The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (3 page)

"The little brassy one."

Cob nodded and counted them into the satchel-man’s hand.  “So the embassy is…?”

“Over the bridge, two streets north, big stone place with the blue and yellow banners.  Get your papers before the morning or you’ll have to ransom yourself out of jail.  Wolf too.”  He noted the payment, snapped the logbook shut and tucked it away, then pulled out what looked like a stick of red chalk and gestured for Cob to extend his hand.  Blinking, Cob did so, and the man sketched a mountain and a five above his knuckles with the stuff.  It felt greasy.  “Don’t wash that off.  Shows you came in today.  And keep your beast under control.”

Earth’s-day the fifth
, thought Cob, examining the mark.
  It’s Cylanmont, then.  Been out of the army less than a month.

“
I’ll do my best, sir,” he said out loud.  The wolf, fortunately, made no comment.

The satchel-man gave him a curt nod and retook his spot, and Cob passed between them with the wolf on his heels, trying to ignore the nervous roil in his gut.  In the distance, Cantorin proper looked anything but foreboding, but it would be his first true Imperial experience; while Thynbell was also an Imperial city, Cob had spent most of his time there either unconscious or locked-up, with only a glimpse of the city sights through the barred window of his prison-carriage.  Entering a real Imperial Heartlands city on foot and free was something else entirely.

He desperately wanted it to be a nice place.  He had been brought up on stories of the Empire’s greatness and benevolence, and though he had seen the sour side of it, he still believed in the sweet.  There had to be some truth to the tales.  After all, why would so many people live in the Imperial Heartlands if it was bad?

A few yards past the guards, his sharp ears caught the pikeman mutter, “Darker than the usual woodsfolk.”

“Probably ogre-blood,” the satchel-man replied.  “You know them northerners.  Shack up with anything.”

The pikeman snorted, and Cob felt their eyes on his back.  He picked up the pace.

It was a long stretch from the gate to the bridge.  The road had been scraped clear and the snow piled on either side, leaving knee-high embankments to define the boundaries of the ruins.  No side-roads or foot-traffic or signs of life marred that winter-shrouded expanse, but Cob’s gaze strayed across it regardless, tracing the fallen blocks and broken walls as his thoughts churned.

After all, he was not a Darronwayn.  Heading to their embassy would be foolish—and so would wandering aimlessly through the city, as he had learned in Bahlaer.  Men his age were snapped up on sight by Imperial and civil recruiters.  The embassy might even be a trap to catch stray Darronwayn men as they went to get papers.  While he had once aspired to be a freesoldier, that dream had died with Jas Fendil at the War Gate of the Crimson encampment, and he could not risk his slave-brand being seen.

He was not sure what else to do, though.  He could not just go around asking about Trifolders; this was Imperial territory, and if Trifold temples even existed here, they would depend on secrecy to keep them from being rooted out by the Gold Army.  Finding Shadow Folk might be easier, but they were just as anathema to the Empire, and he thought it even less likely that they would have visible enclaves like they had in Bahlaer.

Big gamble, Cob
, he thought. 
If not, what next?  Keep on with the pilgrimage to Daecia City?  Climb onto the altar and let them destroy the Guardian after all?

It was a possibility.  He felt like two people sometimes, torn between the Light and the Dark.  The image of the Imperial City still burned in his head, all white stone and shimmering spires.

Redemption.  Peace.  An end to all of this.

But the Guardian was not what he had expected, and there was the matter of his father and Morshoc.  If anything could keep him tied to this world, it was revenge.

Halfway to the bridge, a wave of dizziness halted him, and he swayed in his tracks, blinking.  His first thought was hunger; even with Arik hunting, there had not been much, and he had let the wolf have most of it.  Half-cooked hare did not sit well in his stomach.  But the dizziness gave way to a strange buoyancy, and as the world shifted around him, he realized that he was having a vision.

