AMETHYST 5.8: SECRETS
“Beneath it all – beneath the surface facades, the artificial mask of impermanent flesh, there is the unchanging substrate wherein all are one and the same. You do not want to be the same as everyone else. You want to be differentiated but no matter how you fight it, no matter how you clutch and claw for life, the terrible truth remains. You are the same. You are dead already, even if you still claim to breathe, still cling to the light like a fledgling to the branch. You will spend far longer as bone than as flesh. You must take wing. How better to take wing willingly, than to be flung. How better to fly than to fall.”
– from ‘Grandfather’s Open Arms’
The faerie queen said something in response, something fearful. She no longer wanted to die – I could tell. But I didn’t listen to her words.
I closed my eyes, biting my lip against the onset of excruciating torture that was wracking what little remained of me.
They hadn’t been able to damage the arm inside the sphere.
I pulled.
And for less than a moment, less than the flutter of a glowing butterfly’s wings, less than a caught breath, something pushed.
Pushed with the kind of power that might move mountains, flick them to the horizon with the negligent wave of a single finger.
Less than a moment was enough, too much. My poor mortal frame was the conduit for the might of something I could barely even comprehend.
I swooned, overwhelmed.
I fell forwards, but I didn’t seem to hit the stone. Instead a flood of icy green light, bright even through my eyelids, carried my body forwards on a river of warmth, even as it carried my mind backwards.
* * *
The grass under my feet is blue, as blue and soft as the cloudless night sky. The tree, the only feature breaking the empty expanse, is a silver rod with seven branches. The wind blows like warm laughter, but the tree does not bend: upon the tip of each of the branches is a star.
The constellation of the unicorn, reflected in the pool beside the tree. Its surface is without ripple. The wind cannot stir that water.
Her eyes are golden orbs, aglow.
The maiden wears a blue gown of grass-blades, its hem indistinguishable, perhaps inseparable, from the ground. Her skin and hair are the same shade of gold as her eyes but softer, muted. Upon her brow, beneath her horns of flawless ivory, is a white circlet, inset with emeralds.
Her blue lips smile. Smile down on me.
In her hands, a goblet, carved from a single emerald.
She stoops beside the pool and dips a cup of water from it. Not a drop spills over the edge of the vessel as she rises back to her full height.
I do not realise the extent of that height until she begins her approach, begins flowing towards me, a hill, a mountain, a landscape of grass.
I am standing a thousand miles from her, from the tree, the mere. The tree is taller than a million Maginoxes. The pool is a lake, a sea, an ocean.
This plain is an infinite place – a plane…
Nentheleme stoops before me, and she’s but a maiden in a gown of blue grass once more.
I take the offered goblet. The water smells of autumn rain.
I drink greedily. I drink deep. I close my eyes in bliss.
Blue lips kiss me on the brow. My mask is no impediment to her.
A breeze of floral breath. A voice warm like the wind.
“You can go back now, kestrel.”
* * *
I was lying on stone, wet, cold – freezing. Each quivering breath was like swallowing a knife that split in two inside my throat and descended down into each of my lungs.
No breeze on my face. No brain-melting light discernible through my eyelids. A musty scent of death cloyed the air, the overpowering aroma of blood.
More than anything else, a sense of bone-weakening Evil. The kind with a capital-E. Something in me was shrivelling up, like I could feel my soul in my chest, curling into a foetal position and waiting for death.
Not the sphere-chamber, then.
And I… seemed to be in possession of all my limbs. All my intestines…
“I’m here, Kas.”
Things even more important than limbs and intestines.
Zel seemed taken aback by my complimentary thought, and stuttered:”Gr-Graima – she poured your healing potion down your throat, and, well, with whatever happened when you activated the sphere… I was able to help with the necrotic wounds. Shadowcloud’s here – oh Kas, be careful, they’re not five feet –”
I know. I feel them. Hush now, Zel. Listening.
Two voices. Distant, beyond mortal hearing. One a familiar rasp; the other similar but less confident, less authoritative –
“Her sister, Graima. Neither of them are very happy.”
Graima was pleading:
“… was the doing of the Harlot! There was naught I could do – my hands, ashes as I laid them upon the hatch! All arts fled me! I sent up mindless to bring him down to us. I have him –”
“Yet what of his mind, dear sister? And the one Keltoros brought, he is still under thy spell?”
“Of course – but whatever yon boy did, he brought about the downfall of the Great One! Removing his amulet, worthless! Some otherworld power guards his thoughts from every incision, and he must be properly subdued before he might be submerged in the Elixir…”
“Mistress!” A new voice, male, hoarse. “Mistresses, we must flee this place!”
There was the crack of lich-fire as one of the sisters lashed the speaker, the agonised gasp that replied.
“Thou shalt do no such thing!” Aidel snapped. “Return to thy post, and warn of any approach!”
This time I could pick out the gentle swishing sound as her servant departed. I tried to keep my breathing shallow as I started to prepare myself.
