by Alexey Pehov
Layen was constantly spitting out bitter saliva and recalling Midge and Bamut with “kind” words. If she had her way, she would have happily killed the scoundrels a second time. We didn’t bother to bury them. I doubted this would offend Mols. The guild never defends those who go against its will. So the bodies remained there where they lay. Forest creatures need to eat too.
The Healer walked ahead and when he began to go astray I corrected his course. For obvious reasons we were not going to risk having Shen at our backs. Even after yesterday’s assistance, it wouldn’t do to trust him. But I did understand that all my precautions were just a drop in the ocean. Physically, I could wrap the kid around my finger, but I was powerless against his magic. And not just me, but Layen as well. Shen had definitely heard yesterday’s conversation with Midge and so he knew that my sun had temporarily lost her Gift.
The unprotected back of the Healer was always in front of my eyes, but the temptation to stab it with something sharp didn’t arise. The lad had one goal, and he voiced it more than once—to get to Al’sgara. From this I deduced that prior to the moment when the walls of the Green City appeared, his only interest in us would be as traveling companions. And killing everyone to your left and right is something only lunatics and scoundrels do. I dared to hope that after all my years of work I hadn’t become as vile a brute as Midge or Bamut.
By noon we were soaked to the skin from the endless rain. I feared for my bowstrings, although they were hidden away in a metal box at the very bottom of the pack in which we had our money. The fletching of my arrows should also be kept dry, but there was nothing I could do about that. It’s a good thing that we were walking under the trees, as some of the drops settled on the branches and leaves instead of on us.
“It’s going to be extremely difficult to light a fire this evening,” said Shen. The hood of his jacket was pulled close over his face so that I could only see his stubbly chin.
“We should be out on the road by this evening.”
“That’s good news.”
“Shen, I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while now, who taught you?” asked Layen as she pulled up even with the Healer.
“What are you on about?” His voice was full of contrived incomprehension.
“Who quickened your spark and helped you master the Gift?”
“And who taught you?” he asked defiantly.
“No one,” she answered immediately. “I didn’t need a teacher.”
“As if I’d believe that,” he grumbled from under his hood. “In Dog Green you showed yourself in all your glory. That kind of skill would be challenging without a proper mentor. I may not have those abilities yet but I, like you, am familiar with the fundamentals. None of the Walkers would be able to master a khilss.”
“You yourself sent a spell through the staff.”
“Don’t confuse an ordinary spark with a Healer’s. Besides, you saw how well that turned out. I hadn’t reckoned on that outcome.”
“I don’t doubt that for a minute.”
“And yet.” Shen would not let it go. “Who was your mentor that you would so easily flirt with Death? It definitely wasn’t one of those who live in the Rainbow Valley. They can’t teach such things.”
“Are you really so sure of this, little boy?”
Against all odds, he didn’t take offense at “little boy.” He only laughed mirthlessly.
“I’m sure. Otherwise you’d be with the Walkers. They’d never neglect such talent, and they’d be even less likely to leave it unsupervised. Tell me, why didn’t you kill that necromancer right away, as soon as he came to see us? I don’t doubt that you could have handled him readily.”
“Don’t overestimate my powers.”
“I’d rather that than underestimate them.” The Healer was still agitated. “I just can’t help but wonder how the Seekers missed you. And how many years you were under the noses of the Imperial mages and escaped their notice.”
“And we’re once again back where we started, Shen. If you’re not hiding, that means the Walkers know about you, and you and them together—that’s unacceptable to us right now. Or are you just as clever as I am, and you’ve been lurking all this time?”
“Nothing’s easier than hiding the spark of a Healer from others. They don’t sense it until I use my Gift.”
“Oh, yes! I can attest to that myself. So that means you’re hiding, right, Shen? You’re self-taught?”
“Something along those lines.”
“Even if it’s not so, we’ll really never find out, isn’t that true?”
