As soon as the ship stopped at the rebel port in Iriméze’s pipes, Saia threw Serit and an asleep Nuras over her shoulders and started running. She bumped into people as she crossed the factory, not even bothering to stop their falls. She activated the elevator before the guard in the room could even register the fact she had entered by pushing the door out of its hinges. The cabin seemed slower than usual, to the point she wondered if she should have climbed instead.
Once they finally reached the bottom of the city, she bowled over some more guards, running steadily toward her goal: the representatives’ building.
She realized that Serit was limp, not holding onto her tunic anymore. They seemed asleep. She remembered that the rebels had a strand of their hair and could use it to put them to sleep, so she pushed some viss forward to contrast their action.
Serit came to their senses with a surprised gulp. They emitted a short scream before remembering where they were and what they were doing.
Saia couldn’t help but feel a bit of satisfaction when the guards around the area tried to stop her but couldn’t even slow her down. She opened the entrance of the building with a push. It wasn’t locked, so it slammed against the wall, interrupting the meeting inside. The three people who had been talking to the representatives flattened against the wall while she advanced toward the table and put Serit and Nuras down beside her. She awakened the boss of the rebels with a bit of viss and watched as he raised his feathers in fear.
Izha stood, surprised. Enanit almost did too, her outraged face crossed by fear, and by something else Saia couldn’t recognize. Héshe clasped her hands around the armrests of her chair, then looked at the three guests she’d been talking to a moment before.
“You can leave. We’ll summon you again to resume this conversation.”
They scurried out of the building and closed the door.
“What do you need, Saia?” Héshe asked, feigning a calm it was clear she wasn’t feeling.
“Serit,” she replied, moving her eyes between the three representatives. “Tell them about the rebels.”
“They kidnapped me after you closed me in the warehouse, together with my research,” they said, talking fast. “They created a pattern that includes the entire fifth level and they’re going to activate it tonight. They’ve used part of my patterns to create a link of viss.”
They paused, their voice almost not pronouncing that word, ‘my’. Enanit opened her mouth to speak, but they cut her off.
“It will join every human and shilvé that will participate in the festival. The humans’ viss will go to their shilvé counterparts, and they won’t need to rain anymore. The most recent cargo of weapons you distributed amongst your guards doesn’t work anymore, and they forged multiple rain whistles, so they will take advantage of the general confusion to take the power. You need to stop them now.”
“Where is the proof that any of this is true?” Enanit said.
Serit pointed at Nuras, who had retreated some steps toward the door. Saia pushed him forward with a gust of wind.
“He’s the head of the organization. Question him and you’ll find out the truth. But first, please, help us stop the rebels. They have some people mingling with the crowd and ready to activate the pattern as we speak.”
Saia noticed they had left out Vanan’s involvement. She didn’t correct them.
“You’re still asking us to trust you blindly. It won’t…”
Enanit shut up when Saia stepped forward.
“If you don’t believe them, I’ll make you. I’m not under your control anymore.”
“We were informed,” Héshe said.
“Izh… Representative Izha,” Serit added, turning toward him. “They’re still allied with the wind spirits and using their flying ships to capture the people who rained in the past months. They’re keeping the ones they don’t immediately need in closed bottles, that’s why most of them didn’t return in time. You were one of them.”
He seemed completely confused. Serit pressed on.
“The humans down there don’t have the weapon I created, so raining is not dangerous. Not for that reason, at least. Those were memories they put into you through their unlicensed memories manipulators.”
Izha slowly sat down, eyes lost on the table. Serit approached him and put a hand on his arm.
“The people are already gathering at the fifth level, the rebels might act sooner since they know I escaped. We need to act now.”
Izha looked up at them.
“I trust you, Serit.” He stood again. “Where’s the pattern? I’ll tell my guards to destroy it.”
