The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (62 page)

The lie went right past him, as she had anticipated.  Bodythieves had little to do with the other abominations, and even to the knowledgeable, it was hard to tell the difference between an infiltrator and an assassin until it was too late.  She took advantage of his moment of thought to add, “If you’re planning an assault here, you’ll need some more bodies.”

“We’re an intercept, not an assault,” he corrected automatically.  “Word is that he’s been seen here, and your presence seems to bear that out.  Our orders are to take him when he leaves.  Where is he hiding?”

“
He left several marks ago.”

The abominations stared at her.  She kept her expression steady, made an educated guess about Cob’s plans, and said, “He has dangerous companions.  They spotted me—I barely escaped—then they veiled up and ran.  East.”  She nodded that way, toward the mounting hills and thickening forest that led along the Haarakash border toward the distant foothills of the Trivestean plateau.

It was a gamble, trying to divert them.  She knew she could not fight them all, but she could not let them sniff around Turo; they might hear about the Damiels or that Cob had been seen on the south side.  They might realize that he had crossed the barrier.  Ilshenrir was a powerful sorcerer and Arik a vicious combatant but they would be overwhelmed if they tried to stand in this team’s way.

And if Cob came back directly into a mob of abominations, she did not know if his Guardian powers could help him.

“Several marks?” said the senvraka, annoyed.  “We were just rallied for this.”

Bless the military bureaucracy.
  “They’re small and well-coordinated, and move fast.  And they have a mage, so they leave no piking tracks.  But I know where they’re headed.”

“
Where?”

“
The Garnets.  To the skinchanger enclaves there.  They want to rally an army.”

The abominations and mages looked to each other uneasily, and Dasira kept her expression stiff.  She had picked that destination for its plausibility and because she knew Cob would not go there; if he wanted to hit Enkhaelen in the Palace, he needed to go north.  Still, there was the concern that the abominations would report back to their commander rather than give chase.  She scolded herself for mentioning a veil; it might put them off too badly.

“They went on foot though,” she amended.  “Over the snow.  You can probably pick up the trail once their mage gets tired of holding the veil.”

“
You mean ‘we’,” said the senvraka.  “You’re the Hunter.”

She opened her mouth to decline, but their eyes were on her—every single pair, from senvraka to hounds to mages—and she knew that she had trapped herself.

"Of course," she said.  "I know them.  I can point them out for you if they get lucky enough to reach a town and try to hide in the crowd."

The senvraka nodded curtly and motioned to a mage, who moved to dispel the portal.  It shimmered and collapsed.  "We'll go now, at full speed.  See if we can close the gap.  Ever ridden a hound before, Cerithe?"

She allowed herself a bitter smile, comforted only by the weight of Serindas at her belt.  "Unfortunately, yes."

*****

By the time Cob and the others approached the barrier, it was late afternoon.  Cob’s cuts still bled sluggishly.  A few had closed, but those spots hurt the worst, the skin beneath them threaded with red.  Acclimated to hard work and travel though he was, the pain and exhaustion dragged at him like an anchor.

Fiora was not much better.  She had barely been scratched but was definitely shaken, and held onto Cob’s wrist as if she feared he might vanish.  He wanted to put his arm around her but it was impossible to run like that.  Neither of them had eaten since the blood-apples, and they both stumbled on the uneven ground, catching each other when they could.

As for Adram, his brisk pace had slowed significantly, though perhaps it was to let Cob and Fiora keep up.  He still wore the blindfold but seemed unafflicted.

They had more companions on the trek, though.  Cob could not see them, but he felt them: the red thorns creeping beneath the earth in his wake, following his blood-trail.  The seeking fingers of the Thorn Protector.

Ahead, the hills rose roughly, clad less in thorn and more in grass.  At their tops were hints of snow.  Relief touched Cob for the first time, but with it came concern.  From the slant of the sunlight, he knew they were looking north.

“
Where are we?” he called to Adram.

The Haarakash man halted on the trail to look back.  “Closest section of the barrier.  Less than a day’s walk from Turo if you follow it from the outside.”

“Through the snow and ice?  I’m not sure we can manage,” Cob said, unsure of the Guardian’s strength after this ordeal.  He looked to Fiora, panting and dull-eyed but still holding tight to his arm.  She rallied a weak smile.

“
You don’t have a choice,” said Adram.  “You must leave here.”

“
I know, but can’t we follow the barrier from the inside?  Isn’t your Thorn Protector weaker at the fringes?”

Adram gave him a blind, rueful smile.  “What do you think?”

Cob looked down at his arms, where the red lines spread like capillaries under his skin.  He looked at the ground where a few new drops had fallen and saw thorny red tendrils poking up through the spots.

“
Pike it,” he said, and peered toward the crust of snow on the hill.  A day of following the barrier from the outside could mean frostbite for Fiora, who had changed from sarong to trousers but was still ill-prepared for a winter trek.  He did not know if the Guardian could protect her, but if they were at Turo by the end of the run, at least Mother Matriarch Vriene could help them recover.  “All right.  Guess there are no good options.  Let’s go.”

The last short walk to the border felt harder than ever.  Cob’s legs ached from the climb, but he sensed the Guardian stir in his chest and clung to the hope that it could help them.  No wall stood atop the hill to divide the natural world from Haaraka’s curse, and in the span of a few strides the verdant growth withered to brown stalks, then to frost-encrusted stubble.

It was hard to say exactly where the barrier was.  Cob fumbled at his neck and pulled out the passage medallion, unnerved at how it seemed to throb in his hand.  “Will you be all right?” he said, glancing to Adram as he took Fiora’s hand and pressed it over the medallion.

The Haarakash man nodded.  “I will not return to the complex.  I will go home and stay there until the chaos has died down.  Such things have happened before.  I should have warned you, but—“

“Oh goddess,” said Fiora, staring past Cob with wide eyes.

