Citadel of the Sky (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 1)

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  “It will hold long enough,” said a third voice, old and grim. “If we are careful, it may hold forever.”

  The crafter sighed and set the pendant down. “The hard part will be getting a chance to use it. We have to beat him back first.”

  Somebody said, “We’ll have a chance, at least. You’ve given us what we need.”

  The crafter looked at the speaker, his eyes dark and troubled. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” His hand came down on Tiana, closing around her as he said, “She wants this, to play with. I’m going to give it to her.”

  Muffled, far away, the old man’s voice said, “That’s fine. Cracked, it’s useless.”

  Then the memory became only iridescent darkness. Tiana waited hopefully for another story, looking for new ripples to follow. But all she could see were the curiosity monsters, swarming around her. She wondered what Jinriki was doing. She wondered if he was angry. Had he turned on her? Had he sprouted spikes in a futile attempt to bite her? Was he ranting at her? Not knowing was impossible to bear.

  She gave up and fled back to her body, straightening from where she’d slumped against a wall. The sharp headache was gone and the sword was just a wrinkle under the blanket wrapper. She waited for a moment, then nudged it with her toe.

  **I am paying attention, foolish child.**

  Tiana said, “Oh. Well, I’ll leave again, if I have to. I can protect myself, you know.” She picked up the bundle again.

  Sounding bored, the sword said, **Not enough. In any case, I am certain now that you’ve never had contact with any of the Firstborn.**

  Tiana was startled. “Well, no. No one has, for hundreds of years. Not for real. They left this kingdom to us, you know,” she added, proudly. “To our family, after Shin Savanyel came. He was a great hero.” She pointed the bundle at a mural she was passing. “There’s him and his son Kir, defeating Balath the Arch-Inscriptor. One of many enemies he defeated.”

  **Heroic for a human, I’m sure. But of the Firstborn, my master was the greatest.**

  Tiana bit her lip, thinking about the Citadel of the Sky on top of the mountain Sel Sevanth. It was sacred to Niyhan and the source of the powder that enabled Logos-working and Logos inscriptions. Its priests were her primary source of religious education, but it was a token sort of education, mostly concerned with holy days the Blood were required to participate in. The Magister of the Citadel visited annually for the three weeks it took to celebrate Antecession and the triple holiday.

  But it was basic theology that Niyhan was foremost among the Firstborn. He was also the patron of civilization and the search for knowledge. Swords were not something associated with him. Perhaps the sword meant Rann, who was much more warlike.

  **Secondborn to my lord Innis, both of them. I do not know what happened to him, only that he died in a moment, without warning. I too would have been destroyed or taken by the wild madness that swept through all his children when he died. But his mortal servants, who were my caretakers, dedicated themselves to preserving me. They bound me to stillness and silence with promises of vengeance later, when the world was stronger.**

  There was no Innis in any story Tiana knew. She said, “This must have been very long ago. At least, I’ve never heard of him.”

  **A century or ten thousand years, it does not matter. Everything changed when he died.**

  “Oh.” Tiana shook herself out of listening and drifted down the catacombs hall, choosing her path almost at random. It was tempting to take the sword back to where she’d found the amulet, but that place made her uneasy. So instead, one of her play spots as a child would suffice. But as she walked, the story the sword had hinted at called her back again. “How could a Firstborn die? I’ve read stories of Secondborn pining away for love….”

  **He was murdered, of course. Foolish child. Do you think the Firstborn fall prey to grief or illness like a lesser creature does?**

  Tiana sighed. “Of course. But you don’t know who killed him? Which is why you attacked me?”

  **Hardly an attack, simply an investigation. Here, little one. Do you still insist on leaving me somewhere? Let me show you how I would attack you.** The sword struck.

  A great and dazzling geometric shape unfolded in Tiana’s mind, infinitely complex. No sooner did she recognize its vastness than she was screaming, trying to deny it. She was drowning in its shallows. Its deepness could swallow worlds. She hid away from it, reaching for blindness or the phantasmagory. Instead she found a monstrous labyrinth of frosted glass.

