Yuli was standing less than an arm’s length from the light, and withdrew her hand sharply as soon as Sarine came into view.
“Yuli?” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Sarine,” Yuli said. “I didn’t … I wasn’t …”
“What were you doing?” she asked. “That light killed Lin, after she attacked Paendurion.”
“I … don’t know,” Yuli said, her face reddening. “I wanted to understand this place. It felt right. Forgive me. I was being a fool.”
“It’s all right,” she said. Before she could say more, Reyne rushed into the chamber behind her.
“Did you find it?” he asked.
“No,” she said. Then, for Yuli’s benefit, she added, “We came here chasing a shadow. Some sort of creature that lives here. It was helping me, in the library. Finding books I needed, changing the contents of the shelves.”
“A shadow?” Yuli said. “Like the creature that attacked us in the tower?”
“No,” she said, then stopped herself. Perhaps it was a similar thing. “That is, I can’t be sure. But that shadow was hostile. This one … it seemed to want to help. I followed it here, after it gave me histories written by Axerian himself. And this.” She held aloft the journal.
Yuli gave her a quizzical look.
“A journal,” she said. “It has answers, or at least knowledge I think I’ll need to have, before …”
She trailed off. The pages had fallen open in her hand, to a scene depicting a wide stone room with a blazing light at its heart. It showed two figures standing on opposite sides of the light, one of them touching the column while the other channeled an aura of energy enveloping them both. A caption was written beneath the picture: The Binding of a Champion in the Gods’ Seat.
“Before what?” Yuli asked.
“What exactly were you doing here?” she asked. “What drew you to this room?”
“I don’t know,” Yuli said. “As I said, I was being a fool.”
“You said it felt right. When I came in, you were almost touching the light.”
“That’s how it went, when I first arrived here,” Reyne said. “The Veil was imprisoned in crystal, over top of where that light now burns.”
“You touched it?” she asked him.
“Yes,” Reyne said, and pointed to the drawing in the journal in her hand. “It was like this. A flash of light, arcing between me and the crystal. Then … power. Saruk renewed his stores.”
She glanced down, reading the passage inscribed beneath the drawing. Had the shadow opened the journal? It had led her here, of a surety, after she’d prompted it that she needed to learn how to become the Veil.
“Anati?” she asked. “Do you know what this text means?”
I don’t, she replied. I’ve never been bound here.
“I think …” she said. “I think I might understand what this is telling me to do. If I use the blue sparks to set a warding around us both before you touch it, I think it will protect you. It says this is how a champion is bound.”
“A champion,” Reyne said. “Yes. Paendurion made some mention of it.”
“What does it mean?” Yuli asked.
“Power,” Reyne said simply. “But, more. More than he told me, in any case.”
“Is this what I’m supposed to do?” Sarine asked. She meant it for the shadow, though the creature made no move to show itself.
“It feels right,” Yuli said. “I can’t explain why, but it’s as though the light is why I came here.”
“Will you try it, then, if I can shield you?” she asked. “I’m not certain what will happen, and I can’t promise you’ll be safe.”
“Death comes for us all, Sarine Thibeaux,” Yuli said. “Yes. I will do this.”
Sarine nodded and closed her eyes, finding the reserve of blue sparks pulsing inside her. The sparks had always been there when she called; this time they swirled like a river current, moving in a massive surge as they flowed through the chamber. She reached to set her wardings, directing the river of blue sparks into physical space. One shell around herself, and a second around Yuli.
“Now,” she said, and Yuli stepped forward, her hand outstretched toward the light.
Even before she touched it, a streak of energy shot from the column at the center of the room, lancing out to connect Yuli to the beam of light. Thunder rang in Sarine’s ears as the blue sparks flooded through her. Then Yuli’s fingers dipped into the stream.
Sound vanished, save for a single, pure note.
The blue sparks flowed around them both, touching and blending into the column of light.
A glittering shell spread from where Yuli’s fingers touched, flowing over top of the wardings as though dipping them in gold.
