He let her tug him to where the path became steps and mounted the flank of a vine-shrouded hill. She had changed her leggings for a colorful local sarong and wore it gathered up to not get in the way, and he told himself he was watching the path, not the way her tan legs scissored through the gloaming light.
They were just traveling companions. Not even friends, really. She was bold, and he respected that, but it was nothing more.
Still, he had trouble controlling his eyes.
The breeze picked up as they left the shelter of the valley. Halfway up the hill, the terracing and the steps ceased, leaving the crown an undisturbed thicket of praxum, firebell and thorny apple. Fiora stepped off the last ghost of the path into the wildflowers and beckoned for Cob to follow.
“Are we allowed?” he said, looking around. There were no fences, benches or walls, and no other evening wanderers.
“They didn’t say anything about it. Come on, we can get a nice view over here.”
Cob sighed and waded after her. Flowers bobbed at waist-level, some brushing his elbows, and the drone of insects continued unabated despite their passing. Fireflies patterned the air here as well, but fewer; down in the valley they swarmed like festival lamps. The curtains of the great walkways rippled in the evening breeze, illuminated from within.
“I wish we could stay a while,” Fiora said wistfully, settling in a clearer spot and kicking off her boots. “It’s so nice. Not like the stories at all.”
“Which stories?” said Cob, sinking down nearby. In the east, the tail of the Leviathan constellation was rising over the hills, along with the edge of the Eye of Night; opposite, the Chain of Ydgys was invisible behind clouds.
“You know, all the— Oh.” She looked at him, expression mysterious in the gloom. “That’s right, you’re a westerner. I grew up with the tales of Haaraka, and they all paint it like a vast graveyard full of wraiths and madmen plotting horrible things. Nobody says anything about the flowers.”
“Doesn’t mean they’re not right.”
“Maybe not, but what do you think? They’ve been kind so far. The Trifold could work with them better if more of us saw this.”
“Maybe,” Cob said, lying back in the grass. The stars in the violet sky were comfortingly familiar despite the distance he had traveled, and looking at them meant not looking at Fiora’s legs. “The Trifold’s strongly against necromancy, yeah?”
“Well, who isn’t?”
“Difficult to be friends with people whose way of life y’hate.”
She snorted. “Says the Light-worshiper. Why are we talking about this?”
Cob made a face. She had him on that one. Yet when he looked out at the soft waves of flowers, the thought nagged. Fiora was right; though they were necromancers, the Haarakash had been kind. But there were other necromancers out there—the haelhene, Morshoc.
Those outside-necromancers were monsters. Yet Morshoc hadn’t killed him on the Imperial Road, or opened the Seals the way the Guardian had expected, and though he had bound the Guardian into Cob’s body, it did not seem to be an attempt to harm them. He had to wonder—now that he had seen a bit of Haaraka—whether the title of necromancer meant ‘someone we fear’ more than ‘someone evil’.
What if Morshoc had a good reason for his actions?
He did not want to think like this. It was going against the plan and the memories of Paol and his father. But it was the same question that had kept him awake in his room, and it would not be dismissed by the mere night breeze.
“Fiora?” he said.
“Hm?”
“Who killed all the necromancers?”
She turned her head to regard him, expression hard to read. “The Silent Circle, mostly. Though back in the day, we helped them—the Brancirans in particular.”
“The Silent Circle. That’s the Imperial mages?”
“They’re much older than the Empire. We worked with them when the western kingdoms were part of Altaera, back when Altaera still existed. It’s Jernizan now. The Circle was supposed to be unaffiliated with any government, thus the ‘Silent’. No voice in politics.”
“And you hunted necromancers together?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hunt the Haarakash?”
“No. We didn’t have much influence here until after the War of the Lion and Eagle. The Heartlands were the Eagle, Altaera was the Lion, and the Lion won, so since we came from the Lion’s land, we moved in when they occupied the Heartlands. The Haarakash had already isolated themselves—I’m not sure how long before—and we never disturbed them because it seemed foolish to harass a whole sealed-up nation.”
