Felun

Iolite was waiting for them in the Library foyer.

Felun didn’t recognise her at first; it was a human that had stepped out from behind one of the columns—tall and slim with long, white-blonde hair. She wore a dark witch’s dress, cinched at the waist by a belt that held various vials, each of them half-full with coloured liquids. Silver gauntlets graced her hands—not decorative, those. Weapons. He tensed and reached for his runebook before she laughed. A familiar laugh, tinged with a mocking fondness.

“Felun, how cautious of you,” she said.

He paused at her voice and glanced at Suria for affirmation. When she simply twitched her face-spurs in annoyance, he turned back to—well, Iolite, it was undoubtedly Iolite’s voice coming from that human-seeming mouth—and swallowed nervously as he gave the approximation of a polite nod.

Her gaze moved to the amphora still strapped across his chest. “You performed well?”

“He was satisfactory,” Suria cut in. “You did not state your plan to be here? And you chose to wear a veilment?”

“It never hurts to obfuscate, in foreign territories. I do thank you for your veilments, Suria.” She strode towards them, heeled boots clicking against the tile. “They are a work of art. Incredibly comfortable, this one. Oh, and I will borrow Felun for a little while.”

“Borrow,” Suria echoed, a questioning edge to the word. Out of the corner of his eye, Felun saw the tip of her tail twitch. He suspected that she would prefer Iolite to simply take him away and never return.

“I will return him to your supervision soon enough.”

“Then shall I bring the vessel to the outstation?”

Iolite inclined her head and smiled, a brief flash of perfectly white teeth. “Of course. Guard it with your life.”

“Yes.” Suria acquiesced, dipping her head. “It will be easier without the boy.” She clicked her fingers and the spell-cord fell away from Felun’s chest, rearranging itself to curl around the amphora in a crude net. She whisked it towards herself, catching it in both hands, wings curling almost protectively inwards. “My thanks, Iolite. If you’ll have no further need of me,” she said, hardly a question at all.

“Thank you, Suria,” Iolite said.

Suria nodded once, then darted away on sparking wings.

Iolite turned to him, a hint of a smile lingering on her lips. “Felun, then. How was it? Is Suria treating you well? She can be stern, I know, but don’t let it fool you. She is remarkably capable.”

“It went…well,” he said carefully, though the skin of his palms twinged in protest. “Yes, she’s very capable.”

“I am glad to hear it. Come, now. And put that awful mask away. Others await.”

He stuffed the Magician’s mask into his satchel and followed her through the huge double doors of the Higher Library, down wide, tiled corridors, and up a hidden spiral staircase.

She flexed her gauntlet-clad right hand into a fist as they went, but they encountered no one on their way up. Eventually, they emerged from a small door set into an alcove, an indent polished smooth. Iolite stepped into the room with brazen certainty and when he followed, he saw why.

The room was larger than he’d first anticipated. He moved his eyes away from a series of scratches running down a section of floral wallpaper only to see even more, further down the length of the room—parallel lines, viciously scored down the middle of an enormous painting depicting a desert landscape with hawks wheeling overhead. The room’s rich furnishings had been pushed aside; vases smashed and flowers strewn about. A claw-footed table had been flipped upside down and a large number of gilt-edged chairs lay in a circle of splintered disarray, forming a makeshift clearing in the center of the room.

There, a dozen or so faeries crouched over human bodies. Several human bodies. The bodies were strewn across the makeshift clearing in varying states of injury, most of them facedown and all of them unmoving. He felt ill at the sight of blood pooling around one of their heads; the room was large and the ceiling magnificently vaulted, but the air suddenly felt thick and stifling, heavy with the tang of iron.

“Are they—dead?” he asked without thinking the words through.

Every faery in the room—save for Iolite by his side—turned to look at him, their jewel-bright wings stiffening and shining tails lashing like whips. He cringed as one of them started to hiss, a low sound just on the edge of his hearing that made the back of his neck prickle.

“This is Felun,” Iolite said bluntly. “He is our Breaker. Or Unraveler, or whatever you’d like to call it.”

Was it just his imagination, or did they all shift minutely backwards?

“Ah, Sungrazer Zhao. He wears the garb of the enemy,” one of the other faeries said. He nodded at the blue cloak still draped over Felun’s shoulders. Felun had almost forgotten about that. He frowned, casting back into his memory, and found that he recognised the faery from a brief meeting back at the Hive. Iolite had introduced him as Lieutenant Silverwater. There was a long knife in his hand—no crossguard, and the blade was already stained red.

“Yes,” Iolite said. “He has already shown a measure of success.”

She picked her way past a Magician laying facedown on the tile. Felun clenched his jaw and followed, feeling faery eyes track his every movement. He tried not to look at the rest of the bodies. Most of them were Magicians, their blue cloaks singed but somehow intact. Though a few of the others wore courtier’s clothing, too; torn tunics and blood-soaked dresses.

