Asunder (Incarnate)

by Jodi Meadows

  Carefully, I strode across the chamber toward an archway, nearly invisible in the strange light. My footfalls made no sound, and not because I was trying for stealth. Sound simply did not carry.

  Moans rippled through the walls.

  I halted and waited, but they didn’t return, so I continued along my original path. I couldn’t let Janan intimidate me just because he was a powerful, incorporeal being older than everyone in Range. Just because—by all accounts—he held dominion over life and death and reincarnation.

  Right. None of that was intimidating.

  There were no stairs at the archway like last time. It just opened into another room, and when I crossed the threshold, the archway vanished, cutting me off from the original chamber.

  The new room was smaller, with archways scattered across the walls that made gentle ripples like curtains. They did nothing to create shadows, but successfully conjured a headache behind my eyes. I pulled out my flashlight, gave it a few twists, and shone it across the room.

  It wasn’t perfect, but at least I could tell how far away things were, judging by the size of the beam.

  I couldn’t trust my perception completely. The last time I’d been here, I’d found stairs that looked as though they went down, but actually went up. Nothing in this place was what it seemed.

  The key’s weight in my pocket suggested I could make things easier for myself while in the temple, but I had no idea how to do that. Too bad Meuric hadn’t left instructions.

  Determined to stop wishing for things I didn’t have, I slipped through another archway and lurched into a sideways room.

  I yelped and dropped my flashlight. It flew left and shattered against the wall—or another floor.

  My feet stayed planted on the floor where I walked, but my weight pulled to my left, as though I stood on a wall. The other floor was shiny and lumpy, bubbling around the shards of my flashlight like an unfortunate batch of cheese soup I’d once made. All the cheese had coagulated and the milk scorched; the house had smelled terrible for hours.

  In the temple, there were no scents, save for what outsiders brought in.

  Awkwardly, I sidled through the nearest archway and staggered as gravity righted itself underneath me. My stomach flipped, and I swallowed repeatedly until I was sure I wouldn’t throw up.

  The room was small, only the size of my washroom. An empty white box with no archways, not even the one I’d come through. Only the occasional groan and gurgle shivered through the tiny room.

  Suddenly, the air grew sharp and crushing. The heartbeat pulsed louder until it rattled in my ears, and my chest ached with the fight to breathe. It seemed all the air was being sucked away.

  “Now what, Janan?” I could barely speak.

  No answer.

  I withdrew the door device and jabbed at random symbols. The silver box swirled in my fading sight until I wasn’t sure I was actually pressing buttons, just hitting and jamming my fingers. I felt right side up and upside down, and on both of my sides. All at once. Acid crept into my throat.

  My body ached as though I were being ripped apart, and my lungs burned with all the air pushing and sucking and swirling around. Vision grayed, and the only thing I could hear was the incessant weeping and moaning.

  Janan’s hollow whisper silenced everything. “That is not for you.” It came from everywhere and nowhere. A place on the nearest wall rippled as though something moved beneath the stone, or inside it. I tried not to look because it made my vision worse, but it was impossible to ignore.

  “Let me go.” I gasped at the thinning air. “I’ll keep pushing buttons.”

  Pressure gathered around the lump inside the wall. For a moment, it looked human-shaped, though its proportions were wrong. Limbs too long, waist too narrow, head too wide.

  Then the shape scattered in all directions, ripples smoothing into the glowing stone. A black archway shimmered where the shape had been, and noise returned in waves.

  Whispering.

  Moaning.

  Weeping.

  The air remained stifling, but I could breathe. My vision returned to normal as I replaced the key in my pocket and staggered toward the opening. Losing the key would surely end with my being trapped forever.

  I’d gone through a black archway before. It had been as quick as stepping into another room, like any other archway, though they looked frightening.

  This time, I stepped into ink and starless night. The blackness coated my skin like oil and made breath…what I imagined it would be like to breathe liquid and not die. It sloshed through my nose and windpipe, and I felt ever nearer to drowning.

