by Rachel Dunne
Slowly the fire shrank back to a normal size, crackling angrily, its fingers still reaching out as though searching for something to grab hold of. The hobbled donkeys huffed restlessly, woken and uncertain. The fists edged back closer to the fire, suspicious but clearly more scared by the thought of sitting outside its circle of light. Joros had no such fear, and it seemed Aro didn’t either—the two of them remained where they’d fled from the fire’s reach, at the edge of warmth, the edge of darkness.
Into the silence that lingered, Vatri spoke her words softly. “If I find that you’ve been using us solely for your own ends, I swear by the Divine Mother and Almighty Father that I will bring all their power to bear, and I will destroy you. Doubt me if you like. Test me if you must. But I so swear.”
She was stubborn beyond telling, and there was no doubt in Joros that she meant every word. Worse, it seemed she wasn’t entirely crazy or bluffing, and he’d been assuming both. Still, there was an old saying that a clever man could make a powerful enemy into a powerful ally—that was the mind-set with which he’d handled Anddyr, until he’d realized the mage was powerful enough, but a fool otherwise. “And if you’re wrong?” Joros asked over the fire. “If I’m truly fighting for the greater good, with no motive other than seeing the Twins never rise?”
“Then I will bring the Parents’ power to bear in support of your cause. Truly, I hope that’s how this will end.”
“I hope it ends tonight,” Joros said softly, thinking of Anddyr and Rora and the knives within Raturo. If all went well, they would bring an end to this, and the merra could take herself and her disconcerting powers very far away.
No one else seemed much interested in talking, the fists silently curling onto their sides to sleep, a few staying awake to keep a watch. Joros left them to it, and he noticed that he was not the only one to sleep farther away from the fire, and farther away from the merra.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Rora’d always hated the cold. In the Canals, she’d seen more people than she could count who’d lost fingers or toes in the winter, swelling and turning black and then just falling off. By the falling-off point, they said it didn’t even hurt anymore. Winter meant falling asleep and just not waking up again sometimes. The different packs in the Canals were usually fighting, but once dirty snow started falling from above and the slow-moving canal water froze over, all the fighting stopped.
Going through the North, where the ground turned to ice and even breathing hurt, that’d been like ten winters at once, and she’d been glad to leave it behind. It’d still been winter when they got back to Fiatera, but it’d almost felt warm after the North. She’d thought then that she’d be safe from ever feeling a cold like that again, hadn’t thought anything could come close to it.
She’d been wrong about that. The shaking witch’d taken them to a place that was colder’n winter and near all made of ice.
“The Cavern of the Falls,” Anddyr whispered over his shoulder, said it like it was a holy place. It probably was—the preachers thought the whole mountain was holy, so anything inside it was probably given the same treatment. It was pretty enough, but it took more’n pretty to impress Rora, and the bone-deep cold was already a dozen marks against the place.
The witch stopped at the edge of the frozen-over lake, hugging himself tight as his whole body shook. He was probably more than cold; Rora’d seen lartha addicts in Mercetta get the same sort of shakes when they were wanting a fix. He’d been acting funny since he’d come back from his little scouting mission, and that’d got Rora nervous. Joros had promised his witch would know when to dose himself, but the timing felt off to Rora. She kept her eyes fixed on Anddyr, and wondered who he’d been talking to in that dark storeroom, and what they might’ve planned.
Back in the Canals, back when she’d really been part of a pack and not just forced her way back in, she’d learned plenty about trust. You had to trust that the packhead was giving good orders, trust that the face and arm and hand were passing on the orders right, trust that everyone else in the pack would do their jobs right. You had to have trust in a pack, or everything would fall apart.
Joros’d gathered together a group of people, but they weren’t pack, not really. It was easy to think they were, because she’d spent most of her life in packs and it was how her thinking worked. But they weren’t pack, because it was no kind of pack that couldn’t trust the packhead, and you’d have to be stupid to trust Joros. The witch was Joros’s pet, and that meant he couldn’t be trusted either. So Rora kept her eyes on the witch, and kept her senses sharp.
“You should find somewhere comfortable,” the witch said. You didn’t have to speak too loud, in a place so big and empty. All the ice shone words back just like light. “We may be here a while. It’s hard to tell when night comes . . .”
Rora made a gesture with one hand, and the ten knives scattered out around her. They moved careful, stepping soft over the ice, going around stones instead of over them. Knives learned to move without messing anything up. They were even careful not to touch any of the little ghostlights that floated in the cavern, twisting their bodies away if one of the wisps drifted close.
Rora stayed where she was, watching the witch as he watched the frozen waterfall. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who could keep a secret too well, but who knew what kinds of magics he wove when his fingers twitched. He could’ve cast some spell to make her trust him. Still . . . She walked up behind him, careful to make enough noise it wouldn’t surprise him—she’d seen what he could do with his finger-waving. She stood next to him, shivering, wishing for the heavy white bear cloak she’d left behind. The cloak was big enough for her to drown in, but it made her feel bigger, too, and the snarling bear head was good and scary. You needed extra weapons, sometimes.
