Ardan had already started toward the staircase when a worried voice stopped him:
“And what am I supposed to do?” Bazhen asked, looking around in alarm.
Despite serving in the Black House, studying at the Grand, and wearing the regalia of a mage, Bazhen was—while far from ordinary—a student of the Jurisprudence Faculty. At their faculty, the practical component was all but brushed aside during examinations. After all, their professional duties would involve entirely different skill sets in the future.
Star Jurists were expected to facilitate the coexistence of mages, their scientific pursuits, and all the other inhabitants of the country and the world—a task that was sometimes far from simple. It was for this purpose that Bazhen needed the most rudimentary knowledge of Star Magic, which was what his faculty studied. All their remaining time was devoted to the complex subject matter of law.
It wasn’t like he had never participated in somewhat dangerous operations, but he would’ve still been hard-pressed to erect a Basic Shield in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time.
All of this meant that the slightly-trembling Bazhen was really not supposed to go upstairs. On the other hand, leaving him down here could end up being even more dangerous. If the Cold Crone managed to overpower the echo of the old foundation’s memory, Bazhen’s Stars would become something like an accumulator for her.
“Come with me,” Ardi finally said.
“Is it safe?”
“No.”
“Then maybe I should stay here?” Bazhen asked, the hope bleeding into his tone.
“You could,” Ardan nodded. “But that’s even more dangerous.”
Bazhen cursed and stared somewhere at the ceiling.
“I’m not a cowboy like you, Ard. I like women, using the law to my advantage, and a good drink.”
“You’ve mentioned that before,” Ardan reminded him.
“I’m just saying that, by the Face of Light, there are no Homeless Fae on that list!” Bazhen barked. It wasn’t clear if he did so because his nerves had finally buckled under the pressure of unyielding reality, or to rally his own courage. “What am I even supposed to do up there? Other than not die, of course.”
Ardan thought about that for a couple of seconds. He could have said that he had no idea how a Star Mage was supposed to defend himself against a creature that had not merely studied the art of the Aean’Hane, but was its living embodiment—however, such a declaration would hardly help matters. So, striving to maintain the most optimistic tone he could manage, Ard answered lightly:
“Put up a modified Basic Shield using every ray you have. And then... close your eyes. The most important thing is to keep them closed until I ask you to open them. Understood?”
“Understood... If I don’t botch it,” Bazhen grumbled, already opening his practically-virginal grimoire. “Damn it, even the stupid magical education reform passed us jurists by... Who’s going to send us to the front lines? What would we even do—shuffle papers in the trenches? Damn it... damn it!”
Now assured that Bazhen had understood his instructions, Ardan stepped onto the first stair and... nothing happened. No grim shadows appeared, scraping nearly invisible, misty claws along the wallpaper of the wood-paneled walls. No cold wind howled like a wolf separated from its pack. No sepulchral cackle, brimming with foreign terrors and half-forgotten childhood nightmares, sliced across his ears.
Nothing.
Just the creaking of a floorboard.
Ardan exhaled and reminded himself that he was not in that house on Fifth Street in Baliero. There was no artifact that had come straight from Makingia—those lands that were dark in every sense of the word—here. There was only an embittered creature of spirit, not flesh, one that had forgotten and lost its original essence.
While climbing to the second floor, Ardan shivered slightly, and behind him, Bazhen’s teeth began chattering from the cold. Fresh snow crunched beneath their soles, and ice glistened on the walls, sparkling in the light of the flickering lamps. Four of the five doors were sealed shut with frost, and only the last, at the far end of the corridor, had been flung wide open.
From within, a steady, silvery light streamed out into the hallway. It almost looked as though, beyond the window, there wasn’t a modest sliver of moon winking shyly at them, but a full, brilliant lunar orb.
The Crone was waiting for them.
Ardan, gripping the tin handle of the cup in his left hand and his staff in his right, straightened his spine and strode forward. Sticky, cutting fingers clutched at his throat, pulling him back down to where he could hide and disappear.
Only a madman would not fear an encounter with a Homeless Fae, regardless of the power it possessed—great or small, it did not matter. There was a reason why, in every denomination of the Face of Light’s faith, the faithful were taught that the paths of the creatures of flesh and the creatures of spirit must never cross.
