Red Tide (31 page)

“Why not? The raid has only just started. There's no way the stone-skins will have taken the city.”

“Not the whole city, perhaps, but their first target will be the warlord's fortress. And our route is going to take us across theirs.
Across
it.”

Caval shrugged. “So the stone-skins see us, so what? We'll just be two more locals running for their lives.”

But two locals who had never set foot in the city before. Two locals relying on a map that looked like it had been scribbled by a child. Karmel didn't voice the thought, however. What was she going to do? Cry off with a headache?

She picked up her pack and followed Caval.

Her brother crossed to the port rail where Mokinda waited. Steps were carved into the
Grace
's hull, and Caval descended to the barge now floating below. Scullen demanded to know where the Chameleons were going, but Karmel paid him no mind. Never thought she'd be sad to leave
him
behind. She started down the ladder. The lower steps were slimy with growth, and when the time came to step into the barge, it seemed always that the boat would dip just as the
Grace
was rising. In the end Caval had to grab Karmel and haul her into the prow, where she sat down with a bump.

The priestess wouldn't need her blowpipe for this first part of the mission, so she stored it beneath a sailcloth cover. Across from her, Caval sat gazing up at the sky. There was no hint of nervousness in his expression. Sensing her gaze upon him, he looked over and said. “Your boyfriend not joining us?”

Karmel gave a weary sigh.

“You needn't worry,” Caval added, “I gave him our details in Olaire. When he's next in town he promised to drop in.”

“From a very great height, we can hope.”

Her brother laughed.

Mokinda stepped down from the ladder onto the rear thwart. He settled himself on the oar bench, shipped the oars, and used one to push the boat away from the
Grace.
There was no more disquiet in his look than there was in Caval's, but then neither of them had fought that stone-skin in the Dianese citadel.
This is madness,
Karmel thought. On Dragon Day, just one Augeran had defeated her and Veran, yet now they were about to enter a city full of them?

Mokinda hauled on the oars. The
Grace
rose on a sorcerous wave, and a line of grim faces watched Karmel from the rail as the ship turned and started back the way it had come. Only when the vessel was far away did Mokinda summon up his own wave to carry the boat to shore—slowly at first, then faster and faster until the barge zipped across the water like a skimmed stone.

Ahead a deserted watchtower marked the northern end of a bay at the edge of the city. A handful of fishing boats were moving away from shore. All were brimful with people. Two boats yet remained in the shallows, and Rubyholters swarmed and fought around them like beggars around a corpse. Of the stone-skins, there was no sign. The city was alive with screams.

Karmel looked south toward the harbor. A thump of sorcery set the waterfront shaking, and left a black stain on the air that the breeze could not disperse. A forest of masts was visible over the rooftops. No telling how many of those masts belonged to Augeran ships, or what resistance the Bezzlians were putting up. With luck, the defenders would hold the enemy until the Chameleons reached their destination; though judging by the stampede at the beach, it was clear the locals didn't think much of their kinsmen's chances.

The priestess removed her baldric from her pack and strapped it across her chest. The last fishing boat pulled away from shore. There seemed to be as many people in it as had sailed south with Karmel on the
Grace.
Yet more Bezzlians swam alongside the craft, trying to heave themselves aboard, while those with a seat punched and scratched and shrieked at them to be gone. On the beach behind, two men wrestled back and forth with their hands around each other's throats, apparently unaware that the boat they fought over had left.

Mokinda's voice cut through her thoughts. “You'll have to wade the last part,” he said.

It was only then that Karmel noticed how close to shore they were. Bezzlians were running along the beach toward them, and Mokinda halted the craft a short distance from the surf to ensure he didn't pick up any baggage for the outward passage.

“I'll see you at the meeting point.”

Caval pushed himself upright and raised one foot to the gunwale. “Ready?” he said to Karmel. There was an unaccustomed concern in his look that suggested he would have called the whole thing off if she'd asked it.

