by D M Wozniak
She looks directly at me.
“You,” she says in a high yet raspy voice, pointing as she storms down the aisle toward me. “Black arcanist. Get out of this temple.”
A moment later, Blythe comes running through the same open doorway, steps behind her.
“Your Effulgency,” he says. “Please let me explain.”
“You have explained,” the woman says, without taking her eyes off of me. “And I have rejected your explanation.”
She raises her voice. “Black arcanist, do you not understand the common tongue?” she snarls at me. “Why do you still sit when I have asked you to leave?”
I stay seated as Colu turns to me from the preceding bench. “So much for dinner,” he mumbles deeply.
Chimeline squeezes my arm.
“But Your Effulgency,” Blythe says, catching up to her. “I can prove it. With the master voider’s help, I have entered in soteria—”
She stops in place and turns to him, her white robes blossoming out like a giant flower in the shade of the forest floor.
“Do not speak of that in present company! I still cannot fathom you touching a voidstone,” she says, her voice shrill enough to shatter the windows far above.
“I spoke to them!” he replies.
She shakes her head and points at me again, but this time she’s looking at Blythe.
“This is what happens when you choose to travel with a black arcanist. You start believing the lies. The way of unwanting is as slender as a strand of silk. You of all people should know this!”
Blythe continues to argue with her in forcibly hushed tones while Chimeline leans into my ear.
“You were right,” she says. “She clearly doesn’t believe him.”
“I know,” I tell her as I stand. “She’s going to have to experience it firsthand.”
The two of them are so wrapped up in their argument that they don’t notice me leave the bench in the back and approach them. Only at the last moment, when I am standing at their side, do they respond to my presence.
The woman takes a small step back. Her eyes are sunken in, and in the V-shaped section where her white cloak reveals her upper chest, the form of her ribcage protrudes underneath thin skin.
She shivers while looking down at my stone.
“Please leave,” she says, then turning to the others. “All of you.”
“You don’t believe Blythe?” I ask.
Her lips form a puckering shape. “Who is Blythe?”
I point to the graycloak.
She turns to him. “Is this true? You have taken a name?”
He tilts his head. “I did not take it. The master voider was intent on giving it to me.”
“Good Unnamed,” she exclaims, her voice almost entirely devoid of tone. It’s pure air.
She closes her eyes, perhaps in prayer, and I figure that this is as good a time as any.
Grasping my stone, I grab her skeletal hand in the other. It spasms, but I don’t let go, and she doesn’t have the strength to break free.
Surrounded in the void, I hear the voices of the enervated again, only louder than usual, and then they go eerily quiet, just like when Blythe first grasped me.
They sense her. A new presence.
In the world outside, I may be smiling sadly.
Because even though I don’t speak their language, for the first time I think I may understand them.
They detect the woman effulgent. They know someone new is here. Someone like them. And the reason they are quieting down is because they don’t know if they can trust her.
Blind intuition is telling me this. A raw feeling in the dark.
Then, a whisper of wind.
It’s the woman speaking.
Another current weaves into place, like someone just opened a door and the breeze is singing through the gap. It’s only slightly deeper, and I swear it seems familiar.
Blythe?
I let go.
When the world returns, I notice that Blythe is holding onto the woman by her other hand, and his eyes are still closed. So are hers.
She falls to the ground, her legs giving out. I’ve already let go of her, but Blythe has not. He catches her as he opens his eyes, letting her gently rest against his legs.
“Do you believe us now?” I ask.
“Yes,” she whispers, almost to herself.
“We’re looking for a voider-effulgent,” I say as her eyes flutter open. “Or as you call it, an enervated. This man has taken a consort of a blonde woman—”
“Patience, master voider,” Blythe snaps, stooping down and flashing me an annoyed glance. “Her mind is galloping.”
“Right.”
He speaks to her in the effulgency tongue, sounding similar to how he had in the void, except with less echo. A drier sound without reverberation.
Eventually, she looks up at me, her green eyes wide. And then she turns to the stooped Blythe, grasping his shoulders for support. “We must get the word out. The others must know. Everyone must know.”
“Can you stand?” Blythe asks softly.
She nods.
Chimeline and Colu come near, and the woman looks at each of them before turning back to Blythe. She begins weeping.
“I am sorry for my offense. I give up my ignorance to the Unnamed. I do not own the dark.”
He embraces her. “I do not own the dark.”
Colu, Chimeline, and I stare at them in awkward silence.
Colu eventually clears his throat. “So we’re going to send the pigeons now, and then have some dinner?”
Blythe pulls away from her and nods, placing a hand underneath her armpit, as he attempts to lift her up. I assist, lending her my hand as well.
“Where do you keep your birds?” I ask her.
She motions with her raised head.
“The bell tower.”
The Bell Tower
The five of us proceed up a dark, circular stairway made of stone. Its center is completely open, save for the bell’s thick rope that extends all the way to the ground. Chimeline fearfully hugs the outside wall.
