“Yes.”
“To feed on me,” he said simply, looking at her white eyes.
She was taken aback. He had recognized what she was, and this was his conclusion. He thought she had only healed him to have a healthy victim to drain.
“No, young one,” she said softly. “I have not come to feed on you.”
“You are one of the hollowskins. A vyrksikka.”
“Yes.”
“No breath. No heat.”
“Yes.”
“You feed on the living.” His plain courage in the face of death humbled her.
“I am not here for that,” she said.
His silver eyes shone bright. “Then, thank you for...the root.”
“You are welcome. I wish I could help you more, but I cannot stay. I came here looking for someone. I must continue looking.”
“You chase the Rabasyvihrk.”
It was the quicksilver’s word for Medophae. “I... Yes.”
“Then you are close. He was taken by a dramath. Kikirian. I do not know where they went.”
“I do.”
The quicksilver looked away and pain crossed his face. “Then you must chase them. Quickly.”
“Soon. Will you eat raw meat?”
The quicksilver looked at her sharply, then said, “Yes.”
“Then I will hunt for us both.” She stood up. His hand flashed out and caught hers. His grip was deft and light, but there was strength there. That was encouraging. With food, she gave him decent odds of surviving.
He said, “I am Stavark. My life is mine because you have lived, I pledge my life to—”
She twisted her wrist out of his grip and shook her head. “I know that pledge, my friend. Do not. It is forbidden.”
“You know the ways of the syvhirk?” The quicksilver seemed surprised.
“I am well-read for a dead woman. I know you cannot make that pledge to a vyrksikka.” She smiled. “But I thank you for the sentiment.”
Her pointed nails dug into her palms as the scent of his blood, the feel of his warmth, thrummed through her.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
She leapt away, charging between the buildings and plunging into the forest. Her ravening blood keened in her mind, burning her veins. It was time to hunt.
46
Mirolah
Mirolah pulled the prison door shut behind her. It clicked and locked, and then her body returned to her control. The revulsion wriggled through her like worms in her veins. She fought the sweeping horror that wanted to buckle her knees and send her sobbing to the flagstones again. Instead, she kept her head. She bit her lip until it bled and concentrated, seeking the essence of Ethiel’s spell. What had allowed her access to every fiber of Mirolah’s being? What allowed her to shove Mirolah’s resistance aside and take control?
It was deeper into the threads than Mirolah had gone. Ethiel saturated Mirolah’s threads with her own essence, her own reserve of GodSpill. She had talked of gods being sentient GodSpill.
Question: Why would Ethiel think that?
Answer: Because Ethiel had made GodSpill “sentient” with her own desires. She could make it work for her with her purpose instilled into it. That was what it was. Ethiel’s spell wasn’t mind control. It wasn’t just in Mirolah’s head, as she had thought. Mirolah felt Ethiel’s filthy residue throughout her entire body. Red and red and more red, filling the most secret parts of herself.
She fell to her knees, chasing the thought, digging deep within herself, within those fibers, smaller even than the threads that Korleithan Ket wrote about. And there it was. The red haze was slowly leaving her, and she used her threadweaver sight to dive deeper. She dove into the fibers inside the fibers that made up the threads that she had originally seen.
Those tiniest fibers of herself pushed Ethiel’s influence away naturally, and her own vibrant colors returned. They were doing it of their own volition, because that’s what they naturally were. Ethiel was an invading presence, and they were ejecting her. She reached within the fibers and helped. She turned her focus on it and accelerated the process.
Mirolah gasped.
It felt...wonderful! She had not realized until that moment just how much of Ethiel had remained within her, but as she chased every little smear of the Red Weaver out of her body, she felt purged.
Her eyes snapped open. Energy coursed through her. The threads of the fabricated walls and floor were starkly evident. Her threadweaver sight was clearer than it had ever been. In the corner of the cell, the ghost of Harleath Markin stood watching her. The red rats continued to gnaw at his pants. The red spiders raced across his shirt, but Mirolah could see something about them that she had missed before. Barely visible tendrils reached from the floor and walls and connected to the vermin. In essence, they were nothing more than an extension of the castle.