“If you won’t talk about yourself, neither will I. In my opinion, it’s all pretty straightforward. Let’s abandon this subject. I for one am not planning on discussing anything.”
“As you wish. I can say one thing—your potential is hardly developed. You flare up and fizzle out right away. Do you know how to do much of anything at all?”
“Look after yourself, Layen. Yourself. I’ll deal with my problems on my own.”
After this conversation, silence reigned for a long time in our little group.
* * *
“Do you think this is wise?” said Luk, his voice full of doubt.
Ga-Nor, who looked like a soaked ginger dog because of the rain, tossed his head without turning toward his companion. The guard didn’t know how to take this gesture and so he set about to refresh his companion’s memory.
“They killed two men last night.”
“Perhaps they wouldn’t share. All sorts of things can happen.”
“All sorts?” said Luk, horrified. “Those people just cut down their own comrades, screw a toad! And you expect them to be civil to us?”
“Damned rain. The tracks disappear so quickly.” The Son of the Snow Leopard tugged at his mustache angrily, and then responded to his companion’s indignation, “I’m not planning on facing them. Nor offering my hand in friendship. We’re traveling the same path, that’s all. We’re following in their tracks and not making a sound. That’s all we need to do. I think that even you can manage that.”
“They have an archer. Have you forgotten?”
“Like I’d forget.” Ga-Nor tapped the bandage on his left shoulder. “Make no mistake, the man’s good.”
“It’s too bad they didn’t cut him down, too. I’d feel much calmer if I knew I wasn’t going to get shot at. We’re not going to walk too quickly, right?”
“We’re keeping our normal pace.”
“We’re going to catch up to them!”
“The tracks tell me that everything is all right.”
“Didn’t you just say that the rain was eating away at them?”
“Don’t fret.”
“Don’t fret. Don’t run. Don’t hop. Don’t skip. Don’t sleep. Walk faster. Walk slower. Quite frankly, sometimes I regret that that man didn’t drill a hole in you.”
The tracker chortled gleefully in response to these words, but when he cast his eyes down to the ground he instantly became serious.
“Be silent!” hissed the northerner. He examined the meadow pensively.
“What?” asked Luk with bated breath as he began to look all around.
An arrow with white fletching cut through the veil of rain and landed in the ground by Ga-Nor’s left foot. The archer was at the other end of the meadow, hood thrown back, yellow hair stuck to his forehead, gray eyes, and the tip of an arrow resting upon the bowstring of a powerful curved bow, steadily aimed at the Son of the Snow Leopard.
“We’re really in it now, screw a toad!” groaned Luk. “I told you we were walking too quickly.”
Ga-Nor frowned. If the archer had wanted to, he could have finished them off a while ago. Without any warning. But he was hanging back. That meant he didn’t really want to take their lives. There was hope that they could come to an arrangement.
“And here come the rest,” muttered the soldier when a young man, no older than twenty, and a woman with a pack over her shoulder came out from behind the tre
es. The woman was the same one from the village who had reduced the Burnt Souls to nothing more than wet spots on the ground. Luk wasn’t sure if she was a Walker or an Ember.
“Who are you?” The gray eyes of the archer were like ice.
“Ga-Nor from the clan of the Snow Leopard. Tracker for the reconnaissance squad of the Gates of Six Towers.”
“Luk, guard of the first squadron of the Tower of Ice. Of the Gates of Six Towers.”
The boy standing next to the woman whistled.
“What brings you so far from the Boxwood Mountains? Have you lost your way?”
“Need compelled us.”
“I am sure the need was great.”
Luk liked the youngster less and less.
“Yes. It’s called the Nabatorian army and Sdisian sorcerers.”
“How long ago did you leave?”
“We left when they stormed the fortress. We are making our way home through the forest.”
“And why are you following us?”
“We share the same path. It’s not our fault that you are headed to the same place we are.”
“And just where do you think we’re going?” asked the youth, squinting suspiciously.
“To Al’sgara, of course.”
