Mourning Cloak

by Rabia Gale

And then he’s on the other side, looking smaller, as if I see him from a great distance away.

  “Wait! She’s not—” But he cannot hear me. I lunge for the portal, and it wraps itself around me and won’t let go. Pain flares all over my body but in the red and yellow and black agony of it, I see something that I thought was lost to me forever.

  A glimmering gold pattern, made of loops and curlicues. The hidden threads of the world.

  A Seeing.

  Taurin’s blessing, come back to me again.

  I stretch my arm—my bones extend, going fluid—hook a finger into one of the loops and pull.

  I catapult forward, tearing through the portal. I hear the pop, feel the acid spray, and know that we will not be going back that way.

  I land, my knees half-dissolved through the floor. Back in the southern lands. Back at Tau Marai’s doorstep.

  Prickles break out all over my body.

  “Flutter!” I’m already moving when Kato shouts. The air sizzles with impending discharge.

  I cannot hope to leap out of the way in time.

  I break apart, particles of me fleeing in all direction. Remember, I beg them, remember.

  And as the smudge of Tau Marai blurs in my sight, as the concentrated energy of a dozen swifts blasts through the cloud of me, I do.

  I remember it all.

  I stand upon the cliff overlooking the narrow valley, the arrow-head of the group of eilendi gathered here. At my back is the Kaal Baran—Fort Valor—and ahead the afternoon sun strikes gold sparks from the bronze gates of Tau Marai, City of Golems.

  Below me, so far below that they are almost ants, fight the soldiers of Kato Vorsok’s army. They grapple with the golems in units, six men versus each bronze automaton, working as a team to distract, harry, trip, batter, and finally destroy. Dead bodies and metal parts litter the stained soil.

  I have never met Kato Vorsok, never seen him as more than a distant figure on horseback, but I pick him out easily. He is coated in armor, bulked in iron. His footsteps gouge even the baked sand of the valley floor and he moves faster than any man should. A blow from his sword fells a golem, with the same swift, savage movement he stabs another one through the torso.

  The wind carries his war song, salt with blood and tangy with metal, up to my ears, my lips. The ground vibrates with it, sets it loose in my bones and veins.

  He is a man exultant, on the verge of triumph. Now his foot steps over the Final Line, gouged in rock, made by the Champion Marok, the furthest any man has ever driven the golems back. The closest any man has gotten to the stronghold of the Dark Masters.

  Cries, glad and proud, rise from his men. Behind me, even the eilendis’ chants ring with victory. Our prayer magic is so strong that it comes to me with the scent of life, of dry earth after rain, of a cold wind chasing away the summer heat on the plain. The Seeing, too, takes shape more visibly then ever before, in hues of yellow and orange and gold, in intricate lines.

  We have never seen so fully the hidden threads behind this valley and these gates. Taurin has never given us so clear a vision, so obvious a gift.

  The only thing incongruous about this sweeping tide of victory, about this pinnacle of our history, is…

  …me.

  I am barely an eilendi. Not a year has passed since I exchanged the brown robes of the Novice for the cream ones of the Singer. I was not picked by the elders to be here. I was on my way elsewhere when my path crossed with frail Taulha’s. I had only meant to see her safely to Kaal Baran and then be on my way to my smaller duties, my lesser tasks. Instead I found confusion—the required seven eilendi had not yet gathered, but the Chosen still meant to go on with the attack. I was pressed into service, a warm body to fill the seventh place. I meant to do my duty, staying in the background, as always.

  Until they cast the lots, ivory discs scattering on the ground, and Taurin—certainly not men—picked me to be the Weaver of this most important Seeing.

  It should’ve been Toro, the Chosen’s friend and companion, who sings trust and joy at my left shoulder. Or Kara the Stalwart who sings stillness and patience on my right. Wise Taulha’s grey hairs give her more right to be the Weaver, as her quavering voice praises Taurin’s depthless wisdom.

  Any one of the other six have more right than me to be here. To be the leader.

  The gold pattern, so like a child’s string game, emerges from rock and sand and bronze. I set my fingers upon it, feel the thrum of its energy and know that Taurin has given over to me more power than I had ever dreamed of. With this pattern so pliable in my hands I can cast boulders upon the golems, tear down the walls of the valley, and rip the bronze gates open to Kato Vorsok’s army.

