The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (52 page)

Earth separated, and the tower plunged like a spear.

Lost in the call of his blood, Jeronek could barely make sense of what he saw.  Shattered cliff-sides rushed past as the Pillar was driven down, exposing layer upon layer of tunnels, caverns and underground rivers compressed now like honeycomb beneath a boot.  A part of him screamed as he felt the sea-caves rupture below, felt the base of the Pillar punch through into water, into heaving coral and debris.

White wings burst into existence around him, and he was wrenched up.  His shoulder shrieked again, suddenly holding the whole weight of the Pillar against the pull of the sky.  He looked up into the terrified face of the wraith, hanging upside-down in midair, six wings grasping for purchase amid smoke and dust and fire, hair wild as seaweed in a current, eyes like lamps.  Hands locked on him.

That tenuous grip could not hold for long.  He could break it, and fall with the Pillar.

The wraith's mouth formed words:
Don't you dare.

What other choice was there?  The Ravager could not carry the Guardian; they were opposites.  They canceled each other out.  Falling, he might survive; flying, Kuthra would escape.

Then he saw it through the veils of debris: the wave, greenish-black against the blood-red sky.  Taller than mountains, its crest a white razor that cut the clouds as it followed the pull of the Seals—the demand to wash away the foulness that had infested this land.

As it loomed toward Kuthra's back.

Let him go
, said the Guardian.

It was nearly upon them.  It ate up all the world.  Kuthra would never out-fly it; only the Guardian's power could protect him—

Let him go.

Jeronek gritted his teeth and said, “No.”

His fingers unlocked from the crenelation and the Pillar fell away.  Kuthra's face flashed relief, then he hooked hands and clawed feet into the ridges of the armor and turned upright, wings straining, eyes on the violent sky.  The wave was still behind him, curving ever up and over until Jeronek could see it past the planes of his face, past the white peak of his chin.  Until he knew that Kuthra saw it too.

I'll save you
, he tried to say. 
The Guardian controls water.

But the darkness slithered from him like sand, the black grip in his chest easing.  He didn't have the strength to prevent it.  Kuthra's wings beat harder as the weight on Jeronek's soul decreased, and they rose up, up...

Not fast enough.

“
No!
” he screamed.

Then the Guardian was gone.

Cob jerked back to reality, panting and dazed.  Before him, Jeronek smiled wanly, without pleasure.  “Now you know,” he said.

For a moment, Cob could only shake his head.  Was it his imagination, or had the mist thickened while he walked in visions?  The ground beneath his soles felt slick, his skin damp.  The taste of brine lingered in his throat.  Finally he managed, “Why?”

“Prey philosophy,” came Haurah's growling answer.  “One does not need to be the swiftest—only swifter than the slowest.  And when it is not possible to make your vessel abandon their goal, you simply abandon your vessel.”

He looked over his shoulder to the Guardians behind them, Haurah's face fixed in anger, Erosei's coldly bitter, Dernyel subdued.  Even Vina looked uncomfortable.  “It left you all?”

“I was already dying,” said Jeronek.  “The burns were too thorough.  Perhaps it was selfish of me to cling; perhaps I was wrong, and Kuthra could have escaped.”

Shaking his head, Cob said, “Y'had a solid plan—“

An image intruded: the Hungry Dark at his heels, the black water pouring around him, and Enkhaelen's wings spread above to claw at the sky.  That same moment revisited, a desperate hope.

It nearly choked him.  He clenched his fists and stared fixedly at Jeronek's face, afraid to look down.  Afraid to see the water around his feet.  “You said he died there.  The Guardian ran away and both the vessels died.  How?”

A moment's silence, then with reticence Jeronek said, “I...did not witness it, but I know that the wave took us both.  I died on impact; he was dashed into the sea.  And there was no light.  The disasters had darkened the sky.  He floated for...days, weeks.  We did not rescue him, and he could not escape the water.  Eventually he simply...ceased to fight.”

“Drowned?”

“No.  Exposure.”

Cob winced.  Anything would be angry after a fate like that, let alone a spirit of air and fire.  “But there was time between Kuthra and Enkhaelen.  A thousand years.  You never tried to patch things up?”

Jeronek smiled ruefully.  “Kuthra was a force unto himself.  He dominated the Ravager vessels that came after, so that no matter which one we encountered, it was Kuthra's eyes that stared out at us.  But the Guardian had moved on.  I had as much influence over it as I have over you, and it had always hated him.  While I'd come to know him as a...friend, it saw him as an inevitable traitor.

“And so we stayed apart.  Only when we felt the Seals being opened did we seek him out, and then...”  Jeronek sighed.  “There was no Kuthra left in his eyes.  Only Enkhaelen.”

