There were ritual chambers deep within the mountain but their walls, it seemed, were too confining for an enterprise on this scale. Instead Xaraea led the limping Achaeos upwards, first through slanted corridors and halls that he remembered from his youth, then by ascending long flights of steps that had always been forbidden to him before. From the murky, incense-fragrant halls they led to she took him step-by-step up steeply spiral paths cut into the rock, cramped and tortuous routes that he had never known existed. The chill told him where they were going. The very top of the mountain had signified a place of childhood terror. It was where the Skryres communed direct with the spirits and the elements, wholly open to the lashing responses of either. It was where they took you if you failed the Skryres.
Well, they’re taking me there now, he thought drily. There was light ahead, but it was a muted red. At first he thought it was fire-glow but as he came out into the open air he saw that it was sunset. The entire Lowlands seemed to be in flames, as if the bloated crimson sun was searing the world to cinders.
‘An omen, do you think?’ There were only two figures waiting for them there. One was robed like a Skryre, but the voice told otherwise. The second was the Wasp girl, Raeka, which meant that the first must be her master.
‘Tegrec,’ Achaeos rasped hoarsely, using his stick to lower himself to the ground. He felt as though even getting to the place of ritual might have killed him.
The Wasp magician cast his hood back. With it up, he had seemed forbidding and dangerous; now he looked only pale and worried. He cast a glance at Xaraea, but she was standing by the stair-mouth, locked up with her own demons. Haltingly, Tegrec knelt down beside Achaeos.
‘Second thoughts?’ the Moth asked him.
‘No,’ said Tegrec firmly. Raeka put a hand on his shoulder, and he reached back to grip it, a familiarity normally unforgivable under imperial law.
‘We will be striking your own people,’ Achaeos reminded him.
‘The technical term is “smite”,’ said Tegrec, mustering a smile from somewhere, ‘and I don’t know if they ever were my people.’ He glanced back at the girl, and Achaeos noticed his hand tighten on hers. ‘You can’t imagine… really, you can’t imagine how it is to grow up so different from the others, and to have to hide it. If I’d been poor, I’d undoubtedly have died… only having servants, slaves, being of good family, that’s all that saved me. Can you imagine living in a house where you sometimes can’t even open the doors: you just fumble at the catches and the handles, and curse and weep, and you just can’t see what it is that everyone else takes for granted. And it’s more than that – you can’t read their maps properly. You can’t understand their accounts. I’ve faked a life for thirty years, and all that time I’ve been living off mere scraps: rags of knowledge, learning stolen from old ruins, from the Commonweal, from the Grasshopper-kinden and other Inapt slaves, and all gathered in secrecy because, of course, I could never let anyone know’ – another backward glance – ‘except one. It started with the doors, you know. I bought her simply to have someone to open the doors for me. Everyone thought I was being very pretentious. I let them think that. A reputation for eccentricity was easier to live with.’
Achaeos digested all of this, knowing that Tegrec was only divulging so much because he was nervous about what was yet to come. We are both here solely because the Skryres wish to use us.
The Wasp must have seen something in his expression because he nodded and continued, ‘We’re both outcasts, really. The mad thing is, when this is done, and assuming any of us survive it, I’ll stay here but they’ll make you leave, won’t they?’
‘I have no wish to stay,’ Achaeos replied flatly. ‘I came because I needed their medicine. I stayed because they are my people and, despite it all, I’ll fight for them. But when this is done, my home is elsewhere.’
Tegrec stood up again, and Achaeos heard the shuffle of sandals on stone as other robed figures came up into the red-tinged air. He numbered a score of them at least, before he stopped counting. They have called everyone they can, he realized. All the most skilled ritualists of Tharn had been dragged up that same winding stair. There were at least a dozen Skryres, and there were other Moth-kinden who had never sought that position of power and responsibility: they were scholars, philosophers, skilled and private magicians. Here they all were, now, men and women all two decades older than Achaeos at least, and none looking confident or comfortable. In between them were others who had, like Tegrec, found a place here by virtue of their magic: there were Mantis-kinden and Spider-kinden side by side, a Grasshopper, two Commonweal Dragonflies, even a tiny, silver-haired old Fly-kinden woman who leant on a stick and looked as drained by the climb as Achaeos himself felt. Slowly, and without being directed, they formed themselves into two encircling rings, the Skryres inward, the rest standing behind them, closer to the edge of this little artificial plateau.
Xaraea then came and helped Achaeos to his feet, not out of compassion but from necessity. Hobbling, he took his place in the inner circle standing opposite from Tegrec. Meanwhile Xaraea and the Wasp girl Raeka retreated to the stairwell.
We are the eyes through which this ritual will perceive its prey, Achaeos knew. The work would be done, the power provided, by the others; he and Tegrec would merely focus it. Such rituals had often been done in the Days of Lore so many centuries before. But in living memory? No, and the power of the very last one performed within record had gone so disastrously wrong that, since then, nobody had even attempted what they were now about to do on the same scale. Of the meagre attempts that had been made, most had failed, some without issue and some with dire consequences. With magic so thin and so wan in the light of this new Apt world, nobody knew if what they were undertaking was even possible any more.
Che… He wished now that he had said more before she had gone off to Myna with the wretched traitor Thalric. Standing here on the mountain-top, with the sky on fire behind him, he felt so many regrets.
There was no preliminary signal. The ritual simply bloomed around them, burgeoning from the Skryres as they turned the force of their minds on the weave of the world and tried to scar their desires out upon it. Achaeos felt a ripple of shock run through the outer circle, the lesser magicians yoking themselves into that same great effort, so that the air around them grew hazy and shook with the power that they called up. He felt himself like a bow, taken up, strung and stretched, so that the arrow that they were jointly forming might be loosed. The strain, even right at the start, made him gasp. He became instantly, infinitely aware of the city of Tharn beneath him: of the Wasp-kinden intruders who did not belong, their soldiers and officers, the machines, their alien thoughts and minds.
The Skryres stretched his mind further, until he choked on the pain, and still they tensioned him further. He hoped Tegrec was lasting better than he did, for it seemed that any moment he might snap and fly to pieces. Loose! His mind cried. For the sake of all, loose the shaft! But they did not, only pulled and pulled, the arrow yet unformed. The Skryres and their followers were pouring everything they had – all their living craft and strength – into this one single shot.
And it was not enough.
The greatest magicians in the world, and it was not enough. The circle of Skryres and their acolytes swayed and chanted and concentrated, forcing their will upon the very weave of existence, and it was still not enough. The age of great magics was long past and they did not have the strength. The world was no longer so malleable to their minds.