In the air and on the ground between herself and the city’s white walls, Mazie looked for signs of life, finding nothing but dry brush, stretching across the plain, and a column of smoke that disturbed the soundless air.
Claes looked around and said, “We should start testing each other.”
Mazie asked, “What’s fifteen plus twenty-two?”
He looked at his hands and counted on his fingers.
“Really?”
“I’m sleep-deprived. Or maybe I’m testing you. Thirty-seven.”
“Weren’t you an engineer?”
Claes added, “ I was dyslexic till age nine. Or maybe it was six.”
They had to be cautious, aware that the city’s madness might take them; thus, they stuck together to be one another’s anchor to reality, knowing one never knew it when entering the white-flowered country of illucidity, but hoping the others could bring them back.
“Andor,” she said. “If I have three extra fingers, how many do I have?”
“Three on each hand, or three total?”
They would continue to check one another’s cognition while they progressed. The column of smoke, as they walked, captured a wider section of sky, and Mazie could smell the collection of soot in her own sweat.
Claes asked, “What’s the atomic mass of manganese?”
Mazie chuckled. “Fuck you, is the answer.”
“Fifty-five,” said Eric.
“Is that right?”
“I believe so,” said Andor.
She ruffled Eric’s hair. “Good for you.”
Saito said, “By the sun, what time is it?”
Mazie looked up into the desolate blue sky. “It’s about ten o’clock, looks like.”
“In the morning or evening?”
“That’s a stupid que— Oh, right.” She had forgotten, for a split second, why he had asked. Embarrassing. “The morning.”
The northern gate was impassible, due to fallen rubble and thick vegetation, but they spotted a gap, across a red field of feral amaranth, in the wall nearby, a single-file notch that started four feet off the ground. They would have leave the animals and husker carriage here, but all were able to get through, even Eric with Mazie’s help.
Claes said, “Well...”
“We are somewhere,” Mazie said.
The city gave not a sense of grandness beset by catastrophe, but silent expiration without visible cause. It seemed plausible that its people had simply decided to stop living there. Treasure and polished stones, of course, had been carried away; the public wealth was long gone. No sign of regret or warning, not that they would have been able to read an antique alphabet, had been posted—when these people had reached the end of their history, they had not explained themselves.
Andor asked, “Mazie, what’s the fifteenth prime number?”
“Fifteenth prime?”
“You should know this. Aren’t you part Vehu?”
“Give me time for this one.” The calculation wasn’t difficult; the hard part was doing it in a hurried walk over gnarled weeds and fallen stones, while smoke fouled the air. “Forty-seven. Forty-seven is the fifteenth prime, Claes.”
“I’m the one who asked,” Andor said.
A loop of vultures circled overhead. Their circle widened to let join a newcomer.
Saito, spotting a clear line of sight due south, said, “This could have been their main avenue.”
The domiciles on both sides must have been opulent in their time; the dusted marble slabs were still impressive, for their size alone, today.
“Eric,” Mazie said. “What’s eighteen plus five?”
No reply.
She looked around. “Eric?”
#
Eric found, as he walked through the ruins, that his eyes had already tired of the sights. He had not come here to see an impressive ruin—years of windborne sand and occasional rain had stripped this place of its color, rounded its edges—but to find sanctuary, a world unlike the old one. Hints at the city’s onetime grandeur only worsened the sting of the desolation. Sedge on the ground, almost as colorless as the soot falling from the fire to his south, suggested nothing edible could be grown here.
A girl’s voice called. Eric looked back to see her running toward him. She threw her arms around him.
“You've been gone so long. Your parents are worried breathless.”
Bright-green spots in his peripheral vision spread—trees lined the street, and he wondered why he had been unable to see them before. His mind must have rejected the beauty of this place; he remembered having walked through a place worse than a slum, but now he could not find it. The scent of cashews, roasted with thyme and citrus as was local custom, filled the air. Two boys his age were tossing a leather ball.
“Mazie, the city’s real! It’s here!”
