[Fourth Era – Year 1036 of the Divinity War; Sirithae (formerly known as Hopron), Valley of the Innumenary]

  Within that desert, the boy and I stitched together his memories, our memories, for they were the sum of my substance.

  There within the memory, Jestil’s finely sculpted form moved along the palatial stone corridors with the confident grace of youth, his eyes twinkled like a shared secret held in sacred confidence between friends.

  As I moved into his memory, I knew him to be no ordinary lad. His consciousness split between two bodies at once, all sensation, thought, the sweet taste of each in-drawn breath, all doubled. He was Jestil, yet he had another life—Viinsen, then sleeping upon another world. A body whose back burned with strips of fire, a phantom pain here, to Jestil. A pain that even gratitude could not seem to heal.

  Yet his gaze searched as he rushed along, worry growing in his heart.

  This was all going so badly. Jestil knew he must have had a plan when he came to this world. From what little he remembered of himself he wouldn’t have come here without a mission. If only he could remember it. He would have left a journal, but it was nowhere to be found. Had he hidden it too well? Or was it something worse? The Severed had been targeting him for so long. Perhaps they had something to do with this … with this whole disaster.

  He rushed down the corridors, torn between seeking Irinai, his twin sister, and desperately racing to reach the room before it was too late. Worries gathered like morning dew, an imperceptible heaviness.

  “Jestil?” Irinai’s familiar voice called from behind.

  He turned. “There you are. I feared you’d be hiding.”

  “I wasn’t the one whimpering in the pantry this morning.” She rushed to catch up to him.

  To hide the warmth in his cheeks, Jestil threw his arms around his sister’s waist and picked her up in a rough hug. She squealed, so he released her. “Hurry. We have to get there first if this is going to work.” He flung himself down the passageway.

  “You’re hurt aren’t you?” Irinai observed, “Something from your other life?”

  “I’ll be fine. Hurry.”

  The halls meandered without corners, edges, or straight lines, apart from the floors which ran perfectly level. The walls and ceilings were arches of glass, and within the glass sculpted stone had been shaped into the forms of trees and wildlife and the occasional shadowy figure. All the sculptures were encased within the walls of the glass corridor and colored glass painted the scene behind them. Fractal light from the sacred flame which burned beyond spilled through the glass, shining down like sunlight filtered through foliage. If it weren’t for the floors it would have given the impression that they were passing along a wooded path.

  Yet, if he had to guess, the floors had been overlaid later, in another age. Those floors were covered in lithographic paintings that had been painted directly of stone itself in myriad varieties and colors, which must have been entangled with some kind of liquid, swirled and brushed together into masterful monolithic paintings.

  Running aggravated the phantom pain and stiffness of wounds down his back, wounds from another life, another mistake. Jestil ascended the stairs to the second level, taking them two at a time, wincing at the phantom pain.

  “Slow down,” Irinai warned. Her lithe body danced around him with a grace that belied her unease. “If the chamberlain catches you running in the manor house he could make it worse than Fane and Fraela.”

  Anger erupted through him. He nearly shouted. Oh, so close, the words came to the cusp of his lips, ‘Worse than waking up with the weight of a boulder trying to crush you into a trunk half your size? Worse than being folded in two, unable to breathe, then suddenly being tossed and falling three stories to your death—but no, not death, you feel the rope catch, your stomach lurching nauseously? Aching, straining, struggling for breath, cramps wracking your muscles in torment for what seems like an eternity as the wind bounces you roughly against the wall?’ But Jestil tamped down the words before they could come spewing out. And all he said was “Who hangs a trunk out for laundry?”

  “Okay, maybe not worse. But running in the corridors is beyond foolhardy.” Irinai patted him. “Remember what the chamberlain did to Lilari last season. Lilari of all people.” Irinai’s brow furrowed as she leaned to stare into his eyes. “Jestil, I wasn’t teasing. They did something to you … in your other life.” With a fingertip, Irinai scratched an indecipherable symbol on his shoulder. “Tell me.”

  Jestil shook his head “Not now. We have to focus.”

  “Are you alright?” she asked.

