by Rachel Dunne
The shadow cast itself perfectly across Saval’s face, two wings drawn in darkness beneath his eyes. Cazi, perched before the fire on his back legs, front paws clawing at the air as his wings flapped for balance, let out a shrill, high scream.
That threw them into an uproar. One of the attendants prostrated himself, another lurched forward to grab at Cazi, and Saval stared with open mouth. Keiro wouldn’t have thought he could look any more surprised, but he managed it when Cazi scurried around the fire, scrambling onto Keiro’s knee and up his side, to the shoulder where he usually sat. Keiro reached up to run a finger over the ridge between Cazi’s eyes, a familiar, calming gesture for the both of them. Of course the little beast would have the worst timing.
“What is that?” one of the attendants asked, the one who had lunged after Cazi before thinking to question what he was.
“The savages here call them Starborn.”
“Legend made flesh,” Saval said, with the first real reverence Keiro had heard from him. He had almost guessed the man a false believer.
Keiro tried to shrug Cazi from his shoulder, but the mravigi dug in his claws and refused to budge. “A unique lizard, to be sure,” Keiro demurred.
The sudden, sharp laugh rolled through the grasses. “I wouldn’t have guessed you had any sense of humor, brother.” Saval rose, knelt next to Keiro, and reached with slow fingers to touch Cazi’s head. “Starborn, you said? Well, the savages aren’t wrong!” There was wonder in his voice, genuine awe. Cazi leaned into his hand. “Where did you come from, young one?”
“I’ve been to the Eremori Desert,” Keiro said, “and the sands breed strange creatures. I know what you think this is.” He reached up a hand and Cazi slithered into his palm, obedient. “But he is only a lizard, twisted somehow by the distant touch of Patharro’s fire. I feed him, and he follows me. There is no magic to him.” The lie tasted bitter on his tongue, and Cazi turned an affronted eye to him, but Keiro didn’t want to trust this man, this stranger come seeking secrets beyond his worth.
“You’re wrong about that,” Saval said with easy confidence, wonder still touching the edges of his words. “I can’t blame you for it. I hardly believe it myself.” It seemed hard for him to look away from Cazi, but he did it, fixing his gaze instead on Keiro. The fire was full in his face. “Say it,” the Ventallo said, voice soft with promise—of anger, of violence, of fury. “You know what that is. Say it, brother.”
Keiro looked down, unable to hold the intensity in Saval’s gaze. There was no sense in hiding anymore, in lying. There was that strange certainty that he shouldn’t have bothered trying to lie in the first place. He ran a finger down the ridge of scales along Cazi’s back, noting how the scales had grown darker of late, a gray that was almost black. “Mravigi,” Keiro said, hardly more than a whisper.
“That’s right!” There was a fierceness in the grin that crossed Saval’s face. “How did you find him?”
“He found me,” Keiro said. “Two lonely creatures meeting in these hills.”
Saval’s eyes held no compromise, nor his voice. “Tell me the truth of it, brother.”
Keiro stared down at the top of Cazi’s head, and wanted nothing more than to keep his lips closed around the truth, but a realization struck him. The Twins had set him a test—and here before him was the key.
Keiro lifted his hand to shoulder height, and Cazi flowed smoothly onto his usual perch. Keiro rose to his feet, and he made himself meet Saval’s eyes as he said, “Come with me.”
They followed him, all four, across the hills. Cazi’s tail flicked directions against Keiro’s shoulder, a subtle guide. It awed the others more, when Keiro led them unerringly to the hole in the ground. It was not one he had used before—the hills were peppered with entrances, as plentiful and hidden as the doors into Mount Raturo—but Keiro slid over its lip with an easy confidence he didn’t truly feel.
It impressed him, some, that Saval was the first to follow—a man who would send others into danger first was no kind of leader. He didn’t want to give the man any respect, not even grudging respect . . . and yet. He turned away, dropping down to hands and knees, and didn’t wait for the others as he began the long crawl.
Cazi’s scales gave off a dull glow, just enough for Keiro to see his hands lift from the ground, set back down on another piece of ground. It was nothing like the star-flecked light of the older mravigi, but it suitably dazzled Saval and his attendants, following with scrapes and muffled curses. To their credit—or, perhaps, to their remorse—they asked no questions, and gave no complaint. They felt the life-pulse of the earth, the throbbing heartbeat that threaded throughout the tunnels—felt it, and fell silent in its wake.
