“You won’t die. You can’t yet,” Vize said.
“Well, you certainly won’t,” I said.
“Listen to me” he said.
“You’re not here,” I said.
“She will condemn you as Donor condemned me. You will drift here with me on the edge of death in an ever-present now because our soul stone lies buried beneath the Guildhouse. We will drift here because we are tainted with the darkness. The two people Maeve cannot destroy, lost in the one place she cannot reach,” he said.
“I knew this was hell,” I said.
“Hell is a state of mind here, brother.”
We drifted, not speaking. It might have been a moment or an eternity. We drifted.
“She has the sword and the spear, Grey. She is reaching for the stone. Her hand burns down through your mind as we speak. She will hunt down the bowl. She will destroy whoever touches it,” he said.
“Why would she destroy everything?” I asked.
“Because she reaches beyond her reach. She thinks she can control what cannot be controlled. She thinks she can turn the Wheel of the World, but the Wheel of the World turns as It will,” he said.
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t care anymore. I closed my eyes and let my body tumble through the darkness.
“Meryl will die,” he said.
I opened my eyes and grabbed him, my hands burying themselves not in clothes, but his body signature. “What did you say?”
No satisfaction showed on his face, no mocking. “She will die, and you will never get to tell her you’re sorry.”
I shoved him. He didn’t drift away. “She knows,” I said.
“And I know you. I see it in your mind. You need to say good-bye. You need to face her. Call the bowl,” he said.
“I can’t call it. It’s not like the spear,” I said.
“But it is. Look inside yourself, see what the Wheel of the World has granted you to see. The bowl is the physical representation of bounty. It exists in the Wheel of the World beyond its physical form. We are beyond ourselves here. Call the bowl, Grey, and I will show you truth.”
A suspicion had been growing within me the more he talked. Maeve had abilities I could only guess at. I wasn’t drifting in the darkness with Vize. Maeve wanted me to believe that. If Vize said anything true, it was that Maeve had everything but the bowl. Calling it—and I did understand now that I could—would be handing her the thing she sought most. She had failed, though, by giving me more information than she intended. If I could call the bowl like I could call the spear, then I could call anything the Wheel of the World allowed me.
If I called the spear, Maeve would take it away from me. I could call something she hadn’t possessed, something she could not touch because it had never claimed her. In the depths of my mind, an essence signature registered. It had always been there. I had never thought to look because I didn’t understand I could. I summoned the essence to me, there in the dark, not the bowl and not the spear. In a flash of brilliant white, the sword appeared in my hand. I pointed it at Vize’s chest. “You told me too much, Maeve. Game over.”
Unfazed, Vize held out his hand. “Give me the sword.”
I lifted the point from his chest and smiled. “Thought I was stupid, Maeve? Didn’t think I would suspect a mind trick?”
“The sword, Grey.”
The blade shimmered white in the dark, dark shadows swirling around it without touching it. “Take it from me,” I said.
“It will be easier if you give it to me of your own free will,” he said.
“Of course, it would. You never held the sword, Maeve. You only touched it as the dagger. You can’t take it from me because you can’t take it.”
“This is your choice, Grey,” he said.
I presented the hilt, feeling pretty smug. “Take it, Maeve. Go on. I dare you.”
Vize grasped the sword and pulled it from my hand, pain stabbing my mind as my connection to the sword snapped. I gaped, fear creeping up my spine. I was wrong. I had given her yet another weapon. “I don’t understand. You never held the sword.”
“I am not Maeve,” Vize said. “I held the sword in TirNaNog. It called to me then, and I call to it now.”
“It’s really you, Vize?” I asked.
“I was and am. Now take my hand,” he said.
On his left hand, the ring smoldered with golden essence. It washed across my face with unsettling familiarity. It was me. It burned with my own living essence. Curious, I took his hand. The ring began to slip off his finger.
“I knew you wouldn’t call the bowl, Grey. You aren’t stupid. Your suspicious nature might save everything yet,” he said.
The ring was sliding into my palm. “What do you mean?”
“Tell Eorla thank you for everything. Tell her I died with hope.”
Still puzzled, I looked from my hand to his face. Smiling, Vize drove the point of the sword into my forehead. I convulsed in a shower of pain and essence. The darkness constricted like an iris and a burning cold swept over me as
41
White.
Whiteness filled my vision with nothing to break the relentlessness of it. Above me, the white simply was, as if the air itself was color. Or no color. As if nothing else existed except the white. I hung limp in the air, as if there were no air, no gravity. My head burned, like a cold fire in my mind, blazing against a blanket of night.
Everything is white. I have been here before. This is where it started. Or ended. I don’t remember which. Everything around me is white. I stared into a nothingness of white. I am here again. Around me, I see shadows of light flickering in the depths of the white. They spin and whirl, roll and stop, taunting me with patterns that disintegrate as they take shape.
Bursts of color flare in my vision, fireworks against the white, fading to darkness. More, then more, the darkness is closing on me, like the slow closing of my eyes. My mind, like my eyes, is closing, like my eyes are blinking. Like my mind is blinking.
My mind blinks.
The air begins to haze with white ambient essence, like a fog. Vize has taken out the security and is making his way toward the area where the spent fuel rods are stored. Emergency lights flash bright yellow as I follow him down a long corridor. People in hazmat suits stand frozen along the walls, like statues randomly arranged. They’re not dead, but suspended, caught in an elven binding spell.
The corridor ends at a locked door, a sign flashes the evacuation order and warns of radiation. A keypad beside the door has lights that glow steady red. I don’t have a code. I backtrack to the nearest person in a hazmat suit. The binding spell is not as sophisticated as I assumed. It will degrade within an hour if Vize doesn’t kill us all. I hesitate, expecting a trap, but see none. I hold my breath and call up some essence, hoping it will not trigger something and kill us. I hit the binding spell with a counterspell. The man sways, startled to be aware and alert again.
I steady him and point to the door. “I need to get through. I need you to open that door.”
His glasses behind the mask are crooked on his face. He looks like a family man, maybe fifty years old, not someone who expected to find himself in the middle of a terrorist attack. He straightens his shoulders. “No.”
I wish his family could see him at that moment. The world is crashing down around him, he’s got powerful fey
