Chapter Text
Otabek swings his staff, pivoting on his heel to clear the space behind him.
Sweat is beginning to bead on the back of his neck: he has cut down three courtyards full of spectres. An orange-golden sun hangs high overhead, casting the beginnings of afternoon shadows on the Mediterranean city. His furs lie abandoned on the threshold of the world, and he wears only loose cotton pants.
All around him is a tiered complex of abandoned courtyards; jungle columns framing cracked checkerboard floors, through which mosses and weeds are breaking. He seems to be on the outskirts of the city: to the South, he can see large buildings, and a tower that stands tall and imposing. In the other direction, distant cloud forest and pastures.
There are no people anywhere in sight.
But there are certainly spectres. The landscape is crawling with them; there is one at least every four yards. They move among the courtyards, drifting aimlessly like fog above a lake.
Otabek stops to drink from a lion’s mouth fountain, which is still flowing despite the city’s emptiness. He splashes water over his face and down his bare back. He drinks again, deeply; he has seen water alone keep men and women alive through weeks of fasting, and give them strength for physical training when all other wells of energy have dried up.
He has already pushed down several rushes of adrenaline. When he first saw the specters so close, he felt it. And when his staff slashed through the first ephemeral body, and its nothingness had been torn by the fragments of the subtle knife. He had felt A wave of affirmation as the tour inspector had vanished. But the quickening of his pulse and the rush of excitement or fear will only make him tired when it wears off. He needs to save that for the last push.
He feels Pasha’s absence. Already, he is longing for her. Aching to share the newness of these sites and smells. And under that ache is another, more useless than the first: Yuri Plisetsky already feels like a dream of a mirage.
Otabek runs down a set of steps into another courtyard, and cuts down the specters there quickly and mechanically, trying to find his center again. He slashes his way through a fourth courtyard, and then through a little stand of trees. A man’s body is lying, partially decomposed, against a trunk. Otabek averts his eyes quickly. He holds his breath until he is away from the stench of death.
The courtyard through the trees is thicker with spectres than the ones before it, and he concentrates on cutting down as many as possible with each swipe of his staff. He turns with it, keeping lightness and inertia so that his muscles need barely work. Every moment of physical and mental training that he has ever undergone is in use right now, and the satisfaction of that drives him into a powerful meditative state, through which he twirls and slashes, his breathing rate barely changed, for perhaps two hours.
Then, as he stops to drink from another fountain, a realization comes upon him.
The tide of the specters is beginning to shift.
Instead of aimless drifting in all directions, there is an eastward motion across the landscape. The specters are beginning to move toward the opening into his world. And suddenly, with that uniformity of movement, Otabek can see just how many of them there are.
An eerie whiteness oozes from the distant forests.
What he had thought was fog over the pasturelands is now moving toward him.
And from the direction of the tower, they spill like the cresting of a wave.
Otabek’s stomach twists. This is not going to go as he planned.
How can there be so many of them? How? Where are they all coming from? The corpses in this city are still decomposing. How can such a plague of the supernatural have swept so quickly over this world?
His head suddenly spins with a horrible thought. Panic threatens.
What if someone like him let them in? Someone trying to do something good?
They have already sensed Pasha. Feeling blindly along his connection to her, they are already turning for his world. He has endangered his whole party: how will they defend themselves, when not just a small battalion, but an unyielding and untiring ocean of spectres crashes over them?
Otabek runs for the opening. He should not run. He should save that strength. But he thinks of Yuri, and he has to.
He slashes ferociously at the spectres that have already reached it, before they can get through.
He must not think of Yuri anymore. His heart and mind are flying out of his control, hammering and wild. He needs to stay grounded, to stay here. To catch every spectre before it goes through.
But hours pass, and soon they are coming thick and fast. He cannot cut down every single one. One at a time, they are slipping past him.
Pasha, he thinks desperately, trying to locate her and send her his thoughts. Come. We’ll have to let them get us here. Maybe we can keep them in Chitagazzee…
But he cannot feel her, and he knows that wherever she is, she cannot hear him.
He starts instead to pray as he fights. He barely breathes the words, to save his air. But he moves his lips and fills his thoughts with all the devout desperation that he feels.
But the spirits in this world are unfamiliar to him, and the only energy he can feel around him is the empty, void-like energy of the spectres.
Night falls. The temperature drops. His staff feels heavy in his hands, and he is desperately thirsty. He has to pause for a moment to drink from the oil skin on his leg. As he does it, he feels a chill as the spectres press past him, brushing his skin.
In the darkness, he can no longer see what he is fighting. But he knows that they are there. They will keep pressing forward all night, and through the next day, and on and on and on.
His body is tiring, and quickly. He should rest, and sleep for a little while. But to do so would mean letting the stream of specters go untapped onto Svalbard.
No. He will not sleep again as he is. He will have to stay in this very spot, swinging his staff like this, until one of these creatures finds Pasha. He will sleep once he is a solid ghost, like Michele the missionary.
His heart sinks with true despair.
This was not worth it. His life will barely make a dent. It would take an army of shamans… where are they all coming from?
I’m sorry, he thinks frantically to Pasha. I’m so sorry. I thought… I thought we could do more here. I thought it would be worth it, I swore…
And they had. At eight years old, they had sworn themselves to protect the balance between the worlds. Sworn it with a solemnity and certainty far beyond their years.
With each sweep of his staff, a handful of specters were gone. And that was good. It was.
But it wasn’t worth the lives it was going to cost.
Otabek slashes harder, as hard as he can, and suddenly his foot slips from the ledge.
He overbalances and falls forward. He rolls to catch himself, but he is on slope, and his body keeps rolling for several moments in the darkness. He has the presence of mind to hold onto his staff, but that leaves him with only one hand to try and right himself. He bumps against a stone and tries grab ahold of it, but he misses and the slope is steep now, and sandy. He is sliding down on his side, reaching desperately for something to grab onto. But there is nothing, and it is several more moments before he is finally tossed, winded, onto flat ground.
His exhausted body resists, heavy and bruised and sand-scratched, as he pulls himself to his feet again. He can see nothing but thick blackness around him. He doesn’t even know if he can find his way back to the ledge. He will have to try to climb back up the way he fell…he reaches for the sandy slope…and freezes.
There is something behind him.
He can hear it breathing. It is close.
He tenses his body, his grip tightening on the staff.
But then the thing behind him speaks. A voice materializing from the darkness, and with a touch of sarcasm in it. “You are going to need to make a different plan.”