by Kenyon, Nate
And the humans had led them right to the nephalem stronghold, as Balzael had suspected. The Guardian had decided that there could be a use for the stronghold, if they altered their plans. Although it was shielded from all but mortals for now, the Guardian was already working on that particular problem. It would not be long before the stronghold fell.
The rest had been easy. His spies had known exactly where Tyrael’s team would be and when, and an ambush should have guaranteed a slaughter. Not that the Sicarai should have had any trouble with such a small group regardless of the circumstances. But Balzael preferred to ensure victory ahead of time, and he expected a detailed report of the carnage his warrior would wreak.
Almost on cue, movement came from the shadows beyond his private balcony. A moment later, the Sicarai stepped forth. His sword was at his side; one edge held a dull haze of blood.
Balzael’s pride swelled in his apprentice. He had trained the destroyer well, given him every advantage in the art of battle. He thought again, as he had before: the Sicarai was the perfect weapon.
But the destroyer’s words changed everything.
“He has escaped, my lord. We waited for him and his companions at the bog, as you instructed, but they entered the lair before they could be taken.”
Balzael’s thoughts of victory turned to rage in an instant. His urge to run the Sicarai through with his own weapon was stilled by curiosity. How had they beaten his best soldier a second time?
His aura pulsed once and then settled. “Tell me,” he said, aware of the dangerous growl in his voice.
“I wounded him badly. His mortal blood ran thick. But a human used an object infused with magic against me, draining my strength long enough for them to get to the catacombs.”
“What object?”
“I do not know. But it repelled my killing blow with a force I did not expect.” The Sicarai hesitated, a new sound present in his voice. Could it have been uncertainty? Impossible. “I was held still for a time by invisible hands, and when I was able to break free, they were gone. We pursued the mortals down the tunnel but could not find them again.”
“They have gone into the city,” Balzael said. “The lost stronghold of the nephalem shields them from you.” He contained his anger, channeled it in a more fruitful direction. They were trapped in there and would have to emerge sooner or later. He knew about the second entrance to the catacombs, but his spies were stationed there and in the bog.
Whatever Tyrael had planned, it would fail. Of that, he was sure . . .
“There is more, my lord. Your soldiers have been monitoring their conversations in secret, and they have learned much through their connection to the man Jacob.”
“What have you learned, Sicarai? Tell me, or lose your miserable life.”
The Sicarai’s next words stopped him short. “We have reason to believe he is coming here, to the Heavens,” the destroyer said. “They plan to steal the stone out from underneath you.”
The way to the Pools of Wisdom was silent and empty. Balzael slipped from the shadows of the columned entrance, rage still coursing through him. How could he have been so blind? He had expected Tyrael to make a move on the Heavens, just not so soon—and he had thought the Sicarai would have slaughtered the entire team before then.
Certain he was alone, he hurried across the crushed stone of the path toward the Fount, aware of the hole where Chalad’ar had been, glaring at him like an eyeless socket. He did not have much time; Imperius and the other archangels would be expecting him at the Ascension. But an emergency meeting with the Guardian was necessary.
The Heavens were not the same since the Prime Evil’s attack—that was an irrefutable fact—but the changes had really begun much earlier than that. The Pools of Wisdom were a casualty of them. A once warm, peaceful realm had turned cold and dead.
But there was life here—one just had to know how to awaken it.
At the Fount, he paused, staring into the dry basin. The light was sharper in the Pools of Wisdom, illuminating everything in stark terms, turning the landscape into black and white. He waited patiently for a long moment, then raised his arms above the basin and spoke. The dead air nearly swallowed his voice completely. Nothing happened at first, and then a gurgling sound emerged from below, growing louder. A swirling, flickering light began to fill the basin from the bottom up, until it was brimming with colors woven in a web of countless lines, undulating like liquid in motion.
