Immediately, the world slipped into the grayscale of channeling-space.
Black threads of Mortem wound through the dead boards of the ship, wavering lines of pearlescence dancing with orange-red in the air. Every strand of the world, open to her senses.
A thick band of gold stretched out from the Fount piece in her hand, reaching forward. Through the ship, into the waves, like a gilded road. In her preternatural vision, she could see through the wooden walls, into the ocean beyond, that golden path leading into the depths of the sea.
The Fount piece was like a compass now that it was out here in the open ocean, close to its whole. Leading them to the source.
She didn’t come all the way out of channeling-space as she left the room, staying far enough under for everything to still be black and white, to still hold the awareness of that ribbon of Spiritum emanating from the piece of the Fount.
On the deck, Dani waited, hands white-knuckled on the wheel of the ship, face all hard angles. Lore raised a hand, pointed in the direction of the golden road. “That way. It’s a straight course to the Fount.”
Dani spun the wheel.
The boat lurched in the proper direction, sent on its way by sails that Dani had apparently adjusted while Lore was below catching the breeze. When the Harbor was behind them, almost fully hidden in ash, Dani glanced Lore’s direction. “I’m not sure how you feel about the whole only-channeling-Spiritum thing, but it’s certainly an aesthetic improvement.”
Lore knew what she looked like when she channeled Mortem. Opaque eyes, black veins. Her only reference for what she looked like now was what she’d seen on Bastian. The phosphorescence around his hands, the way he seemed to glow. She looked down at herself and saw the same, as if gold ran beneath her skin instead of blood, as if she’d swallowed the sun.
“It’s an improvement all around,” she said. Her voice sounded different. More resonant.
Dani gave her a sharp look.
Lore just gazed at her hands, glimmering softly, coated in a thin layer of light.
Something was different.
The golden sea was shallower. Bastian wasn’t sure how he knew that, since he seemed to float somewhere in the middle of it, continuously striving toward the surface. But after managing to dive to the bottom, to find that door that led out to the beach and the long corridor of memories, Bastian had a better feel for the parameters of his prison.
And they were shrinking.
It reminded him of a Mortem leak, a slow seeping of power from a godly body.Hisbody, now, which was minorly concerning, even if he didn’t have control of it most of the time.
Apollius’s anxiety was a continuous static, a cloud that Bastian couldn’t emerge from. There was still enough distance between them that he couldn’t put an exact finger on its cause, other than assuming it had something to do with the shrinking he felt. But Apollius’s worries didn’t seem dire, necessarily. More like He was making a momentous decision. Like He’d reached a fork in the road, an unexpected turn in the path.
Bastian took advantage.
He dove down to that door in the bottom of his prison, stumbled across the now-empty beach, back into the corridor of memory. He remembered the approximate location of the door that held the recollection of the ring. He only needed a few seconds…
When he pulled the door open, the ring filled his vision, a first-person account of this moment. Bastian couldn’t make Apollius in the past look at anything else, but he expanded his awareness, straining to take notice of the god’s surroundings. A mostly darkroom, though there, at the corner of his vision, was a cracked-open door.
Beyond, books.
He’d seen what he needed to see. Out of the corridor, back across the beach, back to the door and into the growing-shallow sea.
It wasn’t smart to push his luck, maybe. But Bastian Arceneaux had always been more daring than smart.
He launched himself up, breached the surface, half expecting to be shoved back down—
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
BASTIAN
For all his faults, the boy has incredible strength of will.
—From the personal writings of August Arceneaux
No pain.
That, in itself, was remarkable. Every time he’d managed to wrest bodily control away from Apollius, it’d come with immense pain, his head aching like it would burst, every bone determined to twist the wrong way as the god fought him like an untrained rider on an unbroken horse.
