Black as diamond, p.33
Black as Diamond, page 33
Once the last of the crew had disembarked, they made their way to where the stony shore graded into colorless dirt, seamless as the blend of sky at sunrise. Gray kissed the unmarked path, which crept along like beckoning fingers. The road, if one could call it that, rose in parts as if someone had cracked a geode in two and draped the contents all over the terrain.
They stayed close to Rishé as she glanced up from her compass, turned aside, then glanced back down to it. Following, the crew chattered in the cursive of their native tongue, long and drawling like a melting slurry. Every so often Palenisa tossed them a suspicious glare, which was met with amusement. She trusted them as little as she did Sagan, and rightly so, considering what the masked shit had done. Parts of her brain still felt tender.
Stuffing gloved hands inside her pockets, Palenisa peered over Rishé’s shoulder at the compass. The needle swung aside, swaying as they followed its marrowstone line.
“You know where we’re going?”
“Kimberlite pine trees grow near diamondglass on Anticarta. They’re nourished by the gems, I think,” Rishé said, guiding them beneath an overhang of rock that curved like a crooked back.
The mist opened up on the other side, and the island seemed to unfurl like a rough tongue. Treveyna was much larger than expected, so they found themselves walking for hours, pausing only to eat dried meats and warm themselves by a fire when night fell, much to the chagrin of their companions. For the three of them, though, this had been their lives for the last two moons.
By the time they got to the “forest,” blue and pink were filtering through the relentless cloud cover, casting the island in the suffused hues of dawn. Somehow everything was bright, yet dull and gray, a contradiction of equalities.
Morning frost misted their breaths as they came upon the mouth of what some might call a forest. A thin sheet of snow had fallen overnight, coating the hundreds of stone pillars that jutted from the uncompromising earth. Wide bases spiraled up into many-armed points, like candelabras, the breeze clattering a discordant tune between them. Some pillars rose neatly, others fell across the path like crossed bars sprinkled in white. Trailing through the thick crowd of columns, their reflections stretched and smeared across the silvery surfaces in a myriad of smudged colors.
Tall and commanding, at a certain angle they looked almost like suvaunoors. The sight reminded Palenisa of lying prostrate before the monuments to her faith at the foot of the kharess’s manse. But she would never get to do so again. Not while she wore dishonor as a coat, slathered in the effluent of shame.
As they ventured deeper into the island, the features on the pillars clarified and she saw what they truly were: trees. Petrified kimberlite trees. Palenisa reached out, brushing a trunk ridged with whorls resembling suvaugrams. Where she expected to hear the cries of the earth—there was nothing. The once- trees were shorn to sharpness by centuries of icy winds. Gone for longer, millennia maybe, like a living person once their aether had evanesced, irreparably destroyed in death. The touch left her with a gap in the cavern beneath her ribs. Snatching her hand back, she exhaled and rushed back to the others.
“This place feels familiar,” Asaru said quietly. Something glinted in his black-drowned eyes when he trailed them up the stone roots to the peak of a massive kimberlite.
In the very center of the forest, the enormous fist of a fossil reached for the overcast sky. Its circumference must have been the length of five, maybe six, of Palenisa’s wingspan, and it was the only member of the stony horde that appeared to have branches. Thick gray growths with the consistency of hard light dipped low to form an arch of rock that resembled the legs of hunkering spiders. From the undulating tangle of stone roots half buried in the earth in a windswept spiral, this seemed to be the origin from which the rest of the forest had once sprawled.
“It’s like a dendrite forest,” Asaru said in a breathless murmur that stuttered into coughs. The fit ran through him, shaking sacred silence from the air. Black bile stained the back of his hand, then his coat when he wiped it at his side. The gruesome smear stood stark against the fabric.
It hurt to look at.
When Palenisa’s concerned gaze swept back up, she found him dazed, eyes fogged over. Too much like Khensu, his unfortunate kin found in the worst place to die. Alone.
