Stacy snorted in open scorn, but the scorn faded as some unseen third party lectured her. It wasn’t the old man; the old man was front and center and staring at Carver with something that almost resembled approval. Grudging, harsh approval, and not in great quantity, either.
The stone of the earthen floor began to rise. Or so it seemed to Carver.
But no—no. The altar and the three that now surrounded it, having reached the dais on which it had been constructed, began to sink.
Chapter Twenty-Five
CARVER KNEW PEOPLE WHO were afraid of being buried alive. He wasn’t one of them, but briefly regretted his dismissal of their fears. Where the cathedral had—until the arrival of the demon—been a structure of light and almost open space, the altar and the dais now descended into the earth itself; the soil, dark and hard with the icy chill of Winter, gained height until it was far above Carver’s head. He looked up; he could not tell if the opening that had been rectangular to start was so high above where they now stood it could only barely be seen, or if the earth itself had closed the gap, sealing them in.
Or sealing the demon out. Carver wondered if the earth hadn’t considered leaving most of its visitors in the cathedral and burying the demon instead; it was what he would have done.
Light, however, began to flicker to life around the corners of the altar; it implied fire, but there was no fire here. No, he thought, there wouldn’t be. Fire was the demon’s weapon at the moment, the demon’s power; Carver couldn’t imagine that the wild earth would condescend to use it.
In the glowing light, Anakton was golden. His eyes, however, were silver; so much so that they appeared to be all white.
“Do you trust him?” Stacy asked, as the last of the distant light above guttered.
“Does it matter? If we stay above, we’re dead.”
“You don’t think she can kill him?”
“I don’t think she can survive him for long, never mind kill. But she comes and goes, and there’s every chance that she’ll just step out of the battle.” Literally. “I think she came to buy us enough time that the earth could protect us.”
Ellerson cleared his throat. He started to speak and stopped as the roar of the demon shook the earth. Carver might have considered it the sound of a natural disaster, but there was, about the demonic voice, something that implied music: a dirge, sung too soon after loss, when anger and bewilderment reigned.
It was a pain he recognized. He shuddered, looking up into the darkness of earth and stone. He could no longer see the demon, but it didn’t matter; the earth reverberated with the song of his rage, his pain.
Carver remembered his dead then.
Duster was easiest to remember because he should have been with her. Guilt added dimension and weight to that loss, that death. But conversely, there was a kind of peace as well: Duster had chosen her death. Duster’s life had bought the time required to save everyone else.
But Lefty? Fisher? Lander? No. They had died—Jay was certain they had died—their fates beyond death unknown.
What loss moved demons to cause them to scream in such pain? For he felt, listening, that the losses that had shadowed his life were mere echoes of the demon’s loss. Stories of demons—children’s stories, as adult facts were considered forbidden knowledge and therefore seldom discussed—made demons out to be creatures of petty malice, evil, hate.
Yet it was only the loss of the loved that had caused Carver anything resembling what he now heard in the demon’s voice.
Duster said—frequently—that love was weakness. Not “a” weakness; nothing to qualify it. He had assumed, as they’d all assumed, that she referred to the vulnerability created when one’s defenses were lowered. Love caused that. He was certain that she’d even meant it that way. If you loved, you could be betrayed. If you loved, you could be stabbed in the back because you were stupid enough to expose that back.
Love. Weakness.
Carver had argued—anyone who was willing to argue with Duster had argued—that it wasn’t love that was the weakness. It was the choosing of who to love. Of where to spend the vulnerability and the hope. He could love Jay. He could love Finch. Teller. Angel, even, although he came later. He could love Arann, the gentle giant. He could—and did, he realized—love Duster, and no one smart did that.
But listening, he thought she’d spoken truer than they knew, and for different reasons.
This pain was caused by loss. And the loss itself was not, could not be, felt in the absence of love.
