Neri ran a hand over a small row of jedaat glyphs, lips moving as he sounded something out.
“Can you read that?” Ysira asked, stunned despite herself.
“A little. I wanted to understand, so Uncle Seth found me some books.” She felt a sudden pang of appreciation for Seth and the absurd resources to which his family had access, as Neri said, “I think it says . . . this was a gift for the—rise? Ascension? Of Ikuran Var. . .hmm.” His fingers lingered over a symbol belowthe glyphs. A disjointed triangular spiral. “I don’t know what this means.” He frowned.
“Eat? That can’t be right.”
Ysira supplied the only detail she knew. “Varis what the Zal called their demon priests.”
“Do you think it’s true they caused the Cataclysm?” Neri looked up, taking in the full scope of the frieze. “When the gods saved us . . . Do you ever wonder if it’s true they came from the stars?” He seemed to be talking mostly to himself as he mused, “I wonder what else is out there.”
“Maybe we used to know.” Ysira glanced around the ruins. “Some say we could travel to the moons, once.”
She found that story difficult to believe, but Neri said, “Father told me that. He says the Church lies to us.”
“What do you think?” Ysira asked.
Neri dragged his bad foot back and forth, scraping lines in the dust. At last he said, “My mother was Harvested.” He didn’t appear to notice that Ysira stopped breathing. His lip trembled. “I’ve had friends taken. My only friends, years ago. Father says the gods sent the plague, too, and it killed Lilaya and Grandmother Ynes. It’s selfish if I don’t do anything about it.” He stopped for breath. “Don’t you have anyone you care about?”
Ysira had reasonably fond memories of her mother. She tolerated Seth and owed Ogden her life. But sympathy over the plight of her fellow citizens was not something to which she was accustomed, and she shuttered herself off from it. And . . . the most salient thought that leapt into her head wasYou. I care about you.
“Seth said?—”
“He doesn’t understand,” Neri blurted. “He doesn’t know what it’s
like to be me. I’ll never be a warrior. I’m aweaktelepath. This is the only way I can help, the only way I won’t—I won’tbe worthless.” He turned, and looked up at Ysira. “Can’t you understand that?”
Of course Ysira understood. She knew, intimately, what it was like to be told she would never amount to anything—and the horror of realizing she’d proven everyone right.
But she made herself say, “You don’t know if this”—she refused to call it a plan—“this idea will work. Even if your father is right, if whatever is calling to you really did kill a god, he doesn’t know, either. He couldn’t.”
“How doyouknow?” Neri did not state it as a question so much as a challenge.
They treaded dangerously close to a subject that would not help Ysira’s argument, so she said, “I think caution is warranted. And—come on, we shouldn’t linger here.”
With that, at least, Neri didn’t argue. He followed her to the front of the hall, overlooking the expanse of the canyon. The acropolis of Zal Fel sprawled below, the dead city drenched in dusk, silent as a tomb. Towering human effigies framed the portico, carved as though they knelt and held the crumbling ceiling on their backs and bowed heads. From the overlook, one stair led down the cliffside. The other led up—and it was lined with glass.
Ysira tried to steer Neri away before he saw it. “This way.” “The trail goesup.”
“We’re going back down,” Ysira snapped, and stepped in front of him. She’d have to revert to her initial plan—knock him unconscious, tie him up, and carry him back to Zivora.
Neri stuck out his chin, and for the first time, Ysira saw Ged in his features. “Are you going to stop me?”
In all her life, Ysira had never met an individual so stubbornly bent on his own destruction. If he’d been anyone else in the world, she would have left him to it.
Neri tried to bolt past her. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into a headlock. He went limp, forcing her to lean forward. He hooked a foot around her ankle. Made her stumble. She was so surprised that for an instant her grip on him loosened. He wriggled away, drew his dagger, slipped under her guard?—
—and slashed her forearm.
As she cried out, he staggered back. He was breathing hard, hands braced against his knees, but staring at the wound he’d inflicted. At the tissue knitting back together before his eyes.
“I knew it,” he gasped. “You have a demon.”
Ysira didn’t get a chance to say more, though, because a terrible hunting cry echoed from the canyon depths. She whirled, readying her weapon, and heard it again. Unmistakably, it came from the stairway leading down. And it was growing closer.
She could not escape the sense they had been herded there, as if somehow the Osuunknew.As if they wanted Neri to follow the path of glass.
He had already dashed up the jagged cliff façade, toward a looming crevasse that glimmered in the eclipse’s faint light. With no other choice, Ysira ran after him. They plunged into the asphyxiating black.
