Citadel of the Sky (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 1) (14 page)

“
S
ky fiends are
the rare ones? Twist didn’t say ‘sky fiend.’” Tiana asked Kiar, after everybody had made themselves comfortable in Kiar’s parlor. The sword was left to float near the door. Kiar catalogued Tiana’s too-bright eyes, the scratch on her face, the bandages on Cathay’s hands. She hadn’t had nearly enough sleep, but this was a better distraction than sleep.

“That’s what it is,” she told Tiana. “I banished one yesterday. They aren’t formed from the Logos. It’s easy to see, if you can see the Logos at all. I’m amazed Twist didn’t notice.”

“Ooh, banishment, that’s exciting,” Tiana said. “I want to hear all about it. Could you banish
this
sky fiend, too?” She turned to give the sword a particularly annoyed look.

“Is the sword what happened to you and Cathay?”

“Yes,” said Tiana, and she did not elaborate, even when Kiar waited expectantly.

Kiar covered a yawn. She’d made sure to return late last night, after the reception. There hadn’t been any more sky fiends to deal with, but she’d ridden around all of Rushing Fork, searching vainly for answers. And then she’d returned to report to Jerya, and Twist had been with the princess, apparently idly discussing the weather.

She’d tried to make the situation clear to Jerya even though he was there, distracting her. She described the mystery of the link between the family magic and the sky fiend and the illness, the way even her magic caused reactions. The way an eidolon had climbed
through
the sky fiend, into the world. But Jerya had wanted answers, or at least theories, and Kiar didn’t have anything she was ready to share.

And then Twist, displeased, had insisted on a lesson. Jerya had been no help.
“It seems I must share you,”
he’d said, and,
“Missed lessons must be made up.”

She didn’t want to think about Twist. She turned up the Logos-vision and examined the sword instead. That it was a sky fiend, she had no doubt. But it was different from the one she’d seen the day before. This one didn’t have an eidolon growing out of it, true, but it also puckered the Logos around it. There was something….

“I don’t know if this is normal,” she said dubiously. “It’s very… dense, and there are lines…. It’s
connected
, somehow. To the world. And to you, Tiana.” She muttered a shaping of the Logos under her breath and smoothed out one of the lines. The Logos itself resisted at first, then once she’d convinced it to comply, the sky fiend did something to reestablish the line. She de-anchored another line, and the same thing happened.

“Very odd,” she said, at last. “No, I can’t banish it. I think it would take a number of initiates working together to banish it. And even then, it could be… unpredictable. But I don’t know very much, after all. Um, Tiana, can you put it on the ground? I discovered something yesterday that makes me think we should be careful using our magic for a while.”

Tiana stared at her like she’d grown another head. “I’m not carrying that thing in my hand,” she said flatly. “It’s clingy and it bites.”

Kiar tried to sound like a Regent. “Fine, fine. But just put it on the rug for now?”

“Fine,” Tiana snapped, and the emanation holding the sword aloft vanished. It thudded to the rug.

Kiar resisted rolling her eyes. Tiana was still such a child sometimes. She supposed it was the result of having an older sister.

Tiana snapped, “I am not a child!” Kiar jumped and stared at her.

Lisette coughed delicately and said, “The sword has been talking to Tiana.”

It was Tiana’s turn to stare at Lisette. “How did you know?”

Lisette gave a little smile. “I’m a Regent.”

“What has it been saying?” asked Kiar. She reassessed the shape on her carpet. It had sounded like a sword when it fell, but there it was, distinctly something other than Logos.

Tiana blushed. “Nothing. Other than the obvious. Criticizing my age, mocking me.”

Kiar turned pink herself.

Cathay cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. “It talked to me as well. It’s nasty. Vicious. Cruel.” He winced and shook his head.

Tiana said, “Don’t talk to him! Are you still talking to him? Stop it! Kiar, what should I do with it? If it requires lots of wizards, maybe I should send it to the Citadel?”

Cathay’s breath hissed through his teeth. “Unless you take it there yourself, that won’t work.”

