by Holly Lisle
Vodor Imrish said that Solander had accomplished almost all of what he had come to do—and that his death would complete his mission. But perhaps he could do more. If he could not live to fight, perhaps he could fight from the place beyond death. Perhaps he could even find a way back. The god had suggested letting go. But Solander could not … or perhaps, he thought, he simply would not.
He felt shields building around the arena, and knew he had only instants before his death to do what he had to do.
He stared into the softly glowing blue sphere of the mages’ viewer, and smiled slightly at the thought of what the Empire’s reaction would be if his plan worked; and with every bit of power he could gather and offer, he shouted, “Vodor Imrish! More time—I am not done here!” And as he shouted, he gave Vodor Imrish his life, breath, bone, blood—and soul.
Around him, the light of the wizards’ shields flared to life, and he felt the rewhah coming up through the ground beneath his feet; he could feel the fury of it, the rage born of the deaths of souls.
But before it touched him—before it touched any of the prisoners on the killing field—Vodor Imrish acted. He took Solander’s sacrifice— breath, bone, blood, body, and soul—and to that sacrifice added his own unimaginable power, his own righteous wrath. Solander felt the fire of a god burning through him, cleanly and painlessly devouring him, and a terrifying joy spread through him. Cut loose from the weight of his flesh, with his soul for the moment linked to that of the god Vodor Imrish, he suddenly felt love and compassion for the Empire’s captives trapped on the killing field and waiting within the wings for their chance to die.
Solander reached out to all of them, and before the rewhah could destroy them, he removed them from harm’s way, and secreted them safely out of the reach of the Masters of the Hars.
And when they were safe, Solander used the last of the god’s touch to recreate his own face in fire, and to speak to the audience in the amphitheater and to the millions who watched the nightlies from their homes. “I am with you still,” he said.
Vodor Imrish released Solander from his embrace. Solander found himself bodiless, suspended in a darkness beyond time and light, beyond flesh and need. He could feel the pull of life behind him, and the pull of something else ahead. A door opened in the darkness—a path that would take him forward to the place beyond death.
“Go,” Vodor Imrish said. “You have done well.”
But Solander could not go. Behind him lay his world, his time, his people, his goals and ambitions, his dreams and hopes. Behind him lay promises he had made to himself and to others. Behind him lay the magic that only he truly understood—and if he did not find a way back, who would lead the people he had rescued against the Dragons of the Hars Ticlarim?
Vodor Imrish had said he was done. But Vodor Imrish was wrong.
Do not make this mistake, the god whispered through his soul. Your future is ahead of you, not behind you.
But Solander’s hunger and his heart lay behind, in Matrin. The pull of the door into the eternal, of the golden and welcoming light, called to him strongly. Not yet, he thought, and turned his back on it. He moved into darkness and felt his way through void back to the world he had so recently left.
He could see it rolling like a river before him—the past, the present, the future. He could dip his thoughts in and pull out pieces that formed a story—and in that story, the Dragons flowed like poison.
He could not reenter the world, he discovered. Not yet. But he would find a way. He would find his way back to life, to a body, to a voice. He would create a way to make the stand against the Dragons that would destroy them.
Solander shouted his demand to the heavens, and in the next instant, Jess saw him light up brighter than a sun—gold as the heart of the world, pure as life itself. The light he radiated shot out and touched every one of those on the arena floor with him. A beam of it blasted through the shield and into the tunnel from which the Empire’s sacrifices had been marched. The prisoners vanished in the blink of an eye: One instant there, the next simply gone. Solander did not vanish, at least not instantly. Instead, his body broke free of the bonds that held him and rose into the air, and Jess, squinting at him, watched all the recognizable details about him dissolve into that ever-brightening light. As she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the blinding radiance, she suddenly saw his face fill the arena and heard his voice say, “I am with you still.”
The light blinded her. Then, with a roar, the rewhah summoned by the Dragons to destroy their sacrifices burst up out of the ground, but without human fuel, it had nothing to contain or control it, nothing to feed it. The rewhah hellfires erupted against shields that had not been designed to withstand such all-out fury, and the shields began to buckle. All around Jess, hysteria reigned. People shouted, screamed, fled in all directions. Blinded, she reached out for Patr, and found his seat empty. And the next instant a strong hand grabbed her upper arm and pulled her to her feet, and Patr’s voice in her ear said, “We have Wraith, but we have to get out of here now. Keep your hood over your face and don’t say anything.”
She stumbled, still blinded, at his side as they ran up the steps, surrounded by a stampeding mob. Into the tunnel that led into the bowels of the Gold Building, and into the cool and dark of the main hallway, in the crush of masses of panicked men and women desperate to escape.
Shoved, buffeted, elbowed, and kicked, Jess managed to keep on her feet only through the force of fear.
“Left,” Patr shouted, and began forging a path through the herd toward the left side of the hallway. It branched, and when it did, they were in a smaller, poorly lit, less crowded passageway.
Now they moved faster. They tucked their heads down and kept up with the robed men, all fleeing at as near a run as they could manage.
Patr started guiding them rightward, and shoved them into a very narrow, unlit corridor that ran at a right angle to the passageway they’d just been in.
