Hawkspar

by Holly Lisle

  The three demons surrounded me—Ossal and the wizard I had slaughtered and the one who still needed to die. I knew to shield myself from them, but when I tried, I found myself cut off from water, earth, air, and sun. They had changed the pit in which we struggled, and I did not know how they had done so.

  But they were not hurting me. Not even trying to hurt me. They simply circled me, while in my head a voice whispered, Look at them. Look at them, Ethebet’s daughter, with your Eyes and with your mind.

  I turned, and caught just a glimpse of the woman in white. She smiled at me, and then she was gone, leaving me in the dark with the monsters.

  I stared at them, poisonous shadows all, power-hungry monsters whose obsession stretched their lives to unnatural lengths and bound their souls to this dark place both alive and after their deaths. I did not want to see them. I did not want to take a chance of calling their attention to me, or further opening the barriers that protected me from them most of the time. But the woman in white had told me what I needed to do.

  I relaxed myself and allowed my connection to the Eyes to open, and began to feel time flowing around me. In the cold waters, I sought echoes of the man who I had killed to save Aaran’s life. I had touched him—we shared a connection in time. I located him without much difficulty, and found the moment he had last lived, and the instant that he had died. And then, out of per verse curiosity, I followed the instants after his death, and saw his flesh ripped from his soul, and his soul dragged into darkness, bound between life and afterlife by a thousand frail threads.

  I had seen such threads before, connected from Ossal to the Eyes he made. I followed one of the little threads binding the sea wizard, and found that it connected him to a skeleton that wandered aimlessly beneath the sea. I tracked another, and another—and at the end of each thread discovered another skeleton, moving along the sea bottom, or over a stretch of land, circling or crawling or walking, never with apparent purpose.

  I shuddered, recognizing what they were. They were the screaming legions of the dead that had borne him across the sea—no longer directed by his will, but still bound by his magic, even as he was bound to them.

  I broke away from that wizard, and, because I had seen Ossal more closely than I cared to, I tried to look at the still-living wizard. He had spun webs around himself so that I dared not get too close. But like the other two wizards, threads bound hm—even though he still lived—to the oblivion that lay between life and afterlife. His fate when he died was sealed, I thought. I could not touch him to discover what magic he had cast that would consign him to the dark, cold hell; I could only be satisfied that something had.

  But I wanted to know why he showed up in my future. I did not know him. I had no ties that bound me to him. And since, for the moment, he was paying me no mind, I let myself float backward on the waters of time, from the vague point ahead where he and I met, back to a place where he connected with anything or anyone else I knew.

  And I found him bound to Aaran.

  In that moment the dream, if it had been a dream, ended.

  I woke to blessed stillness. No thunder, no howling wind, no roaring sea, no pounding rain. No screaming children.

  The gentle creaking and sighing of the Taag, the regular treading of feet over deck boards, the smells of the soap the sailors used to clean things aboard the ship, voices speaking normally some way off. I sat up.

  The room smelled clean, and I was alone in it.

  I sat up, sniffed my clothing, and found it malodorous, reeking of sick and fear sweat.

  So I rose, and pulled out my bed drawer, and from the left side found my underwear and a clean tabi, and from the right side clean hakan-ara.

  The practices of slaves and penitents translated well to the life of oracles. We who could not truly see benefited greatly from having been trained for a lifetime to put our clothing in the same places and the same order every time.

  I took my clothes and trudged up the companionway, still feeling weak and sick, and walked along the ship to the afterdeck and the gombaar, which held the board full of holes hanging out over the open sea—the ship’s privy—and beside that, the washing room, where I could shower myself with salt water, and then rinse off with a few wipes from fresh water.

  I cleaned up and rinsed out my dirty clothes at the same time, grateful for how good it felt to be clean.

  And then I went in search of Aaran, to see if I might discover how he connected to the third and final wizard of death I would have to fight before I, too, died.

  29

  Aaran

  “You look surprisingly well for one who was so recently so sick,” Aaran said.

  Hawkspar stood on the deck with the sun glinting blue off her black hair and picking out the gold bands in her eyes. The eyes still made him uneasy, but she did not.

  “A shower and clean clothes cure a world of ills.” She turned her face toward the sea. “We have escaped?”

  “We seem to have. My hope is the three ships pursuing us kept plowing deeper into it and were lost at sea. My hope is unlikely to have much of a tie to reality, of course.” He chuckled a little, still gleeful about the success of his gambit.

  She didn’t laugh with him. Instead, she said, “I’ve found something odd. A connection you have with a … a monster. A wizard bound to pain and death. His life and yours are somehow connected, and have been for a very long time. I would have tried to follow the connection back to where it first began, but I was afraid to do more than float above the time threads connected to him. I’ll … face him. Eventually. And one of the two of us will die in the encounter.”

  Aaran started to protest, but she took his hand and said, “I do not need him to find the connection. I have you. And if I hold your hand, and travel back along the flow of time, I will be able to connect deeply enough to discover the truth without risking my life. Or my sanity.”

  “I can leave Ermyk in charge for a time,” Aaran said.

