Rathal smiled. “Did it get tiring?”
The dwarf did look flushed. “I was having to go in your mind about once every ten seconds by the end, there. Dropping diviners.”
I looked between the two of them in disbelief.
“Yeah, I started editing both your memories as soon as we got out. Didn’t know if he was going to turn on us till then, Feychilde, and I didn’t want you giving it away if I had to stop him. I can read his mind, same as I read yours. You were right. He doesn’t want to kill me.”
“You…” I floated closer to Herreld. “I saw you – dead…”
He chuckled, his beard bristling. “Thanks for the compliment.”
“Gods…”
I made myself partially-corporeal just to grab his thick arm with my good hand, let him pull me into a rough hug. My broken arm hung limply at my side.
He was real. He was really here.
I released him, slid back on the air. “But – Temcar –“
“Yeah, that was him in the water, sorry.” The dwarf’s eyes were shining with unshed tears, and his smile was bitter. “It won’t make much sense to you – I just worked with what I had. But I’m exonerated, aren’t I? I can go back to the city.”
“I think the Magisterium –“ I began.
“Would they really kill me?” He crossed his arms. “For poking a hole in their precious Zyger… yeah… yeah, maybe.”
“You are still a wanted man, whether you will it or no.” Rath was smiling, but his eyes remained distracted.
“I see that.” Whatever the dwarf was perceiving in the diviner’s head, it was making him look less and less happy by the second. “I don’t think I’ll be running any unnecessary risks, from now on.”
“I think it’s time we went to the surface,” Rath said. He looked at the three discs in Neverwish’s lap. “Then we can finally part ways… for a time.”
“You’re inscrutable,” the dwarf enchanter growled, “even to me, you know that right?”
Duskdown offered a small bow.
“What are your plans?” I asked them both, adjusting my wraithiness to allow me to catch the anti-enchantment pendant Herreld tossed me.
“Hide?” The dwarf shrugged. “I’m not leaving. Something’s got to go down soon, and they’re going to need us.”
“The same.” Duskdown was studying the spellbound stone in his own fingers – then he looked over at Neverwish. “Kas is about to tell you that you need to hide in the places I describe to you, in order to avoid being scried by other powers. There’s truth to this – there’s nothing so straightforward as an anti-divination pendant, unfortunately.”
I looked down at the pendant in my hand; it had fully transitioned now, and I was able to bring it into the wraith-state with me.
“But no one is looking for you,” the seer went on, “and I think you’ll be fine wherever you go. Be bold. That is in itself enough advice to let you evade anyone but Timesnatcher, I think. He has no reason to think you escaped…”
The enchanter chuckled, smiling brightly, then said in a chiding tone: “Unless he knew Kas was the sort to bring me back.”
Rath inclined his head, eyes troubled now.
The diviner’s blind-spot. Overuse of their power, blinding them to simple realities.
“What of me?” I said. “I’m not invisible – I can’t really avoid divination without ingesting demons… And there’s my brother and sister to think about. I’ve got to run.”
“It’s two in the morning,” Rath said. “I sense this has been a fateful night. A turning point in the dream. Come, make us ghostlike and take us up through the rock, and I will tell you what you need to know.”
“I haven’t tested that yet,” I admitted ruefully. “Doing this to other people, I mean.”
“It will work. I have seen it. Come.” He waved his hand, gesturing for me to approach. “Attempt it. We can be patient. We… have nowhere better to be.”
The smile on his face was fragile, this time, and I could tell he’d meant what he’d said about his loneliness. It was something Timesnatcher had spoken of – I couldn’t even imagine Everseer’s state of mind – and Killstop…
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Was Tanra still out there? Was she still doing okay?
Had she kept everyone safe?
I looked at Duskdown, and he nodded to me.
He knew what I was going to ask, knew what was on my mind.
Knew what I was going to do.
I reached out for my friends, closed my shadowy fingers about their wrists; within a minute they had transitioned into the wraith-form the same as me, and my blue wings were beating, sending us towards the slumbering bats – sending us sliding through them. Through the layers of stone, breathing our fill in dry cavities that men’s lungs had never before tasted. Through yards of dirt until, no more than a couple of minutes into our nethernal ascent, we broke the surface.
Two minutes, and that was going slowly, bearing the burden of a full-grown man and a stout dwarf.
Six hours and two minutes, I thought, and laughed aloud again, looking up at the sky.
We had to be in Oldtown. The yard in which we’d emerged was fenced in with rust-coated iron bars atop a chest-high red brick wall, and the space itself was filled with tombs so weathered they might as well have just been smooth, flat rocks. There were a number of half-eroded statues – not the moving, killing kind, fortunately – left eerie and alien by the passage of centuries. Low buildings surrounded the space, roofs shining blackly with the run-off of recent rainfall.
