A torture device, just like the one from which he’d freed Meldier.
He stared at the wreckage for a long moment, wide-eyed. If someone had been inside when this had happened …
His strands of Essence vanished, plunging the room into darkness.
Caeden blinked. The kan shouldn’t have been able to—
“Tal’kamar.”
It was a woman’s voice, low and slow with pent-up fury. Caeden flinched, heart pounding as he hurriedly tried to light the room again. There was a second’s illumination; a woman holding a short sword now stood next to the shattered machine, staring directly at him. Her red hair was unkempt, her eyes sunken.
She gestured, and the light was gone again.
“Isiliar.” Caeden took a step back, boots grinding against more of the shattered glass. She’d changed from his memory of her in Rinday when they’d fought together, but it was definitely her. “We need to—”
There was searing light, followed by an enormous force crashing into his chest. He felt his ribs creak agonizingly and then break as he was lifted off his feet and smashed against the nearest wall; something cracked with a meaty snap, though whether it was bone, the stone wall, or both, he didn’t know.
Pain arced through him as utter darkness fell once again. He wheezed and tried to move, moaning as he realized that his arm wasn’t responding as it should. He didn’t know how badly the limb was broken, but it felt like the jagged end of a bone was penetrating out through his skin.
He gritted his teeth and concentrated, remembering what he’d done when Paetir had stabbed him. Unleashed Essence began to flow from his Reserve to the damaged areas of his body; he felt his arm straighten and chest expand, bones and organs and flesh knitting together again as pure energy poured into the injuries.
It all took only moments. He started to scramble back to his feet, hearing the crunch of footsteps too late.
The kick caught him squarely in the stomach.
He felt something rupture as he tumbled, disoriented by both darkness and agony, landing on his shoulder at least twenty feet from where he’d started. Bright spots danced along his vision but his instincts took over more quickly this time; by the time he’d come to a complete halt Essence was already at work, forcing itself into the injury, keeping him conscious.
“Stop,” he gasped into the black, scrabbling at his side to draw Licanius.
There was a flash of memory and he acted, throwing out a delicate mesh of kan to extend his senses. Dim shapes around him began to register in his mind, minute traces of Essence in the stone and air echoing back to him in faint, hazy outlines. It was far from visibility, but it was something.
He recoiled as he looked around. Black tendrils of absolute darkness still lashed out from the broken machine, leaving swathes of emptiness in their wake which were slowly filled again as motes of drifting Essence sought out the newly formed voids. Emerging through the snaking, writhing wisps strode Isiliar, her image burning bright as the sun itself as she stalked toward him.
Caeden focused and reached out, trying to drain some of the Essence from the oncoming figure, hoping to slow her. Nothing happened; Isiliar didn’t even flinch at the attempt. There was something impassable there, a barrier around the woman that Caeden’s kan could not penetrate.
“Two thousand years.” Isiliar’s voice was high-pitched now, edged with madness. “Two thousand years, Tal’kamar.”
One moment Isiliar’s pulsing form was ten feet away; the next it was filling his vision, her brightly outlined features twisted in fury. He balked, slowing time and ducking as an Essence-enhanced punch barely missed his head.
The wall near his skull exploded at the impact, and he could hear crumbling stone bouncing away into the empty street behind him. Isiliar struck again, and again he dodged. More stone disintegrated, this time a section close to four feet wide.
He threw himself backward through the narrow hole and into the snow, rolling and coming to his feet, this time balanced enough to snatch Licanius from its sheath. His grasp on kan instantly became firmer, easier; he pushed himself outside of time and then refined the kan that allowed him to see in the darkness. Immediately Isiliar’s outline—currently climbing through the hole in the wall after him—became clearer. She had a sword of her own drawn now.
Isiliar began moving purposefully through the barely moving snowflakes in the air toward him, and to Caeden’s horror he realized that she was moving just as fast as he. Despite Licanius, her manipulation of time was as effective as his own.
