Somewhere beneath Triah
ASTRID AWOKE IN DARKNESS. It was true darkness, unilluminated by the green glow of her eyes, which meant it was daytime outside. How long had it been since Cabral had taken her?
The damp air clung to her skin and clothes, and it smelled wet; mildew and mold, and ancient rainwater and seawater both. The ground beneath her was dirt and rock, grimy and uneven, jagged edges of stone that jabbed her as she felt her way around. The only sound she could hear besides her own scuffling was a slow, irregular, DRIP drip-DRIP of water.
None of this helped her. But then, that would be Cabral’s intention, to imprison her somewhere completely disorienting. The bastard was lucky she’d woken up during the day; if she’d awoken at night, she’d have more strength to escape.
She’d been Cabral’s captive before. She had escaped him before.
Because of Trave, both times, said a small voice inside her.
The chamber was narrow, and the only egress a large wood-and-iron door in the middle of one bowing wall. The length of the chamber, however, baffled her. She’d walked away from the door, trailing her hand on the wall at her side for half an hour before she turned and made her way back to the door. The whole length she’d walked—the tunnel, as it seemed— remained roughly six rods wide, but continued, at a slight downhill slope, for some time. The syncopated DRIP drip-DRIP of water came from further down the tunnel, away from the door, but how far she could not guess. No light reached her no matter where she walked in the tunnel; it was always darker than midnight.
Astrid yearned for night to fall so she could finally see something, even if it was just bare, grimy dirt and stone. When that happened, she’d explore the tunnel as far as she could. She could not imagine the place held any sort of real exit—Cabral would never make escape easy for her—but she could not help but hope.
So she waited at the wooden door. She waited for her retractable claws to sprout, half again the length of her child-fingers. She waited for her teeth to elongate and sharpen into fangs, for her bones, muscle, and skin to strengthen and harden.
She would try to burst through the door with brute force once night fell. The wood was damp, almost rotten, and while it was reinforced with iron Astrid could smell the rust when she put her nose close, could feel the corrosion. She could bend iron, perhaps even break it if it was already weakened.
But why would Cabral allow it?
Astrid did not have to wait long to find out why.
A small green glow soon began to illuminate her surroundings. As the sun set, her eyes grew brighter, until they were two tiny burning green suns.
The tunnel extended as far as her eyes could discern. The roof of the tunnel was much higher than she’d expected. But the more Astrid looked around, the more she wasn’t sure she could call the place either a cave or a tunnel. The floor was dirt and rock, certainly, but the walls were cut stone blocks and mortar, manmade. Above her, a complex network of wooden rafters supported the stone ceiling.
Astrid shivered. The structure seemed stable enough, but certainly not impervious to collapse. Perhaps that was Cabral’s intention: to bury her alive in an impenetrable tomb of crumbled stone, wood, and grime. He would leave her to rot and desiccate for the rest of eternity.
All the more reason to get out while she still could.
The door had no handle or opening mechanism that she could see, but the hinges faced her. That was odd. If she were in a cell of some kind, the hinges ought to be on the other side, out of her reach. Hinges were invariably the weakest part of any door; remove the hinge mechanism, and breaking the lock was just a matter of applying enough force.
It was easy enough to dig into the rusting hinges with her claws, and pry them apart. Soon, three iron bolts had fallen to the floor.
Astrid moved to face the door head-on, the wood and metal lit in an eerie green light by her own eyes. She tried not to let the stab of hope she felt at removing the hinges affect her.
This will not turn out the way you think, she told herself. Cabral will have planned plot after plot around every eventuality of your escape.
But was that really true? Was Cabral as brilliant as he professed? She had always thought he was, and yet she’d escaped his clutches twice now.
Astrid knocked sharply three times. Thunp, thunp, thunp.
It wasn’t hollow, but it wasn’t a continuous single block of wood, either. Instead, planks roughly the width of Astrid’s stretched hand were stacked side by side, and three metal bands, corresponding with the hinge placements, wrapped horizontally around them.
But the dull thunp sound the door had made when she rapped on it was the best news. It was damp, certainly, perhaps all the way through. She guessed at least one lock would be placed around the middle of the door, near the central iron band.
Astrid planted her feet firmly. Then she kicked the middle band close to where it met the stone wall with all of the strength she could muster. The door quivered. Astrid kicked again, and again and again, and while the door did not burst outward as she hoped, it did continue to shudder clammily in its frame.
Astrid looked more closely at the door. While it had hardly budged, she did notice something else promising. The metal band she had struck repeatedly with her foot had pressed into the wood behind it so far that the wood swelled outward above and below the iron.