“Wait, sister,” Graima said in a hollow voice. “He wakens!”
“Nentheleme,” I whispered through cold-cracked lips, gesturing with one hand while I used the other to steady myself.
I opened my eyes, looking past the trio of vampires that had been left to watch over me and the comatose wizard lying beside me.
Not stone – ice, a huge, glistening cavern. But the ice was not the white-blue I was used to seeing. This ice was like a surface of pink crystals: the recesses around the edges, like the spot where I found myself, were gleaming darkly; a hundred yards off was the centre, a flat floor of vivid translucency, illuminated by the fountain in the very middle.
It wasn’t large, the fountain where the two lich-ladies hovered. A narrow column reaching up twenty feet from the small base, which contained a depressed circle, catching the glowing magenta blood that pumped out of the column as though from a stump, a huge severed artery. The material from which the column and base had been crafted might once have been any colour, but the stains of centuries made it a perfect match for the vile substance spurting fitfully from its openings into the dank air.
Is this it? Is this the ‘crux’?
If Zel was still around, that meant I hadn’t truly been out of it. With a little effort I could still sense my wings, my horn. All I needed was a shield before whatever Nentheleme had done to my mind ebbed away completely, and Graima put me to sleep alongside the arch-wizard. That much would surely count as ill-will…
I’d already reinforced my circle twice before I even extended my wings, used them to lift myself off the ground and into a vertical position.
The three vampires reacted to Graima’s words, of course – they could hear their rulers’ dispute as well as I – but they hesitated. A few fatal moments of confusion, while they weighed the pros and cons of ripping into me – me, the person the archliches seemed to think might help resurrect the vampires’ dead master.
The nearest, a big male in a fine felt coat, made his decision, rushing me, but there was scarcely any hunger for the kill in his halting motions.
Far too little, far too late.
A force-blade, invisible to him, tore out his throat.
That wouldn’t be enough, of course, so I increased the speed of the rotation and fully decapitated him.
His friends didn’t turn to run quickly-enough, watching his return to Nethernum with faces filled with horror and amazement. I spread my next three shields more quickly than even they could flee, and they were carried on the crest of my barrier, flung through the air before my blades caught them up, divided them into chunks.
I noticed the gleam of tiny chains as mine and Shadowcloud’s necklaces fell to the ground amidst their belongings.
I turned to face the two remaining super-undead Zadhalites, keeping my eyes on them, staring at them from the shadows as I went to the pendants and retrieved them.
“You sh-should’ve killed me when you had the chance,” I panted in Mundic, settling my chain around my neck and pulling my hood up, trying not to shudder against the horrifying chill. “Well, hopefully, anyway. I never fought two women before. Not ones your age, anyway. How do you d-do it? You have to tell me your secret. You don’t look a day over two hundred, I swear it…”
After I had Shadowcloud’s necklace in place, his metallic mask still exuding its mist-effect, I built more defences, more blades. Graima, her sister’s mirror-image but for her gown being whitish where Aidel’s was red, sneered at me while I mocked them. She raised a hand, creating a ball of purple flame, and floated closer to me, outside the radius of Shield Twelve.
Aidel did not approach, but raised both arms at her sides, palms held horizontally.
An army of skeletal ice warriors, pink-crystal ribcages and skulls and weapons, rose from every section of the cavern outside my shielding, as if they had but slumbered there till now.
“When last we fought, thou didst best me,” she called, floating above her horde. “Thou hast now none of thy former boons; outnumbered, outmatched – what wilt thou do? Cry to thy gods again? I fear they cannot hear thee – not here. In this place, my god reigns!”
“Your god got his ass handed to him,” I snorted. “The only reins he knows are the ones Nentheleme used when she rode him like a poor little pony.”
Graima shrieked, tore at my shields – I remade them.
“Come on, time to give it up. You have no idea what kind of fire you’re playing with, you know. Last time we fought, I couldn’t summon anything either. Now? How do you like some red fire?”
Within my boundaries, I loosed my own hand-picked creatures. Eight of them.
The liches didn’t seem to like the look of Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks in particular.
Then I heard coughing, spluttering – I looked down beneath me, and saw Shadowcloud staggering to his feet.
My shields were blocking whatever Graima had been doing to him? No, it would be the amulet, finally kicking in.
“And he’s…” Shadowcloud was sick, then replaced his mask, growled, and looked up. “He’s not alone!”
He joined me in the air and set a flood of warmth into my flesh; I almost smiled, but the moment of pleasure and relief was halted in its tracks before it ever really arrived.
I could smell it – on his clothes, his breath – the blood. The weird, purple blood.
“Are… you okay, Shadowcloud?” I asked. I could hear the uncertainty in my own voice.
“Never better,” he said grimly, then looked across at me. “Can we fight now?”
As he surged into the air and called ordinary, orangey-looking fire into existence, I steeled myself.