  “We’d better hurry. The plan won’t work if they get there first.”

  Jestil liked to look at the depictions of scenes on the floor as he passed and make up stories to go with the images. The stories differed based on which turn he took, his path or direction. It was a common game in their house.

  But not today, they tread across scenes of bygone glory, fear, and splendor, but no tales blossomed in his mind now, nothing more than the doom that awaited them if this plan failed.

  The overarching trees of glass and stone framed a figure before them, a little girl with her hair tied in purple ribbons staring at a plain river rock cradled in her hand.

  Jestil and Irinai paused before the girl.

  Irinai approached her. “Lilari? What’s the trouble?”

  “Do you hear that?” Lilari’s voice was strangely distant.

  "What?

  “Weirdling noises, like wind and a song and something like sand in an hourglass, only bigger, like a hundred hourglasses.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Irinai nodded at the rock that had enthralled Lilari’s attention. “What’s that stone?”

  “It was beside the ice mountain.”

  “You mean in the ice house?” Jestil thought of Father, his cold body lying motionless. He shut out the thought.

  Irinai froze at his words.

  “No.” Lilari glanced up from the stone, coming out of the daze. “The ice mountain that all my friends have been playing on.”

  Ice mountain? The games of make-believe children played. “Can I see it?” Jestil nodded at the ordinary river stone. Something about it …

  “For the normal trade. Give a trouble, take a trouble.” Lilari was always trying to get everyone in the manor house to help each other out, sharing troubles with each other as her form of trade.

  “I thought that was when you passed out sparflit bread.” Jestil cocked his head.

  Lilari pouted. “Family should help at every chance.”

  This was taking too long. “Irinai, we must hurry,” Jestil reminded her.

  “Sorry.” Irinai mussed Lilari’s hair.

  They passed her and hurried along.

  Lilari spun to follow. “Do you need my help?”

  “Not today.”

  “Oh, it’s an adventure.” Lilari bounced along their wake.

  Paintings passed beneath their toes—the battle of the hollow soldier, the leaping maiden, winter firestorm, ambush in the fog. Jestil found no story in them today.

  But then Lilari began to tell her own. “Everything was still and quiet as they rushed through the battlefield. They’d been tied up until they’d found this sand. But how could it see? ‘I know this battlefield,’ the sand said, ‘and have no need to see it again. It was mine in a distant time.’”

  But they had already crossed several paintings.

  “Seriously, someone should put pebbles in your shoes,” Lilari complained, “you’re going too fast. You’re going to miss the story. And you just passed the cave. That’s my favorite part.

  “Oh, did I tell you Wurn and Surai found a cave under the manor? They claim it looked like a cellar room with two doors. They showed the chamberlain, but after they went to fetch him it was gone, filled in with dirt. So he thought they’d been digging. They got cleaning duty for lying and for digging, but they promised they weren’t doing either.”

  “That’s terrible.” Jestil rushed up the stairs.

  “Two at a time.” Lilari protested, standing at the bottom of the stairs. “Hey, wait.”

  “Sorry,” Jestil called back. “We must hurry. I’ll take two troubles next time.” For now, they had enough of their own.

  “I’d rather you give two,” Lilari called after them. As they left her behind, they heard her muttering, “No one will take help lately.”

  But theirs was not the kind of trouble that could be shared. “I’d still like to see that stone,” he called back, almost as an afterthought. There was something about it.

  Irinai made it to the room first. Jestil shut the door quickly, nearly slamming it in his haste. A large thick carpet squished below his feet, expertly woven to mirror the stars and nebulous clouds that filled the night sky.

  The room was vertigo itself—stars below, a fiery pit above. Like the halls, the vault of the room was made of sculpted stone and glass, the glass made a smooth vaulted dome, but the stone beneath it … it gave the impression of being upside-down over cliff walls that stretched down into some vast fiery abyss, except down was up, the depths of the pit sculpted at the apex of the vaulted ceiling. A stone figure of a man was inset into the glass of the ceiling with his arms spread as if he had just leaped from a door of fire into the pit and expected to fly—it had to be the legend of Elithir from before he became the Infinite. The door of fire was real, however—where the furnace of the sacred flame glared through a slit in the wall, its light dancing through the colored glass vault overhead, its heat pulsating throughout the walls of the manor house.

