Now Shuthmili screamed.
Before she knew what she was doing, as though some deep internal coil had reached the limit of its compression, Csorwe rose up out of the shadows and leapt forward, drawing a knife from her belt. She could not let this happen.
She didn’t hear Tal call after her. She heard nothing, and saw nothing, in fact, but Oranna and Shuthmili, Oranna’s thin anxious smile, Shuthmili crying out in agony.
She grabbed Oranna around the waist, dragging her back, and held the knife to her throat.
And then, at least for Csorwe, everything was very simple. Oranna stopped struggling once she realised Csorwe could cut her throat whenever she chose to.
She leant in, speaking clearly into Oranna’s ear. Her hair smelled of incense and beeswax. She was dead weight in Csorwe’s arms, resistant without struggling. “Tell her she can stop. Tell her it’s over. She doesn’t have to do it.”
“I’m afraid that is not going to happen,” said Oranna.
Csorwe tightened her grip, cutting into the soft flesh at the hollow of Oranna’s neck. A threadlet of blood ran down the blade.
“Even if you kill me,” said Oranna, “you cannot stop it now. Even if you kill her. The seal is opening.”
“You knew it would hurt her,” said Csorwe. Her voice trembled. She hadn’t realised how angry she was until she heard it.
“She knew it herself,” said Oranna. “She’s quite brilliant.”
Chains ruptured, like a peal of bells breaking. Metal and screaming.
The seal broke. A wave of power flashed outward from the pillar: invisible, irresistible, cold and pitiless and mighty as the corrupted seas. Time seemed to stop. It felt like a physical blow.
With a crack so deep and painful that Csorwe remembered the root of her tusk breaking in her jaw, the ground began to rupture. Shuthmili crumpled where she stood, and only the grip of the frozen man kept her upright.
Csorwe’s ears rang. One moment she stood on solid ground, the next, it broke apart, like sheets of ice. The foundations of the monument shook.
As Csorwe tried to get her balance, Oranna broke out of her grip, leaping back across a fissure.
“I told you,” she said, adjusting her robe. “It can’t be stopped. I suggest you start running.”
Another concussion knocked Csorwe to the ground. She got upright again in time to see the dead man’s hand open, releasing Shuthmili’s wrist.
Shuthmili stumbled back, slipped, and fell. The last of the chains shattered, and the frozen corpse came free. It struck the ground, rebounded once, and disintegrated, scattering crystals of petrified flesh. Its chest came apart and the Reliquary bounced across the ground, skidding toward the edge of the rift.
It was so close. Almost within arm’s reach.
Csorwe gave up trying to keep her balance, threw herself across the ground and lunged for it. Oranna was closer. She seized the Reliquary in her outstretched hand and slithered back.
The central rift in the floor of the theatre grew deeper and wider with every second. The bloody water in the sacrificial pool drained away into the earth. The Sleeper was waking, and it howled with rage, just on the edge of mortal hearing.
Csorwe was on one side of the rift. Oranna was on the other, with the Reliquary in her fist.
Somewhere in the distance, struggling to stay upright as the ground gave way, Tal was screaming, “Get it get it get the fucking thing!”
There was nobody between Csorwe and the staircase to the floor above, far behind her. If she ran now she could make it. The place was coming down any minute now. She had to get out.
Oranna glared back at her. Anger and determination did not mar her handsome face. If anything they illuminated her features.
“Tell Belthandros he lost,” she said. Then, as the ceiling began to fall in, she ran.
Csorwe would have gone after her. She would have run through falling rocks and spikes of ice to get an inch closer to the Reliquary.
At that moment a jagged block of broken masonry struck the floor near Csorwe’s foot and shattered like glass.
Bad news and bad luck swarm around the Reliquary of Pentravesse like flies around a carcass. This could have been bad news, bad luck, or something else.
Csorwe leapt away from the falling rock and saw Shuthmili. She lay motionless, unconscious, her bare hand uncurling beside the toe of Csorwe’s boot.
