Chapter 326

Zaeryn stopped walking, and Astraea continued for another two steps before turning toward him.

He remained where he was, struggling to reconcile the calm way she had said it with the implications of what she was telling him.

He thought of Tiffany standing between him and the door, her familiar face made frightening by Pyralis looking through her eyes.

"He was trying to possess me?"

"Possessing you, or most people on your world, is very difficult for Pyralis without an opening," Astraea said. "That did not stop him from trying. He thought you might be at your lowest after everything that has happened, and he was looking for the access he would need to influence you. He could not obtain it."

Zaeryn brought a hand to his forehead.

The absence of pain had convinced him, eventually, that whatever had happened was over. Now he understood how little that had told him.

"It was the most painful thing I’ve ever felt," he said. "I could barely hear anything over the ringing, and for a moment I could barely see. If that was him failing, I don’t want to know what would have happened if he’d succeeded."

He looked away from her, breathing out slowly.

He now had his answer, and it made a great deal of sense. Pyralis had told him they would meet again. Zaeryn had imagined another confrontation, perhaps another person sent after him, something that would at least have a face he could recognize.

He had not imagined falling to his knees in a quiet hallway while the women beside him prepared to defend themselves against him.

"Can he still get to me?" he asked.

"Not here."

"And when I wake up?"

Astraea stepped back toward him.

"He can try again, which is why I brought you here. I’m not supposed to interfere in your world at all, and I have already stretched that further than I should. Consider this the last time either of us can help you."

"Why can’t you help further?"

"The rules," Astraea said. "Once a world has been made, it belongs to the people in it. Those who made it may watch, and they may give a little, but every time one of us reaches in, the balance shifts, and the others are entitled to answer in kind."

Zaeryn stared at her, looking for an argument that might change her mind, and when he could not find one he gave a reluctant nod as she indicated the path ahead.

He resumed walking beside her, although he no longer felt much inclination to examine the scenery.

"The Fade can’t affect you," Astraea continued. "That hasn’t changed. Pyralis has already seen that the corruption which works on other men doesn’t work on you, and now he is testing another way of overcoming your resistance."

"Through my mind."

"Through an attempt to impose his will directly upon yours. Your mind resisted him, and the Eros Engine reinforced that resistance. He couldn’t make the connection hold."

Zaeryn remembered how the ringing had risen and fallen, becoming worse whenever he thought it might finally be easing.

"Was that why it kept happening in waves?"

"Each attempt put you under strain," Astraea replied. "When he withdrew, the strain ended."

He walked in silence for several paces, trying to make that explanation fit what he had experienced.

There had been nothing inside his thoughts that sounded like another person. He had not heard a voice instructing him to do anything, or felt an urge he could identify as foreign. There had only been pain and the increasingly frightening realization that he could not make it stop.

"The system didn’t know," he said eventually. "I asked it what was happening, and it couldn’t tell me."

"It could detect what was happening to you. It couldn’t trace the source of the interference."

"But you made it."

"I did, and I can improve what it recognizes now that I have examined the attempt."

He looked at her.

"Then improve it."

Astraea held his gaze for a moment, and he wondered whether he had finally spoken to her too bluntly. ’Shit, she’s a goddess and I...’

"That is one of the reasons I brought you," she said, answering before the thought could finish.

They emerged from the trees beside a long pool. Water lilies covered the farther end, while the nearer side reflected the columns of an open pavilion. Astraea followed the edge of the water, keeping to a pace that allowed him to remain beside her without hurrying.

"How did he find me?" Zaeryn asked.

"He has encountered you directly. He knows what he is looking for when he reaches toward you."

Zaeryn did not like the sound of that at all.

"So meeting him once was enough?"

"Enough for him to recognize you," Astraea said. "Recognition does not give him unrestricted access. If it did, he would not have needed to struggle against your resistance tonight."

He understood the distinction, although it did nothing to make him feel better about being recognizable to something that could hurt him without entering the same building.

"Why now?"

"I don’t yet know why he chose tonight. But consider this the start of his attempts to get to you. He either wants you dead, or he wants to be sure you can never threaten him."

Zaeryn fell silent.

He remembered the hallway, the ringing in his ears, and the terrifying sensation of his own body refusing to obey him. He had managed to resist Pyralis once, but that didn’t mean the next attempt would be any easier.

"He can reach me like that whenever he wants?"

"He can try."

Zaeryn looked at her. "Then let’s start with the system. You said you could improve it. I want to know the moment he tries again."

Astraea turned toward the pavilion, and he followed her along the edge of the water.

The pavilion stood a few steps back from the water, a ring of pale columns around a floor of the same stone as the terrace, and the sun had warmed it enough that he could feel the heat through the soles of his feet. Astraea did not go in. She stopped at the edge of the pool instead, where the lilies thinned out and the surface lay flat enough to show the columns upside down, and she looked down at it as though she were reading something written there.

"Come and look," she said.

Zaeryn stepped up beside her and saw his own reflection, and then the reflection went still in a way that reflections do not, and the water cleared until it showed nothing of the garden at all.

What replaced it was a structure made of light. It hung beneath the surface like a lattice, silver-white and finely worked, with warmer threads running through it and holding it in place, and the whole of it glowed with a steady, unhurried brightness. It took him a moment to understand that he was looking at himself, or at whatever Astraea could see when she looked past his face, and another moment to understand that the warmer threads were his bonds. He found it mildly alarming how much of the structure they were holding up, and how little he had known about it.

"This is what happened to you tonight," Astraea said. "Watch the highest point."

A single gold thread slid into the water from the far edge of the pool, so thin that he nearly missed it, and drifted toward the lattice until it touched the highest point of the structure. The lattice bowed inward where it made contact. The thread withdrew, and a moment later it came back and pressed a little harder at the same place, and he realized that the rhythm was the one he had felt in the hallway, the swell and the retreat and the swell again, each one worse than the one before. His right eye ached faintly at the sight of it, which he decided to blame on his imagination.

Every time the gold thread pressed, the warmer threads around that point drew in closer and held, and the lattice did not break. After the last push the gold thread slid away across the water and was gone.

"That is Pyralis," Astraea said. "Or the narrow piece of him that could reach you. The system saw the strain, but it had nothing on record to compare the cause against, so all it could do was tell you that something was wrong."

She lifted one hand over the water with two fingers extended, and a line of pale light ran down from them into the surface. The gold thread appeared again, held motionless where it had touched the lattice, and the light wrapped itself around it and sank into the structure at that exact point.

For a moment nothing else happened. Then text unfolded at the edge of Zaeryn’s vision, and he read it twice.

? System update: Mind intrusion recognition.

? Source: Pyralis, the Dragon Lord.

? Method: Direct intrusion upon consciousness.

? Status: Signature registered. Early warning enabled.

"It will name him the moment he reaches for you," Astraea said, lowering her hand, and the water let the lattice go and became a pool again, with the lilies drifting back across it.

"Will it stop him?"

"No. It can only tell you who is at the door. Keeping him out is still your work. You need to work on your mental strength. Should be easy for you since you already managed to keep him out. Now work on making sure you are totally unaffected."

Zaeryn opened his mouth to answer.

"Time to go home," Astraea said.

He never got the first word out. The pool, the pavilion and the woman standing beside him were gone between one breath and the next, and the cushions of his sofa were under him again, with the light of an ordinary morning coming through the windows.