We can’t fight now, but we might have to fight later.
Shadowcloud – a Sticktowner, a champion without airs and graces, a man I liked, damn it… What would the blood do to him, and in what kind of time-frame? Was there anything I could do to help him? Maybe, with the sphere…?
I couldn’t think about it now. I had to back him up.
Graima ripped into my shields more quickly than I could remake them, ultimately, but she had to avoid my blades, and we started a kind of long-range dance, back and forth. I’d never seen the burning hammers of bintaborax put to such good use as they were now, shattering not just icy skulls but turning whole bodies to slush as the demons waded into the battle. Whenever they seemed to be getting overwhelmed I swished nearer, knocking their assailants back to give them some room to swing their weapons. Meanwhile, on the other flank, Shadowcloud had raised his own army of elementals, pink-ice ones in humanoid shape, but flaming ones also came springing into existence; then Aidel melted the ceiling, quenching his fires in an instant. Just when it seemed Aidel had Shadowcloud on the ropes he responded with the lightning that was his true forte, and then their momentum was reversed again, him chasing her.
I’d been right before. The problem with lich-lords, undead lords of all kinds, really – they weren’t used to fighting. Not against champions, anyway. They sat on their thrones, brooded and plotted, forgetting what it was to truly live. Even with my shields up, Graima could’ve disoriented us by throwing illusions at us; Aidel could’ve brought the whole ceiling down…
Except she couldn’t, could she? Not here. Not where the Evil was concentrated…
“Feychilde?” Spiritwhisper’s voice came through suddenly over the link.
The link! Being deprived of it for so long during my trials in the sphere-chamber had driven all thought of it from my mind –
“Spirit! We’re –“
“You were right, they’re below the droppin’ tower!” Spirit finished my sentence for me. “Shadowcloud?”
The enchanter was busy re-establishing the link with the wizard but my mind went over his words one more time.
Below the tower…
Droppin’ tower…
It was then that it clicked. Not just why Aidel didn’t bring the cavern roof down. Why the ‘Green Tower’ had been chosen to house the sphere in the first place.
How we would save Shadowcloud.
“What – what in the name of all that’s holy do you think you’re thinking about?” Zel screamed in my inner-ear.
Ow! Cut that out! You know the plan’s a good one. I can always go wraith-form…
“’Good’? ‘Good’! I’ve never heard such a preposterous idea in my entire life – and you’ve some idea how long I’ve been around –“
By your own admission, you can’t remember most of it.
I grinned.
“Spirit, when you say below the tower – whereabouts are we, exactly?”
“Fang?” he said.
The druidess replied: “It’s beneath the cellar – Winterprince is about to smash his way down from the street but the vampires –“
“No!” I said. “Don’t. We need him to bring down the floors of the tower, from the bottom to the top. Let the sphere in the top of the tower fall right through the ground.”
It was Timesnatcher who spoke next.
“He’s right. Do it.”
There was a faint, telepathic grunt from Winterprince.
“But they’ll be buried!” Spirit cried. “The kinda mess you’re talking about…”
“Bury the demon-tower? Oh no. But bury the champions? No sweat.” Shadowcloud was muttering as he swerved around the twisting, ever-forking coils of ice Aidel was extending at him. “I can aid him from the underside, anyway, help bring it down –“
“No, don’t,” I cut in. “My shields won’t work against you. Am I right, Winterprince?” I chuckled to myself, readying a new Shield Nine for when the lich-fire shredded it. “You wouldn’t mind dropping a cavern on my head, would you?”
There was silence, then another faint telepathic grunt.
A couple of the others chuckled.
“Ill-will enough for me,” I concluded. “If some rocks do get through, then you’re up, Shadow. Stay within ten yards of me if you can. Winterprince, let me know when you’re going to begin.”
A horrible rending, a heaving, splintering CRACK followed immediately on the heels of my words. It was as though the world were being split in two – well, I supposed it sort of was – but this level of thunderous din I hadn’t expected.
“Warning enough for you?” Winterprince said.
I dismissed my eldritches. It was happening, and it didn’t take the lich-ladies long to realise what was going on. But by then, it was too late. The rock and ice were falling, dust flowing like waterfalls through the purple-lit air. We had two wizards, strong, in the prime of their power, whilst they had one, weakened by time. My shield kept us safe, while, outside its edges, they were buried in hundreds of tons of stone. Aidel’s elementals were crushed, or put out of my sight by mounds of rock.
Ka-koom! Ka-koom! Ka-koom…
The explosions became ever-more distant. Winterprince was working his way up, shattering each of the floors of the tower.
The liches, surrounded by their own shields, fought free of the boulders and struck at us with ever-increasing desperation. We defended ourselves, holding out, keeping them at bay.
“Shadow,” I thought at him, “you need to uncover the fountain-thing down there – I’m sure it’s survived quite unharmed – can you move the rocks aside? We have to drop the sphere in the ‘very crux of the crossed planes’.”
