The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  Be careful. Wait for me.

  Forever if I must.

  She broke away quickly, racing backward along the fragile tendril that connected her to flesh and life: She had no more time. The tendril was already beginning to disintegrate as she poured herself back into her flesh, and the darkness and the cold and the dullness of her senses and the acuteness of her pain enveloped her. She felt fire in her lungs, and pulled in a hard, harsh breath, and let it out and pulled in another. She fought her way back into her flesh, a butterfly fighting its way back into the prison of its cocoon. The beauty of the place she left behind faded, and the memories she’d brought back with her shimmered into nothingness as if they were no more substantial than beams of light cast upon smoke.

  She knew that she had something terribly important to do. She knew that Hasmal was dead. And she knew that she could have been with him, but had returned instead.

  She woke, weeping.

  • • •

  Kait swallowed nervously and licked her lips. The gemstone glyphs lay beneath her fingers, their inscriptions now meaningful to her, their combinations something she knew with the assurance of a thousand years of certainty. Caffell was first. Initiation. She pressed the carved ruby, and it depressed with a soft click. A light sparkled through the gemstone she’d pressed from inside. The Mirror made a soft, whispering sound, and a swirl of mist formed at the base of the column and began to spiral upward slowly through the soulwell.

  You’re doing fine, Kait, Dùghall assured her. I’m with you.

  I know, Uncle. But this is . . . She faltered.

  Terrifying.

  Terrifying, she agreed.

  She located benate—marked in bloodstone—and tirrs—of inlaid jade. She depressed the first, then the second. Again the soft clicks, again the tiny lights that shone through the pressed gemstones. A faint scent of honeysuckle appeared and soft golden light rippled through the column of mist and flowed upward.

  Her mouth was dry, her palms itched. She shifted from left foot to right, then back. Dùghall’s comforting presence filled her, but could not take away the terror she felt at the stirring of the ancient Dragon magics beneath her fingertips. She felt as if she were waking a monster, one that could, when fully awake, turn and devour her without even pausing to consider what it did.

  She did not understand how she could have ever believed the Mirror of Souls was anything but evil. The slimy touch of its magic licked across her skin, and she shuddered. She had wanted a miracle—had wanted her family restored to her from the dead—and she’d been so desperate to believe anything that might make that miracle happen that she’d made herself blind. She wondered if evil so often succeeded for just that reason—that it made itself seem necessary, that it held out hope to desperate people like a sweet-ice on a stick.

  She breathed shallowly and closed her eyes. The memories of strangers played behind her closed eyelids, and she watched them carefully. From Crispin’s mind, she saw tens of thousands of innocent people gathered in the parnissery squares across the city when he activated the Mirror. She saw it connecting through magic to the towers of the Ancients scattered across the city, and saw the blinding blue light of immense power pouring out of the Mirror and tearing across the skies. Through Dafril’s memories she made sense of that picture—she discovered that the Mirror drew its power from the life-forces of those who had crowded into the squares, and used that enormous power to force the souls of the Dragons’ chosen victims out of their bodies and to insert the Dragons’ souls and hold them in place. The Mirror had been working since then to hold those huge energies steady, as if it were a dam holding back floodwaters.

  She was about to open the floodgates, and though she had Dafril’s knowledge of what ought to happen then, she also had his awareness that the Mirror had only been used once—neither he nor anyone else knew for certain that their theories were right.

  She opened her eyes. “I think you need to step out of the room,” she told Ian.

  He stirred from the place he had taken against the wall directly behind her. “I’m not going to leave you in here alone with that thing,” he said.

  She could smell his fear as clearly as she could smell her own. She cared about him—he was her friend, even if she couldn’t love him the way he wanted. She said, “I don’t want you to die unnecessarily if this doesn’t work.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “Please . . . I’ll be able to focus on this better if I’m not worried that something might happen to you.”

