Chapter 60 Baz
BAZ CALLED ON THE THREADS of time to contain the blast of Thames’s Collapse.
He managed to keep it from reaching him and the others as they stumbled as far back as they could.
But Baz couldn’t stop Thames entirely, the power emanating from him too strong, burning too bright, that his magic simply eroded against it.
Baz didn’t understand. If Thames had already Collapsed, how was he doing so again now?
It was as if the Tidecaller synth he’d injected himself with were blazing through his body, liquid silver burning him from the inside out.
The blast flared bright, then subsided for a fraction of a second, before flaring brighter than before, and again subsiding.
Over and over and over again in quick, successive spurts, as if he were experiencing multiple Collapsings one after the other, each more terrible than the last.
Thames’s screams ripped through the Treasury as silver light shot out in every which way.
Clover was screaming too as he fought against the hold Kai had on him, trying desperately to get to Thames despite the danger of the blasts.
Behind Baz, Cordie and Luce huddled close together, in the small bubble of protection that Baz was keeping out of time’s reach.
Around them, the silver light shot through the Treasury, splitting the grotto’s walls in numerous places.
This whole place was going to fall apart if this lasted much longer.
But then, at last, the light died out completely. Thames fell limply to the scorched cave floor beneath him, his body unrecognizable.
His veins had turned black, his skin shriveled in a way that echoed Quince Travers, eyes wide and unseeing, mouth open on a silent scream like Lia Azula.
It was as if his magic had consumed him from the inside. Rotted him to the core, depleting him of every last drop of power and life until he was nothing but a husk.
Clover was instantly at Thames’s side, falling to his knees with a broken cry. He gathered Thames’s body in his arms. Tears fell in earnest down his face. His head whipped to Baz, a bright fervor in his eyes as he said, “Undo this. Bring him back.”
When Baz did not move, Clover’s face turned feral. “Bring him back!”
Kai stepped in front of Baz, as if ready to take the brunt of any attack Clover might launch his way. Baz gripped his wrist to say it was all right.
“I can’t,” Baz said to Clover. “There are limits to my power. To all our power.”
What happened to Thames was proof enough.
But Clover seemed undeterred. “You may be limited,” he said, “but I am not.”
He turned his attention back to Thames and closed his eyes in concentration, taking a deep breath in.
“What are you doing?” Cordie asked. “Cornelius—stop!”
Something prickled against Baz’s magic, a sort of recognition he couldn’t make sense of.
Before his eyes, Thames’s deteriorated body started to change, blackened veins slowly fading back to silver.
Abruptly, they turned black again, and Clover swore in frustration as Thames’s corpse remained that: a corpse.
It dawned on Baz what Clover was doing: he was trying to call on his Timespinner magic. To use the kind of power Baz would not allow himself to use.
Baz remembered the time Emory had tried calling on Eclipse magics, finding it more difficult to do than lunar magics. A warning was on his lips—because if a Tidecaller had limits, surely this was it—but just then the Treasury trembled with enough strength to send Baz lurching into Kai.
Debris started to fall around them as the cracks from Thames’s Collapsing lengthened and expanded. Baz heard Cordie crying out as rubble fell around her. He used his magic to stop the rocks from harming any of them.
“We need to leave!” Luce yelled as she helped Cordie to her feet.
Baz gazed at the stairs up to the Vault, then at the glowing pool he suspected led to the door, that echo of Dovermere’s power pulsing ever so much stronger from it. If they wanted to get to the Hourglass, this might very well be their only chance.
Clover locked eyes with him, as if the same thought had occurred to him. His gaze shifted to Cordie, something pained in his expression. “Delia,” Clover said. “You need to return to the Vault.”
“Me? What about all of you?”
“We’re going to find this door.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not. You’re in no condition to take such risks. I need you to be safe, Delia.”
Something private passed between them that Baz didn’t understand.
“You know?” Cordie said in a small voice.
Clover gave her a watery smile. “I suspected.” He gave Cordie a kiss on the cheek and whispered something in her ear that had her lip wobbling and tears forming in her eyes. “Go back up to safety. And please, get someone to come down here for Thames’s body. He should not have to stay down here.”
Cordie grabbed his wrist. Her eyes were wide and pleading. “Be careful.”
