I try to look innocent, helpful. “I want to help. And, truth is, I’m curious.”
“You want to help?” He stretches the words out until they sound hollow.
“I want to helpyou.”
He steps closer, but I hold my ground, even when his voice drops into something low and liquid. “I think you’re another one who dreams of getting close to the prince.”
“Not the prince.” Not the man who charged into Amma’s. “But you, maybe.”
Surprise flashes across his features, and he takes a step back.
I’m not surprised when he wheels around. But then he stops ten feet away and looks over his shoulder, wearing something like a smile on his lips, and he says in a voice strange and soft, “Come on, then. Tell me on the way.”
I walk beside him, and my body prickles all over, as if tiny sparks are dancing on my skin. I tell him of the statue in the temple, of the shattered depiction of the Great King’s alter ego.
He listens with a furrowed brow, weaving through the Ven until we turn into a small hallway and come to a dead end. The words die on my lips as he goes to a bas-relief embedded in the wall, one that depicts the city surrounded by a spiral of beasts, a riot of legs, claws, tails, and eyes. A man wearing the full-body ikonmark of the Regia stands, arms spread, at the city’s highest point. Golden lines of light streak from his body, holding back the Storm.
Dalca reaches into the spiral of beasts and twists the tail of a serpent. The stone moves in his hand, and he adjusts it precisely. He adjusts two more pieces of stone, and it hits me. I squint, trying to make out the incomplete ikon embedded in the bas-relief sculpture.
With a grinding sound, a section of stone slides aside, revealing an opening a little shorter and squatter than either Dalca or me.
“Go ahead. It allows one at a time.”
His tone is too even. It’s a challenge.
I duck inside. At once, the stone slides shut behind me, and I’m left in total darkness.
My heart thuds, faster and louder with each second that passes. He’s not under my power at all. I’m under his.
The door grinds open, and I’m sick at how relieved I am to see him slide in next to me.
He pulls out an ikonlight that casts a soft blue glow, illuminating a tunnel the width of a single person. Dalca brushes past me, his jacket skimming my skin, and leads the way. The path slopes upward, so I know we’re not descending into the old city. I open my mouth a half dozen times to ask where we’re going, but I want him to think I trust him.
At last we come to a dead end. Dalca kneels, but I don’t catch what he does before the stone slides open.
The door disappears as we step through, and we come out into a long, narrow room, dark and cool as a tomb. Pedestals line the whole length of the room, each one flanked by many-hued ikonlight sconces that flicker like molten diamonds.
Atop the pedestal before me, held upright by strings of glass as thin as spider’s silk, is an elderly man’s face rendered in gold. His eyesare closed, and his mustache is long and curled over a frowning mouth. Someone carved each wrinkle and whisker in astonishing detail.
There’s a golden face atop every pedestal, stretching far into the distance. I shiver. Any moment now, they’ll open their eyes.
The ikonlight plays across Dalca’s face. “These are my ancestors. Every Regia who came before us.”
He points out a man whose wrinkled skin drapes over razor-blade cheekbones. “Caerno Illusora. When he was Regia, the Storm was just a darkness on the horizon. That’s how strong a bond he had with the Great King.”
The pedestal under Caerno’s face is carved with images, one of which is a seven-ringed city surrounded by vegetation, like a forest or maybe a jungle from a fairy story. Each pedestal is likewise carved with its Regia’s story.
Dalca pulls me to a mask of an old woman with deep laugh lines. “Ayeli Amero Illusora. She championed ikonomancy like no Regia before her. The first ikonlights were made during her reign.”
Dalca tells me the stories of a handful more of the Regias. I listen with half an ear, transfixed by the way his face comes alive. While I had to beg and wheedle for every scrap of Ma and Pa’s story, Dalca was handed hundreds of stories, each gilded and glorious, a colossal legacy, enough to drown under. How often did he linger here, among the dead?
On one end of the room are the truly ancient Regias. “Why are they arranged in twos?”
“Long ago, there used to be two Regias, ruling at once, sharing the power of the Great King. They might have been named something else, but we don’t know. We do know that those were times of conflict, of war and bloodshed. The Regia Dalcanin, my namesake, was theone who ended those decades of darkness. His brother took up arms against him, though he had neither the support of the people nor mastery of his bond with the Great King. So instead of waging a clean war, his brother poisoned the wells and set fire to the crops of those loyal to Dalcanin. When even that failed, he used his power to spread a wasting sickness that crippled the city.
“Though it broke his heart, the Regia Dalcanin fought his brother and slew him. They say a cleansing rain fell over the city then, healing what had been poisoned. Dalcanin renounced the surname he had shared with his brother and became first of the Illusoras. He bore the weight of the Great King’s soul alone, as all Regias after him have done.”
The Regia Dalcanin has the broad good looks of a hero, with deep-set serious eyes and strong chin. He’s also much younger than the Regias before him.