She landed in a deep red pool. Karys’ head went under; she submerged completely and then floundered back to the surface, choking. The sky above her was fathomless black; the water deep carmine and thick, smelling of iron—unseen bodies swayed around her, amorphous and slick, moving like eels, like sliding organs. She shuddered for breath, treading through the blood, then kicked toward the side. The edges of the pool curved inward like the rim of a bowl.
Beneath the surface, her fingers snared on a clump of fine weeds. Karys jerked her hand upwards, and the material came with her, clotted and heavy, not a plant, but long matted blond hair. A face followed, rising up from below, the woman’s features vivid with death, her skull half-shaven. The deathspeaker’s eyes were missing.
Karys screamed.
Ferain shoved the woman away. Sabaster’s vassals surrounded Karys, in pieces but not dead, undulating, mouths open, pressing against her legs, her back, tangling their bloated fingers in her clothing. She thrashed, panicked. Her shadow expanded in all directions through the red murk, and drove them backwards.
“Get to the edge,” he said sharply.
Karys swam the last few feet. The wall was too high, and she had no purchase. She could taste foul blood in her mouth. The pool began to churn, the bodies within agitated and squirming, seeking her.
“Here,” said Ferain.
She felt pressure under her heels as her shadow boosted her upwards, and she caught hold of the rim of the pool. Ferain swept across her back and grasped her arms, pulling her higher. The pressure of the drawing tightened within her chest. Karys scrabbled, and managed to hook her elbows over the top of the wall. Past its edge, she could see Sabaster’s domain stretching out into the endless dark. The pool balanced on top of the white pyramid’s pinnacle, at the centre of it all.
A cold, slippery hand fastened around her ankle, and ripped her down from the wall. She fell, and the writhing mass swallowed her again. Karys struggled wildly, but more hands found her arms, her neck—and she could hear them now, the bodies were screaming: favour, favour, favour. They clawed at her clothes, tore off her shoes. Her mind blank and reeling with terror, she descended through the howling press. When she met the base of the pool, it flexed like skin over muscle, resisting, then giving way in a violent rush, and disgorging her into the air.
For a few awful seconds, Karys tumbled through empty space. She saw white. Then her knees hit a soft, pliant surface, and she toppled forward in a wash of rank blood, coughing and spluttering.
“Karys Eska,” said Sabaster.
Her heart hammered. The Ephirit stood a few feet away. She knelt in a posture of worship before him, folded double over her knees. Red gore dripped from her hair, running down her skin. She did not lift her head; she could only see the whispering fringe of her master’s smoke-grey wings, and beyond him, a fence built out of tattered bronze skin and outsized bone. The old Bhatuma corpse, reshaped. The rest of the chamber gleamed blindingly white.
“Vassal of my will.” The Ephirit’s voice sighed into the air. “Your time of honour has arrived.”
Karys spat out blood from the pool; it seared her throat like acid. A numb crawling pain blossomed in her shins and calves—she looked down and saw that thin strands of pale cilia had broken her skin and woven into her flesh, probing deeper, affixing her to the floor. Her throat worked in horror, her shoulders shook. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Sorry,” she whispered, faint.
Her shadow gripped her hand tightly where it lay on the ground. Shame wracked her. She had failed, and damned them both.
“The Disfavoured bore the receptacle. The receptacle has bloomed.” The feathers of Sabaster’s wings rustled in his eagerness, pinions quivering. “The fruit of their bodies spoiled in decay, but this I have righted and brought to new vitality. The stain and the scourge is no more—you shall bear forth our multiplication, Karys Eska.”
She had wanted to save him. She had wanted to carry him from the dark into daylight. She had wanted to see his smile.
A thin trilling filled the chamber, like two metal cables sliding across each other. Karys opened her eyes and found Sabaster looming above her. His three white faces contorted hideously, expressions meaningless, mouths agape. His acrid sweetness washed over her, and the blood on the floor turned to red mist in his presence, rising like vapour. The air flickered with unnatural colour where he wore the Veneer thin.
From beneath his veil of wings, the Ephirit had drawn out a round object. He held it carefully between his long black fingers; the sphere was roughly two feet in diameter, shining and translucent, the sickly brown-yellow of decaying seaweed, the source of the trilling. It looked like necrat, only larger and diseased. Karys stared, transfixed.
“Ferain.” Her mouth shaped his name, although she made no sound. “Please.”
Sabaster leaned closer. The receptacle pulsed with fallow light, a slow heartbeat. She could not look away.
“Please,” she whispered. “You swore.”
