‘You will not help?’
‘I did not say that.’
He waited.
She continued holding her hand beneath the pool’s placid surface, had yet to lift her head and meet his eyes. ‘This will take some time,’ she murmured. ‘The present… vulnerability… will exist in the interval. I have someone in mind, but the shaping towards the opportunity remains distant. Nor do I think my choice will please you. In the meantime…’
‘Yes?’
She shrugged. ‘We had best hope that potentially interested entities remain suitably distracted.’
He saw her expression suddenly change, and when she spoke again the tone was urgent. ‘Return to your realm, L’oric! Another circle has been closed-terribly closed.’ She drew her hand from the pool.
L’oric gasped.
It was covered in blood.
His eyes snapped open, and he was kneeling in his tent once more. Night had arrived, and the sounds outside were muted, peaceful, a city settling down to its evening meal. Yet, he knew, something horrible had happened. He went still, questing outward. His powers-so weakened, so tremulous-‘Gods below!’ A swirl of violence, knotted upon itself, radiating waves of agony-a figure, small, twisted inward, in shredded clothes soaked through with blood, crawling through darkness.
L’oric lurched to his feet, head spinning with anguish.
Then he was outside, and suddenly running.
He found her trail, a smeared track through sand and dust, out beyond the ruins, into the petrified forest. Towards, he knew instinctively, the sacred glade that had been fashioned by Toblakai.
But there would be no succour for her there. Another abode of false gods. And Toblakai was gone, off to cross blades with his own fate.
But she was without clear thought. She was only pain, lancing out to fire instincts of flight. She crawled as would any dying creature.
He saw her at the edge of the glade, small, bedraggled, pulling herself forward in torturous increments.
L’oric reached her side, a hand reaching to settle at the back of her head, onto sweat-snarled hair. She flinched away with a squeal, fingers clawing against his arm. ‘Felisin! He’s gone! It is L’oric. You are safe with me. Safe, now-’
But still she sought to escape.
‘I shall call upon Sha’ik-’
‘No,’ she shrieked, curling tight on the sand. ‘No! She needs him! She needs him still!’ Her words were blunted by broken lips but understandable none the less.
L’oric sank back, struck mute by the horror. Not simply a wounded creature, then. A mind clear enough to weigh, to calculate, to put itself aside… ‘She will know, lass-she can’t help but know.’
‘No! Not if you help me. Help me, L’oric. Just you-not even Heboric! He would seek to kill Bidithal, and that cannot be.’
‘Heboric? I want to kill Bidithal!’
‘You mustn’t. You can’t. He has power-’
He saw the shudder run through her at that.
L’oric hesitated, then said, ‘I have healing salves, elixirs… but you will need to stay hidden for a time.’
‘Here, in Toblakai’s temple. Here, L’oric.’
‘I will bring water. A tent.’
‘Yes!’
The rage that burned in him had contracted down to a white-hot core. He struggled to control it, his resolve sporadically weakened by doubts that he was doing the right thing. This was… monstrous. There would be an answer to it. There would have to be an answer to it.
Even more monstrous, he realized with a chill, they had all known the risk. We knew he wanted her. Yet we did nothing.
Heboric lay motionless in the darkness. He had a faint sense of being hungry, thirsty, but it remained remote. Hen’bara tea, in sufficient amounts, pushed the needs of the outer world away. Or so he had discovered.
His mind was floating on a swirling sea, and it seemed eternal. He was waiting, still waiting. Sha’ik wanted truths. She would get them. And then he was done, done with her.
And probably done with life, as well.
So be it. He had grown older than he had ever expected to, and these extra weeks and months had proved anything but worth the effort. He had sentenced his own god to death, and now Fener would not be there to greet him when he finally stepped free of his flesh and bones. Nor would Hood, come to that.
It did not seem he would awaken from this-he had drunk far more of the tea than he ever had before, and he had drunk it scalding hot, when it was most potent. And now he floated on a dark sea, an invisible liquid warm on his skin, barely holding him up, flowing over his limbs and chest, around his face.
The giant of jade was welcome to him. To his soul, and to whatever was left of his days as a mortal man. The old gifts of preternatural vision had long vanished, the visions of secrets hidden from most eyes-secrets of antiquity, of history-were long gone. He was old. He was blind.
The waters slipped over his face.
And he felt himself sliding down-amidst a sea of stars that swirled in the blackness yet were sharp with sudden clarity. In what seemed a vast distance, duller spheres swam, clustering about the fiery stars, and realization struck him a hammer blow. The stars, they are as the sun. Each star. Every star. And those spheres-they are worlds, realms, each one different yet the same.
The Abyss was not as empty as he’d believed it to be. But… where dwell the gods? These worlds-are they warrens? Or are the warrens simply passageways connecting them?
A new object, growing in his vision as it drifted nearer. A glimmer of murky green, stiff-limbed, yet strangely contorted, torso twisted as if caught in the act of turning. Naked, spinning end over end, starlight playing across its jade surface like beads of rain.
And behind it, another, this one broken-a leg and an arm snapped clean off yet accompanying the rest in its silent, almost peaceful sailing through the void.
Then another.
The first giant cartwheeled past Heboric, and he felt he could simply extend a hand to brush its supple surface as it passed, but he knew it was in truth far too distant for that. Its face came into view. Too perfect for human, the eyes open, an expression too ambiguous to read, though Heboric thought he detected resignation within it.
There were scores now, all emerging from what seemed a single point in the inky depths. Each one displaying a unique posture; some so battered as to be little more than a host of fragments and shards, others entirely unmarred. Sailing out of the blackness. An army.
Yet unarmed. Naked, seemingly sexless. There was a perfection to them-their proportions, their flawless surfaces-that suggested to the ex-priest that the giants could never have been alive. They were constructs, statues in truth, though no two were alike in posture or expression.
Bemused, he watched them spin past. It occurred to him that he could turn, to see if they simply dwindled down to another point far behind him, as if he but lay alongside an eternal river of green stone.
His own motion was effortless.
As he swung round, he saw-
– and cried out.
A cry that made no sound.
A vast-impossibly vast-red-limned wound cut across the blackness, suppurating flames along its ragged edges. Grey storms of chaos spiralled out in lancing tendrils.
And the giants descended into its maw. One after another. To vanish. Revelation filled his mind.
Thus, the Crippled God was brought down to our world. Through this… this terrible puncture. And these giants… follow. Like an army behind its commander.
Or an army in pursuit.
Were all of the jade giants appearing somewhere in his own realm? That seemed impossible. They would be present in countless locations, if that was the case. Present, and inescapably visible. No, the wound was enormous, the giants diminishing into specks before reaching its waiting oblivion. A wound such as that could swallow thousands of worlds. Tens, hundreds of thousands.