by Helen Lowe
What now? Malian wondered. She could hear feet running and voices yelling outside the warehouse, followed by a rattle and thud as those in the square tried to force the doors. Thanir appeared indifferent to everything except Emuun, and although Malian could sense his latent power, he was not using it. The same way, she thought, the net had not been ensorcelled, despite the flexibility and strength of the steel. The reason, she imagined, was because Emuun was immune to magic. Raven had told her that in Stoneford, when he explained why Swarm agents in Emer had mistaken him for Emuun, who was also his First Kinsman.
“Our work in Emer was thwarted and at least one of those involved was immune.” Thanir’s voice whispered out of the wind that still buffeted the night fair. “Before they died, first Orriyn on the Northern March, then Rhike in Caer Argent, swore that immune was you. Arcolin believes you killed both of them to conceal your treachery.” Thanir’s barbed shoulders shrugged. “Even Nirn harbors sufficient doubt to agree that you must answer Aranraith and Salar’s questions. A pity for you, of course, that they have much your own way of getting answers.”
“Nirn.” The single word was stone.
“He might defy Aranraith for you, but never Salar. You know that, or should.” Thanir remained unmoving, but the shadows around him stretched toward Emuun. “I feel bound to invite you to come quietly.”
Emuun laughed. “Now your net has failed?” The shadow warriors accompanying Thanir stepped forward as one. As though together they form a web, Malian thought, remembering her initial impression of spiders leaping out of the gloom. Emuun’s tone changed, becoming conversational as he addressed her. “You realize, little crow, that he’s not going to leave any witnesses behind.”
I do, Malian thought. Despite Thanir’s apparent focus on Emuun, she was certain he had not forgotten her for a moment. She was also aware that not leaving witnesses meant that the fairgoers trapped inside the warehouse must die—and equally sure that Emuun was only concerned about his own survival. Thanir had not stirred, but Malian sensed his power begin to build. Her grip on the frost-fire sword tightened as Emuun stooped, gathering up the net in his left hand. She had heard that arena warriors fought that way, down in Lathayra, but had never seen it done.
“If you want me, Thanir,” Emuun said, “you’ll have to take me blade-to-blade.” Just, Malian thought, as though he had a trident or a sword for his other hand, like those arena fighters, rather than just a dagger. Yet despite the odds, she found she was not prepared to discount Emuun.
For the first time, Thanir’s expression changed. He smiled. “You’ve stolen one face too many, if you think I’ve grown foolish.”
As if his words were a command, the warriors accompanying him drew their swords, and whatever they might be, whether substance, shadow, or something of both, the rasp of steel was real. Cold shivered beneath it, and Malian recognized the whisper of the void: the portal that had brought Thanir here must be opening again. The shadow warriors edged closer, but were too experienced to obstruct each other by rushing in. We must take the fight to them, Malian thought, but knew Emuun would wait as long as possible, wanting either her or the attackers to create the opening he needed. Imperturbable, Thanir regarded them both—and an axe bit through the building’s main doors, defying the sorcery that held them closed.
Raven, Malian thought: it has to be. Without looking away from Thanir, she countermanded his spell and flung every other door and shutter in the building wide. The trapped fairgoers scrambled for the openings as Thanir’s wind roared in answer, tossing trestles and booths into the air. The axe hacked through the hinges of the main doors, preventing their being held closed again, and Raven stepped through behind the final blow, his headcloth wrapped about his face. To avoid being recognized, Malian imagined, as well as providing protection against the wind. She would have been blinded by the gale herself if Nhenir’s invisible visor had not been shielding her eyes.
A small company of Aeris guards, armed with bows and halberds, fanned out to either side of Raven, only to flatten themselves against the walls as the shadow gate gaped wide. The wind, roaring back, hurled Emuun off his feet and battered him toward the portal. Malian would not have stayed upright without the power to channel the gale aside, and she saw Emuun’s face shift beneath the wind’s force—as though the visage he had stolen was being stripped away. Yet the facestealer still seemed able to resist the portal’s suck of power. Malian supposed his immunity must help him, despite providing no defense against the physical power of the wind. Even the shadow warriors were leaning into the blast, although their swords had acquired substance now, a thicket of steel closing around Emuun.
