The woman impaled had aquiline features—olive skin, high cheekbones, a nose that was sharp and slightly curved. Her age was indeterminate. Her hair was held in a single long ebony braid. Her eyes were black, or a very deep brown, and they were locked on the face of her attacker. Her lips were parted as though she were about to speak, or as though she had just begun to smile, and had been interrupted by the blade driving through her.
She had an athlete’s spare frame. She wore plain rags in various shades of brown and grey—a shirt mended too many times, a vest, a pair of charcoal pants over sturdy leather boots. A knife was strapped to her leg, and an empty scabbard hung at her belt. Where she grasped her attacker’s wrist, her knuckles were pale.
The two women were locked in place, intently staring, each focused on the other’s face. Colin looked at them, and then he looked at Privya and saw something ancient and long-buried stirring beneath the girl’s eyes. He felt, abruptly, the childhood urge to beat his wings frantically, desperately, until he couldn’t breathe—until, maybe, he could soar. But there was nowhere to fly, and his coat was heavy on his body. He swallowed. “I don’t think they’re alive.”
“They’re alive. Help her.”
“Which one?”
“Alethea.” Privya spoke the name as an invocation. “The one wielding the sword. The other is a madwoman. Alethea is the one who saved us all.”
“I don’t think they’re alive,” said Colin again, gently—so gently, because Privya’s wanting was a conflagration that threatened to burn his skin away. To alleviate it, he raised a hand and touched the forearm of the woman Alethea.
He wasn’t entirely certain what to expect, with the figures in front of him frozen so expressively alive, though he had the fleeting fear that he might somehow be trapped with them, unmoving in the dark. He found Alethea’s arm to be as cold and impenetrable as stone.
“They aren’t—” he began. Then he paused, frowning, because there was almost something there. “Could you step back a little?”
“I’m hardly—”
“I can feel you. It’s making this harder. And it’s not very easy to start with. Here—hold my coat.”
He felt guilt even as he shed the heavy fabric at his shoulders; he was grateful when Privya apparently took no offence. She only took his coat and drew back, the controlled blaze of her desperation abating a little with distance. It was a relief to stretch his wings. Before him and beneath his hand, he felt a ghost like a guttering candle.
It was a peculiar sensation, this life that flitted within a rock-cold corpse. Colin could not sense any pain or desire. If anything, he thought perhaps the woman Alethea was dreaming, but any visions she might have had were gossamer in his fingers. Wake, he willed her, but he was barely certain she was there.
He dreaded what he might sense from the woman with the braided hair, but laying his other hand against the plane of her cheek, he had no impression of pain; wherever she was, it was not trapped in a frozen moment with a blade in her intestines. She, too, was cold and impenetrable, though he was captured by the look on her face. She continued to stare straight at Alethea. He saw only determination and a broken hint of a smile. He thought the line between her eyebrows was the beginning of a wince.
“This one,” he said. “Who is she?”
“Jihan. Leave her.”
“Hm.”
He could feel them both, the ghosts of life drifting maddeningly just within the statues of their bodies. Though their eyes were on each other, he didn’t think they were aware—of themselves or of him. He reached for them, and they slipped away so easily that he was left unsure he’d encountered anything at all.
The blackness inside them was a precipice he could hurl himself over, seeking. The urge was strong.
He braced himself and remembered he couldn’t fly.
“Come on, then,” he murmured. He took a long, slow breath and let his essence dive into the stillness beneath his hands. He lost the sense of the cavern looming around him and Privya’s furious hope beating at his back.
Colin usually had an instinct for wounds; he knew the pale searing of a weak heart or the hot shard of a broken limb. He knew how to wind his own energy around someone else’s and coax bones and veins back to life, or how to soothe pain or weeping rage. He had never before encountered bodies that were almost—but not quite—the silent nothingness of a granite vacuum. He cast his awareness forward and felt his own self stretch thin.