Her shadow loosened his hold on her hand.
“Forgive me,” he breathed.
“Karys Eska, vassal of my will,” said Sabaster. “I call your com—”
Ferain unfolded from her body, rising over her head and crossing Sabaster’s shadow. In his liar voice, effortless and nonchalant, he said: “That won’t work.”
Sabaster’s wings flared outward in surprise. A discordant ringing rent the air of the chamber; the light bent and discoloured under the Ephirit’s power, and the receptacle vanished. Karys’ heart leapt to her throat.
“I greet you, Prince of Scales,” said Ferain.
Sabaster hissed, his body rippling as though surrounded by a high wind. “A deception!”
“A gift,” Ferain corrected. “You like gifts, don’t you?
Karys tried to rise, but the cilia bound her; she could not get up from her knees. What are you doing? Sick with fear, her voice came out desperate and strained. “No, stop.”
“I am Ferain Taliade,” said her shadow. “The only survivor of New Favour’s attack on the Vareslian ambassadorial retinue to Toraigus, a massacre meant to prevent the Bhatuma’s resurrection. And I hold a living receptacle within my body.”
His words rang clear and calm through the room.
“No!” shouted Karys.
Sabaster’s wings stilled. The Ephirit extended one grasping, long-fingered hand. He passed it across the merged spill of shadow on the smooth white floor, like a wary dog sniffing at something unfamiliar.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” said Ferain. “You’ve been trying to find a viable seed. New Favour misunderstood—you no longer want the Bhatuma destroyed, you want them harvested.”
Karys struggled. The cilia dug deeper into her legs, cold as fishhooks. “Ferain, don’t. Don’t do this.”
“A deception,” murmured Sabaster, although he seemed less convinced. His fingers made a series of small, jolting movements, flexing backwards in their sockets. He circled Karys slowly.
“Yes, he lies.” Karys twisted to keep her eyes on the Ephirit, breathing hard. “He is lying to you. My lord, I am the vassal of your will, I am faithful to you, listen to me.”
“You know that your current receptacle won’t work.” Ferain’s voice flowed smooth as glass. “The seed is corrupted. It won’t grow.”
“He’s a liar!”
Sabaster searched the floor, weaving fractionally closer and then pulling back again. The face in his groin panted, its eyes screwed shut.
“I have what you need.” Ferain’s tone dipped low and seductive. “And you have the power to retrieve it.”
Karys reached for the Veneer, and ripped it back. Immediately, agony ricocheted through her skull. Every sensation and colour flooded her; all of it molten and alive and furious, the whole domain lit up like a dying star. She fell back, gasping, and the Veneer dropped closed. This close to Sabaster, she could not endure it. Her throat was raw.
“Call my compact,” she rasped. “If you want me, call it now.”
Ferain tensed, a barely perceptible darkening on the floor. Sabaster’s body slanted closer to her, searching. His saliva dripped onto her shoulder.
“You hold the receptacle that breeds true?” he whispered.
“Of course,” said Ferain.
She would not let him do this. Karys pressed her hands against the ground, and, with all her strength, pushed upwards. The skin covering her shins tore away with a wet ripping sound. Her blood gushed over the cilia, shockingly red; pain stole the breath from her lungs. Below her, the white tendrils strained to hold fast, stretching elastic between the porous ground and her flesh. She pushed harder.
Sabaster laid a hand on the top of her head.
“It is well.” The chorus of his voices blended: part scream, part whisper. “It is well.”
Karys went limp. His body’s workings crawled over her; she tried to speak, but her mouth failed to respond. The remaining cilia slithered out of her blood-drenched legs. Sabaster’s fingers tightened; he lifted her by the head, and she hung from his grasp like a slack-limbed puppet.
“Put her down,” said Ferain quickly, his perfect control breaking. “Put her down now.”
Sabaster lacked the capacity to interpret Ferain’s emotion, and human command meant nothing to him. With the delicate needle-point of his free hand’s index finger, he sliced through the collar of Karys’ shirt and found the Split Lapse scar. She recoiled with inward horror as he stroked the skin above her left breast.
“Disfavoured,” he said. “It is truth. You have brought me this gift.”
Ferain came between them; a thin wall of shadow pushed back the Ephirit’s fingers. “Put her down now.”
Although Sabaster maintained his grip on her head, he lowered Karys, and her feet met the blood-slick ground. One of his fingers cupped her jaw; she could taste him inside her mouth: molasses and ash. So close to her, so tightly pressed—she felt as though she was unravelling.
“I offer you a compact,” said Ferain.
