Quicksilver (The Fae & Alchemy Series Book 1)

The wind brought tears to my eyes. I fought to open them and then wished I hadn’t. Eighty feet of open-air stretched out in front of me. Below: a shimmering and vast pool of black silk.

No.

Not silk.

Water.

A lake.

I opened my mouth to shout—

—and hit the surface like a meteor striking ground.

Pain.

Everywhere.

I couldn’t—

PAIN.

Oh gods.

I couldn’t breathe.

My ribs screamed. Agony rippled up and down my spine. My head pounded.

Ice cold, the water filled my ears and stung my eyes. It was so black that I couldn’t tell which way was up.

My body reacted, my legs kicking and thrashing, panic immediate. Absolute.

My hands clasped, desperate to find something to grab hold of, but there was nothing. Just water. Everywhere, fucking water.

My lungs burned, desperate for oxygen. I had to breathe. I had to. I needed to get to the surface. I had to breathe. I had to—

My body was buffeted by movement in the water. I was shoved sideways. Suddenly there were hands on me. Someone had found me in the dark. I still couldn’t see, but I twisted, kicking, reaching, fingers numb from the cold. I latched onto something—fabric—and held on tight. My heart was thunder in my ears as I was dragged upwards through the water.

My head breached the surface, and I dragged down a terrified breath, shock relaying around my nervous system. I wasn’t safe. There was no ground beneath my feet. I was going to die.

“Shh, Saeris. It’s all right. It’s all right. Just breathe. Two seconds and we’ll be on the shore.”

Lorreth. Lorreth had me. Facing away from him, I shook violently in his arms, my teeth chattering as he kicked like a pack of hell cats were on his heels. It took longer than two seconds to reach solid ground, but not much longer.

I sobbed as I tried to sit up in the gentle waves that lapped at the lake’s shore; my body felt broken. Some of my ribs were shattered for sure. When I tried to expand my lungs, it was as though I was being lanced in the side with a dagger. “Where’s…Carrion?” I wheezed.

Mercifully, Lorreth didn’t seem to be injured at all. Soaked to the skin, his hair plastered to his back, the fighter stood at the water’s edge, his eyes scanning the dark. I couldn’t see anything at all, but that was probably because my head was splintering apart.

“There. I see him,” Lorreth panted. “Wait here. I’m going back for him.”

Hah! Where the fuck did he think I was going? I fell back against the shore, tiny, sharp rocks biting into my skin. The sky was choked with clouds so thick that they cast the world into darkness. I could make out very little at first. And then, as the pain in my chest lessened a little and my eyes adjusted to my new surroundings, I made out the looming cliff face that punched up toward the sky behind me.

The rock was black obsidian, slick as glass. And it was at least a hundred feet tall.

“Fuck,” I panted. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” A lot had happened in the last three minutes. I’d been standing in the library, and out of nowhere, my friend had crashed through a table. Then, I’d been launched up into a shadow gate, fallen eighty feet into an ice-cold body of water, and nearly drowned. None of it had been fun.

I was slowly sitting up when Lorreth re-emerged from the lake, dragging Carrion behind him. The thief wasn’t standing on his own two feet, which wasn’t a good sign. My worry intensified when Lorreth dumped him onto the rocks, and I realized his eyes were closed, and his lips were blue.

Pain forgotten, I shoved myself up onto my knees. “Why isn’t he waking up?”

“He’s swallowed a lot of water,” Lorreth said tightly. The warrior dropped down and knelt beside Carrion, too. I flinched when he struck Carrion in the center of his chest. The blow would have knocked the wind out of even the biggest fighter’s sails, but it didn’t stir a response from Carrion.

“Come on,” Lorreth muttered. He hit him again.

Still nothing.

I was too scared to blink. “Carrion Swift, if you don’t wake up right now, I’m going to tell all of your asshole friends back in the Third that you were a shitty lay.”

Lorreth dealt another blow to his solar plexus.

“I mean it!” I cried.

Carrion jolted like he’d been struck by lightning. He rolled toward Lorreth and vomited up a lungful of lake water, hacking and sputtering. Oh, thank the gods. I fell back, landing heavily on my ass, trading a relieved look with Lorreth. When he was done puking, Carrion flopped onto his back and fixed me with narrowed eyes. “You wouldn’t…fucking…dare.”

