by Lucy Hounsom
‘I told him that too,’ Kyndra said quietly.
‘I should have let the akan kill you,’ Kait’s voice sounded choked. ‘I saved you because Anohin believed you would help Kierik. Instead you killed him and stole his power. And for what? You are a coward. You will never achieve even a shred of the greatness he possessed.’
Without looking back, she walked away and the woodland dusk swallowed her. Kyndra closed her eyes, trying to ignore Kait’s accusation, but it too closely echoed her own thoughts. She felt a touch on her arm. ‘I don’t pretend to understand what she meant,’ Char said softly, ‘but she is wrong.’
‘She isn’t,’ Kyndra replied. ‘I didn’t kill Kierik, but I am a coward. I don’t want to be like him.’
‘Then don’t be,’ Char said. He took his hand away. ‘You have a choice.’
She looked at him; his eyes glowed slightly in the twilight. ‘Do I? Then … what about you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow comes first.’
Tomorrow they’d reach Khronosta. Tomorrow they’d have to face the dualakat, who still believed Char their Kala, who intended to use Medavle to change what shouldn’t be changed. Tomorrow she would have to call on the stars, or risk losing them both. Kyndra turned as the smoke from the campfire reached them through the trees. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow comes first.’
34
The Eastern Set, Acre
Brégenne
The sun was rising.
All night Brégenne had sat beside Gareth’s lifeless body, the first hours spent in desperation, trying every form of healing she knew. Exhaustion came in the later hours as the moon set and nothing had worked. Gareth lay on a blanket on the deck of the Eastern Set, thin and sunken, his flesh cooling. Brégenne’s eyes stung, the skin beneath them puffy from crying.
The ship was ghosting high above the treetops, the crew silent about their work. Ümvast’s warriors stood at a respectful distance.
‘I’m sorry,’ came a whisper and Brégenne felt Yara’s hand on her shoulder. It brought a fresh wave of tears. She couldn’t believe Gareth was gone, after everything they’d been through, and when they were finally on their way to finding the means to save him.
As if to mock their loss, the sky was a clear blue, the day warming. Birds sang and Acre lay tranquil below the hull. Brégenne couldn’t bear their joyful song, not this morning, not when Gareth wasn’t there to hear it.
‘Not that I want the damned thing any more,’ Argat murmured, his eyes on Gareth, ‘but shouldn’t the gauntlet come off now he’s … ?’
Brégenne frowned. Argat was right. The gauntlet had taken all it could from Gareth – he didn’t have any life left to give. She peered at his arm, but the metal was still fastened tightly, melded to his skin.
She stepped away from the body, dragged a weary hand across her eyes. Her throat was raw from weeping and her knees hurt from her long vigil. There was nothing else to be done here. She should sleep, but it would only be postponing the inevitable decisions she’d have to make.
Kul’Das had kept her distance during the night, but now that the sun was up, she walked across the deck to their small group, staff in hand, to look down at Gareth.
‘I’m sorry,’ Brégenne said to her, too exhausted to feel her usual distaste for the woman. It seemed petty, with Gareth laid out at their feet. ‘I tried everything I know.’
Kul’Das simply nodded. She seemed in two minds about something; her eyes moved from Gareth to the sky and back again. Then she crouched and touched the tip of her staff to Gareth’s chest. The raven heads lolled in grotesque sympathy.
‘What are you doing?’ Brégenne asked, startled.
Kul’Das ignored her. She closed her blue eyes and her hand tightened its grip on the wood. They waited, but nothing happened.
‘Kul’Das,’ Brégenne said, reaching for the woman’s shoulder. ‘Let him be.’
Just before her fingers touched cloth, the staff sparked into life, golden light shimmering along its length. Solar light.
‘You’re a Wielder.’ Brégenne couldn’t help it, so shocked was she to hear the familiar roar of Solar energy. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Kul’Das’s eyes remained on Gareth. ‘Don’t be foolish,’ she said. ‘It is the power of the staff.’
‘No it’s not,’ Brégenne said. ‘It’s you. The staff’s just a piece of wood.’
‘This was given me by a powerful shaman,’ the woman said, still not looking at Brégenne. ‘I earned the right to bear it.’
‘I bet it doesn’t work at night though.’
