The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) Read online

  Joya nodded, but didn’t pick her food back up. Instead she went to the entrance and started closing their curtain of cloaks. While she did that Jovian worked on putting out the fire.

  Cianna took a deep breath and relaxed into the swell of her necromancy. The dead were always with her, but since the Necromancer’s Mosque she had gained power over them. Where before the spirits harassed her day and night, now she had more control and they only came to her when she opened herself up.

  The voices of the dead swarmed to her mind, but this time they were filtered. She was able to block out their words, their pleas for help. Cianna didn’t like using them when they needed her help, but she needed to get over that. When she was through with this, she could focus on helping them. Now what she needed was to protect her group.

  She formed her intention in her mind, picturing the scores of spirits gathered around the group, protecting them, speaking loudly out into the darkness. Cianna wanted the ghosts to keep up their chatter, but not at her, and not at her group. What she needed was for the dead to project their desires and demands outward to confuse the verax-acis.

  When she had the desire formed firmly in her mind, she let it slip out and into the gathered ghosts. At once she felt them snap to attention, and a consensus ran through the group, as if they were responding, Yes mistress.

  A ring of necromantic power snapped into place around the cave and around the group. She could feel the spirits forming a circle around them, and if she looked deep enough she could even see their backs facing the group, like a wall of spirits. They faced out, their chatter spreading far into the night and away from Cianna.

  As she finished she saw in her mind’s eye a pink orb of protective wyrd swirl into place around her. On the wyrd she could feel Joya, and though Cianna could have done her own shielding, that took transmuting a spirit into the form she desired. At the moment she could use all the spirits she had to protect the group.

  When she opened her eyes Joya was moving between Caldamron and Shelara, placing a protective orb around them. Maeven was still eating as though nothing was the matter, and Angelica and Jovian had their eyes closed, weaving their own wyrd.

  Cianna went to her bedroll and laid down without another word. As she was drifting off to sleep she sent out a tendril of thought toward where she could feel the ghost wolf. Now that she thought about it, she was more certain what she was feeling was Altavius. But when she felt like her wyrd was getting close to him, the wolf darted away.

  There was something in his form, however. She knew he was trailing her, scenting her wyrd wherever she had camped. And so she placed her intent into the cave. Her necromancy didn’t only work with spirits; sometimes she was able to place her thoughts into things. In a way, she wove a wyrding to bring Altavius to this spot when she left. It wasn’t a summons so much as a beacon. Cianna thought about the wolf and how she loved him, and how she would give anything to have her friend back with her.

  She fell asleep with a smile on her face. Despite all the danger they were facing, Cianna knew that Altavius would find her beacon and know that she hadn’t left him.

  The Well of Wyrding cracked, a large vein opening in the side. Like water from a dam, the silver wyrd within sprayed out at them, pooling beneath Jovian’s feet. He stepped back, hastily retreating from the deluge of wyrd, but it followed him.

  Beside him, Angelica stepped away from the wyrd as well.

  But the wyrd wouldn’t be deterred. It pulled itself to them over the stones like one lodestone to another, attracted by the pulse of the Goddess wyrd in them, the wyrd that defied the tree.

  They knew from before that the wyrd was seeking a new home in them. The very fact that they lived was killing the tree. The Norns had told them they didn’t belong, that they were killing the tree. They were the Two, they knew that now, and upon the Two all humanity rested.

  The wyrd slipped ever closer, trying to make them a new Evyndelle, make them the caretakers of the fate of man. But Angelica and Jovian didn’t want that.

  With a resounding pop the stones of the Well of Wyrding sundered as the roots of the Evyndelle slipped out of the hole in the ground and ever closer to Angelica and Jovian.

  From within the depths spilled three gray fish. As they slipped and flopped across the brick courtyard between the debris of the well, their shapes changed, lengthened, and became more human until the Norns rested before them, slick with the silvery wyrd of the well.

  Angelica gripped Jovian’s hand and pulled him further back, but there was nowhere to go. Their backs pressed against the brick wall surrounding the courtyard of the well. The Norns came to themselves and the slits of their noses puffed out as they exhaled the semi-liquid wyrd from their lungs. Angelica pulled Jovian to the right, and they made their way haltingly to the exit.

  Still the silvery wyrd and the exploring roots of the Evyndelle followed them, over ruined bricks, over gnarled, dried-out vines.

  “Stop,” called the voice of a Norn. There was no menace in the call, no ill-wishing, just a plaintive plea.

  Angelica and Jovian stopped and slowly turned to look at the three gray-skinned women standing before the open hole of the well.

  But when they stopped the wyrd found them, slipping up their legs like the rush of a waterfall, seeking entry to their wyrd through the pores of their skin.

  “Please, how do we stop this?” Angelica asked, trying to shake the wyrd off like it was water, but they knew from times before that this wasn’t water. The wyrd was like a living, breathing entity.

  As the well pulsed in time with Jovian’s heart he watched the roots closest to him wither and die. The corrosion, the death of the roots continued at a rapid pace, slipping over the wood in such a way that Jovian could actually see the tree as it died. It was then he realized the tree wasn’t seeking them out, it was seeking out the wyrd as it flowed into them, reaching for the one thing that could sustain it.

