Chapter 46

Chapter 46: Chapter 46

The air past the laboratory tasted of dry dust and old, petrified herbs.

I left the cages behind and followed a narrow corridor cut so cleanly into the limestone it might have been poured there. Astra flew a few inches off my shoulder, his wings making no sound at all. The sapphire rune under his feathers and the Mystic Runes in my sword kept passing the same slow pulse back and forth, a warm current running both ways, and the only thing keeping my battered nerves from tipping into shock.

The corridor opened into a round chamber. Unlike everything else down here, this room had been sealed against the damp and the rot. Shelves of petrified wood ran along the smooth walls, bowed under rows of thick glass vials capped with blackened wax, and rusted iron lockboxes sat stacked in the corners.

I nudged the lid off the nearest open crate with the tip of my sword. Inside, wrapped tight in oilcloth that looked untouched by time, were thick blocks of dried, salted meat and dehydrated roots. On a stone workbench, a few open clay jars gave off the sharp, medicinal stink of camphor, sulfur, and pine resin.

I dragged a wrapped block out and slid down against the iron until I hit the floor. Tore the oilcloth open with my teeth and bit into the meat. Tough as boiled leather, and it tasted of nothing but salt. My body didn’t care. The Ember, a heap of cold ash not long ago and kept lit now by Astra’s presence, took the food and burned it straight into heat, which went rushing through my drained muscles. I ate until my stomach cramped from the sudden weight of it, swallowing the dry roots almost whole.

Then the wounds.

I reached up, took a vial off the nearest shelf, cracked the wax seal, and pulled the stopper. The thick, greenish liquid inside hissed as it met the air. I didn’t hesitate. I poured it straight over the arrow wound in my arm and the infected bites on my thigh.

The pain was total, a white, instant chemical burn that dragged a snarl out of me through clenched teeth. But the flesh answered just as fast. Torn vessels clamped shut. Ruined muscle twisted itself back together, the Bud’s metabolism running hot and the Shaman’s old medicine driving it harder.

Astra dropped onto my knee and watched me with his sharp black eyes. I reached out with a shaking, bloody hand and stroked the grey feathers along his neck. The warm pulse of his rune came up through my fingertips and gave my mind something solid to hold onto while the healing tore through me.

At the far end of the storeroom, between two stone pillars, stood a pair of huge dark granite doors covered edge to edge in concentric, angular glyphs. The only way on.

Everything in me wanted no part of them. Dread came off that cold stone in waves, the same heavy, static pressure the air holds right before lightning strikes. I knew, with a certainty that didn’t need proof, that whatever waited behind those doors wasn’t a brittle skeleton or a clockwork trap.

I wasn’t going through there with shaking hands. I needed rest first. I crossed my arms, let my head fall back against the crate, and shut my eyes. The bird’s quick heartbeat against my knee lulled me under. A deep, dreamless sleep. The food and the potions got on with rebuilding me.

When I woke, the air in the chamber had gone freezing. I stood. The wounds were gone, thick pink scars raised where they’d been, and my shoulders felt coiled and heavy, charged with fresh strength.

I closed my hand around the hilt, thumb sliding over the diamond-shaped pommel, and nodded to Astra. He took off, made one lap of the ceiling, and landed on my right shoulder.

At the doors I set both gloved palms flat against the freezing stone, dropped my weight low, and pushed with everything I had. The granite groaned, ground across its hidden iron hinges, and slid back.

I stepped over the threshold, and the cramped world of the tunnels ended.

I was standing on the rim of an enormous circular arena, big enough to swallow the main parade grounds of Trivi whole. Smooth rock walls climbed hundreds of feet and vanished into the dark of the ceiling. Under my boots, the floor was churned earth, dry sand, and packed white ash. Terraced rock steps ringed the whole perimeter, a grotesque amphitheater built for an audience that had never existed.

On my third step onto the sand, the air cracked with a deafening, concussive boom.

I spun around. The granite doors had slammed shut behind me, the stone fusing straight into the wall. The seam was gone. No trace of it. No way back.

A heartbeat later, the dark was torn away.

Gigantic iron braziers, sunk into the amphitheater walls at even intervals, ignited all at once. They went up as towering pillars of white-hot fire, and the glare was harsh and merciless, laying the whole empty expanse bare.

Dead center in that sea of ash and sand stood a tree.

An abomination of a tree. A colossal, twisted monolith of pitch-black wood, easily as thick as an Imperial watchtower, without a single leaf. Hundreds of jagged, spear-like branches crowned it, woven into an impenetrable thicket of iron-hard thorns. Its roots lay bare, digging into the arena floor like the taut, bulging tendons of a titan.

The light touched it, and it began to move.

The sound was the worst part: ten thousand bones cracking at once. The main roots tore themselves out of the sand and turned out to be limbs, thick and jointed, studded with razor-sharp spikes of petrified wood. The trunk twisted and split down the middle, the black bark peeling back to reveal a sickly green core, pulsing with magic, buried deep in the wood.

It gave me no time to study any of it.

A root the size of a battering ram lashed across the arena like a whip. I threw myself sideways and rolled through the ash, and the root slammed down exactly where I’d been standing a heartbeat before. The packed earth vaporized. The shockwave lifted me off my feet and flung me backward, and I hit the sand and skidded several yards.

No mud monster hit like that. This was distilled magic, with the force of a Bud Burst behind it. I could shatter steel and bone myself, and one direct hit would still snap my spine like a dry twig.

I scrambled up, sword already drawn. "Astra!" I roared, as the tree lifted three more spiked roots into the air.

The falcon didn’t hesitate. He dropped from the arena’s high ceiling in a vertical dive, the rune under his wing flaring like a falling star. Nothing was going to scratch that black wood, so he didn’t try. He shot straight across the exposed green core and let out a shriek that rang with sapphire magic.

