76
~ JOSLYN ~
Too much time had passed.
Joslyn had hidden inside this empty q’isson for perhaps a month undiscovered and undisturbed, an amount of rest she had not had in years. Her wounded leg had completely healed. And she hadn’t even had to use the shadow arts to heal it – she’d been here so long that it had finished healing on its own. Joslyn felt strong, fit in body and fit in mind for the first time in ages. Each day she went through her movements for three, sometimes four hours; she meditated; she rested.
She anticipated a battle any day, yet the deathless king did not come for her.
But as much as she appreciated the rest, she was also skeptical of it. Never had he left her unmolested for this length of time, and that had to mean something.
Could he be trying to lull her into complacency? He wanted to break their years-long stalemate as much as she did. Perhaps giving her an extended rest was part of his new strategy. But Joslyn knew her enemy, and this didn’t seem like him. Which meant – what if he had Tasia? Joslyn couldn’t bear to think it.
And then there was the other unbearable thought – unbearable because it was hopeful, and Joslyn had renounced hope as dangerous long ago.
The other possibility was that the deathless king had not yet found her because he’d stopped looking for her. There were only two things Joslyn could imagine that would stop him from scouring the Shadowlands for her.
One possibility was that the deathless king was dead. But Joslyn didn’t believe that. She still had the sword that had been designed specifically to kill him, and she found it hard to believe he would meet his end any other way except with Ku-sai’s blade.
The other possibility, equally tantalizing, was that he had taken his attention away from Joslyn momentarily. Taken his attention away because he was currently occupied by a different threat.
Regardless of the reason for his absence and her long period of rest, Joslyn needed to seize this opportunity while she still could. For so long, she had been on the defensive when it came to the king, fighting not to win but to survive a little longer – another hour, another day, another month. But now, for the first time in a very long time, she felt ready to go on the offensive, to transform from prey to predator.
She wouldn’t hunt him here, though, in the Shadowlands. This place was his territory; Joslyn would always be a visitor no matter how many years she spent here. To take back the advantage, she needed to change the terrain of the battlefield.
She needed to return to the mortal realm.
Joslyn drew Ku-sai’s sword and held it firmly in her hand. She could bring the sword back with her from the Shadowlands to the mortal realm – she knew this because she had done it twice before, but it would only work if she held it in her hand. The sword’s sheath, just like the black armor on her back, the q’isson, even her body itself, was only shadow, only dream, and would disappear the moment she crossed from this realm and into the mortal one. The only things here that were not made of shadow were her mind and the blade. For whatever reason, the sword was real in both realms, and could be transported between both realms. Perhaps that was what made it so special.
Joslyn took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then she closed her eyes and reached for the thread of her physical body, the thread she would follow out of the dark cave that was the Shadowlands and back into the light of the mortal realm.
But then she stopped, hesitating. What about Tasia? If she left Tasia in the Shadowlands, she would remain vulnerable to discovery, and if she was discovered, Joslyn wouldn’t be able to go to her easily.
That decided it. Before the mortal realm, Joslyn had one last journey within the Shadowlands to make.
She drew another long breath and reached out once more, but this time, she reached for the q’isson she had long kept carefully hidden in the far recesses of her mind.
As always with “movement” within the Shadowlands, the change was instantaneous. The blank q’isson where Joslyn had been hiding for at least a month (by her reckoning of time, anyway) disappeared, and the familiar underground landscape of Xochitcyan materialized.
A jewel-encrusted archway stood at the foot of the long causeway that led into the city beyond. Joslyn stepped beneath it, half-expecting small men escorts to appear at her side the moment she did. But she was alone, and all was quiet except for the soft footfalls of her boots against the pavement.
She walked towards the small men’s city. The orbs of light hung above as always, casting milky light over the corkscrewing spires and winding streets. The ceiling of the cavern was lost in blackness, far beyond the orbs’ reach. On either side of Joslyn, the vast underground lake that surrounded the city was as placid as ever, smooth and still as the surface of a mirror. Tension prickled beneath Joslyn’s skin, instinct telling her to prepare for the kinds of beasts that dwelled deep inside caves – or worse, shadows – to attack at any moment. But nothing came. There was only the water, the delicately carved buildings of the small men, and, far in the distance, the hulking dark shape of the tower where she’d taken Ku-sai’s sword to be repaired by small-men blacksmiths.
