The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (49 page)

“Yes.”

Having exhausted the extent of their interest in each other, they hunkered down to wait.

*****

Dasira crouched within the mist, trying to slow her breathing.  The neutral ground told her quite clearly where she was.  She wished she could curse Ilshenrir for it, but with her bracer's threads working full-time to expel the toxins from her pores, she understood.

Still, it was a bad idea—probably as bad as Cob reinvigorating that village's spring.  Maybe even her own idea of crossing the desert.  She had seen a flash just after the mist closed in—a bright pale arrow rising into the air—and guessed it was Ilshenrir abandoning them.

She'd tried approaching that spot, hoping to bump into the others, but had found only more mist.  Now she didn't know what to do.  Without Ilshenrir, she had no way out.

And no perspective.  The mist was not uniform, but in combination with the sourceless diffuse light, it confused her eyes.  Parts swirled slowly as if pushed by phantom wind, but other sections hung like still curtains—or solid walls, for all she knew.

And it was so quiet.  No sound but her own heartbeat, the slowing rasps of her breath.  Unending, unnerving occlusion—

Something moved in the corner of her vision.

She turned her head slowly, hoping she was as cloaked as everything else.  She remembered Ilshenrir saying
Don't encourage them
, back when they'd rescued Cob in Amandon, but he'd never explained what
they
were.  Something sentient in the mist?  Nothing seemed unusual about the place where the movement had been.

Are my eyes playing tricks already?

This place was a crack between realms, he'd said.  A catch-bin for the things that fell through.  How many realms did it touch?  The physical and the spirit, but where else?

Stop it.  Don't speculate.

What happened to the creatures that got stuck here?  Did they die and decay, or just...linger, endlessly lost?

Shut up, brain.

Another shift in the mist.  Eyes sliding sideways, she saw a shape—a substance there, darker through the grey—but when she turned her head, it vanished.

Hallucinating?  Or hunted?

Serindas slid into her palm, bathing the mist around her in dim pinkish-orange light.  That startled her, and she turned her attention to the blade, remembering this color from their climb up Erestoia By-The-Sea.  It hadn't lasted—the blade had gone back to blood-red within marks—so why it would reoccur now...

The blade tugged slightly in her hand, pointing its tip into the distance.

“What, you want to go back there?  To that spire?” she hissed at it.  “You have some kind of special connection now?  Pike that.  Even if you could pull me through, it would take a month to get back here, and who knows—“

Serindas tugged again, like a dog on a leash.  Dasira frowned and weighed her options.  She had no idea where the others were, or if they'd even crossed over, and doubted Ilshenrir could find her unless he accidentally walked into her.  The few steps she'd already taken could have been miles.  And she had no crystal chunk, no arrowhead—not even Enkhaelen's ear-stud.

“Pikes,” she muttered.  The last thing she wanted was to trek all the way back to Erestoia, but contact with a wraith spire might be the only way to get out.

Then again, there were multiple spires...

Narrowing her eyes, she positioned herself to face away from Serindas' pull.  Unless she'd moved a great distance, the spire Hlacaasteia should stand almost opposite Erestoia, at a distance of maybe thirty miles.  Much better than retreating all the way to the coast.

Dangerous though, in the deep salt and surrounded by wraiths...

A smile twitched across her mouth.  Danger had never been a deterrent.

“A little bit further west, though.  Not straight on,” she murmured.  “And if I miss it, I end up walking into the sea.  If there even is a sea here.  If not, I walk forever.”

She looked at the blade, then around at the mist, and shrugged.  What else was she going to do?

*****

“Can anyone hear me?” Fiora called into the mist, to no avail.  She cleared her throat roughly; like her eyes and nose, it still burned from the fumes, and the words came wet with phlegm.  Her stomach was settling, but the taste of bile permeated her mouth.

Her goddess protected her from heat and flame, but not from other hazards.

Grimacing, she scrubbed at her mouth with the inner edge of her robe collar.  It itched but there was no better option; the outside of all her gear was crusted with salt and sand, and she had lost her pack and shield while tumbling through the collapsing dunes.

She felt naked without the shield, her only blessed object.  Everything else she could replace, though the priestesses would scold her for losing a liturgical text.  She still had a few necessities in the pouches bound to her belt—coins, tea herbs, bandages—plus the eye-guard, plus the two swords: her own plain one and the longer silver sword strapped across her back.

