“Yes,” she whispered against my eardrums.
“I’ll try not to struggle, but drowning is hard,” I replied. And then I had no more breath, only a burning in my lungs, and then Bitter’s flow rushed in.
I began to convulse. The panic that all drowners must feel set in, and I struggled to break for the surface. Bitter held me down with a grip as soft as velvet, as hard as iron.
The last thing I remember is the demon river saying “Shhhhhh.”
“Shhhhh.”
“Sh—”
#
Being resuscitated after being drowned is painful. Having a demon seed do the resuscitation by sending roots through the arteries and veins in your arm, across your chest and finally to your heart, and then squeezing, over and over, is like nothing I can possibly relate, and also painful. I only felt the squeezing bit, of course, and only at the end, but as I vomited up the blood Bitter had filled my lungs with, I had the joy of experiencing those roots and tendrils withdraw themselves from my heart, my chest, and back down my arm to my palm. It healed the damage it did to my insides as it went, but it still hurt like all hells.
Luckily, if that is the word, Bitter had cast me onto the bank face down, which made draining my lungs somewhat easier. If ‘easier’ can truly apply to the situation. My reason says it can, but my memory vehemently disagrees.
Once I was done with the retching and had moved on to gasping, I made it to my hands and knees, and glanced back at the river. I saw the woods on the other side. So it appeared Tanglewood’s ruse had worked.
I was in no mood to cheer.
Slowly, dripping blood, I clambered to my feet.
“You live,” whispered bitter.
“Barely,” I croaked.
“Come back to me.”
I spat out another mouthful of blood and bile. “I was mistaken in my affection,” I replied. “But believe me when I say I will never forget our time together.”
I walked away, ignoring Bitter’s hissing, frothing rage.
I enjoyed your death, Halfmoon told me.
“Shut up.”
Thirty-Two
Perhaps half a mile lay between river and wall, and the Wall was visible the entire way. It was a very tall wall.
By the time I reached the Wall, the blood I was covered in had begun to coagulate in some places, crust and flake in others, and stink all over. You don’t want to know what I was reduced to, to clear it from my empty eye socket.
The Wall. It gleamed a bone white in the moonlight. I touched its surface. Glassy. I took in its height—a hundred yards? More? It was the closest thing to impregnable that I had ever seen. That glassy surface was, according to some versions of the legend, impervious to magic.
I did not have the silversword, or thirty years to breach the Wall. But I had two things Havak hadn’t had. Magic, and gunpowder. Not enough gunpowder to take down the Wall, certainly, or even breach it. But enough, I hoped, to chip it. And a chip was hopefully all I would require, if the surface really was proof against magic. If the entire wall was impervious to the Art, or if I couldn’t get beyond the surface using mundane means, I’d wasted a lot of time and effort on the voyage between Bellarius and Lucernis.
I sat down in the long grass that grew before the wall, and rummaged through my blood-soaked pack, and pulled out what I was looking for.
Gunpowder is ruined by wet, of course—oh, you could dry it out again, but the process was involved and the result unsatisfactory. And that was with water, not blood. I’d kept this small wooden casque of it protected from the elements on general principles. Even the damp in the air could render the stuff useless over time, after all.
So I’d sealed it with wax, wrapped it in oilcloth, and sealed it with wax again. I don’t remember my original reasons for doing so. I tend to hold on to things just in case. Amra had laughed and called me a pack rat more than once. If my plan worked, I would get her to acknowledge the usefulness of never throwing anything away. And of keeping gunpowder handy.
If we managed to return to Lucernis.
If I didn’t already have a death decree inked out for me there.
“‘If’ is a foul, foul word,” I muttered. “Strange I never noticed before.”
I wiped the casque on the grass, clearing off the majority of blood. Then I cut away the outer wax and the oilskin. I left the inner seal as whole as I could. There was no real reason to remove it.
I positioned the casque flat against the wall and took a dozen steps back. Then a dozen more, to be safe. Then I lay flat on the ground, to be doubly safe.
