He means that without Lydea as a less bloody path to the throne, Skyllea might have to go to war to stop Thanopolis. Many more people than only Kineas and King Tyros would die.
It wouldn’t be my decision to start a war. It’s ridiculous for Alldan to even place that burden on me, when Skyllea hasn’t done anything for me or Lydea.
But he’s also offering us all asylum in the near future. And that’s not nothing, if he’s telling the truth.
He must see the doubt in my face, because he says, “I mean it when I say you are still welcome no matter what. You only have to find me or one of my envoys, and we will get you there.”
I don’t know how he thinks he could get me out of the city so easily, but I think, Okay, then. My dream of Skyllea is still within reach. Winning free of Kineas is still possible. I don’t know what to do about Lydea, but I haven’t felt hope like this in a long time.
It feels like a promise of fire.
22
I get in touch with Lydea and Japha as soon as possible, passing them notes. My guardian’s absence makes this less tricky than usual. I still have Graecus and Damios to worry about, but the fact that I can see where they are now makes them easier to avoid.
I can’t help being concerned about Ivrilos, too, but in a different way. He helped me in my duel with Kineas, after all, and I appreciate it more than I care to admit. I haven’t seen him in a couple of days. That’s not entirely uncommon, but the timing and circumstances are odd.
The thought of him suffering somehow, unable to tell me, makes my chest feel tight and fluttery in a strangely panicky sort of way. And yet, while I might be my guardian’s responsibility, he’s not mine. I shouldn’t care about him beyond trying to get rid of him.
Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. My silent reminder that he doesn’t care about me doesn’t ring quite as true, though.
After I wrestle with nigh-too-much reading and writing for my fledgling abilities, Lydea, Japha, and I agree to meet at the palace’s private entrance to the necropolis. When we arrive, we’re all wearing somber ceremonial death shrouds. It’s the traditional garb for visiting the necropolis, and the draping cowls and sleeves cover our heads and bloodlines, lending us some measure of anonymity. Even the torches burn low in this stretch of hallway, and the floor is a dark swirl of black and gray mosaics.
The solemnity doesn’t stop Lydea from winking at me. “Hey, beautiful.”
I can’t help smiling back. “Hey.”
I shouldn’t smile, because it feels dishonest somehow. Like I’m hiding something.
I’ve told them I have a way to escape but that we need more information from the necropolis, which suited Lydea just fine. We hope not only to learn more about our guardian bonds from Delphia and Crisea, but to let them in on our plans. Lydea intends to take Delphia with us when we flee the city, and I wholeheartedly encouraged the idea. She also says there’s a place in the necropolis where we all might be able to talk without our guardians being able to overhear. Her mother, Cylla, took her there once or twice.
I haven’t yet admitted that leaving with Alldan is perhaps our best bet. Even though it seems to be the easiest way to help the warded bloodmages, halt the spread of the blight, and avert a war between Skyllea and Thanopolis, I’m afraid to.
Because it might not be what’s best for Lydea. For us.
Japha waves a hand in front of our faces. “Hello, I’m right here, and I’m also beautiful.”
I laugh and throw my arms around their neck. “Of course you are. You were also being less obvious and more appropriate, for once.”
Japha returns my hug warmly. “I can’t help being unremarkable, wearing this.” They shift their shoulders uncomfortably under their cowl. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in this.”
“My dearest, I don’t think you’ll have a choice when the time comes,” Lydea says. “It’s a death shroud.”
“Even so. Fashion is always a choice. That will be my final request: ‘Don’t dress my corpse in a shapeless sack.’”
Lydea laughs and points us to a doorway between columns that are uncharacteristically naked of vines or flowers. I realize now that there are skulls inset over the head of the door, and the surrounding columns have segments between their knobby ends, like finger bones.
“This is the private entrance to the necropolis for members of the royal family. We don’t have to deal with the common masses this way.” She smirks at me to let me know she’s teasing. “Shall we?”
