“Where was it taking you?”
“No, you don’t understand. It was taking me. It wanted to breathe. It wanted to walk, to see through my eyes.” She struggled to sit up, glad he did not try to help. She felt clumsy after days of inactivity, her body strange and heavy. Distracted, she placed a hand on her stomach. The girl on the mountain flitted through her mind, a memory she refused to follow.
“The empirium was claiming me for its own,” Rielle murmured, “and I wanted it to have me.”
Corien watched her curiously. “If the empirium had taken you, what would have become of you?”
“I don’t know. It would have killed me. It would have made me better, or stronger. Or maybe it would have not liked my taste and spat me out. But I would have known, at least, even if it had killed me. I would have understood.”
“Understood what?”
Impatience lashed through her. “This. All of this.” She gestured at herself. “Why I’m like this. Why I am. Can’t you sense what I mean?”
But when she reached for Corien’s thoughts, she felt the startling truth: Only the barest hint of him remained inside her. The rest of his presence was gone, some distance away in the landscape of her mind. Genteel, it seemed, even chaste. Careful. Discreet.
She stared at him, caught between gratitude and offense. “Were you afraid? Is that why you’ve stayed out of my thoughts?” She lifted her chin. “You thought the empirium might work through me to hurt you. You were disgusted by me.”
“Never. I thought…” He paused, at a rare loss for words. “I thought you might want privacy. You were so hot in my arms that it frightened me. I thought me being there, wherever you had gone, would only interfere with whatever was happening. I wanted…” He spread his hands, laughing a little. “Rielle, you are beyond me. I hope someday you can take me with you to that place, and we can learn all the answers we seek together.”
He looked at the floor, his brow furrowed. His lashes were thick and dark; Rielle felt a sudden craving to kiss them. She sent him the thought, and his heated gaze snapped up to meet hers.
“I won’t pretend to understand all that’s happening to you,” he whispered. “But I will do everything I can to make myself worthy of you.”
For a long time, Rielle could not speak. Instead, she rose unsteadily to her feet and turned away from him, looking out over the world.
She stood at the top of a huge flight of stone stairs, past which sprawled a vast network of ice, rock, fire, and equipment. Soldiers ran drills. Other workers hauled crates and turned the spokes of gigantic metal wheels to open great doors set in the earth. They wore nondescript clothing and obeyed soldiers barking orders in what Rielle thought must be an angelic language. Behind her was a massive fortress of black stone. Inside its entrance hall, silent, masked guards stood at winding staircases.
“The Northern Reach,” Rielle whispered. Her breath became clouds.
Corien came to stand beside her. “Home.”
She looked up at him—his travel-worn collar, his stiff jaw, the proud gleam in his pale eyes as he surveyed this kingdom of ice he had built out of nothing.
A tenderness overcame her. She turned his chin, brought his lips down to hers. Unbidden, a memory of Audric flashed across her vision; she felt Corien flinch but did not apologize.
“I still love him,” she reminded him, thinking of her lingering grief so Corien would easily see it in her mind. “But I’m here with you. He’s afraid of me. You aren’t. He turned me away. You didn’t. That will have to be enough for now.”
Corien’s expression hardened. “You are a creature of maddening contradictions,” he muttered, raking a hand through his hair.
“And you love me for it,” she replied. A distant crash of dark waves echoed through her skull. She felt the cold lap of infinite gold against her toes. She touched her head, searching for cracks.
“I’ve had a suite of rooms made up for you,” he said tightly, stepping away from her. “I imagine you’ll want to rest.”
“No.” Audric remained in her mind, his memory warm and steady, even as the rest of her teemed. If she looked at it too closely, pain pricked her chest and eyes like thorns.
But Audric was far away; Audric thought her a monster.
Her mind shivered, exhausted by its own hesitations. She longed desperately for oblivion. She caught Corien’s hand, sending him a thought clear and hard as a diamond: Rest is not what I want.
The force of her suggestion surprised him; she felt his delight unfurl, softening all his frustrations.
Then Corien pressed his fingers into her palm, called for guards to shut the doors against the cold, and guided her upstairs.
• • •
Corien was making monsters.
One hung from the ceiling—though this was not one he had made. Rather, it was his model. His inspiration.
“We named them the cruciata,” he explained, guiding Rielle through a large room he had called a laboratory. Suspended from the stone ceiling by a series of fine copper wires and steel plates hung a preserved bestial corpse. The beast had six splayed legs, a hide of crimson scales, a long, reptilian snout. Empty eye sockets, long hooked tail, a spine ridged with tiny serrated spikes. Its jaws had been pried open, revealing several rows of teeth.
Corien pointed at the frozen slender legs. “Some can fly. Others lumber. This one is a viper. Its greatest weapon is speed. They propel themselves rapidly across the ground, as lizards do, and can move in near silence.”
As he spoke, Corien walked slowly through the room, long black coat trailing after him. He had bathed after their night together, and the dark waves of his hair gleamed in the laboratory’s torchlight.
And Rielle listened as he spoke. She really, truly did.
But she also found those ebony locks of his difficult to look away from—mostly because she remembered how silken they had felt against her thighs the night before.
