“Building is empty. Soldiers took it over. The only riftkeepers came from Ak Reisarth.”
“But that can’t be.”
Neyvik looked between them, chewing her lip. “If you want to have this conversation do it elsewhere. You have already upset us enough.”
“This is important for us all!” snapped Ren, wiping at the blood crusting around his nose. His eye was starting to swell, turning pink.
“Enough,” he said, standing in between them before they could start arguing again. Out of everyone, he couldn’t believe he was the one trying to mediate between two warring parties. Janus knew war well enough. Bringing tempers to heel had always been Sandson’s job. “Enough tragedy has happened lately. Don’t need reasons to be fighting amongst ourselves.”
Both parties tutted, turning away from one another. Janus resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose, sweeping his fingers over his temple. A noise crackled in his skull, growing stronger as the seconds ticked by. It was growing painful, ache flaring up, and he rolled his neck until it cracked for the sensation of doing something. He tried to remember how Sandson had done it, when he’d extinguished tempers with a few careful words until he had them tripping over themselves to apologise for such childish behaviour.
“If all the rifts are damaged now then it’s everyone’s job to make sure we watch them carefully. No use fighting amongst allies, hm?”
Kardak nodded, shoulders sagging as the fight drained from the room. “We mean no harm here, Danshei. If my partner and I could take a look at the rift we might be able to assist you. At the very least I would like to talk to you, Janus was it? If you know anything about the riftkeepers of Tsellyr I’d – we’d – be much obliged.”
He elbowed Ren in the side who nodded begrudgingly.
“Neyvik-dan? If they agree to keep out of your way can they stay for a night or two?”
“Men should not stay here at all.”
“We are not just men, Neyvik-dan. We are wardens from Kathnar on the eastern side of the island, belonging to the same organisation as you,” said Kardak, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Besides, our ship for Rillasok does not depart for two more days yet.”
Janus had no idea if Neyvik was really the leader here but as he watched the way the rift wardens prostrated themselves before her, and the way the other girls deferred to her word, he couldn’t see anyone else take the position. She made a show of sizing them up, lips tilted down. Eventually she nodded, small beaded earrings that matched her kobi jangling in her ears. “Until your ship departs and no more. If you cause any problems you’ll be leaving here on the pyre.”
Ren snorted but mercifully kept his mouth closed and Janus breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t really want to make more enemies, in what should be a place of peace. Just because he could kill, and he would if need be, didn’t mean he should. But to be the one stopping them from tearing each other apart was an irony too great to bear. Surely there had to be someone out there watching over him and laughing. Making a show out of his pathetic life.
Sensing now was as good a moment as any to duck out, Janus slipped from the room and made his way back across the garden, frozen grass crunching beneath his feet as he sucked in the chilly morning air, the sky custard yellow with the ghost of a crescent moon still lingering from the night before. Riftspawn danced around his head, smears of colour out of the corner of his eye, disappearing every time he turned his head. Even after all this time he had no natural intuition towards them beyond instincts honed by time. He couldn’t sense them the way Rook or other members of the Order could. Janus was glad of it. He had enough ghosts hanging over his head; he had no desire to add spirits from another realm to it.
Reaching out as he waited for the blue one to fly past his right side, he snatched at it with a quick fist. A shimmer burned into a blue glow emanating from his hand, skin tingling as if he’d caught a butterfly and its wings were tickling at him. The feeling grew until it vibrated up his arm, tinges of panic and fear flaring in his mind, and he chucked it away, watching the creature unfold long shimmering wings, suddenly in the shape of a butterfly just because he’d imagined it as such. He ran his fingers over his skin, still as pale and scarred as he remember it being.
Sometimes he forgot how powerful these creatures could be. It didn’t matter the size, or how some scholars from times past had attempted to classify them. They had such a vibrancy and energy about them that was difficult to fight. More than that, they bore consciousness. He had felt the creature’s brief terror at touching his mind, stirring up his memories, and it made him wonder just how alive some of these beings really were. Not human, per se, but possessing a personhood of some sorts. An identity. Surely that, the futile clinging to a fistful of memories and a shelter of flesh, was the most human thing there was.
