23
ARIENNE
It was a stone building in the Imperial style, the one that had looked out of place among all the melted buildings of wood and leather. Likely the prefect’s seat.
Marble pillars like half-melted candles lined the hall, but more than half of them were broken and their fragments scattered over the floor. This entrance hall, where officials high and low must have busily walked, had a collapsed wall and was completely in ruins. And standing in the middle of it was a Power generator that had become a fearsome pile of detritus. Its humming was accented by a rhythmic thumping like drums.
Arienne gulped. It was the very sight she had seen when she gripped the imaginary starlight string. Fractica had indeed Powered the enchantment protecting the catacombs for nearly two hundred years, after the first death of Eldred, and even after the death of everything in Mersia.
Arienne cowered in the doorway where she still stood. Thismass of rusting iron, rotting leather, fragmented furniture, and torn fabrics looked as if it were about to whip out its many arms to her at any moment. The strand of starlight that had made its way from the catacombs to the surface was completely incongruous with the hideous monster before her.
Swallowing her fear, Arienne stood straight and shouted into the room in her mind.
“Noam!”
“What?” he called back through the half-open door.
“Is Tychon sleeping? Wake him!”
“Aren’t you… going to run?” Fear had crept into his voice.
“I can win this fight.”
Loran had felled a gigatherion the size of a castle in her battle against the Twenty-First Legion; a lump of trash animated by a single Power generator was nothing compared to that. Of course, Arienne did not have the protection of a dragon, nor a sword made from its tooth.
“But what I do have,” whispered Arienne, “is your name.Fractica.”
In one of the old sorcery traditions, it was said that to know someone’s name was to have power over them. She had never learned this sorcery, didn’t even know if it truly existed, but she knew that when making images in her mind, there was a big difference in knowing and not knowing the true shape and state of things. To her, Fractica had once been a fearsome monster and nothing more. But now she knew its name and what it had once been in Danras.
The Star of Mersia had devastated this land a hundred years ago, and Arienne had come here to seek out the truth behind thismystery. Not everything had been explained, but she had learned things from the catacombs, from Noam, and from her climb up the crumbling staircase—that whatever happened here, it involved Fractica. And at the same time, the catacombs beneath them had been protected because of this very same Power generator. The rest of the truth lay underneath all that trash, hidden in the lead sarcophagus within.
The question of how to defeat Fractica had preoccupied Arienne throughout her climb up the stairs. But this monster was not merely a thing to defeat; it was a safe of secrets to unlock. What those secrets would be was still unknown, but her mission remained—she needed to uncover them.
Tychon woke, and his babbling made something snap within her. A hot wave spread outward from the center of her body. There was a movement near her left foot at the edge of her vision. Arienne didn’t even look at it as she sliced off the tentacle.
“You won’t get me like that twice,” she said, confidence in her grin.
She leaped behind a pillar that was still upright. The hall was big, but Fractica was so large it kept bumping into the other numerous pillars on its way to Arienne. Despite her hopes that its rusted legs would snap as it tripped over the melted stone, Fractica’s awkward advance continued.
Another tentacle stretched toward her pillar. Arienne attempted to jump behind a fallen statue and fell, tripped by some debris, but not before slicing off the arm that was reaching for her as well, backing away from the flailing tentacle as it slowly gave up. Her eyes kept darting around the hall.
The administrative buildings of the Empire were supported byoverlapping arches that were said to withstand a thousand years of time. Many of the pillars, merely decorative, did not even touch the ceiling.
Those pillars were the linchpin of her strategy.
“Watch, Noam, what a true sorcerer is!”
Fractica was not quick on its feet, but its every step rang cacophonously through the hall.
Arienne tried to imagine a house caving in. She had encountered Lysandros for the first time at a derelict inn, below Finvera Pass. Using a spell Eldred taught her, Arienne had brought down the house on Lysandros.
But this building had no crossbeams, no load-bearing pillars. Arienne simply did not have the knowledge to topple proper Imperial architecture.
Instead, she drew one of the pillars in her mind and imagined it breaking like the rotten crossbeams of that inn. She repeated the scene several times in her head, and Tychon’s babbling turned to cries. The sudden increase in the flow of Power pushed immense pressure into her every capillary, her every nerve. Thousands of steel pins needled her heart, and something warm trickled from her nose.
Sensing a change in the air, Fractica became frantic.
“There’s only one chance,” Arienne half murmured, half moaned, and stepped forth from behind the fallen statue. “Halt, Fractica!”
