“Of course,” Linn said a little more bitterly than she had intended and a little less bitterly than she wished the Sage to hear. “Isn’t that always the way of things?”
“Have you not used your power liberally, though you have so recently been granted it?”
Linn felt her heat rising once more. “Out of need,” she said, choosing to look at the iron door rather than the regal woman beside her. “Not out of choice.”
“There is always a choice,” the Sage said, harsh and firm. She reached for the handle, this time with more confidence. “Do not think that our folly was mixed up in anything different than that of men. Through the ages, we have all been fallible, corruptible. But, as your Embers have no doubt proven, power has its place, Linn Ve’Ran. And while my dark brother delved too deeply and too foolishly, awakening the World Apart like an engine of dark intent rather than a well of latent power, he was not wrong in all things.”
Linn opened her mouth to speak, but the queen pushed on the door and it banged open. Linn had to shield her eyes from the spear of blue light that blasted down from some skylight on high—perhaps one of the tallest spires of the palace.
They were in a circular chamber with rough-cut walls made of the same Nevermelt as the rest of the palace, albeit darker. Dark enough to appear as obsidian in places. In the center, there was a rectangular dais, and resting atop it was a form that Linn had to blink at to confirm.
The queen watched her from the shadows as she approached, walking around the carved stone and white slab and examining the body that rested on top. If the Frostfire Sage had some qualities of the Faey about her, then the man who lay at rest before her was their embodiment, albeit larger, grander and more regal than anyone Linn had seen before.
He was tall and well-muscled, with pale skin and large, angular ears. His brow was smooth and his mouth hard. His chin was made up of two rounded hills with a trench between them and his nose was narrow without being hooked, more like the beak of an eagle than the razor hook of a vulture. His eyelashes were long and frosted white and his hair was of the same hue, more silver-blue than the white Iyana and Mother Ninyeva possessed. Apart from his bare arms, face and neck, he was adorned in silver armor that put the Blue Knights to shame.
Linn reached out with a shaking hand. She almost brushed her fingertips against the smooth white hairs on his forearm before she remembered herself and looked at the Frostfire Sage. She nodded, and Linn touched him. At first, he was cold, but as Linn’s warmth melted the thin film of frost that coated his entire form, she felt the faintest heat as her own skin made contact with his. She withdrew as if she’d been burned, and when next she looked at the Frostfire Sage, she saw her as the wide and wild-eyed Witch they had been warned of.
“What is this?” Linn asked. She had been made privy to some grand secret, one whose ends she couldn’t begin to guess and whose consequences she feared.
“This is my husband,” the Sage said, stepping up onto the dais. She gazed down at him with such love and longing that Linn imagined him sleeping rather than buried in the depths of a cold and eternal death. But then, his form was intact.
“You’ve kept him …” Linn started, unsure how to say it.
“Preserved?” She laughed, but didn’t take her eyes from her departed consort. “Yes. I suppose I have.” She looked to Linn, and a flash of that wildness returned. “You felt it, yes?” She began to walk around his form without touching him, keeping her eyes locked on Linn the whole time. “You felt the life that still breathes within him.”
Linn swallowed. She looked from the Frostfire Sage to the creature on the slab, at his restful face and stern bearing, even in the appearance of death, and nodded.
“I managed to slow his heart before it stopped,” she said. “When cursed Rane and his Dark Landkist came for us, I never could have expected them to come so close.”
“Rane?” Linn asked. “T’Alon Rane was here, fighting against you?” She thought perhaps she had known it, but then, who knew what to believe with this strange war and all its machinations? Linn, Kole and the rest of them had fallen into it seemingly at the climax, but there was a history there as long as it was bitter, as complex as it was violent.
