewel wanted to argue, but the words wouldn't come. Truth often had that effect on her tongue. And Finch had talked one boy out from under a bed when Jewel herself couldn't manage. She nodded.

Together, they went toward the doors at the far end of the foyer. They were a dark-stained wood, and looked very fine-far finer than the carpets on which they walked, or the faded patina of the walls. There was a mirror here-it seemed to be a theme-but this one hung across the hall like a painting.

This, Jewel thought bitterly, was where customers came. This was supposed to pa.s.s for wealth.

And it did, and Jewel despised utterly all men with power and money. She wished, for just that second, that she had come at night-at night, when there were customers who could see them, be terrified with them, and join the dead who lay like afterthought in the long hall above.

She wanted them to be afraid.

She wanted them to be trapped here, like they were.

She wanted them to burn- She almost stopped walking as Carver pushed the doors wide. He ran into her back, nearly knocking her off her feet.

"Fire," she whispered. She turned to look at them, at Carver and the very surprising Finch.

Finch couldn't get any paler. Carver could, and did.

"Where?" he asked.

"Here," she replied, her eyes wide, "Everywhere. They're going to burn the house down."

"It would take a lot of fire to burn this place down."

"Not that much," she told him. "Not to start." And then she pulled herself together, took a deep breath, and ran. The hall behind the closed grand doors was narrower than the hallway above. It was also a good deal shorter, and it ended in a T, bracketed at either end by doors.

"This is why we have to hurry?" Carver asked her.

She nodded.

And he waited, again, as if she knew what she was doing. She hated it; it was a burden she didn't want. But without it, she doubted that he would follow at all.

"Right," she said softly.

Carver nodded, and began to run down the hall. Finch followed Jewel. The door at the end wasn't locked, but it was a pathetic excuse for a door.

It opened into the kitchen.

As kitchens went, this was probably c.o.c.kroach heaven. The water that lay in the buckets to one side of the counter that covered the wall to their left seemed brackish or slimy. Not that she wanted to drink it. There were plates on that counter, piled in a precarious heap; there were-of course-c.o.c.kroaches crawling across their dirty surface. The counter itself was a thick, warped wood.

Insects scurried when Jewel and Carver raced by. Jewel didn't stop to think; there were three doors into the kitchen, but one of them they'd already pa.s.sed through, and the other went in the wrong direction; probably to some fancy room meant just for eating.

She led them to the other door, the far door, and paused there.

"Safe?" Carver whispered, crouching slightly, his dagger in his hand.

She nodded, and pushed the door open. It made a lot of noise, and it wasn't easy-but she could see why; a mop and a bucket were pressed against that door. As if they had ever been used. She kicked the bucket aside. Beyond the kitchen were stairs; they went both down and up. They couldn't compare to the foyer's grand spiral; they were narrow and dingy, and what light there was came through the cracks of shutters more warped than the counter.

No gla.s.s here, she thought. No carpet. Just stairs with a railing that looked suspiciously rotten. She stuck to the walls and began to mount them, hoping they didn't come out anywhere near the second floor.

At least they were visible. Had they been otherwise prepared, Rath would have lost Harald in the first few seconds; as it was, Harald chose to be cautious. Where cautious was abandoning, for the moment, the overhead swing for which he was so famed. It always had momentum and strength behind it, but it left him open, both at beginning and end.

Harald liked to play the part of a berserker; had he actually been one, Rath would have a.s.siduously avoided him. Then again, had he, it was likely he would have been dead ten years ago. Anger, in combat, was almost never your friend.

It wasn't Rath's.

Because Harald chose to be cautious, because he chose a conservative stance and a thrust that would give him room to maneuver should he require it, he survived the shock of having his sword almost bounce. He managed to bring it up in time to parry, and the parry sent him back two steps; although the blow itself looked like an exploratory thrust, it was anything but.

Whoever these two were-whatever they were-they were good. At least as good, Rath thought, as Rath himself. But Rath had had the money and prestige of an old House behind him when he had begun his long years of lessons; he wasn't so certain that these men had that advantage. They didn't need it.

Rath, having fought them once, didn't waste his throwing knives; he didn't waste his swordplay either. He moved carefully, fighting defensively because defense was the only way he would survive. Survival was almost everything.

But in this case, it wasn't everything. He hadn't come here to die; he hadn't come to flee. Flight, given his previous experience, was a very poor option. He let fear show; he let it guide the muscles around his mouth, his eyes, the creases in his forehead; he let it be, for a moment, exactly what it was.

He made a play of swordsmanship, in the wide halls, sun streaming just out of reach through the long, long windows that had been rebuilt. These men seemed to cast no shadow, or rather, it seemed part of them, inseparable from them-something that would have existed in the absence of light.

It was a few minutes' work, to seem good enough, and frightened enough, to draw them out, to make them step forward and retake ground that their dead companions had surrendered.

He ignored the voices of the men at his back; ignored Harald. Concentrated instead on two things: the man he was fighting, and his own dagger, unsheathed, on his belt. One of two, it had been a gift from Andrei, and on short notice, it had probably been a very costly gift.

With Andrei, the cost was written afterward.

Rath fought as if there might never be one.

