The Keepers #4

by Ted Sanders

  Dr. Jericho turned, spotting her at last. His beady eyes locked on to hers, and his face became a crumpling fist of rage.

  A huge swath of the golem swirled furiously toward Chloe, curling and rattling, deafening. It poured into her body, hammering at her—cold angry bees swarming in her flesh. It couldn’t touch her, no one could. Not even Ravana’s bow, not even the blue blade of Go’nesh. She kept walking. But now the golem began to tear at the ground beneath her as she walked, ruining the path in front of her, cracking the concrete under her feet and pulling up chunks of it, now great slabs of it, snapping and twisting the buried rebar there like the bones of a corpse. Soon there was nothing to walk on, but Chloe kept walking. Or not walking. She hovered inside the very flesh of the golem itself, the atoms of her body finding purchase in the golem’s thick earthen sea. Or earthen sky. Maybe it didn’t matter—matter was matter. She was the Keeper of the Alvalaithen, the Earthwing. This was like nothing she’d ever done before, like swimming in a deadly current, but the current couldn’t touch her. She didn’t want it to. One of the golem’s hearts flashed past her, a vicious crimson fish.

  She knew what to do. She knew how to do it.

  She went up. The golem rose with her, still trying to crush her, its blind and pointless rage of course belonging to Dr. Jericho. He wore the rings. She ascended through the tornado of the golem, glancing back one last time at her brave companions fighting below. She reached the ceiling of the great room . . . and kept going. She left the swirling body of the golem behind, accelerating now. Upward and out. Stone and clay and dirt and grass and then—open air. City sounds and light. She was traveling so fast she shot high into the air, and as she peaked she thought for a moment she might hang there, or that she might keep going, just because she could. But there was something here she had to do. She let herself land in the grass, searching.

  The mal’gama was a lumpy green hill, buried in shadows. A small figure in a black dress stood atop it, staring, and then began running toward her.

  Chloe met her halfway.

  “What’s happening?” Mrs. Hapsteade said. “Where are the others? I felt a tremor.”

  “I’m handling it,” Chloe said.

  “They have a golem?”

  “That would be an understatement.”

  “What about Henry? Did you find him? What about Joshua?”

  “Mr. Meister’s gone,” said Chloe. “Joshua saved him. He’s safe—at Ka’hoka, I think.”

  Mrs. Hapsteade sank onto her knees in the grass.

  “I need the ring,” Chloe said, and she held out her hand.

  “What?” Mrs. Hapsteade said.

  Chloe tipped her chin at the slumbering mal’gama. “The ring,” she said again.

  It took her a moment, but then Mrs. Hapsteade shook her head. “No. Let me steer it, we’ll take it through the halls and we’ll—”

  “No halls. I’m taking the short route.”

  Again Mrs. Hapsteade hesitated. Her eyes slid from confusion into dubious wonder, and then into a quiet resolve. Or surrender. Or disappointment. It didn’t matter, as long as she gave Chloe the ring.

  Mrs. Hapsteade slipped the green-stoned ring from her hand. Taking it, Chloe slid it onto her own finger—it was big for an instant, but then suddenly it wasn’t. But Chloe didn’t bother to think about that for more than a second, because the mal’gama was in her mind.

  The mal’gama was alive. Or not alive, but like a living extension of herself, one that could never disobey her, but that also had a mind of its own. She hurried over to it, clambering onto its furry green stones. She could feel herself walking, could feel the mal’gama responding to her movement. Taking a seat in the very middle of it, she silently asked the mal’gama to ripple, and it did, rocking her. She wanted it to lift her, and it rose into the air, cradling her gently. She didn’t know quite how she was doing it—a simple matter of asking, or desiring. A laugh popped out of her. She felt the mal’gama’s weight, its strength. It was mighty. Its might was her might. It wasn’t the fierce machine the golem was, no, but it was just as strong. Maybe stronger. Dailen had showed her and Horace how strong, the first time she rode it. She was taking that strength now.

  And Dailen had showed them another thing. How the mal’gama’s stones were chiseled flat on every surface. Though far more complicated, they could stack like cubes. Perfectly. They could tessellate like cubes—that was the word Horace had used—into a perfect solid, with no gaps between them.

