“Meet my father,” said Sorial, gesturing toward the skeleton.
“There’s more left of him than there is of mine.” Myselene didn’t seem overly impressed by her companion’s macabre introduction. “Can we head into the city? It’s chilly out here in the open.”
For a moment, Sorial didn’t move. There was no emotion but there were questions. He wished he had known at the time who the man was. Like so much else in his family history, it seemed a waste. Maraman had deserved his fate but Sorial would have liked for them to have engaged in a meaningful conversation first. With both of his parents dead, there were elements about his past he would never know - the kinds of little things most children took for granted. In particular, he regretted knowing so little about his older brother - the first fruit of Ferguson’s grand experiment. Based on the little he had been told, Braddock would have made a nobler wizard than him. Or was his incomplete portrait of his brother painted from the nostalgic memories and half-truths of those who barely remembered him, with all ugliness forgotten or cast aside?
Sorial located a section of the wall where the once-mighty barrier had collapsed, requiring only a little climbing to enter the city. Ibitsal was like Havenham - an echo of something that had once been impressive. Sorial supposed it was like that for all long-abandoned cities as nature sought to erase signs of human habitation. It was a pile of broken stones, sawdust, and crumbled clay whose occupants were rodents and insects. Most of the structures were unidentifiable, with houses, shops, and other buildings having been reduced by time and weather into an uninspiring sameness. The exception was noteworthy, however: a single tower that had defied the centuries of neglect. Its spire had long since toppled but the rest stood unbroken - a long finger pointed skyward. This was the tower of the portal, the location that pulled at Sorial like a sliver of metal to a lodestone.
They made their way through what had once been the streets of Ibitsal. The morning mist lingered, shrouding everything in a gauzy whiteness, hiding the fullness of the city’s dilapidation from their eyes. Their footfalls sounded unnaturally loud in the otherwise near-perfect silence.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you had two good legs,” said Myselene. “I haven’t had to slow down at all for you.”
Sorial grunted his acknowledgment. Through practice, he had made advances with the mobility of his stone limbs. With each passing moment, they felt more a part of him than a detached appendage. His control was becoming instinctive, almost as if they were flesh and bone. He still couldn’t run or wield a sword but he didn’t feel as helpless as he once had.
“The tower looks well preserved. I assume that’s where we’re headed.”
“It is,” said Sorial, not in the mood for lengthy conversation. In close proximity, the compulsion was distracting. Yet there was something about it… “Whatever’s pulling me here, it ain’t the portal. Near the portal, yes. But it ain’t the actual portal.”
“A trap?”
“Perhaps,” conceded Sorial. Yet his assessment of the summoning hadn’t changed. It was too complex to be the fabrication of a wizard. But if not Justin, then who? Or what?
“Time to turn back?” Myselene’s voice betrayed anxiety. The eeriness of Ibitsal was unnerving her. He wondered if, on a subconscious level, the compulsion was touching her as well. Not being attuned to it, she might mistake it for something else.
Sorial considered her suggestion. That would be the smart thing: leave Ibitsal and its secret behind and head to Obis. If there was danger in the tower, it wasn’t too late to bypass it. If he did that, however, he recognized the not knowing would haunt him more forcefully than any of the ruined city’s supposed shades. Worse, the compulsion would gnaw at him, interfering with his concentration and possibly fouling his ability to use magic. “I have to go on, but there ain’t no reason for you to come too. You can stay here or go back to the mercenaries’ camp and wait for me there.”
“You know I won’t do that.”
Myselene couldn’t see Sorial’s thin smile, hidden as it was in the depths of the hood. “I didn’t know it, but I suspected it. You’re the only woman I’ve met who can match Alicia for stubbornness.” He also suspected her decision to stick close to him was rooted in her uneasiness about being alone in these surroundings.
