energies. Between layers of protection spells and the original foundation, the archives had survived the destruction of the building above mostly intact. It was the not-intact sections that were a problem.
Meryl Dian stood over a fallen box, hands on her hips and annoyance on her face. She wore tight black jeans and old maroon high-top Docs. A dark red lace top set off her black hair as she glared down at the broken glass. “The buffer spell went down. I just lost about a grand worth of crystal inhibitors.”
I slipped my arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “It’s just stuff. You’re working too hard.”
She leaned into me, honeysuckle and clove. “Did you find anything today?”
“I’ve learned how to sicken a flock of sheep from the next town over. It’ll come in handy if I ever get my abilities back and need revenge on a wool farmer,” I said.
She craned her neck to look at me. “Let’s get out of here. I’m hungry and annoyed.”
I took her hand as we returned up the hallway. “Great. My two favorite moods of yours.”
Meryl gave me a playful shove. “I’ve been working down here all by myself.”
“No one said you had to keep the archives a secret. That was your choice. You have a staff,” I said. With all the debris from the collapsed building, wrecking crews were still clearing the street above. The operation had become complicated by the residual essence interacting in the rubble. No one was worried about the basements yet, and Meryl had decided to keep her domain private for a while.
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be able to move around down here if macGoren found out it was accessible,” she said.
Ryan macGoren was Acting Guildmaster, a title he had by default since the actual Guildmaster, Manus ap Eagan, had gone into a coma. MacGoren and I didn’t get along at all. I tried to warn him about the Elven King, but he had ignored me. When the Guildhouse fell, he looked like the fool that he was and didn’t want me running around telling the truth of the matter.
“I wasn’t complaining. You don’t have to do all this work by yourself is all I meant. The city’s been declared a national disaster area. No one’s going to know if you knew the archives were accessible. You deserve a break. I’m a big boy. I can find what I need by myself.”
She tugged at my jacket. “Are you saying you don’t need me?”
I pulled her close. “You, my love, are hungry and arbitrary. What say I get some food in you?”
She laughed and pushed away. “Okay. Let’s do Chinatown. It’s about the only neighborhood left that hasn’t been trashed.”
An hour later, we were sitting on cheap metal chairs at a wobbly table for two. Meryl was digging into a bowl of pho as big as a tureen. “You’re awfully slurpy,” I said.
“You’re supposed to slurp. It’s a cultural thing,” she said around a mouthful of noodles.
I picked at my tempura. “Yes, tell me more about your Chinese heritage.”
“Vietnamese. County Clare,” she said. I laughed. Meryl had a comeback for everything. “How’s your research going?”
“Boring. I’m not finding anything in the construction files about the faith stone. I know there has to be something there. Eagan knew about the stone and never told anyone. I want to know why,” I said.
Eagan had the stone built into the structure of the Guildhouse. Its power was obvious. What was less obvious was why Eagan didn’t want it known where it was. I hoped the answer was somewhere in the archives, lost in years of neglect. For a century, Eagan had watched over the dwarf—now dead—who had given or sold him the stone. Meryl had found documents dating back decades that proved Eagan protected the guy. If those records existed, others had to.
“You can question his methods, but Manny always had good reasons,” she said.
“Well, he better have had a good one. I’ve got a rock in my head,” I said. At the moment of his death, Donor had lost control of the faith stone. In the resulting explosion, the stone tore through my head and into my mind.
Meryl squirted more hot sauce into her pho. “If it was a real rock, you’d be dead. It would have crushed your skull and smooshed your brain into pulp, although sometimes I do wonder.”
“You told me Gillen Yor said it was the stone,” I said. Gillen was my healer, my frustrated healer who had no idea how to help me. Meryl had been acting as go-between for us since people had a tendency to take a shot at me whenever I showed my face near any secure facilities.
“The stone is a metaphor for essence that has somehow become bonded to you. It’s a stone, and it’s not a stone,” she said.
“Okay, that hurts my brain more than having the stone in there,” I said.
Meryl produced a distinct snicker. It was cute when it was because she was amused. It was embarrassing when it was because she thought you had said something stupid. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which. “That’s what you get for abandoning your druidic training when you did. What we do, Grey, is not just manipulate essence. We interact with the Wheel of the World, and that’s a much bigger deal. It’s about faith and balance and fate as much as it is knocking someone on his ass with a bolt of essence. Whatever the faith stone is, it is also something tied to the Wheel of the World. That’s power on a level we can’t understand because it’s starting to touch the ineffable, so we try to reduce it to a concept we do understand.”
“Like a stone,” I said.
“Precisely. The stone is a metaphor for an idea with a purpose wrapped in essence,” she said.
“And the dark mass is the opposite,” I said. The dark mass had been the bane of my existence for over three years. When I was working for the Guild, I had tried to capture a terrorist named Bergin Vize. I cornered him at a nuclear power plant north of the city. Something went wrong. I woke up weeks later in the hospital with my memory and my abilities gone, and Vize still on the loose. A dark mass had appeared in my brain, preventing me from manipulating essence. I went from being one of the most powerful druids to come along in a long time to a guy living on disability checks.
The dark mass in my head drained essence from anything it touched. When the faith stone hit me in the head, it achieved a coexistence with the darkness. They pulsed against each other in my mind—one hot pain, the other cold. The plus side to the whole thing was my body shield came back. I could form a full one again, thickened essence around my body that slowed physical objects and deflected essence-fire.
“Nothing can be in the World and not be in the World. The dark mass can’t be devoid of essence and be in the World. The World, by definition, is essence,” she said.
I smiled. “Teacher, teach thyself. It’s no different than saying a stone can be a stone and not a stone at the same time.”
She twisted her lips in thought. “I’m not buying it. The stone and the idea of faith are things that we can define. You’re defining the dark mass as something that can’t be defined.”
“It has a definition, though. It’s the Gap.”
Meryl frowned with dismissiveness. “Don’t forget who your source was for that idea, Grey. Brokke worked for the Elven King and protected Bergin Vize.”
Brokke was a dwarf who had been a high-level advisor to Donor. He was also one of the most powerful seers in the world. The only thing he didn’t see coming was his own death when the Guildhouse collapsed. I watched him die. As much as he frustrated me, I took no joy in his death.
He gave me somewhat of an answer to what the black mass in my head was. He called the darkness the Gap, an indescribable force that existed as nonexistence. It devoured the essence that made the World possible. It drained the life out of people. It had the potential to destroy the World, which meant I had that power. Brokke claimed I couldn’t control it, that no one could. I didn’t believe that—yet. While I lived, I believed I had a choice to let the darkness overwhelm me or to find a way to stop it.
“Brokke understood the darkness, Meryl. He told me he had been studying it for years. That’s why I’m down in the archives. If Brokke found answers, I can find them, too.”
“If he understood it, why didn’t he lift a finger to stop Vize? He knew Vize has the darkness in him, too,” she said.
“Just because he didn’t understand it doesn’t mean he was wrong. I can’t dismiss him. I might not agree with his methods and motives, but Brokke told me more about the dark mass than anyone else did,” I said.
“And you’re still no closer to the answer,” she said.
“So what am I supposed to do? Sit around with a dark mass and a stone in my head, and pretend they’re not there?”