  And that’s what Chloe needed.

  She drank deeply from the dragonfly, going thin. She lifted her eyes to Mrs. Hapsteade, who was watching her intently from the grass.

  “Do you think I can do it?” Chloe asked her.

  “I am beginning to think you can do anything,” Mrs. Hapsteade replied.

  Chloe laughed again. “I can’t see the future,” she said. “But I’ll meet you there.”

  “May yours be light,” said Mrs. Hapsteade.

  “Tel tu’vra fal raethen,” Chloe replied. And then she gathered the mal’gama to her, bringing the stones into her body and stacking them. They rustled, strangely warm, somehow soft but diamond hard. She asked them to tessellate and they did, locking together so tightly that Chloe could only tell them apart at the level of molecules.

  They filled her. The world went dark. But still she kept gathering, and through the ring she could feel the mal’gama taking shape outside her, encasing her. The mal’gama felt like an extension of her own flesh, in a way, and she wondered if this was what the Ravenvine was like for April. Swiftly the mal’gama became a solid mass, an uninterrupted monolith, as big as a whale, however big a whale was.

  When it was done, when the mal’gama was packed as tight as it could go, Chloe forgot the ring and reached for the dragonfly instead. She reached out into the stones that surrounded her. She willed them to go thin, letting the Alvalaithen’s song flow into them. She could do this, she knew. She’d done it to Horace—made him go thin and pulled him through the supposedly impassable shield of a dumin. The mal’gama was bigger than Horace by far—she didn’t even want to know how much bigger. She just had to know she could do it.

  Slowly the mal’gama became a ghost. Stone by stone, out from Chloe at the center. She pulled hard at the Alvalaithen, pulling its power through her and out into the mal’gama, its song swelling and spreading. Her body ached with the effort, her mind growing blank to everything else. It helped that the mal’gama was utterly uniform, every atom the same. Even as she did it, she knew she could never have managed it if it had been even a fraction more complex than it was.

  But somehow, through luck or talent or sheer will, she managed it. The mal’gama was a phantom vessel, no more solid than air.

  And it was hers.

  Down, she thought.

  They went down. Into the ground, through soil and rock. The mal’gama moved sludgily at first but quickly picked up speed. Meanwhile Chloe did her best to stay motionless inside. She wasn’t propelling herself now. She was inside the mal’gama, and the mal’gama was inside the earth, a nested vessel that the ring allowed her to steer. She could not bother to wonder if she’d ever done anything like this this before, or if she would ever do it again. The effort was outrageous, an unaskable thing. She had to hurry. Down and down. Concrete and steel. Damp ground.

  And then, startlingly, she was there. She felt it through the mal’gama’s ring before she felt it in her own flesh. She brought the ghosted mass down into the great room with the tall metal columns, where she’d left her friends. The mal’gama brushed heavily against the steel beams, coming apart at the edges. The moment she felt its mass come entirely free from the ceiling above, she pushed its stones from her flesh, letting the mal’gama spread, coming undone and releasing her. When the last stone left her, she felt the mal’gama go solid once more. She sank from it, falling through it, and landed hard on the concrete floor below.

  Her arrival—their arrival—brought the battle almost comically to a ha
lt.

  The giant golem seemed to pause and rear back, a cloud of suspended malice. Go’nesh stood among the exquisite chain of curtains he had carved, the Fairfrost Blade hanging motionless over his head, tearing at Chloe and the huge mal’gama she had brought here.

  And then the golem attacked, a tidal wave. She met it with the mal’gama effortlessly, and the collision was like two trains colliding. The golem was faster, but the mal’gama was strong, yes. Dailen had showed her how strong. He had taken the heart of the masterless golem whose ring Chloe had destroyed in the meadow. He’d taken that heart and laid it down in the mal’gama’s grip.

  The mal’gama had crushed it into powder.

  This was why she had brought it here.