“They climbed the black shelves just like you,” the Frostfire Sage said. “We met them there, my husband and I. They thought to snuff us out, to eliminate the greatest and most potent of the Sages who opposed the Eastern Dark.” She shook her head but wore a wry smile. “They came close. Far closer than they had any right to.” She looked back at the restful form of her husband. “But we prevailed, didn’t we, dearest? Yes. We prevailed. Many of them fell. Most. Even Rane’s fluttering lover. My husband cast her down, sent her sailing. He’d have finished Rane as well if it weren’t for her. There were many. By my memory, only three made it out.”
It was almost too much for Linn to comprehend. She knew she should have had questions, but they dissolved just as quickly as they formed. She didn’t know where to start.
“We had heard of their triumph over the Twins of Whiteash,” the Sage continued. “Violent, sick creatures. Powerful, yes.” She nodded, lost in her own memories. “But nowhere near what we were at our heights.” She laughed again, a sound like a crow gloating. “It was a foolish thing to try. Bold, for Valour.” Another shake. “And he nearly got us.”
“Why?” Linn asked. It seemed the only question to ask. The Sage tilted her head like a dog might. “The Eastern Dark believes killing the Sages will stop the World Apart coming,” Linn said. “He is one of you. If you are to be believed,” the queen’s face shifted a bit, but it was a passing shadow, “then surely he would have to die as well. Does he truly think it will stop what’s coming?”
“Ray Valour always wanted to be a hero,” she surprised Linn by saying. “But he was never cut out for it. There was something in him, even as a youth, that wasn’t in the rest of us. Not even Balon, then a handsome lord from the east before it had the towers he’d later put up. Valour is as selfish as any. He would never do a thing without it benefiting him. If he believes killing me will help him achieve his ends, he will do it, just as he was willing to watch from afar as the Dark Kind plundered your Valley and killed your young and old season after season, year after year, so long as his precious Embers—his last, glowing line—endured and were strengthened.”
“From what we understand,” Linn started, hating the words before she said them, “that was a series—”
“Of what?” the Sage laughed. “Mistakes? Yes, child. Uhtren was Corrupted by the Dark Hearts, but where, pray tell, did he get them?” She raised her eyebrows . Linn didn’t speak. “There was a great fight in the west not long before—or perhaps it was after—Rane came calling on our doorstep. The Eastern Dark himself went to tame the Red Fox. He did not succeed. That one is far more clever than Valour ever gave him credit for. In the fallout, some of the Night Lords got into the Valley—or would have, had Uhtren been made of lesser stuff.” She sighed, but seemed more annoyed than truly disappointed. “Would that he had destroyed the hearts and not taken them for safekeeping. He was always a curious one, though. The only one more so was Valour himself.”
“He alone opened the door,” Linn said. She said it like it could have been a question. When the queen did not immediately offer an answer, she asked it again. “He alone opened the door to the World Apart? Ray Valour?”
“You know he did not,” she said through partially-gritted teeth. “But I did not bring you here to pass blame or shed it,” she said. “I tell you of the World Apart so that you know it is real—”
“I don’t need you to tell me that,” Linn said. “None of us do.”
The queen smiled in a sad way and stepped down from the dais, moving toward Linn. Linn took a step back, and that only made the look of sorrow deepen on that ancient, impossibly young face.
“The World Apart is the root of our greatest folly,” she said, and then she gazed back at the form on the slab, as if she couldn’t bear to
be so far from it. “But it may also be the source of our redemption.”
When she looked back, Linn could not do anything to hide the look of shock and betrayal that must have crossed her own face. The queen watched her.
“We must first understand our enemies if we are to defeat them,” the queen said. Her voice had changed. It was subtle, but it was there. A little deeper. A little more firm. “The Eastern Dark has a name, and now you know it. The World Apart is coming, but it can be stopped.”
Linn perked up a bit at that and the queen saw it. Linn frowned. “And I suppose your methods clash with Valour’s,” she said, sounding doubtful. “Convenient, wouldn’t you say? Given what he believes. Given what he feels has to be done, as it concerns you and,” she nodded toward the form on the slab, “yours.”
The Frostfire Sage only smiled.
