The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (50 page)

Strange how that seemed to help.

He did not get far before his strength ran out.  Laying there, trembling inside his overtaxed shell, he saw the salt-slimes slide back into their watery realm and wondered if the Guardian had somehow called them, or left a mark on him that identified him as a friend.  Without them, he would have sunk into the depths with no hope of return.

Or perhaps they simply abhorred my presence.

He tried to muster a wry smile, but his face had ceased to move.  Only morning light would revive him now, the stars too dim and distant.  Still, it gave him time to think.

If the haelhene had caught his friends, he would get them back.

*****

Cob didn't know how far he had run, only that the lights no longer pursued him.

It didn't make him feel better.  In fact, now that he was walking, the sensation of lurking darkness had returned tenfold.

He blamed his surroundings.  The Grey was silent, but he could swear that sometimes he caught whispers or glimpsed things just out of sight, moving parallel to him.  He remembered this from earlier excursions, and Ilshenrir's exhortation not to encourage them, but he'd never asked what 'they' were.  He wished he had.

He was also convinced that the mist beneath him was thicker than that above—cooler, darker, more real.  The first time he'd noticed, he'd crouched down to verify it, and for a moment he'd seen the ground ripple like water under ice.  Fear had shot him up straight, and he hadn't dared to try again.

Now, the tepid lifeless surface beneath his bare feet felt
wet
.

To take his mind off of it, he'd called up the Guardian phantasms, but they had no answers.  Still, having their distinct shapes arrayed around him—Erosei at his left, Vina his right, Haurah in the lead and Jeronek and Dernyel behind—gave him some grounding.  They strode through the fog without being visually affected by it, allowing him to pretend that there was no mist, just blankness.

“So you can't feel any kind of direction,” he asked Vina, enervation flattening the tone from his voice.  It was hard to speak into such dense silence, hard to stop the automatic motion of his legs—hard to expend any effort.  Were he to sit, he supposed he might remain so forever.

“Not from this realm,” said the ogress.  Her low, resonant voice comforted him; hallucinatory, it retained its life the same way her form did.  “We could step up into the spirit realm, but once there, it will be difficult to return to the physical.  You were our anchor, Cob.  Without you, there is little for us to grip.”

“There has t'be some way.  What d'you do when you take a new vessel?”

“Normally we retain a tendril on the physical side.  We do not need to retract into the spirit realm to separate from a vessel; we can drift, or possess animals as necessary.”

“Y'never pull back entirely?”

“We do, sometimes.  But when we wish access to the physical realm again, we must make a deal with one of our beast-children, and follow their spirit-tether to one of their skinchangers.  The salt desert is devoid of skinchanger life.”

“What about Arik?  Can y'find Arik?”

Ahead, Haurah turned to walk backward on her weirdly-hinged legs.  She had shifted toward wolf-shape but remained bipedal, chestnut hair like a mane behind her furry ears, muzzle compressed close enough to allow human speech.  “He is not in an accessible realm.  I have scented for him, and he has gone to the Wolf; as the Guardian, we have no connection.”

Cob's throat tightened.  “Gone to the Wolf?  I thought...I thought that only happened when skinchangers died.”

“I do not know his disposition.”

Cold prickles ran across his skin, but he forced the thought aside.  Grief and anger might be merited, but they wouldn't help.  “Can you contact the elementals?” he asked.  “I still have these.”  He held up the tectonic lever, then tapped the thin membrane of the water elemental that clung to his chest.  It adhered to his finger like a needy child.

From behind, Jeronek said, “No.  Even when I was the Guardian, my earth-blood could not bridge the distance.  Elementals are of the physical realm exclusively—they
are
the physical realm—and the tearing of the Grey made them unreachable.”

Cob grimaced.  “So we're trapped?”

“There may be a thin spot.  A place where the Grey intersects with another realm.  The wraith spires often cause them.”

What else can cause them?  Where else can they go?
  But he didn't let himself ask, lest they answer.  Instead, he said, “How d'we find it if y' can't sense directions?”

“We already navigate by it.”

