by Ted Sanders
Fear.
For all his taunting and raging, all his awful threats and sinister plans, Dr. Jericho, Ja’raka Sevlo, was afraid.
He didn’t want to die.
Joshua’s realization must have bled onto his face, because Dr. Jericho drew back angrily. Then the Mordin released him, practically tossing him aside. Joshua fell heavily to the floor, clutching at his throat.
Dr. Jericho clenched his fists, and the golems that surrounded them parted. In the room beyond, Ingrid and the sharp-eyed Mordin stood there watching, full of alarm. Past them, Isabel had risen onto her haunches, still trying to catch her breath. Grooma had wandered away from her, Aored glowing dimly in his chest, his blank eyes still on the chamber roof.
“They’re coming closer,” Ingrid called. “The Ravids—”
Dr. Jericho held up a hand, silencing her. Faintly, through the rattle of the golems, Joshua could hear the battle still raging. Coming closer. Something or someone roared furiously—an Altari? And then a familiar tearing sound, like a giant sheet of paper being torn in two.
The Humour of Obro. Gabriel was here.
“You heard the truth tonight, Joshua,” Dr. Jericho repeated, his voice low and full of sullen rage. “And here is another.”
He clasped his hands together. The golems to either side of him surged forward and became one, like two flocks of birds mingling into a single massive cloud, big as a building. The huge new mass began to ripple and heave, assuming the loose shapes of predatory beasts, shifting swiftly from one colossal form to another, suggestive but never explicit—a shape like a tiger, a dragon, a wolf, a raptor—pulsing and rippling with power. Each one seemed to seethe with the desire to crush and kill.
Dr. Jericho looked back at Joshua. “You live because we need you. I freely admit it. But the so-called friends who come for you now?” He smiled his savage smile and spoke slowly, seeming to taste each wicked word as it left his mouth. “Them I do not need.”
Chapter Seven
Approaching Thunder
THE CONCRETE TUNNELS BENEATH THE HELL PIT WERE DARK and silent. The Riven were here, all right—Chloe could smell the brimstone, but it was faint. This place wasn’t a nest. A nest meant a crucible dog, and a crucible dog meant hypnotizing green fire, sulfurous and maddening. This place, with its abandoned man-made corridors, smelled mostly of mold and wet stone and stale water.
And yes, brimstone.
Chloe had pulled out her jithandra, setting it aglow. It dangled from the chain around her neck, a shining red crystal set in a silver flower. The Alvalaithen hung just above it, looking bloody in the red light, its wings a fluttering blur that filled her with song. She was ready for anything. They were all ready.
Dailen led the way downward—the real Dailen, or at least the original Dailen, the one who held the compass that would point them to Mr. Meister. Chloe couldn’t see the young Altari up ahead because Gabriel was next in line, carrying the Staff of Obro, and he’d released the humour. The humour, a featureless gray cloud on the inside and a terrible place to be, couldn’t been seen at all from the outside, appearing instead as a wrinkle of unsight. Chloe’s eyes slipped queasily across it whenever she tried to look straight ahead, so she kept her gaze elsewhere. The rest of the group walked with her, including seven other Dailens, each identical. They were all Dailen, all the same consciousness, all aggravatingly handsome. Beautiful, actually, even if Chloe hated her mind for conjuring up the word. It was easier not to think it, though, with Teokas gliding effortlessly at her side, beyond beautiful.
Behind them, Ravana held her bow at the ready, and giant Go’nesh had his Fairfrost Blade. These two had also revealed their jithandras, and their light mingled with Chloe’s—somber bronze from Ravana and a bluish silver from Go’nesh. The Altari’s jithandras were larger than those from the Warren, and set in a cluster of bare black branches, but they seemed to work the same. The light of the three jithandras cast dozens of shadows along the smooth walls, as if a horde were passing. Chloe wasn’t much for teams, but right now she felt pretty fierce, pretty happy not to be alone. This was a proper war party.
“Don’t look at Thailadun, by the way,” Teokas said suddenly. She wiggled her hand, indicating the mysterious Tan’ji that dangled from her wrist. “I’ll try to be careful when I unveil it, but you should make an effort not to look.”
“Why?” Chloe asked. “Will I turn to stone or something?”
