“You still deny it,” Ethiel murmured.
Medophae grabbed at his belt, searching for something. He looked down and then up at Ethiel. “Where is it? Where is the gem?”
“She never loved you, Medophae. Not like I loved you.”
He bared his teeth. “I will kill you, Ethiel. I swear it. I will walk you to the Godgate myself.”
Her eyes narrowed. Her smile turned to a frown, and the young woman’s body became hazy. “You already killed me, remember? I have been to the Godgate. I have suffered more for your sake than you can imagine.”
“You never did anything for my sake,” he said. “You spent your life stoking your own freakish desires.”
“Don’t banter, Ethiel,” Kikirian interrupted. “Put him back in his cage.” The darklings had paused their attack on Mirolah at some silent command from Ethiel.
She didn’t even seem to hear Kikirian. Her hazy form clenched its fists and she hovered nearer Medophae. “Freakish? I am freakish? What do you call a man who makes love to a reptile? Over and over and over again. Dragons are the enemies of humankind, but you lay with her every night for centuries. You are a crime against your own people. I am the one for you, not her! I am the most powerful woman of your own people. Human people. And you slid your sword through my chest!”
“I promise you this,” Medophae said. “If you release Bands, I will let you go your way. I will forget your many crimes. I will forget the children of Gorros. I will forget that you slew your own father. I will forget the murders in Calsinac. I will put it all behind me. Release her, and we will part with a clean slate.”
It seemed as though the two of them had picked up an argument from centuries ago. Mirolah didn’t understand everything, but watched them, tense and waiting. She did her best to recover her strength and her wits as she listened.
“A clean slate?” Her hazy form began to bubble, bulging into an uncontrolled cloud on one leg and one arm. Her face remained, however, and she sneered. “I spit on your clean slate. You will never have Bands. Traitors must suffer, and that’s what you both are, traitors to your own kind. Have you ever wondered how I was able to catch a god in that gem, as well as your beloved dragon plaything? Avakketh can tell you. He gave me the gem. He put the spell on my lips. There is no human in the world, not even you, who can break it. There is only the riddle, and you will never solve it!”
Medophae leapt at her. In a blink, she transformed into the red cloud, and slammed him back with a billowing hand. He crashed down and skidded across the floor.
The darklings hissed and charged him. Kikirian roared and lunged.
“Grab his head,” Ethiel said to Kikirian. “I will send him back to where he belongs. Then she turned air into steel spears, expertly twisting the threads and launching them at Medophae. There were a hundred of them. Mirolah marveled at the amount of power it took to do that. GodSpill streamed out of Ethiel, a limitless amount. Mirolah quickly yanked threads, turning each of the spears into air again. Ethiel screamed and whirled on her. With a gesture, she flung a hundred spears at Mirolah.
She changed them to air again, but they had almost hit her. She gasped, pulled on her connection to the Fountain and revitalized herself.
Medophae disappeared underneath the pile of darklings, but three of them raised their heads, turned, and bounded toward Mirolah.
Mirolah threw up a quick shield, then felt Ethiel invading the threads of her body again, even as she sent another volley of air spears.
This wasn’t going to work. The fight between them was in Ethiel’s favor because she had no physical body to hurt and Mirolah did. If Mirolah succeeded in a strike, she could only push Ethiel back, make her hesitate. But all Ethiel needed to kill Mirolah was to damage her body more than Mirolah could quickly repair. It could come down to one bite from a darkling. Mirolah was only as strong as her mortal flesh allowed her to be, while Ethiel was as strong as the indestructible Fountain that fed—
Yes. That was it. The Fountain.
Mirolah turned the air solid between her and the darklings and shoved at them, sent them sprawling back. She halted the next volley of spears and sent them flying back at Ethiel. While Ethiel pulled and changed those threads, Mirolah had a brief second to begin her plan. She enclosed herself in a sphere of blue stone. That would stop the darklings for a long time, but it would only hold Ethiel at bay for seconds.
Mirolah sent a fragment of her focus through the floor, down to the where Harleath had first shown her Daylan’s Glass, then deeper, where the blue-eyed stranger had showed her the heart of the Fountain, where the colors swirled and raged against the bulbous prison.
