Page 93 of House of Dusk
“Youremember?” Sephre repeated, warily.
There were all sorts of tricks that could supposedly awaken memories of past lives. Sephre had tried her fair share of them as a girl, staring into still pools, walking backward holding her breath. Hoping to catch a glimpse of herself doing great deeds, fighting alongside Breseus and Polypox, voyaging to the Pillars of Eternity. Or even something more mundane, but worthy: bringing healing and comfort as a physician, growing old with a large family she had nurtured and kept safe.
All it got her were damp tunics and several painful lumps on the back of her head. She searched Nilos’s eyes. “You have the Serpent’s memories?”
He nodded, something flitting across his face too fast for her to catch. “More with each mark I take.”
“How manyhaveyou taken?”
“Not enough. Not all of them.”
“So you don’t remember why she went along with it? Did she know slaying the Serpent would cause the cataclysm?”
Nilos gave an eloquent shrug. “She had lost much. Suffered much. But she still loved the world. I don’t think she knew the devastation she would cause. She believed the Ember King’s lies.”
“Which would explain why she fled from him, afterward. Why she took the Embrace. She regretted what she’d done.”
His gaze shuttered.
“Do you remember her name?”
“No. Not yet.”
Sephre shifted, trying to ease the pain chewing at her shoulder. “And what about the rest? Everything that happened after the Serpent was destroyed? How do you know that someone took the Serpent’s place?”
“Most is rumors and whispers and bits of old histories pieced together into a ragged cloth. The skotoi themselves have revealed some of it.”
“Like their new master.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know the Maiden brought Letheko to Stara Bron and made the agia swear to keep it hidden from the Ember King?”
Nilos sat straighter, jerking his green gaze back to her. “The dagger of unmaking is at Stara Bron?”
“It was. But Beroe gave it to Lacheron. He was planning to bring it back to Helissa City, to give it to Hierax. Though if he’s so set on stopping the Serpent, you’d think he’d be trying to use it on you. He’s the one who set the prince on your trail.”
“Yes, an unfortunate complication.” Nilos grimaced. “It’s part of the reason I wasn’t able to reach you sooner. I’m sorry for that.” He frowned into the flames. “I should have been there.”
She squeezed her eyes shut against the images that swam up. Obelia, crushed under a mountain of rotting flesh. Halimede, her chest shattered. Timeus, torn away. Vanishing into a strange and baleful land, in the grip of a demon.
Timeus was so young, sap-strong and overgrowing himself with eagerness. She could not fathom it, all that life trapped within the grimness of the labyrinth. Every story of the land of the dead spiraled through her skull like a flock of corpse crows. The luminous pools that slaked no thirst. The endless passages that taunted you with the promise of an escape that was always just beyond reach. The strange, spectral gleam of the duskflowers that bloomed only in the netherworld. She’d teased Abas about it, once.Iswear one day I’ll go out there and find that you’vemanagedto cultivate duskbloom.
The joke felt sinister now.
“It’s not your fault,” she said roughly. “And I can still save Timeus. The skotoi took him. They said I could have him back, if I followed them. Into the labyrinth.”
“You know it’s a trap.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course it’s a trap.”
“But you’re going anyway.”
“Yes. But first I need to find a way into the labyrinth. Preferably one that doesn’t involve dying. I heard there might be an entrance at Stara Sidea.”
“There was.” He winced as if the words were thorns. “But the House of Dusk was destroyed in the cataclysm. It’s only ruins now.”
“But you know where it is.”
