The Harp and the Ravenvine

by Ted Sanders

  Horace was bewildered, but not even a flicker of curiosity crossed Gabriel’s face. He led the boy away, talking to him softly.

  Just then Neptune slipped down through the canopy of leaves. She caught a branch and hung in midair overhead, her cloak dangling. “The Riven are almost here,” she said, pointing. “There are three packs now, spread out wide through the woods and heading straight for us. They’re just a couple of minutes away.”

  “They hope to pin us against the river,” Gabriel said.

  Mr. Meister rounded on April. “Not to worry. Nothing we didn’t expect. But with the little time we have before they arrive, a question. I believe you had another companion. She carried an instrument—a harp.”

  “What?” April asked vaguely, watching open-mouthed as Neptune pushed herself back into the sky. She seemed dazed, overwhelmed. “Oh yeah, of course. She got out of the canoe, a little ways upstream.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I . . . I told her you were here.”

  “She did not wish to meet with us?”

  April seemed to scan her memory. “She said she wasn’t ready yet.”

  Horace wasn’t sure how to take that—uncertainty, or a threat.

  “The Riven have been chasing us,” April said. “Those Mordin that are coming—they’re after me, I’m sure. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Mr. Meister said. “That is why we are here. We thought you might need help.”

  “We escaped from them before. And an Auditor too—”

  Mrs. Hapsteade sucked in a sharp breath. Mr. Meister grabbed April by the shoulders. “An Auditor? When? Where?” he insisted, his alarm apparent.

  “A few hours ago. Up the river.”

  “What’s an Auditor?” Chloe asked.

  Mr. Meister released April and focused on Horace, his eyes slowly widening in realization. “Horace. Please describe to me the woman you saw in the Fel’Daera.”

  Horace tried not to squirm. Had he screwed up somehow? “I don’t know—long blond hair? She was pale. She had a braid.”

  Gabriel straightened in alarm, gripping the Staff of Obro like a weapon, but Mr. Meister barely reacted. “I see. And she will arrive at midnight?”

  “I didn’t see the actual moment, but . . . yeah, very close to midnight.”

  Mr. Meister ran a nervous hand through his white hair. He and Mrs. Hapsteade came together, bending their heads. Horace, standing nearby, could only just hear them. Mr. Meister began to mutter, as if taking inventory: “The Alvalaithen. The tourminda.”

  “The staff,” Mrs. Hapsteade murmured back. “She won’t be blind in the humour.”

  “And what of the Fel’Daera? She could play havoc with the breach, perhaps, but as long as Horace retains possession—”

  “Isabel,” Mr. Meister whispered, barely audible.

  “Is someone going to explain what’s going on?” said Chloe.

  “A danger approaches,” Mr. Meister announced. “Chloe, you must try to get away. Mrs. Hapsteade will take you, and April too.”

  Chloe crossed her arms. “Thanks, but no.”

  “This is not a request. Gabriel, stay with me. Keep the boy under curtains as best you can, and may yours be light.”

  “And yours,” Gabriel said with a solemn nod. A second later, he and Joshua vanished as the humour swallowed them—a tiny version of it, anyway. From the inside, the humour was a hopeless gray fog, but from the outside it became a fiendish trick of the light, a slippery spot the eyes refused to focus on. Horace had seen the humour through the Fel’Daera, of course, but the sight gave him no comfort now. Whatever an Auditor was, it clearly had them worried.

  “Horace, as for you—” Mr. Meister hesitated, seeming unsure, and then said, “Go with Mrs. Hapsteade.”

  Horace glanced at Chloe. She shook her head. “But I stay,” he protested, pleading with the old man. “I saw myself. So far, everything I saw has come true. I just didn’t know—”

  “You are leaving. Now.”

  Suddenly a bird called out furiously from a treetop a little ways upstream, raucous cries that cracked the night open wide. A crow? April spun toward the sound. She cocked her head. “The Auditor is coming,” she said.

  A split second later, Neptune dropped heavily to the ground and stumbled toward them, breathless. She searched the sky behind and overhead, hands clutched against her chest. “The Mordin have us completely surrounded. There’s more of them now—eleven, altogether.” Eleven! One short of four full hunting packs. And Horace knew who the twelfth was. “Also?” Neptune said, her voice ragged. “There’s an Auditor out there. Very close. She’s already—” She swallowed, grimacing as though she’d bitten into something painfully sour.

