“I thank you for that. And Green Siren is where?”
“Docked at the outer edge of Xxiphu, outfitted for earth sailing, at least for a time. That way. Seren whipped up some fierce magic.” The captain nodded toward the exit where the crew woman had loitered.
Earth sailing? He didn’t know exactly what that was, but he could guess. He gave an appreciative nod. The wizard was resourceful. If he was going to get out of there afterward, he needed to mend bridges, not burn them.
Japheth made a snap decision. “Yeva? Can you release Seren?”
“What?” said the woman.
“Hear me out,” said Japheth. “If Seren wants, she can accompany us. So can Thoster. They can make certain I don’t accidentally relinquish the Dreamheart to the Eldest. We could use their strength … and they can make good on their promise to the monk.”
“I’m not sure I want to enter into the Eldest’s presence,” said Seren.
“It’s still sleeping, and its servitors are busy waking it. Help me.”
“You … would really have me?”
“Of course. I intend to pry Anusha free from this place. But I don’t want to ‘doom the world,’ as you implied I might, in the process. So, aid me instead of hindering me. What do you say?”
The wizard’s brow crinkled. “Very well.”
Yeva loosed her immobilizing mind lock with a blink. Seren stood, picked up her wand, and straightened her garments.
The captain cleared his throat in an exaggerated fashion.
“Are you in, Captain?”
“Yes, though you’re a fool. But let me loose, and I’ll keep an eye on you like you said, in case your mind is less your own than you think. If so, cutting you down would be the least I could do.”
“I … appreciate that,” said Japheth. With a thought, he released his spell. The inky tendrils faded like smoke.
Thoster stood and nodded at the warlock. “Let’s be going, then?”
The wizard said, “Before you walked in, Japheth, I used this scrying pool to locate a shortcut from the throne chamber above us to where Green Siren is tied up. Just in case we live and need to beat a hasty retreat.”
Thoster laughed. “In case? Count on it. All of us are getting out of here.”
Japheth wondered. Besides the aboleths and the Eldest, the Lord of Bats was near. On the other hand, if Seren’s shortcut proved passable, they wouldn’t have to double back and come face to face with a vengeance-seeking Neifion.
Anusha said, “The tide rises again, Japheth. I don’t have much time left.”
Dread prickled Japheth’s skin. Even though he’d renewed their alliance, the captain and Seren had stolen too much of his time.
“Which way?” he asked.
Anusha motioned toward one of the corridors. “This way,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)
Xxiphu, Throne Chamber
Raidon had nearly succumbed to psychosis once before. Right after he’d learned Ailyn had died alone, he’d tried to murder a mob of Shou. When he’d been prevented from that mad caprice, he’d resorted to starving himself.
The intercession of the artificial entity Cynosure saved many innocents that day; his own vaunted self-discipline had crumbled before his rage. It had also been Cynosure who argued the monk into taking an interest in the needs of the world again, rather than allowing himself to waste away by going without food. Raidon’s acceptance of Cynosure’s premise was ultimately responsible for the semblance of equanimity he’d worn since then.
But the mere appearance of composure was not a foundation on which sanity could long stand. Since the day he’d learned of his adopted daughter’s death, he’d never regained the placid assurance a master of Xiang Temple should rightfully enjoy. He’d never forgiven himself for being absent when Ailyn needed him most. He had merely played the role of someone who seemed content through each gray day’s dawning.
When Raidon cut down Opal, his facade shattered. It didn’t even matter that she was a puppet of the Eldest. All the desolation and heartache Raidon had walled away following Ailyn’s death resurged. In doing so, it buckled the walls of his selfhood. His mind was like a smashed mirror. Each shard of his broken mind reflected only a limited view of reality. Events playing out within each piece were haphazard and unrelated.
His mind was shattered. And Cynosure was not there to help put him back together again.
So the Blade Cerulean leaped into the gap.