But nothing else.  No water, no food.  No idea how to get out of this.

Do I stay and wait?  Do I keep calling?  Am I doomed?
  The last thought did not seem real.  She was not a pessimistic person, and had practiced Sister Merrow's self-control routine exhaustively: deep breathing, calm speech, and prioritizing thought before action.

She just wasn't very good at it.

She'd always been aggressive.  There was a core of anger like a little furnace in her chest, and on bad days she warmed herself with it.  On good days, she pretended it was a lantern instead, and Sister Merrow encouraged that; she said it was the sort of flame that brought justice into the world.

Fiora wasn't so sure.  Sometimes it felt like if she let it out, it would burn down everything in its path.  She'd tried to temper it like a blade, but with nothing to strike out at, its sharp edge bit at her hand until she couldn't take it.  Until she shouted at someone, like Cob or Dasira.

All she'd ever wanted was to champion the weak, avenge the hurt and protect the threatened.  And yet here she was—stymied, frustrated, lost—in service to a Guardian who refused to consider killing the Emperor.

She clenched her teeth and forced her mind to the situation.  This wasn't the time to dwell on the end-goal, but to find her way out, and then find Cob.  Lark had been close enough to the wolf and the goblin, so they were probably together and fine, and as for Dasira and Ilshenrir...

Good riddance.

She didn't dislike them as people; it wasn't their fault they were inhuman monsters.  But they were both tied to Enkhaelen somehow, and if Ilshenrir served him—if he had been spared the Ravager's bite because of some complicity—then he could be delivering Cob to him right now.

Digging under her robe, she drew up the sword-shaped pendant she wore and cupped her hands around it.  “Breana,” she whispered, then amended her entreaty to, “Brea Eranine, if you can hear me, if you can reach me, please send me a guide.  Or a message.  Anything.  Even the warmth of your hand, my goddess, my captain.  I pray you lead me from this trackless place.”

Neither breeze nor shape stirred the mist around her.  She prayed again and again—alternating between closed eyes and open, standing and kneeling, sword sheathed or out—but nothing changed, and eventually a knot formed in her chest.

Either Breana couldn't hear, or...

No.  I'm in her favor.  She came to me at the spire by the sea; she poured into me like molten iron and moved me with her will.  That only happens to the blessed, to those who call her by her sacred name.  If she was wroth with me, she would have destroyed me when I spoke it.

So Sister Merrow had warned her when she was inducted into the secret ranks.  That spire had been the first time she'd felt the goddess's presence—and it had been glorious.  If only she could remember what she'd done.  She'd come back to herself with the arrowhead in hand, crouched among the dunes where she'd started.  Dasira's pointed questions hadn't helped, but she'd stayed quiet to protect her sect's secret.  She was sure she'd done well.

Breana just has no foothold in this place
, she thought, and nodded to herself.  It made sense.  The Sword Maiden was an ascendant human with no interests beyond the mortal plane, and none of the bountiful perceptions of Brigydde the Seer.  This riven realm was beyond her.

But Brancir was greater.

It pained her to call upon another deity, even one of the Trifold.  With no other choice, though, she drew the silver sword.  It was heavy, and too long for her short stature, but she did not plan to swing it.

“Forger Brancir,” she tried, “Matron of Silver, I know I'm not one of your followers, but I call upon you as a sister-in-arms.  If you have any power to divide the realms, to reach through from the elemental side, please—I beseech you—grant me your aid.  By the alliance you formed with the Maiden and the Mother, I beg for succor, for salvation from this prison of wraiths.”

Silence fell flat upon her as she finished speaking.  The silver sword quivered in her hands, but she could not be sure if it was a sign or just her strength failing.  She licked her dry lips and tasted brine, poison, dried blood.  She would not last long.

And yet:

Nothing.

The goddesses did not hear.

Her heart clenched and her eyes stung.  She lowered the blade and tried to chase away the tears by blinking.  Never had she asked much of her goddess; calling upon her in battle didn't count, since such blessings served Breana as much as her followers.  The other girls at the Cantorin temple had prayed for silly things—love, luck, confidence, success—but Fiora had abstained, for why should she waste her favor on such foolishness?  Those were things you built for yourself.  There was no need to pester the gods.

