Page 76 of Alchemised
“Stroud,” she muttered.
He swore and left, then came back looking incensed.
He had her carried to a motorcar idling in the courtyard. She was bundled in blankets and tucked into the back seat. The fresh air made her feel marginally better, enough that she could sit up and look out the windows, arms still throbbing from the bruises.
Rather than head to Central, the bridge they took turned towards the lower parts of the city and into a tunnel. The car drove on and on and didn’t emerge. Instead, it stopped somewhere in the gloom. Dim amber lights shone weakly through a sort of vaporous mist that hung over the ground, darkness pressing in on all sides.
The air was stale and damp. She could smell the river threatening to seep in.
Ferron got out and opened the far passenger door, his expression tense. “Can you walk?”
The few figures Helena could make out were old, rotted necrothralls. She swallowed hard and nodded.
Don’t look at the shadows.
“Come, then.” He took her by the arm. He didn’t grip hard, but it still made the bruises throb.
Helena had no choice but to follow, her breath growing short. His silver-white hair became the only thing visible in the dark. She reached out, trying to ground herself by finding a wall to touch.
A damp, slimy surface met her fingertips. She snatched her hand back.
The tunnel finally opened into a large room with green glass sconces illuminating it; dozens of other tunnels all opened into it, as if they were in the centre of a warren. The walls were covered with intricate but faded murals. It looked almost like an abandoned temple.
She’d never seen this place. She knew Paladia had been built on the ruins of a city long ago destroyed by plague. Rivertide. The site of the first Necromancy War. She’d thought all traces of it gone.
The air was thick with the smell of decay, a vile miasma that came from the far end of the room.
Her every instinct screamed to run, but Ferron pulled her forward. Her feet slipped across the floor until they reached the far end of the room.
“Your Eminence.” Ferron knelt, pulling Helena to the ground with him. “I’ve brought the prisoner. My deepest apologies for the delay.”
There was a long silence, so long Helena began to doubt there was anyone there.
“Bring her closer.” The words floated, blurred and mumbled, from the darkness.
Ferron pulled Helena to her feet and dragged her up a series of steps she could barely make out before shoving her to her knees again.
Helena stared in horror at the sight before her. She barely recognised the grotesque shape.
Morrough lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him. Morrough seemed shrunken somehow from the immense distorted being he’d been.
Now he looked as though the skin was rotting off him.
One of the faces in the throne was briefly illuminated in the dim light, and Helena thought it might be Mandl’s old face, but she couldn’t be sure because the throne shifted, lifting Morrough towards her.
Morrough tilted his head, his empty sockets like blackened holes. “Have I thought too well of you, High Reeve? I wanted those memories by now, and you’ve brought me only scraps.”
There was something wrong with Morrough’s tongue, the words slurred as if he were speaking around some large object in his mouth.
“I apologise. I will strive to do better.”
“Yes, you are always striving, aren’t you?” The words did not seem kindly meant. “I shall inspect these memories myself. Hold her fast.”
There was a pause, and the only sound was the heaving of the decayed bodies. Another face appeared, half rotted, but she recognised the wide scar that ran along the side of Titus Bayard’s skull.
Before she could shrink back, Ferron’s knee lodged between her shoulder blades and his hands wrapped around her jaw, holding her in place.
Morrough extended his decrepit right hand, over-large with fingers jointed like spider legs. The bones were emerging through the tips of his fingers, except for two which hung limp, dangling strips of flesh.
