2: THE WOUNDED SKY

Kihrin sat back and exhaled.

“You do have to talk, you realize,” Thurvishar said. “Unless you’d rather I just continued. I’m fine either way.”

“Just thinking how funny it is that I never want to start where everyone else does.” Kihrin chewed on his lip, eyes distant.

“Where would you start?” Thurvishar asked.

Kihrin drummed his fingers on a stack of papers, formulas for some arcane bit of mathematics almost no one in the whole world comprehended anymore. Although—no, that wasn’t right. The dreth probably taught classes in it somewhere.

“The Blight,” Kihrin said.

Thurvishar closed his eyes, opened them again. “Because everything starts and ends there?”

“At least it does for me,” Kihrin answered.

(Kihrin’s story)

I opened my eyes. Sulfur-laced clouds overhead, battling across a wounded sky. A sick, dull pain throbbed inside my head, so it took a moment to realize it wasn’t my imagination; I was lying down while the world lurched past me. The air smelled rotten and tasted sharp, acids layered like fine mist making my eyes water and my throat choke. The humidity made my clothing and hair stick to my body. In the distance, an insistent croon beckoned.

As soon as I saw those clouds, my pulse soared and the throb worsened. I knew where we were, and it had been a long time since this had been a place that knew any joy.

I sat up and looked around. I had been tossed into a slowly moving wagon. Next to me lay three people, all still unconscious: Teraeth, Janel, and Thurvishar.¹ Our kidnappers hadn’t even bothered to change our clothing from the ornate stuff we’d been wearing when we had been ambushed, although they’d taken our weapons.

Two animals pulled the wagon. Nothing I recognized—some ungulate with striped hindquarters.² Since no one held the reins, every few steps, they paused to nip at the grass, which is why we’d been traveling the same speed as a land-bound starfish. Mind you, there was no grass to nip—just thorny bush and slick, gelatinous slime. It all looked inedible. It was all likely toxic.³

“Taja!” I shouted what could only laughably be called a prayer to my favorite goddess before I stopped myself.

She wasn’t going to show herself. Not here. Not this close to where a now wide-awake Vol Karoth cracked his knuckles, preparing for round two. The Manol Jungle had been the closest the Eight had been willing to travel, and even then they’d taken a risk. We were on our own.

I shook the others. “Wake up. Wake up, damn it.”

Janel roused first, to my surprise. I suppose the fact it was daytime helped. Waking her was impossible at night.⁴ She rubbed her eyes before she reached for weapons she didn’t have anymore. “What happened? Where are we?”

Before I could answer, Teraeth woke, followed by Thurvishar.

I took quick stock of our very fancy, very useless wagon: no food or water. Which meant whoever had put us here hadn’t intended on us surviving the experience. “At a guess, I’m going to suggest someone in the vané court wasn’t so keen to let us talk to the king.” I rubbed my forehead. “How did they get us?”

“Poisoned darts.” Teraeth looked offended over the whole matter. He offered Janel a hand; she stared at him oddly as she ignored the offer and clambered from the wagon, followed by Thurvishar.

Teraeth pulled his hand back.

“Do we have any idea who’s responsible?” Janel hesitated. “It wasn’t the king, was it?”

“If Kelanis had been involved, I rather doubt he’d have smuggled us from the palace in secret,” Thurvishar said. “Our kidnappers took care to avoid being seen.”

We paused.

“You were … conscious?” Teraeth’s question wasn’t idle considering Thurvishar’s skills at magic.

Thurvishar pretended to find a spot on his silk robe. “No. Kihrin can tell you; I don’t react to drugs in what you might consider a typical fashion. I experienced periods of near lucidity. That doesn’t mean I was coherent.”

“So who dumped us here?” Teraeth gestured around us. His voice sounded rough.

“Vané?” Thurvishar said. “I don’t remember much. One of them was a woman with blue hair.”

“Queen Miyane?” Teraeth looked over at me as if I had any way to confirm the guess.

I felt a sting in my throat that had nothing to do with the air. “Or my mother. She has blue hair too.”⁵

My answer made everyone pause. Khaeriel’s whereabouts were unknown and she’d been notoriously opposed to ever performing the Ritual of Night when she’d ruled the vané. Now that she’d escaped enslavement, I expected her to try to retake her throne. She probably had allies and contacts in the royal palace. Enough, perhaps, to ambush the messengers sent to see the Ritual of Night completed.

“If your mother did this”—Teraeth gestured to our surroundings—“then you may need to reassess your relationship. Putting us here is tantamount to a death sentence.”

“Literally so,” Thurvishar said. “I believe the vané call this the Traitor’s Walk.”

I exhaled. “I can’t discount the possibility that yes, she did this. A child she never knew versus her own immortality? Maybe that wasn’t even a hard choice.”

“We’ll have time for finger-pointing later,” Janel said. “Right now, we have bigger problems: food, water, surviving for long enough to make it back to civilization. Any civilization. This is the Korthaen Blight, isn’t it?” She looked around, at least as much as she could, given the cracked, craggy terrain.

“Pretty sure.” I gave Janel a curious look. I had expected Teraeth and Thurvishar to recognize our location. But Janel? She’d never been to the Blight before, but only in this lifetime. In her last lifetime, she’d embarked on a rather epic quest into this region.

