The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (51 page)

At the far end stood the Ravager Kuthrallan, no longer in flux: beautiful in the way wraiths made themselves when they mimicked humanity, and robed in white with extensive embroidery of silver.  It was talking, but he could barely hear; the words were arcane nonsense and Jeronek did not seem to have been paying attention.  Instead his gaze roamed the crowd, passing from a wizened Yezadran with ink-stained fingers and scrutinous eyes to a broad-shouldered blond man with a heavy beard and stiff grey coat—possibly Jernizen, but more conservative than any Cob had seen.  Then to a slender ebon-skinned man in armor of white, teal and gold, and then to—

Jasper?
Cob thought in shock.

It had to be.  He recognized that seamed face with its smile-lines, the bright emerald eyes, the trim white beard and moustache.  But he wore armor: heavy tawny-lacquered plates with strips of same-colored fur at the collar and joints, plus a full lion-hide draped across his shoulders.  The helm that sat at his hand was a lion-head complete with real mane.

As he watched, the paws of the hide and the ears of the helm twitched slightly, attentive.

Gwydren Greymark
, came Jeronek's knowledge. 
After his pact with Athalarr, but before the one with Brancir.

His gaze swept onward.  Past a stern woman surrounded by air elementals, the myriad bangles on her arms glittering in the chamber's fluxing light; past an individual shrouded in sand-colored robes and scarves, only a narrow strip of dark skin and reflective eyes showing; past a heavyset wolf-woman with russet-grey hair, a different tribe from Haurah.  To a pair of wraiths.

One was swirled with pinkish streaks yet half-crystallized, its faux hair kinked at strange angles, its forearms and shoulders spiked with growths.

The other was Ilshenrir.

He didn't look the same.  There were familiar elements—the citrine lenses of his eyes, the thick glassy petals that replaced hair and clothes—but much of his upper body was jaggedly crystallized, and his face was fixed, translucent, his features harshly alien.  Nevertheless, the Guardian recognized the light of his essence, which fluttered in his chest like a moth.

There were more participants, but Cob could not look away.  The wraith stood unblinking, silently absorbing the words of the Ravager, and in his mind Cob screamed,
Why didn't you tell me?
  He wasn't sure if he meant it for Ilshenrir or the Guardian.

His eyes closed, and when they opened, he was on a battlefield.

The fight was over, the ground strewn with bits of broken carapace.  A yard away, an opalescent beetle the size of a draft-hog lay on its back, kicking its remaining legs feebly; half of its side had been torn away, revealing innards like glass pipes that leaked vapor.  He expected an acrid stench, but instead it smelled something like boiling water, like heat.

More of the beetles lay smashed around them, and there were other things: a glowing female torso devoid of its head, streaming entrails like an alchemist's coils, its clawed fingers coated to the last knuckle in blood; a panoply of hand-sized dead insects that, on closer inspection, more resembled winged needles and knives; a mantis of some sort, with uncountable wings, torn to shreds and scattered across the fire-scored stones.

Beside him: Kuthra, panting and wiping his white mouth with his sleeve, his Ravager wings folding in on themselves.  Sweat sheened his face, real mortal sweat, and Jeronek wondered when that had happened—when he had switched from thinking of the wraith as a
thing
, an
it
, to a person.

He wondered when the necessity of defending the Ravager had changed into a desire to protect Kuthra.

Now, seeing Kuthra's stricken face, he looked down at the remains they had fought over.  Human bodies, dissected as if by scalpels, and the broken pieces of a lesser wraith: the team that had headed out before them to claim the Pillar of the Sea.

Kuthra's hands shook as he sifted through the glassy shards to find a fragment that still held a glimmer of light.  The Ravager had humanized him steadily, turning crystal to flesh, electric lattice to nerves, energy-flow to blood, and if there were tears in his eyes, they were the Ravager's fault too.  Kuthra had told him that wraiths did not mourn.

“My best student,” he whispered over the shard of Ilshenrir, and Jeronek reached out awkwardly to clasp his shoulder.

An exhale, then Kuthra raised his free hand in a sweeping gesture.  The Ravager's power flickered, and suddenly cloud-serpents coalesced around them, their multitudes of wings shimmering translucent in the heat.

