Eliana’s tears muddied the dark corridor. With each thin breath, her abused body protested. Promise me.
I promise. Once Navi is safe, you will be able to think more clearly.
Eliana didn’t dare to hope that could be true. It had been so long since she had been able to think clearly, since she had felt in control of her own tired mind, that she hardly remembered what it felt like.
“Here,” Zahra instructed, her voice small, contained, and they turned a corner, obeying her.
Eliana sensed her fear of speaking too loudly while within these walls, of existing too completely. She had explained it to Eliana: How easily would you find an unfamiliar aberration of the skin on the back of your hand? A sight you knew intimately and saw every day?
It would not take long. And so the wraiths would easily be able to catch her scent, if she wasn’t careful—an aberration in their hive. An unwelcome visitor.
At the end of a narrow stone corridor, they flew down two sets of stairs and then through a labyrinth of passages dimmer and lower-ceilinged than the rest. At last, their path deposited them before a black door set in the wall, one of several such doors in a corridor that stretched several yards in either direction. At one end of the hallway stood an archway that led to darkness.
At the other end, a wall of stone. A dead end.
Harkan withdrew a set of lock picks from his pocket and knelt, prepared to work while Eliana stood guard, Arabeth in hand. Her castings were dim and quiet.
But the door was not locked.
Instead it stood slightly ajar, a faint artificial light beyond.
Harkan froze, shoulders tense.
Eliana stared at the door, her heart pounding so fast she could feel it in her forehead.
Zahra?
I don’t know, Zahra replied, fainter now than she had been before. Quickly. Inside. I’ll keep watch at the door. She is close.
Wraiths could be careless, Zahra had told her during their swim, distracting Eliana’s thoughts from the cold and the dark with information that would have made Remy’s eyes shine like stars. The wraiths of Annerkilak weren’t Empire soldiers, efficient and disciplined. They were gangsters, dulled by debauchery and spoiled with power. They could have come downstairs to retrieve a fresh jar of lachryma and been so drug-addled that they’d carelessly left the door open.
Whatever the reason, Eliana didn’t have time for debate.
She held her breath, tightened her hand around Arabeth, and stepped past Harkan into the room.
It was larger than she’d expected—deep and wide, lined with dozens of tall shelving units. A smooth black ladder on wheels stood attached to each one. The floor was stone, but polished smooth. Galvanized lights—harsh and white, buzzing faintly—hung from the ceiling rafters in an orderly grid. Neatly labeled white tins lined each shelf, their labels marked with angelic writing. Lissar.
They moved quickly along the shelves, scanning the unfamiliar lettering. The air was cool, but so still Eliana felt suffocated by it. She drew a hand across her sweaty forehead, squinting up at the ocean of angelic markings overhead.
“Nothing here,” Harkan muttered, hurrying past her to the next aisle of shelves.
They searched in silence for long moments that felt as vast as ages, and then, at last, a particular word caught Eliana’s eye.
She climbed a nearby ladder to the fourth shelf up, where a row of rectangular tins labeled zapheliar sat in neat stacks.
Zapheliar—the angelic word for crawler, Zahra had told her. And if she was interpreting the markings correctly, it seemed that there were variations of the antidote, perhaps for different forms of crawlers.
She cursed, hesitated for a moment, and then grabbed one of each. She turned on the ladder, whispering softly for Harkan.
He was already there, holding open his bag at the base of the ladder. She tossed the tins down to him—eighteen in total. They were lighter than she’d expected and rattled oddly, as if they contained items made out of alien material.
“Is that all of them?” Harkan asked.
“I saw nine variations. Grabbed two of each.”
Harkan fastened his bag shut and looked around the room, frowning as if chasing a sound he couldn’t pinpoint, and Eliana had just started to climb down, a question on her lips, when the air in the room changed.
She looked down just in time to hear Zahra cry out a warning and see a slender metal net shoot out of the darkness—a spider’s web, gilded silver. Copper plates snapped open from its heart, like wings unfurling, and Zahra screamed at the sight of it, the sound of her unrestrained terror one of the most frightening Eliana had ever heard.
