COBALT 7.10: FALLING
“I am the stone that turns and turns then stops. I am the loyalty implied by the vow. I am the toil of arduous undertaking. I am Lord Oath.”
– from the Glaivan Creed
No one but me.
I waited until the last moment. The streets of Rivertown rushed up at me as I sank towards them like a stone. There was no wind in my hair, no drumming in my ears. In breathless silence, I went through the darkness to my death.
As far as she cared.
I was numb. The sorrow bit down with bitter teeth on my brain, clamping my mind in place so that my thoughts couldn’t move, locking it into the moment of despair. It was only as the ground approached at a sickening speed that instinct took back over.
Instinct, and indignation.
She really is trying to kill me.
I dispelled my eldritches save for my sylph, and fell through an ethereal portal. Avaelar caught me with fifty feet to spare, soaring with me through a dark-green sky, my back to his chest. I gulped in the sweetly-scented airs like a drowning man.
The influences of vampire and wraith negated, my native attitude was still taking shape, my true assessment of the situation coalescing like a quivering thing, creeping into the light.
“Carry me up, that way!” I cried, nodding.
“Very good, Feychilde,” my sylph huffed, “yet it appears you are once more engaged in perilous activity. Is it truly advisable for you to ascend, if –”
“Up!” I roared.
He obeyed. We ripped away from the landscape below, but now that we were high above the intervening obstacles it only made the strange hills of web and reed, the tremendous tree-pillars of the distance plain to the eye. I felt sick, and screwed my eyes shut.
The vampire had been clouding my thoughts again; under its influence I wasn’t just misinterpreting my own emotions, but everyone else’s. The truth of what Tyr Kayn had done to me, done to Emrelet, finally entered my bone marrow.
My plan had been to lift myself back up to a decent elevation then return to Materium, using Zab and the wraith to hide me this time, until I could start dropping demons on her. Now, having taken a few seconds to think it through, I decided that I didn’t want to fight her. I feared her, yes, but I feared hurting her even more. She’d been deluded by enchantment, as much as it pained me to admit it. She was a victim here, of Lovebright’s lies – and my own.
I should’ve just told her about Nighteye…
But there was nothing to confirm it. Nothing to tell me she’d have acted any differently, finding out then instead of now. If anything, this current performance might be tame in comparison to how she could’ve acted, if I’d said something after the battle at the library. I’d have been right there, in the middle of everyone.
No escape. No enchanter willing to plumb the depths of my mind to uncover the truth, my innocence, for fear of becoming corrupted along with me.
What’s done is done. I need to get the twins.
My main goal now was to lie low. Stay safe.
I opened my eyes for just a moment then jerked my head around, shouting, “That way!”
Avaelar swung about, bearing me in the direction of home.
It wasn’t comfortable, being carried like this, but it was a damn sight better than being hunted across Mund.
I would get home, and I would take the twins, take my money… and that would be it. We would go – live wherever they wanted, do whatever they wanted… We didn’t owe this city anything. I’d paid our debts. I’d done my best. I’d saved the lives I could save. Now I owed it to them.
It was, truly, over. I had no way to proclaim my innocence that anyone would be willing to listen to. Maybe I’d come up with something… one day…
Can I ever come back?
Surely, one day, I’d find a way. Surely…
I shed my tears in Etherium where no one else could see me but my bound slave, just a stupid sorcerer being awkwardly carried through the weird sky by a sylph. When at last I came back to the material plane I was ready.
Ready to leave it all behind.
* * *
Hiding behind Hontor and Sons, I retrieved my glyphstone from my satchel and send out my mind to my brother and sister.
Xantaire answered.
“Kas. They’re sleeping, I think.“
Xan didn’t look the slightest bit tired; her eyes still had a wildness to them, a redness, that could only be the ongoing effect of the nightmare to which I’d exposed her. Getting beat up on her doorstep, getting her son’s face sliced open…
I cast it all aside. She got rich for it, though. She always knew the risks, since that first day, with the Cannibal Six.
