VAstra

  The Umbra was a beast of shadow and sinew, a winged predator that defied simple description. It moved with the lethal grace of a panther, but its wings—bat-like and vast—added a sense of dread beyond its form. Barbed spines ran jagged along its back, its cws wicked, and as it stalked through the storm-darkness, its presence was unmistakably real. No haze of smoke softened its edges like the other creatures they had seen; this one was solid, fast, and terribly lethal. It was those cws, Astra realized, that had drawn a hot line on her arm from elbow to wrist, she had only good fortune to thank that she wasn’t bleeding out in the dirt.

  Rubi seemed like a dancer in the staccato light of the storm. Astra could only catch glimpses of him, each more terrifying than the st as he barely evaded the Umbra’s cws, teeth, and spines.

  Guilt crashed over Astra. He was doing this for her, risking himself, giving her time to run. But her breath hadn’t yet returned, her limbs trembled with fear. She staggered to her feet, gasping for air, eyes desperately searching for the stairwell. Lightning illuminated just as she spotted it, and she stumbled forward.

  Her foot caught on a raised tile, sending her crashing to the ground with a sharp cry. She shouldn’t have looked back—she knew that—but instinct betrayed her. She gnced over her shoulder.

  The Umbra’s eyes were fixed on her.

  Terror strangled her scream as it lunged. Hopeless. She was too slow, too weak, it would tear her apart.

  But then, Rubi was over her. He caught the creature mid-leap, his hands gripping its open jaws, his body caught in the grip of its cws.

  Astra’s scream was lost in a crash of thunder.

  Cws were buried deep in Rubi’s side, a length of sharp talons piercing him just above the hip. His scream was furious agony, his eyes fred bright, all of him straining as he forced the Umbra’s jaws wide, pushing them apart with nothing but his hands. The beast writhed, its cws tore loose and painted an arc of blood on the floor. The Umbra was so much rger than Rubi that it should have lifted him from the floor with ease, but it could only fight in vain as Rubi’s eyes fred anew.

  With a crack that broke through the storm, Rubi broke the beast’s jaw with a sickening snap that sent the Umbra rolling, howling in agony as it retreated into the storm-dark.

  Rubi yanked Astra to her feet to drag her to the stairwell, his breaths shallow and fast, steps unsteady. He conjured a flickering light at the base of the stairs, the meager glow revealing a clear path upward. Without a word, he began to climb.

  “Rubi… Rubi… you are hurt… stop… please!”

  He ignored Astra’s protests, batting her hands away when she tried to press against the wound, breaths ragged and wet. Blood soaked through his side, far too much blood.

  The ascent was agonizingly slow, each step a battle against their shared pain and exhaustion. He growled at her when she attempted to help.

  After what felt like an eternity of panicked ascending they arrived at the top. This floor had only a single hallway, lined with benches and vaulting windows that would provide a startling view if not for the storm-dark outside.

  Rubi slowed finally, halfway down that hall, his body trembling as allowed the patchwork satchel to fall before he colpsed onto a bench. His breath came now in tortured cries. Astra did not think it was possible for either of them to look any more bloodless than they already did, but Rubi had lost so much he was actually managing it. They had left a grotesque drip of it all the way up the stairs and down the hallway, and they were both fouled by it.

  Astra was babbling, panicked, pleading at him to be well in her awkward, stilted way. His hand was pressed against the wound, face twisted in agony, eyes tightly shut. It was an effort to pull it away and lift his robe to assess the damage.

  She froze.

  It was worse than she had imagined. He was going to die here.

  No, he wouldn’t. Astra moved on instinct. She ripped the hem of her dress for a strip of cloth, pressing it against the wound. Rubi cried, body tensing as she worked, but she couldn’t stop now. She packed the makeshift dressing into the wound as tightly as she could. It was a feeble attempt, a temporary solution to a problem far too great for her to solve.

  Astra had trouble tearing another strip from her dress until she peeled it off completely in a rush. She’d worry about the cold and having something to wear ter. This length she got around his thin body, tight around the strip she’d pressed to the wound. It was triage at best.

  A thought struck—a terrible, desperate thought. Blood. What if he took her blood?

  She kept one hand pressed firm on the wound as she patted his face.

  “Rubi! Rubi! Blood… from me blood!”

  He was having trouble listening to her, but that got him to shake his head no vehemently and try to push her away. Astra pressed on, begging.

  “No!” He rasped, his voice barely audible, trembling with the effort to stay conscious. He was too weak to push her off, so she pressed her throat to his mouth, begging him to drink.

  Rubi wasn’t listening anymore. His eyes fluttered closed, the conjured light flickering as if it, too, were about to fade.

  Astra didn’t give up. She sat up from Rubi and squeezed the wound on her arm. Fresh blood surged. She pressed her wrist to his lps, letting the blood drip into his mouth. He didn’t react, didn’t move.

