Like Scharr himself, Zhan ry Wren was more than a mage. Many Jentans were born with a power inherited from Tammos Raak. Those who were blessed with two—mages—were rare and revered. But even though Zhan had been born with three—a rarity in the history of the Expanse—she remained indifferent about her abilities. Longevity—that most coveted of gifts, which Scharr ben Fray and Ryp both enjoyed—was hers as well. She would live in good health for centuries, vulnerable only to calamity. Another blessing helped her catch liars in the act, while a third enabled her to interpret dreams with frightening and often devastating insight. But she eschewed such advantages, applying herself to common things such as caretaking, feasts, gatherings, games. And she had walked away from studying at the School.
Scharr ran the flat of his hand across the labyrinth’s rugged tree-branch rail, glowering at the other Skull Chambers. They looked like ruins, remnants of the culture that had flourished here two hundred years ago, back when he was still hopeful for their house.
Noticing a scrape of blood, he drew out a cloth to wrap his hand. He had found this colorful, half-finished head scarf hidden behind a bird’s nest in Auralia’s caves.
I needed to know, Zhan ry Wren. I still need to know. And tomorrow I’ll have all the pieces to solve the mystery of Auralia’s colors.
Arriving at the center of the maze, he turned to retrace his steps. But someone blocked his path—Ryp’s ivory-skinned acolyte. In her shapeless shift, she had tiptoed barefoot right up behind him.
She held a long vine of sweetberries, and plucking them one by one, she was throwing them aside.
“Listening to me mumble?” he mused. “Will you tell Master Ryp how nervous I seem? How many times I paced this labyrinth?”
She would not meet his gaze.
“What in the name of Brother Ryp are you doing to those perfectly beautiful sweetberries?”
“It’s the discipline,” the young woman said quietly. “We’re to practice rejecting what we enjoy and desire. We want only what we’ve been trained to want, and we must break free of such tyranny.”
“But … those are ripe sweetberries.”
“They’re a distraction from—”
Scharr ben Fray snatched the vine from her hands. She flinched as if she’d been slapped, and squealed, “Your brother requests your presence at the stables.”
“Ryp can wait. I need to correct a few false teachings first. Sweetberries are for eating, not wasting.”
Bowing her head, the girl paused, and then she whispered fiercely, as if frightened she might be discovered. “Master Scharr ben Fray, I need your help.”
“What’s that?”
“I need … another way out.”
“Out of what?”
She cringed as if his question had been a shout. “Please. Before the others find us here. I want to know … Why did you leave? I have only what they’ve told me. The Epiphany Tower looms closer in my mind every day. But I …” She watched as he put a berry in his mouth. “I like the taste of sweetberries too,” she whispered. “And I don’t …”
“You don’t feel right casting them aside.”
She trembled.
What a perfect honeyflower. And Ryp enjoys her company every day? Surely he hasn’t rejected every pleasure.
At that moment the sun’s rays cleared the mist, and Wildflower Isle appeared like a lily pad on the warm, blue horizon.
“Let me tell you a few secrets,” said the mage.
As they walked the labyrinth, Scharr ben Fray stopped resisting the echoes of memory. Now he had a purpose in revisiting his past. A chance to strike back against those who had committed so much wrong.
He spoke of his first hundred years of study and of the Seers’ first visit to Jenta.
“No one paid the Seers much attention,” he said. “They’d come from a camp within the Mawrnash crater, carrying boxes of mawrn dust as if it were some kind of gemstone. Strange folk. Acted like merchants, bowing and flattering. They begged for counsel. But their questions were razor edged, designed to shatter the Aerial’s certainties. They meant to discourage any serious thinking, to rob us of curiosity and hope.”
“These are the same Seers that have ruined House Bel Amica?”
He nodded. “I believe they poisoned House Cent Regus first. That’s where the decline began. Then they came to Jenta, but after a while the Aerial sent them away. We were all frightened of their ability to expose flaws in our philosophies. They injured our pride. We were so distraught, we barely noticed when the Seers began to torment other houses.”
The memories came back to him, one after another—the mages turning against one another, each bent on trumping a rival’s argument.