“Is anyone there?” I asked. “Over Mud Lane, or hanging around?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” she said sourly. “Am I supposed to be on darkmage duty, now? Is that what you pay me for?”
“Xan, please don’t… It’s… It’s actually the champions I’m looking out for. Em…” How to explain it? “Em’s convinced I’m a heretic. It’s gone too far, Xan. I’ve got to go.”
“Go?”
“Leave. Leave Mund, at least till things blow over. Don’t worry, I’ll give you enough money to take Xas, take your granddad and find anoth-“
“So you’re just going to run?” she demanded. “How’s that going to look?”
“Better than the alternative, trust me.” Better than my headless corpse. “I can always try to clear my name, once it’s obvious I’m not a –” I was going to say ‘not a killer’, but then I remembered Linn’s blood splashing across the door. “Not a heretic,” I finished lamely.
“And you want to, what, just make them go with you?”
“It isn’t safe here! Not for me, not for them! Please, Xan. Please, will you wake them? I can’t come and hang around, they’ll be coming for me and if the twins aren’t ready to –”
“Kastyr.” Timesnatcher’s voice was level as he descended alone into the alley, keeping far from my shields, and I immediately lowered the crystal.
Wizard-flight on him, I noted. Others won’t be far behind.
I cast out with my senses but I’d only rejoined with the wraith after returning to my home dimension. I couldn’t perceive anything, other than with the hairs on the back of my neck that were standing to attention, danger-sense in the extreme just pouring all over me, with or without eldritch augmentation.
“Irimar,” I acknowledged him, keeping my voice from trembling. “You at least must be able to see through this charade. I’m no killer, no heretic –”
“I warned you,” he said softly, hovering above the river of drop in which I stood. “I warned you, and you didn’t listen.”
I opened my mouth to retort but he was continuing.
“Yes, Kastyr, there were futures in which you entered the Thirteen Candles. But those futures are dead now. The other future – the other place – is, and has always been, your true destiny.”
I realised what he meant, and my shields almost fell away broken, such was the panic that lanced through my chest.
I might’ve called them a curse, but to put me there and take away my powers… the fact that this was even being discussed made my skin crawl.
How long did I have? Could I convince him?
“Not Zyger,” I pleaded. “It’s not Heresy, Irimar. It’s just the dragons –”
“I give you a chance!” he roared. “Where is Tanra? Did she tell you? Look at me! If she too –”
I started braying laughter. I couldn’t help myself.
He can’t see her.
‘I’ll keep everyone safe.’
At a hidden signal, a telepathic prompt, they revealed themselves.
Netherhame and Spiritwhisper. Sunspring and Fangmoon. The four of them were floating there, above the alley.
Even Fang… Even she’s come for me…
“I know it’s not Heresy – not yet.” Timesnatcher moved a little closer to me. “Only for this reason alone have I been permitted to deny the headsman his shot at your neck. But it will be Heresy. Do not bother attempting to deny it. I have seen it. You have been consumed by lies, Kastyr. This is your only way forward.”
“Into the dark?” My voice sounded like a child’s to my own ears. “That’s no way forward, T-Timesnatcher. That’s –“
“You lied!” he screamed. “You misled me! Me!”
“For his life!” I clenched my fists. “What would you have done to Nighteye? Tell me, tell –”
The enchanter, who’d once teamed up with me at fortify and driven me mad with his constant elbowing, spoke over me.
If I’d thought Em’s voice harrowing at times, it was nothing compared to his. It didn’t cover distance. It spoke within me, bubbling up in my brain like an exploding geyser.
“ENOUGH.”
I still wore his amulet, Spiritwhisper’s magic at my breast. There was no warning. A pulse swept through my head. Brute force attack.
The blackness I feared swallowed me, and I was gone.
* * *
The floor. Cold stone. I am there again, at Aidel’s mercy. The lich-lord is coming for me.
Shadowcloud…
I awoke fully, coming to my senses and pushing myself up to a half-sitting position.
