Chapter 45 Cero
Cero
Cero considered leaving the jungle after the woman’s warning. There were enough reeds in the forest that he might be able to reassemble the Sail. Stay and die was as direct as one could be.
But a preternatural feeling pulled him onward, some old knowledge that had lain sleeping in his mind for a long time. His blood stirred, and with every moment that passed, he felt he must rise, move, search for—
Home.
“Was she a ghost?” Karinna said of the apparition.
Cero didn’t think so. “It’s advanced magic,” he said. “Our legends say the Kegari could do remarkable things before the catastrophe that destroyed the old civilization.”
Karinna glanced around at the ruins. Birds sang from the trees, fat bees buzzed around flowers, and thick clusters of fruit hung from the tall palms. “I don’t know what happened back then,” she said. “But the land has healed.”
Cero took out the map Karinna had stolen from the Jaduna. “I think we’re here.” He pointed to the central part of the Western Continent. “I remember this isthmus—and the reef is marked. Look—”
He pointed to the city drawn on the map—the largest one on it, bigger even than those on the Southern Continent. His skin prickled at the sight of it now. That word came again to his mind. Home.
“This writing,” he said. “It’s archaic, but it looks like it says Ibafint.
In Kegari, Ibbha means ‘gathering place’ or ‘city.’ And the fint sounds a bit like Fount.
In the records the Kegari do have, the Fount was the source of our magic.
Queen Div was called the Vessel of the Fount.
This place must be what the stories call the First City. ”
“Do you know what killed them?” Karinna asked.
“The stories call it a cataclysm. An earthquake or a flood. Some natural disaster the ancients could never have prevented. But…that woman said the Fount had been cursed. I don’t know. I feel—” He tried to describe it. “A pull. Toward this place.” He pointed to Ibafint.
They made their way west, following the river, keeping a good distance from the strange flora and fauna.
The first night they camped near a spring, watching as all manner of night creatures visited it.
The creatures paid Cero and Karinna no mind.
It was beautiful. Almost peaceful. But Cero felt antsy and out of time. He wished they’d gone a little farther.
Karinna appeared not to be able to sleep either, and eventually, she spoke.
“You seem to feel guilt for helping Aiz,” she said. “How do you deal with—with that feeling?”
He glanced over at her, but she was staring straight up at the constellations wheeling overhead. Her question didn’t sound accusatory. More like she had a ghost of her own.
“I try to think of the next good thing I can do, and the next. I hope that one day, they will add up and be enough to—to even the scales, I suppose.”
She said nothing, only curled up under her thin blanket, the thicker one lost somewhere over the sea. It wouldn’t keep the chill away—he could see her shivering from here.
Cero considered his own, warmer blanket. He’d kept it beneath his seat as a bed for Abzi, where it had no doubt cushioned the cat when they crash-landed.
It was a cold night. But Cero didn’t usually get cold. For a long time, he watched the stars above. He did not know them yet. He was so far from home.
But then, he’d never felt like Kegar was home. Not since his father died. Rahn bet-Dafra had been a loving man, giving what he could to his son, though he didn’t have much to give.
He must have known he’d be taken for the highborn raids. He had no magic. Frontline warfare was all he was good for. He must have known, too, that he wouldn’t survive, like his own parents, and theirs before them.
Cero never learned how his mother died. He remembered nothing of her, but of course, she must have existed once, somewhere. He used to dislike the very idea of her. Whether she’d been taken or had died or had left them, it didn’t matter to a young Cero.
Now he wondered if she’d had the magic, like him.
Abzi appeared out of the night, carrying some dead thing that she feasted upon with soft snarls. Shortly after, Karinna’s breathing finally settled into a rhythm, and Cero got up silently and laid the blanket over her. To his surprise, she caught his hand, eyes still closed.
“They will be enough, Cero,” she whispered. “Your good things.”
She let him go and, in moments, was asleep. And for a long time, as Cero sat awake, he felt warm, as if an ember burned in his chest, steady and strong against the dark.
Later, when it was Cero’s time to sleep, it was fitful and plagued with nightmares. He stood upon that same rocky shore, the forsaken ocean pounding around him.
