Chapter 23
“Keita? Britta?” I call out. There’s no answer.
It’s like my friends aren’t here, and yet I feel them nearby, sense them somewhere in the darkness that crowds closer and closer.
My extremities are freezing cold now, as if all the blood has gone out of them. But something warm surrounds me, a moist, fleshy softness. It’s accompanied by a strange scent, a calming, almost intoxicating aroma that reminds me of the flowers that once bloomed in the fields just above Irfut. A fluorescent blue-green mist wafts past my gaze. My eyelids grow heavier and heavier. It’s as if that scent—that mist—is curling around me, lulling me to sleep.
I try to struggle, try to keep my eyes open, but the scent, it’s too powerful.
Deka!Ixa’s voice jolts through my brain the same moment his head butts against mine. Deka wake! he growls.
I’m trying,I reply groggily, struggling up.
But that softness just tightens further, keeping me in place. Squeezing my armor into me. If I were wearing anything other than ebiki armor, it would have no doubt broken under the pressure by now. I recognize this dimly, even though I’m still half asleep.
What is that thing?I ask sleepily. What’s around me?
Monster,Ixa growls, snapping at something I can’t see. Monster trying to eat you!
The horror of what he’s saying shatters through my daze. I gasp up, push against the softness. As if in response to my efforts, the lights brighten and I finally see my captor.
A vale wraith.
I know immediately what it is—because how else to explain this coiling, writhing monstrosity of a creature? Its head is a colossal, shapeless mass that seems to melt into the slimy black tentacles slithering around me. Black grains powder them—black sand, which exudes the same sort of wrongness I felt back in Irfut and in the first vale. It covers the creature so completely, moments pass before I finally spot my friends, also wrapped in those writhing tentacles, their bodies limp as that scent wafts around them in a cloud of fluorescent blue-green, no doubt drugging them the same way it did me.
“Britta?” I shout, heart pounding with fear. “KEITA? BELCALIS? LI?”
None of them answer. They’re all fast asleep as the wraith slowly, inexorably pulls them closer to its gargantuan head, its tiny blue eye slits narrowing as its gaping, rounded maw of a mouth opens to display row upon row of jagged teeth.
For a creature with no meaningful delineation between its head and the rest of its body, it certainly has a lot of mouth. Mouth enough to swallow each one of my friends whole, as it clearly intends to do.
“brITTA! KEITA! LI! WAKE UP!” I shout, but none of them so much as moves a muscle. They’re too deeply drugged, too caught in the dreams that the creature is weaving using that hypnotic scent.
Panicked now, I try to wrench myself from the creature’s grasp, but it’s like fighting against water. The creature’s skin is too soft. All my strikes just glide off it—as do Ixa’s bites. Even when he grows to a larger size to fight, his mouth can’t quite find purchase. The wraith easily slaps him away when he lunges in for another bite, sending him barreling into a far-off dune.
“IXA!” I shout, horrified, as he disappears into the darkness.
I fumble for my atikas, only barely managing to slide one out of its sheath.
As I do so, Okot appears, wafting across the creature’s tentacles toward me.
“You!” I snarl. “Was this your plan all along?”
The god shakes his head in what I assume is an approximation of sadness. “It could have been different,” he says mournfully. “We could have been allies, but you left me no choice, Deka. My brothers intend to relocate your kelai a few days from now.
“While you and yours remain here, I will oversee the relocation, and then I will steal your kelai out from under their noses.”
“So what did you need me for?” I snarl.
Okot shrugs. “I wanted to be your ally. To create a new world with you. It is lonely, you see, to be a god without a pantheon.” He manages to seem almost remorseful as he continues: “It truly is a pity we could not be friends. I can see why my counterpart favored you.”
“And I can see why she hated you!” I spit back.
Okot only shrugs, a rippling of his entire body. “If I possessed the capacity for human emotions, I would undoubtedly be hurt. Let us stop now. I will give you one last small mercy.” He wafts closer, his eyes gleaming white as they peer into mine.
He’s trying to hypnotize me, trying to take control of my mind. But I won’t let him. Since the vale wraith is holding me in place, I can’t look away. So I do the only thing I can—I grasp my atika by the blade, letting its sharpness bite into my palm. Letting the pain center me in the present. Keep me from being ensorcelled by the power in Okot’s eyes.
