The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  “I think not,” Ry said. “I know my own brother.”

  “Lies,” she shrieked. “Lies! Ian is dead! You all conspire against me.” She turned to Greten. “Tell them! Tell them the truth!”

  Greten said, “I was not with you when you sailed to Novtierra. I don’t know the truth.”

  “Bemyar! You were with us. You know what we faced! Tell them.”

  Bemyar looked at Rrru-eeth and saw his neck in a noose, for he shook his head and backed away from her as much as the swords at his back would allow. “They speak the truth, Rrru-eeth. Whether the captain lives or not, I don’t know. But I do know that you did everything they said you did.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she snarled, “You coward. Do you think if you turn on me now that will save your neck from the noose it so richly deserves? G’graal, G’gmorrig, tell these poor fools the truth, and save them from themselves.”

  The two Keshi Scarred gave each other long, measuring looks, and stared down at their feet in unison.

  Rrru-eeth said, “Tell them! I command you!”

  But neither Keshi said a word.

  “I am the captain of this ship,” Rrru-eeth howled, “the master of your destinies! I will see you all dead for your betrayal! Dead!”

  “Confine her in the brig,” Kithdrel said. He turned to Bemyar. “You can earn your way clear of capital mutiny charges if you help us now. Take over the helm of the ship and sail us toward Costan Selvira. We go there to meet up with Captain Draclas—Ry knows where he is.”

  Bemyar stared at his hands. “I’m a coward, Kith. I always have been. I’d join you just to save my own life.”

  Ry said, “If what you know to be right is also the thing that will save your life, there’s no shame in taking the safe path. You do not brand yourself a coward by doing so.”

  “No. I branded myself a coward when I let myself listen to Rrru-eeth. I’ll never rid myself of that mark.” He hung his head. “But I’ll serve you now. If I cannot repair the damage I did in the past, I can at least prevent myself from embracing new sins in the present.”

  Kithdrel said, “Then take the helm, First Mate. Ian Draclas will see that you have served him well.” He turned to the concubine. “Greten, you were not a part of the mutiny, but you are loyal to Rrru-eeth. If you attempt to cause us trouble, we’ll have to kill you. Do you wish to be confined to the brig with her? You will not face capital charges, but you will be set ashore when we take on Captain Draclas and his people.”

  “I don’t know what I want,” Greten said. “Confine me to my quarters if you choose—I swear on God Dark that I will not cause you trouble.”

  “I hear your oath and witness it,” Kithdrel said. He looked at Ry.

  “I, too, bear witness to your oath. Gods adjudge you if you break it.”

  “You need not confine yourself to your quarters. You may not, however, approach the brig. The rest of the ship is yours, as ever.”

  Greten nodded and left the deck.

  And that left the two Keshi Scarred. “She owns the two of you,” Kithdrel said. “Does she own your loyalty?”

  Neither Keshi said a word.

  “As acting captain of this ship,” Bemyar said, “I have the power to grant them their freedom. Once she does not own them, they may speak as they choose, and decide their loyalties without incurring the death penalty for betraying an owner.”

  “Free them, then,” Kithdrel said.

  Bemyar said, “Before Tonn, god of the sea, I declare you freemen. Your only bonds are to your gods and your consciences from this day forward.”

  “I hear and witness your oath,” Kithdrel said.

  And Ry said, “I hear and witness.”

  “Gods adjudge you if you break it,” Kithdrel added.

  The Keshi looked at each other, and one, though Ry could not tell whether that one was G’graal or G’gmorrig, said, “I will take oath, then, as a freeman, that the charges Kithdrel brings are true.” His voice was so deep and his accent so thick that Ry had a hard time making out his words.

  The other Keshi said, “I take oath with my brother.”

  Kithdrel said, “Then you are free aboard the ship, save only that you may not approach the brig. If you do, you will die.”

  The Keshi nodded.

  Kithdrel turned to the sailors. “The matter rests until we take on Captain Draclas. I hereby turn the ship over to Acting Captain Bemyar Ilori. Captain.” He bowed. “Ry Sabir will tell you how to find the captain.”