A jarring pull grabbed hold of the flow of blue energy between the two spheres, yanking it almost free of her grasp.
The Veil. Anati’s voice. She’s here.
Thunder roared in her ears as she struggled to keep hold. The current that had run between the two spheres now roiled around them, each seeming to pull apart from the other. Beams of light shot from the column as the sparks pulled back and forth between her grip and the Veil’s, melting stone in hissing streams of smoke and ash wherever they touched.
Yuli stood beneath a golden shell, her fingers still submerged in the light.
A human-shaped shadow hovered next to Yuli, cowering as it stayed beneath the shell.
Reyne watched in fascination, his skin somehow coated in blue.
The Veil raged inside her, exerting force enough to pull the current, but not enough to seize control. Sarine pulled harder, forcing it into place.
And then it was done.
Yuli withdrew her touch, and Sarine collapsed to her knees. Where she’d stood was solid stone, and a small bubble around Yuli. Reyne’s footsteps had preserved the smoothness of the floor beneath them. The rest of the chamber was molten ruin. Tranches of stone had been cut and turned to slag, like a thousand miniature valleys carved in floors, walls, and ceiling. The column of light at the center still burned, but where the edges had been clean, now they were cut in jagged formations, revealing sections of the beam ten paces above and below where the chamber had ended before.
“I feel … different,” Yuli said. “Rested. At peace. As though I could summon the Twin Fangs at will.”
“That’s how it was for me,” Reyne said. “Well, perhaps not quite like … that. But as though my kaas had boundless stores.”
Are you all right? Anati asked her.
“No,” Sarine said, feeling a rush of emotion as she fought to calm her nerves. “I think it’s done, but I’m bloody well not all right. I need her gone, Anati. I can’t do this with the Veil lurking inside me, threatening to ruin whatever I touch.”
The Goddess is bound, as strongly as I can seal her.
“It’s not enough,” she said. “If we can’t bind her, then before we try anything else, we need to find a way to cut her out.”
69
TIGAI
At the Base of a Hill
The Capallain Mountains, Old Sarresant
Keep together,” Acherre said, repeating her words in the tribesfolk’s tongue after she said it in Jun.
Voren rode behind her, with Tigai next, and Ka’Inari beside him. Since the first night he’d made it a point to keep Voren where he could see him, and been rewarded with no new knives in his chest, though there had been few enough answers to go with it. During the days his only concern was keeping warm and pacing himself as they crossed through the foothills in the southern country of what Acherre called Old Sarresant. In a week they had to have covered eight hundred leagues, rotating between horses and using Acherre’s magic to keep them fresh, save for Arak’Jur, who covered the same distance on foot. A madman’s pace. Fitting, considering his company.
“Stay alert,” Acherre said in the Jun tongue. “There will be … guards? … as we approach the army.”
“Pickets,” Voren said, giving her the proper word. “Forward
scouts.”
Acherre nodded. “Let them see us coming.”
Tigai squinted, scanning the thinly wooded rises of the next hillside. Bloody miserable place to put an army. His brother would have negotiated three times the usual contract, if any general had tried to hire the Yanjin companies to dig into these mountains in wintertime. At least the skies were blue and cloudless, though the sun seemed too cold by half. Booming sounds in the distance signaled the presence of artillery, though they were faint and uneven, echoing between the hillsides as they bounced from a battlefront ten leagues away.
“Did we expect a battle here?” Tigai asked as their horses climbed the hillside. Acherre said nothing, continuing to scan the hills. He left her to it. Better to keep his eyes on Voren.
Voren let his horse fall back as Acherre pushed ahead. Tigai held the reins steady. No reason to let the magi see any fear.
“I won’t strike you again,” Voren said abruptly, when their horses came together. “Not unless you ask me to. You can stop riding as though you mean to court me.”
“I’d sooner court your horse,” he said.
“You understand, I had to surprise you. The communion is done by bringing the subject to the brink of death, without—”
“I don’t need to know your magi secrets,” he said, half meaning it.
