So he shoved instead. The blade was already buried to the quillons and could go no deeper, and when Cob took a stumbling step back, Darilan saw that it had gone straight into the silver arrow-scar like it had sought it. Serindas tried to yank him forward as its victim started to separate from it, then changed tactics. Before his eyes, it drove his arm upward, the part of the blade still inside Cob cutting up through belly and ribs toward his heart.
Then the tip slid free and Cob fell to his knees, blood gouting from the diagonal gash. Trickles of it defied gravity to swirl up to the throbbing black blade, and with a scream of fury, Darilan flung the weapon as hard as he could into the cold forest.
Even as it flew, he knew it did not matter. The wound was mortal.
I did it, he told himself, but he just felt sick.
*****
Cob watched the blood flow over his hands and turn to black water.
I shouldn’t have done that, he thought dimly. Darilan had all but taught him to fight, and though he seemed injured, Cob knew he was still formidable. And that dagger…that monstrous thing…
But it was gone now, and the world was filling up with water. It trickled out from his chest and from between the trees. It flooded around Darilan’s legs as he crouched down and mouthed words Cob could not hear.
I’m hallucinating, he thought. All the light that came through the branches was muting, turning grey and submerged.
Then he saw the shapes among the trees.
Five of them at first. Five familiar figures: Vina, Jeronek, Erosei, Haurah, his father. All in their black armor, solemn-faced as the water poured in around them. Dimly, in the shadows beyond, he glimpsed more figures—many more in all shapes and sizes, filling the vast expanse of the drowning forest.
Above, two lights shone through the black branches. He squinted. A white ringhawk, and something that dazzled and coruscated beyond it—something inhuman and fantastic and too bright to see…
Help me, he tried to say, but his mouth was full of water, and no sound came out.
Darilan clasped his shoulder and he tried to focus, but the assassin’s face was striped with whiteness. Threads hid beneath his skin, pulling at his features like musculature, and Cob looked down slowly to see them all throughout the assassin’s body—shining in some places but dull in most, and dead-grey along his twisted left arm. A single bright cord stretched up from the bracer through the core of that arm to spread everywhere else.
Like the threads in my dream, he thought. The ones that tried to catch me.
His limbs felt heavy. He reached up anyway and pressed his hand to Darilan’s cheek, and felt the threads recoil, saw the assassin’s face go slack. There was nothing behind it. An empty cocoon, no soul that he could recognize, just tangled threads and the shining bracer from which they spread.
The water lapped at his throat and spilled over Darilan’s shoulders. It was cold like the water in the Kerrindryr lakes, and suddenly he was in the quarry camp looking up at a stranger, a blond man who said, ‘It’s all right. I’ll make sure they don’t hurt you again.’
Then in the Army camp. The man intercepting the whip on its way to his back. ‘That’s enough! That’s all the punishment he’s earned.’
And on the march, among the siege engines, in the infirmary—always there. That glimpse of blond and black. The times after the whippings, when he would be dragged back to the scout’s cabin to have his welts salved: ‘Stop picking fights, curse it. If you accidentally kill someone and get yourself condemned, there’s nothing I can do.’ He remembered the wall beyond the flat, hard bunk, with the dartboard hung on it, covered in knife-marks. He remembered falling asleep there a dozen times and being hustled back to the slave camp after dark with a cloak over his head and Darilan swearing furiously beside him.
He remembered the scout’s expression on that last day, when he showed up to warn Cob that the Inquisition was in camp. The fear strung tight under his usual scowling façade.
And at the wall that night, with the moonlight bisecting his features. The fear had been there too.
The ground fell away beneath him. He felt himself floating, the dark water over his head, and there were no trees now—no forest, no snow, no Guardian shapes watching him. Nothing above or below, no hovering lights, just the burn of his scar and the fading threads beneath his hand, growing dimmer as the water deepened. He saw fingers rise to touch his own.
