It was, perhaps, one of the strangest—certainly one of the most colorful—pictures Marcom had ever seen in a book. It showed an animal, what he thought was called a monkey, though he’d never seen one in the flesh before, but the thing had a pair of large, bat-like wings extending outward from its shoulders. It reminded him a little of a kitsper, actually.
The girl went on staring at him expectantly. What the devil did she want him to do? Dammit, he wasn’t good with children.
“Uh…that’s a pretty picture?” he tried lamely. From behind him, he heard Caireann sniff with what was either exasperation or amusement, he wasn’t sure which.
The little girl, sitting with her own wings folded neatly behind her, tapped the monkey in the illustration with the tip of one tiny finger.
“Like me,” she said. Her voice was soft, almost hoarse, and full of the satisfaction of any child who has just reached an unassailable conclusion.
“Nay, dear,” Caireann said, moving to sit on the edge of the bed beside the girl’s feet. There was a look of deep sadness on her face. “Yeh’re much prettier, yeh are. It’s a creature of magic, like you, mayhap, but not really like you.”
The girl frowned, doubt written on her face.
Marcom glanced back and forth between Caireann and the little girl, pondering these words. Creature of magic…creature of magic…
He’d never heard it put quite that way before. In a way, it made sense, and that troubled him. He’d never cared much for magic. It was something he abided because he had to. Marianne had her magic, and the apprentices she took on had theirs, but he understood very little of it and was happy to keep it at arm’s length.
But magic was something that you did or that was done to you. It wasn’t something you were. Flyers and Satyrians and Karikis were just people—different from humans, true, but still flesh and bone and blood.
He opened his mouth, not sure what he was going to say, but Caireann shook her head. The sadness he’d seen in her face earlier was still there, but now it was accompanied by tired resignation.
He looked back at the girl. She was talking now, at least. Perhaps she could finally be coaxed to tell them her name.
He leaned in toward her, affecting a conspiratorial tone. “Well, I think it is a pretty picture, even if Caireann doesn’t.” He tilted his head to indicate whom he meant. The girl giggled. Well, that was something, anyway. “Her name is Caireann, and I’m Marcom. What’s your name?”
She seemed to be thinking about this, dropping her gaze and flipping carelessly through the pages of the book again, hunting for the pictures that were scattered here and there, like colorful islands in a sea of words.
She found the one she wanted, finally, near the beginning of the book. It showed a girl in a blue dress, standing outside a little wooden house of some kind and holding a tiny black dog in her arms.
“She’s like me too,” she said, pointing. She looked over at Caireann and said quickly, “But not really like me.” She giggled again. ”What’s her name?”
Caireann had moved closer, and she smiled a little wistfully at the picture.
“Dorothy,” Caireann said. “That little girl’s name is Dorothy.”
The flyer kid stared down at the colorful drawing, a line appearing between her brows as though she was thinking very hard about this.
“That’s my name,” she said at last, speaking in the tones of someone making a grand pronouncement.
Marcom and Caireann exchanged a glance.
“Nay,” Caireann said gently. “That’s her name. You have a name of your own. What do yer mum and dah call yeh?”
“Dorothy,” the girl said, a note of desperation in her voice. “My name is Dorothy, like hers.”
Marcom opened his mouth to add his protest to Caireann’s, but she forestalled him with a shrug.
“A rose by any other name,” she murmured. “At least now she’s got one.”
***
Marcom found Marianne atop the battlements of the northeastern guard tower. It was rare that she left the spire that she’d claimed as her own, but there was little of the last few days that was ordinary.
She stood perfectly still with her hands on the cold stones; her dress, adorned with a pattern of earth tones and accented with shades of orange, hung loosely from her shoulders, as though there was nothing inside to fill it but bones.
