Forty-One
Flight followed, but very much not in the draconic sense: flight on foot instead, through a series of winding caverns too low even to run through properly. Flight with the sound of falling rock behind them and the earth trembling under their feet, all too aware of the weight of stone that likely lay overhead.
Why?
Erik couldn’t know. Had they, by taking dragon form earlier in a cave naturally too small for any such creature, broken through some vital support? Without the un-ark’s spirit to sustain it, was the temple’s natural structure enough of an affront to the world that it couldn’t survive? Or was the collapse one last trick of the spirit, a trap for any who might truly manage to destroy It?
Any might be true, or parts of each. There might be another explanation entirely. Erik could wonder all he liked, as his boots struck stone and he forced overworked muscles into yet more service, but the darkness gave him no answers.
The phantom town they’d come through before was desolate on their return. A few buildings yet stood as Erik and Toinette ran past, but they looked flat and simple: sketches from an untalented hand. Stairs climbed into a rock wall. Windows opened onto stone, or blank space. One of the roofs caved in behind Erik. The sound was softer than falling rock should have been.
Mostly, he didn’t look back. There were all kinds of stories about what happened to people who did, and he hadn’t even Orpheus’s reason. Toinette ran at his side when the path was wide enough, easily keeping pace with him. When they had to go single file, she was just behind, her ragged breath and running footsteps signs of her presence.
There was no longer a door at the end of the town. A cave entrance just opened onto the junction, and two more faced it. Erik could glimpse shrouded bodies through one of them, and through the stalagmites he thought he saw Adnet’s bones lying at rest. Goodbye, he thought, with no time to stop or breath to speak. God grant you peace at last.
Onward down the long passages they ran, and the world fell apart behind them.
“The ship,” Toinette panted. “How do we get back through it?”
The thought struck Erik mid-chest like a blow. He couldn’t stop to talk—even as they ran, he heard smashing behind them, the world’s longest and largest avalanche on their heels—and could barely manage to think. His blood pounded in his ears. “Find the portal ourselves. Force it. We’ll not have much time.”
He rasped in a breath and grabbed for what scraps of his power were left, but Toinette interrupted him.
“Visio dei,” she said. Her voice wavered considerably and was far higher than usual, but there was power in it.
Aware of how disorienting the visions were, Erik reached back and grabbed her arm, pulling her along the corridors with him. He hadn’t the leisure for gentleness, nor even to regret the violence of his grip, but he did hope he wasn’t injuring her.
She would heal, if he did.
Would either of them survive a rockfall? He didn’t know, and the thought of it was more horrifying than death itself. How far below the surface were they? Where were they?
“Here,” Toinette said abruptly, and gestured. “Down. The floor’s…not false, but…” She bent forward, chest heaving. “You have to think where you want to be.”
“Aye,” said Erik quickly, for it hurt his heart to hear her try to speak. “I take your meaning. Go.”
She slipped through the portal as if it were the surface of a pond. Erik jumped after her, thinking out of here, and then they were on rock, running away from the rotted hulk of a ship and toward a door in the middle of a beach made of stone.
Ah, said a part of his mind that sounded like Artair, shapes have power even in their death. Fascinating.
Erik wasn’t particularly fascinated. He looked away from the door only to glance at Toinette, seeing that she was still keeping up. Her leg dripped blood as she ran, but slowly, and she did run. That would have to be good enough. The ship was groaning as it died, wood buckling and twisting under no force that Erik could see; chunks of timber fell and flew, making him and Toinette duck.
The door crumbled at his touch, falling to fragments and becoming a cavern entrance. He’d just ducked through when he saw the lintel buckle. Again he grabbed for Toinette, but she was already leaping through, her foot clearing the doorway as the whole structure came down in a crash and a cloud of dust.
Destruction was moving faster.
* * *
In the great hall, the high table lay tipped onto its side. The figures were gone, and the hands with them. The other two tables were dissolving into the stone. They melted as Toinette saw them, like fog in sunlight. No great loss—but she looked away swiftly, dizzy from the sight.
All was failing beneath the earth. Or all was returning to the way it was meant to be. The world reclaimed the wreckage of twisted magic with a speed that might have been heartening had Toinette and Erik not been caught in its midst.
On and on they ran, dashing across the great hall and into the passage on the other side, past a cavern mouth with the ruins of a church beyond it. The symbol had fallen off the wall, and all the windows had shattered, revealing more stone beyond.
Toinette’s cut leg hurt less. At first she thought that fear had pushed her beyond pain—she knew the wound couldn’t have healed so quickly, not when she’d gotten it from the un-ark itself—but the rest of her body still protested every motion. Only her legs and feet had it easier than they had before.
The impact of feet against stone jarred less, she realized. There was less stone to jar. Even as the ceiling fell in behind them, the floor was growing softer.
Beyond shame, Toinette would have sobbed with terror, save that she had no breath to manage it. They were going to die. They’d come far, they’d won against all odds, and now, even in victory, they’d be buried alive, never to know air or light again.
Her mind gibbered. Her body, wiser or at least less complicated, bolted down passageways through rock that became gravel and then dirt. She had enough mind left to know that Erik was with her, and to keep making sure of it, glancing to her side every so often. Otherwise, she put her head down and ran like a spooked horse.