The sword pumped Raidon with purpose and will. Instead of collapsing into a raving heap when Opal flashed away, the monk spun and leaped for the other advancing memories and caught dreams. He destroyed the possessed images by the dozen with cleansing fire.
The man holding the blade was lost at sea. As the Eldest had used Opal like a marionette, Angul now directed Raidon. Each sweep and cut Raidon made was under the sword’s sole direction. While Angul was used to overmastering the egos of its wielders, the blade rarely enjoyed such freedom in its choice of actions and enemies to engage. The blade relished the feeling. Though it was not given to introspection, Angul determined not to waste the opportunity. What need did it have for the conscious mind of Raidon Kane?
When the corridor was cleared of every last foe, Raidon paused. Or rather Angul did. Angul relished the perfection of its new vessel, now the blade’s to direct.
The monk’s body turned and sprinted up the corridor after a wisp of churning mist, Angul raised high in one hand. Raidon’s throat screamed, “The Eldest wakes to the end of its interminable existence!”
A sprint up a steep, winding slope finally saw Raidon into Xxiphu’s throne chamber.
Dozens of entrances like the one Raidon had passed through were arrayed along the floor of the vast chamber. Most vented white plumes.
Thousands of cavities honeycombed the high walls of the throne chamber, each large enough to hold an adult aboleth in a comfortable bed of slime. Though most gaped empty, several hundred squirmed with the recently awakened. Each occupied berth burned with a purple flame.
Self-scribing lines rayed across the floor, illustrating concepts that couldn’t exist in reality. Flares of multihued light leaped from the crevices and canyons of the shifting diagrams. The inconstant light played on the bellies of the things that hovered overhead.
Aboleths circled above the writhing floor, flying in perfect formation. One creature followed the next through the air, creating a great ring that could have spanned a city bazaar. Each creature glowed with phosphorescent vigor.
Some of the aboleths were human sized; others were two or three times larger. Many sported hides of brown, rust, jade, and even white. However, several were black as ebony, and these were large as dragons.
Angul presumed these were elder aboleths, old beyond the reckoning of history and swollen with centuries of growth and fell power. They flew with their lesser kin in geometric formation, screaming out the repetitive stanzas of a magical working. The ritual they attempted sent shudders through the air with each revolution of their flying ring.
The mist pouring in from the ground-level entrances was sucked into a vortex shaped by the spinning ring of levitating aboleths. The vapor was constricted to a rivulet of white so dense it seemed a liquid, which spilled upward toward the chamber’s apex, into the darkness high above.
The monk’s eyes were blind behind a cascade of tears, but he did not stumble as he raced across the great floor of the chamber. He easily vaulted the undulating patterns. Angul’s preternatural senses did not require Raidon’s eyes to take in the wonders of the chamber.
To the Blade Cerulean, the throne room was like a treasury laid out for ransack. Forged in Stardeep to put down a priest of the Sovereignty, Angul came close to being awestruck despite the blade’s single-minded nature. For here were the creatures who the priest had served! The gathered aboleths in the chamber made up the Sovereignty itself! Only one being seemed missing from the tableau …
Angul exploded in ce
rulean fire. A flaming blue sphere leaped from the razor-sharp tip. The blaze hurtled toward the ceiling as if hurled from a catapult. It dazed the eyes of flying and perching aboleths alike.
The fire arced high and pierced the haze of shadow clinging to the ceiling. In the light of the flare, something appalling was revealed.
A gruesome shape was lodged in the ceiling. No, Angul saw. That assessment was incorrect.
The thing was the ceiling. The flare’s light revealed a bloated thing the size of a temple complex, one whose bulk stretched at least as wide as what should have been the roof. The creature’s stony hide was as desolate as the dead face of a moon and seemed nearly as large. However, what moon ever possessed dead eyes for craters?
Thousands of eyes speckled the gray expanse of petrified flesh, some small as coins while others were large as houses. Most were closed, but some stared blankly like the glassy orbs of corpses. These gazed into the empty space beneath the creature, down upon the circling aboleths, and across the prophecies scribed on the floor.