But Janus shook himself of the thought. He was a simple man. Not one for reflection like a learned man.
So he took the stairs with little more than a subconscious awareness of the uncomfortable buzz in the back of his mind, like it was trying to alert him to the absence of something. But like with most things Janus ignored it until he was confronted with something he could not run from.
“Might want to talk to these rift wardens,” he said as he entered the room he had shared with Rook. He stopped short.
Standing in the doorway he could see all of the small room, a cot against each wall and a window above spilling in the muted, yellow light across Rook’ empty bed, sheets strewn messily. He almost missed it in his shock, sifting back over their conversation from earlier for signals of what he had missed, when his eyes caught on the loose sheaf of paper lying in the middle of the pile of her sheets.
There was a rough edge from where it had been ripped from her notebook, charcoal fingerprints and scribbles in the corner marking it as Rook’s. Her handwriting was familiar to him, a disjointed scrawl of characters she had obviously never learned how to write correctly. He knew because natives always liked to tell him the same thing.
Janus, it read. I’m sorry to leave like this but I think you were right when you said we needed some time apart. I think I’ve been using you all as a crutch because I do not trust myself to do what needs to be done on my own. But I’ll never learn if I don’t try, right? So forgive me this last act of cowardice. The truth is, I didn’t think I could bear to say goodbye.
I hope you find what it is you’re looking for. Just as I hope I can find the dawn through this endless night. May we meet again.
Rook.
He read it over a few times, just to be sure, paper warping beneath his tightening grip. And then he laughed. There was no real reason for it. There was nothing particularly funny about what was nothing but a heartfelt, albeit brief, letter. Perhaps it was that it was the first goodbye he had ever received that had left him with a flickering of hope. Perhaps it was that it was about as much of a Janus kind of goodbye as it got. He pictured her leaving it, hauling her satchel, and sneaking out before he could find her.
The sun rose higher, shining so bright in his eyes that it blinded him. Janus threw the paper to the bed and shook his head, grinning despite himself.
“May we meet again, Rook-ka,” he said aloud.
And perhaps for the first time in a long time, he genuinely wished someone well on their way.
Part Three: Dakkan Ikka Korshi
Kilai woke to water. One moment she was floating on a sun-soaked sea in her dream, the next she plunged into darkness, the icy cold shocking her into waking all at once. Trying to draw breath, she choked and sputtered, eyes stinging with the saltwater and limbs churring up spray. Somehow she found her way to the surface, breaking through with a hacking cough, chest heaving as she tried to draw air without drinking in half of the sea. Blinking the water out of her eyes, she swam on the spot, taking in the endless blue waves fading into an endless blue sky. Spinning, she was greeted with the cut of green mountains into the sky, wreathed in clouds around their highest peaks. When she kicked h
arder to keep her head above the bouncing waterline she saw a line of black sand and nearly wept in relief.
Her fingers scraped something rough and she yelped, picturing sharks and all other kinds of beasts lurking below. Then a long piece of flotsam popped up beside her head, a panel of what had been part of the Zephyr, and the panic subsided. She must have drifted off on top of it and ended up here, somewhere off the Yllaizlo. Although she was tired and cold, teeth chattering loud enough to rattle through her skull, she grabbed onto it and kicked her legs as hard as she could towards the shore.
It didn’t look far but after a good ten minutes of solid kicking she didn’t appear to be any closer and she could hardly get her legs to move anymore, weak splashes barely kicking up froth. Fixing her sight on where the water lapped the black sand, she psyched herself up and pushed off the wood, trying to remember the proper technique for swimming. Putting her face in the water clashed with her survival instincts and she grimaced as she caught a mouthful of saltwater, foul to taste. But she pushed through it, tugging herself against the hand of the current trying to drag her back into the ocean.
