Citadel of the Sky (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 1) (18 page)

Tiana was skeptical. “She’s remembering cows? How do you know it’s a memory?”

Yithiere said, “You never pay attention to lessons. Look how real it is. She was traveling this road, just today. The memory of this road, among others, has been emerging around her shell. Her horse threw her here.”

“Spooky? Here? I don’t believe it.”

One of the cattle turned its brindled head to inspect them. Tiana’s stomach lurched.

It wasn’t a cow. It was a nightmare.

The world jumped and shuddered around her and she stumbled back, unable to tear her eyes from the horror. Small bulges writhed under the brown and white hide. The black crawling shapes found their exit at the monster’s eyes and mouth, leaking like the black rain from the sky. A third eye, pale blue, shed black tears. Its front legs bent oddly, as if they had extra joints. Human hands dangled from the beast’s udder, fingers wiggling.

Then she realized the large brown spots on the cow’s hide were slowly changing shape. The cow-thing’s horns seemed to grow and twist together without ever changing size, and its mouth was impossibly wide.

Her perception rebelled. She wasn’t seeing hands hanging from an udder, or twisting horns, or an ever-growing mouth. It was something else entirely, but the only way she knew how to interpret it was as those things. It was all lies, she was telling herself, to try and put the impossible horror into a context she could understand. It was something deeply alien that had climbed inside Kiar’s head through her eyes, then migrated from her mind to the phantasmagory.

A scream shattered the air around her, and she couldn’t tell if it was coming from herself, from Kiar, or from the monster in front of her. She stopped up her mouth, gagging as her fingers turned to insects and crawled down her throat. Whimpering, she struggled to pull an emanation around her, but the memory remained stubbornly solid, the maw of the creature opening wider and wider, as if it would swallow her entirely. Then her horror turned to fury, and the road around her burst into flames.

She spread her arms and let the fire sweep through her, burning the blackness from her mouth, burning her vision with gold and red, taking away the nightmare. Higher and stronger she danced the fire, until the road was gone. But the flecks of moving black remained.

The wolf Yithiere stood untouched beside her, in the flames. He ran his tongue over his teeth and said, “Her illness has infected the phantasmagory. You’re right. We cannot wait for her to recover on her own.”

“That can’t be true. I hope that can’t be true. But that’s not—I don’t think that’s a manifestation of the plague, Uncle.” As she spoke, the flames faded away and they stood on a stone bridge over the sea.

“What, then?” He touched his lupine nose to the stones beneath him, testing the currents of the phantasmagory. A black drop from the clouds above fell in front of him, and he peeled his lips back from his teeth as he edged around it.

“I felt—I think if that had been more than a memory, I’d be sick now too. Didn’t you feel it?”

His lips still curled away from his teeth, Yithiere said, “A misborn cow? Did it bite her? She would have said something. It was disgusting but so are fiends and nightmares. That was just more of the same.” His ears flattened. “If it was a fiend, it might have cursed her. But she would have said.”

Tiana didn’t want to explain. It was hard. But she had to, so she tried.

“Kiar and Twist both said there was an eidolon marking the victims of the illness. Like a shadow. I think that horrible creature is casting the shadow and the shadow is making them sick.”

Yithiere flattened his ears. “Eidolons do not make people sick. Neither do shadows.”

“Maybe there’s another word then, and I just don’t know it,” Tiana snapped fretfully. “Kiar is sick and the sickness is associated with the same kind of taint Logos-workers see as they look at family magic. And that thing—that monstrosity—you didn’t see it clearly, Uncle. You couldn’t have.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “When I saw it, it was like it crawled inside my head and burrowed into all my worst nightmares. If I’d seen the real thing and not just Kiar’s memory….” she trailed off, unable to wrap words around the horror.

He gave her a skeptical look, but his ears pricked up. “Well?”

She swallowed. “Don’t you have things you don’t want to think about, ever? I do. Things that hurt me. Sometimes I can’t help it, and then I’m gasping and wishing I was dead. I’d do anything to stop thinking those things. There’re times I think I’d bash in my own skull to stop thinking those things. Maybe Kiar’s body is making her sick trying to burn that shadow out of her brain.”

The wolf studied her. “Frightening. Enough.” The sea and stone landscape vanished, and the two of them were inside a round room with a vaulted roof. Against one wall was an obsidian statue of Kiar.