  Ry said, “South. Toward Costan Selvira.”

  Bemyar pointed at one of Ian’s men and said, “You, Wootan. You’re acting first mate. Tell the men to set all sails and take us down the Inner Current, fast as you can.”

  “Yes, Cap’n.” Wootan began shouting orders, and the sailors scattered to their places. The white sails dropped and filled, the ropes sang in the stiff breeze, the ship cleaved through the chop like a knife through boneless flesh.

  I’m on my way, Kait, Ry thought. And I’m bringing help.

  Chapter 46

  Kait, carrying a pack full of the few things she’d managed to save from the House, trudged along the road with the rest of the refugees, headed for Costan Selvira. If she looked back, she could still make out the top curve of the airible’s envelope behind the growing wall of trees. When they topped the short rise they were climbing and headed down into the next valley, she would lose that view for good.

  She felt less torn about leaving the House this time. She had her sister and niece and nephew with her, as well as Dùghall, and Ry was sailing back to her. She could feel his presence in the back of her mind; he was using her as the compass by which he directed the ship that raced toward them.

  They could have stayed on the beach where the airible had landed, but the road south from Calimekka was a dangerous one inhabited by bandits, and the airible would certainly draw those bandits to investigate. She and the rest of the grounded escapees didn’t want to fight, and Kait knew Ry would be able to find her no matter where she was, so long as she left her shield down at least a little.

  She hoped the bandits wouldn’t destroy the airible when they found it empty, on the theory that what they didn’t understand would be worthless to anyone else. They’d make a nice profit off of the machinery if they managed to hang on to it; the Gyrus paid richly for anything mechanical that still worked, and two of the airible engines were still in working order. The other two could be salvaged for parts. The envelope, though badly damaged, was of high-quality waterproofed silk that would surely be useful for something; the bladders inside were made of specially treated airtight skins—also bound to be useful for something, though Kait couldn’t imagine what at the moment. Even the furnishings and struts would have some value in the barter market, provided the bandits could find a buyer who would believe they truly happened across the abandoned vehicle and didn’t murder Family to get it.

  Or maybe that wouldn’t matter in these new days—perhaps the murder of Family wouldn’t raise so much as an eyebrow, much less send the countryside scurrying for cover in fear for their lives. Who, after all, was left to avenge a Family death?

  Even in the midst of the soldiers sworn to defend her, she didn’t feel truly safe. The pressures of Shift rose inside of her, and she knew before long she would have to break free from the group and run and hunt alone. The old order might be falling apart, the reverence for Family dying or even dead, but the tradition of killing anyone not fully human she felt sure would remain. She stared longingly at the forest as she trudged, hearing the animals that moved just out of sight, smelling prey, hungering for the hunt, and she yearned for the radiance of the Karnee world, and the unheeding simplicity—hunt and be hunted, kill or be killed. There was little of diplomacy in the jungles.

  To keep her mind off her appetites, she ran to catch up with her uncle.

  “You’ve been quiet,” she said. He walked along the road between a pair of equally silent guards, head down, pack slung carelessly across his s
houlders with no thought for its balance or his own comfort.

  He seemed at first not to hear her, and she had almost decided to repeat herself, but a little louder, when he turned and looked at her with bleak eyes. She felt again the shock of seeing his hair black, his face unlined—but this time felt it so strongly because his eyes looked ancient and haunted.

  “By Brethwan, Uncle, you look to have danced with the ghosts!”

  He nodded, but said nothing.

  “You said your auguring went well enough, and we have had no bad news from other sources. . . . Oh! I’ve been stupid. You’re worrying about your sons.”

  He sighed. “I fear for all of us.”

  She gestured at the group that surrounded them. “Us?”

  “The whole of the world, Kait. The whole of the world.”

  “Why? What have you seen that’s so terrible?”

  “A choice that I must make. A sacrifice that I must offer willingly.”

  “What sacrifice? And when?”