But when the moment came-and it did-and the man to his front deflected a blow in such a way that it pushed Rath's sword wide, exposing his chest before Rath could step back, Rath pulled a dagger in his off hand, and drove it into his adversary's chest. It helped that his enemy didn't even bother to make the attempt to get out of its way.

But this blade-this one, small, ornate, incredibly ugly to Rath's more cultured sense of aesthetics-bit. Rath let it go, and swung his sword in, and this time, it, too, cut.

They weren't invulnerable, these men, these unwelcome strangers.

But when the fire started, Rath noted where: at the opening of the wound the dagger had made.

The steps didn't open up as they reached the top of the second set; they continued higher, but a door was closed and contained by wall. Jewel looked at it. "Second floor," she muttered, and Carver, who was seconds behind her, nodded. They looked at the door for a minute, and then left it, racing up the last of the stairs. Or the last two flights; the ceilings here were high.

They stopped only once: When a roar shook the building. It was short, but loud, a thing of fury and pain. Finch had plastered herself against the wall, and she raised shaking hands to her ears. Had it gone on forever, she might have remained where she was standing.

But Jewel hopped back down the stairs, grabbed her arm, and drew her up them; the soles of Finch's shoes, half unattached to their uppers, flapped and made uncomfortable noise as she struggled just to keep up. She didn't let go until they reached the last door; it was at the top of the thin flight, and it was closed.

It was also, to Jewel's eye, old. The handle was almost black with the tarnish of age and neglect-if it had ever been anything but neglected. She had a feeling that the powerful didn't often take these stairs, either up or down.

"Locked?" Carver asked, as she stood there, catching her breath. It was silent again. She twisted the k.n.o.b, and shook her head.

"We're waiting for an invitation?"

Jewel gave him a look, and he laughed. There was fear in the sound, but most of it was pure defiance.

"That looks like an old lady glare," he told her, as the sound faded. She was surprised at how much better it made her feel, because she had never quite heard a laugh like it. Certainly not from her Oma, whose laughter, when it had come, had come most often with barbs and bitterness.

Your Oma came from a harsher place than this, Jewel's mother used to say, in the days when that laughter had bothered Jewel. And kindness was frowned upon by her G.o.ds.

Jewel wondered about that as she pulled the door open. How much harsher could a place be, and still have G.o.ds at all?

Rath had time to draw the second dagger, but only barely; he certainly didn't have time to wield it. The fire that was now consuming the man he had fought continued to burn-but the fire that suddenly shot toward him in a swirling orange-and-yellow beam had nothing to do with the weapon.

If he had wondered-briefly-whether or not he faced mages, he stopped then. He almost stopped breathing, and had it not been for the sudden impact of one of Harald's men, he would have been a pyre.

Instead, the fire stove in a wall. About nine feet of it, as if it were a fist.

Rath had time to see the wreckage that might have been him; he had time to turn his gaze in the direction from which the flame had sprouted. He did not have time to attack the creature, and the dagger he carried was so ridiculously designed that he didn't risk a throw; it wouldn't have gone far, and he wasn't about to be parted from the only weapon he had that he was certain would work.

The man whose palms were still cloaked in flame had eyes that were black; if there had ever been whites there, they were lost. The fire devoured his clothing, deformed his armor, washing away all signs and symbols of things that were merely mortal.

What was left in the fire's wake, what walked at its heart, was something entirely different.

Rath could speak the Northern tongue to a lesser degree; he understood approximately half of what Harald shouted.

The important half. He was sounding the retreat in his deep and resonant tones.

The creature-there was no other word for it-looked at Rath, and only Rath, as he and Harald began to back their way down the wide hall, watching the fire burn. Almost casually, it peeled away some section of that flame and threw it.

Rath lifted his dagger almost automatically-d.a.m.n fool thing to do-and the fire parted as it sheared the edge; the edge was glowing, faintly, like sunlight.

But what that fire struck, it burned, and flame, not wood or plaster or paper, was the shape of the building that contained them all.

"Harald!" Rath shouted, still wielding the dagger, "get the kids-get them out!" And he continued to back away. His weaponsmasters had always said that the difference between a retreat and a rout was the difference between living and dying. The creature watched him, and began to walk slowly toward them all, keeping the distance between the moving Northerners and himself static.

Chapter Fifteen.

THE DOOR OPENED into a dark hall. If there was sunlight in the rainy season, none of it reached this place; not even through the gaps between doors and floor. The hall was a narrow thing, with floors that would have creaked at the weight of a mouse; they groaned as Jewel stepped on the boards. She reached into her pouch and pulled out the magestone that was her prized possession. Pa.s.sed a shaking hand over it, speaking words of illumination. It brightened.

And the sounds from below drifted up through the floor, muted but unmistakable.

She stopped; Carver stopped as well, although he did it by once again running into her back. "Jay?" Quiet voice now, shorn of humor.

"It's started," she said. "We don't have much time."

They looked down a hall packed with small doors; each one could have opened into a closet. She counted twelve; the hall wasn't long. At the other end, however, was a door.

She ran toward it, ignoring all the others, and heard the floor's evidence that her companions were following. The door wasn't locked, which was good; it was stuck, which was bad. In this weather, old doors and warped frames seldom went together well.