The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  And their howling let him know that she had somehow managed to get herself to safety outside Galweigh House’s walls. While curious about how she’d managed it, he wasn’t surprised. That image of the wall she’d climbed in Halles remained clear in his mind.

  With her safe, the time arrived for his next move. He continued to lie on the floor, feigning sleep; the Sabir guards had locked him and the other “valuable” Galweighs, and such technicians and artists as they’d found, in a windowless inner chamber on the fourth floor. Two—the House seneschal and a brawny distant cousin of Dùghall’s—lay dead in a corner from injuries they had sustained in an attempted escape. The guards had refused to summon medical help for them while they lived, and had (to Dùghall’s relief and the rest of his companions’ dismay) refused to remove the corpses when they died. Their bodies lay in the corner next to him—he’d bedded down within reach of them by choice.

  Dùghall sent cautious mental tendrils out and touched each of the room’s living inhabitants. Most slept deeply. A few drifted between sleep and wakefulness. Only one other than himself lay awake. Dùghall repressed a sigh and, with his tiny spare dagger, which had escaped the guards’ careful search—for what guard would think of checking in the tuck beneath the roll of fat on a middle-aged diplomat’s belly for a knife no bigger than a thumb?—he reopened the shallow cut in his palm and dripped his blood onto the floor, and summoned for the one who lay awake and the few who drifted or fought nightmares a peaceful, restful sleep.

  He tried no such trick on the guards who sat outside the door, laughing at each other’s stories of the women they’d raped and the loot they’d stolen that day. First, the Sabir men wore amulets made by some Sabir master which protected them from minor magics. Second, he wanted the bastards outside the door. It was the best place for them.

  When he was sure he alone among the room’s inhabitants remained awake, he sat up and crawled between the two corpses. He reached out and touched their cold bodies, feeling for their hands. When he found them, he placed both on the floor in front of him, fighting the stiffness that had set in. He would get no blood from them; he would have to make the offering one of flesh. Flesh would make the spell stronger, but also harder to control. And the taint of wild magic that still pervaded the House and the city gave him pause. No matter how pure his casting, no matter how entirely defensive its character, the wild magic could add an uncontrollable twist to it that could send it back to attack him and his, and the strength of flesh magic could make it deadly. But he could do nothing and condemn the few survivors of his Family to death and worse—or he could make the attempt at their salvation, knowing death and worse might still be the result.

  In his favor, the Sabirs had burned the other Galweigh corpses. And they would have, he felt sure, removed their own dead to Sabir House; until the Sabirs could consecrate Galweigh House to their own use, any other action would be heretical. An offering of only two corpses would be a meager number for what he needed, but if any in the fire lay even partially unburned, they would add strength to the sacrifice. And the fact that only a few corpses lay within the House’s walls would keep the strength of the spell within bounds he might hope to control if it ran amok.

  Such a delicate balance—the narrow strait between not enough and too much. He pursed his lips and began.

  First he cut the corpses’ hands across the palm and pressed the cuts together. He lay his own bloody palm across the top of the two dead hands and whispered:

  “By the blood of the living

  And the flesh of the dead,

  I summon the spirits of Family

  Who have gone before.

  Without the walls of this room

  But within the walls of this House

  Enemies have come

  And killed,

  Have plundered

  And pillaged,

  Have conquered

  And claimed.

  Come, spirits of the dead.

  All dead flesh within the walls of Galweigh House

  I offer as your payment

  If you will chase beyond the walls of this House

  All alive beyond the walls of this room.

  Harm none; draw no living blood;

  Inflict no pain.

  I ask not vengeance;

  I ask only relief.

  By my own spirit and my own blood

  I offer myself as price to ensure

  The safety of every living creature,

  Friend and foe,

  Now within the House’s walls

  Until this spell is done.

  So be it.”

  A cold voice, distant as the dark realm between the worlds yet close as death itself, murmured in his ear, “We accept.” The finger of a spirit traced a line along his cheek, and a tongue that existed nowhere in the physical world licked the blood from his palm. Something sighed. Something else chuckled. The hair on the back of Dùghall’s neck prickled, and icy sweat dripped from his upper lip and his forehead, slid down the furrow of his spine, and slicked his palms. He had never before summoned the dead. He hoped fervently that he never would find the need again.

  Then the corpses began to glow, softly, from the inside, as if they were fat-bodied candles with the wicks burning deep in their hearts. Soft and red they shone, their light burning brighter as the bodies became ever more translucent, and then transparent. Dùghall felt the magic rising, strong as a river. But the force of the spell far exceeded what he had anticipated. How many dead had lain within the House’s walls? Had that current of wild magic taken hold? He could not find the place where the spell drew extra strength, but while he sought for it, desperate to control the wildly growing pulse of energy, the magical river rose to the flood point, to the place where he might have had any hope of calling it back, and then beyond.

  He closed his eyes and prayed that he had cast his spell without a trace of hatred, without any secret desire for the destruction or death of his enemies. If he had not, those enemies would surely die—but so would he and everyone in the room with him.