The great central chamber was wide and dim, the starlight scales of the mravigi scattered sparsely. There was a red glow, fainter than stars, at the far end of the chamber. Keiro could feel it like a call, the thrumming of the Starborn making him buoyant, carrying him up and along toward that red glow, and quiet, hesitant footsteps traced his path.
They were awake and waiting, the Twins—Fratarro as relaxed as he could be, Sororra looking like a coiled snake waiting to strike. Keiro went to one knee before them with a fist pressed to his forehead, close enough he could have reached out to touch the white scales of silent Straz. Saval and his attendants fell over themselves to make obeisance, blathering astonished words that would have held little meaning even if they’d been audible. What was audible was the snap of their jaws closing when Sororra raised a hand.
“Welcome, faithful followers,” she said, and her voice was no less icy than when she had first greeted Keiro.
Fratarro grinned, though, as if he showed all the joy she never did. “Bear witness to the first steps of our return.”
They babbled again, a jarring chorus of prayers and vows and wonder. When Keiro lifted his face, he saw that Fratarro’s eyes were fixed not on the newcomers, but on Keiro himself. It was a look that did not need words to ask what Keiro would do next.
He rose, smoothly and confidently, as though anger and fear and disappointment weren’t making war of his guts. Rose, and placed himself sideways between the Twins and Saval—a barrier, a bridge. “You’ve seen the truth of it, brother,” he said to Saval. “Now go. Return to Raturo. Tell the Ventallo—tell everyone. Tell them what you’ve seen, and bring them here.” Saval’s attendants stared at him with awe, and the man himself had something like respect in his eyes. Keiro didn’t want his respect; he just wanted Saval to leave, to fill the purpose that had surely led his feet here. “Go. Bring them all. We’ll begin a new age—together, we’ll carry the Long Night.”
“Go,” Fratarro echoed, and Keiro could see his eyelids beginning to droop. He didn’t think the Twins would want these newcomers to see their weakness.
“Go,” Sororra said, implacable as stone. “We have waited too long already.”
Keiro ushered them from the chamber quickly, though they all craned around to look back over their shoulders, eyes wide on their fallen gods. Cazi, a pale streak on the dark ground, led them to a near tunnel, the sooner to hide the somnolent Twins from sight.
They talked among themselves as they crawled for the surface, low voices echoing through the tunnel, ringing loud as shouts. They talked still beneath the light of the moon and the spinning stars, as Keiro led them far from the tunnel’s mouth, so that they would not try to find it once more. They only stopped talking when Keiro’s feet fell still and he turned to face them. “You will go?”
Saval grinned at him, teeth white as a slice of the moon. “Of course, brother! Of course. How could we not go and spread their glory to the far corners of the earth?”
“Raturo will be far enough,” Keiro said tiredly. He was pleased to have found a way to do as the Twins had asked—alert the Fallen, without himself bringing them that news—but he would be happier when Saval and his men were gone. He left them, then, though he set Cazi to keep a watch, to alert him if they tried to find their way back to the Twi
ns. Because he was barred from the tribehome, he found a hill of his own, far from where Saval and his attendants still raised their voices in loud wonder, far enough away that he could lie on his back and let the moon fill his eye, and sleep in peace.
Cazi was waiting when he woke, greeting him with an insistent chirp—nothing urgent enough to wake Keiro, but pressing nonetheless. Keiro followed the mravigi over the gentle hills, valleys wet with dew where the sun’s light had not yet reached.
He shouldn’t have been surprised, really, but it was easier for a man to look into the past than to guess at all the futures that stretched out from a single point. Keiro could look back and call himself ten kinds of fool, could berate himself for sleeping, for leaving at all, could slap a hand to his forehead and think, Of course. The past wrote a clear path.
Grinning at him over the tips of a morning fire, Saval said, “I didn’t say we’d all go.”
PART TWO
Sororra was patient. She had learned that greater reward came to those who waited, and so she knew well the value in planting the seed of a plan and waiting for it to bloom.
