The Sah'niir

by Kim Wedlock

  But, to his disappointment, the outrage suddenly dropped from his face. Rather than reach for the bait, the officer took a step back into his usual infuriating composure. "Whatever your problem is," he said calmly, "sort it out. We need to get out of here with our wits in tact."

  "You are my problem."

  "And what did I do to earn the honour?"

  Rathen bridled at the flat, disinterested tone and the poor, so very poor choice of words. "Honour," he grunted. "Honour. It always boils down to that with you, doesn't it? Honour. Pride."

  "What?"

  "For someone who pays so much attention to his surroundings, you can't seem to see what's staring you right in the face. Or perhaps you just choose not to - I don't really care. Maybe you're just that inept." Garon stormed back towards him, and Rathen met him squarely, thriving on the quick return of his anger. "But you could learn a lot if you just opened your damned eyes."

  "And what," he spat, "am I supposed to be seeing?"

  "Oh, I don't know. That it's possible to live without your pride in absolute pristine condition? That you might even be happier if you muddied it a bit?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I'm sorry," Rathen suddenly laughed, "I'm not doing a very good job of explaining myself, am I? I suppose that's because I can't truly fathom it myself - or perhaps it's because I'm not sure how fine a point to put on it to make sure it actually drills through your skull. I think it's a little of both, though, so I guess I'll just come out with it: for reasons completely beyond my comprehension, Petra feels something for you. But, instead of being even remotely civilised towards her, you treat her like the shit on your shoe. And why? To protect your pride. Don't make faces, Garon. I know how you really feel about her, we can all see it - your authority slips, your rigidity falters, and then you double it all and reinforce it with an extra layer of jackassery to compensate."

  For an endless moment the two impaled one another with contempt, each challenging the other, daring them to say exactly what was on their mind despite being fully aware of the blows it would come to if they did - and yet each almost willing it to happen. Even Anthis looked around at the charge in the air.

  But, finally, Garon's blazing eyes dulled. "That's quite the imagination you have."

  "Don't be ridiculous. I don't have one."

  "I'm not here to worry about people's feelings or make friends--"

  "Well that's a relief--"

  "None of us are. We're out here to do a job, Rathen. A job I only need you and Anthis for - so if I'm being 'uncivilised' towards her, she's well within her rights to leave. No one asked her to come and no one's keeping her here. She's tagging along and putting up with my 'incivility' entirely of her own accord."

  Rathen barked an acrid laugh. "She is far more than just a 'tag-along', and you know it. But I warn you: she is going to give up on you to protect herself, and if you don't want that to happen, you had better do something, and fast."

  "Why would I not want that to happen?"

  The clench of his jaw was so rigid at the sight of the heartless indifference in the man's eyes that he felt his teeth might crack, and he wanted so very dearly to hit him. But Garon wasn't the type to surrender to brawn. So he managed, somehow, to restrain his rage and the offence he felt on Petra's behalf - though he knew she would not be so inclined - and moved a tight step closer, dropping his voice to a snarl. "All right. All right, fine. Continue to deny it. Protect your pride at the expense of everything else. Heart and health - just like this injury of yours. You can keep that to yourself too, if you must - I really don't care - but don't make the rest of us suffer for that ego of yours. And if not us, her. Because she cares, Garon. She cares. And I don't doubt that she's the first since your own mother to do so."

  "You don't know what you're talking about."

  "No, Garon, I know very well, just like I know you're not worth my breath--"

  "Then cease!"

  "But that poor girl is!"

  Garon whipped away from him with a scoff, but Rathen was quick to reach out and spin him back around. His hold was immediately reversed and he was seized in turn. Anthis watched them stare another hail of daggers at one another. "You had better decide what matters to you, Inquisitor. Your pride and your badge, or your humanity. Because if you keep ignoring it and shutting it away, you're going to turn into nothing more than a uniform with a tongue. And I dare say the transformation has already started."