Although the tower seemed close, it took the better part of the morning for them to pick their way through the rubble of Ibitsal’s once-cobbled streets to reach its base. With the door long ago rotted away, the high, wide entrance to the building gaped open, a toothless maw large enough to admit a wagon. Inside was a sight to awe and inspire. Unlike the rest of Ibitsal, the portal chamber had been relatively undisturbed by weather, disuse, and time. Dust and dirt carpeted the floor but there was no major debris and the weeds, moss, and scrub found throughout the city hadn’t crossed the threshold. The top, although once roofed, now lay open to the gray, threatening sky above. The portal itself was atop a tall pillar situated in the exact center of the circular room. The column was seemingly cut from a massive hunk of stone, although Sorial’s insight revealed there to be many pieces cleverly smoothed and joined to give the appearance of an unbroken whole. It rose nearly one hundred feet and had narrow stairs carved into the side, spiraling up around the perimeter.
After hesitating a moment to us his earth-sense to ascertain the stability of the steps, Sorial began a confident ascent. The decay grinding down the rest of Ibitsal hadn’t touched the column. Long after the city had been swallowed by forest and earth, the portal and its column would remain.
Myselene’s approach was more tentative but, after watching Sorial navigate perhaps two-dozen steps without difficulty, she started after him. It took them a quarter-hour to climb all 400 steps and reach the top, where they were greeted by a smooth landing fifteen feet in diameter with a hole big enough to swallow man in the middle. The portal. The wizardmaker. Or, if Sorial was foolish enough to step into it a second time, the widowmaker.
Myselene moved closer but not too close. “I’ve never seen anything so…black.” It was a gross understatement. The portal’s stygian depths were impenetrable and made the darkness of the deepest forest seem false by comparison. Nothing in this world was as utterly, completely devoid of light. Sorial gazed into it, so like its twin in Havenham, but felt nothing. He was correct; the compulsion, whatever it was, didn’t originate from the portal.
What happened next was so unexpected that Sorial nearly stumbled back over the edge of the column. The portal’s black surface shimmered and something insubstantial emerged from it, floating up to hang in the air above it. Initially, it seemed like the trick of the eye but, after a moment, the amorphous blob divided and resolved itself into two distinct images. They were translucent and ethereal, constructed out of energy not matter, but Sorial could see them. And, as the apparitions manifested detail, he discovered in their features an unsettling familiarity.
The first was a likeness of himself, but not the damaged man he had become since donning the wizard’s mantle. Instead, it was the hale, hearty boy he had been several years ago at the time of his maturity. Yet, the more he studied the image, the more he was struck by its incongruities. It was taller and thinner than he had ever been and the face didn’t bear the scars Sorial had sported since a much younger age.
The second figure was Kara. She appeared much as she had been the last time he had seen her, before he left for Havenham and she came here. Here, where she had died. His nape hairs stood on end when he intuited who his near look-alike represented: Braddock, the brother he had never known - the other member of his family to have perished atop this column. Perhaps Ibitsal was indeed haunted.
When the image of Kara spoke, Sorial didn’t know whether he was hearing her words with his ears or whether they were being communicated directly into his mind. The timber of her voice was different from what he remembered: brittle, distant, airy. Gone was the lush contralto he had come to know over the years. Kara, or whatever the phantom was, wasn�
��t only conversing with Sorial. Sorial recognized from her shocked expression that Myselene was included in the audience. This drama wasn’t some kind of magical pantomime confined to his frame of reality.
“My son, thank you for coming.”
“Mother?” The confusion was evident in his voice. Since becoming a wizard, Sorial no longer used the word impossible, but it seemed unlikely at best that this could be his mother in actuality rather than a representation of her.
The shade, however, nodded. “What you see is an echo of who I was at the time of my transformation. With me is your brother, Braddock, who also passed through the portal at which you now stand. We two are the misbegotten children of an old rule and a new age. By all that’s sane and right, we shouldn’t be here, yet here we are.”
