by Rin Chupeco
I abandoned Water for Fire, grabbed eagerly at the heat. It took a good five minutes for the patterns to burn their way through my body, filling me up with the energy I needed to disintegrate great big chunks of the permafrost. At the same time, Mother amplified what she needed from the flames, then funneled them my way. I focused on the closest of the heavy glaciers marring the landscape.
My first volley of fire hit one heavy block squarely in the middle, evaporating it completely. Steam hissed briefly, but I was already concentrating on my next target. Again and again I fired, and each volley found its mark, carving off blocks of ice until I’d destroyed a respectable portion of the floating threat.
I directed my energy at a particularly large lump, the tip of a giant iceberg. It broke apart just as easily as the others.
And then I halted, staring, as tentacles wrapped around the smaller floes and a hideous creature rose from the waters. It had a large, bulbous head and was a sickly purple in color, with yellow bulging eyes. I knew somewhere within the frothing mass of feelers was a large beak-like mouth capable of snapping a man in half. This monster was no stranger to Aranth’s port, nor to the books that made up Mother’s library. The dwindling life in the ocean meant a lesser food supply for creatures of its size, and sometimes they drifted close to our shores, desperate enough to hunt human flesh as a replacement.
“Kraken!” Graham roared. We’d conducted enough drills in Aranth for people to know what to do. Already the ice wall, its favorite point of attack, was rapidly being evacuated while the army started forming up along the lower cliffs, some of the Devoted in command. The kraken’s tentacles had a long reach, but the upper landings of the Spire would escape its touch.
But the kraken wasn’t the only demon rising from the water. I saw an arm as tall as my entire body reach out from the dark depths of the sea, pulling itself up onto an ice floe to reveal a creature made of night. It was a moving shadow, a lean, emaciated figure so black that I could not make out any features save for strange blue stones that glittered along the underside of its chin, like a caricature of a beard. Heavy onyx horns hung on either side of its head.
But it had no face. It was a moving, humanoid blackness devoid of life.
I had never seen it before. And yet I knew what it was almost immediately.
No more than two hundred feet separated us, far enough yet still horrifyingly close, but somehow I knew it had teeth. I could feel its teeth, could almost taste the scrape of them unseen against my back. I could feel its eyeless eyes on me, and a peculiar sense of recognition slammed into my gut.
“What is that?” Gracea gasped.
There was a muffled thump; the flint had slipped out of Lan’s fingers—her shaking fingers. “It found us,” she whispered.
We’d known our share of monsters. Krakens and their stranglers. Devil whales and their ragged mouths dripping with diseased blood, their hollow gullets. Serpentlike cetea with teeth and arms in place of fins. These were some of the creatures born from the Great Abyss, where the Breaking of the World occurred; a personification of poxes cursed into Aeon—or so it was said. But never before had we encountered this twisted amalgamation of shadow.
“What do we—” Gracea backed away, and the others followed her. “Your Holiness! What are we—”
Mother’s voice was inhumanly level, absent of all emotion, but her eyes glittered strangely as she took in the shadow. “Gracea, your priority is to ensure that the dike does not break. Graham, take Pieter and Miel and assist her. The rest of you focus on the kraken. I’d rather not fight it at close quarters, and we’ll all have better success attacking from higher ground. I’ll handle the other. Janella and Emil, bring everyone in the city to the shelters, to await my next orders. Move!”
Lan was still shaking but pulled herself together quickly and took my hand. “We have to leave, Am—Your Holiness.”
I shook my head, my eyes trained on the monster. I couldn’t leave Mother here all alone to face the shadow-creature.
That would be irresponsible, when it was me it was searching for.
The kraken had disappeared underwater, to resurface with frightening speed along the borders of the ice wall. Tentacles slithered across the top, sliding down to the other side of the barrier—and jerked back when dozens of arrows made of pure ice struck each in turn. The strategy was always to keep our distance—as bulky as those appendages looked, we’d learned in the past, very unfortunately, that they were surprisingly quick. The wall still held, but I knew the kraken’s weight wasn’t doing it any favors. I saw the waters shifting to accommodate the behemoth, saw a rising crest of waves speeding toward us.
