The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (15 page)

"I am able to navigate the Grey because of my connection to the ship Syllastria.  It would not be the same for you.  Humans exist in the physical realm only—they have no tether to the spirits and can only be where they are.  Your passenger the Guardian could aid you, but it is inhibited.  If you were to be lost in the Grey, I think only a wraith or a skinchanger could retrieve you.

"But let us not dwell on caiohene things, lest we ire your wolf.”

“He’s not my wolf,” Cob said automatically.  He watched Arik closely as he let him go.  The wraith's calm words seemed to have sapped some of the skinchanger's ire, and he shivered, fur rippling over his skin and fading, then finally glanced up to give Cob a tired smile.

“
So, is the awkwardness over?” said Lark.  “Because now that you've entirely unnerved me, we should probably sit down and figure out what we’re doing.  Oh—and this is Dasira.  Cob, Dasira.  Dasira, Cob.”

Cob glanced to the blonde woman.  Though short, she was solid-looking, with a serious face and straight hair pulled back in a tight puff of a tail.  Her clothes were the plain, dull colors of a Wynd or an Amand, her eyes cloud-grey, and she gave him a curt nod by way of greeting.  He returned it.  There was something familiar about her.  “Shadow Cult?”

“Bodyguard,” she said over Lark’s indignant noise.

Fiora stuck out her hand at the women in the merchant’s way.  “And I’m Fiora, from the Trifold Temple of Shared Light.”  Cob watched as Lark returned the clasp amiably, Dasira disdainfully.  Ilshenrir only tilted his head when she offered it to him.

After that, Lark settled down on the moss and stretched out, arranging her layers like skirts, and the others followed suit in a rough half-circle facing Cob.  The skinchanger stayed where he was, almost hiding, and Cob shrugged his pack off and finally looked down at his tunic.  Blood caked his side where the eerie rapier had penetrated, but the pain was gone.  Grimacing, he started shucking his coat and ruined shirt.

“
Could I get my pack?” said Fiora.  Arik handed it to her around Cob, and she smiled then pulled it open to dig through the contents.

As he scraped crusted blood from his side and mourned the fact that he was getting used to such things, Cob watched the others.  Fiora’s traveling dress was slashed, showing chainmail and padding beneath, but though he saw bloodstains, she did not move like she was hurt.  Dasira and Ilshenrir both seemed content to stay quiet, to watch and wait—though in truth he could not tell if Ilshenrir was watching or meditating or alive at all under his cloak.  It was like sitting across from a statue.  Lark, on the other hand, had made herself comfortable then immediately drawn her weapons into her lap: a rough-looking shortbow and a whole sheaf of arrows.

Cob tried to ignore the threat in her stare.  “So.  You’re all here t’help me.”

A general murmur of assent.

“Do any of you know necromancy?”

Dasira stiffened; Ilshenrir tilted his head.  The first to speak, though, was Lark, her expression horrified.  “What?  Why would you ask that?”

“It is not permitted,” Ilshenrir added calmly.  “We caiohene are capable of manipulating spirits and souls, but the airahene have chosen to disallow such practices.”

“
So you can’t do it?” said Cob.  “Or you jus’ won’t?”

“
I can not.”

“
What the pike do you need a necromancer for?” said Dasira.

Grimacing, Cob turned away to dig through his pack.  The Trifolders had gifted him with spare clothing, and he shook free a green tunic stitched with coppery firebell flowers and pulled it on, trying to ignore everyone watching him.  When he looked up, though, they still were.

“…Because only a necromancer can get the Guardian out of me,” he said reluctantly.  “So I’m supposed t’ go to some place called Haaraka to meet one.  If we’re off-course now—“

Ilshenrir leaned forward, suddenly intent.  “Who told you to seek the Haarakash?”

“The Trifolders.  And the Guardian approved it.  Why?”

