Gates of Thread and Stone(31)

Irra came to an abrupt halt at the top of a staircase. I skidded on my toes to keep from running into him. Avan steadied me with a hand on my lower back.

It felt different here. That empty feeling returned, stronger, pushing beneath my ribs: gnawing, cramping, ravenous. It dipped cold fingers into my chest.

“You feel that, right?” Avan murmured. I nodded and leaned into his hand, focusing on the warmth of his palm and letting it soak into my skin.

“This is where the walls of Etu Gahl end. For now. It does change.” Irra lifted his hand to indicate we should stay where we were.

We watched from the landing as Irra moved ahead and stood in the middle of a hallway that led to a dead end. I didn’t know what we were waiting for until I looked at his feet. The floor changed beneath him. No, not changed—aged.

I looked around. It wasn’t just the floor but the whole hallway. The walls turned from white to yellow to brown; paint bubbled and peeled; mold spread in a dark stain along the crease where the walls met the ceiling and then streaked down to the floor; an entire section of the wall sagged into the beams. In this narrow hallway, time had spilled forward at an unbelievable speed, nothing like what I could do.

But the threads remained undisturbed. Whatever he was doing, it was outside of time. Which didn’t make any sense, but my thoughts were too jumbled to work out what I was seeing.

New objects winked into being as well: end tables covered in lace and then linen and then plaid, set with silver saucers that gradually darkened to brittle brass. Paintings and photographs fastened themselves to the walls, the images fading in and out with new faces until the glass shattered and the wooden frames dwindled to dust. Past the hall where Irra stood, the dead end had given way, and a completely new room had sprung from nowhere.

“The living go to my sister when they pass,” he said. “But Etu Gahl is where ideas and objects come to die. My house is a place of forgotten things.”

Irra glanced back, and I felt his stare inside me, like something alive.

“What are you?” I asked.

“The hunger that cramps your stomach. The decay that shrivels your crops.” He dragged his fingers along the wall. It blistered and rotted beneath his touch. “The shadows that carve into your cheeks.”

He folded his elegant, slender hands at his waist. His golden-brown eyes were soft and warm and terrifying.

“I have been known as Famine. But call me Irra.”





CHAPTER 16




MY JAW SNAPPED shut. Magic was the only explanation for why he could do such extraordinary and inexplicable things. Like me.

But I had a feeling he wasn’t like me. Or rather, I wasn’t like him. This was way beyond my own abilities. Was this what a real mahjo could do?

“Wait,” I said, stepping back and forgetting that I was standing at the top of a staircase. Fortunately, Avan’s hand kept me from tumbling backward.

Irra chuckled. “Is it so hard to believe?”

After what I’d just seen him do? No. And yes. Because as much as magic remained a vital element in Ninurta, as much as I was reminded of it every time I watched a Gray in motion, I had never seen magic do this.

Suddenly, I could understand how powerful the mahjo must have been before Rebirth.

“How did you do that?” I gestured to the hallway still shifting around him, although the speed had slowed. “You just . . . How?”

I knew it was a difficult question to answer, but I still wanted to know. Even though, if someone asked me how I could sense the threads, I would say, “Beats me.”

“I am Infinite,” he said, as if that explained everything instead of confusing me more.

I shook my head. “What is that, like . . . immortal?”

“Generally, yes.”

What the drek was that supposed to mean? “You can’t really think you’re immortal?”


“Among other things,” Irra said breezily. “But no matter. Most of my hollows aren’t sure what to believe, either. I suspect a few of them still think I’m simply a demented mahjo and that Etu Gahl is a lunatic’s magic gone wild.” He didn’t seem bothered by that fact. If anything, he sounded amused.

“Are you mahjo?” Avan asked.

“No,” he said. “But we are connected.”

Seeing what he could do, I was tempted to believe him. But immortality seemed like something much bigger than wielding magic.

Avan’s fingers flexed against my back. “What are you doing here,” he asked, “hiding in the Void with a bunch of hollows?”

“They’re human, right?” I added. I remembered G-10’s smile, the girls we’d passed in the hallway, and the tattoos on their necks.

“For the most part,” Irra said. “And I’m here because my brother—Ninurta, your Kahl Ninu—built his city to spite the laws of our kind.”

The floorboards groaned beneath Irra’s weight as he joined us on the landing again. Behind him, the hallway and the room had stopped changing, and settled into the same state of general disrepair as the rest of the fortress.

“The laws,” Irra continued, “that forbid direct interference with humans.”

“Kahl Ninurta the First?” Every Kahl took on the name of Ninu, and the current one had ruled since before I was born.