Eric had spent too long in that other world—the concrete cold one where the sky turned gray for days on end, where men with guns walked the streets—and had almost taken it as true that, as that realm of lies had told him, he was an orphan born in that wretched place, but now that he was in Qaelet, he could see it was as lovely as it had been when he had left. This city in the equatorial highlands, never too hot and never too cold, his home the whole time, had lost not an ant’s shadow of beauty. How had he forgotten its white-and-purple towers? How had he consigned his mind to visit this place only in the depths of sleep, to be washed away every morning by the wakeful world, when he could have simply walked back home the whole time?
He spread his arms and ran, grateful to be among Qaelet’s gleaming spires once again.
#
Claes shouted Eric’s name, though the combination of his age and the air’s coarse dryness made it hurt his throat and chest to yell. The sky overhead had turned metallic, the sun a mere white glow, as the smoke of a brush fire spread. He hoped Farisa and the flames were both physically and casually separate, but if there was one matter on which he had learned to agree with the Global Company, it was the fair market value of hope: Zero. He had lived long enough—not half a century, but he felt ancient—to learn that things were often as bad as they could be.
We fight on; even still, we fight. Farisa would do it for us. If we can save her, we must try.
“Eric! Eric!”
The man’s shouts echoed back from the fallen city’s walls. He wondered what had leveled this place—even Loran, at its medieval nadir, had hosted ten thousand and their cattle. What could explain the city’s total abandonment?
“Eric! Eric, where are you?”
They had taken five million steps to get here. They would soon cross the equator—in truth, a cartographer’s artifact, an unmarked line stretching from nowhere to nowhere—but had found no reason to believe anything awaited them beyond it but five million steps more. Had it been worth the hardship? Perhaps not. Safety for Farisa might never be found; this was not a place where she could live. No evidence that Dashi had survived, no insight by which to oppose the Global Company, had been discovered. If there were arcane powers in this new southern world that could be of aid, they had given no signs. This gambit had cost Mazie her hand. It had cost Garet’s life and Runar’s, too. Farisa might have gone mad in here, and Eric was missing, too.
And I’ve left my family for this. I’m a shitty husband, an even worse father. My dogs will be twelve this spring—if I ever get back to them, will they be alive?
“Eric! Can you hear me?”
Something skulked in the corner of his eye, and he thought of Kanos. Mazie had never trusted the man in the first place, and time had proven her right. Why had he refused to take her instinct as mint—because of her accent? Some failure of a rebel he was, having let a pessima’s way of speaking prejudice him against the exact right call. Should have dumped Kanos in Portal. Or killed the motherfucker. Bad choices and losing battles. Reverie lost! The Battle of Loran ended nineteen years ago, and I’ve spent my life chasing some other ending.
A house wall had collapsed along a diagonal fracture, leaving a ramp Claes could climb for a better view.
“Eric? Where’d you go?”
Age, perhaps, made for a better person, but it weakened leaders. Young Claes, on sight of Kanos, would have slugged the man one-two, rather than continue to make excuses for his rotten behaviors. He decided he would talk to Farisa about leadership—civility and maturity had softened him, and a leader did have to be a good person, but not too good, and Farisa, the woman who did not trust her own memory enough to kill someone who needed to die, would repeat the same mistakes he had...
... if I ever see her again.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Eric! We’re over here!”
“Get down, you fool!” He heard the old woman’s voice as a jolt of motion crossed his spine. He struggled to keep his footing. Bells rung. Over by the market, people shouted. More motion came from the ground.
“That building was condemned years ago,” said the old woman. “This is certainly not the time to be up there.”
He had somehow climbed up to a dilapidated balcony. The shaking continued, disabling any orderly descent, so he jumped two stories into a cart of hay, landing safely and softly.
“We don’t have quakes like this where I’m from,” he said as he got out of the cart.
“Follow me.”
The woman led him down a street where flowerpots and gardens set opulent lavender houses, tasteful and well-spaced, from the main road. In spite of the city’s vigor and bustle, one could believe people here lived on their own land, as brightly-colored produce sat in every lawn. Though some of the buildings had been rattled, not a one fell, a truly remarkable outcome to Claes because, knowing structural engineering and the Company’s world, one half this intense would have leveled a whole city.
