The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (118 page)

Under her hands, his skin was numb.  He swallowed thickly, the salt burning his throat.  There was no sense of surprise now, no shock at the Guardian's flight, and he supposed a part of him had already known.  Had known since Erosei's casual remark of being thrown down a mountain, his own comfortable connection with the earth.

His father had trusted the Guardian, and it had abandoned him.

'Remember me,'
she hissed in his ear.  Her nails bit into him like icicles, and there was no more light, no ground.  Just the rough goat-hide under his fingers and her cold, cold flesh...

With a convulsive jerk, he pulled himself into that hide mantle—into his father's skin.  Sound, sensation and emotion hit like hammers, sending fractured ripples of an unfamiliar life through him.  A smile on his mother's face; a glimpse of clouds from a summer hillside; a running battle in a snowstorm; a game of stones with himself, terribly serious at six years old, seated on the other side.

Affection, stilted by absence and reserve.  Love like a vise, too painful to be away but too dangerous to stay.  Dedication to the cause, running the cliff-sides between Muria and the human settlements constantly to ease disputes, bring aid, drive back the encroachment of the Imperials.  A circle-dance, home and away, home and away, moving backward through time toward fresher feelings—less careworn, less sad.

He saw his own face, growing rounder and more wondering as he lost years, lost distance from the father who visited but couldn't stay.  He saw his mother's, lapsing ever between joy, dedication and distress—moon-phases subject to the man's inconstant shadow.  He saw the cave-home deplete itself of decorations to become a bare, rough-hewn hole in the cliff wall.

He saw himself swaddled in his mother's arms, too small to do anything but cry.

And then further: the two of them on a trail, man and wife coming down from the high mountains where they'd buried their first child, to the lesser chill of the Low Country, the lesser isolation.  She turned her face away when she spoke of what she'd do there: organize the villagers, support the rebellion in secret.  Her voice had lost its fire.

Backward, backward to the heights, where the air came thin as knives and the mountains stood hollow and echoing.  Back into Muria itself, in the petitioners' quarter, where the ceilings loomed high into darkness and the walls dripped with mineral dew, veined in silver.  Where they had stood once, hands clasped in the strange blue light of the stones.

Where she had smiled down at him, sadness and resolution in her eyes, and said, “Now you will fight for us.”

And backward—

The spirit-memories peeling away; all the faces and voices, all the power, the strength and confidence, the will and the blessing evaporating from his hands...

And pouring back into hers.

As he fell into his mother's skin, Cob choked.  The Guardian was an iron band across his chest, trying to pull him out, but he held tight with hands nearly numb.  She burned in his mind: young, stern, determined, devoted.  A woman he'd never known.

And pregnant.  He felt it beneath her heavy winter robe, beneath the hand she rested there—that second life, dreaming its innocent dreams.

“You don't have to give this up,”
said his father, young himself and soft-faced, concerned.  Beneath his own robe, he wore armor—real armor of metal strips riveted into leather, patterned like flowing water down his chest and along his arms.  The silver sword hung at his hip like any soldier's.

“I won't carry my child into war,”
came his mother's voice from around and within him. 
“But neither could I stand back, if I still hosted the Guardian.  No, it is time for me to release her and seek the peace of my heart.”

“Liska, our mission—“

“Has moved beyond me.  I am no longer the lone voice upon the mountains, nor do I wish to be.  A stronger vessel must take up the fight.”

“You don't have to lead from the battle-lines.  My love...”
  His father caught his mother's hands—so strange to feel this, to see those dark eyes looking up at him with care. 
“If you send the spirit away, she can never return to you.  And if I—  I want us to be together, even if it is in war.  I don't want you to sacrifice this blessing if—“

“I do not sacrifice it,”
she said, hands closing tight on his. 
“I give it as a gift.”

Instead of the outflow, he fell backward through the grey space of her life, cobwebbed by the Guardian's avoidance.  Four years spent spying on the Imperial occupation of Kerrindryr and fighting it with water—snow and avalanche and blizzard.  With stone—carving secret paths through the mountains from village to village, temple to temple.  With wood—aiding the farmers and feeding the resistance through the long dark winters.  With spear sometimes, and bow, and armor that granted the fleetness of a doe and the fury of a mother bear.

Four years of victories and losses.  Of mages ever hunting her; of the Ravager nosing around the High Country, chasing her, threatening her.  Of the warrior cults denying her access to the Muriae until she met that man—

—that beautiful man—

—and made her choice.

The years reeled around Cob, dizzying in their intensity.  Silver spires and cold mountains, white trees rising in a river cleft, sunlit hillsides, laughter, screams.  Burning villages, bloody slopes.  Mirror-like faces in blue-lit chambers.  The Guardian flowing from one to the other...

He tried to let go, but could no longer feel his fingers.  Memories meshed, distorted—or perhaps surfaced from somewhere darker: his mother sobbing into her hands, inconsolable, then grappling at him with a jealous fervor in her eyes.  The boy watching from atop a ridge, distant, unwelcoming.  The first swell of power, the bark crackling into place over her hands, and then the crunch of bone beneath her knuckles—the satisfaction of it.  The soldiers wracked by fever and frostbite, falling to her spear.  Blood on her hands...

'Blood on my hands,'
she hissed.
'Blood on my teeth.  Blood in my mouth, on my skirts, on my thighs.  Hands on my arms, on my ankles.  The men.  The men.'

Stop
, he thought.

'The whips.  The guard-towers.  The quarry walls.  Stone and wood, once my servants, now my captors.  Dir Niul, why have you fled from me?'

Stop, mother!

'Ko Vrin, what have you done to me?'

Her hands on his head pried his face up to hers.  She loomed above him in the night, black hair floating in a fibrous cloud, lips rimed with frost, and everything she touched went numb.  Her legs twined with his, her dress engulfing him—devouring him—rejoining him with her...