Where am I?
The darkness was, if anything, more complete than it had been with my eyes shut. Not a glimmer of light broke into the chamber in which I’d been placed.
The cell in which I’d been imprisoned… I corrected myself.
Is this Zyger? I questioned.
But no – I still had my power. I could feel it. Subdued, weakened somehow, but still there.
It might’ve been a huge empty room, or a tiny one – I couldn’t tell from here in the middle of the floor, and I didn’t feel a pressing urge to explore. I curled up in a ball instead, shivering.
Nentheleme… give me strength!
But she couldn’t hear me – not because of where I was, but what I was. I’d shirked my duty. I’d acted as an agent of intimidation and violence. I was properly censured.
They’d taken my robe and mask, my satchel and amulets, leaving me in my tunic and pants. They’d even taken my boots, and my bare feet were like blocks of ice. The cold was permeating my skin, frost creeping into my bones, making it hard to breathe – I suspected that, were there light to see by, those halting breaths would’ve been misting on the air.
They really don’t care if I live or die.
A million tattered thoughts rolled through my head. People, places, events. Regrets.
Was it possible Tyr Kayn slipped through the net and returned, to cast me down?
Linnard Reyd’s face, exploding in red.
I clenched my teeth and whined a bit. There wasn’t a sylph, wasn’t even a rat to hear me now.
It was my fault. It was all my fault. I would reap what I’d sown.
But no. The damage had already been done, hadn’t it? My actions on Em’s – on Emrelet’s doorstep merely forced her hand. Even if I hadn’t shown up last night (what I assumed to be last night…) she still would’ve been after me. I still would’ve ended up here. It was, as Irimar said, quite simply my destiny.
Destined to give it all for this city. Destined to have it all spat right back in my face.
Did I slaughter a thousand innocents? No. Did I wage a decade-long vigilante war, executing those whom I pleased? No. I was like Neverwish. A victim of circumstance. I was innocent, or relatively-so at least, condemned for simple mistakes, errors of judgement…
Or was it even an error? Were the heretics even really wrong? After what Emrelet did to Nighteye, something in me had transformed and I was still having trouble identifying all the ramifications. I’d witnessed the brutality of summary justice up close but it didn’t make me want to shy away from violence – it’d just made me angrier. I couldn’t blame it all on the vampire because I could feel it as I lay there, and he couldn’t have been farther from me than he was right now.
At last I resolved to find out some more about my surroundings. I slowly got to my feet, and shivered anew as their soles touched the frosty floor for the first time.
The cell, my new world, was small. I’d barely moved, my arm outstretched before me, when my numb fingers made contact with the wall. Six feet by eight feet roughly, and I could find no aperture, no door; they must’ve used wizardry to seal it back up behind me once I’d been shoved in here. A subtle bit of air-flow told me there might be a hole in the ceiling but I couldn’t find it – the roof was low enough for me to touch at full extension, yet it appeared to be nothing but seamless rock when I explored it. Maybe my fingers were just too numb right now.
There wasn’t even a bucket. They clearly expected me to just do my business in the corner. It wasn’t like they cared.
I sighed. I was hesitant to use my powers, because I knew there was no way they’d have put me in here if they thought I could escape.
Portals? They wouldn’t open. I could feel some form of obstruction, clever runes inscribed somewhere suppressing not only my power but the portals themselves. I might’ve broken through, given time and energy and… will.
Force-lines? They responded, but what use were they really? When they came for me, it would be with an enchanter. Resistance would last only so long. And doubtless there were other shields waiting to meet mine, out beyond the cell’s walls. I wouldn’t be permitted to harm anyone, even if I’d wanted to.
I hadn’t taken the opportunity to rejoin with my gremlin and satyrs after my trip to Etherium – I’d made time for the wraith and sylph, but it didn’t matter now anyway. They were gone. Maybe Bor had been able to make me expel them. Maybe they’d shoved my comatose body through a gateway, forcing their expulsion from me.