Perhaps demons were evil because of the death of that love, the loss of it. Or perhaps they were evil because they, like the Arianni, remembered everything so clearly the passage of time didn’t dull the edge of pain and allow the happier memories to finally surface. To shine. They were caught, forever, in the moment of loss, and they would never be free of its enormity.
Demons were hate. That’s what the stories said. Hate was evil.
But if hate was evil, they were all, on bad days—or bad months—evil. The difference was what hate drove them to do, or what they allowed hate to drive them to; the difference was in the reach of their respective power.
He realized he didn’t understand demons.
And he realized, in the end, that it didn’t matter. Judge them, fail to judge them, demons were like sentient hurricanes, sentient earthquakes. They were death to be around, death to be caught up in, caught by.
“He’s crying,” Stacy said, her face turned up, as Carver’s had been.
“Yes,” Carver replied.
“Do you know why he’s crying?”
He looked down to meet her very serious gaze. The pain, the sorrow, made her uncomfortable, but that was fair; it made Carver uncomfortable as well. He shook his head to clear it.
“It doesn’t matter why.”
She frowned. “If you knew—if she knew—maybe we could do something. Maybe we could make him feel better.”
“He’d tear off our limbs. Slowly. Or worse. There’s nothing we can do that could make him feel better.”
“But don’t you want to try?”
“No. Demons killed my friends. If it were up to demons, they’d kill everyone I’ve ever known or loved, and they’d laugh while they were doing it.”
“You know what my mom says?”
“No. What does your mother say?” Besides wake up. Wake up, Stacy.
“That it’s pain that makes people crazy. I thought that was stupid, but now I’m not sure.” Her gaze was turned up, and she closed her eyes. “I don’t like her.”
It took Carver a moment to understand that the her in question was not her mother, which was the other reason it was sometimes difficult to talk to children; they didn’t always remember that communication was the art of telling someone who was not them things that they knew. But no, she meant Evayne.
“Why?”
“She’s trying to hurt him.”
“She’s trying,” Carver replied, “to keep him off balance. She’s trying to stop him from thinking, because if he doesn’t think, he’ll make mistakes.”
“But she’s just hurting him more.”
“Yes. Because he can kill her. He can kill any of us easily. He’s already proved that. None of us matter to him.”
“Do you think demons want to cause pain because they’re in pain?”
“Probably. But it doesn’t matter why, in the end. What we want is not to be in pain. Or dead. Yes, he’s hurt.” Carver couldn’t deny that and didn’t bother to try. Stacy already had at least one parent; he didn’t need to fill that role. “But Evayne would be doing the same thing if he wasn’t: she’d be trying to survive. She’d be trying to keep his attention for as long as she can, because if he’s thinking about her, he’s not thinking about the rest of us.”
“But—” She fell silent, but her attention was no longer on the demon. It was directed at the old man.
“Don’t you have something you should be doing?” the old man asked, his voice a snap of annoyanc
e.
“Oh, probably.” This caused Stacy to snicker, and as the old man was unlikely to be any more disgusted, Carver considered that a win.
Truthfully, though, he had no idea what he was now supposed to be doing. None. He stood in front of the fallen altar, with its invisible blood—invisible to his eyes, at any rate—and didn’t know.
Evayne never arrived without a reason.
Carver exhaled and turned to Ellerson. “Can you see any way to actually detach the light?”
“No. I’m not certain it’s necessary. I believe if light is required, light will be provided.” The earth shook. Chunks of it fell from the height of a tunnel that was narrowing.
“Do you think he can break through to us?”
“Were he a different creature, I would say no.” Which meant yes, which was also Carver’s guess. Carver turned to look down at Anakton, who was almost squirming in place. “Well?”
“The leaf. The altar.”
But Carver shook his head. “That’s not the way this works,” he said.
“It’s exactly the way it works!”
“It’s the way you want it to work, yes. But I’m not you, and it might not be what I want. Or what I’d be happy with, in the end.”
Anakton didn’t give a rat’s ass about Carver’s happiness. Which was fair; Carver wasn’t terribly concerned with Anakton’s, either.
