Mourning Cloak (7 page)

Hours of song and prayer and chant, gone. In one moment.

A hiss of indrawn breath behind me. A choked sob. Toro?

No matter.

I am Weaver. I make the choices.

And I have made mine. I fold my arms, tuck my chin into my chest. “Taurin shows, Taurin hides,” I say, in the ritual words. “The Seeing came, the Seeing is gone. Praise be to Taurin.” My voice cracks at the end.

There is nothing the rest#82ing the of the
eilendi
can do. We stand upon the cliff and we watch as men die in hideous ways, as a few brave soldiers pull Kato Vorsok back from his lonely, doomed frenzy, as his army breaks and flees.

As hundreds of lives are quenched and thousands of hopes crushed.

Tears drip down my cheeks and chin, splotch onto my robes.

I do not wipe them away. I do not look back at the others. I stand as the sun sets, mingling its bloody light with the red stains upon the earth, as the Garguants wheel, dark shadows in the twilight sky, back into the gates, as the moans of men and wails of women rise up in the air behind me.

The others leave, but I do not.

I cannot face the man I have just betrayed.

I can move fast, but not as fast as lightning, even if I were completely transformed. I have only time to shout a warning as the bouquet of glass balls—a new addition to this most ancient of places—flashes. Flutter flies apart inside a flare of white light. I cringe, spiders painting my vision dark to compensate. I see particles of her, points of winking color, and make a futile, desperate gesture out to them with one hand.

And then I have no more time to worry about Flutter, because night walkers are upon me. A pair of them, one jade, the other lapis lazuli, their lean, elongated bodies glistening. They are all wrong in this chamber of curves and arches, of heavy warmth and old light and earth colors. Their knives slash at me and slide off my strengthened forearms and wrists in sparks and screeches.

Spiders burrow into my core, scurrying to armor me fully. Normal vision is completely gone, replaced by heat signatures and energy patterns. My focus zeroes in on one that flashes hot and violet and familiar. Liquid fire zings up my nerves.

Sera. Here in this room.

The night walkers are no more than bugs. I swat them aside, send them clattering to the floor in a tangle of stick-like limbs. One whips its blade at my knee, and I stake it through its narrow chest. My sword bites deep into the floor as it writhes, then falls still. Its companion’s knife stabs for my neck; I sever its head in return. Black fluid, smelling of pepper, leaks onto the floor.

No interruptions. Not after all this time. I walk toward that knot of purplish energy, now gone dark like a bruise.

“Sera.”

She crouches against a pedestal of rough-hewn rock. My heart is a pump, pistons moving with well-lubricated hissing. My stomach burns—I force the spiders back from it, drive them away. I lift my hands and peel the armor back from my face. I want to
see
Sera, really see her, not as a collection of points or a bundle of energy, but as the woman I’d fought beside, slept with, lost for too many years.

She raises a pinched and grayish face to me, her once-sparkling eyes darkened and depthless. Her honey-and-brown hair is thin and snarled, tight against her scalp. But she is still human and she is still Sera.
My
Sera.

She rises to her feet, shakily, as I reach her. She is too thin, too wasted, and I hang back, not wanting to touch her without her permission. Not after leaving her alone and hopeless in a hellish existence for three years. Not after taking so long to come to her.

Sera stares at me a long moment, reaches out to touch my naked face. Her fingertips are butterfly-soft and I shiver.

It’s been so long since I’ve been touched with love.

Sera steps forward first, into my embrace. Metal recedes from my body, my arms almost close around her. Then something pricks me, small and sharp, in the stomach. I jerk back.

“Sera?”

Her perfume wafts to me, the scent of jasmine, but under it is sourness. Her gaze on me is empty, leached of all emotion. She looks at me, but doesn’t
see
me. A cold and constricting current travels through my veins. All my nerves flash pain. I double over, retching. Sera’s arms fall away, dropping me as if I were rubbish.

“Sera, what are you doing?” I plead, between gasps. My body goes numb. I cannot think. I expect her to come to me, the way she’s always done, but instead she tosses a syringe into a container and turns away.

