The guardian, Bijou noticed, was not within their impromptu prison. Maledysaunte must have noticed too, because she cursed tiredly.
The remaining six fell in back-to-back, a defensive ring. Bijou’s breath misted before her. “Cold,” she said.
“The stasis bubble increases the effects of order,” Salamander said. “Heat is entropy.”
“She’ll freeze us?” the prince asked.
“Only in time,” Salamander said, avoiding glancing at Maledysaunte. “Long enough to finish her spellcasting.”
“Right,” said Prince Salih. “After all, ‘she wouldn’t want to kill her daughter.’”
Six
After several minutes, Bijou realized that—slowly, inexorably—the bubble of light was creeping in on them. She watched its curtain contract at about the rate of movement of the dawn’s light crawling down a mountain. She couldn’t hear the echoing trickle of water any more: all the sounds of the cavern were gone.
Ambrosias rattled at Bijou’s ankles. Salamander tucked her small orange associate into her bosom for safe keeping.
“I know,” she said. He reared up beside her, his ferret-skull head at the level of her shoulder. She thought if he could have, he would have hissed.
The cold raised the fine hairs on her arms, the nape of her neck. Her teeth ground together. Ice from the moist cave air rimed the rock and mud beneath her feet. When she shifted her weight, she heard ice cracking. Beside her, she could feel Salamander shaking. Only the bard seemed undiscomfited by the cold, and he had an excuse.
“Oh,” said Maledysaunte from Bijou’s back, “I think not.”
She didn’t speak those terrible words aloud again, for which Bijou was thankful. But Bijou turned anyway, feeling the presence of the Book within Maledysaunte as she raised up its aspect, and blistering heat rolled forth from her skin. Beside her, Prince Salih raised a sleeve to ward the side of his face. Bijou imagined she could smell his beard scorching. Riordan, on her other hand, seemed as unaffected by heat as cold.
The terrible heat baked Bijou’s shoulder and the side of her face before she turned back, shielding her eyes. It was a destroying power, wild and terrible. Bijou felt it wrestling with the preserving chill of the amber light, leaving the rest of them a barely-habitable zone in the middle.
“Can’t you mitigate that?” Kaulas asked.
“Sorry,” said Maledysaunte, with no evidence of strain in her voice. “The Book was not written to preserve life.”
The circle broke and reformed with Maledysaunte at the center, the rest ringing her within the band of light. Bijou squinted at the floor for several moments. Yes, the slow crawl of light had been arrested.
“Well,” Bijou said. “That’s doom staved off for a little while, at least. Now let’s figure out how to break out of here.”
“Punch through?” Prince Salih asked.
“What have you got?” said Salamander.
“Sword.” Bijou heard the rustle of cloth as he shrugged. “Poignard. Bullets.”
“No firing a gun inside the bubble,” Riordan answered. “Did you bounce off that thing?”
“Ricochets,” Prince Salih agreed. “You know, I’m not the one with the magic.”
“No,” said Maledysaunte. “Kaulas, I’m kind of busy. Do you think you can find a loose end in that and un-weave it?”
“Fight order with chaos?” he said.
Her voice still showed no signs of strain. “Since we don’t have a precisian of our own, fire with fire isn’t exactly an option…”
“So we’re all agreed that hitting it with swords won’t work?” Riordan said. Maledysaunte’s voice might show no strain, but that of the undead bard certainly did.
Bijou wondered what it was like, to be dead and still know fear. Could he feel pain? Did it matter? She didn’t know enough about the traditions of the religions of Avalon to guess what Maledysaunte might be keeping him from—or if his own people would hold him just a soulless shell, the essential part gone on to a better place.
“Hit it and find out,” Kaulas answered.
Riordan and Prince Salih must have a shared a glance, or some other moment of unspoken communication that Bijou missed, because they moved forward in unison to break the circle. Bijou saw the flash of swords in the amber light as they skinned their blades.
“You’re rusting my sword, Maledysaunte,” Riordan complained.