  Mr. Meister eyed her through the thick gleam of the oraculum. “So I see,” he said grimly. “Resist her if you can, Keeper. Are you still able to greet our new guests?”

  Neptune nodded. She glanced quickly around, then bent and scooped a single hand beneath a half-buried stone the size of a melon. She lifted it as though it weighed nothing—which, of course, it didn’t. She tucked it under her arm and sprang into the darkness overhead.

  Mr. Meister spun to Mrs. Hapsteade. “Try to get them away. Now.”

  Chloe threw her arms up in frustration. “Would somebody please—” And then her face went blank with shock. She stumbled back a step. Horace saw with dismay that the wings of the Alvalaithen had begun to flutter madly. What was she doing?

  “We are too late,” Mr. Meister breathed.

  Chloe staggered back another step, holding her hands away from herself as if she were covered in something nasty. “I feel her. Where is she?” She stared around wildly, as if searching for someone. Her eyes were hollow, blazing sockets.

  “What’s going on?” Horace cried out.

  “The Auditor is inside,” Mr. Meister intoned gravely.

  Horace’s skin began to prickle. “Inside—what do you mean?”

  And then, like a warrior angel, a tall white figure dropped out of the sky down among them, landing silently in a crouch. It straightened to its full, noble height and looked haughtily around, quickly taking stock of them all.

  Horace stared in awe. Here was the woman he had seen. But this was not a woman. This was not even human. It was a Riven, like none he had ever seen. A hair’s breadth away from being beautiful beyond measure, the creature had round, brown-black eyes and high white cheeks, a perfect, vicious mouth. Just below her platinum hair, a ruby-red stone seemed embedded in the smooth flesh of her forehead. This, clearly, was the Auditor.

  Chloe stepped forward. She stood as tall as she could and glared up at the creature with burning malice. “Get out,” she hissed between gritted teeth.

  The Auditor spread her arms wide, and her monstrous hands too—bone white and hypnotically graceful, mesmerizingly foul, an extra knuckle in each of her fingers. “That’s no way to treat a guest,” she said serenely, her voice like falling sand.

  “You are not a guest, Quaasa,” Mr. Meister said. “You are a parasite.”

  “My dear Taxonomer!” the Auditor said with a faint note of surprise, clearly recognizing him. “How funny that you—of all Tinkers—should accuse me of such a thing. Have you brought out your whole collection today? I can’t remember when I’ve encountered such a feast.”

  “Hey,” Chloe said. “Bleachie. I told you to get out. Get out and stay out, or I swear to god, I—”

  “You are not allowed to tell me what to do, Tinker,” the Auditor said. “Ruuk’ha fo ji Quaasa. All doors are open to me.”

  “Not mine, you sick freak.” Chloe bent down and picked up a dead branch as long as a broom and as thick as a baseball bat. She sidestepped into a tree, vanishing, and emerged two seconds later from the other side of the trunk, already swinging the branch with every bit of weight she could muster. Horace had to leap back to avoid being struck, but it hit the Auditor dead on.

  And passed right through her.

  The unchecked momentum
of her swing carried Chloe to the ground. The Auditor laughed, merry and cruel, and then rose slowly into the air. With a grim terror, Horace understood at last. Somehow, some way, the Auditor was inside the dragonfly now, imitating Chloe’s power. And apparently she was inside Neptune’s tourminda too, using it to defy gravity.

  She was hijacking their Tan’ji, using their own powers against them.

  Horace hunkered low to the ground and scrambled away, headed for the water, trying to distance himself from the Auditor. His first thought—his only thought—was for the Fel’Daera. Maintain possession, that’s what Mr. Meister had said. If the Auditor couldn’t actually see into the box, she couldn’t use it, right? And Horace, of course, would do whatever it took to never let the box go.

  But most of the other Tan’ji here were far more susceptible. The Alvalaithen, of course, and Neptune’s tourminda. Horace had to believe Chloe could handle herself, and Neptune too. But what about the Staff of Obro? Would the Auditor be able to see in the humour just like Gabriel could? Would she be able to control it? He was afraid he knew the answer.

