CSORWE LIFTED BELTHANDROS’ body as if it were an empty husk, and before Shuthmili could understand what she was seeing, she pushed him into the hollow of the sarcophagus.
The sarcophagus, which was now empty. Where that mass of pale cloth had been was only a square stone cell. Csorwe must have been hiding there, among the folds of the Mantle.
Which meant—
Csorwe straightened up. The Mantle of Divinity rippled around her like a veil, gauzy white, wreathing her hair in a garland of twisted lace. She held her sword as if she’d never seen it before. She didn’t react to Shuthmili’s hand on her shoulder.
—which meant that Shuthmili had been too late after all.
“A shame, we know,” said Atharaisse, triumphant despite the awful wounds in her side. “But she did well. An excellent child. She will make a fine vessel.”
Shuthmili could not speak. She gripped Csorwe by the arm, brushing aside the folds of the Mantle, trying to see her face properly. If she could get Csorwe away from here—
“No, no,” she muttered. Trying to wrench away the Mantle was like fighting the wind. One moment it billowed away from her, the next it stuck to her hands like wet silk, lapping around her as though it meant to swallow her as well—and all that time Csorwe stood still, not reacting to Shuthmili, nor to Belthandros’ blood dripping over the edge of the hollow in the sarcophagus, nor to Atharaisse’s blood steaming on the white marble.
“She was his creature once,” said Atharaisse. “She now serves a far worthier master. Say thy farewells, if thou must.”
“Csorwe, please—” said Shuthmili, hardly hearing the serpent at all. “Look at me, darling girl, it’s me—”
Behind the veil Csorwe’s eyes opened, a familiar flicker of gold, a distant, hazy recognition. Shuthmili looked up at her, her perfect face, all that guilt and fear and longing, and lurched violently from desperation to hope. She would kill everyone in this room if she could get out with Csorwe in one piece.
“Go,” said Csorwe.
FLY FROM THIS PLACE! Zinandour’s voice echoed like a distant bell. AN ENEMY IS HERE!
Shuthmili had wondered what it felt like, the moment when your courage failed, and it turned out this was it, this utter helplessness.
“Csorwe, please—please, look at me, come with me, you can fight this—”
“Go, love,” said Csorwe.
“Forgive me,” she said. “But I will never leave you.”
She clutched at Csorwe’s hand, but it slipped from her like water. Csorwe’s expression slackened. Her eyes dulled, and the Mantle closed over her like a tidal wave engulfing a town.
Csorwe—whatever she was now—stepped away from the sarcophagus. The Mantle swirled after her in a ghostly, translucent wake. Her movements were slow but not jerky, as though she had woken from a long sleep and was well rested.
Atharaisse’s eye flashed huge and red like a descending sun.
“Ah, thou wakest?” she said. “Pentravesse was neatly dealt with, as we reckoned—”
“The sarcophagus will hold him for a time only,” said Csorwe. Her voice seemed to echo from some vast hollow space far away. Shuthmili found that she had slid to the ground, back against the sarcophagus, and that she was weeping.
Atharaisse laughed. “Little sister, hast thou no thanks for us? Thou wouldst sleep still if not for us, safe in the stone without body or breath.”
“Then thy duty is fulfilled,” said Csorwe.
“There is much still to be accomplished. With thy assistance—”
“Be at peace, Atharaisse,” said Csorwe. “Thou hast accomplished all that we required of thee. Or … perhaps there is one further service you might do us.”
Atharaisse screamed, a glassy chime of startled pain, like bells breaking. Whatever this not-Csorwe was doing to her, it hurt. She writhed, her great coils thundering like falling boulders as she thrashed.
All at once, her enormous head crashed to the ground and she went still. Csorwe stepped toward her and rested a hand on her snout, almost affectionately. Atharaisse stared at her, red eyes glazed with pain, and began to fade. Her scales, once ivory, turned as white as salt. The eyes were the last thing to lose their colour, from blood red to dull pink and finally to the same pale translucency. The serpent looked like a sculpture in snow. A pale, crumbling husk.
Csorwe raised a hand to her mouth. Only now did Shuthmili see that her arm was slick to the elbow with bright blood, as though she had plunged it into the open wound in the serpent’s flank, and in so doing drained all that gave Atharaisse colour and substance. She chewed and swallowed something, then stepped back, looking blank.
