MARBLE 6.9: MY FRIEND
“There is a fundamental schism in the practice of reverence. On the one hand you have the dilettantes and dabblers, to whom all acts of reverence are celebrations of the various forms of being. There is nothing more worthy of celebration than the silver stream’s song, the cool wind on the hilltop, the quiet gnawing of worms beneath the roots! Even the sighs of the dying, the shrieks of the tortured – yes, even these may be celebrated by terrible entities for the forms inhabited. Yet on the other hand you have the devotee, to whom all acts of reverence constitute worship of a singular being. All becomes filtered through a single lens. There is only one school of doctrine to which all other doctrines must bend, and about which they must be recalibrated or, even, reconstructed in the mind. How will the son of Kaile perceive our Queen of Darkness? Not as she would have him perceive her!”
– from ‘The Syth Codex’, 5:166-175
He tried to fly, spreading himself into a vast raven and leaping for the sky, but I ignored the others and I had the edge on him in speed; before he’d gone fifty feet I managed to bring myself swerving in front of him –
“You were the first champion I ever met, and now –“
The moment he saw I’d caught up, he dropped out of the air. The diamond I’d placed about him did precisely nothing to stop him.
Then he tried to go under the ground, shaped like a tremendous mole. With my wraith exuding maximum levels of insubstantiality into my flesh, I was able to give chase. My wings and wizard-spell didn’t work down here, but the wraith-form let me float right through the soil in whatever direction I fancied – it was slow, but he wasn’t exactly going quickly either. I just had to make sure I had my head in the tunnel he was making when I needed to breathe.
“You don’t have to run from me! Nighteye! Please.”
He didn’t stop, feverishly ploughing through a hundred yards of earth in haphazard directions. If I hadn’t just watched him shapeshift, I’d have thought these the believable actions of a magic-addled giant mole, rather than a human in animal shape. Who was he trying to fool exactly?
I could hear Em calling out for me over the link, but I ignored her voice.
“Nighteye!” I yelled to him again along the hole, drifting down it just twenty-ish feet behind him – he was digging horizontally at the moment. “Nighteye, look! If you want to run from me, you can just make yourself one of the worms – there’s got to be hundreds round here, right? I can’t stop you. I can’t track you.”
He stopped suddenly, and while the wraithiness helped me out in the darkness, I was already missing Zel… whoever she was. I used a touch of Zab’s power to illuminate my surroundings in a pale green radiance.
The mole changed, slowly this time, blending into the hooded heretic once more. He was standing up to his knees in the dirt of the passageway he’d made.
“I’m s-sorry F-Feychilde,” he stammered. “I, hm, I have somewhere to be –“
“It’s okay, we can do it here.” The voice came from behind me, a confident purr. “And I’m certain I told you you’d never have to say sorry again, Theor.”
I tried to whirl when she started speaking, but time seemed to slip away from me, and she’d finished her comment before I could spin to face her.
Everseer, her plain-featured face and deep-set eyes gleaming in the green light, sitting cross-legged in the tunnel.
Empty-handed – no visible weapons.
No visible weapons.
“I have a shield up,” I warned her in a low voice.
“I’m aware.”
“They’re going to miss me up there if –“
“No they’re not. We have time. Plenty, now. You’re under my spell, boy. It’s not something you can protect against.”
I gritted my teeth, tilted my head slightly. “Nighteye, you can’t trust h-”
“I didn’t include him. It’s you I want. Certain moves open up to us, now the dragon’s gone. It’s your turn, Kas.”
Is this how it ends? I die, already buried, and she covers it up just by being here – no one even knows, no one can find out – I go missing, just like Nighteye went missing – and the twins, the twins never know what happened to me…
I laughed aloud.
No chance.
“You think you’ve got me?” I squared my shoulders. “You’re fast, sure, but you’re stuck in a tunnel down here with as many bintaborax as I can fit behind you –“
“I’ll stop them.”
“– and before you pop my shields I can just float freely back up to the surface if I want, or head to another plane –“
“You’ll listen to me first.” She shrugged. “I know it.”
“Listen to you?” My throat was suddenly dry. “You don’t want –“
“No, I don’t want to kill you, but it’s better to let you figure these things out for yourself. See?”
She blurred forwards, suddenly sitting cross-legged ten feet closer to me, well within the range of my outermost shields.
No ill-will.
“I find you interesting, Kastyr. You and Killstop, you interest me.”
‘Killstop’. Not ‘Tanra’.
