by Anthony Huso
Taelin took the bag mutely with her good arm. It jerked her wrist, heavier than expected.
“Come on,” said Sena.
“I can’t. Not with my hurt knee … and now my arm.”
“Where are your crutches, Taelin?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Forgot them, did you?”
“I—”
“Come here.”
“My knee hurts. Dr. Baufent said—”
“Dr. Baufent let you take the crutches even though she knew you didn’t need them. Your arm is not broken. And your knee isn’t injured. You’re going to be fine.” Then, without another word, Sena shanked into the dark.
CHAPTER
35
The ambit of the Abominations was strong here but not as strong as it had been on the Stairs leading down to the Chamber.
There were noises in the dark. Sena knew she had to be vigilant. The “sky” was a great leaking slab. Epochs drained into a lake below the hill. It stank of the deep ocean. Huge walls of hewn basalt thrust themselves upward, strong enough to support the mile-thick chunk of sky. Despite the moisture, dust and porous husk-like stones muffled the landscape.
Sena could picture this rubble-strewn cyst as a garden where luminous moths fluttered over black pimplota under the moons. For a moment, she saw the fires erupting, the cinders and falling rock. She smelled the dead relatives and friends that had stunk for years before they turned to sludge beneath the piles.
She felt sorry for Arrian whose first question had been asked childlike, with cocked head, “Father? Is it you? Corwin?” Sena had been appalled by the antique weaponry strapped to her body, the rotten corslet cut from some mythic beast whose leather had outlasted the dark.
“I have never been to the Mainland,” Arrian had said stupidly. “It snows there but Father says I belong here, on the island.”
Sena had watched the ancient leather flake away from Arrian’s immortal skin. Nothing could cut that skin unless Arrian gave her permission. And that was why she had to be persuaded, like a child at the dentist. Sena had promised escape. She had soothed and bribed. She had been firm. She had been coddling. She had been vicious with the knife.
Sena looked at Taelin and pondered for a moment trying to explain. Not everything. Just the tiny parts that concerned her.
“Taelin?”
“What?”
“You need to keep your necklace safe. You need to keep it hidden.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the key to an important door.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t need it anymore. Here. You take it.”
“Actually I need you to carry it. I’m not going to be around when the door is opened.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your grandfather made it for a reason. With it, there’s a chance to do something good. To save people.” She could talk freely here, without fear of Nathaniel.
“That’s what I’ve always wanted to do,” said Taelin. “Help people. But I always … I always muck it up.” She was tearful again.
“I know,” said Sena. “But this is your chance. So keep the necklace safe.”
Sena watched Taelin’s fingers close over the demonifuge as Something shifted in the immense cavern, Something huge and ponderous slipping over stone.
Taelin gawped toward the sound, trying to see into the netherworld behind them. The shopping bag she lugged drew her fingers down into splotchy white hooks. The bag crinkled and banged against her knees.
Sena knew it was hard for the other woman to breathe here. Even without inhaling, Sena could taste salt and death.
Taelin stumbled.
Sena reached out and steadied her.
“We need to keep moving. They won’t tolerate us here much longer. Are you all right?” Her vocalization was a courtesy, an effort at displaying empathy.
Taelin marveled at the blackness; she was not all right. She pulled away when Sena reached for her. Her face was smeared with horror.
“Taelin?”
With both hands Taelin held up the shopping bag. Offering it to the darkness. A child displaying something she had bought. The bag gushed with light.
“She’s dead,” said Taelin.
Sena grabbed her by the hand. “That’s not true. You saw her blink.”
Taelin started blubbering. Sena was keenly aware of her own guilt in this. This was the cost of advancing her slender margins. Crazy as she was, Taelin managed to glow even here with a kind of radiant innocence. Sena could understand why Caliph found her pretty.
