The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  He plodded from the room, head down and shoulders slumped, leaving Kait to stare at the place where he had been, wondering how much truth his words held.

  Chapter 31

  The bells of Calimekka tolled death—unending peals of grief and loss. Bodies piled in the streets, the living in little weeping groups beside them, mourning the loss of a father or mother, a child, a friend. Here, a woman knelt beside the bodies of her husband and her three young children, who lay unmarked where they had fallen, looking as though they could leap back to life at any instant. She contemplated their still forms with tear-blurred eyes, clutched the dagger in her hands a little tighter, and with a despairing cry rammed it between her ribs and into her heart. There, a child wandered through the streets, crying out for someone, anyone, to come and wake his mama. In the topmost apartment on the corner, a young father clutched the body of his infant son and screamed imprecations at the gods. Scenes repeated a thousand times, and a thousand more—few families within the boundaries of Calimekka came unscathed through the sudden silent flash of magical backlash—rewhah—that normal men and women would mistake for the onslaught of plague; some families were wiped entirely from the earth.

  Life continued in Calimekka—but only in a grim and spectral mockery of itself. The carts rattled through the streets, but they no longer carried fruits and vegetables from the outlying farms or wondrous wares brought from across the seas; they carried only corpses. Men still worked, but they worked at building pyres, at burning the remains of all they had once loved and held dear. Women clutched not babies in their arms, but the ropes of the bells that tolled the souls of those dead babies through the Veil. They did not know that the soul of the Mirror of Souls, unchecked, would have devoured all of them—that the fact that any lived in Calimekka was a great victory. They could not see the victory in the streams and rivers and seas of the dead that rolled to the flames. They could see only inexplicable pain—inexplicable loss.

  They could not see, either, the first wave of a new sea that rolled toward them. They could not see the misshapen bodies of the Scarred clutching their weapons like promises, clutching their dreams of humanity to their twisted breasts. They could not see the lovely young man and the delicate young woman who rode great fanged monsters down the slope of a mountain and across the southernmost border of Ibera, leading a horde of wild-eyed believers on a holy mission. They could not know that in the hearts and minds of the monsters who approached, they were the demons who had stolen a birthright, the monsters who stood between twisted flesh and the perfection of yearned-for human form.

  They could not know.

  But the Mirror of Souls was dead, and the last barrier was gone, and the army of the damned approached.

  Chapter 32

  Crispin stood on the balcony of his old room in Sabir House, staring up at Galweigh House. The red beacon was gone, the feeling that washed through him was that of magic shattered and destroyed. He had to assume that they had succeeded—that Dùghall, whose memories were imprinted in his mind, and whose soul he knew nearly as well as his own, had succeeded in destroying the Mirror of Souls with the help of his Falcons. He stared up at the alabaster House on the peak and wished a slow and painful death on Dùghall—the Mirror of Souls still called to his imagination with promises of immortality, of power beyond imagining. He would have made a good god.

  But if he could not be a god, still he could be a father, and better than that, a father revenged. Where Dùghall was, there Ry would be, too—with his bitch Kait—and there, too, Crispin would find his daughter, Ulwe. Or if he did not find her there, he would find those who knew where she was, and what had become of her. He could make them tell him. And he could hurt them for whatever they had dared to do to her. He could. He would.

  Sabir House had suffered losses. Ry’s mother was found dead, clutching the throat of the demon she called Valard—she’d ripped it out in her death throes. Much of the diplomats’ branch would be lying in the pyre before the night fell, the paraglese included. Most of the trade branch lay dead, too.

  But most of the Wolves survived. They’d felt the first stirrings of magic pouring from Galweigh House and they had shielded themselves. Now Anwyn and Andrew waited in Crispin’s room, eager. They were about to hunt again, and they were impatient for blood.

  “Everyone will have seen the beacon from Galweigh House,” Anwyn said when Crispin turned away from the balcony. “We can tell the people of Calimekka that the last of the Galweighs practiced magic against them—against the whole of the city; we can tell them this sudden plague was a murder committed by Galweighs. We can offer revenge to those who survive, in exchange for their assistance. Galweigh House could stand against siege if it held an army, but it doesn’t. We can throw people over the walls, drop them in by airible, send them up the cliffs, and we can overrun the place with sheer numbers.”