“Tsunami!” Gracea screamed. “Get away!”
“Odessa!” Lan tugged harder, then dropped her hand with a gasp. Her fingers were tinged blue, close to frostbite from my touch. Icicles now covered my skin at a rapid rate, but I didn’t feel the cold.
I felt like I was burning.
I could feel patterns flaring from Mother, saw more steam hissing up as she burned her way through the worst of the waves before they could hit the barriers. Whips of it blazed into the kraken’s scales, and the giant octopus shuddered and retreated back over the wall.
The shadow-monster, too, dove down into the depths. It resurfaced thirty feet away from its original spot and appeared to be walking across the water, though it must have been hundreds of feet deep. It was tall enough that it could reach me from where I stood along the cliffs. Lan tugged at me again, but I refused to budge.
“Odessa—”
“It won’t hurt me. It won’t.”
Dark fingerlike tendrils grasped for me.
My aether-gates opened.
And then I was standing over an abyss, staring into its depths. Lan, Mother, the Devoted—everyone was gone. There was only the shadow and the unending darkness and the bottomless gorge before me, where one more step promised unending death.
Images passed through my head—misshapen forms twisting in the darkness, shadows writhing from someplace where no light had ever entered. I saw Aranth dying, the city swept under by a rogue wave, never to resurface. I saw bodies.
“No,” I wept. Mother had visions, sometimes. But I was too young for them, too young to expect so terrifying a power so soon.
Be satisfied, something whispered. A divine power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You must not open your mouth against the rites of the underworld.
I knew what this ritual meant. I knew what the shadow wanted. I’d read enough of Mother’s books to know.
“You’re the galla of clarity, aren’t you?”
It said nothing, but I knew I was right.
I reached out toward the creature with the blue beard, with the cruelly curved horns.
For one horrifying, glorious, mind-numbing moment I felt time slow, spiraling out into infinity. We stared at each other; a girl cloaked in a skin of ice, facing down the shadow of a great and terrible beauty. For the briefest second we were the only two beings in the world, human and monster. For the briefest second I was uncertain which of us was which.
Its not-a-mouth shifted, and uttered a word—
And then the world slammed back into focus, throwing me onto my back, until I was staring up at the crying skies and threatening clouds. A faint ache echoed from somewhere in the back of my head. I couldn’t feel my arms, my legs.
A hand settled in my hair, shifting down to my shoulders, the small of my back; nudging me up until I was encircled by strong arms—Lan. The cold drained from my body, life returning to my limbs; surrounded by her presence, I felt warm.
“Odessa!”
I blinked slowly up at her. “Is it gone?” A heavy weight was pressing down on my mind, making it harder to think. How much energy had I expended, to leave me feeling so weak?
She nodded, pale. “It vanished into thin air, just like that. Did you—?” She broke off, ran fingers up my cheek. “You’re burning up,” she said instead, and her eyes glowed.
; More heat stole into me, washing the rest of the chill away. I sighed, my eyes fluttering.
Another hand on my forehead, cooler than Lan’s. “My poor child,” Mother murmured. “How is she?”
“She’s all right. Just had the wind knocked out of her, I think. What in the hell was that? Wasn’t that the same thing you saw in your vision?”
Vision?
“No. It was made of shadows too, but the other had a different shape. And this had a—a different kind of hunger. Was it . . .” Mother gentled her voice, aware she was treading on unstable ground. “You reacted like it was something familiar to you, Tianlan. Did you perhaps see it during your journey to . . .”
Lan stiffened, said nothing for several seconds before swallowing audibly. “I . . . I don’t remember. But I think there were . . . things that attacked my team then, that were of a similar shape. But none with those horns. Or those blue stones. I—” She stopped again, breathing unevenly. “I don’t remember.”
