Chapter 34
‘Come with me.’
Lucian stood up wearily. The act of explaining everything to Dalesh had drained his last reserves of energy and sleep weighed on his brow like a heavy hand. Yet he had to keep moving.
Dalesh led him from the altar—away from the dead priest—and along a corridor into a room dominated by a large iron door set into the wall.
There was magical writing over every inch.
Lucian tried to read some of it but his eyes would not keep the letters in the right order.
Dalesh, meanwhile, had unlocked the door with a key that glowed a faint red, and when it swung back he saw rows and rows of shelves that were mostly empty, save for three small glass globes containing a faint luminescence.
With his memories once more intact, he knew that mages of the Bloody Claw collected souls in magical glass globes so that when they were in sudden need of a tithe to work some magic or other, they would have something appropriate to hand.
They would be the souls of animals mainly, but the most valuable would contain the spirits of mortal humans.
His eyes skittered across the globes, taking in the pale lilac fire they contained.
Was that how he had looked when Mother Maura cast him from his body?
‘Right.’ Dalesh plucked one of the globes from the shelves and held it up to the light, frowning slightly.
‘This place is not as well stocked as I’d like, but this should be enough to power the portal.
Mother Maura’s sanctum is in the middle of the shattered mountain, and that place is riddled with old magic that’ll play havoc with my spells.
I can get us to the foothills but no closer—I wouldn’t want to risk emerging from the portal with our guts on the outside. ’
‘Why don’t we just tell him?’ said Lucian. The words seemed to take forever to leave his mouth. He blinked owlishly. ‘Tell the Bloody Claw what she’s up to so he can tear her to pieces.’
Dalesh gave him an impatient look as she pressed the globe into his hands.
‘Load the soul globes into your pack. Do you remember so little of our lord, Lucian? He has no patience for fighting between magpies. Imagine how it will look to him if we claim that Maura intends to kill him? It sounds ludicrous enough that he may just kill us for wasting his time. I’ll be back in a moment.
I need to have your mess attended to and fetch some things. ’
And with that she was gone. Lucian stood looking at the soul globe in his hands. There was a wink of orange light and then Tisk was leaning against the giant iron door, twirling his fox-headed cane in one hand.
‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘that you promised to steal something for me?’ He nodded at the globe. ‘That’ll do nicely.’
‘Why do you want it?’
Tisk grinned and rolled his eyes. ‘Because it doesn’t belong to me, of course. Do I need to remind you that without my help you’d still be trussed up like a festival pig?’
Lucian gave him the globe, and then collected the last two from the safe. He placed one in his pack, taking care to wrap Artair’s old shirt around it.
‘If you can unlock doors, I don’t see why you couldn’t have just taken that for yourself whenever you wanted.’
‘That would spoil all the fun, handsome boy.’
Dalesh returned. Lucian didn’t need to look to know that Tisk had vanished before she got a look at him.
The mage had a small pack slung over one shoulder and a knife pushed through her belt.
She took the glass globe from his unresisting hand and then dashed it on the flagstones, muttering words as she did so.
With a rush of hot fur scent and a crackling noise, like parchment thrown on a fire, a doorway stood lined in fire before them.
Through it, Lucian could see a desolate-looking patch of countryside scattered with chunks of purple-grey stone.
A cold trickle of recognition moved through him.
It wasn’t far from this place that he’d been turfed out of his own body.
And what had happened to it then? Had Maura just left it there under the sky, to be picked to pieces by birds?
Did his bones lie there somewhere, underneath that uncaring sky?
‘Be quick.’ Dalesh was already stepping through the portal. ‘If what you said is true, we’ve very little time.’
Lucian followed her. As he passed through the doorway of ruby flame, however, a strange rushing sensation moved through his body, as though he were falling from a great height, and when he got to the other side he stumbled, dropping to his knees.
Stupid monk body , he thought. Why is it failing me when I need it the most?
Dalesh watched him slowly get back to his feet. It was one of the things he remembered the most clearly about her, that scrutinizing gaze. He had always found it difficult to hide things from her.
‘You’re practically dead on your feet,’ she said, before glancing up the path that rose behind them. The fiery portal snapped out of existence. ‘We’re not too far from Prideful Leap, but you need to rest first.’
‘I can’t,’ snapped Lucian. ‘If I sleep, he will come back.’
‘If you don’t, Maura will chew you up and spit you out.
’ Around them, the wind picked up, bringing with it a brief scatter of raindrops that felt icy against his face.
Dalesh pulled her cloak closer around her shoulders.
‘Are you so sure that this monk will obstruct you? He wants to save these other monks, doesn’t he? ’
‘That’s not the point.’ The idea of giving control back to Artair when he finally had it was unthinkable.
This body was now his, this life was his, and he wasn’t giving it back.
But it was true that Artair needed to confront Maura as much as Lucian did, and if he spent the whole of this day tied up and imprisoned, they would make very little progress.
He had the horrible feeling he might have to… trust the monk. He grimaced.
‘Besides which,’ Dalesh continued, ‘I saw those two together. He’s half in love with that monster girl. I doubt he would want to leave her facing a sacrificial knife alone.’
Lucian’s grimace turned into a scowl. He found himself thinking of the way she had looked at him when he’d waded into the hot spring.
It was hard to accept that it was Artair’s body she was looking at—she had never even seen Lucian’s face.
Except, he realized with a strange tightening in his chest, she had. She just didn’t know it.
‘Fine. I will rest. But you will tie me up beforehand and explain to him exactly what is at stake. He must agree to work together on this, and to give me back control when we face Maura.’
‘Can he do that?’ Dalesh asked, frowning. ‘Just give it back to you?’
‘He’ll have to,’ said Lucian hotly. ‘What use is a monk going to be against a powerful mage?’
