What sort of destination they were being led to, she could not say, but she did not like the options.
No one else knew any more than she did, and Cob only talked about ‘the firebird’. She dimly remembered his firebird-dreams from the Crimson camp, but the only connection she could see was mountains, and those dreams had taken place in Kerrindryr. The Garnets were lower, softer, older peaks, nothing like Kerrindryr’s Thundercloaks.
Worst of all, it seemed that they would only know they had arrived once they got there. According to Cob, he was following the ringhawk exclusively. He did not see any hallucinatory destination in the distance, no pillar of light or sign in the sky. When they stumbled upon their goal, would it be in the black of night, with all of them crushed by exhaustion?
So tired, so mentally withdrawn was she that when they found a path at a mark past noon, she did not realize it until Lark said, “Holy Shadow, civilization?”
Dasira stared down at the stone beneath her feet, then ahead. The path wound eastward, upward, a furrow carved in the land that could once have been a streambed but soon showed signs of paving-slates. Her heart hiked up to her throat, making a lump there. No civilization in the Garnets, she told herself as icicle-edged ledges mounted to either side of the cut, evergreens looming high above. No towns, no humans.
But there were steps carved into the rock—short flights that led up the rise of the road. Cob took them two or three at a time, the others dragged along in his wake. Dasira eyed the gash of sky above them, where ice crystals sifted down from the wind-touched heights, but no birds watched, dead or alive.
All was silent but for their panting breaths, their scuffing steps. A thread of tension laced them together even as their line stretched out, the humans lagging back. When the narrow path became a long flight of stairs, Dasira watched in dismay as Cob sprinted up it, antlers out, Arik at his heels. Fiora was barely halfway up the climb and Dasira at the bottom when she saw him halt at the top.
He never learns, she thought, but nothing nabbed him from that slot of sky, and she kept her eyes on him the whole way up.
By the time she crested the cleft, her body had gone past complaints and was on to serious threats. Her legs felt like they might fall off at the knee, and the threads on her right side—where the haelhene blast had caught her—had loosened with fatigue, letting the muscles sag. It was no fit state to fight in. She felt the weakness from her hip to her shoulder and knew it would affect her grip, her speed, everything.
It was with relief, then, that she saw no enemies before them. But what she did see boded worse.
At the top of the cleft, the land plateaued for some distance, lightly wooded and almost flat, and so it was easy to see the ruins that clad the rock. Once it might have been a village or small town, but some ancient disaster had struck it—most likely an earthquake, to judge by the state of the cliffs beyond. Natural rubble mixed with broken masonry in the streets, turning them impassable, and not a single wall or pillar remained intact. Snowbanks and winter-killed vines shrouded the fallen stones in profusion, with other opportunistic plant life sticking bare branches through the cover. One tall soren tree shot crookedly from the throat of a half-collapsed well, its height dating its age in centuries.
No recent civilization, Dasira amended, though her history lessons told her that the Garnets had never been settled.
She looked to Cob and found that unlike the others, he was not staring at the ruins. His attention had turned eastward to the broken cliffs and the second set of steps that made a winding path up the rock. Trees shrouded whatever might lie beyond.
He started to move toward them, and she reached instinctively to catch his arm.
The gaze he leveled upon her was flat black, utterly inhuman. She recoiled despite the lack of aura, the emptiness in his face like a slap.
Gone, she thought. Gone, gone…
But then he blinked slowly, and the normal warm brown of his irises reasserted itself.
Dasira swallowed and said, “Is that the place? With the firebird?”
He considered her dully for a moment, as if it took effort to translate her words into thought. Then he nodded and turned to look over the others, brows furrowed. “We’re all here?”
“Of course we are,” said Fiora, moving to take his arm. “Were you expecting more?”
He started to shake his head, then frowned and squinted down the cleft the way they had come. Dasira glanced there and saw greyish-brown shapes at the bottom slip from sight.
