Trail of the Witch

They went down after the witch — through the mouth of a fallen titan, and into a hole in the sky, to look on a dead world waiting under their own.

The plan was a lie to catch a liar: a false heart to hold out to Ygva, while Heyou kept the true one invisible and far from any parley. Sylvie thought little of it and said so, and would agree only on that one condition — the real heart nowhere near the trade. Tamber told them what more she could. Ygva had been put out of the Celsian Athenaeum for draining things down to nothing, which their order forbids; Draz's amulet, a relic made at God-King Otheidas's asking to shield lesser mages from the gods, would turn a god's power — even the Askavir's — but nothing of the Umbra the witch worked. The dead of Verrow's Span waited in a makeshift morgue for sky-burial, when there was time again for the oils. The living had none to spare the party; they had their own grief. Jamal packed rations and ale for a long walk, and they set out on the witch's trail.

They went down on ropes, Heyou belaying from above and keeping his distance as agreed, the heart with him. Below, the coast showed itself, and the tall spires of Salthewn standing against the sea-storms. But the river-ravine underneath was wrong to Sylvie's eye — no water had cut it; something vast had been dragged through the earth headlong, and the stream had only later found the wound and filled it.

At a fall with a boulder set midstream they laid a log across the near gap and meant to rope and swim the far one. Heyou gave Jamal and Draz heart for it, and Sylvie crossed first — and the gremlins came, two hordes of them, one swarming Jamal and one stoning Sylvie off her footing. Jamal took five apart with his hammer; Sylvie burned most of a horde to nothing and left one. More of them stacked and leapt the gap, and Draz shrugged off a knife at his back while Heyou, hidden with the heart, put down the last of the near ones. Then the gremlins above them broke a barricade they had built across the river, and the water came all at once, and swept Sylvie and Draz and Jamal over the lower falls before Heyou could get a rope to them.

They fell into a great stone cup — a basin shaped like the roof of a giant mouth — and Heyou, watching from the brink, understood the ravine at last: a titan had come down this mountain headfirst, and carved it with its own body. The three came up out of the cold pool onto a ledge where a cavern opened behind the falling water. Draz's sense of the witch pointed on into it. Heyou climbed down after them unseen, and let them hear his splash.

The cavern gave onto a round tunnel twenty feet across, its walls lined in a living sludge that held broken stone suspended in itself and moved it at will — and the witch's path ran straight down its throat. It began to swell and close as they hurried, and Jamal dragged Sylvie through the shifting rock while Heyou fell behind, and the thing sealed itself shut on him and ground him in its mass. From outside Sylvie put a Fireball into the sealed mouth of it; the sludge cooked and slumped and poured away over the ledge, and Heyou tore loose, steaming, still unseen, and kept his distance from the rest.

Beyond lay a chamber with two stone sentinels standing over a hole of pale light in the floor, and they had begun, slowly, to stir. Draz's tracking ran down through the hole; the witch was below. Sylvie drew her Stoneweaver pendant and held one sentinel's attention, then let it go to take a greater thing — a stone giant, a walking fortress with the ruin of buildings on its shoulders — and bound it, and put the pendant in Heyou's hand so he could drive it from hiding. It plucked a hooded figure off a narrow bridge, its whip falling on stone for nothing, and set it aside. Then they looked down through the hole, and saw what the light was: a colossal island city, ringed by water, dead, lit by a wan false sky. Sylvie knew it for the thing she had glimpsed before — the moon behind the moon — and understood they were looking through a hole in the sky of a world lying dead beneath them.

They were still weighing how to go down when two great mantises fell on Draz from either side, and an astral assassin — a swordsman flickering between there and not-there — stepped out of the air at Heyou's shoulder. Heyou caught it solid for an instant and drove a dagger into it; Jamal raised a swarm of fireflies to worry the mantises; Sylvie reached to siphon one dry and the working turned on her instead, feeding the creature her own strength. The fortress crushed a mantis out of the air. Then the assassin bore down on Heyou, and he reached into the true heart and spent it — one stroke, bright as a god's, that unmade the assassin utterly — and dropped where he stood, unconscious but breathing, as the fortress went still and the heart went cold and quiet in his hands. They held the chamber, and Heyou would not wake, and there were two ways left: call the witch up to them, or go down through the hole into the dead world after her.