Until the ax bit into the wall above my head, and I started screaming.
They dragged me out once the hole was big enough, the jagged, wooden teeth of the demolished wall ripping deep furrows into my flesh. They threw me onto the floor. One sat on my back and held my arms. Another ground my face into the floorboards, keeping my head immobile.
The third parted my head from my thin shoulders.
“Two,” it said.
“Wait—”
I was very small, and didn’t understand anything. I hadn’t eaten in a long time. The fever wasn’t getting any better. Somehow, I’d made it to the city with the others. They said there would be food, but no one had given us any food.
One girl sat me in a doorway and said she would come back. She told me to stay where I was. I stayed there all day, and the fever climbed higher. I watched people pass by. I called out to a few, but all of them ignored me. Every single one.
The girl never came back.
As the sun set, the fever that I’d carried all the way from Elam finally drove me down. I fell from where I was sitting in the dirty, piss-reeking doorway and sprawled out into the narrow street. The last thing I remembered, before I lost consciousness and then my life, was a man kicking my arm out of his way. His shoe was brown, the toe scuffed, the copper buckle tarnished.
“Three,” it said, and I tore my head away from its grasp.
“Enough!” I shouted and scrambled back, panting.
This thing in front of me. It was a conglomeration of the souls of murdered children. Of the street rats that had been slain or allowed to die in the Purge. And it wanted justice. Another unintended consequence of the Telemarch’s attempt to revive magic?
“How many?” I finally managed. “How many are you?”
It shrugged. Shook its head slightly. Not that it didn’t know; rather, the question didn’t really matter. “All.”
“And you’re going to kill everyone in the city.”
It just stared at me, sorrowful eyes and glistening flesh.
A horrible sort of realization was born in me. “In a couple of days, Mount Tarvus really is going to explode, isn’t it? Everything will be destroyed.”
“Yes.”
“Is that your doing?”
“No.”
“Then what is this all about? What justice is it you’re going to lay on this city if it’s already doomed?”
It nodded. “Now, you will understand.” It leaned forward, slowly, never taking its eyes from mine. Put a careful, bloody hand on my knee. For the first time, some emotion crept into its voice. It wasn’t happiness.
“You left. You escaped. Once you were gone, they stopped hunting us.
“You’re saying the Purge stopped once I left Bellarius?” I knew it had ended soon after I’d escaped to Lucernis but not when exactly. It wasn’t something they put notices up about. The implication of what it—they—had just said hit me.
“You think the Purge was meant to kill me?”
“When you left, it stopped.”
“That’s what people call coincidence, for Kerf’s sake.” But I didn’t believe in coincidence. I believed in cause and effect.
“It wanted you. It took us. Now, you will witness. And then, you will join us.”
It exploded into hundreds of sickly, green corpselights. They rose into the air, higher, higher, like Chagan fireworks, until they were almost indistinguishable from the mundane stars above. Then, they began to fall.
They did not make it back to the ground. It was as if they met some invisible barrier and smeared themselves across it. Met or made it. Slowly, the shape of the barrier became plain.
Bellarius was now trapped under a dome of slowly fading corpselight from the peak of Mount Tarvus to the end of the longest wharf. Above the Citadel, unfading, another Hardic rune burned in cold corpse fire.
Guilt.
I got up, picked up my other knife, absently stuck it back in its new sheath, and started walking. I was going to check. Of course I was going to check. But I knew with complete certainty no living person would be leaving Bellarius before it exploded.
Chapter Fifteen
The souls of murdered gutter children had passed judgment on an entire city and sentenced it to death. And then—
And then, they’d decided, I was going to join them in whatever sort of conglomerated afterlife or post-life had become their fate.
I had been on the verge of leaving Bellarius to its fate, and try as I might, I couldn’t muster up much sympathy for the city even though I knew it was deeply, heinously wrong. There was no excuse for murdering tens of thousands, the vast majority of them having had nothing to do with the Purge.
But to my knowledge, no one had offered shelter to the street rats before and certainly not during the Purge. No one had hidden them—us—from the death squads. No one had fed or clothed us. Not one person. I didn’t even remember a single kind word. Just curses, kicks, thrown stones, and backhanded slaps when I’d gotten too close to any upstanding citizen and been noticed.
I had been treated exactly like vermin. A rat, a cockroach. We all had. Every hand, and I do mean every hand, had been turned against us.
How was it possible that an entire city would treat children in such a fashion?
That deep, dark sea of rage stirred within me at the thought. Storm winds had started to blow in my soul.
How would it be possible for those murdered shades to feel anything approaching compassion, mercy, or forgiveness? In a frighteningly real way, Bellarius had planted the seeds of its own death with every murdered street kid. I understood that like few could. I have a marrow-deep repulsion toward the idea of fate, but even I couldn’t help but feel what was happening to the City of the Mount was the next best thing to destiny, to inevitability. And if I couldn’t bring myself to call it justice, I still could not convince myself it was completely unjust. Not from the dead’s perspective anyway.