Harkan drew his sword; Eliana jumped down to the floor, brandishing Arabeth. Distantly, she thought of her castings, but they remained dark, useless. Everything was happening too quickly for her to focus her thoughts and summon anything but panic.
Instead she watched, horrified, as Zahra’s faint dark form diminished, sucked violently into the spinning copper contraption. Then the awful thing snapped closed and clattered across the floor with a hollow metallic racket, where it quaked, buzzing, as if it now housed a swarm of bees. It was a flat octagonal box, glinting and copper-plated, small enough to fit into Eliana’s palm, and from within it came a distant wail that sounded faintly like it could belong to Zahra—but a smaller, frightened version of her that Eliana hardly recognized.
She darted forward, grabbed the box, and shoved it into her pocket. Harkan was at her side at once, his expression ferocious. His free hand hovered over his coat pocket, where Eliana knew a bombardier waited, ready to be uncapped and thrown.
“Show yourself,” she demanded of Zahra’s attacker. “What did you do to her?”
“Such indelicate manners,” came a woman’s voice. Silken. An amused sort of boredom. She entered the room slowly, her gait supple and unhurried, and dragged the blade of a long, curved sword across the floor. She was golden-skinned, tall, slender, her hair a net of shining bronze knots. She wore a high-collared, square-shouldered gown of indigo and gold—one sleeve dark, the other woven with golden thread. The gown fell to her heels, leaving slits on each side for her trousered legs to move freely.
Her eyes flickered from an inky black, like those of an imperial general, to brown, to gray, and back to black. An ever-shifting cascade of ill color.
Eliana recognized her at once. The sensation of the woman before her matched the rising currents of fear Zahra had been sending her only moments before.
Sarash. It must have been.
“Yes, that’s me,” Sarash said, her words lazy and smooth. She nodded at Eliana’s pocket, where the strange box now rested. “It was a mistake to trust her. Too weak to claim a body for more than a few moments at a time. Too small-minded to both protect you from my friends upstairs and also sense danger coming. Until it’s too late.”
She stopped, tilting her head. Her eyes shifted to gray and stayed there.
Eliana’s stomach dropped. She recognized that look. All at once, she was back in the outpost in Ventera. Beneath her, Lord Morbrae sat rigid and gray-eyed in his chair.
Harkan shifted. “Eliana,” he muttered. “What’s happening?”
“Eliana,” Sarash said, her voice changing. Now it was no longer simply her, speaking. It was someone else, too—a voice Eliana recognized.
Her mouth went dry, the fingers of her right hand clenching around Arabeth’s hilt. Her grip pressed her casting hard against her palm.
The Emperor. Corien. He was speaking to her through this wraith, from half a world away.
Sarash’s gaze dropped to Eliana’s hands. A tiny smile played at her mouth. “A pity,” came her double voice—woman and man. Near and far. “Your mother didn’t need those.”
Then, with no further warning, Sarash attacked, the blade of her sword cutting a mean grin through the humming galvani
zed light.
Eliana and Harkan lunged to meet her.
The wraith moved like a dancer, coattails flying. She blocked every jab of Eliana’s dagger, every thrust of Harkan’s sword. Eliana flung Arabeth at her heart. Sarash dodged it, and the blade went skidding across the floor.
Then Harkan threw one of his small knives, catching the exposed juncture of the wraith’s neck and shoulder. She roared in fury; her form quaked, shifting, and then realigned itself. Harkan’s dagger went clattering away into the shadows.
Sarash recovered quickly. Grinning, sword raised, she ran at Harkan. Their swords crashed silver, and then Harkan spun away from her, avoiding a deadly swing. Eliana ran after her, daggers flashing—Whistler and Tuora. Harkan stayed quick on his feet as Sarash volleyed between him and Eliana.
The wraith whirled, slammed Harkan’s sword out of his hands, and sent it flying across the floor. Then she knocked Harkan off his feet with an elbow to the face. She did not stab him; she wanted to play. She laughed as he staggered off, blood gushing from his nose.
