The End of the Curses

Synopsis

The extra week bought from the Elder went slowly. Koa spent it shut inside Wraithblade Keep with Hinta, and gave her the Mól calipers he had carried and never used. She took them as something owed: “these are of my people.” Nancáro explained afterward what that cost her. Some Mól things were made as open vessels, and a person may give a portion of themselves to wake one, which then stays in it forever. Hinta was less than she had been, and could see what no smith should. What she saw in the broadsword the party held for Torgun Kurvroc was how a Mól blade is made: electrum woven through the whole of it like a web. “Because I know how to recreate it, Koa, I think I know how to destroy it.”

Gnolls came over the courtyard wall in the night, tracked north from Ridh, and Koa left them alone rather than pick a fight that would fetch more. Dawn reached Haudh-Gwenn first, where Mikhail and Professor Ashanti al-Hassan burned the ooze in its well with hands already acid-eaten to the knuckle. It came apart into the two things it had been fused out of: the souls of everyone ever taken into it went out to the outer planes, and the elemental water they were bound to went back to the inner, disjoined for the first time in hundreds of years. Mikhail would not leave until it burned out. Aldo hauled him off it. “I feel sick.”

A minute and a half behind them Koa lifted the Wraithblade out of its lead box, hungrier than ever a week off its last feeding. It offered him people who would finally understand him, and he heard the poison in it. Hinta’s hammer came down and the khopesh went like glass, everywhere at once, because the electrum that made it was also the flaw in it. Koa turned to find the barricaded door in full blaze, burned through by the gnolls while he watched the sword. All three groups reached their map rooms, Nancáro’s voice landed in every ear together, and the stones lifted. The cold took everyone in the chambers, two keeps stood open into one another, and a second lift put all of them in the Twisted Grove.

The Grove had grown back: assassin vines on the walls, blights climbing into the death-tree at dawn, a big one in the branches that Koa took apart in a stride. Mikhail spent a wand into the swarms twice, the second time at the wall beside himself because no path to the door was left. Aldo went up the outside and out along the live tree’s overhanging arm, to the pinhole where two planes pressed together like cheesecloth. Koa seated a barrel of oil in the death-tree’s trunk with warp wood oil and lit a ring around himself. Below, cloaked by Nancáro at a cost the god said aloud, Mikhail forced the radiance crystal into the roots, which stripped its positive charge and left only fire; it burned through his palm while he held it in.

The tree went up all at once. The live tree outside was neutralized in the same instant, and its arm, which had never carried its own weight without constant healing, snapped with Aldo on it. He did not fall. He passed through into a plane that holds no souls, and his stayed behind.

He landed in somebody’s arms. A tall figure was walking out of the ruin toward Koa, compressing as she came: the Martyr, whose effigy he had prayed to his whole life. “He went where mortals aren’t meant to go.” She put the body in Koa’s arms and went after the soul. Then the cold came again and Nancáro rose out of the ground as though climbing stairs, younger than either of them had ever seen him, and named her Vëné.

Brother and sister recognized each other like family long parted, then argued the natural order against closing the cycle until he yielded. No mortal body could bear the rejoining alone, so the load was split three ways and made permanent. Neither Mikhail nor Koa would agree until Aldo had been asked himself, and Nancáro brought the soul close enough that body and soul both said yes, out of step with each other, in Galden and Peren at once. He mended Aldo back together with a piece taken from over his own chest, then touched all three and poured himself into them.

That left Vëné owing the balance a piece of her own, and the three of them ranked where it should go. The waypoints won on every list, over verdance for Idir and over Al-Sāmiyah’s brood. She knelt and breathed it into the ground, and light went up from the Grove and from the keeps west, northeast, southeast and east. What broke that dawn was not three curses but four: the Shattered Throne had been Nancáro’s own prison, and out of the elevation he could set down one part of himself. They chose his spite over his need for control, and it went out of everyone it had seeded, the Peren most of all. The keeps left standing were made out of that spite and kept it. “You have a new beginning,” he said. “Do with it what you will.”