Emory hugged her arms to ward against the cold and the unsettling feeling of being watched. “You keep talking about this debt I owe you,” she said, “but what about yours?”
Mine?came his baffled reply.
“All those Tidecallers you sacrificed.”
The ones whose blood had been spilled to seal the doors between worlds—Sidraeus’s own creations, whom the gods had viewed as such a threat to their godhood, they’d been ready to burn down their realms and rebuild them from scratch just to ensure such a power never saw the light of day.
“Saving my life doesn’t make up for what you did to them.”
Emory regretted saying anything at all as the swirling shadows around Sidraeus thickened dangerously, those fathomless eyes of his sucking her in like black holes.
I’ve already told you their sacrifice was inevitable, he said, low and threatening.And this isn’t about them. This is about what you can do for me.
“What exactly do you have in mind?” she asked, if only to defuse the tension, indulge him for a second.
The shadows seemed to retract a bit.I would have asked that you bring a body into the sleeping realm so that I might possess it as I did Keiran,Sidraeus said.But I suspect you’re too far from the door to reach me in time.
“Is there no other way to reunite you with your true form? Without Atheia being brought back first, I mean.” Or her friends having to die.
If there was, do you really think I’d still be wasting away here?
“The people in this world believe there are ancient instruments able to summon their gods,” Emory pushed, watching for his reaction. “A lyre that might bring back the Celestials and earn their favor. A pan flute that could do the same for the Soulless One. They call it the syrinx.”
Ghostly voices rose in an incoherent cacophony, as if summoned by the name. Emory had the distinct impression they were trying to tell her something, but her focus remained on Sidraeus—and the cold fury that emanated from him as shadows thickened around his form.
The syrinx,he repeated,is said to be lost.
He didn’t deny the potential it had to summon him, and Emory latched onto this wild hope dawning inside her. “What if I find it? If I bring you back with it and—”
No. If you find that cursed instrument, you must destroy it.
There was something hiding beneath the strain of his voice that she hadn’t expected. Fear, she thought. From the ruler of nightmares himself.
“Why?” she asked.
Because if it were to fall in Clover’s hands, he would use it to bind me to his will, rendering me powerless. But break the syrinx, and I will help you defeat him once I regain my true form.
Emory shook her head. “It’ll be too late by then.”
His voice lashed out in exasperated anger.Your friends will die, Tidecaller. The sooner you accept that you cannot save them, the better.
“I can’t do that.”
Then you condemn us both to die too.
He spoke it as incontestable fact, but Emory knew it to be a lie. The fear in his voice at her mention of the syrinx, the ghosts’ agitated whispers in the dark—they were proof of this instrument’s power, of what she now knew with utter certainty she must do with it.
“No one has to die if I find the syrinx,” she told Sidraeus. “Not to break it, but to use it as you say Clover would.”
To bind Sidraeus to her own will.
As the weight of her words settled between them, Emory willed her subconscious to wake, leaving the dream and him behind before the angry, swirling shadows that lashed out of him could reach her.
4BAZ
ONE SECOND, BAZ WAS INthe god’s workshop, and the next, he was once again standing on the windswept cove of Dovermere, half-hidden behind a rocky outcrop as he watched himself emerge from the sea.
It was the oddest thing in the world to see himself not as a reflection in a mirror or a face in someone’s memories, but therealhim as he had been the night he and Kai appeared in the past. Glasses askew, drenched and shivering from the cold, so pale as he fought for breath.
