“This is the work of the queen?” she asked. “The Sage of the North?”
“It is,” Valour said. He spoke carefully.
“I don’t understand,” Iyana said. She shook her head and followed the trail again. She even reached out, as if she could untangle it.
“My once-sister in arms has quite lost her mind,” Valour said with a shrug. He sighed as if it pained him, and Shadow could not tell if it was an act or not. “I know you think me guiltiest when it comes to the sins that drew the worlds closer together, and I won’t argue that I had no part, nor even a small one. But when I realized the truth, when I saw the inevitability of the coming clash, I set to preparing.”
“By attempting to ensnare the Embers.” Iyana said it in a flat monotone. She did not seem to have the anger fresh within her, so caught up was she in the strange moment between worlds.
“Another argument for another day,” Valour said. “Some of the others agreed on the threat the World Apart presented. Balon Rael was strong and cunning, but also proud. He would not suffer an alliance with me, not after the things we had done to each other over the centuries—”
“Spare me the history,” Iyana said.
“A true mercy, that,” Shadow said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, as if it couldn’t find the path to her ears without effort.
“What has the queen done?” Iyana asked. “Why does she call to the World Apart, draw it closer? And why does it matter if, as you claim, this war was inevitable?”
“Perhaps I was wrong,” Valour said. “And even if the World Apart came on in full, our own would be spared during the Bright Days. The Dark Months are the work of a natural cycle. Our worlds are close, as you can see. Not in terms of sky and stars, but … in other ways I cannot describe. This world is like our shadow, or we theirs. It could be that we could survive the Dark Months, as you and your Embers have. It could be that, with the right guidance, the right leadership, and the right Landkist most of all, humanity could endure, no matter what happened to us.”
Shadow did not know what he meant by the last, but guessed it to be the dwindling, warring Sages. He seemed melancholy and tragic, and Shadow hated that she allowed a drop of pity for the twisted beast into her poisoned heart. It was gone soon enough.
“But now,” Valour continued, “Elanil has called to it. Called to Him, I know now.”
“Who?” Iyana asked. Her voice quaked, and when she looked at the silver beam again, Shadow felt her fear keenly.
“The Last God,” Valour said. “That is what my companions call him. He wants something from her, and I would guess it is as simple as it looks.”
“Go on, then,” Iyana said. She had clenched her fists at her sides and did not turn.
“Safe passage,” Valour said. “Whoever this man or would-be god is, he has struggled with the denizens of the World Apart. I would guess he has much to do with the Corruption that leaks from the place; that the Dark Kind, Night Lords and Shadow Kings are in some way related to what he wrought—that they are a vision of what our world could be, if she is allowed to live, and if he is allowed to enter.”
“He’s fleeing, then,” Iyana said. “He’s fleeing powers that got away from him.”
Now she did turn, and a wry smile crept across her face as she fixed a judging gaze on the Sage. “You two have much in common.”
Valour did not respond, so Iyana continued.
“You opened a door you shouldn’t have, yes,” Iyana said, indicating the black-and-red vision of dread behind her. “Well, as you and yours have no doubt learned, perhaps he is about to do the same.” She nodded behind them. “The Landkist are a force unto themselves. We are many. We are strong.”
“You will all die in the face of this.”
Iyana swallowed after searching him. The Eastern Dark believed what he said, and Shadow found that—much as she hated the fact—he was rarely wrong in matters of death.
“Why does she call him?” Iyana asked again.
“Love, most likely,” Valour said. “Love blinds more completely than hate ever could.”
Iyana frowned. She seemed to flicker as she did, and she winced in apparent discomfort. Shadow glance back at the Faeykin, who seemed dimmer than he had been.
“I saw,” Iyana said. Her voice had changed. She began to show the cracks beneath that calm visage. “I saw scars opening across the land. I saw the Lake on fire, and the mountains. I saw Center burning. I saw ash and dust for leagues … and bones.”
