Citadel of the Sky (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 1)

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  She didn’t want to think about Twist. She turned up the Logos-vision and examined the sword instead. That it was a sky fiend, she had no doubt. But it was different from the one she’d seen the day before. This one didn’t have an eidolon growing out of it, true, but it also puckered the Logos around it. There was something….

  “I don’t know if this is normal,” she said dubiously. “It’s very… dense, and there are lines…. It’s connected, somehow. To the world. And to you, Tiana.” She muttered a shaping of the Logos under her breath and smoothed out one of the lines. The Logos itself resisted at first, then once she’d convinced it to comply, the sky fiend did something to reestablish the line. She de-anchored another line, and the same thing happened.

  “Very odd,” she said, at last. “No, I can’t banish it. I think it would take a number of initiates working together to banish it. And even then, it could be… unpredictable. But I don’t know very much, after all. Um, Tiana, can you put it on the ground? I discovered something yesterday that makes me think we should be careful using our magic for a while.”

  Tiana stared at her like she’d grown another head. “I’m not carrying that thing in my hand,” she said flatly. “It’s clingy and it bites.”

  Kiar tried to sound like a Regent. “Fine, fine. But just put it on the rug for now?”

  “Fine,” Tiana snapped, and the emanation holding the sword aloft vanished. It thudded to the rug.

  Kiar resisted rolling her eyes. Tiana was still such a child sometimes. She supposed it was the result of having an older sister.

  Tiana snapped, “I am not a child!” Kiar jumped and stared at her.

  Lisette coughed delicately and said, “The sword has been talking to Tiana.”

  It was Tiana’s turn to stare at Lisette. “How did you know?”

  Lisette gave a little smile. “I’m a Regent.”

  “What has it been saying?” asked Kiar. She reassessed the shape on her carpet. It had sounded like a sword when it fell, but there it was, distinctly something other than Logos.

  Tiana blushed. “Nothing. Other than the obvious. Criticizing my age, mocking me.”

  Kiar turned pink herself.

  Cathay cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. “It talked to me as well. It’s nasty. Vicious. Cruel.” He winced and shook his head.

  Tiana said, “Don’t talk to him! Are you still talking to him? Stop it! Kiar, what should I do with it? If it requires lots of wizards, maybe I should send it to the Citadel?”

  Cathay’s breath hissed through his teeth. “Unless you take it there yourself, that won’t work.”

  Tiana shrieked and stomped her foot, which Kiar thought was rather extreme. The sword must have said something as well. Carefully, she asked, “What does it want? Most fiends are in a more monstrous form.”

  Tiana hesitated. “Death. Shut up! Vengeance. It wants me to take it and go kill things.”

  Kiar said, “You seem to be resisting it so far. It hasn’t hurt you yet?” She studied those lines connecting the blade to Tiana again.

  “Well—no. Not—that was you? You stupid piece of scrap. I had a headache yesterday, but that’s gone now.”

  Lisette had her hands to her mouth, and Kiar realized she was hiding a smile. If Lisette wasn’t worried, that made Kiar feel better about what she was going to say next. “The Blood is supposed to protect Ceria from fiends, so I think you’re the best qualified to take care of it. Protect the world from it. At least for now?”

  Tiana said, “Don’t say that! You don’t want me to use the emanations! How am I better qualified than anybody else?”

  “The connection lines… and it hasn’t hurt you. You said so yourself!” The Logos shivered, seemingly in response to her words, and she fervently hoped she was right.

  Tiana nudged the sword with her slippered toe and then yanked her foot back as if burned. The shivering of the Logos became more pronounced, an almost audible buzz. Kiar felt as sleepy as she had late last night. But she wasn’t thinking about Twist. Was she?

  She suddenly remembered the lesson, rather than the teacher. How can we teach the Logos to recognize the signature eidolons of your family? And How might the Logos speak back to an initiate? They’d constructed more protections for the Regents.

  “An attack!” Everyone stared at her. “One of the unfamiliar eidolons—an attack! Somebody!” She shook her head, her drowsiness gone, and ran out of the room, following the tremors in the Logos.

