Chapter 7 Emory #2
Emory felt defeated. The mountains were too vast; there was no way to scour every inch of them for the syrinx. But if she knew where to look, if she could learn more about it…
In hindsight, she really shouldn’t have told Sidraeus she intended to use the syrinx. Should have let him believe she would gladly break it. Because now she needed his help—and she would likely have to grovel to get it.
When Emory fell asleep that night, it wasn’t the crowned umbra she found in dreams, but a face that was achingly familiar.
“Ro?”
Romie spun to her with round eyes full of surprise. “It worked,” she murmured. “It finally worked.”
Emory hesitated. If this was a ghost, if this was a sick, twisted form of nightmare showing her that her best friend had died, that Emory had been too late to save her…
But Romie drew her in a tight hug, and there was no denying she was real.
“We’re coming to find you,” Emory whispered as she clung to her friend. “We’re so close to the sea of ash, a few days at most—”
Romie pulled back, a startled, panicked edge to her voice. “No, Em, you can’t come here.”
“Why not?
Darkness started to press in. Romie swore, and Emory knew the dream was slipping, though she wasn’t sure on whose end it was.
Romie gripped her arms tight. “You can’t come here because Clover wants you here.”
“That can’t be true. He’s been throwing wrenches in our path since we got here, driving us farther and farther away from the sea of ash.”
Romie shook her head. “No. We all heard him, after he burnt his hand, saying that only you could—” She was about to say something else but the darkness pressed in faster, making her dig her fingers into Emory’s arms with painful desperation.
“I’m serious, Em. Whatever he has planned involves you, so don’t come after us. We can handle this on our own.”
“Romie—”
But her friend disappeared, pulled back to a place where Emory could not reach her.
Emory didn’t tell the others about the dream.
She’d mulled over Romie’s words all night, trying to make sense of why Clover would want Emory if he was sending his ash-umbrae and Songless to hinder her and her friends at every step.
Puzzling over what Romie said about his burnt hand, and how Emory might factor in.
Clover had been a Healer once; why would he need her to tend to a burn?
In the end, whatever Clover wanted her for didn’t matter. She couldn’t stop now, when they were halfway up the mountain. She couldn’t turn her back on Romie and Aspen and Tol and Orfeyi when she was so close to seeing them again. For them, she would risk everything.
So they kept going.
It was slow work, making their way back to where they were meant to go.
The terrain here was harsh and brutal, and with no carved path to follow, they had to rely on the compass and their own wits to guide them.
Whenever they found a clear enough path, something always hindered their progress: fallen trees, boulders, patches of snow too deep to tread through.
It forced them to find ways around, getting farther and farther from the peak atop which sat the gate.
And at every one of these detours, they came across more temples. As if the very forces of nature were leading them there.
Some sites were ruined beyond recognition, with a single pillar remaining or nothing but the semblance of a foundation in the stone. Other sites were preserved better than the first one they’d seen, and it was a marvel they still stood at all with the force of the winds this high up.
None of them had any relics or instruments. And though no ash-umbrae appeared out of the shadows, and no Songless swooped down from the skies, Emory couldn’t shake the sense that they were being watched.
She was beginning to lose hope when they set up camp for the night, this time in a cave they found high in the mountains. It was cramped and cold, but offered relief from the snow that had started to fall heavily, and when they managed to get a fire going, it heated up nicely.
As Emory looked up to the illuminated ceiling, her eye caught on the striations in the dark rock, shimmering faintly in the firelight.
They looked like forked veins of lightning running through the rock, in a pattern that seemed too deliberate to be anything but.
Emory followed them to the back of the cave, where the veins disappeared into the floor.
There was a gap there, between floor and wall. Emory crouched to peer through it. She could faintly see some kind of chamber beyond. The gap wasn’t big enough for her to fit through. But if she used a bit of Wordsmith magic, willed the rock to chip away a bit…
“Look,” Vera said at her side, pointing to something on the wall.
Carved in the rock was a faded depiction of a faceless god, both hands closed around a bolt of lightning. Emory ran her hand along the carving and felt grooves around it. On instinct she pushed on it—and the gap in the floor groaned open to reveal crudely carved steps that led into a dark chamber.
Emory and Vera stared at each other. Behind them, Virgil muttered, “Yeah, I’m not going into that death trap.”
