He almost wished he hadn’t.
Slorn pressed his broad hands to the stone floor. Tiny tremors, too small for anyone who wasn’t feeling for them to notice, ran through the Shaper Mountain. They came in long, jagged scrapes, as though something far away was rubbing against the stone. Every time the stone shook, he saw a flicker of movement far, far below, a flicker of movement in the horrible, familiar shape of an enormous, clawed hand.
Slorn lifted his hands from the stone and folded them in his lap. If the hands were above as well as below, then Gredit was right. There was something terribly wrong with the world, something the Shepherdess didn’t want the spirits to see. The Shaper Mountain knew this, but it could not act because of the Shepherdess. However, Slorn was certain that, while the Teacher made all the motions of an obedient servant, not even the Shepherdess could cow such an old, stubborn spirit forever. All he had to do was wait.
With that, the problem of how to spend his imprisonment was decided. Slorn looked away from the bottom of the world and leaned back, settling against the cold stone of the mountain. When he was comfortable, he opened his mouth and, in a quiet voice, began to ask questions. He asked about the demonseeds, about the Dead Mountain, about the clawing hands. He asked about spirits, about humans, where they’d come from, why the Shepherdess had made them, why they were blind. Everything he wanted to know, he asked. No answers came, but Slorn did not stop. He would never stop until the stone replied. Nivel had told him once that he was as stubborn as a mountain. To honor her memory, to give meaning to her death, he was going to prove her right. And so he kept asking questions in the white silence until, far sooner than he expected, the cell door opened.
Miranda lay facedown on the stone floor, her eyes closed against the constant light of the mountain. It did no good. The light bled through her eyelids until even her dreams were suffused in white. She pushed herself up with a groan and stared glumly at the room that had become her world: a white box, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, no door, no windows, nothing even to mark which wall was which. Twice a day, the wall opened and a Shaper appeared with food, but otherwise she had no outside contact, no company at all. After the stone swallowed her, she’d lost consciousness and woken up here, alone. She hadn’t seen Slorn since the meeting, but worse than that, Gin was missing. His absence bothered her more than her own imprisonment, and since he wasn’t a bound spirit, she couldn’t even feel if he was alive or dead.
After she woke up, Miranda had spent the first dozen hours of her confinement trying to break out. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. Again, the Shapers had left her rings, and though the walls of her cell were part of the mountain, they were still stone. Mellinor’s water had broken down larger walls than these, so had Durn’s boulders. But the problem wasn’t the walls; it was her spirits. No matter how she harangued them, they refused to act against the mountain, and every time she asked why, every one of them gave the same answer: They could not raise their strength against a star.
Miranda pressed her cheek against the cold stone. A week ago, she wouldn’t have bought that excuse for a second. Now, after her meeting with the mountain, she understood a little better. Stars were spirits even greater than Great Spirits, chosen and backed by the greatest spirit of them all, the one called the Shepherdess. Spiritualist oath or no, so long as the Shaper Mountain was her jailer, her spirits could do nothing to help her. Not unless she forced them. Revulsion flooded her mind at the thought. She would die here before she Enslaved any spirit, much less her own.
Of course, dying here was looking more and more like her fate. She didn’t even know how long she’d been in her cell. Two days at least, but without a window she couldn’t be sure, and the guard never answered her questions. All she had was the endless, unchanging light and the slow feeling of time crawling over her skin.
Abandoning sleep, Miranda pushed herself up with a frustrated sigh. She walked to the white wall across from where she’d been lying and began running her fingers over the smooth stone. It was a futile effort. She’d already checked the walls hundreds of times. There were no cracks, no weaknesses. Still, she kept looking. She had to keep looking, keep trying for an escape, or she would go mad.
She was standing on tiptoe, running her fingers along the corner where the ceiling met the wall, when she heard the familiar soft grinding of stone. Miranda fell back on her heels and turned just in time to see the stone of the far wall fold in on itself to create a small door. It happened instantly, the flawless stone she’d run her fingers over just a minute before curling away to reveal the stern face and tall, heavy frame of the Shaper who served as her jailer. He was glowering, as usual, and Miranda glowered right back.