Her father tried to draw on her magic, but the huanu stone prevented him. However, his stone dampened the effect of the flames somewhat, indicating they were of magical origin.
Anomer did better. His shield flashed out, enfolding Arathé and Noetos in a soft, water-like substance.
The others expected to die. She could see it on their faces, which bore exactly the same shocked, pleading look the soldier boy had worn a few minutes earlier. Some rolled into foetal balls, awaiting the pain; others tried to beat the flames away.
But no pain came.
One by one they scrambled to their feet, unharmed, confusion and relief mixed on their faces. No bruises from the fall, no horrific burns from the flames groping impotently at them.
Every face turned to the door, beyond which lay the courtyard. No sound could be heard above the roar of the fire, but Arathé had no doubt what was happening out there.
The staircase at the far end of the library had a wooden banister, already beginning to flame. She beckoned the others on. They could not afford to remain paralysed by shock: once the soldiers were spent, the magic would no longer work.
Up the stairs they ran. Arathé saw that Moralye, who climbed just ahead of her, was favouring her ankle. Did she have the strength and finesse to heal her friend? As she watched, the bruise faded and the swelling vanished. Oh. Every hurt?
She imagined each soldier losing a tiny amount of his tongue, and hers growing to balance their loss, growing until it filled her mouth in the way she barely remembered. But it seemed there was a limit to this magic of distribution after all.
Arathé tried not to begrudge Moralye her ankle.
The stair took them up to a second library, the floor of which was already beginning to steam. The next level appeared to be some sort of dormitory accommodation, though empty at present. Unwillingly, Arathé’s eyes were drawn to the window at the far end of the room.
Noetos walked across to it and leaned out, then jerked his head back inside. Duon made to join him, but the fisherman shook his head.
“No,” he gasped, his face pale. “Horrible.” He shook his head again. “The smell. Don’t ask.”
“We are alive because of them,” Torve said solemnly. “Let us make sure we accomplish what we came to do.”
They nodded to each other and set their feet to the next level of the stair.
“No one will be coming up that stair now,” the Destroyer said with some satisfaction. “Your friends will fight it out with my soldiers. I’m not sure who will win.”
“But whatever the outcome, they lose.” Stella was disappointed but unwilling to show it.
He grunted, clearly dismissing them from his mind. “A thousand steps four times a day over two thousand years. Allowing for the time I’ve spent out of the keep, that is about two and a half thousand million steps. No wonder so many of them have needed to be replaced.”
What on earth was the man wittering on about? Could it be… was he nervous? There seemed no other explanation for the irrelevant chatter, so unlike him.
“Lenares would know the exact number,” she said. “For a man so enamoured of statistics, you’re rather approximate.”
“Maybe so,” he said, his grin twisted into something resembling a snarl. “But today, when it matters, I’ll be right on time. And your friends will be… late.”
A final stair, spiralling around the inside of the narrowing circular tower, led them to a small space in front of a plain grey wooden door. It stood slightly ajar.
“You will wait outside,” he said to her, and waved his arm. The magic slid over her but did not catch; he seemed not to notice. “You would be destroyed by the forces about to be unleashed. I will call for you when you are required.”
He stood perfectly still for a brief time, then nodded once to himself, strode to the door and pulled it open. A moment later he had vanished inside, closing the door behind him.
Stella counted to a hundred, then followed.
“Hot air rises,” Noetos said, ripping off his tunic. “With the inferno below, the whole tower is like a sweat-cave.”
“A what?” Moralye asked, panting from the climb. “Never mind. Not difficult to work out the meaning.”
“Will… will the tower burn down?” Cylene asked.
“Mmm,” Noetos said. “I don’t know.”
“I haven’t seen any structural timber holding the walls together,” Sautea said. “As long as the stones themselves don’t crack with the heat, I don’t see why it shouldn’t remain standing.”
“Held together by magic,” Duon reminded them.