  Ferocity, golden and joyful, runs hot in my veins. And why should I not? The golems have terrorized our people, torn up our lands, and polluted our rivers long enough. Now is the time to take the fight to their secretive Masters behind the city gates and end them for once and for all.

  Toro would not hesitate, nor even steady Kaya and prudent Taulha.

  But I am me, and so I probe the pattern with a questing song. I ask for more sight, and I am granted it. The pattern across the walls, the pattern over Tau Marai, is…different. Less gold, more pecked and corroded, as if eaten away by acid. There is a sickliness to it that I cannot like.

  It reminds me of a cage, built to keep something in, rather than defenses to repel invaders.

  I can tear it apart right now. Give Kato Vorsok the victory he has all but earned, crumple the golems and gates at his feet.

  Give him entrance to the city.

  The thought chills my blood.

  If we open those gates, what will we find? Our books, our histories, our lore, are vague on the subject, but a shadow has fallen upon me.

  Kato Vorsok races for the gates, and then they come.

  Out of the walls they come, huge beasts of metal and wing and talon. There is a pause in the chant behind me, the army below cries out.

  The Garguants—creatures of a lost time—come. They come with acid and poison and flame. Scores of men die as death rains down from the sky. The eilendi flinch, their songs waver.

  My hand is on the deepest strings of this valley. I can stop this, bring down the gates and Garguants in one.

  And I still don’t move.

  Kato Vorsok bellows, his cry more animal than human, more despair than rage. He hurls rocks at the Garguants, he bounds impossibly high to wrestle one to the ground. They roll and thrash in a mad frenzy. Talons rip away parts of his armor. I catch sight of his skin, bubbled and reddened, before the metal crawls over again.

  Behind me, Toro whispers, hoarsely, “For Taurin’s sake!”

  Begging me to do something. But I cannot remove the Garguants without removing the gates, and that I will not do.

  I am the Weaver of this Seeing. The other eilendi have given over their power to me and I feel, from the concentrated stares at my back, that they would do anything now to take it away from me.

  But I am the point and if they remove me, the Seeing collapses.

  And I know in every fiber and tissue and bone that the walls of Tau Marai—must—stand.

  Men die in screaming agony, clothes ablaze, poison eating away their skins. Many turn to run, are incinerated before they take a step. Kato Vorsok swings his sword, shoots spikes from his armor into the Garguants, but he is driven back inch by hard-fought inch.

  “Stop this!” hisses Toro. “End this pain!”

  My hands tremble, my arms scream their own agony. How long have I stood here, hands upraised, chanting and singing? My fingers move toward the Seeing of their own accord, wanting to stop the rout.

  No.

  I cannot.

  I drop my hands, slice sharply through the air. Break the Seeing.

  Hours of song and prayer and chant, gone. In one moment.

  A hiss of indrawn breath behind me. A choked sob. Toro?

  No matter.

  I am Weaver. I make the choices.

>   And I have made mine. I fold my arms, tuck my chin into my chest. “Taurin shows, Taurin hides,” I say, in the ritual words. “The Seeing came, the Seeing is gone. Praise be to Taurin.” My voice cracks at the end.

  There is nothing the rest of the eilendi can do. We stand upon the cliff and we watch as men die in hideous ways, as a few brave soldiers pull Kato Vorsok back from his lonely, doomed frenzy, as his army breaks and flees.

  As hundreds of lives are quenched and thousands of hopes crushed.

  Tears drip down my cheeks and chin, splotch onto my robes.

  I do not wipe them away. I do not look back at the others. I stand as the sun sets, mingling its bloody light with the red stains upon the earth, as the Garguants wheel, dark shadows in the twilight sky, back into the gates, as the moans of men and wails of women rise up in the air behind me.

  The others leave, but I do not.

  I cannot face the man I have just betrayed.

  I can move fast, but not as fast as lightning, even if I were completely transformed. I have only time to shout a warning as the bouquet of glass balls—a new addition to this most ancient of places—flashes. Flutter flies apart inside a flare of white light. I cringe, spiders painting my vision dark to compensate. I see particles of her, points of winking color, and make a futile, desperate gesture out to them with one hand.

