Citadel of the Sky (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 1) (16 page)

J
inriki insisted
Tiana find the leatherworker who supplied the soldiers so she could get a baldric and a special scabbard. But, just to show him who was in charge, she ate lunch in the Morning Room first. She laid the bundled sword on the ground beside her.

The kitchen was adjacent to the Morning Room. After a scullery girl had placed her plate before her, poured her wine, and left, Tiana said, “In the stories, magic swords are quite capable of resizing themselves from a needle to a… a really big sword. What’s wrong with you?”

**I’m exactly the right size.**

Tiana opened her eyes wide and gazed at the sword. “I was thinking I could just carry you around, rolled up in a blanket. You said you see through my eyes; you don’t need to be actually in my hand to do your nullification thing, do you?”

**Yes. I do. You will carry me properly, and when we decide it is appropriate, such as when someone is making unwanted advances, you will take me in your hand, slide me from my scabbard, and let me guide your hand in the proper motions.**
It paused and then added,
**A few practice sessions will make it less disturbing. Perhaps after you dine?**

Tiana choked down a swallow of wine and realized she was blushing. “That’s—I don’t think you had to protect monks from unwanted advances!”

**No,**
the sword said.
**They were more likely to encounter thieves on the road and they were skilled in using me, as I recall. Much as your Cathay would be. But my memories are distant, and vague; I was never fully awake in their care. Perhaps I’m forgetting something that prompted that particular example. In any case, you are my bearer now, and pretty princesses are far more likely to encounter unwanted suitors, in many forms, than thieves.**

“What about wanted suitors?”

**Do you desire suitors?**

“Well, yes!”

**Ah. That could be awkward.**

“Hey!” Tiana paused and lowered her voice again. “Just because I said I’d let you help me doesn’t give you the—” The Morning Room door opened and a servant peeked in. He met her eyes, puzzled.

“Are things well, Your Highness? You raised your voice,” he explained.

Tiana snapped, “I’m fine.” She made herself eat another bite of the chicken and rice, even though her appetite had vanished. The servant looked concerned but closed the door again. “Anyhow, carrying you around the way you want would completely mess up my dresses. And I’m not going to let you interfere with my suitors.”

**You already allow nursemaids and bureaucrats to control who may approach you and who may not. Why them and not me?**

Tiana ate another bite and then pushed the plate away. “Are you trying to make me lose you again? Why are you provoking me?”

**Do you consider honesty provocation? I was not made for pretty lies.**

Tiana stared at the sword, thinking of the poet at the reception. Then she muttered, “You all think knowing the truth is so easy.”

After a moment, it said,
**You are far better at the pretty lies than I. See this: even your Lisette is a caretaker. I have seen inside you, and Cathay as well. All your kin require caretakers, or else havoc would sweep indiscriminately across the land. You should not hide from this. Havoc is part of my nature as well, but when I am sheathed, I do not cut freely.**

Tears stung the back of Tiana’s eyes. “That’s just it. I don’t need you to kill people. I do that just fine on my own. The other day—”

**I am aware of that event. Here is the difference: I would have killed them all. Only by your strength of will would fewer have died.**

Tiana’s breath quickened. That sounded almost heroic. It was a sky fiend, kept under control by her will, but sometimes, it might escape. When she was threatened or frightened, perhaps. The thought unrolled before her. She hadn’t killed two, but saved four, from a disaster of their own making.

But would the mother and child who saw the bodies and the blood understand that? Would they still flee her gaze?

Her stomach curdled. Jinriki was offering her a story, and she liked stories very much. But a performance only worked if everybody knew the script. “Truth is not easy, no matter what that poet thinks. I could say that, you could claim that, but I couldn’t make the audience believe it, because they already know what’s true.”

**With time, and my assistance, you could teach them any script you wished. I am far more than an edge for cutting. I am the lens and the channel. I am the last voice of the secret knowledge. I am the sculptor of souls. This blanketed shape is but a small part of the whole of me. A world of power and knowledge has been lost while I was bound to sleep, with but time and your desire, much could be regained.**

Tiana let the voice inside her head flow through her. It hinted at dazzling images of adventure, amusements, and accomplishments beyond anything the world now knew. It implied that she, Tiana, could be far greater than Shin Savanyel. She was more than capable of dreaming up details to match its words.

Twist said, “Oh, there it is. Still carrying it in a blanket?” The Royal Wizard was standing at the side of the room. Tiana fell out of her chair, jolted from her daydreaming.