“But you harassed individual necromancers.”
She exhaled heavily. “Yes, of course. The Haarakash have a mission to contain the wraiths, but necromancers outside of here just did whatever nasty thing came to mind. So whenever we heard about one, the Silent Circle and the Brancirans would hunt them down and end them. It’s just…how things were.”
“Back then.”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
“I don’t know. A couple hundred years. Why?”
Cob closed his eyes, trying to form a picture in his mind. The Morshoc-Ravager on the sandy shore four hundred years ago, unraveling the last Seal while Erosei hunted for him. On the mainland, Trifolders and Silent Circle executing all others who followed his art.
Jasper and Morshoc in the cart, arguing about Justiciars and deaths while they thought he was asleep.
“You’re not having second thoughts, are you?” said Fiora.
He opened his eyes to find her propped up on one arm, watching him. “No. I want the Guardian free and Morshoc dead. I jus’… There’s something I’m missing.”
“If there is, what would it change?”
“Nothin’, I s’pose. You’re really with me on killin’ him?”
Her grimace was obvious even in the thin light. “If he lairs in the Imperial City, then he serves the Empire, and I want to see the Empire fall. My father shouldn’t have been conscripted. He had two young girls to look after, and no one to send us to, but did they care? No. They said the Gold Army needed more men, and then they flung him at the Corvish for no good reason, like they’ve been doing for decades. I had to sell everything to get my sister apprenticed, and what I couldn’t sell, the Imperial tax-men just took.
“The Trifolders my age, they don’t get it. Most of them were born into the faith, born in the basements and raised on stories of heroic martyrdom in war. But my father took a Corvish arrow to the throat, and I can’t forgive the Empire for putting him in its path. I can’t forgive the pawnbroker who paid me a pittance because he knew I was a girl and couldn’t complain. I can’t forgive the people who just let this keep happening and pass it on to the next generation. I want to do something. I have to. If I’d had to stay in Cantorin while you went on to fight Morshoc, I swear I would’ve choked Tavia and her gang of giggly useless girls to death.”
Cob stared at her. He had never thought a girl could hold so much rage, but her voice fairly vibrated with it, and her hands were fisted in the rough grass. For a moment he thought of Ammala’s family, Vriene’s family, both broken up by the Armies’ need for men, and his chest hurt.
“I’m not here t’ make the Empire fall,” he said quietly.
“I know. But killing Morshoc is good enough. And we cursed well have a better shot than a bunch of whiners in a basement.”
He could not help his snort. She kicked him in the leg. “It’s not funny!”
“It kinda is,” he said, grabbing her foot. She kicked him with the other and he grabbed that one too, so she threw handfuls of grass at him while she struggled, and he told himself that this had nothing to do with the way her sarong rode up. Then she swatted him across the face with a long stalk of praxum and all bets were off.
One scuffle later and they were back to skywatching, Cob pinching his nose shut and Fiora rubbing her arm. “You’ve got a hard skull,”
she said.
“Yeah, well no one asked you to cram your elbow up my nose.”
“It was effective. I’ve been well-trained.”
“I was goin’ easy on you.”
“Oh yeah?”
He intercepted the praxum with his arm this time and yanked it from her grip, and she flopped back down with a huff. From the corner of his eye he watched her straighten the sarong. His blood fizzed and he told himself to stop it and rolled onto his stomach.
She propped her feet up on his backside proprietarily. It was not helpful.
“How did you get so angry?” she said abruptly.
“’M not angry.”
“Well, not now. But when you are, it’s scary.”
Cob shrugged. It was not something he wanted to think about.
“Are you angry at us?”
“’Us’…the Trifolders? I’m not angry at the Trifolders.”
“But you’re an Imperial Light-follower. There has to be a reason for that. I mean, you were a slave, right?”
Cob picked at the grass, trying not to be offended. He hated talking about this, but at least she was asking instead of hollering. “Yeah, I was a slave. Converted to the Light when I was twelve.”
“Why?”
“Killed someone.”
