‘Anna,’ he said, putting a tiny hand on her shoulder, ‘it’s okay for you to feel overwhelmed. Breathe in through your nose, exhale through your mouth, accept that you’re a poor student.’
Torroling jerked her shoulder to push the sprite’s hand off. Hmm, a different approach was needed. ‘The daeva have not trained you adequately, that much is clear. The Aether is a force, yes? Your nodding tells me you understand that much, so well done you. It is a fifth element out of reach for mortals; a spiritual essence weaved through every living thing in Torrodil. The daeva can sense it and take it in to wield the four elements. As I sincerely hope you are aware, the Aether is a duality: white and black. The white spirit is of order; it heals and protects. But the black is wild. Destructive. It may restore you, but if it does it will take hold and never leave.’
‘But where do you come from? If I could send you back – very sorry about that by the way – where would you go?’
‘I wouldn’t go anywhere,’ the sprite replied, as if it was the most stupid question ever asked. ‘I would be here. Then I would be broken up and returned, materialised again when you need me. Nothing ceases to be, Anna. It simply changes form.’
Anna thought long and hard, trying to beat him at his own game. ‘You say you know every language, yeah? How have you learned? You need a teacher and books and space to learn.’
‘The Aether infuses every human, humans learn language (though they obviously struggled passing it on to you), and when they die the Aether collects that knowledge and keeps it safe.’
Anna looked at him cynically. ‘I can’t be the first girl to have trouble taking you seriously.’
‘Listen, I have tried with you, I really have. But you and I are stuck together whether we like it or not. I’m your elemental and you only get one, so we might as well try and make this work.’ Torroling seems to be cheering up. Sucks in a good amount of air, lets it out, looks up and down over the sprite’s body, giggles— Hey wait, that’s not fair.
‘I’m sorry, but you remind me of a gnome in our garden. You’ve got the same fat little face.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Anna continued walking. Sprite followed, waiting for a murmur, whinny, anything so he could make a comeback. It did not take long. She said he was a lot smaller than the other elementals. Then he replied that they probably belonged to powerful daeva and that she must be a very inferior conjurist. Then she said that she couldn’t be that inferior if she’d summoned thunderstorms and ice jets and a river of molten flame, discovering a small amount of pride in her accomplishments.
‘Impossible! No daeva can cross three schools and most only have an affinity for one.’
‘It’s exactly as I’ve said or else I wouldn’t have said it at all.’
Remembering Torroling Factoid 16: The Truth About Compulsive Liars, the earth sprite smiled, nodded his head with the pretence of sympathy, and whizzed off in front of her, using his superior vision to find a route down further staircases and screeching at her to come back up, or go back down, or not take another step unless she wanted to see her giblets leap out of her mouth. While they walked he told her that no two Gauntlets are ever the same, as they manifest differently according to the girl’s personality, fears and ability.
The sprite spotted the bridge and led her forwards. Walking across it, torch in hand, Anna watched as arcane runes began to resonate a glossy blue light. Whether the runes spoke of protection or punishment was beyond her. Still, she felt at ease basking in their glow, colour returning to her cheeks, and proceeded with them on either side until the gate was in front, opening with her touch.
Into a tight corridor the two went, gate locking behind them. They emerged into a dark open space where little could be seen apart from a metal brazier fastened to the ground. Anna took her torch and lit it. Like a spark on a dry bed of leaves, so did the fire spread rapidly around the room, leaping from one brazier to the next, ending with the one on their right.
They were standing in the aisle of an amphitheatre, looking down on two men fighting with swords. Anna did not have time to fix her eyes on their faces, as a frost spread over the earth sprite’s translucent wings and body, binding him in a prison of ice that crashed to the ground.
Poor thing, she thought. If I try to free you, I may end up shattering you into pieces. I must be meant to solve this test without your help. I’ll come back, so don’t go anywhere! …oh, that’s an awful joke.