  She seemed to him taut as a strung bow, quivering with barely bridled excitement.

  “What do you think you’ve found?” he asked.

  “At the moment, my suspicions are groundless. Let me look through time and find out the truth before I say anything.”

  “Very well, then,” he said, and left the command to Ermyk, and followed her into his quarters, banishing both Potyr, who had been following him, and Redbird, who had been following her, to the outside with the marine who stood guard.

  They sat at his charting table, facing each other across a corner. She pulled his right hand onto the table and interlaced her fingers with his, and then she gave his hand a squeeze. “I don’t know what I’ll find. As I think about it, I have some ideas, but they may be wrong. If at any time what I discover becomes more than you want to know, tell me, ‘No more,’ and I will cease.” She stilled. “I’ll begin now,” she told him. “You know what to do if something goes wrong with me.”

  “I do.”

  Though she was sitting right in front of him, solid and warm and real, she seemed to fade as he watched her. Her breathing became so shallow he almost couldn’t see it, her face went pale, her eyes stared unblinking. She said nothing for a long time, and fine beads of perspiration formed on her forehead, giving her a sheen like wax.

  Aside from the faint, regular flaring of her nostrils, he would have sworn her a statue, well formed and well painted, but not alive.

  And then her lips parted. “I have followed you back a very long ways, to the place where you and your family last parted. I am in the encampment where you hugged your parents and your sister when no one watched, and then mounted your horse and rode off to join Tuua. The moment of connection with the wizard comes when you hugged your father. So I am following him forward now, slowly, to see if this is the right path. If it is not, I will trail him back in time.”

  Aaran swallowed hard. He said nothing, because she said speech made it harder for her to find what she sought. But as she said the words, he was right back
there with his family the last time he saw them all alive. His little sister with her bright eyes and deep dimples, taunting him about him becoming her big sister instead of a man. His father, clapping him on the back, telling him he would do well. His mother, chin up, managing to smile at that moment, though her lips trembled as she did so. Bidding him be careful.

  The sounds of the camp just before sunrise, on that day when several boys would ride out to seek their manhood. The vibrant colors of sunrise, the hush just before the sun crept over the horizon, the whole clan turning to face east, saying together the blessing of the day.

  He could hear the hushed voices, “Haabudaf aveerzak” floating on the breeze.

  He could smell camp smoke and horses. Spring smells of damp earth and growing things. Running water nearby.

  He blinked back the tears.

  “A month forward from your parting, the slavers have come. From your father, after he fell, they took a medallion he wore. They placed it upon your sister. The medallion is the connection to the wizard I seek. They took all the children and young women, and killed the rest.”

  Yes, he thought. Remembering coming back, triumphant, a man at the end of his three months’ trial. Finding the herds scattered, bodies that still lay where they’d fallen, pecked apart by crows, destroyed by sun and rain. And his sister missing, along with others. Searching with the other young men for family, for survivors, and taking their story to the nearest taak, only to discover that slavers had been raiding the southern coast for months.

  “Forward,” Hawkspar said. “A rough voyage, but your sister has not been chained in the slave holds with the others. She has been kept in a cage on one of the upper decks. She is given food and fresh water regularly. No one touches her.”

  “Why?”

  “The medallion she wears is important to the men who guard her.”

  And in his gut, Aaran felt a sick clenching. The medallion. He suddenly remembered it. His father had taken that from the body of one of the Feegash he killed during the war. He had worn it as a trophy all the rest of his life. He didn’t talk about it, but he’d said it was his reminder of who the enemy was.

  And Aaran’s father had never suspected how true that was.

  “The rest of the captives on the ship have been sold in a market, but your sister has been taken from one ship and placed on another.”

  And then more silence.

  He tried to think that the medallion would not matter. He tried to believe, but in his heart he knew. There would be a price for the taking of that medallion, and Aashka would be the one to pay it. He stared at Hawkspar, willing the next words out of her mouth to be, against all odds, good ones. Words that would give him hope for his sister’s fate, words that would make him think that he might yet find her whole and well. Happy. Safe.

  “From this ship, in a fair harbor, she travels in a long caravan. She is still in her cage, though they take her out and walk her twice a day. It’s big enough that she can stand. She is not touched, she is well fed.”

  But that did not give him hope. It filled him with terror. They were keeping her well for a reason. He did not want to know the reason. He did not want to. He had to.

  He closed his eyes and waited through the eternity of Hawkspar’s next silence, his mouth dry, his palms damp.

  “She has been taken to a grand house. The women there dress in brilliant colors, the servants in dull brown, the men in black.”

  And all he could think was Feegash.

  In the wake of the Feegash betrayal of all of Hyre, every Tonk learned about the Feegash. Children learned how to identify them, and old histories became new again. The ways of the Feegash, what they believed, and how they lived were made a part of every parent’s education of his children.

  There would, the Tonk promised themselves, be no second Feegash betrayal because of trust.

  And yet, here they were, with the Feegash using their position as congenial peacemakers for many of the world’s nations to translate those nations’ trust in the Feegash into vile misdeeds against the Tonk.

  Hawkspar’s hand tightened in Aaran’s, and he heard her quick intake of breath. He opened his eyes and saw her horror.

