Chapter 602: Vision

The old mage looked at the king’s face, then at the guards who had already moved into the spaces between the pillars. He understood. He understood before the first sword was out of its sheath, but his hands were too heavy from the working to lift them for a shield.

"Too late," he whispered.

Aureth raised one finger.

The guards moved fast. They didn’t use magic; they used short, heavy iron blades that went through the wool robes of the exhausted mages like butter.

The room turned into a screaming tangle of fire and iron, men falling over their own knees as they tried to remember the words for protection after spending their souls on a god.

The king didn’t watch the slaughter. He reached down, unhooked the small iron chains from the slab, and lifted Eris against his chest.

Her skin was still hot enough to scorch his silk robes, the narrow white cracks in her arms bleeding a thin, yellow light against his arm.

She didn’t move. She didn’t cry. She was staring at the ceiling, her mind drowning in a well that had no bottom.

Aureth walked out through the broken door, his red sleeves dragging through the grease on the floor, the sound of men dying loud behind him. He never looked back.

In the corner of the room, one last mage was sitting against the wall. He had a deep gash across his throat, his grey beard soaked in dark red, but he wasn’t looking at the guards.

He had both hands clamped around the small metal pendant at his neck, his lips moving over a short, desperate sequence of words that had no power to stop a blade or put out a fire.

It was a record. A witness. A dying man throwing a stone into the future.

"Someone will find this," he whispered into the metal, his teeth red with his own blood. "Someone will know."

The light went out of his eyes, and the room vanished.

The dark pit was around Soren again.

He was on his knee in the dust, his hand still closed tight around the tarnished chain, the bone of the mage’s fingers crushed into white powder beneath his boot.

His own ice magic was humming in his ears, a wild, jagged cold that had risen up to defend his heart against the memory of the fire.

He stayed there for a long time, his breathing rough in the silence.

The image of her on the stone wouldn’t leave him. Father, please. I’m scared. It stayed behind his eyes, turning the steady, controlled anger he had carried down the stairs into something different... something grey and permanent and cold as an iron bar.

She had been carrying that monster since she was a little child. She had been burning from the inside since before she even knew what the word meant, her father’s smile the last thing she saw before the dark took her.

Soren stood up, his joints popping in the dark. He tucked the small pendant into his belt.

He understood the seal now. It hadn’t been designed to be undone. The mages who had built the chains below had meant for them to stay shut until the stone turned back to dust, and the men who had put the god inside Eris had been killed before they could write down the way out.

They had been given a choice between the axe and the ritual, and they had chosen the ritual.

The vision hadn’t given him an answer. It had given him the shape of the knife that was killing his wife.

But there was one thing more. At the very edge of the vision, before the mage’s eyes went dark, Soren had seen a shape encoded into the final words of the spell... a narrow, three-pointed mark scratched into the binding script on the main chain link.

It wasn’t an ice symbol from Nevareth, and it wasn’t a fire rune from Solmire. He had seen it once before, on an old fragment of stone from the deep wastes beyond the western wall.

The answer isn’t here, he thought, his teeth clicking together in the cold of his own making. Whatever that mark is, it’s further west.

He turned his back on the thirty skeletons and walked out through the small iron door, his boots heavy on the stone as he began the long climb back to the surface.

Eris stood outside the council chamber in the winter palace of Nevareth, her fingers tracing the smooth grey stone of the wall as she listened to the old palace steward talk about the tallow shipments from the southern valleys. It was an ordinary morning, the light through the high windows thick with the grey fog of the northern hills.

She opened her mouth to answer him, to tell him to check the stores in the lower cellar, but the words didn’t come out.

The pain didn’t start in her stomach or her head. It arrived right in the center of her chest, a sudden, jagged break that felt like a dry log splitting under an wedge.

It ran outward through her arms and down into her thighs in less than a heartbeat, a cold, oily heat that made her teeth click together.

Her hand slapped against the stone wall, her fingernails scraping the frost.

"My Lady?" the steward asked, his ledger dropping an inch. "My Lady, are you—"

"I am fine," she said. Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, someone standing twenty feet down the hall.

Her legs didn’t agree with her. The knees went soft first, her skirts bunching around her ankles as the stone floor came up to meet her.

She didn’t feel the impact; she only felt the sudden, heavy weight of her own skin, as if her clothes had been soaked in lead.

A pair of hands caught her by the armpits before she hit the flagstones.

Mira had come from the shadow of the gallery, her face white and sharp as she dragged Eris back against her knee. "Get Master Aldwin," Mira shouted at the steward, her voice dropping the formal cadence she used for the court. "Get him now! Don’t look at me, run!"