Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  “They are one and the same.”

  “Either you are afraid to lose what my power can do for you, or you’re afraid to lose me, Rielle. The woman. Because you love me.”

  “And can it not be both?” he said with a touch of irritation. “Even your mind allows you to experience many emotions at once. You cannot conceive of how many mine can hold.”

  With a growl, she flung him hard to the ground. He landed flat on his back and lay there gasping soundlessly.

  She crouched beside him, her hands aching with the urge to touch him and soothe the pain of his stolen body before it could restore itself. She knew she could do it; with a mere glancing thought, she slipped into the realm of the empirium and saw the brilliant map of his body laid out before her. She counted the throbbing red-and-black blossoms of light where his body had been battered by her anger—sixteen altogether.

  But first he would hear her speak.

  “I know what you want from me,” she breathed. “You’ve gently turned me away from it whenever I’ve had enough wits about me to ask questions. I see that now. And I see clearly what you want. You’ve teased me with the idea for months. You want to help me find the remaining four castings.” Now that her memory had cleared, she remembered what was kept in the massive pack strapped to Artem’s back. She understood why looking at it always made her feel sick, the air drawing tight and hot around her. That pack held castings. Marzana’s shield. Grimvald’s hammer. Tokazi’s staff. Corien had stolen them from me de la Terre on the night of her wedding, and their trapped power pulled at her.

  “And then,” Rielle pressed on, “when we have all seven, you want me to use them to open the Gate and release your many vengeful kin. You want to provide me with bodies—millions of human bodies, emptied of their minds, thanks to you—and you want me to resurrect every invading angel. Give each of them a corpse, a body they can actually hold on to. A permanent anchor, since most of them aren’t strong enough to hold on to a body for long. Isn’t that right? You want me to bind them to new bodies, fuse them into being using the empirium, grant them more power than they’ve ever had. You want to use me to win this, your second and final war.”

  She could not bear it any longer; she stroked Corien’s bleeding cheek, and where her fingers grazed his burned skin, it became whole and white once more. He trembled at her touch, his eyes fluttering with relief. And desire, even now. Even after she had hurt him, even as he lay bleeding, he wanted her. The shadows of their shared dark dreams fluttered at the edges of her mind.

  “But what do I want?” she whispered. “To repair the Gate and trap the angels in the Deep for another thousand years? Or do I want to open it, as you would have me do? Do I want to release the millions of bloodthirsty souls teeming on the other side?”

  “Bloodthirsty.” He coughed, still catching his breath. “We are hardly that. It is justice we seek.”

  “Of the cruelest sort possible.”

  “What was done to us was cruel. We will return the gesture in kind.”

  “And when you lead this army of resurrected angels, where do you see me? Where do I fit into this grand picture of yours, Kalmaroth?”

  He hissed in anger at her use of his angelic name. She smiled a little, enjoying the sting of his wrath. His thoughts betrayed him whenever she uttered the word; he hated that angel, the one who had failed, who had fallen screaming into the Deep.

  “You will lead the charge at my side,” Corien answered, his voice tight with pain. His fingers touched hers. “You will show the people who would have caged you forever how mistaken they were to think they ever could.”

  She could hardly breathe. Even holding herself back from him, even with the wall of her unwavering power between them, she felt his heat, his ancient will, as keenly as if they were moving together at last, as they had done in mind but never in flesh.

  “And if I chose to help you,” she whispered, “what would I become?”

  Wincing, he raised himself onto his elbows. “Your truest self. You would rise to greater heights than any being that has ever lived.”

  There was a fever in his eyes, a relentless white plain of conviction. She would have thought it an absurd thing to say—greater than any being that has ever lived—had she not felt that same delicious certainty turning in the back of her mind ever since she was small, even before she was old enough to understand what it meant.

  She tried for a scornful smile. “You flatter me.”

  “You know I don’t. Not now. Not with this.” He touched her hand. “Rielle, this is what I offer you: If you help me in this war, in this great work I’ve planned for an endless dark age as my people suffered in the Deep, I will help you achieve everything you have ever ached to know. The ecstasy of joining with the power that made you.”

  Quite against her will, her blood leapt to life at his words. The world sizzled around her, as if she were a ball of fire flung hard into a frozen sea. She stared at him, seeing the words he did not say, and shuddered down to her bones.

  “And would you have me find God for you, Corien? The source of the empirium? Is that what this is? One war is not enough?” Her thumbs toyed with his lips, which opened at once. His teeth scraped her skin. “Would you use me to destroy and supplant the force that made us?”

  “No, Rielle. It is you who would be God, not me. A kinder, more glorious God than whatever permitted humanity to condemn my kind to eternal suffering. And I would serve you gladly.”

  For a long moment, neither spoke. Then Rielle looked away, unable to bear the intensity of his gaze, and ran her hands over the slender lines of his body, knitting closed every wound she had dealt him.

  “I would have healed in my own time,” he pointed out, his voice a trembling thread. Her touch was light; she refused to grant him more pleasure than that.

  “I prefer to heal you myself,” she said, pretending calm even though she knew he would sense the lie.