  He did not want to know. He did not. But he had to. He held his silence; she said she’d tell him what she saw. He’d said he wanted to know. In a moment she would tell him what she saw.

  She sat there, her grip growing tighter, not a word coming out of her mouth, and he fought to ask her. And fought to tell her not to tell him anything.

  Her shoulders tensed as if she were warding off blows. She winced. She began to whimper—soft little noises in the back of his throat.

  Still she breathed; she was not suffering the symptoms that marked the backlash from using the Eyes.

  Maybe this was not about his sister; maybe Hawkspar had drifted into something else. Somewhere else.

  And then she gasped, “Oh, Jostfar,” and slumped against him, weeping.

  “What happened?” he asked her, his words barely making it out past his blocked throat.

  “No,” she told him. “No. I can’t tell you. I can’t even say the words, Aaran. It’s more than I can bear. She still lives. She is in the keeping of the wizard I must destroy. She is … she belongs to another man, whom the wizard serves. If we can reach her and kill those monsters, we can save her.” Her hand clung to his so tightly his fingers throbbed. “We have to go get her,” Hawkspar said. “Now.”

  In all of it, Aaran made himself focus on the words She still lives. His mind skittered past the fact that what was happening to Aashka was so terrible that a woman who’d been dragged from her murdered family, enslaved, beaten, fed to starving rats, and had her eyes ripped out could not even tell him what it was. He could not let himself think about that.

  She still lives.

  He would reach Aashka. He would kill the Feegash. All of them, or some of them. The ones who were hurting her, at least. They would pay.

  And he would bring his sister home, and somehow, everything would be all right. Somehow. He would make it all right.

  He wrapped his arms around the still sobbing Hawkspar, and tried not to remember the stories of what the Feegash had done to their captives in Hyre. He thought about the boy on his own ship that had been a toy for his Feegash father and his father’s friends. Horror tightened his throat and knotted his bowels. But that sort of dread wouldn’t help him. It wouldn’t help her.

  “Are you in pain?” he finally asked Hawkspar.

  “Some. I’ll … manage. Leave me in here, for a while, if you would, while you go … do whatever you must do. Send me one of the Moonstones, and let me have a sip of your drink. I’ll … I will calm myself, and …” Her voice broke and she covered her face with her hands again.

  “We were going to take all of your Order to Tonk territories.”

  “There’s no time,” Hawkspar said.

  “It’s been fifteen years.”

  She rested a hand on his arm. “If you waited fifteen more years, she would still be there. Or thirty. Or maybe a hundred. However long they can keep her alive. But … no. Have your communicators contact a Tonk ship that can take the children and one of the Obsidians, and the Rosestones, and one of the Ambers to a safe harbor. The rest of us will stay and fight with you. You’ll need us,” she added. “The one who owns your sister is the Feegash leader, as much as their power resides in a single pair of hands. He is the one who directs the allies of the Feegash against the Tonk. You will need us, and many, many more than us.”

  Aaran scooped her into his arms and deposited her in his bed. He covered her, gave her some of his gyriik to drink, and told her to be still. “Then I’ll have a double benefit for killing him, if he’s the Feegash leader as well as the one who stole my sister away,” he told her.

  He left to get her healers and his communicators and to start after Aashka, trying all the while to concentrate on the fact that she was, against all odds, still alive. And not on the questions Hawkspar
refused to answer about her condition.

  He was halfway between having sent the Moonstones to help Hawkspar and locating a communicator to send the message she’d requested—the lot of them were probably down in the attable eating—when something struck him.

  Eban had mentioned that his father and uncle were diplomats.

  What were the odds that they knew the senior diplomat of the Feegash, the man who held his sister?

  He reversed course halfway down the companionway to the attable, and ran back to the temple. Tuua wasn’t there, but Eban was, painstakingly reading aloud from a history of the Viikuu Tonk that Aaran knew Tuua had written. Tonk wasn’t the easiest language to read, even for native speakers, but the kid was making his way through it.

  “Eban,” Aaran said.

  The boy put the book down and looked up. “Yes, Cap’n? Tuua said he had to check on patients, but that he would be back shortly.”

  Aaran took a seat on the bench across the table from the boy and said, “I was actually looking for you. You mentioned your father being a diplomat. And your uncle, too. I need to know if you ever heard them talking about a diplomat named Kafrij Son of Fanbjan.”

  “I’ve heard of my uncle,” the boy said sadly. “But if you have, that means that he’s found me, and has offered you a deal to get me back.”

  Aaran felt the air in the room go thin. “Your uncle? He’s your uncle?”

  The boy looked puzzled. “You truly did not know that?”

  “He’s the bastard who holds my sister.”

  The boy put a hand over his mouth, and beneath the tanned skin, grayness crept in. “Oh, no,” he whispered. “My uncle is … he is a very bad man.”

  At first, Aaran couldn’t even think, beyond the shock of realizing that he had someone on his ship who might be able to lead him straight to his sister.

  And they were, after all these long years, going after Aashka.

  But then Aaran considered the bigger picture, and he started to get scared.