Chapter Twenty-Six

Darius inspected the final bolt, eyeing it in the flickering light of the oil lamp in the corner. Not for the first time, he wished that magelights would work down here— even demon eyes eventually grew weary of constant darkness— but the oppressive weight of the basalt around him would dampen and slowly weaken a source of elemental light as surely as it was doing the same to him. He could still change form, albeit with difficulty. But he wasn't certain how much longer that would be the case.

He pulled his thoughts from that, reminding himself once again that this wasn't permanent. Tanitha had spent far more time than was right or fair in darkness because he had been too afraid to give her the full truth. Now that she had it, he could bear a little of the same. Lithra had said Tanitha wanted to choose her own path, and while Darius didn't believe that was truly possible— how could Tanitha be said to be freely making her own choices, with the amount of power Naratha had over her?— he knew that he couldn't take what choices she did have away from her. Not again. Not anymore.

Of course, that didn't mean he had to calmly sit and wait for news of whatever harm Naratha decided to inflict on her. He looked at the exposed steel of the final bolt, at the faint glimmer of metal through its coating of basalt dust, then nodded to himself. If he judged the risk too high, if he had to act, he could.

Not that that was likely to occur anytime soon. The thought was strangely edged with both relief and frustration. It wasn't likely that any event suitable for a Trial would occur for some time. Naratha would be inclined to be circumspect in what she tasked Tanitha with, and it wasn't as if she could simply manufacture a situation calculated to give Alethia an opportunity to do Tanitha harm. He knew the other two arbiters, Hathia and Torius. They might be low-ranking demons, but they weren't fools, and he had to assume that their credulity of the story they'd been told thus far was being strained by any number of things, from Darius' continued absence to the nature of the second Trial.

Darius' jaw tensed. If he had known, if he had even suspected that they were sending Tanitha into a town ravaged by plague, he would not have been able to restrain himself, whatever good intentions he might have had about letting Tanitha choose her own path. Kai had been clearly disturbed when he'd told Darius what had happened, and only the fact that he'd been able to bring himself to meet Darius' eyes during the telling convinced him that Kai truly hadn't known of it the night it had occurred.

The days that followed had been among Darius' worst. He'd been filled with self-loathing fueled by rage and despair at the fact that by inaction, he'd allowed the woman he loved to be put in a situation directly out of her own nightmares. No matter how certain he'd been in the moment that interfering with her path would only be a repetition of the mistakes that had led them to this point, he didn't think he'd ever be able to fully forgive himself for that.

And even if he could, he did not intend to forgive Naratha.

He didn't know how this was going to end. He might have restricted Tanitha's choices, but Naratha had trapped and controlled them both. And whatever happened, he wasn't going to let that stand.

The cell door slammed open, and Darius straightened quickly as Kai strode in. Darius' heart seized. He knew immediately from Kai's expression and posture that something was very, very wrong.

"Kai?" he asked, his throat suddenly feeling tense. "What is it?"

"Tanitha left with Alethia and the others not long ago," Kai said, speaking quickly. "They got on a boat bound for Zharen's waters."

"What?" Darius demanded. "Zharen? But…"

"The third Trial," Kai said. "It's happening."

Darius gave a startled shake of the head. "That can't… how can she possibly have arranged something so fast?" he asked, stunned.

"She didn't," said Kai. "There was some new intelligence regarding those pirates that Alethia handled some weeks ago. They had something on board, a weapon developed by Sabria's elementalist researchers. Tanitha's being tasked with retrieving it."

"But… Tanitha can't…" He swallowed. "She can't manipulate water." He didn't even know for certain if she could swim.

"I know. She told me. She's been trying to practice, but…" He shook his head. "If she doesn't admit defeat, if she doesn't surrender, I think Alethia's going to drown her." He took a stiff breath. "I know I said Tanitha wouldn't thank you for interfering, but this isn't a true Trial, nor a matter of what she wants to do," he said. "It's just murder."

Darius stared at him. There had been an instant of fear at Kai's words, but the chill of that feeling had rapidly stoked something else inside of him. A fury-borne urge to action.

