Chapter 23
ARES
Rhiannon and I rode the elevator down together. She didn’t seem inclined to chat, and neither was I. When we reached the lobby, she walked beside me, matching my strides exactly. As I hailed a cab, she waited next to me.
“I’m going downtown,” she murmured.
I nodded. “As am I.”
“I am going to the Library of Amarante,” she said.
That piqued my interest. The Library of Amarante was a private institution. “Do you have a card?”
She smiled. “I do. And I am able to bring one guest per visit. Would you like to come with me?”
My heart slowed. Rhiannon’s question was so mundane, nearly friendly.
But the woman did nothing by chance, nothing without meaning.
I’d known her peripherally for years, and that was enough to make such an assumption, but one week in an apartment together and I knew now, without a doubt, that she was the other side to Ember’s coin.
Both were vastly intelligent, strategic even.
While Ember operated on instinct, and a good heap of chaos, Rhiannon Bronte was sheer calculation.
They made a good team. I did have a contact or two I wanted to speak to, but I could send Av later.
She’d get more out of them than I would, anyway.
I was mostly getting out of the house to escape the tension between Ember and myself.
“I’d love to come along.” I had the sneaking suspicion I’d learn more with Rhiannon than going my own way.
The cab pulled up, Rhiannon gave the address for the library, and we rode across town in perfect silence.
Far from being uncomfortable, the two of us seemed relieved to be out of the crowded flat at the Carlyle.
She stared out the window, watching rain drip down the window in the gray-blue light of the morning.
I didn’t need to watch the world go by, so I caught up on email.
The Library of Amarante was silent, smelling of books and cold stone.
Everything in this place was clean, bright marble and highly polished crystal chandeliers.
Giant statues of the Saints towered over us in the lobby.
Rhiannon signed in, then motioned silently for me to follow her up an enormous spiral staircase.
We climbed six stories. On the sixth floor, Rhiannon motioned for me to follow her into a honeycomb of passages, making a sharp left turn down a narrow hallway.
The walls here were close, but the brightly painted white wood panels and embedded shell-shaped sconces made things feel less claustrophobic.
Each door had a brass figurine affixed to the front, like a door knocker.
Rhiannon stopped in front of a door with a swan. But not the usual placid creature depicted in so much art, its curved neck making an elegant S. This swan faced us, beak open in a scream, wings raised in aggression. It was, to be frank, a bit disturbing, but it fit Rhiannon Bronte perfectly.
She gestured to the door. “After you.” I tried the crystal knob, and though it turned, I could not open it. I frowned, but Rhiannon smiled. “Watch.”
She pressed her hand to the door, just under the angry swan. The door knob turned, and the door swung on silent hinges. This area of the library was so quiet my ears rang with the rush of blood in my veins. Far from being calm, this place vibrated with alien energy.
“Would it have opened for me?” I asked as I followed Rhiannon into what appeared to be an empty room, but for a marble plinth at its center, risen out of the floor itself.
The entire room appeared to be constructed from the same piece of stone, almost as if it had been hollowed out from an enormous rock.
She shook her head. “No, none but myself may enter here.” Then she smiled. “My guests, of course, are also welcome. Please place your hand on the plinth.”
My heart beat faster at her request. Was this some sort of trick? I suddenly realized how very alone I was with an immortal capable of ending my life in mere seconds. I wouldn’t even have time to scream at Rhiannon Bronte’s hands.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Ares Necroline,” Rhiannon said. “I will show the truth of who you are. Who we all are. It is a gift. A sacred gift—a burden, really—but a gift all the same.”
“All right,” I agreed, placing my hand on the plinth.
“If you tell anyone what you saw here, you will forget it instantly. The same will happen should the person you tell attempt to speak of what they learned.”
My eyebrows raised, as I thought through the logic. “Would that happen to you if you tried to tell someone?”
She nodded. “Yes, the only way to know this is to be shown. The only way to retain the knowledge is to keep it secret.”
That sounded like magic to me. The Authority had taken so many pains to paint parapsychism as preternatural prowess.
As an abomination of humanity, rather than magic.
Magic, according to the Authority, did not exist. But what Rhiannon spoke of was a spell.
Something that not even a Thaumas could manage.