She was starting to remember.

I knew the Blight because I’d been here once before a few years earlier, when I’d transported myself to the ruined city of Kharas Gulgoth, where Vol Karoth’s prison lay. Once was enough; I’d know those clouds and burning tang in the air anywhere. I’d survived before because three of the Immortals had personally shown up to escort me back out. That wasn’t going to happen this time.

Teraeth picked up a rock and threw it in frustration. “Oh, this is absolutely the Korthaen Blight. Damn it. I’m wondering if the king even knew we’d arrived to see him.” The pack animals still wandered from scrub bush to scrub bush, forcing everyone to walk after the wagon if we didn’t want to lose it.

“Perhaps not,” Thurvishar said, “but he soon will. I’ll open a gate and return us to the Capital. Once there, we can contact the Eight again and decide how to handle this next. Does that sound reasonable?”

There was a beat of silence. Then I realized Thurvishar was waiting for us to give him permission.⁶ “Yeah. Great idea. Do it.”

“Please,” Janel added. She looked down at her red silk outfit with obvious exasperation. “Why couldn’t they have waited for us to be dressed properly before drugging us and dumping us out here?”

The vané had been hospitable. That was the galling thing. No one had ever said, “No, go away.” They had instead welcomed us in; insisted we would see the king as soon as he returned to the Capital; and that in the meantime, we needed appropriate clothing for the court. At which point they’d spent the next week or so throwing sumptuous attire at us, mostly so we could wear something nice at all the parties they’d invited us to attend.

Janel’s outfit resembled traditional western Quuros attire, but only to someone who’d never seen traditional West Quuros attire. So while she wore a raisigi, hers clasped tightly around her breasts and then fell in panels of transparent silk, which deepened from orange to dark crimson. Her kef pants had panels missing at the hips joined by a thin chain of interlocking gold salamanders. The outfit didn’t even faintly resemble outdoor attire, although at least she wore boots.

That was better than Teraeth or I could claim. We wore sandals, in addition to silk vané robes so thin I found myself glad the fashion required layering them.⁷ The only reason Teraeth wore anything that could be described as more than “formal jewelry” was because he’d wanted to make sure he could conceal all his knives.

Teraeth sighed. “At least the silk is worth a fortune.”

“I’d rather be naked and still have my sword,” Janel said.

Thurvishar held out his hands as he began casting the complicated spell that would get us out of this death trap. I wasn’t surprised our would-be killers—whoever they were—had assumed we wouldn’t be able to escape the Blight. There weren’t more than a hundred people in the whole world powerful enough to open freestanding gates—and most of those were god-kings. I can count the number of mortals who can pull off that trick on my hands with fingers left over.⁸

Fortunately for us, Thurvishar was one of those people. Dumping us into the Blight without food, water, or weapons would have been fatal if we’d been stuck there.

Except nothing was happening.

“Um, Thurvishar?” I cleared my throat to catch his attention.

He stopped moving his fingers. “That … didn’t work. Let me try this again—”

“Thurvishar, look up.” Janel’s voice sounded soft and urgent.

I looked up too. The clouds above our heads had turned from sickly yellow brown to silver gray, flickering with rainbow colors: reds, greens, violets.⁹ The clouds seemed to be boiling.

“What the hell is—?” Janel started to say.

“I know that sky.” Teraeth’s eyes widened. “Everyone under the wagon! Under the wagon right now!”

Janel grabbed the nearest person—Thurvishar—and pushed him down. At the same time, Teraeth yanked me down. I didn’t need the incentive, but I was happy to take all the help I could as I scrambled under cover.

Something thumped to the ground nearby. A second sound followed the first, then another, until it echoed like violent rain.

“What—” I turned my head to look.

A sword slammed into the ground, point first, impaling itself. A dagger sank down next to it, vibrating. Then another. Not all the weapons fell point first, but anyone outside without cover could expect to be bludgeoned or stabbed to death in short order. As if to punctuate the point, animal screams rang out, cut mercifully short.¹⁰ Metallic sounds rang out all around as weapons crashed into metal already on the ground.

“Swords?” I said. “It’s raining swords?” I remembered Morios, the dragon Janel had slain, but he’d breathed clouds of wind-whipped metal, more like razor-tipped metal shards. These were actual, honest-to-gods swords, complete with wire-wrapped pommels, cross guards, and blood grooves.

“This time,” Teraeth agreed. “At least it’s not raining acid.”

“Or poisonous spiders,” Thurvishar added. “I’ve read an account—”¹¹

“Yes, you read my account—”¹²

“Kihrin!” Janel grabbed my misha and pulled me toward her, just as a sword found its way through a crack in the wagon’s wooden floor and sliced all the way down. It missed me by the finest of margins.

It also meant I was pressed against Janel, which, to be honest, wasn’t unpleasant at all. Janel seemed to realize how provocative the new position was the same time I did and started to smile.

“Are you hurt?” Teraeth asked.

I looked back over my shoulder, past the sword, and met Teraeth’s eyes. He looked scared, which wasn’t an expression I remembered ever seeing on his face before.

Teraeth’s worry shook me out of any temptation to flirt. I let out a small prayer to my goddess, even though I knew it wouldn’t do any good.

Taja was busy. Or hiding.

I’m not sure which idea bothered me more.