“Pin his limbs with your blades.” Malian heard Thanir’s command clearly through Nhenir, despite the howl of the wind. “We want him alive, but that doesn’t mean uninjured.”
“What’s wrong, Thanir, afraid to fight me unless I’m maimed?” Despite the taunt, Emuun sounded strained—but the last thing Malian saw, before a gust hammered into her back and she staggered, was the facestealer rolling clear of the swords and diving through the portal.
A hand grasped her arm, steadying her. “Time to leave,” Raven shouted above the tumult, and she would have nodded except the wind roared again. For a moment all they could do was cling together, before the blast passed and they fought their way to the nearest doorway. Malian’s counterspell was still holding every opening clear, and she wondered whether Thanir would come after her instead of Emuun, now that she had thwarted his use of power.
They’re aware there are Haarth-born adepts, she reminded herself, and Emuun is his primary quarry. She had refrained, too, from counteracting either the wind or Thanir’s portal, in the hopes he might decide she was no more than a native adept with limited ability. But an impressive sword, Malian added, sheathing it as she and Raven fled into the adjoining alley. Quelling her fear of drawing Nindorith’s attention, she skirted piled rubbish and headed toward the square. So far she could detect no pursuit, but the wind was still howling through the building, while voices yelled orders and horns blew as the guards on the scene summoned reinforcements. Others, she guessed, would be deploying to Aeris’s gates and walls, in case the night fair incident heralded a major attack.
Word of this, Malian thought, pausing to survey the confusion in the square, is going to travel like wildfire. Within a month, authorities from Ij to Ishnapur would be debating every aspect of who and what had happened in Aeris. “Something’s changed,” she said, and felt Nhenir’s silent acquiescence. She looked over her shoulder at Raven, who was watching the way they had come. The visor allowed her to see him clearly, but the cloth still wrapped around his face prevented her from reading his expression. “We’ve grown used to the Darksworn operating out of the shadows. But this suggests they’re done with that.”
“Yes.” Raven began removing the head covering. “We need to get clear of Aeris.”
Malian nodded and dove into the thick of the square, using the crowd’s numbers and confusion to disguise their passage. She kept Nhenir’s visor down, alert for danger, but they made it through without being challenged. The furor faded once they passed into the streets beyond the square, although a squad of town guards soon overtook them, heading for the walls. A few minutes later what looked like a hastily assembled citizen reserve hurried in the opposite direction, arming themselves as they went.
The caravan house was bustling, too, with those guests who had returned from their night’s entertainment gathered around the entrance to ask each other what was happening. Malian and Raven mingled with the rest but kept to the fringes of the discussion. They had reached the stable door by the time the others decided to repair to the tavern—to await more information, they agreed, walking off. Only the night hostler was left in the street, his gaze shifting between the ramparts and the departing company, and he did not look around when Raven disappeared into the stable.
Malian ascended to the deserted dormitory to collect their gear, but the boy who slep
t in front of the lockup had vanished, either to hide or discover what was afoot. The lockup’s heavy iron padlock looked daunting, but the mechanism was straightforward—the work of a moment for Malian’s Shadow Band skills. She remained alert for unexpected arrivals or the boy’s return, but the building stayed quiet as she retrieved their saddlebags and travel rolls, then resecured the door.