He had seen dead bodies before, he reminded himself. Plenty of dead monsters in dungeons, and adventurers too. For heaven’s sake, he’d seen piles of severed limbs in a first-aid tent at a dungeon’s mouth—a bad one, back in Ironport—and he’d nearly vomited from the smell. But for some reason, that hadn’t bothered him quite as much as this did. He couldn’t put his finger on why—maybe it was because with the limbs, he’d only witnessed the aftermath. Right now though, Iolite’s band of fighters was still here, and he felt as if he were also interrupting something dangerous and attentive.

Iolite stopped at a set of large, heavy doors at the end of the enormous room. Felun faltered and stilled two paces behind her. The doors towered, pristinely white and flourished with grand, golden curliques formed into triskelions; spiraling trios of perfect rotational symmetry. He sensed a cold warding magic emanating forth, a thinly-veiled power. It reminded him of the type of big glowing locks on enticing-looking doors, dungeon-traps that practically dared adventurers to try opening them. He hated those. Whenever he tried to unravel them, there were tripwires threaded into the very weave.

Iolite raised her gauntleted fist and knocked. The sound rang out across the room, bouncing off the cold tile and sinking up into the crown molding. “I ask once again,” she said. Her voice was like a clear bell on a cold morning. “Let us enter in peace.”

From the other side of the doors, silence.

Lieutenant Silverwater glided up past Felun, coming to a stop at Iolite’s shoulder. He made a long, low sound at her—half-chitter, half-song—and flexed his face-spines in a pattern as he did so.

Iolite started to hum back at him, then cut off and clicked her tongue in disgust. “Hmph. Fleshly limitations—my apologies, Silverwater. Our esteemed Suria’s veilments are beyond illusion and that is convenient at times and not at others. Yes, you are correct. I suppose they would have heard the commotion. No matter.” She turned her piercing gaze to Felun. “Felun, break the door.”

He tensed, looked from her to Silverwater to the bloodied knife still in Silverwater’s hand. So this was why she’d needed him. Another thought trickled through the forefront of his mind; someone was behind that door, someone who was probably human, and judging by what had happened to other the humans here…but no. It didn’t matter what he assumed, did it? If he opened that door, whatever happened to the person or multiple persons inside would be his fault. At least partially.

But then again, he was the indentured firstson, wasn’t he.

“I…can try,” he said. There was a slight quiver in his voice, which he hated. His palms still burned from unlocking the piece of the labyrinth, and the ghost of a headache tingled at his temples even at mere the thought of trying. He would have to push through; he knew, from experience, that he would feel like shit afterwards, but it wasn’t like he had a choice.

Iolite stepped closer and peered at him. He fought the urge to take a step back.

“Are you tired, Felun?”

He swallowed, felt sweat beading at his temples. “I will try to open the door,” he said, which was true enough.

She inclined her head to the side. “Silverwater, fetch some human-food for him. Felun, you do appear to be tired. Sustenance is a partial solution. We are under time constraints, but is there anything else you would like?”

He stared mutely for a moment as Silverwater left his side to rummage amongst the still-standing furniture. “I uh, I’m fine.”

“It runs against the efficiency of our operations to deny measures of strain,” Iolite said, her lips curving into a slight frown. “You have unique talents. Do not endanger our plans by jeopardising yourself in order to maintain a guise of indomitable strength.”

“I…am a little tired, from the Library,” he said, feeling the gazes of the faeries boring into his back. “But I’ll probably be fine. I appreciate…your consideration. I’ll try the door very soon—thank you,” he said hastily to Silverwater, who had reappeared to press a plateful of biscuits into his hands. “I’ll just—um. I’ll have some of these real quick and then…I’ll try the door."

He wolfed down three of the biscuits—tried to ignore the thought that he was stealing food from the mouths of corpses—and fished another can of prune juice from his satchel, sipping at it as he scratched a line of basic protection runes across the front of the set of doors.

It’s not an ensorcelled Library labyrinth door, he reminded himself as his heart hammered in his chest. It’s not even a dungeon door. It might be hard to crack, but it probably wouldn’t actually attack him. Still, it never hurt to be careful.

He lifted two strings of warding runes from his book and wrapped one over each of his knuckles and wrists, aware of the faeries craning their necks to watch him as he did so. Some of them whispered amongst themselves in that scratchy, humming language of theirs. He shoved the runequill back into his pockets and tossed the empty can back into his satchel where it would inevitably dribble leftover droplets over his spare sheets of paper—but Suria had said not to leave any traces, and he suspected Iolite would be the same way. He flexed his fingers, wincing at the sharp twinges under his bandaged palms.

“Are you starting?” Iolite asked as he stepped up to the doors. “Then we will stand ready, and out of your way.”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He placed his palms onto the gilt surface, and dived.

The warding enchantment felt like a triskelion at first touch, a planar thing that rippled beneath his incorporeal fingertips before puffing up into a membranous sac, inflating like a three-lobed lung.

It made a roaring sound—a sound like the colour of a heat wave—as it did so. A sigil like spellfire crackled to life on it’s surface. It was far from decorative, he realised with dismay. It blazed into the shape of a crown and flung sharp, colourless crystals at him. They sizzled as they collided with his defensive runes. Distantly, he was aware of the line of runes on the door sputtering out.

