hellstone glimmered in that tunnel, trapping the glimmering creature.
The pieces tumbled around Ironfist’s besieged brain like the individual colored tiles of a mosaic refusing to coalesce into an image: Gavin, in the first year after the False Prism’s War, once asking, ‘Ironfist, your family were priests long ago, right? Do you know what happens when the djinn die?’
It had been an odd question, but Gavin had been an odd young man.
Gavin wasn’t in there, and Ironfist was dying. He had to move on before his time ran out.
He pushed off the wall and kept walking, leaning heavily on the wall.
Ironfist had known nothing special to tell the Prism, no family secrets. But he’d delved into the subject for some months before finally abandoning it as nothing more than the Prism’s whim.
That piece, and Gavin’s fierce insistence that he hunt wights alone—though not always alone. Sometimes he’d fought the Blackguard most to fight alone when the wight was the most powerful, and let others come to help him when one seemed least dangerous.
Ironfist reached the portal to the green cell. Gavin wasn’t there, either. Some skeletal tree-thing, like climbing ivy twisted around itself, dragged branch claws against its circular walls, fists knotting.
Not here either, go on.
The djinn were the old gods. To the pagans, they were immortal gods, spirits who sometimes partnered with favored humans—high priests or heroes—and might extend a human’s life indefinitely. The Old Parians had believed the djinn were malignant, that they waited until the hour of death so they could take possession of a body, a host that was always a drafter, in whose body they might then walk the earth. Sometimes they waited for old age; other times they prompted young heroes and heroines to an early death through heroism or suicide. Thus, with their stolen bodies, these spirits might experience physical life—sex and food and time and human relationships, parenthood, even the feel of the wind across one’s face—treasured novelties for the otherwise incorporeal.
The yellow god in the yellow cell was like a taste of sickly sunlight. It was liquid gold coruscating and crashing like ocean waves as it alternately threw itself against the walls and then meditated quietly, lights sloshing about its incorporeal figure, eyes like unquiet stars.
No Gavin.
Weakening further still, Ironfist moved on. Hallucinations. These must be the hallucinations of trauma and fear of impending death.
After all the study Ironfist had done, Gavin had never inquired about the djinn again. Ironfist had dismissed it as the young Prism’s capricious, capacious intellect shining its light every which way, even into dead histories.
As for Gavin’s question, everyone supposed that the djinn simply slipped back into a spirit form when their host finally died, for even their magic couldn’t keep a human body alive forever.
And that was the final piece of the mosaic.
That was why Gavin had hunted alone on those times. He was hunting the contemporary equivalent of high priests, the men and women who might be hosting immortals. He hadn’t been hunting men; he’d been hunting gods. With each successful hunt, Gavin had brought a host and djinn here. Somehow he’d figured out how to bind the spirit of the immortals within this prison. Maybe he’d even made the prison itself.
But now Gavin wasn’t in the orange, and there was no obvious escape route from this one. The orange thing sat, quiet, just a little orange man, not scary, not fascinating, just pathetic. Just longing to be free.
An altogether understandable wish, and why shouldn’t he be free? Ironfist wondered if there wasn’t some way he could help the poor—
It’s a hex. Many, many hexes together, Ironfist saw now, swimming under the surface of the thing’s orange skin.
He blinked and looked away. He didn’t dare look again.
But he buckled at the next step, and he wouldn’t have been able to stand if he hadn’t been helped.
He took up the mag torch again. “Tore open my wound pretty good,” he said to—
To whom? He looked around him.
Who’d helped him up just now?
And what had kept him from falling outside, when he’d been ten paces from the boathouse?
Most mortals can’t see them. You only can because you’re so close to death, where the veil thins between your world and reality. This next part is going to be hard for you.
The voice seemed so familiar, but Ironfist couldn’t place it.
Ironfist pushed along the corridor. Past the red immortal—Dagnu, he realized now—who was in the form of a man yet looked like a thousand tiny embers catching flame, descending