For a moment Jane could only stare at him. Then her skin grew hot, her chest tight. She held his gaze for one long, defiant breath and then closed her eyes.
Her sedfai unfurled into the rooms around them and then the rooms around those. As if it was an appendage she could wield as easily as she flexed her arm, she wound it through the living quarters six levels below. It brushed against the few crew members who walked there, giving off flash images of bodies, silvered outlines of faces. When she found the room she sought, she opened her eyes.
“Your window projector is off, so your room is dark. Messy. There are uniforms on the floor and a stack of books beside your bed. And…there’s a link in your storage wall.” She frowned at the link on his wrist. “It’s not yours. Whose is it?”
“You don’t speak of that,” he ground out as his hands fisted at his sides. “He is not yours to speak of.”
“Valaer, no.” Eithné rose, her eyes pale. “You brought his link? If they find it, they’ll know you were with him when he died.”
White faced and trembling, Valaer looked as if he might respond, but then he turned away.
Jane felt like the breath had been knocked out of her, and her self-righteousness fled. He’d lost someone he’d cared about. Worse, he’d watched the man die.
Who knew better than she the hell of witnessing death?
“My apologies,” she said, lowering her gaze. “I did not know.”
Valaer crossed to the window and stared at the jumplight, his whole body rigid. Jane closed her eyes and ran a hand over her face. He was a dick, but he didn’t deserve what she’d just done.
“You couldn’t have known,” Eithné said. She waited until Jane looked at her, and then she repeated, “You couldn’t have known. Seirsha, how far can you stretch your sedfai?”
“I don’t know. A full sector, at least.”
Jane felt Eithné’s pulse begin a thick, unsteady dance, and she glanced at Valaer once more. His pulse was pounding, a bright, flashing glow she could see with her sedfai. Leima’s eyes were wide and dark, and they kept shooting between Eithné and Jane, as if she was waiting for something. Mikhél stood still and silent, his eyes on Jane, his thoughts impenetrable.
Jane’s eyes narrowed, and she turned to Eithné. “What’s going on?”
Instead of answering, Eithné asked, “Can you sense the processors above us?”
“Yes.”
“The library?”
“Of course.”
Mikhél let out a low breath. “That’s twenty levels away.”
“Try for forty,” Leima suggested, her voice stronger than Jane had ever heard it. For once the younger woman didn’t cringe when everyone turned toward her. “Try the entertainment level.”
So Jane did. And she sensed the whole level.
She saw it as one entity, easily knowable in its entirety. She felt the smoothness of the polymer floor, the gentle give of the metal walls. The statue she’d seen before gleamed at her with that peculiar, otherworldly glow. She sensed the theater where the Watchers had hidden, the museum with its ancient artifacts. She wondered if she could find the gallery they’d searched before, and as soon as she thought of it, she felt as if she was in it.
Her senses gave radiance to the art. They danced along the textures of paint and sculpture. They slid along walls and doorways, skimmed over and through the jumplight.
And then they caught in the recesses of a small, hidden cache of paintings tucked into the wall. Paintings signed with three simple flames.
Jane’s breath caught, and she opened her eyes.
“I found the paintings.”
They were hidden in a nearly empty section of the gallery, tucked behind a wall that showed no visible indication of a door. The symbol of flames was etched into the glass floor below, the image so small it had likely never been noticed before.
“It’s not voice activated,” Jane said when her whispered command yielded nothing.
“It must be manual,” Leima said, but a quick search revealed no mechanism.
“Maybe it is a voice command, but the phrase is different.” Jane began to try other phrases, her voice quiet with the need for secrecy.
But Leima touched her arm and shook her head. She glanced up at the ceiling as Jane’s voice died away, and then she looked at Jane and set her jaw. She said, “Baanrí Seirsha is the strong one.”
And the wall split and opened.
Jane sat back on her haunches. “Why did you say that?”
“I cannot say.”
“What does it mean?”