  She could feel the vastness shifting around her, and she understood immediately that she was a prisoner, snatched and caged so quickly that she’d had no time to flee. **Why?** she demanded of the labyrinth, of the geometry.

  Only her own thoughts returned to her, distorted and blurred by the translucent glass. **Why? Why? Why?**

  Why was this maze, this mental prison, possible when the phantasmagory challenged Jinriki the Darkener to find her? How was this not-place different from the phantasmagory? Was it different from the phantasmagory?

  The phantasmagory was moldable; the emanations obeyed her in both that place and the real world, when she called them. She moved her hand to slice through the glass walls. Nothing happened. She had no hand to move. She had no breath to exhale. She was a thought ricocheting in a diamond.

  Something else was missing.

  She wasn’t real.

  New horror seized her. She wasn’t real. She wasn’t Tiana. Tiana was somewhere else; she was just a daydream, a stray thought, exiled, sent to hell. Was this where bad thoughts went when they died? This piece of crystal insanity?

  That’s exactly what it was. She was Tiana’s insanity. This was where it lived when Tiana pushed it down, kept it from nibbling away the edges of her self. She’d spent so long resisting it. She cared about appropriate behavior. She’d taught herself to ignore things that upset her. She’d taught Lisette to distract her when she needed distraction, and she’d stayed so good. Jerya thought her shallow, Jerya thought her frivolous, but Tiana wasn’t going to lose her husband the way her father had lost her mother.

  But now she and her insanity had changed places. Was that it? Was her madness out there, freed from the leash and chain? Was Tiana running through the halls, ranting about last year’s fashions? She’d had to suppress the dreadful urge to giggle inappropriately, over and over, as the men attending the theater had pranced past in their feathered flounces.

  Was she stalking down the halls, shedding her clothing? It had been so hot the other day. Was she looking for the nearest bottle of whiskey, was she climbing to the highest tower to see if she could really fly? Was she sawing off her hair?

  Was she walking out of the catacombs with Jinriki the Darkener held in her hand?

  Was that all that had happened? Had she lost her self, not to her insanity, but to the sword?

  She was a thought, just a thought, but she was oh-so-quick. Her thoughts existed. She was glee. She’d lost her self, that’s all, and this vastness, this glittering labyrinth, it only served to trick her that she was actually there. If she was a thought, it was a dream. But it was less than a dream, because dreams came from within. Dreams could hold you down because they were you. She was far too straightforward to be an infinitely complicated, crystal labyrinth. It could not hold her.

  First, she stopped thinking about the labyrinth.

  Then, she stopped thinking.

  She felt her body walking along. It was her stride, careful and fast. Her body knew how to walk, even if it didn’t know who was driving it. She hid in her toes, because it was the farthest she could get from the sword she was sure she held in her hand. Her toes flexed and shifted in their slippers. She itched, but her body did not scratch. Would the sword be so unkind to her? Her family would notice if there was a Tiana who did not fidget. Somebody would wonder. Cathay would guess.

  She wondered how Cathay would fight Tiana for Tiana against an evil sword. She imagined him threatening the sword with anot
her sword. It was tempting to encourage it to happen, just to laugh about it. She could wiggle her toes whenever Cathay got close, tap out a code against the floor. Uncle Yithiere was always making up codes. He’d understand what had happened, too. But the plan couldn’t go very far, because toes didn’t have very much in the way of imagination.

  Foolish, foolish sword. It called her foolish child, but it would be lucky if it wasn’t tossed into a furnace instead of just hidden in the dark for another generation to find. She itched more, twitching and convulsing. She extended herself throughout her feet, and then she cramped up and stopped walking. She was the feet, and she was in charge!

  The hand not holding the sword touched her feet, and she stole it. Now she had one hand, and two feet. She took the knees, too, since they were hardly useful without the feet. And the sword knew she was there now.

  It had the right hand, the head, the chest. It was a good chest, but she was standing tight as a soldier, and she always thought that must be painful. It did display her cleavage nicely, she realized, as she stole her left arm, her left shoulder, and felt the downward slope.

