The Hollow God (Swords and Saints Book 3)

by JA Hutson

  A great wave of exhaustion washes over me. I know where this is going, and the Contessa seems to realize this as our eyes meet. She nods slowly. “You understand, Alesk.”

  “I do,” I say heavily, my gaze sliding to the travel packs.

  Bell grabs my arm fiercely. “Wait, what are you talking about? What does she want you to do?”

  “I have to go with Valyra.”

  The scientist’s daughter chokes out a disbelieving laugh. “With her? Back to the dead world she came from?”

  “And where I came from,” I say softly.

  Valyra has slid down the wall and now is sitting on the floor, shaking her head as if she can’t comprehend what is happening.

  “Indeed,” the Contessa says. “Here is what I propose. This key” —she hefts the dark stone threaded with silver— “I have reshaped so that the first time it is used it will open a path to Terithia. The second time will bring you back to this world. Where, exactly, I don’t know. Going there, I’m confident I can transport you all together and to the correct gate, as I’m intimately familiar with where I want you to go. But on the return trip, I cannot promise anything.”

  Deliah snorts. “So you want Talin to bring the girl to the other world, leave her there and come right back?”

  Valyra moans, but the Contessa shakes her head.

  “I do not think Talin would accept that. And I am not so heartless. If I was, I would have smothered the poor weaver in her sleep months ago.”

  “What is your plan, then?” I ask.

  Something hard smashes against the other side of the door, and we all jump. Muffled voices can be heard through the thick wood, and I think I recognize one voice above the others. The Baron, bellowing loud commands. Another blow shivers the door.

  “This world’s fate is on a knife’s edge,” the Contessa says, staring at me intensely. “Alesk, you must take Valyra back to Terithia. Help her find another tribe in the wastes. When you know that she is safe, return to the Gate and use the key to come back to this world.”

  “There are no other tribes!” yells Valyra desperately. “They’re dead! They’re all dead!”

  The Contessa meets my gaze and holds it steadily. “She might be right. Give the word, and I’ll have Fen Poria ensure the Prophet never uses her.”

  Wood splinters. They’ve taken axes to the other side, and we must only have moments before they break through. The Contessa reads my thoughts and shakes her head. “The door is ironwood, nearly unbreakable. They won’t get through it quickly.”

  I nod, relieved. “No, don’t harm her. I’ll go with Valyra.” I hurry across the chamber and bend to scoop the weaver into my arms. She tries to push me away, but when she realizes her efforts are futile she instead sags in defeat, her small body wracked by sobs.

  “Open the Gate,” I say, and the Contessa steps forward to push the dark, silver-threaded stone into an indentation in the ancient archway. Immediately, light seeps from the edges to fill the doorway with a rippling golden veil.

  I square my shoulders as I approach the portal. Valyra is now clinging to me, her arms around my neck.

  “Deliah, slip the packs over my arm.”

  The lamias instead picks up the largest of the bags and comes to stand beside me.

  “No,” I say vehemently, shaking my head. “You don’t want to accompany me. I don’t think I’m coming back.”

  The lamias’s amethyst eyes hold my own, and she crooks a smile. “If you were about to fight a battle against unimaginable odds, I would still stand beside you.” She shrugs. “I would be a terrible mate if I abandoned you now.”

  “Deliah . . .”

  “I am making my own decision, Talin. And it is to go with you.”

  I can only nod in thanks, at a loss for words.

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” Bell says.

  I turn to find the scientist’s daughter and Xela have slipped the remaining two packs over their shoulders.

  “Bell, what about your father?”

  She shakes her head ruefully. “If I was to go back to my father right now and tell him I passed on the opportunity to explore a different world, he would disown me on principle.”

  “But what if Zim . . .”

  “Once the Prophet realizes Valyra is gone, there will be no reason to attack the city,” the Contessa interjects. “By taking the weaver away from here we save Ysala.”

  “And Xela,” I say turning to the shadowdancer. “I didn’t tell you about your mother. The emperor . . . he said she is to be executed at the next Blood Blossom festival as a traitor to Zim.”