“Shouldn’t you be hiding, too?” she asked the witch. He had his crazy eyes on, the ones that darted and danced, and he was shaking. She’d seen the madness take him often enough now that she could see it tugging him down, pulling him deep.
“I will.” His head twitched in a way that might have been a nod toward the waterfall. He always had trouble looking at her. “There’s a fissure in the ice.” His eyes flicked to her. “A hole, a place to hide, a pocket. I . . . should stay out of your way. I have to stay out of the way, stay quiet, stay hidden.”
That was a thing he did, in the madness: repeat whatever orders he’d been given, and she could guess who’d told him to keep back. Stay away from the bloodshed, where she couldn’t blame him if he was too far away to help in time. “You can hide with me. Just stay back when it all starts.”
“I’ll need a lot of power to keep all of you hidden. I can’t waste it on cloaking myself, too. And if they see me first . . .”
’Course he’d have an excuse ready. “You could sit behind a rock. There’s plenty of ’em.”
“Then I wouldn’t be able to see what was happening.” One of his hands reached out, fingers stretching for the ice, then pulled back quick like he’d been burned. He looked down to his feet, but, short as she was, Rora could still see his eyes, and their centers were getting huge. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me.”
There wasn’t too much to say to that, so Rora shrugged. “Should I?”
He looked at her—for a little while at least, and then his wide eyes started flickering around. “I don’t know,” he said real quiet, and then flinched away from her. “You should go. Hide. I’ll keep you all cloaked, but . . . hidden is better. Hidden is better.” He didn’t let her answer that, just started taking quick steps along the frozen lake. There wasn’t much else for Rora to do besides take his advice, and hope he kept his word. If he didn’t, she had a dagger that was balanced for throwing, and a hand that wouldn’t hesitate.
The knives’d scattered themselves out pretty well, and Rora picked a place close to the center of the chamber, near the edge of the ice-lake. She crouched down, staying on the balls of her feet so she could get up quiet when she had to. It d
idn’t take long for her leg muscles to begin to burn, to get stiff with the cold. She pulled out both her daggers, kept her fingers flexing around their hilts so they wouldn’t freeze up. When she peeked her eyes over the top of the rock, she couldn’t see the witch, but she could see pieces of the knives poking out from their hiding places. The witch said his spell was like throwing a big blanket over all of them—they could still see each other under the blanket, but no one outside the blanket would see them. Seemed a stupid way to explain it, since anyone with half an eye would see a dozen people-sized lumps under a blanket. But it’d worked so far, at least. She just had to trust he’d actually cast the damn spell, and wasn’t leaving them sticking out like lumps.
They waited longer’n Rora would’ve liked, to the point where even she was starting to get twitchy, and the other knives weren’t any better off. They all heard the voices, though—couldn’t miss ’em, rolling down the tunnel entrance and bouncing around the chamber, turning a few normal voices into a sound like charging animals, words crashing into each other.
“—word from Dayra—”
“. . . on her way back already?”
“—had to drain half the lake to—”
“. . . missive from the Masters of the Academy.”
“You don’t think they’d ever turn on us in force?”
“They’re too old, too cowardly. Like women locked up in their . . .”
“—anything from Saval? He’s been silent as—”
“. . . heard it was terrible. Monsters and horrors . . .”
“—boy told me I’d never see again. What does he think blind is?”
“He just likes to think of himself as a prophet . . .”
“—wasn’t wrong about Dirrakara.”
The floating wisps didn’t give off much light on their own, but the ice made up for it, catching the light and throwing it back doubled, and there was no end to the ice. A little light became enough to see by, so Rora could see ’em clear as day, the sixteen who stepped into the chamber. It was one more’n Joros’d expected, but one more wouldn’t make much difference. As they walked closer to the lake, she could see that they all had, every one of ’em, red and puckered pits where their eyes should’ve been.
They stopped near the lake, about five lengths from where Rora was crouched, and they stood gathered in a loose group, though one of them was clearly their head. It was creepy, the way all their empty eyes fixed on him. He was just like Joros’d described him: “An old man, tall, with a beard halfway down his chest. He’s the . . . head, you’d call him. The leader.” Joros’s eyes’d gotten hard then. “If you do nothing else—make sure he dies.” Rora’d told the other knives early on to pick other targets, that she’d deal with the head. That was how it should be, leader against leader, with the worthy one surviving. True, it wasn’t much of a fair fight, her against a blind old man, but her time in the Canals’d taught Rora not to question whose throat her blade was pointed toward. If your head told you to kill someone, you killed ’em. Simple.
“Brothers and sisters,” the head said, his voice carrying real nice through the cavern, “many of you have already heard the news. Sister Dayra has found another piece of blessed Fratarro. A leg, to go with the foot Brother Ebarran has returned to us.” A few of the others touched one of the men on his shoulders, and Rora couldn’t figure out how they knew which one was the right man, or where he was. “She will return to us soon. Our success grows by the day.”
Rora took as deep a breath as she could without making any noise. There was no reason to delay it now that all the heads of the black-robes were here. Even with her leg muscles gone cold and stiff, she rose in a smooth motion, but she paused soon as she was standing straight, froze and waited. She didn’t really expect them to see her, what with having no eyes and all, but still—it was a relief when the head just kept on talking. “Soon, brothers and sisters, we shall be able to restore them to their full power.”