By the time her foot kicked up sand she was gasping for air and she collapsed into the shallow water, fingers digging in to steady herself. For a moment she remained, simply breathing, relieved to see solid land after such a turbulent night at sea. She didn’t know what had become of the others. She was afraid of the answer. Of who had survived and who had went down with the ship.
But Kilai couldn’t just let the pit in her stomach weigh her down; not when there were things she could be doing. So she picked herself up off the sand and splashed her way onto the shore, shivering despite the warmth of the sun bearing down from above. Faced with a line of foliage – huge, round trees made of rings of bark with heavy, drooping fronds, and taller, skinnier trees with a scruffy mop of shrub atop them – she realised she had no idea how far she was from civilisation. Without it she didn’t know how to ground herself. Sighing, she wrung out her hair and knotted it up into a bun, squeezing as much water from her shirt and trousers as she could. Hopefully the sun would dry her clothes before she was struck down by illness. If she had survived this much, dying by fever seemed too much an irony to bear.
Kilai walked the black beach alone, stones and fragments of shell crunching beneath her sodden boots. Tired of the squelching, she pried them off and walked the rest of the way barefoot, eyes scanning the coastline for signs of life. The more she walked the more her consternation grew. It started as a quiet hum beneath her skin, rising into a cacophony of her anxious thoughts, swirling around and around in her mind. She didn’t know what to do if she was the only one to survive. It would be too severe a sign that she had never been meant for anything more than being trapped in her father’s narrative, living and dying in the same place she had been born. A sign she should have stayed where she was and never ventured beyond in pursuit of the unknown.
Until the sun reached its peak in the sky Kilai walked, growing wearier and wearier, hope evaporating like the water weighing down her clothes. She was about to give up when she saw a shape sprawled across the line where the land met the sea, hard to discern with the sun shining in her eyes. Running over with her heart lurching, she nearly tripped over the man in her shock, her foot catching on his arm.
A groan slipped past his lips, his arm moving to shield his eyes from the sun. Beneath his arm shone a fiery red beard, thicker than it had been the last she had seen him, and his skin was a tender, swollen pink. “Argh, turn the light off!”
Kilai tilted her head, wondering if she was hallucinating. “You mean turn off the sun?” She gave him another experimental kick when he didn’t respond.
“Do you have any – well stick me in a canon and fire me into the sun. You’re the lady with that inbred halfwit Lakazar.” Ivor sat up, eyes rolling before they found her. He looked queasy and she took a reflexive step backwards just in case he decided to upheave the contents of his stomach.
“Kilai Shaikuro, at your service.”
“Shaikuro, eh?” Ivor rubbed at his eyes and blinked a few times, squinting up at her. “Could you move over a step to your right? Yeah, that’s perfect. So am I dead? Is this some kind of test? Because if it is I don’t get the joke. No offence, demon, but I could have made my own hell a little more … appalling, you know? Like it’s not the dream to wash up on a deserted beach in the middle of the back of beyond but I’m not going to go and weep about it.”
Kilai slapped a hand over his mouth. “Quit talking for a minute, will you? You’re not dead and I’m not a demon and we’re all alive and well. Got it?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t go that far. Alive, maybe.”
Kilai scoffed. He still had the audacity to look sceptical, like she was there solely to make his life miserable, even if in the minute since she had found him he was managing to make hers much more so. “How did you get here?”
Ivor glared at her. “If I knew the answer to that, do you think I’d be here?”
Her eyes raked over him, taking in his dishevelled appearance: the tattered shirt, the trousers ripped over the calf of one leg, one shoe hanging off his foot and the other missing. His dark brown hair was caked with sand, running down the side of his face and smeared in his beard. Blood welled in the cracks of his dried out lips, his skin so pink it looked as if the sun had baked him. One eye was swelling over, puffing over a green iris surrounded by red veins.
“It seems a terrible coincidence.”
“What,” he said, wiggling a pinky in his ear, “you think I followed you to this bloody – well, where in the Netherworld are we anyway?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s useful, isn’t it?” He turned to survey his surroundings, mouth tightening. “We’re still on these godforsaken islands.” Slumping, he fell back onto the sand, limbs sprawling out wide as he closed his eyes.