Teokas shrugged, somehow managing to make the gesture look flirtatious. “Not permanently,” she said, her voice like silken petals. “But it’s not fun.”
Chloe was mulling that over when the seven Dailens, who’d been marching in lockstep, suddenly stopped all in the same instant. If he wanted to, Dailen could have made each version of himself do or say its own thing—his consciousness flickering from one to the next faster than the frames of a film—but Chloe gathered it was rather easier for him to not bother, to let them all move in unison as they were now.
It was also creepy as all get-out.
“Stairs,” the Dailens said quietly, seven voices hissing into the hallway. Seven pairs of eyes gleamed, platinum halos shining around black irises. “To the left and the right. I can’t tell from the compass which way is best.”
“Let us split up,” said Ravana.
“Fine,” the Dailens said, and all seven of them stepped to the right in perfect synchrony. As they stepped, they doubled, and another row of Dailens materialized. Now there were fourteen Dailens in the hallway, plus the original, somewhere ahead beyond the humour. Chloe remembered that fifteen was the maximum Dailen could manage. There were sixteen flat tiles on Floriel, Dailen’s Tan’ji, a segmented band he wore low around his throat. But apparently one of the sixteen copies he could make of himself—variants, he called them—had been killed at some point. And when a variant died while Dailen’s consciousness was still inside, it never came back.
And neither did a tiny part of Dailen himself.
Their little band, no longer so little, briefly discussed how to proceed. In the end, Chloe, Teokas, Ravana, and eight of the Dailens took the stairs on the left. The remaining seven Dailens took the stairs to the right, along with Gabriel and Go’nesh.
The stairs were slippery, damp planks of wood. Ravana took the lead, stalking down the steps three at a time, as wary and limber as a panther. Chloe followed farther behind, among the Dailens, starting to feel impatient. Left to her own devices, she could have simply dropped down onto the next level whenever and wherever she chose, swimming through concrete and steel and wood. But the Altari seemed to have their own way of doing things, smooth and practiced, and she didn’t want to bump them out of their groove.
Not yet, anyway.
She poked the Dailen in front of her, effortlessly willing her ghostly finger to jab him instead of enter him. When he turned to look at her, she said, “Are you the real Dailen?” She’d lost track in the hallway above, as they’d split into two groups.
“Absolutely,” Dailen said.
“Me too,” said the Dailen behind her.
Then the eight Dailens spoke one by one, whispering a swift series of words in turn, a single word each from the front of the line to the back. The sentence swept past her as it formed: “There’s no such thing as an unreal Dailen.”
Several steps ahead, Teokas said, “He doesn’t want us to know. If we know which Dailen is the original, the Riven might figure it out. We’d rather they didn’t.”
The Dailens nodded. “I’m Spartacus,” they all said together.
Chloe laughed, and then frowned. Where would an Altari learn a joke like that?
They reached the bottom of the stairs. The stink of brimstone had grown stronger. The passageway opened up into a wide-open space—vast, judging by the echoes of their footsteps on the concrete floor. Exposed steel girders, thick as a man, ran from floor to ceiling at widely spaced intervals, extending into the darkness like a machined forest.
The Dailens spread out warily. They move
d as individuals now, each one distinct—watching, listening, standing, creeping. Chloe thought back to the meadow where she and Horace had first met Dailen, and how he’d single-handedly—well, not really single, but with no one’s help but his own—managed to hold off Dr. Jericho and a small army of Mordin. A rush of adrenaline filled her, and her confidence grew even stronger. They were going to wreck this place, and get Mr. Meister out of here. And maybe Joshua too, and maybe even—
Music pierced through the gloom, encasing them. A flute, distant but thickly present. Chloe clenched her teeth as Ingrid’s song crept across her skin, knowing her. Finding her.
“What is it?” Ravana cried. She swiped at her ear as if she could brush the flute’s tune away. “It clings to me.”
“Go toward it,” Chloe said, not at all sure it was the best plan, but sure she wouldn’t do anything else. “They know we’re here, and they know where we are. They’ll come find us if we wait. Run toward it, fast as you can—don’t give them time to think.”
