Chapter 3 — Clash at Eldwynd Temple

Dawn came up grey and gave Scarlett her first clear look at the place she had walked all night to reach, and her first thought was that it should have fallen down years ago.

Eldwynd Temple clung to the shoulder of the mountain like something that had been thrown there. Two spires still stood; the third lay in pieces down the scree in a line you could follow with a finger. Every surface was scabbed with lichen. The wind coming off the peaks had a mineral edge, snow and old iron, and under it, very thin, woodsmoke.

Somebody lived here.

She stood at the end of the gravel path with her hand on her dagger and made herself take stock. Her legs were shaking in a way she did not like. She had not eaten since the day before yesterday.

Her left palm was raw where the shale had taken the skin off, and it had bled into her sleeve and dried there, and she could smell her own blood, which meant so could anything else.

Behind her, Fangshade lay quiet. The drones had gone off her since the ravine. That would last until they found the crossing, which she gave until midday, and then not.

“No rest for the hunted,” she said, and went in.

The iron doors were half off their hinges and ground against the stone as she squeezed through, and the noise of it went away down the hall ahead of her and came back twice. Inside, the air changed completely — colder, and thick with damp rock and the ozone smell that hung around old workings.

The hall was enormous, and every foot of both walls carried paint.

Scarlett stopped in spite of herself. They ran the length of both walls, faded to bruise colours but legible: three kinds of people under two moons. Mages in long coats. Wolves, some on two legs, some on four.

Humans with tools. And in every panel their hands were doing the same thing — holding each other’s wrists, in a ring, around something the painter had rendered as light.

Her hand went to her pendant before she caught it doing that.

“Sure,” she said to the wall. “That went well for everyone.”

She was six paces past the last panel when something growled in the dark ahead.

Her dagger was up before she had finished turning. She dropped her weight, got the wall behind her shoulder, and made her breathing slow, because a fast breath tells a room everything.

“Come out,” she said. “I’ve had a long night and no patience left to ration.”

He came out.

He came out of the dark the way a door opens, and Scarlett’s first clean read of him was: bigger than me, faster than he looks, and not afraid.

Broad through the shoulders, dark hair that had been cut by somebody who did not care, several days of stubble, and a scar riding the left cheekbone that had healed badly and long ago. Two blades on his back, hilts worn pale.

His eyes were blue and they did not move off her.

He was also a wolf. She got that off the air a half-second before she got it off anything else, and it went through her like a hand laid on the back of her neck.

“You’re trespassing,” he said.

“Didn’t see a gate.”

“It does now.” He came two steps closer, unhurried. “And I don’t like guests.”

“That’s lucky. I’m not staying.” Scarlett kept the dagger where it was. Her heart had picked up and she was annoyed about it. “I came for the roof and I’ll go when I’ve had it.”

“You came for something.” His head tilted a fraction. “You’ve been running for three days.”

“Four.”

“Then you should be dead,” he said, “so somebody wants you breathing. Who?”

She had not intended to answer, and she heard herself do it anyway, which she filed to think about later.

“Mage-hunters. Six, maybe seven left. Drones.” She lifted her chin at the doors. “They’ll find the crossing by noon. When they get here they’ll take this place apart looking for me, and they won’t be careful about the walls.”

Something happened behind his face. Not surprise. Confirmation, and he did not like it.

“Name,” he said.

“Scarlett.”

She watched him not react to it, and the not-reacting was so complete that she knew, absolutely, that he had heard it before, somewhere, recently. Her grip tightened.

“Kaiden,” he said.

They stood there in the cold with three paces of stone between them.

She could smell him properly now — wolf, and cold stone, and the iron edge of somebody else’s blood, fresh, from tonight. Under all of it something she had no name for that made the back of her jaw ache, the way a room aches when you have walked into it and cannot remember why you came.

She wanted to step back. She did not.

“You’ve got blood on you,” she said.

“Not mine.”

“Whose?”

