Black as diamond, p.31
Black as Diamond, page 31
“Chaos Aspect.” Palenisa hissed as though burned, bringing his fears to life. “Shit!”
The most powerful of the twelve, not only could they counteract other Aspects, but rumor had it, they could do so with spells as well. Only rumors, Wren told himself. But, just the same, the prospect froze him to the floor.
During her rare visits, his Aunt Sanawe had spun tales of the Crusades, when rogue Aspects openly hunted lulaik and Weavers. She’d said chaos was a Weaver’s worst nightmare. She’d said they were the reason the Weavers had died out. Though just stories, she probably shouldn’t have been telling all that to a child.
“Shit, indeed,” Sagan said, turning to her. He reached into the folds of his suman and pulled out an alexandrite token. Pink, blue, and green streaked the glossy coin, a single dark line banding the center—cat’s-eye alexandrite. The kind found only on Anticarta.
“Give this to the captain, Yuri—do not call her that, by the way. Beneath the stairs in the tower, you’ll find a trapdoor and tunnels leading to a cove. They’ll meet you there.”
Sagan pressed the cat’s-eye into Palenisa’s hand, appearing to ignore the agitation his touch elicited. The pause was palpable. It burrowed as deep as a well. She stared at the gem, then at him. Lips thin, he raised his brows. “Go.”
As if drawn back to the situation, Palenisa started. She jutted her chin sharply, and before she left, she locked worried eyes with Wren.
“Don’t die?”
A weak grin painted his lips. “I’ll . . . do my best.”
Behind her, Rishé’s eyes rolled so far back they almost disappeared. She pushed the other woman down the hall, almost tumbling them both into the atrium’s pool. “Wonderful, no one will die—let’s move it.” Rishé peered up through her choppy fringe. A wordless moment passed between them. An apology from him, and what he hoped was acceptance from her. A decade had degraded his ability to read her as he once could. They would never be as they once were—but he hoped they could be something new.
“Take care of yourself,” she mumbled in a raw tone, leaving him with more of her heart than he expected.
They left him and Asaru standing by the door as the world closed in, their time together drawing thin, though he still had so much left to say.
The hand in his tightened.
“Wren.”
He took a breath, tried to wrestle his feelings into submission, and failed. Another gentle hand took his jaw, guiding his face down to meet Asaru’s forehead. He gulped as those fingers moved to the crook of his neck. Their breaths warmed the air between them, a bubble that contained no one else.
Asaru lifted their connected hands, pressed them over Wren’s wreath. Their bond—their own special brand of curse.
“A different kind of friend?” Asaru whispered. The smile he wore was lopsided, as if he didn’t do it often, soft as the suffused pink of dawn. It looked like the kind of smile about which poets waxed, scribes eulogized, painters spent lifetimes replicating. Wren scanned his face, committing to memory that smile in the clay of his mind.
“A different kind of friend,” he replied. From his shirt pocket, Wren pulled out the paper flower he’d crafted the night before during his most embarrassing emotional turmoil, utterly agonizing in his tower room.
Fetching eyes widened, as big and bright as the thousand thousand suns. “A crystal lotus.”
“I, um, searched the Great Memories for accounts of what they looked like . . .” Wren said, tucking the twisted stem behind Asaru’s ear among mussed tresses, lingering a moment before drawing away. “Hope I got it right.”
The bloom was crafted of folded graphite-smeared paper torn from his primer, too limp to stand straight when held by the stem, lacking both the minty scent and shimmering moonlight petals the accounts described of a real blossom.
“Not really,” Asaru said, cupping Wren’s cheek and releasing an exhale that sounded almost like a laugh.
Desperation bled into Wren’s sword-impaled heart, stealing the air from his lungs. He licked his lips like a man dying of thirst as the words stumbled free. More than anything, he needed to know. “Can you promise we’ll see each other again?”
They were wrenched apart before he could hear Asaru’s response. If there even was one.
“We have to leave. Now.” Sagan hauled him outside, his grip surprisingly strong for his stature.