But the sky overheard – the sky…
It was wonderful, beyond wonderful, to taste again the salt of the winter breeze, see the storm clouds roll across the heavens. Yet storms brought the painful reminder, of her, of everything that had happened to me.
I looked down at the ground beneath me and floated a little higher. I didn’t have to care about any of it – the sky, the statues, my stupid memories of Emrelet, a time that had ended – ended long ago, now.
Only the twins remained.
Jaid… Jaroan…
Mum… Dad…
The diviner and enchanter were becoming corporeal once again, now that I’d let them go to drift higher. They were, like me, casting about at their surroundings, as if daring this all to be some trick, another warped game from the insane mind of the guardian of the ways.
But no. It was Mund. We were home.
Then Rath looked up at me, his face set, some awful resolution behind his eyes. For a moment I feared violence, and then –
“Leave her asleep – write a note.”
“Leave…?” I frowned. “Xantaire? Leave her asleep? But –“
“Just trust me, will you? If you say everything you need to say to her face, you’ll stay too long. You’ll… It goes blank, which isn’t good, do you understand me?” The savageness of this sudden question startled me. “No, leave her asleep! But only her boy knows what they did with your spare robe and mask. The magisters didn’t bother to probe his mind, thinking they’d already found everything, and it really wasn’t on the minds of the others –“
I was nodding my head impatiently. “Can I wake him?”
He grunted. “Please… I’m just following the lines… Ah. Not far from your uncle’s grave. No – his uncle’s grave – the boy’s. Four yards behind it – beneath a cedar, in the outer curve of an ‘s’-shaped root. There’s still a small depression in the ground.”
“I… Thanks!”
“Your… brother and sister will both be in when you get back.”
“Well I should hope so, two in the morning…” I sighed. “Do you even know what the date –“
“Your brother has stayed out on the streets past this hour twice this week. I’m sorry if I seem out of sorts, but this raises questions I can’t answer.”
“What do you –“
“And it is going into the twenty-third of Taura. I suspect if it were not for the depth of your native power, combined with the effects of the chronomantic well we clearly entered down there, Herreld and I would have been irretrievably connected to the otherworld; we left Zyger some twenty-seven days ago now. The unicorn’s sacrifice was well-made, I think.“
“What?” I gulped the air, no longer impressed with its freshness, trying to process his words. “Twenty-seven days? Healing us is going to be a problem – and why are they staying out –“
“I move to bring Fangmoon to us now. Be patient –“
He turned aside, poising himself to move –
“Stop!” What does he even mean? “He stayed out on the streets? With Jaid?”
“No. With inkatra salesmen. Knife-men. Those I often slay.” Then, with an almost sick-sounding, regretful note to his voice, he finished: “I would not have slain him…”
He might’ve said something else but I could no longer hear him.
Inkatra salesmen.
I blinked.
Knife-men.
I blinked.
Knife… men…
I blinked again.
“Joran protect us,” I breathed.
* * *
2 – 4 – 2 – 1.
X, I really wanted to wake you up but someone I trust told me I really need to do it this way, so here goes. I hope you’ll understand why. First I need to apologise. In the last few months you had to endure more ups and downs than anyone deserves in a decade. I hope you’ll have some stability now we’re gone. I’m taking them with me because they’re my responsibility, not yours, and I don’t want you to have to shoulder the burden any longer. I know you don’t think of them that way, or maybe you do at the moment – I’ve just heard Jar’s been putting you through it? Maybe I’m understating it? You’ve already done more than I could ever have asked of you, protecting them for so long, looking out for them like they’re your own.
They are, Xan. You’re my sister, and I’m not leaving you behind. I’m just going out ahead of you for a bit, okay? I’m going to get us settled, somewhere far from here, somewhere we can put down some real roots. Somewhere we don’t cause chaos. Somewhere you can be safe too. When I’ve found the place, I’ll send for you, if you want me to. You can move out with us. Well within the limits of Everseer’s time frame, so there’s that, you know? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. The twins are going to be sorry for not saying goodbye too, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to do this without anyone knowing. I had to keep them from coming for me.
I love you, Xan. Please pass it on to Xassy and Orstrum. I’ll be out of the Magisterium’s reach soon.
K.
P.S. Doing it this way has probably got around most of the ways they’d find out I escaped – I got told this method is safe, you get me? But even still you may want to burn this note immediately, ha!
P.P.S. If you see Killstop, say hi to her for me.
P.P.P.S. Stay safe. I’ll send for you as soon as I can.
I promise.