All 4 books in the new series now available!
To celebrate the release, here’s another exclusive look inside The Nicodemus Path:
A man stood stock-still in the street as if thinking, swathed in a cloak, but she would have sworn it was an elf. As tall as Del and broader across the shoulders, every other detail hidden by a cloak of midnight blue, its hood drawn forward. It absolutely had to be the elf who encouraged them to break the Nicodemus Path in the first place, it wasn’t as if they routinely visited the human community.
At this point, he set off down the street in her direction. The way he moved was feral and fluid, and she found it menacing. He was walking with greater haste than was ordinary, and as his cloak stirred about him, it revealed the presence of a sword at his hip. Having passed a week in one of their cities, she had perceived that they didn’t consider their right to own weapons a mandate; men and women with martial jobs went armed, but no one else did.
He crossed the passing way where Danae lurked without a glance. She watched him go, torn. So far as she knew, Del had yet to come up with a theory for why one of his people had lied to hers in order to convince them to destroy a piece of elven property that existed for the purpose of protecting humans. It seemed like both their peoples would be well-served by the truth.
Decided, she set off after him. He walked south unerring and swift, away from Thesra. Not toward the Nicodemus Path, which was south and west of here, but out toward the fields. He then passed through the fields, fallow for the season and deserted. Into the forest.
Danae hesitated again, teetering at this margin. Delephon had told her how different the elven wilderness was, how fraught with dangers she could scarcely imagine. By that very token, what was an elf doing marching out into the woods? An elf, by the way, of dubious intentions.
Drawing a deep breath, she plunged forward.
At first, the woodland seemed no different from the one she and Matros had run through as children, save that, as everywhere in the elven version of reality, there was a glamor that was hard to define. A quality to sounds and smells and the light itself that made the place feel more vividly alive than the world to which she was accustomed. Then a jewel-bright bird flashed past her. This lark-sized creature’s iridescent green tail feathers trailed a foot behind it and left shimmers in her vision even after it had vanished among the trees.
As if it had been a harbinger or guide, the entire woodland seemed to change after that. There were pools of water so still they might have been made of glass, with great, black, lion-maned fish drifting beneath their surface. A thousand birds each with a different song poignant or gay. Deer moved between the trees, deer with delicate hooves and horns exquisitely fluted, with brightly-colored ribbons tied about them, which she could only assume was the work of elves. The trees were bigger and older than any she had ever seen. At one point, she almost walked headlong into a spiderweb big enough to serve as a bedspread; as she backed away, the web’s mistress watched her go from a nearby branch from multifaceted eyes on a body the size of a chicken.
It was hard to keep the elf in sight. Not because he was hurrying or making an attempt at stealth, but because she was so distracted. She trailed after him absently, gawking at a natural environment as fantastical to her as the great city of Haikuron had been. She kept one eye on him, some hundred feet ahead of her, and put her real attention on the syrup-scented ferns dripping jewels of nectar onto the forest floor, the old leaves like lace that dropped on her head occasionally, the never-ending rainbow of bird song.
It must have been an hour later that she woke as if from a dream to the sound of rushing water. They had come to a stream bounding through the woods, and the elf she followed had stopped at its bank. Shaking her head to clear away the cobwebs of wonder, Danae moved behind a tree and watched. He squatted suddenly, cloak billowing, and reached out to the dancing waters. He brought his cupped palm to his lips once. Then he straightened and turned to look at her.
Danae found herself staring into the liquid eyes of a buck. The deer’s ear flicked once, again. One foreleg lifted, cocked. Then, with a suddenness that made her jump, it bounded away along the course of the stream.
She followed it with her eyes, unable to grasp what had happened. She might not have been paying the attention she should have, given how dangerous this half-witted and impetuous errand was, but she couldn’t have mistaken a man for a deer. There was no resemblance whatsoever between them. One second there had been an elf there, the next an animal. She wondered if the elf had transformed into a deer when he realized he was being followed, but she didn’t know enough about their magic to know if that was possible.
While she thought it over, she rested a hand on the metal spike protruding from the tree beside her, leaning on it to take a bit of the weight off her sore-soled feet. It was another minute before the strangeness of this registered. Then she turned to face the tree, hoping it wasn’t about to turn into a deer too. The pine remained reassuringly tree-like, tall, inanimate, covered with bark and needles, but now she came to look, she saw there were lengths of metal driven into its trunk from a few feet off the ground up into its canopy. Each of them was perfectly horizontal, extending several inches out of the wood on opposite sides at even intervals. A ladder.
Climbing it seemed an even stupider proposition than following that elf out here in the first place. For all she knew, he was up there waiting. Maybe this was how he’d seemed to vanish. She couldn’t bear the prospect of returning to Delephon in order to tell him she had stopped at the foot of the tree, though.
A Veil of Waters
Finally, he found himself climbing through a platform shaped like a crescent, wrapped around half of the tree. He couldn’t determine what the floor was made of as he stepped off the trunk onto its surface, and he saw a quantity of metal one didn’t expect to find at the top of a tree. The platform was open, rimmed in a balustrade of bronze. Tall candelabra gave off light that seemed unnaturally white for the flames of candles and leant a bluish cast to the roof of leaves above him. An oak might not shed its leaves for the season, but it was passing strange that they hadn’t changed color. He frowned as he struggled to recall whether it had been so when he began to climb or whether the tree had been facially normal at the foot of the ladder.
