She watched in fascination as Rhys slowly approached the butte. He sounded like he was muttering prayers under his breath; asking his gods for protection, perhaps? Weren’t they supposedly the ones that had created this thing in the first place? The ghostly voices flowed over him, screaming their warning, but they could not turn him away, or even slow his steps. Was his lyr blood shielding him from the worst of their assault, or was his sense of duty simply stronger than his fear?
She watched as he reached the butte at last and climbed to the top of it, then approached the Spear itself. Though the damage was on the side of the spire, he approached it from the front; perhaps that was the path of least magical resistance, she thought. She could see him trembling as he finally knelt down by the opening to see what was inside, though whether that was because of fear, or simply the physical strain of the last few days catching up with him, Kamala could not begin to guess.
And then he drew back suddenly, as if shocked. He wrapped his arms tightly about himself; his body began to shake violently. It was as if some power had taken hold of him and he could not break free.
Long minutes passed. Fear whipped around Kamala like a whirlwind. Still Rhys remained as he was, arms clutched over his midriff as if there were some unbearable pain centered there. He was no longer moving, but frozen in place. It was an eerie, inhuman stillness. As if he were carved from the same stone as the monument before him.
Time passed. The sun shifted its position. The voices screamed in Kamala’s brain with such force that it brought tears to her eyes.
Still Rhys did not move.
Something was wrong, Kamala realized. Something all his training had not prepared him for.
She was going to have to go to him.
She tried to take a step forward, but it was like trying to walk in a hurricane. Black emotions came rushing across the open tundra, howling as they enveloped her. Shutting her eyes, she used the skills that Ethanus had drilled into her to try to focus her mind inward, to regain control of her flesh. Go back! the voices screamed at her. Death is here! Turn and run! But Rhys was not running away, and so she would not either.
Shutting her eyes for a moment, she summoned the memory of his hand holding hers. The warmth that had flowed through his touch. His protectiveness. The source of that warmth was up ahead, and it needed her. The knowledge she sought was up ahead, and he was guarding it. The voices could scream their warnings all they liked; the magic of this place could fill her head with illusions and pain; none of that would keep her from going to him.
Move! she commanded herself. Forcing her limbs to obey. Slowly, torturously, one leg moved forward. Then the other. Raw emotions battered at her soul as she moved, wave after wave of sorcerous assault. Hunger. Pain. Fear. She struggled to stay focused on her body and on the few feet of black earth just ahead of her. At least the ground was solid here; thank the gods for small favors. After days of riding across mountains and through rivers, that was a veritable luxury.
Time ceased to exist. So did the voices. Ethanus had taught her how to focus inside herself in preparation for the day when her First Transition would require such skills; now she applied them here. Illusions of pain ripped through her flesh, but she knew them for what they were and ignored them. Shadowy figures draped in black robes reached out with their sorcery to bind her, but she refused to acknowledge their existence. Somewhere a creature was starving to death, and its hunger reverberated within her flesh as if it were her own; she focused upon moving her feet, one after the other, and keeping her balance as she did so. If the Wrath overcame her now and she fell, she was not all that sure she would be able to rise up again.
Then, finally, she reached the butte and began to climb. Her hands were covered with blood by the time she reached the top; she could not remember the exact cause.
She looked at Rhys and was shaken to her very core. What had she expected to see? Terror in his eyes, or perhaps the black vacancy of supernatural possession. What else could overwhelm such a man so that all his faculties deserted him?
Tears.
She saw tears.
She reached out slowly and touched one. He started violently, as if awakened from a trance by her touch, and he reached up and grabbed her hand. His grip was so tight it was painful.
“Look!” he rasped. “Tell me what you see!”
She leaned forward to peer into the dark space inside the Spear. At first she could see nothing at all, save that the interior space seemed to be regular in shape—cylindrical with a domed top—and had some kind of runic figures scrawled all over it. The script was familiar somehow, but she could not remember where she had seen it before.
Then her eyes adjusted to the dim light, and she saw.
There was a mummy inside. Maybe a living body once, when it had first been sealed into this space, but subjected by now to centuries of cold, dry mountain air. Its skin, stretched tightly over an armature of sharp-edged bones, was the color of tree bark, and its posture and expression made it clear just how the owner had died.
Kamala turned away from the spire and leaned over the edge of the butte just in time to vomit.
Its mouth had been frozen by death in mid-scream, its final expression; its spindly, shrunken arms were thrust outward as if to batter at the inside of its prison. Its fingers . . . its fingers were shattered at the tips, Kamala saw. Scraped raw and bloody as their owner had tried desperately to claw his or her way out. But there was no door in this prison, nor window. No escape. Whoever this was, he had been left to die slowly of thirst and starvation, suffocating in this space as his mind became delusional for want of food, of air . . . of hope.
And memories came welling up from the inner recesses of her soul as her nightmare engulfed her once more.
—Bleeding hands scrape against the wall to no avail. She feels something chiseled crudely into the rough surface. Letters. Surrounding her. Spells—powerful spells—that will slowly but surely steal all the life force that is in her and transform it—
—Wordlessly she screams, opening her mouth and letting the terror pour out until the stone walls shake from the force of the sound. And the animals outside this magical tomb will hear its echo and flee, for the sound will be so terrible that not even a demon would dare to approach—
Her sleeping mind had recognized the Wrath for what it was and tried to warn her.