I wasn’t phasing my way out of this one.
I sat down again, back against the wall, but the chill quickly overcame me, persuading me to stay on my feet, pace about a bit.
It didn’t last long – my toes couldn’t take it for more than ten minutes.
The very moment I sat back down again and fell on my other side, curling my arms around myself in desperate attempt to warm up, a voice penetrated my head.
“Kas.”
Even if he detested me now, it was like a gift from the heavens to hear his voice, a messenger sent from the Horned One herself.
“Bor!”
“Kas… I was supposed to make you sleep until your sentencin’… You’re supposed to be awake to hear that, I guess… And I can’t go in a heretic’s mind when they’re sleepin’, can I? But I had to wake you. I couldn’t let it go.”
The hope of Yune sprung up in my breast, the fire in my soul igniting anew.
“Bor – thank you! If you can make the wizards set me free, give me a hole, I’ll be out of Mund, out of your hair –”
“That isn’t why I’m here.”
The iciness returned, chill covering my skin like a breath of fog I couldn’t see, colder than ever.
“Look, Spirit – I didn’t do anything wrong – and Em killed Nighteye –”
“Nothing wrong? You struck out at her –“
“That isn’t how it happened!”
“What? Are you serious? You droppin’ darkmage!” His psychic bellow was difficult to absorb. “I trusted you. And I thought I felt betrayed after Neverwish! Man. What’s next? You goin’ to tell me you didn’t hit her dad either, it’s all lies, right? I don’t care! I only want to know about Tanra. She’s missin’, no one can find her – did you do somethin’ to her?”
“To her? Gods, man, no! She ran, after…”
“After Em saw you together.”
I scowled in the darkness, hearing him use her name like that.
“I see your mind, Kas. I won’t delve too deep, but I can see your jealousy, your hate. Fine. Maybe you didn’t kill her. But you poisoned her. You stole my girlfriend. Now maybe I’ll steal yours.”
“No – Bor! Spirit! Please! Spiritwhisper! Borasir!”
But it was too late. He was gone, and he didn’t even put me back to sleep, didn’t grant me even that small mercy.
I grew hungry, thirsty, tired – eventually the exhaustion took over, and I stretched myself out on the floor again, welcoming the cold, welcoming the threat of unconsciousness, death. My mind slipped away into fantasy. I remembered the rain falling as we made our way from the Tower of Mourning to the Diamond Mare, that first time. I remembered the scents of the shrine of Yune when the betrayer took me to enter Etherium, the morning I found Zabalam and Avaelar.
I remembered the taste of my wizard’s lips. Her smile. Her smile…
But most of all, it was the real start of it all. The Cannibal Six. Lord Objectionable and the Bone Ring. Kicking the grave.
Leaving the twins to go there that fateful morning. Going alone, so that I could finally vent my pent-up grief.
The twins…
What if I never went, never kicked their grave, never met Zel? Would I still just be Kas, oblivious to everything that was really happening in the city, in the world?
No. Because we would’ve died in the first Incursion. Tanra might’ve died without me, and, even if she’d become Killstop anyway, there’s nothing to suggest she’d have sent Ciraya to Mud Lane without Feychilde in her visions.
But I couldn’t placate myself with that fact. Thoughts of the Incursion only made me think of the vulnerable people I’d left behind – the very notion that I’d never see any of them again made me sink into the prospect of death with a renewed sense of surrender.
There was something to renouncing it all that smacked of dishonour. It wasn’t what the gods wanted. It displeased me on a fundamental level of my being to be abdicating that very being, letting it go.
I couldn’t blame the gods; nor could I explain myself to them, if the time came. I was in a hell of my own creation, a dreadful waiting room, anticipating the gateways of the Twelve Hells opening for me.
Jaid. Jaroan. Please be okay. Please be safe. I’ll – I failed you, like they failed me, failed all of us.
Forget me. Just erase me from your minds and try to live. Most of all, try to be free. Do it better than I did.
