by Holly Lisle
Alarista nodded without looking up. “Even the Speakers said that he was gone. That we had lost him. That the prophecies were broken. But you . . . they said you . . .” She lifted her head again, and once more pulled her shoulders back. “Well. They were wrong, just as the Secret Texts are wrong. You have no secret answer that will save us.” She turned to Kait. “But that isn’t your fault. You’re young. The young have a hard time believing in death, and in their own impotence in the face of disaster. ‘Old age stutters, while reckless youth decrees.’ Isn’t that what they say?” She rose. “If this life and this world must end, at least I can spend the last of my time with Hasmal. That’s some comfort.”
And she walked back to the camp before Kait could find another word to say.
Kait found herself facing not just the darkness of the night, but the deeper, harsher darkness that welled up inside of her. Alarista had dismissed out of hand her secret hope that the Reborn still survived. He was gone and the prophecies were broken—her Speakers had declared it, her experience had verified it, and something about her assurance drove a stake into Kait’s hope. Perhaps it was the fact that, unlike Dùghall and Hasmal, Alarista had dared to hope, had dared to believe that something might yet be salvaged from the shattered ruins of the future. She’d looked for an answer, and her hope had brought her to Kait.
And then she had found in Kait the hope she had hungered for . . . and had discovered that hope sustained by something she knew was not true.
Kait closed her eyes. The scents of the jungle surrounded her—rich moist earth and meaty decay; the heavy sweetness of night-blooming flowers; the musk of nearby animals that crept past the human outpost in their domain, wary of men. No leaves rustled—the night was as still as if it held its breath. She opened her eyes and looked up. Above her head, the black canopy of leaves parted to show stars burning like the cold, unblinking white eyes of blind gods. They stared down at her, but they did not see her. They did not care.
She felt the hollow place in her soul where the connection to the Reborn had once been. She touched that place inside her the way she had probed at a missing tooth when she had been a child; sliding her tongue against the gap, tasting the iron tang of her own blood, worrying the raw, tender flesh. She let herself accept the truth.
The Reborn was dead.
She could not feel him, and he would not have hidden. His life was not to have been about hiding, about preserving himself in secret while his desperate followers wept over his absence. He had come to be a beacon. To show the world a better way to live. And he had died before he could do that.
But he hadn’t just died. He’d been destroyed, and her cousin Danya had killed him. Kait probed that other wound, that other raw place in her soul. One of the few cousins she had cared about had slaughtered her own child. Had given his body over to something evil. Had become something evil herself. Danya, whose survival had sustained Kait when she thought all the rest of her Family was gone, was as dead as the soul of the child who had come to give his love to the world.
I knew the truth. I knew it, but I refused to believe it, because the truth was too ugly. I couldn’t face what my cousin had done, couldn’t face the destruction of goodness by evil, couldn’t look at the death of the future. Dùghall was right. Hasmal was right. We’re walking corpses, all of us.
And Alarista’s Speakers were wrong. I have no hope to offer to anyone.
Even Vincalis was wrong. The future will not be the home of love, of joy, of the worldwide city of Paranne. We’re lost, all of us. Everything is lost.
Interlude
In Calimekka, a year marked by uneasy omens and eerie events suffered a final blow on Galewansasday—the Feast of the Thousand Holies. On that day, the twenty-first day in the month of Galewan, the people of the city gathered to celebrate the Family gods and the old lost gods and remembered that not even the gods live forever. The day was the Throalsday of the Malefa-week of the month, and as such was a day that bore its own dubious omens: Chance of loss, waiting pain.
But on that day, while traveling to the Winter Parnissery to lead the prayer of remembrance, the carais, who had named the year by lottery at its birth, and who had been chosen by the gods to be its speaker, died of unknown but suspicious causes, and his year, Gentle Seas and Rich Harvests, died with him. The parnissas canceled the feast and convened in the parnissery, and for the last six days of the month, they read oracles and cast lots and prayed. They drew their new year, and found that the new year had been born dead—its carais, when they located her, had died the day before, of unknown but suspicious causes.