Despite the workings paralysing her, Karys produced an agonised sound in the back of her throat. No, no please. Her shadow flinched at the noise.
“There are conditions,” he added.
Sabaster’s feathers shivered. The Ephirit seemed bewildered.
“You are a gift of my vassal,” he whispered.
“A gift with a price.” Ferain drew back across the floor. “If you want me, you will separate me from your vassal without harming her. You will return her safely to where she was summoned from. And then you will release Karys Eska from her compact, after which neither you nor any other Ephirit will ever go near her again. I ask for nothing else.”
Karys wanted to scream, but her nerveless body refused. From the depths of Sabaster’s shroud came a harsh, repetitive clicking sound.
“A compact cannot be broken,” he said, and pure relief surged through her. “My honour was given to Karys Eska.”
Ferain was unyielding. “You can claim me from the moment our compact is formed, but in exchange, she is free. I will not negotiate.”
Sabaster went ominously silent.
You can’t, Karys urged him. You can’t, you can’t.
“Does your honour matter more than the Ephirite’s future?” asked Ferain.
The light around Sabaster twisted. The blood on Karys’ legs turned black and ice-cold, separating into disks like liquid scales.
“A compact cannot be broken,” repeated the Ephirit.
“Why?”
The disks turned to blood once more. The clicking below Sabaster’s wings resumed, louder.
“Why can’t a compact be broken?” pressed Ferain.
“To break is to Disfavour,” hissed Sabaster, the syllables rattling. “We treat, we offer—that is the compact. I am my honour; the compact is of me.”
“Oh,” said Karys’ shadow softly. “I see. Well, in that case: Are you more important than the Ephirite’s future?”
Absolute silence.
No, thought Karys. Embrace please. Please don’t listen to him.
“Without me, you have nothing but honour, Prince of Scales,” said Ferain, his words like honey, like poison. “Form the compact.”
Fighting against the power of the working, Karys mouthed his name. Ferain.
“It is so,” whispered Sabaster. “The terms are accepted.”
NO!
In a fluid motion, he drew his fingers together and drove them like a stake into the binding scar over her heart. The Split Lapse broke open.
All other pain withered to insignificance. Karys lost the sense of her body; she was not made from flesh, but blinding, unending excruciation, the deepest recesses of her soul rent asunder and set alight; she came apart, she came apart from him in pieces, their spirits too entangled to unwind, she did not know if she was alive or dead, only that it had to stop, she was broken too deeply, her essence splintered and divided, Ferain, it had to stop, Ferain come back, end, please end, Ferain, let me die.
Then air.
Sabaster released her head, and Karys fell limbless to the floor. For a few seconds, the world was incomprehensible—she could see herself lying on her side, bleeding, a dark sweep of hair slashed across her face, Sabaster standing over her. She could see herself from outside of herself, and feel the weight of a different body around her. Then the room blurred, she blinked, and her view shifted.
Six feet from her, a man lay on the white ground, propped up weakly on his right elbow. Ferain clutched his wounded arm. Blood ran from his nose and ears, dripping from his face. He bared his teeth in a grin, red and savage.
“You’d better fuck me fast, Ephirit,” he said. “I’m dying.”
Karys caught a glimpse of the gash on his left arm, peeling apart, turning inside out and spreading, and then Sabaster swooped down on him. The Ephirit covered his body completely, wings spread in a wide tent. She heard Ferain scream in agony.
She should not have been able to move, but she did; Karys swept to her feet and threw herself at Sabaster. His body felt heavy and oily beneath her, his feathered shroud hard as chitin—and yet she sank into him, his wings sucked at her skin. She tore at the Ephirit’s back.
“Don’t you dare touch him, don’t you dare touch him!” she snarled.
Unscathed, Sabaster rose and shook her off. Ferain lay gasping on the floor behind him, convulsing slightly, his eyes rolled back. The wound on his arm had drawn closed. The Ephirit turned his attention to her.
“First and most disgraced of my vassals,” he said. “I have dishonoured you beyond understanding. The taint is mine; there will be no atonement worthy of you.”
With a cry of fury, Karys punched his second face. She split her knuckle open, but the blow did not leave the slightest mark. Helpless anger emptied her mind, she struck him again and again, and Sabaster stood perfectly still, unmoved by her violence.
“You, I have cherished,” he said. “You, I have stained.”
His focus on Karys, the Ephirit failed to see Ferain’s neck arching to breaking point. With his back turned, he missed the blue spill of light that suddenly blazed across Ferain’s chest. Unearthly, the colour—like the sky cracked open.
