The rest of my group was laid out around me, also going through the motions of getting up. My father was on his feet, staggering; Lyriana was helping Syan up; Ellarion was pacing around, gazing out at the horizon. “Where are we?” I asked. “And…why?”
“The Ghostlands,” Syan answered, her voice distant. Her eyes were cast down with shame, unable to look at any of us. “It is against the laws of the Izterosi for the elders to take a life. They could not kill us. But they could bring us here, send us over the border with a Cut, and turn away. The justice of the sands.”
Lyriana looked down, crestfallen. “We’ve been left here to die.”
I glanced down, realizing for the first time that all my stuff was gone. My sword and scabbard, even my water flask. They’d left us with just the clothes on our backs.
“You!” a voice screamed, and I realized I’d forgotten the last party member. Trell. He stood upright, his hair wild, an expression of crazed fury on his face. “This is all your fault!” He rushed toward Syan, and though they’d taken his zaryas and anything else he could use as a weapon, he looked ready to strangle her with his bare hands. “Blasphemer! Blasphemer!”
“Stop,” Zell said, putting himself in Trell’s path. “There’s no need for that.”
“You don’t understand.” Trell tried to push past Zell, but that wasn’t happening; Zell stepped around to block him, pressing a hand to his chest. “She lied to us. She betrayed us. She doomed us all!”
“I have to admit, he’s right,” Ellarion said. He turned toward Syan, and when he spoke his voice had equal parts hurt and anger. “All this time. Our whole journey. It was based on a lie. You brought us out here, to the very reaches of the world, on a promise you could never deliver. How could you?”
“It’s not like that,” Syan replied, her voice ragged. “I thought my mother would listen. I thought when she saw who you were, when she saw Lyriana’s tattoo, she’d believe me. I thought this was fated. I thought it was meant to be.” She swallowed hard. “I thought she’d want to avenge her son.”
“She is avenging him,” Trell said, glowering. “Don’t you see? His death is your fault. You’re mad. And you’ve dragged us all down with you!”
“I’m not mad!” Syan cried. “I swear. The dreams are real. Zastroya is coming. Yes, the visions come from the Nightmother. But she chose me to bear her warning, like my father before me. She sent me the dreams because she needs me to save the world! She spoke to me!” That last part was new. “In all the dreams, all of them, the same message, the same words. Find me. Help me. Save the world.”
“Listen to yourself!” Trell yelled. “The Nightmother spoke to you and you listened? Madness! Utter madness!”
“I believe her,” Lyriana said.
Now we all stopped, staring at her, the only sound the whistle of the wind over the sand. “What?” Ellarion asked at last.
“You heard me.” Lyriana rose to her feet, staring all of us down. “I don’t care what her mother said. I believe Syan. I think she’s telling the truth.”
“But…but even she admits she lied,” Ellarion countered. “I mean, about the dreams, she was the only one having them.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not true.” Lyriana stood firm, and Syan stared up at her, cheeks streaked with tears. “When Syan held my hand, when our flames joined, I saw those same visions. I saw the fire. I heard the Nightmother’s voice. And I know, I know what I saw, what Syan saw, is real. I think Zastroya is coming, and it has do with Miles. I think she brought us here for a reason.”
“You think it’s real,” Ellarion repeated. “Zastroya. The Storm That Will Consume the World.”
“Yes,” Lyriana replied, and this was a Lyriana I hadn’t seen in ages, maybe not since the war had started: assured, confident, and certain, unflinching in her beliefs. “Look. A year ago, you and I would have sworn up and down that no Westerner could ever do magic. We were wrong. A month ago, we would have said that there are no cities in the Red Wastes, and certainly no mages. We were wrong. If there’s one thing that’s clear to me, it’s that what we’ve been taught is true is likely not, that what seems impossible might well be happening.” Lyriana turned to me. “Tilla, remember what it was like when you were telling us about the bloodmage who attacked you, and none of us listened? When the whole city thought you were mad?”
