The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  Hasmal shrugged. “No. It isn’t like your kind of magic, which leaves marks everywhere. Farhullen doesn’t even leave marks that those of us who practice it can see. But I can, um, see what isn’t there.”

  “And what would that be?” Ry asked.

  Kait was curious about the answer, too.

  Hasmal said, “Look at the glow the Mirror of Souls gives off—but don’t look with your eyes. Look with your magic.” He waited. Kait closed her eyes and focused on the artifact as Hasmal had taught her. After a moment of concentration, she thought she saw what he meant. The faint, warm light that she could “see” with her magical senses glowed around the boat in a perfect sphere. And ended abruptly, which she knew, after months of sailing with it, was unusual. The soft glow had always spread to fill most of the Wind Treasure, fading as it neared the periphery—but there had never been a clear line between where the magic was and where it wasn’t.

  “You see?” Hasmal said.

  Kait nodded, as did Ry. The others who’d tried to look only shook their heads. “Seeing” magic was a matter of practice, and Kait had only recently reached the point where she could do it with any certainty.

  “If you hadn’t put that shield up, the Mirror would leave a trail behind us that any of Ry’s Wolves could follow.” He studied Ry and said, “And if she’d done it with darsharen—Wolf magic—the rewhah would have marked us so that they would still have seen us anywhere in the Thousand Dancers.”

  Ry said, “You know darsharen?”

  “Of it—its strengths, its limitations, the ways it works. I know many of the same things about kaiboten.”

  “Kaiboten?” Kait asked.

  “Dragon magic.”

  “What is that like?” Kait asked.

  Hasmal shrugged. “It’s best explained in comparison. Farhullen is the magic of the individual. It draws its strength from the resources of the practitioner alone, though wizards can band together to cast stronger spells. It is entirely defensive, and because of this, doesn’t create rewhah or leave trails. Darsharen is the magic of contained groups. It draws its strength from sacrifices held within a spell circle, and is more powerful than farhullen. Wolves have found ways to use the blood, the flesh, and the life energy of their sacrifices, and can create either offensive or defensive spells with that energy. Darsharen, though, always leaves a trail and almost always creates rewhah.”

  He took another sip out of the water barrel and propped himself against one of the curved ribs of the longboat. “And then there is kaiboten. It’s the magic of uncontained groups, and the most powerful of all. The Dragons discovered ways to use everyone around them as unknowing sacrifices, at any time, without needing to prepare their victims or even identify them. They could sacrifice entire populations of cities, and according to histories and brief references in the Secret Texts, toward the end of the Wizards’ War, they did. Further, kaiboten offers access to something no other magic has ever touched.”

  “Which is?” Ry asked.

  “According to Solander, the Dragons learned how to harvest souls for their sacrifices. They didn’t satisfy themselves with stealing blood and flesh and life energy, but stole the energy of immortality itself.”

  Kait frowned. “Farhullen uses the soul energy, too.”

  Hasmal shook his head wearily. “In farhullen, you may offer your own soul to the service of Vodor Imrish, and he may accept your offering, or not, as he chooses. But even if he accepts your sacrifice, he doesn’t destroy your soul. The Dragons were crueler than the gods in this respect. Kaiboten uses the souls of its sacrifices the way a fire uses wood. It burns them for the energy they give off, and destroys them utterly in the process.”

  Kait considered that. She had always believed in the immortality of the soul, and in its sanctity. She had faced the ever-present fear of her own death when she was a child by consoling herself with the knowledge that her soul would go on, and with the hope that in another life she would be found worthy to be a true human, and not a Cursed Karnee. She had believed then—in fact had always believed—that the soul was safe from all assaults.

  And now Hasmal told her that the Dragons destroyed their victims both body and soul.

  Ian cleared his throat and rasped, “Hasmal, you’ve been talking about the Dragons returning. Your religion—it knows this is going to happen?”

  Hasmal nodded. “I believe it’s already happened. They’re back, and trying to get the Mirror of Souls to Calimekka. We’re trying to get it to Solander, because Solander and the Falcons will stand against the Dragons, as they did in the Wizards’ War.”

