Asunder

Trembling, I tried to send a message to Sam, but the SED beeped in error. I put it away and pushed myself to my feet. I couldn’t let the screaming get to me, or the crying, or the fingernails raking across my skin. They weren’t real.

They weren’t.

Determined not to let Janan stop me, I stepped forward, and the whole world changed.

16

TRUTH

BRIGHT WHITE SURROUNDED ME.

I crumpled to the floor, clutching my face and stinging eyes as pressure drained and the weeping no longer followed. Now just the hiss and scrape of cloth, ragged breathing that wasn’t mine, and a reek like copper and ammonia so strong it made my head spin.

I wasn’t alone.

“What are you doing here?”

The voice was broken, garbled and raspy at the same time, and came from across what appeared to be the bottom of a large hole, though a stairway spiraled up.

I wiped tears from my eyes and focused on the dark lump of bones and rags. Blood stained his face and hands, and a rotted wound hunched like a spider where I’d stabbed his eye out. But the other seemed to work, and it watched me.

“Meuric.”

“Nosoul.”

He couldn’t be alive. It wasn’t possible. I’d shoved him under the upside-down pit. The fall must have shattered every bone in his body. It had been months. And still.

I felt only a little better knowing I hadn’t actually killed him. And then I felt much worse, imagining the pain he must have been in all this time, trapped at the bottom of a pit with stairs offering a way out—except his bones were splintered and he couldn’t move from this spot.

Blood and other fluids seeped around his filthy clothes, but the rest of the floor was clean. No, he definitely hadn’t moved.

“You tried to kill me,” he gasped.

“After you tried to trap me in here so you could tell everyone I was dead.”

Dried blood cracked and flaked when he smiled. Black rot filled the creases between his teeth. “And now I’m trapped. Does that make you feel better?”

“No.” His stench made my head spin. I squatted on the floor and leaned against the wall for balance. It didn’t help the dizziness, but my back and hips creaked with relief.

The pit was ten paces across. A fair size. When I looked up, the opening was invisible with the everywhere-light. It must have been deep enough to shatter all his bones, and shallow enough so he wouldn’t die. How cruel of Janan to arrange that.

“Why aren’t you dead?”

He laughed, like bubbles rising from the mud pits around Heart. Then wheezing and coughing, then groaning and silence.

I almost wanted to help him, but couldn’t bring myself to go near him while he remained slumped, breath whistling as though there were holes in his lungs or throat. I couldn’t get over the creeping feeling that, if I did go over, his body would miraculously mend and he’d grab me.

That thought coiling in my gut, I pressed my spine to the wall and sat properly, waiting for him to regain the strength to speak. How long had it been for him? As long as it had been on the outside?

“Janan won’t let me die.” His good eye was trained on me. “Do you have the key?”

I pressed my hands to my knees. I didn’t want to slip and reveal the key’s location.

“I need it,” he whispered, managing to lift one arm toward me. “I need it to live after Soul Night. You have to give it back.”

“What happens on Soul Night?” I’d come here for answers, after all, though I hadn’t expected Meuric to provide them.

He wheezed laughter. “You won’t stop it.”

I stood, trying to make myself formidable. “What happens?”

“Give me the key.” His glare followed me as I marched toward him. “Give, and I’ll tell you.”

Not a chance. He’d said he needed it to live after Soul Night, so what happened to everyone without a key?

I hovered just out of arm’s reach, ready to run for the stairs if he so much as shifted his weight. “You’ve been down here for months,” I muttered. “You must be very hungry. And thirsty. When was the last time you had anything to drink?”

His eye widened, and he groaned.

I felt sick taunting him like this, but I knelt so I was level with him. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll give you the rest of my water.”

His thirst must be horrible, even if he hadn’t been thinking about it before. Janan couldn’t fix everything…as evidenced by Meuric’s broken body.

“So thirsty.” The eye closed. The other remained a rotted hole, impossible not to look at; its reek rode the steady heartbeat of the temple. There were no screams currently, just muffled whimpering, as though they were waiting to find out what I’d do.

I checked to make sure the stairs were still an option. “If you tell me what’s going to happen, I’ll give you water.”

“Soul Night.”

The spring equinox of the Year of Souls. “Yes, I know that’s when it happens.”

He nodded. It was frightening how ancient he looked now, though this body was only fifteen years old. Months of dehydration and starvation, incredible physical damage…If he’d succeeded in trapping me in here before Templedark, this could have been me.

“I didn’t think it would work.” His once-high voice sounded like gravel now. “His plan seemed too fantastic, but if anyone could succeed, it would be Janan, so I convinced everyone to let him try. And then he did it. He really did it.”

“What did he do?” I wanted to shake him and force him to speak clearly. Instead, I stayed on one knee, ready to bolt.

“He made himself greater. He made people like phoenixes.” Meuric held out his hand again. “Water.”

“That’s not an answer.” Phoenixes were another dominant species, like centaurs or trolls, but they appeared to reincarnate as people did.