To be let down now, after her disciplined self-denial, after her active pursuit of the goddess's goals, after her striving to sway Cob and the Guardian to the Trifold's needs...

No.  I can't be bitter.  Even deities have their limits.

I'll get myself out of this.  Somehow.  I'll—

Something moved in the mist before her.  A color—a light.

Squinting hard, she tried to make it out.  It looked like a reddish candle-flame, and her hand tightened on the sword's hilt, for that was what wraiths were inside their fleshy cages: little sentient balls of light.

“Hoi?” she called.  “Who's there?”

It came closer slowly—or else swelled in size, difficult to differentiate in the depthless mist.  Either way, it grew until it looked as large as a fist, and suddenly she could discern the shadows of fingers upon it.  A hand.  A wrist.

A figure emerged from the mist, tall and stern-faced, dressed in rippling silvery garments and with sleek hair of the same shade.  Tarnished eyes stared down at her from above a long, aquiline nose.  The mouth creased slightly and she saw cracks form and smooth at its edges like living porcelain.  In its hand was the big shard of reddish crystal that had illuminated its way.

“You're Muriae,” she exhaled, amazed.

“Yes,” it said in a smooth fluting voice.  “I have come to fetch you.”

“You heard my call?  Did you follow the sword?”

“Yes.”  The silver person held out its empty hand.  “Come.  There is a safe place not far from here.  We must exit before we draw any attention.”

“Of course,” said Fiora, and clasped the elemental's hand.  “And praise be to Brancir.  I knew someone had to be able to hear me in here!”

It smiled wider, glimpses of raw silver showing beneath the false flesh before the cracks resealed.  “Indeed,” it said, then turned its gaze from her and led onward, into the fog.

Chapter 12 – Future and Past

Ilshenrir burst from the Grey like an arrow, reassembling himself for speed.  Close above hung his fellow haelhene, already unfurled into their native forms; he barely evaded tendrils from three different phase-angles as he shot into the sky.

As expected, they gave chase.

The bonds of the world diminished as he gained altitude, and he unfurled as soon as he could do so without slowing.  Immediately the probabilities arrayed ahead like a kaleidoscope of doom: the manifold deaths, subjugations and maimings that his kin had in mind for him.  Each pursuer planned differently, and they jockeyed their wills against each other, trying to force the rest to conform to their preference.

They could not fold space, though—not while flying in atmosphere—so he still had options.  Extending fifth-dimensional wings, he let the currents of time and potential loft him high toward where there was no sky, only the black terminus of the Seals, and below no ground but the crushing stasis of the world's disapproval.  His pursuers became potentialities, ever-shifting.  The universe fanned out before his gaze.

In the distance he sensed the grand arrays of Hlacaasteia, unfurled like a thousand flowering buds into the transient substreams of time.  The reaching fingers and the withering ones, the cages and the open doors, the crumbling shells and the ever-rising, ever-renewing spires—all the alterations that it could make, that it might make, branching from it in self-pruning ecstatic profusion.  Its emanating futures made him tremble even from afar.

He curved away, not daring to impinge upon its reach; the probability-waves it could project were far stronger than him, and if caught in their riptide he would have no chance.  His haelhene kin sent out their own waves, but they clashed against each other as often as not.  With five of them—no, six—in pursuit, each determined to be the one to gain the glory, they created plenty of dead space for him to exploit.

There should have been more; he had seen at least ten in the sky.  But this many were already enough to handle.  No matter their division, he could not force his will over all six of them.  His chances spread out ahead, and he wheeled toward discordance—toward a probability where they clashed ever more while he stayed passive and rode their fore-waves through the gaps in their greed.

It was a slow game, not like the one he had played with Lycharvan at Erestoia By-The-Sea.  That spire's probability-waves had been flattened by Cob's presence and scattered by the green Syllastrian crystal, giving the haelhene no strong currents to ride and himself no overwhelming foe.  He had been able to fight Lycharvan on near-equal footing—his strength of will sufficient to carve his preferred future into the substance of his 'cousin'—and then to disrupt and distract, breaking the second wraith's waves with his own to banish the future where it annihilated Lark.

