Chapter 17
My legs carried me to the Old Country with little instruction.
I barely noticed the protests of the four Roses standing guard at the rift in the Middlemist that I chose to pass through—the same one I’d approached before, when Gareth’s page had interrupted my crossing.
I muttered something to them, or maybe even shoved them out of my way.
Whatever I did, they chose not to follow me.
I passed through the spells crisscrossing the rift, welcoming their crackling sting.
This pain was different from that of my bandaged hand or of watching Posey writhe.
This pain was of my own choosing and therefore precious.
It reminded me that I was still alive, for now, and gave me a tantalizing taste of what I was walking toward.
The Mist here was thick as cobwebs and darker than its usual filmy silver thanks to the corrupting effect of the nearby rift.
According to some, such tears in the Mist’s fabric were abominations.
They didn’t care that the monks at all five Cloisters, who had devoted their lives to studying the gods, had issued statements denouncing this kind of fanatical thinking.
In the minds of these zealous faithful, the Mist was a product of the gods and therefore innately perfect.
Flaws shouldn’t have existed, and the fact that they did—that the Mist was failing, that it was flooding the country, that we were at war with the Oldens—was a sign that we had fallen out of the gods’ favor.
We deserved punishment, maybe even extermination by invaders, if that was the will of the gods.
No one had ever been able to coherently explain how that would happen, since as far as they knew, the gods were dead and no longer had a will.
And all of this ignored the fact that if the gods had been as perfect as our holy clerics claimed, the Mist never would have existed in the first place—the seal between our world and the Old Country would have been impenetrable.
Fortunately, I wouldn’t be around much longer to debate the issue.
On this night, the Middlemist knew exactly what I wanted.
It didn’t sing to me about it, nor did it hiss.
In solemn silence, it deposited me in a rocky stretch of Olden Country that I recognized at once.
Desolate crags stretched from horizon to horizon, their valleys cloaked in fog.
The sky was orange, and the slopes were bare.
The air was thin and cold. Crashes of thunder echoed across the dreary landscape though there were no clouds in the sky.
Ghorlock, home of the stone titans. That thunder rumbling in my bones was their distant footfalls.
I nearly laughed. The Mist had a dark sense of humor.
What a dismal place this was, its beauty stark and cruel.
Ghorlock was in the far northern realm of the Old Country, hundreds of miles from the nearest Order-friendly settlement.
Though I had left the Mist far behind, I could still feel its presence in the deep corners of my mind.
You want violence, daughter of Kerezen?
You want death?
As you wish.
And here I was. The titans would be only too happy to oblige me. Stone titans weren’t as easily provoked as their brethren of fire and wind, but even their patience had limits. Insult them with enough persistence, and they’d flatten you without a word.
It would be quick.
I wouldn’t feel it.
I started down the nearest slope, so calm I was almost gliding.
***
It didn’t take me long to find one.
I followed the sound of grinding stone to a mountain path, up which a titan lumbered, churning up dust clouds.
He was smallish for his kind but still towered over me by a good fifteen feet.
He was human-shaped in the way that wild wolves are dog-shaped: some similarities, but one was clearly more ancient and powerful than the other.
He had two legs, two arms, a head, a torso, but instead of flesh, he was made of stone and pebbles and plates of shale.
Every time he moved, he rained rocks, and his joints ground against each other like jostling boulders.
He was perfect.
I ran toward him the second I saw him, sprinting across the rocks at breakneck speed. He heard me coming and turned around to look, blinking his small, sunken eyes in confusion. I leapt the last few feet and attacked him with such a hard roundhouse kick that he crashed to his knees with a grunt.
The impact knocked the wind out of me. If a human who wasn’t a demigod sentinel had done something as foolish as I just had, she would have shattered every bone in her leg.
I slammed to the ground shoulder-first and lay there for a moment, gulping down air, my leg throbbing with pain, before unsteadily climbing back to my feet.
The titan was still on his knees, watching me.
I couldn’t read his expression. His face was a shifting mass of rock, his mouth a thin slit.
“Did you just crawl out of your pit?” I said, speaking haltingly in the harsh Ghorlock tongue. “You’re filthy.”
