Tam told me later he did it to impress me. He needn’t have bothered. Being a Benares, I’ve always been attracted to rogues. Kind of like a moth to flame. And if Tam and I had really formed an umi’atsu bond, I wasn’t just singed; I was fried.
The entrance to the tunnels was in the shipping office at the back of the warehouse. I guess if you did business with certain people and dealt in certain commodities, a trapdoor in the floor of your office that led to tunnels could come in handy. The shipping office wasn’t large. It was no more than ten paces deep and not much more than that across. It had a desk and a couple of chairs with faded ledgers and maps scattered across the desk. The musty, cloying smell of old paper and mold made the air thick. Though that could be as much from cramming so many people into such a small space as anything else.
Uncle Ryn had assured me that this tunnel, after a couple of turns—and a little over an hour—would put us directly under Mid’s entertainment district. Leave it to a pirate to find the nightclubs, bars, and brothels on his first day in port. Like father, like son. His men knew the way, so I could keep my spells to myself. Yes, I was a seeker and could have easily found my own way to Sirens, but since I didn’t know who or what Carnades had looking for me, the safe thing to do was to keep my magic under wraps.
There would be nine of us going down into those tunnels and under the city to Sirens. It sounded like an unnecessary crowd to me; to Uncle Ryn it was barely adequate security. Phaelan, Vegard, and myself had an escort of six of my uncle’s most levelheaded crewmen. Level heads were good when going into a place where heavily armed and murderous bad guys might run at you out of the dark. I hated it when that happened. My eyelid twitched again and I put my finger on it to make it stop.
“Nervous?” Phaelan asked.
My eyelid fluttered under my finger; I pressed harder. “Guess.”
“Sarcasm won’t help,” he told me.
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“Tell me again why we’re going into a rotting, dark hole in the ground rather than taking our chances on the streets.”
“Carnades.”
Vegard and a crewman moved the desk in the corner of the office, exposing an iron ring attached to a trapdoor in the floor. Vegard opened it, and Phaelan and I gingerly leaned forward and looked down. Way down. It was just your basic nonthreatening, perfectly harmless, yawning black pit.
“Maybe that demon’s still chasing Carnades,” Phaelan ventured, still looking into the hole. “We’re not all that far from Sirens. I’m always up for a good sprint.”
“It’s across town and you know it,” I said. “It’s just dark and damp. There shouldn’t be anything down there, but if there is, we can handle it. There’s nothing down there. Right, Vegard?”
The big Guardian shrugged. “Just the usual. Rats, spiders, salamanders, maybe some larger-than-normal crabs—”
Phaelan stopped looking down the hole and stared at Vegard. “Define ‘larger.’ ”
“Just Guardian rumors,” Vegard assured him. “Ruben was coming off leave and a three-day drunk when he said he saw it, so we’ve never put much stock in that one.”
Phaelan didn’t bat an eye. “You didn’t answer my question.”
The big Guardian sighed. “Supposedly there’s some kind of crablike thing with pinchers the size of your head running around down there—at least in the ‘down there’ that’s closest to the waterfront.”
“Which coincidentally is exactly where we are.” My cousin did not look amused, and Uncle Ryn’s boys had become noticeably less thrilled with our choice of routes.
“Captain, it was dark and Ruben was wasted,” Vegard assured him.
“I’ve been wasted and seen plenty of things that turned out to be real,” muttered one of the elven pirates.
Time to put a stop to this. I slapped Phaelan on the shoulder. “We’ll just refill one of our water skins with melted butter and we’ll be good to go. You like seafood.”
“Yeah, but I don’t like seafood that likes me.”
He did have a point, but I chose to ignore it. I jerked the strap tighter that secured my two new short swords across my back. Uncle Ryn had replaced the ones I’d stuck up the demon’s nose. I pushed the crab out of my mind, prodigious pinchers and all. Of today’s problems, carnivorous crustaceans ranked way down on my list of worries.
Vegard and I made a pair of lightglobes and sent them through the trapdoor and into the tunnel; their pale blue light illuminated walls of packed earth that didn’t look all that stable. Vegard went down first, then the crewmen. I followed with Phaelan.
As I climbed down, the rickety wooden ladder creaked, but held. I looked around. Wooden beams supported a packed-earth tunnel. The beams had seen better days. Some had fallen away altogether leaving no visible means of support.
