The Light of All That Falls, page 45
“Law is about order, not right and wrong,” Taeris agreed. “And the latter should always trump the former.” He gave a soft laugh. “You’ve come a long way since we met.”
Wirr chuckled, too. “I don’t know whether—”
“Ishelle?”
The sudden concern in Erran’s raised voice cut through the conversation. Wirr and Taeris turned at once, hurrying over to the others.
Wirr blanched as he saw Ishelle, spotting the signs that were becoming familiar to him now. Ishelle’s hands were trembling—not violently yet, and the rest of her body remained under her control so far, but enough to be obvious at a glance.
“I thought you said that you could dampen the effects,” said Erran anxiously.
“You need to focus, Ishelle,” said Scyner steadily, ignoring Erran. “This connection is like a… noose around your mind. Every time you pull away, it tightens, digs in harder and makes things worse. It’s hurting you because you’re resisting it so much.”
“I’m scared,” whispered Ishelle, her eyes wide and blank as she stared into nothing. “I don’t want to let them in.”
“I’ll protect you.” Scyner’s voice was gentle. “But I can’t until you get out of the way.”
Ishelle gave a tremulous nod, the usually brash young woman as obviously frightened as Wirr had ever seen her.
She gave a sudden, soft sigh, her shoulders slumping and head bowing.
When she looked up, her eyes were completely black.
“They’re here,” she said faintly, terror still in her voice. “They want to know about me. They are trying to burrow in. They’re trying to get in further.” The words were barely more than a whimper.
“Ask them about the sha’teth. About the attack,” said Scyner, the urgency in his tone rising. “Ask them where they are and what is being planned. What they’re seeing. Anything.”
A tear rolled down Ishelle’s cheek, and her body was shaking now, though she hadn’t started the mad ramblings that had previously accompanied that stage. A good sign, Wirr thought. Erran moved behind her, grasping her gently by the shoulders to stop her from falling over.
Everyone watched mutely, holding their breath.
“I… I’m trying,” said Ishelle shakily. “They won’t answer. They keep asking—” She gasped, face contorted in pain; Wirr and Erran both stepped forward but she recovered quickly, sitting straight again. “They’re asking to be let in. For me to… join them.” The last was said in a horrified whisper.
Scyner shook his head. “Keep going,” he said firmly. “We have to know.”
Wirr moved closer, his disquiet growing. “Scyner. We need the information, but not at the expense of her health,” he said firmly.
“She can handle it.” Scyner glanced at him. “Trust me, Prince Torin.”
Wirr hesitated. “Ishelle, if you want to stop—”
“I’m all right.” Ishelle’s voice told a different story, but Wirr accepted the statement, exchanging nervous glances with Erran and Taeris before reluctantly indicating that Scyner should continue.
A few minutes passed breathlessly, only Scyner’s occasional promptings breaking the silence. Eventually the older Augur shifted.
“Ishelle,” he said quietly, “you may not be able to get your answers just by asking.”
“What do you mean?” Ishelle asked, still trembling in Erran’s grasp.
“You need to use the connection yourself. Read them.”
“Are you sure—” began Erran, but he reluctantly subsided at Scyner’s glare.
The uneasy hush fell again for what seemed like an eternity.
“I see something,” Ishelle suddenly gasped. Everyone leaned forward unconsciously as she spoke. “They’re in a forest. Some sort of… temple. There are huge statues lining the entrance, each with a symbol. Men and women. Nine of them. The other eletai are everywhere here.” A shudder ran through her. She spoke urgently but also absently, as if in a trance. “Dar’gaithin too. Hundreds of them. And people—but the Banes aren’t attacking them. They’re carrying things out of the temple.”
“What are they carrying?” asked Scyner. “Do you recognize where this is?”
Ishelle didn’t respond, but beside Wirr, Taeris shifted.
“Desriel,” said the scarred man. When the others looked at him questioningly, he gave a firm nod. “That’s their sacred vault—I haven’t seen it myself, but I’ve heard of it. Those statues are their gods, and they’re supposed to be the only ones who can open it.”