“Would you rather freeze?” she asked.
He hefted the northern broadsword—an ancient, crude-looking thing—and swung it over his head as the prince slashed at the amber barrier with his own ancestral scimitar.
It was as if two great bells rang on different notes. The reverberation seemed to start inside Bijou’s head and shudder down to her toes. Rock dust shifted around them; the floor trembled against the soles of her feet.
The swords that Riordan and Prince Salih raised again blazed bright and true and razor-edged in the sourceless light, reflecting gleams this way and that.
“It sharpened my blade,” said the prince. “Other than that, I don’t think we hurt it.” He sheathed the scimitar.
“Well,” said Kaulas, “it’s good to confirm the hypothesis. Let me try.”
As the prince and the bard fell back, the necromancer stepped forward. Bijou watched his narrow form advance, caftan sweeping about the legs of the suit he wore beneath. She should feel something—Affection? Jealousy? Pride?—at this moment, but whatever the appropriate emotion was, it eluded her. Instead, mind racing for alternate solutions, she waited to see if Kaulas would succeed.
She imagined the ticking clock, the moment when—somewhere outside—Dr. Liebelos would complete her preparations and summon the Book, destroying Maledysaunte in the process. Would they freeze into stasis then, as the bubble of negentropy collapsed around them? Would Dr. Liebelos allow that to happen, despite her daughter’s presence?
Would they even know it had happened until Dr. Liebelos let the bubble open? Could you die inside a stasis trap?
She didn’t know, and under the fear and uncertainty that set her heart to beating raggedly and her palms to oozing sweat she realized she felt mostly the burning itch of curiosity. She was a Wizard, after all—a scientist at heart. She wanted to know the answers before she died.
Kaulas spread his hands wide as he approached the wall of the trap. Not a dramatic gesture: a practical one. Bijou could see the shimmers of heat collecting around his fingertips, stretching in streamers from his hands. There was no light, not yet. Just that warmth, and the infiltrating reach of it like bare roots spreading, seeking.
He brushed those dendritic extensions against the amber wall. It might have shuddered; the faintest of ripples might have spread through it. If they did, they left no trace in their wake.
But slowly, meticulously, Kaulas began insinuating the unweaving of his touch into the tight-spun order that held them in thrall. A dim glow traced their seeking, dull red like the afterimage of lightning strikes on the retina.
They did not so much flare as throb, pulsing in time with what Bijou imagined was the beat of Kaulas’ heart. With each pulse they pushed in farther; with each dimming they receded. Not as much as they grew, however, and for a moment she dared to hope. She found herself leaning forward, fists clenched, rocking in time to that pulse as if urging a horse to a jump—push, push, push now.
Kaulas groaned, grunting with effort, leaning against the wall of the bubble, pushing his palms flat. Slowly, Bijou thought. Slowly, slowly, they began to sink through the amber light, wrapped in a protective glow like sullen embers.
The thunderous crack and the reek of ozone shocked her into a scream. Kaulas made no sound except the harsh whuff of expressed air as he was hurled back, arms blown wide.
Prince Salih stepped in and caught him.
It was one of the smoothest things Bijou had seen in a long partnership of smooth interventions. Kaulas might have been silent; the prince grunted thickly as the necromancer’s weight struck him. But he
was braced, and he only staggered a step backward before arresting Kaulas’s ungainly flight. Bijou covered the distance in three running strides, relieved or furious to see Kaulas’ eyes open blearily.
“Well.” He raised his hands gingerly, still slumped back against the prince. They were raw, and looked sore. “I’ve identified one of its defenses.”
“I’ll say you have,” Bijou said, swallowing irritation and amusement. The damned man had an uncanny ability to make her feel two contradictory emotions simultaneously. She took him by the elbow and steadied him to his feet as the prince pushed. “Now what?”
Nobody spoke, though guilty glances were traded. Guilty, Bijou thought, because everybody felt a responsibility to get them out of this—and nobody had any productive ideas towards that destination.
Or perhaps she was projecting.
