Bastard. The stub of my middle finger throbs once, and I scowl. Even if he saved my life.
A few tense minutes pass as I run. The window to take Atlan is closing swiftly. At the pace the mercenaries set, he’ll be approaching the bank in minutes. I jump over the eve of the next roof, falling and allowing the shadow to cushion me under my clothes, easing my descent. A beggar huddles away from the rain in the entryway to the ovens of the bakery across the alley, and his jaw drops at the sight of my freefall. I glance at him, and he snaps his eyes down, raising a hand in shaking greeting. I almost smile.
I dart out into the thin flow of traffic on the street. The Way of the East is busy even in the deluge, though most sane people are tucked safely indoors. The others all hurry, their heads down, hoods up. I blend in instantly, simply another soaked pedestrian surly to be caught in the rain. Scant seconds later, Atlan and his guards round a corner and march purposefully down the street. The mercenaries distinctly do not have hoods; they prefer clear peripheral vision over dry heads. I angle towards them, the cautious voice in my head shuddering at the blank space where my plans usually reside. Instead of the elaborate scheme I might have executed a few weeks ago, my thoughts are far more primal.
Kill the guards. Take the prize.
A covered carriage rounds the corner behind them, and I smile for the first time that day. Perhaps the Creator is looking down on me after all. People dart out of the way as the carriage, no doubt going far too fast for the downpour, sends a wave cascading to either side of its wheels. Even though everyone on the street is already wet, the ignominy of some snide, dry noble resoaking you is too much to bear. At least two people pick up stones from the street and hurl them ineffectually after the carriage, and several others make rude gestures universal to all cultures.
I glide forward as the vehicle approaches. The wall of water the carriage kicks up covers my approach. Half of the guards turn to glare malevolently at the carriage, while the other half gather closer around Atlan and usher him forward. The Way of the East is smooth and slick, not cobblestones like many parts of the city, or my next maneuver would hurt far more. As the carriage passes, I drop to my knees and slide along the slick stones, riding low as the guards raise their arms to block the encroaching wave of water. The first two die before the others even realize they are under attack, narrow slivers of shadow punching through the soft skin under the jaw and up into the brain. The others react instantly, swords drawn and attacking in the blink of an eye. I backpedal, barely dodging aside from expert sword thrusts from two opponents while the other four usher Atlan farther on the street.
Atlan calls out, some kind of protest at the treatment he’s receiving, but my mind barely registers my surroundings. The mercenaries press me, working in concert, darting in and out of reach, constantly attacking, forcing me to block or roll to the side without pause. I can hardly even maintain the concentration to keep the shadow between my vulnerable flesh and their cold steel, let alone turn things back to the offensive. A shallow cut opens high on my shoulder, and the very tip of the woman’s sword punctures my thigh as my blocks keep the wounds superficial, but only just. The cuts won’t stay that way for long. Who are these people? As the man lunges, the sleeve of his shirt rides high, revealing a telltale series of dark black lines tattooed on the inside of his wrist. Shorn? Who in the forgotten Depths is Atlan to be able to afford the A’kai’ano’ri?
With every passing second, Atlan hurries farther away. My chance at finding Corna is disappearing with every gasping breath.
I jerk my hands up, throwing a thin screen of darkness between us. Two blades dart through on either side, one high, one low, cutting through the living shadow like smoke on the wind. If I was any ordinary person, their attacks would be deadly; I shouldn’t be able to move before their swords catch me. But, in the instant I’m hidden from their eyes, the instant they have to trust their knowledge and experience to guide them, the very nature of how different an opponent I am becomes apparent. I’m already leaping, my feet clearing the higher blade by inches, the shadow drawing me smoothly upwards higher than any normal human could hope to fly. I come down before they can recover, hands darting to either side, and leave them falling in my wake.