“Asaru!” Palenisa tugged the man down the hall, deep into the castle and away from Wren.
Blackened fingers lingered as they parted, the sun kissing the horizon goodbye. Only hope held that it would rise again from its temporary death the next day.
As the Nest door was closing, Wren watched Asaru disappear beneath the floor, his gaze filled with the same keen yearning emanating through their bond. The door shut, and he was unsure it would ever open again.
He blinked a sheen from his eyes as the ward trembled again under a barrage of fire. Red and white rebounded violently off sparkling green. Midnight sludge pooled at the border of the ward where they fell, a writhing dark ring. Boulders of flame struck the incline below, shaking through the earth. Black glass gave a serpent’s hiss as it ran like tears. The desert was crying.
“Damn it,” Sagan muttered at his side. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
The man slid his mask back on, violet blazing to life in the sockets. Expression hidden, his body language betrayed nothing as he undid his wraps and shoved up his sleeves. One forearm bore the image of Eșarpe coiled around an egg. A spellwork mural was stitched across the olive flesh of the other.
War lulaik. The thought rose to the surface of the tangled emotions within Wren, recalling tales of the lulaik who fought in the Founding War. Nothing like him, failed healer that he was.
Crouching, Sagan folded his arms one over the other in a line, fingers pressed into multiple spell circles to charge. The red glow of khetry hung from his wrists, flicking and spinning as the living substance strummed. Then he swung them out in a spiral and cast a spell that the ward echoed in turn.
Geometric patterns whirled to life, flaring on the virulent green dome. The same shapes shone on Sagan’s gloves as he held his arms out, stepping forward as if pushing against the torrent of a sandstorm. The patterns flashed, shifting forms quickly. Concentric, looping, endlessly changing.
Sweat trickled down the side of Sagan’s neck. His arms shook from the effort of maintaining his reinforcements on the ward. It was an honest effort; it wouldn’t hold. The green shield shuddered, the gaps in the barrier growing larger and longer.
“Sagan,” Wren said. “It won’t hold.”
“This is the Chronicler’s life’s work.” Sagan’s distorted voice wavered with strain.
A wispy arm of darkness slammed into the ward with a deafening boom, and spiritual energy shattered like soundless glass. From the uneven hole in the ward, gray lines splintered outward. An infection eating at the green.
Wren recognized it instantly—chaos.
Under his mask, Sagan gasped.
He and Sagan lowered their gazes to where the lone figure stood flanked by fire. The Aspect’s face was hidden by a collar of silver fur, but from their arms dripped a hoary mist, warping the air. The mist doubled in Wren’s vision, and his eyes refused to settle, constantly drawn upward to the chaos Aspect’s unseen eyes.
The gray kept creeping, eating the ward into nothingness.
Slowly, as if moving through molasses, the freelancer raised an arm. They framed their face with their other hand, palm flat.
Wren’s breath caught.
There was a tense pause. The freelancer snapped. And the ward shattered.
All the air was sucked inward to a single point of impact. A high, piercing screech accompanied the torrential winds billowing in every direction. Across the desert echoed the shattering of a hundred thousand crystals. Fragmented, innumerable. Irrecoverable.
A pair of arms wrapped around Wren’s waist, and his eyes slammed shut as he was thrown aside. The ward spared them from the worst of the gale. But as he peeled his eyes open and squinted over Sagan’s shoulder, he watched the rest of it fall apart until nothing remained of the proud ward but green slivers woven through with gray chaos like a fraying net.
One of the fire Aspects snapped, sending a firestorm raining down upon the castle. Bolts of lightning accompanied the blinding blasts as the air thinned of water.
When Wren turned, the Nest was crumbling.
White boiled and popped to reveal nightmarish black innards where the desert merged with the stone as it dripped waxen down the dark candle of the cliff face. Giant burns scarred the previously unblemished surface. What sounded like a million snakes hissed from the interior, consuming everything in its path, as fire was wont to do.
