The power she had demonstrated was beyond what either of them had expected.
Rielle shoved the nurses away. The sudden, sharp movement left her burns screaming. “Leave us. I can tend myself.”
Then she stumbled to her feet and tore the bandages from her skin one by one. At first, the pain was searing, as if she were tearing off strips of her blistered, blackened flesh. But she set her jaw and pushed through the agony to imagine herself whole and smooth, as she had once been. She sent the thoughts up and down her body. Waves of quick power, sculpting.
By the time she removed the last of her bandages, her skin had healed, and all her pain had vanished.
Unabashed before Corien and the gaping nurses, who had frozen at the door to watch her undo all their work, Rielle went to the enormous mirror that leaned against the wall in the room’s far corner. Fascinated, she examined her nakedness.
There was a golden sheen to her skin, and the ends of her hair and fingers sparked like a struck anvil. Her irises were twin circling storms of gold, only thin bands of green remaining. Her lips were pale, bitten, and chapped. Shadows stretched long and deep beneath her eyes, and there was a new hollowness to her face, as if something essential in her had been scooped away. She found she did not miss it, even as her head pounded and her bones ached with exhaustion.
Because there was a clarity to her mind that she had never before experienced, a singularity of purpose. She still knew that she had been born in Celdaria, that she had married a man named Audric and killed a teacher named Tal, but when she turned her thoughts that way, trying to recall the details of their faces, what they had felt for her, what she had felt for them, she could remember very little. Only vague swaths of color and sensation. Every memory that had once tormented her had faded into the shadows of her mind.
In their place seethed golden whispers, fervent and full of appetite, crowding out everything but the now. This frozen fortress, the angel watching her from his bed. Her fingers, still buzzing from the Gate. She would feel that violent ageless charge for the rest of her days, she knew. The cold pain in her teeth, the restless hum of the palms that had gripped the fabric of the Gate and pushed it open wide. These would forever be her companions.
Rielle smiled faintly, touched her face in wonder, then turned to the side and inspected the roundness of her swollen belly. The sight evoked a new fondness in her. She cupped her hands around it, felt the warm pulse of her growing child. This child who had survived the Gate. That she ever could have considered ending her life was inconceivable. No one else in the world would ever know what it felt like to be touched by the Gate’s power. That the child belonged in part to Audric was a fact that now left her indifferent.
The child was hers more than it was anything else, and bound her to no one, not even to Audric.
When Rielle turned back to Corien, she found him staring at her, rapt. She shot a silent glance at the nurses, and they scurried out of the room.
Rielle walked toward her wardrobe. She felt the gleam of her every step. “How many angels did I free?”
“Five hundred thousand,” Corien answered quietly.
She slipped on her black velvet dressing gown with the gold sash, the intricate embroidery of wings, flowers, thorns. “So few? You said there were millions in the Deep.”
“There are. The Gate has force to it still, even though you battered it soundly. The weaker of my kindred are finding it difficult to escape its pull.”
“Perhaps I can eradicate this force,” Rielle mused. “Create a safe passage through which the others can travel.”
Corien rose and drew her slowly toward the bed. “You can—of that I’m certain. You can do anything, my star, my fire.” He found the hollow of her throat and kissed it. “But first we must do something else.”
Faintly annoyed, Rielle considered denying him. Half her mind felt far away, imagining the Gate and how best to alter its fabric to allow the other angels passage. But Corien’s hands were warm and were doing delicious things to her skin. She smiled, sliding her fingers down his torso. This too was a pleasure she craved.
They would speak of the Gate later.
“Is this what you mean?” she murmured.
“It’s been too long, Rielle, since I’ve been able to touch you.”
She shivered at the rough quality of his voice, how close it was to unraveling. She pulled away from him and bid him kneel before her. He grasped her hips, pushed aside the folds of her dressing gown, and buried his face in her thighs with a moan.
“And then I shall begin our great work,” Rielle said, weaving her fingers into the glossy black of his hair.
