Embers of a Broken Throne (29 page)

C
hapter 42

A
t the foothills where the Riven Reaches began in Everland, Ancel parted ways with Halvor. A wind gusted, one that should have been frigid to him, but he felt little if any of the biting cold that penetrated his leather armor and turned his breath into misty spools. Only out of habit did he pull his hood over his head. Cloud banks spanned above them, lightning flickers radiating in hues of emerald and indigo. Blares of angry thunder muttered in discord.

Next to him, Irmina hunkered down within the folds of fur and thick clothing. Trucida did the same. In ways he felt bare without Charra to guard his back, but leaving him behind had been a necessity. With the Netherwood king’s death in the Broken Lands, another one of the animals would need to assert themselves as leader. Until then, someone needed to be in the Netherwood lest the beasts attacked Varick’s forces.

“Trucida, if you will?” He gestured ahead to the white sea before them.

Without a word the wizened Exalted Forged a portal. She stepped through first, and they followed.

They arrived in a hollow amid rolling hills. Quiet caressed the land, the calm in a storm. The sky was clear and blue in a circle above them, encompassing the hollow. A charcoal blanket began outside the circle. Even the wind did little more than moan and kick up swirls of snow. A windowless white-blue spire with a strange mix of other colors was the sole building to break the landscape’s monotony.

A glint among the dark clouds drew Ancel’s eye. The long snake of a zyphyl appeared, two smaller versions of the beasts in escort. A low croon filled the air. The beasts hovered for a moment before returning to the clouds.

“You two should wait here,” Ancel said. He could feel the pull of the Eztezian within the structure. It made what he once felt from Ryne pale in comparison.

Irmina opened her mouth, but Trucida touched her arm. After a deep breath, Irmina nodded.

Ancel drew on the Forms and Flows. Snow piled before his feet, spreading into the replica of a miniature barge. He stepped up onto it. With his next Forge, he sent his creation scooting over the snow and ice toward the spire.

When he reached the structure he saw that what he had thought to be odd colored stone that made up the spire was instead massive ice blocks. Trapped within the surface were the bodies of men and creatures, shadelings included, all whole and fully garbed. Ancel remained a good distance from the structure.

“You know I’m here,” he said. “You can let me in, or I can find my own way.”

Nothing but the wind’s moans.

He circled the spire, seeking an opening. All sides were the same, closed, beasts and men preserved in ice.

“I can only assume this is a test.” He delved into the Eye. A ball of flame burst into existence around his fist. Throwing his hand out, he flung the fire at the spire. It dissipated with a hiss.

“Definitely a test.”

He touched Prima, calling forth heat essences from his Etchings. This time the fireball penetrated at least a foot deep into the ice before it stopped. The hole closed up with a crackling sound.

One answer remained. Eyes closed Ancel said, “Heat to balance cold. Heat to evoke passion. Passion is unrelenting.”

The air split around him, portals opening up, the smell of burning pitch seeping out. Ferezen’s massive snakes of flame swept out from them, each with eyes that glowed brighter than the fires themselves. They hissed when they met the cold. He directed them to the spire. Together, they struck, burrowing into and through the ice. Dismissing the sentient, Ancel strode through the opening into the darkness beyond.

Inside the spire was odorless. As he waited for his sight to adjust to the dark, lightstones flickered on, revealing the walls that housed them. The luminance multiplied too many times to count, but his Matersense told him there were only ten lightstones. He glanced down to images of himself in semitransparent, glassy ice before he surveyed the rest of his surroundings.

Four columns stood at the structure’s center, a spiral staircase winding around their exterior. Both stairs and pillars disappeared some thirty feet up into a ceiling from which he could see himself. Carved from the same icy blocks as everything else, the columns sparkled, and reflected a million distorted images.

Intricate carvings decorated each pillar. Certain they were Etchings, he reached a gloved hand out and touched them. Frigid cold radiated beneath his fingers. When he tried to ease away to touch another section his hand stuck against the surface. He yanked harder, to no avail. Forging, he drew on the heat essences stored within his Etchings. The pillar absorbed them. Another attempt at a Forge proved similarly futile.