  * * *

  Hasmal rolled in the berth on the ship, restless, wakened yet again from nightmare-wracked sleep by the sound of laughter. And once again the laughter hung only in his memory, tinkling and feminine, never touching the world he inhabited.

  In his dreams the creature who mocked him hovered over him, her hair red as rubies, her wings flashing and sparkling like gems in brilliant sunlight, her delicate body no bigger than his hand. She was a creature of the spirit world—the same spirit world he had invoked in seeking to escape his doom. One of her kind had told him to flee. His later spells and auguries had led him to this ship, to a captain who needed a man who could work metal and repair things.

  The previous shipwright had arrived in port with too much money and too little sense, and had gotten both drunk and in trouble. The captain, when hiring Hasmal, clearly stated in his terms that he would not bail his men out of prison (which was how the job came to be open in the first place); Hasmal, who didn’t drink and whose entire existence at the moment focused on keeping himself out of trouble, saw no problem in this. He’d been working for the past few days on getting the ship seaworthy, and the captain had spent the time (though so far without success) hunting for a cargo. He assured Hasmal that the Peregrine never waited long in harbor and that they would surely sail within days.

  While not as good as being at sea, that promise seemed sufficient to get Hasmal out of harm’s reach. But the spirit laughter rang in his dreams, and interrupted his sleep, and as he lay there in the darkness he wondered if he ought not flee upland, away from people, to hide in the dark wet jungle.

  His castings were clear—tossed bones, the cards, and even a solitary late-night check with another of the blood-conjured spirits reassured him that he was where he needed to be. No matter how nervous he might become, this was his right path. His ship. The Peregrine was a form of falcon . . . as he was a form of falcon—and wasn’t that a sign in itself?
One falcon would fly the other falcon away from danger and destruction.

  He settled down again in his berth and listened to the comforting creak of the planks and the lap of water against the hull. Sweet, soothing sounds that promised imminent escape and glorious freedom. He drifted to the edge of dreaming, to the twilight land between waking and sleep. And there the winged spirit sat, cross-legged in the air, a wicked grin on her face, waving her fingers at him.

  Miserable beast. He strengthened his shields, drawing energy from the bay beneath him and the currents of air around him and spinning them into another layer of the wall that kept out evil and made him seem to be no one—a man who made no impression, left no mark, captured no one’s fancy—and that gave him silence. Blessed silence. The spirit, walled out of his mind, vanished. After a while he slept.

  * * *

  Get up! Get up or you will die!

  A man, by turns annoying and angry, shouted at her from somewhere in the distance. The girl curled tighter into a ball and tried to shut his voice out; it was bringing her to wakefulness, and though she could not remember why, she knew she didn’t want to wake up.

  At least move beneath the trees, where you’ll have some shelter! Move! Move, girl! You cannot die on me now!

  Her body hurt, but not in ways she understood. She didn’t feel attached to the hurts at all. She recognized pain, but it didn’t seem to be her pain. It occurred in places that her body didn’t have. It hurt wrong, though she could not quite comprehend how that could be. She seemed to have been inserted into the body of a stranger, and the stranger’s body didn’t feel things the way she felt them, or smell things the way she smelled them, or hear things the way she heard them.

  Vaguely, she knew that she was cold. The air smelled wrong—sterile and empty. All her life, her world had been scented by the lush growth of the jungle, the rich dark earth scents, the profuse perfumes of flowers, and the thousand colliding odors of the city of Calimekka, and now all of that had been erased and replaced with nothingness. The cold didn’t bother her as much as the emptiness of smell . . . and of sound. She heard wind whistling and moaning, and from time to time a distant, sharp cracking, and nothing else.

  Get up! Please get up! I can’t let you die, girl. We need each other, you and I.

  Almost nothing else, then. He hadn’t left her yet. Why hadn’t he? He was a stranger. She’d never heard his voice before. In fact, she’d never even heard a voice like his before. He spoke with a faint accent, but one unlike anything in her experience. And she thought she’d heard all of them. She opened one eye.

  Whiteness assaulted her. Something had erased the world, leaving her in a place as empty as a sheet of vellum untouched by the scribe’s pen. Impossible. If she rubbed her eyes, they would work again. She tried to do just that, but when she moved her arm, a monstrous clawed hand moved into view and reached for her. She screamed and tried to scrabble away, and the white ground gave way beneath her and beside her, and turned to powder that blew into her nose and her eyes and her mouth, stinging where it touched, and melting, and tasting like . . .

  Snow.

  She dropped into a deep drift of it, realizing as she did just what it was that surrounded her. This was the snow that merchants brought from far in the south and sold by the cupful in the open market. She had never imagined the world being covered in the stuff—in her mind, those merchants had always had to dig for the precious delicacy, mining the earth for pockets of it the way miners dug out opals and emeralds. Here lay a fortune in snow, so deep the pocket she stood in reached from her feet to her neck, stretching away as far as the eye could see in all directions. She turned, looking for anything else, and at last circled around to see a small copse of trees not too far away. Endless wind had bent them until they hunched over like tired old men carrying firewood on their backs. Their leaves were needle-shaped and short; they were green, but the green looked dreary and dark to her eyes.

