A. Hartley - Will Power

“ ‘His feeding time’?” I muttered. “What am I, some kind of sideshow ape?”

“William Hawthorne in a sideshow?” she remarked archly. “No, you’re strictly a main stage attraction.”

“But still an ape,” I added.

“A pretty smart one,” she said, grudgingly.

“Thanks. Where are these bloody kitchens?” I muttered.

We rounded a corner, chose a door, moved quickly down a narrower passage that ran around a small, cloistered herb garden where the air was cold and fragrant, and passed through an arch into a broad room floored with ceramic tile and dry with the heat of ovens. In one vast hearth a woman was stewing cabbage, and the scent, sour and slightly metallic, hit us like a large animal. Several others went on with their chopping and skinning and whatever else they did in this hellish place to ruin whatever food came near them. No one paid any attention to us at all.

It didn’t take us long to find the cellars. There was a narrow flight of steps down into a bricked arch with a heavy door whose paint was black and flaking. There was no keyhole and the bolt was clumsy and ill-fitting. We opened it and descended.

I had been shown a plan of the palace cellarage, but it was several generations out of date and no one knew exactly what it would look like today. The Stehnites were pretty sure their enemy didn’t know about the secret means of egress from the city, but pretty sure wasn’t absolutely sure, so we would have to be alert for guards, though we hadn’t seen any in the kitchens or the lower chambers so far.

The area below the kitchen had once held an extensive wine store, but the wine had long since been used or thrown away. The Arak Drül did not replenish, I had been assured; they merely consumed. There were a few shelves of salted pork, some bags of white flour, and several barrels of the thin, flavorless yellow beer they made, but otherwise the place seemed empty. There were alcoves and cupboards with shelves, stone cold chests, and a meat locker with hooks, but little of it looked used. You could imagine the place fragrant with cheeses, hanging with sausages, and piled high with bottles of rich and flavorful wines and barrels of hearty ale, but the palace’s new inhabitants apparently ate merely to stay alive. With me, I thought dryly, it was rather the other way round.

Renthrette watched me as I paced around the dank and freezing cellar. “Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“Where is this passage?”

“I’m looking for it, aren’t I?”

“It looks to me like you’re thinking about food.”

I gave her a shocked look. “You misjudge me,” I lied. “Give me a hand with this. My ape strength seems to be failing me.”

Between us we shifted a large-but empty and partly rotten-cabinet. One of its doors flapped open as we lifted it, twisting its corroded hinges till it was barely hanging on. Setting the piece of furniture down we found a large hatchway where it had stood. This was latched but not locked, and it opened upward with a long, high-pitched creak. Renthrette lit her lamp and the cellar flared with leaping orange tongues before settling down to an amber glow.

“It’s just a stone cistern for cold storage,” Renthrette whispered, beginning to lose patience. It had, after all, been minutes since she’d killed anything.

I climbed in and looked around, stretching to take the lamp from her. By its light, a rusted iron grill shone dully in the corner of the floor. The shaft beneath it looked like a drain of some sort, but it was quite dry.

“I think this is it,” I said.

“You think?” said Renthrette, dropping easily in through the hatch and peering at the grate.

“See any other possibilities?”

“Not here.”

“Then this must be it.”

The grill was held in place by heavy nails driven into a timber frame. We hadn’t brought tools, so I squatted down beside it, wondering how we were going to move it and smelling the cold, damp air that drifted out of the shaft. Renthrette nudged me aside and planted her boot squarely in the center of the grate. She pushed and it bent noticeably, scattering red flakes of iron into the hole beneath. Leaning on my shoulder she stomped at it twice more, until I hushed her, sure that someone would be attracted to the noise. We waited, holding our breath and looking at each other. Then, without warning, she did it again, and this time her foot went straight through.

Two bars of the thin metal had snapped clean out, and several more had buckled enough that they could be bent out of the way. Renthrette went first and I lowered myself awkwardly into the shaft after her, her hands closing about my waist, drawing me down toward her in ways far less erotic than they sound.

“Drop,” she said. “It’s only a couple of feet.”

I did so and she braced me against the impact embarrassingly.

“I’m fine,” I spluttered. “You don’t have to heave me around like a child, you know.”

“I was just trying to help,” she said, affronted.

“Don’t. Now where the hell are we?”

We were in a passage. The shaft we had just dropped through had been alarmingly narrow and I had had visions of crawling, as we had done through the cistern drain at the Falcon’s Nest. But this was quite different. Once in the tunnel proper, we were able to walk upright and side by side. The lamp showed the same carved buttresses and gargoyle ornaments that we had seen elsewhere in the city, but here you could see the goblin heads that had been smashed elsewhere. The ancient kings or tribe leaders of Stehnmarch stood proud, though strange to our eyes, and noble. Renthrette lifted the lamp and gazed at them.

“So it’s true,” she said, her voice hushed. “They were here first. The ‘fair folk,’ Sorrail. . It’s all been a lie.”

“I hate to say I told you so but. .”

“No, you don’t,” said Renthrette. “You love it. And to be precise you never told me so at all.”

“I implied it,” I said. “I was skeptical.”

“You always are.”

“Thank you,” I said, smiling and bowing slightly as if she had paid me the highest compliment. Renthrette was moving off down the passage, however, staring at everything except me, and didn’t notice.

The passage was straight and there were no doors or corridors leading off it, so we made rapid progress in what felt like a slow turning and descending spiral. The flint underfoot seemed newly cut and showed little sign of wear, but patches of dark moss clung to all the surfaces and water dropped from the arched ceiling in places and coursed in rivulets down the walls. It seemed to be getting colder as we progressed, and in minutes I was catching sight of tiny icicles gleaming in the lamplight like quartz.

Then came a staircase, broad and steep, and at its foot, a round chamber, with relief carvings on its walls showing the Stehnites laying out their dead. There was a single door leading out of this chamber and I stopped Renthrette before she opened it.

She gave me an impatiently inquiring look.

“Did you look at the carvings?” I said.

“No. This is hardly the time for artistic appreciation.”

“They’re funeral engravings,” I said.

“So?”

“This is a burial chamber.”

“I thought you said this was an escape route from the city,” she said.

“That was its secondary function, yes, but it was also where they brought the bodies of their rulers and dignitaries.”

“So?” she parroted.

“So we are about to enter an underground graveyard, a mausoleum. I thought you should know.”

“You said,” she said, unmoved, and in truth I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. I suppose I thought we should somehow feel a sense of respect for those who had died, but since we had recently been doing our best to kill their successors, that didn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe I wanted her to feel guilty like me.