Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,144

hunted rising to greet her and the gold eyes of her castings open wide in her palms.

29

Rielle

“I have decided not to tell anyone of what I saw in Meridian. Knowing that Rielle killed Grand Magister Belounnon will bring no comfort to anyone here. But I cannot stop thinking of the look on her face as she incinerated him: The shadows on her gaunt face. The furious molten gold of her eyes. One moment he was there. The next, there was fire, and he was gone. And before Annick and I fled, I looked back at Rielle and saw her trembling in the rain. She wept, her skin glowing with a faint gold sheen, and gazed across the sea toward the black eastern horizon.”

—Journal of Garver Randell, dated February 17, Year 1000 of the Second Age

Rielle knew after her first resurrection that it was impossible to continue working underground. All that weight above her, the mountain’s cold black bulk. She needed to see the sky.

Corien asked for no further explanation. He ordered a dozen of his soldiers and an outfit of one hundred adatrox to construct an altar on the mountain beside his fortress. A stone walkway led from one of the windows on the highest floor of the fortress, near Corien’s own rooms, out across the snow to this towering black edifice, dark against the mountain’s endless white.

The altar’s structure reminded Rielle of the Gate, which delighted her. Three steps led up to a flat plinth of black rock. There was a table of stone for the bodies to lie upon, and stone pillars flanked the spot where she would stand. The plinth itself was freshly engraved with wings, a whole storm of them, feathers so fine that Rielle knelt in her furs to run her fingers over their delicate grooves.

“They made this so quickly,” she said, looking up at Corien. “Four days. How?”

It had started to snow. Whorls of it, tiny swift flakes, danced across the altar. A cold wind ruffled the hem of Corien’s black cloak. His collar of dark fur was dusted white.

He shrugged at her question, held out his hand. “They had no choice.”

She took his hand and rose. The light was dimming. Near the horizon, past the snow-spitting clouds, patches of indigo sky held the last gold of the sun.

“Bring me the next one,” she murmured, and kissed him distractedly. Her fingers tingled, hungry and eager. “I want to do it again.”

• • •

Corien came to her at dawn. He stood beside her in the gray light as the snow fell soundlessly from the sky.

In silence, he watched her weave wings for the reborn angel on her table. The body lay on its stomach, naked and stark white in the cold.

Once, Corien had shown her where the wings would join the back—not with joints of flesh and bone, as with birds or bats, but with a simple blooming growth of light. He had drawn pictures for her with his mind, shown her the look of the wings in flight. Not just any wings, but his own, long lost. For the first time, he had shown her himself as he once was: Kalmaroth, warmonger and rebel. His name meant “light undying” in Qaharis, and he had understood that to signify he was meant for greatness. Pale skin and dark hair, tall and slender, blazing blue eyes, and wings flaring out from his back—light at the root, shadow-tipped. Apart from the wings and the height of his body, Kalmaroth had looked very much as Corien did now.

Rielle thought of that as she worked. A smile played at her lips. She liked thinking of him years ago, escaping the Deep and finding a human who reflected his own lost beauty.

Like a patient weaver sitting at her loom, Rielle pulled strands of the empirium from the air. Her eyes saw gold, and in it were many things. There was the long, ridged cord of the corpse’s spine. There were the stormy dark places within the mass of muscle and sinew where the wings should begin. Her body churned with aches, hot spools of tension burrowing into her shoulders, her wrists, the small of her back. Despite the mountain’s bitter cold, beads of sweat raced each other down her brow.

But her mind was clear. Her thoughts soared like knife-winged birds of prey, swift and amber-eyed. She guided the empirium with the needle of her power, and with each swift silver stab, her blood leapt higher, seeking more.

When it was done,