“Take it somewhere safe,” Kuthra whispered, holding up the shard.

The elementals swirled around his hand, lifting the fragment like a feather, then whisked off eastward—toward the unruined land.  Kuthra stared after them for a moment, then turned his gaze west to where the white tower burned in the distance.

A step, a blink, and all was grey again.  The Guardians walked beside him, and it took a moment to remember that he was Cob, not Jeronek.

“So Ilshenrir died,” he murmured.  “And then...he must've been caught by the bad wraiths.  The haelhene.  He said that when they rebuild themselves, they lose their memories.”

“Perhaps,” said Jeronek, “but that was fourteen hundred years ago.  Your Ilshenrir claims to be merely two hundred.”

Cob swallowed thickly, then said, “Are you tryin' to make me doubt him?  You trusted Kuthra.  Why can't I trust Ilshenrir?”

“Because Kuthra became Enkhaelen,” growled Erosei behind them.  “And Enkhaelen didn't kill your wraith—didn't eat him like he's eaten every other wraith that's crossed his path.  He let that one go with just a few teeth-marks.  Why?  Because Ilshenrir serves him.”

“That's crap,” said Cob, trying to ignore his sinking heart.  “Ilshenrir's been in the Mist Forest with the grey wraiths, who—“

“Likely also serve Enkhaelen.”

“No.  You said y'self, he doesn't get along with them.  Not everythin' is a conspiracy.”

“Grey, white, they all want the Seals removed.  Enkhaelen almost did it.”

“That doesn't mean they're workin' together.”  Cob looked to Jeronek.  “I've seen what y'wanted me t' see.  Now show me how it ended.”

Face clenching, Jeronek stopped in his tracks.  “It was the scene of my demise—and his.  I will not revisit it.  We set the final Seal, completed the ritual, and died.  Let that be enough.”

Cob wanted to.  The pain in the man's eyes was real, and after Jeronek's reaction to the great wave in his training dream, he thought he knew how this ended.  But it made no sense; not all water held the Hungry Dark, and the Guardian was allied with the element.  It should not have been able to kill him.

Many things made no sense.

“Show me,” he urged quietly.

Jeronek took a step back.  Around him, Cob felt the other Guardians closing in, and wondered if they could restrain him.  But no—he had forced them into submission before.

“Don't make me do this,” he told Jeronek as he strode forward.  The ancient soldier halted, face pinched, and when Cob reached for him, he did not recoil.  His eyes were flat black, something struggling behind them.

“You should know this,” he rasped.  “We owe you the truth.  But I—  I do not want to see.”

Then he blinked—they blinked—and the world filled with smoke.

He coughed harshly, aware that he could breathe only because of the cloud-serpent Kuthra had summoned.  Its anxiety tremored in his throat; it wanted to flee as much as he did.  But while it could fly, he was trapped here at the summit of the Pillar, forced to watch as their work tore the world apart.

The Seal at the center of the tower had become a vermilion column too bright to look at directly; from the corner of his eye he saw its base eating at the floor, its tip piercing the sky.  Under the pressure it produced, the mountains shuddered, and the tower as well—as if the earth had awakened and was shifting its shoulders, stretching its legs beneath this blanket of limestone and karst, soil and trees.

Above the bloody clouds, arcane sigils throbbed with such strength that they blotted out the sun.  A wind had kicked up, raking hard fingers across the tower and shredding mindlessly at the thunderheads.  Natural lightning pulsed down to lance the ground.  In the valley to the north, the locust hordes and human dead rattled around like bones in a dice-bowl; to the south, the sea foamed as if sick.

“How long until the spell sets?” he called to Kuthra over the thunder.

The wraith raised his head reluctantly.  He lay against a crenelation, sides heaving, his white robe stained with soot and blood and his wide eyes lightless.  Threads of energy continued to unspool from the nubs of the Ravager's wings, pouring into the coruscating Seal as if the great working was trying to consume him.

“I do not know,” he whispered.  “This is...beyond my sight.  Your world is so dark, Guardian.  It has always thwarted me.”