  And then I have no more time to worry about Flutter, because night walkers are upon me. A pair of them, one jade, the other lapis lazuli, their lean, elongated bodies glistening. They are all wrong in this chamber of curves and arches, of heavy warmth and old light and earth colors. Their knives slash at me and slide off my strengthened forearms and wrists in sparks and screeches.

  Spiders burrow into my core, scurrying to armor me fully. Normal vision is completely gone, replaced by heat signatures and energy patterns. My focus zeroes in on one that flashes hot and violet and familiar. Liquid fire zings up my nerves.

  Sera. Here in this room.

  The night walkers are no more than bugs. I swat them aside, send them clattering to the floor in a tangle of stick-like limbs. One whips its blade at my knee, and I stake it through its narrow chest. My sword bites deep into the floor as it writhes, then falls still. Its companion’s knife stabs for my neck; I sever its head in return. Black fluid, smelling of pepper, leaks onto the floor.

  No interruptions. Not after all this time. I walk toward that knot of purplish energy, now gone dark like a bruise.

  “Sera.”

  She crouches against a pedestal of rough-hewn rock. My heart is a pump, pistons moving with well-lubricated hissing. My stomach burns—I force the spiders back from it, drive them away. I lift my hands and peel the armor back from my face. I want to see Sera, really see her, not as a collection of points or a bundle of energy, but as the woman I’d fought beside, slept with, lost for too many years.

  She raises a pinched and grayish face to me, her once-sparkling eyes darkened and depthless. Her honey-and-brown hair is thin and snarled, tight against her scalp. But she is still human and she is still Sera. My Sera.

  She rises to her feet, shakily, as I reach her. She is too thin, too wasted, and I hang back, not wanting to touch her without her permission. Not after leaving her alone and hopeless in a hellish existence for three years. Not after taking so long to come to her.

  Sera stares at me a long moment, reaches out to touch my naked face. Her fingertips are butterfly-soft and I shiver.

  It’s been so long since I’ve been touched with love.

  Sera steps forward first, into my embrace. Metal recedes from my body, my arms almost close around her. Then something pricks me, small and sharp, in the stomach. I jerk back.

  “Sera?”

  Her perfume wafts to me, the scent of jasmine, but under it is sourness. Her gaze on me is empty, leached of all emotion. She looks at me, but doesn’t see me. A cold and constricting current travels through my veins. All my nerves flash pain. I double over, retching. Sera’s arms fall away, dropping me as if I were rubbish.

  “Sera, what are you doing?” I plead, between gasps. My body goes numb. I cannot think. I expect her to come to me, the way she’s always done, but instead she tosses a syringe into a container and turns away.

  Turns away. She’s never done that before. Not when I was just a shepherd-boy, not when the Circle rejected me, not even at Tau Marai.

  But she does it now, and her manner is not that of a prisoner but a mastermind. Her clothes, I see now, are simple but smart. She puts on a pressed white coat, tugs down the sleeves. Rings wink on every finger. The jewels set in them flare to life as Sera raps them in an impatient staccato. The door crashes open. More monstrosities, weird hybrids of night walkers and eerie men bound in.

  Sera speaks to me, over her shoulder, without even looking at me. “Finishing what we started all those years ago, Kato. You were too weak to see it through. You weren’t the man I thought.”

  Oh, Taurin. That hurt. Hurt more than the convulsions, more than the transformation, more than the pain of mere physical wounds. I hadn’t been the man she wanted me to be. I hadn’t fought to the end. I hadn’t died for the cause. I’d run when we couldn’t drag victory from that debacle.

  But she hadn’t been at the front, on the line of battle. She didn’t know what it was like, those Garguants and those cold bronze gates, sucking out all the life from you.

  “No, Sera! The gate… It’s too…” Fresh spasms wring me dry. I can’t speak.

  She bends. I look into her cold eyes. “I finally have my army ready. The Dark Masters can’t stand against us. And I have the power to open our way.”

