by Will Wight
She killed his opponent without looking around, setting another pale spirit of a fireball spinning around her. Put her blades up? Why? If she did that, she wouldn’t be able to kill Elders anymore.
She looked up at the Handmaiden with the longing of a starving woman staring at a feast. It was hers. It was all hers. And the giant was wounded! Bleeding! The more time she wasted, the more strength it would lose. She had to act now if she wanted to take it.
And she did want to.
She started forward, but he begged her again. “Just sheathe it, please. I’ll teach you how to kill it.”
How? It was simple. All she had to do was kill Meia, kill any Children that got in her way, and then kill the Handmaiden. A three-step process.
But she and Syphren both recognized Lucan, even as they resented the delay. She slammed both shears into the sheaths at her back.
And a second later, when Syphren’s voice retreated to a dull whisper, the world looked much clearer.
Meia relaxed, her eyes lingering on Shera for a moment before she went about the work of clearing out Elderspawn again. Had Shera almost attacked Meia? Really? Meia could tear her limb from limb.
She shuddered, both in fear of herself and of what she had almost done.
“I...” she said, but she wasn’t sure what to say. “I don’t...”
Lucan’s eyes raised past her, and without a word he tackled her out of the way.
A tree fell where they’d been standing a second before. The Handmaiden had another in her hand, roots and all, and this time she howled before she threw it like a javelin.
Shera and Lucan rolled in different directions, but this time the tree struck at such an angle that it drove itself straight into the ground like a spear. The ground rumbled like a struck drum.
The Elder reached down and tore up another couple of trees, readying them to throw. Children skittered closer to Shera.
The two of them ran next to Meia.
“We need a plan,” Shera yelled, as they got close to the Elder’s tentacles.
Meia gestured to the Handmaiden with one hand as she punched a skeletal horse out of the way with the other. “Kill it! Do what you’ve been doing to the others!”
“Won’t work,” Shera said briefly. That would be like trying to inhale a tornado. “I have to stab it.” If the blade penetrated the Handmaiden’s flesh, it would turn the Nakothi’s power against her servant, and the Handmaiden would effectively destroy itself.
But she didn’t explain any of that out loud, nor did Meia ask for an explanation. As they closed on the tentacles through the trees, and as the Handmaiden prepared to throw another tree, Meia threw out a hand for Shera to stop.
When she did, confused, Meia scooped her up in both arms.
It was both shocking and a little embarrassing, and she couldn’t help but fight it. “What are you doing? Let me go!”
“I’m going to throw you!”
“...what?”
“I’m throwing you!”
Shera looked up the sixty feet to the top of the Handmaiden’s neck. “I’ll die. I will definitely die.”
Meia threw her.
The wind tore around her as though she’d been launched into a hurricane, and her scream was sucked into her lungs by the speed of her flight. She had expected to tumble head over heels, but she flew surprisingly straight. She supposed that was thanks to Meia’s aim.
But her flight path had at least one drawback: she could clearly see that she wasn’t going to make it to the top of the Handmaiden’s torso.
Instead, she was falling toward the creature’s bed of tentacles.
Shera managed to pull her shears as she fell, hoping that she could at least deal the Elder a blow when she hit.
Instead, one of the tentacles whipped up and grabbed her out of the air.
She hit hard, blowing all the air out of her lungs, but not as hard as she expected. She survived the impact, at least. Hands, sprouting out of the Elder’s flesh, grasped fistfuls of her clothes and every inch of her body.
And Syphren, cackling with glee, stuck into the meat of the Handmaiden’s limb.
Green light crawled out like moss spreading over a boulder, and the Elder shrieked loud enough that the sound tore at Shera’s ear.
Then Shera was falling. Again.
The giant limb had lost its strength, releasing Shera and falling limp. That allowed her to plummet on her own.
But the strength lost by the Elder had gone somewhere else.
Into Shera.
The world blazed with light and motion, and for a second Shera felt like she could see everything perfectly, as though she was focused on each individual detail all at once.
She was falling toward the Handmaiden’s other tentacles, and most of them were easily the size of thick tree branches. With enhanced reflexes, Shera landed on her feet, dashing down a tentacle as though running on a narrow bridge.
The Handmaiden lashed the limb, flailing it about and trying to knock her off, but Shera kept her balance. Green lights swarmed around her like a parade of fireflies.
A moment later, she reached the creature’s torso, a vast wall of pale and desiccated skin.
Shera raised Syphren, prepared to plunge it into the exposed flesh. The Awakened blade hissed in anticipation.
Then the Handmaiden doubled over, sticking her face in Shera’s own.
She was staring directly into the heart of everything disgusting and vile that had ever existed. A nest of writhing worms, a disemboweled corpse, a mass grave, a plague-infested heart, it all watched her from inches away. The smell alone was enough to make her retch, but she couldn’t look away, couldn’t tear her eyes from the horror.
The Handmaiden spoke into her heart, but it was nothing that she could translate into words. She spoke hatred, death, bile, a thousand twisted torments and a million exploitations of human flesh.
