by A. R. Knight
“We’ll take it,” I said. “Selena and Alec, they’re busy dealing with the breach. Once it’s cleared, we should be able to mop up the rest of these guys no problem.”
“Thank you, Carver,” Anna said.
“My fault you’re in this mess,” I said. “Think I owe you at least one escape.”
We stood there, holding ground at the top of the roof for a while longer. Until shrieks started down below. Alec and Selena had closed the breach and were working their way up to us. When the spirits turned their back to me, I made quick work of them. We met up in the middle, on the fifth floor. Alec and Selena with grim looks on their faces.
“Where’s Laurence?” I asked.
“He crossed over, after we saw the two of you up top. Apparently the two of you have spent a little while on this side?” Alec said.
“My body’s probably dead,” Anna said. “I’m only half joking.”
“Then go,” Alec said. “I’ll tell Bryce about the building. Do not worry.”
“We have to get moving too,” I said. “Nara is waiting.”
“She is not the only one,” Alec said. “Everyone’s waiting, Carver, go. Find a way to save us. Selena, do not let him mess it up.”
“You’re asking the impossible,” Selena said as we pushed our way through stunned spirits.
“Carver,” Alec said, and I saw him holding my long knife by the blade. “Forgetting something?”
He tossed the weapon to me and I caught it, felt the edge cut into my palm. Felt the slash start to knit itself back together immediately as I slipped the knife into its holster. My spirit covering for my mistakes.
We left the Warrens and headed east. The first time we left the city, Alec and Anna had given us a personal escort. Now we had none. Now the guides running around barely noticed us. We didn’t have blue fire in our eyes, we didn’t have a breach behind our backs, there was no time to investigate a pair of spirits. No reason if we weren’t trying to kill them.
Riven was dying from a thousand gashes. The guides had to focus on the largest ones.
Chapter 28
The grain fields weren’t as endearing as Riven’s dark streets. Something about those endless stalks, knowing that they been made by a sick goddess with no love left for the person Mali had trapped made the waving plants even worse than before. I saw Selena shudder, felt like doing the same as we pushed our way through. Each and every one of these mirrored stalks the product of one person’s delusion.
We made it to Nara’s clearing quickly. Neither one of us cared to spend an extra minute in these fields. Her fire still burned, the grain stack the same height as when we left. The charred ruin sending thin smoke up to the sky and leaving the air with the smell of dry kindling. Nara herself wasn’t out as we came in. Only appeared after we’d been standing there for a full minute or more. As though waiting for the proper moment to make her grand entrance.
Not that her frail form, robed and tired, could pull that off.
“I count only two of you,” Nara said.
“Mali didn’t like your offer.” I sighed. “Didn’t like us much either.”
I launched into the story. The fight with the ghoul, Mali’s water show, and kept an eye on Nara’s face throughout. Her expression never changed. Not even when I shared Mali’s comments, those harsh statements about whether Nara should be trusted. About whether her motives were true. That Nara would only bring Riven into further chaos. In fact, the only reaction I saw came when I told her how I’d stabbed Mali with the crossbow bolt. The blue fire burning away Mali’s power, her consciousness. At those words, Nara closed her eyes for a second and I swore, I swore I saw a tear make its way down the creases in her cheeks.
When Nara’s eyes opened again they were as fierce as ever.
“I should have expected that Mali would have lost her sight,” Nara said. “Mali was ever the most attuned with the present. With what she felt in the moment. It made her such a great and terrible creator. Her whims built the city, built the forest, built this massive field. She gave no thought to where it was going, gave no thought to what she was doing.”
“I wanted to ask you,” Selena said. “If you knew why Riven’s city is so close to modern? If Mali had been here for centuries, then why would she build a place that must be completely different from her time?”
Nara smiled, glanced over at the fire. “It wasn’t always like that. The city has lived and died a thousand times. I haven’t seen it in so long that I barely remember how it looks. As new spirits came to us, Mali would have them tell her of the world, and she would remake Riven to suit their tales. You say that she kept new spirits of her own. I assume, whenever she felt like it, Mali rebuilt the city.”
“Wouldn’t we notice?” I said. “If, say, a hundred years ago, the city changed itself?”
“Perhaps you did,” Nara said. “Are there records? Written journals?”
“Some,” I said. “But most are concerned with guides. Names and titles. Positions and laws. Riven itself always seemed to be the same. An endless task.”
“Then perhaps that is your answer,” Nara replied. “If the focus is ever on the spirits, then a world that changes slightly once in a lifetime may not be so remarkable.”
Nara had a point. If I’d wandered into the Warrens tomorrow and found it made over with newer buildings, I might be confused for a moment, but at the first sight of a tortured spirit, I’d be back to the usual. Riven tended to kill the curious.
“Mali mentioned prisons,” I said, switching back. “With the water, she seemed to show the three of you being divided. Is that why you didn’t come with us?”
“When we parted,” Nara said. “We had our differences. We realized that we posed a great danger to Riven with our struggles. So we sealed each other away. I had hoped Mali could part the barriers.”
“I don’t see any barriers,” I said.
“The field,” Nara said. “That is my prison. Dolan has his desert, and Mali her canyons.”