“A man who came in through my catacombs last night looking for somebody.” His voice did not change at all. “He didn’t find her.”

Scarlett opened her mouth, and outside, the drones began to sing.

Both of them turned to the doors. The note was rising off the eastern slope, two of them, then three, and behind it the flat crack of a discharge finding a tree.

“Noon,” Kaiden said.

“I said maybe.”

He was already moving. “Then help me or get out of the way. I don’t care which, but decide now.”

Pride told her to walk. She looked at the doors, and at the man, and at the arithmetic — one of her, seven of them, a mountain at her back — and she went after him.

He took her through the hall at a pace that ate the distance, into a side chamber where the walls carried rows of cut runes, and the air had the hot-metal taste of something under load. A bank of iron levers stood in the stone.

“Traps,” he said. “The first four still work. They’ll cost them ten minutes and their nerve.”

“And the fifth?”

“Kills whoever pulls it.” He threw the first lever. “Don’t pull the fifth.”

Stone ground on stone somewhere above them, and the first drone came in through the high window.

Scarlett did not think about it. She stepped into the room, let it come, and put her dagger through the seam under its sensor housing where the plating stopped. It came apart in her hand in a shower of white sparks and hit the flagstones as scrap.

A second followed and Kaiden took it out of the air.

She had not seen him draw. The blade went through the drone’s body on the diagonal and he was already turning for the next one, and Scarlett, who had spent nine years alone and had opinions about other people in a fight, found she did not have to watch him.

That was strange enough to be worth noticing later.

They cleared four. The fifth came in low and she went flat and it went over her and Kaiden’s blade came down through it into the floor, and in the sudden quiet they could both hear boots on the gravel path outside.

“Too many,” she said.

“Yes.” He was breathing hard. “There’s a ward deeper in. It’s the only one in this building that was built to hold against people. We can make it.”

“Then move.”

They ran. The temple went past in fragments — a collapsed stair, a corridor where the floor was gone and they took the ledge, a room full of nothing but rain. The boots behind them multiplied and organised.

The last corridor opened into a round chamber with a domed roof, and in the middle of it stood an altar.

Scarlett’s feet stopped without asking her.

Waist high. Twelve shallow bowls cut into the top, worn smooth. And on the front, under a century of grime, a wolf’s head in profile with the muzzle open.

“No,” she said.

Kaiden was already at it, both palms flat on the stone, saying something under his breath. Light came up out of the carvings and ran round the walls, and the air went tight, and a skin of it closed over the doorway they had come through.

“That’ll hold a while,” he said. “Not long.”

“That mark.” Her voice came out wrong. “On the front. What is it?”

“It’s on half the stones in this building.” He looked at her over his shoulder. “Why?”

She pulled the pendant out of her collar and held it up on its chain, and watched him understand.

He came off the altar slowly. He did not reach for it. He stood close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him and looked at the little tarnished wolf’s head turning on its chain, and his jaw set.

“Where did you get that?”

“My mother. It’s a pack mark. It’s a pack that doesn’t exist any more, three hundred miles south, that never came within a week of these mountains.” She let it drop against her chest. “So you tell me.”

Outside the skin of light, the boots reached the corridor and stopped, and somebody out there began giving instructions in a calm, carrying voice.

And in the middle of it the howl came.

It came up through the floor of the temple and filled the chamber, long and low and climbing at the end, and Scarlett’s whole body flinched.

So did his.

They stared at each other.

“You heard that,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re not supposed to hear that.” Her voice had gone thin and she could not do anything about it. “Nobody hears that. It isn’t there. I’ve had it nine years and it is not there —”

“Six months,” Kaiden said.

She stopped.

“Six months,” he said again, “and every month it’s been closer, and tonight it came from the east slope.” He was very still. “How long since you turned?”

The question went into her like a splinter.

“Nine years,” she said.

“Eleven.”

Behind the barrier, the calm voice finished giving instructions.

“It was never your pack,” Kaiden said quietly. “It was never mine either.”