Chapter 2 #2
“She’s there,” Mon said slowly. “I haven’t seen her. Finding anyone here is a monumental chore and takes... time. Resources. Come, we’ll speak more in the canoe.”
“But I can find her? It shouldn’t be too hard, right? It’s only been hours.” Jesstin nearly ran into the small craft Mon unwound from the pier. The water was no longer serene or welcoming. The sky was dark with the threat of a coming storm. “We’re taking a canoe across this?”
“I assure you, it is perfectly safe.”
“Safe?” He’d never been at such a disadvantage. Many others had crossed that same agitated river, but the difference was they had nothing more to lose, while he was risking everything. “And those things worse than death here?”
Mon’s dead eyes and gleeful grin were at odds. “I’ll tell you about them once we’re on our way, but nothing will prepare you for seeing them yourself.”
Jesstin felt whooshed through the gates. He turned to see the backs of them, but they’d vanished. The beach was gone too. There was nothing in their place except a gray haze with vague indications of shapes, like the first brush strokes on a blank canvas.
He’d save his questions for things that mattered.
The river was as still as a lake now, though just as dark as before.
Dozens were still launching their small vessels, but most were already distant specks. The ocher sky had become a muted, hazy tawny faster than it should have.
“Anyone could skipper one of these on their own. Takes no special skill,” Jesstin said as Mon pushed off and leaped in, taking the double-ended paddle from Jesstin. “Why the need for custodians?”
Mon dipped the oar in one side, then the other. It glided through the dark water. As the shore faded, the sun weakened further, no longer even strong enough to light the sand. “You might make it across without one. But what would you do next?”
“Pardon?”
“Where would you go when you landed?” He cut another smooth pass with the paddle. “Or did you think what’s here would be a mirror of what’s there?”
Jesstin had actually assumed that. “I’d sort it, same as you all did.”
“We didn’t sort it. We had help, as I’m now offering you.”
“So all custodians are made equal?”
“What?”
“They’re all so helpful and full of knowledge?”
Mon scoffed, catching onto Jesstin’s sarcasm a beat too late. “Your arrogance isn’t an advantage here. What would you know about existing in a place like this? Surviving? Avoiding?”
“At least two of those things are antithetical to being dead, no?”
“Hundreds of years have come and gone since someone has been allowed to move onto the Halls of Ilyn, the word ‘afterlife’ takes on new meaning.”
Hundreds of years was quite an era, regardless of how time moved above and below. “You want me to help you leave, but you haven’t said how.”
Mon glanced at the weakening sun, worry pulling his brows closer. He wiped his face on his sleeve without missing a stroke. “You’ll find the door just as you did in the labyrinth.”
“Why not the door I just came through?”
“There are many doors, but only one for us.”
“How? How do I find this door? How will I know it’s the right one if there’s so many?”
“You found the end of the labyrinth.”
“No, you showed me the end, after a not insignificant amount of torture.”
“It’s commonly misunderstood that a man requires the dead’s hospitality to win the challenge,” Mon said. “But anyone can beat the labyrinth, Jesstin. What makes the ‘winners’ different from the ‘losers’ is a privation of hubris.”
Jesstin snorted. “I have enough of that to spare.”
“You have confidence. But when you braved the Labyrinth of Deception, it was thoughtlessness guiding you. You weren’t challenging a crop of hedges. You were challenging fate itself.”
“I won because I’m an arrogant asshole?”
“You won because you didn’t think at all about the outcome until you were inside. You were testing Ryquin as much as he was testing you. He thinks you passed his test, but he does not, cannot know how... or that you have no intention of helping him in his appalling endeavors.”
Jesstin had never outright said, to anyone, that he wasn’t going to aid Ryquin, but Mon was a mind reader, or had been in the maze.
Jesstin had no experience hiding his thoughts, but Rhiain did, from her time training to be a spy for Mathias.
If you’re not yet skilled enough to close the windows into your mind, then you confuse the listener by introducing as much noise as you can.
“If I find this door, though, won’t that be helping him too?
” He nodded at the paddle. “I can take over.”
Mon’s face was a patch of crimson effort and beads of sweat.
“I can go faster than you, and haste is...” He glanced up again.
“Expedient.” His cheeks flexed as he pushed his pace.
When he caught his breath again, he continued.
