The Last Sun

by K. D. Edwards

  Farther down the street, a cloud rolled toward us. I didn’t understand what it was at first. My mind ran through a Rolodex of images: banks of fog, the debris of explosions. Then it was close enough for me to see the mob of spectres that numbered in the dozens.

  Brand grabbed my wrist and yanked me across the street.

  In front of us, the Tower’s block was a frozen queue of pedestrians—a window washer, a doorman, a woman with a dog.

  They leapt into motion.

  All of them, down to a man, rushed to the edge of the sidewalk. The woman’s dog vanished in a hiss of broken glamor. She put a hand on my shoulder, grasped it, and tossed me behind her with inhuman strength. I tumbled across asphalt and banged into a newspaper dispenser.

  I could feel spells being released from over a hundred sigils. Fake pedestrians—up and down the street—held out their hands and linked together a wall of Bless-fire.

  That was when I saw they’d left Brand on the other side of their makeshift barrier.

  I tried to run past the woman. She hip-checked me. I reeled back. The spectres were nearly on top of Brand. I yelled something that wasn’t even words. The woman moved to block me.

  My Aspect flared to life, spilling from my eyes. It was brighter than I’d ever known it to be, brighter than it’d been in Cubic Dreams when I’d cowed Ciaran. Fire—actual fire—raced along my arms. The woman staggered to one knee. An opening appeared in the wall of Bless-fire.

  I reached past her as the first of the spectres flooded over the opposite curb. Brand’s hand grabbed mine, and I pulled him through the barrier.

  The woman sprang up and rejoined the line, raising the barrier. The spectres drove themselves into it. They had as much of a chance as bugs on a windshield. The Tower’s defense burned them into nothingness.

  Brand and I collapsed to the ground in a tangle. Arms came into my peripheral vision, as Addam helped us to our feet.

  I stared, dumbfounded, at the line of people. A six-year-old surrounded by abandoned chalk sketches. A bodega shopkeeper. Men in business suits. Women with now-empty baby slings against their breasts. Dozens upon dozens of fake-random people, loaded with powerful magic. The scope of the Tower’s secret front-line defense left me staggered. A secret now compromised for me.

  “Come on,” Brand said tiredly. “Your arm is cut up.”

  I let him lead me toward the Pac Bell while giving my arm only a quick look. The flesh had been torn from wrist to elbow. It didn’t even hurt yet.

  “Maybe I do need a nap,” I said.

  Brand unsnapped the button over one of his shirt’s ammo pockets. He pulled out a square of paper and handed it to me. It was a napkin, not a bandage. I unfolded it and saw an oatmeal raisin cookie.

  I bit into it with a grateful sound and focused on the simple act of chewing. Ahead of us, the revolving door unlocked with a kchunk and began to spin, welcoming us inside.

  The myth of liches is ancient.

  They are allegedly the dead souls of powerful spell-casters who’d turned their magic toward a perverted treasure hunt for true immortality.

  Liches are supposed to be the antithesis of existence; the color negative of Nature. They suck the universe into them like a sponge, growing nastier and nastier, more and more powerful. Legend says that if they aren’t cauterized early enough, they leave nearby nations as husks.

  Legend says.

  RURIK

  The marbleized lobby of the Pac Bell was empty except for a man by the far elevator bank.

  “My eyes itch,” I said, rubbing them.

  Brand clamped his hand on my shoulder to keep me in a straight line. “They were on fire.”

  “Ah.” Then: “What?”

  “Your eyeballs,” he said. “Were on fire. When your Aspect took over.”

  I stared at Brand. He gave me a you Atlanteans shrug, which I’m pretty sure he was faking, because my eyeballs had been on fire.

  “This is new?” Addam asked politely.

  “It really is,” I said.

  We reached the man at the elevator, who I now recognized as Lord Tower’s chief of security and Companion, Mayan. Mayan was the tallest person I knew, with long brown hair tied back in braids. All of Lord Tower’s staff were trained killers, right down to the part-time bellhops, and Mayan was the head guard. It was enough to give one pause.

  “Is Lord Tower expecting us?” Addam asked.