  Panic surged. Rubi had gone still. Too still.

  She pulled back from him. A tense fear settled, as the world pulled away. For a moment she feared she would faint. Whimpering, she pressed her ear to his chest and held it there.

  A faint heartbeat.

  She held her breath, listening, waiting. And then, the shallowest of breaths.

  Rubi wasn’t dead. Not yet.

  The light flickered out.

  Adina

  The storm for hours raged before receding into a writhing mass of shapeless coalescence as it fled west, quicker than it came. It left the sky scraped clean, bereft even of the overcast haze one would normally expect in the passing of a hurricane. Storm season was the worst time to be here when it came to shades, but also the best time when it came to avoiding other treasure hunters. It was why Adina was here now with a party of four instead of a full company.

  “Bryn, Tan, are you ready?” Adina called as she eyed that vacant sky. The two were trading quiet flirtations as they emerged from the building they’d sheltered in. A long night that gave way to a day nearly as dark and seemed to drag on forever. It had forced them to camp at the top of one of the taller buildings and burn through three day-mps to keep the shades at bay. All of them were eager to get going.

  “Sigild Tan!” Tan emphasized, pulling her green eyes from the sandy haired young woman that’d been chatting her up the entire expedition, to fix on Adina with irritation.

  Adina’s expression was ft as she tapped a slender brown fingertip—nail broken from a climb a few days back—against the golden sigildrie tattoo under her left eye.

  Normally it was rude to refer to a licensed sigild without their title, but Adina enjoyed teasing the fresh graduate. In part because the endless flirtations between her and Bryn had begun to annoy a bit. The woman was a rake, with a storied history of broken hearts and misunderstandings in her wake, but for now her gres and the urgency of the expedition kept the two from sharing a bedroll outright.

  The sigild was the shortest of the group, effortlessly petite and pretty in the way that the young tend to be. She’d had the fair complexion of a city socialite when they’d departed, now she was sand toned, darker on her cheeks and brow. Given her pampered background her skin had likely seen more sun in the past few months than it had over her entire lifetime. Tan didn’t even have to marry up if she wanted a life of soft luxury, instead she was out here in the rough wild. Chasing a dream. Adina liked her for that.

  Tan frowned and chewed on her lip at the gesture. They’d agreed it meant she was getting too distracted, by Bryn specifically. Tan separated from Bryn and came to stand beside Adina, who had turned back to look at the storm-swept streets and the city skyline beyond. Bryn held back and rubbed at the scar on her chin, eyes on Tan.

  Adina’s left eye lit up in gold. She could feel Tan’s sidelong envy at the silgildrie springing to life before the younger woman pulled her notebook from her hip pack and got to work.

  “Forge is back,” Adina said as the eye dimmed, sure enough the man rounded the corner of a building two blocks down. Waving, he made his way to them in a light jog as Tan reviewed, for doubtless the hundredth time, her research.

  Forge was broad and square in form, nearly Adina’s equal in height, the hard shape of a seasoned treasure hunter. His dour wind-burned face was brightened by sharp, flinty blue eyes that hung above a pugilists' nose and a mouth that didn’t smile often but ughed good and loud over a shared joke. Forge was a good one to have at your back in a pinch. Normally.

  Out here, Adina trusted no man to act with decency; the distance from civilization seemed to dissolve any sembnce of restraint. Hard lessons had taught her to keep her back from all of them—though, by skill and hard-won luck, she’d escaped the worst of fates. Forge was different, or so she hoped. A wife, a young daughter; no hint of deceit or disgrace had ever reached her ear. Still, she had brought him only because there was no one else as fit for the task.

  “It’s as the miss says,” Forge confirmed, the miss being sigild Tan. He was not at all winded from his jog, “six blocks and you can see it, just as described. Deeper n’ any of us have gone.”

  “We won’t get a better chance,” Tan said, too excited to reprimand Forge for the ck of title, “a sky this clear gives us days without a storm!” Tan beamed at Adina.

  “You’ve done good work sigild,” Adina’s response was measured. She fixed the tie keeping her curly bck hair in pce at the nape again, considering, “how long do you think we’ll have?”

  “Three days… or four? At least, but I've never seen it like this! But if the archive is intact then we won’t need it all, I know I can decipher it!” Tan’s eyes were faraway, daydreaming of the moment she'd make her name.

  It was Tan’s first time in Odrysae, but Adina sensed the schor meant that nowhere in her studies had she encountered the city in this state. She let it pass—no need to dampen the woman’s enthusiasm. With a nod, she turned away.

  Bryn appeared, tossing a small, paper-wrapped bar to Forge, who ripped into it eagerly. She offered another to Adina, pausing at Adina’s raised hand and quiet refusal. A former medic, Bryn had a soldier’s instinct, always watchful, always tending to the well-being of those around her.

