Nausea still held Domi in its grip when he, Valens, and the other Silvula Salutis sorcerers reached the border.
"Never make me do that again," he told Valens, his voice husky from constant vomiting. He lifted his head just enough to cast Arbita a queasy glare as she stepped off the skychariot behind the two of them. "Or at least make your betrothed help me next time."
"Sorry, Kiddo," the physician said with a sympathetic smile. And she no doubt was sorry, for all the good it did him. What was the point of having magic if you didn't use it? "Most of the work lifeholders do uses up promenia. I can't make more of it the way worldholders can."
"But—"
She patted his back with a soothing touch. "I realize airsickness might make you miserable enough you think you're going to die, but until that's an actual risk, I can't spare the promenia for something so minor."
"Minor?" Domi managed around a burp. He held his roiling belly. "I am going to die of this if Valens makes me do it again. I'm sure of it. I'll want to die."
The half-hour journey along the skyway had been awful. Domi had never traveled faster than his own feet carried him or higher than the upper stories of a domus in all his life. Careening three hundred fifty miles an hour along a thread-thin promenia track in a cramped skychamber high above the clouds had been an experience he never wanted to repeat.
"You're back on the ground again," Arbita reminded him as she continued to rub his back. The soothing touch helped ease the nausea. A little. "And look. There's a sight we'll never again get to see."
"We hope," Valens added, his voice grim as his amber eyes narrowed up at the sky.
Domi had never caught his aedificans sounding disturbed about anything. Dread sank like a cold, hard stone into his belly. He followed the man's gaze and gasped. "Oh, that can't be good."
On the horizon, the Trellis weeped golden sparks that fell to the snowy earth below. Beyond the fiery teardrops, no net of light remained at all, just jagged fragments of angry molten gold. They trailed off into a burgundy sky far darker than any Domi had ever seen.
"Is that the night-side?" His voice sounded faint to his own ears.
"No," Valens said. "But it might as well be, without the Trellis."
The other worldholder aedificans, Serenitas—a tall woman with dark-bronze skin and long black hair hanging down her back in a wealth of tiny braids—stepped up beside them. "Can you feel it, Domi?"
"Feel what?" The damaged promenia apparatus almost shrieked, the hum was so loud. He didn't understand how anyone could concentrate enough to feel anything. A headache gathered behind his eyes, distracting him from the biting wind, and blood bubbled from one nostril.
Valens exchanged a frustrated glance with Arbita. "I don't want him trying to sense anything yet, Serenitas," Valens said. He turned to Domi, who found himself relaxing as Arbita's soothing wave of promenia drained his headache away. "When you're more experienced, you'll be able to sense the Trellis's general shape and condition near your location. Worldholders are more sensitive to promenia than the other lineages, and there's a wealth of it in the Trellis."
"If you could sense it," Serenitas said, "you'd be able to tell that part of it has... Well..." She hesitated.
"Melted," Valens supplied with a glare up at the bleeding lattice of fire. "The idiot Princeps in Vola Apertus melted a fifty-mile-long segment of the Trellis."
"Is anyone still alive who was under it when it came down?" Domi asked. The breath squeezed out of his chest as his mind filled with images of liquid fire raining down on some unsuspecting village.
Arbita swallowed. "There are at least two survivors. They need care. Let's go."
The group of thirty-seven Promethidae hiked the last half-mile from the skyhaven to the last waystation still under the Trellis's protective light.
Domi's nausea relented even as his headache from the promenia and his uneasiness about being so near the damaged edge of the Trellis increased.
"What are we going to do when we get there?" he asked Valens.
"You're going to stay out of the way."
Arbita rested a hand on his shoulder, guiding him toward the wooden structure overlooking the nightmarish landscape beyond. "Your aedificans and the other worldholders will repair the Trellis and remediate any rogue promenia in the area. My lifeholder alumnas and I will tend any wounded and rehabilitate damage to fields, livestock, and water sources. The forgeholders will repair the aqueducts and buildings. And the starholders and mindholders will drive out the clivias."
The waystation turned out to be half domus, half barracks. Made of wood with promenia reinforcements against weather that sometimes proved harsh in the borderlands, the building was massive enough to house and feed up to fifty Promethidae at once. Someone carved and painted the wood to resemble arches and other useless adornments.
Domi rolled his eyes as their group trudged through the snowy courtyard and he spotted a bubbling fountain. The water should be frozen solid, but promenia rang within it. Their curia held a rather strange notion of the ancient proverb "waste not, want not."
