THe Grave at Storm's End

by Devin Madson

  Once the scent of their souls faded, I let my Empathy range, but Kimiko was elusive. Her whispers were there and gone in flashes, no sooner caught than they slipped free.

  He’ll do it.

  Nothing else matters now.

  And she was gone leaving four thousand, five hundred and ninety-four Pikes loyal to Katashi sitting at the edge of my awareness like a lump of sod.

  Nivi Fen. I had run from the place, had run from Darius’s judgement, but there had to be a way to save him. I needed Kimiko.

  One million, three hundred and seventeen thousand and seven. Four thousand, five hundred and ninety-four. My mind would not be still. Two Empaths. Twenty-six Vices. The numbers came quicker than ever, each a truth about the world that lived beneath my tongue. And they would keep coming if I let them, keep clawing at my attention. Sixty-four. Seven. Five hundred and eighty-two. That was Risian, close enough to taste. One hundred and five. Sixteen. Two. In Kogahaera six thousand, two hundred and twelve, while Shimai, the smaller of Kisia’s sister-cities dragged on my mind with its vast weight. One hundred and twenty-six thousand and eleven.

  I must have known silence once.

  One million, three hundred and seventeen thousand and six.

  And Darius, there like a burning sun, his mind just a thought away.

  With a pained cry I wrenched myself back, dragging my Empathy across the world like a heavy anchor. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You already know his judgement.’

  Anxiety prickled the back of my neck. A horse appeared on the track ahead, its drooping head emerging from a stand of straw pines edged in gold.

  Kaze twitched.

  ‘Just a priest,’ I said as a cart followed, its wooden panels brightly coloured.

  ‘Where are you travelling to, brother?’ I called as the man in white came within earshot.

  ‘To Giana,’ the priest called back. ‘The smart man is one getting out of the Tzitzi Valley, eh?’

  Kaze continued toward the priest’s weighty draught horse. ‘One might say you’re late in making good your escape,’ I said. ‘We have been at war for weeks.’

  ‘Nearer two months. But when one has duties…’

  He trailed off as loose thoughts leaked from his mind, leaping the gap between us like a spark.

  She had been alone.

  A girl. A peasant girl with her short robe ripped at the shoulder. Sixteen. Seventeen – no older than Hana – sobbing as she ran along the road, a village behind her ablaze in the dark. She had clutched her stricken clothing and begged for help, a broken sandal askew on her foot.

  I helped! I let her hide in my wagon. I let her wash. I fed her. I dressed her. I offered to take her with me to the next town. She was so grateful.

  And from the darkness a groan and a thick huff of breath. A whimper. A cry.

  Oh, Wrent, what have you done?

  Kaze drew alongside the carthorse. ‘Wrent?’

  The wagon clunked to an abrupt halt. ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘You just told me.’ Kaze stopped, his hooves crunching on the loose stones. ‘And what was the girl’s name?’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘The one who cried with you inside her.’

  Wrent’s lined face drained of all colour. ‘How do you know? Who told you?’

  ‘You did,’ I said again. ‘You had best be careful, Wrent. Even in wartime a priest needs his reputation. A coin for my silence?’

  He did not look away, but edged his hand slowly toward his belt pouch. Guilt seeped from him, thickening as he held out a coin.

  I did not take it. ‘Have you seen another young woman in your travels?’ I said. ‘Short, with a mess of dark curls, likely dressed in dark clothes and riding?’

  The priest still held out the coin. ‘Yes.’ His hand was shaking. ‘I’ve seen her. A few days ago on the road. And she asked if I had seen a strange young man, plain faced and riding a docile animal without a saddle.’

  He glanced down at Kaze. ‘When I said I had not she warned me to keep away from him if I did meet him.’ He twitched the coin. ‘Take it!’ he said. ‘Dear gods, take it and leave me be.’

  ‘I am a god,’ I said, and took his hand. For an instant the memory of Kimiko was there, her eyes ringed with fatigue and her dark clothes covered in dust from the road.

