Chapter 28
Chapter 28
My forward momentum sends me colliding with the old planks of Salki’s floor. I catch myself with my free hand and fall onto my hip. Casnia releases my other and falls into a heap beside me.
Just like before.
“Cas!” I cry, rivers streaming from my eyes. Rivers. I remember rivers. Oh gods, I remember rivers and trees and night and stars and Cas’raneah. I roll her onto her back and smooth hair from her face. I barely recognize her like this. She’s so changed, so ... mortal.
She gave everything to create that wall. She pulled the power for it right from her mind, right from her soul. Left her like this, but it didn’t kill her. Thank the Well it didn’t kill her.
But she couldn’t tell me. She lost herself to the confines of her own prison.
“Cas. Cas.” Hovering over her, I pat her round cheeks. “Cas’raneah, can you hear me?” I pull back one of her eyelids; her iris rolls back. I check her pulse. Heart beating. Still breathing. But she doesn’t wake, no matter how hard I shake her. “Cas!” Tears hit her collar and my knees. “Cas, I’m so sorry, I’m so—”
Serpent save me, I fixed the damn machine. Tampere’s World Serpent is free and turning. We’re heading into night, and it will only take about six hours for Moseus—for Ruin—to reclaim his true power.
How did it escape? How did it obtain a physical form and reach the tower?
Arthen pushes open the door just then. “What—” Seeing us, he rushes to Cas’raneah’s side. “What happened? Is she okay?”
Oh, Arthen.He’s so different from how he used to be. So much smaller, weaker. Aged. We used to be so much more. Strong, tall, golden. Halfway to gods. All of us, and Ruin took it from all of us. Devoured our shadows of divinity as it was sucked down into its terrestrial prison.
“She fell.” I wipe my eyes. I remember, but Arthen doesn’t. Casnia gave the last of herself to make me remember, and she had nothing left to give. “I don’t know if she’ll wake up this time, Arthen.”
“This time?” he lifts his eyes, then pauses. Blinks. “P-Pell?”
Lifting the collar of my shirt, I catch stray tears. Arthen’s never seen me cry before—
“What happened to your hair?” he asks instead. “Your ... eyes?”
“What do you mean?” Panic leaks in with my renewed understanding. I rise to my feet, turning, spying a metal spoon on Salki’s table. Rushing to it, I pick it up and peer into the convex side. My lips part.
I expect to see my old self, to see eyes and hair turned gold. But no—my brown hair has darkened to jet black, and my eyes ... my eyes are a brilliant violet, just like Cas’raneah’s.
In that moment, staring at my warped reflection, I understand how Ruin did it. Why Moseus and Heartwood look so similar. The paleness, the green eyes, the hair—they’re not features of his people. Of gods or otherwise. They’re all features of Heartwood.
Cas’raneah gave her power to me and subsequently changed my appearance. When Heartwood came here looking for his sister, Ruin must have stolen his. It had nothing to do with the planet. The only curse upon Tampere is that bastard locked inside my tower.
Moseus needed Heartwood. The forest god was his damned battery, but he wasn’t enough—thus Moseus’s sickliness. The dried-out copse of wickwoods, the ruined row of crops ... Moseus must have been siphoning life from them in attempts to hold on to his stolen form. He needed Heartwood to remain physical, and he needed me to fix the machines. But in six hours, he won’t need either of us anymore.
I can’t do this alone. I never could.
“Get her to the bed,” I shout, storming toward the door. “And get everyone to the alehouse, now—”
I run right into Salki, nearly knocking her over. But she steadies herself, her eyes round as ball bearings. She, too, is a sliver of her old self. Her short hair grayed, her body wrinkled, her stature small—
She’s holding a stack of papers. My papers. The ones I hid under my floor. The ones with my hundreds of paragraphs of what happened to me, should I forget a second time.
I’m relieved. It will make the rest that much easier.
“Salki, I’m ready to explain everything. To everyone,” I promise. “And I need you to help me do it.”
