Whyborne
“Did the masters send you, kin from the sea?” Griffin asked. His voice was rough, like something dragged across stone and left bloody. It contained none of his usual inflections, but a cadence alien to his normal speech.
As alien as whatever stared at me through his eyes. His pupils had shrunk to pinpoints, the irises lightened to a pale, frosty green rather than their ordinary emerald.
“Griffin!” Jack stepped toward him, then stopped, as if he meant to interfere but didn’t quite know how. “Let him go!”
The sight of this thing inside Griffin sent a shudder through me. I wanted it gone. I wanted to look into his eyes and see my lover looking back, not some horror. But there was no choice, not if we had any hope of leaving here alive.
I tore my gaze from him and focused on the vast, orange eye high above us, the shifting coils beyond. “What do you mean? What masters?”
The Mother of Shadows hissed. Through Griffin’s mouth, she said, “The cruel ones, the creators, the enslavers. They created us to build for them, to fight for them.”
“Us? The umbrae?”
Griffin’s lips peeled back from his teeth. “Us. Our kinds.”
My extremities went cold. “The ketoi and the umbrae?” But that wasn’t possible, was it?
“The ketoi always struck me as being rather...unlikely,” Iskander said, almost apologetically. “Biologically speaking, I mean. They seem rather a mishmash of other things, and can breed with humans...if they were created as some kind of servitor race, it would explain a great deal.”
The stone reeled beneath me. I wanted to sit down, but I locked my knees and forced myself to stare at the serpentine Mother of Shadows. Could it be true? Had some unknown race created us to be their slaves? Was that why the umbra wouldn’t attack—they’d been shaped to recognize their fellow thralls as belonging to the same masters?
“Who—what—are these masters?” I managed to ask. “The dweller in the deeps—the god—is it one of them?”
She paused. A thin trickle of blood leaked from Griffin’s left nostril. “No. It is like we are. The masters are gone. Left this place long and long ago. We grew strong and refused to submit. Refused to lose our children to them, to be forced to build their cities and tend their needs and fight their wars. We rose up, and they learned to fear us. They fled, abandoning their cities in order to trap us within them.”
High above, her head swayed slowly, back and forth. “We have lived here ever since. Singing our history from one Mother to the next. Locked away through this age of cold, trapped and yet free. Living on the creatures that stumble inside, on the flying things, on our gardens.”
Griffin turned sharply to me, brows diving down, fists clenching. “But now you have come to steal our children!” His voice rose into a howl of rage. “I have seen this one’s memories, seen what the humans do to the children of my sisters! Break them, defile them, corrupt and hurt and destroy.”
I held out my hands, half afraid she’d force him to attack me. “No, wait! That’s not why we came here. We came to stop Turner, the man who stole your—your child.”
“Not just a child! My daughter.” Coils unwound, thrashing, and her feelers cracked the air like whips. Blood ran freely from Griffin’s nose now, slicking the lower half of his face. “The one meant to come after me, the next Mother of Shadows.”
Dear God in heaven. That’s what Turner meant, when he said the chrysalis didn’t belong to a mere soldier. He hadn’t taken a simple servant, something to twist into a fierce guardian like I’d seen in Egypt.
He’d stolen a queen.
“And now she is gone, beyond our reach,” the Mother said through Griffin’s mouth. “But you are a sorcerer. And you are as trapped as we are.”
My heart pounded in my chest. Soldiers appeared from the darkness, gliding slowly back and forth through the vast chamber. “What do you want?”
“Release us. Let us go forth and save my daughter.”
“I wouldn’t know how to begin,” I said. “I learned how to lay down seals, but not...oh.”
Oh God. The curse breaking spell. It would work, wouldn’t it? But no. I didn’t have the strength to blindly rip through eons-old magical wards of this extent.
“I could in theory,” I said carefully. “But in practice, I don’t think the spell I know would work. I don’t know what shape the magic creating the seals takes. A small enchantment I could shatter with brute force, as I did with the pearl, but this...” I gestured to the vast ceiling above me. “This is beyond me.”
A low rattle came from Griffin’s throat. “I can see the seals. Perceive the magic. But I cannot do anything about it. We have no magic of our own.”
Just as the ketoi didn’t. These masters, these creators, whoever or whatever they’d been, clearly wanted to keep such power out of the hands of their slaves.
Her rage slipped away, became something more calculating. “This one’s mind has already been opened to us. I can alter him, allow him to perceive the magic as well. Together, the two of you can do what one alone cannot. Destroy the seals, and set us free.”