“Distract them. She’s gonna see what I’m doing as soon as I start.”
“On it.”
“It’s time,” I called to the sisters, still speaking Mundic – but even they couldn’t hear me over the din.
I summoned Zab into the air beside me and joined with him.
Six.
What had changed? I didn’t know – I knew only that my instinct was that it’d work.
“You’ve thought a few times of archmages in the ‘fullness of their power’, have you not?” Zel said, in an almost-formal tone. It didn’t sound like she was smiling.
I smiled for both of us.
When next I spoke, I augmented the sound, roared louder than the rocks falling:
“Aidel and Graima, archmages of the Diamond of the North, heed me! Your time is come, and that of your followers. The time of unmaking, the breaking of the spell that still clutches your souls, binds them to the shadowland!”
“No!” Aidel screamed, thrusting herself bodily into my shields, uncaring of the way they sliced into her undead flesh. “Thou mayest not do this thing, Feychilde!”
“Afraid I kind of have to,” I boomed, in a softer but no less-loud voice. “It’s not fair on your souls to try to live forever. You shouldn’t be afraid to move on when the sphere arrives. Take the opportunity to pass through the Gateway. You might not be Infernum-bound.”
“I will not risk even Etherium!” she hissed, almost bisected by the last force-blade to gouge her midriff, continuing regardless. “Thou dost not – canst not understand… We live – to save thy city!”
“Save us from what?” I asked. “Heresy? Incursions? We have it quite in hand, thank you.”
She halted, drew back, looking worse for wear. Her skull had a crack in it, discernible even at a distance.
Aidel and Graima exchanged a glance, then the wizard-lich rasped her response, using the air to bring the shattered voice to my vicinity.
“Save it from ye. From me. From archmagery.”
“What do you mean?”
“My husband, he who was perhaps the most-potent diviner of his time, saw it all – mixing the bloodlines was merely the genesis of the downfall: an unprecedented growth of archmagery in the world, focussed in thy Mund. And the power – the power is –“
She turned her head, jerked it to one side to look –
“Oh Kas,” Zel purred.
I knew what had come over her. I felt it too.
It was too late for answers.
Blinding green light backlit the boulders and the dust-rain – I could see the neat bows of spell-threads penetrating the stone, whirling as they fell –
The impact was silent, a thing of brightness, and coolness that swiftly passed away into warmth as the sphere absorbed the fountain and its putrid ‘Elixir’; warmth such as I could barely remember, like the hot bath protagonists enjoyed sometimes in stories, a luxurious plasma surrounding me, flowing all around me –
As the magic of the otherworld took hold and the light spread, cleansing the cavern, the street, the city, the last-rasped whisper of a dying lich was carried by dying winds to my ear:
“– then perhaps thou, Feychilde, canst seek out my memoirs, and in my place save this world that now spurns me.”
* * *
“Wow,” Timesnatcher said, finishing his cup of Flood Boy-provided wine.
“I know.”
“’Save the world’? Really?”
“I wish I caught the rest of her words – it was the sphere’s fault… She thought she had it all figured out. Or her husband did, at least.”
“Those who dabble in darkness oft come away half-blinded,” he murmured, looking down at the cracked paving of the square beneath us. “Gods know I’ve partaken of enough in my time. Today… You saw clearly where I saw only shadows, Feychilde.” He shook his head slowly.
“I don’t know about that,” I replied. “The Green Tower just called to me, is all. If Direcrown hadn’t been there already to help me, I doubt I’d have achieved much.”
“I don’t know about that. The vampire, and the Prince’s manifestation, clouded much of the future I could perceive.”
Didn’t seem to trouble Killstop, I noted.
“… I had no idea they could bring the night like that; never once did I see it. I’ll have to go back, study the mechanisms of the clock… But you saw the way, the true path, without the gift. I hope your little friend was helping you?”
Zel hadn’t come forward to speak to me during this whole conversation, which wasn’t entirely unusual, but it was almost as though she were hiding – and the fact she didn’t intrude in this very moment to make some kind of snappy remark, about being called my ‘little friend’ or about my doubts, was telling.
“I – don’t – like – arch-diviners!” she whispered, her tone cutting.
“To be honest, she wasn’t actually active… I suppose I might borrow insights via her power…” I frowned, thinking about it.
Is that why I’ve had such funny dreams lately? I wondered.
He looked away towards the west, towards the tower district. We were sitting together on the edge of the roof of one of the big buildings surrounding the Winter Door’s plaza, far enough from the portal that I wasn’t afflicted with the teeth-aching background hum. We could speak plainly – we were alone up here. The others had already retired to Mund, and the magisters who’d entered the moment they went through reporting our victory were now roaming far from us. And, of course, there were now no undead within the city’s bounds.
