72. Down the Drain (Gadarien)¶
Gadarien sweated in his furs as the flowstream surged through the Gyre, an intense pressure suffusing his body. The snow was so thick that he could barely make out Vaye’s glowing face. He couldn’t see Adranaya at all. A high whining tone, just at the edge of perception, wove through the creaking of the ice.
The flowstream spun through the Gyre. Oddly, it seemed to slow a little between Vaye and Adranaya, as though hitting a bump. He wondered if it had to do with the tension that had lingered between the two of them since they’d left Cantereia. The awkwardness felt clear to Gadarien, but Vaye and Adranaya had both denied its existence. Even his spy training hadn’t helped him pry free its source.
Suddenly, something shifted in the flowstream. There was a space that hadn’t been there before, a vacuum. This was the moment.
“Now!” cried Vaye as she opened her mind. Planes of light blazed between the axes of their bodies, speeding up and growing brighter with each pass. Gadarien had already exceeded his previous limits, but he pushed on anyway, driving himself past the realm of safety or sanity. His extremities went numb, his arteries racing with power. It felt like jumping between grips on a climb, terrifying and raw.
A brilliant shaft of light shot up from the center of the ice, snowflakes glittering in its beam. Vaye half-laughed and half-screamed, stretching out her arms and throwing her head back.
The Gyre gave him a glimpse into Vaye’s intuition, and for the first time he truly sensed the flowstream the way she did. Far away, at the other end of the meridian, something pushed back like a marble stuck in a pipe. The blockage, although abstract and remote, possessed a tangible structure akin to the boulder they’d shattered with the War Chord. He marveled as Vaye shaped the flow to match its resonance, feeding the echoes back upon themselves. Abruptly, like a grape popping between his teeth, the resistance gave way, and he knew the Vorkyrda had fallen.
With nowhere else to go, the pulse they had sent bounced back up the meridian. He realized belatedly that they hadn’t discussed how to actually release the Gyre. Hopefully Vaye knew.
He tried to close off his own connection, but the flowstream forced its way in, tearing the edges of his mind. It was too much, and it kept getting worse. He was perceiving everything at once, the geometry of each individual snowflake crowding out his sense of self, the textures of the wind replacing his body’s memory of how to breathe.
But the flowstream coming in from the Tine wasn’t making its way around the Gyre evenly. It was, instead, striking a single point in the circle and reflecting back on itself, the resonance overlapping and growing with each pulse.
That point was Adranaya.
Vaye screamed, her fear spiking through the connection. Somehow, Adranaya had become a kind of mirror, forcing the flowstream to bounce back onto the other two. Gadarien felt Vaye try to shut it off, but he could tell she needed the full power of the Gyre to do so. Without the cooperation of all three of them, even Vaye was paralyzed. And if she couldn’t stop it, he had no chance.
Through the waves of snow, a second set of eyes and veins began to glow, as bright as Vaye’s. Adranaya muttered something, her voice strange and distant. It almost sounded like she was arguing with someone. All of Gadarien’s spare energy was required just to keep his heart pumping, but for a moment it seemed like Adranaya’s presence in the Gyre carried the weight of two separate minds.
Gadarien fell to his knees, his muscles spasming uncontrollably. “Adra!” Vaye screamed. “Please! You’ll kill us all!” The Sarmalan was beyond responding, though. She was on her knees as well, her head thrown back and her palms open as though beseeching the sky. She ignored Vaye, her voice desperate and unintelligible as she prayed or begged or did whatever she was doing.
Vaye fell last, clutching her head. Then the swirling whiteness swallowed them all.
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