Another shudder squeaked through the cavern, like tons of rubber slipping, slumping somewhere along the far side of the lake. Sena didn’t look. She already knew What was there, What had crawled out of Lewlym’s Navel so many thousand years ago and died here in the dark.
“We need to go,” said Sena. She started walking and Taelin stumbled after. They crossed the flat ash-draped space that had once been a courtyard and entered the fortress.
The vaulted hallways of Jorgill Deep were empty. Whatever tapestries or paintings had decorated them had long turned to ash. Smudges of rust lay here and there, the stains of former objects. Halls of empty night. More dust. Thick gray tendrils choked every room and casement. Taelin’s candle struggled in one hand while the glowing shopping bag cast a soft moving halo in the clouds stirred by her feet.
Sena led the way, her compasses subtracting, narrowing. She guided Taelin from the dripping vaults up a shrunken staircase wracked by catastrophic quakes. Anciently sundered stones overlooked the delirious blackness where something vast and unseen jostled far below.
It was dead. It did not watch them. Flesh so strange, like a mushroom, honeycombed and deep, deep enough to confuse souls. It lacked eyes. Its perception was endemic; superseding organic limitations with an acute hyperawareness. It knew precisely where Sena and Taelin were. It suffered them to be here. It felt the power of Sena’s ambit.
Sena’s eyes tracked It. She maintained her vigil in case It tried to make a grab. She could not hide from It. It “saw” in all directions: a black prehensile god.
“What’s down there?” Taelin was gibbering now. She sensed her own danger.
They had reached the parapets and the shattered remains of an arcade. Sena walked down the center. She drew up when she realized she was leaving Taelin behind.
“The same thing wired to St. Remora. You know? The eleven clocks?”
“Yes. W-what are they for?”
“It’s one of the .24”
“Sekwah-what?”
Sena leapt over a pulverized obsidian window frame in the destroyed hall and repositioned Taelin behind her. She also tried to modify the air for Taelin’s sake but the Yillo’tharnah were pressing too hard, pushing, groping—despite the agreement, they had begun to struggle for the necklace. While Sena pushed back and mentally warned them away, reminding them of the pact, she tried to answer Taelin’s question.
“You remember what you saw that night I came to St. Remora? The shadow bursting out of the wall?”
“Yes…”
“That was one of them.”
“But I thought … everyone knows there are no such things—or if there ever were they were locked away, shut up or entombed or—”
“They were,” said Sena. “But you can still feel Them sometimes. That chill that goes through you? In lonely places? Their thoughts can leak through from the other side, and if They want to, if They need to, They can manifest for short durations even though it costs Them dearly. Which is how I got these—” She gestured to the lines on her body.
“Imagine a wasp’s nest,” said Sena. “Gone wild. Built enormous in every direction. Like the wasps kept building and building. For decades, centuries, millennia. Black papery chambers so deep—so perfect. Except there are no wasps. It’s the cells that are sentient. The pockets. The empty space that’s thinking. And the larvae inside those pockets, those pastel burning maggots—are souls. Little squirming workers stacked
in twisted tori, in perfect galleries.
“The Yillo’tharnah have shapes described by numbers. Their ratios, set down in books, were the inspiration for the coriolistic centrifuge, which launched Pneumafuel L.L.C. in 1431 S.K., and Solvitriol Solutions two years later.”
Her words were a hook that pulled Taelin along. “This is about business?” asked Taelin. “I don’t understand.”
“No,” said Sena. “This about numbers, physics. But Solvitriol Solutions discovered that the pneumata in their batteries had inertia. Think of it like money. The more you have the more you can consume. And faster.
“Pneumata are the gravel in Their gizzards. Pneumata are Their currency. They barter in souls.”
“And that’s what’s down there in the dark? Yillo’tharnah?” Taelin’s pronunciation was skewed.
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand what They are.”
“The harder you try to understand, the more inconsistencies you will find. Their bodies are haloed in paper ash you could destroy by breathing. They’re not made of matter. They are holes. They are dead. And when they are sufficiently haunted, They can move.
