PROMISES AND HOPE
SAERIS
THICK. CLOYING. PUTRID.
Usually, the quicksilver rolled away, beading from clothes, hair, and skin alike whenever we exited one of its pools.
Not so this time. Whatever the foul substance was that filled the pool at Ajun, it was nothing like quicksilver.
It probed up my nose and coated my tongue, filling my mouth with the taste of rot.
Passing through it felt like drowning. Unbridled panic ratcheted in my chest as my lungs pulled, desperate for air, urging me to Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!
My head breached the pool, and I immediately sucked down a lungful of—
PAIN.
I’d inhaled razor blades.
I—
I couldn’t—
Easy, Osha. Don’t panic. Khydan was close.
I didn’t so much rise from the pool as find myself being spat out by it. On my hands and knees, I crawled forward, gasping and choking as I tried to make sense of the sensations assaulting my body.
The reek of sulfur and a wall of tremendous heat slapped me in the face. Until very recently, I’d spent my life in a desert. I’d never imagined anything could be hotter than the Third during reckoning . . . but this? This was unimaginable.
I was in shock. Panic spiraling up and down my spine as waves of adrenaline warned me to move, to step out of the fire, to retreat to safety. But there was no retreat. There was no safety. There was only a crushing dark, and air so superheated that it felt like it was tearing my lungs to ribbons.
My eyes stung—either from the sulfur or from the heat, I couldn’t tell. It seemed as though they should be watering. Perhaps they were, and the moisture wicking from the surface of my eyes was the source of the unbearable stinging.
“Osha? Can you stand?” Khydan’s voice was low and quiet, but the worry in his words made them loud as a shout.
I felt his hand on my back, then on my arm.
He helped me to my feet as I tried to hack the tar-like, disgusting filth up and out of my throat.
“That’s it. Spit it out. Whatever you do, don’t swallow it. ”
Oh, gods. “What is it?” I rasped.
Khy took longer than I would have liked to answer. “It’s probably best if you don’t ask,” he said. His voice was too quiet, as if it were being carried away by an invisible wind. “Are you okay?”
His hand found mine in the dark again; the squeeze he gave me calmed my nerves enough that my voice only shook a little when I spoke. “I’m fine. At least I think I am. I can’t see anything. And I feel like I’m being cooked.”
Pale green light flared next to me, almost white but not quite.
Khydan held a thin tube in his other hand, the top half of which glowed with evenlight.
He held it out to me. Once I’d accepted it, he produced another of the strange tubes from his pocket and shook it hard, activating it so that he held one, too.
My mate’s eyes were dark as drowning pools, the brilliant green muted almost to black.
His hair dripped with foul liquid that still churned in the pool behind us.
It mottled his skin, viscous and thick, his fighting leathers sticky with it.
My own hair was plastered to my skull, the liquid soaking all the way through my leathers.
I would have taken that fall into the lake outside Gillethrye all over again, broken ribs and everything, if it meant that I could wash this filth from my body. It wasn’t right.
Shooting me a lopsided smile that was probably supposed to be reassuring, Khydan said, “Two hours. That’s all the time we can spend here, otherwise you will wind up cooked. Your body wasn’t made for this place.”
“Then we’d better get moving. But . . . where do we need to go?
” Had I really been so foolish? “You’ll need to pass through the gate at Ajun,” Lorreth had said.
“You’ll need to bargain with the creatures there for access to their brimstone.
” I had accepted that doing so would be gravely dangerous—but I hadn’t thought to ask how to find these creatures.
Didn’t know where they would be . . . or where we would be when we stepped out of the pool, for that matter.
Our evenlight torches were far from enough to fully illuminate our surroundings.
A six-foot-wide sphere of light embraced us, but on the other side of it waited the unwavering darkness.
Roiling beyond the bounds of evenlight, it felt sentient.
Cold and cruel. Khydan swept a hand over his face, smearing the black muck in a futile attempt to wipe it away.
His eyes roved, sharp, staring out into the dark.
The moment he opened his mouth to speak again, a thunderous rumble split the fetid air, and two glowing orange-red points blazed to life in the near distance, piercing the veil of dark.
They were balls of living flame, those twin points of orange and red. Only they weren’t, because they were eyes, and they burned with hate. The ground shook beneath our feet as a booming voice spoke: “Bolddddd.”
