The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (10 page)

Some marks later, once all the drinkers had lapsed into sleep and Lark had curled up by the fire in a ball of coats and snores, Dasira heaved herself up and shouldered through the door.

It was dim outside, pre-dawn, and bitterly cold.  She leaned her arms on the porch rail and squinted down the road, trying to suppress a yawn.  Tarwood was just stirring, the sharp crack of a single axe on wood ringing through the still air, a few bundled-up figures moving between longhouses.  In the caravan-shelter beside the tavern, the draft-hogs made surly sounds as the stablehand started his rounds.

“
Are you prepared?” said a soft voice behind her.

She stiffened and glanced over her shoulder at the wraith.  He stood barely a pace behind her, a grey silhouette against the tavern window, cloak and hood hiding everything but the thin line of his mouth.  No frost marked his breath, if he breathed at all.

“Ilshenrir, is it?” she said flatly, mood souring.  She hated being surprised.  “Have you found him?”

“
No.”

“
Then what do you want?”

“
Are you prepared to meet the Guardian?”

She scowled.  “What do you care?”

“I would know how to approach it.”

“
I’d say don’t.”

The wraith tilted its head slightly.  Even from up close, Dasira could not say if it was actually male, or if Lark had just picked the gender of her preference.  The name sounded male but the fine jawline and slim shoulders muddied the image, and she had seen dead ones before; stripped bare, they were like broken dolls, featureless and sexless, their individuality eradicated.  Impossible to think that they had once been people.

“Retreat is no longer an option,” said the wraith.  “Tell me how.”

“
Why are you even here?  Pretending to be a grey wraith, picking up hitchhikers…”

The wraith was silent.  Though she could not see its eyes, she felt it watching her, and her hackles rose.  They always did that, as if they could see straight through their hoods, their masks—as if they had eyes everywhere.

“Answer me,” she said through her teeth.

“
Or?”

She glared at its mouth, at the faint smile that curled there.  Even its teeth were unsettling when they showed: pearly, perfect, all the same.  “Or pike you,” she said.  “You’re a threat.  I should—“

“You will do nothing,” said the wraith.  “You have no options.  I see the connection to your master, abomination.  I recognize his signature.  He has sent you in pursuit again, yes?  After retrieving you from the corpse in which you fought the vessel, died for the vessel.  If I believed you a danger to Aesangat, I would have left you in the Grey.  But you did not lie to Lark.  What is your mission now?”

Dasira stared at the wraith, suddenly very aware of the metal stud in her right ear and the throb of Serindas against her thigh.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The wraith made a faint sound, a laugh or a sigh.  “Answers for answers.”

Her mind raced.  If it had seen her fight Cob in the forest, then it could not be a haelhene; they were locked out of the Mist Forest as much as the airahene were locked in.  As for recognizing Enkhaelen’s signature...

That worried her.  Enkhaelen was usually so cautious with his illicit projects.

All it’s doing is connecting the stud to the body Enkhaelen wore to retrieve me
, she told herself. 
It can’t know who he really is.

“
I’m meant to protect Cob,” she muttered.  “How did you get out of the woods?”

“
Carefully.”

“
That’s not an answer.”

“
It is all that you would understand.  I am here to aid the Guardian.”

“
Why?”

The wraith paused, as if planning to force another admission from her first, but then said, “One of us must.  As I loosed the arrow, I have selected myself for the task.”

Fury gripped her, sudden and hot as a wildfire.  In her mind's eye she saw the enchanted arrow quivering in Cob's side, the ice crawling up his flesh.  The wraiths vanishing into the mist.

Her hand dove through the slit in her dress to yank Serindas free, but the blade's quillons caught on the fabric partway out.  That instant of pause undid her, for as she tore it through the gap, Ilshenrir's hand clamped around her throat and shoved her half-over the railing.  It was hideously strong for such a fragile-looking thing, its hands hard and strange under the gloves, and as she flailed automatically for balance, it caught her forearm and pinned it to the rail.  In the shadow of the hood, its eyes glowed like foggy citrine, without pupil or white.