  When she finished, Corien was himself again, unhurt and unruffled, smiling up at her. She helped him to his feet, her cheeks warming.

  “Come, my glorious tormentor.” He kissed her hand. “My miraculous queen. Together, we will right the many wrongs that have been done, and then, our war won, we will find the empirium’s source at the heart of creation. We’ll rend it from the stars and remake its heartless throne into one you deserve.”

  “You assume I have agreed to help you, or that I ever will,” she managed with dignity.

  “No, my beauty. It’s only that with every breath you draw, I feel how deeply you crave more than this small, pale world will ever be able to give you.”

  Rielle could say nothing to that. She had thought the same thing herself, and he knew it. Refusing his arm, she returned to lead the way back to the abandoned manor house, feeling cold in the still mountain air and unsettled, her mind heavy and muddy—and then she realized, just after Corien did, what their argument in the ruins had done.

  A beat of silence, and then he grabbed an ancient, cracked vase from the floor and flung it against the nearest wall with a roar of fury.

  The house was empty. Obritsa and Artem—and the three castings—were gone.

  6

  Eliana

  “They say Elysium’s towers pierce the clouds, that it’s as white as the highest snows. They say it glitters day and night with the stolen jewels of dead cities. They say there are thousands of desperate people on the bridges, screaming to be let inside, and more arrive every day. Cowards and traitors, all of them. Pathetic wretches. But if the doors opened up for me, I’d be right there with them. I’d kill my own brother to get inside the Emperor’s city, if I had to.”

  —Collection of stories written by refugees in occupied Ventera, curated by Hob Cavaserra

  The Emperor’s city was a gargantuan sprawl of spires and turrets on a high flatland, surrounded by a circular chasm spanned by a dozen slender white
bridges.

  It glittered like a careless spill of jewels, thousands upon thousands of them, every facet finely crafted, every tower winking in the chill sunlight. The air was thinner than Eliana was accustomed to. Since they’d made port at the coastal city of Luxitaine, their caravan of fine carriages had climbed and climbed until now, in the most mountainous region of Celdaria, they had at last reached Elysium. The mountains ended abruptly, and then there were rocky plains, and then a great chasm ringing the city. It had once been me de la Terre, the capital of Celdaria, a city Saint Katell had crafted after the war. Home of the Lightbringer. Home of the Blood Queen. And Eliana’s own home too, she supposed, even now with its altered name and an ancient angel on the throne.

  Elysium. Thanks to Remy, Eliana was familiar with the angelic roots of the word. Paradise. A state of bliss or delight.

  A giggle sprouted in her throat, and she let it rise. There was no point in hiding her growing fear. The Emperor would dismantle any mask she wore.

  She sat on the velvet-cushioned bench in the fourth carriage of eight—the fourth and finest—and laughed, ruffling neither the angelic guards sitting on either side of her nor Simon, who sat silently on the bench opposite her. It was the kind of laughter that brought tears along with it. She didn’t even bother to wipe her face. She laughed and cried and looked out the window.

  Once, she would have inspected the landscape, noted the number of watchtowers along the nearest stretch of the city wall, estimated the wall’s height and circumference, made quick, careful note of how many miserable people were clustered on either side of the bridge they were traversing. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in the mountains surrounding Elysium, and thousands more arrived every day, begging for entry and crowding the chasm bridges, eager to supplicate at the feet of angels.

  But Eliana didn’t think it mattered now, counting the towers and counting the refugees and wondering about the chasm circling the city. What could she do with that information, surrounded by angels who could sense any escape plan the moment it began forming in her mind?

  Nothing. She could do nothing with it. She had nothing, and she was nothing, and she had no one.

  She flexed her naked hands; their bareness repulsed and terrified her. She couldn’t sense the empirium; her mind was an endless expanse of choking black wool. Remy sat in another carriage, and she had not been allowed to see him, even after an embarrassing display on the Luxitaine piers that began with begging, progressed to screaming, and ended in exhausted silence.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked. It was a stupid question, given the view out her window, but she could no longer bear the quiet.

  Simon’s cool gaze flicked up from the thin leather-bound notebook he had been writing in intermittently since they had left Luxitaine three days prior. “Elysium.”

  She thought she had grown used to the new awful flatness in his eyes. She was wrong. She dug her fingernails into her thigh. “Where in Elysium?”

  Simon turned a page and resumed writing. “The Emperor’s palace.”

  “Where in the palace?”

  “The receiving hall.”

  “Which receiving hall? I imagine there must be several, this being a palace.”

  One of the guards, his broad chest emblazoned with the winged imperial crest, shifted with what Eliana hoped was irritation.

  But Simon remained indifferent. The pages of his notebook were lined with meticulous script. “His favorite one.”

  Eliana tried to sound cheerful, hoping it would unnerve someone other than herself. “And what will we do there?”

  The carriage glided to a halt. Simon closed his notebook. He didn’t smile, not even cruelly. Eliana wished he would.

  “Soon you’ll see for yourself,” he replied, then exited the carriage with the kind of easy, efficient grace she’d once admired and now despised.