Usually Kiar manifested as an all-encompassing, fantastic, elaborate suit of metal armor. But now she was still and only herself, no visor obscuring her face.

Dismayed, Tiana asked, “What’s happened?”

“She’s shielded herself in the real world.” Yithiere paced over to the statue and pressed his face against it. “Inside her wall. She’s lost, panicked.”

Most of the Blood, when lost in phantasmagory, were dangerous to the people around them. Kiar’s fugues had always been of the opposite sort, from the very beginning: opaque shields that kept everyone away from her and her away from everyone.

At age six, when she started service in the Banquet Hall and panicked at the number of people, her shield had expelled dozens of people from her immediate vicinity and lasted until Jerya had patiently soothed her. When Kiar had been nine and took plepanin, it had been worse. The Logos changed her perceptions, and only Twist had the understanding and ability to get close enough to calm her.

“I am speaking to her, but she does not respond.” Yithiere had never sounded so frustrated before. Lisette or any of the other Regents would be more useful now. Or Jerya, or Twist—practically anybody but Tiana. Tiana, wind and fire, and nothing useful at all.

She stepped forward and put her hand on the statue’s arm. “Kiar,” she said quietly. “I’m not Jerya, but I’m here. I don’t know what Yithiere has been telling you, but it’s not good in here.”

Roughly, Yithiere said, “The wall means she’s still alive.” It was a reassurance directed at himself, in the voice they all used for talking to their Regents.

Tiana said, “Uncle, you should go, if you can. Devote your energy to the real world.”

“I’m fine,” he snapped. “Better than you, little girl. Hone your own awareness of the real world and then lecture me.”

Tiana pursed her lips and resolutely turned her attention to Kiar. She brushed her knuckles across the cool obsidian of Kiar’s hair. The room became cold and long tendrils of mist stretched across the ceiling. Each arm of mist had a black shadow.

“Definitely not good in here, Kiar. I think we saw your nemesis. Something horrible, anyhow. And now bad things are happening. But, good news, we have ideas on how to cure the plague.” She paused, scrutinizing the statue for any change, any reaction.

Yithiere said, “You tell her nothing I have not. This is useless.” He darted over to a black blob oozing through the mortar of the stone wall and batted at it with his paw. “This is our place. Whatever this… invasion is, it crawls into our territory.” He pulled his paw back, pulling black goo with it. Then he narrowed his eyes at the substance and folded an emanation into a knife that scraped the goo off the phantasmagory itself.

Tiana stared at him. Then she looked back at the perfect carving of Kiar. “Please, Kiar. There are bad things in here. I don’t want to be alone, and I don’t know where Lisette is, and to be totally honest, I’m afraid.”

She didn’t know what else to say, so she whispered the same thing a second time under her breath, and a third time. Then the statue opened its arms to her, and she fell into another place.

She was blind, but she never thought that blindness was a field of white. “Jinriki, what’s going on?” she said uncertainly.

“Jagged dreams and hybrid magic. Nothing has changed outside.”

“Oh,” Tiana said. “Hybrid magic?” Slowly, the whiteness began to resolve. Flecks of black swirled around her. They made patterns. She realized abruptly they were characters, and they formed words. Hundreds of words, thousands of words. She was in a storm of words, more than she could count, more than she could imagine. They moved around her faster than she could process them.

“She is speaking as if to the Logos, but only nonsense.”

That sounded like Kiar had somehow imagined her part of the phantasmagory was the Logos. Was that even possible? “Is that what all these words are? Can you understand them?”

He chuckled. She didn’t know he could laugh. It was disturbing. “Analyzing….”

Tiana moved her hands around the storm of words while she waited, watching the way they grew denser as she focused.

Finally, he said, “Unexpected. What I sense feels like… a copy of the Logos. Can you even dream the Logos?”

“I have no idea. I barely know what the Logos is, but you can dream of anything,” said Tiana firmly and then added, “Kiar says that when she looks at eidolons with the Logos, it’s like a blind spot.”

“Dreaming the Logos is dreaming everything. Her Logos makes no sense, though.”

Tiana wondered,
where do I hide, if not the phantasmagory?
and then shook herself. “Is she trying to make an eidolon of the Logos? Trying to use the Logos while in the phantasmagory? I don’t understand why
she’s
not here anymore.” She wished Great-Uncle Jant was there; he was the scholar of the phantasmagory and how it worked.