Joslyn reached the far end of the bridge and entered the city proper. Over long years of experience, she’d grown accustomed to this kind of thick silence being broken by the growls and screams of shadows, with the almost-human things crawling out of the ground, shattering the q’isson, mindless except for the singular intention of destroying her and taking the sword.
No shadows came. Yet neither did small men. Or, for that matter, Tasia.
“Hello?” Joslyn called into the eerily silent city. She strained to hear a reply – from her love, from a shadow, from anyone – but heard nothing except the darkness. “Tasia – are you here?”
The only reply Joslyn heard was the echo of her own voice, mocking her, underlining how utterly alone she had been these past ten years.
Loneliness had long been Joslyn’s only companion, nesting inside her chest and murmuring to her its lullaby that she would never see Tasia again, that she would die in the Shadowlands and become one more mindless, misshapen shadow herself. She heard that lullaby of loneliness now in the echo of her voice, returning to her after finding the city empty.
You won’t find her,it sang. You were born alone; you will die alone, and no one shall mourn your passing.
She walked through the deserted avenue, Ku-sai’s blade still in her hand, eyes swiveling left and right in search of a sign of life. She couldn’t remember crafting the q’isson to be empty of small men, but perhaps she had. After all, it had been years since the last time she was here, and when she created this place, she visited only long enough to deposit Tasia and leave again.
Joslyn’s eyes were so focused on searching for the smallest sign of movement that she scarcely paid attention to where her feet were carrying her. But then her feet stopped as though by their own accord, and Joslyn found herself standing at the entrance of the tower made of quartz, the tower she’d seen in the distance when she first arrived. The same tower the small men had taken her to when she’d come here in real life.
And she found the inhabitants she’d been searching for since her arrival. Small men stood on either side of a set of double doors tall enough to be considered large for ordinary-sized humans. Each guard held a pike tipped with a deadly point that was nearly two and a half times their size.
They watched Joslyn without any sign of concern; it seemed they were unsurprised by her arrival, as though they had been waiting for her. She knew they were dream images conjured from her own memories, and yet still she found their impassive stares unnerving.
“Is Tasia within?” Joslyn asked them, looking from one small man guard to the other.
“Yes,” one answered calmly, his voice all gravel. “The Empress waits at the tower’s top.”
Without another word, the second guard took a step to the side and pulled the iron ring that hung from one of the doors. The door swung open, letting out a cool draft that smelled like the must of a cellar. He swept his arm towards the shadowed chamber within.
Joslyn hesitated. She squinted towards the opening, as though straining at the darkness might reveal what awaited her within.
When Joslyn had visited here before, in the mortal realm instead of in her own q’isson, entering the tower had pulled her into a hallucination – a kind of test the small men administered to ensure that her purpose in coming to them was pure of heart. She never fully recalled what visions she had seen, only that Grastinga, the guardian of the tower, had emerged when it was over to tell her she had passed.
Would she have to face a test again, even though this version of Xochitcyan had been constructed from her own mind?
If she did face another test, would she still pass?
After a decade spent in the Shadowlands playing cat and mouse with the deathless king, Joslyn wasn’t sure if there was anything pure of heart left inside her.
Her love for Tasia, perhaps. Maybe that was still pure.
Reassured by the thought, and with no better place to take her search, Joslyn stepped inside. The guard closed the door behind her, and she braced for what was to come.
But nothing came. Smooth walls of smoky quartz reflected back the light from the room’s six torches, one placed in a sconce along each wall. Joslyn didn’t remember the entry chamber ever being this bright, nor its perfectly symmetrical hexagonal shape, nor its quartz walls. She remembered the opposite of symmetry and smoothness, in fact – Joslyn was nearly positive that the last time she’d been in this room, its walls were rough and natural, like a cavern. When she had manufactured the q’isson of Xochitcyan, it should have aligned with her memory. Shouldn’t it?
Joslyn frowned.
A mystery to solve later. In the northeastern corner of the room, she saw something she did recognize from her memories – a passageway that appeared to curve upwards. She took a torch from one of the sconces and entered.
Unlike the entry chamber itself, with its grand domed ceiling high enough for any normal human palace, the passageway was built to accommodate small men, not someone Joslyn’s size. She followed the passageway upwards, hunching as she went. This time, her memory was true; the tunnel spiraled ever-upward, curling like a snake around the central spine of the tower.
The last time she reached the top of the tower, the small men had taken Ku-sai’s broken sword from her and repaired it. This time, Joslyn wasn’t sure what to expect at the tower’s zenith. She could only hope that the guards at the door were right, and Tasia waited for her at the top.