From his throne he witnessed the turn of millennia and the birth and death of stars. He watched mountains rise from oceans and continents sink beneath the waves. He thought his rule would see no end, not until every soul to have ever lived had ventured into the infinity beyond the gates of heaven.
But then the extinctions began. A corruption rose from a far-flung arm of the milky expanse, determined to destroy the gates of heaven, and it waged a war unlike any ever fought, a war of shooting lights and fireflies zipping across empty black skies, stars blinking out of the cosmos in cataclysmic explosions. Death and loss on an untold scale, and the Impundulu’s domain was not spared.
Helplessly, he witnessed its destruction, how his people were corrupted into vile parodies of what they once had been. He could not bear the sight, so when the chance came to escape, he took it.
He joined an immense convoy, a gathering of survivors who took the gates of heaven with them and fled toward a great princess of the stars, in whose arms they hoped to find refuge. But there were traitors in their midst, and their plans were given away.
The Great War resumed when the corruption gave chase, but this time there would be no winners. Curses were cast and Veils erected, and in the aftermath, the Great War was forgotten, and so was the Impundulu. Now he roams this lake restlessly, waiting to deliver a message no one can ever understand.
The visions in the water around Salo begin to cycle through different landscapes. A city in the jungle, where a red beacon flashes high above a citadel. Another city, this one preserved beneath glass domes and towers, sitting on the ocean floor. A truncated pyramid half-buried in the desert.
Then the visions hurtle up, up, up to the rock clusters in low orbit around the world, onward to Ama Vaziishe, pausing to look down at the blue-and-green marble the Yerezi call Meza, onward to the Morning Star, then the dancing suns, then the asteroids, then the four giant worlds of the deep black, and finally stop at the Star of Vigilance, also known as the fastest-moving object in the heavens, or the comet that marks the New Year when it slingshots around the world in a streak of blue fire.
It’s a sleek pebble wrapped in a smoky shroud of ice, bright blue against the deep black like cobalt, or like a shard of the high summer skies, or like a blue flower on a quilt, blue like lapis lazuli. Salo wonders at it for several heartbeats before the bewildering visions wink out. In the ensuing darkness a voice reaches out to him from the lake’s deepest crevice and says: Listen, for the Veil shall be weakened until the rising of the second sun. Only those who remember the gifts given to them shall live to see its first ray.
Then all goes silent. The presence retreats, and in the skies above him the red lightning fizzles and disappears.
Something is different, though. A vein of power has opened in his shards, a path that was previously inaccessible to him. He runs a little essence through it to probe its nature and is surprised when his Axiom responds not with Storm craft but with a different arcane energy altogether. Whatever it is, it makes him shiver like he’s standing at the edge of an abyss, or maybe like there’s an alternate dimension just out of focus, and if he tilts his gaze just so or leans a little closer, he’ll see it.
He needs no one to tell him that this is his first taste of Void craft.
Even more, a cache of information now tickles the back of his mind, like a word on the tip of his tongue. He concentrates and is almost overwhelmed by the answering surge of cipher prose that floods his thoughts without warning.
A spell. An immense array of prose that marries Storm and Void craft to produce powerful lightning barriers. Such a thing would have taken him decades to compose on his own and months to learn from a spell book, but its secrets unfold to him in the twinkling of an eye. An explosion of knowledge so intense and unexpected he’s left reeling.
Something moves in the water beneath him. No, to his far left. Or is it his right? He can almost taste it. A sorcerous rancidness grasping for him, inching closer by the second. In a blind panic he floods his right arm with essence and sinks it into the witchwood ring on his middle finger, activating its charm.
A sunrise in the lake. Salo has to turn his gaze away as the ring’s citrine stone flares to life with a dazzling golden glow. Rays of Mirror light explode away from it and penetrate the lake’s gloom farther than the eye can see, giving him perfect vision and a frighteningly vivid sense of the sheer depths beneath him.
And of the horde of pale figures swimming rapidly toward him from all sides.
They are a multitude, a sphere of grasping talons and empty eye sockets closing in, and they bring with them an unpleasant tingle that offends his shards, like a fetid wound or an oily rot.
Black magic.
Acute terror gets Salo moving. He kicks upward with as much power as his limbs will allow, and when his head finally breaches the surface, he gasps in his first breath in minutes. His arms flail as he tries to keep himself afloat. A thick layer of mist has blanketed the lake, and he can’t see through it. “Help!”
“There he is!”
“Salo! Salo, over here!”
He quickly reorients himself toward the voices and launches into a powerful stroke. Soon the stalled waterbird appears out of the mists just ahead, and he sees Tuk and Ilapara gawking down at him from the main deck. Mukuni has his paws on the gunwale and is watching, too, his neon-blue eyes beaming like torches in the mists.
“Help!”
“Grab the rope, Salo!” Tuk shouts.
He has already thrown the lifeline overboard. Salo reaches it in several strokes and immediately tries to use the rope to climb up the hull, but his feet can’t find purchase. “Pull me up!” he shouts. “Pull me up!”
“We’re on it. Come on, Ilapara.”
Around him the mists thicken, and the unpleasant thrum inside his shards grows stronger. He feels tension in the rope, and soon it starts to lift him out of the water. He uses his legs the moment his toes can grip onto the hull, until finally Tuk and Ilapara manage to haul him over the bulwarks and back onto the main deck.
He sprawls on his side, trying to catch his breath, trying not to vomit. Isiniso, the white sun, has just risen, and its rays make the mists enshrouding the waterbird appear incandescent. His traveling companions stare down at him, both worried, though Tuk appears confused while Ilapara is clearly furious.
“What the devil were you thinking?” she says.
“What actually happened?” Tuk says.
Salo tries to explain, but his lungs won’t let him.
“I was sleeping,” Ilapara says, “then I opened my eyes to see this idiot standing right over there. And then he jumped! I mean, who does that?”
“Danger!” Salo finally rasps, getting up to his hands and knees. “We’re in danger! They’re coming!”
“What’s coming, Salo?” Tuk says, even more confused now.
“The . . . the things in the water. Look!”
At last they take their eyes off him and notice the shroud thickening around the ship. Tuk cranes his neck in a futile attempt to see better through it.
“I don’t know about you, Ilapara,” he says, “but I don’t think this mist is a good thing.”
“No kidding, Tuksaad.” Somehow Ilapara has already found her spear. She turns her worried gaze toward the bow. “And what the devil happened to the sailors?”
“They weren’t there when I woke up,” Tuk says, then offers Salo a helping hand, his eyes blue and curious. “Were you communing with the Lightning Bird, perchance?”