“And their gods are the Venerate,” murmured Wirr, swallowing.
“They’ve seen me,” Ishelle whispered suddenly, as if trying to make sure that the eletai couldn’t hear her. “They know I’m here.”
“What else do you see?” pressed Scyner, before anyone else could speak.
“No. No. I have to get out.” There was panic in Ishelle’s tone. “Let me out.”
“Tell us what you see,” said Scyner firmly.
“They know I’m here. They’re going to tell the others.” Ishelle’s voice was getting louder as it became more urgent. “They know we know, now. They were waiting for something, but they’re going to launch the attack now. Oh fates. It’s our fault. They’re going to hit Ilin Illan, use the eletai to try to cripple us before we can react. And they’re coming for us now. They’re coming.”
Wirr felt the blood drain from his face, and he heard a sharp intake of breath from Taeris.
“That’s enough, Scyner,” said Taeris, and Erran began pulling Ishelle toward the door.
“Stop.” Scyner’s voice cracked like a whip. “Ishelle, it’s too late to take it back now, and we need more information. What about the sha’teth?”
“They’re coming, they’re coming.” Ishelle’s voice was breaking now, and she was shaking violently, Erran having to adjust his grip to hold on to her. Suddenly she gasped and her eyes, still completely black, went wide. She gripped Erran’s arm so tightly that the young man grunted in pain. “They know the sha’teth are here. We’re not safe. Nowhere here is safe. We need to leave. Fates oh fates they’re coming WE NEED TO LEAVE!”
Ishelle screamed as she writhed and broke free of Erran’s grip, black lines creeping along her body. Erran reached for her but somehow she twisted and threw him, sending him sailing through the air to land in a heap ten feet away.
“Grab her!” shouted Wirr, strengthening himself with Essence and seeing Taeris do the same. Scyner helped, too; they wrestled with Ishelle as she resisted like a wild animal, clawing and shrieking and thrashing with every inch of her body.
“We need to get her inside,” growled Taeris as a flailing limb caught him across the chest.
“We need to tie her up and keep questioning her.” Scyner yelled the response above Ishelle’s frenzied screams. “She was getting answers. I just need—”
“No.” Wirr glared across at Scyner, doing his best to restrain Ishelle while still being gentle. “She goes back inside. Now.”
Scyner’s lip curled, but after a second he looked away with a brief, frustrated dip of the head. More black lines were spreading across Ishelle’s face and limbs, almost like a Shadow’s except these were far thicker and straighter, somehow more disturbing. Whatever they were seemed to be giving her near-inhuman strength, because it took all three of them—four, once Erran had recovered enough to help—to drag her twenty feet to the door and finally through it.
Ishelle gave a final gasp as she crossed the threshold, then went limp.
Their exhausted, shocked panting was the only sound to break the silence as they looked at her with a mixture of trepidation and concern. She was unconscious, the black lines on her skin not fading yet, her breaths coming in what looked like dangerously short and uneven bursts.
Erran was the first to move.
He punched Scyner in the face.
“You said you would protect her,” he snarled as the older Augur staggered back, the attack clearly having taken him by surprise. “Are you actually capable of not doing fates-cursed awful things?”
Wirr placed a restraining hand on Erran’s shoulder as Scyner steadied himself, shaking his head dazedly.
“I chose to prioritize everyone else. You heard what she said.” He looked around at the other three. There was no defensiveness to his tone, only cold certainty. “We should have tried to get more. Now we know that Desriel has Banes and that they are going to send the eletai to attack us here.”
“Have already sent,” corrected Taeris bleakly.
“Have already sent,” agreed Scyner. “And she said that they know the sha’teth are here, too. It sounded like there was a purpose to that.” There was clear frustration in his tone.
