Only the living are lost.
Cross checked the iron beams. As he’d expected, most of the device had been damaged in the blast, and two of the beams had fallen down into the hole. The third, however, was still bolted into the ground, and it hung over the opening at a forty-five degree angle. The pulley mechanism was gone, but there was still plenty of cable, and he thought that if he secured a line tight enough he could lower himself down.
The fourth Sorn was down in the hole, where it clu n g desperately to the wall. The rock in the shaft was blasted obsidian that shone like dark stars. The one-eyed giant’s face and body were riddled with cuts, and it looked to have lost some of its fingers. It blinked up at Cross and grimaced.
He found a crate filled with machinery and slowly pushed it into the hole. He heard the Sorn fall as the box of equipment tumbled and struck the creature, and they both crashed down the sides of the shaft.
Cross couldn’t get the image of friends long dead out of his mind. He was shaking, and had to take a moment to right himself. He saw them, remembered them, and vowed to waste no more time.
It took him a handful of minutes to locate enough cable. He tore cloth from the Sorn’s clothing and wrapped it around his hands so he wouldn’t slice himself apart with the frayed metal line on the way down. He wound one end of the cable around a low column of quartz, then looped the other end twice around the beam and dropped the rest into the darkness of the shaft. He searched the Sorn’s bodies and used the smallest carabineer — like clamps he could find to secure himself to the line. He lowered himself into the hole with a handful of flares in his pockets.
The air was bitterly cold. It was like sinking into a pool of ice. Subterranean wind kicked up from below and sent shivers up his spine. His lungs itched from rock dust. Shards of crystal protruded from the walls. He lit a flare as he descended, but it would be tricky to hold it and repel at the same time, so he dropped it down the length of the shaft. To his great relief he saw it hit the bottom, which was several hundred feet below.
He repelled slowly, and his arms soon ached from the effort. He carefully kicked off from t he walls. The grey blood stains left on the jagged stone indicated how sharp it was.
Another blast of ice wind came up at him. Dread whispers filled the air, lost voices that hissed at him to leave. The black quartz was threaded with gold and radiated a primeval chill.
He thought about the spider as he made his descent.
Something wasn’t right. Something had happened when he’d looked into its many eyes, something he’d been unable to piece together. In the past, a white spider had always appeared when he was on the right path, when he was moving to where he was supposed to be. It had helped him prevent the Obelisk of Dreams from being destroyed, and it had helped him stop the Sleeper. It had been strangely absent from his life ever since the team had been formed, just a memory. He’d taken that to mean he hadn’t needed it — that he’d been making the correct choices, and that the path he’d walked had been the right one.
He felt cold inside. His breaths crystallized. The pull of gravity seemed to intensify the deeper he went down the shaft, an inescapable draw that led to the fused core of the mountain. He smelled iron and sulfur as he dropped closer to hell.
He remembered looking up at the spider in that cold chamber. He’d seen his own reflection s in its many eyes, and those reflections had a ll been different.
Different angles? Or something else?
The walls seemed to move as he made the descent. Everything rolled around him like he was stuck on a ship in a violent sea.
The light of the flare below him went out, leavi ng him in darkness. He stopped and dropped a second. The new light flickered as it fell, turned at odd angles. It seemed to phase in and out of existence, and when it landed he swore it was somehow different than when it had left his hand.
A different flare. A different possibility.
Reflections. Many eyes.
He realized the truth.
It wasn’t just different angles of myself I saw in the spider’s eyes. I was seeing different versions of myself. It was me, moving along different courses of action. Possible selves.
Cross ’s mind had always been overly analytical. He had a naturally photographic memory, a keen sense of calculation and data analysis. He could read a text once and commit it to memory, compare it to a similar text and see the differences and similarities line-by-line. He had a natural knack for solving arcane algorithms and hex theories, for unlocking codified texts and discordant formulae. He could see patterns and variations where many others couldn’t.
He analyzed the events of his own life, from the first moment he’d seen that white spider with Snow in the cemetery outside of Thornn up to where he was now, lowering himself down a frozen shaft, trying once again to save human magic from annihilation. He broke down every choice, every crossroads he’d ever stood at. He tried to determine what might have happened differently, how events might have changed if he’d made different choices.
The spider saw them all. She (he wasn’t sure, still, why he thought it was female, but he did) had known all along, had guided him.
Guided…or manipulated?
He stopped.
I’d always assumed she was some sort of…guide. Fate, maybe, showing me where to go, what to do.
But to what ends?
He saw the Sorn’s mangled corpse below his feet, so he kicked off and twisted himself around to avoid landing on the body. H e touched down on the rock at the nadir of the massive shaft. The black stone cracked under his feet: it was brittle as ice. A single wide corridor led off from the shaft towards a distant chamber filled with golden light.
His vision shifted, halted, and started again. The air felt uncertain, out of synch. It was like when he’d been dipped in the black fluid in the Bonespire and had stepped outside the normal flow of time. This entire place was disconnected, and it shifted away from the possible realms.
Cross paused, gripped by a cloying chill inside and out.
He knew in his gut that the spider in the Citadel was Azradayne.
Something not of our world, or any world we know, was what Vala had said about her. The Grey Clan hadn’t said what she was.
The more he thought about it, the more sense it made.
She’s moved me where she wants me to be. If she can see different possibilities, different versions of what would happen, then she could have seen how my being in certain places could alter the course of history.
It didn’t mean that he was all important. Chaos theory, the notion of a hurricane caused by butterfly wings, held to the principal that minor events led to greater events, distant chain reactions, small occurrences potentially initiating world-changing sequences. It could have been anyone. All that mattered was seeing the pattern, knowing what threads led to what.
Maybe s he wanted the Obelisk here, so she moved me, made it so my actions would cause it to happen when I destroyed that train.
He drew his blade. The cold caused the hilt to cleave to his skin.
But then why would she send me after it again? And why now?
His mind raced as he stepped down the corridor. The air warmed, but it also grew less stable. His shadow folded and doubled, fell away and danced along the wall like he was more than one self, a group of possibilities. His vision blurred, cleared, blurred again. The sound of his footsteps echoed down the uncertain hall.
Why send me here? he wondered again. Or does it even matter? Now that my part has been played, is she even concerned with me at all?
Was she ever?
He felt he should have resisted somehow, should have made some different choice, tried to act in an unpredictable manner. He also knew it was too late. If he was right, if Azradayne was indeed the spider and she’d manipulated him for the sake of altering the pattern of fates, if she’d spun her webs out as far out as he suspected, then she’d have planned for every contingency. He was nothing more than a fly now, caught in her strands.
Cross continued down the tunnel. Whatever she’d determined his fate to be, he’d meet it head on.