Stay alive, alive, alive. The refrain reeked with a need matched only by her desire for the Zodiac’s approval. A fool’s errand, she envisioned as their reply. But surely once they had the diamondglass, the end to all this would be that much closer. Not a cure, not a break. An end. To the curse, her promise—promises, plural. Everything, neat and final.
Shafts of sun dappled a pale, watery light through the branches as she rounded the central kimberlite . . . and came face-to-face with an Antorcan. Equally wide mismatched verdant and red eyes locked onto hers.
Lulaik, said her mind.
“Wuh,” said her mouth.
The Antorcan gasped as a pirate’s sword shot out from behind Palenisa. Steel flashed in the corner of her vision, and she wrenched the wrist of the attacker, forcing their sword loose. It clattered to the ground, echoing loudly through the forest. She then gave the Antorcan researcher a swift, hard kick, knocking them out. They slumped over their journals. Reams of paper fanned out, covered in a strange script and annotated diagrams of the kimberlite.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” The words sparked off Palenisa’s tongue as she glared at Yurikhun. A grin split Yurikhun’s face wide, wrinkling the blue scales that hatched her cheeks, faded, likely due to her age. The tall, thick woman rolled a shoulder. Infuriating.
Shaking her head, Palenisa leashed her tongue. She took the fallen researcher beneath the armpits and dragged them aside. They loosed a snore, their lashes fluttered. Her feet left sandy footprints across their notes.
“Shouldn’t we keep going?” Palenisa asked when Rishé crouched to examine the base of the tree. When Rishé rapped the stone with a knuckle, it sounded strangely hollow. Slender hands felt along the tangle of roots, between the earth hardened by time and something that felt far more arcane. Rishé stilled and looked over a shoulder with a grin that sent heat swooping to just above Palenisa’s navel. Blue eyes met amber, which crinkled in smug delight.
“There are markings! It’s here.”
Curious, Palenisa wandered closer, her shadow falling over the smaller woman. She jumped slightly at their proximity when Rishé suddenly stood.
“Everyone, um, you should step back. I want to try something,” Rishé said, raising her hands, fingers spread wide, like an Aspect might. A pink tongue peeked from the corner of her lip as she drew that waterlogged tome from the Nest out of her coat. It hadn’t stopped dripping since, still soaked by some unnatural enchantment.
Immediately, the crew took a step back.
“Try what?” Asaru asked, though he, too, made room. As did Palenisa, but only after Rishé sent her a heated look that sped the thrum of her heart. She discreetly pressed a hand to her chest to still it. Seriously, what is wrong with me?
“An experiment.” Rishé flipped the book open and turned to a page.
She pulled off her necklace, squeezing the pendant tightly in her palm. The gem seemed to glow, causing the space around her fist to shimmer in a heat mirage. The way the air warped when Rishé began to speak must have been a trick of the distorted light.
The tree shook, the shuddering speeding up until the disruption was a constant buzz under the earth. It vibrated beneath Palenisa, trembled through her, jarred her teeth in her skull. Long-dead roots shivered, writhing as though they’d come back to life to pull free under Rishé’s command. But stone remained stone—until it didn’t. A crack formed, rising from hidden markings.
In a flash, the trunk splintered, and it sundered apart with a terrible shudder. Light poured from within, a divine vein severed through the earth by a vicious dagger. Tumbling from the dendritic cavity was a cascade of diamondglass, glittering as the beacon did—brighter even. Gems clung to the flayed edges of the kimberlite like dew, an overflowing waterfall of wealth. A crystalline glow beamed the sun in all directions, flaring, throwing twinkling spots wreathed in rainbows across the pillars around them.
Palenisa shielded her eyes against the glare and stepped closer. She would have taken another step, but she was snared by Rishé’s voice. Crisp, her words drifted in one ear and melted out the other. The language was unlike any she’d ever heard, blanketing her with a heady power. It didn’t smell like khetry with its pungent petrichor and irritating essence.
It didn’t smell like anything at all.
The nonsmell soaked revulsion into her bones as it muffled her senses. Different from the tunnels, but no more appealing.
A cough broke through the air. A bolt of sound that shocked her from the trance.