"You stay with me so Valens can work," Arbita said, nudging him ahead of her as they stepped within. "Let's go check on my patients in the infirmary." She turned aside, murmuring instructions to several lifeholder kids around Domi's age. Once they departed to their tasks, she guided him down a hallway with rich but muddy rugs to a pair of double doors.
Inside the spacious waystation infirmary, they found the two survivors of the Trellis failure. The pair were in a bad way.
Domi recoiled in shock at the appearance of the Promethidae huddled, shaking and feverish, on two of the infirmary cots. Something profoundly unnatural had happened to the Empowered young man and woman, who, if Domi must guess, were brother and sister even though one was a forgeholder and the other a worldholder.
The fevers shaking the two gave their skin a sickly cast, but these two did not just look grayish or flushed, as very ill people sometimes appeared. A strange bluish tinge mottled their complexions, and to Domi's horror, frost-like, almost crystalline scales crept over their skin from their wounds.
Arbita did not seem as disturbed by the appearance of her patients as Domi. She offered a sympathetic smile and said, her voice casual, "Well, it appears the two of you had a nasty run-in with a clivia."
The patients stirred. The young woman squinted at them and drifted back to sleep. Her brother rolled onto his side and studied the lifeholder with bleary eyes for a moment before offering a weak smile.
"Not just one, Arbita," he said in a croak. "So many."
Promenia wafted through the air and gathered around the two patients. The wavering distortion sank first into the young forgeholder woman and then floated up out of her like mist and seeped into the young worldholder man.
"I realize this is unpleasant, Epileus," Arbita said after a moment as she peered at him with a faraway gaze. "But thank the Eternal Radiance, it's not life-threatening. Which means you know the drill. No healing, just treatment."
The young man nodded, then coughed, and Arbita turned aside to cast Domi a pointed glance. She inclined her chin toward an empty pitcher on the bedside table.
Grateful to have something to do other than stare at the weird wounds, he grabbed it and retreated to the back of the infirmary to pump water from the spigot. While the lukewarm crystal-clear water poured into the pitcher, he wondered if the pipes in the fountain connected to the pipes supplying water here. If so, using promenia to keep the fountain from freezing made sense after all.
The young man noticed him for the first time. "Who's that?" Then, as Domi padded near with the pitcher of fresh water, the Empowered Lightbearer stared, his jaw slack.
The intense gaze made Domi squirm. Had he spilled something on his tunica? He hoped he managed not to puke on himself earlier.
Arbita frowned at the stare, bending over the Empowered man and taking his chin into her hand. The promenia in the air began to vibrate a new way, and Domi eyed the mirage-like distortion as its song slid lower in pitch.
"Are you all right, Epileus?" she asked. After a moment, she let him go, satisfied, it appeared, with whatever the promenia showed her. "I'm going to need to suture these cuts. I'm surprised you didn't do it. I taught you basic field medicine myself."
Still staring in something like shock at Domi, who frowned at the weird look, the young man shook his head. "I was not sure if I should close our wounds with this stuff." At last, he glanced away from Domi to flick his fingers at the strange crust of bluish-white substance creeping from the injuries. But his eyes snapped back up to the boy a moment later.
Arbita smiled and guided him to turn over onto his back, draping his wounded arm over his chest with care. "If you were Pyrrhaei, I would want you to leave it open until I purged the wounds, but your prometus should be able to battle the infection on its own."
"Infection?" Domi stared in unease at the nightmarish streaks and scales. He knew clivias were toxic, but he hadn't realized something like this might happen if one managed to slice a person's skin with their long, hairlike filaments. He hoped the starholders and mindholders would drive the clivias back out to the night-side where the bestias belonged before there was any risk of him meeting one of the monstrosities.
The young man—Epileus?—cleared his throat as Arbita stepped away to the cabinets at the back of the infirmary and gathered supplies. "Nasty creatures," the worldholder said. He squinted at Domi. "Who are you? You're not..." His eyes narrowed at the boy. "What's your name?"
"Domi. Nice to meet you... Epileus?"
The young man nodded weakly. "It's so weird," he murmured, head falling back to his pillow. His eyelids fluttered as his fever began wearing away at his consciousness. "You... but the hair..." And he drifted off to sleep.
Domi scowled. What was wrong with his hair? It was short, yes, but other Lifeholders wore theirs shorn, too. Though he doubted any of them had it cut every few weeks by their Ma's switchblade. The dunces probably went to fancy barbers instead.
Arbita cleared her throat. "Will you go gather more blankets from the storage room? It's going to take a few hours for their fevers to relent."