Hawkspar

by Holly Lisle

  I was to be a part of that line, and I was the part that would break the chain. I could not believe that I would survive my future. I could not think it likely that I would return to the Citadel, though after my death, the Hawkspar Eyes might. This Hawkspar could be the last for whom the old prayers were prayed.

  I was breaking something that could not be fixed.

  So I prayed that I would be worthy of the power that I was about to receive, and that I would not fail in my task … and that my task was worthy, as well.

  I did not let myself think that I had already seen the last sunrise I would ever see. The last sunset. The last red in a rose, the last green in a blade of grass, the last blue in the sea. I’d spent days thinking on that, while I prayed in Hawkspar’s chapel and worked my way through the knot-books she had set aside for my personal use, reading everything I could get my fingers on. I knew what I was losing, and I would have given anything had someone else been the person who could have carried out the tasks that lay before me.

  But Hawkspar’s records let me see that she had marked me as her probable choice even before I had been bought from the slave traders. Her carefully tied journals let me follow her years of studying the paths I took, my character, my interests, my allies and enemies.

  She had always watched for others who might be better suited to the task ahead, and she had found several candidates. But in the end, everything led her back to me.

  This was my task. No one else could carry it for me. It was bigger than I had understood. My chances of success were poorer than I had imagined. What was at stake was more than just the Tonk.

  I watched four oracles light the fire as if they were one person with many arms. They lit it, and stepped back, and the Obsidians nudged me forward. I took the few steps that brought me into the oracles’ circle. They began another chant, asking that I be found worthy, that I serve with honor and courage and integrity, and that I give myself over to Vran Vrota and the Ossalene Order with goodwill and a cheerful heart.

  I could have told them there was nothing cheerful in my heart at that moment, but they didn’t ask. Instead, Tigereye called me to her, and bade me kneel. For the first time I could see around to the other side of the pyre, and there was a stone altar there. And knives. And several Seru Moonstone waiting.

  My eyes. I could not bear to think about what would happen to my eyes.

  I clenched my fists tight—so tight my knuckles hurt. I wanted to run. How had so many before me done this? How had they found the courage to stay still instead of fighting or fleeing? Their courage was more than I had, and unbidden, my eyes blurred with tears, and I could not stop myself from thinking, Last time for that, too.

  I would have vomited had the seru let me have anything to eat or drink before the ceremony, but I had been made to fast for a full day and a night.

  The chanting stopped, and the Oracle Tigereye said, “You have been chosen by the Hawkspar Eyes of War to become the new avatar of the Eternal Dyad, the new Goddess of War made flesh. From this day forward, you sacrifice all that you are to Vran Vrota and the good of the Order. Vran Vrota has chosen you, and we, vessels of the other aspects of the Sacred We, welcome you into our midst.”

  She stepped back, and Sunspar walked over to stand in front of me. Sunspar sneered down at me and said, “You proved yourself by trial. Your Eyes have chosen you.” And under her breath, she added, “We’ll see how much they like you once they have you.”

  In their turns, the other oracles came to stand before me, and acknowledged that I had earned the right to be one of them.

  Then Tigereye came to stand before me again, and she commanded me to remove my acolyte robes. Behind me, I heard the dead Oracle Hawkspar crackling away. I smelled the smoke, and after I undressed, a shift of wind changed the direction of the fire, and sparks stung my bare flesh.

  When I stood naked before all of them, Redbird brought me a gray sack dress—the same robe worn by slaves. I stood there with the heat of the fire behind me and the cold of my fear inside of me, shivering, and Tigereye held aloft a simple copper goblet and said, “This bitter draught we have all tasted, and its fruit we have known. It is the gate of passage between the old and the new, and the path by which you will traverse this final road, and the door that will open for you the new world that lies beyond this one.” And she handed me the goblet.

  “Drink,” she said.

