“She killed him,” Sword said, offering him the bottle. “My head is chock-full of the worst kinds of magical secrets, and she couldn’t risk him knowing them too.”
“Damn.”
Sword put his arm around Heath’s shoulders and squeezed. It felt…natural.
“Sword,” Heath said, “you’re wasted.”
“We’re good together, Heath.”
“No, we weren’t. You would come to my home blind drunk and sobbing at obscene hours of the night. Catherine was right—”
“No, I mean you and me, the Sword, are amazing together. We’ve been with each other through thick and thin. Fuck, we argue like an old married couple. And this body still has feelings for you. I know it couldn’t work with Maddox, but he wasn’t a part of this life. I’m your fucking partner
and
the guy you used to fuck. I—”
“Jessa, are you okay?” Heath asked, clearly looking to change the subject
“Capital.” Jessa glanced back. He couldn’t tell, but in the flicker of lightning, she might have been smirking. She continued walking.
“I love you,” Sword whispered in his ear. “I’m in love with you. Maybe I always have been…but I’ve never had the psyche to express that through any of my bodies. Guides…this is kind of a headfuck.”
“We have a job to do,” Heath stated. His body struggled with its desire. His best friend’s mind now resided in his hot crazy ex. Was that a dream come true or the beginning of another nightmare?
Heath blinked against the rain again. A lone figure stood on the roof of one of the mansions, his robes billowing wildly in the wind.
Probably just an Invocari.
Although Heath’s vision was blurry, he caught something in a flash of lightning that sent chills down his spine and stopped him in his tracks. He pointed at the shepherd’s crook in the man’s hand.
“Fuck,” Sword whispered.
Jessa stopped and glanced up. “What is it?”
“The Harbinger,” Heath said, “and he’s looking at the towers.”
“You want to talk to him?” Sword asked. “Hold on. I’ll get his attention.”
“Maddox, don’t.”
“Who is he?”
“Someone very old and very dangerous.” Heath grabbed Sword’s arm, but it did nothing to stop the stone bench from flying toward the Harbinger’s head. It missed by a good couple of feet, but the man’s head snapped in their direction. Even in the darkness of the storm, his white eyes shone like slivery lamps.
Silence fell on the empty street. Around them the rain slowed until the shimmering droplets quavered in the air, inching along slowly toward earth. The bench Sword had hurled at the man rotated in a lazy, tumbling arc over the house where the Harbinger perched.
Heath shoved Sword. “What the fuck?”
“I wasn’t trying to hit him,” Sword said. “He knows that.”
“We meet again,” the Harbinger called warmly to Heath.
He appeared in front of them, leaning on his crook. “Don’t fear. I’ve altered the flow of time around us to give us opportunity to speak so we won’t miss our respective appointments.”
“Please,” Jessa implored. “You’re clearly powerful, and we’re in need of aid. My mother plans something awful for this city and its people. They’re good and innocent of any crime that would merit this retribution. Simply name what you want, and I’ll grant it willingly.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Would you offer your life to save these people?”
“Jessa,” Heath whispered, “don’t bargain with him.”
She raised her chin and said, “Yes. I’m but one person, and if it’s to be my life or the lives of thousands, there can be no question.”
“I was merely curious whether her selflessness was sincere, priest.” The Harbinger shook his head. “The power of the Stormlords is locked by the most ancient of theurgies to any who don’t carry the blood. My wyrd doesn’t allow me to alter the course of events in any matter.”
“If you do nothing, you’re complicit in my mother’s evil,” Jessa declared.
“It is evil only from your eyes,” he replied. “The world is rife with injustice and suffering. For one creature to nourish itself, another must give its life unwillingly. For one kingdom to flourish, another must languish. For one to be elevated, others must be oppressed. The solution isn’t to change nature but to find balance in the greater pattern of history.”
“Bullshit,” Sword said. “You can stop this. I’m a fucking Architect—I know how magic works.”
“Then stop it,” the Harbinger challenged.