I nodded. “Yeah. It was the worst.”
“Well, I don’t want to do that to anyone ever again.” Lyriana pressed a hand to her chest. “The only thing I can rely on is what I feel. And my heart tells me Syan speaks the truth.”
Syan stared up at her, and it was as if nothing else existed but the two of them. “Thank you,” she whispered, like no one had ever said this before. “Thank you.”
Zell cleared his throat. “We can figure out the truth later. Right now, we need to focus on getting out of here.”
Ellarion nodded, and I could see the exact moment he switched into strategist mode. “Right. You said they made a Cut to get us out here. Can you make a Cut to get us back?”
Syan shook her head. “They took my zaryas. I could make new ones, but I’d need materials. Stone, metal, something to smooth them.”
“And time,” Zell said. I followed his gaze and now I saw it, a rapidly growing dot in the sky to our west. A gathering storm. “We need to move fast.”
“Could we just run?” I asked. “Like to the nearest benn?”
“That’s miles and miles away,” Trell replied. “And even if we got there, they wouldn’t l—”
“All of you,” my father cut in. It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d woken up. “You need to see this.” He stood at the edge of the downward-sloping crater. “Now.”
We made our way over to him, to the cliff’s edge. Then we stopped and stared.
It was a while before anyone spoke again.
The crater was massive, maybe the size of a whole Lightspire block. Its surfaces were perfectly smooth and slick, like someone had reached into the sand with a giant bowl and lifted it straight up. And in the very middle of it was a tall, rounded structure that I couldn’t take my eyes off of. Jutting out of the sand was the top of a tower, a long massive spire maybe five stories tall. The roof was a rounded dome, smooth and polished; the body was spiraled with thick curves, like a serpent wrapped around a staff. It was coated in ash and soot, but even underneath that, the original shimmersteel shined through, glistening like the scales of a fish in the sun’s light.
“The prison!” Trell gasped. “The Nightmother’s prison!”
“That’s no prison,” Ellarion said, his voice a million miles away. “That’s the Godsblade.”
I felt like my head was going to explode. Because it was undeniable. That’s what it was: the Godsblade, the giant Titan building at the heart of Lightspire, the ruin around which the city was built, the tower that housed the throne and the court and the Heartstone. It was here, or the very top of it was anyway, jutting up out of the sand like a sword stabbed into the dirt. The Nightmother’s prison, the center of the Ghostlands, was the Godsblade.
“How?” I demanded. “How is this possible?”
“The story Trell told us,” Zell said, his eyes locked on the structure. “The Nightmother and her siblings, coming from the sky to enslave the people. Could they have been…Titans?”
“They built the Godsblade in the Heartlands,” Lyriana speculated. “Perhaps they built another out here? One that fell to ruin when they Ascended?”
“A second Godsblade. That could mean a second Heartstone!” Ellarion said, actually jumping with the realization. “This explains everything. The Izterosi mages, the storms, the magic everywhere out here. It’s all connected. All of it!”
Lyriana turned to Syan, who looked mostly perplexed by our reactions. “You’ve been down there? Did you go inside?”
“No. I couldn’t find a way in,” Syan said. “I just touched the surface, and that’s when the visions came strongest, most deafening and overwhe
lming.” She reached up to the sides of her head, rubbing her temples. “Can you not hear it? The voice, so loud and clear…Find me. Help me. Save the world.”
I definitely did not hear a voice, but I was now firmly with Lyriana in the “nothing is impossible, just roll with it” camp. “We should go in there, right? See what’s inside?”
Zell nodded, looking out at the horizon, where that little blip of darkness was now five times its size. “Even if we can’t find any magic, it’ll be shelter from the storm.”
“Go in there?” Trell scoffed. “Do you understand what you’re saying? That’s the Nightmother’s prison! The house of darkness and chaos and terror! We can’t go in.”