I put on a burst of speed. Atlan has already disappeared around the corner with his guards. Shorn, I remind myself dourly. My gut clenches with worry even as I near the corner. Fighting two of them fairly was almost too much for me. The warmth of blood drips from my wounds and mixes with the cold rain, and the focus I need to Shape the shadow to my will is fading.
At the back of my mind, I feel a tiny urge, a nudge. I glance down at my boots as I run, scowling. There’s no way I’m going to open myself up to Tecarim again. He, whatever he is, has proven himself far from trustworthy. I shake off a shudder even as the memory of his alien energy racing through my body resurfaces. I almost lost control, lost the very vessel of my soul. No, not again.
Take some from me. His voice is distant, drifting up through the walls I built in my mind, an uncertain echo.
Never, I declare firmly.
You’re wasting your focus and your energy keeping these walls between us. Your natural will was more than enough to hold me back before, remember?
I can’t trust anything you say, I growl back, trying to wrest my focus back to the present. I’m wearier than I believed if I’m wavering enough to allow his annoying voice back into my thoughts. That damn voice is the reason Corna was captured in the first place.
I’m sorry for that, Tecarim responds, sounding entirely sincere. It had been so long since anyone had opened themselves to me with the Creator in their veins. I condemn myself for the sacrilege.
I wish I cared how you felt, I snarl back.
You will not do this, even to save yourself?
Especially not for that.
Not even to save your friend?
The words are a silent reverberation that shakes me to my core. Am I being selfish? If I embrace the energy Tecarim offers, I will be in control, surely. I won in that battle of wills, before I even knew to expect treachery. Certainly, this time, wary and prepared, I can use that power, just a trickle…
My walls start to erode as I consider it, that feeling of being so very alive, of every bit of me down to the tiniest part thrumming with energy, so sweet and—
I skid to a halt as I turn the corner, nearly losing my balance. The four remaining Shorn wait, swords ready, perhaps ten paces around the corner. Atlan’s pasty face peeks out from behind their tense shoulders. I tense myself, dropping into a crouch and preparing to spring into action, consequences be damned. Corna needs me.
“My lady Po’lial,” Atlan calls from under his umbrella. “Let us end this without any further bloodshed, yes?”
Neither his Shorn nor I relax.
“I’m here with a proposition for you,” he continues, picking at his damp collar and swallowing nervously behind his teeth. “A meeting, if you will.”
“Having your mercenaries attempt to kill me on sight is a strange way to set up a meeting,” I shoot back, eyes gazing into the flat and deadly eyes of the Shorn. “Not exactly the best way to engender trust.”
“Ah, well, yes,” he says. “They were perhaps overzealous—”
“What has become of them, Lady Shaper?” the thin man to Atlan’s left suddenly cuts in. His eyes are serious, tense, but his tone holds nothing but respect. He has grey hair and the lined face of an older man well past his prime, but his body looks to be in superb condition. I almost spit out the first dismissive insult that springs to mind, but the earnest curiosity in his face cools my anger.
“They have joined the Creator,” I say, meeting his eye. “They fought well, and died for their duty.”
“They were fools who yearned to test themselves against the rarest of foes,” he answers, shaking his head. “Our orders were clear. You were not to be harmed. That they fought well is immaterial next to the shame of their disobedience.”
“Eve
n so,” I answer, unsure why I continue the conversation when all I care about is finding Corna.
“Your words are a kindness. Why youth always seeks its end so swiftly has ever mystified me.”
“You were not the same?”
His eyes crinkle, a mournful kind of merriment dancing behind his gaze, but he doesn’t respond. Atlan looks confused by the entire conversation, but he takes our silence as his cue.
“My employer wishes to meet,” he begins. “He has no more desire for bloodshed, nor for any further—”
“Where is my friend?” His eyes flash with annoyance. Just because I’m no longer playing a role doesn’t mean I have to let the man finish a sentence.