Eliana darted forward. Sarash knocked Whistler to the floor, but then Eliana ducked under her arm and thrust Tuora into Sarash’s gut.
The wraith howled, then spun around, ripped the knife from her belly, and let her sword fly.
The blade caught Eliana on the shoulder—not a deep cut, but a cut nonetheless. She cried out, stumbling, and then Harkan shouted her name. He tossed Arabeth to her, but Sarash smashed it out of the air with her sword. Eliana grabbed Harkan’s discarded sword from the ground and jumped to her feet right as Sarash attacked.
They moved together between the stacked shelves, swords spinning. Eliana’s skin was drenched with sweat, her weakened muscles pulsing with fire.
Then, at last, Sarash growled and tossed away her sword. Eliana faltered, caught off guard, and swung hard for Sarash’s torso.
But the wraith caught her blade with both gloved hands and held it fast. Eliana fought to jerk the sword from her grip, but Sarash would not budge. She backed Eliana against the wall, blood darkening her sleeves and her eyes flickering black-gray.
“I’ll find you, Eliana,” came her voice—half Sarash, half Emperor. Livid, and strangely tender.
A wave of revulsion swept through Eliana’s body, scraping hard against her bones.
Without warning, her castings flared savagely to life.
A jagged force erupted from her palms, an explosion of light like the birth of a new star. It blinded her. She saw a solid field of white. The ground shook underfoot. She could not feel her fingers; instead she felt only a blazing, biting heat. Smoke stung her throat. At the rim of her vision, orange light snapped and flickered. The hairs on her arms stood rigid, and her mouth felt suddenly parched, as if all the moisture had been sucked from the air.
Whatever had happened, it sent Sarash flying. She collided with the nearest stack of shelves, toppling it. A cascade of tins rained down upon her, and she scrambled away, dazed, just before the shelves themselves teetered and crashed to the floor, pinning her beneath them.
She howled in rage, her scream more the Emperor’s than her own. Eliana felt immobilized by the sound. It scrabbled for her with unseen fingers. It wrapped itself around her throat, voracious.
“El, move!” Harkan shouted, then grabbed her arm and pulled her back with him, toward the door. As if through a fog, Eliana watched him, his mouth and chin streaked with blood, uncap a bombardier and throw it at Sarash. They ran from the explosion, Harkan pulling her on, out into the corridor, up the steps, into the winding basement corridors.
But she could hardly breathe, her ears ringing, and no matter how insistently Harkan pulled her onward, she couldn’t keep up with him. Smoke clogged her lungs, stung her eyes, and that orange light still flickered at her eyes, chasing her. It wasn’t until they were upstairs in one of the abandoned lounges—the air thick and sweet, lachryma-stained rags littering the tile—and then tumbling out onto the street that Eliana understood what was happening.
She had unleashed a fire. Massive and hungry, it had already consumed the wraith’s hive, and was climbing higher, faster, zipping through the tiled roads of Annerkilak, climbing up the sculpted stone pillars, reaching for the roof gardens. Faster than ordinary fire, tenacious and unnatural. It roared, it devoured. Her ears filled with screams, with the crashing groan of buildings collapsing beneath the weight of the fire’s rage.
She searched dizzily for Harkan. There, very near—his skin gleaming with sweat and blackened with ash. He was pulling her on, from light into darkness, from the inferno of her fire to the cool black of the outer caves. People were pushing past them, fleeing the flames, climbing up staircases cut into the cave walls, cramming themselves into tunnels, jumping into boats that would take them down subterranean rivers out to the sea.
Eliana stumbled and caught herself on the rocks below. Her hands slammed against stone. Dazzling pain ricocheted from her palms up her arms, burning tears from her eyes.
“My hands,” she whispered, too afraid to look at them.
