“The Maiden smiles,” Arinei responded. She did look pleased; Miryo could see just a hint of it around her eyes.
“Let the testing continue.”
This time the response was not Miryo’s. She faced Satomi, who met her gaze as she sang the words. “No one stands ready for the Void. The test begins. May the Goddess as Warrior have mercy on your soul.”
Everything vanished.
There was nothing. Not only was the Hall gone, and the Primes who stood in it, but nothing came to replace it. There was no wind, no images, nothing at all. Miryo had been struck deaf and blind—more, even; her skin felt no sensations, she smelled no odors, even her own sense of her body was gone. There was nothing.
And Miryo knew it was the Void, but even that thought would not come, would not form in the emptiness. There was nothing.
Not even herself.
Her heart would have beat faster, had she a heart. She would have been terrified, had fear been able to exist. Her mind, were it not gone, would have dissolved into shrieking insanity. But it was gone, they were all gone; there was nothing except the Void, and the Void was nothing.
Her scream rang in the vaulting of the Hall.
Miryo stared around at the five women, the stones of the Hall, her own body. Her eyes drank in the images. The sound of her own panicked breathing was music; the touch of the air pure bliss. The world had returned.
She had screamed. Perhaps she had failed. But at the moment, Miryo could not bring herself to care; nothing mattered except the return of the world.
“You have glimpsed the Void, for an instant only, and it has marked you,” Satomi sang. An instant? Eternity, and no time at all. Miryo’s mind flinched back from it. “The Warrior has tested you, and you have not been destroyed.”
“Let our newest fly on the wings of power.”
The five women sang that phrase as one, and as the last syllable was released, something flooded into Miryo.
Pain annihilated the world.
6
Ravelle [Mirage]
Mirage awoke with a start, and didn’t recognize her surroundings.
She sat up swiftly, battle instincts leaping into readiness. No one else was in the small, plain room. It was sparsely furnished, with just the bed she had been lying on, a small wardrobe, and a chair. The wardrobe doors were closed.
Moving as silently as possible, Mirage rose and stepped over to the wardrobe. Then, after taking a single breath to steady her muscles, she threw the door open.
No one was inside.
Reassured that she was alone in the room, she turned to survey it once more. Her saddlebags were there, piled on the chair; their presence did not clear up her confusion in the slightest. Where was she? And how in the Goddess’s many names had she gotten there? Her blades were with everything else, so whatever had happened, she wasn’t a prisoner.
Did I get waring drunk, and just don’t remember it? I don’t have a hangover, though. Headache, yes. There was a mildly painful lump on one side of her head. Was there a fight? What happened?
There was a tiny window on one wall, but it only looked out onto a narrow alley and another building beyond. Nothing moved in the alley save for a stray cat. No clues there to help her figure out where she was.
Which left the door.
She belted on her sword and dagger before trying the handle. This situation might turn out to be harmless, but she’d rather be overarmed and laugh at herself than walk into trouble unprepared. The handle turned easily, and she stepped into an unfamiliar hallway.
Other doors lined its length; she put an ear to each one briefly, but heard no sounds from inside. When she came to the end of the hallway she found a staircase leading downward, curtained off by strings of enameled beads. Teria, then. I recognize the style. What am I doing in Teria? And where in the Warrior’s name is Kerestel?
The stairs threatened to creak, so Mirage took them slowly, shifting her weight onto each one with exaggerated care. The effort made her head pound. It took forever to get downstairs. When she reached the next-to-last step, she flattened herself against the wall and peered through the beads into the room beyond.
She was looking into the common room of an inn. It was filled with trestle tables, each flanked by a pair of benches. At the other end of the room, a few comfortable chairs made an arc around the hearth. The fireplace was cold and empty right now, but Mirage saw a familiar blond head over the back of one of the chairs.
Alerted by his own instincts, Eclipse rose and saw her through the beads. “Sen!”
Mirage relaxed her wary muscles. She pushed through the curtain and walked to the middle of the room, survey-ing it. “At the risk of sounding like a minstrel’s bad tale, where are we, and what happened?”
He gave her a careful look. “I can answer that, sort of, but not really.” Taking her arm, he pulled her gently toward a chair. “Come sit down, and I’ll tell you what I know.”
“This isn’t reassuring me,” she said as she followed his pull.
“I bet.” They sat down, and he looked directly at her. “I can’t really answer your question because I don’t understand what happened. We were riding along, doing nothing special. It was pretty far into the night, but we were trying to get to Chiero, and neither of us was tired—or at least you said you weren’t—so we kept going. Then you pitched headfirst out of your saddle onto the road.”
Mirage’s eyes widened.
“I think you were unconscious before you hit the ground, but if you weren’t, the fall certainly put you out.” Eclipse shrugged. “We were almost to Chiero by then, so I tied you onto your saddle and brought you here to Marell’s. That was yesterday.”
Marell. A Silverfire agent, though not one Mirage had ever dealt with personally, hence the unfamiliarily of her surroundings. He owned this inn; it gave him a good means for gathering information that he could then pass along to the Hunters.
“Do you remember any of this?” Eclipse asked, worry lining his face.
Mirage leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees, and stared at the floor. “We left Starfall. There was nothing else important in Tari-nakana’s house, not after the itinerary.” In her peripheral vision she saw Eclipse nod, but he did not interrupt her. “We went to Nasha in Handom; she told us Avalanche had last been seen on the road to Insebrar. On the way east, we wrote to our witch contact, because we wanted to ask about the new Fire Heart Key. She said she’d meet us in person in Ravelle. We agreed because it was on the way to Insebrar. She hadn’t known about Avalanche working for Tari-nakana.”
“What about the fall? Do you remember that?”
It was hard to pick any one day or night of riding out from the rest; the last five years of her life were a smear of roads, inns, towns, saddling her horse, unsaddling her horse, building campfires, being rained on, with only occasional landmarks to distinguish one bit of traveling from another. She closed her eyes, but it didn’t help her memory. Riding, riding, then a blank. “No. I don’t.”
A short, tidy man came into the room then and introduced himself to Mirage as Marell. After reassuring him of her health—she felt fine, aside from the lump on her head—she asked about Avalanche.
Marell nodded briskly. “Bodyguard job in Vilardi. The Silk Consortium is there, negotiating with some of the major shipping companies. There’s a lot of bad blood, so the head of the Consortium hired Avalanche to keep poison out of his food and daggers out of his back.”
“How long are they there for?”
He tapped his fingers against his chin, head tilted back, apparently doing mental calculations. “They broke up recently over some argument, I believe, but it was a temporary halt only. They’re aiming for an agreement within the next week.”