“Is that right?”
“Take it easy, Shen.” The woman reined in the youth. “We’re not sure you’re here by chance.”
“If you don’t want to travel together, then don’t,” the tracker replied in a surly manner. “We’re not looking for your company. You go on ahead. We’ve nothing to quarrel over. To each his own.”
“You’ve been tromping along behind us since the village, haven’t you?”
Luk really wanted to lie, but, judging by the expression on the archer’s face, he had no love for fairy tales.
“Yes. We left a bit earlier, but then we let you go on ahead.”
“So it was you who was walking around our campfire at night?” The gray-eyed one had noticed Ga-Nor’s bloody bandage.
“Precisely. You’re a good shot.”
“And you’re a good runner.” He gave back as good as he got, but his face was no longer quite as dark. “You’re a lucky man.”
“Ug preserves the skillful,” said the tracker serenely. “May I know your name?”
“Gray,” replied the man after a short pause, and then he lowered his bow. “Drop your weapons and you can walk in front. So I can keep an eye on you. And no tricks.”
11
Tal’ki often insisted that mirrors love to lie, even if you ask them to tell the truth. When commanded to show fact, they always answer with a laugh and a distortion of reality. They wheedle, play tricks, dodge, and they lie and lie and lie.
“Never trust mirrors, honey. And never turn your back on them. They’ll burn you,” the old crone had said, smiling kindly and sipping on her cold shaf.
Tia had never believed her—a mirror always reflected reality. But all that changed today. For the first time it deceived her, and the Damned stared at her reflection with hatred; it had suddenly become alien to her.
She wanted to howl. To scream. To kill everyone within easy reach: the stupid locals, the frightened Nabatorians. But most of all, she wanted to kill those whose fault it was that she was now like this: that slut of a girl, the insignificant little whelp who turned out to have the Gift of a Healer, and that archer. The last one especially. She’d rip the flesh from his bones and force him to eat his own eyes.
A fat, wide-shouldered thug with chubby, drooping lips, a flat, dull face, and white, inhuman eyes looked at Typhoid from the false reflected world. And she couldn’t stand it. She snarled like a she-wolf at bay and with all her strength swung a heavy fist at the abhorrent face. It shattered and showered the floor with sharp, oblong shards that threatened to cut her bare feet. The face disappeared and … remained.
Here. With her. Hers. Forever.
The knuckles of its right hand were burning; blood was trickling onto the floorboards. Tia ignored this and tried with all her might to calm the rage seething in her chest. Only now did she truly understand Alenari, who always smashed these liars wherever she found them.
It is intolerable to know that you are no longer yourself. Alenari had been lucky. She may have lost her face, but she kept her body. Tia couldn’t even claim that. In one moment the Damned had lost all that she had, all that she had rightfully taken pride in. Eternal youth and beauty, fallen into the Abyss. Her true form was destroyed, and only her spirit remained, trapped within the soul and body of a fool, to whom she was bound. Tia’s spirit stood behind the left shoulder of the boy and, keeping a tight hold on the reins of control, examined the odious degenerate.
The body that Typhoid was linked to, like a dog on a chain, was mortal. A horribly short amount of time had been allotted to it. Sooner or later it would get old, die, and what then? The Healer wouldn’t be nearby the second time.
The boy’s unpredictable soul lashed out, rebelling at the pain in its hand, and for a moment Tia released the reins. Before she had the chance to wrest back control over the other’s body, the cowherd whined, saw his bloody fist, and yelled, “Let goooo!”
The ghastly whiteness fled from his eyes and they once again became blue and watery.
Cursing, Typhoid “embraced” him from behind by the neck, trying to suppress her aversion, and began whispering soothingly. Pork’s pupils dilated, turned white, and the whiteness flowed outward, consuming the iris and melding with the sclera, transforming them into appalling cataracts. At the same time Typhoid cut off the soul, which was surprisingly strong, from control of the vessel.