He flinched back out and panted for breath as he surfaced. A sheen of sweat was forming at his brow. His nose was starting to drip blood.

“Something wrong?” Iolite said, walking up to him.

She frowned at the failed runes he had placed on the door. He realised that there were scorch marks burnt onto the wooden panels.

“It’s…stronger than I thought,” he said. “I’ll need to add more defenses.”

“Well, yes. It is likely warded as befitting of royal chambers. If that helps your assessment.”

“Yes, it…thank you,” he said, as he thought, royal? with a diamond-point spike of alarm. It would have been nicer to know in advance, but maybe Iolite had assumed he could know the type of enchantment just by looking. She wouldn’t be the first to assume that.

He drew more shimmering bundles of runework from the pages of his book, spread them in matching spirals over each unbudging door handle. He chalked a facsimile of the shielding circle he’d used back in the Library labyrinth, though the runes he placed there were lighter ones—both because he’d already used up most of the good stuff, and because he wasn’t sure he’d have the strength for it in face of what was to come.

He dived once more and the enchantment rose to meet him. This time, he peeled back the crown crest before it had a chance to reload its crystalline ammunition, juggling a tripwire net in one hand and a drip-dropping, refilling-reservoir of poison with the other.

A wave of flute and shadow and harp and song crashed down over him, muffling his senses, cutting him off from the real, physical world. He gathered up a scrap of the song-storm in his hands, bathed it in his own magic, and spun it out into a thin sheet. He cloaked himself in it, just in time, as he felt flickers of lightning sprouting around him. But now he was a piece of another piece, not distinguishable enough to be worth attacking. The storm howled around him, mighty but futile, as he burrowed into the next layer. Whoever had made this enchantment must not have encountered a true Breaker before.

Crackly, dry reeds tried to tangle his blistering hands and gilded chalices poured caustic wine over his lines of runes. Some sputtered out, but others held strong. He was tired and overtaxed. He had no choice but to continue.

This enchantment was almost as strong as the one in the labyrinth, but only a quarter as cunning, if that. And that was what mattered, the cunningness. Yes, it was that the way the spell…thought…that mattered most. Orhan would have been laughing if he were here. ‘Spells don’t think, you little fool,’ he’d say, grinning around the blisters crowding his face. But Felun had seen things since—things like the Labyrinth door—that made him believe otherwise.

He wondered if it would do any good to fail, to be inefficient, to tip himself over the edge of burnout and say ‘I did all I could’. Would he be less guilty then? But there were promises made, debts sold, people who kept him safe and fed and alive—useless firstson. Too late; he gritted his teeth as he unraveled the final knots in a movement that was half-instinct, half-memory. Berry-coloured silken strands, studded with thorns and slippery with grease. It made his fingers bleed. The cuticles of his nails ached. Every tooth felt a touch too loose in its socket.

The enchantment fell apart in his hands, fizzling down to nothing. His magic was fast ebbing away from him, waning. He was almost run dry. Almost. If only he had thought of a way to be blameless sooner. He surfaced fully and staggered away from the triskelion-door, almost falling flat on his back. Strong hands caught his shoulders; hands with pointed-claw fingertips.

“Sungrazer Zhao appears to be injured,” said Silverwater.

He was. His hands were bleeding, soaking through the bandages there. His nose was bleeding properly now, a slow, steady trickle down over his lips and chin. His muscles ached and his mouth felt dry. “It’s done,” he croaked out. There was a bolt on the other side—he had sensed its impotent shadow behind the warding enchantment—but it was just material. He had seen what a hopped-up Suria could do to mere stone, ironwood, glass. It wasn’t his problem now.

Iolite walked up to him and frowned. “Felun, drink this.” She took a vial from her belt and pressed it into his hand. “It is human formulation,” she added, seeing the flash of trepidation across his face, “It will not harm you. Let him onto the floor and be ready, Silverwater.”

Silverwater shoved him sideways, towards the shelter of the wall, and rushed to join the group of faeries clustering into a group.

Iolite backed away from him and centered herself in front of the doors. “Ready yourselves.” Her gauntleted hands clenched into fists. They jostled into formation, making an arrowhead of chitin and wing and sharpened blade, with Iolite at the very tip.

Felun sagged against the wall, every muscle trembling with exhaustion. He sniffed as blood dripped from his nose and splattered against the tile. Then he uncorked Iolite’s mystery potion vial and drank it down. It tasted mostly of spearmint and faintly of caramel. A rush of cool sensation ran down his throat. Then it went through his limbs and down his torso. A dull tide of fatigue began to lap at the edges of his consciousness.

Iolite faced the set of royal doors and drew a sheet of paper from the pocket of her dress. She unfolded it and said something, a word that seemed neither faerie nor human, an ear-blistering sound that roared through the air. The paper burnt itself up, flecks of ash speckling the floor. He heard the sound of the bolt breaking as the doors flung themselves open, outwards, bracketing him against the corner.

The faeries charged in.

Felun curled up against the wall, the room beyond blocked from view by white-gold triskelions. Lassitude slithered over him like heavy blankets.

He heard screaming, moments before he lost consciousness.