“...What?  But I jus' asked—”

“It is not a direction.”

Cob rounded on the earth-blooded Guardian.  Like the others, Jeronek moved through the mist as if it was mere backdrop, completely visible.  His face was set in resignation, stony armor cladding him like scales or hard shell, with his tortoise-backed shield on one arm and his bloodstone khopesh in hand.  He met Cob's stare with flinty eyes, mouth compressed.

“Pike you,” Cob snapped.  “If anyone should wear that look, it's me.  You people—  I'm sick of your hog-crap, I really am.”

“It is not 'hog-crap'.  The wraith spires extend through manifold realms including the Grey, and their resonance permeates the space around them.  This is how wraiths extract themselves from it after death.  But neither the Grey nor the spires correspond to standard spatial dimensions.  We do not know where we are or in which direction we face; we only know where the resonance is strongest.”  Shaking his head, Jeronek added, “We should not need to enter the spire.  It should have a broad radius of intersection.”

As much as Cob wanted to stay angry, it made sense.  He grumbled, “You know an awful lot about this.”

Jeronek's expression went flat.  “Kuthrallan taught me.”

“A wraith?”

“The Ravager of my time, but...yes.  We—“  Abruptly he shut his mouth and looked away.

Cob glanced to the others.  Erosei stood smirking, arms crossed; Haurah seemed exasperated.  Vina wore a sympathetic smile, but the serpents that usually hung languidly across her shoulders now writhed and hissed in agitation.  As always, Dernyel's face revealed nothing.

“What happened?” said Cob cautiously.

“Turtle-face wanted to dick it.  The wraith,” said Erosei.  Haurah slapped him on the back of the head, and the two faced off with bared teeth.

Cob ignored them in favor of watching Jeronek.  The dead earth-blood did not flinch at the accusation, but slowly shook his head.  “You cannot understand,” he said.  “Even Erosei does not, and he walked the path of my memories once.”

“He's just an asshole,” Haurah interjected.  Erosei pushed her; she pushed him back.

“Talk to me,” said Cob.  “Y'were gonna stop hidin' things.  Now seems like the time.”

“It does not seem relevant—“

“Just show him, you wretched wraith-lover,” snapped Erosei.  Shrugging off Haurah's restraining grip, he stepped toward Jeronek, dusky face twisted with hostility.  “Show him what he should've seen before we let him trust this Ilshenrir.  You and your star-crossed shit—“

“There was never anything between us.  You unreasonably accuse—“

“Unreasonably?  Without that sparkly bastard—without all those sparkly bastards—there would never've been any trouble for us.”

“Not true.  The Muriae were the first to contact—“

“Shut up.  They're not at fault.”

“Ha!  You harangue me about my—“

“Stop it,” Cob growled, shoving them apart.  Erosei made as if to lunge past him, but Haurah caught him by the vest and dragged him backward, while Jeronek just turned away.  Pursuing him, Cob said, “Tell me.  I don't care about personal stuff—”

Jeronek barked a laugh.  “There was nothing between us.  Enmity at best.  Erosei is a petty, spiteful—“

“I know.  Jus' tell me what you're hidin'.”

A long silence, then Jeronek exhaled, armored shoulders slumping.  “Very well,” he said, and gestured with the khopesh.

The Grey peeled back to reveal a dimly familiar landscape, green and swampy.  Cob turned as the illusion swept past him to show red cliffs rising in one direction, coils of woodsmoke in another.  The rest of his view was shrouded by trees, thick with vines and lichen and cowering animal life.

“That's Varaku?” he guessed, gesturing toward the cliffs.

Or tried.  His arm would not move, and when he looked down he realized that it was clenched at his side beneath a layer of rock.  The other Guardians had vanished.

In the sky, a great light flared.

He looked up, and memory struck.  The Ravager-vessel had dragged him here to meet with an ancient wraith, to discuss a plan to shut away the Outsider that had devoured all of Lisalhan.  He didn't want to be here, didn't trust anything to do with wraiths, but the Ravager-vessel was his comrade and she usually knew what she was doing.