Perhaps I could live in that freedom; perhaps I could let it be my salvation, taking me up to Celestium despite my crimes. The shadowland beckoned, but it wouldn’t be the end. Not if there was Justice.
For I knew – it was only in death that I might now find a freedom of my own.
* * *
My skin was warm once more; almost uncomfortably so, the fierce itching on my face and arm only exacerbated by the heat’s dissonance with my last memories. My eyes flew open, and there was light – light! – so I blinked, attempting to make sense of my new surroundings. It took me a moment to realise that I had a huge, disgusting gag in my mouth – it must’ve been there for some time. My fingers and wrists were locked down in metal bonds. I couldn’t move my head either, not with the way I was strapped into my seat, my cage – so I stared forwards instead, taking in what I could.
A blazing hearth, just a few feet from me on my right. I was elaborately chained into a kind of chair, a contraption that was located on the rug in front of the fire. The room was an opulent mess of bookshelves and paintings, arranged with no eye for taste, only wealth. Directly before my immobile feet, an extremely well-groomed (and extremely well-fed) dog was stretched out, basking in the warmth. Beyond, there was a table at which an almost equally well-groomed (and disproportionately well-fed) man was sitting. He had an orange moustache and a badly-disguised bald-spot and he was eating his dinner loudly, almost uncouthly, slurping down strips of beef, clinking cutlery each piece of which would equal in value to the yearly pay of a Sticktowner.
I was no longer hungry or thirsty. Was it a nourishment somehow achieved through druidry, or had they simply fed me under enchantment? Who had cleaned me? I couldn’t tell what I was wearing, but it was no longer my tunic and pants.
This gag… the sudden heat… all this humiliation… unnecessary.
Why? Why? What did I do to them?
Behind the rich man, arms folded across their chests, were Stormsword and Spiritwhisper, masked and stern-seeming. Now that I saw them together, thought of their names in tandem like that, I saw how alike they were, how good of a match they might make. She was always too good-looking for me. It was just a dragon’s whisper in an old lady’s ear anyway. It was all wrong from the beginning.
But my loathing for the enchanter suddenly crystallised, setting into the shape it would now hold forever, a blackened blade plunged into ice-water and achieving its final, lethal edge. If he’d thought he’d felt my jealousy, my hate before, what must he have been feeling now?
Give me access to my vampire right here and I’d kill you, Spiritwhisper.
In front of the heavyset man were two other champions, their backs to me. Timesnatcher and Fangmoon. It seemed that Timesnatcher was speaking, but I couldn’t make out his words over the crackle and roar of the flames… then he gestured to Fangmoon.
I saw her nod. She hesitated first – almost glanced at me, Mortiforn bless her soul – but she nodded all the same. I could imagine the pressure she was under to submit.
This… Fang… he’s… he’s treating it as a test for her… her loyalty… Testing that she hasn’t been tainted somehow by Nighteye…?
A test!
White-hot fury was injected into my veins.
How did I ever think myself a good judge of character? How did I think myself smart? I trusted him! I thought him a man of principle, someone to look up to, someone to idolise! He was the demon in the human skin all along. He was Duskdown’s true enemy. And I betrayed him. I betrayed Duskdown when he needed me to stop him being sent to Zyger by this foul thing… I betrayed the one person who wanted to take Direcrown out of the picture, right then and there, when it really mattered…
How stupid could I have been to ever believe in Irimar Nemmeneth?
My fingers were immovable inside the metal glove but that didn’t mean a thing. Pure anger built the shield without me making a single gesture towards its creation – blue lines started whirling –
The anger fled me, replaced between one moment and the next with a kind of overwhelming embarrassment, the kind that made you want to cringe and crawl and hide your face.
Spirit…
The moment my shield withdrew itself, Timesnatcher was next to me. He was still speaking and I could now make out his words.
“… Liberator of Zadhal cannot be treated as a common darkmage, or even an uncommon one. We can’t let it go public, my lord. The potential unrest amongst the public – it might be that the champions are never trusted again.”
