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32
I lifted the bell’s chain over my head, and the minute the instrument’s cool quicksilver touched my skin, I was launched into the Gray. But unlike the times I’d Graywalked before, I did not have to leave my physical body behind. With the bell, both parts of me—my physical and subtle selves—were one and the same.
I could feel the pull of the Gray’s currents, too, as time and space eddied around my form like a river splitting for an impervious rock. I was still within that moment in the Stella’s bell tower, but it was no longer one moment, not really—it was hundreds. Thousands. Forward and backward, there for the taking.
I knew where I had to go. I held the bell and concentrated, trying to re-create the Assembly in my mind. The mist stirred and solidified into a set of stairs before me.
I fumbled up the steps, hand to the side of my stomach, bell heavy around my neck. “Simon?” I whispered into the cavernous hall, but no one answered. All around me, headless gods and beautiful monsters warred in stone reliefs, darkened by age and draped in cobwebs. This was, without doubt, the same room I’d seen when Simon had appeared to me at his death.
Had I come too late? Was he already dead? My strength was flagging; if Simon was not here, I wasn’t sure an attempt to go back further to find him would leave me with enough strength to do what must be done when I did.
I was panting by the time I got to the top, dots swimming across my vision. I sank against a pillar, pain radiating from the wound under my ribs, robbing me of my breath.
“Simon?” I called again, louder. My voice echoed into the rafters, disturbing the pigeons roosting in the high buttresses.
I blinked to clear my blurring vision, the Assembly’s sanctorium nave stretching seemingly endlessly before me, the meters extending into miles. And at its head, the coffin of glass rested empty upon the altar. Cael’s coffin. The one in which he had been entombed for centuries before a hapless historian named Toris woke him and released him to wreak havoc upon the Assembly and the world. As my stumbling feet scuffed the dust on the floor, I could make out pieces of feral-magic sigils, like the ones in Galantha’s book. But these were all the same, one after another. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.
The mages of the Assembly couldn’t kill him, so they did the only thing they knew to do: they put him here, locked him away in his luneocite box, believing that they were safe. That he was as good as dead.
But sleep is not death.
The night may stretch long, but it ends.
Slumber ends. Death does not.
Grunting with the effort, I made my way up the nave toward the casket, balancing myself against the splintering remains of the pews where skeletal Assemblymen remained bent in eternal supplication; whether they had died begging for the Empyrea’s forgiveness or Cael’s mercy was impossible to know.
Either way, their cries had gone unanswered.
I was almost to the casket, my feet unsteady and fingers shaking, when I heard a voice from behind me.
“Aurelia?”
I turned slowly to find Simon standing in the nave, an open book slipping from his hands as he stared at me. Even here, in this lost and lonely place, he was dressed in his fine satin brocade, black hair gleaming like a raven’s wing. But despite his regal posture and his fine clothes, his cheekbones were prominent against his sunken skin, and dark circles framed his green eyes. “Simon,” I said in a cracking voice, blinking away tears. Even knowing all I knew about the Ilithiya’s Bell, even after all my experiences treading the Gray, it was a bewildering joy to see him again. Alive. Or, at least, not yet dead. “Tell me the day,” I said.
“Aurelia, you’re injured—”
“The day,” I demanded. “I need the day.”
“Nonus,” he said, rushing to me as my knees began to buckle. “The . . . twentieth, I think. Why? What is happening?” He helped lower me to the floor, where I put my back to the altar, grimacing as he moved my cloak aside to inspect the gash in my torso.
“I can patch this up, I think,” he said, “It won’t be pretty, but at least—”
“No,” I said breathlessly, pushing his hands away. “There’s a lot to say, and very little time in which to say it. Listen to me.”
“But you—”
I grabbed a fistful of Simon’s tunic. “Listen to me! Zan didn’t die in Stiria, Simon. He made it from the boat and onto shore. He knew Castillion wanted him dead, so he went underground.”
Simon’s eyes were shining. “He lives?”
“He does. But it was a temporary stay; he’s going to die again unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless we stop it.”
“And how do we stop it?”