“We blamed each other as our theories collapsed. We kept records of each other’s failings and divided into camps. We became consumed with pointing out contradictions in each other’s teaching. We’d stir up rumors to discredit one another and revel in ridicule. The people’s affections and admiration were the measures of our contests, as if wisdom could be judged by ovations. We stopped caring about what was best for Jenta.”
“So when mother says the mages betrayed her ancestors, she’s right.”
“She’s right to want justice. Imagine. My brother and his contentious clan came to see their own people—their own families—as inconvenient. A distraction. So they conspired to be rid of them.”
The acolyte’s gaze strayed toward Wildflower Isle. “That’s why they sent us across the water to start a new colony.”
“They convinced the people that the island would be a better home. Hunting. Gardens. And a wall made of the sea to keep beastmen away. Ships once designed for a future of flourishing trade were filled with families and their belongings. And off they sailed into that lush, green prison.”
“The Aerial threw their own people aside.”
“They spit them out like seeds.” He handed the vine with its last few berries back to the acolyte. “But it was slow. The colony’s early days were industrious, high-spirited. The mages returned to the School only occasionally, for what they called ‘investigations.’ Investigations became frequent. And long. The School devolved to what it is today—a place of isolation, where mages wallow in dissatisfaction and shame. It’s a place to give eloquent speeches about the impossibility of true communication. Anything beautiful—like the orchestral halls that once drew people from across the Expanse—was neglected or torn down.”
The acolyte absently fingered the last berry on the vine. “And families were forbidden to come back.”
“That didn’t stop them from trying. But the wildspeakers of the Aerial commanded ram-horned seabulls to batter approaching ships. And the stonemasters crafted reefs beneath the water. Reefs that ripped through hulls.” He watched her lips curl in revulsion while the pulse at her temples quickened.
“The Aerial only accepted me to the School because I submitted to their authority.”
“Authority. It’s strange, isn’t it? The Aerial teach that there is no trustworthy truth. There is only argument for the sake of distraction. All is meaningless, chaotic, accidental. So why teach at all? And where does their authority come from? I tell you, the Seers’ questions are devouring the mages’ minds the way rot-eaters hollow out trees.”
“Yesterday as I lifted a spoonful of broth to my lips, I asked myself, ‘Why bother?’ ” She blinked back tears. “Sometimes I doubt that I’m actually here at all.”
“The broth they serve here would spoil anyone’s joy.” He laughed. “The meals, the roads, the walls—time and storms have stripped the School to its bones.” He gestured to the chimneyhouse, the stout brick smokestack above the subterranean furnaces that had once powered Jenta’s mills. Black clouds plumed above it. “Sculptures once surrounded that, and we marked the hours by the shifting of the smokestack’s shadow. Now they call time an illusion and art a delusion.”
The girl ate the last berry. Her expression suggested it was sour. “So why are you different?”
“I lik
e storytelling.” He grinned mischievously. “That’s what saved me. I lived in the libraries. My head filled up with questions.”
“But you said questions will chew up—”
“Some questions you ask to make sense of an enchanting world. Others you ask to tear things down so you can escape accountability. The more I questioned the histories that I read in the Aerial’s libraries, the less sense they made to me. I had to find a more persuasive story. So I set out to discover just that. And the world came to life before my eyes.”
“You counseled Abascar’s kings,” she said admiringly.
“And they gave me freedom and access that helped me find answers.” He turned and whistled. A dustbird hopped toward him along the branch-rails of the maze, cutting across the winding path. He opened his hand and chirped an invitation. The bird thought it over. “Knowledge is power,” said the mage. “So tell me, what frightens you most?”
“Your brother.” The acolyte shrugged. “And the curse.”
“The Cent Regus Curse?”
“No. The curse in the clouds beyond the Forbidding Wall. The one that makes children yearn for a Keeper that will save them.”
“Listen to this,” said Scharr ben Fray, dropping his voice so she would lean in. “Knowledge can give us the power to cast even that curse down. That’s become my mission.”