“Listen to me,” it said softly.  “I am not your enemy.  The airahene fear the Guardian's wrath too much to act, but I must; it was my arrow that struck your friend, my trigger to your master’s trap.  My responsibility.  If we do nothing, if we let the Guardian be taken by your Empire and destroyed, then we are one step closer to our own annihilation.  I will not be dragged back to the White Isle without a fight.”

Dasira snarled up at it, then squelched the rage with a concentrated effort of will.  It would keep.   “Dragged back," she said.  "You’re a haelhene deserter?"

“I am as much a haelhene as you are an Imperial,” said the wraith.  “Control your blade.”

Grimacing, Dasira glanced to the dagger to find that it had twisted in her hand, seeking the wraith's flesh.  She clamped down on its presence in her mind, pushing it to submit, and though it struggled more than usual, it finally slumped in her grip, sullen.  She crammed it back in its sheath.

Ilshenrir released her and stepped away, and she set her feet on the porch again, rubbing her throat.  “Why should I believe you?” she said after a moment.  “You could have stolen a cloak off a grey wraith—“

“
Your belief does not matter.  All I require from you is the way to approach him.”

She opened her mouth, thinking to say,
Tell him the truth.  Tell him everything, from shooting him to being a haelhene wraith
, then decided against it.  As much as she would love to see Guardian-Cob tear Ilshenrir apart, the wraith represented an important resource: mist-travel, knowledge of its kind, potential fighting skill.  Whatever had spurred Cob to leave the woods and head into the Heartlands, it would bring trouble, and she had the bitter sense that she could not deal with it alone.

“
Don’t tell him you shot him,” she said instead.  “He has a temper.  But I don’t know that it will matter.  He’s petrified of wraiths, and it’s obvious what you are.”

The wraith’s thin mouth twitched.  Then, as she watched, the porcelain pallor of its features warmed and softened, taking on a faint peach tone; the sharp planes of its cheeks rounded, the angles of its eyelids curving delicately.  It blinked, and when its eyes opened, they were no longer crystalline but human—a light golden-hazel in a face at once beautiful and masculine, indefinably exotic.  He brushed his hood back to reveal a smooth sweep of blond hair.

“Is it?” he said, and his voice held melody and amusement now, breath pluming in the crisp air.  He touched the cloak with one hand, and its glossy material shifted to a dull woodland green.

Dasira stared, then shook her head slowly.  “He’ll see through your illusion—“

“It is not an illusion.”

Frowning, she eyed him up and down.  His whole outline had shifted under the color-changed cloak—less willowy, more solid though still rather androgynous.  She could not remember ever seeing a haelhene change like that.  “What—“

“I have descended closer to your...solidity.  It has its disadvantages, of course.”

Slower, I hope.  Weaker.
  “All right,” said Dasira grudgingly, “if that’s how you plan to play it, maybe Cob won’t attack you on sight.  But the Guardian…”

“
The Guardian is not in control.”

“
For both our sakes, that had better be true.”

Ilshenrir smiled briefly, then blinked and reached beneath his cloak to draw out the arrowhead.  Its crystalline material glimmered in the dim light, and as he hooked his fingers through its leather cord, it lifted upward in defiance of gravity to point south-east.

“Retrieve the girl,” he said.  “We must go.”

Dasira hesitated, well aware that he might vanish the moment she turned her back.  But he could vanish in front of her too, and had not done that, so she forced herself to the door and into the stifling confines of the tavern, to pick through the caravaners snoring on the common room floor until she found Lark.

Her first shake of the girl’s shoulder drew only a groan.  She resisted the urge to bang Lark’s head against the floor and hooked arms around her bearskin-shrouded waist instead, hauling upward.  Lark awakened with a squawk and a flail, and Dasira let go immediately, satisfied by the subsequent thump.

“
What the—“ said Lark.

“
Up.  We have a trace.”

“
Oh Shadow, my head…”

“
Up!”

