Flailing her leg didn’t manage to shake the skull loose. Her boot was holding up, though, and the teeth were only mild pressure and irritating movement. She’d ignored worse. Darya sighed and started squirming forward on her belly again, focusing on the light ahead of her and gripping her long knife in one hand, in case she met an enemy that leather couldn’t hold off.
So far, there’d been two of the walking dead—one with flesh, both in the rotted remains of armor—and a puddle of black ooze that moved on its own, not to mention the cockatrice she was chasing. Its trail had ended at the collapsed hallway, but then, the cockatrice had wings. Not being so gifted, Darya had to search for another route up.
“Some days,” she grumbled, pulling herself along and trying to ignore the skull, “I think I should have sworn out at thirteen and gone off to be a pig farmer.”
You’d be no good at it. Besides, just think of all we’re discovering.
Gerant wasn’t wrong. The city, what was left of it, was beautiful. The years and the wilderness had done a lot of damage, but some buildings still spiraled to the sky, and even those that had fallen had come down in chunks of vividly colored marble, some inlaid with gold and silver; Darya’s prey had made its nest in what had clearly once been the wealthy part.
One more wiggle of her shoulders and her head was past the wreckage. Darya drew herself out into a larger room, where moth-eaten tapestries still adorned the walls and a staircase of pale-blue stone led up—graceful, spiraling, and likely about as stable as a house of cards.
As soon as she was free, she reached down, wrenched the skull—now mostly a jaw and a shattered braincase—off her heel, and flung it across the room. It did shatter then, and the sound was extremely satisfying.
The staircase didn’t seem sturdier up close. She could actually see cobwebbed cracks in the marble, and three of the steps in the middle were sunken in, as though a giant had stepped on them. It was the best way up Darya had yet seen, though, and up was necessary if she wanted to catch her prey; the Traitor God and his minions hadn’t consulted her opinion in the matter of winged monsters.
She put her weight lightly on the first step, held her breath, and waited for a crucial part of the stairs to come crashing down. When it didn’t, she continued to the next—cautious, wary, and yet full of the excitement that always gripped her at such times, when she pitted herself against the world with her life on the table.
If you die here, said Gerant, I’ll spend centuries being extremely bored.
“Should have thought of that…” The stair shivered below Darya’s feet, and she shifted her weight hastily to the side, her free hand on the wall. “Before you agreed to be in a soulsword.”
The service of the gods is very demanding.
“Don’t I know it.” Two more steps up, she leapt from edge to edge like a gazelle, catching herself on the wall when the unstable footing got the better of her.
The hallway ahead stretched out clear for a while, barring a few armored skeletons that didn’t seem to be animate, then ended in a pile of rubble and daylight streaming through a gaping hole in the roof—ideal for Darya’s purposes. Vines covered the walls, blooming here and there with roses in a rainbow of colors: bloodred as Gizath’s wings, sunset orange, blue like the summer sky, darkest black. They were lovely. They also grew thickest over and around the rubble, keeping Darya from seeing past it.
“I wonder if they’d eat me if I tried to take cuttings,” she said. “Seems a shame that none of the scenery in this place has been portable so far. The only ones to appreciate it are you, me, and the ooze monsters.”
Gerant didn’t reply. The emerald glowed as usual, so Darya wondered if she’d stepped on some metaphysical toe. “Sorry,” she said, and took a step forward. They could talk about it at length later, when they were out of hostile territory, but the apology was important.
Behind her, the world shifted.
Darya had felt it change half a dozen times since she’d followed her quarry past the mist-cloaked walls of the city. She doubted a normal mortal would have, just as nobody normal would’ve been able to find the city itself. Even she couldn’t quite define the feeling: the closest she could come was a solid thock in the back of her mind, as though a phantom finger had flicked her there.
So far, none of the changes had been directly dangerous. They’d all been damned inconvenient, though, so Darya didn’t even look behind her at first. “The stairs are gone, aren’t they?”
In a sense.
They were still, strictly speaking, present, she discovered. But they’d folded in half lengthwise, then curled up. Darya stood facing a marble snail’s shell, suspended in air in a way that hurt to look at.
She raised her hands and let them fall back against her thighs. Even swearing was beyond her for a moment. Wheeling around, she started down the empty hall.
After a few minutes of walking off her frustration, it occurred to her that Gerant was still silent, and that he’d sounded distant when he’d answered her before. Normally the instantly folding stairs alone would have sent him into a frenzy of theory: being dead hadn’t gotten rid of his wizardliness. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you know this place?”
No, said Gerant slowly. Unless my memory or my logic has gone very badly wrong, it’s Klaishil, but I never visited. As he spoke, Darya felt his attention turning to the roses, as he looked not quite with her eyes and not quite with his own. I know the spell that grew those, though. It was one of mine.
* * *
The real distress in Gerant’s “voice” silenced all the smart replies that rose to Darya’s lips, from comments about his taste to asking whether he’d also made ornamental mazes.
“I’ve never seen one like it before. Didn’t let this one get around?”
I’d only just worked it out when the storms broke. And I had the help of Sitha’s High Priestess, who died in those storms. Nobody since has been able to bear so much of the Golden Lady’s power, and the spell wouldn’t work without it.
The rubble was higher than Darya’s head, but the rose stems would work for handholds: she’d had worse pain than a couple of thorn scratches, and she’d yet to find the poison that could cause her more than a moment of discomfort. As she reached for the first, she saw that it was bent already, and by someone with at least as much strength as she had.
She froze and listened. The hall remained silent, even to her enhanced hearing. Whoever had come that way was likely long gone.
“You want to tell me about it?” Darya asked, when she felt safe speaking again. “If you don’t, I won’t ask about anything that won’t kill me.”
It’s an enchantment of stasis, Gerant said. He didn’t hesitate—Gerant would never be hesitant, talking about magic—but he spoke slowly, as though he stripped all feeling from each word before he let it leave his mind. Beyond this, likely not far beyond, time has stopped. Those there when the spell was cast can’t be hurt, and they don’t age, but they… Sleep is the best word for it.