  Hard hands grasp me, pull me up. Sera takes hold of my wrist, pushes aside the tattered remains of my sleeve. My arm is limp, and I can barely feel my fingers, rubbery and fat at the end of my too-heavy hands. I can’t move my limbs, can’t keep myself from falling, can’t do anything as she plunges a needle into my vein. Can’t take my eyes from the syringe filling up with red-gold blood. My blood, caught mid-transformation, bristling with tiny invisible spiders.

  Sera motions to one of the eerie men. He slaps a gauze pad, then an adhesive bandage to the pinprick in my arm. Sera rolls up her own sleeve and injects my blood into herself.

  “No!” It takes so much effort to get that one word out through my numbed lips that it should’ve come out as a bellow, echoing off the ceiling. But only a whisper reaches my ears. “My blood will kill you!”

  Sera’s eyes are closed, her head tilted to the side. She smiles as the death-tide of spiders washes through her system. When she opens her eyes, they are weary. “I’ve built up an immunity to your blood, Kato,” she explains, as if to an exasperating child. “I’ve been giving myself some of it every day for months now. Weeks apart before then.”

  How?

  “The ward woman.”

  The ward woman. Even my emotions are muted. I want to feel angry and hurt, but instead of lashing out, the feelings are coiled into knots inside of me. The soft-voiced, soft-skinned ward woman coming every month for my blood, explaining how she needed it to keep the wards strong. How I’d accepted it without question and let her bleed me.

  “You sent the cloak.” My words come out in a mumble, but Sera’s mouth tightens.

  “No.” She clips the word. “She slipped her leash. I sent a flash to destroy her but she was too strong for it.”

  So Flutter had escaped. Poor confused, falling-apart Flutter. My laugh comes out bitter and ends on a sob.

  Sera’s eyes narrow. “You care what happens to the cloak, Kato? You hunt cloaks for more than a year after I left you, yet you care about this one? Do you even know who she is?”

  “Eilendi,” I manage.

  “So you know that much, do you?” Her voice is low and angry. “Did you know that she is the eilendi who did nothing the day we fought and lost at Tau Marai? They made a Seeing as had never been before—oh, yes, Toro told me later—and she watched us burn and die instead of tearing open those gates and tak
ing the fight to the Masters inside.”

  So. Flutter had been the Weaver of that Seeing. I am too tired to feel the rage that still boils within Sera after all these years.

  “They kept their secrets well, the eilendi,” Sera goes on. “It took me years to find who the Weaver was, but I tracked her down at last, the traitorous jackal-whore. And yes, I enjoyed watching her suffer, the way she made all of us suffer that day.”

  What do you know about the suffering, Sera? You were not at the vanguard of the attack. You did not feel the acid eating away at your skin or the scalding breath of the Garguants on your face. I am too heartsick to say any more.

  “Well, I don’t need them.” Sera tosses her head. “I don’t need Taurin and his gifts, nor the eilendi and their Seeing. Highwind taught me that power is for the taking and I will take it and use it the way it should’ve been. I will be the one transformed.”

  Sera strides toward a console of sleek metal and square lights and fiddles with the buttons. Wires attach it to a crystal pedestal that looks like it grew out of the very floor. Highwind technology merged with Kaal Baran arcana.

  Her minions drag me to one side as if I’m a sack of flour and prop me against a wall. I sag, one shoulder lower than the other, and can’t sit back up again. My mouth is slack. I feel saliva drip down my chin and pool on my chest.

  Taurin’s Champion. Taurin’s joke, more like it. And I hate myself as Sera steps into the sunken pool, as the nozzles vibrate and screech to life, as their beams of light sear into my eyeballs because I cannot close my lids nor move my head. I loathe myself as I try to stir my spiders to life, but they are beyond my reach, smoked into unconsciousness by Sera’s drug.

  Sera screams with the agony of it—and don’t I know how much it hurts, that first time!—and I can do nothing.

  I can do nothing at all.

  I think my cheeks are wet.

  And then the sleep that’s overcome my spiders pulls me under, and I fall into its embrace.

  I am undone by Kato Vorsok’s anger, his sorrow, his despair. They’re knotted into his muscles and dug into his bones and flooded into his veins. Adrift inside him, my bonds break apart. Senses disappear first, then judgment, and memory last.