‘Because it is a sun staff. My mentor had a moon staff, but he claimed this would suit me better.’
‘Mentor?’ Brégenne was too tired for this. Here was a Wielder, right under her nose, and she hadn’t noticed. A corona now surrounded Gareth’s body, limning his wasted flesh in gold. She caught her breath, as dark tendrils began to worm their way through the light, dimming it, fusing the gold and the black into a murky shroud which sank into Gareth’s skin, leaving it sickly.
Gareth opened his eyes.
As one, they recoiled. His eyes were black, deep-set and shining. A suggestion of the ebony armour wreathed his limbs, but Brégenne could see Gareth’s clothes beneath as it shifted phantasmagorically around him. Kul’Das’s hand trembled on her staff. ‘Kul’Gareth?’ she said in a small voice.
There was no recognition in Gareth’s face as he looked at her, as he looked at all of them. Brégenne held his gaze, though it raised the hairs on the back of her neck and she longed to glance away. He opened his mouth, spoiling the air with the stench of the tomb. ‘Where is Serjo?’ he said, his voice grating and unfamiliar. ‘Where is my brother?’
‘Gareth,’ Brégenne said after a moment, ‘do you know me? Do you know where you are?’
The black eyes gazed at her blankly. ‘Serjo,’ he said again. ‘I didn’t kill you, my brother. You know that. You know me. I wouldn’t kill you.’
‘Please, Gareth,’ Brégenne said, bending nearer despite the reek that hung about him. ‘You must remember. You are a Wielder. You were born in Ümvast and lived at Naris. You know me – it’s Brégenne. We set out to—’
‘Brégenne?’ The black eyes blinked. ‘I … don’t …’
‘Stay with me, Gareth.’ She took his hand and almost dropped it again when she felt how cold and stiff it was. Gareth looked down at it, face corpse-pale.
‘What’s happened to me?’ he whispered. He raised his other hand, fingers twitching as he struggled to open it. His skin was waxen and the hand’s movement jerky. His hair had grown since they’d left Naris; now new strands of white started from his temples, streaking the brown like fingers of frost.
‘We thought you were dead,’ Brégenne said, as she helped him sit up.
Gareth pressed a hand to his chest. ‘My heart,’ he whispered.
Brégenne forced down trepidation, laying her hand beside his, flat to his chest. The flesh beneath his tunic was cold and still.
‘No,’ Gareth said, panic starting up in his face. ‘It’s a mistake.’ He glanced at the gauntlet with its overlay of shadowy armour. ‘You said you’d get it off, Brégenne.’
She flinched. It wasn’t at his reproach – there was none – but at the bald fact that she’d failed.
She was unprepared for Gareth’s lunge. He snatched the knife from her belt and, in one smooth motion, plunged it into his thigh. Yara and Argat had thrown themselves towards him, perhaps thinking he meant to stab Brégenne, but Gareth ignored them. He stared at the knife in his leg, at the lack of blood pumping out of the wound. ‘I don’t feel anything,’ he whispered.
‘Gareth –’ Brégenne began, but he’d already wrenched the blade from his flesh. Although beads of blood rolled sluggishly down the metal, the injury wasn’t really bleeding at all. Before he could plunge it into his chest, she caught his hand, held it tightly. ‘Stop it, Gareth. Harming yourself does no one any good.’
The kn
ife fell from Gareth’s grip to clatter on the deck. ‘What am I?’ he asked, despair thick in his voice. ‘If I am not dead, why doesn’t my heart beat?’
There was that strange duality again, as if another presence overlay Gareth’s own. Had his link to the Solar revived him, Brégenne wondered? Alone, it could not have brought him back from the dead. It seemed the gauntlet wasn’t finished with Gareth.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but we’re going to find the gauntlet’s partner and make you well again.’
‘I don’t feel anything,’ Gareth repeated.
A shiver went through them all. Brégenne could tell Argat and Yara shared her unease. Just being near Gareth raised hairs all over her body. Kul’Das, however, was gazing at him smugly. She twitched her staff and the raven heads jostled each other for space. ‘Now that you’ve seen the staff’s power for yourselves,’ she said, ‘I hope I’ll be shown a little more respect while on board this infernal vessel.’
