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

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  “No. You won’t.”

  She paused, watching the movement of the invaders. They grouped together as they swerved around the hill and slowed as they noticed her drifting above them. Then she said, “When I fall, they’ll take you from me. Your revenge will be lost. I’m sorry.”

  The black cloud’s voice turned cold. “Let’s kill them all, then.”

  She sighed. Then she swept her hands forward, Jinriki in one hand, the other hand straight like a knife. The emanation scythed away from her, rippling down to the leading edge of the invaders.

  The mounts screamed, a high whine interspersed with hiccuping thuds. Three reared, stumbled backwards, fell. Two more failed to swerve around them. Then rising dust screened the details.

  “Three?” Tiana said. “Three at once? Did I hit all three? I just meant to trip the leader.” The phantasmagory vanished from her perception as she strained to make out what was happening below.

  **Well done.** Jinriki’s voice was saturnine.

  “You just make my magic stronger? Why didn’t you help me before, at the Mystery Spot?” Tiana shook the blade in aggravation, her quiet dispassion chased off by her surprise.

  **Pay attention!** Something dark and thin flicked by her face and then her knee, and the emanation supporting her vanished for a plummeting heartbeat as she flinched away.

  “Ah! What—do they have bows?” She tried to focus on the dust and riders below. But he should have helped me earlier! Another dart skimmed past her cheek and she flung out her hands again, frustration propelling another emanation down to the riders, untargeted. It sliced through the dust and more creatures screamed. She saw one of the mounts snap its tail forward, and Jinriki twisted in her hand. A dart spanged off the blade.

  Bewildered, Tiana pushed her free hand forward, fingers spread, sending the emanation rushing forward like the wind. A black spike pinwheeled. She crooked a tendril of force to bring it to her.

  It was as long as her forearm, a thin, dark, mottled horn. She scowled and hurled it away from her, back at the riders. Then she sank into the phantasmagory again, where Jinriki was a black cloud beside her, not a sword in her hand.

  My hand is a sword. She sliced. The screaming of the mounts was joined by the deeper, guttural cries of the four-legged creatures. She saw one of the slim riders standing at the edge of the wreckage of mounts and riders, looking up at her. Then more darts flew at her.

  My hand is a shield. She held it up. But it was Jinriki who cut one out of the air and her flinch-and-drop that saved her from another. Infuriated, she sliced and sliced and sliced again, cutting blindly at dust and screams and darts. She realized part of the enemy had continued on, into the town.

  “You have no idea how to defend yourself,” Jinriki observed.

  Shut up! Why didn’t you help me before? I could have saved Kiar—

  “That rider is still watching you. Don’t let it live to report what it’s observing.”

  Black specks flying—she reached out with the emanation and the sword and cut them out of the sky, one, two, three. The fourth one cut through her clothing, grazing her arm even as she jerked and fell another few feet. Its path against her skin burned.

  Her emanation stuttered around her as she caught herself. Jinriki made her stronger, but she was still worn out and getting wearier. Damn you, if you’d helped earlier, I wouldn’t be so tired now. She blew and the emanation parted the dust long enough for her to take in what was happening beneath her.

  A shape moved at the heart of the black cloud and Jinriki’s sudden rage was a palpable force against her mind. “You were having a tantrum, accomplishing nothing. Are you having another one? Will you get yourself killed to punish me for not indulging such a childish urge in one who could be so much more? I promise you, that’s all that would kill you today.” His voice turned acrid as he said, “I regret that I was ever placed in your hands.”

  She stared blindly as the dust parted and swirled together again: a mass of dark shapes, some moving, some not. Some of the shapes were limbs, parted from their bodies. The lone watching figure had not moved. White and grey eyes, real and living, scrutinized her.

  She startled out of the phantasmagory and focused on the watcher. “That’s not a helm,” she muttered. “That’s its face?”

