Jonathan Moeller - The Ghosts 09 - Ghost in the Surge (31 page)

That alarmed her further. Jadriga had stolen the Staff of the Elements from the Tower of Study in Catekharon, a staff that had the power to awaken the great elemental lords. If Ranarius had awakened the great elemental sleeping in the Stone of Cyrioch, it would have destroyed all of Cyrioch. 

What would happen to the world if Jadriga woke them all at once? 

Anyone who survived the golden dead would perish in the earthquakes and firestorms and hurricanes unleashed by the awakened elementals. Was that was Jadriga wanted? The Moroaica had often spoken of destroying the world and remaking it anew, of rebuilding it without pain and suffering. Did she think to lay the world waste, that the golden dead would kill each other over and over again until they were perfected?

Was she really that mad?

Or had she fooled herself?

The philosophical considerations could wait. Caina pushed on, climbing the steep stairs as fast as she could manage, Corvalis keeping close pace behind her.

A few moments later they reached the Pyramid’s apex, and Caina looked at the wreckage of the Sanctuary of the Surge. Once, she suspected, it had crowned the entire top of the Pyramid. Now only a few broken walls remained, and a delicate spire of ice rose from the ruins. It stabbed upwards, rising a thousand feet over the Pyramid, and vanished into the maelstrom of the gate. 

A set of stairs wound their way around the spire. 

“Quite a climb,” said Corvalis. Talekhris pulled himself up the last step, rubbing his bad leg. 

“Aye,” said Caina, “but we have to make it now. Jadriga must have used it to enter the gate. Just as well for us that she did not destroy it behind her.” 

“She saw no need. She believes her victory is assured.”

Caina had never heard a voice like it. 

It sounded like the voices of three women speaking at once, one old, one young, and one in the prime of her life. Was it a trick of Jadriga’s? Caina turned, her dagger ready, and Corvalis adjusted his grip on the ghostsilver spear.

“No,” said Talekhris, “no, she’s no threat. Don’t attack.”

A woman in a plain robe stepped around the pillar of ice, her gray hair blowing in the wind whipping past the Pyramid. She looked about middle-aged, but her eyes glowed with silver light.

“Who are you?” said Caina, but she already suspected the answer.

“I am called the Surge,” said the woman, “for I see the storm of the world, and the path it shall take. The Bringer of Ashes has unleashed the great darkness, and ruin shall engulf the world. Yet there is a chance the course of the storm can yet be turned. For you are the Balarigar, and you have come.”

“The Balarigar is a myth,” said Caina, though she had exploited that myth from time to time.

The Surge offered an eerie smile. “Then why are you here?” 

“Enough,” said Caina. She looked at the Agora a thousand feet below, saw Ark and Kylon and the Imperial Guards locked in combat with the monstrous golden dead. “Why didn’t the Moroaica kill you?”

What if the Surge now housed the Moroaica’s spirit? It was the sort of trick Jadriga might try to play, if she feared Talekhris’s power.

“Because I was no threat to her,” said the Surge. “My mantle of power permits me to observe events, to see the path the storm of the world might take. Not to interfere with the course of events.”

“She is right,” said Talekhris. “The Surge will observe, never interfere.”

“Then she’s not the Moroaica?” said Corvalis. He must have come to the same conclusion as Caina.

“No,” said Talekhris, his jade mask glinting in the golden flame dancing overhead. “She is who she says that she is.” 

“Fine,” said Caina. “If you cannot interfere, than perhaps you can share your observations.”

“I shall,” said the Surge. “You are the last hope. Already the darkness swallows this world. Unless you stop the Moroaica, she will triumph, and destroy the world in her rage.”

“She’s up there, isn’t she?” said Caina, pointing at the rift. “She opened that gate into the netherworld and then climbed up the spire of ice?”

“You are correct,” said the Surge. “Already her great work unfolds. The lords of the elementals wake from their long sleep, and the fires of the phoenix ashes spread to every corpse in the world, raising them to a twisted mockery of life. The Moroaica’s vision is to destroy the world and remake it. Already it is begins…but the world she creates will be far different than the perfect world she envisions.”