I had no fuse, and was not going to try and make a trail of powder through the grass to act as one. I didn’t need to. I did, however, need to hurl fire at it as precisely as I could.
Keeping my head as low as possible while keeping the casque in sight, I pointed at it, and called up my magesight. Thraxys blinded me. But in the wash of illumination was one black dot of mundanity. I focused on it, putting everything else from my mind. I visualized a lance of fire being flung from my finger, narrower than I had ever managed, hotter than the Telemarch’s trap. I breathed in, out. And then let fly.
The explosion was something of a disappointment, to be honest. Not as loud as I’d imagined, and not as large as I’d hoped. Bits of the wooden casque and clods of dirt rained down for a few seconds, and the air was thick with smoke and the stench of burnt powder, but the Wall certainly hadn’t tumbled down. No great fissures marred its glassy face.
I approached the Wall. I could see no cracks. I tore up a clump of grass and wiped the Wall as clean as I could.
Nothing.
I sighed. I was at a loss as to what I should try next. I did not need a gaping hole for the second part of my assault, but I did need something. Some fissure, some little chip. A foothold, as it were.
“Make sure then, Holgren,” I told myself. “The light isn’t the best, and your eyesight has been better.” I followed my own advice and ran my fingers slowly and carefully along every inch of the surface of the Wall that might conceivably have been affected by the blast.
And I found what I was looking for. The smallest chip, just to one side of where the casque had rested against the Wall. Probably one of the little nails that held the casque together had caused it, blown out through the wood with sufficient force to leave a tiny indentation. Infinitesimal, really. I must have run my finger over it three or four times before it registered. Once it did register, I ran a fingertip over it half a dozen times more, just to convince myself I wasn’t imagining it.
I smiled rather grimly and dug out the diamond Moc Mien had grossly overcharged me for; the one I’d spend the entire voyage from Bellarius to Lucernis investing with power and a simple but subtle pair of commands—unmake and spread.
I took great care to place the diamond against the indentation, working mostly by feel. When I was certain as could be, I set loose the magic.
The diamond began to spin against the wall’s surface, heedless of gravity. Slowly at first, then faster. It began to glow with a warm light, then cast out brilliant beams, a prism refracting light that came from no external source. A humming filled the air; ten, a hundred, then ten thousand bees on the wing.
The diamond sank into the surface of the Wall. Light and sound receded. I grabbed up the pack and took several precautionary steps back, and waited.
And waited.
The Wall did not come tumbling down. No great gap suddenly appeared. I could no longer hear any buzzing, or see any light shining from the hole. I did not know if the diamond had been exhausted; it was technically an artifact, existing outside of my direct control. I had no connection to it at this point. It was an arrow loosed. I did not know if it was still in flight or spent.
I gave it a little more time.
Nothing continued to happen.
Cursing, I started back toward the Wall to see if there was anything to see, but stopped dead in my tracks when an almost deafening ripping sound filled the air. At first I th
ought my spell had finally succeeded—and then I realized with a blossoming dread that the sound was coming from behind me.
I looked back over my shoulder and saw that the earth was opening up; a huge fissure had appeared and the Tanglewood was now split. As I watched, the crack severed the Bitter; creating a sudden double waterfall, or rather bloodfall, as the river poured away down both sides of the rift—its course fatally disrupted.
As above, so below, Tanglewood had told me. It hadn’t lied.
The crack was spreading wider. It was also lengthening, running towards me in a jerking zig-zag path. The rending of Thraxys grew louder as it approached.
“Dead gods. I’m too late.” I watched, fascinated, as the rent raced towards me. I didn’t even think of trying to run. It isn’t every day you see the end of an entire plane of reality, after all, and besides, where was there to run? My only hope of escape lay behind the Wall, in the Black Library.
The rent passed not a yard from me and slammed into the Wall.