It was the Eldest. It presided over its progeny as a statue might, without breath.
Angul comprehended what was happening within the chamber: the last of the recalled thoughts and memories distributed throughout Xxiphu were splashing upward and being absorbed. Before, a single thought turned over once every ten thousand years in the thing’s gargantuan brain. But now, hundreds of new sensations quickened beneath its hard carapace.
Angul hesitated. The blade did not know fear. But the panorama of the throne room complete with the Eldest was beyond the blade’s experience. Even Angul’s arrogant belief that it was up for any challenge finally slammed against stark reality. The Blade Cerulean’s light dimmed. Angul recognized its strength alone could not hope to win the hour.
It needed to join its power to the Sign’s. To do that, Angul needed Raidon Kane after all.
Jagged shards scraped and punctured him. The world was a broken mirror, and he lay in its ruins. An image showed in each shard. Some revealed a man named Raidon Kane. Some were of a girl named Ailyn. A few showed the likeness of a different child named Opal.
If he didn’t move, he felt hardly any pain at all. He’d learned that despite not really having a body, attempting to see the pieces as a whole was agonizing. When he tried to stand up to see more than a few splinters at once, pieces of him were flayed off by the crush of shards, each as sharp as a torturer’s scalpel.
Better to just lie still and watch the events in the glass unfold. In some, Raidon laughed. In others he slept, ate, or walked. In several he fought. He didn’t like to watch those. If he did so too long, he shifted his perspective so often in order to follow the action that he sliced himself anew on the images’ sharp edges.
Welcome, agony.
So he observed images other than his own, chiefly of the girl Ailyn. These were mostly idyllic. Mostly. A couple showed grave markers. When he turned his attention to avert his gaze from them, the shards cut more cruelly than ever.
Thus when the sky blue fire blasted into him, tumbling his perspective end over end through the shattered splinters of his mind, Raidon screamed like a lost soul.
The fire roared, furnace hot, across the bed of broken glass. The shards wilted under the heat. They slumped into reddish goo that began to congeal. When the flame puffed out, the melted pieces had formed together in a lumpy, sharp-edged mass.
The mirror was reassembled, but crudely and with mismatched seams. Nothing reflected in its crazed surface would ever look the same again.
Raidon heard music that he guessed was played on instruments forged of rotting skin and hollowed bones. Unwept tears filtered everything through a quilt of fractured glints. The monk wiped his eyes with the back of his free hand and saw the throne chamber of Xxiphu. He saw the spiraling elder aboleths—and that which stared down with its ocean of eyes high above. The noise was the creatures’ chanting ritual.
“I don’t care,” Raidon said. “Let me go, Angul.”
All aberrations must be purged. You know this. Pull yourself together and join with me.
“I’m empty. I’m done.”
Raidon made to throw down the sword, but the Blade Cerulean overrode his intention. Instead, the weapon pointed up at the ceiling.
Angul said, That is what we must defeat. Afterward you can collapse in upon yourself and embrace your weakness until death finds you.
“I killed her!” the monk screamed. His voice rang out into the throne chamber. “I cut her down! It is something that can never be forgiven!”
You did nothing that requires forgiveness. You did what was necessary. You cleansed an abomination, Angul offered.
“No!” This last denial was offered at such a volume that a few aboleths flying in formation overhead twitched. Raidon briefly wondered why they weren’t reacting to his presence. The effort of even that small question exhausted him.
You must call upon the Cerulean Sign and join its power to mine.
“I must do nothing.”
Several aboleths resting in wall berths pressed to the edges of their moist balconies. They fixed their eyes on the intruder. The flying creatures overhead maintained their litany, but many now fixed an extra eye or two on the raving half-elf below.
Time grows short. Will you compound your error by giving up now, rendering all your past actions a pointless charade?
“Yes. Because that is what they were. The last futile gasps of someone who should have perished in the Year of Blue Fire.” Raidon tried again to fling the sword away and throw himself into one of the moving furrows that slid along the floor. His heart wasn’t in it, though. The Blade Cerulean easily checked him.
