But this was different. In meter and scheme, the verses were the same, but words and whole lines had been replaced to reflect a martial bent, not only within the Breanan songs but in the Brigyddian ones as well. In many places, the goddesses’ names had been truncated—Brea instead of Breana, Brigga for Brigydde—and their surnames included where they had not been before. Dasira would have thought it a trick of her memory, but all the Branciran ones were the same as she recalled.
And though the pictures in the margins were flames and swords and hammers as before, there were an awful lot of eyes. Not by themselves, but drawn within the flames and in the pommels of the swords. There was something familiar about that motif.
Some kind of special sect? she mused. The Cantorin way instead of the Turonan, like Vriene said? But why not the Brancirans? They’re as warlike as the Breanans.
Or it could be a code, a front. Fiora could be Enkhaelen’s other agent; he hates the Trifold, I’m sure he’s found some way to infiltrate them. Her arrival at Cob’s side was oddly convenient…
A hand touched her shoulder.
It was the shock of her life—having heard nothing, sensed nothing—and instinct moved her instantly. Sweeping her arm up and backward, she hooked it around the arm that had grabbed her, locking her assailant’s elbow and twisting the shoulder outward as she turned.
Fiora hissed in pain, staring down at her through narrowed eyes.
For a long moment they stayed like that, neither speaking. There was nothing to say; the prayer-book sat open in Dasira’s other hand, the rucksack on the bed by her knee. The Trifolder girl’s free hand curled into a fist, relaxed, curled again. Attack or separate were the only options.
It had been a long time since Dasira had found herself in a situation where she did not want to fight. At any other place or time, she would have gladly pummeled the girl’s nose flat, but here, with her strength at low ebb and the others perhaps below, she knew that striking would be foolish. The hard glint in Fiora’s eyes told her that the girl had some inkling of her issues, but she could not gauge how much.
Hating the necessity, she released Fiora from the arm-lock. The girl leaned back, rolled her shoulder, then reached in to snatch the book from Dasira’s hand.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said, her voice more measured than Dasira had ever heard it. “The Shadow Folk are known to be nosy. But then I wonder why you told Lark they were ‘her folk’.”
Dasira held her expression neutral, determined not to twitch. She dimly remembered that slip of the tongue but not the context; trying to explain it away could make her trip again. But then, she had already been caught in the act. No need to explain herself.
Instead of answering, she stood to face Fiora and smiled flatly when the girl shifted back. They were not much different in height but though Fiora had the musculature of a fighting student, Dasira had the spite; it was something she had never been able to mask. When she stepped forward, the girl eased aside, the flint of her gaze gone to wariness.
With a curl of her lip, Dasira brushed by and exited the room.
*****
For another two days, life in the Damiel house stayed quiet, with time devoted to chores and mending, rest and food, card games and endless pots of tea. Supplies were packed, armor repaired, advice given—though more than a few whispers were traded in dark rooms. Now and then, Lark visited Ilshenrir in the woods.
Then, on the evening of the third day, Cob began to sleepwalk.
Chapter 13 – The Shadow Sea
“You told us to teach you,” said Aloyan Erosei as he chucked another rock at Cob. “So stop whining.”
Cob winced as the rock deflected stingingly off his upraised arm. He was knee-deep in the black water again, surrounded on all sides by ruins, with Erosei perched casually on the wall before him and Jeronek standing on another. The ancient Kerrindrixi warrior was more lively than in Cob’s wraith-spire vision, with his fighter's braid swinging like a tail when he moved and his black eyes fierce and mocking. His sleeveless scaled vest showed off the muscles under his dusky-brown skin as he cocked his arm for another throw.
In comparison, Jeronek was impassive as a statue, broad face locked in a non-expression and southern-style armor morphing from leather-and-scale to stone in slow regular cycles. They had angled themselves so that he could just barely keep both in sight at once, too high to reach with a lunge, and he knew from painful experience that if he tried to climb one’s wall, the other would pelt him with rocks while his target danced away across the broken slabs.
