The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  She barely evaded it; she was small and fast, it was large and slower. But not slow enough. It jumped sideways to block her escape, yelling as it did. From behind her, one of the others shouted back.

  They talked to each other. It was too easy to think of them as animals, but they weren’t.

  She shot straight up a solid tree, claws hooking into the bark. The monster stretched after her, its claws slashing into her haunch, and she felt a single instant of blinding pain along her spine. She dug harder with her hindquarters and pulled free. She clung to an upper branch, out of reach of the things, wishing for the safety of the bay. She was running out of time. She began the careful process of moving across the network of interfaced branches that would get her there.

  She heard the flat twang of a bowstring, and an arrow buried itself in her flank. She screamed, feeling the hot gush of blood down her leg and the weight of the shaft throwing off her balance. The pain was another weight, sucking the fight from her. She stared down; one of them tracked her through the trees, waiting for another clear shot. She flung herself forward, and heard another of them crashing toward her from the side. The ones behind her were closing.

  Hurry with the fire, Hasmal, she prayed. If he did, her friends would survive; they would find a way to get the Mirror to the Reborn even if she died. They had to succeed at that—Solander the Reborn had told her he had to have it. The Mirror, which was rumored to resurrect the dead, would one day give her back her murdered Family, but even before it did that, it would serve Solander’s purpose in creating his world of peace and love—the world in which her kind would be accepted, not hunted down, tortured, and slaughtered.

  She never thought she’d discover something worth dying for, but a world that would not murder little children for being born Scarred was such a thing. Her family’s lives were such a thing. If her friends could live to get the Mirror to Solander . . .

  She yanked the arrow from her flank with teeth and claws, and, fighting the agony, went scrambling on three legs along the branch. The Karnee Shift began closing the wound, but ate up her energy to do it. Her body would devour itself to heal; if she lived through this, she would have a hellish price to pay.

  Then she heard fire crackling behind her and caught the first whiff of smoke. The spellfire wouldn’t be stopped by rain, or by live, wet wood, or by unfavorable wind. It would burn everything burnable in its path, carving a perfect circle of destruction through the forest, stopping only when the energy with which Hasmal had fueled it ran out. It would burn faster than any normal fire, reducing a full-grown tree to ashes in mere moments. If she didn’t get out of its way, it would burn her, too.

  The stream ran below her, within reach. But the monsters held the game trails to either side of it. If she wanted to live, she had to get to the bay. She was out of time.

  The monsters sniffed the air, smelling smoke—but they didn’t know how fast the fire would come. She did. In desperation she threw herself into the center of the flooded, icy, boulder-studded stream. The water dragged at her legs as she scrabbled to touch bottom, lifted her off her feet, and flung her forward.

  She fought to keep her head up. The current was fast, brutally fast, the normally negotiable water made deadly by days of rain. It slammed her into boulders as it dragged her downstream. With every bone-cracking collision she could only remind herself that worse was coming.

  The current spun her backward for an instant before sucking her completely under the water. In that instant, she saw the world behind her lit up like a blast furnace, blue-white fire advancing in a wall faster than the fastest man could run.

  She’d seen the monsters behind her outlined by the fire.

  And then she was under the muddy water, caught in the fierce center of the current, dragged headfirst through blackness. She held her breath and kept her forelegs over her head, hoping to protect herself from rocks, but the current jerked her into one from the side, and when her head hit, the pain hammered her. She inhaled water and choked as the current flung her upward again, playing with her. She spewed water into the air and pulled smoke-poisoned, fire-heated air into her wet lungs.

  Then everything got worse. The stream became a waterfall that plunged down the side of a cliff and poured into the bay. The current flung her over the precipice amid a torrent of pounding water. The sensation of floating seemed to last both forever and no time at all, ending abruptly in horrific pain. Her body crashed against rocks, water slammed her, and ribs and hips and legs all shattered and screamed agony at once.

