Treason's Shore

by Sherwood Smith

  A hand on his shoulder caused him to start. He whirled, the tool shedding drops of blood. Fulla Durasnir picked up one of the waiting tendon-slicing knives and wielded it to knock aside Biddan’s slow, late blocks. With his other hand he seized the torturer by his hair, then ripped the blade across Biddan’s throat.

  Body and knife dropped at Signi’s feet, a lifetime of pain-bought secrets bleeding out.

  Durasnir gazed in horror at Signi. The other part of their plan would not work. She would grip no knife today, maybe never again. But he could, and did, catch some of her blood on his fingers and smear it over the knife for those who would investigate.

  His two most trusted ensigns had undone the manacles by then.

  Signi fell forward into someone’s arms. Her inflamed, crusted eyes blurred with odd lights and shadows.

  Then a familiar voice whispered, “Phew! What a wretched stench! No, lean on me.”

  “Brun?” Signi whispered, then gasped. New colors of lightning ripped through her as Brun gently shifted her in order to take all her weight.

  “Is he dead?” Brun asked, her voice orange with hatred.

  Signi peered wearily down at an empty, lifeless hand. “He had once a mother,” she breathed.

  “More shame to her if she’d grieve over such a son,” Brun stated, and kicked the dead man in repudiation. “Now, I’m going to pick you up. It’s time to leave.”

  Signi’s hands fell to either side of her, throbbing with glowing-coal red heat. Steel blue shards of agony jabbed her shoulder joints and her knees buckled.

  “She’s got to touch the key.” Durasnir’s words were burned mint.

  “I can’t. Lift my hands.”

  Durasnir pressed the key against Signi’s manacle-galled wrist, then dropped it to the ground.

  “There. I don’t know how mages can tell who touched a key last, but these were my instructions.” Durasnir’s voice buzzed.

  Brun tightened her grip on Signi. “Now let’s go.” Her voice vibrated with a beehive hum.

  “We’ll run point.” Durasnir had moved, his voice shading to willow-bite. “Can you manage?”

  “Yes. Halvir is heavier. She’s nothing more than bone and cloth.”

  “And skin and blood.” Signi breathed a laugh, or almost a laugh. It tasted of rust and mold, and her words buzzed, too. “Brun. Is there danger to you and to others in my being taken away?”

  “No,” was the brisk answer, with only the faintest betraying tremor. “There is right now a . . . hole in the guard. Erkric did not want the Erama Krona hearing what the Biddan did to you, so they have been posted elsewhere this night. Fulla and Ulaffa will make certain no one else sees any of us. Erkric’s own precautions will work against him. And I very much fear that you are going to be accused of the murder of this pig-midden in your escape.” Brun spat on the dead man as she passed.

  Brun carried Signi the same way she carried her son Halvir, trying to avoid touching Signi’s wounds. Signi’s breath keened, causing Brun’s innards to clench.

  Down the stone steps she passed in the wake of her husband, and then set out at a swift pace along the cold stone tunnel.

  Brun was afraid Signi might pass out and never waken. “Erkric is desperate to discover Brit Valda’s whereabouts. Did you guess that?”

  “Yes,” Signi whispered, as red pain billowed up her arms, lapping at her eye sockets.

  After the length of two tunnels, they reached the first underground level. The cool white stone arches led off in three directions.

  “We wait here.” Brun’s voice turned blue and pine-scented as she gently set Signi down on the ground.

  From her clothing she brought out a long knife, one not used since her training days.

  Signi looked up through bleary eyes. Thoughts flitted through the murk of her mind, quick and silver minnows of remembered sanity. She remembered that Brun, when young, had been an assistant archivist. When had she learned to carry a knife? Probably in Ymar . . .

  “Ah!”

  Fulla Durasnir, his ensigns, and a dag arrived at a run from the tunnel leading to the next tower.

  The dag bent to trace a square on the stone floor, whispering the while. Then he straightened up and motioned Signi into the square.

  The Oneli commander and his wife each slid a hand under Signi’s armpits, gently lifting her within the circle. Each felt the sharp ridges of Signi’s bones under their fingers.