—from The Tale of Sororra and the Golden Rose
CHAPTER TWELVE
Pain rippled through Anddyr again, pulled another moan from his lips, and that in turn brought a hand thumping against his skull. “Shut up, witch,” the fist said for the hundredth time. Anddyr could only look at the edges of him, at the ill-fitting black robe that had belonged to a now-dead man. Anddyr’s own black robe had been stolen, too, and Anddyr hated the way the color felt against his skin, hated the memory of the farmer and his family that the robes had come from. They had been preachers, but relatively innocent ones. Folk who worked the land, took a simple pleasure in a good harvest, pride in well-raised cattle. They were preachers still, though, and that was the only distinction that mattered to the cappo. “If we leave them alive,” he’d said, “they’ll get to the mountain just after we do and raise the alarm.”
“They’re innocents!” the merra had shouted at him, twisted face twisted more with fury.
“They’re preachers,” the cappo had said calmly. “That should be crime enough for you.” She’d argued with him more, but he’d had his way in the end. He always did. They’d taken clothes and coin, the farmers’ wagons, provisions for themselves, and enough tribute to not raise suspicion. The merra had fallen into a silence of loathing and anger.
Anddyr tried to keep his distance from the fist, sitting as close as he could to the end of the wagon bench. It was a small bench, though, and his arm brushed against the fist’s occasionally. Where they touched sent screaming shivers through Anddyr’s flesh.
“Wait,” Anddyr told himself softly, the mantra he’d been repeating since they left, Cappo Joros’s words but Anddyr’s voice. “You have to wait. It has to be perfect. You have to wait.” The skura hunger chewed at him, though, gnawing his intestines. He’d seen bodies at the Academy, part of his education, all manner of corpses and all the things that sat beneath their skin. He’d seen a man savaged by wolves, his stomach ripped open, the pieces of him scattered and shredded. That’s how Anddyr felt, just without the gaping wound—but he could feel the wolves inside him, tearing apart his vital bits. “You have to wait. It won’t be so much longer than usual. But you have to wait.”
Anddyr made the mistake of looking up again, and a muffled scream earned him another thump. He could almost forget, if he wasn’t looking. Children always covered their eyes and pretended a thing didn’t exist if they couldn’t see it—and it worked, that was the thing, and Anddyr had been staring at his hands to not stare at it, and so he’d forgotten about it, because a thing unseen was not truly a thing at all. But now he’d seen it again, and so it was real, and it cackled at him as its tendrils reached for him like black smoke.
Mount Raturo shouldered aside the sun, pressed back the sky, crushed down the trees, swallowed the world—its shadow reaching out to swallow him . . .
“Enough,” the fist growled. He twisted around, called softly to another fist in one of the other wagons: “Be ready if the crazy fecking bastard makes everything go ass-up.”
“I’m waiting,” Anddyr told him sullenly, looking down at his hands again, making the horrible thing disappear by looking away from it. One of the pockets of his stolen robe was heavy with a small jar, so heavy he could hardly breathe over its beckoning call. But he couldn’t have any yet, he had to wait, and it couldn’t be much longer because the thing had been so close when he’d seen it, and it had been horribly real for a moment.
The wagon rocked to a halt, and bile bubbled up Anddyr’s throat. He didn’t want to, but the cappo’s commands slithered through him like snakes, filling his arms and legs, making him move. He stepped down from the wagon, walking hunched over on unsteady legs—and paused beside the mule pulling the cart, resting his hand on her neck. He decided she looked like a Sooty. It was a good name, even if she wasn’t quite a horse, and he reached into his robe to pull out the stuffed Sooty, her namesake, to show her, to let them talk—
“Go, damnit,” the fist snarled, startling Anddyr forward, and he made the mistake of looking up again.
He hadn’t really seen the mountain from outside before—not in daylight anyway. He’d only seen it in the night, that one blessed night when he’d left the place behind, a darker shape against the dark sky. When he’d first come to Raturo—been brought, more accurately—it had been with a burlap sack over his head. He’d seen the mountain’s twisty insides for eight years, learned all the secrets it held in dark corners and fissures and forgotten places. This, though, was the first time he’d truly seen anything of its outsides.
Horror pulled his eyes up farther, but no matter how far back he craned his neck, he couldn’t see the top of it—just the wall of its face stretching endlessly before him, swirling with blues and reds and blacks, like a giant pulsing bruise. It made him feel sicker, looking at it, the anger of it shimmering like the air on a hot day, and he wanted nothing more than to hide beneath one of the wagons.
