by Holly Lisle
I was to seek out the third way for my people—the path that would not lead to their destruction, either with or without the concurrent destruction of the Feegash. I was to look for the path that would let us save the innocent. I was to look for a path that Ethebet’s messenger insisted existed, but I could not look with the Eyes that had brought me this far, because the Eyes lied. They only showed the paths of the herd, which would lead to destruction.
Eban sat beside me. “You look worried.”
“Do I?”
“You have for a long time. And I think only part of your worry is about the captain. I think the other part is about the battle.”
I laughed a little. “I’d be a fool if it weren’t.”
“But you can see the future. You know how it will go.”
“I know how it can go. Some of the many ways, and not all of them.”
He said, “I wouldn’t like that. I wouldn’t like being able to see things that might happen, but not be able to fix them.”
“Sometimes you can.”
“Not always though, right?”
“Not always,” I agreed.
We sat in silence for a little while. Behind us I could hear our people settling in for a wait. The horses clustered together, tethered and with their packs off for the moment; the men in little groups, talking softly. My Obsidians and Onyxes kept to our perimeter, on watch against things seen and unseen.
A cool breeze blew across my face and beside me, Eban shivered. “I wish we could reach the slaves.”
“Why?” I asked him.
“Because they were kind to me. I’d let them know to get out of Ba’afeegash.”
“They would talk to you? Even though you’re the son of an important man?”
He laughed—such a bitter laugh in a little boy. “I’m not a favored son. I’m one of the throwaways to be used for whatever amuses my father or his friends. The slaves pity me. They would talk to me. They always did before.”
I sat there for a while, contemplating the slaves of Ba’afeegash. Men and women and children who had suffered under the torments of their owners. Certainly some of them would not be willing to turn on their owners, but others might.
They would know things. Where keys were kept; which doors led to places we needed to reach; how we might best hit the ones we had come to kill without destroying those who had done nothing wrong.
How many innocents might there be in a city-state of a hundred thousand people? How many among those had served the whims of libertines and sadists? How many might stand and fight beside us, or at least help us in our battle, if only to open doors before running away?
If we came to slaughter them, we would make ourselves the enemy of all.
If we came to liberate them, however, we would be the enemy only of those who were our enemies.
I, too, wished that Eban could talk with the slaves inside Ba’afeegash’s massive walls. But I could not begin to imagine how such a feat might be arranged.
45
Aaran
The Tonk huddled close to Hawkspar, as if around a fire. Cold mountain wind bit into them, and they shivered and shuddered, and at the periphery, Aaran heard muttered complaints, but they dared no real fire. The flames would betray their position to the Feegash. It didn’t matter—these were not the best of conditions, but neither were they the worst he had ever endured.
Hawkspar had finished explaining her idea—that they find a way to talk with the slaves within Ba’afeegash’s wall, and win them over to helping the invaders gain access to the Feegash elites.
Having explained it, she then opened the discussion to suggestions with a simple question. “How do we reach the people who might help us without betraying them to those who would gladly kill them?”
It was such a simple question. If they could answer it to their satisfaction, they would have cause to rejoice.
Aaran sat thinking about his sister, now only one city wall and a limited number of streets away from him. He wanted to charge the place with sword and fire and kill everything that moved to get to her.
Yet she was as truly out of his reach as she had been when he was on the other side of the ocean. He had no idea under what circumstances she was being held, nor had he any knowledge of what might be done to her if he were to charge in to rescue her.
He hated operations that relied on stealth and guile. He much preferred direct action, skill, and strength. He clearly would be out of his element in the upcoming campaign to overthrow the Ba’afeegash elites. Yet he would do anything to get Aashka out of there, to see her healed and well and safe away from the monsters who had stolen her and kept her and hurt her for so many years.
He did not allow himself to think about what she would be like. About what might be left of the loving, laughing, bright-eyed child she had been the last time he saw her. He hadn’t let himself consider that in all the time she had been missing he had moved forward with single-minded faith that if she lived he would find her, and when he found her he would bring her home. And everything would be all right.
Around him the men were throwing suggestions to Hawkspar, considering different ways that the Tonk might make contact with those held against their will by the Feegash, to let them know that rescue was at hand and to ask them to help as they could. They came up with everything from throwing notes over the walls with an improvised catapult to dressing as shepherds and infiltrating the city.
Aaran let them talk. He, his kor daan, and the other captains and their firsts would filter everything, and he would pay more attention when it got to the point of the serious hows and whys. In the meantime, though, he had to find his sister.
So he slipped over to Hawkspar and whispered in her ear, “Show me how to connect with Aashka. I need to track her to make sure I’ll be able to find her and get my men to her to protect her once we’re in there.”
Hawkspar turned her face to his, and those blank stone eyes stared at him. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I’ll show you. And I’ll stay with you while you find her.”
She pointed Redbird to her position, then took his hand and rose, and stepped with him away from the men and their tight war circle.
He led her a few paces away from the talking, and when he dropped cross-legged to a sitting posture, she did the same. He wrapped his Hagedwar around both of them.
