by Dorian Hart
Slowly Lapis wandered the small plaza, peering into the shadows beneath the empty buildings, poking her head into those with either open doorways or sufficient breaches in their walls. Dust lay thick on stone floors and caved countertops, on the shattered marble tile of deserted foyers. If the shrine of Dralla was close at hand, it was well concealed, and its denizens did not venture out of it.
She returned to the statue. Surely it was not meant to be an angel of Dralla; its features were too pure, its countenance too noble. She imagined how it would look without its accumulation of filth and cracks—perhaps it was an angel of Kemma, goddess of the sun. Lapis gritted her teeth; that would be her next stop, after dealing with the Drallans. But for now she needed guidance.
Lapis closed her eyes and let the power of the Black Circle flow into her. The sensation of knowledge—arcane, secret, forbidden, tantalizingly close—filled her mind. If only she had the power, she could know everything there was to know, on Spira and beyond, but that power was not meant for mortals. If she opened herself fully to the Circle, she would know everything she desired—for one glorious moment, before burning down to a cinder.
But the shadow of that perfect knowledge felt muted. Here in the Plaza of Glory, something nearby stifled her connection, proof that she was close to her target. She turned a slow circle, once, twice, searching for the detail, the tiny overlooked clue that would ignite a spark of discovery.
There. The ground in front of one wall, broken only by a single boarded-up door, had a slightly thinner coating of dust than its surroundings. If not for the slanting sunlight spilling over the rooftops behind her, she would have missed it. Lapis strode to the building and examined the nailed planks that covered its doors and windows. Ah, now that she knew where to look, the entrance was more evident. The door and all its boards together had been remade into a larger concealed door. She gave it a tug, and it moved a fraction—proving her hypothesis—but did not open.
The sun was lowering itself behind the buildings on the west side of the plaza. Time was running short; even Lapis had no desire to tread upon Drallan holy ground after dark. She would have to speed things up.
“Followers of Dralla,” she shouted at the wall. “I seek an audience!”
Unsurprisingly only silence answered. She hoped to save her strength for her visit to the cathedral of Kemma this evening, but force would clearly be necessary.
“I am here to trade for a book!” she called. “I wish no harm to you, only to negotiate in good faith!”
Even as she shouted at the mute façade, Lapis began to draw a small circle on the uneven flagstones, just large enough for her to stand within, using a thick black slab of chalk. When her request finished echoing around the plaza, she produced a smaller fragment of chalk, kneeled, and wrote a complex series of equations around the perimeter of the circle. They described angles, trigonometric relationships, balances of magical forces; they were equations that marked how power could be channeled, shaped, and augmented. They were taken from a long list of the Lesser Equations that Lapis had committed to memory; she had neither the time nor the necessity to invoke anything stronger.
When she completed the diagram, Lapis stepped into the circle. “Let me in!”
She gave them two minutes, but no welcome was forthcoming. They couldn’t say she hadn’t given them a chance to do things the easy way. Lapis gathered her concentration, drawing power from the chalked circle, murmuring her equations and flexing her hands rapidly through a dozen awkward positions. Pure power infused her, the Circle granting its blessing. She pointed at the concealed door, and it flew apart as though struck by lightning, wood and masonry flung outward in a thousand trajectories. A few of these might have struck her had her chalked circle not shielded her. Lapis stood, calmly, waiting for the rain of debris to end and the dust to clear.
From the far side of the breach, in a dark courtyard seething with indistinct shadows, came what sounded like the angry shrieks and chitters of dozens of small rodents. Mixed in with those noises were lower-pitched growls, furious thumps, frenetic scraping and slithering, as if an entire menagerie of furious beasts had been loosed from their cages.
I have kicked over a hornet’s nest, haven’t I?
Lapis stepped out of her circle, tracing circular patterns and cross-angles in the air with her fingers. Despite the implicit threats, Lapis strode forward into the darkness. The Circle would protect her, and she was well prepared, having spent much of the past week studying the Abjurative Glyphs.