“It’s gone.” Barely audible, there was a tremor to Sagan’s distorted double voice. “Now we are alone.”
One of his gloves fluttered to the glass in tatters, stray sparks sizzling across his swollen fingers. The thin black lines tattooed around the index and middle fingers were hidden by purple and covered in thin cuts Sagan tried to hide from Wren. Their eyes met and he offered his hand. Wren took it, letting Sagan tug him upward. He wished he could see the man’s true eyes. See if the emotion that welled there was the same as what slumped his shoulders.
Breaking his gaze, Sagan took a cracked shard of obsidian and carved a spell into his palms before clapping them together. Feathery light streamed from his fingertips. Blue lines branched into the veins of a leaf, forming a convex shield to protect the front of the Nest. What little it could protect.
Still, the Nest burst into flames, an explosion of ethereal light coloring the distant, flat expanse with a sickening green. The smoke provided them cover as Sagan took Wren’s hand again, and they hurried around the castle.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen.” Wren heard Sagan mumbling. He tried not to listen, but he heard it repeated. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
The ground split to reveal a set of perilous steps carved from the cliff face that disappeared behind them as they gingerly descended, sliding seamlessly back into the wall like dresser drawers being shut. At the bottom was a small cove created by indelicate hands, the upper curve bearded with black stalactites. Murky water lapped at the shore. There was actual sand there. Sadly, Wren thought this must have been all that remained of the desert that once had been.
Cinders fell like snow outside the cove, dissolving into the gentle sea.
Against the far wall, a strange-looking boat bobbed in the shallows. An engine hung over the back, a long handle protruding from the mechanical mess.
“What is it?” Wren asked, catching the rope Sagan tossed his way.
“Steam skiff from the Veil Islands,” the man muttered, shoving the boat the rest of the way into the water.
Wren hopped into the front, boots drenched. At the rear, Sagan unfurled the crimson sail with practiced ease. Placing a knee on the back bench, he started the engine, and the skiff took off with a cough of steam as they sped into the sea. As the skiff sailed from the cove, the water faded to a crisp robin’s-egg blue, and the sky brightened to a cloudless afternoon.
But when Wren glanced up to the Nest, his heart turned to stone and sank to his gut.
Thick globules of ivory melted down the face. The lip of the cliff drooped under the scalding heat. The deep-set foundation caved under the castle’s monumental weight by the sheer force of violence. Fading spots of bismuth gray dotted the white miasma, hissing on contact with the water. Soon the Great Memories were but a smear of burnt color in the geode gash. The accumulated knowledge of thousands of years and a constant record of the present, gone in a matter of minutes. What remained of the tower finally crumbled into the sea, sending a wave rolling toward them. It swept them farther from the destruction of the Chronicler’s work.
The eyes of Sagan’s mask dimmed. His shoulders fell, and he shoved down the engine’s handle with the tense line of his swollen arm, guiding the skiff east.
To the north, Yuri’s ship sailed away. They were already so far out that the people aboard were but spots in Wren’s vision. Atop the mizzenmast he spotted a dark figure and knew from the pulse in his brand that it was Asaru. Limp wings spread out on either side of the figure, seeming from that distance to be made of midnight. What were once feathers were now dripping with slick, roiling pitch.
Smiling sadly, Wren clutched his heart. The brand sent a flare of anxiety through him. The southern heat warred with the sea spray along the sides of the skiff. Cool water threaded loss through him as a tapestry of resolve unfurled. He touched the pocket at his breast and was sure of the choice he’d made. The pitiable one. But when they met again, he would have the power to mend his mistakes—to save Asaru.
We’ll see each other again.
IV
Brilliant
Facets
Rishé
“Put it to your ear and hear the water for me, mior little ceurer,” Jarha had signed to her daughter as they roamed the shore. “Aulkit’an’tios coshi cainr’an-kolle. Be my ears, and tell me of her song.” Listen to how she sings.
