by Holly Lisle
Around her neck she wore starfish and bloodred shells, and in the hand that traditionally held a weapon, she carried a harpoon.
And she was smiling at him.
Ethebet in her ikriis never wore a smile. And yet here, she smiled, and her smile seemed to him to say, Have faith. I’m here. I hear you.
He put the incense atop the cedar shavings, and lay the bigger sticks over that. When everything was ready, he lit the shavings, and when the sticks were burning well and the smell of the incense filled the small temple, he grasped his sacrifice braid with both hands and yanked it out. The pain hurt all the way into his eyes and nose. He could feel a trickle of warm blood start down the side of his face.
He lay the braid over the flames. And at first, all he could think to say was what he had already said. Aloud he prayed, “Give her blade a perfect edge, and her feet wings.”
But the eyes of Ethebet looked down on him. Kindly. He did not often think of her as kind. But that faint smile encouraged him to add, “Keep her safe because she is ours. Because she will be yours, if you have not claimed her already. Because she works for the good of the Tonk and we need her.”
And then he heard himself add one other thing.
“Because I love her.”
He’d not intended to say that, not to Ethebet, and certainly not to himself. He’d not intended to ever allow himself to think it again, because she was not the woman he could have. And yet, no matter how much he denied it, he now stood facing the loss of her. The truth that he would likely never see her again, though, forced him to face the other truth, the one he’d wanted to deny.
He did love Hawkspar. He’d promised himself that he would never give his heart to a woman until he had fulfilled his promise to his sister and his parents—to bring her home.
The fire died out, leaving the temple reeking with the stink of burned hair overriding the faint memories of cedar and incense. In the sacrifice bowl, black ash still glowed red in places.
This keeper did his altars differently. He had the oil in a vial on the left side and the water in a larger vial on the right. He found that out when he picked up the oil vial first.
He put it back, poured a little water on the embers, and waited for the sizzling and the smoke to die away. Then he took one of the sticks, dipped it in the oil, and stirred the damp ash. On his forehead he drew the figure for Ethebet, on one cheek Hawkspar’s clan mark.
His face marked, he turned away from Ethebet.
At the temple door, he looked back to thank the keeper, and Ethebet’s ikriis caught his gaze.
Perhaps it was the change in angle, or a shift of the light. But she no longer seemed to be smiling. She looked the same as every other Ethebet ikriis he’d seen.
Hawkspar
I am
We are
You are not
This is mine
I’ve waited too long. You will stand aside. I am you now, and you are nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
I was not me. Ossal was me, and pushing me into the utter, shapeless, formless darkness that felt to me like death, only without the hope of after. To the place where he had for so long lain. Some religions have a hell. The Tonks do not. But there are evidently ways to make your own hell, for the creator of the Eyes had done a fine job of fashioning his. He no longer wanted it. He wanted to give it to me instead.
And this time he had the advantage over me because I was weak, and to do what I had done, I had to blow the door between us wide open, and I would never be able to shut it again. I had drained myself, paid too much of who I was and all that animated me to push the Eyes, to use them, to make them give me what I needed. He’d had centuries to gather strength. He tried it at the various doors of his Eyes from time to time, but all his might would not supplant a soul bound tightly to flesh, or an unbroken will.
I’d given him too much to use against me, though. He’d been able to watch me and ready himself for the moment when I could not shield myself, when I could not fight.
The coming defeat of the Tonks at the hands of a world led by Feegash had bent me. Yearning for Aaran and a love I could never have had twisted those bends. The sheer physical strain of holding time, reading time, fighting to change time—those had snapped my weary metal in a dozen places. I was nothing but shards, and shards consigned to hell, while the creature who had created the abominations that were the Eyes slid into my exhausted flesh.
I could see the lines that connected him to the Eyes, and the Eyes to me.
But I could clearly see the lines that connected him to the other Eyes, as well.
To very many others. To all the scattered Ossalenes. And those Eyes did not connect to him through me. Even as I lay separated from my flesh, in the dark, able to move neither back to my body nor forward to the peace of the Summerland I could feel before me, I could see those other Eyes pulling at him like hundreds of anchors. Dragging him back into his hell and out of my body.
While I was weak, he might have a faint hope of holding the ground he’d gained.
But in the hell of utter nothingness, in the silence that transcended death, nothing hurt me. Nothing tore at me. And I began to regain my strength.
He would not hold me for much longer. Would not try to keep me back, to shove at me, to steal my body and my life because he had been too much the fool to appreciate his own when he’d had it, or to appreciate the value others might attach to their skins.
He would not hold. His theft would not hold.
With a snap that made my skull ring and the Eyes throb, I wore my skin again.
And woke up.
I don’t recommend sleeping in a box filled with tools of torture. It makes defining the sources of one’s pain far too difficult. The closed lid of the box makes breathing a chancy feeling thing.
And the voices outside of it, raised in fury and dismay, let me know I was not getting out of it right then.
I lay there, and let myself sink into the moment. Not to toy with it, or try to reshape it. Just to get a clear view of who was talking, and what the situation was out there.