Three steps across and the creatures flung themselves at her. The first, some small furry thing, bounced off the air two feet out from Lapis and fell back, smoking. For a few seconds more, a veritable hailstorm of small animals threw themselves toward her, claws and teeth bared, while she continued to draw diagrams in the air. The darkness made it difficult to know, but some of the beasts were clearly unnatural, agglomerations of eyes and limbs and claws attached to malformed bodies. Their fury was no less for their deformations, but their success was no greater. All fell back, repelled by her arcane shield.
When at last the wave of creatures had subsided and the beasts had retreated back into the shadows around the edges of the courtyard, silence fell once more.
“Who here will speak to me?” Lapis asked of the darkness.
An uneven shuffling noise started up from somewhere back in the depths of the yard. It grew steadily louder and nearer, scrape-THUMP, scrape-THUMP, until Lapis could make out a humanoid shape approaching. A horribly disfigured man limped toward her, his back hunched and humped, one eye covered by his own drooping brow. He leaned heavily on a gnarled staff as twisted as himself.
“You have made a terrible mistake. Dralla does not appreciate your impudence.” The man’s voice rose and fell, as though he could not control his inflections. Within just those two sentences he both shrieked and whispered, his tone like crushed gravel wrapped in silk.
She smiled at him. “Do you speak with authority here?”
The hunchback laughed, a wheezing, choking sound. “I am Shreen the Fair, Night Master of Dralla. My authority is supreme within these walls. Who are you that would dare breach our sanctuary?”
“I am Lapis, and I—”
His distorted body was preternaturally quick. His staff whirled at her head before she could even flinch; it smote against her shield, buckling her protections, nearly crashing through them. Her own hands flew up, stretched into a form that would reinforce her wards, and she spoke the eleventh equation of Kethnod’s Set to draw energy quickly from the Circle. Shreen’s power here in his shrine was appalling, greater than she had anticipated. At the edges of her vision she saw more of the revolting little creatures approaching, ready to spring if her protections failed.
But for all Shreen’s strength, standing on his holy ground, Dralla was still a toy goddess, a presumptuous child before the Black Circle. Lapis transitioned abruptly from wards to a projection of force, meshing her fingers together with practiced precision and reciting the Gald Theorem inverted. Shreen the Fair was thrown backward to the ground, his staff cracking into several pieces. His pets were flung aside as if snatched up and hurled by a whirlwind. She heard their bones snapping.
“I would have preferred a less violent meeting.” Her focusing of power had left her winded, but she didn’t let it sound in her voice. “The rest of Djaw seems so civilized, it’s no wonder you hide away from it. Now instead of offering a bargain, I will simply make a demand. Bring me the book Labyrinthine. I will take it and leave you with your life, and you should consider that a great kindness in light of your poor hospitality.”
Shreen the Fair struggled to prop himself up on one elbow. “That is why you have accosted me? You seek the Crosser’s Maze?”
Lapis was acutely aware of the ever-lengthening shadows. Would Shreen recognize that time was his ally? Weariness from her expenditure of energies spread outward from her center, and she needed to conserve her strength.
“Once I have the book, I will want not
hing more to do with you. And the sooner I have it, the sooner I will depart. Deny me, and I will scour this benighted place with a fervor you cannot imagine.”
She took a step forward and raised her hands. Would Shreen call her bluff? He peered at her through his one unencumbered eye.
“The maze is not meant for you, blasphemer. You would be wise to turn your back on it.” His voice warbled high and low, now a shout, now a murmur.
“I am not interested in your opinions. Only your book. Will you bring it to me, or shall I blast away your shrine, clod by clod and stone by stone, until it turns up?”
Shreen snarled at her, but he dropped the last splinter of his broken staff and hissed something into the blackness. A sound of scurrying feet receded toward a dark edifice behind them.
“Why do you desire the Crosser’s Maze?” he asked.