“Wolves,” said Cob faintly. “But not our enemies.”
“How can you tell?” said Fiora.
Cob shrugged.
“Well, are we going up?” said Lark. “I don’t know about you lot, but I wanna get this over with so we can go back to civilization.”
Dasira opened her mouth to caution against running in, but Cob beat her to it. “You’re all stayin’ here,” he said, his gaze fixing on Fiora.
Beside them, Lark said, “What? No way! We ran all the piking way here and you just want us to stand back? After you complained about that with Haaraka? Pike you, Cob.”
“Y’can’t see the path.”
“It’s right piking there. Look, there’s stairs and everything.”
“That’s not—“ Dasira saw frustration curdle Cob’s expression, but he did not look away from Fiora. The Trifold girl stared back at him, and Dasira saw Lark’s ire turn to intrigue.
As the couple’s expressions grew complex—tension, longing, fear, determination—Dasira just grew angry. She imagined kicking Fiora down the stairs.
“You can’t tell us to stay,” Fiora said finally, as if deigning to voice their silent battle. “We’re here for you, and we can’t just let you walk into Enkhaelen’s trap. You know that’s what it is. We both heard him talking to himself about it.”
“I don’t—“
“Want us to get hurt?” The Trifolder girl sighed. “That’s not something you can prevent by going alone, Cob. What are we supposed to do if you get in trouble? We can’t fling ourselves up the stairs like you do, and once we get there, maybe it’ll be too late. The Ravager, your counterpart, he knows you. He’s been watching you, stalking you. He’ll be ready for anything you throw at him. You need us to guard your back, and we need you—because pikes, those wolves aren’t enemies now, but what happens when you leave us?”
Despite herself, Dasira agreed. She watched Cob’s face twist with indecision. “What if it’s not somethin’ you can help with?” he said. “Y’saw his power in Haaraka. There’s nothin’ any of you can do to stand against him, ‘cept maybe Ilshenrir.”
“And I would like to avoid it,” said Ilshenrir softly.
“You don’t know that,” said Fiora. “Just because we haven’t had the opportunity to—“
“What? Shoot him with arrows? Stab him with a sword? Y’think that’s gonna work?”
“Look, Cob—“
“No. This’s between me and him. If that’s where he lairs, then I’ll go up, I’ll breach it, I’ll wreck his day. You’ll all stay here and be safe. And afterward…”
“What, we disband? Go our separate ways? Cob, we’re here precisely for this! You can’t just—“
“I can do what I want. I’m the leader.”
“You’re a stubborn boy, that’s what. You can’t block everyone out because you’re scared they’ll get hurt. Is that why you’ve been ignoring me all week?”
“I— No, I—“
“Because let me tell you, I am not going away. I am not staying behind. Maybe you need to be the big man, the hero, maybe you don’t want me saving your tail again—“
“It’s not—“
“—but you can’t shake me, you understand? I am going to help you whether you like it or not, whether we’re together or not, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
He stared down at her, at the accusing jab of her finger, and Dasira watched him fight his emotions. He had always been easy to read, and it pained
her now to see him bend to Fiora’s tirade, no matter how much the girl’s words had merit. “We’re… Are we together?” he said helplessly.
Fiora opened her mouth, then blinked as if that was not the reply she expected. She blinked again, and Dasira saw the gears turn in her head.
The girl lowered her accusing hand, stepped forward, touched his arm lightly. Looked up at him—so far up—her stern expression softening. In a lower, huskier voice pitched as if they were alone, she said, “I want us to be.”
Cob’s expression cracked into something at once apprehensive and giddy, and he grabbed the girl in a bear-hug, making her squeak.
Dasira took a step back, fighting to compose herself. Artifice, her instinct screamed, replaying the girl’s words, her gestures—watching as Fiora laughed in Cob’s embrace and patted him awkwardly, then squealed again as he lifted her off her feet. Lark was hiding a grin behind her hand, Arik in wolf form panting happily; even Ilshenrir seemed to wear a faint smile.
