The Void Ascendant, page 26
Eventually we narrowed it down to two doors, so far apart I had to wonder how big the jail cells were behind them... or how big a god might be. The size of a mountain? The size of a virus? No size at all? Maybe it was nothing more than a burst of light, or three musical notes, or a hopeful thought.
And would it be happy to see us, even? What might happen once we freed it? What if it responded by lashing out at us?
“There’s a ritual speech,” Yenu said in response to my fretting, but she sounded like she wasn’t really listening. She studied the door minutely, running her fingers across the carved greenish metal and pressing her helmet to it as I had. “It’ll be fine. They protect life, they hold life sacred. There’s no oath they’ve sworn to fight the Ancient Ones, but that’s all they ever did.”
“So it’s said,” I said.
“So it’s said.”
Said by who? I almost said, clamped my lips shut. Now was not the time for doubt. Even so: “Will we know it as soon as we see it? What if it looks like some horrible dangerous thing?”
“I don’t know.” She ran her fingers along the spirals again, then dug something out of her coat. “I suppose if it tries to kill us immediately, it’s a guard.”
“And if it waits till you start talking to kill us, it’s a god.”
“Mmhm.” She had brought a small glass flask of something sluggish and inert, golden but gleaming like mercury. It looked for all the world like the stuff that had emptied out of her with that first spell to move the ship. Maybe it was.
“What’s that?”
“I’m still figuring it out,” she said, and tipped the flask against the door, sending a slow glittering stream trickling onto the floor.
“You’re... what?”
Sudworth took a large step backwards from the door.
Yenu said, “Look, I’m going to analyze it at some point, I swear. It’s not a totally unknown thing. It’s... It moves around, accompanying things, not a thing itself. I think it’s something that was once used in the past to run certain spells. So I’m using it as if it were.”
“None of that made sense. And you’ve done this before? You’ve read about this?”
“Not exactly.” She stepped back too, and watched as the thin sparkling stream paused, found one of the carvings, moved slowly into it, began to climb back up, filling in the spirals and sending out tiny symmetrical tendrils, for all the world like a millipede, moving against gravity. “Educated guess,” she said again, but more uncertainly.
It was looking for something, I thought: its movements had purpose. In the silence, the scratch and skitter of its movement across the pale metal made the hairs go up on the back of my neck. All at once it vanished into a nearly-invisible crack fifty yards up, nearly at the limit of the weak, wobbling circle of golden light from our lantern.
“Mm,” Yenu said approvingly. “There’s the lock.”
“How did it know to look for a lock?”
“Beats me. You never know what things know.”
Something creaked, then groaned, a metallic noise but uncannily like a voice. Yenu slowly replaced the empty flask. Behind me, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ksajakra drawing his sword; I did too.
And the door slid upwards in little jerks, metal grinding against stone, screaming, inch by inch. The smile fell away from Yenu’s face. I glanced at it only once.
“Run,” I said.
This was something I had thought lost in the years I had spent pent up in the tower: me, the princess, never letting down my hair. But it was still in there somewhere, the ability to know danger for what it was, taught by the best.
Ksajakra barely hesitated; he swept Sudworth smoothly under one arm and took off, his form as perfect as any Olympian sprinter. I tailed him, arms pumping. The entrance was so far away, and whatever was behind us, whatever it was, would outpace us. But it was run or fight, and a single look at Yenu’s face had told me we could not fight.
“Wait!” she screamed behind us in Low Dath, from another direction entirely, not behind us. “Not that way!”
I risked a look back: a darkness, of course, since we had the light, but also a new light, pinkish—in fact reddish, bloody—outlining a boiling mass of black tentacles, and a small shadow not running but scuttling across the floor. Yenu: heading for the other door.
I skidded to a stop, nearly cracking my head on the slick floor, and flailed for Ksajakra, too far ahead of me. “Did you hear her? This way!”
“What?” He kept running; I took off again to keep up with him, and finally snatched at his sleeve, tugging him backwards.