The woman ducked under an aqueduct arch. She said, “These don’t happen every day.”
“I should hope not,” he said.
“I haven’t seen one this bad since I was a little girl, but it seems to have stopped. This is the price we pay for perfect weather. Welcome to Qaelet.”
#
Saito, suspecting Eric had run south, climbed a column that leaned against a limestone wall. Claes, now walking in a daze, had also broken from the others.
“Claes, don’t move!”
The man in the leather jacket seemed not to hear him.
“Claes! Stay where you are!”
To have two people taken by this treacherous city, in so little time, he knew to be a dangerous outcome, so he ran toward Claes, jumping from a height of seven feet. He expected, given his age, to feel the landing in his knees, but there was no pain.
“Kestriyo!”
Sayuna, a young girl wearing a white headband, stood in an alley.
“Kestriyo, is it true?”
Saito put a hand on her warm cheek. “Is what true?”
Sayuna’s eyes watered. “That you have lived among our enemies, and you come to destroy Qaelet.”
“No.” He put an arm around the girl. “It is not true. No one will ever hurt you, Sayuna. I’ll protect you to the end.”
She led him down a busy market street. “All sorts of odd things have happened since you left. There is a witch in town, and there are spies who mean to reach the White Shadow, and I’m told that if an outsider ever sees it—”
“The loop ends,” he said.
“I don’t want to die, Kestriyo.”
Saito put his hands on the girl’s shoulders. “There are worse things than dying.”
A tear fell from Sayuna’s cheek. “What do you mean?”
“I should tell you that the man you see is dead.” The city’s marble walls, purple except when struck by direct sunlight, looked more real with each glance, and it was a fight to keep his true sight about him. “Your brother, Kestriyo, died a long time ago. The choices we make, not death, are what we should fear. Those are what can curse us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I left Qaelet, but it wasn’t my choice. I never forgot you. I wish I could have taken you with me, Sayuna. You could have saved me.”
The girl ran off. Saito struggled to hold lucidity, understanding that Qaelet’s lovely pictures were false, although to be amnesiac about his long-gone sister for millennia had not, now that he could remember her, erased his longing for her company. Could a minute of real reunion be possible? Would it not offset the pain he had suffered in forty-eight years? Nothing could forgive his crimes in Camp Prosperity, or his abandonment of his family, but another sweet moment with Sayuna could... and if he could sink into this deep past, he could change... the future... and steer a future self away from such crimes as were on his soul...
A man in bright armor approached. “Kestriyo? You’ve been away for—”
He laughed. “If I told you how long, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Word was, the plague got you.” The man hugged him. This was no ghost, as Saito’s arms did not pass through him, as they would a dream or apparition. This was a living, breathing man.
“It almost did.”
“It’s good to see you.” The soldier led him across a river bridge, one of the dark brown ones only men-at-arms were allowed to use. “Do you remember that beer garden? I got you so washed, you were speaking all kinds of nonsense.”
“Nonsense?”
“You babbled about being an old man, a traitor to some mercenary company in a place we’d never heard of.”
Kestriyo laughed. “Now I remember. One hell of an introduction to drink, but it kept me on the straight since then.”
“And you shall be a fine soldier because of this.” The man in bronze lowered his voice. “We have a war now. It was inevitable. And did you know there are spies in Qaelet?”
“Spies?”
“You are not of their kind, and you never will be, but if I know you have lived in their world. They will never forgive you for—”
The boy had been sick for too long. He remembered sixty lives, all torn short by death, all equally true and therefore all false. Imaginary. “For what?”
“One of the bad dreams you’ve had, they remember as true. You will be forgiven here, though. You have only been gone a year. How bad can a young man become in so little time?” The soldier put an arm around the returned squire. “You are home, with us, and safe so long as our gods are not insulted. If these spies profane the White Shadow with their presence, though, we shall all die—all of us but you. You will be thrown back into that bad dream, and you will be killed. The witch will be the one to do it.”
“A witch?”
“I am told her name is Farisa.”
“I’ve never heard that name,” Kestriyo said. “You say she will kill me?”
“Farisa will kill you,” said the soldier. “Unless you kill her first."