  ‘Well if you do meet him, keep away,’ she had said. But she had not known that he deserved death.

  Justice poured into his veins. His heart hammered. Hard. Too hard. His hand jerked out of mine and the coin fell.

  Two hundred and twenty-seven. Days and weeks were a distant memory, but I could always count souls.

  ‘Walk on,’ I said, nudging Kaze with my heel. The colourful wagon remained where it was as we passed and I once again let out my Empathy, always hunting the same target. But now as I looked for her, I knew she was looking for me.

  Two hundred and twenty-seven.

  The threads of Kimiko’s whispers led me in the direction I feared to go.

  Toward Darius.

  *****

  Rain danced at the edge of Nivi Fen. The storm season had come late – two hundred and twenty-nine judgements late. The last time it had happened Jian had turned for Chiltae as fast as the ox would carry us. ‘I don’t trust Kisia,’ he had said when I asked why. ‘It takes much more rain to flood The Ribbon than the Tzitzi River.’

  Now Kaze and I took cover in the dark trees, but the dense canopy seemed merely to condense the rain into fatter drops. The heavy patter cut Kisia’s whispers.

  Shivatsa! That’s another sack ripped. If I don’t get this rice under cover it will never dry.

  Already soaked to the skin and it’s only the first of the season.

  I’ll never find him now!

  One moment damp with sweat, the next rivers of rain ran down my face.

  The Pike camp filled the plain at the bottom of the hill, but it was the wagon parked on the outskirts that drew my gaze. Dark figures gathered around it like a flock of sodden blackbirds hunching their shoulders against the rain.

  A warm snort of air brushed my skin. ‘I know,’ I said, patting Kaze absently. ‘I’ll find you a warm stable soon. And an apple.’

  Another snort, harder this time.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Two apples.’

  Mollified, Kaze nuzzled my ear. Joined by skin, his acute senses fed into my thoughts and I could feel the weight of the storm and smell the changing season. The sounds of the forest were like a town crier to his ears, like the trees were a great city so fortunate as to be devoid of human life.

  Another smell. He had no word for it, but I knew it well. It clung to Malice like a misty cape, his drug the only vice he took with him everywhere.

  Malice was leaving.

  My Empathy sped down the hill, battered on all sides by disconnected emotions. Pikes filled the plain and their whispers came thick and fast – all noise and no sense. Single words leapt out but they meant nothing – tent, storm, shivat, gods, whore, sick. It was a lethargic soup, impatient and angry, the Vices alone beacons of comparative peace in the mire. I could sense them more clearly than the rest as though their signatures were carved upon my mind. Spite. Hope. Avarice.

  To nook vaest a toii.

  Even his whispers growled.

  And there was Darius, Errant consuming his thoughts. A dozen moves hung at the forefront of his mind: counters and options, plays to the gate, calculations, and a string of percentages for the chance that each of his opponent’s pieces was their king. Unable to pull myself away I listened to his dancing whispers, each one pulling up memories of an old game.

  He doesn’t like to lose men; that’s his weakness. Surround him with opponents and he has already lost.

  It all came at once. Like the strands of a spider’s web, thoughts and memories connected – from Errant t
o Esvar, from Esvar to our father, to the night a frail boy had become a man in the storm. It was hard to hold on to them; hard to see more than a frame of time as his thoughts spun on. Errant. A smiling Avarice turning a king. The frightened whinny of a horse as it reared. Water flooding the wisteria court, its surface dusted with rotting petals.

  My mind began to strain.

  Malice kneeling at his feet. The touch of his lips. The warmth of his breath as he whispered in Darius’s ear. So many words. Two hundred and thirty-nine days of the spider’s words while Darius had been confined to the silence of Maturation.

  My grip weakened. Errant again. Two hundred and eighty-four games against Avarice, three hundred and nine against Malice, fifty-six with Emperor Kin, two with Kimiko, eight with me, eight with Katashi, and one thousand and fifty-nine competition matches played against different opponents, each one beginning with a single gold coin in the palm of his hand, baiting skin.