The flash of blue light threw the tree off. Its three strikes came down wide, crashing into the sand around me, and dust and ash boiled up in a choking cloud.

I took the opening. Speed was the only edge I had over this thing, and I spent all of it.

I drove the Ember’s heat down into my thighs and ran. Ducked under a root snapping back. Vaulted a jagged slab of rock the last impact had torn out of the ground. Threw myself at the trunk.

The tree saw me coming. Two spear-like branches dropped out of the canopy, timed to run me through.

I flipped my grip on the sword and shoved a sudden surge of heat into the runes. The dark steel hissed, and a crackling burst of static tore out of it. The blue arc caught the falling wood. It couldn’t burn it, not with bark that dense, but the discharge slammed against it hard enough to knock the spikes off line. They still raked across the leather on my shoulders and shredded it as I slid under them on my knees.

After that it stopped feeling like a fight. It felt like weather: a storm with a grudge, hitting with the weight of a whole siege cohort and never pausing for breath. The floor was fast becoming a field of smoking craters.

Above it all, Astra was a blur of grey and white, diving and climbing through the thorned canopy with a grace that shouldn’t have been possible. Whenever my muscles got close to giving out, the resonance between us pumped a steady pulse of heat into my Ember and dragged me back from the edge.

A horizontal sweep came for me. I dropped flat, bounced up, and ran up the length of a root that had buried itself in the sand, using it as a ramp.

The green core was ten feet away. The tree ripped its bark open wider, gathering itself for a frontal shockwave that would throw me off.

Astra hit it like a bullet. He sank his talons into the bark at the very edge of the core and let out a screech that rang off the walls, and the concentrated pulse of sapphire magic froze the tree’s inner flow of power. For one millisecond, it just stopped.

That was all I needed.

I launched myself into the air. Everything the Bud had left in me went into the throw, and I felt the veins in my arms swell under the pressure. I drove the sword forward in a two-handed thrust with every volt of static I could pack into its diamond-sharp tip.

The blade went into the green core.

I didn’t let up. My whole body weight went in behind the steel, all the way to the crossguard, and I wrenched my wrists around. The static poured into the tree’s channels of magic.

The detonation was muffled, deep as an earthquake underground, and it tore through the beast from the inside out. The black wood split lengthwise with a crack that filled the amphitheater. The green light sputtered and died at once, and thick, boiling, acidic smoke took its place. The implosion threw me back, and I landed hard on the sand as the tree collapsed in on itself in a rain of burning ash and splintered wood.

I lay flat on my back, lungs burning. Astra glided down out of the smoky ceiling and settled on my heaving chest.

I’d survived. Again.

I forced myself up, brushed the grey ash off my ruined tunic, and limped toward the smoldering stump of whatever had ruled this arena. The trunk had split clean in half, like an oyster shell opened wide. In the middle of the charred remains, on a small pedestal of petrified inner roots, something sat untouched.

Not a wooden heart. A small, thick diary bound in pale grey leather.

A rune hung a few inches above it, made of nothing but condensed light. It was a pristine white that throbbed with a slow, ancient rhythm, and nothing about it resembled the chaotic fire of the Ember or the earthy pulse of mud magic.

I lifted the diary off the pedestal, carefully, and thumbed through the yellowed pages. The handwriting was frantic and jagged. The exiled Shaman’s.

The Rune of Antiquity, I read, the words lit by the glare of the floating rune.

The pages laid out the mad culmination of his exile. After all those failures on corpses and animals, he had finally done it. He had synthesized a power far beyond the fire the Imperial Buds carried, a new rune, an ancient one, made by his own hands.

But it came with a cruel catch. A mud-born barbarian’s body couldn’t absorb it. Coalition flesh would burn itself to nothing from the inside the moment it tried to hold the thing.

So he’d made himself a guardian. To keep his life’s great secret out of the Empire’s hands, and away from the ignorant fools of his own tribe, he had grown that tree: an immortal, bloodless thing, the only vessel that could stand up to the rune’s constant, ruinous radiation.

The final entry sat on the last page, the ink pressed deep into the paper. The rune wasn’t bound to the earth, it said, and it wasn’t bound to any body’s heat. It is the power of the stars. Its light does not merely burn. It illuminates time itself. I hypothesize that any flesh capable of sustaining its core will gain total control over light and, above all else, the divine gift of precognition.

I lowered the diary and stared into the throbbing starlight.

Something older called me, and I reached out with my right hand like a sleepwalker.

My gloved fingertips brushed the light.

The rune shattered like glass, went liquid, and poured into me through my skin. The cold was alien, a piercing, astral chill, nothing like the boiling fire of the Ember, absolute zero from somewhere far past the sky. The glyphs spread and burned themselves into my right arm from wrist to collarbone, a lattice of stars branded into the flesh.

I dropped to my knees and clutched the glowing arm to my chest. My mind was torn out of the present.

The vision went off behind my eyelids.

I saw space itself, whole, all at once. I could follow the air currents moving through the cavern, invisible until now. I saw a hidden, sloping tunnel tucked behind the northernmost brazier. I saw water running upward through the rock to feed the roots of the swamp above. The whole route out burned itself into my skull as a map, so clear it frightened me. I knew where to put each boot, which loose rocks to avoid, which shadows to step through.

I opened my eyes. The iris of my right eye shimmered, a pale reflection of stars. White marks of the Ancient Rune glowed across my whole right arm, and my body held them steady. Flesh born of the mud would have burned to nothing. Mine, remade by the Bud, had taken the light and kept it.

I looked at Astra. He watched me in silence, almost reverent. I stood tall in the middle of the empty arena and fixed my eyes on the north wall, on one exact patch of stone the vision had shown me.

Time to go back to the surface.