Leima hesitated and then shook her head. “My apologies, but I cannot tell you. We must hurry.”
She began to pull out the paintings, and it took Jane a moment to help. They were keeping secrets from her. She’d never suspected it, and she wondered now how she could have been so naïve.
They pulled three landscapes and a portrait from the wall. The portrait meant nothing to Jane, but the landscapes…the places they depicted were familiar. Her head throbbed as a staccato flash of sound and light burst inside her skull, and she remembered where she’d seen them.
She’d dreamed about them.
There was the fire on a forest floor, its golden light gilding the surrounding trees. She imagined she felt its heat kiss her face, a small weapon against the wall of cold at her back. Next to it the waterfall, magnificent in its height, carving a path mercilessly through planks of jagged stone. And finally a broken fountain in an abandoned courtyard, surrounded by thousands of tiny crystalline flowers.
How had her dreams been represented by a stranger, the images painted so perfectly, when she herself had forgotten them? Was this, as Eithné had described before, the result of prophecy? Had someone seen her dreams before she’d even had them?
Beside her, Leima knelt before the portrait, her hands trembling. When Jane turned toward her, she said softly, “It’s my mother.”
“How is this possible?”
“My father was an artist.” Leima’s fingertips pressed against the signature at the bottom of the portrait. Instead of the image of flames, this painting was signed with a name: Lhúk. “He stopped painting when the war broke out, left his art behind when he took my mother to safety. I’ve never seen his work before.”
“Leima, I have dreamed of these places. Each of them.”
Leima studied the landscapes then looked back at her mother’s face. “You knew it would come to this,” she murmured.
“What?”
She turned to Jane and shook her head. “I’ll tell you everything. If the Endet won’t explain things, then I vow that I will.”
“Thirty-nine levels,” Eithné said. “It is…extraordinary.”
“It’s not a city,” Mikhél said.
“No, but it’s closer than anyone else has ever come.”
Across the room Valaer stood frozen. Their voices barely filtered through the rush of emotion that swamped him. Eithné’s words still rang in his head: You were there when he died. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the face of his beloved clenched in agony as he died to protect the strong one. Valaer had been so sure it was a wasted death.
Until now.
She’d sensed through thirty-nine levels—a feat so far beyond the realm of possibility that only children tried it, giddy with the fantasy that they might be the strong one. She clearly had the gift of knowing. If she had a sight gift too, then she might soon learn what he’d been planning. Unless he could distract her.
“We’ll have to tell her about the prophecy,” he said. The words felt like gravel in a throat gone almost impossibly tight.
“You mean the bedtime story?”
Valaer shrugged and forced himself to face them. “The evidence no longer allows for disbelief, Eithné.”
“I disagree. Her sedfai is certainly impressive, but she doesn’t have the gift of prophesy.”
“That we know of.” Valaer moved closer to them in a deliberate attempt to align with them physically.
Things were changing. If he was going to succeed, he would have to adapt. Holding himself apart from the group was no longer a viable option. “It’s possible she’s had visions this entire time and didn’t recognize them for what they were. If they’ve come to her in dreams, as the strongest do, she might not even remember them.”
He quieted at the sound of approaching footsteps. When the women entered with the paintings, their eyes pale and strained, he gave Eithné a pointed look.
“You found something,” Mikhél said. “Show us.”
Seirsha looked at him and then at Leima, and then she laid out the paintings. Valaer skimmed over the landscapes, and then he saw the portrait, and his thoughts ground to a halt. He walked over to it on legs that tried to lock into place, and then he turned to Leima. “Did you know about this?”
“No.”
“Lhúk painted it. It had to be a message for you. Think. What did he say to you before you left?”
“Nothing.” Leima stepped back, and he realized he’d stalked toward her. He made himself stop and forced his face to smooth, and he tried for an encouraging nod. Leima’s gaze jumped to Mikhél and back. “He didn’t say anything about this, I vow it.”
