The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  For now, he concentrated on the job at hand. The Mirror of Souls called to him. He could smell it, he could taste it, he could see its radiant light; it knew his name and it sang a song that only he could hear. If not for the dark shadows of the gorrahs circling it, he would have Shifted and dived into the water to bring it up himself.

  As it was, he stared down at it and sweated and slapped at seaflies and bloodflies, and he worried. He suffered doubts. He didn’t mind that he’d lost men—most of them had been crew belonging to the Goft Galweighs anyway, and men were easier to replace than grappling hooks or chains. What worried him was that perhaps he would never get his hands on the Mirror—that maybe nothing he tried would successfully bring it to the surface. Or that if he did, it would no longer work. Or that if it worked, it would not work as the voice had promised.

  But, oh, if it worked the way the voice had sworn it would . . . then he would be a god. Power, immortality, more magic than he’d ever controlled before: He could tolerate huge discomforts and worries with those images to sustain him.

  From the boom, two of the crew began to shout. “We have something, Parat! We’ve latched on and we’re bringing it up.”

  The gorrahs were everywhere. They were following the line as if they were bait on the hook. The chain clanked on the winch; the grappling boom swung left and left and harder left, dragged by a great weight; the nose of the airible swung to follow the boom; the men on the deck strained at the crank, and sweated, and swore.

  The brilliant red light rose through the depths, eclipsed by the schools of gorrahs. Crispin moved closer to the ship’s rails and looked down into the water, squinting against glare and waves and clouds of stirred sediment to see what he had. His gut writhed and his heart began to race. The smell of honeysuckle grew stronger, and with it the reek of death that underlay it.

  For a long moment he fought back the urge to puke. His stomach heaved against the stink. He shuddered, and his instincts told him to cut the thing loose—that he would regret claiming it. His heart told him to turn away, to go home content with the treasures from the Wind Treasure’s hold, to forget about the Mirror of Souls.

  Crispin wasn’t in the habit of listening to his gut or his heart. If men were meant to listen to them, they wouldn’t have minds. His mind told him that with the Mirror of Souls, he would be a god, and without it, he would be mortal, and would someday die. He yelled, “Keep at it! Haul it! Haul it!”

  His skin felt tight, his muscles ached, a chill ran down his spine, and his pulse raced. Magic unlike any the world had known in a thousand years, unlike anything it would ever know again without his efforts, was about to become his. He grinned and shouted as he saw the first light in the depths begin to grow brighter. “That’s it! Bring it up faster! Faster, damn you!”

  He could begin to make out its shape. Big as a horse . . . no, big as a house, and black as moonless night, with a ring of fire around it. Almost alive, with tendrils trailing out from all around it like a—

  Gorrah! he thought, and leaped back from the rail of the gondola’s catwalk.

  The gorrah came up out of the water ahead of the Mirror of Souls, twisting its whip-lean body as it rose to gain more altitude. Its red eyes focused on Crispin, the fingers of its mouth-talons spread wide to embrace him, the wreath of tentacles it wore behind its head whipped upward to the place where he had stood only instants before, and easily half of them curled around the rail. The airible gondola creaked, the rail cracked, Crispin scrabbled uphill along the catwalk as it started to peel away, with the metal bending and screaming beneath the monster’s immense weight.

  Crispin reached the back edge of the gondola and stared down at the thing. Its maw, big enough to swallow a tall man standing up, snapped and opened, snapped and opened, and it thrashed and glared at him.

  A sign, he thought. Danger from the depths.

  Then he grinned again, because if it was a sign, it was one that would turn to his benefit quickly enough.

  The rail broke away at last—mere moments that had seemed like entire stations passing—and the living nightmare corkscrewed back into the sea.

  The crew cheered . . . though Crispin suspected they would have cheered twice as loudly if the beast had devoured him.