The table I stand on in Maglon’s alehouse creaks with my movement as I address the crowd. Everyone is here but Casnia, who still lies unconscious but has been deemed stable by Amlynn. People fill the pub, and they’ve left the doors open to accommodate more bodies. Farmers and craftsmen alike sit hip to hip on the bar. Every chair is taken, every disbelieving eye on me. Had they not seen the tower and the sun move, had Casnia not overlaid her colors on me, they never would have believed my story. But these are three witnesses that something has changed, and so the crowd listens, albeit with a thick air of skepticism.
When I’m done explaining, Frantess says, “So you want us to believe that we are Ancients, and we forgot because Ruin itself lives on the planet? But you remember because Casnia of all people cast some sort of spell on you?”
“Casnia was changed by the war. We all were,” I repeat, struggling to keep a hold on my temper. I could call salt salty and she would disagree with me. “I don’t have time to debate it with you. Salki?”
Salki, in the doorway, turns away from the crowd. She’s checking the sundial, which she had lain in the street. “Five and a half hours,” she reads.
“That’s how much time we have before Ruin returns to his full power. Its full power.” It’s hard for me to think of the Devourer as anything but him—Moseus. “I need help. We have to get into that tower.”
“We’ve never been able to get into that tower, Pell.” Arthen works his hands.
“We’ve never gotten the whole of Emgarden to try,” I retort. “Do you not understand? Ruin will destroy everything, and it won’t stop with Tampere. I can’t give your memories back to you, I can only tell you what I know, both before and after this happened!” I gesture to my changed self. “Don’t you wonder why we don’t have blood parents, or children? Why none of us can remember a place before Emgarden?” I stop to rub a throbbing spot on my brow. “If nothing else, there’s an enormous amount of metal in there. Enough to supply us for a long time. Let greed entice you, I don’t care. But I need help.”
The crowd grows silent. My gut knots.
“Arthen, you had the longest, most annoying beard.” The table creaks as I lean toward him. “You would never cut it. You accidentally lit it on fire all the time. And Balfid”—I twist toward the farmer—“you were the size of an ox. You thought the gods liked you the most because of it, but you were lazy as a rock.”
“Hey!” he protests.
“Amlynn”—I find her in the crowd—“you were an architect, and a healer. You always have been. But you were also a brewer, and you’d come up with all sorts of weird potions in what I considered a very obvious attempt to impress Maglon.”
Amlynn’s face brightens to a ripe shade of red.
I turn again. “Maglon, that scar on your back isn’t from a fall, it’s from a horse. We used to have horses. Gethnen used to sing late into the nigh ... the mists. He could make up a song on a whim and never lose his meter. Frantess, you were so young, so new, so intrigued by the world around you. So gods-damned annoying, too.”
A few chuckles echo across the room.
“Thamton.” I scan the room and find him in the corner. Oddly enough, emotion chokes my words. “You were the oldest of us. The first. You helped us find ourselves, our purpose, especially once the war started and called away our makers.” I swallow, trying to regain my composure as I search the doorway. “And Salki, you have been and always will be my best friend and greatest supporter. Ruin took so much from you, and yet somehow you still find it in yourself to forgive, even when I’m narrow-minded and selfish. I’ll make it up to you, somehow.”
I don’t have time to single out each one of them, but I do make eye contact with every person who allows me.
“I’m going to the tower. I know more—remember more—than I did before. We built that tower; we can tear it apart again.” Fists clenched, I continue, “I would like to believe I’ve never done anything that would lead any of you astray. I want to believe I’ve earned your trust. This is a lot. I wouldn’t believe me, either. But help me for the next six hours, and I’ll be in your service for the rest of my life.”
“Can’t we just,” Balfid treads carefully, “turn off the machine?”
“No, we’d have to re-employ it, and the Serpent won’t return for twenty-three hours. It’ll be too late.” I take a deep breath. “Everyone needs to bring a lamp. I’ll answer any other questions on the way. Now move.”
The folk closest to the table scoot back to allow me to jump down. I start toward the door, then turn back and, standing on a chair, pull the clock from the tavern wall. With it under my arm, I push my way to the door. I will do this by myself, if I have to. I’ll fail, but I’ll try.
The sun has passed its zenith, warning me of my dwindling time. I need to run. I must hurry. Too many lives are at stake.
Salki, bless her, falls into step beside me. She says nothing. She doesn’t have to. But I do.
