“Not enough to suit your purposes,” she replied. She blinked again, her green eyes unwavering in the eerie violet glow around them. “I suggest you use it wisely. You and I will not meet in this place again.”
Her dissociated certainty unsettled him; she observed him as if she were watching a hungry beast devouring its prey, knowing the final outcome as well as the fact that neither creature’s fate had any bearing upon her own. Torrahs leaned forward, finding it in himself to still act the kind, unwitting caretaker in this exchange. He put a hand to his breast over his robes and said, “I want to know what must be done.”
Finally, Dehlyn offered an emotional response. She smiled at him, though it bloomed with pitying amusement instead of a willingness to cooperate. “You think that by summoning me to the ingress of Time, you’ve changed the laws governing us both?”
Torrahs pulled away from her then, smoothing down the front of his robes and trying to maintain his persona of control. He had not expected this enchantment to change anything, other than to give him more than a few seconds in the vessel’s exposed presence. But the fact that she had so succinctly patronized his efforts brought a brief and fleeting surge of humiliation. “Of course not,” he replied. “But those laws are shifting more quickly now than they ever have before, and I mean to gain what answers I can.”
“As you always have.” Dehlyn closed her eyes and inclined her head, seeming to finally acquiesce to his forced entreaty with her. “Ask your questions.”
“How will the vessel be opened?” He knew she recognized the term, that while he used the word to refer to her in her current state, this Dehlyn was both the prison of the amarach’s wisdom and its guardian.
“With a sacrifice.”
Torrahs lowered his chin to regard her beneath a furrowed brow. “What type of sacrifice?”
Dehlyn eyed him from head to toe and back again, not in disdain or contempt for his presence but as though, while taking in the sight of his entirety, she also could see his thoughts and intentions. It felt, disturbingly, as though she tasted his very essence with that glance. “One that directly contradicts what you seek. One you will never be willing to make.”
More riddles and hidden meanings—Torrahs knew that was the only way she could speak to him. The amarach were bound by the same such rules, but he had spent years deciphering the messages that existed between vague words. He gave a wry chuckle of surprise. “You think the boy will be willing to lay down his life for such an end?”
Dehlyn’s lips parted, and it seemed she tried to smother some hidden pride she knew she should not have harbored. “Kherron will either do as he is asked, or he won’t. The choice has always been and will remain his own.” The corner of her mouth flickered in a vanishing smile. “But yes, I believe he will be willing to pay the necessary price in the end.”
Her words gave Torrahs pause. She did not say Kherron would sacrifice himself to unlock the vessel, only that she believed he would. He knew the amarach vessel contained the knowledge of the future, that she held all histories of the past, unshared prophecies, and awareness of things yet to come. But this, he thought, she did not know. Fate, when it was so clearly foretold for those within its iron grasp, left little room for free will—for choice. Some unexplained suspicion itched at the back of his mind, but he could not in the moment connect it to what he’d just heard.
“There is little you can do to stop him, once he’s made his decision,” Dehlyn added.
“Why would I wish to stop him?” Torrahs asked with a grin. “If he is the one to give his life for what I seek, I will be there when it happens. And I will take what you have kept from this world for far too long.” Dehlyn chuckled, though her amusement did not share the source of Torrahs’ own enthusiasm. It made him feel oddly as though she wished to give the appropriate, polite reply to a jest that was not, in fact, humorous. His pleasure waned as they stared at each other for a few more seconds.
“He is here, you know.”
“Who?” Torrahs asked, surprised by a reference to this timeless place beyond the two of them sitting upon the straw pallet.
“Kherron.” Dehlyn’s smile softened when she said the lad’s name, her eyes for the first time glistening with an affection Torrahs had not yet seen in her. “Close enough to grasp, if you so desired. You would only have to step across the threshold. Enter what you call the Ebbing Realm. Shorten his journey by bringing him here, now.”
