Yet here she was, mourning the destruction of someone that meant nothing to her. Why?
“Only what was necessary.” Christina sipped her tea, slowly, thoughtfully. “I take it we’re in a worst-case scenario?”
Anna shook her head, eyes kept tightly shut, her anger boiling beneath the surface of her thoughts. First, she needed to get a grip on herself before more embarrassment. The Hoarfrost Anna melted away and was replaced by her perfect self. That, at least, put some distance between the present and the deed.
A worst-case scenario would’ve been a hostile Rhine Amni whom Anna would’ve had to subdue violently. Given what she’d seen of the girl, that may have proved beyond what her conscience, shrivelled up thing that it was, could accept.
In a way, Rhine’s reality was far worse.
“The girl is conscious,” she finally said through gritted teeth. “On the brink of madness, yet not yet there. She is, indeed, Tallah’s sister in all but temper.”
Or maybe both Amni sisters were hopping mad, but just in different ways. It didn’t make it an easier pill to swallow. If anything, it made Anna feel worse to consider she’d taken advantage of a woman pushed far out of her mind.
What, in the blazes, is wrong with me? Is this Bianca’s influence?
Part of her wanted to get off the chair and go intruding on Bianca’s work rather than debrief with Christina. She resisted the urge, for now.
“Tell me everything.” Christina had her cup down, hands on the smooth, polished wood of the table, eyes alight with anticipation.
A look that way revealed the other ghost looking haggard and haunted. Dark circles rimmed her eyes, and her stiff posture was now slumped, as if some great weight was laid on her shoulders. In all recent memories, Anna had never witnessed Christina looking anything but her most pristine and in control. This shift of the mask unnerved.
“What’s happened to you?” Anna asked. “Did the witch break through my warding?”
It should’ve been impossible, given all the preparation they’d all undergone for this attempt. Anna warding the mindscape with her own intrinsic shielding. They summoned Catharina specifically to reduce as much as possible of the power the empress could’ve brought to bear were she forewarned. Taking over Christina’s mindscape was a neat trick on Iliaya’s part, but that was just surface level prep.
Anna had felt no real pressure against her own power.
“We were not compromised, no,” Christina said, not moving to drink more of her foul sweet tea. “If anything, we’ve demonstrated our capacity quite well. I don’t expect more intrusions for some time now. They’ll likely try to figure out a countermeasure to you, though they seem engaged with other matters now.”
“Did we get the answers we needed?”
“Some. Enough that we can grasp the shape of things to come. Not enough to act on them just yet.”
“That’s far from a serviceable answer, Cytra. What did we get that’s useful?”
There wasn’t much said of any real importance up to the point where Anna slipped underneath the meeting’s layer. The only piece of information of any real use was that they could break the soul trap, if that was to be believed. But Christina would probably already be working on the issue by now.
Instead, the Metal Mind appeared pensive and distracted. Her silence was an all-engulfing maw that stretched between them, swallowing the whole mood. Anna was tempted to get up and slap the woman.
What could that Iliaya witch have said to rattle someone as formidable as Christina? Why was Anna the collected one after what she’d just done to a person she genuinely liked?
She drew in a breath to speak, more for the noise than the pretence of normality, but Christina raised a hand, the movement slow and deliberate.
“Iliaya raised an interesting problem for me personally,” she said, her tone lacking the usual incisiveness. “I wish we would’ve known of her earlier.”
Anna’s eyebrows rose. “And why is that?”
“She proves it possible to remain a unique entity after soul binding. I find myself blindsided by this reveal.” She bit on her lower lip and her nostrils flared; a look Anna hadn’t seen on this older iteration of Christina. “I am vexed.”
Anna blinked. That had nothing to do with any of their goals or plans. Wasn’t it a given that any of them remained independent in Tallah’s form of soul binding?
“I don’t follow.”
Christina’s lips quirked into the shadow of a despairing smile. “You wouldn’t. You don’t know what’s happening to me. Bianca probably feels it, but she’s the very soul of discretion about such matters.”
