“A vyrkiz isn’t curious. You never see one unless you are pack or prey.” Elekkena spoke a short rhyme:
If vyrkiz hunts
And bond is true
The vyrkiz never hunts for you
If vyrkiz comes
With no bond laid
From vyrkiz teeth your grave is made
“A quicksilver nursery rhyme?” Mirolah asked, wrinkling her brow at the gruesome poem.
Elekkena gave a polite smile. “No. It is a human rhyme. A caution on the nature of the vyrkiz, to remind the unwary that, for these beasts, it is one or the other.”
“Sniff the GodSpill,” the dog whined. “Bad GodSpill. Dark GodSpill.” The skinny dog shivered as though cold. He raised his head and lowered it but always kept his gaze on Mirolah.
“Come in,” Mirolah beckoned the skin dog. “You are safe here.”
The skin dog whined and shifted on his thin legs but did not enter the library. He looked nervously around, then back at Mirolah, lowered his head and whined again.
It took Mirolah a second to understand. The library was full of GodSpill. Perhaps it “smelled” too strong to him. She crossed the room and touched the skin dog gently on his flat head. It was warm and hard, skin over muscle and bone.
He snapped his long jaws three times, and she jumped, startled. He cringed, dropping to press his chest against the ground.
“This one greets,” he whined. “This one greets. No harm! No bite!”
“That’s how you say hello?” Mirolah asked.
“Yes,” he yipped quietly, glancing up from where he groveled on the ground. “Snap teeth. This one greets.”
“Okay.”
Slowly, the skin dog rose again. His tail came up and wagged. He pressed his bony head against her leg. She felt his bramble of teeth through her skirt and breeches.
“Won’t do again,” the skin dog said. “Not scare you.”
“No, I like it. I’ll know next time,” she said. She looked down at the dog and clacked her own teeth together.
The skin dog gave a bark, and his bony tail wagged hard.
Mirolah turned to see Elekkena watching her curiously. “You’re talking to him?” she asked.
“It’s... Well, yes.”
Elekkena bowed her head in reverence. “Maehka vik Kalik.”
“Stop it,” Mirolah said. “We had a deal.”
“Yes, Mirolah,” Elekkena said, but the way she said it had the same reverence as the quicksilver title. And she bowed her head.
“And no bowing,” Mirolah said. “Don’t do that.”
“Have you named him?” Elekkena asked.
“I...no. We’re not bonded. I just—”
“You should name him.”
“Look, he probably already has a name.” Mirolah looked back at the skin dog. “Do you have a name?”
“I sniff the GodSpill,” he yipped.
“But do you have a name?”
“Sniff the GodSpill,” he whined. His tail stopped wagging.
“No,” Mirolah said. “An actual name.”
The skin dog cringed. “Sniff the GodSpill,” he whimpered.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” she said. It was like talking to a four-year-old child with giant teeth. “You sniff the GodSpill. Look, I’m just going to call you Sniff. You can choose your own name when you want to. I mean, if you want to.”
The skin dog’s tail came up and wagged again. “Sniff the GodSpill,” he assured her. He raised his head and sniffed the air. “You come. Human house,” Sniff barked. “Bad GodSpill.”
Excitement thrilled through her belly. Bad GodSpill. That could mean darklings. It could mean Orem.
“Yes,” she said. She glanced over her shoulder at Elekkena. “Let’s get the boys first.”
Mirolah and Elekkena stopped by the city circle where the darkling corpses still littered the street. The bodies were stiff where they had fallen, dried but not decaying, as though nature wouldn’t touch them. Medophae and Stavark looked up as they arrived. Sniff barked, and Stavark raised his silver eyebrows.
“Sniff found something,” Mirolah said.
“Who?” Medophae glanced over at the huge skin dog. “Oh. You named him.” He raised an eyebrow.
“Shut up.”