In the end, they found a spot out of the wind and made a makeshift camp.
Lucian sat and began pulling things from his pack, looking for something to eat before he gave up to sleep, and his hand brushed against something solid wrapped in a silky cloth.
At first, he thought the soul globe had somehow changed shape, and then when he unwrapped it, he saw that it was in fact a small, porcelain heart, anatomically correct and glazed with something that gave it a faint shimmer.
He picked it up between finger and thumb, meaning to examine it more closely, but when he did, his mind filled with an image: a forest at dusk, and Artair standing under the trees in blood-soaked clothes.
Elver was looking up at him, a vulnerable expression on her face, and as Lucian watched, she stroked his face and kissed him.
In Lucian’s chest, something tightened painfully.
Is she kissing me, or him? Somehow, it seemed a more important question than why his clothes were soaked with blood.
He watched the scene again and again, examining the young man’s eyes to see if he could spot something of himself in them, but wherever they were, it was too dark.
Eventually, Dalesh nudged him with her boot, and he stashed the heart away in the pack again.
‘Enough stalling. You need to sleep.’
It felt strange to be instructing Dalesh in how to tie him up and he was half convinced that his blood was running too hot to sleep, but when he laid his head down darkness came up to claim him as swiftly as falling into an old well.
When Artair woke, it was to find himself on the edge of a freezing mountain, gazing out across a dizzying drop.
He gasped and tried to wriggle backwards away from it, his wrists and ankles bound tightly together, but a hand took hold of his shoulder and dragged him away slightly. A vaguely familiar voice spoke.
‘You’re safe, monk. Calm yourself.’
He rolled onto his back to see Dalesh, the magistrate from Ashingdown that Elver had had such an alarming reaction to; the mage who had delivered her to Mother Maura in the first place.
The woman’s lips were pressed into a thin line, as though she had received bad news, or was about to deliver some.
‘What are you doing here? Where am I?’ That was, he realized, one of the things he hadn’t expected about losing control: all the questions he awoke with every day. It was exhausting.
‘I am here to help you idiots,’ she said dryly. ‘Although the Twelve only know why I’m getting mixed up in this.’ She sighed. ‘I have only a little time to explain, so I’m going to need you to listen and actually take in what I’m telling you. Now. Do you know who Lucian is?’
Artair sat up. ‘Can you at least untie me?’
‘Not yet. Answer my question, monk.’
‘Lucian is what the Other that lives inside me calls himself. He is a spirit of evil and chaos.’
‘Hm. Chaos I might give you, but Lucian is, or was, a real person, and not a dark spirit. He’s someone that I knew when I was an apprentice to Mother Maura. He was also an apprentice—one of her most promising, in fact.’
Artair shook his head. ‘That’s not true. It’s not possible.’
Dalesh continued as though he hadn’t spoken.
‘I had thought for all these years that Maura had killed him outright, but it seems she merely displaced him from his body. Removing souls from mortals is something mages of the Bloody Claw can learn to do—it lets us save tithes for when we need them. The last thing you want is to be in desperate need of a spell only to have nothing to give to our lord in exchange for the power. Somehow, he ended up in your head—but that, perhaps, is a mystery for another day.’
‘That’s just not true,’ he said again. ‘It can’t be.
If that were the case…’ If that were the case, it meant that he had helped imprison someone.
It would mean that Lucian had endured years of torment at his hand, denied simple things like walking under the summer sky, the pleasure of eating a hot breakfast on a cold morning or speaking to a friend as the sun set.
It was unthinkable. And yet… Elver had also believed Lucian to be more than a dark spirit.
‘Why would the Brothers and Sisters of the Golden Tower lie to me?’
Dalesh shrugged. ‘It’s likely they didn’t know. Maybe the Sleepless demons are real, or maybe all these so-called dark spirits are simply misaligned souls. It doesn’t matter. This is what you need to know, Artair. Artair, are you listening to me?’
‘I am,’ he replied, although it was difficult to fix on her words. A cold rush of horror was moving through him, threatening to drag him away like a rip tide.
‘Mother Maura doesn’t care about this monster cub she had you steal. The cub was bait to get Elver out of the Jih Forest and into Maura’s sanctum. Maura intends to use Elver as a sacrifice to trick the Bloody Claw—’
‘What?’ This brought him back to the present sharply. ‘What do you mean, sacrifice her?’
‘I mean exactly what I say.’ Dalesh was losing patience. ‘She needs the life of your friend to throw down and depose a god. Elver is on her way there now—and a sacrifice that walks right up to the knife is so much more powerful than one that is taken by force.’
‘Then we have to go.’ He made to stand up, and remembered his ankles were tied. ‘She could be there already!’
‘Wait.’ Dalesh took hold of his forearm, holding him in place.
She fixed him with dark brown eyes. ‘Lucian needs to know if you will work with him. If, when the time comes, you’ll let him take control.
It annoys me to say it, honestly, but he was a talented mage when I knew him.
He could be our best chance at stopping Mother Maura. ’
‘Give him control? I…’ Artair shook his head. ‘Why does Lucian even care?’
‘Mother Maura means to kill our god, Artair.’ Dalesh sighed. ‘And I strongly suspect he is quite fond of your friend, as much as he would like to hide it.’
‘He is?’ Artair swallowed. He thought of the vision he’d seen at the Temple of Threshold, his counterpart’s hand curling gently around Elver’s bare foot. Does he know what you two get up to at night?
‘Can I trust you then?’ asked Dalesh. She shook his arm lightly. ‘Can we trust you not to run off down this mountain when I untie you?’
There was no question, not really. If there was a chance of saving Elver, he would have to take it. He held out his bound wrists.
‘You can trust me. Lucian can trust me. Cut me free.’