“It was traced with the celebrative lights, but altering it is too dangerous,” Serit explained. “It has dozens of superfluous lines to mask the fact it’s a pattern, and it could have unforeseen consequences if the rebels activate a modified version. It’s better if you evacuate the fifth, fourth and third levels. Without people to act upon, it won’t work.”
Izha nodded.
“I’ll handle this.”
He squeezed Serit’s shoulder, then headed out of the building. Shortly after, a group of guards entered to escort Nuras out.
Serit took a deep breath, then turned toward Héshe, at the opposite corner of the table.
“The rebels’ hideout is near the city, only marginally above the rain threshold. They’re counting on the cloud system to keep them hidden, so if you temporarily deactivate the pattern you should see it easily.”
Héshe was already pushing herself away from the table, the wheels of her chair rolling like thunder on the wooden floor.
“I’ll take care of it personally.”
“The bottles are full of prisoners,” Serit added quickly, before she could leave the building. “And they have locks of hair from each person they managed to awake, so they can control them a bit. Don’t trust Hilon!”
Héshe turned her head to flash them a confident smile, then left the room.
Serit stood in front of the table, breathing fast as if they had exhausted all of their energies.
“The shard, now,” Saia said.
They nodded, but before they could say anything else, Enanit’s chair scraped the floor while she stood up.
“What about me? Don’t you have a task for me too, engineer? I don’t want to miss the chance to run around like your lapdog.”
Serit glared at her.
“We don’t have time for this. Fifth level, Saia.”
“Saia, right, I keep forgetting your name,” Enanit said, smiling at her. “I have something that might interest you. From mount Ohat.”
Saia hesitated. Her mind was screaming for her to run toward the fifth level, but her viss buzzed with longing at the idea of knowing what was going on at the mountain, what had prompted whoever had Aili’s shard to send her such a desperate message.
“You have ten seconds,” she said.
Serit raised their hands as if to tell her to stop, but Enanit took a story-bottle from the ones clustered on the desk in front of her and raised it.
“I promised I would contact the other cities to know whether they were having the same problems as us, didn’t I? This is from Taliméze, which right now is crossing the area right above your mountain. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to discuss the contents with the other representatives, but I think you’ll find them interesting.”
Saia looked at the bottle, wondering whether it was a trap to make her waste time, and to what end. Enanit’s fake smile didn’t linger for long. She scoffed, then threw the bottle in the air.
“Ten seconds, was it? I believe they’re over.”
Saia was already jumping before she could fully register what was going on. She had to correct her trajectory a bit with gusts of winds, but in the end she grabbed the bottle one armlength from the floor. She put a hand against the wall to stop her impetus and steady herself. She started reading the story-bottle without bothering to stand upright, so strong was the thirst for news from home, the tiredness of asking herself over and over what was going on, how everyone was doing.
She saw the mountain from above. The vision was perfectly circular and surrounded by darkness, as if she was staring at it through one half of a binocular. She immediately recognized Suimer’s bay, saw the boats lined up in front of it. Lights periodically flashed from the top of the mountain, breaking the gloom of the sunset. The vision was moving so slowly it seemed stuck, so Saia started reading more quickly. A barrier of light exploded between the boats and the village.
“Saia,” Serit’s voice called from somewhere, but she was too busy thinking of Zeles, left to fend off the monks alone.
She read even faster. She saw one of the boats detach from the rest. A wave pushed it into Tilau’s waters, turning it upside down. A second barrier of light exploded from nothing, perpendicular to the first, only to disappear soon after. She saw a blue light spread from the bottom of the sea, more monks converging to fish it out.
The thread of viss that contained the vision ended too soon. She went back and read more carefully, but there was nothing else to see. She stayed in the darkness of the aftervision to reflect, viss buzzing with distress. There were two deities in danger, the one in the water and the one protecting Suimer. She didn’t need further proof to know they were Aili and Zeles.
She left the dark space of the story-bottle.
“We need to go now,” she was beginning to say, looking for Serit inside the room, but her words died out.