Tiana shrieked and stomped her foot, which Kiar thought was rather extreme. The sword must have said something as well. Carefully, she asked, “What does it want? Most fiends are in a more monstrous form.”

Tiana hesitated. “Death. Shut up! Vengeance. It wants me to take it and go kill things.”

Kiar said, “You seem to be resisting it so far. It hasn’t hurt you yet?” She studied those lines connecting the blade to Tiana again.

“Well—no. Not—that was you? You stupid piece of scrap. I had a headache yesterday, but that’s gone now.”

Lisette had her hands to her mouth, and Kiar realized she was hiding a smile. If Lisette wasn’t worried, that made Kiar feel better about what she was going to say next. “The Blood is supposed to protect Ceria from fiends, so I think you’re the best qualified to take care of it. Protect the world from it. At least for now?”

Tiana said, “Don’t say that! You don’t want me to use the emanations! How am I better qualified than anybody else?”

“The connection lines… and it hasn’t hurt you. You said so yourself!” The Logos shivered, seemingly in response to her words, and she fervently hoped she was right.

Tiana nudged the sword with her slippered toe and then yanked her foot back as if burned. The shivering of the Logos became more pronounced, an almost audible buzz. Kiar felt as sleepy as she had late last night. But she wasn’t thinking about Twist. Was she?

She suddenly remembered the lesson, rather than the teacher.
How can we teach the Logos to recognize the signature eidolons of your family?
And
How might the Logos speak back to an initiate?
They’d constructed more protections for the Regents.

“An attack!” Everyone stared at her. “One of the unfamiliar eidolons—an attack! Somebody!” She shook her head, her drowsiness gone, and ran out of the room, following the tremors in the Logos.

She ran down the hall, past closed suite doors, and around the corner, her feet thudding against the carpet. Cathay, far more athletic, caught up with her and jogged easily beside her, one of his eidolons beside him. “Where?”

The Logos was rippling so much she was astonished that it wasn’t making everybody dizzy. Where was Twist? Then Yevonne ran straight into her as they both tried to round the same corner in opposite directions. Beyond, there were shouts and animal growls. Cathay barely paused before speeding past, but Kiar caught the younger girl in her arms. “Is it you? Are those your guards?”

Yevonne’s face was hard and determined, but as Tiana and Lisette tumbled into Kiar’s back, she blinked and stopped struggling. “Y-yes. I was in the garderobe. I ran. My guards….” She looked over her shoulder.

Kiar peeked around the corner in time to see Cathay wading into a tangle of eidolons and two wounded guards. A single shape detached itself from the swarm and lunged down the hall, towards them. Kiar scooped Yevonne up and whirled out of the way. The eidolon, squat and the color of glass, bounded around the corner, into Tiana’s outstretched hand. The princess’s expression was savage as she slashed at the creature with fingernails like knives.

Kiar backed up, letting Yevonne out of her arms. She watched intently as the Logos quavered around each of the four enemy eidolons, breathing out as two of the three fighting Cathay and the guards dissolved. A voice breathed in her ear, “I’m pleased to see it worked.”

She jerked and then ducked her head. “Twist!” she said, but she didn’t look at him. Intently, she continued watching the trembling. Tiana’s victim popped like a soap bubble, and she saw the ripples of the final eidolon fade away, until only the shadows of Tiana’s emanation and the friendly eidolons marred the Logos.

Only then did Kiar look over her shoulder at Twist, who was lounging against the wall, studying her instead of the scene of the attack. “I was out of the Palace,” he said. “Looking at some of these plague victims. Good thing you were here! Though, I’d like to change places tomorrow.”

She tried not to feel too relieved that his anger had passed as he went on. “I can see the Logos monitoring plan will need some adjustments if it’s to work when no wizards are around to get the message. Busy, busy.” He raised an eyebrow at her, right before something tore a wound in the universe.

A perplexed expression, unusual on Twist, found its way onto his face. “Wha—”

The Logos screamed. The world wept as something terrible and enormous clawed a hole in it. It couldn’t be real; only in nightmares did the world bleed words through Kiar’s mouth.