“That is no concern of yours,” she said curtly. At that moment the sun dipped entirely behind the buildings that surrounded the Plaza of Glory, and all warmth was sucked from the air. Shreen wrestled his ungainly body to his knees, then his feet, obviously unaccustomed to maneuvering himself without his staff. Had he sensed a shift in the balance of their powers?
“The book, Labyrinthine,” he said. “Its secrets are not plain. The words inside match their subject, a tangle of confusion and riddles that none have solved. You will not learn their meaning.”
Lapis smiled at him. Shreen did not understand that the Black Circle was Knowledge, that with time all mysteries could be laid bare.
“Then for you the loss of the book will be no great loss at all.”
A large gray tome ambled out of the darkness on its own, but when it came closer, Lapis saw that it was carried on the backs of four low cat-like creatures. They dumped it at her feet.
Shreen the Fair gestured to it. “When you have the maze and have finished using it for whatever purpose, will you bring it back here? To me?” He looked sly, as though setting a baited trap.
“That is not for me to say,” she answered carefully. “What I do know is that I will make no promises on Drallan holy ground. I will say, if it pleases you, that such a thing will be considered.”
Lapis doubted severely that the Sage would ever give up something as supposedly powerful as the Crosser’s Maze, but it did no harm to feed this pathetic creature a crumb of hope. She picked up the book; it was old but well preserved, its title clearly embossed upon its front cover.
“A wise choice,” she said. “I am sorry you didn’t answer your door at once and spare us both such unpleasantness, but I am not your enemy. Good evening, Night Master.”
Night was falling fast; Lapis hastened away and didn’t look back.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A small sliver of Visciv’s mind continued to protest, weakly, a guttering candle in a dark room.
The scent of his prey filled his nose, washed over his whiskers. This was something far stronger than his usual scavenging instinct, a drive imposed upon him by the black madness mixing with his blood, coursing through his body and limbs. The droplet from the woods lived angrily in his veins.
And it had a voice, a voice that told him to kill.
No!
Even in its full capacity, his mind had been helpless before the power of that squirming black oil. Now his protests were a last dying echo of despair, born of knowing he was merely a thrall in the grip of a greater will.
The Spark is near. I can smell it. I will tear out its throat.
Visciv couldn’t tell if those were his own thoughts or those of the malignancy that possessed him. Soon there would be no distinction. But a tiny fragment of himself remained, and in it was the divinity that the god Quarrol had imbued in him. That would be his, always. Visciv had been born with a great gift—that he would guide his creatures, the rats of the world, keep them safe, help them mesh and meld with the human civilizations that everywhere spread and ruled.
Yes, the Skittering Mischief had not always acted in accord with its counterparts: the Noble Herd, the Feline Conclave, the Great Pack, the Unkindness. But they were all of a type, the only creatures of true divinity permitted on Spira, and there had never been violence among them.
Disembowel. Dismember. Devour.
No!
The black ooze surged and bubbled inside of him, like water in a heated human kettle, frothing and sizzling. It felt like a swarm of hot, angry insects crawling upside-down on the inside of his skin, pressing outward, seeking escape. Whatever else that foul stuff was doing, it was physically enlarging him, swelling his muscles and bones, elongating his whiskers and incisors, and stoking his appetite. All of his fur had fallen out.
Visciv stopped and tasted the night air. His prey was below him now, down a hill southward, perhaps a quarter mile distant, somewhere on a flat, grassy plain. It smelled of dog and reeked of divinity. Around him, scurrying between and around his legs, dozens of smaller rats squeaked and squirmed, held in his thrall, eager to do his will, to join in the slaughter.
He took an eager step forward—and pain lanced through his right forepaw, as though a farmer’s scythe had sheared it clean off. But there was nothing, no blade, no wound, no hindrance. On his right foreleg, round black dots traveled along his skin, ecstatic animated lesions that burned with bloodlust.
The scintilla of his old true self, that sliver of Quarrol’s blessing, rejoiced in his own pain. The dreamed severed-limb agony of the conquering ooze-ink was a just punishment for what it had done, was still doing.