Guards had entered while she’d been focused on the vision. Only a handful of them were humans, amidst a dozen or more birdguards. Two had been carefully approaching her, tridents pointed to her back. They froze as soon as she moved.
The rest was clustered around Serit: two pushing them down by their shoulders, one holding a foot against their back, two crossing the central blade of their tridents in front of their throat. The rest formed three defensive rings between them and Saia. Enanit had positioned herself on the opposite side of the room.
“Extend your domain and they die,” Enanit said.
“What do you want from me?” Saia replied. “What was happening there?”
“I don’t know much more than you do, but if I had to guess…”
Enanit paced in the corner of the room, so that half of the time she was hidden behind the guards who were clustering around Serit. They were looking down at the floor. By their resigned expression, it seemed they could peer past the cheap wood, through the rocks of the city and the surface of the world below, straight at the abode of their goddess under the earth.
“You desperately want the second shard. Serit told us it belongs to you, but when we used it to deactivate you after your escape, it didn’t work. You didn’t already take it, which means you don’t know exactly where it is.”
“Fifth level,” Saia replied.
“Of course, but which building? I’ve told the guards to be ready at my next command. It’s your choice if they’ll use it to awake your friend, or they’ll throw it away. I just need to send a message.”
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
She opened the palm of her hand, revealing for an instant the small lantern she was holding.
“Serit knows, but they won’t speak because it will get them killed.”
“Izha and Héshe won’t allow you to…” they started, but the guard behind them pressed their foot harder against their back, while the ones holding them by the shoulder heaved back. Their face scrunched up in pain, a rivulet of blood running from their throat to the neckline of their tunic.
“I can just tell them the rebels managed to kill you. They can’t do anything to me, and if you think representative Izha will miss you, you overestimate him.”
“Liar,” Serit managed to whisper despite the pain.
“What do you want?” Saia asked.
Enanit smiled.
“Your shard, obviously. I’ll deactivate you and get your viss harvested, and put an end to this madness once and for all.”
Saia went through her possibilities in the back of her mind. The guards were enough to slow her down, enough for Enanit to give the order to throw out Aili’s shard, and with it any chance Saia had to awaken her in time. On top of that, the birdguards were close enough to see her domain and any pattern she traced with her viss, so they could kill Serit the instant she tried to reach them. If she wanted to save them, she had to act without moving or expanding her domain.
Enanit opened her mouth, probably to taunt her a bit more, but Serit spoke before she could.
“On the other side of the ring from your shard,” they said, talking quickly. “Oranges orchard, red roof.”
“Kill them!” Enanit yelled.
“You’re free from our deal,” they added with a whisper, then closed their eyes.
The guards drew back their tridents a bit, coordinated like clockwork. In an instant of clarity, while her brain of glass buzzed in search of a solution, Saia wondered whether she could appeal to them, whether any of them were the same she’d saved back at Ifse from being struck by the whistle.
Under those feathers they were still shilvé, after all.
She produced the sound without even knowing if she could, trusting in the same ability that allowed her, Aili and the other deities to imitate any voice with ease.
The sound was raspy at first, exactly as if a bird had been trying to emit it by blowing through its beak, just like the first and only time she had heard it at the rebel hideout. It intensified before anyone else in the room could realize what was happening.
The guards, Enanit and Serit collapsed as one. The moans of pain started immediately after, as the bodies rolled over each other, begging everyone in earshot to let them rain.
Saia crossed the room to reach Serit. They didn’t emit a sound, even if their entire body was in convulsion. They were clutching at their throat, probably to stop the rivulet of blood that was still spilling out of it, but their grip had become so rigid it looked like they were trying to choke themselves.
Saia touched their fingers, healing the superficial cut with her own viss. They didn’t seem to have other wounds, even if their energies were moving in a weird way. She didn’t know how to stop them, so she just forced their hands to open with her own, then heaved their trembling body across her shoulders, as if she was carrying water from a well with a pole and two buckets.
