Hansa stepped back, and as he felt the rift open, he put himself in Umber’s arms. Umber had put Naples gently down on the rime-frosted grass, and now held Hansa tightly.
It’s not the time, Umber said, but before another crazed Numini offers you the option . . . I’ve decided I don’t want to break the bond. If you don’t.
Hansa laughed again, and then leaned forward to catch a snowflake on his tongue.
Divine snow tasted a little like strawberries, and that, too, seemed funny.
I love you, too.
Then at last, Alizarin stood in front of him, a form of dark beauty, indigo shadows, and sharp claws. Umber’s arms tightened, his body going tense, but neither of them moved to struggle or flee. Guards, living and dead, looked at Hansa and started to raise blades.
“Stay back!” Hansa ordered, as Alizarin’s shape solidified, coming closer to the somewhat-feline blue form Hansa knew as Alizarin’s “play” form. The Abyssi raised onto his toes and lifted his head to sniff the air, as if seeking an elusive scent.
Hansa braced himself for the attack, but it never came. Instead, Alizarin turned.
“No,” Hansa whispered as the Abyssi moved not toward him and Umber, but toward Pearl, Lydie, Cadmia, and Ruby. He stalked forward, his tail swishing, then paused, rocking side to side questioningly. Something was in his way, something that, like the shades, had gradually started to come clear.
Lydie’s eyes suddenly widened at the same time that Pearl shouted, “Daddy!”
Cadmia whipped an arm around the girl, turning her away just in time, before the Abyssi pounced.
At last and unwillingly, Hansa could see the Numini, who shone in all the radiant colors of the sunrise—pink and gold and white and black—for only an instant before the Abyssi tore into him as effortlessly as he had once devoured nearly a dozen guards.
Instead of blood, this time, what rained down was a mix of snow and feathers.
The world sparked, beautiful, as the first hints of true dawn shone though the carnage.
Over and over, Pearl wept, “Daddy . . . Daddy . . . Daddy!”
Alizarin shook dust from the Numini’s feathers from his arm, then started to move toward Pearl again. Cadmia pushed Pearl behind her, toward the ring of living soldiers, and hissed, “Protect her,” before she stood firm before Alizarin.
Alizarin looked at her. And stopped.
He turned, and his silver gaze raked the remains.
Silver?
As Hansa watched, the Abyssi collapsed, gathering feathers with trembling hands. He lifted first one and then another before he raised his face and howled. The sound made Hansa’s throat tighten and brought tears to his eyes, and at the same time pulled him forward.
“Careful,” Umber warned. “You’re a mancer now. You’ll be drawn to your Abyssi, but that doesn’t make him safe for you.”
Hansa shook his head and moved out of Umber’s arms until he could kneel in front of Alizarin. He put his hand on blue fur. “Alizarin?”
“I killed him.”
“You had to,” Hansa said.
“I killed him!” Alizarin cried, the pain in his voice bringing Cadmia to his side.
She reached for him tentatively. “Rin?”
“I killed him,” Alizarin said once more. “He was . . . I was . . .” He dropped his head.
“Dear Numen,” Umber whispered. “He’s . . .”
“Veronese knew what he was doing,” Ruby whispered. “He gave himself willingly.” No, she wasn’t whispering. She was fading, as were the other shades. Like a final echo in the night, Hansa heard her say to Jenkins and the others, “This way. He told me how I could bring you all . . .”
Then she was gone.
“Veronese knew,” Azo said, limping up to join them, “but how did you, Hansa? He could have devoured you when you walked up to him.”
“Couldn’t you feel it?” Hansa asked. How could anyone think Alizarin would have hurt him, right then?
“We’re not bound to him,” Umber pointed out, still sounding dazed. “I didn’t realize . . .”
Alizarin leaned forward, his body shaking with spasms, and he began to whimper.
“Step back,” Hansa warned Cadmia, who was still leaning against Alizarin.
“What? Why?”
He pulled her away as feathers the color of night cut through the Abyssi’s back. Inky blue with streaks of silver like stars, vast wings grew, coated with silver dust that fell to the ground when Alizarin shuddered once more, twitching them awkwardly.
“Gressi,” Hansa said, as proud as a father who has just watched his first child being born.
Umber quirked a brow, started to speak, stopped, then simply said, to Hansa, “Gressumancer.”
Alizarin did not stop to marvel at or even acknowledge his own divinity. Instead, he reached for Cadmia and clutched her tightly as he wept.
With an aching heart, Hansa suspected Alizarin might cry for a long time, as he learned to understand, accept, and cope with Veronese’s final gift to him.