Harkan pulled her up, coughing. The air was full of smoke. It suffused the entire vast chamber, a toxic black cloud blotting out all light. Eliana looked over her shoulder once and glimpsed the massive terror of the fire she had created. Flames crawled to the stone sky above. Spitting tongues of fire trailed after her, marking her path. Explosions rattled the caverns, echoing each of her frantic breaths—the fire, perhaps reaching storage rooms full of smuggled explosives.
They ran until they were climb-crawling alone through damp, sloping tunnels of stone. The pain in her hands was extraordinary. She wanted to sit and scream over them, but Harkan wouldn’t let her stop. She concentrated on the weight of the horrid copper box in her pocket, the slap of Harkan’s bag against her side.
She didn’t understand what had happened to Zahra. She couldn’t imagine what they would do if the antidotes they had stolen didn’t save Navi. Her mind was a roar of impossible questions, each of them exhausted.
They stopped running. Harkan put a hand on her arm. He coughed, a terrible, harsh sound.
“Hold your breath,” he instructed, and she did, and the distant explosions stopped rattling the walls.
Then he said, “We’re going to swim now.” His voice was taut, worried. “Follow me, all right? Stay close.”
Eliana nodded and jumped after him into the water that she knew, thanks to a vague nudge of memory, would lead them back to Tameryn’s cave. When her scorched hands met the water, her castings hissed. The still black water bubbled, frothing.
A voice followed her as she swam, unmuddied by the water’s depths and the weight of the mountains above. She couldn’t understand the words, but she understood their sentiment, and the accompanying feeling of rage that gnashed its teeth at her toes.
And worse, a sense of loss and frustration so immense, so profound and old, that the sensation punched her chest in two and sent her clawing up to the surface, gasping for air in the darkness.
16
Rielle
“Some scholars refuse to discuss what lies within the pages of the book you are about to read. Certain holy figures would even declare it profane. But what we write is something the saints believed to be true: it is possible to reach beyond the elements to a deeper layer of the empirium. What lies there, we don’t yet know. But perhaps, someday, when Aryava’s Queens come at last, we will have the answer.”
—Beyond the Elemental by Kerensa Garvayne and Llora Maralia of the First Guild of Scholars
Resurrection.
The word moved constantly about Rielle’s mind—sometimes skittering, erratic. Distracting. Sometimes it slithered, sly and slow, and she could almost forget it was there.
At night, when she managed to sleep, in the warmth of Audric’s arms, the word whispered to her, sibilant and insistent. More than a sound—a sensation.
Someti
mes it came in Corien’s voice, so faint that in her dream-addled mind, she had to strain to identify it.
She knew what the word meant, of course, in the broadest sense: to bring back to life that which was once dead.
But what kept her awake at night, what sent her haunting the royal libraries so often that the librarians began setting aside a workspace for her, sunlit and stocked with cake, was the sense of what resurrection could mean beyond that.
Restoring wounded flesh to its original wholeness.
Healing a painful scar that marked a friend’s arm.
Knitting together a new body out of an old one.
• • •
And then a change occurred. A bend in a wooded dark path, a shift in the ground underfoot.
It began with prayers.
The Archon had suggested it, and Audric and Ludivine readily agreed with him. Rielle would pray, in public, in a different temple every night, alongside the people of the city, and prove her piety. Her devotion to the saints. Her earnest love of Celdaria. By doing so, she would perhaps quell some of the unrest that had remained, simmering, since the fire trial. Since Ludivine had come back from death, while the other victims had not.
But this plan quickly went awry, for whenever Rielle prayed, Corien took the opportunity to visit her.
• • •
The first evening, kneeling at the feet of Saint Tameryn, with the Archon at her side and the temple roof open to the pale-violet sky above, Corien arrived softly.
What a good Celdarian you are, he murmured, his voice like the press of a petal against her nape. What a dutiful child of Katell.
Rielle gasped at his sudden nearness, too startled to disguise her shock.
The harsh sound was a crash in the quiet temple, with its gentle fountains and the shuffle of slippered feet across obsidian tiles. Citizens gathered on the prayer steps, their candles flickering before them, looked up—wide-eyed and curious, frowning and amused.
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