Had the Fae vanished from the mortal world by sealing themselves inside their City on the Hill after the Fall of Ectassus? Or had Ectassus fallen because the Fae had abandoned the enchanted castles and palaces that had allowed them to dwell among mortals? This was a question that neither human nor Firstborn historians could answer.
Ardan stopped at the doorway.
“The moment we go in, cast your shield,” he practically commanded without turning to Bazhen. “And under no circumstances should you open your eyes.”
“And what happens if I do?” Bazhen asked, teeth chattering from the cold.
“You’ll lose your mind.”
“Wonderful... Then I suppose I’ll keep them shut.”
Ardan nodded and focused on what the eye could not see. He honed in on the mirages that sometimes flickered at the very periphery of his vision. Ardan reached for them, seized them with his Will, and, fashioning them into a veil, draped it across his own face. Here, far from Ley-wiring and generators, using his Speaker’s Sight was far simpler than in the Metropolis.
The world around him changed. The snow underfoot transformed. It was no longer a carpet of fluffy, glistening flakes, but a layer of bone shards and ash. The frost on the walls trickled downward, now looking like putrid flesh, and the cold revealed itself to be the stench of sulfur.
Ardan entered the room. It was nothing like what Marina had seen in her memories. The wardrobe was not askew, the toys lay in neat rows, and on the large bed, curled into a ball beneath the covers, a little girl sobbed quietly.
There was no pus, no blood—nothing of what Marina had witnessed. This wasn’t because her memory had deceived the tormented mother, but because back then, when she had nearly strangled Nisa and almost jumped out of the window, it was not her daughter she had been seeing, but the Crone.
The one who now sat upon the windowsill. Her back was turned to Ardan, but he didn’t need to face her directly—long gone were the days when he hadn’t been able to see a tree trunk from all sides at once.
She was as withered as one of the crooked branches that were striking the walls and window over and over. She had long, hooked fingers that resembled dead knots or lifeless roots. Her long neck was unnaturally stretched forward and she had a tight bun of white hair. Her light dress was the kind that one would not wear even in the warmest summer weather. With her sleeves rolled up, she was spinning a white thread from the frost that swirled around her. And once it reached a sufficient length, she would use that same thread to bind the house.
Creaking and groaning like dead, dry wood beneath the weight of a winter blizzard, she opened a mouth in which, instead of teeth, there were only broken bones.
“Hello, student of the She-Wolf,” a voice like a limping thing greeted him, speaking in the language of the Fae.
“Hello, Crone,” Ardan answered and took a step forward, but before he could finish the movement, the thread in the Homeless Fae’s hands shimmered with icy light, and little Nisa screamed in pain.
“Stay right there, young Speaker. Stay in the doorway, on the threshold. You are a guest. And I did not invite you to enter.”
“A guest indeed,” Ardan agreed and stepped back. “They say that it is unbecoming of a guest to arrive empty-handed, Crone. I’ve brought you a gift. Will you taste it?”
A moment ago, the Crone had been facing the outdoors, and now, jerking like an old marionette, she turned toward him. The joints of her body crackled and crumbled, popping like inflated soap bubbles. Her dress tore and immediately stitched itself back together. And her body—in truth, it was a bark-wrapped skeleton—snapped and fused anew.
She laughed the way only a dead forest can laugh when a young and foolish spring wind tries to play with it.
“The She-Wolf taught you well, Speaker. But you will not muddle my mind with your words.” Her right hand rose jerkily, her index finger extending to point at the cup of brew. “The Water of Hot Blood. You’ve prepared it well. That ignorant flame, the friend of the old stone that hides those below from me, helped you.”
Ardan tried not to let anything show on his face. Some of the corrupted Fae sometimes forgot or hadn’t yet recognized their Homeless nature, and in such cases, their minds could indeed become confused. But the one sitting on the windowsill was completely aware of her new form. She was closer to the Lost—to demons—than to the Homeless Fae.
The Crone cackled again.
“Too much for you, am I, Blood of Aror?” Empty eye sockets flared with an ugly yellow fire.
“Perhaps,” Ardan replied, employing the teachings of Skusty.
He could not afford to stay silent or retreat. Every such gesture, every such misstep would give the Crone a small window into his mind. And once that breach widened, the same fate that had befallen Marina and Nalail would consume him.