Lyriana stepped over and put one hand on his shoulder. “Trell of Benn Sevalos. I’m sorry that we dragged you into this mess. I’m sorry that you’ve suffered for our journey. I’ll do everything I can to make it right.” She squeezed. “But we need to go in there. You can come with us or you can stay out here, but I doubt you’ll be safer all alone when the storm hits.”
I could see the exact moment he broke down, when his fear outpaced his conviction. “Madness,” he said, “utter madness,” but when we started moving, he walked with us.
Making it down the slope wasn’t too bad; I slipped only two, maybe three times, and Zell was always there to help me. The sand had this weird way of crunching underfoot, almost like ice, and we left a long trail of our footprints down the side. Worse, way worse, was the feeling in my head. Everything around me was blurry, my nose was stuffed, and there was this endless throb, like thumbs being ground into my temples. I could see stars and taste blood, and it felt like every cell in my body was screaming This is bad! Turn back!
But there was nowhere else to go, so on we went. Seeing this second Godsblade from above had been weird enough, but being up close felt truly like we’d crossed into a fever dream. Here were the slick symmetrical octagons, the grooved sides, the telltale glow of shimmersteel. This was definitely the Godsblade. Except, you know, just the very top of it, jutting out of the black sand of a cursed desert.
“I think I found a door,” Lyriana said, approaching a flat circle carved in the building’s side, with a slick slate of shimmersteel grooved into the wall next to it. By my estimation, only the very top story of the building was visible here, the rounded dome that, in the Lightspire Godsblade, housed the massive chamber with the Heartstone. Was that what was waiting for us inside? Was the rest of this Godsblade down there, below the sand? What else was down there?
“I found the door as well,” Syan said, “but I couldn’t figure out how to open it.” She pressed one hand to the building’s side. “The voice is so loud. Unbearable. It wants us to open it. To come in.”
I was going to suggest that maybe listening to the voice in Syan’s head wasn’t the best idea, but before I could, Lyriana reached out a hand toward that grooved slate. She ran her fingers over its surface, and it glowed to life, displaying a perfect blue trace of the symbol she’d drawn. Syan clasped a hand over her mouth, and Trell looked ready to pass out.
With a rusty hum, that round circle in the wall glowed a vibrant blue and then vanished, revealing a passageway into the side of the building.
“It worked.” Lyriana stared at her own hand in disbelief. “The open symbol, the one the priests taught us as an ancient rune of the Titans…it actually worked.”
“It’s all connected,” Ellarion repeated. “Titans here…Titans there…”
We stepped through the opening, because what else were we going to do? The room inside was small, just barely big enough for all of us to fit in, with a different carved circle in the opposite wall, its own slate grooved into the wall next to it. Once we were all in, Lyriana touched this second slate, drawing the rune again.
I expected the second door to open, but instead the first one reappeared behind us, sealing us in. A soft red light shone down on us from the ceiling above, though I couldn’t make out any lamp. The room got warmer, a lot warmer, the floor beneath us glowing orange as drafts of heat wafted up. The walls around us hummed, louder and louder.
Then…I don’t quite know how to describe it. There was a rush of wind into the room, fluttering my clothes, and a surge of magic in the air, that awful sickly crackle. The smell of ash filled my nose. And there was this feeling, this awful feeling, as if something was reaching into me, snaking invisible tendrils into my body, probing and grasping. I gritted my teeth and dug my nails into Zell’s hand, while the others around me all stiffened and gasped. The hum grew louder, the room grew hotter, the lights burned bright, and all I could think was what an incredibly stupid way to die.
It stopped, as sharply as it had started. The lights above dimmed, the heat vanished, and that horrible feeling went away. The door in front of us, the one leading deeper in, glowed and vanished, revealing a long shaft leading into darkness.
“What was that?” I asked. “Does anyone have any idea what just happened?”
Lyriana looked to Ellarion, and he shrugged. “We’ve long left behind anything close to understanding,” he said. “All we can do is keep going.”
That wasn’t technically true, because we could also, you know, break down crying or bang on the walls or just stand there screaming in terror. It didn’t seem like anyone else was open to that.