‘You,’ Brégenne said, rounding on her. ‘What gave you the right to keep your abilities secret? Does Ümvast know of them?’
The indignation ran off Kul’Das’s lips like water. ‘No,’ she said quietly.
Brégenne eyed her. ‘I wouldn’t count on that. Ümvast isn’t someone to choose arbitrarily. She selected you to accompany Gareth because she knows you are—’
‘Responsible,’ Kul’Das finished. ‘Ümvast trusts me with her son’s life.’
‘She knows, Kul’Das.’
The woman turned away. ‘Impossible. Ümvast scorns magic.’ She darted a glance at Gareth. ‘She exiled her only son because of it.’
‘We don’t call it magic,’ Brégenne said after a moment. ‘There are natural energies present in this world and we can harness them – it’s that simple.’ She paused to look at Gareth too. ‘Thank you for whatever you did,’ she said, putting aside her instinctive dislike. ‘I think it was the touch of another Solar that reminded him who he is. You brought him back.’
Kul’Das lowered her voice. ‘I don’t believe he came back alone,’ she said.
The airship’s crew was skittish. Brégenne noticed it over the next few days, as Gareth recovered his strength. Perhaps not his strength, she thought, as she watched him sweep across the deck. Sometimes he walked with the confidence of an older man and those were the times he muttered and mourned for the brother called Serjo. The crew had the superstitious nature common to sailors; unsurprisingly, a dead man walking their decks rattled them to the point where their casual singing ceased and their work grew slapdash.
She couldn’t blame them. Gareth’s skin had the mottling of a corpse’s and he pulled his hood about his face whenever he was himself enough to remember it. The smell that clung about him didn’t help. When they travelled during daytime, the wind blew it away, but at night, the stench returned like an open plague pit, and Brégenne feared it was only a matter of time before Argat’s crew refused to sail further with Gareth aboard.
Argat realized it too. On the seventh evening since they’d crossed into Acre, with the lights of a city flecking the western horizon, he took Brégenne aside. ‘The crew are restless,’ he said. ‘They’ve started calling him as that woman does. Kul’Gareth. They think he’s some kind of necromancer.’
‘It’s true he’s … not always Gareth,’ Brégenne said. ‘I can’t pretend he’s safe to be around.’ She looked Argat squarely in the eye. ‘You’ve been more than a help to us both, Argat. I know it’s not just because of our deal.’
The captain grunted.
‘Whatever else he is,’ Brégenne continued, ‘Gareth’s a man of his word. He promised you the gauntlets. Putting us off the ship won’t change that.’
Argat angled his body into the wind. His knuckles were white on the ship’s rail. ‘I don’t want the cursed things any more.’
Brégenne couldn’t blame him. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘if you would fly us as far as the forest, we’ll be able to follow Kyndra’s directions on foot. Ben-haugr lies on the far side.’
Argat regarded her. ‘From the little you’ve told me, this forest doesn’t sound too hospitable. Didn’t I hear you call it the Deadwood?’
‘Yes,’ she conceded wryly. ‘But I am not defenceless.’
‘I don’t doubt your abilities when the sun sets,’ Argat said, ‘but what about in the daytime? Even though you claim she’s like yourself, the Kul’Das woman seems of little use. And my gut tells me you can’t trust the boy.’
‘We’ll travel by night, then,’ she said reluctantly, ‘and hope that Gareth’s still himself by the time we reach Ben-haugr.’
‘And if he isn’t?’
She felt a chill in her blood at the question.
‘Brégenne,’ Argat said and she looked at him – it was the first time he’d actually used her name, ‘have you the strength to do it, if it comes to it?’
She didn’t ask him what he meant. She knew well enough. ‘Gareth’s not lost to us.’
‘Yet,’ the captain added with a glance at the figure that stood at the prow of the airship. Brégenne followed his gaze and watched the black armour coalesce around Gareth so that his face was all but hidden.
‘Yet,’ she agreed.
35
Khronosta, Acre
Medavle
The inside of Khronosta was like nothing he’d ever seen. White sand covered the floors, carefully raked into mandalas morning and night by shaven-headed children, who looked at him with eyes that belonged on beings far older. Even Medavle, who had seen five centuries of life, felt discomfited by their stares.