She blindly tried to staunch the wound, tried to listen to the blood, but the words were the buzzing, meaningless syllables of books in dreams. They left the taste of ash and tears on her tongue. Then she could try no more, because the phantasmagory reared up and wrapped her in a demanding, stifling embrace.

She stumbled, pushing away spider webs. There were always spider webs in her phantasmagory: webs, and the walls. The webs were in her hair and her mouth, in between her fingers. Sticky things, dusty, and woven whenever you weren’t looking. You could kill the spiders but there would always be new webs.

They crowded around her, tangling up her arms and her feet and she fell. A long-haired woman she didn’t know watched her and then turned away. She saw a dazzling sunfish writhing frantically, caught by the webs, panicking.
Shanasee.
A hawk screamed, and a cat tore violently at the webs, and a wind like knives with blades of fire blew through the night, and the yellow eyes of her father surrounded her and the mirrors of the King, the white horse, the red stag, the fox, the swan, the snake, the—

They were all in the phantasmagory, all at once, all the Blood, every last one of her family. The undertow threw them into each other, scraped them against the bloody coral of each others’ egos. She couldn’t help it; the walls shimmered into existence around her. She could still feel them fighting, tangling into each other in an uncontrolled frenzy of hallucination and power, but they were outside, against the walls.

Inside, it was her, just her, nothing but herself and the pearlescent grey shimmer of the walls. There wasn’t even her. All that she was, was walls.
Nothing there!
There was nothing inside the walls and only chaos outside. Despair swept over her as she searched frantically for something, anything within the walls. And then she lost herself in all that there was to find: the walls contained her scream.

She felt hands holding her shoulders. But who would look for her? She’d been afraid of all the eyes and wished herself out of existence. There was only an empty shell. What was there to want inside a shell? They wanted her to be them, but she couldn’t, she wasn’t, she disappointed. They turned away. She was not enough to fill the spaces inside her, but the red powder didn’t fill her either. It showed her that she didn’t exist.

No.
He whispered to her. She was nine years old, trapped and screaming inside what she’d conjured, and no one could reach her but him. He’d come to her, out of darkness and terror, out of desperation and growing madness, and he’d held her, wrapped warmth around her.

He was touching her, and she felt it through the thickest walls of the phantasmagory. She opened her eyes. With some surprise, she remembered color. Blue. The walls of the world still clung to its foundations. He hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t slept. She could smell sweat.

She worked a jaw clenched with suppressed screams, tasted blood. Twist’s hands were on her shoulders, his fingers brushing the bare skin of her collarbone, his head close to hers. His eyes were dark and hollow, but she tore herself away from him, stumbling backwards.

“Everybody….” she murmured, and felt her lip, swollen and bleeding, where she’d bitten it. Tiana and Lisette were nowhere to be seen, Yevonne had fled, and Cathay had flung his sword down the hall and was walking in a small circle. One of the guards had died, eidolon-torn. She tried to recall if he’d died from the enemy eidolons. She hoped so.

“Tiana ran off. Lisette went with her. Yevonne went to Gisen when she understood what happened.” Twist stepped back, brushing lint from his coat. “Are you free of it?”

Kiar shook her head to clear it. “Cobwebs. I hate them. Yes, free enough. What happened to the Logos? Was it backlash from the working?” Recklessly, she opened her vision again. But the Logos was placid, as if it really had been a dream.

Twist shook his head. “No. That was to backlash as an earthquake is to a house fire. And now it’s smooth again.” He put his hands in his pockets. “And it touched the phantasmagory. Double-sighted Kiar. Did you see the connection?”

Kiar looked away. “No.” She tried to determine if she could have caused it, as a bridge from the phantasmagory to the Logos. The cobwebs threatened to return.

He sighed and when he spoke again, last night’s winter had returned to his voice. “Spend today as you need to, but come see me before nightfall. I’ve mapped the local plague outbreaks, and tomorrow you can ride that path and see what there is to see.” And then he was gone.

Kiar stared at the place he’d been and wondered why his coldness made her sensitive, instead of numb. Then she turned away. There were messes to clean up.