How long this had been going on, he could not tell. It seemed like eternity. His skin should have been purpled with bruises, but though the rocks stung, they did not actually harm him; still, it was impossible not to flinch away as they flew at his face.
“I don’t understand!” he hollered back, narrowly dodging Erosei’s next rock. His frustration had bubbled over more than once, causing him to scrabble wildly at the walls while screaming curses, but Erosei had only laughed at him, Jeronek stoically indifferent. Any time he reached down into the water to grab a rock of his own, he was pelted again, and he had found that anything he gripped below the surface inevitably disintegrated in his hand. All the stones, all the branches he felt under his boots became sand and mold once exposed to air.
On broken pillars further away sat Haurah the skinchanger and Vina the ogress, watching the show. Dernyel was nowhere to be seen.
“It is not your fault,” said Jeronek calmly as he sent another rock whipping toward Cob’s face. Cob smacked it away, palm and fingers aching from the strike. “When we take a normal vessel, we merge with it, our memories joining theirs, our knowledge infusing them. We are barred from doing this with you. Thus, our difficulty.”
“Jus’ tell me what to do!” Cob yelled.
Another rock thwacked him in the back of the head, and he rounded on a sneering Erosei.
“Oh, because we’ll always be here to guide you,” the ancient Kerrindrixi taunted. “Always whispering in your ear, telling you the trick. You’ll never have to figure it out for yourself.”
“I figured out the root-thing,” Cob shot back, and evaded another rock from Jeronek. “I bound up all the abominations. I made the pikes turn into trees!”
“Yes, but how?” said Jeronek. “Do you know? We broke you from the mages’ grip, built your armor, opened your senses on that battlefield. Had we not done that work for you, it would have gone as badly as the fight alongside the caravan.”
“But that’s what you’re for! A connection!”
“You’re an idiot,” said Erosei, winging another rock at him. He ducked and lunged up the wall, and Erosei bounded to a higher perch, laughing. “You think it’s easy for us to work through your bonds? If you don’t pull your own weight, we waste our strength on the simplest things.”
“We are the power,” said Jeronek from the other side, “but you are our conduit. The water can not spill far from its pipe. If you do not learn to make the connection yourself…”
“What does that have to do with pikin’ rocks?”
“This is just for fun,” said Erosei, and flicked another at his face.
Cob caught it, snarling, and felt it turn to sand in his hand. He flung the sand in Erosei’s direction anyway, setting off another convulsion of laughter from the man. To his side he heard Jeronek’s sound of annoyance, then flinched away as two rocks in quick succession stung his shoulder.
“If you can not comprehend even our most basic defenses, what hope do we have that you can learn the rest?” said the southern man. “Think past your anger, Ko Vrin. Do not let it be your downfall.”
Snarling, Cob shifted in the water, trying to get both of them in sight again. It was hard to keep his footing stable; under his boots, the seabed was rugged with debris, and he had taken a few accidental dunkings before. His feet squelched within their leather confines, one more annoyance atop all the rest.
Ahead, Erosei tossed another rock from
hand to hand, grinning mockingly. Jeronek watched from a different wall, no doubt waiting for Cob to dodge Erosei’s next throw before pelting him with his own projectiles. With them looming above him, so untouchable, so superior, it was all Cob could do to keep from tearing his own hair out.
In sudden, inspired desperation, he lifted his right foot and yanked the boot off, then flung it at Erosei.
He did not see it hit. As soon as his bare foot touched the ground, his mind filled with sensations of life and current: the stone, the roots, the mud like a flexible skin over them, the water binding all together and sliding fluid fingers down into the sand and silt and bedrock beneath. The stones of the ruined walls lit up to his senses like teeth in a jaw, not hewn and dead but grown atop each other—a baffling but organic sensation that seemed to recognize him like a pet finding its master. The ruins were not his enemy.
Blinking, he braced himself in the mud and realized that he could run up the walls if he wished. A rock hit him in the head painlessly, then fell to his shoulder and adhered like a fragment of armor.
