Chapter 36 First Ever
First Ever
Every obscenity he knew beat time inside his head. What the fucking hell was going on?
You know what this is. Control fed Father wrong information, or—
Erik could figure out the treachery out later, if they were both still alive to do it.
The good thing about their situation was that he knew the layout of most temples and could break a window on the first floor, carefully laying his sliced, battered coat over the glass before giving her a boost through.
It was child’s play to hop himself inside, but he heard the hunting cry again behind him, much closer than before—and the silvery wrong notes of a horn winding through a deep, diseased descant.
Shit. A lun’nyie, out during the day? Though the solstice was officially past it was still the dark time of the year, and the blizzard, helped along by the unclean and their god’s urging, was a lid over the sun’s cleansing eye.
This temple had indeed been active once; a faint feeling of welcome clung to dusty, shuttered rooms. No stick of furniture, not a scrap of cloth—nothing of whatever lirai had sheltered here remained, except that slight lingering warmth.
“Big place,” Liv whispered. Her eyes were huge, deep circles underneath. Terror wore on the body like lack of sleep. She wasn’t bruised, though she moved a little stiffly—car accidents weren’t good for anyone, even with healing sorcery.
Those weren’t accidents, Erik. “There were probably two or three lirai here once.” If Jake was still alive, he’d work along their path, clearing stragglers and attempting to reinforce his Elder.
If he was dead, or part of the treachery—but Erik couldn’t afford to think about that at the moment. “The Flame’ll be below.”
It wasn’t hard to figure out which of them was braver. Liv let out a soft, strained sound trying to be a laugh. “Great. You going to tell me what it is?”
“It’s kind of…” He paused as the hunting horn cried outside again, a glassy trill blunted by the solid walls but still nerve scraping.
“What’s that?” she whispered.
Hunters, beautiful. They rode big leng-spiders back in the day—among other things.
“Bad news.” He checked the hall, ghosting through half-open doors.
That passageway would lead to the main armory; there would be smaller ones on each floor for convenience and in case of siege.
Nothing would be left in the larder, of course.
It was a pity. More weaponry was always better.
“I can tell that much.” Sarcasm, shaky but definite, tinted her tone.
“I know.” The whispers rose inside his skull for a moment, despite her proximity, and his temper almost snapped.
It wasn’t like him, he knew it wasn’t like him, and the thought that the god might be taking a personal interest in chasing down this very powerful and practically unattended potential was enough to make him sweat.
“Just don’t want to scare you. More than you already are, I mean. ”
“That’s awful nice of you.” Her voice broke, and she did something strange.
Liv’s slender, chilled fingers found his, threaded through, and squeezed. She was actually holding his hand, and a soft haze of power poured up his arm, took a break in his aching shoulder, flooded the rest of him with warm honey.
The whispers stopped. Their sudden cessation was a balm he didn’t deserve, and Erik found himself stock-still in a hall leading to a low archway, bare blocks of blue stone fitted carefully together without mortar.
His head was down, his chin almost touching his chest, and a thin tremor ran through him, much like the shaking in her own small, vulnerable hand.
“Sorry.” Now Liv just sounded sad. “I thought it would help.” She attempted to tug her fingers free, but his clamped down. Not hard enough to hurt, just enough to contain.
You mean, just enough to trap. “It does,” he said.
“You can’t know how much. Come on, this way.
” He gave a gentle, experimental tug and she followed as if she did trust him, and more than just provisionally.
“Nothing can really prepare you for the Flame. If the planet has a soul, that’s kind of what it is.
Or a pulse, maybe.” He was chattering; any information he gave her now would be hopelessly mangled.
“Oh.” She absorbed this, following him almost fearlessly. She hadn’t been taught to step only where he did, or to send sonar-rings of numinous force through him to scan their surroundings. There was so much other lirai had to teach her, but first they both had to survive this.
If they managed that miracle, finding another temple would be easy.
Past the archway was another short hall of undressed stone leading to yet another black, blank archway.
If the place was active, there would be Sons on both sides, standing and sweeping guard, plus a full lirai with Liv, keeping her calm.
The air would sing with pleasant tension, and maybe Erik would be drifting behind his potential, haunting her steps.
