Thirty-Three

The temple came fully into view, and all else around it faded.

It wasn’t just by comparison. The trees around the temple were gray and leafless. From their looks, they’d long ago abandoned even such twisted life as the others had possessed. There was no wind, but their branches moved sluggishly against the sky, in patterns Toinette could watch for only a few seconds before the back of her eyes began to ache.

“It’s just as well we didn’t try flying earlier,” she said, looking back down. “Landing through that—” The thought of even a scratch from one of the branches made her shudder. She and Erik both kept very close and used their swords with thorough care.

Cutting their way through didn’t take as much effort, despite that. The plants, from wayward moving branches to patchy grass, were all brittle, crumbling at not much more than a touch. The grass was gray too, and the leaves of the plants. That color was more noticeable there, without bark to obscure the shade.

“I think they’re all dead,” said Erik. “Most likely everything here is. Look.”

He gestured to the foot of a nearby tree. Toinette turned her head and saw one of the hairless squirrels lying there, though at first she almost didn’t recognize it. Normally that would have been down to scavengers, but as far as she could tell, nothing had touched the rodent—or no animal. It had the same grayish undertone as the grass around it.

Pits of blackness spotted its skin, though, and a larger one, craterous and uneven, sprouted from its side. Toinette had seen a growth like that on a beggar’s jaw once, but that had been flesh. The…growth…on the squirrel was nothing, void formed into irregular shapes and fastened onto living flesh. The creature’s mouth was open, as if in a scream, and Toinette could see more pitted darkness inside.

She swore and looked down at her own hands, then to Erik’s face. She couldn’t see any dark patches forming, but clothing covered a great deal, and stripping there and then would be foolish.

Nothing moved in the dead forest to either side of them. No birds called. The moving branches creaked slightly, and the stream flowed in the distance, but that was all. Toinette could hear each of her breaths and most of Erik’s. “Do you know any spell to protect us?” she asked.

“I don’t even know what I’d be protecting us against,” he replied. “That is, this”—a quick wave of his hand took in forest and dead squirrel alike—“but I don’t know what sent it. Our best defense is most likely speed.”

It wasn’t the answer Toinette had hoped for, but it was one she’d more or less expected. “The plague didn’t touch our kind,” she said. “I’ll hope that’s a sign.”

* * *

Trees thinned and died, their trunks collapsing into sharp angles in the forest. Toinette’s and Erik’s footsteps crunched on dry dirt. It sounded like ash, and floated the same way when disturbed, but the smell was cold, wet, and bitter.

Erik spotted more small corpses by the side of the road. Most were desiccated; a few were only bones, stripped by weather if nothing else. There was air in the darkness. It was frigid and stale, but it served its purpose.

A few yards before the temple, the last of the trees vanished. They approached the great steps through a gray wasteland, a wide ring where nothing grew and not even the dead remained. Erik would have felt exposed, with such sparse cover, but he couldn’t imagine any would-be attacker coming from his surroundings. He and Toinette felt as unlikely and as much out of place as fish in the desert.

The temple was as gray as the dirt. Each step was surely a full foot in height, and there were at least fifty of them. Above, pillars four times the height of a man stretched up to end in shapes Erik was glad he couldn’t make out clearly, then supported a vast conical roof. It seemed to cast a shadow in the darkness, and the shapes from the pillars danced within that deeper blackness.

Toinette’s breath hissed through her teeth. “This…” she said, craning her head up and then shaking it in disbelief. “This doesn’t work. We should have seen it when we were flying over the island the first time. The trees aren’t that tall.”

Erik wanted badly to argue. The trees might have been on a hill, he would have liked to say, and the temple in a valley, or they might have been distracted and missed the temple, or the sun had been in their eyes. It hadn’t been. They’d been looking carefully. And their wanderings over the island had left him in no doubt that the temple was more or less on a level with the forest around it. “No,” he said and clenched his throat against a wave of nausea.

“No,” said Toinette. She took the pine needles from her hair and smelled them again, prompting Erik to imitate her. It helped, but only slightly.

He reached for her free hand. Briefly she was still, surprised, but then she twined her fingers through his. Toinette’s hand was cold, but still warmer than the air around them, her fingers callused and strong. “Best we don’t get separated, anyway,” she said. A smile like a guttering candle crossed her face. “And if it comes to a fight, I can always use you as a shield, no?”