“That mark upon your wrist…” The Crone pointed at the icy symbol (the true form of Allane’Eari’s “kiss”) hidden beneath his watch. “I have no reason to anger the Princess. Leave. Take the one you brought with you and leave. My supper is nearly ready. I shall dine and depart on my own. No one beyond the forest, or in the settlement, will come to harm. Thrice I have spoken, and thrice you have heard me.”
“Homeless Fae are not bound by the Laws of the Queens, Crone. Which means that the law of threes does not apply to you.”
“It does not,” the Homeless Fae didn’t deny it. “But why would I deceive you, Blood of Aror? Your Queen—and mine as well, once—draws near. You feel it, don’t you? You can feel how your strength grows with each passing day? I have no need for an enemy like you, student of the She-Wolf. Leave. There is no reason for us to fight.”
Ergar had taught him to never hunt something stronger than himself. Shali had cautioned him that there were sometimes encounters on the trails where it was better for both hunters to part ways, lest they perish. Skusty had assured him that as long as you were still alive, there was always a chance to settle scores.
Common sense, logic, and even his life experience told Ard to seize this opportunity. They all told him that he should turn around, take Bazhen, and flee the half-elf’s home.
And perhaps the young man would have done exactly that had it not been for...
“Mister wizard...” Little Nisa peeked out from her hiding place and whispered, barely audible, her lips alone forming the words: “Help me... Please... help.”
How was this any different from the “House of Dukes” incident? Yonatan Kornosskiy and the son of Duke Abrailaal had both warned Ard that he couldn’t help everyone…
“Take one of those sleeping downstairs,” Ardan offered.
Regardless of how hard those words were to force through his numbing throat, or how much their weight pressed him toward the ground... it was the best he could hope for without risking absolutely everyone in the house.
The Crone’s bone-teeth clacked against one another.
Clack-clack-clack.
The sound was resonant and muffled all at once. Like a metronome set to a quick but steady rhythm.
“Do not bargain with me, student of the She-Wolf.” The fire in her eye sockets started blazing brighter and fiercer. “You are weak. I am stronger. I am within my rights, and you are not. Leave before I change my mind.”
Ardan shifted his gaze to the cup in his hand. It now looked like a vortex of liquid flame that was holding at bay the cold that pressed in from every side, surrounding him and Bazhen.
“Then we will fight, Crone.”
Clack-clack, the teeth hammered again.
“And you will die, Blood of Aror. Your fragment of the Name of Ice and Snow is still too small and weak to overcome me. You hold no dominion over Winter. You are merely mortal, and-”
“And who said that I intend to fight you using the power of Winter?” Ardan interrupted her, and before the Fae could react, he raised the cup and poured the sphere of liquid fire down his throat.
Ardan saw the Crone’s face, which already resembled a death mask, contort even further. Her crooked teeth bent like broken shards and her branch-like fingers stretched outward and sprouted long, wooden daggers. She swung them and effortlessly tore through the stone walls, shaking the roof.
But they never reached Ardan.
Liquid fire coursed down the young man’s throat and his breath became a roaring blaze, erupting from within him and whirling in a conflagration across the surface of willing fuel. What fuel? Any fuel. Fire, unlike ice, once it shed its playfulness and left behind its tenderness, discarding its costume of comfort, left nothing in its wake but all-consuming destruction.
Ardan was burning alive in the fury of the flame. His flesh blistered and burst. His eyes dried out, his lips cracked, but not a single drop of blood fell—it hissed and turned to dark, iron-scented steam.
The moments he spent inside the maelstrom of reds and oranges laced with whites and blues felt like he was spending entire years in the maw of the sleeping volcano where Atta’nha had taught him how to hear the Name of Fires and Sparks.
Ardan reached out with his mind toward the flame born of a mother’s fury that someone was trying to take her daughter; he touched the wrath of the hearth’s sparks that had been born with a single purpose—to protect those who, for many years, had not let them die. The three of them braided together: Ardan’s Will, white as snow; the heat of Marina’s maternal love, scarlet as her blood; the flame of the hearth, orange as the sun a few minutes past dawn.
Ardan drowned in them. He lost himself amid the roaring and thunder. It was like that time on the banks of that ancient river that still remembered the days before creatures of flesh had come to be.