  “Lord Saint Nicholas, with all respect, people in a five-block radius are expecting you.”

  Brand bristled—he’d been bristling since the moment he spotted Mayan. They had the complicated relationship of two alpha dogs. Brand said, “That was a great idea, not returning my fucking calls. It’s not like you hired us to do a job or anything.”

  “We’ve been somewhat preoccupied,” Mayan said dryly. He stepped aside and gestured into the elevator car. “Please.”

  He didn’t follow us into the car, but turned a key in a console outside it. The doors slid shut. I experienced a moment of vague confusion at the lurch—vague enough that I didn’t realize what had happened until Addam said, “Are we going down?”

  “Oh,” Brand said. “Motherfucker. We’re going to his war room. Rune, we’re going to the war room—what the hell is after us?”

  I wanted to close my eyes and sit down. “Lord Tower thinks Rurik is a lich.”

  Brand’s face went blank, and Addam’s lips curled into an uncertain smile. “Liches don’t exist.”

  “I think they do, Addam.”

  Brand’s cell phone beeped. He took it out, rolled his eyes, put it back in his pocket. After a few seconds I said, “Anything interesting?”

  “Max sent another text.”

  “Max is sending you texts?”

  “Max is fucking flooding me with texts.”

  “Like what?”

  “I need to do laundry. Is it okay if I try to fix the washer machine? Oops, I didn’t fix the washer machine, where are the towels? I used up all the towels. Is it okay if I eat a Devil Dog? Oops, I ate all the Devil Dogs.”

  “He ate my Devil Dogs?”

  “Go back in time and outrun the monsters without losing your breath,” Brand said. “Then we’ll talk snack food.”

  “I do not know what a Devil Dog is,” Addam said. “Or a Max.”

  “Houseguest.” I peered at the elevator console, which had no helpful flashing numbers on the panel. While putting more pressure on my arm wound, I said, “Are we going right through the center of the earth?”

  The elevator slowed. I’d never actually been in the Tower’s war room, and I hadn’t felt the lack of it. Lord Tower was a man who ordered people’s death from a chaise lounge. Anything that required his presence over an actual battle map was unsettling on a global scale.

  The elevator opened into a narrow, stainless-steel hall. There were six-inch slits on either side of us. It was a type of decoration very popular in medieval castles, and it operated in much the same way as a slaughter ramp at a cattle farm.

  We passed down the hall unchallenged, into another room. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but there were no crackling walls of energy, no dragons flanking the entryway. It was just a simple, hexagonal room with a large tabletop monitor in the center. The fact that I couldn’t even sense defensive wards indicated just how good they were.

  Lord Tower stood by the monitor. He was barefoot and wearing a loose martial gown called a keikogi. His black hair was tied back.

  Standing next to him was—

  “Ciaran?” I said.

  “Sun,” the principality said. He gave me a wide grin.

  “Godfather?” Addam interrupted.

  Lord Tower tapped a button. Flashing red circles vanished from a digital representation of New Atlantis on the monitor. He came over and gave Addam a hug that was, I think, entirely genuine.

  “Thank you for sending someone after me,” Addam said.

  “Addam,” Lord Tower said, the word between a rebuke and affection. “Your mother w
ould have, too, if she’d understood the level of danger you were in.”

  Addam gave him a rueful look. “She would have avenged me. It’s not entirely the same.”

  “Are we supposed to pretend that Rune isn’t bleeding all over the place?” Brand asked. “Because he is.”

  “Apologies,” Lord Tower said, and brushed a hand over a sigil on his bracelet. Healing magic filled the air as he walked over to touch my injury.

  My own healing magic was like sunburn; Lord Tower’s was a cauterizing blowtorch. The moment my skin pulled shut, I yanked my arm away from him, saying, “It’s like you mix your spells with horse cocaine.”

  Brand said, “What the hell is happening?”

  I added, “What did Rurik do? What did he do outside?”

  Lord Tower stared at me. He dropped a hand to the computer terminal and tapped a sequence of keys. The flashing red circles reappeared on the map. From where I was standing—from where anyone was standing—it was impossible to miss the symmetry.