  He managed a hollow laugh. “I don’t know. Not where, not when, not what. I only know that the choice will be hellish, and that it will test me to the very core of who I am . . . and if I fail, we will lose . . . not just a war, but the world. I have cast the zanda a hundred times the past few days. I have summoned Speaker after Speaker until I have near bled myself dry asking for answers, and I know an answer exists. But I can’t find it. I am blind to it, deaf, walled into a windowless, lightless room with only my knowledge of some pending doom.” He glanced over at her and she saw the fear in his eyes. “And facing that knowledge, I don’t know if I will ever sleep again.”

  Kait reached out to comfort him, to rest a hand on his shoulder, and as she did, she heard a voice in the back of her mind.

  That which you so desperately seek, you already have.

  She froze. The voice spoke to her from the dead. Or did it?

  Hasmal, she thought, I would know your voice anywhere. Where are you? Have you found a way to come back to us? What can you tell us?

  Hasmal didn’t answer any of her questions. Instead, she heard again the single sentence she had heard before. That which you so desperately seek, you already have. It echoed inside her skull, slipping away from her like the vapors of a ghost; the more she reached after it, the more elusive it became.

  That which you so desperately seek, you already have.

  She closed her eyes and stood still in the middle of the road and sought the source of the voice, for she had learned from hard experience to fear voices that whispered into her mind. She chased after it, and came up against the place inside of her that she had shielded and shuttered and walled up—the place where she had buried Hasmal’s memories, and Dùghall’s, and Crispin’s . . . and Dafril’s.

  Dafril’s memories.

  Yes.

  She had blocked them away because she could not bear the touch of that evil inside of her. She could not bear to feel that any part of the monster who had been removed from the world at such great cost still lived in any way, and when she brushed against those memories, she could feel Dafril himself stirring inside of her.

  But she had touched those memories, and in one cursory brush with them, she had learned something. Something about the evil that came, the evil that Dùghall feared. She knew something.

  Or perhaps she didn’t. But she knew where she could learn it.

  Eyes tightly closed, she pulled down the shields that had kept Dafril’s poison from spilling onto her. She touched those memories tentatively, hating the feel of the creature that twisted where she prodded. Surface images flashed behind her eyes, pictures of a tall and handsome man, tiny shards of conversations, the briefest bite of dread.

  Dafril had feared someone. Dafril had lived in terror of someone. And she thought, Why would the most powerful wizard who had ever lived fear anyone?

  She moved into his memories, embracing them, accepting them, following that fear.

  • • •

  Dùghall kept the soldiers back from Kait, who stood in the center of the road, eyes shut, body rigid, unresponsive to anything or anyone.

  “Just wait,” he said. “This is nothing of magic, nor is she ill.”

  “Then what’s the matter with her?” Ian demanded.

  “Wait,” Dùghall said.

  They stood that way for long moments; he probed the Falcon sea within himself, looking for some sign that the tide of Falconry had swallowed her, but she was not within reach of the Falcons. She stood unshielded, but no magic touched her. She was gone from her own mind, oblivious to her own body, and he thought that rationally he ought to be frightened. But he wasn’t. She was doing something she had chosen—he was sure of it.

  Suddenly her eyes flew open, and with a cry she crumpled to the ground. She landed on the dirt road facedown, arms barely managing to catch her. She vomited, and when she had emptied her stomach she continued to retch.

  Ian shouted, “Help her, damn you!”

  Dùghall felt helpless. “Kait! What do you need? What has happened?” He placed a hand on her back, and she shook it off. “Kait? Can you hear me?”

  She shook her head weakly, wiped her mouth on the back of her forearm, and pushed herself upright so that she knelt in the road, head hanging down, eyes focused someplace very far away.

  “I know,” she said at last, and hers was the voice of a week-drowned corpse animated by some nightmare magic to speak from beyond the grave.

  “You know?”

  She looked into Dùghall’s eyes then, and a hellish spasm gripped his gut and his bowels, and fear stabbed its knives up and down his spine and flayed his every nerve.

