The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) Read online

  The treant came closer, and it lashed out at him with those tendrils he had seen the other one use to yank Angelica away. The sword answered, and Jovian could do little more than obey its call.

  Jovian danced out of the way, the shin-buto shimmering in the faint green light of the swamp. The tendrils wrapped around empty air where Jovian had been moments before, and started to retract. But before they could fully make it back to the treant, the sword lashed out, severing them in a spout of sap.

  The treant howled and made to back away, but the sword wouldn’t let it go. Jovian darted after the treant as it retreated through the forest. He danced forward, swung out with his sword, and like a hot knife through butter the shin-buto slipped through the one leg the treant had been hopping on.

  With a concussion of earth, the treant slammed to the ground, snapping trees as it fell and throwing dirt high up into the air upon impact.

  Jovian ran up on its back, but now that the treant knew there was no escape, it started to roll, and Jovian had to change the direction of his run so that he was running along its exposed surface, trying to stay atop the creature. His legs carried him faster than the treant could roll, and Jovian jumped to the ground beside it.

  There was fire in his blood, and Jovian meant to release it on the treant. But his attention was diverted to the right, where a wisp of blue flame appeared atop a bone-white torch between Jovian and the tree where he knew Baba Yaga to be. It was calling him back, and in the moment he looked away from the treant, it merged with the ground and vanished from sight.

  “How did that happen?” Jovian asked, reappearing back at the tree.

  “Didn’t you feel it?” Angelica asked him, elated. “When I used my wyrd to unlock the shin-buto, I just knew that it would help with wyrding. It makes sense — it used to be Aunt Pharoh’s, right?”

  “And mine was given to me to protect you guys,” Jovian agreed. He looked down at the blade, trying to figure out what had just come over him. It hadn’t been his mother, it had been something else. The feeling of the sword still thrummed intoxicatingly through his veins. He closed his eyes and felt the power recede from his body, ebbing down his arm and back into the shin-buto. After long moments he opened them again and surveyed the splintered wreckage that had become of the treants. “So how do we tap into them?”

  Angelica shrugged. “I imagine the same way we just did. It’s apparent that my shin-buto works on wyrd, and strengthens it. Yours feed off your need to protect, or your command, and makes you a better fighter.”

  Jovian scowled. “Are we sure?”

  But before Angelica could respond there was a jingling sound behind them, and they turned to see what was happening. Like curtains being drawn back, an opening in the large trunk parted, emitting a flickering, golden light from beyond.

  “Looks like that just proved it,” Angelica said, and then smiled.

  Jovian looked down at his sword, his mouth agape. Shaking himself, he came back to his senses, sheathed his sword, and followed Angelica into the trunk before the opening could slip shut. Once he was inside, the way back closed in a rush, and a slip of light along the opening sealed it. They were in the middle of a hall that extended around a very gradual bend to the left and right. To their left were only shadows; to their right was the warm glow of a fire.

  Without words Angelica pointed to their right. Jovian nodded, and so they set off toward the light. As they followed the hall Jovian tried to conjure the feeling of protection inside of him again, but couldn’t seem to. He wasn’t sure why; maybe because he doubted it? Maybe because there wasn’t any threat to make him feel protective at the time? He placed his hand to the ivory pummel of the shin-buto again, and he could now feel the sword like a living being under his palm.

  That’s strange, he thought. It hadn’t been like that before. He’d never felt the swell of power through the sword before like he did now, but there he was, traveling toward the ever-strengthening light, feeling the sword like a slumbering consciousness under his hand.

  As the hall continued around the inside of the tree, Jovian slipped his channels of wyrd open and tried to pry a conduit open between himself and the sword. Oddly, he felt his wyrd slip into the sword, travel down the length, and then back up into his hand. He shivered. That’s right, the sword doesn’t work by wyrd, it reflects it. That wasn’t the way to activate his sword, but it seemed to be all Angelica needed to do.

