Page 62 of House of Dusk

SEPHRE

I t began to brighten slowly. Not sunlight, not moonlight, not firelight, but a pallid blue mist that hung over the Lyrikon like fog. Curls of it twisted around the pole, as if to tug it from Nilos’s grip, only to fall in shreds as he drove the barge onward.

Sephre sat in the prow, watching the smooth water slide past, her attention drawn taut as a bow. It would be far too easy to let the lull of this place consume her. It seemed to go on forever, a luminous mirror under clotted shadows dark as iron. If there was a ceiling, it was lost to her sight.

But something else loomed on the horizon. Even at a distance, she knew it was massive. Like seeing a mountain range from across a wide, flat plain. The black, bleak wall of the Labyrinth of Souls.

“Is that it?” she asked. A silly question. What else would it be? But she needed to speak. To hear her own voice. And his.

“Yes.”

She glanced back. He sounded weary. “Do you need me to take over?”

He thrust the pole into the water, giving a small shake of his head. “I heal quickly. One of the advantages of carrying around the power of a god.”

Sephre brushed a hand over her shoulder, highly aware that the burn was barely even itching. If her own single fragment of godly power could do that, no wonder the man was so strong and quick to heal when he carried dozens, even hundreds.

Nilos’s marks were hidden once more, but she was still aware of them.

Aware of other things too. Like the smooth, capable way that he handled the pole, thrusting them unerringly onward.

Fates, this was what she got for hiding away in a temple for ten years.

She wrenched herself back toward the prow.

Surprise slammed a sharp breath into her lungs. The wall was no longer a smudge on the horizon. It was right there, towering over her, so tall she couldn’t see where it ended. Smooth and glossy, as if carved from obsidian. It stretched away on either side, seamless and endless.

The barge bumped onto a crescent of white sand.

Sephre stood warily, feeling the uneasy tilt of the boat beneath her.

One slip, and she might topple into the poisonous waters.

She doubted her single mark would be enough to protect her.

Though Nilos had said the balewalkers of old had once entered the waters.

How different was it, from the trial of the Holy Flame?

Nilos leapt lightly to the shore. She was bracing herself to follow when something caught her eye, shimmering in the strange, still waters of the Lyrikon.

At first she thought it was her own reflection.

Coiled dark-brown hair, light olive skin, serious brows.

But the woman looking back at her was barely half her age.

Her eyes were gray, not brown. Her chin softer, her nose sharper.

Her lips moved, but Sephre heard no sound.

The woman in the pool frowned, reaching up.

Trying to reach her? To tell her something?

“Sephre?”

The alarm in Nilos’s voice jerked her back to herself.

A sick horror washed through her as she realized she was poised at the edge of the barge, fingers barely a handspan above the deadly waters.

She snatched her hand back with a shudder.

But there was something beneath the horror. An unanswered question. A yearning.

Warm arms caught her, lifting her over the pool.

Her feet sank into the white sand, and it was Nilos’s worried face that filled her vision.

The heat of his hands burned back the horror, reminding her that she was here, alive.

That blood pulsed in her veins, that breath caught in her lungs.

She leaned into his touch, and felt no shame.

“What happened?”

“I saw someone. A woman. In the water.” Saying it aloud made it seem foolish. She grimaced, rubbing a hand over her eyes. “Or, I thought I did. It was probably my own reflection.”

But Nilos was still frowning. “Or not. As I said, the waters of the Lyrikon are not unlike your Holy Flame.”

Not mine. Not anymore. Though the loss of it no longer felt quite so sharp. “You said they held the Serpent’s venom. So, death, basically.”

Nilos grimaced. “Death is more...a byproduct.”

“Of what? Time?”

“In a sense. Mortals interact with the world. We experience it, we feel it. Love, fear, hate, joy. Those things are spawned from our connection to the world. From change. From impermanence.”

“So who was she, then? It wasn’t me. Or—” She thought of the old child’s game, sneaking glimpses in a still pool, searching for glimmers of some past life. “Could it have been one of my past lives?” One particular, painful life that quite honestly terrified her. If it was true.

Nilos shook his head. “I doubt it’s as simple as that. You’re a mortal, and this is a place not meant for mortals. As you may have noticed.” He stepped away, releasing her back to the chill of the place. The sense that they were unwelcome. They did not belong.

