by Azalea Ellis
You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometimes fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Torliam’s eyebrows raised. “You have heard of it?”
My eyes flicked over the words again. So the Oracle hadn't renounced me after all. I'd had my suspicions, after we succeeded in dispersing the God of Knowledge and cleansing him of the Sickness. She’d been playing some twisted game of reverse psychology, not actually trying to teach me how to lose. It didn’t endear her to me any further. “I just got a quest to go there.”
“Is it from the Oracle?” Sam said. “Maybe she can help guide us out of this mess.”
“To the place that ‘usually always’ ends in death?” Adam drawled, raising his eyebrows.
Torliam kept his attention studiously focused on me, but his voice was chagrined. “Well, yes. The Spire is a place where those who are the subject of prophecy may gain glimpses of the workings of the universe, as it pertains to their place in it.”
“This is not a good thing!” Blaine said, the tendons in his neck standing out as he clenched his jaw. “Based on my knowledge of past experience with the Oracle, let me guess the contents of the quest. We must go to this Spire of Prophecy, and, upon arriving, place ourselves in mortal danger? She has already betrayed us before. Have you forgotten how she sent us to the Goddess of Testimony and Lore, trapping even the children in her games? Or how she turned against us in the final battle against the God of Knowledge, attempting to remove Eve from the quest given to her, and leave all the rest of us to die?”
“The gods have their own agendas,” Torliam said. “Many times, those may not align with the wishes of us mortals. But in this case, I have no doubt that the Oracle wishes to cure the Sickness. Is that not also what we want?”
“If only staying alive and going along with the Oracle’s crazy quests were mutually compatible,” Adam said.
“Exactly my point,” Blaine said. He turned to face me directly. “The Oracle’s goal might be to stop the Sickness, and I want that too. But she has proven she does not care if we die along the way, if it increases her chances of success.”
“That’s true.” If I were the Oracle, I’d undoubtedly act the same. Sometimes, sacrifices had to be made to reach a goal. It’s just that I might choose the specific sacrifices differently than she would, because I cared about my team members more than the myriad people I’d never met, whose lives didn’t converge with mine. “But the kids have the Sickness. Chanelle has it. Maybe others of us do, too, and don’t even know it yet. The problem is, we don’t have any better alternatives. The Oracle knows what we need to do to fix this, whether or not she cares about us. She’s our best bet.”
“I think we should go,” Zed said. “It’s too big of a risk not to go, and like you said, Blaine, we’re kind of flailing blindly right now. We need answers to some questions before we try to fix all this.”
“But the Sickness must follow the rules of nature, even if the discovery of Seeds and ‘gods’ does change our understanding of science. That means one person can’t hold the answer secret forever. We do not need her.” Blaine’s jaw clenched repeatedly, but his tone wavered, almost as if he was pleading with himself.
“Do you really think we can ‘science out’ the answer ourselves, before it’s too late?” Adam said.
Blaine spun toward him, already glaring.
Adam held up a hand to stop him from speaking. “I know you’ll try. I also know this conversation is pointless, because you won’t risk being wrong. We’ll do our best to protect the kids and keep them away from whatever danger might arise. We’re not just going to rely on the Oracle to solve this. Anything and everything that might help, we’re going to do. But this is part of it. We have to go…and it’s not like the kids will be any safer separated from us. Not under these circumstances.”
Blaine was silent for a long moment. “You are not wrong,” he finally said. “I cannot truly remove them from danger.”
Jacky walked over to Blaine and nudged him with her shoulder. “We’re just gonna have to help them get strong enough that they can handle a little danger on their own, yeah? That’s the only real way to protect someone.”
Adam rolled his eyes and turned to Torliam. “How do we get to this Spire, then? I’m sure your mom won’t let us go. Unless she decided a visit would be a good excuse to kill us off believably.”
Torliam raised a deliberate eyebrow. “We may travel there by ship. However, seeing as she has access to Ichi’s Skill and can transport us about the world in an instant, there is no reason for her to allow us access to a ship.”