Lark staggered to her feet, guided by Dasira’s grip on her arm, and together they navigated back through the sleeping travelers to the door.  The southern girl winced as they stepped into the cold morning, pulling her coat tighter around herself, but Dasira was just relieved to see Ilshenrir still there.  The arrowhead’s glow had intensified in the brief interlude and now hovered like a star on a string.

“Come,” said Ilshenrir, extending one hand to them, his gaze never wavering from the arrowhead.  Already mist had begun to rise from the porch.

Lark clasped his hand and looked back to Dasira.  Fear had already banished the bleariness in her eyes.  “Don’t let go of me, all right?” she said.  “No matter what you see or hear.  It’s…weird in there.”

Remembering Lark’s comment about the underworld, Dasira steeled herself and nodded.

Then the mist rose, and Tarwood was gone.

In the early light, Cob waited beside the half-frozen river, periodically squinting up the road that entered the populated side of Cantorin.  He was not alone; Arik in wolf-form sat next to him, furry head resting against his leg, and Sister Talla stood like a sentinel a few paces away.  She was not in armor but dressed warmly, with a knitted cap over her tight-braided grey hair and several layers of shawls and skirts in the flower-patterned Amandic style, yet she still radiated an unapproachable militancy.

That was fine with Cob.  He had no desire to talk.

They had been bundled out of the hidden temple after a quick hot breakfast and the Mother Matriarch’s blessing in absentia; she was apparently confined to bed.  Cob felt bad about that.  She had seemed nice.

He knew he should be in a better mood.  After all, he was warm and washed and well-fed, his scruffy beard-growth now clean-shaven, and his pack was stuffed with all the food, clothing, and travel supplies it could fit.  It had been difficult to convince the mob of Trifolders to trim down their offerings to just the essentials; if they could have figured out a rucksack that a wolf could wear, Arik would be weighted down too.

Their generosity discomfited him.  He still felt like their enemy, for all that he had chosen to side with the Guardian.

The most important item was tucked in an inner pocket of Cob’s coat: his new travel papers, complete with a license for a tame wolf.  According to them, his name was now Aloyan Erosei, though Sister Merrow—who had procured the papers—had warned him that not all Imperials were ignorant of Kerrindrixi legends. 

It was the only other name he dared take, though, and even then he was uncomfortable.  He understood its necessity; the brand on his shoulder meant that his real name was recorded somewhere in the Imperial archives, and he had the dim sense that there was a network of magic that made such knowledge available to the Imperials.  Still, he hated calling himself by a title he had not earned.

The alternative was to pick a real Darronwayn name, but that felt too dangerous.  The Guardian’s presence already made him distractible without adding a foreign identity he would forget overnight.

All of this made him uneasy as he awaited the caravan, his attention straying from the city to the snow-cloaked hills that stretched eastward.  The plan was to travel with the caravan as a hireling and his guard-wolf, first south to Nissaton and then east to the Amandic capital at Silverton.  From there, they would head southeast to Turo, the only town that shared a border with the Accursed Thornland of Haaraka, where they would meet with a Trifolder enclave and gain passage through the barrier that apparently separated Haaraka from the Empire.

Cob did not look forward to submitting himself to necromancers, even Trifold-trusted ones.  His only experience of such malevolent magic had been through Morshoc, and from the stories, Morshoc’s behavior was standard for his kind.  Yet he hated waiting even more.  Brain abuzz, he had barely slept after the ritual last night, and wanted to be far away now—on the road, moving toward freedom.

‘It will come,’
said a voice beside him. 
‘We are already more free than we were.’

Cob flinched, then grimaced as Sister Talla gave him a brief cool glance.  Slanting his gaze sideways, he found another figure standing just out of arm’s reach.

His father.

“
You’re imaginary,” he muttered into his scarf.  Against his leg, the wolf perked an ear.

The phantasm that was Dernyel son of Rithmar shook his head slowly. 
‘Hallucination, yes.  Imaginary, no.’
  He was not an old man, but weathered, his dark face scoured by years in the mountains, and he wore his black hair bound back in traditional Kerrindrixi style: a waist-length braid as severe as Sister Talla’s.  His black dream-armor had given way to plain herder’s garments of leather and wool, with a goat-hide across his shoulders in lieu of the typical fur covering; over the goat-hide ran a broader strap that held a sheathed greatsword across his back, every inch of it wrapped to conceal the metal.  Cob remembered that sword from the flying dream, an unexpected silver blur.