  Signi made one last, great effort. “Will you be safe?” she asked her rescuers.

  “If Ulaffa’s spells work,” Durasnir said. “You leave that to us. Your job now is to survive.”

  His buzz-voice voice had gone gourd-hollow, rattling like bones in the winter wind. He brought his hands together, and performed the low obeisance of honor. Brun, the ensigns, and the dag performed the same bow.

  Signi’s eyes blurred. The mage made the transfer signs, and Signi fell out of the world then back in again. She staggered into Brit Valda’s waiting arms.

  Chapter Thirty

  THE white tower of Ala Larkadhe formed out of the haze of early winter. Inda gazed up at it, remembering smells, sounds, sights from that summer. Sometimes memory was overwhelming. He recognized the place the army had camped when he’d been made Harskialdna; they stopped there to water the animals. Inda paced over the grass, trying to remember it all exactly. There, the two fires had been set. Barend was here, the command tents there.

  Inda smiled at the memory of the fight. A few of those tricks he had invented in their early days as marine defenders, but most of them were Fox’s, from their winter at Freedom Harbor, when they were drawing independents to them in order to fight the Brotherhood of Blood. Their real practice sessions had been on the hills, the staged “drills” on the docks full of such trickery . . .

  Inda looked at the winter-dead grass. The memories of those days seemed so very long ago, like they belonged to another person as well as another time. That sensation—being so distant from himself—made him uncomfortable; it made him feel split into different Indas.

  He walked away, though he knew that physical distance never gave him mental distance. So he’d keep moving as fast as possible. He wished he had Tdor to talk to. He wished he’d see Signi. He’d thought they must meet on the road, but they hadn’t. Instead, everywhere he saw evidence of her magic. Silent reminders of Signi, without her presence.

  “Ready?” he asked his Runner on duty, short, quiet Twin Ain. “Let’s ride on.”

  Valda half carried Signi into a tiny ship’s cabin. The deck below Signi’s feet heaved and rolled as Valda stripped the disgusting garments from her and eased her into the gently steaming water of a wooden bathtub. Signi hissed as the water searched every ulceration and cut. For a time the colored pain shapes crowded her vision, and she withdrew into her breathing, concentrating on the length and quality of each breath. Gradually she became aware that the billowing red breaths permitted her smooth, silken green ones, if she just did not move.

  “Signi? Don’t sleep in the water.”

  It took an effort to open her eyes.

  On the other side of a small cabin Valda grimaced, her face turned away as she dunked Signi’s clothes into a magic bucket. “Phew!”

  For the first time the cleaning magic did not just glitter but flared and crackled with weird blue sparkles. The clothes came out innocent of the filth that snapped away to the ground from which it had come.

  Valda ran up onto the deck to lay the clothes in the sun, and when she returned her worried face smoothed just a little when she saw Signi’s eyes open.

  Signi floated in the herb scented bath, her bandaged hands resting on the towels Valda had hastily folded along the edges of the tub.

  Valda did not know where to begin, so deeply was she disturbed. Begin with something good, she decided. It’s little enough, alas, alas. “It must have seemed all Twelve Towers was out in the Blood Crowd, but they were not.”

  Signi’s eyelids flashed up. “My . . .”
<
br />   Valda’s cracked-crow voice tasted of pure water, and shone the silver of truth. “Your mother was locked in her rooms at Skalts’ Tower. In the west window of the senior dancers’ floor burned all nine candles in her Tree, there for all to see. You have your name again, Jazsha Signi Sofar.”

  Signi’s eyelids closed over the burn of tears. Though her skull ached almost as much as the rest of her, memory welled up, pure and clear, giving her the intricate carved candelabra in the family chamber of her early home, lighted on special days—sometimes one candle, for a birth day. Sometimes three, for an achievement. All nine for great events. She had worked hard not to think of that candelabra extinguished after she had been outcast.

  A deep breath, green veined with red. “Thank you.”

  “Now, you must drink this. It’s listerblossom, with tincture of poppies.” Valda brought Signi a cup of pungent liquid.