She gathered herself, then nodded.

*   *   *

Amerel watched the Augeran caper into the center of the room and perform a clumsy pirouette. His face was a lattice of evenly spaced scars, as if someone had cut the lines in his skin so they could use him as a hafters board. Looking out from the devastation was the deadest pair of eyes Amerel had ever seen—deader even than the eyes that stared back at her from the mirror when she looked in it.

Noon stepped between her and the stone-skin.
My hero.
His expression was assured. Purposeful. After the mystery of that suddenly appearing portcullis, here was something he could understand: an enemy with a beating heart. The two men faced each other like duelists waiting for the referee's call. Scarface grinned, his head cocked to one side as if he didn't know why the Breaker was being so unfriendly. Noon reached over his shoulders for the twin shortswords scabbarded at his back.

Then his arms snapped forward. His hands were holding not his swords, but two throwing knives that must have been sheathed at his wrists. The daggers flashed toward the stone-skin.

A clever move, Amerel had to admit: lull the Augeran enemy into thinking Noon was reaching for one weapon, then surprise him with a strike from another. Scarface certainly seemed to have been wrong-footed, for he made no move to evade the Breaker's knives. The first thudded into his chest over the heart. The second took him in his left eye, and his head snapped back. That was one wound he wouldn't be stitching up after. Amerel waited for the stone-skin to fall.

But he didn't fall. Instead he took a step back and righted himself.

Then giggled.

He tugged the knives free and tossed them onto the floor. Where his eye had been was now a hole in raw pink flesh, leaking gray fluids.
But no blood.
He placed a finger in the hole and wiggled it around. Was this the point where Amerel was supposed to clap and ask how it was done? She watched the hole close, the skin drawing up around a new eye that formed where the old one had been. Scarface rolled the eye to test it, then sent his other orb turning the opposite way. His chest wound had healed too, leaving just a tear in his shirt where the knife had struck.

Noon hissed through his teeth. “What is he?” he asked Amerel.

She'd been pondering the same question. A necromancer of singular power might have survived his wounds, but death-magic didn't explain the portcullis, or the sense of incongruity Amerel got just from looking at the man. Then a memory came to her of her time in Kal three years ago, sipping ganja around a fire of bones and talking to the soulcaster Thorl. He'd told her of a peasant girl in a village in the White Mountains. A girl with a rare ability who had unwittingly killed her parents after an argument over something no less trivial than the way she wore her hair. Killed them in her sleep. Amerel had thought the tale fanciful at the time, but now …

“A dreamweaver,” she said to Noon, watching Scarface's reaction for confirmation. “A man who can make his dreams manifest in the waking world.”

The Augeran sketched a bow. “Hex is my name,” he said in heavily accented common tongue. A hollow note to his tone signified his voice was being projected from somewhere else.
A sending.
“But please, no need for you to introduce yourselves. I already know all about you from our friend Talet here. Hee hee!”

Noon looked at Amerel. “You're telling me we're in his
dream
?” He glanced about the room. “So how come I can still see this house?”

“Because his dream doesn't replace our reality, it overlaps it. Here, we are subject to both.”

Noon gestured to the portcullis blocking the doorway behind. “This is real?”

It was Hex who answered. “Quite real, I assure you. You wish to put it to the test? Please, be my guest.”

Noon wasted no time striding to the gate. Crouching, he took a grip on the lowest horizontal bar and
lifted.
The portcullis did not budge. Veins stood out in the Breaker's neck as he tried again. Still no movement. Amerel was tempted to add her efforts to his, but Hex wouldn't have invited them to try if there had been any hope of succeeding.

The stone-skin hopped from one foot to the other. “Sooner lift the Dragon Gate than that barrier, poor fools. We're in my dream, yes, and here
I
make the rules.”