“Don’t believe most of what I just told you. The language is wrong. The words are…” she touched her upper lip with her tongue, “wrong. Besides.” Sena took the candle back and laced her fingers in Taelin’s. “I don’t really know what They are.”
They had arrived at a small room whose doorway had no portal. The ash at the threshold showed frequent tracks. In one corner, the ruins of what might have once been a bed lay as a crumbled relic. If Arrian had ever slept, or pretended to sleep, she had done it here, under a window that now looked out on a wall of stone.
Sena looked down at a ceramic doll’s head, peering morosely from the gray powder.
* * *
TAELIN tried to remember her mission home in the snow-filled streets of Isca but the picture would not focus. She tried to think of people’s names that she knew there. When she thought too hard it always hurt right where the boy had knocked her head against the cement.
Taelin looked down at the crunched doll’s head. Sena was busy, crouched, sifting through the powder with her fingers, holding the candle.
The witch had endlessly outmaneuvered her. She was more powerful than Taelin had ever expected. Subtle yet strong. Like wind orchestrating the shapes of trees. How had this happened? She sat down with her glowing shopping bag and watched Sena dig in the ash.
Everything Taelin had tried to embody was slipping away from her. In this vacuous hole no thought of Nenuln’s golden light could soothe her.
I am not a priestess.
“Are you all right?” Taelin looked into Sena’s concerned face and those horrible, beautiful eyes. The witch’s thumb reached out and stroked her lips, which was precisely the thing her mother would have done when she was a girl. It was terrifying and comforting at the same time. Taelin tasted ashes on her lips.
The candle seemed to float beside them, unattended. This strange fact freed Sena’s other hand, in which she rolled a small spherical object. She must have found it in the powder of the room. Despite the dust, it was black and shimmered with a satiny organic texture.
The candle was burning low. It settled to the floor and sagged there like a glowing mushroom.
“What is it?” Taelin nodded.
“A black pimplota seed, for which I didn’t have a blueprint.”
Taelin believed that Sena was a god.
* * *
SENA moved the seed from her hand into her backpack with hardly a whisper. Then she asked for the shopping bag.
With a blank expression, Taelin nudged the glowing purple dragon with her foot. It was heavy. She kicked it gently. Sena dragged it the rest of the way, dredging a meaningful furrow between them.
She gripped it by one of the handles and the object inside shifted. When she tipped it, leaned it over and upended it, Arrian’s head slid out like a stone. It came to rest on its crown, severed neck blazing into the dark.
From her pack, Sena called for a slender steel tube. There was no point in being discreet anymore. Taelin had ceased paying attention and even an endless string of miracles could do little harm. Their relationship, no longer a charade of normalcy, now at least simulated truth.
Sena uncorked the tube and rolled Arrian’s head over. This was what Arkhyn had requested, that she get his daughter out. But not like this.
Sena nervously upended the shuwt tincture into Arrian’s candescent tissues. She tipped the head back on its crown so the poison rolled up the back of the throat, pooled through the sinus and dripped into the seat of consciousness. She was uncertain this endeavor would end in success.
She whispered to the head in Dark Tongue, hoping to comfort the creature that had once been a girl. Arrian could still resist, close her cells to the exchange. But she seemed disoriented. Her eyelids fluttered as the tincture took effect.
Arrian would be going out like Caliph and Taelin had gone out, like everyone who used the drug went out. But unlike them she would not be coming back. This was an overdose of the variety Arkhyn Hiel had used.
Sena felt sorry for Arrian. Twenty thousand years had been enough. Too much in fact. While she waited for the pneuma to seep from Arrian’s neck, she watched Taelin scratch the silvery patch of skin on her wrist.
Taelin noticed the attention. “I think I’m getting it.” She sounded defeated. “I should have listened to Anselm and stayed out of the tents. I’ve been so stupid.”