Before leaving, she opened one bag and removed a slender lead case, unlocking it with a traced sigil. The halves clicked apart, revealing two linings: the first visible as a line of silver between the lead and an inner lining of gold bearing the Shadow Band’s engraved mark. “Fire, water, shadow.” Silently, Malian invoked the ward and slipped Jehane Mor’s medallion into the case, resealing it with another traced symbol. If Swarm magic had used the disc as a marker for Emuun to follow, the case should neutralize the spell until she had time to erase it. If the medallion had been of lesser value, she would have cast it into a river or the nearest forge fire and let the elements do their work. But this was Jehane Mor’s gift, and one tied to Tarathan and Imuln’s path of earth and moon. So not, Malian thought, sliding the case back among her other belongings, for discarding lightly, if at all.
The hostler was still outside, seated on a cart-tail that gave him a clear view of the street in either direction. Malian wrapped herself in shadows and ghosted past him into the stables, where Raven already had the horses saddled. “We’ll have to risk a portal,” she said, and he nodded. They both knew the city gates would not be opened again that night and by tomorrow morning it would be too late: the Aeris guard would be looking for the sword-for-hire named Crow, who had played such a prominent part in the upheaval. Malian secured the last saddlebag and gave her mare, Hani, a pat. “Do all you can to shield us,” she said to Nhenir, and met Raven’s eyes. “Ready?”
He nodded and took both horses’ reins, although Malian kept one hand on Hani’s neck as she opened her mind to the Aeris night: the dust from the plain, the scent of pines from the mountain slopes, and the first snow on the heights. Mentally, she retraced her journey to reach the old town a year ago, charting the main caravan route with its way stations and established campsites, before shifting to the less-used road she had taken on her return to Ar. Little more than a bridle-track in places, it looped through the foothills and mountain passes between Aeris and the wide green lands of the River.
Malian let her mind follow the secondary route, leaping over huddled villages with their sheep pens and rocky fields, to settle on a pine grove near the crest of the road’s first long ascent into the foothills. She had camped a night in the dry earthy hollow beneath the trees, which grew so close together that only the very heaviest rain fell between the branches. Now, it was the best shelter she could recall along the secondary route’s wild terrain. The alternative was to reach right through to the River—but even if she was confident of her ability to open a gate of sufficient size over so great a distance, the power use would resemble a comet, blazing across the Haarth night.
Not what we want, Malian thought, and gathered herself. Breathing in the resin of the pines, mingled with acrid earth, she brought the two places together in her mind, folding the distance between them. For a moment she stood poised between the quiet stable with its scents of horses and leather and hay, and the darkness beneath the pines with its thickly layered needles and scattered cones. She smelt sheep dung, too, scattered among the tree roots—and opened her portal, out of the stable and into the hollow in the foothills.
Peta, Raven’s mare, tossed up her head, but he spoke a quiet word and she steadied. Hani pricked her ears forward, and then both horses followed Raven through the gate. Malian waited until the mares’ tails had swished clear before following, letting the opening close as soon as she stood on the foothill side. The imprint of the stable lingered briefly against the darkness, and then there was just the pine grove, with the wind sighing down from the high peaks, bringing the chill of snow.
16
The Dark Hours
“No fire,” Raven said, and Malian did not argue. Even a faint glow seen through the dense curtain of the trees would be a beacon, but it meant they were in for a cold night. She searched as unobtrusively as possible with her seeker’s sense, but every indication was that they were alone in the blackness of the foothills. Regardless, she circled the hollow and set her Shadow Band trip wires, each with its own cantrip against detection.
“If you’d done that in the Long Pass,” Raven observed, “the wolfpack might not have feasted on your mule.”
“Maister Carick’s mule,” Malian said, finally pushing up Nhenir’s visor, although she kept the helm on. “You can keep my head warm, if nothing else,” she told it. “The maister was meant to draw out enemies. But for what it’s worth, I do still feel badly about the mule.” Raven was taking first watch, so she worked herself into a hollow between gnarled tree roots, where the pine needles were thickest, and unfolded her blanket. Even beneath the trees, the night air was already cold as iron.
Raven spoke again from the lip of the hollow, his voice quiet through the darkness: “What you did in Emer, the way you were Carick so completely, is a rare gift, one I haven’t encountered for a long time.”
