Uncle Jyntre and Father guided me down to the door of the ‘Combs. The entire way, I gripped my dagger, the hairs on my arms prickling to attention and the down on my wings tingling. The intruder must have been long gone by now, but the deeper into the mountain we ventured, the more nervous I grew.
At last, we reached the single word scrawled into the wall of rock. I stopped as far back as I dared, waiting for Father or Jyntre to say something—anything.
“I smell it,” Father said after a moment. He turned to me, his lips curled in an approving smile. “Well done.”
“A trail of magic,” muttered Jyntre. “Frendyl, lad—I owe you an apology. You were right about someone being here.” He frowned. “Ilbondre, what do you suppose this means?”
The smile vanished from Father’s lips, and he rubbed his bearded chin, his brow tightening as he frowned at the door. “Nothing was taken from my study. At least nothing we’ve noticed yet.”
Jyntre shook his head.
I narrowed my eyes at the door while considering what had happened. Someone had come in through the Catacombs and cast a spell, but it seemed the magic had done nothing but make a mess of Father’s study and the passages it had followed. Why would someone break into our home just to make a mess?
“It was a distraction,” I said.
Jyntre glanced at me, and Father nodded for me to continue.
I lifted my chin. “Whoever broke in wanted to break someone out of the ‘Combs before we could catch on. The spell—could it have been a distraction? A way to keep us from realizing what happened?”
Jyntre laughed, as though I were a fool. “Breaking out of the Catacombs is impossible.”
Father rested his palm against the cold stone and murmured a few words. While I couldn’t tell what spell he cast, the sudden thickness of the air, like a static charge, told me he pulled magic from the earth. I knew the very basics of magic—that we drew power from one of the three gods for different reasons—but anything else was beyond me.
The wall slid open, rock grinding loudly against stone as the entire end of the passage moved aside. Blackness spread beyond the door. Not the sort of darkness you get from wandering a hall at night, but more complete. The utter lack of light made my heart constrict. I glanced over at Father, but his expression remained unchanged. Of course, he’d seen this before, but I still thought that something would show.
This sort of darkness even the guttering braziers couldn’t touch. It was like all light ceased to be at the threshold to the ‘Combs. Where the light stopped, screams and moans began. They sounded muffled, and I supposed that was because of a barrier of magic placed around the borders of the Catacombs.
“Come,” Father said.
My Center thumped wildly along with my heart as I stepped over the border after them.
The barrier was cold and almost sucked my breath away. After a single step, I could breathe again, though I didn’t inhale salty sea air. Something else met my nostrils, something foul, like garbage and day-old fish baking in the hot sun. I gagged and coughed, shaking my head and swallowing down the urge to throw up, though the sour taste of bile entered my mouth before I could force it back.
My feet stumbled forward beneath me—at least, I hoped I was moving forward. I tried to follow the sound of my father’s steps, or my uncle’s, but a shriek sounded nearby, and I floundered away from the opening. A heavy, desperate moan bubbled up somewhere to my right. I froze, unwilling to walk any deeper into the dungeon.
Jyntre grabbed my wrist and tugged me after him. “Trust me, boy, and trust yourself to get through this place.”
Despite his words, once he released my wrist and the door to the ‘Combs ground shut, I found myself inching along, clutching my dagger to my chest. A dwindling cry for help echoed, followed by the crunch of bones breaking as someone landed at the bottom of a pit. I cringed and bit my tongue then shuffled my feet a little slower, just to ensure I didn’t accidentally follow that nasty fate.
Once the convict had landed, his screams didn’t stop. This time, though, instead of wailing for help, he shrieked in agony, high, long, and loud, followed by sobbing. Someone else, a woman, shouted for the injured amüli to be silent, while others banged and scratched on the walls of the shifting cavern.
Were we in another place, away from the world I’d always known? I lifted my hand but felt disconnected from it, as if my body weren’t moving, and I was just imagining that it was. I shuddered and dropped my hand back to my side, though I kept the dagger close as I followed Jyntre and Father.
The darkness bothered me even more than the screams and the begging of the trapped amüli did. Something about the nothingness that met my eyes and the constant howls that came to my ears disjointed my perception of the world around me. I began to wonder if this was what it would be like to lose my soul.