  It had followed the chain up to the ship, blocking out Crispin’s view of the Mirror of Souls. Now, though, when he looked over the edge, the men on the winch seemed to be raising a small sun. Other gorrahs circled the artifact, all lesser kin of that great monster who’d burst from the sea. Crispin, who hated the sea and everything in it, watched them with loathing. Giant sharks circled among them, looking like minnows among trout. He’d never seen sharks act in such a fashion—gorrahs generally ate them with enthusiasm, and sharks avoided the bigger, more vicious predators. And gorrahs didn’t usually school, either; they were solitary hunters.

  The Mirror seemed to bring out the worst in everything. Uncanny behavior from deadly beasts, the insistent crawling of his skin, the feeling he had that he was being watched—he studied the approach of the Mirror of Souls with less certainty. What, after all, did he know about it? Nothing but what he’d been told by a ghost. He could order it dropped back into the sea, or let Anwyn take it back in the Galweigh’s Eagle, or . . .

  Then he stopped and laughed at himself. His cousin Ry had touched the artifact last. It would be like that treacherous bitchson to put some sort of spell around it so that it would disturb anyone who tried to claim it. Ry and whoever of his friends had survived would undoubtedly be thrilled if they returned to this place to find their prize intact.

  No thrills for them. Crispin smiled slowly, savoring his victory. The Mirror of Souls broke the surface and with it rose half a dozen gorrahs, but they fell back into the sea, and the radiant Mirror continued to rise.

  It was a lovely thing. Godsall, but the Ancients knew how to craft tools! It looked to him like a giant metal lily growing on a stalk of light. Five connected petals of luminous platinum-white metal formed a ring around a circle of blazing red light; the largest of the petals bore incised markings that appeared to be inlaid with precious stones. The base supporting this ring, which mimicked the smooth curve of three long, swordlike leaves, had also been fashioned of that glowing white metal. And in the center of the leaves rose the stem, which was nothing but more light, born of nothingness, flowing upward to feed the center of the flower in a spiral that swirled outward from its heart and vanished as it touched the inner aspects of the petals.

  He had envisioned something different. Something more mirrorlike, and more ominous. Something with buttons and levers and complicated gears, something that looked like it did something. Not a fancy light fixture for a room, nor a work of art. He couldn’t get any clear idea of how it worked from looking at it, and he couldn’t imagine how he would make it grant him immortality.

  Those concerns would have to wait, though. Now he had business to take care of. At his direction, the captain of the Heart of Fire signaled a midair rendezvous with the Galweigh’s Eagle. He and Anwyn would direct the airships to Calimekka and would take on the Sabir soldiers who would be waiting, armed and armored, at Sabir House—and by the end of the day, or daybreak of the next day at latest, Galweigh House and its strategic position, vast wealth, and surviving population would belong to him to do with as he pleased.

  The women and children would make entertaining slaves, he thought. The men . . . they would become fodder for executions in the public squares. He would erase the Galweigh name and the Galweigh crest from Calimekka, and eventually from the world.

  And he would become a god. Sometimes he was amazed at how well his life was turning out.

  Chapter 22

  Kait and the other survivors came ashore at the base of the volcano on Falea in the lengthening shadows of twilight, weary, thirsty, hungry, and afraid. They’d spent the day hiding from one of the airibles, which had plainly been searching for them. The Thousand Dancers, however, offered some cover from visual searches, and a
second blood-drawn shield spell had given them equally effective cover from magical searches.

  They had survived—so far—but they’d lost the Mirror. Kait had failed the Reborn. She dreaded the future.

  They dragged the boat into the underbrush at the shoreline, then trudged single file along a narrow path that Ian pointed out. They were a quiet group, downcast and despairing. Ry and his lieutenants, no longer pressed by immediate fear of capture, had begun to talk softly of Karyl’s death. Hasmal and Kait didn’t speak at all; Kait still saw the Mirror of Souls tumbling beneath the surface of the water, the blood-red ray of light that burst from its center spinning as it fell. Her memory still heard the thrumming engines of the airibles growing closer, and though her heart wanted to believe those aboard the airibles would not be able to retrieve the Mirror, it did not. She knew, as surely as she knew her own nature, that they—whoever they were—had the Mirror already and were on their way to Calimekka with it.