She didn’t turn at his approach, but only went on looking out over her wounded and bleeding city. From here, the black husks of the buildings that had burned were clearly visible, merging together like dark scars between the lines of cobbled streets and dusty lanes. Those streets and lanes were nearly deserted. Few souls had ventured out today, shellshocked and licking their wounds. Those who had braved the smoke and ash that still lingered in the air were mostly picking through the smoldering ruins, searching for lost loved ones. It angered Marcom to look at it, so he averted his gaze, focusing on his mistress.
“Captain,” she said at last, still not looking at him.
“Mistress,” he acknowledged. He stood beside her, placing his own hands on the stones. Their chill was even more pronounced now, despite the cloudless day. The weather was cooling, the daylight hours growing fewer; Samhain was coming—growing nearer by the day.
For a long time, neither of them spoke.
Marcom fell to thinking of the letter that rested, folded neatly, in the bottom of a drawer in his room, only a few yards below their feet.
…The attacks on Seven Skies were not orchestrated by the Brood…
…The work of Marianne herself…
Those words—those accusations—gnawed at him. He’d found himself oscillating between doubt and certainty, unable to find firm enough ground on either side to plant his feet. He couldn’t believe those things were true, and yet he couldn’t stop turning them over in his mind either. That fact, perhaps more than the words themselves, was the most unsettling.
“We must take some time to secure the city,” Marianne said. Her words were low, almost a whisper, and Marcom was not entirely sure if she was addressing him or simply thinking aloud.
“Yes,” he said.
She started a little, as if she’d forgotten he was there. She turned to face him, and Marcom took an involuntary step away from her.
“Why?” she asked him suddenly. Her face was filled with a terrible anguish, and for the first time in all the years he’d served her, Marcom thought she looked older. Lines traced the beautiful features of her face. Flecks of silver were scattered amidst the gold of her hair, where he’d seen none the day before. Her cheeks were hollow, making her ordinarily narrow face seem positively gaunt.
“Why…what?” he asked, trying to catch the thread of her thoughts.
“Why would they do this?” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she waved an arm in the direction of the city at large, but she never took her eyes from his face. They glistened, and Marcom was struck dumb as tears began to fall from their lashes and run down her face.
“Our beautiful, beautiful city… Why, Marcom?” she whispered, the note of pleading in her tone unmistakable as anything else. She was suffering in a way he’d never seen her suffer before.
He didn’t have an answer for her. He’d been operating automatically, as all good guards were trained to do. There were always two sides: yours and theirs. You fought them and you won or you died. Yes, he’d known that there would be some rationale for the actions of the dissonance, but he’d taken very little time to ponder what their motives or agenda might be.
Seeing Marianne this way, now, filled him with disgust that he’d ever allowed the words of that damnable letter to cause him to doubt, even for a moment. The mistress, whatever her faults, was doing her best by her people. Hadn’t that been why she’d appointed him captain of the guard? And so far, in this crisis at least, he’d failed her and the people of Seven Skies. You only needed to study the destruction laid out below them to know that it was true.
As if reading his th
oughts, she turned away from him to look down into the broken streets, and a gust of wind suddenly lifted a swirl of ash from the battlements. It fell like dirty snow over them, the tiny flakes catching in her hair.
“I don’t know,” he told her at last, letting his gaze follow hers but seeing nothing. He thought of the panicked people he’d seen in the streets the day before, fleeing the destruction wrought by the alien thing in their midst; he thought of Dorothy, broken and unable to tell them her own name, sitting alone in an empty room in the tower across from them; he thought of Matthew’s lifeless form, lying burned and broken in the street.
“But I will do my best to see that no more die, Mistress.”
He turned away then, feeling weary and old. Slowly, he made his way down through the fortress, wondering why he’d sought Marianne out in the first place. Had he thought she would be able to ease his burden? Had he been so foolish to believe she, of all of them, was not suffering as much—more?
He had nearly reached his chambers when he heard footsteps behind him.
“Captain!”