  A mighty presence, not her, sank into the parts of Tiana she’d reclaimed, reaching out from the high places it occupied to reclaim what it had lost. But she was in the low places, the valleys, the far reaches, the depths and extremities. And it was not, she found, very familiar with how female bodies operated. The presence moved across her skin like the wind over a wildfire, trying to recapture that which had burned the prison down. She took back her mouth and laughed at Jinriki the Darkener, and then surged, roared, danced into the heart of her self.

  Tiana opened her hand and let the sword fall, clattering, onto the flagstones of the small hallway. Then she wiggled her fingers, let an emanation buoy it up, and cocked her head to look at it floating in front of her. She was content to let it speak first, and she was quite certain that it wouldn’t find a thing in her head to eavesdrop on. She knew it in her fingers. She knew it in her toes.

  Finally, it said **I see you have returned again, yes.**

  Tiana stuck out her lip and said, “That’s no fun. I bet you’ve done that before, on other people, eh?”

  **Yes.**

  “But you didn’t expect me to get out so quickly, I’d wager!” She bounced up on and down on her toes and made the sword spin in a circle.

  It didn’t respond, so she dropped it again and tapped her foot on the blade. “I’ve been thinking. Do you want to know what I’ve been thinking?” Still no response, but she fancied she was being annoying all the same. “I know you do. So I’ll tell you. I’ve been thinking, rather than hiding you away, I should find the hottest furnace in the Palace and stick you in there until you’re just a lump of metal. Maybe you’d still talk, maybe not. We could find out.”

  **You’d be wasting your time.** She thought it sounded tired. **No heat in this world could destroy me.**

  Tiana scowled. “Well, we could at least test that.” She waved the blade aloft a second time. “But I’m not that knowledgeable about furnaces, and I do know about my hiding spot, so I don’t mind taking your word.” She stumped down the hall, back into the catacombs.

  After a time, she heard, **Do not banish me from your hand. It would not help you. You will hear my voice, no matter how far you go.**

  Now the sword sounded desperate, and she felt the barest twinge of pity. But she said, “Cathay is drawn to swords, and when I’m lost in the phantasmagory, I’m unpredictable.” She considered, and added, “Besides, you just stole my body. I don’t want you near me.

  “As for voices, that’s nothing new. I’ve learned to ignore so many others.” She did not share with the sword that its voice was different from the whispers of the phantasmagory, that it had a strength and vividness, an intimacy that she could not imagine shutting out. She’d learn to cope.

  The sword was silent. So she padded through the halls, taking a lantern from one of the junctures before she left the lit area, until she reached the spot where she and Lisette used to play, back before they were even ten years old. It was down some age-roughened steps, around a corner. Perhaps it had been a larder, long ago. It had stone shelves, and under the lowest shelf there was a depression, where two little girls could hide and giggle.

  When she was six and it was her turn to pick a Regent from the crop of noble daughters her own age, she’d led the flock of girls down to the catacombs. Three girls abandoned the quest for her favor there, at the entrance to the old halls, frightened by nursery tales of ghosts.

  “Of course there are ghosts; it’s where the Blood walks,” had said Lisette, and walked down the stairs, completely unafraid. They’d played hide and seek there. The third time through, when Seandri was the seeker, Lisette had found the larder and led Tiana there, around the corner, under the shelf. They’d never been found, not when all the other girls were found, not when the adult searchers came with lanterns and shouts, not until Uncle Yithiere and his eidolon wolves had sniffed her out.

  There was still the blanket she’d brought down another time, and the porcelain teacups, the old metal teapot she’d stolen from the kitchen, and a gold-rimmed plate. Tiana put her lantern on a hook in the wall. She took the hilt of the sword in her hand and rolled under the shelf, into the depression. Then she laid the blade beside her, on its edge. It made a disturbing companion. In the light that seeped under the shelf, she thought she could just see the colors of her reflection in the blade, wobbling in the uneven light.

