Mourning Cloak (6 page)

“In here.” Arms and wings wrapped around herself, Flutter looks even more insectile, her face elongated, her eyes faceted, her torso long, segmented. “This is where it all began.” She squeezes herself into the curve of the railing, not quite dissolving into shadow and stone.

I grin. My spiders hunger for metal; the more I take in, the more powerful I become. If there ever was a time to transform, it is now, and the consequences be damned to the nine hells.

I’m going to save Sera.

I place my hand on the slick surface, and
pull.

I expect resistance, but the door gives in, easily, eagerly. A warning panic surges through me.
Oh no.

Alien particles race through my body, tearing bindings as if they are made of paper. They shoot off bursts of energy, disrupt delicate systems. The metal around my fingers corrodes.

The door is laced with chromatic salts. Someone set a trap for me.

How had they known? Had they tortured my weaknesses out of Sera?

I wrench at my hand, but the door bubbles and reforms around it, magnetic and molecular bonds holding it fast.

I am dissolving into itnd ving in even as it dissolves into me.

Then Flutter is there, her hands thin and cool on my wrist. She tugs at my frayed sleeve, asking permission. My armor slides away from her fingers, just above my elbow, showing elastic-looking skin underneath. Flutter slices a fingernail through, revealing whitish flesh. Blood so dark that it is almost black oozes out.

Like this, I am just as inhuman as she is. Worse, because I chose to do this to myself.

Flutter bends her head and touches her lips to the wound. The edges of her blur; her particles, flickering purple, blue and green, congregate to the area—and slip inside me. I gasp, not because it hurt, but because she can really do it—this thing that I can not fathom, this mingling of essences, this sharing of physical space. I feel her chase down the shark-hungry chromatic salts, quench them of their desires. When she would’ve withdrawn, I shake my head. “The door.”

She understands. I clench my teeth, and pull that door—the door she can’t get through—into me, and she cleanses my body of the poisons that pollute it. Armor plating spreads over my limbs and creeps up my neck. My vision changes, and now Flutter is an ever-changing cloud of lights, her substance turning to mist and smoke. My bones harden into something both stronger and springier. The cold pierce of metal pricks all through me.

And then the door yields and my attention is caught as it collapses into a heap of crumbly flakes.

A hot blast of wind scorches my cheeks, a gust as dry as if it had been kiln-baked and as gritty as if it had blown across a desert. I pull Flutter along with me and step across the threshold.

And look into another world.

Half the room is the same as what lies below, tiled in white, furnished in steel. I scarcely pay attention to the machinery that crowds against the curved walls because a veil—flickering at the edges and shimmering like a soap bubble—divides the room from floor to ceiling.

I recognize the chamber beyond the veil. The mosaic on the tiled floors. The cracked marble walls. The huge sunken bath that takes up one side of the room.

I had once lain in the bronze mold within it. Glass orbs glisten from the ceiling above. Bronze devices I have no names for crowd around the bath. These are the things that gave me my power—and my curse.

The reddish light of a setting sun floods in from the empty arched windows. They look out on to a narrow valley and on the other side of that valley, barely seen, are the huge bronze gates of the city of the golems.

Tau Marai.

I turn to Flutter. My words come out savage, with teeth. “Did you show them this, Flutter?
Did
you?”

She looks at me, shakes her head. She may be
eilendi
but even
eilendi
know little about the chamber on the other side of the veil, which opened only to Taurin’s Chosen. I’d been the first to enter it here in over a century, and the only one who’d been with me was Sera.

Oh, Sera. What did they do to you?

She’d not have given up the secret willingly.

Were they holding her on the other side, torturing more secrets out of her? She’d been the one to make the arcana work, who’d pored over obscure diagrams and instructions in ancient languages, who’d made it all happen.

They’d had her for three long years. They wouldn’t have her for a momentidtfor a m longer than I could help.

“Come on,” I growl to Flutter.

“Wait!” she calls, panicky, “Wait, I…” But I’m already stepping through the veil. It folds around me, clammy and slippery on my skin, lye and ashes on my lips. My vision wavers, as if I’d plunged into water. All sound is muted, I no longer hear Flutter.

“Meet me on the other side,” I call over my shoulder, not caring whether or not she comes.

I have my spiders and my armor and soon I will have Sera.

I remember.

I stare, stunned, as Kato Vorsok plunges through the portal. It clings around him like a second skin, embracing him in spider webbing and poison.

And then he’s on the other side, looking smaller, as if I see him from a great distance away.

“Wait! She’s not—” But he cannot hear me. I lunge for the portal, and it wraps itself around me and won’t let go. Pain flares all over my body but in the red and yellow and black agony of it, I see something that I thought was lost to me forever.

A glimmering gold pattern, made of loops and curlicues. The hidden threads of the world.

A Seeing.

Taurin’s blessing, come back to me again.

I stretch my arm—my bones extend, going fluid—hook a finger into one of the loops and
pull.

I catapult forward, tearing through the portal. I hear the
pop
, feel the acid spray, and know that we will not be going back that way.

I land, my knees half-dissolved through the floor. Back in the southern lands. Back at Tau Marai’s doorstep.

Prickles break out all over my body.

“Flutter!” I’m already moving when Kato shouts. The air sizzles with impending discharge.

I cannot hope to leap out of the way in time.

I break apart, particles of me fleeing in all direction.
Remember,
I beg them,
remember.

And as the smudge of Tau Marai blurs in my sight, as the concentrated energy of a dozen swifts blasts through the cloud of me, I do.

I remember it all.

