Courage of falcons

by Holly Lisle

  Or maybe that wouldn't matter in these new days perhaps the murder of Family wouldn't raise so much as an eyebrow, much less send the countryside scurrying for cover in fear for their lives. Who, after all, was left to avenge a Family death?

  Even in the midst of the soldiers sworn to defend her, she didn't feel truly safe. The pressures of Shift rose inside of her, and she knew before long she would have to break free from the group and run and hunt alone. The old order might be falling apart, the reverence for Family dying or even dead, but the tradition of killing anyone not fully human she felt sure would remain. She stared longingly at the forest as she trudged, hearing the animals that moved just out of sight, smelling prey, hungering for the hunt, and she yearned for the radiance of the Karnee world, and the unheeding simplicity hunt and be hunted, kill or be killed. There was little of diplomacy in the jungles.

  To keep her mind off her appetites, she ran to catch up with her uncle.

  "You've been quiet," she said. He walked along the road between a pair of equally silent guards, head down, pack slung carelessly across his shoulders with no thought for its balance or his own comfort.

  He seemed at first not to hear her, and she had almost decided to repeat herself, but a little louder, when he turned and looked at her with bleak eyes. She felt again the shock of seeing his hair black, his face unlined but this time felt it so strongly because his eyes looked ancient and haunted.

  "By Brethwan, Uncle, you look to have danced with the ghosts!"

  He nodded, but said nothing.

  "You said your auguring went well enough, and we have had no bad news from other sources.... Oh! I've been stupid. You're worrying about your sons."

  He sighed. "I fear for all of us."

  She gestured at the group that surrounded them. "Us?"

  "The whole of the world, Kait. The whole of the world."

  "Why? What have you seen that's so terrible?"

  "A choice that I must make. A sacrifice that I must offer willingly."

  "What sacrifice? And when?"

  He managed a hollow laugh. "I don't know. Not where, not when, not what. I only know that the choice will be hellish, and that it will test me to the very core of who I am... and if I fail, we will lose... not just a war, but the world. I have cast the zanda a hundred times the past few days. I have summoned Speaker after Speaker until I have near bled myself dry asking for answers, and I know an answer exists. But I can't find it. I am blind to it, deaf, walled into a windowless, lightless room with only my knowledge of some pending doom." He glanced over at her and she saw the fear in his eyes. "And facing that knowledge, I don't know if I will ever sleep again."

  Kait reached out to comfort him, to rest a hand on his shoulder, and as she did, she heard a voice in the back of her mind.

  That which you so desperately seek, you already have.

  She froze. The voice spoke to her from the dead. Or did it?

  Hasmal, she thought, I would know your voice anywhere. Where are you? Have you found a way to come back to us? What can you tell us?

  Hasmal didn't answer any of her questions. Instead, she heard again the single sentence she had heard before. That which you so desperately seek, you already have. It echoed inside her skull, slipping away from her like the vapors of a ghost; the more she reached after it, the more elusive it became.

  That which you so desperately seek, you already have.

  She closed her eyes and stood still in the middle of the road and sought the source of the voice, for she had learned from hard experience to fear voices that whispered into her mind. She chased after it, and came up against the place inside of her that she had shielded and shuttered and walled up the place where she had buried Hasmal's memories, and Dùghall's, and Crispin's... and Dafril's.

  Dafril's memories.

  Yes.

  She had blocked them away because she could not bear the touch of that evil inside of her. She could not bear to feel that any part of the monster who had been removed from the world at such great cost still lived in any way, and when she brushed against those memories, she could feel Dafril himself stirring inside of her.

  But she had touched those memories, and in one cursory brush with them, she had learned something. Something about the evil that came, the evil that Dùghall feared. She knew something.

  Or perhaps she didn't. But she knew where she could learn it.

  Eyes tightly closed, she pulled down the shields that had kept Dafril's poison from spilling onto her. She touched those memories tentatively, hating the feel of the creature that twisted where she prodded. Surface images flashed behind her eyes, pictures of a tall and handsome man, tiny shards of conversations, the briefest bite of dread.

  Dafril had feared someone. Dafril had lived in terror of someone. And she thought, Why would the most powerful wizard who had ever lived fear anyone?

  She moved into his memories, embracing them, accepting them, following that fear.

  * * *

  Dùghall kept the soldiers back from Kait, who stood in the center of the road, eyes shut, body rigid, unresponsive to anything or anyone.

  "Just wait," he said. "This is nothing of magic, nor is she ill."

  "Then what's the matter with her?" Ian demanded.

  "Wait," Dùghall said.

  They stood that way for long moments; he probed the Falcon sea within himself, looking for some sign that the tide of Falconry had swallowed her, but she was not within reach of the Falcons. She stood unshielded, but no magic touched her. She was gone from her own mind, oblivious to her own body, and he thought that rationally he ought to be frightened. But he wasn't. She was doing something she had chosen he was sure of it.