I shone my lightglobe down the tunnel a few yards. “I thought all the tunnels were natural—and rock.”
“Most of them are,” Vegard replied with a shrug. “Some of them aren’t.”
I had a spell in mind should this particular tunnel pick sometime in the immediate future to collapse. Considering recent events, I thought it prudent to be prepared.
“I should lead,” I told Vegard.
“That wouldn’t be wise, ma’am. I should go first.”
“Then I would have to bring up the rear, because these men are experts with steel. They don’t have enough magic between them to light a candle, let alone torch a demon—or whatever might come running at us. And, if I bring up the rear, you can’t keep an eye on me—and I know you want to do that. So, do you want to cover our backs, or spend half your time looking back at me?”
The Guardian scowled. “You lead.”
I turned to one of Ryn’s men, a young elf named Galen. “I want the most direct way to the entertainment district, no scenic routes.”
“Understood, Miss Benares.” He flashed a nervous grin.
“We know the quickest way to the best bars, including Sirens.” He looked down the dark tunnel and swallowed. “We just didn’t know there was anything down here.”
“Hopefully you won’t find out anything different this time. And if you do hear pinchers clicking, just walk faster.”
“That goes without saying.”
“Good.” I sent my lightglobe ahead of us. “Let’s go. And just tell me where to turn.”
The tunnel was damp, moldy, and had things that slithered and scurried into the dark ahead of our lights. But thankfully, there was no clicking or clacking. However, a series of white lines ran along the walls at various heights. Salt. I knew what that meant. We were close enough to the harbor that a storm or exceptionally high tide would put where we were under water. I’d just add drowning to my worry list under giant crabs.
Time was next to impossible to keep up with underground. I didn’t know how long we’d been down here, but it’d been long enough for me. I was ready to see the sky or the inside of Sirens, anything but tons of rock and packed dirt looming only a couple of inches above my head. Vegard had to walk in a perpetual hunch; I knew he was ready to get out of here.
The tunnel ended abruptly in a small chamber. It didn’t end so much as give us five more choices of tunnels. Though it did give Vegard a chance to stand up straight, which he did gratefully. While he cracked his spine and rolled his neck, I surveyed our options.
“Okay, Galen, where are we now, and which way do we go?”
“We’re under the center of town, near the college campus.”
“And which way?”
“Sirens and the other higher-class establishments are on Rathdowne Street. That would be down the tunnel to our left.”
“Where does it come out?” I asked.
“It forks after a hundred yards or so. One tunnel comes out in a drainage pipe that runs under Rathdowne Street, the other one dead-ends at a door.”
Phaelan and I exchanged hopeful glances.
“The door, what’s it look like?” I asked.
“About this tall,” Galen held his hand to the middle of his chest. “Looks like solid iron.”
“Is there a knob or handle?”
Galen thought for a moment then shook his head. “Nothing. Not even a key hole.”
Last time Phaelan and I had been down here, we’d left Sirens by a door that had a handle on one side, but not the other. It hadn’t been a problem for us; we needed to get to the elven embassy, not back into Sirens. Tam didn’t need a handle, knob, or key to open his basement door; he’d use magic. I was sure he kept it locked and warded. Tam had arranged it so that his wards in his nightclub in Mermeia always let me in. I’d find out soon enough if these wards liked me, too. Get there first, Raine. One problem at a time.
I smiled. “Things are going right. That’s the place. Let’s—”
Our lightglobes died, leaving us in the pitch dark.
Crap. Me and my big mouth.
“No one move,” Vegard ordered, keeping his voice to the barest minimum to be heard.
I felt him try to conjure another lightglobe. Not one flicker.
I tried the same. Nothing.
“Galen, do you have a torch?” Phaelan kept his voice calm.
“Yes, Captain. We all do.” He sounded scared to death.
“Get them lit. Now.”
I heard flints striking. Not one spark.
Something was down here with us and getting closer, moving at a steady pace, as if it had all the time in the world. It negated magic, smothered fire, and sure as hell wasn’t a crab. Then the bottom dropped out of the temperature, and I knew what was down here with us. It did have all the time in the world.
Death was eternal—and so were its Reapers.
I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face let alone the frost from my breath, but I could feel it. I clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering, and the long muscles of my back convulsed with cold, the violence of it sending a shuddering spike of pain through my entire body.