Lyriana stepped over the door’s lip and flicked her hand to make an orb of Light appear. It was clear the air here was still full of raw magic; her first orb flickered out, her second stretched like a balloon before bursting, but her third worked right, floating alongside us to illuminate our way. As soon as she did, she let out a little shriek. Because this was a wide chamber all right, a wide and round room about the size of the grand hall back in Castle Waverly. The walls were lined with rows and rows of heavy stone chairs, stacked up above one another like shelves in a cupboard, all the way up to the ceiling.
And in every chair was a Titan.
I’d seen them before like this, in the catacombs below Lightspire. These looked a lot like those had: hulking human forms at least nine feet tall, their bodies slick and hairless and nude. Their skin was white as snow, their heads bald as eggs, and every one of them somehow had the same face, with a bony nose and lips curled ever so slightly in a subtle smile. Their eyes were shut, their heads reclined a little, with some kind of strange shimmersteel tube hooked into the bases of their skulls.
“What is this?” Trell whimpered. “What are they?”
“Titans,” Ellarion whispered. “It’s another Titan crypt.”
My heart leaped into my throat. The last time we’d been in a Titan crypt, the wild magic in the air had nearly driven all of us mad, had sent me into a horrific nightmare vision of my brother’s corpse. I was not doing that again. “We should go. Now.”
“No, wait.” Lyriana raised a hand, as if testing the breeze. “It’s different in here. The air isn’t as corrupted. I think we’re safe.”
“Are we really going to take that chance?”
“If they have a Heartstone, it’ll be in here.” Ellarion gestured toward the end of the room. “We need to at least look.”
So we went on, through this sprawling hall, past one creepy dead Titan after another. The hall gave way to a rounded wall that I’m guessing was the inside of the dome. Just like in the top floor of the Godsblade in Lightspire, there was a second shimmersteel dome sitting in front of it, where the Heartstone would be. But this dome was cracked, a big chunk of the front missing. I could see something inside, a husk of trembling rock, black and colorless, like a stone dug out of a long-dead fire. If this was the second Heartstone, then all the magic had long since drained out.
There was something else at the end of the room, too. In front of the smaller dome there was a single throne, this one twice as big as the others. Long shimmersteel cords stretched out from the chair, snaking like vines into walls all along the room. A Titan sat in it just like the others, but this one seemed more important somehow; bigger, more imposing,
its seven-fingered hands hooked into slots built into the chair.
“I might not know about the Titans, but I’m guessing that was their leader,” my father said.
“The Nightmother,” Trell whispered. “It’s her. It’s her.”
“What happened out here?” Lyriana asked. “Why did they all die?”
“The Heartstone’s broken,” Ellarion said, equal parts horrified and awed that it could even happen. “I can’t imagine that went well.”
“I don’t understand,” Syan said. I thought she was responding to Ellarion, but she was looking at something else, a long black wall at the far end of the room, past the Heartstone. It was broken up into panels, each at least a single story tall, their surfaces smooth and dark as nightglass. “The voice…it’s coming from in there.”
She reached out a hand, and even as Lyriana yelled “Wait, no!” she touched the wall’s surface. The panel lit up around her hand, a halo of blue encircling it the way the floors would light up underfoot in the Godsblade, and then it spread out until the panel was glowing, then the one next to it, then the one after that. Syan jerked back but the panels kept glowing, and it took me a second to realize it wasn’t the surface itself but a glowing layer of light in front of it, like a floating magical skin, a series of translucent panes hovering in the air.
“It’s a gallery,” Ellarion said, transfixed, and sure enough, images were appearing on those panes. Each held a single picture, if you could call it that, a glowing series of lines that pulsed with light, flickering in and out of existence. In some moments, they were crystal clear, as detailed as the lavish oil portraits of themselves that nobles liked to hang around their mansions. In others, they were more like hieroglyphics.
War of the Bastards Page 22
