Dasira rose in trepidation as they neared, ready to run, but as the flyers passed their position, the tide of animals slowed to a halt. Flanks heaving, they stared after the flyers as they ascended toward the tip of the spire. As Ilshenrir had suggested, the very pinnacle of it shimmered and seemed to melt away, creating a gap into which the flyers and their prisoner passed.
As the spire’s peak resolidified, a great sound of torment arose from the gathered beasts, so loud that Dasira clamped her arms over her ears and still could barely dampen it. The ground itself shuddered with their outcry, and it was many long breaths before they silenced.
Looking up, she saw them with their heads bowed, some sitting or laying among the seething snakes, others staring fixedly toward the tip of the spire. The churning of the water had extended in a half-circle around the structure, leaving a wide space at the center barren.
“Holy piking shit,” said Lark behind her.
Standing, she set one hand on Serindas and the other on Ilshenrir’s arm. He rose obligingly, and together they moved through the sedge, his grey cloak indifferent to the twigs in a way her tattered dress could not mimic. She stayed close as they approached the gleaming spire, and though she expected his magic to fall away and expose her, the tingle did not fade from her skin. Even when they reached the sandbar, where the damp grains seemed to shiver under their feet and the water made repeated refractory patterns against its span, she still felt the magic veiling her.
With the briefest of nods to her, Ilshenrir strode for the structure’s north face. Dasira circled eastward into the lee of the spire.
Out of his sight, the tingle faded slightly, replaced by the soft thrum of the spire itself. She kept her distance from the glassy wall until she was a full facet away, nothing in view but the endless water and a sliver of the shore.
There, at the base of the spire, she removed her gloves. Drawing Serindas, she pressed its hilt to her bracer, something she had not dared to do in the Grey or the forest, and the hard black material separated into a splay of hooks. The blood-glutted blade tried to struggle, but she forced it down and felt the hooks dig in, sending a surge of vitality through the threads that riddled her body.
As her aches faded, her senses sharpened. Scents of salt and seaweed and shock-killed sea creatures assaulted her nose along with the distant ammonia of raywing guano, and the hum of the spire filled her ears—low and melodic and somehow undulating, its energy cycling like blood in a heart.
Serindas’ red runes had dimmed nearly to darkness by the time she pulled it free. It writhed sullenly in her hand.
“Oh be quiet,” she muttered. “If I’m right, you’ll be full again soon.”
And if I’m wrong, I’ll be too dead to hear you complain.
Gritting her teeth, she reached out and prodded the spire with the very tip of the blade.
As Lark had warned, a spark jumped at the touch—big enough to blind her briefly and set every short hair on edge. Her heart twitched in her chest, and even Serindas flinched.
Then it swallowed the burst of energy and its hunger became gluttonous glee. It yanked her forward, sinking into the crystal as if into soft wood.
Immediately she sensed the hum of the spire alter, like water swirling around an obstruction. She cursed and pulled Serindas out, then stared at the blade in shock, for its blood-colored runes had paled to a pinkish-red.
For a moment she just stood there, tense and silent, trying to sense any hint of impending haelhene assault. Then a sound arose from the front of the spire: a high, clear, strange note like a bell echoing within a tunnel, breathless yet somehow the product of a voice. It struck the crystal spire like a hammer, sending ripples through the walls that hid Serindas’ damage, then a moment later struck in a different tone, causing fractured patterns of energy and light to dance mesmerically throughout the structure.
Dasira stared at the brilliant flux, entranced. Then Serindas yanked in her grip again, and she was forced to return her attention to the task.
“No stupid knife tricks,” she hissed, then cut a shallow divot from the wall. The crystal cleaved neatly, putting up less resistance than steel, and despite the akarriden blade’s hunger something about the shifting resonance seemed to dissuade it from drinking. She felt the spire’s song alter around the damage only to be washed away by Ilshenrir’s work, which grew in chaotic complexity as he sang.