“I don’t like him,” Stacy said, as if he’d spoken aloud.
Carver did not reply. Anakton could, in theory, hear the voices of the trapped, but unless he wanted to destroy the leaf, he couldn’t do anything about it. He could, however, make Carver’s life more difficult.
“More difficult than this?” Stacy asked, which answered the question he hadn’t asked.
“I’m still breathing,” Carver replied.
“So are we.”
He stopped, then, to catch the flicker and shift of her expression. He bowed his head. “Stacy, can you wake up?”
“I haven’t tried.”
But the old man said, “No. Of the dreamers, Stacy is the one most likely to dream without warning or notice. She takes to it, and to the dreaming knowledge, far better than an old man like me, but she cannot shed it completely on waking.”
“Could she, when she first woke?”
Stacy turned a glare on the old man. “I can,” she told them both. “. . . I can. But it’s hard to wake, sometimes.”
“Was it hard to wake before?”
She nodded. “But it’s not that—I can hear her crying, when I’m awake.”
“But not when you’re dreaming?”
“Not mostly. It’s been harder, though. I think she’s crying all the time. Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes I can hardly hear her at all. But—I tried to tell her it’s all right. I tried. Sometimes, if my mother cries, she stops when I hug her. But I can’t hug Jewel. She doesn’t even see me. She doesn’t know I hear her.”
Carver hesitated. He glanced at Ellerson, who seemed content to wait; he glanced up, at darkness, when the demon roared again, and then down to Stacy. He swallowed. “She doesn’t know,” he agreed, changing the tone and texture of the words. “If she knew, I think she would never stop crying.”
Stacy shook her head; her flyaway hair seemed to catch in a breeze that did not exist for Carver. “She doesn’t see us.” This was not the first time she had said this.
“No—but Stacy, if she did, she would know that you’re trapped. By her.”
Stacy nodded. “But the old man says it’s the right thing. He says that it’s only because of us that she has a chance to do what must be done.”
“What must be done?” Carver asked, his voice dropping in volume. The demonic roars did not prevent his words from reaching her.
“She has to save the city. She has to save my mother. And our dog.” Her voice got smaller. “I’m scared.”
The old man looked down at her, his expression cracking enough to reveal something other than dour irritation. It was gone before she could see; it was almost gone before Carver did.
“My mother will cry.”
Carver nodded, throat tight. He had never been good with tears; they made him awkward, uncertain. But she was a child. He reached for her, open-armed.
It was hard to tell who was more surprised when his arms enfolded her: Stacy or Carver himself. But Ellerson’s expression grew stiffer, more remote, when Carver glanced at him. No, at them.
Ellerson could see Stacy.
Stacy did cry. She cried for a long time. Her tears, however, were cold; Carver felt them as a patch of ice growing across his chest. It didn’t matter.
“Master Carver,” Ellerson said, when Stacy’s tears had stopped. “You are shivering.”
He was. The cloak that protected him from the Winter wasn’t proof against Stacy’s tears and the chill they engendered. Stacy quieted while Anakton fumed and a demon raged above them. The ceiling, such as it was, shook; the stone beneath his feet shook at the same time. The whole of the earth seemed to vibrate with the pain, the fury, the majesty—even in death—of Darranatos.
Carver trusted Jay. He had not understood why she was so terrified of herself, of her own future actions.
Not until now.
If she could do this to Stacy—to all the dreamers, although admittedly he was less concerned about the old man—without being aware of what she was doing, she had every right to be terrified. Every right to be fearful. She could be monstrous without intent. Without conscious choice.
“You are not helping,” the old man snapped.
Carver looked at him over Stacy’s head, his arms hard curves around her. “Truth is truth.”
“Master Carver,” Ellerson said again.
Carver nodded; he was cold. He thought he might never be warm again, although the howl of winter wind no longer touched him. “There’s a hall,” he said quietly.
