Citadel of the Sky (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 1) (22 page)

L
isette’s shriek
as Kiar touched the Mystery Spot banished Tiana’s curious disorientation. But Kiar fading away was enough to give her vertigo.

She took a wobbly step after Kiar. Maybe there was a trick to it…? Then she was borne to the ground by Lisette as Jinriki snapped,
**No!**

“Oof,” said Lisette and lay there, gasping for breath.

Tiana complained, “What was that for?” and got back up again, moving over to the makeshift fence.

“No!” wheezed Lisette. “Don’t go near it.”

Annoyed, Tiana said, “I want to see what happened to Kiar.”

“Please. No. Wait a moment.” Lisette looked like a fish, mouth and eyes both round.

Tiana shook her head. “Why?” She shook her hair back and looked around the little street. Where could Kiar have gone? Any second now she’d probably saunter out of one of those buildings, looking smug about her trick.

Lisette rolled to her feet and took Tiana’s hand in both of hers. “Because if something bad has happened to her, I don’t want it to happen to you.”

Tiana squeezed Lisette’s hand. “Silly. Kiar’s just playing a joke.”

Lisette said, “Let’s wait for her, then. Once she comes back, you can ask her what she did.”

Tiana said, “Fine, fine.” She looked around. Then she called, “Kiar! Come on out.”

Only silence answered. An unpleasant feeling sprouted in the bottom of Tiana’s stomach, and she promptly squashed it. “I wonder what else there is to do here. There’s some kind of rural dancing, isn’t there?”

Lisette said, “We could go ask someone.” She pulled gently on Tiana, but Tiana resisted.

“We need to wait for Kiar. She
couldn’t
have actually vanished. That makes no sense. If the Mystery Spot were eating people, there’d—well, there’d be a bigger fence!” The ache in the pit of her stomach surged up again.

**Something happened to her.**

“Shut up,” Tiana snapped. She watched Slater and Berrin walking down the dusty street with the horses. Then she dragged Lisette over to them.

Berrin said, “Where’d Lady Kiar go?”

Tiana said, “When I find out, I’m going to shake her until her teeth clatter.” She freed a hand and fumbled at Jinriki’s scabbard.

Lisette said, “What are you doing? Don’t do anything stupid, please.” She looked on the verge of tears, but Tiana pushed that thought aside just as she pushed Lisette towards Slater.

“Take her off me.” When Slater didn’t obey quickly enough, she shouted, “Do it!”

Lisette jerked away, into Slater’s chest, then lunged after Tiana again. Tiana ducked and stepped away. Lisette said, “Don’t let her touch it!” But Slater’s hand settled on her shoulder, and she slumped.

Tiana jerked the scabbard off her sword. Then she called, “Kiar, time to come out!” She scanned the street. People were staring. A small child ran away. Her shame mingled with a burning fury, and she ran over to the Mystery Spot. Emanations danced around her, lifting the dust in sheets.

She leveled Jinriki at the emptiness. “Tell me about it.”

**It is not a part of this world.**

She pushed the tip of the blade into the space. “And?”

**And what? It is not a sky fiend. I have not yet intersected it, though you think I have. I do not know how Kiar interacted with it.**

One side of her head pounded and her vision flickered. “You’re useless, then,” Tiana said and sent the sword scything away from her. Then she kicked aside the makeshift fence and plunged her hand, and her emanations, toward the Mystery Spot.

Her hand never reached it, but the emanations did. While it seemed to drift just beyond her fingers, she could feel the broken-glass edges of it through her emanations. Blowing her breath out, she twisted and pushed against sharpness, staring at the spot until her eyes teared up. She couldn’t tell if she was having any effect at all.

Blinking furiously, she released the emanations and turned away, rubbing at her eyes with the palms of her hands. What had Kiar done? Where had she gone? Lisette assumed the worst, but that didn’t have to be true. It didn’t
always
have to be the worst. Did it? No, it didn’t. It didn’t.

“Aunt Rinta,” she whispered and bit her lip when she heard herself. Louder, she said, “No. I
will
find her.” Aunt Rinta hadn’t vanished, but Aunt Rinta had died. Just like Uncle Pell, just like Grandpa Anther, but Tiana
remembered
Aunt Rinta, remembered her face after she’d choked to death on her own blood. She remembered the yellow paper flowers at the funeral. She’d held Gisen’s warmth in her arms, just as Jerya had held her when their own mother went away. Shonathan had wanted her to know what she was getting involved in, but he couldn’t have meant this.