Amial Garitsday, the first day of the month of Joshan, was usually the day of Fedran, in which a morning of solitude and prayer, fasting and silence was followed by midday tithing at the nearest parnissery and the Breaking of the Silence, where Calimekkans ate a traditional meal of plain rice and unspiced black beans on cornbread. But the parnissas declared Fedran void, and did not even collect their tithes. No one in the city could recall a time when the parnissery had turned away its tithes, and the mood of the city grew panicked, and people spoke of the coming of the end of the world.
On that day and the following days, all vows and all holidays waited, as did all contracts, all marriages, all new ventures; no business could be carried on in the dead time between living years. The parnissas, instead, after further prayer and divining, drew another name from the great vat of yearnames. They went out in search of their new carais, and this time found him alive, and healthy. And that, perhaps, was the worst omen of all.
The carais was a man named Vather Son of Tormel, who had only a month before been charged with the deaths of his wife and children, all three of whom he’d slaughtered, cooked, and eaten in a brutal ritual the purpose of which he had refused to reveal even under torture. He had been sentenced to die on the first day of Joshan in Punishment Square for his crimes.
But the gods had given him their own reprieve—no executions could be carried out unwatched by a living year, so his execution had waited the conclusion of the parnissas’ business. And no carais could be executed during his or her term, for the carais was chosen by the gods, and all his deeds, past and present, became the instruments of the gods. So the murders of Vather’s wife and children were automatically, entirely, and eternally forgiven. The judgment of the gods in choosing the carais for the new year was final, and not subject to questioning by mortals. So Vather Son of Tormel would be draped in gold cloth and paraded before the people of Calimekka like a hero, and he and he alone would speak for the new year.
Vather Son of Tormel named his year Devourer of Souls.
Dafril smiled from his place within Sabir House at the appropriateness of that name. Solander was dead, the Falcons leaderless, and Luercas still invisible and, it seemed increasingly likely, powerless. He reveled in the helplessness of this new world, at the unguarded souls that flowed in endless torrents past him, and he called his people together and laid out for them the plans for their new city—a city that would be built by nothing less than the devouring of souls.
This was a good world he had brought them to. A good time. And it would become their world and their time.
A few more technothaumatars, a few more pieces of the puzzle filled in, and they would become the new immortals.
Book Three
“It’s very large, the world, and that’s what is—and always will be—its saving grace. So look to far seas and distant hills in your time of need, and welcome unlikely heroes, for help comes from the strangest quarter.”
THE BEGGAR IN THE GUTTER, IN ACT III OF THE TRAGEDY AND COMEDY OF THE SWORDSMAN OF HAYERES
BY VINCALIS THE AGITATOR
Chapter 43
In the last days of the month of Brethwan, Kait ran through the snow-buried mountains that surrounded Norostis, Shifted to beast form and lost in beast mind. She hunted whatever moved—mice, rabbits, small birds, deer forced down from the peaks by the heavy snows above. She fed on raw flesh, blood, and e
ntrails; she rolled in the carcasses of her kills; she slept in the hollows of dying trees, in banks of snow, on sun-warmed boulders above ice-clotted streams. She rode Shift obsessively, fighting off her woman-form, seeking oblivion from the events that touched humanity.
She was, for the time that she could hold herself within the beast body and the beast mind, beyond grief, beyond thinking, beyond regret and pain and loss. She exulted in the bitter sting of the wind, the violence of the weather, the pale hard blue of the day sky and the still-lengthening nights. Her hungers were things she could fill with food and sleep; her regrets were the quick sharp pains of a missed pounce or a bit of game stolen by a larger beast.
But she could not hold Shift forever. When, bloody, gaunt, filthy, and stinking of dead things, she dragged herself back to the camp where Alarista’s Gyru-nalle band and Dùghall’s soldiers and her own people hid, she discovered that she’d lost a week. She had never been Karnee for so long. She would have been amazed, but she was too tired to feel anything. She gave herself a cursory wash, ate everything she could lay hands on, and finally crawled into her cold tent and fell into the deep, miserable sleep of post-Shift.