Anna reached for the ever-present cup of tea, just for something to hold. A fair bit of gossip was promised in that cryptic reply. It would help ease her mind away from Rhine’s impending doom.
“You’re dying?” she asked mockingly. It seemed the only reason for such melodrama.
They laughed together at the prodding jest. But the laughter did not reach Christina’s eyes. If anything, she looked even more haunted.
“Tallah is consuming me,” she finally said once the silence reasserted itself. “We are both aware of it happening. It is not painless.”
Her right hand fingered the buttons of her robe, undoing them on a line across her chest.
When she peeled the fabric back there was only darkness beneath. A yawning void, right above her breast, swirling like a vortex in the Great Divide. Bits of Christina’s skin shimmered and flaked around the outer edge of the wound, like charred paper smoking down to nothing.
She sighed, picked up the cup again, and sipped. “I am not going to be myself for much longer. I may not even last until summer, if I continue to help Tallah as I have thus far. There is a price to be paid for the kind of power we’ve been building together.”
Anna swirled the tea around in her mouth and gazed at the yawning hole in her friend’s chest. Her whole fist could disappear into that void.
She suspected something of the sort was happening, at least based on how much more alike Tallah and Christina had grown during the battles of the Cauldron. A pity, really. She quite enjoyed this older, more measured Christina, and the conversations they had. The woman had come far from the girl she’d been, and the dissolution of her mind would be a terrible loss to the world.
Again, she felt the tug of her anger for witnessing another piece of vandalised art.
“And you think this could have been avoided?” she asked, not tearing her eyes away from the wound.
The hole covered Christina’s left shoulder and stretched all the way down between her breasts. Anna half-expected tea to slosh down through the empty space.
Christina shrugged. “I believed absorption was inevitable for all of us. A grafted soul cannot remain separate from the host. The soul thread is absorbed into the flesh. The souls meet and mingle and disperse into one another. For all my studies, I haven’t found any proof of anything different.” She covered up, each button reset with slow, deliberate care. “Yet Iliaya has been a part of the empress for over two centuries and remains independent and unchanged. I am nearly digested in less than a decade, and I do not consider myself that witch’s inferior in any conceivable way. Nor do I believe Tallah’s will superior to the empress’s, or to my own. Something else is at play, and I am doubly vexed by the realisation.”
Ah, arrogance and pride. A Metal Mind’s worst enemies and their greatest sources of strength. But, in this, Anna agreed with Christina. The woman was monstrously powerful in her own right and easily rivalled Tallah herself even in this limited soul form. She’d seen Christina properly unleashed against the Egia girl and the sight had been nothing short of breathtaking.
So much raw power wielded with such grace. One of the few Metal Minds that truly proved their channelling was Art.
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“So why are you being absorbed? It can’t be a matter of will or strength. For all your faults, you lack neither quality.”
Christina leaned back in her chair. It squeaked beneath her weight, the effect a pointless little bit of charade. She absently traced the line of her cheek with a fingernail, eyes unfocused, staring into some far distance. “I died once. Have I told you?”
“You have not, no.” Anna assumed it was something to do with the beast she’d seen in Christina’s struggle against the soul trap. “Why is that relevant?”
“We had a bad winter at Hoarfrost some time ago. Terrible weather. Little light. You know how the place can get, especially with the drays coming down from the mountain. That terrible winter we had in our fourth year was tame by comparison.
“I’d sent several of my staff into Neant to answer calls for aid. Drays in the town. They made off with livestock. With three children. And one old woman. Lady Temalla, if you remember her from that foppish Amaranthian cafe.”
Anna didn’t have to search her memory for the name. It was inconsequential.
“I do not, no. But go on,” she prompted.
“While my staff was in town, dealing with this crisis, I remained sole caretaker of Hoarfrost and the students. We had several promising young sorceresses that season, and between myself and them I was reasonably certain we would not have any issue in case of any unforeseen disturbance.
“I was wrong, of course.”
Drays had come down from the mountains in their days of Hoarfrost too. It wasn’t uncommon and generally amounted to little more than a nuisance and some noise in the night. A barbed memory, because Anna remembered a young Rhine seeing her first dray scratching at the outer walls together with some others of her generation.