All Dasira could think of was kicking them down the stairs. All of them. Then dropping rubble after.
“You’re gonna bust my ribs if you keep squeezing me!” said Fiora, and with a sound of chagrin, Cob set her back on her feet. The Trifolder girl straightened her armor and smoothed her hair self-consciously, then looked up at him again. “So. You stop ignoring me now, you hear? We’re coming with you.”
“I was jus’… It’s hard t’ think about too many things at once,” he said lamely. “You and Enkhaelen, and… I didn’t wanna get mixed up. I still— It’ll be trouble if I’m distracted…”
“Trust us to do our part, Cob. We’ve all shown you we can defend ourselves. You don’t have to be our protector.”
He looked crestfallen but nodded slowly, then glanced around as if just remembering he and Fiora were in company. His cheeks reddened, and he cleared his throat and said, “Well, fine. If y’get hurt though, it’s your own pikin’ fault.”
Fiora snorted, then strutted past him to pick her way through the ruins toward the stairs. He turned automatically to watch her, but it took Lark prodding him to make him move.
Nothing stirred as they carefully skirted the ice-encrusted buildings, detouring around the gaps in the bedrock and sliding over fallen pillars. Clouds hung low overhead, more like a ceiling than a sky, the sun barely visible in the heights. At the foot of the new stairs, they paused to look up. The trees at the top of the high ledge were spread like hands trying to push back a storm.
“I go first,” said Cob, giving Fiora a stern look. The girl nodded.
They mounted the crooked stairs carefully, Cob then Fiora then Arik then Lark, with Dasira then Ilshenrir at the back. Rock walls overhung them at all points, the sky narrowing to a slit, and when the wind rose, it did so with a moan, clattering the branches above like dry bones. A chill ran up Dasira’s spine, and she kept right on Lark’s heels, trying to will the Shadow girl to keep the pace.
But the loose snow sifted down upon them, unmoored by the wind, and between one step and the next, before she could even think, Magic, the others were gone.
*****
Kelturin glanced to the spill of light that accompanied the opening entryway and was privately relieved to see Enkhaelen. He pushed up to his elbows, the best he could do with his lower body still in disarray, and raised a brow at the energy-cloaked necromancer.
“Do you think that’s enough?” he said dryly.
“Probably not,” Enkhaelen replied as he moved past the medical slab to the shelf where he had left his tools. The details of his face were bleached away by the nimbus of blue-white light around him, bands of blazing runes moving through it in slow rotation like the orbits of arcane satellites. The glow gave the room a hallucinatory quality, the subtly veined ivory of its furnishings washed out and the ink-pots, quills, needles and blades—not to mention the black sigils on the walls—seeming to float within depthless space.
“It would be much quicker if you’d draw from the Palace.“
“You know how I feel about that,” said the necromancer, and Kelturin sighed and let it go. There was little sense in riling the only person who could stitch him back into human form.
In the days since the disastrous audience with the Emperor, Enkhaelen had done what he could. Stretched out on the medical slab, Kelturin looked roughly the way he once had beneath his illusion. From the waist up, the sprawling pictographic tattoos gave shape to a muscular torso, broad shoulders, thick arms, and hands that ended in truncated claws, the best that Enkhaelen could do to modify the hideous talons Kelturin had been born with. His skin was thin, translucent, leaving every grotesque cord and vein visible. The spines and glassy carapace-growths were gone, cut away by the necromancer’s silver knife, but deep gouges remained in his flesh where they had been.
His face was back in shape—the framework of the golden prince, the beloved mask—but without his illusion, he was a parody of himself: yellow-eyed, sunken-cheeked, his mouth a bloodless slash over two rows of serrated teeth. The ivory quills he cringed to call hair scraped harshly against the slab as he lay back down.
Still, it was better than the mass of tentacles, feelers and wet, glossy wings he had been at birth.