“We’re leaving the lights off because I don’t want to call attention to us,” Patr said. In the narrow space, his voice seemed suddenly close and loud. “Watch your step. We’re going to reach the stairs in just a second.”
Even warned, Jess stepped off into air and only the hand around her arm kept her from taking a bad fall. “Careful,” Patr said.
On the other side of him, she heard Wraith swearing.
“Quiet,” Patr said.
“Nearly killed myself on the stairs,” Wraith whispered. “No balance at all with my hands bound like this.”
“I’ll fix that when we get where we’re going.”
In the dark, the stairs seemed to descend interminably—Jess could almost imagine herself hurrying to the heart of the world. The air began to stink of rot and mold and the sickening sweetness of death; her skin prickled from increasing cold and damp and a crawling, clawing air of malice. She started hearing the faint drip of water, and she got a sense of space opening up in front of her.
“Almost to the last step,” Patr said. “The ground is slick once you get past the stairs—but we’re almost where we’re going.”
Jess felt bad magic erupt at a distance. “If you think it will provide some protection, we need to get there fast,” she said.
“You felt the rewhah break free?” Wraith asked.
“Yes.”
“Hell’s-all!” Patr swore. He muttered, “Vey-takchaes!” and dim lights flickered on all around them. They’d arrived in a natural cavern, huge and arching, with stalactites hanging from the vault like the fangs of demons, and stalagmites stabbing up from the slick floor to meet them, so that Jess felt herself trapped in the massive jaws of death itself. The eerie blue-green lights cast long and twisting shadows that did not successfully hide bloated bodies in all stages of decay, stacked one atop the next and crumbling in on each other. Dead eyes stared at her, dead jaws gaped open in frozen shock. Some faces were human, some might once have been human, some were barely recognizable as faces. Jess thought some
of them still twitched.
Jess felt her heart contract, and Patr said, “Don’t look. Just run.”
They fled, Patr dragging the two of them to a doorway carved into a massive pillar of stone, opened the door, hauled both of them through the narrow opening so fast Jess crashed shoulder, chest, hip, and face into the doorway while getting through, and then shoved the door shut behind them.
He dropped a bar into place, pushed a bright red button just above the door …
… and all sensation of evil, of malice, of the horror that had been unleashed in the amphitheater of the Gold Building vanished.
“Safe room,” Patr said. He leaned against the wall, panting, bathed in pale light for which Jess could find no source. “There are a lot of them scattered around this cavern. Things go … wrong … quite a bit down here. This room burns power like a floating mansion, but we should live through whatever is going on above.”
“Out there,” Wraith said. “Those bodies … what were they there for?”
“Very specialized … research.” Patr looked grim when he said it.
Jess rubbed her hip. It hurt bad enough she expected an impressive bruise—but if she didn’t melt into ash, she’d take a hundred bruises. “What sort of research?”
Patr had taken Wraith’s wrists and was trying various small wands above the opening mechanisms. He didn’t look up to answer. “The Silent Inquest considers the Dragon Empire its mortal enemy. Masters of the Inquest will take Dragon money and do Dragon dirty work if that work also suits their needs, but the Inquest antedates the first of the Dragon dynasties by nearly four hundred years, and in eras when the Dragons lost their grip on power, the Inquest has been here to resume its control of the lands and peoples of the Hars.”
Jess frowned. “Most people don’t even know the Silent Inquest exists. And we’ve never had an Inquest government.”
“Ah, but we have,” Patr said. “The Dragons prefer to rule by deception—by making people believe that the Dragons have the best interests of the people at heart. They make a show of all their good works, but they want power just like any other government, and they’ll use any methods to get and keep it. They spend a lot of time and money painting their work in pretty colors, though.
“The Inquest has always ruled from the background, and by fear. Most people don’t know it exists because that’s how the Inquest wants it. Outside of the Gold Building, Inquestors wear no special clothing, no insignias, no distinguishing marks. We know each other by reputation, but never identify ourselves as Inquestors to others to whom we have not been introduced by those we know are Inquestors. And we never introduce another of our own as an Inquestor to one to whom we have not been formally introduced.”
The first lock clicked open at Wraith’s wrist.
“But I’d heard rumors of the Inquest before they took an interest in me,” Wraith said. “I didn’t know the rumors were true, but I heard things.”
Patr nodded. “We are a secret society and a silent government, but some of our members—those in higher positions—took a liking to the fruits of fame and became … visible. When they became too obvious, the highest of the Masters had them killed, and when even our Grand Master once made a spectacle of himself, lower Masters convened and agreed to his death.”
He sighed. “And that is what this place is all about. When the Masters command a death, we are required to provide that death—and sometimes the death they want is of a powerful wizard, or someone with access to the protection of powerful wizards. Here is where we learn how to reach powerful people and kill them.”
Wraith rubbed his wrists. “And this is what you did? You killed people.”
“I mostly provided information. I’m good at blending into places, making myself seem to belong. But … sometimes, yes.”
Wraith studied Patr without expression. “But you risked your life to save mine.”
