From the vision, Lark knew that there would be fire-lit chambers within that cavern, warm and secure from the cutting wind. As the horse followed Radha hesitantly up the ramp, Lark lowered herself to the interior and let the grey-painted children lead her onward.
*****
Lieutenant Sarovy looked up from the page to find wan sunlight streaming through the slatted window, and realized that he had not slept a wink.
He was not surprised. His tiny desk—really a plank set over the footlocker where he kept his belongings—was covered in papers. Reports. Several versions of one report, actually, each of them interrupted by a compulsive attempt to draw that thing in the alley. All vastly different but for the underlying fluidity of its shape, the boneless sentience.
His head hurt. He had always had a good eye, even for a Trivestean. Beside being an excellent archer, he had drawn detailed scouting maps and enemy camp-views during his early stint with the Sapphire surveillance corps, and had progressed to illustrating important points in his Sapphire and Crimson reports. They were one of the reasons he had been grudgingly promoted back to Lieutenant despite the stigma of his exile.
But these pictures…
He could not look at any of them for long without his eyes trying to slide away. There was a knot in his head that kept tightening as he kept forcing the ink from the quill. Any time it got the best of him and he turned away, took a moment to drink some water or just stare into space, when he looked back he would have no memory of writing what he had written. The words jumbled together into nonsense, and the pictures just stared up at him with their eyeless faces, raising all the hairs at the nape of his neck even though he could not recognize them.
The disorientation and disconnection were mindwashing aftershocks, he knew, but they had never gone on for so long. And they were not erasing the memory of that thing. He could still see it, moving and shifting in his mind’s eye, blending into the shadows.
Whenever he drew it, right before the breaking-point that forced him to look away, he always had the strangest sense of déjà vu.
He rubbed his face wearily, then flinched and nearly upset the inkwell when someone pounded on the door.
“Lieutenant!” came the aggravated voice of his captain through the thin wood.
“Yes sir,” he said, scrambling up from his cross-legged pose. His room was hardly bigger than a cell, but it was a room nevertheless, with the privacy that allowed. Camp-bed, makeshift desk, armor rack, chamber pot, shuttered window. He was still in uniform from the night before, his sword and boots the only things he had removed, and when he opened the door, Captain Terrant stared at him for a long moment.
“Report not go well?” he said finally. He was a big fellow, as were most Wynds, with a thick sandy beard and shoulders that barely fit the narrow doorway. Normally his face was locked in an expression of deep disapproval, but unusual lines crinkled around his eyes now, like brackets.
Sarovy swept a hand over his hair as if that could make him presentable. He had ink-stains on every finger. “As well as could be expected, sir,” he said.
“You realize it’s nearly noon. I’ve sent three men to fetch you and you sent them all away. They said you sounded strange.”
Sarovy blinked. He did not remember any of that. And sunlight meant that the rain had broken temporarily, which meant he had been expected at drills. He had never missed drills before. Never.
“I—“ he started, shaken.
“Get yourself to the infirmary, Lieutenant. You’re white as chalk.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but the captain’s stare brooked no backtalk. They had never been friendly; Terrant had been incensed to be saddled with a ‘dainty failed archer’ in his cavalry and had taken every opportunity to deride, bully and intimidate Sarovy during the first few years. But compared to Sarovy’s childhood in the harsh Trivestean Youth Corps and service to the Sapphire Army, Terrant’s efforts had been underwhelming, and though Sarovy himself questioned the decision to make him a Lancer, he had given the task the same intense focus he turned on everything. And now he was Terrant’s second.
“Yes sir,” he said.
Captain Terrant nodded curtly. For a moment his gaze traveled past Sarovy toward the mess of parchments on the desk, and Sarovy had a weird urge to slam the door, hide the drawings—burn them—
He shook himself. Captain Terrant looked down at him, brows crinkled again in that odd way, and said, “I’ll ask about getting the mages to do your mindwashes sooner. Bloody queue. You should've had them done by the Miirutin.”
“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Get your boots on.”