  Xela’s face goes slack with shock. “My mother? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I sense she did not support this war. Perhaps he found out that she helped us rescue Valyra from the Prophet’s followers.”

  Xela blinks rapidly, her pack falling from her shoulder. “The Festival is only a month away . . . if I can reach Zim by then, maybe I can save her.” She glances at me, anguish in her eyes. “Talin . . .”

  “Go save your mother,” I tell her gently. “It would lift my heart knowing Auxilia’s daughter was coming to save her. But thank you, Xela. For everything.”

  The shadowdancer quickly looks away, blinking rapidly.

  “And perhaps I can help Xela,” the Contessa says. She is at the cabinet, placing the keys and a few other strange objects into a travel bag of her own. “I owe the Orthonos family a favor from long ago, and we must flee the city as well.” She picks up the purple crystal stone. “This key will bring us to an underground temple a few days outside of Zim. It is one of the few doors I left open, and I did this so I could easily keep an eye on what Ezekal was up to in the Twilight Empire. I will open a Gate to there once Talin departs for our old world. Your key,” she says, indicating the stone I’m holding, “should send you to an ancient ruin that was once one of the greatest cities of our people. The tribes may have left something behind hinting at where they have sought refuge.”

  A shattering crack comes from the door, and we whirl around to see that a wedge of black iron has finally broken through the wood. As the ax head is wrenched loose a triumphant roar comes from the other side.

  “Now!” the Contessa cries, gesturing at the shimmering portal. Deliah and Bell rush forward, vanishing into the doorway. Gritting my teeth I follow, just remembering to pull out the key before I’m swallowed by the golden light.

  8

  My boots plunge into red dust somewhere high up a steep slope. The momentum I had in the last world is transferred into this one, and I lose my balance, falling forward as Valyra flies from my arms. I get a mouthful of the dust and sink almost up to my elbows in the sandy grit. I try and arrest my descent, but it’s no use and I just come away with handfuls of dust as I go tumbling.

  Eventually, the slope begins to level out and I come to a hissing stop. For a long moment I lie there, breathing hard, staring up at the colors swirling in the sky above. A pulse of sickly yellow flares and then fades into burnt orange. Swirls of green spiral around a shimmering purple hub. There is no sun, no clouds. Night will never fall.

  I’ve returned.

  I sit up, red dust sliding off me. Valyra is a little farther up the hill in an unmoving heap. Bell is on her knees nearby, staring up at the sky in wonder, her pale skin smeared red by the dust. Deliah squats a few paces from her, frowning as she investigates the contents of the pack the Contessa has given us. She’s also covered in dust, but it blends with her reddish skin. She looks to have tried to wipe clean her black carapace armor, and was somewhat successful, but there’s no way she’s getting the grit matted into her indigo hair out without a very long bath.

  And the chances of that happening here are impossibly slim.

  I twist around to see where we’ve come from. A vast red-dust dune looms over us, and perched at its summit is a freestanding doorway of the same opalescent material as the other Gates. It must have once been part of a larger structure, but the rest has either been destroyed
or buried beneath the dust.

  “Are you two all right?” I ask Deliah and Bell. The scientist’s daughter tears her eyes from the colors cavorting across the sky and looks at me, then gives a small nod. She seems overwhelmed by this place.

  The lamias, on the other hand, appears to be taking it all in stride. She pulls a large skin from the pack and holds it up.

  “This is all the water I have,” she says, concern in her voice. She gestures with the skin at the vast red expanse stretching out in every direction. “And it doesn’t look like there’s much out there.”

  I run my tongue along my teeth and then spit out the dust I’ve collected. “There must be a way to get water from the wastes. Perhaps Valyra has a trick for doing this.”

  Deliah jerks her head in the direction of the weaver. “You may want to go check and see if she’s alive.”

