The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (54 page)

“
But you harassed individual necromancers.”

She exhaled heavily.  “Yes, of course.  The Haarakash have a mission to contain the wraiths, but necromancers outside of here just did whatever nasty thing came to mind.  So whenever we heard about one, the Silent Circle and the Brancirans would hunt them down and end them.  It’s just…how things were.”

“Back then.”

“
Yes.”

“
How long ago?”

“
I don’t know.  A couple hundred years.  Why?”

Cob closed his eyes, trying to form a picture in his mind.  The Morshoc-Ravager on the sandy shore four hundred years ago, unraveling the last Seal while Erosei hunted for him.  On the mainland, Trifolders and Silent Circle executing all others who followed his art.

Jasper and Morshoc in the cart, arguing about Justiciars and deaths while they thought he was asleep.

“
You’re not having second thoughts, are you?” said Fiora.

He opened his eyes to find her propped up on one arm, watching him.  “No.  I want the Guardian free and Morshoc dead.  I jus’…  There’s something I’m missing.”

“If there is, what would it change?”

“
Nothin’, I s’pose.  You’re really with me on killin’ him?”

Her grimace was obvious even in the thin light.  “If he lairs in the Imperial City, then he serves the Empire, and I want to see the Empire fall.  My father shouldn’t have been conscripted.  He had two young girls to look after, and no one to send us to, but did they care?  No.  They said the Gold Army needed more men, and then they flung him at the Corvish for no good reason, like they’ve been doing for decades.  I had to sell everything to get my sister apprenticed, and what I couldn’t sell, the Imperial tax-men just took.

“The Trifolders my age, they don’t get it.  Most of them were born into the faith, born in the basements and raised on stories of heroic martyrdom in war.  But my father took a Corvish arrow to the throat, and I can’t forgive the Empire for putting him in its path.  I can’t forgive the pawnbroker who paid me a pittance because he knew I was a girl and couldn’t complain.  I can’t forgive the people who just let this keep happening and pass it on to the next generation.  I want to do something.  I have to.  If I’d had to stay in Cantorin while you went on to fight Morshoc, I swear I would’ve choked Tavia and her gang of giggly useless girls to death.”

Cob stared at her.  He had never thought a girl could hold so much rage, but her voice fairly vibrated with it, and her hands were fisted in the rough grass.  For a moment he thought of Ammala’s family, Vriene’s family, both broken up by the Armies’ need for men, and his chest hurt.

“I’m not here t’ make the Empire fall,” he said quietly.

“
I know.  But killing Morshoc is good enough.  And we cursed well have a better shot than a bunch of whiners in a basement.”

He could not help his snort.  She kicked him in the leg.  “It’s not funny!”

“It kinda is,” he said, grabbing her foot.  She kicked him with the other and he grabbed that one too, so she threw handfuls of grass at him while she struggled, and he told himself that this had nothing to do with the way her sarong rode up.  Then she swatted him across the face with a long stalk of praxum and all bets were off.

One scuffle later and they were back to skywatching, Cob pinching his nose shut and Fiora rubbing her arm.  “You’ve got a hard skull,” she said.

“Yeah, well no one asked you to cram your elbow up my nose.”

“
It was effective.  I’ve been well-trained.”

“
I was goin’ easy on you.”

“
Oh yeah?”

He intercepted the praxum with his arm this time and yanked it from her grip, and she flopped back down with a huff.  From the corner of his eye he watched her straighten the sarong.  His blood fizzed and he told himself to stop it and rolled onto his stomach.

She propped her feet up on his backside proprietarily.  It was not helpful.

“
How did you get so angry?” she said abruptly.

“’
M not angry.”

“
Well, not now.  But when you are, it’s scary.”

Cob shrugged.  It was not something he wanted to think about.

“Are you angry at us?”

“’
Us’…the Trifolders?  I’m not angry at the Trifolders.”

“
But you’re an Imperial Light-follower.  There has to be a reason for that.  I mean, you were a slave, right?”

Cob picked at the grass, trying not to be offended.  He hated talking about this, but at least she was asking instead of hollering.  “Yeah, I was a slave.  Converted to the Light when I was twelve.”

“Why?”

“
Killed someone.”

