8. OMENS #2
The word evoked a strange sadness in Ysira. She sighed. “I think they were people, once.”
This is who we are without the gods, the priests said, spreading tales of madness and depravity.
Others whispered that the Osuun were the Harvested, transformed by the gods and set loose to roam the canyon for eternity, sating their monstrous hunger with the flesh of anyone who dared disturb these ruins.
Ysira remembered so little of her own Harvest; for all she knew, she had narrowly escaped becoming one of them.
She glanced upward, to the ledge that was still vacant. For now. “All right,” she said at last. “We’ll go through the arch. But we’re not following your trail.”
She motioned him ahead of her. Cowed for the time being, Neri slunk through the stone passage to a crumbling stair.
His brow furrowed as though his thoughts had formed a massive knot in his head, requiring all his energy to untangle.
Ysira knew the feeling. It nagged at her as they climbed in a tight spiral, until the stairway opened on a ruined hall.
They climbed through rubble from the fallen ceiling, between toppled columns bathed in the eerie light of the eclipse.
Twice more Neri had to stop and catch his breath. Whenever Ysira moved toward him, threatening to offer a hand, he squared his shoulders and quickened his steps.
Though it would not do for him to catch her staring, Ysira struggled not to.
She had never before let herself think of Neri as her son.
She found herself trying to deduce what came from her and what came from his father, searching for evidence of her own parents in him.
Neri’s elegant facial features and obsidian eyes were Ysira’s, but his skin was a darker brown, his hair black.
He looked more like a Semira, more Telu than Zal.
Ysira’s father would’ve hated that. Yeran Naktis had been a destitute grifter from the Knots, but he’d taken such pride in his Zal bloodline, telling Ysira they descended from conquerors.
He’d have been horrified as she picked her way through the ruins of their people’s ancient glory, no longer able to decipher the written language he’d risked so much to teach her.
The jedaat glared at her from all around the hall, its sharp geometric patterns the sole adornment on these stark stone faces.
Yeran had died when Ysira was eight; she remembered little of him but his cruelty.
And yet, the notion that he would be disappointed in her stung nonetheless.
Perhaps she understood Neri’s stubborn insistence on proving himself to Ged better than she liked to admit.
Neri had stopped in front of a massive frieze. His voice echoed in the silence. “Was this a temple?”
He squinted at the frieze. It depicted seven spheres, caught in a spiraling current around an eighth, much larger.
The sun, with their world and its celestial neighbors.
Art in Zivora never depicted them so clearly, as though the Church preferred not to remind people that anything existed beyond this sphere—Celes Lor.
Yet they could not erase the sky and the stars, let alone the sight of Oe at night.
On the frieze, the ringed giant shared a path around the sun with Celes Lor.
Two tiny circles denoted the moons Ixion and Nue.
Neri ran a hand over a small row of jedaat glyphs, lips moving as he sounded something out.
“Can you read that?” Ysira asked, stunned despite herself.
“A little. I wanted to understand, so Uncle Seth found me some books.” She felt a sudden pang of appreciation for Seth and the absurd resources to which his family had access, as Neri said, “I think it says . . . this was a gift for the—rise? Ascension? Of Ikuran Var . . . hmm.” His fingers lingered over a symbol below the glyphs.
A disjointed triangular spiral. “I don’t know what this means. ” He frowned.
“Eat? That can’t be right.”
Ysira supplied the only detail she knew. “Var is what the Zal called their demon priests.”
“Do you think it’s true they caused the Cataclysm?” Neri looked up, taking in the full scope of the frieze. “When the gods saved us . . . Do you ever wonder if it’s true they came from the stars?” He seemed to be talking mostly to himself as he mused, “I wonder what else is out there.”
“Maybe we used to know.” Ysira glanced around the ruins. “Some say we could travel to the moons, once.”
She found that story difficult to believe, but Neri said, “Father told me that. He says the Church lies to us.”
“What do you think?” Ysira asked.
Neri dragged his bad foot back and forth, scraping lines in the dust. At last he said, “My mother was Harvested.” He didn’t appear to notice that Ysira stopped breathing.
His lip trembled. “I’ve had friends taken.
My only friends, years ago. Father says the gods sent the plague, too, and it killed Lilaya and Grandmother Ynes.
It’s selfish if I don’t do anything about it.
” He stopped for breath. “Don’t you have anyone you care about? ”
Ysira had reasonably fond memories of her mother.
She tolerated Seth and owed Ogden her life.
But sympathy over the plight of her fellow citizens was not something to which she was accustomed, and she shuttered herself off from it.
And . . . the most salient thought that leapt into her head was You. I care about you.
“Seth said—”
“He doesn’t understand,” Neri blurted. “He doesn’t know what it’s
like to be me. I’ll never be a warrior. I’m a weak telepath. This is the only way I can help, the only way I won’t—I won’t be worthless.” He turned, and looked up at Ysira. “Can’t you understand that?”
Of course Ysira understood. She knew, intimately, what it was like to be told she would never amount to anything—and the horror of realizing she’d proven everyone right.
But she made herself say, “You don’t know if this”—she refused to call it a plan—“this idea will work. Even if your father is right, if whatever is calling to you really did kill a god, he doesn’t know, either. He couldn’t.”
“How do you know?” Neri did not state it as a question so much as a challenge.
They treaded dangerously close to a subject that would not help Ysira’s argument, so she said, “I think caution is warranted. And—come on, we shouldn’t linger here.”
With that, at least, Neri didn’t argue. He followed her to the front of the hall, overlooking the expanse of the canyon.
The acropolis of Zal Fel sprawled below, the dead city drenched in dusk, silent as a tomb.
Towering human effigies framed the portico, carved as though they knelt and held the crumbling ceiling on their backs and bowed heads.
From the overlook, one stair led down the cliffside.
The other led up—and it was lined with glass.
Ysira tried to steer Neri away before he saw it. “This way.” “The trail goes up.”
“We’re going back down,” Ysira snapped, and stepped in front of him. She’d have to revert to her initial plan—knock him unconscious, tie him up, and carry him back to Zivora.
Neri stuck out his chin, and for the first time, Ysira saw Ged in his features. “Are you going to stop me?”
In all her life, Ysira had never met an individual so stubbornly bent on his own destruction. If he’d been anyone else in the world, she would have left him to it.
Neri tried to bolt past her. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into a headlock.
He went limp, forcing her to lean forward.
He hooked a foot around her ankle. Made her stumble.
She was so surprised that for an instant her grip on him loosened.
He wriggled away, drew his dagger, slipped under her guard—
—and slashed her forearm.
As she cried out, he staggered back. He was breathing hard, hands braced against his knees, but staring at the wound he’d inflicted. At the tissue knitting back together before his eyes.
“I knew it,” he gasped. “You have a demon.”
Ysira didn’t get a chance to say more, though, because a terrible hunting cry echoed from the canyon depths. She whirled, readying her weapon, and heard it again. Unmistakably, it came from the stairway leading down. And it was growing closer.
She could not escape the sense they had been herded there, as if somehow the Osuun knew. As if they wanted Neri to follow the path of glass.
He had already dashed up the jagged cliff facade, toward a looming crevasse that glimmered in the eclipse’s faint light. With no other choice, Ysira ran after him. They plunged into the asphyxiating black.