Erik managed a laugh: brittle, but it counted. They met each other’s eyes once, and then began to climb.

* * *

Each step was a heartbeat. Their feet lifted and came down in unison on the next block of stone, sending echoes down the steps and through the starved land. Before they’d gone more than a quarter of the way up, Toinette’s mind was blank of words. There was only the count: twenty-five, and then the strain of leg and thigh as she stepped upward, twenty-six.

For the most part, she kept her eyes fixed ahead of her. She glanced from side to side on occasion, alert for possible attackers though she doubted there’d be any, and she listened for any sounds other than footsteps, but she didn’t look down. She’d never been afraid of heights. She couldn’t be afraid of heights: she flew, for Christ’s sweet sake.

But she didn’t want to look down.

The top of the staircase came as a surprise, not because she’d reached it quicker than she expected—Toinette doubted she could tell quick from slow any longer—but simply because she had reached it, and the stairs hadn’t gone on forever. Catching her breath, she also made her vision expand out of the tunnel it had fallen into as she climbed.

She and Erik stood in the entrance to a courtyard like the ones she’d seen in Roman ruins. People had walked through those, set up market stalls along the edges, fought and courted and lived in the sunlight. There was no sunlight here, and no people save her and Erik: only ancient gray emptiness.

Erik squeezed her hand, and Toinette wasn’t sure he knew he was doing it. They stood together in the shadow of the pillars like Adam and Eve just outside the gates of Eden. What lay behind them had been no Paradise, but ahead would be far worse.

“Won’t get better for waiting, I fear,” Toinette finally said. Speaking took more effort than she’d been expecting. Her throat felt rusty.

“Ah,” said Erik, “and here I’d been hoping.”

The courtyard was darker than the forest, which hurt to think about. Toinette couldn’t see more than a foot or two in any direction. Judging from what vision she did have, that was no great loss. She saw only the flat, featureless rock to either side, gray and blank. If they’d gotten turned around, she wouldn’t have known what direction they were heading.

A shorter walk than climbing the stairs brought them to a pair of tall doors. Despite the lack of light, they had a metallic gleam, but in a green-purple shade that belonged to no metal Toinette had ever seen. A black handle on each jutted out and back in again, forming angles sharp enough to injure any who encountered them with force.

“Should we change, do you think?” she asked, then added, “After we open the doors.” Her talons would be too large and clumsy for gripping the handles. Teeth might have worked, but the notion of putting her mouth on that sharp, dark substance made Toinette clamp her jaws together.

“N-oo,” Erik said slowly. He was looking at the doors carefully. “It’d likely be too small inside for us to move well, and we dinna’ know what we might have to avoid, and quickly.”

“Right you are.”

One last time, Toinette clasped Erik’s hand tightly, then reluctantly let go. Comfort, as always, took second place to necessity.

The handle was so cold that her fingers stuck to it at first. Toinette swore, let go before the pain could become more than a brief sting, and shrugged one hand up into her sleeve. She wished she’d brought cloth with her, or that she had more of her skirt left to sacrifice. Keeping her arm bent bled off some of her strength, and the door was heavy enough as it was. She had to put her other hand to the handle, keeping it over the first, and set her hips to get leverage before it would budge.

Metal scraped across stone with a scream damnably close to human. As the door only moved slowly, the scream kept going, while the cold of the door handle crept through the cloth and up Toinette’s arms. That probably did her muscles good. If Toinette lived to see another sunrise, it would be an immensely painful one, but for the moment cold and fright kept soreness at bay.

Erik’s door shrieked in earsplitting harmony with hers. Their breathing, quick and ragged, made up the percussion. Toinette stared at the green-purple sheen in front of her and tried to ignore all of it, until at last they’d opened a passage wide enough to fit through, though they’d have to go in single file.

Beyond was more light than Toinette had expected: a cloudy, half-green storm light that would have had her furling the sails and tying down the cargo had she seen it on the Hawk—but at least it was light, and she could see. She was thankful. Her near future, she suspected, would involve often being thankful for extremely small blessings—

—and that would be her future if she was fortunate.