Having achieved a stalemate, they waited and paced and thought. Bijou found it necessary to rotate often, in order to even out her temperature exposure between the furnace of Maledysaunte and the icebox of the stasis bubble. It was that—the tension between hot and cold, chaos and order, that let the first threads of the idea drift through her mind. There was something there—but if she pursued it, she knew, she was as likely to knock it away as pull it closer. Like butterflies, ideas were best ignored and left to alight when they would.
So she paced, too, and stared at her toes, and felt the anxious closeness of her comrades at arms for some time before the tickle turned into an inspiration.
“Maledysaunte,” she said.
The necromancer looked up, pulled from her own brown study. “Bijou.”
“You said the guardian is in the Book. There’s no indication that this could be his doing?”
“None whatsoever.”
“And no reason for him to be helping Dr. Liebelos?”
“I imagine,” said Maledysaunte, “that the Book’s destruction is the last thing he’d desire. It can’t make any mischief if it’s not out in the world, after all.”
“And he’s a creature of entropy himself.”
“Yes.”
Bijou nodded. “And if he wants the Book out in the world, he’s going to want you out in the world, isn’t he?”
Maledysaunte stood taller, her dark hair breaking over her shoulders. They were attracting the attention of the others. They gathered now, leaning forward, interested.
“We don’t need to disassemble the stasis bubble,” Kaulas said. “Just punch a hole in it, and then he can help.”
“That was my thought,” Bijou said. “Can you and Maledysaunte do it by working together?”
There was a pause as the two necromancers eyed one another.
“I’d have to stop holding the bubble open,” Maledysaunte said eventually, slowly. “If it didn’t work, I don’t know if I’d be able to re-establish control.”
Bijou glanced at Prince Salih.
“Do it,” he said. “I have no desire to find out if I can die of thirst inside a stasis trap.”
It had just been waiting someone’s determined word to stir them all into action. Maledysaunte took a deep breath, closed her eyes to concentrate, and unwove her spell. Bijou watched as she opened them again, breathed deeply, and stretched her neck until it cracked.
The returning cold broke over Bijou like a wave.
“Right then,” Maledysaunte said, and took Kaulas’ raw-fleshed hand in her own.
It was much as before, except this time Maledysaunte and Kaulas each placed one hand on the wall—his right, her left—and leaned into it. And instead of a lightning-craze pattern of dull red threads, what grew before them was a spiral that turned into itself over and over again, writhing, twisting. Bijou tried to watch, but even to a Wizard’s eye, the arcane twisting was nauseating.
She felt the change of air pressure when they broke through, though—and the sparkle of new energy joining them. The guardian must have been waiting for just such an opportunity.
That black hand—utterly black, as if light fell into it, like a shape cut out of the universe—lunged from the gap they had made, and reached toward Maledysaunte and Kaulas. They grabbed his fingers with their joined hands, and there was an abrupt pop—not so much a sound as the shift of air pressure against the drums of her ears.
The stasis bubble unraveled like a snagged sweater, leaving them standing in the chill of the cavern surrounded by the echo of the water running down.
“How long?” Maledysaunte asked the guardian as he stepped back, lowering his hand.
“Thirteen seconds,” he said.
Bijou felt her eyebrows climb, but said nothing. Of course, time had slowed inside the bubble. Of course it had.
Seven
They began to smell burning soon after. A dull glow crept around a curve ahead, limning the crooked edge of the stone. Bijou turned off the torch and they made their way forward on tiptoes, each one testing each step before committing his or her weight. Another few cramped strides brought her to the corner.
Mouse-soft, Bijou leaned around the edge and peered up a limestone dam almost as tall as she was to a great cavern that flickered with light and heat. The warmth of wet air made her realize suddenly how cold she was and had been. Skin that had long since stopped stinging and settled into the corrugations of gooseflesh burned anew.
The stream broke over the dam to her left, trickling down the surface in a series of rivulets in yellow and white limestone channels. Beyond that—beyond the limestone wall she faced—another small underground lake stretched to a stony bank beyond. It was from that bank that the light and the smells of burning emanated.
