She’d fallen to her knees at some point in the memory; her hands dug into the soft earth, grit thick enough under her nails to hurt. This was it, then. Here was His body, and here was the way to get to it.
Slowly, she stood, holding on to the tree until she was sure her legs could support her. With a firm nod, she made her way back to the Fount to get her bag and Dani’s dagger. She hadn’t been bringing it with her, unafraid of anything Dani could do. The other woman was smart enough not to try.
The Fount sang as she collected her pack. An anticipatory air to the melody now. A build before a big finish.
This is what We need, It said softly.
“No shit,” Lore replied.
“What’s going on?”
Dani wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be on the other side of the island, looking through the ruined huts. “I could ask you the same question,” Lore said.
“There’s nothing in those villages.” Dani leaned against amostly intact doorframe, arms crossed. “It’s far more likely we’re missing something in here.”
“Hm.” Lore turned away, headed back toward the path.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
There was a warning tone in Dani’s voice, a fierceness.
“You found something,” the other woman said.
Lore spun back around, mouth set in a thin line. “And if I did?”
Dani pushed off from the doorframe, stepped closer. “We’re working together, Lore.” She swallowed, a hint of emotion on her face that she tried to scrub away. Desire, blazing plain. “If you found Him, take me with you. Let me help.”
A lie would do no good. Lore didn’t know what it would take to kill Apollius’s body; maybe she really would need Dani’s help.
And what if it killed her? What if she tripped some mechanism, trying to open that Spiritum door, and killed herself falling down the cliff face before she could kill the god? Someone had to do it. They couldn’t come all this way for nothing.
Lore jerked her chin, indicating for Dani to follow. Then she trekked back to the cliff.
Dani stayed quiet, even when Lore set down her pack, afraid the extra weight might overbalance her as she climbed out onto the rock. A handhold here, a foothold there; slowly, she made her way onto the slightly canted drop, painfully aware of the churning sea far below, the wind pushing at her body.
But she didn’t fall.
Finally, she reached the middle of the cliff face, balanced on a tiny rock outcropping that she prayed with every breath wouldn’t crumble. This was the place; she could see the seams between the stones, fit back together so perfectly that from far away, it looked unbroken. The monks had put it back like they were solving a puzzle before letting themselves fall into the ocean.
Lore leaned forward, placing her hands on the rocks, allowing them to take some of her weight so it all wasn’t balanced betweensky and sea. This close, she could feel Spiritum blazing behind the stones, as gold and strong as the day it’d been spun.
She dropped to channeling-space, blocking out everything but those sunshine threads behind the black of Mortem in the cliff.
It was similar to the door she’d opened in the vaults to find August’s undead army, in the bowels of the Church to find the prophecy. Similar, but not the same. Those locks had only needed one piece tripped to be opened; this was a mess of magic, a tangled web that had to be unwoven strand by strand.
“Of fucking course,” Lore muttered, and got to work.
Once she began, the threads came apart. Not easily, necessarily, but with a sense of purpose, of setting yourself to a task you were meant to accomplish. Lore didn’t know how much time passed, her hands braced against the rocks and her vision gray-scale, unpicking the lock Apollius had made.
But when it was done, the force of it knocked her backward.
A moment of empty air, her stomach recalibrating to the lack of solid ground, dropping and then floating up into her throat. There was no time to scream as she started to fall, but Lore still tried, a small, ridiculous sound more like a kittenish mew than a cry of horror.
It was replaced by anoofas something caught her hand.
Dani, standing inside the lip of the cavern she’d uncovered, bruised and bleeding from the fall of puzzle-piece rocks, from her scramble over the cliff face—she must have climbed over while Lore was untangling magic.
Lore’s sweaty hand slipped in Dani’s fist, pulling the smaller woman toward the edge. Every muscle in Dani’s arm strained painfully, her mouth a twisted rictus. “You’re going to have to help me here!”