“I need you to run back to my house and get the machine in that nook.” I hand her the emilies looped through my belt. “Then I’ll tell you my plan.”
She nods and runs ahead.
We pass a house, then another. I’m about to break into a sprint when footsteps behind me signal the arrival of Maglon, followed by Balfid and Gethnen. Behind them, Arthen runs from the alehouse. A few more follow him, and then a few more.
I grin at the blossom of hope opening in my chest. I might not have won over all of Emgarden, but I will have enough.
I see it before we reach it. Hope it’s a trick of the moving sun. Memories aside, it’s been a long time since I saw the natural rise and fall of daylight. I need that empty spot at the base of the tower to be a shadow and nothing more.
Arthen slows first. “What ... is it?”
“A hole?” Maglon guesses.
Even before, I was never part of the war. I’m not a soldier. Even if I were, I couldn’t fight amidst gods. Mortality binds my life to physical form, to gravity. I never saw Ruin with my own eyes, before it took the shape of a wayward forest god and settled into this tower.
Heartwood, I’m coming.I take solace in the fact that Moseus still needs his battery alive. For the next five hours, anyway.
I approach the dark spot where the doors used to be, stopping ten paces back. It hurts my eyes to look at it—a two-dimensional rift in a three-dimensional world. It has no true color, just endlessness, darkness, eternity, a void, a gap in reality where nothing is nor can be. Just large enough to engulf the heavy double doors into the tower.
Ruin siphoned Heartwood’s strength to take the form it has now, but to create something like this should have drained Moseus immensely. But Moseus is smart. So long as nothing disturbs him or this tower, all he has to do is sit around meditating for five hours and he’ll have everything he wants.
Meditating.He never drew his strength from peace, but from lack. That sheltered room was an artificial night, but never enough to truly heal him.
“Can we climb it?” Salki asks, my little machine in her hands. She wrings the frame.
Arthen responds, “I’ve tried before.”
“Ladder?” Balfid suggests.
“Windows are too narrow,” Maglon says.
Crouching, I close my eyes and work my brain. I can do this. I helped build the damn thing. Does it have another weak spot, outside that apparent gap between floors two and three?
I would reprimand whoever constructed that floor, if I could recall who it was. Then again, they wouldn’t remember, either.
Frantess throws a rock into the void. It makes no landing, no sound. Amlynn grabs her elbow and pulls her away.
“Your tools won’t work, Arthen?” Salki asks.
He must have shaken his head. I hear no other answer.
“There’s no back entrance?” Maglon shuffles, like he’s going to walk around the tower to see. As if in all these years, we’d never bothered to check.
“Maybe if we throw in enough,” Thamton calls from the back, “that blankness will fill in?”
“And then what?” asks another. “Can we dig under it?”
“No,” Salki answers. She’d know. She read it in my book.
“I say we still build a ladder,” Balfid says.
“Or ... a hook? To open a door?” Frantess suggests.
“What door?”Frustration leaks into Arthen’s voice. “There is no door!”
Build,I think as sweat drips from my temple. The mist should be coming any time now. Except—
I shoot to my feet so quickly it makes me light-headed. “I’ve got it. But we need to go back to Emgarden now. Arthen, can you run?”
His eyes widen, but he nods.
“Good.” And I take off for the town.
Back at Arthen’s forge, half the water I chug spills over the front of my shirt, but I don’t care. I toss the bladder aside and finish my slapdash sketch. “Like this. I need you to make this as fast as you can. It needs to be thin and light.”
He stares at the crescent-shaped sketch. “It’ll be brittle—”
“I only need to use it once. Go! Balfid, help him.”
Frantess, Maglon, and Salki come huffing through the falling mist, carrying my rover between them.
“Right here!” I bark, pointing to the opposite end of the forge. They oblige. Amlynn comes with my tools. I pull her over to help. If she had her memories back, this would go so much swifter, but we have what we have, and only four and a half hours to get this done.
“Hex turnscrew.” I hold out my hand. Amlynn shuffles and hands it to me. Salki returns a moment later with a lantern. “Wrench. Thamton, see that gear over there? It’s a flywheel. Bring it to me. With the—yes, that. Just bring it all.”