“The golden dead,” said Caina. The sounds of battle drifted up from the Agora below. “She thinks they’ll…improve, somehow? That they’ll regenerate until they’ve recovered their memories and their souls return?”

“Yes,” said the Surge, all three of her voices full of sorrow. “But they will not. The Moroaica’s heart is frozen, her ability to change her choice taken from her by death. She will continue until she is destroyed, or the world is destroyed around her.”

“She’s in the netherworld now,” said Caina. The Surge nodded. “Why? To open a gate to challenge the gods?”

“You speak truly,” said the Surge. “Even I do not know what realm lies beyond the netherworld. Such sight has not been given to me. Yet the Moroaica has gone to the netherworld to rip open a portal to the realm beyond and destroy the gods. She wields the Staff of the Elements, and so long as she carries it, she can draw more and more power from the elementals awakening here.”

“That’s why the rift is getting larger, isn’t it?” said Corvalis, and the Surge’s silver-glowing eyes shifted toward him. “She draws more and more power to open her portal to the realm of the gods, but to pull the power through, it has to make the gate here larger.”

“You see truly, consort of the Balarigar,” said the Surge. He snorted at the title. “Even the twisted world unfolding below us will not come to pass if the Moroaica succeeds. The power needed to open a gate to the realm beyond the netherworld is immense. She will draw so much power that the gate over the Pyramid will expand until it shatters the material world into dust.” 

“If we kill her,” said Caina, “we can stop it? Or is it already too late?” 

“No,” said the Surge. “She is the axis of the spell. If she is killed while in the netherworld, the axis shatters. The spell will unravel, and her great work shall be left incomplete.”

“Then we find her and kill her,” said Caina. “For the final time.”

“It will not be so easy,” said the Surge.

“Of course not,” said Caina. “She is a powerful sorceress. But Talekhris has power of his own,” she gestured at the Sage, “and we have ghostsilver weapons that can penetrate her wards.”

“This is so,” said the Surge. “But I can see the shadows of the future, the path of the storm of the world. Heed me! You can defeat the Moroaica, but she must first defeat herself.”

“Defeat herself?” said Caina. “What does that even mean?”

“She must overcome herself,” said the Surge. “Her sorcery is mighty, her mind cunning and deep. Yet her will is frozen, her heart locked. She must first defeat herself.”

“You speak in riddles,” said Caina. “What do you mean?”

The Surge’s silver eyes met hers. “I am sorry for the price you shall pay, if you are victorious.”

What did that mean? That Caina would lose her life if the Moroaica was defeated? That they all would lose their lives? She did not want to die. She most certainly did not want Corvalis to die. She did not want anyone to die.

But if they had to die to stop Jadriga…then that was the price they would pay. They were still Ghosts of the Emperor, at least until Lord Corbould worked his will. Caina’s feet had been upon this path for eleven years, half her life, ever since Maglarion and her mother had murdered her father, and she had vowed never to let it happen again, to stop men like Maglarion. 

She would walk this path to the end.

“Ghost,” said Talekhris. “We cannot linger.”

“You’re right,” said Caina. 

“Go,” said the Surge, “and may your valor hold true to the end.”

Caina walked past her without another word and came to the spire of ice.

She put a boot upon the first step, expecting it to be slick. Yet the ice felt as firm and rough as rock, and Caina found that she could climb with ease. She braced one hand against the spire, and the ice felt pleasantly cool beneath her fingers, though it tingled with sorcery. 

“Come on,” said Caina, and she started up the winding stairs, moving as fast as she dared. Up and up they climbed, the golden vortex drawing nearer. Already from the top of the Pyramid she saw the whole of New Kyre, but as they climbed higher, she saw the sea stretching away to the west and the plains outside the walls.

Everywhere she saw golden fire as the burning dead made their way across the plain and rose from the waters. A mass of golden flame blazed before the base of the Pyramid in the Agora, and Caina hoped that Ark and Kylon and Claudia and Martin were holding their own. 

But the only way Caina could help them was by killing the Moroaica.

She kept climbing.

Soon the vortex blazed a dozen feet above her head, wave after wave of terrible sorcery washing through her. The sense of arcane force was so powerful it made her bones hurt, and she took care to keep her balance. It would be a poor joke to have come all this way only to trip and fall to her death from such a height. New Kyre seemed like a toy city spread out beneath her, a child’s model.