  Ian alone had lost nothing in that last exchange, but he was as subdued as the rest of them.

  “The village is up ahead,” he said at last. “We have to stop here, or risk being shot by the sentries.”

  Kait came to a halt with the rest of the small band, and sniffed the air. She smelled the village ahead, the scents carried lightly on the breeze. Along with unmistakable odors of human habitation—composting human waste, cookfires, sweat, and domestic animals—she smelled flowers, overripe fruit, and the rich sweetness of caberra incense.

  “Hayan, etto burebban baya a tebbo,” Ian called into the darkness.

  They waited. Kait listened, Karnee senses straining for the sound of the sentry, but she heard nothing. She could not smell his position either, though they had approached the village from downwind.

  “I don’t think anyone is watching,” she said when they had stood in the darkness for a long time with no response.

  “They’re watching,” Ian said. “They’re always watching.”

  A cool breeze moved through the treetops, and Kait suddenly realized he was right. She didn’t smell humans, but she smelled . . . something. And she could feel eyes watching her in the darkness—eyes as sharp and wary as her own.

  A shrill, high-pitched voice directly over her head trilled, “Hayatto tebbo nan reet. Bey hetabbey?”

  Kait jumped, startled by how close the sentry was. Nothing had managed to get so close to her without her knowledge since . . . she couldn’t recall a time when anyone had gotten so far inside her defenses. The sentry wasn’t human, but that didn’t excuse her carelessness.

  Ian said, “Ian Draclas, ube reet.”

  “Hat atty.”

  “The sentry says to go ahead. They know me here. Don’t put your hands near your weapons as you go toward the village, though, or do anything that looks threatening. Some of them will be following us all the way in.”

  “What are they?” Kait asked.

  Ian shrugged. “They’re Scarred of some sort. Allies of the villagers here. I’ve never seen them; I don’t know what they look like or how the villagers came to reach an agreement with them. All I know about them is that they are deadly shots with the poisoned arrows they carry, and that they slaughtered more than a hundred men who attacked this village in the length of time it would take me to sit down. One instant the war party was charging forward, screaming, weapons raised, and the next instant every one of them had fallen to the ground, dead from the wounds of single arrows.”

  No one spoke the rest of the way into the village, for fear of having some sound or movement mistaken as threatening.

  Two men, both holding torches, waited for them at the village gate. They spoke Iberan, though with a heavy accent.

  “We knowed you for to be coming,” one of them said. He was stout, middle-aged, his face laced with knife scars. His cloudy eyes squinted through the flickering light at them. “The old warrior, he telled us for to be watching for yourselves.”

  “This is to being Ian Foldbrother, Father,” the other man said. “The old warrior was not to be saying Ian Foldbrother would come.”

  “He never was saying who maybe to be coming. Only saying someone, and that the fire we was to be seeing last night was for being a sign.”

  “Bad sign, he saying.”

  “Bad sign,” Kait agreed under her breath. “It was that, for sure.”

  “To be coming in, all of you,” the younger man said. “The old warrior is to be waiting.”

  Some weary old village chief, Kait thought, had watched the sky and guessed the red beacon of the Mirror of Souls slashing through the night sky had portended trouble. And had warned the sentries and the villagers to be on the lookout for anyone it might stir up. Now they would go before him and try to convince him that they didn’t mean trouble. And after that—

  Her mind was too tired to try to guess what would happen after that. She and Hasmal would have to try to get into Calimekka to find the Mirror, she supposed. They would likely get killed in the attempt, but they were going to have to make the attempt.

  Meanwhile, she followed the old man, who, in spite of his near blindness, led them through the narrow streets of the tiny village with swift confidence. “To be following me,” he kept saying.

  He stopped in front of a house that looked no different than any of the other houses. Whitewashed baked mudbrick walls, a roof thatched with bundled palmetto, windows covered with cloth mesh, a bamboo door that would keep out nothing but chickens or ducks . . . or goats, but only if they weren’t interested in getting in to begin with. The house smelled of caberra incense. And of something else. Something familiar, or perhaps someone familiar, though her mind refused to connect the smell with a name.

