“What child?” Sonara asked.
“A girl,” Karr explained. “She told me the half-place was made up of my memories.” He saw the girl in his mind, heard the ghostly recall of her voice. But the exact words she’d spoken had faded like ashes on the wind. “There was something ancient about her all the same.”
Markam shook his head. “There’s no child in the half-place, Wanderer.”
Thali’s pale eyes met Karr’s from behind her mask. The firelight danced in them, a blazing inferno that had him locked in her gaze. “What did she look like?”
Karr shrugged. “Like starlight incarnate.”
Her eyes seemed to dim for a moment.
“I heard a voice when I was there,” Sonara said. “I have heard that voice every day since. It is the whisper of my curse, the voice that begs me to pay attention. But it never had a form. Never a body. Certainly not a child.”
Silence swept across the cave like a heavy blanket.
“So… why amIhere?” Karr asked softly. “What do you want with me?”
Markam plucked a limb from the rat and began to gnaw on it, the only sound in the cave besides the crackling fire. “You’re a ransom, Wanderer. But for now, we need information. In exchange for offering it, we’ll let you live for the time being, until your captain meets our demand.”
“A fine reward,” Karr said darkly.
Again, he thought of Cade. Of what would come when the Antheon was distributed across the stars, Geisinger’s new creation.
“What do you know of this Antheon my brother seeks?”
It was Azariah who answered. “It… changes a man.”
“In what way?”
She swallowed, looking about the group. They watched her closely, as if they too were waiting on her answer.
“I do not know. Not fully. But to see it land in the hands of this Geisinger, and of my…” she cleared her throat, “of the king… I fear it would give them a great deal of power. A great deal more than they deserve.”
“You have a mighty power,” Thali said. “Thebothof you, for whatever reason, are being called. Your fates are intertwined. I suspected as much with you, Sonara, but… but now, it seems thetwoof you are called. Joined.”
“The heart of the planet,” Sonara said. “The place Eona found.”
“Who the hell is Eona?” Markam asked.
“The first Shadowblood,” Sonara explained. “She tried to steal the planet’s heart. To take it for her own and wield it. To become the most powerful person this planet has ever known.”
A face flashed in Karr’s head suddenly.
Cade, standing beside the Dohrsaran king as they looked at their prisoners cutting into the mountainside, a hunger formorealways shining behind his eyes.
“The heart,” Karr asked slowly. “Is it atrueheart?”
“The source of all things,” Thali said. “When a Child of Shadow is chosen, she lends to them a bit of her very soul. The heart… well, as the records show… it has no limit to its power. It can do all things.”
“In the story,” Azariah explained, “Eona was drawn to the heart. The pulse of its power was too deep for her to resist.”
“Like your magic,” Thali said. “When you reached a place of great fear, it struck out as raw as a babe’s first cry in the world. The heart of the planet, I believe, is calling you and Sonara both. Beckoning you to pay attention. To listen close. The heart is a beautiful gift, the source of life. But to others, it is a dangerous weapon, the kind that only a monster would want to control. To take it would be to kill the planet. To take it would be the end of the end.”
The end of the end.
Only a monster would want to wield the planet’s heart.
A monster like Geisinger.