He reached for Alethea first; the threads of her were pure, unmarred by blood or the echo of impending death. She was rivers of grey mist. Come home, he told her as he traced the lines and gathered her close. She was somewhere beyond sleep, though the sense of her life grew more solid as he drew her in.
His breath was coming hard in his chest. He ignored it.
He could almost curl his fingers around Alethea—not just the physicality of her arm, but the veins in her lungs, the lines of her bones, and the deathly stillness of her heart. He was losing the other woman, though; she dreamed in fading will-o’-the-wisp. His left hand held Alethea and his right hand touched Jihan’s face and extended ineffectually into the void of her frozen death.
He could still hear Privya—the other is a madwoman—but he could see the ferocity of the hope in the stranger’s eyes; he could see her smile at the woman who killed her. He worried she might feel pain.
He was getting slightly dizzy. He ignored it.
The shreds of the woman Jihan were ephemeral and bronze. He coaxed the sensation of her around his fingers, gathering the phantom strands, seeking the shape of her veins and the curving sweep of her skull. She had a multitude of scars; he almost knew the way they sliced and puckered on her skin. He could just begin to feel the gaping hot wetness of the sword wound.
He realized Alethea had become barely a whisper of thought in his other palm. He breathed life into her again, hurriedly, pulling at her dreams.
The stranger’s bronze delicacy shivered and threatened to collapse. He threw his energy into her. He nearly lost his grasp on Alethea again.
A searing pain spiked through his right temple.
“They’re somewhere else,” he said. “They’re almost gone. I can’t—”
“Bring her back.” Even at the periphery of his awareness, Privya was roasting him.
There were times, later, when he wondered what would have happened if she’d been standing closer—if her grieving need had swallowed his will, or if he did not have such a close impression of that scarred stranger with the shattering smile. But Privya’s fire burned at a distance, and Colin stood with one hand around Alethea’s arm and the other cupping the stranger’s face. He clung to spirits in grey and bronze, and fed his own life into their sleeping souls. They were cold and unresponsive to his touch; their eyes remained locked on each other. Within, they were ghostly tangles, and he drowned in a blackness far darker than the echoing cavern.
He reached for one, and the other faded. He almost had Alethea; he flowed through her, feeling the strength of her limbs and the sturdy ease of her body. Her hand gripped the sword hilt with granite determination. He mentally dove into dark stillness, seeking the sense of her—betrayal? anger? remorse? was that love?—but her mind was lost and drifting. The effort almost cost him Jihan’s bronze strands; he jerked his attention to the other woman instead, tugging at the petrified blood in her veins as he willed her to return. Alethea’s presence decayed.
The spikes of pain shot through his skull with regularity now. His teeth were gritted.
There was an instant when he almost had them both, though sparks flared in his vision and the ache of his knee thrummed with the same beat as the pressure in his head. The grey and bronze were a braid in his fingers; they were blood and flesh, muscles bound to stillness, but ready again for life. He felt Alethea’s heart stir once, then again. It was a peculiar sensation. There was no hurt in her for him to heal, but he almost had her attention.
Simultaneously, he sought Jihan. He was
careful—so careful—to keep Alethea in balance. He tasted blood at the back of his throat.
That was when he felt Jihan’s pulse flutter once, then twice, before it caught on a ghostly flare of pain. He knew in that moment exactly where the sword ran through; it had sliced the edge of her bowel on its way up through her lung. He felt the poison of her innards and the way it would spread through her the instant he forced her to life.
That sort of pain was easy. He didn’t think about it. He just reached out and fixed it.
He’d had his hand on Alethea, still—he had a flashing sensation of movement, of guiding her to draw out the blade, of a single haunting smile, then he lost it all. His vision went white.
He couldn’t see for a long time. He could hear someone screaming—a high, shrill keen of agony. It wasn’t his. His lungs were empty. Grief and anguish ripped at him from at least two different directions.
There was cold rock under his knees and his palms. He tasted blood. When the snow-static of his vision cleared, he saw darkness; even his own glow was guttering.
Privya snarled, “Just kill them.”