  She could not see the source of the voice that had so insistently harassed her until she woke; neither could she see any monster. In fact, in the whole world she seemed to be the only living creature. She wondered where the monster had gone, or the speaker; she wondered if they were one and the same. “Where are you?” she shouted, and immediately, as if from inside her head, the voice she’d heard before whispered, Shhhhh! They’ll hear you, and you aren’t ready to face them yet.

  She whirled around, but nothing was behind her. Keeping her voice down because she didn’t like the sound of “they’ll hear you,” especially not when said with the frightened tone the stranger used, she said, “Don’t hide from me. Come out and let me see you.”

  I . . . can’t come out. And you can’t see me. I’m trapped in a place where I’ve been kept prisoner since . . . well, since long before you were born. I can only send you my voice, but not into your ears. I speak to your mind, though I can see things through your eyes, and hear things through your ears.

  Danya frowned, and lifted a hand to brush blowing snow from her face. And once again saw the hand of a monstrosity coming toward her face. This time she didn’t scream. Bits and pieces of memory were starting to come back to her—she began to recall being in a dungeon for a long time, and then being kept prisoner in the rooms of her Sabir torturers. Yes. Those days blurred into an endless pageant of humiliations and degradations and pain. They had ended, though; she no longer lay chained to the floor. Something had happened recently—something had taken her from the three of them, but that something had been worse than what they had done to her . . .

  Then she had it. The memory returned, and she wanted to scream, but did not. Instead, she stared at the hand. Her hand. Tiny dark copper scales covered it like armor, right to the fingertips that terminated in hard, black, curving talons. The scales moved up the arm, becoming larger and lighter in color, so that at the elbow they were a bright copper, and at the shoulder, where spikes of bone or horn jutted from above and below the joint, they were pale, almost tan, but still with the same metal sheen. She moved the hand and its twin to her face, and closed her eyes so that she didn’t accidentally scratch them out, and she felt her face. Nothing of the woman she had once been remained. She now found a sharp crest of bone running from the top of her skull down to the much-widened space between her eyes. Her nose swept forward, as long as one hand, part of a lean muzzle. Her teeth felt like daggers—rows of daggers. More spikes erupted from the angle of her jaw on either side of her face—a face now entirely covered by tiny, pebblelike scales.

  Not until her fingers tangled into a heavy braid of long soft black hair did she begin to weep. The hair, now wet and in some places frozen, felt no different than it had before she served as sacrifice to the Sabirs. Before their magic Scarred her. The hair was still human, though she would never again be.

  Ignoring the voice that implored her to move to the relative shelter of the copse of trees, she dropped to her knees and covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed. The invisible stranger kept telling her if she didn’t find shelter, she would die. That suited her perfectly. She wanted to die.

  Cold tears clung to her face and froze. The bitter wind howled around her and began to cut into her. In the distance, so far away that it might almost have been another voice of the wind, something screamed. Her heart howled out its pain and grief for all that she had lost and all she would never have again. She fell toward voluntary oblivion, looked at the darkness of surrender and easy death, and almost . . . almost . . . almost let herself tumble in.

  Then, slowly, her sobs grew softer, and her tears fewer. Danya lifted her head and stared out at the bleak expanse of nothing that lay in all directions. Hellish nothing, empty of all she had once loved. She had lost her Family, her world, her friends—and in this twisted body she wore, she had to acknowledge that she had lost them forever. She could never go back and be Danya Galweigh, Wolf of the Galweighs, again. Her Family had not rescued her, had not ransomed her, had left her in the hands of enemies, and she could not and would
not forget that. She had suffered in the hands of her captors, and she had expected to die many times, and wished to die many more. She hated the monsters who had tortured her. She would never escape the sounds of their voices, the feel of their touch, the bitter vision of their faces.

  But she was alive. She was alive, and she was free, and no matter what the Galweighs had not done, and no matter what the Sabirs had done, she was now in a better position than any of them. Because she was alive, and they could not know that. And she knew who they were. And she knew where to find them.

  And she would find them, no matter how long it took, no matter what it cost, no matter what she had to do. She would find the people who had abandoned her, and those who had tortured her, and those who had sacrificed her, and she would make them pay.

  She stood, and shook the snow from her body, and lifted her head. Let them lie in their warm beds, safe in the comfort of their ignorance. She was coming.

  She was coming.

  Very good, the voice of her unseen ally whispered in her thoughts. Very good indeed. I thought you were strong enough to survive. If you desire revenge, I will do everything in my power to help you get it. Anything, Danya. But first I suggest we get you to shelter, and perhaps food. Because you won’t be able to make them pay if you die here.

  “You can get me to shelter?”

  I can direct you. I am limited in what I can do—but I have ways of finding things.

  “Why would you?”

  Silence for a moment. Then, Because I know what happened to you. Because I know what that’s like. Because I didn’t survive the things that happened to me. You wouldn’t be wrong to never trust anyone again, but I can tell you that I’ve been where you are now, and I have more reason than you could ever believe to help you get what you want. You can help me, Danya—and I can help you.