Here, he dared not turn on them.  They would swarm him, and if none attained full dominance, the clash between their waves would tear him apart.  That option hung the heaviest in his view, saturated with probability, and it took all his energy to resist its gravity—to chart a path toward a dimmer glint of hope.

His options: the Grey again, tremendously difficult to access from the air.  Defiant self-detonation, either before or after they swarmed him.  Continued flight, until they eventually peeled off from him or night fell to sap them all.  Or descent.

Their waves tugged at him, trying to sway his choice just as they influenced each other.  Some wanted a continued flight, their probabilities forecasting the others falling away and an eventual exhausted capture.  Others nudged him toward a detonation that took out only their rivals—standard haelhene politics.  Even if they were all from the same House, they were not the same rank; he could feel it in the unequal weight of their thrusts.

He took another turn toward discord and forced it back at them, targeting the weakest two.  Immediately those began to pull against the strongest haelhene, flinging their futures forward in opposition to it, while a fourth pushed from a different angle to bend the outcome more to its benefit.  The other two tried to maintain their personal trajectories by narrowing their waves.

Cooperation would have netted me before I left the ground
, thought Ilshenrir clinically. 
Was I like that when I was haelhene?

The chaos in their waves roughened his flight, so he folded himself narrow lest they scuttle him by accident.  Wingless, he could no longer project waves, but he retained just enough fletching to steer, like a glass arrow punching repeatedly through the lopsided bubbles of fate that tried to trap him.

Up, and up, and up, until the Seals loomed fierce and massive—the burning black limit of the world.  No other option than to turn into the ripples, to try to ride them to escape—

And then he saw it.  There, far at the edge of the chaos, an outlier glinting in a dark field of death.  A pinhole so small—so constricted—that he could not see what lay beyond, only that the others' waves rebounded from the blank space around it.

Pause to think and he would pass its threshold and consign it to the oblivion of unchosen paths.  Ahead, the others' waves rebounded from the Seals to tear his future into prison-sized chunks.  Convergence approached, swiftly, soon,
now
—

He chose.

The turbulence nearly snapped him as he dropped through a scatter-zone in the waves, straight down toward earth and solidity.  The others, having pushed for some sort of turn and not a complete reverse, wheeled above him in confusion, probabilities in disarray as some struggled to spot him and others pressed their agendas on their rivals.

He forced his gaze down to where the pinhole glinted, feeling physical reality press tight against the dimensions he had already folded in.  Less willing to restrict themselves, his pursuers lost ground, and as he fell, fell, fell, he started to lose track of them.  His senses collapsed in on themselves until he could barely feel their fore-waves—could barely tell if they still tailed him or if they'd spun away, dissuaded by the darkness that rushed up ever faster.

His fifth dimension closed completely, and he opened his physical eyes to see the salt lake below.  Blue-green and perfectly circular, crusted as thick as winter ice.

I am solid again
, he thought. 
I will dash myself to pieces on it.  That is why I can not see past that pinspot; I will be dead.

He had foreseen his death before, though—many times, in many different situations—and it had never been like this.  Probable death showed itself like a vision, a grand reel of gravitational inevitability that could drag down an unwary seer no matter their actual chance.  It was the curse of foreknowledge, the basis of all prophecy; a living mind, even a caiohene one, fixated on its demise more strongly than any other option.

Even as he thought this, he saw deaths spin out to either side of the hole, created by the wavering of his will.  Faint like dreams.  He scanned frantically for other possibilities, but his physical eyes could only hold so many, and all faded as the sand approached—

Ah.  I understand.

It was the limit of vision.  The world compacted the caiohene form, its dimensions, its senses, its essence.  On the surface, they could still function, but underground...

Underground, they were blind.

He could have changed trajectory then; he was falling fast but he had no spine to damage, no innards to pulp if he made a sudden sharp turn.  But dimly he felt his kin still on his tail, the waves of their intentions shimmering around him, and he did not think he could evade them again.

He closed himself tight and slipped through the pinhole, and everything shut down.

Then he hit the salt lake.

Pain—

—shock—

—shatter?

Physical sensations consumed him.  He didn't understand; he never
felt
, not really.  Temperature and texture and touch, yes, but this was a rending fire—agony?

And yet his consciousness was whole, his shell battered but unbreached.