“I don’t understand,” Selena said. “How? How can you seal someone to a single place?”
“Surely by now you accept that Riven has secrets to which you are not privy?” Nara said. “Perhaps, in time, you will understand.”
I’d listened to guides give me vague statements all my life. Growing up with one sentence after another telling me to accept what I’d been told and not ask questions. To deal with the fact that some things weren’t meant for me to know until some undefined ‘time’. I’d bested the leader of the guides in combat, rescued and damned my own parents, and been murdered. What else could I possibly do to be ready to understand something?
“Nara.” I unsheathed the great sword. Pointed it towards the woman. I felt Selena’s eyes burning into me, but ignored her. “Explain. Or I’ll assume what Mali said is true. I will end you here and take my chances with the spirits.”
“A bold statement,” Nara replied evenly. “And no doubt, Carver Reed, you are willing to take your chances. But what about her? What about your friends back in the city? Are you willing to risk all of them on your rash judgment?”
I narrowed my eyes and she held up a gnarled hand. “Still, perhaps you are right. You want to know why we are sealed? Go, find Dolan. He will tell you. If Mali can’t help, then he is our last option,” Nara said. “While the three of us would have been better, Dolan and I can still do what needs to be done.”
“And why can’t you tell us? Why can’t you give us the answers?”
“Would you believe me if I did?” Nara replied, and I had to admit she had a point there. Already I’d started taking her every sentence with a heaping helping of doubt.
“You said he lived in a desert?” Selena said, shoving us past the tension. I lifted the sword away, put it back in its sheath.
“South of the city,” Nara said. “In a sea of sand much like this field. If you keep walking, you will find him. Bring him here, and together we can help you.”
Nara turned to go back int
o her hut, and Selena looked back the way we came.
“Wait,” I said to the spirit’s back. “I have one more question.”
Nara looked back at me, her face a set line. No surprise, no irritation, no anything. “Ask.”
“Mali. What she showed to us, it looked like you bound spirits. Many, many of them. How did you do it, if you weren’t alive?”
Nara smiled, but I didn’t like the hunger that came over her crinkled eyes. A person reminded of her brilliance and eager to show it. “A living soul binds another through by giving part of their life. Like setting fire to kindling. A dead spirit binds the other way. By stealing what remains of the one they seek to control.”
Her words clicked. Barth’s tower, on the far edge of the city. The mad former guide had more than a dozen spirits doing his bidding, but most had lost their personality. Had been stock still and silent, save for the one Barth had directed to greet us.
“How many?” I asked. “How many spirits could you bind like this?”
“Why do you need to know?” Nara replied. “Are you getting ideas?”
“I’m trying to find yours,” I replied.
“I have told you, time and again, that my true wish is to save my home,” Nara spoke, annoyance drifting along the edges of her voice.
“You haven’t said how.”
“You are in no position to ask,” Nara said. “Now, go. Your friends are dying while you dawdle.”
I had no argument against that point. As Nara went back into her hut, Selena and I once again set forth through the field of grain. Marching back to the city, and then south, to another part of Riven I’d never seen.
Hopefully the desert, and Dolan, would prove less hostile than the jungle and its queen.
Chapter 29
To get to the desert, we once again had to choose: go back through the city or around it. We made it back to the east gate without facing that decision, and, looking in at the broken Palace and the parade of sparks beyond, I glanced at Selena and shrugged.
“We go in there, we’re liable to get bogged down,” I said. “You heard Alec, there’s no time to waste.”
“You hear me arguing?”
“I, uh, no I don’t,” I said. “Guess I wanted to state my opinion.”
Selena nodded, matched my eyes through the archway. “Come on, Carver. Let’s go around the outside. Bryce and the others can keep it together long enough.”
So we followed the wall south. Spent most of the journey bantering back and forth as to whether Nara would turn out to be the worst decision we’d ever made. After seeing Mali’s show, I felt less and less like the old spirit in the hut would turn out to be a good call. That in trying to save ourselves, we’d wind up bringing Riven into an even darker ruin.
“Hard to get worse than world-ending,” Selena replied when I’d spoken the thought.
“Do you trust her?” I replied.
To our right, the city wall continued. We walked on hard dirt, staying clear of the grain off to our left. Above, the same gray sky loomed over a breeze that blew ashen flakes around the air. I never really understood where those flakes came from, but they made Riven feel as though it was constantly snowing. Light flurries. Without any of the seasonal charm of the natural, chilly kind.
“I see someone who wants something, and thinks we’re the best way to get it,” Selena said. “My first husband, the alcoholic?”
“The one who fell from the apartment window?”
“Matthias, yes. We had a similar understanding,” Selena said. “I didn’t want to stay in the country. He wanted a wife and lived in the city, where I thought all that really mattered took place.”
“That’s naive,” I said.
“What do you expect from a fifteen year-old girl?” Selena replied. “For a brief time, too, it was everything I imagined. Matthias used me, his new, pretty wife to get into the sorts of clubs and parties he’d not been invited to earlier. It was a deal, and we both made our profits.”
“You’re such a romantic.”