Even the supremely fit explorer was out of breath. Noetos dropped his hands to his knees and tried to catch his own breath, difficult in this heat.
His daughter put a hand to her head. In the last little while her hand had seldom been anywhere else. “I can feel something,” she signalled.
Noetos could feel it too. Power had begun to build far above them and, in response, pressure had begun to build in his head. Could heads explode? He remembered the Padouki woman’s head exploding as she battled Kannwar in the canopy.
Duon fell to his knees, both hands pressed to his temples. Anomer grabbed the back of his head.
“Umu puts forth her strength,” Noetos said with gritted teeth.
Through his cloud of abject misery, Deorc sees the one thing he’s kept himself alive for, the one thing he does not want to see. Not now, when he is impotent to act!
The Undying Man steps through the door, closes it gently behind him and stands there, hands clasped behind his back. Seemingly relaxed, unconcerned, but harvesting magic furiously from everywhere around him.
Will they exchange witticisms, the immortal and the god? Will they use their voices to gain some advantage in the trial of strength to come?
No. Suddenly Umu expands, filling Deorc’s poor mind with an unbearable weight. There is a conduit open to the void beyond the world and she draws from it flagrantly. In the distance, visible to the broken man’s inner eye, stars begin to go out.
Deorc has sampled the Undying Man’s strength, knows and appreciates the man’s limits. Worked with him for a decade and more leading up to the Falthan War, then suffered under his powerful hand. At the time there was not another man alive to match him. Since then, however, the Undying Man has been broken by the arrow of the Most High, wreaking severe damage on his magical abilities. It has taken him many years to recover. Surely now, at best, he can only be as strong as he was at the commencement of the Falthan War. And if that is the measure of the Undying Man’s strength, it will not be enough. Not nearly enough. Deorc is appalled by the reservoir of pure power Umu has assembled. She may be able to be tricked, as Lenares did once, and subsequently bound, but there is no chance of overwhelming her by using main strength.
The Undying Man has miscalculated. Badly. Fatally. It may not be by his hand, but Deorc will see his long enemy die. And if the Daughter has spent her godhood wisely, accumulating interesting practical knowledge, that death promises to be both protracted and inventive.
This may be satisfying, after all.
She sends her magic forth, not as a bolt of lightning but as a roiling, smothering blanket of world-eating darkness.
The Undying Man snarls, extends his hands and shapes a shield.
Wrong move.
The darkness eats at his shield like acid.
As the shield melts, an unnatural wind begins to blow. Pressure difference in the air. The Undying Man has vanished the air around Umu, around Husk’s poor body sitting on the chair by the window. Clever, that. The darkness flows back towards Umu. Deorc cringes, despite knowing she will bear the pain. He does not want to see his hard-won body corroded.
She puffs out her cheeks—his cheeks—and the miasma is blown through the window, dissolving chunks of rock from the lintel as it expands into the open air outside the tower.
Kannwar is sweating heavily. His face is lined with worry. He begins to apprehend the trouble he is
in.
Umu laughs out loud. A weakness, this displaying of emotion. It smacks of anticipating a victory as yet un-earned, however inevitable.
Deorc begins to wonder if his victory might be achieved regardless of who wins this battle.
Should Umu win, she is likely to discard this husk of a body as worthless. She could take the Undying Man’s own body perhaps, with its immortal blood. Were gods immortal already, or would her conquest of Kannwar give her something extra? Either way, she would certainly abandon Deorc. Perhaps she might not kill him first.
In the unlikely event of the Undying Man’s triumph, Deorc might well be in the position he has wished for, after all. Depending, of course, on the nature of the victory. Somehow Deorc will need to persuade the Undying Man to spare his body.
Desperate chances, and nothing he can do to affect the outcome either way.
Umu spits something out of her—his—mouth: things she has fashioned from trace elements stolen from his body.
At that moment, everything changes. Stella walks through the door.