“That can be stopped,” Valour said. He took a cautious step forward and held his hands out. “Together, we can stop it. The Dark Months will persist. They will get worse, perhaps. But we can stop this doom from befalling us completely. Let this Last God, this lord of darkness in all its forms, hurl his beasts from afar, make his rips and rifts when the worlds are closest.”
“Why not kill him?” Iyana asked.
Shadow looked at the Sage, curious as to his reaction. She marveled to see the look he had admitted to earlier. A look of fear.
“You don’t believe we can.”
“No.”
“You underestimate—”
“Iyana,” Valour sounded as if he were pleading, “we cannot defeat something like this. We must—”
“You want Kole’s power,” Iyana said. Her tone had changed, growing more solid and more flat. She did not trust the Sage. She never would. “You want Linn’s. You want mine, and you want it aimed at one you have considered an enemy for centuries, if not longer. You’ve pulled us into a family dispute.” She spat. It looked strange coming from her, and with a wall of burning world behind her. “The War of Sages is the greatest sin I’ve ever known, and we won’t be caught up in it on the wrong side.” She tossed her head toward the doom curtain behind her. “No matter what may come.”
“That war is over,” Valour said through gritted teeth. “Iyana, this is the only way we all survive—”
“A world in which you survive is one me and mine cannot abide,” Iyana said. “I do not believe in forgiveness for all, contrary to the teachings many of my ilk pass on. If you wish to atone for the hell you’ve put us through, I suggest you prepare for this one’s coming.” She pointed at the silver thread. “Maybe he’ll finish you off before Kole does. Maybe you can be our shadowed blade instead of us being your bright one. A tool. Nothing more.”
“I sought out the World Apart out of fear,” Valour said. “Fear of my own power, and where it came from.”
“It came from the world,” Iyana said. It seemed to pain her to say it. “Just as ours did.” She looked at Shadow as she said it, and Shadow frowned and cast about. What was the girl suggesting? Shadow’s power was born of darkness and made of it. It was forced upon her, though many others had died in the attempt, as Valour had crafted his weapons for the coming war. A war against his fellows. A war to prevent the last one from ever happening at all, if he was to be believed.
“Not mine,” Valour said, his tone brooking no argument. “I was not Landkist by our world. I was not chosen.”
Iyana frowned again.
Valour seemed shaken. He was saying more than he had intended, but now the floodgates had opened, there was no stopping the deluge.
“I was chosen by another.” He did not look toward that black-and-red curtain, but the others did, even the Faeykin who was now very dim indeed.
“Landkist by the World Apart …” Iyana said. “You truly believe that?”
Valour looked down at his own hands. At least, at hands that looked like his.
“Chosen,” Valour said, more to himself than her. “Found. What is power but more of the same?”
A strange vision came into Shadow’s mind, and she did not know if it was the work of Valour’s magic or of her own imagination. She saw a young man with fair features. He walked through carven halls. Crystal halls with tapestries inlaid with gold and jewels. He lay with courtesans and wrote songs and ballads. He fought in wars for the right reasons and others for wrong, but
reasons not his own.
He was strong and handsome and sought after. But there was nothing special about him. Nothing potent. Nothing that would put him above those whose power began to awaken in the latest of what Shadow now recognized as a cycle that spanned all of time. A cycle of birth, death and rebirth. A cycle of gifts. Gifts of power from the world itself. A gift that was not given to Ray Valour. A gift he had been forced to look elsewhere for, using tricks of sight best left to those who knew them best.
“Everything that happened after, I played a part in. This much is true. But if you believe I wear the face of evil, you mistake the word or else use it too often. Make no mistake, when she lets that one in, you will wish for my strength. More so, you’ll wish you’d never had need of it in the first place.” He sighed and turned away, stepping back toward Shadow. “As it is, perhaps you won’t need it anyway. I will kill the Frostfire Sage.” He paused and thought of turning back. “I will kill any who get in my way.”