It seemed we walked for hours, until my calves ached and my feet throbbed. The soles of my shoes were hard boiled leather, not meant for long treks, and the creaky, angry material kept digging into my ankles. Not to mention my pants and vest, which were both sweaty and heavy. I wiped my arm across my forehead, surprised at how cold my skin felt.
This place must have had some sort of enchantment on it. No matter how far we traveled, I could never quite hear what the hundreds of voices were calling out—just general screams for help and other noises. At one point I reached out to either side of me to see if I could touch the walls. Nothing but freezing, damp air greeted my fingertips. Even when I spread my wings as wide as possible, they met with nothing, and I remembered that the floor might gape open before me at any moment and drop me into nothingness.
I considered asking for a break when light appeared ahead of us. I blinked and grimaced as we grew closer. We’d made it... well, somewhere. The darkness had been so complete that my eyes ached, and I rubbed them with the heel of my hands to help my vision adjust.
We stood at the mouth of an exit, which faced the ocean and was tucked into the cliffside. Waves crashed in the near darkness of night, and the two moons hung heavy in the sky like sleepy eyes. There were two pairs of footprints trailing away in the sand, but those could have been made by an animal not an amüli.
I frowned. “The ‘Combs don’t have an exit, do they?”
“None other than the door we came through,” my uncle said, nervously pulling on his beard.
“So this?” I asked, gesturing at the massive hole we had emerged from.
Father spared me a glance. “Someone has learned how to bypass the enchantment on the Catacombs. They know the secret.”
I shook my head and stared at the black hole. “That’s not good.”
“It’s worse than not good. It means someone knows,” Father said.
“Knows what?” I asked.
The silence between them told me enough. Someone, somewhere, had just broken out of the most notorious prison in the Amüli Kingdom. I frowned and turned my gaze out to sea, then lifted it to the sky. Stars dotted the heavens, and silvery clouds drifted lazily overhead.
“We need to seal this off,” said Jyntre.
Father gave a curt nod. “Frendyl, you are to return home and pack.”
“Who did they set free?” I asked.
“I cannot be sure just yet.” Father was right; the wind had carried away both blood-scents, meaning we had no way to track whoever had escaped. “Return home and prepare for your trip. Jyntre, I need you to bring your best casters to me.”
My uncle tugged on a gem in his knotted beard. “If the amüli who broke into the ‘Combs is as powerful a caster as I suspect, my men won’t find much.”
“I’d rather try than not.” Father then waved me away.
Jyntre cast me a last glance before I ran a few steps and launched into the sky, once again sent home to be safe, once again expected to always do as I was told, even when I didn’t agree. In xiangqi—Chinese chess—there were many pieces, but I always saw myself as the Advisor, a piece that could never leave the area of the board called the palace. Never able to leave Drüssyevoi of my own volition, never able to be my true self, I was always tied down to being the person Mother and Father wanted me to be—a quiet child who always did as told. Well, no longer. I’d break out of my own palace one way or the other.
To do that, I needed to know what was really going on, and Father seemed to be withholding something important—so important that he would only reveal it to Jyntre. As quietly as possible, I glided up and away before curling back around and landing on a ledge out of their sight, but just within earshot.
“How are you going to find the person who did this?” I heard my uncle say.
“Someone capable of breaking out of the Catacombs must be powerful enough to avoid normal means of detection,” Father said. “Which means the Blood of the Sun may be the only way to track the one responsible.”
Whoever had done the impossible could hide from normal magic, but if the stories were true, no amüli was strong enough to hide from something as powerful as the fabled gemstone containing the blood of the first amüli king. The gem’s properties were legendary. I’d grown up hearing tales of the stone’s wielder crushing whole armies in a single blow and wielding magic as though he were a god.
“Do you have any idea where it might be?” asked Jyntre.
“No, but Melroc believes he is close to uncovering its hiding place.”
I leaned against the cold stone of the cliff side and frowned. My uncle Melroc was their youngest brother, a relative I hadn’t seen in years. He was famous for traveling the world and gathering information on new lands and the people who lived there.
“Then we should send word to him,” Jyntre suggested.