  Suddenly her eyes flew open, and with a cry she crumpled to the ground. She landed on the dirt road facedown, arms barely managing to catch her. She vomited, and when she had emptied her stomach she continued to retch.

  Ian shouted, "Help her, damn you!"

  Dùghall felt helpless. "Kait! What do you need? What has happened?" He placed a hand on her back, and she shook it off. "Kait? Can you hear me?"

  She shook her head weakly, wiped her mouth on the back of her forearm, and pushed herself upright so that she knelt in the road, head hanging down, eyes focused someplace very far away.

  "I know," she said at last, and hers was the voice of a week-drowned corpse animated by some nightmare magic to speak from beyond the grave.

  "You know?"

  She looked into Dùghall's eyes then, and a hellish spasm gripped his gut and his bowels, and fear stabbed its knives up and down his spine and flayed his every nerve.

  "I know," she said simply. "I know who comes, I know what he desires... and I know why, even if it costs us every life around us, he must never be permitted to reach Calimekka."

  "Tell me."

  "His name is Luercas. He was the only wizard Dafril dreaded where Dafril and his colleagues created the Mirror of Souls, Luercas alone created the Soul-flower."

  "Soul-flower?"

  "The wizardly device that, when loosed within the great cities of the Hars Ticlarim, the civilization in which the Dragons ruled, slaughtered five and a half billion people and created the Wizards' Circles."

  Dùghall felt the world begin to spin. No one had really known the genesis of the circles only that they had been born at the end of the Wizards' War, and that they were places of great death and great evil. "Luercas... the circles..."

  Kait nodded. "Five and a half billion souls, all trapped there still. Held within the Wizards' Circles by a carefully wrought spell, waiting against the day that they could become the final, refined fuel for the Dragons' immortality engine. Now they are to be fuel for Luercas alone." She pulled her flask from her hip, took a swig of the water in it, and rose shakily to her feet. "It is no accident that Calimekka was spared the destruction that swallowed most of their world's great cities. It was a minor city at the time, and within it the Dragons created for themselves a fallback location in case something we
nt wrong in Oel Artis." She managed a weak smile. "All that was left of Oel Artis was the Wizards' Circle that almost destroyed us when we sailed through it on our way to retrieve the Mirror of Souls, so I suppose we can assume something went wrong. In any case, Calimekka did not fall to the Soul-flower; its towers remain intact."

  "What towers?"

  "All the lovely spires of the Ancients that grace the city."

  "Oh. Those towers. What of them?"

  "The towers themselves are devices made to stand against time. The proper spell will awaken them; a portion of that spell has already been used once, when the Mirror pulled the souls from innocents so that the Dragons could steal their bodies." Kait looked away again, and in her eyes, Dùghall saw afresh the horror of the vision she'd uncovered.

  "We've destroyed the Mirror of Souls," he said. "We've destroyed the Dragons. Surely he can't replace everything the rest of the Dragons worked so hard to do "

  Kait held up a hand, and Dùghall almost knew what she was going to say before she spoke. "He doesn't need to. He alone carries the full knowledge of the Soul-flower within himself. The work the rest of the Dragons did, they did because they did not know and could not uncover the spell that would reawaken the Soul-flower. What they hoped to do by mechanical means, Luercas can do with a word."

  "And that word?"

  Kait shrugged. "Dafril didn't know, so I don't know. But if Luercas stands in the heart of Calimekka, he can speak the word and the towers will hear him, and all within the walls of the city will fall first to feed the towers' magic... and then five and a half billion trapped and tortured souls will die forever. And Luercas will become a god incarnate."

  "And every other living thing on this planet will become his slave."

  "Until time itself turns to dust. Yes."

  "I see. And where shall we find Luercas, that we may stop him?"

  Kait's voice grew soft. "He's on his way to us now, approaching from the Veral Territories at the head of an army of countless Scarred, wearing the body that he stole when Danya murdered the Reborn. Ulwe told us something approached from the south on countless feet Luercas and his army are that something. If we still had the Mirror of Souls, we could use it against him and tear his soul from his flesh we would do so at the cost of our own souls upon our deaths, but at least we would have something with which to fight him. He owns the flesh he wears by rights, however, so the spells we used to call the other Dragons from their stolen bodies won't touch him."

  Dùghall laughed bitterly. "Don't go breaking things you can't fix."

  Kait frowned. "What?"

  "A bit of practical advice I got from a Speaker. When I demanded that she tell me something useful, she said, 'Don't go breaking things you can't fix.' "

  "We had to destroy the Mirror of Souls."

