The Tales of the Wanderer Volume One: A Book of Underrealm (The Underrealm Volumes 4) Garrett Robinson (poetry books to read TXT) 📖

“Quiet,” he said, so sudden and brusque that I found myself complying at once. It was like the order of a battlefield commander, and I realized rather suddenly that I knew almost nothing about the old man’s past. Mag, too, had fallen completely silent.

Back and forth Dryleaf walked, and now it was as if he was sniffing. But I could smell nothing other than whatever terrible, nameless stench seemed to permeate the very air in this place. At last he stopped near the center of the room. Then he turned and strode right towards us.

“Move,” he said, again speaking in a voice that brooked no disobedience. Mag and I stepped aside, watching the old man. As he passed us, Mag looked at me, raising her eyebrows. I shrugged.

Dryleaf stopped at a tapestry hanging on a wall. He reached out and felt it with his hands before pulling it aside. He probed the wall behind it with his fingers. Then, suddenly, his fingers sank into the wall—or rather, a piece of the wall moved, taking his fingers with it.

There came a sharp click, and a section of wall beside the tapestry swung open to reveal a dank staircase.

The old man turned to us, folding his arms over each other and around his staff. I eyed him for a long moment.

“When I was a child,” I said slowly, “I heard stories of blind people whose other senses grew sharper than was natural. Their other senses became so good, in fact, that they almost replaced the missing sight. Some of them could perform incredible feats, like seeing through walls, or catching arrows in midair. But I never believed such stories.”

Dryleaf snorted loudly. “You were wise not to,” he said, grinning. “Such tales are ridiculous, at least so far as I have experienced. I cannot hear a mouse fart from a span away, or some such nonsense. But without my eyes to distract me, I do pay a bit more attention to my ears. That is why, when I was walking about, I heard this.”

He walked to the middle of the room. There, he took his staff and struck the floor at his feet. Then he struck the floor again a pace away.

Thoom.

Thunk.

Mag stared at him, astonished. “They sound different.”

“Indeed they do,” said Dryleaf. “Because there is a hollow spot here, and a deep one. A chamber under the house.”

“Well,” I said. “I suppose that makes more sense than my first thought.”

Dryleaf grinned. “Sometimes, what appears to be magic is simply a matter of paying attention.”

Constable Yue stalked through the street, entirely irritated. Ashta had come and fetched her as soon as she had found the north gatehouse unoccupied. Ashta would have gone to find Shen on her own, but she did not know where the woman lived—and so it fell to Yue, as so many things did.

Yue hardly thought it was worth it. Shen was probably in her home getting drunk, celebrating the vampire’s death. That was what Yue had been in the middle of doing, before Ashta came pounding at her door.

Two lefts, and then … and then a right? Yue frowned, stopping in the street and looking around. It had been this way. She was almost certain of it. But in the middle of the night, and with two cups of wine in her belly, it was suddenly less clear.

Kaw

Yue looked up. A raven perched on the edge of a building above her, looking down. It seemed to be studying her. For a moment Yue had the nonsensical thought that it was waiting for her to do something.

“Shoo,” she growled at it. “I have little patience for anything tonight, least of all you.”

The raven did not understand her, of course, and so Yue surely imagined the vague expression of amusement in the way it tilted its head at her.

She had had just enough wine that she did not wonder what a raven was doing out at night.

“Ah, there,” she said, recognizing Shen’s home and happy for a reason to leave the bird behind her. Shen lived in a small, two-room house wedged between a smith on one side and a tavern on the other—a tavern where she and Yue had shared many drinks in the past. Sky as her witness, Yue was going to make Shen buy her plenty of drinks to make up for this cursed nighttime adventure.

The front door stood slightly open. Curse the woman, she must be well and truly drunk. Yue threw it open unceremoniously.

“Shen!” she cried. “Where in the darkness below have you gotten off to?”

But the front room was empty. Yue gave an exasperated grunt and stalked towards the bedroom in the back. She threw it open, but the bedroom, too, was empty.

That gave her pause, and she looked back into the front room, frowning. Where under the sky had Shen gone?

And then she heard a scraping against one of the walls.

Of course. The alley between Shen’s home and the tavern. There was a privy there. Shen was having herself a piss.

“Shen!” roared Yue, stalking towards the alley. She would likely wake up some of the neighbors, but she did not care. Let them take their frustration out on Shen, once morning came.

She rounded the corner. There was the privy.

And there was Shen. On the ground, slumped against the wall, her face deathly white, her tunic covered with blood—but not as much as Yue would have expected, judging from the gaping wound in her neck.

Yue froze.

No, she thought. No, that is not right.

The vampire did not come within the walls.

Yet there was Shen.

The vampire was dead.

Yet there was Shen.

Even as she watched, Shen’s fingers scrabbled futilely against the cobblestones. She shuddered one last time and died.

Yue turned and sprinted for the constables’ station.

Dryleaf took my arm, and together we followed Mag down the stairs into a wide chamber beneath the house. With every step down, the evil feeling in the air increased. Oku whined, trotting just behind me,