  And then, from far behind—footsteps, rustling and snapping, approaching the river. A moment later, the biting stench of brimstone.

  The Mordin were nearly here.

  Horace reined in his panic and stopped, looking back. The Auditor was floating four feet above the ground, circling the scene. She reached out for a nearby tree and pulled herself clean through it, drifting like a ghost. Chloe was cursing at her. April was backing away, clearly at a loss—what was her power? Was the Auditor tapping into it too?

  Beyond them, across the clearing, Horace could barely detect the slick wrinkle in his vision that indicated the unseen cloud of the humour, where Gabriel and Joshua were hiding. Off to the left, Mr. Meister and Mrs. Hapsteade were turning toward the forest, turning to face the looming shadows that now tilted forward down the dark lanes of the trees. Was he imagining it, or had the Mordin actually altered their skin to look more like trees?

  But even as Horace looked, the humour was thrown wide, swallowing him with a roar. In his panic, he’d forgotten this was coming. He jumped as the sky and the ground and everything in between vanished into a featureless ocean, the entire clearing and riverbank gone into gray. Every sound became a cavernous murmur—cries of alarm and shouts of command that sounded as if they were deep underwater.

  He crouched down again—cowering. He heard the unmistakable high-pitched growl of a Mordin. After that, two muted cracks like distant cannon fire. He’d heard that sound before, he thought, in the tunnels behind the House of Answers after they’d escaped the golem. Horace did his best to ignore the sound now, trusting each Keeper to hold his or her own. He had to trust. The Auditor had erased all their advantages.

  Well, almost all. He caught his breath and reasoned it through, trying to calm his nerves, to ignore the senseless sea of chaos around him.

  The Auditor was a terrible surprise, and he didn’t know who had control of the humour now—Gabriel or the Auditor. But the humour had gone up right on schedule. So far nothing had yet happened that directly contradicted the Fel’Daera’s sightings. Not one thing. Perhaps the willed path was still intact.

  Horace realized he was counting. He’d been counting off the seconds since the humour had swallowed him—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. It was now one minute past midnight. He’d witnessed this future, of course—fifty-nine minutes ago—and he knew what he had to do. What he was going to do. He stumbled as best he could through the horrid nothingness of the humour, assuming he was still headed toward the river. After several steps, he felt spongy ground beneath his feet. He must be near the water. He pulled the Fel’Daera from its pouch and cleared his head, pushing aside his fear and letting his logic come to the surface. If he’d seen truly, Dr. Jericho was due to appear on the opposite riverbank any moment now. The Mordin would hesitate there for a couple of minutes, for a very simple reason.

  Fear. Fear of Horace. Dr. Jericho would be feeling the Fel’Daera from fifty-nine minutes ago. He would know that he was living through a future Horace had already witnessed, a stunning disadvantage. Realizing that Horace was a step ahead of him, and worried that whatever move he made might be the wrong one, the Mordin would be hobbled by his uncertainty.

  And now, with the breach still set at two minutes and two seconds, Horace planned to add to that uncertainty. Swiftly and surely, he opened the box and pointed it in what he hoped was the direction of the river. He couldn’t see through the box in the humour, of course—he couldn’t see it at all—but that wasn’t the point. When Dr. Jericho arrived, he would be feeling two open Fel’Daeras from the past at once! It was a brain-ratttling thought. And when Horace was freed at last from the humour, he would be able to witness the near future unfolding, using his knowledge to do what he could to keep Dr. Jericho at bay, and help his friends.

  “Gabriel,” Horace muttered quietly into the gray of the humour. He could barely feel the word leaving his mouth. He hoped beyond hope that the Warden could hear him, that the Auditor wouldn’t have the power to block his voice.

  No response. Horace’s inner clock, meanwhile, told him that Dr. Jericho should just be arriving across the river.

  “Gabriel,” he said again.

  Another distant boom. And then, blessedly, Gabriel’s powerful voice, quiet but omnipresent. “I’m here,” he said, his voice reverberating remorsefully. “I’m sorry for your blindness—I can’t stop her. She’s blinding you all.”

