Chapter Seventy-Three. Into the Mist.
Seventy-Three
Into the Mist.
Moisture drips off my nose and clings to my hair, and I taste the sea in the back of my throat.
As Lavante keeps snorting, I suspect he’s experiencing the latter as well, the sound eaten by the fog.
The trees are the same leafy variety as were by the river, and I have to hold my uninjured arm out in front of me to ward them off.
My saddle creaking is the only thing I hear.
The disorientation is real and total.
This makes sense on another level. I’m still down on the flats, even as my physical body is up here. I picture Merc getting caught again, and he and his horse dragged back to become one of those pods that rest as coffins among the ruins.
Maybe some of the salt is from tears.
How could I leave him like that?
Anger curls in my gut as I want to go back and make another choice.
I should have stayed in the Outpost in the first place.
Then Merc wouldn’t have been able to get through the Crystal Gate and none of this would have happened.
And while I’m at it, why couldn’t someone else have the destiny to bring this army to the fight with demons, why couldn’t they be the one to have to pick a journey they don’t want over the man they l—
I squeeze my eyes shut.
Love.
The man I … love—
Another branch wheels through the thick mist and slaps me in the face.
My eyes whip open. And I yell. At nothing, at everything.
And that’s when I hear my name.
I snatch the noise I’m making back from the mist, and hold my breath. When what I thought I heard doesn’t repeat, I feel like it was something I made up—
“Sorrel…”
“Merc!” I pull up on the reins and spin Lavante around. “Over here! Merc!”
My heart gallops in my chest and I put a hand over my mouth so I can hear better over my harsh breathing.
“… Sorrel.”
The ghostly sound weaves through the fog, and I turn Lavante around again. “I’m here!”
When nothing more comes back to me, I panic, thinking that those are his last words, traveling up from below, a condemnation of my selfishness and cowardly—
“I’m here.”
Merc comes through the wafting cloud right in front of me, nothing but a big shape astride his horse. At least … I think this is really him. My visions were so vivid down below, I can’t tell whether I’ve conjured him or he’s actually found me.
I shove my hand out into the void. “Are you real?”
His strong arm penetrates the mist between us, and I grab on to his scarred palm, squeezing as hard as I can, feeling the calluses and the vital warmth and the unyielding bones.
“Yes, woman.” He laughs a little. “Very real. You don’t think I’d let that bunch of uglies keep us apart, do you.”
“Fates, how did you get away?”
Merc leans forward, his face emerging, the specter made real. His black and white eyes search for mine, and as they lock on, his half smile is arrogant as always.
And like the ocean, so beautiful, I will not forget it.
“I just told myself your friend Thale was up here for the killing. The motivation was more than sufficient.”
I’m shaking my head as I too tilt out of the saddle. He meets me more than halfway, our lips brushing before our horses fidget and the contact is broken.
“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” I breathe.
“The spiders or the admission,” he replies dryly.
The way he looks off into the fog shuts the door on all that. But my heart is singing for so many reasons, I don’t even care.
“I think your compass should be helpful,” he says. “We’re all turned around—and if we so much as poke our heads out of this cover, those spiders are waiting for us.”
Before he finishes, I’m already taking off my pack and going in for the instrument. As my hand closes on its satchel, a piercing sadness has me turning and looking back—not that I necessarily find the direction we came from.
It dawns on me that I lost Mare’s coins. I had to drop them to get the crystal knife.
It’s not really the intrinsic value—it’s all they represented: Her last request, her attempt to take care of me, her kindness in return for my own. I feel as though I’ve left her behind in those ruins with those eight-legged predators, even though she’s already died.
“What’s wrong, then?” Merc demands.
“Nothing, sorry.”
Once in my palm, the compass top flips open on its own and the map jumps out at me as it does. It’s wheeled around once again, the landmarks that I now readily recognize oriented at a different position. Immediately, the arrow and the directional headers start on their counter-spins.
