Approaching Lavendon Abbey
Near the Great Barrier
Sunset streaked behind them, painting the clouds a blend of purple and blue. Zi’s scales seemed to mirror the hues, flashing as he lay draped across her saddle. His pallor had recovered after the slaughter in the market, but he’d remained visible, sickly, and weak as they’d followed the roads north. For the twentieth time she questioned the decision to chase Axerian, and redoubled her conviction as she clung to her gelding’s reins.
The barrier had grown in the time they’d spent on the road, from a blue line shimmering in the distance to a towering haze, consuming half the sky in either direction. Hard to fathom the barrier could be real, seeing it so close. A marvel of engineering, and it ran unbroken from the coastline here to the tip of the Thellan colonies in the south, beyond even the Gand territories. She might have appreciated it more if not for Zi, and for feeling like her backside had been beaten with reeds after two days in the saddle.
“That’s the abbey’s spires,” Acherre said, pointing to a dark shape silhouetted against the barrier’s haze. “Shall we make a race of it, the rest of the way?”
“No,” she said. “Zi does best under a steady walk.”
The reminder seemed to sober the captain’s mood, and Acherre nodded as she and her mount fell into step beside Sarine’s gelding.
“We’ll have to get you a proper mount,” Acherre replied. “A well-trained binder’s mount is worth a company of muskets, in the right hands.”
Acherre stroked her horse’s mane, and the creature whickered without missing a step. Their movements were as fluid as Sarine was sure her own were not, and if Acherre had any sores she hadn’t needed Life when they’d put in at a farming village the night before. Horses and riding had always had a certain appeal, a majestic cadence to it when teams of four or six drove carriages through the Gardens. She’d imagined riding one couldn’t be all that different from being driven by them, more fool her.
Another quarter league and the abbey resolved from silhouette to wood and stone. Her uncle’s chapel was a lavish affair in comparison, the Sacre-Lin’s stone and stained glass cutting a sharp relief against the dull brown rectangles clustered around the abbey’s spire, but any comfort would be welcome after a few days on the road. There were a dozen such abbeys placed along the barrier, charged with maintaining the Shelter bindings that kept it standing against the wild. With luck the priests would recognize Axerian from the drawings she carried. And surely even priests had to keep warm water on hand for a bath.
Acherre called something to her, muted and lost on the wind as the captain charged her horse forward.
Her gelding skittered to follow, caught between obeying her hold on the reins and charging alongside Acherre, but Zi was in no condition for a gallop, let alone a run, and for a moment her attention turned to struggling not to fall.
“Dead,” Acherre called back. “The priests. Their bodies … my Gods.”
Acherre had dismounted in the outer yard, and now hovered over what appeared to be three brown-robed figures sleeping beside a stone well. Sarine scooped Zi into her arms, careful to cradle him against her chest as she swung a leg over her gelding’s flank, dropping the reins as she all but jumped from the saddle, her mount as eager to be free of her as she was of it.
“The snake we saw in the market,” Acherre said. “It must have come through the barrier here.”
“I don’t think so,” Sarine said, nestling Zi into place across her shoulders. “It might be the snake, but the ones it killed were sickly, covered with rot. These are different.”
She pointed toward a man in priest’s robes, with pale skin, cold and gray, but where the man’s eyes should have been there were empty sockets, as though carrion birds had come and pecked them clean while leaving the rest alone.
Acherre nodded, pacing between the bodies. Another two shapes lay on the path from the well to the inner yard, and no doubts there would be more.
“Could it be the assassin?” Acherre asked. “These priests have been dead for days. If it was his work, he’ll have moved on. We should check the rest of the abbey, then do the same.”
She shook her head. “It isn’t like Axerian to kill innocents, not unless he sees no other way.”
Acherre raised an eyebrow. “You know him that well?”
“I …” she began.
The world lurched.
She stood on a field of ice, a rolling tundral plain beneath a darkened sky. Armored figures lay dead around her, piled deep and caked in snow and frozen blood.