  “Not all good though is it?” Bryn asked as she turned back to Forge, who had already devoured half of the bar. The question stalled Tan’s excitement. Forge held a hand up to indicate he needed a moment to chew and swallow before he responded. Tan was on the edge of crestfallen.

  “Ain’t want to be right, but we’re not alone out here; fresh treads in the mud,” Forge was pin the way he said it, but he might as well have told the sigild that the expedition had just been canceled by the look on her face.

  “We can’t go back!” Tan started, so emphatic that she grabbed onto Adina’s sleeve.

  Adina looked down at the sigild, eyes hard. The young woman’s lip trembled.

  “It was agreed that if we ran into another group of hunters we'd go back,” Adina began.

  “But we’re so close! You heard Forge, six blocks! Please! They can’t possibly know where we’re going!”

  She was right. They were close and Adina felt the excitement of it too, but she had not made it this long as a hunter by letting her excitement cloud her decisions. She put her eyes on Forge, expectant. He read the question in Adina’s eyes, “tracks goin’ south, we’re headed west. Not like to get noticed with a group this small.” Ponderously, he finished the bar and wiped his fingers on his coat, “could turn back and run into them. S’ a risk all the same.”

  “Would be a shame to turn back now,” Bryn interjected, earning a thankful look from Tan.

  Adina didn’t want to turn back really. This had been a lengthy, miserable expedition, mounted long after anyone else would dare for fear of storm season Turning back after all this would be terrible. Tan watched her, pretty green eyes tight, pensive. For a moment Adina wondered how bad it would be if they were caught by the worst of the worst you could run into out here. They’d kill Forge, probably make Tan, Adina, and Bryn wish they had been. Even if it was someone Adina had worked with before, a group she had made contracts with and bled alongside. If they were men there was no trusting them out here. Even so, if not for the prize they sought none of them would be out here so te in the year to begin with, and what a prize it could be.

  Adina spat, to get the nasty thoughts out of her head. Some nonsense habit her grandmother taught her, “We go on. Too close to turn back now, and Forge is right that we could run into them either way.”

  Tan, forgetting her pretense as a stoic professional, bounded at Adina for a hug that was arrested by the sour look on the older woman’s face. She stopped short and tented her fingers, shoulders slouched a little, in grateful supplication instead.

  “Thank you Adina, really,” she breathed.

  “We’ll thank each other after we return to camp, hopefully before they pack up and leave. Just remember,” Adina pointed a finger directly at Tan’s nose, close, she crossed her eyes to focus on the broken nail, “I tell you to run, you run. No hesitation or questions.”

  Tan nodded emphatically as Bryn dropped a hand on her shoulder, this set her to a blush, “Th-” she started again, then stopped, “I understand.”

  ?

  Forge was where he was best, on point, his sharp gaze taking in everything. He was quiet, save for a comment here and there; an interesting observation for the sigild, or a word to Adina about their route, always in a hushed tone that encouraged no follow up questions. He slowed as they approached the tracks. “Here,” he pointed to the indentations in the mud and the boot prints on the street between, “reckon one, scoutin’. No way they’re out here on their lonesome n’ a fools guess what for.”

  Adina stopped beside Forge to scowl. Seeing the prints made them real enough to question her decision. She knew better than to change her mind now though.

  No hesitation.

  Move forward.

  Her hand drifted, automatic, to the artavus holstered at her belt. Calloused fingers traced the carved lines of sigildrie etched along the hilt, fingertips lingering over the graceful cruciform guard, and the textured iny beneath—a familiar comfort. As long as she held this, all would be well. They pressed on, coming to a long-dry fountain, its basin cracked, half-choked with wiry growth, each stone fractured by ages passed. In its center rose the stunted remains of a statue, severed at the feet by looters long ago. Where the missing pieces had gone, she could only guess—perhaps polished, footless, tucked in the shadows of a noble’s private collection. Tan, wanting to stop and investigate, slowed. Adina turned before the young woman’s lips even began to form the request, the word no in her gaze. Tan kept her mouth shut. Bryn kept pace at the rear just behind Tan. She spoke to her softly as she caught up so Adina wasn’t able to hear, but whatever it was brought a quiet giggle out of Tan. She batted at her shoulder in pyful recrimination. It wasn’t long after that they sighted their destination; the archive.

  Hunters called it the archive today, but it was specuted to be more than that back when the city had lived. Stories of it serving as a university, seat of government, even boratory teased the imagination of pop-adventure authors for the better part of a century. Adina had only ever read about the pce, it was simply not worth the risk to get this far out. What set this expedition apart was the sealed chamber at the very top. As far as Adina knew, no one had crossed that threshold since the days of the old nobility. Countless attempts had been made over the past century—each ending in ruin. At best, they had wasted time, money; at worst, lives. The threat of shades was too fierce, and the architecture of the old nobles, wrought for endurance, rendered any attempt to bst the door or break the floor from below a perilous folly, an effort bound to fail.