"I don't know what to do," Kai said, his voice taut. "It's bare luck that Naratha decided to trust me enough to even tell me this would happen." He made a helpless motion toward the bars. "You were right when you said we were doing the same thing to you that we feared Tanitha doing, and I'm sorry for that, for all of this. I've been trying to find the token to disarm these enchantments, but she obviously doesn't trust anyone enough to tell them where she's hidden it." He took a stiff breath as if bracing for something, then said, "If— if you tell me to go after them myself, I'll do it. But I'm no match for Alethia, and—"

"Kai." Darius' tone was flat with rage, and Kai abruptly went quiet, looking at him with rising apprehension. "Move."

Kai's eyes widened, and he jolted back several steps as Darius shifted form.

Batlike wings unfurled from the coiled, scale-covered muscles of his dragon form. It wasn't large, due to the confines of the space and his own flagging strength, but he found himself utterly unconcerned by the latter point. Smoke curled from between his teeth. The fury lashing through him was more than enough to compensate for his present limitations.

He slammed himself against the cell's bars. There was a shriek of metal against stone, and the metal buckled. A guttural snarl escaped Darius at the pain of the impact. Heedless of it, he backed away as far as he could, then curled his wings inward and barreled toward the bars once more.

With a final shriek of protest, the entire steel grating came loose from the wall.

The bars fell forward to the ground with a tremendous clang. Kai, for his part, blinked several times.

"… I see the design for long-term imprisonment needs work," he said, recovering some of his usual equanimity for a moment. Darius ignored this, keeping to his dragon form as he moved forward. His talons clicked against the stone.

"Darius," Kai said, and Darius turned his head to face him, smoke still curling from his jaws. "Use your hawk form," he said. "I'll distract Naratha as best as I can, but you don't want to tempt fate by being recognized in that form too soon. Take the east corridor; I've already dismissed the guards on that side. And there's one more thing," he added hurriedly as Darius started forward once more. "The weapon, the device. It's supposed to be able to restrict our access to the Rifts. You might not be able to use any elemental magic, even shapeshifting. Please, please be careful."

Darius had no intention of utilizing anything resembling caution by that point, but he nodded nonetheless, the motion stiff with determination. An instant later, he was a hawk, streaking out the door with the wind under his wings.

Tanitha managed to stifle the scream that wanted to tear from her as she fell, keeping her jaw tight against it out of pure stubborn spite. She dropped seemingly faster even than the weights she'd pitched over the side, and struck the water somehow even harder.

The force of the impact drove the air from her lungs as she was suddenly immersed in dark and shocking cold. Holding what little breath remained, she forced herself to remain still for several seconds, then propelled herself back toward the surface. Mindful about Alethia's warnings about sharks, she kept her motions small and regular, fighting down the panicked urge to thrash and claw her way back to light and air.

Her head broke the surface, and she gasped, relief filling her as she paddled in place against the weighted harness. She could hear the demons shouting at each other from the nearby boat, though the fog was too thick to make them out, and she firmly dismissed the matter from mind. Her sense of Darius was still weak, but very present, and she didn't know how much time she had.

She found her guide rope, then dove.

It took two attempts for her to reach the sunken ship's deck, following the slick rope hand over hand. She seized onto the deck's rails for several moments, her own heartbeat loud in her ears. Eyes stinging in the saltwater, she summoned a ribbon of air from the surface above.

A trickle of air pocketed over her mouth and nose, and she took several shallow breaths. She sent out a soul-speaking pulse, feeling for any other life forms. There were some minds around her, most of them small and simple, but others seemed more complex. All seemed eerily still, as if waiting for something.

She didn't have a way to know which were dangerous and which were not a threat, so she sent out another pulse, a harder one. Flee, she told them. Danger. It wasn't hard to summon up the emotion that went with that. Leave.

Seconds later, the sea was suddenly churning with life. Hundreds of brightly colored fish of all shapes, some smaller than her little finger and some bigger than her torso, suddenly darted by. A gasp of pain escaped her as fins and scales sliced against her arms, drawing blood.

