The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4)

by H. Anthe Davis

  Ilshenrir navigated by crystal beacons, right? And by the spires. So I should be able to sense the nearest one and—

  Except that's Hlacaasteia now.

  They'd left that piking thing behind at the Palace, and Lark had no intention of returning. Locating it then striking out opposite wasn't ideal either; she didn't know how straight the White Road ran, or how strangely distance might bend within the Grey. They could end up overshooting Keceirnden by a hundred miles or stepping out into a mountainside.

  Their best chance was to wait here a while, then try to cross over and hope they were still where they'd started.

  Just for practice, she focused on the crystal, trying to feel Hlacaasteia through it. She'd been within a stone's throw of that horrid spire and its bloody glow still haunted her, the song of its substance still ringing through her bones. She'd seen Erestoia-by-the-Sea and the broken spire in the Corvish forest too, but those had been tiny in comparison.

  Her crystal had its own resonance. Faint and soft like a murmur in another room; warm like sunlight through clouds. She hoped that wherever Ilshenrir had gone, this didn't hurt him, and that he was safe.

  Turning it this way and that, she felt for any distortion in its song. There was no guarantee she could detect it; wraiths had higher senses and communicated in ways humans couldn't imagine. But every bit of knowledge was useful, and if she could discern one new thing…

  “Um,” said Maevor, “did you summon that?”

  She looked up to see a point of light bobbing through the mist. It was tiny compared to the head-sized glow of the wraiths from the Riddish desert, but still undeniably wraithly.

  “Shit,” she said, and stopped feeding the crystal.

  The mist closed in on her again, and the tiny light halted in place.

  “It's a wraith,” she hissed to Maevor and the others who had leaned in. “A really little one, or— Or a dead one. Disembodied.” That made her feel bad, actually. “I think they fall in here when they die, and if they can't find a spire, they just wander.”

  “Looking for other wraiths and wraith-things?” Maevor said dryly.

  She glanced at the crystal. Without her input, its glow and resonance had died. In the mist, the little light jittered as if confused.

  If it's an enemy and I draw it to us, we can fight it—maybe. Maevor can see it, so likely everyone can, and Erevard still has his sword. If it's not an enemy, and it's been trapped here…

  “There's another one,” said Yendrah.

  Lark looked the way the Riddishwoman was pointing and saw a smaller, fainter speck of light, also twitching with confusion. Turning further, she saw two more on the far side, almost invisible in the mist.

  One glance at Maevor's face told her his opinion, but she had been in this situation before, in the shaking tunnels beneath Bahlaer and in the crumbling streets of Daecia City. Something strange was seeking her—something potentially dangerous—but she couldn't just turn away.

  “I'm going to bring them in,” she said.

  “Are you insane?”

  “Trust me. Trust me.” She didn't trust herself, but she stood anyway. Her legs felt watery, the robe dragging at her as Ripple clung with its slush-thick new weight. Raising the crystal, she pushed a bit of power into it again and watched the wraith-lights perk to life.

  They came in erratically, jaggedly, like injured bees seeking their hive. As the first flitted into her circle of sight, it gained color: a strange dusty violet that shaded to gold at the edges. It hesitated at arm's-length, then shot forward, striking the crystal with a sound like a chime.

  Lark nearly dropped it as the energy she'd put in recoiled on her, stinging her fingers. Cursing, she tossed it from hand to hand until its resonance faded to a low hum.

  The other three lights had halted at the same time the purple one jumped in, but now drifted slowly closer. Only one had color, a delicate blue; the others were pure white. Gently they melded into the crystal, altering its resonance and tone for only a moment before the purple-gold prevailed.

  “Um...greetings,” Lark said to it, not sure what else to do. With all four inside, the resonance was strong enough that it felt like her arm was being strummed.

  A choral buzz came from the crystal, too chaotic to make out words. White and blue light swirled like ribbons within the purple then subsided, only to rise again at the next hum.