  A good suggestion. Various aches flare as I push myself to my feet, and I nearly stumble. The last few days have been an endless litany of falls and fights and exploding statues; I haven’t gotten a night of rest since I descended the stairs at the inn in Zim to find Auxilia Orthonos seated at a table. What has that been, two days ago? Three? I shake my head, trying to clear it. There’s a thickness to my thoughts, and I’m not sure whether this is from passing through the Gate or a lack of sleep.

  I wait until my head stops spinning, and then I slog through the dust to where Valyra lies. She’s so still that for a moment I’m seized by the fear that she’s broken her neck in the fall, but as I gently turn her over I see tears glistening on her cheeks. Her copper eyes find mine, then her gaze moves past me to stare at the color-scarred sky. The hopelessness in her face makes my chest ache.

  “How are you?” I ask, brushing dust off her legs.

  Her eyes flick back to me. “I’m dying,” she says dully, and I quickly glance to see if she’s wounded. She sneers when she sees me do this. “We’re all dying.”

  “Don’t give up.”

  She barks a vicious laugh. “What do you imagine happens now? My tribe hid inside our rocky citadel for centuries. Only the strongest and the bravest ventured into the wastes, and if they stayed out for longer than a few days then we knew they were dead. This place is murderous.” She breathes out heavily. “It is dead and it wants us dead as well. My entire life I wanted to leave this nightmare. I wanted to go to a place like in the old stories Lorekeeper Ghervas used to tell Valans and me about what the world had been like. Lakes of cool blue water and lush green forests.” She squeezes her eyes shut as more tears carve tracks down her face. “And somehow I found it. Now you have taken it away from me. As you took away my family. Here I am again in this horrible place but without my mother and my brother . . .” Her voice cracks, trailing away.

  There’s nothing I can say. I’m sorry for her, but she is the key to allowing the Shriven to turn the other world into a ravaged husk. One life cannot endanger millions. I sigh and straighten, shielding my eyes as I search the horizon. Nothing. There’s no sign of this ruined city the Contessa has spoken of.

  “Do you know where we are?” I ask Valyra, and she snorts derisively.

  “Of course I don’t. In my entire life I never took more than fifty steps outside our home.”

  I frown. “I’m going to climb up to the top of this dune and get a better view.”

  Valyra says nothing, merely rolling away so that I can’t see her face.

  Shaking my head, I leave her and start to climb the treacherous slope. The dust is less compact up here, and it’s a struggle to wade through. I’m exhausted before I’m halfway back to where the archway gleams in the unnatural light.

  Valyra has a right to be angry with me. I can only hope that with time she comes to forgive me for the choices I’ve made. Perhaps that will happen if I can find her a new tribe. A new home.

  My legs are burning by the time I crest the top of the great dune. The Gate we tumbled through seems strangely immune to the dust, its pearly luster uncorrupted by the swirling red grit. I avoid stepping through it, even though the golden portal has vanished – what a disaster that would be if I was somehow whisked back to the other world without the others. They would probably kill each other. Shaking my head, I make a circuit of the Gate, staring out in every direction. The wastes undulate like a desert, but I’m perched on one of the highest points, so I can see quite a ways. There’s no sign of any city, but something does draw my eye. A pair of tall thin objects are emerging from the wastes, and then a little ways beyond them are two more. Then another pair and another and another, marching off into the hazy distance. These are the only things breaking the monotony of the endless sweep of red, so I suppose that’s the direction we should go.

  It feels like it takes half a day of trudging through the dust to reach the things I glimpsed, but since there’s no sun moving across the strange sky it’s nearly impossible to measure the passage of time. When the tall, narrow objects finally resolve into great pillars of white stone we’re sweaty and dust-caked.

  “What do you think this is?” Deliah asks, laying her hand on the pillar’s plinth and squinting at its distant top. This one looks intact, but most of the rest have been broken at varying heights. The large mounds heaped around their bases suggest that the dust has covered these fragments.

  I turn to Valyra, who has been trailing us since we left the Gate. She’s angry enough not to walk beside us, but not angry enough to strike off in a different direction and face the dangers of the wastes on her own.

  “Any idea why these were built?” I ask her, but she merely gives a sullen shrug.

