The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  “Since they’re already dead, I don’t see where speed is an issue,” Hasmal said.

  Kait’s glare sent him hurrying ahead.

  * * *

  Three days and hundreds of filthy, half-buried, ruined buildings later, Hasmal was willing to concede that his joke about waiting for the intervention of the gods had not been his best. The rest of the searchers had found treasure beyond their most fevered imaginings. Plaques and bits of machinery, precious metals, statues and jewelry and things impossible to identify that would nonetheless draw a nice sum in the market were rowed out to the ship in the longboats and poured into the ship’s holds. The crew went through the city in shifts, with half staying on board to recuperate and keep an eye on the accumulated treasure, while the other half did their best to outdo the previous shift in adding to it.

  Hasmal had never heard of such a trove as the one accumulating aboard the Peregrine. He thought this city was the richest ever found. A thousand young men could spend long lives combing for treasures and do no more than skim the surface. The sheer brutal size of the place stunned him. Calimekka was the largest city in the world. More than a million people had lived within its boundaries at the last census, and it grew greater, in numbers and sheer size, every day. Mathematicians were forever estimating how many times the roads and streets of Calimekka could circle the world, if they were laid end to end. But the ruins of this nameless graveyard in the forest could have swallowed the great Calimekka and another dozen like it, and perhaps more. The buildings around the bay had been only the leading edge of what Hasmal guessed must have been one of the largest cities ever to exist.

  Kait grew more and more dispirited as they searched. She and Hasmal marked their share of sites where treasure lay, and already they would be richer than all but the Five Families. But they weren’t searching for wealth, so while everyone else grew jubilant and talked about the castles they would build and the slaves they would buy, Hasmal watched Kait draw deeper and deeper into herself.

  Ian had noticed her mood, and had done everything he could to find out what was causing it. He’d been solicitous, but Hasmal believed the captain suspected he and Kait were searching for something specific, something of tremendous value, and he wanted to be sure he got his share of it.

  Kait remained uncommunicative.

  * * *

  The torches of the night searchers flickered on the beach. They stood waiting for the remainder of the day crew to ferry the last of their finds out to the ship. Kait stood next to Hasmal at the longboat that would be last to leave.

  “I’m staying,” she said.

  Hasmal rubbed his eyes. “Staying? By Vodor’s eyes, Kait—we’ve searched all day. What can you hope to accomplish wearing yourself out?”

  She stared up at the hills, then returned her attention to Hasmal. “I’m not going back to the ship again until I find it. I have this terrible feeling that we’re running out of time. I don’t know why—I don’t know where the feeling comes from, or if there’s any truth to it. But I want to see my mother and father again. My brothers. My sisters. Dùghall. My cousins. I would do anything—”

  Her voice broke. She swallowed hard, tasting tears. She knew—knew—that if she didn’t find the Mirror of Souls within the next day, she would not find it at all. She felt the truth of that in her marrow, in her blood. She had nothing she could point to that would let her say, Here. This is why I’m afraid. But that only made the fear worse. She held lives in her hand, hundreds of lives, and among them the lives she valued more than her own. And if she failed them because she hadn’t tried hard enough, she would not be able to live with herself.

  Better she had died.

  “I would do anything to save them,” she said when she regained control of her voice. “But there are only so many things I can do. One thing I can do is search at night.”

  “And when will you sleep?”

  “Once I’ve found it.” She was Karnee. She could drive her body harder than any human if she needed to. Now she needed to. “Go and get some sleep, and I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning. We’ll hunt together then.”

  “I can’t let you do this.”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “Perhaps not. But what about the captain? You know he wants to stay with us; he wants whatever we’re looking for.”

  “I know. So you have to lie for me. Tell him you think I went to the ship in an earlier boat. If he tried to stay with me tonight, he would only slow me down.”

  Understanding flashed across Hasmal’s face. “You’re going to . . .”

  “Shift. Yes. I can cover much more ground that way, and my senses are better. There’s something we’ve been missing, and I have to think this will be my chance to discover what it was.”

  Hasmal looked past her shoulder and whispered, “Then go now. The captain’s dragging something down the beach; he’ll be here in a moment.”

  Kait nodded, and moved toward the trees. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Wish me luck.”

  “Luck,” he said.

  Kait loped up the hill, unlacing her shirt as she went. She had not taken a torch. Even in human form, her eyes made the most of available light, so that she saw quite clearly. When she Shifted, she would see as well as if she hunted by daylight.

  She wanted to avoid the night teams. Like the other crewmen on the Peregrine, they didn’t like her; she didn’t trust them. No matter what good things she’d done for their lives by bringing them to this city, she suspected any of the pairs would try to hurt her if they found her alone.

  She stripped out of her clothes, folded them, and left them in a building at the top of the cliff. Then she gave herself over to the inhuman hungers and lusts of Shift, and flowed into the ecstasy of otherness.

  To her keener Shifted senses, the night became a thing of unutterable beauty. The stars blazed through the broad leaves of the hardwood canopy, carving the trees into statues of liquid silver and bleaching the ruined buildings into creations of translucent shell. The wind sang in whispers, sweet accompaniment to the voices of insects and nightbirds and the four-legged predators who hunted through the wood. And the scents . . .