T
iana hated
that she had to waste another day recovering from something unfair and ridiculous. Great-Uncle Jant, phantasmagory expert and eldest of the family, said that he’d never experienced something like the day before. No one knew what to make of it, but he was going to find out.

Meanwhile, Tiana dreaded returning to the theater. No matter what reassuring notes and gifts they sent, she didn’t think anybody would perform their best on a stage she was directing now. Would all her hard work keeping everything under control be ruined in less than a week? It couldn’t be true. She had to find some way to fix it.

**Mummers? You want to direct mummers? When you could be directing armies? Well, you will never see more obedient mummers than with me in your hand.**

But first, she had to get rid of the sword.

The sword was in her hand, wrapped tightly in a blanket, as she walked through Palace halls. She’d sent Lisette to Jerya’s court today, with her regrets. They were going to watch for clues explaining what had happened the day before, anything that could help them understand the Logos shuddering and the phantasmagory’s spasm.

She
was going to deal with the sword. She had a plan. It wasn’t a clever plan, but she’d come up with it herself. It would work until Antecession, when the Magister of the Citadel of the Sky visited.

It couldn’t hear her, she’d found, if she kept her thoughts deep inside, as if she was looking for the phantasmagory. But it wasn’t a natural skill, to surf the edge of secrets that way.

“Yes,” she said aloud. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Dominate actors. That’s even better than killing people. That’ll solve my problems admirably. You stupid piece of metal.” She pushed open the door to the catacombs.

**You’re lying to me. What are we doing?**
She felt a spike of headache and resisted dropping the blade right there. It would be found too quickly if she did that.
**Found? Foolish little child. Are you really going to hide me away like the prize in some scavenger hunt?**

“Well, yes,” Tiana said. “Except without the scavenger hunt part. I said I didn’t want a sword. Especially a fiendish, talking sword. I suppose you can’t help being murderous, but I don’t need you for that. Unfortunately. Still, we’ve got to do something with you.”

**How very distressing.**
It didn’t sound the least bit distressed. It sounded amused.
**I am certain that my keepers intended for us to work in partnership. It’s much more satisfying than the other option. Are you sure you won’t reconsider?**

Tiana said, “Pfah.” But her pace slowed as she walked familiar paths. “You said you wanted vengeance.”

**Yes,**
the sword practically purred.

Tiana compressed her lips. “On me? On my family?”

**On that which destroyed my master, my maker. I had thought you to be the method of my vengeance, but your magic is very strange….**
The headache spiked again, fingers of pain that crawled up her skull.

Tiana pulled the curtain of the phantasmagory up, and said, her voice flat, “Stop it, or I will go beyond your reach again.”

**I must know.**
The pain became sharper, and she could feel it dancing among her memories, slicing pathways to forgotten things like a scalpel. She dropped the sword and pulled the phantasmagory over her mind, slipping away from the questing tendrils.

Yesterday, tangled in the phantasmagory, Jinriki the Darkener had not been able to find her. When Lisette had finally coaxed her back to reality, the voice of the sword had been unmodulated thunder in her head. There’d been nothing of her left, it had claimed, just the mark it was bound to, buried in her senseless flesh.

Once again, there was escape from the whispers of Jinriki the Darkener, and escape, too, from the pain of its searching for answers. Instead, there was the woman, the ghost with the long hair. She touched her lips, her heart, her brow, and her mouth curved in a mysterious smile. Her eyes were no longer empty. Then she spread both her hands and faded away.

Tiana drifted in silence for a time. The phantasmagory had been a nightmare the day before, but today it was serene and unoccupied. Yesterday, it had been impossible to resist being yanked in, but today she could hardly maintain herself in it. She itched with curiosity about the sword’s reaction to her psychic departure. As soon as she thought it, the itch became literal, little monsters crawling over her.

She concentrated, bringing herself into a stronger alignment with the phantasmagory. If she really focused, she could see the impressions of where the ghost with the long hair had drifted. Tiana still couldn’t tell if she was part of the phantasmagory or something else; only the Blood created ripples in the space. But sometimes the Blood left behind impressions so strong they took on a life of their own: memories and dreams permanently engraved.

