She Who Rides the Storm (The Gods-Touched Duology)
She Who Rides the Storm: Chapter 23

Despite his father’s instructions to go with the Roosters to the dig, Mateo didn’t relish the idea of trying to ride Bella between their auroshes, not with the sound of the dead Rooster’s scream so firmly lodged in his head. He made excuses for the missing Rooster, made buffoonish attempts to show them he wasn’t quite ready to leave, and sent them ahead of him once Tual’s requested half hour had passed. They went, eyes rolling, but they didn’t come back, so Mateo supposed his father had been successful in removing the dead man and his agitated auroshe.

And cleaning the one that had killed the man. Mateo’s stomach squirmed.

When he got to Bella in the stable, she nosed her way into his shoulder as if she meant to cry until she felt better, a sentiment he could echo.

All evidence of blood in the back stall was gone, the ground lined with new straw, though Mateo wasn’t sure how that was possible, even for his father. He would have had to get rid of the body, get rid of the straw, get rid of the auroshe.… He must have had Lia and the hostlers do some of it—Harlan had been with the family so long, he would do anything for Tual, even throw a body over the cliffs. But where could Tual have sent the mourning auroshe? Over the cliff with its master? To the underground fights? Mateo had heard of wild auroshes on the eastern plains, but the idea of those creatures running in packs across open farmland left him feeling sick.

Mateo held on to Bella, breathing in her honest horse smell, and she breathed back as if her nose in his shirt blocked out the scent of auroshe. Lia had killed that man right in front of him. With his drawing tools. That he’d given to her. That razor was for sharpening pencils, not… He closed his eyes, blocking out the images, but they only burned brighter in the dark. Death wasn’t new to him—he’d seen Devoted wasting away in their little rooms in the seclusions, some not waking up in the morning when he went to check on them for Tual. But those sad, starved deaths were different from the vibrant color of life that had been fighting for existence one moment and then gone the next.

Yet another idea he was a little too familiar with.

The Rooster would have either killed Lia or taken her back to the Warlord, Mateo told himself. She hadn’t meant to kill him—the railing had broken. But if killing him hadn’t been her strategy, then what had it been? Was her life at the seclusion really so bad that killing was justified in order to escape?

Bella pressed up against him, and Mateo sighed out all the tightness in his back and neck, the warmth of his horse like a comforting blanket. He clutched Bella tighter. If it had meant the difference between his own life and death, between replaceing caprenum and not, maybe he would have done the same as Lia had. But who knew why she had done it? Maybe she was just… violent. Like the rest of the Devoted, locked away in their seclusions until the Warlord whistled for them to dispose of the people she thought should not exist.

People like him.

It wasn’t hard to imagine Lia turning those pencils on him if she found out what he was.

There were flowers carved into the back of Bella’s stall, and Mateo stared at them until a kind of calm washed across him. Valtri blossoms, he thought. The horse tamer’s blessing. The knowledge made him feel grounded. He was still alive, and they were on caprenum’s trail. All this other stuff could disappear.

Mateo waited until Bella was done shaking before saddling her and following the Devoted to the tomb. When he got to the compound gates, however, the air seemed just as tense as it had back at the house. The guard at the gates waved him through, and the hostler who took Bella didn’t quite meet his eyes, though he did tie her well away from the two auroshes scratching at their leads at the other end of the hitching post. The Roosters themselves had disappeared—probably gone to talk to Director Van or any other archeologist aboveground. Based on Mateo’s interactions with Ewan and his little tagalongs, they didn’t like the idea of digging up a shapeshifter any more than the workers did. Mateo did hope they were occupied with the director, because the man gave Mateo the creeps.

“Ah. There you are.” The voice made Mateo jump. Luck really wasn’t on his side today. Van stepped out of one of the artifact sheds and slid the door closed behind him before Mateo could get a glimpse inside. “I was wondering when you’d come.” He smiled, a hint of a house mark peeking out from his canine. “Shall we? I need your help with something.”

“You need my help?” Van had done nothing but glower every moment Mateo had been at the dig. “With what, exactly? Father mentioned you found poison in the new room I uncovered.” Mateo didn’t miss the way Director Van’s smile widened at his ownership claim on the room, and little flickers of anger started in his belly. Was Van laughing at him? “Did my father tell you my hunch about where the next door is?”