Then, she ran away. Out of the building, across the bottom level, toward the nearest staircase. A river of people was descending it, threatened and encouraged by small groups of guards.
She pushed in the opposite direction, bumping into everyone that stood in her way. Soon the yells of protest and the trail of people sitting on the stairs after colliding with her body of stone convinced the ones above to move out of her way well before reaching her. She accelerated.
Once at the top of the staircase she moved toward the next, unfazed by the guards yelling her to stop.
“Why?” she heard whispering next to her head.
“What?” she asked.
Serit’s voice was groggy. They were still trembling, even if less strongly than before. Maybe trying the whistle with their friends had made them a bit more resistant to its effects.
“Why bring me with you? I thought you hated me.”
“Did you prefer to stay with Enanit and her murdery friends?”
They didn’t answer, so Saia kept talking.
“There was a person I hated more than anything in the entire world. When it finally came the moment for her to die, I still pleaded for her life.” She smiled at the memory, even if Serit couldn’t see her expression. “Besides, you might still be useful.”
They didn’t speak until she had reached the fifth level. The last staircase was empty, with only a group of guards lingering at the bottom, where the effect of the pattern could still catch them. They tried to warn Saia, but she bowled them over without even stopping.
Serit pointed with a trembling hand, and she followed their directions up to the house next to an orchard of oranges and with the wooden roof painted in red. The guards inside had deserted along with everyone else, too occupied in saving themselves to worry about Enanit’s plans. The shard was still there, inside a uselessly locked room.
Saia put Serit down next to the wall, so that they could sit with their back upright, and handed them the shard.
“Awake my friend.”
They hesitated, their fingertips trembling before reaching the glass.
“Are you sure?”
“There’s no time. I’d do it myself, but I can’t.”
They took it delicately and shut their eyes tight. They reopened them after an instant and abandoned their head against the wall.
“Done.”
Saia checked the shard: Aili’s viss seemed more lively, but it was difficult to tell. She put it back inside her shoulder, then shut off her sight. The darkness was calm and welcoming, even if glimpses from Enanit’s story-bottle flashed in front of her mind, reminding her that there was still a battle going on in her village.
Still, she allowed herself a moment of rest.
“So now you’ll leave?” Serit asked, voice a bit more firm than before.
Saia activated her vision again. She smiled openly, with her statue as well as her viss.
“Yes, finally.”
The corners of Serit’s mouth raised with the hint of a smile, but they immediately returned serious. Their eyes moved away from her to look out of a nearby window. Saia could easily guess what they were thinking, because the same question was creeping up from the recess of her mind: what, now?
She didn’t know where she was, exactly. Her viss was still flowing toward the mountain in vertiginous quantities, even if it would supposedly slow down once she was back on land. Still, it was a scary feeling when she had so few years left inside her sphere.
Thirteen. Only thirteen, and the monks still controlled the mountain. She couldn’t afford to lose it looking for the way home. As soon as she knew where to go, she had to move steadily, without a single break along the way.
But what if it wasn’t enough?
“So what are your plans, now?” she asked Serit, as if aiming that question at someone else could eradicate it from her mind.
They glanced at her before pointing their eyes at the window. They shook their head, then exploded in a bitter laugh.
“I’m thinking about it, but I don’t see a way out. I’m implied with the rebels, and after you used the whistle against Enanit she’ll use that notion to bring me down, whether in prison or shunned to the fourth level. I can’t go back to Hilon, nor to the shelter, if I don’t want people to think that the children of viss are connected to the rebels. Without Hilon’s or the representatives’ support, I don’t know how I’ll obtain the funds for another research. And if Vanan somehow escapes the guards, he’ll resume looking for me. Every idea I have belongs to him, after all.”
They laughed again, then hung their head.
“I’ll have to leave Iriméze. I don’t think I can stay inside the city after all of this.”
“Good,” Saia said. “Because you’re not staying.”
She ignored Serit’s confused gaze and approached the window to look out at the shining lights of the festival.