And just for a moment he saw the card. Black sea, white shore. Two figures with hands clasped around a cup.
Then even that fell away. The threads were just wisps, disappearing. He tried to close his hand on them but felt nothing. The water no longer rushed, but shrouded him. Far below, he sensed the cold hunger of the void.
No. No, I won’t go.
But there was no escape, and no rescue. The Guardians had done nothing. As if they could not—as if they would not. As if—
It’s not real.
The water surrounded him, soothed him, dragged him down. But it was in his mind. He was not drowning. He was in the bottom of the well—the shallow sea over the void. The place where the Guardian kept its power.
‘If you let yourself, you can breathe underwater. See in the dark.’
He opened his eyes and inhaled the blackness.
*****
Darilan felt the fingers going cold and lax against his face, and gripped them with his good hand as if he could hold the life there. Cob’s eyes had sunk shut, and the flow of blood down his chest was ebbing—no longer in great pulses now but a slow stream, his tunic and breeches already soaked, the slush dark pink around them.
He did not want to let go.
“Cob,” he said again, his voice harsh in his throat. “I’m sorry. I failed you. I didn’t come to kill you, I came to die. I’ve been doing this for half a century and I hate it, I hate them, all my masters and superiors, everyone. Five years ago I was satisfied to do this, but not now. You little bastard, it’s your fault.”
But Cob did not respond. He had stopped trying to speak, and only the slowing beat of his heart let Darilan know he was still alive. Tears tracked down the assassin’s face, bitter and unwanted. When that last beat ended, he would find Serindas and split his bracer with it.
“I should have done better by you,” he whispered.
Cob lifted his head.
His eyes opened, full black. His fingers clenched on Darilan’s like cold stone. He breathed in through bloody teeth and the air around them crackled with breaking magic.
Darilan looked up as sparks filled the air and danced on the icy limbs of the trees. The persistent undertone of wraith-enchantments recoiled from the clearing, leaving them in a growing bubble of dark power. He looked down and saw the wound sealing, the silver scar aglow as if on fire around the gash his blade had made.
“Oh shit,” he murmured.
Then the darkness invaded him through Cob’s hand, and cold flooded every thread, striking them dead. Darilan choked on a cry and wrenched backward as his bracer spasmed, managing to break free of Cob’s grip and lurch up, then collapse as his legs suddenly stopped working.
One by one, the threads unraveled. After five years and countless battles, this body was more thread than flesh, and his heart strained in his chest as those false muscles ceased to function. The newest sutures in his stomach ruptured and nothing moved to replace them.
Blood and ichor welled up in his throat.
The cold converged from all sides. Flat on his back, he watched the glitter fade from the trees, leaving the woods black despite the straining sunlight. Crushing pressure pushed him down, and beneath him he felt the roaring void that the Shadow Cultists had tried to muscle him into in Bahlaer. Exactly the same.
Cob appeared above him, the broken sword in his hand.
The wound was gone but the scar shone through the blood-soaked rips in his shirt, reflecting in his eyes like two tiny stars. Pinned by the cold and the power, Darilan could only watch as Cob knelt over him, expression grim�
�sad, maybe—but unhesitant.
“I know why you did this,” Cob said quietly, holding the blade over Darilan’s heart. “But I have to hate you. I have to break the bond, because you won’t let me go.”
Against the pressure, Darilan raised his hand and clasped it over Cob’s. Urged it upward. His grip was weak, but Cob obliged. The blade’s point skimmed his jaw, then his cheek, then hovered a hair’s breadth over his eye.
“There,” he said. He looked up along the wicked splinter, feeling the last bright knot of threads pulsing at the base of his skull, and saw Cob’s face set. The young man nodded once.
Then the blade came down.
*****
It broke through the bony orbit with one crunch and came out the back of the skull with another. The body jerked once, then the unsplit eye rolled up beneath its lid and the assassin sighed, long and low and ghastly, and went still.