  In a flash the setting changed. The three Norns stood looking down at three skeletons. The Norns wore black dresses with black veils. The skeletons were kneeling, heads back as if in prayer, and their hands held loosely together. They knelt in a triangle.

  Behind them the Evyndelle stood in withered relief. Its once-mighty branches looked little more than the tattered remains of a giant. Jovian couldn’t help the sob that welled up and lodged in his throat.

  “What do we do?” Jovian asked around the lump. A lone breeze moaned through the courtyard, and as it blew, a segment of wall behind the tree crumbled into dust, spinning and drifting out of sight. Through the opening Jovian could see the sun shining through storm clouds. It seemed like a promise out of the terror that had become of the courtyard.

  He took a tentative step forward, but Angelica’s hand stopped him. When he came back to his surroundings, the Norns were looking at the both of them.

  “Only your death can stop the death of the Evyndelle,” they said in unison. And then, as one, they lifted their hands, pointing to the opening through which Jovian had seen the sun before. But now there wasn’t a sun; only the ebony woman from his dreams graced the opening in the courtyard.

  Ostrich wings spread above her veiled head. An orange snake wound tightly around her black arm. She held a burning iron torch aloft, and in the other hand she held a key, pressed tight to her lips. She was staring at them with her cataract eyes, lit by some inner fire. With the key she pointed behind herself.

  Though their feet didn’t move, Angelica and Jovian felt themselves being pulled across the ground. When the shift in time and space ended, they collapsed to the earth.

  They looked up in time to see a pair of white feet stop in front of them. A black silken robe whisked around the ankles of the figure, and their eyes traveled upward. Amber looked down at them, her golden eyes glinting in the faint light. Above her back spread black wings, but they saw that they didn’t belong to her. The wings tread the air once, and from her back, another figure of scales and terror seemed to grow.


  Amber tilted her head back, splayed her arms out to the side, and went limp. But she didn’t fall. She was clasped around the waist by talons. Angelica and Jovian scurried back, a cry frozen on their lips. Jovian trembled before the creature rising up behind Amber. He recognized the leviathan that was gripping their sister.

  Out of some immense fiery hole the Beast rose. Seven snake-like necks held seven heads above them. Each head carried two faces, some sad, some happy, some perverse, and some they couldn’t even understand. They were all human, somehow, blending perfectly with the scales to be one seamless figure.

  Upon the back of the serpent fluttered twelve sets of leathery wings. It was unfathomable to Jovian’s mind how such a creature could fly, but those wings lifted the bloated creature into the sky with ease, high above the battleground of fallen and angels. The twisting serpent blotted out the sun, and as the Beast rose higher it began to rain.

  Fat red drops of blood sheeted out of the sky, coating the white wings of the angelic host in scarlet. The legion of black wings drank in the blood and grew stronger from it.

  And then the Beast vanished into the clouds, carrying the figure of Amber with it.

  There was a thundering in the earth, and Jovian knew at that point the Beast had entered the Kingdom of the Goddess.

  Angelica and Jovian stumbled as the ground thundered beneath them, knocking them to their knees. Searing pain blinded their vision, and they felt their hands melting together, becoming one with someone else. When they opened their eyes they were able to see a triangle of hands, of which they were both a point.

  They looked up to see who the other hands belonged to, but they were already drifting away from the dream.

  “Only through your death will the Evyndelle stop dying.”

  Jovian came to himself with a start. In the darkness of the cave Maeven’s arms reached for him and pulled him back down to slumber. Outside the wind moaned hauntingly. Jovian shivered despite the warmth of the bedroll and Maeven beside him.

  “It was only a dream,” Maeven mumbled in his sleep. He pulled Jovian tightly to him, but moments later Maeven’s arms went slack as he was claimed once more by sleep.

  “Have any of you dreamed about the Turquoise Tower recently?” Jovian asked the following morning around breakfast.

  Joya shook her head.

  “No,” Cianna said.

  Inwardly Jovian sighed. He could almost believe Maeven’s words, that it was only a dream, except Angelica was staring at him in a way that told him she had been part of the dream too. He refused to meet her eyes, because as long as he didn’t meet her gaze he could think for a moment that he had been alone in that dream, and the figure of Angelica beside him had been nothing more than a dream version of her his mind created, not actually her.

  “Why do you think that is?” he wondered. “Before we were seeing it all the time, and now we aren’t?”

  “I think it’s probably because we were being called.” Cianna started cleaning up her dishes and packing them away. “When the Necromancer’s Mosque was calling to me, it would only plague my dreams when I stopped moving. When I was traveling toward it, the dreams would stop.”

  “Do you think this is the same thing?” Joya wondered. There was a tone in her voice that made everyone aware that she didn’t think they were the same thing at all.

  “It makes the most sense,” Cianna said with a shrug. “The dreams stopped when we started traveling toward the tower.”

  “She’s right,” Russel said. “I stopped dreaming about it when I started traveling here as well.”

  Jovian traveled through a fog of weariness that day. He was so consumed with his own thoughts and with the thought of the vision he’d had of the Turquoise Tower that he barely noticed when Cianna drew to a halt. She pointed off to the south, and Jovian turned.