Ostensibly we’re visiting so I can pay respects to my father in the afterlife, and Lydea and Japha to their mothers and grandfather. Attempting to speak to the dead is a common-enough ritual in Thanopolis, even if it’s more often practiced by the wealthy. It’s expensive unless you’re royal; then it’s free. Somehow that makes sense to everyone. Of course, I’ve never done it.
“Let’s,” Japha says. “Despite our dreary outfits, I’ve actually been looking forward to this.” There’s a bright gleam in their eyes.
They march straight over to the darkened doorway and open it without further ado. Lydea and I both follow after a few cautious glances down the hall. I give her a subtle nod to let her know that my guardian isn’t paying much attention. She and Japha return the nod, not realizing that I can see both their guardians. Graecus and Damios take note of where we’re headed, but they aren’t following very closely. I only catch flickers of them in the gloom. The thought of a visit to the necropolis must not be terribly exciting for dead men.
Ivrilos himself either truly doesn’t care what I’m up to, which I doubt … or he can’t spare the energy.
The way beyond the door slopes downward, continuing in twining mosaics that look more like flowing shadows than cut pieces of stone. Torches, surrounded by alcoves filled with skulls, barely light the way. This underground passage will connect us to the necropolis, built partially into the cliffside of the plateau upon which Thanopolis sprawls. The rest of the edifice looms on top like a vulture on its perch. The massive main building has no ornament, only weather-beaten pillars like bundles of bone. I’ve never wanted to go near it, and my mother, probably because of my father, never encouraged it. Aside from this underground palace entrance, only the poorest part of the polis abuts the orderly mausoleums outside the necropolis. Because who wants to live near the dead, other than shadow priests?
“They have a consistent sense of style here, I’ll give them that,” Japha murmurs, before carrying on down the hall.
“Were you able to get word to Delphia that we’re visiting?” I ask Lydea, as low and as close to her as I can manage after we close the door.
She nods. “She’s not supposed to meet us during this part of her training,” she says out of the corner of her mouth. “Seeing family can make adjusting to life like the dead … difficult … so she’ll have to sneak away.” Her lovely lips cant downward. “I’m nervous for her.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, squeezing her hand discreetly under my baggy sleeve. “We’ll find her.”
I let my fingers slip away from hers quickly, and not just to avoid being seen. Lydea gives me a glance, but she’s too preoccupied by our mission to do more than that.
We wander on down the dim passageway until abruptly it’s no longer narrow. It spits us out under a deep column-lined aisle, which in turn opens onto a cavernous central chamber. Columns and arches disappear into the shadows overhead. A statue of only one aspect of the tripartite goddess, the crone, stands stooped at the far end, a staff in one hand and a raised lantern in the other. Eerie blue fire burns there, throwing a sickly glow around the room. In the light, Japha’s lips look blue—suffocated, drowned—and Lydea’s skin as pale as a corpse’s, her mouth bloodied. I pull my cowl tighter around me, as if I can keep the light from touching me.
“Hello, benighted ones.” The hissing voice from the shadows next to us nearly makes me leap out of my death shroud. A person shambles forward in an outfit matching ours, except where a cowl would cover their
head, twisting bands of ropelike iron bind them. The mask leaves only their mouth exposed, lips darkened to an unhealthy black at the corners, teeth jagged and rotten. As far as I can tell, it even covers their eyes. As much as I hate the sight of it, it’s almost unfortunate it doesn’t hide everything.
“Benighted?” Japha says with ill-disguised distaste.
“Shadowed by death. Bound to darkness.” A skeletal hand flickers out from a sleeve, not taut with age but something worse, and reaches for Japha’s face. Japha takes a hasty step back. “How I envy you. No matter how close to death I come, even touching the shadows”—they say another word after that, an old word, like what I heard Ivrilos speak, and something like black smoke coils around their thin fingers—“I will never be as close as you.” The iron-strapped head tips nearer to all of us, and I can hear a raspy inhale. “I can smell it on you.”
Whatever death smells like to the shadow priest, I hope it’s not as bad as the stench they’re giving off. Glorified cult of death worshippers, Japha once called Thanopolis, and that’s never felt more apt.
