The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  “Cover,” he screamed. “Take cover! Incoming!”

  Men fell off the ratlines in their hurry, and lay stunned on the deck. Others, more graceful or else just luckier, pounded over and around their fallen comrades and flung themselves down the ship’s hatches as the second green fireball descended. Ian judged arc and trajectory and guessed the thing would hit the foremast; he raced aft and was under cover in time to see foremast, forecastle, yards, sails, ratlines, part of the cabins, and another circle of deck disappear as if they’d never been. But the gale kept blowing, and the next fireball one of the airibles launched fell into the sea short of its target . . . and the next fell even farther away.

  The ship hadn’t been holed. That was a mercy—or else planning on the part of the attackers. Boring clean through it with that green fire of theirs could have destroyed the thing Ian was certain they had come to get: Kait’s artifact. They wouldn’t risk that. They’d just disabled the ship.

  But they hadn’t counted on that lovely, sudden, wonderful wind. The airibles blew out of range of their target and, while the sailors watched, almost out of sight. That was a hellish wind. Ian would have cheered, and certainly felt that his own survival deserved a cheer, but the survivors had much to do. The Wind Treasure was a wreck. They might manage to limp the ship to a safe port on just spritsails and mizzens, but they’d have to shore up the bowsprit to do it. They’d lost all but their aft square sails, all their jibs, and even the top spritsail, and they’d have to rig a tiller to the rudder since the ship’s wheel was gone. Nevertheless, with sufficient time, Ian thought he could get them to safety. To do it, the wind would have to remain in his favor and keep the airibles at bay.

  A wave of nausea overcame him suddenly. It felt like it had rolled over him from outside, and when it left him, he was weaker, and plagued by a nagging feeling of sickness that hadn’t been there before.

  But he’d no more than gotten control of that strange malaise than the wind died, cut off as if it had been the breath of a giant who had ceased to find amusement in blowing his toys around. Ian prayed that the stillness was just a pause between gusts, but before his eyes, the chop in the strait died away, leaving the water smooth as rolled glass. The Wind Treasure quit tugging at her anchor. The air took on a hush of expectancy. And in the far distance, tiny as minnows but graceful as eels swimming through the sky, the airibles got themselves under control and slowly turned back toward the Wind Treasure.

  The battle was as good as lost. With the captain gone and the first mate nowhere to be seen, Ian declared himself temporary captain of the doomed ship and the lost fight and shouted, “All hands on deck! All hands on deck! Prepare to abandon ship! Prepare to abandon ship!”

  They came running then, streaming from the hatches like mice from a flooded burrow. The sailors were first, and they swung the longboats free from their tie-downs and moved them over the ship’s rails with amazing alacrity. Behind them came Kait, dragging Hasmal, who—bleached white as death, and with his eyes rolled back in his head—looked like he’d already fought the losing half of a war. Ry came next, sword already in hand, with four of his five lieutenants carrying the halved, bloodless body of the fifth. They, too, looked drained, though not as near death as Hasmal—and they looked terrified.

  “What happened?” Kait yelled as she dragged Hasmal toward the nearest of the three longboats. “Hasmal sacrificed to his god and raised a wind, and the airibles were out of range. We’d beaten them, and then suddenly the spell snapped like an overstretched cord. It whipped back on him and knocked him out—I thought he was going to die on me.” She looked at Ian and growled, “He still might.”

  Ry stopped and stared at her. “The two of you summoned that wind? Ah, gods’ balls. . . . We set up a shield that blocked their spellfire. But we shielded the whole ship, so of course it broke your spell. We thought the wind was natural—I couldn’t feel the magic.”

  “Damned fools.”

  Ry and his lieutenants claimed one of the longboats and swung it over the side of the ship into the glass-still sea. “Get in here,” he told her. “We’re going to have to run for it.”

  Ian looked at the corpse they started to ship into the boat and said, “Leave your dead behind. The smell of death will have the gorrahs on us before we can commend his soul to the gods.” He couldn’t bear to look at the body. It had been sliced in half, the right side of the head, the right shoulder, right chest, and a portion of the outer right thigh removed neatly and bloodlessly, and the wound had been cauterized black and hard and shiny.