Distract us? Syphren whispered, sounding amused. We are your death.
Once more, Shera’s thoughts grew cold.
The Handmaiden’s shock tactic only worked if she thought of those pieces as people. She didn’t. The people were dead, and what was left was nothing more than garbage.
Shera was here to kill this thing. That was it. That was all she needed to know.
There was nothing left to think about.
Shera plunged her Awakened blade straight into the center of the Handmaiden’s head.
A shriek obliterated thought, Syphren laughed like a madman, and the Dead Mother screamed from somewhere out on the Aion. An emerald light swallowed Shera’s vision.
The next thing she knew, she was falling. Meia caught her.
Lucan jogged up next to them a second later. “I’ll catch you next time,” he said. “Just don’t fall from quite so high up.”
Meia snorted, carrying Shera away. “Don’t hurt yourself. Leave it to me.” Her eyes were back to normal, and she carried Shera with no trouble, but her steps were weak. She had to be exhausted, maybe even more so than Shera herself.
Tired? Who’s tired? Shera wasn’t tired, she realized. She felt great. She wanted to jog around the Island once or twice to burn off some of this excess energy. Why was she letting someone else carry her?
She started to say so, but then Lucan peeled Syphren out of her hand and shoved the blade into her sheath.
“Get some sleep,” he said gently.
That was all she remembered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
When a world dies, it starts to decay. It breaks into fragments, and these fragments float on an empty sea: splitting, changing, and merging with one another. They will fade forever, until they latch onto a healthy, inhabited world…or until there’s nothing left.
Living inhabitants can sometimes survive the death of their world. They’re often twisted, grotesque, and powerful beings, forever altered by their exile to the void.
Something very much like your Elders, in fact.
-The Unknown Wanderer, from Observations of
the Unknown Wanderer
(Held in the Architect Council’s secret archives)
A group of Shepherds, Masons, and Architects hurried over as soon as the Handmaiden toppled, fighting their way through the maddened Children of Nakothi to provide aid. Lucan started to explain the situation to them, but Meia simply handed Shera over with a polite request for medical attention.
Then she left. There was one more thing she’d left undone.
She limped and staggered her way back toward Lucan’s prison, so exhausted that she didn’t remember half the trip. Her body raged at her, muscles screaming in pain and writhing for control, but she didn’t give them an inch.
Everyone seemed to have forgotten, but Calder Marten had escaped.
Calder Marten, the Navigator who had brought the Heart here in the first place. The one who had been working against them all along. The one whose wife was a member of the Sleepless.
If Shera hadn’t caused all this, it was a good bet that one of the Martens had. And they would stand trial for it if she had to drag them before the Council of Architects herself.
If Calder’s wife was in her cage, Meia would stand guard and make sure she could be brought to trial. If she wasn’t, Meia would hunt her down.
She may have felt like she was going to collapse at any second, but Meia never left a task undone. Besides, she still had more than enough strength to overpower a merely human opponent.
Meia found the trap door leading down to the prison standing open, the stairs lit. She followed them down, and even the second door—the one within the tunnel, the one that should have been guarded—was standing open.
She didn’t visit this underground prison often, certainly not as often as Shera did, but she was surprised to see the far end choked with debris. It must have collapsed under the Handmaiden’s weight.
Lucan’s cell seemed intact, if dirty, but the one next door had hundreds of pounds of earth and stone spilling out of it. If Mrs. Marten had been in there, she was dead.
And Calder looked like he knew it.
He stood with eyes closed and hand stretched out, obviously Reading for a glimpse of his wife.
This was too good of an opportunity to miss.
Meia pulled her shear quietly, sneaking down the hall toward him. Her knees felt as though they would buckle, so she had to move even slower than usual or risk breaking him out of his trance, but he was gone. There was no way he’d hear her.
She was weaker than she’d thought; she couldn’t drag him to trial if he resisted. She hadn’t brought any non-lethal needles with her, and he would be too heavy for her to carry in her condition.
Well, that was fine. She was a Gardener, after all.
She slashed at the base of his jaw with her shear, intending to spill his blood on the stones. He must have felt her coming, because he jerked back, bending all the way backwards at the waist.
Meia leaped after him, drawing her second shear in the same motion…
Or she tried to.
Her legs locked up, the Kameira within her resisting her control. Her body screamed at her to rest. She staggered to the side instead, propping herself up with one hand.
Just because she couldn’t control her limbs was no reason to give up. She had a mission to complete.
“You…will not…escape,” she said between breaths.
Maybe he would give up.
Calder looked at her for a moment, horror and pity mixed on his face. He looked as though he was about to rush her to a surgeon, not attack.
I must look three days dead, she thought. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea.
Then his expression firmed, and he pulled his orange-and-black sword. “You should have checked behind you,” he said.
The words took a moment to register, but when they did, she glared at him. He thought he could beat her with tricks? On the verge of collapse she might be, but she wasn’t going to put on a farce for his amusement.
