He smiled, his face fading in and out of darkness. “Like to like, Grey. You are essence here, as am I. It matters not whether we are physical or ethereal. How many times have you tried to kill me, Grey? How many times have I tried to kill you?”
I shoved him. He drifted a few feet away. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Vize lifted his dark hand, the hand that wore the gold ring that had ended our fight and caused us to lose our abilities. His hand and arm had been consumed with the dark mass like my mind had been. The ring burned in the darkness that was his hand, a mote that glowed bright with life in the black. “Do you remember?” he asked.
“I remember enough. I lost my abilities because of that ring,” I said.
“Focus, Grey. Remember,” he said.
I had been trying to remember for three years what had happened the night I fought Vize. I had tracked him down to a nuclear power plant he was planning to blow up. We fought. He lost control of his ring, and we lost our abilities. “Stop saying that.”
“Do you know what a soul stone is?” he asked.
People made soul stones as safety measures. Split a piece of your body essence—or even a significant amount—bond it to a static object to create an essence ward, and, well, don’t die. Without the destruction of someone’s life force— what some called the soul—and its container—a body or a ward—a person could receive a fatal wound and live. All that needed to be done to save them was the uniting of the soul stone with the body. “Of course I do.”
“We made a soul stone, Grey. We made a soul stone together. We saved the world,” he said.
I frowned. “You and me? We made a soul stone? Not likely.”
Vize held his hand out, a glitter of essence in the darkness. “The ring, Grey. We remade the ring with a piece of our souls. It was the only way to stop her from killing us because we are the only ones who can stop her from killing everyone.”
I closed my eyes, but it didn’t matter. Vize registered in my sensing ability, his body signature adrift in the dark. If I was dead and the Christian hell existed, this would be it. I was going to pay for everything I had done by being taunted by Vize forever. That was what I got for destroying TirNaNog.
“TirNaNog is not gone. It is here, and it is not here,” he said.
I opened my eyes. “You can read minds. Great.”
“Focus, Grey. You can do the same with me,” he said.
I sighed, or at least thought I did, alone there in the dark with my nemesis gnawing at my mind. I didn’t want to focus. I didn’t want to think or remember. I wanted to be left alone. Drifting was a decent option for a change, especially if I was dead.
“You won’t die. You can’t yet,” Vize said.
“Well, you certainly won’t,” I said.
“Listen to me” he said.
“You’re not here,” I said.
“She will condemn you as Donor condemned me. You will drift here with me on the edge of death in an ever-present now because our soul stone lies buried beneath the Guildhouse. We will drift here because we are tainted with the darkness. The two people Maeve cannot destroy, lost in the one place she cannot reach,” he said.
“I knew this was hell,” I said.
“Hell is a state of mind here, brother.”
We drifted, not speaking. It might have been a moment or an eternity. We drifted.
“She has the sword and the spear, Grey. She is reaching for the stone. Her hand burns down through your mind as we speak. She will hunt down the bowl. She will destroy whoever touches it,” he said.
“Why would she destroy everything?” I asked.
“Because she reaches beyond her reach. She thinks she can control what cannot be controlled. She thinks she can turn the Wheel of the World, but the Wheel of the World turns as It will,” he said.
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t care anymore. I closed my eyes and let my body tumble through the darkness.
“Meryl will die,” he said.
I opened my eyes and grabbed him, my hands burying themselves not in clothes, but his body signature. “What did you say?”
No satisfaction showed on his face, no mocking. “She will die, and you will never get to tell her you’re sorry.”
I shoved him. He didn’t drift away. “She knows,” I said.
“And I know you. I see it in your mind. You need to say good-bye. You need to face her. Call the bowl,” he said.
“I can’t call it. It’s not like the spear,” I said.
“But it is. Look inside yourself, see what the Wheel of the World has granted you to see. The bowl is the physical representation of bounty. It exists in the Wheel of the World beyond its physical form. We are beyond ourselves here. Call the bowl, Grey, and I will show you truth.”
A suspicion had been growing within me the more he talked. Maeve had abilities I could only guess at. I wasn’t drifting in the darkness with Vize. Maeve wanted me to believe that. If Vize said anything true, it was that Maeve had everything but the bowl. Calling it—and I did understand now that I could—would be handing her the thing she sought most. She had failed, though, by giving me more information than she intended. If I could call the bowl like I could call the spear, then I could call anything the Wheel of the World allowed me.
If I called the spear, Maeve would take it away from me. I could call something she hadn’t possessed, something she could not touch because it had never claimed her. In the depths of my mind, an essence signature registered. It had always been there. I had never thought to look because I didn’t understand I could. I summoned the essence to me, there in the dark, not the bowl and not the spear. In a flash of brilliant white, the sword appeared in my hand. I pointed it at Vize’s chest. “You told me too much, Maeve. Game over.”
Unfazed, Vize held out his hand. “Give me the sword.”
I lifted the point from his chest and smiled. “Thought I was stupid, Maeve? Didn’t think I would suspect a mind trick?”
“The sword, Grey.”
The blade shimmered white in the dark, dark shadows swirling around it without touching it. “Take it from me,” I said.
“It will be easier if you give it to me of your own free will,” he said.
“Of course, it would. You never held the sword, Maeve. You only touched it as the dagger. You can’t take it from me because you can’t take it.”
“This is your choice, Grey,” he said.
I presented the hilt, feeling pretty smug. “Take it, Maeve. Go on. I dare you.”
Vize grasped the sword and pulled it from my hand, pain stabbing my mind as my connection to the sword snapped. I gaped, fear creeping up my spine. I was wrong. I had given her yet another weapon. “I don’t understand. You never held the sword.”
“I am not Maeve,” Vize said. “I held the sword in TirNaNog. It called to me then, and I call to it now.”
“It’s really you, Vize?” I asked.
“I was and am. Now take my hand,” he said.
On his left hand, the ring smoldered with golden essence. It washed across my face with unsettling familiarity. It was me. It burned with my own living essence. Curious, I took his hand. The ring began to slip off his finger.
“I knew you wouldn’t call the bowl, Grey. You aren’t stupid. Your suspicious nature might save everything yet,” he said.
The ring was sliding into my palm. “What do you mean?”
“Tell Eorla thank you for everything. Tell her I died with hope.”
Still puzzled, I looked from my hand to his face. Smiling, Vize drove the point of the sword into my forehead. I convulsed in a shower of pain and essence. The darkness constricted like an iris and a burning cold swept over me as
41
White.
Whiteness filled my vision with nothing to break the relentlessness of it. Above me, the white simply was, as if the air itself was color. Or no color. As if nothing else existed except the white. I hung limp in the air, as if there were no air, no gravity. My head burned, like a cold fire in my mind, blazing against a blanket of night.