Four aboleths along the closest wall surged form their observation cavities, producing tiny waves of disturbed slime. None of them had apparently been graced with a connection to Xxiphu’s orrery, for they slid down the walls like slugs dropped down the side of a garden wall. When they reached the floor, they squirted forward on a layer of ooze.
The four creatures advanced on Raidon in a ragged line. Their tentacles gesticulated and lashed, as if doing so was the only way they could express their surprise at finding an invader in their midst. If surprise was even an emotion such creatures were capable of.
Raidon was only vaguely aware of the onrushing threat. So when an orb of pulsing goo flashed toward his head, his body betrayed his fractured intentions and slipped to the side.
A volley of similar attacks burst from the other three creatures. Already in motion, the monk whirled and rolled to avoid each attack. His somersaulting evasion melted into a charge, almost without Raidon’s awareness. His trained muscle memory, once engaged, took over.
One aboleth had gotten slightly out ahead of the others. When he reached the creature, it tried to heave itself backward, but Raidon transferred his momentum into a high leap. He came down upon the creature with a slashing elbow that smeared two of the creature’s eyes into so much jelly.
A hollow scream burst from its tri-slit mouth, and its lashing tentacles redoubled their frenzy. Raidon rolled off the creature’s back to face its three siblings.
Angul remained quiet and kept its power quiescent, as if it sensed that urging the monk to use its aberration-slaying edge could push the mentally unstable man back into his fit of apathy.
The half-elf’s face hardened into an expression of feral determination. Whatever else came to pass, the aboleths before him would rue challenging him. Though if they could not feel surprise, sorrow was also probably beyond their grasp. Raidon didn’t much care, so long as he stamped them into nonexistence.
Now that he was in motion, he found he preferred it to being still. Smashing his fist or shin into the flesh of a monster was far better than letting his mind dwell, over and over again, on all his many failures. There was sure to be time enough for self recrimination later.
Or, if he was lucky, he would fail here in the bowels of the world and be dead.
He would cherish the peace of death.
Three abolethic minds reached for Raidon’s and tried to leash it. Before, the monk’s discipline had easily warded off alien instructions. But his mind was a stitchwork of barely knitted parts. The aboleths’ mental strength easily curled into his brain and squeezed.
Angul acted, as if the blade had been waiting for just such a contingency. With a blaze of cerulean fire, the webs of control burned away so quickly that the monk hardly realized he had been momentarily leashed. Certainly his charge into the left flank of the next closest monster didn’t suffer any loss of ferocity.
The monk, holding Angul in his right hand, executed a flying jab with his left fist. The momentum of his fist and body lent the blow the ferocity of a sledgehammer’s strike. Even as the jab pounded home, he stepped out and to the creature’s right with his left foot. He stepped back with his right foot, spinning into what would have been a back fist, save for the fact Angul was clutched in his right hand.
The creature, already dazed by the jab and off guard from the monk’s swift position change, didn’t even realize its danger until after it was gutted by Angul. The spray of dark blood doused man and sword, but the Blade Cerulean’s next flare burned them both clean again.
One of the remaining two uninjured aboleths managed to slap Raidon with a tentacle. That time when the monk spun half around, it was because of the force of his enemy’s attack. Stars briefly glinted around the edges of his vision. His breath sounded ragged in his lungs.
The other aboleth, sensing an advantage, conjured an orb of slime out of thin air, then sent it slashing at the Shou. Already dazed by the tentacle, Raidon couldn’t quite avoid the orb, which punched him in the chest. The ooze splattered him, coating him in a thin layer of mucus that instantly began to harden.
Without realizing he reached for it, Raidon sought his focus.
A monk of Xiang Temple trained first in the ability to concentrate and find an inner point where all thought was concentrated. Only after monks showed some ability to find a focus were they trained in the martial arts.
City of Torment Page 24
