“Where are we?” she asked.
“The vents,” he said. “Warm air flowed up through this tunnel and into other smaller tunnels. It kept most of the palace warm.”
“Why are there no rails?”
“There was something about the danger that appealed to the architect. No one ever fell, so far as I know. One does get very aware when walking onto these wide steps. Maybe that was the point. This circular room we’re in lights up when the sun rises; there are windows everywhere. It’s quite spectacular, actually, and it only goes on for a little while.”
She looked up, keeping herself from looking with her threadweaver sight. She wanted to see what a normal person would see, and she thought she could make out a starry night sky through small, circular windows high above.
Moments later, the walls closed in on them again, and the stairs ended onto a flat hallway. To her left, Medophae’s torchlight swept over the sculpted face of a knight, carved in bas relief right into the wall. She wanted to see it all, but instead the torchlight only tantalized her with hints. What other statues stared at her from alcoves? What other paintings adorned the walls?
Her curiosity damped as two skeletons appeared at the edge of the circle of light. They sprawled across the floor with their frozen grins and sightless eyes. Medophae paused, then nudged them out of the way with his boot. Bones clacked and tumbled down the steep steps. Mirolah stepped aside, not wanting to touch them. Part of her was curious, but another part revolted. It seemed a part of her now to want to know about everything she encountered, but the idea of poking through the bones of a dead person did not appeal to her.
She reached out with her threadweaver sight, finding skeletons in almost every shadowy corner. This room had two big archways, one through which they had come, and one on the other side of the room. The other two walls had three arched fireplaces each, that began at about waist level. There were six tall, rectangular tables taking up most of the center of the room. A dozen skeletons lay scattered on the floor. There had been some kind of battle here, many years ago. Mirolah ran her ethereal fingers over the fallen corpses and found, in some cases, arrows lying among the bones. There was a broken sword near one of them, but if the dead had had any weapons, they had been looted after the attack.
“These were the kitchens,” Medophae said softly.
“What happened here?”
He knelt and picked up the broken sword handle. His thumb rubbed the symbol of a sun on its hilt. “Sunriders,” he said. “Long ago. They swept through Calsinac, killing everyone. Come on.” He moved past the skeletons and into a huge dining room. There were skeletons in here as well. Had they been caught during a feast?
“This way,” he said, seeing her discomfort. He led her out of the dining hall into a foyer, up a sweeping staircase to an open arcade of pillars and archways that looked out over the dark city. Smaller buildings crouched before the front of the palace, some still intact, some crumbling to ruin. They looked like giants cloaked and crouching in the darkness. She couldn’t see the ocean from here, but she could smell it.
He led her away from the arcade into a hallway, choosing a small room with an arched window that looked out onto the city just as the arcade had done. There were no corpses here.
He fixed the torch in a sconce on the wall. “We’re safe for now. We can sleep easy tonight. We are far enough away that Zilok won’t find us for a few days at least, a few weeks at most.”
He stripped the dusty, rat-chewed blankets from the bed and inspected the mattress. Rat holes riddled the cloth that had once kept the straw inside. What remained was rotten and moldy. The rats had apparently abandoned it long ago. He hefted it over his shoulder and walked to the window.
“Wait,” she said. She reached out with her threadweaving fingers. She altered the old straw, recreating more out of the mold, the rat droppings, and the air, and revitalizing the existing straw. She re-knitted the cloth wrapped around it all, recreating the threads of actual threads, which amused her. In minutes, it looked as if it had just been fashioned by a mattress maker.
He tossed it back on the bed and bowed to her. “I’d forgotten the comforts of traveling with a threadweaver. Would you care to sleep, milady?”
“It has been a long day. Still, there’s one thing I’d like to do first.”
“Is there?” He gave a wry smile.
“Lie down. This may take a while.”
He sat down on the bed. “I thought sleep would be more alluring than—”
“It’s not what you think.” She gave him a tired smile in return. “As pleasant as that sounds.”
