“Because of”—Trent gestured to the top of his head.
“No,” said Grenn. “Nothing like that. At least—I don’t think it’s anything like that.” He stared at the front of a clothing store. Its signage promised twenty percent off pullovers and bespoke boots. “Pet project.” His gaze returned to Trent. “And she’s apparently good at what she does.”
“Do ya know why exactly the Priests became a thing?”
“Kingy pushed super hard for ‘em—what?—five, six years ago? I thought, and so did a lot of us, that his repugnance for Manifeld is what caused it. I never really cared. Happened after my trials.”
“It would make sense,” said Trent, and he hoped he didn’t sound as unsure as he felt. He lamented not asking the king what had driven him to form the Priesthood. Manifeld no doubt had a hand in Brech’s actions, but his Majesty couldn’t have known the Leynar could manipulate the Light—at least in any meaningful way. Priests had quickly gained an earmark for Trent’s interest, and so did Brech’s involvement with them. “I wonder if the Undertaker would hold counsel with me.”
“I don’t see why she wouldn’t.” Grenn winced when he spoke the last syllable and sprang open his mouth, like trying to pop his ear. “Seemed on-board with you being Grand Master. But she’s been hush-hush since she got here. Won’t even let anybody know her real name. She’s just”—he held his right hand out and moved it in a downward arc—“the Undertaker.”
“Distrust has sown its seeds well in my absence, it would seem.”
“All depends on who’s tending the field. Distrust flourishes in uncertainty. Since you’re back, maybe they might come to bear.”
Trent huffed. Fucking farming metaphors, of course. “Just in time for War. Nothing could be more uncertain.”
“Then should we have come here first?” Perhaps despite himself, Grenn’s tone had grained with evident displeasure.
“Had to. I am the Grand Master, even if no one wants to believe it. I’m duty-bound to return to the Seat if I give an edict. Gone twenty years, and suddenly I activate everyone?” He tutted. “Though now that it’s done, I don’t know why I followed that instinct.”
“To return?”
Trent shook his head. “To recall everyone. I thought that—I dunno—that making everyone aware would be good. Couldn’t hurt, right? But even back during the War, when we were preparing for potential invasion—time was time, after all—no one wanted to believe.” He paused. “And then we got here and that demon found me, almost like I played into her damn hand.”
“That’s how you’re reading this?”
“Just a feeling. And again, me not understanding somethin—maybe underestimating someone is a better phrase—will get someone killed. Got people killed, Goddess alive. Because that damned thing somehow got into Karhaal.”
“If anyone can tell you how, it’s the apothecary.” Grenn wavered, long enough for Trent to become wary of the lull. He spoke when he noticed Trent staring at him. “Why do I get the idea you’re not on great terms with your secret-keeper? Just—you would have gone there first if you were, right?”
Trent sighed. “I haven’t talked to her in almost eighteen years.” She moved to Munsrow, gave up Ollerian to help you, for the gods’ sakes. “Lost contact with each other. My fault—it’s all my fault with her. I don’t know if she even wants to hear from me.”
“That’s not much to expect of someone, especially when that someone is, ya know, your secret-keeper.”
Trent considered what he wanted to say. He sufficed with: “I don’t expect much of anyone anymore.”
5
At the Spoke, Trent headed for a narrow alley between two of the streets that ran from the town’s center. “There’s a shortcut this way.”
Toward its other end, the sky darkened. The clouds, that he could see between overhanging balconies and eves, suddenly moved at a windswept pace across the sky. Any time he stopped to get a better look, he’d take one step too far and end up unable to see between the buildings, as though they conspired to obscure his sight.
Grenn had stopped at the alley’s mouth, his gaze well trained on the device he held.
“You waitin for something?” Trent said over his shoulder. His footfalls faded into quiet nonentity as he neared the other side, where he ducked under where two buildings had leaned together.
The square beyond appeared freshly-swept of snow and clear of time’s hard passage, the brick work un-scuffed and neat. A row of darkened shop fronts lined the plaza. He’d never seen this part of Karhaal before. Out-of-place adrenaline filled him with muted dis-ease.