  But the mal’gama wasn’t meant for fighting. The battle was desperate and clumsy, like trying to run on stilts. Had she been anyone other than who she was, Chloe would have been flattened in an instant, because in order to keep the mal’gama moving—searching for the golem’s hearts—she couldn’t keep it solid. The golem wormed its way through the cracks of the mal’gama, slick and writhing. It tore at her again, fuming and pounding. And though it couldn’t harm her, the golem’s assault distracted her, blinded her. She willed the mal’gama to keep fighting, to keep searching, to keep the bulk of the golem at bay, but above all to find the bloodred crystals swimming somewhere inside it. They had to be destroyed. Over the terrible din, she could hear Dr. Jericho roaring thinly. It was him she was fighting, him she had to defeat. But she could barely think, the golem an angry, clattering cloud, literally in her head.

  And now Go’nesh was at her side, swinging his blade, battling the golem back. Teokas appeared an instant later, throwing the light of the Moondoor. The Dailen with the phalanx joined them, blasting holes in the golem as it circled.

  And then she had it. Through the body of the mal’gama, through the ring, she felt one of the golem’s hearts slashing past. She clenched her fist reflexively, willing it to bear down.

  The fiery heart imploded audibly, crumbling into red ash.

  On the instant, half of the black stones surging about them dropped out of the air like black hail, clattering lifeless to the floor with a great crash. One half of the great twinned golem was dead. Chloe caught sight of Dr. Jericho now, through the thinned arms of the beast that remained. He roared in anger, ripping one of the black rings from his finger and flinging it aside. The other Riven cried out now too, and some began to turn and run.

  Go’nesh surged into the belly of the remaining golem, swinging his Tan’ji with brutal, musical grunts. Ribbons of blue sliced at it, captured it, shattered it. He was heading for Dr. Jericho. Chloe brought the mal’gama together over his head and beat back the golem with him, grasping at the golem’s flesh and crushing huge bites of it in the mal’gama’s irresistible grip.

  “Ji’an fura!” Go’nesh bellowed. He swung the Fairfrost Blade down like a hammer at the golem, swinging it so hard it plunged into the floor. The floor cracked asunder, crumbling around the sickle of frozen blue that bloomed inside it. Go’nesh swung at the blue arc, and shockingly it shattered beneath the new one that now formed, spraying bits of itself across the room like blue meteors. Some of them struck a nearby Mordin, and it clutched its face, screaming, fleeing. “Ji kentu, Raka!” Go’nesh shouted. “Tu’landa mi gom’ra.”

  Chloe brought great fists of the mal’gama down on either side of the raging Altari as he stormed onward toward Dr. Jericho, shaking the floor like it was made of paper. Her muscles burned, and her teeth ached from grinding.

  Dr. Jericho just stood there, heaving. He cast his angry eyes about the room, at the thousands of dead golem stones scattered everywhere, at the cracked floor and crumbling ceiling, at the dozens of Riven lying helpless all about. Then he stood tall and lifted a hand, pointing at Chloe through the wreckage, through the thinning boughs of the golem.

  “You are the progeny of your own savior, Tinker,” he snarled, “though you do not yet know it. Do not bother to come and thank me when it is done.” Then he smiled his savage smile. “I will come for you.”

  He turned, and ran. The golem withdrew, swirling, after him. The few Riven remaining—those still able to walk—followed him into the darkness and out of the room.

  For a moment, Chloe thought she would go after him. She would muster the mal’gama again and take it down to the chamber where she’d left her mother. She would rescue that woman from the terrible beast that loomed over her, even though Isabel was beyond saving. She would save Joshua too, even if he didn’t want to be rescued.

  But the will wasn’t there. Nothing was there. She collapsed, and the world seemed to go away. For a moment she thought she had fainted, but no—it was just this new quiet, the golem no more than a distant rumble now. She tried not to think about where it was going, about who waited for Dr. Jericho in the tunnels below. She tried not to think about whether it was right to go after Isabel, or right to never try again.

  A Dailen knelt in front of her. He cupped her chin. Chloe held out her hand, the one with the mal’gama’s ring. “I can’t do it anymore.”

  “You don’t have to.” The Dailen took the ring from her finger and placed it on his own, where it fit him perfectly.

  “There was a creature, down below,” Chloe began. “Huge. He had a . . .” She circled her hand over her chest, trying to indicate what she’d seen. “And my mom—” She choked on the word, unable to go on.

  “Your mother is here?”