#
Mazie’s eyes stung of smoke. The gray cloud had swept through and reduced visibility to no more than twice her height. She felt a spell of vague but intense discomfort—her body seemed overcharged and energetic on one side of itself, the other in distress at the deteriorating quality of breath, as if the injury to her arm had split her into a strong and a weak person who lived under the same skin. When this odd feeling occurred, she would find herself having walked a hundred yards with no awareness of movement through the points between.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Andor, though, had thus far stayed by her side. The others had been split off and it would be necessary to find them soon, but he and she were together.
“We should lock arms,” Mazie said. “So we can’t get split up.”
“That’s a good idea,” Andor said as he ducked under the branch of a tree whose roots had once wrecked the foundation of an ancient wine cellar.
“Get on my other side. I only have one.”
“Only have one?”
“Arm,” Mazie said.
“Right,” Andor said as moved to wind his arm around Mazie’s. “There we go.”
“I think we’re close to her.” Mazie coughed. “What’s the dlayo of onions worth?”
“Worth?”
“In ehrgeiz.”
“The dlayo is the—?”
“Oh, of course. You’d know it as the king of clubs.”
“A lot, I guess? A hundred points?”
Mazie laughed. “You fail!”
“We play different card games,” Andor said before stopping silent.
Mazie could hear the crackle of fire. The smoke was making her nose itch, and she wanted to scratch with a fingernail that no longer existed.
Andor stopped and his eyes widened as if he were afraid of something.
She asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I barely knew him, but I keep seeing that fucking guy. Kanos.”
“The good thing is that he’s very dead.” Mazie raised her stump. “Pig-eyed fuck caused us a lot of trouble, but Claes finally fixed the problem.”
They walked under the arch of a wall whose crenellations the ages had rounded. “Malisse is clearly not our destination,” Andor said. “Where do you think is?”
“Same answer as it’s been my whole life. Elsewhere.”
“You told me that, until you met this group, you had never left Exmore.”
“Never said I was efficient in getting there.” She stopped. This overgrown road, where arrowroot had connected but also smothered the once-proud shrubs, seemed familiar. Had they come around in a circle? “I hope the others can hold themselves together for long enough.”
Andor looked around a corner and down a rubbled road. “I suspect that, once we get Farisa out of here, the danger is not one-hundredth of what it is now. I am seeing shades and shimmers, but they are harmless—except, I fear, to her.”
“I’m almost envious,” Mazie said. “The rest of you are seeing oddities, but I have only seen what is.”
Once her vision or hearing locked on a fruit stand, or juggler, or street crier announcing the world’s imminent end, the apparition dissipated, leaving only the dusty white ruin that could not possibly be the end of their travels.
“I suppose if Qaelet were insistent on taking me in, it would fix my mind, not distort it.” She could remember everything up to Century Rock (late June) clearly; events were more scattershot and causally disconnected through the summer, and she could faintly remember Garet saying his birthday would be in two weeks, putting her into September. The rest of the Road, until she had come into being on a bright December morning, seemed like it might be gone forever. “That’s how I would seduce me.”
“What’s Qaelet?”
“I... I don’t know why I said that word.” She had never heard it before; it had come naturally. They reached a T-shaped intersection. A white wall with lavender veins towered four stories high, but so long as she saw a smoky ruin, she could trust that she had not been pulled in yet. “You know, there’s something I can’t figure out about Farisa. We were friends—we are friends—but is it possible—?”
Andor stopped.
Mazie looked around. The smoke was dense enough that it was starting to feel like night, and the dissonant songs of a madwoman—garbled words, pitch unsteady, manic laughter breaking through—had become audible. Mazie had heard singing like this in Exmore from an old fevered woman, her face riddled with tumors, in the wailing days before her death.
“Shit. I am starting to hear things, and they’re fucking awful.”
“No,” Andor said. “That’s real.” He dipped his dart in an open vial of blackrue oil, then readied his blowgun. “She’s not far away at all.”
“You’re certain it’s safe?”
“I drank a little bit. It helped with the leg pain.”
“She’s a mage, Andor. It could kill her.”