  As soon as she Shifted, she’d begun running inland, acting on hunches and some subliminal direction that she go east. She and Hasmal had hunted in that direction during the day, and there had been something . . . something . . . something that had excited her, but had been too muted and insubstantial for her to identify. It had tickled the back of her mind during the day, leaving her certain that she headed in the direction of something vital. Life-changing. Essential.

  Now, stopping at the top of a ridge and facing into the wind, she caught the faintest whiff of that same pulse-stirring scent. Yes, her mind told her. Whatever it is, you’ll find it in that direction.

  She ran into the wind, pushing herself hard, hoping that the scent would get stronger. It was probably stupid to be chasing it—after all, what were the odds that the aroma meant anything? She kept running, though; she had no other ideas to pursue.

  She ran far beyond the area she and Hasmal had covered, far enough that she broke free of the cover of forest onto a rolling plain. Even in the moonlight, she could see the scars that a fire had left on the remaining stumps of trees. The field had burned more than a year ago, and in its wake grasses had grown in profusion, and exquisite wildflowers, and the first tiny starts of what would, in twenty or thirty years, be the new forest.

  Life didn’t disappear in the aftermath of disasters, either large or small, though it did change. Uncounted small creatures inhabited the plain. They weren’t alone. She smelled and heard a pack of big animals moving northeast of her. Her nose identified the blood-scent on them. Predators, then. She was glad to be downwind.

  That other scent—the one she thought she knew—got stronger. Sweet. Beautifully sweet, but under the sweetness, the slightest taint of decay. Where had she smelled that scent before? Floral images flashed in her mind, but the scent had not come to her
in a garden. Not in the jungle. No place ordinary.

  The puzzle nagged at her, but she didn’t focus on it. She kept tracking; when she found whatever it was, she would most likely remember where she had run into it before. She lost the scent, doubled back, and began quartering north to south and back until she picked it up. When she found it again, the seductive tendrils of that tantalizing perfume led her far onto the plain, through rows of the ribs of buried buildings, along a stream, and finally into a declivity.

  She came to the head of a small falls. Cliffs dropped down to either side, sandstone that jutted at sharp angles from between tangles of vines and scrub trees. A pond at the bottom of the cliffs swirled away into a stream that rolled out of sight around a curve. Whatever she’d been tracking was down there. The scent filled the valley. Sweetness and decay. Both excited and afraid, she worked her way down the rough cliffs, sampling the air for any change that indicated danger. A bird sang beautifully, but fell silent as she neared the water. The insect noises stilled, and she felt the eyes of the darkness watching her, the frightened and huddled prey acknowledging her as the predator she was. She took the silence as her due, but did not break it. She, too, could find herself prey—hunted instead of hunter.

  At the bottom of the cliffs, she discovered a path. To that point, she had seen nothing that would make her think humans survived anywhere near the city. But while she could not catch any human scent about the path, it had the look of human work. It was neat, straight, sharp-edged. And it had been kept up. The fur along her spine stood up and an instinctive growl rumbled in the back of her throat. But the path led toward the source of the scent. She flexed her claws and moved forward, trying to focus on all directions at the same time. The path followed the edge of the little pond down to the stream that drained it. It continued to parallel the stream for perhaps two Calimekkan blocks. Then it veered sharply to the right and uphill into another ravine.

  This ravine bore further signs of current inhabitants: the increasingly broad, neat path edged with flowers; thorny shrubs planted to form a barrier hedge along the tops of the cliffs; and finally, a building in good repair built into the stone in the same manner that Galweigh House was built into the cliff.

  This building looked small from the outside. The part of it that Kait could see was about as big as the gatehouse back home. Or perhaps as big as one of the shrines to lesser gods. That thought occurred to her because in its form, it reminded her of those shrines. One doorway, no door, no windows, an elaborate roof, and within the shrine, an altar on a pedestal.

  The altar was different, though. It glowed, radiant as a small sun, its warm golden light illuminating the inside of the shrine, setting its translucent walls ablaze, and spilling welcoming light out onto the pathway and the tumbles of flowers to either side. And from the altar emanated the scent that she’d followed for such a distance.

  Honeysuckle, she realized. The cloying sweet scent was honeysuckle. And the place she’d smelled it before had been in the airible, in the instant before magic had overwhelmed her and Dùghall. In the instant before everything changed.

  In the back of her mind, Amalee said, That’s it. That’s the Mirror of Souls.

  Where? Kait asked, not speaking out loud.

  You called it an altar in your thoughts. The glowing pedestal.

  Kait stared at it and groaned. It’s too big. I’ll never be able to take it back by myself.

  Then get back to the beach and be waiting when your friends get here. And do it quickly. Because that is what you’ve come all this way to find.

  At that moment, the monsters who guarded the shrine chose to attack.