They’d taken away his flute. It was the first time he’d been without it since forging it from metal and magic. It’s only a tool, he reminded himself. The flute merely augmented the power he already possessed. But it was part of him, something he’d borne through rage and terror and grief. He missed its familiar weight at his hip.
He brushed a hand along the porous orange stone. It felt warm to the touch, not unlike the pocked skin of some animal. Great bricks of it formed the temple, neatly mortared, climbing towards the central dome. The space directly beneath was called the mandala chamber – where the Khronostians danced their way into the past. He was forbidden to go there.
Pain stabbed his forehead and Medavle suppressed a groan. Whatever they’d done to him, he could feel it in his flesh, a twisting serpent that burrowed in him, rooting through all the long years of his life. It was the eldest’s will – he’d extract it soon, in order to read Medavle like a chronicle. He wanted to find the best point to enter the past, the safest point, which would not destabilize the future. They’d explained little to him, claiming that no non-Khronostian could grasp the concept of time as they saw it. Their arrogance reminded him of the high Wielders of old, those who would have condemned him for loving Isla.
I do this for you, he thought as the pain reached a crescendo. He dropped to his knees, images from his past racing before his eyes. In them, he followed a dark path through a forest, moss slippery beneath his feet, tangled branches catching his white robes. He was consumed with the need for vengeance, with hate for the Starborn who had taken his people … who had taken Isla. Water ran over basalt rocks, a crow cawed high above him, and his echoing scream silenced the wood.
He was back, looking at the orange floor, the grains of sand rough beneath his palms. When he raised his head, he saw a child gazing at him reproachfully; he’d fallen into one of the mandalas. Medavle got to his feet, aching, feverish. Was this what humans meant by illness? He had never suffered such a thing. It felt as if his head were stuffed with wool.
‘We were right, Yadin,’ came a hissing voice. ‘The Kala comes for you.’
The eldest stood behind him, flanked by two dualakat. Inside the temple, they had no need to hide and Medavle found himself staring at the terrifying collage of their faces, old and young and dreadfully sad. ‘They’re here?’ he asked, his heart beginning to beat faster. ‘The Starborn too?’
The eldest
nodded. Medavle didn’t know what to think. Kyndra had come, but was it to rescue a kidnapped friend or to eliminate a threat? She’d heard of anchors – she must have realized what the Khronostians could do with him. ‘Come, Yadin,’ the eldest said, ‘we will go to welcome the Kala. It is with his power that you will change your story.’ To Medavle’s surprise, the eldest handed him his flute.
The dualakat formed up around them both – thirty warriors trained in the art of manipulating time. Kyndra wouldn’t be able to stop them from taking Char, not as she was, not when she spent half her energy fighting herself. Medavle knew why she did; he respected her for it but at the same time he thought it foolish. He looked at the walls of the temple, carved with symbols augmenting the Khronostians’ power. He looked at the dualakat, fixing their bandages in place. Behind his eyes, the memory of a past Medavle crouched in a forest, his body wracked by sobs.
They passed into the outer ring. Wooden gates, new and only half-decorated, opened on a wooded clearing. Yellow trees listed like ships in a high wind, rattling their dry leaves. A watchtower lay in ruins to his right, built on a slight rise. Now its stones had tumbled down into the clearing, as if a giant fist had simply scattered them. Strange glass orbs glinted beneath the afternoon sun, some still affixed to fallen walls, others half-submerged in the grass.
Medavle caught movement. Figures approached from both sides, sliding between the tight-clustered trees. His eyes widened when he recognized the bloody armour of Sartya. The other force were armoured too, black feathers adorning their shoulders. A breeze swept the clearing, making the feathered cloaks flutter as if they were indeed wings. Beside him, on the steps of the temple, the eldest waited in silence.
The two forces stopped, facing each other. He spotted Kyndra standing beside Char and a dark-skinned woman Medavle didn’t know. The soldiers in the feathered cloaks were ranged around them. Was this the Republic? A man stepped out of the ranks and Medavle caught his breath in surprise when he recognized General Hagdon. A Sartyan from the opposing force mirrored Hagdon’s movement, face concealed behind a helm, carnelian-coloured cloak tossed by the wind. When the figure raised its hands and removed the helm, Medavle saw a raven-haired woman. Her lips twisted into a sneer as she regarded Hagdon.