“And then we shall begin our great work,” he agreed. Then he put his mouth on her, and Rielle knew nothing but the supple new strength stretching happily inside her, the luminous glow of her skin, the power beneath it rising to meet Corien’s lips.
• • •
There was a vast underground honeycomb of chambers and halls beneath Corien’s fortress. Weapons lockers, stores of grain and wine, the narrow dark rooms in which the servants slept. Dozens of passages led outward to the laboratories, the barracks that housed the adatrox, the pens where the ice-dragons of Borsvall were caged, dissected, poisoned.
At the heart of this grand labyrinth of stone, a ring had been carved into the floor—a great swirling circle of wings. Acres of pillars fanned out from the circle, each tall and thick as a battering ram.
Rielle stood inside the feathered circle. Corien had told her he had engraved it himself when the fortress was first built. No one had stood within it until now. Until her.
It was an altar meant for resurrection.
At Rielle’s feet lay a beautiful young man from a rural province of western Kirvaya. He had been stripped naked and trembled on the cold floor. His skin was pale and smooth, his limbs long and healthy. The torchlight flickering around the circle painted him gold. Chosen for his beauty and strength, plucked from his bed by an eager angelic mind, even laid out on the floor like a slab of meat he was exquisite. His name was Tamarkin.
Corien, standing at Rielle’s side with his hands clasped behind his back, held the man fast, waiting.
With her eyes, Rielle traced the lines of Tamarkin’s body—every muscle, every sinew, every bone. She saw beneath his skin to his pulsing organs, his veins rich with blood. At his foundation, a sea of gold crashed and ebbed, forming everything that he was. Brightest in his mind and at his heart, illuminating the twin webs of his lungs.
She could have looked at him for hours, watching in fascination the pulses of light and energy that were his frantic thoughts, his rapid heartbeat. Only she could see these things, these deep inner workings of body and blood; not even the angels were witness to them.
“Are you ready, my love?” asked Corien gently.
Dreamily, she said, “Almost.” She knelt at Tamarkin’s side, ran her fingers along the dips of his pelvis, the ridges of his ribs. His skin twitched at her touch. In Corien’s grip, mute and terrified, his eyes were wild. He watched her fingers as if fearing claws.
Around them, the chamber pulsed. Tricks of light teemed in the air, but there was a heft to them, and their intelligence pricked at Rielle’s mind, deferent but greedy. The air bent to make room for them.
Angels, waiting in throngs. Their energy was that of a herd of beasts in their pen, muscles trembling, flanks sweating.
One of them hovered over Rielle’s head. His name was Sarakael, selected on a whim by Corien as the first to be resurrected. Rielle could sense Sarakael’s fervor, how he longed to fall before her in ardent worship.
But she hardly noticed him. Though she could sense every watching angel—how their minds slipped through the air, how their whispers rustled and hissed—her attention was entirely on the man lying before her.
She wondered if she should be nervous, but she was not. The chills trave
ling along her spine were like fingers tapping her awake.
Corien stepped closer. Now, Rielle?
She nodded. Now.
At once, Corien killed the man. An easy shattering of his mind, and without the mind, all else would fade. There would be agony, he had told her, for an instant, and then a nothingness, a slip into the long dark of death. Rielle watched the light leave Tamarkin’s lovely blue eyes.
His empty body waited for her to begin.
The how of it was easy, but she suspected the doing would not be. She had thought it all out. As Corien slept, she had sat in the fur-draped chair by the windows and stared out over the vast ice, designing her method.
And now, she followed her own instructions. Her breath trembled, her body alive with a surging heat that knocked like fists at a door. She reached out with her power and commanded the angel Sarakael to enter the body, then waited while his faint shadow-self sank through every orifice—the slightly open mouth, the nostrils, the ears. She placed her hands around the skull, for this was the most important anchor. Living mind to dead brain. Bright eyes to dull ones.