The clique had supervised Rhine and her colleagues on the first night of seeing the animals scratching at the walls.
Tallah’s sister had laughed atop the walls, easily chasing the creature back into the forest with a few well-aimed fireballs. None of that effervescence remained in the wraith Anna had witnessed, and the discrepancy knotted her stomach in rage.
“Your point, Christina?” she prompted. “You got yourself killed. How is that important?”
“I died to carelessness. Too much pride. Not enough sense. We had several animals within the walls. Dug in through one of the gardens, through the frozen ground. We learned of them too late, when the screaming began.” Christina tried to suppress a flash of anger on her face and failed miserably. “I swept down. All righteous fury and indignation. Got ambushed by three of the things. Tore me limb from limb. It hurt quite a bit more than you’d expect it to.”
She left her eyes linger on Anna for a few moments too long.
“Though I doubt you’d find it all that impressive.” She raised her hand to stop any comments. “I am getting to my point.”
“I can only hope so.”
Anna’s hand clenched around the cup to the point of pain. She fought to release the tension in her fingers and marvelled at the reaction. Where was this coming from?
“My wards dealt with the disturbance, of course. They were well-trained and smart, every single one of them. And I got resurrected by Isadora, as per Hoarfrost’s covenant with that goddess’s cult.” She pressed her fingers to her chest. “That, I believe, is where this affliction comes from. That act of stitching my soul back into my mortal shell, pure ether violence under the guise of healing.
“I was resurrected the next day. I did not come back whole.”
Her fingers clasped the cup so hard that it shattered. Tea spilled on the table and immediately disappeared, sucked back into concept.
Resurrection was not something strange, though Anna had never been particularly interested in the practice. Isadora’s cult was the more well-known of those that promised and achieved resurrections, though the mechanisms were rather obscure. Some of the windfalls that had come her way back in the bad days had brought in several priests of Isadora, captured by ratmen in Valen’s hills. Pilgrims spreading the faith and all that.
Anna had tried to see how the goddess effected the resurrections. To her disappointment, none of the wretches had come back to life after she was done with them. No quick decomposition of the remains, as was often the case with the more well-known stories.
A pity. Apparently, the goddess wasn’t quite as omniscient as she claimed to be with regards to her faithful.
Hoarfrost’s covenant with the cult stretched back centuries. They were allowed to practice their faith on school grounds if they offered their services in case of emergency.
Christina dying to a wild animal attack could be considered such an emergency. This was Anna’s first time talking to someone brought back.
“How was it?” she asked, interest piqued. “Crossing over? Death?”
Christina resummoned her cup but did not touch it. “You already know. You’ve been there. Dark. Cold. Confusing. Though I suspect our tethering—you to the soul trap, myself to the cult—may have changed the core of the experiences. We experienced a state in-between.” She spoke through clenched teeth, the effort of calming down evident on her face. “It’s far more interesting that I felt myself changed after I came back. Something missing, somewhere deep. It sparked my interest in soul magic.”
This was all fine and interesting, but it also drifted them far from the point of their conversation. Anna reeled in her questions before she got sucked up too far into whatever this digression tried to become.
“What’s all this to do with anything from today? Don’t get me wrong, Christina, I do understand how galling it must’ve been to find yourself… reduced. But why is it relevant now? Seems ancient history.”
“More or less. I joined Tallah’s cause the moment she came to me for aid with her affliction. By then I had already gained quite a bit knowledge on soul magic which would have seen me executed were it ever to slip out, and I understood what had been done to me. Gods are aethervores, I learned. They feed on us, on our souls and our minds. An act of kindness is nothing to them but an opportunity to gorge without drawing attention, a way to mark you for their feasting. When I joined Tallah, I was already unravelling, the shadow of Isadora a constant, looming terror over my spirit. I thought I’d escape through this transference. In that, at least, I was right. But the hole in me remains, and I suspect it must be what’s sealing my doom.”
