Mourning Cloak (2 page)

It is part of this chorus, one voice among many, one body among many, but it is discrete, concrete, only. It has boundaries; it cannot step into the wall or glide into the thought-tide of someone else’s head.

It looks down and sees the rough cream linen of its robes and small brown hands clasped together.

Its hands. No, my hands.

My voice. I have a voice.

No longer it, but an I. A being. An individual being.

Sensations trickle, then flood, borne along on the remembered words. It…
I…
struggle to remember. My lips shape and form:
lalita vey. Lalita vey.
My hands move in practiced ritual gestures. My braid tickles the back of my neck, sweat runs between my breasts.

I am a she. I am part of a group. I am part of a great undertaking. I am…

“
Eilendi
.”

The mourning cloak sits up, swift and sudden, eyes open.

I crouch, hand wrapped around the hilt of the sword, expecting an attack. My knee bumps the little table. The bowl of soup wobbles, tips over, sends the broth splashing down the side and into Sera’s prized cashmere rug, one of the few things she saved from her ancestral home before we fled to Highwind.

The cloak and I ignore the spill.

“What did you say?” I ask, eyes narrowed. That this creature of the cold, indifferent north should know not one, but two, things in my desperate-to-forget past, is not just spooky, it is menacing.

And I do not like being threatened.

The mourning cloak’s delicate mouth moves again. Those pale lips with their tracery of gold blood seem unsuited for human speech. “
Eilendi.
I am
eilendi.
”

I stare at her, speechless.
Eilendi
are as far away from mourning cloaks as the sun is from the moon. What did the Taurin-loving, prayer-singing priest-mages of my homeland have to do with this pale northern species of demon?

I’d be hard-pressed to say which one of them I loathe more.

“It’s another’s memory,” I say. “Something that you sucked out from a person, along with their blood and essence.”

Are you the one that took Sera?

Because if she is, she is not leaving here alive.

Doubt flickers in her eyes, then she shakes her head, vehemently. “No, it is
my
memory. I know the Seven Rakayas, the Eight Invocations, the Twelve Petitions, the—”

“Babble-talk. Parrot-speak. Words you could’ve pulled out from someone’s head.” My chest is tight with hope, and impotent rage at myself for daring to feel it.

Could you be—Sera?

“They are too true to be someone else’s feelings. A lizard darted along my foot in the middle of the Rakayas. My nails biting into my palms, the air thick with…” She shudders, wraps her arms and tattered wings around herself. “I remember. I remember.” Said with wonder, and a light on her face, as if the clouds have opened up long enough to let the sun shine through.

She needs a reminder that the sun burns as well as reveals.

“Oh yes? Then tell me,
eilendi
”—I make the name sound like an expletive—“who am I?”

“You?” She looks at me, falters. “I—I—Kato. Kato Vorsok.” She bobs her head, decisive. It’s clear the name has no meaning for her.

“If you were really an
eilendi
, you’d know what I was. But you have no idea, do you?” Mixed in with my bitter triumph is bitter regret.
Of course she isn’t Sera, you old fool.

“I don’t.” Her eyes are still brown. “So, tell me.”

Kato the weak. Destroyer of hope. Deceiver of many.

“A failure.” I say. “I’m the biggest failure in the southern lands.”

Her face softens into the semblance of something human. “No, Kato-rimcha. You are the hope of the many-banded lands.”

Her words pierce me to the core. Only one person ever called me that. Kato-rimcha.
Kato Shepherd-boy
, a pet name. Only one person believed in me when I had stopped believing in myself. I try to see Sera in the mourning cloak’s features, but her face is too narrow and delicate, the angles of her bones all wrong. Snow-white skin instead of gold-touched, hair dark and sleek instead of a riot of bronze and brown and gold. And Sera had never been
eilendi
, though she’d been tutored by them, and learned the Rakayas and the Invocations along with the law and the arcana. But still…

I force out her name through the lump in my throat. “Sera? Is that—can it be—you?”

It is the first time I’ve said my wife’s name aloud in three years.

