“Stop! Stop!” said Persin, huffing down the mound. “We are going together. All is lost. Shrane betrayed us.”
About lay ruination. The city shook. The delicate, fluted web of the buildings was breaking apart. A musical tinkling of destruction rang out from across the convoluted streets and suspended pathways. Cracks spidered the dome, and as they watched a enormous expanse of it sagged inward and collapsed across the avenue with a resounding roar, barring their way back to the ship.
“We’ll have to get out through the side of the dome,” said Antoninan, running between his dogs and slashing at the hobbles the Maceriyans had placed on their feet. Others joined him, and soon the dogs were free. Antoninan waved his arm frantically. “Everyone on the sleds.”
“There are too many!” shouted Persin, shoving at his own men in his panic. One hit him in the gut with a rifle butt, folding him in half.
His assailant looked Antoninan dead in the eye. “The dogs will manage,” he said.
“On board, all of you!” commanded Antoninan.
The party scrambled onto the sleds as the city shook violently. Ice burst in sprays of crystal and water, sending fist sized chunks toward them. Several men were pelted, one fatally. They waited, desperate to go as Trassan was brought painfully over the mounded rubble of the wall and laid onto the lead sled as gently as possible. Trassan’s contorted face suggested it was not gently enough. When he was aboard and tied down, Antoninan leapt onto the driver’s perch behind him.
“Out! Out!” said Antoninan. “That way!”
He cracked his whip over the dog’s heads.
Valatrice refused to move, but lifted his head high, nose twitching. A flick of Antoninan’s whip across his flank drew a quiver from his leg, but he still did not set out.
“Move damn you, move!” bellowed Antoninan. A triangular lump of ice as big as a temple steeple fell from the dome less than a hundred yards away. Its point speared the ground and the whole toppled sideways, smashing artful tracery that had stood for aeons into nothing.
Antoninan whipped Valatrice again, and again. The other dogs whined and hunkered down, tails curling between their legs.
“Why... does... he... not... go?” said Trassan, his breaths were a saw dipping in and out of his ribcage.
A final time Antoninan whipped his lead dog. The mighty dray gave him a penetrating stare and showed his teeth. “Not that way, fool. This way.”
With that he reared onto his hind legs, forelimbs pawing as he took the strain of the sled. He howled, and his teammates and the drays on the second sled responded, standing themselves, or leaning into their harness to tug the sleds into motion. The sleds rasped into motion, crushed ice complaining under their runners, then picked up speed. The dogs pulled hard, claws scrabbling at the ground until they were going fast enough to jog, then run. Valatrice barked loudly and added in perfect Karsarin.
“Hold fast, this will not be easy.”
He plunged down a dark street that seemed to go nowhere. The second sled followed. No sooner had it left the avenue and sped into the deeper city than the buildings behind them collapsed into a millions shards, and the dome was quick to follow.
VOLS IAPETUS GLORIED in his might. No longer did his ability slink from him like a fox in the night, but rushed into the embrace of his mind to be directed as he saw fit.
The Iron Mage sent a wave of magic that burned him, impossibly infused with the spiritual essence of iron, the magic-killer. He swung out his arm, imagining a fountain of sparks to stay the wave, and so it was. His will imposed upon mundane reality the form and effect he desired. From somewhere beneath the realm of matter and being he took the power, and he felt it give as the world was rewritten to his design. As they fought, they rose higher. This was her desire, but he gave into it, reinforcing it with his own talent, so that they flew on the air as surely as if it held them up in its hands. Up they went, up through the hole in the roof into the cold. His eyes shone with magic, and he imagined Shrane slipping from the wind to be dashed to pieces on the hard ice below them. She fell, then checked herself, and flung a spear made of blue light towards his heart.
“The scion of the god-driver!” she mocked, and she spoke into his heart. “Let us see what makes you!” Reality became plastic under the opposing efforts of their will, screaming strange atomic screams. Their beings bled out into the fractures and thus into one another. Her thoughts were his, and his hers.
