His hand reached out without thought, his signature intertwining with the buzzing, humming energy of the gate. He took a step without thinking, already on his way through when he remembered. Rook. Turning frantically, he saw her surrounded by snarling warriors and an ironclad dread sank in his belly. “Rook!” he cried, yanking himself back even as the rift sucked him in.
Her blond hair flew as she turned. “Wait!” she cried. The distraction cost her. Chief Haknor struck his axe into the meat of her shoulder, blood spraying across the snow. A horrendous cry wrenched from her lips as she fell, a sound so human in its terror. Viktor could feel the tug of his command, the rift pulling him towards his destination. He grasped out to her as she crawled, Haknor’s axe poised above her.
With a yell summoned from his very core, Viktor released the fire brimming in his veins all at once; a wave of bright, burning green flame aiming for the warriors advancing on a struggling Rook. It hit them all at once, burning through their bodies before they could even open their mouths to scream. Their skin blackened and bubbled, peeling away from flesh. Their hair turned to ash, bones charring as the reek of boiling flesh filled the area, strong enough to make him gag. As their bodies fell one by one, Viktor pulled himself out of the gate far enough to grab hold of the wrist of Rook’s injured arm. She screamed as he reeled her into him, and then the two of them tumbled through the rift. He felt her shake in his arms as the door appeared before him out of the blackness.
Viktor held her tight and opened the door.
*
Landing on the hard ground knocked the wind from Rook’s lungs. She gasped for air, shoulder screaming in pain, trying to gather up her scattered consciousness. It felt like someone had used her brain for bowls. Everything spun, her thoughts tumbling away from her before she could catch them. Her body shifted between hot and cold, gooseflesh lining her skin, and she felt the acidic burn of vomit rising from her gullet. Stomach heaving, she vomited on the ground, swaying on her hands and knees with a groan. If this was travelling through the doors of the world beyond, she did not care to repeat the experience.
“That felt even worse than last time,” mumbled Viktor, eyelids heavy when he blinked. Spread eagled across the floor, his head lolled to the side as if he might drift off to sleep. Rook wanted to rouse him but her thoughts looped back on the images of her father and his men burning up. Singed flesh and the stench of burning. She gagged and threw up once more, dry heaving once the contents of her stomach emptied.
A booming sound reverberated through the dank dungeon of a room. This was the underground floor of the Riftkeeper’s headquarters in Tsellyr, which meant that the noise had come from above, out in the city itself. An earthquake? The stone trembled beneath her palms, finally petering out to silence. She glanced at the prone form of Viktor, fighting back the knee jerk reaction to keep her distance. He had done it to save her. It hadn’t been intentional but just a reaction out of stress. A slip that had allowed the phoenix to take over. Or so she thought.
“Did you hear that?”
Viktor groaned. “My head hurts.” He sat up and she flinched at the blood flowing from both nostrils, streaks of dark, angry red dripping beneath his eyes.
“I think you’ve been pushing your body too hard.” They weren’t made to cope with channelling such powerful spiritual energy. The phoenix was more than anything she had ever experienced with The Rook and she knew how much that drained her. How Viktor was still going when he was possessed by a god of the otherworld, channelling too much power for one human to safely contain, she could hardly begin to fathom.
“Yeah, me too. I’m just going to –”
Another booming reverberation, louder than the last one. Dust and debris spilled from the ceiling. The vibrations rattled through her, stirring her already shaken head. The deep, violent pulse of the rift overpowered her senses so that she couldn’t focus on what was happening above, leaving her sightless and disorientated.
Trying to pull herself to her feet, a white hot pain lanced her shoulder and she tumbled back onto her hands and knees with a choked off sob. Viktor jerked in response, moving to help her peel back her clothes to inspect the wound, only to have her freeze as he approached. Hazel eyes met hers in the gloom, wide and dark. The lights of the rift danced in his eyes as he rocked back on his haunches, lips parted, but no words came out. She could see his fingers kneading into the meat of his thighs, sweat glistening across his furrowed brow.
“Viktor, I –”
“I understand,” he said, voice dark. “I needed to save you but I didn’t – I mean I just couldn’t watch you die.”
“You killed them all. My father, too.” Rook gritted her teeth, peeling cloth from sticky blood and flesh. A potent wave of pain crashed over her, enough for white to flash before her eyes for a brief second. She caught herself before she fell and continued to pull it with whimpering breaths until the deep gash revealed itself. It cut right into the meat of her scapula, starting from the back of her neck and curving down to her lower back. It needed stitched. Badly.
Viktor sucked in a breath, eyes roaming over her swollen, red flesh and the oozing blood. “They were going to kill you, Rook! At what point do you stop showing mercy and fight back?”
She rather thought she might faint. A whistling rang in her ears, Viktor’s face so strange and distant out of the corner of her eye. “You can’t always rely on violence,” she said. “Once you kill it becomes so easy to see it as a solution.”
“Some people can’t be saved! Some people just need to die.”
“Who are you to decide the deserving?”
“You weren’t going to do it! What were you going to do, go out in some stupid noble sacrifice like a, like a –”
“Like a coward?”
