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“Comin’!” Britta says, excitedly riding back with a struggling deathshriek in hand.
It takes only a few minutes for the path through the gates to be cleared to my satisfaction, and the moment it is, I urge my friends onward. “Move, move!” I shout. “We don’t know how long we have before the Idugu realize we weren’t actually captured by the gates.”
“Not to mention the Gilded Ones.” I turn as Belcalis adds this under her voice to me: “If all those vales in the city are theirs, it won’t be long before they’re powerful enough to breach this place.”
The thought is enough to spur my panic. “Go, go, GO!” I urge, slipping through the opening, my friends behind me.
Katya and Rian are the very last to enter, and Rian has to be the luckiest soul I ever met, because he manages to scrape through just moments before the nearest tendril comes lashing out. Just like that, we’re on the palace grounds, a different world from the one across the river.
When my friends and I were still at the Warthu Bera, we visited Oyomo’s Eye at Emperor Gezo’s behest. At the time, I thought the imperial palace was the grandest place I’d ever seen, its halls awash with gold and light, its gardens lush and verdant, all sorts of exotic trees and animals flourishing in luxurious abandon.
That was two years ago.
Now those vibrant gardens are graveyards—the lush green grass a decayed brown, the delicate fruit trees withered stems, and the beautiful animals eerie white skeletons in the dirt. I shudder as I glimpse what appear to be the skeletons of a family of nuk-nuks, huddled together in their last moments. Somehow, the sight unnerves me even more than the vale gates did.
“What happened here?” Katya asks, eyes wide.
Kweku shakes his head mournfully at her. “Sacrifice, that’s what it always is.”
The entrance to the palace is somehow even worse than the gardens, the air a strange, slithering cold that chills me all the way down to my bones. And I haven’t even walked through the door yet.
Where are all the people I saw when I was here last night with the Being? Where are all the priests, the guards—where is everyone? Foreboding pricks me when I think of what could have happened to them, how the Idugu could have powered the gates we just left in our wake.
“It’s so strange,” Britta says as she slides off her gryph and glances around. “It’s like everything is dead here—even the wind.”
“Divine trickery, no doubt,” Acalan mutters, his lips a grim line.
I nod in commiseration, sinking back into the combat state. “Everyone keep your eyes open. There’ll be more traps.”
Just like the gardens outside, the hallways are empty when we walk through them. They look exactly as they did the previous night, the walls stripped of their decorations, the floor missing its valuable tiles. Worst of all is the sound—or, rather, the lack of it. When my friends and I came here during our time at the Warthu Bera, the palace was filled with noise, courtiers scurrying to and fro, the jatu patrolling, the air echoing with the sound of their footsteps. Now there’s nothing—merely a desolate, echoing emptiness.
“This is a trap,” Britta says nervously, blue eyes scanning our surroundings. “I can feel it in me bones.”
“Well, hopefully your bones will inform us exactly what the nature of the trap is,” Belcalis says archly, the way she always does when stressed.
“Keep going,” I say, moving steadfastly onward. “My kelai is down that way.” I can feel it now—have felt it since the moment I walked through the hole in the gates.
The thought fills me with nerves.
I force myself to focus on the path ahead of me, each footstep a death knell leading to the executioner’s final blow. This is it, the moment I take my kelai or die in the attempt. Either way, my journey with my friends ends here. As I inhale, tears suddenly stinging my eyes, Britta stops and glances at me. “Ye all right, Deka?” she whispers.
I just blink at her, my vision blurred. “I—I—” I begin, but I stop when a calming hand intertwines with mine.
“Yer all right,” Britta says gently. “I’m here with ye.”
“Me too.” These words come from Keita, who takes my other hand.
And together, both of them, the pillars of my life, walk me slowly and surely to my destiny.
* * *
It’s almost a shock that we encounter no more traps as we descend to the lower levels of Oyomo’s Eye, which are every bit as cold and dark as the rest of the palace. I keep glancing about, trying to see if a vale wraith or another such monster will emerge, but nothing else appears. There’s only that ominous cold and that chilling silence. It’s so constant that, for just a moment, I’m almost lulled into complacency.
Then we turn the corner and see the group of jatu and Forsworn deathshrieks waiting there in gleaming red armor, all of them surrounding a heavily armored leader whose milky-white eyes I recognize even before I feel the oiliness that pours off him in waves.
“Afternoon greetings, Deka,” the Idugu say, although I’m not certain if it’s all or one of them that’s currently inhabiting the massive jatu.
“Idugu,” I reply, annoyed.