Worry for Zi surged, and panic. But her emotions counted for nothing here; she tried to move, to shout, to fight and make it go away. Instead she stood, as frozen as the corpses, and heard a voice roaring with the fury of battle beside her.
Paendurion.
Fire crackled around him as Shelter shielded him from the heat, and he danced forward, toward the last man standing on the Regnant’s—her ancient enemy’s—side of the field.
Shelter dissolved the moment before impact, and Paendurion’s longblade clanged as it met his opponent’s folded steel. Her champion shifted his massive girth behind his shield, and his enemy twisted, evading his attacks, weaving purple lines in the air with the dessicated remains of his free hand. A sheet of glass turned Paendurion’s attack, conjured and shattering at the last instant, and the other man darted forward, striking with the sword in his hand and four new glass shards conjured in the air. Death tore them apart as they flew, and Paendurion rushed into the man, bashing through another sheet of glass with his shield.
Paendurion’s enemy staggered backward, weaving a barrier of light between them, and Ad-Shi gored him from behind. Spectral claws emerged from his belly, and the Regnant’s final champion died, gasping for air as Ad-Shi twisted her hands, rending his flesh to pulp.
A voice sounded in her ears: FOR THIS ONE, IT ENDS.
Paendurion dropped his sword.
“It’s done,” her champion of Order said, emotion welling in his voice as tears mixed with blood and dirt on his face.
It was.
Power flowed into her, a torrent of energy. A sea of possibility, already changing the face of the world.
“Forgive me,” Axerian whispered, and black claws tore into her from behind. Sorrow and shock overpowered her senses, and she screamed. Betrayal. The world shuddered, and she rushed to complete what she’d begun.
Air choked from her lungs, and tears soaked her cheeks. Sunlight burned on her skin.
Blue light flashed, and a sensation of … sobbing?
I can’t stop it. Zi’s voice, and she recognized the sobbing as coming from him, a tide of emotion and despair.
“Sarine?” Acherre asked.
A hand propped her up, steady on the small of her back, with another around her arm to brace her.
Her vision returned, shimmering from moisture in her eyes.
“No,” she said, rushing to cradle Zi from atop her shoulder. “Not another one. I’m sorry, Zi. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Zi writhed in her arms, constricting his body to dig his claws into her skin. She reached to shelter him by reflex.
“That’s what hurts you, isn’t it?” she asked. “Each time … each time I see these things.”
Yes.
She hadn’t expected otherwise. But hearing it tore her through the heart.
“I’m sorry,” she said, barely above a whisper. He felt brittle against her skin, like cold glass on the cusp of breaking.
Acherre walked a few paces away, giving her and Zi space as she inspected the priests’ bodies.
“I count seven, in the yard,” Acherre said quietly. “There may be more inside. And I need to check the barrier.”
Sarine said nothing, cradling Zi as she walked to sit atop the well. Emotion hadn’t helped him after all; his color had refreshed after the murders in the market, but he was still languid, as infirm as any poxy child. She needed answers. Without knowing what was wrong, she couldn’t begin to help him recover, or stop the visions. If the answer lay there, perhaps she could piece together what had triggered them. That was something at least.
NO.
The thought roared in her mind, as fierce and strong as Zi had ever sent, and a white shield flared to cover her left side, where a tiny lizard had clamped its jaws around her finger.
She leapt to her feet, shaking her arm to fling the lizard into the dirt, but Zi acted first, a wave of purple light flaring in her vision as the creature exploded into ribbons of gore and paste.
Shock glazed over her senses. The lizard had bitten her. Zi would never have reacted so strongly against a common reptile; it had to be one of the terrors native to the New World. She stared between the empty-eyed corpses and the stain of brown and red Zi had made of the lizard in the mud beneath the well. He’d saved her life. Not that he hadn’t done the same a hundred times over with his gifts of Red and Green and Yellow, but it was something else seeing him act directly. And now he was frozen, quivering as he coiled around her forearm.
“Zi,” she said. “I …”
“Gods,” Acherre said, coming around the side of the abbey. “There are holes here all right, bores through the barrier wide enough to drive a cart through. Clean made, too, no sign of fraying or … what’s wrong?”
