Twenty: Tunnels

Lord Harkenn's foyer was a mess of the groaning wounded. Dela stopped just shy of the front doors, staring. She'd heard about what had happened – the Devils had launched an attack on the city food stores, repelled semi-effectually by Harkenn's guard. One store had still burned, and if Harkenn's demon hunter hadn't been on hand, the Firebull which had been attracted by the flames might have done more damage than it did. An Unspoken physician moved among the group of patients wounded by the demon, all Harkenn's men – though she supposed criminals couldn't expect the same standard of treatment.

"Kiel's blessed teeth," Lin whispered at her side. "They said it was just a skirmish."

"I think it was." Dela had seen battles between tribes before. Scenes like this weren't new territory, but never before had she been one of the people trying to pick up the pieces. Though there couldn't have been more than three dozen patients, it suddenly seemed like a gargantuan task – especially since the real reasons the acolytes of the Long Path were here were stacked in a wagon in the front courtyard, covered over with black cloth.

Still, it was just as important to aid the living while they were present. She grabbed blankets from the cart that two of the temple guards had rolled up to the castle and moved among the patients, handing them out. Apparently the Lord Harkenn wasn't used to this kind of hospitality, and had paid for a wagon-load of medical supplies to be brought up from Kerrin's stores.

That, or all of his own supplies had been in the warehouse that burned.

Dela felt a flicker of anger. She had done her time in the community shelters; she knew how scarce food had become. Even the acolytes in the temples were feeling the brunt now – the portions were smaller, the gruel thinner. But she didn't complain, because her having less meant others could have something – a logic the Devils didn't appear to apply to themselves.

Two ladies from the Medica were treating those wounded by people. They acknowledged her with thankful glances.

The Unspoken physician she approached with more caution. Hap and Koen had been friendly, but it wasn't quite enough to erase the years of stories she'd been told about the Hooded Men.

"Ah, thank you," he said, as she approached with an armful of bandages. "I just ran out."

He stood beside a soldier who looked like he should have been on the slab already, save for the gentle, almost undetectable rise and fall of his breathing. He was stripped to the waist, and three large gashes occupied his left side, angry red-purple. Neat rows of sutures stood out against the ruined flesh, though judging by his blue-lipped pallor he had been bleeding for some time before they'd been stitched up.

"I don't know if he'll make it through the night," the physician said. His voice was soft and soothing, but something about him made her nervous. "But I've done what I can."

He took the bandages from her, and she tried not to shudder as his crackling magic touched her skin. Another Unspoken picked his way through the wounded – Harkenn's infamous favourite, Yddris, she guessed – and she turned away.

"Water," a man at her feet said. A swathe of bandages covered one side of his face. "Please."

"Of course," she said, in her best attempt at a calm voice befitting an acolyte of the Long Path. She hurried to the cart and returned with a cup. The Unspoken were still talking, so she knelt down and, with a hand under the man's head, gently tipped the cup to his lips.

"...going to talk to Harkenn about it tomorrow," she heard the physician say, and unlike the moment before, his voice was harsh and strangled with fury. "You weren't with him last night, Yddris, he fell to pieces the minute he got back."

"I said I'd talk to him," Yddris said. His voice was a low growl, though Dela suspected it was always like that. "How is he today?"

"I left him with Hap and Koen, staring at a wall and shaking like a leaf." The physician bit off each word like they pained him. "If you can't get him out of this city by the end of the week, I'll take him myself."

"Fine." Yddris sighed. There was a pause, then a slap.

"No smoking around my patients."

When Dela straightened up, the physician was alone. She turned just as Yddris disappeared down a side corridor rubbing his arm. Dela took her chance to duck away as the other Unspoken sighed, rubbed his eyes, and bent down to bandage up the man with the gashes.

"What was that all about?" Lin asked, as they crossed paths at the cart. "An Unspoken domestic?"

"I don't know," Dela said, already feeling guilty for listening. "I didn't catch most of it."

Lin looked disappointed. "How are you supposed to find out anything interesting if you don't listen?"

"Interesting is a relative term," Dela said, chuckling. "Now go away before Maniel decides we're loitering."

They both glanced at the Cleric supervising the acolytes from the bottom step of Harkenn's grand staircase. Her head turned, and in a blink Lin had vanished.

