Janan’s words, and the weeper’s—they meant something, but my head was too fuzzy to let me think clearly. The darkness remained overpowering.
Maybe I was blind. No matter how I forced my eyes open wider, I never caught light. I tried my SED again. A white glow pierced the dark, but illuminated only blackness when I held the screen to the floor.
And blackness all around.
Trembling, I tried to send a message to Sam, but the SED beeped in error. I put it away and pushed myself to my feet. I couldn’t let the screaming get to me, or the crying, or the fingernails raking across my skin. They weren’t real.
They weren’t.
Determined not to let Janan stop me, I stepped forward, and the whole world changed.
16
TRUTH
BRIGHT WHITE SURROUNDED ME.
I crumpled to the floor, clutching my face and stinging eyes as pressure drained and the weeping no longer followed. Now just the hiss and scrape of cloth, ragged breathing that wasn’t mine, and a reek like copper and ammonia so strong it made my head spin.
I wasn’t alone.
“What are you doing here?”
The voice was broken, garbled and raspy at the same time, and came from across what appeared to be the bottom of a large hole, though a stairway spiraled up.
I wiped tears from my eyes and focused on the dark lump of bones and rags. Blood stained his face and hands, and a rotted wound hunched like a spider where I’d stabbed his eye out. But the other seemed to work, and it watched me.
“Meuric.”
“Nosoul.”
He couldn’t be alive. It wasn’t possible. I’d shoved him under the upside-down pit. The fall must have shattered every bone in his body. It had been months. And still.
I felt only a little better knowing I hadn’t actually killed him. And then I felt much worse, imagining the pain he must have been in all this time, trapped at the bottom of a pit with stairs offering a way outexcept his bones were splintered and he couldn’t move from this spot.
Blood and other fluids seeped around his filthy clothes, but the rest of the floor was clean. No, he definitely hadn’t moved.
“You tried to kill me,” he gasped.
“After you tried to trap me in here so you could tell everyone I was dead.”
Dried blood cracked and flaked when he smiled. Black rot filled the creases between his teeth. “And now I’m trapped. Does that make you feel better?”
“No.” His stench made my head spin. I squatted on the floor and leaned against the wall for balance. It didn’t help the dizziness, but my back and hips creaked with relief.
The pit was ten paces across. A fair size. When I looked up, the opening was invisible with the everywhere- light. It must have been deep enough to shatter all his bones, and shallow enough so he wouldn’t die. How cruel of Janan to arrange that.
“Why aren’t you dead?”
He laughed, like bubbles rising from the mud pits around Heart. Then wheezing and coughing, then groaning and silence.
I almost wanted to help him, but couldn’t bring myself to go near him while he remained slumped, breath whistling as though there were holes in his lungs or throat. I couldn’t get over the creeping feeling that, if I did go over, his body would miraculously mend and he’d grab me.
That thought coiling in my gut, I pressed my spine to the wall and sat properly, waiting for him to regain the strength to speak. How long had it been for him? As long as it had been on the outside?
“Janan won’t let me die.” His good eye was trained on me. “Do you have the key?”
I pressed my hands to my knees. I didn’t want to slip and reveal the key’s location.
“I need it,” he whispered, managing to lift one arm toward me. “I need it to live after Soul Night. You have to give it back.”
“What happens on Soul Night?” I’d come here for answers, after all, though I hadn’t expected Meuric to provide them.
He wheezed laughter. “You won’t stop it.”
I stood, trying to make myself formidable. “What happens?”
“Give me the key.” His glare followed me as I marched toward him. “Give, and I’ll tell you.”
Not a chance. He’d said he needed it to live after Soul Night, so what happened to everyone without a key?
I hovered just out of arm’s reach, ready to run for the stairs if he so much as shifted his weight.
“You’ve been down here for months,” I muttered. “You must be very hungry. And thirsty. When was the last time you had anything to drink?”
His eye widened, and he groaned.
I felt sick taunting him like this, but I knelt so I was level with him. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll give you the rest of my water.”
His thirst must be horrible, even if he hadn’t been thinking about it before. Janan couldn’t fix everything…as evidenced by Meuric’s broken body.
“So thirsty.” The eye closed. The other remained a rotted hole, impossible not to look at; its reek rode the steady heartbeat of the temple. There were no screams currently, just muffled whimpering, as though they were waiting to find out what I’d do.
I checked to make sure the stairs were still an option. “If you tell me what’s going to happen, I’ll give you water.”
“Soul Night.”
The spring equinox of the Year of Souls. “Yes, I know that’s when it happens.”
He nodded. It was frightening how ancient he looked now, though this body was only fifteen years old.
Months of dehydration and starvation, incredible physical damage…If he’d succeeded in trapping me in here before Templedark, this could have been me.
“I didn’t think it would work.” His once-high voice sounded like gravel now. “His plan seemed too fantastic, but if anyone could succeed, it would be Janan, so I convinced everyone to let him try. And then he did it. He really did it.”
“What did he do?” I wanted to shake him and force him to speak clearly. Instead, I stayed on one knee, ready to bolt.
“He made himself greater. He made people like phoenixes.” Meuric held out his hand again. “Water.”
“That’s not an answer.” Phoenixes were another dominant species, like centaurs or trolls, but they appeared to reincarnate as people did.
They were rare—reports said there were perhaps a dozen in the entire world—but once someone had observed a phoenix in the jungles on a southern continent. It built a nest of dry brush, then settled down as though to lay an egg. Instead, it exploded into a rain of sparks and died.
The explorer had stayed at the pyre for hours, trying to figure out why the creature had done that. And then sunlight broke through the jungle canopy and shone on the ashes, dazzling him. When his vision cleared, a tiny phoenix chirped. It looked at him with the same ancient expression the other had worn, and then it flew off, trailing sparks and ash.
“It
“No. What is Janan trying to do?”