He saw a childhood spent with a dying hag. Snatches of a long, lonely life spent treading back and forth across red sands. A life spent in hiding, alone, cleaving to a creed she no longer believed in. One aim was ever in her mind, never thought to be realised, but embraced fully now it had arrived. Diligence rewarded by fate, she was destined, or believed herself to be. Such people were the most dangerous of all.
In her turn, this is what she saw of him: a life of missed potential, a boy that disappointed all, and when his ability failed to grow, ridiculed. A red fox named rabbit by his tormentors, a dreamer frightened of his dreams. Children mocking him in their fear and disdain. No friends, no lover, no confidence. Threaded through every memory that shamed him was the magic that would not obey his call.
Viciously, she tapped into these insecurities and threw them into his face.
“You are nothing!” she half sung, a croon of despair. “See how little you are, child of heroes. You shame your ancestor with your weakness,” and her voice merged with a memory of his mentor, his face sunken with disappointment and his words, though spoken in anger, taken to heart. Vols remembered his tears.
Vols shrank back as his past attacked him. I cannot do this, I cannot do this, he thought. I cannot do anything. I am not Res Iapetus. I cannot. I am not Res Iapetus. I cannot do this.
So many times he had said, I cannot do this. To every farmer with a failing crop, to every government minister facing a crisis, to every parent with a sick child, to every mother with a missing daughter.
He fell, the gravity of failure clawing him from the sky. Shrane saw his weakness, and streamers of blue and gold fire roared past his ears, barely dispelled. The ground rushed up at him. Through the glare of the gate he saw the things from beyond. They stood motionless, awaiting the opening of an entrance barred against them for eight thousand years. They were patient. He felt determination more pervasive than the cold. An elemental patience, solid as the rock and as indomitable as the sea.
“I have waited for them. I, Adamanka Shrane, last priestess of the Iron Church, and they chose me! Who are you to defy me, failure? Disappointment. Weakling.”
She tossed him upward. The city dwindled to the size of a model. He tumbled helplessly as straw doll. Hurricane winds snatched at him, rolling him around the sky.
“They come into this world to reclaim what was stolen. This is their Earth, not the Morfaan’s, nor man’s. They are the children set to inherit, and they will be denied their birthright no longer!”
He shared the pain as Shrane’s soul burned—the toll of her toxic magic. Her gift was impure, not like his. Not innate but placed into her by foul means. The source of her ability was a canker in her soul. While her body revelled in triumph, her ghost shrieked as it was consumed. There was so little of her left, the cries were whispers.
Shrane let the winds drop, and he fell again. He was so intimately connected to her, more so than the most ardent of lovers, he knew she would not snatch him from death again. She was done with toying with him. He would die, and then the world would burn.
I cannot do this, he thought again, but I must.
Somehow, thinking of others made it right. The cause of his failure had always been about his own failings. He saw that now. This was something that had to be done, no matter how he felt.
Selflessness loosed his will.
Magic bloomed in him with the glory of a thousand dawns.
He stopped four feet from the ground. For a second he spun slowly around, feet pointing skywards, then he righted himself, and flew upwards. He
pulled moisture from the clouds, moulding it into daggers of hard water that spewed from his outstretched hands in multitudes.
“I am not Res Iapetus,” he thundered. “I can never be Res Iapetus!” The daggers streamed from his fingers with murderous speed. “I am Vols Iapetus, and you shall find me mighty enough.”
With her iron stave Shrane batted his daggers to spray, but they were too many to all be destroyed. One pierced her shoulder, another her thigh. She dropped, recovered, then fell steeply as Vols smote her with a blast of power that stripped flesh from her body, neck to hip, exposing glistening muscle and creamy bone. Screaming, she plummeted down, crashing into the wreckage of the dome around the gate.
