by S. M. Beiko
Suddenly Corgan stopped, throwing me down hard through a narrow open doorway. I caught myself on one hand but the other crumpled at the wrist, and I felt it crack.
“Nng!” I hissed, cradling my wrist.
“Master did not specify if you should be comfortable now or later,” the creature croaked nastily.
“Specifics don’t seem to be his specialty.” I grunted around the pain, looking up, trying to see. But the room was pitch-black, and Corgan blended seamlessly with the murk. There didn’t seem to be a way around Corgan, either, as it took up the entire doorway.
Something splorched onto the ground between us.
“What the hell was that?”
Shifting footsteps — obviously Corgan backing up. “Master said to feed you.”
“Ugh, what!” I recoiled, scampering backward, horrified that whatever he’d dropped could be spreading a sickening puddle towards me. It was already starting to smell. “I am very suddenly whatever-that-is-intolerant.”
“Suit yourself,” Corgan sneered. Then the door slammed, and a massive lock bolted to, and I knew I was alone.
I couldn’t tell how many hours ago that had been. I still held my twisted wrist plastered to my chest, pressing it into the stone. I pictured the sharpened edges with geode roots tangled around my ribs, going deeper. You stupid goddamn bauble. Just when I actually need you, you desert me. I tried to remember the Opal’s vibrant colours — a corona of gold cutting through the centre almost like an eye, the supernova of red and purple and the flashing green I’d first known it by, once upon a time in Winnipeg. But the more I tried to recollect the Opal, tried to call it back to how it had been when I’d first adjusted to life with it — getting out of the shower every day, pulling a shirt over it, tracing it with a fingernail at night . . . even the memory seemed corrupted, the edges going black, spoiling and eclipsing the colour. The cold dark taking hold.
I let my injured hand drop and thought this was as good a place as any to finally lose my mind.
“Come on,” I snarled, smacking my palm onto the stone. “Wake up!” I needed to move. To get out of here. I had to stop Killian, Seela, all of them, before the body count went up. That’s all it seemed to do around me. With each impact of my hand on the Opal I saw their faces — Table Five. Every customer in the explosion at Fingal’s Pint. Ben. Athika. Victims of Seela’s quake at the Conclave of Fire. Ruo. Mala. Then further back — the first of the Red River girls with her eye gouged out. A group of innocent bystanders suspended in the air over the Osborne Bridge. Cecelia —
“Sil.” My face was wet — I hadn’t noticed I’d been crying, but each memory had transported me, and now I was back in my own body, in the dark, invaded by something that only wanted to kill. My bones are a haunted house.
“Sil. Cecelia. Please. I know you’re there, somewhere. Help me. The fire, it . . . it’s gone.”
“The fire is never gone,” she answered, and my head jerked up so hard I slammed it into the wall behind me.
“Sil?” I got up, looked around, but I didn’t move beyond that. There could be an open hole in the ground at any given point, as far as I knew. Nervously, I put my hand out.
“C’mon . . .” I made my hand hard as stone, trying to push the fire out of each knuckle, the flesh.
A spark.
I pushed harder, stopped breathing. “Yes, c’mon!” Harder, straining, the spark was a flicker —
The flame was a blooming flower, perfectly cupped in the palm of my hand. It was normal, a honeyed, splendid glow, and I thought I’d pass out from relief. But in its light was Cecelia’s face, and I leapt backward.
“Mother of —” But the flame flared up my arm, licking my skin like it was sweating gasoline.
And it hurt.
The darkness peeled back like a sunburn, and Cecelia was still there, but I wasn’t. Where I’d been standing was a boy, close to my age, maybe a few years younger. They were in a summoning chamber, clothes light, faces beaded with sweat as though they’d been training. There was no ease to watch this memory as there had been before — it wavered like a mirage, and I was struggling just to keep my eyes open against the roar of the blaze consuming me.
“Yes it does,” he spat, petulant. “Maybe not mine or yours. But I’ve seen it fail in others. Who’s to say that one day Ancient won’t just be asleep — it’ll be dead, and any powers the Denizens had will die with it?”
