Wayfinder

Eleven

Murky night enclosed her as she stepped through the door. Mist crawled up, encircling her thighs as if to hold her back, and the city shifted in her vision, becoming darker, grimmer. Lara retreated a step and encountered rough sticks that cracked under the pressure of her pack. She twisted around, heart jolting, to find the doors bleak hollows overgrown with impassable coral. Evrei and Evrawg were gone, if they’d ever really been there at all. The thought wavered tunelessly and Lara put it out of mind, unwilling to explore what was true and what wasn’t, especially having deliberately chosen the wrong door.

What had once been city streets sprawled before her, but she no longer saw them as Llyr had enchanted her to. Silver stone was buried beneath drifting sand, and scuttling bugs peeked out of bone shelters sunken in the moving earth. The homes and towers that had graced the Unseelie city were dank now, lightless and lifeless, and the defiant banners that had flown no longer rose above the town. Chilly wind passed through instead, lifting Lara’s hair in thin dancing tendrils and holding it aloft the way water would. Coral snatched at the strands, trying to tangle it and hold her in place.

She shut those thoughts down, too, and forced herself forward. Aerin had left no footprints, or the shifting sand had already taken them. Had already taken her, perhaps; Lara sank ankle-deep with each step, sand clouding up to grasp at her calves and knees before wafting down again. Pressure swam against her legs and over her arms, wind carrying more weight than it usually did. She wondered what devils hid in it. Song pounded inside her skull, encouraging her to pull down the veil of Llyr’s gift and see what accompanied her as she walked across the ocean floor.

It would be a very brief viewing. A minute or two of appreciating just what monsters and dangers roamed the drowned city. Then, without Llyr’s gift at hand, she would join them, one more lost soul far beneath the sea. And if she was lost, so were all the memories she’d promised to return to Annwn. So was Dafydd, and so, maybe, was Annwn itself. She’d seen no forgiveness in Emyr’s eyes. If she didn’t come back with answers, he would ride on the Unseelie city and destroy it. The transformation would be complete: Annwn would be the Barrow-lands in totality, a land of the dead and dying, though it might on the surface appear to be more.

An orchestra’s worth of triumphant music flooded her, pushing back the weight of heavy air. She had seen the Seelie as dying, had even seen the rival peoples as two halves of a whole, but the entire land’s metamorphosis had escaped her, at least in conscious thought. Drowned Lands, Barrow-lands; together they made up a whole, and she doubted suddenly that the Barrow-lands would ever be healthy, so long as the ground she walked now still lay beneath the sea. Whatever Hafgan and Emyr had done so many millennia ago had spelled doom for both of them. Hafgan, perhaps, had realized it earlier, and fled back to the Drowned Lands. A generous soul might think it was to lend his strength to maintaining what little memory of the land was left here, but Lara suspected his intentions were darker. Harboring his power, perhaps, so that when Emyr was weak enough Hafgan could attack without compunction.

She’d become cynical since meeting Dafydd ap Caerwyn. She wasn’t certain she was proud of that, but it lent her a sour strength to forge beyond the gates and enter the city itself.

Broken walls rose up cleanly, streets remaining delineated, but the ground was uneven, stone from fallen buildings making hills and toe-stubbing lumps. Lara scrambled up them, fingers dug into shallow earth, and slid down their far sides with her attention more for the grim skies than the path she took. The ebony towers shone darkly in the murky light, as opposite to the glowing Seelie citadel as could be imagined.

Her mind’s eye abruptly filled in details of shattered architecture, finishing the spires and swoops of the towers. They’d echoed the Seelie citadel once, though this city was built around its soaring towers where the Seelie city was entirely contained within the palatial structure. Still, their hearts were one and the same, another reminder that the highland and lowland peoples were of a kind. Or that they had been, before they’d been torn asunder by the staff Lara now carried across her back.