  **Apparently. Kill it now, and examine it later.** His voice was cold and dispassionate again, and she wondered if the rage was gone or merely hidden. Jerya’s disappointment slipped out like that sometimes. She flinched away from the thought, dropped a few inches. Then she curved one hand into talons and clawed at the watcher. It stepped nimbly to one side, never moving its gaze from her. One of its hands twitched. A mount moved behind it, tail cracking violently. A spike flew.

  Tiana bit her lip hard and pushed herself into the phantasmagory again, curving both hands around into claws. She thrust her hands out and then jerked them apart, tearing the watcher apart as easily as she tore apart the eidolon at Tomas’s funeral. The black spike filled her vision, moving, true. Then it shattered against Jinriki’s blade.

  In a voice nobody but she could hear, she whispered, I’m sorry.

  The black cloud said, “Do you wish to pursue those who continued into the town? You and I have quite an advantage over them, but they will be formidable opponents for your so-called bodyguards.”

  Tiana looked at the seething mess below. Maybe they’ll go back. She flexed the emanation supporting her and she began to rise to the top of the hill.

  “Or maybe the people of this village will clean up.” She caught a hint of displeasure in his voice.

  At the top of the hill, she stepped onto the ground again and darted down the slope. It seemed like the larger portion of the invaders had spread out through the town. A four-legged man was rocking a covered cart back and forth. Begging and squeaks emerged from the cart. Tiana skidded to a stop. Then she lashed out, slicing the one of the four legs from the creature’s torso. It coughed explosively and fell, twitching.

  Oh. No blood? She started running again.

  “They ooze,” said the black cloud.

  Belongings had been scattered all over the street from overturned wagons and abandoned packs. She slapped a rider and its mount away from a fallen woman and hoped the woman’s friends would return for her. Ahead, in the town’s intersection, a handful of mounts were digging in gardens, and crashing into buildings. The road beyond, leading to the Mystery Spot, was clogged with riders. Tiana could just see her table, overturned and broken, before the curve of the road eclipsed her view.

  What are they doing to the Mystery Spot? She skipped into the intersection and sent an emanation out to tangle among the legs of the monsters there. Is that why they’re here? Absently, she pushed a volley of tail spikes away and slashed. How could they know? Something roared at her and she ducked, pushed. Hey, Jinriki, how did Twist know I was doing something with the Logos earlier? She tilted her head, thinking about spider webs.

  “No! Pay attention!** Something hard and heavy smacked Tiana from the left. Pain exploded on her side and shoulder, and she staggered and fell, unable to catch herself. The light phantasmagory trance slipped through her fingers, but her mind was still full of spider webs.

  She rolled. A four-legged man stood over her, holding a maul. He reared, those clawed feet flashing over her head. She stared at him and thought, Is this how I die? Now? Panic shook her away from spider web distractions. She flailed for an emanation but they were deep and distant, a spool almost emptied and hard to reach in her terror—and the sword Jinriki was in her hand.

  Up, up, she forced herself to her knees, her shoulder screaming, and surrendered herself to the sword. Then, an observer in her own body, she watched and winced as she threw herself to one side, the sword slicing out. It was just like when she used emanations, except she felt the shock all through her arm and spine as the sword sliced into the monster’s torso. And afterwards, pulling it out, it stuck. Not much, just a little, but it was slow to come out and the eman
ations never were.

  **Blood is richer than this stuff. Go on, let us go to your wretched Mystery Spot, if it is so compelling that it blinds you.** Once again, the sword’s voice was cold.

  “I told you I didn’t want a sword! But you insisted,” she muttered as she ran down the road.

  **Alas for both of us, then, that my caretaker didn’t ask first.**

  She lashed out angrily at another four-legged man and dodged a mounted rider. Something scraped across the back of her leg and she threw herself down to the ground, crying out at the pain in her ribs and arm. She fumbled, trying to find the shallow phantasmagory trance that made everything flow, but she was teetering on the edge of the deep end. She pushed the emanation out from her, slamming it into another mount and scrambled to her feet again, dodging over to a building, where at least she’d have her back against a wall.