She thought she would have to explain more, but the Dailens were already running, headed deeper into the room as fast as a horse, into the music. Ravana sprinted after them, quickly disappearing into the gloom.
Teokas watched them go. Her pretty nose was wrinkled with disgust, as if the creeping notes of the flute were like insects on her skin. She glanced down at Chloe worriedly. “Our friends have forgotten you don’t have the legs of an Altari,” she said. “How will you keep up?”
“How will you?” Chloe said, and she dove into the floor.
Dark beyond dark, and silence. The only sound came from inside her now, Ingrid’s song replaced by the swelling music of the Alvalaithen, a symphony. The concrete was cool and gritty through her flesh. Chloe held her breath and willed herself forward, propelling herself through the stone. Truth be told, she didn’t know how fast she could move down here. Faster than she could run, for sure, but also she believed—knew—that she could go faster still.
And faster still.
She pushed with what felt like every atom of her body. How many atoms? Billions, probably. Billions of billions. Horace might know. But it didn’t matter—it wasn’t matter. Not completely. The path was easy for her, as if the dragonfly gave her a way to be both elsewhere and here, every obstacle removed except those from which she could leap, onward and onward.
Chloe rose, breaching the floor like a dolphin, briefly going airborne. The Dailens thundered up ahead, and Ravana too. She was catching them. She plunged back into the cool sea of the floor, straining. More speed, a trillion tiny thrusting footholds, and then another breach. She was nearly among the sprinting Altari now. She flew on, ever faster, but when she breached for a third time, the air was filled with screeches and cries. She rolled, somersaulting. She skipped clumsily to a halt, keeping herself afloat atop the stone floor.
Ingrid’s music had stopped. But around her, a battle raged.
The Ravids had found them. Dozens, it felt like, but it was impossible to count. No bigger than humans, the hideous creatures flickered in and out, fizzling from sight only to reappear several feet away, scampering on all fours and screeching with their foul, toothy mouths. The Dailens—larger by far but outnumbered—were wrestling with them, throwing them to the ground and tossing them aside, grappling at their throats.
With a whuf, a Ravid burst into existence right in front of Chloe. It swiped at her, screeching, but she was still thin. She felt its cold, sharp claws pass through her belly, her spine. She stepped through the creature, whirling, letting the Ravid stagger past. Just as it spun to try her again, a great thwang! rang out. On the instant, a bolt of molten red, finger thick and four feet long, materialized inside the Ravid’s body, protruding from its chest. The Ravid burst into flame. Panicking, it vanished with a hiss and reappeared twenty feet off, screaming and scuttling away, still on fire.
Ravana stood to one side of the fight, standing tall in the bronze glow of her own jithandra. Her attention was already elsewhere. She pulled back her great bow, Pinaka, again, and another bolt of red fire blazed to life on its string. She loosed it, and the massive arrow, like a rod of melted steel, vanished. In the same instant, forty feet away, another Ravid burst into flame as the arrow blossomed deep in its belly, flightless and faultless.
Suddenly Teokas was at Chloe’s side, puffing. “Earthwing indeed,” she said breathlessly.
“I can’t fight,” Chloe said, furious with herself that she hadn’t brought a weapon of some kind. But none had been offered, or even mentioned.
Teokas laughed. “The invincible girl who thinks she cannot fight. But she cannot lose, can she?”
A Ravid materialized on their left with a soft burst. Teokas spun toward it as it leapt, raising her hand, Thailadun dangling from her wrist. Just as Chloe remembered she wasn’t supposed to look at it, a corona of white light exploded from the little black sphere, stabbing at her eyes. This was the view from the backside of the Moondoor as Teokas unveiled it, and even from here Chloe felt a tiny dizzy swoon, as if she had lost a moment of awareness. Meanwhile the Ravid, caught in the full brilliance of the Moondoor like a possum in headlights, instantly froze. It hung in the air, its black eyes now utterly white.
One of the Dailens darted over to the hanging Ravid, shielding his eyes from Thailadun. Teokas closed the Moondoor, letting it go dark. Immediately Dailen grabbed the bewildered Ravid and slammed it viciously to the ground.
“You froze him,” Chloe said.
“Time slows to a crawl in the light of Thailadun,” Teokas said. “But there are limits.” Her jithandra was hanging free now, Chloe saw. It shone like a sapphire, brilliant blue. Just like Horace’s.
