Wayfinder

Thirteen

From above the city became an intricate piece of knotwork, streets sweeping in cross-patterned loops. Degradation had taken hold too thoroughly for Lara to pick out the image for certain, but she saw hints in the longer lines and curves that suggested a leaping fish as the city’s layout. It made her wonder what forest animal the Seelie citadel might be designed after, then made her reach back to touch the staff. She hadn’t noticed obvious patterns in its carvings, but she might have been looking too hard for familiar shapes instead of the abstract features knotwork favored.

Llyr made a soft sound, dissuading her from examining the staff, and she dropped her hand from it to say, “The whole city is glowing.”

“Unhealthy light,” he agreed. “It will poison you as it poisons the sea creatures that swim through it, if you remain here too long. I had hoped to spare you the risk.”

Lara’s mouth twisted with faint humor. “But I had to go chasing after Aerin. I can see—” She broke off, then breathed deeply, trying for confidence. “I can see her path, I think. That streak in the blue?” She pointed, and Llyr nodded.

Her own brief passage through the city was mired with sediment and the remnants of battle. It made a cloudy path in the … air, Lara reminded herself again, though dirt hung in it the way it would in currentless waters. The Sirens and skeletal men still darted around the door she’d escaped through. She wouldn’t be able to return that way: they would have all the advantage. They were comfortable with viewing things through debris-laden water, and Lara was unable to risk her power to clear that or any road through the drowned city.

Aerin had gone a different way from the moment she stepped through the coral doors. She had struck out to the right, toward what Lara thought was the fish’s head in the city’s layout. Bodies littered the path she’d taken along the city wall, blood lingering in black slashes as though put there by a sword strike. But signs of her passage stopped abruptly, with no hint of whether Aerin survived or not. The lingering blood remained ichory purple-black, the same color as the chimera’s, but for all Lara knew, any blood visible in black light would be the same hideous shade. If Aerin had met her death there, then—

Lara sighed and glanced skyward, though the city’s dark light destroyed any chance of knowing where the sun stood. If Aerin had met her death, Lara had at most a few hours to find Dafydd and find a way to contact Emyr before Ioan’s hidden city was destroyed. She could waste time in worry, or she could act.

Not so long ago, she’d have taken time to worry, but now she turned to Llyr. “What’s in that direction? Why did Aerin choose to go that way?”

His silence was all that answered for long moments, complex struggle showing in his face. “Rhiannon’s children do not die,” he finally said. “Not often, not easily. But there are accidents, there are battles. They find comfort in a place of memories, a quiet center to speak or think of those rare handsful who have gone. It may be different for mortals, whose lives are so brief they can hardly be missed when they end.”

“You’re—” You’re kidding. That was something other people said. Lara ducked her head, looking for something else to say, because the sea god was unquestionably not kidding. Not mortal, either, and his perspective made a certain amount of sense, from the long view. “We call them memorials. We have them, too. Our lives are as long to us as yours are to you. We don’t have anything else, after all.”

“You have souls,” he disagreed, but left it there. “A memorial, then. It would be in that direction, and will be where your fallen lover lies. See the bend, where her trail disappears? You will continue that way along the city wall. When you see the wall curve again in front of you, blocking the way, turn left sharply. The roads will lead to the memorial gardens.”

“I’ll continue that way? I thought you were guiding me.”

Llyr smiled, no more than a ripple over his face. “My guidance is of limited use, especially in the dark of the city. Had you passed through the other door …”

“But I didn’t. Will the memorial still be there? Will I find Dafydd and Hafgan there, or did I have to go through the right door to find them?”

“The city is the same, dark or light. What is in one is in the other. But you may see and feel and face things here that you might not have had to there.”

“More trials,” Lara said, and Llyr tipped his head in acknowledgment. Lara nodded, then turned her attention back to the city, trying as best she could to memorize the overlapping streets and curving walls. She couldn’t use a truthseeker’s path, but a study of the byways now might allow her to test them as she came to them, to get a sense of their trueness or falsity with regards to her destination. Eventually she nodded again, as confident as she could be of her bearings. “How will I get past the front door?”

“There are other entrances to the towers. That, at least, I can help you with.” Llyr offered his hand, guiding Lara from the parapets back into the tumbledown towers.

Shadows flickered at the corners of her eyes as they left the towers, monsters like and unlike the chimera. None of them came for her, though, not with Llyr walking beside her. Some even swam closer, like they were curious about the watery god. Pain flooded his face time and again, suggesting he lacked the power to set the amalgamated creatures to rights.

No, not the power, Lara decided, when one monstrous fish with a jaw like a coelacanth’s swam up to them. Nothing else about it resembled prehistoric fish; it was sleek-bodied, delicately finned, and of bright clashing colors worsened by the black light. Llyr lifted a hand, a slow sympathetic gesture, and almost touched the thing, but recoiled at the last instant. The fish twitched as if it had been shocked and darted away with a few quick beats of its tail.