  The sickness in Ian’s gut twisted tighter as he looked at the body and he turned away. The man had been Karyl—Ry’s cousin, so his as well, the player of the guitarra, the writer of insipid love songs. He’d been decent enough to Ian when they were children, and he’d been decent enough to him aboard the ship.

  Ian felt only relief, though, that Karyl was dead and he still lived.

  Kait said, “I can’t get aboard yet. Take Has. I have to go back and get the Mirror of Souls.”

  Ry grabbed her arm. “They’re coming. Coming. And the thing they want—at least as much as they want to see you and me dead—is the Mirror. If we take it, everything they want is in one neat package. They get it, they kill us . . . and one, two, three, everything is tied up pretty as a Ganjaday present.”

  “If we leave it, they’ll have it.”

  Ry picked her up and flung her over his shoulder. “I have as much reason as you to want to keep the Mirror with us. But if we take it, they’ll still have it, only none of us will be alive to try to get it back.”

  Kait twisted, braced her feet against Ry’s stomach, and shoved free. She landed on the deck on her back, but sprang to her feet faster than a cat could have. “We’ll take it. We’ll shield it, and us with it. But I’m not leaving without it.”

  The two of them glared at each other, deadlocked.

  “We’ll get it,” Ian said. “The three of us. But we have to hurry.”

  While Ry’s surviving men lowered the unconscious Hasmal into the longboat and lowered the Allus ladder over the side into it, Ian, Ry, and Kait raced down into the hold and cut the bindings that held the Mirror of Souls to the bulkhead. They hauled it up the gangway and out onto the deck, careful to avoid touching the column of light that flowed upward through the center and also the jeweled controls on the rim. They ran a rope around the base and lowered it into the longboat. Then they scrambled down the Allus ladder. Both other longboats, and all of the Wind Treasure’s crew, were already gone.

  By the time Ian cast them off from the Wind Treasure, Hasmal lay on the bottom of the boat in front of the thwarts, the Mirror of Souls beside him. Ry’s lieutenants had already unshipped the long, two-man oars—the sweeps—and fitted them into the oarlocks. Ry, who had clambered down the Allus ladder before him, had taken the seat at the tiller; he glanced up at Ian as he dropped into the boat, then back at the sky.

  Ian was the only sailor in the bunch, and the others’ inexperience showed. There were eight of them in a longboat that could have accommodated twenty; it had thwarts and sweeps for twelve—three sweeps on each side—and the escapees had readied all of the sweeps and sat facing the front of the boat. The empty sweep waited for him.

  Ian snapped, “Face the rear, not the front—you can put your back into your stroke that way. The sweeps were made to be pulled by two—you’ll have Brethwan’s own time pulling one alone, much less trying to do it facing forward.” His eyes locked with Ry’s. “You’re going to take the last sweep. I’ll take the tiller.”

  Ry said, “I’m already here, and I understand how a tiller works.”

  “I’ll take the tiller because I know these islands,” Ian said. “I know where to hide in them, and where to get help and find friends. I sailed along these waters all those years that you were conniving in your little rat hole in our father’s House.”

  Ry held his position for a moment and Ian began to think that they were going to have to fight e
ach other right there. Then Ry nodded and took a seat at the sweep.

  Ian gripped the tiller with both hands and said, “You’ll row on my count—”

  Kait, at the middle port sweep, said, “Hasmal had a spell that might keep us unnoticed. Not that he’ll be able to do anything for us now . . . in his condition.” Hasmal’s eyes had opened, and his head lolled from side to side, but he still showed no sign that he understood anything that was happening around him.

  “I can’t do anything that will make us disappear,” Ry said. “I can only create an energy wall to shield us from the magic they throw . . . and I don’t know who we’d ask to take the rewhah. We spread it out among everyone on the ship before.”

  Ian, like most Iberans, had spent his life thinking that magic was dead—a banished perversion of the past. He didn’t know what rewhah was, and he didn’t want to know.