Cecelia folded her arms, eyes crawling into the back of her head. “How many times are we going to lapse into this rhetorical debate?”
The boy scuffed the shining gold rings beneath him. “When I’m convinced any of this is worth it . . .”
Cecelia dropped a hand to his arm. “That’s enough for today. Are you sure you aren’t mine? I’m seeing too much of myself in you lately to think otherwise, Killian.”
Killian? No . . . but this was the boy I’d seen back at the stone choosing — the one Cecelia had noted was a trainee of the former Paramount, Chartrand. The one she’d taken on hand-to-hand in the Sun Trial.
But it made sense. Killian had admitted all of this himself, though he hadn’t cast himself directly in this role. It was so obvious. It was my fault for missing it the first time.
Nng . . . the heat was so much hotter now, like someone had turned the oven temp up, and the memory shifted, brightened. There was Cecelia, and Ruo, one hand slipped through Cecelia’s bent arm as they stood at a gathering. I recognized some of the pillars and the stonework — the Conclave in Glencoe. Before them both stood a girl, her long red hair parted down the centre and draped over her robes of black, red, and gold. An initiated acolyte skittered across my understanding. An elder dipped a thumb into a brazier, pulling a streak of ash down from the girl’s forehead to her mouth and ending at her chin. Holding the brazier was Killian, and the two shared a glance and a mischievous smirk.
Ravenna.
“I grew up with her.” Killian’s voice over this memory was more painful still. I felt myself collapse to one knee. Once, Cecelia told me the fire couldn’t hurt me. I’d trusted her fully, just as I did now, watching the stone sift through her life. But the fire was doing its damnedest to hurt me now, as if I were the virus. The enemy.
But I had to see.
It was all fire now, and it resolved into a dark alley, the walls close, the ceiling closer. It smelled damp, musty. I’d been down here before — in the memory Ruo had shown me back at the Conclave. The South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh.
Cecelia slammed a young man against the wall by his shirt. Killian.
“What were you thinking?” she hissed. She picked him up again by the scruff, dragging him farther down the corridor. He collapsed in an alcove, groaning. His head was bleeding — no, his face, a gash that I knew would become a neat scar I would admire many years in the future and not understand until now.
“You promised me you’d be careful. You promised for Ravenna’s sake, you damn fool.”
Killian spat blood, his grin faltering. “I promised I’d do my best to make this a world she’d be proud to live in.”
Cecelia cuffed him hard across his bleeding face.
“And how can you do that if you’re dead?” She let him go, paced back the way they’d come, casting a flame towards incoming voices. “The others. I didn’t think you’d be this stupid to gather in the open like this.”
Killian chuckled. “And yet you still came to warn us. Who’s the stupid one now?”
Cecelia dragged him back to his feet. “Ravenna would never forgive me if I let you die. And the cause would never forgive me, either.” She was older — maybe in her fifties, but still beautiful. Fierce. What had she meant by the cause?
“Even if I die,” Killian grunted, “it won’t have been for nothing. We’re getting closer. Maybe even you will finally be free. You deserve that.”
“What I deserve is not to
have to be cleaning up after the rest of you damn kids for what little life I have . . .”
“You knew what you were getting into when you decided to join the Stonebreakers.” Killian got his feet back under him, but he was limping.
“Yes, well,” Cecelia said, but they were getting farther and farther away from me, “I’m still seeing too much of you in me. Maybe I should’ve joined years ago. And this could’ve all been avoided.”
They faded away down that long dark hall, and when their light diminished so did the memory. I felt myself buckle, slumping bonelessly against the wall at my back with the sigh of a fire going out.
Cecelia had been a Stonebreaker. She and Killian had been allies . . . but to what end?
It was still so dark, yet my eyes were open wide and unblinking. So many lies. Too many secrets. I had trusted everything Cecelia had told me. Had trusted the stone she’d entrusted to me. Had it all been a trap?
I really was alone.
~
This was a fool’s errand, and it only took a couple of hours on wing for Eli to come to that conclusion.