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  With his will Jestil whispered to the sacred flame, calming and cooling the living chaos.

  “You brought the contract?” Irinai asked.

  “Of course.” Jestil pulled it out from a fold in his kajin robes where he’d clasped in a document pocket.

  “Make sure it’s not one you wrote.”

  “Of course I wrote it,” Jestil said, handing her the contract.

  Irinai took it, her brow wrinkled, musing yet bemused. “But I thought it couldn’t bind you if you wrote it.”

  “It’s not for me.” Jestil patted his robes and sent his hands searching through various pockets he’d clasped into his kajin robes. “It’s for them, to bind them with an oath not to hurt or compel us.”

  “You can’t blame me when you don’t explain the plan.”

  “I would have if I’d had the time.”

  “Then hurry, block the door. Do that thing.” She pantomimed writing.

  “One moment. I need my scribing needle.” He had little numen of his own, not like the Innumenary, yet he could perform an entanglement, given enough time and the proper conditions.

  Ah, that’s right. He remembered being interrupted by the scribe and weaving the needle through the hem of his robes, so he would remember to clean out the blood, but he had forgotten.

  Hopefully, it hadn’t clotted again, or his whole plan could fail. Nothing else would work, only his scribing needle. He knew from long experience that fingers, brushes, quills, or pens simply could not create fine enough details for a soul key.

  Jestil let the scribing needle drink from his fingertip before he began the soul shaping. He made a test line, blood flowed from the tip of the needle without clotting, and he hissed a relieved sigh. Then he began the intricate line of the key that would unlock his numen.

  He didn’t know why the power was locked. Perhaps some cosmic guardian watched over the numen of entanglement, that to pass its gates he needed an ever-changing key, a key formed from his very soul. But how do you reshape a soul? He knew of only one way. It is in the blood. Soul clings to blood for some time after leaving the body. And so it was that he scribed the key in blood, to shape the soul, to unlock the numen, to bar the door, to halt his cousins and relieve them from reliving last night’s terrors.

  As he scribed, Irinai began pacing the room like a caged lykanth. “I didn’t realize how long this would take.”

  “You’ve never seen me write contracts?”

  “Of course not, I would never watch any boy do that.”

  “But you’re watching me now.”

  “I only glanced,” Irinai said, fanning herself with a hand. “Besides you’re my twin brother, it’s different.”

  “Does that make it better or worse?”

  She cleared her throat, then continued pacing. “They could be here any moment.”

  “It would help if you let me focus.”

  “But how close are you?”

  Jestil frowned in concentration at the long, continuous line he was drawing. “I’m not sure.”

  “How can you not know?”

  “The soul key is different every time.”

  “What? You’ve never said.”

  “I thought it was indecent to speak of such things. Somehow it changes, and good thing too, otherwise even heathen men could copy the ones left behind.”

  “Then how do you know …?”

  “It’s the reason so few men can. I have to feel it. I have to trust.”

  “Trust what?”

  “That it will lead me.”

  “That what will lead you?”

  Jestil leaned in, squinting at that single complex line. “Can I focus now?”

  “You’re avoiding the question.”

  “Because I don’t know the answer, alright.”

  Irinai stopped her pacing to watch him.

  “Some whispered numen pours into me when I etch. It … well, it guides me somehow. I don’t know. Oh, that’s it.” He lifted his scribing needle from the door and offered a mystic grin.

  “It’s done?” She stepped closer to examine the intricate shape of the soul key.

  Jestil watched Irinai stare at the soul key. This time it reminded him of stars winking out from within a vast cloud. Irinai caught his gaze and blushed.

  Now the entanglement could begin. Still, blood would be required, for his soul was the binding element for each entanglement. And the soul was in the blood. It was the only way he knew to shape his soul, using blood.

  He swiped a single line of his blood across the gap between the door and the wall and bound it together.

  “Are you sure it will hold against Fane?”

  “Even against him.”

  “What was I supposed to be doing in all of this? Your plan, your contract, your entanglement. I feel useless.”