The trick, she thought, was to work while the empirium was still bright inside the corpse. Tamarkin’s body was warm, and seas of gold still pulsed inside him, but soon they would thin. The more vital the empirium, the stronger the binding would be.
So she began to knit.
She used her hands, because she found the physicality a useful focus and because she wanted to look impressive and unknowable. As she knelt on the ground beside this dead man, rebuilding him into something new and glorious with her deft fingers alone, the angels would look upon her and marvel. The bond would be stronger than if Sarakael had simply possessed the living body. She would stitch them, mind to body, fusing the two together so completely that they would become a single being, stronger than either human or angel. A new kind of life of her own creation.
Rielle moved over every inch of the skull, and beyond her fingers, her power searched and explored. She felt the cool, supple texture of Sarakael’s presence, waiting breathlessly. The empirium shone brilliantly in the minds of angels, and Sarakael, young and weak as he was, unable to take true hold of a human body without assistance, was no exception.
Once, it might have hurt her eyes to look at him. Now, she stared right into the blazing inferno.
She worked her power like a seamstress with her needle and stitched the angel to its new body. Incandescent light to fading, dull light. Inch by inch, speck of gold by speck of gold. Millions of stitches, each miniscule and infinite.
Sweat poured down her back and arms. She felt a distant coolness—Corien placing a wet rag against her neck and brow. She had warned him not to interfere with her mind, as it could disrupt her concentration, the flow of power from fingers to angel to body.
But as she worked, she began to long for his familiar touch. Resurrection was an immensity for which she was not truly prepared. With each stitch, she lost a bit of herself and then regained it. Her muscles were torn and rebuilt a thousand times over. Her breath came fast and sharp.
“My love, should you stop?” Corien’s voice was tight with concern. “Is it too soon after the Gate?”
“Leave me be,” Rielle commanded. She formed the words through a dreamlike fog. “I am both the Maker and the Unmaker. The thing that destroys and the thing that creates.”
Her vision blurred and expanded until she could see everything in the vast underground chambers at once, and then everything in the Northern Reach, shrunken to the size of an artist’s canvas. Or was it she who had grown, surpassing the constraints of her own body? She saw the mountains encircling them, the vast frozen sea, the White Wastes. She saw the stars in the sky and the worlds that turned beyond them—and that was too much, too confusing. Frightened, full of wonder, she reined in her wandering vision, returned her focus to her furiously knitting hands.
At last, she finished.
Her vision was still consumed by the empirium, and she watched, elated and exhausted, as the body before her, this new creature with his ancient powerful mind and his supple human limbs, rose before her. He tried out his legs, stretched his arms to the high ceiling, and crowed in triumph.
He coruscated, glinting. He experimented with running, jumped and darted. He was faster than Tamarkin had ever been, beautifully limber, breathlessly strong. He gripped a torch bracket affixed to a nearby pillar and swung himself up into the stone rafters. Naked and glorious, he shone faintly, as if he had been dipped in gold.
Rielle watched him from her spot on the floor, holding her body still. She felt Corien standing tensely behind her but could not possibly turn to look at him; she would crumple with exhaustion, and she refused to do that where they could see—this swarm of angels, all chasing after Sarakael. Their jubilant howls were a clamor in her mind.
Sarakael jumped to the ground, then hurried to Rielle and prostrated himself before her. He kissed her fingers, the hem of her gown.
“Thank you, my queen,” Sarakael murmured at her feet. “My glorious queen. I do not know how to express my gratitude. To move again, to run and jump. To feel the cold of this stone and the damp of the air, the weight of the mountain above me and the soft glide of my perfect skin. My queen,” he choked out, “you cannot know what this means to us all.”
“That’s enough, Sarakael,” Corien ordered, his voice shifting to that of a practiced commander. Rielle could easily imagine him as the angel Kalmaroth, ordering regiments of angels to war. “The rest of you, make yourselves useful. My generals, who are stronger than any of you—strong enough to escape the Gate long ago and to possess bodies of their own accord so they could help me begin to build our new home—these generals have tasks each of you can perform. Until you are summoned for resurrection, you will obey their every command.”
