She caught a fistful of his shirt and dragged him towards her, and he was helpless as a rag doll in her hands. She was far stronger than he’d thought. Or maybe he was just far weaker. ‘I’ve done enough talking,’ she hissed at him. ‘I’ve done enough of the proper thing. We might all be dead tomorrow. Now come with me.’
They might all be dead tomorrow. If Rakki had one last lesson to teach him, surely that was it. And men rarely win fights they want to lose, after all. So he pushed his fingers into the soft cloud of her hair, kissed at her, bit at her lips, felt her tongue in his mouth, and nothing else seemed all that pressing. He was here and she was here, now, in the darkness. Mother Scaer, and the Breaker of Swords, and Rin, and even Rakki seemed a long way off with the dawn.
She kicked his blanket against the wall, and pulled him through her door, and slid the bolt.
Relics
‘This is the place,’ said Skifr.
It was a wide hall with a balcony high up, scattered with broken chairs, dim for the dirt crusted to the windows. A curved table faced the door with a thing above it like a great coin, ringed by elf-letters. There had been a wall of glass beyond but it was shattered, splinters crunching under Koll’s boots as he stepped towards an archway, one door fallen, the other hanging by broken hinges. The hall beyond was soon lost in darkness, water dripping in the shadows.
‘We could use some light,’ he murmured.
‘Of course.’ There was a click, and in an instant the whole chamber was flooded with brightness. There was a hiss as Father Yarvi whipped out the curved sword he wore and Koll shrank against the wall, feeling for his knife.
But Skifr only chuckled. ‘There is nothing here to fight but ourselves, and in that endless war blades cannot help.’
‘Where does the light come from?’ murmured Koll. Tubes on the ceiling were burning too bright to look at, as though pieces of Mother Sun had been caught in bottles.
Skifr shrugged as she sauntered past him into the hall. ‘Magic.’
The ceiling had collapsed, more tubes hanging by tangled wires, light flickering and popping, flaring across the tight-drawn faces of the two ministers as they crept after Skifr. Paper was scattered everywhere. Sliding piles of it ankle deep, sodden but unrotted, scrawled with words upon words upon words.
‘The elves thought they could catch the world in writing,’ said Skifr. ‘That enough knowledge would set them above God.’
‘Look upon the wages of their arrogance,’ muttered Mother Scaer.
They passed through an echoing hall filled with benches, each with a strange box of glass and metal on top, drawers torn out and cabinets thrown over and more papers vomiting from them in heaps.
‘Thieves were here before us,’ said Koll.
‘Other thieves,’ said Scaer.
‘There is no danger in the world so fearsome that someone will not brave it for a profit.’
‘Such wisdom in one so young,’ said Skifr. ‘Though I think all these thieves stole was death. This way.’
Stairs dropped down, lit in red, a humming from far below. A chilly breath of air upon his face as Koll leaned over the rail and saw their square spiral dropping into infinite depth. He leaned away, suddenly giddy. ‘A long way down,’ he croaked.
‘Then we had better begin,’ said Father Yarvi, taking the steps two at a time, his withered hand hissing upon the rail.
They did not speak. Each of them too crowded by their own fears to make space for anyone else. The deeper they went the louder their heavy footsteps echoed, the louder that strange humming within the walls, within the very earth, until it made Koll’s teeth rattle in his head. Down they went, and down, into the very bowels of Strokom, past warnings painted on the smooth elf-stone in red elf-letters. Koll could not read them, but he guessed at their meaning.
Go back. Abandon this madness. It is not too late.
He could hardly have said how long they went down, but the stairs ended, as all things must. Another hallway stretched away at the bottom, gloomy, chill and bare but for a red arrow pointing down the floor. Guiding them on towards a door. A narrow door of dull metal, and beside it on the wall a studded panel.
‘What is this place?’ murmured Mother Scaer.
Something in the terrible solidity of that door reminded Koll of the one in Queen Laithlin’s counting house, behind which she was said to keep her limitless wealth. ‘A vault,’ he murmured.
‘An armoury.’ And Skifr began to sing. Soft and low, to begin with, in the tongue of elves, then higher, and faster, as she had on the steppe above the Denied when the Horse People came for their blood. Father Yarvi’s eyes were hungry-bright. Mother Scaer turned her head and spat with disgust. Then Skifr made a sign above the panel with her left hand, and with her right began to press the studs in a pattern not even Koll’s sharp eyes could follow.