“When your saints created the Gate,” Corien was saying, “the act of tearing open the fabric of the Deep sent ripples of chaos through the entire realm. An immeasurable vastness forever altered by the crime of our imprisonment.” His voice darkened. “The making of the Gate rent apart countless seams, most too insignificant to consider. One of them, however, opened into the world from which these creatures originate. The crack is small, but it exists, and it is ever-widening. The cruciata are cunning, and the strongest of them, the luckiest, are finding ways to escape their own world and enter the Deep. It has taken them centuries. Even fewer of them have managed to pass through the Deep, ram their way through the Gate, and come here. But more will come. It is only a matter of time.”
Rielle’s mind struggled to accept the idea that there were other worlds beyond their own, beyond even the Deep. Countless others, Corien surmised, all connected by the immensity of the empirium.
Other worlds. Yet another piece of information Ludivine had neglected to share with her.
Ludivine. Ludivine. The more often she said the name to herself, the less it hurt to remember it. Someday, she would imagine Ludivine’s face and feel nothing at all.
Someday. But not yet.
“But the Deep stripped your bodies from you,” Rielle pointed out, trying to focus. “When the cruciata enter the Deep, does the same not happen to them?”
Corien’s expression was grim. “No. They seem to be immune to such indignities.”
“Perhaps the empirium saw fit to punish the angels for beginning the war against humans,” Rielle offered blithely. Antagonizing him cleared her mind. She could not resist it. “Perhaps the cruciata have committed no such offense.”
Corien shot her a dangerous look. “Perhaps.”
“I was told about these cruciata before,” she said, moving past him. “I heard they originated from the Deep itself.”
“Who told you this?”
“Jodoc Indarien. Speaker of the Obex in the Sunderlands. He shot Ludivine with an arrow constructed of a strange metal. He called it a blightblade.”
Corien stiffened, reading her memory. “He told you only what he knew, which was incomplete.”
“Jodoc also said that a cruciata’s blood is deadly to angels. Is this accurate?”
“Frustratingly, yes.” Corien glanced up at the suspended beast. A line of neat black stitches bisected its belly. “This viper crawled through the Gate some years ago and—clever thing—snuck aboard a trade vessel that had come to the Sunderlands with supplies for the Obex. I don’t think the Obex even knew it had broken through. Many angels died during its capture and during the journey here. It’s something about the blood. We had to bleed it dry before it was safe to dissect. Even the fumes can be toxic.”
“To you,” said Rielle. “Not to humans.” She blinked guilelessly at him. “So Jodoc said.”
Corien’s mouth thinned. “On that point, he was correct. My hunters, once exposed to the beast’s blood, were pushed from the human bodies they inhabited and completely lost cohesion. Thankfully, others took their places, and I’m confident we’ll eventually engineer ways to protect ourselves from their toxins, should we encounter more cruciata in the future.”
The suggestion in his voice killed her amusement. She looked straight at him. “You mean if I open the Gate.”
He gave her a tight smile. Her use of the word if had not escaped him. “I do.”
She shivered at the thought. The empirium rippled through her, a dark tremor. Was it afraid or eager? She searched her own heart for the answer but found none.
“I have many loyal to me in the Deep,” Corien went on. “Thanks to you, my dear, and your failed efforts to repair the Gate, I can now communicate with them. They tell me the vast majority of cruciata remain in their own world, which we have named Hosterah. If you open the Gate, the risk of a cruciata invasion is slim. If you’d like, you can reseal the damn thing once my people are free. And if any cruciata do come for us before you manage that, you will destroy them.”
Rielle sensed a memory. It floated to the surface of his mind and drifted toward hers. It was herself, months ago in the Sunderlands, attempting to repair the Gate and instead cracking it further.
“Is that why you urged me toward it?” She watched Corien closely. “You wanted me to touch it. You wanted to see if I was powerful enough yet to open it.”
“In part,” he admitted smoothly.
“But you suspected I wasn’t ready and that it would hurt me.”
“I guessed it would hurt you and knew that your failure would help me—and thereby help you.”
She stepped back from him, reaching for his mind and finding, to her horror, that he spoke the truth. “You astonish me.”
“And you yourself wanted to attempt a repair.” Corien approached her slowly. “Even if I hadn’t encouraged it, you would have done exactly the same. Why shouldn’t I have taken advantage of a situation that was already in motion?” He was near her now, his eyes alight with passion. “I have my people to think about, Rielle. Millions of angels, imprisoned and waiting for me to free them. Remember that.”
At his words, a bitter thought occurred to Rielle—that Audric, even to help his people, even if everyone expected it of him, would never urge her toward a thing he knew would hurt her.
She shoved the thought at Corien and watched the anger settle over him like a net of flitting shadows.
Satisfied, she lifted her chin and stared him down. “Can you control the cruciata as you can control humans?”
His furious gaze moved across her face, as if searching for a chink in her armor. “No. Their minds are too alien.”
“So you are creating your own.” Rielle stretched onto her toes to touch the cruciata’s stiff tail. “Beasts with blood that won’t harm you. Beasts with minds you can influence.”