But now Ardan knew what to do. He imagined himself standing amid the Alcade’s peaks. He imagined the familiar icy winds touching his skin. He recalled how, in the distance, a snow leopard had roared, greeting the storm, and the storm, in its helpless fury, hadn’t been able to break through the rising blizzard at whose center Ardan now stood.
He extended his hand and, clenching his fist, locked the shard of a Name that was slamming itself against the impenetrable walls of his mind inside a cage of ice. The Name of Fires and Sparks held no dominion over Ardan. He had summoned it into this world, not the other way around.
“That’s impossible...” The Crone creaked. “How can you Hear foreign Names... This is impossible!”
“You can Hear foreign Names...”
“I’ve been told that before, Homeless One,” Ardan said, feeling every word tear itself free of his lips like an escaped wildfire, and opened his eyes.
No longer Fae, but not quite a demon just yet, she spread her branch-arms wide. They wove themselves into a tight cocoon and encased her disfigured form in a dense, wooden shield.
Ardan, who was all too aware of the roaring fire inside his mind that almost felt like an extension of his own will, was about to slam his staff against the floor when he stopped himself just in time. This fragment of a Name that was foreign to him was unlikely to obey his directions as precisely as a shard of the Name of Ice and Snow.
And so, when the young man did finally bring his staff down, instead of a roaring blaze erupting from it... nothing came out. But the floorboards lurched. Like the keys of a piano beneath the fingers of a virtuoso, one after another, they spat out the nails that held them together. And from somewhere within them—from between the joists, most likely—fire erupted and coiled around Ardan’s legs.
Had he unconsciously replicated part of the Selkado Seal Armor? Most likely. But at that moment, Ardan was concerned with something else entirely—how long he could hold the gradually-dying flame within its cage of ice. A few seconds at most, he reckoned.
Pushing off from the floor, Ardan crossed the distance between him and the Crone in a fraction of a second, leaving a flaming trail in his wake. Profaning the memory of his great-grandfather and defying the teachings of the she-wolf, Ardan swung his staff with all his might, acting like this was a mere brawl and not a battle of the art and Names.
The raging fire bellowed, wreathing his staff in rings of heat. The Crone screamed just as loudly as her branch-fingers were consumed by golden flame. The blow sent her hurtling through the window, shattering the glass and tearing away a section of the wall in the process. And Ardan, who was no longer even surprised by the absurd predictability of it, leaped out of yet another window to go after her.
Landing lightly on the ground, he looked straight ahead. The world around him blazed so brightly that it felt like the fire was burning not within the young man’s mind, but in his very eyes. Instead of a gloomy night, a brilliant dawn shone in every direction.
“Fool!” The Crone cackled as her legs—still those same dead roots—gradually burrowed into the frozen earth. “Out here, it is night! And Winter! You are a dead man!”
She unhinged her maw so wide that an automobile tire could have fit inside it. A piercing shriek shattered the ground-floor windows, and black stingers hurtled toward Ardan. From the very depths of the Crone’s mouth, hundreds of dark projectiles, each the length of a finger, flew at him. Sharper than razors, they sliced through the metal laundry poles with ease, reduced the wooden outbuildings to splinters, and they even tore open the earth, leaving deep furrows in their wake.
Ardan struck his staff against the ground and then swept it before him in a broad arc. This almost felt like that time he’d fallen into a river in his childhood, except this time, he was fighting against the current with his staff, not his arms.
The crown of his staff blazed with brilliant light, and a river of fire shone in the middle of the yard. Where his staff had passed, rivers of liquid light spilled forth. The swift current swirled around Ardan, cloaking him in an almost tangible shroud. The sharp barbs burned away in a fine haze, and when none remained, Ardan thrust his staff forward.
Like a writhing serpent, one that was as wide as the sidewalk along Markov Canal, the river of fire streamed toward the Crone. Clenching her teeth, she plunged her branch-arms into the earth, and one after another, shattering the soil and ice, dead trees erupted from below, blocking the path of the fire. Despite surrendering to time, drought and wind long ago, they still stood like black idols with broken, jagged branches, now burning inside the fire. They burned, but they also refused to let the flames reach their mistress.
“I will drink your Ley, Blood of Aror!” The Crone screamed, reveling in her growing power. “And when the hour of the Harvest comes, my name shall be sung for a thousand journeys of the Spirits of the Day and Night! How much strength does that shard of the Name of Fires and Sparks still hold? I think it has nearly gone out!”