He scratched the bird’s striped brow and remembered how Zhan ry Wren would tilt her head whenever she caught him gazing at her, as if his love were the strangest mystery. But what could be mysterious about loving the most irresistible woman in the Expanse?
Zhan slept soundly, and he had loved lying awake night after night, watching the freckles on her back rise and fall with her breath. But she resented waking to find him gone. She was hurt that anything had the power to draw him away. Her contentment to live slowly confounded him; he could not rest without being caught by another question that needed answering. To go on loving her would have meant living with questions while others sought answers. He would feel weak, common, diminished.
Beauty is best at a safe distance, he reminded himself. Otherwise it traps you. Freedom is better.
The bird hopped into his hand, nestled down, and sighed.
The chimneyhouse shadow had shifted. Soon it would fall across him where he stood. Flames flung themselves like flower petals into the sky. It pained him to remember how he had watched those flares by night while concerts flourished on the sand. Music had shaken the Skull Chambers. Oh, to hear those instruments again with their exotic names—preezner, zimmer, perys, bowey, hewson-pipe, rain-dog, keaggy strings. (All he’d ever played were stone whistles and a handmade mouth-spring that he loved madly for its strange, tiny voices. He called it the Scar.)
“We had so much to offer,” he said to himself. “We still do.”
The girl watched him, puzzled.
“I’d give you a message for Zhan,” he chirped to the bird. “But then I would be thinking about her all through the coming winter. I cannot afford distractions.”
The bird shifted so she could stare fixedly at the mage with one eye, then the other, delighted to find a man she could understand.
“I can help you solve your mysteries,” the acolyte whispered.
“Then tell me this,” said the mage. “If my brother is right and the world’s so worthless, why does he continue to hide and protect the treasures within Raak’s Casket?” I will have them tomorrow, he thought. At last I will have them.
“They preserve Raak’s Casket because, unlike the other houses, Jenta was loyal to Tammos Raak to the end.” Her answer faltered. “But … but this is just a story.”
“Stories are power. Tammos Raak’s story has shaped the Expanse. It led us to scatter into four houses. It will save us from Deathweed if we can find our way back to Inius Throan, a city built on stone that Deathweed cannot break.”
That legendary city—he had tried to find it before, but the mountains had deceived him. He’d stumbled, furious, into maddening mazes that led to nothing but dangers and death. But in Mawrnash, through the Seers’ farglass, he had glimpsed its towers. And so he had returned, finding at last the city’s main gate. Locked.
If keys exist, they’ll be among the treasures in Raak’s Casket. He whistled to the bird. “You’ll see something tomorrow that House Jenta has never seen.”
The acolyte reached out to touch a tiny wing. The bird did not stir. She looked up at Scharr ben Fray with a radiant smile. “I came to tell you that your brother has something to show you. But what I really wanted to say was this.” She put her small, warm hand over his. “I want to go with you. When you leave.”
He knew that the girl was his if he desired. She’d grown up hearing the exaggerated stories of his powers and courage. She was enthralled. But the temptation was only intensifying his longing for Zhan. He smiled sadly, sitting down in the very center of the labyrinth’s path. The sun was blazing down on them in earnest now.
Try not to learn her name, he told himself.
“I have a better idea,” he said. “You were brave to risk your life, come to the School, and spy on these despondent old fools for the resistance. But if I’ve already figured you out, so has my brother.”
She winced and withdrew her hand.
“Give up your studies here. Go back to your angry friends on the island. Tell them to stop sharpening swords for revenge. This wasteland’s not worth dying for. But New Abascar will be a paradise. And I mean to invite the Wildflower Isle colonists to join us.”
The acolyte rose and walked away, looking around, afraid.
And I’ll bring you, Zhan, if you’ll come.
Scharr ben Fray and his brother Ryp rode north and west through the evening and a night. These were swift Jentan horses; Ryp’s was an arrogant stallion the color of coal, tattooed with runes spelling out a verse about renouncing the world, while Scharr’s dun mare was plain but impressively muscular.