She left the sprite and continued walking past the empty benches. Did this space even exist without her, or had it been used on other girls, putting them before its trial to assess their merit on a single day when who knew what effect the previous night’s sleep would have, or the previous meal, or the previous conversation with teachers that burdened them with their expectations? With so much riding on one test, Anna thought, it’s a wonder there are any daeva left.
About three quarters of the way down the aisle, she pitched her eyes on the two combatants, made out their familiar tabards, smiled an irrepressible smile, and ran as fast as her frozen feet would permit down the steps and onto the sandy floor.
‘Am I glad to see you. You won’t believe what I’ve been through. This crazy woman shut me in here and I’ve—’
Their black eyes gazing into her.
‘No, you’re not them. They’re alive.’
Bearing down their judgement on her.
‘You’re not real. This is another trick and I’ll figure it out. Don’t come any closer. I won’t have you touching me.’
Mateo and Cesar seized her with abnormal strength, bringing forth the Black Aether into her body, letting it wash from cavity to cavity, swimming in the secret gardens and drowning in the rivers. It stroked at every dull scar and covered flaw, every prejudice and soft spot, giving life to the tendrils and hands of her nightmares. Whispers. A man’s face whittled away into nose and chin. A scourge that wanted to live in this wild husk for an eternity.
Once the Aether had immersed her eyes, the boys threw her to the floor, picked up their swords and continued fighting. Cesar cut across his friend’s chest in a backhand swipe, sending a line of blood onto the sand. They stopped, looked at one another, and laughed: an echoing beat that joined the stream of chaos floating through Anna’s mind.
She fought it in an internal battleground as best she could, resuscitating the good memories when they were drained and thrown to the floor, shouldering the six protectors when they were sapped of their vigour, but she was no match for the inescapable darkness. It rooted itself in her and unbuttoned her eyes. Dripping from her fingernails was liquid Aetherial energy; pulsing from her skin was an aura of smoke and black; and she could feel the air percolating and the theatre vibrating from the force pouring out of her.
With her permission did the walls behind her burst and a surge of water path around and onto the sand. Sky-energy ripped through stone columns while its host relished her newfound power. No more waiting for anything. If she did not get what she wanted the very foundations of the world would burn in her wake, since hers was a matchless union with the Aether, and it would do anything she wished so long as it could remain beating in this husk, a dual heart where there had been one.
‘One of us must die,’ announced Cesar. ‘You must decide.’
Anna was not sure where the ball of lightning in her hand had come from. The beating. The incessant beating. When she did nothing the darkness seized her in its thrall. Down she went to the floor, lightning ball flying off and beheading a statue while the sand around her parted to fissures of flame.
‘Do not fight it,’ came a voice, and from voice form. It looked like Anna, toffee hair fanning out around its body while steam rose in the background. ‘Their lives are meaningless. Take them; let them perish by your hand as they should have done in Leitrim.’
Water fell into the widening fissures and the girl’s aura began to blink between black and white. Her head, too many voices, make it stop.
‘They are laug
hing at you,’ said the mirror image, body ravaged, eyes of darkness. ‘Child. Birth brand. They put you down and kept you there with their boots. Today you are free to have your vengeance. Take their green fields and winding brooks and snickering faces and grease-stained blouses. Start with the stuttering one. He can’t even speak, let alone fight.’
Anna was marooned on an island of rock, chasms of the earth opened up around her, boys awaiting annihilation. The girl struggled with the conflicting forces inside her and the liquid energy dripping from her fingernails quickened its flow.
‘No-one can love a creature such as you. You have seen their eyes after the reckoning. In the jungle. They fear what you are and they fear what you will become. Let one of these boys be baptised by fire and find absolution in the flames. You would give him more than he deserves and the Shaper of the Summerland would thank you. The nightmares would stop, I promise you.’
‘Stop?’ Anna asked, sweat running down her back.
‘Everything was because of them. End this by your hand before it is too late.’
