Chapter 7 #2
The raft rose toward the dome, rotating in a way that Kai was sure ascension rafts weren’t supposed to. A force pulled all the air from the room, as if a pit had opened up and their little part of the world poured into it.
A thump overhead jerked Kai’s attention upward to the open roof panels. The raft around him dissolved just as Arnsterath landed beside Sura.
Kai expected a jolt. He didn’t expect the sudden sensation of plunging off a cliff. His vision went black for a heartbeat that lasted far too long. It wasn’t like falling, it was faster, like being pulled, dragged, careening helplessly down a mountainside, ripping the breath out of his lungs—
It ceased so abruptly the sudden absence of sensation was almost more disorienting.
Kai found himself crouched on the deck of the raft in near pitch dark, his heart pounding.
He called an imp by reflex. It appeared almost immediately, reassuring him that they were still in the mortal world with its channels to the underearth.
The imp’s wan light fell on the raft. Ramad sprawled next to Kai, Dahin still standing but wide-eyed and pale, with a death grip on the raft’s steering column. Sura huddled next to the net holding the bags of supplies. And Arnsterath next to her; Kai hadn’t imagined her abrupt appearance.
Kai lunged an instant before Arnsterath reached for Sura.
He tackled her and bowled her over, caught her wrist before she stabbed at his eyes.
His first impulse was to throw her over the side, but they might be in the center of a city, and he couldn’t risk that.
He wasn’t sure when he had decided to kill her but evidently he had decided.
The heartbeat of indecision about heaving her out of the raft gave her a chance to throw him off. Kai rolled into a crouch and she scrambled to put her back against the far railing.
“Stop! Kai, stop!” Dahin snapped. “We’ll move again in a moment, I can’t stop it once it’s started. If you keep moving you’ll throw us off balance and we’ll all die.”
After Arnsterath, Dahin was next to be thrown off the raft. Kai stayed where he was, seething.
Sura thumped back against a supply bag. She stared in alarm at Arnsterath, then blinked up at the imp. “Is that— What—”
“Kai called an imp,” Ramad said. He focused on his prisoner, ally, new friend, whatever she was. “Arnsterath, what are you doing?”
“You promised me a chance to prove myself to the Rising World,” she said, her wary gaze on Kai. She had fought him when all he had wanted was to escape with his companions. She had never fought him when his only thought was murder.
Kai looked away, swallowing rage down. He admitted to himself that throwing anybody off the raft would be counterproductive, no matter how badly he wanted to. “Prove yourself,” he sneered. “That’s why you reached for the closest mortal as a hostage.”
Sura edged further away, flicking a frightened glance from Arnsterath to Kai.
“I have no reason to trust anyone here.” Arnsterath turned a hooded gaze on Ramad. “I wasn’t going to let you leave me behind.”
Frustrated, Ramad said heatedly, “I didn’t intend to—” He stopped, and visibly took hold of himself. “Dahin. Why did you do this? The Tescai-lin was arranging for you to make the trip.”
Dahin had clearly been forming a strategy. He began airily, “Address me as Scholar Dahin—”
His voice as flat and cold as death, Kai said, “Answer the question.”
Dahin froze, swallowed, and looked away. “I’ll … explain later. We don’t have much time here.”
Kai gritted his teeth and instead of throwing Dahin out of the raft and interrupting the anchor stone and killing them all, he sat up enough to look out over the railing.
He could tell now that they were inside something, a large cave or structure.
An opening to one side, a squared-off doorway, was large enough for a wallwalker.
Outside it was the lighter darkness of a night lit by starlight.
The raft sat above the ground, on some sort of platform or pillar.
The air was dry, cold but with none of the sea scent of Ancartre, just the smell of rock and sand and some lightning-like bitterness that probably came from the anchor stones.
“This is an old fort in Ecrea,” Sura said softly. “We camped here on the way to the Capstone and Ilhanrun placed the first anchor stone.”
“A good spot, isolated but sheltered.” Dahin’s gaze flicked around the raft, anywhere but at Kai. “How many stops?”
Sura’s glance at him was suspicious. Dahin had stolen the key from her, stolen the expedition’s only means to move easily between Sun-Ar and safety. She admitted, “Six more.”
Dahin nodded. “I see. Quite big jumps, then. I would’ve thought a quantity of small hops rather than a large distance—” He took a sharp breath. “Hold on, we’re going.”
