In moments, the final explosion would blow open the chaos repositories she’d activated, down below.
Lijjen was sprawled on the ground, his cracked helmet discarded, revealing his raw skin and blackened scalp. A cadver had torn at his leg.
The look of hate he threw her reminded her of Keeper Makkdarm with the dagger in his throat.
Terese unlocked her cage.
Lijjen crawled backwards. “What was the point of that?” he snarled.
“I’m sorry your missionaries will die, Lijjen,” she said, “but they chased cadvers into a hotbed of chaos.” It was her voice, speaking from somewhere far away. The calm had returned.
He glared at her in dazed contempt.
A boom sounded below. Cadvers shrieked. “That’s the sound of the chaos repositories opening their loads.”
A paling of his dark face. “No,” Lijjen barked. “Fool! You’ve unleashed charged cadvers in a chapterhouse. You don’t know what you’ve done.”
Neither did he. She explained as she worked her shockpole’s tip. “When you have a Polis that can’t quite see the chaos energy you’ve hidden,” she explained, “you have to give Him a little encouragement.” She pulled out the stone Morgenheth had given her, placing it on an enlarged ammunition socket in her altered pole. “I’ve opened the repositories, which are supplying the charge to the cadvers, who are drinking in the chaos.” She didn’t want to imagine what it looked like. Human screams echoed from below, harmonies of terror and pain. “I exposed one cloaking node, and it’s absorbing the chaos from the repositories. Now the node is infected, the chaos energy will spread to other nodes.” She held up her pole. “This pole I’ve altered, is set to fire at light strength and wide angle, and will travel down to Polis. It will tell Him that Sumad Reach is compromised by chaos, with an entire subterranean structure surrounded by chaos pulses, inside of which are a dozen deranged cadvers in a feeding frenzy, drinking in chaos energy from what He will only be able to perceive as some sort of chaos fountain. The longer the image I send him, the more panicked He will become.
“And the faster He will come to Swallow us.”
Lijjen stiffened. Not even replying, he turned and staggered frantically out of view and up the corridor.
That… that would do nicely as a final memory of Keeper Lijjen.
She pulled apart the pole tip to allow for a wide angle and stood it on the floor, pulling the trigger, the little mechanism rattling as it set to destroying an ancient fortress. Only inhuman howls from below. The cadvers would have taken on an unbelievable amount of chaos by now.
The chamber shook. Quietly at first, almost imperceptibly, then with smoothly-accelerating vigor. The Swallowing. Polis Sumad was on His way.
She relaxed for the first time in months.
She’d had a fear of drowning her whole life. Of dark ceilings of water falling on her from far above and of gagging and flailing in darkness. Would dying in a Swallowing be the same as drowning? Or would she be crushed first? How long would the lights last before the dark consumed all?
Such questions would ordinarily have distressed her, but now, looking death in the eye, she was unafraid. She would die. Hopefully quickly.
How ironic. She was at her most content, moments before her death. The high point of her career would be what killed her. The Seekers couldn’t let her live to tell the story, and she dared not release the trigger in case Sumad settled. And she wanted Him enraged; to lash out with a fury remembered for generations. To make Sumad Reach a shameful byword for disgraced chapterhouses.
She wondered what the renegades had wanted of her out at HopeWall. The decent thing would have been to at least visit them, but that hadn’t been possible. The only way to solve this problem was by dying alongside it.
She was ready.
There were no more tricks in her satchel.
With her free hand she pulled a small wooden frame from her satchel. A pencil drawing of Pella’s face. Messy, short brown hair and shy smile, small nose and green eyes. And those beautiful freckles.
Terese tugged off her helmet to look on Pella with her own eyes and awaited the Gods.
The world shuddered harder.
The room’s glowbulb pulsed like a heartbeat at His approach. Masonry scraped against itself and slowly shattered. Shockpoles mounted on the walls clattered to the ground. Shelves tipped over. Her knees hurt from kneeling on the bouncing floor.
And in a distant corner of her mind sounded a scraping rattle. A sound felt more than heard. The Roar. The sound of the God Himself, come to send her to His awaiting brethren. She hoped they’d show her mercy.
It would be safe to let the trigger go now. The cadvers had stopped wailing at the thundering earth’s rising sound. She removed the stone from the pole. She wanted it with her, its pulse in her fist as the world went dark. It brightened. Perhaps it was excited to meet its master. The blue glow lit Pella’s face in undulating waves, almost alive.
Armer watch over you, Pelina Saarg, Armer save you and keep you. Armer love you as I do.
“Terese Saarg.”
A voice in her head and a shape above her. An old Sumadan man appeared, made from the stone’s blue light. He was dressed in the sort of sophisticated robes the spirits at the monk hill had worn, and beaming a kind smile as he leaned on his cane.
He knelt to join her, his hands wrapped around hers. Around the stone.
She looked into his eyes and lost herself. Nothing mattered but this being. There was no sound nor sight.
22
“Will it… be fast?” Terese asked the spirit. She didn’t ask if it would be painful, for she knew the answer.
Glass shattered, stone moaned. A piece of the roof crashed to the floor. There was warmth on her back,
