“Who are you?”
Chills ran down her spine. The voice sounded like a knife the size of a cruise ship rasping over a mountain. If Ghost hadn’t been right behind her, Marci would have turned and run. But hewasbehind her, his cold, comforting weight reminding her that she was not alone, and that gave her the courage to step forward instead.
“My name is Marci Novalli,” she said, speaking as loudly and clearly as she could. “Bound to the Empty Wind, Master of the Heart of the World, first Merlin since the return of magic, and I’m here to ask for your help.”
She reached down to touch the ground at her feet. Thanks to the swirling dark, it looked as black as everything else here, but she knew from what she’d seen in the Heart of the World that the smooth, hard substance beneath her feet wasn’t stone or congealed magic or anything else natural to this world. It was part of the Nameless End, one of the roots he’d set down, and it was everywhere.
“I’m sure you already know what this is,” she said, scraping her nails across the hard, black substance. “Algonquin’s Leviathan is a Nameless End, a devourer of worlds. He’s eating her as I speak, and when he’s finished, he’ll have a foothold in our plane big enough to keep him rooted while he eats the rest of us. He’s already dug in deep. If we don’t want to die, we’re going to have to work together to dig him out again before he ends us all.”
Marci thought that was a pretty compelling argument, but the powers above her seemed unimpressed.
“Why should we fight for you?” asked a growling voice. Then, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, a wolf appeared. Not a normal wolf, but a monster the size of a charter bus, its long tail lashing in anger.
“Why should we fight?” Wolf asked again, his yellow eyes flicking up to the much bigger spirits looming over him. “Theyare back, which meansourworld is already doomed. The mortal gods are even bigger than they were before. They will overrun us all!” He bared his bloody teeth. “Why should I fight for a future where I will be trampled?”
“You dare blame us!” cried the enormous, knife-scraping voice, and the magic above them jerked, forming into a painfully thin man covered head to toe in a long, red shroud. No, Marci realized, not a shroud. It was blood. The man was dripping with fresh blood as he stabbed his red hand at Wolf.
“This is your fault!” he cried. “We’d barely woken before you tried to tear us to pieces! I don’t even know my name yet, and you had your mongrel teeth on my throat! Why should we be devoured because your Algonquin could not control her fear? We are spirits just as you are!”
“You aremonsters!” Wolf roared. “Fear, impulse, panic, the worst of humanity’s sins made flesh! All of this world’s problems lie atyourfeet. If you could control yourselves, Algonquin would have never turned to the Leviathan!”
“You attacked us!” cried a rasping voice as a new figure appeared beside the bloody man. A bent old woman wrapped in animal hides with a bushel of stinging nettles clutched in her bare hands. “We did nothing but wake,” the woman snarled, beating her nettles across the wolf’s nose until it yelped. “You are what is wrong!”
“TheLeviathanis what is wrong!” Marci cried, shoving herself between them. “I know you’ve all got a lot going on right now, but who’s to blame won’t matter when we’re all dead. And make no mistake, we willallbe dead if we don’t act quickly.” She turned to glare up at the giant wolf. “You’re the spirit of wolves, right? What do you think is going to happen to all those wolves when Leviathan wins? Because I’ll tell you right now, it’ll be a lot worse than anything they can do.”
She pointed at the red man and the old woman, but the giant wolf just snorted. “You know nothing, human. Your kind has already hunted mine to near extinction. Why should I tolerate your spirits as well?”
“I’m not asking you to tolerate them,” Marci said. “I’m asking you to help yourself not die. We’re not trying to solve thousands of years of conflict here. You guys have miles of legitimate reasons to be mad at each other, but if you let all that anger get in your way right now, there’ll never be a chance to fix anything because we’ll all be dead. So if you’re cool with dying stupidly, go on your way. But if you want to hear my plan to save everything, stop yelling at each other for five minutes andlisten.”
That was not how one talked to gods, and Wolf’s glare made sure Marci knew it. But for all his big talk, the animal spirit didn’t leave, and Marci took that as her cue to keep going.
