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

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  Usually, but not always. The Regents were hands and eyes, feedback on a world beyond reach but not beyond the ability to affect. But Lisette was not here. She would have to do it alone.

  “I am here,” said Jinriki, close to her skin.

  She studied the island. A bridge would be convenient, but she wasn’t sure she could make a bridge. That was like an eidolon. She decided if she had a rope, she could pull the island across the bay. She carefully tried to trickle out a ribbon emanation, one that would only affect the phantasmagory.

  Nothing happened. The phantasmagory ignored her. It was like she was six years old again, and all magic was beyond her reach.

  “I am here,” Jinriki repeated.

  “You are not a Regent,” she muttered. “I do not trust you.”

  “I am aware of that, my lady. But I cannot let you bash your skull in, all the same.” The sword’s voice was curt.

  Louder, Tiana said, “I can’t do it. I don’t have Lisette and I don’t have the skill.” I’m the younger one, she thought belligerently. You’re twice my age, you should have twice my experience.

  “Then we are useless here. I hope the Green Daughter looks fondly on Kiar.” Shanasee backed further away from the shore. “I can’t be here anymore. It’s too dark. Cara, help me.”

  “No!” Tiana said. “No! Hiding and praying is not what we do, Shan!” She sounded like Jerya, which was irritating. “Lord of Winter!” she swore and cupped her hands around her mouth.

  “Yithiere!” she shouted at the island, and she didn’t care if she shouted in the physical world as well. When she shouted again, it was amplified a hundredfold by her magic. “Uncle! Come and talk to us! We are small and powerless, while you are wise and skilled! The two of us are hardly a threat!”

  Shanasee finned backward in surprise. Lightning danced across the sky again and the rasping, tearing sound grew louder. A drop of rain plopped on Tiana’s head and then skittered down her arm, now a glass spider.

  She shuddered and stared as mist rose from the beach and the sea. “What is happening to the phantasmagory? This is… strange.”

  “I don’t know,” said Shanasee. “Not Yithiere after all. There’s sand under my skin.” The beach shifted underfoot, stable footing flowing away, and the mist thickened.

  Tiana shouted again, “Uncle Yithiere! Please! Just talk to us!” She didn’t try to disguise the desperation in her voice.

  The mist swirled.

  Then a tall, black wolf, elegant and lean, appeared through the drifting white, stopping a good distance away.

  “Do you know what they want me to do, Tiana?” the wolf asked.

  Tiana caught her breath. “What?”

  Yithiere lowered his head, his yellow wolf’s eyes narrow. “Attack her. Perhaps even slay her. But if I could just understand… I would know what to do. I can almost see the secrets, Tiana.” He looked up at the sky, flattened his ears. “In the hidden corners of the world. I didn’t want her to be a pawn. I didn’t listen closely enough, so I couldn’t protect Zavien. I knew this was coming. But not from Twist. How could he not know? I thought he saw into the corners.”

  Softly, Tiana said, “I have heard she is ill.” Shanasee moved in agitated circles.

  The wolf said, “She is strong, and there are many who survive. I will take care of her. Zavien wouldn’t die a second time. If you want to help her, you should convince the others to leave us be. I can’t concentrate with all these distractions.” He pawed at his face. “I’ve almost got it.”

  Tiana felt like weeping. Had Rinta or Pell been like this, before their deaths? They were Yithiere’s younger siblings, and there were such stories about them in the weeks before they’d died. Had Benjen been like this, before his Blights? Was this what lay before her, Shonathan’s hollowness or this madness?

  Jinriki whispered, “I can find them, with some time. Only a direct path, though.”

  Tiana shook her head and tried to focus. She remembered what Kiar had mentioned about the plague. “Many who survive the illness continue on only in body, not in spirit.” She imagined Kiar with empty eyes and shuddered.

  Yithiere took a deep breath and pawed at his nose again. “Is that so?” Wolf-ears swiveled to Tiana. “I have never seen an illness take hold so quickly, I admit. Save for the fever, I would imagine she’s been poisoned.”

  “She has!” Shanasee burst out. Tiana made frantic shushing motions. “A poison, and you must leech it out. Like calls to like, Yithiere!”

