Mourning Cloak (3 page)

I fling the sword away—or try to—but the hilt is fused to my hand. The blade is now truly an extension of my arm.

Swarms of tiny spiders scuttle under my skin, pin-prick along my nerves. They change me, despite my will. My heart thumps, not fast but steady. My guts roil and pulse as they are pulled apart, pushed aside, making way for a pulsing ball of heat in my core.

Every transformation costs me years of my life, but all I can think of is the pain of melting and reshaped bone, of half-metal, half-tissue muscle, of the corrosive fluid coursing through my fragile veins.

Freeze travels up to my brain, touches my synapses, turns them into wires. Numbers reel in front of my eyes, faster than I can count:

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512…32768, 65536, 131072, 262144…1267650600228229401496703205376

And again:

3, 9, 27…

A flicker of motion in my enhanced sensors. A beautiful system of energy, a hurricane of ever-moving particles, and a second mourning cloak swims up to the first.

Two of them. The transformation will never stop now.

Then the new mourning cloak turns on the first and rips into her.

My
mourning cloak. Come to save me.

Wings billow. The two of them are interrupted streams of color, bleeding energy into the air. The spiders are distracted as the mourning cloaks battle, two galaxies spinning and colliding, hemorrhaging particles like stars.

No longer in immediate danger, I force my body to relaxation. The exercise.

Before the cloak who fights for me brought them back out again when she pricked me.

Bitter, black anger rises again and I think of Sera, of her laughing eyes and smooth skin, of how she could be returned to me again, and the transformation ebbs. My skin turns flexible and warm, my lungs take over breathing, the fire in my belly dies, and the numbers fall and puddle in my head.

…601, 607, 613…six hundred…

I stand there, trying not to clench at the thought of the pain I know is coming. My mourning cloak takes another savage tear out of her opponent’s energy, and I see now how they are different from other people, other beings. Other living things are a steady pattern of points in my mech-sight, each point flickering but fixed, like stars in a constellation. The cloaks—are not. Their points
move
, vanishing and reappearing in a different place.

Is this why they can walk through walls and sink into rock? My vision loses focus, loses color, becomes once again the ordinary night-vision of a normal, slightly far-sighted man.

Every joint and ligament, tendon and muscle, bone and vein and nerve, screams its anger at the abuse it has endured. I bite my lip and feel blood.

High-pitched screams, almost beyond my hearing, stab at me as the cloaks fight. Then one of them—I can’t see who—throws herself on to her sister and the two disappear into pavement, leaving me alone.

For an instant, I stand paralyzed, sword arm limp against my side, point grazing the ground. Then,
Run! Before they get back!

I stumble forward two steps, and a pool of concrete shimmers and softens right in front of me. A mourning cloak staggers out of it, like a swimmer dragging herself out of water. Crumbs of cement cling to her tattered wings, and as she reaches the lip of the pavement, she falls to her knees, her ankles still sunken into the ground. Her hand falls limp next to my foot.

I look down at the dark head and wonder again,
Are you Sera?

Who else would fight for me?

Flashes of light brighten the sky behind the roofline. Electric movement roils among the low clouds. The air thickens with static and tension.

Wind swifts!
I grab the cloak by her shoulders, try to pull her out of the pavement. Her feet are stuck fast. Her head lolls.

“Hey, you!” I shake her, gently at first, because her shoulders feel so thin and delicate under my hands, then harder. What do I call this mourning cloak who thinks herself human?
Eilendi?
And give in to her delusion? I can’t call her Sera, can’t see Sera in her features. “Hey, you. Flutter. Get yourself out of the road.”

She opens her eyes, slowly. The insectile facets gleam, then soften. White creeps across the edges. “Kato Vorsok.”

“In the flesh. Come on, the wind swifts are coming.” I glance up at the sky sparking with agitated swifts, the buildings around us, the swift rods glittering with gold foil, reflectors, and cheap shiny trinkets.

It’s not a good idea to be around when a wind swift spends itself upon a rod.

The cloak bobs her head. The pavement drips off her feet, then hardens into frozen wavelets and hairline cracks around her. A jagged green flash cracks the sky open.

“Hurry.” I grab her hand and pull her up. Together, we break into a stumbling run. Swift light throws our shadows, sharp-edged and narrow, ahead of us as it swoops down. I fumble in my pocket, find a reflector, and fling it over my shoulder.

Just in case the swift makes a last-minute course correction.

