All empires fail. They overreach, spread too thin, collect one enemy too many. They’re gnawed at from within by corruption, greed, betrayal. The Mesaret Empire was no exception. There was fighting on all fronts when a young smith called Skathis looked into the swirl of chaos and saw...opportunity.
He slew the emperor, but he did not take his place. He had other aspirations. He wished be a god. So he took the emperor’s godsmetal, and then he left the world with his ship and a small, handpicked crew that included his spy, Korako, whether she wanted to go or not.
Nova reached Aqa just too late. She missed them by a week. And she might as well have wished to fly to the moon as follow them through the portal. It simply wasn’t possible. Nevertheless, she did it. Not that year or the next, but she did it. Skathis had a mesarthium skyship to navigate portals and realms. She had nothing but her wits and her diadem, and still she found ways to follow. Sometimes it took her years to get from one world to the next. The trail grew old and faint, but always she kept on going.
There comes a certain point with a hope or a dream, when you either give it up or give up everything else. And if you choose the dream, if you keep on going, then you can never quit, because it’s all you are. Nova had made that choice a long time ago. She was so far down this path that to turn around would be to face a howling, dark tunnel with nothing at its end, not even ice or uuls. There was no going back. There was nothing else. There was only Kora, and the words that haunted Nova:
Find me. I am not free.
It had taken her more than two hundred years to track Skathis’s skyship to the edge of the shattered empire. She had lived many lives in that time, finding her way—making her way—through world after war-ravaged world. It was something, to have survived so much and come so far. The sea, she thought, would not know her now. She scarcely knew herself. No one still lived—in any world—who remembered Koraandnova, save Kora herself, her other half, so long ago severed from her.
She had been just Nova for centuries now, but the broken edges of that sundered name had not grown smooth with time. If anything they had gotten sharper. Touch them and you’d bleed. Through it all, whatever life she was living, whatever way she was surviving, she never stopped searching for her sister.
There was a treacherous whisper that lived inside her—the sea’s voice, which she couldn’t leave behind. Thakra knows she’d tried. Whenever she felt it stirring, its words starting to form in her mind, she’d bite the inside of her cheek or lip, hard enough to draw blood. The blood was a tithe she paid to keep it silent, or else it was a prayer that she would prove the whisper wrong.
Too late.
Those were the words she couldn’t kill. That was the fear she quelled with her blood—that she would always and forever be too late.
But now, at long last, she had found the white bird—or it had found her, as it had once before. And as she followed it through the portal, she knew: It could only be leading her to Kora.
Chapter 40
Onslaught
Sarai was numb with the shock of the red-sea vista as Wraith burst through the portal. The warp stretched to disgorge the eagle, its massive wings spread wide, and snapped back into place only to open again as figures poured in behind it: one...two... four black-clad marauders, one in the lead, three fanning out behind.
Wraith’s shriek was twinned with a scream, and even muted by the chamber, it was bloodcurdling. It was no natural scream. Sarai, Lazlo, and the others were racked by it. It invaded them, body and mind. It came from a woman, the one in the lead. She was fair-haired and slight. She was blue, clad in tight black garb that made her seem dipped in oil. At her brow, like a crown, she wore a circlet of mesarthium. Her eyes were mad, and her mouth was open to pour forth this soul-scouring scream.
Sarai had never heard a wilder sound. There were wolves in it, and war cries, carrion birds and storm winds, and she’d never have believed it came from a person if she weren’t seeing it with her own eyes. It struck terror in her, in all of them, rendering them stunned and helpless.
It was magic. It was an assault. It drilled into their minds and cut them off from their instincts, muting their natural reactions.
Lazlo faltered, stricken. He was in the act of pulling back the walkway and closing the orb, but everything halted. Where he might have sent forth a surge of mesarthium to engulf the intruders, he did not. Even the defensive instincts of Eril-Fane and Azareen, razor-honed by years of training, were overpowered. They didn’t draw their hreshteks, which should have been second nature, but shrank from the sound, hands flying up to flatten against their ears.
. . .
Nova breached the portal screaming Werran’s scream. He was one of her cohort, and this was his gift: a scream to sow panic in the minds of all who heard it. There was no better way to stun one’s foe in the opening assault. Nova liked to lead with it, and buy herself a moment to assess her opponent at leisure. Usually, she let Werran use his gift himself, but she had a mighty need to scream as she followed Kora’s bird into this unknown world, so she took it over and let it loose, and relished the way it ravaged her throat.
At last she had come to the moment she’d been chasing for more than two centuries, since the night she unwrapped the diadem and vowed to free her sister.
She’d lost count of the number of worlds there were between this one and her own. And she hadn’t kept track of the men she’d killed since Zyak and Shergesh. But she knew the years, and the months, and the days since the white bird came to Rieva. It had been so long, but now she was here. She was going to save her sister, and she was so much more than ready.