  Kait said, “That’s why we all feel so sick, then,” and glared at Ry’s back again, and Ian’s nausea reminded him that it was not yet gone. So rewhah was something that made people sick. It figured.

  Kait continued, “I was going to say, I know his spell, though not well. If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll do what I can to cast it for us, though I can’t promise it will work.”

  Ian considered only for an instant. “We won’t reach cover before the airibles have us in sight. As we stand now, we’ll only survive if they pursue the other two longboats before us. If you can do something to change our chances, do it.”

  Ry twisted to look over his shoulder. He said, “I don’t know farhullen, but if you’ll tell me how to help you, whatever I can do, I will.”

  “I’ll need a peth—a blood-gift.” Kait hurried to Hasmal’s side, took his pouch from him, and from it extracted a wooden bowl with its interior surface plated in silver. “You can only give what is yours to give,” she said, working her way back to her oar. “Hasmal told me the Wolves always draw their magic from the lives of the people and things around them.”

  Ry nodded. “That’s the essence of magic. If we drew only from ourselves, we’d deplete ourselves—”

  He stopped at the vehement shake of Kait’s head. “If you do that, we will have to fight the rewhah, and we might all die anyway. Farhullen has no backlash—part of the reason that you can’t see it, I suspect—but we’ll avoid the rewhah only if you do as I tell you. Give me only what is yours to give. Your blood, your will, your willing life-force. Nothing more. If any of your men know how to draw energy from themselves, I can use that, too. But only what belongs to you, and only what you give freely.”

  Ian saw every other head on the boat nod in understanding. How could he be the only person aboard the boat who was ignorant of this forbidden spellcasting she spoke of? It was as if he was the only one present who knew one vast sea, and the only one who knew nothing of another.

  Kait had drawn her ornate Galweigh dagger. She sliced the side of one of her fingers lightly, and let three drops of her blood fall into the bowl. She whispered something, and Ry, turned around on his thwart, watched her intently. When she finished, he drew his own dagger. She passed him the bowl and he followed her lead. Each of Ry’s men cut a finger and contributed to the little puddle of blood in the bowl, and to the whispered words. Trev, the last to hold the bowl, nodded toward Ian, but Kait said, “No. Ian sees only the outward form of what we’ve done. If he gave, he would not know what he gave, or how to limit his gift. Pass the bowl back to me.”

  Ian thought briefly of protesting, of insisting that he could give his blood, too. He didn’t want to be seen as a coward, even if he hated the idea of magic. But she was right; he’d seen them drip their blood into a bowl, but he had the feeling they’d done much more than that just beneath the surface of perception. He couldn’t duplicate what they did, so he couldn’t offer them any help. He could only sit and watch and hope that the airibles would not spot their longboat before Kait finished whatever she had to do. He could now hear the steady thupp, thupp, thupp of the approaching engines, and the shouts of the men in the other two longboats.

  Kait sprinkled some sort of pale powder into the blood, and began to chant:

  We offer what we have—

  Purity of intent,

  Willingness to serve,

  Desire to survive.

  We ask what we need—

  A shield with no shadow,

  A wall with no window,

  A road unseen.

  So we say,

  So shall this be.

  Light sparkled up out of the blood-bowl and spun itself into a ball; the ball expanded like a bubble blown by a child. The light dimmed as the ball expanded, and as it reached out to cover the whole of the boat and its crew, the bubble vanished completely.

  Ian looked at the boat, at the people in it, at the water outside of it. He glanced behind him at the Wind Treasure, and at the white curve of the first airible, rising over the edge of the hull. He couldn’t deny that she had done something, but it seemed to have failed. Nothing looked any different to him.

  “Did it work?” Ry asked. “I can’t feel anything.”

  Kait’s face was tight with worry. “I’m not sure. I think I can feel the edge of the shield around us, but if it’s there, it’s thin. I don’t know if it will do what we need it to do.”

  Ian’s mouth went dry.

