Chapter 15 #3
And as though my own thoughts betrayed me, the will o’wisps danced and shivered on the far bank, and the veil of mist parted to reveal the slick iridescent carapace of a machina.
A beautiful machina, all chthonium and crystal, shimmering as it unfurled. I squinted, my brow furrowing as the light splintered between the crystals, wisps of light emerging from its core…
“Wroth.” My mouth was dry, my heart racing.
He turned to follow my gaze. “What?”
“Do you…see anything over there?” What was it doing, unfolding like that?
It moved with oiled grace, the mechanisms invisible, but the crystalline interior was a riot of fractal spirals, and its purpose began to make a certain sense…
because it was organized. It was a library of knowledge, a compendium, everything I wanted right there and glowing like a grail.
“Lots of mist, a few little lights. What are you seeing?” He glanced at me, leonine features distorted in a heavy frown.
With a monumental effort, I pulled my eyes away from the beautiful Artifice, because it wasn’t real.
I focused on Wroth, drinking in the icy gleam of his gaze, the broad, smooth planes of his inhuman face.
Remembering the wildness of his need to bury himself inside me, and the shivering heat rising in my core…
At the corner of my eye, the wisps danced furiously, but the Artifice was gone.
“Nothing,” I said with a faint smile. “Nothing worth looking at over there.”
We carried on in silence, and if Wroth made a little more effort to block my line of sight to the far bank, well…I couldn’t blame him.
But the knowledge that I’d rather look at him than gaze at my heart’s desire in mirage form was disturbing in its own right. I had no business putting him on a pedestal after one night, even if that one night was a mind-melting, body-wringing ecstasy.
I ruminated on that as our path sloped upward, taking us into a ruin of shattered walls and empty broken towers.
We picked our way between ancient, chiseled stones and heaps of rubble, and when my heart sped up as Wroth took my hand to help me over a fallen column, it was only because I was nervous about being left behind, not because his touch was soft and protective, or because he stroked his fingertips over my palm like a promise.
And I also knew perfectly damn well that I was lying to myself again, but what else was there to do?
We continued through the canyon of ruins, and I was pondering the thought of leaving the Rivers forever, and whether it was more terrible that I’d be leaving home or never seeing Wroth again, when the scent I feared caressed my nose.
My mouth started watering. It was lush and juicy, begging me to follow. I swallowed hard, suddenly all too aware of the pinched feeling in my stomach, the unpleasant necessity of living on bland, dried rations.
Wroth looked grim as he eyed the path ahead. “We have no choice but to pass through the orchards if we continue in this direction. We could turn around and look for another path, but it would take much longer to return.”
“Better to keep going this way, then.” Even with the extra provisions, I’d be on limited rations soon if the journey back took much longer, and when I ran out of energy to traverse the Below, that would be it for me.
I wouldn’t force Wroth to carry my deadweight over his shoulder once I really began weakening.
Wroth searched my face. “Don’t even look at the fruit if you can help it.”
Part of me wanted to ask if they were really all that awful, but this was the Below. It would be a silly, pointless waste of breath.
The canyon ended in a wide archway, fractured and fallen, and beyond I heard a gentle rustling in the dark.
“Are these trees like the ones outside the bastion?” I whispered, my ears pricked for any sound beyond the rustling. “Will they try to harm us?”
“Directly? No.” Wroth’s ears were swiveling as well, his entire body frozen. Even his tail was held low, quivering at the tip, but not lashing about as it usually did. “The greatest danger lies in our own willpower. What time is it?”
I checked my pocket watch. “Half past the third hour. The Light only knows whether it’s day or night.”
He closed his eyes, breathing evenly for a long minute. “It is day. The orchard keepers will be sleeping, but if it’s already the third hour…we must pass through as quickly as possible. We don’t want to be there when they wake up.”
“Mmm.” I rolled my shoulders, adjusting the weight of the pack, tilting my head back and forth until my neck popped. “I simply love ominous pronouncements before walking into sinister unknown places.”
“Jesamin, I swear by the ancestors…”
Something still thrilled in me when he said my name. He was no longer holding me at arm’s length with my family name, or my title. Somehow it felt almost more intimate than the night we’d shared, an admission of growing closeness.
“Would you prefer it if I cowered or cried?” I took a deep breath or two, fortifying myself. I had eaten a perfectly acceptable breakfast of thick gruel, with the wild luxury of rehydrated jerky in the gluey mass. I wasn’t hungry for anything else, at all, no matter how delicious it smelled.
When I looked up, I realized Wroth was staring at me.
“No,” he said softly. “I wouldn’t want you any other way.”
My lips twitched, wanting to form a smile, but another cool breeze drifted through the archway, and the scent it carried was so thick and heady I almost doubled over, my stomach cramping with hunger pains.
Wroth’s hand settled on my back, stroking me soothingly. His lips were pulled back in a grimace when I straightened. “If we could go any other way, I would, but…”
“I can do it,” I rasped out, leaning on him. “I won’t touch the damn fruit.”
A low rumble emanated from his throat. “I’m sorry, Jesamin. I’m sorry to make you do this.”
“You’re not making me do anything.” Cold sweat had beaded on my forehead, and I wiped it away with irritation. “If you must blame someone, blame Alvar. We wouldn’t be here if not for him. Now let’s get through this before all the willpower I’ve saved up goes to waste.”
Wroth squeezed my hand and nodded at me, approval in his pale eyes, and in a way I hated how much his respect warmed me. In due course, I would never see him again, nor bask in the warm glow of his admiration.