Down the woman’s arm was stitched an intricate display of threads in varying iridescent shades to form a bower of sticks. Burnished-copper fringe obscured her eyes as she pressed the striated conch to young Rishé’s hand. She was indistinct, not quite right in this watery recollection.
The child reached up with chubby fingers, giggling as the tide shushed in and out of her ear. Practiced hands forming the words of her second language, she did her best to describe the voice of the susurrating sea to her mother. Beside them, Jarha’s shadow-faced husband looked up from his primer, features equally unclear.
“Actually, it’s not—” Isile’s signing was interrupted by his wife’s foot knocking the side of his ankle, hard. He winced, rubbing with his blueberry-stained fingers at where she had jammed him. He couldn’t hold the expression for long, his face softening at the sight of their daughter as she grinned at him.
Jarha knelt and plucked something from the surf. Cupped in her hand was a gem with silver whorls. It pulsed, a glowing flame contained.
She tried to show it to her daughter, but she toddled away, more interested in the shell than anything else. It was just a gem. What did a child care? The child should have cared. For mere moons later, her mother would be gone, and that crimson stone would be all that remained.
“Vuan’kon.” Look.
A little Rishé looked back at her mother with bright-eyed intensity.
Jarha’s face blurred, torn like a waterlogged painting. Colors dripped, umber melting into amber and sapphire—and red. Burning, burning. Isile, too, was a smeared mess of strokes, his voice indistinguishable from the rush of blood.
A single drop of water fell. Then another. The drops morphed into a flood cascading down, the image in her mind a smudge of memories. As the memory melted, Rishé exhaled. On the water, contentment went hand in hand with grief.
Her fingers brushed Jarha’s last keepsake; she clasped it. The stone leeched warmth from her hands, and light glinted off the shallow whorls. At certain angles, it had the translucent quality of ice.
She pressed it to her lips and wished her mother were still with her. More time—she just wanted more time. They should have had more time together—unearthing the secrets of the gem, knowledge passing from mother to daughter like a primer passed through generations. But she was alone. Because the world didn’t care what anyone wanted. It went on carelessly, and it was her self-appointed duty to steal from it any meaning she could.
Sighing, Rishé breathed in the sea, tasted its salt. She watched the murky Lethean waters melt into that of the pale yellow Nectarian. Silver sailfish leaped by the ship, and in the depths, silhouettes of behemoth beasts glided at a ponderous pace before disappearing.
In her mere sixty-five years, she’d never left the continent. Hadn’t even considered it until the madam’s offer to send her to Fa Djain. The farthest she’d ever traveled was the stony shores of southern Bartrom. Her mother had always wanted to see the world beyond the horizon. In a way, she was—through the eyes that her daughter inherited from her.
The temperature dropped and her nape prickled. Wind whipped her braids into her eyes.
They’d been at sea over a week, but only during the last three days had the sky darkened. It grumbled testily with a storm that didn’t seem to want to break. Somehow, though, she felt it would soon. A twinge from an old shoulder injury gained in the forge told her so.
She looked down at the waterlogged tome. On one knee she balanced her journal, pages brimming with notes. Her neat penmanship gave way to hasty graphite scribbles, curving across the page as she tilted it to accommodate her overexcitement. How could she be blamed when this was everything she’d been searching for?
Her lips rounded over the incantations she’d interpreted thus far. Without sound, they felt strange in her mouth—with, they sounded even stranger. Like something sparking along her tongue, popping overly warm and sour as a badly made tart.
The language, she’d found, bore a very distant similarity to Emedu, the Chilawari tongue. Using her thin knowledge of it and her proclivity for linguistics, Rishé translated another line into a vague approximation in Akiki and jotted it down. She had no idea if her translation was anything close to correct.
So far, she had deduced that the page described a location. Or a ritual. Or a location of ritual significance. Most of this was done through diagrams, which depicted a series of mirrors arranged in a hexagon. There were what she assumed to be numbers calculating lengths and widths and other formulas, as well as a caricature of a drake doodled in the corner. Spiraling—her pen followed its coiling body—spiraling.
