Under city, p.4
Under City, page 4
I stopped breathing.
I’d broken the first rule, and this terrifying man was goading me to break the second. The coldness brushed against my lips, confirming my suspicions. Don’t, it said. My answer stayed in my mouth. There was no way I could answer anyway.
I looked to Dariush who interjected, “Annalise.”
“You will be paired with Annalise—the valkyrie.” Hints of scepticism edged the councilman’s words before he scribbled the name on a piece of paper and continued to read out the names on his list. “Jaz, child of Samhain, you will be paired with Geira the valkyrie. Naranbaatar the mora, you will be paired with Zorya the daywalker. Councilwoman Haeva, please officiate the unions.”
“Honoured fara.” Councilwoman Haeva took over, sweetly reciting words she seemed to know by heart. “It is by the order of this council, the Blessed Tuath Dé Empire, and its Hidden Cities that you have been bestowed with this partnership. Your pairing is till death as is your service to this council. May you be loyal in every aspect of your service. Accept this honour with these gifts.”
Dariush and the two boys moved to the silent councilwoman who opened the three wooden boxes in front of her, each revealed four silver bangles. I almost followed until a blonde-haired woman beside me grabbed my arm and shook her head.
Each came back with a set of four bangles and the group rearranged themselves around me. Dariush silently waited for me to stop gawking at everyone else before he fastened a bangle to each of my wrists. The two pieces of jewellery consisted of thick silver and locked with a short wand of white crystal.
I looked at my wrists dumbfounded.
Weren’t they just contemplating killing me? Why give me jewellery?
A purposeful cough brought my attention back to the man in front of me. He was holding two slightly larger bangles, one in the palm of each hand. It took a moment before I realised he wanted me to put the bangles on his wrists.
Why is my mind being so slow?
With far less grace than he had shown to me, I fastened one bangle onto his right wrist and turned to the left arm to repeat the process.
I stopped. The fur reminded me of the two black dots bellow my left eye. Two dots that had left me starved of friendship through most of my school years and clinging to toxic ones when they eventually came. I wondered what childhood must have been like for this man. Even surrounded by people, magical beings rather, with facial birthmarks of all shapes and colours, Dariush’s arm stood out. It made him seem other in a world full of weirdness.
Shaking away my sympathy, I took the remaining bangle and held firmly onto the man’s upper wrist. This time the bangle slid on with ease and locked in place with a delicate click.
Another cough, from someone behind me, brought me back into the room. Everyone else seemed to have returned their attention to the group of councillors in front of us.
“May the blessings of the Sacred Tree be ours,” Haeva finished. The words landed with a sense of ownership, like ours wasn’t meant to include those who stood before her.
“Prince Dariush, you and your squad will join the Samhain descent from Hag’s Mouth tomorrow at sundown. Dismissed.” Councilman Tierney waved his hand and turned his attention to a collection of papers Councilman Kāne had handed to him. Taking the head councillor’s lead, Councilwoman Neeta waved her hand and the large wooden doors in the front of the room swung open.
Everyone, excluding me who had only just let go of Dariush’s hand, let one knee touch the floor before rising and turning for the door.
“Oh, and Prince Dariush.” The squad froze as Councilman Tierney continued, his attention split between giving orders and flipping through paperwork. “You won’t be paired a third time.”
I looked from the long table at the end of the room where the beautiful, bossy people resumed their discussions, over to the open doorway, and down to the piece of cold metal around my wrists. The bangles were thick and heavy. Each curved perfectly to the shape of my wrist. While they weren’t uncomfortably tight, there was no fitting a finger underneath them. Now that I looked closer, the fastening latch seemed to have completely disappeared.
They looked like pretty handcuffs. My mind felt cold. Muffled. Like my thoughts on all this were behind some barrier. Like on some level I understood what was happening around me, and I’d know what to do if I could just break past that coldness.
A strong hand grasped my upper arm and pulled me out of the room.