I would have had more sympathy for the dead, however, if I wasn’t as trapped and doomed as everyone else.
I walked out to the end of Aloc Pier, the longest of the docks wharfside, ignoring the drunk, slurred questions of the single guard stationed there. I could still see, faintly, the corpselight prison wall shimmering just an arm’s length away off the edge of the pier. I reached out and tried to put my hand through it. I felt nothing, but my hand would not break that almost invisible barrier no matter how hard I pushed.
“Hey! What’re you doin’?” The drunk guard behind me. He stumbled up next to me, squinting first at me then at my hand.
“What’n hells is that?” he said and reach out to touch the barrier.
“Maybe you shouldn’t—” I said but too late.
As soon as his hand met the corpselight, he froze. His eyes grew wide. The corpselight crawled up his arm in a heartbeat then wrapped around his head. He never screamed. It released him an instant later, dissipating, and he fell to the salt-stained boards of the pier, dead.
The guilt rune was branded on his forehead.
I was pretty sure the same would happen to anyone who tried to leave Bellarius. Except for me, apparently. I was here for the duration.
I left him there. He wouldn’t be the last. The spirits of the slain had passed their judgment. Which meant that the Hag had known this was going to happen. She’d told me her price would be my memories and the Founder’s Stone once the dead talked to me.
But her price for what? I’d assumed she’d meant for finding Theiner, but that seemed highly unlikely in light of recent events.
I started walking to the Wreck. I had a feeling she’d be expecting me.
The rain I’d seen approaching from Arno’s stoop began to fall, soft and cold.
#
The madmen’s camp was deserted. Not even a fire. The war galley was a stony as it ever was. The sea still rushed in and out of the great hole in the hull. But I could see a faint light leaking out of the tiller�
��s shed, past the tarp.
I didn’t bother knocking.
The room was very dark except for her eyes. They glowed like fire opals. Looking her in the eye would have ruined my night vision, so I settled for looking at the air over her shoulder and her hands.
She hadn’t moved a muscle since the last time we’d spoken as far as I could tell.
“You knew this would happen,” I said.
“What ‘this’ do you mean exactly, Doma Thetys?”
“This situation we’re in now. Bellarius about to disintegrate, and the souls of murdered children making sure nobody escapes before it happens.”
“Yes. I knew.”
“What are you?” I asked.
“I am the Hag, the Mind Thief. Or so they call me, no?”
“Tell me who and what you are,” I insisted.
“I am Elytara Mour, Queen of Trevell, Avatar of the Goddess Mour.”
“Trevell I’ve heard of. It was destroyed during the Cataclysm.”
“It disappeared during the Cataclysm,” she corrected.
“Normally, cryptic statements like that would drive me insane, but tonight, I just don’t have the energy. Who was Mour?”
“It doesn’t matter. She was destroyed in the Cataclysm. No one worships Her any more, and few even remember Her.”
“Why do you want my memories, Lyta?”
“For several reasons. Information. I don’t get out much. Entertainment. I’ve been alive a very long time, and experiencing the memories of others helps to stave off the inevitable madness that confinement paired with longevity brings.”
“What else?”
“What makes you think there is something else?”
“There’s something else. I don’t know how I know it, but I know it. Why do you want my memories?”
“You have lived a very interesting life. Much more so than most who seek my assistance. Is that not enough?”
“No. You have some other purpose.”
“All right. Mour had a sister.”
“That’s nice.”
“Her sister became the Eightfold Goddess.”
“Ah. So?” I asked, but I didn’t much like where this was going. That’s what I got for asking.
“Consider it a familial curiosity on my part. I am Mour’s avatar. A part of her remains in me though She is no more. That part of me wishes to know the doings of Her sibling. You have experienced something of the Eightfold. I want to see those memories.”
“Tell me; were Mour and her sister what you would consider close?”
She laughed softly. “They were bitter rivals from birth.”
“Mour couldn’t have been that bad then,” I replied.
She waved a hand. “As I said, it doesn’t really matter. She is gone, never to return. The Cataclysm did what the Wars of the Gods could not.”
“A couple more questions. Why are you here, like this?”
“When Trevell was about to fall to the Cataclysm, I fled with my consort and the Founder’s Stone.”
“Just left everybody to die, did you?”
“I did not. You have no idea what the Stone truly is. No one does in this benighted, magic-poor Age.”
“So tell me.”
“It is Trevell. Every soul, every stone, every tree and tower and toss pot.”
“Um. What?”
“The Cataclysm raced across the land, an unstoppable tide of unreason, first sickening and then severing every bond of nature and logic. Up became down, light became dark, the blood in your veins might turn to water or wine or molten lead. The very air might become poisonous vapor or simply disappear, leaving countless thousands to suffocate like fish on land. You could not trust your senses. Silk could suddenly cut skin like razors. Between one moment and the next, your eyes might see something a thousand leagues or a thousand years removed. Reality itself was collapsing. Most living things died. Some became monsters. A few became dark powers, not far removed from gods.
