That day was now. Isiem channeled a thread of magic into the wand and was rewarded with a trickle of healing—not enough to knit his wound or even force the arrow from his flesh, but enough to keep him from the brink of death. He let his hand fall back to the rocky ground.
A clap of thunder sounded close overhead; Isiem could just make out the bluish flicker of lightning bolts through his cloud of mist. The bolts came one after another, too regular to be natural. The scent of ozone and burned flesh drifted toward him. It sounded like the fight was moving away from him, still high above ...but blind as he was in the fog, it was impossible to be sure.
Then another arrow fell from the sky—a lucky shot or an accident of fate, Isiem would never know. It plunged into his side. Pain blazed through him, and darkness followed.
Chapter Fifteen
The Lonely Stones
Isiem awoke in ashes.
Clotted blood soaked his clothes and the covers of the spellbook tucked under his shirt. Rocks jabbed into his back like dull spears. The ground had leached all the warmth from his body, leaving him stiff and cold as a corpse.
He was mildly surprised to feel the aches and pains of life, once he was conscious enough to register them. Isiem had assumed that if the devil did not kill him, whoever found him—strix, Hellknight, or looter—would.
But he was alive, if barely so. He sat up weakly and began the grisly work of forcing the arrows out of his body. One was a wicked thing of devilish make, barbed and seemingly crafted of brittle glass. The other was not an arrow after all, but a slender spear with a shaft of hollow bone and a head of knapped gray flint.
Neither was stuck deep enough to need forcing through. Grimly Isiem pried them out, pausing twice to wipe his own blood from his hands when his palms grew too slippery to hold a firm grip. When they were out, he bandaged his wounds and drained two of the potions remaining in his satchel, healing some of the lacerations.
Pushing himself up from the ground, the Nidalese wizard plucked at the chill wet weight of his robes with a grimace. He needed new clothes. Dry ones. He'd need food, too. Water. And whatever else he could salvage of his own belongings or the signifers'.
Isiem had no intention of going back, either to Nidal or to the devilsworn heartlands of Cheliax. This was his chance to break those old bonds.
Pezzack seemed like his best chance. Erevullo had called it a viper's nest of rebellion; if a Nidalese deserter was likely to find refuge anywhere in Cheliax, it would be there.
Reaching it, however, meant a hard journey through the mountains in winter, then persuading mercenaries and malcontents to help him disappear.
Isiem was more concerned about the former than the latter. His spells gave him enough of an edge to make survival possible, but he had no illusions about his skill in woodcraft. He could conjure water to drink and sparks to ignite his campfires, but he would still have to hunt, forage, and collect firewood like any dirt-grubbing peasant. And, unlike the peasant, Isiem had little idea how to do any of those things. It had been a long time since his childhood in the Uskwood.
He needed supplies, and he needed money. The discomfort of his blood-drenched robes forgotten, Isiem hurried toward whatever remained of the Hellknights' boarding house.
His heart sank when he reached it.
The boarding house was a blackened skeleton standing in a field of wind-tossed ash. The huge copper vessels used to heat silver ore sat in the desolation like funeral urns, their gleaming sides dulled by soot. Gray flakes swirled over the bodies of men and mules in the street, blowing through the broken spokes of wagon wheels and clinging to empty windowsills like smoky snow. Nothing else moved in Crackspike, as far as Isiem could see; only the ash and the wind played among its cooling corpses.
The monochrome stillness, perfumed with the scents of smoke and fresh death, made him think of Nidal. Not a comforting thought.
Some of the dead had been crudely butchered. What had been done to them did not look like defilement for its own sake; large chunks of flesh had been cut from their thighs and torsos, as if they'd been taken for meat. There were no strix among the dead. It seemed the survivors had removed their fallen kin to pay whatever respects were customary among their kind, and had had enough time afterward to butcher their fallen foes. Whether or not any of Erevullo's Hellknights survived, clearly they had lost control of this corner of western Cheliax.
Isiem had no wish to join the dead. He needed to take what he could find quickly, and then he needed to leave.