“Yes, and we found it.” Van nodded to workers as they passed with wheelbarrows, some with shovels propped up on their shoulders or buckets in each hand. He stopped one worker with a pan containing a human skull, each tooth dipped in gold. “Where are you going with that? It should be in shed six.” He pointed back the way they’d come. He turned back to Mateo and led him along the path between sheds and past the shaded baskets of fill, workers sorting through them with wire screens. “So, your door: there are stairs beyond the wall. The two workers who got it open set off a mechanism in the floor that dumped them down to the next level, and we haven’t heard from them since.”

Van pushed through the crowd of workers around the tunnel opening. Two men were lying on the ground, another kneeling next to them. Mateo almost stopped when he saw blood stippling the fronts of their tunics. “Are they…,” he started.

“Oh, fine, fine. They’re just reacting to the poison in the statue room—can’t have them down there more than an hour, even with the carpets, before that starts happening. They slow down, and then the bleeding starts. It’s not serious—the effects go away. Your father can give them what they need to get them back up to speed.”

“I thought precautions had been taken—” Mateo startled back as one of the workers went into a fit of coughing that bent him over. “Father’s not even planning to come here today. Have you sent him a messenger yet?”

“Precautions have been taken. They’re fine, Mateo.” Director Van grabbed hold of Mateo’s arm. “Come on, now. We’ve got more-important things to talk about.”

Mateo struggled to keep up, his drawing satchel flapping against his side as they snaked through the crowd of workers bringing buckets up from the tomb opening. Van kept talking as they walked. “We’ve managed to cut the wires and pulleys so the mechanism by the door can’t engage again. But I’m worried every single stair is some kind of pressure plate. There are holes in the walls, and we aren’t sure what is going to come out of them. We must be close to the burial chamber, so whatever it is, if it hasn’t rotted away, can’t be good. And…” Van stopped by the tomb’s mouth, the ladder jutting out of it like a needle in mid suture. He flicked a glance over his shoulder at Mateo. “Listen, it’s important for you to keep your mouth shut about what happens in here. The entire dig. That it even exists.”

“Keep my mouth shut?” Mateo extracted his arm, stumbling back a step, suddenly not sure he wanted to go down into the tomb. Director Van had done nothing but try to get him away from the tomb until now, but suddenly he wanted Mateo down there? With workers coughing up blood left and right? He could feel the pull of the tomb, of caprenum, but Van was pulling awfully hard too.

“We’ve had some problems with people talking about the tomb, and you’re one of the few people allowed outside of this compound. Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about?” Van pointed to the ladder. “Go down.”

The tomb’s mouth seemed to breathe, ruffling Mateo’s curls, the awful smell of wrong bristling in his nose. Director Van watched him, his eyes a hair too eager.

“What did you need my help with?” Mateo asked very slowly.

“Your father is so set on getting to the burial chamber as soon as possible—a goal I share, even if we have to sacrifice a few things here and there.” Van didn’t look back at the workers huddled at the edge of the pavilion, but Mateo could still feel his skin begin to prickle. Van couldn’t be saying Mateo was disposable, could he? The director knew who his father was, that he would be angry if he disappeared. “I’m surprised to replace you less interested. Were you planning to just watch from afar today? Maybe from the wall with your Rooster friends where it’s light?”

Mateo stiffened. “No.”

“So what’s the problem? Go.”

Clutching his satchel to his side, Mateo put his foot on the ladder, running through the logic of the scenario in his head, hoping it would calm the irrational spikes of fear skewering him through. Director Van works for the Commonwealth. He’s not going to just murder people at random. If he wanted to kill you, it would be much easier down here, but what reason could he have for doing it?

The ladder twitched as Van climbed after Mateo, pebbles and dirt raining down on Mateo’s face when he looked up. Once they both got to the bottom, Van led the way to the spot where Mateo had fallen, several of the stone blocks now removed, a ladder leading down into the hole and a pulley system perched on its lip. Workers were taking turns hauling buckets of dirt and rock toward the entrance.

“Now.” Director Van gestured to three workers sitting at the edge of the hole, and they brought a rope and a harness. “It seems like you’ve got a knack for this work, Mateo. An extra sense for it, if you know what I mean. Here, put this on.” He held the harness out to Mateo.

The hairs on the back of Mateo’s neck stood on end. Extra sense?

The director was still talking. “I’ve come to the realization that your extra sense here is going to get me to where I need to go. The way you found this trapdoor. The hidden entrance in the statue room. All your doing—it’s almost like magic.”