If she was trying to show off by displaying her knowledge of my name, would she not do the same with that of her rival seeress, were she capable of it?
Curious.
“You’re going to talk Heresy at me, and then I’ll lose my head,” I said. “Literally.”
She smiled, baring her teeth at me, but it was a look of displeasure rather than amusement. “That’s not going to happen, Glaif take me. You’re too smart to repeat what you hear today.”
I flicked my tongue and pressed my lips together, trying to stimulate some saliva, but it was useless in wraith-form. My throat was sore. I didn’t know what to say.
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I stared at her –
“Thank you, Kas. I can call you Kas, right?” She eased herself back into a relaxed position, putting her hands on the freshly-compacted dirt behind her. “You need to give me the wizards, Kas. You may think you’ve defeated the dragon but her family aren’t finished yet. This all ends in absolute, utter ruin if we don’t do something and we only have until Yearsend before the Crucible begins. After that… one more year… no more Mund.”
Heresy?
I heard her words, but I stopped listening, caring. “Give you – give you Saff, and Tarr?”
She nodded slowly, studying me, sunken eyes glinting greenly. “You could do worse, you know. You could leave them with the Magisterium, with the Gathering. That way, when the dragons want them, they know where to find them.”
I scrutinised her. “What do you want with the library?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Well-spotted. Honestly? There’s a book in the master’s section we can’t get at through invisibility or subterfuge. Purportedly the only copy, taken from a manuscript located in the Yenistraph Par. Every way I plan the heist, it fails, and we end up worse-off. I’ve been looking forward to today for about three months. Took me awhile to figure out the Treetown part, though.”
‘Well-spotted.’ Such a compliment from someone like her meant precisely nothing. I didn’t have a diviner on-board anymore; I didn’t have any qualms about admitting to myself that she knew with perfect clarity exactly how this conversation was going to play out. She could see my future, at least until someone like Timesnatcher interfered with it.
“A book,” I repeated.
“A book.” She stared back at me, then quickly went on: “Don’t worry, you can’t stop us. I’m only willing to tell you now because Ibaran’s already retrieved it. We are due to withdraw in around fifteen seconds’ time.”
“Something… something to do with the twins.”
She grinned, or grimaced, and let the change in expression carry her compliment this time – and her gloating.
She knew my weakness.
I need answers.
“The twins are the key to everything. The dragons fear them, and them alone, do you follow? Tell me – I shall tell no other – were you dreaming of killing them yet?”
I didn’t want to but I nodded, a reaction pulled from me by the bluntness of the question.
I could remember it – but it wasn’t Saff and Tarr – it was my brother and sister.
It was… ten twins…
“You were her weapon,” Everseer mused. “Ah, Quietsigh… It’s as I feared. I heard your voice coming from the dark place, the darkness unlike this…” She gestured at the close, earthen walls of our buried meeting-place. “The darkness into which I cannot step. Grip the brand tightly, and all that. He had it mostly correct, I think.”
“Magicrux Zyger,” I breathed.
She nodded again, suddenly looking slightly unsure of herself, and leaned forwards somewhat to peer at me. “You are interesting, Kas. I can’t read anything past it, really – there are just too many variables. I’m sorry.”
I felt her sincerity, even if I couldn’t trust it.
“Am I doomed, then?” I asked, and heard the twinge of emotion in my voice.
“Yes,” she responded at once. “And I. And everyone you have ever known or met or seen or heard.”
“But – Zyger…”
She shook her head. “Nothing is ever fixed, except the ending – Ulu Kalar saw to the ending personally, you understand? That’s what I’m here to discuss… This Tyr Kayn clearly recognised you’d be close to the twins – she knew she could use you. It makes no sense!”
There was little agitation in her voice, coming from her lips calmly, level and cool – but it was there to be read in her eyes, even by the meagre green twist of spell-light hanging between us.
“Do you know anything, Feychilde? Do you know why she wouldn’t just kill them right away? Do you suspect anything? Have you heard a whisper on the cold winds carried by distant planes? Anything you could tell me about the Time of the Twins might be pivotal to our survival.”
She launched the questions at me like they were attacks, rocking me with them.
Everseer thinks Saff and Tarr are it, I realised.
And I knew I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell the heretics the dragon thought there’d be ten twins.
At the same time I knew I was beginning to be sucked in by her mindset.
“Survival?” I said harshly, more for my own benefit than anything else. “I watched you kill. You’re just like the rest of them.”
“Yet here I sit.” She spread her hands again, looking about. “I’ve been granted the sight by one of my friends. I can see your shields just the same as you can. Am I just like the rest of them, really? Do I bear you ill-intent?”