The green mist that had enveloped everything faded in minutes, leaving behind not a single inhabitant, corporeal or not-so-much; by the time I’d extricated the unconscious Shadowcloud from the sunken cavern and flew him out, it was already passing and my undead-senses were as quiet as they’d been when we first arrived in Zadhal.
I’d leave it to someone else to test whether we’d turn undead, using portals here. I’d taken enough stupid risks for one day, as far as I was concerned.
“They brought the night, but we brought them to a whole new realm,” I said at last. “We freed their souls, Timesnatcher. Or at least gave them the opportunity. And we did it together. Whoever made the sphere, whether it was this ‘Saphalar’ person the lich mentioned or just someone he knew – they understood the problem. It was them who did it, really.”
“The fountain?”
I nodded. “Whoever made the sphere planned it so that it could be dropped into place. It was like the fountain was casting a spell on them, all day, every day. Gods-damned Magisterium…”
“It was centuries ago, Feychilde. Let it go.”
“Why do you think Zakimel made everything go wrong for us? He got Rosedawn killed! And we would’ve risen again just like them, if we’d fallen.”
“I know. I had Rosedawn’s… remains… taken away for burial.”
My jaw dropped. “See, I hadn’t even been thinking about that. Good work, man.”
His jaw set in frustration. “Can you stop doing that, please?”
“Doing what?”
“Congratulating me. Thanking me. Praising me. Are you trying to belittle me, or is it just happening unconsciously?”
Belittle…? It couldn’t have been further from my mind.
“I… suppose it’s happening unconsciously,” I said slowly, trying to weigh his mood from the set of his frame. Perhaps the wine had had the opposite of its intended effect. “My apologies… I get that you’re frustrated – today didn’t go how you hoped – but…”
“No,” he cut me off, shaking his head again. “Never mind, Feychilde. I’m just whining because… because today you were our leader. You have to let it go, though. You can’t fight Zakimel.”
“I’m… erm… doing the eyebrow thing again.” I pointed at my mask’s right eye-slit.
He chuckled dryly, and I could sense some of the tension in him melting. “I can’t believe you actually said that to them… well, I can, obviously, I can see it now, but…”
“Oh, you should take a look at what I said to some of their bosses… there was this bit, before I headbutted the vampire…”
“Kastyr,” he said softly, and I hushed instantly. “Kastyr, you must understand this. The Magisterium… they’re beyond our remit. We can’t interfere.”
I shrugged. “I disagree. We’re champions. The gods sanction us, not men.”
“You saw that thing tonight, same as I. Gods are corrupt.”
I shook my head, remembering Nentheleme. “And men aren’t?”
“I didn’t think I’d hear you arguing on the side of divine authority. Do you think the ability of men to make their own decisions, rule their own fates, is a disadvantage? Would you have it all prescribed and proscribed from on-high?”
“No,” I said at once. “But a servant complaining about an abusive master should have a law to go to, to seek justice… When the law itself is the abusive master, who else is there to turn to but the gods themselves?”
“Is that how you see the magisters?” His eyes were keen, glinting, seeming almost coppery-coloured through the slits in his mask. “Abusive masters?”
I waved a hand at our surroundings. “They destroyed this. And they kept it from us, keep it still. They’re the shepherds and we’re the sheep – they keep half the flock well aside while they cull those with the thinnest wool for their meat.” Timesnatcher was smiling ingratiatingly at my metaphor, so I concluded, “And, sorry and everything, but I’m not really including you in the ‘we’ there. You’re the ‘they’.”
“Because I’m rich?”
“It stops you from being able to understand. I like you, Timesnatcher, and if it’s worth anything I certainly think you led us today – when you gave me orders and I ignored them, you didn’t tell me off… You’re a good leader, the right kind of leader, one who sees his mistakes, doesn’t hide from them… Everyone makes mistakes…” I thought of my rampage through the underworld after Morsus’s death, my overconfidence when I went hunting the vampires… Charging Vaahn… And Leafcloak and Dustbringer, thinking the same old tactics would work against superlative foes. “But you can’t know what it’s like to be me. I can’t know what it’s like to be you –“
“If your investments come along as nicely as I think they might, you may find out sooner rather than later what it’s like to be rich…”
“Maybe. But I won’t forget. I can’t forget.”
“I’ve been through the lives of the poorest in the city,” Timesnatcher replied wistfully, “and I can’t forget, either.”
“But you can’t be them, Timesnatcher. I doubt even an enchanter could pull off a trick that’d give them the true experience, what it’s like to actually grow up in the drop.”
The arch-diviner lowered his face, then when he looked up again his expression brightened. “And while you say you can’t know what it is to be me, you think you understand the highborn? You think you understand the burden of responsibility –“
“No, I don’t, but –”
“I do not imagine they toppled Zadhal lightly, my young friend. I imagine it was the last in a long line of ever-more-desperate attempts to stop the Heresy.“
“Mixing bloodlines? That’s what the Heretics hate?”