“No,” said Sena. “You’ve doing everything right. Trust me.”
“You mean I’m not going to die of plague? Can you really see that? Can you really see everything?”
“I can see you’re not going to die of plague.”
“How do you know?”
“We don’t have a lot of time to—”
“Time to what? Why did you bring me here? What are we doing here?”
“We’re here to get Arrian, and the pimplota seed for the ink.”
“You didn’t need me to do that—either of those things.”
“Yes, I did. But I also brought you because I needed to tell you something about your grandfather’s necklace and this was the only place I could do that.”
“I don’t understand. This place is—”
“This place is safe enough to talk.” Sena steered away from Nathaniel Howl. She didn’t try to explain that the shade was always listening or that originally she had planned to bring Caliph here, instead of Taelin, so that she could tell him directly what she was doing. That idea had quickly been scuttled. Showing deference to the High King was an unnecessary risk. Already, Nathaniel was on the cusp of understanding the truth.
“It doesn’t feel safe here,” said Taelin.
“I know. And it’s not. But it’s the only place safe enough to tell you what I need to tell you.”
“So tell me.” Taelin’s eyes were red-rimmed and glazed.
Sena paused, grew serious and said, “Your grandfather made that,” she pointed to the necklace, “so that it could be broken.” Sena felt a tremble in the black air, as the Yillo’tharnah pressed her ambit. They reached for the demonifuge and Sena gasped under the sudden weight. Taelin didn’t seem to notice as Sena paused to check her boundaries. After a painstaking moment, Sena said, “It’s not really a necklace, Taelin. It’s a hole in the world. It’s been tearing, getting wider for years, for decades. Right now, it’s enormous, but that little ring of numbers is like a drawstring, holding the whole thing together.”
“A hole? In the world? What’s inside?”
“Monsters.”
Taelin laughed quietly without voice. “So I was actually right.” She mumbled through her beggary high. “It is a demonifuge.”
“Yes.”
“Then why break it?”
“Because when that door opens, so will another. And that’s our chance to run.”
“You really think the world is ending?” Taelin coughed on the harsh vol
canic dust drifting over the floor.
“It’s already here,” said Sena. “The Cabal has been spreading it. People are changing, dying, everywhere.”
“You mean the disease. But we can stop that,” said Taelin. “Stonehold has vaccine. We can—”
“Shh—” And Taelin stopped talking. “There’s something else,” said Sena, “besides the necklace, that I need you to carry.”
“What is it?”
The tincture had burned through Arrian’s cells. The Gringling girl’s pneuma slipped out.
Taelin touched the scar on her forehead and Sena knew it was done. Arrian had a new home. The priestess and the sheleph of Jorgill Deep were together now, until the end.
Nathaniel was going to be furious.
* * *
A TREMOR shook the ground as the Yillo’tharnah pressed Sena’s ambit, bent on seizing the necklace. Fine dust trickled from overhead and Sena looked up into old cracks with new dimensions.
The Yillo’tharnah had preserved Soth in this bubble beneath the Loor Ocean for twenty thousand years. They had buttressed it from the crushing deeps to house the things Sena had gathered from the ash. They had preserved this place not because They cared about it, but because of the bargain Arrian’s father had struck. This place and the objects it contained were pieces to be bartered. But now, with the necklace so close at hand, They reneged and reached out.
Taelin stirred slightly and complained that she felt cold.
“I know,” said Sena. “It will get better.”
Arrian’s head was empty. The perfection of her tissues still oozed light. The head would never die. But it was an empty vessel now and that was a kind of death. The exact death that the Yillo’tharnah existed in.
Sena could smell Their sweet stink. They were drowsy from the evaporation of souls. From waiting for eternities. But They were stirring now.
A massive shape hurled itself against the fortress, sending another tremor through the walls. Somewhere, a section gave way and, like a hydrant gushing from another world, the Loor began pouring in.