Progress was progress. Astrid planted her feet at an angle to the door, clenched her fist, and drove her hand into the wood above the metal band where it bulged outward. With her enhanced strength and hardened skin, muscles, and bone, it was like hitting it with a hammer the size of a child’s fist, and hers plunged satisfyingly into the wood, damp splinters jutting out around her hand.
For the first time since waking up in her strange cell, Astrid allowed herself a smile.
She had not punctured all the way through the wood, but her fist had sunk half its length into the swell. Astrid pulled back again, and hammered her fist into the door. Again. Again.
THUNF. THUNF. THUNF.
Then, with a THFOOK, she burst through. Warm air greeted her fist as it penetrated the door, much warmer than the air on her side of the portal. She had not realized it was so cold in her prison.
She searched for a locking mechanism, and found one—a sturdy slide bolt, easy enough to manipulate once she slipped her arm through up to her bicep. With a slide and a clank, the bolt slipped free.
She kicked the door again. It quivered significantly more this time, but still did not move from its frame.
Astrid went to work on the bottom lock, punching her way through the wood near the bottom band. She moved quickly, the sweet smell of hope sharp in her nostrils, and soon had the bottom lock unbolted as well.
She took a step back. The top metal band was higher than she could reach, and it would be significantly more difficult to break through up there. She could climb, bracing herself on the hole in the middle she had already made, but she would not be able to leverage enough force in that position. Best not to bother. She hoped there was only one lock remaining, and that the damage she’d done to the door had weakened it enough for her to break her way through.
If it hadn’t, now that she knew the integrity of the door (or lack thereof), she could always punch her way through as a last resort. Her hand ached, despite her enhancements, but the pain would be worth her freedom.
Fortunately, she did not have to resort to that. With three firm kicks, punching her foot downward at the bottom band of the door, it swung open enough for her to push her way through and into the chamber beyond.
But, as Astrid looked around at her new surroundings, the hope she’d felt turned to a horrible, sickening pain.
She was in a circular stone chamber, with no ceiling above her. Instead, the walls of the chamber jutted upward, up and up, and in the distance she could see a hint of the night sky above, the indifferent stars twinkling. For a moment, as she gazed up at them, Astrid had the most unreasonable reaction to the lights above her.
She feared them. She feared them like she’d never feared anything else before, anything in her life. She could not explain it, other than a great dread that overtook her, that pierced her hardened skin and toughened muscle and bone, penetrating her and surrounding her all at once. She wanted to cower against the ground, to run back into the dark tunnel from whence she’d sprung.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t because of who lay here in the chamber, dead on the dirt floor.
How had Cabral done this? How had he taken all of them, or even known who to take?
Two bodies lay in the center of the chamber.
Knot and Cinzia.
Dead, because of her.
Cinzia had been beaten to death with the sort of viciousness that only a vampire could manage; two bloody, gaping holes stared from where her beautiful eyes had once been. Astrid would not have recognized her, except for her autumn-colored hair and the Trinacrya she wore around her neck. Two corners of the golden triangle were clean and pure, one reflecting the starlight above, but the third corner was dark, and as Astrid looked more closely, she saw it was crusted in blood.
Astrid reached out and caressed her friend’s skin. Something inside her swelled, building and building, threatening to burst.
She turned to Knot.
The feeling of dread compounded, increased without limit. As she approached, she understood why.
Knot had a ragged wound on his neck. A wooden stake impaled each limb. There was a lot less blood than there should have been. Almost none, in fact; just a dribble, crusted around Knot’s lips.
Astrid clutched her chest, where she felt the greatest pain she had ever felt in the long life she could remember boring into her, hollowing her out, carving away until she was nothing but a husk of vampiric intent.
Knot’s eyes snapped open, emitting a bright red light of their own. The color burst into Astrid’s world, conflicting sharply with the green light her own eyes emitted. Knot’s mouth opened.
You did this to me, she imagined him saying. This is your fault, you little bitch—I wish I had never met you—
But he made no sound.
The stars looked down indifferently on the dead and undead alike, and Astrid feared them.
With a sob mixed with a scream of despair, anger, and horror, Astrid turned and burst back through the door she’d broken through, leaving the terrible starlit chamber, and sprinted down the tunnel, down, down, deep into the Sfaera, away from her friends and away from the dead as quickly as her feet would take her.
* * *
She ran until her muscles ached and cried out. The tunnel went on and on, and she began to wonder if she was running through the exact same stretch of stone, dirt, and wood over and over again.