The cold seeped up his arm, the limb growing numb. Ancel reached to his waist, removed his knife, and proceeded to cut the laces on his gloves. Once he freed his wrist, he worked his hand from the glove. A crackling echoed above his heavy breathing as the ice claimed the glove with a transparent coat.

Frowning, he strode around the pillars to a point where the stairs curved high enough from him to peer up into the squared hollow they formed. The structures seemed to stretch up forever. A visual illusion, he realized, from the infinite reflections.

He made his way back to the steps. Etchings also adorned them. Rather than risk his boots, he removed his other glove, bent, and touched it on the first step. It froze in place. He snatched his hand away before the ice claimed it.

Left with only his swords, armor, knife, cloak, and boots, he pondered his next course of action. Regardless of what decision he made, he had to ascend. The pull from the Eztezian said as much.

Ancel removed his knife from the sheath on his belt, undid his cloak by its clasp, and sheared the material in half. The upper bit he refastened around his neck. He took the lower half and threw it at the second step. In the count of five it became ice.

Careful not to allow any part of his body to touch the step he leaned forward as far as he could and tapped the knife on the third step. Near instant crackling. So fast he barely managed to be quick enough in removing his hand. The knife never fell. The weapon froze standing up.

Grunting his frustration, he considered another Forge, but concluded it would have the same effect as before. Left with few options he made to venture outside and question Irmina and Trucida.

A wall of ice and Etchings covered the opening through which he’d entered.

Ancel faced the stairs once more. He mulled over the problem, pacing back and forth while stroking the bush under his chin. A part of him said the solution stared him in the face, but he simply couldn’t see it. Annoyance growing, he sat on the floor.

People he loved would continue to suffer if he couldn’t get past this. People who relied on him. His mother and father dominated his mind. Without this step chances were slim that he’d see either one of them alive again. Particularly, Stefan. The pain his father must be enduring echoed to him, a weight in the pendant around his neck. Stefan’s essences had called to him from the southwest, a distinct difference from the charm in Benez.

Thinking of his father conjured images of the years spent training and learning
the Disciplines.
Memories of Galiana also rose to the forefront. Ancel continued to stare at the stairs while the flood of old memories, most pleasurable, flashed through his mind.

The most straightforward and simple approach is often the solution to a complex problem.
Father loved that one
Discipline
. Ancel recalled hearing the same from Ryne.

Mind a buzz, he wondered what Galiana would have thought about everything that happened so far. He could see the old woman admonishing him, telling him he should’ve expected some of it. Not that he hadn’t. Since losing her, he’d been applying one of her core teachings to all he did: the idea that coincidence didn’t exist. Every event was part of some plan.

The ideas repeated in his head and with them the spark of a solution, one that seemed too great a risk to take. Yet it was simplicity itself. Ignoring it for the moment he wracked his brains for a different angle, an action that would not mean his life if he failed. None came. Another
Discipline
repeated to him instead.
In every stratagem, regardless of how sound, or how infallible, there is risk. Expecting to war without risk is to already accept defeat.

With those words as his guide he slipped off his boots. The cold floor was a distant touch at the back of his mind. Dread crawled in his gut as he stood, a tight thing balled and ready to spring. He allowed it to thrive instead of forcing it down with the Eye. Fear made him feel alive. He drew in a deep breath, exhaled, and stepped onto the first stair.

The steps felt as if he walked on Eldanhill’s sun-warmed cobbles in the middle of summer. Cracking a smile, he headed up.

Round and round the flights wound, the lack of bannisters a scary proposition until he found himself above the ceiling in the spire’s heart, surrounded by ice walls and a multitude of self-images. He lost track of time. When he finally stepped up through an opening and onto the final landing, his chest was heaving, and his legs burned.

The last flight opened onto a square with the four pillars at its corners. In the middle of it sat a lone, naked, hairless figure, skin the color of snow. Etchings covered his body and became one with the floor.