She said, “I’m pushing back into the past—just to the last time that I found her. From there I’ll let myself follow her forward to where she is now. And when I’ve found her, I’ll make sure the mark is at the same location I gave you. You’ll be able to read my send, right?”
“I’m sure of it,” he said.
She shook her head, and he watched her taking slow, steady breaths. He realized that she was afraid.
“You’re strong,” he told her. “You’ve recovered from your ride across Greton, from your fever. You don’t have to go back very far in time.” He made his voice sound confident and encouraging.
And she whispered, “That isn’t why I’m afraid.”
“No?”
“Aaran …” She reached out and took both of his hands in hers. “I know you’ve been going after her for most of your life. I know that you want to take her home and make her well. But I don’t know that you can. I don’t know that there is any mercy to be had in rescuing her now.” She bit her lower lip, and his heart skipped a beat, and then another.
“I’m going to get her.”
“I know,” Hawkspar said. “You will. It’s almost certain. I simply don’t know if you will be sorrier if you fail, or if you succeed. You have to know, not just where she is, but how she is.”
He watched her lips tremble and tears roll down her cheeks.
“You have to know,” she said at last. “You have to understand. I’m going through him, to her. When I reach out for you, hold my hands tightly; so long as you touch me, you can feel what I feel, can’t you?”
“I believe I can,” he said.
She closed her
eyelids over those gleaming stones and all expression drained from her face. She seemed to pause in mid-breath, to drift away from him even as her body stayed firmly anchored to the ground before him. He watched her face, and knew the instant that she found Aashka. Suddenly, her face became a mask of agony, and her whole body went rigid. Her hands locked into tight fists, her lips peeled back, and she began to make a mewling noise in her throat that effectively stopped all conversation in the war circle and turned every head toward her.
Aaran found himself fighting for breath. Hawkspar was feeling the pain that Aashka had felt. But not pain she was experiencing right at that moment, he told himself. She wasn’t always hurting. She couldn’t possibly always be hurting.
Hawkspar moved forward in time, and her face changed rapidly. Pain to repose to pain to fear to rage to pain. And on pain she stopped, and fought with her body to reach over to him, and take his hand. And what Aashka felt poured into him.
The pain nearly overwhelmed him. He was being boiled. He fought to control the scream that almost escaped from his throat. Ice, then, and more heat.
He could not hear any sound from her in his mind. But he could feel her presence. Her awareness. She knew what was happening to her. She was awake. She couldn’t fight, and somehow she couldn’t flee. Not even into her own mind. Whoever had captured her had found a way to lock her into the horror of the torture, to keep her with her torturers.
She did not respond to words that he sent her through the Hagedwar. He could not go into her thoughts, but he could touch the experiences that she wore like dust on her skin. He could read much of her from that—and nothing that he read was still human. She had become living pain and rage and awareness, fear and abyssal despair. He could find no sign that she understood what was being done to her. He could brush no tatter of hope. Could locate no memory of anything other than this moment and the last, and the pain that lay there.
He tried to reach out to her, to offer her some comfort, some shield from whatever pain her captors were inflicting on her. She didn’t notice him. She didn’t respond at all.
For the first time, he realized that he might be able to go in and save her body, but that even though she still lived, he might never have his sister back.
He shook off the Hagedwar and knelt in the darkness, hunched like an old man, shivering and heartbroken. And he wept, silently at first, and then in ragged sobs.
Hawkspar crouched beside him and wrapped her arms around him. She pulled him close and murmured in his ear, “There is always hope, Aaran. Even though we cannot see it, even though all avenues seem closed, there is always hope.”
“She’s gone,” he whispered. “There’s nothing left of her.”
“We’ll do what we can. She and Jostfar will do the rest.”
He thought of the Tonk master healers back in Hyre. Perhaps Talyn or one of the other four could save her.
Hawkspar was right. Hope remained.
He sat up and took a deep breath. He’d known all along that he might not be able to save her. He’d found her. That was something. And his determination to reclaim her was unchanged. He would slaughter every bastard within those walls if he had to in order to get to her. He would get her out of there, or he would die trying.
But he could not let himself think of her as the whole mission. For the moment, he had to see her as the symbol of the evil the Feegash wrought with their actions. She was the personification of the price his people paid simply to exist. They were hunted, reviled, slaughtered, and enslaved because they would not accept the Feegash yoke, nor the Feegash philosophy that all gods were the same and that good and evil were the same, or were matters of local interest and custom that varied as men defined.
The Feegash denied the existence of innocence.
In the end, the vast differences in their two philosophies could be illuminated by that single point. The Tonk believed in protecting the innocent from harm. The Feegash—declaring none innocent and thereby deserving of protection—raped their own sons and daughters and the children of others for amusement, tortured their wives and concubines, enslaved their neighbors, betrayed their allies, declared their power the only arbiter of justice, and their will the only law. The Feegash said, “He who hates my enemy I shall embrace as friend,” and maintained alliances based only on mutual hatreds, then discarded those alliances as soon as their allies became inconvenient … or had something the Feegash wanted enough to encourage them to leap into alliance with their one-time allies’ enemies.