Andor said, “On a second exposure, is what Saito said. Unless there’s something in her past she never told us about—”
“I know she would never lie to us, but wha—”
Heat flashed over Mazie’s legs as a dry bush erupted in flames twelve feet tall. Andor’s and Mazie’s arms unbuckled as they sprinted, chased by the force of heat, the world turning red, through this smoky and breathless labyrinth, often reaching a juncture where only one tolerable turn existed, but they seemed to be coming to the same purple-veined walls, color less visible each time due to settling soot. Mazie’s lips dried and her eyes hurt and each breath drew hotter and hotter air into her lungs.
Farisa, across ten yards of brush and broken stone, was almost impossible to recognize at first. Her hair had once been as black as a monastery cat, but was now discolored by white dust and sun. Her clothing was shredded; she hopped from one shoeless foot to another, pointing her finger as if it were a gun, engulfing vine-choked bushes in flame.
Andor said, “The Farisa we know...”
“She's still in there.”
“It’s on me to get her out.” He raised the blowgun to his mouth.
“Hold off.” Mazie stepped in his way. “You might not need it. If she recognizes us—”
“If.”
“If she sees us. If she hears us.” She nudged his blowgun downward. “She will come back. I know who she is. You know who she is.”
“You're right, M—”
A fresh mountain wind crossed Mazie's face. She had been stuck in the oddest reverie—everything in this beautiful city catching fire, as if her hardened mind had refused to believe such a place could exist without being immediately destroyed by some contract written into the world. The bitter crust on her soul had formed such a sense of hazard that it taken a while for her to accept this place’s reality, but here she was in a place where she truly belonged.
Someone beautiful, someone with dark skin whom she could not recognize by face, and whose name she could not remember, but whom she had known for a long time—the Universal Lover—stood in front of her. Overcome with the lust of a thousand lives, she grabbed this lovely figure and planted a kiss on the lips, which became a passionate grabbing of flesh.
“No. Mazie, don’t do that. Mazie! My name is Andor Strong. You are mistaking me for someone else.”
“No,” Andor said. “Don’t do that. Mazie. Mazie! My name is Andor Strong. Whoever you think I am right now, I am not.”
Mazie stepped back. “Right.” The lustful impulse dissolved; the flames and smoke and coughing returned. “Qaelet got me. It finally fucking—”
Farisa, eyes nova blue, ran toward them in a wake of fire.
#
The mage—victorious over Qaelet’s prosecution, but also defeated, whether by Ilana’s murderous intentions or the city’s irreality—wondered if, upon taking the benefit of return to life in Venys’s stead, she would remember the young girl’s past actions as her own choices. How would she square that with her own rationales? Would there be discomfort, at first, with the resident memories? How many nights of sleep would it require for her to forget Farisa’s suffering and become fully Venys? Seven? Fourteen? Twenty-eight? Fifty-six? One hundred and twelve?
The judge forced a cough. “As I mentioned, the pardon and privilege we have offered you comes with conditions, and they must be met very soon.”
“We have not heard my witness,” Farisa heard herself say.
The Blue Marquessa had haunted her for so long, she had every right to confront this adversary before slipping into the new, easy life in which she would surely not remember that such a personage existed, except perhaps as a footnote in obscure literature. In less than one minute, she would be Venys, ignorant of the kind of misery this ancestral madwoman inflicted, but for now, she was owed a parting glance, a last exchange of insults.
The judge frowned. “You are demanding time from us we may not have. If a single one of your interlopers beholds the White Shadow, we will all die, and cannot fulfill our offer.”
An old woman’s voice boomed. “I am here.”
Idrissa walked forward. She looked nothing like the gargantuan wraith-woman of Farisa’s worst attacks. Rather, she was frail, with white hair and papery skin, shorter than five feet, with a rounding in her upper back. Aside from her bronze skin color, she looked precisely as Farisa would have imagined Nadia at the age of a hundred and six—and, as with Nadia, one could tell even now she had been gorgeous when young. Farisa perceived a certain aura of kindness—were she unaware of who this woman was, she might have been seduced by it—she had not felt in any of Qaelet’s people, save two: Sayuna, and the deceased king.
