Blinking rapidly in surprise, the amarach cocked his head and whispered, “Wohl.” The world seemed to close in on Kherron at the words, not because he felt any fondness for the dark-haired amarach with the deadly orange gaze but because he knew what Wohl’s duty had been—he protected Dehlyn. The amarach seemed to read the dread in his thoughts. “I have been sent here to tell you, but I cannot stay. She is without a shield, and if we do not act—” A streak of light shot past them, barreling into an encroaching body of their foe’s dark host. Kherron flinched, but the amarach merely flicked his silver gaze toward the averted battle before returning it to Kherron’s face. “Another must be chosen before she is safe, and for this, we can spare no one. I regret we cannot help you now. You must call on others for aid.”
The message moved through Kherron like a cold, thick dream, bringing with it an unbearable horror—not for himself but for Dehlyn. If she was so unprotected as to draw all other amarach from their endeavors elsewhere, how much danger did she face? If Wohl’s attempts to guard her—from whatever warranted an amarach’s protection—had led to his death, what more could Kherron possibly provide? A numbness settled in his bones, and he felt only the sickened pounding of his heart. “What?”
His breath had barely left his lips before the amarach disappeared with a flash, leaving nothing but a quickly fading streak in the night sky and glaring points of light behind Kherron’s eyes. Bewildered by the unendingly shifting turns of fate, it took him a moment to realize his own peril had not abated with the immortals’ departure. The air was calm and quiet, the Honalei undeterred from its journey east across the Sylthurst. But while the messenger had performed his duty, the remaining host of the Roaming People had regrouped, moving slowly and without sound. The amarach’s attack upon it must have lessened its forces—it seemed now only a fraction of what it had been when Kherron had spotted it in the distance—but that had no effect on the ferocity of its deadly intent.
It happened both all at once and slowly—far too slowly to comprehend. Kherron turned toward the cabin to see Uishen stumbling around the corner, a crossbow loaded and wavering precariously as he tried to settle it at his hip. The black cloud built on itself and streaked forward, stretching out as if it meant to finally ensnare one or both men within its grasp. And the calmness of the Sylthurst erupted in an angry, violent roar; the water surged as if the river were an ocean in a vicious storm, rising into an enormous wave and towering over the highest point of the Honalei, at least twice as tall as the barge itself. The water cast a deadly shadow beneath the gibbous moon, and Kherron witnessed the scene with a detached yet heightened awareness. In that moment, Uishen’s gaze met his, trapped by a veil of confusion and a silent plea for help. Then the wave crested, broke, and descended upon them.
Kherron felt the Honalei’s deck shift beneath him as the barge tipped with the force, groaning and splintering beneath the attack. He slid along the wooden planking, scrabbling for purchase though he knew he would find none. It seemed odd that the last thing he noticed was the water enveloping him from above, catching him like a giant fist before he could be consumed by the depths of the Sylthurst.
Chapter 13
For hours the next morning, Torrahs had tried to focus on the parchment in front of him. Before their latest attempt in the tower, he’d sifted through the Brotherhood’s vast collection of records, selecting those on the topic of manipulating time. Not moving through it to the future or past; that in itself was impossible. He merely wished to learn how to slow its passing—to stretch one hour into two, perhaps three. This he’d experienced firsthand in his lifetime, once when a dying Priest of Imlach had wished to impart his life’s knowledge, and again when he’d traveled through the Ebbing Realm. That was the name Torrahs had given it, at any rate; he’d found no true name for the place of frozen, circular time, where living things existed both in stasis and in change, where direction and natural laws had been abandoned to a stagnant eternity. It had been foolish of him to pursue that plane, but the creature he’d hunted at the time had gone there, wrongly believing it would be protected in such a place.
Other beings, he knew, employed such magic as well. The Roaming People used it efficiently, though to the opposite effect of moving more quickly toward their goals. He wished neither to accelerate his hours nor to entreat the Roaming People to share their methods. Regardless, they’d failed again to deliver on their promise, and Torrahs had never fallen into the habit of fully depending on others to do what was necessary. He would not seek their aid again unless he had no other choice.