Recalling her best friend Tommy and Lake Leitrim. Andres trying to make sense of the map. Cesar next to her at the pyres and that trademark wink. How the sun caught Mateo’s face outside Riverdale Farm and how he caught her arm. Lysander pulling her inside the Order sanctuary. And Kara, masked, throwing the Webbing Vial at the rude guard’s face. And Kara, unmasked, covered in mud.
Ground crumbling, Mateo seconds away from his end. He stared down into the abyss like he’d been expecting this from the start.
‘I can’t,’ said Anna, drifting into oblivion.
The scourge seethed and lunged at the memories, finding its blows deflected by a shield of clean light. Where it had swum freely, it now found itself hunted by the guardians of Anna’s mind. Darkness was driven upwards by their light, from gardens and rivers to the back of her mouth, where it sank its teeth in and vowed never to leave. Yet to hands went swords, and to tendrils went salt, and out of her mouth did the demonic spirit run, breathed out of her and taking with it the aura of smoke and black, quietening the stream of beating voices to one.
By the guardians’ strength the fissures in the earth were sealed shut; the flow of water from the walls ebbed; the aura and dripping fingernails dispelled; and dark Aetherial energy sent home. The apparitions of the two Venecians bowed their heads, then looked to an unseen sky and faded away.
The woman with grey flecks in her hair was staring into the eyes of six hopeless meatsacks – soon-to-be six dead, hopeless meatsacks.
‘Give her time,’ said Tommy. ‘She will come for us; she will pass your stupid test!’
‘You try my patience. I’m afraid she has failed and you are no longer needed. I’ll have to dispose of you before the others wake up. But how to do it…’
Tommy had apparently not learned his lesson and grabbed hold of a metal railing, sending a jolt of lightning through his body and flinging him backwards onto the floor. Enchanted daevan prison bars: less enchanting than the name suggests.
Stepping over the frazzled boy, Kara attempted to bring about a compromise. ‘We will leave. We won’t tell anyone what we’ve seen or where you live. You can have all the gold in my pack and any of the reagents too. Just let us out of here and promise not to come after us.’
‘Really? All the gold in your pack?’
‘Shut it, Cesar.’
‘While your offer is tempting,’ answered the woman sardonically, ‘I can’t help but wonder why I would let you go for gold I already have taken and promises I know to be false. You see, the thing about humans is that you have no loyalty, not even to each other. One mug of cheap Carric ale or a glass of acidic Venecian wine and you will spill everything you know just for empty praise and a pat on the back. But don’t fool yourselves into thinking that the next morning they won’t pass on your tales as their own and walk right by you in the street without saying a word. Eventually the tales would lead someone to our home and, one way or another, they would meet their ends in the pointless pursuit of fame and fortune.’
‘W-what are a few more lives when you have t-taken so many?’ asked Mateo.
‘And who is to say the stories you’ve heard are nothing but hearsay that was passed from person to person and embellished along the way?’
‘You don’t seem to have any qualms about killing us,’ said Lysander.
‘You came into my home.’
‘You invited us.’
‘And let that be a lesson about accepting a stranger’s invitation. But enough with this arguing,’ she said, opening the cell door with a bolt. ‘Morning light will be upon us soon and I am not about to risk my life for six meatsacks that should’ve known better.’
Anna walked with the earth sprite, who flicked ice off his shoulders not because it was making him cold, but because it pained him to see it there. He was telling her how he couldn’t be doing with this ice, he couldn’t. If it melted the velvet would be ruined and did she have any idea how rare this velvet is? She didn’t. He said she was moping an awful lot for a girl who passed the second test. She objected. Passionately. About five minutes later.
Her head was teeming with echoes of lives gone by. Bits and pieces mostly. Their aspirations. Images of former lovers. Each had cherished their image on the mornings when they’d prise themselves out of bed, chewing on whatever scraps could constitute a breakfast, unsure when they traded a life worth living for one of monotony and routine.