Further up the staircase, Dela saw Harkenn's Angel slave perched on a step, watching what was going on below with an unreadable look on her face. She had been present when Kerrin and Dela had brought the plague news to Harkenn, the same blank look on her face as she sat in a large chair in the corner and listened in silence. A heavy collar wrapped around her neck, trailing a chain into her lap. Her feet were bare, hair and eyes dark as night. She had probably been very beautiful once, Dela thought, but her beauty had a starved look to it now, weighed down by sadness.

Her eyes flicked to Dela, who jumped and tried to look busy, realising belatedly that someone had come up behind her.

"Do you need any help?" the girl said. Her hair was brown-yellow, a colour Dela hadn't even seen among the tribes, eyes a warm green-tinted brown. The otherworld girl. Dela looked back up at the stairs and found Anarabelle Novae was still watching her.

"Don't mind her," the otherworld girl said, matching the stare with a playful glare of her own. "She's just nosy. Here, let me."

With an ease Dela envied, the girl hefted the large basket full of bread she had been trying to move down from the wagon.

"You get used to it if you work in the laundry," the girl said, probably catching the look on Dela's face before she could wipe it off. "I'm Grace, by the way."

"Dela," Dela mumbled. "Thank you."

"Do you want any help handing it out? I'm dying for something to do."

Dela eyed her. She didn't look like she was dying, and by this point Dela was pretty sure she knew what that looked like. All the same, she nodded and indicated the patients she had been planning to hand it out to, to go with the soup provided by Harkenn's kitchens. A few uninjured soldiers had found their way into the makeshift Medica, watching the food distribution hopefully, and she gave bread to them too, certain that Kerrin wouldn't mind.

Grace seemed to know what she was doing; she moved among the patients with confidence, talking to them and joking.

"She worked in one of Kerrin's shelters," a voice said. Anarabelle had moved down several steps and was watching her through a gap in the bannisters as she handed out food to the guards laid out near the stairs. "If you're wondering."

It made sense. "Oh, right."

A small smile played around the slave's lips as if she was enjoying making Dela nervous, and her dark eyes seemed suddenly bottomless. "What did she say about me?"

"That you were nosy," Dela mumbled, wishing she'd gone to a different part of the room.

Anarabelle said nothing, only watched Grace move among the soldiers with a quirked brow. They both jumped as a harsh voice from above barked, "Anara!"

The Angel rose to her feet and climbed the stairs again without looking back. The soles of her feet were black with dirt, and as she went Dela caught a glimpse of the stubs where her wings should have been. She had heard stories about Angels that were almost as bad as those she'd heard about Unspoken, but the sight of them was still terribly sad in a way she struggled to put into words.

She was still thinking about Anarabelle when she returned to the temple, tired and aching but feeling fulfilled. She hopped down out of the wagon along with the other acolytes and, with those of her order, gathered around the wagon that held the dead as several Clerics in black robes emerged from the bowels of the temple.

Dela glanced over at the head of their procession. They had been escorted back by Yddris – the physician had stayed on with the wounded – and now he was talking to Lady Kerrin outside the vast front doors. Not for the first time she wondered who he had been arguing over with the other Unspoken, but resigned herself to the fact that she would never know. She was still terribly curious, though; ever since meeting Hap and Koen, the Unspoken Gift had been a source of intrigue instead of just an abstract concept from the world outside the temple. She wondered if someone they knew was struggling to cope with it, and why.

But then they started moving the bodies, and she had to turn her mind to other things.

There were six dead – four had been removed from the scene of the fight, and two had died of grievous injuries shortly afterward. Dela walked beside Lin as the Clerics carried the bodies down to the catacombs. Three of them would rest with Kiel, and three would be washed and dressed in a shroud before being sent to other orders. Dela and Lin were both assigned to the group for the Kelian bodies. Under the close eye of the Clerics, they washed the bodies and laid them out on stretchers to be taken into the chambers for preparation. Dela knew she wasn't the only one who breathed a sigh of relief when they were dismissed rather than being required to watch. She thought of her pallet in her cosy room with Lin and two of the other girls and felt her muscles begin to unwind at the prospect.

