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

by H. Anthe Davis

  “That's different.”

  “No it's not. I've been watching, and it's not like the Guardian or the Dark. It's just energy. If you do it right, it doesn't touch your soul at all.”

  “It drained me,” Cob growled. “I nearly knocked myself out with it.”

  “That's because you're using it like the Guardian used you, dummy. You're pulling it into yourself and then pushing it out like...like you're trying to put out a fire by drinking water and then peeing on it, instead of dumping the water from a bucket. Enkhaelen's method, when he's not being a crazy firebird, is to use energy like a tool. Do you get that?”

  Cob eyed him. His hackles were still up, but the magic-talk was mystifying enough to take the edge off his nerves. “Sure, I guess. If that's what you say he's doin'. I have no idea.”

  Rubbing the bridge of his nose, Lerien said, “You could stand to use your head for something other than a battering ram.”

  Cob scowled. “I don't have t' take this.”

  “No, I know. It's just frustrating. I'm all that's left, and you just resist, resist, resist...” Lerien looked up through his bleached forelocks, hands spread in supplication. “So could you be kind to me and listen, please?”

  Those murkwater eyes held him, too like Darilan's to refuse. Darilan—Dasira—his friend would have been angry at him too, for digging his heels in against things that could benefit him even if he couldn't yet see how.

  “Fine,” he muttered. “So I'm doin' magic wrong.”

  “Yes, but it's not about that. Unless you want to be a mage.”

  “No.”

  “Because that's not what the tree is.” Half-turning, Lerien gestured to it in all its twisted glory. “It's you. The spiritual manifestation of your soul. You've petrified yourself because you're scared to change. All you want to be is Angry Cob Who Punches Things.”

  “I did change! I tried breakin' from the Light and embracin' the Dark, and look how that pikin' turned out!”

  “That wasn't a real change, Cob. That was you jumping from one display of anger to another. You've always worn it like armor—you just switched from white to black.”

  “Then what d'you want from me?”

  Lerien gestured toward the tree again, face tight. “For you to accept yourself. Accept the ways you have changed, and learn to use them. The Guardian worked on you extensively while you were its vessel. You're not just bigger than you should be. Your soul is different.”

  A shiver went up Cob's spine. “What d'you mean?”

  “I mean normal people can't pull stone staves from their chests. The earthkin guided you in making the tectonic lever, yes, and the Guardian braced you, but it was you who shifted the bedrock with it. You who turned the sand into fists and the snow into armor, and bound wood into the lever's stone after you broke it. The Guardian stopped wearing you like a coat a long time ago. What you learned to do with its backing was your work, and you can still do it. That,” he added, jabbing a finger at the tree, “is what you're refusing when you flee it.”

  Cob stared at it numbly. “You're sayin' I should be that again. Be like the Guardian.”

  “I'm saying you should stop acting like you've gone back to the kid you were! You lost a piking arm because of it!”

  “I'm not actin'—“

  “You are. You've barely even tried any of the things you learned. You've let Enkhaelen push you into his magic because you refuse to reach out on your own. Pikes, you tried to attack that woman with Serindas!”

  “It was all I had.”

  “It's not! You've moved earth and twisted wood and commanded water! You could probably do metal too, if you tried—but do you? Yes, you let yourself sense the rock sometimes, but only on command, and you haven't even tried to reach for animals or spirits. It's like you decided that losing the Guardian meant you'd lost everything, so you didn't even check.”

  Cob looked down at his feet. They were bare, rough, travel-scarred, as they'd been when they'd brought him to the Palace and the brink of annihilation. “Maybe I wanted t' lose it,” he mumbled. “Maybe I jus' wanna go away somewhere and be normal.”

  “You'll never be normal, Cob. Even if you hadn't been altered, you've gone too far into the Dark; it will always be there now, waiting. We can't fix that. But you can defend yourself with these skills you've gained, if only you'd just try. I know you haven't given up. If you had, you wouldn't be on this trek.”

  “What if I screw up?”

  “Everyone does now and then.”