  Signi’s first impulse was to resist. Everyone knew that tincture of poppies gave a false euphoria that would, if you drank much of it, turn into craving and then worse pain. But dags could not take kinthus in any form, and oh, to be free of pain for just a short time . . .

  She gulped it down, and in the time it took to breathe in and out, a cool blue-white cotton-blanket formed between her and the steady boil of agony.

  “You saved my life, Jazsha Signi Sofar,” Dag Valda said, making a formal bow. With each word the strange distortion faded, leaving her voice in proper proportion. “You were willing to give yours to save mine. I will honor you all my days for what you did.”

  Signi opened her eyes, and smiled a little, though tears ran freely. “You do not have to bow to a bathtub.”

  “I will bow to the gutters running with the filth that dropped off you. To the blood you shed in keeping my name and secrets from those with evil intent.” Valda made another deep obeisance.

  “I did betray you,” Signi whispered. “At the end. If the questioner had not died, Erkric would know everything.”

  “Which is why the questioner died,” Valda returned. “Ulaffa said to me that he himself would not withstand torture long. We dags never trained in giving and receiving violence and pain, and even those with a great deal of physical courage rarely have sufficient defense against such desecration of being.”

  “Desecration of being,” Signi whispered. “Yes.”

  “But you protected me in that travesty of a trial. And I heard about the glow of Drenskar in your face when you stood below the Tree in chains. Signi, not one of our dags performed magic. There was no known signature in the air, though all felt the magic. Erkric himself spent a night and a day testing and retesting, along with others. Ulaffa said he knows not what is more disturbing, the idea that some presence beyond human ken was there and acted, or that some mage with skills far beyond our ability to trace was there and acted. Compelling, do you not think?”

  “I can’t think at all,” Signi admitted, her voice tremulous.

  Brit Valda sat back on her haunches, wondering yet again if that shared experience had been caused by Signi Sofar’s innate grace. So few had grace. Valda knew she didn’t. Is the difference simply an absence of anger? Valda thought. I am angry.

  She’d been angry all her life, ever since her mother abandoned her, pretending Brit was someone else’s, just to hide her birth as a thrall. So Brit could have a future. But that was too simple: Signi was also an outcast yet she did not stay angry.

  Was her lack of whatever spark the hel dancers sought a lack of anger? That was too simple as well—and beckoned to the comfortable but deadly road of self-justification. I am angry, and I know anger is seldom a tool to be trusted. But it gives one vigor, and that can be put to use. So be it.

  “How cruel my heart abraded that day, to witness from my hiding place how you were the target of every piece of filth, every flung stone, meant for me. But I had to stay hidden. I still must! Abyarn Erkric knows what I did. More important, he knows I am aware of his intent, and his covert actions in service to that intent. He spent a year trying to track me down—using dags—while the Erama Krona was hunting you. I had to go into hiding, but I put that time to good use, seeking the oldest archives in the world, to discover ways to ward Norsunder’s magic. Though three times I was just ahead of him, and once just behind him. We were on a thousand-year-old treasure hunt, he and I, each totally alone, with only trace magic as clues and warnings.”

  Signi said, “So there were wards keeping you from communicating with me?”

  “I can’t tell you how tangled were the traps laid for anyone who tried to contact you! He’d had it all planned out, you see, by the time the southern fleet reached the homeland. Your geyser merely gave him his excuse. He knew that you went south with your Inda. That—and trying to use you to find me—were his real reasons to pursue you.”

  Signi would have winced, had she the strength. “The old plan, to capture the king of the Marlovans? That is in force?”

  “No, not publicly. But secretly, Erkric was pursuing it, once he succeeded in tampering with Prince Rajnir.”

  Signi understood. “I see! He did not want people hearing . . . about his plan for the Marlovan king . . . and then looking askance at Prince Rajnir.”

  “He put tracers on the Erama Krona Blood Hunt sent after you, without their knowledge or permission. So by the time Ulaffa and I discovered that you’d been found, the wards were up.”

  “I felt them.” Signi’s voice was fading. “Too late. I did not seek past. My own. Magical traces.”