The catacombs were cool, glowing with a buttery warm light that lulled her deeper into her exhaustion. Maniel led them through the winding tunnels back towards the main body of the temple, and Dela and Lin shuffled along at the rear, struggling to keep their eyes open.

This bone-deep weariness was the reason Dela first thought she'd imagined it when she saw a figure standing in a branching corridor.

She walked forward a few paces, frowned, then stopped. She looked around. The whipping end of a cloak disappeared around the corner at speed, nothing like the measured stroll of a priestess.

"Hey," she said, starting forward. "Hey!"

"Dela, where are you going?" Lin hissed, grabbing at her sleeve and missing. Dela stopped at the entrance to the corridor, trying to catch another flicker of movement.

"What are you doing, child?" Maniel snapped. Their little group had come to halt. The other acolytes stared at Dela and whispered among themselves.

"I saw someone....there!" She ran down the corridor, barely leaving herself enough time to think it through. She heard shouting behind her, and the sound of pursuit, but all she could think of was how good it would be if she was the one to catch the intruders in the temple. Kerrin would surely be pleased with her for that, even if it meant disobeying Maniel.

The glimpses she caught of the intruder didn't give much away, only that they were wearing black. In the back of her mind alarm bells shrilled– this was stupid, nothing was worth putting herself at this much risk, Maniel was going to flog her when she caught up – but she kept going.

She wasn't sure when she stopped glimpsing her target, but when she came to a stop, fully out of breath, she didn't know where she was. Maniel had fallen behind some time back. The sealed chamber doors on either side of her loomed in stony silence, giving her no clue on how to orientate herself. She crushed the panic clawing up her throat and tried to think. She hadn't run that far, and the corridors here were lit, which meant it was a path that priests took daily. In theory, all she had to do was wait for either Maniel to find her or for the priests' rounds to come past. In theory, there was nothing to panic about.

Only she knew she wasn't alone. In her haste to prove useful, she hadn't considered that she was only a young girl, and that whoever she'd been chasing may well have been someone who was breaking down chamber walls to get to bodies.

She took down a brazier from a wall bracket and began to retrace her steps, dismissing the feeling of invisible eyes on the back of her neck. The catacombs had never felt so sinister before. The echoing caverns bounced her own steps back at her, made it sound as though there were two sets. She knew that the worst thing she could possibly do would be to succumb to fear and start running. The priests had been telling them that from the start, because it was all too easy to become disorientated or turned around without even realising. The mind did strange things out of fear.

The problem with that theory, though, was that it was one thing to theorise and entirely another to live it. The tunnels all looked the same, and she was certain that she hadn't run this distance on the way in.

The brazier flickered in the still air and she froze. Her breath went solid in her throat, and she suddenly felt cold. So cold, even though the air around her was warm.

The catacombs around her were silent, but not empty, she was certain. She shuddered. A prickle ran over her skin like an unseen gaze.

The fire didn't go out, but returned to its calm crackle. The others along the length of the corridor seemed normal, and warmth was slowly returning to her limbs. She had to keep going, to not present a standing target if someone did have a mind to keep her quiet. Dela stayed still for a moment, forcing out a breath, and then braced herself to keep moving.

A step, behind her.

All caution vanished in a panicked shriek, and Dela broke into a run. She wasn't sure at what point she threw the torch away, only that one minute she had it, and the next she didn't. Turn after turn passed her in a blur, until she was certain she would never find the way out. Her thoughts scurried frantically round and round her mind, as repetitive as the tunnels, until all she was fully conscious of was the rasping of her breath, in and out, in and out.

She didn't slow when she rounded the next corner, and screamed when she ran into someone solid. Hands gripped her shoulders hard and shook her until tears spilled down her cheeks. Dela squeezed her eyes shut, praying to both Kiel and Varthi that it wouldn't hurt.

"Night take me, girl, what in all the circles of the Pit possessed you to do something so stupid?"

Dela cracked open an eye. She didn't think she had ever been, or ever would be again, so glad to see Cleric Maniel's furious face.

"I thought it was the intruder," she said, voice thick with tears. "I thought...I thought..."

"That a girl of thirteen with limited knowledge of our catacombs would be able to catch a criminal who can break into stone tombs?" Maniel asked, her tone withering, but Dela was so relieved that she didn't care.