Picking up a partly charred tent pole, he began digging through the remnants of the boarding house. Part of its roof and a few fragments of the exterior walls remained intact, but the rest of the upper floor had collapsed. He avoided the teetering roof; its fire-gnawed supports looked anything but steady, and anyway his room had been on the other side of the house.
While poking through the wreckage, Isiem heard a feeble moan rise from the rubble to his left. It didn't sound human. The shadowcaller approached cautiously, a spell on his lips, and held the pole poised equally to crush a skull or pry up a fallen beam.
Pushing a few fallen shingles away, Isiem uncovered a fan of ebony feathers and a bruised, coal-colored hand. Strix. The rest of the creature was buried under more rubble, but the little of its body that was visible was enough to show that it was still alive. Its fingers twitched weakly, as if grasping for the light.
Isiem stepped back uncertainly. He was not altogether surprised to discover that it was a strix trapped in the ruins; its voice had given that away. Perhaps the fiendish archer had shot it from the sky and then assumed, along with the other strix, that her victim had plummeted to its death. Perhaps one of the signifers had felled it with a spell. He couldn't see enough to discern the nature of its injuries, and it hardly mattered in any case. What did matter was what he intended to do about it.
The safest thing would be to ignore it and walk away. Leave the creature to its own fate. He didn't have to intervene, and there was no benefit to be gained by doing so.
Failing that, Isiem knew, he should kill the strix. They'd done their best to kill him, and the butchered bodies in Crackspike stood testament to their savagery. If this one somehow survived, it might well try to finish what its kinsfolk had begun. Even if it didn't, it had just become the only witness to his survival—the only living being, other than Isiem himself, who knew for a fact that he had abandoned his companions and survived.
And yet he began nudging the shingles and rafters aside anyway, working cautiously to avoid collapsing the wreckage. It was soon apparent that a single beam kept the creature pinned; everything else was just debris.
The strix watched him as he worked. Ash and dust covered its face in a gray mask and crusted its feathered wings, giving it the look of a gargoyle come to life. It never blinked, except when dirt fell into its odd yellow eyes, and it never spoke a word. It barely seemed to breathe. Isiem wondered whether its stillness was meant to unnerve him, or was merely meant as a safeguard against revealing any weakness to a presumed foe.
Either way, he paid it no mind. He had prepared a strength-increasing spell the previous day, having thought that he might need to disguise himself as a rough laborer or would-be soldier again, and although events had obviously bypassed that plan, it seemed the spell might still be useful. Isiem pinched a few bull's hairs from his pocket and chanted its words quietly, sifting the loose brown hairs over his own head.
When he felt the magic take hold, he grasped the end of the beam and hoisted it up, staggering a few steps sideways to free the strix before letting the wood down again. He checked its wounds visually and could see nothing obviously life-threatening. One of the devil's glassy arrows had broken off in its wing, but the injury did not appear to be crippling, and he was reluctant to come close enough to examine it more carefully, given the strix's uncertain disposition.
Still the creature stared at him, unmoving. It made no attempt to rise even after Isiem retreated another few paces to give it mo
re space.
"Fine, then," he muttered, turning his back on the strix and picking up his discarded tent pole. Ignoring the feathered creature, he resumed poking through scorched shingles and collapsed joists.
It took the entire morning, and he was blistered and filthy when he finished, but finally Isiem dug a few worthwhile finds out of the ruins. Oreseis had left his traveling chest in the room, and although his mundane notebooks and spell components were roasted beyond recognition, the shadowcaller's spellbook—warded, as any sensible wizard's was, with all the protective spells he could muster—had survived intact.
So had some of Oreseis's potions, shielded from the worst of the heat by the warded spellbook. Isiem drank one, relieving the remainder of his arrow wounds. Then he took another and held it in his palm, bouncing the leaf-green bottle lightly. On the third bounce, almost before he realized that he'd made up his mind, Isiem tossed the vial toward the injured strix. The creature's eyes widened in surprise, but it snapped its gaunt hand up in time to catch the bottle.