“At twelve?”
“I was a quarry-slave,” he said flatly, trying to keep his mind on the grass and nothing else. Trying to keep to the bare facts. “Jus’ up from bein’ a runner to workin’ on the rocks. This…fella caught me in a corner when no one was lookin’. Another slave. There was…a scuffle. I hit ‘im with a rock. Sharp rock. Real hard.”
“Oh,” said Fiora softly.
“The guards decided it was a rockfall. They didn’t care what us slaves did to each other. But I’d done a bad thing, y’know? M’mother said it was all right, but it wasn’t. And there was a priest in the camp, a Kerrindrixi fella. He’d talk at us every mornin’, and before that I thought it was jus’ weird stories, but there was stuff about…purification and redemption. And I felt like shit, I was havin’ nightmares. So I went and talked with him.
“It made sense then. I still think it makes sense. Redemption through service, purification through sacrifice. I wanted to not feel bad anymore, y’know?
“But…m’mother didn’t take it well. When I told her, she looked sad. Tried to smile, but…”
He closed his eyes and saw the shadow on the swinging rope. His skin prickled coldly and he swallowed, not wanting to say it, not wanting to hear it aloud.
“…she hanged herself a couple days later.”
He waited for Fiora to respond, to say so it was all your fault or better to die than convert. But she said nothing, and unpropped her feet from him, and he glanced over to see her stretch out next to him and regard him sidelong. He looked away.
She touched his shoulder. He forced himself not to shrug her off.
“After that, I guess I jus’ stuck with it,” he continued finally, surprised to feel no water in his eyes or weight in his lungs—none of the usual sick, sodden feelings. Just weariness. “I thought ‘that’s what I get, that’s my sacrifice’. Losin’ her. And lookin’ back, maybe I was crazy but it made me think there was a balance to the world. Like I needed it, even if it was painful. I understood it. Y’do somethin’ bad and somethin’ bad happens to you.”
“Simple,” said Fiora.
“Yeah. But then I came down from the quarry when I was fifteen and the Crimson Army had no priests, no one t’ tell me what it meant. What I should do. I got stuck in a worker brigade with a buncha heretics and they were always hasslin’ me, but I figured bein’ in the Light meant helpin’ people even when they didn’t want help, so I did that. Usually it meant bendin’ their fool heads until they learned to behave.”
“You beat people up for the Light?”
“Heh. I guess.”
“Did it work?”
“Uh…we got whipped a lot for fightin’, but that’s better than gettin’ a hand cut off for thievin’ or executed for tryin’ to stab a freesoldier.”
“But it was them doing the fool things?”
“Yeah.”
“So you got whipped for them? Most people would try to avoid that.”
“Most people wanna get away with all the crap they do.”
“You don’t?”
Cob looked at her in the thin moonlight, at the line of puzzlement creasing her brows and the moue of her lips, and realized that she was really listening. Even if she didn’t get it, she was trying to figure him out. He flushed slightly, feeling self-conscious yet proud that he had not gone all soggy.
“Well, no,” he said. “That’s the point of livin’ in the Light. Y’can’t hide what you’ve done, not from the world and not from yourself. The priest told me that if I was truly sorry for killin’ the man, I had to live right. I had to let the Light burn me, because that’s the only way to chase off the darkness. I had to work hard, be honest, make no excuses, and take the punishments I deserve.”
Fiora considered him for a long moment, then said, “Have you lived up to it?”
“I’ve tried. I—“ He thought of the Guardian and grimaced. “I don’t know. I wanted t’ turn myself in and get exorcised by the Empire, but I didn’t wanna die, and now I don’t think it’d be right. There’s so many people involved in this—you, the Armies, the Trifold, Morshoc, the wraiths, the Haarakash, the Shadow Cult. Even the Corvishfolk. I don’t know who’s right, who’s in the Light and who’s not. The Guardian’s not Dark, jus’ angry, and so am I.
“So I’ll jus’…do what I have to do. And anyone who wants my blood can come try me.”
