It was him I anchored myself to. I drew the thread tight, strong. I prayed it would hold enough to get us there.
And I stepped through it.
I collapsed against the damp stone. My sides and abdomen ached with violent coughs, lungful after lungful of briny water dripping to the rocks. Beside me, my rescuee did the same, and Erekkus helped her to her feet.
Someone touched me, and I jerked away.
“Stop,” Atrius growled.
Pain, as my arm was lifted. I cursed as something was drawn tight around it, trying to yank my arm away.
“Stop fighting,” he snapped. “You’re wounded. I’m stopping the bleeding.”
Bleeding.
My breaths slowed. My heart steadied. I felt my arm—the gash in it, now bandaged up tight.
Atrius regarded me like I was the subject of an assessment. “You can move?”
There was no concern in the question. Just pragmatism.
“Yes.”
He extended a hand, and I still felt unsteady enough that I allowed myself to take it. His grip was rough and scarred. Hands that carried lifetimes.
I swayed a little on my feet when he let me go. I was sore, but my injuries were surface-level. More disorienting was the exhaustion of my magic. The threads seemed intangible and distant now, hard to grasp. Wonderful. That would make it fun to navigate these tunnels.
“We need to go,” Atrius said. His gaze bored into me like a scalpel into flesh, trying to reveal what lay beneath.
“I’m ready,” I said. I took my blade from him, let him hoist me up to the next level of the tunnels, and we were off again.
15
We’d gotten much closer to the surface by breaking through to the upper tunnels. Another wave of Aaves’s warriors was upon us before long—fewer of them, thankfully, than last time, but enough to slow down our exhausted and much whittled-down group. If Atrius was feeling the strain of the journey, he didn’t show it. The man was as ceaseless as the tides that had battered us, and just as immune, apparently, to the flaws of the body. Injuries, fatigue—none of it seemed to matter to him. He forged forward, taking kill after kill. It was hard to keep up with him, but I was determined. The paths were so narrow that we needed to spread out in a thin line—I worked hard to stay close to Atrius, the two of us finishing off each other’s injured prey, covering each other’s weak sides.
“Not much farther,” I rasped out, as I yanked my sword from another body.
Atrius nodded tersely, already moving on.
We were in the midst of another lull in opposition when, at long last, we found ourselves approaching a starry sky ahead. “The end of the tunnel,” Erekkus breathed, when we spotted it. “Thank the fucking Mother for that.”
And I had to agree, it was nice to feel that sudden rush of fresh air. The castle was not far ahead now, looming over us forebodingly. It wasn’t as big of a building as it appeared at a distance. Up close, one could tell that the way it blended into the jagged incline of the mountain bent reality in its favor. It was mismatched and gaudy, much like the gates we burst through to get into the city—like the entire thing was cobbled together in a stubborn rebellion of what a castle should look like. We were up very high now. The streets of Alka surrounded us—if they could be called such a thing, considering that they were little more than streaks of packed-down dirt and rotted hanging bridges, which led to houses built precariously into the stone. The people of Alka were used to violence. They knew to stay in their homes and draw their curtains tight.
Still, vampire attackers—that was a whole different game than their usual squabbling warlords. The whole city vibrated with terror.
Atrius paused to take all this in. Then turned to look out over the sea, and the other islands of Alka, where stone bridges extended like crooked spider legs to the mainland. The relief rolling from his presence was perhaps the most palpable emotion I’d ever sensed from him when he spotted his soldiers slowly making their way toward the inner city.
He’d lost many. Surely he knew that, too. But right now, it seemed like enough of a victory that he didn’t lose them all.
He turned to those in our little splinter of his group. He shouted a command in Obitraen, then turned ahead and set his gaze squarely on the castle: our final target.
He pointed his sword, and we marched.
Kinder rulers, perhaps, would not have wanted to fight in streets filled with civilians. Aaves and his ilk were not kind rulers. His people, as he’d proven over and over, were just pawns to be used to hold on to his power. His warriors yanked them from their homes as we approached, cluttering the already-difficult paths with terrified bodies who wanted nothing to do with any of this. They flung makeshift explosives, oil-soaked rags, from the windows of the lower levels of the castle, sending the rickety wooden homes up in smoke and burning the smallest of the bridges.