  She was with the pain, in the pain, made of pain for an instant that was an eternity, while her blood boiled and her skin burned and a fire erupted inside of her that was hotter than the spellfire that had destroyed the world around her.

  Then . . .

  Nothing.

  Chapter 2

  The Veil joins all the worlds—those that are, those that were, and those that will someday be; they exist simultaneously within its compass. It is no-time, no-place, no-thing; infinite, terrifying, unknowable. Its winds blow through the realities, its storms twist them, and even its silences cast long shadows.

  Through the Veil, galaxies and souls travel as equals. In it, stars and gods and dreams are born, live out their spans, and die. It is neither a heaven nor a hell, though men of uncounted realities have named it one or the other or both, and have built stories and religions and civilizations around their error.

  The Veil . . . is. Uncaring, unchanging, and unchangeable, it nonetheless offers much to those who know how to reach it and exploit it.

  Within the Veil, the Star Council regrouped in answer to the summons of a single powerful soul, its members racing inward like stars in a tiny imploding galaxy—hundreds of brilliant points of light spiraling toward an ever-brightening center.

  The soul that summoned the Council was named Dafril. Dafril yearned for the immortality of the Veil, the power of gods . . . and a body of flesh. When Dafril’s soul had thought it would claim Kait Galweigh as its avatar, it had begun forming its thought patterns in female mode. Now things were changing. Kait’s compliance was ever more in doubt, so it began to shape itself toward a male existence. A thousand years earlier, it, or rather he, and his friends had devised a plan that they hoped would bring them all they yearned for. At last they were close to achieving their dreams.

  We have two orders of business, Dafril announced when all the councillors save one—a missing soul named Luercas—were gathered. First, we must prepare our avatars, for the hour of our return draws near. Second, we must decide how we will deal with the forces that have risen against us in our absence.

  We’ve spent a thousand years in the planning of our return, Mellayne said quietly. If we don’t know what we hope to do now, will we ever?

  At the last moment things change, Dafril said. And this has become the last moment. We could only speculate before now about the kind of world we’d find when we returned—now we know what we face. We could only guess what sort of people would inhabit it. And we never expected betrayal by one of our own—yet we must assume, since Luercas has disappeared, he has done so in order to oppose us.

  I thought the Mirror would only wake us when they’d rebuilt a real civilization, Shamenar said. I cannot believe the primitive conditions we face. The filth of even their greatest city stuns the mind. Raw sewage in the gutters; animal waste in the streets; slaughtered animals hanging in open-air markets; rooms lit only by fire. And the sicknesses of the people . . . worms and boils and rickets and yaws, influenza and diabetes and rat plague and things I haven’t even heard names for before.

  They’re ignorant, Tahirin added. Superstitious, cruel, violent, dishonest—and as brutal as their short, uncomprehending lives, most of them. How can we work with these people?

  Dafril drew energy from the Veil and grew more luminous, to give his people courage. This is the world we come into. This is the lot we’ve drawn. They’ve built what they could—now we make it better. Only we can return ci
vilization to our home. We can cure their diseases; we can improve their city; we can teach them and set them on a new path. The white cities will rise again, and we will ride through their streets in skycarts and breathe perfumed air and feast on wondrous food. The wind will once more play the White Chimes, and a hundred thousand fountains will sing and cool the breezes, and coldlamps will illuminate the darkest corners. Remember. Remember what we did before, and know that we can do it again.

  I wish I could be so sure, Werris said.

  Dafril felt their fear. A thousand years of passive waiting lay behind them, and that time had weight. In it, his people had grown accustomed to the limitations of bodilessness and fearful of change, challenge, and danger. Now they faced all three, and he sensed in many of his followers a desire to continue as they were, to cling to the known. He felt the same fear and in some small way tasted the same desire, but he also recalled the hunger he’d brought with him from life.

  Life was the only game worth playing.