Every so often, thin slits in the wall offer a view of the outside. We’re at least five stories up, and climbing. Everything else is below us—the rooftops and even the canopies of the grandest trees in the park.
“Did you build this part of the temple?” Chimeline asks Colu. Besides a quick glance at him, her head stays fixated sideways toward the wall.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t think to put in a railing?”
He lets out a deep laugh.
“We are almost there,” the head effulgent says, a few paces ahead. I am surprised—despite her gauntness, she leads us fervently and is not even out of breath.
Soon the stairway gets brighter, and we pass through an open square cut out of the wooden ceiling into the tip of the spire.
Chimeline lets out a rare curse and stops, hands splayed against the stone wall at her back.
A massive brass bell, glowing in the late-afternoon sun, hangs from a thick beam. Above this are smaller rafters. A few wild birds take flight as we step upon the wooden floorboards. They easily escape, flying through the four surrounding archways.
Each of the four walls are the same—a grand arch made of stone, through which is the open air. To the north and east, dark clouds cover the sky—the remains of the afternoon storm. To the west is the brilliant sun, low on the horizon, and to the south lies Xi Bay.
Neither Blythe nor the head effulgent stop to admire the view—they both head straight to a barbed-wire cage in the southeast corner, large enough to hold a grown man standing tall. The dozen pigeons inside begin to coo and flutter about excitedly.
Meanwhile, I furrow my brow and point to a gigantic ring of masted ships in Xi Bay, far from shore.
“What is that?” I ask Colu.
He puts his hand across his forehead to shield his one eye from the sun. “They’re not Xian, that’s for sure.”
“It’
s a perfect circle,” I say.
He grunts as he lowers his hand. “Formations usually indicate a blockade. To prevent other ships from leaving port. But...”
“But what?”
“Blockades are usually a line.”
I nod. “I’m no naval commander, but that’s what I thought as well.”
“Almost looks as if they’re trying to protect something,” he says.
“You mean inside the circle.”
“Yeah. Circle the wagons sort of thing.”
“The Axiondrive.”
Chimeline lets out a sound which is something between a sigh and a groan.
I turn to her, thinking that she’s responding to my comment, but her hands are grasping her head, and she’s looking at the rafters.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
Her eyes flutter, and then she takes a step away from the top of the stairs and toward the open center of the floor, directly underneath the bell, where the rope descends over a hundred feet to the ground floor.
Cursing, I quickly run over and pull her away from danger and towards the northwest corner, where the floor safely meets the stone wall. She has no strength in her body—she collapses in my arms.
“Chimeline!”
I lay her body down softly. She’s shaking her head back and forth, her eyes shut tightly. Her body curls up into a ball against the dusty stone.
“It’s happening again, isn’t it?” asks Colu, coming near.
I place my hands on her, ensuring that she stays down. I don’t want her moving towards the open center of the floor, nor down the length of the walls to the open archways. A few steps in any direction could be a fall to the death.
But soon, her body stops wrestling with itself and her breathing calms.
She passes out.
Standing up again, I remember the time that I had to coax her up on the stone wall in the citadel, before we jumped. “Actually, it might not be voidspeak.”
“Voidspeak?”
“What happened earlier underneath the willow tree,” I say. “I think she just might have fainted. She’s scared of heights.”
“Then why is she in a fucking bell tower?”
“I told her that she could wait down below, but she didn’t want to be alone.”
He shakes his head.
Behind us and on the opposite side of the bell, the woman effulgent steps into the birdcage, quickly closing the latched door behind her. She begins catching the pigeons, one by one, and tying a coiled note to each foot.
Next to her, on the outside of the barbed wire, Blythe meets my gaze and gives me a proud smile and single nod.
Colu nods toward them. “She’s even worse than he is,” he says under his breath. “Stubborn and self-righteous.”
“Blythe is alright,” I say. “I think, deep down, he knows that neither he nor I have all the answers. Besides, he is helping me find the voider-effulgent.”
“What about her? You think she knows him?”
I look at the bird-like woman. “No. Otherwise, she would have mentioned it by now.”
“What’s your plan, then?”
I look to the west, down at the canopy of trees covering the park. There are thousands of people down there, laughing and clapping at the performance on stage.
“I have to find Mander,” I say distantly.
“Who’s Mander?”
“A friend of mine and the best of submasters.”
“He’s stationed here, in Winter’s Baiou?”
I nod.
“And you trust him?”
I furrow my brow without meeting his gaze.
“Ever since Marine left me, I have been running through the list of men she could have fallen for. Someone she knew well, who was a strong voider, and was somehow involved with the war to the south. Mander is the only one who matches this description.”
I turn to him. His face is contorted in confusion, as if the answer is obvious.
“It’s not him,” I say.
“Why?”
“For one, he’s not an effulgent.”
“Ah.”
“And second...if you ever met him, you would understand. The man is...peculiar, to say the least. The idea of someone like Marine going for him...” I let out a bitter laugh.