Sarine wiped tears from her cheeks, cradling Zi against her chest with her other hand. She was doing this. Her inattention had caused him to overexert himself, as sure as these Nameless-cursed visions were responsible for his sickness.
“A … a lizard. A beast. It attacked and Zi killed it.”
“A lizard?” Acherre asked. “Like the snake in the market, or something else?”
She stood, keeping Zi close to her skin. She wanted to cradle him there, hold him and assure him she’d find a way to make things right. But tears and weeping wouldn’t bring her any closer to Axerian.
“You said there were holes in the barrier,” she said instead.
Acherre nodded. “That’s right. Like nothing I’ve ever seen. Even with these priests dead, it should have taken longer for the Shelter to decay, and no binding unravels as clean as this.”
“Show me,” she said, and let Acherre lead the way.
They went around the abbey, where weeds had already started breaking through what had been well-tended grass and gardens. A wheelbarrow had been left full of mud, now leaking rainwater into a puddle in the dirt. Signs of well-tended grounds, interrupted by whatever terrors had come through the barrier that had been their most important charge. No chance the priests had let the stretch of the barrier right behind their abbey fall into disrepair. Yet as soon as she and Acherre rounded the main building, she saw the holes, clear as she saw the barrier itself. Two gaps in the blue haze, made with clean, fine cuts, as though the pearls of Shelter had been split with a razor’s edge.
“Black,” Sarine said. “It has to be. It was him. Axerian was here.”
“Black?” Acherre asked.
She cradled Zi closer to her chest. Even with the horror of what Axerian had done here, knowing they were following his trail put a spark in her belly. “A kaas power. Like Yellow, or Green. It disrupts magic.”
“Like a Death binding?” Acherre said. “Though I’ve never seen a Death binding cut this cleanly.”
“It’s similar, in some ways. But worse. And not without its costs.” She almost shuddered, remembering the waves of pleasure when she killed, the barest taste of Zi’s harvest from death and murder. A foul thing, made worse for her bond to Zi making it feel sweet. “Black disrupts magic, like Death does, but it takes it in, allows its wielder to borrow …”
“Hm?” Acherre asked. “To borrow what?”
Words slid away from her. The barrier towered overhead, and it should have turned her stomach to see any hole in it at all. Instead she caught a movement, something faint and out of place.
“Sarine?” Acherre asked.
“This is wrong,” she said. “Axerian … he did something, here. More than Black.”
And suddenly, she saw it.
Blue sparks, the same color as the swirling haze above the holes, but different. They’d been woven into the fabric of the Shelter itself. Axerian had called it a warding, when he’d first shown it to her: the blue sparks that allowed her to set anchors and channel leyline and kaas energies from somewhere else, somewhere far away, even if she wasn’t there in person. She’d seen that same energy around Reyne d’Agarre’s Codex, and again in the sewers, guarding the place the strange spirit voices had named Tanir’Ras’Tyat. And now she saw it here, dancing among the strands of Shelter in the towering haze of the barrier, a mesh of blue sparks woven as far as she could see in both directions.
She reached for it, the same as she’d done before, and the blue sparks obeyed. A slow trickle at first, then faster. They’d been woven into the barrier itself, but they unknotted at her touch, as though she picked apart a knitted pair of stockings or a rug.
“He set wardings here,” she said as the sparks pulled toward her. “Gods, Acherre, he wove wardings into the barrier. They’ll let him channel the kaas’ gifts as though he were here in person. If he has enough of them, he could—”
Black.
The warning sounded like a bell in her ears.
Holes appeared in the barrier, a hundred at once, as far east and west as she could see. In an instant the towering haze shimmered, all hundred handspans of swirling blue film seeming to wane like the last slivers of a sunset. Then it was gone.
The barrier was gone.
Trees and grass stretched to the horizon. Bushes rustled where squirrels or rabbits might have nestled against the barrier before it vanished. Otherwise the land was quiet, as still and calm as any ordinary wooded plain.