Free When the Heavens Fall by Marc Turner

Maybe I’m not the only one who hears voices. “I will have to take your word for it, mage. Your senses are clearly sharper than mine.”
    â€œPerhaps.” Mottle tapped his nose with one finger. “Or perhaps your attention is occupied by other matters at present.”
    The spirits’ voices rose in consternation. He knows. Ebon found himself battling against the urge to draw his sword.
    Mottle went on, “It is not so hard to detect the Currents, my boy, for those who know how. But perceiving is not the same as understanding, yes? So much information to take in, it can overwhelm the senses. One must learn to separate each fragment from the others.” His gaze was calculating. “To isolate one voice from the crowd.”
    â€œIndeed. And how is this done?”
    â€œBy riding the Currents. By surrendering to them—letting them take you where they will. Such is Mottle’s fate, like a leaf borne on the breeze—”
    â€œAnd what if the Currents drag you under? What if there is no coming back?”
    Mottle shrugged before turning away. “Come!” he said, setting off for a doorway at the far end of the chamber.
    For a few heartbeats Ebon could only stare at the old man’s retreating back. Then he followed.
    He had to bend low to enter the passage Mottle had disappeared into, edging forward in a shuffle. After a dozen steps he felt a resistance in the air as if he were pushing through cobwebs. The room beyond was even gloomier than the main chamber. Scattered across the floor were rolls of parchment that rustled as Ebon picked his way through. Alcoves were set into the walls, like resting places for the dead. One contained a tattered sheet and a rag scrunched into a pillow; the others were filled with a jumble of scrolls, animal skulls, and piles of roots and dried petals. The prince felt somehow lighter here—as if, were he to jump, he might not come down again. Looking up, he saw scrolls resting against the ceiling.
    From the darkness at the far end of the room came a series of irregular click-clacking sounds. Peering into the gloom, Ebon said, “You have something against daylight, mage?”
    Mottle glanced across at him. “What? Ah, more light. Of course.” He gestured with one hand. The shadows retreated to the corners of the room, forming unnaturally dense pools of blackness and leaving the center of the chamber filled with a pale, indeterminate glow. At the edge of the light, Ebon saw an apparition that made his skin crawl. Suspended from a noose was a skeleton the size of a child. Two stubs protruded like broken horns from the top of its skull. The other bones had evidently been collected from a number of different donors. Some were charred, or discolored with age; others were gnawed, splintered, or carried the marks of weapons. The figure rocked back and forth, its bones striking each other to produce the clicking sounds Ebon had heard earlier.
    â€œFascinating, is it not,” Mottle said, “the unseen powers that act on us.”
    â€œWhat is that thing?” Ebon asked.
    â€œMottle has not given it a name,” the mage replied, frowning as if the oversight troubled him.
    â€œI meant, what does it do?”
    â€œIt detects energies. Forces that would otherwise be imperceptible, even to someone with senses as acute as Mottle’s.” The mage approached the skeleton and began to circle it, moving from shadow into light, then back into shadow again. “Mottle has felt a growing power of late, riding the Currents like an infection. The resistance you experienced as you entered … it is a seal about this room to prevent outside interference. Similar barriers exist round the other walls, the ceiling and the floor. The air in here should be still, yet the figure continues to move as if a soul were bound to it.”
    â€œAnd you are using that thing to, what, gauge these forces?”
    â€œPrecisely. Mottle