“I tried for a very long time,” Llyr murmured a few steps later. “I tried to turn them back to the things they had begun as. It worked. It was only as the new creatures became more grotesque and deformed that I realized that each new burst of power I released in healing them corrupted and twisted another beast even more profoundly. The deformities only reach as far as the shallow fishing waters that were once these lands’ shores. Beyond that barrier I can correct for the things magic has done here, but very little passes through it safely. These waters were once my heart, and are long since my heartbreak. I do not come here, Lara Jansen. Not if I can help it.”

“I’m sorry for the pain coming for me must have caused,” Lara said carefully. “But I’m not sorry you came. Thank you.”

“Perhaps something bright will finally be born of the darkness here.” Llyr stopped in front of a shell-ridden wall looming before them. Arches filled with black light showed the extravagance of carved doors that had once stood in them, even giving hints of the colored windows that must have dominated the doors and hall. “The city walls are very near here. Strike out on your companion’s path and you will, with luck, find your way to the … memorials.”

“And without luck I’ll die,” Lara said quietly. Llyr shrugged and stepped back as she put a hand on one of the light-filled doors and pushed. It moved easily, but barely: even built of light, it had the mass of stone carved ten feet high. “Llyr?”

“Truthseeker?”

Lara looked back at him. “Do you know what happened in Annwn? Can you tell me how the lands were drowned?”

A shudder ran through the sea god, washing away the edges of his elfin shape. The wild foam that was his hair stretched, dissipating into water, and when he answered it was as if the ocean surrounding her spoke. “I was there, as was my daughter’s mother Caillech, and all the old gods of the land and sky and sea. But we cannot tell you what came to pass. Rhiannon was our daughter, and her blood binds us as she is bound. Seek. Do your duty, and may worlds come changed at end of day.”

Electric recognition shot down Lara’s spine. She pushed off the door, snatching at Llyr’s vanishing form, but there was nothing left to hold. “Wait! Wait! That’s what Oisín said in his prophecy! Did you send it to him? Did you … did you …?”

The questions, even if she could generate them, would get no answers. Llyr was gone, the only reminder of his presence her continuing ability to breathe. Lara clutched the straps of her pack, heartbeat hard enough to feel in the hand curled over her chest. Prophecy came from God, or the gods; she’d known that, but to hear the poet’s words echoed from Llyr’s lips still shocked her. She said “I’m just me” to the empty city, not meaning it as an excuse, but as an expression of astonishment.

Unexpectedly, Dafydd’s voice echoed in her thoughts: I’ve been searching for you for a hundred years. Being herself was extraordinary enough, it seemed. Extraordinary enough to have truck with gods and elfin immortals, and to command a power worth prophesizing.

The staff warmed against her spine, bringing a mix of heightened conceit and rueful banality to the moment. “I’m not that impressed with myself yet. Stop trying to tempt me.”

A distinct sense of churlishness rose from the staff, but it quieted again, leaving Lara with a grin as she exited the city’s tower structure. Power corrupted—she had little doubt of that. Still, as long as the staff’s tendency was the combination of destruction, blatant cajoling, and sulking, she thought she could withstand it. And she had a destination now, which was more than she’d expected to be granted. All she had to do was survive the city and reach that destination.

She knew it for a treacherous thought even before Aerin rose up out of the sand in a full-on attack.

The Seelie woman’s white hair ran to blue, the same way it had the night Lara met her. But then it had been moonlight; now it was the city’s sickly color twisting what was natural. Her eyes trailed yellow fire, their usual green distorted as well, and her elegantly boned face was pulled in a grimace of hatred. Even the armor she wore was corrupted, moonlight silver corroded and blackened as if it had been buried in the sea for decades. Only her sword still shone bright, its edge unblemished as it swung down toward Lara.

Lara ducked, knowing it wasn’t enough even as she did so. A spurt of panic lent her strength and she turned the duck into a dive, flattening herself on the ocean floor. The sword passed over her head in a hail of grit and sand that matched the one floating up from Lara’s dive. She slithered forward, not quite daring to get as high as hands and knees, and grabbed Aerin’s ankle to yank as hard as she could.

Aerin stabbed down with the sword rather than fall over. The blade caught the thick shoulder padding of Lara’s doublet and drove into the ground, pinning her, but tangling the sword as well. Its cold pressure through the shirt beneath the doublet warned her of how close Aerin had come, and how easily she might sever her own muscles by moving too much. Aerin clearly had the same idea, wrenching the sword down rather than pulling it free.