For one heartbeat, two, three, nothing happened, no change was apparent—and then there was a tremendous boom and the Wall was split from bottom to top, nearly faster than my eye could follow. Cracks began to radiate outward from both sides of the split, and the Wall started to crumble.
“Ha! Damn you, then!” I shouted at the Wall. Exulting in the destruction of an inanimate object was no doubt foolish. I didn’t care. “Damn you anyway!”
Chunks of the Wall began to fall. Many of them were very large chunks, and many of those were falling towards me. I stopped being foolish and started to run.
It was a deadly rain. The ground trembled with every impact, throwing up great clods of dirt. I ran back towards the Bitter, looking behind me and above, trying to judge where to run to dodge the massive debris. It was difficult, one-eyed and fleeing at speed. I stumbled, I fell, I scrabbled back to my feet. A section of the Wall roughly as big as a door slammed into the ground beside me and threw me off my feet once more. A smaller one grazed my shoulder as I rolled away.
I ended up on my side, looking up. Saw death.
Falling toward me, a ragged portion of the Wall bigger than a barge, blotting out the sky as it rushed toward me.
“Hells!” I threw my arm out and hurled power at it, pure force barely formed.
It split the bastard in two with enough force that the two sections folded into a giant, inverted V just before they slammed into the ground, essentially forming a big stone tent around me.
I blinked and lowered my arm. “That worked out better than I expected,” I said.
Then one side of my ‘tent’ began to slip downwards with an ominous grinding noise, its purchase against the other slipping, failing, the balance between the two slabs shifting as inertia sang its irresistible song.
I scrambled out, and one side fell flat to the ground, and the other side fell atop the first.
“Still alive, you bastard,” I muttered, and slowly got to my feet. I surveyed the destruction. It was impressive. Perhaps fifty yards or so of the Wall had collapsed on either side of the rent. It would be easy enough to clamber over the debris to get to the other side. That was the good news.
The bad news was that I was on one side of the fissure, and what remained of the Black Library was on the other. It looked as if some giant cleaver had descended from the sky and sheared off the front of the building. Some of the rubble had fallen on my side of the divide, glossy back stone scattered about the rough grass like giant child’s blocks. Not enough to account for what was missing. Much more of it must have fallen into the rent, which at that point was more than a yard across.
I approached the divide and stared into its depths. It did not have a bottom that I could see. Whatever fell into it would keep falling, perhaps all the way to the Ur that Vosto had mentioned. The cosmology of the eleven hells was an imperfect science, and I had only become a pupil of it out of desperation.
I looked back up at the Library. Directly across from me was one huge room. Every surface that I could see was polished black stone. There were no books, but there was a door on the far side, barely visible in the gloom. There really wasn’t any other way to enter, and the rent wasn’t getting narrower.
Not really having much choice in the matter, I backed up several yards, got a running start, and jumped.
Thirty-Three
Half of me made it.
I landed hard, arms spread wide, chest and face taking the blow. Everything below my belt was left dangling down the ragged gap. I scrambled up, away from oblivion, panting through gritted teeth.
A low groan had been building, from everywhere and nowhere, the harmony of destruction. I looked back towards failing Thraxys, and saw it coming undone. Tanglewood had disintegrated. Bitter, it seemed, had forgot what gravity might be, and painted the air as a ribbon of bloody mist. Individual pieces of the moon still cast off light, but that light was sputtering and going out, piece by piece.
The Library began to slowly list, like a ship taking on water.
I summoned magelight and pulled out the glory hand one last time.
“Lead me to Lagna’s notebook,” I told it, “and believe me, this is no time for being funny.”
It pointed into the dark interior, and I staggered into the darkness as quickly as I could, fighting to keep my balance on the polished floor.
The Library was more like a palace, heavily ornamented walls, ceilings, and columns—all the same unrelieved black. I got only the barest impression of my surroundings, though. I wasn’t there for sightseeing. A black door big enough for any barn appeared out of the gloom that my magelight pierced only in a sullen fashion. I twisted the handle and it swung open silently. Beyond, a room filled with books—thousands of them, scattered across the floor, slowly sliding leftward, every single one of them black bound, with dead black pages. Demon humor.
