Wicked Throne by Alex Hill

Author:Alex Hill [Hill, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

16

THE SECOND TIME I hallucinate, it isn’t Razanhi bel Magg who comes to kill me. I wake up in a glass cell.

Glass? Really? I’m thinking. Amateurs. I conjure a full-body shield and aim my right hand at the glass. I cast Shatter.

The hex’s yellow flash ripples across the surface and fades into diamond dust without so much as cracking the glass. The diamond dust drops to the steel floor and evaporates. The glass remains.

So it’s warded. Great. Not amateurs. I look around for something physical to break myself free. My eyes catch on a second pair of eyes looking back at me through the glass. Someone’s standing just outside.

He’s the man in Ygraine’s thaumograph. Me.

The Other Ivar’s cold dead eyes scare the hell out of me. People aren’t supposed to look like that. Not while looking at another person. His pupils relax and tighten, jumping into ovals and narrowing into slits, appraising. I don’t know what he’s thinking. He might as well be an alien. That scares me, too.

Mostly because I’ve seen eyes like that before. Working in the Black Tower Guard, you meet some psychopaths.

The other me taps on the tank’s control panel. Warm pink fluid bubbles from black pipes octopusing from the tank’s sides, flooding the glass cell until I’m suspended in gelatinous goo. Sharp pain digs into my arm. Black worms burrow under my sleeve, into my bones.

The dead eyes watch and do nothing. Only now, he’s not alone—twenty men wearing my stolen face surround the cell.

“What are you doing?” a female voice calls. “Azan?”

Lady Trold walks through the clones into my cell. Pink fluid pushes around her face and slicks back her long golden hair in a wave. Black worms drop from her narrow, pert nose. The room collapses around her and blurs into my suite in Tes Ap Hanhga.

I sputter. The pressure and the worms vanish. The poison-gas fear lights up my head. Trold reaches out as though to catch me but appears to think better of it and freezes with her arms up in case I’m really going to fall.

“I’m going to get a healer,” she gasps, and rushes out the door. Icy sickness floods my knees. I sit down on my unmade bed wearing Razanhi’s sweaty nightgown.

Desert heat slants through the open window. A blue-green ocean covers the horizon. Tes Ap Hanhga.

I was asleep. No, I was standing up.

A warm breeze rocks my hanging bed on its ropes. My sleeping potion sparkles blackly from the shell-colored nightstand along with half a glass of brandy and the reports cataloguing faerie survivors. Blazing dawn sizzles across the water, lighting up the emergent spires from Bakiba’s underwater city. My candy-blue room solidifies around me. Real, and not real.

O . . . kay. That’s got to stop. I grab the potion by its scrawny neck and fling it into the trash pot. Black liquid spatters the reef-colored hangings. I cup my face in my hands.

I don’t know if it’s the potion. My heart screams a million miles an hour, so hot it hurts.

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