The wraith hesitated, pale eyes searching Cob’s face, then spoke slowly as if choosing its words.  “That is curious, for it is a fell place for you, Guardian—but of course you are aware of that.  However, for me, it would be suicide.  If your intent is to cross the Haarakash barrier, then I can not—“

“Wait,” said Cob.  “It’s dangerous to me and deadly to you?  What the pike is in there?”

Ilshenrir frowned and glanced past Cob, who looked back to find Arik bristling again, a growl emanating from between his tight-pressed lips though his gaze stayed on the ground.  His shoulders were hunched, tense, hands clenched on his ankles as if trying to keep his limbs from shifting by strength alone.  Cob’s skin crawled, and he gritted his teeth against the tickles of anger that seeped from his friend.

Guardian, what didn’t you tell me?
he thought into the darkness.

Visions swarmed up behind his eyes—trees afire, crystal spires, unraveling vines, confusion, pain, terror—a flood of fractured memories so intense that he doubled over to clutch at the ground, stomach rolling with nausea. 
Stop, stop
, he thought at it,
slow down, I can’t—

It broke off as abruptly as it had come, leaving him with a bitter copper taste in his mouth and thunder in his skull.  He lifted his head to stare at the wraith, hardly registering the others, only aware that the entity that faced him was alien, enemy—and afraid, though it had lured him into its own place of power.

“Explain,” he said tightly.

The wraith locked its hands together in its lap, the only outward sign of its tension.  Its knuckles looked oddly knobby through its gloves. “You are not aware of your history with our kind?” it said quietly.

“No.  Apparently not.”

“
This is not neutral ground.  I am unsure if—“

“
Talk
.”

A silvery ripple went through the wraith’s cloak, and for a moment the face beneath the hood seemed paler, finer, as if the force of Cob’s voice had pushed the solidity from it.  But Ilshenrir did not move, and after a moment the cloak stabilized at a murky green.  “From the beginning, then,” he said.

“My people are aware that we do not belong here.  We are refugees from a higher, lighter realm, where we did not have shapes so much as…transdimensional clouds of shining sentience.  Our descent into this twilit realm caused us to fold inward, to take on material forms we find cumbersome and unnatural, but we had no choice; we were being pursued by a greater light, a scouring light that would have devoured us all.

“
We sought refuge here, thinking that we could hide in the solidity, the opacity of your world.  It was sufficiently verdant to provide cover for our ships, with creatures enough that we could camouflage our essences within the ambient life-energy.  We did not anticipate that those creatures—or the world itself—would be sentient.”

Arik growled, “You were fools.”

Cob set a hand on the skinchanger’s arm, gaze not moving from the wraith.  Incipient quills receded at his touch, but Arik’s anger rippled through him like a stream disturbing a lake.  The Guardian was a dense mass in his chest, the forest darkening around him—not real, he knew, but the slower inception of the visions that had struck him before.

The wraith inclined its hooded head.  “We know that now.  There were civilizations active at the time of our descent—the Teria, the Nimir—but both were situated underground, hidden from our perceptions.  All that we saw were the furred things, the nomadic packs and herds.  We were surprised when they advanced upon our ships instead of fled.”

Darkness converged upon Cob.  He closed his eyes, and the full memory spread out before him.

Thick forest stretched in all directions, cladding the hills like fur.  The wind was wet and rich with scent, the night sky banded by the familiar glow of the Chain of Ydgys but also by other stranger streaks of light.  Like stars falling in formation, three groups of three, they descended into the distance while he and his herd watched in fascination.

Then came the flare, the heat, the furious quaking of the earth.  The screams of his harem, his children; the flashes of terror from the other creatures of the forest like pinpricks on his skin.  A ghastly wind swept through the trees, flattening flowers and grasses and bending branches until they snapped.  It felt like an eternity before the ground stilled, even longer before the leaves fell silent again.

Ash and mist coiled in the air.  Though he feared fire, he knew that this was nothing natural, nothing right.  As the Antlered King, he had a duty to the forest and all of its denizens, not only to his herd—and the stars had fallen into the very center of the woodland, where the rivers converged into the sharing lake.  Where all the herds and clans and packs came to drink.  The one place of peace.