  How in the Realms do I project my need for protection into the sword? But there was an answering sensation from the sword. Danger. He placed his hand on Angelica’s shoulder and pulled her to a stop.

  “Wait,” he whispered, scanning the hall behind him, which disappeared into shadows. Was there something behind them? He turned to the right and tried to scry what was ahead, but as they traveled further into the tree the hall became more and more like a spiral, and the bends became increasingly sharper. He figured they were traveling to the center of the tree, but not just to the center. The gradual decline of the ground around them told Jovian they were also traveling down, not just in.

  “What is it?” Angelica asked after several moments.

  “I thought I felt something,” he answered. “Never mind, it’s nothing.”

  She started walking again, and he analyzed the sensations coming from the sword. By the time the spiral of the hall opened up onto a large set of stone stairs, Jovian had his answer. Only through danger was he able to wake the power of the shin-buto. Only then would he have a true need for protection.

  He released his hold on the sword and focused his attention forward. The stairs continued down at a steeper rate than the hall had. As they went further and further down, the spiral of the stairs became greater, as if the spiral had reached its center, and now they were traveling back out to the edges of the tree.

  Soon the wall to the left dropped away, and the source of the fire could be seen. There was the familiar sound of bubbling fluid, and a huge shadow huddled over an equally large cauldron. The mountainous shape was familiar to them. As they reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out onto the loose gravel of the floor, they could almost see the lumpy shape of a face in the shadows of the hood. But all that Jovian could actually see was a bulbous, hooked nose darting out of the recesses of the hood.

  Baba Yaga of the Swamps acted as though she didn’t know they were there. She turned, took a box off the shelf, and shook it several times. Within they could hear a menacing hiss that sounded incredibly large, and incredibly dangerous. Baba Yaga turned the box over, opened it, and dumped a writhing snake into the bubbling mixture. Fresh screams fountained into the air even as gold and green sparks showered upward.

  With a weathered hand, Baba Yaga scooped the sparks toward her and her giant nostrils flared as she inhaled the tragedy that was happening within her blackened cauldron. As the sparks flirted with the edges of her nose, Jovian thought he could see it become less pockmarked, healthier, maybe even younger. He scowled, remembering how the first Baba Yaga they had met had grown younger from an inky blue flower.

  “So it’s my turn at you, is it?” Baba Yaga asked in the creaking, wizened voice they had come to associate with her.

  “This is where we were brought,” Angelica said.

  “I know of you,” Baba Yaga said. “I won’t entertain your endless questions, and I won’t be hospitable. You aren’t as welcome here as you were with my sisters.”

  Jovian reached for his sword once more, but he felt as though the hag were watching him, and he dropped his hand away.

  “That’s a wise decision,” Baba Yaga said. “My sisters and I are the mistresses of wyrd, the guardians at the crossroads of death and life. Your puny human weapons would do nothing against me.”

  “Then why are we here?” Jovian asked.

  “Because my sisters have given you a gift, and so will I.” She turned to the shelves behind her and gathered from them two bundles of folded fabric. One was blue, the other was green. She tossed them at Angelica a
nd Jovian.

  Jovian caught the green one and turned it around in his hands. “It’s fabric.”

  “Very astute. I’m glad your LaFaye bloodline has gifted you with such a keen intellect.”

  But Angelica was already opening her package. Inside glittered a spark of blue fire.

  Eagerly, Jovian opened his as well, and found a mirrored green spark. He dropped the green fabric, which whispered to the ground at his feet. He examined the spark, noting that Angelica was already reaching for hers. He did the same, watching how the infinitesimally small light illuminated his hand in shades of green as he gathered the spark near him.

  But even as he was about to ask what to do with it, the spark became a flame that lashed out at him in green tendrils, catching him in the chest, holding him in place like a giant umbilical cord. Other tendrils of fire wrapped around his legs and his arms, around his neck, and even arced toward his eyes. And then the fire was gone, transferred from the air before him and into his being through the tendrils which had bound him only moments before.