He was strapped and at the limit of what had before been an endless font of energy. Of power. He hadn’t let himself recover to any extent — but there wasn’t any time. There might not ever be. He knew that going after Roan was impulsive and irrational and made absolutely no sense — even if he pretended it was simply to retrieve the Dragon Opal. He should have left her to her own devices. That’s what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? To be alone. To carry the burden entirely. That was what it took to be a stonebearer, after all.
But going after her — it was a selfish move, too. Because the Moth Queen’s shadow hung over Eli with every stroke of the Therion’s wings . . .
There is a light in you now, when before there was only darkness . . . Her light will diminish. Only you can free each other.
Freedom. From the stones? Death dealt in riddles and any offered explanation rarely went deeper than the surface. The phantom chain around Eli’s arm, in his chest, tugged hard. West, it said. Keep going. But for how long? Eli glanced down, the razored air raking through his thick feathers. Russia stretched tens of thousands of feet below. He couldn’t determine where the Moonstone pulled him, but Roan had been in Scotland, before. It would take a commercial airliner at least sixteen hours to cover that distance. And if that’s indeed where he was headed, the notion chilled him to the marrow. He hadn’t been back to Scotland since he was young. Too young to understand what going after the Moonstone might cost him, even after he’d lost everything.
Don’t you dare, he heard his mother say from one of those corners of his mind he thought he immured the memories, hoping they’d suffocate and vanish, don’t you dare go looking for it, Eli. No matter what they say, if they come looking for you, telling you it’s your destiny. That stone . . . I hear it still. I won’t let it hurt you. No matter what it says, no matter what they say. Please, Eli, please promise me you won’t —
He extended his will, reached out, and slashed, and the hysterical pleading died. Too late for that. He felt the stone strobing before him, cutting through cloud.
Help me. The fire, it . . . it’s gone. Roan’s voice was pitiful, but he heard it all the same as if she’d been beside him in the air. His jaw tightened.
Eli banked higher, latched onto the wind currents at the tip of the earth. Faster, he hissed, and the stone took him higher still.
~
“Rise ’n’ shine, girlie.”
I involuntarily bunched myself into the fetal position, covering my eyes as light struck them, blazingly bright as if the sun itself were in the room.
I lifted my stiff neck. Huge swaths of black, which I at first took for drapery, fell away from soaring windows. But it wasn’t fabric — Killian stood there, pulling the darkness down with a gesture, and the black seemed to seep into the floor, eaten up by his own shadow as he passed.
I sat up. Once he was finished, I could see the room clearly through squinted, flexing pupils. The ceiling was a glass dome, seemingly set in wrought iron like an enormous atrium. The floor beneath me was the familiar obsidian marble with silvery veins of other summoning chambers I’d seen. Killian spun to me with a flourish and a bow.
“Ye look a sight better now than when last I saw ye.” His eyes passed over me, then beyond me, and he scowled. “I see Corgan’s idea of a joke is still here.”
It took too much mental strength to turn, see what he was pointing at, but I shied away, covering my mouth — I’d fallen asleep inches away from what looked (and smelled) like regurgitated entrails . . . possibly Corgan’s. I heard Killian laugh, felt a strange heat close to me, and when I turned again all that was left was a dark stain, the offending pile incinerated by black flame.
“Ne’er thought I’d be cleanin’ yer room for ye so soon,” Killian chided, and then he was hauling me up by my forearm. “Up now. Work to do.”
I ripped free and brought the other arm around in a wild haymaker for his ear. He dipped out of the way, caught my already-injured wrist, and twisted it painfully behind me. I thrashed, screaming through my teeth.
“Now, now. No need for that.” He let me go and I toppled forward, catching myself against the huge window. My breath fogged the glass — I was panting. God, I was not in any shape to climb a flight of stairs, let alone kill this asshole right now. I pressed my face into the cool clear surface, and as the landscape beyond it materialized, I leaned back.