Malian wrapped the blanket about cloak and coat. “The Band calls it illusion. It’s a skill they teach all their adepts.”
“Yet how many of your peers could achieve what you did in Emer, subsuming the true identity so completely beneath an outward persona?”
Despite his phrasing, it was not really a question. The truth was that Malian had been one of the Shadow Band’s most gifted students in almost every respect, but no one could match her when it came to altering outward appearance and maintaining convincing disguises. First Kin to a facestealer, she thought, grimacing. Except that I create my personas, I don’t murder people to acquire their faces. “You saw through most of the illusion layers,” she pointed out, feeling the cold start to bite. “I suppose,” she added to Nhenir, “it would be wrong of me to use my power to warm the air?”
“For the whole night? You would run less risk of attracting unwelcome attention if you lit a fire.”
“I saw through the illusions meant to convince the world you were a young man,” Raven agreed. “But if Carick the scholar had been a young woman, and Malian of the Derai concealed within that disguise, detection would have been much harder, if not impossible. Even carrying the sword that is bound to both you and the helmet, I was still not sure about you for a long time.”
Malian shifted, trying to get more comfortable. “But you have encountered those with similar abilities before?” Any power found among the Derai, she supposed, could also exist among the Darksworn. Her eyesight had adjusted now and she could make out his silhouette against the starlight that pricked the hollow’s rim, enough to catch his glance her way.
“The gift was always rare, but we looked for it most in Night on the Derai side. Among the Sworn—” The outline of his shoulders shrugged. “We in Fire claimed it as our own, since the few with the ability among Lightning’s ranks were all our kindred. As for Sun, they had facestealers, plenty of them, but Aranraith hungered for those who could assume an unshakable persona for years, or even decades. Such adepts were deadly because the assumed identity was real, its belief in itself absolute, until the moment came for the hidden personality to strike.” Raven paused, and when he spoke again his voice was spiked with a chill Malian could not recall hearing before, even on the Northern March. “That is one reason Aranraith values Thanir, whom you have just met, so highly. He has many abilities, all considerable, but he is also one of only a very few facestealers who can sustain a stolen visage for prolonged periods.”
Malian folded her arms, recalling Thanir’s assurance from the night fair. The blanket, she decided, was doing little good against the cold. “It’s true that if you don’t know you are anything but the created identity, then you can’t be surprised or flushed out.” She shivered, thinking how important maintaining so profo
und a concealment would be for a Derai agent infiltrating the Darksworn. “But the inner self is always present, aware at some level and processing what it needs to know.”
She did not add that it was Nhenir, building on Shadow Band skills learned from Elite Cairon, who had taught her how to weave in triggers that enabled the hidden personality to resurface at the right time and complete an assigned mission—or simply avoid being killed inadvertently, like Carick in the Long Pass. If Raven had not come along when he had, or the Normarch patrol arrived just as the wolfpack was catching them again, the Long Pass brigands would have received an unpleasant surprise when they caught their soft River scholar. But that would have destroyed her cover and created the same kind of ripples that she feared the night fair incident was going to do. So it was far better for everyone—including the outlaws, Malian reflected, conscious of the irony—that first Raven and then the Normarch patrol had come along.
She wondered how many of the outlaws had died later, either at The Leas or the hill fort, and supposed she could consider it recompense for her mule if they had. Except that during her time away from the Wall of Night she had learned that sometimes it was circumstance and weakness, as much as outright evil, that made outlaws. Her father, that stern unbending man, had taught her that justice must be served, but that cruelty and the desire for revenge should never guide it. Something the wider Derai Alliance forgets too often, she thought, remembering the stories about her grandfather, as well as the fate that had befallen her mother in the House of Adamant.
The Patrol, on the other hand, had served justice and kept the peace of road and river in the River lands for close on a thousand years.
“It was more than that,” Nhenir said softy. “They made peace in the River lands.” And momentarily, Malian heard the echo of Yorindesarinen in the voice that was both bright and dark.