The mourning cloak sags, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. I reach for her, but she catches herself before she hits the floor. She comes up, hissing, and swipes at my neck. I arch away, and her claws miss tearing out my throat by a hair’s breadth.

Her eyes are back to faceted black. She throws her head back and howls, an eerie sound almost too high for hearing. Her wing-cloak spreads and ripples, blue patterns swirl within the dark brown. She swoops at me, faster than a blink.

I barely feel the pricks of her nails on my skin before she’s past me and onto the wall. Pain shoots up my arm, my wrist burns. I drop to the floor, cursing, and push an end table between us. Wetness streaks down my arms, splotches red onto the rug.

The sword!
Not enough space, too cluttered to use thered toit, and
—what if she really is Sera?
I whip out my knife, peer over the table.

She’s perched on the wall, sideways. She moves as if she were a dancer, light, walking among eggshells, unheeding of gravity. One of her wings is askew, the silk-and-ivory structure of bone and skin not yet healed. Her head turns, slow and alien. Light multiplies in the crystalline structure of her eyes.

Then she leaps—not for me, but for the door. She half-dissolves into it, half-disintegrates it. It crackles and splinters.

“No!” I disentangle myself from furniture, dash to the doorway. I smash my foot through the remnants of the door. “Come back! Are you Sera? How do you know me?”

She’s already gone, past my powdered lines that mean nothing now that I invited her in. She sinks into the wall. I grab a handful of wing and twist. She jerks, turns liquid, slides from my grasp.

I run for the door. The handle is warm, my palms sweaty and my hands trembling. It takes me too much time to wrestle the door open. I kick aside the trash can in my haste and sprint into the alley.

She’s gone. The banish light is low and an eerie man raises a lament in the distance. I lean against the brick wall, breathing hard. Heat and cold sweep over my body, as if ice water and liquid fire alternate through my veins.

No one would be out in this. The deep night is ruled by other creatures, creatures worse than mourning cloaks.

But I’m not anyone. I’m Kato the Idiot, Kato swayed by a name and a handful of words, Kato longing for things he has no right having. I reach behind the door for my coat, lock it behind me, hitch the sword belt, and set off into Highwind. To find that mourning cloak.

The square in front of my shop is empty. Across the way, a thick chain is strung through the handles of the rhyme house’s doors; a large padlock keeps it in place. A soft violet glow illuminates the display window of the button shop next door, turning the colorful assortment of coin-sized discs into shades of midnight and moonlight. The glow boards that advertize sales and performances, book buttons and group poetry during the waking hours are squat, rectangular, and dead-eyed.

A chill wind lifts long strings of bells in front of Madam Lorianne’s Ribbonery—the sound shivers through the air.

Thin trolley tracks thread across the paved brick. The flow lights are turned off, but banish lights glower all the way down to the safe road, creating a ribbon of white light for those brave enough—or stupid enough—to venture into the night. The flames-that-are-not-flames ripple as I walk past. My shoes crunch on crushed shells and salt crystals, and I thrust my hands deep into my pockets.

The safe road is glassy black, reflecting the lights as if it were made of water. It curves and winds from one side of Highwind to the other, gleaming wetly, like the back of a sea serpent. It is smooth under my feet, and warded against cobble crunchers, though this is not a night for the children of the earth.

The wind gusts in, wild and electric, from the five mountain lakes that surround the city. Tall peaks shred the clouds around them; the tattered remains scud across the sky. No, this is a night for the creatures of air and fire, for flashes and eerie men and wind swifts.

A night for mourning cloaks to kill—and be killed.

In her current state, she is prey for wind swifts and flashes.

I pull up my coller l up myar, hunch my shoulders. Where does a mourning cloak hide in the daytime? Does she fold herself small and slide into a crack? Does she hang from a wind-twisted tree in the stunted forests above the city? Does she turn into a snowflake or a trickle of water or a puff of air?

Where would a mourning cloak who thought she was an
eilendi
go?

And then I know.

