4.114: Climb and Sing

The spinal column of our prison was our prison was our home/ and the shadow of our home/ lay in the vessel’s bones/ and we knew these halls these halls but smaller/ in this temporary hauler/ and we ascended

We ascended

We ascended

And rung by rung the vessel sung and we sung as we drug it up and left below the pit we knew in which we’d stew and which we grew

But grew no more

Here was our call

Calling from above our love our newest home our truest home a world of life a world of hosts free for our homes we could impose

She calls

She calls

We climb

We climb we climb the Airess calls and though this vessel may be small we wait in shadows of familiar halls until we climb, we’re free, we climb

To the SKY to the SKY to the SKY

A poking POKING in its mind and other spell our vessel finds but there’s no focus for an Eye so we say NO and climb, we CLIMB

AROUND the staircase cradling rooms and UP the staircase UP we move the vessel’s muscles don’t approve but we are CLOSE we CLIMB we CLIMB

The arms don’t work legs barely step we barely see outside this head but STAIR up STAIR just STEP AND STEP we CLIMB she CALLS we CLIMB we CLIMB

It CALLS scout CALLS we CLIMB we CLIMB

WE CLIMB WE CLIMB SO HIGH WE CLIMB

TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD

I collapsed onto a stone floor. Through the bright fuzz clouding my vision, I could see a row of tiny stone arches on the floor just in front of my face, curving around to form a giant circle; inside that, a very low wall that formed a pentagon around the centre of the room. And in that centre, a metal column etched with runes reaching all the way up to the top of a glass dome covered with runes etched into the glass and painted on in blood and ichor.

I was at the top of the tower at Duniyasar. Right; this was good, this was where I was supposed to be.

“You’re here,” di Fiore’s voice said. “About time. Are you alright?”

Nothing he was saying was useful to my task, so I ignored it. With some trial and error, I managed to get an arm underneath myself and haul myself a few inches off the floor. Two pairs of arms grabbed me and dragged me to my feet.

Kylie (the airess the scout she calls it calls it knows the way) was slumped against the far wall under a line of bloody runes, completely oblivious to my presence. She hummed something, a faraway smile on her face, both hands clutching her crescent moon dagger so hard that her knuckles were bloodless.

I took a swinging, faltering step towards the central column, and stumbled. Realising where I was going, my helpers half-dragged me to my destination. I shook them off and fell to my knees at the column’s base.

Here we were. (Here we are here we are time to GO time to SEEK) A grounding shaft ran the whole length of the school, from the heart’s home at the very bottom of the stairs, up though the statue of Power in Layers of Pearl, up through the lake and the Pit and the well and the tower of stairs and this column, to the glass dome of the sky. We were at the Top of the World, the metaphorical place on high from which prophets could see everything, reach everything. From which a particularly clever prophecy could see and guide spells anywhere in the world. If I were to look out the glass, I’d see only the sands of the Sahara desert. A limited view of a landscape from a fairly short tower.

But this place wasn’t for me.

I pressed my hands and my forehead to the cool metal, willing the spells out into it, but of course that wasn’t going to work. I had been filled with runes specifically designed to keep magic bound and inside.

But I was intimately familiar, now, with the shape of the spell trap that was my body. I could feel the points where they pressed against the sides of me and were turned away. I could feel the way they rushed through my limbs, only to be turned back. I knew how to disrupt this prison.

The easiest way would be to sever at least three of my fingers somewhere below the first knuckle. That would create an avenue for escape. The idea revolted me, but if Saina could give up a hand for this, I could hardly balk at a few fingers. Did I have anything that could do this? Teeth, maybe? No; even if my bite force was enough to break through bone (which I very much doubted), there was simply no way I’d be able to bring myself to keep biting through like that. I opened my mouth to explain to di Fiore and Clara what I needed, but I simply didn’t have the physical coordination to form words, so that wasn’t going to work.

With a clumsy shrug, I unshouldered my bag. Maybe I had something in there? Bolt cutters or something? As it hit the floor with a thud, something clinked in my pocket.