  More than a million people inhabit Calimekka, he reminded them. And the city grows daily. You can bring civilization to a million souls far more easily than you can to a hundred, because you have more people to work with. We shall . . . tax them. We’ll apply a fair tax equally to every soul in the city. With that little tax, we give them the good things they haven’t the talent or the intelligence or the imagination or the ambition to give themselves. We will have our civilized city, and they will live healthy lives protected from violence in a world that no longer knows war, famine, or pestilence. What could be more reasonable?

  Well. Yes. Why would anyone object to our making their lives better? Except Solander, of course, Sartrig said. And his Falcons. And evidently Luercas.

  Dafril felt the stab of truth there. Solander, who had fouled their work so completely a thousand years earlier, had somehow come back. He’d found himself a body, an incredible body subtly shaped by magic, hardened by magic the way fire hardened steel—a body worthy of immortality. He was not yet born, but he and that wondrous body were waiting for them, already watchful, already planning to oppose them again, standing as ever on the side of dirt and disorder and chaos. They would have to deal quickly with Solander. And Luercas . . .

  Luercas had been Dafril’s closest and most powerful ally a thousand years earlier. He’d been a friend and a companion; he had shared Dafril’s dreams of their shining white city and of immortality spent amid beauty, luxury, and art; he had struggled with Dafril to save their fellow dreamers when everything went bad at the end. But when the Mirror of Souls finally woke the hundreds it held within its Soulwell and set them free within the Veil, Luercas had vanished. And Dafril was left wondering what his absence meant—whether the cold and twisted things that preyed between the worlds had devoured his soul, or whether some unsuspected bitterness or treachery had turned it against the Star Council. He could not believe that Luercas, ever the most careful and patient of souls, would carelessly allow himself to be devoured. Which left . . . betrayal.

  Sartrig’s spirit-light darkened as the senior councillor brought himself to the fore. I have a problem. I have chosen a marvelous avatar—a young Wolf named Ry Sabir—a powerful, well-bred man with training in magic and a body shaped by magic. But he has some knowledge of blocking and shielding, and he fights my direct influence at every turn. As long as he believes me to be the spirit of his dead brother, he at least considers my council. But he is most intractable and strong. When the moment comes, I don’t know that I will be able to penetrate his magic to . . . lead him.

  Dafril felt the fear behind Sartrig’s remark and its echoes shivered through his own soul. Men and women in this new time and new place were not all purely human—an interesting result of fallout from the last weapons in the final exchange between his people and the Falcons. He and his companions had just barely missed seeing the first fruits of that fallout, he suspected. A thousand years had honed the changed people—the people the Calimekkans called the Scarred—into a host of lovely species; some of the specimens in this new time offered options he had never imagined a thousand years earlier. His preferred avatar was a young woman named Kait Galweigh, a strong, beautiful girl of high birth with an interesting twist. She was a skinshifter, thereby possessing a talent he found irresistible. She was well thought of, had the necessary connections to Calimekka’s ruling factions, and had for some time been willing—even eager—to listen to his advice, believing that she heard a long-deceased ancestor when he spoke to her.

  But she had become increasingly suspicious in the last weeks, after falling in with unfortunate companions who had introduced her to magical training which allowed her to block out his presence.

  He had therefore chosen a backup for his preferred avatar. Exquisite little beast though Kait was, he had accepted the fact that she might be out of his reach when the great moment arrived. So his second choice was another of those marvelous skinshifters—a powerful wizard who had friends in useful places, and who was as beautiful as Kait. To his detriment, he was not as young. He wasn’t female, either, and Dafril had been fascinated by the idea of femaleness. He was also cruel, and known for perversions of a sort that Dafril found disgusting. And he had enemies. But Dafril had decided that he could cope with Crispin Sabir’s drawbacks if Kait failed to work out.

  Another fact made Crispin interesting to Dafril, though it wasn’t something he yet knew how to use. Crispin was father to the body that Solander inhabited. Dafril could feel the faint resonance created by the link of paternity. He knew that if he found a way to use it, his enemy could also use the link against him . . . if he knew of it. If he didn’t, well . . . it was, for the moment, something to keep in mind.