She succeeded, but it was hard work. Every attempt to overwhelm the foreign vessel required an incredible exertion on her part. And if she had to execute a more complicated movement, like walking or running, the Damned thought she might be ripped away from this safe haven and spat out into the Abyss. All her power was focused on control. Using a different side of her magic was out of the question. Typhoid could only produce the simplest of spells. Without her own skin, she couldn’t feel the depths of her Gift.
The Damned still didn’t understand how this had happened. The boy, who had used the khilss to create the most unbelievable incantation, had almost been the last thing she saw in this life. The incredibly complicated, threefold weave of her shield had been burnt to a crisp, dissolving the ethereal fibers. In the fraction of a second before the all-consuming light engulfed Typhoid, she cast up the only thing that came to her head—the Mirror of Darkness. The spell should have saved her, even though she would have paid for it with disfigurement. Given time, she would have been able to cure that. But then the archer played his part, coming in at the worst possible time! Tia had been so blinded by pain that not only could she not kill the yellow-haired bastard, but she couldn’t even stop his arrows. The last one finished her off. Her body could no longer keep hold of her soul, and Typhoid died.
It was a complete mystery what happened after that. She saw darkness and light, the tremulous embers of the living all around her, and the bright orange palpitation of the ether in the firmament. She tried to claw after her lost shell, but she had neither teeth nor nails. The Damned would have been dragged into the Abyss, if the bright light of the Healer’s magic hadn’t seeped into the negative side of the world. It snatched up the silvery filaments of her soul and scorched them, stripping away her innate strength, mercilessly freezing her talent and wits, and murdering the very substance of her Gift itself. It flung her left and right; bathed her in an icy spring; flung her under scorching rays; squeezed, stretched, twisted, turned her inside out, and spat her straight into one of the surrounding embers of life. The sharp thorns of the Healer’s magic impaled the Damned, tied her to a foreign soul, anchored her there, and forced her to hover over the back of a stranger.
She didn’t hesitate for a second. Realizing that this was her only chance to push the peasant’s soul aside, she decisively took the body under her own control. And then she shuddered.
Light, life, the world struck her through another’s eyes. The skin sensed the warmth of the sun, the tenderness of the wind. Air entered the lungs, and Tia, opening an alien mouth, wailed like a newborn. Pain tormented her and she had to let go of the reins; she had to give the man his rightful body back for a moment so she would not lose her mind from the strange, unbearable, foreign sensations. Only then, when she was able to think sanely, did she see herself lying in the street—dead, covered in blood, and broken. She wailed in grief and self-pity, wishing that all this were nothing more than a dream. A nightmare that had caught her up in its web. But no one could hear the Damned except for Pork.
Now, after several days had gone by, she was beginning to believe that all of that had really happened to her. A cruel joke of fate. Tia’s spirit was firmly tied to a foreign soul. And there was no way to disrupt this connection—otherwise the last thread between her self and this world would disappear. Even more bitter was the fact that she existed but was visible to no one except for Pork. She was fated to hover over the man’s back without a body, as a shadowy spirit. Until the moment he died, at any rate. The Damned tried not to think about what would happen after that. Her spirit would be free, but it was unlikely that it would escape the Abyss’s attention.
And in the meantime there was no way to escape this trap. It was a dead end.
“Go sit on the bed,” Typhoid whispered in Pork’s ear. He flinched but, not having the strength to resist her, obeyed.
She kept watch so that the fool’s bare feet did not tread on the mirror fragments, but on the way the cowherd once again lashed out, trying to throw off her mastery. The Damned, who was already well versed in the ways of her charge, was ready for this. She pulled at the reins and got him under control, hissing from the intangible pain that was inflicted on her by the Healer’s weave, and then she stumbled, tipped a chair over, and swore crossly. The other’s body was still unfamiliar, too massive, and far less agile than the one to which she had become accustomed over the centuries. Tia had to exert a lot of effort to cope with the recalcitrant man.