  “I'll just wait until you're done fighting, then,” Lark told it, and sank back down to the fake ground. The agitated resonance worried her; probably there weren't meant to be so many in such a small space, and their energies were spilling over.

  Her eyes narrowed at the thought, and she tentatively grasped the crystal with both sets of fingers, trying to pull energy from it instead of push.

  She'd done it with the hot-rocks, sort of, when Ilshenrir had been teaching her. Infusing them had been tough, reabsorbing spillover energy much easier, but withdrawing what she'd stored in them had taken a strange sort of mental effort, like trying to uproot a tree without damaging it or the soil.

  Drawing from the crystal, though, was like cupping water from an overflowing fountain. It ran right up her fingers and into her veins, igniting constellations behind her eyes and crackling between her teeth as her jaws clamped shut. Every muscle went taut, and she remembered Maevor's words with panic—backlash, overload. Burning from the inside out.

  Someone smacked it from her hands, the cord catching on her thumb before it could shoot off into the mist. She gasped as her lungs unlocked, then crumpled into a crowd of arms.

  “Trust you?” Maevor said incredulously from the back of the crowd.

  “Just...have to learn...to moderate it,” she rasped as they eased her down to the ground. Her pulse was zinging like after Maevor's bracer-spike, but this time the surge stayed within her, spreading out through her body rather than dissipating into a deeper weariness. She brought the crystal to eye-level, its interior still roiling with captured light, and said, “They're intelligent energy with no physical bodies, just this little shelter. They have more power than it can contain. If I just sip at it...”

  “Sip at wraiths,” echoed Erevard disdainfully.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  Her advisors stayed silent.

  “Just...be ready to swat it away again if I screw up. I'm new at this too.”

  Heads nodded. The steadying arms left her, the staring eyes turned away, but she could still feel them there—her comrades, connected by sashes and shreds of cloth and shoulder-contact, tired and frightened in this endless mist. She wished she could pass her confidence on to them, but she wasn't sure it was real. What she knew and what she speculated were dwarfed by the mysteries of magic like a pebble before a mountain.

  Still, at least it was something.

  Chapter 13 – Stress Fractures

  A tap on his office door drew Captain Sarovy's attention from the letter he was composing. “Enter,” he said, setting the quill-pen back on its stand.

  It swung open to admit Enforcer Ardent, in her typical gear, with a wooden case under one arm. Sarovy stood—a reflex—and she inclined her head to him, then took the opposite chair by his desk at his gesture.

  “Progress?” she said, nodding to the pile of scrolls at his left hand. Each was tied with a white ribbon with two to six names carefully lettered on it: the sender, the potential recipients, and sometimes the subject.

  Sarovy's name was on too many of them, informing the relatives of men who had died. The others were from living soldiers to family and friends who, considering the current conditions, might not be alive themselves.

  “Some,” he answered, and tapped the rewritten company roster and the unread letters beside him. “Still many to review.”

  “We can take them as soon as you like.”

  He nodded, then raised his brows at her questioningly. Since giving him this small office beside the larger warehouse space, she hadn't stopped in, sending agents instead to take his requests for su
pplies and materials and to inform him of new Shadow excursions. The halls were now open between here and Blaze Company's bunk-site; he no longer needed guidance or permission to travel back and forth, nor did his men.

  They were both acting as administrators now, with increasing demands on their time and attention. It was unusual to see her outside of the post-mission meetings.

  Rather than speak, she set the wooden case on his desk and opened the latches. The whole thing unfolded into an inset game-board, with flat pouches that rattled as she scooped them up. He recognized the distinctive crosshatch pattern of turnabout and tilted his head.

  “You don't sleep, you don't eat, you rarely leave the office,” she said, shaking the black stones out into her palm. “That wasn't what I'd intended when I lent it to you.”