“It wasn’t a message for her,” Eithné said weakly, her attention on the portrait. “It was for her mother. Da-Faen is the one I’d intended to bring with us. If she hadn’t refused, it would be her standing here with us today.”
She turned to Mikhél, but he was staring at the landscapes, a muscle ticking a clipped rhythm in his jaw.
“I have seen these places,” Seirsha said. Mikhél’s gaze lurched away from the paintings as if eager to find something else upon which to land, and Valaer frowned. “I dreamed about them.”
And he could have sworn that Mikhél jerked at that.
“The language program…” Eithné’s voice trailed off.
Valaer shook his head. “It’s possible she saw the Appalaeds there and even Nhóstravai Falls. But this fountain? A fire in the middle of the woods? They wouldn’t be in the language program. That’s not why she dreamed of them.”
Eithné’s shoulders sagged, and when she looked at him he found himself wishing that he could take back his words. That he could offer her the comfort that had once come so easily to him. But he was not that man anymore, and his purpose here had changed. He said, “It’s time,” and he looked at Mikhél.
The Endet was staring at Seirsha, the muscle in his jaw twitching furiously. He nodded. “Valaer’s right. It’s time. Get the prophecy.”
While they waited for Eithné to return, Valaer moved methodically from painting to painting, capturing each image in whole and in smaller parts with the camera built into his link. As he did, Jane glanced at Mikhél with a growing sense of pressure.
He was staring at her in a way that made her heart race. She wanted to ask what he meant by the prophecy, but she was afraid. Something in his eyes told her she didn’t really want to know, and she found herself looking everywhere else to avoid his unnerving gaze.
The painting of the waterfall seized her attention. The water, spilling over the rocky ledge, looked cool and crisp in the painted sunlight. In her dream it had carried the bite of ice, so the spray felt sharp against her skin. As she studied the image, she frowned. Something about it was off, but she didn’t know what until Valaer lifted the painting, and the light caught the image a different way.
The waterfall was painted from the wrong perspective. This wasn’t the cliff she’d seen in her dreams.
It was the cliff she’d stood on.
The two faced one another, she remembered now. Valaer had called them Nhóstravai Falls. Those she had seen in the language program. A stunning result of a geographical anomaly, the falls represented a convergence of two rivers. Sarunai, the largest river of the northern continent, flowed south into the falls. And Thúlaen, the only river on the planet that flowed north, surged up from the southern continent to meet Sarunai in a never-ending battle for supremacy over the space between rock.
In her dream she’d stood on the cliffs near Sarunai. It was those cliffs that were shown in this painting. And there, hovering between the few trees brave enough to lay roots in the rock, was the faintest gleam of silver. It was drawn exactly where she’d stood in her dream, as if the artist had sensed her presence but had not seen her clearly enough to paint her.
As the hair stood on the back of her neck, Jane looked from painting to painting and found that same gleam of silver in each—exactly where she’d stood in her dreams.
Eithné set the painting of the Appalaeds down against the wall, the red gleam of the mountains a striking contrast to the black of night surrounding the fire. And now that Jane knew what to look for, she found the gleam of silver at once. In this dream she’d stood at the base of the mountains, ready to climb.
“Seirsha,” Eithné said. Jane turned toward her, her throat working, and she saw that her teacher clutched an old, leather-bound book in her wizened brown hands. “I never told you about the woman who is credited with the birth of our society. She lived over ten thousand years ago. Her name was Armín.”
A sense of familiarity brushed over Jane, and she wondered if she’d heard the name before. She glanced at Mikhél, as if he could somehow offer insight. He was still staring at her, that muscle ticking in his jaw. The room was hushed, the air motionless. But Eithné was still talking, and Jane found her gaze drawn inexorably back.
“The story of our world began when Amín went on a walk,” Eithné said. “She disappeared and wasn’t seen for three days. When they found her, she was unharmed and unconscious, sleeping in a field that had been searched several times during her disappearance. When she woke she could tell them nothing of where she’d been. But she knew exactly what she’d seen.