  Ah, gods. They’d lost the little lead they had, and meanwhile the other two longboats, fully crewed with experienced men, were shooting across the water toward cover.

  “Man your sweeps,” Ian snapped. Everyone gripped their oars. He shouted, “Row! Back to my count; oars in the water. Ready! Pull . . . and lift . . . and forward . . . and dip . . . and PULL! . . . and LIFT! . . . and FORWARD! . . . and DIP!”

  He leaned into the tiller and swung the boat back toward the west, angling their path until the anchored Wind Treasure blocked out all sight of the oncoming airibles.

  “Pull . . . and lift . . . and forward . . . and . . .”

  Behind him, the great engines of the airibles thundered. He alone would not see them when they rose over the false horizon of the Wind Treasure. But he wouldn’t need to. Six pairs of eyes stared over his shoulders at the scene behind him, while six backs pulled the longboat across the strait. He saw where he took them, but the faces before him would tell him all he needed to know about where they had been.

  Chapter 19

  Shaid Galweigh, from his velvet-covered chair in the Galweigh’s Eagle, surveyed with deep satisfaction the wreckage of the Sabir ship and the wild rowing of the men in the longboat the Eagle pursued. The Sabirs looked like they were going to go through with their half of the agreement. Their job had been to locate their ship, take it over, find the Mirror of Souls, and bring it on board one of the two airibles. When they did that, the Galweighs were to be responsible for getting them all back to the city and for attacking Galweigh House.

  Of course Shaid had no intention of following through on the second half of that bargain. Once he had the Mirror of Souls in hand, everything was in his favor. The airibles were his, and the crew that worked on them, and the pilots who flew them. The Sabirs’ sole contribution had been that they knew how to find the Mirror and Shaid didn’t.

  His Wolves were already primed to kill their Sabir counterparts the instant the Mirror came aboard the Eagle. His soldiers would take care of Crispin and Andrew and that monster Anwyn. And he, being Galweigh, would land in the great yard of Galweigh House in Calimekka with men and Mirror and claim it for himself. By the end of the day, he intended to be a god.

  And so you shall, the reassuring voice whispered inside his skull. I have promised you the immortality that the Mirror can confer . . . and you shall have it.

  * * *

  Crispin Sabir leaned against the gondola window and watched the airible drop down to the Wind Treasure. He noted with pleasure the leadsman’s facility with the catchropes, which he latched onto the ship’s bowsprit and mizzenmast with only one throw apiece. Another toss to attach the
ridewire, and then a few moments’ wait while the leadsman rode a pulley down the ridewire to the ship and attached the anchor ropes. Once the man finished and signaled, the airible’s motors fell silent, and the great ship hung in the air over its captive, a spider above downed prey.

  Competent crew—Crispin already thought of the ships and the men as his own. The one thing the Galweighs had that the Sabirs needed in order to take Galweigh House: Galweigh airibles. By the end of the day, Crispin would have everything he needed.

  Ladders unrolled from the gondola, and the soldiers waiting in the Heart of Fire swarmed down them. They’d search for any crew or passengers who hadn’t taken to the longboats, question them, then kill them. The other airible and her crew and complement of soldiers would take care of those who had chosen to abandon ship rather than stand and fight.

  Crispin grinned down at the wreck of the Wind Treasure. He was always fond of an unfair fight in his favor. He wondered how his young cousin Ry was feeling at that moment.

  Crispin didn’t think he’d find Ry aboard the ship. The lying, manipulative bitchson would have done the sensible, cowardly thing: He would have run, just as he ran from Calimekka. Crispin’s people would find him, of course—provided the gorrahs didn’t devour him first. Those longboats were slow and awkward. And Crispin had time. Even if Ry managed to elude the first roundup, he wouldn’t escape. Once they’d taken the Mirror of Souls aboard the airible, Crispin could afford to spend a few days thoroughly searching the area. He’d make sure Ry went back with him—Crispin had a ceremony planned in the Punishment Square that would make the one he’d pulled off with Ry’s brother seem like an afternoon’s chat with friends.