It was just the three of us.

Renfis hadn’t made it.

The general had boosted Lorreth up into the shadow gate and yelled at him to go.

“I felt it suck me in as it was closing,” he said, as we gathered ourselves. “If I’d jumped a second later, I think the damned thing would have cut me in half.”

He’d had a split second longer than me to process Layne’s warning about the water. When he’d started to fall, he’d quickly realized what was happening and tucked himself in tight to prepare for the impact. Carrion had had no warning at all. He said he thought he’d hit the water chest first, and I kind of thought I had, too. It would explain why neither of us could fucking breathe without hissing.

Lorreth fished around in his sodden pockets and took out a small leather bag, cinched shut with a draw string. While Carrion and I struggled to our feet, he dug around inside the bag and produced a bundle of leaves, which he shook dry as best he could and then offered us each two of them. “Chew them a bit and then put them under your tongues,” he advised. “Whatever you do, don’t fucking swallow them, though. You’ll be shitting yourselves within five minutes.”

“What is it?” Carrion asked.

“Widow’s Bane. It’ll deaden your pain for a couple of hours. Completely deaden it, mind you. We carry it on us at all times in case we need it in battle.”

“Why the cheery name?” I made a face when I bit down on the leaves. They were bitter as hell.

“Because they’re highly addictive and make you feel like you can take on an army of feeders. Plenty of warriors take them once to dull the pain of an injury. But then they keep on taking them. And then they die.”

“Ahh. Good to know.” I was very careful not to swallow once I’d chewed the leaves. Popping the mash I made of them under my tongue, I could already feel the plant’s numbing properties taking effect.

My mind started to clear a little. And then it started to sharpen.

Where the hell were we?

I looked around and did not like what I saw. We were on a beach of sorts, inside a small cove. To our backs, cliffs rose up like a line of jagged teeth. They buttressed the beach, enclosing it so that there was no way around them on either side. There were two ways off the beach. The first—reentering the lake and swimming around the cliffs—was obviously impossible since neither Carrion nor I could fucking swim. Which left us with only one other option: up. The three of us stared up at the wall of obsidian, and each of us blanched.

Falling out of a shadow gate and hitting water had been bad enough. But falling from a cliff face and being impaled on a bunch of sharp rocks? That sounded like a great way to punch a one-way ticket to the afterlife, and I wasn’t ready to go just yet.

Luckily, Carrion and I had one thing in common: we were both very good at climbing. We’d spent most of our lives scaling the walls of the Third. Walls which were, unbelievably, even taller than this cliff face and far more dangerous to boot. And the Widow’s Bane was kicking like a mule.

“Are we doing this, then?” Carrion asked, craning his neck to peer up at the very tops of the cliffs.

Fisher was up there.

I knew he was. I could feel him.

I blinked up at the cliffs, too, and was taken aback when I saw that it had started to snow. The air was full of fat snowflakes, drifting and swirling down from the sky in lazy circles. One of them landed on my cheek. It was only when I brushed it aside and my fingertips came away marked with a fine grey powder that I realized it wasn’t snow at all.

The sky over Gillethrye was raining ash.

As I placed my first handhold on the cliff face, an explosion of sound boomed out into the night. It was so loud, so many crazed voices bellowing and screaming all at once, that it made the pebbles beneath our feet rattle and quake.

“Annorath mor!”

“Annorath mor!”

“Annorath mor!”

“Climb,” I shouted. “Climb!”

We made it in minutes.

Somehow, by the grace of the gods, in one piece, too.

Our hands were full of deep cuts and slick with blood, but that didn’t matter. When we hauled ourselves up over the edge of the cliff, the scene that spread out before us was like something out of a nightmare.

A huge amphitheater, open toward the lake, rose up around us. Tiers and tiers of seating stretched up forever, the structure so overwhelmingly massive that my mind couldn’t grasp the sheer size of it. The building, if it could even be called that, was some kind of megastructure. Hundreds of thousands of people sat in the stands, roaring at the top of their lungs.

“Annorath mor! Annorath mor! Annorath mor!”