  Inside he felt the two other gifts he had been given by the previous Baba Yagas greet this new force as if it were an old friend. He felt them join, become whole, become a single force from the triumvirate of power that had been granted to him by the three sister hags.

  “That’s my gift,” Baba Yaga said as they both looked up at her. “The courage to do that which must be done.”

  Jovian opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.

  “No time for that. You are needed elsewhere, and honestly I tire of you.” As she finished speaking, a silvery blue light grew in the space before them. Jovian remembered the light in the center of Vorustum-Apaleer, and he wondered at how much the two lights looked alike.

  “That’s right, through the light. Go. Go!” Baba Yaga insisted. By then she sounded so hostile that Jovian didn’t waste any time stepping through the light, and into a chamber so bizarre that he could barely comprehend it.

  Angelica could hardly imagine the room she had stepped into. In fact, if anyone had ever told her that such a place existed, she would never have believed them, let alone been able to envision it.

  It was a chamber built of the same material the rest of Vorustum-Apaleer was made of, some shiny material that was both cool and slick to the touch. There were no seams, and apparently nothing holding the walls together, as nails and mortar would hold human buildings together.

  Along the walls slithered the familiar language they had seen on the buildings outside. It was a language she knew, yet couldn’t fully read. It was more like the symbols gave her impressions of words, but didn’t actually form words she understood. It was a weird language; she would see one symbol, and she knew it was either a name, or a word, or even directions to a place far from the Great Realms. As she read the words, a lilting melody ran through her mind in a language she couldn’t understand, but her soul comprehended.

  Concentrating on the language was giving her a headache, and her attention was drawn up to points of light in tiny glass globes that ran the length of the ceiling and the walls. They were almost like the candles and lamps she was so accustomed to. Tentatively she touched one, expecting to be burned, but she wasn’t. It was a pure, white light, and she came to understand that this light was cold.

  “What kind of wyrd runs this place?” Jovian asked, looking at a strange black chair-like thing which sat facing the shiny wall, which had a window in it that didn’t look outside. Jovian touched the window, and when he did it flickered to life in a miasma of gray dots that seemed to skitter across the surface of the glass.

  “I’ve been wondering that myself,” Joya said, stepping from a cubicle beside Angelica. Angelica gasped, her heart suddenly in her throat.

  “Where did you come from?” Angelica asked when her heart had stopped hammering.

  “From this room filled with odd vines.” Joya motioned behind her, and Angelica looked inside the dark room. Sure enough, inside there were vines of various colors coming out of the wall, only to connect to other parts of the wall for reasons Angelica couldn’t understand. Joya shrugged and closed the door.

  “What is this place?” Jovian asked, and surprisingly, from the walls there came an answer.

  “The Vault of Fates,” the voice said. It was oddly hollow, like it wasn’t coming from a real throat at all.

  “Like in the Well of Wyrding?” Angelica wondered. She sat down in another black chair near Jovian and yelped when it spun with the momentum of her sitting down. Regaining her equilibrium, Angelica stopped the chair with her feet, and slowly spun back around to look at the window Jovian gazed at, though nothing was happening on the glass other than the strange gray dots.

  “Similar, yet different.” The voice never changed in cadence as it spoke. “This is the Vault of Fates for angels. The human Evyndelle cannot track the fates of angels, yet we can.”

  “We?” Joya pondered, standing behind Angelica, not sure if she could trust one of the chairs on the other side.

  “So you record the fate of all angels?” Jovian wondered, leaning his elbows on a metallic desk before him that was lined with knobs and buttons. Angelica hoped he didn’t accidentally hit one, considering the way the window reacted to his touch.

  “All angels and half-breeds,” the window spoke, though, oddly, the sound seemed to come from the walls, not the window itself.

  “So you can see our future?” Angelica asked.

  “No. Angels create their own future, there is no determined path for the host,” the voice said.

  “But you can see our past, you can see our present?” Jovian wondered.

  “Yes,” the room spoke.

  “Then, maybe you can tell us what our mother Sylvie was speaking of when she told us she had killed Arael in the wrong way,” Jovian said.