Dernyel had died nine years ago in Kerrindryr, thrown off the mountain in front of his wife and son.  It unnerved Cob to stand beside him again.

“Why are you here?” he mumbled.

The phantasm looked to him calmly, black eyes like chips of flint. 
‘I am always with you, Ko Vrin.  Your bonds have been weakened enough that we might speak freely, though you need not do it aloud.’

Cob’s grimace deepened at his father’s pronunciation of his name.  All the Guardians called him that, but he could not remember ever answering to it in reality.  They said it meant ‘truth-seeker’, like it was supposed to inspire him to live up to it.

He just wanted them out of his head.

“
I don’t wanna think at you,” he mumbled.  “It’s creepy.”

‘
As you will.’

Silence fell.  Cob stared at his father sidelong, jealous of the patience in the older man’s demeanor.  The serenity.  When he had confronted Dernyel in the flying dream, he had raged at him like a child, yet Dernyel had been the one to apologize.  Despite that, and despite Cob’s shame for his own misbehavior, the ember of anger still seethed in his heart—anger for Dernyel’s death, for his and his mother’s enslavement, for the Guardian trapped inside him.  He felt his hands curling into fists at the mere thought, incapable of letting go.

But he could not yell here.  Not with Sister Talla and the wolf as audience.

“
So the Trifolder ritual worked?  You’re free?” he mumbled instead, trying to make himself relax.

‘
No.  But it helped.’

“
What d’you think of the plan, then?”

Dernyel looked east. 
‘I think that it is necessary.  We have no love for the Haarakash but their necromancy is a tool more than a weapon, and we owe them…reparations.’

“
For what?”

‘
You will have to ask Vina.  I would not intrude upon her memories, and we have something more pressing to discuss.  Your contact with the Dark.’

“
I thought you were the Dark.”

‘
We have discussed this, Ko Vrin.  Though we are associated with the so-called Dark elements, we are not part of them, nor are they malevolent.  As the beast-spirit of prey, we represent those who need protection, those who are hunted or hurt or simply frightened, and those who wish to shelter their offspring.  We are no more the true Dark than the Ravager is the true Light.’

Cob made a face behind his muffling scarf.  Stated that way, he had no argument.  “So what’s the problem?”

‘You are in danger.  You touched the true Dark in Thynbell when you destroyed the wards, and now it seeks you.’

Cob nodded slowly, having revisited that memory all night.  He had been dragged down from the monstrous Lady Annia’s boudoir after their disastrous encounter and been thrown into a cell ringed with arcane wards, alongside another prisoner: Geraad, a fallen Circle mage.  Pity toward Geraad had led him to call upon the Guardian's power to break the wards outside the cell—his first purposeful collaboration with his 'rider'.

But the draining magic had gone into a great nether darkness in such a mad torrent that he had found himself being battered down with it.  And there had been something in those black depths—something that pulled at him.

It was the same as the Darkness in the Trifold ritual, trying to get in.

‘As welcoming as the Trifolders wish to be, theirs is a place of fire and metal,’
said Dernyel. 
‘Their powers weaken our own, but the Dark is not so easily dissuaded.  It is strong enough to penetrate even the brightest sanctum, the noblest heart; the only light it can not block is the sun, and so the Trifolders are right to send you to the Haarakash.  But you must take care along the way.  You must allow us to aid you, not try to use our powers yourself.  You do not know how to do it safely.  We will teach you, but it will take time.’

“
You’re the ones who showed me how to break the wards,” Cob muttered.

‘
Yes.  It was our mistake.’

“
I don’t regret it.  Dark findin’ me or not, it needed to be done.”

Dernyel was silent.  Cob had no doubt that the Guardian disagreed; though a pitiable prisoner, Geraad had still been an Imperial.  An enemy of the spirits.