I stand upon the cliff overlooking the narrow valley, the arrow-head of the group of
eilendi
gathered here. At my back is the Kaal Baran—Fort Valor—and ahead the afternoon sun strikes gold sparks from the bronze gates of Tau Marai, City of Golems.

Below me, so far below that they are almost ants, fight the soldiers of Kato Vorsok’s army. They grapple with the golems in units, six men versus each bronze automaton, working as a team to distract, harry, trip, batter, and finally destroy. Dead bodies and metal parts litter the stained soil.

I have never met Kato Vorsok, never seen him as more than a distant figure on horseback, but I pick him out easily. He is coated in armor, bulked in iron. His footsteps gouge even the baked sand of the valley floor and he moves faster than any man should. A blow from his sword fells a golem, with the same swift, savage movement he stabs another one through the torso.

The wind carries his war song, salt with blood and tangy with metal, up to my ears, my lips. Thjus my lipe ground vibrates with it, sets it loose in my bones and veins.

He is a man exultant, on the verge of triumph. Now his foot steps over the Final Line, gouged in rock, made by the Champion Marok, the furthest any man has ever driven the golems back. The closest any man has gotten to the stronghold of the Dark Masters.

Cries, glad and proud, rise from his men. Behind me, even the
eilendis’
chants ring with victory. Our prayer magic is so strong that it comes to me with the scent of life, of dry earth after rain, of a cold wind chasing away the summer heat on the plain. The Seeing, too, takes shape more visibly then ever before, in hues of yellow and orange and gold, in intricate lines.

We have never seen so fully the hidden threads behind this valley and these gates. Taurin has never given us so clear a vision, so obvious a gift.

The only thing incongruous about this sweeping tide of victory, about this pinnacle of our history, is…

…me.

I am barely an
eilendi
. Not a year has passed since I exchanged the brown robes of the Novice for the cream ones of the Singer. I was not picked by the elders to be here. I was on my way elsewhere when my path crossed with frail Taulha’s. I had only meant to see her safely to Kaal Baran and then be on my way to my smaller duties, my lesser tasks. Instead I found confusion—the required seven
eilendi
had not yet gathered, but the Chosen still meant to go on with the attack. I was pressed into service, a warm body to fill the seventh place. I meant to do my duty, staying in the background, as always.

Until they cast the lots, ivory discs scattering on the ground, and Taurin—certainly not men—picked me to be the Weaver of this most important Seeing.

It should’ve been Toro, the Chosen’s friend and companion, who sings trust and joy at my left shoulder. Or Kara the Stalwart who sings stillness and patience on my right. Wise Taulha’s grey hairs give her more right to be the Weaver, as her quavering voice praises Taurin’s depthless wisdom.

Any one of the other six have more right than me to be here. To be the leader.

The gold pattern, so like a child’s string game, emerges from rock and sand and bronze. I set my fingers upon it, feel the thrum of its energy and know that Taurin has given over to me more power than I had ever dreamed of. With this pattern so pliable in my hands I can cast boulders upon the golems, tear down the walls of the valley, and rip the bronze gates open to Kato Vorsok’s army.

Ferocity, golden and joyful, runs hot in my veins. And why should I not? The golems have terrorized our people, torn up our lands, and polluted our rivers long enough. Now is the time to take the fight to their secretive Masters behind the city gates and end them for once and for all.

Toro would not hesitate, nor even steady Kaya and prudent Taulha.

But I am me, and so I probe the pattern with a questing song. I ask for more sight, and I am granted it. The pattern across the walls, the pattern over Tau Marai, is…different. Less gold, more pecked and corroded, as if eaten away by acid. There is a sickliness to it that I cannot like.

It reminds me of a cage, built to keep something in, rather than defenses to repel invaders.

I can tear it apart right now. Give Kato Vorsok the victory he has all but earned, crumple the golems and gates at his feet.

Give him entrance to the city.

The thought chills my blood.

If we open those gates, what will we find? Our books, our histories, our lore, are vague on the subject, but a shadow has fallen upon me.

Kato Vorsok races for the gates, and then they come.

Out of the walls they come, huge beasts of metal and wing and talon. There is a pause in the chant behind me, the army below cries out.

The Garguants—creatures of a lost time—come. They come with acid and poison and flame. Scores of men die as death rains down from the sky. The
eilendi
flinch, their songs waver.

My hand is on the deepest strings of this valley. I can stop this, bring down the gates and Garguants in one.

And I still don’t move.

Kato Vorsok bellows, his cry more animal than human, more despair than rage. He hurls rocks at the Garguants, he bounds impossibly high to wrestle one to the ground. They roll and thrash in a mad frenzy. Talons rip away parts of his armor. I catch sight of his skin, bubbled and reddened, before the metal crawls over again.

Behind me, Toro whispers, hoarsely, “For Taurin’s sake!”

Begging me to do something. But I cannot remove the Garguants without removing the gates, and that I will not do.

I am the Weaver of this Seeing. The other
eilendi
have given over their power to me and I feel, from the concentrated stares at my back, that they would do anything now to take it away from me.

But I am the point and if they remove me, the Seeing collapses.

And I know in every fiber and tissue and bone that the walls of Tau Marai—must—stand.

Men die in screaming agony, clothes ablaze, poison eating away their skins. Many turn to run, are incinerated before they take a step. Kato Vorsok swings his sword, shoots spikes from his armor into the Garguants, but he is driven back inch by hard-fought inch.

“Stop this!” hisses Toro. “End this pain!”

My hands tremble, my arms scream their own agony. How long have I stood here, hands upraised, chanting and singing? My fingers move toward the Seeing of their own accord, wanting to stop the rout.

No.

I cannot.

I drop my hands, slice sharply through the air. Break the Seeing.