by Alec Hutson
He slumped even further, though in relief or exhaustion she couldn’t say. “I hope… I hope they do not kill you.”
Alyanna pursed her lips, watching the shadowblade up ahead as he slipped among the tumbled boulders.
She hoped so, too.
The kith’ketan led them along narrow trails seemingly cut from the mountains, some barely wide enough for their horse, the walls of stone rising so high around them that only a thin slice of the sky could be seen overhead. Alyanna thought she could still make out tiny black specks marring the blue—they were nothing if not tenacious, those birds.
She wished she could still pluck them from the sky with her sorcery.
The path twisted and turned, and several times she thought they’d arrived at a dead end, only to have the kith’ketan draw back some hanging vines to reveal a passage or to find a hidden way recessed behind a seemingly random rock piling. They passed a deep pool so clear it was like a pane of glass, fed by a hissing waterfall that tumbled from a hidden alcove far above. Staring at the veil of falling water, Alyanna felt a strange tingling begin to crawl along her skin. She rubbed at her arms, dismissing the sensation. No, that was impossible. But when they crossed a natural bridge over a chasm, a slab of rock that had tumbled just perfectly to span the abyss, the tingling returned, insistent. She found her breath coming in short, almost panicked gasps, and when they rounded a spot where a gnarled mountain tree thrust onto the path she already knew what they would find: a great bronze door set into the mountain’s flesh, veins of glimmering quartz radiating from it like streaks of lightning frozen in the white stone.
“No,” she whispered, the reins falling from her slack fingers.
It was the entrance to Tivana, the mountain fortress where a thousand years ago she had conspired to end the old world.
“Yes, Weaver,” Demian rasped behind her, his voice heavy with pain. “Welcome home.”
The door clanged shut behind them with a sound like rolling thunder. The reverberations trembled the air in the great hall in which they stood, echoing among the square stone pillars and disturbing a nest of creatures lairing in the crevices above. Leathery wings flapped as the things soared higher into the gloom, chittering.
It was familiar, though not exactly as she remembered.
The pillars had once been twined with colored silk and affixed with shining mistglobes. Sofas wrought of copper strands and mounded with cushions had been scattered about, and marble water basins had been set just inside the entrance for the refreshment of those arriving or leaving the mountain. Now the hall was barren, as if it had been abandoned long ago.
Which it had. And yet…
A pair of cowled youths stepped from beside the pillars. Both held wooden rods, from which dangled translucent spheres she would have guessed were blown from glass, though their surfaces had a strange shimmering sheen. Clinging to the inside of each of these spheres were dozens of small, wriggling worms that glowed with a faint blue luminescence and gave the solemn faces of the youths an unearthly pallor.
“We did not know you would be bringing your own light,” said one of the shadowblades softly, striding forward. Despite the silence of the hall, a quiet so deep she could hear Demian’s labored breathing, the assassin made no sound when he moved. It was as if he was as insubstantial as a ghost. Alyanna did hear the shuffling steps of the child acolytes as they turned to follow him, and after a few moments she was outside the wavering circle of blue light cast by their strange lanterns. The radiance spilling from her eyes illuminated a little, but the light was quickly swallowed by the suffocating darkness. She shivered—it truly felt like something was watching her, out there beyond the limits of what she could see.
“Come,” said the other shadowblade as he passed her, carrying the unconscious Demian in his arms as easily as if he were a child. “We must bring the Undying One to those who can help him.”
They exited the great entrance hall through a doorway shaped like a tiered triangle—this was one of the strange architectural flourishes of the wraiths, the creatures that had first carved this place from the stone. The wraiths had once lived almost as men in their mountain redoubts, tunneling labyrinthine dens that spiraled deep underground. Now the creatures persisted only in the wilds of the Frostlands and had long ago fallen into barbarism. They were little more than animals, but once they had been a mighty people, well before the first empires of man had arisen in these lands. Mighty wars had been fought between the emerging holdfasts of Min-Ceruth and the ancient, deteriorating wraith kingdoms.
They descended a wide staircase clearly hewn from the stone for human legs—a legacy of her own efforts, as when she had chosen this mountain she had imported hundreds of skilled slaves from the Imperium to transform this wraith nest into a comfortable sanctuary. And in the end, it turned out the final beneficiaries of her efforts were the kith’ketan. She shook her head, still reeling from this revelation. When had they occupied the mountain? And why?
The two youths turned from the passage, entering a small chamber, and the shadowblade carrying Demian followed. Inside was a raised slab of dark stone covered in a thin layer of something that might have been moss, a tall, crooked figure looming beside it. The man—if it was a man, as its features were recessed inside a cowl, and its shape was hidden beneath heavy robes—gestured for the shadowblade to lay Demian down upon the slab. Alyanna gasped when from the figure’s dagged sleeve emerged a twisted hand, withered and blackened like a limb that had been held inside a great flame.
The figure jerked its head in her direction at the sound. “The Pure,” it said, in surprisingly smooth and cultured Menekarian. It reached up with its monstrous limbs—both were the same, she saw—and touched the hem of its hood. Alyanna feared what horror would be revealed, her breath quickening, but when the cowl was drawn back the face of a handsome young man emerged into the room’s soft blue light.