Rielle listened to him speak as if from a great distance, her spinning head a whirlpool on the verge of collapse. Distantly, she comprehended that Corien was helping her to her feet, that he was supporting her weight with an arm linked through her own.
When at last they reached their bedroom, Rielle let herself fall.
Corien caught her, kissed her softly. “My beauty, my brave one. You’re here with me now. You can rest.”
She relaxed her tense muscles, began to shake in his arms. As he led her to bed, she saw her startling reflection in the mirror: lips pale as her skin, all color leeched from them. But her eyes glowed as if embers burned within them. She imagined herself opening her mouth and breathing fire. She imagined biting Corien’s neck and injecting him with venom.
A strange thing, to tremble so and need Corien’s hands to hold her up, and yet to feel stronger than any of her past selves. It was as if they had all been skins to shed, and she was beginning to uncover the true Rielle beneath them all. A sweet nut of power glowing hard in its shell.
Gaunt and glittering, she grinned at her reflection, watching black-gold shadows roil at her collarbone, in her palms, at her tender pulsing temples.
“When I’m strong enough,” she whispered against Corien’s chest, “I will give them all wings.”
25
Eliana
“Many of the saints’ writings about the Deep have been lost to time, or to vandalism by radical factions of humans—such as Anima Primoria—who support the angels and decry the creation of the Gate. Those writings that have not been stolen are under close guard by whoever possesses them—usually that country’s holy authority—and are not available for study by visiting scholars, a reality that this scholar in particular finds not only offensive but potentially dangerous. Only by understanding what happened in those days can we prevent it from happening again.”
—The Fathomless Deep: A Treatise by Tasha Kirdova of the First Guild of Scholars
When the Prophet returned to Eliana, seven days had passed since her journey to the Deep.
You’ve done
well, they said, sending her cautious waves of comfort. He sees nothing of the Deep in you, and it will not occur to him to suspect it.
Curled on the floor where Corien had left her, Eliana cracked open her eyes. She swallowed and tasted copper; she had bitten the inside of her mouth bloody. Across the floor, shards of glass were scattered like fallen snow. Corien liked to break things when he was angry. Her windowpanes stood open to the evening, their edges jagged. Half her guards were dutifully sweeping the remnants into pans. The other half, with their blandly watchful expressions, made sure she didn’t lunge for a piece to cut her throat with.
“Under the rug,” Jessamyn ordered, toeing the floor with her boot. She glanced at Eliana, a troubled expression darkening her face. “Take up every carpet.”
Eliana watched them clean, then climbed into her bed and pretended to sleep, her face hidden beneath her hair, but in fact she was watching the doors to her rooms, waiting for Corien to storm back through them. Tears wet her cheeks, but she hardly felt them. Each sound from her guards made her flinch. An hour passed, then two. A shift change. Jessamyn left for the Lyceum, the home of Invictus, where she would sleep.
At last, Eliana felt it was safe.
I want to go back, she thought to the Prophet, the forming of each word a triumph. I have an idea. Do you think it can be done?
Then she sent them her plan, what she envisioned for its end.
The Prophet’s pride was unmistakable. Oh, little one, I like the way you think. Yes, I believe it is possible, and worth exploring. We will begin tonight.
• • •
In the courtyard, tucked into the thicket where she had first entered the Deep, Eliana sat in the dirt with her legs crossed, considering the dark seam hovering in the air before her. It pulled at her like a mouth eager for a taste. She had to hold on to the tree roots at her knee to keep herself away from it until she was ready. Everything near the seam—moss and leaves, the dirt, its pebbles—had turned black and withered. The desiccated remains shivered, pulled toward the fissure as if resisting being swallowed.
Lightbringer Page 31