Mateo couldn’t see Van’s face in the dark, only a hulking shadow. Tual had been accused of Basism enough times—he always laughed it off because the Warlord’s might was enough to protect him from any purging rituals that might have left him without ears and a nose, or even with his guts spilled onto the ground, depending on where the accusers thought he kept his magic—but no one had ever looked twice at Mateo. Mateo could sense rocks and minerals, and if he’d taken oaths, he would have been able to move them. Combine them. Change them, much the way his father did with herbs. But without oaths, all he had was dodgy aurasight and enough sense of rocks and minerals to know how much he was missing. Neither tended to alert the witch hunters.

Van continued. “Like I said, we’ve run into some problems with people talking.”

“Talking? Who would care? Why are you telling me?” Mateo stepped back from the hole. “And I don’t need a harness. There’s a ladder.”

“Can’t see what I want to show you without hanging.”

Hanging. Van leaned forward into the mirrorlight, daring him to argue. His eyes looked oddly black. Mateo’s humors hummed as one of the workers came forward, hands outstretched to help him put on the harness. “You shouldn’t go down there,” he whispered in Eastern Forge.

Mateo knew the workers had been shipped in from far away but hadn’t known they were from the east coast. He’d spent a whole summer searching for caves on that coast, so the dialect was familiar. “Why shouldn’t I go down?”

The worker startled back as if he hadn’t anticipated Mateo understanding his warning. But then he leaned closer to feed the harness straps around Mateo’s legs and waist, his voice low as he said, “The ghosts are angry.”

Ghosts? Mateo blinked, and suddenly everything looked normal again, the shadows only a normal sort of black, the hole nothing more than an entrance to a place he really wanted to go. The key to his future. He wasn’t afraid of superstitious nonsense. The only things down there were one man’s self-centered tribute to himself and a lot of old bones. If he could replace the burial chamber and Patenga’s caprenum sword, Mateo could leave behind his sickness, these new episodes, Lia the murderer, all of it. He moved to the hole’s edge, his toes peeking out over the black drop beneath. Mateo looked Van in the eye. As best he could. It was dark. “What did you want to show me?”

Van gestured for him to go in. Gritting his teeth, Mateo leaned back against the rope and walked over the edge, letting the workers lower him down. Catching light with his hand mirror, Van directed it onto the wall below. It was so dark—why was it so dark, hadn’t workers been down here only moments ago?—that Mateo could see only the tiny spot of mirrorlight reflected, glossing over carvings of vines, flowers, mountains, and constellations up near the ceiling, all coated in bright colors of peeling paint. Without thinking, Mateo reached out with his mind, feeling the echoes of precious gems set into the stone. Until the light stopped on an ugly section of broken rock just next to Patenga’s largest relief.

Mateo’s stomach sank. “I thought this tomb was untouched.”

“It was, until last night.”

Van’s mirrorlight flipped back to shine directly in Mateo’s face. Mateo’s hands shot up to block it.

“Someone came in here last night right after all the commotion up in Chaol.” The director’s voice was cold.

“Commotion?”

“Ghosts. Attacking the guests. Setting fires. Telling the whole Water Cay that we’re digging up their master.”

Mateo tried to look past the light, his vision nothing but bright spots. “So you’re worried the high khonins of Chaol are going to show up here to cut off our heads and skewer them on poles outside to satisfy some stupid archeologist’s idea of a prank?”

“No one has left the compound except you, your father, and the Warlord’s representatives.”

“Aren’t there people delivering food, supplies… what about the governor?”

“They’ve brought word of a plague in the lower cays, Mateo Montanne. Ghosts in the governor’s house. All my workers are scared half to death, and there are artifacts missing from my sheds and bloody chunks of the wall gone.” Van’s voice rose to a roar. “Who did you tell about the jewels? About the shapeshifter, about the dig? No one is supposed to know we are here. Even the Warlord is pretending we don’t exist!”

“What’s a plague got to do with…” Mateo’s hands were shaking, the rope swinging back and forth as if the workers holding him were slipping. He couldn’t see the ground, only awful blackness that seemed to go on forever beneath him. “I didn’t tell anyone!”

“A plague, ghosts, and a dead shapeshifter king. You don’t see any connections? My workers do. People in the city already do. What happened to the subjects that the shapeshifters drained to keep themselves alive, don’t you remember?”

They died. Just as from a plague. “So… you’re worried people will come break down your walls and fill the dig with seawater?” Mateo craned his neck, his heart racing even as he tried to hang on to his jaunty tone. “I didn’t do it, and I don’t see how hanging me down here is going to help anything now.”