  Their guide shouted into the house, “They are here! They are here, Foldbrother!”

  She heard a softly muttered oath—but an Iberan oath, said in accentless Iberan—and the hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she braced herself.

  In the next instant a face peered through the door, and face and name and scent all tumbled into one familiar picture, and the rest of the world fell away.

  “Uncle Dùghall!” she shrieked, and burst past the old man and her traveling companions. She tore the flimsy door off its leather hinges in her haste, and threw her arms around the still-drowsy man who stood before her.

  Chapter 23

  Crispin still couldn’t believe his luck. The Galweighs of Galweigh House, invaded from within, had surrendered within moments of the landing of the airibles. Less than a station had passed since he had stepped out of the airible into his new House, and already he had claimed an apartment, sent the new Galweigh slaves to Sabir House, and sent both Anwyn and Andrew in search of whatever interesting treasures they could find within the House itself.

  The Dragon’s voice in his head had spent much of the trip back to Calimekka telling him the other things he needed to do. Now he paced in his apartment, feeling the press of time at his back.

  It is essential that you have a crowd around you, the voice told him. The moment you activate the Mirror, it will draw its magic from the lives of those within its reach. If you are alone, it will have no one else to draw on, and will draw from you and suck you dry. It has safeguards built in to protect the operator, but those safeguards are useless if you’re alone.

  How many people did he need? he asked. Ten? Twenty?

  The more people around you, the more power you’ll draw into you, and the more godgifts you’ll receive. You don’t want ten. You don’t want a hundred. You want thousands—tens of thousands.

  That was how Dragon magic—kaiboten—worked. All the books he’d read about it had been clear on that. Kaiboten was the magic of masses; it could draw power from everyone at once, not just from those few who had been specially prepared and offered as sacrifices. To the practitioner of kaiboten, all the world could become an unknowing, involuntary sacrifice.

  And he was about to acquire the secrets of that ancient, wondrous magic. He needed someone who could give him
the crowd he required, though.

  A knock sounded on his door, and the servant stepped into the room. “Nomeni heo Tasslimi,” he said, and bowed.

  Calimekka’s head parnissa, Nomeni heo Tasslimi, stepped into the room behind him. Nomeni had been Crispin’s instructor when he was young. The parnissa, a lean old hawk of a man, looked like he had come directly from his prayers; he breathed hard and still wore his parnissal robes, though the parnissas never wore the sacred robes into the streets.

  “Crispin!” He smiled and patted his old student on the shoulder. “How odd it is to hear from you at this late hour, and how strange the circumstances: I had just been thinking of you. A rumor had already reached me of your . . . acquisition . . . of this fine House.” He glanced around the room, noted the glowing artifact sitting in the corner, and raised an eyebrow.

  Crispin smiled. Nomeni had always maintained good sources, which was essential in his line of work. “I found treasure,” he said.

  “So I see. I’ll hope that will be good news for the parnissery, too, of course. The generosity of the gods deserves commemoration with a suitable gift.”

  “I have such a gift, I think. But only for you.” He nodded at the artifact. “That’s the Mirror of Souls.”

  Nomeni’s shocked expression gratified Crispin, and he elaborated.

  “It’s better than anyone could have imagined, Nomeni. It’s a wonder; the greatest of the Ancients’ creations.” He watched the old parnissa from the corner of his eye. “It can make men immortal and give them the powers of gods.” The old man’s eyes grew hungry at that, and Crispin smiled inwardly. He turned to the old man. “I want to be a god.”

  “I’m old. I’m sick . . . I suspect that I’m dying. Will you give me immortality, too?”

  Crispin nodded. “That’s why I asked you to come here. I won’t share this great power with everyone. Gods must have their subjects, after all. But two gods could share the vast world with little problem, don’t you think? The two of us . . . and eternity.”