Joseph Lewis - Wren the Fox Witch

Tycho hurried on past two more cisterns that had been grand ball rooms or dining halls for the long-dead lords of Constantia. The major kept his eyes on the walkway.

Perhaps Constantine himself danced in these halls. Princes and emperors from half the world might have walked here, talking of war and love and religion and politics. Writing history with every gesture and word. And now it’s all one big well full of cold water for people who barely remember that Constantine ever really lived. What a joke.

Beyond the cisterns stood the hall of small locked rooms guarded by the pale-faced soldiers, who leapt to salute the major as he led the Duchess and her entourage past the cells ever deeper into the ancient palace.

Finally they came to another large room, one not flooded but still pocked with broken tiles and wide shallow puddles from the water that dripped from overhead. The moldy remains of the ceiling were supported by two rows of thick Hellan columns, which may have been solid marble, or merely granite, beneath the layers of moss and fungus and filth on them. A dozen other doors led out of the room in every direction, but Tycho paused just inside the entrance and said, “We should be safe here.”

“Where is here?” Wren asked.

“We’re fifty feet underground, near the edge of the empty field.”

“Very good,” said the Duchess. “With nothing on the surface, there’s no reason for the airships to bomb this area. Good thinking, major.”

Tycho nodded. He was too tired and too worried to feel any pride in the compliment.

Salvator hobbled out into the room and sighed loudly. “Well, if we must, we must.”

For the next ten minutes, Tycho watched the Duchess direct the clerks and porters and other servants carrying in the machinery of government, hauling chests and desks and tables and an endless supply of paper into the dingy, dark hall. Torches were set and lit, furniture was arranged, and within half an hour the center of the ancient hall resembled a large office ringed in fire light, already bustling with the mundane business of reconciling numbers and reports and issuing new orders. Couriers began jogging out the door, heading for the surface to deliver their new papers to the officers outside.

Toward the center of the room was a round table with a square map laid on it with the corners drooping over the edges. Wooden figures of soldiers, marines, horses, archers, and ships were scattered over the map to show the last known positions of every defender in the city. They were scattered very thinly.

“You see, this would have been an ideal moment for two forward thinking gentlemen to be on a ship sailing away across the placid Sea of Marmara toward the Ionian coast,” Salvator said from his chair. “Have you ever been to Palermo? It’s quite picturesque in the winter. And when spring comes, those two gentlemen might take a leisurely journey up to Rome to seduce foolish young women and kill arrogant young priests. For money, of course.”

“How are your stitches?” Tycho asked, his eyes never leaving the map.

“Holding, for the moment. Your common Hellan surgeon is no match for even the lowliest Italian tailor, but I suspect I’m going to survive.”

Tycho said nothing. He stood by the map, his arms folded, his foot tapping, as he waited for the runners to start bringing fresh reports so the map could be updated and he could offer the Duchess some new idea, some new tactic that might help save Constantia from the airships. But as he stood waiting, his mind was a blank. His eyes traveled up to the young woman in black, to her long red hair cascading around her shoulders in wild tumbling locks, her tall red ears poking up in front of the black scarf that was slipping back over her head, and to her pale white hands with the jangling silver bracelets.

“Is everything all right?” he asked her. “Can I get you anything?” He frowned as he glanced around the makeshift office in the dank cavern.

That was stupid. What the hell can I get her? A handful of dirty water?

“I’m fine.” She flashed a brief, tired smile and came over to stand beside him and look at the map of the city. “Just restless. I don’t like standing still, waiting for something to happen to me. I spent a long time with my first teacher, Gudrun, in this one little village, just listening to old stories and learning about herbs. And toward the end, I couldn’t even leave the tower for more than an hour or two. It wasn’t safe. But then when I did leave the tower, it was nothing but running and fighting and arguing and more running. Even after I left Ysland with Omar, it’s been nothing but moving and moving. We sailed across the Sea of Ice in a ship made of steel, and rode through frozen forests on huge shaggy horses, and then crossed the glaciers on sleds pulled by dogs.”

“It sounds like it was hard. And cold.”

“It was, but it was wonderful. I saw new places, met strange people. I talked to ghosts hundreds of years old and visited tiny villages in the mountains that can barely survive, but somehow do, generation after generation.” Wren stared up at the shadowy ceiling as she spoke in soft, reverent tones. “And then we reached Vlachia and saw the walking corpses, and fought them, and escaped here, and the war, and Yaga…”

“Not a moment to rest?”

“Not a one.” She glanced at him. “I guess I’m starting to like it that way. I don’t like just standing still like this, especially in the dark. Waiting in the dark. It brings back bad memories.”

“I’m sorry. It’s only for a day or two,” he said. “But at least we’ll be safe from the bombs.”

“Right, the bombs.” She nodded absently. “If they ever drop any bombs.”

He sighed. “If. When.”

Wren looked sharply to her right. “Did you hear that?”

Tycho turned to peer into the deep shadows at the far end of the hall. He heard people murmuring and papers shuffling and pens scratching, and faintly, he heard water dripping. “What was it?”

Wren’s ears twitched, jerking left and right in tiny increments. “It was like footsteps. Tapping, but irregular, not like the dripping. And scraping, like boots.”

Tycho frowned a bit deeper as he started walking through the office space and out beyond the perimeter of torches across the wet tiles toward the dark corners and sealed doors. He heard nothing. Still, he drew his white-handled Mazigh revolver and pointed it at the shadows and stood very still, listening.

Wren followed a moment later and stood behind him. “I hear it. Scratching.”

“It could be rats in the walls,” he said quietly.

“Maybe.”

One of the sealed doors in front of them banged against its hinges and the deep wooden thump echoed across the room. A dozen clerks looked up from their papers.

Tycho pointed his gun at the door and took a few more steps forward. “That wasn’t a rat.”

“What else could be down here?” she asked. “Are there other parts of this palace used for other things? Could other people be down here for shelter too?”

“Maybe,” he said.

But probably not.

Tycho waved to two of the soldiers to follow him and they crossed the room through cold puddles and over crackling, uneven tiles to the door that had banged. It was a double door hung in a thick frame of carved pillars crowned with stone leaves and flowers.

“Hello?” he called.

The doors banged, and banged again. Something heavy was striking the wood panels, and the doors shook on their hinges, rattling against the old iron locks that held them together. They banged a third time and the left door cracked apart a bit, splintering just enough to reveal a sliver of darkness on the far side.

And from that darkness a pale blue hand clawed into the light.