  The officer released him tersely and stormed away without a word, vanishing back into the trees whose company he seemed to favour. He spared not even a moment for Rathen to read his response.

  An infuriated growl rumbled in his throat. "I'm surrounded by children." His eyes snapped towards Aria, who sat still beside the fire, watching the confrontation with a mixture of fear and fascination in her big eyes. "Arenaria, come here." He turned and stalked off in the opposite direction. "I need some adult company."

  Every step they took away from the brooding camp became easier. She was sure something had laced into the air back there - such anger just couldn't be natural. But while Aria wondered what had happened to upset everyone, she found she was a little afraid of asking. She decided eventually that she didn't need to know - though when she looked up at her father and saw the deepened lines in his face, the need rose anew.

  But still she chose not to address it.

  A few minutes later, however, and she found herself smiling. "I'm enjoying this."

  Removed from his thoughts, he looked down at Aria in surprise. "'This'?"

  "Adventure." She didn't notice the pondering look he sent her mature and considered smile. "What will we do when we leave the forest?"

  "Go where we think Salus is most likely to try to cause chaos."

  She nodded and pursed her lips, and the thought that so frightened the adults came back to claw at her. She decided to voice it before it grew too big. "Can he move Turunda?"

  "I really don't know, little one. But, like Hlífrún, we have to assume he can, for the sake of everyone else."

  "...I wonder if someone will write about all this when we're done..."

  His eyebrow arched as he looked down at her pensive pout.

  "Like all my stories. Important stories - heroes stopping villains."

  "We're not heroes, little one."

  "Good people stopping bad people, then."

  "I'm afraid we're not important enough for that," he said softly. "We're just a few very small people. No one will notice we even had a hand in it. They'll all think the Order was responsible for the magic's end, just like they do its start. Little people never get noticed. Not for good deeds."

  "Well, we don't really need to be noticed, do we? As long as we do the right thing. And...I don't think I'd like to read the story if it was written, anyway."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I would already know the ending."

  "That doesn't usually stop you."

  "I also think, once this adventure is over, I'll miss it. Reading it will make me sad." She pushed the encroaching disappointment away - it was foolish, since the adventure wasn't over yet. But, still... "Can we have another when we finish this one?"

  "Oh, not right away, I don't think," he replied evasively. "But...in time, maybe. Probably. Who knows what life has in store..."

  His breath was almost snatched away by the onslaught of images he could do nothing to stop. His old life - how simple it had been despite the trials of his superiors and everyone's expectations; Taliel - what happiness they'd shared, though that had not been simple, and it remained as such even then; of the future they had planned, the life he'd had, what it should have been...and what it could now become...if he really could be pardoned...or if she really could leave the Arana...

  He blinked when he realised Aria was speaking, and offered her an apologetic smile. "Sorry, little one, I'm very tired..."

  She cocked a pale eyebrow and her face broke into a far more impish grin. "Thinking about our next
adventure?"

  He couldn't help smiling despite his heartache, and pulled her close beside him. "I dare not."

  Mercifully, exhaustion struck quite abruptly, so they turned about and made back for camp, seeking the tell-tale light of the fire through the darkness. Aria was asleep in his arms by the time they returned, and everyone else had retired to their blankets, their backs turned away from one another but for Eyila, who appeared to be the most peaceful. But while his eyes stung with that same desire for sleep, his mind had set itself aflame.

  He settled Aria upon her blankets, across which she promptly sprawled, and sat down beside the fire with only the company of his relentless thoughts.

  Anthis's insinuation still stung. Garon's pomposity still grated. The ideas that had exploded from Aria's innocent words were still swirling ruthlessly in his head. But though he was too tired to even consider finding a distraction, he didn't think on them at all. They swilled and mingled, but nothing progressed; no new worries formed or grew, no old ones resolved or weakened. They were nothing more than an unpleasant mass, a dull cacophony that drowned itself out into a constant, tolerable hum.

