The floating heads.
The prodding fingers.
The death warrants that had passed through this space.
Eli had allowed herself to be their tool. A tear threatened to spill down her cheek, but she took a breath and kept moving through the empty chamber. Cam’s hand on her shoulder helped.
They passed through dark rooms filled with venomous plants spitting acid, golden halls that moaned, vast chambers filled with diamond insects suspended in the air. Finally, the rooms collapsed back into a hallway, but it was now stained a sickly greenblack and smelled of infection.
“Here.” Kite stopped. Her hair floated around her head, like antennae smelling the air. “I’ve never been here before.”
Someone stepped out of the shadows, and Eli stifled a scream.
If the body had a face, it had been worn away with sun and wind and rain. A smooth blank head on a smooth blank body. It moved so gracefully that Eli felt like a clumsy mechanical object in comparison. She had never seen anyone move so fast, as if swimming through the air. As if every step was part of a complicated dance.
She knew, in that moment, her destiny: to fight this creature, and perhaps to die.
“I am the Guardian,” said the faceless one. “I protect what is inside, and I protect what is outside. Turn back or die.”
Kite had become immaterial, and through her body, Eli watched the creature prowl back and forth. Tav drew the obsidian blade. Cam stepped forward.
“No,” said Eli. “This is my fight.”
“It’s all of our fight,” said Tav.
“You can’t win,” Kite whispered.
Ignoring all of them, Eli walked through Kite, faced the Guardian, and then bowed. “It will be my honour to duel you.”
“It has been a long time since these halls held honour,” it said and bowed in return. And then it leaped.
Her superhuman reflexes kicked in, and Eli spun to one side, slashing wildly with the blade of thorns. Her blade cut through the air, and then the Guardian was on top of her.
An arm knocked the blade from her hand, and Eli was flung back against the wall, forcing the breath from her lungs. She cursed her human half and lunged again.
This time, she managed to plunge the bone blade into its shoulder before the Guardian threw her down the corridor. She landed on her arm and could hear the snap of bone cracking. Adrenalin spiked in her body, and she felt no pain, only pure undiluted rage. When she looked up, she could see her knife still embedded in its shoulder, black sand leaking from the body.
Drawing glass and pearl, she flung herself at it again.
It was learning her movements and easily blocked her strike. The Guardian wrenched the glass from her hand and crushed it.
Eli screamed in agony. It felt like losing a limb. Forcing herself to keep moving, she managed to evade its next attack and stabbed upward with the pearl blade.
The Guardian caught her unbroken arm and threw her to the ground. “You will die and be grateful for this mercy.” It raised both arms to crush her skull.
Eli, looking up at this superior creature, wondered if Circinae knew that she had failed to make the perfect weapon. Lying in defeat, she watched the end come. She would die with dignity. She would face death with her eyes wide open.
“No!”
The sound of stone on stone crashed against Eli’s ears. Cam had thrown himself in front of her, using his body as a shield. Tav threw themselves on the Guardian’s back and plunged the obsidian dagger through the flesh and into the spirit that animated it. The Guardian screamed.
Eli suddenly felt cool, and a bluegreen glow covered her body. Kite was using her essence to heal her. The healing hurt, and Eli hovered at the edge of consciousness, forcing herself to stay awake, watching Cam and Tav put themselves in death’s path for her.
When her eyes came back into focus, Eli saw that the Guardian was leaking black sand in two places. Cam was shaking but still standing. Several stones had been ripped from his body and lay shattered on the floor. Blood ran down Tav’s nose. And still they stood between Eli and the Guardian. They were strong, but it was stronger. They were buying her time to escape, had chosen to sacrifice themselves for a made-thing, a killer, a tool.
Something awoke in Eli’s body, and she sat up suddenly, gasping for breath. Her eyes were pure black. Her jaw was overflowing with teeth. Her blades started to shake.
The entire chamber shook with violence, as Eli was swept up in the dance of death, moving gracefully around her companions and grasping at the smooth skin of the Guardian. In one swift motion, Eli ripped the head from its body. The body fell, cracking into a million pieces.
Its face spoke, “I tried to guard you. Now you will suffer.”
It crumbled into pieces of loose rock.
Forty-Two
Cam pulled her up. “You okay?”
“I look better than you.”
He grinned. “I told you I’m handy in a fight,”
“First time for everything,” said Tav.
Eli looked down at what remained of the Guardian. She reached down, retrieved the bone blade, and sheathed it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, fingertips grazing a piece of stone.
She looked up at the doorway that had opened when the Guardian fell. She could see nothing through the darkness. The smell of the sacred infected in the air, and they all felt the itch of the forbidden.
This is what they had come for. This moment. This room. Eli took a breath, her adrenalin-ruined body begging for rest. Not here. Not now. Eli picked up the thorn blade from where it had fallen. She stared for a long moment at the pieces of glass that were scattered across the hallway. Some broken things could not be mended. She curled her hands into fists. Took another breath. Turned to her companions.
“Ready?”
The others nodded. Bracing herself, Eli led them into the unknown.
The walls were black, glittering with a hundred thousand flecks of mica and magic and old roots from trees that bloomed silver after every death. Above them, cathedral archways and Gothic spires and stone gargoyles intertwined in a tangle of styles and times and barbed-wire threats. It had begun as an idea, a thought in a powerful witch’s mind. It had grown into a shape, a space, a floor. A powerful secret. A weapon.
In the centre of the cavern was a tree.
The tree was glowing with life and magic and purpose. It was honey and anglerfish and the memory of comets streaking endlessly across a clear night sky. It was black flame and birthday candles. Lightning and dying embers. A thousand different lights flickered across the ancient tree, tracing delicate veins and arteries under the bark. They had found the living, beating core of the world.
They had found the Heart.
But something was wrong. Eli could hear it in the scattered stones like fallen stars, the malevolence blooming from the spires like ink in water. She could taste the power here — it was old and malicious — and knew that these spells hadn’t been designed to keep her out.
They were keeping someone in.
“It’s a prison,” said Eli.
Kite was glowing like a jellyfish, her brightness pulsing to the rhythm of the Heart. The stones that covered Cam’s body were twinkling, catching and holding the light. The silver of mica powder on his skin glittered until he looked like a small galaxy. Even Tav’s hair was lit up, an electric violet. And all the fault lines of Eli’s making — the line under her kneecaps, a knuckle, the tendons on her left ankle — were glowing, too, as if bathed in moonlight.