Godslayer.
It throbbed against her palm, singing a wordless song of power that made the blood surge in her veins; a Shaper’s power, power she did not know how to use. It didn’t matter. It was a Shard of the Souma, and it had another purpose. Cerelinde straightened and whirled, prepared to fend off the Sunderer.
He had not moved.
“You see,” he murmured. “I kept my word.” He took a step toward her, turning his hands outward. “Finish your task.”
Although she could not have said for whom she wept, there were tears in her eyes, blurring her vision. Cerelinde tightened her grip on Godslayer’s haft. “Why?” she asked, her voice ragged with grief. “Why?”
The Shaper smiled. “All things must be as they must, little sister.”
He took another step forward and another, looming before her. The clean aroma of water had vanished, and the sweet, coppery scent of ichor filled her nostrils. A Shaper’s blood, spilled many Ages ago. An unhealing wound. Cerelinde raised the dagger between them. The Shard’s deadly edges glimmered with its own rubescent light. “Stay back!”
Satoris Third-Born shook his head. “One way or the other, you will give me what is mine.” He extended his hand as he had done once before, in the moon-garden. “How do you choose, daughter of Erilonde?”
Now, as then, there was no menace in the gesture; save that it asked Cerelinde to betray all that she knew, all that she held dear. The traceries of marrow-fire that illumed the walls of the Chamber dimmed but slowly, revealing the Shaper’s grave features. His empty hand was outstretched and the vast expanse of his breast was before her, immaculate and vulnerable, marrow-lit obsidian flesh. Godslayer throbbed in her hand, a reminder of the dream of the Rivenlost. The Souma made whole and Urulat healed, a world no longer Sundered.
Will you dare to become the thing you despise?
“Arahila forgive me!” Cerelinde gasped.
Raising the dagger high, she plunged it into the Shaper’s breast
It sank with sickening ease, driving hilt-deep. Her clenched knuckles brushed his immortal flesh, immortal no more. He cried out; only once, a cry of such anguish, terror, and relief that Cerelinde knew it would echo in her ears for the remainder of her days. For a moment they swayed, locked together; her hand on Godslayer’s hilt, the Shaper’s hands rising to cover hers.
Cerelinde saw things.
She saw the dawning of the world and the emergence of the Seven Shapers within it and understood that it was at once an ending and a beginning; the death of Uru-Alat and the birth of a vast divergence. She saw mountains arise and rivers burst forth. She watched the world grow green and fruitful. She beheld the Shapers at their labor, crafting their Children in love and pride. She saw Satoris Third-Born walking alone and without fear in the deep places of the earth, conversing with dragons.
And then she saw no more.
Godslayer’s hilt slipped from her grasp. In the Chamber of the Font, the Sunderer had fallen to his knees, was slumping sideways. The shadow of a smile still hovered on his lips. In his breast, the dagger pulsed like a dying star.
“So,” he whispered. “It begins anew.”
Tanaros wasted no time examining the inert form of the Bearer. The lad’s role was finished; it no longer mattered whether he lived or died. Moving swiftly in the dim light, Tanaros made his way to the outer wall of the chasm and began to climb.
If fear had impelled his descent, no word was large enough for the emotion that hastened his ascent. He was dizzy and unfeeling, his body numb with shock. His limbs moved by rote, obedient to his will, hauling him up the harsh crags until he reached the surface.
The passages behind the walls were growing dimmer, the veins of marrow-fire fading to a twilight hue. Tanaros paused to catch his breath and regain his sense of direction.
Then, he heard the cry.
It was a sound; a single sound, wordless. And yet it held in it such agony, and such release, as shook the very foundations of Darkhaven. On and on it went, and there was no place in the world to hide from it. The earth shuddered, the floor of the passage grinding and heaving. Tanaros crouched beneath the onslaught of the sound, covering his ears, weeping without knowing why. Stray rocks and pebbles, loosened by the reverberations, showered down upon him.
Although it seemed as though the cry would never end, at last it did.
Tanaros found himself on his feet with no recollection of having risen. Drawing his black sword, he began running.
Within ten paces, it happened.
There was no warning, no sound; only a sudden dim coolness as the veins of marrow-fire that lit the passages dwindled in brightness and the temperature in the stifling passages plummeted. Elsewhere in the passageways, he could hear his distant madlings uttering sounds of dismay and fear. Somewhere, the horns of the Rivenlost were calling out in wild triumph. Above Darkhaven, the ravens wheeled in sudden terror. Ushahin shivered and pressed onward.
He was halfway to the Chamber of the Font when he heard the cry. It struck him like a blow, piercing him to the core. It was like no sound ever heard before on the face of Urulat, and he knew, with a horrible certainty, what it must portend. Ushahin stood, head bowed as rubble pelted him from above, his branded heart an agony within his hunched torso, arms wrapped around the useless case, and waited it out as another might outwait a storm.
Too late, always too late. The enemy was at the gate. The little weavers had completed their pattern. Haomane’s Prophecy hovered on the verge of fulfillment.
Everything he feared had come full circle.
Almost …
In the silence that followed, Ushahin Dreamspinner stirred his ill-set, aching limbs. Step by painful step, gaining speed as he went, he began to follow the faint echoes of his Lordship’s cry to their source.
TWENTY-FOUR
Entering the chamber of the Font at a dead run, Tanaros halted, brought up short by the sight before him. “No,” he said, uttering the word without thinking, willing it to be true, willing his denial to change what had happened and render it undone. “Ah, my Lord, no!”
It didn’t change. Nothing changed.
Where the Font had burned for century upon century, there was nothing save a ring of scorched stone blocks surrounding an aperture in the floor of the Chamber. It seemed a small opening to have admitted such a gout of marrow-fire. Without the Font, the Chamber was dim-lit, the fading veins of marrow-fire that laced its walls filling it with a vague, subterranean twilight.
Lord Satoris lay supine upon the floor of the Chamber; shadows clustered the length of his awesome form. It seemed impossible, and yet it was so. Even fallen, he filled the space until it seemed little else could exist within it. The scent of blood that was not blood, of sweet, coppery ichor, was thick in the air.
The rough-hewn haft of Godslayer pulsed faintly, a ruby star, where it protruded from the bulwark of the Shaper’s chest.
It moved, ever so slightly.
She stood in the far corner of the Chamber, beyond the ashen pit of the Font, shrinking away from it; from the Shaper, from her deed. Her eyes were stretched wide with horror, her hands upraised, sliding over her mouth as though to stifle a cry.
“Cerelinde,” Tanaros said. The black sword was loose in his grip. “Why?”