  His heavy, fading focus drifted onto the fire. He was lulled easily into its calming flickers, soothing waves and almost predictable rhythm, his eyes moving with its tongues a fraction ahead of each undulation. The smoke stung with every breath and he blinked against its dry heat, but he remained transfixed nevertheless. Before long, the sensations vanished.

  The scent of sap and scratched bark began to slip in, and damp soil churned up by foraging nocturnal beasts. It smelled homely. Safe. And when the chirp of a nightlark, both distant and close at hand, cast a thread of brightness through the gathering familiarity, he felt his muscles loosen and his body disconnect. It was as though his hands, feet, legs, arms, head were not his own - but it didn't alarm him. Fatigue was drawing his mind away like an old friend.

  His frustrations, too, began to dim, appearing trivial now that he sat apart from them, and as moments trickled by, the darkness about him deepened. He became distantly aware of the strangeness of the disembodied sensations. He'd never noticed them before. Or perhaps he had, and the fleeting moments before sleep remained vague mysteries in waking, experienced only in the descent. He found he enjoyed it.

  He watched as the shapes around him vanished, the light softened, and the face formed above the flames. Regal, beautiful, perfect. He watched the enticing lips curve into a smile. Was it Taliel? Or Kienza? No, neither. The face caused him no anguish - and yet it stoked a fire in his heart and a lurch in his gut just the same.

  The fire dropped beneath his sight, but the face endured, with eyes of flaming chestnut, of painite. The light drifted behind him and the darkness reigned, but the face, the body, they never melted away. He felt soft fingertips run over his palms, over his wrists, feeling his pulse, and his fingers closed around hers, feeling the same rapid rhythm. It was supreme, the clearest sensation when all else felt slow, muffled, numbed and disjointed. But still there was no alarm. Her pulse echoed the dance of the flames.

  But the fire was lost. The darkness engulfed him; arms and legs intertwined, soft lips, hungry lips, hers and his, brushing the other's skin, smooth and rough, like the bark of a tree.

  And then, euphoric haze.

  Chapter 38

  It was only when Petra startled Rathen out of his confused and sluggish bout with waking by sitting bolt-upright that he finally realised there was a problem. She spun around upon her blanket in an attempt to find the bearings she hoped she'd simply misplaced, but every narrow tree trunk and wide space between them dropped the pit in her stomach even deeper. "This isn't where we made camp!" Her eyes crashed onto Rathen, who shot up in belated alarm. "Where are we?!"

  "Where's Aria?!"

  "Eyila's gone, too!"

  The pair scrambled, waking Garon and Anthis in the process, and set immediately upon a desperate hunt until a giggle fluttered from the direction of the sunrise. They steered sharply and tracked it to the edge of an overhang. Standing over a collapsed and blackened old house and its broken well a short way from its foot, there, among the trampled planters and splintered food barrels, sat Aria in a ring of ditchlings playing a merry game of pat-a-cake, while Eyila sat upon a rotten bench with two more ditchlings fussing through her hair.

  Their shoulders sagged in relief, but an anger of disapproval was quick to flood into its place when all the ditchlings paused to look up and cast them great big innocent smiles. Aria and Eyila promptly followed, though the former was the quickest to realise what trouble they were in.

  Fortunately, Petra spoke first. "You shouldn't have run off like that," she chided far more calmly than Rathen would have as she made her way down a shallow gulley, driving her sword into the dirt for stability if not also to make a point. "Anything could have happened to you out here."

  "Not with us around it wouldn't," one of the ditchlings chimed, but Rathen shot him a sharp look.

  "We weren't talking to you." He turned to the rest as Garon and Anthis appeared at the ledge above. "Are you responsible for this?"

  They each blinked giant, silver-green eyes and looked around at one another for a clue, but they appeared only more surprised when they returned. "Why would we be responsible for this?" A girl asked from beside Eyila, who had, it seemed, been braiding her hair. "It was like this when we found it - someone else burnt it down. One of you hoomans, I reckon. Ain't no such thing like we'd have done. It could've scorched the trees!"