“Only because Jess asked me to. I would have let you die.”
The faintest of smiles crossed Wraith’s lips. “Thanks for being honest, anyway.”
Patr smiled grimly and said, “Anything for a friend.”
“So what happens now?” Jess asked.
“We let the rewhah run its course. We arm ourselves.” He nodded upward, and Jess saw what looked like standard stun-sticks, but with more settings on the handle. “Those will kill almost any nightmare that even a heavy rewhah backlash can create,” he said. “Take one. I hope we won’t need them, but I’m betting otherwise.”
“I couldn’t kill anyone,” Jess said.
Patr looked to Wraith. Wraith reached up without a word and took down a weapon from one of the hooks. His face told Jess more than she wanted to know: not only that he could kill something if he had to, but that he thought he was going to have to. She stood there for a moment, considering. She and Wraith could fight the Empire if they could get out of this place. If they didn’t live to escape, though, this desperate rescue became nothing but a waste of Patr’s sacrifice of himself to save her.
She looked from Wraith to Patr, and back to Wraith. Then she stood up on her toes and reached for the weapon. She was too short by far. “Give me one,” she said. “I’ll do what I have to do.”
The light inside the room flickered and then went out. The sense of being protected vanished. Jess gripped her weapon with shaking hands. What came in the wake of a magical blast so fierce that it could blow the spells of a wizard’s safe room?
“I wish Solander were here,” Wraith whispered.
Outside the safe room, something big growled and clawed at the door.
Chapter 22
Luercas lay in the corridor, alive and untouched, but surrounded by masses of the freshly dead. He raised his head carefully, fractionally, ready to drop it and pretend to be a corpse again should anything in the corridor move. But this time nothing did.
So he got to his feet slowly, watching in both directions in case one of the scarred monstrosities that had survived the rewhah came back. Those things were known to go mad and turn on people; when the rewhah had scarred him, he hadn’t—but he’d known what had happened to him, and had felt certain that sooner or later magic would be able to set it right. Most of those in the corridor knew nothing of rewhah: thought that the magic the Empire used was a clean source of energy; believed that they would be protected and that their lives mattered to someone other than themselves; thought the world they inhabited was a safe place.
With their beliefs shattered, they could turn dangerous quickly— and some of them came out of the hell of rewhah with the equipment to make them doubly dangerous. Three fast beasts with talons and fangs had risen out of the ruined bodies near him—he’d caught a glimpse of them through slitted eyes, and it was enough to make him fear for his life. They all matched—something unexpected when dealing with back-wash damage. Not only were their body parts consistent within themselves, but they were consistent from monster to monster. The damage had the look of intent about it, as if …
Luercas had lain on the whitestone floor and held his breath and tried to be logical. To the best of his considerable knowledge, no one had ever managed to control the effects of rewhah to create anything useful. No one. Many had tried, but rewhah resisted the best efforts of talented Masters—and those who dared push their luck a bit too far found themselves fighting for their survival. Yet here in front of him were three matching monsters—almost birdlike in their movements, featherless, with dark copper hides and teeth as long as his hand set solidly in gaping jaws. They each moved on two huge, powerful hind legs, and had tails as long as their bodies, and long, supple necks, and eyes that glowed like the setting sun. Most times, guards would bring down anything that looked too dangerous—but those three had the air of survivors about them. And the air of the intervention of gods—and of that sort of thing Luercas had seen entirely too much already for one day. He’d been more comfortable in a world where gods were dusty myths, trotted out at holidays to provide a reason for merriment. He did not ca
re to be confronted with proof of active, interested gods; he did not care to have his rules changed.
But at least all the living, viable monsters seemed to be gone.
Nothing like them in the corridor anymore. Nothing but bodies dead, and wreckage that had once been human but was dying. He had drawn from many of them to save his own life—pulled from their living energy to create a shield around himself, and fed the rewhah back on them. More might have lived had he not done so, but he’d already borne the scars of rewhah once in his life, and had no intention of doing it again.
He hurried through the corridors of the Gold Building, aware that somehow the rules had changed, that in these corridors neither he nor any other Dragon would be an accepted visitor. The Dragons, who had been providing the shielding and the rewhah for the day’s executions, had lost face badly. Those Masters in the Council who could get to the City Center would have put a curfew into effect, and would have found someone to blame the disaster on, but while they could claim the intervention of some anti-Harsian faction, people had seen what had happened, and without careful handling, they were going to sympathize with the people who had been … what? Saved by a god? Or simply removed from the world in a less painful manner?
Luercas had never even believed in the gods; his theology put him near the top of a pyramid of wizards and conceded the existence of nothing higher.
The presence of gods changed things. He wasn’t sure how yet, but if the enemy could call on gods for assistance, and actually get the assistance requested, then the Dragons should find a way to do the same thing. Or perhaps they could harness the power of the gods, in the same way that they had harnessed the power of souls. Wouldn’t that be inter-esting—using gods as fuel? What wonders could the Dragons do with fuel like that?
He got out of the Gold Building and took his aircar home high above the streets and out of the usual flight patterns to avoid any trouble. He had a lot to think about. A lot of research to do.
