Page 137 of The Cradle of Ice

—he’s a girl, fleeing down a street, a winged silhouette pursuing her.

—he’s a Reef Farer, wearing a heavy stone circlet, staring across the ruins of a village, his feet standing in a pool of blood.

Daal returned to his body again, his chest heaving, but only pumping water. He remembered flying atop a raash’ke, full of exhilaration and joy. His fingers curled in the water, as if still trying to reach for those ancient reins again.

With a jolt of recognition, he realized that Neffa’s saddle matched the one mounted atop the raash’ke.

Is that where the gear came from, adapted from a past when the raash’ke were our allies?

Even living through those brief moments, he had trouble imagining such a time. Still, it was clear something had corrupted the raash’ke, turning them into winged monsters. The Dreamers seemed to hint at the source. Throughout the last images, he had sensed a shadow looming over all those glimpses. It was the same shadow—underlaid by the same terror—from earlier, when a man had died on his back.

Daal cringed in the embrace of the tentacles.

Who or what cast that shadow?

The answer didn’t come from the Dreamers. Though Nyx couldn’t speak, he shared her memories. He flashed to when she had fought off the bat that had grabbed Henna. Through her senses, he felt the dark presence lurking behind the greater mind of the raash’ke horde. She had even given it a name.

The spider.

Nyx glowed brighter next to him, fury stoking her fire. Whoever or whatever that spider was, it had stolen Bashaliia from her.

She cast out a single word, a fiery demand.

Who?

The question seemed to quake through the Dreamers. The mesh of glowing threads shivered over his body. For a moment, it felt as if the tendrils were about to withdraw, that the Oshkapeers would refuse to answer.

But the threads settled again.

An image swirled and formed inside his skull. It was the same memory from before, as if the Dreamers were repeating themselves.

—Daal lies on his back again, lifting a bloody hand, knobbed and thinned by age. With his final gasps of life, he senses another’s approach. A shadow looms over him, sparking terror.

Only this time, Daal was not allowed to escape. He was held there for that last breath of the dying man.

—his arm drops as death envelops him. The world darkens to its end—then brightens for just a moment. A blurry torch of reflected light passes over his face, coming from the shadow behind him. It coalesces into five fingers and a hand.

Daal thrashed with recognition, tearing himself out of the past. Still, the last image persisted, burning across his brain, branding it there forever.

The hand was made of shining bronze.

54

WHILE THE WATERS remained warm, Nyx’s body had gone cold. The glow from her skin dimmed as she stared over at Shiya. Her bronze body was still wrapped in powerful tentacles.

Nyx knew it wasn’t Shiya’s hand that had formed over the dead man’s face. The palm had been far broader, the fingers more thickly knuckled. It was the hand of a man.

Still, there was no mistaking the truth.

The spider was another Sleeper.

She tried to fathom his existence, how he came to be in the Crèche. A thousand questions filled her. He clearly had arrived countless millennia ago and corrupted the raash’ke. But the ancient alchymist who had died had kept a secret, burying it deep under dark waters.

She stared through the mesh of glowing tendrils to the spread of reefs, to the teeming life, to the hundreds of Dreamers skimming these waters, creatures who shared a lineage with the raash’ke, but who diverged along a different path.

She pictured the blood being infused into the specimen on the table.

Was the alchymist’s creation of the Oshkapeers happenstance, or had he known what was coming?