Voren maintained his pace, keeping his mount in lockstep with Tigai’s. “You’re a young man,” Voren said finally.
“What does that matter?”
“Your pride means a great deal to you. But our Lord sees our deepest desires, and he has the power to grant them. In time you will see this, and let go your pride.”
“How did you know what that creature spoke of?”
“It’s evident in your demeanor,” Voren said. “But you’ve had time enough for sulking, I think. What did our Lord require of you?”
“I never asked for this,” he said instead of answering. “All I wanted was to see to my family’s concerns, to get as far away from magi business as I could.”
Acherre hissed something in the Sarresant tongue, accompanied by a gesture that made clear she wanted silence. He gave it, falling quiet with a glare for Voren’s benefit. But for all the magi’s smugness, he’d felt real power after he’d been stabbed, during whatever had transpired with the old man among the stars. A frightening thing. Not near compelling enough for him to want to be stabbed again, but a dark reminder of how life had transpired since his family’s capture. The old man among the stars had invoked his desire to keep his family safe, and in truth it was all he’d ever wanted: the strength to tell the world to fuck itself. Mei’s bargaining had ensnared him and brought him here, to a foreign hillside with foreign companions; before that it had been Indra, and their father’s debts. It would be nice, for once, to be the one who set the terms of his own bloody life.
“Down,” Acherre said. “Keep the horses back.”
He slid from the saddle a moment after Acherre did, handing the reins to Voren. Acherre was crouching as she approached the hilltop. Not the sort of behavior he expected, approaching what was supposed to be a friendly line. He joined her, staying low. Not likely they could hide sign of their passage, having left leagues of tracks and hoofprints in the snow. But given the thumping booms in the distance, he understood her caution. Soldiers maneuvering for battles could spin and dance until one side held the other’s territory. If they weren’t careful, they could well run headlong into a hostile supply train, if those booms did indeed signify a battle.
Except, when they reached the crest, it wasn’t a battle. It was a rout.
Across uneven fields of snow and rocky foothills, he saw waves of soldiers breaking to the north. Only small dots at this range, still leagues away, but with none of the smoke clouds he would have expected if their marksmen were exchanging fire. Instead he saw surges of dots, breaking as they climbed hills and melted wide swaths in the snow. From their vantage he saw only part of the field, with the rest obscured by a range of hills some leagues to the east, but he saw enough to know the retreat was taking its soldiers northward, and unless they’d somehow been spun around, it meant Erris d’Arrent’s allies were on the losing side.
“Dieux damnés putain de merde sanglante,” Acherre said in the Sarresant tongue. Clear enough from her delivery it was a curse.
Voren shuffled up the crest behind them, holding their three mounts in tow. He began speaking with Acherre in the Sarresant tongue. Heated words, but Tigai didn’t bother listening. He’d been right. For once in his life, caution had proved the wiser course, and he’d been right to counsel Mei to learn more of the dealings on this side of the Divide before pledging their family to one side or the other. Hearing d’Arrent talk about the goings-on here, he’d expected lines of soldiers squaring off in the mountains, perhaps a skirmish or two. Nothing close to the waves of blue specks he saw retreating in the distance. She must have misjudged the strength of their enemies.
“Tigai,” Voren said. He turned to find Acherre’s eyes glowing gold beside Voren, with both of them staring at him. “The Empress needs you to bring a company of binders to this location at once. How long will it take you to set an anchor?”
“I’ve been setting them the whole time we’ve been traveling,” he said. Acherre’s eyes pulled his attention, and he found himself staring. It was as though both her pupils had been replaced by miniature suns. He’d seen something like it before, back in Kye-Min. It was as though someone different was looking at him through Acherre’s eyes. “I can travel back to the star I used to take us across the sea, and then back here, so long as it’s done quickly. The anchor won’t hold for long if I’m not familiar with the place where I’ve set it.”
Acherre snapped a few words after Voren translated, and Voren repeated them. “How long do we have to get the company assembled?”