“We’ll tell the Council,” said Wirr, “and advise that they kill them immediately. But right now, we need to alert the city that there are eletai on the way.” Saying the words suddenly made the horror of the situation more real, and a queasy wave of fear washed through him, though he quickly forced back the sensation. He turned to look at Ishelle. “Erran, do you think that you can take her somewhere to recover? And then inform the Council of what’s happened. Tell them that they need to deal with the sha’teth before… whatever’s coming.”
“I’ll do it,” said Scyner. “The Council will take too long.”
“No. I need you with me,” said Wirr. He deliberated, then motioned to Taeris. “You too.”
He gazed at the two men grimly. “We need to convince the Assembly to evacuate Ilin Illan.”
Chapter 28
Davian sat on the sole chair in Tal’s room, eyes close to drooping shut despite the seriousness of his situation.
First bell, fainter but still audible here, had rung out a while ago, but he was still no wiser than when he had arrived. He’d had ten minutes of excited discussion with Tal—mostly answering questions, to his vague irritation—and then Tal and Niha had needed to leave. A scheduled requirement of their time, was all he’d been able to gather; Tal had been suitably apologetic, but had told him in no uncertain terms to stay put. Tal, apparently, trusted the others imprisoned here in the crater about as much as he did the dar’gaithin.
Davian had been promised answers upon their return, but that had been hours ago. He’d watched out the window for a while—not that there was a great deal to see—and then done his best to rest. His Reserve remained dangerously low, and he couldn’t afford to keep draining it just to stay alert.
The door abruptly opened and he leaped to his feet, his heart skipping a beat.
He sank back into the chair as Tal and Niha walked through. The two of them looked exhausted, Tal in particular seeming a hollow shell of the man who had greeted him just a few hours earlier. Dark bags sat under his eyes, and every movement was slow, strained, clearly taking effort.
He gave Davian a cheerless smile, trudging over to the bed and collapsing onto it. Niha—who also looked tired—shut and locked the door behind her, then took up position by it, giving Davian a cool glance as she did so. Their movements had the feel of an established routine.
“What happened?” asked Davian tentatively.
“Nothing.” It was Tal, staring at the ceiling from his prone position on the bed. “Which is always good.”
Davian glared at him. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Sorry.” Tal groaned, levering himself up into a sitting position again and waving away Niha’s look of concern. The woman threw an accusatory glare at Davian, who shrank a little beneath it. “You’re probably wondering what in El’s name is going on.”
“You could say that,” admitted Davian drily. “Where were you?”
“Down below. Lending Essence to the cause.” Tal rubbed his face tiredly, seeing Davian’s expression. “Right. Where to begin.” He glanced over at Niha, pleading for help.
“This tower is a Vessel. If it doesn’t get enough Essence, everything in Zvaelar collapses,” said Niha, sounding bored. “And then we all die.”
“Everything collapses?” Davian repeated pensively.
Tal sighed, giving Niha a wry look.
“What do you know about this place?” he asked Davian.
“Not a lot,” Davian admitted. “The scavenging teams figured out pretty quickly that we traveled through time to get here. Other than that…” He shrugged.
“So nothing, then,” muttered Niha.
Tal closed his eyes; when he opened them again he seemed stronger, sitting straighter.
“This city—Zvaelar—was the capital of a desert nation, on a continent far to the north. Around… three and a half thousand years ago now, give or take, by both our reckoning.” He hesitated, as if loath to reveal what he was about to. “It was where Gassandrid was born.”
Davian raised an eyebrow. “I take it the city wasn’t like this, back then.”
“From the way he tells it, it was pleasant enough. As good as any other place where large groups of people congregate. He certainly has a nostalgia for it.” Tal sounded sad. “When he was twelve, Gassandrid took part in a trial—a sort of test to pass into manhood—in which he had to go into the desert and kill a sand serpent. When he returned three days later, Zvaelar was gone. Collapsed in upon itself, withered to dust, everyone who had lived there dead. Including Gassandrid’s parents and three sisters.
“Everyone who bore witness to the destruction said that it happened in an instant—that it had been a deliberate attack. There was only one group in the region who had the sort of power that could effect such a strike. A race called the Shalis.”