Reaching up high, she buried Serindas in the wall and hoisted herself one-armed, jamming the toe of her boot into the divot. It was precarious, but the crystal showed no sign of crumbling beneath her. Yanking the blade out, she cut a higher divot while balancing on that one hold, then lifted herself there.
With one hand splayed on the wall like a clinging lizard’s and the other cutting with the blade, she continued her ascent: awkward, haphazard, but quick.
*****
When the motion ceased and the vibration began, Cob stirred slightly. He did not have the strength to open his eyes more than a sliver.
Below, the glassy, ridged floor of the hexagonal chamber glowed with its own internal light, overlaid by the golden radiance of the orb that floated in the center. Two wraiths in white robes stood by it, observing its slow fluctuations, their features obscured by hoods and masks. There was something strange about the set of their angular shoulders and the way the robe-sleeves bunched along their arms, but Cob could not concentrate on it.
To his right, a third wraith stood by a crystal frame large enough for an ogre to pass through. Pinkish sparks flickered between its prongs as the wraith sang quietly, accreting within the frame like a spiderweb of light.
Cob tried to raise his head, but the motion sent a flood of agony through his shoulders and down his spine. Muscles spasmed and chains clinked. He was as draped with them as before, his feet off the floor, and he could not feel his fingers—could not feel anything but the burning spikes in his back. His mouth was gummy and thick, tongue plastered down, and when he tried to swallow he felt scales of clotted blood lining his throat.
He lapsed into stillness, taking small sips of breath. Even those made his chest feel like it was tearing apart; whatever had seized him had pierced under his shoulder-blades, through his lungs and nearly out his front. He could feel them etching his ribs from the inside with each motion.
As he watched through slitted eyes, the crystal spire filled slowly with darkness. It drew in on him and snuffed the glimmering sphere, silenced the resonating walls, washed over the arcs and ridges of the floor, and lapped silently at his dead legs.
It was cold. So cold. He felt its breath on his face, full of emptiness.
Guardian, he thought. Come to me.
For a moment, the breath warmed. The darkness before him opened eyes that seemed familiar somehow, endlessly aware…
Then the Guardians were there, standing knee-deep in the black water, and the phantasm evaporated.
What was that? he thought, but none of them answered. Arrayed around him, they merely watched: Vina the ogress, Jeronek with his stone armor and khopesh, Haurah smiling sadly, Erosei with arms crossed so that his wrists rested on the hilts of his swords. And his father Dernyel, looking up at him without expression.
Help me, he thought.
‘We cannot,’ said Haurah. She was a lean, feral-looking woman with slanted eyes and mahogany-dark hair, dressed roughly in leather and fur. Her husky voice held great sorrow. ‘These walls separate us from the natural world. There is little that we can do.’
‘We keep you alive by will alone,’ added Vina, the ebon-skinned ogress. Here in the black water, she towered over the others, her necklaces of claws and feathers doing little to clothe her vastness.
Jeronek, dark-tanned and grim-featured, said, ‘It may not be possible to disrupt their portal. We are suppressed here as much as we suppress them, and with no access to our realm, we are water in a bottle. They can do with us as they please.’
But I popped the portals in Thynbell…
‘Thynbell had
stone floors. Wood ceilings,’ said Erosei. The ancient Kerrindrixi looked more like a mercenary from the ogre-lands than an uplander, with his half-shaved head and war-braid, his twin blades. ‘Even a breath of native air would help us, but we can’t reach it. This is the best possible prison they could make.’
Then what do we do?
The Guardians were silent.
Cob stared down at them, disturbed. He knew that it had been foolish to charge into the fray like that, but he had trusted in them. Relied on their support and the endless depths of their power. For a brief time, it had been glorious—and now he was strung up like a side of meat while they told him there were no options.
There has to be something, he thought. My friends are still out there—
‘If they survived,’ said Erosei.
Cob glared. He knew the danger he had left them in, but he refused to consider them dead. They had too many tricks up their sleeves—and to one of them, death seemed no barrier.