Bellicose tones of a couple arguing filled the sterile air, far enough away that Trent heard it from every direction depending on which way he walked or turned. Deep-fry wafted to him then lost itself, guiding him nowhere. The atmosphere buzzed and pressed against him and morphed at the corners of his vision.
An old trashcan’s lid broke the tempered scene, and from between two shops, a man walked into the square from a side street. A serren followed him, hopping after the man on tiny feet, chittering in a squeaky language Trent didn’t understand. The man walked with a gimp. A crude wooden crutch tucked under his left arm, on the wrong side of his body to aid his crooked left leg. Gray hair matted down his stooped back.
The man paced a few steps, saying, “I understand. That doesn’t mean you’re right,” before he saw Trent and stopped. Brown teeth showed between his raw-red lips. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
Trent’s mind settled on the most obvious question: “Who are you?” Or maybe why would have been better.
The man puffed and headed for a chair that paired with a small iron-wrought table and sat. He leaned his crutch against his left armrest; a threadbare hanky hung from where the stick tucked under his arm. While he settled himself, against low groans and pained exhalations, he massaged a lump in his left leg that moved underneath his skin.
Trent got the idea, from outside his mind, that the store the man sat in front of sold frozen yogurt. But they didn’t call it that, and his mind struggled to figure out they.
“I’ve been trying to remember who I am for a long time,” the man finally said, like there hadn’t been a gap between him answering and the question. “I’d convinced myself once that I was trying to recall something, coming through all these different points, that I was heading somewhere meaningful.” His lower eyelids had pulled away from his eyes, and tears collected in pools before skidding down his face. “But that time passed so long ago, and now I worry I’ve gone far enough away that trying to find it again would—unloose the tether, and I’d lose myself forever. If I could head back”—then he spoke to himself: “Back. Just follow the crumbs.” He hit his head three times with his right hand, loud enough for Trent to wince at each thwack.
The serren tittered next to him, perched on the table on its hind legs. Its silver fur sheened even though no light shined upon it.
“Cookie crumbs.” He petted the serren with the back of his left hand. “Whatever you want, my prince.”
“Do you have a name?” Trent asked.
“He does.” The man gestured to the serren.
It cheeped at its master and stamped its right foot.
“She,” the man corrected himself. “Of course. We don’t use genders in my native tongue. At least I don’t think we do. Did.” He spoke in a language that sounded like babble to Trent, like he’d overloaded his cheeks with cotton balls. “Is that my native tongue?” He gestured to his head. “All gets jumbled up there, more than it already is.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t hit it so much,” said Trent.
The man just laughed and looked to the serren. “Small comforts, isn’t it?”
“What’s her name?”
“I can’t pronounce it. Doesn’t matter what language it’s in, my tongue gets caught in my throat. Got stuck behind my soft palette a few—has it been years? Whatever. Took days for it to fix itself. I suffice to just call her Mildred.
”
“And what do I call you?”
“Whatever you want. But Feneus L. Potkitt, at your service, if you please, and so on. I’m not sure how much service I can provide, and I’ve run out of uses for the artifice of names. She seems to enjoy hers, though.”
Mildred beamed a gummy grin. During his years as a farmer, he’d thought of the beasts as pests, merely thieves at the best of times that burrowed under his crops and pulled them through the ground to massive cave structures that tunneled for hundreds of miles. Trent imagined what Sieku would have said about one acting like an old man’s loyal hound—He what!?
Somewhere in his subconscious, Trent knew the questions he needed to ask, but their answers resulted in new queries that his mind couldn’t form the proper syntax or phrasing to ask about. “Where are—where are all the shop owners?” Sure, it makes sense to ask about them.
Fen looked at him from under dreary eyelids. “There’s nothing like that here. If anyone ever was, they left far before I arrived and have never returned. I like to imagine they jumped down the well.” He gestured to the covered cylinder at the square’s center behind Trent. “Gods know I wish I could. I’ve gotten a few visitors, though. People dressed like you, as unsure as the next of where they are, searching for answers I can’t give.”