Viktor’s mouth snapped closed, head turning away. For all of his years he looked suddenly ancient, the shadows lengthening beneath his eyes and the lines around his mouth deepening as he frowned. In many ways he was ancient. Older than her mind could really fathom. The vehemence of his youth had been exacerbated by the arrogance of immortality, turning the chip on his shoulder into a boulder.
The worst part was that she wasn’t sure who was in the wrong. In the headiness of her pain and fatigue, Rook could barely fathom out the arguments. It sounded so reasonable, that sometimes people just had to die. Sometimes they did. She believed that. But to be the one to decide roiled uneasily in her gut like spoiled meat. For any one person to be able to decide who should live and die was too much power, too easily corrupted by sheer human fallibility that not even the most pure amongst them could cleanse themselves of.
Ripping at her shirt, she winced as she wrapped it tightly around the wound. It needed cleaned and sealed but for now it would have to suffice. A hiccuping breathe escaped her as she pushed herself to her feet, swaying against another wave of nausea. “I am not trying to judge you, Viktor. I merely fear what will become of us if we forget that we are still human. These powers could inflict such violence and suffering upon this world.” She hissed through her teeth, adjusting the straps for her blades. Her right arm hung in a sling she had attempted to fashion from the remains of her shirt, covering herself with old Sorren’s bloodstained coat.
“Are we still human?”
She turned, seeing Viktor’s silhouette against the weaving pattern of the rift.
“How can I be? I remember centuries past. I can summon fire to my palm that goes so far beyond what an ordinary flame can do. I can walk through the doors of this world at my command.” His eyes shone with a faint green light. Symbols she had failed to notice etched into the wall began to glow with the same colour, all around them. “Do we really still call ourselves human when he have these powers?”
She thought of the writings of Shinrak and his warning about the knife edge that their abilities crested on. As much as he had been intrigued by the potential of such power, he had also been cautious about the effects when left unmonitored. He had thought that just by channe
lling the riftspawn’s power, they were opening the doors up further to that other realm beyond, and was concerned that the world might go to ruin if people kept channelling power recklessly. There had to be balance. That had been his ultimate conclusion to the truth of the world.
“Viktor, we can’t think like that.”
“Why not?”
“Or we could become monsters! I’ve seen it happen! Sometimes I still wake up with the memory of blood on my hands as I remember the light leave my friend’s eyes. I think you understand that. You’re just a little lost right now.”
“Or maybe I’m discovering who I really am.”
“That’s not who you are. I know you.”
“Do you? Or do you only see who you want to see? The boy you want to save to prove that you can be saved too.” He marched past her, to the stairs. “Maybe you are a coward, Rook.”
The words were a punch to the gut, leaving her spiralling in her memories once more. Coward, spat from her father’s lips with his disapproving glare. The pain cutting into her back, throbbing with such severity she felt dizzy. Anger flaring in her, that he could use that word when he knew how it had been wielded over her in the past. He was angry and hurting, yes, but so was she.
“Viktor!” she struggled after him, each step jolting her arm enough for her to feel the gash move. Blood trickled from it and she grimaced. “Viktor, where did you –”
Light spilled from the door. Too bright. She shoved it open with her left hand and then shielded her eyes from the glare. Rubble and dust. Another booming shake. Destruction. Smoke and the thundercrack of gunfire. Distant shouts. Riftspawn weaving through the smoke, spots of colour against so much overwhelming grey.
Rook was standing in the ruins of what remained of the Riftkeeper’s headquarters, the entire street blasted to rubble and debris. The ground beneath her feet quaked in intervals, the sky one great blanket of smoke and clouds that smothered the sun, leaving her surroundings washed out and grey. She gaped at the sight of it; this grand, ancient city ground to nothing but dust, and stumbled forward until she stood shoulder to shoulder with Viktor.
When he turned to look at her it was with the round eyes and open fear of Viktor. Not the prince that lurked within, nor the phoenix with fire running through its very being that could destroy as much as it could heal. This was pure Viktor, the young man she had first met in Nirket, lost and angry and desperate in so many ways. It would have been a relief, had the circumstances not left her as stricken, smoke filling up her lungs until she doubled over in a fit of coughing.
“Fyera…” said Viktor. “I just left her there.”
Rook reached out with her good hand to rest it gently on his shoulder. “That wasn’t your fault. She’s resilient to have survived this far.” She choked off as another cough stole her words, lungs burning with the smoke rising from burning buildings. “We need to find shelter until we find out what is happening.”
She took a step and nearly overbalanced, head so light she swore it was flying away from her. When her vision settled she saw the concern on Viktor’s face, eyes flicking to the wound soaking through her clothes despite the bandage and sling.
“You need help.”
“Where do we go?”
“Sandson. The mayor.”
Rook bit her lip. “If the city hall still stands.”
But Viktor had already grabbed her wrist and was hauling her through the streets, heedless of the smoke and destruction. Despite the ruin there was no one to be seen, the two of them the only ones racing through a world that looked like it had been dragged to the bottom of Var Kunir’s locker. There was an eerie stillness to the air that let the smoke linger in a heavy draping of smog over the city, coalescing like mist until she could barely see what was in front of her. All of a sudden a gnarled trunk would appear before them, red leaves gathering around the roots like a pool of blood. It seemed only a matter of time before that became reality.