He almost wished he had hallucinated it. He had no idea how Dasira could be Darilan or how the dead man could have come back, but he did not doubt the Guardian's senses. Some part of him felt irrationally comforted by it, though all logic told him that Darilan was here to kill him again.
They’ll come for me, he thought. What can we do to help them?
The Guardians looked at each other, then back at him. ‘You are too weak,’ said Jeronek. ‘If you attempt to act—even to free yourself of these chains—you will die. We can not permit that. Though our presence inside you is small, like a hand in a glove, we can not retract it while you are imprisoned here, and your death would trap this part of us permanently. It must not happen.’
I’m a piking glove to you?
‘A bad analogy. Your cooperation is essential,’ said Haurah, giving Jeronek a look. The desert warrior turned away.
So why won’t you cooperate with me? thought Cob. I’m not an idiot. I know I can’t move. But you can do things without moving, can’t you?
‘We can’t do anything while separated from our realm,’ said Erosei.
That wasn’t my question.
Erosei and Haurah traded glances, but Vina said, ‘Yes. Not much that would be of any normal use, but in this situation, yes.’
Cob nodded mentally, unsure if he could have done it for real; in the dark water, he had lost all sense of his body, and felt neither pain nor the spire’s song. Then teach me, he thought at Vina, ignoring the doubters. So I’ll be ready when they come.
One by one, the four Guardians looked to Dernyel, who had observed the discussion without comment or reaction. Even now, he seemed indifferent to their attention, his gaze on Cob alone. ‘A predator, a wraith, an abomination and two godfollowers,' he said measuredly. 'How can you put faith in them?’
Cob smiled without humor, thinking of Darilan. They’ve chased me this far. A little wraith spire won’t stop them.
*****
From the dunes, Lark could just see Ilshenrir like a grey smudge against the base of the spire. Dasira had disappeared around the side, and now the air hummed faintly with whatever the wraith had done.
She looked to Arik as he settled beside her on his belly, still in wolf-form. He did not return her gaze, but stared fixedly at the spire. He was the only one still close, since Fiora had moved forward when the others did in order to conceal herself behind a nearer dune.
Do you think we can do this? she wanted to ask, but he was a wolf and even were he not, she dared not vocalize her doubts. It hadn’t been long but she felt attached to these people—even Cob, the idiot. She had wanted him to hurt for leaving Rian behind, but not like this.
Biting her lip, she unslung the bowstave from her shoulder and started limbering it up. She missed having a nice, simple, reliable crossbow that she could shoot at a moment’s notice—though even then, she would rather not have to use it. Their decision not to shoot at the wraiths while in flight had taken a weight from her shoulders, but it was back now; there was no way to know how many wraiths would answer Ilshenrir’s call.
Abruptly, something changed in the wall by Ilshenrir’s position, and she froze, stomach tying itself in a knot. What began as a slight paling became a white silhouette, then a body, as a robed figure passed effortlessly through the crystalline material to step out onto the collar of the sandbar. It left no door or mark on the glossy surface, not even a ripple.
She held her breath as the wraiths faced off, hands stilled on the bowstave. Arik’s earthquake growl beside her was the only sound.
Chapter 9 – Erestoia By-The-Sea
Ilshenrir stepped back as the white wraith flowed through the crystal façade. At first glance, he could not identify it; like all haelhene off the White Isle, it wore a high-collared robe with hood, full gloves, and a white porcelain mask with slit mouth and narrow eye-slots. No decorations, no identifiers.
As he opened his higher senses, though, the details came clear. Even with the brilliant flux of the spire in the background, he could discern the individual flow of magic in the cloth, and with a slight adjustment to the lenses of his eyes, he focused past it to the soul. Though the mask remained opaque, the slits in it were enough to glimpse a familiar light.