“Your beauty, young ’weaver, strikes at my heart. You have potential for the weaving art.”
“I went to see Ethiel and she...showed me something,” Mirolah said.
“Oho! You have gone where I cannot. I am the ink she’d like to blot.”
“That makes two of us. She wants me to join her little crusade, be her ‘friend.’ When she realizes there’s no way I’m going to do that, I think my days are numbered. We have to find a way to fight her.”
“Ah! Would that I could. I know that I should. I have tried and been denied. Her hand, her heavy hand, it is more than I can bear. The Lady Red, she wants me dead, I swear, I swear, I swear...”
“Have you always talked in rhymes, Harleath?”
“It’s a new development, this kink. It comes from having time to think. Words are colors, hard to catch. I do my best to make them match.”
“Never mind. We need to find a way out of here.”
“What will you do, to thwart your fate? A key for the door? A key for the gate?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’d rather die than stay here waiting for Ethiel to steal my body again. Why haven’t you left?”
“I was too slow when she came. A slow ghost with a slower brain. And when she came, it was too late. To be trapped here became my fate.” He looked around in worry. “Now the best I do is flee. A spell keeps her from finding me. See, I have tricks and secret lore, but every day she guesses more.” He looked down at his clothes. “But soon I’ll burn under her gaze, and that will end my ghostly ways.”
“Show me how you do it. How you hide. Let me learn.”
“Your best course, you know, is pleasing her. She’s a pot that you’d best not stir. If you begin to stoke your power, you’ll be dead within the hour.”
She pressed her lips into a firm line. “You’re scared. Fine. If you’ve given up, I can’t stop you. But show me what you know first.”
He turned and stared disconsolately at the wall.
“Harleath,” she said to him. He didn’t respond.
She focused on the ghost’s form and reached inside. His threads were a light gray, thin, almost translucent, and spaced much farther apart than the threads of something alive. His worn and gnawed clothes were comprised of this same kind of thread, though thickened and toughened until they were a dark gray. His clothing was his protection spell, something that thwarted the spiders and the rats from reaching him, but it was dwindling even as she studied it. The spiders and rats were hunting spells, swelling with the vigor to find, find, find!
Mirolah guessed that once the vermin chewed through the “clothing” to Harleath’s “flesh,” it meant Harleath’s spell had failed, and Ethiel would know where he was. Then he’d have to fight her face-to-face.
Just as she had chased Ethiel’s retreating presence out of her own body, so Mirolah focused on chasing it out of the threads that connected the wall to the rats and spiders. This was far more difficult. With her own body, Ethiel had wanted to leave, and her body had wanted to eject her, so it was easy to finish the process. But Ethiel’s dogged intent did not w
ant to leave this spell. It was eager and powerful.
Sweat beaded on Mirolah’s forehead as she forced her own colors into the threads of spiders and rats. This gave her more control over them, and she pulled them off Harleath. The threads didn’t want to go. They whipped about like angry snakes, trying to latch onto him again, but she guided them into herself. They latched on, seeking, rushing into her body, looking for Harleath Markin.
Once the spiders and rats were connected to her, it got easier. Here, in her own body, she was stronger. Pushing her intentions into the threads happened faster, and the rats and spiders slowly turned from dusky red to a rainbow of Mirolah’s own colors. They began to listen to her. They began to obey her.
Her body quivered with the effort, and sweat trickled down her forehead, the nape of her neck, down between her shoulder blades.
She suspected that if she destroyed the spell, Ethiel might know it, so she did something else instead. With her own colors, she inserted a new aspect to the standing order to search for Harleath throughout the castle.
Harleath Markin is in the floor, she told the threads, cementing that as a part of their objective. Search only the floor.