  Tan was Adina’s key—or so she had persuaded herself with a certainty that bordered on obsession. Her confidence in this conviction was why she had chosen only those few whose loyalty she could rely on. In these wless nds, untouched by any civil decree, Hunters prowled—most of them a brutal breed, eager to pounce on any chance, however base or dishonorable. But if, by some chance, Bryn, Tan, or Forge had spoken incautiously to the wrong soul, if that misstep y behind the mystery of the unexpined footprints?

  Adina didn’t want to think about that. She set eyes on Bryn, who was staring at Tan’s rear as she bent to lift a piece of stone that had once been part of an engraving. Tan held it to the three. “This is clearly from the archive,” she passed the piece to Bryn, then turned and pointed with the fullness of her ebullient nature, her voice rising, a reverent apex, “from the end of the war! Can you imagine? Oh! that tree!” The young sigild drew Adina’s gaze high, beyond the sinuous arched windows, the nearly organic details that framed them, and the curved edge of the corners that reached to the furthest height of the ancient building. It was difficult to see, but she could just make out a massive tree growing out of the rubble of the wall on the south side.

  Adina blinked as she activated the silgaldrie under her left eye, her vision telescoping as she closed her right. In enrged crity she could see that the tree had managed to crawl along the building, growing its way to the roof where it pursued loftier heights beyond. Near the tree she could see the tops of bushes where groups of spotted doves flitted about, likely feasting on berries.

  “Significant growth up there,” Adina commented under her breath, she could feel Tan’s interested gaze on the silgaldrie tattoo’s glow. She was about to discharge the working when scattering birds, as if startled, deyed her. The bushes shifted as if something stumbled through them. Adina held her gaze there, hoping to see more, until the working depleted in its entirety, rendering the tree in human acuity. It was a little thing to feed it again, but the thought that she might need to save her strength for ter insisted otherwise.

  Adina continued as she blinked at Tan rapidly, “something’s up there.”

  Tension rose like an oppressive cloud over the four of them. It was too bright now for shades, no terrestrial animals could make a home here. Adina could see on the faces of the other three; suspicion. It wasn’t something she could allow to take root.

  "None of us talked," she insists, her voice firm as her thumb brushed the sigildrie on her artavus. Forge, Tan, and Bryn exchanged looks, then fell in step behind her. A chill settled over them as the shadow of the archive loomed.

  They crossed beneath the archway’s silent grandeur, stepping into a vast chamber bathed in light. Massive windows, floor to ceiling, framed three walls, casting stark angles over the space. Empty shelves stood in regimented rows, chairs and benches scattered, and the debris of years left idle marked what had been—now remnants of something lost. Once, this room breathed with purpose—library, academy, hall of records, seat of power—all one and the same.

  Now? It was like walking into a tomb. The presence of the four echoed loudly as they made their way amidst the ruin.

  “It’s beautiful,” Tan’s whisper carried the awe the rest of them hadn’t dared to give voice.

  Bryn spoke next, “That sigild gss?” Adina guessed that it wasn’t, but she didn’t know for sure.

  “No, and yes!” Tan began cheerfully as she picked her way around the ruin of a bookshelf nearly three times her height, “there isn’t any sigildrie in the gss itself but the production used techniques and principles we still haven’t been able to reproduce. Recent micrographia revealed that it’s a sort of ttice…”

  Tan’s voice trailed off into a dying echo that made Adina’s skin crawl.

  “What is it?” She asked, armed.

  “Adina… ahm… There's a campfire here?” Tan whispered.

  The three were by her side with haste. Forge nudged the remains of burned wood and ashes. A nearby shelf had been pulverized for kindling and fuel. The smell of wood-smoke lingered, faint.

  “Nothing else?” Bryn sounded dubious as she circled the perimeter, “passing strange.”

  The air had a telling feel to it. An itch at the periphery like a pressure headache. She looked at Tan, who was looking down into her open satchel already.

  “Sigild?”

  The young sigild drew a slender gss vial from her pouch, within it a thin slip of paper threaded with copper-red wire. Hermetically sealed in some distant factory, it bore a precise, thumb-pressed mark, a seal designed to shatter and admit the air around it with a single press.

  Tan held it above the dead fire and pressed down. A muted pop broke the silence, her thumb sinking into the seal. They waited, breaths tight, unmoving.

  Ten seconds passed, then the copper-red wire bzed to life, the paper twisting, curling as though scorched by unseen fire, until it y shriveled, bckened, falling to ash.

  Tan’s gaze darted to Adina, her eyes wide. “Unresolved,” she murmured, though the others understood well enough. Whoever had arrived before them had brought a sigild along.