  Chloe squeezed her eyes shut. A trickle of stupid water ran down her cheek. “No,” she said, waving the truth away. What even was the truth anymore? “But Mr. Meister escaped. Joshua got him out.”

  Concern swam briefly in his golden-ringed eyes, but then he nodded. “I assumed as much,” he said, and he pulled the silver compass from his pocket. This was the real Dailen. Or they were all real. Did it matter? It did matter. He was so pretty, even now. “The needle won’t budge,” he said, showing her, “no matter how I move. Wherever he is, he’s far from here.”

  “Ka’hoka.”

  “Let us find out.” And then he picked her up. Chloe caught a glimpse of Floriel, his Tan’ji, peeking from under his high collar. Two of the black slabs that hung from the necklace had gone stark white, the golden symbol that adorned them erased. Permanently erased. Only thirteen now. Chloe realized she was crying.

  “I think we helped,” she tried to tell him. “The rescue—I don’t think Joshua would have had a chance to do it if we hadn’t been here.”

  Dailen smiled. “And if you hadn’t been here . . .”

  But if he ever finished the sentence, Chloe couldn’t say, because she sagged into an exhaustion she’d never felt before—not even after crawling from the burning wreckage of her own home, or being severed for a full day. Everything that happened next became a blur.

  The mal’gama, easing slowly upward through the maze of hallways with the Altari. Their brave little band—so much smaller now—emerging into the bottom of the hell pit, under the city sky. Rising up to gather Gabriel and Mrs. Hapsteade. Climbing into darkness and wind.

  They flew on for however long it was, away from the city. Chloe lay on her side, her cheek pressed against the blanket of the mal’gama. At some point she looked up, suddenly startled by a memory she didn’t have.

  “Where’s Ravana?” she said.

  But Teokas only stroked her hair. “Shh,” she said. “Rest now.” And she hummed a tune so lovely and strange that Chloe knew she would always recall never being able to remember it.

  Hours later, or minutes, or days, the mal’gama brought them down onto thick grass and a grove of quiet trees. Chloe didn’t want to move. Her bones hurt, and her head was milk. The stars were out now. They had always been out. The clouds had found another place to sleep. Her father lifted her again easily, tall and strong. Or no, not her father—Dailen.

  A man with white hair was here. Sitting in the grass. Chloe blinked at him, utterly lost, until at last a sliver o
f her senses came back to her. Mr. Meister. Ka’hoka. They had come back, and so had he. Joshua had let him come here.

  Mrs. Hapsteade hurried over to the old man, crouching down at his side. They murmured quietly to each other. His glasses glinted in the dark. Somehow, he’d gotten the oraculum back.

  “You’ve traveled far to find me,” Mr. Meister said. “By the Loom, I am glad you’ve returned.”

  “And you, Taxonomer,” Teokas said kindly, squatting before him and bowing her head. “How badly are you hurt?”

  “No worse than I was, in the body. But I—” He spotted Chloe.

  Chloe slapped Dailen’s chest, fidgeting softly. Gently Dailen lowered her to the ground. She stood before Mr. Meister, her legs trembling.

  “My mother,” she said.

  “I saw her,” he said. “Please forgive me.”

  “What did they do to her?”

  “Something that should not have been,” he said. “My own ill deeds come back to haunt us. Please forgive me.” Then he seemed to gather himself, and he looked around at them all.

  “I must speak to Sil’falo Teneves,” he said. “A fiendish deed is under way. Your arrival in the city tonight interrupted it, but only temporarily. I fear that deed will soon be done.” He kept his voice firm, but his eyes were wild and frightened. “And when it is, our long vigil may collapse. The end of everything, as we feared, may well be at hand.”

  Part Two

  The Corners of the Earth

  Chapter Nine

  The Great Council

  THE PROVING ROOM WAS PACKED. HORACE WASN’T PARTICULARLY happy about it. And judging by the look on her face, Chloe was something far less than happy. Not even angry—which, for her, sometimes was a kind of happiness. She looked sort of broken, to be honest, her eyes focused inward in a way Horace had never seen before, sad and weary and . . . elsewhere. He knew she had fresh new scars from what she’d done the night before. Scars he couldn’t see.