Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (74 page)

The Serpent roared.

And so did Margret of Arkosa. Diora heard both. She held on. Held tight as the ship began to lurch, slowly, awkwardly, away from the storm.

She thought, given the speed of their retreat, that the storm should follow with ease, but they left it behind.

She composed herself. She let the tears dry as the rain suddenly—and completely—disappeared, as the moon's face, lambent, full, silver, resumed its dominance of the clear, cold night.

The winds no longer howled; they no longer attempted to pry fingers and hands from the slick surface of wooden railing. But the Serra Diora held on, held tight, a moment longer. Her head was bowed. Her eyes closed.

Composure
, she thought.
Composure, composure, composure
. In the darkness between lid and vision, she remembered all the elements of a life that existed in perfect grace. She fought her way back to that state as she had done so many, many times.

And in that struggle, a single face came to her, a single name—and it was not one of hers, but it made the struggle harder.

Adam.

"So," the Matriarch said quietly, bitterly. "This is your life."

The Serra was quiet. The silence extended until she realized that Margret expected her to say something. "You should… find something… drier to wear," she said at last. She had not opened her eyes.

"There is nothing drier." Pause. "My mother would have said that."

"Your mother?"

"That it would be just stupid enough of me to die of cold after having survived everything else the Lord could throw at me. Yours?"

"My?"

"Mother."

"I… don't know what my mother would have said. According to my father, I killed her." She half-expected the Matriarch to assume some murderous inclination on her part.

"Oh." Another pause. The voice drew closer. "Childbirth?"

And was almost shamed by the expectation. "Yes. Childbirth." She looked out at the storm that was now a distant wonder. The boat had stopped. "He was said to have loved my mother."

"He must have. I've heard men lose wives to infants— they speak with rage and sorrow only when the love was there to lose."

"He was more indulgent than most clansmen would permit themselves to be."

"Until he destroyed your life."

"Until he destroyed my life. But we were speaking of parents, of what parents would say. He…" Such a struggle for words. Ona Teresa would have been appalled. Silently, gracefully, coolly appalled.

Or would she? It was the Serra Teresa di'Marano who now traveled clothed as Voyani, her face exposed to sunlight and wind, her life in the hands of rough strangers. "He… would have said nothing at air about clothing, or cold, or water. I am not certain he would have noticed them now. If he had been here, he might have told me, 'Look upon the Serpent, Na'dio. Look well. Very few could have passed through the storm of its breath and survived. Learn, from the things which have not killed you. Marvel at them.'" She bowed her head.

"My father…" Margret said quietly. "I hardly remember him. My father was the gentle one. I don't know what he would have said." Her voice was closer. "I can't imagine him here, in the midst of so much conflict. I know what my mother would have said, would have done. If she were here now, she'd slap me for taking so long to clear out." She was closer. Diora looked up and saw the wreathed mist of breath pass her lips and hang there, cloud surface thinning. "Will they die?"

"I do not know."

"Neither do I." Margret bowed her head a moment. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I have no idea what your life is like. You knew they were going to die, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"How? How could you have been so certain?"

"Someone came," Diora said quietly. "During the Festival of the Moon. She spoke to me while—while the others slept. I don't know if their sleep was natural. It doesn't seem to matter now. She spoke, and I heard truth in every word—but she didn't speak of their deaths. Just of… of what I would have to suffer… to make them mean anything at all." She looked down at her hands; she could see the long gashes that wood had made in her palms. An hour ago, she would have been horrified. An hour from now, she would be horrified again. But between the beginning and the end of that interval, she wanted to see herself as just another person, not a weapon in the war.

And she despised the weakness, she who had let Margret show none.

"She," the Matriarch said, after a long pause.

"A stranger."

"Did she wear blue, and carry her soul in her hands?"

"I do not know what she carried in her hands, Matriarch, but she carried something in her voice. I have often thought about her, in the shallows of evening, between the Lord and the Lady's time—and I think that whatever choices I made, they were not so terrible as the ones she has had to.

"But I hate her anyway."

The Matriarch's laugh was rich and low; it was not a stilted or forced sound, but rather something that came as naturally as breathing. Diora felt it travel the length of her spine. "That's the first time I've ever heard you say anything I could completely agree with—in words I'd even use."

Lightning illuminated her expression as Diora looked up; it robbed her of shadow and distance.

Both women looked to the East. "The rain…" the Serra said.

"Yes. It's slowed. Maybe stopped." She frowned. "I wish Adam were here. My eyes aren't a tenth as good as his. That lightning—"

Flashed across the sky, denying night, the moon, the stars. It was hard to look upon.

Just as the wings of the Serpent were unnaturally dark, the lightning was unnaturally bright; the one did not alleviate the other, but seemed, at this remove, to be a part of it, a counter to it. Diora was not surprised when the lightning struck again, but this time she saw its heart: a single, slender man.

The Serpent roared.

She stood, again mesmerized by what she heard in its voice, until the wind answered, the lightning replied.

No, she thought, there was more than a single man who stood in the wild folds of storm-laden wind, but the second man took to shadow and did not announce his presence; she saw him on the edge of a pinion before the wind carried him away from the glittering teeth of the Serpent's snapping jaws.

"Serra?"

Kallandras
. She did not call his name.

"Serra Diora? What do you see?"

Without thinking, Diora lifted her hand to her throat, to the invisible chain that hung round it, chafing skin. "Kaliandras," she said softly. "Kallandras and another of the companions who travel with the Northerner."

The torrential downpour became, in minutes, simple rain.

But the minutes had been too long; the tide of the water was such that it was an effort to stand. The tunnel walls were not smooth; they offered purchase to hands strengthened by the toil of the
Voyanne
. But the water carried small pebbles, hand-sized rocks, and heavy stones within its rolling currents. It swept up tents and silks, adding to its carelessly gathered hoard.