Iyana was angry, but she paused before speaking. Her look shifted, grew more calm as Valour stalked away, looking like the angry youth Shadow had just drawn an image of in her mind. “You courted a power you did not understand,” Iyana said. “And now we all live with the consequences.”
“Die with them, more like,” he said.
“You betrayed your mother.”
Valour stopped. Shadow saw death in his eyes, saw him tense to whirl. She thought for certain he would strike her down with a blast of shadowfire, or some unknown spell.
When he did turn, he did so slowly. Iyana’s eyes were glowing now. Glowing even more brightly than they had been when she had first come to seek him out. There was no black in their centers.
“You call your world ‘Mother,’” Valour sneered. “And to what avail? She blesses some and curses others. Some mother. Some benevolence. Some lie.”
“She knows her own,” Iyana said. “Those best suited—”
“She is a fallacy! Your kind is a happy mistake! A pattern. A bored, empty cycle, like the stars that turn in their sorry constellations.”
Valour was breathing heavy and ragged, now. He hunched forward, his hands curled into rigid fingers splayed like talons. “You fear your power,” he whispered.
“As you should have feared your own,” Iyana said. “Before it was too late. You are a Sage. An enemy of the world. An enemy to me and mine. I will not broker peace between you and our champions. Not with Kole. Not with Linn. Not with Baas Taldis or any of the names from the songs they’ll sing about their meetings on their long, dark road to your ending and our salvation. You have a reckoning coming.”
“With Kole Reyna and Linn Ve’Ran?” Valour laughed. The sound was maniacal, and Shadow could see tendrils of black tinged with amber streaming from his hair, which wavered and split apart like tentacles in water.
“Perhaps,” Iyana said. “But that is not the reckoning of which I speak.” She spoke as if channeled, and Shadow wondered what she could see with those bright orbs. She shivered at the thought of it and did not want them turned upon her.
Valour straightened. He looked at the Faeykin who had followed Iyana all this way. “What has your guide—your anchor—told you? What does he think he knows?”
The Faeykin seemed to hear the Sage on a delay. He only shook his head once to dispel the notion. Iyana’s words did the rest.
“Not him, Sage,” she said. “I have seen it. I see it now. The root of your doom, which will be here for you before the rest of us, no matter how long or short a time separates the one from the other.”
Valour’s laugh had no humor in it, and Shadow could see his hand shaking at his side, its pale, sweating surface reflecting the light of the world behind them. “You speak in riddles, girl. I am too old for them to work—”
“You have two hearts,” Iyana interrupted. “Two minds. You are a being with two cores. The other is not gone. The other is alive and well. He is angry.” Her eyes flashed so brightly they momentarily stole the red glow from her surroundings. Even Valour winced and covered his eyes. When he did, there was an amber glow on his palm.
“You have a reckoning, Sage,” Iyana said again. “And it’s coming sooner than you think.”
Now Valour did reach out, his right hand shooting up quick as a striking serpent. Iyana’s green eyes lost their light as she took a faltering step back. She raised her own hand in an attempt to ward the coming blast off, but Shadow knew it would be too late.
There was another flash to the side, and when the river of orange-and-black fire roared across the void to engulf the place Iyana was standing, she was gone, along with her silent, watchful companion.
Shadow watched the comet of shadowfire race across the black span between worlds, leaving the Sage panting. His back heaved beneath its black-and-red armor. His hair no longer flowed on airy currents. His eyes emitted light that Shadow could not see from her vantage. He straightened and looked at the place where the girl had been for a long while as the silver beam of light flowed under them like a herald of doom.
It wasn’t shame that drenched the Sage as he turned toward her, but rather defeat. No matter his bold words, the Eastern Dark did not believe this was a fight he could win. And if he could not defeat the combined powers of the Frostfire Sage and her new Ember companions, Iyana’s Sage-blessed sister and the Blue Knights, Shadow knew there was no hope of stopping the Last God and the denizens of the World Apart, should his fears come to pass.