And their purpose became hers. They would search through every stone of the floor, over and over again. She pulled the vermin away from herself, one at a time, and sent them into the floor, where they would stay until Ethiel turned her full attention on them again.
“They’re in the floor now. Don’t touch the floor or they’ll find you,” she whispered to Harleath. She fell forward onto her hands and knees, then slumped to lie flat on her stomach, exhausted. She felt as if she’d just poured her strength down an empty well.
Her eyes burned, and she blinked them. Her body was covered in sweat, and her night dress stuck to her. She rolled over onto her back and breathed for a time. When she could finally sit up, she put her back against the wall and looked at the shocked ghost of Harleath Markin.
“Show me what you know,” she breathed. “And I will learn.”
47
Mirolah
Mirolah sat cross-legged on the floor of the cell and worked with a hundred threads simultaneously. Harleath put a hand of approval on her shoulder, and it felt good. It spurred her on. She could feel his touch now. He was a ghost, but he was still comprised of threads just the same. Every single thing was. And every single thread was comprised of smaller threads. And so on. She had gone so deep that her concentration burned. They were everywhere, each one a minute piece of the whole, each with a purpose.
“The GodSpill sings for you like a child trying to impress his mother,” Harleath murmured as he studied her handiwork. She was turning the wall into an intricate bas-relief carving of the history of the world, the story Orem had told her in Rith. She had also learned how to create a “bubble” of protection around her work so that Ethiel wouldn’t know what she was doing.
She could have dissolved the bars now without Ethiel knowing. She could have made a hole and escaped into this construct of a palace, but she was done running. What was the point of running except to tell your enemy you were scared and overmatched? Everything Mirolah wanted was right here in Daylan’s Fountain, and by the gods, she was going to do what she came here to do or she was going to die.
It had been four days now since Ethiel had sent Mirolah to the cell, and during that time, she had learned more about weaving from Harleath than she had in three weeks with Orem.
Neither Ethiel nor Kikirian had visited. They had left a jug of water, but had brought no food. They were hoping to break her spirit. By rights, she should have been starving, weakened to collapse, but she was stronger than she had ever been in her life. Harleath had shown her how a threadweaver could tap into nourishment other than the consumption of food. A threadweaver could pull sustenance from the never-ending banquet that was Daylan’s Fountain.
He had also showed her how to separate her spirit from her body, to fly through walls as though they weren’t there, and he took her to the heart of the Fountain—deftly avoiding Ethiel’s little thread warpings that searched for intruders—to a column of swirling colors flowing upward, trapped behind a cylinder of what looked like cracked glass, but wasn’t glass at all. Glass was fragile; this was—from what Mirolah could deduce—the strongest substance she’d ever encountered. The “glass” that caged the swirling rainbow had been warped and woven so intricately, so masterfully that she couldn’t even see it, no matter how deep she tried to look. Just staring at it made her threadweaver sight go blurry. She decided to call it Daylan’s Glass.
Daylan’s Glass was cracking at last, after centuries of the GodSpill battering against its prison, and Harleath showed her how to pull minute amounts through the tiny cracks and feast upon it. Just a taste was so potent that she swelled like a giant, felt like she could do anything, and she wondered at the unfathomable power that slammed itself futilely against Daylan’s Glass again and again. It was enough power to destroy the world, yet somehow Daylan Morth had harnessed it and sent it back, specifically, to all of the humans in Amarion in a concentrated form.
Harleath had explained to her what he knew about it. She understood what the Fountain did, but still didn’t understand exactly how. Daylan’s Glass, that furious maelstrom inside, was the focus point. It sucked all the GodSpill from the lands and collected it, contained it, then sent it back out to humans in a heady rush. During the Age of Ascendance, humans didn’t have to pull GodSpill from the soaked threads of the tapestry like Mirolah was learning to do; it was delivered straight to their bodies from Daylan’s Fountain. It’s what made them all super-threadweavers. Harleath told her to imagine a series of invisible aqueducts, one for each person in Amarion, that ran the GodSpill to them like water.