She woke two days later with the full weight of post-Shift depression riding her. Her fugue had solved nothing. The problems her world faced remained unsolved, but were a week more firmly entrenched. The Reborn was still dead; her once-beloved cousin was still a murderer not just of her own child but of the hopes of the world; the Dragons still walked free and worked toward the day when they would rule the world as gods from the backs of a world of enslaved mortals.
“This won’t do,” she whispered to herself. “If I’m not yet dead, I can’t act as if I am.”
So she forced herself to get up. She ate hugely, then washed, ignoring the icy water, the howling wind. She dressed in the only good clothing she had—a fine winter suit of Gyru-nalles spun wool with heavy fur boots and a long fur coat. She plaited her hair and painted the symbols of devotion on her forehead and eyelids.
She looked for answers as she had been taught by the parnissas. She prayed—to the Falcons’ god Vodor Imrish, who had fallen silent with the death of his Reborn; to the Iberan gods whom she had been taught to revere, but who had no place for a magic-Scarred monster like her; and even to the old gods that her parents had scorned as the superstitions of ignorant peasants. For two days she fasted and prayed, but the gods had no word for her.
She could have despaired then, but she didn’t. If the gods offered no answers, she would find one for herself. She took food again, then meditated. She discovered that she did not wish to give the world over to the Dragons without a fight, no matter how hopeless that fight might be. She discovered that she still had breath and will, the two things she’d had before the death of Solander. And she discovered that action—even action she firmly believed was hopeless—gave rise to its own strange breed of hope.
She began to wonder if she and the Falcons had overlooked something in their rush to declare their cause lost and the Dragons triumphant by default. Another three days spent poring through the Secret Texts convinced her that they had.
So she sought out her uncle.
Dùghall lay in one of the Gyru wagons, wasting away. The Gyru girl who had taken over tending him said that he had only accepted bites of food and sips of water in the last days, that he would get up to relieve himself but that he never spoke or moved otherwise. She said she’d begun bathing him each morning with a bucket of cold water and coarse rags, partly because he had begun to smell, but mostly because she hoped the rough treatment would stir him to some sign of life. So far, she said, her plan had failed.
Kait stepped up into the wagon and noted that, even after the baths, Dùghall stank. He lay in a fetal position, curled under several blankets, face to the featureless wall. His hair stuck out at odd angles, unwashed, greasy, gone from black with a smattering of gray to gray entire in the days since the Reborn’s death. Where he had been lean—the Reborn’s sword, he’d said—now he was scrawny. He looked like a sick old man, like a dying old man.
“Uncle,” she said, “this has to end.”
He said nothing. He didn’t move, didn’t twitch. The rhythm of his breathing didn’t even change. She counted his breaths for a moment and realized that he had put himself into the Falcon trance; he was far beyond the reach of her voice.
She shook him hard, and felt his breathing pick up, then fall back into the slow trance-inducing rhythm. She considered her options, didn’t like any of them, and chose the least offensive. She slapped him. Again she jarred him from his breathing for an instant, but again he escaped her.
She was going to have to hurt him. A lot. She jammed her thumb under his collarbone and pressed hard. He lost the rhythm of his breathing entirely; he growled and tried to push her hand away. She was stronger than he, though—Karnee strength would have let her best a stronger man than sick Dùghall—and she pushed harder; he whimpered with pain.
“You can’t sleep yourself to death, and I can’t hide inside the monster. There aren’t any answers there. You know that. You’re hiding out of fear, but you can’t be a coward anymore. We need you. Get up.”
“Go away.”
“Get up or I’ll break your collarbone.” She shifted her pressure from the space under the bone to the bone itself, and bore down. She could feel the grinding of the ends of the bone transmitted through her fingertips, and she shuddered and gritted her teeth and pushed harder.