He gave an insufferably smug smile and held his hands up in a pacifying gesture. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Let’s go,” Mirolah said. Sniff started up the street, and they all jogged after him.
They soon arrived at a large, low building. Sniff stopped in front of the closed door and barked.
“He says he has found bad GodSpill inside,” Mirolah translated. And now she could see it. From a distance, it would have seemed like just another house, but now that she stood close, she could see the threads inside the house. It was like they had been yanked open, twisted around, then left that way, rent unnaturally wide.
Elekkena spoke quietly to Stavark in the tongue of the quicksilvers.
“This is a bad place,” Stavark said, and he moved toward the door. Sniff whined, as if in agreement.
“Wait,” Medophae said. “I’ll go first.”
26
Medophae
“Are you sure?” Mirolah asked. “If there’s a spell upon this place—”
“Then I’m the one best equipped to survive. Stay back until I cross the threshold.”
Medophae put his hand on the door, expecting any moment for something to trigger, a blast of flame, an attack on his mind.
He opened it and entered, peering around. It was exactly what he expected. He’d seen lairs like this before. This was a house for dead things. Decay rode the air.
Charred ropes dangled like dead snakes from a burnt bed. A wide, oak table carried disparate objects. Spell components. A dagger lay next to a bunch of herbs tied together with twine. A pot of dirt hunkered in the right-hand corner of the table. There were fleshy lumps on the table that he could not make out.
He moved closer, following the smell of decay. The rotting lumps had once been animals. Some kind of fish and...was that a rockfire toad? Dried blood on the dagger told the story, and Medophae felt a twist in his guts. Zilok had been here.
He heard Mirolah’s footstep on the threshold.
“Be careful,” he said. “This was where Zilok worked his spell on me.”
Stavark and Elekkena slipped in behind her.
“I’ve seen his workshops before. This is what they look like.”
“He was here? In Denema’s Valley?” Mirolah asked. “While we were here?”
“That is exactly the kind of thing Zilok does. He finds himself particularly clever when he’s hiding in plain sight.”
She looked at the table, her brow wrinkled and her mouth open. “He killed these animals?” She touched the rotting, half-charred rockfire toad. “Why would he do that?”
“Zilok is the kind of threadweaver who uses components to guide his thoughts. To steady his mind. To keep the picture of what he wants firmly focused. These were his components.”
“Living things? Why not use objects?”
“Lives are objects to Zilok. It’s all the same to him. He spent a long time learning to view the world differently. What appalls you comforts him.”
“That’s disgusting,” she whispered.
“He’s not really a person anymore.”
“Look,” Elekkena said. She had gone to the far side of the room, a shadowed little corner with a steel ring bolted into the floor. Empty manacles lay in a pile. Elekkena stepped aside, and they looked at a small cache of two pouches and a wide, thick book bag.
“Orem!” Mirolah raced around the table and dropped to her knees next to the book bag.
She flipped open the leather flap and pulled out a book. “It’s 52 Ways to Threadweave by Beverid Lorz,” she said. “He was here.” She closed her eyes, and Medophae recognized that type of trance. She was searching the threads, looking for Orem. Or Orem’s body.
“The only corpses in th
is room are the ones on the table,” she said a moment later, opening her eyes. “But he was here. He was alive. For at least a little while.”
Medophae put two and two together. “Zilok drove away the darklings. For some reason, he decided to save Orem.”
“Why?” Mirolah asked.
“To use him,” Medophae said. “Zilok always has a purpose.”
“But why would Zilok need...” She stopped in mid-sentence.
“What is it?” Medophae asked.
“By the gods...” she murmured.
“Mirolah—”
“Anchor,” she said.
A cold chill ran up Medophae’s spine. “Sef was Zilok’s anchor,” he murmured.
“And Vaerdaro killed him,” she said.
“Oh gods...” Medophae said.
“Zilok Morth isn’t gone,” she spoke his dread. “He’s not dead. Orem is Zilok’s new anchor.”
