“You should have died with your wife, Khault,” he replied. “I buried the last of my mercy alongside her.”
Khault’s features twisted in rage. His mouth gaped wide, showing the grips of a very human emotion on an anatomy more suited to the dark depths of a gods-forsaken sea than land. Uthalion smiled cruelly, seeing the man Khault had been still hiding in the beast he’d become. As Khault rose higher, several appendages rose like broken wings from his back, flat growths with tiny barbed mouths at their tips swiftly descending.
Uthalion skipped backward, batting one of the whipping tentacles away as his left hand rose to his lips, a wooden whistle between his fingertips. The tiny instrument, given to him by Chevat of the aranea, blew a single piercing note, barely more than a slight keening in Uthalion’s ears. But its effect on the hordes of Tohrepur was immediate.
Shocked screams spread through the infected assemblage, and thunderous frightened roars shook the ground as the slippery bodies slid back from the piercing whistle. Ears, heightened by exposure to the beguiling song and suddenly cut off from its soothing melody, ran with tiny crimson streams. Chaos reigned as the Flock abandoned their Choir, clawing their way past the pained beasts to seek refuge from the terrible shriek. Khault flinched in pain, stumbling backward, his head turning blindly in confusion for a moment. Then he lurched forward, ignoring the whistle with a rumbling growl.
The air grew thick as Ghaelya ran through the glittering spires, early stars shining in countless reflections all around her. Shapeless fingers breezed over her skin, dug into her flesh with tendrils of ice, and a voice sang to her of fear. A powerful scent of lavender washed over her coldly, and she paused wide-eyed as the vines that led her on twisted and changed. Their deep, rough green became a smooth pale blue that squirmed with life, pulsing with veins and gently writhing in the dirt. The roping stalks slowly converged toward a single point as she followed the broken stone path. Ghostly beams of early moonlight stabbed brightly through the spires, illuminating a laree clearing ahead.
The vines knotted and entwined themselves together, disappearing beyond the edge of a wide cavern in the center of the clearing. The constant song took on a hollow, echoing quality, rising from the ground in waves. She stopped at the perimeter of the crystal forest, trembling, unable to look away from the mouth of the cavern and the web of vines spidering out from its depths.
Approaching slowly, she managed her racing heart, suddenly uncertain of herself. She glanced back the way she’d come, seeing more than just the darkness or the long journey behind her, or even her companions facing the Choir without her. She imagined Airspur and her mother sitting alone in their dark family room, weeping and worrying over the disappearance of her daughters. She pictured her father busying himself with work and unable to accept the disintegration of his family, acting among his friends as though all were normal.
She thought of these things and caught herself avoiding the idea of what she could find in the cavern that issued a music so sweet she’d heard it in her dreams and followed it beyond all reason for the brief hope of finding her sister again. She feared the blood her last dream had prophesied. Swallowing her fear, she took, a step into the clearing.
“I’m coming, Tess,” she whispered.
I know.
Her sister’s voice stunned her; gliding along inside the singing, it filled her mind. She took another step, her boot disappearing in the smoky mist-grass that filled the clearing. The sudden sense that she was walking on air twisted her stomach with vertigo, but she continued, ripples radiating out from her boots and lapping at the edges of the spires.
“Tess?” she said hoarsely. lean hear you.
Screams split the night air. The ground shook, and she crouched defensively, her sword turning in a circle and shining in the moonlight. It reflected in the eyes of a figure sitting on the opposite side of the cavern. Rising hope quickly faded as she made out the crouching form of Vaasurri, his black-green gaze fixed with a solemn sorrow.
“It was her song that called us here, a song of the Feywild, I should have known,” he said, staring down into the shadows of the cavern and shaking his head. “The song of a sirine, transformed by the Spellplague into a song of ruin, of nightmares made flesh.”
“No,” Ghaelya blurted out, disbelieving. “It was Tess… I know it was her.”
“An accident, perhaps fate,” the killoren said, his dark eyes rising, “Your sister, she must have run away from the Choir, tried to make her way through the crystals and… Well, I will not stand in your way.”
Just a bit farther.
Tessaeril’s voice pulled at her, drew her closer to the cavern with a gentle tug that threatened on the edge of near desperation. Hesitantly she continued, looking between the dark and the killoren, realizing that the worst of her imagination over the past tenday could become horrid reality in the next few heartbeats. She took a deep, calming breath as the fear in the song passed, giving way to an almost undetectable sorrow.
She gripped the edge of the cavern, and looked down to a rocky path leading into an ethereal, glowing pit of shadows and reflected light. The wet rock walls glistened and smelled of brine, and flowers bloomed inside. She lowered herself over the side, hanging by the fleshy vines as Vaasurri appeared over her.
“Do not touch her, no matter what,” he warned. “I suspect that’s what the Choir wants.”
Mystified and unnerved by the emotion on the killoren’s features, she merely nodded-and continued her descent. The son? was focused within the cavern, almost visible as a wavering haze that eddied around her and gushed outward into the sky. She slipped on the vines a few times, her nerves causing her to make simple mistakes as she felt for the cavern floor with the toe of her boot. Setting down on the rocks, she crouched and crawled forward into the ephemeral, glittering light.
Vines squished wetly beneath her hands and led her to a viscous mass that dominated the large cavern. About to search the waters for the source of the song, she noticed a network of branching veins that spread and pulsed rhythmically through the mass. Sluggish waves roiled through the giant, watery body that was curled up before her, rippling like an underground pool. The vague shape of limbs, creases and folds suggestive of a lost anatomy, gave an impression of femininity, of soft curves and once delicate features.
The air hummed, distorted and dreamlike around the slumbering form, a constant song. Or perhaps it was the memory of a song once sung, still repeating itself over and over until fixed in place, a force flooding from the soft blue flesh. Vines fanned outward from the back of the cavern, a network of tangles and knots that crawled the walls in thick, ropey strands. They lay across the surface of the being, framing a large face that stared sightlessly toward the ceiling, occasionally shifting left or right in languid movements that shook the entire mass. Watery eyes, deep blue-black pools in the blue, rolled and turned, lost in a dream.
Ghaelya was frozen, trying to take in the sight of the creaturethe sirine she decided, for Vaasurri’s word for it was as close as she might imagine could fit. She realized she had stopped breathing and gasped a long breath, the sound echoing in the chamber. The sirine took no notice, the radical changes in her form too extreme, the changes too great to support consciousness. The buzzing air vibrated across Ghaelya’s skin in a quick tempo of sound. She was reminded of the cavern outside Caidris, I and the deep temple in the warrens of the araneaplaces of bones and savage beauty.
The memory struck her with such force that she stumbled backward and leaned against a rock as she realized what she had truly seen. Few bones decorated the walls that she could see, but the handful or more that were visible made familiar patterns. They adorned the walls of a sirine’s home, once deep beneath the waves of the Akanamere, waters stolen by the land-shaping earthquakes of the Spellplague.