He had only a second before Isiliar was upon him; he brought up Licanius and blocked her first strike, his arm shivering from the impact. He quickly fed more Essence into his limbs, defending desperately as his attacker rained blow upon blow down on him.
Caeden’s eyes widened as Isiliar’s sword flashed again and again, faster and faster and faster, each attack creative and unpredictable and relentlessly efficient. He poured every bit of concentration he had into stopping the furious blows, and he knew within ten seconds that it was not going to be enough.
Finally a quick flick of Isiliar’s wrist sliced her blade along his fingers; he gasped, losing his grip on Licanius. The blade sank into the snow several feet away.
Caeden dove for it but without the sword, he wasn’t able to maintain his time bubble. Isiliar was already standing there as he started to move, holding Licanius in her left hand and her own sword in her right.
She sheathed the latter blade and then blinked forward, backhanding him in the mouth so hard that he spun, falling hard again and sliding in the icy wetness. He rolled as he fed Essence into his broken jaw, fully expecting to see Isiliar’s outline plunging Licanius into his chest.
“Do you know? Do you know what it took for me to stay me?” To his momentary relief, Isiliar hadn’t moved. “Do you have any idea what it is to fear sleep? And then to fear waking?” He couldn’t be sure while using kan to see, but he thought there were tears rolling down her cheeks. “El take you, Tal. I can’t sleep without the pain now. I can’t sleep if I’m not in pain.”
Caeden stumbled to his feet, holding a shaking hand out in a defensive posture. “Isiliar,” he gasped. “Please. Stop. I’m here to keep Licanius from the Lyth.”
Isiliar whispered her reply, so that Caeden could barely hear it.
“I don’t care.”
The next minute passed like years. Without Licanius, Caeden was all but helpless against Isiliar’s attacks; every punch cracked bone, every kick damaged organs and sent him skidding helplessly along the frozen ground. He lost his grip on kan entirely, plunging the street into complete darkness again. Every moment held the anticipation of more pain and the unknown of which direction it was coming from. Essence flowed in a steady torrent from his Reserve into his body now, but before he could do more than heal, Isiliar would be upon him once again.
Then Isiliar struck him one last time, and something changed.
Suddenly the pain and fear and cold and confusion … dimmed. They were still there, but distant.
He was calm now. Focused.
He reached out for kan, stepped outside of time. Isiliar was a force of nature when she attacked, but she had never had strong defenses. If he wanted to survive, he needed to take the offensive.
Caeden gestured, barely aware of what he was doing as an impossibly fine net of hardened kan sprang up around his body, each strand whisper-thin. He extended his time bubble outward as far as he could.
Then he opened his Reserve and unleashed a wave of Essence in every direction.
The energy decayed slightly where it struck kan but mostly twisted in on itself, intensifying, forcing its way through the minute gaps in the net. What started as a single, solid wave quickly became thousands of individual, razor-sharp needles bursting from his body, exploding in a shower of deadly light.
There was the crashing roar of crumbling masonry as buildings nearby caught the brunt of the force, the stone shredded by Essence, entire walls vanishi
ng in clouds of angry dust, piles of snow from the rooftops collapsing into the street. To his left he caught the image of Isiliar desperately raising a kan shield, but by extending his time bubble he’d left her virtually no time to react. She absorbed some of the projectiles but not all; hair-thin blades of energy spiked into the left side of her face, her arm, both her legs. She gave a scream of pain, flesh ruined where his attack had struck, stumbling to her knees as the dazzling light quickly faded again.
He knew that the injury wouldn’t slow her for long, though. His moment of odd, calm clarity passed and he stood stock-still for a moment, stunned by the destructive power of whatever it was he’d just done.
Then he ran.
He allowed his time bubble to shrink again as he dashed as best he could through the drifts of snow, heading toward the faint, flickering glimmer of Essence in the distance. The streets were straight and smooth, and he didn’t waste time trying to augment his vision with kan again. Within a minute he could see the faint shimmer of white in front of him, and after a few more, the wildly fluctuating Essence was once again all around him.