“Well, it’s useful for finding you in the Palace, no matter what you wrap it in. I hope it’s behaving?” Twist’s speech was more hurried than usual. “No blood, I see. Good. I need your help. Kiar is sick with this wretched plague, and Yithiere has taken her away, into the fortress.” He frowned at the sword.

Tiana recovered herself and demanded, “What can I do?”

The wizard’s gaze snapped back to Tiana and he said, “Your uncle would protect Kiar from the only treatment I can imagine. The plague is like an eidolon to the Logos-sight. Defeating it requires the family magic, not the Logos. Can you locate him?”

That was when the ghost woman stepped out of Twist, pulling herself out of his skin. Tiana felt sick and vehemently hoped she’d never see the bones beneath Twist’s face again. The ghost’s hair swirled around her, her bare toes just brushing the floor she drifted above. Tiana snatched up Jinriki and edged away.

Twist said, “What’s the matter? Why—” He cut himself off, pressing his lips together.

The ghost’s eyes were white. She stretched out her hand to Tiana. Tiana swallowed and said, “Nothing!”

She squeezed her eyes shut as a ghostly hand passed through her body and tried to focus. “Kiar’s the one who knows all the locks, but I might be able to force my way in. Um. I don’t know if he’s prepared for that. He might be.” She opened her eyes enough to peek. The ghost was standing right in front of her, tilting its head from one extreme to another as it stared at her. She closed her eyes again hastily, but not before she saw her own wrist bone.

Twist sighed. “I see that dealing with the fiend is taking up a lot of your attention. I shouldn’t distract you from that. Keep up the good fight and so forth. Somebody else is sure to help.” He vanished from the room before she could protest.

**An interesting trick with the Logos. That wizard may become a problem. By the way, the woman that your eyes perceive is not real.**

“I know that!” Tiana snapped. She backed up, eyes still closed, waving Jinriki in front of her. She was horrified that Twist thought she was mad, but she’d lose her lunch if she saw the ghost’s passage.

**Fascinating. There is nothing to see when your eyes are closed.**

She opened her eyes. It was a mistake.

The ghost was still there. Tiana waved Jinriki and saw the glint of the glass labyrinth within the shape of the blade. Then the ghost woman stepped forward, and Tiana could take no more. She fled the labyrinth and the ghost, into the phantasmagory.

It was moving around her, surging like water on a stormy day. She stood in the shallows and watched debris left by others bob to the surface. A decapitated head floated past, forever screaming. A book with half its pages ripped out, a bear’s severed foot, a shield in which blood pooled, the torn wing of the Secondborn Ashadel, three iron nails floating in a black chalice. Nightmares. She pushed them away.

Then the ghost was there as well. It held her in a motherly embrace. Tiana wriggled, and the woman responded by pushing her shoulders and head down. The water became upsettingly real. Tiana was being drowned by the ghost woman.

A masculine voice spoke. “Madness.” The water turned to clouds of hissing vapor. The woman pushing Tiana down looked up and frowned. It was a terrible, frightening expression, and Tiana squirmed away from her grip, pretending she was a fish like Shanasee. It didn’t change her shape—nothing ever changed her self-perception in the phantasmagory—but the woman lifted her strong hands away and swept her arms through the rising billows of steam.

The man’s voice said again, “Madness. This is where you hide?”

Her curiosity piqued, Tiana paused in her scramble backwards and asked, “What do you see? Do you still see through my eyes? How did you get here?”

“I followed you. I learn. It’s my great strength. But this—this is… madness. Everything happens. At once. Now. How can you—but I suppose you’re mad already.”

Tiana rose to her feet, giggling. The giggle bloomed around her, red and yellow, and drove the mist before it. “You’re not made for pretty lies, silly sword. It’s in our blood. I suppose you didn’t taste enough of Cathay’s to learn the knack.”

“I could take some of yours….”

“That would be the opposite of protecting me, you understand,” Tiana observed as her pink hills grew around her.

“It’d just be a nip. Can you really feel pain in here? You scarcely seem aware of anything.”

Tiana stared at the windswept hills. A crimson rose danced before her, bowing like a suitor at a ball and she looked away. “Yes. There is pain here. Are you still trying to track the physical world? It takes decades of experience to master that; no wonder you’re so lost. Stay or go, but don’t try to straddle both worlds.”

“That’s exactly what I will do. Anything could happen, and you still have eyes for me to see through.”