Turning, Palenisa found Asaru doubled over as his legs buckled. He collapsed with a wounded cry. His hood fell back, revealing the unnatural red, far more striking than that of the Antorcans, and his back convulsed, his wings rippled and jerked, threatening to break free of the thick seaross coat he now wore. Though it looked more like vermin pulsing through decaying flesh.
The scent of Black Diamond filled Palenisa’s nose as the curse flared through his body, attacking every part of him with the cruel and pointed hand of its creator. It thickened, the world slowing to a crawl as her every sensation narrowed to a single point. As strong as the spell that summoned him—stronger. It swelled over her in a startling black wave. Death—he smelled of death. She knew that smell well, better than most.
Stricken, Palenisa whipped back around to the lack of smell. Then to Asaru coated thickly in the curse, clutching his middle as pain daggered him.
“Stop,” she yelled. “Rishé, stop!”
As she was snapped suddenly from her chanting recitations, Rishé’s head shot up. There was a glaze over her eyes, peeling away like scales as she registered Palenisa’s cry. She wore an expression equal parts stunned and apologetic as her pendant fell into the folds of the tome.
“By the spirits, what was that?” Palenisa knelt by Asaru, unsure what to do as his face tightened, furrows notched deeply in his brow.
With a sharp intake of breath, Rishé clapped the tome shut, swallowing her burning pendant within its pages. She shook as if she were flinging away rivulets of water, turned. Diamondglass silvered the sly contours of her profile in a pale glow.
“Something I think the world used to know.” Her voice had lost its clarity, coming out in a croak, as though she’d gargled a generous mouthful of sand.
Palenisa’s response was interrupted by a sharp whistle.
Behind them, Yurikhun twirled a finger, spurring her crew into action with a shout in her native tongue. They moved like smooth, dark water through a clock, a machine with every part in perfect unison as they loaded the mass of diamondglass into large nondescript bags that may have once held flour. Covetous eyes flickered over the gems as they disappeared into darkness.
Palenisa bristled at the slavering desire painted on their faces. She bore no great hatred for pirates on the whole, but this crew? By their mere association with Sagan, she distrusted them innately.
“Don’t even think about it,” she snarled.
“Testy, testy,” Yurikhun tutted, rolling her eyes. “Pull that staff out of your ass.” Swinging an arm like she was looping rope, Yurikhun snapped at her crew in Vulgar Antic, the Anticartan tongue. The jeweled glow dwindled away as the small spark of divinity faded, leaving in its place the island’s creeping cold, which wrapped its fingers around Palenisa’s neck. And Asaru’s neck as well, latching him in place as black spittle dribbled from his panting mouth.
Rishé rubbed the top of his spine between where his wings lay, waiting for permission before pressing her other hand to his damp forehead.
“Fevering,” she said, wriggling her fingers upward. “Fevering badly.”
Cupping the lower half of his face, Asaru hacked into his gloves. Spirits, what a horrible sound. The drag of claws on glass, the cacophonous rumble of a storm, the scream of a dying horse. His gloved hands came away utterly drenched in black, as dark as a burnt desert. Chuckling, Asaru smiled grimly at the pool of bile dripping onto the rocks.
“I suppose”—he began weakly—“I might have to break a promise I never made.”
His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fainted into Rishé’s side.
Palenisa’s lips pursed at the thin line of blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Rishé wiped it away and looked up at her in barely restrained worry. It was getting worse faster, and they didn’t know how long he had left.
Palenisa moved to his side, knelt, and placed her staff on the ground, not once taking her eyes off her . . . charge. Friend, she admitted. Closing her eyes, she hovered a hand over his midsection. Though she was first and foremost a warrior, as Sister of Faith, some of her duties had been of a religious nature. It was her calling, ingrained in every facet of her life: honoring the Zodiac for her blessing, for the life she almost lost in pursuit of revenge, for the coterie.
But they’d excommunicated her. It was the only place she’d felt the scaffold of true belonging. And they’d put her out in the gutters as a drunken sobbing mess. Her chest seized with the ache of wanting. Ada’s gift—she wanted it back more than anything. Many other things she wanted too. Off this desolate, frigid island. To make it to Aedyton in time to meet Wren. For Asaru not to die.