“Scared?” Vera shot back at him teasingly.
“Of the creepy secret chamber in the creepy caves hidden in the creepy mountains? Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Inga did tell us to be careful in the ruins,” Nisha said cautiously.
“Vera and I will go check it out,” Emory said, “and the rest of you can stay here.”
Ivayne huffed, grabbing her sword. “As if I’m letting you go down there alone.”
They descended the steps into the freezing cold of the hidden chamber, Emory holding up a ball of light to guide them through the dark.
“I think we’ve found the Soulless One’s temple,” Vera said with quiet awe.
Carved pillars of obsidian stone rose all around them. The ceiling was domed and depicted forks of silvery-blue lightning that shone in the light. In the middle of the space was an altar. And sitting atop it, covered in dust, was a glass pan flute made up of five pipes of different lengths.
The syrinx.
It looked heavy, the thick glass tubes bound by ornate silver and obsidian fixings. Emory could feel its power. It felt like Sidraeus, like the crowned umbra that ruled the sleepscape.
The layer of dust on it was disturbed by five fingerprints, as if someone had recently played it. And yet it was still here, pulsing with power that seemed to call to Emory, begging for her to pick it up from its altar.
An inkling crawled along Emory’s skin. “Go back up,” she said to the others. “Get everyone and leave.”
Vera frowned at her. “What—why?”
Whatever he has planned involves you, Romie had said of Clover.
Clover, who Sidraeus said wanted the syrinx for himself. Whose hand was burned, perhaps, after he tried to take it, and whose creatures had since been pushing Emory and her friends off the path, herding them to this very place. For someone to take the syrinx for him.
“Because this is a trap,” Emory said, “and we need to run like hell.”
The walls around them shook. In the cave above, someone screamed. Emory heard the crashing sound of thunder, the clang of steel against steel—or perhaps steel against lightning.
Clover’s creatures were already here.
Ivayne didn’t wait to bound up the steps, sword at the ready.
Vera followed, but Emory had to get the syrinx first. It didn’t matter if that was exactly what Clover wanted her to do, didn’t matter if the instrument might burn her the way it did him.
She needed it—would stop at nothing now to get it.
Certainty danced at her fingertips as her hand closed around it. There was no burning, no pain. An imaginary breeze whirled around her, everything in her going still with calm.
Break the syrinx, Sidraeus had asked her to do. It would be so easy a thing to drop it and see the glass flute shatter at her feet. But there was a more powerful voice inside her telling her not to do it, that there was another way, a better way…
“Emory, let’s go!”
Emory clutched the syrinx to her chest, feeling like she’d been pulled out of a trance by Vera’s voice. Vera hadn’t left. She stood at the base of the steps, gesturing at Emory to hurry as shadows filled the temple.
For a moment, Emory dared to hope she’d done something right—that just by picking the flute up, it had called Sidraeus here; that it had broken him out of his sleepscape prison, and now he would be bound to her will, and they could face Clover together.
But the shadows that engulfed her were not Sidraeus’s. They felt like rotten death, and Emory knew they belonged to the ash-umbrae before they materialized around her.
Emory drew on her magic to erect a ward around her, around Vera, making it so that nothing could harm them.
“Go!” she yelled at her cousin. As Vera disappeared up the stairs, Emory directed her magic to the ash-umbrae, willing them to unmake.
But she stopped short as a face appeared out of their midst.
Clover.
He still wore that suit of emerald velvet, black veins peeking out of the collar, stark against his pale skin.
That strange power of shimmering clouds interspersed with all the elements he’d imbibed from the previous set of keys swirled around him, making his veins flash silver and gold every few seconds.
His turquoise eyes glinted eagerly as they took in the syrinx in Emory’s hand. A smile lifted his mouth.
“I was waiting for you to find it,” Clover said. “Only a true Tidecaller can take the syrinx off its altar.” He lifted a hand that was burned. “I tried taking it myself, but I’m afraid the divine power that’s in me makes me… no longer quite a Tidecaller.”
He extended that same hand to Emory. On his wrist was a spiral scar like her own, likely from when he’d first opened the door in Dovermere in the past. But while her own mark was silver, his was black, as if whatever corrupt power coursed through his veins had tarnished the mark, too.