  The guards helped her out and into a broad stone yard where everything was white—the cobbled ground, the stone walls, the thin November sky overhead, the lack of sound. Wherever Remy was, they were keeping him out of her sight. At some point during her numbness, they had passed through one of the city gates, and now Eliana could no longer hear the wailing wretches crowding the bridges outside the city. She wondered how many of them had fallen into the chasm, charging desperately after the carriages in hopes of breaching Elysium’s walls.

  As she thought of the chasm, a memory returned to her.

  Remy had read it to her from one of his stolen books back home in Orline, in a life that seemed distant and absurd to her now: And on the final night of that old gilded age, the Blood Queen pulled the oceans from their beds, called down the sun’s fire, uprooted the mountains, and all that Celdaria once was, all that the world once was, collapsed under the weight of her rage.

  With Remy’s dear voice echoing in her mind, Eliana realized that the chasm was where mountains had once stood. Mountains her mother had obliterated on the last night of her life.

  Once again, Eliana flexed her bare hands and called for the power she had fought so ferociously to understand.

  Nothing answered.

  She nearly resumed laughing. Of course nothing answered, for she had become nothing, a wreck of her former self, and it was a relief to know it. A powerless Sun Queen would be of no use to anyone. But if they returned her castings to her, that would be the real danger. Her mother’s power in her blood, her castings around her hands once more, and the Emperor’s mind directing her exhausted one. His control supplanting hers. His will consuming her own. Encouraging her to try again. Insisting she try again, and again, until eventually some exhausted spark of power would alight, and it would all be over. He would have her—a Sun Queen puppet to play with as he liked.

  A frightening giddiness overtook her as she imagined the angels clawing at the scraps of her mind, searching for a weapon they would never find.

  Fists clenched in her chains, Eliana bit her lip until it bled.

  She would take her own life before she allowed her power to rise for the Emperor’s use.

  They passed through a white archway, then across another stone yard and down a flight of steps into a series of tunnels. They were dark and cold and twisting, clearly designed to confound intruders, and in the close, damp air, Eliana began to feel as queasy as she had when she and Harkan had first boarded the Streganna, when the black lily’s poison sat thick in her veins.

  Thinking of him—his warm, dark eyes, his arms steady around her, how he had accepted her even on her meanest days—Eliana’s eyes grew hot. She stumbled; a guard caught her elbow. It was possible, she told herself, that Harkan hadn’t died. She hadn’t seen him on the beach in Festival. Simon hadn’t shot him as he had shot so many others.

  It was possible. It was a tiny, timid hope. It turned in her heart like a tender bud working hard to open, and she clutched it with every ounce of tired strength left to her.

  The world around her was changing. She noticed it dully, her vision unfocused. A polished marble floor. Ceilings high and dark, glittering with painted stars—silver and gold, violet and crystalline blue. Tall windows of painted glass cast streams of colored light across a tall, narrow room. Amber and rose, turquoise and jade.

  Admiral Ravikant led the way, hands clasped behind his back, his gait easy and sickeningly familiar. Her father’s steps, slightly altered. Then Simon after him, quiet but clearly comfortable, the tension missing from his shoulders. He had been pretending before, Eliana realized, and now he was not. Now he could relax. Now he was himself.

  A wash of human-shaped color to her left, startlingly near, caught her eye.

  She faltered, foundering in the grip of her guards.

  It was a statue. A woman.

  One of many.

  “Come, come,” said Admiral Ravikant. His voice bounced with glee. “No dawdling.”

  The guards pushed her onward,
and Eliana obeyed—but she hardly noticed any of them.

  Instead, she stared at the women.

  It was a gallery of women, some carved out of stone, some blown from glass, others assembled from thousands of miniscule colored tiles. Women of golden brass, women fashioned from plates of steel and copper wires, women painted with splashes of color and hung from the walls.

  Eliana’s skin prickled as they passed between the frozen figures. They seemed too exquisite to be real, even the grotesque ones boasting a strange sort of beauty, and there were too many of them, so many that Eliana felt unbalanced, as if the world had tilted askew. It was an obsessive collection, packing the room from wall to wall with seemingly no logic to their arrangement.

  And then, passing one, Eliana stopped, jarred to a halt by a sickening realization.

  She stared at the sculpture before her—a woman of glittering black stone, her limbs impossibly delicate, her proportions elongated and alien. She was on her knees, her body arched in obvious agony, her arms and head flung back and left vulnerable to the fury of the skies. Innumerable gilded flames sprang from her arms, her fingers, the ends of her streaming, wild hair. Her gown only half clothed her, its hems and collar shredded. A starburst of gold paint gleamed on her chest. Two more shone in the flat places where her eyes should have been, and two more marked her open, rigid palms.

  Eliana tensed. The woman’s open mouth was also gold, the deepest visible parts of her throat painted as though bright red fire were crawling up her throat.

  She was screaming.

  And Eliana recognized her.

  Looking around as the guards shoved her on, she recognized all of them. They were all the same woman, over and over, her features sometimes exaggerated or caricatured, but always recognizable, always familiar. Eliana had seen them herself, weeks ago, centuries ago, back in Celdaria, in those woods where Rielle had tried to kill her. In those woods where Corien had slipped inside her mind and said, What a life you have led. What interesting company you keep.