  Crispin shook his head. “That would work, but I want the people inside the House taken alive. All of them.” He was thinking of his daughter, of her chances of surviving an all-out assault on the House. He didn’t like her odds. “I don’t think we’ll be able to get Ry and Dùghall and whoever else they have in there out with their hides intact if we stir up the masses.”

  Andrew for once didn’t giggle or titter or say something inane. He studied Crispin through narrowed eyes and said, “And just why do you care if they all get out with their skins intact? At this point, I’d think dead sooner would be as good as dead later—they’ve hurt us, and the longer they survive, the more they’ll hurt us.”

  Crispin thought again that he was going to have to kill Andrew, and soon. He had more going on between his ears than he let show, and the fact that he’d managed to hide the truth of that from Crispin for so long made Crispin nervous. “Dùghall has access to forms of magic I want,” he said coldly. “Ry . . . I have plans for that bitchson. As for the rest, each of them knows something. It might be something useful, it might not. But they eluded us for this long, they managed to destroy the Mirror of Souls, they overthrew the Dragons. I’m assuming we’ll find what they know useful. I want them to live until we’ve had a chance to get to it.”

  Anwyn paced the room, his hooves making a sharp, clipping sound on the tile floor. “Like Andrew, I have my doubts about the wisdom of this. They’ve been disastrous to us up to now. I think we’re better off if they’re dead, no matter what knowledge they take with them.”

  Crispin couldn’t believe this. Anwyn—his own brother—siding with Andrew?

  He stared into his brother’s eyes, hoping to see that Anwyn was playing a game with their cousin, but the eyes that looked back into his were dead serious. Anwyn, who had always deferred to Crispin’s will, looked to have developed a sudden streak of independence, and at the worst possible time.

  Crispin said, “No. I’m telling you, we’ll go after them ourselves—the three of us and a few handpicked soldiers.”

  Anwyn’s smile was that of the shark—his razor teeth gleamed in the harsh light of midday, and his eyes flashed. “And I’m telling you, we won’t go in after them alone. While you’ve been busy with all your little projects, Andrew and I have had a lot of time to think and talk. And plan. We aren’t going to get ourselves conveniently killed to leave your path to power clear. We aren’t going on any suicide missions now that the paraglesiat of the Family is open; we aren’t going to take on wizards or gods single-handedly for you. We’ll stay well to the back of the line and let the commoners die for us.”

  “We’ll talk to the parnissas in the Prethin Quarter today,” Andrew said, and smiled. “They’ve kept their control over their people through the riots by acting like they were on their side. We’ve been getting good information from them all along, and we’ve financed some loyalty in the Prethin Quarter in spite of all the anti-Family activity elsewhere. We’ll be able to start our army in that quarter—the rage will spread fast enough as word gets out.” He giggled then, and twisted the lone braid on his shaved skull with fingers that
moved like the legs of a nervous spider. “But we should let them burn the bodies first. Maybe I could go help them. I could find a nice one for me. Lots of pretty little girls out there just waiting for me, I should think.”

  Crispin was aware of Andrew’s bright, clever eyes on him, aware that beneath the facade of madness those eyes were evaluating his reaction, testing him, deciding . . . something.

  How much of it was an act? Andrew did like little girls, and he didn’t care whether they were alive or dead—but every time he and Crispin disagreed, Andrew seemed less and less the perverse jester and more and more the conniving rival. In that instant, Crispin decided that Andrew would die by his hand. He would arrange it as soon as he could.

  First, though, he had to get Ulwe away from her captors. She was probably trapped inside Galweigh House, held hostage. He hadn’t gotten Ry’s or Dùghall’s demands yet, but no doubt those demands would be coming—very soon, since the Mirror had betrayed their hiding place. With his brother and his cousin bent on raising the countryside against Galweigh House, he would have to act.