The Feegash knew no loyalty. They knew only the convenience of disposable partners and partnerships. Sooner or later, they bit every hand that fed them.
Aaran sat up and got himself under control.
Aashka stood as the symbol of what the Feegash did to the innocent. She was Aaran’s beacon, his shining light leading him forward to destroy people who would choose to see no difference between a warrior and a child, who would claim depravity nothing to be ashamed of, and who would then dare to hold themselves up as the model all others should follow.
Below him lay the place from which this poison emanated. It was not a contained poison—it had spread beyond the walls of Ba’afeegash, and others had adopted the morality of convenience as their own, because excusing evil was always easier than stopping it.
The Tonk might fail in their assault, Aaran thought, but at last the Feegash treachery had been laid bare, and the Tonk knew their enemy by name and they would not permit more of their people to be slaughtered or more of their children to be stolen away without facing the cowards who used puppets to persecute them.
Aaran stood and Hawkspar stood with him.
“Whatever else happens,” he said, “the Feegash are going to stop hunting us through their proxies. We’re going to deal with them face-to-face.”
Hawkspar
I sat in on the war council, which went until nearly dawn. Our warriors covered both slopes of the one valley that lay out of sight of the road, the city, and the shepherds’ valley, while the captains and the kor wogans—the marine masters—prodded their trackers to map out the locations of Feegash communications centers, guard posts, military strongholds, and most important for our purposes, locations of the prominent men of the Feegash. The diplomats in their mansions, the wizards in their colleges, the rich merchants and the officers in their comfortable retreats.
Men with scribing talent copied off these maps for units to use. I did not know what they managed for light, but someone among them apparently had a trick with the Hagedwar that gave them a way of seeing what they were doing without alerting every Feegash guard and soldier around us of our presence.
“I say we go in over the wall from three points,” a kor wogan from one of the other ships said. “Drop into the city, make our way first to the communications points, take all of those out simultaneously. From there, spread into groups. I’d like to go after the military and the diplomats at the same time, because if we hit the military first—which would be tactically sound—the diplomats will scurry like rats and we’ll have to track them down one at a time.”
It sounded reasonable to me, and in the time river this plan clearly allowed us to wipe out the Feegash. But it led to most of the rest of the known world banding together to attack and annihilate the Tonk.
I said as much, and felt the stares of the men around me as clearly as if I could see them.
“You have a suggestion, then?”
“Win the people to our side. The same thing I suggested before.”
“And you see that working?”
I wanted to say yes, that this was the solution that would allow us to conquer the Feegash and at the same time win over enough of the world that we as a people would not be annihilated. The problem was that I could not see this future at all. Which meant that either it was the true third path the woman in white had suggested to me, or else that it was a foolish idea I had that would lead us nowhere.
Eban said, “I could slip in tomorrow when the shepherds
come out. I know the city. I spent most of my life here before my father took a foreign assignment. I could tell people you’re coming. The right people, people who will want you here. I know other children who can get places that I can’t. Adults don’t see us. Not unless they want to hurt us. To the important people, we’re almost invisible.”
Tuua and Aaran sat on either side of the boy. I could hear the urgency in Eban’s voice. I thought his was the path that could lead us to safety, but I had no evidence upon which to base this hunch. I could not see how it played forward in time. I could not see any sign of this path at all—and that, of course, was because it was utterly dependent upon the success of one person, and then upon individual actions from those who would meet with the boy.
Tuua said, “I don’t want him going in alone.”
One of the captains snorted. “I should think not. Send one of the treacherous little brats back into his lair and trust him to work for our good?”
“I’d stake my life on his integrity,” Tuua said. “I don’t want him going in because I don’t want them to catch him and hurt him anymore. He’s not one of them. He’s Tonk in all but name.”
“So he’d have you think.” The captain laughed. “Why don’t you go in with him? Keep him safe while he introduces you to all the poisonous little spiders scuttling around in there just waiting to become big spiders.”
“I’ll go in with him,” Tuua said. “I like that idea far better than abandoning him to those monsters himself.”
Aaran turned his face to me. “How do you see this, Oracle Hawkspar?”
And so it rested on me. I could lie. I could say that I saw the outcome of the two of them going in before us was our best hope. They would not know; they could not tell what I could see from what I couldn’t.
I even wanted to lie.
But in the end, all I could say was, “I think this is how we should proceed.” I think.
They weren’t accustomed to the speech of oracles. I think to them was no different than I see. If I said it, they would assume I had some better view of the outcome than they had, when in fact this time all I had were views of two outcomes of variable degrees of disaster, and a strong feeling in my gut that the proposed third path would give us something other than more disaster. I couldn’t very well tell them about the visitations of Ethebet’s white-clad messenger, or about that brief time when I could once again see as others saw. Those had been dreams. I believed they were true dreams, but I could not make a convincing argument for my instinct. My intuition.