For a brief moment, an unrestrained thrill spurred Torrahs to entertain such a notion. The Roaming People had failed in their promise to deliver Kherron to Deeprock Spire, and while he had since written them off as unreliable, he’d also come to accept he would have to wait for Kherron’s arrival. The vessel had chosen the lad, after all. And now that he knew the requisite sacrifice would be offered by someone else—by the person he’d correctly assumed had the power to deliver Torrahs what he sought—the temptation to act now and avoid further waiting in this desolate place grew only too strong.
Then his instincts pulled him away from that elation. Over the years, he’d learned that any seemingly simple task was always steeped in duplicity. Every decision at his fingertips reminded him of that eventuality. Dehlyn might very well have spoken the truth; Kherron could, of course, have somehow found himself in the Ebbing Realm, and how it had happened did not matter. But Torrahs had never been given such direct, detailed answers by any immortal being—vessel, amarach, or otherwise—and the frankness of such revelation on Dehlyn’s part disconcerted him. He would not be provoked against his better judgement.
“No,” he said, raising a hand to stroke the wooden beads strung through his beard. “If the lad found his way through the timeless gates, he can surely find his way out again. I will remain here. My patience extends toward all manner of possibilities.” He raised his palms in a gesture of humble acceptance, as though admitting he had no influence beyond his work within Deeprock Spire. He did not expect the woman before him to be fooled by such a display. But he could not deny that the Ebbing Realm, by its very nature, was a snare of deception and dissolution. If the vessel had meant to lure him beyond this doorway with the promise of Kherron’s immediate presence, to remove Torrahs as a threat and abandon him in a place without direction or the conventions of time, she had failed. He would not act in desperation so close to reaching his goals, and nothing had changed.
“That is your decision,” Dehlyn said, eyeing him with something akin to suspicious approval. “Was there ought else you wish to know?”
“You’ve been inordinately gracious,” Torrahs replied, surprised by how much he found himself enjoying the flippant exchange of strained etiquette and cryptic conversation. “You’ve given me plenty.”
“Then we are done here,” she said.
Torrahs readied himself to remove them from the violet doorway beyond time, raising a hand and intending to gently grasp her wrist once more. “Yes—”
Before he could touch her or even began the words to end the summoning, the violet light shimmered in the room. Neither the cloying pressure of airlessness nor the crack of shifting through the veil preceded their return. There was merely a moment of all-encompassing black, and then he sat on the pallet beside the green-eyed woman in his own world. The flame within the oil lamp continued its flickering course, and Torrahs’ last image of the vessel was her penetrating gaze above a scowl of irritation. Then the grey-winged amarach finally brought his hand down upon her shoulder, as if their interlude had never occurred, and they vanished in the brilliant white flash.
A deep flush of anger suffused Torrahs’ face and neck with a searing heat, and he was grateful for the scant light and the absence of witnesses. He’d spent so much time searching for a way to speak with the green-eyed woman before she disappeared, and now it seemed she had always had access to the doorway. She’d merely deigned to entertain him. Games and puzzles—that was all this was to her—circling endlessly around the powers of creation and destruction.
Standing
to grab the oil lamp from the table, he had to remind himself that none of that mattered; his pride was not so weak as to let the vessel’s scorn sway him. He had finally garnered some semblance of an answer, some direction as to how and when the knowledge he sought would be unleashed. It lightened his footsteps, filling him with a new optimism for the future. Whether or not Kherron really had been just beyond the doorway in the Ebbing Realm, Torrahs knew the lad would find his way here eventually. The boy had no choice.
Now that Dehlyn had confirmed Torrahs’ suspicions—that the blacksmith from the Iron Pit would be the one to open the amarach vessel—Torrahs found himself eager to spend his remaining time delving through more of Rovlen’s accounts. A certain pressure had been lifted from his shoulders, knowing he himself would never be required to make the sacrifice Dehlyn had mentioned. He would never, of course, have agreed to lay down his life for his goal; how was he to seize the vessel’s secrets as his own if he were dead? After all the things he had renounced in his lifetime, there remained little he would not give in exchange for what he sought. He had already relinquished the things he cared about for one end or another, and nothing was too important anymore to barter. But the final payment, in the end, would be Kherron’s to make.