The wounds were minor, but it was still a shock to see blood welling like slow-coiling ribbons in the water. Mindful of Alethia's words about sharks, she sent out another pulse to repel anything lingering in the area, then swam, her body parallel to the rotting wooden deck beneath her.

She reached the trapdoor leading belowdecks, and at that moment, a strange ripple shook her senses. The pocket of air covering her mouth imploded, and she barely managed to restrain a shocked inhalation. She summoned a strand of air, and…

Nothing happened. Tanitha went still for an instant in shock before she understood. Startled, she reached for her sense of the elemental powers that always surrounded her. Nothing. Nothing at all. The device had pulsed, cutting off her abilities.

Pushing off the rotting deck with all the force she could muster, she swam frantically upward. After what seemed an impossibly long time of her lungs burning, she broke through to the surface, gasping in fresh air. The fog was somehow even thicker than before, and all was eerily silent.

Gods. She suddenly understood on a deep, primal level why no demon would attempt this. It was an excision, a cutting-off from the elements and powers that made them what they were. And yet, they were willing to send her in.

The thought filled her with fury. Naratha thought she was nothing, that her life was worth nothing? Well, she'd had enough of that. She was going to defeat this Trial. She was going to finish this. And she was going to prove that Naratha could not harm her, that she could not take her life and dreams away from her.

She waited until she had the barest sense of the Rifts once more, then forced a stream of air down beneath the surface again. She dove, seizing the guide rope she'd thrown down before. Hand over hand, she pulled herself down, the rope somehow both rough and slimy under her hand. The water around her grew suddenly dark as she released the rope to swim through the hatch to the ship's interior. Tanitha summoned a coil of light, directing it to form into a ball so it glowed like a miniature sun.

The space below the decks was eerily still. Her sight through the water was dim and blurred, and she increased the amount of light, illuminating the ship's hold. Its rows upon rows of galley benches were all empty and still but for the strands of sea plants that had already begun to colonize the wood. She took a step forward, then another, her feet barely touching the wood despite the weighted harness she wore. She reached out with her senses. There was something… a wrongness, a strange tension in the water.

There was a chasm sliced through the hull in front of her, deep and cold and utterly impenetrable to sight. With a stirring of trepidation, she realized this must have been how Alethia had sunk the ship, her leviathan's spine cutting through the thick timbers as if they offered no more resistance than cloth.

She swam forward through the enclosed area, one part of her attention closely tuned to her surroundings, and the other part to bringing a slow trickle of air from the surface. She was breathing easily enough for now, but she knew that could change in an instant. Her heartbeat was thudding in her ears, strangely amplified by the water pressing against them. Everything was still except for the slow waving motion of her own clothes and hair, and the light that she'd summoned wavering weakly along the inner hull and the galley seats.

The chasm gaped in front of her. Though she knew she had little to fear from darkness alone, the sight of the gaping maw still stoked her fear. Her heart pounding, she braced both feet against the wooden floor, then pushed off, swimming across toward the front of the ship.

She almost lost concentration for a moment from apprehension, her air supply dwindling to a gossamer strand of bubbles, but she reclaimed it seconds later, dragging more air to herself. She consciously slowed her breaths; she was going through air faster than she could replenish it. Practicing in the bathing basin back at the palace, she'd only had to move the air a few inches. This was much more difficult, the pressure of the water opposing the intrusion of the air more and more the deeper she went.

She continued her odd, half-floating progress to the front of the ship, climbing slightly against the angle it had landed at. It wasn't steep, but the tilt was noticeable enough that the rowers' benches surely would have slid if they hadn't been built in place and securely nailed down.

She reached the platform where the drummer who kept time for the rowers would have stood at the front of the ship. The platform itself was empty, of course, though she did spot the drum wedged beneath one of the front benches, its skin long since ruptured. She summoned more light. It coiled around her fingers, a ghostly dappling of pale yellow that danced along the ship's interior hull. She looked around warily. If she were attempting to test a weapon without making its presence obvious to demons that were expected to attack from above, this was where she would have placed the weapon's wielder.

But there was nothing. Just the broken drum, and a chest made of thick wood lying on its side. It had detailed geometrical carvings, but it was empty.

