by Ted Sanders
Anyone who had survived.
Staying inside the stone, letting only her face break the surface, she slid along the tunnel ceiling, slid toward the light—as if she were floating on her back along an upside-down river. There were soft voices. Human voices. She drew closer.
She reached the entrance to the room, a large chamber lit with dirty golden light. She saw Joshua, the Laithe floating at his side, looking miserable. Ingrid crouched before him, murmuring in a distinctly unpleasant way, her terrible white flute in her hand.
“Where did you send him, Joshua?” Ingrid was saying. “To Ka’hoka? So he can finish the terrible work the Wardens started?”
“He was hurt,” Joshua said. “You were just hurting him more. I let him go.”
“Letting him escape didn’t change anything, Joshua,” Ingrid replied. “You haven’t helped a friend, because he was never your friend. All you’ve done is anger those who truly want to help you.”
“Mr. Meister is my friend. You’re not.”
Ingrid jabbed the flute at him. “Then why didn’t you go with him?” she asked scornfully.
Joshua hung his head, looking miserable, stubbornly refusing to say any more.
Chloe could hardly believe it. Mr. Meister was gone. A stupid, aimless surge of anger filled her. She tried to quash it. She’d come here with the Altari to rescue Mr. Meister, but apparently he’d already been set free by Joshua and the power of the Laithe. Why did that make her angry? Because Joshua had done their work for them?
“You believe him,” Ingrid said to Joshua, mocking him. “When he says the Mothergates have to die—that we all have to die—you believe that?” She flung her hand back, pointing across the room. “You saw what was happening here tonight. It’ll be finished soon enough, Altari or no Altari. And when it is, you think we can’t fix what the Wardens say is unfixable?”
Chloe was hardly listening anymore. Where Ingrid had pointed, a third figure she hadn’t noticed stood swaying woozily. Wild red hair, an arresting but scowling face.
Isabel was here. Still alive. Chloe’s own mother, back from the abyss—yet again. The sight was a shock, bringing a firestorm of emotion Chloe couldn’t hope to name. She was disgusted to find in the tumult a shimmer of something like relief, and she crushed it, disgusted by it. Disgusted by the mere fact of Isabel at all.
Ingrid was pleading with Joshua now, murmuring too low to hear. Chloe slid closer, until she was directly above the girl, twenty feet below.
“This can be fixed, Joshua. She can do it. We’ve been given this gift, and we intend to use it. Everything will be set right.”
This gift. Isabel. But what kind of gift was she, and what could Isabel possibly do? The anger and disgust brewing in Chloe’s belly churned, growing stronger.
“Don’t you see, Joshua?” Ingrid said. The boy was looking up at her now, his face full of hope and doubt. “I left the Wardens in order to save them. I mean them no harm, believe me. I want to save them from themselves.” She threw a finger back at Isabel again. “And this,” she said, spitting the word like she was talking about something scraped from the bottom of a shoe. “This is the way.”
Chloe let herself fall. She slipped from the ceiling like a stone, like a hawk. She descended on Ingrid, her eyes on the bone-white flute in her hand.
Chloe reached out, pouring all her focus into it. She fell into Ingrid and grabbed at the flute, willing it to go thin, willing it to go with her. In a flash, she was past, and the flute came with her. Down into the dark stone underneath, too fast to even hear or see Ingrid’s reaction. She went deep, so full of rage that she thought she might heat the earth around her.
She was going to let the flute go.
She was going to leave it behind, leave it melded here in the dark ground, no longer the thing it once was, its atoms intertwined irreparably with the atoms of the earth. And what would happen to Ingrid then? Dispossession, at least. Cleaving? Would she die on the spot? It would be beyond easy, come what may.
But instead Chloe held on to the flute, hardly knowing why. She flew swiftly back up to the chamber above, bursting from the ground, still clutching the flute. She released the Alvalaithen and landed on her feet, breathing hard.
Ingrid was on her feet too, her face clouded with rage.