Tal paused, sentiment in his voice as he continued. “The Shalis denied responsibility, but the survivors of the Zvael remained convinced of their guilt—particularly after a few years, when it was discovered that Gassandrid was able to wield kan. It was a power that the Shalis were known to abhor as a rare and dangerous weapon, and one that they immediately called upon him to abandon.” He shook his head. “Gassandrid became convinced that the Shalis had destroyed Zvaelar to kill him, to stop him from coming into his power. He eventually led the war against them. And though it ultimately destroyed his people, he won many years later. With our help.”
Tal shifted, the story unmistakably painful to tell. “Gassandrid’s motivation to go back in time has always been this place. It’s always been to save his family, his friends. His people. After the ilshara went up—after I broke the Jha’vett and Gassandrid realized that his goal might still be lifetimes away—he tried to replicate what the Darecians had done in Deilannis. Against our advice, he built on their work and made… a portal to the past, I suppose. To Zvaelar of old.”
Davian glanced out the window at the ruined city. “That obviously didn’t go as planned?”
Tal gave a low, humorless laugh. “No. Instead, Gassandrid created this mess. Closer than anyone has ever come to being able to go back, but still an unmitigated disaster.” He shook his head sadly. “We’re fairly certain now that he actually destroyed the city. That in his efforts to save Zvaelar, he was the one who caused its destruction.”
Davian swallowed, trying to parse the information. “So we’re… somewhere in those three days when Gassandrid left the city, as a child?”
“Inside the very moment when it was destroyed, in fact. He did manage to open a portal back, obviously—one that could be safely traversed,” Tal said quietly. “But in doing so, he miscalculated. He had a series of Vessels set up to dampen the effects of the portal in Ilshan Gathdel Teth, but he needed a duplicate set of those same Vessels here. So when it opened, it caused a cataclysm on this end. A massive distortion that ripped Zvaelar almost entirely from the time stream.”
“Like when we let time flow around us?” asked Davian.
Tal screwed up his face. “Yes and no. We use the parallel of the river because what we do is much gentler by comparison: when we push against the flow of time, we resist it—but we’re never in danger of separating ourselves from it. Never threaten to truly break away from it.” He shook his head. “Whereas Zvaelar… Zvaelar was violent. Messy. A better analogy for what happened here would be that it was like a limb that was almost torn off. One that’s now just hanging on to the body by a few pieces of sinew.”
Davian felt a chill run through him. “Which means?”
Caeden glanced across at Niha, who shrugged. “It’s too far out of step, essentially—you only have to look at the sky to know it. Nearly four months here, and probably only a few seconds back in Gassandrid’s childhood. And El knows how long has passed in our own eras. Time is broken here. And the result is that the time stream isn’t trying to drag Zvaelar back into alignment. It’s trying to exorcise it.”
Davian looked around at the steel tower. “So all of this is…”
“Everything we could do to slow that process down.”
Davian walked over to one of the steel plates, touching it wonderingly. “But if you can’t use kan, how did you make the Vessels?” They were clearly more than simple Essence conduits. “And why out of metal?”
Niha chuckled, a small smile playing on her lips as she watched Davian. “My rations for a week if you guess.”
“It’s complicated,” Tal assured Davian, giving Niha a stern look.
“I have time,” said Davian drily. “I need to…”
He trailed off.
There was a grinding sound coming from outside the door.
Tal gestured urgently to Davian, but it was already too late; the door was swinging open and three dar’gaithin were slithering through.
Davian’s heart sank as he took in the creatures. Each of them at least nine feet tall, they had to contort to fit through the doorway. Short, obscenely muscular arms hung from powerful serpentine frames as they came to an abrupt halt.
All three were staring at Davian.
“So he is here,” hissed the first. “Did you think his rope would not be found?”
Davian winced. He’d forgotten about the rope he’d left dangling at the edge of the crater.
“Theshesseth was right,” said the second, sounding amused. “You were hiding him all along, Devaed. This does not bode well for our deal.”