As far as I could look, a treacherous sea stretched for miles. The day was overcast, not as bright as the stinging daylight impressed on my dark-accustomed eyes, yet the breakers beneath me smashed and left sparkling whitecaps behind. We could’ve been on any coast in the entire world — there was no way I could even begin telling where on the map I’d been deposited, but it didn’t matter; I wasn’t getting loose anytime soon. The dome followed the cliffside, as if it had grown out of it, the rocky shore curving inward on either side. An island, maybe. It could be Narnia, for all I knew.
This fortress was impressive, wherever it was. And when I stood back and squinted at the framing of the glass, I realized it wasn’t steel. It was charred bones. I recoiled and spun, taking in the rest of the room — gothic spires hung from the ceiling like stalactites, teeth waiting to gnash. The whole building was brick and stone and glass and bone, finely wrought. But the brick was dark, and I’d wager anything it was made from ash, that this entire stronghold was cut from the cliffside and augmented with the material that Killian had at hand in abundance. Bodies. Ruin.
Migraine or not . . . I looked back to the window, tried to judge the distance between the dome tower and the water. The glass couldn’t be that thick. But even if I smashed my way out —
“Don’t think of it, girlie,” Killian said with a sigh. “If I let ye do it, ye’d drown. But I won’t let ye. I’ll bring ye back up and stuff ye back in the hold if ye can’t behave. Instead I’m offering you the best view in the house. And my trust.”
I levelled him with a dark grimace. “Trust? You think I’ll ever trust you?” I may have been sick to my stomach, but my spirit eye let me know what he really was beneath his handsome face, his casual stance. A towering mantis shadow on claw legs, spinning a neat web. I spread my feet, dropping a hip and lifting my fists, heavy as hammers. “You’re sick.”
He puffed out his cheeks. “Not me. Yer fighting it, I see. Though I dunno why yer bothering. The sooner you embrace it, the better ye’ll feel.”
“Me? I feel fine.” I didn’t know what I felt. Time was a flat circle, too many lives overlapping mine. I was about to pray inwardly for Cecelia as I had before, but now calling her up felt like a curse. I’d have to summon the fire another way, without her.
“Oh c’mon now. I didna bring ye here to fight. A summoning chamber is a place to learn. And I have much to teach.” He started moving towards me round the curve of the room, and I move
d away on the opposing axis, willing my fists to stop quivering.
“I’d think something that slithered out of the ground like you would prefer to worship there.” Something flashed on my arms, but I didn’t look away from him. A spark?
“Oh, yer one to talk!” Killian laughed, wagging his finger. “Fox-girl who trained in a summoning chamber underground thinks she’s above me.” He turned to the windows as the sun broke through the clouds, arms wide. “My family has been condemned to the dark. In the Bloodlands, all they dream of is the sky.”
The flint clicked over inside me and I lunged. Just as it had when I was seeing the stone’s memory, it hurt to bear the fire rippling over my skin, but I didn’t care. I struck, but Killian was too fast, and my fist impacted the obsidian floor, cratering it.
“Look at ye!” He slow-clapped and laughed again. It only made me hotter, sicker. Angrier.
I ripped my flaming fist free and took another shot, a poorly thrown cross that didn’t land anywhere near my target.
“Yer miserable. Ye must know it. But I can show ye relief, if ye want it.”
I caught him in the jaw with my elbow, tripping backward just from the impact of it. At least it’d shut him up momentarily, but he was on me just as fast, hammering down hit after hit like I was a speed bag.
He had me by both wrists, crossing them in front of me. The fire still held up, flickering, hurting. I fought back, tried to get loose, get away, but his grip was iron. “Listen to me,” he hissed in my face. “Yer in pain. Yer sick. Ye know why.”
“Because you fucking made me sick,” I spat, trying to jerk away, but he was carefully yanking me back towards the centre of the room.
“I’d ask if ye kiss yer mother with that mouth, but I’m no’ such a bastard as ye think.” His smirk was unforgivable. “No one made ye sick but yerself. All Urka did was quiet the stone, make way for yer true power. The power I’ve given ye through my blood. Surely ye’ve felt it. Ye saw it down in that pit with ol’ Corgan, didn’t ye?”