I shook my head. “That’s meaningless. You’re just so deadly it doesn’t register. A bath of acid doesn’t bear me ill-intent either. That doesn’t mean it won’t reduce me to sludge if I make a single slip-up. And even if you won’t kill me,” I couldn’t help but draw a shuddering breath, “that doesn’t mean you get to go around killing anyone who isn’t ‘interesting’, does it?”
“Why on earth are you asking me?” She looked amused. “I clearly do not give a damn about anyone’s life but my own.”
I stared at her.
“Right?” Everseer prodded. “I’m here out of selfishness, aren’t I? I mean, I believe Mund’s going to be devoured, its very core gnashed until the final pip at the heart of the apple pops – but I’m sticking around in my own best interests.”
I held up a hand so she’d stop – the sarcasm was getting old.
“So why kill people?” I asked plainly.
“Because they are already dead.” She shook her head. “You don’t understand, because you haven’t seen it, but you won’t accept my vision, will you? I can see how that conversation goes. You never trust me again if I even ask you to indulge me one more time…”
“I can see that,” I admitted. “Don’t try it.”
“If I kill them, the dragons don’t eat them. Their souls are gone.” Her voice was a low hiss, and there was true emotion, enmity, exuding out of her. “If the dragons don’t get to feed enough when the resurrection comes over them, it doesn’t take properly, we believe. Ord Yset can’t fully restore them. They’re forced to plane-shift. We so-called ‘heretics’ get to kill them, piecemeal, once the champions have expended their last efforts.”
I tried very hard to keep my jaw from dropping.
“And as for the champions,” she continued, “we try especially to snip from fate’s pages the ones we think may be taken by the arch-demons. These particular fiends come in many guises, some obvious, some less so, riding the waves of the gateways between worlds. The demons who disintegrate archmages with red and white light – all of those demons serve the undying will of Mal Tagar. They are stealing our souls, Kas, when they do it. Our power. We know it. We have… tested it.”
Then she drew a sudden breath, and blurted: “Consider! We will reach out to you –“
The roof of the tunnel between us exploded inwards, and the frowning face and green-lit colours of Killstop’s apparel came bursting down into view amidst a rush of dirt.
“Kas.” Tanra spoke in a quiet, throbbing voice from her crouched position, not even looking back once over her shoulder at me. “Are you okay?”
“She hasn’t tried anything.”
“Is – Nighteye, is he okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Killstop.” Everseer’s voice came through a little muffled from the other side of the soil-flood the girl brought through in her wake; I could make out that the heretic had got to her feet, crouching to fit under the low tunnel-roof. “I… apologise, what I did to you. I had to get Winterprince before the next Incursion, and I knew they’d have you back on your feet in minutes. Tried not to do anything too… permanent to you. The wizard had grown immensely in power over the last few months, and if we let Nil –”
“Enough of your Heresy.” Killstop sounded tired. “If you’re apologising, that means you’re going to let me go.”
“I will.”
“Both of us,” Tanra pressed.
“Of course.”
“All three of us,” I grated.
Everseer tutted suddenly, and the emptiness of that simple little clacking sound reverberated in my ears.
“You know that’s impossible.”
“Not impossible,” I retaliated. “You just don’t like it.”
Now Tanra glanced back at me. She could sense the tension building. Maybe she didn’t want to get her insides turned to pulp again, or perhaps there was more to it, but I definitely got the impression she didn’t want me starting something.
But I wanted to. It would be two-on-one, unless she brought Nighteye in – and would he really fight us? He might join us, help us take her down…
I had no fairy onboard, no lying vermin to talk me out of situations she saw as too dangerous for poor little Kassy.
Everseer cut out Winterprince’s brain, I reminded myself in a steely voice.
“I’ll make this really easy for you.” The darkmage spoke from the far side of the dirt-pile – then suddenly she spoke again from behind me: “Go. Now.”
I turned back, and saw her there, crouching in front of the time-locked Nighteye. The way out was clear – Everseer had moved past us, and I hadn’t even spotted a blur, even in this slowed state.
“Come on, Kas,” Killstop muttered. “I don’t wanna die down here.”
I stared at Nighteye. The young arch-druid, paralysed: a victim of a dark diviner, a cog in her deadly machinations.
I’ll free you, Nighteye, I promised silently. There’ll be a time, a place… I’ll do it.
I solidified my arm and nodded to Tanra; she took my elbow in her hand, and then we were gone.
* * *