“Transformation? Not death?” According to Rexall, Kara had been torn apart after failing at the portal.
“It’s a matter of perspective. My body is certainly dead, its molecules scattered all around this chamber and the surroundings. Yet my essence - my soul, if you will - continues, trapped within the Otherverse. You too have passed through the portal, Sorial. You’ve gazed into the place between worlds. When you entered, however, nothing precluded your return. That wasn’t true of me. The transformation occurred but I was blocked from reuniting with my body. The link was severed by virtue of my daughter’s existence. I continued on into the Otherverse, abandoning my flesh to its inevitable fate. And, because I entered the other realm powerless, I became subject to its whims and eddies. I’m a parasite, living off its energy but with no real existence. Even now, though I can communicate with you, I’m not really in your universe. I’m speaking to you across a bridge.”
“Then all the failed wizards are with you?”
“No,” said Braddock, speaking for the first time. His voice might have been like Sorial’s but it was difficult to determine because of the distortion. “For a while, I was the only one. Then Mother arrived. I was glad for the company but dearly wish it had been someone else. Humans without the aptitude who step through the portal are annihilated. They lack the capacity to pass into the Otherverse in any form. The blocked wizards of the past had been rescued and delivered to eternity by the gods. When I arrived, however, the gods were gone. So we remain, too small to make a difference and too big for our consciousness to be absorbed into the energy that sustains us.”
“We aren’t alone, Sorial.” There was urgency in Kara’s tone. “The purity of balance in the Otherverse has been corrupted. It was thus long before we arrived but the situation grows more precarious with every passing moment.”
“By Justin?” asked Sorial.
“Justin? Who’s Justin?”
“The Lord of Fire.”
“Ah - the name is new to me but not the title. The man who stole the mantle from Braddock. No, it has nothing to do with him. The seeds of disaster were sown long ago in the Otherverse, possibly even without the gods’ knowledge. This realm is dominated by two masters who call themselves The Lord of Order and The Lord of Chaos. Brothers in their former life, they now contend endlessly with one another, maintaining balance because they are evenly matched and each has the will necessary to stave off the other. But the contest between them, which has raged for a thousand years, cannot last forever, and there are signs it may soon end. If one of them breaks, as may happen at any time, balance will be shattered and all energy and matter will be the tool of the victor. A victory for Chaos will plunge the realm of matter into a spiral of deterioration. A victory for Order will freeze all things in stasis, destroying everything that doesn’t conform to a rigid code. With no gods to block his path, whoever emerges as the victor will set himself up as a new, terrible deity. The last god.”
“Then this has everything to do with Justin. He believes it’s possible to enter the Otherverse. Ferguson thinks that’s his endgame for the continent-wide devastation he’s carrying out.”
“If he attempts entry into the Otherverse, even if he fails, he may create a sufficient disturbance that the balance would alter in favor of Chaos. With nothing to counter it, the unchecked entropy would then infect the energy emerging from the Otherverse and all the gods wrought would be undone.”
Another reason to stop Justin, as if one was needed. Apparently, Ferguson had suspected something of this sort, possibly gleaned from his years of study in the library across the sea. His desperation to prevent Justin from making an assault on the Otherverse now made sense.
“Is there anything you can do?” asked Sorial.
“We have no power,” said Kara. “We’re insubstantial shades, forgotten flotsam in the energy stream that The Lords of Chaos and Order perceive as too inconsequential to remove. We represent no threat to anyone on either side of the portal. Even our ability as watchers is limited.”
“Yet you were able to summon me here.”
“We can manipulate small amounts of the energy. Not enough to do anything substantive but enough to attract attention. Had you ignored us, the compulsion would have faded.”
“What about Ariel, Alicia, and Justin? Did they hear your call?”