She sent her emanation probing into the Mystery Spot a second time, concentrating so hard that the pain in her skull faded away. Plumes of fire blazed across her vision, but she was precise and clean in her direction of the emanation. After a time, she thought she could manipulate the blurry emptiness, move its leading edge around, but what good did that do? She couldn’t make it do whatever it had done to Kiar—

She realized that Berrin was standing patiently beside her and let the emanation drop again. The hollowness left her dizzy and swaying, and her headache surged back. “What?”

“What is it, Your Highness?” He seemed unperturbed, as solid and steady as a great ox.

“I don’t know. Something unnatural.” She felt stupid as soon as the words escaped her mouth. Of course it was unnatural, and of course he was asking her. “I’ll figure it out.” He ought to ride back to the city, tell Jerya, get Yithiere and Twist to come out. People who knew what they were doing. But she couldn’t tell him that.

She realized that Jinriki was resting by her foot, placed neatly on his scabbard. “How did that get back over there?”

Berrin said, “Begging your pardon, Your Highness, but I brought it back over.”

She wrinkled her brow, staring up at Berrin’s broad, bearded face. “You picked him up?” She glanced down at his hands, but he seemed fine.

“It asked me to. Wanted to be closer to you. Did I presume?” He moved his eyes from her shoulder to her face, and she twitched and turned away.

“It’s
my
sword, not the other way around.” She nudged the blade with her toe, but Jinriki apparently had nothing to say to
her.
Scowling, she added, “Go away. Go back to Lor Seleni if you must. Just let me be.”

She raised her eyes to the blurred emptiness again and embraced the pain of her throbbing headache. The emanation rose around her, steadying her. She turned the pain into a knife and sent it against the Mystery Spot, tearing, ripping, rending. This time, the emanation was a tempest, and her mind was cold and empty, the taste of blood on her lips.

K
iar stood
in a place without light and looked at the mist she could see anyhow. She knew, somehow, that there had never been light here. It was cold, but not freezing, and absent-mindedly she wondered where the warmth came from without light.

Stepping into the distortion had been a matter of instinct. As soon as she saw it, she knew that beyond the strangeness was the phantasmagory. What was there to be frightened of? She
recognized
what she was looking at. The distortion was a gateway into the phantasmagory, simple as that. A gateway to the place the eidolons came from. So she stepped forward and reached into the place inside herself where the magic came from, and twisted just a little—

She stepped in, and she thought of the eidolons in the plague. There was that to be frightened of. But it was too late.

When she went into the phantasmagory, she fell. But she hadn’t fallen here. She did not descend. She’d simply stepped
in
and there she was, standing in a place without light. It didn’t feel very much like the phantasmagory, now that she was here. It felt… large. Wild. Alien. And it was full of far more mist than the phantasmagory usually was.

She blinked and remembered the world she’d glimpsed twice before: when she’d swallowed enemy eidolons and reached into the distortion within a sky fiend.
Ah.
This place was that place, and she was here for real. This was her body, not just her mind, in a world where eidolons lived. Perhaps it was a cousin to the phantasmagory.

She inhaled and something flowed into her lungs. It wasn’t air, wasn’t water. She wasn’t drowning, but she could imagine she was. She could feel the thickness on her skin, seeping under her clothes, clogging her eyelashes.

She closed her eyes and reached inside. But that was no longer the road to the phantasmagory. She tasted the thick air in her mouth, like winter water. Was she without magic, as well? Fear flared, and instinct reacted. She held out her hand, and a flaming sword appeared. It was real, without the iridescent shimmer of an eidolon in the real world. She could feel its warmth and weight.

She turned in a circle, trying to find the way back. All she saw was grey mist, illuminated by her flaming sword. She whimpered. What if she couldn’t leave? What if she was trapped here, in a place Twist couldn’t reach?

She felt the sound on her skin, as if the mist reflected it back at her. Something else vibrated against her skin, and there was a cry, long and low. It undulated through registers lower than any human could achieve. Kiar froze, her sword still outstretched. Something moved through the thick greyness. She could feel its movement against her skin too, its slow, heavy tread on the ground and the flutter of motion higher than her head.

She was in the place where eidolons lived, and that had to be one of them. Unless it was something else? In the phantasmagory, did something exist below the dreams and memories the Blood layered onto the mists? She resisted trying to call up the Logos. That was likely a quick route to utter insanity. The flames of her sword burned slowly but did not illuminate the grey. The invisible creature groaned and trilled.

“What are you?” Kiar asked. Her voice sounded strange and distorted, like talking underwater. She walked forward, thinking about the eidolons she’d swallowed and the world she’d glimpsed through them. It had been mist-free, a vast, alien, monochromatic place.