“I was changed against my will,” Alyanna said, trying not to stare at the man’s arms.
“Interesting,” the man murmured. “Perhaps I will study you later. I’ve always been curious about how the Cleansing alters the body.” Then he turned from her, staring down at Demian.
“I know him,” he said simply, brushing a gnarled finger along Demian’s cheek.
“It is the Undying One,” one of the shadowblades said.
“And yet he is dying,” replied the strange young man. “How unexpected.”
“Yes,” continued the shadowblade. “And the daymo wishes him saved. Can you do it?”
The twisted man studied Demian for a long moment, his gaze traveling the length of the sorcerer’s limp body. Then with startling quickness he slashed with his hand, Demian’s already tattered shirt parting before the hooked talon at the end of his finger. He prodded the flesh beneath, frowning. “The wound is deep and layered over an older injury. Some corruption has set in, but it seems like there is no internal bleeding. I believe I can bring him back from the Paths.”
The shadowblade who had carried Demian into the room nodded curtly. “Do so,” he said, and strode towards the door, the other assassin and the two youths turning to follow him.
“Wait,” Alyanna cried, almost grabbing the shadowblade as he passed, before stopping herself. “What about me?”
The eyes above the assassin’s veil revealed nothing. “Hope that he survives,” he said without emotion.
Then she was alone with the twisted physicker and Demian, the only light in the smaller chamber that which spilled from her eyes. There was a narrow bench against one of the walls, and as the man circled the sorcerer, prodding and muttering, Alyanna sat, suddenly acutely aware that she had not slept in days.
The thought of falling asleep in this place, with this creature hovering over her, was too terrible to contemplate. So she forced herself to concentrate on what was happening. To her surprise and revulsion, it looked to Alyanna that the shadowblade physicker
actually pressed his finger into Demian’s now-exposed wound, black blood trickling across his belly. The sorcerer moaned, squirming, and after a moment of watching him intently the physicker withdrew his finger and brought it to his lips. His tongue—strangely thin and long, Alyanna thought—flickered out to taste Demian’s blood.
“What are you?” she asked, her stomach turning at the sight.
“A man who was too curious,” the physicker said distractedly as he tore a clump of what she had thought was moss from the bed Demian lay upon, kneading the substance in his withered hands, “and wished to see the face of God.” He pressed the moss onto Demian’s wound, covering it completely, and the sorcerer’s pained murmurings subsided.
Watching him minister to Demian, Alyanna remembered another time, and another grievously wounded man that had been brought into this mountain. Savaged by wyverns, she’d thought Jan would die when they found him—one of the beast’s barbed stingers had plunged into his belly, and his skin had been turning black from the poison flooding his body. But the Visani fallowmancer Querimanica had shown his unparalleled skill in restorative sorcery, somehow knitting Jan’s broken body together and purging the poison from his veins in the span of only a few days. It had been an awesome display. Healing magic was one of the most difficult branches of sorcery to master—life was exceedingly complex, and to regrow flesh and mend bones took an incredible knowledge that could only be gained from deep study and an exacting attention to the smallest detail.
With sorcery, it was always easier to destroy than to create.
“Weaver.”
Alyanna came groggily awake. She had been dreaming that she’d returned to the mountain where she’d broken the world and found it full of living shadows… She raised her head, rubbing her sore neck.
Jan was sitting up, watching her; the torn remnants of his shirt had been removed, and in the chamber’s dim light his pale skin seemed to glow. Except for where he’d been wounded, as a smear of black covered most of his side. No… not Jan.
It was no dream.
“Demian,” she said, rising from the bench and approaching the sorcerer. “How do you feel?”
He gingerly touched the blackness encrusting his torso. “Well enough, I suppose. This is the work of the kith’ketan. Did they… did they put anything in my ear?”
“I didn’t see, but I fell asleep while the physicker was attending to you. Your ear? What could they put there?”
Demian grimaced. “A worm. It burrows within the skull and lairs in the brain. The daymo breeds them… after a while the host is nothing more than a husk and cannot help but answer without hesitation any question.” His hand went to the side of his head, as if he could tell by touch whether one was squirming inside him right now. “I hope he still considers us allies.”
Alyanna laid her hand on Demian’s arm. “They seemed to still respect you. And their physiker brought you back from the brink.”
The sorcerer nodded. “I lived in this place for a long, long time. All of them have heard tales of the Undying One.”
Alyanna shuddered. The darkness… the emptiness… the weight of the mountain pressing down from above… and of course, lest she not forget, the deranged murder cult. “How could you live here? And why?”
Demian ran a hand through his sweat-damp black curls. “I returned a few centuries after the ceremony. I was searching for answers, at that time—I’m not sure why I looked for them here, but I had exhausted nearly everywhere else. I wanted solitude, I think, and I thought no other place would be as empty.” He stared into the gloom, quiet for a moment. “But instead I found the kith’ketan. There were fewer of them then, and their legend had not yet begun to spread. A prophet had brought them here, a man they called the daymo. He spoke of a god beneath the mountain, a god who would flense the world and expose its secrets for them in exchange for their devotion.”