No, not quite empty. She stooped, her dress flaring around her in the water with the suddenness of the motion, swirling in the slow currents that flowed through the ship. There was another piece of wood in it, a nearly flat board with a half-dome divot about the width of her palm sanded into it.

She stayed still for several heartbeats, then had to consciously remind herself to summon more air while conclusions rapidly clicked into place in her mind. If she was right, then the device had been here. And though she didn't know precisely what it looked like, it seemed that it was small and meant to rest in a round place, so it was likely round itself.

She half-turned toward the chasm that yawned behind her, that gaping hole that had torn through two levels of hard timber.

The device would have rolled when it came loose from its place.

Suddenly conscious of how long she'd been below, she turned quickly, then swam as fast as she could manage for the trapdoor above her. Just as she passed through it, a horrible sense of emptiness, of disconnection and disorientation washed over her. She took a sharp, truncated breath, barely managing to force any air into her lungs before her streams of light and air from the surface both vanished.

Her adrenaline surged wildly, and she frantically made her way up her guide rope. She tucked her chin to her chest, working blind as she pulled herself up hand over hand. It hadn't seemed so terribly far when she had air, but now, moving as fast as she could with no light to give her hope for an end point, her panic was rising. Her lungs burning furiously, she released the guide rope to swim directly upward with as much strength as she could manage.

Her head broke through the surface of the sea, and she gasped, paddling with more frantic strength than was needed. She blinked seawater—and probably tears—from her eyes, trying to get her bearings in the fog.

At that moment, another pulse rippled over her. Tanitha gasped, startled, and paddled to turn herself to face the origin point. Her senses, already numbed, felt completely dead. That had been bare moments after the one that had driven her to the surface. She'd assumed there was a rhythm to it, a regular spacing. But now… now it seemed more likely that the pulses were random.

Which meant that she had no idea how long she had until the next one.

With that being said, every second she remained up here was a second less until that time. She looked down. Though she couldn't see through the churning froth of the waves, the image of the yawning black chasm rent through the hull of the ship still loomed dark in her mind's eye.

A shudder rode over her, disrupting her paddling enough that she dipped almost to her nose beneath the waves before she recovered. Could she do it? Could she force herself to go back under there, to suffocating darkness?

Yes. The answer came to mind fiercely, cutting through her fear. She could. She could, and she would, and she would win this.

The second she was able, she sent out another soul-speaking pulse, warning any sea creatures that might have returned to the wreck to flee once more. Then, she dove.

Pulling herself down hand over hand along the guide rope, she returned to the wreck, drawing air and light to herself all the while. She seized the remaining loose rope that had coiled on the deck as she swam past it. The ghostly sense of abandonment seemed somehow worse this time as she maneuvered herself through the trapdoor, down to the lower deck, but perhaps that was just the knowledge of where she was going next. She walked the final steps to the gaping maw, then threw the guide rope down. Then, she dove once more.

The water felt heavier here; every fathom deeper she swam meant another fathom's worth of water weight pushing down on her, pressing against her ribs. And at the same time, her sense for air as an element was weakening. Little bubbles were escaping the stream leading to her, leaving it no more than the barest gossamer trail by the time it reached her. She kept her breaths shallow, trying to steady her heart rate against her rising anxiety and the exertion of forcing herself to swim deeper and deeper still.

The light coiling around her seemed weaker, the illumination pitiful against the close, dark cavern formed by the ship's jagged and rotting timbers. Forcing her breathing to remain slow, she looked around. There were no signs of movement except for the gentle swaying of sea lichens and weeds that had grown up already in the knots and burls of the cracked and broken wood. They cast large and eerie shadows, and more than once, she had to turn quickly at a perceived motion that turned out to be nothing but a trick of light and darkness.

She finally reached the bottom, her feet alighting on the sand. A small cloud of it rose around her ankles, and she looked around, heart beating hard. The device, whatever it was, was small and round, and could be anywhere, nestled into a shadowed crevice formed of wood against stone, or even just buried in the sand. And if it pulsed while she was still this deep…

She glanced longingly toward the surface, then realized in that moment with an unpleasant twist of the stomach that she couldn't make out any light at all from this depth; the day was misty and dark from the demon's efforts, but even if that hadn't been true, she wasn't sure if it would have made a difference. She was well beyond any help or aid.