“So you trust him.”
I ask a question for an answer. “Have you heard of this Commander Reddles?”
Colu shifts in place, his leather armor making a crackling sound. “No.”
“The king appointed him in charge of this city.”
“So I heard.”
“My hunch is that the voider-effulgent is working closely with Reddles, toward the same objective.”
“Which is?”
I point to the circle of ships, and he nods.
“If I can seek out Mander, he might know of an effulgent that has been seen around Reddles.”
“And?”
“That’s our man.”
The woman steps out of the cage, cradling a single pigeon in her hands. I can see the coiled note tied to its foot with bright-red string.
She clasps the cage behind her, trapping the rest of the birds inside, as she steps toward Blythe.
She delicately places the single pigeon in Blythe’s hands, and then covers his hands with hers. They bow their heads, foreheads almost touching in silence, until the silence is broken.
A flash in the air.
A gust of wind.
The bell rings.
It’s so loud that I feel the reverberations course throughout my entire body. My bones shake. The dust on the floorboards hover in the air, and if I tried to take a step, I know that I wouldn’t be able to.
A few stones from an archway fall, hitting the wooden floor near Colu and then ricocheting off, tumbling to the ground far below.
Instinctively, I cover my ears with my hands as I turn to Colu, seeing that he’s done the same. It doesn’t seem to help. The ringing in my ears doesn’t stop.
“Why is someone ringing the bell?” I shout to him.
He must read my lips or have the same thought, since he crawls down onto his hands and knees, peering over the square hole in the center of the floor where the rope descends.
He glances back up at me, shaking his head. “There’s no one down there!” he shouts.
Yet, feet above him, the massive bell hanging over us swings wildly. I can still see it vibrating, the edge of it hazy against the sky.
What is going on?”
Another stone block from an archway falls.
Blythe and the woman have stopped praying. Her hands are over her ears, while Blythe takes a step back. He still has the bird in his hands, but he’s peering intently through the archway, down onto the crowds in the courtyard below.
Colu slowly stands back up, his feet widespread for balance.
Dust falls upon us like snow. The dry kind, like when it is well past freezing.
“Something is wrong,” I say.
Colu nods. “We need to get down now.”
Before I’m able to respond, a wave flashes through the sky past the north archway. It originates from the ground, and heads diagonally upwards, straight towards us.
It looks almost like a crest upon the sea, rolling and white-capped, except it is instantaneous, and mostly transparent. Nearly as faint as a membrane of dynamic voidance, but this is far stronger than that.
Within less time than it takes to blink, the wave climbs and hits us at the top of the bell tower. There isn’t even enough time to warn Colu, or even open my mouth.
A buffeting gust of wind hits me as the bell rings again.
I am pushed back, my legs turned to putty, due to the vibrations coursing up through the boards.
It’s worse this time.
I lose my balance and fall to the floor.
Colu, Blythe, and the woman have all done the same.
The vibrations are not coming from the bell, but from the wave. The bell simply reacts to it, as do we.
“Dem!”
It’s Chimeline’s voice.
I turn toward her.
She’s awake.
She’s still lying where I left her—in the northwest corner—with wide eyes, her body propped up on her outstretched arms, palms on the wooden boards.
I quickly crawl over to her, kneeling by her side.
“Don’t move!” I say to her, loud enough for her to hear me over the ringing.
She grabs onto me with trembling hands, crying out in pain.
“Dem, he had a message.”
My brow furrows. “What did he say?”
She grips me harder and I see her swallow. “I’m going to be buried alive. Along with the rest of you. Because I lied to him.”
My hands cradle her head, and I feel wetness there. I pull them away, seeing blood on my palms. It’s coming from her ears.
He’s down there, somewhere. And he’s destroying the tower.
I bring her to me and hug her tightly, speaking into her blood-soaked ear. “It’s going to be alright.”
Another shimmering wave passes over us, and the bell rings out a third time. Chimeline screams, her nails digging into my neck.
Then, a horrible feeling. A crumbling noise and the piercing, snapping of wood. I instinctively cover Chimeline with my body, while the sounds around us deepen.
Turning my head, I watch as the southeast corner of the bell tower gives way.
One moment, the woman effulgent is standing there, next to the birdcage full of pigeons, her hands to her head. The next moment, she’s gone in a flurry of white robes. The birdcage is gone. All of it falls away.
The entire corner section of floor and archway disappears, inches from Blythe. He is left standing on the severed edge, underneath the unsupported roof, holding a single pigeon in his hands.
“Blythe!” I scream.
He looks up from the clutched bird and over to me in shock, his face like stone except for his blinking eyes.
Colu swears and rounds the bell, running over to him while the roof groans. He grabs his shoulders, pulling him back toward us.
The massive beam overhead starts to dip without the support of the corner, and this causes the bell to swing toward Chimeline and me as it rings again. Looking up, I can see into its darkened insides, black instead of gold, the open mouth of some hideous beast.