The staff pulsed as she thought of it. The air flinched, then surged in, weightier than before as it pried at the ivory rod. Lara’s breath clogged, her confidence slipping away as the air—air, she insisted, not water—took on a determination to separate her from the staff. Muck thickened, daylight fading until the only light came from the dark towers.

The air—the ocean—lit up around her in wrong colors, a flood of black light illuminating the things she hadn’t been able to see before. Sea life flickered by, darting around her at the last moment. Lara was grateful, as it seemed wholly possible, in the wavering blue light, that she might register as a ghost herself, and that fish might swim through her without noticing. Bits of net wafted through the water, constantly tied and untied by the currents. But it was the city itself that came alive in unnerving pulses.

Fallen buildings were reconstructed in the changing light. From one moment to the next walls flickered into place and faded again, reminiscent of an old hand-cranked film. But no ancient film had the quality of effects the withering city showed her. Beasts swam within the broken city walls, serpents and kraken and long-toothed monsters she had no name for. Lara stood rigid on the ocean floor, heart sick in her chest, certain that any motion on her part would bring a tentacled, hard-beaked behemoth whipping down on her.

Women sauntered by, their bodies so beautifully formed that Lara’s avocation as a tailor twitched to the fore, eager to measure and mark them for clothing. Their long hair streamed behind them, paragons of femininity, but the faces they turned to Lara were stretched in raging screams, like the Sirens of Greek legend. Men trailed after them, but not lovelorn sailors: these were ragged skeletal horrors, as tormented in appearance as the women whose paths they traced. Fish darted in and out of their skulls, escaping through parted teeth and eye sockets. Lara pressed knuckles against her mouth, holding back gasps.

The impotent fury of a drowning people had not left their city unmanned. Not when those who died were creatures of magic themselves. The phantasms revealed by the towers’ light were real, as able to rend and destroy as any mundane animal. Motion would almost certainly attract them, and she had no weapon with which to fight.

Warmth pulsed from the staff again, contradicting that belief. A stillness swept through the ocean. Then as one, the city’s protectors turned toward Lara. Toward the staff she carried; toward the embodiment of the city’s downfall. The next breath she drew was thick with water, though the black light didn’t relent. There were more magics at work here than just Llyr’s, and the only question was whose were the strongest.

Lara whispered “Llyr’s,” investing the word, the thought, with a thread of desperate truth. She didn’t dare unleash the staff, not yet, maybe not ever, but the air cleared a little. She lurched a step or two forward, sand still clouding around her feet. It settled again quickly, though, making divots like any sand dune might. Wind—wind, not water, she told herself fiercely—rushed over those depressions, smoothing them out again so she left no more trace of her passage than Aerin had, but the greater ease of movement was heartening. She wasn’t utterly without power, even in a dark realm where her magic could be her undoing.

Laughter barked free, distorted by the thick air. Never in her life had she imagined herself to be in any way powerful. Yet in the midst of a lost land a world away from what she’d known, she was willing, even eager, to rely on a talent that mere weeks ago she’d only recognized as a sometimes-frustrating quirk.

Laughing had been a mistake. Monstrosities half-hidden in ruined buildings darted forward, drawn to the sound. It marked her as alive, and the living were unwelcome in the Drowned Lands. Lara spared a thought for Aerin, whose blade would do her no good against enemies she couldn’t see, and then she was running, no longer caring that speed would attract attention.

The sea beasts were faster than she was, much faster, black light showing them in their natural element while she ran as if in a nightmare, slowed by the density of water. The back of her mind screamed panic, urging her to hurry, but every step came more slowly as mist and water clawed her back again. Something latched on to her ankle, sending her sprawling, and cold hands scampered up her leg in search of a vital place to strike.

They encountered the staff instead. Heat flashed against Lara’s back, blister hot, though soothing water struck as quickly. Behind her, though, a shriek rent the air, its pitch so high and loud that black light fell apart. For brief seconds the world was as Llyr had commanded it to be: warm skies above, a silvered pathway beneath Lara’s hands and knees. She scrambled forward, gaining her feet already in a run, and managed a dozen steps before the light changed again. Before the air grabbed at her again, holding her back, while the infuriated creatures following after were able to surge forward, quick with the gift of water. But they only darted around her, reaching, snapping, snarling, none of them risking the staff she carried.

