The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) (22 page)

Eagerly, Jovian opened his as well, and found a mirrored green spark. He dropped the green fabric, which whispered to the ground at his feet. He examined the spark, noting that Angelica was already reaching for hers. He did the same, watching how the infinitesimally small light illuminated his hand in shades of green as he gathered the spark near him.

But even as he was about to ask what to do with it, the spark became a flame that lashed out at him in green tendrils, catching him in the chest, holding him in place like a giant umbilical cord. Other tendrils of fire wrapped around his legs and his arms, around his neck, and even arced toward his eyes. And then the fire was gone, transferred from the air before him and into his being through the tendrils which had bound him only moments before.

Inside he felt the two other gifts he had been given by the previous Baba Yagas greet this new force as if it were an old friend. He felt them join, become whole, become a single force from the triumvirate of power that had been granted to him by the three sister hags.

“That’s my gift,” Baba Yaga said as they both looked up at her. “The courage to do that which must be done.”

Jovian opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.

“No time for that. You are needed elsewhere, and honestly I tire of you.” As she finished speaking, a silvery blue light grew in the space before them. Jovian remembered the light in the center of Vorustum-Apaleer, and he wondered at how much the two lights looked alike.

“That’s right, through the light. Go. Go!” Baba Yaga insisted. By then she sounded so hostile that Jovian didn’t waste any time stepping through the light, and into a chamber so bizarre that he could barely comprehend it.

Angelica could hardly imagine the room she had stepped into. In fact, if anyone had ever told her that such a place existed, she would never have believed them, let alone been able to envision it.

It was a chamber built of the same material the rest of Vorustum-Apaleer was made of, some shiny material that was both cool and slick to the touch. There were no seams, and apparently nothing holding the walls together, as nails and mortar would hold human buildings together.

Along the walls slithered the familiar language they had seen on the buildings outside. It was a language she knew, yet couldn’t fully read. It was more like the symbols gave her impressions of words, but didn’t actually form words she understood. It was a weird language; she would see one symbol, and she knew it was either a name, or a word, or even directions to a place far from the Great Realms. As she read the words, a lilting melody ran through her mind in a language she couldn’t understand, but her soul comprehended.

Concentrating on the language was giving her a headache, and her attention was drawn up to points of light in tiny glass globes that ran the length of the ceiling and the walls. They were almost like the candles and lamps she was so accustomed to. Tentatively she touched one, expecting to be burned, but she wasn’t. It was a pure, white light, and she came to understand that this light was cold.

“What kind of wyrd runs this place?” Jovian asked, looking at a strange black chair-like thing which sat facing the shiny wall, which had a window in it that didn’t look outside. Jovian touched the window, and when he did it flickered to life in a miasma of gray dots that seemed to skitter across the surface of the glass.

“I’ve been wondering that myself,” Joya said, stepping from a cubicle beside Angelica. Angelica gasped, her heart suddenly in her throat.

“Where did you come from?” Angelica asked when her heart had stopped hammering.

“From this room filled with odd vines.” Joya motioned behind her, and Angelica looked inside the dark room. Sure enough, inside there were vines of various colors coming out of the wall, only to connect to other parts of the wall for reasons Angelica couldn’t understand. Joya shrugged and closed the door.

“What is this place?” Jovian asked, and surprisingly, from the walls there came an answer.

“The Vault of Fates,” the voice said. It was oddly hollow, like it wasn’t coming from a real throat at all.

“Like in the Well of Wyrding?” Angelica wondered. She sat down in another black chair near Jovian and yelped when it spun with the momentum of her sitting down. Regaining her equilibrium, Angelica stopped the chair with her feet, and slowly spun back around to look at the window Jovian gazed at, though nothing was happening on the glass other than the strange gray dots.

“Similar, yet different.” The voice never changed in cadence as it spoke. “This is the Vault of Fates for angels. The human Evyndelle cannot track the fates of angels, yet we can.”

“We?” Joya pondered, standing behind Angelica, not sure if she could trust one of the chairs on the other side.

“So you record the fate of
all
angels?” Jovian wondered, leaning his elbows on a metallic desk before him that was lined with knobs and buttons. Angelica hoped he didn’t accidentally hit one, considering the way the window reacted to his touch.

“All angels and half-breeds,” the window spoke, though, oddly, the sound seemed to come from the walls, not the window itself.

“So you can see our future?” Angelica asked.

“No. Angels create their own future, there is no determined path for the host,” the voice said.

“But you can see our past, you can see our present?” Jovian wondered.

“Yes,” the room spoke.

“Then, maybe you can tell us what our mother Sylvie was speaking of when she told us she had killed Arael in the wrong way,” Jovian said.

Suddenly the gray dots on the screen began to coalesce in the center of the glass, and when the image cleared, Angelica could see words written on the window, like on the pages of a book. It looked like the table of contents at the beginning of a book. At the top of the page was printed in a strange font: Results of Sylvie LaFaye and Arael.

Beneath it were several entries, and Angelica imagined they were like journal entries where they would be able to read about her mother and Arael.

“Where do we start?” Jovian asked, looking at his sisters. Joya came closer to read the glass better, and then she pointed at one.

“Try that one, the one that says ‘Final fight, death of Arael,’” Joya said.

“We don’t want to see any others?” Jovian asked.