“Don’t,” Chloe warned as Ingrid took a step toward her. She wiggled the flute and pointed at the floor. “I could have killed you already. Maybe someone can explain to me why I didn’t do it, but I sure as hell can’t promise you I still won’t.”
Chloe backed away, edging toward Isabel, who was kneeling now but taking no notice of them at all.
“Open a portal, Joshua,” Chloe said.
But Joshua just sat there, eyes wide, staring at Chloe. “The Mothergates are going to die,” he said.
“I know,” said Chloe, and a jolt of confused hurt skated across Joshua’s face. Chloe continued to back away. “Open a portal, and we can get out of here. We can figure it out.”
“We already are figuring it out,” said Ingrid.
“Isabel,” Joshua said, as if that explained everything.
Chloe turned to her mother. Isabel looked up at her. Still alive, Chloe had thought when she first laid eyes on her.
But now she wasn’t so sure.
Isabel looked . . . empty. Hopelessly famished. Like a soul who had lost everything she had ever been given but still wanted more, if only to give it all away again. Like a bottomless drain into which—for no other reason than to obey a hunger that could never be satisfied—every last thing might be fed.
And then Isabel looked at her, and Chloe knew that she herself, this woman’s own daughter, was one of those things.
This was not her mother. Chloe had not had a mother in years.
“Chloe,” Isabel said. “You’re here. You’ve come to see.”
“I came to save people who need saving,” Chloe said.
Isabel nodded eagerly. “Me too. I’ll save everyone. The Riven—”
And then an enormous figure stepped out of the shadows, so large that Chloe’s eyes hadn’t even allowed her to see it. A Riven, standing nearly to the ceiling, with arms that dragged along the floor and sagging gray skin. Buried in its chest, like a gaping wound, was an oval Tan’ji leaking faint golden light.
The Riven’s pale gaze drifted over Chloe without so much as a hint of curiosity, and then fell on Isabel. A new kind of hunger seemed to light in its face, and Isabel looked up at it.
“More,” she begged, staring into its eyes. Her voice was desperate and mad, making Chloe want to vomit. “Finish me, please. Fix me, and then I can show her. I can show them all.”
Chloe ran. She ran before she even knew she was running, down the tunnel the way the golem had gone. She kept running even as she realized how silly it was, this running, how beneath her—she was the Keeper of the Alvalaithen. She did not run.
But her mother’s face. The hulking beast that stood with her, the ghastly way she’d pleaded with it, begging for more. More what? It was nothing she understood, except that she had to get away.
On and on Chloe ran, down the darkening tunnel. She heard no sounds of pursuit behind her. And then, abruptly, the world disappeared. She sprinted into a sea of gray, full of dull blank light, a blindness so complete she could not even see the tip of her own nose. She stumbled on the unseen floor beneath her and went hard to the ground. The rib she’d broken the other day bit at her painfully.
“Chloe,” came Gabriel’s voice, filling the humour, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. “Are you all right?”
Chloe got uneasily to her feet, shutting her eyes against the blankness of Gabriel’s humour. Better no light at all than endless unsight.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Fine.”
“Why are you running? Is someone coming?”
“No. I don’t know. Joshua’s in there, and Ingrid, and . . .” She didn’t know how to say more. She wondered if Gabriel could feel the heat that burned in her
cheeks now.
But instead, his voice thick with shock, Gabriel said flatly, “You have Ingrid’s flute.”
Chloe looked stupidly down at her hand, though there was nothing to see. Gabriel, though, could feel its every detail. She rubbed a finger across the flute, testing its smoothness. It was wrong to touch another person’s Tan’ji without permission, and she hated that it felt wrong even now.
“Yes,” she said. “I stole it. I was going to bury it. Meld it.”
“That would have killed her.”
“And so?” Chloe demanded. Gabriel didn’t respond, seeming to know better. “What are you doing here?” she asked him. “Where are the others?”
“Fighting, as best they can,” Gabriel said. “But there’s a golem, huge and—”
“I know. I saw it.”
“I came to find you,” he said, “I’m not much help against the golem. We need to find Mr. Meister and get everyone out of here.”