“She’s not fully conscious, based on prior observations.” The sword sounded far away.

“Of course not. If she were, she’d be talking and helping us out.”

When she was eleven, she’d had a terrible sore throat and earache. While she’d mostly slept through the illness, she still recalled the vivid dreams of fighting off an endless swarm of enemies.

“So, let’s go with ‘She’s trying to turn an eidolon into the Logos.’” She watched the storm of words for a few moments. There was something very worrying about all the movement, the flickering black on white. It was as if the words were forming patterns she could almost recognize.

A cow. One of them was a cow. The pattern shivered unpleasantly, then flew apart. The other, less recognizable patterns, flew apart as well and it returned to undifferentiated chaos for a time. Then the same patterns started coalescing again.

Tiana chewed on her lip as an idea surfaced. She hesitated, looking at the idea, and then words tumbled out. “The Logos… describes everything that’s real, right? Even the words we say?”

“A child’s simplification, but yes.”

“No calling me a child!” she snapped and then took a deep breath. “What if she’s trying to make the Logos describe the cow-monster, too? Or the shadows that come with the illness? What if she’s trying to, well, make eidolons part of the Logos?”

“I have not yet found a way to apply the Logos to your magic.” The sword’s voice was flat.

Was it a stupid idea? She felt hot and flustered, and wished she’d caught the plague instead. Kiar was the clever one. “Our eidolons and emanations, they’re copies of real things, so the Logos can understand them. But that abomination was horribly unnatural. I saw her memory and I thought ‘cow-thing,’ but it made me really, really unhappy. It’s not the right word. I could talk forever and never describe it. There isn’t a right word. It was like madness, made real.” She paused and shook the nightmare out of her head, then continued.

“Even though the Logos can’t touch our eidolons, they’re not unnatural, because they come from us, and we’re real. We have words. ‘Yithiere’s eidolon wolf.’ That means something. And if I have the words, the Logos must as well. But if those plague shadows come from something that isn’t real… the Logos wouldn’t know how to interact with them.” She paused. “And that’s why the plague destroys people’s minds—because they don’t work properly in the place where the shadow is. The Logos doesn’t know how to deal with it, so neither do people’s minds.”

Jinriki said, “You realize this idea presupposes a mysterious origin for this plague, beyond the Logos, from outside the world. Why do you have any reason to believe such a thing could exist?”

Tiana jerked and then shouted, “You! You’re a sky fiend! From outside the world! And Kiar couldn’t banish you! You’re incredible. Do you think I’m stupid? Are you trying to hide something? Are you at fault? Lord of Winter, I—” She stopped. The sword was laughing at her.

“Clever girl. Your idea is troubling. I don’t know if it’s right or not. It seems like such an… engineered thing, to affect humans in such a way. But if so, it suggests that if a nearly-identical copy of the plague monster was added to the Logos, it would make the illness less a plague and more a bad day.”

Tiana scowled. “That’s what Kiar is trying to do, then. I should go tell Twist.”

“That man? He can’t possibly have the resources required.”

“Then what?” Why was he laughing again?

He said, “Let us make this monster you saw, within the embrace of the Logos. Then the troubled mortal patterns will be able to accept it.”

She gaped. “You can do that? Just like that? Just… make something? I thought Kiar was just trying to… teach.”

“Oh, she can’t. It requires some energy from outside the world. But, as you pointed out, I’m a sky fiend. I happen to have some left over, from before I was bound to sleep. I did say I was a channel.” Why did he sound so happy? “I’ll need your very close assistance, I’m afraid.”

She growled, “How? Why?”

“Well, my pretty little princess, I can work the Logos in that way, and I have the energy source we need, but you’re the one who saw the memory. You’re the one who knows what to create.”

Tiana knew it was useless, but she tried anyhow. “It was a cow. With three eyes. And… insects crawling out of its eye sockets. And the spots—they moved….” She shuddered convulsively.

Jinriki, though, was practically purring as he said, “Even now you try to pin it with mortal words, although you know you can’t. That just won’t do. You saw more than you ever could say. This phantasmagory is a wondrously useful thing, I see. We must take the memory and go to the Logos. We must work as one.”