Shuthmili knew that, in the same position, Csorwe’s courage would never fail, she would never run, she would never betray a friend—and she knew what she would have to do, whatever it might cost her. She swallowed her tears, and dragged herself forward in an ungainly half crawl.
“God-Empress,” she said, and hoped she had chosen the correct title.
“Indeed. And what art thou?” said the Mantle, with Csorwe’s mouth. “No friend to either of these pretenders, we hope.” She nudged the ashen remnants of Atharaisse’s body with her toe.
“No,” said Shuthmili, her voice faltering, as though only just realising the shocking danger of the course she had settled upon. “But a friend to you, I hope.”
“Oh?”
“I am a mage—quite a good one,” said Shuthmili, and winced. This was not the time for proper Qarsazhi modesty. “One of the best mages in my country. I’m interested in power. I would make myself useful.”
“Thou wouldst serve us?”
Shuthmili was still stumbling over her qualifications, wondering what it would take to convince. But the God-Empress said this as though it was the most natural thing in the world for anyone to fall at her feet, and in the end, all Shuthmili had to reply was:
“I would.”
Tal felt the rumbling from where he sat on the shore of the other island. Jagged little waves slapped at the shore. He’d once been in a minor earthquake, on business for Sethennai in some distant world, and at first he thought it was the same again. The shaking hurt his chest.
Oranna burst out of her tent a moment later.
“Something’s happened,” she said, reaching for her staff.
“To the others?” he said, following. She was clearly moving as fast as she could. If she could run toward the explosion so could he.
“Such a bright spark,” she said, hurrying on. “By the Unspoken—can’t you feel it? The shadow?”
He couldn’t feel anything but the persistent ache in his chest and the rumbling under his feet—and now a thundering sense of anxiety—but he didn’t need magical powers to see what had now become visible behind the island.
Something had risen up from the water, raising with it a thick mist. Then the mist cleared, revealing a great tiered pyramid.
“The temple…” murmured Oranna. “You fool, what have you done?”
There was a kind of causeway they could cross to reach the temple, still ankle deep in water but rising fast, shedding clumps of weed. They struggled across it, and crawled round the tiers until they found a door. Under other circumstances, Tal might have objected to having to cling to Oranna, but needs must.
Inside, the temple was a changeful place. At times they found themselves hurrying along a narrow passage—now scuttling across a room so vast that Tal couldn’t see the walls—now crossing a bridge above a chamber far below. The building flexed and altered all around them, compressing and distending like a squeezebox.
Then the light fractured, and he saw two or three temples at once, overlaid on one another as though on sheets of glass, with no way to tell which was real but to follow Oranna. She was panting, and the tapping of her staff on the tiles grew slower.
At last they emerged from another splintering corridor into a room where an island stood in a pool that shivered as though a rain was falling.
There on the island were Csorwe, wrapped in a strange filmy cloak, and Shuthmili, crumpled on her knees against a great block of white stone. Blood and ashes smeared everywhere. No sign of Sethennai.
Tal moved toward the stepping-stones which traced a path across the lake. Oranna grabbed his collar, yanking him back.
“Don’t be an imbecile,” she hissed. “That is Tlaanthothei blood.”
It was true—the smears on the white stone were the vivid red which Tal thought of as the normal colour of blood.
Tal nodded, and drew his sword. God knew what was happening over there. He had fucked up before, when they had fought Atharaisse. He didn’t plan to do the same again. No stupid stunts this time.
Oranna was barking some kind of instructions at him, and then stopped abruptly, as though her tongue had stopped working. All she said was “Oh. No.”
Csorwe had stepped aside, revealing what lay bleeding in the hollow of the sarcophagus. The body of Belthandros Sethennai was unmistakeable.
“No, no,” said Oranna, softly, a small noise of pain.
At that moment, Csorwe turned and seemed to notice them. Behind her, the white door closed on Belthandros’ body, smearing blood on the marble. Tal’s ears pricked up involuntarily, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling, as though his body knew something was wrong before he did. He felt the stone beneath his feet give way, and leapt back to the next. The ground collapsed beneath him and he had to fall back, again and again. He saw Csorwe approach in flashes, and at last, he saw her face behind the thin film of the cloak she wore.
Tal thought he knew all Csorwe’s blank looks. The stiff glare of anger, the dull stare of loathing, the deadpan glance of a shared joke. He had, against his will, made a complete study of Csorwe’s obscure nonexpressions. But here was something newly hollow, uncannily remote, alien and dead.