As she walked, the gauzy curtain lifted, vanishing as if it had never existed. The world was deep black, but strands of colorless vegetation surrounded her, bright against the blackness. Moving through the stalks and leaves was a giant. It had six legs, thick and stumpy as tree trunks, and a straight, tall neck wound around with more vegetation. Where she would have expected a head, she instead found dozens of silvery birds, quite recognizable: two eyes, wings, tails. The birds fluttered and trilled, a hole opened in the flock and that deep groan emerged.

Kiar turned her head rapidly as she backed up, refusing to take her eyes off the giant for more than an eye blink. More of the vegetation surrounded her; it was a forest of vines and seaweed, growing in luxurious grey and white profusion.

“Time to reconsider,” she said. “Do I really think this is like the phantasmagory? Are
you
in the phantasmagory, big guy?” The birds warbled in response, and several of them darted out to drag a length of vine back to their perch. She could just make out what appeared to be a spar of bone jutting out from whatever served as the base of the creature’s head, before the birds obscured it again. The creature moaned again.

Kiar watched the creature until she decided it wasn’t about to attack her. Then she spent more time examining her surroundings, letting her sword fade away. She crouched down to peer at the ground and discovered only a thickening mist that she could force her hand into, like very loose, very fine sand. The vegetation had root tendrils buried in the stuff. The giant had similar roots on its legs, though they waved and moved slowly.

She felt the noise of something else moving just out of sight and scuffed behind the thickest grouping of the vines, wondering if hiding was even meaningful in this place. Then she saw the black silhouette that padded up beside the giant, and her thoughts were swallowed by fear. She’d seen that shape before, clawing its way out of a sky fiend. These
were
eidolons.

She held her breath as the silhouette looked around alertly and pushed its head against the giant, who moaned in response. The silhouette was shaped like a human, but it moved like a deer, sudden and graceful, a black dancer cast upon a screen.
Andani
was the best name from the Catalog for it.
It had four fingers on its hands and she could see movement like muscles beneath its skin.

The face was alien, save for the eyes, which were grey and disturbingly human. It had a dog’s nose, an ugly, wide mouth, and it was totally hairless. It reached for the leaf on one of the vines twined around the giant and tore at it, shredding it with a sharpened bone plate in its mouth. Then it plucked another leaf and advanced on Kiar’s hiding spot, holding the leaf out like an offering.

Warily, Kiar edged into visibility. She couldn’t help thinking of flies caught by honey, but she couldn’t hide behind vegetation, that was clear. Without conscious intent, a steel shield shimmered on her arm.

The black dancer sprang backwards, emitting a high whine. Then it fell to the ground and scuttled away, looking from side to side like a panicked animal. “Are you scared of me?” Kiar asked. “Or my magic?”

The andani made terrified clicking noises and hid behind one of the six legs of the giant. The giant had only moved a few steps since she’d first seen it, and it was unfazed by her magic. No—the birds were agitated. Several swooped down on the andani, their chirping rising in pitch. The giant stepped back, a surprisingly complicated maneuver. It was too much for the andani, which shrieked one final time and fled.

Kiar took a deep breath, wondering if anything else would come to investigate. She really needed to figure out how she was going to get out of here. That was the smart thing to do. This was a place where eidolons acted like people and animals, like living things, and it was the place enemies came from, a cousin to the phantasmagory but vaster and wilder. She had to share the mysteries with someone.

But surely more information couldn’t make things any worse? There was no research in any book to help her. She edged around the giant and pushed her way out of the vine thicket, passing under a smear of buzzing she hoped was insects. Beyond was a shallow incline leading up to a cliff, then down in a wide, gently curving path. What passed for the sky beyond the drop was the stark black of a night without stars. Cautiously, Kiar dropped to her knees as she approached the edge of the cliff and then down to her belly, unwilling to let whatever might look up notice her.

The landscape below the cliff was just as monochromatic as the jungle: light grey for the land and dark grey pooling like water, here and there. The vines flowed down the cliff, though not in the profusion she’d encountered at her point of origin. She could see other giants moving through other tangles of vegetation directly below her. Further away, thin dark strips divided the areas of vegetation and giants into irregular, polygonal fields. To her left and right were other plateaus, precisely placed at equidistant points on a circle; each had a beard of vines. Beyond those plateaus was only darkness.

In the heart of the vast circle indicated by the plateaus was a teeming throng of creatures. There were many more black dancers—andani—, tightly packed into precise squares and other creatures as well: grotesque parodies of humans and giant birds and—Lord of Winter—the nemesis beast.