  “I have work—“

  “You have make-work. You don't need to sit here and pore over your men's letters home. Don't pretend you've been quick or efficient in that, captain. In your maps, in your requisition-lists, yes. Not with those.”

  Her black eyes nailed him. He looked away rather than meet them. The office gave him little to focus on; tiny, windowless, with no decoration and minimal furniture, the walls bare, the mirror turned backward behind the washbasin. He had a bookshelf but it held only scrolled-up maps and stacks of blank paper, and on his desk were just his current work, his time-candle, his lamp, and the Sarovingian blade serving as a paperweight. It was still in its wrappings.

  “You're going around in circles,” she said. “Do something else. Challenge me.”

  He looked back to find that she'd already set up her pieces. The white bag sat at his end, awaiting his hand. With a touch of guilt, he glanced down at the part-written letter in front of him, with its cross-outs and marginalia, its thought-process so recently cut off: 'Irsa, I ask you, if things had been different—'

  Quite suddenly, he didn't want an answer. That line of thought deserved no more contemplation than the fifteen pages that had come before, or the many more he'd mapped in his head to explain this new, strange life to his wife. For all he knew, she had a new husband and children.

  “I have been self-indulgent,” he said, turning that sheet face-down. “I should attend to proper business. Games are—“

  “Necessary. Downtime is essential. Did you sleep, back when you thought you were a man?”

  Her phrasing carved a bitter smile on his face. “Yes.”

  “Then maybe you should remember how, some time. Just because you don't have to doesn't mean you shouldn't.” She pushed the white bag closer to him. “Play the game.”

  “And if I decline?”

  “Captain, really. I'm not holding a sword over your head. Indulge me so we have something to do while we talk.”

  Frowning, he took the bag and tipped the white stones into his hand. The feel of them brought nostalgia: a sense of damp stone and narrow windows, winding staircases, wind-swept plateaus. A pang squeezed his unreal heart.

  “I—“ he started, but her black stare halted him. Still frowning, he placed the stones.

  “Guest first,” she said.

  He hesitated over his opening play, torn between a quick loss so that she would go or a properly competitive game. It had been quite some time since his last opponent, a fellow Crimson-exiled Trivestean from an associated company. They had played between shifts during the first occupation of Savinnor—what, eight years ago?

  He couldn't remember the man's name.

  That was happening more and more often, and it bothered him. He'd always been splendid with names and faces, but since the loss of the Light, they'd begun slipping from his grasp. The old ones first, rarely thought-of: his subordinates at Fort Vaden, his original archer platoon before he was tapped as a lancer, the comrades who'd fallen in Jernizan and Kerrindryr.

  When he tried to envision them, their features blurred. Changed. New names rose in his mind, wrong but familiar. The more he tried to remember, the more they tried to speak, their voices muddled but insistent, demanding...

  Forcing his attention to the game-board, he moved a white stone to an empty square. She pushed her first stone forward in an audacious counter, and the game was on.

  “Your men are still comfortable?” she said as he moved his next stone. “We're still working on a better facility, but the privacy screens should help.”

  “They're used to barracks living. But we plan to transform the infirmary into another bunk-area to ease the space constraints.”

  “For the specialists?”

  “For a platoon. I've integrated the specialists with the rest of the troops.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “It was the Crown Prince's plan. Integrate the branches of service into a cohesive whole—infantry, archers, lancers, mages, specialists, all working together on a small scale to deal with situations a large single-branch army can't handle. Taking Illane taught us that we could not expect to face our enemies afield like we did in Jernizan or the north.”

  “The Illanites aren't warlike.”

  “No. But they are angry. And they have you.”

  She smirked—or was it a smile distorted by her scar? “We're only here as a response to you. The local kais operate independently; we provide support, supplies, but they manage their own affairs. If you hadn't crushed them, the greater Shadow forces wouldn't have stepped in.”

  Sarovy waved that comment off; it was old business. “Regardless, the Crown Prince commissioned me to integrate us. Just an experiment, but perhaps why our association is working.”