The darkness retreated, unveiling a cavernous stone hall draped in shadows and littered with bones.
When the beast ahead opened its maw, its giant jaws parting to reveal the glowing glands at the back of its raw, bleeding throat, the air buzzed with sulfur so badly that the stench nearly upended my stomach.
I knew what it was.
The name of the monster bounced around inside my head.
I didn’t dare speak it out loud.
It was seventy feet tall from its huge, taloned feet to its withers. Its long, articulated neck was stooped thanks to the rough rock ceiling. The gods only knew—possibly feared—how tall it might have been if it was able to rise to its full height. My breath stoppered in my lungs as I took it in.
Flashing scales of gold? No—black. It was hard to tell, given that the beast itself was the only source of light.
A horned ridge protruded from its wide, bony head like a crown.
Enormous bulky wings were tucked tightly into its sides.
And its teeth. They were three feet long and jagged, like the edge of one of Elroy’s saws.
I had been filled with awe at the sight of the massive skull that had loomed behind Belikon’s throne at the Winter Palace, but it hadn’t translated, not truly: just how big the rest of the creature would have to be to warrant a head that monstrous. I understood now . . . and I was afraid.
The temperature climbed, fresh waves of sweat breaking across my brow and evaporating as the dragon slowly propped itself up on taloned elbows and then pushed itself up from the ground. “Boldddd indeed,” it rumbled.
Don’t . . . run. Khydan’s warning was fortuitously timed.
I’d been considering it. The noxious pool was right behind us, still open.
How many seconds would it take to turn and dive back below the choppy surface?
Two? Three at most? From the edge in my mate’s voice, any amount of time wouldn’t be long enough.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Khy slowly reached over his shoulder and drew his blade.
Should I—
He gave a single, firm shake of his head. Don’t touch your swords. If it takes umbrage with anyone, let it be me. Don’t move, Osha. Just . . . stay exactly where you are.
Smoke rolled off Nimerelle, thick and angry.
If the dragon cared, it was impossible to tell.
Like a dog waking from a long nap, it shook its giant head, sparks flying from its flared nostrils.
The horns atop its head smashed awkwardly into the rough-hewn rock, and a large section of the ceiling sloughed away and came crashing down around the beast, rock turning to shrapnel where it struck the ground.
Run, my heart urged. What in all five hells are you doing, Fane? Fucking run.
I stood my ground, boots firmly planted, heeding Khydan’s command.
“Two thousand yearrrrssss have I lived. Never has a meal walked straight into my mouth,” the dragon snarled.
Its mouth didn’t move. The words were spoken out loud—the walls wouldn’t have quaked so terribly otherwise—but it must have formed its words differently to Fae and humankind.
Its tongue, forked and blackened, darted between its teeth, as if it was tasting the air.
I’d seen plenty of dune asps do this back in Zilvaren.
I’d never seen a snake lick a mouthful of yard-long yellowed teeth, though.
“You are not of this place.”
“We are not.” The hall rang with Khydan’s voice. Clear and steady, he didn’t sound afraid. I sensed his fear, though. He didn’t try to shield me from it. “We’re from—”
“I know the name of your home,” the dragon interrupted. “Do not speak it out loud.” It seemed to gather, pulling back, its neck arching and tucking into its broad, gleaming chest. The temperature in the ancient hall rose a degree or two. “Why have you come?” it demanded.
“We—”
“The other must speak!”
Me. I was the other. For some reason, it wanted me to answer.
But I wasn’t as practiced an actor as my mate.
Khydan’s hand tightened around Nimerelle’s hilt.
The blade was kicking out so much smoke that it almost drowned out the light cast by our torches.
Was it Khydan’s worry, bleeding into his god sword?
Or was it the spark of Ren’s sister that still resided in the blade concerned for me?
Don’t give it much, Khydan warned. Tell it we need to speak to—
“I hear you, boy,” the dragon snarled. “There is no dark corner where you may hide your whisperings from me.”
Boy? How old was this thing that it would consider Khydan a boy? And, disturbingly, it could hear us speaking directly into each other’s minds? Could it hear our thoughts, too? Our—
“I hear the grindings of the gears that drive the universe toward destruction. I hear all. I know . . .” Its tongue probed between shattered teeth, flickering back and forth in the air. “. . . all.”