Chapter six
Zorya
Geira was a glowing coal. Her eyes burned through Annalise as the heavy wooden doors slammed shut. Dariush almost dragged the pale woman as he headed for the elevator. Something about the way her dark brown eyes stared through me as Dariush pushed past had felt odd.
“Oh, don’t brush this off, Dariush! Our loyal servant!” Geira bowed mockingly. “What happened? We had a plan! Who is she?”
This made Dariush stop. Without so much as looking over his shoulder, Dariush spoke with equal fierceness. “Plans change, Geira. She’s none of your business.” He moved down the white hallway and disappeared around a corner.
A shrill of frustration escaped Geira as she kicked a leg of the wooden chair I had been sitting in before the ceremony. The leg cracked where it met the seat of the chair but didn’t break away.
Jaz and Nate watched dumbfounded as the valkyrie took a moment to calm herself.
I took the distraction as a chance to slip back into the council courtroom.
Getting into the best squad was what I’d worked hard for, but that dream included becoming a squad leader. If I didn’t act now, I might never get another opportunity to take it.
My left knee had barely skimmed the ground before Tierney spoke.
“Speak.”
I stood and faced the council, ready to tell them— Ready to tell them what? That they’d made a mistake? That would go down well. Tell them that I’d caught their precious prince in a supply closet with that strange fara woman, and then what? They’d give Dariush a chance to speak and he’d give them information I swore I’d never part with.
They’d end me.
“I request extra duties as a means to earn my entrance into the White Guard.” I was so surprised by what had escaped my mouth that I almost forgot to finish my request with “Councilman Tierney.”
Silence filled the room. All councillors, excluding Tierney, looked at me as if I’d just spoken an insult. They’d all heard the declaration of what I was. A daywalker. A dorka—a fara whose very essence was darkness.
It was called the White Guard for a reason. They only accepted solas fara into the White Guard. Valkyries, sylphs. Those born of light and definitely not a bloodsucking upir. Even though I was the only upir they had.
The terms had always felt arbitrary to me, just more lines the Tuath Dé drew for their own amusement. I didn’t feel like the big, scary beings of badness they made us out to be. The other dorka, mostly mora and shifters, didn’t feel bad to me either. From what I could tell, the only thing that separated us from solas was the fact that our orbs, the power that we could temporarily pull out of ourselves at will, were cold and dark where the solas’ were bright and warm.
I sucked in a breath. Tried to look through Tierney as he lifted his head, face unsmiling.
“You may leave,” he said before returning his attention to the papers in front of him. It took a moment for the others to return their attention to whatever agenda had been set before I made my stupid request.
I kneeled and left quickly.
***
Deep, scratchy growls emanated from the speakers. “Break what binds you.” Geira smacked her hands on the dashboard in time to an impossibly fast beat, talking the lyrics that were hidden beneath the vocalist’s screams.
Dariush had been the one to put the song on, but the most enthusiasm he’d shown for it were small taps of his fingers on the steering wheel as he kept his gaze focused on the road. A peace offering to a friend, maybe?
“Yeah! Who’s this?” Nate leaned over the front seat to check the mobile phone sitting in a compartment under the AC dials.
“The lead singer’s a woman,” Geira said. She doubled down on her hand drumming, only stopping for the drop.
“This is a chick?” Nate’s jaw dropped as a particularly impressive growl vibrated through the SUV. We were about an hour into a fourteen-hour trip from London to Hag’s Mouth, and this was the first time I’d seen Geira do something other than silently burn with rage in her seat.
I was glad the music was helping someone because it did nothing to ease the queasy feeling in my stomach. I’d fucked up. If they weren’t thinking of making me a squad leader before I opened my damn mouth, they definitely weren’t thinking about making me one now.
A White Guard? Ugh, where had that even come from?
I should have just told them about the closet thing and denied whatever Dariush spilled about me.