  “A grid,” I said.

  “Yes. The lich tracked you using fixed points of spectral observers. I can’t say with any certainty whether it was searching for you or Addam, but it—”

  “Not a tracking spell,” I said. My voice was suddenly loud. “Not just. It was a tracking spell powered by a death spell. People—those—” I stared at all the red circles. I couldn’t count all of them in a single glance.

  “Yes,” Lord Tower repeated in the same, level voice. “The lich used its own type of death magic, which preys easily on the old and weak. People died. More will. I’m afraid you have no idea how bad this is likely to get, Rune.”

  Brand was studying the expression on my face. His own was stuck between unhappiness and resignation. He said, “Are you sure it’s a lich?”

  “As the only living Arcana to have seen one,” Lord Tower said, “yes, I am sure. It’s a long story, but I’ll tell it, if you’ll indulge me.”

  I absurdly wondered where my coffee was. When had I lost my coffee? I couldn’t even remember the last time I rested. When had . . .

  I pressed my eyes shut, because the circles were still blinking and there were so many of them.

  Lord Tower said, “The Dagger Court has always had concerns in Spain and Portugal. In my younger days, I would visit the older civilizations in Central and South America. By then, of course, many of them were in decline—we’d carried too many germs, both of illness and of ideas, into their cultures.

  “In the mid-1500s, there was an explorer named Francisco de Orellana, of whom I was fond. A remarkable human. He’d been traveling since he was seventeen. In 1541, he joined an Ecuadorian expedition to map the Amazon—or what would become known as the Amazon—in search of the Canelas, the Land of Cinnamon, which they believed lay in the east. I went with him.”

  I wanted to ask question, but I didn’t. The Tower almost never talked about his early years. I kept my mouth shut and learned what I could.

  “Early on, Francisco was charged with gathering horses and left for Guayaquil. I traveled from Quito with the main body of the expedition. We were under Gonzalo Pizarro’s command, and began with four thousand natives and over two hundred Spaniards. Expeditions in those days began as massive things—sprawling tent cities that sprang up around port towns, flowing with Spanish gold. But despite all the bodies and supplies and ships, the minute we entered the Amazon, we were dwarfed. We numbered over four thousand souls, and our insignificance was palpable. Once, I might have told you that a modern comparison was impossible. But now we have the Westlands. That is the closest I can come to describing the sensation of being consumed by nature.

  “The expedition soon ran into trouble, as expeditions are prone to do. By the time Francisco and his horsemen met up with us, we’d barely left the region’s mountains, and over three thousand natives and a hundred Spaniards were dead or had deserted. We were forced to camp, to build returning vessels for the sick. Francisco was charged with a second expedition in the meantime: to go and find the head of the Coca River.”

  Ciaran made an appreciative sound. “I’ve been there. In its own way, the Amazon and its rivers are as powerful as any jungle in Atlantis.”

  Lord Tower nodded. “It is an old place, as you say, with deep and strange magic. And I traveled, as you must imagine, without a sanctum. It took hours of meditation to restore the most meager spell to my sigils.

  “When we found the head of the Coca, the urge to press on—to see what lay around the next bend—was obsessive. When Francisco broached the idea of returning to the main expedition, the crew nearly mutinied. So we pressed on, into the unknown.

  “We were chased by the Omaguas. We found the Negro River, which took us in turn to the Amazon herself. We built a bigger ship to navigate the rougher waters. We were nearly butchered by natives, nearly starved. We saw a full turn of seasons. We spotted pigmies with heads growing from their spines; a race of blond and blue-eyed wizards; men with tails, and backward feet, and staves of living fire.

  “And then, in June of 1542, we entered the lands of the people Francisco would name the Amazons—a race governed by aggressive warrior women.

  “By the time we arrived, the lich had already rotted them at the core.”

  The Tower slid out a drawer, which held a sleek keyboard, and began to type a series of words that flashed across the bottom of the monitor. He put his finger on a glide pad and began to open documents from a file manager.