  “Yeah, but...” There was a weight in his chest trying to hold the words down. Slowly he forced them out. “I hurt Arik. Almost hurt Das and Fiora when they fought. I was gonna drown the caravan by the Mist Forest and do worse to everyone in the Palace—everyone in the world, maybe. I don't wanna reach into that part of me again. Especially not with any kinda power at my command.”

  Lerien stared at him, then exhaled slowly. “Cob. That's why you learn to control yourself. Why you don't just bottle it all up.”

  “I don't—”

  “You do. You know you do. Bottle it up and it's still there, fermenting inside, until you can't cap it anymore and it blows like Aekhaelesgeria. And when it does, Cob, you won't just punch someone, because you're not an angry kid anymore. You're a force. What you did to Arik, what you could have done to Dasira and Fiora—it will happen again, by accident, because you haven't got it under control. If you don't know how to use it, it will use you.”

  “But if I touch the tree, that all gets fixed?” Cob said dubiously.

  Lerien made a clear effort not to roll his eyes. “When you touch the tree, you set yourself on a path. That's all. It's not a short or easy one, but you have to try.”

  Slowly, Cob nodded. He hated it, but Lerien was right. Sooner or later, he'd trip into another disaster of his own making, and if he couldn't stop himself, who would? Enkhaelen? He'd never live it down.

  As he stepped past Lerien, the young man said, “Also, the next time you want to use Serindas, call on me first. It takes a certain kind of mind to handle those blades.”

  “Sure,” Cob murmured, attention now wholly on the tree. With each step, he felt its pull more strongly, like it had its own sort of gravity—as if it, not the rock, was the foundation of his world. Wan light gleamed from petrified wood and silver alike, and the pulse in his skin matched the rush of water under the stone, the Dark beating against that thin barrier insistently.

  Forcing himself to ignore it, he reached out as the tree loomed near. Against the bark, his hand looked strange, thin, transparent, and he remembered it was the one he had lost.

  It made contact—then sank in, the wood-grain unwinding around it, the silver twisting like wire to bind his arm and pull. He staggered forward, other arm raised in defense, but the whole tree folded in like a hand and he was—

  —caught, held, cradled—

  —and it was—

  —seeping, spreading, pervading...

  unfurling,

  flowering,

  changing,

  and then—

  *****

  He twitched awake to a slow tap-tap-tap on his forehead. Opening his eyes, he found Enkhaelen right there, staring down at him from a hand-span's distance. The necromancer's finger paused, uplifted, then descended one last time to poke him between the brows.

  “Ow,” he said flatly. “What d'you want?”

  “Oh, it's not what I want,” answered the necromancer, pointing the offending finger somewhere above Cob's head. “It's what our wonderful host wants—or rather, what she'd like you to stop doing.”

  Dubious, Cob craned his head back and saw fresh branches rising up from the previously-dead headboard of the guest bed he'd been inhabiting. Some of the carvings were still identifiable as woodland figures, but most were smeared past intelligibility, just odd-shaped nubbins and trenches on the new growth.

  “Practicing in your sleep?” said Enkhaelen, indicating Cob's upflung right arm.

  Cob opened his
mouth to protest—more than that, to scoff, because the stub of his forearm was several inches from the headboard. But as he shifted, he felt the ghostly fingers of his missing hand still wrapped in the grain of the wood.

  His face heated. “I—“

  “Not to worry,” said Enkhaelen, stepping back. Beyond him lingered Arik, ears raised, and Drakisa Snowfoot keeping to the doorway. “Certain people were concerned, that's all.”

  Cob tried to sit up but found that his arm wouldn't come away. The phantom hand was locked in the wood, and even though it wasn't there—even though he could pass his real hand through the gap with just a shiver of strangeness—it kept him from moving.

  “Um,” he mumbled, “I can't...”

  “Relax, Cob. Focus. You know how this works.” The necromancer inspected his nails idly. “I suppose I should have taken more time to train you, but there wasn't any.”

  Don't want your training, Cob thought, but closed his eyes instead of saying it. With the visible world blotted out, his phantom hand felt no different from the other. Living wood encased it firmly, giving him no wiggle-room, no way to just slide free.