Anna had just condemned Rhine to slow dispersal and now learned of this happening. “There is a certain sense of rhyme to the universe, I feel,” she said. “Do you feel it? It’s hard not to.”
“Acutely,” Christina agreed and cracked her first genuine smile. “We condemn one sister to destruction while, at the same time, I circle my own. An act of kindness disguising a slow murder. Rhyme is a good analogy I feel.”
Anna rose to her feet and walked about, trying to clear her head of intruding images of Rhine. Was this how Tallah felt constantly? The intrusion somehow galled since Anna hadn’t thought of her own flesh and blood sisters in decades, much less feel any longing for them.
Was she, too, being absorbed in Tallah? Or was she drawing from her host?
“If Tallah absorbs you, will she gain your knowledge?” A pyromancer melded with a Metal Mind would be something terrifying to behold. But what if Tallah gained full control of all their abilities? Of them all?
Her imagination sparked with the possibilities of what could be achieved with that level of power.
Christina’s eyes followed her around the room. “Do you believe I have even the vaguest idea? I can assume she will gain all of me, but how that will materialise is anyone’s guess.”
“So, she’ll know of what we just did. How do you think she’ll take news of Rhine’s second death?”
“Poorly.”
“But not fatally so?”
“No. Tallah’s far too much of a pragmatist for that. She’ll rage and see about exploding some things, but she will not stray from her path.” Again, that fatalistic smile. “I daresay it will not be any of my concern at that point, but I do offer my sympathies for what you and Bianca may have to endure.”
“And now you’re mopping because you think this could have been avoided?” Anna felt Bianca tugging on her, a soft call for attention in the mindscape. It was time they swapped for the work, and Christina did not seem to be fit for it.
“I’m vexed, not mopping, thank you very much. You would be too if you discovered the edges of your ignorance and how much closer they are to you. I believed I understood what we wielded, and yet we seem to have missed something critical.”
Bianca’s call became insistent.
“What did we learn?” Anna asked, eager to move on. “And what did we trade away?”
Christina’s eyes also rose and they flitted about. She too was hearing Bianca’s call. The room melted away and, in a flash, they were with Bianca in the soul siphon. The whole place was trembling, ready to collapse.
Bianca knelt beneath the weight. Sweat slicked her bare skin and her eyes were tightly shut.
“Bloody. Time.” She gasped in agony. “One of you take this.”
Both Anna and Christina sprang forward to aid the other ghost. As far as Anna stretched her senses, she couldn’t perceive an attack of any sort, nor any oddity. Tallah’s mindscape outside the soul trap was quiet and calm, as if the sorceress was asleep.
“What’s happened?” She grabbed Bianca’s inverted pyramid of suffering and raised it off the ghost. It weighed so much more than before and burned to the touch.
Christina did the same on the other side then shifted the scene to her own mindscape, turning the load into her feral beast. It was thrice its original size now, snarling and biting at them, spittle flying anywhere. Blood-red eyes roamed wildly about.
And something was terribly wrong!
Anna pulled Bianca to her feet and the gigantic dray leapt at them, dragging Christina across the snow. It ignored the Tallah representation laying in the snow and came straight for them.
“Tallah drank the bloody coffee,” Christina squealed as she planted her feet. Heavy chains wrapped around her arms and yanked her forward and she strained to keep the beast at bay. “Bloody witch had a trick up her sleeve.”
Both Anna and Bianca found themselves having to run as the soul trap lashed out at them, barely contained by Christina’s effort. They were chased around the old Hoarfrost courtyard, snapping and snarling. Great yellow fangs closed with dry clangs, trying to rip into them, always a breath away.
“Get. Tallah.” Christina manifested a second copy of herself and, together, they finally slowed the monster’s advance. “Get her now.”
“Go.” Anna pushed Bianca out of the conceptual space, into the mindscape. “I’ll help here. You rest.”
The rules of the trap had just changed. Something had gone past Anna’s wards in the end, disguised as nothing more than imaginary coffee. Iliaya had played her bloody silly.
That Metal Mind would pay for this! Anna would make sure of it.
But first, they had to survive this.