“Valour may have opened the door, child,” she said. “But he wasn’t the only one who went digging. It is a place of unparalleled chaos and unchecked power. It is a treasure trove of miracles. It runs on an energy that is different from that of this world.” She looked around the kaleidoscopic chamber, as if she could see the entire world through its myriad walls. “In the place of the Landkist, the power there manifests in the form of great titans of fire and shadow. More so,” she focused on Linn’s eyes and held them steady, “titans of life and death. You know of this,” she added. “You faced one of them, or else the barest remnants of her power.”
Linn leaned back against the wall. It was cold in the chamber, and she preferred the shock of it to the sick, unsettled feeling that was beginning to envelop her. She worked the queen’s words over in her mind and tried to think. The leering, red-eyed image of a Sentinel came to her in a rush, snarling in the rain while her slick hands clawed mud and gravel for the broken spoke of a wagon wheel.
“The Corrupted,” she said, recognition dawning.
“Just one of the gifts of the would-be gods of the World Apart,” the Sage said, nodding along with her. “The power to turn death into life.”
“Or some sick approximation of it,” Linn said. She remembered what the rain had done to those black-shelled bodies after the siege of Hearth. She remembered how many had been taken from lands without the Valley and raised up again and sent against a people they might have called friends in another life.
“Fair,” the queen said. “But then, power is not evil or good. It goes in the direction in which it is aimed. I have been to the World Apart, Linn. I have gone where no other has gone, and I have brought back knowledge of how to beat it. More so, I have gained power. More than the Landkist could ever imagine. More even than my fellow Sages—those who remain. More than the Night Lords of the World Apart.”
She stepped forward. Her bearing was strong, rigid. Proud.
“I will turn back the dark tide,” she said. “I will protect this world unto my dying breath.”
Linn was not convinced. Her look must have showed it.
“But not before you take something for yourself,” Linn said. Her eyes flicked unconsciously toward the dead man whose heart still beat, faint but steady.
The Frostfire Sage swallowed and pursed her lips.
“What better chance does the world have than me?” she asked. “The World Apart is coming. On that point, there can be no debate. You have felt it. You, whose own power grows by the day, though you do not know it.”
“The world has the Landkist,” Linn said.
The queen’s face passed through a range of emotions, some of them alien to Linn, so complex and strange they were. In the end, she settled on something that lay between amusement and delayed recognition.
“What?” Linn asked.
“The stories you children have been told,” she said, shaking her head. “The Sages took their power.” Her voice went comically low and her frown deepened. “The Landkist were chosen. Gifted by the world to turn back the war those mighty tyrants had plunged it into.”
“Do you deny it?” Linn asked. She felt defensive and did not quite know why. Perhaps it was all just too much to take in. Perhaps she wanted those old stories to be true, though a part of her had always doubted them.
“I’ll ask you,” the Sage said. “If father sun cast one of his rays down in the depths of night. A single ray, golden and beautiful, and warm to the touch, in a field at the edge of a barrow. And if you, Linn, were walking in your slippers and gown and happened to see it. If you circled that beam of light—that beacon of warm and vibrant day that should not have been there—and felt the kiss of its radiance on your neck and on the backs of your hands. If you saw that and felt that, would it be ‘taking’ to reach your hand out? Or would it be something else?”
Linn opened her mouth to speak, but found the words slow in coming. She watched the Sage for a long time, trying to discern whether the story she told was true or not. She had grown up on stories of the Sages as miserly old wizards; magicians who tricked the world into giving them its power and showing them its secrets. They found the names of things—the wind, the trees and even the birds and beasts. The oceans and tides, the clouds and even the mountains, though never the sun and stars, and never—much to the pride of the Emberfolk—the Mother’s Heart that was the fire beneath the deserts. As Linn had aged and learned firsthand of the cold reality that was the World Apart and all its horrors, she began to subscribe to the growing notion that the Sages had taken their power from that blasted and barren realm and brought it here, either through some dark intent or vain folly.