Mr. Bald-Spot just gave a non-committal ‘hmm’, audible across the room now that he’d increased his volume, and continued slurping his food.
So Irimar doesn’t really want me to live. He just doesn’t want his own reputation tarnishing in the process.
“Much of what Feychilde has done was not his fault.” It was hard, listening to Emrelet talking in that faux-highborn accent, the accent she’d adopted after my incessant badgering about taking up the mantle of champion. It didn’t fit her, or it fit her all too well; I couldn’t decide which. She was projecting her words to Timesnatcher at my side.
Then her voice hardened and broke, a hint of Onsoloric slipping through the cracks: “Yet much was his fault. I don’t know if you vere provided with a copy of Mistress Henthae’s report, my Lord Audient, but he struck my own… my father vithout cause, using supernatural strength.”
Struck. Not ‘struck down’, or ‘killed’ or ‘nearly killed’, gods be praised… Yet, even still, she’s going ahead with it, arguing for my execution.
“However, the strain he was under on Moonday is clearly a mitigating factor – he saved Mund.” Timesnatcher placed a hand on my shoulder and I clenched down with my teeth on the gag, trying to jerk away from him, heedless of the pain of my straps. “Not for the first time.”
“Not on his own, he didn’t,” Spirit said.
Mr. Bald-Spot rang a little bell beside his plate and a servant rushed forwards from somewhere behind me, already producing a handkerchief from their top pocket. They dabbed at his mouth gently for a few seconds, then he spoke in my hearing for the first time. His voice wasn’t quite what I’d have called nasal, but it was getting there.
“Oh, very well, Timesnatcher. I shall dispense justice as you recommend. I’m afraid, Stormsword, that the kind of spectacle you’re pining for is quite out of the question.”
It was only as I came to focus on his moving lips, mercifully clean now of gravy and other juices, that I noticed the pendant hanging on a fine platinum chain about his neck. Three small gavels, the largest crowned with a wreath of roses.
This… joke of a man… This is a judge?
“His monetary proceeds shall be sought out and seized, of course.” He picked up his cutlery once more, the patterns on the precious metal objects gleaming in the firelight where they weren’t occluded by gravy. “The miscreant shall be committed to Magicrux Zyger, and there’s simply no more needs be said on the matter.”
With a triumphant note in his voice, Timesnatcher turned from me and said, “Magister!”
Suddenly everything changed again. My vision blurred; the gag in my mouth disappeared and without realising it I was now gritting my teeth, clenching my jaw painfully. No plunge into blackness greeted me this time. I swooned, dizzied by myriad colours and half-glimpsed vistas, feeling nauseous – more than nauseous – like I was sitting on the edge of a cliff looking down – like I was flying without the twisted touch of a wraith or a friend-slaying wizard to aid me.
Like I was moving with an arch-diviner.
Killstop? Did you save me? Am I free?
I screwed my eyes shut, fighting down the urge to retch, empty an already-empty stomach, cough up bitterness and dust. I whimpered instead, the sound pulled from me involuntarily, motion-sickness dragging vocal chords from my throat and playing the strings like a harp.
Tanra? Please?
And, as unpredictably as it had begun, it stopped – I stopped. The scene before me had been replaced and I was walking now, not sitting. Not bound by chain or gag. Just walking, being ushered down tunnels by magisters under flickering torchlight.
Were we still in Mund, or had I been taken out of the city in my time-snatched stupor? Were there really caverns this extensive beneath my home? Why had it never occurred to me to wonder? I’d thought such places existed only in far-flung lands, in fables and legends. I was reminded of the adventurers’ stories of Ord Ylon’s lair, but the monstrous denizens of those tunnels were missing here. The spectacle in this place was all beautiful void, vast unlit emptinesses calling out to me beyond the firelight.
The everlasting flames weren’t particularly good sources of illumination; they were riveted to the walls of the cavern paths, and although the floors had been smoothed with wizardry I still stumbled on occasion as we entered patches of shadow. My feet were bare, but I didn’t care about a few bruises and gashes now.