A tall and slender figure stood at the far railing, looking out among the leaves onto the skeletal forest canopy. Garbed in a loose robe of pink and red and gold that trailed across the floor, one might almost mistake it for an elf. When it turned to regard him, it was obvious it wasn’t. The being’s visage was wrapped in lengths of linen, leaving only a shadowy opening across the eyes, but the face below this slit thrust outward in what looked more like a beak than anything. What are you? he wondered.
It made a chattering noise, and he knew that it was speaking. A sing-song voice arrived in his head without passing through his ears: This is your question?
“No,” he said shortly. “That’s why I chose not to say it out loud.”
It clacked and hissed at him. The words in your mind and the words in your mouth sound the same to me, elfling.
“How about this: when I ask my question, I’ll tell you I’m doing it.”
It made no response, head rotating one way and then another.
Isador studied the oracle in turn, wondering what it was and where it came from. Nothing he knew of but Telume himself could invade one’s thoughts; it was curious that it couldn’t distinguish between the ineffable currents of the mind and sensory perceptions deriving from the material functioning of Asal. It fit with the only other fact he knew about this creature, which was that it could see into the future. Not the way seers saw, in random unlooked-for flashes, but as it chose and at will. It was as if this thing was only present for a certain value of present. If that was true, it was like nothing else he knew of in this world, which reinforced his suspicion that it wasn’t from here.
Whence come you? he wondered.
And this is not your question, either?
Did I say so?
It approached, pacing a slow circle around him. Its movement were strange and unlovely, a bobbing forward and backward that minded him again of the avian. It smelled of sweet desert spices, fennel seed and coriander. It stepped softly, each footfall accompanied by a clicking noise. He couldn’t tell if this was caused by clawed feet or hard-soled footwear.
You are frightened, but you are not uncertain.
“Disappointed?”
It made no response, pacing another circle around him. Then it turned away. It made a gesture with one arm that rippled the trailing sleeve without exposing the appendage. You need not worry. I will strike no deal with you, elfling.
Surrender Together
The hidden valley was shaped like the head of a spade, a long, straight cliff along the face where they had entered, tapering into a point at the western end. The ground rose as the verdant hot-spring-warmed soil ran out. Maybe thirty yards from the spot where the valley reached its end, their guide stopped before a short patch of vertical rock not much taller than her head. She stepped up to the rocky wall and placed both hands against it, leaning forward with her head bowed. Then she stepped back and gestured them forward into the hole that had appeared. Not a cave with its entrance hidden, Delephon saw, but a doorway cached in the side of this mountain.
They entered a passage that was totally dark, the gelid moisture condensing on its too-close walls to give the place a sense of boding. They took only a few steps forward before the door closed behind them with a portentous thump, shutting them in darkness. “There are steps,” he could hear their guide murmur, addressing the concern to her brother in the lead.
The choking way led them up a flight of stairs, maybe as many as twenty-five, and it took them a while to negotiate in the dark, burdened and in tandem and operating blind. At the head of the stair, they emerged into a more open space loud with the sound of moving water. Their way came to resemble a natural cave rather than a tunnel carved by hands, and along one side of the path ran an energetic stream. Delephon felt the cool spray coming off of it and wondered if it could be the same stream they had slept beside last night. It was still cold as it came off the mountain’s flanks, before it entered the valley.
This peaceful length of corridor ended in another doorway, and at first Delephon didn’t understand why they had come to a halt just beyond: the door was already ajar. It took him a minute to realize this was precisely what was worrying. There was a breathless pause, while the rest of them hesitated in confusion and their guide stood frozen with one hand outstretched, too afraid to do anything. Then she raised her voice ever-so-slightly, calling, “Shirin? Nenet?”
Only silence answered her.
Become
When they felt the first tremors in the wall, the defenders descended to ground level. Delephon fell back with his friends into the mouth of an intersecting lane a block away; the streets in this quadrant of the city had long since been purged of refugees, the houses evacuated. There should not be a single person left in the area who wasn’t party to the plan, armed, armored, with no other burdens weighing them down, ready to fight and then to run as their strategy dictated.
Standing at the wall’s base while he listened to the stone’s groaning, he had been convinced it would topple at any second. Now, however, time went from a speeding cataract to a sluggish clot while they waited. He was very conscious of the beating of his heart, the rush of blood through his veins, and had to fight not to hold his breath.
Even when it happened, it seemed to do so slowly. The wall moaned, then screamed, as the earth beneath it rumbled ominously. He thought he could see cracks spreading through the stone, and the ground came apart all at once, as if it had exploded. The tall white cliff buckled, bent, and folded at its center. The bulk of it fell outward, doubtless crushing hundreds more of the enemies who seemed endless. Shattered blocks of masonry tumbled into the city as well, smashing trees and punching through the walls of houses. The drama of it was awe-inspiring and weirdly satisfying: if they must die, at least let them do so spectacularly.
There was a delay before their foes began appearing. Delephon had an inkling that they hadn’t bothered to clear the area before the wall came down, assuming they even knew that was going to happen. They could easily have fashioned a tunnel to get in, with ample building supplies available in the human community, and that way, they needn’t have sacrificed everyone involved in digging. It seemed likely that they hadn’t tried, and he had a brief mental image of the monsters clustered in their multitudes around the tunnel’s far mouth, weapons clutched in eager hands, as the mass of stone came down on them.
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