Mildred chittered.
“Seriously, don’t ask him that.”
“I’ve heard of pockets opening like this before in Leynar towns,” Trent said. “Now that Priests are at Karhaal, I’m not surprised of spaces like this, really. How long have you been here?”
Feneus stared at him. “Karhaal. Yes, bit fancier armor, but”—he flicked his right temple a couple times with his middle finger—“something jogs up here every so often. Plenty of time passes without such blessings—long enough to lose track, to grow old and broken and keep running around in circles hoping I find my resolution. To move on to the next test, or whatever it is that comes next.”
Mildred barked at him.
Fen visored his brow with his right hand. “Woman, I can’t fit through your holes. Even if I could, where would we go?
She whined.
“The Underground of what? For all we know, you just get through the brick and fall into space.”
“What about this way?” asked Trent, pointing to a street across from where he’d entered. “There’s more town that way. Can’t you hear them?”
Fen waved his hand. “They’ve been arguing since right after I got here. Something about him not going down on her enough even though she does it for him all the time. You’d think he would just learn, yet here they are. Again.”
“Not them,” Trent said. He walked past Fen. “Just a few steps past this building”—he ran through the city plan in his head—“yeah, Helbret Avenue. Leads straight out to Vqenna if the gate’s open.”
Fen peered at him, unimpressed, his old body twisted in his chair. He laughed a solitary exhale, then turned forward and waved Trent off.
Trent followed the brick-way to its end, where it turned into an alley on his left that ended in a point of light and a small lane on his right that curved out of sight. He’d been to enchanted alcoves before, but nothing this sophisticated had he seen—Helbret Avenue should be right here. He knew it.
He headed right and followed the curve to its end, past stores’ back doors and new shop fronts. The darkness leered at him, and his reflection looked frightened when he tried to see inside, obscured by a mask-of-face not his own. He set his gaze forward and hurried past them. The street ended at a shopping square, and there sat Fen, who casually massaged the lump in his left thigh while he flipped through a tattered magazine on his lap, uninterested in Trent when he reappeared.
Huh. The couple argued as Trent lapped the mall, and he passed by the store behind which they had to live. He set his hammer down, put his foot on the windowsill in front of him, and pushed upwards. But muscles in his back seized, and the sill spilled away like sand and scattered him on his ass. When the last grain had refitted itself from under his boot, Trent touched the brick, which hardened under his hand and filled the air with a close approximation of how knocking on brick sounded when he rapped it with his knuckles.
“You think I haven’t tried that?” said Fen.
Trent stood and picked up his hammer. At the fork again, he chose left and headed toward the point of light. It dulled as he neared it, and at its end, before he ducked under a pair of joined buildings, he turned and saw Grenn staring at his tablet. He called to his young friend: “Grenn.” But Grenn didn’t respond, didn’t look up from his screen. One step toward him turned the world ninety degrees, and the building to Trent’s right became the ground. He stepped onto it with an unsure stride. The glass strained underfoot.
At the edge of his vision, a shadow stared at him, its hands held together on its chest by crossed fingers. When Trent looked its way, the shade tucked itself behind the corner from where Trent had come and peeked its hooded guise over the building’s edge. The alley shifted, and the buildings behind Trent fell and closed the gap to wherever they led.
The presence manifested next to him for his wandering gaze. “Ooh-woo,” it said in an effeminate voice. “Hello.”
“Good fuck!” Trent yelled, and he hopped toward Grenn—anything to put distance between him and the shade, which scuttled away, as though that gave it an advantage. He kept his back toward the ground, at least to ensure it couldn’t get behind him again.
A terror from outside himself gripped him, one that came at him in voices he didn’t recognize, in languages and pleas he couldn’t comprehend. All at once, he knew the gods vicious in their retributions against those who overstepped their bounds or tried to outsmart them, and though he didn’t understand the rules of the game he played, he understood another: run.