Uncomfortable, Cob turned away.  The others were watching him as if expecting an outburst, but he had no energy for that.  He almost wished he hadn't asked.

“Jus'...let's get out of here, all right?” he told them, and one by one, they nodded.  Haurah ranged into the lead to seek the haelhene spire, and he fell in at her heels and tried not to think.

The whispers followed.

*****

Ahead, the mist dissipated into a long, low stone corridor lit faintly from beyond.  Fiora blinked at the change, then again when her eyes watered, and covered her nose and mouth would gloved hands but could not keep her lungs from pulling air.

It stung,
burned
—

Then the Silver One made a gesture with the hand not holding the red crystal, and a tingling blanket of energy enfolded her, sliding its arcane fingers up her nose and across her eyes as well as over her skin.  She shuddered and choked, but the inhale was clean—the air thin and chemical but tolerable.

She coughed harshly, chest spasming, then managed to get a hold of herself.  A moment later came the first hiccup.  Blushing, she looked to the Silver One again.  “I—hp!—thought elementals and such couldn't—hp!—do magic...”

The Silver One turned tarnished eyes on her but did not dignify the implied question with a response.  Instead it started forward, metallic robes stirring liquidly around its legs—or at least where legs should be. 
Does it have normal body parts?  Is it just doing this for my benefit, like Ilshenrir?
she wondered as she hurried after.

The red crystal cast a sullen glow along the corridor, catching glints from thick layers of crusted salt.  More hung as stalactites from the ceiling, short and fine as if removed regularly.  The path beneath her feet was crunchy with mineral debris; looking back, she saw the passageway dead-end in a wall of salt, a faint ruby glow trapped within.

“Where is this?  Where are—hp!—we going?” she asked her guide, but it was silent.  Even at this easy pace, her body ached and her throat burned with thirst.  She tried to tell herself that since her rescuer knew she needed air, it must know she needed water and food, so everything would be fine.  She wasn't sure she believed it.

The ruddy light at the end of the corridor deepened as they approached.  It made her guide look weirdly fleshy, hair and robe included, and sent a nervous tingle up her spine.  Trying to swallow down her hiccups, she pursued the Silver One doggedly until it came to a halt.

Too curious to heel, she peeked past it into the cavern beyond.  Her jaw dropped.

“Welcome to Hlacaasteia,” said the Silver One.  “Our home away from home.”

Chapter 13 – Hlacaasteia

Straining to catch a whisper, Cob almost ran into Haurah, who had halted just ahead.  She gave him an odd look, then tapped her nose and said, “I scent your lover.”

He stared at her.  It felt like they had been walking for days, and in the silence that followed Jeronek's story had come the voice.  Faint, distant, indistinct, yet somehow familiar, speaking words he couldn't quite discern.  Even now, it continued at the threshold of perception, prying at his attention.

“Cob?” said Haurah, concerned.

He shook himself, and mustered a wan smile.  “Jus' tired.”  That they couldn't hear it was obvious, which made him doubt his sanity.  They'd been able to detect Enkhaelen and Darilan's splinters, so why not this Dark intrusion?

Unless they were ignoring it, maybe hoping it would go away.  He'd tried that.  It hadn't.

“'M fine,” he managed.  “Fiora...y'can track Fiora?  Thought y'needed a spirit connection.”

Haurah's half-shifted face twitched, her furry ears canting back like she had made a mistake.  She opened her mouth, closed it, then looked past him to the others.

A big hand clasped his shoulder, reassuringly real despite being imaginary.  Leaning down, Vina said in a low, soothing voice, “It is not Fiora she tracks, but the child.  Your child.”

Cob's throat locked.

“I thought we agreed not to tell him,” said Haurah petulantly.  “Now it'll distract him.  And it's not a sure thing with our current plan.  If it dies—“

“Well, too late,” said Erosei.

Cob could not focus.  All he saw was Fiora's face: grinning, laughing, blushing, smiling sleepily in satisfaction.  He tried to move his mouth in the shape of a question, but none came out.  His legs felt wooden; his hands trembled.  His chest was being squeezed by iron bands.  It felt like fear—like panic—but it wasn't.

My kid
, he thought. 
Mine.

“How d'we get to her?” he managed finally.  “Can we jus' step across?”

“No,” said Vina.  “First we move to the spirit realm, which will let us see better and bypass most obstructions.  Once we reach her vicinity, we step down to the physical realm.”

“Then go.  Go.”

The ogress shook her head.  “Ko Vrin, you wield our power now.  You must learn to do it yourself.”

