Covenants: Anodize (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 9)

by Terra Whiteman

  “After nearly taking it,” sneered the wraith.

  “I don’t respond well to pity-parties. Take my thanks. You can’t control what you are, or how you function. Not where biology is concerned. Fighting your instincts is no shallow feat.”

  Nibli seemed to consider my rebuttal, shifting their eyes back toward the flames. “Who is… Ky-rah?”

  I froze with the rim of the mug against my lips.

  “You were screaming when I was trying to feed you, calling me that name.”

  “Qaira is my husband.”

  Nibli hesitated. “The winged man, whose statue we saw?”

  I nodded, downing the rest of my drink. I could already feel the elixir expanding in my stomach, sloshing around with each step, but I took heed and poured more into my mug. “If I’m lucky, you might meet him soon.” I waited for Nibli to feel the keenness of that dual-edged response, but their reaction was indifferent. I changed the subject to more pressing matters. “What’s happened here?”

  “I don’t know,” said the wraith, wearing an uneasy frown as they looked at the voidal sky. “But I think we should finish our adventure, sooner than later.”

  “Was there a pillar at this hearth?”

  Nibli shook their head. “This hearth was empty. No bodies, either.”

  I forced a smile, watching Nara stamp around behind us. “Your totem seems unhappy about that.”

  “We both are,” sighed the wraith.

  Yes, nothing to eat. Except me. “Aren’t you full yet?”

  The silence was broken by a violent pop of the bonfire. Nibli regarded me, unflinching, their eyes alit with contrition. No response came, and I finished my third mugful, about to burst.

  “Well?” I demanded, steeling myself. “Are you going to take from me or not?”

  “No,” said Nibli, looking out beyond the boundaries of the hearth’s candescence. “I think I might find something else soon.”

  I followed their gaze, seeing something moving in the distance. Not alive, no, but flickering with shadow. Moving out of the circle, I squinted through the darkness, studying the object that I discovered was an edifice, emanating black smoke. I recognized it from the attica thread.

  The Committee of Esotericism.

  “Congratulations,” said Nibli, their tone betraying their words. “We’re home.”

  XIX

  QAIRA

  LAITH LED US OUT OF THE FOG AND TO another crystalized tundra. It’d grown darker subtly over time, and none of us could pinpoint when exactly night had fallen.

  Zira and I walked with our gazes cast permanently upward, the sky now devoid of the soothing panoramic view of drifting stellar clouds (the only selling point here, in my opinion). Instead that creepy eye had grown in size and color, and it reminded me of the supermassive black hole on Poekka, except woven with scarlet rather than blue.

  “Why is everything so empty?” asked Zira, to Laith.

  “It wasn’t always like this,” she said, quietly. “Wayfarers kept manifestations within their quadrants, but now many are dead.”

  Zira frowned. “Manifestations, as in they thought up the environment?”

  “Yes.”

  So, I’d been right. Eschatis was like a giant, blank canvas at its core, painted on by its residents all at once. “How do you know where we’re going?”

  “I’m a wayfarer. I fare the way.”

  Zira scoffed. I only rolled my eyes. “How come he gets his questions answered and mine only get the sly of tongue?”

  “I did answer your question,” quipped Laith. “Maybe you should specify exactly what you want to know.”

  I swallowed back the customary ‘Fuck you’ that I normally afforded anyone who spoke to me like that. “You said there are quadrants. That suggests mapped locations around this place. How are you able to navigate them?”

  “The waystations. A wayfarer can see the trains leading to them. You say this quadrant looks empty, but I see a web all around me, all the time.” Laith paused, her expression dimming. “It’s thinner now than before. Without the wayfarers to attend to them, the bonfires die and the trains are lost.” She looked up at the eye, spiteful. “He wishes to destroy them all; undo everything we’ve woven. Reshape Eschatis to his liking.”

  “The eye has a gender,” I noted, casually.

  “Why does the eye want to destroy Eschatis?” pressed Zira.