Fiora sighed. “Sounds almost reasonable when you talk about it like that.”
“You wanna convert?”
She smacked his arm and he grinned in the dark. Then, to his shock, her warm hand moved to his neck and she leaned in and pressed her lips to his cheek. Her long hair brushed against him like a million tiny fingers.
“You’re a good man,” she murmured. “Kind of an idiot, but good anyway.”
Flushed to his ears, Cob mumbled something incoherent. The moonlight limned her curves beneath the light blouse, and her eyes seemed lambent, a faint smile lingering on her mouth. The place where she had touched still tingled. His heart thundered in his chest, and he sat up cautiously, unsure if she would laugh, but she shifted closer instead and took one of his hands in hers.
“There shouldn’t just be punishments,” she said. “There should be rewards. Not just the light, but the warmth as well.”
Then she guided his hand to her waist and coaxed him near, and he went gladly.
*****
In the dark time between moonset and dawn, a hawk glided down from the frosted hills. It had flown a long way but felt neither weariness nor cold, though the beetle in the vacant socket of its left eye had long since curled up and died. In its talons, the hawk held a tiny amulet in the shape of a rose.
Between one wingbeat and the next, it passed through the Haaraka barrier. The warm breeze lifted it high over the thorn wilderness. Where men would have taken days to pass, it flew in scant marks, until the predawn glow touched the horizon to show roofs and pavilions still dreaming in the morning mist.
The hawk circled down to perch on a familiar windowsill, and tapped lightly on the colored glass. Then again, more insistently. When the curtain drew aside, it lifted the amulet into view.
A long hesitation passed between hawk and occupant, then the window opened and the bird hopped inside.
Part 4
Mnema
Chapter 15 – Crimson Adaptations
The morning sky above the Crimson Army camp was thick with clouds, but Weshker barely saw them. All of his attention should have been on the walls of the warehouse he was climbing—rough brick carted down from Fellen after wood became a dangerous commodity—but he could not focus on that either. Not with Sanava less than a yard above.
She clung to the wall like a t
ick in a white dress, strong fingers that had so recently dug into the back of his neck now finding the narrow gaps between bricks, the places where the mortar had already crumbled. A few spots had no brick at all, and Weshker had nearly gotten his fingers snapped off by grigs nesting in the gaps, their stubby wings sufficient to get them up here and their sawlike teeth enough to keep him at bay. Sanava seemed not to care; sometimes she avoided their nests but once she scooped one right out of the brick, nearly dropping the patch of rags and twigs and its squawking occupant onto Weshker's head.
If not for the flashes of leg, he would have said 'pike this' long ago.
The white dress disappeared over the edge of the roof, and he snapped back to awareness of his position nearly thirty feet in the air. For a moment his hands locked on the brickwork and he broke out in a sweat. He had no fear of heights in general, but in specific, clinging by the fingers and toes to a rough wall above a stinking alley was not what he had been hoping for today.
“Come on, Korvii-boy,” she taunted him over the edge, and he grunted and forced himself to keep climbing. He had not come this far for nothing.
As he crested the edge, she hooked a hand into his uniform collar and pulled him onto the roof headfirst. He caught for her as he tumbled, but she was too quick and his hands only grazed fabric before he hit the weathered boards.
"Not yet, not yet," she said in Corvish. "Not until we call the crows."
Weshker groaned, but rearranged himself into a sitting position, the base of his spine against the brick lip of the roof. A yard or so away, Sanava put her hands on her hips and arched coppery brows at him; the sun hung occluded behind her, drawing a pearlescent outline around her shadowed form.
"Giving up so soon?" she teased.
"Au, I jes' have no desire t'be kicked off the roof."
Her expression darkened at his use of the Imperial tongue, and he grimaced. They had met a few times since their encounter in the women's barrack closet, and she had tried to get him to speak Corvish. And he wanted to; since that day, he spent most of his time in a haze of thoughts about her—her taste, her scent, the feel of her against him—and in racking his brain for every scrap of his birth-language.
The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) Page 43