"It will heal you," Isiem said. He mimed uncapping an invisible bottle and imbibing its contents. "Healing," he repeated, slower and louder, although he had no idea if the strix understood Taldane. Nothing in its expression changed. It clutched the bottle but made no move to drink, and after a moment Isiem shrugged impatiently and pocketed the remainder of the chest's contents.
He'd given the strix a chance to save itself. If it was too stupid or stubborn to use that chance, that was on its head.
Already Isiem rued the extravagance of tossing his potion to the creature—they were hardly allies, and he needed every bit of magic he possessed for himself—but something about the strix's mute patience tugged at him. Maybe it was the eyes: that shining yellow-green, so vividly reminiscent of springtime leaves, in a sea of lifeless black and gray. Maybe it was respect for the strix's stoicism, which would have done any Nidalese proud.
Or maybe it was just maudlin foolishness brought on by too many wounds. Whatever the real answer, it was past regretting. His potion was gone, whether the strix drank it or not; he would simply have to conserve the handful he had left.
Using the pole as a walking stick, Isiem hobbled away from the ruins. He spent the rest of the day scavenging through Crackspike, shooing away wrinkly-headed vultures as he relieved the dead of anything that might be useful to him. Knives, clothing, food—if it was in salvageable condition, Isiem took it.
He found a hutch with three wild-eyed rabbits still inside, a henhouse that held a handful of good eggs, and a small kitchen garden with a few straggly carrots and wilted cabbages. He took them all. What he really wanted was a mule, or one of the small shaggy mountain horses, but none of Crackspike's pack animals seemed to have survived, or to have stayed around if they had. Isiem would have to carry his burdens himself.
The only other animal he saw in Crackspike was a gray-muzzled brown dog that resembled a small coyote. Ghostly black stripes ran up and down the dog's mahogany fur, giving it a tigerish look, but despite its wild appearance Isiem had no doubt that the animal had been someone's pet. It circled around him constantly, keeping its distance but watching him with furtive hope. Obviously the dog felt even lonelier in the abandoned town than he did.
Isiem tossed it a raw pullet that he'd found in the Long-Bottomed Lady's kitchen. He had no great affinity for dogs—the few he'd known in Nidal had been wizards' familiars or huge slavering mastiffs used to hunt men—but a dog would be useful in the mountains. It might be able to carry a pack or help him hunt. At the very least, it could guard his campfire while he slept.
But this dog seemed more interested in the chicken than in him. After snapping his offering out of the air, it trotted away with a wave of its bushy brown tail.
Shrugging wryly at the ingratitude of every living creature he'd found in Crackspike, Isiem left the town to set up a tent for the night. Twilight was rapidly approaching, and he needed to start a fire while he could see well enough to build it.
At least there was no shortage of wood to burn in the empty town. Isiem gathered planks and boards until he could carry no more, and then he built himself a bonfire to stay warm through the night. He put another pullet in a covered clay pot and poked that into the side of the fire. The meat was tough and tasteless when Isiem fished the pot back out again, but it was cooked, and it was food.
He ate as much as he could stomach and flung the rest into the night, hoping it would lure the brown dog back to his side. Then he pulled a smoky-smelling bearskin over himself, curled up, and went to sleep on his bed of pilfered canvas.
∗ ∗ ∗
"Up slow. No fast moving."
Isiem opened his eyes groggily. The blurs that ringed him, stark against a pink desert dawn, gradually resolved into five grim-faced strix. Four of them held flint-tipped bone spears pointed at him. Painted masks of wood and bone rested atop their heads, ready to be shoved back into place with a single quick movement. The fifth, and the only female among them, was a wizened, hunched creature. She wore a fibrous rope knotted with bone and feather talismans around her reedy neck, and her moth-eaten black wings were heavily dusted with pollen. Curlicued scars disfigured her face; he couldn't tell if they were ritual markings or the traces of old wounds. She was the only one who had no mask, although he had no idea what that meant.
