A Mountaintop
Kinigari Shuhet, Bhakal Lands
Light flashed, and a cord of pain tore through her. A white-hot wire seemed to cut her arm, her torso, legs, and neck. Blackness closed from all sides, and she withdrew, pulling two flickering lights as she fell.
Dry air filled her lungs, and she was sobbing, curled on the ground.
No, Anati thought to her. Almost. But you retreated into the Regnant’s void again.
“I can’t …” she said between breaths. Tears stung her eyelids, but it was clear they were atop a hill or mountain, looking down over a vast expanse of brown and green. The air was hot, though it should have been winter, and trees and grass seemed to be lush and growing, as though the seasons had been made to stand on end.
Lin Qishan stood, watching her, while Yuli had right away set out to gather wood for a fire. It had become routine, after days of failed attempts.
“Do you have any inkling of where we might be, this time?” Lin said.
Sarine shook her head, gathering herself and wiping tears from her eyes. “No,” she said. “When it starts to burn, I don’t know what happens. I grab onto something safe. And Anati tells me I’ve failed.”
You did fail, Anati thought. The Seat should be a place of stone, not trees and brush.
Her kaas appeared atop a nearby rock, looking down at her with disapproval. It stung, not least for having somehow snared Lin and Yuli with her when she’d followed Anati’s instructions. It made trying to get them back to New Sarresant—or even to their homes, on the far side of the Divide—her next priority, but she’d failed there, too. So far every attempt to do as Zi had told Anati had resulted in failure, arriving in new and distant, unrecognized places.
This one seemed to be a lone mountain jutting from a flat plain. A strange sight, as though some God had cut one towering peak from a range and set it down where it didn’t belong.
“By the look of it we are far to the south, this time,” Lin said. “The first you’ve taken us to the bottom half of the world. A sign of progress, perhaps?”
“How can you tell?” she asked, retrieving a waterskin from her belt. Every attempt to shift them left her parched and aching, made worse if she tried it too many times in a day.
“It’s summer, here,” Lin said. “And far from the world’s center, owing from the sun’s position in the sky.”
“The seasons are reversed, in some parts of the world?”
“Do they not have academies and schools, on your side of the Divide?”
The rebuke cut deeper than perhaps Lin had intended; her uncle had done his best, where her education was concerned, but he was only a priest, and their supply of books had been limited. “They do,” she said. “I didn’t have the pleasure of attending.”
“Apologies, then, if I gave offense,” Lin said. “No child with your talents would be left untrained, in the Jun Empire.”
Her waterskin had soaked her lips and throat, and she offered some to Lin, who accepted the drink with a nod of thanks.
“The southern half of the world,” she said as Lin drank. “I wonder where.”
Lin shrugged, returning the skin close to empty. They’d have to find a watering hole or a spring soon. “The south is all desert on the Jun side of the Divide,” Lin said. “Or islands, peopled by savages and barbarians.”
“I thought you said one Emperor ruled every nation, there.”
“He does,” Lin said. “But why count a tribe of island-dwellers as a nation? If their land was of any import, the army would come to subdue their leaders and install governors and magistrates loyal to the throne. If their magic was a threat, the Great and Noble Houses would be there to take the children.”
She’d listened with rapt interest whenever Lin spoke of her homeland, and now was no exception. Soon the Regnant would be coming with his champions to fight against the Veil. Against her. Anything she could learn of their ways might be of use.
“What about Yuli?” she asked. “She said she wasn’t raised in one of your monasteries.”
“The Natarii clans are left to themselves, so long as they pay tribute and answer our calls to war. That her father pledged her in service to a rebellion will mean the end of her clan, once the Emperor settles the threat posed by Isaru Mattai. Doubtless why she came with you; an attempt to keep the Great and Noble Houses from—”
Ubax aragti.
Lin continued speaking for a moment, but Sarine rose to her feet, glancing around until she came to rest on Anati.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“The Emperor won’t tolerate rebellion in any form,” Lin said. “He’ll crush them, as swiftly as he crushes any rebels.”
“No, not that,” she said. “Anati, what was that? ‘Ubax arat’? Or ‘ragti’?”
It was ubax aragti, Anati thought to her. Close by.
One of the kaas’ warnings. She’d learned to recognize them, first with fellow kaas-mages and then again, on the far side of the Divide.
“What does it mean?” she asked. “What sort of magic is it?”
It is ubax aragti, Anati thought.
“We need to fetch Yuli,” she said to Lin. “Something is coming, something I don’t recognize.”
At once Lin turned toward the trail Yuli had taken. Sarine followed behind; she’d been preoccupied with pain during their arrival, and though her senses were on full alert now, it was just as well Lin had paid attention to the way Yuli had gone. They tracked down the side of the hill, around a rise leading down into a steep decline covered with brush and grass. The tree line was a quarter league down the mountain, and there was no sign of Yuli in any direction, though she would have headed down if she meant to gather firewood.
“Yuli,” she called, cupping her hands and hearing it echo off the mountainside.