Spin, spin … spin …
As the turning continues, I worry that my disorientation has been transmitted into the instrument. Or maybe the fog is enough to do that on its own.
“No reading?” Merc says. When I don’t reply, he curses.
I’m feeling the same frustration—
The halting comes not with the definitive stop of before, but more a sliding halt with the arrow pointing to our rear.
As I twist around and look over Lavante’s rump, every instinct in me tells me it’s the wrong way. That that is going to take us back to the ruins and to our deaths.
I glance down again, in case the compass shows me something else. It doesn’t, and I try to take some confidence that the directional headings are south and a little west, just as before.
“What does it tell you?” Merc coughs as if the salt is in the back of his throat, too. “Where—”
“That way.” I point behind myself. “But always forward, never back, so it feels all wrong.”
“Back is relative, however.” He reins his horse about. “And it took us to the water—besides, what else do we have to go on?”
Lavante swings his big butt around, as if impatient with the pause.
“True,” I murmur as I put the compass away.
I’m not sure what exactly I’m agreeing with, but off we go, through the mist and the infernal, slapping branches. As a chill settles into my bones, I am grateful for the red felt skirting. It really makes for a terrific cloak, especially with my arms out through the pocket-holes.
Predictably, I feel like we go forever, and I wonder whether time, like our own senses of direction and even the compass’s ability to see, isn’t confused. My brain continues to scream that we’re going the wrong way, and I swear I can feel the constriction of the webs once again.
Still, I keep going, though blinded, and the parallel to destiny’s path through a person’s life is inescapable—
A glow up ahead. Otherworldly, as if something magical is coming for us.
Surely, evil wouldn’t be golden against the fog.
“Let me go first,” Merc says.
“No, we go together.”
“Why do you not listen—”
“You have no more idea what’s up there than I do—”
“—when we have no idea what is up there—”
“—so we might as well both find out—”
We’re arguing as the mist disappears as abruptly as I dove into it with Lavante, like the cover is a solid block we walk out of.
The horses stop without being asked. Then again, considering what’s ahead, there’s no farther to go. The mountain range has indeed curved around to the ocean, just as Merc’s map detailed, but what confronts us was not shown on his parchment.
The gate is the largest and most fortified I’ve seen, and like the translucent barrier Lalah managed to break down, it secures the vast gap between two of the pointed elevations with utter surety: Running from the grassy ground up to the very sky, the flanks lock into every nook and cranny of the passage that was cut into the black-and-brown spires.
And the pair of hinged halves lock against a great vertical pillar.
The whole lot of it drips with condensation, as if it’s alive and sweating from the effort of keeping closed.
“Quite the construction,” Merc remarks. “Why use boards when you have the tree itself.”
That’s when I notice what it’s made out of. An entire forest has been felled and bound, countless stripped trunks lined up horizontally and stacked in dozens of rows. Secured by mortar, and bolted in groups by great metal bands, they form the cage door that locks whatever is on the other side out.
Except then I glance back, and decide that more likely it’s keeping where we are coming from contained—and contained we be.
“There are hinges.” Merc urges his horse forward. “So it opens. Or used to.”
Testimony to the gate’s age is in the staining down the exposed, weathered wood from the salt in the air corroding the metal banding system.
The passage of time is also in the debris that’s built up at the whole of the base—which seems to be a kind of sawdust?
Perhaps the bark wasn’t so much stripped as it fell off, the wear of the many years disintegrating the arboreal casing into a reversion back to the soil that once nurtured the roots of its very origin.
I let Lavante go on his own wander, and no surprise, it’s to dip his head and suspiciously sample the grass.
Whatever flavor it is, the green blades pass inspection, for he begins munching in earnest, putting one foot in front of the other as he chomps a trail closer and closer to the newest thing we must get through.
Exhaustion doesn’t so much creep up on me as leap into my body.