No. I was loyal to the Tuath Dé, even if they were mostly a bunch of shits, but what Dariush could use against me was too big a secret to let slip into their hands.
A melodic chorus broke the song’s heavy beats for a second time, and Annalise hummed along from the back of the car. A sharp pain erupted through the back of my head.
“Ah! What the fuck?”
The complaining didn’t come from me. Jaz and Nate rubbed the backs of their necks, the three of us all seemed to share the same pain.
“Did you feel that?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was like someone shoved a knife into my neck,” Jaz said.
I rolled my eyes because Jaz exaggerated everything, especially pain.
“Weird” was all Nate had to say about it. The front seats stayed noticeably quiet, though Geira shot Dariush a questioning look.
We stopped every four hours for breaks, including to catch a ferry. Dariush drove most of the way, only letting Geira take the wheel for the final stretch.
It was some time after midnight when we arrived at Hag’s Mouth, a campsite that sat just inside a cave carved into a rocky mountainside somewhere in the southwestern part of Ireland. We slept in sleeping bags on the ground next to the SUV and got up early to prepare for the hours-long procession into the earth.
The Tuath Dé we were charged with escorting beyond the veil and into the undercity deep below our feet took their sweet-arse time getting ready for the day. Almost every family had spent the night in tents large enough, and well equipped enough, to be considered a fully functioning home. Of course, my new squad, and all fara soldiers assigned to the descent, were called on to help with the dismantling of the structures.
Because who would go camping without their own personal army to save them from physical labour?
Our descent began shortly after midday. There wasn’t any point in starting earlier. Should a Tuath Dé, or any other fae, try to cross the veil before sundown on Samhain eve, when the veil thinned away to nothing for three months, they would turn to ash. It was one of those things that kept us fara so useful to the Tuath Dé. We could pass through the veil unharmed all year round.
As the path became increasingly steep and the walls crowded around us, a hole opened up in the side of the cave revealing an assortment of intricate pulley systems and a sheer drop.
A shipping container about three metres high, two wide and six long was being attached to a system of pulleys, a second and third waited to be attached behind it. I wanted to stop and watch the workers, mostly non-Tuath Dé fae, lower the containers into the hole, but the procession kept moving, and I was swept through a smaller tunnel and down a set of stone stairs. I could hear the echoes of their commands and grunts behind me as I walked farther into the earth.
The descent was disappointing. After we’d walked a good five hours, by which point I’d become deaf to a young Tuath Dé man’s incessant complaining, the air lifted around me and hummed. The energy signalled that we’d walked through the space where the veil would have stood strong and near solid less than an hour ago.
Shortly after, Dariush used hand signals to communicate to the squad that he’d sighted a sluagh—a beast that lived in the depths of the earth and the main reason we were called to guard Tuath Dé on their pilgrimage. It didn’t take me long to find its shrunken shadowy form that had morphed to fit the cracks in the stone walls. It watched as our charges walked the protected path and passed through the wards into Dubnos’s first town, completely unaware of the faceless form that assessed them. The thing only vanished when it seemed to become uninterested in our movements.
Fáilte wasn’t much of a town. The narrow tunnel we’d been travelling through opened up to a pocket in the earth. If you focused on the rows of warehouses and the open spaces used to house the large shipping containers while they were sorted, you could pretend the town wasn’t entombed in stone. Little shopfronts attached to the warehouses tried to distract from the swathes of stalactites that clumped together in areas and made the cave ceiling feel lower than it was.
We should have kept walking with the other fara soldiers, guiding Tuath Dé towards the end of the underground town where open tram carriages waited on tracks to ferry them through another tunnel to their next destination. Instead, Dariush led the squad towards a woman who stood in the centre of a large open stretch of road.
Her grey-streaked red hair fizzled outward, adding to the frantic scene before us. It seemed that everyone wanted to speak with her, ask for her opinion or direction. I watched as each of the busy underdwellers, a mix of fae and a few humans, took their turn to ask the woman their questions.