Her great-uncle Jant had dedicated his life to studying the contents of the phantasmagory. She’d have to ask him about the woman sometime. Later. After she’d dealt with the sword.

No, she wasn’t going to think about the sword, wasn’t going to give into the crawling curiosity. She followed the impressions of the ghost instead. They were so hard to see that if the phantasmagory had been roiled by even one other of her family, she was sure they’d be imperceptible. Only now, in this quiet, could she do this.

Down she went, through layers of the phantasmagory. It was like before, like after Tomas’s funeral: she was descending through history. Its strata passed her by, each one made of layered memories and dreams. Sometimes they could merge into something new and cohesive, something almost alive. Maybe that’s what the ghost was?

Her feet touched something hard and unyielding. Bedrock. There was no more down to drift through. Barely had she realized that when a fragment of somebody else’s memory swept over her.

A young man she didn’t know worked at a workbench beside a small forge and anvil. Her point of view was strange, as if she was crouched on the workbench beyond his tools. She could best see his hands and what he held. It was the Royal Pendant.

Somebody nearby said, “Will it hold? The first one cracked.”

“I think so,” said the young man absently. “I didn’t really understand what I was doing, the first time.” He turned the pendant over in his hands, smoothing the opal with his fingers. An eidolon shadow fell across the workbench, as iridescent as the stone.

“It will hold long enough,” said a third voice, old and grim. “If we are careful, it may hold forever.”

The crafter sighed and set the pendant down. “The hard part will be getting a chance to use it. We have to beat him back first.”

Somebody said, “We’ll have a chance, at least. You’ve given us what we need.”

The crafter looked at the speaker, his eyes dark and troubled. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” His hand came down on Tiana, closing around her as he said, “She wants this, to play with. I’m going to give it to her.”

Muffled, far away, the old man’s voice said, “That’s fine. Cracked, it’s useless.”

Then the memory became only iridescent darkness. Tiana waited hopefully for another story, looking for new ripples to follow. But all she could see were the curiosity monsters, swarming around her. She wondered what Jinriki was doing. She wondered if he was angry. Had he turned on her? Had he sprouted spikes in a futile attempt to bite her? Was he ranting at her? Not knowing was impossible to bear.

She gave up and fled back to her body, straightening from where she’d slumped against a wall. The sharp headache was gone and the sword was just a wrinkle under the blanket wrapper. She waited for a moment, then nudged it with her toe.

**I am paying attention, foolish child.**

Tiana said, “Oh. Well, I’ll leave again, if I have to. I can protect myself, you know.” She picked up the bundle again.

Sounding bored, the sword said,
**Not enough. In any case, I am certain now that you’ve never had contact with any of the Firstborn.**

Tiana was startled. “Well, no. No one has, for hundreds of years. Not for real. They left this kingdom to us, you know,” she added, proudly. “To our family, after Shin Savanyel came. He was a great hero.” She pointed the bundle at a mural she was passing. “There’s him and his son Kir, defeating Balath the Arch-Inscriptor. One of many enemies he defeated.”

**Heroic for a human, I’m sure. But of the Firstborn, my master was the greatest.**

Tiana bit her lip, thinking about the Citadel of the Sky on top of the mountain Sel Sevanth. It was sacred to Niyhan and the source of the powder that enabled Logos-working and Logos inscriptions. Its priests were her primary source of religious education, but it was a token sort of education, mostly concerned with holy days the Blood were required to participate in. The Magister of the Citadel visited annually for the three weeks it took to celebrate Antecession and the triple holiday.

But it was basic theology that Niyhan was foremost among the Firstborn. He was also the patron of civilization and the search for knowledge. Swords were not something associated with him. Perhaps the sword meant Rann, who was much more warlike.

**Secondborn to my lord Innis, both of them. I do not know what happened to him, only that he died in a moment, without warning. I too would have been destroyed or taken by the wild madness that swept through all his children when he died. But his mortal servants, who were my caretakers, dedicated themselves to preserving me. They bound me to stillness and silence with promises of vengeance later, when the world was stronger.**

There was no Innis in any story Tiana knew. She said, “This must have been very long ago. At least, I’ve never heard of him.”