  Laith clicked her teeth, annoyed. “I said we would talk at the waystation.”

  “And how long will that be?” I snapped. “We’re a little pressed for time, here.”

  Zira sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose. “Qaira, could you please refrain from being yourself in front of the only person willing to help us?”

  I scowled at him, while Laith seemed amused by our exchange. “We’re nearly there.”

  And, as if on cue, a soft, blue dome of light took form in the distance—the very same beacon we’d spotted, right before Zira had folded in on himself and I’d gone through the most terrifying experience of my life. Remembering that gave me pause.

  Laith noticed and said, “Don’t worry, this one won’t bite you.”

  “How do you know the last one did?” I demanded.

  “You’re the opposite of your ‘colleague’,” she said. “I bet you’re a very bad liar.”

  “He is,” said Zira, giving merit to Laith’s assessment by delivering that with zero countenance.

  I laughed dryly. “Well, it’s hard to be any less expressive than a piece of cardboard, like you.”

  “Being deceptive is hardly a good thing,” offered Laith, bringing an offended frown to Zira’s lips. “You are a genuine soul, Qaira. Your kind is coveted here.”

  That comment made me mildly uncomfortable, so I didn’t respond.

  “Then you should keep him,” muttered Zira.

  *

  The waystation was the loneliest we’d seen yet; just a few runic pillars scattered around the skeletal remains of an abandoned hovel. The hearth looked the same—stone slabs for stools, four in total, bordering the bonfire in a circle. Even the same charred rack was placed over the flames, a pot hanging directly underneath. My eyes lingered on the pot, remembering the sound it’d made against the augur’s skull.

  I grimaced.

  “Go and sit,” commanded Laith. “I need to cast the circle.”

  We did as she instructed; neither one of us would dare refuse a seat and some warmth. It’d grown cold in the surrounding darkness.

  Laith took a dagger from the belt of her robe, slicing through the tip of her finger. She walked along the boundary of the circle, pressing the injured finger to each of the three pillars along the way. Her blood had the look and consistency of black oil, and the mark she left on the pillars lit the runes in green light—;

  The same green light, both in energy pattern and intensity, as that of the monastery’s. Two thirds of the way through Laith’s ritual, green orbs filtered out of the shining runes on the pillars, dancing spirals from base to top. It reminded me of some kind of magical bubble machine.

  Our eyes had followed Laith until now. When the glowing bubbles appeared, Zira and I looked at each other with grim cognizance. If that was wayfarer energy, or whatever, then I suspected we had done something wrong at the monastery.

  Laith joined us at the fire with an added detail to her already-ethereal image. Her emerald eyes had taken on the same luminosity as the orbs. Her robe was now a living piece of art; the black embroidery waving back and forth over the red silk, like branches in the wind. She stirred the pot, lifting the ladle only to let the contents pour slowly back in, checking the consistency.

  “It’s not fresh,” Laith assessed, “but still potent.” She snatched an empty mug from the seat-slab beside her, filling it with the pot’s contents. It went to me first, since I was closest. Hooray.

  I studied the dark, thick, four-day-old coffee looking shit I’d just been given. “It smells like motor oil.”

  “It doesn’t
taste as bad as it looks,” said Zira.

  I glared at Laith, incredulous. “Why are we even drinking this?”

  “For protection,” she said. “Under normal circumstances, any visitor is required to drink the tea before traveling outside of the waystation. It tethers their thoughts; keeps them from being used against the journeyer.” She regarded me with a hint of acclaim. “That you two even made it this far without tea deserves some praise.”

  Satisfied with that answer, I sucked up my doubts and drank the pungent, warm liquid in just a few gulps. I then resisted vomiting it back up when the aftertaste numbed my tongue and throat. Laith ignored my evident play at pretending I wasn’t disgusted. She simply took the mug back and ladled more in. Zira rose to take his portion, murmuring thanks. He drank his down without hesitation. So valiant.