Gritting his teeth, Jeronek unlocked his hands from the crenel he'd been clutching and shuffled toward the wraith.  The tremors tried to kick his feet out from under him but he was attuned to the minerals of the tower—not quite stone, but close enough—and stayed steady, closing the distance until he could reach down and grip Kuthra's arm.  The wraith came up easily, feather-light, and clutched at his armor with claw-like fingers.

They'd never been so close.  He looked away from that pale face and said, “But it's done?  It's working?”

“Yes.  I could not have pulled down the beam if it was not.”

“Then we can leave.  Your magic—“

“All gone.”

“Wings, then.  Glide away.”

“I could not carry you.  The Guardian would be a stone around my neck.”

Jeronek swallowed thickly and felt the spirit clench inside him, aware of his thoughts.  “Then go.  Flee,” he murmured.  “I'll stay.”

A scoffing sound from the vicinity of his gorget.  Hot electric breath.  “Don't be a martyr.  I dare not manifest.  The Seal would take me.”

“It was your design.  Surely you can—“

“It is beyond me now.  A part of the world, empowered by it.  I could not withstand it even were I at full strength.  Not as the Ravager, nor as I was before.”  No bitterness in his voice now, just a wry acceptance, as if it had been eons rather than months since he was brought down under the Ravager's control.

Jeronek clamped a stony hand to the crenels again and looked out to the mountains.  There were few options.  Pull a sphere of earth around them, drop into the valley, then break out and flee toward—where?  The nearest locust-free area was three hundred miles away.

Perhaps they could flee toward the sea, or climb down to where the Pillar connected to the extensive underwater caves.  Or perhaps they could just wait.  The tower had some give to it; despite the shaking, it had not yet fractured, and its roots were deep.

Yes.  They would stay, and they would be—

Whiteout.  Impact.

Silence—raging, deafening silence.  His hand on the crenelation stayed fixed but his shoulder nearly snapped as the tower whiplashed beneath him.  Pain drew his skeleton on the inside of his eyelids.  Nails like shards of glass bit into the back of his neck, the floor rose to meet his knee and hip, and in a panicked reflex he threw himself into his earth-blood birthright.  As his skin hardened and his bones petrified, his senses flared with knowledge of the land beneath.  The land that pitched—

—yawed—

—buckled.

It was like a punch in the belly, a sick sinking sensation of impact and rupture.  The mountains shattered along old seams, sloughing away great sheets of limestone and ice; karst pillars snapped like trees, cave-networks collapsing into sinkholes like punctured cysts.  Along the shore, the cliffs split—flaked—fractured, dropping village-sized chunks into the roiling brine.

Fissures formed around the Pillar.  The green and black skin of the world disintegrated in foam.

Further, the continent—his backbone—twisted and splintered as the hammers of the sky struck down.  One for Fire, two for Air, three for Wood, four for—

The armor on his back went molten as the Seal of Water ignited, and the skin beneath it flash-cooked: an instant of agony and then numbness, nothing.  The cloud-serpent at his mouth vaporized, searing his lips.  Teeth clenched, he fought to hold his breath against a heat that would burn his lungs black.  Smoke rose from his scorched scalp.

Only the spots beneath Kuthra's hands remained whole, cool.  Radiance flowed up the wraith's arms and filled his fluid hair with light.  Through baking eyes, Jeronek saw him look up—saw the Seal's overwhelming glow being siphoned into his pure white blaze.

The wraith said something but he could not hear it, only the baseline whine of his shattered eardrums.  Glass-cool fingers pried at him, and he thought he understood—Kuthra could escape now!—but he could not release his grip.  His armor was fused solid, the Guardian too shocked to aid him.

And still he felt the hammers fall.  Five for Earth, six for Metal.

Seven.

Something in him shattered—or was it the world?  It felt like a door being slammed, and for a moment he saw a huge bright force in flight—dwindling—gone.  But at the abandoned epicenter, the land split down to the bedrock, the Seals' horrid energy racing along every fault-line in a spreading circle of destruction.  Water displaced; air roiled; wood flattened as if beneath a scythe.  Fire leapt its bounds; metal strained and snapped.