  An airible strike, he thought. With a brilliant pilot, a few handpicked soldiers, and an onboard landing crew that could slide down the ropes and drag the thing to its anchors, he could have her out of there and perhaps kill off most of his surviving enemies before his brother and his cousin could even realize he was gone.

  Galweigh House had been haunted the last time he’d passed through its walls, but the haunting must have subsided if people were living there. He’d give the place a few new ghosts.

  Chapter 33

  Alcie stood atop the wall, staring down at the river of smoke that filled the valley. “The stink of smoke and the sound of the bells is going to drive me mad,” she said. “And how is it that everyone within these walls lived when so many died?”

  “You were shielded.” Kait had explained it all to her before, but Alcie couldn’t seem to understand it. “Be grateful you don’t have my hearing. Their wailing carries up to me. It’s far worse than the bells.” They were keening in the streets below, mourning their dead. They had been for two days. The sound seemed to burrow under her skin, into her skull, behind her eyes—and it bound her to it with her guilt. She had brought the Mirror of Souls to Calimekka. She had poisoned the well, however inadvertently. All of these dead were her doing, dead by her hand. Their ashes rose up to her, ghosts coming to call on their murderer, and fell like gray snow on the cliff’s shelves, on the ground outside the House, on the leaves and fronds of the jungle. But not on the House itself. Dùghall’s spell remained in force—the Galweigh spirits consumed even the ashes of the dead as their due.

  Below the wall, Ulwe crouched on the road that led down into the city, her eyes shut, her fingers splayed against the dirt, her body tight as a coiled spring. She was as gray as the ash, her lips white with strain, her face a carved mask of pain. When finally she rose and waved to them that she was finished, she did so like an old woman.

  Kait and Alcie went down to meet her.

  “He comes,” the girl said. “He’s found a pilot who will bring him here in a flying machine, and soldiers who are to kill all of you, and men who have learned to land the machine with no crew here to help them.” She staggered a little, and Kait caught her.

  Alcie asked, “Are you ill?”

  “The roads . . . they weep,” the girl said softly. “Every mourner carries grief to the pyres. The road remembers every death—and I had to go through all of them to get to my father.”

  Kait hugged the girl. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to feel that.”

  Ulwe hugged her tightly. “He’s going to be here tonight—my father. And then you will have to kill him, won’t you?”

  Kait dropped to one knee so she was looking up into the girl’s face. “Ulwe, I cannot promise that I won’t kill him. He murdered my friend. He intends to kill all of us. If I have to kill him to protect my family, I will.” She took Ulwe’s hand. “But I promise you that if I can stop him without killing him, I will spare his life.”

  “You don’t have to promise.”

  “But I do. I don’t know how things could work out between you and your father, but I’ll do everything I can to see that you get the chance to find out.”

  Ulwe nodded sharply, then turned away and ran back to the House. Alcie cleared her throat. Kait rose and looked at her sister.

  “You’re going to promise not to kill a murderous Sabir monster—one that even your Ry dreaded.”

  “I have enough blood on my hands already. I won’t seek his death. But I didn’t promise not to kill him. I promised that I would try to defeat him without killing him. There’s a difference.”

  “The difference might be your life, and ours. If you go into a fight concentrating on how you can beat your enemy without killing him, and his only thought is on how to destroy you, he’ll have the advantage.”

  “You want me to tell the child, ‘Yes, I’m going to kill your father’?”

  “I don’t care what you tell her. Lie to her if you have to. She thinks you’ll try to spare his life—that’s sufficient. When he arrives, kill him and tell her you had no choice.”

  Kait laughed bitterly. “If you’re so hot for blood, you could always kill him, Alcie. Run him through with a sword—feel his hot blood splatter against your wrists and taste it when it splashes on your lips. Smell the stink of his bowels and his bladder as they let go. See the life go out of his eyes, and know that yours is the hand that took that life—”

  She was staring at her sister. When Alcie flinched, she stopped.

  “Don’t you like the idea of that, Alcie?”

  Alcie looked away from her. “He needs to die.”

  “He probably does. But I wonder at your willingness to call for his execution if you aren’t willing to be the executioner.”

  Alcie still wouldn’t look at her. “I’m a mother. I’m not a killer.”