Gold begins sliding down the hilt, my blood, dripping from the cut I’ve made.
Okot, thankfully, does not notice. “Sleep now, Deka,” the god intones. “And never again wake.”
I immediately flicker my eyes closed, pretending to sleep, but to my surprise, Okot doesn’t disappear that very moment. Instead, he says one last thing, a sentiment so low, I almost don’t hear it. An unexpected yearning, coming from a god like him.
“I truly wish we could have been allies,” he whispers. “Together, we three could have changed the world.”
With that, he’s gone.
And I’m left in the darkness, the vale wraith’s tentacles writhing around me. When I flick my eyes open again, it’s to a sight from my deepest nightmares. The vale wraith has Li almost to that colossal mouth now. One more slither of a tentacle, and my friend will be consumed.
“LI!” I shout, fully unsheathing my atika.
I twist in the wraith’s grasp with a strength and swiftness I did not know I possessed, slicing off the tentacle around me with one smooth movement. Then I’m running across that moist, soft body toward Li, who’s in a deep sleep, his face peaceful despite the enraged screams the vale wraith is now making.
Even wounded as it is, the creature keeps trying to feed. Its tentacle pulls Li higher and higher, that mouth gaping wider, the teeth gleaming sharper.
“LI!” I shout. “LI! WAKE UP!”
But there’s still no answer, not even when Ixa lunges out of the darkness to throw himself against Li’s unconscious body. That blue-green scent cloud is wrapping ever tighter around Li, dousing him in a veritable mist of pheromones. He’s lost to the world now.
Unless…
I sink into the combat state, suddenly grateful my friends aren’t wearing the infernal armor that used to be their daily uniform. Each one contained a small portion of my blood, which kept me from using my abilities on them.
Now, however, they’re completely unprotected.
“Li,” I say, putting every bit of power and compulsion I can behind my voice. “WAKE UP!”
My friend immediately gasps upright, his eyes disoriented. “Wha? Huh?” he asks, glancing around. Then he sees the vale wraith. “What in the name of—”
“EXTRICATE YOURSELF!” I shout, another command.
Li obeys my command with alacrity, immediately twisting to wrest himself from the vale wraith’s grasp. When the wraith lashes more tentacles at him, he slices through them automatically, his body fueled by pure instinct now.
But even that isn’t enough. Yet more tentacles hurtle Li’s way.
“IXA!” I shout, but I shouldn’t have even bothered. My blue-scaled companion is already darting across the writhing appendages, nimbly avoiding their ever more desperate movements, as he makes his way toward Li, who’s stabbing at yet another tentacle with his dagger. He twists it so that it embeds deeply in the slimy mass of muscle and skin.
The vale wraith screams again, a shatteringly high-pitched sound, but it’s nothing compared to a deathshriek’s cries, so I ignore it as I turn to my other friends, breathing to connect to the Greater Divinity’s power once more.
“WAKE UP, EVERYONE!” I shout, putting as much compulsion as I can behind my voice. “FIGHT AGAINST THE WRAITH!”
The effect of the command is immediate. My friends gasp awake.
“Wha is this, Deka?” Britta cries, horrified as she glances around herself.
“Don’t ask questions—stab!” Belcalis snaps, already doing as she advised.
Britta nods, ripping apart the vale wraith’s tentacles with her bare hands. She doesn’t even bother with her atikas. Beside her, Keita begins singeing tentacles with his fire. More shrieks echo into the darkness—terrified ones. It seems vale wraiths are frightened of fire.
The realization widens the smirk slicing across my face.
That is, until newer, fainter shrieks reply from the distance.
This wraith, it seems, is not alone. There are others.
“HURRY!” I shout to my friends, slicing off an incoming tentacle. I understand the method now—stab, then twist, to gain a hold despite the slickness.
Li stops hacking and sawing long enough to turn to me with horrified eyes. “There can’t be more of those things out there.”
Another shriek answers his question.
“We need to leave!” Belcalis shouts. “Can you open a door from here?”
“To where?” I ask, overwhelmed.