What—

He remembered again that he had eyes, and tried to open them.  Liquid pressed against their lenses, sluggish and thick, and he realized that it was water.  Briny slush-filled water reacting to his descent-heated surfaces, peeling bubbles of air away from him and replacing them with frost.  Above, his entry-point had already vanished; below was an endless night, squeezing him thin inside his compacting shell.

Panic rose, and he jittered within his prison, throwing pale citrine light across the constellations of ice that surrounded him.  Had he trapped himself?  Already the heat had dulled, his cracks filling in with minerals, and he remembered how it had felt to crystallize.  To be sealed into an unwieldy matrix, motility stolen, essence denied.

So be it
, he thought. 
Better this than to be captured.
  But there were other voices within him, whispering,
Foolish to side with the natives.  Naive to attempt restitution toward this dark abscess of a world.  Insane to sacrifice self and freedom for the sake of ephemeral lives.

We should not have come here.  Should not have left the forest.

Should not have left the Isle.

He had no head to shake.  It was strange that pure emotional denial did not seem enough now—that he had come to rely on physical actions to convey his mood, rather than the multi-tiered resonance with which his people communicated.  His thoughts clamored with the wrongness of it—a dozen voices that could have been former selves or old mentors, enemies, difficult to tell.  Here in this echo-chamber of midnight, they spoke louder than they ever had.

Were they right?  Was he insane?

He had experienced it often in his first decades within the forest: a keen disjunction between the way he felt, sensed, thought, and the things he was told.  Vallindas had steadied him, but even that closeness was wrong.  He'd felt himself slipping, weakening—being subjugated not through force but by influence.  Changing.

It had been impossible to measure his alterations against the airahene, with their bright colors and flowing forms, their easy adaptation.  They shifted constantly yet stayed the same, while he shifted slowly and felt more and more a stranger—an enigma to himself.

Watching humans had been a comfort.  They stretched and shrank and shed their outermost layers but they didn't change, not really.  Something at the core remained static despite all iteration and collapse.  He hadn't known what it was—still didn't—but tried to emulate it a little.  A distinct face, a gender, a bodily conformation.  A physical identity.

The airahene, who put on human skins only when necessary, thought it ridiculous.  His haelhene kin would find it abominable.

Did his past selves feel that way too?  Had he tarnished the line?

There are no selves.  There is only me.  Thinking like a human is truly a sign of madness.

And useless.  What did it matter now?  He was lost.

Had he even saved them?

No
, said a voice from the dark. 
They are as doomed as they would have been without you.  Nothing you have done outside the Isle has mattered.  You should not have run.

His essence shivered.  It was not a voice he recognized.

Then he felt a tug on his shell.

Had he a throat, he might have screamed.  He remembered seeing lakes like this during the trek—unnaturally perfect circles—and even then they had raised dim recollections of a time before this life.  A starfall, a constellation of craters and pits with water bubbling from their centers.  Old, old memories from some era between the Descent and the Seals.

He could not recall investigating, though, nor had he seen them in this life.  Nevertheless, they conjured a fear in him.  Worse things than wraiths dwelt in the black of the Void.

The light from his eyes could not penetrate the thick soup of saltwater, and when he felt a second tug, he pressed his essence into the opposite end of his cage, as if that miniscule distance could protect him.

But the contact became a current, pushing him sideways, and for an endless span of time he drifted helpless in its grip, salt accumulating over all surfaces to blind and stiffen him.  Sometimes a few inches would scrape away and he would press his essence against the clean spot, desperate to illuminate his captor, but there was nothing to see.

Suddenly, without warning, he breached the surface.

It was not the same lake.  The dimensions were the same, but the local emanations were different—less touched by Hlacaasteia—and the surroundings less ridged with salt.  Above, the sky was dark, the sphere of stars turning slowly against the velvet night.  He wondered how far he had floated.

The tug came again, pulling him toward shore.  Another spot of contact heaved at him from behind.

Under starlight and his own faint glow, he managed to perceive them through the rime: two crystal-ridden globules festooned with narrow pseudopods, like stranded jellyfish struggling to reel in a last meal.  As they nudged him completely free of the water, the subterranean paralysis melted from him, and he split his shell into limbs to drag himself further from the lake.  With every clawing inch, he felt its drag lessen, and soon he had fingers again, and a face, and a mouth so that he could clench his teeth.