“Amongst other things…” he replied, pursing his lips uneasily.
I thought it over. It would make a certain amount of sense, given what the girl in Firenight Square had said.
‘Look at us.’
It was already plain that all archmages shared the blood of the Five, distant connections to nobility and whatnot. A lot could happen over a thousand years. But I shuddered to think that someone would find this reason-enough to seek to slaughter people indiscriminately.
“They think that mixing the bloodlines will result in more archmages,” I said. “Or less-controllable archmages, at least. In that I can hardly say they’re wrong –“
“In that case, on that topic you ought to hold, and say no more,” Timesnatcher reminded me gently. “Heresy may not be attended or repeated or interpreted, on pain of death.”
“On pain of death?” I said, rather shrilly.
“Nor ought one agree with them aloud,” he went on urbanely, “even if one has been under extraordinary pressure for the last several hours…”
“Hey, now – I wasn’t actually saying I wish there were less archmages, or that the blood of the Five only ran in the highborn families – obviously,” I gestured vaguely at my mage-robe, “but I just want to understand what they want to –“
“And therein lieth the crux of the problem.” He sighed. “In understanding, one becomes a heretic. Do you want to become a killer?”
“I… I don’t get it,” I confessed. “It’s a magical disease, is it? You listen to what they say, and you just… change?”
“Precisely.” The arch-diviner chuckled dryly. “The magical disease called persuasion.”
“You mean…?”
“It might be that there is nothing inherently magical to what the heretics do to their converts. It is said that those who follow the Heresy are shown a vision; they are not put under an enchantment, but their beliefs cannot be removed – nothing so straightforward, oh no. Unfortunately, every enchanter who has turned their hand to fixing a heretic has ended up one themselves. At the school, young diviners live in fear of seeing something that will drive them to kill and kill and kill… I think it is akin to this.”
I stared at him in shock.
“No,” he went on, “their creed, or their vision, is persuasive. Apparently the way of life that means killing every innocent you can get your hands on is incredibly compelling, once someone’s shown it to you.”
I swallowed in a dry throat. “Maybe we should do something… I mean, what if they’re right? About part of it, I mean. What if –“
He laid a steady, sturdy hand on my shoulder. “When you lead the Gathering, and must weigh the counsel of dozens of champions, many of whom you’ve saved from certain death a dozen times, and who have saved you in kind – then you will remember Zadhal, and our conversation. Then, you will understand the value of your hypotheticals, and what we did here today.”
I reeled, trying to recover from this – prophecy?
Is he actually saying I will lead the champions?
He couldn’t know that, surely – other diviners would interfere with a vision like that – wouldn’t they?
“Do you see the danger in them now?” He laughed, then flashed to his feet. “Come on – let’s go find this Aidel’s book. One touch of my power will tell me if it’s safe to read or if it’ll turn you into the massacrer of children.”
I let him go ahead, and followed him on uncertain wings.
* * *
We flitted through the ruins for almost an hour. It was now getting close to midnight, but there was nothing untoward about being here in the darkness anymore. If anything it felt, well, magical – an empty city, snow billowing… A magister-band stationed at the remains of the Green Tower was renewing our protective spells and flight every fifteen minutes – even if they were inferior, the spells of mere mages would still do at a pinch – and Timesnatcher was stretching each interval out for us, allowing us more time to comb through the shattered laboratories and libraries before Zakimel’s lot got their hands on them. I’d long-since let Gilaela go back to Etherium to save myself the inevitable jokes, but even without the glittery radiance I got by okay – I needed little light to see by, and as far as I could tell the arch-diviner would’ve been just as happy with his eyes closed. As such I didn’t bother with any illusions or other light-sources I could’ve produced.
We stood, the two of us, in the dusty darkness of a tower-room, alone but for the artefacts of a bygone era.
“Do you actually know what you’re looking for?” I called to him across the stacks of books, time-worn volumes of dubious value. He’d been ‘feeling’ increasingly strange to my power, but I couldn’t quite discern what was going on.
“It’s lain dormant, buried under the vampire’s potencies for a long time,” he said. “The traces are almost cold. It might be that it won’t speak to me, but I would be most surprised if it were hidden entirely from my sight. There should be more traces to be found… Should we continue?”
He was putting the weight of the decision on me?
We’d explored what we could of the Green Tower’s basement, and I’d stayed behind him while he went from place to place, from one horrid, bloody room to the next – after the first twenty minutes we’d started investigating the other towers, and now here we were, no closer to answers than we had been right at the start. A number of objects had called out to my senses, and in the undead archmages’ chambers there’d been opulent (if ancient) furnishings accompanying spell-worked swords, a number of wizardry-imbued pieces of armour… but for the last thirty minutes everything I’d perceived had been an ensorcelled item of inauspicious nature. The only interesting ones were a pair of mouldy boots granting the wearer a light tread, if I was reading the runes right, and a bracelet designed to imbue the wearer with a strong grip (probably made for an old person). There’d been one book, but it was just a mass of pulp, sitting as it did unprotected beneath a bare, rotten windowsill; the covers were proofed against burning, and, to add insult to injury, it was a text of divination.