Time to be rid of this place, Anna thought. Not only the Gauntlet but Thrace and the desert and Mezbollah and every pit stop between here and Leitrim. She was done looking for answers about who she was, done looking for adventure, done looking for a gap in the life market that she could fill. Home was not with these women; it was hundreds of miles away in a village where the inhabitants would celebrate her homecoming in the day and build her pyre at night. And she’d deal with it, accepting her lot as the town freak, as long as it meant she could put the jack back in the box.
But she was here. Still. There was one last test. Sprite said he knew what it was and she would just have to drink it. They walked down a small flight of stairs and saw there were no more bridges or gates left. They were at the bottom of the Gauntlet and the only way out was a geyser that sprung to life as the gate behind them closed.
The geyser, however, did not keep their attentions. At a font Bale drank from a chalice, letting the elixir spill down and fizz on torched flesh. The earth sprite flitted forward. With a curl of a hand he was dismissed back into the Aether.
The girl restrained her fear, watching as the man ran a finger inside the cup and brought it to his mouth, letting the last drop seep into his lips. ‘Are you actually alive?’ she asked.
Silence back at her. Tongue licking. Hands falling into a skip across exposed ribs. Anna ran for the geyser and got her body and mouth bound in vines.
‘Quiet,’ said Bale softly, sliding over. The vines parted for a hand to rest over Anna’s chest. He did not seem to feel her struggling body. His mouth did not turn upwards, yet Anna saw a smile in the perverse animation of his face; a drop of water onto a pool of obsession. ‘Inside you is the most beautiful sound. Hear how it quickens, excited by my touch. You would miss that sound if it were gone.’ Mouth vines were bid away. Bale did not react to Anna’s taunts, for he was cut off from all sound save for the heart.
‘I am sorry for what I did. It was not out of spite and I don’t expect forgiveness, but for what it’s worth I am sorry.’
Bale’s vaporous eyes set on her. ‘I do not want pity. This Aether we have access to. I feel it writhe under Torrodil, stream out its fonts and wrestle with its prey. It is life and death. Pain and dignity and knowledge. It has told me to take this drink for you and I have done that.’
Anna replied that that was really good. Great in fact. Him, this Aether thing, this gift, take it all, she doesn’t want any of it.
Bypassing her ignorance, Bale said, ‘You have passed the Gauntlet and shown tha
t you are worthy of your power. The women would reward you with a drink to dilute it, but I have drunk the elixir and given you your freedom.’ He turned and walked away, vines dropping off Anna and slithering over into him. ‘Come now, with me.’
‘Hmm.’ Anna put a finger to her lips. ‘Ominous claptrap aside, the last time I went anywhere with you I ended up attached to a stake. Not exactly my idea of a good time.’
Bale slanted his head. He walked forward, morphing into the thatched-roof Venecian, then Yae, then Gazon, words altering in timbre with each shell. ‘But you lived, didn’t you? And you can’t help shake the feeling that somehow, if you’d just… No, you are wrong to doubt yourself. You have done a great deal of good, and there are few who would wield such power with equal care. Did you not see how the other women looked at you? They don’t mind who they kill, as long as it is not one of their own.’
‘They can help me control it. I’ll learn—’
‘Don’t you get it?’ Bale stops shy of Anna’s face, digging away at the girl’s already trampled nerves. ‘There is no control.’
Anna, weakened, lets her guard slip. Flashing before her is possibility, dreams turned into reality and lives spent. A sea of blood and unholy life wading through. Bale lets the Aether drift out of empty sockets, face whittled away into nose and chin.
He pushes Anna off the platform and dives after her into the black abyss. Both are screaming. Anna in fear. Bale in elation. Space whistles past and a choir of twisted voices comes through, imploring her to join with them.
Light burns into her retinas.
She casts him down.
Up flies Anna as Bale falls beneath. Geyser cleansing, light shining, and girl soaring into day.
Torrodil Page 19