His brow wrinkled in confusion. “Then what?”
“A precaution. Zilok Morth is fond of traps. Let’s prepare one for him.” And she began threadweaving.
69
Mirolah
Mirolah had been asleep for less than an hour when her fears came true. She had wanted to believe Medophae when he said they were safe, but she didn’t. So she took steps, weaving a spell around Medophae. After, she allowed herself to pretend they were safe, and she fell asleep in his arms, her head snuggled into his shoulder.
Mirolah had learned to divide her attention into multiple pieces in Ethiel’s castle. And after, when her soul had become one with the Fountain and then miraculously escaped back to her body, she felt as if the air, the stone walls and floor, the mattress and the bed, even the sandy beach outside the window, that all of these things were a part of her now, that she was connected to them. Her awareness of them wasn’t as acute as when she was consciously focusing on a task. Rather, it was as if she was a cat with a million tails, softly swishing, and she could tell when someone walked near one of her tails.
A new presence had entered Calsinac.
Without moving or even opening her eyes, she reached into the threads of the air, a light and buttery yellow color—almost white—and created a barrier similar to the one she had constructed in Ethiel’s prison cell, the one that kept her threadweaving from being discovered. She made it seem as though the area around the bed was empty to one with a threadweaver’s sight.
She whispered, “He’s here,” and touched Medophae gently on the chest. The spell she had hung over him before they’d gone to sleep activated. She had been fascinated by the trigger spell at the portal, and had wanted to try one. Before Medophae could even nod, her trigger spell activated. He flew out the window, down, and out of sight.
As she had feared, the presence sensed her, and shot to the room with the speed of thought.
She sat up.
“Well...” the voice came, so familiar. Smooth, cultured. “A merry chase, Weaver of Rith. Well done.”
She could see his hovering bright blue eyes with her threadweaver sight, but he formed the construct of himself in front of her regardless. Obviously, it gave him satisfaction to imagine himself in human form. That was curious.
The man coalesced in the room, visible with her normal vision. It was the man she had met in the Fountain, the man who had helped her defeat Ethiel.
“I know your name now,” she said. “Zilok Morth.”
He bowed low, holding one hand over his stomach and the other out to the side. He straightened and his hand moved up to stroke his short beard.
“Except you were wrong,” she said. “You said the next time we met, I wouldn’t want to be in that room, and I’m exactly where I want to be.”
He gave her an amused smile. “You amaze me, Lady Rith.”
“And this is the part where you kill me?”
“I did promise you,” he said. “And as a rule, I dislike those who go back on their word. But I’ve had a change of heart. You are a diamond in the sand. So unexpected, and you glitter so brightly. I find I’m having a hard time casting you away. I have questions. When no one else could, you destroyed my grandson’s fountain. That is an achievement. I should love to see your power at its height.”
“You will,” she promised. She stayed loose, keeping her attention in every th
read of this room, waiting for what he did, ready to counter it. In addition, she tried to probe his threads, ever so gently. There was a little cluster around those blue eyes, but not much else there. He hadn’t seemed to notice what she was doing, which was encouraging, and she was afraid to probe deeper. It was more important to stall for time.
He laughed. “Threats? Please. Let us be civil. I am not the Wildmane. I don’t leap to violence out of hand. You and I, we have helped each other in the past. We could help each other now. We could be allies. I would like that, I think.”
“‘Great weavers are never friends,’” she quoted.
“Oh, well done.” He seemed to take genuine joy in his words being flung back at him. “But great weavers also change the rules. That’s what we do. I have admitted that you’ve done something I cannot do. I would learn from you. Aren’t you curious what you might learn from me? Think of all the knowledge I could give you, grander than a hundred libraries. I could fill your mind until that thirst for knowledge was, at last, sated.”
She felt the itch at the base of her skull. Zilok would have knowledge unlike anything else she’d ever experienced. He was a threadweaver who had walked the path almost as long as threadweavers had existed. She could only guess at what he knew.