Lin turned, hissing a sharp rebuke. “You said something was coming,” Lin said, just above a whisper.
“Something is,” she said. “But we have to find her first.”
Lin spun back, snapping her fingers for quiet as she stooped to grab a handful of dirt. A moment later it became glass, the armor Lin used to protect herself and the shards she threw at their enemies. But instead Yuli appeared, emerging from behind a thick row of brush with a small store of sticks and dried leaves in her arms.
“What is it?” Yuli asked, looking as though she was prepared to ditch her stores.
“Nothing, yet,” she said. “Anati gave a warning. I wanted to be sure we were close, in case … something happened, and I needed to get us out of here.”
“We are close,” Yuli said. “Are you prepared to travel again, so soon?”
“If I have to,” she said. It would hurt; she’d tried shifting twice in a day already, after her first attempt had taken them to a barren field of ice. But it was better than being surprised by some unknown magic, with only Anati’s cryptic name for it for a warning.
It isn’t cryptic, Anati thought. It’s a flower that grows here, blue and purple petals on a thorny stem.
“Oh Gods damn it,” she said. “You mean you warned me about a flower?”
Yuli looked puzzled, while Lin had moved ahead, stepping onto a rocky ledge as she surveyed the flatlands at the mountain’s base.
“I don’t think it was a warning about a flower,” Lin said. “Something is coming.”
She went to where Lin was standing, looking down from the mountain. Something was there: a party of travelers—four or five tiny shapes moving together. A cloud hung above them, a hundred spans above their heads and rising. An odd coincidence, perhaps, save that it was the only cloud in the sky in any direction.
“Anati, is that the ubax aranti, or whatever you’d said?” she asked.
Of course not.
“I’m not so certain we want to be here, when that cloud arrives,” Lin said. It was growing, puffs of white bulging from it as it moved.
“Can you take us elsewhere?” Yuli asked her.
Her body ached already, a throbbing pain lingering from the cord of heat that had almost cut her in two during the last attempt. But she could do it.
“Gather close,” she said.
“Are you certain?” Lin said. “There’s no shame in heading down to confront whatever’s coming. Dragons study a lifetime to master that gift. A mistake could send us under the ocean, or somewhere deep below the ground.”
She isn’t trying to use the Dragon magic, Anati thought.
“Just get close,” she said. Yuli and Lin both backed away from the ledge, though the cloud had already risen to be visible, almost level with where they were standing, near the summit.
She emptied her thoughts, as Anati had told her. A breath, drawn deep. It began with separation. A sense of pulling away from herself. Like shifting her senses to the leylines, but different. A void of emotion, mind, and body, similar to the emptiness of communing with the spirits, though, too, a different reality. Did every form of magic have a place of separation from the physical world? A fleeting thought. Unimportant. She could feel the Veil, raging inside her. She found the place where the blue sparks flowed, the power of Life to counter Death. That was where she had to project her thoughts. Anati said it came from there, where the blue sparks seeped into the soul that was her. Not the Veil, though that was part of it. Not Anati, and not Lin or Yuli, though they were there, too.
“Sarine?” Yuli was saying. “Sarine, quickly … it’s almost here.”
No distractions. She fed her consciousness into the place where she drew the blue sparks, reversing the usual flow. A storm seemed to rage around her, pillars of blue lightning in place of sparks. She raced through them, weaving around columns of energy caught between two infinite planes. It was as though she were in a room with no walls, only a low ceiling and a floor, all vibrating in time with her steps. An old place. A place that seemed to reject her presence, arcing bolts lancing out from the torrents whenever she drew too near. Anati had told her to find the strongest pillar, the place where light fused together to burn white. She wove through the rest of the columns, somehow knowing where to go to find the center. Heat rose, and tendrils of surging energy. She felt fear from Lin and Yuli, and hard determination from the Veil. She was close.
And then she was there.
A column of pure white light, stretching the two planes until floor and ceiling became almost as infinite as the space on either side. A bore between worlds, but somehow anchored in the same place. Here, and not here. A channel to house a consciousness in a physical vessel, like a mind—or a soul—trapped within a body.
She moved toward it, pulling Lin, Yuli, Anati, and the Veil in with her.
She heard a scream around her. Yuli’s scream. She smelled blood, heard shattering glass and metal, bone and steel clanging in a haze of mist.
Beams of light shone from the column in narrow, focused lines. She wove around them. She had to reach the center, Anati said. The beams multiplied, and she dodged them. Almost there. Five cords of white-hot wire, then twenty, then fifty.
One of them struck her, slicing through her in a wave of agony.
The blackness called; stars and strands offering an escape. Another cord bit into her sense of self, ripping loose some part of her. Memories, or knowledge. Gone. She screamed, and heard shouts mix with her screaming.
The cords were wrong. A perversion of the true thing. Fragments of the soul. The world in decay. But the core of it was there. She drove through the pain, burning away more of her sense of self. She was Sarine, though she wanted to be the Veil. Stewardship was hers. She’d fought for the right, and slain the old master to ensure it would pass to her. She touched the core, and light flashed around her, pushing the rest away.