  In the reflected light of the fire, the liquid in the copper goblet looked like the eyes of the Obsidians. Black, but transparent, catching the light and twisting it. Its smell was pungent, overwhelming. Breathing its fumes, I felt myself grow dizzy.

  “Drink,” she told me again. And, not unkindly, added, “It sends the pain away for a while.”

  So I drank—all of it—in one convulsive, gagging swallow, and felt my tongue go numb even as my mouth seemed to catch fire. And the world turned sideways on me, and I heard a voice shout, “Catch her, get her to the table!”

  And then …

  Dark dreams that I could almost touch. Voices whispering inside my head. Colors and lights and shapes, all of which swirled around me in taunting mimicry of … something. I was searching for my name.

  In a place without shape, without rational form, without describable texture, I was walking past names. Names uncounted, uncountable, all of them discarded, unused, unneeded, unwanted. If I could only find my own, I could have it back. But it was not there, or perhaps it was but I did not recognize it. I wandered all alone, overwhelmed by the vastness of the place in which I found myself and the hopelessness of the task I had been given.

  But by whom?

  I had a name. I had no name. My name was everything, it was nothing. It was gone.

  I ached, and then the ache became sharper, and yet sharper. The ache became agony, became nails in my skull and fire behind my eyes and fire in my eyes so great I could feel myself trying to claw them out. The Eyes were coals in my head, burning me to ash as the Oracle Hawkspar had burned.

  Aaran

  Pain. It was all pain, and wandering in darkness. He could feel her—the girl he was fighting so hard to save—and something was wrong with her. Something horrible had happened to her. He was too late. Too late by far. She was fading, drowning in poison, while a monster stalked around her, looking for a way to reach her. To hurt her. To violate her.

  Aaran had a sword in his hand, though he could not remember how it had come to be there. He raced forward, across ground that looked solid but that reached up to grab at his ankles with every step he took.

  Push harder, a voice whispered behind him. Fight for her. She will not survive without you.

  He turned, and behind him saw, for just an instant, a Tonk woman dressed all in white, her face painted for war, but not with ash. With streaks of white instead. Her hair was white, her eyes the cold, pale blue of a winter sky.

  For only an instant he looked at her, and then she was gone, and the monster was gone, and the girl was gone, and he was thrashing in his bed, trying to work his way out of a tangle of sheets.

  And both runners were peering out of their cubbyholes, their expressions identically worried.

  “Do you need something? Anything, Cap’n. We’ll run for it,” Neeran said.

  “I’m fine.” He untangled himself and stood. “A restless night, and too much hot sauce at dinner.”

  The boys both vanished back into their cubbyholes, the doors closed, and Aaran considered that sharing open quarters with forty other men at a shift was less bothersome than partially sharing quarters with two nosy boys.

  He stalked out to the deck, made restless by the nightmares, unwilling to face sleep again. He judged from the track to her that the girl and all the slaves with her were about fifteen days off, if the wind and weather held. She and those with her had survived for so long.

  Surely she could hang on for fifteen more days.

  Hawkspar

  Something horrible and thick and foul crawled down my throat, and oblivion came t
o me again.

  It was a voice that woke me the next time. “You have been long asleep, Oracle, and you have not been restless, so the Oracle Tigereye bade me check to see if you could speak yet.”

  Everything was darkness. Everything was darkness, but worse, it was darkness full of pain, and beyond the pain and the blindness, it was without any special magic to compensate for my agony and my anguish and my loss. I was no goddess, no vessel of gods, no magnificent light-filled being, as I had imagined I would be. I was nothing but a woman—now a blind woman—whose head and eyes ached. Hawkspar had warned me this might be the case when first I awoke. She’d also warned both Redbird and me that under no circumstances could we permit anyone to know of it.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “In the infirmary,” the same voice said. “I am Sera Moonstone Pale. You’ve been with us for two days now, but you seem to be healing well at last.”

  I was not heartened by that. My eyes were gone, but the new Eyes for which I had sacrificed them as yet did nothing.