“
At
twelve
?”

“
I was a quarry-slave,” he said flatly, trying to keep his mind on the grass and nothing else.  Trying to keep to the bare facts.  “Jus’ up from bein’ a runner to workin’ on the rocks.  This…fella caught me in a corner when no one was lookin’.  Another slave.  There was…a scuffle.  I hit ‘im with a rock.  Sharp rock.  Real hard.”

“
Oh,” said Fiora softly.

“
The guards decided it was a rockfall.  They didn’t care what us slaves did to each other.  But I’d done a bad thing, y’know?  M’mother said it was all right, but it wasn’t.  And there was a priest in the camp, a Kerrindrixi fella.  He’d talk at us every mornin’, and before that I thought it was jus’ weird stories, but there was stuff about…purification and redemption.  And I felt like shit, I was havin’ nightmares.  So I went and talked with him.

“
It made sense then.  I still think it makes sense.  Redemption through service, purification through sacrifice.  I wanted to not feel bad anymore, y’know?

“
But…m’mother didn’t take it well.  When I told her, she looked sad.  Tried to smile, but…”

He closed his eyes and saw the shadow on the swinging rope.  His skin prickled coldly and he swallowed, not wanting to say it, not wanting to hear it aloud.

“…she hanged herself a couple days later.”

He waited for Fiora to respond, to say
so it was all your fault
or
better to die than convert
.  But she said nothing, and unpropped her feet from him, and he glanced over to see her stretch out next to him and regard him sidelong.  He looked away.

She touched his shoulder.  He forced himself not to shrug her off.

“After that, I guess I jus’ stuck with it,” he continued finally, surprised to feel no water in his eyes or weight in his lungs—none of the usual sick, sodden feelings.  Just weariness.  “I thought ‘that’s what I get, that’s my sacrifice’.  Losin’ her.  And lookin’ back, maybe I was crazy but it made me think there was a balance to the world.  Like I needed it, even if it was painful.  I understood it.  Y’do somethin’ bad and somethin’ bad happens to you.”

“
Simple,” said Fiora.

“
Yeah.  But then I came down from the quarry when I was fifteen and the Crimson Army had no priests, no one t’ tell me what it meant.  What I should do.  I got stuck in a worker brigade with a buncha heretics and they were always hasslin’ me, but I figured bein’ in the Light meant helpin’ people even when they didn’t want help, so I did that.  Usually it meant bendin’ their fool heads until they learned to behave.”

“
You beat people up for the Light?”

“
Heh.  I guess.”

“
Did it work?”

“
Uh…we got whipped a lot for fightin’, but that’s better than gettin’ a hand cut off for thievin’ or executed for tryin’ to stab a freesoldier.”

“
But it was them doing the fool things?”

“
Yeah.”

“
So you got whipped for them?  Most people would try to avoid that.”

“
Most people wanna get away with all the crap they do.”

“
You don’t?”

Cob looked at her in the thin moonlight, at the line of puzzlement creasing her brows and the moue of her lips, and realized that she was really listening.  Even if she didn’t get it, she was trying to figure him out.  He flushed slightly, feeling self-conscious yet proud that he had not gone all soggy.

“Well, no,” he said.  “That’s the point of livin’ in the Light.  Y’can’t hide what you’ve done, not from the world and not from yourself.  The priest told me that if I was truly sorry for killin’ the man, I had to live right.  I had to let the Light burn me, because that’s the only way to chase off the darkness.  I had to work hard, be honest, make no excuses, and take the punishments I deserve.”

Fiora considered him for a long moment, then said, “Have you lived up to it?”

“I’ve tried.  I—“  He thought of the Guardian and grimaced.  “I don’t know.  I wanted t’ turn myself in and get exorcised by the Empire, but I didn’t wanna die, and now I don’t think it’d be right.  There’s so many people involved in this—you, the Armies, the Trifold, Morshoc, the wraiths, the Haarakash, the Shadow Cult.  Even the Corvishfolk.  I don’t know who’s right, who’s in the Light and who’s not.  The Guardian’s not Dark, jus’ angry, and so am I.

“
So I’ll jus’…do what I have to do.  And anyone who wants my blood can come try me.”