My curiosity was far, far too piqued. “All right,” I said. “I want to know.”
She stood directly across from me, placing her hand on the plinth, next to mine, but facing the opposite direction. “Close your eyes.”
I did as she asked, and though nothing in the room moved or changed, as far as I could tell, now there was noise: The sound of crashing waves and seabirds crying far above.
“You can open them now,” Rhiannon said.
When I did, I found myself somewhere else entirely, high above the raging sea, at the edge of a rocky cliff. I gasped, stepping backwards, right into Rhiannon. “Careful,” she cautioned. “This is real. You can be hurt here, just as in the open world.”
“The open world?” I stammered, still staring out at the sea. “Where am I now?”
“Oh, still on Kraitos, you haven’t traveled so far as that.” Rhiannon smiled as she slipped out of her high heels. “And though you can be hurt here, we are not exactly here.”
She turned away from the cliff, beckoning me to follow her as she picked her way through lush, tall grass that undulated in the wind.
We stood at the bottom of an enormous forested hillside.
Everywhere I turned, there were spirits.
But they were like none in Orphium. They fit none of the usual classifications.
These spirits were at rest, in harmony with the land, blinking in and out, obviously curious about me, but barely taking note of Rhiannon.
And what was more, here I felt that same sensation as in the library. The vibration of some alien power. Only here it felt less strange. In fact, it spun out in concert with the whisper of the wind through the trees. Was this what magic felt like?
My heart felt as though it might swell out of my chest when a flight of herons swept across the field, upward towards some unknown location. Tears slid down my cheeks, though I could not fathom why—why this place felt like home.
Rhiannon turned to me, a wistful smile on her ethereal face. “I am sorry, Ares. That feeling you have now? You will carry it with you all your life. Homesickness for a place you may never come to, a world we are not meant for.”
“Where are we?” I asked, desperate to know why I felt this way.
“Otrera,” Rhiannon said, as though I might glean some essential knowledge from the name.
It was familiar. There was lore about this, wasn’t there? “Otrera was the first of the Maere?”
Rhiannon nodded. “Yes. She was Amarante and Tanith’s child.”
I sensed she might say something else, that she had something to add about Otrera, but she stayed silent, so I asked the first of many questions that came up. “The Saints?”
“The gods,” Rhiannon replied, sinking down into the grass, wrapping her arms around her legs as an enormous reptile crept shyly out of the trees far above us.
It had scales, as well as a silky green ruff around its neck.
It took a few delicate bites of a treetop, then paused to look at us.
Rhiannon raised her hand to it, bowing her head as she slapped my thigh.
I mimicked her motions, and when I raised my head again, the creature was gone. “What is this place?”
Rhiannon sighed, though it was something between a deep breath and a powerful exhalation. “This is where all parapsych power originates from. It is the heart of our planet, the one place the Corps and the Authority cannot touch.”
“What about the Consulate?” I asked, though I thought I already knew the answer.
“Nor them,” Rhiannon said, her wistful expression turning sour. “The Consulate has done their best, but they are a corrupt organization. You know this. And they can never know this place exists.”
“What does it all mean?” I asked. “I mean, why am I here?”
Rhiannon shrugged. “You’ve been trying to sort out your place in things all your life, right?”
I nodded. She’d cut to the quick of me so easily.
“This is it,” she murmured, gesturing around her. “This is our place. This is our origin.”
“But what does it mean?” I asked again.
Rhiannon sighed. “It would be easier to show you. Are you up for a walk?”
We walked up the hillside, along a stone path, passing the place where the giant reptile had appeared. Everywhere there was birdsong and the sound of the sea. As wind flowed through the trees, a symphony of natural noise filled my ears. There were no cars here, no factories.
The smell of green things and fresh water filled my nose. Tears pricked endlessly in my eyes, emotion filling me to the brim with a bittersweet longing that had, perhaps, lived inside me all my long life. The trees here were so large it would be impossible to wrap my arms around them.
In all my life, I had never seen such a place.
When we crested the hilltop, we found a clearing that looked out onto a small range of mountains.
Dotting the terraced hills and valleys were the types of structures I had been taught to believe were built by humans in the ancient world.
But now I saw that those humans had only been copying this place, whatever this was.