Cob could not think that way.  The Guardian might not be the malevolent corrupter that he had expected, but it was not his friend—not after what it had made him do.  Those who hated or feared it were not automatically his enemies.

The wolf bumped his hand from below, and he looked down into pale, quizzical eyes and forced a smile, trying to shake his annoyance.  He let his hand stray through the quill-thick ruff to scratch under the furry jaw, and Arik leaned into his fingers with a pleased sound, tail whapping against the back of his boot.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dernyel watching him in displeasure.

‘
You should not put your trust in him.’

“
Pike you.”

‘
He is one of Raun’s children.  Ninke Raunagi, the First Hunter, the predator who split the Great Spirit with the first act of murder.  His master is the Ravager, not you.’

“
He’s my friend,” Cob said under his breath.

‘
No.  He is your warden, like the lying splinter in your soul.  The one you call Lerien.  They will both betray you, Ko Vrin.  They will keep you in your trap and offer you to our enemy at the first opportunity.’

Cob shook his head sharply.  Whether in wolf-form or human, Arik had never tried to steer him, never advised him except in pursuing women.  He had come to Cob’s rescue in the Mist Forest, pulled him from his black moods, and followed him into civilization without complaint or question.  He was the best companion Cob had ever had.  Dernyel badmouthing him only made Cob want to punch his father in the face.

He settled for crouching and scratching the wolf more thoroughly, and the beast flopped to the slushy ground as if unable to stand against the assault, eyes half-closed in bliss.

‘
He is lulling you into—‘

“
Shut up,” Cob muttered.  “I don’t pikin’ care what you think.”

For a time afterward, there was silence but for the happy panting of the wolf and the occasional exhale from Sister Talla.  Finally, the Sister said, “I do hope you’re done talking to yourself.  This is your ride.”

Cob looked up and was relieved to see no sign of his father.  At the Cantorin gates, the first draft-hog of a caravan was trudging out: a rusty barrel-shaped beast almost half the size of the wagon it drew, its whole body covered in thick hide plates but for its snout and the long triangles of its ears.  A man walked beside it with a driver’s switch, occasionally swatting the back of its ear; as its shoulder came up level with the man’s, it was a tribute to the creature’s amiability that it did not sideswipe and crush him.

“
Yeah,” Cob said, reluctantly straightening.  The wolf flipped to his feet and looked sly, but Cob stared at him until he lowered its head and slunk away before shaking the slush wildly from his coat.  Some still spattered on Cob, and he bent down to gather wet snow.

“
This is not the time to play,” said the Sister.

“
Not playin’,” said Cob, but let the snow fall.  He could always mash the wolf into a snowbank later.

Slowly the caravan approached, and Cob frowned.  He could outpace the whole thing at a brisk march, which he had been trained to keep up for days—but then this was unfamiliar territory with unfriendly soldiers around, which meant caution instead of speed.  Just watching it grated on his nerves, though.  More delay meant more time stuck with the Guardian in his head.

“Hoi, Meleth,” called Sister Talla as the lead wagon drew into earshot.  The man walking beside the hog nodded curtly toward her and yanked the chain that ran along the beast’s cheek, pulling one of the rings in its soft nose.  It snorted and turned into the pull, and he steered it toward them.  As it drew close, the wolf tucked himself cautiously behind Cob’s legs.

“
This the fare?” said Meleth as he looked over Cob and the wolf.  He was a round-faced, rosy-cheeked man made stocky by the many layers beneath his coat, and wore a peaked hat with a crest of branches and spindles stitched to the front.  The same crest was painted on the wagons.  Cob guessed a woodwork and fabric exporter, and hunched his shoulders so as to not loom so much.

Sister Talla nodded, drawing a small pouch from the swaddle of her clothes and passing it over.  The man weighed it briefly before tucking it away.  “Traveling to Turo,” she said.  “Willing to work as needed.”

“That right?” said the man, glancing up to Cob again.

Cob nodded.

“Good.  Can’t let you ride with that wolf, it’ll anger the hogs.  Got to keep it away from them, you understand?”

“
Yeah.”