  “Does the Oracle Tigereye wish to speak with me?” I asked, but I got no answer. At least not immediately. I heard soft footsteps coming toward me—two pairs of them. And the voice of Sera Moonstone Pale said, “She is awake, Oracle.” I had not even heard the sera leave.

  “I have come to talk with you,” Tigereye said. “A ship has sailed into the harbor, and you have been requested.”

  My first thought was that my rescuers had arrived and had foolishly come to the front gate, and that I would be helpless to meet them, or to get all those who would have followed me away from the Citadel.

  But Hawkspar had prepared me for this.

  “The prince, then, requests my presence already?” I asked her, though I did not want to hear what she would say.

  A pause followed my question. “Prince Sheoua, of the Islands of Silver Hand, stands at the gate. He has sought out the advice of War on two previous occasions. She refused to grant him audience both times, declaring him unfit for her visions. He has been a long-wooing suitor with little to show for his great affection. Perhaps Vran Vrota will lead you to accept his offerings and send him on his way a happy man.”

  It had begun. This was the prince whose appearance would set into motion the last events the old Hawkspar had foretold. She had schooled me carefully in the steps I had to take in greeting him. In what I should say. In how I should act.

  “Keep him waiting at the gate,” I said. “Send word to him that I am considering his petition for audience, and that I will notify him of my decision.”

  “When should I tell him you will do this?” Tigereye asked me.

  “You shouldn’t,” I said.

  The pain gnawed at me, pounded behind my skull, drove like great metal spikes into the places where my eyes should have been. I could not bear to lift my hands to my face, to touch the damage that had been wrought there. I could barely breathe, the pain weighed so upon me.

  Tigereye sighed heavily and said, “We could use Sheoua’s gold. It will spend as well as any other prince’s, and he is eager to give it to us.”

  “I already know what he wants,” I said. “I have not yet decided if I will give it to him.”

  “You will do what is best for the Order,” Tigereye said. “The manner of your choosing tells me this can only be the case. And that the Eyes have accepted you so quickly; that is a great blessing.”

  “It would appear so.” I managed to sit up and swing my feet over the side of the bed, though when I did, a wave of nausea brought bile to the back of my mouth. “While you are sending a messenger to inform him of my intentions, I shall also need Moonstones and Obsidian Leap Bronze Flotan to assist me in preparing to meet with him.”

  “I’m here,” Redbird said. “And the Seru Moonstones are all around you.”

  “Is the pain still with you, Oracle?” a sera asked.

  “It overwhelms me,” I told her.

  Silence, a pause, and the sera spoke again. “This is milder than the elixir you drank at the Ceremony of Eyes. It will permit you to move, to walk about, and to think clearly, and still it will ease the worst of the agony.”

  She pressed a cup into my hand and I drank it.

  It burned down my throat, spreading warmth as it went. I waited. It began to nibble away at my many hurts, to settle my stomach, to pull the stakes from my eye sockets.

  “Better?” the Moonstone asked.

  “Getting there,” I told her.

  Abruptly, I was so dizzy, I had to lie back down again.

  Within me, around me, through me, sudden fire burned—but cold fire unlike anything I could have imagined. I felt weight, a rushing movement within and around and through me, and in the middle of it, Prince Sheoua stood. I felt the evil in him; I felt his corruption and brutality. I was in a river with him, the two of us standing in the same place, with the bitter-cold fire of time burning around the two of us. I could feel it flowing forward, and I discovered that I could let it carry me with it. Sheoua moved with me through the current, and I watched him sail in the stream of his choosing, burning and raping and slaughtering as he built for himself an empire within the islands around us.

  I fought clear of that stream, with its visions of horror and death, and found myself back where I started. Facing him, the burning current pouring around us.

  There were other streams. They flowed off in a dozen directions, and forked, and forked, and forked again. I could not follow them all.

  I snapped out of the trance as abruptly as I had fallen into it, and found the Moonstones trying to wake me.