A sound behind her caught her attention, like a snapping flag or flapping wings. And a voice like Othaghor himself bellowed out, “BEHIND YOU!”
There was something behind her.
She spun, bringing both shears to bear, slashing out in front of her. A pain and a white light flared in her skull.
Meia struggled weakly, but the blow and exhaustion took their toll. Her consciousness faded to black.
Her last thought: I can’t tell Shera about this.
~~~
When Shera woke, she found herself alone in the infirmary.
Over the last two weeks, she’d spent more time in the Gray Island infirmary than in the ten years prior. She’d have to be more careful. Well, considering that she was heading straight back to a desk job in the Capital, she effectively had no choice but to be careful.
The thought of working at a desk actually seemed appealing at the moment, which Shera took to mean that she needed more sleep.
But she needed answers, and she needed to relieve her bladder, and most importantly she was starving. She spent most of the next ten minutes easing herself out of bed.
It was like her body was having a contest to decide which could hurt the worst: her joints, her muscles, or her impressive collection of flesh wounds. When she pressed her feet against the floor, even the soles of her feet hurt, as though she’d bruised them.
Straightening her back was another exercise in agony, primarily because her chest, both shoulders, and her neck were all stuck in the same network of bandages. She couldn’t turn her head without causing the stiff cloth around her stomach to tighten.
Shera found her knife belt sitting on a table nearby, and she realized that someone had done to Syphren what the healers had done to her. The blade was wrapped, sheath and all, in a full case of bandages. A few bare spots of the sheath peeked out, but not a speck of the knife showed through.
After a moment’s concentration, Shera determined that she couldn’t hear a single whisper coming from the weapon. That could only be a good thing. Whatever Syphren had done to her—whether she was a Soulbound or not—she didn’t like it. It seemed complicated.
And she wanted to avoid further complications for the moment, not embrace them.
A few pointed questions led her to Lucan. From combining the stories of several passing Masons and Architects, she was able to piece together what Lucan had done during the day she’d been asleep. First, he’d invested and woven bandages around her blade to stop it from whispering. Second, he’d reported to the High Council of Architects, telling them his version of the battle against the Elderspawn.
Finally, he’d found a new prison and reported back to his cell.
It took her longer to find his new cell, as everything on the Island was hidden, and all the Consultants were still in chaos. Most of them were still panicking over the single, most obvious change: Bastion’s Veil had vanished.
The island was still surrounded by low wisps of fog, like smoke that hadn’t quite blown away yet, but the sun shone brightly on the Gray Island. Shera didn’t know what had caused it, but every single Elderspawn on the island—dead or alive—had vanished.
The Veil was supposed to protect them; well, maybe it had finally done its job. Somehow.
Shera finally tracked Lucan to an open cell at the base of a cliff. His walls were mountain rock, and the door—instead of being made entirely of bars—was a single piece of solid wood set with a small barred window at the top.
And a familiar face stood outside the door: Hansin, the same Mason guard that had watched over Lucan before. His shoulders slumped when he saw her, and his hand moved to the hilt of his sword.
An unconscious gesture, she was sure.
“Why do you always come during my shift?”
Shera held up another covered wooden bowl. She smiled as cheerily as she could, though even smiling seemed to stretch the bandages around her throat. “Because you work lunchtime!”
He sighed and backed away, giving them some semblance of privacy.
Shera cha
tted with Lucan for a while as she ate, though it took her far too long to get through all his questions about her recovery. “Should you be out of bed?” “Do the Architects know where you are?” “Do you need to be resting?” “Should you be throwing knives right now?”
But after she assured him that she was fine and recovering comfortably, he spoke about his new situation. “At least I get some fresh air,” he said, peering out the window. “And I’ll get to see the sunlight. They managed to recover most of my belongings from the old cell, so I’m right at home.”
“You went back into prison,” Shera said. She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.
He gave her what he likely intended to be a comforting smile, but it came across more sad than comforting. “I was never here because I couldn’t escape, Shera.”
Shera let that go, for the moment. She had plenty of time left to get him out. Kerian was on the High Council, and she would eventually see reason.
After that, Lucan explained the wrapping on her knife.
“I used the wrappings on Jorin Curse-breaker’s sword as a guide,” he explained. Jorin, the Regent of the South, carried around a full-sized sword wrapped in cloth everywhere he went. It looked incredibly inconvenient, and she said so.
“You won’t be able to draw it quickly,” he admitted. “And you’ll need to change wrappings every few days. Jorin should be here soon, and he might be able to come up with something that lasts longer, but this was the best I could do. At least you’ll be…yourself.”
Shera remembered the unnatural focus that had come over her at the sight of the Handmaiden. The focus, the greed, the rush of energy as she fed on the power of her enemies.
She had almost attacked Meia.
“Thank you,” she said eventually.
Nearby, Hansin cleared his throat.
She pointedly looked away from him, taking another bite of her lunch.
“Gardener,” he said, a little louder.
Shera eventually gave up and looked at him. “Is visiting hour over?”