A shudder ran over Balzael as he stared at the mesmerizing pattern, a feeling of dread mixed with anticipation. He had done this before, and it was always the same: it was like the moment he was born at the Arch, a sense of expanding possibilities along with confusion and a pulsing energy that raced through him until he felt invincible. Wisdom was all about understanding the connections that others did not. There was a web underlying everything, a world beneath his own that must be carefully guarded. Knowledge was power, after all, and this sort of power could be very dangerous indeed.
A shape appeared in the flickering light.
At first, there was nothing more than a blob of darkness within the threads, as if a knot had formed at their center. But the shape grew until it nearly filled the basin in front of Balzael. Unlike the constantly moving threads, this was motionless, and it emanated a chilling darkness that brought shadows drifting across the Fount: a hooded figure, its face a black, empty hole.
The Guardian.
A sound like a slow hiss came forth.
“He is coming here, my lord,” Balzael said. His eagerness was too obvious, and it shamed him. But he could not help himself. “The Sicarai and our scouts in Sanctuary have confirmed it—”
“Yes,” the Guardian said.
“Of course,” Balzael said, suddenly uncertain. Had he made some kind of terrible mistake? The Guardian did not speak plainly, and his strange tendencies made him even harder to read. “Tyrael is growing desperate. We will cut him down, as soon as he shows his mortal face—”
“Our plans have changed.”
The Guardian did not speak for some time. Balzael waited, knowing well enough that this was his way, and he would continue when he was ready. Eventually, the Guardian shifted, and the slow hiss came again. “Tyrael’s efforts provide us with an opportunity.”
“I—I do not understand.”
“The stone is working too slowly,” the Guardian said. “The people of Sanctuary are ripe for an attack. Tyrael’s Horadrim must be allowed to take the stone. See what we shall reap.”
The Guardian’s hooded face rippled and fell away, and Balzael fell inward, tumbling end-over-end into the web of nightmares and horrorscapes. He saw Tyrael and the Horadrim take the stone from the Heavens, and then it was taken from them just as quickly; he was immersed in fear, drenched in blood, awash in flames; the screams of humankind rose up around him like a symphony, and the Guardian was conducting it with skilled hands, plucking flesh and drumming bone. Sanctuary crackled and crumbled upon itself, until all that was left was the dead silence of empty space.
Balzael floated inside for a while, understanding what must come to be. Connecting the threads, one at a time, with the help of the Guardian. When he came back, the Pools of Wisdom were once again silent. The Fount had gone dead, all traces of the Guardian vanished. But he had shown Balzael the end of Sanctuary, and other things, and the way to victory was clear in his mind. Although Tyrael had gotten the better of him and his Sicarai until now, all was not lost. Far from it; he knew exactly what he needed to do to salvage the situation.
But it would require a carefully orchestrated series of events, and time was very short indeed.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The High Heavens
Jacob was the first to step through the portal.
He thought he had steeled himself for what was to come, had imagined every possible reaction. But what he felt first surprised him: a physical ache and a thrumming within his very bones like the low, violent rumble of a waterfall somewhere nearby.
He realized he had squeezed his eyes shut against the world shaking itself to pieces beneath his feet. That put him off balance, but it was nothing compared with what he saw when he opened his eyes and looked around.
Jacob now stood on the edge of a vast plain made of light and sound. Light seared his eyes, sparkled like reflections off cut glass. But this light was not warm and friendly. The atmosphere was arid, the air dead and ice-cold. He thought the Wastelands would have prepared him, but no. His ears felt filled with cotton, and his mouth went suddenly dry. Running his tongue across his lips, he could feel every crack. Sweat ran down his neck, made his back crawl. When he blinked, he felt a sandpaper-like grit under his eyelids.
Jacob watched through a watery haze as the others stepped through the portal. They recoiled against the intensity of the light before opening their eyes enough to peer around them. He tried to speak and could not. Everything was larger and more overwhelming than it seemed, each sensation enhanced tenfold until he felt the unbearable weight of it bearing down.
That was when the whispers began.