He risked a glance over his shoulder, but behind was only shadow. Isiliar could be twenty feet away, or not coming after him at all.
He dashed down a side street, taking several quick turns before ducking through an open archway and collapsing against a wall, panting. He’d taken too much of a beating; his body might be whole but it was sapped, exhausted well beyond its limits.
His rest was short-lived. To his horror, outside in the street he could hear the distant scraping of metal against stone. He held his breath.
The sound paused for a moment, then came again. Closer this time.
He closed his eyes, reaching out with kan, extending his senses into the main street. Isiliar was walking slowly toward his position, dragging Licanius along the wall as she did so. She cocked her head to the side as he watched, looking straight at him.
“Tal’kamar.” Isiliar’s voice, edged with madness, boomed and echoed all around him, projected and magnified somehow. “You know that walls do nothing to hide you.”
The stone ceiling above him cracked, then began to fall.
Caeden spun and dove back through the archway, rolling into the street as the building collapsed behind him. He struggled to his knees, coughing from the dust and debris.
He looked up to see Isiliar standing directly in front of him. The redheaded woman grabbed him by his shoulder, Essence-strengthened hand crushing muscle and bone as she lifted him to his feet and then beyond, holding him aloft as if he weighed nothing at all.
“You said that you would return to check on me. You swore.” Isiliar’s voice trembled as she watched him. Tears began to run down her cheeks.
She punched him in the head, hard enough that Caeden heard his skull crack, could feel the hot, sticky blood as it started to run down his neck. Isiliar barely noticed as she wept. She punched him again. Again.
Again.
“Isiliar. Stop.”
Caeden’s vision was nearly gone now, the fading world tinged with dark red. He tried to get his blurred gaze to slide in the direction of the newcomer, but to no avail.
“He left me.”
“I do not believe … willingly. Once the ilshara … restrictions that he could not have anticipated … already explained this.” The words were hard to make out in the haze. There was motion, and the vaguely familiar male voice came again. “You … not fully recovered, Is … give me Licanius before … better than him … not let Tal’s sins become your …”
There was more that he couldn’t understand; Isiliar eventually let go of Caeden’s shoulder as she responded, letting him drop limply to the cold ground. He couldn’t make out her words either, now, but her tone was defiant.
Not a good sign, he conceded absently. It didn’t matter, though. This time, even the Essence flooding to his skull wasn’t going to be enough.
He let the blackness take him.
Caeden guided Isiliar in front of him, taking care to move at a slower pace so that she wouldn’t stumble and fall due to her restraints.
“We’re almost there,” he told her softly as they crossed the Bridge of Travail and into Alkathronen, the warm glow of the Builders’ last city making navigation easy.
Isiliar shook her head, her auburn tresses bouncing with the movement. “Why are you doing this, Tal?” she asked hoarsely, not for the first time. “You cannot possibly hope to gain anything. The others will find me, or I will die and tell them in a year or two. Either way, they’ll know you for a traitor.” Her voice broke and she said nothing for a moment, as if waiting for Caeden to respond. When he didn’t, she kept talking, though this time in close to a whisper. “Why now, Tal? Why, when we are so close to the end? So close to saving …” She trailed off, shaking her head. “You want this more than any of us. I know you do. So for the love of El, tell me why!”
Caeden considered not replying. Trying to explain to Isiliar—to any of them—was a lost cause.
And yet, Isiliar was his friend. Given what he was about to do, he owed it to her.
“What is the definition of a god, Is?” he asked quietly.
Isiliar cocked her head to the side, evidently taken off guard by the question.
“A god is … someone so much more powerful and knowledgeable than another being, that they are beyond their comprehension,” she said slowly. “This makes them not just worthy of the lesser being’s respect, but of their devotion—their faith.”