They were rare—reports said there were perhaps a dozen in the entire world—but once someone had observed a phoenix in the jungles on a southern continent. It built a nest of dry brush, then settled down as though to lay an egg. Instead, it exploded into a rain of sparks and died.

The explorer had stayed at the pyre for hours, trying to figure out why the creature had done that. And then sunlight broke through the jungle canopy and shone on the ashes, dazzling him. When his vision cleared, a tiny phoenix chirped. It looked at him with the same ancient expression the other had worn, and then it flew off, trailing sparks and ash.

“It is an answer.” Meuric’s garbled voice grew panicked. “Water.”

“No. What is Janan trying to do?”

“What has he already done, you mean.” His good eye squeezed shut. “You’re so stupid. It’s already done. Soul Night is inevitable now. He will rise.”

“Like a phoenix?”

“No. No, nothing like that. Come Soul Night, you won’t care about phoenixes. No one will. Birth is so painful.”

Okay. Something terrible would happen. We’d gone over that. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what would happen. Or maybe he was too crazy to express how awful it would be.

I forced myself to meet his good eye, though he seemed to have trouble focusing. “When I came here before, I found books. But I don’t know who wrote them, and I can’t read the symbols.”

“No one wrote them. They were simply written.” He groaned and dropped his hand. “Give me water. You promised.”

“Tell me how to read the books.”

“Same way you’d read anything. Learn the language.” Oil-dark fluid seeped from his ruined eye, down the crevices of his face, and into cracked lips. He swallowed it.

“What’s the connection between sylph and Janan?”

“Janan is nothing like sylph!”

“Don’t lie to me. I know there’s a connection.” The poison wouldn’t have worked on both of them otherwise.

“He is greater than them. He has always been greater, and they deserve to be cursed.”

Cursed? “What are sylph?”

“They are betrayers!”

“Did they betray Janan? Did he curse them?” Maybe all their attacks on Heart were about revenge. But why did they seem to like me?

“Oh, they betrayed Janan,” Meuric said. “But he didn’t have to curse them. I don’t know who did, but if I had to guess, I’d guess a phoenix did it.”

A phoenix. No, that seemed too incredible.

“Give me water!” Meuric’s body tipped toward me.

I stood and stepped backward in one motion. “You’re not getting anything until you give me answers. Real answers.”

“There are no real answers.”

“Look, Meuric.” Ugh, wrong thing to say, because he grinned widely.

I fought hard not to gag. Meuric’s odor of ammonia and bile made my headache increase. Soon my body would stop breathing out of self-defense.

I tried again. “Here.” I pulled the bottle of water from my coat. “Half-full.” I sloshed it. “I’ll give you this water, but you have to answer questions for me.”

“What questions?”

I put the water away and found my notebook, wishing I had the list I’d given to Cris. Still, I remembered lots of the symbols, and I flipped to a blank page and began drawing. “See this mark? What does it mean?” I showed him the symbol that looked like a crescendo.

“Less.”

“What?”

“It means less than. Math. Or it could mean ‘speak louder.’ I don’t know. Context. You must tell me more for me to tell you anything. Honestly, I can’t believe how stupid you are. Do you think I’m a data console, able to call up information when you press the correct buttons? Or a vision pool? Oh, I remember those. We used to think the hot springs would give us visions if we stood there and inhaled the fumes long enough. And they did give us visions! But not of the future or past or anything useful. Headaches. Like you’re giving me now.”

I blinked and glanced at the page, desperately hoping it wasn’t a math symbol and that all the books weren’t written entirely in mathematical equations.

“Okay, let’s try another. Maybe it will be less ambiguous.” I offered a symbol that looked like an up arrow, but with four points along the shaft rather than one at the top.

“Hmm. Another.”

The next was a circle with a dot in its center.

“Still wanting answers from those books.” Meuric shook his head, as though disappointed but not surprised.

“Do you know what these mean?”

“Of course.”

“You must tell me everything. No leaving out details. If I think you’re lying, I won’t give you this water.”

“Very well.” Meuric coughed, flecks of blood and mucus spattering across the floor. “The second symbol means rising or higher. Ascending. You may sometimes read it as Janan, though it isn’t his name, simply a reference to him. The third symbol means city, or Heart—but only Heart in the way the other means Janan.”

“How do you tell which it means?”

For someone in his condition, he did an admirable job of looking at me like I was an idiot. “Context. Of course.”

“Oh, of course,” I muttered, scribbling notes to myself. “What about the first symbol? The ‘less than’ mark.”

“It is but a modifier, changing the meanings of the words around it.” He gave examples of how the symbol might affect others.

I showed him several more symbols and he answered readily, the whole time grinning as if he believed I would regret all this questioning. But I continued on, and he told me how and why different meanings might be assigned to different marks. Then, too soon, I couldn’t remember any others well enough to ask about them. If only I’d found the stack of books again when I came in.