Ethiel’s red threads covered the largest cracks, thick and twisting like the roots of a great tree. Mirolah tore Ethiel’s connections to the Fountain away, unraveled every twisted root, then shot back to the throne room and invaded Ethiel’s cloud-like form.
The result was astonishing.
Ethiel’s defenses crumbled. Mirolah soaked into Ethiel’s tiniest threads. She changed them, grabbed control of them, pulled them apart.
Ethiel’s shriek was cut off as the cloud burst apart, spinning away in little crimson spirals that vanished. All save one tiny puff. It fled.
Mirolah pursued.
53
Zilok Morth
Zilok Morth looked over the main room of the small house, tucked away from prying eyes in the city of Denema’s Valley. His master spell would be cast here, in this plain place, where ordinary mortals had once rested, eaten, and toiled away their meaningless lives. It was fitting. In this place, Zilok would strip Medophae of his godly airs at last, reducing the Wildmane to a common mortal worm.
It was also appropriate that the Wildmane little flock had roosted here for a time, and that he had never sensed Zilok waiting nearby. But then, the Wildmane had always been blind to what was most important.
Zilok glanced at Vaerdaro, secured to the iron bed. The Sunrider had not spoken for a while, which was surprising. Even though Vaerdaro never had anything interesting to say, he persisted in his ceaseless braying—
“When do we start?” Vaerdaro broke the silence, as if he had known Zilok’s thoughts. “If you’re going to wander around the room for an hour, I’ll do something else.”
Zilok floated to Vaerdaro, though Zilok’s apparition appeared to walk the distance. Leaning close, he whispered, “If it is within your power to hold your tongue, Sunrider, I suggest you do. This weaving is complex, and the threads of your very life will be tied to its workings: your blood, your skin, your bones. If I perform it incorrectly—if anything distracts me—it will pull you apart.”
Vaerdaro made a defiant face, but Zilok could see the fear. Vaerdaro was a selfish, bullying brute, and his backward culture despised threadweaving above all else. He was not Zilok’s ideal choice to become the next puppet pulled over the mighty hand of Oedandus, but he was the best of limited options.
“If you can but hold yourself still, if you can but stay silent, I will harvest a god from the undeserving Wildmane and bring it to live in your veins. You will become the legendary Golden King.” Zilok asked.
“All right,” Vaerdaro said through clenched teeth.
“We are agreed. Not a word.”
“Get on with it, Spirit.”
“Excellent.”
Zilok turned toward the rest of the room’s implements. Strictly speaking, none of them were necessary for threadweaving. But then, “necessary” was subjective for one who had no need to eat, sleep, or shelter himself from the elements.
Using spell components was something Zilok had done since his first moments of threadweaving. Such physical items helped frame his mind. Most threadweavers had affectations that guided their weaving. Some spoke incantations that they had memorized. Some drew symbols to keep their minds from wandering. Some made gestures in the air. The relationship to the GodSpill and the threads of the tapestry was unique for each threadweaver. Using physical items, imbued with significance, guided Zil
ok’s imagination, binding him to the essence of each step.
He floated to the circular table. It was three feet tall, held up by one hourglass-shaped leg made of roughhewn stone. The tabletop was glassy smooth, bearing a three-inch braid of golden hair. To the right of the hair lay Vaerdaro’s dagger, its hilt wrapped in strips of leather, the sharpened steel glinting dully in the lamplight.
To the right of the dagger was a fish bowl with a lockmouth in it. The fish’s circle mouth was attached to the glass, sucking in vain, dreaming of blood. The only things that obscured the black hole of its mouth were the upper and lower rows of teeth, which flexed up and down with its rhythmic sucking. The lockmouth’s last meal had been a bit of the Wildmane’s hair. Already, its threads had changed, taking on a slight golden sheen. The galling augmentation of Oedandus, which had shielded the Wildmane from harm for centuries, would be used to finally bring him to his knees.
