Beyond the Shadowed Earth

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  She bowed to the goddess, tightened her grip on the godkiller, and stepped into the Tree.

  Chapter Forty

  EDA STOOD BEFORE AN IRON GATE IN a high stone wall, illuminated only by the knife in her hand. Behind and on either side of her was a horrid nothingness that she knew somehow would swallow her whole if she stepped into it, no matter how much Starlight flowed through her veins.

  There was only one way to go.

  Eda pushed on the gate. It creaked open, and she went into the earthen passageway beyond, the godkiller casting eerie shadows on the floor and walls. There seemed to be no ceiling, but neither was there any sky—just that same hungry nothingness, kept uneasily at bay by the gate and the passage.

  In the darkness ahead of her, someone was weeping, the anguished cries of the utterly hopeless. Eda set her jaw against the noise—she was not about to let Sorrow consume her, not now when she was so close to her goal.

  She hurried down the passageway, her footsteps echoing on the hard-packed earth. Eyes watched her from the wall above; she thought she heard the whir of feathers, the clack of claws. Another voice joined in the weeping, somewhere ahead—a man’s voice, brittle and broken.

  She went faster, running past the openings to several new passages that branched off the main one.

  And then she saw Niren just ahead, the hem of her silver gown whispering over the stone.

  Eda cried out and ran to catch her.

  “Niren!” Eda stumbled into an alcove that she recognized with confusion as Niren’s sitting room, back in the palace. Rain poured outside the window, and Niren sat at a carved ebony table, sipping tea. The air was rich with moisture and the scent of cardamom.

  Contentment settled over Eda—Niren was here, alive, well. Tuer’s Mountain was nothing more than a bad dream.

  And yet there was anger in Niren’s eyes. She rose from the table, her hands shaking. She was holding a silver chain that dragged along behind her on the ground—a chain made of sorrow. Without a word, she paced toward Eda and hung the chain around her neck.

  Then both Niren and the room wavered, disappeared, and Eda was standing alone in the dark of Tuer’s Mountain, something scrabbling in the blackness behind her.

  The chain was heavy and bitterly cold, and no matter how hard she tried, Eda couldn’t seem to shrug it off. She started running again, as fast as she could with the chain weighing her down.

  Behind her, wings scraped stone. Beaks clacked. Something gave an awful shriek. Talons grasped her shoulders, digging down to bone. She yelped and slashed blindly above her with the godkiller, and whatever creature had grabbed her let go again.

  She glanced back as she ran to see a mass of dark carrion birds filling the passage. They had long necks and blood red, featherless heads. Their black wings oozed shadow that pooled hissing on the floor and they watched her with cruel, sneering eyes.

  And then she slammed hard into a packed earthen wall—the abrupt dead end to the passageway. She fell backward, all the wind knocked out of her.

  The carrion birds crept toward her, claws clacking on the ground. “A labyrinth,” they hissed all together. “She did not know. She did not count the turnings. She’s caught like a rat in Tuer’s maze. Her sorrow will taste so sweet. So sweet.”

  Eda scrabbled to her feet again, and raised the knife high as she barreled back the way she came.

  The carrion birds screamed, flapping their awful wings and flinging themselves away from the godkiller’s light.

  She ran, trying not to feel the icy sorrow of the chain that seemed to be sinking into her soul. She turned right at the first passage she came to, then left into the next one. The birds had spoken truly: she had not counted the turnings. She didn’t know which passages might lead her back out, and which ones led to the center of the labyrinth, where she was sure Tuer was waiting.

  All she could do was keep running.

  Suddenly, her surroundings shifted a second time, and she found herself in the palace dungeon. Rescarin lay on the floor of his cell, cradling his fingerless hands against his chest as his forehead poured with sweat, with fever. Eda hated the guards for not doing a better job tending his wounds. She hated herself for her careless order to mutilate him. But even more than that she hated that she cared that he was dead. That his death was her fault.

  Rescarin forced his trembling body upright, a silver chain in his bloodied palms. He draped it around her shoulders and was gone, the dungeon fading with him.

