Chasers of the Wind (27 page)

“We’re keeping our normal pace.”

“We’re going to catch up to them!”

“The tracks tell me that everything is all right.”

“Didn’t you just say that the rain was eating away at them?”

“Don’t fret.”

“Don’t fret. Don’t run. Don’t hop. Don’t skip. Don’t sleep. Walk faster. Walk slower. Quite frankly, sometimes I regret that that man didn’t drill a hole in you.”

The tracker chortled gleefully in response to these words, but when he cast his eyes down to the ground he instantly became serious.

“Be silent!” hissed the northerner. He examined the meadow pensively.

“What?” asked Luk with bated breath as he began to look all around.

An arrow with white fletching cut through the veil of rain and landed in the ground by Ga-Nor’s left foot. The archer was at the other end of the meadow, hood thrown back, yellow hair stuck to his forehead, gray eyes, and the tip of an arrow resting upon the bowstring of a powerful curved bow, steadily aimed at the Son of the Snow Leopard.

“We’re really in it now, screw a toad!” groaned Luk. “I told you we were walking too quickly.”

Ga-Nor frowned. If the archer had wanted to, he could have finished them off a while ago. Without any warning. But he was hanging back. That meant he didn’t really want to take their lives. There was hope that they could come to an arrangement.

“And here come the rest,” muttered the soldier when a young man, no older than twenty, and a woman with a pack over her shoulder came out from behind the trees. The woman was the same one from the village who had reduced the Burnt Souls to nothing more than wet spots on the ground. Luk wasn’t sure if she was a Walker or an Ember.

“Who are you?” The gray eyes of the archer were like ice.

“Ga-Nor from the clan of the Snow Leopard. Tracker for the reconnaissance squad of the Gates of Six Towers.”

“Luk, guard of the first squadron of the Tower of Ice. Of the Gates of Six Towers.”

The boy standing next to the woman whistled.

“What brings you so far from the Boxwood Mountains? Have you lost your way?”

“Need compelled us.”

“I am sure the need was great.”

Luk liked the youngster less and less.

“Yes. It’s called the Nabatorian army and Sdisian sorcerers.”

“How long ago did you leave?”

“We left when they stormed the fortress. We are making our way home through the forest.”

“And why are you following us?”

“We share the same path. It’s not our fault that you are headed to the same place we are.”

“And just where do you think we’re going?” asked the youth, squinting suspiciously.

“To Al’sgara, of course.”

“Is that right?”

“Take it easy, Shen.” The woman reined in the youth. “We’re not sure you’re here by chance.”

“If you don’t want to travel together, then don’t,” the tracker replied in a surly manner. “We’re not looking for your company. You go on ahead. We’ve nothing to quarrel over. To each his own.”

“You’ve been tromping along behind us since the village, haven’t you?”

Luk really wanted to lie, but, judging by the expression on the archer’s face, he had no love for fairy tales.

“Yes. We left a bit earlier, but then we let you go on ahead.”

“So it was you who was walking around our campfire at night?” The gray-eyed one had noticed Ga-Nor’s bloody bandage.

“Precisely. You’re a good shot.”

“And you’re a good runner.” He gave back as good as he got, but his face was no longer quite as dark. “You’re a lucky man.”

“Ug preserves the skillful,” said the tracker serenely. “May I know your name?”

“Gray,” replied the man after a short pause, and then he lowered his bow. “Drop your weapons and you can walk in front. So I can keep an eye on you. And no tricks.”

11

Tal’ki often insisted that mirrors love to lie, even if you ask them to tell the truth. When commanded to show fact, they always answer with a laugh and a distortion of reality. They wheedle, play tricks, dodge, and they lie and lie and lie.

“Never trust mirrors, honey. And never turn your back on them. They’ll burn you,” the old crone had said, smiling kindly and sipping on her cold shaf.

Tia had never believed her—a mirror always reflected reality. But all that changed today. For the first time it deceived her, and the Damned stared at her reflection with hatred; it had suddenly become alien to her.