  The wolf’s ears flattened. “Like calling to like is exactly the reason I will not use it. That is why Math died.”

  A trickle of cold went down Tiana’s spine. “Oh, no,” she said. She wasn’t sure what he meant, but it invoked a powerful dread. Math had died in a final confrontation with Benjen, and Shanasee had never been the same. She glanced at her cousin, who had gone very still.

  The mist roughened, brushing across her skin like sandpaper, then faded away. A road stretched across the sea from the shore. They all stared at it. Then Yithiere said, “I did not make that.” He growled to himself. “This is a memory.”

  The breeze picked up, carrying the smell of grass and dust. Faded, green fields unrolled across gentle hills and in the distance, Yithiere’s island wavered like a heat mirage. Beyond it rose the vast mountain of Sel Sevanth, whose shadow sheltered Lor Seleni and the Royal Palace. Astonished, Tiana said, “This is the Royal Highway. Why are we on the Royal Highway?”

  Shanasee swirled a whirlwind of dust around herself and said uneasily, “It’s just the tide of the phantasmagory. But look at the sky: something is wrong. Cara, please, help me!”

  Tiana looked up. The sky was clear blue, but dread crept across it, a black wall. “Insects,” she said. “Locusts? What’s going on?” She reached out for her body, for any sense of the other world, and found only the current of the phantasmagory.

  Panic rising, she said, “Jinriki?”

  In her ear, the sword said, “I’m here.”

  “What’s going on, Jinriki? Are you still… out there?”

  Shan muttered to herself. Yithiere stared keenly at Tiana. She bit her lip and folded her hands behind her back.

  There was silence. Then Jinriki said, “Yes. The place you are in becomes hostile, though. The dreams are sharp and jagged. If you would like to come out at last, I will protect you.”

  Tiana shook her head. “Are you all right?”

  The sword said, “I’m sharp and jagged, too. It takes more than dreams to hurt me.”

  Irritation overwrote the panic. “Well, good for you.”

  Yithiere said, “Who are you addressing? Not Lisette, I think.”

  Tiana tossed her head. “Lisette is with Jerya. I’m talking to the fiend. My sword. Uncle, the phantasmagory’s changed. I think it’s because of Kiar’s illness. I think if we don’t cure her, we’ll all be in trouble.”

  Yithiere bristled. “Do you see it too? You haven’t the skill.” He snapped his jaws in Tiana’s direction and growled. “There is… you may be right. But Kiar… come and see.” He trotted towards the island, down the road.

  Tiana looked at Shanasee, who was swirling yet more dust around herself, her movements jerky and frantic. “Shanasee—” she began, then stopped. “I’m going to see Kiar. I’ll come back for you if Cara can’t help you. You’ll be all right.”

  “Cara, Cara,” the brilliant fish whispered. “Cara, the darkness is coming.” Tiana clenched her fists and walked after Yithiere.

  She walked, but the fields and the road did not move beneath her. Soon, Yithiere was walking beside her. “I’m tired of wondering what’s going on,” Tiana complained. The sunlit day darkened under the pestilent swarm that flowed across the sky, and black drops fell intermittently.

  A fence beam broke with a sharp crack and cattle crowded over it. Mooing and chuffing, they wandered into the road. Yithiere said, “This is Kiar’s memory.”

  Tiana was skeptical. “She’s remembering cows? How do you kno
w it’s a memory?”

  Yithiere said, “You never pay attention to lessons. Look how real it is. She was traveling this road, just today. The memory of this road, among others, has been emerging around her shell. Her horse threw her here.”

  “Spooky? Here? I don’t believe it.”

  One of the cattle turned its brindled head to inspect them. Tiana’s stomach lurched.

  It wasn’t a cow. It was a nightmare.

  The world jumped and shuddered around her and she stumbled back, unable to tear her eyes from the horror. Small bulges writhed under the brown and white hide. The black crawling shapes found their exit at the monster’s eyes and mouth, leaking like the black rain from the sky. A third eye, pale blue, shed black tears. Its front legs bent oddly, as if they had extra joints. Human hands dangled from the beast’s udder, fingers wiggling.

  Then she realized the large brown spots on the cow’s hide were slowly changing shape. The cow-thing’s horns seemed to grow and twist together without ever changing size, and its mouth was impossibly wide.