Sarovy did as ordered, and buckled on his sword-belt automatically. The heirloom sword was still blunted, his appointment with the camp Artificer not until next week, but he would not carry a lesser weapon.
Outside the barrack, he squinted in the bright sunlight. Clouds hulked to the west, already spreading toward camp again; they would arrive by evening in storm and downpour, but for the moment the ground was almost dry and there were men playing kickball on the street, shirts versus skins. Drills were already over.
“Linciard!” hollered Captain Terrant.
The Wyndish lancer broke from the game and trotted over, wiping sweat from his brow. His dark eyes flicked from Sarovy to the captain as he drew up in salute. “Yes sir.”
“Escort our dainty dove to the infirmary. Make sure he doesn’t keel over.”
Sarovy’s jaw tightened. He had not heard that slight since he had kicked the stupid out of a Riddish corporal. He was built thinner and lighter than the other Lancers but that just meant he fought smarter. Tripping a rage-blinded fool face-first into the corner of a building and then curb-stomping him until he yielded was a perfectly valid move.
“Yes sir,” said Linciard, and untied his shirt from his waist to shrug it on. Sarovy started off without him, catching a last look of condescending amusement from the captain as he went.
His legs felt steady, so he picked up the pace as he heard Linciard chasing after him. It was not that he disliked the Wynd—Linciard was one of the most reliable soldiers he knew--but with Terrant as captain, it seemed like half of the company was rugged Wyndish mountain men. Most of them had little facility in horsemanship. It was plain nepotism, and it aggravated him. Sarovy had hand-picked his team for the mission to avoid being assigned those chunks of uselessness.
Unfortunately, Linciard’s legs were longer than his. Fortunately, even when he caught up, the lancer said nothing.
They broke out from the warren of barracks and warehouses in short order, the white walls of the central infirmary rising up ahead of them. Though it was bright daylight, the sight of its double-doors brought back memories of last night, and Sarovy realized that he had brought the slave here.
Suddenly being sent this way no longer stung.
“I do not need assistance,” he told Linciard as they neared the doors. “As you can see, I am well enough to check myself in.”
“The captain said to—“
“Escort me to the infirmary. Which you have done.”
“I don’t think that’s what he—“
“It is what he said.”
“Sir.”
Sarovy cast a brief look to Linciard, reading worry in his voice and more on his face. “Sir,” the lancer continued awkwardly, “you really do look like shit.”
“Thank you for your concern, Lancer,” said Sarovy coolly, “but it is unnecessary. You are dismissed.”
“…Yes sir.”
Sarovy focused ahead and was satisfied when Linciard’s footsteps stopped pursuing him. He felt the lancer’s gaze on his back but that was easy enough to evade. Pushing through the doors, he stepped into the cool white expanse of the infirmary and let his annoyance fall away.
The central infirmary was the closest thing to a temple of any building in the camp. Light spilled through its high windows, washing the white walls and making patterns on the curtains that su
rrounded individual cots. Most were drawn open; only a few men lay convalescing near the rear of the building, where the medics congregated with their supplies. More curtains blocked off the very back.
Sarovy had seen behind one of those curtains last night. When he had hauled the moaning slave into the infirmary, a lady medic in the traditional red-and-white striped coat had rushed up to them, taken one look at the smears of grey on the slave’s face, and told Sarovy to bring him into the back. Parting the curtain, she had beckoned them to a red circle painted on the flagstone floor and told him to push the slave in.
The results had been unsettling. The slave had collapsed almost instantly, and in moments had been convulsing, eyes rolling as he made awful noises from low in his throat. Greyish foam had bubbled from his lips, and he had only barely managed to flip himself over before he started retching strings and wads of the grey stuff.
It was all inert, fortunately. Just sludge but for those bits that hit the red paint and sizzled into greasy smoke. When the medic had pulled him out of the circle and stripped him, though, Sarovy had noted streaks of the grey clay-stuff all over him, from thighs to scalp. They reminded him of the marks on Trevere, but the medic had been able to scrape them off.