  The darkness was deeper than before, the chains too heavy to allow her to run. So she walked, as quickly as she could, down another passage and then another. She felt the weight of Tuer’s Mountain, the weight of Tuer’s sorrow. Behind her came the scrape and clack of the carrion birds.

  She wasn’t surprised when her surroundings shifted a third time and she stepped out onto a terrace that overlooked the palace rose garden. She was glad to get out of the dark, away from the carrion birds, if only for a few moments. It was a fierce, hot day, the sun high in the sky, and the Emperor was lounging in a woven reed chair, a pair of attendants holding an awning over his head. He was younger than she’d ever seen him, not yet twenty, and she was surprised to find him almost strikingly handsome. His dark hair curled slightly over his ears, and his beard was neatly trimmed. A shrewdness shone from his eyes, and a lazy smile curled on his lips.

  He beckoned her over. Eda went, and sat at his feet on a thick orange cushion.

  “Your aspirations do you credit, my dear. I always admired you, you know. I wished you were mine. I would have instructed you. Groomed you. Taught you how to rule the Empire and not lose it.” He gave her an admonishing glance.

  “It’s not like you held onto it,” Eda grumbled.

  “Only because you poisoned me, my dear. An interesting choice. I thought the sores in my mouth were making my food taste odd, not the other way around.” He shrugged, and took a long drink from his wine goblet. “Live and learn, I suppose. Or rather, die.” He laughed more than his strange joke merited, and it took him a moment to sober up again. “The point is, you took something that did not belong to you. And now you must pay the price.”

  “The gods promised me the Empire. I made a deal with them.”

  “Ah, yes. But it is a tricky thing, is it not, dealing with the gods?”

  Eda fidgeted on her cushion. “I held up my end of the bargain. They didn’t hold up theirs. And in any case—” She jerked upright and paced over to the balcony, wrapping her free hand around the sun-warmed stone railing. “In any case, what did the gods even do for me? I bargained with and bribed my supporters. I forged documents and mixed the poison into your food. I got rid of Talia and built the temple and rescued Niren—”

  “You mean ‘killed Niren,’ I suppose.”

  Eda wheeled on him. “I saved her. And then the gods took her anyway.”

  “Hmm,” said the Emperor. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “And what’s another?” Eda spat.

  The Emperor’s face creased with pity. “That you are a scared, lost child, who threw a fit when she didn’t get what she wanted. The gods don’t exist to do things for us. They exist to guide us, to shape the world, to keep it, as the One instructed them at the beginning. They do not bow to our whims. They don’t care if we build temples or carve statues or sing hymns. They care for the things of their own domain, and they expect us to care for ours.”

  “My domain was taken from me.”

  The Emperor shrugged. “And so was mine, but you don’t see me whining about it.” He took another draught of wine. “Just take care, my dear, that the thing you think you’re seeking is not the thing you actually find.”

  He rose from his chair, another chain lying silver in his palms. He seemed almost apologetic as he hung it around her neck. “I wish you hadn’t poisoned me. We could have had so many things to talk about.”

  And then the Emperor and the terrace were gone.

  The chains were so heavy now she could ba
rely walk. She shuffled forward, angry at the dark of the labyrinth, terrified of the carrion birds whose wings came quick behind.

  She went on, her chains scraping against the stone, and then she was stepping into her childhood bedroom, a window looking out to sea, the waves crashing white on the shore. Her books were there, stacked on shelves, and lined up in neat rows in front of the books were her wooden toy soldiers that her father had carved for her and her mother had painted. Eda had given them needles for swords and sewn tiny blue sashes for them, so they looked like the Emperor’s Imperial Guard.

  Her parents stepped in, death clinging to their wasted bodies. They held shimmering chains in their hands, and their faces were drawn and angry.

  Pain stabbed under Eda’s ribs. “What wrong have I done you?”

  “You lived,” said her father.

  “And we died,” said her mother. “We are trapped forever because of you, and so you shall be also.”

  They hung their chains on her, wrapping them round her arms and legs.

  She sank to her knees.

  Her parents vanished, but the room did not.