Ardan probably should have asked what the Harvest was and why every Homeless Fae and demon he encountered kept mentioning it. Also, how had the Crone come to be here in the first place? Was it all connected to the Puppeteers, to Tazidah, and to the fact that the Aean’Hane elf had stolen a book of tales written by Atta’nha from the bank a year ago?
It was too many questions, and he had far too little time.
The Cold Crone was not wrong. Inside Ardan’s mind, within the cage of ice, the shard of the Name of Fires and Sparks that had been summoned with Marina’s blood and the hearth’s flame was indeed dying out.
That was why Ardan wasted no time on words. He struck his staff against the ground once more. Drawing in every last remnant of the flame, he inhaled deeply and, pressing the staff to his lips, exhaled with all his might. Long ago, in his childhood, his great-grandfather had told him a story about an Aean’Hane from a mountain tribe who had competed with a dragon in a duel of the art.
It didn’t matter if that was just a fairy tale or not, or whether Aror had truly fought the last of the Great Beasts. Ardan had no time for such contemplations right now. Uniting his breath, his Will, and the last vestiges of the Name’s fragment, he unleashed a torrent of fire upon the Crone.
It roared and thrashed like a cornered beast. The earth hissed, melted, and turned into wide streams of lava. The air grew so hot that it shimmered like a drunken haze, and tiny fires erupted everywhere, stretching out almost to the foot of the hill.
And the Crone...
The Crone cackled. As she did so, the night thickened and the frost groaned. Shadows rose from the earth, assuming the shapes of twisted children’s bodies, or taking on the silhouettes of tormented parents. Some screamed. Others wept. But all of them, clasping their hands together, cried out in despair. Like a somber wave, their scream rose up, becoming an insurmountable wall before the torrent of flame and, crashing down from above, it shattered the fire into tiny sparks.
Ardan staggered and very nearly fell to his knees. Clinging to his staff, the young man wheezed. Coming from his chest, sliding up his throat, and pushing past his lips, thick, dark blood flowed. His head spun and everything he could see began to dance.
It was almost the same as that time...
“...Your teacher clearly didn’t show you what battles between the Aean’Hane are really like and what makes them so dangerous, Speaker...”
Only this time, no familiar siren would sound, and no friend and mentor in a black cloak would come to his aid with that smug smirk on his face and six stars on his epaulettes.
“The Master’s Puppet is right,” the Crone casually approached her opponent. “For now, you are nothing, but one day, you will be as strong as Aror. You cannot be allowed to live.”
Despite being clearly weakened—patches of her flesh that had been woven from dead wood had blackened with char—she was still “alive.”
The Homeless Ones, demons, and the regular Fae couldn’t be “killed” in the conventional sense of the word. They possessed no flesh that could “live.” The only thing that the Speakers and the Aean’Hane could do was send the creatures of spirit back to where they belonged and banish them from the mortal world, which was never theirs to begin with.
“Were you sent here for that purpose?” Ardan rasped. “To kill me?”
The Crone paused briefly and erupted into another fit of creaking, cawing laughter.
“You think too highly of yourself, student of the She-Wolf. I merely sought a place free of the Dead Ley to feed. In the boundless village of artificial stone and Dead Ley, I can do almost nothing.”
Ardan raised his gaze to the Homeless Fae.
“Are there many of you in the Metropolis, Crone?”
She came within just a few meters of him.
“More than you can imagine, mortal. We wait… And there is little waiting left. Soon, our Master will fulfill his grand design. Soon, the Harvest shall come!”
Someone was the master of Homeless Fae and demons? What utter nonsense. Fae were ruled by the Queens of the Fae. And demons and Homeless Ones were ruled by no one, for their essence was corrupted and they could sometimes fail to even recognize themselves. They were like forces of nature—abstract and beyond comprehension.
“...I can handle it now, Speaker. I can hide among the humans. I can speak their language... I can do so much. We can do so much. The Harvest is coming soon...”
It seemed like the Puppeteers and the Homeless Fae truly were connected.
“Rejoice, Blood of Aror, for you shall fall by my hand!” The Crone raised her clawed wooden limb to strike him down.
“You do not fear the Princess’ displeasure?” Ardan held up his wrist that bore the symbol of Allane’Eari.
