“Look,” Vera said at her side, pointing to something on the wall.
Carved in the rock was a faded depiction of a faceless god, both hands closed around a bolt of lightning. Emory ran her hand along the carving and felt grooves around it. On instinct she pushed on it—and the gap in the floor groaned open to reveal crudely carved steps that led into a dark chamber.
Emory and Vera stared at each other. Behind them, Virgil muttered, “Yeah, I’m not going into that death trap.”
“Scared?” Vera shot back at him teasingly.
“Of the creepy secret chamber in the creepy caves hidden in the creepy mountains? Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Inga did tell us to be careful in the ruins,” Nisha said cautiously.
“Vera and I will go check it out,” Emory said, “and the rest of you can stay here.”
Ivayne huffed, grabbing her sword. “As if I’m letting you go down there alone.”
They descended the steps into the freezing cold of the hidden chamber, Emory holding up a ball of light to guide them through the dark.
“I think we’ve found the Soulless One’s temple,” Vera said with quiet awe.
Carved pillars of obsidian stone rose all around them. Theceiling was domed and depicted forks of silvery-blue lightning that shone in the light. In the middle of the space was an altar. And sitting atop it, covered in dust, was a glass pan flute made up of five pipes of different lengths.
The syrinx.
It looked heavy, the thick glass tubes bound by ornate silver and obsidian fixings. Emory couldfeelits power. It felt like Sidraeus, like the crowned umbra that ruled the sleepscape.
The layer of dust on it was disturbed by five fingerprints, as if someone had recently played it. And yet it was still here, pulsing with power that seemed to call to Emory, begging for her to pick it up from its altar.
An inkling crawled along Emory’s skin. “Go back up,” she said to the others. “Get everyone and leave.”
Vera frowned at her. “What—why?”
Whatever he has planned involves you,Romie had said of Clover.
Clover, who Sidraeus said wanted the syrinx for himself. Whose hand was burned, perhaps, after he tried to take it, and whose creatures had since been pushing Emory and her friends off the path, herding them to this very place. For someone to take the syrinx for him.
“Because this is a trap,” Emory said, “and we need to run like hell.”
The walls around them shook. In the cave above, someone screamed. Emory heard the crashing sound of thunder, the clang of steel against steel—or perhaps steel against lightning.
Clover’s creatures were already here.
Ivayne didn’t wait to bound up the steps, sword at the ready. Vera followed, but Emory had to get the syrinx first. It didn’t matter if that was exactly what Clover wanted her to do, didn’t matter if the instrument might burn her the way it did him. She needed it—would stop at nothing now to get it.
Certainty danced at her fingertips as her hand closed around it. There was no burning, no pain. An imaginary breeze whirled around her, everything in her going still with calm.
Break the syrinx,Sidraeus had asked her to do. It would be so easy a thing to drop it and see the glass flute shatter at her feet. But there was a more powerful voice inside her telling her not to do it, that there was another way, abetterway…
“Emory, let’s go!”
Emory clutched the syrinx to her chest, feeling like she’d been pulled out of a trance by Vera’s voice. Vera hadn’t left. She stood at the base of the steps, gesturing at Emory to hurry as shadows filled the temple.
For a moment, Emory dared to hope she’d done something right—that just by picking the flute up, it had called Sidraeus here; that it had broken him out of his sleepscape prison, and now he would be bound to her will, and they could face Clover together.
But the shadows that engulfed her were not Sidraeus’s. They felt like rotten death, and Emory knew they belonged to the ash-umbrae before they materialized around her.
Emory drew on her magic to erect a ward around her, around Vera, making it so that nothing could harm them. “Go!” she yelled at her cousin. As Vera disappeared up the stairs, Emory directed her magic to the ash-umbrae, willing them to unmake. But she stopped short as a face appeared out of their midst.
Clover.