Hurry, the boy, Ruh, said to him. I am running out of time, Cero. I need you.
They came upon Ibafint in the early afternoon, first catching glimpses of it through the jungle before finding themselves on its outskirts. As they stood upon the lip of the valley where it was built, Cero wanted to stop and marvel, for the city was vast, even if it was ruined.
The few buildings left standing towered higher than any place he’d seen in the Southern Continent or the Northern. Even with windsmithing, he couldn’t imagine how they’d built behemoths that had lasted all this time.
There was a pattern to the pointed arches and peaked roof beams that Cero knew well. Multiple buildings had the same look as the cloisters. The shape of another recalled the Aerie. Large tracts of land overtaken by jungle hinted at parks or Sail yards.
A peculiar feeling came over him—this place was a part of him. He was made of this dirt. These waters. And yet he knew Ibafint was completely empty. It had been empty for a long time.
“It’s just like Kegar,” he said softly. “It’s even laid out the same.”
“Maybe that will make it easier to find the Fount,” Karinna said. “Where is it in New Kegar?”
But there was nothing like the Fount in New Kegar. “I can feel it,” Cero said.
His attention fell upon a low hill with a vine-choked triangular building atop it. It appeared to be situated at the very center of the city, and when Cero looked at it, his skin tingled, as if in acknowledgment.
“There.” He nodded to the building. “That’s where we need to go.”
Hurry, Cero. Ruh’s voice. Cero picked up his pace, thankful that Karinna was as tireless as he.
As they got deeper in the city, Cero noticed things he could not explain.
He didn’t spot a single staircase. The spaces between the buildings were unusually wide.
The buildings themselves had enormous, symmetrical gaps in their outer walls.
“They look like windows,” Karinna said. “But no one could make sheets of glass so large. I’ve not seen any cisterns or stairs or aqueducts.”
“The stories say the Old Kegari cities were something to behold. Without illness, without waste. They could communicate across hundreds of miles. Harness their windsmithing to float to the feet of the clouds. I never believed it, but”—Cero glanced around—“it might explain the lack of stairs.”
The buildings were built not of brick or steel but out of a creamy stone that was pocked and weathered by time yet still sturdy.
Cero’s magic remained elusive, skittering away like a shy cat every time he tried to grab hold of it.
Karinna was equally thwarted, unable to communicate with Abzi as she usually did.
Cero looked for Ikfa, wondering if the magic-numbing substance was to blame for how he felt.
But he didn’t find signs of it anywhere.
As they approached the central building, Cero heard something strange—a buzz. He slapped at what he thought must be a mosquito, only for Karinna to look at him quizzically.
“Don’t you hear that?” he asked her.
“Clearly not,” she said dryly. “Describe it.”
“Like a mosquito. Or a bee.” The buzz grew louder. He felt dizzy. After a few more steps, Karinna suddenly slowed.
“I hear—something,” she said. “And I feel strange. Like the time that idiot boy from Tribe Kisam gave me ghas cake and I thought I was a butterfly.”
Cero would have laughed if not for feeling bizarre himself.
He tried to seek out a change in their environment.
But the stone beneath them was rock solid, with no plants or vines growing between.
The trees nearby were trees they’d seen all day.
There was no toxin in the air that he could see, nor anything in the ground that would make them feel as they did.
The apparition’s warning rang through his head. Stay and die.
And yet he was pulled on. It was such a powerful compulsion that he kept trying to move forward, ill as he felt. Karinna took two more steps and straightened.
“Here.” She tapped the earth with her boot. “The stone here is worn. There’s a path. We just have to follow it.”
They moved carefully, eventually reaching a set of stone stairs that led up the hill to the triangular structure.
Abzi scampered ahead and when they reached the building at the top, she was waiting beside a huge closed door that was easily twenty feet across and twice as tall.
Cero gave it a shove. It was like pushing a mountain.
Abzi watched as Karinna drew close to her, bending down to scratch her face.
“Do you think she knows anything?” Cero asked.
“She usually does,” Karinna said. “She’s telling me something, but without the magic I can’t understand her.” Karinna looked around. The wall was completely flat but for a slight depression in the stone to the right of the door, near where Abzi was sitting.
