Chapter 23 Daesra #2
When I pose them the silent question, about a third of them vanish in streaks of light, and the others are left so frightened that they only need the slightest nudge to scatter with the pounding of heels on stone.
Some of them dive into other parts of the tower, while others flee through the door at the opposite end of the entrance, which opens onto a long arcade.
At least it’s covered, so there’s less risk of something attacking from the sky or knocking me back into the sea.
Still, when I reach the other side of the passage without incident, I’m pleasantly surprised.
Then less pleasantly so, when I barge into the part of the main fortress that just so happens to be an even bigger guardhouse, with benches and tables and racks for weapons and shields.
It’s filled with guards, too, of course, who shout and rise at the sight of me.
But I pass through them easily enough with more flashes of light and more fleeing shades, many of whom drop their swords where they stand with echoing clangs, peeling off into the hallways that branch from either side of the wide, circular room.
Curiously, none of them run directly away from me this time, avoiding the double doors straight across the hall.
When I kick through them, I see why. The doors crash open onto a shadowy, lush courtyard with a domed iron cage overhead and a silver-tiered fountain in the center that overflows with sinister-looking smoky water—too much like the River of Forgetfulness to be a coincidence.
Isha himself is standing on the path in front of it. Waiting for me.
I wouldn’t want to be caught fleeing right in front of him, either. Fortunately, fleeing is the last thing I want to do.
Now I bring out my sword. I walk slowly down the steps leading from the guardhouse, my blade low at my side, my eyes flicking around the courtyard for signs of danger—other than the obvious one, that is. Isha only stares at me with those cold, dark, dead eyes of his.
“Where’s Sadaré?” I growl when I reach the path between us.
“Not here,” he says, his voice silken and low.
“What have you done with her?”
“Come, find out.” With a sweep of his black-robed arm, he gestures toward the main keep behind him. As if I would naively accept such an invitation.
“How about you bring her out, and she and I leave this wretched place behind forever?”
He cocks his head, his black hair unmoving. “She prefers it here, actually.”
“Horseshit,” I sneer. “She hasn’t had a choice other than to pretend for you. Everyone deserves a choice.”
He smiles grimly. “Tell that to the dead.”
I bare my teeth back at him and press the hilt of my sword over my heart. “As you wish, Isha.”
His eyes follow my blade, while the rest of his attention is most likely directed at the inner defenses guarding his soul.
So he doesn’t—or can’t—feel when I spread my senses anywhere but him.
After reaching out of the underworld, reaching everywhere in the underworld isn’t that challenging.
My silent call spreads like fire from each little glowing light to glowing light, until I’ve cast an entire web over them all—thousands upon thousands of threads—hundreds of thousands—stitching those souls together in a brilliant, intricate tapestry that only I can see.
I ask them all the question. Give them the alternative option. And then I open the doorway out.
It’s still a kind of death I’m offering, but they’re already dead. And yet it’s also a rebirth. A choice where there was none.
Many of the lights wink out. Everything floating in the dead sea and everyone in the Pit of Hell, even most of the daemons.
The majority of the shades wandering in the Plains of the Forgotten.
About a third of those standing in line, who haven’t even fully entered the underworld yet—so Kardon should definitely appreciate me more now.
Even a smattering from the Blessed Isles, who must have tired of paradise after so long.
None of them extinguished, no, but gone in a myriad of bright streaks—returning to the source that created us all.
Rejoining Breath, the god who made mortals and who will remake them until the source itself burns out.
I let the web fall away after that, returning to my body.
So I know exactly when Isha feels the blow—all that aether leaving his domain at once.
He staggers, doubling over and catching the lip of the fountain for balance.
When he raises his eyes to me, they’re tight and glinting with absolute rage.
I’ve never seen him this angry, so he must have some sense of what I’ve done.
How I’ve shaken his realm to its roots.
Of course, there will always be death. He’ll always have his own source of aether replenished. But right now, he’s weaker than he’s ever been. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, having taken another great gulp of aether from the divine realm, like surfacing for a breath of air.
I slash out diagonally with my sword, putting everything I have into the blow.