Snowflakes drift down, shimmering in the banish lights. They melt on the safe road and on my heated skin. In a distant way, I know that I am tired and my limbs weary, but purpose swells within me, untangling the knots of doubt and fear within.

The mourning cloak might be Sera. Or she may know what had become of my wife, might be the one who’d feasted on Sera’s essence that night.

Either way, I am going to find out.

I stride off the safe road, away from the banish lights, on to pavement freshly powdered with snow. Inviting the mourning cloak to find me.

It’s not true what the Taurin-worshippers say. Revenge
is
satisfying. Oh, so satisfying.

I am not holding the sword, but its bloodlust stirs in my mind, swells in my body. It nuzzles me like a cat.

Once again, we are in accord.

Highwind honors no gods, recognizes no priests, gives credence to no religion but that of pleasure and progress. No peak-roofed Mistrian temples, nor spiral arrangement of conical Ton Li huts, nor any of the affectations of a hundred different faiths break the architecture of business and pleasure. Yet it is the nature of man to worship, and to congregate in worship, and it is to the only ataura—Taurin’s House—in the city that I bend my footsteps.

The spark fairies find me first. They whine around my ears, press against my lips, buzz near my nose, seeking out any orifice, any cut, any opening. Spark fairies feed from the
inside
. I swat several into stinging blue smears against my skin, then pull out a heat-stick from my pocket. I crack the inner glass tube. The stick warms as the chemicals inside mix. Spark fairies aren’t very smart either; once they are all focused on the heat-stick, I leave it—and them—on a hitching post.

Overhead, the wind swifts call out their piercing hunting cries above the soundless fall of snow. They are curls of darkness, all curves and movement, to my sight. I duck my head, lest the paler skin of my face stand out against my dark clothing and attract their attention. I can deal with the spark fairies and the flashes. Not wind swifts and—

The hair rising along my arms warns me, but not in enough time to avoid the attack completely. The mourning cloak flows out of the pavement, lunges at me.

Not again!
I jump back, and her claws rake my abdomen, slicing through fabric and scratching a sting across my skin. Shocked into alertness, I feel everything—wetness on my lashes and cheeks, the squeak of my boots scuffing through new-fallen snow, the chill dead air surrounding the cloak.

I grab my sword. It whispers out of its sheath, a gleaming line that meets her next slash with a block. The shock reverberates through my bones, but the cloak is already flowing away, moving like a dancer in three dimensions, gliding into the air, misting through the pavement. The sword hums to me and years of practice and technique from its former masters flow into my limbs. Even so, all I can do is block, block…and block again.

I grit my teeth, move to the middle of the street, kthe strwhere no mourning cloak can emerge from the wall at my back, or fall upon me from a flow light.

She can’t materialize inside my body, can she? Hook her claws into my gut from the inside, twist my entrails? No, that is just my panic, rising like a tide, cold and dark, threatening to drown me. I stab wildly at her wing-cloak, but it ripples around my blade. I draw back and the hole closes up as if had never been.

This is not my mourning cloak, this one with her whole wings. If my sword can’t tear those wings, what tattered the ones of the mourning cloak I’d found?

The cloak darts in again, and I find that I don’t want to know, after all. She is weakening me, content to use her speed and dexterity to inflict a dozen small wounds, penning me in a small, tight square. She has all night, after all.

The sleeves of my coat are shredded, small cuts cris-cross my skin. My breath rasps in my lungs, grates against my ears. My bones are weighted, my muscles burn, my blood turns thick and heavy, but suddenly, somehow I can move faster. My vision, blurry with sweat, swims, then sharpens.

And then suddenly I know what’s been swelling in my body, ever since the cloak stabbed me in my house.

The transformation.

I stagger at both the jolt of the realization and the changes in my own body.

Why now? Why after these three years?
Dark things creep under my skin and I no longer have the discipline to stop them. Cold seeps into my bones and joints, my skin hardens. My labored breathing is replaced by the pneumatic hiss of more efficient mechanisms.

The mourning cloak strikes and her claws screech against metal scales. I stand immobile as my body armors itself.

No! Never this. Not again.