by JM Guillen
While he berated the cowering woman, I scanned the floor for the blade she’d held to my neck. I found it under the table.
Too far.
“Yes, High Rector.” Her voice was piteous. “My deepest regrets are not enou—”
“Stop slobbering and get over here!” He cut her off and slammed his foot harder down on my back. “Hold her!”
“Yes! Instantly!” The woman cried joyfully as she crawled toward the dagger, her blind face fixed on mine. “She will never move from that place!”
And I’d thought Valter had been demented.
I squirmed under the heavy boot of the High Rector, whatever that meant. Some sort of priest? I’d never heard the title before.
I found I didn’t care. His tupping title didn’t change my situation one whit. I rolled abruptly toward the leg planted on the stone floor, intent on bowling him down.
I was a bit irreverent at times.
I slammed into his leg.
The man grunted. His boot scraped across my back, and his weight was suddenly gone from me.
Time to go. I shoved my feet under me only to hit the stones again as a knobby knee slammed into the small of my back, crushing me down to the floor.
“Oof!” I cried out as I bit my tongue.
Hands were on my shoulders an instant later, and the man leaned down to whisper in my ear, “That would be a mistake, child.”
I scowled and turned my head to bite him. My teeth met empty air.
A single whispered word, wrought of darkness and despair slashed at my ear. Images of blood and peeling flesh screamed into my mind with the charnel stink of burnt hair and scorched flesh.
I screamed. I couldn’t help it. The overwhelming horror was too great.
“Shh.” He clasped a hand over my mouth, his grin wide and sharp. “Killing you would be a blessing. One you don’t deserve.”
I bit back a whimper as he pushed my shoulders into the stone.
“I will not fail the All-Seeing,” the spidery woman muttered obscenely as she crawled atop my back.
She yanked my hair, and my head fell back, arching my throat. She placed the dagger on the floor, blade up toward my exposed gullet.
My wrists were crushed to the floor by two small boots deliberately placed on the backs of my hands as the woman rode my waist like a child going pig-a-back.
I nearly expected her to bounce and kick my sides.
The High Rector stood and walked toward the ledge. Calling out commands in a loud voice, he directed the others to stand in various places around the bound. I could just see him out of the tail of my eye, a lanky figure with graying, stringy hair that fell to mingle with the wrinkles in his dark robes.
“It is time. The wyrding bitch is here.” He raised his hands.
“It is time.” That was another man, his sibilant hiss an echo of the High Rector’s.
A trio of voices took up a low chant then, a sonorous croon that rose and fell like the sea. The High Rector called out sharp words in a language I didn’t know.
I strained my eyes and twisted against the grip on my hair trying to get a better view. Tingles ran over my scalp as I felt the bound react. Golden sparkles and reddish-brown threads teased at the edge of my vision, blocking the High Rector out at times, outlining him in outrageous, wavering colors at others.
Soft laughter taunted my ears.
“So you wish to watch the mysteries? Yes, yes, I agree!” The woman yanked my head, wrenching me to face the bound. “Watch now, watch with eyes that only see shadows.”
Two blindfolded men and a woman stood equidistant from each other on the sloping ramps, holding their hands out to mimic their leader, exposing the eye-shaped scars on their palms to the air. Their chants were sharp, visceral words that burned into my mind.
Scarlet motes of light boiled into existence, clouds of fire that flattened out into faint, wispy lines that connected the scarred hands.
“All is seen.” The High Rector’s voice was a deep bass, echoing oddly louder in the room.
“We are the seers.” The response was perfectly timed.
The ringing voices of the High Rector’s backup crew took on a smug tone, and they chanted louder, braiding their litanies around one another in an interlocking boundary of sound. The sharp words of the High Rector boomed against them, like thunder over the ocean.
The woman on my back had grown quite distracted by the show, I realized. She panted in my ear as she gently rocked back and forth. Her lips moved, air pulsing between them, but no sound came forth. She was completely engrossed. So much so that she didn’t seem to be aware that her boot had loosened over the back of my right hand.