Together, we stepped through the archway.
We took several strides into the roiling shadows, and I slowed to a halt, peering into the gloom. Pale, eerie wisps of light drifted over the orchard like ghosts, winking in and out of existence.
Second by second, my eyes adjusted to the shifting lambent glow.
A cold chill rippled through me, and I turned to look at the archway, my feet already shifting to move, to sprint back through into the relative safety of the ruins as fast as I could.
But there was nothing behind us. The archway was filled in with a cracked stone wall, leaving us no way back. Illusion, or reality?
“Stand your ground, Jesamin.”
Wroth’s voice seemed to come from a distance, filtered through the pounding of my racing heart. I swallowed and heard the dry click in my throat as I turned back to the orchards of bloated trees, their trunks threatening to split at the seams.
Moist roots grew over the ground before us in a thick and endless carpet.
Fleshy and wriggling, in shades of visceral crimson and oxygen-starved violet.
The ones nearest the trees were nearly as thick around as my waist; smaller ones were climbing the walls in a dense lattice, giving the impression we were being crushed inwards by their sheer mass.
I looked down at my feet, trying not to hyperventilate, as several pale-tipped roots began to thrash towards my boots.
“As long as we keep moving, they can’t hurt us. And as long as we don’t eat the fruit, we won’t join them,” Wroth said grimly.
“Oh, I beg to differ.” My words came out in a faint rush, and small spots were glittering in front of my eyes. “I think these could hurt us very much if they were so inclined.”
Something squirmed against my ankle and I bit back a shriek of pure revulsion. The thought of those things touching me was like trying to imagine burying my hands in a bucket of maggots, or slowly stabbing a needle into my own eye; something that made my stomach twist violently.
And the thick, sweet scent of the fruit was so dense it was almost nauseating, a siren call juxtaposed against the horror of the stringy, pulsing flesh growing over everything in sight.
The fruits hung in clumps from the boughs, as red and glistening as fresh meat, taut and plump, and despite the visceral horror of their appearance, my mouth watered and hunger ate at my stomach.
Wroth took my hand and started forward, and when I stepped on a root and it exploded with a wet pulpy burst, writhing wildly, I did scream. I screamed so loud I thought my throat would tear. I screamed like I was trying to empty my mind into the air and evaporate it entirely.
Wroth clapped a hand over my mouth, muffling my screams.
I finally fell silent, throat aching, unshed tears burning my eyes.
“Did you get it all out?” he asked in a low growl.
I nodded, shaking.
“Good. This will be the worst hour of your life, but when it’s over, you never have to come back. You can make it through this, love. Do you trust me?”
I nodded again, sniffing hard.
“Then put your mind away for now. Think of other things, and let your body move through this on its own. I will lead the way, and your mind can come back to me when it’s over.”
I nodded for a third time, blinking and setting a cascade of tears down my cheeks, and took a deep, sickening breath.
I thought of the Thing as Wroth took my hand and walked us forward.
The intricate gears and mechanisms—I was still working on the delicate toothing of the iron gears, though I was considering adding a coil of electrum.
Why, I wasn’t quite sure yet, only that my intuition told me that pure gold and iron alone weren’t quite right for the Artifice’s final purpose—
Something damp slapped against my calf, groping upwards, and I shuddered even as Wroth physically picked me up around the waist and pushed me forward, keeping me a step ahead. There was another horrid wet pop as he crushed the thing reaching for me.
With a shudder, I forced my mind back onto the electrum. It just wasn’t right. There was something about the Thing, a twist in the blueprint I hadn’t quite nailed down, and I still couldn’t shake the idea that I wasn’t seeing it clearly yet.
But the electrum felt friendlier in conjunction with the faceted milky quartz set in the heart of the Thing, which would store a spark of fulmen that would regenerate as the mainspring wound…but there the idea began to peter out again. Electrum alone was not the answer.
But if I used something else, a material designed to draw in the occult energy, and amplify it with the fulmen spark…now there was a plan.
In my mind, the Thing’s purpose began to take shape a little more clearly, and I managed to do no more than gag as my boots squished through wet, writhing warmth, following Wroth like an automaton.
He gripped my hand like a lifeline the entire way through, and fresh tears sprung into my eyes as pale light gleamed through the swollen trunks ahead of us, the way out. I never thought I would look upon the lights of Liuridar and feel relief to see them again.
We climbed pale stone steps towards the light, my legs shaking from holding myself back from an outright sprint as we left the carpet of roots, leaving red footprints on the steps behind us.
But I made the mistake of looking back, and the faint light illuminated those engorged trees, and I realized why they were so distended and misshapen.
The light cast the impressions under the soft bark into full relief. No longer suggestions or shadows, but outlines: the curve of a shoulder here, the knob of a knee there. A face with empty sockets and a gaping mouth, the gentle ridges of a ribcage.
All of them crammed together, limbs interwoven, flesh consumed and converted to bark and leaf, blood pouring through the network of roots. Even the damp, gleaming skins of the fruit took on a horrifying new aspect.
I stared at them, at the terrible orchard we’d passed through, the countless trees all fed with bodies.
“Wroth,” I whispered, something awful and cold growing inside me.
He closed his eyes, his hand clamped tightly on my shoulder.
“It’s them, isn’t it? It’s…everyone in Lonmire.” I stared at the orchard, the two hundred people who had been herded underground, fed to trees, and pulped into nutrients for that cursed fruit. Wroth nodded slowly, murder in his eyes.
My voice faded to a thready breath. “They’re all here.”