The Crone froze. For only a few seconds, she was the captive of her own indecision. And that time was exactly what Ardan needed.
Last time, he’d had to use the Dark Names to summon the Icy Lightning of the Alcade Storm during battle. And before that, he had managed it only once—during his fight against Gleb Davos. But something told Ardan that it would work this time.
He drove his staff into the ground with all his might. Inside his mind, the blizzard—the one that shielded Ardan from the Alcade’s winter tempest—fell silent. Instead of hiding from it, the young man filled his lungs with its thunder. He seized its lightning in his hands. He looked up at the sky of the eastern shore. It was dark, low, cold, and untamed.
“Hear my tale of your mountain brother, oh great Dark Expanse,” Ardan exhaled, and together with his words, a fragment of the Name of the Alcade Storm surged once more toward the black clouds of the Metropolis.
*
After barely managing to cast the modified version of the Basic Shield spell, which cost Bazhen every meager ray his two Stars had, he closed his eyes as instructed.
Bazhen kept them closed even when he heard things that human ears were probably never meant to hear. The cowboy’s voice—usually a soft baritone—spoke words in an unfamiliar, melodic language, where one sound flowed seamlessly into the next. And the thing that answered him... the thing that answered him was something. Something that sounded like a bad street in the dark hours of the night.
It sounded like viscous, engulfing danger. Like the cracking of bones. Like the strangled cries of those unlucky enough to have become acquainted with whatever had caused that particular street to gain such a bad reputation.
It sounded like the snorting of a cemetery groundskeeper digging a fresh grave—a memory from Bazhen’s distant childhood, when they had buried his grandmother. He had been plagued by nightmares for months on end afterwards.
But Bazhen did not open his eyes. He didn’t open them even when his shield shook because of a kind of fire that Bazhen had only ever felt around his acquaintances from the Military Faculty—and only the ones close to graduating. He had sensed something similar only when wielders of the Blue Star had fought.
Bazhen did not react to the crash and crack of a shattered window and a section of wall being torn away. He held firm and did not yield to the sound of a child’s weeping—which, for some reason, was filled with both relief and hope.
He really held on for as long as he could. But when a groan struck his ears—the groan of a living corpse, one Bazhen had previously only imagined in his nightmares—he could no longer hold back. The sound was so frighteningly familiar and yet so impossibly odd that Bazhen opened his eyes.
He saw that his shield had actually been destroyed long ago, and that he was standing in the middle of a scorched room. On the bed, pressed against the wall and clutching a blanket, was a little girl. She was sobbing and could not tear her gaze away from the hole in the wall.
Bazhen walked toward it for some reason, not really understanding why. He looked outside and saw the cowboy he knew so well. He was outwardly almost indistinguishable from a human if one ignored his height, fangs, and those amber eyes.
He could usually pass for a human.
But not today.
From head to toe, Egobar’s figure was cloaked in a mantle of roaring flame. It seemed to pour out from every pore of the mage, seeping through his rumpled suit and coat before dissipating into the air.
It transformed into a wide river, following the sweep of what was either a staff or a painter’s brush. With his breath, it spread out in a fiery avalanche. It all looked like spells of the Blue Star. But that was not what seized Bazhen’s attention and made him regret the fact that he’d never spent so much as an extra hour on the training grounds or paid any attention to military magic.
“Oh Light and Angels, I place my trust in you,” Bazhen whispered against his will, reciting the words from memory—he was usually far from religious—and blessed himself with the sacred sign.
He could not say precisely what was standing on the opposite side of the inner courtyard. It was not a silhouette locked within sharp, defined edges. It was not a blurred, dark stain, as though someone had accidentally toppled a jar of ink. It was nothing that Bazhen could contain within words and terms he understood.
No. The thing currently facing Ard was... a feeling. The very same feeling Bazhen had spent his life trying to flee from. He remembered how his usually calm and cold father had howled. Acting like a beaten dog, clutching at anything his always-clean, always-smooth hands could grasp, his father had not even screamed. He had truly howled. Unable to look away, he’d howled at the coffin being lowered into the earth—the one that had held his mother, Bazhen’s grandmother.