  Kait moved around to stand in Alcie’s line of sight, and when Alcie tried to look away, reached up and caught her face with both hands. “I am a killer, Alcie. As a Karnee, I hunt down my own food and kill it with teeth and claws. I killed men who tried to kill me. In trying to save my Family, I brought about the deaths of half the people in the greatest city in the world.”

  “You don’t know if it’s half.”

  Kait held her annoyance in check. “No. I don’t. The sky is black with the ashes of the people who died because of me, but I didn’t go down in the streets and count the corpses. Alcie—listen to me. In order to live with myself—in order to live inside my skin and my head—I have to know that I won’t kill a little girl’s father—a friend’s father—without at least looking for a way to let him live.”

  “He’s evil.”

  “He loves his daughter.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Kait could still touch Crispin’s memories—if she allowed herself to enter that place in her mind, she knew what he knew, and felt what he felt. Amid the horror and the evil and the foulness of his thoughts, a single chamber lay, filled with light and hope, with belief in something good. That one room he had marked with his daughter’s name. That one part of his life he had kept apart and separate, had cherished and left unsullied. It was a ghost that haunted the halls of who he was, crying out for who he could have been, and its very presence chilled her and confounded her and made her wonder what would happen when the door opened and his actual daughter entered the room he’d kept for her. Would the goodness spill out, or would the evil flood in? How strong could a tiny fragment of love be against a sea of hate? “Yes. I do,” she said, and did not elaborate.

  “You’ll do what you want,” Alcie said bitterly. “And we’ll probably all die for it. But when we die, we’ll have no one to pray at our pyres, and no one to mourn our deaths.”

  She walked back to the tower that would take her to the top of the wall. Kait watched her for a moment, then headed to the House. She and Dùghall and Ian would need to plan th
eir defense, and they hadn’t much time.

  Chapter 34

  There were no better streets in Heymar than the mud river of Bayview Street: no lightly traveled back ways cobbled over, no boarded walks, no pleasant surprises where the filth gave way suddenly to firm roadbed or to mown grass. The whole of the town seemed to have been designed as a pig wallow, with no thought that people might wish to walk above the mire or even that they could.

  Ry and Yanth and Jaim had waded their way through the filth from one end of the harbor to the other, studying ships. Most of those anchored in the deep bay were recognizable tramp ships, travelers from any harbor that would give them cargo to any harbor that would buy it. They carried settlers, too—immigrants from the crowding in Ibera’s central region, from the poor eroding land of her North Coast, and from the unending appetites and expenses of Calimekka, civilization’s jewel. Slavers lay in harbor, too; they brought new workers for the landowners in the New Territories, but many of the less desirable slaves would be sent to work in the lands opening up in Galweigia, New Kaspera, and the Sabirene Isthmus, harvesting timber from the forests and mining metals and gems from the earth. Only one ship was a diplomatic envoy—it flew the Masschanka Family flag and the banners of Brelst, seat of the greatest concentration of Masschanka power. Most of the vessels at anchor looked barely adequate to survive the mild temper of the Dalvian Sea; few would have any hope of making the harrowing crossing of the Bregian that the Peregrine had accomplished.

  But near the west end of the harbor, they found a fine ship of Sabir make, a three-masted beauty freshly painted in viridian and deepest azure, the most costly of pigments, with bright brass fittings, sails that looked to Ry’s practiced eye very like heavy silk, and fresh gilding on the figurehead—which was of a peregrine falcon. The decorative painting of the masts and cabins and rails spoke of time spent in Varhees among the Ko Patas, renowned for their woodworking prowess, but Sabirene ships traditionally eschewed paint, preferring the beauty of natural wood grains brought out by hand rubbing. It was a ship of contradictions; it bore no name glyphs and flew no flag, though it flaunted the wealth of kings. And the crew, dressed though they were in silks and velvets, were of mixed human and Scarred origin; they did not wear their finery as did those who were born to wealth, but instead as those who had come into it suddenly and with little preparation—as if, on receiving their first great sums, they had bought everything bright and expensive they could find without thought for style or taste.