She stared at it for a long time, observing her own reaction. But what Tiana had done seemed to have worked. It was disgusting, but it didn’t take up residence in her brain. It was just a thing. An eidolon nemesis beast, far more familiar than the six-legged giant. Perhaps the nemesis beast inoculated the Logos against these other strange monsters too, so that she could look and say,
Oh, how strange,
instead of screaming.

She remembered too, what Tiana had whispered to her.
Jinriki thinks it was engineered to hurt us.

Then she methodically continued her inspection. Whoever had engineered an eidolon designed to destroy minds had been very, very busy. The mass of monsters in the distance crowded around a monolithic pile of stone, charcoal against the black sky. From the energetic movement of individuals within the army, she determined that they were very excited. About what, she couldn’t imagine.

The giant moaned somewhere behind her. She looked around, saw an andani crouching near her, and rolled to her feet, stumbling back down the slope towards the vegetation tangle. Once she was a good distance away, she paused to study the creature again. It hadn’t followed her, and it hadn’t run. It was just sitting there… watching.

Kiar shivered. “I have to get out of here.” Her voice was comforting, even distorted as it was. “Intelligence gathered. Time to wake up….” And she tried to wake herself from the phantasmagory, instinctively. But there was no indication there
was
a phantasmagory here. It was a cousin to the phantasmagory, but the two were not connected.

“This isn’t the phantasmagory. There must be some other way,” she told her observer. “It feels
real
. It’s cold here. I can taste the air, I can feel the ground. Well, what passes for the ground. But how do you step out of a
world
?”

She fumbled her way back into the tangle, hoping she didn’t get stepped on by the giant. But it had moved only one giant-sized step from where it was previously. She stopped next to the third pair of legs and pressed her fingers against one.

She could feel it, too. It was cool and pebbled, and she thought she could feel movement under the surface. Then the leg she was touching lifted and a trilling flock of birds flew down from the creature’s head to perch on the leg. She backed away, hands raised to fend them off, but they didn’t attack her. Instead all of them looked at her, moving their heads in unison. Then one of them trilled, and a second one picked up the sound, and a third, each one in at a different pitch. The beast itself moaned as well, creating an extraordinary harmony. She froze, staring up at it. The beauty seemed out of place.

Then she shook herself. “Oops. I was just curious.” Kiar backed up, pulling some of the foliage between her and the giant. Another three birds trilled at her. Suddenly she was worried that she’d hurt it, that what she interpreted as beauty was actually pain. She covered her ears with her hands and turned her back, pushing her way deeper into the monochrome jungle. After only a moment, the vegetation was too thick to climb through.

That was unexpected. “And ridiculous,” she whispered. “I didn’t do any wading through a forest when I got here. I couldn’t even see.” But she conjured up her sword again and slashed at the vines. The cut vegetation shriveled where the sword touched it.

Her sword clanged off something. A set of four strands ran parallel to the ground, one above the other, starting at her knees and ending over her head. The vines twined around it, but after they shriveled and crumbled, the sword against the strands made only black sparks. They were very thin and hard to see; at first she’d thought they were just lateral vines. But they were smaller, dull black, and very taut.

Kiar hesitated. Something felt wrong. The thought almost made her laugh. Standing in a colorless world of monsters and something felt wrong? But she carefully cleaned all the vines off several feet of the strands and then stepped back, squinting. They weren’t
quite
parallel. They were wider at the thinner side of the tangle, narrower at the thicker side. She held up her hand sideways, spread her fingers, looked through them. Yes. The strands were like thin, long fingers, like the strings on a violin. Presumably, somewhere in the deepest part of the thicket, was the place that they met the palm.

She needed to find out. She felt more cheerful as soon as she admitted that to herself. It was better to have a direction and an achievable goal, than to fumble around blindly, after all. And a guide, as strange as it was. But she’d only taken a few steps along the path indicated by the strands before she stopped and looked at them again. The third one was close to her eye level. It looked like thick wire, pulled taut. She wondered if it would make music when she touched it.

She brushed her fingers over it.

Vision exploded around her. Concepts without words flashed in her head: a great hive, a machine, pulling. Puppets full of needles, wire piercing her flesh. What happened to a world turned inside out? A team of horses could pull a man apart.

She was running through the vegetation again, swords whirling around her, running towards the iris, eye, valve,
gate
she was certain the strands led to. There it was. A flap of eidolon stuff, thick and organic, pulled aside by four wires on the near side and four wires on the far side. They reached through the flap to whatever was on the other side. Her world. Her world with hooks in it.