Page 93 of Beyond the Shadowed Earth

Pain burst hot in every part of her, a deep, soul-rendingagony.

Her vision blurred. The carrion birds crushed her as they devoured her, grinding her body into the stone.

She was drowning in chains and feathers, and she couldn’t even scream, because when she opened her mouth she tasted dark wings.

Pain and sorrow, sorrow and pain. There was nothing else, and there could be nothing else, because she had left Death far behind her. There was no way back.

And then a hand, closing round her wrist, pulling her up through the gnashing birds as Raiva had pulled her from the memory pool.

But it was not Raiva who stood there.

It was the man from her dream, long ago in the holding cell in Evalla. Gnarled, ropey scars ran all down his face and arms. His eyes were piercing, dark, his grip steady.

The carrion birds shrank before him. “Be gone,” he commanded them. “You do not belong to this Circle of the world, nor any other. Go into the void, and there be undone.”

The birds hissed and screamed but did as they were bidden, gathering their wings and hurtling into the nothingness above the passageway.

“Come,” said a deep voice. “I will lead you through the labyrinth.”

She could not stand on her own; the chains were too heavy. She crumpled back to the ground, peering up at the scarred man between the links of sorrow. “I cannot move,” she said, utterly wretched.

The man smiled at Eda, though his expression was sorrowful. “Do not fear, daughter of the dust. I know you cannot—I will carry you.”

And he scooped her up into his arms, chains and all, as if she weighed no more than a handful of jasmine flowers. He carried her on through the labyrinth.

“They are not heavy, you know,” said the scarred man.

“What are not?”

“The chains. They are your sorrows, and so the only one they weigh upon is you.”

Eda shut her eyes, tried to shut out the pain, but she couldn’t do it.

The scarred man seemed to walk for an eternity. At last he stooped beneath a wooden doorway, and bore her into a vast dark hall.

He vanished like smoke and she tumbled to the ground, landing painfully on hard stone. Her chains, like the scarred man, were suddenly gone.

She could see nothing either ahead or behind her, but the sound of someone weeping drew her deeper into the chamber.

And she knew, without even having to see him, that it was Tuer, chained somewhere ahead in the dark.

She gripped the hilt of the godkiller, and went to find him.

Chapter Forty-One

ASHADOWY LIGHT FLICKERED SOMEWHERE IN THE DARKhall, enough to illuminate the host of mirrors in the center of it, and the god who knelt weeping before them, hung with chains.

Eda sheathed the knife, not wanting Tuer to see she had it, and paced up next to him.

There were hundreds of mirrors, perhaps thousands—she couldn’t see properly in the shifting light—and they looked into peoples’ lives like the pools in the Circle of Time had looked into Eda’s memories. In one, a woman clung to a boy’s bloodied body, sobbing. In another, a girl in a drawing room clutched a letter that clearly contained ill news. In yet another, an old man held the hand of an old woman who lay shuddering on a thin mattress piled high with blankets; silent tears ran down the old man’s face.

Eda couldn’t bear to look very long into any of the mirrors, but she found she couldn’t wholly look away. She saw a young boy crying over his dog who’d been slain by a bear. A girl standing stoic as she watched the man she loved wed someone else. Two Itan girls kneeling in a mountain temple, pleading for the gods to bring their father safely home.

But there were smaller sorrows, too: broken limbs and lost toys, grownup children striking out on their own and leaving their parents in empty, echoing houses. A flower, dying in the heat of the sun. Loneliness.

“All the sorrows of the world,” came Tuer’s voice, low and heavy at her ear.

Eda jumped and turned.