“Stop. Tianlan, relax. Don’t think about them. They can’t hurt you anymore. Close your eyes, and stay with me.”
The Catseye nodded, her face twisted in pain. “Asteria, there’s something wrong with Odessa.”
“What?”
“There’s a—the sickness—the shadows inside her are bigger again.” Lan’s voice shook. “But I can’t shrink them back to what they were before.”
“Get her back to the Spire, immediately! I’ll handle everything else here.” I was looking up at Mother then and saw a strange, fleeting smile cross her face as she stood. “Inanna’s Song,” she murmured, turning away. “So it’s not too late, after all. . . .”
Already I could hear the shouts of the others above the worsening storm, interlaced with Mother’s own commands to secure the area, to search the city and—
It was getting harder to think.
“Odessa, you wonderful fool,” Lan whispered softly, her voice as gentle as she ever let it be. “You’re going to be the death of me one day.”
I love you. How do I get you back? I closed my eyes instead. “It called me ‘daughter,’” I whispered.
“What? Why—”
But the rest of her words were lost to the winds, for I was already asleep.
Chapter Four
Haidee of the Golden City
THE MIRAGE STARED UP AT me from the pages of the Bestiary of the Dead. Or someone who resembled him, anyway. But I recognized the clothes immediately: the same peculiar style, the same cloak so thick he would have sweated out his own weight in water traveling through the desert.
The illustration showed him offering a cornucopia of odd-looking fruit to a beautiful woman with colorful hair not unlike my own. The lady was too busy thrusting a sword through a shadowy titan to pay him notice. There was an inscription written underneath, and it said A Devoted priest attending to Inanna, the Heavenly Queen, as she slays a galla.
I paused in my reading to gate some patterns of Air and allow a few breezes through the room, light enough so as not to dislodge the rest of my research. It was inordinately hot today—warmer than even our typical fire-scorching weather—and here in the engineering rooms, tucked within the bowels of the Golden City with steam rising from the nearby vents, the heat was especially cloying.
I sat back, thinking. Inanna was a direct ancestor of mine, the first of us. Aeon had always been ruled by a sovereign goddess, her title passed down from mother to daughter, but to all the goddesses Inanna was our Great Mother: the epitome of what a true ruler should be. Like her, my mother had her own selected coterie of Devoted, though their influence on the Golden City’s throne was restricted to military rather than political matters—my mother knew her own mind and rarely conferred with others.
But her Devoted’s clothes were light and flowing, and their armors were made of Earth, relying on Stonebreaker incanta more than solid metal for their defenses. None of them wore the strange archaic clothes the mirage did.
I drew out the silver brooch, stared at it. I had picked it up in the sandstorm’s aftermath. Unlike the mirage, it had not disappeared once the dust had settled. I’d been rather sly about it, certain the boy had not seen me—
I grunted, irritated every time I thought of my would-be executioner. A desert forager from one of those clans that lived underground, past the ergs and along the beginnings of the stone plateaus, where sand was minimal and the rock solid enough for tunnels. His skin was dark, and he wore a hezabi head scarf on his head, popular among the original Qedarites that had roamed these lands before the Breaking, so I presumed he was an offshoot of one of their tribes.
He was obviously a Firesmoker, and they were always the ones to suffer the worst accidents. I understood his hostility, but I had saved his life. He had protected me from the winds. Surely both actions had meant something.
But he had tried to repay my kindness by—
Didn’t matter. I’d left him eating sand, and he wasn’t worth another thought. Ass.
I focused on the brooch again. It was an unfinished star with a point missing, and a crooked line slashed through its center. Some books said it was an emblem the Devoted of old once wore. And his clothes told me he was from some colder climate—an astonishing revelation, since there was no colder climate, except . . .
I stared at the etching. Had the mirage crossed over from the other side of the breach? Had it accomplished what no other person living could?
