Chapter 21 Baz
BAZ STOOD FROZEN WITH FEAR as Kai thrashed around, sputtering as if something were choking him.
“What’s wrong with him?” Nisha asked in a panic.
It looked as though Kai was fighting an invisible demon, and Baz realized that might very well be the case.
They were in the sleepscape, after all—the realm of dreams and nightmares.
The same place Kai had been having a hard time distinguishing from reality, never knowing what was fabricated fear encountered in sleep and what was tangible out in the real world.
But this… Whatever unseen horror Kai was fighting against, there was no denying that his suffering was real.
Baz snapped out of it, recalling another time he’d seen someone he cared about falling prey to inexplicable magic.
And just as he’d wound back time on the budding Tidecaller abilities Emory had unleashed the night Travers washed ashore, he pulled back the threads around Kai now, desperate to wind back time to before this nightmare started.
In the Belly of the Beast, it had been easy to call on his magic to open the door. As soon as he’d stepped close to the Hourglass, he’d felt the magic of Dovermere brushing against his, whispering lovingly in his ear. Hello, Timespinner. We’ve been waiting for you.
This power that permeated Dovermere had always felt vast and unknowable to him, yet so very familiar.
It was the strangest thing Baz had ever known, stranger still, he thought, than the Tidecaller power Emory could wield or the fluttering he got in his stomach when he caught Kai’s gaze sometimes.
Inexplicable and wonderful and frightening all at once.
And so Baz had reached for the threads of time around the door, tugging ever so gently at the ones that made up the fabric of the Hourglass, this column of rock that was just rock until it unlocked and became a portal into realms of endless possibility.
He had pulled away at the threads with the utmost concentration, the most delicate touch.
As if he were a mechanic operating on the inner workings of complicated clockwork.
Pull. Untangle. Stop and start again until at last he had unraveled the mechanisms of the door, wound it back to the time it was unlocked and open to other worlds. It had felt natural, instinctive, as if his magic had been created for the sole purpose of tending to this door.
But now, as Baz reached for the threads of time inside the sleepscape, he found that time here was not what he was used to.
It was more complicated than the threads bound to the portal.
In fact, they were not just loose threads at all.
Time was a tapestry of closely woven threadwork, patterns that were complex in a way he couldn’t understand.
An overlapping of color and sense and feeling and life and death and everything.
Time here was a language he did not speak, undecipherable and strange. Though it left him with the impression that it was something he had understood, long ago. A language he’d once heard and tasted and forgotten since.
The tapestry shifted before his eyes, something darker tugging at the edges of his vision. A sense of urgency gripped him. He reached for the thread he thought was connected to Kai and pulled it back, letting go of his magic as quickly as he could.
In a blink, Kai was no longer convulsing and choking on air, but standing beside Baz once more, as if the past few minutes had never happened.
Kai gaped at Baz with confused bewilderment.
“What was that?” Vera exclaimed.
Kai’s eyes caught on a point behind Baz and all the color leeched from his face again, the same as it had done before.
“Brysden,” he said in warning.
Baz whirled, hoping to catch sight of this nightmare that was starting all over again.
But where before the nightmare that came for Kai had been invisible, this one was decidedly not.
Three figures had just stepped through the rift still open to the caves beyond, joining them in this liminal space between worlds.
At first Baz thought them to be umbrae, and his hand reached for Kai’s arm in a quiet plea. But the newcomers were not umbrae.
“I knew I’d find you here,” said Artem Orlov.
Artem’s expression was triumphant, and more than a little wild.
His lip curled in contempt as his gaze slid from Baz and Kai to where Nisha stood.
“Zenara. I can’t say I’m surprised to see you with them.
I always thought your loyalty to the Order was rather unconvincing, especially after the Brysden girl died.
” He smirked. “You and Virgil really thought you could fool me.”
“What did you do to him?” Nisha asked.
At first the question baffled Baz. But then he finally saw who the other two coming up behind Artem were: The first was Virgil Dade, an unsettlingly vacant expression in his eyes that could only mean Artem was using his Glamour magic on him.
And the second, equally Glamoured, was a woman in her thirties whom Baz recognized as Freyia Lündt.
The Reanimator.
It dawned on Baz that Virgil and Freyia were carrying something between them: a stretcher, on top of which was a body bag.