And once again, everything was very clear. Csorwe picked Shuthmili up, hoisting her over her shoulder. She let Oranna and the Reliquary go, and she ran for her life.
11
Entirely Gone Away
NO GOD WATCHED OVER Csorwe any longer, but something must have guided her steps. The Monument didn’t fall until they were out.
The bowl-shaped valley crumpled like an eggshell, giving its tombs back to the earth. The boundary wall was falling, and Csorwe ran for the nearest gap, bent almost double under Shuthmili’s weight. They emerged onto a stony hillside, where black leafless trees stood, petrified where they once grew.
There was no sign of Oranna, of Tal, of Lagri Aritsa or Daryou Malkhaya. Csorwe and Shuthmili might as well be the only ones left alive.
Csorwe kept running, one hand on her sword and the other keeping Shuthmili steady over her shoulders. She battered her way through the woods, breaking glassy thickets underfoot. Stray branches cut her clothes and scratched her skin. She screwed up her face against the sting and trampled on, stumbling on the edge of panic.
She hacked through a stand of reeds that fell like wind chimes, barely cleared a little frozen stream, ran on down a clear slope, and cleared the petrified woods just as her foot caught on a loose stone and she tripped. They fell headlong down the frozen hillside, her thoughts scattering as they hit the ground at the bottom.
Csorwe struggled to catch her breath, looking dazed at the sky above the branches. It was a bruised and chilly gold.
Shuthmili lay perfectly still, peaceful, as though resting. Csorwe crawled over and checked her over, but she was unharmed. In that respect she was doing better than Csorwe, who had a stinging graze down her hip and thigh despite her thick winter clothes.
What had she done? The Reliquary had been right there. All she had needed to do was pick her moment, and she had failed. She had been tested and tempered again and again, and when it came to it, in the moment that mattered, she had weakened. Oranna had the Reliquary.
Shuthmili sighed, settling on the cold earth. The sound was enough to shake Csorwe out of her self-pity. She told herself to get a grip. It would soon be night. They needed rest and shelter, or they weren’t going to survive it.
She mustered her strength one last time and lifted Shuthmili, carrying her to a hollow nearby. It wasn’t much, but it would protect them from the elements and make them harder to see.
Csorwe curled up beside her, throwing her cloak over them both to try and conserve warmth. She was too numbly tired to take any other precaution. Sleep hit her like a falling rock.
She woke slow and sore. The wrenching pain of her lost tusk, deep in the root of her jaw, returned first to her perceptions, like a small insistent haunting. The rest of the world assembled itself shard by jagged shard.
She was very cold, propped upright against something very hard and colder still. It was morning, and someone had tied her to a tree.
A few feet away, Shuthmili had laid out her cloak on the ground and was kneeling in prayer, facing the sunrise. It was a relief to see her awake. It took Csorwe a moment to realise exactly what had happened.
“You tied me up!” said Csorwe.
Shuthmili straightened up and looked her over. There was nothing even remotely approaching gratitude on her face. She looked as though she were checking that a rabid dog was still securely chained.
“Yes,” said Shuthmili.
“… Why?” Csorwe was too baffled and too tired to be angry. She could hardly make sense of it.
“You lied. I know you aren’t who you said you were. You obviously weren’t st
udents. You—you must have been working for that woman,” said Shuthmili.
“Oranna?” said Csorwe.
“You must have been,” said Shuthmili. She had sounded calm enough initially, but Csorwe saw now that she was jittering as badly as Tal at his worst, pacing back and forth as if trying to remember something she had forgotten. Eventually she went back to the pile of their belongings and started going through Csorwe’s bag.
“I should have realised,” Shuthmili added. “She must have sent you to undermine me.”
Csorwe leant back against the petrified tree trunk. She could almost have laughed. She didn’t know how to begin to deny it.
“I rescued you,” she said.
Csorwe wasn’t sure what kind of reaction she had been expecting. Surprise, at least. Maybe a thank-you. Instead Shuthmili pushed her hair back out of her eyes and scowled.
“Well, you picked a good moment for it,” she said, and went back to rifling through Csorwe’s things. “If you were going to rescue me you could have got there sooner.”
