"All very interesting, these troubles of kotarra," the rokoa interrupted, "but what has this to do with us?"
"I saw the slaves that the Chelaxians sold in Pangolais," Isiem answered, letting as much of the old anguish show as he dared, "and I saw what became of the rebels in Westcrown. I know what happens to those who defy Imperial Cheliax and lose. I dealt some of those punishments with my own hand. I cannot stand silent in my cowardice and watch it happen again."
"Do you hope for atonement?" the old strix asked. Her face remained a mask of wrinkles, her eyes opaque and unrevealing as opal cabochons. Nothing in any word or gesture betrayed the slightest hint of her thoughts.
Somehow, that very opacity freed Isiem to speak more frankly than he would have imagined possible. He felt that she would not condemn him, whatever he said. "I don't know," he admitted. "I don't know what atonement would be. But I see how badly your people are outmatched, and I do not want you to suffer as you will if you fight and fail. And I see, too, that you are faced with the same choice that Nidal was, and that Cheliax was. Both of them, I believe, decided wrongly."
"Ah," she said. "Yes. The choice between land and soul." The rokoa reached into her hollow tumbleweed cushion and brought out the copied map that Isiem had made for Kirii. "My daughter showed me this. Your drawing. The places that the black riders claim." She ran a wizened finger over the paper, sketching out a smaller, jagged shape within the larger one Isiem had drawn to mark the silver strike. "Our summer roost."
Isiem inclined his head in acknowledgment, saying nothing.
"You suggest we should cede these grounds to them? Risk losing Windspire and retreating to Ciricskree in dishonor? Consign our children to the lowest nests, give up the teachings of our ancestors for those of the Screeching Spire? My daughter told you true: our kin would take us in. The itarii do not abandon their blood. But we would live among them as beggars. Is that the fate you would have for us?"
"Yes," Isiem said. The word tasted bitter on his tongue; he could not imagine how much more so it was to hear. No doubt the rokoa regretted her kindness in healing him. But the answer, he believed, was clear. "If you fight them, your warriors will die—on the battlefield, if they're lucky; on the altars of Pangolais, if they're not. I don't believe the Chelaxians have any interest in the remainder of Devil's Perch. This land is impossible to farm, too dangerous to hunt. Windspire itself holds nothing of interest to them. All they want is the silver. Were I you, I would let them have it, and protect the lives of my people."
"This land holds our bones," the rokoa said calmly. "We hunt here, we raise our young here, we die here. The bones of a thousand generations of itarii, all the way back to the first dread storm that carried us from the world of gods. You suggest we abandon all our traditions."
"I suggest you abandon dirt and rocks. The dead are dead. What do they care? Anyway, you will not lose them all. Your people carry the bones of your dead; I've seen them, and Kirii has explained the custom to me. But even if you were to abandon them, every last one, I ask you: Which matters more? Protecting your ancestors, or your descendants?"
The rokoa trilled a sharp little hiss through her teeth. "That is our choice? Dishonor or death? Over a shiny metal that kotarra women hang from their ears?"
"Over silver, yes," Isiem said. "Over silver and Cheliax's dreams of glory. I'm sorry."
Chapter Twenty
Narrowed Choices
They put him in one of the empty nest-tents at the heart of Windspire. The itaraak removed the bridges and ladders linking Isiem's nest to the others, leaving him confined to that single small perch, but he could still watch the life of the strix around him.
There were not many young strix, Isiem soon realized, and even fewer old ones. If it were not for the wounded, the clan would have had little need for its linked tents at all. But for every fledgling and elder strix he saw, there were at least three who bore fresh wounds or old scars. Some looked to him like hunting mishaps, but many—perhaps most—of their injuries had been dealt by human hands. And as swiftly as the rokoa made them whole, they seemed to return with new hurts.