“How could they be dead? I have come all this way, across country, at great personal discomfort. You tell me you have a Tonk who claims to be Reform Mindan. Who claims the Tonk plan to go to war against the Feegash, and who claims to be able to prove it. You told me you had an entire crew of prisoners upon whom I could test the truth of his words. You told me you had captured a ship filled with Greton fire and other items we suggested you not sell to those barbarians.”
So this Greton, too, knew something of what the traitor would have said. And he’d told the Feegash the subject of the emergency he’d declared—so much for Greton neutrality—and in context with the presence of recent Tonk purchases of Greton fire and other war materiel and the sightings of Tonk warships in this region, where no Tonk warships were being reported in clear Communicator channels, the Feegash would certainly figure out the rest.
Jostfar alone knew who else these two had talked to.
“We had everything we said we had,” a Greton said, anxious voiced and pitiful.
The Feegash’s voice grew louder. “And yet, when I arrive, what do I find? The prison broken into, all your men killed, some ludicrous story given by the prisoners about how they all fell over with their throats cut, and all at the same moment, no less, with not a hand to touch them. And how not a single one of the prisoners saw another cursed thing. The ship is gone. Your informant is dead. And from the looks of it, the one who murdered him is none other than the man you claim called me via emergency communication to get here as quickly as possible. It appears he killed the informant, and then he killed your chief warden, and finally killed himself.”
“We suspect that the Tonk are in collusion with demons, Your Excellence. That these demons somehow controlled the minds of the prisoners, and perhaps of my men as well.”
“Demons? You’re dealing with a stupid rabble of religious fanatics who haven’t had
an original idea in ten thousand years, and the best you can offer me by way of explanation is demons?”
I found I didn’t care so much for my own discomfort when the entertainment outside was so good. I lay there, listening to him, hoping I could get something useful from this situation while I gathered my strength.
The Greton said, “We have no other explanation. The Tonk were reliable trading partners with the Gretons for many years. We never knew them to be fools.”
“You would trade with them instead of us and our alliance?”
“We would trade with any who sought our business. We have maintained our neutrality in order to do that—something that I would think a Feegash diplomat above all others would understand.”
“The Tonk are not people. They’re animals who figured out how to walk on two legs.”
Were we really? I considered how I might best teach him otherwise.
The Greton said, “As you would, then. Animals or men, we never knew them to be able to control minds, or make men see things that they could not have seen, either. I’m an educated man,” the Greton added, his voice stiff. “I have studied the four elements, the four humors, the writings of the philosophers of Greton, the pillars of mathematica. And if I am neither a geometer nor a physick, still, neither am I a superstitious peasant. But I cannot explain what they have done, unless a demon was present. Can you?”
“Oh, certainly. I think,” the Feegash said, and his voice suddenly held a silky, insinuating note, “that the name of the demon we need to pursue here is money. Who could have seen to it that the Tonk were freed, that their traitor died without telling us anything he knew, that no one lived who could—or would—give an honest account of their escape? And how much money would it take for a city official to arm his enemies and let them slaughter his own men?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“How much did they pay you? And where have you hidden it?” I heard him laugh softly. “I’ll have the truth of you, man. Your only say in the issue is how much I enjoy myself getting it.”
And I heard his footsteps walking across the floor toward the box I was in.
Ah, hell.
I was in no shape to fight the flow of time, to grab a moment and hang on to it, but if I didn’t, the Feegash diplomat would have his truth without having to lift a finger.
So I slipped and scrabbled and grasped after the now, the here, and clung when I caught it, and fought to hang on to it as the lid lifted and the Feegash stood over me, staring down at me, slowing, slowing.
And frozen.
I would have killed him while he could see me, could see the clan mark on my left hand, while he could know that he’d died at the hands of one whose family his people had destroyed. That he was paying.
I would have hurt him. I would have hurt him the way some other Feegash diplomat had hurt Eban. I would have reveled in his hurt; I would have made him the recipient of vengeance for an entire people, for dead named and nameless.
But I could never hurt him enough, could never kill him enough, to satisfy my heart. So I slashed his throat with the knife I’d used on the Tonk traitor and the two Greton officials, the knife the two of them had argued over. I put it into the hand of the Greton official. But him I did not kill. How much better for my people if the Gretons should fall out with the Feegash over the murder of one of their mighty diplomats at the hands of a Greton city official already suspected of killing a Tonk informant and freeing a shipload of Tonk captives?
Where I could stir dissension, I would. The war might be over for the Tonk, but that didn’t mean I had to quit fighting.
I pushed up the stairs, my lungs burning from the cold and the difficulty of pulling in air. I took a knife from the sheath of a guard standing by the back door, hid it inside my sleeves, and got myself a block away from the trouble before I had to let go of the moment and allow the relative warmth and fluidity of Greton in the midst of an early spring snow snap back around me. I leaned against a building just to catch my breath and steady my legs; then, I walked with my hood pulled forward to hide the Eyes, and ambled my way toward the docks, trying to hide the fact that I was hurrying.