This vale connects to Irfut, but there’s no point going back there. Okot destroyed every trace of Mother that remained. And the Warthu Bera is out of the question; I doubt that any part of our former training ground even remains standing after the battle that took place there three months ago.
There’s nowhere I can think of that’s safe.
“White Hands!” Belcalis replies. “Take us to White Hands!”
“But I don’t know where she is—” I stop as I remember the place I last saw her in. That grove.
Despite what it feels like, we’ve been gone only a few hours since we saw her. She’s probably still near that grove somewhere, and if we can make our way to her, we can regroup, perhaps even get to Mother’s body before Okot does, even though I have no idea how.
But that’s not my concern right now. Survival is.
I build the image of the grove in my mind, remembering the towering ganib trees, their canopies like domes, leathery vines dripping down from their purple branches. As I sink deeper and deeper into the combat state, I breathe in the Greater Divinity, letting the power rise inside me until I feel it, the answering tug deep in my body. The tug Myter taught me to watch for when I must travel to a place I’ve never been.
Once I have it, I pinch the air in front of me. Immediately, I see it—the tiny, shimmering line in the darkness. The line that is the sunlight coming in from the other side. It must still be day where the grove is. I pull, forcing the door wider, and sunlight floods in. The wraith screeches, its tentacles scuttling backward as the light burns through them, obliterating their protective layer of slime. So fire isn’t the only thing they fear.
“Open the door wider, Deka!” Belcalis calls out, slicing through the tentacle that is still trying to hold on to her. “Massacre the beast!”
“With pleasure!” I call back, steadfastly prying the door wider until—
“Deka? Deka, is that you?”
There’s so much sunlight flooding into the vale now, it blinds me. I can’t see what’s beyond the door. Even then, I recognize that voice, that accompanying blast of wind that is the divine gift of the twins Adwapa and Asha. “Adwapa?” I shout, relief flooding over me. “Is that you?”
“Help us!” Britta calls out. “There’s wraiths in here!”
She doesn’t have to ask twice. A familiar dark figure darts through the door, wind seeming to lift her footsteps: Adwapa in all her bald glory, looking even stronger than the last time I saw her. By her side is Asha, the luminous ferns interwoven in her black braids glowing like a bright green beacon in the darkness. She sends a spear hurtling straight into one of the vale wraith’s eyes, the wind pushing it along with deadly accuracy.
The screech the creature releases is deafening. All its tentacles shoot up at once, writhing horrifically as it tries to pull the projectile out of its eye. Unfortunately, the wind has driven it so deep, it’s likely a fatal blow. My friends stumble to the sand, released at the same time from the tentacles the wraith has once more managed to wrap around them.
“Everyone, through the door!” I shout.
I don’t have to speak twice. A mad stampede to the door ensues, Britta leading the way, Keita at the back.
I take one last look at the vale wraith, its eyes bleeding an angry fluorescent blue, its tentacles flailing all around it. Less than an hour ago, it was a monarch in the darkness, a squat toad sucking the life out of its unwitting victims so it could feed their essence to the Idugu. Now it is a roaring, shrieking mass of pain. As its makers will be when I’m done with them.
Okot will suffer for what he tried to do. I will ensure it.
“I hope you die a slow and painful death,” I say to the monster shrieking in the darkness. Then I step out of the shadows into the light.
The grove looks exactly as it did when I first saw it via White Hands’s gauntlets: groups of ancient ganib trees intertwined with each other, each one a miniature forest in its own right. Velvety yellow flowers and dark red fungi sprout from the colossal purple trunks; bright-winged birds flit through the glossy green leaves and the masses of leathery vines that connect each tree to the next, making the entire grove seem like a single gigantic, interconnected plant. Except it’s so much more than that. I glance around, mouth agape with awe as I realize that what I thought was just a grove of trees is actually the edge of some sort of monument—a sprawling, expansive network of stone steps that lead down to what appears to be a deep forest spring.
“Deka!” a familiar voice calls.
I turn, and there, running toward me, is Katya, the towering deathshriek who was my bloodsister back at the Warthu Bera before being reborn into this form. Her much shorter betrothed, Rian, struggles to keep up with her, his human legs no match for Katya’s gigantic ones.