  Three more steps and I still wasn’t through. I stretched out my arms to feel the walls, but there weren’t any. The archway either led into an empty black room, or I hadn’t made it through before the portal vanished.

  That meant I was trapped in the walls. With Janan.

  Groans and whines pursued me like sylph. There was no telltale heat or strange singing, only the heartbeat and pressure, and what might have been my hair—or someone’s fingernails—brushing my arms.

  I ran.

  The wailing grew all around, tangible, and Janan whispered right by my ear, “You wanted somewhere to go. Now you have everywhere.”

  I pushed my legs harder, away from his voice, but the fingernails scraping my skin never ceased. If I stopped, he’d hurt me worse. He didn’t have to say it.

  When I slowed enough to wrestle out my SED, hoping for some kind of illumination, the onyx air only swallowed the light. If anything, the darkness closed in further, though I couldn’t fathom how complete blackness could become even more perfect.

  Hours passed. Or longer. It was impossible to measure time, if time even mattered in here, but my hips and legs ached and I had the vague sensation that I should be hungry or thirsty.

  And then I was, because I knew I should be. I slowed to grip my stomach. I was starving, though Meuric had said before that I wouldn’t need to eat or drink in here.

  “I am hungry, too,” Janan murmured, “and I am sure you are delicious.”

  My hiccups fell flat on the liquid air. I wished Sam were here. I wished we didn’t know about Janan. I wished we were sitting at the piano playing a duet, our legs pressed together because neither of us were thinking about music, not really. I wished it all so hard that for a moment I thought I was there, but then a scream cut through the blackness, and I remembered the temple and running and Janan.

  “No tears.” Not Janan. Not a real voice, either, but a thought that wasn’t mine. “The Devourer is incorporeal. He has never been able to touch the other one.”

  My feet caught on themselves and I stumbled, dropped, and hit the floor. Stabbing pains raced up my palms and knees as I searched the darkness for the non-voice. If it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Janan, perhaps it was one of the weepers.

  I struggled to catch my breath, then fumbled through my coat for the bottle of water and drank half of it. The sensation of claws on skin never faded, but the non-voice was right. The feeling was just in my mind, and stopped when I rubbed my palms over my face and neck and hands.

  Janan’s words, and the weeper’s—they meant something, but my head was too fuzzy to let me think clearly. The darkness remained overpowering.

  Maybe I was blind. No matter how I forced my eyes open wider, I never caught light. I tried my SED again. A white glow pierced the dark, but illuminated only blackness when I held the screen to the floor. And blackness all around.

  Trembling, I tried to send a message to Sam, but the SED beeped in error. I put it away and pushed myself to my feet. I couldn’t let the screaming get to me, or the crying, or the fingernails raking across my skin. They weren’t real.

  They weren’t.

  Determined not to let Janan stop me, I stepped forward, and the whole world changed.

  16

  TRUTH

  BRIGHT WHITE SURROUNDED ME.

  I crumpled to the floor, clutching my face and stinging
eyes as pressure drained and the weeping no longer followed. Now just the hiss and scrape of cloth, ragged breathing that wasn’t mine, and a reek like copper and ammonia so strong it made my head spin.

  I wasn’t alone.

  “What are you doing here?”

  The voice was broken, garbled and raspy at the same time, and came from across what appeared to be the bottom of a large hole, though a stairway spiraled up.

  I wiped tears from my eyes and focused on the dark lump of bones and rags. Blood stained his face and hands, and a rotted wound hunched like a spider where I’d stabbed his eye out. But the other seemed to work, and it watched me.

  “Meuric.”

  “Nosoul.”

  He couldn’t be alive. It wasn’t possible. I’d shoved him under the upside-down pit. The fall must have shattered every bone in his body. It had been months. And still.