A woman bent over a great stone block, a stalagmite whose top had been sliced away to make a flat surface. A great black anvil was set upon it. Bijou the Artificer owned anvils of every shape and size, from a silver-working rig you could balance on the palm of your hand to a monster four men couldn’t lift. This was the largest she had seen.
The light and heat came from a forge nearby. As Bijou watched, aware of the rest of her group slinking up behind her, the woman—pale-skinned, stripped to the waist except for a leather apron, her long light hair twisted into a straggling knot at the nape of her neck—moved easily between one and the other, stirring coals and checking heat levels. Bijou noticed that there was no bellows and no smoke. A magical fire.
“The Forge Unquenchable,” Maledysaunte whispered.
Bijou gave her a sideways look and whispered back, “It’s in the book?”
Maledysaunte nodded. “It is where the Book was forged.”
Their voices should not have carried across the lake, but perhaps Bijou should have thought about whispering galleys and the acoustics of caves. Because the woman—Dr. Liebelos, of course—stood up from her forge with her fists in her back and stretched tiredly. Sweat gleamed on her face as she said, “Is that you, Wove? I’ve been expecting you.”
“Wove?” Kaulas asked.
But even as he spoke, Salamander moved forward. She set her eft down at the edge of the water and turned right, to clamber up the jumbled boulders that slumped there. They made a kind of awkward ramp or stair, and Salamander scrambled up it.
“Her cradle-name,” Maledysaunte said, already moving to follow. “Let’s not wait for an invitation.”
Riordan required an assist to get up the bank, but still they made it as a group, in seconds. Salamander had paused at the top, hanging back until they could join her. Now the seven moved forward as one, six following Salamander across a narrow stone bridge. Bijou was braced, Ambrosias clattering along beside her. If she were defending that forge, she would strike when her enemies were bottlenecked on the cane-width span.
But Liebelos just watched them come, her hands at her sides, until they reached the far bank and fanned out, three on each side of Salamander.
Bijou noticed that Maledysaunte kept the black-man construct close beside her. His presence—or lack thereof—still discomfited Bijou deeply. But Maledysaunte was right—bringing him along had been the best
solution. What else could they have done? Try to fight him, when they were in a hurry, he’d done nothing to provoke them, and they knew nothing of his powers? Leave him behind, and have him following out of sight?
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, she told herself. It was good advice: and for now, the enemy was Dr. Liebelos.
Except Liebelos was tossing her round-headed hammer casually to the rock beside the anvil and wiping the sweat from her palms onto her leather apron as she came forward. “Darling,” she said, extending her hands to Salamander. “I knew you’d come around. And you’ve brought your friend…”
She didn’t acknowledge Riordan at all, and her eye only skipped appraisingly over Bijou, Kaulas, and Prince Salih. She did give the guardian a considering glance, though.
“Mom,” Salamander said, “I’ve come to talk you out of this madness.”
“It’s not madness,” Dr. Liebelos insisted. “This is necessary. I’m a precisian, Wove. A scholar of order. Trust me when I tell you that it is a ticking bomb to have the Book present in the world in a form as capable and enduring as Maledysaunte’s. It is a pattern that will remake all our world in its image, with the Hag of Wolf Wood its possessed and terrible demon-queen.”
Bijou was close enough to Prince Salih to see his eyebrows rise in the light of the smithy. “A precisian complains of an excess of order?”
“Just because I am a scholar of order,” Liebelos said, “does not mean I am always its partisan.”
With a shrug of dismissal, she turned back to the forge and anvil. From here, Bijou could see that what she had taken for coals were no such thing. Pellets of stone filled the Forge Unquenchable, as Maledysaunte had called it, glowing white-hot. The air above them shimmered with heat as Dr. Liebelos moved toward the forge.
She lifted a set of tongs from a rack and reached into the coals with them. As if miming, she drew the tongs back, holding nothing in the tines.
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