“Cousin Ilshenrir. Such a surprise to see you again,” said the wraith before he could speak. Its voice sounded flat in the higher aspect, the one humans could not hear, and in that restriction of resonance Ilshenrir recognized what he had once been.
“Lycharvan sa Kirsannuin,” he replied, wishing for his own mask. He had hoped he would be forgotten as one of the fallen, the ninsyc’haithe; it was unfortunate to have encountered a relative, artificial though those ties were. “It has been some time.”
“More than a century since you were lost at the Wrecking Shore,” said Lycharvan. “We expected you to be slain and reembodied, but here you are, in the same fleshly cage.” The bright gaze ran over him, and a hint of amusement entered the wraith’s physical voice. “And using their tactics. How native.”
“It was necessary,” said Ilshenrir, keeping his higher affect flat. After so many years among the airahene, restricting his aspect was uncomfortable, but he dared not give Lycharvan forewarning. As stilted as the haelhene had become, they were not blind, and the fossilization of their essences had made them rigid but all the more powerful.
Lycharvan laughed faintly, a hollow sound. “Of course. And now you have shaken your captors and sought us out, at quite an interesting time. One might almost think the two related.”
“I have been hunting the spirit you captured,” Ilshenrir said. “It was my arrow that prompted its imprisonment in that vessel, my arrowhead still hanging around its neck. I could not complete its destruction from within the Mist Forest, so I have followed it here.”
The white wraith tilted its head, regarding him. “You would have us believe that you are still loyal to the Isle?”
“I know what I am,” said Ilshenrir, drawing off his gloves. They were the only truly fabricated part of his garments; as Lycharvan had noted, he had adopted the airahene method of shaping his physical cage to mimic clothing as well as flesh. It allowed for greater fluidity in appearance and easier gathering and manipulation of energy, but it made him vulnerable in ways that the haelhene and human mages, with their enspelled robes, were not.
And it made it difficult to hide fossilization. As he removed the gloves, he saw Lycharvan’s gaze fall to his hands—to the knobs of crystallized essence that distorted his slim fingers and forearms. In humanoid form, the hands were the interaction-points between essence and world; thus they were the first to deform and the last to lose their taint.
“You have kept in practice,” Lycharvan said, amused. “Your handlers, were they aware?”
“I was the first of our kind to not destroy itself in captivity. They did not know the proper rate of defossilization. Once I had earned a measure of trust, I continued my studies in private.”
All of which was true, and from the avidity in Lycharvan’s s
tance, Ilshenrir knew the white wraith was interpreting his words the way it wanted to believe. They always expected the worst of others.
On the White Isle, they were rarely wrong.
“Then have you come to rejoin us, cousin?” said Lycharvan. “You know that we will take you back without reservations. Your House has missed you.”
Ilshenrir spared a glance for the sea that shivered around them. Beyond the ring of sea-creatures, the water stretched endlessly, unbroken—no sign of the White Isle’s filigreed spires. It could move itself, and for decades he had dreamed of it mounting the shore like some titanic crab, scything through the forest to find him. The thought of it there on the horizon, watching, still chilled him to the core.
He had been embodied there more than two centuries ago, into House Mallandriach, one of the preeminent forces in the constant struggle for dominance. Though there were no bonds of blood between wraiths, the hostility between Houses forged each into a family, dysfunctional though it might be. As Mallandriach’s Butcher, he had been responsible for the slaves—the detestable, fleshy human-beastfolk hybrids produced by the House arcanists in their attempts to create the perfect shock-troops.
He remembered it all too clearly: the crushing cruelty of the Householder, the snipes and sabotage from his fellow centenarians, the abuse from his elders. Butcher was a safe point in the hierarchy, a shelter from the maelstrom of House politics, but it had given him no joy.
Getting shot down and captured on the Wrecking Shore had been a blessing.
“You would take me,” said Ilshenrir, “and you would torture me for my knowledge of the airahene, whether or not I tried to give it willingly. You would kill me and reembody me with no memory of who I had been.”
The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) Page 23