  "Not the house," he sighed. "Our camp has moved."

  "You're sure you didn't just forget where you were? It's dark at night."

  "There's no sign of our fire."

  "Just as well." She gestured a dirty hand back towards the house.

  He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut tight. It was too early for this. "Never mind. Where are we, then?"

  "Wildlands," a boy replied unhelpfully, then added, "about a day's run from Rul."

  Rathen's eyebrows rose in astonishment. "Rul? I thought we were still three days from the border..." Then a thought occurred to him. An obvious thought - and a thought that brought with it phantom stirrings that he couldn't place for the life of him. Even so, his eyebrows dropped low. "Hlífrún."

  "We're as good as out of the forest," Garon declared. "I have no intention of questioning the means nor the motive. Though I would like to know what you all want."

  "Why should we want anythin'?"

  "Because you're here."

  "We're here 'cause we live here, geenyus," the boy rolled his oversized eyes. "Why are you here?"

  "We don't know - and, I notice, we didn't see any of your kind in the Wildlands at all. Why is that?"

  "Are you mad? It's wild in there!" But then his eyes suddenly turned to glass and he stared off for miles for the briefest moment. He stood when they cleared, and his naturally devilish demeanour was quite suddenly set aside in favour of an unsettling sobriety as he approached them. When he spoke, they shifted promptly in the same direction. "We had that fella, Salus, for a while, but we lost him 'cause magic snapped and shuddered and crumbled the ground. We reckon he was on his way to Fendale, but we dunno what he was gonna do there."

  Rathen's gut turned over. Fendale. If he'd just had the Zi'veyn working back then...

  "Also, his toadies are bein' more aggressive with us than before. They been leavin' poison out - it ain't been gettin' us, nor the harpies really, but that's what they been tryin', along with smokin' us out and trappin' us when we try and scurry away. It used just to be fires and scattered traps, but now they're gettin' right up close to our setts, and while we ain't much ones for toleratin' trespassin', none of our usual deternments work on 'em."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," Rathen said, honestly, "but there's really not much we can do about it right now."

  "We ain't askin' for your help," he almost laughed, "we're just lettin' you know what's been up. We got our own plans - we can be nasty, too, and they're gonna find out! And, no,
you don't wanna know - not with ladies in your company." Petra stifled a laugh at the bold and extravagant wink he sent her.

  "The harpies," Rathen said, untickled as he returned Aria's hug of apology with a squeeze of her shoulder just soft enough to let her know that she was forgiven, but that there would indeed be words. "How are things...?"

  "Eh, they don't try to hurt us no more," a girl with a remarkable crown of dusty white mushrooms replied from the circle, "and we been holding back on 'em, innit - but they did come screeching in to one of our homes not two days ago and start accusing us of stealing..."

  "...And I take it you were guilty?"

  "Not me personally, but in our defence we thought the turkeys - harpies, right, yeah, 'no more descriminatinery terms' - well, we thought they didn't need these shiny knifes and forks, and 'cause we're all friends now, we ought to share, innit. But they got mad and took 'em back." She fired them a spiteful look. "What? Just 'cause we ain't hooman we can't use cutterly?"

  "Cutlery, and that's not what I was thinking. If I'm honest, I was wondering why they had them..."

  "Well 'cause they're shiny, innit? But we weren't gonna eat with 'em and dirty 'em up, we wanted 'em to make better weapons - ones this Salus wouldn't expect us to have."

  "Well, that is in their interest too, I suppose. But what happened when they took them back?"

  "...We couldn't make the weapons..."

  "He really is!"

  They looked towards another ditchling, and Rathen frowned uncertainly at his cryptic outburst. "But," he looked nervously back to the girl, "did they attack?"

  "No, admittedly, so we didn't do nothing to 'em but call 'em names. No one wants to be the reason the harpies leave us to die. Not that I reckon they're really gonna save us, but it doesn't hurt to have eyes above, does it? We're all crossing our fingers and toes for it to work out."