  Chapter 30

  She’d never smelled them coming, nor heard from them the faintest sound. The honeysuckle-and-rot scent had hidden them from her. They dropped down from the sides of the cliffs and shambled out of the shrine; warped and twisted parodies of humans, naked and snarling, carrying hoes and long-handled trowels and rakes in their knot-jointed hands. Their ancestors had surely been human, but they were not. They smelled only of leaf mold and damp earth and dark, hidden places, and they whispered as they moved toward her, wordless whispering that mimicked the rustle of leaves. They came at Kait from all sides. In spite of her wariness in her approach, in spite of her strength and speed, they cut off her route of escape, and she discovered how well they had planned the protection of their shrine.

  She had the low ground, and nothing to guard her back. She couldn’t seek refuge in the cliffs, nor could she attempt escape in any direction but the one by which she’d come. She counted twelve of them, and doubted that they’d sent their full complement against her in the first wave. She still saw too many good hiding places like the ones out of which these attackers had materialized.

  They weren’t armed well, and they moved awkwardly, their bodies poorly designed for speed or fighting. Those two advantages she held. Against the monsters’ advantages of position, numbers, familiarity with terrain, and surprise, her two strengths would not, she felt, be sufficient to save her life. She felt fear as a force that pressed the air from her lungs and sat atop her shoulders and back, pressing her down. Making her slow. Weak.

  So close. She stood so close to success, to triumph. She’d come from half a world away, and now crouched less than a stone’s throw from the magical device that would restore her beloved dead to her, and neither she nor they would have their chances. Kait howled her rage and her anguish, and attacked the nearest of the monsters.

  Kait.

  They shrieked and swung their gardening tools, catching her in the face and across the shoulders and ribs. She leaped and slashed with teeth and claws, and those she attacked fell back. But others moved in at her sides, and more blows fell. She slashed one of the monsters and blood spurted from its belly; at its screams, more of the creatures appeared from above her, behind her, in front of her. All of them carried tools, or sticks, or clubs.

  Kait!

  At last she heard Amalee shouting at her, and realized she had been doing so since the monsters first surrounded her. “Not now!” she snarled. “Can’t you see I’m busy dying?”

  You have to be human.

  Kait killed one of the creatures, but even more appeared. She guessed that more than thirty now surrounded and attacked her, though she couldn’t be sure—they were all around her and she was too busy fighting to try for an accurate count. For every one she killed, a dozen managed to connect with their makeshift weapons. They wounded her faster than she could heal. They would kill her in pieces, dragging life from her a little at a time, tearing her into a slow, gruesome death.

  You have to be human! Amalee insisted again, shouting it into Kait’s mind so fiercely that she could no longer ignore her dead ancestor.

  “Pity I’m not, then, isn’t it?”

  Listen. You have to Shift into human shape. They’ll kill anything and anyone not in human shape. They’re the guardians of the Mirror, and if you’re human, they’ll let you walk on the path safely. They’ll even let you take the Mirror. Your arrival is what their kind have waited almost a thousand years to witness.

  “I have no weapons in human form,” she said. “No clothes. I’ll be completely helpless.”

  You have to be human. Or you’ll die. If you’re human, they won’t hurt you.

  Kait didn’t believe her ancestor. Five of the monsters now lay dead, and she didn’t believe they would forgive that slaughter if she Shifted back to her human form. They would, instead, kill her all the faster, and with no further loss.

  But she was dying. Slowly. She would, in her Karnee form, kill more of them before they completely overcame her. Nevertheless, she would still die.

  I have to be human, she says.

  They won’t kill a human, she says.

  She’s a fool, I say.

  Well, if I must die today anyway, I’d rather die as a human than a beast.

  Snarling, fighting, in pain, she struggled to find the still place within herself, the place
that was all blues and greens and placid water and silence. Fear, rage, and anguish buried her humanity deep. The red-hot bloodlust nearly drowned it. Years of effort to keep herself human in the worst of circumstances rose to her assistance, though, and she found that place after all. Touched the silence in her soul. Felt the battle hunger die slowly, even though the monsters still attacked her, even though she no longer attacked, but only attempted to ward off the blows that rained on her from all directions.

  She Shifted, and felt her blood cool, and her skin grow heavy, and her senses dull.

  She stretched and reformed, and all around her the monsters backed away, mewling, as she rose from four legs to two, and stood over their hunched and twisted forms. They dropped their weapons, and some began to weep, and all of them prostrated themselves at her feet. She stood over them, bleeding from a hundred burning cuts, dizzy with pain, and slowly she stepped over and around them. Not toward the Mirror of Souls. Away from it. Back the way she’d come. She had to get back to the beach by the time the morning crew arrived. She had to bring Hasmal and Ian and one or two others to help her carry the Mirror back to the ship. The journey, which in Karnee form she could run in one night, would take humans several days. And time was precious. Time was everything.

  Once out of the ravine and well away from the Mirror’s guardians, she forced herself into Shift again, though it drained her body’s resources. Her body devoured itself to complete the Shift, and would consume even more of her own tissue when she had to become human again upon reaching the beach. She stopped her headlong rush several times to kill and devour animals unlucky enough to end up in her path. They would only keep her from starving to death before she reached the ship; she would need a massive meal when she arrived.

  That was a minor detail. Everything else was minor detail. Against all odds, she had found the Mirror of Souls. Her Family and the Reborn would triumph.