“This way!”
“Are you crazy?”
“Put me down, you fucking maniacs!” Sudworth screamed. “The way out is over there!”
We both got an arm on her instead and raced after Yenu, the tentacles rumbling behind us, snarling now, a voice behind them groaning, tendrils shooting out to stab at the other doors, a secret key. One by one they began to squeak and lift, up into the body of the mountain.
The room became a kaleidoscope and cacophony of pursuit. The usual nightmare: we were too slow, our pursuers too swift; we were small, they were large.
What saved us, I thought later, was only that Yenu had not started towards the entrance, even for a moment: had rushed, instantly, to the other of the two doors. It was the only one not opening.
She raised a hand and sent out a streak of green-blue light so bright that it burned into my retinas from top right to bottom left, like a knife slash, melting a round hole in the door. She slid through it like a snake.
It seemed to take forever to reach the door. Ksajakra pushed Sudworth through, then shoved me in the small of the back. “Go!”
“You first! I won’t fit!” She did that on purpose, I thought clinically as he dropped flat and wriggled through. Made a hole I wouldn’t fit through. I drew my sword and turned to face the darkness, feeling the stone floor shake as the things gathered, galloped, flew, soared towards us.
“Prophet! Get in here! I have to seal it up!”
I wavered, glanced back, saw nothing, not their faces, nothing. Just the darkness of the hole.
“Nick!”
All right. If she thought I’d fit... So much for death with dignity. I threw my sword through first, yelling “Heads up!” and then shucked off my coat, stuffed it through, dove in as best I could.
As I had calculated, my shoulders caught, then my stomach, but someone inside—impossible to tell who, maybe all of them—seized my wrists and dragged, and I kicked my way through into a cold, stale-smelling gray light, the same slick floor. Yenu shouted “Duck!” and loosed another blast of light.
The door rang to a thousand impacts from the outside: the sound of claws and fangs and feet and anger on the green metal. I backed away from it and climbed to my feet, gasping for air faster than the helmet could generate it. Sudworth handed me my sword, her hand shaking.
“And what was that, then?” she said critically as I stuffed it back into its sheath, which took several tries. “You were going to fight off the guards by yourself?”
“I was going to distract them for a few seconds while you two figured out how to seal up the door,” I said.
“Well, she wouldn’t let us till you were through,” Sudworth said crossly. “Damn fool. Could’ve got us all killed.”
“I mean, there’s still time.”
“That won’t hold,” Yenu croaked, padding past us; huge swathes of her coat had been burned away, leaving the charred lining holding it together in spots. I picked up my own coat and put it on, glancing back at the lumpy round patch-weld she’d put over our entrance hole. “Come on.”
The god’s cell, if that’s what we were in, was the size of a cathedral, and the gray illumination that I had assumed was daylight was actually a small but brilliant light set high in the arched ceiling. The room was carved from dark blue stone, veined and slickly polished and warded from top to bottom, the wards inset in what looked like white glass or tile. The floor vibrated as the things outside scrabbled at the door.
I gave it another once-over. “It’s...”
“Empty,” Ksajakra said slowly, drawing it out. My stomach sank. Was this it? The end of the con? The betrayal Sudworth said we should watch for?
Yenu said, “No, it’s in here. We just have to wake it up.”
“We?”
She cleared her throat and began reciting something that I immediately recognized as the Old Tongue, whose real name you could not even say, lest it draw the attention of the Ancient Ones. Sudworth recognized it too, and froze in place, mouth open. Stop! I wanted to scream, but Yenu would not have used it lightly, and would not have used it at all if any other words of power would do, surely, surely this wasn’t the double-cross... My blood ran cold just to hear it, and the wards began to whine, then shriek, till we had to cover our ears over their screams.
When they began to explode from the walls, there was nothing we could do but duck, the transparent shrapnel shattering into iridescent dust against the stone floor, pinging against our backs like thrown stones, clipping our exposed hands or sticking in our boots.
