by Will Wight
The entrance to the arena was concealed within a giant boulder, but when she finally found the right clearing, she couldn’t figure out which giant boulder. There were several to choose from. She ran from rock to rock, checking the symbols that generations of Consultants had hidden, to give those who knew where to look directions to the hidden entrances.
The sounds of slavering beasts drew closer, and Shera made a mistake: she turned to look.
The bone-spider had indeed continued to follow her, as had the bear—dragging a loop of blue intestines behind it—and a pale slug bigger than a man which she hadn’t even seen. Other things loped behind, white and blue and fused together from mismatched parts, but she didn’t stop to look.
Inches ahead of the Children of Nakothi, she slid into the boulder and jerked open the hidden door, crawling inside and tugging the door shut.
Nerve-scraping shrieks cut at her from outside, and sturdy limbs pounded at the door in impotent fury. Shera stopped in the tunnel to catch her breath, watching dust stream upward in the dim light. Anything more than four or five feet ahead still looked distorted, as though space had turned in on itself.
The Dead Mother’s laughter echoed throughout the Island, and Shera shuddered.
Had someone destroyed the Heart? Or had something else gone wrong?
Either way, her best chance of fixing it was to find the Heart, if possible. And Urzaia could lead her straight to it.
Hopefully.
~~~
The air warped in Lucan’s cell, and dust drifted from the floor to the ceiling. Worse, Nakothi’s laughter drowned out even the whisper’s from Shera’s new shear.
His head still pounded, and he was afraid to open his Reader’s senses, but he hated feeling so blind. What had happened? Had Shera destroyed the Heart? He doubted her remaining knife would be powerful enough to do it, but he’d been wrong before.
Whether this was Shera’s mistake, or a Sleepless attack, or simply a natural consequence of his Awakening Syphren on an island with the Heart of Nakothi, he didn’t know. No matter what, his first step remained the same: he needed to get out of here.
Once again, he stopped and looked at the bars on the front of his cell.
The Emperor had taught him the trick to active Reading: making physical changes to objects using nothing more than his Intent. That alone made him one of the most accomplished Readers in the Empire, with the ability to escape this cell whenever he wanted. In theory.
There were a few problems.
First, active Reading required a serious mental effort. One that he wasn’t prepared to make, suffering as he was from Reader burn. Second, destroying an object was much easier than changing it. And that tended to get...out of hand.
Even if he succeeded, he had a very real chance of bringing the whole roof down on his head. Active Reading was a lot like planting an explosive charge, and it had many of the same applications.
A wet shriek cut through the air, and the whole island shook, sending plumes of debris falling from the ceiling to match those rising from the floor. Now he certainly couldn’t risk it. If the cell was already unstable, anything he did to remove the bars might kill him.
Speaking of killing himself, he did have an equally insane option that was just as likely to result in his death.
He walked over to the bundle of blankets and folded the corner back, regarding Syphren.
The knife looked the same: like a clear slice of glass with a thousand bright green hands pressing against it like they were trying to escape.
Take, the blade whispered. Take, steal, drink, break...
It went on, dropping below audibility several times, and Lucan was doubly glad that he had his gloves on. If he could Read the Intent behind those words, he would never have the courage to do what he needed to do.
Gathering up his courage and taking a deep breath, Lucan picked up the whole bundle, gripping Syphren’s hilt through layers of blankets and his gloves.
The knife hissed. Take you! Take you, steal you, drink you, break you!
His hands trembled and weakened, cold stealing into his bones. He lifted the whole bundle, moving the blade forward awkwardly, pressing the edge of the blade against the lock between the door and the bars. The edge hissed as it met the steel, and the hands on Syphen’s blade moved more furiously.
But it didn’t cut through the steel, as he’d hoped.
He pushed down with all the strength he could gather, despite his awkward position. The more force he used, the louder the knife’s words became.
Take me to the strong one, it demanded.
Lucan ignored it, pressing against the lock.
TAKE ME!
“I’ll take you wherever you want,” Lucan muttered, icy hands shaking against the metal. “Just let me out of here.”
The blade sank half an inch into the metal.
He couldn’t believe that worked.
Hurriedly he wrapped the knife back up in its restrictive bindings, folding the blankets back over it. When it was entirely covered, its voice returned to a muted, annoying buzz in the distance.
Lucan shook out his hands, which trembled uncontrollably. The cold hadn’t gone away, but it didn’t feel like he’d carried a block of ice; rather, it felt like blood loss, as though the dagger had sliced his palms open and let him bleed.
Then he drew his foot back and stomped in the door.
At least, he tried.
Almost two years of captivity hadn’t done much for his athletic ability. He exercised as much as he could, in his cell and on the few occasions where they let him out into the hallway, but that was no substitute for active duty.
The door shook and rattled loudly, but the latch didn’t break.
The island rumbled around him again, and he gathered himself, kicking once more.
Was it his imagination, or had that kick done even less?
Lucan backed up all the way to the wardrobe at the back of the room, until his shoulder blades were pressed against its doors. He ran with all the force he could muster, striking the bars of the door with his shoulder.