With a secret smile, the man stepped into the hallway and locked the door behind him. He would, no doubt, have to deal with the results of his agreement with Dehlyn’s amarach guardian. The immortal would return come the dawn, and he would then seek to fulfill his end of their bargain by visiting Lorraii. Whether or not the celestial being planned to take the Ouroke with him or merely deal with her in her chambers and leave her there when he was finished, Torrahs could not know. He would address that later. Tonight, he thought, he would sleep quite well indeed.
LORRAII HAD LISTENED to the sounds of the fortress after dark, knowing the time had come for her to finally act. When the Wanderer had paid her a visit, he’d been hiding something. He always hid something, no matter how much he explained to her or how many morsels of temporary satisfaction he doled out like dwindling rations. Since they’d met, it seemed he’d only wished to gratify her temporarily, never deigning to truly give her what she craved until he first fulfilled his insatiable desire for omniscience. That was the truth of it, she’d realized. The man wished to possess immortal sentience within a body of flesh and blood, and she never understood how he could believe such a thing was possible.
Though she’d tested the limits of his patience since the moment they’d met, she’d clearly overstepped them when she’d slain the amarach. And she did not care. Her loathing for the immortals ran deep and unending. They had given her what she’d asked of them, so many years ago, yet had failed to warn her of the impotent results. That was the way of the celestial beings, time after time; they spoke in infuriating riddles, acted in contention, and had no conscience when it came to the consequences for mortal beings upon this earth. She had not been able to restrain herself from pursuing a viable course of revenge in that tower, with the Sky Metal blade in her hand. Nor did she think she could do so again. But she would not have to if she rejected her agreement with the Wanderer and once more walked her own path. She was the last Ouroke, after all, and destined for nothing else.
Still, she was well aware of the fact that the completion of Torrahs’ work would bring the amarach to them in droves, like a swarm of flies to a fresh pile of dung. Even she had not managed to lure so many of them at once; her call to them had required far less of them and did not hold nearly as much importance as the lure of the amarach vessel. But the old man moved too slowly, biding his time and waiting for the pieces to move on their own when he should have focused on moving them himself. This was where they differed, the Wanderer and the Ouroke, and she’d decided to take matters into her own hands and speed things up a bit. She had never practiced the art of waiting, nor did she relish depending on others for an outcome.
The cowards who called themselves Brothers had never posed any true threat for her. The old men who’d taken shifts in standing guard outside her chambers had little stamina for such a duty. None of them remained at their stations long after nightfall; she was, after all, locked away behind this door with no other exit. She could not blame them for assuming her safely imprisoned here, and Torrahs had been so blindly intent on picking up the pieces of their ignorance, he’d had no mind to consider the folly of such presumptions. Surely, in time, whether it was the next day, the day after, or a week in the future, he would find the time to decide how truly to punish her for her disobedience. Lorraii did not intend to lie down like a wounded animal and wait for the jaws of the hungry beast to find her neck.
She’d waited and listened, noting the fading echoes of the Brothers leaving the main hall after supper, of dwindling conversation beside the roaring hearth, of one or two straggling pairs of footsteps making their way through the corridors of the fortress to find rest and the unconsciousness of sleep. The two runes behind her right ear and the one behind her left—pierced with the sacred die of ancestral blood and the heart-clay of the earth beneath countless layers of her flesh—had been some of her very first when she’d come of age. They were essential to Ouroke rites of passage, lending newly blooded warriors the heightened senses of stalking predators, unmatched by the natural abilities of the human body. To incite the quickening power of these specific runes was a simple, easy task; every Ouroke inducted at adolescence could channel their uses. Maintaining the pulse of their power for hours on end, as she’d waited for her moment in the fortress, had required far more focus and precision, especially when the ciphers behind her ears had steadily warmed, growing into a searing heat beneath her flesh that left her with a throbbing headache. But she’d never found physical pain a worthy opponent.
