“It’s connected to the ceiling,” I called. “But, there’s—it’s like a knot in the thread.”
“A knot?” Guyer repeated. “Okay. I think I know what they’re doing! Can you actually see the connection being blocked?”
“No. But I can feel it.”
“It’s a stopper connection, like the bells Harris gave me.” She almost laughed. “And you can touch it? This is amazing.”
“I don’t care what it is. How do we kill it?”
“Do we want to?” said Jax.
“Hells yes,” I said.
“No, he’s right! If the stopper bond is waiting on Serrow to sever it, then we’d trigger the sinkhole immediately. That’d be bad.”
Jax stepped forward, raking his light up and down the natural grotto. “Okay, first thing, this isn’t where we thought they were headed. So is their plan different?”
Guyer nodded. “That might affect how we turn it off.”
I tugged at my lower lip. The stopper spell had been the same one used by Serrow to kill Saul Petrevisch. I turned to my friends.
“It’s tied to the wooden rod! Like the one Vandie used when she killed Bobby Kearn by mistake.” It took a sorcerer to create manna bonds, but anyone could use them. “We have to find that wooden rod, and keep it safe!”
“I believe it is quite safe, little detective.” I pivoted, reaching for my weapon as Weylan’s voice echoed across the room.
A shape appeared at the far edge of the chamber. The Barekusu guide drew closer, lit by our trio of flashlights. “We are still gathered to share the truth. The only change is that we won’t be alive to see its impact on the world. One way or another, we’ll find what lies beneath this city.”
He stood on his hind legs and one show hand, and held Serrow’s wooden staff in the other. My mouth was dry. You didn’t need to be a sorcerer to use manna-linked devices, only to create them.
Jax kept a bead on Weylan, and Guyer circled in the other direction, flanking the religious leader who’d lost his faith, only to be born again in self-aggrandizing delusion. He’d even lectured me on justice when he’d held those two boulders in his—I blinked.
I’d been so obsessed with disarming the sinkhole, I hadn’t considered why the rock in the center of the room looked familiar. It was one of the two buzzing rocks that Weylan had used to demonstrate the sleight-of-hand trick in his tent. The ones he’d said held “the weight of the world” or some other bullshit. A pompous self-aggrandized ass like him couldn’t help but flaunt the tools of the city’s destruction in front of me.
The weight of the world.
Weylan began talking again, but I’d stopped listening. I studied the manna-bound rock in the center of the room. Spreading my arms, I wove my fingers through the invisible web linking it to the ceiling, until I found a separate, much thicker, thread leading directly up. One that angled up and away, in the direction of the Mount.
I turned and interrupted whatever he was ranting about. “You made an easy-to-carry totem,” I said, moving my hands through the air above the rock, plucking the manna threads like the strings of a harp. “Something you could bring down here for Serrow to bind with the ceiling.” My left hand was entangled in the multitude of thin threads connected to the cavern ceiling, while my right still held the thicker thread that had the stopper spell. “You get a safe distance away, snap those rods, and this boulder transfers the weight of the Mount to the ceiling. The cavern collapses like a too-heavy anchor dragging a boat down to the bottom of the sea. The rock gets buried, and you’ve got a sinkhole that looks totally natural.”
His eye plates rose and he stared at me with all his swirling pupils. “There is nothing you can do. Not even death can stop me from breaking this bond.”
“You’d be surprised at what I can do,” I said, and began to feed.
The threads that connected the rock to the ceiling were legion, and they were delicious. There was a pop and the flapping sound of fabric pulled taut on a grand scale. I exhaled and let my eyes shut, and for a moment pressure wrapped me like a shroud, as if I’d been embraced by giant arms, tender and oh so cold. But the reverie was short lived, shattered by another crack, this one timed with a buzzing roar.
I forced my way through the layers of cold, rising from the depths and breaching the surface. I stumbled forward, eyes open wide, taking vast hungry gulps of air and exhaling like a whale sending spouts of hot air streaming high into the clear blue skies.
The room came back into focus. Aware of my surroundings again, I studied Weylan. He’d turned his attention away, probably assuming that I was trying to distract him. The hunger was unbearable, and I was both ravenous and engorged. I felt I might vomit, and then devour that as well, a dog eating his own sick or a murdered teenager devouring his intestines through an unnatural, gaping mouth.
Weylan snapped the rod. With the stopper spell broken, the mass of an entire mountain passed through the thread in my other hand, channeled into the tiny footprint of the rock, which immediately sank through the stone floor. And that was all that happened.
Weylan stared at the intact ceiling and made a deep, throaty noise of confusion and raw rage. I grinned at him like a wolf grins at a hare. I’d drained the threads leading to the ceiling to almost nothing, and the link was no longer enough to pull down the ceiling. I’d stopped the sinkhole from happening.
But with the magic came the cold, and the pressure was building. My vision dimmed, and the cold penetrated my very core. When my knees buckled, I realized the magic I had drawn was more than