She clamped down on her desire as he gave her a knowing smile.
“How did you find us?” she asked.
“Ah yes. Question number one. Once they start, it’s hard to make them stop. There are so many trapped behind your eyes, like horses in a corral, waiting to break out. How did I come here? The GodSpill, of course. The threads of Amarion. Join me, young Mirolah, and I will show you how. We will enrich each other.”
“Okay,” she said. “I will.”
He seemed surprised, and then he smiled. “I hadn’t expected you to see reason so quickly.”
“I will join you. I’ll tell you how I destroyed the Fountain. Just leave him alone.”
His smile flattened to a sardonic curve of his lips. “From delightful to predictable, alas. That, I’m afraid to say, is impossible.”
“You’ve taken away his power. Let him live. He’ll die in another sixty or seventy years, and then you’ll get what you want anyway. The world will know that the great Wildmane was killed by Zilok Morth. What else do you need? What can those sixty years matter?”
He sighed. “He has sunk his hooks into you. Young Mirolah, this is my first lesson to you. Listen and learn it well: Medophae is a liar. He will make you feel loved, but it is not love. It is an enchantment. It is the tainted blood of a god working on your mortal mind. And once you serve him like a dog serves his master, he will send you to your death. Or he will kill you outright.” He shook his head. “I am rescuing you from your fate. Justice must be done upon him. You’ll see, when he confesses his wrongs, that everything I say is true.”
Mirolah suddenly realized something. “You’re the same.”
“Excuse me?”
“You and Medophae, you’re the same. You linger in this state of bitter hatred because of him. He lingers in a state of self-loathing because of her. You can’t let go. He can’t let go. You spin and spin in the soup of your past. You drown in it.” She wondered if it was a curse of immortality, that the moment you became immortal, you were stuck, forever, unable to change.
“I am nothing like him,” Zilok Morth said in a low voice. “I do not lie to those closest to me. I do not betray those who love me best.”
“You’re still doing it,” she said. “I don’t think you can stop doing it.”
“Child,” he said. “This ‘good man’ was my best friend. He would be in the grips of eternal torment at the hands of Dervon the Dead if not for me. I protected him, bled for him. I saved his life, and when it was my turn to need his help, he stuck his burning sword through my stomach.”
“How many times have you relived that moment?” she asked. “How many times has he relived the loss of Bands?”
He waved a hand dismissively, seemingly bored. “It is simple. Learn with me by joining our knowledge. Or learn from me as my enemy.”
“I think—”
White knives like icicles formed in the air and shot at her. They almost got her, a dozen coming close enough that they pierced her clothing and pricked her skin before her quick manipulation of their threads turned them to water.
By the gods, he was fast! If she hadn’t been feeling every thread in the room, vigilant for his attack, she would be dead.
He would stop time next, she knew. If he couldn’t kill her outright, he’d threadweave that spell he’d done in Ethiel’s throne room. She had to look for that change, that ooze of gray-black that he created to stop time for everyone else but him.
She’d distracted Zilok for as long as she could. She only hoped he hadn’t seen her send Medophae away. That he was here, in this room, talking with her, seemed proof of that. If Zilok knew where Medophae was, she assumed he’d just got here. She hoped that Medophae was ready with their plan. She had days of time to study Ethiel through her handiwork and even her physical presence as she talked in her throne room. She didn’t know how to defeat Zilok. She hadn’t had a chance to study him at all. Her one meeting with him had gone so quickly, amidst such towering stress, that she hadn’t even thought to find his weaknesses. After all, until the last moment, she’d thought he was befriending her.
What she needed was more time to watch him, to find his weaknesses, and the only way to do that was to set him back on his heels. If she could hurt him, make him cautious, even make him run away, she might chase him, might discover more about him.