At first, he thought it was the hiss of something being dragged across rock or perhaps a reptile slithering nearby. He squinted, trying to make out more of his surroundings. Pathways filled with crushed stone wound through the flat plain and led from one jumble to another. Dry stream beds, perhaps. Liquid had run here some time ago, but it was long gone now.
The hissing came again. He looked in all directions, searching for the source, but could not pinpoint it. It began to sound like words in a tongue he did not recognize. The whispers, he thought, might have been trickles of sand or ground crystal sliding down dry channels. They wormed into his brain, began working on him in ways that made him feel as if he was losing control.
Emotions bubbled up within him: fear and regret, sorrow and loss. The sounds of voices receded from him, and the light began to coalesce into bright flares that seemed to time themselves with each beat of his heart.
Some kind of reflective surface winked nearby. He stepped closer, drawn to it by something he could not place, a need for answers. The surface was a pool of quicksilver surrounded by polished marble. A thrill ran through him. The whispers around him grew again: voices of people from his past, those long dead and gone and haunting him. He felt their losses like little jabbing wounds opening him up and bleeding him out, red streams soaked up by the hungry stone.
When he looked into the reflective surface, death stared back.
His face was a mass of purple and gray gristle and bone. His eyes were gone, replaced by empty holes. His jaw hung loosely from strands of sinew like leather.
Recoiling from the horror, he looked around him and saw skulls everywhere, white bone gleaming, dead sockets of shadow staring lifelessly, jaws half-buried in crystal sands. The remains of friends and loved ones reduced to nothing but cold, empty shells.
Not this . . .
Shanar came to him through frigid air, her lithe form like a mirage. She spoke gibberish as though from a muffled distance, took his face with both hands, drew close.
The touch of her lips was electric, jarring. He was yanked back through himself to this single point, everything else falling away. When it was finally over and she broke free, he was able to find his feet again under him, and this strange new world swam back into focus.
“Don’t get lost,” she whispered, holding his gaze for a moment, her face inches away. “The resonance can draw you away from yourself.”
Jacob nodded, tried to find his voice. Shanar dropped her hands from his face, kept her eyes on him for another moment. “I’m alive,” he said. His lips still burned from her kiss. His throat felt as if he had swallowed sand. But she had done something to him, brought him back to his center of gravity. The light was bearable now, the whispers receding. The ground beneath his feet had stilled.
They stood in a vast room filled with winding beds of crushed, glittering crystal that twisted and turned and dropped like waterfalls into round basins. What he had thought were skulls were actually round chunks of marble worn down over centuries. Magnificent, intricately carved columns rose to support an arched ceiling far above them. The air in here was very still, and Jacob had the sense that it had been this way for some time. A dead and abandoned place.
A fountain nearby had been carved of some kind of material Jacob couldn’t place. What a breathtaking scene this must have been at one time, sparkling liquid spraying up through the fountain’s throat. Yet it, too, was long dead, its basins dry and empty. A depression in the cut stone made it seem as if an object had once lived there, inserted like a key into a lock, but it was gone now.
He turned back to the others. Gynvir stood staring at a point somewhere beyond him, tears shining on her face. Her gaze flicked to him for a moment, held his own; then she looked away. He did not know if she had peered into the quicksilver mirror, could not read her expression. Had it been the kiss, or had she seen her own death in the reflection?
Shanar spoke softly to Gynvir as the others gathered, gaining their footing. Tyrael was the last through the portal. He was pale, his armor slashed, pain playing across his normally stoic features. What could they possibly accomplish without his strength? Jacob felt infinitesimally small against a vast world beyond these dead walls, facing an army of angels that could crush them in an instant.
It is time for you to lead the others.
It was almost as if Tyrael had spoken inside his head. Fresh doubt crawled inside Jacob.
He was not ready, not yet.
Not for this.
Tyrael saw the uncertainty on Jacob’s face. There would be more to come; the Pools of Wisdom were overwhelming enough, but they were nothing compared with the breathtaking beauty of the Gardens of Hope, the majesty of the Courts of Justice, or the sheer power and scope of the Halls of Valor. There were also dark sides to each of these Aspects. The darkness would come whether Tyrael liked it or not, and that would be the true test of their strength.