  “More disturbing than Erkric’s misprision is how each action is claimed to benefit Drenskar and yet each more deeply forswears our moral center. Even Ulaffa had forgotten Erkric’s plan against the Marlovan king. And I dared not remind him, lest he think the political advantages outweigh the moral. The Marlovan king, under Erkric’s control, could order that vast army launched against the continent in our name. Think of the devastation!”

  Signi closed her eyes. “Inda ... would he—yes, he would do it. Though it would probably kill him.”

  “He’s the King’s Voice,” Valda said, sitting back on her heels beside the tub. “He is sworn to obey. That’s probably saved him from Erkric’s attentions. That and Erkric is desperately overworked.” Valda tapped her scrawny chest. “Since I could not save you, I used the time they chased you to ward the Marlovan royal city. I mirrored Erkric’s own spells. He will never break those wards. As long as that king stays in his city, he’s safe from Erkric.”

  Signi breathed again.

  Valda straightened up, one hand to her aching hip. “We all make warding signs against Rainorec, but how many understand what it means? It means our people are betrayed by our own customs. Erkric has found it far too easy to take our laws and twist them toward evil ends while speaking the names of everything we hold honorable and right.”

  Signi tried to speak, but her lips had cracked again, and she tasted blood. Even with the blanket of herbs, darts of pain reached her, faint warnings of what was to come when the herbal effect wore away.

  “What is next?” she whispered finally.

  “Frin of Loc House sent this salve by Brun Durasnir.” Valda picked up an open shell on which something pungent glistened. She leaned over the bath and began to anoint Signi’s remaining wounds, which, now clean of the crust of infection, bled sluggishly. The salve was cool and soothing.

  “You must vanish,” Valda said. “No more magic at all. Not the smallest spell, so that Erkric will never again be able to trace you. You will rest and heal. When you can hold a book and pen, I will rely on you to help me with my search through magical archives. I cannot do it alone, and still monitor Erkric’s movements.”

  Signi’s brow eased slightly: she had something to do.

  “When you are sufficiently healed, then this ship must vanish. You must land and hide.”

  “Where?”

  “I suggest you take advantage of my wards and go back to your Inda. But Signi, it is only for a time.”

  Another
blow. It took all Signi’s strength to speak. “The plan. Sartor. It still holds?”

  “Correct. We have not given up our plan. If we can get Sartor to listen, our gift might go a long way toward redeeming the Venn in the eyes of the world. Erkric still has his spy wards around the Destinations we use to transfer to Sartor, but as soon as we can deflect him, we will attend to those. And then send you the signal, the milkweed again.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I plan to keep him so busy that you will be able to go to Sartor unmolested.” She leaned down and kissed Signi’s bruised, scraped brow.

  Signi summoned the strength for one last question. “How can. You keep. Erkric busy?”

  “I have several plans. You are going to help, as I said. While you are healing, you will be going through the ancient records I stored in these chests.” Valda reached behind the tub and touched two heavy wooden chests, so old the carving was worn and blurry. “You are going to find me the spells to break Erkric’s control over Rajnir’s mind.”

  The relentless flood of memory reached high tide when Inda rode through the gates of Ala Larkadhe. Everywhere he looked reminded him so vividly, so viscerally, of Noddy and Hawkeye busy with tasks, of Buck striding back and forth, whole and laughing, it was like seeing ghosts. He knew they were not ghosts in the sense that others talked about and he’d seen so briefly once. These were memory ghosts, ones he carried with him, who came alive in dreams.

  Inda tried to wall the flood of memories and ghosts by concentrating on the cold stone of the new garrison, the smells of baking pan bread and simmering cabbage rolls, the long, vowelly Iascan accent punctuated by the quick, sibilant Marlovan. But those things, too, were reminders of his previous stay.

  Then Beaver Yvana-Vayir came bounding out to greet him, his distinctive square chin, his dashing smile so strong a reminder of Hawkeye that Inda grimaced.

  Beaver rushed into words. They’d been sweeping, cleaning, repairing, and practicing for days, so that the King’s Voice would be impressed. Beaver had been there a year—at New Year’s his brother would ride north and they’d switch, and he’d be a Jarl . . . what Badger had said . . . what Cama said on his last visit . . .