With a heave I turn the rover over and pull apart its belly, wiping sweat from my eyes. Frantess hands me a bladder. I drink half of it, then dump the rest over my head, desperate to cool off. “Make sure the others are drinking,” I insist without looking up from my work.
“Sprocket,” I say, and Amlynn hands me one. A few minutes later, Frantess hands me a strip of dried meat and a bar of grain. I thank her and chew while I work. “Hold this.”
Amlynn puts her hands on the slide head. I tighten the prongs holding it, then use screws to make a crude shaft for steering, though I’ll have to depend on the distribution of weight for tighter turns.
“I need water,” I say to no one in particular. “A lot of water.”
Footsteps vanish from the forge as Arthen fills the room with blistering heat and the pealing of his hammer.
I connect a makeshift piston and seal up the rover’s belly. It won’t last long, but I only need a couple of hours. More than that and we’ll be doomed, anyway.
Amlynn helps me right the thing, and I make my final adjustments. Water arrives, and I fill the cylinder with as much as it can hold, then fasten another bladder atop it. I’ll cut it loose if it weighs down the machine too much. I wedge the clock and my tool bag between the two.
“Mag, help Amlynn carry this to the road. Salki—” I gesture to the back entrance of the forge, and Salki follows me out into the mist.
“It’s so dark,” she says.
It’s not even sunset yet, but the mist does seem darker. I worry the onset of night will scare my help away, but there’s nothing to be done. If this next step doesn’t work, we fail. If Salki can’t accept this final request, we fail.
I plant my hands on her shoulders and look her in the eyes. She stares in wonderment, seeing Casnia in mine.
“I need you to listen very carefully, because I can’t do this part,” I say in low tones. “I’m going to show you how it works, and then what to do with it, and we only have time to go over it once. Do you understand?”
She nods, and I begin.
Arthen finishes the crescent-shaped piece. I look over the hastily crafted part—it’s still warm—and hand it back to him. “Get on.”
His eyes bug at me. “What?”
“I can’t lift what I need by myself.” There’s barely enough room for the two of us. “If we slow down at the mountains, you’ll need to get off, but we’ll see what happens.”
Balfid gapes. “You’re going to ride that thing?”
I ignore him. “Arthen, get on.”
He holds out the crescent-shaped piece he made, the new chamber plate. “Don’t you need to attach this?”
“It’s not for the rover. Get on.” To the others, I say, “I want you to wait halfway down the road to the tower. With ladders. Do not approach the tower, do you understand me?”
“I’ll make sure,” Salki assures me.
I pass her a grateful look as Arthen gingerly straddles the water rover. I shove his shoulder to seat him, wind the motor, pull a cord, and jump on just as the vehicle pops and bolts forward. I nearly collide into a barrel as we take off down the road at an alarming but intensely satisfying rate. Hopefully my slapdash work holds up long enough.
Arthen yelps as we take a sharp turn out of Emgarden, grabbing my shoulder for balance, his other arm wrapped around the chamber plate. The ground between Tampere’s random rock protrusions is mostly flat, so the rover holds steady, kicking up a monumental dust cloud in our wake. Without the mist, the thing would be visible for kilometers. Regardless, I don’t care if Moseus is watching. There’s nothing he can do to stop me. Not until nightfall, and I intend to beat him to it.
My pulse counts down the seconds. Gods let this work. Let this work. I pray my memory of the machines proves correct. It’s been a long time, but with so much of my past having been safely stored away, maybe it didn’t have the opportunity to decay like everything else.
The earth inclines as we reach the mountains. I know the path, and it’s barely wide enough for the rover, but not entirely smooth, and the machine bucks over rocks and dips. Arthen yelps; I hold my breath. The incline builds, and the machine slows.
“Come on, come on,” I murmur, stroking its hot sides like I would a horse. “You can do it.”
“How much farther?” Arthen yells.
I look up the path as the rover climbs and shakes. “Not ... too far.” Come on!
“I’m going to jump off.”
I whip around and look at him, only to force my attention forward and lean hard to avoid a rock. “What?”
“You said it’ll go faster, right? I can run. It’s just up this path, right?” He swallows, and his nerves carry on his breath, tangling in my hair. “I can follow the tracks.”