He’d known the lad had evaded him once more when Kherron had still not been delivered to Deeprock Spire before the dying amarach and the green-eyed Dehlyn disappeared. He had not expected a man so uninformed and displaced to present such a frustrating obstacle. As far as he was aware, Kherron understood significantly less about who he was and what he could do than Torrahs himself, though the man admitted his knowledge remained scattered and limited. He’d enacted his plans on nothing more than assumptions, reading the signs and interpreting their meaning to suit him. In this matter, he did not deny the possibility that he’d been wrong. Still, the only proof of this remained the fact Kherron still had not arrived and that Torrahs had not yet broken the vessel. The longer the Iron Pit’s former ward remained beyond his grasp, the more time the lad had to discover his potential. And if that happened—if Kherron truly was who Torrahs thought him to be—the lad stood a much greater chance of thwarting all his endeavors. Unless Torrahs first managed to compel the vessel on his own.
Perhaps it had been a foolish decision to leave Kherron stranded in the forest. He’d seen right through the blacksmith’s poor attempt to mask his knowledge of Dehlyn’s curious transformations. That had been the first real evidence to support Torrahs’ hunch, and he admitted now that his eagerness to begin had blinded his better judgement. He had indeed underestimated the lad, though not in his feelings for Dehlyn or his desire to protect her. He’d underestimated Kherron’s resilience, his urge to press on against the overwhelming odds beset upon him. Torrahs had arrogantly presumed that his betrayal would have broken Kherron, who had not once shown signs in the Iron Pit of struggling against or plotting to rise above his lot in life. The lad had consigned himself to an existence of toil and servitude, and Torrahs had expected that to persist after he’d paid the lad’s bond. His careful plans, it seemed, had turned against him.
The greatest surprise had been Dehlyn’s return in the early hours of the morning. Though the amarach who had collected her and restored her every night for years had most assuredly expired, it had not changed the nature of her disappearances. While he’d known that, should the black-haired immortal be slain, another would simply take his place, the fact that a new guardian had been chosen so quickly did not sit well with him. It meant one of two things, or perhaps both—that someone, somewhere, had foreseen the occurrence, or that the celestial beings also held sway over the machinations of time itself. He could not decide which he preferred, and at the moment, he could not clearly see a way to use either of these possibilities to his advantage.
After last night, nothing had really changed, yet everything was completely different. He and the Brotherhood had made no progress, Kherron remained elsewhere, Dehlyn would continue to be delivered to them before sunrise, and they still had time. But Torrahs’ certainties had crumbled and scattered like ash in the wind. It was now possible that Kherron knew something he did not. The Roaming People, ruthless and unrelenting though they were, could no longer be depended upon to deliver the lad. And the final remnants of trust Torrahs had placed in the last living Ouroke had been stripped away.
He’d always known Lorraii was volatile. It was in her nature, the nature of her people, and the eerily vast number of runes tattooed upon her flesh. He’d seen a handful of Ouroke in his time—though none as thoroughly covered with those markings—and he’d guessed correctly that she’d continued the rites of adorning herself even after her peo
ple had been taken from her. No other Ouroke had pursued such a reckless, perilous endeavor, but no other Ouroke had been the last of their kind.
Despite all this, he’d been prepared to treat with her, to let her walk by his side and join him in his work. In return, he offered her knowledge and the opportunity to exact her revenge. She had but to wait, to defer to his judgement, and to allow him to achieve his own designs unmolested and unchallenged. It had seemed she would fulfill her end of their bargain; she had for many years. And yet he’d underestimated her, too, as well as her hunger for action and retribution. He’d been too complacent in his trust to see that allowing her presence in the tower, in such close proximity to an immortal—against whose kind she’d sworn to avenge the Ouroke—had been as dangerous and foolhardy as dangling a slaughtered lamb before a ravenous wolf and expecting the beast not to bite.