I didn’t know how long I’d been … wherever it was that I went. Moments, maybe. Surely not more than that. I felt the sun on my skin, though, so I knew I’d been in the box for a while.
I tried to tell myself that they would still be there. I’d told them to go without me if I didn’t make our meet point in time—but I’d thought I’d be dead.
Only I wasn’t dead, and was, in fact, in rather good shape considering the night I’d had. And I wanted to go home. To the Taag. To the family I’d found.
But I was still well away from the docks when I could tell no Tonk ship waited there.
This time when I leaned against the wall, it was because I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.
I was alone in Gerstaggen. On Greton. And no one would ever look at me and think I was normal. I could not pass as a Greton, or anyone who might belong in the city. Darkness was the only friend I had left in this place, and even darkness had abandoned me for a while.
The city was a jumble, though. Big and tangled and full of hidden places. I had an advantage over those who belonged here—I could see which of those hidden places were empty before I went down into them.
Head down, hood over my face, I began to walk, careful not to bump into anyone, and at last found a basement warren in a vermin-infested house that had no occupants, and, from the absence of any food or fresh water, seemed likely to have been without them for some time. I went in through a window that had a broken shutter, and found myself a comfortable corner.
And for a while, stupid though it was, I wept.
37
Hawkspar
Perhaps tears are not the waste of time they seem. They lulled me into a sleep I needed.
I was back in the field of wildflowers and tall grasses. It was beautiful, with a brilliant blue sky full of high, wispy clouds, with the colors of the flowers and the grasses so rich and deep it seemed more real to me than the gardens in the Citadel ever had. In the distance, I could see people moving. Children playing. Horses galloping in herds, free and wild.
As I stood, slowly turning, taking in everything and filled again with indescribable joy to find myself there, I realized she was coming toward me. The woman dressed all in white, with white feathers in her warrior’s braid and white paint on her brow. She was a warrior of the Tonk, by her braid one of Ethebet’s. But when she held up her left hand in greeting, it bore no clan mark. So who was she?
She smiled at me, and from nowhere there appeared a white rug on the grass before us, large and thick and woven through in complex designs—white on white, but when I looked at it, I could almost think I was looking through milky glass at a whole living world that lay beneath.
“Will you break bread with me?” she asked. Never had she asked this before.
I nodded, unable to find any words. She was both fierce and beautiful, filled with a radiant light that made her so much more than human that I scarce dared meet her eyes. They were blue; I’d noticed that before I looked down. The deep blue of the middle of the ocean—bottomless, knowing eyes.
I managed to whisper, “Are you Ethebet?”
She settled herself across from me on the blanket, and a meal appeared—jerky and a bean-and-fat stew, bitter greens, flat bread, and bowls of water.
I knew the food. Knew it in my soul. My mother had cooked such stews and greens inside our shadda, and made flat bread like this in the clay oven outside; and my father had dried and smoked the same sort of jerky. I could smell this food, and it made me weep again. For all that I had lost once. For all that the Tonks—my Tonks—had lost again because I had failed them.
The woman laughed. “I am a messenger only. You are Ethebet’s daughter, to whom Jostfar and all the saints owe a great debt. Ethebet has sent me to thank you, and to warn you.”
I shook my head, my gaze still
cast down. “She owes me nothing. I failed.”
“Have you?” She handed me a bowl of the stew, a plate of the jerky and greens, and one of the bowls of water. I heard merriment in her voice, and looked up at her. She smacked the hard bread on the plate that held it, and it broke into a dozen pieces. “Take, eat,” she said.
She seemed almost ready to laugh aloud. She ate the bread, and so did I, and at the first slightly smoky taste, I was a child again, sitting at my mother’s feet while she stood, chopping vegetables, handing me down little nibbles of the bread to keep me still while she finished our meal. I could almost reach out and touch her, she was so near to me.
And I wanted to, so much.
I managed to choke down the bread with a sip from my water bowl, and the messenger smiled at me. “Eat. Eat. You have a long journey yet before you are done. This meal will give you strength to do all that you must do.”
I wished it would. Dream food is never filling on waking. But I ate, and was home and safe again while I did. And as I ate, she talked.
“You think you have failed, because when you looked before you, all you could see was failure.”
I nodded. I couldn’t say anything. My mouth was full of jerky.
“Think of this, then. What you see is the river of chances—of what may be. Those things that will likely happen flow through deep, strong channels. Those that are unlikely to happen run in rivulets, don’t they?”
I nodded again.
“But if something could only happen in one way, at one moment, if carried out by one person, what would that stream look like?”
I finally swallowed the bite of jerky. Took a sip of water. “I don’t know.”
“There would be no stream at all. Some futures are so unlikely you have to dig the streambed as you go, by living it. But once you have dug, child, the whole of the river can follow you through.”
I sat staring at her, trying to catch the import of what she was telling me. “There was no hope,” I told her. “I killed the traitor and the men he confessed to, and I looked into time, and nothing had changed.”
