He sighed. His hands fell, and for several long breaths, we stared each other down. The crack and pop of the Firewitched matches echoed around us. Even the Rook stayed absolutely still, absolutely silent.
The Rules were very clear about what to do with Accidental Guests of the male variety, and I had seen firsthand how that law was carried out. It had happened the year Tanzi arrived. A hunter had lost his way in a blizzard. He’d managed to pass through the glamour, and he’d ended up at the Convent’s front gate.
Sister Rose had wielded the knife. No questions asked, no hesitation, no remorse.
“It is the will of Sirmaya,” Hilga explained to Tanzi and me later. “And Rule 37 leaves no room for misunderstanding.”
But today—right now—I wasn’t actually in the Convent. I was inside the mountain, and there was plenty of room for misunderstanding.
Drip, drip, drip went the quicksilver. A reminder I did not have time for distractions. For men.
I broke our standstill first. “How did you get in here?”
“A good question. One for which I have no good answer.”
“Meaning you don’t know.”
“No clue.”
I rubbed at my throat with my free hand. Either my Nubrevnan was bad, or he had a roundabout way of speaking.
Likely both.
“Stop that,” I snapped.
“Stop what?” His hands lifted higher.
“Whatever you’re doing with your face.”
“This is my attempt at a smile. To calm you.” He smiled even wider, and I shuddered. The stretching of his lips and crinkling of his eyes made him look like he wanted to eat me.
He sighed. His face and shoulders drooped. “I suppose I’ve forgotten how to smile along with everything else …” He trailed off. Then he flung up a hand, eyes widening. “Um, there’s something behind you.”
“I’m not stupid.”
He gulped. “No doubt that’s true, but I’m not lying. A shadow is rising behind you. Very snake-like in shape—and very large.”
At that moment, the Rook erupted in a warning of feathers and howling.
So I turned.
I saw.
Ink spilled across the ice. Darkness slithering in two distinct columns, each with a thousand feathery legs on either side.
“Shadow wyrms,” I said at the same moment the man said, “Hagfishes.”
I flinched. He was right beside me, and this close, there was no ignoring how much he stank.
Of course, my awareness of his stench was a cursory, background thing compared to the approaching wyrms.
I had seen pictures of shadow wyrms in Tüll’s Compendium of Creatures. Though nothing in that tome had prepared me for their size—easily as long as the Convent—nor for the sound they made.
If it could even be called a sound. It was more a punch of surprise in my chest. Of hunger in my belly.
It was, in all ways, the opposite of the spirit swifts’ gentle call. This was visceral. This was hard. This was deadly.
“I think maybe we should run!” the man shouted, voice distorted by the shadow wyrms’ cry.
“I agree!” I shouted back, pivoting for the fire. “But not together!” I grabbed for the Firewitched matches. I couldn’t leave them behind. They were all I had for warmth. “Douse,” I commanded, and the flames snuffed out.
A half breath later, the wyrms stopped screaming. Somehow, the silence was worse. An echo to jitter down my spine and knock inside my organs.
The beasts were coming this way. Crossing over the glacier ceiling, they would soon reach the path behind us.
“I know you specifically said ‘not together,’” the man said, “but I don’t have a choice. You’re running this way, I’m running this way, and if we don’t do it at the same time, then one of us is going to die—”
“Enough!” I shrieked. “Come on!”
Another scream knifed over us, but we were running now. No time to dwell, no time to look back.
For the second time that day, I ran for my life.
The wyrms didn’t like it. They let loose another cry that hardened in my belly and tangled in my limbs.
I stumbled. My pack listed sharply forward—had it always been this heavy? But the man steadied me with a grip.
“Don’t touch me,” I snapped, an instinctive reaction. Even with the shared enemy of the shadow wyrms, I still did not know who this man was or what he wanted.
He released me, and the air around us seemed to gust colder.
The wyrms stopped screaming right as my feet slammed off the platform onto the ledge cutting forward. My escape was an overloud gallop, made all the louder by the pack’s jangle and clank.
“Maybe … they won’t … hurt us,” the man said between gasps. Already he wheezed, and we’d barely begun our escape. “Maybe they’re just curious!”
“Curious how we taste,” I barked back. “Faster!”
I don’t know why I added that command—it wasn’t as if he could move any faster. I blocked his way, and the pack slowed me down. Plus, my legs were half the length of his.
Ahead, the walkway cut left, curving with the ice before vanishing around a bend.
Please, Sirmaya, please be a tunnel on the other side—
A thud rattled through the earth. It shook right up to my knees, and a blast of cold seared over me from behind.
“Don’t look back!” the man roared.
I looked back.
A mistake, for the shadow wyrms had landed on the ledge, and with the flat, smooth stone beneath them, they were accelerating.
By a lot. Shadowy legs tendriled back and forth. Centipedes of pure darkness with no distinguishing features. Simply silhouette and hunger.
Briefly, as my gaze flew forward once more, I met the man’s eyes. They bulged and shook, the whites swallowing everything. I could only assume that mine looked the same—
I tripped. My left heel slipped over icy scree. My pack tilted toward the abyss.
