Quicksilver

Fisher summons Saeris to bed, asking her to forget their disagreement about how to handle his issue with the quicksilver until after they rescue Everlayne. Saeris likes the implication that he will then confront the problem rather than accepting his death as inevitable. He transports them to the apartment in Ballard, which he has decorated with hundreds of candles. As they kiss and have sex, Saeris can feel the mystical bond between them. The runes reemerge. Saeris puts aside worries about their significance to enjoy their sexual encounter.

When Fisher accepts the bond, runes appear on his skin, too, resembling feathers. Saeris, thinking of her own limited lifespan compared to that of a Fae, is aghast. He says he loves her and that any time he gets with her he will value, though he urges her to take time to decide what she wishes to do about accepting the bond between them.

When Saeris wakes, Fisher is gone; he has left a shadow gate and a note instructing her to take it back to Cahlish. His note further indicates that he does not intend to return from rescuing Layne—he expects to die instead. Saeris is crushed, even more so when she sees that Fisher left his sword Nimerelle behind to keep it away from Malcolm.

Furious, Saeris returns to Cahlish and shows Fisher’s note to Ren. Carrion suggests that, when Fisher opens a shadow gate to send Layne back, they use it to go to Fisher’s aid. Carrion requests a sword; Saeris forges him one while they wait for Kingfisher’s gate to open. The blade, which Carrion names Simon, accepts him. Lorreth mistrusts witches, seeing them as responsible for the initial blood curse and thus vampires overall, but Iseabail dismisses this as rumor. Layne suddenly drops through a shadow gate in the ceiling. Carrion, Lorreth, Ren, and Saeris hurry to the gate.

Saeris drops into a lake from a significant height. She flounders, but Lorreth drags her to shore before returning to save an unconscious Carrion. Lorreth performs cardiopulmonary compressions, waking Carrion. Ren did not, they realize, make it through the gate before it closed. Lorreth gives them a painkilling substance. Saeris touches an obsidian cliff face and hears the “Annorath mor!” chant. The trio begins the dangerous climb up the cliff. At the top, they see an amphitheater full of people, all chanting “Annorath mor,” which Lorreth translates as “Release us” (537). At the bottom of the amphitheater is a dais, upon which Fisher stands.

Harron, the captain of Madra’s guard, suddenly appears behind Lorreth. His eyes have been entirely taken over by quicksilver. As hundreds of Feeders approach, Harron transports them using a type of portal that, compared to the shadow gates, Saeris finds unnatural. Via telepathy, Fisher urges her not to enter the portal, but the warning comes too late.

Fisher kneels at the foot of the dais, defeated and covered in blood. On the dais, Malcolm sits, flanked by Belikon and Madra. We now learn that the three are siblings; Belikon, despite long blaming Fisher’s father, has always known that it was Madra who closed the quicksilver gates. He has maintained the war to increase the numbers of Malcolm’s undead army. Now that they are reunited, their power has grown. Malcolm releases Fisher from the oath that has prevented him from speaking about what happened at Gillethrye a century prior; the gathered undead, killed at that battle, scream at him.

Fisher, wounded, struggles to his feet, then explains the events of the century before. As 20,000 vampires approached Gillethrye, Fisher took Ren and the Lupo Proelia to Gillethrye via shadow gate. When they arrived, the horde was already massacring the people. Fisher sought Malcolm, but found Belikon, who admitted to having murdered Fisher’s mother.

Belikon and Malcolm decided that a coin flip would decide whether Malcolm would leave the city undisturbed or destroy it, but when Belikon flipped the coin, Malcolm caught it. It never hit the ground, so the deal was never completed. Fisher, to stop the murdered Fae of Gillethrye from joining Malcolm’s horde, ordered the city closed and burned. Fisher was banned from speaking of the deal.

Malcolm then built an elaborate labyrinth and hid the coin at the center. He filled the amphitheater with all the people Fisher had tried to save at Gillethrye, leaving them eternally burning and tormented. Fisher’s exile was spent searching the labyrinth to find the coin so he could put it on the ground, end the suffering of the people of Gillethrye, and challenge Malcolm anew. It took Fisher decades to find the middle, until the quicksilver pool opened beneath the labyrinth and Fisher jumped through because he detected the sword Solace on the other side. 

After telling this story, Fisher quickly seizes Solace from Saeris and runs Belikon through.

Malcolm lunges at Fisher, but Lorreth raises his silver sword, burning Malcolm where he nicks him. Harron lunges at Saeris, who stabs him with a dagger in the gut. Madra doesn’t join the fight; Saeris taunts Harron about serving Madra eternally before killing him. Fisher urges them to run for the labyrinth as Malcolm and Madra scream. They run through the obsidian maze, which has walls that move.

They come across a massive half-Fae spider that can’t see or hear them but can detect movement. Once Saeris detects the quicksilver at the labyrinth’s center to guide them, they slide against the walls to evade the spider. The walls move at an inopportune moment, leading the spider to chase them until Lorreth kills it, though Fisher warns that it will soon reappear. Saeris follows the pull of the quicksilver, even as the maze walls shift to try to stop them.