  He clicked his tongue and arched an eyebrow. "It certainly seemed the best path at the time. But you must admit having it would be useful now."

  "Considering that we have no other weapons with which to fight this monster... yes."

  Dùghall became aware of the fact that the two of them were standing in the center of a road. That Ian, the soldiers, Alcie, and Ulwe surrounded them, staring at them. That not a single listener seemed to dare to even breathe.

  "Well," he said softly. "I still don't know what decision I'll be called upon to make, but at least I know what will happen if I fail to make it correctly." He gave a grim smile to those who surrounded him and said, "A bit of pressure is good for the soul, I hear. Come. Let us get to Costan Selvira; maybe we'll find better news there."

  Chapter 47

  The Army of the Thousand Peoples swept out of the pass and down the good mountain road that led toward Ibera and civilization. The way lay clear ahead of Danya and Luercas and their throng the first three villages they passed were ghosts, the houses abandoned with every belonging still inside.

  The soldiers hunted for occupants and found none deprived of a fight, they looted the homes and shops and took in stores of food to add to their supply wagons, and kegs of wine and beer, and tiny caches of silver, and even smaller caches of gold. They were satisfied enough with those things. But the quality of the household goods they found disappointed them these were little different in quality from what they'd had at home, and the exotic shapes and patterns couldn't change the fact that the treasure everyone had been hoping to uncover eluded them.

  So far the Green Lands, the Fields of Heaven, looked as bleak and rocky as any mountains, and the troops began to whisper to each other when they thought they were well away from their Ki Ika and their Iksahsha.

  Danya told Luercas, "They've lost children and lovers, and they're beginning to lose faith."

  "Nonsense. Their natural greed hasn't been slaked by tempting prizes. They'll perk up when we reach a good city. A hard fight, some rape and murder and a good haul and the sight of rich green farmland and fine city houses and they'll be ready for more."

  "You're loathsome."

  "Perhaps. But I'm right. We'll get to Calimekka, and we'll take the city easily. My prediction."

  "I'll laugh at you when you prove wrong."

  "Will you? But if I'm wrong, you won't get your revenge." He smiled, jabbed his heels into his lorrag's ribs, and rode away.

  And the army moved on.

  * * *

  Glaswherry Hala fell in less than a station, and every human being still within its walls when the Scarred took it died at the hands of the invaders. Brelst stood no more than two stations, its wall crews at last succumbing to the aerial attacks of the Scarred flying forces, and to the tunnelers who breached the walls from beneath and permitted the waves of Scarred to pour into the heart of the city and kill from the inside out as well as from the outside in.

  Humanity fled in a steady stream, pouring northward ahead of the implacable, unstoppable tide that rolled toward it. Villages and towns along the Great Sea Road offered no resistance; their populations less fond of their belongings than their lives raced toward the promised safety of the great city of Calimekka, whose greatest walls had been made by the Ancients, and whose soldiers were acknowledged the fiercest and most skilled in the world. If Calimekka could not stand against the horde, what place in all the world could?

  Chapter 48

  The refugees from Calimekka got the news from the first of the southern refugees a week after Glaswherry Hala fell and the news was bad. A few tatters of the army that Dùghall had placed in the pass still survived, leading guerrilla attacks against the outer edges of the Scarred army, but the damage they could do was minimal and the effect they were having was minimal, too.

  "When will they be here, then?" Dùghall had asked one man.

  "Our army what there is of it in a day. The leading edge of the enemy forces only a few stations later than that. The full army of the damned two days. Maybe three. I won't be here when they arrive. They don't take prisoners and they don't leave survivors."

  Dùghall, seated in a small inn near the harbor, rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes.

  "What's wrong with him?" the man asked Kait.

  Kait did not go into detail. "His sons lead our army."

  "Yes? Good men, them but if they want to be living men, they better lead it to Calimekka and get inside the walls there. The only way we're going to live to see another day is if the Families take these monsters out."

  Kait did not tell him that Calimekka had fallen from the inside or that if any remnants of the Families survived there, they would be powerless to stop the approaching enemy. He left, thinking that he headed toward safety, toward a place where someone else would look after him and his children and make sure that they survived.

  "Dùghall," she said when he was gone, "to that bad news I can at last add a bit of good news."

  "You've met up with Falcons who've answered my call?"

  "No not yet. But Ry just sailed into the harbor."

  "Thank you, Vodor Imrish," Dùghall whispered. "For that at least we can be truly grat
eful."

  * * *

  Neither Kait nor Dùghall had told Ian what waited in the harbor for him. They had decided between themselves that since Ry had found the ship and won it back for his brother, he deserved the honor of returning it to its rightful captain. Ry wasn't sure whether he anticipated the moment when he would tell his brother what waited for him with dread or pleasure.