  She ran down the hall, past closed suite doors, and around the corner, her feet thudding against the carpet. Cathay, far more athletic, caught up with her and jogged easily beside her, one of his eidolons beside him. “Where?”

  The Logos was rippling so much she was astonished that it wasn’t making everybody dizzy. Where was Twist? Then Yevonne ran straight into her as they both tried to round the same corner in opposite directions. Beyond, there were shouts and animal growls. Cathay barely paused before speeding past, but Kiar caught the younger girl in her arms. “Is it you? Are those your guards?”

  Yevonne’s face was hard and determined, but as Tiana and Lisette tumbled into Kiar’s back, she blinked and stopped struggling. “Y-yes. I was in the garderobe. I ran. My guards….” She looked over her shoulder.

  Kiar peeked around the corner in time to see Cathay wading into a tangle of eidolons and two wounded guards. A single shape detached itself from the swarm and lunged down the hall, towards them. Kiar scooped Yevonne up and whirled out of the way. The eidolon, squat and the color of glass, bounded around the corner, into Tiana’s outstretched hand. The princess’s expression was savage as she slashed at the creature with fingernails like knives.

  Kiar backed up, letting Yevonne out of her arms. She watched intently as the Logos quavered around each of the four enemy eidolons, breathing out as two of the three fighting Cathay and the guards dissolved. A voice breathed in her ear, “I’m pleased to see it worked.”

  She jerked and then ducked her head. “Twist!” she said, but she didn’t look at him. Intently, she continued watching the trembling. Tiana’s victim popped like a soap bubble, and she saw the ripples of the final eidolon fade away, until only the shadows of Tiana’s emanation and the friendly eidolons marred the Logos.

  Only then did Kiar look over her shoulder at Twist, who was lounging against the wall, studying her instead of the scene of the attack. “I was out of the Palace,” he said. “Looking at some of these plague victims. Good thing you were here! Though, I’d like to change places tomorrow.”

  She tried not to feel too relieved that his anger had passed as he went on. “I can see the Logos monitoring plan will need some adjustments if it’s to work when no wizards are around to get the message. Busy, busy.” He raised an eyebrow at her, right before something tore a wound in the universe.

  A perplexed expression, unusual on Twist, found its way onto his face. “Wha—”

  The Logos screamed. The world wept as something terrible and enormous clawed a hole in it. It couldn’t be real; only in nightmares did the world bleed words through Kiar’s mouth.

  She blindly tried to staunch the wound, tried to listen to the blood, but the words were the buzzing, meaningless syllables of books in dreams. They left the taste of ash and tears on her tongue. Then she could try no more, because the phantasmagory reared up and wrapped her in a demanding, stifling embrace.

  She stumbled, pushing away spider webs. There were always spider webs in her phantasmagory: webs, and the walls. The webs were in her hair and her mouth, in between her fingers. Sticky things, dusty, and woven whenever you weren’t looking. You could kill the spiders but there would always be new webs.

  They crowded around her, tangling up her arms and her feet and she fell. A long-haired woman she didn’t know watched her and then turned away. She saw a dazzling sunfish writhing frantically, caught by the webs, panicking. Shanasee. A hawk screamed, and a cat tore violently at the webs, and a wind like knives with blades of fire blew through the
night, and the yellow eyes of her father surrounded her and the mirrors of the King, the white horse, the red stag, the fox, the swan, the snake, the—

  They were all in the phantasmagory, all at once, all the Blood, every last one of her family. The undertow threw them into each other, scraped them against the bloody coral of each others’ egos. She couldn’t help it; the walls shimmered into existence around her. She could still feel them fighting, tangling into each other in an uncontrolled frenzy of hallucination and power, but they were outside, against the walls.

  Inside, it was her, just her, nothing but herself and the pearlescent grey shimmer of the walls. There wasn’t even her. All that she was, was walls. Nothing there! There was nothing inside the walls and only chaos outside. Despair swept over her as she searched frantically for something, anything within the walls. And then she lost herself in all that there was to find: the walls contained her scream.