“Ryquin needs a different door than us. But forget him and that. You’re here to help us. ”
“I’m here for Elloven,” Jesstin said, growing testy. “Whether I help you depends on what you have to offer me.”
“You’ll forgive me for saying this, but Elloven’s death prevented catastrophe.”
“Come again?” Jesstin fought the urge to shove Mon out of the canoe.
“It would not have been of her doing. The door we need was closed when all doors between the worlds closed. But reopening the other doors, to the other worlds, can never be allowed to happen. Her uncle, her brother... They’re part of a council.
..” Mon sighed. “The door you need to find has been hidden from the dead. We think it may be visible to the living, because they say it was a living man who closed it.” Mon rested the paddle.
Again, Jesstin offered to take over, but Mon held his hand up.
“The Infinitum is a treacherous, unruly place, where you will find no aid from authorities, no succor you can trust from allies. It is every man, woman, and child for themselves. The one who rules has had far too long to cultivate a culture of fear, and it is well-embedded. You’ll never see them, never meet them, but you’ll feel the effects of its influence all the same. ”
Jesstin chortled. “Sounds like our world.”
Mon didn’t laugh. “This place will make you long for your world.” He grunted through another big push. “Your fight with Elloven was prudent. It saved your life. The pretor was rallying his guard right as she arrived at the sept to be free of you. You might even say her death aborted yours.”
Jesstin had considered that, but it led nowhere helpful. He’d also clocked Mon’s vagueness around Estelar and Acheron. “Did he want me dead for the fun of it? He got what he wanted. Taven and Elloven...”
“No one told you?” Mon whistled. “The pretor wasn’t pleased with the complication you brought to Rivenholde, but he was prepared to release you. And then he saw how deep your bond with her had rooted, and there was only one solution for that.”
“Isn’t that how bonds work?”
“The magic takes hold instantly. The fusion of souls takes years. But he saw yours had already... It had embedded too far. Some bonds go beyond what any spell or ward could. He believed Elloven would never stop until she found you again, and he couldn’t have that.”
Jesstin squinted into the dying light. “I really doubt she’d have come searching for me after our last conversation.”
“Yet here you are, Jesstin, searching for her.” Mon steered the canoe to the left, heading diagonally from their path. “Nearly there.”
“And still you’ve told me nothing.” Jesstin rolled his shoulder. “Except don’t be out after dark? Right, Father?”
“Not only dark. There are four transitions of time here. Lightrise, which is morning. Illumina, daytime. Twilight and moonrise mean just as you’d guess.
The only safe times to be out are lightrise and illumina, when there’s light to guide you.
If you’re not tucked away when twilight falls, then.
..” Mon affected a shiver. “There are fates worse than death.”
“So you’ve said,” Jesstin muttered. Mon was no more forthcoming than anyone else in Rivenholde. “Someone gave a similar speech to Elloven?”
“Everyone receives these cautions.”
“And they were hopefully more direct with her?”
Mon rested the paddle with a labor-weary exhale.
There were other canoes leagues behind, but most had already left the river.
“I could spend weeks speaking on this world and not come close to enlightening you. But all you must really know is how to survive long enough to reach the end of the spiral and, with enough divine fortune, the way out for yourself and us all.”
“The spiral?”
“Our door and yours will be there. At the center, they say.”
“And you can’t see these doors?” Jesstin considered it might be easier to just take the paddle and figure shit out for himself. Each passing second was potentially hours Elloven would never get back.
“The spiral is a repellent force to us. Now listen, we’re close, and I’m not even halfway through what I need to tell you.
There are two forms of succor in the Infinitum: havres and cloisters.
Havres are modest structures, huts or homes or even what appear to be little businesses or taverns.
You’ll know them because they bear the symbol of the flame above their doors, illuminated regardless of the hour.
” Mon pointed at his pendant. “Cloisters are larger, meant for communities. They resemble what you’d think of as monasteries.
They, too, have markers above their doors, though you’ll know them on sight, marker or no.
There will be dozens, sometimes hundreds, of dead hovering around its premises.
Be safely entrenched in either a havre or a cloister before twilight, or not even your pendant can protect you. ”
Jesstin stopped himself from another na?ve question. Mon could offer nothing useful beyond where to sleep? It would probably be easier to find Elloven than some invisible doors that may or may not actually exist.