“But there’s nothing here,” Alyanna said. “No god. We would have sensed it long ago.”
Demian glanced at her, his face solemn. “There was nothing then. Now there is.”
Alyanna swallowed, remembering the sense of being watched from the darkness. “What is it?”
The sorcerer shook his head. “I have my suspicions. But perhaps this is not the time or the place to share them.”
Alyanna peered into the darkness. It had seemed to thicken as they spoke, but surely that was her imagination…
“You said you were meditating here?”
Demian winced as he explored the edges of the mossy bandage with his fingers. “Aye.”
“Why?”
“As I said, I was also… ng… searching for answers when I came back. For a long time after the ceremony that… made us… I wandered, trying to unravel the riddles of existence. Where does the world come from? What is our purpose here? What will be our fate? I thought the answers would be out there, somewhere, and with my immortality in hand I now had the time and patience to discover them. A secret hidden in some ancient ruin, perhaps, or in the ramblings of a mad desert mystic. Always I was disappointed.” He raised his sword arm above his shoulder, testing its range of motion. “But I did find something. South of the Broken Sea, in the Empire of Swords and Flowers, I came across a temple clinging to the side of a mountain. The monks there could do the impossible—leap incredibly high, and break stone with their bare hands. And yet I felt no sorcery to explain these powers.”
“You’re speaking of Red Fang.”
“Aye. The daisun monks were the inheritors of a tradition that stretched back to the ancestral lands of Shan, far across the ocean. Through intense meditation and discipline they could perform incredible feats.”
“And you discovered how they did it?”
Demian nodded curtly. “In a sense. I never achieved their level of mastery, even after centuries of meditating. But perhaps that was because of what I already was.”
Alyanna leaned closer, intrigued. “What you were?”
Demian raised his hand, and a sphere of wizardlight flared into existence. The radiance filling Alyanna made her shiver as he summoned forth his sorcery. It was so strange, to feel the magic welling in another, when for an age it had been twined with her very soul.
“A sorcerer. Within us there is a thread to elsewhere, a place of limitless power.”
Alyanna nodded. The Void. The realm of gods and demons and other creatures beyond the ken of mortals.
“You know this, of course. But the revelation of the monks is that this passage to the beyond is not restricted merely to those born with the gift. Everyone in the world, not only sorcerers, is connected to the Void. We are unique because this power bubbles within sorcerers like a spring, and after training we can shape it with our will—and what we are capable of doing is only limited by our ingenuity and the size of the reservoirs within us. But the daisun monks, through their intense meditation, have also discovered this pathway to the Void. They call it the Nothing within the Self. And the greatest of them have learned how to plumb these depths to strengthen their bodies far beyond what is natural. The difference is that they reach into the Void and draw forth something, while we merely make use of the sorcerous dribblings that collect within us.”
Alyanna felt like she had to sit down. The idea that those who lacked the gift of sorcery could also access the Void was stunning. Such a heretical belief would have had Demian sanctioned or even executed in the days of the Imperium. Was it possible? If anyone could reach into the Void… did that mean she could learn how to do this as well? Had her path to sorcery truly been closed forever, even though the spring inside her had dried up? A tiny flame of hope kindled within her for the first time since she had been strapped screaming to the Radiant Altar.
“So all the time you spent under the mountain you were trying to find this Nothing within the Self?”
Demian let his wizardlight sputter and fade. “Yes. And I never di
d. Perhaps it is because, as I said, I am already a sorcerer—or maybe I am missing secret knowledge the monks somehow kept from me, despite my… strident questioning.”
“Centuries in this place… a long time for a fruitless search.”
“It did not feel so long,” Demian mused. “Time flows differently here, especially deeper, down where my chamber was situated.” He hesitated, as if uncertain how to express himself. “Do you remember when you dreamsent to me, how strange the feeling was to be aware within our dreams? Like you were watching yourself from a distance. The air was honey-thick, unreal… that is what it was like for me under this mountain. I would emerge from my meditations to find a decade had passed, and even though the kith’ketan left food and water in my cell, and I must have consumed it, I have no memory of doing so. When you dreamsent to me here, I almost did not realize what you were doing because it was already so similar to my life beneath the mountain.” He paused again, and when he spoke once more his voice was distant. “It was a waking dream, truly.”
“What do we do now, Demian?”
Her question seemed to shake him from his reverie. “We rest, Weaver. We both need to recover, I think. I’m certain the daymo will call on us before long, and we will discover then whether we are still within his good graces.”
Alyanna clenched her fists. “What use would I be to him now? What use am I to you?” she said harshly, trying to keep the bleak hopelessness from rising up. If she let it consume her—if she faced what she had become—she wasn’t sure how long she could keep on living. “I should kill myself and free you from whatever obligation you think you have –”
She started as Demian’s hand closed around her wrist. His grip was like an iron manacle, and he leaned closer to her, staring without flinching into her blazing eyes. “You are Alyanna ne Verell. It was with your brilliance that you bent the world to your will, not your sorcery. Remember that. You are still the Weaver.”
She turned away so he would not see her tears.