Never before or since had Bazhen seen eyes so empty, so simultaneously alive and yet dead. David Eorsky had changed after that funeral. Imperceptibly. Almost intangibly. Something inside him had simply broken, barely affecting his daily life. But it was gone nonetheless, and gone forever.
After that, in the coming days, weeks, months, and even years, the word “despair”—previously empty and meaningless to a child—had suddenly acquired a face. The face of his own father.
And now Bazhen watched as that word acquired a new face. And that face, in shadows and phantoms, in grim fogs and phenomena that were beyond the mind’s grasp, was doing battle with the flame-wreathed Ard.
Bazhen clutched at the wall. The broken brick tore open his palm, but Bazhen didn’t notice the pain. The longer he watched, the deeper he seemed to sink into some sort of abyss. It grew ever harder to distinguish reality from his own thoughts. It felt as though he had drunk some cheap rotgut brewed not even by the Telkarts, but in the cellar of one of the Tend’s many illicit breweries.
Nausea washed over Bazhen. His breathing grew harder. He felt as though he were drowning. Drowning in his own suddenly-leaden thoughts. His mind simply refused to see and comprehend what it could neither unsee nor fail to comprehend, and yet it would still not abandon the attempt to do just that. Such was its nature.
Bazhen wanted to look away. He wanted to shut his eyes again. But he couldn’t. He felt it when he started losing his mind, felt the madness taking hold, and he could do nothing about it.
And so it went until Ard struck his staff against the ground. Only then did Bazhen realize that the cowboy had lost his fiery mantle, and that everything around the corporal had been engulfed by formless... not even shadows, but whatever lies behind shadows themselves, if such a thing could even be expressed in words. He could be forgiven for being a bit inarticulate at the moment—he was going mad, after all.
“Light and Angels, protect me in the hour of night, the hour of darkness,” his petrified lips barely managed to rasp.
Bazhen could have sworn that the ground beneath his companion’s feet had rippled like a disturbed pond. But it didn’t erupt in shattered stone and clods of mud—no, the earth truly became liquid for just an instant. And then a dense cloud of white vapor tore itself free from Bazhen’s mouth.
The blood on his torn palm froze, and the drops that had been falling to the floor shattered as they turned into tiny, red ice crystals. Everything within the invisible boundary of a nearly thirty-meter circle that was centered on Ard was then coated in a layer of blue ice. Snowflakes that were, for some reason, falling not from above but rising from below swirled around Egobar. They blazed brighter and brighter, forcing the darkness that had thickened in the distance to retreat.
And yet, the most astonishing thing happened not below, but—surprisingly—above. Bazhen heard a kind of thunder that had never before visited the Metropolis. And he had lived in the capital since his birth and had witnessed the Week of Storms more than once.
But this thunder was different. It seemed to crash down like some invisible, colossal carcass, plummeting straight to the earth. It made rooftops bow and pressed down on the tall trees of the spruce forest. It was heavy and deep, nothing like the fleeting and distant rumble one could get accustomed to.
And for some reason, it came before the lightning. It was like a herald announcing its mistress. And she did not keep them waiting. Crooked, jagged, and whiter than the first snow, she pierced the suddenly-blackened sky like an arrow and struck down directly in front of Ard—into the very heart of the darkness that had swaddled the light of the dancing snowflakes.
Everything fell silent. The rolling thunder ebbed back into the dark heavens like a retreating tide. The lightning, after leaving a growth of ice along the ground, not a simple burn, dissolved into the air. And along with it, the frost that had bound the earth and the walls of the house vanished as well. Bazhen’s breathing steadied, and blood once more dripped from his palm.
The darkness retreated like dirty smog, like a stained fog, until it was sucked back into the pit in the middle of the ruined garden. Ard swayed and fell face-first to the ground.
“Light and Angels,” Bazhen blessed himself with the sacred sign for the third time, and was already turning toward the staircase when he noticed the girl. He had never been good with children, and so, before running to his companion’s aid, the best he could manage was: “Don’t go anywhere.”
*
Ardan didn’t want to wake up. As always, he had covered himself with Ergar’s tails and burrowed into his Teacher’s fur. The snow leopard’s steady breathing lulled the young man, and those powerful paws bestowed a feeling of peace and safety.
That was why Ardi categorically refused to surrender this warm bliss to the anxiety forcing its way into his mind. And yet, with each passing moment, each stinging slap after stinging slap, Ardan remembered that his days of being a little hunter and a snow leopard’s apprentice were far behind him.