Dùghall yelled and flailed at her with his free arm.
“I’m not leaving, Uncle, and you aren’t going to lie in here and die. Get up and face me.” He tried to fall back into trance, tried to regain the slow, steady breaths that took him there, but she applied more pressure. She hated to hurt him, but she could think of nothing that would force him to act faster than intense pain. Better a broken bone than death. She hardened herself to his eventual wordless scream, and was rewarded for her efforts—thankfully, before she had to snap the bone in two.
He jerked himself upright in the narrow bed and turned to glare at her. “Get out of here, Kait.”
“No.”
“Let me die. The world is doomed, and I want to end before it does.”
“I don’t care what you want. We have things to do, you and I.”
“Things to do. Don’t make me laugh.”
She stood over him, staring down, and said, “The Reborn is dead. He’s gone. His soul has slipped beyond our reach, and nothing we can do can bring him back. This is the truth, isn’t it?”
“You know it is.”
“Yes. I finally do. And a thousand years of prophecy have just come crashing down around our heads; the Dragons returned as promised, and the Reborn came when he was supposed to, but Danya has destroyed the prophecies and we’ve lost him forever. Correct?”
Dùghall sighed. “Of course it’s correct! Why do you think I want to die?”
“I think you want to die because you’ve become a coward. Uncle, think with me for a moment. The prophecies are shattered, the Secret Texts overturned in a single blow. What does that mean?”
He stared at her, his face creased with frustration. “It means we’re doomed, you idiot. With the Reborn gone, the Dragons have already won.”
“Who says so?” Kait asked.
“What?”
She asked again, patient. “Who says so? Who says the Dragons have already won?”
“That’s a stupid question. If the Reborn doesn’t lead us against the Dragons, then the Dragons will triumph. The Secret Texts constantly refer to the doom that would come upon the world if the Reborn did not conquer the evil at its heart.”
Kait nodded. “I know what the Texts say. I’ve spent the last three days and three nights reading them yet again, looking for anything that warns of the possibility of the Reborn’s premature death.”
“He wasn’t supposed to die.”
“No. He wasn’t. Vincalis never considered his death a possibility. Nowhere in all th
ose prophecies does he say, ‘If the Reborn’s mother kills him at birth . . .’ or ‘If the Reborn dies before he can lead the Great Battle . . .’ or anything else of that sort. I’ve been over every word again, Uncle. Such an occurrence doesn’t exist within the Texts’ pages.”
“I know that.” Dùghall’s evident annoyance grew greater. “I knew most of the Texts by heart long before you were born.”
“Then answer my question. Who says that, because the Reborn is dead, the Dragons have already won?”
He glowered at her. She crossed her arms over her chest, refusing to be cowed, and waited.
He said, as if speaking to a particularly stupid child, “The Texts clearly state that the Reborn is the key to conquering the Dragons. So, if Solander cannot lead us, the Dragons must win by default.”
Kait shook her head. “If the Reborn cannot lead us because he died at birth, then the Texts no longer predict the future of our world.”
“Clearly.” Dùghall shrugged. “The Texts promised us the leadership of the Reborn, the city-civilization of Paranne, and triumph over evil. Without them, we face doom, destruction, and the Dragons’ hell on earth.”
Kait smiled slowly, and asked him for the third time, “Who says so?”
As he saw her smile, a puzzled expression crossed his face. “The Texts warn—”
Kait held up her hand. “You and I have agreed that the Texts have become invalid. Something has happened that Vincalis could not foresee. So we cannot trust the Texts to guide us from here on. Correct?”
He nodded slowly.
“So. What authority now tells you that the Dragons have already won, that they cannot be defeated, that our world is doomed?”
Dùghall sat quietly for a moment. “It only stands to reason—” he began, but Kait shook her head, and he stopped.
“Uncle, the future is built by unreasonable men. You told me that when I was a little girl, and again when you stood me for my place among the diplomats.”