“A few more recharges, I expect,” said Enkhaelen as he set his ink pots by Kelturin’s waist. “Legs are easier than all the innards, so I would guess two days, but this body is feeling the strain. I’ve been using it too much.”
“All your projects?”
“Mm. Did Annia leave?”
“I sent her away. I can only tolerate so much hand-holding.”
“A gentleman as ever, I see.” Enkhaelen smiled, the bluish light turning his expression ghastly, and dipped his quill to begin.
From the waist down, Kelturin’s flesh remained in chaos. It had mostly stopped mutating, though now and then another muscle stretched and split and budded a new feeler or claw. Even without the constant shift, Kelturin could not stand to look at it. He had nothing he could call legs; the bones of pelvis and thigh had warped into a mélange of spines, medusan tendrils and glassy insect parts that extended two whole yards on their own. They all worked, and he knew he could walk—or glide, or spring, or whatever they were meant to do—if only he tried.
But he refused. It hurt just to remember that this was his true self.
The last time he had experienced this, he had been barely adolescent. Without the peace sigil Enkhaelen had later etched into his back, everything had made him angry, and the Palace had felt like an intolerable prison despite its vastness. He did not remember how the fight with his father started; all he recalled was writhing on the floor, consumed by the pain of the change, while his father chuckled above him as if he had just heard a good joke.
Despite the frustrations of his long and twisted childhood, he had always loved his father. Until that day.
It was the screams. From the courtiers, the handmaidens, the few unthralled guards—but most of all from his mother. Poor mad Empress Mithara, who always smiled at everyone, her green eyes swimming with a desperate need to recognize them.
In all his life, she had known him only a few times. He used to watch her on her lesser throne during court, measuring where she looked and how warmly she greeted petitioners and noblemen, trying to read in her empty smile whether or not she recalled them. Whether or not they meant more to her than he did. The only ones she ever consistently knew were the Emperor and Enkhaelen.
But she had recognized Kelturin in that monstrous form, and from her horrified shrieks he had learned the truth. He was not the son of a man—he was the son of a thing. Not a mortal vessel for the Light but some terrible manifestation of that scathing power which had inflicted itself upon his mother long ago.
An Outsider.
No wonder Mithara was mad.
He winced as Enkhaelen pressed the quill to his skin where the last rune ended. Blue-white energy flowed from the necromancer’s arm into the implement, and Kelturin gripped the edges of the slab as the pain dug
deep. It felt like he was being carved, but perversely he welcomed it.
“Thank you for stepping in,” he said roughly, claws chipping fragments from the slab.
Enkhaelen’s face was fixed in concentration, a furrow between his black brows, but he nodded slightly in response. The proximity of his energized aura made Kelturin’s skin tingle. “I have no interest in drawing this out, so letting him completely regress you would have been counterproductive.”
“Nevertheless. You defended my possession of the sword too.”
“I won’t give the haelhene another weapon to use against me.” As one of Kelturin’s many extra limbs started to itch, Enkhaelen set the quill in the pot and picked up the silver knife, which reflected his blue radiance eerily. Kelturin braced himself. “But you took the blame gracefully, and I appreciate that,” said the necromancer. “I consider this relationship reasonably symbiotic.” A flash of pain, then a slithering sound as something jointed and carapaced slipped to the floor. The blade clicked on the slab, and the quill returned.
“I can help you,” said Kelturin in an undertone. “If you’d tell me what you’re up to…”
“Whatever makes you think I’m up to something?”
Kelturin could have named a hundred incidents over a dozen years, but he looked up at the ceiling with a sigh. The Palace had ears, even in a place as heavily warded as Enkhaelen had made this, and in the time Kelturin had spent here, he had watched those wards slowly disintegrate as their energies were absorbed. He had no idea if they still worked—or if they ever had.
The Palace belonged to the Emperor, after all.
The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) Page 65