“Mr. Gordyn sends you his assurance that she has not been harmed. She—”
“What good is Jon Gordyn’s assurance? I need to see her, alive and well. Tell him the conflict between us will end when she is returned to me. In return, I will offer him his... property.”
“I don’t have the power to negotiate on Mr. Gordyn’s behalf,” Atlan says, a bit of fear creeping into his voice. It’s almost as if, just like wild prey stalked by a true predator, he can sense the danger behind my growing impatience. “He told me to simply give you a time and a place. He desires to meet with you in person. You may bring a second, for he will have one as well. He requests that, for the sake of your friend, you do not test the parameters he has laid out for this meeting.”
“Where? When?” I ask, resigned to the fact that Gordyn holds the better cards in this game. For now.
“The Falling Edge. His personal room. Tomorrow night at half past six. Come dressed for dinner.”
Cheeky bastard. The very room he offered to me when he believed me to be Aea Po’lial. Of course he wouldn’t forget.
“You may not have the power to negotiate, Atlan, just as you lacked that power at our first meeting. But tell Jon Gordyn this: bring her, show her to me alive and unharmed, and our meeting can be cordial. If he tests that singular parameter I’ve laid out for this meeting, I can’t promise what will happen.”
***
The Abyss isn’t something you easily forget. More than a mile wide, almost a perfect circle, the gaping maw is enough to drive people to vacate the land for blocks around, just so that the impenetrable darkness doesn’t catch their eye as they go about their daily business. It’s a sobering and unhappy event to consider. One day, tens of thousands of souls had been bustling about, chasing their dreams, fleeing their nightmares, loving their families, hating their enemies, but living. From one instant to the next, all of that changed. The city just dropped out from beneath them, their final moments comprised of terror and a long, unmeasured fall deep into the earth.
All from the death of one man.
The cataclysms when Shapers die did not occur prior to the war with the Eternal. It used to be that the power passed seamlessly, a simple transference of a soul to its next body. Unlike the rest of the heathen world, who believe Shapers are something to be venerated, souls to be worshipped due to their extraordinary power, the People remember the names of those souls, the men and women who slew the Creator and so carry the Curse from one body to the next, never able to pass on, never able to move beyond and rejoin their maker. I listened to those stories with the same mixture of fervent terror and wonder with the rest of the students seated at the feet of the Seer. The thought of a soul flitting from body to body, wandering through hundreds of pairs of eyes, always Cursed, never satisfied… I shuddered myself awake for a fortnight wondering what those horrible parasites experience in their unending torment. I never thought I could be one of them.
Still, they used to pass to their next host quickly, harmlessly. Now, however, the deaths of the Cursed wreak destruction on unimaginable levels, and the extent to which they fight to stay among the living only serves to heighten the desolation of their death. The lives in which they live the longest, use their stolen power the most, are the deadliest. The cataclysms they leave behind are legendary.
Eo, Cursed of Thought. He lived for five hundred years before he passed again. His last death twenty-one years ago had driven an entire city mad, Tarin transforming from a bustling trading post on the west coast of Donir into a set of empty buildings, abandoned even now. The people had killed and eaten one another, speaking strange languages never heard before nor since, their gibbering unintelligible even to one another. Stories of horror still abound of mothers spitting their babies and roasting them slowly over fires, of fathers quieting their daughters with hands over their mouths to disguise their screams as they were violated. Thousands died in the first day, and none ever recovered. The living victims of Eo’s death are still being cared for in places, their madness making them a danger to themselves and everyone around them.
Yali, Cursed of Earth. She is one of the more powerful of the Cursed, the element she stole so much stronger than most. She last lived as the man Belden for three hundred years, her soul behind his eyes on the so-called Council of the Shapers. The gathering of the Cursed. Her death at the hands of the Sealord created the Abyss. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent souls fell to their deaths, the unholy grating and rumbling of the earth drowning out their screams. The Abyss blights the landscape of beautiful Donir, and the proud city can do little but ignore the ugly scar of that deadliest of days.