  “Kait. . . .” He stepped into her line of sight. He was frowning. “I understand what you’re saying, but I can’t leave you alone. I can’t. You don’t know what will happen, so you can’t know whether or not you might need me. So I have to stay.”

  She couldn’t tell him that he was wrong. He was correct when he said she didn’t know. So she nodded and said, “Thank you, Ian.”

  He pressed his lips together and retreated to his place behind her against the wall; he’d said nothing, but she could guess at his thoughts.

  She rested her palms on the rim of the Mirror. The next three buttons she pushed would reopen the connection between the Mirror of Souls and the souls of the Dragons.

  They lay in a neat cluster to her right, marked with the glyphs pethyose and neril and inshus. Modulate, gather, and set-hold. She pressed golden cat’s-eye, glittering jacinth, and pale aquamarine—and then she held her breath.

  Again the soft clicks, again the light shining through the depressed hieroglyphs. The soft whispering sound that emanated from the Mirror rose in volume and pitch, and a faint breeze stirred the air in the room. The light from the soulwell intensified, and began to take on a greenish cast. She began to think she could almost catch individual words in that soft, steady whispering. Gooseflesh rose on her arms and a bead of icy sweat rolled down her neck, slid along her spine, and left her shivering in its wake. The room felt both hot as a furnace and cold as death.

  She could hear Ian breathing rapidly. She felt her own blood bounding through her veins as if racing for a way out. The energy that swirled in the pool of light in the center of the Mirror of Souls felt heavy, hungry, and watchful.

  And she was going to have to embrace it. She had to let it use her body as a lightning rod—she had to ground that swirling green fire.

  She sought the glyph peldone—draw—and let one index finger hover over it. She found galoin—reverse—and placed her other index finger over that. Pressing both together would reverse the direction that the souls had flowed before, and would draw them back to the Mirror. With them would come all the energy that had been stolen from the lives of the Iberan people. That energy would, if Dafril’s theory was correct, leap from the Mirror of Souls to the nearest available living body, and from that body would stream back to the places from which it had come. It might be a violent process. It might destroy her. It had never been attempted before, so not even the memories of the Dragon Dafril could offer her reassurance.

  Dùghall said, I’m still with you, Kait. I’ll be with you no matter what happens.

  She sent him her love, and jabbed her fingers against the two jeweled hieroglyphs simultaneously.

  The green light changed to hypnotic, brilliant blue. She felt the slight breeze in the room become a rush of wind, and felt the wind pulling against her, tugging her nearer to the twisting column of light that burst upward through the ceiling and down through the floor. The whispering became shouts inside her skull. She felt the building around her begin to tremble, and saw ghostly forms erupt from the walls. The room filled with fog, cold and damp and thick as baled cotton. It swirled around the Mirror of Souls and fed itself into the column of light, and the scent of honeysuckle became a gagging, thick miasma overlaid by the sweet rottenness of decay—the scent which she’d learned was the smell of Dragon magic. The fog in the room kept her from seeing anything but the blue light that rose like a sword from the Mirror. But she heard crackling and rumbling in the dist
ance—thunder and lightning, coming closer with the speed of a cyclone’s wind.

  The walls shook, the floor shook, and to the invisible accompaniment of ten thousand tortured screams, a cascade of blue light poured into the Mirror and burst from it, slamming into Kait like a man-sized fist. Her arms flew out to her sides, her legs pushed away from each other so hard that both her hips made cracking sounds, her lower jaw snapped open and stretched wider and wider, her fingers pushed away from each other, her hair stood on end, her eyeballs pushed outward as if they would crawl from their sockets and flee. Every joint in her body stretched and pulled, as if her bones could no longer stand each other’s company.

  She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move, she couldn’t scream. Thousands of arrow-thin bolts of blue light erupted from her body and shot outward in all directions. Fire burned beneath her skin; screaming deafened her, thunder shook her, dust fell from the ceiling. Pain racked her; her sight dimmed from lack of oxygen; she began to die.

  Then the blue fires pouring out of her weakened; first a few wavered and disappeared, and many in a rush, and finally the last dozen straggling bolts.