  Suddenly the gray dots on the screen began to coalesce in the center of the glass, and when the image cleared, Angelica could see words written on the window, like on the pages of a book. It looked like the table of contents at the beginning of a book. At the top of the page was printed in a strange font: Results of Sylvie LaFaye and Arael.

  Beneath it were several entries, and Angelica imagined they were like journal entries where they would be able to read about her mother and Arael.

  “Where do we start?” Jovian asked, looking at his sisters. Joya came closer to read the glass better, and then she pointed at one.

  “Try that one, the one that says ‘Final fight, death of Arael,’” Joya said.

  “We don’t want to see any others?” Jovian asked.

  “I would love to see them all, but the truth is, we just don’t have the time,” Joya said. “This is most important. If mother has been indicating that she didn’t kill him right, we need to see what happened, so that we can fix it.”

  “How do we see it?” Jovian asked.

  “Which entry?” the room asked.

  “The final fight,” Jovian said.

  Suddenly the words were gone and the window turned black. When the darkness faded, they were looking at the inside of a blackened room. Along the walls hung torches and braziers, licking fire balefully into the air. They could see their mother, short, slight of frame, long brown hair braided behind her back and looped around her head. She stood with the ivory shin-buto that Jovian now wore on his back.

  “You killed her,” Sylvie said.

  Angelica gasped. It was the first time she had seen and heard her mother outside of her dreams and visions. It was so easy to imagine that Sylvie was nothing more than a figment of her imagination, but now that she was seeing her, watching this alien moving picture, it was amazing for Angelica to imagine that she had actually been in contact with her mother. Tears welled up in her eyes, knowing that she would never truly see her mother, but the pictures were moving, and there was more to be seen.

  “How could you do that? She loved you!” Sylvie said, holding her sword down to her side, seemingly forgotten.

  The image zoome
d out, and Angelica could see a shadow sitting on a throne raised up off the blackened ground.

  “But I didn’t love her,” the voice said, full of moonlight and velvet. It caressed Angelica’s skin, and it was easy for her to see how her aunt was able to fall for this man. His voice was seductive, and awoke sensations in her body seldom felt.

  “You betrayed everyone,” Sylvie continued. “You betrayed me. I loved you like a brother, Arael.”

  “And that’s my problem how?” he asked. There was a smile in his voice. “Why did you come here, Sylvie?”

  “To take revenge for Pharoh,” Sylvie stepped closer to the throne.

  “You traveled all the way past the Black Gates for a little revenge?” Arael said. “And how do you expect to get out?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “All that matters is your death.”

  “But I’m here, beyond the Black Gates. Isn’t that where you wanted me? When you turned my faithful alarist on me, you wanted to send me here.”

  “I wanted you dead and suffering. Yet here you live like a king.”

  “Indeed, I’m revered here.” The figure stood. Angelica sat back in her seat as the picture adjusted to get his full height into the window. Arael was tall, and behind him spread leathery wings, jointed like elbows with claws at each bend.

  “And here you will die,” Sylvie said.

  Without further delay Arael launched himself at Sylvie, and she was lost in a flurry of black wings and startling speed. They watched their mother dart in and out of his reach, slicing here and there as she went. Blood painted the floor, both hers and Arael’s. But no matter how she struck him, Arael seemed to gain in strength while Sylvie tired.

  “Yes, feed me your hate!” he triumphed. With a heavy backhand Sylvie slammed into a basalt wall and tumbled to the ground, her shin-buto sliding away from her grasp. She pushed herself against the wall, holding her shoulder and panting for breath. “I could do this all day, yet you don’t look like you can stand another minute.”

  Arael reached for Sylvie, and when he almost had her in his grasp, Sylvie slammed her hand into his, and there was such a flash of pure white light that Angelica was momentarily blinded. It took long enough for her vision to return that when it did, Sylvie was standing over Arael, who now lay prone on the ground. Sylvie lifted her sword, and with a great heave, slammed the point through Arael’s heart.