Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(64)

The holiest always have the farthest to fall.

“Come.” Merik cocked his chin, beckoning Cam onward. The storeroom’s shelves crisscrossed toward a central intersection where a stone staircase circled upward six levels.

Row after row they passed, each shelf crammed full of supplies.

“What’s that say?” Cam whispered, pointing to a fat sack. They were halfway to the room’s center, and supplies were thinning out. “It doesn’t look like Nubrevnan letters.”

“Because it’s not,” Merik answered. He toyed with his filthy sleeves. “Those are Dalmotti words. That one says wheat. The other says barley.” He motioned to a crate with red paint on the side. “That crate has dried dates in it from Marstok. That one of over there says walnuts in Cartorran.”

Cam’s lips pinched sideways. “But, sir … what are foreign foods doing here? I thought no one would trade with us.”

Merik was wondering the same, though he could make a guess. One that conjured Marstoki weapons, miniature ships, and violence at sea.

Heat spindled down Merik’s arms.

The amount of stores here was far more than two weeks of piracy could provide though. Vivia must have started the Foxes months ago—long before she’d betrayed Merik at sea and left him to die.

Merik’s certainty of that grew, as did his rage, the closer he and Cam came to the cellar’s heart, where the stairwell waited. Here, all shelves were empty, as if whoever had stocked this space wanted the wares to be hidden.

“Up,” Merik ordered. He had to check the fifth level. He had to see if there was more of the same.

There was, and Merik’s lungs fanned hotter. The fifth floor was even more crowded with supplies than the sixth, none labeled in Nubrevnan.

And all of it here, where it could do no one any good.

This food should be feeding Pin’s Keep or the homeless in the Cisterns—or, hell-waters, the people of Nihar would take it. Instead, though, it sat here and served no one. Except, perhaps, Vivia.

Enough—Merik had seen enough, and it was time to leave the way they’d come. There was no meeting here. Only a hole in the Cisterns wall that needed fixing.

Merik and Cam were halfway back to the stairwell, though, when a groan drifted toward them. “Help.”

Merik froze midstride; Cam halted beside him. The groan repeated, “Help,” and Cam clutched at her stomach.

“We need to go check, sir.”

A snap of Merik’s head. No.

“Someone’s hurt, sir.”

Another snap, harder this time. Something icy was rising in Merik’s veins. Something powerful and dark, made of Hagfishes and shadows. Leave while you still can, Merik’s instincts screamed. This place is not safe for you!

The shadow man was here.

Merik grabbed Cam’s cloak, still damp and filthy, and towed her toward the stairs. They made it three steps before they reached the source of the groans.

A man stretched across the flagstones with a sword in his belly and intestines glittering on the floor. Pain shook in his eyes, while lines as dark as the sea’s blackest depths webbed across his face.

It looked so much like a different death. A different murder—one that Merik had committed. Leave while you still can, leave while you still can.

Cam yanked herself free from Merik’s grip and dropped beside the man. “I’m here,” she crooned in an attempt to comfort. “I’m here now.”

The man’s eyes swiveled to Cam, and something almost like recognition flashed there. He tried to speak, but blood burbled from his mouth. From the hole in his stomach too.

The guard could not possibly survive this injury, yet Cam was right. Even dead men deserved compassion. So though every fiber in his body screeched at Merik to run, he made himself crouch beside the girl. That was when he saw it.

The man was missing a finger—his left pinkie, just like the assassin Garren.

It was like that night on the Jana all over again. How, though? Who was this man? It couldn’t just be random coincidence.

Before Merik could put these questions to the dying man, everything stilled in his body. Even the storeroom and the dust motes seemed to pause.

Dead. The man was dead.

Merik’s throat cleared, ready to order Cam onward. Except that at that moment, a rasp scuttled through the cellar. It crawled over Merik’s skin like a thousand sand fleas.

“Fool brother Filip led blind brother Daret

deep into the black cave.

He knew that inside it, the Queen Crab resided,

but that didn’t scare him away.”

Cam rocked back, falling onto her haunches. Merik simply gaped at the corpse. The man’s dead mouth didn’t move, and his eyes stayed stiff and glassy … Yet there was no denying the words came from his throat.

Impossible, impossible.

Cam scrabbled back on all fours, hissing, “Sir, sir,” while the corpse continued to whisper.

“Said blind brother Daret to fool brother Filip,

does Queen Crab no longer reign?

I have heard she is vicious, and likes to eat fishes.

It’s best we avoid her domain.”

“Sir, sir, sir.” Cam grabbed for Merik.

A bell began to clamor. Ear-splitting in volume and brutal in intensity, it was the palace alarm.

Merik moved. Hand in hand with Cam, he bolted for the stairs—even as the rest of the song slithered out around them.