Yet people were dying down there.

One final step, and the vortex writhed a foot above Caina’s head, an enormous sheet of golden flame that spread in every direction. Strange that it was so silent, that it gave off no heat. Yet sorcerous power radiated from it in terrible waves.

She took a deep breath, looked down at Corvalis.

“I love you,” said Corvalis. “Whatever happens next. Remember that.”

She managed to nod. “I love you, too.” 

“Go,” said Talekhris. “If we can defeat the Moroaica, you shall have all the time in the world to exchange endearments.”

Caina nodded, took another deep breath, and climbed the final step.

She walked into the blazing sheet of golden fire.

###

The netherworld screamed around Jadriga, shuddering from the power she had summoned. Here reality was fluid and reshaped by the power of thought, and sorcery was a form of thought.

And Jadriga had drawn a tremendous amount of sorcerous power into the netherworld.

A blazing tear of white light shone before her, widening with the might of her spell. The arcane strength of the elemental princes tore into the netherworld, and the gash of white fire widened, opening into a gate to the realm beyond, the realm of the gods.

And once it was open, Jadriga would fling the gathered power of the elemental princes through the gate.

The gods would burn for what they had done. Even if there was a high god, he too would burn.

Jadriga summoned more power…and paused.

She sensed the presence of others within the netherworld.

Caina Amalas. 

It had to be. There was no one else who could have done it…and had the Surge not predicted it? 

Idly she wondered how Sicarion had died, and decided that she did not care.

Not now, not when she was so close to creating a world of immortals, a world free of death and suffering.

Briefly she wondered if Corvalis had come with Caina, and a tide of emotion surged through Jadriga…

She shoved it aside. Those memories did not belong to her.

And she would not allow Caina to jeopardize the new and better the world, her vengeance upon the gods.

She turned to face the gate back to the material world and began casting a new spell.

Chapter 22 - The Netherworld

A sheet of gray mist swallowed Caina.

Utter silence covered her. The mist absorbed even the noise of her footsteps. She heard nothing but her heartbeat and the steady rasp of her breath. Caina looked around in alarm, but saw neither Corvalis nor Talekhris. 

Had the gate deposited them somewhere else? Or it had trapped them here, in this misty place between the worlds? Perhaps Jadriga had anticipated that someone would pursue her, and had left a defense upon the gate.

Then why bother leaving the spire of ice standing?

Caina took another step, and the mist billowed away into nothingness.

And once more she found herself standing in the netherworld. 

It had changed little from her last visit. The gray, featureless plain stretched away in all directions, the colorless grasses waving in a wind she did not feel. Black clouds billowed and rippled over the sky, moving far faster than clouds ever did in the material world, green lightning leaping silently from thunderhead to thunderhead. Strange objects floated overhead, pieces of broken statues, stairs that went nowhere, towers and trees that hung upside down.

From time to time the terrain changed, the plains shifting to barren black trees, or a stagnant gray swamp, or a glittering desert of black glass. Caina knew that she could control the terrain with her thoughts, that if she stayed long enough the landscape would start mirroring her unconscious mind. 

She turned, seeking Corvalis and Talekhris, and realized that something was wrong.

The first sign was the hum. She felt it just at the edge of her hearing, a low tearing that sounded like stressed metal, like a cuirass slowly being torn in half. A strange vibration went through the ground beneath her boots.

She sought the source of the hum, and saw the white light.

It was a tear in the sky, like the one over the Pyramid of Storm. Yet it was fashioned of brilliant white light, more light pouring out of it, so bright Caina had to squint. Looking at it made her head hurt, and the tear seemed to grow larger and larger.

“The gate to the realm beyond.”

Caina turned as Corvalis and Talekhris moved closer. Behind them she saw the spire of ice rising from the ground of the netherworld. The vortex of golden fire stretched beyond the spire, and she glimpsed New Kyre through the gate, far below. 

“That’s it, then?” said Corvalis, the ghostsilver spear in his right hand. The blade gleamed with a pale white glow as the ghostsilver reacted to the netherworld’s ambient power. “A gate to…the next life, or the home of the gods?”