Now she, too, was trembling.
“He was right.” Rhys’ voice was hollow. “Anukyat. He knew.”
No god had created this spire. No god had condemned this person to death or deliberately crafted a horror chamber to turn his last hours into agony. This was done by human hands.
“They killed all the witches,” Kamala said. Wincing at the taste of the words in her mouth. “That must be why there were none of them left after the war with the Souleaters. Every one of your Spears contains a human sacrifice.”
Only witches could have served for such a sacrifice, she thought. No one else could expend all the vital energy of a human lifetime in a brief span of days; no mere human being could have provided such terribly efficient fuel for the curse that bound them.
She gazed out across the tundra; her Sight could barely pick out the shimmer of the Wrath stretching across the land from east to west, a grim and compelling power. “It is the energy of death,” she whispered.
“Human fear, human starvation, the madness that comes of being buried alive, all concentrated by these spells written here, a lifetime’s worth of soulfire released in a brief span of hours, then woven into a barrier—”
“Who made the spells?” he demanded. “Who did this to him?”
She shook her head and whispered, “I don’t know.”
“Willing? Was it willing? The legends say the witches sacrificed themselves. . . .”
She shuddered. Was it possible that any man or woman would agree to such a fate? “I don’t know, Rhys.” How many Spears were there, in all? Dozens on this continent at least, and supposedly more wherever
dry land was available around the world. The whole of the polar region had been circumscribed, a line of Spears to guard the human lands forever. A seemingly impenetrable barrier, whose mortar was death.
How many witches had died for this? Who had killed them?
“We can’t fix this,” Rhys said. His voice was a hollow thing. “The spells are broken. Look . . .” He grabbed up a handful of shattered brick and let it run out between his fingers. Whatever figures had once been drawn upon it were beyond restoration now. “No man would know how to redraw them.” She saw him open his mouth to say more, then shut it again. No man would be willing to, his expression said. We are Guardians, not murderers.
Closing her eyes for a moment, fighting to shut out the terrible power of the place, Kamala tried to think clearly. “We need to copy the figures,” she said at last. Ethanus would know how to decipher them, or at least how to begin researching them. “Bring them back with us, for others to look at.” Maybe something could be done to restore the Wrath to strength without repeating the atrocities that were used to establish it in the first place.
If so, the Magisters would surely value such knowledge.
Rhys shuddered. For a moment he was so still that she feared she had lost him again; then, with a nod of determination, he pushed his left sleeve all the way up his arm, baring his flesh. Taking out his knife, he unsheathed it one handed and then pressed the point against his forearm . . . and began to cut.
“Rhys!” She reached out for him but he pulled away from her.
“Did you bring pen and ink to this place?” he demanded. “Wax tablets, perhaps? Because I know that I didn’t.” He stabbed the knife into his shirt sleeve, tearing through the fabric. “Maybe we can weave a tapestry instead, with this. Embroider a record. What do you think? Or maybe . . . maybe you can work some witch’s spell here, so we remember everything? Oh, but wait. No spells here. So that won’t work.”
His eyes met hers, and she saw they were filled with madness; his blond hair, made wild by the wind, clung to his tear-stained face. For a moment he just stared at her, and then, when she made no further move to stop him, he returned to his work. Copying the runes from the inside of the magical tomb, carving them into his flesh. “Not so deeply,” she whispered once. “If you bleed too much you will not make it home.” But he didn’t seem to hear her. The self-mutiliation was an act of penance, the flow of blood a purification. Now and then he winced as the knife cut into his arm, and it seemed to her that he drew a savage satisfaction from the sensation. Pain was communion with those who had come before him, who had suffered and died so that he and his people might live.
Finally he had copied all that he could. She helped him roll down his shirt again, wrapping the sleeve snugly about his arm to staunch the flow of blood. He made no move to help or hinder her, but accepted her ministrations in stoic silence. When she reached across him to gather up a handful of the shattered brick he did not move, but stared off into the distance. In shock. She put the sample in her food pouch and then, gently, took his face in her hands.
“Rhys. Rhys.” She shook him gently until his eyes fixed on her. “We have to go now. We have to go home. Can you walk?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
She helped him get to his feet. Helped him climb down from the butte. Mercifully, his state of shock seemed to be sparing him the worst of the Wrath’s power, and concentrating on his welfare seemed to be helping her. Or perhaps it was because they were leaving this place. The power of the barrier was focused on driving living creatures away, so that none would be able to cross: fleeing it now, Kamala and Rhys had its metaphysical current at their back.
Hours passed. Night fell. Exhausted and drained, Rhys stumbled through the darkness. Exhausted and drained, Kamala tried to guide him.
Eventually the screams faded into silence, and with them the power of the Wrath. Not knowing where they were—nor caring—the two of them lowered themselves to the rocky ground, arm in arm, and slept at last.
Mercifully, they did not dream.
Chapter 15
SOMETHING WAS wrong.