  She felt hands holding her shoulders. But who would look for her? She’d been afraid of all the eyes and wished herself out of existence. There was only an empty shell. What was there to want inside a shell? They wanted her to be them, but she couldn’t, she wasn’t, she disappointed. They turned away. She was not enough to fill the spaces inside her, but the red powder didn’t fill her either. It showed her that she didn’t exist.

  No. He whispered to her. She was nine years old, trapped and screaming inside what she’d conjured, and no one could reach her but him. He’d come to her, out of darkness and terror, out of desperation and growing madness, and he’d held her, wrapped warmth around her.

  He was touching her, and she felt it through the thickest walls of the phantasmagory. She opened her eyes. With some surprise, she remembered color. Blue. The walls of the world still clung to its foundations. He hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t slept. She could smell sweat.

  She worked a jaw clenched with suppressed screams, tasted blood. Twist’s hands were on her shoulders, his fingers brushing the bare skin of her collarbone, his head close to hers. His eyes were dark and hollow, but she tore herself away from him, stumbling backwards.

  “Everybody….” she murmured, and felt her lip, swollen and bleeding, where she’d bitten it. Tiana and Lisette were nowhere to be seen, Yevonne had fled, and Cathay had flung his sword down the hall and was walking in a small circle. One of the guards had died, eidolon-torn. She tried to recall if he’d died from the enemy eidolons. She hoped so.

  “Tiana ran off. Lisette went with her. Yevonne went to Gisen when she understood what happened.” Twist stepped back, brushing lint from his coat. “Are you free of it?”

  Kiar shook her head to clear it. “Cobwebs. I hate them. Yes, free enough. What happened to the Logos? Was it backlash from the working?” Recklessly, she opened her vision again. But the Logos was placid, as if it really had been a dream.

  Twist shook his head. “No. That was to backlash as an earthquake is to a house fire. And now it’s smooth again.” He put his hands in his pockets. “And it touched the phantasmagory. Double-sighted Kiar. Did you see the connection?”

  Kiar looked away. “No.” She tried to determine if she could have caused it, as a bridge from the phantasmagory to the Logos. The cobwebs threatened to return.

  He sighed and when he spoke again, last night’s winter had returned to his voice. “Spend today as you need to, but come see me before nightfall. I’ve mapped the local plague outbreaks, and tomorrow you can ride that path and see what there is to see.” And then he was gone.

  Kiar stared at the place he’d been and wondered why his coldness made her sensitive, instead of numb. Then she turned away. There were messes to clean up.

  Chapter 14

  Wildfire

  Tiana hated that she had to waste another day recovering from something unfair and ridiculous. Great-Uncle Jant, phantasmagory expert and eldest of the family, said that he’d never experienced something like the day before. No one knew what to make of it, but he was going to find out.

  Meanwhile, Tiana dreaded returning to the theater. No matter what reassuring notes and gifts they sent, she didn’t think anybody would perform their best on a stage she was directing now. Would all her hard work keeping everything under control be ruined in less than a week? It couldn’t be true. She had to find some way to fix it.

  **Mummers? You want to direct mummers? When you could be directing armies? Well, you will never see more obedient mummers than with me in your hand.**

  But first, she had to get rid of the sword.

  The sword was in her hand, wrapped tightly in a blanket, as she walked through Palace halls. She’d sent Lisette to Jerya’s court today, with her regrets. They were going to watch for clues explaining what had happened the day before, anything that could help them understand the Logos shuddering and the phantasmagory’s spasm.

  She was going to deal with the sword. She had a plan. It wasn’t a clever plan, but she’d come up with it herself. It would work until Antecession, when the Magister of the Citadel of the Sky visited.

  It couldn’t hear her, she’d found, if she kept her thoughts deep inside, as if she was looking for the phantasmagory. But it wasn’t a natural skill, to surf the edge of secrets that way.

  “Yes,” she said aloud. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Dominate actors. That’s even better than killing people. That’ll solve my problems admirably. You stupid piece of metal.” She pushed open the door to the catacombs.

