“Fire magic,” Echo said. “That’s what powers this chamber. Maybe she felt strongest here?”
Dorian nodded. “Perhaps she needed that connection to battle the pull of the ku?edra. She did say she was acting against its wishes.”
“By leaving Caius here,” Echo finished. She began walking toward the door Tanith—or her projection—had blocked. “And you know what? I don’t really care how or why this is happening, but if she was telling the truth, then I’m not leaving Caius here a moment longer.”
“Agreed,” Dorian said, hot on her heels. When they got to the door, Dorian reached over Echo’s shoulder to touch it. There was no rune, but the stone glowed faintly in the shape of his handprint and then slid open, revealing a dark chamber and another door—a plain wooden one, also free of runic inscriptions—set into the opposite wall.
“Let’s go find him,” Dorian said.
Tanith’s perplexing presence opened up a whole host of questions that would need answering eventually, but right now Echo cared about only two: where was Caius, and what had his wretched sister done to him?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The wooden door led to a spiraling stairwell that took them down, deeper and deeper into the belly of the temple. When they reached the bottom, they encountered another door made of the same nondescript wood as the first. Echo pushed it open, coughing as centuries of dust filtered down on her head. Inside, a soft amber glow emanated from the walls, illuminating a modest, round room.
Shelves lined the walls, carved out of the stone like long, shallow alcoves. Bits of ancient pottery sat in the depressions, hidden by layers of spiderwebs. There was another door set into the far wall, this one much less modest than the one through which they had just come.
A complex lock held the door shut. Echo approached, looking for a way to open it. Any lock could be picked, but this one just might be beyond her skills. The lock’s exposed gears were made of a green metal. Flakes of rust had fallen off the teeth of the gears, and corroded metal peeked through heavy rust.
“What’s all this for?” Jasper wondered aloud, peering at the earthenware pots. The ones Echo could see through the thick layer of white webbing that coated them were sealed with wax gone dark with age.
“Old potions and elixirs, I expect,” Dorian replied as he, too, investigated the lock. “For healing. Or possibly killing.”
Before Echo could touch the large gear in the middle of the lock, it started rotating. The smaller gears followed suit. More and more green flakes snowed upon the floor as the metal creaked and groaned, struggling to turn after countless years of neglect.
Echo could not see the inner workings of the mechanism that held the heavy door closed, but she could hear it turning, the tumblers of the giant lock clicking into place. Propelled by some unseen power, the door began to swing open with painful slowness, evidently deeming them worthy of entry for having survived the series of trials. A distant, detached part of Echo’s brain noted the elaborate carvings hewn into the metal of the door: dragons, at least a dozen of them, flying in a spiraling formation, batlike wings spread wide, ferocious teeth bared in permanent snarls. It was hardly a welcoming image, but then, she supposed that was the point.
Echo was ready to step through the door as soon as there was room enough for her to slip by, but a hand on her shoulder wrenched her backward. Dorian shoved past her, and for a brief moment Echo wondered if he had seen something beyond the door that she had not, some threat or new trial, and was shielding her from it. But when she saw what lay within the chamber, she knew that it had not been altruism or a desire to defend her that had driven Dorian forward with such haste.
“Oh” was all she managed to utter. Behind her, Jasper let loose a curse in strangled Avicet.
The room on the other side of the elaborate door was massive. It wasn’t a room so much as a cavern. The ceiling was high, and the ground opened up a few feet in front of them, revealing a pit that looked like it might actually be bottomless. The cavern walls were stone, and mottled with depressions where it looked as though the stone had been gouged out. A footbridge connected the landing to a round island in the center. And that was where he was.
Just as he had been in the vision provided to Echo by the scrying bowl, Caius was hanging limp from chains connected to the ceiling. Seeing him in person was far, far worse.
His head hung down, dark hair falling messily across his forehead and obscuring his eyes. If not for the shallow and too-quick rise and fall of his chest, Echo would have assumed he was dead. The mere thought of his being dead—and the sight of him so close to it—made her stomach clench. His chest was bare, and he was clad only in a pair of well-worn leather breeches. The clothes he’d had on the day he was abducted were nowhere to be seen. Indeed, there was nothing else in the room except for him—and the chains. A horrified gasp escaped Echo as she took in Caius’s state. His torso was covered in dried blood. Welts marked his skin; it looked as though he’d been lashed with something thick and heavy, like a leather cord or a whip. The manacles around his wrists had rubbed his skin raw. The wounds were an angry shade of red and thickly encrusted with dried blood. His fingers rested on the chain connected to his shackles, as if he were holding on to it to take some of the pressure off his shoulders, wrenched upward as they were. Gods, how long had he been standing like this, dangling like a slab of meat at the butcher’s?
For all his haste to enter the room, Dorian was now as motionless as Echo. His expression was a rictus of pain, as if he himself were the one in chains, left to rot by his own sister.
“What are you waiting for?” Echo’s voice broke halfway through the question as a choked sob threatened to escape her. “Get him down.” Without waiting for Dorian to respond, she crossed the short footbridge to the island. She was mere feet from Caius when Dorian blocked her with an arm flung around her waist.
“I can’t,” he said bitterly. He jerked his chin at the ground.
Echo had been so transfixed by the horrific sight of Caius helpless and hurt that she hadn’t noticed the ground surrounding him, but now she saw what had delayed Dorian.