Minutes passed. Csorwe tested her bonds, reflecting that she was certainly Shuthmili’s first prisoner and the knots might not be secure, but she had no such luck.
Shuthmili’s hair had fallen into her face again and Csorwe couldn’t read her expression, but she was searching through the bags now in a kind of panic, as though she had lost something.
“Don’t you have any food?” Shuthmili said eventually, with obvious reluctance.
“There’s dried beef in the side pocket,” said Csorwe. Shuthmili scrutinised her for a moment, maybe calculating whether this could possibly be a trick. “It’s not good, but it’s fine,” said Csorwe.
Shuthmili wolfed almost the whole packet of beef with absolute, efficient concentration, tearing the sticks apart in her hands. She turned away from Csorwe, as though ashamed of her hunger.
Csorwe was pretty hungry herself, but that could wait. The hard facts of her situation were beginning to make themselves known, like shards of glass in a mattress.
She tried not to think about Tal, and what might have happened to him. He had cheated and betrayed his way out of too many situations for it to seem fair for him to die in a rockfall. It was hard to imagine he might actually be gone. He had been a grim fact of her life for too long. There was no triumph in beating him like this, anyway, without him around to know that she’d won.
And what had she won, anyway? The Reliquary was gone. She had come so close to Sethennai’s heart’s desire, and she had failed him. She remembered the old dream, with Sethennai as the heir of Pentravesse and Csorwe as his right hand. She had imagined all kinds of things. That she would learn his secrets, that she would properly understand him, that she would help him shape the world to his design … looking back, it all seemed rather pathetic. As if he would trust her again now.
Around them, the frozen hills stretched away, the mountains rose up in silence, the grey sky seethed. All the sinews that held this world together had snapped. No light, no warmth. Nothing to eat in the whole wretched, beguiling expanse.
After a while, Shuthmili brought her a few sticks of dried meat.
“Going to untie me?” said Csorwe.
“No,” said Shuthmili.
Csorwe bared her teeth. She was reaching the end of her patience with this. “How do you expect me to eat?”
Shuthmili tore off a bite-sized piece of beef and held it out to her, at arm’s length.
“No,” said Csorwe.
“That’s fine, if you’re not hungry,” said Shuthmili.
Csorwe’s pride wasn’t all that refined. She didn’t exactly like being fed from the hand like an animal, but she liked it better than starving. Shuthmili tore up the remains of the beef and fed it to her piece by piece. Shuthmili enjoyed this experience perhaps even less than Csorwe did, flinching back every time as if she might get bitten. Afterward, at least, she gave Csorwe a drink from the last of the water.
“Can you make food?” said Csorwe. “With your magic or whatever?”
Shuthmili, who had withdrawn to the other side of the hollow again, shook the last shreds of beef into the palm of her hand and tipped them into her mouth. “No,” she said.
“Clean water? Light? Heat?”
“I could purify water—I could light a lantern if we had fuel—but it’s not that simple,” said Shuthmili. “I can’t make something out of nothing.”
“All right,” said Csorwe. “In that case, I think we’re screwed.”
“I don’t have to listen to anything you say,” said Shuthmili.
Csorwe wished her hands were free so she could bury her face in them.
“Look,” she said. “I’m not—I didn’t lie to you. I had nothing to do with Oranna. I didn’t know she was there. But—”
“Why should I believe you?” said Shuthmili.
“But it doesn’t matter if you believe me,” said Csorwe. “We’re lost. It’s cold. We don’t have anything else to eat or drink. Maybe you haven’t done this before, so you don’t know how quick it can happen, but we will die here if we don’t do something.”
“If that is the will of the gods,” said Shuthmili, eyeing the pile of bags as if she wanted to lie down in them and sleep again.
All Csorwe could do was groan. “You think the gods give a shit what happens to us?”
“Well,” said Shuthmili, frostily. “It’s one of the central tenets of—”
“If someone was watching us, people would behave themselves better,” said Csorwe. “You don’t want to die. Your gods made you with a brain, probably.”