  Another figure appeared before her, his back bent with long sorrow—Niren’s father, nearly a decade gone, now. Chains weighed heavy in his hands. For an instant, Eda didn’t understand why he was there. And then she looked into his eyes and saw her own eyes staring back at her, and remembered. Because he was her father, too.

  He wrapped his chains around her head, over her eyes and ears and nose. The room at last faded and she lay gasping on the ground in utter darkness. The chains bit into her skin, crushed her bones.

  But that wasn’t why she writhed in agony, weeping until there were no more tears and then heaving dry, wracking sobs.

  She felt, for the first time in her life, the full weight of the sorrow she had inflicted on those around her. It ate at her, ate and ate, until she wanted to die but she couldn’t die because the chains were binding her to life, binding her to the sorrow so that she could never escape, so that she must feel every grief, every pang until the end of time itself, and beyond.

  Because sorrow is greater than everything, even time.

  Dimly, she was aware of the sound of wings, of an awful, hissing laughter.

  “Her sorrow is so sweet. So sweet. Let us taste it. Let us gorge ourselves.”

  The carrion birds leapt at her, talons locking around her arms and legs, hooked beaks tearing into her flesh as if her chains were not even there.

  Pain burst hot in every part of her, a deep, soul-rending agony.

  Her vision blurred. The carrion birds crushed her as they devoured her, grinding her body into the stone.

  She was drowning in chains and feathers, and she couldn’t even scream, because when she opened her mouth she tasted dark wings.

  Pain and sorrow, sorrow and pain. There was nothing else, and there could be nothing else, because she had left Death far behind her. There was no way back.

  And then a hand, closing round her wrist, pulling her up through the gnashing birds as Raiva had pulled her from the memory pool.

  But it was not Raiva who stood there.

  It was the man from her dream, long ago in the holding cell in Evalla. Gnarled, ropey scars ran all down his face and arms. His eyes were piercing, dark, his grip steady.

  The carrion birds shrank before him. “Be gone,” he commanded them. “You do not belong to this Circle of the world, nor any other. Go into the void, and there be undone.”

  The birds hissed and screamed but did as they were bidden, gathering their wings and hurtling into the nothingness above the passageway.

  “Come,” said a deep voice. “I will lead you through the labyrinth.”

  She could not stand on her own; the chains were too heavy. She crumpled back to the ground, peering up at the scarred man between the links of sorrow. “I cannot move,” she said, utterly wretched.

  The man smiled at Eda, though his expression was sorrowful. “Do not fear, daughter of the dust. I know you cannot—I will carry you.”

  And he scooped her up into his arms, chains and all, as if she weighed no more than a handful of jasmine flowers. He carried her on through the labyrinth.

  “They are not heavy, you know,” said the scarred man.

  “What are not?”

  “The chains. They are your sorrows, and so the only one they weigh upon is you.”

  Eda shut her eyes, tried to shut out the pain, but she couldn’t do it.

  The scarred man seemed to walk for an eternity. At last he stooped beneath a wooden doorway, and bore her into a vast dark hall.

  He vanished like smoke and she tumbled to the ground, landing painfully on hard stone. Her chains, like the scarred man, were suddenly gone.

  She could see nothing either ahead or behind her, but the sound of someone weeping drew her deeper into the chamber.

  And she knew, without even having to see him, that it was Tuer, chained somewhere ahead in the dark.

  She gripped the hilt of the godkiller, and went to find him.

  Chapter Forty-One

  A SHADOWY LIGHT FLICKERED SOMEWHERE IN THE DARK hall, enough to illuminate the host of mirrors in the center of it, and the god who knelt weeping before them, hung with chains.

  Eda sheathed the knife, not wanting Tuer to see she had it, and paced up next to him.

  There were hundreds of mirrors, perhaps thousands—she couldn’t see properly in the shifting light—and they looked into peoples’ lives like the pools in the Circle of Time had looked into Eda’s memories. In one, a woman clung to a boy’s bloodied body, sobbing. In another, a girl in a drawing room clutched a letter that clearly contained ill news. In yet another, an old man held the hand of an old woman who lay shuddering on a thin mattress piled high with blankets; silent tears ran down the old man’s face.