The great doors lay fallen from their frame, the metal twisted and molten. Some shapes lingered. Others didn’t. Toinette didn’t know why and didn’t care. She hurdled the wreckage and landed on the other side, almost stumbling in the loose dirt. It was falling down into the earth, filling the cavern from whence it had come. Like the tide, it tried to carry all before it.
Toinette’s vision went red halfway across the courtyard. Her face was wet; she wouldn’t have known sweat from tears then, or either from blood, and didn’t bother wiping the moisture away. She didn’t need to see. The edge of the steps was a few feet away, a few feet that felt as though she were treading water against the waves.
Dimly she thought of wings, but she had no strength to transform, and none to take off if she had. More weight would only have sealed their doom.
They made it to the edge of the steps and threw themselves over, running headlong downward. Halfway to the bottom, the dirt was soft and sucking as quicksand, and Toinette’s legs worked no longer.
She turned and grabbed Erik’s shoulders. “Jump,” she managed.
They clung to each other and leapt, not down but outward as far as their collected strength could manage.
Toinette felt her feet leave the sand. Through a red mist she saw the distance between them and the steps grow, and the steps themselves collapse in on themselves, buckling and bending in a way that no stone had ever done. She felt Erik’s arms tight about her, and buried her face against his neck, shielding the back of his head with her own arms.
She closed her eyes.
They landed hard, with a solid crunch and a stab of pain through Toinette’s wounded leg, not to mention a blunt impact that jarred her whole body. Her teeth clicked
together with enough force to chip one; her shoulder hit a good-sized rock, which tore through the cloth of her gown and half the skin of her upper arm.
But they did land, on firm, solid ground that moved not at all. They landed, and lay for a while as the temple’s final collapse roared behind them.
Forty-Two
Having come to a stop, Erik couldn’t rise again. He told himself that he should, that they’d do well to keep walking, but the earth was too nice and flat, his bones too heavy, and Toinette’s head too welcome against his chest. All he could do was roll onto his back, pulling Toinette with him, and stare up at the sky.
For a change, there was a sky, one the mundane gray of low clouds and lit by the faint sun of midafternoon. What midafternoon was a mystery. Based on when they’d eaten, they’d spent only half a day in the temple, but Erik had heard many tales. Time worked differently in such places. They could have emerged weeks or years later than they’d gone in—there was no way to know.
He hadn’t the strength to worry.
Small things occupied his mind instead. Air, for instance: real, clean air, smelling vaguely of the sea beyond the island and vaguely of pine. There were no trees around them—the ring around the temple was a wasteland yet, if not so sinister as it had been when Erik and Toinette had entered—but after so long with nothing but the un-ark’s smell, Erik thought he could have caught the scent of a plant in England.
Toinette breathed as deeply as he did, the motion steady against him. It reassured him where her closed eyes might have otherwise given alarm, as did the slowing beat of her heart. Her hair fell across his face, and tickled, but he made no move to brush it away.
In time, though Erik couldn’t have said in how much time save that the sun hadn’t set, Toinette groaned and sat up. “Praise the saints,” she said and licked cracked lips. “And we’re…mostly…each in one piece.”
The whites of her eyes were as red as Erik suspected his own were, and her voice as hoarse as his throat felt. The cut on her leg was a raw-looking line of red, but it had mostly stopped bleeding from what he could tell. “Aye,” he said, “and glad to hear it from you. Though I fear we left the wine behind us when we changed, and the food as well.”
“Bah,” said Toinette, but good-humoredly. “And we’re quite lacking in mead and fowl as well. Inhospitable, I call it.”
Erik laughed, though it hurt his throat and his ribs alike. They’d both gone without for longer. Survival was food and wine enough.
“We should walk,” he said, though. “Get to the stream, clean your wounds.”
“Clean everything we can, after that run,” Toinette replied, getting to her feet with another groan. “Just poke me in the ribs if I fall over on the way. You’ll never carry me in your condition.”
He might have protested, but knew it for the truth, and was in no shape to speak very much. Instead, when he stood, he wrapped an arm around Toinette’s shoulders and, careful of her burns, leaned his weight a little on the one she offered.
Thus supporting each other, staggering sore-footed like a pair of drunks in the small hours of the morning, they retraced the paths they’d taken.
Dead trees stayed dead, and nothing moved among them. Time and nature might reclaim the woods around the temple, or the blight might remain. Not all scars healed. It was enough for Erik to know that the dead forest was a scar, to look through the trees and see the red light of the setting sun, and to breathe in nothing sinister as he walked.
Likewise, though the trees and wildlife in the livelier part of the forest were yet deformed, no phantom shapes appeared among them. The wind was chilly, more so as the evening approached, but the bone-deep cold was gone. A malignity had made its home nearby, and the land yet bore the marks, but It dwelt there no longer. The forest Toinette and Erik walked through was empty, and then twisted, but it was free.
They walked wearily enough that night fell when they were hours from the stream. Erik glanced down at Toinette as the sky darkened, and she shrugged beneath his arm. “I’d rather keep going. You?”
