Chapter 64
SIXTY-FOUR
As Safi careened through the burnt forest, she had the distinct sense she was following a path someone else had made for her.
She’d been shoved onto tracks like a mine cart before, by her uncle in Venaza City during the Truce Summit that had changed everything.
By Vaness when she’d served as the woman’s Truthwitch in Marstok.
By Henrick once she’d become his wife—and had later been bound to the Hell-Bard Loom.
Then by Leopold as he’d manipulated and lied and spewed out pretty words to convince her to traipse across the continent after Iseult.
Now, Safi was almost certain she was locked on someone else’s tracks again. The question was, whose? Leopold was the most likely answer—always acting in the shadows. Always angry when no one obeyed his whim. And, if it turned out to be him, could Safi break free? For that matter, should she?
Very safe and very alone. It was what she’d thought about Leopold in Praga, when she’d first started wondering if maybe he couldn’t be trusted. Now here she was again, very alone … but most certainly not very safe.
She could still see Itosha’s Threads, far ahead—although they were hazing in a way that worried her. As if the Exalted One were somehow leaving, somehow sinking down into some place Safi couldn’t follow.
Because they are, Safi realized when she finally broke from the trees. Before her was a clearing filled with column-like stones that she would wager a lot of coin weren’t natural. There was a pattern to them, a circling inward like the markers on a highway.
Oh, something tickled in her brain. That’s important and you should remember it.
She hugged Merik’s coat to her. It smelled like woodsmoke and rain, and she was glad to have it. Snow fell now in clumping, wet flakes that soaked Safi’s body. Gone was Itosha’s electric storm; now it was the forever clouds unloading.
She dug forward. This way, this way, on these tracks someone else had placed for her until she reached a hole in the ground of spiraling black stone where snow did not gather, nor melt, but simply vanished.
The Threads of the world shivered into the hole, following the ramp like a whirlpool.
Itosha had gone that way. Which meant Merik must have as well.
So Safi would go that way too, picking up speed as she spun downward.
As Threads wormed past her in brilliant lines.
More colors than Safi had ever heard Iseult describe; more than Safi’s eyes could fully separate; and more than this magic (that wasn’t really her magic) had ever before encountered.
What the hell-gates was going on?
Safi felt the sputter of a mountain door.
Felt the familiar and agonizing gravity of it as it towed her inward like the worst kind of riptide.
This time, as she was torn apart, she had the engulfing sensation that someone else was there.
A giant, inescapable being that observed her without malice or love. Just curiosity as Safi passed through.
Then Safi was rebuilt. Restored. And dropped inside the mountain—or at least her addled brain assumed it was the mountain. Logically, it had to be. It looked different though: a tunnel filled with melting ice instead of a cavern.
Everywhere she turned, glowing blue seemed to ooze and bleed. In some spots, she thought she saw bodies. In others, it was just limbs exposed and thawing.
A hand grabbed at her hair.
“Weasels piss on me!” Safi jerked away. “Don’t touch me—no, no. Get off, get off!” She ran, her gait stumbling and desperate. To the right, ice had been gouged in huge pieces, lightning had scored stone, and Threads trailed where Itosha had been.
More bodies. More melting ice. More hands and occasionally mouths too, shouting about lands long contested and fissures in the ice and five turning on one. There was one particular refrain, though, that kept leaping out above the others.
“Think beyond. Think beyond.”
Beyond what? Safi wanted to scream back. But there were no fully formed faces for her to latch on to—and there were still too many hands grappling. Nightmares she couldn’t escape no matter how fast she pushed her legs or how many swivels and turns the tunnel made.
Until at last, Safi did finally escape the wretchedness. She did finally reach a fork in the mountain with only stone. It was jagged and rattling, as if the mountain had only just opened it up, but the chaotic, exuberant Threads traveled this way, so Safi would too.
She ran. She chased. She didn’t stop. Not until the rift through the mountain reached its end. Not until she stumbled out into the part of the mountain she’d visited before. Paladins’ Hall spread before her, both exactly as she remembered and also completely changed.
No longer did the mountain itself attack, but instead the Exalted One.
First came the cackling squall that signaled Itosha.
She’d been slowed by the narrowness of the tunnel, but now she gusted and chanted from the cavern’s heart: “You cannot escape me, Little Hound. I will follow wherever you try to go.”
And Itosha did follow, cycloning into a new doorway. A massive, shimmering thing of lucent blue hovering on a platform in the middle of the abyss. It was a full moon all eyes would latch on to, no matter how bright the constellations that shone nearby.
The sense of being placed onto tracks hit Safi again. So hard in the chest that she staggered into stone. Her vision spun, shrouding her view of the cavern.
Think beyond, quavered voices against her neck. Think beyond.
The mountain started moving again, a brutal lashing side to side as stones ripped down and dust choked. Shards of rock fell, so sharp they cut at Safi’s scalp, her arms, her legs. Then came a voice, so like Itosha’s and yet so different.
“You should not follow him, Itosha. You should change your course before it is too late.”
“Coward, Ferisien. This is our chance.”
“This is your doom,” the voice replied. And then it was no more.
Safi shook her head, wobbling like a dog as she tried to latch on to her senses. Her vision was clearing; the mountain was calming; and sure enough, she could see a new upthrusting of rock that had formed across Paladins’ Hall. A bridge made of stone that hadn’t been there before.
But a bridge Safi could take all the same.
Once more, she staggered into a run. And once more, she did not stop.
The temple on Hawk’s Way was as old as the city itself. Time had smoothed away the Hagfish columns at the shadowy entrance. Six of them, Stix noted as she helped her father inside. Always six.
How much of the past had always been embedded here? How much more had they all forgotten of the living history that was reborn today?