Turns away. She’s never done that before. Not when I was just a shepherd-boy, not when the Circle rejected me, not even at Tau Marai.

But she does it now, and her manner is not that of a prisoner but a mastermind. Her clothes, I see now, are simple but smart. She puts on a pressed white coat, tugs down the sleeves. Rings wink on every finger. The jewels set in them flare to life as Sera raps them in an impatient staccato. The door crashes open. More monstrosities, weird hybrids of night walkers and eerie men bound in.

Sera speaks to me, over her shoulder, without even looking at me. “Finishing what we started all those years ago, Kato. You were too weak to see it through. You weren’t the man I thought.”

Oh, Taurin.
That hurt. Hurt more than the convulsions, more than the transformation, more than the pain of mere physical wounds. I hadn’t been the man she wanted me to be. I hadn’t fought to the end. I hadn’t died for the cause. I’d run when we couldn’t drag victory from that debacle.

But she hadn’t been at the front, on the line of battle. She didn’t know what it was like, those Garguants and those cold bronze gates, sucking out all the life from you.

“No, Sera! The gate… It’s too…” Fresh spasms wring me dry. I can’t speak.

She bends. I look into her cold eyes. “I finally have my army ready. The Dark Masters can’t stand against us. And I have the power to open our way.”

Hard hands grasp me, pull me up. Sera takes hold of my wrist, pushes aside the tattered remains of my sleeve. My arm is limp, and I can barely feel my fingers, rubbery and fat at the end of my too-heavy hands. I can’t move my limbs, can’t keep myself from falling, can’t do anything as she plunges a needle into my vein. Can’t take my eyes from the syringe filling up with red-gold blood. My blood, caught mid-transformation, bristling with tiny invisible spiders.

Sera motions to one of the eerie men. He slaps a gauze pad, then an adhesive bandage to the pinprick in my arm. Sera rolls up her own sleeve and injects my blood into herself.

“No!” It takes so much effort to get that one word out through my numbed lips that it should’ve come out as a bellow, echoing off the ceiling. But only a whisper reaches my ears. “My blood will kill you!”

Sera’s eyes are closed, her head tilted to the side. She smiles as the death-tide of spiders washes through her system. When she opens her eyes, they are weary. “I’ve built up an immunity to your blood, Kato,” she explains, as if to an exasperating child. “I’e b8220;I&;ve been giving myself some of it every day for months now. Weeks apart before then.”

How?

“The ward woman.”

The ward woman. Even my emotions are muted. I want to feel angry and hurt, but instead of lashing out, the feelings are coiled into knots inside of me. The soft-voiced, soft-skinned ward woman coming every month for my blood, explaining how she needed it to keep the wards strong. How I’d accepted it without question and let her bleed me.

“You sent the cloak.” My words come out in a mumble, but Sera’s mouth tightens.

“No.” She clips the word. “She slipped her leash. I sent a flash to destroy her but she was too strong for it.”

So Flutter
had
escaped. Poor confused, falling-apart Flutter. My laugh comes out bitter and ends on a sob.

Sera’s eyes narrow. “You care what happens to the cloak, Kato? You hunt cloaks for more than a year after I left you, yet you care about this one? Do you even know who she is?”

“
Eilendi
,” I manage.

“So you know that much, do you?” Her voice is low and angry. “Did you know that
she
is the
eilendi
who did nothing the day we fought and lost at Tau Marai? They made a Seeing as had never been before—oh, yes, Toro told me later—and
she
watched us burn and die instead of tearing open those gates and taking the fight to the Masters inside.”

So. Flutter had been the Weaver of that Seeing. I am too tired to feel the rage that still boils within Sera after all these years.

“They kept their secrets well, the
eilendi
,” Sera goes on. “It took me years to find who the Weaver was, but I tracked her down at last, the traitorous jackal-whore. And yes, I enjoyed watching her suffer, the way she made all of us suffer that day.”