Heath nearly lost his stomach as his vision scrambled. When he recovered himself, they stood atop a tall tower. From the shape of it and the skyline, he judged they were on top of the Lyceum’s observation tower. He lurched forward and recovered his balance. Sword fell on his ass. Jessa swayed for an instant but kept her footing.
“Do you remember this place, Architect?” The Harbinger motioned to the surroundings with his crook. The rain remained slowed in freefall, but it somehow became more transparent, almost invisible. The two towers—that of the Invocari and the Assembly—spanned the waterfall of the massive Trident River tributaries.
“It rings a bell,” Sword said, picking himself up off the stone. “You want to throw me off the roof? Because that doesn’t work so well.”
“I’m one of a handful of beings in this cosmos who can permanently kill the mortal flesh you inhabit, Valor of Crigenesta,” the Harbinger mentioned casually. “That isn’t my reason for bringing you here. You’re here to bear witness to the fall of the towers.”
Jessa protested, “This is madness. If you can bring us here, you can bring us to the Thunderstone, and you can take us to my mother. You have the power to prevent this.”
“It already has happened.” The Harbinger sighed. “It happened as you walked toward your destination, minutes before you discovered me. The crash of thunder and pounding of rain prevented you from hearing it. Behold.”
They watched the Invocari tower as the rapids of the waterfall surged past the dams. The water didn’t fall over the cliff. Instead it turned upward as if falling toward the sky. The streams of white water reached toward the stars, misty at first but liquid as they grew closer together.
“No!” Jessa exclaimed.
“This is the past,” the Harbinger said. “Only an Architect, not bound by wyrd or Geas, could alter what has been written. Everyone has the potential to change the course of history; a very few are given the opportunity; and vanishingly fewer have the resolve to go through with it.”
The streams of water rising from the river waved like dancers in a line making sinuous motions with their bodies. The streams braided together, becoming pulsing blobs of water congealing into thrashing tentacles several stories tall.
“Mother’s summoning Kultea,” Jessa whispered. “I don’t understand how. She’s too far inland.”
Heath knew of Kultea. She was the kraken sea goddess of the Dominance. The figurehead of a religion where priests were blood mages rather than healers. The Dominance used their menacing goddess to frighten their laity into submission. Kultea didn’t offer redemption for the weak, only survival through placating her. He had thought it a different but equally effective way to enforce religion—Ohan was the carrot and Kultea the stick.
Surely as if he bore the Veritas Seal himself, Heath knew everything he saw to be true. He saw it with such clarity it was beyond vision. He thought only absently of his impaired eyes as he witnessed the events unfold.
Jessa grabbed his hand and held it firmly for comfort. He found himself returning the gesture. She needed an anchor; he needed it more.
“Kultea is real,” Heath whispered. In all his years of training after his mother’s death, he never had entertained the notion that such beings existed outside of the institutionalized superstitions of the various faiths.
Jessa turned to him. “Of course she is. They all are.”
The tentacles gracefully lashed toward the towers, wrapping themselves around the stone like pythons encircling their prey. Even though the towers were at least a mile away, he heard the crack and groan of the stone as the watery appendages squeezed against it.
Flocks of Invocari floated around the tower, waving their arms and freezing chunks of the tentacles; the ice fell away, and water rushed in to replace it faster than they could freeze it.
“You proved your point.” Sword turned away and drank from his bottle. “I can’t stop this.”
The tentacle lashed and struck the side of the Invocari tower, breaking through the stone. Then it pulled out a black sphere that absorbed all light around it. With a flexing motion, the tentacle crushed the stone and exploded into a cloud of black-and-purple dust. In that instant hordes of wraithlike Invocari tumbled from the sky, screaming and flailing toward the earth.
The tentacles around the Assembly tower tightened, and with a twist, the structure ripped apart, chunks falling to the Overlook and the Ambassadors’ District below. The crown of the tower plummeted into the Backwash. Seconds later the Invocari tower broke apart, raining its stone across the city.