Caeden nodded, pulling Isiliar to a gentle stop so that he could open a door for her. “So to many, we are gods. And yet we are far from perfect. We act in anger, in jealousy. We make mistakes. We fight amongst each other.” He hesitated. “We lie.”
Isiliar stiffened. “We have had this discussion a thousand times, Tal. Andrael was wrong. Mad. El has never misled us. You know that. We all know that. We established this before the Venerate even existed!”
“And yet I have doubts,” said Caeden. “Doubts that after what we did to Andrael, I have not felt able to voice. We established only that the things that El was asking us to do were good. Or appeared to be good, anyway.” He rubbed his forehead. “I am not trying to prevent Him from reaching the rift, Is. El knows I want to go back. I want the world that He’s promised us more than anything. But I just … I also want more time. I need to be sure. And everybody else is so focused on the goal, they won’t stop and listen.”
Isiliar didn’t reply for a few moments.
“I can understand that,” she said eventually. “We all feel that way sometimes. But … we aren’t El. We’re not omniscient. At some point, we have to decide to trust. To believe.” She sighed. “That is another mark of being a god, Tal. Lesser beings cannot fully comprehend them or their plans, and therefore must choose to have faith instead.”
“That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think for ourselves, though.”
Isiliar shrugged. “It’s irrelevant—you have to know that. This will all be over in a few months. A year at most, depending on whether the Darecians have anything left up their sleeves.”
Caeden didn’t meet her gaze. “It will be longer than that,” he said softly, leading her into the building.
Isiliar frowned as soon as she saw the Tributary, and Caeden could see her quick mind turning over the possibilities. He was stifling her ability to examine it with kan, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before she figured out its purpose anyway.
It was subtle, but he saw it, even sooner than he’d expected. The slight stiffening of the shoulders, the half-drawn breath, the minute widening of the eyes. For a normal person, it might not have been noticeable. For one of the Venerate, it was virtually a scream of horror.
“Who told you?” Isiliar’s voice held the faintest edge to it now, the slightest tremor.
“I figured it out on my own. You hid it well, erased most of the evidence. But there was a monastery outside of Silvithrin. You stayed there once, before you met Gassandrid,
and—”
“I got caught in the fire. For two days,” said Isiliar softly. “I told them not to write it down.”
“It was a miracle, for them. They had to.”
“So that’s why we’re here.” Isiliar shook her head. “What … what in El’s name are you powering?”
Caeden hesitated. “An ilshara.” He almost smiled at Isiliar’s quirk of the eyebrow, though the grimness of the situation quickly reasserted itself. “A big one. Something of Andrael’s design.”
Isiliar nodded slowly, and though Caeden could feel her trembling beneath his grasp, she managed to keep her voice remarkably calm. “You believe Andrael’s theory, that El will not be able to pass. You will be sorely disappointed.”
“I hope I am.”
“The others will know it’s you,” said Isiliar, a little desperately now. “Your signature will be all over it. Everyone knows that wolf symbol now.”
“I will tell them that Andrael fooled me into helping make it, and then gave it to the Darecians. They will be suspicious, but they will believe that before they ever believe that I am against them.” He shrugged, albeit uncomfortably. “And if El is truly who He says, then perhaps He will know. Perhaps He will reveal my treachery. There are many ways for this to fail, Is, but only if you are right.”
Isiliar twisted slightly, glancing back at him. “Don’t do this. Please.”
Caeden gently adjusted his grip on her shoulder. “You know I don’t want to,” he said, heart breaking with the words. “But you and the others haven’t given me a choice.”
He tried to move Isiliar forward, toward the Tributary, but she resisted this time. Caeden swallowed his emotions and gave her a steady push, forcing her onward. Isiliar was a wonderful fighter but bound as she was, she had little choice but to obey. She was too old, too wise, and too proud to beg. She knew that he was past the point of having his mind changed, too.
Still, accustomed as she was to keeping her emotions in check, her body language spoke volumes. It was the equivalent of another person screaming in frustration, outrage, and terror.
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