She scanned the room, still pouring out the scream, her heart pounding fit to burst. Five Servants and three humans, she counted. Her eyes flicked over them fast, then over them again even faster. Kora’s bird flew in circles, its cry twining with her scream. Nova’s heart beat harder. She bit off the scream. She’d thought the bird would lead her to her sister. The need to see her was a violent fire within her.
But Kora wasn’t here.
Too late, came the treacherous whisper. She bit her cheek, and her mouth filled with the metal tang of blood.
. . .
Humans and godspawn cowered, paralyzed by the scream, and when it cut off—when the woman bit it off and bared her teeth at them in an animal snarl—they were left reeling in silence, each of them feeling stranded, as though the scream were a wave that had hurled them onto a beach and left them alone and gasping, the bits and pieces of who they were strewn all around them.
The invaders fanned out before them in the air. They were flying, or floating, impervious to gravity. Besides the leader, there were two men and a woman, all blue, and all clad in the same oily black—a uniform that fit like skin, with boots that looked built to crush bones underfoot and somehow stood on air. Sheathed short swords hung at their sides, and they were grim-faced with menace, all wielding rods of some gray metal with two short prongs at the end. Lightning leapt between the prongs, emitting an ominous crackle.
The sight brought Lazlo back to himself. In the wake of the scream, instinct returned—not in a surge but slowly, as though scattered bits of his mind were trying to reassemble themselves. His first thought was to put Sarai behind him. For her part, she could only stare. She felt as though she were back in Minya’s nightmare, because this woman with her fair hair and pale brows...she knew her. She’d seen her in the nursery doorway.
Korako, she thought.
So did Eril-Fane, though he knew it was impossible. He remembered his knife plunging into her heart, the life leaving her eyes. But her eyes glittered now, alive with brutal intensity. He drew his hreshtek. Azareen did, too.
Lazlo, hearing the twin sounds of blades unsheathing, gave his sluggish head a shake and reached for his power. It was too late to close the orb and keep the intruders out. They were in, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t stop them. Already, he had learned: Nothing could stop mesarthium. He opened himself to the energies that were alive all around him. Gritting his teeth, he willed his metal to strike, and up from the floor of the chamber, a geyser of mesarthium erupted. It was a shining blue jet of liquid metal, propelled with volcanic force. It surged up at the woman. It would annihilate her on impact. But Lazlo didn’t have annihilation in him. He willed the geyser to hollow and open, making a molten tube that would, instead, surround and contain her.
Or, it should have. But just as it reached her, it froze. Gaping open like a mouth around her feet and ready to swallow her, the whole explosive jet of metal...stopped.
With a sickening helplessness, Lazlo felt his mesarthium awareness peel away from him. The sensation of claiming—the metal claiming him, and he it—evaporated, and the energies, too, as though the air had emptied of its staves of silent music. It was akin to sudden blindness or deafness, the loss of this new sense. He sought his power, desperate, and...nothing.
The others looked to him and back at the intruder, their eyes wide, confused. Why had he stopped? “Lazlo...?” asked Sarai, a quaver in her voice.
“My power,” he gasped. “It’s gone.”
“What?”
The walkway had come to rest hanging out into the chamber like a half-finished bridge. Sarai and Lazlo and the others were all clustered together at its end. They had shrunk back at the first screech of onslaught, only to be paralyzed by the unnatural scream. Now they all snapped out of stillness.
Ruby kindled into Bonfire. Her eyes filled up with flame. Her hair writhed and glowed like rivulets of lava, and sparks hissed in her closed fists. She’d never attacked anybody before. Minya had told her she was a weapon, but she’d never felt like one until now. But before she could do anything, she felt it snatched away. It: her fire, her spark.
It was taken, and no sooner did she register its loss than the attacker’s eyes turned red and leapt alight. Her flaxen hair smoked, aglow like a bed of coals. Ruby saw. She felt gutted and guttered, as though the woman had reached inside her and stolen what made her her. “You,” she choked, outraged. “That’s mine. Give it back!”
At the same time, Feral, with a gulp, closed his eyes and ripped a thunderhead from a sky half a world away. The air above the attackers darkened. The rain was instantaneous—a gyre of stinging, half-frozen pellets, each one a tiny ice blade. The dense cloud strobed and crackled, lit from within by unborn lightning. The roar of the thunder flattened out under the chamber’s muting properties, but it still reverberated in their bones. For years, Minya had tried to make Feral do this very thing: summon storms as weapons, aim and strike with lightning—but he’d always been afraid, so he’d always failed. Now he felt his power as though it were boiling in him and pouring out like steam, as though he were a conduit for the sky’s full might, the untamable power of nature itself. For the first time in his life, Feral felt like a god.