  Laith sat on a slab, folding her hands onto her lap. Our seating arrangements formed a triangle around the bonfire. “You have questions. Ask them.”

  Neither of us said anything at first, the effects of the tea having kicked in immediately. My exhaustion evaporated, and for the first time since our arrival here, I could think with perfect clarity. Everything around us appeared different, but I couldn’t put my finger on how. It just did. The closest I could come to describing this effect was like having impaired sight for your entire life, and only realizing it when wearing glasses for the first time. The tea had served as metaphorical bifocals.

  There were so many questions that I had, but most of them weren’t at all pertinent to the mission objectives. As much as I’d have loved to sit here and pick her brain, I had to stick to our assignment.

  But before I could get a word out, Zira asked, “How do you make this tea?”

  Yeah, that was totally an important question. Fucking idiot.

  Laith raised her brows. “You want the recipe?”

  “No—well, I don’t know—but I remember there being botanical ingredients in it. Where did you gather them from? We haven’t seen a single form of plant life.”

  I activated my vis-capture then, beginning a recording of the exchange.

  “They’re gathered from the antediluvian quadrants.”

  “…The what?”

  “The ancient precincts, manifested by the primeval totems. They’re scarcer in number than the newer quadrants, usually protected by primex sentries.”

  … And what the ever-loving fuck did any of that mean?

  “You’ve been to a precinct, actually.” Her eyes slid to me, as if reading my mind. “And destroyed it, thank you.”

  “The monastery,” said Zira, aloof. “There was no way for us to know. The sentry attacked us, and we defended ourselves.”

  “It attacked you because you were not imbibed with a wayfarer’s tea,” said Laith. “Which, is no one’s fault, yes. But if Eschatis is ever somehow restored, our harvesting resources will be greatly reduced.”

  “There was a child,” I interjected. “The sentry was pursuing them.”

  “For good reason. That ‘child’ was trying to break the coil.” Her response was drenched in rancor.

  “What is—?”

  “The primeval totems were responsible for sealing away Suzerain. They fractured his shadow into two coils—one was safeguarded by the primex sentry that you destroyed. The child was a pillar. There are six of them,” she paused, reconsidering her words. “Or, was six of them. I’ve been doing everything I can to shave off their numbers. The Six Pillars of the Assemblage—,”

  The Four Horses of the Apocalypse, I mused, reminiscing of my time in the Jury.

  “—are Suzerain’s acolytes. They work to free him. They do this by killing wayfarers and their augurs, and destroying waystations. Narrowing down the amount of trains eventually leads them to ancient precincts, where they look for Suzerain’s coils.”

  The trail we’d seen was a train, but I couldn’t fathom why we’d seen that train and not any other. I kept that thought to myself. “So, we broke a coil, then. What happens now?”

  “The remaining pillars will search for the last coil. They’ve already started, two trains have vanished since we’ve sat down.” Laith sighed, wincing. “I fear they’ve already found where it is kept.”

  “If the last coil is broken, the rift can’t be closed,” deduced Zira, trying to fit all the puzzle pieces together.

  “The rift will keep expanding if Suzerain is restored,” she corrected him. “The rift opened because there aren’t enough wayfarers to keep the gates locked anymore. The rift won’t close until we reactivate all the gates.”

  “Our Queen,” I began, the weight of urgency suddenly threatening to collapse on me. “She’s in Eschatis. We need to find her.”

  Laith nodded. “She’s with my augur. I can take you to them.”

  “With your augur?” I repeated, near-panicked.

  “She’s safe,” assured Laith. “More or less.”

  “I had to beat one to death to keep it from folding Zira like laundry!” I snarled.

  Laith held up a hand, gesturing for me to settle. “My augur is different. Don’t worry, you’ll see.”

  I rose from my seat, having heard enough. “Alright, this tea party is over. Take us to Leid.”

  Laith looked up at me with an indolent frown.

  I clenched my fists.

  “Qaira,” warned Zira, his eyes as sharp as daggers.