But Visciv didn’t slow. Eager now, ignoring that he limped with phantom pain, he charged down the hill, saliva flying from his open mouth. His army of rats hurried to follow him.
You cannot slay a Spark, said the true piece of him. It will be reborn, just as I will be when you have snuffed out my final protest.
A death-knell voice answered him. There will be no rebirth, little godling. Our powers together will eliminate the rest, extinguish the Sparks forever. We will put down Quarrol’s Chosen until none but ourselves remain; only then will I twist our neck.
Visciv knew that voice, that unquenchable will, told the truth. Quarrol had given him a power, but the ooze in his blood whispered of something greater, something as far beyond his own authority as he himself was above the rats of Kivia. It was erasing him from the inside, hollowing him out and refilling him with defilement.
Time to feed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Pewter butted his head against the woman’s ankles and purred for all he was worth.
“Aww, she’s so sweet.”
The man at her side rolled his eyes. “We’re not bringing it home. It’s only after your food.”
They’re on to you, thought Aravia.
Doesn’t matter. Watch a master at work.
Pewter interrupted his purring long enough to emit a heartbreaking meow, and gently pawed the woman’s calf. She carried a little wooden bowl filled with chunks of fried fish, and from this she pulled out one small morsel.
“Don’t encourage it, Wya.”
“Here you go, little cat.”
The woman leaned down and held out the fish to Pewter, who ate unashamedly from her flat palm. It didn’t take him long to gobble it down, and once he had consumed the dainty, Pewter dashed away into the night.
Shame it was cooked, but that’s humans for you. They couldn’t even tell I’m male! Are you almost done in there?
Yes. Sad to say, the quality of their paper is disappointing though not surprising. I should count myself lucky that there’s anything like a stationer in a town of this size.
Aravia left the shop, and Pewter appeared, jumping up to her shoulder.
Your breath smells like fish.
Lyme was a small town, a trade town piled up around a crossroads. Having ambled along its streets during Dranko’s convalescence, Aravia pegged it at a population of maybe five thousand people. Mule-drawn carts and more of the human-powered rickshaws clattered through the streets in a steady stream.
Like T
rev-Lyndyn, Lyme felt both foreign and familiar at once. Yes, the language was different, as well as the food, fashions, predominant skin color, architecture, and most other superficial markings of a civilization. But in Kivia there were still towns and cities and farmers and merchants and guardsmen, just as in Charagan. Aravia reminded herself that the Kivian Arch had connected the two lands for decades if not centuries. And had there been a time when a traversal of the Uncrossable Sea had been possible? From the commonalities of Kivian and Charagan existence, it was more likely than not.
Tor hadn’t wanted her walking alone, but it had been three days without any sign of a trap set by Lapis. Having purchased some clothes in the local fashion with Dranko’s stolen windfall, Horn’s Company could even stroll about without drawing constant stares from the locals, though the others were largely content with staying holed up in Laramon’s Lair, the inn where Dranko recovered. She wondered who Laramon was but figured asking would only call unwanted attention.
Aravia had assured Tor that she could take care of herself, though his concern was sweet.
Boss, watch it.
What is it?
Rats, off to the left. Almost a dozen of them. I think they’re looking at us funny.
Ew.
Lyme crawled with rats, just like Trev-Lyndyn. At least she had a natural rat-killer riding on her shoulder these days.
Just leave them, Pewter.
Fine. I just ate anyway. Where are we going?
The stationer said that there’s an illuminator a few streets away who dabbles in cartography. I’ve long thought that having a map of Kivia would be quite useful, but there was no chance to find one in Trev-Lyndyn.
The late afternoon air was uncomfortably warm. Aravia’s new lightweight purple kirtle had modest slits around the elbows and ankles, but sweat still made its fabric stick to her back and thighs. Summer might be winding down, but their journey to Djaw took them southward, into ever warmer climes.
Boss, we need to talk.
Oh? About what?