  She sucked air into her tortured lungs and collapsed to the floor, pain consuming her. She rolled into a ball and stared at nothing, and her vision began to clear.

  The fog around her thinned. The blue light dimmed. She held her breath. The screaming faded back to soft, steady whispering. And the last of the fog gathered itself by wisps and tatters into the column of light—Kait could only think of a giant sucking in smoke as she watched it swirling into the center of the room and vanishing.

  The last of the light flowing into the Mirror seemed to crawl down itself, pressing and shrinking and squeezing to fit as it slipped inward. It filled the soulwell and spiraled around the basin of the Mirror of Souls again. It wasn’t the same as it had been before she pressed the hieroglyphs, however. It felt at that moment the way it had when she found the Mirror back in the ruins in North Novtierra. It felt full, and she hadn’t been aware of the difference until right then.

  Now the whispers were clear—dozens of them, maybe even a hundred, all scrabbling at the same time, all fighting to reach her mind. When she felt for the energy that she needed to shield herself from those evil whispers, it was there, and she drew a shield around herself, and then around Ian. She knew what those voices had to say. She knew, and she wouldn’t listen again.

  It worked, Dùghall told her. By all the gods, it worked. We’re saved and the Dragons are defeated.

  Then she felt Dùghall react with surprise—the connection that bound him to her changed in shape and form, and a spirit that was not her and was not Dùghall moved through her and shimmered out of her fingertips, making the leap to the Mirror of Souls. Behind her, Ian hissed and drew his sword; she backed away from the Mirror. The smooth surface of the pool of light began to curve inward on itself, rising into a round bubble that stretched after a moment into an oblong, and then developed indentations that became eyes and a mouth, and protrusions that shaped themselves into a nose and ears. Kait’s heart began to race.

  “Kait,” the face in the center of the Mirror said, “it’s me. Hasmal.”

  “Hasmal?”

  Dùghall said, That was Hasmal. I left him with Alarista, but that was him.

  Hasmal said, “You aren’t done yet. You’re only where you would have been if we could have gotten the Mirror to Glaswherry Hala without the Sabirs getting it.”

  She nodded. “I know. I’m going to release the souls into the Veil.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then Ian and Ry and I are going to hide the Mirror in Galweigh House.”

  “Not good enough. How many people would willingly ignore the promise of immortality—of godhood? If you permit the Mirror of Souls to exist, someday someone else will use it.”

  “The Dragons are captured. Soon they’ll be gone forever. No one else knows how to build an immortality engine, or how to use the Mirror.”

  “I do,” Hasmal said. “Dùghall does. You do.”

  She started to protest that of course she didn’t know that. But she discovered that in fact she did. She knew everything the leader of the Dragons had known; she could make herself a god. She could make Ry and Dùghall and Hasmal and Alarista gods. They could live forever.

  They could live forever.

  She stared at the Mirror of Souls, feeling her skin prickle, tasting the scent of honeysuckle and rot growing stronger all around her. She knew the magic to stave off death. She knew, as well, its horrible price. She could feel the stain of the Dragon’s soul within her, could feel the marks branded into it by the annihilation of uncounted other souls.

  In her mind, Dùghall said, It could be used for evil, Kait, but it could be used for good, too. Consider Hasmal. We need him to rebuild, Kait. And Alarista needs him. After you purge the Mirror of the Dragons’ souls, you could use it one final time to put Hasmal into Crispin Sabir’s body. You could give him his life back.

  The Mirror drew its magic from the lives of others. She considered that. She knew how it worked. She could draw energy for the spell only from those who had hurt others. The Sabir Wolves, murderers, thieves, rapists and torturers and pedophiles. Maybe slavers. Maybe . . .

  She felt herself standing at the edge of an abyss. She didn’t let herself look too closely at the gaping void beneath her feet. She said, “Hasmal, I could give you Crispin’s body. You could be with Alarista again.”

