The Shining City (v5)

by Fiona Patton

  And fell into a total, silent, and all-encompassing darkness. The blond-haired youth and the rising tower appeared before his eyes once more, and as he fought to keep his head above water, the youth came into focus.

  Spar, but not as Graize had known him. Spar grown with eyes as black as pitch and the power of prophecy swirling about him in the shape of a wide, black net.

  Graize spat a curse at him, but his rival just made a casual gesture and the water closed over his head once again, the weed-choked confusion of the distant past entangling his arms and legs. He saw a mist-covered doorway and a dark-haired boy with a prophetic line of red across his cheek beckoning him toward warmth and safety, but before he could take his hand, a future filled with blood and gold swept them apart. He saw the dark-haired boy—he saw Brax—give his promise of warmth and safety to another—to Spar—and the pain of his betrayal twisted under Graize’s feet to become a vast and empty landscape of madness and loss. Brax became a man and Graize fought him in the fields before Serin-Koy and then on the grasslands before the Gurney-Dag foothills. When he raised his arm to strike him down, his Godling screamed Its denial, and he plunged under the churning waters once again.

  “Kardos!”

  A single word shot toward him through the maelstrom, and he struggled to catch hold of it, but the water was filled with choking weeds once more, the past became a future of madness and death dragging him under again. Far in the distance, he thought he saw Brax, outlined in silver, standing on a snow-capped mountain ridge, beckoning as he had before, but then the path split, and Brax struck him a blow that hit him like a lead ball, throwing him backward.

  A sharp pain blossomed in his chest, and the water filled with blood. It swirled about him, driving the spirits around him mad with hunger. He fought them as savagely as he’d fought them years before, but the blood leeching into the water was his own and he found himself slowly weakening. The mountainside exploded in crimson fire, and the past reared up, writhing like weeds in a storm, seeking to ensnare him and Brax together. Darkness rushed toward them, Spar in its center. His rival watched them struggle, his face twisted in uncertainty, and then as the spirits rushed forward in a swarm of hunger, he stepped aside as Hisar suddenly slammed into the water above them.

  “NO! MINE!”

  The young God slapped the spirits away with a single smack of Its hand, then knocked Graize from the water with an equally violent gesture. Spar jerked Brax to safety and Graize felt arms, both strong and physical, catch him up and jerk him out of prophecy.

  “Kardos!”

  He opened his eyes.

  Danjel’s smooth features swam before him, the Yuruk’s own eyes wide with concern. For a moment, he thought Danjel had fallen into the water beside him, then he tasted blood where his teeth had scored his lips. The physical and the prophetic struggled for supremacy; with his head swimming with vertigo, he caught hold of the Yuruk’s hand to steady himself and slowly the physical won through.

  Danjel’s eyes cleared.

  “Are you back?”

  Graize coughed weakly. “Almost . . . back,” he gasped as the whisper of prophetic pain echoed across his ribs, then faded. “Where?”

  Danjel smiled in relief. “In my arms, in the mud, outside a shearing shed, on the north bank of the Halic, beneath the aqueduct, a mile or so from Anavatan’s Northern Trisect. We were just about to make camp when you collapsed.” Lifting him into a sitting position, Danjel swept a lock of rain-soaked hair from Graize’s face with one hand while maintaining a comforting grip around his chest with the other. “Did you have a vision?”

  “An attack.”

  “You had an attack?”

  A dozen cryptic answers came and went, each one choked with weeds, and with a burst of unusual impatience, he snarled at them to get back into vision where they belonged. “No,” he answered harshly. “Got . . . attacked.”

  Danjel’s eyes widened again. “By?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Over now. I won.”

  “NO! MINE!”

  The echo of Hisar’s presence thrummed against the lien, and Graize stared blearily past Danjel’s face, expecting to see the Godling vibrating the air above them, but Hisar was nowhere to be seen. As his head finally cleared completely, he saw the huge pillars of the aqueduct disappearing into the fog, heard the sound of running water high above his head, smelled the faint odors of dung and hay from the fields all around them, and heard the distant bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle. The sun of his prophecy disappeared behind a blanket of purely physical rain, and he remembered where he was.