Not that they had much choice. Everything the strix ate, wore, and used to build their homes came from outside Windspire. A steady stream of scouts and hunters flew in and out of the hidden city throughout the day. They brought in dry dung and tough grass from the lowlands, oblong blue-black berries and flattened red ones plucked from mountain slopes, and whatever meat they could catch or find. Dust-brown snakes, small plains deer, an innumerable variety of birds—they even ate fat white termite grubs, cracking open their mounds and collecting them in basketfuls like squirming grains of rice. Isiem couldn't stomach the things himself, but he developed a profound respect for the strix's adaptability. They were a people who did not let pride slow their survival.
He hoped that would be as true of their politics as it was of their food. The tension in Windspire was impossible to miss, even for an outsider who saw little and understood less. The itaraak and the rokoa were sharply at odds, often pretending not to see one another and, when they were forced into direct conversation, holding themselves with stiff formality.
The leader of the itaraak, a short yet imposing warrior named Red Chest, was especially prickly, and he made no secret of the fact that his hostility extended to the human among them. Isiem stayed inside his tent when Red Chest was about. Kirii said the itaraak had gotten his name when, as a youth, his mask was knocked loose during an attack on human settlers. Rather than turn back from the battle, he had spread the blood from a chest wound across his face in a makeshift design and kept fighting. His tenacity was as legendary as his temper, and Isiem had no wish to provoke either.
The other warriors, however, were not much calmer.
Once a young itaraak flew to Isiem's nest-tent after an especially heated argument with the rokoa. The warrior's feathers bristled with agitation and he held his flint-tipped spear as if he meant to use it, but Isiem was not immediately frightened, only wary. No itaraak of Windspire would dream of taking a life—not even a human life—without that mask to shield his soul.
This itaraak was bare-faced, so unless he was a visitor from the Screeching Spire, Isiem did not believe his life was in imminent danger. But the warrior's yellow eyes were hot with rage, and the story of Red Chest's name indicated that an itaraak could improvise a mask in times of need, so the Nidalese also knew to tread carefully.
"I could kill you," the itaraak said.
Isiem had just finished his day's conversation with Kirii, and his spell of translation was still with him. He understood the strix's words clearly, and wondered whether the sight of the rokoa's daughter leaving his nest might have been part of what prompted the spear-wielder's anger.
"You could," he agreed cautiously.
His acquiescence only seemed to incite the strix. The itaraak groped reflexively at his brow, reaching for a killer's mask that was thankfully not there. "I could kill a score of you. A hundred."
"Perhaps."
"You have infected the rokoa with your cowardice. Because of you we will run from these mewling kotarra. Because of you we will abandon our hunting lands to groundlings and black riders. Our lands. Lands our ancestors fought and died to keep!"
The itaraak's fury had drawn curious eyes to their conversation. Isiem, conscious of the others watching, kept his own voice low and his manner subdued. "I cannot change the world," the shadowcaller said quietly, "and this is its way."
"We would not lose!"
"You don't know what you face."
"You do not know what we would lose," the itaraak spat back, and threw himself from the ledge. For an instant Isiem was afraid that the young warrior had hurled himself onto the rocks, but when he looked down he saw the strix's broad black wings skimming the abyss.
The others were still watching. Tired, and feeling oddly defeated, Isiem went back into his borrowed nest. Alone inside its felted walls, he tried to imagine a tragedy in being forced to abandon Ni
dal.
He couldn't. His homeland was too dark a place, too cruel. All his memories were of trying to escape Pangolais, or at least lessen its shadows.
It was possible that he might have struggled to stay in Crosspine. But try as he might, Isiem could recall nothing solid of his childhood in that village. The life he'd led there was too long ago, and too short. He couldn't remember his brother's face, or his own mother's. All that came to his mind's eye was a pale shape and a cloud of brown hair, and a vague sense of gentleness.
Was that enough to fight over? Not for him. Perhaps that made him a coward, but Isiem could not see how. Having come to manhood in a poisoned land, he had never set down deep roots, and he could not imagine how another, born to more spiritually fertile ground, might become so bound to it that severing those roots would kill him.
He sat there the whole day, searching through his memories for something that might help him understand the itaraak's anger, but at sundown he still had nothing.