“No reason except politics,” I said. “I don’t think that will be a problem. And once we have access to both publicity and a ship, we’ll have access to the arrays, and everything gets a lot easier. So we need a reporter who’s willing to ask the questions we want to answer, a ship with enough eyes on us that nothing can go wrong, and a plan to tie it up in a bow perfect enough that Queen Mardinest can’t stop us without cutting her own neck. To make this work, we need to know what you know. Start off with everything you can remember about our new guards and your brother Reglium.”
Our scheming was interrupted by one of the watchdogs checking in on us. I’d kept Wraith active, so we had barely enough time to scramble back out of the many-times renewed ink bubble and to our respective bed mats.
Still, by that time we had a plan, and we wasted no time implementing it. It was likely the queen would want to see us again the next day, and if she did, she would almost certainly discern enough of our plans to ruin them. We didn’t have time to wait.
Adam tried to get an ink construct out of the room, but there was no opening in the barrier for it to slip through.
Instead, we ended up using a combination of Wraith and Summon. Kris’ marionettes were halfway across the castle, but with some concentration that was firmly within Wraith’s range. Kris hadn’t experimented much with Summoning a spirit into a body she couldn’t see, but we knew she could do it. So I curled up with the girl inside another concealing ink bubble and talked her through the mental travel to the room where her marionettes were, describing the setting in as much detail as possible.
The Summoner Skill granted her a vague ability to sense the bodies of marionettes even when they were empty of a spirit, and along with her imagination of the path I described, it was enough for her to reach out to the one next to the table in her bedroom. She was sweating and pale by the time the distant marionette twitched with seeming life.
I resisted the urge to cheer as I sensed its metal body climb shakily to its feet. It took a few steps across Kris’ bedroom and grabbed the Estreyan datapad lying on the desk. The marionette jerked around at first, touched several commands at once, and altogether flailed like someone trying to thread a needle with a foam noodle after guzzling an entire bottle of vodka. But with painstaking slowness, and plenty of correction, she was able to operate the datapad through her artificial servant.
Some whispered instructions from Torliam guided her in sending off a few messages to various important contacts, flagged as urgent correspondence with his royal code. The people on the receiving end would get the messages, middle of the night or not.
There were no obvious signs of surveillance on our old rooms, but the danger of being caught was enough to wind us all into a state of quivering tension.
Finally, when a few more hours had passed and dawn arrived, we knew we could wait no longer.
Kris began to move her marionette through the halls and out onto the palace grounds, with my help avoiding notice from the early risers, mostly servants. As it moved closer to her, its jerky, puppet-like movements smoothed out, and her labored breathing grew easier. She had it hide inside a large bush outside the closest outer wall to us, and could only hope no one noticed it.
Torliam began to do some sort of martial kata, blue mist wafting off him and through his armor. It illumin
ated the room, both for us and the guards outside keeping track of us through the display screen.
Adam grumpily pushed his upper body up from his bed mat. “Some of us are still trying to sleep. Do that some other time.”
Torliam continued to move, his power now causing gusts of winds to buffet the room. “How long do you puny humans need to sleep? Your lives are too short to waste a moment. Consider me to be doing you a courtesy.”
I couldn’t help the upward twitch of my eyebrow. He was laying it on a bit thick.
Adam spilled ink, the liquid supporting his torso and legs and sprouting spider legs beneath him. “Doing us humans a courtesy?” His voice rose into a yell. “You’re just like your damn mother!”
Outside, the Estreyan guards shared a look with each other. The woman who had been powering the barrier was now on monitor duty instead, and Ichi sat within the circle.
“I am nothing like her!” Torliam roared, face twisting with anger as his glow increased and his hair blew outward from his head.
Birch growled at Torliam, puffed out his wings and fur, and, with a shriek, unleashed a gust so strong it literally blew the huge man off his feet and into the wall.
Torliam cushioned himself from the stone with a gush of his own power.