I nod. “Yes, thank you. Quickly.”
The rover whines up a turn, and Arthen jumps. With roughly two-thirds of its load gone, the vehicle lurches forward with renewed life. I glance back to ensure that Arthen hasn’t injured himself before the rover zips behind a natural stone wall, ever climbing.
The path forks. A twist of my steering stick and a lean to the right takes me up to a ridge. The rover slows again, struggling in loose dirt. When the machine moves slower than I can run, I reach down and shut it off. Grab my tools and hike up the rest of the way, pausing for a few seconds atop the ridge, giving my lungs a chance to catch up with me.
It’s here, behind a short outcropping, settled in a depression in the rock. This is the fourth of six fog machines—the one I saw near Heartwood’s garden is six of six. It consists of a brassy set of pipes connected to a giant metal belly. There’s a pump system under all of it, pulling water from underground, pressurizing it, and spitting it out over our chunk of land. The mist thins here, standing beneath the pipes.
I slide down to it, quickly refamiliarizing myself. I shut off the timer first thing. The pump halts, though the air will take a while to clear.
Next, I gauge the pipes, select the one I’ll have to redirect the least, and close off the others. The farthest one’s stopper is stuck open, so I slam a hammer into it until the aperture pinches shut.
Three hours, nine minutes.I check the clock too often; my own circadian rhythm has been askew for ... I don’t even know how long. And I don’t have time to dwell on it.
Loosening the fixture holding my selected pipe in place, I twist the thing northward, then leave it there, waiting for the mist to clear. Heavy huffing comes over the ridge.
“Perfect.” I run up to meet Arthen.
Sweat marks the front of his shirt and underarms. He holds the chamber plate to his chest like a newborn, uttering no complaint when I relieve him of it.
“Follow me,” I direct, and he does, panting and wordless. I set the plate aside. After climbing the body of the machine, I loosen the upper half of the pipe. This piece alone measures two meters long. “Can you reach this from where you are?”
Arthen wearily stretches up his hands. To my relief, he can.
“Hold it,” I instruct. “I’m going to lift it up and out. Don’t dent it.”
On the count of three, we both heave, though the angle drops the bulk of the pipe’s weight onto Arthen. Exhausted as he is, he has the arms of a blacksmith, and with a stifled grunt he manages to pull the thing loose and set it ungracefully on the ground. Scaling the remaining portion of the pipe, I grab a ruler and peer in, sighing as I confirm my measurements.
“Hand me that plate.”
He does, then wipes sweat from his brow as I shift, trying to get as much light from the waning mist and setting sun as I can. “What is it?” he asks, hands on his hips, back hunched.
“Plate for an ignition chamber.” Tying a thin rope to it, I carefully lower it in, then slide down the exterior of the pipe to adjust the flange bolts and secure it.
“No ... what is this?” He gestures to the machine as a whole.
“This is where the mist comes from.”
“The ... what?” He steps back, taking in the enormity of the machine. “This?”
“I’ll explain later.”
He pauses. “What do you mean, ignition chamber?”
I work swiftly, my tools slick in my hands. “I’m going to blow a hole in the tower.”
He says nothing for several seconds. Only when I jump down and run to the back of the machine to harvest parts does he speak. “You’re making a cannon.”
I’m glad he remembers what cannons are. “The tanks are already pressurized.” I pull free parts that will obliterate the fog machine, but we won’t need the fog after this. “I’m going to direct all of it to one pipe and aim it at the tower.” But I chose Arthen to assist me for more than his big arms. “We did archery, once upon a time. You were rather good at it.”
He merely stares.
“Find me good stones that will fit in that.” I point to the top half of the pipe. “Go!”
Urgency restored, Arthen rushes past me. Gods bless him.
By the time he piles up his last stones, I’m more or less set up. Two hours, forty-two minutes.
“Give me your shirt.”
He doesn’t question me. With the way he’s sweating, he’s likely glad to be rid of it. He pulls it over his head and hands it to me. Honestly, the perspiration will probably help with the wadding. I shove it into the pipe, using a fallen branch from a wickwood tree to tamp it down as hard as I can.