It was the female who had addressed him. In a low, inhuman croak, she spoke again. Her Taldane was clumsy and so heavily accented that Isiem could barely understand her. "Up. Slow. Now." The others prodded the shadowcaller with their spears—not hard enough to draw blood, but not far from it.
Reluctantly, Isiem got to his feet. He was stiff and sore again after sleeping on the ground, although better off than he had been the previous morning. The day was sunny but brutally cold; he wrapped the bearskin around his shoulders as he stood. "What do you want?"
"You come. Now. With us." The female hobbled away. One of the warriors came forward and searched him, removing the rest of Isiem's potions and both of his wands. Surrounded and outnumbered as he was, Isiem made no protest. The searcher stepped back, and with jabs of their spears, the others ushered the shadowcaller along.
The strix herded him northwest of Crackspike, into a dry ravine so cunningly hidden by the surrounding rocks that Isiem had almost no inkling it was there until he'd stepped into it. Another two strix waited at the bottom. One appeared to be a hunter or scout of some kind; the upper surfaces of its wings were painted a mottled gray-brown, blending in with the surrounding rocks, while the lower halves were a paler color, presumably to make itself less obvious when glimpsed from below.
The other was Kirraak.
Isiem's heart sank when he saw his former captive. The glass shards in Kirraak's wings were still there, twinkling like false diamonds. The joints around them were badly infected; they were an angry, bloated red, and foul-looking pus seeped from the wounds into the lustreless black feathers. The stink of disease filled the ravine.
Kirraak never blinked. The Hellknights' bonds were still on the strix's wrists, but they did not seem to register. The injured strix sat completely motionless in the rocks and dead dry weeds, his unseeing eyes sheeted with the black of Zon-Kuthon's eternal shadow.
"Your doing," the old female strix said. She pointed to Kirraak's eyes, then her own, and made a quick gesture across her chest. Some sign to ward off evil, Isiem guessed. "His soul is ...hurt. This you did. You will heal it."
"I can't." Isiem saw that the old one did not understand, and sensed impatience and hostility from the rest. He reached slowly for the pouch of components tied at his hip. "May I cast a spell? It will let us speak more clearly."
The elderly strix nodded. She spoke a few sharp words to her companions in their own clicking, cawing language. Their faces darkened, and some lowered their masks, but they spoke no word against her. Hoping that meant he could act without offending them, Isiem began his spell. He pressed the talisman of the clay ziggurat into his palm, focusing on the universality
of speech. Beyond history, beyond race, beyond time ...
...and he could speak as they spoke, and understand as they did. Strix and human shared pure meaning, overlooking the words that served as a superficial cloak for thought.
"I cannot help your friend," Isiem said. "What was done to him has destroyed him. What lives in his skin is no longer your kinsman."
"That is not so," one of the spear-wielders said angrily. "Itaraak Quiet Wings is himself. He remembers our hunts together. He remembers the ways and stones of our people. He remembers what you did to him."
"And yet there are things that are different about him as well, aren't there?" Isiem asked. There was no heat in his voice, only weariness. "Gaps in his memories. Things he remembers differently from how they happened, or not at all. Moments where he does not seem to hear you, and other times when he seems to marvel at his own ordinary body. Staring at his fingers, pulling at his hair, poking at his wounds as if delighting in the pain. Is that familiar too?"
The spear-wielder did not answer. But the crone did. "Yes," she said sadly, gazing at Kirraak. The black-eyed strix gave no indication that he had heard her, or that he was aware of any of their conversation. "That is so."
"The most merciful thing you can do for him—and the safest—is to give him a gentle death," Isiem said. "The parasite that possesses him will kill him, eventually, but before it does that it will try to catch as many of your kind as it can. It will try to give them to the same shadow that now inhabits Kirraak." Some of the spear-wielders blinked at Isiem's use of the name, but he couldn't tell what had startled them, so he ignored it and pressed on. "Your kinsman cannot be saved. Kill the ones who did this, if you like. Kill me, too. It won't change anything."
"They are already dead," the spear-wielder who had spoken previously said. Anger twisted his features. "You should die too. You did this to him, and you refuse to undo it."
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