Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

She looked at him, startled, as if she’d forgotten he was there, or that he would speak.

“Be ready.”

The bracelets split with an audible crunch. Thuan reached out, lightning fast; grabbed Kim Cuc and pulled—she came light and unbearably fragile, a doll he could have snapped with a careless gesture—threw her over his shoulder, and ran.

He didn’t look back.

The spikes under his feet tensed, but didn’t surge—behind him, a blinding light, that filled the pump room until he could hardly see. He ran for the open doors, and the maze of corridors leading back to safety.

He’d expected to have to fight the children at the entrance, but they’d vanished in the wash of light. He could still see their silhouettes in the midst of the radiance, shock-still. Stunned, but recovering. He didn’t have much time.

Which way had he come? The corridors all looked alike, all with that same faded flower wallpaper, and the stains of blackened mold spreading from the carvings on the ceiling. The light behind him was dying down, the spikes at his feet quiescent. Waiting.

“You’re fast,” Sare commented, as she caught up to him.

“You—” Thuan was breathing hard. He’d slowed down to see where he was going. He expected, at any time, to see the spikes reforming, children of thorns waiting for them in the darkness.

“I hit him hard.” Sare sounded cheerful. “It was easier, knowing what I was dealing with.”

“You—” Thuan found a breath, finally. “You didn’t have to do this.” It was the House. It was the wards that kept all their dependents safe. She only had to look the other way.

Sare raised an eyebrow. “As I said, I’m responsible for the safety of the Houseless during those tests. And there are some choices that I won’t make. We’re not monsters, Thuan.”

Thuan clamped his mouth on the obvious response. “The Court of Birth,” he said, instead.

“This way,” Sare said, pointing to a corridor that seemed like the others, cracked parquet and faded wallpaper with an alignment of the same doors, all painted with stylized flowers. And, in the growing silence, “Children died, because Lord Uphir wouldn’t protect them. Before Lord Asmodeus took the House from him. It remembers.”

And Asmodeus protected children? Thuan didn’t voice this question, either, but Sare answered it regardless.

“The House keeps faith with its own. Lord Asmodeus understands this,” Sare said.

“Fine,” Thuan said. He wasn’t about to argue with her. “Any plans?”

“Yes.” For someone who’d been through Hell and back, Sare was still inordinately cheerful. “My turn. Be ready to run. It’s straight ahead, and left at the first intersection, the one with the two chairs and the pedestal table with the Chinese vase.”

“I don’t understand—” Thuan started, but she was looking past him, at what was coming up.

He turned, slightly—Kim Cuc a growing dead weight on his shoulder—and saw the maw of darkness, rising from the bottom of the wing—flowing like ink, like polluted oil, glittering with the shadows of thorns.

They couldn’t possibly outrun this.

By his side, Sare was leaning against a wall—the light coming out of her pale and weakened, the artefact around her neck open, with no hint of magic left within. The shadows flowed around her, not touching her—House, she was still House, and it didn’t care for her, didn’t want to hurt her, just in case she turned out to be useful one day. Under Thuan, the floor seemed to have become broken glass. And, as the shadows came forward and extinguished the light, they pooled—becoming the shape of children, the shape of a Fallen.

They didn’t speak, anymore: just a thin thread of sound that might have been the creaks of floorboards, the trickle of water. Stay. Stay.

Thuan backed away, until he stood in the center of the corridor, with threads of magic stretching, trying to bind him to the floor, to make him part of the House as they’d tried to do with Kim Cuc. He could barely hold on to his human shape. Any moment now, he was going to lose it, and Sare was going to see antlers sprouting from his temples, scales scattered across his cheeks.

Stay. Stay.

Never .

“I told you.” Sare’s voice was conversational, her face utterly emotionless, as if she was merely shepherding Houseless through tests. “We guaranteed their safety. It’s not an idle promise.”

The being that looked like Samariel was stretching past her already, making for Thuan. Sare was leaning against the wall, winded and exhausted; but her gaze found Thuan’s, held it.

Be ready to run.

There was no blinding light, no rising magic. Instead, the floor under Thuan changed—as if someone had smoothed out the broken glass, stroked raised spines until they lay flat again. The threads under his feet snapped.

He ran.

The darkness would follow him, but he couldn’t do anything about that. His lungs were burning, his legs trembling. Kim Cuc wasn’t heavy, but he couldn’t keep carrying her forever. She kept sliding off his shoulder, head lolling against his chest.

Turn left at the next intersection. Two chairs, a pedestal table with one of those horrible Chinese porcelain vases on it. He almost tripped over one of the chairs, had to force himself to change course, calves burning.

On either side of him, the wallpapers were turning black again, the painted flowers and birds merging with the growing shadows, and he could see the shape of children, pooling from the paneling like ink, thorns and branches and a House he couldn’t fight, a power that was slowly choking the dragon kingdom.

Demons take them. Demons take them. He couldn’t possibly—

At the end of the corridor was the door to the garden, so close, so impossibly far. Whatever Sare had done was nothing more than a sop, a few moments’ safety gained. He was never going to make it. He was going to freeze there, within sight of the exit…

He’d started to shoulder off Kim Cuc’s weight, ready to stand over her and defend her—when the magic hit.

It came, not from behind him, but from the door. And it wasn’t harsh, blinding light, but something smoother and softer; the voices of children, laughing and teasing each other; an echo of a lullaby, sung over and over; a smell of fried onions and warm bread, and a hint of unfamiliar spices.

In front of Thuan, the being of thorns formed, stared at the light, empty eye-sockets shining in the darkness. Khi water pooled around its feet, circled its shape on the parquet. It didn’t move. It stood, entranced, as if listening, its head cocked.

Thuan would have run, but he had no energy left. Instead, he straightened out Kim Cuc on his shoulder, and hobbled towards the light.

An eternity of walking, with Kim Cuc growing heavier; and the spell—whatever it was—spreading around him, a warm embrace, a promise of small, ordinary things; of fire in the hearth, water and wine in crystal glasses, the smoothness of cotton sheets at the end of the day—never mind that the bed was moldy and broken, the wine sour, the hearth cracked, it was still home.

But not his home. Never.

When Thuan stepped outside, the light blinded him for a moment. Then he saw the magician—Albane?—kneeling in the middle of a circle traced in the mud. Light streamed, highlighted the words she’d written, as fluid and as deliberate as a master’s calligraphy. Leila was kneeling by the side of the circle, both hands plunged deep into the earth, the light coming up to her wrists, making her swarthy skin seem pale and colorless.

Thuan kept walking—he wasn’t sure he could stop. His feet carried him down the stairs, by the side of the circle: Albane looked up at him and nodded once, grimly. Leila withdrew her hands from it and grabbed him. “Thuan!”