To all of us, Umber added silently. Look around.
The square was emptier than it had been when they had first run out here, probably due to people fleeing—that election wasn’t going to be quite a landslide after all, apparently—and the abandoned streets had been ravaged by earthquake, fire, and ice, but the creatures of the Other realms had faded back into their respective planes.
“Ruby? Jenkins?”
No response. Those boundaries, too, were restored. Remembering the last words he had heard from Ruby, Hansa realized she must have led her brother and the others to the Numen after all.
Hopefully the new management is better, Hansa thought grimly. Quinacridone was dead. What were the others like? Could the Gressi still strengthen the veils to keep the Numini from breaking through again?
Gressi.
He looked at Alizarin, and finally processed Umber’s words.
Gressumancer.
Those two things were required to keep the world from falling apart.
And he was one of them.
Quinacridone and Modigliani had been killed—he thought. Modigliani had been dispatched by a high arbiter of the Numen and, though technically Quinacridone had been killed by a mancer, the weapons had been formed of the bones of powerful Abyssi. They might really be dead.
If not, the next time they tried to break through and take over, Hansa and Alizarin would be the ones standing exactly in the way.
In the meantime, Hansa looked back, to where Cadmia and Umber had gently laid Xaz and Naples on the grass by the edge of the plaza. The realms were secure for now, but not without a bitter price.
“I’ll see you in the next world,” Hansa whispered to Naples. “Try not to take over before I get there.”
On the other hand . . .
“Never mind. Rule the fucking place. You would be good at it.” The Abyss needed a new king anyway.
He pushed himself to his feet. What next?
“Sex?” Umber suggested.
Hansa pondered the possibility, but not for very long.
“In memory of Naples,” he replied, solemnly. Mentally, he prodded at the raw, tender place in his heart Naples had briefly occupied. They had been enemies first, and more recently lovers. Modigliani had resurrected Naples once, and certainly that wouldn’t happen again, but it was still hard for Hansa to believe this death would be the Abyssumancer’s true end any more than the previous one had been.
“Absolutely,” Umber agreed.
Wait—“Fuck!”
“What?” Cadmia jumped at Hansa’s vehement tone.
He hunched a little, embarrassed. “I promised my mother I would have breakfast with her.”
“But . . .” Umber’s eyes widened. “Earthquakes, Gressi, end of the world, and you’re going to have breakfast?”
Hansa shrugged. “We can still have sex. Just . . . after you meet my mother.”
Umber shook his head.
“We should’ve let the worl
d end.”
“It still might,” Lydie murmured. “Do we stand, fight, or flee?”
“Wha—” Hansa cut off his own stupid question as he looked up and saw the company of guards that was now striding forward, led by Rinnman. There would be fast-talking necessary, some to keep himself and the others from being executed—and some to win the position of President and make it work for him.
Because now, more than ever, Hansa wanted to fix this world.
He stepped forward, to the front of the group but clearly still part of them. Umber, Lydie, Azo, and Cadmia fanned out behind him.
“We stand.”
Epilogue: Rinnman
It was the third time Rinnman had sat on tribunal for Hansa Viridian.
The first time, Hansa had been—at least partly—guilty. It was hard to lie to an animamancer. Hansa Viridian had not been having inappropriate sexual relations with his best friend Jenkins Upsdall, but he hadn’t been entirely honest when he had denied ever having such thoughts.
Rinnman had voted against conviction.
The second time, Hansa had been—at least mostly—innocent. Rinnman had never believed the young, earnest lieutenant had been deceiving them all for years about Abyssal allegiances, or that he had deliberately led his men into a deathtrap. If he had meddled in black magic, he had begun to do so only after that event.
And clearly, he had begun to do so.
That wasn’t the question at hand.
It was strange, starting with the premise that Hansa Viridian—along with Cadmia Paynes, Umber Holland, and Arylide Rackley—had engaged in the practice of sorcery, and then needing to debate whether or not they had committed a crime. Rinnman had been quite sure there had been another person with them, a woman with clearly unnatural traits, but she had disappeared before the arrests were made; Rinnman had deliberately encouraged the assumption that, like the otherworldly beasts and shades, she had disappeared when the veils between the realms restabilized.
He had also firmly suggested that any hint of magic on the child, Pearl, had been caused by her exposure to what had happened in the Cobalt Hall—and then had sent her back to the Hall, away from sighted guards, before anyone could question it.
Maybe, by the time she came of age, she wouldn’t need to hide.
Maybe.