He shrugged. “A few minutes, maybe? Over a distance this large, I can’t be sure. If I had a day to wait here, to get familiar with the place—”
“There isn’t time,” Voren said, “as you can see.” He turned back to Acherre and translated again, only to have her repeat the same curse words as before: Dieux damnés putain de merde sanglante, this time with a slightly different inflection.
Voren nodded at whatever else she said, and Acherre’s eyes snapped back to normal.
“Fifteen minutes,” Voren said. “D’Arrent will put together her company and be waiting at the place along the coasts, where you first took us, after crossing the sea. Fifty binders, she says. That should be tolerable, yes?”
He nodded, watching the lines of blue-coated soldiers continuing to scatter. It wasn’t natural. So far as he could see, there were no smoke clouds, no bloody pools where limbs had been hacked off by swordplay and spears. It was like … it was like Kye-Min. His stomach turned, remembering the sight of Sarine scattering entire companies without firing a shot. If she was here, or if their enemy had magi who could do what she could do …
Acherre was calling out something to Ka’Inari, evidently finished with any pretense of stealth. The tribesman was seated on his horse, with no sign of Arak’Jur, who’d made it a habit of ranging far ahead of them, dismounted though he was. Yet when Ka’Inari approached, Tigai heard him speaking the Jun tongue, the shaman’s eyes glassed over as he spoke.
“Arak’Jur has heard Mountain’s call,” Ka’Inari said. “It will take him through the battle lines. I can see it, and I must go to him, no matter what lies ahead.”
Acherre cursed again, this time switching to speak Sinari. Wind spirits but he wished he had Mei’s gift for tongues. Instead he approached Voren, standing now in plain view at the crest of the hill.
“How certain are you that you can return here?” Voren asked as he approached.
“I can do it,” he said. “Provided the Empress’s magi are ready to move as soon as we arrive.”
“If you fail, it means our travel is wasted, no? That we’d have to travel south again.”
“I won’t fail.”
Voren showed him a grim smile. Knowing the face was false made the creases in the old man’s skin appear like clay, or wax.
“This is serious, Lord Yanjin,” Voren said. “As serious as anything you have ever attempted in your life.”
“My brother is Lord Yanjin,” Tigai said.
“Aid me in this—aid our Lord—and you will be remembered as the greater brother.”
It was all he could do not to laugh. “I don’t give a fuck about titles, and the last thing I want is to steal my brother’s inheritance. I’m doing this because Mei asked me to, not for any design of yours, or the creature among the stars.”
Acherre and Ka’Inari had descended into heated words, ending on an angry shout from her as the shaman rode his horse forward, down the face of the hillside.
“Where is he going?” Tigai asked.
“The tribesmen have left us,” Acherre said. “Some bloody prompting of their bloody spirits. We’ll make the trip back alone.”
The sight of the shaman—sitting poorly on his horse, riding toward a mass of tens of thousands of fleeing soldiers—could as well have been a frame around a painting, watching the remnants of this battle unfold. This was a damned fool’s exercise. He’d have been better served hooking himself to the strands, taking his brother, Remarin, and Mei somewhere else.
“Do you think it’s her?” he asked Acherre. “Sarine. The girl.”
Acherre seemed surprised at the question, but she replied before Voren could translate. “No,” she said. “We saw a man, Reyne d’Agarre, do the same. Could be him. Could be another. Not Sarine.”
The rest of the delay passed in silence, watching streams of yellow flags now winding around the hillsides where the view had been blocked, before. Their enemies: the Thellan, and another set of flags, these ones red and white. Acherre cursed and said something about Gandsmen, though in his memory they were allied with d’Arrent. Another faction, perhaps, but all the more vindication that they’d chosen the wrong side.
“It’s time,” Acherre said when the moment arrived. He nodded, gesturing for them to gather close. His anchors would hold; Voren’s worry was none of his. That was the one certainty in all of this: His magic was safe, and solid. That much he could trust, come whatever else got in his way.
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