  He and his small party had parted ways with Rayne, leaving their ponies in her charge and crossing the Halic just hours before this latest round of storms had spun the waters into an impassable maelstrom. Always wary of boats, Danjel had argued against any crossing at all, but standing staring at the gathering storm clouds, Graize had cut the argument short with unusual bluntness.

  “We can’t infiltrate the Western Trisect as a group without notice. The God-Wall’s too high to climb, and its gates are guarded by Estavia’s Sworn. We have to enter through the Northern Trisect where the wall is purely physical and guarded with less attention.

  “Besides, you remember the lovely jagged rock formations and piles of broken blocks and rubble gathered around the aqueduct that we navigated last time we boated down the Halic, Kardos,” he continued in a sweeter tone. “The waters swirl and churn on the quietest of days, throwing up eddies and whirlpools that spin around the great pillars, ever searching for an imprudent little wild-lands swallow to . . .” he chuckled. “To swallow,” he finished. “Look into your prophecy and tell me what these storms have wrought on such a landscape.”

  Danjel had glared at him but remained silent, and so, led by the more experienced Skirosians, they’d made the crossing with a northern hills fishing party who neither knew nor cared about their conflict with the shining city to the south. They’d traveled on foot through increasingly savage weather until they’d finally fetched up beside the aqueduct’s more northerly expanse, making good time under its partial protection. Until now.

  Graize reached up to touch the blood-smeared lump spreading across the back of his skull. “The others?” he rasped.

  “Are inside in the dry where we should be. Can you stand?”

  “Yes.”

  Danjel helped him up, then catching him around the waist, half supported, half carried him into the shearing shed as the skies opened up with still more driving rain.

  Warmth and the comfortingly muted silence of stone and thatch surrounded them at once as Danjel kicked the door closed behind them. The Skirosian entourage had already stowed their gear and gotten a fire going in the hearth, Yal and Hares were pulling food from their packs, and Panos was standing by the largest of the empty stalls, staring up at a complex spider’s web in the corner as Graize headed for the fire. She glanced over at him as he sank onto the hearthstone with an inaudible sigh.

  “We are discovered?” she asked in a tone of simple curiosity.

  Graize just shrugged.

  “By Spar,” Danjel answered, merging swiftly to the female form. Pulling out a pouch of herbs from her own pack, she handed them to Yal. “Can you make a poultice from these?”

  The Petchan woman nodded. “I’ll need to boil some water first. How long have we got?”

  “Long enough,” Graize answered, his voice growing stronger as he soaked in the fire’s comforting warmth. “He’s seen us by the aqueduct, but the aqueduct’s long. As long as a snake swimming through the water,” he added in his more usual singsong manner. “A grass snake maybe, swimming in the weed-choked water? No, it had better be a water snake, hadn’t it? But he doesn’t know what part of the water snake’s body we’re swimming beside and he can’t send any snake catchers against us in this weather, so we have time to build a rat trap.”

  Yal raised one eyebrow at him. “Well, it’s nice to see your fall hasn’t addled your wits any,” she said in a
dry voice. “I’ll just see to your poultice, then.”

  As Graize pressed a hand against his chest, feeling the last of Hisar’s presence whisper along the lien, he nodded. “A poultice,” he echoed, “to staunch the flow of prophecy into the world before it builds itself into a snow-capped mountain ridge.”

  “Would that be such a bad thing?” Danjel asked, gently removing Graize’s jacket and tunic.

  Graize’s right pupil contracted until it almost disappeared. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Feeling the metaphysical bruise along his ribs, Graize bared his teeth. “Because I don’t want to climb it.” Accepting the dry cloak the wyrdin held out to him, he wrapped it about his shoulders and refused to say more. As thunder rumbled in the distance, he thrust aside the last vestige of the black beach and its accompanying future streams.

