The Astronomer's Spire

The Keeper of Splendor opened a door in the empty air and stepped through it, and the light went out of the Spire behind her. With the pyre already gone thin, that was all the dark had been waiting for — and among the things that came knocking, one wore the voice of a god.

While Sylvie bent over the nailed tome's copied pages, the rest of the company kept to the compound. Jamal passed the day lying up with Dagga, then spent a while in the company of Pinchie, then lay up with Dagga again — an easy day, the last of them. Draz had a thread of Splendor in his sight that would not settle: a light burning up at the Astronomer's Spire, out past the failing reach of the Sacred Pyre, where by rights no light should have held. So they went to see it.

Across the bridge and through a great brass door, the Spire opened above them into a skeleton of metal — a lattice frame climbing to a mesh platform at the top, and above that a half-circle observatory dome seated on a ring of gears, made to crank open to the sky. Some manner of helmet stood wired into the apparatus, a thing built to be worn while one looked up. Draz and Heyou climbed; Jamal hung back below. And near the top they saw her — Inola, the Keeper of Splendor — as she worked some dimension door open in the air, a seam of blue crackling like light seen through water, and walked through it, and was gone. The Splendor went out of the Spire with her.

Where she had stood they found a ring of paper laid on the floor, salt and other crystalline stuff strewn across it: a ritual circle, its purpose left behind with no one to read it. And that was the moment the dark chose. With the pyre reduced and the Keeper's light gone, the Umbral things pressing on the Spire from outside began to knock — and then to break in.

An Oak Treant struck the brass door until it tore free of its frame, and hurled the whole slab inward. Jamal caught it out of the air and stood buckling beneath its weight — and as the first Demonic Hound Pack poured in around his legs, he dropped the door straight down onto them. A Stag Knight came up the stair, and Heyou descended off the height to meet it rather than let it reach the top. Draz tried to speak to the living tree inside the treant, to reach whatever grew under the Umbra in it — but the words found nothing, and it kept on swinging.

Sylvie, drawn out of her reading, came down the bridge from the far side and into a closing wedge — a pack of hounds, a Stag Knight, and one of two Vampires turning toward her at once. She threw a Power Push at the hounds to break the pincer, and they only crouched flat to the floor and would not be moved — so she was pinned into melee the length of the fight, until at last she darted clear and flung a Fireball back over her shoulder into the press. Jamal took the worst of the Vampires' attention — scratched, bitten, scratched again — and answered with a blow of a kind none of them had seen him land, and with fire out of a jar. Above it all Draz held the top mesh and fired down into the room, coming off the height only at the very end.

Down against the last Stag Knight, Heyou fell to the edge of death — and before Sylvie could siphon the life out of the room and pour it back into him, a voice not his own spoke through his mouth. It asked where the Runt God was. It said to bring it back. Then Sylvie's stolen life reached him and hauled him back from the dark, and the voice was gone.

And at the top of the Spire, Draz put his head to the observatory helmet and looked up through the hole in the sky — and something looked back. A vast eye, gazing down through the gap between the worlds. He worked the gears and cranked the dome open on it, and caught a glimpse of the same: an eye, watching, where the Spire had always been built to point.

They killed everything. The Vampire on Jamal fell first, then the Stag Knight that had been on Heyou, then the Vampire and the hounds and the Stag Knight that had hemmed in Sylvie — and the rest went down in some order after, the Oak Treant and the middle Stag Knight the last of them to fall.

Afterward, Sylvie went back to the Forbidden Library to reckon up what was truly there — and found a gap on the shelves. A book of planar passage was gone: a work that opened gates between planes and let its reader step through solid walls. She took it that Inola had lifted it in the chaos of their last descent and used it now to make her door — a way, perhaps, to the World Above, or perhaps somewhere else entirely; there was no telling which. Where the Keeper had gone, none of them knew. What Sylvie did carry out were paintings and academic works treating far parts of the Amber Reach — true faces of far places, the very thing she needed if she was ever to reach them.