* * *
The phrase “nothing to lose” had been a popular one in Leith’s court. Introduced by Phemanderac, it bespoke a certain degree of risk-taking, an innovative approach to difficult political problems. Leith had adopted the term with glee: as he matured, he had abandoned the nervous, introspective disposition that had characterised him as a young man and had become quite adventurous. Sometimes too adventurous. The affair with the Central Plains-men came to mind as an example of an outrageous but ultimately successfully negotiated solution to what had been thought an intractable problem.
“Nothing to lose” summed up Stella’s thoughts exactly as she closed the door behind her. If she died, she achieved an unexpected but welcome release. If she lived, it would be because one or the other of the colossi in the room had lost everything. So as the door clicked gently into its frame—a sound drawing the attention of both parties—she stood there with absolutely no fear.
She expected surprise to rise into the face of the Undying Man. Instead, she saw relief.
He turned from her to face the oncoming peril. A thousand tiny spikes sped through the air towards him, each one rotating vigorously, impelled by dark magic. Stella knew she could not have stopped a single one of them. The Undying Man stopped almost all of them.
The fact that a dozen or so slipped through his defences implied deliberate intent on the part of the Undying Man’s opponent. Carefully calculated to overwhelm without utterly destroying him. Stella watched in fascinated horror as the spikes dug into his skin, vanishing in a cloud of blood and flesh.
Hooks, they were, made fast in his flesh. Magical ropes extended from them to the body sprawled on the chair. An appendage—not a hand, more a flipper—held the ropes and jerked at them. The Undying Man skidded across the room. To finish up in a heap at the feet of a… a monstrosity.
Stella clapped her hand to her mouth, burying four fingers in her long-ago childhood gesture, at what Deorc of Jasweyah had become. He was the shape and texture of a slug. Body covered in slime, skin glistening, solid only in patches, abraded in others. Covered in deep red gouges, as though hacked at by swords. Riddled with suppurating sores. Leaking fluids onto the chair and floor. Something that had once been a man, his former identity visible only in the general form and the vestigial appendages. Not in the face; there was no face. No real head. Just the top of the slug-like torso, from which twin stalks jutted, each ending in a single large eye able to swivel to view the whole room at once. Now focused on the form at his feet.
No wonder he’d called himself Husk.
Horrified at the sight, Stella found herself on the point of regretting what she’d done all those years ago.
A fifth appendage in the centre of the ghastly shape drew her eye. What… was that? Length and thickness of a forearm, sharp edges protruding, leathery, some sort of weapon perhaps. Pus dribbled from its end in a slow stream.
No. Nausea grabbed at her stomach as she realised what it was, what it had been designed for. Who it had been designed for.
Conal had been spiked in order to draw her here. To where Deorc could exact the cruellest revenge he could imagine—and he’d had seventy years to imagine it.
“Nothing to lose” suddenly became a mockery. Deorc of Jasweyah must not, must not win this fight. If she had been wearing a sword, she had no doubt she’d be hacking at him.
She breathed out, and let her anger go. As though this was a signal, the presence of the Most High unfolded within her.
She’d once thought the Firefall a rare and sacred experience. Certainly that was how the Halites understood it, though they denied she’d shared in it. Denied, in fact, the evidence of holy Hal’s own brother. But if it had been so rare, why had it been repeated by the Son and the Daughter in their possession of Dryman, Conal and Cylene? And now, she guessed, Deorc. Noetos had reported a brief encounter with the Most High. And, of course, Stella and the Undying Man himself, in the guise of Heredrew, had allowed the Father access to their bodies. Possession by a god, it seemed, was far more common than the Archpriest and the Koinobia thought.
The Most High possessed her, but she still had control. In that respect, she supposed, as she accessed his power to slice through the threads binding the Undying Man, this possession was different from that to which the others had been subjected. Less intrusive. Somehow she was more herself despite the overwhelming, crowding presence of the god. Expanded, not constrained.
She took the Undying Man by the hands and dragged him away from the monster on the seat.