Once, she’d noted Torrahs’ footsteps echoing past her chambers and around the turning corridor. He could not be mistaken, walking with crisp intent and a sure stride. The rest of the Brotherhood shuffled and ambled slowly, one barely discernable from the other—excluding the clomping gait of the fat one. Then he returned a short time after, and she listened to him moving about his chambers until he settled on the bed. She listened to his breathing, which fell into the slow, steady rhythm of sleep. He’d submitted to slumber rather quickly, like a child ignorant of the burdens of life harbored by its parents.
Now, Lorraii stood from where she’d sat, cross-legged upon the fraying rug, and made her move. When she reached the heavy wooden door to her chambers, she placed a hand against the iron strike plate below the doorknob. The outline of the keyhole—useless to her from the inside without an actual key—pressed against her palm. She summoned the unbinding rune, which glowed a burning red from the flesh of her inner elbow and listened for the slide and click of metal parts within the locking mechanism. Some unseen piece tumbled from its place within the cylinder; either the Brothers could manage to fix the lock, or they’d have to replace the thing entirely. This thought made the corners of her mouth twitch in amusement before she turned the knob and opened the door just enough to slip into the hall.
Her booted feet moved swiftly across the stone floor, making little sound in the dead of night. The fire in the main hall’s hearth shimmered with low, glowing heat, the logs having dwindled to hot red coals. But it gave her enough light to see the main entrance to Deeprock Spire, the two tall double doors closed tightly against the cold, wet spray of the Amneas. Lorraii noticed a dull glimmer upon the long table before the fireplace, and when she neared it, she could not contain her grin.
The Brotherhood’s oblivious disregard remained her good fortune. They’d apparently decided—with her locked away and their fortress so widely removed from any port, city, or unsuspecting traveler—that it was safe to leave such precious items where anyone could take them. The four Sky Metal daggers she’d first seen upon the shelf, imprisoned in the spire with two bounded amarach, glinted in the fire’s low glow, including the one she’d taken as her own. Torrahs had confiscated her own daggers after she’d
slain the black-haired immortal, and she had not fooled herself into thinking she could successfully recover them. But this was far better.
Snatching the weapon with the cobalt-blue inlay swirling across its handle, she ran a finger along the flat of the blade, as if stroking the face of a loved one. This would make things so much easier than she’d anticipated. Then she crossed the main hall and pulled at the round iron ring on one of the double doors. It was not barred or locked, of course; there was nothing out here against which the Brotherhood required protection. A small click echoed around her as the doors parted, and she slipped into the biting cold of the cloud-darkened night to do what the others were too craven to consider.
Chapter 16
Kherron remembered screaming and that it had seemed to last forever. He’d screamed in anger and fear at the violet light dancing all around him, polluting the clearing in which he’d stood but at the same time was undoubtedly somewhere else. He’d screamed his rage at the Roaming People, at their manipulative audacity, at the cruel act of leaving him here. And he’d cried out in pain and longing for the opportunity lost to him—to say yes to the woman with the paint on her cheeks and no to his fated burden. To be whisked away wherever he wished and never have to look back.
His voice had risen for a moment before it seemed both drawn from him and smothered into nothingness, and he remembered wanting to stop and being somehow unable to do so. Now, he found himself slumped on the ground that looked like earth and grass but felt like a void beneath him. He didn’t know if he’d been breathing heavily or not at all before he gasped, rawness in his throat and chest, as if he pulled in heavy, searing heat instead of air. It felt very much like that first desperate, excruciating, life-affirming breath he’d taken on the riverbank, Dehlyn gasping beside him too once he’d dragged them both from the icy waters and out of immediate danger. But this felt like dying and not dying, like being crushed under tons of stone and at the same time dissipating into the very space around him. Kherron felt his limbs and the flesh of his body, the burning of his chest and the thumping of his heart, but he could not convince himself entirely that he still existed.
Secret of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 2) Page 20