“Deka!” Katya shouts again, overjoyed. Then she skids to a stop a few steps in front of me, her green eyes suddenly unsure. The last time we saw each other, I was still very much injured, and easy to anger as a result.
I hold out my arms, tears dripping down my cheeks. “It’s all right, you can embrace me.”
“Truly? White Hands said you were healed but—”
“Come here, you!”
Katya squeals with delight as I clasp my arms around her, squeezing her tight. Well, squeezing her legs, that is.
Like most deathshrieks, Katya is inhumanly gaunt and tall, her body stretching nearly half the length of a ganib tree, her claw-tipped fingers nearly reaching past her knees. I have to crane my neck to look up at her.
“I’m fine now,” I continue swiftly. “I learned how to keep myself from being injured.”
“Oh, Deka!” Katya flings me up, the quill-like red spikes down her back rustling as she swings me round and round. “You’re all right, you’re all right!”
“I won’t remain that way if you don’t put me down soon,” I grunt as I feel the bile rise inside me. It’s one thing to be embraced but quite another to be spun about like a drunken whirligig.
“Oh, my apologies!” Katya swiftly releases me, then turns to the others in the grove, who have been walking cautiously closer. “It’s all right, everyone, it’s Deka! It’s really her!”
That’s all it takes to open the floodgates. Masses of people suddenly come rushing from beyond the ganibs, all of them calling out greetings to me and my other friends. There, hurrying over, is Mehrut, the plump, butter-brown alaki who is Adwapa’s sweetheart. Acalan and Kweku, Belcalis’s and Adwapa’s uruni, follow Mehrut, burly, jokey Kweku already grinning while studious, quiet Acalan seems almost nervous in his excitement to see us. Behind them are more groups of alaki and jatu, and even deathshrieks, many of whom I’ve never seen before. It seems White Hands truly has been successful in her attempts to acquire more allies to resist the gods.
Then a pair of familiar white forms appear, relief in their eyes as they canter unhurriedly toward me. “Quiet One,” the equus twins, Braima and Masaima, say together as one, “it’s truly you.”
“Couldn’t be certain you weren’t those tricky goddesses,” Masaima continues, his pure white mane glistening in the late afternoon sun. The equus looks almost human from the waist up, except for his inhumanly large eyes and flattened nose that resembles a muzzle; the rest of him is horse, except for the iron-tipped, raptorlike talons that stand in for hooves. His coat is a velvety white that covers nearly his entire body.
“Their worshippers are always lurking about,” adds Braima, who looks identical to his brother except for the black stripe in his mane, which travels all the way down his back to his carefully manicured tail.
“Precisely, which is why one can never be too cautious.” This comment comes from White Hands, who is now striding forward, footsteps as unhurried yet businesslike as ever. “And the Deka I knew didn’t know how to open doors, especially not ones to places she’d never been.”
“White Hands!” I hurry over and embrace my former mentor. To my relief, she embraces me back, her arms as strong and capable as ever. “The Deka you knew is much changed from when you last saw her. She’s a bit more accomplished now. Much less wounded, certainly.”
White Hands glances down at the ebiki armor covering my body. “So, it yet holds—the ebiki armor?”
I nod. “As does the power inside it.”
And I’m not speaking of the ebiki’s power either.
It’s the Greater Divinity’s power that’s kept me going so far, the one thing that’s kept the emptiness inside from growing. Even though I only call upon the amount sufficient to power my abilities, it’s enough that I never need to draw from my own well. As long as I continue in this manner, the ebiki armor should hold, as should the time I have left.
I’ll still die if I don’t connect to my kelai, but it’ll be at least months yet, instead of the mere weeks I had when I first crossed into Maiwuri.
“It seems you’ve had a time of it, Deka,” White Hands says, looking me up and down.
“Like you cannot even imagine,” I say with a sigh.
I nod meaningfully toward the edge of the monument, where the sound of rushing water obscures all else.
I head in its direction, White Hands immediately following behind, all business once more. Braima and Masaima follow us as well, their massive white forms keeping everyone else at bay.
Once we’re out of hearing distance from the rest of the group, I turn to White Hands. “How has it been going, your quest for allies?”