“I began to doubt if you’d make it.” The voice was male, old, raspy, and weary. “Being able to reach me means you possess the necessary Tenets.”

“I do,” Ancel said.

The man’s eyes opened. They were the purest gold. “I have waited a long time for one such as you. So long in fact that I forget what time means.”

“How did you know I’d come?”

“Not you per se. I knew
someone
had to come. Eventually. It was inevitable.”

“How so?”

The Eztezian smiled. “If a place exists and can be reached, won’t someone go there?”

“Um.”

A chuckle echoed through the room.

“Whatever made you come to this place, or choose this place?” Ancel asked.

“I was tired of the wars, the constant fighting. So I built all of this.” The man gestured around him with frail, spindly arms. “From it my power courses out into Ostania, touching here, touching there, making me aware of all that happens. Eventually it spans the entire world.”

Ancel frowned. “The storms?”

The Eztezian nodded. “And the zyphyl.”

“Who are you?”

“A man, a godling,” the old man said, shrugging, “even I am uncertain.”

“Do you have a name? Something I can call you?”

“It matters not. Like Ryne or Thanairen, I’ve had countless. None that could be remembered today.” The hairless man paused, seemingly deep in thought. “Except perhaps the last due to a long forgotten line of descendants or a city dead and gone. I doubt even they would know their origins. Log ago, when I was just a man, they called me Jenoah Merinian, the First Chronicler, the First Beasttamer.”

Ancel gasped.

“Ah, it still means something.”

“The city of Jenoah died during a battle among the gods, or so my dreams say,” Ancel answered. “And the Chroniclers are still revered to this day for their ability to tell the future.” He considered mentioning Galiana and Irmina, but a part of him said Merinian knew of them.

“The future’s many paths,” Merinian corrected. “Paths divined by me and passed on through the zyphyls. And your dreams have the right of it. What else do they say?”

“Not much besides reminding me of Antonjur.”

“Then you must seek it out.”

The words were more command than suggestion. Ancel felt a strange need to obey. “The old homes of the gods?” he asked. “Why?”

“It’s where they live.”

“Who?”

Merinian gave Ancel a blank stare. As realization dawned, Ancel’s mouth formed an ‘O’.

“Before you can do so, you need cold and the shade’s Tenets,” Merinian said.

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Really? I thought perhaps you came because you loved the frigid, empty wasteland where nothing but my creations live.” Merinian chuckled again. He climbed to his feet. His chest and genitals were absolutely flat, featureless. “When I first saw into the Planes of If and passed the message of the creator’s bane and the Aegis, I myself did not quite know what I was seeing. It was simply a message delivered by things beyond my grasp, possibly by the very gods who we helped to lock themselves away. But, no matter how many different possibilities revealed themselves to me, there was one constant …”

Prima flared around Merinian, his aura growing to reach the ceiling. A gold and silver nimbus surrounded his body.

Ancel tensed.

“In order to pass cold’s Tenet to you, we would need to do battle. I would have to be defeated.” Merinian’s voice echoed from every direction.

A lump caught in Ancel’s throat, fear threatening to choke him. His heart pounded.

“And in every scenario you lost,” Merinian said, voice even, flat, a simple statement of fact.

Ancel prepared to recite his Tenets in his mind.

“Do you know why?” Merinian stared him down, the golden eyes seeming to penetrate to Ancel’s core.

Mouth like chalk, Ancel could offer no answer.

“Because this is my domain, my stronghold, and even if heat and cold balance each other, nothing of heat that I couldn’t snuff out can enter this place.”

Something about the man’s proclamation, about his demeanor, said he didn’t wish to fight, that he was doing as he’d seen from his zyphyls, from his connections to the Planes of If. The words also gave Ancel an idea.

Without a second thought he snatched the sword at his hip and stabbed it into the ground, igniting its Etchings. The blade sliced into the ice like a sharp knife parting silk. He called upon heat’s Tenet.

The portals opened, the fiery sentient shot through. Ancel drove its power into the weapon,
his divya
. Prima Materium tore through the building, spreading in a golden glow, lighting up every Etching along the way.