“I don’t trust him, either.” Neri’s voice was very small. “I feel so stupid.”
“You’re not stupid,” said Ysira. He waseleven.She clenched her fists, nails biting into her palms, glaring into the fire until it dried out her eyes. If she ever saw Ged again, she swore to herself she would kill him.
Then Neri blurted, “Is Uncle Seth my real father?”
Ysira looked up at him. He pressed, “Is that why he sent you? Because he—because he’s the one who actually—” He couldn’t finish. It made Ysira’s heart clench.
She shook her head several times. “No.” She finally said it: “I’m so sorry.”
The tears fell. Neri wiped them away, ashamed, but a sob escaped him, and he gave up. He hugged his shoulders, eyes squeezed shut as his body quaked and his breath came in gasps and wheezes. Ysira sat frozen, telling herself she was giving him space. She’d known what to do when the Osuun attacked and even when his heart stopped. But not now. Not for this.
For the briefest of moments, she considered telling him the truth of her identity. But she would not impose that on him, not now and maybe not ever.
Did she make this choice for his benefit or her own? Did he deserve to know? Or was he still, after all these years, better off without her?
Ysira let Neri cry himself to sleep, then took off her outer robe and folded it into a pillow. She lifted his head to slip it underneath, careful not to wake him.
As the fire burned down to embers, Ysira sat in near-total darkness, unable to sleep. Beyond the drip of water in the cave, delicate as the patter of strange footsteps, a new sound echoed from the depths.
No, not quite a sound. And maybe it had been there all along, but she had finally been still long enough to hear it. It wasn’t the red thing—probablynot. She assumed that had gone silent after it crawled inside Neri. But it tugged at the periphery of her senses in a similar way, as compelling as gravity.
Her passenger writhed around her brainstem, agitated. It grew to a point where she couldn’t stand it. She jolted to her feet, pulse pounding, hand clamped around the base of her skull.
“We’ll go look,” she muttered. “If only to shut you up.”
She pulled a skein of tough cactus-fiber thread from her belt and anchored it around a boulder on the riverbank. She readied a new torch but hesitated over Neri’s sleeping form. The creatures of the canyon avoided him. He should be safe there. Besides, she needed to ensure whatever she sensed did not pose them a greater danger.
Ysira’s passenger guided her along the river, like an insistent kirikil yanking at the reins. She unspooled her skein as she went, marking rocks when she ran out.
It did not often occur to her to be claustrophobic, but she’d also rarely ventured so deep. How many tons of rock lay overhead, held up by—what, even? She didn’t trust it. Where the way grew narrow, the cave seemed to taunt her, molding itself just large enough for her to pass. The inky blackness pressed up against every nook and curve of her, a hungry thing threatening to dissolve and digest.
Ysira reached a series of switchbacks, only to realize they were stairs—unthinkably ancient, hewn out of the rock, leading down to a looming triangular door. She could not read the jedaat glyphs on its façade. So deep under Zal Fel, though, this could only be the holiest of temples, which must exist in total darkness.
Light glimmered beyond the door.
She snuffed out her torch. The very fact that she’d brought it so near there bordered on sacrilege. Andthislight—even to Ysira, who cared little for tradition—this was obscenity. The closer she moved, the brighter it grew, throwing the red stone walls into garish relief.
She was so fixated on it, she forgot to watch her step. She stumbled over a cable.
Acable? Ysira squinted down at the thick coil of unfamiliar material. It reminded her of the mechanisms supporting the dock elevators in Zivora. Slow and cautious, she palmed a knife and pressed forward.
She came upon a vast circular space illuminated by cylindrical apparatuses arrayed between titanic columns. Those cables were threaded throughout it all, connected to larger, stranger pieces of machinery that she could not begin to identify.
In the center of the space was a hole in reality.
Trying to focus on it made Ysira’s head hurt. A space where the air became liquid, colors blurring together and shimmering like oil. Rawenergy—there was no other way to describe it—pulsed off it in waves. Her skin prickled, electrified, and her bones vibrated.
This was the sound she had heard—or, rather, that her passenger had heard. Almost without realizing it, she’d wandered very close. The demon squirmed, bizarrely, as though satisfied.
She’d heard tell of such things but never imagined she would see one for herself: a Gate.
On instinct, she reached out a hand to the beckoning void. She had the sense of leaning over a precipice into a liquid darkness, into a dimension where thought and physical form were one and the same.The Source.This far realm of stardust and shadows, where demons dwelled. Some slumbered, some sang, others hungrily beckoned. Time ceased to exist. All of creation lay at her fingertips and she could reach out, touch it,becomeit?—
Her passenger seemed to grow much larger. As her constituent parts began to drift, her essence unraveling, her demon’s form changed and spread. It flowed through the spacebetween her flesh, blood, and bones. It was as if she inhabiteditand not the other way around. In the Source, it was home. There, it would protect her and keep her whole.
Ysira stepped back, heart pounding. Reality slipped sluggishly back into focus.
“Stop right there!”