The sounds from outside grew muffled; Yenu’s voice faded. A golden mist enveloped her, pure magic precipitating out of the air and snowing onto her clothes and skin, sticking to her helmet like powdered paint.
And then it was there. A narrow slit in reality reaching from floor to ceiling, a slender darkness from one angle and invisible from the next, in which a few, faraway stars glittered.
Faintly, Yenu said, “We bid you greeting, and thank you for your kind regard in letting us live.”
What language was she speaking? I was hearing it, impossibly, as every language I knew, layered on top of each other like the pages in a book. Was the god doing it?
The restraints are not completely broken, the god said, or somebody said; I seemed to feel it, in the bones of my jaw and up through my teeth and eyesockets, rather than hear it in my ears. Next to me, I saw but did not hear Sudworth swear.
“We released the guards,” Yenu said. “Accidentally. I apologize. But our need was... is dire. And there’s no time. Please hear us: the Ancient Ones are more powerful than ever, and They have started a new war of conquest. Millions of lives are at stake. They are killing even now, as we speak.”
That is not a war. That is massacre. It is how they fight: one-sided.
“Yes,” Yenu said meaningfully. “Unless someone could oppose Them.”
If we are free, we will; we have sworn a secret oath to do so. But you should not have started with me, little mortal. I cannot even get us out of here.
The temperature seemed to drop; Yenu’s mouth moved for a moment in sheer stunned surprise, and then she looked up at the god, gathering her thoughts. Below my growing panic, I allowed myself a dark moment of glee: she hadn’t been expecting this wrench in her plans. The others, maybe. Maybe. But not this. This was supposed to be the end of it, and she would dust her hands off and walk away the hero. This was the entire goal of the resistance... and now the god was trying to tag out.
I am weakened from this captivity. From the long enclosure. What time has passed, what power has left me, you will never be able to understand...
“Can we help?”
I will need a resting place to regain my strength and feed. Inside a mortal. My own is not enough.
“Then I volunteer.”
Not you.
Ksajakra flinched; Sudworth blinked, tightened her lips. And again memory ambushed me: a dry, soft voice... a book speaking to me, or dozens of books, across dimensions and galaxies, through walls and angles real and imagined. Not her. Never her.
Not her. They didn’t say why.
They didn’t say why.
There are others here, the god said slowly, who can access the etheric flow... one of them.
Yenu nodded stiffly, disappointment as well as terror radiating off her every movement. Behind us, metal screeched; I glanced back to see the the patch bowing towards us, a grotesque sight, like a swelling boil. Already something sticky and probing was coming through the gaps.
Choose, I thought desperately, but said nothing. Yenu, for once wisely, also did not.
The books didn’t say why. And I didn’t ask them why, either. But why not her? A genius, a powerful practitioner of magic. Sudworth talking about—what’s the word? Neosomething. That no one in history has been able to do, because they all died. Why not her? And my God, the venom in their voices, if I had heard it correctly. The books said: Not her. They said: Never her. They said Never.
Hurry, hurry, hurry...
You, the god said, and my back teeth clacked together.
I stared at the long streak of darkness as best I could, the tiny stars moving inside it, if stars they were. “I don’t know,” I said, and glanced behind myself again: the metal tearing now—grudgingly, like a thick sheaf of paper, but tearing anyway. What was coming in? A claw appeared, startling, stark white against the metal, and withdrew.
“Prophet,” Ksajakra whispered urgently. “Just say yes.”
I glanced at Sudworth, who shook her head almost imperceptibly, staring straight ahead at the wall, avoiding looking at the god.
And I thought very clearly, as if someone were saying it out loud: Wait a minute. Weak. The god said it was weak.
Maybe her plan does end here. She didn’t know this was going to happen; she doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. Maybe I can still salvage this. Maybe there is something to salvage.
