Chapter 55
In Which the Mad Sorcerer Has Been Defeated. In Which My Prophecy Has Come to Fruition. In Which I Have Destroyed a Man Who Once Was My Enemy but Now Is Anything But.
A scream of anguish. Something you’d sooner expect from a rabbit in the teeth of a dog, not from a man. Not from Merulo.
“It’s alright,” I said, though I didn’t believe it. The sorcerer writhed in the sand beside me, and I tried, again, to soothe him. “It’s alright.”
“No, no,” Merulo wailed. “I can feel the magic. It’s all around us. She protected it! And I am not transformed. Nothing is transformed. I failed!”
Unable to help, I instead lay back on the cold slope of the dune.
A day of sweating and panic had left my throat raw, but nothing clouded the sky, no potential for quenching rain.
The night sky was a pit, with only the flimsiest of forces preventing us from falling into it.
From falling into nothing. Vertigo made the edges of my vision swim, but I maintained my focus, mapping out the stars that Merulo had wanted so desperately to reach.
I couldn’t see any of the constellations I knew—perhaps because of our foreign location, or perhaps because of the stupidity that comes from dehydration.
In the morning, I’d come up with a plan to find water.
It would be difficult, escaping this barren desert alive, but for now I lay silent and peered upward.
Merulo’s wails faded as he lost his energy, but his breath still came in dry heaves. And I did nothing. I did not move, and I did not comfort him.
What more could be said to a man whose life purpose had evaporated in a sudden heat, and who now, mangled and drained, had nothing left but me? A paltry prize, given that he’d wanted the entire cosmos.
I stared harder. The stars were moving.
Two pinpricks, of a brighter intensity than their surrounding stars, swam through the night at a leisurely pace. “Merulo,” I said. Then, with more urgency: “Merulo. For fuck’s sake. Look UP.”
Something in my voice must have broken through his anguish, because Merulo obeyed. “The barrier,” he said, his mouth hanging open. “Hydna destroyed the barrier. We didn’t fail, not entirely. They’re coming!”
“Who is?” I pushed myself upright in the sand, staring at the twin stars. The night seemed huge now, every speck of light a possibility. “Who’s coming?”
“Mars,” he croaked. Then his head dropped, crunching on impact with the dune.
Leaning over him, I shook his shoulder with care, not wanting to grip his meatless bones too tight. “Merulo!”
“Hurgh,” said the sorcerer, returning vaguely to life.
“Stay awake, just a little longer.” I quivered with energy, a tantalizing idea unwrapping itself like a gift.
Merulo’s amputated leg, lying feet away, contained more magic as a fetid ruin than I’d ever held in my own body.
And before me lay the world’s most adept magic-user.
“You’ve gotta help me with a spell. The one you did earlier, with your arm. And where are we, precisely?”