I edged it out from under her entirely and hid a triumphant grin. One hand free.
The High Rector withdrew a dagger from his robes, a twin to the one under my chin. He thrust it into the air in one swift, dramatic gesture, holding it aloft. It gleamed so brightly, I thought it must have cut the light.
My hand crept, ever so slowly, closer to the woman’s grip on the dagger hilt.
The old man’s chanting lifted above the others, a quavering cry that nonetheless rose above the din, his ancient words cutting clearly.
Darkened shadows began to gather in the air between the cultists, shadows which took on strange and terrible shapes. They had eyes which burned with a lurid and unquenchable hate, and constantly shifted forms, now a great skorpiin, now insects, now a flight of carrion birds. Glowing cordons of blue and purple threaded with crimson, danced within them, a bloody bruise that ripped the central pit open with thunderous silence.
The bound groaned, flickering with a wan, weak light. The erryxwood pieces which slowly spun around it stuttered. One fell to the ground.
No! My heart sank.
(—each one a great bastion against the Shroud, all bound together like a great web across the world. The falling of one is the weakening of all—)
“Come, O Ictithia!” The High Rector slashed the dagger down, and blood burst from the inside of his forearm. He held it out over the ledge, and the blood dripped down into the pit. “Come, you who dwell beyond the seven gates. Come and drink of the silver flame!”
That sounded unhealthy. I needed to be along.
No sooner did I have the thought than a discordant wail erupted from the bound, and a loud crack split the air.
“What is—?” The High Rector seemed horrified. Before he could say anything else, however, flaming sheets of light erupted out of nowhere, curtains of heat and pain. Singing fire filled the air. One burning sheet wrapped around the High Rector.
“Stop! You are not welcome!” The High Rector cried out at something I couldn’t see, but the fire still warbled out of control. “I have beckoned Ictithia, she of the swarming death!”
If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was afraid.
In the shadows behind my mind, I could feel the scuttling of a thousand insectine legs and hear a warbled, alien whispering from behind those scarlet flames.
This seemed like my moment. I grabbed the dagger, pushing up from the floor hard.
The woman on my back didn’t like that at all. She yelped and leaped to her feet jerking the dagger away.
Then I was yanked to my knees by her rigorous grip on my hair.
“Make it stop!” she screamed.
I stared at her. “What?”
“Make it stop!” she screeched again and gestured toward the bound with the knife. Frantic with fear, she didn’t seem to care that I had tried to escape.
She thought I could halt the singing flames?
As if I had control of the bound?
“I can’t,” I told her.
She whirled on me, brandishing the dagger.
“Make it stop or die with him!” She lunged and slashed the dagger down one of my cheeks.
It was my turn to scream. I jerked back from the crazed woman, pulling my hair out of her grip to land on my knees and clutch at my face. Blood ran everywhere.
“I’ll die anyway
!” I shoved the woman back. “You scut-tongued cavy-rats made certain of that! I’ll choke to death because of your damn collar!”
The woman brought the dagger back, ready for another swing. A snarl wrinkled her pouty lips, twisting her half-obscured features. Knife high above her head, she dropped to her knees beside me as she swung it down once more.
“No!” Warmth burst through the veins in my hand as I turned on her in fury. A storm of rage blasted out from me, striking the woman like a hammer. That sphere of my wrath then bowled over the High Rector and his cullies.
I didn’t mean to invoke the second legacy; however, I had never been good at controlling my temper.
The room trembled just a touch.
“Oh!” I whirled toward the bound, fear like ice in my veins. I leapt toward it, irrationally hoping that I could somehow—
Elemental fury incandesced white-hot as it plunged from a vast height down the star-streaked chute to the bound. Glowing motes spiraled off it. The bound surrounded me, drank me, eroded away everything I had been.
I screamed.