He looked up at her through a glaze of pain. “I knew you would come,” he said.
“What?” Stella asked. “You brought me here.”
“The Most High. He’d not miss such an important nexus. Claims to be disinterested, but he’s always there, interfering. Thank him, by the way.”
“Huh,” Stella replied, unable to think of anything more sensible.
A glance at the suddenly quiescent figure on the chair gained her nothing. With its lack of discernible face, there was no way she could tell how the Daughter was reacting to the presence of the Most High.
“Your father asks you to give up this selfishness,” she told Umu. “Take yourself back to the void, he begs. There is much work for you to do there.”
“You won’t unmake me,” Umu said confidently. “Not your own daughter.”
“No,” said Stella. “He won’t. He will not raise a hand against you.”
The stalks quivered, the nearest, Stella supposed, the body she inhabited could come to a smile.
“He will have his champion do it instead,” Stella added.
“What?” said the god, the voice strained.
Kannwar nodded to Stella and dragged himself to his feet. “I will not fail you,” he said.
The Father spoke the words into her mind just before she said them; and oh, she so enjoyed saying them. She knew how badly they would hurt the one who had so hurt her. Her revenge.
“You are not his champion,” she said. “I am.”
The door at the top of the last stair was barely visible in the smoke-filled haze. Everyone wheezed and whistled, trying to draw breath. Poor Arathé still whimpered from the after-effects of the magical activity in the room above them: she had stood and screamed when Umu had begun to draw on her power. Duon had gone milky-white, while Noetos and Anomer clung to each other, unable to move.
Something dreadful was being shaped in the Tower of Farsight.
Eventually the fisherman drew himself up, wiped his mouth and beckoned them up the stair. Hands supporting each other, under elbows, resting on shoulders, in the small of the back, the companions struggled to the landing. The sound of stone crashing onto a wooden floor came echoing up the tower from far below.
“I don’t want to go in there,” Cylene said, coughing as she eyed the door.
“Aye.” Sauxa rubbed at his left cheek. “Somethin’ weighty in there. Best I can describ
e it.”
“We have to go in,” Anomer said, but Lenares could see his whole body leaning away from the door.
“No,” Cylene moaned, and Lenares knew her sister had come to the end of herself. Shaking uncontrollably, no colour in her face. “I can’t.”
Lenares reached out her hand, touching her on the arm, and Cylene shrieked. Her body was rigid with fear for a moment, then she pulled away from Lenares’ touch, breathed a low “sorry” and ran back down the stair, sobbing as she went.
“Cylene!” Noetos called after her. He made to follow.
Cyclamere grabbed his arm. “Too much,” the swords-man said. “We’ve asked too much of her. She knows what it is like to have an evil god inside her. Which of us would not flee had we her knowledge?”
“But she’ll burn,” Noetos said desperately as the sound of feet on stone faded into silence.
“My lord,” Cyclamere said after too long a moment, “we’ve come this far. We must go on.”
The numbers told Lenares the fisherman was about to fling the swordmaster’s arm aside and run after Cylene. The numbers were never wrong, but as she watched, they changed.
“Aye,” he said, and turned to Lenares.
“You and I,” he said. “We must face the gods.”
His face was as blank as a stone wall, but his numbers told her which sister he would prefer beside him. Lenares inclined her head, strode quickly to the door—don’t think about it—set a hand to the latch and pushed.
The problem with the Most High, Deorc thinks, is that because he holds himself aloof from the world, no one factors him into any conflict. So when he appears, all calculations are rendered moot.
Umu, he can see, is terrified. The Father made her thousands of years ago in an unparalleled act of intervention in the affairs of the world, and he can unmake her the same way. Can thrust her back into the void. Can even make it so she no longer exists. Has never existed.
Her red-edged thoughts leak to him. Deorc realises he is beginning to lose his sense of self, beginning to be absorbed into her. He huddles there, not knowing exactly where there is, as her thoughts and memories wash over him, leach through him.
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