As soon as he Torliam the wall, Zed’s fingers dug into an invisible crack in the world, just enough to open the room up to the Other Place.
Ichi grunted, then began to pant. “It pulls too much power, again!”
Torliam recovered from Birch’s attack easily and lifted his hand for a retaliatory strike.
Adam dashed ink out into the air with a dramatic arc of his hands, and it burst into a barrier that cut off most of the room from Torliam, shielding the rest of us away from his attack. The barrier also happened to cut us off from the faint dawn light of the ceiling where the monitoring device was, and thus from the sight of the guards outside.
“Coward!” Torliam yelled. “Come and face me!”
Zed pulled the rip wider, and grey light spilled out of it.
A careful check reassured me the guards’ display showed only black ink over most of the room.
I stepped through the rip gingerly, one foot and then the other, careful not to touch the edges just in case. The cold was biting, more like a full body blow than a mere temperature change. But I didn’t die. I motioned for the others to follow, tucking my hands under my armpits and trying not to make any sounds of pain as I hurried toward the doorway, where the barrier rippled and buzzed despite being untouched. Little pieces of gray fluff lay on the floor around it, like dust accumulated by static electricity.
Chanelle’s vacant look cleared as Jacky helped her through the rip. “Wow. Please tell me this is only temporary.”
The female guard looked between her fellow, gasping on the floor as the Other Place affected the barrier, then back at Torliam, the only visible figure within the cell. “We must stop him,” she said. “They have somehow damaged the barrier again, when the tailos attacked him.”
“Damnation,” the remaining guard said, but he nodded. They rushed forward, hands ready on their weapons, and opened the door. As soon as they did so, the buzzing barrier around the room in both the normal world and its counterpart cut out.
I lunged into the hallway of the Other Place through the doorless opening, turning to face the place where the guards stood in the real world.
As the rest of the team, except Torliam, rushed out of the cell, I pointed to a space in the air, and Zed opened up the nearest rip in the world with a grunt.
I looked through the little portal into warmth and color, and reached my hand through. As Adam’s ink barrier dropped, and Torliam threw himself backward toward the larger rip, my clawed, too-long fingers pierced into the back of the female guard’s neck.
She barely had time for a gasp before Chaos ate into her, tearing apart skin, muscle, and bone between my fingers, leaving me holding a still-disintegrating mush as I tore backward. She was the one who could supposedly track us. Not any more.
Torliam made it through the opening to the Other Place, and, with an exhale from Zed that hung visibly frozen in the air, the large rip inside our cell closed itself up again.
As soon as my hand was clear, he closed the second, smaller tear, and we ran. The Other Place looked like a replica of the palace, though a few of the smaller pieces of furniture and almost all the doors were missing, the color was completely washed out, and the vague grey light seemed to suffuse the air rather than emanating from any specific source.
It would have been fascinating, if the cold hadn’t been so savage.
Gregor stumbled and I picked him up, hugging him to the already-cold armor covering my chest as I pushed ahead harder. “It’s almost over.” I puffed, my feet slapping into the painfully cold stone and scoring little claw marks with every step.
“What is this place?” Blaine asked, squinting against the cold until his frost-laden eyelashes stuck together. His suit was wheezing more than normal, and I assumed it struggled to continue, just like the rest of us.
“There!” I pointed to what would have been a window looking out onto the grounds in the normal world, but here was just an empty opening in the outer wall of the palace.
We hurried through it, and with trembling hands, Zed opened another rip.
I jumped through with Gregor, and the others followed immediately. I collapsed onto my knees, coughing as I sucked in heaving breaths of the sudden warmth, painful in its intensity. I allowed myself a few moments of recovery, then forced myself to stand. I looked around and met the shocked gaze of one of the gardeners, clippers frozen in his hands as he looked at us. “We have to move,” I said.