Right now, she was fighting the wraith.  He wasn't sure why.  Negotiations had gone well; the wraith, which called itself Kuthrallan Vanyaris, had been stiff and distant, but its proposal for a grand working to protect the world seemed sincere, and the Ravager-vessel had appeared swayed by the arcane babble.

She had pulled him aside, then, to express her doubts and recommend the wraith's destruction.  By the gleam in her eyes, he'd known she wanted to eat it; she'd devoured others before.  And he'd accepted her plan, though it was strange how the wraith just hovered there, folded down into a nearly-human state as if it expected them to deal honorably with it after all the harm its kind had done.

He'd tried to grab it with earth and vines, but it had flitted free, and now the Ravager-vessel was up there tearing at it while it shrieked its good intentions.  It bothered Jeronek that it hadn't fled.  If it had been trying to trick them, surely it would realize it had failed.

Whatever its purpose, it and the Ravager-vessel were well-matched.  The glare of their clashing powers hurt his eyes, and even when he squinted, he couldn't follow their motions.  They produced radiance like a torch trying to snuff a lantern.

A sudden thunderous crack came from above, loud enough to make his eardrums shudder.  The Ravager screamed in a dozen voices, bird and woman multiplied with agony.  A great flare, a sky-shaking blast, and then—

Two figures.  Falling.

He cupped the earth beneath them, softening it with water and moss, and felt the first one impact with the limpness of a corpse.  The vessel.  His mouth went dry, and when the second hit a few moments later, he wrapped earth-fingers around it like a cage.

“Don't,
Aesangat
,” it called in a voice both fluted and shaking.

He wanted to crush it—to pulverize that unnatural crystal shell—but within he felt the flutter of familiar wings.  The fire and lightning of the Ravager, newly nested.

Bitterness welled up in his chest, but he knew his role.  Relaxing his stone hand, he let the wraith rise.  It looked almost mortal now, its glow gone, its feet on the ground, the doll-like face twisted in pain as its limbs twitched spasmodically.  It had hair too, pale as spun glass, and huge pupil-less white eyes.

“I did not lie,” it quavered, voice just a shadow of the resonant melody from before.  “I know a way to save us all.  Why did you have to fight me?”

With the cooling corpse of a friend in one earthy palm, Jeronek clenched his other—his real hand—around the hilt of his khopesh.  How dearly he wished to cleave the head from the wraith's congealing body!  But the Ravager's wings wafted out from its back, and it shuddered convulsively as it went through the usual trauma of meshing.  They were one.

This was the new vessel.

Mist rushed in abruptly, washing away the scene.  Cob shook himself, then pressed the heels of his hands to his temples as if he could stop the blood from pounding there.  The Guardian's memories were always disorienting, but here they made him feel ill.

“Is—  What?” he mumbled.

Jeronek gripped his shoulder to steady him.  It was strange to feel the man's hand and realize that it was just a figment of his imagination.  “Kuthrallan was weakened by the fight,” he said softly, “enough for the Ravager to take control.  I was not pleased.  We fought frequently—the Ravager and I, Kuthrallan and I.  But Kuthrallan's plan for the Seals was solid, and so the Ravager set forth to put it into practice.  They dragged me along to help, for they knew that our allies would be wary of their wraith-shell, even if it demonstrably bore the Ravager.”

“Why did Kuthrallan even offer?” said Cob.  “The wraiths—don't they want to leave?”

“Some of them have other agendas.  I learned later that Kuthrallan had been an experimenter, an iconoclast—the leader of a small group that sought to study our world and adapt it to their needs.  Their main rival was the wraith-god Daenivar, who orchestrated the opening of the Portal to sow chaos and fear in the human lands.  We suspected that Kuthrallan aided us simply to thwart Daenivar, but that was enough for the mages and witch-folk we gathered.”

Cob blinked, and the Grey was gone.  Instead, he stood stiffly against the wall of a circular room, its space dominated by a map-covered table and populated by men and women in strange, archaic attire.  Every surface flickered with runes, the air subtly pressurized by power.