Kirii came to see him again that evening, bearing a covered bowl of savory black seeds steamed with shredded meat and mountain herbs. The food was good, but Isiem had no appetite. He ate without tasting, while beside him Kirii squatted on the precipice and stared into the infinite shadows under their rocky perch.
"I worry that I've advised you wrongly," he said.
Kirii shrugged—another human affectation she had learned to mimic. Her eyes had an eerie shimmer in the dark, like the alien glow of cat's eyes. "You only answer what we ask. We do as we wish with the knowledge."
Isiem swallowed the last of the seeds. "But if I've given you misleading answers ..."
"We have eyes to see for ourselves, and minds to judge." The strix's eyes flashed, inhumanly bright with reflected firelight. "It is not for you to choose what becomes of our people."
"I just worry —"
"Wrongly," Kirii interrupted, more sharply than he had heard her speak before. "You told us to flee. My mother advised the tribe to flee. The itaraak refused. All this time, they have been arguing in circles, talking and talking for hours into days about the best way to go, but never opening their wings. While they talked, the black riders came. Now it is too late. And still they talk."
"What do you mean, ‘too late'? The Hellknights haven't found Windspire." Nor did Isiem think it likely that they had found the summer roosts. In the warm months, the strix were a nomadic people, settling in light tents just long enough to hunt and forage, cure the fruits of their work, and return the preserved fruit, grain, and meat to Windspire for storage. They left little to mark their passing, and even if the Chelaxians found those traces, they would be all but meaningless.
"No," Kirii confirmed. "They have taken Tokarai Springs."
"I don't know what that is."
"It is the surest source of water for Windspire. Not the closest, but the only one that never dries. Animals go there to drink. Okash trees grow by the water. Tokarai Springs is key to our survival. Without it, Windspire starves, and four other clans suffer hardship." The strix voiced a low, disconsolate trill. "If they realize that, they will poison it, and that is the end for us. We will go to Ciricskree as beggars. If they do not poison it, they will still take it. No one is fool enough to give up good water in the stonelands. That is nearly as bad. It robs us of our spring. So, the itaraak say, we have no choice but to fight—and they are correct."
"Let me help," Isiem said. He made the offer impulsively, and was surprised to hear himself say the words, but did not try to retract them. It felt right to help the strix. True, he was in hiding from Cheliax and Nidal, and joining the itaraak of Windspire on an open field could expose the secret of his survival ...but what was the point of that survival if he did nothing to help his friends?
And they were his friends. Or at least Kirii was.
The strix's glowing eyes widened and then dimmed as she blinked twice in quick succession, the opaque membranes sliding rapidly across her enormous irises. "The itaraak will not trust you with weapons behind them."
"That seems ill advised. You can scarcely afford to refuse allies now."
"I agree. But the itaraak have their pride. And their fears. You offend both."
"Would it offend them as much if I merely offered to play scout?"
Kirii cocked her head to one side. "What could you hope to see from the ground that they would not from the sky?"
Isiem smiled slightly. He turned a hand outward, sweeping it to encompass the nests and ropes and bridges around them, all so cunningly hidden from the air. "Different truths."
∗ ∗ ∗
Two days later he came upon the Chelish encampment. The strix had blindfolded him again and left him to the east of the Chelaxians, so that his approach would not give away the direction of Windspire if they saw him. Isiem lost most of the first day regaining his bearings, but the smoke of the army's fires led him to their camp by the following afternoon.
And it was an army, he realized as he approached. Judging from the number of tents and horses dotted around the tiny patch of green that surrounded Tokarai Springs, at least a hundred soldiers, perhaps a hundred and fifty, were marching on the strix. Cooks and squires scurried among the wagons and lines of horses, but they were greatly outnumbered by armed knights, most of whom appeared to be carrying out their own chores. For a Chelaxian to give up the privileges of rank was no small thing. This was a force pared down to its essentials.
The infernal eye and swirling vortex of Citadel Enferac flapped over a few tents, but the majority of the camp flew the crossed circle of Cheliax. Only a few crimson-cloaked signifers were visible; most of the men appeared to be soldiers in the Chelish army. It seemed Vicarius Torchia had chosen to let the throne deal with the strix rather than send more of his own Hellknights on a task that did not, after all, directly concern his order.