They arrive at the center of the maze, which is filled with coins that look exactly like the coin from Malcolm’s bet with Belikon. Malcolm and Madra appear over one of the piles of coins. Belikon has recovered; the three must all be killed for any one of them to die. Fisher telepathically tells Saeris that only the true coin is silver, as Malcolm could not stand on a pile of true silver without being burned.

Carrion taunts the rulers, goading Malcolm into biting him before revealing himself as Carrion Daianthus. Saeris does not know what this means, though she can see Malcolm is injured. She races toward the call of the quicksilver coin, which beckons her by name. The quicksilver demands a small favor in exchange for revealing that it is inside the dead spider demon. She says aloud that Fisher is her mate, which causes her runes to flare as she reaches inside the demon and grabs the coin. Malcolm appears behind her.

Malcolm tries to wrench the coin from her before she can get her hand out of the demon and drop it on the ground. The effects of the painkiller wane as Saeris struggles. Even though Malcolm’s strength is clearly diminished, he seizes the coin, throws her against a wall, and points to the runes on her hands, which indicate that she can work with many elements, not just quicksilver. Malcolm is jealous that Fisher has drunk Saeris’s blood. Saeris stabs him. Malcolm, outraged, uses his supernatural strength to punch into Saeris’s torso.

Saeris reveals that stabbing him was a distraction to seize the leather pouch that holds Belikon’s coin. She flips it so it lands. The trapped souls from Gillethrye are finally freed. Saeris uses her last strength to grab Solace and use it to decapitate a distracted Malcolm. His head bursts into flame as the sword’s power ricochets, destroying the amphitheater. Fisher speaks telepathically to Saeris, but she is too disoriented to direct him to her location. Madra escapes through the quicksilver gate. Lorreth is fighting Belikon, his sword’s power renewed.

Saeris briefly faints, waking to Fisher and Taladaius. Fisher wishes to save her as he did Lorreth, but Saeris forbids him from doing so, as a second soul donation would kill him. Taladaius, who speaks familiarly with Fisher, offers to turn her immortal; he is sufficiently powerful to do so, but hid his ability from Malcolm. As she dies, Fisher tells Taladaius that Saeris agreed to the change, though she has not done so.

Saeris hears a strange voice in her mind. It asks her about fate, calling her “the peace that must come after” Fisher’s “storm” (585). The voice asks if she wishes to remain in Yvelia, despite brewing troubles; Saeris does. The quicksilver—the source of the voice—requests an audience with Saeris as its favor. When she agrees, the invisible tether that holds her to the quicksilver pulls her toward the labyrinth’s center. She is yanked into the pool of quicksilver.

Saeris wakes to two young women debating if she is alive or dead. They reveal themselves to be twin Corcoran gods Bal and Mithin. They bring a stunned Saeris to meet their father, Zareth, the God of Chaos. He calls Fisher his champion and tasks Saeris with “[resetting] the balance and [clearing] the way for what is to come” (591). He shows her a tree of fate, with one blackened limb. He quickly cuts off the limb and informs Saeris that this destroyed many realms, ending billions of lives.

Zareth explains that Saeris’s Alchemist skills are not unique. However, he found it intriguing that she and Kingfisher are fated, so he swayed fate to ensure they were born in different realms. Saeris was originally meant to be Fae. Even with this distance, fate aligned to bring them together. Zareth meddled because their meeting will lead to the death of an entire universe. Zareth tried to avoid this but was unsuccessful. Nevertheless, Zareth does foresee a potential victory where Saeris and Fisher fight together to save the universe. Zareth plans to “sever” her from the “tapestry of the universe” (595) so that none of the other gods, who prefer to see the universe restart, can interfere with her life. Saeris balks at the pressure of saving the universe, but Zareth points out she need only live as she wishes and that this is the only way to save Fisher. She agrees to be transformed “into something that has never been seen before” (595). Zareth shoves her into the quicksilver pool.

Saeris floats in darkness until she sees a bird that reminds her of Fisher. She wakes in a strange bed and vomits. Taladaius confirms this is normal when transitioning into a vampire, though Saeris seems to be half-Fae, half-vampire. Taladaius has blocked her memories to spare her pain, but he reveals them at her request, showing not only her death and conversation with Zareth, but the days of excruciating pain that followed. When he was first turned and forced to serve Malcolm, Taladaius feared immortality. Now free, he is uncertain what he wants from his life.

Saeris scolds Carrion, now in his Fae form, for not telling her he was Fae royalty. Fisher’s father hid Carrion from Belikon by taking him to Zilvaren; Carrion has lived in Zilvaren for 1,000 years. Carrion was immune to Malcolm’s venom because Carrion’s ancestor created the original blood curse. Lorreth tells Saeris of Everlayne’s survival and Belikon’s escape.

Fisher worries that he did the wrong thing by telling Taladaius to transform Saeris. Saeris is uncertain. Te Léna and Iseabail have discovered a way to remove the quicksilver from Fisher—it will take time but will alleviate his symptoms. Saeris, as the person who killed Malcolm, is to become queen of Sanasroth.