I’d expected more, frankly. Had the place been so-thoroughly picked-over already by the previous treasure-hunters?
I somehow doubted it. We’d been taken to the more-boring areas, that was all.
“Is there some reason you want me to be the one to decide?” I asked. “You’re supposed to be the arch-diviner.”
“I don’t think we’re going to get any further tonight,” he said at last, carefully placing a thin volume back where he found it. “I… There’s something – something ahead of us. I can’t see what’s coming – for us.”
I stared at him.
“Oh, damn it, fine,” he said in a resentful tone, and slammed his hand down on the shelf a second time –
A new book was there, bound in pale human leather, stamped with a single Vaahn-rune on its cover. Along the spine was a series of glyphs I couldn’t read at this distance.
No wonder he’d been triggering my sorcerous senses lately.
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
I kept my voice level: “When did you find it, Timesnatcher?” I was more curious than angry.
“Fifteen minutes ago. I’ve been trying to find a route to avoid it, because I don’t think it’s safe to read – but every path I travel ends in trouble between you and I. That I wish to avoid at all costs. Everything about those futures screams I’m doing something wrong.” He smiled, tired-looking, and seemed to wait pensively for a moment before saying, “How do you intend to respond?”
“Well at last, I found you!” a voice cried out above us, cutting us off.
For a split second I didn’t recognise her without the obvious Onsolorian accent, but before I looked up to see Em floating above us I twigged it was her and moved higher to meet her, darting between the sections of broken roofing.
She was in her Stormsword apparel, the rising-phoenix mask and teal-coloured hood, and when I ascended into the snow storm and kissed her it just brought back memories of last night… her flesh, so much of her skin in contact with my own… I almost shuddered, and felt the same quiver of pleasure pulse through her body as I held her.
“Ah – I believe you had something to report?” Timesnatcher interrupted after giving us a second or thirty. “Stormsword?”
I noted the strain in his voice.
Can’t he tell what she’s going to say?
I expected an update on Shadowcloud’s condition, something similarly ominous.
“Oh, ze – I mean, the, guard…” Em took a moment to catch her breath, “the guards are saying that Rosedawn’s… her body – it has gone missing. The courier, found alive three miles from where he was last seen – from where he last saw himself, he says, once they found him and untied him. They…”
Em faltered. We watched, looking down from fifteen feet as Timesnatcher blurred.
The kind of incessant motion into which he’d entered was uncanny. It was as though he’d been painted-on to reality then smeared across its surface – I drifted closer to him, back through the roof, as if to reassure myself he still possessed depth, solidity…
Suddenly I was almost on the ground, and he was standing before me – his fingers around my wrist were painful despite the satyr-flesh I was partaking in.
I didn’t have shields up, and his violence startled me. He held my right hand palm up, and his eyes behind the mask were closed.
“Savarre… oh, oh… this hand – did you have a dagger, Feychilde?”
Did I have a…
“A dagger?” I swallowed. “Duskdown took the only dag-”
I lost all breath, all consciousness, for a single instant. As though the world stopped and restarted.
“-ger…” I finished the word explosively, looking around in amazement.
Snowflakes, frozen on the air.
Em, unmoving above me, not a hair stirring in the breeze.
No – for there was no breeze.
“I’ve taken you as deep as you can go,” Timesnatcher said, loosening his grip on my wrist only slightly. “What – what is Duskdown to you?”
“I honestly don’t know how to answer that. He seems to have a plan for me, and he’s warned me off trying to take him down…”
“Can I ask – for a favour?” He suddenly sounded scared. “Will you shield me, Feychilde? A-against any ill-will?” He licked his lips.
“What is it, Timesnatcher?”
There was an awful hollowness to my voice, a borrowed terror that came in recognition of the emotion that gripped him. He hadn’t been afraid like this even once throughout the whole day, not when facing thousands of enemies, not when facing a deity.
“It’s him. Duskdown.”
“If I put a shield on you,” I said slowly, mind struggling to keep up, “it can’t go too far from me or it’ll weaken, dissipate, according to the books. I’m working on getting a better range, but if you’re going back I’d –“
Time span again, everything desynchronised.
There was a fluidity, a motion, like being pulled deep under the water in a terrible current that goes only downwards, ever downwards, into the heart of the world where Wyrda ruled the dark under-oceans, miles from the light.
“– have to –”
A single normal moment, a moment of blue fire, and I knew I was crossing the Winter Door – then the dark depths washed over me a final time before it was over.
“– come with you… Where are we?”