She wanted to press closer, to reach for him again. Get a hold of yourself, woman . “I don’t know,” she said, making her voice light. “It could be a bit more ominous.”

His laugh drove back the chill. “How?”

“Bloody waterfalls, towers of skulls, maybe some distant creepy drumbeats that sound like a beating heart? A terrifying guard dog?”

Zander would be proud of her, joking in the face of doom. But it was working. Her galloping heart began to slow.

“You’ll have to take it up with the Serpent,” said Nilos. “Once we restore him.”

The words shook her, though maybe she should’ve expected it. She’d promised him her mark, after all. “Are you really so close?” she asked. “Surely there are more marks than mine?”

His jaw tightened. “Yes. But as I said, the fragment you carry is...unusually potent. I suspect it will be sufficient to awaken him.”

Awaken . An interesting choice of word. He stepped away before she could decide if she wanted to ask what it meant, heading for a gap in the wall roughly double the measure of Sephre’s spread arms. He stalked up to the threshold, pausing to search the corridor within.

It was a bleak, barren place. A few trailing vines spidered over the stones, but she saw no hint of any bloom, only dry, leathery leaves the color of dried blood. Puddles of oily water sheened the earth, reflecting the pitiless sky above.

“I begin to see your point,” Nilos told her. “There should be a guard dog, at the very least.” His smile was brittle, but he was playing along with her so she would do the same.

“But it can’t just be a normal hound,” she said, joining him. “Not if it’s guarding the Labyrinth of Souls. Maybe it could have a scorpion tail. Or three heads. Or bat wings.”

“You were clearly wasted as both a soldier and an ashdancer,” he said. “Obviously you were born to be an aesthetic advisor to the gods.”

But humor was a fragile shield. The passage stretching away on either side was as endless as the wall without.

Fates, how could they ever find Timeus in this place?

She pressed her eyes closed, but it did nothing to stop the images chewing at her.

It was as if some cruel artist had taken all her most terrible memories, all the ways that a mortal body could suffer, and painted the boy’s face onto them.

She saw his strong young body shattered.

Bones broken, viscera streaming. Eyes wide and mouth a terrible rictus of pain.

“Which way?” she asked. “Where would they be keeping Timeus?”

“Most likely the center. The source of the Lyrikon. It’s where the skotoi are most powerful. But the route to the heart of the labyrinth is different for every soul that walks it.”

“Even us? We’re not dead.” She frowned. Nilos looked troubled, lips pressed together, the corners of his eyes creased as he squinted at nothing she could see. “Are you all right?”

“I’m...fine,” he said, after a moment that felt like a year. “It’s the spirits. I can—” he winced—“I can feel them. Because of the Serpent’s marks, I imagine.”

Sephre felt nothing. Or at least, nothing she could separate from the ambient dread of traveling the underworld. “This is the Labyrinth of Souls. Aren’t there meant to be spirits here?”

She recalled a taverna that she had ill-advisedly allowed Zander to drag her to.

It had been called the Necropolis, and was famous for offering free drinks to any soldier on the eve of a deployment.

The entire place had been decorated like a tomb.

She had laughed at it, back then. Downed a cup of the sour wine out of a skull-shaped goblet, watched Zander flirt shamelessly with a dark-eyed bard singing funeral dirges.

She had even—she squirmed to remember it—joined the other patrons scrawling on the walls.

They had been painted with scenes of the labyrinth.

Only a pale, mortal approximation, the maze, uneven, rough.

Populated by spirits, roughly drawn by laughing soldiers eager to share their conquests.

And she had been one of them, scratching seven awkward figures into one of those painted corridors.

Zander had teased her, saying they looked more like bundles of sticks than people. That was before the war.

She had never gone back, after.

“Not this many,” said Nilos, wincing again. “Too many. Something’s wrong.”

“Is it the skotoi?”

“We’ll find out soon enough.”

· · ·

Sephre trudged along yet another glossy black corridor, the walls slicing up to a narrow strip of iron sky high above, wondering where all the spirits could be.

They had been walking for what felt like hours.

The passages had begun to blur, each the same as the last, making it dangerously easy to lose focus.

Twice, she’d nearly stumbled into one of the myriad small pools and streamlets that ran through the maze, no doubt chock full of deadly poison.