“That doesn’t count,” said Erosei. “He didn’t learn it, he just stumbled into it.”
“Too late now,” said Jeronek. “Next lesson.”
Cob kept blinking as the men jumped back from their walls and dropped out of sight. His connection to the elemental world seemed to flow in only through his bare foot, so he put his weight on that one and tore off the other boot. With both feet in the mud, the entire panorama opened to his senses—ruins rooted in soggy earth, vines and seaweed stitching the ground like nerves.
And two presences moving through the water as if walking on his skin.
He heard the scrape of a sword leaving a sheath, and realized what was coming.
Conduit, he thought, looking down through the water to the mud. If I’m the pipe…
He tugged at the sensation of the mud and saw it rise in response. Tugged again, and made it flow up his legs, through his clothes, rising and hardening in layers like scales until it crested the water and started lapping up his chest.
Erosei came around the side of a wall then, twin swords sweeping for him, and he lurched aside, momentarily hampered by the rising mud. The blades cut lines of air past his face then reversed course, tips diving for his throat and chest. Behind them, Erosei’s face contorted in vicious glee, certain of victory.
Cob swept a still-bare arm up just in time to beat the blades aside with his second boot.
“Son of a—“ Erosei started, then dodged away as Cob looped a punch at him. A moment later he was back, one blade coming in overhand as the other stabbed low, and Cob managed to avoid the high cut and felt the second sword scrape a furrow through the muddy armor.
Motion behind him. He dropped flat into the water as Jeronek’s khopesh sliced through where his waist had been.
Mud surged up his arms as he touched the seabed, followed by chunks of rock and weeds. Planting his feet, he lunged up and forward to slam his shoulder into Erosei’s gut, then kept pushing until the swearing man struck the wall behind him. The hilts of two swords beat on the back of his head but the mud was there, dampening the shocks, and he reached up past Erosei’s struggling arms to clamp a hand on his neck and haul him down sideways into the water.
Something hooked around his throat and yanked him up and back, cutting into the mud that protected him. He lost his grip on Erosei and scrabbled at it, realizing it was the stone khopesh’s curved end working like a herder's crook. Something else hit him hard in the back of the head, something broad and flat, but again the shock was dispersed by the mud. Getting his heels under him, he thrust backward, impacting the flat object and staggering Jeronek enough to twist free of the khopesh.
He stumbled aside a few steps then turned to find both men facing him, water running from Erosei’s bristly war-crest to drip past his snarl, Jeronek as always composed and now bearing a rocky shield as well as the khopesh.
“Good,” said Jeronek. “Fully armored, though not as strong as our usual form. But you can not stay on the defensive.”
“You’re a fighter, kid,” said Erosei. “Get a weapon.”
Wasn’t pikin’ defensive, Cob thought, but took their point. The tree he had battered the Golds with had been much better than his fists, and as Jeronek said, his mud armor was vulnerable. A few stones clad him but when he tried to gather more, they stuck stubbornly to the earth.
The two men advanced on him and he backed up, casting around for something weaponlike.
His heel hit a submerged lump of wood—a half-rotted branch or beam, hard to tell but better than nothing. As Erosei rushed, he pried from the mud.
It was big, and should have been too heavy for him, but his muscles had forgotten their constraints. Once free of the water, it began to disintegrate like all the other debris, and Erosei’s first strike crunched halfway through it. The other blade stabbed straight, and Cob snarled as it cut deep into the mud armor. Clenching his hands on the rotted wood, he lifted it to return strike and felt a solid sliver within the mess.
He focused on it. Pushed instead of pulled.
The beam crackled to life in his hands, sloughing its dead layers as green wood burst free. Energy flowed from him into it, and with his will he shaped it staff-like and twisted it hard between Erosei’s out-thrust weapons. The ancient Kerrindrixi swore as his arms were pushed across each other, and had to wrench away to free his first sword from the wood as it kept growing.