  “We’re the only chance you have of stopping these pillars,” I said, dialing it back. “For whatever reason, it seems you can’t.”

  “A wayfarer without an augur is only half of themselves,” said Laith. “The pillars killed my augur and desecrated my station. I was lucky to escape.”

  I squinted, confused. “You just said Leid was with your augur.”

  Laith presented a tiny smile. “My new, indentured augur. Synthesized by your multiverse, unintentionally. The only good thing to come from any of this. They’ve killed two of the six pillars already. So, you’re wrong. You’re not my only chance.”

  Oh my god, those fucking plebes. “Then you don’t want our help?”

  “Of course I want your help.”

  “Okay, so let’s go.” I swung both of my arms in gesture for them to get the fuck up.

  Laith took the mug from Zira, refilling it to the brim. “Take this, and share it if you start to feel burdensome again.” She returned it to him.

  I lifted a brow. “You’re not coming?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. The sixth pillar will kill me the moment I step foot inside her quadrant.”

  “You said you were going to take us there.”

  “Since you drank from the quantum coffers, I can now make my augur’s train visible to you. Follow it, and you’ll find your Queen.”

  As soon as she said this, a wispy, iridescent thread appeared, trailing off into the black unknown. I stared at it with trepidation.

  “Thank you, for everything,” Zira said to Laith behind me.

  “Consider it repayment, Scholar,” she said. “Good luck, for everyone’s sake.”

  Laith watched our departure from the safety of the phosphorescent circle until it evaporated from sight, as did she. We were left alone once again with only an ethereal trail and angry, hovering eye.

  Qaira, help me.

  Help me, please. I don’t want to die.

  I’m sorry, help me—

  Leid’s voice invaded my mind; desperate, terrified. Icy tingles shot through my body, and I gasped.

  Zira froze. “What is it?”

  I spun. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  I didn’t explain and started to sprint, leaving Zira in the dust. He shouted after me, but I didn’t stop. He’d catch up.

  XX

  NIBLI

  LEID KNELT DOWN TO STUDY THE PARAPHERNALIA left around the facility grounds. There were shards formed in strange rock formations—little piles, intentionally created—scattered amid corroded bones and old blood splatter.

  “This wasn�
�t here when I left,” I said.

  She didn’t respond, inspecting a long-bone, tapping her chin.

  The facility wavered in some kind of shadowy energy. It looked like it was on fire, yet without the fire, smoldering and dark. All fifteen levels of it.

  “It appears you aren’t the only one able to leech the power from the living,” she said, holding the bone up for me to see.

  I didn’t know what she was trying to show me. It looked like a bone. “Never said I was.” And then I noticed the tiny specks of light, thin as thread, weaving in and out of it. I promptly smacked it from her hand. “Don’t touch that.”

  The bone clattered to the ground. Leid looked up at me, appalled.

  “Leeches power from the living, remember?”

  Her anger wavered. “I don’t have any power. Not here.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  We stared at each other.

  Leid waited for me to explain, but I didn’t. I couldn’t, because telling her would grant her even more. I waved a hand to generate some air, sending a small cloud of effluvium her way. Leid backed off with a defeated pout, heading for the entranceway staircase. I watched her, wondering how such an audacious little thing could have lived this long, let alone become figurehead of a renowned, specialized organization (or so she claimed). My world view was very limited, but people like her had died very quickly in the facility.

  “Are you coming?” she demanded from the top step. “Or are you just going to stand there staring at me like an idiot?”

  Case in point.

  Nara nudged my arm, suspecting I was about to abandon it.

  I patted its neck. “Be a good totem, okay? I won’t be too long.”

  Satisfied with my promise, Nara trotted off to eat the power-leeching bones. I joined Leid at the facility’s rotating double-doors, keeping the customary several-foot distance between us, looking up at the smoldering, torpid construct. I’d hoped to never see this place again. “What’s the plan once we get inside?”

  “I ditched any plans a while ago,” said Leid, pushing on the rotating door. “Just keep me alive while I investigate.”