  Kait turned to look at Ian—she’d never heard a sound from a human throat like the one he’d made right then. He was staring at the Mirror of Souls. “That thing—it burns souls?”

  Hasmal shrugged. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know what it does. All I know is that Solander says he needs it, and Solander and the Falcons are all that stand between humanity and a return of the Dragon Empire.”

  Ry had been silent while Hasmal talked, but now he said, “Hasmal, when we’re safely out of this, I want you to teach me farhullen.”

  Hasmal’s mouth twitched in the faintest of smiles. “A Wolf approaching a Falcon for help. These are surely the latter days of the world.” He closed his eyes wearily; in the dim light he still looked pale as death.

  “We’re already safely out of it, aren’t we?” she asked. “We’re shielded, we’re well away from the airibles and hidden from them now by islands, and we have the Mirror.”

  Ian looked at the setting sun and frowned. “I don’t know that I’ll ever feel safe again. I liked the world better when magic was dead, and swords and speed and cunning made a man.”

  Hasmal said, “That world has never existed—but I’m sure it was comforting to believe it did.”

  Kait closed her eyes and leaned forward, letting her head drop down over her knees and her arms and shoulders hang loose. Her spine popped in a dozen places, and for a moment burned with fresh pain. She sympathized with Ian. She, too, had preferred the world when she hadn’t known that magic still ran beneath its surface like thick poison in the bottom of a glass of wine.

  Ian said, “We need to get moving again. I don’t like being on the water any longer than we have to. Since my hands aren’t blistered, if you’ll give me your shirts, I’ll tear them into rags for you. You can wrap your hands with them. It will ease the pain and keep you from breaking any more blisters.”

  Kait groaned. “Why didn’t you think of that earlier?”

  “I did. But all of you had two choices—blisters on your hands or sunburn and blisters on your shoulders and backs and faces. And with the sunburn, you’d have gotten sun poisoning, and you’d have been sick and feverish, and have slowed us up when we reached our destination. I know your hands hurt, but at least you don’t have to walk on them.”

  He tore strips for them. Trev told Kait, “You don’t need to use your shirt for strips. I’ll give you some of the cloth from mine.”

  She smiled at him. He had always been pleasant to her, where the others among Ry’s lieutenants limited themselves to being cautiously polite.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’d want someone to do the same for one of my sisters,” he told her.

  She managed to smile. “Me, too,” she said, trying not to think of her own sisters. They were gone, and the part of her life that had contained them was gone, and nothing she could do would change that.

  Valard asked Ian, “Where are we headed?”

  Ian said, “There’s a village on the island of Falea, right at the base of the volcano. It’s called Z’tatne, which my friends there tell me means ‘good mangoes.’ It’s a hard place to reach, easy to defend, and my friends will be happy to take us in and help us on our way. They’re fishermen, hunters, sailors, and farmers most of the time, and pirates when the crops aren’t good or the fish aren’t running.”

  Kait was wrapping strips of linen around her hands w
hen the hair on the nape of her neck started to stand on end. Her gut tightened, and the air around her seemed to get thicker. And she felt a greasiness she hadn’t felt since . . . since . . . She closed her eyes. When?

  Then it hit her. She’d felt that precise sensation in the airible on the way home to Calimekka. Right before the magic attack that heralded the onset of her Family’s destruction. She looked at Ry, and found he was staring at her, his face marked with fear.

  “Not you?” she asked him, and he shook his head. They both looked at Hasmal.

  He wasn’t creating the feeling, either; he was staring at the Mirror of Souls.

  Yes. That was where the magic originated. The air grew thicker, and filled with the stink of rotting meat, the stench sweetened by honeysuckle, but only slightly. “What’s it doing?” Kait asked.

  Hasmal shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing good.”

  “What did you do to it?” Ry stood, and began making his way back to the back of the boat.