“I know what options you have given her,” said the Marquessa. “The decision is hers to make, but I must give this young woman a few words. Then I will go.”
The judge snapped. “Be quick.”
“I have lived far too long to heed your orders,” Idrissa said to the judge.
Farisa forced herself to look at the decrepit woman.
Idrissa’s bony gray-veined hands grabbed the defendant’s stand. “Farisa, I have trained you to be better than this.”
Before Farisa could respond, the Marquessa walked away with no apology, no gust of hateful defiance, no taunts of insults of any kind. The crowd, though they clearly disliked the woman, deferentially parted to let her leave. When she reached the doorway, the old woman clapped her hands and Farisa’s upper arm burned as if she had been struck, exactly where her faint scar crossed brown skin.
One did not know, at fourteen months of age, when a tired cat was sick, or when a sick cat was near death and should be let go; the infant’s mother, Kyana, did. “May your merit in this life be reflected in the next.” The tabby cat, black stripes on a brown coat, passed.
Kyana had not died in childbirth; Farisa had always known that. The death had occurred several days later. The cuts and burns and shocks and infusions had put her in such a state that even the pressure of a bedsheet was intolerable—it crested, then receded, then rose to the next in a series of worsening crests—until, when a wave of agony should have come, none did. That brown tabby cat, to whom she’d said goodbye a year ago, stood on her chest. I’ll lead the way, Mama. There are no monsters, and if I see one, I’ll scare it off.
Farisa muttered, “Who will scare mine?”
The scar on her shoulder burned hotter. She had loved. She had loved Raqel and Mazie and even Erysi. Venys had no scars, no betrayals, no dark nights in whistling forests...
Farisa. Farisa! Farisa, Farisa! I have trained—I have trained—you I have trained—I have you—I have you have to—I have trained you—I have trained you—to be better than this.
She remembered the malice in Ilana’s eyes, that fiery night in April, as it curdled into the foamy glee of consummate power. She flashed it back.
“I have every intention to take your sister’s life for myself,” she said, watching the rotted corpse who had lost everything lose a little bit more.
Ilana didn’t do what she did—Erysi didn’t do what she did—because I am brown, or because I am an outsider, or because I love women, or even because I am a mage, but simply because...
She looked at the judge. “But I reject your offer.”
The judge bit the corner of his mouth. “You do?”
... because I am better.
“I do,” Farisa said.
“I have offered you a new life. You instead take a sentence of death?”
“Ilana Harrow has died for her crimes. One could say I killed her, and even in that interpretation, I do not regret having done so. Still, if I take Venys’s life, causing her to inherit my death, then I am killing her, and she has done nothing wrong. You are asking me to return to life in a world where I must murder to extend my time—to steal, solely because I have been given the power to do so. Such a place is like the Company’s world; such a place is hell. If I reject it, and die, then I die out of hell, do I not? So, that is what I choose.”
The judge pushed his lips together. “Are you sure of this?”
She traced the scar on her shoulder for its tender, sweet pain. She missed Raqel and would miss the memory of her. She missed snowy winter nights in Tevalon and hated that she would never see another one. She missed Arvi and Skaya. She wanted to read the Vehu chorae again. She wanted to read The Tales of the Sixteen Winds again. She wanted to see Loran, where she knew she had grown up, but of which she had no memory. She missed Merrick and Nadia. She missed Claes and his terrible jokes, though those had become less common on the Mountain Road’s trying last miles. She missed Andor and Saito and Eric. She missed her memories of Garet and Runar. She missed Mazie and would miss the way she smelled.
“No, I’m not. But I choose it.”
The judge lifted his well-worn mallet. Farisa braced for him to strike that gong beside his seat but, instead, thrust it toward the sky with outstretched arms. The silk restraints around Farisa’s calves disintegrated.
“You are free to go,” said the judge.
“Free?” Had this been a test? Had she passed? “Did you say...?”
The judge nodded. “I say nothing, other than this court no longer takes interest in you.”