Cob sat back and ran his hand across his mouth, feeling weak inside. The water still surged around and within him, but he could feel the earth under his knees again. He wanted to puke it all up. All the darkness, all the power.
But the Guardians were there again, standing among the trees, and though he did not look up at them, he felt their satisfaction. They had offered him the reins, and in his desperation he had accepted. He hated them for it.
Further away and retreating, he sensed the wraiths that had been watching. The circle that he had burned into their woodland enchantment was stable around him, and he did not think that they would approach again soon.
His side hurt terribly. He ignored it.
Carefully he pressed his thumb to the open eyelid and slid it down over the empty murkwater eye. The other, with the sword-hilt pressed tight against cheek and brow, he would not touch.
He thought about the cards. It felt like a lifetime since he had sat on the rug in Bahlaer, watching the old woman turn over the Gates. He no longer remembered most of her words, but now he believed them. He wished he had never known.
He rubbed his face with the heel of his hand. His eyes were dry. Too tired to cry.
Rising slowly, he stepped back and looked down at himself. The silver light was ebbing, and he was coated in blood. His feet felt frozen. His clothes were rags. He wanted to crawl into a cave and sleep for a month, or scream until the trees came down and crushed him, but both were stupid.
There was work to do.
Something bumped his hip. He was too shell-shocked to startle, and it was just the wolf. It looked up at him with pale, sad eyes and licked his hand softly, and he turned away. He did not want sympathy.
“We should go,” he said roughly. “Deeper in. You don’t have to follow me.” He was not afraid of the wraiths now—not anymore. They would stay out of his way, and the woods would keep everyone else from pursuing.
The wolf whuffed and nudged his leg again, and he buried his cold fingers in its bristly ruff. It was some comfort.
A deep breath, and he picked a direction. Guardians filled the spaces between the trees with their dark forms, but they drew away as he approached. The wolf fell into step at his side, looking up at him frequently, but he never looked down, only stared straight ahead into the snow-cloaked wilderness.
*****
By the time new footsteps approached the clearing, the corpse was already cold. The bracer had lost all control when the broken sword penetrated the body’s brain-stem, but the sentience lingered, bound into the bracer itself. A normal blade could not destroy it.
The few threads that remained in the sensory apparatus picked up the approach, and the caged mind thought, Lark. It knew her breath and the cadence of her footfalls, knew that she was limping, that she was frightened. In the dead arm, the hooks retracted slowly, considering.
“Oh Shadow,” it heard her say, in tones of surprise and regret. It registered a light touch on the sword-hilt but the weapon did not move; the point had broken through the other side of the skull and embedded in the dirt.
“You were a bastard but you didn’t deserve that,” she said, then sighed. “Shouldn’t let this go to waste.”
A tug at the body’s waist, and it thought, What is she doing? Then it heard the buckle of the other belt, the fancy one Annia had not reclaimed.
“No pouches,” Lark muttered. “Where’d you keep your gold?”
The bracer unfurled slowly beneath its sleeve, hooks and spines pulling free of the dead flesh. In its concealment it was like a flat spider, a few threads still binding it to the corpse through the marrow-spike.
Hands touched the dead neck, fumbling at the doublet’s collar. “What’s this,” she murmured. Something tugged. “An arrowhead? Huh. Shiny.” The cord snapped.
The other sleeve rolled up. She made a thoughtful noise, then the bronze band pulled off the dead arm.
“No rings or anything,” she muttered. “This crap can’t be all you’ve got.”
The bracer crouched, waiting. It sensed her hands patting over the doublet, checking one boot, then the other. A disgruntled sound; she had found nothing.
Take her and go, it thought. Far away. Hide from the war, from the General, from the maker. Put this all behind.
A touch on the sleeve. It tensed.
“Leina! What yeh doin’?”
The hand withdrew, and Lark made an aggrieved sound. “Radha, I’m just—“
“Dun yeh disrespect the dead, leina,” snapped the other woman. “Kem on, we gotta meet wi’ the others.”