  I snapped back to my own head. For a disorientating moment, everything was wrong. I was no longer crouching but flat in the mud, every muscle a string of aching knots. Steel pricked my throat.

  ‘Good evening, Endymion.’

  ‘Good evening, Kimiko,’ I said, painfully aware of the bony knees cutting off circulation to my hands. Nearby Kaze snorted, the muddy ground muting the sound of his hooves as he stamped in place.

  ‘I have no fire and no lantern,’ I said, the forming of words lifting my throat into the knife blade. It was only a nick, but I pressed myself lower into the mud. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘A man with a horse can never hide.’ Kimiko adjusted her weight, digging her knees harder into the crooks of my elbows. A lantern sat upon the ground, lighting her from beneath. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. I was starting to think you might play favourites and not come for your brothers at all.’

  ‘I didn’t come for them. I came for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘I need your help.’

  The blade dug deeper and her fingers touched my neck. Connection flared.

  Darius’s name was on her tongue and his face in her thoughts. His smell. His touch. It was all so real, the feel of his skin against hers so tangible it might have been mine he touched. Flesh and blood, he stood in the long gallery at Esvar while sunlight warmed the portraits of our family. There his mother, Lady Melia Laroth, her eyes the same as his, her lips, her nose, everything but the expression. ‘I’ve never told anyone else about her,’ Darius told Kimiko. ‘I’ve never told anyone else how much I needed her.’

  Kimiko threw herself off me and scrambled, dog like, into the shadows. ‘What did you just do to me?’ she said, her knife hand shaking. ‘Were you just inside my head? I was thinking about… I don’t know, I don’t know what I was thinking about but it was important and now it’s gone.’

  ‘Darius’s mother.’

  She blinked rapidly for a moment. ‘Why would I be thinking about that? He never talked about her.’

  In my head Darius was staring out the window. ‘She understood me,’ he was saying. ‘She knew me. Better even than Malice. I wish you could have met her.’

  ‘You’re not all there, are you?’ Kimiko said, stepping back into the light as her panic gave way to curiosity. I tried to focus on it, on her, but my Sight kept slipping.

  Can’t stand these stinking fens much longer.

  Careful.

  I’m going out with the next skirmish whether they name me or not. I can’t sit still another day in this wretched place.

  Kimiko hadn’t moved. She looked to be waiting. ‘Did you say something?’ I said, pushing myself into a sitting position. I was covered in mud but it hardly seemed important.

  ‘I asked if you were all right,’ she replied. ‘You look sick. And to think I was worried you’d do Darius harm. You can’t even focus.’

  ‘Darius,’ I said. ‘That’s why I came. That’s why I’ve been looking for you. You can help me save him.’

  Kimiko regarded me solemnly. Lit by the lantern at her feet, the rain fell around her like gold. ‘I cannot save a man who does not want to be saved,’ she said. ‘I cannot even get close.’

  I struggled to my feet, every muscle aching with a fatigue like I had never known. ‘I need to know he can come back, Kimiko.’

  The rain fell through her derision. ‘Always thinking about yourself,’ she said with a bark of laughter. ‘At least some things never change.’

  ‘The world must be put right. Justice must be done.’

  Her arm shot out and I was looking right at the tip of her blade. ‘No. That’s what I was afraid of,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen your justice. If you touch him I will kill you, Endymion, don’t think I won’t. If he dies it will be by my hand and my hand alone.’

  ‘“That is all we need, another Otako clogging the drain”.’

  She froze, nothing but the rain marking time. ‘I said that, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I meant it. But you’re not really an Otako, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m a Laroth, and so is that child you’re carrying.’

  She held my gaze while a blooming myriad of emotions thickened the air. Fierce joy. Deep fear. Horror. Hope. ‘Child,’ she said. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You have two heartbeats. What other reason can there be?’

  Slowly she let her arm fall, removing the knife once again from my throat. She thrust it into her sash. ‘I’ve said what I came here to say,’ she said, snatching up the covered lantern. ‘Darius is mine. Leave him alone or I will hunt you down and skin you.’