She wanted to howl. To scream. To kill everyone within easy reach: the stupid locals, the frightened Nabatorians. But most of all, she wanted to kill those whose fault it was that she was now like this: that slut of a girl, the insignificant little whelp who turned out to have the Gift of a Healer, and that archer. The last one especially. She’d rip the flesh from his bones and force him to eat his own eyes.

A fat, wide-shouldered thug with chubby, drooping lips, a flat, dull face, and white, inhuman eyes looked at Typhoid from the false reflected world. And she couldn’t stand it. She snarled like a she-wolf at bay and with all her strength swung a heavy fist at the abhorrent face. It shattered and showered the floor with sharp, oblong shards that threatened to cut her bare feet. The face disappeared and … remained.

Here. With her. Hers. Forever.

The knuckles of its right hand were burning; blood was trickling onto the floorboards. Tia ignored this and tried with all her might to calm the rage seething in her chest. Only now did she truly understand Alenari, who always smashed these liars wherever she found them.

It is intolerable to know that you are no longer yourself. Alenari had been lucky. She may have lost her face, but she kept her body. Tia couldn’t even claim that. In one moment the Damned had lost all that she had, all that she had rightfully taken pride in. Eternal youth and beauty, fallen into the Abyss. Her true form was destroyed, and only her spirit remained, trapped within the soul and body of a fool, to whom she was bound. Tia’s spirit stood behind the left shoulder of the boy and, keeping a tight hold on the reins of control, examined the odious degenerate.

The body that Typhoid was linked to, like a dog on a chain, was mortal. A horribly short amount of time had been allotted to it. Sooner or later it would get old, die, and what then? The Healer wouldn’t be nearby the second time.

The boy’s unpredictable soul lashed out, rebelling at the pain in its hand, and for a moment Tia released the reins. Before she had the chance to wrest back control over the other’s body, the cowherd whined, saw his bloody fist, and yelled, “Let goooo!”

The ghastly whiteness fled from his eyes and they once again became blue and watery.

Cursing, Typhoid “embraced” him from behind by the neck, trying to suppress her aversion, and began whispering soothingly. Pork’s pupils dilated, turned white, and the whiteness flowed outward, consuming the iris and melding with the sclera, transforming them into appalling cataracts. At the same time Typhoid cut off the soul, which was surprisingly strong, from control of the vessel.

She succeeded, but it was hard work. Every attempt to overwhelm the foreign vessel required an incredible exertion on her part. And if she had to execute a more complicated movement, like walking or running, the Damned thought she might be ripped away from this safe haven and spat out into the Abyss. All her power was focused on control. Using a different side of her magic was out of the question. Typhoid could only produce the simplest of spells. Without her own skin, she couldn’t feel the depths of her Gift.

The Damned still didn’t understand how this had happened. The boy, who had used the khilss to create the most unbelievable incantation, had almost been the last thing she saw in this life. The incredibly complicated, threefold weave of her shield had been burnt to a crisp, dissolving the ethereal fibers. In the fraction of a second before the all-consuming light engulfed Typhoid, she cast up the only thing that came to her head—the Mirror of Darkness. The spell should have saved her, even though she would have paid for it with disfigurement. Given time, she would have been able to cure that. But then the archer played his part, coming in at the worst possible time! Tia had been so blinded by pain that not only could she not kill the yellow-haired bastard, but she couldn’t even stop his arrows. The last one finished her off. Her body could no longer keep hold of her soul, and Typhoid died.

It was a complete mystery what happened after that. She saw darkness and light, the tremulous embers of the living all around her, and the bright orange palpitation of the ether in the firmament. She tried to claw after her lost shell, but she had neither teeth nor nails. The Damned would have been dragged into the Abyss, if the bright light of the Healer’s magic hadn’t seeped into the negative side of the world. It snatched up the silvery filaments of her soul and scorched them, stripping away her innate strength, mercilessly freezing her talent and wits, and murdering the very substance of her Gift itself. It flung her left and right; bathed her in an icy spring; flung her under scorching rays; squeezed, stretched, twisted, turned her inside out, and spat her straight into one of the surrounding embers of life. The sharp thorns of the Healer’s magic impaled the Damned, tied her to a foreign soul, anchored her there, and forced her to hover over the back of a stranger.