Zilok turned his attention to the next article on his table. The quicksilvers called it a quirak klamar, which translated to “rockfire toad.” The stumpy creature was a foot high and a foot wide. Its rock body hunched down, the knotted shoulders close together, and the head turned upward. Rockfire toads didn’t move much, but the rocklurs hadn’t bred them to move. They were the stone men’s tools to heat the colder caverns in which they lived. Cold slowed the rock men, and the rockfire toads had been designed to breathe fire on cold walls until the chambers warmed to a temperature that enabled the rock men to move more quickly. Zilok had ranged to the fringes of Amarion, deep into the Spine Mountains, to find the creature.
The last item on the black glass table was a thin, circular flap of human skin, mortal skin. The last skin the Wildmane would ever wear.
Zilok remembered the first moments of his friendship with Medophae, before he became the Wildmane, before they had destroyed a god together. Zilok, the son of a count, had been raised to rule, to make decisions about the lives of others. That was simply the order of the world. But Medophae saw every person as equal, an individual no greater or lower than any other. His passion infected Zilok. In those first days, Medophae had demonstrated how narrow Zilok’s perspective had been, and most importantly, that one could be trapped by his own perspective without knowing it. Medophae’s passion burned through those invisible cages, and for the first time, Zilok realized that he need not follow any particular path, that he could be anything he wanted—peasant or king or threadweaver.
Zilok had been a self-involved young man, stubborn. That he had fallen in love with Medophae’s brash confidence was a shock to his parents. When Zilok left home to follow Medophae on his quest, it stunned even Zilok. Back then, he would have followed Medophae anywhere.
But then they had succeeded in the impossible. They slew Dervon the Diseased. They soared to heights that no mortal had ever dared dream. Zilok had never been happier. Medophae had changed his life, and together, they had changed the world. He thought they would be friends forever. He thought the bards would sing of them for a thousand years.
But no. Medophae had been written into legend, as the Wildmane. And where Zilok should have been equally lauded, his contributions had populated nothing more than a sad little footnote. Wildmane rose, casting a tall shadow over Zilok, and Medophae vanished forever.
It was a base betrayal of their friendship, and not the last. The Wildmane betrayed Zilok over and over, and when Zilok refused to trust him any longer, the Wildmane set out to destroy him permanently.
But now, at long last, the god who should never have been would become mortal again. The account between them would finally be settled.
Next to the worktable stood Zilok’s scrying pool, constructed in rough stone like the table. When he looked into the water, he could see whatever he wished, no matter the distance and without expending any of his own energy. This had been the most difficult thing to recreate since he had awoken. Scrying pools were complicated, an extension of his own threadweaving. The pool’s threads had been infused with, and could store, incredible amounts of GodSpill. It had taken him days to make it. But now that it had been willed into existence, it could fold the threads of the lands so that distance could not impede Zilok’s vision. He could see whatever he wanted to see, no matter how far away it was.
“Everything is in place, Sef,” he said.
“Yes, my master.” Sef waited patiently at the head of the pallet where Vaerdaro lay.
“At last,” he said to himself, and he sank into meditation. The power required to dislodge a god must come straight from the ultimate source of GodSpill: the Godgate itself. And Zilok must go there to get it.
Lesser threadweavers scrabbled about the lands, pulling GodSpill from the threads of the living and the dead. Zilok himself had done that in the early days. But for a spell of this magnitude—to actually wield the power of a god, however briefly—one couldn’t simply drain the droplets left on the mortal plane. One must drink from the waterfall. One must dare oblivion.
When a person died, the Godgate sucked their soul upward into a swirling maw that no mortal could see, that no mortal could resist, and from which none ever returned. It was said that beyond the Godgate was a golden land where the original seven gods had met and decided to create the world, where they had woven the tapestry that comprised every single thing. It was where the GodSpill—the force for all creation, change and destruction—had been birthed.
But when Zilok’s mortal body had been slain by the Wildmane, he refused the excruciating summons of the Godgate. He had used his knowledge of the GodSpill and his will to live to lash his soul to an anchor in this mortal plane.
But the Godgate never stopped pulling. Its summons was like a hundred flaming fish hooks stuck through his soul, constantly pulling upward. Zilok had mastered the pain, had learned to “live” with it, fending off the Godgate’s promise of sweet respite if he simply capitulated.