Ravana cried out.
Mordins had joined the battle. Six of them, two full hunting packs. One of them leapt at a Dailen who was wrestling with a Ravid, lunging for his throat. The Dailen, caught by surprise, winked out of sight. Not dead, Chloe knew. Just taken out of play before it could be harmed. Soon enough, another Dailen would split into two, and the lost variant would return to the battle.
But where was the real Dailen? And where were Go’nesh and Gabriel?
A Mordin charged at them. Teokas stepped into it and spilled the light of the Moondoor into its snarling face, freezing him.
Chloe watched the Mordin’s eyes, chillingly still. If time was slowed almost to a halt for him, everything around him must seem to be moving crazily fast. Right? And what were the limits to Thailadun’s powers? Obviously Teokas couldn’t freeze the whole room, or she would have done it already.
Chloe’s head ached trying to make sense of it. This was more Horace’s territory, not hers. “I’m going down,” she said. “I can’t help here. I’m going to find Mr. Meister.”
“You can’t go alone,” the nearest Dailen said.
“Pretty sure you can’t go with me,” Chloe replied. Briefly she released the Alvalaithen, catching her breath, and then filled herself with its song once again. She began sinking into the floor. She shrugged at Teokas, whose face looked caught between worry and approval. “Besides,” Chloe told her. “I’m invincible.”
Into the cold stone again. She headed downward. She quickly left the concrete behind, moving into damp, hard-packed earth. For a moment, her old fear grabbed hold of her. The earth was a bottomless sea into which she could sink. A literal world to get lost in. And truth be told, she didn’t know for sure that she needed to go down to find Mr. Meister. But her experience with the Riven told her that the deeper the secret, the deeper it was buried. And so she would search. She could hold her breath for nearly four minutes, and she could fly down here. There was nothing to fear. And Mr. Meister owed her answers.
Was that why she was so determined to find him? To get answers?
And would those answers make a difference?
She kept going down. The earth grew colder. She was just beginning to think she’d gone too far, that she’d made a mistake thinking there was passageway down here or that she could somehow find it
, when she plunged into open air. She began to fall. She caught herself by her still-buried feet, arms pinwheeling. She hung there upside down like a bat, dangling by her ankles from the ceiling of a wide, rough-hewn passageway. It was obviously much older than the construction project above.
She could hear the battle still raging, down the tunnel to her right. She heard an Altari bellow—Go’nesh, no doubt—and then the unmistakable tear of the humour. To her left, meanwhile, a distant light, and voices. One particular voice, angry and sneering. Dr. Jericho.
And then thunder. The earth shook. The light at the end of the tunnel was swallowed like the sun behind a cloud. Swiftly Chloe reached up into the rock with one hand and hoisted herself back into the earth, leaving only her face sticking out.
The thunder grew. It shuddered through the bedrock inside her, rattling her bones. The golem roared through the tunnel beneath her, not like a snake but like a many-limbed beast, arms and legs writhing into existence to claw at the stone, pulling the bulk forward, and then melting back the body of the thing. And the body was . . . huge. Massive. Far bigger than any golem she’d seen. It tore at the tunnel walls as it passed, leaving a trail of dust and rubble. Chloe glimpsed a flash of red, a cruel-looking crystal the size of a fish, darting through the black. The heart of the golem. But then she saw another.
Two hearts.
Two golems, moving as one. And it was headed for the battle still raging up above.
After what seemed like forever, the terrible creature was past. Dr. Jericho followed in its wake, walking alone. Biting back a growl, Chloe tucked her chin into the stone, leaving just her eyes free, hoping that the Mordin wouldn’t sense the Alvalaithen. She was protected, yes, the signal of her Tan’ji masked by the time she’d spent in the guarded realms of the Warren and Ka’hoka. Still, when the Mordin passed without so much as glancing up at her, she felt a flood of relief.
Briefly, she considered following him. There were things she could do to help her friends, maybe, and the golem couldn’t harm her as long as she stayed thin. But if Mr. Meister was here, he had to be in the room down the corridor, where the faint light still glowed. Him, and maybe anyone else the Riven had brought here from the Warren.