Cordie gave each of them a quick hug, tears running down her cheeks. Baz couldn’t bear to say goodbye. She’d become his friend. And if he never saw her again… He bit back all his emotions and focused on keeping a hold on his magic as Cordie went back up the stairs.
Only once she disappeared from view did they all turn to the pool. Clover was the first to step into it. He edged toward the cascade in its middle.
“There’s something here, at the bottom,” he said with a frown. “Something that wasn’t there before when the wards were still intact.”
Before they could ask what it was, Clover dove below the water and did not reemerge.
With a sad look back to Thames’s body and whispered words that sounded like Sleep well, my friend, Luce dove in after Clover. Then it was just Baz and Kai, staring wide-eyed at each other.
“We can still back out,” Kai said haltingly.
“Do you want to back out?”
“No. You?”
Baz shook his head. They’d gotten this far—if anything, he had to see for himself where this led.
Kai grabbed his hand, and together they dove in after the others.
Whatever made the pool glow turquoise seemed to emanate from the bottom, where a hazy light shone.
But as Baz and Kai kicked toward it, there seemed to be no bottom at all.
Suddenly, light particles danced around them, forming into a great spiral that spun quicker and quicker as it pulled them farther down.
Just when Baz was certain he’d run out of breath, an odd sensation overtook him, and the light drowned the world in white.
Solid ground rushed up to meet him, too quick—
Pain lanced through his wrist, then his head, as he collided.
“Baz. BAZ!”
He opened his eyes to a blurry Kai hovering over him. “Thank the fucking Tides.”
Baz blinked. His vision remained blurry. Or maybe that was his glasses, all wet and askew. He lifted his hand to right them and winced. His wrist was leaden with pain, and his head—
“Easy,” Kai said as Baz tried to push himself up. “You landed pretty hard.”
“Where are we?” Baz managed. He was sopping wet and on solid ground, that much he could tell.
“Take a wild guess.”
Baz ventured a look as his vision slowly focused. They were in yet another cave, this one utterly familiar. “The Belly of the Beast,” he breathed.
Clover and Luce stood at the base of the Hourglass, staring at it with parted lips. Luce seemed to be limping, and Clover’s cheek was scraped, but otherwise, they seemed fine. So did Kai, with only a scratch on his chin, from what Baz could tell.
And the Hourglass stood in the middle of the cave as it always had, pulsing with power.
Before Baz could make sense of how they’d gotten here, the cave shook as chunks of rock fell from above.
He glanced up. There on the cave ceiling was a mirage-like reflection of water, as though they were looking up from the bottom of the Treasury’s pool.
There was no way to reach it from this distance. No wonder the fall had been so brutal.
It was only then that Baz noticed the cracks that ran like veins along the ceiling, emanating from the magicked pool bottom, and growing rapidly.
They spanned all the way to the far end of the cave, where it should have opened onto the rest of Dovermere’s tunnels.
There was only a wall of solid rock there, the same wall Baz and Kai had come up against when they’d tried getting back to the door after first arriving in this time.
The fissures in the wall groaned.
And burst.
The tide rushed in, the cave wall shattering beneath the full, raging force of the Aldersea. Baz flung his magic toward the tide, freezing the waves before they could reach them. But he wasn’t quick enough to stop the growing cracks or the rocks that fell onto the Hourglass.
Baz had an unsettling sense of déjà vu as the Hourglass split, the stalactite that formed the upper part of it crumbling at the foot of the dais. The stalagmite still stood, though the spiral etched on its surface was cracked.
The door was broken. Their only way out of here, and it was gone.
Baz grasped at the threads of time around the door, thread by flimsy thread.
They were all over the place, scattered and cut to pieces and lying in shambles, as if the door’s brokenness had disrupted the very fabric of time itself.
Baz couldn’t fix it—did not know how, not with all his focus and power fighting to hold back the sea.
The magic of Dovermere did not speak to him as it once did because it was not there; it was broken just like the door itself.
“You can do this, Brysden,” Kai said at his side, a tethering presence, steady as he’d always been.
Baz tried to breathe. He forgot how it was supposed to go.
In. Hold. Out.
Like the rhythm of the sea, the slow breathing of the tide. Ebb and flow. A cycle so continuous it could never be broken.