  Far to the south, in the dark place, Spar and Hisar—still in Its tower-seeming—stood regarding each other with equally dark expressions.

  The young God was the first to break the silence.

  “You stopped me,” It accused, Its voice echoing across the now-empty beach.

  “You were interfering with the vision,” Spar retorted. “We needed to see where it would lead.”

  “Into the future? Into that future?”

  “Maybe. Into a future we can use, anyway.”

  “No. I don’t like it. It’s too confusing. His present is all muddied up with his past, and it looks like there might be two separate futures branching out with the same strength: the mountainside one where Brax and Graize stand together, and one where Graize gets injured, maybe even killed. By Brax. And then they both fall.” The tower bared a sudden set of teeth. “I don’t want that,” It snarled. “I won’t have that. I saw one path, not two. I won’t have two.”

  Spar raised an eyebrow at It. “Then don’t have two. At the end of the vision you intervened to save Graize. Intervene in the future.”

  “I intervened to save Graize in the dark place,” Hisar corrected stiffly. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “So, make it the same thing.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet. You saw us all together with the spirits of the cistern. That has to be where we’ll make our stand. Do it there.”

  “There.” Hisar sniffed dismissively. “Your great trap isn’t there,” It reminded Its First Priest. “It’s on the other side of the Halic.”

  “Then we have to get there.”

  “How?” Hisar demanded again, changing from tower-seeming to golden-seeming in an agitated spray of light. “The rain and the fog have driven every boat and barge off the water. You can’t cross.”

  The sudden shrieking of a lake gull spun Him about to stare, wide-eyed at the symbol of Incasa perched on a dark rock at the water’s edge. The waves lapped gently against the bird’s feet, keeping the fog at bay with their gentle motion. The bird stared steadily back at Him and Hisar’s eyes narrowed in reluctant understanding.

  “I . . . could go for help,” He said slowly.

  Spar’s own eyes widened in surprise. “From who?”

  The young God just shrugged. “I dunno,” He hedged, continuing to stare at the gull. “But on the grasslands Kemal said it was all right to ask for help, remember? And Yashar said it only just this morning. Besides, you got help from First Oracle Bessic once.”

  “Just once, and I’m still not sure it wasn’t a mistake.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “You’ve seen that?”

  Hisar frowned at him. “No, but it worked out, didn’t it? Bessic helped us, and . . . Incasa helped us,” He added with renewed reluctance. “On the grasslands.”

  “Yes, they did,” Spar admitted just as reluctantly. “But I don’t think they can help us now. They have bigger things to worry about. Besides,” he added. “Graize is our problem. He always was.”

  “Brax said that.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s wrong.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re all three tied up in a prophecy that affects everyone. First Oracle Freyiz saw that right from the beginning.”

  “How do you know what First Oracle Freyiz saw?”

  Hisar kicked at the sand beneath his feet. “Incasa hurt me once,” He said quietly.

  “He hurt you?”

  “He caught me, and He threw me at Freyiz. She saw right inside me and I saw inside her. I saw her visions. I didn’t understand them until now. She saw the past: four figures fighting on the streets of Anavatan. One died; the spirits killed him.”

  “If the figures were us, that that would be Drove.”

  “One became silver.”

  “Brax.”

  “One ended up in Brax’s arms; that was you. But the other got taken by the spirits of the Berbat-Dunya.”

  “Graize.”

  Hisar nodded. “They would have destroyed him, but Incasa intervened and instead of killing him, the spirits became Me. That’s how I was born.” He stared out across the waves. “Freyiz had another vision about me later, just before she died,” He continued in a quieter voice. “I was a shimmering tower, blazing as brightly as the noonday sun, first gold, then silver, then gold again. Back and forth and back and forth,” he whispered. “Three figures stood before my gate; the first was wrapped in a silver light.”