That realization chilled Isiem, for it meant that the strix faced not a single order of Hellknights, but the full enmity of the throne. A dozen had failed, so Abrogail II had sent a hundred soldiers. And if those failed, she'd send a thousand.
He doubted the thousand would be needed. What he saw spread around the spring was more than enough to overwhelm Windspire.
Two of the tents struck him as unusual. Neither was the commander's tent—one was close beside it, while the other was far on the eastern periphery, almost detached from the camp—but they were nearly as large, and both were far more ornate.
The eastern tent was made of a stiff gold brocade covered in metallic green sigils. From such a distance it was impossible to make out the details of its design, but the tent's arcane nature was unmistakable. It shimmered in the sunlight like a chartreuse sphene, all fractured rainbows over a bed of blinding yellow-green. The garishness made Isiem's eyes ache.
Nor did the strangeness end there. The tent's entry flap was enormous; a warhorse could have trotted through without ducking its head or brushing its sides. An entire supply wagon, piled high with sacks of flour and jarred honeycomb and squawking black chickens in cages, seemed devoted to that single tent. Murky, slime-streaked glass tanks squatted near the wagon's front. Isiem couldn't see what was in them, but the contents were clearly alive. The water in the tanks rippled constantly in slow, lazy waves.
Two bald brown slaves, each tattooed with the same sinuous green designs as those on the tent itself, worked outside it. Long scars on their cheeks indicated in the crude, universal parlance of slavers that they'd had their tongues removed. Their eyes were a brilliant, glowing yellow-green, and there was something bestial about their features—flattened foreheads, chins and noses thrust outward like muzzles, a slight sharpness to their ears—that suggested they were not quite human. Devil-blooded, perhaps.
Bronze collars, engraved with yet more runes, encircled their necks and waists. The skin underneath those metal cuffs was roped with layers of old scars, inflicted by too-small collars being struck off carelessly and new ones soldered on. The marks of such cruelty identified them as chattel even more clearly
than the cuffs did.
He wondered where they were from, and what enchantment held them. Slaves were hardly rare in Cheliax, but Isiem had never seen any kept in that fashion. These wore collars but no chains, and their minds did not seem to be their own.
Of the tent's inhabitant, he saw nothing.
The other tent, next to the commander's at the center of the camp, was comparatively plain. It was all in black and red, the standard Chelish colors. A jewel-eyed imp perched on its spiked central pole. Isiem didn't recognize the imp, and none of the tent's trappings were unusual for devil-dominated Cheliax, but something about it still tugged at him, tantalizing his memory like a whisper of an old lover's perfume.
Velenne.
As if the lenses of a sailor's spyglass had clicked into place, the tent seemed to come into focus for the first time. He recognized, now, the line of burgundy stitching where an assassin had cut his way into the tent ten years ago. She'd told him that story one night, laughing about the man's fate when she caught him. The ornaments and talismans that dangled from the tent's roof were the same ones that had hung over the windows of her rooms at the Umbral Court, maintaining her privacy against magical spies.
The realization hit him like a punch. Isiem sat down, feeling suddenly suffocated. A tangle of confused emotions rose in his chest. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but no clarity came.
It couldn't be a coincidence that his former mistress was here. True, after the massacre of Erevullo and his Hellknights, the throne would want more accomplished agents to deal with the strix, and Velenne was certainly that. But she hated traveling, and despised being made to leave the comforts of civilization. She had more than enough influence in Egorian to avoid being sent to the hinterlands for any ordinary matter.
Either she had her own interests in Devil's Perch, or she was here because of him. Either possibility filled Isiem with dread ...and a small, anxious thrill of excitement. He longed to see her again, even as he feared what her presence might mean for the strix and his own chances of freedom. And he hoped, perversely, that she had come for him, even if that meant his ruse of being dead had failed. He wanted to believe she cared that much.
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