  “I didn’t do anything to it. I was sitting beside it, and Ian was talking about where we were going, and I felt it start to . . . to hum, after a fashion. Like a cat purring with its side pressed against my skin. And now . . .” He frowned and rose, and stood staring down at it. “It isn’t humming anymore. I don’t know what it’s doing now, but I don’t like it.”

  “We need to figure out how to turn it off,” Ry said. “I don’t trust an artifact that starts working on its own.”

  “It’s been working,” Kait said. “The column of light in its center already glowed when I found it. I just don’t know what it’s been doing.”

  Ian said, “You’re sure your Reborn needs it?”

  “Yes,” Hasmal said, and Kait echoed him with a soft, “Yes. He told me so, too.”

  “Because I’d be for throwing it over the side and leaving it to the gorrahs,” Ian continued.

  “We have to take it,” Hasmal said.

  “It was waiting for something,” Ian insisted. “As if it wanted to know where we were going, and once it knew that . . .” His voice trailed off into silence and he stared at the glowing Mirror.

  “We have to take it,” Kait said.

  “Shang!” Ian clenched a fist tight and stared out at the dark hulks of the islands that rose around them. “Then let’s get going before it does something else.”

  Everyone turned to the sweeps, and gripped the sturdy oak with wrapped hands. Hasmal pulled in the anchor, then settled himself beside Trev on the front thwart and gripped the oar. “Forward . . . ,” Ian said. “And down . . . and pull . . . and lift. . . .”

  Her back was an agony, and fire lanced through her palms, partially healed though they already were. She tried to think about pulling her sweep, about finding safety. But Kait shivered. She had a premonition that they were doing the wrong thing by moving on instead of staying and finding out what had gone wrong with the Mirror of Souls.

  She started to say something, but the air changed again. It filled with crackling energy, with a current so powerful that it constricted her chest and made each breath feel as if she was sucking through a narrow straw.

  “Motherless Brethwan!” Ry swore. “We have to stop that thing.”

  If they had ever had the chance to stop it, that time had passed. The light in the center column of the Mirror of Souls—that lovely golden light that had poured silently upward to pool in the center of the ring—turned the red of blood, and burst out through the top like a whale leaping from a puddle. It hit the shield that all of them had created with their wills, blood, and magic, and for an instant strained against it. Everyone could see the fiery light filling up the invisible sphere Kait had crafted. But that shield had been created to keep things out, not to keep them in—so when the crimson light finished filling the space around them, it grew brighter, and then brighter yet . . . and then it shattered the shield and erupted into the clouds, a beacon in the blackness more brilliant than a pillar of fire.

  “They’ll find us fast enough now,” Valard growled. “I knew all along we wouldn’t get away.”

  “Throw the thing overboard,” Yanth said.

  Kait and Hasmal stared at each other. Hasmal said, “If we lose it, all the souls on Matrin and in the Veil stand forfeit.”

  A long way away, she could hear the engines of the airibles starting up. The wizards aboard them would have felt the magic bursting free of the shield, and everyone would have seen the beacon.

  Kait said, “They’re coming. We have to decide fast.”

  Lit from below in bloody hues, Hasmal looked like a fiend from the nightmare realm. He frowned and stared back the way they had come. “If we could save it, it would be worth dying for. But they’ll come, and we’ll die and lose it to them anyway.” He shook his head. He buried his face in his hands, and sat that way for a long moment. Kait heard him sigh, heard him mutter something she couldn’t make out—not because she couldn’t hear it, but because she didn’t recognize the language—and finally saw him shrug. He looked at all of them. “We have to throw it into the water. Deep water, if we can find some. Tricky currents would be best, a reef would be good, and if you know of such a place within our reach, someplace where the gorrahs are especially dangerous . . . maybe we can keep our pursuers from retrieving it.”

  Ian said, “And while we’re trying to find the perfect place to throw it overboard, the airibles are closing on us. No. Pitch it over the side here. It will have to do.”

  Kait half-rose from her seat. “No, Ian. We have to do what we can to keep them from getting it—”

  Ry cut her short. “We have to save our own skins. If we live, we can, perhaps, get the damned thing back from them before they figure out how to use it. We’ll have some time,” he said. “You’ve had the thing for—how long?—and you have no more idea how to use it than you had the day you found it. Am I right?”