Literally. And waiting for the moment when he’d have to do the unforgivable.
She flinched a bare moment before the entire main structure shuddered, mutely protesting an invasion. The fucking unclean had made it to the temple, and while its residual blessing would be uncomfortable, it wouldn’t slow them down.
Not with valuable prey so close.
“I can’t see anything,” she whispered, and the dread in her voice was almost enough to break him.
He’d forgotten to hold some corpselight since she couldn’t see in the dark, and of course the oneiros would be mute—she was only potential, not lirai, and the danger wasn’t close enough to make it flash.
“There’s stairs,” he said, and decided he wouldn’t use the light.
Blindness was terrifying, but seeing what he was about to do would be even worse.
“A spiral, going down. Just keep holding my hand.”
“Sure.” Her tiny, jagged laugh held more panic than amusement. “This is a weird first date, Erik. Even for you.”
The pain in his chest wasn’t from the claw-spear; that was well-healed. It was all her. “Yeah, well, it’d be my first ever, so I’ll take your word for it.”
“Your first? Ever?”
“The Sons are taken young. Generally, straight from the orphanage.” His voice bounced off stone, fell into a deep well of overlapping echoes. “Stairs. There’s the first one… good. I know you can’t see, just hold onto me. Don’t let go.”
“Oh, no fear of that.” She flinched again as the entire temple shuddered, even its wings and outbuildings noticing the incursion. “They’re here.”
“Don’t worry.” The words were ashes against his tongue. “I can hold a door for a long time.”
Her hand tensed. He moved carefully so she didn’t stumble even in this absolute blackness. The Flame would give her a type of dark-vision; a full lirai could use the eyes of the Sons around them as well as the corpselight.
But right now, she was blind. And he could only see because of the filthy mark on his wrist, the doorway he drew strength through—and the god behind it, writhing with fury, would eat her alive if he could.
The end of the stairs came sooner than Erik expected; he would have liked a few more seconds with her hand caught in his.
Her fingers had warmed; a moment’s worth of simple sorcery flushed her with heat and she exhaled sharply.
The shadowbeasts and nightmares were tearing through the temple above; they wouldn’t expect Erik and his all-but-helpless charge to go down.
“The Flame’ll come.” Was he trying to convince her, or himself? “It, ah, might not be very pleasant.”
“Neither will getting eaten by those things.” She swayed slightly on the last step, and he was glad she couldn’t see the great circular stone lid in the middle of this chamber, its surface crawling with glyphs in a language long dead. No lirai would see such carvings without a shudder. “Erik?”
“Yeah?” He got her to the edge, and his fingers slipped reluctantly free. “Stand very still. I have to open it up.”
“Great.” She froze, and for a long moment he examined her face.
Pupils swollen in what was total darkness for her, her chin lifted, her hair a mess and her shoulders dusted with gemlike drops of melted snow, she was utterly beautiful.
“I’m sorry I was mean to you.” It came out of her in a rush, as if she could feel his gaze. “It’s just… this is all so much.”
His chest hurt even worse. “It’s fine,” Erik mumbled, crouching.
His hand found the space it wanted between lines of blocky carved symbols telling the story of the Breaking, when lirai and Sons made their final stand with their backs to a blood-red sea deep in nighttime lands the lirai ruled, their gleaming lost city burning and the greatest of ancient Dreamers sacrificing blood, life, and their very souls to lock the Mad God away. “Just stand very still.”
“I can hear them.” It was the whisper of a child alone in the dark. “They’re about to find us. Whatever we’re going to do, please let’s just make it quick.”
The lid shuddered; a slow, deep grinding began. Hieroglyphs twitched into motion as stone separated with clockwork precision, and if she’d been able to see it, the wrongness of the lid’s crumbling in defiance of earthly physics might have made her even more apprehensive.
Erik looked into the black hole. Of course, the Flame had retreated when it was blocked off.
He just hoped it would sense her need and come back in a hurry, or could be sparked by the oneiros. “All right.” He straightened. “Liv—”
“Jesus,” she whispered. “They’re on the stairs.”
Shit. There was nothing else he could do. Erik’s right hand found a knifehilt, and for the first time since his initial week in the Sons’ training dormitory, his palms were damp with fear.
Now came the betrayal.