Cob settled the greenwood staff in his hands and glared a challenge at his two foes. He was no expert with a staff—no expert with any weapon, never trained for soldiering despite his interest—but he had beaten people with shorter sticks and felt confident that this would be no different. It was already taller than him and kept growing as he concentrated on it, gaining heft and thorny protrusions to suit his anger.
Then Jeronek clacked his khopesh against his shield, and Cob heard a crackling sound from behind, strangely familiar. He glanced back just in time to see a great mass of fur and teeth descend upon him.
He was thrust under the water, teeth at his throat, and felt the mud armor disintegrating beneath the strength of those massive jaws. In desperation he slid the staff between him and the beast and shoved it to the beast’s neck, and though its clawed feet tore at his body, it could not keep its clench without choking. When it wrenched away, he took the moment’s advantage to grab a fistful of its fur and drag it sideways, rolling his weight to yank its head underwater then press it down by the neck with the staff as he rose above it.
Jeronek’s shield slammed him in the face. Claws dug into his thighs and chest. Determined not to be moved, he bore those blows and more as he held the massive wolf under, his concentration fixed on staying in place and dragging more mud up to patch his armor. The claws ceased scraping, and the beast’s writhing slowed.
Then, abruptly, it was gone.
He glanced up to find that the men had stepped away. Standing with them now was Haurah in human form, her chestnut hair a sodden rag, face feral in its annoyance, arms crossed over her bare chest.
“He got you good,” Erosei told her, grinning.
“Like you’ve done better,” she said tightly.
“He is a decent vessel,” said Jeronek. “When he pays attention.”
Cob scowled. “I’m right here. Don’t talk about me like—“
Twin pains drove into his ankle and he yelped and leapt aside. Something long and sinuous came with him. The pain heightened into a burn and he jammed the staff down at the wriggling thing, then grabbed at it barehanded. It came free of his leg only to bury fangs into his wrist: a massive mud-colored serpent that coiled itself around his forearm like a cord.
More fangs pierced his shins. Looking down, he saw the water swarming with them like the seabed had come to life, and with each puncture another wash of venom entered his system. His chest constricted, cramps radiating up his legs. The Guardians watched impassively as he staggered and barely caught himself with the
staff.
The snake on his arm buried its fangs through the mud on his shoulder. His heart skittered in his chest.
No, he thought.
His leg-muscles convulsed again, dropping him to one knee in the water, and the snakes swarmed up his body. A million scales scraped the mud from his skin. Fangs sank into his back and the nape of his neck, sending agony along his spine.
No! he thought.
The staff shuddered in his twitching hand.
Then he gripped it fiercely, thinking of the swelling of dampened wood, and thrust himself down into the shallow sea. Opening his mouth, he breathed in the brine until it flowed through his lungs, his veins, every empty space—kept swallowing it until the pressure of the black water forced the fangs from his skin, then the poison. Soon a morass of venom and blood and snakes swirled around him, and with one hand he pulled at the water, dragging it toward the endless sea behind him. His other held tight to the staff.
The sea moved. It pulled at him like he pulled at it, raking its black fingers across his shoulders and down his back, but he locked his arm around the staff and though the water yanked his legs out from under him, the staff’s roots held. The snakes swirled away like so much detached seaweed. The floor of mud and sand and pebbles shifted beneath him, then slowed as the water receded.
Shakily, coughing water, he regained his feet to find Vina watching him from atop another wall. Her tusked face was creased in thought, her heavy body nude but for jewelry now without her usual drapings of snakes, skin black as pitch. After a moment, she nodded approval.
“You might want to move before the wave returns,” Jeronek said faintly.
Cob glanced back to see that his pull had stripped the water from the ruins for nearly a mile seaward, showing not only broken stones and plants but wrecked ships, drowned buildings. It looked like a harbor town that had succumbed to the sea—a fallen civilization pocked here and there by the white of a skull.
Beyond the destruction, the water rose like a wall of black glass. Haurah and Erosei were already moving toward the shore, discomfort on their faces, but all Cob saw of Jeronek was his back. The southerner’s eyes were fixed on that wave.
The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) Page 35