It’s as my head falls back that I measure the sky. That star is still up there, brighter than ever, looming like a portent that, considering the way things have been going, I know for sure is not good news.
And then I get a proper look at the top of the gate. There’s a parapet that runs across the obstacle as if the builders knew with weight so great, framing reinforcement was required not just at the sides and center, but all along the height. It’s also a prime defensible position.
Merc glances back at me. “No bell to ring.”
“I don’t know if visitors are welcome from this side of things.”
“Can you blame them—”
The sound is like thunder, except it has a metal ring.
One side of the gate begins to vibrate, to the point where rain kicks off from the bundles of trunks, the drops falling on my face and hair, even as Lavante backs away. Just as I think the metal bands are going to pop and the forest is going to fall free to roll over us, there’s an earthquake.
Lavante jumps into a splayed stance to stay on his feet, but Merc’s horse has the opposite reaction. He bucks and tries to bolt, forcing Merc to sink into the stirrups and fight for control over the bit—
The seal breaks with a crack that resonates through my chest, and I exhale as a rush of wind comes at us through the small opening.
That’s when I smell something unbelievable: Flowers.
I catch the scent of meadow flowers, and there’s a beam of sunshine that pierces in, landing on the grass where Lavante was nibbling.
I once again palm the crystal knife, and Merc, who’s gained control, points his broadsword in the direction of the aperture.
After that …
Nothing happens. The opening gets no bigger, nobody comes through it, and no hint is given as to who’s giving us access or what we’ll find on the other side.
“I go first,” Merc says as he urges his steed forward.
I don’t argue with him this time, mostly because I don’t want either of us to be distracted. Lavante is ready to go, as always, trotting in place as we proceed at a cautious walk. When I finally get a look at what awaits us—
My delight knows no bounds. The undulating field ahead is just a profusion of blooms, the beautiful specimens possessing every color of the rainbow.
And beyond them? A marble city, gleaming and white in the declining sun.
It’s four times the size of the one that lies in ruins in the ocean valley, the very picture of what that ancient metropolis must have been like in its heyday.
And now I am on the other side of the gate, standing in a chute created by a forest rim having been cut back and kept clear, no doubt for occasions such as this.
Immediately, the screaming metal-on-metal sounds repeat, and then comes the thunder followed by the earthquake, once again. But now there is something else. A squeaking.
Glancing over my shoulder, I see that a huge bar is being pushed into place, extending across the center vertical pillar. Surely it must be getting moved by men, but there is a cascade of ivy draping down the sides of the mountain, and whoever is working is underneath its extravagant fall.
There’s a finality as the bolt fits into its socket, the stasis returned. But in spite of the beautiful field that unfurls before me, and the fragrance in my nose, I don’t feel protected. I feel imprisoned—
The guards come from out of the trees. They’re on horseback and on foot, the former with spears, the latter with swords.
Their uniforms are dark blue and tailored, with gold details, and a crest over the left pectoral, and their caps are set on tightly shorn haircuts of various shades of brown and black.
We’re surrounded before we can even attempt a getaway, and then no one moves. Not them, not us.
What clearly is an authority emerges down the wall of green ivy, as if he’s descending from some kind of hidden facility there, and when he hits the ground, he strides over at a lazy pace, arrogance preceding him with the thrust of his narrowed jaw and the slash of his lips.
I gather he’s in charge, for the guards part to accommodate his approach, and then close ranks in his wake when he nods at them with an arching glare.
His eyes pass over Merc … and lock on me. I hate the way he looks me up and down, the banked speculation on his face the last thing I ever want to see.
“You have trespassed upon the land of the Queen of Sudaland,” he says in a deeply accented voice. “I am placing you under arrest and you shall be tried accordingly—”
Merc’s voice cuts through the posturing. “You have no right to detain us—”
The officer takes out a pistol and shoots Merc in the chest.
As I start to scream, I hear the soldier say, “The woman is mine. You know where to take her.”