“Are you well, sir?” said a woman’s voice, and he blinked from the memory and turned his head. A large-boned, bosomy woman with grey-flecked hair had risen from the chair by the door and loomed beside him now, frowning, her dark eyes raking him. He felt momentarily self-conscious—surely he was a mess—but remembered that his idea of mess was still most soldiers’ neat and tidy. He was not ill, just felt strange, and by the crinkle of her brows the woman was uncertain why he was here.
“I am well enough,” he said. She wore a medic’s coat, but he knew that if he had stumbled in, she would have manhandled him into a cot with professional ease. That was what the women like her were here for--as well as bouncing the malingerers who would rather be in a cot among women than doing their jobs.
“I brought a slave in last night,” he continued. “He had been attacked, and was also very ill. I need more information to complete my report on the incident. Is he still here?”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. He had the sense that she had been asked this question before, but she gave him another once-over and then a curt nod. “You’re the lieutenant, then. Yes. Follow me.”
She started away, and he fell into step with her, stretching his strides to match. All around them, the light glimmered on metal cot-fittings and well-scrubbed stone, bleached blankets, glazed water jugs. Scents of strong soap and herbs cleansed away all but a hint of the sick-sweat, the urine, the coppery whiff of blood.
She led him to the curtains in the back. A different one than the previous, he noted, and when she drew it aside there was no red circle on the floor but several cots set against the infirmary’s rear wall. One of them was occupied, and a younger medic sat beside it with a stylus and wax tablet. She blinked owlish eyes at them and slid to her feet, clasping the tablet to her chest as if caught in a crime.
“The lieutenant wishes to see the patient he brought in,” said the woman bouncer.
It seemed to Sarovy that some message passed between the women without speaking. The younger one widened her eyes, the elder made an obscure motion with her brows, then some of the tension left the younger and she nodded. “Of course. Right here, sir.”
He stepped past the bouncer and approached the cot, considering the younger woman briefly. She was proper woman-sized, with watery eyes and high color in her cheeks, and shifted away as he neared as if fearing he would lunge for her.
Trifolder? he wondered. He was not sure if he believed Trevere’s claims.
On the cot was the slave, buckled down beneath a blanket--a Corvishman, his hair dried to a frazz of bronzy-red. The gouges on his forehead and shoulders and arms had been stitched shut, the thread more evident than the wounds. He was dreaming, his eyelids twitching, face contorted in distress, body twisting under the straps. Mutters streamed from his lips in no language that Sarovy knew.
Sarovy felt all too akin to him right now.
“The Mother gave him the sleep-tea,” said the younger medic hesitantly. “She said after the, um, after you left, he was trying to hide under things. Staggering around. She made him take the tea—she can be very stern. It’s worn off now. He’s been like this for a few marks.”
“You have not tried to wake him?”
“We don’t do that unless necessary, sir. Dreams can be important.”
He glanced to the wax tablet she held, but it was still tight to her chest, its surface invisible. He wondered what she had written. “I will wake him,” he said. “I am not interested in his dreams.”
The medic opened her mouth to protest, but thought better of it. Sarovy nodded his appreciation and turned to smack the slave awake.
The first light strike to the cheek made the slave twitch, eyes rolling under his lids. The second popped them open, pupils shrinking to pinspots in the sudden illumination. The slave’s gaze fixed blindly on Sarovy, then he jerked in the cot, felt the bonds, and went into a panicked spasm.
The cot rocked wildly. With a growl, the woman bouncer threw her weight over his legs, but though that stopped the rocking, it made the slave shriek and snap his torso around like an eel. The younger medic retreated with a fearful sound.
Sarovy grabbed the nearby water jug and upended it on the slave’s head.
The slave spluttered and stilled, blinking rapidly. His gaze tripped around the small room and finally fixed on Sarovy’s face. Utter confusion swirled in his eyes, a thin skin over the shrieking madness that echoed in Sarovy’s mind.
Sarovy pushed it aside. He was good at that. “Your name,” he said sharply, in his officer’s voice.