Tiana shuddered. Aviani the Blind, an ancestor, had clawed her eyes out while in the phantasmagory. She resisted the temptation to rub at her own eyes.

The phantom woman stalked past, flowers swirling and following her like a train. The landscape changed behind her. It was desolate and dusty, scattered with the skeletons of animals and monsters, most of which never existed outside the phantasmagory. The eidolon graveyard.

“What do you see?” Tiana wondered. “Jinriki? Sword?”

“Did something change? I see the same. I am aware, as I am aware of blood on my blade, of you, mired within a morass of… memories. The memories of a thousand souls, all moving and flowing together, interacting and changing. Dreams?”

“A delusion so powerful it overwhelms every other sense. Influenced by the outside world, though, and by my worries and desires, and others of the Blood. It comes with the magic.” That wasn’t strictly true; long before she’d manifested emanations, she could access the phantasmagory and Shanasee used the phantasmagory while refusing the magic.

“I’m not personally familiar with dreams. Why do you stay? You seem coherent. Can you not control your return?” The man’s voice was as close as her shadow.

“When I want to return, I do. If I don’t want to return, I can’t.”

Jinriki demanded, “Well, come back, then.”

She said, “But I don’t want to.” She set off walking across the eidolon graveyard.

O
nce
, the fortress had been just an old wing of the Palace. But when Benjen the Bastard announced his second Blight by kidnapping the baby son of King Math from his nursery, that old wing changed almost overnight. As Math, Shonathan, and the cousins hunted Benjen, Pell the builder and Yithiere the guardian turned a near-ruin into a twisty stronghold for the other children, for the spouses, and for the Regents.

When it was all over, when Math and Benjen were both dead, the family was happy to leave the fortress behind. But Yithiere kept the locks clean, the traps ready to arm. He rebuilt some of the corridor maze, and rememorized the routes. And after his Regent Zavien died, he moved back in.

Kiar laid her head on his shoulder as he carried her down grey halls. He moved quickly, silently. He was always silent unless there was something he needed to say. When Kiar was ten, he’d told her, “The less you say, the less those who listen can learn about you.”

Then he was putting her on her feet again. “Can you stand? Can you walk?” he asked her, feeling her forehead. “I need a hand free to work the doors.”

She smiled at him and tried to tell him about the words in her head. The road, the plague, the guardsmen. The cattle. He put his hand to her mouth. Then he touched the wall. It swung open silently and he pulled her through it. The floor beyond was bright and dark, like Logos and eidolon.

A moon-bright wolf emerged from Yithiere, shedding a dull glow. It led them across the floor. Then Yithiere slid another door open and drew her through into a dusty sitting room and bolted it behind him.

“What did he do?” she wondered. “Twist. Don’t let him bother you. It’s too much trouble, and once you start being bothered you just can’t stop.” For some reason, that was funny, so she snickered.

Her father looked around. “This will do. Rest on the sofa. Are you thirsty? I can fetch water.” But he stood there, watching her. “I wish Zavien was still alive. I get tired….” He looked around the room and then up into a corner. “I can’t quite….”

Then he stared at Kiar again, squeezed his eyes shut. “Zavien’s gone. I’m stronger than this.”

Kiar summoned a smile for her father. “I am very thirsty, yes. And cold.” But of course, there were no windows in the fortress. Her head was stuffed with felt and parts of her skin prickled. “I can watch myself. See?” And suddenly she could see her body from the outside, as if she was standing beside herself. She watched as her mouth moved and words fell out. “Is this the Logos? But there are no shadows on my skin.”

She watched as Yithiere put his hand on her face and head, and then set his jaw. “I’ll be back. Sit down.”

“Yes, sit down,” she said to herself. Her knees bent and she sat. Yithiere looked at her a moment more and then strode to a bookcase and touched a volume. The bookcase slid aside and he vanished into the hall beyond. The entire room was dusty and untended, except for the bookcase, which gleamed.

It couldn’t be the Logos she saw through, for there was no taint at all, not where she sat, not where Yithiere walked. That meant it was pure delusion, a half-step into the phantasmagory. The Kiar she saw was a ghost, an eidolon, just like one of poor Shonathan’s twins.

The fuzziness in her head became a spike of pain. Time passed while she was lost in fire and misery. Where was the water? She was so thirsty. Then she became aware of a gentle knocking at the door Yithiere had bolted. A voice called through it, “Kiar?”

