Noam’s eyes grew wide. “Like what?”
“Well, I came up with a cutting spell all on my own. Threads or pillars…”Or Eldred’s arms or Lysandros’s lifeline or me and my past…But Arienne wouldn’t say that aloud to Noam, even though he now looked disappointed with her sorcery. Arienne frowned and said, “You’ve probably only learned engineering at the Academy, so you don’t know any spells either.”
“True, but… I thought there would be more to a runaway sorcerer who… learned a few things from the Grim King.”
“Before I came here, I did learn a pathfinding spell. Wait…”
She had thought of something. Arienne held up an indexfinger to Noam, signaling him to wait, and left the room in her mind. She sat down on the floor, crossing her legs.
If the enchantment of Danras’s Hosts had really continued for seventy years after the annexation, there had to be someone behind it. Maybe the line of Hosts could have continued after the Empire’s coming, hidden from the eyes of the Office of Truth. Or maybe the people of Danras had continued to pray at secret altars, powering the age-old enchantment. Then there might be some trace of it left now, even one hundred years after the destruction of Mersia.
But Arienne had a feeling that it would be more than just a trace. When she had first stepped into the catacombs, she had felt a shock that had hit her heart as well as an urge to turn around and go back the way she came. That must have been the catacombs repelling Eldred’s sorcery—his “smell” permeating her mind had clashed with the enchantment from two centuries ago. The spell was still active. Someone must be guarding the city’s catacombs from the twice-dead Eldred…
On the dusty floor, she drew a map of the way she had come so far, from where she had woken up after falling into the water to the beginning of the brick wall, then the entrance of the crypts and then from there to the Empire-style doors of the Power generator chamber… As she drew each segment, she pictured it in her mind. Then she drew other paths she could’ve taken and imagined the places those paths would’ve led to. She imagined the smell of soil and each ghost of eerie blue light. In her mind, the catacombs formed.
Next, she imagined the protective enchantment over it. A Power the color of starlight that opposed the darkness of Eldred’s night. Thecatacombs in her mind filled with stars. Arienne, drawing from her absolutely real curiosity as to where this starlight was coming from, recited the pathfinding spell. She felt Power gather in her mouth.
She opened her eyes. The faint fragments of light floating in the air made a string that was just about discernible. The string stretched from the door she had come through and continued up the broken staircase. It probably went quite far up. Arienne stood.
“Fine. I can’t stay underground forever. I’ll crawl up if I have to.”
Determined, she went over to the stairs. The first intact step was too high up for her to reach, so Arienne leaped as high as she could and grabbed the end of a broken stair. Her two hands just barely held on, and she used all her might to pull herself up. Arienne saw there were several sections of the winding stairs that were missing like this, but the starlight string did not care if she could follow that path or not. If she fell, Arienne would be badly hurt, or even die.
“Of course I only know how to cut things but not how to connect them,” Arienne scoffed at herself as she looked up the crumbling staircase. But she adjusted her balance and began to climb.
Through her leaping, hanging, and crawling, Arienne thought of a character in her adventure books named Dr. Irena—an Imperial historian armed with a hook, rope, and two daggers, roaming the world in search of artifacts. In every volume of her adventures, there would be an old god or fearsome monster or secret brotherhood intent on having their revenge against the Empire, and Irena, with the help of an assortment of local men, would discover truths about ancient civilizations and thwart the rebellious plans.
But Arienne was not an Imperial historian. This was not theruins of an ancient civilization but a building of the Empire itself. The monster wandering the surface was a Power generator of said Empire. And the local man helping her was a ghost in her mind wearing an Imperial uniform.
“Is that why this is so hard?” she murmured as she leaped to the next set of stairs. As her hands grabbed the stairs, the stone under her right hand gave way, and Arienne felt her body begin to fall before her left hand tightened, just barely managing to hold on. A scream escaped her, and the scream echoed, amplifying her own fear. She reached up wildly and grabbed the first thing she touched.
Then a sensation of both fire and ice struck her right hand, then her heart. She screamed again, almost falling. Her right hand had grabbed the string.The string is imaginary,she thought.It can’t possibly support my weight.But it was, somehow, as taut and strong as any rope, visions coming through her desperate grip on it.
She saw Fractica, a silvery metal giant standing atop a hill in the night, looking down on two figures, a man and a woman, a waterfall of starlight shining down on them. Then in another flash of vision, Fractica again, this time a mountain of refuse, standing in a ruined hall of an Imperial building, shining its lanterns in her direction, the string of starlight trailing into its body.
She managed to take her hand off the string and grab on to a higher stair. The visions stopped. With both hands secure, she was able to reclaim her calm and pull herself up.
Was it Fractica that had been powering the catacomb enchantment, in the Host’s absence? Was it waiting at the end of this string? Arienne shuddered and got back up.
This was just the first of several instances in which she almostdied. It didn’t feel any better with experience. Her heart felt like it was constantly beating too fast and she was losing her breath. After what felt like an uncountable amount of time following the string, Arienne leaned against the wall and tried to rest for a moment.
A loud thud issued from above. Bits of rock rained down. Arienne quickly found something to grab hold of and looked down to see if the stairs crumbled any further. Some part of her knew she should feel afraid that the insane Power generator Fractica was roaming somewhere up there, at the end of the string. But right now, she could only feel relief that she was almost there. Arienne carefully continued up the stairs.
And suddenly, uneventfully, the stairs finally ended. Arienne followed the starlight string into another white corridor, this one also decrepit and falling apart like the one below, and came to a rusted iron door. Would it even open? Then, just as she was about to push, the whole door screeched as it fell off its hinges. Light from the outside came in.
A wide hall lay before her. There wasn’t a single gray floor tile that was intact, and one of the walls had completely collapsed, showing the street outside. A pair of falcons, symbolizing the Empire, that must have hung from the ceiling had fallen and shattered on the floor.
And there stood the Power generator Fractica, all manner of debris on its back, holding the iron door with three of its long arms, the string of starlight running directly into its torso.
21
YUMA
The oroxen had fattened, and the days were colder as winter was closing in. On a clear day and high ground, a sharp-eyed herder could make out the chimney smoke rising from faraway Danras. Now wearing thick coats, the herders crossed the yellowed steppe toward home. They all longed for their families and friends in the city. The songs they sang at night changed with the cooling weather, as they did every year.
Lysandros had finally learned how to ride a horse. He had taken off most of his scaffolding, leaving only the bare bones of the frame, and was helped onto his mount by a herder. Because his legs couldn’t command the horse, Yuma took his reins on his right. When Yuma worried aloud that he was risking serious injury, Lysandros said he had to be conspicuous as an emissary of the Empire entering a realm for the first time, that he had no choice in the matter.
“You can ride on the back of Fractica,” Yuma countered.