“Please,” Selena said. “You’re no better. It’s why we’re perfect for each other. We’re so bad at sharing sentiments that it took both of us dying to really fall in love.”
I laughed. Couldn’t argue with that. Before, when I’d bound Selena, there’d always been our unequal standing hanging over us. I could jaunt back to the other side while Selena had to stay in Riven. If I’d died, the binding would be broken, potentially sending her to the Cycle. Now, we needed each other. Needed each other’s stories, their hand to keep the Cycle’s whispers at bay.
Riven didn’t have dinner dates. Didn’t have theaters or a circus. But it did have time. We didn’t sleep anymore, didn’t get tired. Our moments came when we worked to wrangle a spirit, when we navigated the crowded jungle in Mali’s canyons, when we filled the endless gray with stories we’d tell to each other. What we had wasn’t a fairy tale, but I loved it all the same.
“So how does Matthias make you trust Nara?” I said.
“Because she will not change until she has what she wants,” Selena said. “And when people get what they want, they let their guards down. If Nara starts to do something we don’t like, we take care of her.”
“Don’t know that there are many apartment windows to push her out of in that field,” I said.
“We don’t need one. Not here,” Selena said. I could tell without looking that her hand rested on the cleaver’s handle. In that, Selena was right. If Nara decided to play a different game, tried to change the rules, we could end her just like we did Mali.
Chapter 30
When we reached the south gate, on the other side of the Shambles and the busiest spot in Riven, I stopped and stared at the train of spirits. Thousands of them milled through the gate, heading out of the city and towards the Cycle. On a downbeat path that journeyed into the dark forest and up to the Mountain beyond. Technically, the west gate would have been closer, but the path went this way and the spirits followed it.
Maybe that’s how Mali had designed it.
To the south, Riven’s scraggly dead grass continued off towards the horizon. I wondered if it would be like the canyons, where we would be walking towards nothing at one moment and, in the next, see a new world open up in front of us.
“Why is it so crowded?” Selena said, marveling at the gate. “It wasn’t this bad when we rescued Bryce.”
“The breaches,” I replied. “Normally spirits are spread out all over Riven, but now they’re concentrating. When a battle on Earth forms a breach, it pulls in other spirits crossing over. Then you’ve got a big group. The guides wipe them out, and they walk here together. Join the rest.”
“It’s eerie,” Selena said. All of those faces; men, women, children from across the world shuffling their feet one after the other. Looking straight ahead. Quiet and numb.
“It’s peaceful,” I said and Selena cocked her head at me.
“Suppose you could see it that way,” she replied.
“I choose to,” I said. “Easier to deal with if you look at it that way. A peaceful march to an endless sleep.”
We ventured south, padding along the ground until I noticed that it began to give away. My footfalls landed on less firm soil. The dirt shifted, and my footprints left deeper indents. What grass there was died away.
“It’s white,” Selena said, looking ahead. In front of us, Riven’s dirt fell into a silky sand, laid out in small drifts as though someone had spread a fine blanket of snow in front of us. Ash flakes fell on and vanished into the landscape, buried by Riven’s slight breeze.
“At least it’s not gray,” I replied.
Trudging through the sand would have been a slog had we been alive. Able to get exhausted. I figured that’s why nobody had explored these regions before. The canyons and the desert were so far beyond the walls of Riven’s city that any living guide would have had to turn back. Perhaps with a succession of different spots to cross over you could gradually make your way farther
and farther, but that begged a different question.
Why?
For nearly two thousand years, guides had operated in Riven without chasing the origins of its structures. Had stuck to their prime goal. Wrangle the spirits, keep the dead moving to the Cycle. Our numbers never gave us the luxury of sending guides out on expeditions.
Our. Still talking like I’m one of them. Not only was I a spirit, no longer alive, but I’d killed Piotr, the last leader of the guides. He might have been chasing disaster, but I don’t think I still qualified for membership in that esteemed group. I glanced at Selena walking beside me, her eyes bright in the light reflecting from the sand. I had what I needed.
The column appeared in a slow unveiling. A shaded obelisk on the edge of our vision that resolved itself and its fellows behind it as we came closer. As tall as the ones bordering Mali’s temple, and similarly carved in runes. Behind the column, splitting it on either side, were more. A long row leading back to what appeared to be a wide cluster of buildings.
Laurence had a map, back in Chicago, that hinted at a town like this. A ruined place. If there was anyone that would take the leaps to get so far afield, he’d be the one. Now I wished I’d studied that map more closely. Much as I enjoyed walking into the trap in Mali’s temple, I’d prefer to avoid the same situation here.
“Do you see it?” Selena said to me. “On the statue?”
I took a harder look as we walked up. And recognized it. The disk, the three figures plastered on the hard stone. The same image as Mali’s show with the water. Nothing else adorned the statue, just a pile of sandy brick stacked on top of each other.
The next column continued the tale. The figures moving now, some of the thin blue outlines that I’d taken for spirits appearing on the disk. The same illustrations, the same story. It played out across the statues, each one showing the next scene as we went deeper and farther down the row.
“I guess that means Mali told the truth,” Selena said. “Unless she made these too, and it’s all a lie.”