**A century or ten thousand years, it does not matter. Everything changed when he died.**

“Oh.” Tiana shook herself out of listening and drifted down the catacombs hall, choosing her path almost at random. It was tempting to take the sword back to where she’d found the amulet, but that place made her uneasy. So instead, one of her play spots as a child would suffice. But as she walked, the story the sword had hinted at called her back again. “How could a Firstborn die? I’ve read stories of Secondborn pining away for love….”

**He was murdered, of course. Foolish child. Do you think the Firstborn fall prey to grief or illness like a lesser creature does?**

Tiana sighed. “Of course. But you don’t know who killed him? Which is why you attacked me?”

**Hardly an attack, simply an investigation. Here, little one. Do you still insist on leaving me somewhere? Let me show you how I would attack you.**
The sword struck.

A great and dazzling geometric shape unfolded in Tiana’s mind, infinitely complex. No sooner did she recognize its vastness than she was screaming, trying to deny it. She was drowning in its shallows. Its deepness could swallow worlds. She hid away from it, reaching for blindness or the phantasmagory. Instead she found a monstrous labyrinth of frosted glass.

She could feel the vastness shifting around her, and she understood immediately that she was a prisoner, snatched and caged so quickly that she’d had no time to flee.
**Why?**
she demanded of the labyrinth, of the geometry.

Only her own thoughts returned to her, distorted and blurred by the translucent glass.
**Why? Why? Why?**

Why was this maze, this mental prison, possible when the phantasmagory challenged Jinriki the Darkener to find her? How was this not-place different from the phantasmagory?
Was
it different from the phantasmagory?

The phantasmagory was moldable; the emanations obeyed her in both that place and the real world, when she called them. She moved her hand to slice through the glass walls. Nothing happened. She had no hand to move. She had no breath to exhale. She was a thought ricocheting in a diamond.

Something else was missing.

She wasn’t real.

New horror seized her. She wasn’t real. She wasn’t Tiana. Tiana was somewhere else; she was just a daydream, a stray thought, exiled, sent to hell. Was this where bad thoughts went when they died? This piece of crystal insanity?

That’s exactly what it was. She was Tiana’s insanity. This was where it lived when Tiana pushed it down, kept it from nibbling away the edges of her self. She’d spent so long resisting it. She cared about appropriate behavior. She’d taught herself to ignore things that upset her. She’d taught Lisette to distract her when she needed distraction, and she’d stayed so
good
. Jerya thought her shallow, Jerya thought her frivolous, but Tiana wasn’t going to lose her husband the way her father had lost her mother.

But now she and her insanity had changed places. Was that it? Was her madness out there, freed from the leash and chain? Was Tiana running through the halls, ranting about last year’s fashions? She’d had to suppress the dreadful urge to giggle inappropriately, over and over, as the men attending the theater had pranced past in their feathered flounces.

Was she stalking down the halls, shedding her clothing? It had been so hot the other day. Was she looking for the nearest bottle of whiskey, was she climbing to the highest tower to see if she could really fly? Was she sawing off her hair?

Was she walking out of the catacombs with Jinriki the Darkener held in her hand?

Was that all that had happened? Had she lost her self, not to her insanity, but to the sword?

She was a thought, just a thought, but she was oh-so-quick. Her thoughts existed. She was glee. She’d lost her self, that’s all, and this vastness, this glittering labyrinth, it only served to trick her that she was actually there. If she was a thought, it was a dream. But it was less than a dream, because dreams came from within. Dreams could hold you down because they were you. She was far too straightforward to be an infinitely complicated, crystal labyrinth. It could not hold her.

First, she stopped thinking about the labyrinth.

Then, she stopped thinking.

She felt her body walking along. It was her stride, careful and fast. Her body knew how to walk, even if it didn’t know who was driving it. She hid in her toes, because it was the farthest she could get from the sword she was sure she held in her hand. Her toes flexed and shifted in their slippers. She itched, but her body did not scratch. Would the sword be so unkind to her? Her family would notice if there was a Tiana who did not fidget. Somebody would wonder. Cathay would guess.