Kingsbane

“Let me,” Jessamyn snapped, snatching the keys.

Once they were inside, flickering light from the corridor poured into the black room, illuminating a woman in a stained tunic and trousers, barefoot, huddling in the far corner in a pile of her own waste. Her pale skin was cut upon, bruised. Bulbous sores marked her temple, her throat, her left arm. Dark tendrils capped her shaved head, framed her cheeks and brow.

Eliana’s heart sank. This woman’s transformation had already begun, which meant she would be volatile.

Jessamyn strode forward. “Can you walk?”

The woman’s eyes flicked to each in their party. She nodded, bestial in her nervousness. Her hands twitched atop her knees.

Jessamyn grabbed her arm, hauled her to her feet. “Catilla, help her if she needs it.”

Catilla hurried forward, guiding the woman out of the room. “I’ll have to fight, if we’re attacked,” Eliana heard her explain. “But don’t be afraid. Just stay back, keep yourself safe, and when the fighting’s done, keep running. We’ll get you out of here.”

They hurried from room to room, gathering prisoners where they could and leaving the dead where they lay. Some rooms they left untouched, for at the sound of the keys, the prisoners inside launched themselves at the doors, roaring and howling.

With each abandoned room, Eliana felt a scream building inside her—a scream not of rage but of exhaustion. It was too much, this fight. Too immense, too incalculable. Once, she would have been angry to be in this place, to see its carnage. Now, she proceeded numbly through it, half listening to the whimpers of the seven prisoners they had collected, killing any guards who intercepted them with a numb efficiency.

At the final door—1, read the metal plate—they heard nothing, no roars, no cries of pain. Eliana glanced back at the others. The second prisoner they had freed—an older woman, gray-haired and brown-skinned, leaned heavily against Jaraq. Another stood, clear-eyed and square-jawed, with another, half-conscious prisoner in her arms.

The first prisoner hovered wide-eyed just behind Catilla, clutching her arm.

Jessamyn unlocked the final door and pushed it open. Immediately, a shot rang out. She cursed, barely yanking the door closed in time. The bullet ricocheted off metal. More shots rang out, frantic and unthinking, one right after another, until silence fell once more.

Eliana glanced at Jessamyn. “Leave it.”

“They’re out of bullets,” Jessamyn replied.

“Unless they have another gun.”

“We should go,” the square-jawed prisoner suggested. “Before others come.”

“Please,” whimpered the first prisoner, her face pressed against Catilla’s sleeve. “Please, go.”

Jessamyn hissed a curse and pushed open the door, her revolver aimed to kill. Eliana followed, daggers at the ready.

But neither weapon was necessary. In the far corner of the room, huddled around a bleary-eyed prisoner, were two men. Healthy and fair-skinned, pressed tunics reaching their knees, high collars buttoned primly at their throats. One lowered his revolver to the floor, then raised his trembling hands into the air.

“We are physicians,” he said, his voice thin. “We are not soldiers. Please, have mercy.”

“Physicians?” Jessamyn spat out. “You mean you’re the ones who have been torturing these women.”

The man’s face crumpled, tears spilling down his cheeks. “No, please, it’s not like that!”

“It’s exactly like that,” the square-jawed prisoner said over Eliana’s shoulder.

The other physician, however, did not raise his hands and did not beg. Instead, he fixed Eliana with an icy, scornful glare.

“‘We are the ones he calls at night,’” he muttered. “‘We are the vessels of his might.’”

Eliana’s castings lit up like fire, sending hot spikes of urgency up and down her limbs.

Jessamyn cursed, stepping away from her. “What’s that? What are you doing?”

“What’s he saying?” Catilla asked, her voice tense.

“‘We speak the word that he has prayed,’” he continued, and then his eyes shifted. Their color quavered and paled. “‘Upon his wings, our souls remade.’”

Eliana felt what was about to happen before it did, but she couldn’t move away. A presence, charged and furious, burst from the mind of the physician on the floor and scrambled, seeking, for Eliana’s own. It seized her, held her still in that fetid, dark room. The world shifted, rearranging itself.

She stood once more in the red-carpeted corridor from her dreams. She had not seen it since that long-ago night in Astavar when Navi attacked her. But now, seeing it again, the eternal space felt as familiar as it had then felt foreign. Galvanized lights buzzed along the gleaming, polished walls. Endless rows of doors arched to sharp peaks.

One, at the farthest visible end of the corridor, flew open, admitting a beam of light so bright and white that it terrified her. An instant of that, and the door slammed shut.

Then the next followed, and the next, and the next, each door closer to the spot where she stood—flanked by her reflections in the polished wood, red bubbling hot between her toes. When each door opened, a bright light emerged, accompanied by a sound—faint at first, an unintelligible susurration at the edge of her mind. The doors opened at a faster and faster rate. The cutting white lights they emitted sliced the red hallway into slabs of meat. The hissing sounds became whispers and formed a word.

Eliana.

She turned, wrenching her feet from the carpet. She ran, but the doors followed, the lights sizzling at her heels.

Eliana.

Far ahead of her, on the right, a door stood open, admitting no light. She ran for it, desperate for the shield of darkness, and tumbled inside. She slammed the door closed, pressed herself against it, turned the latch with shaking hands.

She stood, breathing hard, cheek hot against the cool wood.

Then a hand touched her neck, and another, her wrist.

A voice kissed her temple, ecstatic and familiar. “There you are.”

The Emperor.

Corien.

Her mother’s long-ago lover. Leader of the angels, the immortal destroyer.

He wound his fingers through her hair, tighter and tighter, until her scalp smarted and tears sprang to her eyes. “Eliana, Eliana. A lovely name. Lilting and sweet. I wonder what she would have named you. I wonder if she’s watching us, even now.” He pulled her back to his body, shapeless in the dark. “Rielle,” he howled, voice cracking. “Can you see this? You died for nothing!”