In one of Kultea’s tendrils, Heath saw a spark of light—a willowy figure posed majestically and suspended within the water.
Satryn
. The tentacle lowered her gently into Oiler’s Park, near the Grand Menagerie.
The Harbinger said, “I can’t alter the past, but I can hasten the future. I’ll give you ten minutes you wouldn’t have had…”
With a sickening blurriness of vision, Heath found himself on a cobblestone street. Sword fell again, and his wine bottle shattered on the ground. Jessa seemed unfazed by the transition. “We must find the Thunderstone,” she said. “If my mother has the power to call Kultea this far away from the depths of the Abyss, it’s our only hope of defeating her.”
“You may have to be the person who does it, Jessa,” Heath said.
“Nah,” Sword protested. “’S’cool. I can TK that shit right into her. Hey, look—we’re here!”
The DiVarian estate stood at the end of Willow’s Witness Wynd. Lightning flashes all around them illuminated the decrepit estate and overgrown lawn. The DiVarians were a fallen house, their last member claimed by the harrowings. Heath had considered buying the place and renovating it, but it was a giant architectural monstrosity with sagging gables and peeling paint. Half of it was still unfinished, nearly a decade after construction had started. One half of the rusted front gate hung by a single hinge.
The trio marched up the cobblestone path toward the front door. Side by side they mounted the steps to the porch, and Sword blasted the double-door entrance, creating an explosion of splinters and sparks from the shattered warding glyphs.
“Let’s destroy these assholes,” he slurred, a gleam of murder in his eye.
A horde of revenants charged from the foyer, their dead fingernails reaching forward hungrily as they rasped in unison. Sword waved his arms, and the parquet floorboards erupted with the force of explosive traps. Jessa blasted them with lightning, laying down an easy staccato of suppressive fire. Her powers were instinctive, and she seemed surprised at her own capabilities.
Heath tossed off his water-soaked priestly robes as his companions made short work of the small army. He cleaned his fingernails as Sword brought a gaudy gold fainting couch low under the revenants, scooping them up and spinning them off in all directions.
“Wheee!” Sword exclaimed.
Jessa flung electricity at the revenants. “This is oddly gratifying.”
“Just let me know if either of you needs healing.” Heath smirked despite himself. They might have failed to anticipate the extent of Satryn’s power, but on the field, they made a fucking good team.
They strode through the destroyed double doors. Jessa paused over a dead body. “The embroidery on this one’s clothing…She was from Amhaven. They used my people to create this macabre army.” Her face went pale with rage.
“Maddox?”
Heath saw Riley storm out of a pair of double doors at the end of the hallway. Riley wore a white fur coat with no shirt underneath. He carried a walking stick adorned with the Landry eagle.
Esme walked by his side, nonchalantly twirling her knife and a blue chunk of pointy rock in her hands. Behind him stood a big man, a black wolf, and an ancient lady with a confused expression. Heath counted his blessings that the walking stick wasn’t another of Sword’s siblings. The eagle was clearly modern in design.
Esme sneered, “I thought you were in prison, Maddox.”
Riley looked at her in surprise. “You said he were vacationing in Barstea.”
“Your evil girlfriend lied to you, Riley,” Sword said, whipping out his blade. “I can cut my way out of anything. Except kitchen duty. I tried to mince carrots for a stew once and ended up turning the butcher’s block into kindling. But that’s why they make smaller blades.”
Esme narrowed her eyes. “You should measure a blade in blood, not inches.”
Heath stepped forward. “I know we have our differences. You killed my guy. I killed one of your guys. You tried to kill me. We can settle that later. The city is falling around us. The queen regent of Amhaven, Satryn Shyford, has destroyed the Dark Star and manifested an avatar of Kultea in the Trident waterfall. There’s no money in any of this if the Dominance claims Rivern. Give us the Thunderstone, and we’ll fix this mess. We can settle our grievances later.”