  She would leave it here, rolled up in the blankets. If the Magister could deal with it, she would come back for it. There was no reason she shouldn’t. It was hers to deal with. Kiar might not think it was the responsible choice, and yet it had always worked before. But she held it loosely by the hilt, and she saw that it wasn’t bending itself to wrap around her hand, as she knew it could.

  “Why were you so cruel to Cathay? He’d appreciate you much more than I can. Even now. He’s like that.”

  **He isn’t mine. You are.**

  Tiana shivered, but she said, “It’s the other way around, if anything. I’m a princess. I don’t belong to anybody.”

  **When the monk—Helliac? When he woke me, he’d invoked you as the one who would carry me to the vengeance I was promised. You have the mark. You are the one. I can manipulate any mortal to fulfill my basic desires, but the mark is the only channel for my power. If you do not do this, there will be no one else who can.**

  Tiana laid the sword on its flat, arranged the blanket around it, and tucked her arm under her head. Cathay would never find it here, would never even consider looking. He was disturbed by small, enclosed spaces, and he’d never liked the catacombs. Neither did Shanasee, who disliked the shadows and the memories.

  She ran a finger up the center of the blade. It looked like it belonged here somehow, like it was the bone of some forgotten creature. Even more than here, it belonged below, in the dungeons, with their thick dust and strange doors. But that place frightened her. The shadows, the memories. Even now, she felt that something lived down there, something that did not know how to die. She imagined something walking the long corridor of cells, touching doors, sitting in the chair with its back to the door. But where was it when they had gone looking? Had it emerged into the catacombs above? Was it walking these halls now, soft footsteps echoing in the halls, murmuring to itself, looking for something taken from it?

  She inhaled sharply. She could hear it, really hear it. Footsteps in the corridor, the soft murmur of a voice. Then the murmur of a different voice. Coming closer.

  **Walkers. Are you afraid? If you hold me close and trust me, I promise you will never have anything to fear. Your curse, your madness is strange, but I am learning to understand it. We can conquer it, together.**

  “Hsst,” she said to the blade, squirming further under the shelf. She snaked out a hand and took the blade’s handle, sliding it deeper into the shadow. She tried not to hyperventilate, but she could hear the walker coming close, hea
r the uneven shuffle of the footsteps and the strange multi-layered way it murmured. She flicked her fingers and the candle within the lantern was snuffed.

  The darkness was absolute; she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed. She ran her fingers lightly up the blade again, feeling the cold metal, the sharp edge, the roughness of the blanket. In and out, she practiced even, quiet breaths. Would it be able to find her by the warmth of her body? Would it see the taint of her power through the Logos?

  The voice was close enough that she could make out words. “—amenable. Just because she’s suddenly taking an interest doesn’t mean she’s trying to get in our way. Maybe she’ll be as cooperative as the other one.”

  **Two people, talking. Just mortals.** Something eased inside and the panic surging through her started to fade.

  Only for a surge of adrenalin to replace it, as a second, familiar voice spoke. “She believes in the old ways. And she is stubborn, she and her uncle. They are the two who would fight us, no matter what. For tradition’s sake, for history, for themselves. Lost in dreams of centuries past… They can’t begin to understand.”

  “It’s good that our crowd of one yet lives, then. Best keep him that way. Have your investigators made progress?”

  She knew that voice.

  “It’s a tilting game, seeing what we can find out without someone calling Blight and activating them. And honestly, he’s likely to bend his head to her. A family squabble that wipes out the top three and leaves us with the younger girl would be ideal. She’d be overjoyed to give you free access in exchange for a pat on the head.”

  The stranger said, “Judging from the past, the collateral damage would be tremendous. We don’t want that. But this plague is a lever. The workers are very interested. I wish we could get the wizard to provide us with his insights. They’re close to a way to neutralize their magic.” The voices were moving further away.

  “I think that’s risky. Better to steal some of his notes. He’s got the bastard as his apprentice and he’s fond of her, to all appearances. I know someone….” It faded into indistinct murmuring again.