With a grimace, he turned on his heel, wondering if he would ever get to rest, and found himself facing one of his rapidly dwindling guard. The boy was hardly into his teens; the beard on his chin, surely cultivated in an attempt to make himself look older, was little more than ragged patches that only served to emphasize his youth. Marcom wondered vaguely if there were any men left in his guard who had seen more than twenty years. In the last few weeks he’d lost William, Dalivan, and now Jared. And that was before you started counting the boys…and the girl…
He shoved that thought away angrily and focused on the guard before him.
“What is it, lad?” he asked tiredly. “And if you tell me there’s another bleedin’ catastrophe underway, I’m going to name you captain to deal with it while I get some goddamned sleep.”
The boy’s eyes went wide.
“No, sir,” he said nervously. “The healer wants to see you. The one examining the body.”
With a sigh, Marcom started to stomp back the way he’d come, pushing the boy out of his way.
“Very well, I’m going,” he said quietly. “Go back to your post, son.”
The poor flustered kid stammered something behind him, but Marcom wasn’t listening.
Ten more minutes, he thought grimly. Fifteen at most, and then sleep.
He made his way through the grove of trees at the base of the guard towers and into the courtyard, listening to the subdued silence. Even the leaves, usually so restless in the wind, were motionless. All was still, save for the fountain that ran eternally at the keep’s center, where he had, not so long ago, challenged a talented young woman to a tournament.
The sting of that betrayal was still too sharp to dwell on, and he wasn’t even sure why. How could he have misjudged her so completely? How had he been so wrong as to trust her—indeed, trust her more than he did some of the men who had been with him for years? He’d known the girl for less than a fortnight. Why couldn’t he let it go?
It was exhaustion, he decided, causing him to obsess over things he ought not. He forced himself to focus on the steps leading up to the southeastern tower.
Unlike the others, the doors to this tower stood open. He ignored the candle that hovered just inside, acknowledging its solicitous dip with a perfunctory nod and went straight to the narrow stairs that led up through the tower’s center.
He’d watched the men bring in the demon’s corpse and had given the order for a healer to be sent for to examine it. He wanted to know as much as he could about the damned thing in case there were more of them out there. If there were, they were going to need a way to kill them without winding up burned to cinders like poor Matthew.
Marcom gritted his teeth. Enough, he told himself. Enough.
He found the healer in the tower’s top room, leaning over the makeshift table the guards had hastily assembled from boards and crates. A dozen candles hung in the air above him, casting a bright, if uneven, glow over the thing that lay there.
The healer turned as Marcom came in, his face splitting into an entirely incongruous grin, considering the thing on the table behind him.
“Captain!” he said excitedly. “Excellent! I have so many questions for you.”
Marcom scowled. “I don’t need any more questions just now, Master Healer. I need answers, and the sooner the better.”
The healer’s smile faltered, but only for a moment. “Yes, sir. Of course. Well, let’s get right to it, then.” He turned back to the table, and Marcom, with some trepidation, went to stand beside him, looking down on the body.
It looked more or less as it had lying on the street at his feet: smooth metallic armor, sculpted to mimic the presumed musculature beneath, a faceplate of the purest, most transparent glass Marcom had ever seen, two oversized black eyes in the gray, misshapen face that looked every bit as dead now as when the thing had been alive, and the torn and ragged hole in its chest, surrounded by the burned and blackened remains of whatever served this monster as flesh. There was no blood.
“I’m no healer,” Marcom growled, “but shouldn’t you be slicing it up to see what makes it tick?”
The healer looked affronted. “I’m a healer, Captain, not a butcher…but, essentially, you are correct. Ordinarily, that is what I would do, but there is a difficulty.”
He picked up a tiny delicate knife and shifted slightly to one side, allowing the candles’ light to shine on the hole in the thing’s chest. Somewhere deep inside, something glinted like steel.
“Watch what happens when I attempt to make an incision.” The healer brought the instrument down and made a swift cut from the hole to the hollow of the creature’s neck. The blade passed easily through the metal armor—or was it flesh?—as if it were nothing more than warm butter.