“Set it down,” Artem said, voice laced with compulsion.
Virgil and Freyia did as he commanded without blinking an eye, setting the body between them on the path laden with stars.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it? You can talk now,” Artem added as if in afterthought, waving his hand at them.
“But no moving, no magic. That goes for all of you.”
Baz felt the Glamour magic settle into him, rooting him in place. He couldn’t reach for his magic now, no matter how hard he tried.
Virgil blinked rapidly, that vacancy leaving his eyes. His gaze found Artem’s, full of fury. “I’ll kill you for this,” he said through gritted teeth. Then, to Baz and the others: “He’s the one who broke the Reanimator out. He forced her to use her magic on Lizaveta, and now he’s—”
“Don’t you dare mention my sister’s name!” Artem howled, getting dangerously close to Virgil’s face.
A strangled cry that sounded like a laugh broke from Virgil’s throat. “You killed her all over again.”
“Artem, what did you do?” Nisha asked in a small, horrified voice. Her eyes darted from Artem to the body bag, no doubt realizing whose corpse was hidden inside.
A flicker of shame or maybe grief flashed in Artem’s wild eyes. “I tried to bring Liza back.” He looked at the Reanimator with disgust. “This Eclipse scum is Collapsed, so I thought her limitless magic would work. Seems it wasn’t so limitless after all.”
Freyia closed her eyes, a tear running down her cheek. “I warned you it would not work. The dead are meant to stay dead.”
Artem gave a manic laugh at that. “Explain to me, then, why you killed all those people so you could have corpses to experiment on.”
“I never took a life that was not already dying, or so corrupt that it had no right to live,” Freyia said fiercely. “Criminals and killers of the worst sort. The terminally ill, hours from death, to whom I could offer this small kindness, before…”
“Before bringing them back as soulless corpses?” Artem pressed. “Trying to play god and perfect this twisted, unnatural gift of yours. If the dead are meant to stay dead, why bring them back at all?”
Freyia swallowed hard. “I brought back my husband,” she said in a barely audible whisper.
“After he was murdered. He came back with his Reaper magic all wrong. It—he couldn’t control it, and it got our son killed.
I Collapsed trying to bring our son back, trying to fix my husband at the same time.
My son came back an empty shell. My husband shriveled up from the inside, as if his own Reaper magic was killing him all over again.
And it did kill him, for good this time.
Then it was just me and my son, barely two years old and no livelier than a porcelain doll.
I went on the run with him, unable to let him go.
I thought maybe, if I perfected the Reanimation, if I tried it often enough that I managed to bring back someone the right way, soul and all, I could fix him too. ”
Freyia blew out a sigh. “But I was never able to. Even with the expansion of my Collapsing, I could never bring them back right. And my son… It seems the clock ran its course on this second life I’d given him, which was really no life at all.
” She fixed Artem with a hard stare. “So yes, I learned my lesson the hard way. The dead should stay dead. You saw what happened with your sister, and it won’t be any different for your friend. ”
“It will be,” Artem argued. He motioned to the starry expanse around them.
“Here, the boundaries of the possible are expanded. Magic is endless. Your power won’t be constrained to its usual restrictions.
At least, that’s what he believed. So you’ll bring him back fully, soul and all. Not just an empty corpse.”
The words made the hairs on the back of Baz’s neck rise.
“Artem, who is that?” Nisha asked, eyes glued to the body bag.
Artem unzipped it in answer. Inside was not Lizaveta but another familiar face, deathly pale and horribly still, yet perfectly preserved, as if his corpse had been kept on ice.
Baz wanted to recoil but couldn’t, kept rooted in place by Artem’s Glamour. This had to be a nightmare, his worst fears drawn up by the umbrae he was certain lurked in the darkness, playing tricks on his mind.
He had watched Keiran Dunhall Thornby die in his arms, had gone to his funeral and watched as his body was buried six feet deep. Yet here Keiran was, still dead—there was no doubt about that—but perhaps not for long.
“You can’t be serious,” Baz said with bleak realization, shocked that Artem would go to these lengths to bring Keiran back. But as he looked at Artem, he recognized the deep grief there, and somewhere in his heart he felt sorry for him.
Artem was alone—his sister dead, his best friend dead. Those he’d called family, all gone.