“We’re too late for that.” Quickly she told Gabriel what she’d overheard, that Mr. Meister had already been freed.
Silence. Through the fog of the humour, she could practically hear Gabriel thinking. At last he said, “Let us go, then. What we came here to do is done. We must return to the others. They need us.”
“And what about Joshua?”
“He can’t be helped,” Gabriel replied. “We don’t even know if he wants to be helped.”
“Don’t be stupid. He got Mr. Meister out of here, didn’t he?”
“So you say. Yet he did not get himself out. Again.”
“You’re not serious.”
“The portal was open, wasn’t it? If an old man with a broken leg could get out, why not the Keeper of the Laithe himself?”
Chloe fumed, hating his logic. Hating that he was probably right. And Joshua had refused to open a portal for Chloe, even when it would have been safe to do so.
“It’s not easy for a Keeper to resist what the Riven offer,” Gabriel said. “They promise survival. We promise death. Ingrid left us for a reason, you know.” He paused for a moment, and when his voice returned it seemed more present than ever, leaning on her heavily from all sides. “Have you not considered leaving us yourself, since you learned the truth?”
Chloe threw up her hands. “I just learned the truth, like, yesterday!”
“And I would wager there were moments yesterday when you could not have sworn you’d still be with us today.”
“A moment is a moment,” Chloe said, scowling. Gabriel wasn’t wrong, but . . .
Gabriel wasn’t wrong.
Maybe she hadn’t completely swallowed the bitter pill Falo had given her, not yet. But she sure hadn’t spit it out. Because after all, the Riven were the Riven, horrible in every way, and when Chloe tried to imagine trusting Dr. Jericho, her mind simply shorted out in a fiery jolt of rage. If anyone was going to tell her what to do, it certainly wasn’t going to be that ten-foot freak with the rotten-egg breath and beady eyes. Even if he promised survival. And whatever that creature was in the room back there, whatever he was going to do to Isabel, even if she deserved it . . .
Chloe squeezed the flute, then tossed it aside. It clattered to the ground unseen, the sound echoing thinly inside the gray waters of the humour.
“I’m not Ingrid,” she said. “Even if I’m not sure about the good guys, I know who the bad guys are.”
“But Joshua may not,” Gabriel said simply.
Chloe sighed. “Get me out of here, then. Take me upstairs to the others.” She held out her hand. She felt Gabriel take it, warm and strong.
“It’s bad, I’m afraid,” he said, leading her onward at a cautious trot. “We came in force instead of stealth, and with the Riven . . .”
Chloe scowled and started to tell him that they were a war party, that they didn’t simply sneak around. But here she was, the girl who walked through walls, buried in a cloud meant to hide everything from anyone.
And she said nothing, instead promising herself that she would find a way. She would turn stealth into force. She’d done nothing here tonight, saved no one.
But that was about to change.
Chapter Eight
Earthen Sky
GABRIEL LED CHLOE THROUGH THE TUNNELS, QUIETLY NARRATING the way, still holding her hand. He led her around a bend or two, or so it seemed, and then up a slick, steep slope. Chloe knew Gabriel couldn’t see anything outside the humour—and was utterly blind without it—but he had perfect knowledge of everything inside it. He guided her surely, confidently, no doubt knowing she hated it in here. He knew well enough not to bother asking her why she didn’t simply leave him, traveling on her own by way of Alvalaithen.
Chloe didn’t want to be alone.
Somehow she found it easy not to think of Isabel. Much, anyway. Instead she thought of her sister Madeline, and her father. How when Isabel had disappeared all those years ago, her dad had raised them on his own—badly, at times, but at least he’d been there. And where was he now? Mrs. Hapsteade had assured her that he’d gotten safely away from his room in the Academy, above the Warren, when the Riven attacked. Chloe wondered when she would see him again. She wondered if.
Gabriel tugged at her hand, startling her. He pulled her down to her haunches.
“We’re here,” he said.
For a moment Chloe thought they were too late. It was utterly silent. But then again, no sound could pierce the humour from the outside. They could have been inside a hurricane and neither of them would have known it. And now she realized—the floor was shaking beneath her feet.