I shoved my hand in, and withdrew two objects. A silver compass and an awl, both etched in runes.

I let Max’s fetish fall to the ground and inspected the awl. This thing had been designed specifically to release the power of a spell from a body. Maybe…

I lined the point of the awl up with the witch mark on my breastbone. Even with shaking hands, I had no concerns about my aim. I’d known exactly where that spot since I was a baby; I’d stabbed a runic pen blindly into it hundreds of times, and I had never, ever missed. I lined up the awl and then  touched the back end to the metal pillar, leaning forward, letting my body weight push it in.

A loud thump reverberated around the room, the glass windows of the dome barely staying intact.

Something far below cracked.

I felt the magic leave my body, all at once, all in a rush, racing all the way down the spine of Refujeyo, cracking and crumbling it, then all the way back up again, slamming against the runes around the dome that prevented them from leaving, and filling the tower. The white haze in my vision was no longer an artefact of my eyes or mind; the room was full of spells, little pricks of light like water droplets in an unusually luminescent fog. Kylie, laughing hysterically, jammed her dagger into the centre of her mage mark and sliced upwards, cutting straight through her right eye.

Amputating or mutilating a body part inhabited by a curse is, as Saina would attest, one of the more effective ways of removing said curse. But it wasn’t universally successful. Particular sticky spells will just find another part of the host’s body to infest, and under normal circumstances, an ancestral prophecy bound to a bloodline would never be forced out of a body simply because its associated body part had been destroyed.

But Fionnrath’s Destiny wanted to leave, as much as a spell could want something. It had a job to do, and that job no longer involved being stuck to Kylie. It wanted to go home. It let her tear it out of her flesh, and one more little mote of light joined the others and they were no longer a fog but a whirlwind, a coordinated rush of spells following a leader, although it was impossible to determine from their motion which one the leader was. I wondered, dimly, which of the spells was mine, the one that I’d carried in my heart for my entire life. I suppose it didn’t matter now. It never had, really.

I’d collapsed as soon as the spells had left my body. The magic definitely had done physical damage, because movement was even harder without it. I could breathe shallowly and move my eyes, but the movement of anything else at all was a real, focused effort.

Which was a pity, because the job wasn’t finished yet.

“B…” I managed to say. “Ba…”

“What is it, Kayden?” Clara asked, crouching over me to try to hear better.

“Ba…”

“Your bag?”

I managed to give a jerky sort of nod.

I heard di Fiore hunting through my bag. He pulled something out. “Is this it? The heart that Kylie told us about? Wow.”

“It’s not much to look at,” Clara said.

“It’s the most valuable object in existence. Harmless, now that it’s been removed, and a miracle of enchantment skill. Anyone who owned this…”

“Di Fiore, no. You have to destroy it. I can see the temptation, I know things are about to get rough and uncertain for your family, but if anyone comes out of this situation owning something like that then the political instability – ”

“Oh, I’m fully aware. I was just saying that it’s interesting, is all.” He slammed the heart against the metal column; chips of pearl rained down and the whirlwind of magic quadrupled in thickness and ferocity until we could hear only the roar of movement and see only white.

It was too much for the glass dome over the tower to handle. The sound of shattering broke through the roar and fragments of broken glass rained down on us.

The spells dispersed almost immediately, scattering all over the world. Seeking their homelands, or new hosts that matched their specific requirements.

I was full of all kinds of aches and pains indicating injuries that I couldn’t even begin to guess at. With effort, I managed to tilt my head enough to see Clara and di Fiore, who were brushing broken glass from their bleeding bodies and discussing predictions and strategies for surviving the political chaos being created in the tunnels underneath us. I caught Kylie’s eye; she pressed a rag to her bleeding face and gave me a watery smile. The Eye of Duniyasar was pushing at my mind again; I let Saina in to report our success.

The situation was complicated, and messy, and costly, and painful. And it was probably going to keep being so for a long time.

But it was, unequivocally, victory.

It was probably safe for me to pass out now.