After the Eternal’s death, either the souls of the Cursed desired vengeance for the death of their queen, or some knowledge has been lost preventing such catastrophes. Ever since, the deaths of the Cursed have caused immeasurable tragedy.
Of course, there is one Cursed my people do not mind so much. We know of the sixteen souls, their betrayal of the Creator, all of the evil they wrought… but R’hea, Cursed of Nothing, is pitied rather than hated. She has not been seen for thousands of years, has not been active in the world since long before even the Eternal’s fall. Her element was little more than a rumor even before Isa fell. Her death never causes a cataclysm. There are no tragedies surrounding R’hea, only the unhappy story of a misguided follower, a young girl who did not understand what her brother was leading her towards. No, my people only tell tales of her unending loneliness, her unceasing regret.
As it turns out… R’hea is Cursed with something after all. Even the long storytelling tradition of the People has not been able to keep up with R’hea’s long absence. The element of her Curse has long since been forgotten. Luck, for good or ill, led me to rediscover it. Even so, I don’t feel like I possess any memories of a long-forgotten life. I don’t feel as if evil flows through my veins, as if my actions murdered the very being who gave me life eons ago. I am Aea turned Kettle. A young girl who found something she never should have found, but who embraced a new life after her old passed. No, I do not fear that I am evil.
But…
I understand her loneliness.
I live her solitude.
I refuse to spend my life, our life, alone.
Even if I don’t believe the stories, I will give my soul, new or old or both, a chance at companionship, a chance at a family. We—R’hea and I—whether myth or truth, will live a life surrounded by friends.
Jon Gordyn will not take that from me.
***
The Falling Edge is far too expensive a place to stay for me to have considered it for a meeting. Despite that, the dangling structure and tiered terraces were visible from the roof of the House, when it existed, and we used to jokingly throw rocks at the structure from afar, imagining the thrill seekers among the wealthy toppling to their doom deep in the darkness. That Jon Gordyn keeps a personal room on the Edge is proof enough that the hotel isn’t for people of my means. For all I know, he owns the damn place.
And yet, as I walk up the steps in a brilliant white dress, a functional twin to the dress I ruined when Gordyn and I tangled the first time, I struggle not to be impressed. The servant at the entrance bows low before us, the filigreed doors swinging open so smoothly it seems like magic. The foyer is as ost
entatious and ridiculously opulent as expected, though Timo and I both pause for a moment and admire the display. The chandelier alone would keep the Temple and my children fed for a year, and that’s a conservative estimate. We glance at each other, and I almost laugh at the hunger in his gaze.
Timo, of course, wears the same suit he wore to the bank. If Gordyn can be petty and bring me to the Falling Edge, I can give him a taste of the same. The boots are hidden away, guarded by no less than five members of the Family. If he wants to make a run at my life at this meeting, he won’t ever find the boots again.
Tecarim was almost inconsolable when I mentally told him to get off my feet. The whispers of his words in the back of my mind spoke of helping, of lending me strength, of providing another perspective… but, in the end, he agreed to stay. While the prospect of having an ace in the hole for the coming confrontation is appealing, tempting Gordyn seems less than wise considering Corna’s life hangs in the balance. Even though Tecarim is a rat bastard who tried to steal my body, he’s reasonable when you present him with logic.
“We should have been robbing this place,” he mutters under his breath. “Way easier than the bank.”
“Agreed,” I say, but I push down a pang of sadness at the thought. It had been Corna’s idea to go after Gordyn’s vault, Corna’s fast talking which earned us entrance. Her enthusiasm never faded over the long two years of planning. It would have been safer to rob the Falling Edge, no doubt. But Corna would have told me it was boring. Looking around, seeing the light security and the wide windows, I know I would have agreed.
The Crux of Eternity: Eternal Dream, Book 1 (The Eternal Dream Saga) Page 33