The thrumming power should have scorched me as it passed, should have seared my psyche, charring it, blackening my very being, but it did not. Instead it passed through me, hurtling from my fair hair to my toes before I could blink, a soothingly cool tingle spreading through my physique as it thundered into the world.
“YsssaBel DArTanGe.” The bound spoke my name again, the sound bent and strange. My eyes drifted closed as my mind coursed into that great and terrible power.
“One.” Wonder forced my eyes wider. “One bound. One great span of them across—”
(—were bounds in the mountains, in the desert, on the sea, and in the wild forests. Wild places, exotic places, deliciously unexplored, tantalizing—)
There were so many! Cities and forests, fields and caves, coves and mountains, all rang with the power that tied them together.
They shone like jewels, like dewdrops shimmering on a spider’s web. And just as the stars had, they tugged on one another. Power spooled from the sky to the cities to the wind-swept waves. It waxed and waned, poured and pooled, sparked and spread, flowing along a vast pattern that surged like the sea at storm.
The bound caught me, snagging my mind like hooking a fish, and I was pulled along to a thousand places at once. In a single, eternal nonce, I felt the vast expanse. I was nowhere and everywhere at once. I had no body; I wasn’t even in the deep chamber anymore.
I was the wind.
Trees surrounded me, vaster than any cottage that had ever sheltered me. Their leaves were so large I could have wrapped one around my shoulders as a short-cape. Graceful, feathery fronds grew along their trunks, and I glimpsed two eyes, rounder than the moon, that blinked bright gold. They peered out from a profusion of tiny fern leaves and thick vines bigger than my wris—
I searched the room in my confusion, noting that the cultists froze in place, as if trapped in amber. Everything seemed to be slow.
Sparks of color floated on the air, fizzing as they wafted up in lazy spirals and drifted through sunbeams. The scent of spice cake, redolent with cinnamon and clove, clung in the air where they passed.
My gaze was drawn after the bright fizzles as they circled a pillar of moss and cracked stone.
I stood within an abandoned jungle city, and my eyes went wide as I tried to take everything in.
Tiny ferns and moss covered everything in sight. Vast square archways towered over delicate gazebo-like structures that held sculpted statuary resembling creatures I’d only heard of in figment stories.
I stared at two carved pillars before a raised platform, the corner posts of a temple that stood crumbling. A sloping ramp led to where it sat on an island of green, open on all sides to the dizzying depths below. A great coffer sat there, overgrown with vines and neglect as it sang with all the power of the stars.
The bound shot straight through the enameled repository like a—
I blinked, my mind cascading between different places at once. Even as I felt the wet heat against my skin and smelled the spicy wind, I felt a punishing—
—hot wind that moaned and blew gritty sand into tiny whirling sandspouts. They danced and jigged along a hardened clay road.
A great palace of shining, white stone and bright, blue tiles on a rising tier of domed roofs stood at one end of the road. A great deal of curving palisade walls guarded the many fountains that were visible even from this distance. A hint of rich green dotted the edges of the water that overflowed the smooth walls and roared down into vast circular pools.
Once resplendent gardens must have graced this palace in the eye of the desert.
“A garden city in the desert…” I gasped. “Fair Tressia?” It couldn’t be. Tressia was lost ages ago. A fabled city of opulence, hidden in the eye of the desert, ringed by mountains—
I gaped at the ruins the mythical oasis citadel, famed for its lavish gardens and fabulous riches, the Azure Eye of the Murmuring Wastes. At the distant horizon, a jagged ripple of red mountains encircled everything within sight. Protected by an evil wind within that never-named ring of mountains, the way to the storied palace had slipped the grasp of history and settled into fable.
There Ja’an the Wild had lived and loved and fought and died. Born in the mountains beyond her great city, Ja’an had conquered this place in the name of revenge but had ruled in the name of peace.
She of the sword and the bow, she of the blood and the waters, she of the people and the rock, she had once ruled this land and brought it riches beyond any imagining through war and diplomacy, cunning and guile.