“Cow...boy! Da...mn it! Wa...ke up!”
Ardan shook his head and struggled to open his eyes. Hovering above him, hand already raised to deliver another slap, was Bazhen Eorsky. He had telltale bloody streaks on his upper lip, neck and cheeks. His face was also pallid and he had eyes that gleamed with an unhealthy light.
“You opened your eyes,” Ardan stated the obvious.
“Oh, go to hell, you towering bastard!” Bazhen shouted because of his frayed nerves rather than any desire to hurt or offend him.
He helped Ardan into a sitting position.
“Damn it, cowboy, you look like you could serve as a cadaver at tomorrow’s healing practicum.”
Ardan, using a trembling, barely-obedient hand, drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his face. Need it be mentioned that the cloth was instantly soaked through with blood and sweat?
Sleeping Spirits...
Were it not for the brew, he would not have lasted even a second against the Cold Crone. She would have shattered his Will and his shard of the Name of Ice and Snow in an instant. Fighting a Homeless Fae in its own domain was nothing like facing those that had acquired physical flesh, like the fight back at the factory and at Alla-Lisa’s house.
It was no wonder that the Fae, Homeless Ones and demons were considered the sole responsibility of the Aean’Hane themselves, and never their students—the Speakers.
“Did you kill that thing?” Bazhen asked, settling down beside him and turning toward the pit in the garden.
“You can’t kill it,” Ardan shook his head, and immediately, howling with pain, he regretted doing so.
“Then...” Bazhen searched for the right words for a moment. “You drove it away?”
“For now,” Ardan confirmed without any undue optimism. “She’ll come back. As soon as the snow stops melting, she’ll come back.”
“Eternal Angels...” Bazhen exhaled. “So it was all for nothing?”
“No.” Ardan tried to stand but couldn’t manage it. His body retained just enough strength to breathe and stare at a single point in front of him, and nothing more. “I’ve completed the first part of the ritual. The Crone’s consciousness is confused now. We just need to give her what she came for.”
“Meaning?”
“The Crone came here for the despair of a parent or a child. In other words, she came to feed on the pain caused by the loss of something precious.” Ardan, struggling to catch his breath, mentally turned the pages of an ancient book in Atta’nha’s library. “We must take something they value from each family member. Then we bury it in the ground where the Crone emerged, and that’s it. She won’t come here again.”
“How valuable?” Bazhen asked cautiously. “Something like their future child? Their ability to feel emotions?”
“Nothing out of a fairy tale, Bazhen.” Ardi tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it. “For Nisa, her favorite toy will do. For children, that’s always a safe bet. From the others… we’ll take whatever they choose. The important thing is that the object is truly valuable to them.”
For several seconds, the half-destroyed courtyard seemed to absorb the crushing silence.
“You’re suggesting that I should do this?” Bazhen asked, placing deliberate emphasis on the pronoun.
“I doubt I’ll be able to get up anytime soon, Bazhen.”
“Well, you know… I’m not feeling much better over here.”
“I did ask you to not open your eyes.”
“Eternal Angels, yes! You did ask!” Bazhen didn’t deny it. “But... what in the actual hell? Why did I get so messed up? It feels like I drank a couple of liters of bad booze!”
Ardan could have explained that it had to do with the complex interrelation of Stars in a mage’s mind, the Paarlax field, and other subtleties related to the Ley, but not only did he himself barely understand the matter, he had almost no strength left to waste on that conversation. He just knew one simple fact: those who couldn’t see a tree trunk from both sides at once and yet had a direct connection to the Ley should never look upon the Fae in their true form. Such carelessness could even scorch the mind on a physical level, let alone drive someone insane.
That was precisely why Star Mages had been unable to plunder the castles of the Fae and had only razed them to the ground. And as for the “theft” of the Sidhe Flame, the legendary Sergeant Mendera’s unit had, for that very reason, included no Star Mages in it at all.
“Fine, alright, I’ll go do it,” Bazhen managed to get to his feet. “And what will you be doing?”
Ardan carefully lowered himself onto his back and closed his eyes.
“I’m gonna lie here for a bit.”
“Won’t you catch a cold like that?”
Ardan, who was lying on the cold ground, only smiled.
“No.”