“Do you think the pattern would work on me?”
Serit tried to stand, but their legs weren’t steady enough and they fell back down.
“What do you mean?”
Saia turned her head to stare at them with her statue’s eyes.
“The link to the mountain is draining me. I need to replace it.”
Serit’s eyes widened.
“You mean… You want me to come with you?” They paused. “To the land below?”
Their voice cracked a bit at that last question. Saia was glad to see fear and confusion crossing their face. Their expression eventually settled on something similar to resolve.
“We need to activate the pattern, though,” they continued. “If I’m not mistaken the activation point should be…”
Saia hoisted them over one shoulder before they could finish the sentence.
“Just point.”
She ran through the deserted orchards, the lights of the pattern mixing with the ones that were used only as decoration. After weeks far from home and with time to appreciate her surroundings, she noticed how deeply comforting the simple presence of trees was.
She was a bit surprised to recognize the buildings toward which Serit was guiding her: one of the administrative structures she had visited during her search for the shard.
“First floor of the uniform room,” Serit said.
Saia kicked in the door of the empty building and let her memories of the place guide her toward the staircase and into the room. She stopped at the top of the stairs, looking for decorations, but she was only met with darkness.
“Under the floor,” Serit said. “They couldn’t just leave them around.”
Saia expanded her domain a bit to look under the thin floorboards. She found pipes for running water, and wrapped around some of the innermost ones, the wires that held up the small lights. Except the bulbs had been broken off, probably to hide them better.
“How do I recognize the activation point?” she asked.
“Round surface of metal. A bit like the pommel of the rods in the navigation room.”
Saia found it on one border of the floor, where lines of unassuming boots lay in pairs next to the wall. She tore off the plank that covered it and stared at the wire wrapping around the base of the pommel. Easy to replace if broken.
“How much viss will this cost me?”
“I can stand, you know?”
Saia put Serit down. They straightened, keeping their balance with a hand against the wall.
“It’s supposed to be used by a shilvé, so a bit more than what a human can produce in a day, considerably less than a tanhata’s average reserve.”
“Even if the pattern is so big?” Saia wondered.
Serit nodded.
“This is partially why they tied together the wires with the lights and didn’t use, say, one long regular wire.”
They put a shoulder against the wall and let themselves slide down against the wood until they were kneeling on the floor, right in front of the hole. They pointed at a broken light.
“Each of these contains either a sprite or a piece of a sprite. They can resist for the whole duration of the festival, but they have to be fed after that and brought back to the temple or arena, so the glass is fairly fragile. When viss is pushed along the wire, the sprites sense it and become so agitated that they escape their confinements. Then they perceive the nearby viss of the other sprites and run toward them, freeing them in turn.” They moved their finger further along the line. “The mass of sprites follows the wires, gobbling up any speck of viss they can find. Then they break out at the end of the line, conveniently placed inside a bigger glass container.”
They clapped their hands.
“Close the container, close the sprites inside. Then you can free them where they’re needed.”
“So they’ll activate the pattern by running?”
Serit nodded.
“With absolute certainty.”
“What about the link with the mountain?”
“It’s going to replace it, just as I planned in my… Vanan’s original research.”
Saia touched the pommel and sent forward some days worth of viss, to be on the safe side. For an instant, nothing happened. Then, she heard a faint ‘pop’ from the outside, immediately followed by another, and another.
Serit tugged at her sleeve, standing carefully.
“You can stop sending viss, now. Let’s watch the show.”
Saia raised her hand carefully, hesitant about letting go of a pattern without yet achieving the effect she wanted from it.
Serit wobbled toward the window. Saia chose another one nearby and leaned forward with her elbows on the windowsill. The lights in the distance all around the ring of the fifth level stood out against the darkness, even if the effect was somewhat weakened by her ability to see well in the dark. The popping sound continued somewhere to her right, but her view of what was happening was obstructed by the trees of the orchard. She saw some lights disappear, tracing a path in mid-air. Then, a small sun emerged from the other side of the trees.