Gone were the snow and the winter sky.  Gone were the ruins.  In their place rose columns strung with banners of red and yellow, violet and blue, marked with pictograms that he somehow understood as words.  Hot-Water-Road.  Place-of-Spirit-Houses-Road.  Below them, the wide streets were tiled in wave-like patterns, and huge people plodded along—massive, rotund, bald or bewigged people, their skin glossy red or black or olive, their garments loose and flowing.

Ogres.  Like Vina Treakhaher, the first Guardian in his flying dream.  Ogres in vibrant robes and sandals, followed by smaller people in drabber attire—some furred like skinchangers, some human, all walking behind as attendants.  The buildings that lined the streets were single-story but tall, with curved roofs of polished tile and doorways wide enough for six humans abreast.  Beyond the city walls, the hills were covered in vineyard and orchard and terraced fields, and to the east where the river had been, there lay a vast glimmering lake, its surface marred by the heavyset swimmers that bobbed there like corks in a barrel.

Cob took in all of it, puzzled.  And then he spotted Vina.

She wore no colorful robes; her garments were fur and teeth and claws and the serpents that draped her dark, sloping shoulders.  She stood near the end of the Hot-Water-Road, and though he could not make out her expression, he felt the connection when their eyes met.  Without breaking the gaze, she turned down a cross-street and vanished among the towering buildings.

Despite the walls, he sensed her clearly, and followed her progress as the floating sensation began to fade.  The color bled from the banners, the rooftops, the hills.  Buildings crumbled.  Orchards died.

He blinked, and all was ruins once more.  For a moment he saw Vina's dark bulk outlined by the snow and wreckage, then she too was gone.  A pale grey banner twitched in the wind where she had been.

“
What was that about?” he muttered as the Guardian sank back into the depths.  It did not answer.  His head ached, but not as badly as it did when the spirit tried to control him; hallucinations evidently took less effort.

Squinting, he regarded the banner.  Vina had obviously wanted him to see it, as if it was an answer to his question, and though it was strange to think that the Trifolders or the Shadow Folk would be out here in this desolation, on second thought it made a kind of sense.  There might be intact basements among the ruins, or hidden structures—perhaps even the kind of undercity he had seen in Bahlaer—and this area did not seem to be patrolled.

How did you know about them?
he thought at the Guardian.  It did not respond.

That annoyed him, but he told himself that it had already done enough.  He did not know how much effort these visions cost it, and it was a relief that it was willing to communicate at all.

He glanced to the guard-post, but the guards were not watching.  When he looked back, he almost missed the banner, so well-camouflaged was it by the rubble.

“
Pikes,” he muttered.  “So if I go to the city, I might never spot that again.  Which means the city’s gotta wait.”

The way his heart lifted at that realization made him feel like a coward.  For all the dangers the city represented, a part of him wanted to brave it—to force his way through the inevitable conflict and see the Empire laid bare, not skulk around in the rubble.  Pragmatism dictated he take the evasive way, though, and with mixed regret and relief, he focused on the banner.  A cold nose nudged his hand and he nodded, not daring to look away.  “Yeah, we’re takin’ the detour,” he told the wolf, then stepped over the low snowbank into the pristine white.

The wolf sprang after him eagerly, and together they crunched toward the interior.  The snow deepened to mid-shin, and Cob angled toward the nearest ruined wall, wanting to stay out of sight in case the guards looked back.  It would be frighteningly easy for someone to track him.  The wolf let him break trail, occasionally peeking past his waist to see where they were going, and Cob did his best to keep the position of the banner fixed in his mind.

That this had once been an ogre place amazed him.  He dimly remembered his dream of Vina and her army and their long march past the red rocks of Varaku; evidently the ogres had once spread their influence far and wide.  Now they were found only in the northern lands—mostly Krovichanka and Gejara—and no full-blooded ogre had passed through the Pinch in a hundred years.  Gejaran ogrekin sometimes found employment with the Imperial Armies as mercenaries, and evidently there was some of the bloodline in Darronwy, but it was strange to think that things had once been so different.