Few people had survived to describe the Great Abyss—the breach, the center of a great cataclysm that had cost the world a spine, with an outburst of magic so strong the world had stopped spinning, dooming us to an unrelenting sun. Three-quarters of the world perished when that breach was formed.
Mother had sent scouting expeditions to the Great Abyss in the past. Promised them wealth and power beyond their imaginings when they returned.
No one ever came back from those campaigns.
There was no known way to cross that deadly gap—not alive.
How did the mirage bridge the chasm? As pure energy? Impossible; this brooch couldn’t have been carried over by something that was completely incorporeal.
There was no way to bring someone back from the dead. Yet my ancestor, Nyx, had done just that. It was possible, definitely, that she was lying—but why? She had told none of her contemporaries, and the diary detailing her attempts had lain hidden and unread for years until I’d stumbled upon it in Mother’s athenaeum. Very few journals penned by my foremothers had survived the Breaking.
I took out Nyx’s treatise again, skimming through.
It was not a complete resurrection, I fear, a fault of my inexperience, no doubt—some miscalculation I made performing the Gate of Life. It was alive by observation, but not in the manner that science proves. It possessed no heartbeat, exhibited few mannerisms of the average fowl, and its skin had a waxed cast to it, like new life had given it transparency. It neither ate nor slept, but was content to watch me most days and nights. Even now, it watches me still.
But it is a gentle bird, silent but sweet. I think I shall call her Hemera. . . .
What had gone wrong? Nyx recounted channeling every conceivable pattern—Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Aether—into the bird’s corpse, but strangely enough, she had neglected to mention what gate she had used for the experiment. I gated Air when I had conducted my experiment on Betsy the aspidochelone—perhaps that was my error?
And then there was the mirage.
“Cruel Kingdom,” I said aloud to myself, frowning. Where had I heard that before?
I would have loved to study mirage anatomy as well, but wherever they went, sandstorms followed. I suspected that the Golden City’s air-dome would do little to protect us, even if I found a way to bring a mirage inside the—
A loud cranking noise and metallic screeching jerked me out of my thoughts, before a peculiar hissing filled the air. It sounded like something was about to boil over.
I leaped out my chair. “Rodge! Jes!” I yelled as I tore past their
rooms, not stopping as I bolted toward the North Tower, where the ominous noises had emanated from. Inside, I ran past the mazelike troughs and tubes, years of experience allowing me to dodge past whirring gears and interlocking pipes without thinking. Yeong-ho was already at its center, struggling to raise one of the many levers that opened and closed the tower’s intricate steam pathways and tunnels. Charley was there as well, the gates in her eyes shining white as she tried to divert some of the steam pouring out of nearby vents away from us.
“The chain drive’s loose in valve twenty-six!” Yeong-ho shouted, and I changed course, barreling past a startled Jes to head deeper into the mechanical labyrinth, nearly tripping over an exposed spigot before reaching the valve in question.
As I’d feared, the metal had worn down so thin on one of the transmissions that its gear had lost two teeth from the resulting pressure. That had slowed it down enough to affect the speed of the other cogs, sending some screeching to a halt and increasing friction a hundredfold. If it lost one more tooth, the resulting chain reaction could scrape off the whole left wall of the North Tower and cause everything to collapse, with us inside.
And should that fall, the city would be out half its water supply. Here in the desert, that would mean we were as good as dead.
“What can I do?” Rodge had appeared, red-faced and panting, Jes already unscrewing the bolts that kept the cog in place. Behind me I could dimly hear Yeong-ho bellowing more orders at Charley. I realized then that I was still clutching the Bestiary of the Dead and promptly tossed it onto a nearby wooden bench.
“Find me a replacement!” I hollered, pointing at the wheel. “Ten-inch diameter, Y-spoke!” I gated more Air, funneling and honing it until the tip was as sharp as a knife, and then shoved it in between the cogs. That would have to hold. Without a substitute on hand, removing the gear now would make things worse.
Rodge paled. “Haidee, not even you can hold up a whole—”
“Ten inches diameter, Y-spoke, Rodge!”