“Look!” Emmy suddenly shouted. “I see something.”
We followed her pointed finger down to the valley below, and though I had no idea what, exactly, she was pointing at, a flash of movement also caught my eye, and I focussed in on one of the puddles. A shape was pushing from the shallow muddy depths, mixing with the water as it grew and swelled and threw out a limb, clawing onto the softened dirt beside the puddle. I squinted, trying to figure out what sort of creature it was, until it pulled more of itself free and I realised it was aperson.
“Oh my gods,” I muttered in horror. “Someone is drowning down there. We need to help them.” I turned instantly, but Siret reached out and caught my arm at the last moment, shaking his head, his eyes still fixed to the person below.
“It’s not a dweller or a sol,” he warned, seeing something I’d clearly missed. “There’s something wrong with it. Look.”
I turned back to the scene and watched as the thing tore its body free of the mud and rose, straightening up to its full height. Siret was right. There was something wrong with him—I could see his gender now, as he stood there, freakishly immobile. If it had been me I would have been gasping for air or wiping mud from my eyes and mouth. He simply stood there, staring ahead, completely unbothered by the fact that he had just freed himself from being buried alive. The puddle moved again, then, and I watched in increasing confusion and horror as another shape clawed itself free, rising to stand beside the first.
“There are more,” Emmy whispered, sounding terrified.
I scanned the bank and realised she was right. Some had already climbed out of the ground and were standing, immobile, staring forward and blending into the rock behind them since they were still covered in the muck that they had climbed out of. The water began to waver, to shift, and move, and roil, and soon the figures were stepping out of the river itself, walking to the bank to join the others. They didn’t speak to each other or interact in any way, and I had no idea what they were waiting for, but it was clear that they waited.
“They look like servers,” I noted, examining the figures that stepped out of the river, since the mud had been washed off by the water, making it easier for me to make out their details.
Some of them had bald heads; some were only partly shaven, with tufts of scruffiness or messy strands tumbling from patches on their heads. They were all in various stages of undress, with ripped material hanging off their sunken-looking bodies. The material seemed to be older than they were. It was sagging, stained, and crumbling away.
No, not crumbling …decomposing.
“How long have they all been buried under there?” I squeaked, as more and more of them rose from the waters, and those who had been waiting began to walk.
“Many life-cycles, clearly,” Cyrus replied. “There’s no way that this many dwellers have died in recent life-cycles without my knowledge. I may not know of every little thing that goes on in this world, but I would have been aware of a culling of this scale.”
For some reason, it only just occurred to me in that moment that all of the bodies had come from somewhere. They had once been people, just like the servers in Topia, and Cyrus was right … this was too many deaths. Even Emmy and I would have heard about it.
“It was the water,” I heard Emmy whispering. “This was Staviti’s plan. He’s taken every single dweller who has ever died and buried them around Minatsol. In this valley. And no doubt out in the desert beyond the ninth ring. Because he knew that if anyone ever broke his barrier on the Great River and the other channels between the worlds, the waters would flow everywhere. His enchantment draws the water into the land, deep enough to reach where he hid the bodies.”
“And then the water brought them to life,” Cyrus finished for her. “That must be how he creates the servers. He strips away most of their soul and imbues them with his will before giving them the water, and by extension, reanimating them.”
So he’d had an army of servers lying in wait.
“The only question is …” I swallowed, watching as the mass of bodies began to march toward the far end of the valley, leaving room for a seemingly endless stream of their fellows to crawl from the mud and pull themselves from the water. “The question is: What is his will here?”
“It’s his backup plan,” Yael said. “If we attack his water blockages, we’re weakening him. We’re forcing his hand, forcing him to do something drastic to achieve his master plan.”
“And what’s his master plan?” I asked, wondering if there was really any true method in the mind of a crazy person.
“To stop sols from ascending to Topia. To stop anyone from ever threatening his power again. The guardian said that everyone will die. I think she meant it, quite literally. Look at the direction they’re marching in.” He pointed toward the narrow mouth of the valley.
“Toward Blesswood.” Emmy was actually shaking when she answered.
“But this isn’t the only water source that was freed this sun-cycle,” I surmised. “If he has an army buried beneath each one, there will be several armies marching toward the entirety of our civilisation, fromalldifferent angles.”
Cyrus swung his bag down and pulled out the maps that he had scavenged the night before, laying them out on the short grass between us all. We crouched as he began placing broken-up pieces of twig on certain landmarks. He dropped one on the map near where we were, at Champion’s Peak, and then he dropped several others down, and I realised that it was an older map. There were still rivers and lakes depicted in the outer rings, where now there was only desert. Cyrus was marking several of the larger waterways.
“These are all the entrances into Topia,” he explained. “They all lead into a river that has since dried up.”
Almost distractedly, he reached for another of the maps and slapped it down onto the ground, showing the valley that was now marked beside Champion’s Peak. I glanced back to the other map, where it showed a river.
“So these are all the places Staviti would have buried his dead?” I asked. “The places where Topia’s water would fall on them and bring them back?”
“Exactly,” Cyrus confirmed.
“That one.” I pointed at the twig that marked a large river running through the desert plains stemming from the Ninth Ring. “They’re only a sun-cycle or two from the nearest town. They’ll hit there first.”
“We need to prepare each ring starting there,” Rome decided. “But we’re going to need help. We can’t do this on our own.”
“We’re going to have to expel our energy to get to the furthest ring in time anyway,” Cyrus said. “So I might as well take Emmy and go back to Topia instead, while you six prepare the dweller people for attack. We’ll tell everyone what’s happening and convince them to help us.”