Jeweled statues to her glory studded the land she once ruled.
I scanned the land around me.
Here and there great towers of sunset-colored stone dominated the dusty landscape, rivaled only by the monumental sculpture of a winged warrior woman whose head and sword blade had not survived whatever calamity had befallen the behemoth of a palace.
“Ja’an!” Her name came in a reverent breath on my lips. She had been my childhood hero, but I had grown to think fair Tressia to be a my—
—poured off that surrounding storm, trickling over the land in imperceptible rivulets. It was wreathed in the galvanism of the perpetual lightning, the imperturbable strength of the mountains, and the shimmering silver glory of the power of the boun—
“Witch!” From where my wrath had blasted her to the ground, the crazed, gangled woman turned to where I had stood before joining the bound. “Save him! The gateway is open!”
What was she talking about? I only saw the darkened flames surrounding the High Rector. He, too, had been driven back by the second legacy, but now he grimaced, an ashen look of horror—
—white, pure and unsullied. A cold and biting wind snapped at my nose and ears, and I blinked at the flakes of snow that settled on the upward-curving corners of the roof.
Gracefully arched bridges bounded through the snow like winter hares, while pointed roofs pierced the sky as icicles speared ever downward. Layer after layer of square domiciles rose into the frozen air atop each other to perforate the sky with their delicate towers.
Lights glowed softly along curving streets, yellow lanterns upon ornate pedestals, and I could see at least one person bundled in long, colorful robes, trundling along on wooden shoes that clattered loudly as she traversed a covered, wooden bridge. Her shining, black hair was bound in a severe and shining bun at the back of her head, and she tucked her hands into voluminous sleeves against the cold.
Outside the snow piled up like clouds, but inside all was warm, polished wood; beautiful, silk tapestries; and bright cushions for the merchants and the rulers of Nimjemin alike. Known for exotic goods and secret indulgences, far off Nimjemin glowed like an ornamented jewel set in the clouds.
Rising up to the tip of the highest pinnacled roof, I could see the ocean lapping at the base of the city. Thousands of ships, with sails like giant wings, bobbed in a massive harbor that lay at the f
eet of the city like a prostrate lover.
“The gate is unkept!” Panic laced the High Rector’s deep voice. “Ictithia has fallen, and now her brood seeks flesh!”
Now I could see that the darkling fire surrounding him was no fire at all, but was a crevice into a place both dark and wild. It was night in that place, a night filled with stars that roiled and lusted for blood.
“Witch, you have to stop them!” The woman screamed in a frantic, wild keen. “The young of Ictithia will—!”
Oh, the sea! I had never seen it before, never known the salt tang of it, never witnessed so much water stretching endlessly to the horizon, had never seen it rollick and sparkle like diamonds that could dance.
They shared a bond, the city and the sea, as inevitable as breathing, as undeniable as song. Power flowed from one to the other, from the crest of each wave to the tall center point of each roof and back again, folding in on one another, doubling, tripling the potency between them until all I could encompass was the vast, silvery power of the bound. It grew and grew, brighter and brighter, until I had to squint and shelter my eyes from the shining, dancing pinpricks of light.
“—the All-Seeing Eye!” The High Rector and his cronies still moved slowly though they were clearly panicked. The gateway they had crafted of fire and blood gaped ever wider, and I could smell a sour wind drifting from it.
It was all due to that warbling flame, that passage to the strangeness where once dwelt the creature they called Ictithia. They had done this, all part of their scheming war against creation.
It was blasphemy.
“They come!” The High Rector’s voice filled with nightmare terror. He peered toward the woman, his eyes wild. “The rend must only remain open for a nonce! If it remains—!”
Abandoning the bounds, I grumbled, “I think you might deserve whatever happens.” I glanced back to the table with its instruments of pain, its documents of destruction, and beyond it, toward my once-captors, running in panic.