“The sprites!” Serit yelled, pointing like a child.
Saia observed the movement of the evergrowing mass of sprites up and down buildings, around trees and benches, flying over the squares where the line was suspended over the cobblestone. The light was tracing the pattern right in front of her. It was running so fast that some pieces detached from the main body. They hovered as if stunned by a heavy meal.
The bulk of the sprites kept going, faster and faster, until it was on the other side of the fifth level, so bright it could almost blind Saia too. It approached from the opposite direction, then entered a section of forest that was hidden by the wall of the building.
“Quick,” Serit said, but stumbled on their own legs as they tried to reach the staircase.
Saia easily picked them up and carried them outside with her. She was surprised by how fast she was running, not wanting to lose even a second more of the show of light.
They arrived at the entrance of the building just in time to see the sun approaching them. Saia stood in its way while Serit hid behind her. It sharply turned before it could get too close and spiraled around a trunk. The tree looked on fire while the light climbed higher and higher.
Once it reached the top, the sphere of sprites exploded in the air. They ascended in the night sky, either alone or tangled together, as if they were stars waiting to join their sisters up above.
As spectacular as the scene was, Saia almost didn’t register it. The flux of viss that anchored her to the mountain, plaguing her days since the moment she had stepped inside Iriméze, had disappeared. She was so close to Serit that she almost didn’t notice the thin stream that joined them.
She smiled, then let out a laugh.
“It worked!”
Serit clutched their hands to their chest, still looking up at the dispersing sprites. Their fingers weren’t trembling anymore, as if the viss that was holding their body together had reassured their receptors that there was no need to rain.
“I won’t need to make the voyage anymore,” they said, in a tone that was riddled with loss.
“I can withhold the link for a bit, if you want.”
Serit turned to look at her with wide eyes.
“I… I knew it could happen if you exerted yourself too much. You can do that at command?”
Saia nodded.
“Not for much.”
“An instant is enough,” Serit looked up again. “Once I become water, the link won’t put me back until I evaporate. But at that point I’ll be here again, and who knows what could happen to me.”
Saia smiled.f
“Good to know.”
Serit couldn’t reply, because the sprites were shining light on something else approaching the city from above. Saia recognized the hulls of the ships: some of the rebels had probably escaped capture and were coming to the fifth level to salvage what they could of their broken plan.
Short on their heels, more sprites appeared, this time ridden by just as many guards. Saia doubted they could actually hurt the hulls of iron, unless they tired out the crews.
“We could take some sprites to ride,” Serit said, pointing at the approaching guards.
A spirit appeared from above, so quick they look like lightning. They pierced one of the sprites with their long needle, dispersing its body in a thousand little pieces. The rider fell down, into Iriméze’s clouds.
Serit stared with an open mouth as more guards were struck down in the same way. They stopped following the ships, and the group of spirits that was attacking them stopped as well, observing the small fleet as it landed between the buildings.
Saia grabbed Serit and jumped up to the top of the city. Her way out was through the clouds below. There wasn’t anything left to do at Iriméze.
She thought of the humans working in the pipes. Of the crowd who had just been evacuated from the higher levels, all of those people flowing down the stairs.
She jumped and propelled herself upwards, toward the waiting spirits. She expanded her domain until it included them all. She raised winds from every direction to squash their bodies together in a screaming ball of luminous fog.
“Go tell your elders,” she said, her voice coming out from every corner of her domain, “That Iriméze can defend itself.”
She glimpsed the guards converging onto the rebels as the spirits tried to untangle themselves, only obtaining to float away from the city. The battle wasn’t over, but it looked much more in the city’s favor.
She was only certain of one thing: she wouldn’t be there when it ended.
Twelve years, she counted. She did nothing to stop her body from falling, still clutching a screaming Serit against her shoulder. A few seconds and they pierced the clouds, plunging down to the world below.