They stumbled out into a place where the path widened and saw what at first looked like a tall, slender man in the grip of some terrible palsy, arms flailing above his head and body swaying like a sapling in a fierce breeze—but it was shadows he fought with, Chert saw a moment later, shadows who clutched at him with hands like torn, flapping curtains.
“Help him!” the girl screamed.
Briony only hesitated for a moment, then raced toward the strange struggle with a dagger in each hand. Chert could only stare, wondering again what had happened to the young girl he had seen at the funeral. When had she become this thing of rope and steel?
But it doesn’t matter—those dark things will kill her. Then Chert, too, was running, waving his torch and trying to force a frightening bellow out of his pinched throat but not succeeding.
The half-elf was wrapped in a ragged mass of darkness that leaked light like a hooded lantern. As Briony approached, one of the creatures detached itself from Kayyin and floated toward her, billowing like a cloaked man in a high wind. Only its eyes had color, glinting like green garnets.
“Those are old blades you carry,” it said as it neared her. The voice seemed to sigh from every corner of the darkness beyond Chert’s torch. “Metal of a tumbled star. They have even wounded some of us in the past, and it is not easy to spite us.” The eyes flared briefly. “But wounding is not destroying—and you are no mighty warrior, girl.”
Briony had not stopped to listen, but was keeping her two blades before her as she moved in a broad arc, trying to draw the thing away from Kayyin and the other black shapes. “What you say is that you can be hurt, demon.” Her voice was tight but surprisingly steady. “That is all I needed to hear. I just killed my vilest enemy with my own hands, so come, then—let’s see who ends up the better!”
Briony crossed the knives in a quick flick as she lunged, like a single great pair of scissors. The apparition rippled away from her like smoke, then flowed back again and hooked at her with a ragged claw. Chert swung his torch at the thing’s arm, but the brand only passed through; the shapeless thing turned toward him and the darkness of its face seemed to fill his eyes. Chert was thrown backward. He cracked his head against the wall on one side of the path. The torch flew from his fingers and bounced toward the edge, landing a pace short; the flames rippled and nearly died, then flared up again.
Chert tried to rise, but it was not only the unsteady flames that made things before him tilt and spin. His head felt like it was full of bees, and his legs had no feeling at all. Earth Elders, he thought, I can’t die, not like this, not at the edge of someone else’s fight and away from Opal.…
The flapping, flickering thing that had spoken before swirled around Briony like mist, then slid just out of reach again when she swung her blades, as if it mocked her.
“Come close enough for me to kill you, you coward!” she said, her breath coming in gasps. “Queen Saqri swore that your kind would be our allies!”
“Saqri does not speak for us—and a mortal cannot kill an Elemental,” the thing said in a gleeful tone. “I am Shadow’s Cauldron and my doom is written down in the Book for long after you will be dust. Besides, I only sought to amuse myself until our task could be completed. Sisters? Have you taken our prize back from the thief?”
The other shadows lay stretched over the half-Qar Kayyin like black blankets, but at the sound of Shadow’s Cauldron’s voice they fluttered up into the air. Balanced in the overlap of their two darknesses was a large stone that gleamed yellow and roiled like muddy water. “We have it,” they declared, and it was their thoughts Briony understood, not their words.
“Yasammez is his mother,” one of the Elementals cried. “She must have told him of the Egg!”
“No,” said the other. “He saw it in her thoughts.”
“Take it, then,” cried the one called Shadow’s Cauldron. “How he learned of it does not matter!” The Elemental waved a ragged appendage and Briony was flung down, her knives clattering from her hands. Shadow’s Cauldron then blew away like mist and re-formed a heartbeat later in midair above the abyss, flapping now like some great, fire-eyed bat. “Now take the Egg and drop it onto hard stone, sisters. Crack it open and let death spill out for all these warm, fleshy creatures!”
All the shadowy shapes flew up into the heights so quickly that they might have been blown there by a howling wind. Only the gleam of their watching eyes and the sickly sheen of the Egg showed Chert where they hovered.
“The bodiless thoughts of the Deep Library helped us create this, but they did not have the courage to use it! Neither did Yasammez—in the end she died as much a coward as even Ynnir the Traitor. But we are different—we are the Guard of Elementals!” The calm certainty in the thing’s hissing voice grabbed at Chert’s innards like an icy hand. “We have nurtured it in our darkest garden and made it even more potent than Yasammez could have dreamed.”
“The Egg must not be broken,” croaked a weak voice. Kayyin crawled shakily onto his feet, so close Chert could almost have touched him. “When the fevers hatch out they will not just destroy what is in the castle but will creep up and down the earth for years to come, until there is nothing left that breathes,” the half-fairy said.
“Yes!” crowed Shadow’s Cauldron. “Our children will dance beneath the moon, with all the empty lands and seas to themselves. ...!” Its voice rose like a shrieking gale. “Cast the Egg down, sisters, and scour this sullied earth clean again… !”
“Those are my prisoners.” Of all those in the cavern, dead or still clinging to life, the autarch alone looked as though he had walked in from somewhere else. Sulepis was free of burns and only lightly touched with ash, his golden armor gleaming with the reflected light of the flames all around. The autarch’s falcon-crested helmet had been pushed high on his perspiring brow and his eyes bulged with an insane fury that Vansen had never seen before in any man. “And this boat is mine, too. What have you put there, dog—what else have you stolen from me? Ah, it is another Eddon, the fire-haired one. More ancient blood to be spilled, then, yes, more blood.” Although his knife pushed ever harder against Vansen’s neck, the autarch scarcely seemed to notice him. “Surely I can find another of Heaven’s prisoners—another sleeping god who will bargain for his freedom and rid me of this turbulent, treacherous Trickster,” Sulepis said. “No, the gods are not yet done with me—I will repay them for this slight. Who do they think they are?” His eyes turned back to Vansen. “I am the Golden One! I am the Living Sun!”
Vansen had to speak through clenched teeth. He fully expected these would be his last words. “You… are… only… another… fool.”
“What?” The autarch leaned down, pressing a little harder on the knife, spreading his knees to hold down Vansen’s shoulders and stop his struggling. “What are you? One of the Southmarch peasants?”
“I would rather ...” Vansen’s voice was barely a whisper; the autarch leaned closer. “I would rather be… the lowliest sheepherder in Southmarch… than you in your golden armor ...” Vansen had not been struggling at all, but reaching for a stone; he grabbed it and smashed it as hard as he could against the autarch’s gleaming falcon helmet.