“There’s a little pocket here.” Karinna stuck her finger in it, but nothing happened.
When Cero approached, he recognized the thin grooves that branched out from the pocket. They exactly matched the types of grooves the Loha flowed through in the Sails.
He had only a small block of Loha. “Without this, we can’t use the Sail,” he said. “We’d have no way back. But—” His hand hovered over the grooves. “I must, Karinna. This is where I was meant to come. What I was meant to see.”
The pull was so strong he swayed toward the door. But he waited, because if he was stranded here, she was stranded with him.
“Well, then let’s hope whatever we find in there is worth it,” Karinna finally said.
He pushed the Loha into the slot. One tendril of it wrapped around his finger. The rest shot to his left in a straight line before turning sharply upward and outlining the writing in the door that hadn’t been visible before. Cero recognized one word: fint.
A moment later, the door swung open with a quiet whoosh. The Loha dropped into Cero’s hand, a solid brick once more.
At first, Cero couldn’t see what was within. Karinna took two steps and seemed to disappear into the shadows of the place, the darkness was so complete. Cero thought of the Jaduna portals and froze. He had to make himself step inside.
As soon as he did, two panels moved silently overhead.
Light spilled into the building in two thick gold beams, revealing smooth gray walls about fifty feet high and a perfectly triangular floor.
It was pale marble, thickly veined with purple metal that disappeared into the earth at the building’s walls.
“Ikfa.” Now he understood why he’d felt so awful. Cero turned and looked to the center of the room, just as Karinna did.
And there he saw something that he found difficult to understand, to even describe. It was as if every cry of despair he’d heard in the slums, in Dafra cloister the night of the fire, in the Empire as the Kegari rained down the hells—it was all those screams given physical form.
A hole in the earth. But deeper somehow. A void in the fabric of the world. Perfectly round, its inside teeming with some unspeakable horror. Something Cero could only feel. Something that made him want to flee this place, this continent, his very skin.
“Oh—” Karinna staggered back toward Cero, catching herself on his arm. “No—no, that’s—that isn’t real—It can’t be.”
She was staring at the hole not in terror, as Cero was, but in recognition.
“You’ve seen it before,” he said through numb lips. “Where?”
“In the Tribal Lands, north of Nur,” she whispered. “There was something just like it in the—in the cave where my brother died. I only saw it for a moment. My father wouldn’t let me stay in b-because there was so much blood. Some of it was Ruh’s—”
She shuddered. “I’ll never forget. And that thing—that hole. Something inside was moving. Just like this one.”
“Stay and die. I told you.” A voice spoke from behind them. As one, Cero and Karinna turned.
It was the apparition from the tunnels again. Despite her words, she did not look forbidding. Only mildly surprised.
“You stayed.” She spoke in heavily accented Ankanese now, as if realizing Karinna would not understand Kegari.
“This was the test. I did not think you would pass, but I should have known. I should have trusted. You are the only one who has come, in all these long years. You passed through, despite the poison that destroyed this land.”
“The Ikfa?” Cero frowned. “There wasn’t any in the city.”
The woman went on as if she didn’t hear Cero. “It taints the sands of our beaches, the branches of our trees, the earth beneath our city. It is our shame. It was our end.”
“Who in the ten bleeding hells are you? And why did you test us?” Karinna bared her blades, but the woman was not looking at her.
She was looking at Cero. The eldritch void in the ground shimmered behind her.
“Who are you?” Cero’s voice shook. Lo, and the Tel Ilessi shall meet the Queen of the Crossing, for whom he was named. There in the shadow of our bloodiest betrayal, the Tel Ilessi shall hear the dark history, our Ninth Sacred Tale. And thus may our people finally be led home.
“Are you—are you Div?”
She cocked her head. “Div—yes. Div. They called me that. Do you know what that word means in Ancient Kegari?”
He said nothing. She smiled gently.
“It means ‘monster.’ ”
Cero remembered the snippet from the journal at Kade’s house. Div, they call me, and Div I have become.
“It matters not,” the apparition said. “You are not here for my name, Cero bet-Dafra. You are here for our story. The story of how our people were destroyed. And of how you might yet save them.”