Ferain cried out her name, and Karys’ heart flew straight to him. The chamber dissolved into hallowfire.
The blast staggered her. Flames burned across her eyelids, all-encompassing and bright as the midday sun; fire roared over her body, but she felt no heat. She flung her arms up in front of her face, warding off the light. Then, as abruptly as it appeared, the Bhatuma’s brilliance diminished, and the room was visible once more.
Karys lowered her arms. The fence of skin and bone had fallen flat to the ground, flickering with eddies of blue flame. Where he had lain, Ferain now hovered a foot off the floor: upright, eyes closed, his skin licked by banking waves of hallowfire, his chin tilted to the ceiling. He opened his mouth, and produced a rattling inhuman sound, a throaty noise like a ratchet turning, a crow’s warning.
“Disfavoured.” Sabaster spoke in reverential, whispering chorus. “The vessel bears fruit.”
Ferain’s head lowered. His eyes flicked open, shining with azure fire.
That’s not him.
The attack was too quick for Karys to see. One moment, Sabaster stood before her, and the next he was gone—in the blink of an eye, Ferain ploughed him across the room and slammed him against the chamber wall. The Ephirit’s lowest face cleaved away from his body; Ferain gripped the visage between his hands and crushed it like chalk.
“Did you think to play cuckoo, usurper,” he hissed. “Did you think to supplant me within the womb?”
Sabaster’s body pivoted. With a brutal wrench, reality dislocated. Gravity of the domain reversed, and the world flipped upside down.
Karys fell back to the ceiling and the pool; in midair, she twisted, landing hard on her shoulders. Her collarbone snapped—a heavy crunch reverberating through her chest—and her teeth sliced into her bottom lip. The skin and bone fence clattered as it struck the base of the pool next to her. Winded, blood filling her mouth, she rolled over and pushed herself up onto all fours. Her flayed shins seared with anguish. Through the thin membrane of the ceiling, she could see the imprints of the deathspeakers’ hands as they reached for her, their fingers grasping desperately.
In a shuddering crash, Sabaster and Ferain collided with the pool beside her. The force of their impact sheared through its floor, tearing half the structure away and opening a wide abyss to the black sky. Karys scrambled back from the edge. The fence slid and fell through the hole, and she could hear screaming: the howls of Sabaster’s blood-soaked vassals as they dropped down into the vast darkness. Her heart thudded.
Sabaster and Ferain rolled to the far wall and broke apart. The Ephirit thrust off from the ground, taking to the air in a rippling wave. A web of yellow fibres emerged from beneath his winged shroud, fine as spun silk. The net shot forward and enveloped Ferain. The instant that the glistening cords touched his body, he went rigid; all his muscles drew tight and still, and his face pulled into a tortured rictus. The strands drew inward, coiling close like a living creature.
Ferain flickered with blue light, and turned to shadow.
The net collapsed. A dark silhouette raced across the ruptured base of the pool; he flew along the wall, formless and quick as mercury, and climbed to the former floor of the chamber. There was nowhere to hide in the spotless white hall; Sabaster pursued him with dispassionate, singular focus, and more strands of the yellow silk reeled out from between the Ephirit’s wings. The scales had shifted; where they had appeared evenly matched before, Ferain now held the disadvantage; he retreated.
Sabaster’s shroud drifted wider, expanding to form an enormous mantle. He rose serenely after his prey, surrounded by his flowing reams of shining thread. His web almost reached the edges of the chamber, thick and weaving ever more densely, cornering the shadow above him. In the last seconds before the trap closed, the white surface of the floor underneath Ferain flared with blinding fire. When Karys’ vision cleared, the shadow had vanished.
Sabaster had lost sight of him too. Above Karys, the Ephirit halted and hung suspended in the air. He slowly rotated in place, scanning the chamber. When he finished his circle, he stopped. An eerie sawing groan emerged from the mouths of his two remaining faces. In response, every surface in the hall—the walls, the floor, the ceiling—turned to mirror glass.
Thousands of identical Sabasters hovered over Karys’ head. Then they began to move, reflections separating and diverging. Each Ephirit hunted the hall alone, hungrily seeking Ferain.
Karys clenched her fists. Her breathing was shaky. The vast crowd of wings and white faces seemed to smear together; her mind could not make sense of the way their bodies decoupled. Every inch of the domain lay under Sabaster’s control, reality itself an extension of his command. Within this place, she was the only aberration, the one thing that did not belong. The only unknown—and the only place to hide.
She scarcely moved her mouth, her words no louder than an exhalation. “Tell me what to do.”