Trent bounded toward the alley’s end, and storefront and door and window cracked and splintered for his heavy step. The shadow retreated to the small street’s egress as Trent came to the fork. Even at a brief glimpse, the square below him appeared nothing like the one in which he’d found Fen. At its center, a huge fountain shot water toward the sky from the mouth of a naked seraphim, and scuffed cobblestone had replaced the ornate brickwork. His armor boosted him forward, and he landed on his knee against the shopfronts across the gap. Wood splintered under his impact.
Panic made him hasten, and in his rush, he struggled to right himself. His feet wouldn’t get under him. He didn’t need to see it to know the shadow had chased him around the corner, and his armor propelled him forward again. But the alley stretched like taffy, and a shadowy tendril wrapped around his waist to stop him, even against his breastplate’s engine.
“Grenn!” Trent screamed, yet like in a dream, his voice escaped him as hardly more than a whimper. The young man did nothing when the world turned again and the shadow’s curl hung Trent over a chasm of sky.
His vision wouldn’t resolve. He failed to make sense of the upended realm, and with nary a chance, the shade let him go. Uniquity tumbled from his grip and disappeared into the haze, but for it, his fingers caught a shop’s eve, on which he hoisted himself, his last hope urging him to hold on. But gravity pulled him toward the abyss.
The eve cracked, and though Trent had pulled himself onto his arms, the building tore to pieces, and he fell. The shade flickered at the edges of his sight as he tumbled. He reached for the ground, willing his body to fall the other way.
“Grenn!” he yelled, but he couldn’t even hear himself for the wind in his ears.
The shade stayed at the border where the clouds thinned and gave way to blue sky, but it watched him fall. “Do I know you?” he heard it say.
At the atmosphere’s edge, Trent saw the planet from which he plummeted. It looked nothing like Coroth, its continents mismatched, its oceans sprayed in the wrong places. The muscles in his neck spasmed for the discord in his mind, and his eyes crammed shut against the pain. The convulsion passed a moment later.
When he next saw,
the sky had turned to night. Stars shone above him in a way he’d never seen—perpetual twilight that lit the world as the moon did during its wax on his farm. Each star danced like a firefly on a humid night, and as he fell into their light, the world became nothing but a speck. The blackness of space turned into a blanket of galaxies that spanned in all directions away from him forever, blighted only by a morphing shadow at the corners of his sight.
Trent’s heart pulsed in his ears. Off nothing could he push, and as he twisted in place and fell from the only place he’d ever known, sorrow filled the deepest parts of himself. He’d had a purpose. Now it left him in this place.
A point of light far off to his right burned bright while he floated, and he wondered what distant system suffered because of its tumult, what affect it had on someone like him—someone just trying to make their way through an uncertain time. For weeks, Trent watched it, and his world became that light. His sorrow faded from him until in one minute, the nova dimmed, then disappeared altogether.
Trent wept. “Oh, Goddess alive, help me.” While the star had flared, the ghost had fled, but it returned, creeping toward him, pushing closer than it had, almost desperate to reach him. With his right thumb, Trent wiped a tear from his cheek. It glistened for the light that danced and twinkled against his skin, a small wonder in this nightmare as he gazed upon his manifest pain. But as he slowly turned, a shadow cast over him.
Horror made him jerk his head. The shade’s gotten me. But behind him, instead of a shadow, a star blazed purifying Light—the same Light that had glittered his tear—upon a planet. He craned his neck to get a better view and knew it true: Karli’s Light had somehow guided him home.
His body twisted, and he fell headfirst into the atmosphere, at first toward Keep, his home. An ash storm spread over millions of square kilometers, buffeting toward South Borliee. The rune on his arm warmed, and he looked north, where the Dragons’ Forest mired dark and wet. West of it, a midwinter storm had settled itself over the Light’s bastion at Karhaal. His purpose pointed him, and so he followed and aimed his rocketing body for the country of Vqenna.
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