Even Markam lifted his hands before him in surrender. “Goddesses, no.”
He cleared his throat, and the strange moment of togetherness, of non-hatred between them, melted.
“They’ve trapped them,” Sonara explained. “With a power I have never seen before. Torture that renders them useless should they try to fight back.”
Thali stepped past them and peered out the mouth of the tunnel, down at the scene below. Sonara risked a glance. The prisoners were standing now, all in a line. The torture, it seemed, had ended. The Wanderers were passing them tools from their massive vehicle. Black axes and strange sharp-pointed drills.
“We’ll go back to the cave,” Markam said. “Come up with a way to strike. At nightfall, perhaps, because—”
“Strange,” Thali said suddenly. She leaned a bit further out of the tunnel, as if she wasn’t sure what she was seeing was true. But she was lookingup,not down. At the starship hovering in the sky. “I thought you killed the Wanderer, Devil.”
“What?” A strange coldness crept across Sonara’s skin as she approached the cleric. “I did. I saw him fall to the ground, after I pushed the blade in deep.”
“Not so,” Thali said softly.“Look.”
Sonara took the spyglass from Markam’s outstretched hand and pressed it to her eye as she swung it upwards, looking at the small landing dock that jutted from the side of the hovering ship.
A balcony of sorts, where the smaller transport ship was parked. And there beside it, leaning over the railing to peer down at the prisoners below…
The Wanderer she’d stabbed, killed beneath the power of her curse.
Now very muchalive.
Chapter 17
Karr
One moment, Karr Kingston was in agony, lying on his back in a kingdom made of fire and ash.
The next, he stood alone in a throne room, in a palace carved entirely out of ice.
He shivered, his breath forming a dense cloud as he turned in a slow circle. His body was miraculously free of all pain.
The left side of the room was all white, untouched by color or shadow. It was ornately designed, a jagged sort of beauty that reminded him of the mountains. Ice curtains were pulled back from towering, sharply carved cathedral windows. Beyond them stood the ghostly outline of mountaintops far away, the telltale diamond-shape of a flock of wyverns riding the wind between their peaks.
Karr gazed past the curtains, to the walls of the throne room, which were carved with thousands of tiny snowflakes. Each one of them unique in shape and size, but all shimmered with a dusting of frost as his gaze slid past. Rows of towering ice columns lined the throne room, bearing depictions of crystalline beings that could have been goddesses.They had crowns upon their heads, but no faces. Swords in their hands, but no enemies, for Karr realized the base of each column was carved to look like bones; ones each goddess, on each pillar, had slain.
The artistry was impeccable, so meticulously carved that their heavy gowns looked to be flowing in a forgotten wind.
Far overhead, the ceiling came together to the sharp peak of a single twisting spire. All of it, the purest shade of white.
He swung his head to the right, and gasped.
It was stillice,he was certain, shimmering and frozen, and slick as glass… but the color had turned black.
A mirror image in shape and design, the same jagged, frozen beauty. Buteverythingwas made of black ice. If Karr looked close enough, he swore he could see movement beneath the dark ice, like living shadows that slithered past.
He glanced down, in the space where he stood.
Unease crept through his senses as he realized that the space in which he stood was not black or white, but solid grey.
A carpet of grey, a single strip of muted color down the center of the throne room, rolled out to split the space in two. The design on the frozen grey carpet was beautiful, with foreign constellations he did not know broken up by snowflakes. Each one of them woven different from the next.
The carpet rolled all the way to a distant throne, carved to look like an exploding star.
Half of the throne was slick black ice. The other, purest white.
Karr shivered again, his bare feet cold on the grey rug. It was the only space in the room where he could not be touched by darkness or light, unsure of which way to go.