I want to recoil like Japha, maybe run, but Lydea only smiles calmly. She might be the bravest person I know.
“Yes, lucky us,” she says without a hint of the sarcasm I know she feels. “Excuse me, shadow priest, but we wish to try to commune with our royal family. Pay them our respects. There is a place where other shades cannot accidentally interfere with our summons?”
“Yes, there is a place for that.” The shadow priest cocks their horrible, half-faceless head. “But your connection with your guardians may become disrupted. You see, the room has deep, dark magic in its stones. Its bones. By blocking out the many voices of the dead, it serves as a channel to those you call.” The priest hesitates. “And just know that not all shades come when summoned.”
Probably because most of them can’t come, I think. Because they’ve been used as mortar in the underworld. Or worse.
“Of course,” Lydea says placidly, “but it is our devotion to the dead—and the crone that shepherds them—that makes us try.”
The priest hisses something that might be satisfaction. “The crone smiles upon you, as does her king.” They gesture behind them, trailing a ghostly sleeve from their bony arm. I squint until my eyes adjust. There, at the end of the massive central chamber, behind the statue of the goddess, I finally see it: a darker, taller statue, deeper set against the far wall. It must be the first king, Athanatos, looming in the shadows behind the goddess.
I shiver.
The priest’s head snaps in my direction. “Do you find death uncomfortable, you, whom darkness has kissed the most?”
My face blossoms with heat. Now I appreciate the sickly lighting making me look pale, because it’s not just the shadow priest who’s staring at me through the impossible iron bands of their mask. At least Lydea and Japha only appear confused.
“No, death and I are … um … pretty well acquainted,” I stammer. “My apologies. I’m just cold.” The opposite of cold, more like. My armpits prickle with sudden sweat.
The priest licks their lips with a blackened tongue, and I can barely suppress another shudder. “You should welcome the cold, because cold is the embrace of—”
“Of darkness, death, whatever, we get it,” Japha says, looping their arms through Lydea’s and mine. “If you’ll excuse us, we have respects to pay and places to be. Um, where is the room we want?”
“There is only one place we will all be, in the end … but go in peace,” the priest says with a terrifying smile. “Behind you, third door on your right, and at the end of the hall.”
“Thank you!” Japha sings, practically dragging us away between the columns.
I lean toward Japha and mutter, “Do you even remember the directions?”
They keep their eyes forward. “No, but if I had to smell that priest’s rancid breath one more time I was going to prove how alive I am by vomiting on their death shroud.”
“I remember the way,” Lydea says grimly. Determined. She paces ahead a few steps, and we follow. “Here, this door.”
The entire frame is lined with skulls. All but the skull at the apex are lacking jawbones.
“It gets the message across, I suppose,” Japha says, eyeing it as Lydea opens the way for us. “The dead are silent in here, unless it’s the specific shade you’re calling.”
In other words, no guardians allowed.
The hallway stretches forward, darker than ever. And it’s completely stacked in jawless skulls. They even curve around to cover the arched ceiling. The priest wasn’t joking when they said the room’s magic is in its stones and bones.
“Delphia said she knew where to meet us,” Lydea murmurs after closing the door behind us. She hurries down the hallway. “Dear goddess, we have to get her out of here.”
I hope that whatever magic keeps out unwelcome shades is already working and that it for sure applies to guardians. Because what she’s just said could definitely raise suspicions.
As if my thought summoned him, I hear a voice behind me:
“Rovan? What are you doing?”
My heart leaps into my throat. Halfway down the hallway of skulls, I spin around to find Ivrilos standing behind me. He’s squinting, a pale hand on his dark crown of hair, looking for all the world like he’s just woken up with a hangover.
“Where have you been?” I demand.
“As close to resting as my kind can get,” he mutters, as if talking hurts. “What is this?” He gestures down the hall with his other hand, still clutching his head. “I felt the strain in our bond. It … woke … me, if you want to call it that.”