  “Brax again.”

  “The second was holding darkness like a shield.”

  “Me, I’d guess.”

  “And the third one wore a cloak of gray mist.”

  “Graize.”

  “We all stood before a range of mountains burning with a crimson light that looked to set the whole world on fire. If we don’t come together, it just might. That’s what Freyiz saw. That’s what she showed Bessic just before she died.”

  “And he knew that when we talked,” Spar mused. “That’s why he helped.”

  “Probably. So, he can help again. They both can, him and Incasa.”

  “I dunno, Hisar. Gods are big, and they’ll do you if you let Them, remember?”

  “So don’t let Them,” Hisar snapped impatiently. “Make Them help us instead. We can’t sort this out all on our own, not this time. It’s what They’re for. It’s what . . . WE’RE for.”

  Spar noted how the young God’s voice resonated across the beach, and his expression grew serious. “Yeah, It’s what You’re for,” he allowed, “but how do we make Them help?”

  Hisar’s gray eyes narrowed in thought. “You send Bessic my dice; he’ll know what they mean. And I’ll go and . . . poke him.”

  “Poke him?”

  The young God shrugged impatiently. “Incasa won’t let me poke Him; I’ve tried. So, I’ll poke His First Priest, and he’ll poke Incasa for me, and Incasa will help us.”

  “Brilliant thinking.”

  Hisar glared at Spar. “It’ll work,” He growled. “You’ll see.”

  Spar raised his hands in a gesture of mock acquiescence. “I’m not saying it won’t; you always get your own way when you poke me. But you can’t just go around poking Gods or Their priests for help without knowing exactly what kind of help you need.” He gave the young God a warning look. “You can’t leave it up to Them. Ever. It’s not safe. They’ll do you, even if They don’t mean to. They’re just too big.”

  “Yashar said . . .”

  “I know what Yashar said, but this is different.”

  “So, what kind of help do we need, exactly?”

  “We need to cross the Halic, so the Halic has to be calm enough to cross.” He turned. “You’re right, Hisar, we need help, just like on the grasslands, but this time we need Havo’s help.”

  “Havo?” The young God stirred uncertainly. “How do we get Havo’s help?”

  “Same way as last time, through First Oracle Bessic.” Spar gestured at the seagull. “ ’Cause it’s his God’s bird that’s invaded my dark place, so it’s his God that’s gonna do the asking. You go to Incasa-Sarayi and poke Bessic, then go to Brax and warn him
that Graize is close.”

  Hisar gave him a penetrating look. “Graize saw us in vision just like we saw him,” He reminded him. “And he saw the trap. What if he breaks off his attack because of it?”

  Spar snorted. “Do you honestly think he will? At this stage? For any reason?”

  Hisar met his gaze. “No,” he answered after a long moment. His brows drew down. “And Brax promised he’d give me the chance to talk to Graize,” He said, “but Graize didn’t promise anything. What if he goes after Brax right away?”

  The ghostly image of Graize, arm upraised in threat, rose up from the dark water before them.

  “Brax’ll have to defend himself,” Hisar continued.

  Another image, this time of blood leaching into the water as Graize sank beneath the waves, appeared.

  Spar’s brows drew down thoughtfully. “We have to keep them apart, at least at first.”

  “But they need to come together,” Hisar repeated, more to himself than to Spar. “And they have to be kept apart. Together and apart. Together . . .”

  “Stop it.”

  Startled by the vehemence in Spar’s voice, Hisar just blinked at him.

  “You sounded like Graize,” the youth explained with a scowl.

  “Oh.” The young God’s seeming wavered for a brief moment, His hair moving from golden to light brown, then snapped back as He turned to stare at the gull still perched on its rock by the water’s edge. “Sounded . . .” His eyes widened. “I know how to bring them together and keep them apart,” He said suddenly.

  When He continued to stare at the gull as if mesmerized by it, Spar raised an expectant eyebrow. “How?”

  “What?”