Annoyance stirred him from his daze.  He glared up at her.  “Y'can't jus drop somethin' like this on me and then say, 'Do magic'.”

“The world does not wait for you to be ready,” said the ogress.  “Instead of snapping, focus your energy upon this need.  Feel our presence within you, find the tether that connects you upward, then follow it.”

Lacking the will to argue, and more than ready to be free of the Grey, he closed his eyes.

As always, the Guardian's presence was heaviest near the scar on his belly, where it had first entered him.  Usually he felt it descending into the earth—that great solid darkness—but there was no earth here, just the textureless neutrality of the Grey.  Instead, the pull canted slightly upward.  “Why?” he mumbled, brows creased.

Vina said, “The Ravager.  When he tore the realms apart to thwart the wraiths, he disjointed the spirit realm away from the earth.”

“Not very far.”

“No.  But it was enough to create fractures.  Once, it was a mirror-image of the physical realm, but now some of the spirits hide in their own free-floating shards, and there are many gaps where things can slip through.”

“Things,” Cob echoed, but Vina did not clarify, and he balked at mentioning the black water or the whispers.  No matter what was in the spirit realm, it had to be better than here.

Concentrating on the Guardian's tether, he tried wrapping fingers around it, but its shivery sensation slipped away when he tightened his grip.

“Do not grab it.  Move with it,” said Vina.

How?
Cob thought, baffled. 
Do I follow it, or jump up, or what?

He tried both, but nothing happened, and he could swear he heard Erosei and Haurah snickering.  Irritation a dull throb in his chest, he took a moment to stop and breathe.  It reminded him of when Jeronek and Erosei had taught him to manipulate the elements by jeering and throwing stones at him.  He supposed he should be proud not to be so wroth this time.

Finally, after far too long, he realized that the tether was not pulling at him the way he had thought.  There was no tug from the tether-point, but something like a pressure at his back—one he automatically leaned into as if he had spent years resisting it.  A strange dual push, at once sideways-down and up-away.  Once he concentrated on it, the conflicting directions began to nauseate him.

Two different connections
, he thought. 
One toward the Guardian, and one toward...

His stomach sank.  If the spirit realm was up-away, then sideways-down was the Dark.

It has its hooks in me.  It has its hooks in me.  It has its hooks—

Stop.  Do as the Guardian said and move with its tether.

Lifting the tectonic lever, he tried to lean toward the up-and-away, and—

—rose—pushed—fell against some kind of membrane, a semi-permeable barrier that stressed against him, stretched and thinned and finally—

—slid him through, then snapped shut like a slap, leaving him on one knee in wet sand.  Blinking, he lifted his head to see salt-crystals rising before him like towers, their faces glossy but pitted, bases etched by the rippling water that surrounded them.

He rose slowly, feeling nauseated, and steadied himself with the lever.  Around him rose a claustrophobic forest of pillars and spikes and weirder shapes, glinting with rainbow light.  Tall white spheres, half-submerged tetrahedrons, branching fractals of blue and green, crazed spiky constructions of rust-red and smoky black.

Cautiously he touched one and felt the life within it: a hive-sentience buzzing with a need to grow, to accrete its granular cohorts from the brine-thick waters and expand to its limits.  Under his bare soles he felt water elementals like the one coiled around his chest, but these were clean; like couriers, they slithered over and through each other, meshing and parting as they ferried missing pieces to the collectives of salt.

He tried to touch one but it passed through his fingers like vapor.

'They are too weak,
' said Vina's voice in his head, and he looked around to realize that the Guardians had disappeared. 
'Normal elementals would be tangible to us even through the gap in the realms, but these appear to be diluted, or else dead.'

“They're ghosts?”

'Memories.  Echoes.  For an elemental, individual existence is an anomaly—something that only happens when a piece is forcibly divided from the whole.  When that division ends, they fall back into the main mass and are integrated thoroughly.  They have no separate soul.'

“Like skinchangers.”

'Somewhat.  But where the shade of a skinchanger may remain cognizant within the whole, an elemental loses its individuality and cohesion, and reintegrates fully.  Its experiences become part of the Primordial element, like a dream.'

“And the other elements...Earth, Metal.  They're like that too?  You 'die', you go back to the mass and forget you were ever separate?”

'Yes.'

Cob shook his head slowly.  He was not one for metaphysics, but that seemed cruel.  No afterlife, no soul—and yet the elemental-folk obviously had lives, like the earth-kin he had met at the wolf den, and Jeronek's ancestors, and the Muriae.  Enkhaelen's wife.

Forget about that.  You've got your own woman to worry about, and your kid.