Whatever was here now, Csorwe was gone.
Later, in shame, he would realise that he’d never even considered whether Shuthmili or Sethennai might still be alive. He turned and ran, outrunning the pain in his chest, powered forward by sheer terror. He heard no sounds of pursuit. She must have let him go.
Some time later, Oranna caught up to him, gasping for breath in great retches.
“We should go back,” he said, knowing that he wouldn’t.
“Can’t—help,” said Oranna.
The pain had caught back up to him, but they seemed to have escaped their pursuer. The two of them limped slowly back out of the atrium, clinging together like two crabs with their limbs torn off. Tal could hardly see where he was going. Every time his vision blurred, he saw it happen again: the utter emptiness where Csorwe had once been.
“Move,” said Oranna sharply. “If that creature decides to come after us, we are dead, Talasseres Charossa, and I do not plan to die with you.”
“I don’t fucking care,” said Tal. It would have taken some effort to dislodge her from his shoulder or he would have shoved her off and crawled into a corner. Let it take him. It was over.
“Oh, kindly get a grip,” she said. “I don’t like it any better than you, but we are going to live. This isn’t how it ends.”
By the time they got out of the temple, Tal was bent double and felt as though he’d crawled over glass. Every breath felt like a knife in the lungs. But the cutter was there, still stowed under ferns. They hauled it out and climbed into it. Tal’s hands felt slow and clumsy. He didn’t think he could fly the damned thing if he tried.
“Get out of the way,” said Oranna, climbing into the pilot’s seat. “And get in the back if you want to survive this, but don’t slow me down.”
She took the cutter up, rising as fast as it could go toward the faint patch of sunlight above the temple. The darkness of the true deeps blurred into brighter green. Tal’s stomach dropped. For a blessed moment he felt nothing but the pressure of the acceleration and a sharp pain in his ears, and then the whole of it struck him like an abattoir hammer.
His voice came out in a ragged whisper. “They’re gone.”
Oranna settled one hand on the wheel and buried her face in the other. For a moment he thought she was about to weep, and envied her, but instead she took a deep breath and looked back at him. “They were happy. They went together. That’s more than most people get.”
“Yeah,” he said, though this was no comfort at all. “I guess. I’m sorry, about, uh…”
“Belthandros?” she said, and gave a shudder of laughter, indistinguishable from a sob. “Oh. Ha. Well. He—he served his purpose.” Another strange choking laugh, bubbling up out of her like blood from a sucking wound. “I always meant to outlive him anyway.”
The ancient flagship lay in its berth within the temple, a fragile shelter against the world outside.
Cherenthisse had trimmed away the worst of the vines and was now working at getting the main hatch open. She knew she would not make much of an honour guard, in her prey aspect, her clothes stained with sweat and sap, but the Most High Atharaisse had given her a job to do.
She had tried to make her case to the Most High—that she was a more worthy vessel for the Mantle than Csorwe, that without her true aspect this was the only meaningful service she could offer—and Atharaisse had only laughed at her and said that there was more ahead for Cherenthisse than she might think.
At last, with a groan, the main hatch of the flagship opened a crack. The smell of dead air seeped out like groundwater, and Cherenthisse stepped on board, the first person in more than three thousand years to enter the Blessed Awakening.
Cherenthisse knew the interior of the ship as well as she had known the grounds of her own estate. Once she was certain that the hull wasn’t about to collapse on her, she made her way straight to the ship’s chapel, as the Most High Atharaisse had instructed.
At the sight of what the Most High had promised her, Cherenthisse felt alien tears running down her cheeks. Her true aspect had never wept, but she could not restrain the reflexes of the prey body now, seeing what was here.
Here, in the chapel of the Blessed Awakening, was a stasis circle, exactly like the one which had sheltered her back in the hatchery, except that this one was much, much bigger. Its frail bounds had lasted, somehow, through all that had happened, and lying within the circle was an entire battalion of Thousand Eyes.
All of them in their prey aspect. All identical to Cherenthisse. That was no surprise. Atharaisse had told her not to hope for too much, that it was most likely they would be trapped in two-legged form as Cherenthisse was. Even so, it was not nothing. They lived. And while the Thousand Eyes survived, so did Echentyr.
