Chapter 16
The glow of dying fires cast a warmth throughout the dining hall. Shadows danced across the tapestries, making the ceilings feel higher, darker. Fear lay heavy over the townsfolk, as insistent as sand clinging to wet skin. They jerked every now and then, like a lead line pulled taut.
Families clustered together, each as oddly shaped as grapes on the vine. Their eyes watched the barricaded door with as much hope as terror.
Then, everyone stiffened and cocked their heads.
Listening.
Their eyes widened. Some hunched over their children, others covered their ears. The floor trembled, transferring a racking vibration up legs and spines. It crawled over skin with the same prickliness as beating rain.
As one, everyone collapsed.
Bastion stared, seeing the room as if through a pane of glass frosted at the edges. If he’d had any breath, the sudden stillness would have taken it.
The sea of bodies lay in a tangle, like puppets with severed strings, but among them, three men still stood. Their lips pulled back with leering laughter.
They scanned the room and spotted him instantly.
He bolted.
Irrational irritation bled into every fiber of his being as he clenched slippery skirts and leapt over townsfolk. He disappeared into the kitchen.
The cooks and scullery maids lay across the ground. He darted around them, desperate for space to maneuver.
Fast as a whip, he unsheathed the bone knife at his waist. Twilight skin and sharp claws startled him as he cut into the sea of satin, tearing it quickly to free knees and ankles.
A moment later, the men burst into the kitchen.
Muscle memory that wasn’t his shot through his arm as his knife hand drew back and threw.
The first man went down with the blade in his throat.
Rage tempered fear that rose like a tide. It washed over Bastion and unmoored him.
Everything went black.
He sank and struggled, grasping with blind panic for the thread he knew was there, tethering him to her consciousness.
When he caught it, it reeled him upwards and slammed him back into her mind.
Ulla staggered.
The remaining men glanced at each other with sordid smiles that made Bastion’s blood boil.
Ulla shook her head, righted herself, and snatched a cast-iron pan from the fireplace. She charged, swinging violently. The second man’s jaw shattered on impact and he crumpled to the ground.
The last backed away, eyes wide as he held a pendant close to his mouth and spoke. Bastion didn’t hear the words–he didn’t hear anything–but some distant knowledge recognized the shape of them on the man’s lips.
The Yvri woman is still awake.
Ulla’s nostrils flared, and she bared her teeth. The man turned to flee–
And tripped over a body.
Ulla lunged for him.
He swung a dagger. Behind his glass prison, Bastion roared and threw all his effort into blocking the strike.
Ulla lifted her arm and deflected, slamming his hand to the stone floor.
Surprise flashed through her as the blade bounced away.
She used the pan to smash his other hand against the floor, and he jerked, his face shriveling with pain.
With him distracted, she seized his face in her other hand.
His jaw stretched, opening in a wide-mouthed scream.
As Ulla’s claws sank into the pirate’s ruddy cheeks, he went rigid as a corpse.
His eyes rolled back until only the whites showed.
A barrage of images hit Bastion, like a flock of birds dive-bombing. They flew by so furiously, he couldn’t process them. Instead, emotions struck him with bruising force.
Damning hope that he’d found a place to belong. Burning anger and fear towards a captain who at first had been charismatic, but now meted out punishment with the changing of the tides. Nervy, frenetic distrust of his crewmates, and black resentment that none of them dared fight back.
The man’s feelings swirled in a torrid hurricane.
Ulla paused, as if she’d been flipping through the pages of a book. Everything bled away, ink diluted by water, and a memory materialized. Bastion struggled to make sense of it.
They stood in the captain’s quarters of a ship, cluttered as a packrat’s burrow.
Through the murky, warbled glass, weak light fell over a dozen men.
Buck came forwards and dropped two items into this man’s hand.
He looked down at the gleaming gold and fiery red of an Acari pendant. Next to it, a lump of yellow wax.
In the voice he used to mollify his men, Buck said, “We’ll attack at dark of moon. Don’t draw attention to yourselves between now and then. If you are caught, make sure you destroy your pendant. Otherwise, I’ll lash you to the figurehead and let you starve.”
Pride, fear, and doubt swelled in the man’s memory. There was potential for great gains here, but also pain and death.
“We’ll alert you when we’re in position,” Buck said, handing out more pendants and wax to his teams. He pointed at the wax. “Be thorough. As soon as the inhabitants fall to the weapon’s magic, lower the drawbridge. Capture Lady Nesrin. She’ll be our bargaining chip. ”
Ulla sneered and turned the pirate’s head. An excess of wax protruded from his ear. Keeping a firm grasp on his face, she picked up the pendant glinting beneath the man’s shirt.
“But what are we looking for?” It was this man who asked, the question pulling both Ulla and Bastion back into his memory.
Buck leveled him with a malicious grin.
“Something old. Something strange. I was told that it’s black and looks like a hunk of rock, as long as a man’s arm.”
The way the crew leaned forwards made Bastion certain that until this moment, Buck hadn’t told them anything about what they were really doing. The pirates looked at each other, a ripple of skepticism racing across their faces.