'What have you done to me?'
she whispered against his lips.

He saw himself reflected in her eyes: a child of twelve, bruised and bloodied and contemptuous, speaking of the Light.  Praising it.  And in him, the echo of his father, always gone.  Pulled away by purpose, leaving her to rot.

Stop.  Please
, he thought.

She grinned at that, a soundless laugh parting her mouth.  There was nothing inside it, only darkness.

The black water swelled Cob's lungs in answer.  “No,” he gurgled through it.  “Mother, stop.  I didn't want—  I didn't know—“

'You knew,'
she whispered, black eyes reflecting the night.
'You saw, even then.  And you became one of them.  Like Dir Niul, running toward the war—like the men, their mouths full of scorn.'

“I—“

'And now you have seen the Guardian's true self.  Coward, fool, neglector, abandoner.  I prayed for its return—holy spire, I begged it to claim one of the slaves, the other women or you.  It could not reenter me, but it could save us somehow.

'But no matter how I called, it never came.  And then you spoke to me of the Light—'
She spat the word like poison. 
'My son, my legacy.  My only inheritor, kissing the feet of the enemy.  You could not understand—'

“I never knew you!” he shouted, trying to pull free of her hands, her swarming hair.  It was like being underwater, no traction for his feet, no sense of gravity—barely an awareness of his body at all.  No concept of where he ended and she began.  “They separated us, locked you away, but even back when we were free, you never told me!  You sent me out into the mountains with the goats, and stayed at home!”

'I called the spirits.  I bade them watch you on the slopes.  But I could not call them in the quarry; the Empire's magic was too strong.  And you...  You were my precious one, and you betrayed me.'

He shook his head vigorously.  The blackness bled through his clenched teeth, through his nostrils and eyes.  He wanted to stop it but there was no end.  The deep well where he'd packed down all his hate and fear had ruptured; it filled his belly, his throat, his skin until he was no more than a thin membrane holding back the darkness, a barrier with a voice.  Even that was failing.  “I didn't—“

'I wove my own rope,'
she breathed.
'Bloodied bedsheets and dress-rags, discarded cords and belts.  All the things they left behind for us to clean up.  I wove my rope and then I climbed the last height, thinking of you—'

“No!  No!”

'Thinking of your father.  Of the Guardian.  How I would sleep in the Dark, and only wake when you were near.'
  Her mouth twisted in a parody of a smile, her fingers suddenly soft on his scalp, his spine. 
'Time brought you all back to me in the end.'

He couldn't speak.  Black ice clogged his veins, made his thoughts stick.  Somewhere beyond her, something glowed, but he couldn't see—couldn't tear his eyes from hers.  She pressed her brow to his, and he felt the barrier tremble.

Was it wrong to give up?  To curl comfortably into her embrace?  As the black sargassum closed in around them, he found himself strangely weightless—almost buoyant, her presence a faint pressure on him.  Not quite equilibrium, but...

'Bring them down,'
she whispered against his lips. 
'They will join us, they will dance with us forever in the silent sea.  Bring down all the lights and shadows, quench them, freeze them in our hearts.  Eternal, unchanging, undying, ours.

'Begin with the Guardian.'

At its name, he felt the spirit suddenly like a tether in his gut, straining against her undertow.  He grappled at it—whether to drag it down or to free himself, he wasn't sure—but at his touch, a flare of pain radiated out from it, delineating every muscle in stark relief.  Separating him from the black mass of her.  He spasmed helplessly, spine bending as the grip clenched tight in his stomach and yanked him up, up, through the dark foliage of fingers and weeds.

As he rose, something fell toward him: a figure, black-eyed, wide-mouthed.  He raised his arms defensively and it mirrored him; he swung his feet up through the rushing water and felt them connect with it, sole to sole.  Cold.  Then he slammed into it like a bubble against ice, its reflected face a hollow mockery of his own.

Their foreheads touched, and he felt something flow from him to it—or it to him.  He couldn't tell.  Cracks scored the surface between them, widening with each new tug on his chain until, pressed flat to its riven surface, he saw the image grin.

Then it shattered, falling away from his brow as his antlers split through, the rest breaking against his chest and shins and thighs as he was pulled through.  And there was light above, chasing the last of the black ribbons from his skin.  Grey light over ruins.

He breached the surface with a choke, the brine still boiling from his mouth.  Soft silt molded itself to his feet.  Ahead, on the shore, stood two solemn figures.  Dernyel and Liska.

“Go away,” he rasped.  “Leave me alone.”

'Do not listen to the Dark,'
said one.

'It lies,'
intoned the other.

He couldn't tell which.  They both sounded the same.

“Go away,” he said.  “You're not even real.  Just masks that the Guardian wears when it wants to manipulate me.  Your souls are gone.”

'We need you to obey.'

'To serve us, not side with it.'

“No.  I'm tired of this.  I'm tired of—“

'You have a responsibility.'

He looked down, not wanting to be here—already missing the blissful emptiness.  Beneath him, the water mirrored his face: normal, tired, crumpled with indecision.  Somewhere down below, the Darkness awaited him, but for now there was only earth beneath his heels.

His eyes still stung.  For years, he'd wrestled with his memory of that night: the rope swaying slowly in the rafters, the shadow on the floor.  To hear it from her mouth—
your fault
—tipped the scales with a dreadful finality.

He wanted it all to stop.  To reverse; to find some point where he could have changed things.  Or, if that was impossible, to forget.

To sleep and never wake...

'This is not done, Ko Vrin.'

“Don't call me that,” he growled.

'You have to finish our work.'

'Kill the Ravager vessel.'

'Pull it down.'

'Quench it.'