He heard footsteps echoing to his left, and then a sudden, meaty gurgle. Beneath the maelstrom that already tore through him, he felt a terrified life flare and then die. It was familiar. He shuddered for the girl with the cut palm.
Death surrounded him then—one, two, three lives ending in fear and slicing pain. He clutched the rocky earth, desperate to do something, but he only vomited bloody bile. His wings flailed outward with each heave of his shoulders.
Privya’s rage flared again and cut off, quite suddenly. If he’d been standing, Colin would have staggered with relief. As it was, he could only close his eyes and gulp for air. The abrupt stillness was a balm, even as his bones burned with the pain he’d failed to heal.
A single other life remained in the cavern, marked by a furious, wounded confusion. He could have traced it in ribbons of bronze.
He saw light, first as a glow through his eyelids, then through tears that reflected the shine like a multitude of jewels. Inhaling roughly, he raised his head and froze to find the lantern just in front of him, illuminating rough boots. He knew who stood there. He could still feel the whirl of her outraged loss, even as the psychic sense of her faded. She was pulling in on herself.
He looked up. She was watching him. Her eyes gleamed silver, emotionless, no more than mirrors reflecting the light she held in her left hand. In her right, improbably, she clutched the folds of his coat, the hem trailing on the dusty cavern floor. The untroubled planes of her features held neither anger nor pity. She stood very still, and he felt her now like an ache, like his joints swelling in the winter.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He wasn’t certain why.
He thought he should probably be afraid, but he was infinitely tired. His skin was raw with other people’s deaths. He knelt on the rock and waited for her to kill him, too.
The stranger stood there looking at him—or perhaps only looking in his direction. He wasn’t sure. The light didn’t waver in her hand; she was much like the statue she’d been moments before. He looked back: he knew her now. He knew the hooked shape of her nose and the slightly aquiline slope of her face. He knew the scars he couldn’t see.
“Christ,” he said. She didn’t answer that, either. She did hold out his coat.
“Oh. Well … thanks.” Pulling the familiar weight back over his shoulders, Colin turned his head to look at Alethea. With a stab of remorse, he saw she was no longer there. The lantern’s glow spread far enough to illuminate the column of stone and the ragged pile of crumbled rock that no longer resembled a woman at all. He sighed. “I would have brought you both back, if I could.” His voice was rough in his own ears and liquid with blood. “I don’t understand. What happened?”
The stranger—Jihan, he reminded himself—was motionless. The lantern’s light gleamed in her mad eyes and picked up the uneven edges of the rent in her shirt. There was more blood on her than before. It smeared her hands and shone in wet splashes across her neck.
“What happened?” Colin asked again, and he knew—of course he knew—but still he felt a creeping dread. Cautiously, he looked down to find his fallen cane, a little distance from his left hand. He grasped at it, slowly, watching the stranger again from beneath the hood of his lashes. She didn’t react.
When he set the tip of the cane against the ground and gathered himself to rise, Jihan took a step forward. He was too tired to recoil. He stared in exhausted disbelief at her outstretched arm. She had bent down, extending her hand to him. Her features were empty and cool in the lantern glow.
“You’re friggin’ kidding.”
In her eyes, he saw only the pale hollows of his own reflection.
Colin considered, then grasped the woman’s forearm. He meant to only touch her sleeve, which was sticky and wet with death, but his fingers brushed a rip, and through it, he felt her skin and the yawning abyss of her being.
He wavered; he could have fallen into her again. Jihan was a pit, and his wings spread again on sheer instinct, but then she’d pulled him up with a smooth, surprising gentleness and stepped back. He let go as soon as she pulled away; that, too, was instinct. He had never in his life held to anyone who didn’t want him to.
“Let me help you,” he said. Again, she only stood, holding the lantern. She was looking somewhere into the hidden distance. It made it easier to study her. He fixed on the steel of her hair—her braid was grey now where it wasn’t soaked with blood, though he remembered it as black. She somehow appeared both older and younger than before. Her hair might have been covered with dust, or the remnant of a fire.