  His image stilled. For a time that seemed like an eternity, he hung suspended above the Mirror, silent, unmoving, unblinking.

  “Oh, Vodor Imrish,” he whispered, “I would give almost anything to be with her. You cannot know. . . .”

  Dùghall spoke into her mind. Tell him I need him. I’m but one, and so many of the other Falcons are dead—I need someone to help me.

  Kait relayed the message, her voice quavering.

  Again he was silent for a long time. “I can’t lie, Kait. I want to come back. You don’t know what it’s like to know that this thing could put me into a strong young body and give me another chance with Alarista. You don’t know what it’s like to move beyond the Veil and know that another flesh-life waits for me, with its forgetfulness and struggle and pain and the truth that no matter when or where I find Alarista again, she won’t be Alarista anymore. And I won’t be Hasmal.” He paused, then said, “I love her. I want so much to be with her now. Not later, not different. Right now.”

  Kait felt a lump growing in her throat. She swallowed hard.

  “I found the love I hungered for my whole life.” A wry smile crossed his face. “I found a measure of courage, too, there at the end.” He paused, and she saw remembered pain move across his face like clouds across the sun. “But it did end. My body died, and I can’t get that back. Any other body I had . . . would be stolen. Right now, a little of that courage I found is still with me. While I can remember what is right and what is wrong, and while I still care, you have to listen to me. Shut down the Mirror. Shut it down, and when the Dragon souls are gone, destroy it. Don’t give Dragon magic another chance to get free.”

  “What about you?” she asked. Her voice came out as a croak. “Isn’t there some way I can save you?”

  “There is,” he said softly. “You can let me go. And I can be man enough to leave.”

  He started to dissolve. Kait was having a hard time breathing. “Wait! I have so much I want to say to you.”

  He was shaking his head. “We’re friends, Kait. Friends don’t need words. But you need to hurry. This may be the most important thing you’ll ever do, for me or for Matrin.”

  She clenched her hands to her sides and dug her nails into her palms and did not allow herself to weep. She stood straight, and she said, “We’ll always be friends. Good-bye, Hasmal.”

  He vanished without a ripple into the light.

  She stared at the Mirror of Souls, at the gleaming metal petals that arched up to form the basin for the pool of light, a
t the graceful stems that surrounded the soulwell beneath, at the array of jeweled hieroglyphs before her.

  Shut it down.

  Other heads began to rise from the pool of light, panic-ridden faces that screamed, “You can’t shut it down,” and light-formed hands that reached for her and through her, trying to fend her off.

  She was shielded, safe from them.

  They’d planned for their own protection—shutting down the Mirror had been designed to be difficult. But a way existed, in case something went wrong. And one person could shut it down, because in an emergency, perhaps only one person would be able to do what had to be done.

  There were three buttons that had to be pushed in unison—three that required the awkward stretching of one hand, the careful jab of the other. She pressed the three, and the Dragons in the Mirror of Souls erupted from the pool of light, clawing for her eyes and heart with ghostly hands, lunging for her throat with insubstantial jaws agape and teeth bared. Some screamed, some pled, some offered her anything if she would just return them to their bodies, to their new lives. They promised to change their ways, to do good things, to make Calimekka a better place.

  The three buttons clicked.

  She lifted both hands, and they stayed depressed. She knew that they would only hold for an instant. She steeled herself and reached through the mass of frantic ghosts to the other side of the bowl, and there found the button that meant nothing. Almost hidden beneath the edge of the most distant petal, unadorned, plain, it was a small onyx circle that anyone who didn’t know better would have overlooked entirely.

  She pressed it, and the ghosts only had time to scream, “No!”

  Then the light that danced its stately dance through the heart of the Mirror of Souls flickered out. And was gone.

  The smell of honeysuckle and rot vanished as if it had never been. The pressure of evil vanished, too. The weight of the presence of Dragons who had dared to name a world their prey and dared to stalk it across a thousand years fell into nothingness, without sound, without light, without spectacle.