Sura gripped the netting again. Dahin pressed himself back against the rail, keeping one hand on the steering column.
Arnsterath settled on the floor, still watching Kai warily.
He sat on the deck and banished the imp, because there was no reason to put it through this too.
Then the world dropped out from under him again as the next anchor stone wrested them away.
After first hearing about the anchor stones, Kai had expected it would be like normal travel only far more disturbingly fast. He hadn’t thought time would be snatched out of their lives in abrupt and upsetting pieces.
It certainly didn’t change his opinion on Blessed devices and how they seemed designed to wring the maximum discomfort out of anyone who used them.
It explained why so many of the Immortal Blessed were so cranky.
It also didn’t give him any time to process his anger.
They weren’t able to see much of the countryside they passed through, which otherwise would have been a fascinating and distracting journey.
Ilhanrun had chosen other isolated spots for his anchor stones—an immense dripping cavern, a rocky island obscured by cold sea mist and loud with the cries of unfamiliar birds, a bluff above a desert of gray sand and freezing wind, a bare foundation looking down on the tumbled stone ruins of a flooded city, an empty clearing in a forest of snow-covered impossibly huge pine trees.
The different angle and strength of the sunlight at each stop should be a way to tell how much time and distance had passed, but Kai had no idea how to figure that out.
The raft shuddered to a halt on what should be the last stop and Kai blinked away the haze over his vision. The light was bright and clear, the blue sky cloudless. Kai felt a deep ache in his bones, a lead weight in his stomach, and a chill on his skin.
Ramad said, wearily, “I think I’ll walk back.”
“Me too,” Dahin groaned from his huddled position at the base of the steering column. He had been trying to engage more with Ramad and Sura over their brief stops, presumably as a buffer against Kai’s silent, furious hostility.
“That was worse than usual.” Sura pried her stiff fingers off the supply netting.
Kai found himself meeting Arnsterath’s dark gaze. She looked sick, sallow, her cheeks hollow, as if she felt as bad as he did. He thought the mortals and Dahin had come through the journey better. There might be something about demons and anchor stone travel that didn’t mix.
Ramad had, of course, noticed this too. “Kai, are you all right?” he asked, frowning.
“Yes.” Kai forced himself to uncoil and stand, pretending his immediate need to lean on the rail for balance was normal.
They were in a large bowl of rock, like the caldera of a dead volcano, but one side had collapsed, allowing a view out onto a plain that seemed to be all low scrubby trees and shrubs.
The dry cold wind chilled his skin and carried the scents of unfamiliar plants.
There was no sense of a death well here.
But then Kai had never felt the Hierarchs’ Well until one of their trained expositors had called on it to destroy something.
“Where’s your camp?” Dahin asked Sura.
“It’s down that way.” She pointed to a rough path that wound down the slope out of the caldera. “Away from the anchor stone, so no one comes near it accidentally.”
This raft was more utilitarian than the one they had taken from the conspirators, and had no gate to make getting in and out easy. Dahin clambered over the railing and Sura, with a wary look at the rest of them, followed.
The cold air was clearing Kai’s head, though it wasn’t helping his aching body. He swung over the railing, and as Dahin turned to say, “I need to talk to Highsun first so—” Kai caught him by the collar of his coat and dragged him away across the rocks.
Kai stopped, possibly out of earshot, he didn’t really care. He said, “Give me the anchor key.”
Dahin, infuriatingly, looked guilty. “Kai, I know how this looks—”
Kai shook him, once.
Dahin grimaced in defeat and dug in his pocket.
He pulled out a round palm-size stone, with a Blessed metal inset in the center.
It had the icy touch of Thosaren on it, more so than any other Blessed tools Kai had come in contact with.
Still he held it up and raised his voice to say, “Sura, is this the key?”
“Yes!” she called back. Ramad and Arnsterath stood a little distance away, Ramad watching Kai with a furrowed brow and Arnsterath looking off toward the path.
“I know you’re angry,” Dahin began.
Kai put the key in the pocket inside his coat and started away.
He headed toward Sura, possibly because she was the only person here he didn’t want to kill, or at least maim, or leave abandoned in a remote part of the forsaken hills of Sun-Ar.
He had no idea what he wanted to do next; the anger and the misery of the trip, and the fact that he couldn’t trust Dahin, had made a hash out of any tentative plans.