“But you said yourself there’s nothing we can do!” said Shuthmili. She paced back and forth, perhaps hoping that the Mother of Cities would descend from the skies, smite the heretic, and give her new orders.
Csorwe took a deep breath. Shuthmili hadn’t enjoyed the Hollow Monument any more than Csorwe herself. Whatever doubts Csorwe had about Shuthmili’s life up until this point, it seemed to have been well ordered and predictable. All things considered, it was amazing that Shuthmili was holding it together even this well.
“We could go and search for the cutter,” said Csorwe. “Even if it won’t fly, it has food and fuel.”
Shuthmili agreed to the plan with indecent haste: in her place Csorwe would have stalled a bit, just out of basic self-respect. Shuthmili unfastened the bindings and immediately tied Csorwe’s wrists back together. Csorwe could have taken the opportunity to overpower her, but it didn’t take much to imagine how Shuthmili would react to that. And then she’d have a hostile prisoner to deal with.
“Could do with my arms to balance,” said Csorwe, without much hope.
“I could do with a bath and a cup of coffee,” said Shuthmili. “I’m afraid we’re both just going to have to live with it.”
* * *
It was hard going. The ground had settled, but there were occasional tremors, like the earth’s death rattle. The rope chafed Csorwe’s wrists, and the walk gave her too much time to think: about Tal, about Sethennai, about the Reliquary and her failure. She tried to concentrate on survival. Uncertainty was a deep pit to fall down, and there were spikes at the bottom.
If the old boundary wall was still standing, and if they could find their way back to it, they could probably follow it round to the landing site. The trouble was that she had no idea where they were. The tremors must have been worse than Csorwe had thought. They had obliterated any landmarks she would have remembered from their outward journey.
“Do you recognise any of this?” she asked.
Shuthmili shook her head. “This is my fault,” she said. “The awakening of the Sleeper must have caused a tremendous rupture. An outpouring of energy.”
“Is it dangerous?” said Csorwe, not that she needed anything else to worry about.
“Not in theory,” said Shuthmili, looking miserable. “Not to us, anyway.”
They picked their way through a field of boulders. It was icy underfoot. The wind had dropped, which w
as a measure of relief, but Csorwe was starting to think someone was following them. She heard—not footsteps, but the tap of pebble against pebble, the sound of gravel shifting.
She tried to imagine it might be Tal, that he had somehow survived just to spite her, but that was a dangerous way to start thinking. She was used to losing things, and wishing never helped.
They passed across an open plateau, clear of boulders. There was something uncanny about this place. Something about the boulders—they were too even, too regular, but Csorwe couldn’t place exactly what it was she disliked.
There was a crack like a sheet of slate breaking. It echoed among the boulders on the other side of the plateau.
“Shuthmili,” said Csorwe quietly. Shuthmili glanced back at her. “Give me my sword and get behind me.”
“What?” said Shuthmili.
A shadow surged up from among the boulders. It was a revenant, the corpse of some dead giant. The ragged shreds of a robe hung about him, like mist around a mountain. He was enormous, misshapen, a blasphemous engine of skin and bone. A broken coronet trailed over his forehead like something left on a grave. His eye sockets were hollow, but a spark burnt within them.
Shuthmili shrank back, retreating into herself. Then she swallowed, straightened up, went to remove her gloves—and found them already gone.
“Mother of Cities,” she muttered.
“Give me my sword!” said Csorwe.
The revenant lumbered downhill toward them, swaying like a drunk. He was unarmed, but his jaw hung open, off its hinges, and his teeth were jagged. The stink of rot and dust and embalming salts poured off him.
Shuthmili raised her fist, as if to keep shut the gates of hell with one hand. She was shaking. Csorwe didn’t know much about magic, but she knew what it looked like when someone was about to pass out from exhaustion. And, by now, she knew intimately what it looked like when someone made an avoidable mistake by pushing too hard.
“Don’t do this,” said Csorwe, holding out her wrists. “Give me my sword, for god’s sake, and let me go. I can fight!”
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