Approaching Siderea’s hilltop palace, Colivar could not pin down the source of his disquiet. Nothing seemed out of place, at least to his casual inspection. Brilliant white columns gleamed in the sunlight as they did on every other summer day; the salt-laden breeze blew in from the sea in its accustomed manner; even the distant murmur of human activity in the port far below was its usual timbre and volume. No, everything looked and sounded perfectly normal.
So what made him so sure that it wasn’t? It was something he sensed viscerally, as an animal does, without having a name for it. A fleeting unease that he could glimpse out of the corner of his eye, but not look on directly. It was a kind of thing he had never felt before, and since there were few things in the world that he had not experienced—sorcerous or otherwise—it bothered him.
Perhaps it was simply the lack of welcome that seemed so odd. He was accustomed to having a servant run up to him the moment he arrived so the absence of one was noteworthy. Evidently Siderea no longer expected surprise visits from sorcerers—or perhaps no longer welcomed them. He could hardly blame her for the latter. The Magisters had not exactly treated her well of late. Lazaroth’s comment about maggots came to mind.
And then, at last, a servant appeared. The man wasn’t exactly jubilant to see him, but at least he was properly respectful. “Magister Colivar.” He bowed deeply in respect. “You are here to see Her Majesty?”
“If she is receiving,” he said, berating himself a moment later for expressing himself in such a manner. A Magister should never appear obsequious.
“Of course, my lord. Please follow me.”
Colivar was led into the palace and taken to a receiving chamber, where he was left to wait. That was also a new custom; normally Siderea put all her other business aside when a Magister came calling. Nothing about the room itself looked any different than the last time he’d seen it, but even so his hackles rose as he entered. Whatever disturbance he had sensed outside the palace was clearly active in here as well.
Then Siderea entered. She looked lovely as always, of course, but a trained eye could pick out the change in her demeanor, from her usual languid elegance to something colder. Not a great surprise. The fact that she had made him wait had warned him what to expect.
“Colivar.” She raised one eyebrow as she looked him over, as if not quite sure what manner of creature he was. Then she held out her hand to him, inviting the appropriate homage. “It has been some time.”
He walked over to her, took her hand in his, and lifted it briefly to his lips in greeting. He could smell a strange perfume rising from her fingertips, some kind of warm, sweet scent with undertones of musk. It seemed oddly familiar to him. One more part of the puzzle.
“And to what do I owe this great honor?” she asked, slipping her fingers free of his grasp.
He made sure his disquiet did not affect his tone, asking with accustomed lightness, “Can a humble sorcerer no longer visit?”
A fleeting smile came and went, though her gaze remained cold. “Come now, Colivar. You were never humble.”
“Even a sorcerer can be humbled by beauty, lady.”
“Beauty fades in time. And not even the Magisters can save it, in the end. At least that’s what some of them have told me. Is it true?”
Inwardly he sighed. “I wish that it were otherwise,” he said, with rare sincerity.
The dark eyes narrowed. “Do you really?”
“Of course. How could you doubt it?”
She folded her arms across her chest. “So, would you teach me true sorcery, if you could? Would you make me like yourself, so that I might survive the ages?” The black fire in her eyes burned fiercely, hungrily. “If you could.”
He drew in a deep breath before answering. “It is not within my power, Siderea. You know that.”
“Because no woman can wield true sorcery. Isn’t that right? We are . .
. what? Too weak to master it? Too flighty?” She shook her head. “Do you know the answer to that, Colivar? Can you tell me why I must die? Can any Magister?”
For a moment he was silent. There was no right answer to such a question, and he did not know which wrong one to choose. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “No one knows.” Hopefully she would accept that at face value. “I am sorry, Siderea.”
Even if Transition were possible for women, it would not be possible for you. You are simply not inhuman enough to survive what that change requires.
With a heavy sigh she shut her eyes. For a long moment she was silent. He could sense some great internal struggle going on, and he respected her enough not use sorcery on her to eavesdrop on the details. Finally, she whispered in a trembling voice, “Why did none of you tell me? Why did you leave me alone to discover the truth?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, Siderea.”
“I expected better of you. After so many years. . . .” She turned away from him, biting her lip. “I expected better of all of you,” she whispered.
“You know better than anyone else how few morati we become involved with. The rhythm of mortal life is alien to us. As are its accustomed sentiments.” He sighed. “Accuse the Magisters of many things, lady. Gods know, we probably deserve them all. But never believe that we would not drive death from your door if that were possible.”
How convincing his words sounded! And it was the proper thing to say to her, even if it were not really true. Colivar suspected that most of the Magisters would not lift a finger to help her if they thought the price of it was having a woman invade their exclusive brotherhood. Siderea was like a king’s concubine in that regard; good enough to share a man’s bed, not good enough to share his throne. Thank the gods that would never be tested.
What about me? he wondered. Would I give her the gift of eternity if I could?
He didn’t know the answer.
Gently he took her by the shoulders, turning her back to him. The strange, sweet perfume that she wore filled his nostrils, stirring his blood unexpectedly. He put a hand to her cheek and felt the life pulsing fiercely within her. This one will not go quietly to death, he thought.
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