In the meantime, to decide what charges should be leveled against Viridian and his cohorts, they had needed to refer to the oldest archives, which still held records of the laws regarding sorcery and malfeasance from the days of the royal house. It would never have occurred to Rinnman to open those records if it hadn’t been for a woman named Keppel, who had appeared at the compound with a manuscript scribed by Dahlia Indathrone in the first days after the revolution. Keppel claimed the manuscript had been stolen by the individuals truly responsible for the magical disaster that had so nearly destroyed Kavet.
Rinnman had not missed the shine of Abyssal power on the young woman, who had refused to come in to give a statement.
The most powerful statement came from another Abyssumancer, a wheat-blond man named Cupric, who had come to the compound weeping and begging for the brand. His flesh was still sizzling from the mark, which would burn away any mancer’s power, when he began telling his story.
It rose Rinnman’s gorge, but he listened. He invited two others in to listen. And he took notes.
Then, acting within the authority of Citizen’s Initiative 126, he executed the vile creature without further discussion, debate or trial.
Then he brought the evidence before the tribunal.
“By previous vote, we have declared the four accused innocent of the crime of malfeasance. The question now at hand,” he said to the group, where he was acting as secretary and judge, “is whether Viridian, Paynes, Holland, and Rackley should be pardoned entirely for their use of sorcery, as defined under the articles of Citizen’s Inititive One-Twenty-Six, under the reasoning that such magic was wielded for the defense of the country of Kavet—and, as has been explained to us, of not only our entire world but the realms beyond as well.”
Rinnman had considered recusing himself from the tribunal. He could have admitted to his own power and taken his place beside the others who had bravely decided to put themselves before the 126 and demand justice. After so many years in the 126, keeping his power carefully veiled all day every day from sighted guards, it would almost have been a relief.
Almost.
He hadn’t. Partly, he had stayed because he wanted to ensure this trial happened, and was fair. None of them had fully understood what was happening when Hansa and his companions stumbled out of the Cobalt Hall with corpses and monsters among them; Rinnman had insisted that they needed to allow the accused to speak on their own behalfs, something that normally was not allowed. He had also been the one to propose that a blanket charge of sorcery was inappropriate, and the trial should be for malevolence instead—a charge he felt fairly confident this group was innocent of.
So, partly he had stayed because he wanted to ensure justice, but that wasn’t the main reason. The real reason he stayed, and stayed hidden, was because he wasn’t a hero. He would wield a sword to protect the innocent from evil, but he wouldn’t put his neck in front of that sword’s swing.
He would survive today, no matter which way the vote went.
He was a bit of a coward.
Especially since he knew, whichever way the vote went, the course of Kavet’s future had been irrevocably changed by recent events.
“All in favor of granting a complete pardon for these four individuals’ charges of sorcery, raise your hand now.”
Some hands raised. Some stayed down. Rinnman began to count.
Acknowledgments
As the Mancer trilogy comes to a close, I want to thank everyone who helped these books and this world come to life with their encouragement, advice, feedback, and support. Mortal had a few key beta readers, including Becky Friedman and Raeven, whose willingness to dive into this and any other story I hand them and provide fantastic and focused comments has definitely improved the quality of the book in your hands.
About the Author
AMELIA ATWATER-RHODES is the author of the Mancer Trilogy: Of the Abyss, Of the Divine, and Of the Mortal Realm. She is also the author of three YA series, Den of Shadows, The Kiesha’ra, and The Maeve’ra, which have been ALA Quick Picks for Young Adults, School Library Journal Best Books of the Year, and VOYA Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror List Selections.
www.atwaterrhodes.com
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By Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Mancer Trilogy
Of the Abyss
Of the Divine
Of the Mortal Realm
Den of Shadows
In the Forests of the Night
Demon in My View
Shattered Mirror
Midnight Predator
Persistence of Memory
Token of Darkness
All Just Glass
Poison Tree
Promises to Keep
The Kiesha’ra
Hawksong
Snakecharm
Falcondance
Wolfcry
Wyvernhail
The Maeve’ra
Bloodwitch
Bloodkin
Bloodtraitor
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
OF THE MORTAL REALM. Copyright © 2018 by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, revers
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Digital Edition AUGUST 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-256217-3
Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-256218-0
Cover design by Guido Caroti
Cover photographs © yousang/Shutterstock (mountains); © Maxiphoto/iStock/Getty Images (sky); © CarrieColePhotography/iStock/Getty Images (tree)
Harper Voyager, the Harper Voyager logo, and Harper Voyager Impulse are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.
HarperCollins is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States of America and other countries.
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