  “I know,” she said simply. “I know who comes, I know what he desires . . . and I know why, even if it costs us every life around us, he must never be permitted to reach Calimekka.”

  “Tell me.”

  “His name is Luercas. He was the only wizard Dafril dreaded—where Dafril and his colleagues created the Mirror of Souls, Luercas alone created the Soul-flower.”

  “Soul-flower?”

  “The wizardly device that, when loosed within the great cities of the Hars Ticlarim, the civilization in which the Dragons ruled, slaughtered five and a half billion people and created the Wizards’ Circles.”

  Dùghall felt the world begin to spin. No one had really known the genesis of the circles—only that they had been born at the end of the Wizards’ War, and that they were places of great death and great evil. “Luercas . . . the circles . . .”

  Kait nodded. “Five and a half billion souls, all trapped there still. Held within the Wizards’ Circles by a carefully wrought spell, waiting against the day that they could become the final, refined fuel for the Dragons’ immortality engine. Now they are to be fuel for Luercas alone.” She pulled her flask from her hip, took a swig of the water in it, and rose shakily to her feet. “It is no accident that Calimekka was spared the destruction that swallowed most of their world’s great cities. It was a minor city at the time, and within it the Dragons created for themselves a fallback location in case something went wrong in Oel Artis.” She managed a weak smile. “All that was left of Oel Artis was the Wizards’ Circle that almost destroyed us when we sailed through it on our way to retrieve the Mirror of Souls, so I suppose we can assume something went wrong. In any case, Calimekka did not fall to the Soul-flower; its towers remain intact.”

  “What towers?”

  “All the lovely spires of the Ancients that grace the city.”

  “Oh. Those towers. What of them?”

  “The towers themselves are devices made to stand against time. The proper spell will awaken them; a portion of that spell has already been used once, when the Mirror pulled the souls from innocents so that the Dragons could steal their bodies.” Kait looked away again, and in her eyes, Dùghall saw afresh the horror of the vision she’d uncovered.

  “We’ve destroyed the Mirror of Souls,” he said. “We’ve destroyed the Dragons. Surely he can’t replace everyt
hing the rest of the Dragons worked so hard to do—”

  Kait held up a hand, and Dùghall almost knew what she was going to say before she spoke. “He doesn’t need to. He alone carries the full knowledge of the Soul-flower within himself. The work the rest of the Dragons did, they did because they did not know and could not uncover the spell that would reawaken the Soul-flower. What they hoped to do by mechanical means, Luercas can do with a word.”

  “And that word?”

  Kait shrugged. “Dafril didn’t know, so I don’t know. But if Luercas stands in the heart of Calimekka, he can speak the word and the towers will hear him, and all within the walls of the city will fall first to feed the towers’ magic . . . and then five and a half billion trapped and tortured souls will die forever. And Luercas will become a god incarnate.”

  “And every other living thing on this planet will become his slave.”

  “Until time itself turns to dust. Yes.”

  “I see. And where shall we find Luercas, that we may stop him?”

  Kait’s voice grew soft. “He’s on his way to us now, approaching from the Veral Territories at the head of an army of countless Scarred, wearing the body that he stole when Danya murdered the Reborn. Ulwe told us something approached from the south on countless feet—Luercas and his army are that something. If we still had the Mirror of Souls, we could use it against him and tear his soul from his flesh—we would do so at the cost of our own souls upon our deaths, but at least we would have something with which to fight him. He owns the flesh he wears by rights, however, so the spells we used to call the other Dragons from their stolen bodies won’t touch him.”

  Dùghall laughed bitterly. “Don’t go breaking things you can’t fix.”

  Kait frowned. “What?”

  “A bit of practical advice I got from a Speaker. When I demanded that she tell me something useful, she said, ‘Don’t go breaking things you can’t fix.’”

  “We had to destroy the Mirror of Souls.”

  He clicked his tongue and arched an eyebrow. “It certainly seemed the best path at the time. But you must admit having it would be useful now.”