Swift of foot, he sped through the trees, his herd at his back, until he came to the place where there were trees no more—only splinters pulverized by some great impact, the air thick not with mist or smoke but steam that glowed with strange colors.  The wind struggled to part the veil, its manifold spirits aswirl in confusion.

Inch by inch, the bleached belly of the lake came bare before his eyes.  Seared rocks, boiled fish, smoldering plant-life.  He stepped cautiously among them, feeling the heat through his thick hooves, watching as the diaphanous layers of vapor dissipated.  Their colors did not fade with them, but strengthened into nine narrow slices of light, taller than the greatest tree, arising from the heart of the murdered lake.

And then, from those tall lights, tiny ones detached like a swarm.  He watched them flicker through the steam in all directions, seeking outward, and some of them sought toward him.

He raised his crowned head, awaiting.

They grew larger on approach, but despite their firefly-glow, he could see no shape to them.  Troubled, wary, he squinted as they emerged from the steam.  It might have been the residual vapor, but the air around them shimmered strangely as if there was more to them than the solidity at their centers, the tight buds of radiance that unfurled into five-lobed, vaguely bipedal forms to regard him.

He lifted his hands toward them in question, the palms hard-callused, the three fingers keratin-sheathed.

They responded with fire.

The vision ended.

“What we did was unconscionable,” Ilshenrir said as Cob opened his eyes.  “I do not wish to excuse us: we saw you as a threat.  We had fallen so far and in such fear that we were not willing to compromise, to become just one of many peoples.  We had to be in control.

“
But there were too few of us.  Four flights—forty-two thousand caiohene in all—escaped our realm to reach yours, and the last flight did not arrive until we had already begun the war.  Oh, we were powerful compared to you, and united in our goals while you were split into many tribes, many struggling alliances, but it did not take long for our aggression to turn your world against us.

“
Still, we fought hard.  We found that many of you were bound together by communal essences—what you call ‘spirits’—and that we could break the will of entire tribes by destroying them.  And so, for a time, that was our tactic.”

“
It almost wiped us out,” growled Arik into Cob’s ear.  “When our spirits die, we Forget.  We become mindless animals or soulless humanoids, empty, alone—trapped in one form forever.  Sometimes we pledge to other spirits, but it alters us.  We can never be what we were.”

Cob squeezed the skinchanger’s arm and tried to keep a lid on his own boiling temper.  “What happened to the stag—the Antlered King?”

“
Aeruhtali Tanrant
….Tan.  Your forefather.  Raun’s beloved enemy.”  Arik exhaled heavily.  His hot breath made the hairs on the back of Cob’s neck prickle.  “He was the first to feel their wrath, before they knew how to kill our spirits.  When they shattered him, his shards infected the deerfolk with his terror, and they scattered to the four winds—always fleeing, always feeling the fire at their backs.  They used to be so strong.  When his last shard died, it was a relief.”

For a moment, Cob remembered the fear that had chased him through the streets of Bahlaer, through the Illanic countryside and all the way back to his childhood.  The terror that froze him in place when he knew he should act, the panic that had possessed him in the Kerrindryr quarry—made him fight blindly with nothing but a rock in hand.  All those instincts he had struggled to suppress, to control.  The persistent sense of being hunted.

He ran his hand across his mouth and stared at Ilshenrir, weighing blame against pragmatism.

“
Keep going,” he said finally.

The wraith nodded.  "For a time, we held our own, but your people were learning our ways—learning to mimic us, to harness a terrestrial version of our magic, to join together as one force.  And we had our schisms.  By the time the fourth flight descended, we were deeply torn between those who believed we had wronged you and those who would see you annihilated.  Our holdings had spread far across this northern land, but thinly, and even with the influx of power from the fourth flight, we found ourselves endangered—our army fractured by assaults from every angle, every element, every beast and tree and vine.