“I did the only thing I could. I called upon the goddess to save Trevell, and she did. My city is there in the Founder’s Stone, the greatest transformation the world has likely ever seen. We took the Stone and fled, seeking a place to rebirth Trevell, far from the consuming chaos of the Cataclysm. Mour was destroyed holding that tide at bay, giving us the time necessary to escape.”
“That’s…that’s incredible,” I said.
“Whatever challenges you face, yours is a quiet Age, Amra Thetys. You are blessed.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t feel particularly blessed,” I replied. I take death very personally, especially my own. Which was rapidly approaching.
I squatted down, leaned my back against the wall. My face hurt from the punch I’d received, and my wrist ached from my blocked strike. “How did you end up as you are now?” I asked her.
“My consort, Kyphas, was a powerful mage. Eventually, he grew weary of the search for a new land in which to wake Trevell. We argued many times. I wanted to continue the search, to go as far as possible from the lands which had fallen to the contagion. He believed we had journeyed far enough. I suppose he was right,” she said. “In the end, the Cataclysm never did reach the Dragonsea.
“When we were wrecked upon the rock here during a fierce storm, he unleashed magics that he had, somehow, been preparing in secret. I was battling the storm; his treachery caught me completely off-guard. He carried me, senseless, to this room and trapped me here. I cannot leave; I cannot die. I believe he intended to return, to set me free once he had woken Trevell. He did love me. But he overestimated his own powers. He could not call the city forth from the Stone; only I, the Goddess’ avatar, can do that.
“Love me or no, Kyphas was proud to a fault. Instead of returning to me and admitting defeat, he built the first crude iteration of the city that stands here now. Bellarius. The City of the Mount. The Archmage of Trevell died the chieftain of a mud-walled village, his throne a split log atop the Founder’s Stone.”
“And you’ve been here ever since.”
She nodded.
“Now, you want my memories and the Founder’s Stone. What do I get in return?”
“If you manage to avert the disaster that rapidly approaches Bellarius, the spirits of the slain will not simply disappear. As things stand, they are content to contain the city’s inhabitants. If the city fails to be destroyed, they will fall on the city like the judgment they are, killing every living thing.
“I, and only I, can keep them from doing so. But not while I am trapped here. And in order to escape, I must have the Founder’s Stone.”
“The God of Sparrows, the souls of those dead street kids, and now you have all confirmed that Bellarius is going to end badly. But I still have no idea why, except that it has something to do with the Telemarch.”
“What do mages want more than anything else?” she asked in reply.
“Generally speaking? Power.”
“Correct. True in my day, true today. But magic is fading.”
“I’m aware of that. What’s your point?”
“If you were the most powerful mage in the world, would you be happy about that situation?”
“Probably not. But as far as I know, there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about magic going away.”
“The Telemarch believes he has found a way to bring it back. Or at least create a reservoir of magic, of power for his own personal use. A very, very large reservoir.”
A chill crept over me. “Let me guess. He’s using the Knife to do it.”
“You are clever when it suits you, Doma Thetys.”
“What’s that got to do with you? Or me, for that matter? Or with Bellarius being leveled?”
“The power he is gathering, it isn’t truly magic. Or rather, it is magic that hasn’t been refined. It’s chaos. Pure possibility. The Telemarch believes he has it safely contained, but that is impossible due to the nature of that which he is attempting to cont
ain. How can one contain the essence of possibility?”
“That’s a little too philosophical, or maybe semantic, for me to tackle. I do better with more mundane questions.” But that word, possibility, itched in my mind.
“That power has been leaking out from day one,” she said, “and reacting with the mundane world in unpredictable ways. There are things out there in the city, Doma Thetys. Impossible things, that can do impossible things, that know impossible things. They are not nice, and they are not sane by any reasonable definition. But they are not what concerns us now.
“In a few days, the safeguards that hold that chaos more or less contained are going to fail. Catastrophically. They are already crumbling. Bellarius will become a waking nightmare before it’s finally destroyed. It is even possible that we will see a short encore of the Cataclysm before the final curtain.”
“And all of this is somehow because of me. Or so the God of Sparrows seemed to think.”
“It is, I’m sorry to say.”
“Nothing you’ve yet told me has any connection to me at all.”
“You know how these Knives work, Doma Thetys. You have experience.”
“I do. Though how you know that is beyond me.”
“It’s not important now. What is important is this: the Telemarch is using the Knife that Parts the Night. What do you think the Knife is doing in return?”
I sighed. I knew the answer to this one. “It’s using the Telemarch in turn.”
“Absolutely,” she replied.
“How do you know all this, Lyta?”
“Do you know who Mour’s lover was?”
“I have no idea. I’m not really up to date on the love lives of dead gods, sorry.”
“Bath.”
The God of Secrets. The Silent One. Except He talked sometimes. He’d said a very bad word to me once. I still hadn’t forgiven Him.
“What’s your point?”
“Bath shared some of His secrets with Mour. Including the getting of information by unusual means. I know things, Doma Thetys. I am Mour’s avatar.”
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