“I do not see it.”
“It’s down the nave. Where we entered.” He glanced once at the altar, and once at Anakton, who seemed frozen in place, but nonetheless quivering in what might be indignation. He disentangled his arms, but Stacy caught his hand. He didn’t have the heart to refuse her.
“I’m Stacy,” Stacy then said to Ellerson.
“I am Ellerson, Master Carver’s domicis.”
“Not just his.”
“Ah, no.”
“I’m dreaming,” she said. “This is a dream. I think I liked the church better. Where are we going?” she then asked Carver.
“That way.”
“I don’t think we should.”
“I’d like to get farther away from the altar, if that’s all right with you.”
She nodded. Anakton shrieked in frustration, but his voice in the small form was thinner and emptier than the voice of Darranatos above.
“Why won’t you plant it?”
“Anakton, this is Stacy. And this,” Carver added, “is Anakton.”
“I don’t like her,” Anakton said. “I don’t care what she’s called.”
“I don’t like you either.” Stacy did not stick out her tongue, but this clearly took effort.
“Do you even know who I am?”
“Don’t know and don’t care.”
Anakton swelled with rage; Carver remembered that the ancient expected and even demanded respect. Before he could intervene, Stacy said, “Are you going to save a world?”
Ellerson cleared his throat, and Stacy looked up. “It is unlikely that I will save a world. Or that Carver will. But good manners should not depend on it.”
“He was rude first!”
“Perhaps. But you can, with effort, strive to be better.”
Anakton took a swipe at Ellerson’s leg, and then stomped off down the long hall.
• • •
Ellerson was correct. Light followed their progress, and the hall, which the domicis had not seen from a distance, was illuminated as they entered it. Some of that light, however, came from Stacy. He found it disturbing; she look
ed, to his eyes, like the ghost of a child—and Ellerson had seldom encountered the ghostly. Stories, yes; myths. Legends. To Carver, Stacy did not look like a ghost, but he was once again chalky in color, and his breath was shallow.
This was the weight he carried. And Stacy was not the only person present; she was merely the only one Ellerson could now see.
He understood what Carver had been given, in some fashion; not its use, not the reason for its creation, but the weight of it. It was not a weight meant to be borne by Carver. Nor by Ellerson. By the earth, perhaps—but not this earth.
He could hear the cries of the demon grow faint, but this brought scant comfort; things that knew pain and rage thought far less clearly when in their grasp. His silence did not guarantee absence, and Ellerson was too pragmatic to believe it presaged death. The demons were considered among the dead by the earth, and even so caused nothing but destruction and pain.
• • •
The passage was more of a tunnel than a hall. Carver paused to examine the walls, and to look askance at the ceiling; he did not, however, expect that it would fall on them. Stacy didn’t care for the tunnels.
“It’s all just dirt and rock, right? I like the church better. When the demon isn’t in it,” she hastily added. “Do you think this tunnel leads to something better?”
“I’m not sure better is the right word,” Carver replied. “I know it looks like dirt and rock to you—”
“Well, and roots—that part over there, that’s the underside of trees, right?”
Carver nodded.
Anakton sneered. Since Stacy didn’t see this, he added words. “Not trees. Tree. And if you weren’t so ignorant, you’d know.” Here, in the darkness of the greater earth, he was almost white, a thing of living snow.
He reminded Carver of the cats. Or rather, their interchange did. And he wasn’t Jay, to drop a hand on the nearest head to command what passed for better behavior among the furred predators. Even if he were, he would have had to crouch to touch Anakton.
Carver touched the tree roots instead; they were warm. But so, too, the dirt of the tunnel wall. What Stacy dismissed, he couldn’t. He understood that to her eye—and admittedly, to his own—the cathedral was the grander edifice: it was worked, it was crafted, it was built as the Artisans might once have built, the perfect result of creativity, intent, execution. But it was built of the things that now rested here: ancient, living stone, living tree, the things that the earth had taken into its embrace.
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