  “You can negotiate with them. It will sound better coming from you.”

  “If you say so.” Gripping the contract, Irinai waited at the door, staring at that single line of blood. “That line looks awfully small. And there is only one of them.”

  “It will hold.”

  “It won’t hurt you to put more though. I mean, there’s no reason you couldn’t put a hundred right? You do remember this is Fane don’t you?”

  “I’d be more worried about the hinges failing.”

  “Then can’t you add some on that side as well? Maybe just surround the whole thing?”

  “It will be fine. Stop worrying.”

  “I’m not worried. It’s just such a thin door. Would it be possible to reinforce the whole thing?”

  “It’s solid kornut, at least I think it is. And when have any of the doors in the manor ever failed? They were made by the Innumenary themselves.” Jestil turned his back to the door. “Besides I’ve reinforced it, the door is entangled with the wall. What more could you want?”

  “Okay, fine. The door is fine. How is my voice? Does it sound … um … convincing?”

  “You’ll do fine. Perhaps you should stop waiting by the door. Sit. Relax.”

  She finally sat on the edge of Fraela’s bed. But soon she was fidgeting with her hair. “So?”

  “What?”

  “How was it, being stuffed into a trunk and hung out the window?” she blurted.

  How dare she. “Why would you bring that up now?”

  “They’re going to do it again if this fails.” Irinai’s snorted a mirthless half-laugh. “I didn’t think they’d really do it. Especially not before Father’s cloud burial.”

  That brought them both to silence.

  It had only been two days since Father … Jestil must have looked up from his scribe work a dozen times, expecting to find Father staring at him; or caught a glimpse of a figure through one of the lower windows and thought Father was coming.

  Jestil had even gone to see him resting in the ice house. Father’s body hadn’t decomposed, not in that cold. But something was severely missing. He was not napping. Jestil had seen actors at festivals fain death, illusions and paintings portraying it. He thought he knew what it looked like, but he’d never imagined this vast, cavernous lifelessness. Nothing burned inside that husk. Nothing. Like pale ashes after even the coals have burned out.

  “Why did he have to leave us to this?” He gestured to take in Fane and Fraela’s room, which they now shared, kicked out of their old room by their father’s death. Supposedly shared, though Fane and Fraela refused. It was two to a bed. He’d never had occasion to ask which two.

  Sleeping with the giant Fane could get him crushed into oblivion. Plus imagining those massive, smelly feet in his face. He shuddered. But then sleeping beside his twin sister … he supposed if he had to sleep with anyone’s feet in his face he wouldn’t mind if they were hers. But it wouldn’t be decent.

  He thought of Irinai’s friend, Elizzin, and wondered what her feet smelled like. But he could only imagine spring rain and berries on a sun-touched meadow and over it all the scent of winterblossoms. Surely no one’s feet smelled like that … why was he thinking of Elizzin anyway?

  Since she’d turned snobbish he’d completely lost interest—yes, completely. But sometimes he thought of her from before, when she was younger and sweeter, and far less beautiful. When they’d played tune juggling, ring-round-run, or hide-and-seek beneath the stalls of the merchants, who had hollered at them whenever they were discovered.

  The entangled door, and even the glass and stone wall itself, shuddered as if a great bulk had struck it with force. A grunt of surprise accompanied the sound, followed by a muttered curse. And then the pounding began in earnest.

  Irinai cautiously approached the door, from the left side, as if fearing it would explode across the room, or at least fly open at the blows of those massive fists.

  Several steps back from the door she turned to Jestil and mouthed “Are you sure you can hold it?”

  “The wall is taking those blows,” Jestil whispered back, “not me. All I have to do is keep them entangled.” Surprisingly no cracks had formed in the glass of the wall from the force being exerted upon it.

  Her oblique gaze showed little confidence in his words.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t let go.”

  Irinai gathered herself and turned to the door. “Fane is that you?”

  “What have you done?” Fane’s words were not a shout, though they boomed throughout the room. “Open this door.”

  “Of course. I just need you to make this contract first. Then you can come right in.” Irinai managed to keep most of the tremors out of her voice. Then she slid the contract under the door.