She stepped back from the stand. She did not want to gloat in her victory, because hundreds of spectators, now dumbfounded, had come for her blood and been left unsatisfied. She held an expressionless face as she walked toward the doorway, but gradually let her chest and shoulders move into a position of defiance. She changed her walk to be seen from more angles; she felt all of them ought to see her long black wavy hair and her shapely arms. She nearly had the audacity to remove her shoes, and she was five steps from the courtroom’s exit when an invisible python coiled around her throat.
This court no longer takes interest in you.
The invisible pressure would not cease. Her chest tightened and her legs buckled. With her last wind, before her throat closed for good, she shouted: “Idrissa! I make only one demand. Protect my friends!”
Qaelet’s cold courtroom floor swung up to strike her face.
#
Andor, knowing his life and Farisa’s would end if these flames continued spreading, closed his lips around the mouth of the blowgun. Sweat beads sizzled as they formed on his face. The furious mage charged. A yellow-white flash blinded him. He puffed. The dart sped into smoke, and then he heard Farisa fall.
He and Mazie ran to her.
Mazie asked, “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Andor crouched to check her throat for a pulse.
“Did you hit her? Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
“She isn’t dead yet. Let’s take her somewhere high so she doesn’t breathe in any more smoke.”
Mazie looked around. The wall at their back was too sheer to climb. “Where?”
Saito, swinging his machete, came running. “Hands off my sister, you animals!”
#
The other mage—a healer of souls, the occasional thief of a scrap of fish—ran on four paws, knowing everyone’s survival depended on her getting south as fast as possible. The madness of this place had even taken Farisa; the others were entirely outmatched. Perhaps she too had been in animal form for too long—whenever a wage of heat pressed too close, cognition failed and raging instinct forced her the other way at five times a human’s speed. It was not cowardice, for she knew she might die today, but a reflex that took place before her mind had any say.
Ouragan, too, had felt her abilities grow stronger with every mile south, but the awful power here had a hundred times her mind’s force, and she could only push herself through it by outrunning its allures. The citizens of this cursed place knew she was no ordinary cat; they had first tried to tempt her with food and sweet noises, but were now throwing rocks that landed real as ice as they crashed into her furry side. Boots kicked at her and buckets of boiling water scalded her, but the pain never reduced her body’s ability to run. She scrambled over stones, climbed stairs when they were available, and took falls as steep as four stories when necessary, thankful to be in a cat’s body for this, for she could land safely without slowing her run. Covered gutters concealed her as she hurried through them. Grocers turned over their carts to block her way. Old men swung broomsticks, hitting her head and making her dizzy. Walls of white and purple marble materialized where a clear way had been a moment before and, unwilling to stop her sprint, she collided with and passed through them. Brambles tore at her fur, and she suspected those were real. Sometimes she saw ornate flower gardens; sometimes she saw the drab olive-colored brush of a desert ruin. All sights were of a kind one could get lost in, but not at the blurry speed of thirty miles an hour.
The White Shadow was not far; it was no longer mere opposition, but anxiety, that she sensed in the townsfolk who clubbed and stoned and scalded her—the wounds healed in half a second—as she raced through the southern half of town. These false injuries could be ignored, but the blaze nearby demanded caution, because she was low to the ground and one breath of the very-real smoke would be enough to slow her, the second enough to put her to sleep, the third enough to kill her.... She took a detour, knowing no safe alternative, and found herself in a corridor with flames at her back—the first breath of heat put her into a full-speed run toward a white marble wall. She ran toward it, as if to go through, expecting an illusion like all the others, but her limbs piled up as she crashed into it. A running jump would not suffice to get her over. Red, orange, and yellow flames were spilling toward her like rushing fluid, surrounded by shimmering air that offered no clear lines of sight. The fire tightened its grip on the cat’s tiny body.
What nonsense, nine lives—in the end, it really is just one.
Farisa could no longer be blamed; she had also succumbed. The mage, face buried in a killing smoke, lifted her head off the ground for one last glance, eyes shining inexplicably blue, and a gust of frigid wind cleared the air of smoke just in time. Ouragan’s paws lost their weight upon the ground, then felt only air as she found herself ten, thirty, seventy feet above the ground, now atop the white wall, where she scampered down its other side, taking a harsh but safe four-legged landing on a stone slab rooftop, after which she bolted fast enough to whisk the world down until she had crossed the city’s southern gate. On its other side, the cat found a white plaza, featureless aside from an indentation, shape and size of a sprawling human body, that appeared to belong to a falling victim into setting concrete.