Vols alighted next to her, his body thrumming with potential. She lifted her strange, semi-human face, stranger now for its mutilation. “So you find your strength at last,” she said. “It will not be enough. I am but a half. When you face the whole, you will fail.” She smiled with elation at something behind him.
Vols was too late. The spirit of the Earth retched as something repugnant pierced the membranes of space and time. A spear of light roared into the heavens, blasting apart the blue of the sky until the dark of night was revealed. The light shut off, air rushed back in on itself with a sonorous peal. A dome of light bloomed from the gate, racing across the ground toward him. For a second before he was torn to pieces, Vols stood upon the soil of a black world of fire and fume, surrounded by an army of iron things radiating heat enough to cook him. A corresponding hole opened in the pall of smoke shrouding the sky, and he found himself looking up at the Earth.
The Twin, he thought, as he choked on unbreathable air. I’m on the Twin.
Vols’ body was atomised. The space between the Earth and the Twin was compressed to nothing. To the sounding of brazen trumpets, the Draathis began their march.
The Gates of the World were open.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The Heart of Mists
METAL LIMBS SCREECHING, the Draathis advanced, preceded by a wall of withering heat. Hot breath shimmered. Its mouth and eyes shone with the searing glare of molten metal. It punched at the walls as it came, shattering marble and exotic minerals. The floor cracked and blackened under its feet. Garten could not comprehend how it could move. It looked like nothing more than a crude statue given life, a half-finished work executed by a mediocre artist. But move it did, and fluidly, accelerating into a hunched, clanging jog that shook the castle.
“Run!” Josan screamed. “Run!”
She grabbed his arm, and they sprinted away from the creature, but they were fowl before the dracon; it would catch them in five long strides. Garten’s fear threatened to kill him. His legs wobbled beneath his body, refusing to bear his weight.
Josan stopped by a smooth door of mother of pearl; he skidded into her, knocking her hand away from the doorhandle. She looked behind them as she groped to open it. Inner eyelids nictated rapidly over her eyes. Garten saw she was as terrified as he was. The Draathis was upon them, and swung back its fist to strike. The door banged open. Josan yanked him through, slamming it behind. The roar of the Draathis cut off.
They were by a window, high up a tower. The room seemed to serve no practical purpose, being very small. There was barely enough room for he and Josan to stand side by side. A small window looked out onto the seething mist. A narrow stair led downward.
Garten expected a smoking iron fist to smash through the delicate door, but there was no sign of the Draathis.
“We can evade it, if we are stealthy,” said Josan. “You must follow me. Do not open any door. The ways of the castle are not straight. Only I can take them. You will be lost.”
“Why did you take me from the hall of the gates? We need to leave!” he said.
“Yes, we do,” she replied. “There is nothing here that can stand against it. Our cause is lost, but there is something I cannot abandon.”
“Then what? Back to the hall?”
“First we have to lure it away from the gates. It should be easy, the Draathis hate my kind and it will pursue me until I am dead. Its hatred will be our salvation. We might escape because of it,” she said.
“Are there more? What if one stands guard and waits for us?”
“If there were more, we would have seen them.” She leaned out of the window and looked around. It had no glazing, and the sill was slick with moisture. Garten could see nothing past her shoulder but vaporous blankness. “The gate was damaged. To get through it like that from the World of Form, it must have had help from the World of Will.” She pulled her head back into the room. “The mage. She was waiting. It was a trap. She must have known I would do anything to save Josanad. I revealed the location of a gate to her. Once, one of the Draathis would have posed little threat to me, but now? I have no weapons, I am alone.”
“Do not despair,” said Garten. “Or we will die.” He took her hand. It was curiously dry and rough.
“Despair is all that is left. Today I am witness to the last hopes of my people burning in the flames of the Draathis. We must get away, or the Morfaan will die and your people will follow.”
She pulled herself free of Garten’s grip and headed for the stairway without another word. Garten could only run behind, Tyn Issy’s lantern-like box jounced in his hand as he went round and round the stairs.
“You cannot trust her,” said the Tyn.