“Dariush!” the woman said loudly with a smile, cutting off a desperate human-looking underdweller who’d barely gotten their question out.
“Aunt Hestia,” Dariush responded with a bear hug.
My mind raced. I hadn’t even known the queen had a sister. Maybe this was his father’s sister? I shrugged the questions away. It wasn’t like I was going to ask.
Then the woman turned to Geira and greeted her with the same warm hug.
“I missed you.” Geira smiled to the red-haired woman.
“You must be the rest of the squad. He said he was being assigned a new one.” The woman’s voice became soft, like she realised too late that she’d said something insensitive.
Dariush brushed it off. “This is Hestia. She’s the keeper of Fáilte and the commander of resources.”
I didn’t know the Tuath Dé had a commander of resources.
“For my mother,” he added.
“I’m the one responsible for making sure Dubnos has enough clothes to wear and food to eat,” Hestia said in simpler terms. A woman of a similar height to Hestia, wearing blue overalls and a black headscarf, placed a hand on her shoulder. With a turn of her head, pointed ears peeked from Hestia’s frazzled mane of reddish locks. A physical feature that signalled her out as a Tuath Dé despite her important role within the Dubnos Kingdom. Strange choice for the queen to put a Tuath Dé in charge of resources. Dubnos may have been a colony of the TDE, but the kingdom and the empire had a strained relationship.
The woman who’d interrupted didn’t need to say anything. There were plenty of impatient stares from the people behind Hestia, all desperate for her guidance.
“I’m sorry, Dariush. I’m terribly busy. I’ve set you up in the house, make yourselves comfortable.” She began to turn away, only to turn on her heel again as if she’d remembered something ultra-important. “Oh, Geira, dear. There are new jumpsuits for you to try on. Just send back the ones you don’t like. I’ll pick out a few things for the rest of you and send them up. Let me know if I need to make any adjustments to the fit.” She stressed that last point.
“You really didn’t give me enough time to organise all this.” She shot Dariush a playful tsk before returning to the growing chaos behind her.
Within moments the woman was arguing with a man half her size about plates.
Dariush and Geira led the way to the back wall of the town’s pocket in the earth. Lights danced between the stalactites above us like little stars, throwing a soft cool glow across the town similar to that of late dusk.
As we neared the wall of the cave, scattered windows became visible, and lines of ornate doors welcomed us at its base.
Dariush opened a dark green door and ushered us in, looking back at a handful of Tuath Dé loading themselves into an open tram carriage just shy of one hundred metres away.
Are we not allowed to be here?
The constant need to stuff down my doubts about this man and his methods was wearing on me. In the span of two days, he’d proven to be a leader who hated doing anything by the book. While I had no restraints about bending the rules on occasion, when warranted, Dariush seemed to ignore them outright.
Hestia’s home was far more vibrant than the stony setting of the town. Decorating the rounded stone walls were woven squares depicting colourful scenes of battle and ancient myths. All the furniture was made of dark wood, softened by emerald velvet cushions and white knitted throws.
On the third floor, above what I could only assume to be Hestia’s private space, Dariush split off with Jaz and Nate. I followed Geira into a room on the southern half of the floor. It was small for one that held three beds, but it had its own bathroom and a large wardrobe. At one end of the room was a stained-glass window and streaming onto the floor was a patchwork of colour.
I walked over to the window, curious to see outside as I knew the lights from the city of Fáilte were behind me. My breath hitched as I peered out, or rather, in. I was looking into the next city. And by the look of a large castle that sparkled under its own sky of starlight, I was looking at Dubnos City.
“Is that?” I started, making an effort to ignore Annalise’s sulking as she entered the room and dropped her duffel bag on the middle bed.
“Dubnos City? Yeah, the trams will take the Tuath Dé on a bit of a wild goose chase to make them think the city is farther away than it actually is,” Geira said in amusement.