  But it was Fane’s sister Fraela that responded. “You think a little piece of … of … paper will protect you from us, after this? Barring us from our own room. We’ll be back.”

  “And you’ll be dead,” Fane added.

  This could be very bad. What if they never made the contract? They couldn’t stay there forever. He’d made no plan for their chores or provisions. Fane and Fraela could just find another place to sleep out the night, but he and Irinai were trapped until they either starved or surrendered.

  How long would they leave him trapped in that trunk this time? Or would they just drop it to the ground, break him into a million pieces? Or maybe leave the trunk out in the morthel wilds to be clawed apart and devoured.

  The trunk. Jestil opened the horrid thing.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Maybe I can rig it for escape.”

  A horrified look filled Irinai’s face. “You said this would work.”

  “Oh, I know. If I entangle these parts … bend this … dissolve that, I’ll be able to pull the hinge right out.”

  “Jestil, don’t tell me …” Irinai sat on the edge of the bed and started to bounce her legs. Then she got up and smoothed the bed linens. She lay back for but a moment. “How can they stand that ceiling, I feel like I’m falling upward.” She sprang back onto her feet. “Oh, I know, we can clean the room, and surprise them. We’ll say it was our plan all along! The contract was just a joke to give us time.” She rushed around the room dusting with the hem of her kajin robe.

  Using an entanglement, Jestil got to work on the trunk. It didn’t take as long as he’d feared. Yet, if he held too many entanglements at once he could end up with chaos sickness. And the cost of that could be very dire, or very strange. Either way, he would be risking delirium, which may not be the worst possible result of chaos sickness. Spontaneous combustion seemed pretty bad; it was the one he feared the most, for certain.

  Irinai had stopped her frantic cleaning and stood watching him again. “Won’t he just shove you in a different trunk? And where will he put me?”

  The other trunks were full, but it was possible.

  “Perhaps I should do them all.”

  When he reached the third trunk, he found it locked. Of course he could remove the hinge from the outside, once he’d opened it he would reverse it to the inside.

  After some effort, he pulled the hinge free and the lid open. Peering inside, he stared down upon a seven-sided box made of some strange golden wood, inlaid with white crystals, wrapped with golden wire seven times around each of its seven sides in a star pattern.

  “What is that?” Irinai asked.

  “I think it’s a spirit trap.”

  “Like in the stories? Release a spirit he’ll give you a boon?”

  Jestil paled. “That’s what they say?”

  Irinai frowned. “You must have read Harfool and the Hallow Tree? Or at least Kiss of The Siberdean?”

  “I read history, not children’s stories.”

  “They’re not children’s stories … well, not entirely.”

  “The Severed must have possessed some fool to write them. Teaching children to release their accomplices,” Jestil scoffed.

  Irinai folded her arms and raised an eyebrow. “Then what are you supposed to do with a spirit trap?”

  “They’re weapons, prisons from the old war, The Divinity War. A few Severed princes were trapped inside them.” He picked it up and turned it over. “If they were set free it would be a disaster beyond imagining.”

  There was a hole torn right through the side of the trap, and it bulged outward as if something had escaped through it. Jestil gaped, a sick dread spreading through him. The soul trap was torn open. Someone had released it and likely gotten themselves possessed in the process. Worse, they had begun the war all over again.

  Irinai stared at the hole in the spirit trap. “I think you might be the only one who hasn’t read those ‘children’s stories’.”

  “If he was possessed that could explain …”

  Then he spotted the journal at the bottom of the trunk. Fane’s journal.

  “You’re not going to read it are you?”

  “How else do you expect me to find out which of the Severed he unleashed? Besides, the Amnesia Storm didn’t leave much else behind for us to remember.”

  “If he finds out you’ve …” Irinai looked around and saw the window. She opened the shutters and looked down at the three-story drop. Then she looked up.

  Jestil opened the journal. “Wait.” This writing, it looks so much like … his memory strained and faltered. But one thing he knew … “It’s not his.”

  Fane’s voice boomed through the wood of the door. “Here it is.” A contract was slid back under the door. “Now open up.”