Corien’s eyes followed her every movement. “Precisely. Though complete control of their minds remains elusive, we have devised…other methods to manipulate them.”
For a moment, Rielle gazed up at the viper, imagining it alive and vicious—twenty feet of muscle and scaly hide, racing across the ground with claws as long as her forearm.
“If I open the Gate,” she said slowly, “I could exacerbate the damage done by the saints.”
“Yes,” Corien agreed.
“Without meaning to, I could widen those cracks in the Deep and bring the cruciata here.”
“And then you will destroy them, as I’ve said. You’ll blink them to ashes.” Irritation colored his voice. “You worry for the people of this world. You worry for those who would not worry for you. Why?”
Because life is precious.
Because it’s the right thing to do.
Because I am the Sun Queen. I protect, and I defend.
None of the answers she mulled over rang true. Early in the trials, she had believed such things, had even proclaimed them for all to hear. But maybe she had been lying to herself even then.
Corien was watching her intently. “They don’t deserve your pity or your protection. You’re more like us then you are like them. You belong with us.” A pause. “You belong with me, not with him.”
Rielle tried to hold this declaration in her mind but could not find a steady grip on it.
She turned away from Corien to stare at the beast, with which she felt a sudden sick kinship. “I belong nowhere,” she whispered.
It was the truest thing she had said in some time.
Corien’s fingers brushed the small of her back. “I know you must come to this truth on your own, and I will wait for you to find it, but I urge you to see it now: where you belong is at my side.”
When she did not reply, he found her hand, pressed his thumb into her palm. “I have been engineering this war for centuries. And at the end of it, you and I will reign over a glorious new world in which the only beasts are our own and will obey our every command.”
She drew in a breath and turned to face him. “Show me.”
• • •
He had carved out an entire city beneath the mountains. More immaculate laboratories, staffed by white-robed angelic scholars and lined with metal tables, racks of wicked-looking tools, rows of stoppered vials. Mines and forges that burned day and night. Barracks for legions of mute, gray-eyed soldiers that Corien called adatrox.
“They’re human,” Rielle said quietly as Corien escorted her through a massive stone hall. On either side, lines of adatrox ran the room’s length. They were dark and pale, fat and thin. Borsvallic men, Kirvayan women. Mazabatians. Celdarians. They stood like dolls arranged by a child—rigid, slightly awkward, slightly askew.
As Rielle passed, their clouded eyes did not follow her.
“They will be our first wave of terror,” Corien said. “Stupid brutes. Not very creative, but certainly effective.”
“How many are there?”
“Seven thousand. In two months’ time, I will have ten.”
A shiver of fear ran through Rielle as she began to comprehend the scope of his work. She remembered the Sauvillier soldiers at the fire trial—their gray eyes, their muteness, how they had turned on their own neighbors without warning.
Then, there had been dozens of soldiers. Here, there were thousands. Thousands of people ripped from their homes, possessed by angels.
“And you inhabit all of their minds?” Rielle whispered.
“Most. Each of my commanders controls a few squadrons.” He glanced her way. Amusement lit up his thoughts. “This frightens you.”
“It impresses me. And yes, it frightens me.”
He lifted her hand to his lips. “I like impressing you. And I confess, I also like frightening you. It pleases me to imagine you shaking in awe of me, as I have so often done in awe of you. Ah. Here.”
&nbs
p; He did not give her a chance to respond. She sensed him registering her discomfort, how utterly he had unnerved her, and yet he pushed on gleefully. It was a game between them, a push and tug. She had bested him in the laboratory, and now he was gaining ground.
A game in which the objective is not to win, he thought to her, but to emerge as equal victors.
Rielle kept her gaze trained on the path before them. And if I decide I no longer wish to play?
Corien did not answer, instead leading her down a series of dimly lit corridors. The air grew hotter and fouler as they walked, and when they emerged into a cavernous room lit from above by an iron gridwork of torches, the stench nearly knocked Rielle off her feet—but she was glad for it. The distraction was welcome, evaporating the tension between them.
“Look,” Corien whispered, gesturing grandly. “Little works of art, are they not? The dragons have been particularly helpful to us. Their genetics are robust and versatile.”
Rielle didn’t know what he meant by that, but she nevertheless approached the edge of a pit carved out of the ground, hot ropes of fear tightening her throat. The pit itself was massive, perhaps three hundred yards square, with a thick iron grating bolted across the top. Around the edge were children, and none of them could have been older than ten. They too had veiled gray eyes, but there was a power to them, as there had not been with the adatrox. Some stood, some crouched. All of them stared down into the pit.
And all of them wore castings.
They were all identical—twin gold bands around the wrists and a gold collar about the neck. Floating through the air, piercing the stink, were familiar scents. Damp earth. Sun-baked stone. Rainwater, smoke, alpine wind. The acrid bite of shadows and the bitter tang of metal.
Rielle stared, her revulsion a swift cascade.
These children were elementals, far too young to be using castings. Her own experience with magic, and Audric’s too, had been exceptional; ordinarily, a child might start studying elemental power when they were quite young, but would not forge their casting until at least early adolescence.
“Did they forge their castings here?” Rielle asked faintly.
Lightbringer Page 18