The towers were abruptly before her, their black-light emissions unaccountably welcoming, as though Lara had become one of the remnants of Unseelie magic. Doors, half real, half built of shimmering light, rose three times her height, abstract blue-on-ebony carvings reminding her of the staff’s design. Relief burned her eyes and tightened her chest. Within the towers lay safety, a truth that reverberated through her bones. She shoved the doors in, grateful they moved easily, though sand swirled up in a dance as they opened. Lara pushed the doors closed behind her, then hobbled a few steps beyond the sand cloud. Not one of the seaborne creatures followed her, as if the half-magic doors construed a genuine barrier to the sea. Breath sobbing in her chest, Lara glanced upward to whisper, “Thank you,” with the hope that she had passed through the worst of the wrong door’s dangers.

A black swatch dropped from the ceiling.

It slammed her to the ground, sand washing up around them to make the creature difficult to see. A tail whipped toward her face, a vicious barb barely missing her eyes, and it lifted a long limb and struck downward, making eddies of sand.

Lara surged sideways, out from under the worst of its weight. She rolled and the thing pounced after her, landing on her backpack and shaking it hard enough to rattle her teeth. The instinct to curl up protectively warred with the impulse to run, and in the moment of hesitation the thing collapsed on her, wrapping multitudinous legs around her ribs and hips. A clatter sounded by her ear, a chitinous warning, and she had a sudden vision of a spider severing her spinal cord.

She flung herself forward, fingers dug in the sand until she was on her feet and running for a wall. The air supported her wrongly, offering waterlike buoyancy, but she was grateful: in normal atmosphere the beast’s weight would have kept her pinned. Grunting with effort, Lara spun at the last moment and slammed her back into a wall with enough force that the monster riding her squealed and released her. Black ichor popped from it, drifting through thick air. The thing slithered to the ground, then shook itself like a dog as Lara backed off.

Spider, crab, stingray; there might once have been some kind of taxonomical name for the thing, before dying Unseelie magic had corrupted it into something else. It had six legs, not eight, and a plated spine that curved over broad wings and bled down to a lashing tail. Bulging eyes were set far apart on a flat head, but its mouth protruded, pincers snapping together almost too fast to see. The sound was primitive, reaching into the back of Lara’s mind and speaking of danger.

“I exorcise thee, unholy spirit.” The words, whispered, were comforting, though Lara was unsurprised when the many-legged thing didn’t flinch. Nightwings were made purely of magic, and in the Barrow-lands were susceptible to the rituals of Lara’s faith. But this chimera contained too much of animals that had truly existed. Magic might have re-formed them into one, but an exorcism wouldn’t banish a nest of spiders, either. It took more mundane means.

The chimera rippled its wings, lifting up, slower than before but still quick and graceful. Blood floated from it as it pumped its wings and gained height. She tipped her head back, hair wafting around her face the same way blood followed the chimera.

It beat its wings down in two sudden rushes and was gone, black against the black distance of the tower ceiling. Alarm spurted through Lara, hands going cold and core tight as she searched the darkness for warning of its next attack. Scraps of song ran through her mind, pieces of music she’d used as spell-magic in her own world. They could perhaps be used to tear the chimera back into its component parts by calling up the truth of what it had been: “Amazing Grace” had given her the ability to see clearly, and had ripped apart nightwings as they attacked.

But too much clarity of sight would shatter the remains of Llyr’s magic, a risk she couldn’t afford. She reached over her shoulder, curling her fingers around the ivory staff. It was a bad choice, of that she had no doubt. But it was also her only weapon, and the chimera was quicker than she.

“I’m not any good at this,” she whispered without knowing to whom she made the protest. “I barely know which end of a sword to hold. I don’t know how to fight.”

The chimera fell on her again, and there was no more time to worry.