“I would love to see them all, but the truth is, we just don’t have the time,” Joya said. “This is most important. If mother has been indicating that she didn’t kill him right, we need to see what happened, so that we can fix it.”

“How do we see it?” Jovian asked.

“Which entry?” the room asked.

“The final fight,” Jovian said.

Suddenly the words were gone and the window turned black. When the darkness faded, they were looking at the inside of a blackened room. Along the walls hung torches and braziers, licking fire balefully into the air. They could see their mother, short, slight of frame, long brown hair braided behind her back and looped around her head. She stood with the ivory shin-buto that Jovian now wore on his back.

“You killed her,” Sylvie said.

Angelica gasped. It was the first time she had seen and heard her mother outside of her dreams and visions. It was so easy to imagine that Sylvie was nothing more than a figment of her imagination, but now that she was seeing her, watching this alien moving picture, it was amazing for Angelica to imagine that she had
actually
been in contact with her mother. Tears welled up in her eyes, knowing that she would never truly see her mother, but the pictures were moving, and there was more to be seen.

“How could you do that? She loved you!” Sylvie said, holding her sword down to her side, seemingly forgotten.

The image zoomed out, and Angelica could see a shadow sitting on a throne raised up off the blackened ground.

“But I didn’t love her,” the voice said, full of moonlight and velvet. It caressed Angelica’s skin, and it was easy for her to see how her aunt was able to fall for this man. His voice was seductive, and awoke sensations in her body seldom felt.

“You betrayed everyone,” Sylvie continued. “You betrayed me. I loved you like a brother, Arael.”

“And that’s my problem how?” he asked. There was a smile in his voice. “Why did you come here, Sylvie?”

“To take revenge for Pharoh,” Sylvie stepped closer to the throne.

“You traveled all the way past the Black Gates for a little revenge?” Arael said. “And how do you expect to get out?”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “All that matters is your death.”

“But I’m here, beyond the Black Gates. Isn’t that where you wanted me? When you turned my faithful alarist on me, you wanted to send me here.”

“I wanted you dead and suffering. Yet here you live like a king.”

“Indeed, I’m revered here.” The figure stood. Angelica sat back in her seat as the picture adjusted to get his full height into the window. Arael was tall, and behind him spread leathery wings, jointed like elbows with claws at each bend.

“And here you will die,” Sylvie said.

Without further delay Arael launched himself at Sylvie, and she was lost in a flurry of black wings and startling speed. They watched their mother dart in and out of his reach, slicing here and there as she went. Blood painted the floor, both hers and Arael’s. But no matter how she struck him, Arael seemed to gain in strength while Sylvie tired.

“Yes, feed me your hate!” he triumphed. With a heavy backhand Sylvie slammed into a basalt wall and tumbled to the ground, her shin-buto sliding away from her grasp. She pushed herself against the wall, holding her shoulder and panting for breath. “I could do this all day, yet you don’t look like you can stand another minute.”

Arael reached for Sylvie, and when he almost had her in his grasp, Sylvie slammed her hand into his, and there was such a flash of pure white light that Angelica was momentarily blinded. It took long enough for her vision to return that when it did, Sylvie was standing over Arael, who now lay prone on the ground. Sylvie lifted her sword, and with a great heave, slammed the point through Arael’s heart.

Blood gushed from the wound, and into the air drifted a blackness like smoke. It smothered her mother, who stumbled back, away from the figure, coughing at the putrid energy oozing from her foe.

When the blackness finally cleared, Sylvie grabbed her sword, cleaned it on Arael’s clothing, and stumbled out of the range of the window’s vision.

The darkness of the image dissolved into frantic gray dots once more, and Angelica was left stunned. What she had seen was too much, and how was she even able to see it? It was like she’d been there, looking in on a private moment, as if she had been a bug on the wall. For several moments they were all silent, stunned by what they had seen.

“But what does that mean? How do we kill him?” Angelica wondered.

The voice was silent for several minutes, then, “I don’t understand.”

“It’s not going to be able to tell you,” Joya said. “That probably isn’t in any line of fate.”

“But we can guess,” Jovian said.

Angelica was already nodding. “Yes, if mother killed him out of hatred and revenge, and that’s what his power thrives on, then we have to kill him out of love, from a place of forgiveness.”

“Isn’t killing kind of contrary to love and forgiveness?” Joya asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Not necessarily,” Jovian said. “If you are out hunting, you don’t kill an animal because you hate it. You kill the animal because you have a need to survive, and the animal helps that. It would be the same way with Arael. We need to kill him so that everyone else can go on living.”

“We don’t need to do it out of a place of hatred,” Angelica agreed.

“But it’s more than that.” Joya stepped away from the two of them and leaned against the opposite wall. “You can’t have any hatred for him in your heart. Is that something you can do?”

“Yes,” Jovian said, but Angelica looked at her hands again. The truth was, she didn’t think she could find any love for Arael in her heart. “Angie?” Jovian said, drawing her attention to his face. “What are you thinking?”

“Oh, Jovian, as if you don’t already know,” Angelica joked. “How can we love him?” she went on. “How can we
not
kill Arael out of hatred? Think of all the things he’s done to us: he destroyed our home, he kidnapped our sister, and he changed everything about our lives. Because of him we are in untold danger, and he is trying to destroy everything good in the realms. How are we just supposed to turn a blind eye to all of that?”