Blinding, stunning pain. It felt almost as though he’d crashed straight into a metal wall. His shoulder throbbed, and he’d managed to clip the side of his skull, which had done nothing for his headache.
A moment later, another shriek came through the air, and the island shook once more. But instead of fading away into echoes, this one grew stronger. And stronger.
He was thrown off his feet and the world seemed to dissolve around him in a fury of howling sound and random color. He tumbled about like a bird in a hurricane, though he managed to grab Syphren’s bundle in all the chaos. If the knife escaped from its bindings and slid out into the hallway while Lucan was still trapped in here, he couldn’t imagine the sort of trouble it would cause.
Chunks of stone the size of his two fists together fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing him. In the far back corner of his cell, high up on the wall, another stone block fell away from the wall separating him and Jyrine.
If I went through all this trouble only to be crushed to death in my own cell...
He didn’t complete the thought. With a squeal of metal, the bars warped, the latch broke with a sharp ping, and the door swung open.
For a moment, he stared at it.
His room was covered in dust, gravel, and chunks of masonry, which distressed him more than he would have thought. He’d spent a long time keeping this room organized.
Now his door was open, and he couldn’t believe it.
He could have waited. He didn’t have to do anything with the knife, he could have just sat there and waited.
It was enough to make a grown man want to cry.
Scooping up Syphren’s bundle, Lucan started to walk out of the room. He pushed the door out of his way, and what remained of the hinges squealed loudly.
A woman shouted behind him. “Lucan! Light and life, Lucan! Can you hear me?”
Jyrine.
He stopped in place for a
second, considering. She was in danger here; if another of those earthquakes hit, she could be crushed to death with no one to save her. He could at least check her bars for weakness, perhaps see if he could weaken them with Syphren.
Then again...she was one of the Sleepless. He couldn’t release her onto the island in the middle of an Elder-related disaster. She would likely try to make things worse.
It pained him to leave her there: he could imagine being helplessly trapped as the ceiling caved in little by little, eventually crushing the air from your lungs...
“I learned a lot from you, Jyrine,” he called, hardening his heart. “I’ll be back.” Once he delivered the knife to Shera, he would come back and do what he could for Jyrine.
She slapped her palm against the wall again. “No, let me out! Lucan! Come and get me! I’m a Soulbound! If you get me to my Vessel...”
She kept shouting, but Lucan had already left.
On the way out, he found Hansin’s ring of keys sitting on a small table, next to a weighted lead chest. His breath caught.
He hadn’t dared to hope...
Fumbling with the keys, as the ground shook beneath him, he finally managed to find the right one and open the chest.
Inside, in a bundle of black, his gear sat waiting for him.
~~~
The guards occasionally let him out for exercise—it wasn’t as though he’d spent the entire last two years in the cell—but he still emerged blinking into the unexpected brightness of the sunlight. It took him a second to get his bearings.
So he had to find Shera. How, exactly, would he go about doing that?
Not for the first time, he wondered how people got anything done without a Reader’s senses. He might as well fumble around the island blindly.
Lucan considered the pain in his head. Maybe he could Read the ground a little, risking the pain.
He shook the thought away. He might need to use his powers when he reached Shera. He couldn’t waste it now. He had to do what Shera or Meia would do, and actually think the situation through.
Shera had run deeper into the labyrinth. Either she had died in a corner there, or she’d found an exit. If so, it would be...this direction.
He turned around and started to walk, coming face-to-face with a monstrosity like a six-handed man with a thousand eyes.
The jaws split in half vertically, like the mandibles of an insect, and the Child of Nakothi let out a wet, threatening whistle.
Lucan’s instincts may have rusted after two years alone, but he wasn’t that far out of shape. He drew a shear in half a second, driving it straight through the eye on the creature’s forehead and withdrawing, stepping back to avoid its death throes.
Use me... Syphren whispered. I want them. Give me their lives.
He ignored the blade, though he did pick up the speed.
He was back in his blacks again. How long had it been? Even the shroud over his mouth felt right, as though these were the clothes he was meant to wear. The weight of his shears at the back was a comfort.
Lucan felt dangerous again, competent, which was a comfort when monstrous things moved in the shadows of the woods.
He ran faster.
Finally, he came to one of the many boulder-strewn clearings on this part of the Island. Even this place looked beautiful after so long.
Nakothi’s Children, of a dozen wildly different descriptions, crawled, oozed, and lurched all over the clearing. Nearby, the body of a black-clad young woman was being dragged off into the woods by something that looked sort of like a white mantis.
At least, he hoped it was a body.
Something like a dead horse with a ridiculously elongated neck waved its head around, hissing in frustration. It dipped once again, opening its mouth to feed on something behind one of the biggest boulders in sight.
A woman shouted, and when the tall horse’s head withdrew, its lips were split open and spilling pale blood.
Lucan adjusted course. He might be looking for Shera, but he couldn’t abandon someone fighting off the Children.
The tall horse burbled through its long neck as Lucan leapt off the top of the boulder, slashing at its throat with his shear as he sailed past. He landed in a crouch as the woman stumbled forward and plunged her own bronze knife into its chest.