Two priests in black robes stood behind the Cleric, and they stepped forward at a gesture.

"Which direction did they take?" Maniel asked, and Dela pointed down the tunnel from which she'd just hurtled. The woman nodded, and then turned to the priests. "Get a group of the guard together. There may be another break-in tonight if we don't act fast. I will alert Lady Kerrin."

They nodded and slipped away, leaving Dela alone with her furious mentor.

"Are you hurt, girl?"

Dela shook her head.

"Did you see the intruder in any detail?"

"No, ma'am." She sniffed and tried to still her shaking hands. "They were covered up. But..." She trailed off.

"But?"

"It felt like when the lamp went out during the observation," Dela said. Cold – from fear this time – stole up her spine as she recalled the unnatural chill that had crept over her in the tunnels. "The torches flickered like they were going to go out, and I felt...cold. An unnatural cold, just before I heard them behind me."

Maniel's lips pursed into a thin line. "Come."

She led Dela through the temple. The other acolytes had moved on, and Dela had recovered enough to feel dread at the prospect of returning to the other girls and their questions. Dully she registered that she was being taken straight to Kerrin, but the prospect of a night or three in Contemplation didn't feel as much of a hardship as it had before.

Maniel sent one of Kerrin's door guards to get something with a muttered word, and then knocked and let them in. Kerrin sat behind her desk, head in one hand as she reviewed the papers in front of her, but she looked up as they entered, confusion turning to concern. Her eyes found Dela even though she tried to look invisible, hovering at the Cleric's elbow with her gaze on the floor. She didn't want to see the disappointment in Kerrin's eyes.

"What's wrong?" Kerrin said, in a voice that said there was no point in pretending it wasn't bad news. "I feel like we may have been here before, somehow."

"The security measures aren't enough," Maniel said. "We currently have an intruder roaming the tunnels."

"Have you sent a guard patrol in?"

"I have, my lady."

"Good." Kerrin's brows furrowed. "Not as good as I'd hoped, but at least we had warning this time."

"You can thank Deladrina for that." Maniel cleared her throat. "She chased the intruder into the catacombs but I do not think the effort turned out as valiantly as she hoped. She's described the encounter, my lady, and I believe we are still dealing with the same entity, whoever or whatever they are."

The guard returned then, with a cup in one hand. He offered it to Dela, who stared blankly at it.

"Soup," Maniel said. "There was some left over from today's efforts."

Dela accepted the cup from the guard, and sighed in relief at the warmth against her fingers.

"Was the figure hooded?" Kerrin asked her.

"I think so, my lady."

Kerrin sighed. To Dela's immense relief, she didn't look angry. "I fear we'll have to bother Faellian in the middle of the night again, Maniel. Can you send a runner to him?"

"Of course. Would you like me to..."

"I will deal with Deladrina."

Dela was suddenly glad she hadn't had any soup yet. Her guts coiled and her throat closed in anticipation.

When the door closed behind the Cleric, Kerrin sighed. "Take a seat."

Dela dropped into the chair opposite the Lady, clutching her soup against her chest with one hand and rubbing her fingers over the lump of Raklan's amulet under her robe with the other.

"You know there's going to be a punishment."

"Yes, my lady."

"It was a very reckless thing to do. I'm assigning you lines and two nights in Contemplation."

"Yes, my lady," Dela replied, at little more than a whisper.

"Do you wish to return to your dormitory tonight?"

Dela considered lying, but found she couldn't. "No."

"For tonight only, you can have one of the empty Clerics' cells, and I will have one of the medics look you over just in case."

Relief sagged her shoulders. "Thank you, my lady. Could I..." She shut her mouth. She was in no position to ask favours.

"Go on." Kerrin smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. In that moment, she looked incredibly tired.

"Could Lin come in with me?" Dela asked. "She'll be worried."

Kerrin's smile warmed a fraction. "I shouldn't grant you favours after this little transgression, Dela. However." She chuckled as Dela almost slopped some soup in surprise. "Since, in your endeavours, you did alert us to a security threat in a timely fashion, I will allow it. Just promise me you won't do it again."

"Yes, my lady, I promise. Thank you."

"And Dela?" Kerrin winked. "Don't tell Maniel."