This time, though, when the man grabbed the pack and yanked me upright, I did not say a word. I just pumped my legs faster.
I also did not dare look backward again.
We reached an inward curve in the ice, and the outward bend was approaching fast. So were the wyrms, though. Their hundreds of legs kept an endless vibration running through the stone, and with each breath that ripped from my throat, the vibrations shook harder.
“You called them shadow wyrms before!” the man shouted.
I offered no reply because by the Twelve, I did not understand why he was trying to speak. I could barely breathe and run at the same time, and he was panting much harder than I.
Yet still he continued: “So this isn’t Noden’s Hell, then? And those aren’t His Hagfishes?”
“No,” I huffed.
“That’s a relief—”
“STOP. TALKING.”
He stopped talking.
We hit the bend. The Rook had already swooped around—I took this as a sign that there was nothing dangerous ahead.
I was wrong.
A third shadow wyrm crawled over the ceiling, just like the one from before, and at its current pace, it would intersect with our one and only escape.
But there was a bit of gold to coat all the chaos: a doorway, almost identical to the one in the Crypts, waited a few hundred paces ahead.
If we could just get there before the wyrms got to us.
The Rook seemed to think the same, and, blessed bird, he gave a vicious screech before flapping right for the shadow wyrm on the ceiling.
A moment later, the wyrm screamed.
And its brethren behind us screamed too.
There it was again—that gut response. The urge to vomit welled hard in my throat, and I had to slow … then stop entirely, a hand planted on the wall to keep from losing my balance.
“Your bird is going to get itself killed!” the man said. He latched his hands firmly to my pack to keep me from toppling headfirst over the ledge.
>
“He knows … what he’s doing!” I answered between gasps for air, though I wasn’t entirely sure if that was true. What had worked in the Crypts might not work here.
I couldn’t dwell on it, though, just as I couldn’t stay stopped for long. The Rook had bought us a precious few moments with his sweeping and swinging.
I shoved off once more, picking up speed with each step, even as the wyrms’ shrieks pierced louder.
If the Rook could just keep that wyrm from crossing the ceiling for a few more moments, then we could reach the doorway.
So long as the ones behind us didn’t catch up.
As if on cue, the wyrms’ screams broke off and the man called, “Weren’t there two wyrms behind us?”
Oh, blighter.
“There was definitely a wyrm behind us,” he went on, but I didn’t make the mistake of looking back this time. If one wyrm was gone, then maybe that was a good thing.
Besides, the doorway was closing in. I could make out individual planks in the wood, and there at eye level was a slot for my knife.
Fifty paces and we would reach it.
Of course, the ledge on which we raced was also narrowing with each pounding step. Worse, the wyrm on the ceiling now scuttled toward us.
It was right as I groped the knife from its sheath—forty paces, only forty paces—that the earlier shadow wyrm catapulted from the ravine beside me.
All light winked out. In the space between one moment and the next, the world shrank down to me, the wyrm, and the sense of endless free fall.
This close, I could see what the creature truly was: a skeleton of black speckled with embers, as if bones had been dropped into a fire and left to burn. Smoke coiled off it in vast, eternal plumes of frozen darkness.
Then the sense of free fall hitched higher because I actually was falling.
Found in only the deepest, darkest places of the Witchlands, shadow wyrms are creatures of the Void. Few have entered their lairs and lived to tell the tale.
Something clamped—hard—onto my shoulders, and my fall ended as suddenly as it began. At first I thought the wyrm had reached me, had bitten.
Then I realized I was dangling, the ice wall at my back and a long, long drop before me. At my side, the wyrm still clambered upward.
Cold scored off it in vicious, mind-numbing waves.
I had no time to find out where it aimed before a strained voice called down, “I’m sorry! I know you told me not to touch you, but it was life or death—”
“HAUL ME UP,” I screeched. The shadow wyrm had not yet changed its course, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t.
“About … that,” the man panted, blocked from view by my pack, “with your bag and my angle … I’m not sure I can.” As if to prove the point, he jolted forward.
And I jerked down.
“Sorry,” the man called, his voice muffled by a steady boom that now drummed through the ice and stone. “The wyrms are … fighting each other … and … they’re tumbling this way.”
I had no choice—though fool that I am, I tried to think of some other way. This pack was all I had to sustain me. It was all I had left of the surface. Without it, I was truly on my own.
Another drop downward, and the man’s face appeared above the pack. Which meant he was about to fall.
That was it, then. This was my path and I had to stay firmly gripped upon it.
I wriggled free from the pack. One strap, two, and it was off. I had just enough time to watch the bag plummet downward—so, so far—before my vision wrenched upward and ice scraped across my back.
Something cracked against my belt before I reached the ledge, where the Nubrevnan helped me to my feet. He was panting, I was panting, but as one, we launched into a sprint—and just in time, for one of the wyrms was angling back toward us, emitting a scream that sent my vision whirling.
I had to keep one hand flat against the ice as I ran, not caring that the cold sliced.
Those screams that were not screams were getting closer, and the stone beneath me trembled.
Twenty paces shrank to ten shrank to five.