As she had hobbled her father through the city, Stix had directed healing magic into him. It wasn’t a skill she’d used often—or ever, really. She had always been more comfortable as a fighter, defender, sailor on the seas.
But magic was different now, and the power inside Stix was dimensioned in ways her Paladin memories knew how to use. She sent warmth into his blood. Clumsy, but soothing against the pain that shuddered through him. And she kept his blood inside so no more would fall on to the cobblestones.
He’d lost too much though, and what he needed more than anything was rest.
The air turned cool as Stix guided him deeper into the temple.
Sunlight faded, replaced by two lamps above a statue of Noden on his throne.
It was almost funny now, knowing what Stix did.
The god all Nubrevnans had worshipped for centuries did not exist. There were no Hagfishes at his side in an abyss.
There was, instead, a goddess sleeping with spirit swifts and shadow wyrms inside a mountain.
On the statue’s left was a fresco of Lady Baile.
Noden’s Right Hand, and Stix’s own self from a thousand years ago.
Her skin was painted like a starry sky, while her fox-shaped mask shone blue.
She held golden wheat and a silver trout, and the copper urn resting before the image was filled to the brim with wooden and silver coins.
Before her figure, tens of people had gathered. There were no cots or mats, but she recognized healers from Pin’s Keep. Trained medics—some with magic, some without—moving through the rows and clumps of injured.
It was too many hurt and broken and dying, and suddenly Stix was afraid to leave. Not merely because she feared for her father’s life—although she did—but because she could do good here. She was a fumbling healer, but she could learn.
You will return, she reminded herself as she eased her father down against the cold wall. You will return after you help Cam with the Cisterns, for you are Lady Baile and you will never abandon them.
“I’ll be back,” she told her father, releasing her hold on his blood. Instantly, she felt it start leaking anew. But it was a slower trickle now, for the journey here had given his body enough time to start repairing itself. “Just hold on, Father. I’ll be back very soon.”
“I know.” He smiled. A brief burst of sunlight in these shadows. Then he slumped down and his eyes drifted shut.
Stix turned to go, making herself not look at all the bloodied and half-drowned people around her. The broken limbs and bodies drained of life. The Cisterns had to be the priority. She would return.
Her gaze briefly flickered over the other fresco.
Noden’s Left Hand, the Fury. Normally, there were no offerings in this urn, for no one wanted the Fury’s eye to find them, lest they be judged.
Now, though, there were nine people bowed low before him, murmuring and begging, some with injuries. Others with injured ones in their arms.
They thought Lady Baile had forgotten them, so they begged out of desperation for the Fury to turn his cruel eye their way. I will be back. Stix bit her lip. I swear, I haven’t forgotten you. She picked up her pace, aiming for the Hagfish columns.
But she never reached them. Not before a sound knifed into her ears. Into her mind. Then electricity rammed into her spine.
It was like a thousand firepots beating at her from the inside out. She felt her skin burn, paper over flame. She felt her muscles give out and her body crumple downward.
The ring-bond. It is my ancient ring-bond just like long ago.
No one approached Stix. No one even seemed to notice she was suffering. After all, she was just one more person in the temple who needed help after calamity had struck.
Stix grabbed at her throat, at her eyes, and she searched frantically for any sign of where that old, old enemy might be. Then she saw him, coming from behind Noden’s throne as if he’d always been there.
“Hello,” he said in a voice that had always been too soft, too kind for the cruelty that lived within.
“You have changed greatly in these last thousand years, Baile. I, however, am the same as I always have been.” He smiled now, his face as beautiful as she abruptly remembered it had been—and a perfect match to the stone Noden nearby.
Because of course, the city hadn’t created their god out of nothing …
They’d simply renamed a person who really had come before.
Time might have changed the tales, the memories, the title, but his likeness—there could be no denying who Noden had been inspired by all along. The Exalted One Lovats had the same broad shoulders over a supple waist. He wore the same curls, silver and gleaming.
He came to a stop before Stix. She curled onto her side, wheezing. Those are the rings, she thought. Those are the rings we are bound to. There were three on his right hand, and Stix remembered now: this was why her city had so much magic.
The Exalted One, Lovats, had bound the Six with jade rings crafted by Portia.
Midne had already been claimed by Portia, so she was untouched.
The Rook King had been too powerful for domination, so he had also been left alone.
But the four elemental Paladins? They’d had no choice but to kneel, to serve, to build this city that Stix had just worked so hard to save.
One ring was missing now, and that was the ring Kahina wore.
Lovats dropped to a crouch beside Stix. Somehow, he was even more beautiful than he had been a thousand years ago. The silver of his hair glowed like moonbeams.
He ran a hand over Stix’s face. There was nothing she could do to stop him.
She was aflame. She was dying. The pain shattered every bone, lacerated every vein.
“I missed you more than any of the others, you know.
And now, here you are. The first face I find upon waking.
But do not fear, my love. I have no plans to claim vengeance.
No desire to hurt you—or anyone else. I am changed, you see.
“Now stand up, Baile.”
Stix’s muscles convulsed. Then obeyed, shoving under her. Cranking her upright.
Lovats smiled at her, only a few inches taller than she was. “This version of you is so lovely. You always have been, though, for your soul is ever constant.” Again he stroked at Stix’s face. He leaned in too, as if he might kiss her …
But he paused, mere inches from her lips. “Come with me now, Baile. I command you.”
The pain exploded, and again, Stix lost control of her muscles. But rather than collapse to the stones, Lovats simply caught her. Lifted her like a Nubrevnan groom with his bride.
The pain will stop, my love—she heard crackling inside her skull—if you would just stop fighting against me. Can you not see that you have already lost?