  Her perception rebelled. She wasn’t seeing hands hanging from an udder, or twisting horns, or an ever-growing mouth. It was something else entirely, but the only way she knew how to interpret it was as those things. It was all lies, she was telling herself, to try and put the impossible horror into a context she could understand. It was something deeply alien that had climbed inside Kiar’s head through her eyes, then migrated from her mind to the phantasmagory.

  A scream shattered the air around her, and she couldn’t tell if it was coming from herself, from Kiar, or from the monster in front of her. She stopped up her mouth, gagging as her fingers turned to insects and crawled down her throat. Whimpering, she struggled to pull an emanation around her, but the memory remained stubbornly solid, the maw of the creature opening wider and wider, as if it would swallow her entirely. Then her horror turned to fury, and the road around her burst into flames.

  She spread her arms and let the fire sweep through her, burning the blackness from her mouth, burning her vision with gold and red, taking away the nightmare. Higher and stronger she danced the fire, until the road was gone. But the flecks of moving black remained.

  The wolf Yithiere stood untouched beside her, in the flames. He ran his tongue over his teeth and said, “Her illness has infected the phantasmagory. You’re right. We cannot wait for her to recover on her own.”

  “That can’t be true. I hope that can’t be true. But that’s not—I don’t think that’s a manifestation of the plague, Uncle.” As she spoke, the flames faded away and they stood on a stone bridge over the sea.

  “What, then?” He touched his lupine nose to the stones beneath him, testing the currents of the phantasmagory. A black drop from the clouds above fell in front of him, and he peeled his lips back from his teeth as he edged around it.

  “I felt—I think if that had been more than a memory, I’d be sick now too. Didn’t you feel it?”

  His lips still curled away from his teeth, Yithiere said, “A misborn cow? Did it bite her? She would have said something. It was disgusting but so are fiends and nightmares. That was just more of the same.” His ears flattened. “If it was a fiend, it might have cursed her. But she would have said.”

  Tiana didn’t want to explain. It was hard. But she had to, so she tried.

  “Kiar and Twist both said there was an eidolon marking the victims of the illness. Like a shadow. I think that horrible creature is casting the shadow and the shadow is making them sick.”

  Yithiere flattened his ears. “Eidolons do not make people sick. Neither do shadows.”

  “Maybe there’s another word then, and I just don’t know it,” Tiana snapped fretfully. “Kiar is sick and the sickness is associated with the same kind of taint Logos-workers see as they look at family magic. And that thing—that monstrosity—you didn’t see it clearly, Uncle. You couldn’t have.”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “When I saw it, it was like it crawled inside my head and burrowed into all my worst nightmares. If I’d seen the real thing and not just Kiar’s memory….” she trailed off, unable to wrap words around the horror.

  He gave her a skeptical look, but his ears pricked up. “Well?”

  She swallowed. “Don’t you have things you don’t want to think about, ever? I do. Things that hurt me. Sometimes I can’t help it, and then I’m gasping and wishing I was dead. I’d do anything to stop thinking those things. There’re times I think I’d bash in my own skull to stop thinking those things. Maybe Kiar’s body is making her sick trying to burn that shadow out of her brain.”

  The wolf studied her. “Frightening. Enough.” The sea and stone landscape vanished, and the two of them were inside a round room with a vaulted roof. Against one wall was an obsidian statue of Kiar.

  Usually Kiar manifested as an all-encompassing, fantastic, elaborate suit of metal armor. But now she was still and only herself, no visor obscuring her face.

  Dismayed, Tiana asked, “What’s happened?”

  “She’s shielded herself in the real world.” Yithiere paced over to the statue and pressed his face against it. “Inside her wall. She’s lost, panicked.”

  Most of the Blood, when lost in phantasmagory, were dangerous to the people around them. Kiar’s fugues had always been of the opposite sort, from the very beginning: opaque shields that kept everyone away from her and her away from everyone.

  At age six, when she started service in the Banquet Hall and panicked at the number of people, her shield had expelled dozens of people from her immediate vicinity and lasted until Jerya had patiently soothed her. When Kiar had been nine and took plepanin, it had been worse. The Logos changed her perceptions, and only Twist had the understanding and ability to get close enough to calm her.