He turned to look at the barrier, and it looked back at him.

Writhing into visibility, it was a ghastly sight: a lattice of veins and thorns pulsing in thin air, spotted with tight flower buds.  Vines lashed from it toward Cob, and his arm moved as if on a string, the red splinters pushing out through his skin and growing wildly to connect with the reaching thorns.  He tried to yank backward but they were already crawling over his arm and up his shoulder, strong as iron.  In the center, near his hand, a knot opened into a bloodshot eye the size of a fist.

Fiora pulled at him, then gasped and sagged, and he half-turned to see her sink to the earth in the grip of more vines, eyes fluttering shut as the buds bloomed into blood-colored roses.  Adram was already on the ground, thoroughly covered.  A thick, cloying scent flooded the air, and Cob’s head swam with weariness.  His fingers went slack and Fiora’s hand slipped from his, taking the medallion with it.

Pike it, no
, he thought, and reached for the Guardian.

It withdrew.

Anger roared through him, momentarily driving back the roses’ intoxication. 
How dare you?
he thought at the spirit, and reached deeper, the world going dark around him.  No sight, no sound, just the cellar of his soul where the Guardian struggled to barricade itself.

For an interminable, frustrating span, the dark spirit slid away while the burning eye watched him from above.  The harder he clutched, the faster it slipped free, and the more his panic heightened. 
You can’t leave us to die!
he thought furiously. 
You’re the one who made the curse!

But if the Guardian felt shame, it did not react, and Cob’s sense of his own body started to drain away through the lines of agony in his arm.  A cold knot formed in his chest as he envisioned the Guardians in the black water, watching, uncaring.

Water.  That's why I can't grab it.  But it’s not all water.

Aware now of the black sea, he reached through and felt it try to freeze around him, to bar his way.  But he forced himself deeper, to the sense of mud and roots and stone, and locked onto its solidity even though it tried to recoil.  Pulling hard, he strained against the Guardian's struggles until finally it crested the surface and spread its protection through his flesh.  His senses reopened.

And he saw the futility of the struggle.  The ground beneath him was not his to command; cracked and riddled with cursethorn, it was like thin dirt cast over an enemy’s trap.  He could not reach native earth beneath the network of rhizomes and runners, the bones and broken blades that the Carad Narath had claimed, and even though free land was right beyond the barrier, he could not touch it.

He could protect himself, but not the others.  He had no power here.

Still, grimacing, he held tight to the Guardian.  The familiar black armor swept down his arms, red slivers springing from his skin as if ejected.  His wounds sealed beneath scales of stone and bark, and antlers erupted from his forehead with a crack of new wood.

The vines coiled angrily around his captured forearm but their needle tips could not penetrate.  Red buds grew along their lengths and tried to bloom, but he tore them away with his free hand.  Bloody sap dripped from his fingers as he crushed them.

The single eye stared at him.  Though its vines could not break his armor, he could not pull free.  Though he could tear the flowers off, he could not dig his fingers beneath the red tendrils, and when he braced his heels on the earth and tried to pull, he felt more of them wrap around his legs.

Deadlock.

“What do you want?” he rasped.

It stared at him, unblinking, its vines still questing at his armor, and he got the sense that it had not heard him.  Its attention was not on him, but on the Guardian.

Yet the Guardian had stilled within him like a hare before a predator.  He knew that if he relaxed his grip on it, it would bolt right back into its hole and leave him to the mercy of the thorn.

He looked back at Fiora and Adram.  They were little more than slumped shapes beneath blankets of vines and flowers, but he saw them moving subtly.  He focused and felt the faint throb of their heartbeats, their slow breathing.  They were asleep.

That took a weight from his shoulders, though he was still terrified for them. 
I brought them here.  I involved them in this, and now they might die because the Guardian just can’t—

He blinked.  Could it be that simple?

“Hoi,” he said at the staring eyeball.  “Hoi.  Thorn Protector, Carad Narath.  Airahene-
sanwy
.”

At the wraith words, it stirred, then focused on him.  He felt its attention like a touch on the forehead: a faint sense of listening and a presence, calm, implacable, ancient and unutterably distant, like a star looking down upon a child in a dark field.

Cob remembered the luminous figure fleeing along the shoreline, followed by the howling, vengeful army of beasts.  The bone spear and the sudden physicality of the thrashing wraith, and its collapse into vines.  The Ravager’s laughter.

“
The Guardian’s not sorry for what it did,” he told the eye.  “But I am.”

It tilted slightly as if interested.

In his grip, the Guardian tried to shrink further, and he strained to keep it under control.  The vines still tested his armor.  He took a deep breath and said, “It was a horrible punishment.  Maybe you deserved it, because you were pretty horrible y’self, you and your people.  But doin’ this to you hasn’t made anythin’ better.  The Guardian won’t say it because it’s stubborn and scared, so I’ll speak for it, whether it likes it or not.

“
I’m sorry we killed you.  I’m sorry we cursed you to torment your own people like that.  It’s not right, and it’s not what somethin’ that calls itself the Guardian should’ve done.  Vina, the lady ogre who was the Guardian back then—I think she regrets it too.”

Inside him, the Guardian blazed with indignation. 
Shut up
, he thought at it. 
This is your pikin’ fault.

The eye regarded him solemnly, and he returned its stare, spine stiff.  It felt weak to apologize, even though it was for someone else.  It was almost like begging for mercy.  But there was no way to fight this thing—not unless he punched it in the eye, and he doubted that would work.

And beside that, he meant what he said.  What the Guardian and the Ravager had done on that long-ago shore had been wrong.  It was far worse than what Enkhaelen had done to him.  And the Guardian, at least, should have known better.