I reached the door, and in a frantic movement that sent the button flying off my leather sheath, I had the knife free.
I slammed it into the eye-level hole.
The door creaked wide.
The Nubrevnan grabbed my biceps and threw me inside, right as black cold and knee-shaking screams swallowed all my senses.
Then we were through the door, running—still running—as it thundered shut behind us.
The wyrms had not followed. We were safe.
Y2786 D354
MEMORIES
I met with the Six today, in my workshop and by cover of night. Always by cover of night.
They came to me, each by his or her own magical means. Only the Rook King could not come, but he sent his bird as a proxy. A rook trained as well as any dog. Better, even, for somehow after these meetings, the bird communicates all we discuss to his master.
That rook unsettles me. I wish the King would send his general instead. I’ve never met the man, but at least he is human.
It has been almost half a year since the Six last met and half a year since I promised them I could make the doorways between kingdoms as well as a way to kill the Exalted Ones once and for all.
But I have no doorways, and I am scarcely any closer to producing a weapon than I was at our last meeting.
I did not tell that to the Six, though. The cards show me again and again that an answer is coming—which means Sirmaya Herself is telling me to be patient.
So patient I will be.
“The underground city is almost finished,” Bastien said as we went around the table with our various updates. For once, he had removed the mask he always wore, and his scars from the Exalted Ones were plain for us to see.
A not so subtle reminder of why we fought as well as the power we were up against. For as powerful as the six Paladins were that I worked with, the other six, who called themselves the Exalted Ones, were even more so.
“There is currently space for twenty thousand,” Bastien continued with a scratch at the brow over his missing eye, “but Saria assures me we can expand.”
“We can,” Saria inserted. “The wheat and sorghum crops are finally responding to foxfire and magic light.”
“And we,” Rhian said, “have almost finished the lamps and the heating apparatus.”
“All that we lack,” finished Midne, looking to Baile, “is a source of energy to keep the billows blowing.”
Baile smiled. “It is done. I finished three days ago. The currents inside the plateau will flow and move exactly where we need them.”
“Oh, excellent!” cried Midne, and Rhian beamed at her aunt. “That means we can begin moving families as soon as the doorways are prepared.”
In perfect synchrony, all gazes swiveled to me. Even the bird’s, for of course the doorways are my responsibility. My promise to the Six.
“Soon,” I murmured. “’Tis no small amount of magic, and unlike all of you, I was not born with power.”
I use this excuse every time—that I am not a Paladin. That I do not have magic. But I know this tale will not keep working forever.
The rest of the meeting we spent lost in discussion. Family by family, we would move the people most oppressed by the Exalted Ones out of danger. They would remain in the underground city to the south until we could kill the corrupted Paladins and end their reincarnations forever.
Although our plans might soon come to fruition, one wrong move could still give us all away. And the violence Bastien had faced at the hands of the Exalted Ones would be nothing compared to the punishment our rebellion would unleash.
When the quicksilver in my hourglass ran out, the Six took their leave. All except Lady Baile. She lingered, pretending to examine my latest assortment of stones. Yet as soon as we were alone, she spoke, “You seem preoccupied today, Dysi.”
I cringed. This was exactly what I had
feared—that Lisbet and Cora were taking up more of my mind and energy than I had to spare.
“I apologize, my lady.” I bobbed my head. “One of my wards is … trouble.” This wasn’t entirely true, of course. Lisbet was not trouble at all, but I did not want to explain how worried she made me lately.
With eyes almost full silver, her mind was in another world.
“Ah.” Baile’s forehead wrinkled with a frown. She dropped a limestone chunk atop its pile. “I admit this was not what I expected you to say. I thought perhaps you had found someone.”
“Found … someone?”
“Hye. A new man or woman—or perhaps both.” She twirled a hand in the air. “It is just that you seem happier than I have seen you in ages.”
Nothing could have surprised me more, and Baile seemed to register the shock on my face, for she hastened to add, “Of course you also seem worried, Dysi, but we are all worried these days. What I see in you tonight is a flush on your cheek and a secret smile on your lips. Which is why I cannot help but suspect that you have found someone.”
“I … no.” I could barely swallow the chuckle building in my chest. Me, finding someone. It was truly laughable. “You mean like a Heart-Thread, don’t you?”
But Baile wasn’t laughing. “Hye, like a Heart-Thread.”
This time, I let a snort break free. “Where would I even meet someone, my lady? I spend all my time here, in the workshop, trying to build our doorways.”
Baile bounced one shoulder. “Sisters may take lovers, no?”
“Of course,” I said, “but I haven’t.”
She glanced toward the door, where I noticed a masked figure waited in the tunnel outside. “Sometimes we fall in love with those who have been beside us all along.”
Ah. So my suspicions regarding those two Paladins were true.
I shook my head. “I am afraid this is not the case for me. No Sisters have suddenly caught my eye, and no one else has entered my life …” The rest of my argument faded from my lips, for while I had been speaking, someone’s face had indeed come to mind.
Someone who would be at the Supplicant’s Sorrow tomorrow. Someone who visited once each month on the full moon.