Kiar pushed herself to her feet and stumbled over to the door, where she slid open the bolt and fumbled at the latch. When she eased the door open, her older cousin, Shanasee, was standing beyond, with Cara, her Regent, peering over her shoulder. She looked like a more mature copy of Tiana, although she kept her hair as short as Kiar’s.

Shanasee and Cara both had a glowing inscribed orb, and Cara had a bag with another inactive orb and a bundle of candles sticking out. Even so, Kiar was struck to unexpected tears by Shanasee’s courage, coming this far into the unlit fortress, because she knew darkness upset Shanasee. “So little light. So brave,” she croaked, then fell against a bookcase.

Briskly, Shanasee said, “If what the servants say is true, we’ll be living by lamps alone in ten years. But for now, I’ve come to bring you out of here.”

Kiar said, “Father—I mean, Yithiere—has already rescued me from Twist. I’m not sure what Twist was going to do, though. Would you like to come in?” She slipped down to the floor.

“She’s really sick, Shan,” said Cara, a tall woman whose hair had started greying when she and Shanasee were teenagers. “Let’s get her back to the seat.”

She and Shanasee crowded through the door and put Kiar on the couch. One of Yithiere’s eidolons trotted in behind them and joined the moon-glow wolf. Jant’s fox eidolon followed and scooted under a chair. Shanasee didn’t have eidolons now either, though she’d manifested them before Benjen had died. Like Tiana, she was dependent on her relatives to protect her Regent from whatever stalked them.

Kiar wondered if a wolf eidolon was still protecting Lisette as well. How many eidolons was Yithiere maintaining? Again, she was struck to tears. He tried to be so tireless. But the more eidolons one projected, the less resources one had for one’s self.

Shanasee said, “We’re here to rescue you from Yithiere, actually. Where is he?” She looked around and Kiar pointed at the polished bookcase.

Cara sighed. “That man. Well, we can carry you between us.”

Kiar hesitated and then said, “His eidolons are here. I don’t want to make him angry. And he’s trying so hard.”

Shanasee said, “Is it true, people have died from the sickness you have?”

“Am I sick?” She tried to remember how she could have become sick. Had something happened? She was riding home. There was something—

The chaos in Kiar’s mind overwhelmed her again.

S
he woke
from dry heaves with Cara standing beside her, patting her back, and Shanasee saying, “—through the servant’s hallways. They know you very well and they care about Kiar too.”

Yithiere growled, “Kiar is not theirs, or yours, to be concerned over. Get out.”

Kiar remembered freshly shaved skin under her fingers. “Where’s Twist? Why isn’t he here?”

Cara said, “Oh, sweetheart, he doesn’t want to make things worse with your fool of a father.” The moon-glow eidolon began growling at Cara. The two eidolons protecting Cara growled back.

“No, please, don’t fight,” Kiar begged. “I’m sorry I got sick. I’m not sure how—” She gasped and curled up into a ball, clutching her stomach as cramps seized through her.

Shanasee said, “Give her some of that water, Yithiere. Or let me.” She reached out for the pitcher and goblet Yithiere still held.

Cara said, “The fortress can’t protect the children from this.” She stroked Kiar’s hair.

“No!” he said. “I don’t have to listen to you. I don’t have to listen to any of you. None of you. You don’t know what I know.” He held the water away from Shanasee, narrowing his eyes at the inscribed orb in her other hand. “You have those. That’s how you got here.”

Shanasee flinched away. “Don’t touch my lights.” Something in her voice had changed, something crackled under her words. “If you have ever loved me, don’t.”

“Then go! Leave, or else….” The two wolf eidolons stopped growling at each other and turned as one to fix mad, yellow eyes on Shanasee.

Shanasee froze. Cara stood up hastily. “Neither of you want to hurt each other. Let’s all agree that we want Kiar better and give her some of that water, hmm?” She reached across Yithiere for the pitcher. He jerked, looking around wildly. The water spilled on the floor.

Comprehension finally seeped through the fog in her brain. Kiar realized she was very sick, and her father was not just refusing to allow other people to care for her, but arguing with them and threatening them. Fear boiled through her. She moaned and began sobbing: dry, painful cries that threatened her ability to explain and calm matters. “People… have been dying. But… not fast. I was fine yesterday. Yesterday? Was it yesterday? I don’t remember.”

The wolf eidolons snarled in response.

Kiar stepped outside herself again and stared, horrified, at the tableau around her. Then, she fled. She left madness for the phantasmagory, but the wolves of Yithiere howled and hunted her into the dark.