And yes, he’d acted rashly when she’d followed her own desires, but the betrayal had angered him to a surprising degree. He’d wanted to have her chained and thrown in a dungeon before the Brothers reminded him no such thing existed in the fortress. This was an imbecilic oversight on their part, especially considering the ramifications of their work. The Brotherhood had not expected the current events to unfold in their lifetimes, and in accordance with their ignorance, they had prepared for nothing. So instead, Torrahs had had Lorraii sequestered once more in the quarters provided for her, though this time he’d ordered the connecting doors to his own chambers bolted and any other exits accessible to her locked from the outside and guarded. His wizened peers made poor jailers, but at least now they understood, if not wholly than in part, the need for vigilance.
Now, with the fire blazing in the library hearth and the weak grey light of a smothered sky spilling through the window, he found himself unable to concentrate on the tomes he suspected would aid him. Lorraii’s face reared in his mind, her mouth gaping with fury and vengeance, eyes lit by the pulsing glow of the amarach’s lifeforce beneath his many wounds. He’d had such plans for her, and now he could not reason away his reluctance to keep her by his side.
With a heavy sigh, Torrahs rubbed a hand down his face and tugged at his thinning beard. He could not move on until he confronted her, no matter how much he wished to let her wither in solitude and confinement. So he stood from the table, exited the high walls of the library, and headed through Deeprock Spire toward their attached chambers.
The suspicion that his contracted warrior had changed the nature of his work with her unbridled urges discomforted him the most. No matter what he’d done in the past, no matter how far his search for knowledge and attempts to gather the necessary pieces had led him, the immortals had always left him alone. Torrahs had never sought them out, knowing full well the precariousness of their internal feud; any creature that would turn on both its own kind and the rest of the world could never truly offer him what he needed. And whether or not an amarach believed in protecting Dehlyn’s existence, maintaining their current exile, or freeing themselves to find companionship among humans, he highly doubted any of them would support his own ends. But thus far, no celestial being had intervened in his journey, even when he’d brought Dehlyn to the shores of the Amneas to begin this final stage. The end felt so close, and no one had attempted to stop him. Yet now that Lorraii had taken it upon herself to attack an amarach—specifically the one being who had been Dehlyn’s attendant and her guardian through the silent, darkest hours of every night—Torrahs did not believe things would continue as they had been. He could not let himself believe that the dark-haired immortal did not matter.
When he arrived at the outer door to Lorraii’s expansive chambers, set a fair distance around the corridor from the door to his own, he only had to eye the two Brothers posted there to ensure they did not question him. These men did what he bade them, and he knew Fortenu also now supported his decisions implicitly. Even still, they looked wary and haggard, adrift in the torrent of newfound application for their decades of study, overwhelmed by the weight of responsibility they’d never truly expected to fall upon them in consequence. Averting their gazes, they stepped to either side of the entrance as Torrahs produced the iron key from his robes and unlocked the door. When he shut the door behind him, he did not hear the Brothers move again in the hallway.
Lorraii lay on her back, arms spread out over the thin, fraying rug beneath her. Her eyes remained closed, but a thin smirk crossed her lips at the sound of Torrahs’ arrival. He stood silently where he’d entered, giving her a few minutes and the opportunity to speak first. He’d confiscated both the daggers within her boots and the weapon with which she’d slain the amarach; no doubt she would have protested quite viciously if he had not rendered her unconscious. Even so, Torrahs had expected a tirade of anger when she saw him, some form of entitled condemnation on her part for his actions. Instead, she seemed calmer and more at ease now than he’d ever seen her. Surprisingly, this concerned him even more.
Convinced she would not be the one to engage first, he took a deep breath and sighed noisily through his nose. “Did that satisfy you?”
“Some,” she said, her voice low and languid, yet she did not move. “Not nearly enough.”
“It will have to be enough,” he said. “I did not bring you this far so you could behave so thoughtlessly. You acted quite against both your own best interests and mine.” Though he thought she would react to that edict, she did not. “We tread a delicate balance—” A deep, throaty laugh escaped her, and Torrahs forced himself to wait until she was finished.