A volley of prayers swirled in her thoughts. Under her breath, Palenisa lingered at the end of each orison. All twelve spirits were present. Somehow, she felt them, as real as the chill seeping into her bones. She heard the layers of their imagined whispers coiling in her ears. Piety kept her going. Belief kept her strong.
Thinking was one thing, but saying made it thus. Into existence, Palenisa spoke it. And desperately, she hoped it would work—that Asaru would live.
Wren
On their third day at sea, Wren woke to a sharp pulse in his brand. The persistent throbbing was broken occasionally by an acute stab of pain—Asaru’s pain—filling him with regret that he had ever agreed to leave. Like a lulaik needed physical contact, some part of him needed to feel Asaru’s hands cupping his face, skirting lightly over his nape as if hesitant to touch. It both disturbed and ate away at him how much he yearned, a bottomless hunger and a quenchless thirst.
A different kind of friend, whispered a soft voice at the back of his bleary mind. Furtumbér take him now, he was a fool.
Groaning, Wren rubbed his palms into his eyes and recalled an ivory tower. Black swept in, and the tower toppled, dissolving into the sea like foam. The destruction of millennia of history and the present as it was written. The scarred geode on the cliff became a faint stream of smoke.
Had he not seen the ship sailing off in the opposite direction, his heart might’ve dropped like a stone at the thought that his friends still remained in that melted mass of black and white and bismuth gray. But he’d seen them leave, he told himself. Though he was less reassured by their being in the hands of pirates. They were teetering on a bone point, and his anxieties only grew along with the distance between them.
The brand tugged his chest, and he turned on the stiff bench, trying to fall back asleep despite the insistent glare of the sun. A crooked staff was shoved none too lightly into his stomach, jarring him back awake.
“Tios’dov-sovi’dem inust.” Wake up.
“I am,” Wren groused, sitting up. Drowsiness drew his lids to half-mast under the weight of poor rest. He felt laden with grime, damp from the constant spray of the sea. On the other hand, Sagan looked frustratingly fresh once he shucked his mask. There were thin bags beneath his lower lids, but little else to indicate he’d spent the last two days only occasionally snatching rest. It was mildly irritating.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
As he peeled open his bleary eyes, Wren’s lower lip popped out. “I. Am.”
Sagan grinned slyly. Violet hair fell into his mismatched gaze, and Wren was caught for a moment. He’d never met a lulaik that wasn’t from the continent, so to him, purple was a unique color for a khetry eye. Striking and vaguely unnatural, forcing him to avert his own to the crimson waves of the Red Gulf. Water sprayed into the bottom of the boat, warmed by the Volcanic Steps, a small peninsula cradling eastern Peskelos, whose molten mountains boiled from the depths.
“Tut-vaneran takeš?”
“I’m fine.”
“Someone’s cranky.” Sagan blew up his fringe and glanced at the island they were approaching.
Centuries-old stores of iron oxide seeped into the water, lapping at bloody beaches. The rest of the island was an impressive ruddy sprawl smothered in coconut palms and feathered fox trees.
Wren planted an elbow on the side of the boat, rested his chin on it, and watched daily life on Peskelos pass along either side. Shaded stalls and steps of marble descended into the water. Bodies draped in coral fabrics crowded near the edges; children splashed in the shallows, picking up pink cowries, while adults huddled in groups over low tables covered in food.
“Where are we going?”
A notched brow rose. “Where do you think?”
Wren tilted his head at the central hill—which, with its massive eye-catching size, was more of a mountain. A waterfall cascaded down one side to the river they were sailing toward. As the gulf narrowed into the tributary, they began to see other vessels. Their skiff rocked in the tight gap between a boat from which merchants hawked jars of spices and jewelry and the lunar-powered trawler hauling a woven net of fish.
“Specifics would be nice.”
“Lake Alhena, at the top of Adranza Hill.”
“That’s—”