“Delivering it is going to make us very, very rich men,” Buck said, his eyes glittering. “Don’t fail.”
That word kicked them to a more recent memory.
Along the edge of the great hall, he skulked with his crew, surveying the press of bodies and the barricaded door. He bristled at the work it would take to undo it.
From his pocket, he withdrew the ball of wax and broke it into pieces. Out of the side of his mouth, he said, “Keep an eye on the Yvri bitch. If we don’t bring her back alive, Buck will string us up like that healer.”
NO! Bastion tried to scream.
Ulla reared back, alarm shooting through her limbs. Then, once again, darkness engulfed him.
He grasped blindly with hands he couldn’t sense, desperate to find the lifeline back to her consciousness.
It was impossible to tell which way was up or down, and he floundered, urgency stinging him like salt in a wound.
Then he caught the thread and let out a breath, only for water to pour down his throat.
His grip tightened, and he hauled himself to the surface.
When he landed back in Ulla’s mind, gasping like a drowned man, Minato lay at her feet amid the fallen townsfolk.
Bastion pressed against the glass, a soundless shout ripping through him in an effort to get Ulla’s attention.
Fear and distress battered at the walls of her training, but she ignored them. Devout discipline was all that stood between her and complete hysteria.
She knelt and laid a hand along Minato’s face.
Power leapt to her fingers with barely a thought.
Only a trickle at first, as she tested the depths of the magic that had befallen him.
Then more, manifesting as a steady stream that licked at her fingers like fire.
Soft blue light played across the other Yvri’s face as she searched for him beneath this strange, magical shroud.
It coated his consciousness like grave dust. Ulla swept it away, only for it to return, insistent as exhaustion. When it settled, a path lay at her feet, leading deeper into the prison of his mind. Bastion watched, awed.
A shiver of trepidation made Ulla pause. Walking through another’s mind uninvited was taboo… but what choice did she have?
She let herself sink deep into Minato’s mind.
When her feet finally touched down, it was at the top of a staircase.
Flight after flight of ancient stairs lay before her.
With only the briefest glance over her shoulder, she began to descend.
Time passed, and Bastion couldn’t tell any more than Ulla how long the steps continued, each heavier and darker than the last. Some distant part of herself knew this place, understood this magic was an echo of a future certainty.
It was a maddening juxtaposition of terror and comfort.
Eventually, the smell of fresh water filled her nose, and with it, relief.
At the bottom, Ulla stepped into a shallow pool. It spread before her, contained by slanted walls carved with a labyrinth of twisting staircases that rose like steam. She and Bastion looked up, shivering beneath a watchful sky. Their minds rejected what their souls recognized.
Every road led here.
But this wasn’t the end for them. They were merely voyeurs in someone else's dream.
The current tugged at Ulla’s ankles. She dragged her eyes back to the bottom of this well of absolution. Across the water, a group of people stood before the mouth of a cave, their backs all turned, save one.
Bastion.
A deep knowing filled her as she met his eyes. What had barely broken through the surface in the waking world was fully formed and concrete here, the roots deep and inevitable.
He felt it, too. The draw, the pull, the bond resonating between them. A breath of fear lurked in his eyes, but he wanted her more than it scared him. Certainty filled her, like the scent of rain before a storm.
She ran to him.
Feverish hope carried Bastion forwards. In the center of the well, he swept her into his arms and buried his face in her neck, filled with the exultant relief of coming home.
Their hearts pounded against each other, desperate to kiss through the bars of their ribs. For one brief moment, nothing else mattered.
Then a voice spoke in Bastion’s ear, as cold and final as a crypt.
Wake up.
Ulla fell into the pool as Bastion turned to smoke in her arms. Gone. She shot to her feet, teeth bared.
And stopped.
Before her, impossibly tall and wreathed in an amorphous black cloak, stood a god.
Ulla lifted her hands, one palm up and the other down, then inverted them. A certain amount of petulance accompanied the gesture.
He smiled, but no amount of gentleness could make it less skeletal. When he answered, his lips didn’t move. Yes. But it is not yet your time. This is only sleep, come with magic stolen from my direct line.
Ulla’s brow crinkled.
Wake them before it’s too late.
He stepped back and gestured with a spidery hand towards the cave. Ulla’s eyes caught on the manacle hanging from his wrist before it was swallowed in the folds of his cloak.
She lifted her hands, signing a question.
I cannot say. What they want is not yours to discover.
His ambiguity annoyed her. She scanned the crowd until she saw Minato at last.
Ulla took one step forwards and stopped.
The god raised his brows as she looked up at him.
With her thumb folded against her palm, she touched the hand to one shoulder and then the other, her expression curious.
Awake. Waiting for you. He pointed at her chest. Ulla looked down. A shimmering cord tugged at her heart and disappeared upward like a shard of moonlight. She suddenly knew, with absurd certainty, exactly where Bastion was within Moonwatch.
Ulla marched past the god, one final word nipping at her heels.
Hurry.