She ran until, finally, the tortuous loop of the tunnel widened into a larger torchlit chamber, the ceiling twice as high. Astrid stumbled to a stop, her breath ragged and halting.
Two vampires stood in the center of the hall. One was a woman, young, dark-skinned, muscular and beautiful, long braided hair tied in a large knot at the top of her head. Colorful flowing robes elongated her already tall, majestic frame. Astrid stared in shock. The woman’s eyes glowed yellow. Every other vampire on the Sfaera she had encountered had red eyes, as did the other vampire standing with this woman.
The other vampire was Olin Cabral.
“It took you longer than I had hoped, but here you are,” Cabral said, smiling. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
If Cabral was here, this was real. What Astrid had witnessed in the starlit cave—
“Was not real,” the female vampire said.
“You could have kept up the ruse a bit longer,” Cabral muttered. The creases around his red glowing eyes, still locked on Astrid, bespoke nothing but amusement.
“Your friends are not dead,” the woman said, ignoring Cabral. No one treated Cabral this way—as if he were inconsequential. Even more surprising was the fact that he didn’t seem to care. The Cabral Astrid knew would have made an example of—and then killed—anyone who treated him like that.
“Who are you?” Astrid asked, staring at the woman unabashedly.
“You may call me Elegance. The vision you experienced was of my own making.”
A vision. Was Elegance a psimancer of some kind? Astrid had never heard of psimantic abilities surviving the transition from human to vampire.
“I owed Cabral a favor. That debt is now paid.”
Cabral’s smile faded. He knelt before the woman. “I thank you for it, Elegance,” he said.
Astrid blinked, her weariness and the horrors she had just seen almost—almost, as Knot’s wide eyes bored into her, burning red, his mouth moving—forgotten. Cabral, the most powerful vampire she had ever met, had just knelt to another. And her friends…
“My friends are not dead?” Astrid asked.
“It was not real,” Cabral said, rising. “But I want you to understand something, my dear.” His eyes flashed, a surge of red light brightening the room. “It was not real, but it could be. I could do that to you. I will do that to you.”
Astrid stared dumbly at him. Relief siphoned through the stark grief that had consumed her on her hectic, wild run through the tunnel. Relief, and with it, the slightest hint of confidence.
Astrid did not hesitate in showing it off.
“You have me, Cabral,” Astrid said. “But you cannot hurt my friends. They are more powerful than you know.”
“The ex-Nazaniin?” Cabral asked with a smirk. “His psimantic power is spent, and he is nothing without it.”
What Cabral said was true, but Knot’s power wasn’t what Astrid had had in mind. Cabral might be able to best Knot, but not Cinzia and Jane when the power of Canta settled upon them.
“Do not underestimate my power and patience, little girl. I will take away everything you love. The vision you saw was just a hint of what is to come.”
Laughter bubbled up from deep inside of Astrid, and she took pleasure in Cabral’s puzzled look. It had just dawned on her that she should have known better: Knot and Cinzia dwarfed Cabral; their destinies went beyond the squabbles of vampire lords. And Cinzia and Jane’s ability to avoid assassination was truly uncanny.
“You cannot touch my friends,” Astrid said. She did not say it as a challenge, or even as a warning, but a simple statement of fact. “You have me, but you can do nothing to them.”
Cabral’s red eyes bored into her. “You misunderstand me, my dear,” he said. “I’ve looked into hurting these human friends of yours, and believe it or not, I’ve come to the same conclusion as you have. They are untouchable.”
Cabral took a step toward her, and an involuntary tremor worked its way down Astrid’s spine.
“But you said it yourself. I have you, my dear. And to take your ridiculous friends away, you are all I need.”
Astrid did not respond. Cabral knew exactly how to find the source of her hope and pierce a hole straight through it.
“I can see you do not understand. You’ve always been a step behind, haven’t you, so allow me to explain it to you.
“Now that I have you, things will be different. You will not be a part of the new Fangs I form, not for many years at least. You will not be a servant, either. No, Astrid, I will take no more chances with you. You will be my prisoner. You will remain confined for quite some time—I don’t know, a half-dozen decades at least, perhaps a hundred years or more depending on your attitude—but certainly long enough for your friends, for everyone you know and love today, to die.”
Cabral glanced at Elegance.
“That is, unless I’m granted another option first.”
Astrid felt the hope drain away completely. Cabral could keep her here forever if he wanted to. Even if he died, she would remain here. He could take away everything she loved, and he didn’t even have to harm them to do it. While Knot, Cinzia, and the others could protect themselves from physical harm, there was one thing all mortals were vulnerable to.
Time.
Astrid’s legs collapsed beneath her, and she crumpled to the ground.