Ryp led the way in smug silence, while Scharr imagined a thousand possible purposes for this excursion. When the elder brother slowed them to a stop at a break in the earth, a steep-sided canyon on the edge of the Cent Regus wasteland, Scharr stared in disbelief. He had never imagined this.
“Behold,” Ryp tried to say, but a tooth fell out of his mouth. He climbed down from his horse to sift the sand for it.
Across the dry streambed, in the opposite cliff wall of the canyon, a line of fourteen enormous caverns echoed as the hissing wind cast debris against soot-blackened walls. Before each cavern lay massive metal bars in disarray across the ground. Whatever had been caged was gone.
“The Imityri,” he whispered. “The Seers captured the Imityri.”
Ryp, his hand covering his mouth as he tested the tooth he had inserted, said, “They trapped thirteen.” Then he gestured to a cavern that seemed unscarred, untroubled. “They needed only one more to complete their collection.”
“And then what happened?”
Ryp shrugged, scowling.
“Why? Did they mean to tame them?”
“Perhaps they merely sought to remove the creatures’ influence from the world. But as you can see, they failed.” Ryp sounded almost disappointed.
Scharr ben Fray watched him closely. “You knew this was happening.”
Ryp, avoiding his brother’s gaze, walked to the very edge of the cliff, knelt down, and pressed his hand to the stone. Stonemastery poured out from him, and the rugged cliff melted, forming a smooth incline suitable for their horses.
As they descended, the smell emanating from the empty caves spooked the animals, but they would not refuse their masters.
Scharr dismounted and walked slowly around one of the empty cells. Its walls were burnt and cracked and intricately lined as if the beast within had ceaselessly clawed at them. The cavern floors were scarred and stained. Deep gouges, bloodstains, and shreds of scaled skin littered the hard pack.
Tears stung his eyes as he lifted pieces of teeth and tusks. If only I’d been here sooner. I woul
d have freed them. How could anyone torment such magnificent animals? And how could Ryp let them?
When he saw his brother lift a wide curtain of castoff skin—something shed from a wing—he knew. “Seers promised to give you one. If you kept silent, they’d give you a chance to fly.”
Ryp spread the wing scrap on the ground, then folded it up in reverence. “I thought you might have set them free. I hoped you had. But I see now that you had nothing to do with it. And I do not like what that tells me.”
“I’ve never seen two Imityri in one place.” Scharr remembered glimpsing the back of a winged creature as it vanished into clouds over the Cragavar. He’d found seven-toed footprints on Deep Lake’s shores near the caves where Auralia had lived. Auralia, who said that the Keeper had sent her. “Unthinkable. How did the Seers capture thirteen, Ryp? How did they keep such a secret?”
“Beastmen guarded the Imityri while brascles circled above to watch for trespassers.”
“But someone outwitted them, Ryp. Someone set them free.” Ryp was watching him.
“It isn’t Cal-raven, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s strong but not this strong.” Scharr ben Fray kicked at one of the fallen bars. It was so heavy he could not move it.
“This ends an age of questions.” Ryp took on a lecturing tone, one Scharr had always hated. “So many have wondered if the Keeper that haunts their dreams might actually exist. But there is no such guardian—only thirteen or fourteen animals that remind them of that childish hope.”
“These skins …” Scharr ben Fray lifted a blanket of scales as long as the train of a queen’s wedding gown. “These bones they shed. It’s as if they die and rise.”
“But they’re hardly invincible.” When he turned, Ryp could not conceal his satisfaction. “You see, brother? You’ve been kindling Cal-raven’s belief in an illusion. And he has been shaped by that. A potted plant knows only the soil it’s been given. When he learns that you’ve taught him to embrace a falsehood, he’ll either succumb to fear and cling to the lie, or he’ll let it collapse and despair.”
Scharr looked up into the evening sky. He felt weary and defeated. “We see the suggestion of a shape among the stars. We give it a name, even though that shape is only a fiction. It’s how we’ve always assembled our myths and our religions. We do this to comfort ourselves about all we do not understand. But surely this isn’t an empty pursuit. If it helps us face the day, why fight it? We all choose stories in which to root ourselves. Why not choose the story that enables us to flourish?”
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