  High in the sky, streaking through the atmosphere, was a bright trail of light.

  “What do you suppose that is?” Angelica asked.

  “I really don’t know,” Joya said.

  “It’s a meteor,” Caldamron told them, watching the light trail of the comet through the sky. They were high enough now that they could see stars just barely visible through the veil of the afternoon sky.

  “What’s a meteor?” Jovian asked as the light faded out of sight behind the mountains to the west.

  “It is debris from space, a chunk of rock that breaks apart when it reaches our planet. It happens sometimes.”

  “How do you even know this?” Maeven wondered.

  “Frement technology isn’t only of the steam variety. We have texts from before the veil of the Shadow Realm went up. Our people started out studying the stars; it was only when we were shut off from the heavenly bodies that we turned to more earthly advances. No doubt I could tell you much about the darkness that surrounds our planet.”

  “You know all this, but you thought you were going to fall out of the planet when you left the Shadow Realm?” Angelica teased. Caldamron looked to his feet and Jovian thought that if he could blush, he probably would have just then.

  “Alright, does anyone else find it odd that the meteor was heading toward the west?” Russel asked.

  No one answered. Jovian gazed off toward the west, wondering precisely what was happening. He looked up at the heavens once more and wondered how many of those stars were out there, and if there were as many stars in the sky as he could see, would they all eventually crash into the planet?

  But then something strange happened that made Jovian question what Caldamron had just told them.

  Hundreds of lights flickered in the west, each climbing toward the place in the sky that the meteor had just plummeted from. Fiery trails were left in their wake, and each seemed to be racing one another. They made Jovian think of flaming arrows shot from some distant parapet in the Barrier Mountains, but they didn’t travel in stationary lines. Instead they flitted here and there, spinning around one another like birds on the wind.

  Up they climbed, steadily, into the clouds high above. And then, as they reached the crest of the sky, the zenith of their flight, just when Jovian thought they might leave this world and enter the darkness beyond the sky, there was a flash. Thunder shook the air, like two giant boulders colliding together with such force that they were split in two.

  The lights flickered. One by one they turned cold as each individual ascent was greeted with a violent flash of light.

  And then, one by one, each of the objects turned black and fell, smoking, through the clouds and toward the earth below.

  Jovian looked questioningly to Caldamron. The frement shrugged.

  “Well, I could be wrong,” he said.

  “Alright—” Cianna started, backing away from the trail as if she were trying to move away from the train of thought forming in her head.

  “That is the beginning,” Russel whispered.

  “Of what?” Angelica asked.

  “The war on the Ever After,” Cianna said.

  The chill winter breeze toyed at the ends of Hilda’s black hair. She pulled her cloak tighter against the bitter afternoon, and the fear that shook her core. What had she seen? She and Justice had been sitting at the table moments before, settling in against the cold of the approaching night when several . . . things had fallen out of the sky, quaking the ground as they landed.

  She’d never hated living in the wilds of the Realm of Earth until Davin had died, leaving her and their son alone. Without city or town around, it was up to her to raise their son. She wasn’t a fearful woman, but lately the lands were dangerous. The chaos dwarves had passed not too far from her home just weeks ago. She and Justice had hidden in the secret room under the floorboards until they could no longer hear the rumbling passage of the baneful beasts.

  At least there were advantages of living in less populated areas; mostly they avoided attack from alarist and fallen alike, which was something only the smaller towns were escaping nowadays, if the telfetch she shared with her sister in the Realm
of Fire was an indication.

  But now this?

  The shiver that ran up her spine had nothing to do with the cold this time, and everything to do with the memory of what she had witnessed.

  “Mom, what’s that?” Justice asked, setting his cards down and pointing out the window and to the west.

  Hilda had finished her move before looking out to where her son was pointing.

  “I don’t see anything, Just, why don’t you finish your hot cocoa?” She pulled the housecoat tighter around herself and checked the front door. She would have to have it replaced soon. When it was windy out she could feel the cold cutting through the house.

  “No, there’s definitely something happening,” he told her, his eyes following a point through the sky that she hadn’t seen.

  Again, she went to the window and searched for what he was trying to show her, but this time it didn’t take long. Hundreds, maybe thousands of points of light were trailing through the sky from the west, gaining height as they went. She’d seen things like this before, but falling from the sky, never ascending into it.

  The points of light left smoldering trails in their wake, like puffy clouds or vapors straggling behind them. As the objects climbed higher Hilda realized they were reaching a point nearly right above her house. Indeed, she was watching them so intently that she was now crouching down and looking up.

  And then a bright flash nearly burned her eyes. She yelped against the jab of pain, and then sank to her chair when the roar of something she could only call thunder shook her house. The noise was tremendous.

  Hilda began to shake. And then something large slammed into the ground outside her home.

  “Look!” Justice said, standing on his chair and pointing out the window.

  The smoking creature wasn’t the only one. For minutes afterward, several more of them landed around her home. Thankfully none of them landed on her home. They sat there, watching each beast fall from the sky like smoking boulders heaved out of the Ever After to crack the land below.