Fiora sighed.  “Sounds almost reasonable when you talk about it like that.”

“You wanna convert?”

She smacked his arm and he grinned in the dark.  Then, to his shock, her warm hand moved to his neck and she leaned in and pressed her lips to his cheek.  Her long hair brushed against him like a million tiny fingers.

“You’re a good man,” she murmured.  “Kind of an idiot, but good anyway.”

Flushed to his ears, Cob mumbled something incoherent.  The moonlight limned her curves beneath the light blouse, and her eyes seemed lambent, a faint smile lingering on her mouth.  The place where she had touched still tingled.  His heart thundered in his chest, and he sat up cautiously, unsure if she would laugh, but she shifted closer instead and took one of his hands in hers.

“There shouldn’t just be punishments,” she said.  “There should be rewards.  Not just the light, but the warmth as well.”

Then she guided his hand to her waist and coaxed him near, and he went gladly.

*****

In the dark time between moonset and dawn, a hawk glided down from the frosted hills.  It had flown a long way but felt neither weariness nor cold, though the beetle in the vacant socket of its left eye had long since curled up and died.  In its talons, the hawk held a tiny amulet in the shape of a rose.

Between one wingbeat and the next, it passed through the Haaraka barrier.  The warm breeze lifted it high over the thorn wilderness.  Where men would have taken days to pass, it flew in scant marks, until the predawn glow touched the horizon to show roofs and pavilions still dreaming in the morning mist.

The hawk circled down to perch on a familiar windowsill, and tapped lightly on the colored glass.  Then again, more insistently.  When the curtain drew aside, it lifted the amulet into view.

A long hesitation passed between hawk and occupant, then the window opened and the bird hopped inside.

Part 4

Mnema

The morning sky above the Crimson Army camp was thick with clouds, but Weshker barely saw them.  All of his attention should have been on the walls of the warehouse he was climbing—rough brick carted down from Fellen after wood became a dangerous commodity—but he could not focus on that either.  Not with Sanava less than a yard above.

She clung to the wall like a tick in a white dress, strong fingers that had so recently dug into the back of his neck now finding the narrow gaps between bricks, the places where the mortar had already crumbled.   A few spots had no brick at all, and Weshker had nearly gotten his fingers snapped off by grigs nesting in the gaps, their stubby wings sufficient to get them up here and their sawlike teeth enough to keep him at bay.  Sanava seemed not to care; sometimes she avoided their nests but once she scooped one right out of the brick, nearly dropping the patch of rags and twigs and its squawking occupant onto Weshker's head.

If not for the flashes of leg, he would have said 'pike this' long ago.

The white dress disappeared over the edge of the roof, and he snapped back to awareness of his position nearly thirty feet in the air.  For a moment his hands locked on the brickwork and he broke out in a sweat.  He had no fear of heights in general, but in specific, clinging by the fingers and toes to a rough wall above a stinking alley was not what he had been hoping for today.

“
Come on, Korvii-boy,”
she taunted him over the edge, and he grunted and forced himself to keep climbing.  He had not come this far for nothing.

As he crested the edge, she hooked a hand into his uniform collar and pulled him onto the roof headfirst.  He caught for her as he tumbled, but she was too quick and his hands only grazed fabric before he hit the weathered boards.

"
Not yet, not yet
," she said in Corvish.  "
Not until we call the crows
."

Weshker groaned, but rearranged himself into a sitting position, the base of his spine against the brick lip of the roof.  A yard or so away, Sanava put her hands on her hips and arched coppery brows at him; the sun hung occluded behind her, drawing a pearlescent outline around her shadowed form.

"
Giving up so soon
?" she teased.

"
Au
, I jes' have no desire t'be kicked off the roof."

Her expression darkened at his use of the Imperial tongue, and he grimaced.  They had met a few times since their encounter in the women's barrack closet, and she had tried to get him to speak Corvish.  And he wanted to; since that day, he spent most of his time in a haze of thoughts about her—her taste, her scent, the feel of her against him—and in racking his brain for every scrap of his birth-language.

But he had spent more time among the Imperials now than among his kin, and his vocabulary had dwindled.  There was so much he could not say without the Imperial tongue.