The terrible chant rocked me to my bones. These were the first words that the quicksilver had hissed at me back in the forge at the Winter Palace. The words that had affected Fisher in a way I hadn’t expected. He’d seemed afraid. And now I knew why. This wasn’t just an amphitheater. It was a slaughterhouse. And we were standing on the killing floor.

“What are they screaming?” Carrion breathed.

Lorreth answered in a horrified tone. “Release us.”

Release us! Release us! Release us!

I heard it now, as if the words had been translated in my mind. Hundreds of thousands of people, begging to be released. I couldn’t bear to look at them.

I focused on the deep pit that had been dug into the ground before us instead. At the sprawling labyrinth within it. On the other side of the labyrinth, I could make out a raised dais, but barely. There were people sitting atop it. And at the foot of the dais, at the top of a set of stone steps that lead down into the labyrinth, was Fisher. He was just a smudge of black, tiny in comparison to the colossal structure surrounding us, but I knew it was him. Oh, yes, it was him, all right.

“What in all five hells am I looking at?” Lorreth whispered.

The voice that came from behind us made my blood run cold. The last time I’d heard it, it had been screaming for mercy back in the Hall of Mirrors in Madra’s palace. Now it said, “Actually, this is only the first circle of hell, Lorreth of the Broken Spires. But I’d be very happy to introduce you to all five.”

The captain of Madra’s guard, Harron, stood inches from Lorreth’s back. His eyes were orbs of scuffed metal, pure quicksilver, gleaming inside the sockets of his gaunt skull. His lips were thin and peeling, his skin wrinkled and translucent. He broke into a wide grin, displaying shattered teeth, when I noticed the dagger he was pressing against Lorreth’s throat.

“I’d slit your throat right here and now just to get to the girl,” he wheezed into Lorreth’s ear, those freakish eyeballs swiveling around in his head. I could only tell he was looking at me by the way his face was angled toward me. His smile took on a sinister twist. “You’ve caused all kinds of trouble lately, Saeris. You were supposed to die for me like a good little pet. But never mind, never mind. Perhaps this will be better.”

Harron.

How could it be Harron? Here, in Yvelia? The sight of him just…made no sense.

Lorreth could have easily taken him. He was a full-blooded Fae warrior, and the captain was human. A very unwell human by the looks of things, but still. It would have been nothing for the warrior to spin around and disarm him. I was sure that’s exactly what he would have done, too…if it hadn’t been for the hundreds of feeders crawling up over the cliff face behind him.

They scuttled along the ground toward us on all fours, thick strings of venom-tainted saliva hanging from their mouths. These feeders looked fresh, which made them all the more terrifying. Their clothes were a little dirty, but they were mostly intact. The flush of life still clung to their skin. It would fade soon enough, but for now, they still looked like Fae. And they wanted to eat us. They crept forward in an encroaching tide, but a twitch from Harron’s hand kept them at bay. What power could Harron have over these monsters?

The captain held out his free hand; it trembled with effort as the air beside Carrion appeared to harden and then fracture like glass. The fractures turned to fissures, and then the air shattered and fell in on itself, creating a spinning vortex. A sound came out of it, like layers of agonized screaming.

“The walk would take far too long,” Harron said. “And we don’t want you to miss out on the beginning of the games now, do we?” He jerked his head toward the vortex. “In. Now. If you hurry, there might still be time for you to say goodbye to your friend.”

This was nothing like Fisher’s shadow gate. Harron’s vortex wasn’t right. It felt like a perversion of nature, and my gut told me firmly and in no uncertain terms that I should not step inside it. But what choice did I have? At least three hundred feeders were crowded on the cliff’s edge now. Their eyes were blank voids, showing no signs of the Fae they used to be. Only hunger. Only death. I would rather have jumped back into the middle of that lake than enter the shimmering distortion in the air…but I caught Lorreth’s eye, and my friend nodded.

“It’s fine, Saeris. Go. We’ll be right behind you.”

I hope to the gods this doesn’t go horribly wrong. I looked back over my shoulder at the dais and that small black smudge standing at the top of the stairs, and my stomach rolled with nerves. We’re here, Fisher. For what it’s worth, we’re coming.

I didn’t expect a reply, but as I entered Harron’s gate, I got one.

Saeris? Fisher’s voice was full of panic in my mind. Saeris, do not come here!

But it was already too late. Harron’s vortex was ripping me to pieces.