An Outsider had seen the White Shadow, breaking Qaelet’s curse.
#
The six travelers had not wandered far from each other. Claes, now lucid, called for the others. They found their way to him easily. Farisa’s fall, precisely when Andor had fired the dart, had caused it to miss her. Ouragan had run off somewhere, but they knew she would find them before they found her.
Saito heard Sayuna’s voice. “Thank you for freeing me.”
“I wish I—”
“Who are you talking to?” Farisa asked.
“No one.”
They walked south at first toward what had once been a public square, still recognizable as an important place by the streak of black stones amidst the rubble.
“There was a memorial to plague victims,” Farisa said. “Even grief does not live forever.”
The wind blowing north, they walked untroubled to the ruin’s southern edge. Ivy had conquered nearly the entirety of the plaza outside the gate, but the White Shadow, free of vegetation by five yards in all directions, stood extant in quake-riven concrete, the doomed man clinging to one of the slab’s cracks.
Despite exhaustion, they agreed, out of respect for the ancient site, that they would neither camp there nor go inside again. They went around the city’s walls to get their animals, then returned to the Road, as best they could measure it, as it progressed into the southern hills.
They took their evening meal of hard bread and cured meat, more satisfying than plain food ought to be, while the sun was still in the sky. Mazie found dried dates in their husker wagon, perfect for this occasion, and they tasted sweeter than the finest candy. This montane overlook, a thousand feet higher than Qaelet’s plain, offered a panoramic view of the ruin they had come through. Standing together, they traced in their minds the paths they had taken through it.
Mazie shook her head. “That was...”
“The people seemed as real as you and me,” Saito added.
Claes said, “I felt an earthquake, real as red.”
Eric added, “At first, I knew they were ghosts, but...”
Mazie washed her face with water they had gathered from a fresh stream. “I think we were all pulled in by it, all of us but Andor.”
“In fact, so was I,” he said, looking over the ruins with a spyglass. “I see it now. And I owe Farisa an apology. We all do.”
Farisa bit into a piece of salty bread. “Why?”
“The fire,” Andor said. He handed Mazie the spyglass as she came up beside him. “See for yourself.”
“You’re fucking right,” Mazie said. “There never was one.”
Mats of sedge and ivy covered Qaelet’s ruins; not a leaf of it had burned.
“What’s this about a fire?” Farisa asked.
Claes put a hand on her arm. “We can talk about that tomorrow.”
Farisa put a tiny piece of dried fish between Ouragan’s front paws. “Have you any clue what they’re on about?”
Ouragan, in the posture of an ancient statue, meowed.
#
Farisa had hoped for dreamless sleep. Like the others, she had been up late in fireside conversation, thankful to have the company of real people rather than ghosts, and hoped for rest so deep it demanded no awareness. Still, in spite of this slumbering will, the closed-eye lights of the early morning hours did dance, and she found herself opposite Ilana in the ornate first-class car of a train.
“I had it,” Ilana muttered. “I had absolute power, and then I— I had absolute power, and then I— I had absolute power, and then I—”
“If it’s any consolation,” Farisa said, “I felt it all. The parts that really happened, the parts that didn’t. I experienced everything. I did survive, and I did learn of Erysi’s role in the fire, but I still felt you kill me. You shall live on, in trauma.”
Ilana’s eyes widened. “Rissa.”
“Farisa.”
The train car tilted as it came around a bend.
“What is this place?” Ilana looked at her hands in fear. Perhaps one who knew she was dead took the sight of a living self with the same horror the living felt toward a corpse. “Where am I, R?”
“I don’t know.” Farisa crossed her arms. “This is your train, not mine.”
“I didn’t know it would—”
Farisa shrugged, then said the words of Rhazyladne: “Your mind is the place you make it.”
The mage disappeared. The train’s engine chugged on through the night, taking its sole passenger wherever she wanted to go.