Isha only has time to straighten before the arc of light hits him, cutting across his chest from his shoulder to opposite hip.
His eyes narrow—and then widen as golden blood begins to seep out along the path that the light took, like water through a crack.
And then the top half of his torso begins to slide from the bottom half with a wet, sticky sound.
But then his fists clench, and he squelches back together, his blood rapidly retreating back inside of him—the crack in his untouchable, imperturbable form resealing.
Except I did touch him. And he certainly looks perturbed now. Alarmed, even. Furious.
But definitely not dead.
He raises both hands as if he’s about to pull the very fortress out from under me like he did the bridge, or perhaps bring the walls down on my head.
A grinding screech from above draws his gaze as well as mine to the spiked cage spanning the top of the courtyard.
I assume it must be his doing, and so I drop into a ready crouch to dodge whatever is coming, but then I see the huge, dark shape looming against the dreary sky—white teeth flashing, jaws wrenching, iron shrieking, until there’s a hole big enough for the creature to squeeze through. So, a big hole.
The black-winged creature flattens a few trees as it lands in the courtyard.
I think it’s Bereus come to finally fulfill his duty until I realize there’s only one head.
The doglike creature is smaller than Bereus, though still the size of several horses bundled together.
Its snout is much more squashed. Its eyes are amber instead of yellow, as if brown had been mixed into the irises.
Instead of the shaggy scruff of a wolf, it has a hint of a mane around its face.
And its arched wings fold to reveal Melé on its back.
I stare in just as much shock as Isha, though his mouth hasn’t fallen open like mine.
“Bereus?” he says at the same time I exclaim, “Mother!… Pogli?”
It’s not Pogli, of course. Not entirely. The creature doesn’t look like two horses pressed together so much as it looks like a mix of Pogli and Bereus.
Like when Sea absorbed Sky to become Horizon.
“Oh gods,” I breathe, sagging under the realization. “Pogli.”
Melé quickly slips off his broad shoulders—having to drop far enough to the ground that she stumbles and nearly sits down.
She scrambles through the crushed foliage to duck underneath him and slip behind me, even backing a short ways up the stairs toward the guardhouse with understanding in her wide eyes at what she must have just walked into.
Well, flown into—atop Pogli, who could never fly before.
At least I hope it’s still Pogli. Perhaps that uncertainty is why Melé chose to hide behind me instead of him.
And then I spot the spiked tail whipping dangerously around his hindquarters and think that was rather why.
After all, he seems to have broken in here to protect me, never mind that I told Melé to stay away.
Isha takes a domineering step toward him, command in his voice. “Bereus.”
Black lips curl around daggerlike white teeth, bristling hackles rise beyond the short, shaggy mane, and a low growl rumbles from that cavernous chest. Isha stops in his tracks, his eyes dark slits.
Even if the creature isn’t entirely Pogli, he’s certainly not Bereus, either. And he’s given me the perfect distraction I need. I’ve been able to free the aether of those here from Isha’s clutches. Maybe I can free his aether from him, until he has nothing left.
I am the sun next to a mortal’s flickering candle.
So, I need to darken the sun.
He’ll not go willingly or quietly like the others, so I don’t bother asking or nudging. I reach out, even lifting my hand as I do, to seize his aether while he’s glaring at what used to be his obedient pet.
It’s like trying to seize the River of Fire.
At first he smiles, because I wound him about as much as I would wound the river by plunging my hand into its flames. But it’s not actually my hand.
It’s a siphon.
He gasps a ragged inhalation so grating that it sounds like a death rattle, and yet one befitting a god—powerful enough to drop the pressure in the courtyard and stir the leaves on the trees.
My ears pop and Melé cries out as Isha draws the very air around us into his lungs.
His back arches, and his arms go rigid at his sides, as if he were struck by lightning.
A powerful current is flowing through him—his own.
And exiting out of him, through me. It’s by letting go of it as soon as I have it that I, myself, don’t get burned.
I’m draining the sun, not holding it.
Isha’s pale skin turns even paler, and the iron of his irises fades to white. His black hair starts to gray, and his fingers curl in on themselves, looking skeletal.
I begin to hope I can actually win this.