  “I am speaking to her, but she does not respond.” Yithiere had never sounded so frustrated before. Lisette or any of the other Regents would be more useful now. Or Jerya, or Twist—practically anybody but Tiana. Tiana, wind and fire, and nothing useful at all.

  She stepped forward and put her hand on the statue’s arm. “Kiar,” she said quietly. “I’m not Jerya, but I’m here. I don’t know what Yithiere has been telling you, but it’s not good in here.”

  Roughly, Yithiere said, “The wall means she’s still alive.” It was a reassurance directed at himself, in the voice they all used for talking to their Regents.

  Tiana said, “Uncle, you should go, if you can. Devote your energy to the real world.”

  “I’m fine,” he snapped. “Better than you, little girl. Hone your own awareness of the real world and then lecture me.”

  Tiana pursed her lips and resolutely turned her attention to Kiar. She brushed her knuckles across the cool obsidian of Kiar’s hair. The room became cold and long tendrils of mist stretched across the ceiling. Each arm of mist had a black shadow.

  “Definitely not good in here, Kiar. I think we saw your nemesis. Something horrible, anyhow. And now bad things are happening. But, good news, we have ideas on how to cure the plague.” She paused, scrutinizing the statue for any change, any reaction.

  Yithiere said, “You tell her nothing I have not. This is useless.” He darted over to a black blob oozing through the mortar of the stone wall and batted at it with his paw. “This is our place. Whatever this… invasion is, it crawls into our territory.” He pulled his paw back, pulling black goo with it. Then he narrowed his eyes at the substance and folded an emanation into a knife that scraped the goo off the phantasmagory itself.

  Tiana stared at him. Then she looked back at the perfect carving of Kiar. “Please, Kiar. There are bad things in here. I don’t want to be alone, and I don’t know where Lisette is, and to be totally honest, I’m afraid.”

  She didn’t know what else to say, so she whispered the same thing a second time under her breath, and a third time. Then the statue opened its arms to her, and she fell into another place.

  She was blind, but she never thought that blindness was a field o
f white. “Jinriki, what’s going on?” she said uncertainly.

  “Jagged dreams and hybrid magic. Nothing has changed outside.”

  “Oh,” Tiana said. “Hybrid magic?” Slowly, the whiteness began to resolve. Flecks of black swirled around her. They made patterns. She realized abruptly they were characters, and they formed words. Hundreds of words, thousands of words. She was in a storm of words, more than she could count, more than she could imagine. They moved around her faster than she could process them.

  “She is speaking as if to the Logos, but only nonsense.”

  That sounded like Kiar had somehow imagined her part of the phantasmagory was the Logos. Was that even possible? “Is that what all these words are? Can you understand them?”

  He chuckled. She didn’t know he could laugh. It was disturbing. “Analyzing….”

  Tiana moved her hands around the storm of words while she waited, watching the way they grew denser as she focused.

  Finally, he said, “Unexpected. What I sense feels like… a copy of the Logos. Can you even dream the Logos?”

  “I have no idea. I barely know what the Logos is, but you can dream of anything,” said Tiana firmly and then added, “Kiar says that when she looks at eidolons with the Logos, it’s like a blind spot.”

  “Dreaming the Logos is dreaming everything. Her Logos makes no sense, though.”

  Tiana wondered, where do I hide, if not the phantasmagory? and then shook herself. “Is she trying to make an eidolon of the Logos? Trying to use the Logos while in the phantasmagory? I don’t understand why she’s not here anymore.” She wished Great-Uncle Jant was there; he was the scholar of the phantasmagory and how it worked.

  “She’s not fully conscious, based on prior observations.” The sword sounded far away.

  “Of course not. If she were, she’d be talking and helping us out.”

  When she was eleven, she’d had a terrible sore throat and earache. While she’d mostly slept through the illness, she still recalled the vivid dreams of fighting off an endless swarm of enemies.

  “So, let’s go with ‘She’s trying to turn an eidolon into the Logos.’” She watched the storm of words for a few moments. There was something very worrying about all the movement, the flickering black on white. It was as if the words were forming patterns she could almost recognize.