  I felt only a little better knowing I hadn’t actually killed him. And then I felt much worse, imagining the pain he must have been in all this time, trapped at the bottom of a pit with stairs offering a way out—except his bones were splintered and he couldn’t move from this spot.

  Blood and other fluids seeped around his filthy clothes, but the rest of the floor was clean. No, he definitely hadn’t moved.

  “You tried to kill me,” he gasped.

  “After you tried to trap me in here so you could tell everyone I was dead.”

  Dried blood cracked and flaked when he smiled. Black rot filled the creases between his teeth. “And now I’m trapped. Does that make you feel better?”

  “No.” His stench made my head spin. I squatted on the floor and leaned against the wall for balance. It didn’t help the dizziness, but my back and hips creaked with relief.

  The pit was ten paces across. A fair size. When I looked up, the opening was invisible with the everywhere-light. It must have been deep enough to shatter all his bones, and shallow enough so he wouldn’t die. How cruel of Janan to arrange that.

  “Why aren’t you dead?”

  He laughed, like bubbles rising from the mud pits around Heart. Then wheezing and coughing, then groaning and silence.

  I almost wanted to help him, but couldn’t bring myself to go near him while he remained slumped, breath whistling as though there were holes in his lungs or throat. I couldn’t get over the creeping feeling that, if I did go over, his body would miraculously mend and he’d grab me.

  That thought coiling in my gut, I pressed my spine to the wall and sat properly, waiting for him to regain the strength to speak. How long had it been for him? As long as it had been on the outside?

  “Janan won’t let me die.” His good eye was trained on me. “Do you have the key?”

  I pressed my hands to my knees. I didn’t want to slip and reveal the key’s location.

  “I need it,” he whispered, managing to lift one arm toward me. “I need it to live after Soul Night. You have to give it back.”

  “What happens on Soul Night?” I’d come here for answers, after all, though I hadn’t expected Meuric to provide them.

  He wheezed laughter. “You won’t stop it.”

  I stood, trying to make myself formidable. “What happens?”

  “Give me the key.” His glare followed me as I marched toward him. “Give, and I’ll tell you.”

  Not a chance. He’d said he needed it to live after Soul Night, so what happened to everyone without a key?

  I hovered just out of arm’s reach, ready to run for the stairs if he so much as shifted his weight. “You’ve been down here for months,” I muttered. “You must be very hungry. And thirsty. When was the last time you had anything to drink?”

  His eye widened, and he groaned.

  I felt sick taunting him like this, but I knelt so I was level with him. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll give you the rest of my water.”

  His thirst must be horrible, even if he hadn’t been thinking about it before. Janan couldn’t fix everything…as evidenced by Meuric’s broken body.

  “So thirsty.” The eye closed. The other remained a rotted hole, impossible not to look at; its reek rode the steady heartbeat of the temple. There were no screams currently, just muffled whimpering, as though they were waiting to find out what I’d do.

  I checked to make sure the stairs were still an option. “If you tell me what’s going to happen, I’ll give you water.”

  “Soul Night.”

  The spring equinox of the Year of Souls. “Yes, I know that’s when it happens.”

  He nodded. It was frightening how ancient he looked now, though this body was only fifteen years old. Months of dehydration and starvation, incredible physical damage…If he’d succeeded in trapping me in here before Templedark, this could have been me.

  “I didn’t think it would work.” His once-high voice sounded like gravel now. “His plan seemed too fantastic, but if anyone could succeed, it would be Janan, so I convinced everyone to let him try. And then he did it. He really did it.”

  “What did he do?” I wanted to shake him and force him to speak clearly. Instead, I stayed on one knee, ready to bolt.

  “He made himself greater. He made people like phoenixes.” Meuric held out his hand again. “Water.”

  “That’s not an answer.” Phoenixes were another dominant species, like centaurs or trolls, but they appeared to reincarnate as people did.