Both Blaine and Chanelle were woozy to the point of dizziness, and required support to move. As we stumbled off through the grounds toward the outer wall and the main city, I watched with Wraith as the gardener moved over to the spot we’d appeared from. He waved his hands through the empty air with wide eyes. Maybe it was the adrenaline making me loopy, but I couldn’t help but gasp out a laugh.
We ran through the streets at first, then hid for a little while to recuperate and measure the response to our escape. I used some water from my pack to wash the blood and little chunks of meat off my hand as thoroughly as possible, suppressing a shudder at the origin of the sticky red coating. Without the female guard, Ichi wouldn’t be able to teleport himself or anyone else right to us. And both Ichi and Reglium required line of sight to affect other people with their Skills, so, as long as they didn’t know where we were, we’d bought ourselves time.
After a short recuperation, we hurried toward the airbase. I knew Queen Mardinest would be able to track us eventually. We didn’t have the resources or preparation to avoid that. But, if things went according to plan, soon it would be too late.
As we neared the huge, flat patch of land that was their equivalent to a civilian airport, the huge cylindrical ship taking up most of the launch pad came into view. It looked more like a shelled clam than most of the other Estreyan ships, which tended to take the forms of more maneuverable “sea” creatures like crustaceans or stingrays. People scurried around it, obviously preparing for takeoff.
Adam’s mouth fell open. “You can’t be serious. We’re supposed to escape in that thing? It doesn’t look like it could outfly a chicken!”
Torliam shrugged, a very human gesture. “It is meant for comfort over long distances and pleasure journeys, not speed.”
I spoke before Adam could continue. “It doesn’t matter if it’s fast. We care about the people inside, not actual escape capabilities. That is the right ship?” I turned to Torliam, my eyebrows raised. If I were honest, I, too, felt a little underwhelmed by the cow of a ship.
“My mother has been foisting off half her duties onto me for the last few days as she dealt with or avoided the passengers of that ship,” Torliam said, drawing my attention back to the bags under his eyes. “The leader of the Panacean is aboard, along with dignitar
ies from a few of the smaller countries and a couple people rich enough to think they’d get an audience with Queen Mardinest and her godkiller if they came along.”
Jacky grinned up at me, bouncing lightly on her feet. “There’s no way she messes with us when all those people are watching.”
I nodded vaguely, looking around till I spotted the other recipients of the late-night, urgent messages we’d sent out. “There,” I said, jerking my head toward the group of reporters milling around the edge of the takeoff pad. Their broadcast equipment and looks of excitement labeled them clearly. Some of them noticed our group in return and pointed the pen-like camera devices in our direction. “Let’s go,” I said, checking my posture and facial expression for proper camera-readiness.
Torliam sent me a pointed look, and I nodded reassurance. My Charisma wasn’t high enough to lie convincingly on camera, not when people with Skills in lie-detection would be watching the three-dimensional recording taken by the cameras once we got closer. Whatever I said had to be at least a version of the truth, if I didn’t want to be caught in a lie.
We strode up to the group of reporters as confidently as possible, ignoring the double takes and stares from the workers preparing the fat clam-ship for takeoff. I gave a shallow bow to the assorted reporters, who shined their recording devices toward us with quivering anticipation. “Thank you for meeting us here today—” I cut off, as movement at the corner of my vision caught my attention, and Wraith identified the person peeking around the corner of a building out onto the airstrip as Reglium.
“Shields!” I snapped, jerking my head toward Adam.
He responded with lightning-quick reflexes, well-conditioned in the art of creating almost instantaneous barriers at the slightest provocation.
One of the reporters actually screamed, as the ink engulfed them along with us, their recording devices now emitting the only light within the barrier.
“They’re already here,” I said. “They must have been waiting, anticipated our next move.” I resisted the urge to curse. Queen Mardinest was intelligent. It wasn’t such a leap to assume we’d be trying to escape from the capitol via ship. If she’d been able to deduce which way we were moving through the city, either from surveillance or the occasional civilian spotting, it would be easy to get Reglium in place before we arrived.