He nodded. Given the thing that had inflicted it, he didn’t want to sleep without cleaning Toinette’s wound, and his thirst was almost as great as his tiredness. More than that, the stream had become a symbol as they walked, a border. Once they made it there, they’d be back in the world they’d grown to know.
That was all sound reasoning, but by the time they finally dragged themselves to the water, Erik had questioned it to himself on several occasions. Even getting his head down to take a drink was an effort.
Yet the water did help. He was far beyond the reach of a second wind, but after minutes of drinking, when his stomach felt swollen from water, he knew himself to be alive again and possessed of human limbs, not rusty mechanisms. Erik dipped his face into the stream, washing away blood, sweat, and dirt alike, then turned to Toinette.
She sat barefoot and wet-haired on the bank, cupping water in her hands and pouring it over the slash on her leg. Blood ran anew as the scab broke open, and Toinette hissed in pain, but she kept going.
“Let me,” Erik said, kneeling at her side.
Without a word, Toinette leaned back on her hands, staring up at the sky as Erik took over her task. The wound was deep, and running had done it no good, but only blood ran from it. Erik saw no odd colors, smelled nothing unusual, and was cautiously relieved. “How does it feel?” he asked.
“Not bad,” she managed, and though her voice was unsteady with pain, Erik knew what she meant. “It hurts worse than a knife would’ve, but there’s nothing odd about it. Nothing cold, or…well, you know.”
“Aye, I do.”
The scraps of his sleeve they’d have used to mark doors, unused thanks to Adnet’s aid, made decent bandages. While Erik saw to her leg, Toinette lay on her side, soaking her burned hands in the water. “My pride,” she said, glancing down the length of her body at him, “may never recover.”
“Just as well. Pride’s a sin, they tell me.”
“Are you taking credit for saving my soul?”
Erik tied the final knot, sat up, and looked at her: bruised, cut, wearing only the dubious remains of her gown, in need of a far more thorough wash than her brief dip in the stream could provide, and utterly beautiful. “I’ll save you any way I can,” he said, “if there’s need.”
At that, Toinette turned and rose to face him, silent for a long minute before she spoke. “I love you too,” she said, “if you hadn’t worked that out. Now let’s get back onto land before we fall asleep and drown.”
They slept on the ground that night. It was hard, and colder than even the sand of the cave, but they could hear the stream running nearby, and Toinette curled into Erik’s arms, warm and loose-limbed. He couldn’t have voiced any complaints.
* * *
However she’d tried to hope, Toinette had truly thought she’d never see morning light again. Waking to it made up for the taste in her mouth and her hunger, just as having Erik pressed against her back outweighed the lack of mattress or blankets.
It was a good morning. It got better when they stripped and bathed in the stream, as cold as it was. Toinette wrung out her hair and rinsed it twice over, feeling that she rid it of invisible slime as well as the normal sort of filth.
Sleep and her nature had done well. Her hands were still sore, but no worse than they’d been after taking the wheel during a storm. The minor bruises and cuts had vanished. The wound from the un-ark had stopped bleeding, and didn’t start again when Erik cleaned it. It’d take days to heal fully. It would doubtless leave a scar. But it was on the mend.
Erik’s hands on Toinette’s leg were as gentle as the sunlight on her shoulders. She watched him as best she could from her angle, marking the muscles in his bare arms and chest as he worked and the fall of his hair over his face. He was very serious just then.
She smiled and waited, and then
, when the bandages were back on her leg, turned and stretched, pointing her toes and parting her thighs. Erik’s head lifted. Although her view wasn’t what she would have wished while he was kneeling, Toinette thought she saw motion between his thighs as well.
“Ah,” he said, his voice low in the morning air, “we haven’t celebrated our victory properly, have we?”
“Tragically.” Toinette ran a hand down from her neck, tracing her fingers around one pointed nipple, and over her stomach to brush the auburn curls above her sex. “And it’s always important to mark these occasions.”
Erik agreed, she saw, as he turned toward her. His cock had risen to press against his stomach, and swayed a little when he moved. He stretched himself out by her side, kisses hot down her neck and hand sliding between her thighs. “Only,” he said, “you’ll lie quiet this time, like a good lass.”
“Is that what you like in your women?” she teased, drawing her nails slowly up his spine. “How clerkly you’ve become.”
“I’ll show you clerkly later, love,” he growled into her shoulder. “Only you’re too tall for me to carry back, so I’ll have to leave you in shape for walking.”
And so they did go slowly, gently, in the steady rhythm of the running water near them. Toinette—looking up into green trees and blue sky as Erik thrust inside her and she felt herself falling into that final dissolution—thought, This is right, and knew she was thinking of more than pleasure or even love. The golden morning and the land itself were a part of what she and Erik did. It was life, and renewal, and a final triumph over the forces that would deny such things.
She did lie still, or still enough not to damage her leg further. Quiet Toinette didn’t manage at all. Before the end, she was crying out with joy in a voice that likely carried to the treetops.
Forty-Three
“They’ve come back!” Raoul bolted upward from his former seat on the rock and started forward to meet Toinette and Erik, until John caught him by the arm.
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