Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

I can win free, if I can only be patient and clever.

She sat for a long while and listened. The weight of rock oppressed her, but power lived here, too, felt as a hum deep in the earth. Kansi-a-lari had called this place “the Heart-of-the-Mountain-of-the-World’s Beginning.”

The Ashioi cities she had seen looked different than the towns and habitations erected by humankind, which rose haphazardly although any one might be built around a central building grounded with sacred power—a cathedral or church or, in older days, a fort. The crowns held power; weaving threads into a stone crown brought to Earth the melody of the spheres.

She breathed into her belly, into the stone, and it seemed to her that the deeper she breathed the deeper she fell. The Ashioi understood the power that lies in the landscape, and they built to encourage and enhance it. This heart was a kernel around which the city had risen. So deep, and so high, and pulsing with a force whose heat and contours, almost too faint for her to perceive, had the taste of the aether, funneled into this place as canals channel rainwater into a central pond.

She stood, and called her wings.

They flared golden, and she lifted a hand’s breadth off the ground. A vast ceiling vaulted so high that its peaks lay in shadow. Above, frozen spears of lightning glistened, rock formations hanging from the ceiling like so many points. The cavern was immense, its far walls lost in dimness. The floor stretched smooth and unbroken.

Except there.

A narrow, black spire, somewhat taller than a man, rose out of the floor, so far from her that it was barely visible in the gloom. Blue fire flickered along its length where the aetherical glamour cast by her wings brushed it. Like a shadow, a second, insubstantial pillar blossomed into existence beside it, a burning stone through which she could see

“Liat’dano! Where are you?” The shaman speaks to her from beyond that gateway. The centaur woman is insubstantial but nevertheless present. She shades her eyes as against a harsh light and peers through the gateway toward Liath.

“I am here, at the Heart-of-the-Mountain-of-the-World’s Beginning!” Liath cries.

“I have been looking for you, Daughter, but the aether is thin and the gateway closes. Come to me! Quickly!”

The pulse of the aether was too feeble, even here, to sustain her wings. They withered, and she dropped the hand’s span to Earth and stumbled as too much weight came down on her injured leg. The glowing illumination faded and the burning stone dissolved into a pale nimbus, rapidly dissipating.

Caught in the last lambent twilight, a figure hunched out of the shadows and scuttled to the spire. It turned, and she saw that it was not human. It had luminous bulges where eyes ought to have been. Its skin had the look of granite.

Blackness swallowed her, and it. She heard two scrapes, that bellows sigh followed by two scrapes, and then nothing.

She dug deep, and fought to call her wings again, but the first effort had taken its toll on her and they only flickered, like the spark of a wick catching for an instant before snapping out. She could not get illumination enough to make her way to the black spire.

She had not hallucinated that creature. Indeed, she had a good idea of what it must be, because Mother Obligatia had told her of the inhuman creatures deep in the rock beneath the convent of St. Ekatarina’s whose charity had sustained the sisters for many months. In legend, humankind had many names for them: goblins and “Old Ones” and more besides.

Creatures who lived in the earth must have some means of moving around, just as moles shifted through tunnels. Where they could crawl, so could she. It was only a matter of having provisions and steady light.

Ai, God, if only the gateway of the burning stone had not collapsed so suddenly. If she could step through—reach Li’at’dano—she could gain her freedom and be reunited with Blessing, if her girl lived.

She must live.

“I will it so,” she murmured, knowing that words are not magic in themselves but only because we weave them in a way that, like sorcery, creates a spell around our listeners.

She sat for a long while, breathing to quiet her heart and mind but also fighting against the exhaustion that washed at her and between one breath and the next swept over her. Pain from the wound in her thigh stabbed every time she twitched, and she braced herself against the wall to stop her legs from moving. Could she reach Li’at’dano? Thoughts wound down lazily, and she dozed off.

What had woken her?

Liathano.

Was that the shaman’s voice? It nagged at her. She must have heard the shaman calling her name in the dream she had just been having, which had already faded, leaving a slow trembling ringing in her ears as if she had dreamed in sounds and not images.

Liathano.

One voice, tolling like a bell.

A sick dread infested her, shuddering her body inside and out.

Ai, God. A galla.

Kansi had captured her and meant to kill her. No, that was fear talking. She had no reason to believe that Kansi knew the galla or had ever used them.

Liathano.