Now, here she stood, blessed or cursed with the power of one of their number and standing before another—one who spoke of a soft ray of golden light in a faraway field out of place and time. One who likely danced in glittering parlors and watched gulls bank and wheel over the crashing foam from her crystalline towers in a time before wars were fought with anything but blades and bows and hurled stones.
What surprised Linn more than anything else, however, as she stared at the Frostfire Sage, the Witch of the North and all her other names, was the fact that she believed her. In this, at least, she believed her.
If the Sage saw the odd mix of chaos that passed behind Linn’s eyes, she made no move to show it.
“You can stop it,” Linn said. Her voice was faint. She expected the Sage to smile a smile of victory. Instead, her face hardened with purpose. It was just the look Linn needed to see.
“I can,” the Sage said. “I can stop the World Apart from coming. But I can’t if I die before my work is done.”
“Your work …”
“Unless you want to be burdened with visiting that dark, malevolent realm for yourself, I would suggest you leave the particulars to me.”
Linn glanced at the body on the dais, remembering the Sage’s words regarding life and death. The Sages were immortal, near as she could tell. So long as they weren’t killed. It seemed obvious to Linn that the Frostfire Sage was looking to get something else out of the World Apart. Some last secret. A parting gift before she closed the door for good.
“I need him,” she said, and Linn’s heart felt as if it had been bitten for the naked honesty with which she said it. “I need him in all the ways you think,” she said. “More so, we need him, if this is to work. He has a power about him that, once restored—”
“I understand,” Linn said.
In truth, she didn’t want to know the particulars. They were in over their heads. If she hadn’t known it as soon as they had passed from the Valley core to the black plains where a Raith had commanded an army of beasts to ride them down, and if she hadn’t felt it when she had seen the forces at work beneath the slick and dripping branches of Center, she knew it now, standing at the edge of the world and before one of its last clinging powers.
Kole said they had come all the way here to see what the Sages were about, to kill them if they had betrayed mankind. And if they hadn’t? To let them live.
Linn feared Kole was already bent on his purpose, blinded by his rage. It was quieter now than it w
as in the Valley, but Linn knew him better than most. She knew his quiet bearing was little more than a shell. She knew he felt in his heart that the Sages must die. In that, it seemed he was the same as the Eastern Dark, much as she hated the thought of it. In that, she knew it was she and she alone who was capable of protecting him from himself.
In the meantime …
“What do you need of us?” Linn asked.
The Frostfire Sage smiled. It was a smile of victory, but also of relief, and Linn chose to remember the latter more fully.
“The Eastern Dark is coming to kill me,” she said simply. “Ray Valour is coming to kill me because he believes it is what must be done. Just as he tried to kill my husband.”
But he is wrong. Linn thought it but did not say it. He is wrong. He must be wrong, or else…
“The Blue Knights will not be enough to stop him. But you,” she said. “The Valley Sage and her Embers…”
Linn grimaced at the term. “We’ve got a Rockbled, too,” she reminded her. “Others have truly rued the day they’ve forgotten that one. And a hound of Last Lake.”
The queen nodded.
“I will speak with the others,” Linn said.
“You mean Kole,” the queen said. She searched Linn’s reaction, and Linn had the impression that perhaps it had been no coincidence that she had been the one to see the queen in her frozen garden. “The Ember does not like our kind.”
“Many have good reason for that,” Linn countered. “Especially in the Valley.”
The Sage did not argue.
“Speak with him, then,” she said. “Though I wonder if he is willing to see new ends.”
Linn did not say that she was thinking the same thing—that Kole was so bent on killing the Sages that he wouldn’t stop to consider the possibility that those with the power to doom the world might be the ones best made to save it.
They went back the way they had come, the iron door shutting behind them sounding to Linn like secrets kept. She pictured the green door of Towles’ bathhouse at Last Lake and swallowed down the guilt that came with it, wondering if it were truly deserved.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 37