Where rock or tent collided with a hand clinging to a tunnel wall, something had to give.

Jewel heard the shouts and cries of men and women she could barely distinguish as they floundered, wet robes clinging to skin. Those desert robes did them no good now; they were heavy. That was all.

Avandar!

He did not seem to feel the current, but that was artifice; Jewel could see the binding magics that held his feet firmly against the ground; that forced the water—and all it carried—to give him wide and careful berth.

She heard a name, each of two syllables attenuated until it was almost impossible to distinguish the sound from a scream.

The rain had come out of nowhere.

And she
knew
that that was impossible. There should have been warning.

Why? Why should there have been warning? Storms came, suddenly, in the North and she had never questioned them.

Her gift replied, wordless.

But it didn't matter. The current caught something large that floated just beneath the reach of her left arm. Without thinking, she reached out for it, and was pulled half off her feet by the weight.

She braced herself as the weight pulled itself up, clutching at her hand, her arm.

She managed to grip rock with fingers that were white as bone—but her hands were too cold and her grip too tenuous. She saw a face rise out of the current, eyes wide, mouth open to swallow air—

And a hand slid from her grasp and into the water.

Avandar! Help!

He did not look in her direction, but she knew he'd heard: He lifted an arm. She saw the light that bound him to earth—orange light—give way to green, an intense, deep green that even emeralds couldn't boast.

Avandar
—

The earth moved. It moved once, like the sudden slap of a giant's hand, breaking and buckling beneath the water as the ground reared up, and up, a living slab.

The water slowed in its deadly rush, but Jewel saw small rivulets push their way around the thin slab of stone.

The water pouring down the tunnel's walls from the barren flats above had slowed; if they could climb up to the heights, they could probably be quit of the currents. But the walls themselves were high, and the Voyani ladders had been swept away by the currents.

She didn't pause for thought. Deeper than thought was instinct. She
knew
that the wall wouldn't last.

So did he.

Kallandras did not speak.

He heard the Serpent's roar; if death had a texture, if it cast a shadow, if it informed the whole of a creature, it was this one. Pinions flexed, changed shape, gathered and extended as the creature sought the height of safer skies.

But neither he nor Lord Celleriant confused flight with flight; the creature sought a better vantage point, not escape. This was no simple mortal combat; there was no posturing now, no obvious ritual, no rules simpler than this: Death ended the conflict. Its death, or theirs.

And are you not mortal now
? the wind whispered.

Yes
, he replied.
I am a mortal in thrall to the majesty of the wild elements
.

The wind was pleased; its breath was momentarily warm. Kallandras understood the value of flattery. Understood it well enough that he never attempted it if he could not lace sweet words with truth.

Here, suspended between the air above and beneath him, while the wind chose to serve as a buffer between himself and the storm, he drew his weapons. He had never understood why mages who had the vast arsenal of the elemental and the mystical arcana at their command chose—as the
Kialli
or the
Arianni
did—to draw weapon when they faced their peers.

But he understood it now. The hafts of either blade fit into the contours of his hands as if they were teeth in the contours of a jaw; they were the most natural extension of himself.

The wind whispered a complaint; it was sensitive to the nature of the blades, and was disinclined to accept with grace any other power of import. The steady, quiet whisper of its voice lulled; Kallandras dropped ten feet just before the Serpent's claws struck. They missed.

Its tail did not.

Clearly the Serpent had the advantage of terrain. Kallandras was
Kovaschaü
, a disgraced member of the Lady's dark brotherhood. He had been trained to fight in the dark, to fight in the water, to fight in the brightest of light. He had been tested in the billowing smoke of open—and dangerous—fire; he had been required to fight upon building's edge, to maneuver through dense forest, to balance on the rocky outcroppings of mountain in the thinnest of air.

But his training had not encompassed this.

To his surprise—and little surprised him—he had to stop himself from attempting to gain his footing. He had fought in places where footing was not required, but the viscosity of the medium—the Southern ocean—was different; his instincts did not recognize the storm-laden skies as water.

The wind roared. He looked down at his chest as Celleriant's lightning illuminated sky, Serpent, and warrior; the fabric was dark with blood.

It had been years since he had taken such a wound. Many years.

Memory was a dangerous ally. Necessary, but treacherous. Stripped of the context of earth, stripped of the companions he accompanied along the
Voyanne
, stripped of Salla, the lute that anchored him when all else failed, he was left with his earliest memories of combat.

In the Labyrinths.

The voices of his brothers were stronger, for a moment, than the voices of the storm, the dialogue of wind and lightning.

They were always present, of course; that was the Lady's gift to her faithful, her curse to those who had—as Kallandras—deliberately chosen to break faith and vow. But they had become, over time, like sun, like wind, like rain: a part of the elemental landscape. As such, they invoked a sense of both awe and distance.

The distance was gone. The wound was open.

He was wise enough to change his grip on the haft of either weapon; both had tasted his blood once. Once was enough.

He wondered, briefly, what they would do if he received a mortal wound.

Mortality did not frighten him. In the wilds of the storm, nothing did. The only thing he had ever feared in his life was desertion, and he had learned to live through that fear. To accept the isolation that he had once feared.

He heard his brothers' voices.

They did not speak to him. They were not, he thought, aware of his presence in any but the most minimal way, although should any one of them desire it, they might find him.

No
, he thought.

Lightning strobed sky in a brief, terrible flash. He leaped into the wind, remembering.

Emerald light.

Avandar frowned. The light intensified, and Jewel noticed as it did that it was changing color; a pale, golden light had seeped across the edges of pure green until the power signature he wove looked like a complex tapestry.