“Not very well.” She sighs. “The aviax remain as intractable as ever.”
And yet she remains here. But I understand why.
Aviax are the only humanlike race with the ability to fly—an ability indispensable in long-distance combat, not to mention scouting, bolstering supply chains, and any number of other integral tasks. And now that the gods have opened more vales, we need them more than ever, since we have to move up the timeline of the offensive White Hands has been planning. If we’re to stop the gods from feeding, we need to cut them off from their priests and followers once and for all. And we need to do so in a matter of weeks—perhaps even days now.
But it seems the aviax are as unapproachable as their reputations suggest.
That they’re even allowing so many strangers near Ilarong, their capital city, speaks to the persuasiveness of White Hands.
I refocus my attention on her as she sighs again. “Now that you’re here, however, perhaps I can build some momentum. They do love anything shiny and new, and you are the Angoro, a god trapped by flesh. You’ll be irresistible to them.” When I reluctantly nod, unsure how I feel about that statement, she continues: “And you—I assume you were not able to locate your kelai?”
I shake my head. “We went back to Irfut as Mother encouraged, but Okot was there. He locked me and the others in the shadow vale you just saw.”
White Hands grinds her jaw. “So we’re back to where we started.”
“Not quite.” When she glances at me, curious, I inform her of everything Okot revealed about my kelai.
“Fascinating…” White Hands stares down at me. “So why haven’t they moved it yet?”
“I think it must be somewhere dangerous, somewhere where the Gilded Ones would notice any unusual movements. The Idugu must have placed it there at least some time ago, not giving any thought to its security, since they controlled Otera.”
“But then you woke the Gilded Ones,” White Hands says, putting two and two together.
“And everything changed,” I say, nodding. “The goddesses would notice any strange movements in their territory—especially from priests or the Idugu—and they would act.”
“Which means your kelai must be somewhere close to Abeya.”
“More than that,” I say, finally voicing the suspicion I’ve had since talking with Okot. “If the Idugu are reluctant to move it now, when the Gilded Ones are so weakened, that means it must be somewhere directly in the goddesses’ territory, either near or in the Bloom.” That massive expanse of greenery is the truest measure of the Gilded Ones’ power, and every inch of territory it covers is linked directly to them.
“It’s feasible.” White Hands nods, tapping her bottom lip. “Only gods would be arrogant enough to forget something of such importance near their enemy’s territory.”
“But even if that’s true,” I say, slumping, “it won’t be there for long. Okot said they would move it a few days from now.”
“Which means we must move swiftly.” White Hands nods decisively. “I’ll have my spies in the region monitor any strange movements—”
I gape. “You already have spies in the region?” White Hands was with us when we fled Abeya just over three months ago—how has she already reestablished her network?
“I have spies everywhere,” White Hands returns primly. “And the moment they notice anything strange, they’ll inform me.”
Familiar panic swells inside me. “But I should be out there, searching.”
“To what end? Given everything you’ve told me, I doubt you’d find the Idugu’s followers before my spies do. Besides, they’ll be on the lookout for you. No, it’s best you remain here and help me finalize battle plans as well as woo the aviax to our side. And there’s more—something else I need from you.”
I glance at her. “What?”
White Hands glances around, as if just now noticing all the people waiting to greet me. “We’ll discuss it later,” she says airily. “This is a reunion, after all. But, Deka?” She leans closer to me. “How much time?”
When she glances meaningfully down at my hands, I sigh, understanding what she’s asking. How much time before the emptiness caused by my depleting kelai consumes me and I scatter like dust on the wind? “Much more than I hoped for,” I reply truthfully. “I think I’ve bought myself a little extra time—a few more months if I keep the armor on and use the Greater Divinity to power my abilities. But all that won’t matter, given the state of Otera.”
“The end of the world?” White Hands asks.
“The end of the world.” I nod.
“Plenty of time to discuss that after,” she says, tugging me forward.
I frown up at her. “You’re not frightened of the world ending?”
“I’m the oldest living alaki in history.” White Hands shrugs. “If you think this is the first apocalypse I’ve encountered, you’re sorely mistaken. Come along, Deka, we have places to be.”