  Illuminated from below, there was something wraith-like about the dark circles under her eyes. I stared instead of speaking as though the words were too heavy, too hard.

  There was a child.

  Kimiko strode to where her horse stood in company with Kaze, their manes dripping. There she paused and looked back, her hovering hand kissed by raindrops. ‘It is not I who made him what he is,’ she said. ‘If you want to save him then Malice has to go. I can’t get close enough, but you—’

  ‘Tell him about the child.’

  ‘No!’ She almost screamed the word. ‘Gods help me, no, how stupid do you think I am? I hate to think what Darius would do if he knew, let alone Malice. I want my child to live, Endymion, not be cut from my bleeding belly like a diseased rat. No. If you will not do the only thing that can bring him back then at least give me your word you will not betray me. Darius will know when I can trust him with the truth and not a moment before.’

  ‘And if that day never comes?’

  ‘You would have liked her and she would have liked you.’ Darius’s hand was on my back, tracing lines across my robe as he went on staring out the window. Long dead Laroths watched on in silence.

  ‘How did she die?’

  A pause.

  ‘Childbirth.’

  A child.

  But Kimiko had gone leaving hoofbeats fading into the storm. Down in the camp Darius played on heedless of the new life even now making itself felt in the whispers.

  Chapter 3

  The headache came on suddenly, its pressure that of another mind trying to squeeze into a space too small for two.

  Endymion was back.

  A piece dropped from my fingers. It hit the wooden board with a heavy thud and rolled onto the floor. Across the table Katashi lifted his brows. ‘Ill, Master?’ he mocked.

  ‘Hardly.’

  Katashi placed the piece carefully back onto the Errant board. ‘I am more than happy to stop playing,’ he said. ‘You know I hate this game.’

  ‘Because you’re bad at it,’ I said, moving the piece to where I had intended with a snap. ‘And that is why we play.’

  Last time Endymion had just skimmed surface thoughts, but now he dug with the talons of a bloodthirsty hawk. He was getting stronger. I curled my fin
gers into my palms, but only the left hand moved, the right no longer there.

  The pressure headache ceased abruptly, leaving behind the patter of rain on the wagon roof and the stink of burned cloth coming from across the table.

  ‘You know it would be easier to kill him.’

  My head jerked up. ‘To kill who?’

  ‘Your delightful brother.’ Katashi tapped the side of this head. ‘Just because I detest your stupid game does not mean that I am stupid.’

  He moved a piece.

  ‘It must,’ I said. ‘Else you would not so quickly suggest ending Endymion’s life. If you sacrifice a piece early you inevitably need it by the end.’

  ‘How poetic.’ His strong Otako features creased into ugly lines.

  ‘The feeling is mutual,’ I said, eyeing his sneering countenance. ‘I loathe you quite as much as you loathe me. But why don’t we pretend for a moment that it is not so. Call it novelty. How went the mission in Risian?’

  ‘Bloody.’

  ‘Such is the nature of war.’

  He moved his next piece with an angry snap and turned one of mine. ‘I know. It was a small force, as you said, and they weren’t expecting an attack.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Risian is old ground now. Who goes back to fight over old ground?’ I shifted a piece back across the board to recapture the lost soldier, white for black.

  ‘You, it would seem.’

  ‘Me indeed,’ I said with a mock bow over the board. ‘Because I understand the importance of every single piece.’

  He didn’t answer, just moved another piece, boredom evident in the way he sat, his hand flopped negligently off the table. I could not be so relaxed. Though it took little mental acuity to best him at Errant, it took almost all my concentration to move the pieces with my left hand as gracefully as I had once done with my right. Too often did I reach for a piece with an absent hand. And every time Katashi just watched.

  ‘A good Errant player plans as many moves ahead as they can.’

  He gave me the look of a man who could put six arrows through my chest without blinking. ‘That only works if you know what your opponent is going to do, Empath.’