  **You’re lying to me. What are we doing?** She felt a spike of headache and resisted dropping the blade right there. It would be found too quickly if she did that. **Found? Foolish little child. Are you really going to hide me away like the prize in some scavenger hunt?**

  “Well, yes,” Tiana said. “Except without the scavenger hunt part. I said I didn’t want a sword. Especially a fiendish, talking sword. I suppose you can’t help being murderous, but I don’t need you for that. Unfortunately. Still, we’ve got to do something with you.”

  **How very distressing.** It didn’t sound the least bit distressed. It sounded amused. **I am certain that my keepers intended for us to work in partnership. It’s much more satisfying than the other option. Are you sure you won’t reconsider?**

  Tiana said, “Pfah.” But her pace slowed as she walked familiar paths. “You said you wanted vengeance.”

  **Yes,** the sword practically purred.

  Tiana compressed her lips. “On me? On my family?”

  **On that which destroyed my master, my maker. I had thought you to be the method of my vengeance, but your magic is very strange….** The headache spiked again, fingers of pain that crawled up her skull.

  Tiana pulled the curtain of the phantasmagory up, and said, her voice flat, “Stop it, or I will go beyond your reach again.”

  **I must know.** The pain became sharper, and she could feel it dancing among her memories, slicing pathways to forgotten things like a scalpel. She dropped the sword and pulled the phantasmagory over her mind, slipping away from the questing tendrils.

  Yesterday, tangled in the phantasmagory, Jinriki the Darkener had not been able to find her. When Lisette had finally coaxed her back to reality, the voice of the sword had been unmodulated thunder in her head. There’d been nothing of her left, it had claimed, just the mark it was bound to, buried in her senseless flesh.

  Once again, there was escape from the whispers of Jinriki the Darkener, and escape, too, from the pain of its searching for answers. Instead, there was the woman, the ghost with the long hair. She touched her lips, her heart, her brow, and her mouth curved in a mysterious smile. Her eyes were no longer empty. Then she spread both her hands and faded away.

  Tiana drifted in silence for a time. The phantasmagory had been a nightmare the day before, but today it was serene and unoccupied. Yesterday, it had been impossible to resist being yanked in, but today she could hardly maintain herself in it. She itched with curiosity about the sword’s reaction to her psychic departure. As soon as she thought it, the itch became literal, litt
le monsters crawling over her.

  She concentrated, bringing herself into a stronger alignment with the phantasmagory. If she really focused, she could see the impressions of where the ghost with the long hair had drifted. Tiana still couldn’t tell if she was part of the phantasmagory or something else; only the Blood created ripples in the space. But sometimes the Blood left behind impressions so strong they took on a life of their own: memories and dreams permanently engraved.

  Her great-uncle Jant had dedicated his life to studying the contents of the phantasmagory. She’d have to ask him about the woman sometime. Later. After she’d dealt with the sword.

  No, she wasn’t going to think about the sword, wasn’t going to give into the crawling curiosity. She followed the impressions of the ghost instead. They were so hard to see that if the phantasmagory had been roiled by even one other of her family, she was sure they’d be imperceptible. Only now, in this quiet, could she do this.

  Down she went, through layers of the phantasmagory. It was like before, like after Tomas’s funeral: she was descending through history. Its strata passed her by, each one made of layered memories and dreams. Sometimes they could merge into something new and cohesive, something almost alive. Maybe that’s what the ghost was?

  Her feet touched something hard and unyielding. Bedrock. There was no more down to drift through. Barely had she realized that when a fragment of somebody else’s memory swept over her.

  A young man she didn’t know worked at a workbench beside a small forge and anvil. Her point of view was strange, as if she was crouched on the workbench beyond his tools. She could best see his hands and what he held. It was the Royal Pendant.

  Somebody nearby said, “Will it hold? The first one cracked.”

  “I think so,” said the young man absently. “I didn’t really understand what I was doing, the first time.” He turned the pendant over in his hands, smoothing the opal with his fingers. An eidolon shadow fell across the workbench, as iridescent as the stone.