“We’re not going after Cob? I mean, Aesangat?”
“She loose. We want that. Not gonna fight her vessel.”
“But— All right, fine.” It felt her rise and move away. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. Are the white wraiths gone?”
“No. We scatter an’ regroup. Kem on.”
The presences departed, their steps sloshing in the wet snow, and the bracer settled. The cold deepened, and time passed.
Perhaps it was better this way. The forest wraiths might find it, or it might be buried by winter. It could sleep, maybe. Even without a body, it could dream. Forty-five years and it was tired of being bound to this bracer, tired of being controlled. Perhaps it would rot away without a host, and be free.
It was drifting in foggy older memories—the music, the swirl of lights and laughter—when it heard the new footsteps.
Heavier. Accented by the shuff of chainmail. Through its closed eyelid it sensed that the day had darkened, that evening was falling. The sounds of distant battle had long since faded.
The heavy boots moved to its side. Beneath the sleeve, the bracer stirred itself, but felt no sense of heat from the figure above.
A thick, guttural glugging sound came, then an irritated grunt. It heard metal scrape on flesh. A throat cleared slowly, harshly, as if moving a great mucous mass.
“So here you are,” it said. A male voice, hardly human, choking out its words.
Light filtered in as a cold thumb peeled up the eyelid and rolled the eye down like a marble, the frozen tendons creaking. The bracer was blind, but its threads lingered; through the eye it saw a soldier’s face, pale with frost, a great knot of gory flesh across its throat like it had been torn open then squeezed shut.
“I think you need some adjustment,” said the dead soldier. “And more explicit instructions. You need to remember who owns you.”
He lifted his hand to his pallid forehead and tapped his right brow. Despite its lack of focus, the eye saw the thin, bloodless slice that split it in two.
“This is not a game,” said Inquisitor Archmagus Enkhaelen through the corpse he wore. “Not this time. I’ll make sure you remember it.”
Gauntleted fingers slid under the sleeve, brushing lovingly over the black surface of the bracer. It shuddered, but let itself be pulled. It had no choice.
As the marrow-spike was torn from the cold bone, the last of the threads snapped, and its senses faded to nothing.
Coda
Captain Firkad Sarovy tapped his finger methodically on the
page and watched the man on the other side of the desk squirm. If he had to work with a Corvishman, he supposed it was fine for it to be this one, but he was not required to be kind.
“So you don’t know why you’ve been assigned to me, Specialist Weshker.”
The Corvishman shook his head quickly. Even with a new uniform and a proper wash and brush, he still looked like a thief, furtive-eyed and edgy. A fox stuck in an Army cage.
“Not a clue, boss.”
“Sir.”
“Oh, yeh, right. Sir.”
“And you don’t know what you’re a specialist in.”
“Uh…crows, I guess.”
“Crows.”
Weshker smiled apologetically and gave him a broad shrug. “Look, boss, I dunno why I’m not off at the Palace wi’ the rest of ‘em. There was some mage who said I’d be useful but I didn’t ask, right?”
“Sir. Which mage?”
“Uh. The one wi’ the lightnin’ bolt on ‘is robe.”
“The Inquisitor Archmagus?”
“Yeh. Sure.”
Sarovy looked down to the drift of personnel files on the desk: two hundred of them, only seventeen of men he knew. Specialist Weshker did not count. He had never seen his men’s files before, and browsing through them had been enlightening. But the others…
There were words in the documents he did not understand. Aenkelagi. Senvrakaenka. Lagalaina.
There were also several women, which was peculiar, as the Crimson Army did not allow women in the fighting ranks. By their files, these women were not meant to serve as simple camp-followers.
“Did he say anything else?”
“Dun think so.”
“Did anyone say anything to explain why you’re now a freesoldier?”
“Only what the lightnin’ mage said.”
With a long sigh, Sarovy sat back in his seat. “And you haven’t been mindwashed.”
The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Page 60