  Meanwhile, the avatar Sartrig had been drawn to was also one of the world’s few skinshifters. Those flexible bodies were so tempting, but offered special problems as well as opportunities.

  Prepare an alternate, he said. For that matter, each of you should have at least one alternate. We will have only the one moment to reach our avatars once the Mirror draws us through the Soulwell into the world. If your avatar is beyond the Mirror’s reach at that moment, or is in any way closed to you, you’ll be tossed back into the Veil without an anchor, and lost to us forever.

  The silence that greeted this statement echoed with fear.

  Someone from far in the back of the Council’s cluster finally broke the silence by changing the subject. Which leaves us with the problems of Luercas and of Solander and his minions.

  Dafril considered that for a moment. Serious problems, both, though I think Solander is the lesser. We have already defeated him once, and though he is already embodied, and the body is truly his, in order to acquire it he is being born. He will be an infant, and then a child, and while he is helpless, we will have time to prepare. We know of his presence and that of his followers; they should pose little danger to us.

  Luercas is another matter. We must accept that with every moment he ignores our calls and hides himself, the likelihood of his plotting against us increases. Nor am I comforted by the fact that he is one and we are many, for though we have the strength of numbers, we cannot assume that he is alone—he has always had a talent for finding allies in unlikely places.

  We’d thought to show him mercy, to give him a chance to rejoin us, Dafril continued, as suits those we love and would call friends; but though I am loath to admit it, I must now concede that those of you who advocated his destruction were right. When you search for him, search in groups large enough that you can overcome him if you find him. He is old, and clever, and he survived things in the Old World that most of you cannot imagine. When you find him, don’t try to reason with him, don’t warn him of your presence. Annihilate him. For if you do not, I fear he will annihilate you.

  Chapter 3

  The Wind Treasure cut through rough seas, heading south along uncharted North Novtierran coastline. Ry Sabir leaned against the curved bulkhead of the cabin and frowned out the porthole at the ragged black l
ine of land that lay on the horizon to the east, feeling sick dread in his belly. Kait was in trouble. The link that bound them, whatever it was and wherever it came from, had sent him fear, rage, pain . . . and now nothing. Nothing was the worst thing of all.

  He turned back to his lieutenants and said, “I haven’t discussed it because there hasn’t been any need.”

  All five of his lieutenants, who were also his best friends, had gathered in the small room. They’d locked and barred the cabin door and now sat crowded on the two bottom bunks.

  Yanth, dressed for high drama in black silk breeches and a black silk shirt, with his long blond hair braided with black cord, said, “I’m afraid there is a need. Each time one of us has mentioned what we’ll do when we get back home, you fall silent. Or you look away, or change the subject, or make some mock of the idea of returning to Calimekka. And not once have you told us how you expect to show up with a bride who’s a Galweigh. Surely that seems to us to require some planning, or at least some thought.”

  Trev, Jaim, Valard, and Karyl all nodded.

  Yanth continued, “You’re hiding a problem from us, and the problem you’re hiding concerns us. We’re determined to have the truth out of you, no matter what we have to do to get it.” He flushed as he finished speaking, and the vertical scars on his cheeks stood out like two stripes of white paint.

  This was the moment Ry had dreaded, the moment when his friends would no longer be turned aside from asking their questions, the moment when he would have to face the truth. He pushed his worries about Kait to the back of his mind—they would still be there later. He had immediate problems.

  “Doesn’t matter that you’re first-line Family and we aren’t,” Jaim said. “Doesn’t matter that Trev’s not Family at all. We’re going to know what you’re hiding from us before we leave here, or we won’t leave here.”

  Yanth would speak out of anger. It was his way. And he could cool down as quickly as he heated up. Had it been only Yanth in the room with Ry, he felt sure he could have avoided the confrontation his friends sought.