  Kait didn’t know if he was right or not. But the sounds of the airibles were becoming clearer, and there was an undeniable sweetness in the logic of dumping it into the sea and hoping her enemies wouldn’t find it, or that if they did find it, they wouldn’t know how to use it.

  But that hope didn’t hold water. The ghost of a Dragon had masqueraded as her ancestor, and had told her how to find the thing. That ancestor could tell whoever retrieved the Mirror how to use it.

  Ry, Yanth, and Valard had moved to the front of the boat. Valard pushed his way between Hasmal and the Mirror. Ry and Yanth grabbed the Mirror.

  “One, two, heave!” Ry said.

  The Mirror arced through the air, tumbling, the blood-red beacon cutting a swath through the sky and through the water like a sword.

  It splashed into the glass-smooth strait, the water hissed and boiled, the light illuminated a spinning path as it dropped toward the sea floor far below. Hideous, hideous, that light—as if the islands were bleeding. Kait couldn’t take her eyes off of it. It burned through the murky water below and set the surface ablaze.

  “Man your sweeps!” Ian shouted. “Now! And row! And maybe we’ll live to see the sun rise.”

  Kait stared at the cold fire that burned across the surface of the sea while she pulled her sweep. It was as if the Mirror had chosen to betray them all, she thought. As if, having gotten what it wanted from them, it had chosen to rid itself of them and summon new allies.

  Her heart was hollow, and her bones ached with dread. They might live out the night, she thought. They might reach Ian’s island. But even if they did, her enemies—and the Reborn’s enemies—would have the Mirror of Souls.

  And then what price would the world pay for her survival?

  Chapter 21

  The sun beat down on the Thousand Dancers, hot as rage and heavy as sin. Crispin stood at the front of the Heart of Fire’s gondola and stared at the red blaze that called out to him from beneath the water, and swore against Ry’s soul that he would make his devious cousin pay for throwing the Mirror into the sea. He could see its light down there, even in daylight, as brilliant
as a sun. He just couldn’t reach it.

  Three of his own men had died in trying to raise it, along with seven Galweigh soldiers. The gorrahs schooled above the thing, circling . . . circling . . . and every time one of the crewmen tried to grapple it up from the bottom, one of them would grab the chain and pull, and about half the time the monster would drag the man into the sea. One dead gorrah floated belly-up in testament to the fact that the monsters didn’t win every round; it was a small one as such creatures went, which meant that it ran the length of ten men laid end to end, and the sea vultures and gulls and blackbeaks covered it like larger cousins of the flies that swarmed around it in clouds. Its mouth-talons hung limp to either side of its huge maw; its bony, armored body stank in the oppressive heat; and its two spine-tipped, clawed forearms floated above its head in a gesture of surrender. That one had caught its jaw on the grappling hook, and the crew had locked down the chain, and the pilot, thinking fast, had taken the Heart of Fire straight up and, when it was as high as it would go, they’d snapped the chain free and the bastard had fallen back into the sea and smashed itself flat when it hit the water.

  Which hadn’t been as satisfying as it should have been. They’d lost the first of two grappling hooks then. The second—the one they’d salvaged from the Wind Treasure, along with the replacement chain—they lost when one of the big gorrahs hooked onto it and nearly pulled the Heart of Fire into the sea. They’d had to cut that monster loose.

  So Crispin had sent the Galweigh’s Eagle, which had been trying to find Ry’s boat and its occupants, back to Goft to get replacement grappling hooks, and more chain, and a grappling boom to mount on the front of the gondola, and more soldiers to work the equipment. He’d spent the better part of the day waiting while Anwyn loaded the supplies and came back. Anwyn had been in a foul mood when he returned, too—the pilot had tried to alert the Galweighs to the fact that the airibles had fallen under the command of the Sabirs, and Anwyn had to hurt him. Crispin thought he was lucky he didn’t have to kill the man; that, unfortunately, would probably be necessary at the end of this work.