But now, he let the hooks tug him upward, let his consciousness rise through the roof of the small house and into the sky.
It took only moments for the Godgate to form in front of him. Only the dead—or very powerful threadweavers—could see it. The sky twisted into a funnel of colors, like festive ribbons swirling down into a maw at the center. The hooks in his soul yanked tight, and agony flared through him. Suddenly the ribbons were connected to the hooks. These were the tongues that wanted to pull him into the belly of the Godgate, but he resisted, halting his advance and hovering there.
He saw other souls, the newly dead, caught in the ribbons. They made no sound, just swirled around, around, and disappeared into the black hole. He called out to one of the souls, but it didn’t answer, just stared forward in an unnatural, wide-eyed sleep.
Zilok looked down to discover that he had started moving slowly toward the Godgate again. He had not commanded himself to start moving. With a jolt of panic, he realized he had let his thoughts wander and had lost a modicum of control.
He grappled with his own fleeting thoughts, dredging up particulars of his impending weaving, anything to anchor him to his purpose, his life, but the thoughts slipped away like eels.
He had to think clearly. Why return to the land of mortals? Think! Your desires are many...
But his mind had gone empty, and he realized with horror that he was unraveling. Perhaps that was what the sightless, floating souls felt, this stripping of their selves, of their identity.
The gate loomed. He was on the edge of it. Beyond was the place only gods had walked, and his soul began to melt through the end of the funnel. Streams of bright blue flowed into the ribbons as Zilok’s gleaming eyes stretched, leaking away, blending in and swirling in a spiral.
He couldn’t remember anything. It was time to die, to finally rest. Certainly no threadweaver had ever come this close to the Godgate and returned. Not even the Wildmane had come this close to the Godgate...
The Wildmane...
He saw Medophae’s face surrounded by the golden fire of Oedandus, the fire of limitless power, of towering
arrogance, the fire that had taken his friend away and replaced him with a demigod. If he passed beyond the Gate, then the Wildmane won. The Wildmane would live while he would vanish.
He would vanish.
Zilok Morth would vanish. That was his name...
A memory came to him then, the last memory of his mortal life, more than a millennium ago. Medophae, wreathed in golden flame, snarled at him. Zilok, only fifty years old, injured and weakened, pulled desperately at the threads comprising the Wildmane, but he couldn’t pierce Oedandus’s protection. The Wildmane stabbed the godsword into Zilok. Even with all of their previous conflicts, Zilok had never thought the Wildmane would really kill him. Not in the end. No matter how estranged they became, you just didn’t kill your best childhood friend. You just didn’t.
But Oedandus’s rage twisted in Zilok’s guts, cutting through the threads of his spell, through the threads of his life.
And then the worst part. As Zilok’s spirit separated from his body, the Wildmane turned to Bands and told her he was sorry, so sorry he had to kill Zilok. So sorry that it had to come to this...
Zilok opened his flaring eyes to find that he had stopped at the rim of the Godgate. It yawned, implacably dark and larger than the night sky, ready to swallow him. Zilok could barely see anything, even the multicolored ribbons swirling into the edges of the maw. All he saw was the blackness. It hauled on the burning hooks, but Zilok refused to be moved. The limitless power of the Godgate surrounded him, and he knew his purpose again, as clear as the black oblivion before him. He stole from that fathomless place, as much GodSpill as he could contain. He gorged himself.
Now. I am ready.
He turned and floated away from the swirling ribbons of colored light, using the overwhelming power he now possessed to fight those terrible hooks. The farther he moved away from the Godgate, the weaker its hooks became. He could see the sky again now, its stars sharp and bright. He could see the Spine Mountains in the distance. He looked down at the Inland Ocean, stretching farther and farther toward the horizon as he descended. Then he saw Denema’s Valley, its mossy blanket silver in the moonlight. He floated nearer, down to the roof of the small house, then through and into the room with the table, the scrying pool, and the iron bed with Vaerdaro. Sef, Zilok’s anchor to this mortal plane, stood obediently waiting.
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