“We do not have much choice,” said Garten.
“This place is a lie, Garten. The Morfaan bend things to forms more pleasing to them. They use everything they encounter, be it magic, worlds, or people. These stairs will go on and on far longer than you might think, or stop suddenly, depositing you far away—and I mean very, very far away—for reasons no other than caprice, and damn the cost. Nothing they do is straightforward. They were created to be perverse; creativity is their function. They are intentionally unbalanced, but without check they have wrought untold harm on so many places. This world they have made is an abomination. To create this refuge, they stole land from another place, and another time. Such things can kill stars and all their children if done without care, and the Morfaan are rarely careful.”
“What do you expect me to do?” said Garten. Issy was right, the stairs went on, growing darker.
“Be careful,” said Issy.
“My dear Goodlady Tyn,” said Garten. “I really do not know how much use that advice will be.”
Light engulfed them. The stairs ended. Garten ran after Josan into a huge hall full of golden radiance. Enormous gems, each fashioned into a teardrop shape, hovered over the flagged floor, nailed in place by rays of light. Josan headed for the centre of the room where the biggest gemstone floated. An opal, alive with inner, kaleidoscopic fire.
“Oh no,” said Tyn Issy. “Oh no oh no.”
Josan ran to the gem. It hovered trapped within a beam of gold just above head height. She reached up and plucked it from its surrounding ray of light. As soon as the gem left the beam the light was extinguished. Gems plummeted from their stations, cracking into the marble. The hall plunged into darkness a moment, until a glow kindled itself in the gemstone, lighting Josan’s hands pink and softening the dark.
“This is the Heart of Mists, the last hope of all Morfaan,” she said, holding it out to show him. “Now we can leave.”
“Garten, don’t let her take that back into the world,” said Issy.
“Why?”
Issy made a frustrated noise. “I can’t say!”
They ran toward a tall portal that hissed open as they neared. Screaming violated their minds. Four voices calling out in terror floored them both. The Heart of Mists bounced across the floor as Josan fell. Garten regained his feet, clutching his head. Josan was worst affected, and writhed on the ground.
“Lady Morfaan?” he said.
“It... It is killing the Council!”
Garten staggered as a violent agony stabbed him in the temple. She screamed.
“Lord Mathanad! He is dead!” mo
aned Josan.
The castle shook. Garten heard beasts roaring in the distance outside.
He grabbed Josan under the elbow and pulled her to her feet, dragged her to where the Heart of Mists lay on the floor.
“Don’t let her take it!” said Issy.
“No!” said Josan. With trembling hands she plucked it up, and they stumbled from the hallway into another corridor, through yet another door, and down a short flight of steps. Garten could make no sense of the castle’s architecture. Now they were in a gallery, looking down on the courtyard. The tree was felled, its creamy stone branches shattered. Lord Mathanad’s statue was a smoking ruin. The Draathis was pounding at another, that of the insane Lord Solophonad. The stone cracked. Another bone-curdling shriek blasted Josan and Garten as the statue exploded. A green ghost shot skywards, blasting aside the mist and sending it into violent turmoil, but there it stopped. Solophonad’s essence had nowhere to go, no way out of the bubble world, and it rushed from one side of the limited sky to the other, taking brief form at the end of each traverse, before finally it dissipated with a cry more horrible than all the rest, staining the mists an eerie green and sending flickers of queasy light throughout the whiteness.
The Draathis went to assault the statue of Helisin. It grabbed the head. The Draathis was so lumpen looking Garten expected unthinking violence, but the Draathis took its time, shifting its grip, searching the statue for the weakest point, all while Helisin screamed and screamed.
“Stop!” screamed Josan. “Stop!”
The Draathis looked up at them with its soulless eyes. With a grinding of stone, it shoved the statue sideways from its plinth leaving it jammed against the wall. Evidently a living Morfaan was a greater prize, for it strode from the courtyard, kicking one of its precious doors to flinders and dragging its massive bulk through.
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