Elliana Morris's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Elliana got to her feet. Silas had gone back up the coin pile to speak with the guards who had dragged the second grey shape into the corridor. He waved her toward the archway she had come through. "Wait there," he said. "Don't cross it. Don't touch it. I need a moment." She walked back across the hall. Her shoulder still ached from where the spirit had pushed cold through it. The archway rose ahead of her, stone laced with old cobweb, a faint glow bleeding out of the dark inside. One skeletal sentry stood beside it. The other must have gone with the guards down the corridor. The one that remained was wrong. It had been still as furniture on the way in. Now its helmed skull turned in small jerks, tracking her, then the arch, then her again. Its spear tip drifted off the vertical. The orange in its eye sockets pulsed, dimmed, flared. Elliana stopped six paces short. "I'm just going to stand here," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "He told me to wait." The sentry took one step sideways and planted its spear across the opening. Her stomach dropped. That arch was her only way back to her cellar. To her house. She thought of the warning carved in the tunnel wall: the dead keep the door. She had assumed that meant Silas. "You know me," she tried. "You walked me in." The skull cocked. The orange guttered like a candle in wind. Then the spear came off the arch and swung level at her chest. Elliana stepped back. "Silas." The sentry lunged. She threw herself down. The spear point scraped the stone where her ribs had been. She scrambled sideways along the wall, hands raw on grit, cornered against cold rock. The skeleton pivoted with that same jerking wrongness and brought the spear up for a second strike. A blue streak came through the archway. A fox, small and pale, wrapped in cold blue flame, shot past her legs and slammed into the sentry's knee. Bone cracked. The spear went wide. The fox turned in the air, and where it landed it was not a fox anymore. Silas stood in its place, robed, crowned, gold staff already in his hand. The blue stone at its head burned white. He struck the floor once. Blue fire climbed the sentry from boots to helm and held it there, shaking. The orange in its sockets snuffed out. The armor dropped in a clatter. Silas stepped over the bones and took Elliana's elbow. His grip was cool and exact. "Something is happening to my souls," he said. "You are not going back through that door tonight." "My house — " "Will still be there. You won't, if you cross now." He guided her away from the arch, into the hall. "You'll stay in the palace until I know what is hunting you. That is not a request." Elliana looked back once. The archway glowed, empty, quiet, closed to her.