"
Nin ha, nin ha
," he tried, holding up his hands placatingly.  He was getting to know that apologetic phrase well.  "
You know I speak bad
," he continued more slowly, working to get the words right—or at least in the right order.

Was he imagining things, or did her lips twitch in amusement?

"
Aa
," she said in acknowledgement, and there was definitely a smile in her voice.  "
Thus we practice.  Thus perhaps why the crows do not come
."

He swallowed thickly and nodded, and she stepped closer to fold herself down in front of him.  It was not just language-practice that she had mandated, but regular attempts to summon up the crows that had twice aided him—the spirits that had poured from his tattooed shoulder to attack first the clay monstrosity that had tried to eat him, and then the mages who had gone digging through his mind.

"
Shirt off
," she told him, and he eagerly fumbled with the buttons of his jacket, peeled it away, then wriggled out of the tunic and undershirt below.  The camp had cooled from the rains and the turn of the seasons, mandating a few layers, but despite her thin dress, Sanava did not look chilled.  He supposed she was not yet adapted to the hot lowlands.

Scooting closer, she beckoned him to turn so she could see his left shoulder, and he complied.  Her hand on his skin felt like desert sunlight, warm and a bit rough.  He tried not to look down the neckline of her dress as she leaned close, instead focusing on her cheek, her ear, the smooth slope of her neck and shoulder and the loose auburn flow of her long hair.

He wanted to bury his face in it.  Keeping his hands knotted together in his lap was difficulty itself.

Her nails nipped lightly at his skin as she poked, squeezed and thumbed along the contours of his slave brand.  Weshker tried not to make a face.  He had been branded more than a decade ago, after his clan's slaughter by the Gold Army and the Wyndish Border Corps, and the mark had stretched and gone smeary with time.  His designation, CRV117, was almost illegible beneath the fallen tree mark for Corvia, which itself defaced the crow tattoo he had been given after his successful spirit-quest.

The number meant that before him, only a hundred and sixteen Corvishfolk had survived capture to become slaves.  He doubted many had lived much longer than that.

He wondered what number Sanava bore under her sleeve, and why she had not cut her own throat after receiving it.

Finally, she sat back and cupped her chin in one hand, slanted brown eyes narrowed to slits as she contemplated him.  "
I am kin to neither spirits nor magic
," she said thoughtfully, "
but I think they afflict you both.  The spirit must be there, in you.  It has come out twice, yes?  But there is magic to prevent such things from outside
."

She pointed at the sky, and Weshker squinted up, then nodded his understanding.  The camp wards—the magical dome that kept out enemy spells and probably spirits.

"So the crows live in your soul
," she continued, "
and come out for danger.  Never before the monster?
"

"
No, that was first.  But I have had danger before
..."

She tapped short sharp nails against her chin in thought.  Her critical gaze made him shift anxiously; he wondered if he smelled, or was dirtier than the men she was used to.  He had scrubbed clean on the first day of his induction into the freesoldier army, but since then had not visited the wash-section of the river much; he did not like the idea of being exposed among so many other men.  One of his fellow scouts had threatened to throw him in the river if he did not go soon, but he kept avoiding it.  There were more important things to do.

Like be here.

But she was clean.  She was very clean.  So what did she think of him, if he couldn't manage not to be a little earthworm?  Why would she want him when there were hordes of other men—

And that was where those self-pitying thoughts always stopped, because he had seen the women's barracks.  He had seen the hospitality tables, and the rows of barely curtained beds.  He knew what happened here, and that the slave-women had no choice.

And he knew that Sanava was up here on the roof with him, alone, because she wanted to be.

"
Of course you have been in danger before
," she scoffed, "
or you would not bear a brand.  Did the crows not aid you when you were taken
?"

Grimacing, Weshker tried to remember.  There had been so much smoke, so many shouts and screams, and a veritable blizzard of crows—spirit and flesh and skinchanger alike.  And cunning cousin-foxes, switching forms on demand, tracking blood through the snow and ash as they fought to keep the Imperials away from their more fragile human kin.  There had been screams in the shadows, demand for the assistance of the Kheri, but the Talkur-Nent clan had broken their promise to the Shadow Folk first, and so no reinforcements had come.  No rescue.