I’d been placed under an enchantment of languor. I was a condemned man, and entering my mind, breaking my will – it wasn’t just permitted, but expected. My pains had evaporated. I’d been granted a momentary deferral of punishment, the eye of the storm before the hurricane washed again over me. I cast about idly, all thoughts of escape far from my imagination, all thoughts of those I was leaving behind far from my conscience. My worries were gone – I knew it for a fact that the dismay would reawaken later but, for these long silent minutes, I simply didn’t give a damn.
Someone was going to enter my home, maybe even enter the minds of my family members – confiscate my money, my assets… They would end up getting kicked out without me there to protect them. I knew it, but when I focussed on the idea of such a terrible-seeming thing, instead of feeling anything I just shrugged as I continued on my way. I realised belatedly that this was why Tanra had wanted to move her mum. She would shut down all the avenues that ended at her capture. Her mum was an important part of that.
Was that how I’d been caught? My use of the glyphstone?
I shrugged some more, stumbling on as the path sloped downwards again. I went in the company of these four fine fellows, as though they were my friends escorting me to the theatre.
Four waywatchers of a rank or assignment I’d never encountered before, garbed in the black-and-white magister’s robes but masked too, the metal features expressionless. Two of the faces were enamelled white with black eyes and lips, while two were black with white eyes and lips. The one at the front was carrying the rod. The others each bore a small sack. Kindling. Salted meats. Nuts.
Theatre snacks. Except the kindling. No idea who’d ordered a bag of dry sticks for their mid-entertainment meal.
I could suddenly imagine the revulsion inside of me, imagine it speaking.
“Where?” I blurted in a thick voice, stumbling as I walked. “Where – where –“
“How in the name of the Five is he doing that?” one of them, female and youthful, asked the others.
“No idea,” a delicate male voice answered. “He is Feychilde.”
“Was,” another woman said dryly.
One of them came alongside me as we strolled between the jagged, flame-lit walls of the cave. A rough hand took me by the arm, shook me. I smiled at the magister, and he seemed to relax.
“I don’t believe there’s cause for concern,” the delicate male voice said again. “He’s still under.”
“Almost there, now, newbie,” a fourth voice came: gruff, older.
A minute or so later I saw what awaited me as we turned a steeply-descending curve.
I was swooning on the edge, standing close to the lip of a dark hole in the ground. The ring of torches about the shaft gave no texture to its pitch-black emptiness. It was like a huge, natural well, dropping away into nothingness.
“Keep him still,” the gruff voice said – then people were holding my arms, positioning me while a spell was incanted in a high-pitched voice, reagents scattered on my head.
Finally, I was ushered to the very edge. I looked down. I felt the chill breath of the void on my face.
I don’t have my wraith, I thought; then: It’s okay. I can fall and die. I can go on my way.
But no.
“The flight-spell will take you down to the bottom,” the dry voice said from beside me, while another waywatcher was strapping something to my back, forcing me to find my balance again on the uneven rocky ground. “You’ve got about two minutes. If you dither too long, you won’t make it – you’ll land too hard in the water, and you’ll get all these lovely provisions soaking wet through. So you go now, okay?”
I nodded, but then I looked to the side, staring at her mask.
Feelings. There were feelings there.
Hate?
“Go, now! You could die!”
“I – don’t,” I gulped air, “wan – wan – wan –“
The young woman behind me gasped, and the dry-voiced one drew away as though I might be infectious.
Then two hands landed squarely in my shoulder-blades, just between the straps of the bag, shoving me forward –
The spell worked as they said. My descent was fast, but controlled. There was none of the nausea, which might’ve been due to the languor-spell – or simply due to the fact that I didn’t spin. I just fell like an anchor.
I craned my head back at first, watching, waiting, until the tiny speck of torchlight disappeared far above me, swallowed up by the incomprehensible distance that now loomed between me and the world.
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