“I wouldn’t have come out here if I didn’t have a plan,” she said, pointing over her shoulder at the looming pillar of the Heart of the World. “We didn’t mean to let the magic out all at once like that, but having all of it active right now actually works in our favor. The Leviathan is a Nameless End, a scavenger who eats dying planes. Butourplane is healthy, which means he’s not supposed to be here. The only way he was able to stay is because Algonquin let him, and now he’s using her magic to dig in deeper still. But the same thing that made his plan work is how we’re going to beat it. By filling himself with magic like a spirit, he’s picked up your vulnerabilities as well, specifically banishment.”
“What is banishment?” asked the blood-covered man.
“Ignorant,” Wolf sneered, causing all the Mortal Spirits to boil over in fury.
“We only woke a few hours ago!” cried the old woman.
“I remember nothing!” cried another, a giant shadow dripping with something she couldn’t identify. “Even my name is gone!”
“We are lost, lost,” moaned a third, who was so far back in the swirling void Marci couldn’t even see its shape. “We have no anchors, no help.”
“We’ll get you help,” Marci promised, giving the creature what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “I know things are crazy, but this is actually the beginning of a golden age. There are more humans now than ever before, including millions of mages. That means there are Merlins enough for all of you!”
“You don’t have to be alone,” Ghost added, putting his hands on her shoulders. “I, too, was alone when I woke, but Marci found me. She calmed my rage and helped me find my purpose. Now we work together to serve the Forgotten Dead, and I am content. You can be too. We are human spirits, and humans are not meant to be alone. We are born in darkness, but we don’t have to remain there. The Merlins are here to help us.”
“The Merlins betrayed us!”
The shout crashed through the dark like breaking ice, and Marci froze. She knew that voice. As long as she lived, she’d never be able to forget it. Sure enough, the tall spirit who appeared from the dark beside Wolf was the same blue-skinned, seaweed-bearded Viking she’d seen when they’d ripped the black bag off her head in that interrogation room what felt like forever ago. He no longer had a weapon in his hand, but there was no mistaking the piercing eyes and hate-filled sneer of Vann Jeger, spirit of the Geirangerfjord, the Death of Dragons.
“You’ve been played for a fool, cat,” Vann Jeger said, sneering at Ghost. “The Merlins were the ones who sealed magic away to destroy your kind. She’s banking on your ignorance now as well, because her ‘plan’ won’t even work. She speaks of banishment as though it’s the end, but she and her pet dragons did the same to me, and here I am.” He pounded his fist against his massive chest. “I was banished by her hand for attempting to slay one of the dragon interlopers, but all she did was send me back to my vessel here. I was too weak to rise again at first, but when the magic came crashing down, I was refilled in an instant. The Leviathan will be no different.” He bared his black teeth. “She thinks she can make fools of us all!”
“I’m not trying to fool anyone!” Marci cried, stomping forward to face him as anger overwhelmed her fear. “I never said banishment was permanent. Isaidit was a solution to the Leviathan problem, because while he’s impersonating a spirit, he doesn’t actually belong here. You had a fjord to go back home to. He doesn’t. There is no Leviathan-shaped hole in the bottom of the Sea of Magic. If I banish him, all the magic he’s stolen will go back to Algonquin.Shewill rise again. He will not. Without Algonquin’s magic, he’ll have nowhere to hide, and our plane will kick him out like it should have done at the beginning.”
“A convenient technicality,” Wolf growled. “But why should we trust you?” He nodded respectfully toward Vann Jeger. “The lord of the Geirangerfjord speaks the truth. You Merlins started this mess when you stole our magic. You sent us all to sleep so you could keep our world for yourselves. Now you come with talk of unity because you need our help. Why should we believe a word you say?”
Because she wasright. Because they wereallgoing to die if they didn’t. Marci was dying to scream the truth in Wolf’s stupid dog face, but as justified as her rant would be, that sort of anger was how they’d gotten into this mess in the first place. If this was going to work, then Marci had to actually make them listen, and you didn’t get that by yelling. She was trying to figure out how shecouldget it when a black shape swooped over them.