He remembered the strain in his arms as he pulled a bow too big for him, as he fumbled with the arrows while the smoke stitched pain through his lungs.  He remembered the screams of his sisters—rage or fear, it was hard to tell.  Remembered the fighting between the huts, and the fire in the cave, as if the volcano Aekhaelesgeria had awakened and was belching flame through this low, minor mouth.

Had there been wings stroking comfortingly against his cheek as he struggled to put an arrow through a soldier's neck?  Had there been claws on his shoulders, gathering as if to bear him away into the sky?

He coud not be sure.  Sometimes he dreamed that the black host had swooped down and carried him and all his family away, brought them to the great roosts on the flanks of the fuming, holy mountain.  Or that his sisters had all transformed into crows and foxes as soon as the clanhold's walls were breached, and escaped through the gaps into the snowclad forest.

And sometimes he dreamed that he himself was a crow, picking through the smoking remains of his old home.  Plucking at the bone charms around his sisters' pale necks, the obsidian beads, the copper rings. Snipping out soft tongues; relishing the last visions in frosted eyes.

"
I don't know
," he whispered.  "
It was a long time ago.
"

Her incisive gaze softened slightly, and she set a callused hand on his.  It swept away the morose mood and he turned his fingers to meet hers, wondering where she had gotten those calluses—wondering if she spent much of her time in high places like this, avoiding the soldiers and her fellow slave-women down below.  She seemed a better crow than him.

"
Perhaps the monster did something
," she mused.

"
Perhaps
..."  He frowned.  "
It nearly killed me.  If not for the crows...  If not for their claws cutting me, I would not be sure that I am me, and not it.  It wanted my face.  I have never been so close to death.  Perhaps they have been sleeping inside me, waiting to save my life
?"

Her mouth pursed.  He wanted to kiss it.  She was so close.  "
You were not long past your marking when you were taken?  You were never trained?
"

"
True
."

"
Then perhaps it is all they can do.  You are meant to be a spirit-speaker but you never learned, and so you are deaf to them, mute.  Like the rest of us.  If we had the awakening-smoke, perhaps we could reach the spirits again and beseech them to teach you, but
..."

Sanava spread her hands apologetically, one still linked with Weshker's, and he nodded his understanding.  Neither of them had the resources or knowledge to gather a shaman's supplies—the narcotic herbs that breached the barrier to the spirit world, the bone tools and blessed inks that could fix his tattoo and extend its covenants further across his skin, the scrolls of ritual summonings and offerings and pacts, the sacrificial blades.  Weshker could barely speak the language.

If Maevor had still been around, perhaps Wesker could have sought his aid, and that of the Kheri black market.  Surely even though the Shadow Folk had abandoned the Talkur-Nent, they had not turned their backs on all Corvishfolk.

But Maevor was gone to the Palace.  Probably dead.  And Weshker had no allies here, no matter what his new captain said.

"
We can do nothing, then
?" he said, worried.  If he had nothing to show for this 'training', the captain would probably cut him off—maybe even send him to the Palace like the others.  And he would lose her...

Sanava smiled with one corner of her mouth and twined her fingers more firmly with his.  "
We can do many things.  Teach you to be Vesha Geiri, not this Imperial mask you wear.  Teach you to be Korvii, that when we are free of this prison, we can speak with spirits as is proper.  Teach you to be a man, hm?  That demands some practice
."

His heart skipped a beat.  His pants said
yes!
  But down below was the women's quarter, the seedy barracks and soldier-filled tables, and even isolated up here, he could still feel their existence like eyes on his back.  The closet had been spontaneous; since then, they had barely touched.  He did not want to associate what happened between them with what happened down below.

He had never thought he would fall so swiftly, so thoroughly.  But on that night when he had stepped from the assembly hall on the heels of his condemned comrades, feeling wretched and treacherous in his uniform jacket, and seen her there in the foreyard, seen her burning eyes...

Oh, he had fallen.  He had hit the ground at her feet.  Any touch healed him; her lips brought him back to life.  But he hated to have this happen here—to think that when they parted, she returned to a place of pain.

"
I...I like practice
," he said, "
but I...  Sanava...  You know of me.  Would you teach me of you
?"

With an expression bordering on nonplussed, she said, "
Of me
?"