  For a moment, the black tree stood stark behind his eyes. He'd touched it, fallen into it, and it was—

  Me. It's just me. I come from the wood and the stone and the water and the silver. I push my essence into it like a hand into a glove, and I bend it to my will.

  The headboard lit up in his mind like splayed, tangled musculature. He felt the place where it intersected his hand and flexed those parts, twisting and pulling until they made a sufficient gap, then slowly drew himself free and sat up on the bed, shaking his arm as pins-and-needles throbbed down it.

  “Well, now it has a hole in the middle,” said Drakisa Snowfoot philosophically, “but I suppose I can pass it off as art.”

  Cob blushed harder, pulling the top blanket up around himself. “Sorry.”

  The scryer made a dismissive gesture and stepped out from the room. Only her voice drifted back. “Mystery meal will be ready soon.”

  “Because we don't know what time it actually is,” Enkhaelen clarified. “Or what day, frankly, though we can guess.”

  Cob nodded slowly, then frowned. “I had a dream. Lerien, the...the splinter Darilan put in me, he was tellin' me about magic…”

  Enkhaelen snorted. “What would he know? Anyway, come along. I'd like to get moving soon.”

  Quizzical, Cob slung himself from the bed to follow the others. He'd slept fully-clad in his borrowed clothes: a long tunic and trousers stiff with embroidery but lined in some slick fabric that kept them from being scratchy. They felt very fine and he was embarrassed to be mussing them with himself, even though he had cleaned up thoroughly in that waterfall-thing Snowfoot had called a shower.

  The room was too nice for him too: built in a truncated wedge-shape like the gap between spokes of a wheel, with the headboard against the short inner wall and a variety of colorful windows on the curved outer one. The central window could open, but he hadn't touched it, or any of the highly carved furnishings, or the painted walls, or the pretty little lamps that burned with mage-light. He'd barely dared step on the carpet.

  The door led into a curved hall, which fed immediately into a broader wedge-space full of benches and tools and scurrying metal-and-stone constructs before becoming a hall again on the other side. Several doors stood closed within that hall—other guest-rooms, perhaps—while the occasional archway on the inside wall led into the gathering-room where they'd first been. Finally, another large space opened before them: a mixed dining-room and kitchen, with one side dominated by a huge inkwood table and the other covered in cabinet-doors and counters. Several constructs worked there, turning things in pans and arranging dishes. From the center of the ceiling, a dome-shaped light shed a warm glow across the chamber, almost like sunshine.

  Enkhaelen had already plunked himself down at the end of the table, a ceramic mug at one hand and a scatter of cards in front of him. As Drakisa settled herself around the corner from him, one of her spider-like constructs scuttled up the far end of the table with a tea service on its back and started laying it out.

  Arik awaited at the spot across from her, ears perked, and pulled out the chair for Cob as he neared. That felt awkward too, but the wolfman's bright expression forestalled any complaint. Only once he sat did Arik settle in the chair beside him.

  “Food always gets people moving,” said Enkhaelen, scraping together the cards. “Drakisa has been kind enough to restock our supplies, so once we eat, I'd like to move directly on to Kerrindryr.”

  Cob blinked. “Are y'well enough for that?” While the necromancer had washed and waved a comb in the direction of his hair, he'd been a lump of charcoal only a day ago.

  “I'm fine,” said Enkhaelen dismissively. “I absorbed quite a lot of power when the volcano ignited. Unfortunately I went a bit too far into the fire, so once I left that vicinity, I passed out. Too much cold and darkness too quickly. I still have some of Aekhaelesgeria's energy packed away, so I should be able to feed on it for a while. No more uncontrollable narcolepsy.”

  Unsure whether he liked that or not, Cob just nodded.

  “Anyway, I'm back to mostly flesh, so I'm ready to go. You are actually the concern. How's your arm?”

  “Missin'.”

  Enkhaelen gave him a dirty look. “Yes. I see that. But you're already using your spirit hand, so…?”