“True. And not everyone’s scared. The thieves who chiseled out artifacts down here were dressed like ghosts. It’s not just violence I’m worried about. It’s the art. Untouched, and in the one and only undisturbed shapeshifter tomb we’ve ever found. Why do you think the Warlord sent Roosters and Devoted to protect it—Roosters who got called away the second the governor cried for help at his ball?”

“So you’re worried about thieves now?” Mateo gestured helplessly. “Which is it? This is ridiculous. Let me back up!”

“You are the only person who has connections in the city, the only person who has even been to Chaol other than me to deliver reports. My guess is you told the right people, then used the distraction to come in here yourself.”

“I… I would never…!” The babbling came out as if Van had a knife to Mateo’s throat, and he might as well have with the mirrorlight shining in his eyes, a pit of poison at his feet, and three workers who were scared enough just standing in a shapeshifter’s tomb. They weren’t going to do anything but run if something bad happened. “This is a unique replace. We could learn so much… not to mention the value of the burial chamber contents—was anything else taken?”

“Yes. Two of the sheds were raided—they took everything with gold or precious stones and left all the pottery.” Van let the light slide down, so instead of blinding Mateo, it sank into the gloom below them. Mateo tried to grab hold of the rope, thinking perhaps he could climb back to safety, then despaired immediately because the tight arms of his coat wouldn’t let him reach high enough even to try. “I heard you and your father talking about the burial chamber. You know what’s down there. You knew where the doors were. You know a lot for a teenager who should be drinking tea with the Rentara University head and thinking of the largest words possible to include in your next essay. You know more than anyone is supposed to.”

More than anyone is supposed to. Mateo tried swinging to the side, wishing for even a teaspoon’s worth of Lia’s spidery, flippy, sword scariness. But then the rope jerked, pulling him back up toward the opening.

“Seems like kind of a risky business, knowing so much about shapeshifters.” Van’s whisper snaked down into the darkness, a light suddenly illuminating him as he adjusted one of the mirrors. He helped Mateo back up into the antechamber, his grip crushing Mateo’s thin artist’s fingers even after he’d found his feet.

“Stop!” Mateo cried. “Stop. You think the Warlord won’t hear about this?”

Van grinned, the light catching in his mouth, making it look misshapen and feral. “You want to get to the burial chamber. I want to get to the burial chamber. And I think we both know your special knack is going to get us there faster.”

Heart burrowing up to his throat, Mateo fell back a step. How could Van know what he was? Could he see it like a Devoted? Mateo stared at the air over Van’s head, but it was empty of any kind of aura, much less Devoted gold. If he’d taken oaths, though… Could Basists identify other Basists? Every Basist had slightly different powers, and little was known about them, so he supposed it wasn’t impossible. What if this man had some kind of affinity that wasn’t for stone, but he still knew the value of caprenum?

There weren’t many in the Commonwealth who would seek an assignment digging for old shapeshifter kings. And Mateo wasn’t stupid enough to assume he knew all the uses for caprenum.

“Let’s go down.” Van’s voice was scaly and sleek as he gestured to the ladder. “There’s a safe path to the lower doorway, and I’d appreciate your thoughts on the stairs and how I might get down them without having my throat cut.”

“I’m not going to help you raid this tomb before the Warlord gets here, Van.” Mateo stepped back from the hole, wondering if he could make it up the ladder and to Bella before the man grabbed him with his big, meaty fists.

“Raid this tomb?” Van laughed, the sound echoing unhealthily. “How about this, Mateo. I’ll help you get out of this bed you’ve made for yourself. You help me get to the burial chamber, and I’ll try to make sure it happens before the people in Chaol decide which of us seems most likely to be Patenga come back from the dead. I don’t think the Warlord would even intervene, what with her trying to pretend she isn’t a part of it. Do I make myself clear?”

Patenga back from the dead. Most of the workers knew that Mateo had been the one to uncover the trapdoor, and he’d sent more than one report to the director about the door in the relief room, his own name at the bottom. And a plague beginning in Chaol? Had Father heard about that yet? It wouldn’t be hard at all for Van to connect the dots for frightened workers and people up in the city.

The air around Mateo pressed in on him, the stone pulsing with wrongness. If people thought there were shapeshifters in Chaol, and the dig director pointed at Tual, the Warlord’s aukincer… at his poor, sick son, who knew so much about rocks…

People would believe it.

Mateo swallowed. Then started down the ladder.