27
Zilok Morth
Zilok Morth coalesced in the Coreworld, obsidian walls glistening with moisture that looked like diamonds. Everything sparkled when he was this full of GodSpill. It roiled within him, stolen from the Godgate only moments before. He needed it. If his calculations were correct, this overwhelming amount of GodSpill would deliver victory today.
Though there was no obvious source of light, he could see as though it was dusk, as though some illumination oozed from the black walls themselves. The floor, ceiling, and walls were smooth and flat. There were miles of hallways and rooms, twisting and turning for no apparent reason, all empty. Or so it seemed.
At first glance, one might wonder who made this place, and why? Had it been abandoned? Why was it empty?
But it wasn’t empty. There were cracks all over this flat floor, in these walls, in the smooth ceiling. These cracks, invisible to Zilok, represented the life and destiny of every mortal. He reached out with his threadweaver sight and tried to see them, but he couldn’t. He never could.
The goddess Natra, maker of the world, had created this place, and she had set protections around it such that none could tamper with it. Anyone who might manage to find this place would be summarily killed. Immortal, obsidian guardians came out of the walls for any disturbance. Even the slightest touch on the invisible waters within those invisible cracks would bring the guardians, and they were immune to threadweaving.
The entire labyrinth was made of some unearthly obsidian, and it did not have threads. Zilok couldn’t manipulate it no matter what he did. To even arrive in this place was a harrowing journey, like squeezing himself through the eye of a needle.
The Coreworld intrigued him…and frightened him. His curiosity harried him to understand it, but he was nearly helpless here. There was no GodSpill from which to draw, which meant he’d had to bring a reserve with him, and every moment he stayed, his reserves slowly bled away, and he became weaker. If he stayed too long, he simply wouldn’t have the ability to push his way out again, and that would be the end of him.
But the Coreworld was important somehow, integral to the great tapestry Natra had woven. Even if he didn’t understand how it worked, he knew that much. He could feel the magnitude of power all around him. Here, if you were one of the few who could see the invisible cracks—the flows of destiny—you could predict the future.
So far as Zilok knew, only unicorns could see the cracks and the flows of destiny within.
As a spirit, Zilok Morth could travel the threads to wherever he wanted. The threads of the world, everything the gods had created—except this place—were imbued with GodSpill. When Zilok had first lashed himself to an anchor, denying death, he had discovered his ability to travel great distances at will. He could sink into the very GodSpill that saturated the threads, and travel along them like oil down a string.
He had experimented. He had traveled to all the places that would be dangerous to a mortal man. He went to the top of the Spine Mountains, to the center of the Sunrider culture. He braved the perils of the dragonlands, Irgakth. He even went across the sea to Dandere, the island where his once best friend and now immortal enemy, Medophae, had been born.
And he had stumbled across the Coreworld, a place so secret that almost no one knew it existed. Even, he suspected, the other gods.
He had found unicorns here the first time he’d come here. At first, he had thought they were the guardians, but he soon came to learn that they were interlopers like him. They hid from the real guardians, viewing the cracks of destiny, playing with the future, influencing events with their knowledge.
Of course, Zilok had not discovered this information until after he had captured one of them. While the obsidian guardians were immune to threadweaving, the unicorns were not. So he had taken one, tortured it, and learned from it.
The unicorn’s name had been Lynvarion, and under the right pressure, he had revealed everything: how the Coreworld came to be, that it was Natra who created it, that it bore deep secrets and power and finally, unforgivably, that these unicorns had been aiding the Wildmane in his arrogant endeavors. These unicorns had been instrumental in ensuring the Wildmane prevailed, over and over again. So many times Zilok had thought that the Wildmane had some unseen, unfair advantage, and finally he knew it was true.
Zilok returned to the Coreworld and killed every unicorn.
Or so he had thought.