  Cob looked down at the stump. Just the sight of it made his skin prickle and his shoulders tense, a black hole opening in his belly. “It's not good,” he mumbled. “I want m' arm back. Can't even do up m' pikin' breeches without it.”

  Enkhaelen sighed. “Unfortunately that isn't an option. If we had a wealth of time—and by 'wealth' I mean a month or more—I could attempt to regrow it. Your pattern hasn't changed; mind and soul both think the arm is there, thus why you can still sort of use it. But that much flesh-manipulation requires laboratory space and a place to rest, for both of us. Stability. We don't have that, and we won't for some time. Just count yourself lucky that I found that last bit of akarriden taint.”

  Cob grimaced. The necromancer had checked his stump over before bed and extracted something like a black bone splinter from it. He'd also poured so much energy into Cob that it had been initially difficult for him to fall sleep, what with his racing pulse and thoughts. Now, in the morning aftermath, he felt less fragile—though still not quite normal. “Yeah, but y’fixed the Mother Matriarch...”

  “I removed a series of tumors from her. It was a long and arduous working, and it set me back in my own recovery, but in the end it was still just a removal. It did not require remapping an entire limb, and I was able to hand off her aftercare to the rest of the temple. Regrowth requires as much effort from the patient as it does from me; I can't just wave my hand and make it so.”

  “Y'don't think I'm strong enough?”

  “No one is strong enough. I can't regrow pieces of myself without serious effort, and I'm part fire—as malleable as a person comes. Skinchangers take time too: reasonable function returns in the first few shifts, but it takes much longer before they regain their form and strength. And that is with the full force of their spirit and all their connected kin behind them.”

  Arik nodded his agreement. “When I bit my arm off, it came back stumpy,” he rumbled. “Remember? Took many shifts to be fully healed.”

  “That's how spirits and gods work,” said Enkhaelen. “They take little sips from all their followers so they can cause great effects in a single one, but their influence is still limited by their own templates and by the constraints of the mortal body. I could pour all of my energy into your arm to force it to grow back, but that would burn out your nerves and stop your heart—not to mention all the mutations it could cause. You don't want to be one of my metastatics.”

  “Those folks who slung the black goop?”

  “That was flesh. Corrupted flesh that became infectious and corrosive once separated fr
om the restraint of their souls. Most of them were only held in human form by my templates; they could heal up any wound and regrow limbs or even heads because almost every inch of them was the same sludgy stuff. Is that what you want?”

  Cob shook his head, stomach turning. His hand drifted automatically toward the arrowhead on its cord—the only way he'd learned about these things. Geraad Iskaen's memories. “They seemed happy enough,” he mumbled.

  Enkhaelen snorted. “How would you know?”

  “I mean… They had lives, even as metastatics.”

  The necromancer's brows crinkled, and Cob realized that he didn't know about the arrowhead. Or perhaps he did—it had been taken from his lair, after all—but wasn't aware of the contents. Cautiously he pulled it up from under his collar and saw Enkhaelen's gaze lance to it.

  “Geraad put a lotta observations in here,” he said, watching the necromancer's face. “About all sorts of things. 'S how we figured out where y'were in the Palace, but also that y'were maybe only mostly an asshole. Not a complete one.”

  Enkhaelen's mouth flattened, the skin around his eyes squinching up in a way that, in someone else, Cob might have taken for distress. “May I see it?” he said quietly.

  With a nod, Cob pulled it off and passed it over. Enkhaelen let it rest in his palm for a long moment before closing his hands around it.

  Immediately his eyes went distant, and Cob could imagine what he saw: the underground lair, the laboratory, the stone pillars in the magma, the metastatics and the corpses on slabs. The Palace in all its headache-inducing glory, made doubly so by the fervor and terror Geraad had felt there. The Emperor still on his Throne and that pulse of rage behind the wall, sickened and trapped, pitiable. Enkhaelen himself.

  And from him, a series of odd, unreadable actions. Permissions given, and protections, and duties, challenges. Books left laying around, secrets spoken, plans explained. Some sort of trick, an act? Or a glimpse into a lonely man struggling to connect?