  “Liches are associated with—” Images flickered across the screen: terrain maps, old papyrus pages, artistic representations. “The Antioch earthquake. Pompeii. Stroggli. But by 1542, liches were a myth, even among the Arcanum. Or—no, perhaps that’s too strong. No, not a myth; they had become an extinct danger. Our records on them were antiques. We knew that liches were created using the inverse of creation magic. They are summonable creatures, and virtually immortal. They feed off death and annihilation; they draw strength from disasters on an epochal scale; and if they are not stopped they become, I promise you, a threat that can bring down empires.”

  He said, “All of these disasters followed the rise of a lich. In each case, one thing is clear to me: the lich, as a species, changes. As humanity ages, so do lich-kind’s appetites. Look. We move from earthquakes and tsunamis, to plagues and pandemics, to . . . To what I saw among the Amazons.”

  The Tower stopped talking. He pressed a button, and the monitor went black. I could see the Tower’s reflection appear beneath him.

  “The lich called itself Yacam. It was accidentally summoned by the village’s wise-women, and, at first, was revered. They fed it. They housed it. They let it grow. But unlike liches of antiquity, when Yacam’s growth reached critical mass, it did not bury the land in rockslides. Instead, it ate their minds. It played with them.

  “I hid my companions from Yacam’s sight, and we watched as it possessed the population in segments. It would possess the men, and make them hunt the women. Then it would possess the women, and make them hunt the men. One hour, Yacam would have every remaining person tear apart the village in search of the eyes of old women; and the next hour, Yacam would have them rioting for the thigh bones of prepubescent boys. There was . . . more. But this is all I am comfortable saying.”

  Still, he lingered over this point. He finally admitted, “Between each routing, between each bout of lunacy and brutality, Yacam would lift the madness from the Amazons’ eyes, so that they could see what they had done. That was worst of all, in its own way.”

  “Bloody hell,” I said. “What did you do?”

  “I retreated. I spent days meditating over sigils without sleep. And then I went back and ended it.”

  Lord Tower turned, to hide his expression, over the keyboard, pressing at keys that produced no visible effect.

  The silence that fell was almost as uncomfortable as what Lord Tower had said. Addam finally broke it. “We need to rise up. The Arcanum must act. It doesn’t matter how it began, or what happened to me. T
his is no time for secrecy, if—”

  “No,” Lord Tower said. He was looking at me as he said it. “We mustn’t do that. Do you understand, Rune?”

  I did. “It does matter who started it. Because that’s how you reverse a summoning. Having the city panic would accomplish nothing. And I bet you’d need to spend time convincing the Arcanum that liches were even real. They’re not all as old as you are.” Lord Tower raised his eyebrows at the last part. I didn’t care. I always got a little pissy when he tested me; he might as well hold up a sign saying “Future Arcana Training in Process.”

  “But if it’s as serious as you say—” Addam tried again.

  Ciaran said, “If the lich senses you’re ready to move against it, it will run. We cannot afford the months it would take to root it out. It grows stronger with each passing day; though, fortunately, it is far from full strength right now. This is why I took my concerns to Lord Tower. He’s in the best position to act quickly, given his past encounter.”

  “Which,” Lord Tower said, giving Ciaran a narrowed stare, “I’d thought was known by very few.” Just as quickly, he held up a hand, dismissing the curiosity. “Either way. Subtlety will serve us best here. I will alert Lady Justice. Given Addam’s role in this, I am assured of her cooperation. Together we will figure out a way to approach the Arcanum. But now, for now, I need Rune to find the summoner.”

  “He—I mean, we . . .” Addam started to say. “There are suspicions that—Rune thinks—it’s possible my sister is involved.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt him, then.”

  “You have an idea where we should go next?” I asked Lord Tower, mainly to change the subject. I’m not sure Addam realized yet what Lord Tower was asking me to do.

  Lord Tower dipped his head in a yes. “I’ve taken the liberty of gathering your houseguest and maid. You may—”

  Brand said, losing control of his building anger, “You want Rune to expose himself to a threat like this? Did you know it’s after Rune now? That it’s fixated on Rune?”

  “As it stands,” Lord Tower said, “I’m counting on it.”