She didn’t hesitate for a second. Realizing that this was her only chance to push the peasant’s soul aside, she decisively took the body under her own control. And then she shuddered.

Light, life, the world struck her through another’s eyes. The skin sensed the warmth of the sun, the tenderness of the wind. Air entered the lungs, and Tia, opening an alien mouth, wailed like a newborn. Pain tormented her and she had to let go of the reins; she had to give the man his rightful body back for a moment so she would not lose her mind from the strange, unbearable, foreign sensations. Only then, when she was able to think sanely, did she see herself lying in the street—dead, covered in blood, and broken. She wailed in grief and self-pity, wishing that all this were nothing more than a dream. A nightmare that had caught her up in its web. But no one could hear the Damned except for Pork.

Now, after several days had gone by, she was beginning to believe that all of that had really happened to her. A cruel joke of fate. Tia’s spirit was firmly tied to a foreign soul. And there was no way to disrupt this connection—otherwise the last thread between her self and this world would disappear. Even more bitter was the fact that she existed but was visible to no one except for Pork. She was fated to hover over the man’s back without a body, as a shadowy spirit. Until the moment he died, at any rate. The Damned tried not to think about what would happen after that. Her spirit would be free, but it was unlikely that it would escape the Abyss’s attention.

And in the meantime there was no way to escape this trap. It was a dead end.

“Go sit on the bed,” Typhoid whispered in Pork’s ear. He flinched but, not having the strength to resist her, obeyed.

She kept watch so that the fool’s bare feet did not tread on the mirror fragments, but on the way the cowherd once again lashed out, trying to throw off her mastery. The Damned, who was already well versed in the ways of her charge, was ready for this. She pulled at the reins and got him under control, hissing from the intangible pain that was inflicted on her by the Healer’s weave, and then she stumbled, tipped a chair over, and swore crossly. The other’s body was still unfamiliar, too massive, and far less agile than the one to which she had become accustomed over the centuries. Tia had to exert a lot of effort to cope with the recalcitrant man.

The abhorrent vessel was driving her mad. It was uncomfortable, clumsy, poorly controlled, and it smelled awful. Saliva was always dripping from its mouth to its chest. But she had already started working on the appearance of her disobedient puppet. Step by step, little by little, she changed the face, intertwined the muscles, filling them with power. She needed a tough vessel; she had no wish to ride a moronic gelding. Another two, three weeks and his own mother wouldn’t know this blimp. Typhoid would completely rebuild this body underneath her as she saw fit. The only thing she couldn’t do anything about was the chalky color of his eyes.

The Healer’s magic had incinerated much of what she had. Her spark was not blazing, but smoldering, and she had to waste all her resources on watching over Pork. She couldn’t even think about any other displays of her Gift. Right now Typhoid could hardly light a candle, let alone raze the village to the ground. In one moment Typhoid had lost not only her body but also her powerful Gift. That which remained was only a pathetic grain of sand compared to her former might.

She had become weak and defenseless. Any of her brothers or sisters could now dispatch her effortlessly. Even Mitifa, the most unskilled of the Octet.

“What should I do?” she whispered, and Pork, who was sitting rigidly on the bed and staring dully at a single spot, flinched in fear and looked over his shoulder.

Suddenly a warm wave surged up her spine. Typhoid frowned, not wanting to answer. It was Tal’ki. She was the only one of the Octet who radiated warmth. Alenari’s summons could be distinguished by cold shivers; Rovan’s by an unpleasant burning; Leigh’s by demanding jabs; Mitifa’s by impossibly timid, objectionable caresses. Ginora and Retar had died so long ago that she had forgotten what sensations they produced. But they hadn’t been pleasant either. Only Tal’ki’s summons never vexed the Damned. The warmth emanating from the Healer always felt pleasant. At times Tia wondered how the rest of the Octet perceived her during such conversations. But she had never once bothered to satisfy her curiosity.

Typhoid felt the summons once more and hesitated. Could she put her trust in Tal’ki? What would she do when she learned what happened? How would she proceed? There had never been much peace among the Octet. And when two of them died after the Dark Revolt, the squabbling over precedence only increased. Rovan and Mitifa would gladly annihilate her. She had never been on friendly terms with Alenari either.