Pain splintered Lara’s thoughts. Her right arm stopped responding properly, trapezius cut so deeply she feared the collarbone was in pieces as well. Blood welled up, tasting sharp and bitter in the air. Turning her head to see the damage was agony. And useless: Aerin’s blade remained in the way, angled dangerously into Lara’s shoulder, though it was a matter of seconds before Aerin withdrew the sword to strike again.

Without the sword’s presence to block it, blood swam free, billowing into Lara’s eyes. Dizziness ate her in waves, making her thoughts soft and unfocused. She could turn her head. That probably meant that despite sharp deep pain, the muscle wasn’t cut as badly as she feared. But there was a significant vein somewhere in there, one that fed from the jugular; she was almost certain of it. Terror pulsed through her, vivid fear that it was a vein large enough to bleed her out in seconds, unable to save herself.

She grated, “No,” in a voice so low she didn’t recognize it as her own. The pain lessened not at all, but some of her light-headedness faded, and her next heartbeat didn’t seem to blur the air with more blood. She put more force behind the next “No,” willing a difficult thing to be true: that was a truthseeker’s gift, to make something that was not, be.

Staunching the blood flow did nothing to stop Aerin, though. Lara flung her left hand up, wishing against reason she held the staff in it so she might at least parry, and put all the strength she had into her voice: “Stop!”

Aerin’s sword trembled to a halt an inch above Lara’s heart. Distortion wracked the Seelie warrior’s features as she fought the coercion, trying equally to drive the sword down and drag it up again. Lara clenched her teeth and dug her heels into the ground, shoving herself along the city street. That was her stomach Aerin would skewer if she broke the compulsion; now her pelvis; now her thigh, each push bringing a different body part into danger. But bad as gut wounds were supposed to be, dangerous as severed thigh muscles might be, she had a chance of surviving them. Her truthseeker’s power would be of no use at all if her heart were pierced.

Aerin roared as Lara inched to a less deadly position, and the compulsion failed: she slammed the sword down again. Lara jerked her legs apart, the blade scraping her inner thigh with another bright flare of pain. She had cut herself with a knife a time or two. Those accidental slices had nothing on the white-hot anguish of a sword blade parting skin and muscle. The pain was so great there was a purity to it: nothing else could possibly exist within its realm.

Except, perhaps, a thready, panicked desire to survive. The only thing greater than pain was wanting to outlive it. And possibly a growing ambition to visit the same anguish on the one who’d hurt her.

That was how wars were fought, Lara thought in a burst of clarity. It had to be, and that was a revelation she’d never wanted. She laughed, knowing the sound to be almost a sob, and inched back a little farther, taking herself out of the blade’s way. Aerin had driven it down too hard: it was mired in the stone beneath drifting sand.

Sitting up was difficult. Not impossible, though even the discolored blood floating around her went gray as her vision dimmed with the effort. But being able to sit, like turning her head, was probably good: it probably meant the muscle wasn’t as badly damaged as she’d initially imagined. And there wasn’t nearly as much blood as she was sure there should be. Aerin had broken one compulsion, perhaps, but the one Lara had laid on herself still held true.

Aerin gave up on the blade and whirled around with a kick aimed at Lara’s jaw. Dizziness, not reflexes, saved her; she was already sagging when the warrior woman threw the kick, and Aerin misjudged the distance. Lara kicked her in the other knee with just enough strength in it to knock Aerin’s footing askew. Aerin fell and Lara surged forward, drawing on reserves she hadn’t known existed in order to pounce on Aerin’s torso.

She landed with her knees on Aerin’s upper arms, knowing the pin would only hold her for a few seconds. Knowing, too, that she couldn’t keep Aerin down any other way, not with her arm only half responding. Not with Aerin’s fighting skills and Lara’s utter lack of them.

Something malfeasant crawled under Aerin’s skin, as though her blood itself had been corrupted and fought to be free. Scales rippled on her skin and faded again, replaced by sharp rows of teeth bursting from her gums. Her eyes were losing their color, sickly yellow replaced by a dead black that reflected the city’s dark light. Like a shark’s, Lara thought, and pieces fell into place.

Aerin had lost a fight on her way to the memorial gardens. Maybe against an unaltered animal, but more likely against some creature whose largest part had been a shark. And given this new predator, this Seelie warrior woman, to meld with, it was taking the city’s bleak magic and re-forming her into a deadly, undead monster.

Llyr had pulled chimeras apart, returned them to their native state. He’d paid the price for it in seeing new, more dreadful monsters born of his efforts, but it didn’t matter. If the magic Lara released backfired, made monsters of greater horror and scope than before, at least she had tried, and there might still be a chance for redemption ahead.

“I don’t even like you very much, and I don’t think I know you well enough to be sure of making this work. But I can’t just leave you like this. I won’t leave you like this.” Not for the first time, Lara wished she had an instrument, something to guide music with. She promised herself once more that she would learn one, when the fight for Annwn was over.

But for the moment she reached for the only weapon she had, and began to sing.