The first thing he’d done when he had returned to sentience after Daylan’s Fountain began leaking was to plan to destroy the Wildmane. The second thing he did was return to the Coreworld to see if, by some unlikely chance, there were any unicorns remaining that might thwart him by reading the future and moving events. Sure enough, he had found one, and he’d made sure the obsidian guardians destroyed her. There would be no more stacking the deck in favor of the Wildmane.
But then something new had arisen. That damned threadweaver from Rith had interfered and changed the balance of things just enough that Zilok had once again failed. Zilok intended to pull that thorn before he and Medophae faced one another. The Threadweaver of Rith was talented, but Zilok had dealt with talented threadweavers before.
He flowed through the granite hallways, carefully watching. Touching the invisible waters of destiny inside the invisible cracks brought the guardians like falling anvils, so he stayed well away from the walls, ceilings, and floors.
Lynvarion the unicorn had rambled about many things during his torture. He’d been hard to break. It had taken Zilok two weeks and, toward the end, creative techniques before the unicorn began to spill his knowledge. But once he snapped, he babbled as if in a trance.
Zilok had learned about the guardians, the cracks and the water of destiny within them. He’d learned that the unicorns had been created by Saraphazia’s daughter, Vaisha the Changer, and Vaisha had gifted the unicorns with her ability to see possibilities, including possible futures.
And he’d learned about Natra’s treasure room. Within it were implements that Natra had used to create the world, and she left them behind when she had departed. Lynvarion had described a scythe, three books, a tall staff, two spheres, a short wooden stick, and a crown made of green vines grasping upright crystals.
The last was Natra’s Crown, imbued with the power to destroy a god, mentioned only in the oldest recorded human text, a journal written by a woman named Shev Lek. Shev Lek recorded a conversation with the goddess Natra, back when the great goddess would sometimes take walks with certain mortals of the different sentient races. Shev Lek described a crown that Natra wore, and Natra had said the crown was the reason none of the other gods would challenge her. The crown could redirect any god’s power, enabling the wearer to utilize that power in any way she saw fit, to even redirect it at the god from whence it had come.
Natra’s Crown was a god-killer. It was Natra’s insurance that none of her unruly children or siblings ever turned on her. And she had left it here in the Coreworld.
Zilok slowed as he neared the great archway. It was easily fifteen feet tall, a pointed arch with borde
ring black stones as wide as a human was tall, each lighter than the dark obsidian of the wall, each inscribed with a curse in white, flickering sigils.
Zilok had known about Natra’s treasure room since he had first come to the Coreworld a millennium ago, but he had never entered. The goddess who had birthed all life had created those curses.
But Zilok had no choice. He had tried and failed too many times to cling to caution now. He needed the power of a god on his side. He couldn’t continue to be this errant spirit, tied to the world only by his rage at the injustice that a person like Medophae could have the power of a god when he, Zilok, did not.
Beyond the threshold of the treasure room were artifacts that would elevate him to Medophae’s level. Then, at long last, they would have their final battle.
The tall archway was beaded with moisture. The words weren’t written in any language of humankind, but Zilok had studied the writing of the gods, and he could read it. The words were warnings from Natra to her fellow deities:
My love, my dedicated bind, take these up and all unwinds.
Brother, leave these peaks untouched, or face the fear you fear so much.
Zetu, father, keep your place, it’s not with these to join the race.
Dervon if, for greed’s sweet sake, you wield my tools, your soul will break.
Saraphazia, endless toil, touch these and your waters boil.
Thalius, my jaunty son, dance with these, your dancing’s done.
Those who seek, please walk away, take your pleasure in the day.
I’ve made it, and it’s free for you. A joyous life with simple truths.
But touch these items, flesh will rot. In decaying throes you’re caught.
These, my children, let them be. Or lose all this that makes you free.
If these warnings you can’t heed, if wisdom is subsumed by need,
Then breach the threshold, do not wait, and face the horror of your fate.
The GodSpill Page 19