  There were a handful of riders standing around the Mystery Spot. One of them had its hand pushed right up to the Mystery Spot, closer than Tiana had been able to come with her own hand. The strange sick feeling Tiana had felt right before Kiar vanished resurfaced. She fought for breath and reached down deep for more power. “What are they doing? I don’t care what it is, it’s bad!”

  Even with Jinriki’s amplification, she was running out of energy. But she wasn’t dead yet. She was hardly even hurt. There was still a lot more damage she could do, with emanation, sword, teeth. She dragged in another breath, batted a mount out of the way.

  The rider touching the Mystery Spot pushed his hand into it and wrenched. It felt like he’d reached inside Tiana herself. Nausea overwhelmed her and she vomited up all the earlier alcohol. Her magic blinked out of existence for just a moment, and then the rider pulled his hand back out of the Mystery Spot, holding onto an arm attached to the struggling figure of Kiar.

  Two other riders raised weapons but Kiar was shrieking at them, twisting and kicking. Six flaming swords orbited around her and then flew out of the circle of riders to slash at the air around the Mystery Spot.

  Tiana realized she was shouting too, that Jinriki was urging her onwards. She sent everything she had left rushing across the street, clawing and rending as her hands twitched and blurred. Then there was nobody left standing around Kiar.

  The hand holding Kiar’s arm opened and fell away. Kiar’s swords dissolved and she looked around, puzzled. Then she met Tiana’s gaze. “That was really hard,” she said, almost accusingly, and dropped to her knees.

  There was a scream from back at the intersection. It sounded like Lisette. She was in pain. Tiana pushed herself—

  The edge that kept Tiana from the deep phantasmagory eroded to nothing. She fell, and Lisette was left to the monsters.

  Chapter 25

  Where Bad Girls Go

  Even in the deep place where Tiana hid herself, time passed. Outside the phantasmagory, things happened. Within, she made for herself a room, filled with her favorite stories and a dozen dresses, but not a single mirror. There was one very small window that she could not close, and outside it a thousand nightmares played out. She did her best to ignore them.

  Time passed, but she could not say how much. An hour or a day or a week—it was all the same. She didn’t care. She didn’t want to wake up, to look out the window, to find out what had become of the screaming and her own weakness. She didn’t want to understand why her dream had not finished in an endless brightness of pain. Sometimes, she wondered if it had. Perhaps she was the first new ancestral memory of the cleansed phantasmagory.

  After a while, she heard Kiar calling for her, outside the room, elsewhere in the phantasmagory. This concerned her more than all the nightmares beyond her window, so she took The Book of Splendid Tales and stuffed it into the high, small window. Kiar’s calling stopped.

  Then the black cloud appeared in her room. She threw The Wedding of Princess Annath at it and cursed it for finding her. But her book sailed through the cloud, and it did not seem affected by her curses. It spoke to her in a man’s voice.

  “You’ve hidden long enough, foolish princess. Your ladies and guards are discussing tying you to your horse in order to take you home.”

  “I fell apart,” Tiana explained. “I heard Lisette screaming. She could be dead now.” And then she clapped her hands over her ears and watched the red flashes in the black cloud. Coins rained down around her, heads and tails, so she shut her eyes too.

  It was no use. The room flowered around her. What did closed eyes mean in the phantasmagory, and how could she close her ears? The black cloud drifted through the space between the room and her closed eyes. It said, “Both ladies are hale. Your guardsmen are not totally incompetent and neither is your lady-in-waiting.”

  Tiana hesitated and then shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. She could have died. That’s just luck. I can’t trust luck. I can’t thank luck. She screamed and I was empty, I failed her.” The window in this room was an octagon and outside the nightmares resumed.

  The black cloud was silent. Tiana sighed and arranged pieces from The Bridge of Sherata in front of her. Then the black cloud said, “Is this your choice?” It drifted closer.

  “The phantasmagory was empty but now it’s full again and everything is bad. All my bad dreams. Even this one.”

  The black cloud obscured The Bridge of Sherata. “My master was not fond of children, though he was credited with the spark that begins life.” She worried at his nearness and closed her eyes.