The woman was a Heartlander wearing a purple dress. A Mason?
Then he realized that she had used a Gardener’s shear, and he noticed the white line down the middle of her face. Not a Mason. Kerian.
She gripped her shear in obvious pain, her left arm hanging limp and useless at her side. She limped forward, dragging one leg behind her.
“Lucan,” she said, her voice tight and full of obvious pain.
Before he said a word, he shoved Syphren’s bundle into his belt, then stepped up to support Kerian’s shoulder.
“Where can I take you?” Lucan asked.
“I need to get to the Council chamber. There’s something there that might help.” She nodded toward the center of the island. “As long as you can find a way to take care of that.”
Lucan looked where she indicated and almost dropped her.
There was a monstrosity looming over the trees at the center of the Gray Island, shoulders set against a backdrop of slate-gray mist. Its chest and arms were the pale, sunless gray of a dead worm, and through the gaps in the trees, he saw that it was slithering forward on a nest of tentacles.
But its head drew him with a horrible fascination even as it repelled his gaze. It looked like a rib cage full of fish guts, or a maybe a mass of bodies all churned together...
He stopped thinking about it. The face was everything horrible he could imagine stuck on a long, flexible neck, and the more he imagined it the sicker he would get.
Kerian noticed his horror. “Did you not see it before?”
“I was looking for Shera.”
“It was my understanding that you could sense her anywhere on the Island.”
They both froze for a moment as a Child, like a small elephant, ambled past.
“I overdid it today,” he whispered. “Have to find her like an ordinary—”
He was cut off by his own realization. Syphren, which had kept up its constant whispering ever since its birth, had gone completely silent at the sight of the Handmaiden.
Lucan had been the one to Awaken the blade. He was its father, in a way, and he understood the weapon’s nature at a fundamental level.
It wasn’t silent out of fear, or respect.
This was the silence of a child presented with a present so unexpected, so huge, and so massively generous that the only appropriate response was a stunned silence.
And like that child, Syphren would eventually...
GIVE IT TO ME! TAKE ME THERE! LET ME TASTE ITS SPIRIT!
...start shouting.
Lucan had to release Kerian, stumbling into the underbrush, and pull the knife’s bundle from his waistband. Keeping it at arm’s length helped, but it only kept the volume down. Syphren was still screaming, lashing out with its own power, and writhing in its container. It wanted that Handmaiden with a pure, overwhelming desire that Lucan could only envy.
Kerian came to a stop and eyed the blanket-wrapped package. “What’s in there?” she asked.
“Shera’s knife,” he responded.
She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead and nodded.
“I don’t know where Shera is,” Kerian said. “She ran off, chasing the Heart, and I don’t know where that took her. The monsters showed up after she vanished, so she might be dead.”
His mind refused to take in that idea. He didn’t even consider it.
“But Meia should be in the arena. She was supposed to lure the Champion, Urzaia Woodsman, there and keep him occupied.” Kerian looked around her, at the destruction of the forest and the Children lunging around in the trees. “I don’t know how well that would have worked, given how things turned out, but that was the plan.”
It wasn’t as
good as having his Reading back, but at least it was something. He gathered up her shoulder again, ignoring Syphren’s hysterical shouts.
“Let’s get you to the Council chamber,” he said, but she pushed him away.
“No,” she said. “Get going. I’ll make it if I have to crawl.”
Nearby, a snake that looked like it was made entirely of a stretched-out spine raised its “head” and hissed at them, then continued on its way.
“...are you sure?”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Worry about Ayana. She’s still doing paperwork.”
~~~
Meia leaped at Urzaia, so that when he dodged, her shears were planted straight into the stone. Rock fragments burst up, slicing open her cheek, but she didn’t bother to pay attention.
The Kameira had taken control.
She’d given herself almost entirely to her body’s instincts. There was too much effort involved in the strategic approach—she had to borrow more and more from her Kameira to keep up with Urzaia.
Finally, she had given in.
Now she fought like a beast, slashing at his flanks and leaping out of harm before rushing in to snap at his throat. He seemed to enjoy this even more, judging by his frozen grin.
She was getting stronger now...but so, it seemed, was he.
The arena was shot through with cracks, from their wild blows as much as the earthquake. When one of his hatchets struck the ground it was like the wrath of a thunderstorm unleashed, blasting away a circle of debris as though a star had landed on earth.
When the Children of Nakothi arrived, she almost didn’t notice.
Something on four legs with a pair of crocodile heads came lumbering down the steps, but she was locked in Urzaia’s grip, trying to push her shears into his eyes. He held her wrists back, muscles straining, as she snarled into his face.
He laughed and looked as though he was about to say something, but then he noticed the creature she’d seen out of the corner of her eye. His expression grew somber, and he pushed her aside, waiting.
When the Child reached him, it howled with one head and struck with the other.
His hatchet blurred in a rush of black, and both heads were blasted to dry pieces.
The stench was awful to Meia’s enhanced senses, but the Kameira within her roared their approval. The weak should not interrupt a battle between the strong.