Exhaustion had seeped deep into Tyrael’s bones. Every part of his body ached. The wound across his chest throbbed dully. His knees sent sharp stabs up his legs and through his back. Every step was an ordeal, every breath an acute remembrance of his mortality. He felt disconnected from his brothers and sisters, alone in a world that had rejected him in all his forms, immortal and mortal, light and flesh. He wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep, and if he could not sleep, he wanted to consult the chalice. Wisdom, insight, answers . .
The monk touched his arm. He alone seemed nearly unmoved by the spectacle of their surroundings. “We should move quickly,” Mikulov said. The others were watching. Tyrael realized his hand had gone to the hidden pocket inside his armor; without a conscious thought, he had been about to draw out Chalad’ar right in front of them all.
He dropped his hand. The chalice was like a bottomless hole that he tumbled down, losing himself while the Heavens burned. And yet he still wanted it, craved what it brought him: darkness and oblivion.
“Now is the moment when we prove our worth,” he said to the others. “If I am right, we have come when the Luminarei are attending the Ascension. Shanar’s magic will cloak us, and we will move as quickly as we dare and blend in. We must trust that they will not suspect treachery in their own realm. Jacob, lead us to the Gardens of Hope and, from there, through the Courts of Justice. There will be very few angels there, only those who have been left to stand guard. The archangels will be with Imperius in the Halls of Valor preparing to join the ceremony, and that shall give us an advantage as long as we avoid close scrutiny. If all goes well, we will be in the Council chamber before they realize anything is wrong.”
Jacob nodded. He looked pale, his hair damp against his forehead. There were no answers held in the man’s gaze, no hint of what inner strength he might have found. Tyrael turned to the wizard. It was time for her to test every ounce of her abilities; everything now depended on her unique skills.
Shanar took a deep breath, as if steadying
herself. When she raised her arms, the energy that sprang from her was breathtaking; it met the light of the Heavens, challenged and absorbed it, encasing them in a bubble of crackling heat, magic that flowed from deep within her and through her fingers with bursts of brilliant color.
Commander Nahr’s Luminarei armor began to glow, the Horadrim’s mortal features masked by glorious light. Their forms grew larger, their bearing more magnificent, the resonance of angels rising from them until their song matched the majesty of the Heavens.
And when she was done, the bubble receding, they all had wings.
Chapter Thirty
The Guard
The Horadrim emerged from the Pools of Wisdom in single file, Jacob in the lead. Outside the pools, the courtyard was empty. The stone boulevard, ten times as wide as any road Jacob had ever seen, was polished to a high shine. It was lined with living structures, trees made of light, and their boughs swayed without any hint of wind. Musical notes came from the movements of the delicate branches, and the sound brought him close to tears. Song of the Arch, Tyrael had called it. It was haunting.
Beyond the tallest branches rose the majestic, soaring spires of the Silver City, towering so high they made him dizzy. It was dreamlike, and yet every detail was wrought with a sharpness that spoke of another level of reality, as if Jacob’s senses had increased tenfold. His legs began to tremble, and he forced himself to be still, to breathe, to clear his mind of everything other than putting one foot in front of the other.
Don’t get lost. The resonance can draw you away from yourself. Shanar’s kiss still lingered on his lips, and the ghost of her touch helped him remember.
He glanced back once, and Shanar’s talent amazed him: he saw a troop of Luminarei marching in formation, wings undulating and angelic songs resonating wondrously, their bodies appearing to be made of pure light under golden armor and hooded features. Tyrael had made it clear that as good as Shanar could be, the illusion might fool the angels at a distance but would never work up close. The plan hinged on them making it to the Council chamber without interacting directly with anyone. Still, it was remarkable to see. No human had ever been able to mimic an angel’s song; no human had ever even understood it.