I tilted the bottle over him until water trickled into his mouth. He drank, sputtered, coughed, and I backed far away. I didn’t trust all those sudden movements.
“Answer a few more questions and I’ll give you the rest.” Unless he started coughing on me again. Maybe I could leave the bottle next to him and call it the end of our agreement. But he couldn’t drink it on his own. I hated that I felt obligated to make sure he got what he’d bargained for.
“You want to know how to stop Janan. There is no way to stop him, least of all for you. You are nothing to Janan. Insignificant.” He kept staring at the bottle, even as water dribbled down his chin.
“I’m not insignificant to you. I have the water.” I shook the bottle again. All this protest. All this insistence on my insignificance. Meuric was afraid of me, of what I might do, because I was the only one against Janan who could remember everything others were supposed to forget. Because I was new. Different. Asunder.
Maybe special.
I steeled my voice. “Now tell me how to stop him.”
“Nothing can stop him. Already the world quivers with anticipation.” He glared up with his good eye, and the bad one gaped wider. “Why are you even here? You should have been like these screams, these crying souls never born.”
Terror flurried inside of me, and I whispered, “What do you mean?”
“You weren’t supposed to be born. You keep interfering and because of you, more oldsouls have been taken from Janan forever. More newsouls escape.” Meuric cackled, rough and bubbling. “But it doesn’t matter. You came too late to have any effect on him. He won’t notice the loss of your tiny spark.”
“But the others?” My tongue might have been paper as I asked, “Will he notice the darksouls, and the newsouls born in their place?”
Meuric settled into the position I’d first seen him in, obscured by ratty cloth and blood. “He may notice, but it’s too late to stop him. Your trials are for naught. You’ve secured a few short years for yourself, and a few short breaths for others. But the death you’ll soon experience will surely be a hundred times worse than your original fate.”
My boots hissed on stone as I backed toward the stairs. “And what was my original fate?” I asked, thinking of the weeper and what it had called Janan. The Devourer.
When he grinned, a cracked and bloodied tooth dropped from its socket. “The same fate of all newsouls, caught to allow an oldsoul to be reborn. The same fate of all the newsouls you hear right now with their little screams and lives never lived.
“They’re being eaten.”
17
KEY
THE WATER BOTTLE dropped to the floor, spilling open, and Meuric howled with laughter.
I threw myself up the spiral stairs, around in circles higher and higher. My thighs burned and my head throbbed, but I ignored my own pain. It was nothing. Janan was replacing souls, letting the old live and keeping the new for himself. The weeper, the non-voice that had comforted me in the blackness, was being consumed.
As I climbed, the sobbing and wailing grew louder, and I imagined the souls were calling me back, though whether to save them or die with them, I wasn’t sure.
Up the stairs, I emerged into a spherical room. I didn’t stop running, and the entire chamber rolled under my feet as though I were trapped inside a giant ball.
Remembering how the upside-down pit had sucked Meuric upward, I stopped while the hole was still on the side of the room, then fumbled for the door device with my pulse thundering in my ears. I pressed the combination that had opened a path to freedom before. Gray misted on the white stone, and I ran into scorching daylight.
Even as the door vanished, Meuric’s words pursued me: they’re being eaten.
All the weeping, all the whispered cries for help. Newsouls.
Light rained around me and the temple pressed against my back, echoing my pounding heartbeat. All I could see were the cobblestones under my boots and my shaking hands as I thrust the key into my pocket. I blinked to clear my vision, but it didn’t help.
I gasped at air, gulping the scent of sweat and burned coffee and sulfur from an erupting geyser beyond the wall. Steam wafted across the agricultural quarter, through the orchards and fields. Two more geysers erupted in the north and east, their loud gush and whoosh audible even over the market field din. Water sprayed high, reaching over the immense city wall.
Hands closed over my shoulders and yanked me close, and I screamed.
A man I’d never seen before shoved me and slammed me against the temple. Lightning snapped through my vision and thoughts, and I cried out as the stranger pinned me to the wall. I couldn’t get away. The temple thrummed against my spine, and the back of my head ached where it had hit. The stranger dug into my pocket and seized the temple key.