He laughed, like bubbles rising from the mud pits around Heart. Then wheezing and coughing, then groaning and silence.
I almost wanted to help him, but couldn’t bring myself to go near him while he remained slumped, breath whistling as though there were holes in his lungs or throat. I couldn’t get over the creeping feeling that, if I did go over, his body would miraculously mend and he’d grab me.
That thought coiling in my gut, I pressed my spine to the wall and sat properly, waiting for him to regain the strength to speak. How long had it been for him? As long as it had been on the outside?
“Janan won’t let me die.” His good eye was trained on me. “Do you have the key?”
I pressed my hands to my knees. I didn’t want to slip and reveal the key’s location.
“I need it,” he whispered, managing to lift one arm toward me. “I need it to live after Soul Night. You have to give it back.”
“What happens on Soul Night?” I’d come here for answers, after all, though I hadn’t expected Meuric to provide them.
He wheezed laughter. “You won’t stop it.”
I stood, trying to make myself formidable. “What happens?”
“Give me the key.” His glare followed me as I marched toward him. “Give, and I’ll tell you.”
Not a chance. He’d said he needed it to live after Soul Night, so what happened to everyone without a key?
I hovered just out of arm’s reach, ready to run for the stairs if he so much as shifted his weight. “You’ve been down here for months,” I muttered. “You must be very hungry. And thirsty. When was the last time you had anything to drink?”
His eye widened, and he groaned.
I felt sick taunting him like this, but I knelt so I was level with him. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll give you the rest of my water.”
His thirst must be horrible, even if he hadn’t been thinking about it before. Janan couldn’t fix everything…as evidenced by Meuric’s broken body.
“So thirsty.” The eye closed. The other remained a rotted hole, impossible not to look at; its reek rode the steady heartbeat of the temple. There were no screams currently, just muffled whimpering, as though they were waiting to find out what I’d do.
I checked to make sure the stairs were still an option. “If you tell me what’s going to happen, I’ll give you water.”
“Soul Night.”
The spring equinox of the Year of Souls. “Yes, I know that’s when it happens.”
He nodded. It was frightening how ancient he looked now, though this body was only fifteen years old. Months of dehydration and starvation, incredible physical damage…If he’d succeeded in trapping me in here before Templedark, this could have been me.
“I didn’t think it would work.” His once-high voice sounded like gravel now. “His plan seemed too fantastic, but if anyone could succeed, it would be Janan, so I convinced everyone to let him try. And then he did it. He really did it.”
“What did he do?” I wanted to shake him and force him to speak clearly. Instead, I stayed on one knee, ready to bolt.
“He made himself greater. He made people like phoenixes.” Meuric held out his hand again. “Water.”
“That’s not an answer.” Phoenixes were another dominant species, like centaurs or trolls, but they appeared to reincarnate as people did.
They were rare—reports said there were perhaps a dozen in the entire world—but once someone had observed a phoenix in the jungles on a southern continent. It built a nest of dry brush, then settled down as though to lay an egg. Instead, it exploded into a rain of sparks and died.
The explorer had stayed at the pyre for hours, trying to figure out why the creature had done that. And then sunlight broke through the jungle canopy and shone on the ashes, dazzling him. When his vision cleared, a tiny phoenix chirped. It looked at him with the same ancient expression the other had worn, and then it flew off, trailing sparks and ash.
“It is an answer.” Meuric’s garbled voice grew panicked. “Water.”
“No. What is Janan trying to do?”
“What has he already done, you mean.” His good eye squeezed shut. “You’re so stupid. It’s already done. Soul Night is inevitable now. He will rise.”
“Like a phoenix?”
“No. No, nothing like that. Come Soul Night, you won’t care about phoenixes. No one will. Birth is so painful.”
Okay. Something terrible would happen. We’d gone over that. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what would happen. Or maybe he was too crazy to express how awful it would be.
I forced myself to meet his good eye, though he seemed to have trouble focusing. “When I came here before, I found books. But I don’t know who wrote them, and I can’t read the symbols.”
“No one wrote them. They were simply written.” He groaned and dropped his hand. “Give me water. You promised.”
“Tell me how to read the books.”
“Same way you’d read anything. Learn the language.” Oil-dark fluid seeped from his ruined eye, down the crevices of his face, and into cracked lips. He swallowed it.