So, after Mirolah had put the trigger spell on Medophae, which would send him out of their little room to the great room downstairs, she wove a spell around the head of the spear he had found in the portal room, an attack that, once activated, would repeat over and over and over. It had taken most of an hour to get it right. When the spearhead struck the spirit of Zilok Morth, and the spell activated, it would grab the spirit’s nearest thread and pull it away, a thousand times in one instant.
When Mirolah had fought Ethiel, the most effective attack she’d used, aside from tossing the Red Weaver into the maelstrom of GodSpill, was to pull her threads apart. Without a physical body, Ethiel’s presence was based solely upon her will to remain intact. Once she had been disconnected from the Fountain’s power, her threads came apart like bits of fluff. Mirolah was gambling that Zilok Morth shared that same weakness.
The first step of her plan was to get Medophae out of the room, into the greatroom below and—most importantly—away from Zilok Morth. Once Zilok got his “hands” on Medophae, the fight was over. The spirit would flee with his prize, leaving Mirolah behind if he could.
The second step was to delay, to play for time so Medophae could get in place with his spear, which they’d hidden in the second-story arcade of the greatroom.
The third step was to get out of this room to their chosen battlefield.
These thoughts went through Mirolah’s head in a fraction of a second, before the icicles had even fully turned to water.
She tapped her own chest, activating the same spell for herself that she had used on Medophae, and flew out the window, down to the first floor, into the open double doors beneath her room and into the great room.
She landed in the center, spinning to face the doors, and she pulled GodSpill from the threads all around her. She fragmented her attention into three parts and floated above herself in a triangle. One fragment was to attack Zilok. One was to defend herself. The third was to look for opportunities.
The long walls were bordered with arched arcades, above which were galleries with smaller arches. Her gaze flicked briefly to where she and Medophae agreed he would hide with one of her camouflage spells wrapped around him. She couldn’t see him with her threadweaver vision or her naked eyes. When Zilok entered and came close enough, Medophae would spear him.
The blue eyes descended through the high stone ceiling, and Zilok’s illus
ion of a body formed shortly thereafter.
He stared at her, but she knew he was searching the room for Medophae. She prayed her spell held together under his scrutiny, and that Medophae waited until she had his full attention.
“This seems planned, young threadweaver,” Zilok said. “Is this where you want your last stand?”
“This is where I give you your last warning,” she said, and he drifted down, almost in position. “Leave Medophae. Go live your life, such as it is.”
“No.”
She attacked, sending herself into his threads, trying to pull them apart. As she expected, he was deft at turning her aside, and she couldn’t do it.
He descended lower, coming closer.
Medophae popped up and threw the spear with deadly accuracy.
Black ooze spread out from Zilok. His time-stopping spell!
Mirolah focused on the threads being saturated with this gray-black color. She reached into them, turned them back, turned them.
No! He hadn’t changed the color. It was something else! She put all of her focus into understanding it.
Zilok loomed over her, blue eyes burning bright.
What had he done? The texture? Did the threads have facets? Had he angled them differently? Had he—?
70
Zilok Morth
Zilok looked at the frozen threadweaver, concentrating so hard. Her lips were tight together, her brow wrinkled in concentration, her tumbling brown hair framing her young face. He supposed she was trying to understand his time-stopping spell even as Zilok wove it. So brave. So ambitious. So foolhardy. It had taken him ten years of study to understand how to affect time, another two years to finally perfect it. And in the end, he could only do it for a very limited span.
He loved her a little bit, he suddenly realized, for believing she was a match for him. For being so ferocious. Perhaps that was what allowed her to accomplish the miracles she’d already achieved. To have done so much in such a short time, it invigorated him like few things ever had. This pup of a girl had slain the Red Weaver, destroyed Daylan’s Fountain, and sparred with him competently. On top of it all, she’d fooled him. She had effectively hidden Medophae in this room for several long seconds. Zilok had scanned it, and he had overlooked where Medophae crouched behind the stone, invisible to his threadweaver sight.
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