  “It’s perfectly obvious,” Bell says, inspecting great jagged runes that have been carved into the pillar. She gestures at the endless procession marching away from us in their perfectly straight lines. “These pillars used to flank some sort of important road, which is now buried beneath the dust. Maybe they were merely for decoration, or perhaps they were distance markers.”

  “Important roads go to important places,” I murmur, shielding my eyes as I stare at the shimmering horizon.

  “If there’s a city around here, it’s at the end of this road,” Bell says confidently. She points at the runes. “Can you read these?”

  I step closer to get a better look at the ancient writing. For a moment they are simply scratches in the stone, but then it’s like puzzle pieces sliding into place and suddenly I can understand the pattern.

  “It says, ‘And in the following summer, in the thirtieth year of his glorious reign, Tribune Amodeus defeated the outcast Irons and drove them beyond the sea.’ Then there’s the number eighteen.”

  Bell traces the runes with her finger, as if trying to commit them to memory. “Interesting. I would guess that a similar snippet of this Amodeus’s life is etched into each of these pillars. They must have been erected during his lifetime, or perhaps by his successor. And this number must measure how far away the city is.”

  “But eighteen what?” Deliah asks. “Days marching?”

  “It’s not too far,” I say. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. “Each unit here is about a league. We should be able to walk seven or eight before we have to rest.”

  “So two and a half days walking,” Deliah muses. “That’s about how much water we have, so there had better be some more at this city. There better be a city.” She turns to Valyra, who has come closer since we stopped but is still hanging back a ways. “How did your people get water from the wastes?”

  Valyra stares at the lamias like she’s just asked a ridiculous question. “Get water from the wastes? There’s no water out here. My tribe’s home had a spring beneath it that was fed by an underground river. Any member of my people that ventured into the dust had to bring all the water they would need.”

  The lamias looks at me, her lips pursed. She’s not one to display fear, I know, but I can tell that the idea of running out of water worries her.

  “If there’s a city at the end of this road, it probably has wells,” I tell her, try
ing to sound more confident than I feel.

  Deliah grunts in reply as she starts on the buried road. She doesn’t sound convinced.

  “Wells?” Valyra says, her tone incredulous. “Wells? You think that in a land regularly lashed by dust storms that there are wells that haven’t been filled to the brim with dust?” She snorts a harsh laugh. “We’re going to die of thirst . . . unless we get lucky and the Shriven kill us first.”

  Deliah stops, then turns around. She begins walking towards Valyra, who takes a nervous step backwards.

  “What are you –”

  I flinch as Deliah slaps the weaver across the face, knocking her to the ground. Valyra’s hand flies to her face as she stares up at the lamias in wide-eyed surprise.

  “We are here because of you,” Deliah says calmly. “Because Talin feels enough of a debt to your mother that he would risk his life to help you. We could have easily let the crazy wolf girl shove a knife in your eye. But we did not. And do you see us complaining? Be grateful, little girl.”

  Then she adjusts her pack and without sparing another glance at the shocked weaver she turns and trudges away.

  I step over to Valyra and hold out my hand. “Come. We have to work together if we are going to survive this place. And I mean to survive it.”

  The weaver gazes at my hand for a long moment, the dry wind pushing red curls across her face. Her copper eyes are unreadable. Finally, her hand slips from her cheek, revealing a red smear that looks like the beginning of an impressive bruise. I wince, but I also know that Deliah could easily have shattered her face if she’d wanted to. Without looking at me, Valyra climbs to her feet and starts walking in the direction the lamias is going.

  Letting my hand drop, I shrug and follow.

  I’m down to my last few mouthfuls of water when the city finally appears on the horizon. It feels like we’ve been walking for an eternity, but we only needed to stop for sleep once. We huddled around the base of one of the great pillars, and Bell managed to cleverly construct a small tent. It was only large for two of us to rest beneath, so we took turns lying in the shade it afforded. I didn’t think I was going to manage to sleep at all, but I must have, because it seemed like as soon as my head touched my travel bag I was being shaken by Bell so she could take my place.