“Weshker en-Nent,” mumbled the slave, still blinking.
“I have questions for you.”
The slave’s gaze skimmed the room again, more thoroughly. The bouncer had straightened from his legs and was smoothing her coat, the younger medic edging close again, and as his gaze found their faces he relaxed slightly under the straps. Sarovy noticed the brand on his left shoulder, smudged with age, and the tattoo beneath it. Black and feathery but deformed by his slave-number. Likely a crow.
“I dun know nothin’,” the slave said as he looked back to Sarovy.
Sarovy arched a brow, then looked to the side-table where he had caught up the jug. It held an empty cup, a folded cloth and six long knives haphazardly wrapped in strips of rag and leather. Some were marked with company insignias. The slave’s belongings.
“The grey thing,” Sarovy said, running a finger along a makeshift sheath. “The thing you had no chance to fight. Where did it come from?”
The slave blanched, and Sarovy knew that he had guessed right. He had seen the medic strip the slave last night, seen the knives strapped to him. No empty sheaths, no touch of grey stuff except on the hilts. This Corvishman, this wild creature trapped within the Army, would have fought in a frenzy if he had had any warning. He had not.
“I dun— I dun know nothin’,” the slave repeated, but the whites of his eyes made full, frightened rings.
“It ambushed you,” Sarovy guessed. “From behind? Grabbed you? Tried to smother you?”
The slave’s mouth pressed into a sickened line, but he was shaking his head.
“Not from behind,” said Sarovy, and that stilled the shaking. “You saw it coming. But you did not fight.”
“It—“ The slave swallowed, and his dry throat clicked. “I-- Ken I have some water?”
Sarovy frowned, annoyed by the pitiful look, but the medic said, “Of course,” and scurried away for another jug while the bouncer maneuvered around and started unstrapping the slave. Her gaze bored into Sarovy from beneath her salted brows, and he kept his objections to himself. It would not do to alienate the infirmary staff.
The medic returned with a cup soon, bits of crushed leaves floating in it, and the slave elbowed to a sitti
ng position and drank it greedily. He was a small man, lean as a whip, with a map of light scars over his shoulders and across his back. Lash-marks. A troublemaker.
Sarovy waited until the cup was drained, then said, “What did you see?”
The slave gave him a furtive look. The fear had faded from him at the releasing of the straps, and there was cunning in his eyes now. Sarovy knew that expression. But there was something tempering it, something he did not recognize, and when the Corvishman opened his mouth, it was with that look.
“Horrum,” he said.
“Horrum?”
“…’M camp-mate. Big fella. Dun much like most of us. Din make sense why he was there, so I say ‘what yeh doin’ here?’ and he dun say anythin’. Not strange, that, ‘cause he never talk much, but he smile weird, and he grab my arm and then—“
The slave’s eyes glazed, and a shudder ran up his narrow frame.
“—His face. It all went to grey. And it come for me. It lean over me. Too close, and its body is ropes that get me ‘fore I can pull a knife, and then it’s—“ His throat clicked again, his hands making motions as aimless as his struggle for words. Sarovy watched, troubled, as his expression shifted through shades of fear and revulsion. “—And then wings,” he continued suddenly, as if finding something solid in the morass. “Wings and claws tearin’ away at it, and I ran, T’okiel, I ran my ass off. But there was-- There was clothes in the alley. I remember that. Empty piles of clothes.”
“Where was this alley?” said Sarovy.
The slave shot him that look again, furtive and guilty. He could guess why. There were no alleys in the slave-portion of the camp, only endless tents and fire-pits. If he had been in an alley, it had been in the freesoldier area, which was restricted.
“Dun remember,” he said.
“Why were you there?”
“Sleepwalkin’, I guess.”
“And sleep-meeting?"
The slave shut his mouth and lifted his chin stubbornly, and Sarovy held back a sigh. He could not properly interrogate with the women around, and regardless, he was not interested in the slave’s misbehavior. “The grey thing. Have you seen its like before?”
The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Page 42