Then again, much of what the Guardian showed him was different.  Swamps where arid grassland now grew, mountains turned to islands, the plateaus of Varaku standing unbroken, the Rift gone—to say nothing of the cities, the people.  Thousands of years of upheaval lurked in his head, and it troubled him.

He navigated cautiously among the crumbled buildings.  It was colder in their shadows, and he drew his coat tighter; two years spent in the scorched plains of Illane had taken the edge from his Kerrindrixi cold-tolerance and he had yet to get it back.  All was silent beside the crunch of his boots in the snow, but when he reached the turn that Vina had gone down, he spotted another set of tracks.

He blinked.  Certainly those were not Vina’s prints.

Peeking around the corner, he saw nothing but ruins, no movement but the distant flick of the banner.  No sound but his breath and the wolf’s soft panting.  Warily, he moved to the new tracks and felt their edges.  The snow inside was still soft, neither melted nor refrozen, and the boot-prints were small but deeply impressed: a woman or a child carrying a heavy burden.  The trail seemed to run parallel to the road, toward the banner.

“That means someone’s there,” he told the wolf softly.  “Suppose that’s a good thing.”

The wolf leaned in to sniff the tracks, then nudged Cob banner-ward with his head.

They followed the trail to the entryway of a roofless stone ruin, its broken walls shellacked with ice.  The inside was shadowed, and Cob sidled in carefully, feeling more ice on the floor.  Shattered columns littered the interior, and from their placement he guessed that this had been a banquet hall or temple—no inner walls, just a vast gallery.  If there had been furniture, it had rotted away long ago.

The banner hung from a surviving column that jutted from a platform at the rear of the building like a tusk in a ruined jaw.  It had a mark on it of three crossed lines, the same as the etching on the bronze band Jasper had given him in Bahlaer.  Cob had lost that in Thynbell along with everything else he had owned, but he still remembered it.  Jasper had told him it would protect him.

A Trifold place, then.

The ice showed no tracks, so Cob picked his way through the rubble toward the banner.  There was no further to go—the back wall loomed, a cyclopean hole gaping where its window had been—but as he approached the column he saw a square chiseled from the ice on the floor behind it.  A trapdoor lay there, almost blending in with the stone.

He crouched before it, and the wolf sniffed the edge.  A slight indent in the stone showed him where to grip.

“
What do you think?” he murmured.

The wolf huffed, then chewed at his paw.

“You’re too helpful.”

Regarding the trapdoor, he noted that the rim of the gripping indent was painted red.  In his mind’s eye he saw Ammala Cray’s house in Illane, its doorway painted the same.

“Protection,” he said.  “Definitely Trifolders.  So it should be safe, right?”  The wolf did not answer, so with a deep breath, Cob wedged his hands into the gap and hauled the trapdoor open.

Warm air gusted up and dissipated in the chill.  Beneath was a square hole edged in red.  Slick, rough-hewn steps descended into dimness.

The wolf sidled forward and gingerly extended a paw to touch the first step.  When nothing happened, he slunk in, nails clicking on the stone.  Cob waited for him to get a few steps down, then slid in after, lowering the door behind him.  As the light from above faded, a faint warm glow bloomed from below.

Another step down, and Cob bumped into the wolf, who had paused.  “What?” he whispered.

The wolf huffed again, then Cob heard the pop of joints and creak of stretching sinews.  He grimaced; however familiar this had become, it was still unnerving.  He reached back to pull the rolled-up chiton from the top of his pack as the wolf rose onto two legs, blocking the glow.  “So now you wanna be human?”

“
Yes,” came Arik’s voice in the dark, rusty from disuse.  “It is warm enough in here.”

“
Want your boots?”

“
Not yet.”

Cob passed the chiton into the skinchanger’s hairy-knuckled hand, then leaned away while he pulled it on.  As a wolf, Arik had come to Cob’s rescue twelve days ago when he had been fleeing the ambushed caravan with Gold soldiers on his heels.  He had never met a skinchanger before, and at first it was terrifying, but now it was just awkward when Arik decided to walk around naked.  Cob had improvised the chiton out of a blanket to deal with that problem.