Chloe nodded. She took a great breath and drank from the Alvalaithen, filling herself with its song.
“Show me,” she said.
Gabriel squeezed her hand and let her go. “Tell me what you see,” he said.
The humour parted.
Into a hurricane.
The great golem she’d seen below was everywhere, swirling madly across the wide-open concrete floor, clanging against the tall steel columns. It moved so swiftly, so massively, that as it swung its mighty limbs about they hissed audibly through the air. A few limp Mordin and Ravids lay strewn here and there, but others were still fighting. A handful of Dailens grappled with them, now winking out of sight, now doubling. The Ravids screeched. The Mordin roared. She heard an Altari bellowing faintly. Chloe took another step into the room, awestruck.
Dr. Jericho was here, his back to her. He fought savagely with a pair of Dailen—now just one, now three. The bristles on the Mordin’s spine had pierced his clothes, and his face was the monstrous visage Chloe had seen in the meadow, his true face, one he wasn’t bothering to disguise. She saw more clearly now that he wore two of the golem’s rings, one on each hand. He steered the huge, doubled golem about even as he fought, clearly directing its wrath where he could, letting it thunder on its own when he could not.
Beyond him, Ravana stood inside a transparent sphere, ten feet across and shining with light. A smallish stream of the golem circled it, pounding. The sphere was a dumin—a shield so strong, Chloe knew, that even the golem couldn’t hope to break through it. But apparently Ravana’s arrows could. The grim Altari fired her bow, again and again, into the swarming mass of the golem. Wherever the fiery bolts struck home, a cluster of the golem’s chunks turned to hot coals and shattered, crumbling to ash. But it was far too little, far too slow, handfuls shoveled from a mountain. And the dumin was only temporary. How much longer would it last?
Go’nesh was faring better, swiping at the creature with great swings of the Fairfrost Blade, dancing deep into its thickest midst. Teokas and one of the Dailens moved with him. The Dailen had a phalanx, a wandlike Tan’kindi that fired a great blast of force. Whenever he fired it, with a huge crack that slapped the air, stones went flying as if struck by a great fist. But no sooner had they scattered than they swirled together and surged forward once more.
Go’nesh was scattering stones with his blade, too—by the bucketful. But even better, buckets more
of the relentless black bits were frozen inside the great curtains of glistening blue the swinging blade carved into the air. A gleaming sequence of these swaths crossed the room like painted memories of the battle Go’nesh had been waging, huge and beautiful arcs that took Chloe’s breath away—boomerangs, corkscrews, sails, scythes. The golem knew well enough to avoid the blue curtains, cold as they were. At nearly absolute zero, Chloe imagined the curtains might shatter any stones that touched them.
Still, the golem managed to pour through the gaps, reaching for the Altari inside. Teokas was flashing the Moondoor at it wherever it got close, and when the ghostly white light fell upon the stones, the golem’s grasping limb became a statue, if only for a moment. Dailen fired the phalanx at them when he could, blowing them back.
Chloe couldn’t breathe. The scene before here was maybe the most magnificent sight she had ever seen. Magnificent and horrible. And if Horace had been here . . .
What would Horace have seen, through the Fel’Daera? What could he have told them about how this great clash would unfold? Because as mightily as the Altari battled the golem and the Riven now, as boldly as they fought and as beautifully they moved—like gods out of a storybook—they were losing.
Horace should have been here. Horace could have told them. The Altari were mighty, yes.
But so was Horace. And so was she.
She backed into the humour. Silence swallowed her.
“Tell me,” Gabriel said. “Your heart is pounding.”
And it was pounding. No doubt Gabriel could feel her pulse in her neck. But not from fear.
“Get outside,” she told him. “Keep Mrs. Hapsteade safe. No need to hurry, but she’ll be unprotected in a minute or two. Wait for me there. I’ll bring the others.”
“But what about—”
Chloe left him. She strode boldly into the room. She pulled her jithandra from her shirt and let it blaze. It burned like a ruby on fire.