Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker 3)

But, as Toshi considered it, he realized that he’d never had a chance of becoming Ivan’s second. Grace had stopped trusting him enough for that when he saw the hardness in her eyes and ended their brief roma

nce. She knew that if he didn’t love her she couldn’t control him, and Grace would never allow anyone she couldn’t control to know the secret of willstones. He wondered what Grace had on Ivan.

Toshi went inside, but he didn’t go up to his rooms. Instead, he went to find Ivan. He wove through the myriad rooms and down passageways that led to other buildings. The façades of these buildings were made to look like they were separate, but behind them, nearly all the buildings in the governing area were connected. They all led back to Grace.

Toshi found Ivan in the power relays. The windy, stadium-size room was humming with the electricity being generated by the three dozen crucibles and witches who were transmuting energy for the city. They each stood in their niche in the marble walls, suspended in a gentle column of witch wind, their faces underlit by their glowing willstones. They looked like lovely floating statues. The mechanics grouped below them and monitored their bodies, making sure they didn’t transmute to the point of taxing themselves. Salt and herbs were strewn on the floor. A banquet of food was ready in a niche to refuel them when they had completed their shift. Out of respect, the food was always presented spilling out of a cornucopia.

The only things that marred the hypnotic beauty of the relays were the thick cables that carried the electricity out to the city, but since they were the whole point, the cables were regrettably unavoidable. Ivan made sure they were kept out of the way nonetheless. A serene witch was a productive witch, and it just made sense to keep the generators of the city’s power happy.

Ivan was checking an output gauge when Toshi came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and smiled when he saw his protégé.

“I didn’t see you on the schedule today,” Ivan said, his smile falling as he took note of Toshi’s expression.

“Can we talk?” Toshi asked.

Ivan waved someone over to take his place. They went down a corridor and through some back doors in silence until they got to Ivan’s laboratory. Unlike the grand and stately space of the relays, Ivan’s laboratory was a cramped, untidy room full of glass beakers and tiny crystal vials of strange potions.

There were few places in the world where Toshi felt as comfortable as he did here. It was filled with memories of his childhood. After being chosen by the Hive and the subsequent commotion of bonding with such a large and impressive willstone, Ivan’s laboratory was the only place that reminded Toshi of his parents’ apothecary shop. It was unheard of for Toshi to wish himself back to the restricted zone, or to even speak of it, and so Ivan’s acrid-smelling, usually sticky, and occasionally explosive laboratory became the only place Toshi could go as a boy to ease the homesickness he was told he shouldn’t feel.

Pickled creatures, half created before they were destroyed, yellowed in their chemical baths along one wall. Each shelf was a trial and error in a series of experiments carried out on the Woven ages ago.

Toshi had asked Ivan once what they were for, and Ivan had replied, “To remind me of what not to do.”

“What’s troubling you?” Ivan asked, bringing Toshi back to the present with a small jump. Ivan perched on the edge of his scorch-marked desk and placed his hands properly in his lap, waiting with the same kindly patience he’d always given Toshi, even when he didn’t deserve it.

“Did you create the Hive for Grace?”

The question brought an end to the decades of good memories Toshi had of that room and, like a bad smell lingering close to good food, tainted all of them.

Ivan looked down and let out a long, tired breath. “How did you find out?” he asked.

“You are the master of kitchen magic. And it’s the only thing I could think of that she could use to keep you silent. You would have had to have done it in order to want to keep it hidden for so long,” Toshi answered. “What about the rest of the Woven?”

“I can’t claim full responsibility for them, but I was a part of it.” He swallowed. “A large part. I made Grace the kitchen, as it were, for her to make the Woven.” He swiped his hands over his face, his eyes older in an instant. “Bower City was just an outlawed trading post, scared to death that Salem would find out we existed and kill us all. We couldn’t stand against the Eastern Covens. Then Grace had this idea about the Woven. I was young and angry and, I swear to you, I never thought the wild Woven would last more than a generation or two. I certainly never considered that she would learn how to make them grow willstones inside their bodies so she could control them. That’s no excuse, but it’s the only one I have.”

“How many other people know?” Toshi asked.

“They’re all long dead,” Ivan said. “Like I should be.”

The irony of it was suffocating. Ivan was the one who created the soap that slowed aging to a crawl, which Toshi had improved until aging and the slow decline of the body into decrepitude were essentially stopped, but you didn’t have to use that soap if you wanted to grow old and die.

“Why aren’t you?” he asked, cruelty flaring inside of him.

Ivan smiled down at his folded hands, accepting Toshi’s anger and feelings of betrayal. “I knew I could never make up for what I’d done, but if I helped enough people, maybe my life wouldn’t be a complete travesty.” Ivan laughed softly. “Why aren’t I dead yet? Because I have so many sins to repent before I die, I just might have to live forever.”

The two of them watched a Worker crawl across Ivan’s thigh. Toshi saw the loathing in Ivan that he never dared show before, and he just knew.

They had worked together as teacher and student for over fifty years, so it was easy for Toshi to read the subtle shift in Ivan, a shift that signaled he wanted to get to work. Over the years they had cured the incurable, mended the irrevocably broken, and essentially ended the need for people to grow old and die. That much time working together solving the biggest biological problems gave them an advantage over the myriad eyes that watched them.

Without even changing the attitude of their bodies, Toshi and Ivan agreed to solve this together. Toshi stood up, took off his jacket, and went to get a lab coat. They were going to find a way to exterminate the Hive.

CHAPTER

10

At some point in the night, Lily became aware of the fact that she was thrashing about in a big, white bed.

She felt hands soothing her and smelled the grassy scent of Rowan’s ointment cooling her charred skin. No matter how many times Lily went to the pyre, burning on it never got easier. The trauma was not something the body could ever allow to become commonplace, and if she couldn’t—or, in this case, wouldn’t—transmute the heat fast enough, agony was the sacrifice she had to make.