The gardens were small for a building of this size. There was a neat rectangular wall eight feet high enclosing the estate; trees loomed beyond the wall whichever way I looked, even through the silvery gate, clearly overgrowing the pathway that was the only way in and out. The ivy covering the building’s peach-painted exterior had been recently trimmed, and the rose-bushes were expertly maintained. I looked up at the big mansion, its three storeys pale against the night sky.
No lights were lit within. The stillness of this slowed-time spell he’d put me under was creepy, sending shivers up my arms.
“My home. We need help.” He went up the steps and opened the door, pulling me along with him. “Come – she’s locked the window and I can’t keep you like this forever, not without paying the price. I need my full faculties. There’ll be hell to pay if I just smash my way in…”
“Where – where’s Em?”
“I did not bring her.”
“… Why?”
“I neither need nor trust her. She is Henthae’s. Zakimel’s.”
It chilled me to hear him speak of her in such a manner, but I could hardly argue – not with him – not when his very words set my own doubts aflame.
As we entered the hall and flew together up to the shadowed balconies looking down upon the entryway, I settled shields about him, shields separate from the ones I put around both of us. Even if Duskdown didn’t intend me ill-will, he still shouldn’t have been able to get through the barriers so long as he intended Timesnatcher ill-will – but this wasn’t the time to test it. An independent defence made the most sense in this situation.
At first I thought the shapes’ rotations were slowed like everything else here, but I blinked and saw with satisfaction that it’d just been a relic of my fearful imagination – they would still operate under the effects of the diviner’s magic.
It was only as we reached the upper floors that I realised what I was sensing.
“Timesnatcher…”
“Just here – in here –“
Doors, narrow passages – a bedchamber.
I could tell immediately that something was wrong, even before I saw Lightblind’s corpse. A debris of fine objects littered the room; one of the bed’s four posts had been buckled, caved in. The smells of death were heavy on the air, but there was blood in only one place: ‘DUSKDOWN’, the characters drawn by his finger, the red word written on the mirror.
Timesnatcher released me, and before I even realised that his fierce grip on my wrist was suddenly alleviated, gone, he had already cleaned everything up – the mirror was clear once more, the buckled post of the bed righted and the debris swept aside; the masked corpse in its gleaming white robe was across his lap as he sat on the edge of the bed, his head bowed and his shoulders shaking.
“Perri! Perri, no, Perri…”
Quite how long he’d been sitting there like that, I didn’t know. But no amount of clearing up would eradicate the image from my mind.
The blood on the mirror, long dried, each letter having run, dripping at the bottom edges so that they were twice the length they ought to be. Giant, gaunt letters.
The little items on the ground: the platinum figurine of a house-cat, looking pleased with itself; a tiny ring inset with three diamonds; a small, cracked pocket-watch.
The champion’s body, hanging beside the bed. The Bagger Boy’s dagger, punched through her mask at a crack in its brow, stamping Lightblind’s head to the wall.
“T-Timesnatcher,” I said, voice breaking –
He whipped his head around as if to glare at me. “You – your dagger – how? What is this, Feychilde?”
“I suppose,” I said thickly, raising my wet eyes to the ceiling so I didn’t have to see such a glorious champion flopping around lifelessly across his knees, “he’s… erm… Oh drop it all.”
He already knew what I looked like. I removed my mask, pawed at my eyes while I thought out loud.
“He’s trying to drive a wedge between us. A dagger. Whatever he wants from me, it involves us being at odds with each other. He –“ I drew a quivering breath, forced myself to look back down, meet the arch-diviner’s eyes. “He knows you can’t fight him. He knows you’ll have to blame me instead.”
Timesnatcher was shaking his head softly but I continued:
“He kn-knows you know you c-can’t blame me but you have to.” Revulsion, a sickness comprised of anger and sorrow, rose up through my vacant innards – I wanted to throw up, I wanted to put my fist through the wall, I wanted to fall to my knees – the opposed urges kept me trapped, pinned in the moment, disgust rolling up and down my taut skin in waves. “Why? Why, Duskdown? Why did you have to do this?”
One urge finally won out – kneeling.
I fell forwards, then sat back on my feet, setting my mask down next to me.
I looked down at the metallic half-face, designed to complement a grinning visage.
I am not Feychilde, I thought with a shudder.
Whatever answer I’d expected the universe to provide to my rhetorical question, the growled words of the arch-diviner were not it – words so deep and strangled I could barely discern them:
“I k-killed his w-wife today.”
Then, at last, he broke, bursting into dry sobs.
I wanted to return to Em, to my brother and sister. See them all, explain everything. Maybe even pick up an incredibly-dangerous text that’d been haphazardly placed on a pile of books in a random tower.
But first I knelt on the floor of Timesnatcher’s bed-chamber while he cradled his dead lover, knelt there and listened to the wept words of a crushed hero.
I might not have been Feychilde, not right now, but I was still a champion, damn it. I was there for those who needed me most.
Lightblind, Leafcloak, Rosedawn were gone. The others could wait.
In this moment, the one who needed me most was Timesnatcher.
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