“Rovan?” Japha says over my shoulder. They’re looking at me with a concerned expression, as is Lydea. Of course, neither of them can see or hear my guardian.
“One second,” I say to them hurriedly. “I’m sure he’ll go away like the other guardians.” I turn back to give Ivrilos a significant look.
“How do you know they’re not here still?” Lydea asks.
Because I don’t see them. But she doesn’t know I can. Damn her, she’s sharp.
“So you show up now, of all times?” I hiss at Ivrilos as he seems to get his bearings. “I’m about to go … uh, pray. Commune. Whatever.”
“No, you’re not,” he says, dropping his hand and glaring at me with more frustration than he usually betrays. The familiarity strikes me as sweet, somehow.
But I’m not going to let that ruin everything.
“Yes, I am. I’m going to try to talk to my father.”
Ivrilos’s face falls flatter than flat. It nearly sinks.
I didn’t have much hope, but I can’t help my breathless whisper. “Is my father down there? Have you seen him?”
He gives a single shake of his head, more like a twitch.
My throat tightens, and I feel a terrible pressure behind my eyes. He knows better than anyone what can be done to shades in the underworld. But I can’t think about that right now—either about my father lost in that horrible place or, worse, becoming part of that nightmarish city, just like Ivrilos’s mother and sister.
Gone, forever.
“Just be careful,” Ivrilos says, shocking me out of my dark reverie, “whatever you’re doing. I can’t do much when you’re in that room.” He nods toward the end of the hall. “To help you, that is. Graecus and Damios couldn’t even make it this far.”
I’m baffled that he would first think of helping me instead of hindering me. He must know I’m up to something that I don’t want him to overhear.
I try to cover my surprise. “How can you be here, then?”
“Rovan, we need to hurry,” Lydea says, but Ivrilos’s words keep me from turning away from him.
“You and I have a … deeper … connection, right now,” he says, wincing slightly, “that even the magic here has a difficult time silencing.”
You, whom darkness has kissed the most, I can’t help but remember the shadow priest saying.
“I
gave a lot back to you when I … you know,” he adds, shifting awkwardly. Awkwardly for him, at least, which still looks like a dance somehow, even amid all the skulls. Wreathed in flowers, wreathed in bones, Ivrilos stands apart from it all. “More than I should have. There are pathways open between us now that shouldn’t be. That’s why I didn’t have much to give you during your sparring match.” The apology in his tone is a small knife, stabbing me. “I think I’m still giving, without realizing it.”
And he’s not taking, like he normally would.
“It’s okay,” I force myself to say. Force myself to ignore that he might not be okay. Force myself to twist the knife. “If it’s too much for you we can try to figure something out later, but I’m fine.” I hope I am. “I need to go. Keep resting. We’ll just be a moment.”
I turn away from him quickly, because I can’t stand to see his expression anymore. It’s a little tired, a little pained, a little lost. It’s like he’s trying to reach out to me, and I’m smacking his hand away.
Lydea and Japha have twin “you’d better explain” looks on their faces, but they continue down the hall without another word. They obviously don’t want to speak in front of Ivrilos, and they don’t know if he’s gone. I don’t know, either, because I refuse to look back as I follow them.
I refocus on our purpose here. Finding Delphia, learning from her, and eventually getting her—and the rest of us—out of this city. None of that has anything to do with Ivrilos.
We walk the rest of the way in heavy silence, the jawless skulls around us somehow adding to the weight of it.
“It should be just in here,” Lydea murmurs, reaching the black door at the end of the hall.
Delphia should be just in here.
And she is, as we open the door onto a strange, dim room. The glasslike walls are all dressed in black. The only furnishing, if you can call it that, marring the equally smooth, dark floor is a raised stone slab. Luckily there’s not a body on it. Only a lone sconce burns on one wall, casting barely enough light to see by. This room is much like the one I found myself in—or at least my spirit in—when I was first bound to Ivrilos. Delphia’s cloud of white hair is like a torch in the darkness, even half-tucked in the cowl of her death shroud. Her silver eyes are wide.
In the Ravenous Dark Page 22