“You sound like Ruxii,” she said. Torrahs smirked. “There is no balance, Wanderer. You tipped it yourself.”
Those words unnerved him; he’d not revealed so much to her that she could understand every facet of his plans, and he had not known her to seek such comprehension on her own. “That may be,” he replied, eliciting another chuckle from the tattooed woman. “But the foundation has been shifting long before my time. Or yours. It would be unwise to believe you can sway the outcome this close to the final undertaking.”
“More unwise than you believing it of yourself?”
Torrahs knew she could not see him—she had not yet opened her eyes—yet she raised her brows as though assessing his interpretation of her statement. The Ouroke had never questioned him thus, and had anyone else said the same, he would have discarded it as a fruitless attempt to discredit his certainties. Coming from Lorraii, as she lay unprotected and unconcerned on the floor, it felt more like a threat. “I see why Ruxii deposed you.”
Lorraii offered only a thin hum of dismissal; either she played the game as well as he, or she truly no longer cared about the causal circumstances of her solitary longevity. When she said nothing more, Torrahs finally stepped away from the room’s entrance and approached her, his footsteps whispering across the stone floor. He stopped at the edge of the rug and lowered himself into a squat beside her, masking the protesting ache of his joints with a firmly set jaw. “Where did you get the Sky Metal blade?”
That got her attention; the woman’s eyes opened lazily, and she turned her head to settle her gaze upon him. She studied him for a moment, then blinked and propped herself up on one elbow, the ghost of an amused leer on her lips. “You do not know.”
“I do not find sport in asking questions for the sake of asking,” he replied, fixing her with a warning stare. Whatever her motives, he would not allow himself to be strung along by her caviling impulses.
Lorraii gazed from one of his eyes to the other, apparently entertained by what she found there. With a cold, wicked sneer, she said, “I took it from your amarach.”
Torrahs blinked. “I don’t keep immortals.”
“Perhaps not. But your Brothers do. And they’ve been quite busy putting their bonded creatures to work.” She nodded slowly, her calculating stare unflinching, and Torrahs’ found himself gritting his teeth so hard, his lower lip trembled with the unconscious effort of restraint. “That blade was not meant for me, but it answered my cal
l all the same. Nor was it created for human hands.”
As swiftly as he could, Torrahs stood and took a step back. His legs had ached so much beneath him, he’d thought he would have toppled onto the floor if he did not move. Luckily, he managed not to falter in his motion, and it seemed preferable for Lorraii to believe her words instead of his old age had spurred him. He had never heard her speak with such coy riddling, and though he understood full well what she implied, it concerned him. No doubt the runes upon her skin had enabled such knowledge of the weapon’s purpose; many of the Ouroke¸ he’d heard, had empowered themselves with such esoteric communion. But this new understanding of hers brought an unintended transformation in the woman. Lorraii’s allegiance to him wavered, evidenced by her tangled words and her careless reclining before him on the rug. He expected that, should he fail in keeping her interest and providing what she desired, she could not be reasoned with for much longer after this. For that, he needed time to think, and he could not let her see his predicament before such a solution presented itself.
So he pushed out a heavy sigh and chose to speak as if she did not matter so much. “I have explained the importance of containing your urges until the end. You acted rashly with the amarach, but now you’ve gotten it out of your system. Do not do that again.”
Lorraii smiled and took a deep breath, looking around the room as if she’d just woken on a bright, warm day. “You can hardly expect me to submit to such a demand.”
“We made a pact, Ouroke,” he replied, the anger rising in him again. “I have upheld my end, and I will fulfill my promise to you when the vessel is released. I expect you to maintain your dignity and do the same.” He realized, with that, how fine a line he skirted between enticing her back into their agreement and tempting her fury. The woman was arrogant and defiant, yet he knew she still nurtured a seed of betrayal and wounded pride beneath it all. He still had to tread carefully. “Your father would not have made such asinine decisions.”
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