And her shadow, dark and still at her side, whispered into her ear.
“Jump.”
Karys shut her eyes. It was not Ferain. She knew that. Whatever lurked in the darkness, it was not the man she had bound. Her muscles tensed. I can’t do this. She shifted her weight, rising even as her mind rebelled. Please don’t make me do this.
She knew that it was not Ferain. But the shadow had spoken in his voice.
With a cry of despair, Karys ran forward and threw herself into the sky.
Time slowed. Ahead, nothing: no light, no sound, no end. The void sang, and she fell into it, too terrified to scream, unable to move any part of her body. Air rushed over her skin. She felt each second, each heartbeat booming inside of her chest, all of it increasing; ever faster, darker, and colder. The empty black sky yawned. Her momentum spun her downwards, cast her headfirst into oblivion, and she was falling, falling, falling.
With a cruel jerk, gravity reverted. The shift hit her like a punch; her momentum expired, and for the barest instant she found herself weightless and unmoving in the air. It felt like floating—like the swell of a wave before it broke. Then it gave way. Karys dropped and the void receded above her; she plummeted back toward the pyramid.
Sabaster caught her before she reached the summit. Still descending, the Ephirit swept around her, his shroud folding over her and breaking her fall. He pulled her in close, and Karys clutched him instinctively, latching onto the only solid matter within her reach.
Her shadow struck.
The ambush tore through Sabaster, cutting wing and sinew and the unnatural pulsing organs below, splitting his highest face in two with a shower of white powder. The Ephirit shuddered. His body compacted, his feathered mantle flattening to a single plane, but he did not release Karys. They fell together through the white chamber, and hit the ground.
The impact wrenched Karys from Sabaster’s grasp. She rolled across the floor, coming to a stop flat on her back. Her head rang. The rushing of air still roared in her ears; she felt her master’s feverish heat on her skin. She wheezed, and turned her head. The Ephirit knelt ten feet from her, supported by one arm. His exposed organs, dark below the tattered veil of his shroud, leaked a thick milky gloss like paint. Shattered mirrors lay in fragments around him; in pieces, they quietly chanted: new favour, new favour.
He meant to save me.
The thought stood hideously stark in her mind. Ferain, no longer in shadow, crouched to her right. His expression was harrowed; he faced Sabaster, and reality rippled between the pair—weak flashes of blue, incongruous reflections spiralling into nothing.
With a jagged breath, Karys picked herself up. Everything hurt. She swayed, then limped unsteadily across the glittering floor. When she reached him, Sabaster tilted his last face up toward her. In isolation, his expression only looked sad.
“Vassal of my will,” he said weakly. “Most honoured … most disgraced.”
She touched his cheek, and he crooned. The white surface of his skin felt cool and smooth.
“I was unworthy of you,” he whispered. “My honour insufficient. I am sorry, Karys Eska.”
Karys found that she was crying. She did not know why. Before her knelt a nightmare. Her ruin, her greatest regret. Tears rolled silently down her face.
“You still have honour,” she said.
The Veneer opened to her. It burned, but less brightly than before. The workings of Sabaster’s body shone before her, intricate and vast; she could see into his wounds, all the broken parts amidst the glow. Too complex to be understood, aching and alive. Karys reached her senses into the deepest and brightest of the lights, and gently brought them undone.
Sabaster unravelled with a sigh. His last face dissolved into silver like moonlight under her fingers. Then he was gone.
Karys slipped to her knees. The low chanting of the mirrors faded, replaced by a deep creaking: the wind through giant trees. She looked up. Clusters of black holes had appeared in the walls and through the remains of the chamber’s ceiling. They expanded slowly. Through them, she could see nothing but darkness.
Movement caught her eye—Ferain had climbed back to his feet. He stretched, then rolled his shoulders in their sockets as if to dismiss old stiffness. A glimmering brightness settled around him, a clean smell like the breeze off the sea. Without paying her the slightest attention, he rose into the air. His expression was smooth as he ascended.
Karys felt a pull in her chest.
“Ferain,” she said. Her voice cracked.
A faint tremor ran through his shoulders. He hesitated, and his gaze drew back to her. Karys stared at him, unable to speak. There was nothing familiar in his face, nothing she recognised.
Come back to me, she thought.
He smiled like he could read her mind, but it was not his smile—somehow, she knew that. Sabaster’s palace continued to break apart around them. The creaking grew ever louder as the darkness ate through the walls.
“Well, why not?” he said.
Shadows reared from the glass-littered ground, and swallowed Karys.