No, she told herself firmly. She'd found a way to help Darius. He was coming. And if she needed it, he would find a way to help her in turn.

On a hunch, she sent out a pulse of her own. There were few creatures remaining down here; she'd warded most of them off herself, after all. But there were still some. Mussels, clams, and the like, along with skittering crabs and tiny sand eels. They were scattered about, distributed fairly evenly. Except…

Her heart lurched, and she took a single bound forward, more sand clouding around her with the movement. She knelt in the white sand, digging frantically and wishing passionately that she could just direct a current of water to drive away the sand, as she was certain Alethia could.

In that moment, her hand struck something hard and warm, the temperature in stark contrast to the cold and sluggish sand. She gasped as her hand closed around it, though chided herself instantly for the careless use of air. She seized fast to it, then pulled hard.

The device was a sphere of thick glass, about the size of her hand and solid nearly all the way through except for the very center, which was divided into three chambers. Her hands glowed red from the twisting single flame in the center chamber, its light refracted by tightly contained water in the next. The third chamber seemed to hold only air. It was strange craftsmanship— she had no idea how a glassblower might accomplish such a thing— but she could feel a wealth of elemental magic in it. Sudden understanding struck her, and her breath caught.

It wasn't sending a negating pulse out, as she'd thought. It was pulling surges of power in, temporarily draining the area in its immediate vicinity. It was a genius design; though she herself felt unable to connect with the power it was holding, someone trained in its use could probably tap the concentration to great effect. There were some problems with its functionality that she could imagine— one couldn't use it without depriving everyone else nearby of magical ability, including allies, for instance— but nonetheless, if a single magic user could deprive nearby demons of their strength and their abilities while simultaneously strengthening themselves? It could change the course of the world.

It could destroy her home.

She wasn't going to let that happen. The upwelling of determination felt strange, though perhaps it shouldn't have been. Despite everything that had happened, she loved Karazhen. And though she had a deep appreciation for the flaws of its rulers… she wouldn't let it fall. Karazhen was her home, and besides that, it was the land Darius was meant to lead. If by bringing this back she could possibly help him protect it, then she fully meant to.

She shoved the device into her satchel, then began to swim upward, weaving through the broken timbers of the ship. The tiny trail of light she'd summoned still seemed pitiably weak, and more than once she scraped against one of the jutting timbers, unable to accurately judge their positions in the deceptive shadows cast by her light.

Suddenly, there was a jolting pressure around her waist, and she looked down to see that her weighted harness had snagged on some of the timbers she had just passed. She moved to yank it free it.

In that moment, the device pulsed once more.

Its influence washed over her, and she had just an instant to realize what was happening. She gasped in a final breath of air before her stream of bubbles from the surface dissipated like a scattering of sparks blown by an errant breeze, glimmering in the last of her vanishing light. She froze, her heartbeat echoing in her ears. She couldn't see, and her lungs were already beginning to cry for air.

Blind, she fumbled at her harness, though by feel she couldn't tell how it was caught. Her motions frantic, she cut her hand on the timber's jagged edge. She barely noticed the hot pain of the cut, too focused on trying to tug the rope free. It was snagged fast on something, and abruptly, she gave up, shifting her attention to fumbling at the knots she'd made so carefully above, cursing herself for her earlier diligence. All the while, panic was welling up from the depths of her mind, rising like the crashing of a tide in concert with the furious beating of her heart.

One of the knots came loose in her hand, and she struggled madly for an instant, finally managing to wriggle free of the harness. Still blind in the suffocating darkness, she began to swim upward with all her strength.

She propelled herself upward, trying to make out any sign of the surface, some glimmer of the muted half-light of the fog-clouded day above, but there was nothing. Just darkness made somehow more complete by looming shadows that were somehow deeper still. She swam, drawing herself upward in the quest for light and air.

In that moment, her side struck a jutting timber. Its jagged point tore straight through her clothing, and against her will, she took in a choking gasp of water as the fiery pain raced through her.