As Rora took careful, quiet steps around her hiding-rock, one of the other black-robes called out, “How? You keep saying what we’ll do, brother, but never how.”
Rora near snorted; ’course they’d start talking about their plans soon as she showed up. Joros’d probably strangle a few people to be able to hear this sort of talk, but he’d strangle people for a lot less, and anyway, she wasn’t here for spying. Out of the corners of her eyes, she could see the other knives standing up, stepping out from their hiding spots, moving quiet and slow and unseen across the ice. The head turned to the black-robe who’d spoken, and his voice was deeper when he said, “You must have faith, brother. I have said it before. The Twins have entrusted me with the secret of their freedom, and it is a secret that sits heavily upon me. I would not burden any others with it.” That almost pulled a snort out of Rora, too—those words near dripped horseshit, but at least it wasn’t anything worth strangling over.
It wasn’t easy to do—Rora and the knives placing themselves near enough to the black-robes to strike, but not so close that they’d know before the strike. Rora’d known a blind man in the Canals who said he could hear the air move different when there was a body near enough, and he’d had the skill with a knife to prove it. Still, set two men at him from different directions, and he went down easier’n most. Maybe blindness made you better at hearing, but it didn’t make you better at fighting—that was fact.
The black-robes were clustered together, mostly, with some empty spaces between their bodies that Rora might’ve been able to slip into, if she’d felt stupid enough to try. Instead she stood herself behind the head black-robe, one dagger pointed at his kidney, the other waiting, waiting until her other knives were in place. Then she lifted her second dagger, the one with the shattered blue stone in its hilt, and saw the other knives raise their daggers as well. None of ’em made a sound about it, but they all brought their daggers down at the same time.
Rora’s, instead of sinking into the head black-robe’s neck, clattered against metal and went skittering down the blade of a sword as the black-robe lurched sideways. The shock of that hit Rora harder than the fist to her jaw. She stumbled back, managed to get her feet steady and her knives up to face the huge man stepping out from a space between black-robed bodies, a space she’d thought’d been empty. His face was smooth and hard and had no emotions, and he held his sword angled up across his body.
Fecking witch . . . she knew she never should’ve trusted Anddyr.
Her knives were making noises now, and they weren’t any good kind of noise. They were fighting noises, dying noises. The swordsman was stepping forward slow enough Rora could flick her eyes quick, see more giant men just like him facing off against her people. Cutting through her people, spreading their blood on the icy floor. Then the man was in front of her, and the only way to fight a swordsman when all you had was daggers was to get in close and do it fast.
She darted to one side and he swung his sword over to block her before he recognized it was a feint. The recognition lit only after one dagger sliced through his belly, but he got an elbow in the way of her second dagger before she could put it in his neck. She twisted away, dragging the one dagger along with her so that when she ended up behind him, she’d also opened up half his stomach for him.
Bastard was too stupid to know he was dead on his feet. He twisted to follow her, the top half of him sliding around faster than the bottom half, and his sword arm flying out wild. Rora dropped to the ground, rolling under the blade and slicing a dagger across the backs of his ankles while she was down there. That put him down, and no matter how long it took him to realize he was dead, he wouldn’t be coming after her anymore.
Back up to her feet, and Rora only saw three of her knives. Well, three left standing; there were plenty on the ground. A few of the black-robes were dying with ’em, and some of the big swordsmen, too—that was good, but there weren’t enough of ’em dead. Two of the knives were fighting together, smart-mouthed Lanthe and a girl he’d been dicing with, backs press
ed against each other, fending off three men. There were two more who’d cornered the other knife, a youngster she hadn’t even recognized, but he must’ve done well enough for himself to not be dead yet. She started forward to help him, and then she saw the black-robes.
They were standing near the ice-lake, except the three who were busy dying. They were clustered together again, and it seemed like the eyes they didn’t have were fixed on the fighting. The head black-robe stood at the front of ’em, and the bastard was smiling.
If you do nothing else—make sure he dies.
She could do that.
Rora stumbled across the floor, the ice more slippery with blood, but she had a clear shot on him, nothing in her way. She threw her dagger and it bounced off the empty air in front of the head black-robe’s face. She kept going forward, the other dagger held ready to sink into his neck like it should’ve from the start.
Something hit her chest. It felt like being hit with half a tree, knocking the air out of her even before her back touched the ground. She lay there, mouth wide open but nothing else moving, her whole body putting all its efforts toward trying to breathe. And that was before she even felt the burning. It was like someone walked up and set a coal down at the center of her chest. She didn’t have any breath to scream out the pain of it. There was a wailing in her ears, getting louder with each moment she couldn’t draw in air. The ghostlights were dancing above her, and other-colored spots joined them before shadows started creeping in at the edges of her sight.
One of the swordsmen stuck his face above hers, blocking out the ghostlights, and she saw him lift his weapon.
Something let go in her chest, and she hauled in a messy, desperate breath. It gave her enough strength to screw her eyes shut—there was a kind of bravery, one she didn’t have, to watch a man kill you.