He squinted into the forest of spires.  “This's Crystal Valley?  Center of the desert?”

'Yes.'

“How do I find Fiora?”

'Extend your senses.  Seek the child.'

Cob squinted in a random direction.  The light reflecting from the crystals did not sting his eyes, but it was distracting: color everywhere, toxic but beautiful.  A part of him wanted to wander the labyrinth while he could, for though he could smell the chemical fumes, they didn't hurt; they weren't quite real.

But he wasn't here for that, and the sensation of water around his feet—even phantasmal—made his skin crawl.  Focusing his senses down, he felt the disjunction between the spirit-earth he stood on and the real-earth on the layer below, a mere few inches that nevertheless divided the world.  If he was to bridge that distance...

Brows furrowed, he pushed the tectonic lever chisel-first into the sand.

It cleaved through without resistance or sensation, as if the ground was merely an illusion.  Down, down, until it touched something semi-solid: that separating membrane.  He put his weight on it, and the chisel-end bit through.

Agony surged up the stone staff and into his arms, his head.  He reeled back, feeling the injuries like they were to his own flesh: numb chancres like the land around Akarridi, burning abscesses, burrowing parasites, hollow cysts, and the constant sting of salt.  This whole land was wounded—dying—in a way he had not felt from its outskirts.

Teeth gritted, he pushed past the deluge of pain.  It was difficult to sense through the sand; all those separate grains, though shellacked together, gave him a faint idea of direction and shadows and pressure but no real view.  Water might have been easier but he was loath to touch it.  Even at the periphery of his senses it felt thick, subterranean, strange.

No trees grew here.  No animals scuttled amongst the salt-pillars of the burning valley.  Without options, he sifted through an ocean of sand, trying to find a path to follow.

Then, suddenly, there it was: fine as spider-silk, following the breach he had made between the realms and then wafting out across that tormented landscape.  A soul-connection beginning in his chest and ending somewhere, distantly, at the space beneath Fiora's heart.

He remembered blessing the boar-women, and shivered.  He should have known this would happen, should have been more cautious.  But when he looked at that delicate thread, he could not regret it.

Fiora would be furious.

It drifted outward, further, and then down.  Sand became incongruous stone.  His consciousness seeped through the cracks, following the thread, and felt a weird thrum in the solid foundation like a great beast breathing.  An energy, pervasive but not awake, not aware like that of Erestoia By-The-Sea.

Hlacaasteia.

And there she was: an envelope of heat and safety wrapped around the bead that ended the thread.  Fiora, his lover, his future...what?  He felt too young for this, even though he knew he could have been betrothed at thirteen, could legally marry within a few months.

He tried to feel the space around her and, to his relief, detected only elementals.  Metal ones, dim in his spirit-perceptions but there.

And someone else, someone a bit more fleshy.  Metal-blooded?

That was interesting.

Opening his eyes, he saw the path drawn through the spirit realm like a red cord.  Across Crystal Valley, into the underground, to the very foot of the wraith spire.  He withdrew the tectonic lever from the physical realm and the pain vanished, but not the cord.

Time to go.

*****

Fiora sat on a fallen salt-pillar, hands clasped between her knees, watching the silver folk go about their business.  The one who had led her here had vanished amongst its fellows after telling her it would find someone to aid her better.  She wished it had stayed, if only for company.

She didn't know what to think of this place.  Above curved an irregular stalactite-encrusted ceiling, sometimes a hundred feet high and sometimes just yards; below, the floor was a flat plane of salt, fractured in places but polished elsewhere by the passage of many feet.  Most of the walls were either covered in or made up of crystalline salt-growths, with more erupting from the rough patches of the floor.

The wall she watched was even stranger.  It was sheeted in salt like everything else, but through it glowed a strange light, dark reddish, at times nearly black.  A wraith spire—the one Dasira had said was trapped here and couldn't fly away.  She didn't know how big it was, but the glow ran across the wall from end to end, then all the way up to the ceiling and down out of sight; its radiance shone through the clearer parts of the floor.  It was tilted too, though the salt made it hard to tell the angle.

The Silver Ones had built houses around it, which Fiora thought was charming if peculiar.  Low, boxy buildings of hewn salt stacked up like blocks against the glowing wall, they had few doors and no stairs.  Instead, the Silver Ones climbed the walls with the neatness of spiders, their hands and feet attenuating to aid their grip.

Watching them made her uneasy, but she kept telling herself that they served Brancir, that they had rescued her from the Grey and bore her no malice.  Their magic had allowed her to breathe here and seemed to ward away the gaseous plumes that rose from the portions of broken salt.  They were friends, just keeping her safe.