“So, what? You’re just going to sleep now?”
“Yes.”
She huffed, kicking at a stone. The hot sun made her sweat beneath her drying clothes, leaving her hot and sticky. Her dry mouth was becoming uncomfortable – she knew she would have to look for water soon – but she was reluctant to tear herself away from the beach. Here she could see the sea stretch away for miles. If anyone appeared, she would spot them easily.
“How did you get here anyway?” she asked.
An eye cracked open. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“Can’t you ever just answer a question?”
Grunting, he sat up again. “I imagine it went a lot like how it went for you. I was on a ship. Hit a storm. Ship went down. Washed up here.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “Where were you heading?”
Ivor made a non-committal noise and heaved himself to his feet with heavy breaths. “Away. Anywhere.”
She couldn’t argue with that, either. “Did no one else survive?”
He gestured around them, to the black, empty beach curving around the coast towards cliffs and foliage to either side of them. Other than a few gulls cawing overhead and the scuffling of a small blue crab from the shallow pools cut into the rocks, there was no sign of life. Such an idyllic picture should not have made her despondent but it was hard not to keep her eyes trained on the horizon, resenting the sea for being so placid after such a tantrum the night before.
“We should try and find some water.”
“Shelter first.”
Kilai glanced at him but he was watching the water with eyes the same shade of blue-green.
“Shelter then water. In the order of survival, I mean. Or so they say. It’s not like I care at this point.”
She found herself smiling despite herself. “Don’t you?”
“That’s it! Mock a man made witless by all the trauma he’s suffered, why don’t you? Fine, that’s fine. I’m going to find a nice cave to squat in and freeze and you’re not invited.”
Ivor stalked off and she had to jog to keep up with his stride, covering he
r laughter with her hand. “You sure are dramatic, aren’t you?” Somehow when he exaggerated everything, it became less severe.
“Dramatic? Do you want to be stuck in the middle of a feast for all when the appetiser, main course and dessert is you?” He slapped at a bug buzzing on his arm and pinched it between his finger and thumb to show how large it was. “I hate this place. Who needs bloodsuckers this bloody huge? Like take a nip, sure. No harm. But I need to keep some of my blood inside my body, you know?”
Ivor tore into the jungle, ripping the leaves out of the way with his bare hands. Scurrying after him, Kilai jumped over fallen, rotting logs and dodged the branches firing her way from Ivor’s vehement attack on the trees. Sweat dripped down her back, her shirt clinging to her skin, the heat making her head spin. Her limbs were stiff, shoulder sore from her landing upon the ship. Away from the rhythmic breathing of the ocean the noise of the fauna grew overwhelming, the shrieks and caws and birdsong drilling into her head, the blur of green as she attempted to keep up with Ivor too much. She stumbled, gasping. She tried to call out to him but her voice wouldn’t come, words drying up in her throat.
Ivor’s voice rang out, followed by other voices and then scuffling and muffled thumps. She heard someone yell. Another thump, louder this time.
Dizzy and disorientated, Kilai braced herself for the worst as she chased the source of the sounds with the jungle swimming all around her. Catching herself on a branch, she ripped her shirt free and pushed through a thicket of thorny bushes, wincing as they nipped her skin. The pain brought some clarity back to her.
Tumbling out of the shrubbery into a small clearing, she watched Ivor take a swing at another huge, hulking figure. His fist glanced off the woman’s jaw as she ducked and at the same time a smaller man sneaked behind his turned back. Kilai could barely get the words out fast enough.
“Stop! Stop, all of you!”
Jorkell’s answering punch flew wide as she spotted Kilai and Makku jumped about a foot into the air with a yelp. Ivor spun, looking like he might strike him for simply standing behind him, so Kilai shoved her way into the centre and forced them all back, taking a moment to catch her breath. She thought her tongue might be permanently stuck to her mouth.
The Rising Tide Page 12