“Witch,” the fist rumbled.
Anddyr stumbled forward and reached out, hands flat against Raturo’s cold stone, and sent a pulse of power skittering into the mountain. He didn’t know how it was done normally, what old blood magics had been bastardized to let the simple farm folk come calling with tribute, but he knew the magical signal that rippled through Raturo, and that he could mimic.
Anddyr returned to the wagon and clambered back into the narrow space that was his on the bench. He could feel the fist staring at him. Anddyr wanted to say that he’d done it right, he knew he had, and the fist just had to wait. The words stayed behind his teeth, too frightened to slither out toward the fist.
After a time the stone door opened, a great pit spreading like a maw, wide enough to drive two wagons through side by side. They went singly, though, the mules—brave Sooty leading them—twitching their ears, the fists hunching their shoulders, Anddyr curling around the ball of need in his gut as they slipped down Raturo’s gullet.
There was a preacher waiting within the darkness, an old man with his eyes plucked from his face and two mouse-faced initiates. “Name and purpose?” the old man asked.
“Kelnen,” Anddyr supplied. It was the name the farmer had told them, before the cappo had put his sword into the man’s chest. “Beef and potatoes, for tribute.” Inside the sleeves of his robe, Anddyr’s fingers began to weave, moving slow as worms in a rainstorm, his mind fractured between magic and need and fear. The spell eked out of him, a deflection of attention; the preacher and his initiates wouldn’t wonder why none of the farmers looked familiar, wouldn’t pry any deeper. An attendant made a mark in his ledger, and waved the wagons forward. Anddyr made fists of his fingers to keep them from shaking, straightened them back out to be ready for another spell, got lost in the jarring sway of the wagon over the pitted floor.
In the wide cold storeroom where the walls leaked ice and words made gentle clouds, Anddyr stepped to the sid
e as the fists unloaded the wagons, moving his fingers again in familiar sigils. The crates were carefully stacked, the burlap sacks set gently down, and the attendants counted each but failed to check any of them. The head of the fists was given a jangling pouch, the wagons were turned with the mules—sweet Sooty leaving him first—straining for light, the no-eyed man and the initiates left, and Anddyr stood unseen.
His fingers scrabbled at the lid of the first crate, prying against the nails loose-set into their homes to free its occupant. Rora was like the sun rising, like cool water against the twisting in his gut. She was real and true, no matter what else his eyes might show him.
“Ten fecking hells,” Rora spat as she climbed from the crate, twisting her back, bones popping.
“I’m sorry,” Anddyr said, keeping his voice low. There was no telling if there were any preachers outside the room, and if there were he certainly didn’t want to attract their attention. “They went as fast as they could . . .”
She shook her head slightly, eyes not on him. “Help me open the rest of these.” As she turned away Anddyr saw the smooth patch of skin her hair didn’t hide. He’d done as much as he could to heal it, but his magic couldn’t regrow flesh, couldn’t hide the unprotected hole of her ear. He still remembered when they’d found her, tied and bleeding, and she’d leaned into his hand as he’d eased her pain.
There were twenty crates in total that they’d brought in, and half of them were subtly marked, their lids held in place loosely enough that they could be pried open with fingers. Ten of those who Rora called “knives” climbed quietly from the open crates, slim and silent as the blades they were named after, mostly men but a few women as hard-faced as Rora.
One of the crates held more black robes, taken from the farmer and his family. As the knives drew robes over their sharp bodies, Anddyr wedged himself into a corner and finally pulled the jar from his robe. He’d waited so long that the wolves had eaten so much of his insides. But it was timed, all so carefully timed, not a second to spare or waste, and the skura tasted so sweet on his tongue. It shuddered through him, suffusing him, melting along his veins and nerves, sending the wolves howling in fear, and it slowly tacked together the fragmented pieces of his sanity. The skura sat as heavy in him as it always did, like weights dragging at his limbs, like handfuls of mud in his stomach, the filthy aftertaste of dirt and iron that would linger on his tongue for hours—but it made him whole once more. The heaviness and the aftertaste were fair prices for his sanity . . . no matter how fleeting it would be.