  “I'd call it an adoption, myself.”

  “Would you?”

  She gestured with the stone in her hand, as smooth and glossy-black as her short nails. “We're trying. I don't have to tell you there's no love lost. But the off-duty mixing is going well. They've got kickball teams now.”

  “Yours against mine.”

  “For now. A few days can't patch up our rifts, but a few will become a dozen, a score, and onward until we blend together or break apart. We just need to aim for the former.”

  Sarovy looked down at the splay of stones, then pushed his next into place. He wished he could feel that confident about this situation—wished he could be entirely comfortable within these confines, this role. He had made his choice to side with the Shadows, and there would be no return. Still he missed the Light and the life he'd thought he'd had.

  Thus the letters home. Thus his busywork, his automatic isolation. He knew it was unwise, but he couldn't help himself. There was no one to speak to about the voices or the fear—no one who wouldn't either be terrified or want to peer into his mind and tinker with it. He kept himself aloof in self-defense, but even that frustrated him; he knew he was going in circles.

  “How do you feel?” she said.

  He glanced up, alarmed, but her expression was casual, brows arched just slightly in interest. “Feel?” he echoed, at a loss for how to answer.

  “You know, emotions. I know you have them. So far, my favorite is when you're aggravated because one of your men has done something ridiculous but also kind of funny or smart, and you're not sure whether to yell or crack a smile.”

  He stared at her. After a moment, she continued, “My least favorite is when you get this slack look, this sort of emptiness like something's just sucked your life out. You were doing that a moment ago.”

  “Was I?” he stalled automatically. He hadn't realized it showed on his face, and had to wonder how many others had glimpsed his lapses of control. The voices didn't swarm up in public, but they made a low baseline now: a soft wave of crowd-sound beneath their conversation, noticeable when it lapsed.

  “Mako says you don't visit.”

  “Did she send you?”

  Ardent sat back with a snort. Her dark armor seemed to eat up the candlelight. “Didn't have to. I've been meaning to come. And not to call you out, though I'm sure that's how it seems. The fact is that we need you out there, not barricaded in here.”

  “Out ther
e, on missions?”

  “No, just with your men. You're not in the army anymore. I don't want reports; I want to see this integration in action, and they need you to lead them into it. More than that, I want your advice—not just on the Seethers you grab, but other things too.”

  Sarovy blinked and straightened. “Such as?”

  Her lips quirked in a definite smile. “We don't organize ourselves in large groups; we're trained to be semi-independent small-team operators. And yet here I am with a crisis involving thousands of civilians, hundreds of agents, all of your Blazes and whatever Seethers you can net. How would you manage it?”

  He had no words at first. The conversation had already veered too much for him. But as she placed her next stone, he saw the patterns of play that spread out from it, and something in his mind kicked back to life.

  “Thousands,” he murmured, “how many thousands?”

  “A maximum of fifty. That was the census before the sun vanished. Since then, some have run into the countryside—good luck to them—and some have come in from it. About five hundred are useful, either local Shadow Folk or Trifolders or council or militia that slipped your grip, but none of them have experience with this, and the Lord Governor is losing his mind. He still wants to execute you.”

  Sarovy shook his head.

  “We've dealt with refugee crises before,” she said, “but right now everywhere is as bad as this. There's nowhere to go. The Shadow Realm can't take them in, the underground isn't big enough, and they're all spread out through the city—some swear they won't leave until the Seethers kick in their doors. You were some sort of military governor, right? What would you do?”

  He had held Fort Vaden for only two years, more than a decade ago. The eight hundred soldiers under his command, plus his wife's eight hundred auxiliaries, did not nearly match Bahlaer. Yet he remembered clearly the barrack houses, the cliffs-edge towers, the supply depots, the bridges and barricades that made up the fortress's sprawl, and the broken stretch of plateau and forest and mountain that had been its territory—even as he was forgetting its people.