It doesn’t have to be a war, even now. The presence of an enemy doesn’t mean there has to be a fight. I could reason with the god, make it see sense, if it’s inside me I might be the only one who can. Weak as it is. Maybe. You never know. Convince it; or fight it and control it, gain its power; or suppress it, refuse to let it act. I won’t know until I...
“All right,” I said. There would probably be a ceremony, and I hoped it would be quick, or the god would be trying to enter a dead body. “What do I—?”
And the darkness rushed in on me, all gladness and the distant sound of bells.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Startled, I fell through void that should have held nothing to fall through, nothing for my skin to sense and resist, no air, no gravity, and yet I felt wind rush past my face and all the chemicals of fear and panic race through my blood and I screamed silently and the scream came out along frequencies of wave and particle that the void simply disregarded, and another emptiness behind this emptiness opened up like an eye, perceiving me until I was too close to perceive, and I fell through it, and another emptiness opened up again, perceiving me.
I was falling towards the god and the emptiness that had eaten everything inside of me, and when at last we met, it was nothing more than a small, golden mote, a sizzling little ordinary-looking spark, as if it had just been spat out of a fire.
If I could see the light and the colour, maybe I had eyes. Did I have hands? I tried to hold them out in front of me and succeeded, though they looked odd: smooth, unscarred, unscorched. Their hair gleamed like gold filigree.
I reached for the spark, which jumped as if startled and jerked out of the way. “All right,” I said. To stand, to speak, felt real enough: muffled, diluted, but real. “Where are we? We’re in me, aren’t we? In my mind. So now I’m going to be calling the shots. Can you understand me? Are you listening?”
I’m listening. The sound seemed to come straight into my head and march across whatever parts of my brain could hear and see, as if briefly imprinted across both my eyes and my ears like a projector.
“Okay, good,” I said, nonplussed. Even embarrassed, I had to admit, but I tried to push it down. Lives, worlds were at stake. I found myself rushing, stumbling over my words. “I don’t think Yenu—that woman out there, the one in the black coat?—really made it clear what was happening. Which is that she’s trying to use you. Just like she’s trying to use me. If she’s not aligned with the Ancient Ones, I mean the Adversaries—”
I know who you mean.
“I... Yes, thank you. If she’s not actually allied with Them, actively, right now, then she’s as close as doesn’t matter. Whatever she’s choosing to do serves Them, and to me that means there’s no difference. What she wants you to do is start rounding up the other gods, so you can create an army like the one in the last war, and fight Them again. But to me all that means is that a lot of innocent people are going to die. Not that the war will end. And especially not the way she wants it to.”
The god hung silently, expectant, in what I slowly began to realize was not quite void—more like water, stagnant water full of some very fine particulate, like ash. The darkness around us was not a lack of light, only an inability for light to penetrate from outside.
Why does she feel that ending the war is her responsibility?
“That is a good question with a very, very long answer. But it doesn’t matter. To stop her: that’s something mortals can do. Gods don’t even have to get involved. So that’s what I’m doing. Don’t do as she tells you, you understand? She’ll give up on this, and that’ll be that. Lives will be saved. Maybe including hers. And part of her knows that, part of her knows I’m right. She freed you. I get that you’re grateful for that. But don’t let it lead to another war. Are we clear?”
Silence again. Idly I wondered if I could fight it, the god. Overpower it maybe, if I had to. I was the one we were inside, after all; I should be able to control it if it didn’t obey me. Not physically, but what did ‘physically’ mean anyway? We were in my mind. My place. My power. And the god was the one who was weak.
“All you have to do,” I said, “is do nothing.”
I am so weak now that nothing will be all I can do for some time.
“Good. Just keep it up then.” And unbidden, I felt a flare of hope so sudden and bright that for a second I was surprised we both couldn’t see it in here as something real, like fireworks. There was still hope for me, at least, no matter what Yenu said. And she was the one who had made it so. I could get the god to take me back to Aradec if she wouldn’t, and maybe the King and the Queen would listen to me, understand that I had been taken hostage and forced to act under duress, and then I could turn over the god as a prized POW...