“It was directed at you alone. It would have been difficult to target Justin or Ariel. They’re too far away from any portal at the moment, and the tendrils of energy dissipate rapidly over distance. Braddock and I have been calling out to you almost since I arrived here but, until a few days ago, you were too far. Alicia is even farther away. In fact, she has…vanished.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“We can’t sense her,” said Braddock. “She’s blocked from the Otherverse.”
“Dead?” Sorial uttered the word quietly and with great reluctance, his heart quailing to even speak the possibility aloud. If there was one thing that could destabilize the whole of his existence, it was losing Alicia. Yet he needed to know the truth. Running from something horrible didn’t make it any less real.
“No,” said Kara. The gentleness in her voice was evident even through the distortion. “Not dead. But beyond our ability to sense her. She’s entered a nexus protected from the Otherverse. There aren’t many of those in the whole of the world.
“But why aren’t you with her? And who travels with you and carries your child?”
Not mine, Azarak’s. But the ramifications were clear. Myselene’s desperate plan had succeeded.
“This is Queen Myselene of Vantok.”
“Ah. A pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty. Your husband was a great and honorable man.” Kara’s specter mimicked a curtsey. Myselene, taken aback, said nothing. “Not very talkative, is she?”
“What are your limitations?” asked Sorial. Despite the strangeness of the situation and the dire nature of the warning, there was an element of fascination in this encounter. A chance to peer behind the curtain of death, unless there was something more devious at work here. These shades might look like Kara and Braddock, but that didn’t mean they were Kara and Braddock.
“If there’s energy flowing out of the Otherverse, we can use it to observe and, like now, communicate. That’s the extent of our abilities. Active magic draws us like moths to a flame. We saw when Vantok fell. We saw your struggle with the efreet. We saw when you and Alicia confronted your sister. But our narrative is discontinuous. We don’t see everything and this kind of direct interaction, I fear, will be erratic. It is, after all, a violation of the natural order of things, but the gods are no longer able to enforce the laws they established. To hear and speak with us, you would have to be in close proximity to a portal and even then, we are subject to eddies in the Otherverse. Independent action is a tricky thing. Even now, I feel the bridge becoming tenuous.”
So many questions… which to ask? And could he trust the answers?
“How many portals are there?”
“Of the eighteen gifted by the gods at the beginning, only four remain: Ibitsal, Havenham, one in the southeastern Forbidden Lands, and one on a distant continent. If those should be destroyed, the natural world
would be sealed off from the Otherverse. Magic would cease to exist and The Lords of Chaos and Order wouldn’t be able to reach beyond their current realm. Their control comes through energy; they can’t manipulate matter directly. It’s a drastic solution but, if it comes to it, don’t discard it. Formed by giants at the behest of the gods, portals are exceedingly difficult to destroy but men have found ways. Fourteen have succumbed already.”
He understood what Kara was suggesting: the only way to save humanity might be to sever the link with the Otherverse. Put a permanent end to wizards and magic, which the gods had deemed crucial to the world’s survival. How much of this had they envisioned? Had Ferguson recognized this as a possible last, desperate maneuver once the game was already lost?
“Is there anything you can tell me about The Lord of Fire?”
“Little you don’t already know. He’s a powerful wizard but his reserves can’t be deep. His army marches on Earlford but he’s not always with them and he recently suffered injuries after an expenditure of magic. He represents a concrete danger but, even should you defeat him, you’ll have gained only a brief respite. Perhaps years. Perhaps much less.” As she spoke this warning, her words became quieter and less distinct. Her image began to flicker like a candle flame subjected to a draft.
“Mother…” began Braddock, but Kara waved him off.
“How do I enter the Otherverse?” asked Sorial. If Justin knew the answer to that question, Sorial had to learn it.
Kara said something but he couldn’t understand it. Next to her, Braddock was becoming animated. Kara ignored him and tried again. “The living cannot enter the Otherverse. This is a realm of energy not matter.”
Shadow of the Otherverse (The Last Whisper of the Gods Saga Book 3) Page 22