Gunfire startled her and she dived out of instinct, crawling along the line of a chewed up wall that had once belonged to a Zorashiran church. How pitiful, to think this ancient city so full of Myrish history and culture, was being levelled to the ground. Her eyes watered but she did not know if it was the sadness or the smoke. Wiping them, she gasped for polluted air, feeling around her with her hands until she grasped the warm arm of Viktor and held on; an anchor amongst the sea of terror crashing over her. The booming noises grew louder, resounding in her chest. Flashes of indigo caught her eye through the billowing smoke. Soldiers on the move.
“They’re coming from the bay.”
A cough erupted from beside her. “It must be the warships.”
“But why? Why would they want to destroy the city?”
“It’s a warning.”
“Viktor?”
His face was obscured by the smog but she could make out the grim line of his mouth. “For me. For Fyera and for Sandson, too. For anyone who might look to support leadership that is not Sonlin. That bitch warned me.”
“Viktor, why for you?”
Silence.
“What did you do?”
He bumped her shoulder as he brushed by her, running in the direction of the Onyx Plaza, footsteps muffled by the dense atmosphere. In moments she lost him in the smoke and had to draw into the pool of her power, feeling it trickle through her and heighten her senses. Following the familiar signature, she picked her way across the plaza, trying not to recall the memories of the last time she had been there, upon the gallows for what had felt like one time too many. There had been smoke then, too, when that creature had taken the sky.
A weariness settled over her shoulders as the thought struck her that perhaps things never changed. No matter what she did it never seemed to matter, like her actions were mere ripples upon the surface of a vast ocean, the depths of which she could never hope to fathom. Perhaps she would be running like this until her life finally caught up to her, convincing herself she could really make a difference when all she ever really seemed to do was get caught in the crossfire.
“I wasn’t me when it happened.”
The smoke thinned around the white pillars leading into the city hall, revealing Viktor standing by the huge oak doors. One of the very centre pillars looked as if some colossal creature had taken a bite out of it, a pile of debris scattered at its base. In the wall a hole gaped, smoke wafting from the collapsed brick and stone. One side of the roof had collapsed, red tiles and massive boulder sized bricks in a chalk white creating an avalanche towards one side. Her stomach lurched to see such a proud building in ruin.
“I understand, you know,” she said as she entered, eyes adjusting to the gloom inside. “More than anyone, I understand.” Dust lingered in the air, tickling her throat, and she pulled a remaining scrap of her shirt from her satchel to tie around her nose and mouth.
“But you would have resisted. You would not have been so easily swayed by his memories. His thoughts.”
She barked a laugh, her throat feeling like it had been shredded with cut glass. “Neither you nor I could know that.” Pulling the mask back up, she pressed a finger over it. Talking would only steal precious breath.
They didn’t get far along the circular corridor before Viktor began to talk again. “I don’t think we’re going to get help here. Anyone who was here has already –”
Dust plumed up into the air as a piece of the ceiling crashed to the marble floor. A shriek ripped from her throat, staring up with a hand slapped over her thumping heart. A hole in the roof leaked cool air, milky light spilling upon the marble floor and revealing the small mound of red roof tiles amongst the debris. She shivered. It had been mere feet from where they stood, enough that she had felt the force of it as it had rushed passed her on its descent. Sickening images flashed through her mind, of what could have been.
A hand latched onto her arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
A scuffling noise caught her heightened senses, The Rook informing her someone was nearby.
“Hold on,” she said, creeping along towards a familiar door. Ironically it still stood, polished and gleaming in all its intricately carved glory, dragon head iron handles beckoning her forth. The door stuck when she tried to open it and she grunted, throwing her weight upon it only to be crippled by the staggering pain she was in.
“Rook! Rook, are you all right?” Viktor helped her to her feet and the two of them picked their way into a room only half there, the back wall collapsed to reveal the gardens beyond. Items were strewn across the room, part of the ceiling caved in. Her stomach lurched when she tripped over the outstretched arm of a person in servant’s robes, covered by a huge piece of debris.
Scuffling sounded somewhere towards the collapsed wall and she lumbered over the pieces that had once made up Sandson’s office, shattered porcelain crunching beneath her feet and a brass lamp sprawled across the piles of shattered stone and brick. The great cherrywood desk had collapsed, broken in the middle where part of the ceiling had fallen upon it. The jagged halves rose from the ground like the angry jaws of a crocodile ready to swallow her whole. Holding onto Viktor to keep her balance, she continued around and then gasped, seeing a familiar figure trapped beneath part of his desk, wood digging into his legs.
“Sandson-shai! Can you hear me?” She dove to her knees in the dust and debris, searching for any noticeable wounds. His eyes rolled around and then landed on hers, glasses almost comically askew upon his nose. They were lucid, if pained, his breath coming in shallow gasps.
The Rising Tide Page 46