At the far end of the long room, stairs up and corridors left and right. The glory hand indicated I should take the stairs. I went up them as quickly as I could. The Library was nearly on its side. I finished the ascent using the black balustrade as a ramp of sorts.
“Which way?”
Left. Which meant down now, more or less. A corridor that was now essentially a dark shaft.
“I’m beginning to dislike you immensely,” I told it, and slung myself over the edge, holding on to the balustrade. And then let go.
There was enough of a tilt that I half-slid, half fell. Which meant that when I hit the bottom, I did not break my legs. That’s about the best that could be said of the experience. I hit hard enough that I wondered for a few moments whether I had broken them, though. The pain was exquisite, and raced up from my heels to my knees. It left me breathless. Otherwise I would have screamed.
Above me came a terrible groaning, ripping sound. The rest of the Black Library was coming apart.
There was a door at the bottom. I reached down and turned the handle. The door opened in towards the room, and so gravity took hold and ripped the handle from my hand as the door dropped, and the smell of rain wafted up, clearing from my nose and lungs the noxious odor of Thraxys that I’d become used to.
Beyond was not a room. Beyond was something my eye could make no sense of whatever. Floating stars, cosmic whirlwinds, emotions unknown to me, to any mortal, perhaps—my eye delivered to me this synesthetic chaos, and I could make nothing of it. So I closed my eye and opened my magesight, expecting to be blinded.
Instead I saw only the outlines of a nearly empty room. There was one table standing on what was now the wall. The table did not seem to recognize the change in direction, nor did the black metal box that sat in the middle of the table.
I entered, and the definition of ‘down’ changed. I didn’t stumble too badly. It was a strange sensation, but compared to the previous hours, it barely rated notice. Much stranger was the reluctance to open the box that stole over me as I hobbled towards it. Did it come from the box, or did it originate within me?
I still don’t kn
ow. But reluctant or not, I certainly wasn’t going to not open the damned thing. I’d gone through hells to get there, to that moment, and besides, Lagna’s notebook was the only way I was going to survive the destruction that had engulfed Thraxys.
When I’d devised my plan to bring Amra back, I’d thought I’d have more time to study the notebook once I’d secured it. Days, perhaps. Hours at least. I hadn’t factored in the destruction of the eleven hells. Short-sighted of me. It looked as though I’d be lucky to have a few minutes.
I put a hand on the box. Opened the heavy lid.
It wasn’t a notebook. It wasn’t a book at all. It was a ball, an orb, roughly the diameter of your circled thumb and forefinger. To my magesight it was crystalline, and glowed brilliantly, giving off a golden-white light. I looked more closely at the thing, and realized it was finely etched.
It was an eye; complete with pupil, iris, delicate traceries of arteries and veins,
The Guardian’s words came back to me. ‘You’ll see,’ she’d said. Ha, ha. Her sense of humor wasn’t actually very amusing. I suppose that shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
I picked it up. Other than a faint tingle, likely more imagined than felt, there was no reaction.
“What now, then?” I wondered, but a creeping sort of dread was washing up my spine. Had the Guardian meant her words literally? No doubt it had been an excellent joke to her, if so; a one-eyed mage gone looking for the secret of Lagna’s notebook.
It could have been worse. I could have been whole-sighted, and forced to remove my own eye just to test the theory. As it was, I’d already lost an eye, and so had only to lose a little dignity.
“Hurvus would not approve,” I muttered, and took off the eye patch and shoved it in a pocket. Then, with not a little distaste, I spread the lids apart with my left hand, while with my right I maneuvered the crystal sphere into my eye socket.
The feeling was unpleasant, undignified, and rather cold. But it fit, that orb, and after a few blinks it seemed to come to some sort of equilibrium or accommodation with the socket.
The Thief Who Wasn't There Page 22