“She wrote a book in the days that followed, detailing her visions carefully. Then she gathered all of her belongings, so she might begin a pilgrimage. Her tribe, unendingly loyal, gathered their belongings too, so they might follow her.
“They began at Tsourmalhín, the birthplace of Armín, and walked all over our world. Each time they came across a tribe, they stopped. Armín worked with the leaders of the tribes, held babies, tilled fields. When she left she had their allegiance and a pledge of tribal members who would join her on her quest.
“By the time she reached the northern continent, word of her pilgrimage had spread, and tribes began to come to her. She finally stopped in the Melendar Valley and established our capital city. Two weeks after they broke ground on the Royal Tower of Lan’Vercai, Armín went for another walk. This time, when they found her, she was dead.”
“It took her over two years to cross Spyridon,” Valaer said, respect touching his voice in a way Jane had thought impossible. “By the time she was done, over three hundred Nhélanei tribes had joined together to form one strong, united front.”
“This is a rare thing in the connected worlds,” Eithné explained. “Most planets are comprised of a multitude of nations, especially worlds as large as Spyridon. But Armín did this because she knew we needed it. She was preparing for war.”
“What war?”
Eithné glanced at Mikhél and then back. “Our war,” she said. She opened the book in her lap and turned to the page marked by the ribbon. “I said she wrote a book following her disappearance. This prophecy is all that is left of that book. It foretold what is happening now. It predicted Lhókesh and the Meijhé.” She took a deep breath. “And we believe it predicted you.”
She held out the book, and Jane took it with hands that had gone numb. And she began to read.
“In the time of star flight, a dark man will take Spyridon. His army will possess gifts such as we have never seen, and they will take our people as slaves. We will bow before the dark man.
“The dark man can be stopped only by the strong one.”
The strong one. Jane looked at Leima. The younger woman was watching her, her face unusually fierce. Her eyes were dark, her color high. Jane
realized the depths of the secrets they’d been keeping from her, and her hands began to shake. She wanted to throw the book into the nearest incinerator and pretend she’d never seen it, but her eyes were drawn back to the page as if they had no other choice.
She will be unmatched in power and past. She will see what was, what is, and what might be. Her knowing will span the distance of cities, and her courage will give hope to all.
The dark man and the strong one will battle for Lan’Gemhína, the sacred jewels of Spyridon. The jewels bring weakness to the strong one. In her nearness they will scrape the flesh from her bones. They will slow her heart and boil her blood, and lesions will be upon her. They bring power to the dark man. In his nearness they will bind in the synthesis of shadows. They will become Lan’Undarei, a weapon that will destroy worlds.
If the strong one does not stop the dark man, the destruction of Spyridon will spark the end of all thinking life.
Jane reread the passage until her lungs began to clog, and then she looked at Mikhél. “You think I am the strong one.”
“Yes.”
“You are wrong.”
“The prophecy is clear. You’re the only one who has the power to stop Lhókesh.” But his voice was rough, as if he found it difficult to push out the words.
“How? By finding some rocks?”
“Lan’Gemhína,” Eithné said softly. “If Lhókesh finds them first, he’ll make Lan’Undarei. He’ll destroy Spyridon and countless other worlds. We can’t let that happen.”
“I don’t even know what that is.” When Eithné hesitated, Jane’s blood mercifully heated. “Neither do you. None of you knows what it means, do you?”
Eithné gestured to the book. “You know as much as we do.”
“How could you keep this from me? You let me believe you were rescuing me.”
“We did rescue you,” Valaer said.
“No,” she shot back. “You took me away from the only home I have ever known so that I could rescue you. But you did not even have the decency to tell me as much. And if you had not believed I was the strong one, you would have left me there to die.”
Spyridon (The Spyridon Trilogy Book 1) Page 17