What do you know about the suffering, Sera? You were not at the vanguard of the attack. You did not feel the acid eating away at your skin or the scalding breath of the Garguants on your face.
I am too heartsick to say any more.

“Well, I don’t need them.” Sera tosses her head. “I don’t need Taurin and his
gifts
, nor the
eilendi
and their Seeing. Highwind taught me that power is for the taking and I will take it and use it the way it should’ve been.
I
will be the one transformed.”

Sera strides toward a console of sleek metal and square lights and fiddles with the buttons. Wires attach it to a crystal pedestal that looks like it grew out of the very floor. Highwind technology merged with Kaal Baran arcana.

Her minions drag me to one side as if I’m a sack of flour and prop me against a wall. I sag, one shoulder lower than the other, and can’t sit back up again. My mouth is slack. I feel saliva drip down my chin and pool on my chest.

Taurin’s Champion. Taurin’s
joke
, more like it. And I hate myself as Sera steps into the sunken pool, as the nozzles vibrate and screech to life, as their beams of light sear into my eyeballs because I cannot close my lids nor move my head. I loathe myself as I try to stir my spiders to life, but they are beyond my reach, smoked into unconsciousness by Sera’s drug.

Sera screams with the agony of it—and don’t I know how much it hurts, that first time!&n="first t#8212;and I can do nothing.

I can do nothing at all.

I think my cheeks are wet.

And then the sleep that’s overcome my spiders pulls me under, and I fall into its embrace.

I am undone by Kato Vorsok’s anger, his sorrow, his despair. They’re knotted into his muscles and dug into his bones and flooded into his veins. Adrift inside him, my bonds break apart. Senses disappear first, then judgment, and memory last.

Who am…?

What…?

Hold on.

Lalita vey lalita vey…

Old routine and deep faith arrest the flow, slow the dissolution, gather,
hold
.

Brings myself to myself. Holds myself to my myself.

Not that there is much to me now. I’m a bundle of energy, a collection of particles, hiding inside a body in pain, a body frozen in mid-transformation.

I hear the skitter-click of spider legs, see half-unraveled tissue, taste the change of living matter into crackling energy.

I flee, not because I have a plan, but because something terrible is happening and I’m trapped in here with it. Already, the spiders have grabbed particles from me—or else I left some behind in the room, when Kato Vorsok called to me and I fled into him.

I’m going to be rather short if I ever return to myself.

Dry humor. Understatement. I stop at the familiar lemon taste of that thought.

This. This is me.

I have a personality.

What happens to Kato’s as he transforms? Does he lose himself in metal and energy, just as I lost myself in dissolution and darkness when I became—was made into—a cloak?

I run into what looks like a frenzied group-coupling of spiders. Several attach together to form another creature, something dark and biped. I dodge into arteries and stay in his blood as long as I can, but it is more light than liquid and does little to hide me. I leap on to nerves stretched fine and silver, up the spinal cord, up to the neck…

And right into alien sentries, bristling with weapons of undoing. Jagged stars, spiky caltrops, nets with cutting strands. These don’t belong here. They hold Kato Vorsok a prisoner in his body as much as they do me.

Disperse.
I scatter into nervous points, my components so much less than the sum of the whole.
Remember!
I tell my fleeing particles.
Remember…eilendi…Taurin…

Taurin.

My God.

Remember.

Surely even the smallest part of me will.

I am cut so small, spread so thin, that the sentries don’t notice me as I flow past them.

For one moment, I think the hard part is over.

Smack. Like a wave breaking onto shore, I hit a wall.

His mind, so tight that even the smallest part of me will not slip through.

But it is still a wall. And walls usually have doors. He’s not had time to brick himself up completely.

I coalesce and flow around until I find the one doorway in his wall.

They are the same bronze gates th unnze gatat lead into Tau Marai. The same gates that resisted Kato and a dozen Champions before him. The most impenetrable things he knows.

Gates such as these can only be opened from the inside.

“Kato Vorsok. I wish to talk to you.”

Nothing.

“You cannot give up and die. If you do, you take me with you.”

He doesn’t care.