Colin could hear nothing but his own harsh breath and the pounding of his heart in his ears. He clenched his grip on the cane and stood swaying, while Jihan ignored him and held the light that spilled across the ground. His own skin had lost its illumination.
When the cavern stopped dancing around him, Colin hobbled carefully back across the mesa and began following the slope of the ground down toward the entrance. He didn’t hurry. His knee was stabbing at him, and he was sick already with what he knew he would find.
The woman followed him. Her footsteps were soundless, unlike his sliding shuffle, but the light remained steady behind his left shoulder. His shadow staggered in front of him, long across the rocky ground. It stretched over pale pebbles and scraggly stalagmites. It stretched over Privya’s upturned hand and then blotted the light that reflected from her staring eyes.
Colin’s breath caught, but he didn’t hesitate; he only continued his careful progress, stopping at the fallen girl’s side. Her gaze was already filming over. The wound that had killed her was self-evident; the sword was still in her. The slash started at the join of neck and shoulder and then bit deeply into her chest. The angle of her head was impossible. Her brows were still drawn down, her teeth bared in horrified rage.
“I’m sorry.” He said it to her, too, even though it didn’t matter anymore. Her blood was still pooling, and it ran along the edge of his right boot. He studied the girl’s body while her murderer held the lantern high.
He’d barely known her. He thought he felt a last drift of her desire, a stirring ghost of life and need. She was cooling meat now, and he could have wept for the innocent softness of her skin.
He turned his head and saw silver eyes, impassive in the lantern glow. Fury curled in him, and for just a second, he could spit, “Why?” But no response came, and in the next breath, he was overwhelmed with the need to pour his golden essence into the chasm of her madness. He almost fell.
He gripped the cane and closed his eyes until the impulse passed, then he moved toward what he hoped was the exit. He was still following the tug of recent death. He spared a last look for Privya, but he didn’t trust himself to straighten again if he bent to close her eyes.
The way in front of him was dark, but Jihan followed just behind, illuminating the rough rock. He saw the slow blood pooling ahead
before he saw the bodies. Grief stabbed through him again. His knee was close to giving out. His lungs felt as though they were filling with glue.
“Why?” he asked again, this time without hope. He could see, though: outstretched hands and the gleam of weapons. He saw a switchblade fallen in the spreading blood just before he saw the crumpled body of the girl whose hand he’d healed. Now her fingers were curled around a smeared pair of brass knuckles. Unlike Privya, she only looked surprised, the tip of her tongue between her teeth and her wide eyes glazing.
Next, a moustached man in a plaid shirt had fallen next to the baseball bat he’d been carrying all morning; he was missing an eye where Jihan’s blade had entered his skull. Colin hadn’t spoken two words to the man, but sorrow suffused him anyway. He stumbled onward to the dead woman with the short blonde hair and the hunting knife who’d bled out all over the ground. He sighed, looking down at her.
“I get it,” he said over his shoulder. “They attacked you. You didn’t have to kill them.”
But the woman with the lantern only watched him silently; when he glanced back, he saw her eyes gleaming cold as a wild beast’s. He swallowed. She made no move toward him, though, and when he walked, she followed.
He almost missed the tunnel out, but the light behind him veered to the left and then paused, waiting off to the side. “What?” he asked her; then he saw the curve of the stone at the exit and adjusted his path.
The slope of old rock beneath his boots gave way to the rise of stone steps as the walls narrowed inward. The stairs were as difficult as he’d feared, going up. He felt sweat bead on his temples and pool in the spaces between his wings.
He stopped to vomit. He didn’t fall; he stood there with one hand against the wall and the other braced on the cane, leaning to the side as he tried not to puke where he was about to step. “What just happened?” he panted, staring at the froth running down the stone wall. “And I don’t suppose you know how to get out of here?” He slid a look back at Jihan. He would have laughed, if death hadn’t lingered in his memory and in the impassivity of her blood-splattered face. “We’re in a cave. In a wall. What the fuck is my life today?”
In Veritas Page 28