“Okay, help me with this.” I wipe sweat from my eyes and loosen the base of the pipe a little more. With sore muscles, I grab the pipe and squint over the rise of the mountain. I can see the top of the tower from where I am. “Arthen, your aim is good. Tell me where to point it.”
He stands on his tiptoes, shading his eyes from the lowering sun. “It’s far. How hard a punch will this thing have?”
“Hard enough.” Or so I hope.
“We’ll need to aim high,” he suggests, grabbing the pipe and shifting it up, to the left, and up some more. “I think that will do it.”
“Run ahead and make sure.”
He does. Takes his time—and he should—scanning the tower and the pipe. I secure the thing where he indicates. Two hours, twenty-nine minutes ...
“Okay.” I take a breath, steadying myself. “Can you hold this down?” I point to the upper half of the pipe. He does as I ask, and with a hammer, I smash the smaller end of it, turning it every few whacks to get a point. Arthen then holds the pipe vertically, pointed end down, while I fill it with rocks, estimating the total weight in my head. Hesitate toward the end and take the last one out. It will have to do. I hammer the broader end shut as well, trying to keep the makeshift closure as flat as possible.
“Help me load it.” Together we heave and groan to get my enormous, elongated projectile into the bottom half of the pipe. My limbs feel like oversoaked grain by the time it’s in there, but I can’t slow down. I’ll rest when I’m dead.
Arthen huffs. “What now?”
“Get behind the machine and plug your ears.”
With renewed energy, he does so. I engage the fog machine’s engine and hunker back with him, knees digging into the red soil, fingers pressed into my ears. After a few seconds, the machine starts to rattle.
Please, please,I beseech the universe. Please let this work. Please let it miss Heartwood and skewer that bastard instead. Please help me save them all.
The earth rumbles. Through my plugged ears I hear the machine bubble and hiss and groan, and then a thunderous boom ruptures from the unblocked pipe, spitting an immense column of water vapor with it, blinding us with a thick vomit of mist. The body of the cannon has cracked.
Rushing to my feet, I feel along the hot metal to the pipe. It’s split open. The projectile launched. But did it—
A second, distant rip of thunder echoes through the mountains, followed by a handful of faint screams from the Emgardians.
I’m too scared to hope. I wave the mists away. The machine can no longer produce them. Will not produce them ever again without extensive repairs. I climb higher up the peak as the fog-propellant clears, trying to see over the mist. The mountain soon gets too steep to climb without equipment. Steadying myself, I peer into the valley. The fog settles there like a blanket, but a line of it has thinned, since this machine no longer contributes. I can just make out the top of the tower. It hasn’t fallen. My bones go limp within me.
I stand there, staring, exhaustion leaking into my limbs. Rack my brain for another option. Arthen calls up to me, but I barely register his words. Machine five of six ... I could try again, there. It’s close enough to do some damage. I just don’t know if we’ll have enough time.
Serpent save me, I have to try. I don’t have another crescent piece, but ... I have to try.
Stumbling back down to the ruined machine, I snatch my tool bag and bark at Arthen to get back on the rover. “We missed. We have to make it to another machine.” Please let the rover’s power last, I pray to no one, yet in the back of my mind, I see Cas’s face.
Arthen doesn’t question me. He helps me turn the rover and hops on as we take the mountain path down, moving much more quickly with the help of gravity. There should be a narrow trail heading north up ahead. The fifth fog machine doesn’t have the same elevation, but—
“Pell.”
“What?” I snap over the roar of the rover.
“Pell, stop.”
Gritting my teeth, I pull the brake. “What, Art?”
He points into the valley.
I squint. The mist from this peak has dissipated even more. I can see the west edge of Emgarden. Just make out the tower ... and the great pile of rubble at its base, to the left of Moseus’s door-eating void.
“We ...,” I start, shivers coursing up my spine. “We hit it.”
The projectile struck right where the tower meets the ground. There’s rubble, red rock and white alike. And where there’s rubble, there’s a hole.
“We hit it!” I cry, suddenly full of air and energy and need. “Hurry, we have to hurry!”
We race back to the rover. Gravity propels the tired rover down, down, down the mountain, toward the cluster of people waiting to strike.
One hour, fifty-eight minutes ...