  “Can she hear us?” Horace asked. The utter blankness around him was starting to make him lightheaded, and he clenched the box harder, still holding it open.

  “I can fend her off for a few moments. She is stretched to her limits, I think. She’s inside the staff, the tourminda, the dragonfly. It can’t be easy for her to wield them all at once.”

  Horace’s inner clock told him Dr. Jericho had just arrived on the far bank of the river. The Mordin was no doubt standing there, aware that the Horace of an hour ago was watching him through the Fel’Daera, seeing the future unfold. “I have a plan,” Horace said. “Well, not so much a plan, but . . .”

  “A path.”

  “Yes. Do you think you can pull the humour away from me? On my mark?”

  A pause. “She’ll fight me,” Gabriel said. “But I’ll try.”

  “You’ll do it,” Horace said meaningfully. He’d seen it happen.

  “Understood,” said Gabriel.

  Suddenly another voice swept through the humour like fine sandpaper. “What’s this?” the Auditor sang. “Secrets? Please share. Whatever is yours is m—”

  Her voice was cut off as abruptly as it had appeared—Gabriel’s doing, no doubt, wrestling her for control of the humour. Horace thanked him silently.

  Horace had every reason to believe that Gabriel would come through. He’d witnessed it.

  But there was a problem.

  The breach. It wasn’t small enough. He’d tried his hardest, but he now understood that two minutes and two seconds was an eternity. The breach was nowhere near narrow enough to be useful. By his reckoning, barely a minute had passed since the Auditor’s arrival, and as he listened to the muffled sounds of the battle raging behind him—Gabriel shouting directions, the heavy footsteps of the Mordin, an occasional whale-sized thpack—he knew this whole thing might already be over two minutes and two seconds from now.

  Horace reached out for the black heart of the silver sun. He caught hold of the breach and bore down on the stream of power that flowed there. At first he couldn’t budge it, but slowly the breach began to shrink. It crept below two minutes. Pain crackled between his eyes. He ignored it, thinking of Chloe, and Gabriel, and April, and all his companions—out there doing battle, out there resisting the Riven. He would do his part too. He gritted his teeth, and the breach approached ninety seconds. He wasn’t sure what the bottom limit was, but he needed to go farther than this.

  No. Not farther.

  Closer.

 
He squeezed harder. The breach plunged below a single minute, Horace’s head full of lightning. It was exhausting work, and even as he strained to close the breach, precious seconds ticked by.

  And then suddenly—terribly, unforgettably—a presence crept into the Fel’Daera like a cloud of murky ink. An invader, a shadow, a poison. It reached out, fully aware and predatory, groping for control of the breach.

  The Auditor. She was inside the box. Horace went numb with shock and then his shock turned to horror as cold lips brushed against his cheek, unseen in the humour. “What have we here, Tinker?” the Auditor whispered coarsely into his ear.

  She was right beside him here in the gray. And of course she was—he’d witnessed it, thinking she was Isabel. How could he have been so stupid? Horace couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. He gripped the box so hard he thought it might shatter in his hands. “Can I play?” the Auditor crooned, and then she pried at the breach, trying to throw it open wide.

  On the instant, Horace unfroze. An anger like he’d never felt before exploded in his chest. A roaring wave of will coursed through him, surging into the Fel’Daera. He clamped down on the breach harder than he thought possible, so hard that the creeping presence of the Auditor was blown back from the breach like smoke on the wind. The breach closed even tighter, becoming microscopically small. The flow of power through the silver sun waned to a trickle.

  At the uppermost limits of his strength, Horace pinned the breach in place with all the authority he had, hammering it home. A massive thrum of energy tolled through the Fel’Daera, and in its wake, the Auditor’s presence evaporated, ejected forcibly from the box. She cried out in astonished rage, her shriek suddenly cut off—whether by Gabriel or by her violent eviction, Horace hardly cared. The Fel’Daera was his again. It would always be his.

  Horace nearly fell to his knees, but managed to stay upright, still holding the open box in front of him, out in the gray void of the humour. He couldn’t see the silver sun, of course, but he didn’t need to. He knew where the breach sat now, though he could scarcely believe it. He’d been trying to get below a minute, and he’d managed that—spectacularly. He felt for it again, just to be sure.