Harleath had then explained his idea for destroying the Fountain, for returning GodSpill to the lands, for returning Amarion to what it was before the Age of Ascendance. Harleath knew that Daylan Morth was the strongest threadweaver ever to live. He couldn’t break what Daylan had done by pitting his might against the Fountain. He just wasn’t strong enough.
But the GodSpill was. All that raw GodSpill was mightier than Daylan Morth. It was like a god itself, without the sentience. All Harleath had to do was turn that unfathomable raw GodSpill against its vessel, and that would blow the Fountain apart.
So Harleath created a very simple spell. He’d thought it was genius at the time. It was just a suggestion spell, a warping of the threads so subtle it challenged nothing. It only changed one small aspect. It didn’t urge the GodSpill to destroy the Fountain. In fact, in a way, it bolstered the strength of the Fountain. The spell was a phrase spoken into the GodSpill, repeated over and over, that would spread throughout like a prairie fire, aligning every bit of that potent ocean of creation to one purpose: plug the holes.
If all of those “aqueducts” were suddenly cut off, trapping the GodSpill inside Daylan’s Glass, the pressure would become overwhelming, and the Fountain would explode.
But Harleath had been wrong. So devastatingly wrong. Daylan’s Glass was stronger than the GodSpill, at least strong enough to last three hundred years with the pressure. Instead of exploding, it simply sucked all the GodSpill from Amarion like it had been designed to do and held it, cutting off Amarion like a severed limb. That was the end of the Age of Ascendance. That was the beginning of the Great Dying.
But now, at long last, cracks were forming. Harleath’s plan, three hundred years late, was coming to fruition. Cracks were forming, and from those cracks leaked the GodSpill. That was why GodSpill was seeping back into Amarion, why Harleath was awake, why Stavark could use his flashpowers, and why Mirolah could be a threadweaver.
She and Harleath feasted on those leaks, and from that moment on, pure GodSpill became her diet. All thoughts of food were unimportant. She and Harleath turned her cell into an intensive threadweaver practice room.
On the first day, he had taught her small things. He started with the caution that Ethiel would be able to
detect Mirolah’s weaving if she focused her attention on this cell, so he taught her to feel for the vibration in the threads that hailed the Red Weaver’s presence. He warned that the door had Ethiel’s alarms on it. If Mirolah attempted to alter it with threadweaving, Ethiel would know immediately. But the Red Weaver had neglected to attach alarms to the wall, so Mirolah practiced there at first, changing that damnable dusky red to a color of Mirolah’s choosing, then releasing it to return to Ethiel’s unconscious control.
On the second day, after witnessing her aptitude, Harleath opened up and showed her everything she wanted to know. He said she bypassed details that required months—even years—of study for his long-dead apprentices.
On the third day, Harleath’s rhyming ceased. His instruction became lucid and to-the-point. It was as though her progress built him up, filled the gaping holes torn in him, and she could begin to guess at the man he used to be. He was a gentle, patient teacher with the kind of presence that set a student’s doubts at ease.
Day and night had little meaning within the Fountain, but she could keep track of them in her head. As always, she sensed the moment the sun rose, even if she could not see it. It was as if the heartbeat of the land pulsed in her veins. She refused to sleep, though Harleath warned against that. He said replacing the body’s natural rest and rejuvenation cycle with GodSpill was a handy threadweaver’s trick, but it had downsides. It could only last for a limited time, and the backlash was debilitating. Coming down from a diet of pure GodSpill was ten times as bad as awakening after a night of hard drinking.
But she didn’t stop. She didn’t know how much time she had, and she refused to be lulled into complacency like she had been in Denema’s Valley. Every moment that passed could be the moment she was tested.
Now, four days after she’d met Ethiel in her grand throne room, Mirolah focused so hard it burned. She felt it behind her eyes, in her hands, even in her toes tucked under her knees. Her breathing came labored.
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