Not
all
the rules, Amerel knew. Fragments of her conversation with Thorl were coming back to her. Dreamweavers, the soulcaster had said, could only
add
to the material world, not take from it, so while the stone-skin could conjure up any number of gates to cage her with, he could not make the floor disappear, or vanish the ceiling to expose her to the elements. How that might help, she did not know. But learning the rules governing Hex's power was a necessary first step to breaking them.

Even before that, though, she needed to determine how far the stone-skin's dreamworld extended. Escape that world, and she would escape his influence. She looked toward the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him. A pity she hadn't thought to make a break for them when Noon let fly with his knives, but an opportunity might yet present itself—

Three more portcullises dropped down across the windows, striking the floor with a
crack, crack, crack
that Amerel felt through her sandals.

Hex grinned.

My, aren't we pleased with ourselves.

She needed to buy herself time to think, so she pointed at Talet's corpse and said, “If he told you who we are, he must have told you it was us who shot your commander. So why can I hear bells ringing? Why are you attacking the city?”

The stone-skin lifted Talet's corpse from its chair as if it weighed no more than a scarecrow. Putting one arm behind the spy's back, he grabbed one hand and struck a pose like they were dancing partners. “Why not?”

“You must have thought Dresk could be of use to you, else you wouldn't have approached him in the first place.”

Hex led Talet twirling about the room. The spy's lolling head bounced off his shoulder. “
Thought
he could, yes. Then we met him. What use is an ally who can't even protect us in his own fortress?”

“More use than an enemy, surely.”

“But an enemy for how long? Listen!”

Through the doorway at Amerel's back, she could hear the tolling of bells together with the thrum and clamor of a population fleeing. Then above that, she caught a distant ring of steel on steel, a muted scream. The attack was already under way! But how could that be? The bells should have meant the stone-skins were in the outer isles. How could they have made it here so fast?

Hex nodded. “Right now Dresk is discovering his precious warning system is not all that he said. Within a few bells, this city will be ours, and the warlord and his clan either scattered or dead. Hee hee!”

“And when the other tribes unite against you?”

Hex gave her a hurt look. “Please. I may be a stranger here, but even
I
know the clans are as fractured as the lands under their sway. And when we recover our gold, we'll have twenty thousand reasons to keep it that way.”

Amerel frowned. She'd probed Hex's thoughts with her Will—the gentlest touch so as not to draw his attention—and found his mind too strong for all but the most inconsequential manipulation. “So, with Dresk gone, you can pick the other clans off one at a time? Is that your plan? Or do you just want to make sure they don't interfere when you attack Erin Elal?”

Hex smiled a sly smile, then changed his jaunty step to a more sedate affair.

“Why come all this way to pick a fight with us?” Amerel pressed. “According to our texts, it was you who attacked us all those years ago. What reason did we give you to come back for more?”

“You really don't know?”

“You sent a delegation to Dresk, why not to Avallon? You've given us no threats, no demands. What do you
want
?”

The scarred man ignored the question. “It seems we both have much to relearn about the other.” He halted his dance and released Talet's corpse. It crumpled to the floor. “In Dresk's fortress, I detected your power, yet didn't recognize it for a Guardian's. Were it not for your dreams—”

“My dreams?” Amerel cut in.

“Of course, your dreams—so much like my own.” A wave of Hex's hand, and the light in the room started to fade. The windows clouded over with grime. Speckled shadows spread like mold across the floor. “I can share others' dreams without their knowledge, you see. Or sometimes
with
their knowledge, if that is my decree. Rarely, though, are someone's dreams so strong that they leak into their waking hours.” He studied her. “And the cause of this … a Deliverer's powers?” Behind him, the desk and chair became blackened and warped, and the gates over the windows darkened to rust as if a century had passed in the space of a few heartbeats.

Amerel held his gaze. The freak thought he was in control here, but it wouldn't take much to rob him of that illusion. Somewhere nearby he was sleeping, and the surest way to bring this nightmare to an end was to wake him from that slumber.

How was she supposed to locate his body, though, if she hadn't found it earlier when she spirit-walked?