  “I am not ill. I had a vision,” I said. “Of Prince Sheoua.”

  In my head, I could still hear the voice of the previous Hawkspar, instructing me in my duties. “Much of what you do is for show,” she had said. “And so long as you are the Ossalene Oracle Hawkspar, you have to put on a show for everyone—even the seru and the other oracles. Sometimes especially them. Once you are Hawkspar of the Tonks, perhaps you’ll be able to do as you please.”

  I had a show to create. And I hadn’t much time. I was too sick, too in pain, to go out and face the prince. But he did not need to see me immediately, in any case. Hawkspar said he needed to wait.

  So I would keep him waiting.

  I lay in the soft bed, so different from the mat on the floor I’d slept on for most of my remembered life, surrounded by sounds and smells and textures and darkness. The darkness, absolute and unyielding, was the centerpiece of this new world of mine.

  The truth that lay before me terrified me. I who had yearned above all for my freedom, and who had foolishly thought that escaping the place that bound me would make me free, now found that no matter where I ran, I would carry the means of my own deeper enslavement with me. The Eyes were my masters—they would define what I could do, where I could go, how I could live. But slavery is such a funny thing, for the chain binds the man who holds it as much as the one who wears it. In my darkness, brushed by cold fire, I felt the first stirrings of the other half of the slavery, the part where I might grab the chain and yank back.

  Aaran

  The Taag av Sookyn sailed along Makkor’s recommended path, avoiding the places where he had encountered cannibals, pushing hard. The volcano had erupted well after it was behind them—the Taag had suffered some cinders through her sheets, but the volcano hadn’t been huge, and they were far enough from it that they suffered no real damage, and no loss of life.

  It sat behind them like an omen. Before them lay an area on Makkor’s charts where he had not found safe passage, where he and his men had fought their way through with injury and loss of life.

  Aaran was going to have to try another route for that part of the voyage, and once he got out of Makkor’s waters, he could not be certain he would ever find his way back.

  When he reached out to the girl, sometimes he couldn’t find her, and then he lived in terror that she was dead. If she were dead, that cold place in his gut insisted, his link to Aashka d
ied with her. When he could find the girl, her pain drove into him so completely that he could not hold to his link for long before he had to back away and shield himself from her. Something terrible had happened to her. But it was not the thing she most feared, for still, when she cried out, she begged him to hurry. That they were almost out of time.

  Every bit of magic he could muster suggested that she was right.

  11

  Hawkspar

  A gentle hand shook my shoulder, and a voice whispered, “Oracle. Oracle? The other oracles are in a state—there’s a … a … disturbance at the gates, and you are wanted.”

  I woke to an absence of pain. The Eyes—I did not feel them as things apart from me. They were not burning coals inside my skull any longer, not spikes driven into my skull, nor were they foreign lumps of stone. They felt right.

  Normal.

  I could not see, of course. But for the moment I was grateful for relief from an agony that had plagued me even in my dreams.

  I sat up, wondering why I would be wanted for a disturbance at the gate. That was, after all, the sort of thing Obsidians dealt with.

  But then I remembered Prince Sheoua, whom I had kept waiting.

  The Eyes pulled at me, and I followed their pull into the dark streams and swift, cold currents of time.

  I felt the presence of Sheoua again, and with him many soldiers who stood at the Citadel gate.

  So he came with his army, did he? In spite of myself, I smiled. Hawkspar had spun that out as one possibility—for my purposes, the best one.

  The time had come to start the previous Hawkspar’s final show.

  “I will have my bath now,” I said in the commanding voice of a woman who would be treated as a goddess, “and black robes of silk, beaded and bejeweled, and necklaces of sharks’ teeth and the teeth of wolves, and the Silver Islands war headdress. For a brazen prince knocks at our gate who would dare make demands of a goddess. He believes his time has come. And I believe perhaps it has, though not in any fashion he will appreciate.”