She wiped her eyes and did her best to clean herself up before returning to the hatch. Just in time, in fact, because two small figures had entered the hangar chamber. There was Csorwe—or rather, the God-Empress, wrapped in the Mantle, just as she had been when Cherenthisse had stuffed her into the sarcophagus earlier. And beside her was—
“What are you doing here?” said Cherenthisse. “Where is the Most High Atharaisse?”
“You missed a lot,” said Shuthmili. Her voice was hoarse. She moved like one who had sustained a mortal wound, yet she was clearly alive.
“Go back to your burrow and lick your wounds.” said Cherenthisse. “There is nothing for you here.”
“Oh, no,” said Shuthmili. “We’re on the same side now. Aren’t you going to greet your Empress?”
Cherenthisse’s cheeks flushed with shame, and she fell to her knees. This was not the introduction she had intended.
“Majesty, I am sorry—”
“Cherenthisse, first in loyalty,” said the God-Empress, and gave her a smile that was as sad as it was kind, and as kind as it was terrible. “We sorrow with thee. Atharaisse was killed in the struggle with the Pretender Sethennai.”
Cherenthisse reeled. The death of the Most High Atharaisse and the perishing of Echentyr each felt equally distant and equally vast. She no longer knew how to react in the face of so much loss.
“But I only just—” said Cherenthisse, and shut her mouth tightly. This was not proper behaviour before the Empress. The cold tears had dried on her face. She would have to endure this, as she had endured all else.
“She will not be forgotten,” said the God-Empress.
Her grey skin was flushed. It was a pity that the vessel was so ill-used: scarred and weather-beaten all over. One of its tusks was missing, replaced with a gold prosthesis like a crude copy of an Echentyri war-fang. Cherenthisse still did not understand why Atharaisse had insisted on Csorwe, when Cherenthisse had offered herself—no matter. The vessel was what it was, and in any case hardly mattered. Here was the last of Iriskavaal, walking and breathing once more.
Shuthmili looked up at the God-Empress. Whatever expression flickered across her face, it was gone before Cherenthisse could understand it.
“When Echentyr lives again, it will be a fit monument to her name, and to all thou hast lost,” said the God-Empress. “Take courage, Cherenthisse. When Echentyr is restored, we shall all of us take our true forms again.”
All right, my lady. I know you’re there.
GO! FLEE FROM HERE! IRISKAVAAL IS AN EATER OF WORLDS! DO NOT LINGER IN THE PRESENCE OF HER OFFSPRING!
Shuthmili sat on the floor of an empty cabin aboard the Blessed Awakening. Csorwe’s coat lay in her lap, discarded by a God-Empress who disdained mortal rags. She opened the inner pocket of the coat and pulled out the gauntlets. She tried not to think of Csorwe folding them neatly away. Another thing she might never see again.
I know what these do now. You made me an offer, didn’t you? Beyond fear and limitation? I don’t want that.
WHAT, THEN? NAME IT.
I want her back.
Shuthmili squeezed her eyes shut and pulled on the gauntlets. Zinandour seemed … relieved, as you might be to find some small thing, briefly lost.
Let’s make a deal, my lady. Help me get Csorwe free of that thing, help me get her away, safe and alive, and I’m yours. This body is yours. You can do what you want with me. I will be the gate through which you return.
I AM WEAKENED BY CAPTIVITY. IRISKAVAAL WAS OLD WHEN I FIRST WALKED THE EARTH. I CANNOT BEAT THIS RELICT OF HERS BY FORCE.
Then you will never have me. I will fight you with everything I have, and I will destroy this body at the first opportunity I have. You will never escape the void.
HOW I HATE SENTIMENT. LISTEN TO ME. THERE ARE METHODS OTHER THAN FORCE, QANWA SHUTHMILI. I AM THE FLAME THAT DEVOURS. IF I DESIRE THE MANTLE OF IRISKAVAAL DESTROYED, IT WILL OCCUR. BUT YOU WILL HAVE TO BE PATIENT, AND YOU WILL HAVE TO ACCEPT MY INCARNATION IN FULL. CAN YOU?
When Csorwe lives again. Yes.
THEN IT WILL BE ACCOMPLISHED.
The rush of divine force came again, fast as a blush, vast as a tide. If she stood her ground, it would wash over her head, flood her lungs, tear her apart from within. Instead she let herself float, let the power swell around her, within her, and carry her forward.