  They were rare—reports said there were perhaps a dozen in the entire world—but once someone had observed a phoenix in the jungles on a southern continent. It built a nest of dry brush, then settled down as though to lay an egg. Instead, it exploded into a rain of sparks and died.

  The explorer had stayed at the pyre for hours, trying to figure out why the creature had done that. And then sunlight broke through the jungle canopy and shone on the ashes, dazzling him. When his vision cleared, a tiny phoenix chirped. It looked at him with the same ancient expression the other had worn, and then it flew off, trailing sparks and ash.

  “It is an answer.” Meuric’s garbled voice grew panicked. “Water.”

  “No. What is Janan trying to do?”

  “What has he already done, you mean.” His good eye squeezed shut. “You’re so stupid. It’s already done. Soul Night is inevitable now. He will rise.”

  “Like a phoenix?”

  “No. No, nothing like that. Come Soul Night, you won’t care about phoenixes. No one will. Birth is so painful.”

  Okay. Something terrible would happen. We’d gone over that. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what would happen. Or maybe he was too crazy to express how awful it would be.

  I forced myself to meet his good eye, though he seemed to have trouble focusing. “When I came here before, I found books. But I don’t know who wrote them, and I can’t read the symbols.”

  “No one wrote them. They were simply written.” He groaned and dropped his hand. “Give me water. You promised.”

  “Tell me how to read the books.”

  “Same way you’d read anything. Learn the language.” Oil-dark fluid seeped from his ruined eye, down the crevices of his face, and into cracked lips. He swallowed it.

  “What’s the connection between sylph and Janan?”

  “Janan is nothing like sylph!”

  “Don’t lie to me. I know there’s a connection.” The poison wouldn’t have worked on both of them otherwise.

  “He is greater than them. He has always been greater, and they deserve to be cursed.”

  Cursed? “What are sylph?”

  “They are betrayers!”

  “Did they betray Janan? Did he curse them?” Maybe all their attacks on Heart were about revenge. But why did they seem to like me?

  “Oh, they betrayed Janan,” Meuric said. “But he didn’t have to curse them. I don’t know who did, but if I had to guess, I’d guess a phoenix did it.”

  A phoenix. No, that seemed too incredible.

  “Give me water!” Meuric’s body tipped toward me.

  I stood and stepped back
ward in one motion. “You’re not getting anything until you give me answers. Real answers.”

  “There are no real answers.”

  “Look, Meuric.” Ugh, wrong thing to say, because he grinned widely.

  I fought hard not to gag. Meuric’s odor of ammonia and bile made my headache increase. Soon my body would stop breathing out of self-defense.

  I tried again. “Here.” I pulled the bottle of water from my coat. “Half-full.” I sloshed it. “I’ll give you this water, but you have to answer questions for me.”

  “What questions?”

  I put the water away and found my notebook, wishing I had the list I’d given to Cris. Still, I remembered lots of the symbols, and I flipped to a blank page and began drawing. “See this mark? What does it mean?” I showed him the symbol that looked like a crescendo.

  “Less.”

  “What?”

  “It means less than. Math. Or it could mean ‘speak louder.’ I don’t know. Context. You must tell me more for me to tell you anything. Honestly, I can’t believe how stupid you are. Do you think I’m a data console, able to call up information when you press the correct buttons? Or a vision pool? Oh, I remember those. We used to think the hot springs would give us visions if we stood there and inhaled the fumes long enough. And they did give us visions! But not of the future or past or anything useful. Headaches. Like you’re giving me now.”

  I blinked and glanced at the page, desperately hoping it wasn’t a math symbol and that all the books weren’t written entirely in mathematical equations.

  “Okay, let’s try another. Maybe it will be less ambiguous.” I offered a symbol that looked like an up arrow, but with four points along the shaft rather than one at the top.

  “Hmm. Another.”

  The next was a circle with a dot in its center.

  “Still wanting answers from those books.” Meuric shook his head, as though disappointed but not surprised.