He looked down at himself with those unreadable sunken eyes. His limbs were caked in dried mud and frosted with dust. Given that and his size, I wondered if he might in fact be a child, freshly formed in the steaming mud pits where all stone titans were born.
“I thought they didn’t let puny newborns like you climb this high,” I continued, still in my fighting stance, though my whole body was shaking. I couldn’t even tell if I was afraid. I buzzed, I thrummed. I was hot and aching, feverish. I was going to die.
“You’d better hope your elders don’t see you,” I said, “or else they might throw you down the mountain. You’d fall to pieces, and then you’d have to wait there for someone to wander by and hope they cared enough to stop and help rebuild you.
If there was anything left to rebuild, that is.
Maybe you’d simply be dust after a drop like that.
You certainly don’t look strong enough to—”
He moved fast. That had always surprised me—how quickly they could travel given their bulk.
One swipe of his arm was all it took. His fist hit my stomach and I went flying.
I hit a cliffside so hard that my vision flashed white.
And then I was on the ground in a heap, gasping, tasting blood, my ears ringing.
The world spun and spun, and the titan began to trudge away.
“Foolish,” he rasped in Ghorlock. He waved back at me in disgust. “A human and a fool.”
The delirious thought came to me that he was very funny, that I wanted to laugh. Then the world went black.
***
Rain woke me—a cold, stinging rain. I was floating through the air, which reassured me that I was dead and being transported through channels of aelum to the Great Dominion, birthplace of the gods and final resting place of the dead. Aelum: the basis of all magical life.
“Yes,” came a voice from somewhere above me, “that is indeed the definition. I’m glad to hear that you’ve still got use of your brain.”
The voice jarred me. I forced open my eyes, and a flash of lightning afforded me a glimpse of a familiar spectacled face.
“Gareth?” I croaked.
“At your service,” he replied. “Don’t worry, we’re almost out of the rain. There’s a cave not far from where I found you.”
His voice was cheerful, as if we were on a pleasant stroll. But his arms shook around me, and he was breathing hard.
“Are you dead too?” I asked.
He choked out a sad burst of laughter. “You’re not dead, Mara. You’re alive. And I need you to stay with me, all right? I’m not equipped to defend myself against Freyda should you die in my care.”
“Freyda’s here?”
“She is, and she’s very angry and very wet. I told her to wait for us in the cave. We’re almost there, darling. Stay with me.”
His voice began to fade. My eyes drifted shut.
Do you hear me? His voice floated through the darkness. Stay with me, Mara. Please.
***
When I next awoke, I lay shivering on a blanket.
The ground was hard but smooth, and I was in a shallow hollow of stone, like a giant thumbprint.
Several yards away from me, the mouth of a cave framed a dark world of wind and rain.
My head ached so sharply it felt like someone was screwing knives into my skull.
But the world looked a bit more solid, my vision less hazy. I was still alive.
As I lay there, my eyes filled with tears, and I was too tired to keep them from falling.
“Oh, Mara.” Gareth moved carefully into my field of vision. He was a mess—his clothes soaked through, streaks of mud all over him, his glasses speckled with raindrops. He cupped my face in his hand and brushed his thumb across my cheek. His touch was cold but so gentle it made my heart twist.
“Please don’t cry,” he said quietly. “I know it hurts, but—”
“You don’t understand,” I bit out, staring at the cave ceiling. “I shouldn’t be here.”
“Well, I suppose that’s true. You should be at the priory, safe in your bed.”
“Safe? At the priory?” I laughed through my tears. “You do tell wonderful jokes.”
“Certainly it’s safer than Ghorlock.”
I glanced at him. “How do you even know about Ghorlock?”
He gave me a look, his mouth quirking into a small smile.
“Oh, right.” I rolled my eyes. “You read about it in some obscure text a million years ago and can recall every detail with perfect accuracy.”
“Gods, it sounds even better when you say it.”
Something moved to my left, and I heard the familiar click of talons.
I turned slightly to see Freyda creeping carefully toward me across the cave floor.
The sight of her ruffled wet feathers and stern amber glare nearly unstitched me.
I held out my wounded hand to her. The bandage was sopping, stained an ugly yellow-brown.
She cocked her head and stared at it, then at me.