  A new room flowered around her. The window was almost perfectly round, though very high. But the black cloud seeped through the space between rooms, even closer than she remembered.

  “He said that it was wrong to bind a mature soul to an immature understanding. But it was done and the world is full of children looking at a world they do not understand, judging the world and themselves.”

  As politely as she could, Tiana said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  The silver eyed cloud regarded her. “Why do you hide in this quiet space instead of surrounding yourself with your nightmares?”

  Tiana scrambled away, into a corner of the room. A bookshelf fell over, spilling a mountain of books between her and the cloud. From the safety of the corner, she shrieked, “This, this is my worst nightmare! I can’t let them in! I can’t stop!” She began to stack the books into a useless wall. “I can’t look.”

  He began that slow steady drift over to her again. “I am but a voice here. I can feel your manipulation of this place, though I cannot influence it. But I can always find you. Would you like my nightmare? I promise, your denial cannot keep it away.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “How could you stand it?”

  “I had no choice.” The cloud enveloped her.

  She lay in state in a sacred place, her father’s deepest and most powerful servant. She was his hand, his eye, his symbol. She waited to be called or sent out. The least of her father’s servants attended her, slaking her thirst, keeping the mundane elements of the fleshy world from tarnishing her shine.

  Then, through the bond she shared with her father, she felt his interest in something new, then his amusement, and finally, his fear and the gathering of his strength. That included her; there was a calling, but before she could jump out of the world to his hand, everything shattered. The universe died.

  But she did not. Her roots were so deep, so strong, that she could not lose herself in the wave that swept everything else away. When the last of the wave had passed, there was a universe again. It was a poor shadow of what once had been, a corpse that hadn’t the grace to die when its heart was destroyed.

  Of her father’s other servants, only the weakest and smallest had survived unbroken: his human worshippers. She was drained and her mind cloudy, but she cried out to them and they whispered to her of revenge. There was nothing else worthwhile left.

  The black cloud moved away and she was Tiana again. “Now you know what might have been,” he said.

  The universe died, she thought. Yes. O
utside the window, the nightmares were gone. It’s like a story. “But I don’t need revenge, if she lives. I don’t want to reach that point. I don’t.”

  “Then next time you must be faster and stronger. Open your eyes.”

  She did so, emerging cleanly and instantly from the phantasmagory. She found herself in a sun-drenched room, lying in an uncomfortable, narrow bed. A new pain stabbed at her head, and her entire body ached. She sat up, shading her eyes from the dazzling morning sunshine. Jinriki had been placed on a small chest at the foot of the bed, but otherwise the room was empty.

  She stood up and mumbled, “What am I wearing?” It was scratchy and too big, a woolen shift of some kind. There was a full mug by the head of the bed, and she picked it up and sipped cautiously at the water before downing the whole thing.

  Lisette hurried in and then stopped. “Oh! You’re awake. That’s good! Kiar said you were hiding from her.” One of Lisette’s hands was bandaged, but she seemed well otherwise. She’d had time to arrange her hair into a pair of complicated braids.

  Tiana dropped her gaze to the mug. “It’s morning. I’m sorry.”

  Lisette took the mug with her uninjured hand. “You saved the town. Don’t apologize.”

  “You were injured. I heard you scream.”

  Lisette glanced at her hand. “You were covered in your own blood when we found you. Those spikes cut you up. Even your face. This is nothing.”

  Tiana frowned and touched her face. There was a scab running horizontally along her right cheekbone. It burned when she pressed her fingers against it, and she drew them away hastily. “Oh, well, that’s just wonderful. Do you think it will leave a scar? I’ve hardly healed from last time.”

  Lisette hesitated. “I don’t know. Here, I’ll go find some clothes for you. Are you ready to go back?”

  “I guess so. Jerya’s going to flay me. It didn’t seem like a problem yesterday….”

  Lisette’s smile was absent-minded and worried. “At least she’ll have the chance.” Then she hurried off.