Shadow never doubted much of what Valour said. She had no need to, as the Sage’s macabre proclamations had always seemed like commands to her. A thing would happen because the Sage said it would. Because he would bring it into being through the force of his will, and the will of those he controlled.
Still, she could not fathom the sight before them as anything other than hell. A hell that could not become of their world. No matter how bad wars between Landkist and Sages got, there would always be white clouds and blue rivers, yellow plains and snow-capped peaks. Shadow took few pleasures in the nightmare she called her waking life, but the land had always been one of them. There was no pain in a thing so vast and so sprawling. So beautiful. There was no betrayal in it.
There should have been no ending. But now, as she took the tired, smoking hand of the Sage who offered it to her as if she were a daughter and he her father, however twisted, she thought she wanted the world to remain as it was, albeit more empty of man and all the war they made. More empty of things like her, Valour and the Frostfire Sage. And even more empty of the Landkist, for a time. She thought, then, that she would help the Sage in the coming fight because she wanted to.
The passage back to the place they had been was no less chaotic than the last one was, but Shadow braced herself for it. She opened her eyes and felt the sting of the cold, icy wind against them, drying the film to a blurry paste. She saw her black hands pressed into the crusted snow, which was lit only by the last rays of the dying sun, so dark as to be called night. She looked up into the sky. The stars were hidden behind a rush of gray clouds, and to the east, the horizon was a swath of white and gray as the frozen waves came up against the sky she had just stood upon.
She tried to picture the World Apart and found that she could not. She looked at the lands about her with fresh eyes, feeling it all as small and precious. She looked toward the northern peaks and the crystal palace across the flats and tried to imagine the silver beam piercing its sides and carving a path through the horizon.
How quickly the vivid could seem unreal.
Lastly, she looked at the Sage, who seemed very tired. It was the second interaction he had had with the girl from the Valley, and both had left him in a state Shadow had never seen him in before.
Seeing him thus, Shadow remembered the words the departing Iyana had left them with. Those that heralded a coming reckoning for the Sage. Those that suggested what Shadow had guessed, but kept from thinking on for too long, lest they kindle hope in her.
T’Alon Rane was alive. T’
Alon Rane was angry. And the Eastern Dark knew it.
Valour turned his head sharply to the west and Shadow followed. The Shadow Kings stood just outside the entrance to the cave. They had changed so much that Shadow would not have recognized them apart for Alistair, who still had ashen gray skin and a bone armor chest. The others had grown into new colors. Red skin and blue for Thehn and Myriel, respectively. Dark, dark green for Martyr and snow white for the twins who bore red eyes. They looked like beasts in everything but for their bearing, which was watchful, considering.
“I don’t trust them,” Shadow said.
“You shouldn’t,” Valour said. He sounded tired. “But what choice do we have?”
“They will betray us,” Shadow said.
“Yes, Shadow. Some will.” She met his tired purple eyes, looking for a spark of amber that she couldn’t find. “That’s why I have you here.”
“You don’t believe we can win. You said it yourself.”
Valour shrugged. It was not a look of defeat. “Without Iyana, I cannot gain the favor of her sister. Of that, I have no doubt. But Reyna … Reyna is another matter.”
“You think you can gain his?” Shadow nearly scoffed.
“No, Shadow. But I intend to try.” His boots made a splitting sound as they tore free from their frozen holds in the ice and snow. He started up the slight rise toward the cave and their otherworldly companions.
“First, let us see if such a foolhardy move is necessary. Let us see what our friends can do, and what we can do with them.”
“We attack?” Shadow asked, feeling eager and afraid as she started up behind him.
“No,” he said, surprising her. She paused in her disappointment, and the Sage turned lazily. “We will move out into the frozen waves tomorrow. We will make our presence felt, and we will wait. We will not attack, Shadow. She will.”
The days passed with agonizing slowness, the lengthening nights with bitter cold and sour company.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 53