“Looks pretty damned easy to me,” Marcom said.
“Watch,” the healer repeated, but before he’d finished the word, Marcom saw. A soft, sibilant sound came from the gash, much like the hiss of a snake about to strike. In the space of a heartbeat, the edges of the incision came back together, sealing closed and leaving not so much as a blemish behind.
“I’ve tried a number of methods to force the incisions to remain open after I make them,” the healer went on, setting his knife back down, “but the flesh’s imperative to heal is stronger than any tools I have.” He held up another knife whose blade had been broken an inch from the top of its wooden handle. “When I tried to force the wound to stay open with this blade here,” he said, enthusiasm layered thick on every word, “it simply snapped it in two.”
“I see,” Marcom said, frowning. “So why didn’t this one close up, then?” He nodded at the gaping hole in the creature’s chest.
“Well,” the healer said, his voice still rising, “I can’t say for certain, but my best guess is that the blow struck too close to a major organ, or perhaps severed some crucial nerve, which has prevented the process from completing in that portion of the creature’s anatomy. Since It has a physiology entirely unlike any I’ve ever seen, it’s difficult to make any sort of absolute determinations about how its biological functions operate and what may disrupt them.”
“Is that all?” Marcom asked, unable to keep the disappointment entirely out of his voice. It seemed they were no closer to knowing any more about the devilish thing than when they’d hauled its smoking, stinking carcass from the street.
“Oh, no!” the healer said. “There’s plenty more. For example…well, no, just let me show you.”
The healer picked up another tool from the pile on the table, some kind of small mirror on the end of a slender handle, and positioned it over the creature’s wound. Carefully, he reached inside the corpse’s chest, causing Marcom to shiver involuntarily.
“Its physiology, as I eluded, is absolutely unique—very dry and remarkably uniform, though that isn’t to say that there is no soft tissue, because there is…a great deal of it, in fact.” Carefully,
he lifted what appeared to be a dark metallic cube from amidst the nest of bloodless arteries. He set the mirror back down, cradling the cube between his palms. Several of the strange vessels ran from one side of the cube, coiling back into the creature’s unfathomable innards like so many dozing snakes.
“What the hell is that?” Marcom asked.
“I’m not sure,” the healer said, his excitement ratcheting up another notch. “Judging by its position within the abdomen, it could be either some form of heart or stomach. But if I didn’t know better, I’d almost say this looked artificially crafted. Obviously, that’s impossible, but you just don’t see these kinds of precise angles and flat surfaces in nature. In fact, I—”
The healer’s voice cut off abruptly, and his jaw suddenly snapped shut. He just stood, stock-still, staring at the thing in his hands.
Marcom was about to ask him what was wrong, when he felt it—a strange heaviness in the air that crawled over his skin almost, but not quite, the way Marianne’s magic did. There was a smell too, like the subtle, almost imperceptible tang that fills the air before a thunderstorm.
Marcom’s hand was already falling to his sword when the room was suddenly filled with that same hissing sound, and the cube in the healer’s hands flashed a dazzling white before being yanked away.
Faster than Marcom could track, the creature’s arm whipped up from where it lay on the table, and its inhuman hand closed around the healer’s throat. There was a flash of blue light between the thing’s fingers, and then the man’s head was ripped from his body. With incredible speed, it hurtled across the room, passing just inches before Marcom’s face. It hit the wall behind him with a sickening crunch before its body had finished toppling to the floor. Blood erupted from what was left of the healer’s neck, spraying Marcom and the ceiling high above with fat crimson drops.
The creature was upon its feet, the hole in its chest gone, replaced by nothing but an expanse of glistening, metallic muscle.
For a moment, it met Marcom’s horrified gaze with its dead, inhuman eyes—eyes that were now very much aware.
Haven Divided (The Dragon's Brood Cycle Book 2) Page 19