  Eda couldn’t bear to look very long into any of the mirrors, but she found she couldn’t wholly look away. She saw a young boy crying over his dog who’d been slain by a bear. A girl standing stoic as she watched the man she loved wed someone else. Two Itan girls kneeling in a mountain temple, pleading for the gods to bring their father safely home.

  But there were smaller sorrows, too: broken limbs and lost toys, grownup children striking out on their own and leaving their parents in empty, echoing houses. A flower, dying in the heat of the sun. Loneliness.

  “All the sorrows of the world,” came Tuer’s voice, low and heavy at her ear.

  Eda jumped and turned.

  The god of the mountain, on his knees, was taller than Eda. His hair was white as snowy peaks, his skin speckled gray like stone. His eyes were a startling, vibrant green.

  “All the sorrows of the world are my fault,” said the god. “And so I sit here, and watch them, so I will understand the gravity of what I have done. So I will feel every wound and every tear. The One did not see fit to punish me. And so I punish myself.”

  Eda stared at him, the old anger rushing back. “You did this to yourself? Locked the Circles? Trapped the Dead? The world is tearing itself apart because of you!”

  “I bound myself to the world’s sorrow—those are the chains that keep me here. I cannot be free of them, even if I wished to be. Locking the Circles happened by accident. I never meant to trap the Dead, never meant to poison the world.”

  “The world is dying! Spirits are breaking through the cracks, escaping from the void where they were banished. Your Shadow—Rudion—is leading them. They’re murdering people. Devouring life.”

  “Soon they will swallow the sun.”

  Eda followed Tuer’s gaze to one of the mirrors, which showed a score of the winged spirits attacking a village by the sea. Bodies were strewn like rag dolls on the beach; the spirits’ bone swords dripped crimson. She had to shut her ears against the screaming. “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!”

  “Yes, it is.” Tuer crouched back on his heels, watching her sadly. Knowingly.

  Eda paced around him, itching to draw the knife and be done wi
th it, but she didn’t have her answers yet, and she forced her hand to be still. “Why did you make Rudion call me here? Why did you take Niren and the Empire from me? Why, when I did everything you asked? I built you a temple. I began the priesthood again. I would have reinstated religion across the Empire if you’d given me a chance. Instead—instead, you ripped everything away. My husband, my home, my country, my—my sister—”

  “You did not do everything I asked,” said Tuer quietly.

  Eda wheeled on him. “Yes. I did.”

  He shook his great head, a strange light of humor in his eyes. “It was never about the Empire. It was never really about Niren. It was always about you, Eda Mairin-Draive. All the sorrows of the world play endlessly before me, and sometimes, they allow me to see the future. And so I knew you would make a bargain with me. I knew that, in your mind, I would fail you. And I knew that it would make you so angry you would be compelled to journey all this way. To find me. To have your revenge.”

  “So you could make me the next Bearer of Souls,” Eda snapped. “I know.”

  “The Bearer of Souls?” Tuer frowned. “You are not the Bearer of Souls.”

  Something wrenched inside of her, and Eda grew suddenly still. “Then who is?”

  “Niren, of course. The gods chose her as the Bearer long ago. I thought you had figured that out by now. I allowed you to think you were sacrificing Niren, when you promised her to me as earnest, but the gods would have taken her without regard to any deal you did or did not make. Niren’s life was never yours. It was never hers. It always belonged to the gods.”

  Eda’s world shifted sideways. “She deserved a choice.”

  “And she was given one, but that does not concern you, little one.”

  “Don’t call me that. I’m not a child anymore.”

  “Dearest, you are all children to me.”

  She scowled at him, her nails digging hard into the hilt of the godkiller.

  “When I came here, centuries ago, I did not realize what my self-punishment would inflict on Endahr. I did not know that with every strand of sorrow I drew from the world and bound to myself I chipped away at the doors I had made, until they shut and locked and could not be opened again, not even by the Bearer of Souls. They’ve been sealed twenty years, now. But Raiva made a plan, as Raiva always does.”