Ascendancy of the Last - By Lisa Smedman Page 0,35

perpendicular to the silver curtain, which now hung above her head. Even so, she still felt a flat, solid surface beneath her feet. Dizzy and disoriented, she scrambled “upright” again.

What was this place?

She breathed—rapidly, due to her exertions. At least she was still alive. Her body felt solid enough. She slapped a hand against her breastplate and heard the thud it made—though the sound came to her ears an instant later than it should have. She could also hear the low hum of her singing sword. Her movements, however, seemed slow to her eyes. Every motion took twice as long as it should have. Yet she felt no impediment. Though she stood entombed in hundreds of chunks of broken stone, it wasn’t these that slowed her down. When she stuck her fingers into a gap between the stones and wriggled them, they moved just as slowly as they did within the middle of a block of stone.

Short of dying and becoming a ghost—something she was certain hadn’t happened—she knew of only one way to move through objects: by being rendered ethereal. She was loath to leave the portal, but standing next to it and staring wasn’t going to tell her where she was—or how to get back to the Promenade. Still, it was her only landmark. She decided to keep the portal at her back, to move in a straight line away from it. She’d go as far as she could without losing sight of the V-shaped silver curtain, then repeat the process in a different direction if the first search proved fruitless.

She walked away cautiously, sword at the ready. It was difficult not to flinch as she moved through what appeared to be a wall of jagged rubble. Each time her head seemed about to strike a rock, she half-turned away. Eventually, she adjusted to the odd sensation of passing through objects that only looked solid—objects she couldn’t touch or feel.

At about the thirty-pace mark, the portal behind her all but vanished. All she could see of it was the faintest shimmer of silver amid a gray blur of jumbled stone. About the same distance ahead of her, slightly lower than the spot where she “stood,” she saw a dark purple shape. She couldn’t make it out entirely—like everything else in this place, it looked as though it lay behind a pane of frosted clearstone—but it had the general shape of a broken column. A piece of masonry that might have once been the column’s capitol lay nearby.

She glanced behind her. If she kept going, she might never find her way back to the portal. Then she realized how useless it was to her. She might as well leave it behind. The ruined column, on the other hand, might offer a clue as to where she was.

As she moved closer, she saw that the column had been carved from mottled purple stone. Other smashed pieces of column lay nearby, resting on a slab of the same purple rock that must once have been their foundation.

This was the ruin of an ancient building. One that appeared to have been smashed to pieces by a rockfall.

Carefully, she noted the shape and orientation of the broken column. She moved from it to the next closest chunk of the building, and then to the next. She’d expected the smashed building to be rectangular or circular, but the foundation slab had an irregular shape, with bulges around its circumference. The placement of the columns, judging by what remained of their bases, had been equally random. Even the columns looked odd. They weren’t smooth cylinders, but tapered and bulged along their length, as if the masons hadn’t been able to decide which thickness to make them. She tried to touch one, but her hand passed through it.

Some of the columns had inscriptions on them: lines of text chiseled here and there like random graffiti. Cavatina peered closely at these but couldn’t read them. No matter how hard she stared, the writing wouldn’t come into focus. It blurred just enough to render it indecipherable. She tried to trace a line of it with her finger, but couldn’t feel the outline. She might as well have been touching a wisp of shifting smoke.

During her investigation, her body had drifted upward. She was high enough to see that the foundation of the buildŹing was carved with an enormous symbol. It took a moment to puzzle it out, as the lines were interrupted where the slab had shattered, and