We hit wall, just as the swift impales itself upon a rod. Flutter’s shoulders crush against mine. I push her face into stone and fling my other arm over my eyes. The air crackles, grows hot. Whips of electricity arc through it and lash against my skin. My spiders pounce, reroute that sizzling energy back out, to the wall, the ground.

Flutter goes rigid beside me, her breath caught in the middle of a gasp.

Nine hells!

Cloaks are not immune to swift shock, obviously. Flutter jerks. Spasms ripple through her cloak. Sigils—almost-familiar—glow blue and white within its folds as she arches her back, head thrown back, rising on her toes.

I smack her sharply across the face. My hand burns where it makes contact with her skin. Tingles run down my nerves.

She draws in a great shuddering breath. Lets it out again. Inhales. Exhales. Now her breath is light and shallow, coming in gasps. Her muscles jump, she fades, grows solid again. The frayed edges of her cloak dissolve. A singed smell comes off her body, that fusion of skin and membrane and cloth.

“Taurin’s veil!” I bite out. “You can’t disappear, Flutter!”
You haven’t led me to Sera yet!

There’s only one place I can think of to go for help. For Sera, I will go even there. I would even go back to the broken plain and hammer on the bronze gates of Tau Marai for Sera. Losing her has taught me that much, at least.

I swing the cloak back up in my arms, ignoring the way she mists against me. She has trouble controlling her form. If she slips inside my skin—shudder at the thought—would the spiders repulse her? “If you really are
eilendi
, Flutter,” I tell her, “you’ll like this place I’m taking you to.” As she fades in and out, I add, “Maybe not.”

Taurin-worshippers do not like foreigners, or those of their own kind who deviate from their notions of acceptable. I had found that out in my last days as Taurin’s Champion and the bitter-ash years since.

The rest of Highwind may ward itself with chimes and charms, build magic into the bones of its buildings, and run wires in the walls, but not so with the
ataura
. A plain square white-washed building, it is remarkable for only one thing—it has no protections against the deep creatures. Night after night, the few
itauri
in Highwind gather there to chant the Invocations and dance the Rakayas, with only their vigilance and their uncertain prayer-magic to keep the cloaks and eerie men away.

It is, to them, a test of faith.

One of these days, a swift-strike will obliterate the
ataura
. But then, I’d been predicting that for three years and it hasn’t happened yet.

Itauri
keep to themselves, but they won’t refuse me. Even when I kick the thick wooden door repeatedly, even when Toro opens the door and recwondoor anognizes me. I shoulder my way in, to save myself from his questions or—worse—his blessing. Flutter’s wings sweep the stone steps down into the circular room. Dark-eyed faces look up at me, pooled, deep, secretive. The faces of my people, who I no longer understand. I swallow a growl of frustration as I take in the room, devoid of the technological comforts that Highwinders take for granted. The cook fires, the lanterns, the small children, the circle of
eilendi
, novices all, intent upon their worship magic. My people, still stuck in the past, still putting themselves and their children in unnecessary danger.

No, it’s me. I have changed. I left, not them.

I put the mourning cloak down on an empty pallet, more roughly that I intended to. My hands come away sap-sticky with her blood and blackish-red from the pigmentation in her wings, seeping at their torn edges. She lies tumbled where I left her, eyes closed, chest barely moving.

The
itauri
lean closer to look, suck in an involuntary breath. I swear there’s a vacuum in the room.

I point at Flutter, but look at Toro. At his gentle, fine-featured face that I can no longer read. When did that rift happen, Toro on one side, me and Sera on the other? And why in nine hells didn’t I see it
before
the disaster at Tau Marai? “She’s one of yours. Heal her.”

A few of the
itauri
make warding signs, thumb and forefinger of the left hand circled, held up to the eye, then covered with the remaining fingers.

Toro doesn’t. He kneels at Flutter’s side, takes up her delicate, elongated arm, trailing cloak, and checks her pulse. He puts his ear to her chest, peers under her eyelids, just as if she were one of his own.

He is kinder to a cloak than he was to me, one of his closest friends. The questions burn in my heart still.
Why, Toro? Why didn’t you and the other
eilendi
stand with us before the city gates? Why did you let the Dark Masters’ creatures destroy my men?

Ah, but he’d already given me that answer, slowly, patiently, as if explaining to a dim-witted child.
It was not in Taurin’s will.

An answer that answers not at all. I grind my teeth and think I feel grains of desert sand between then still. I wait for Toro’s pronouncement, his condemnation of Flutter, but he will not give me the satisfaction.

Not quick to speak, that Toro, and not one to rush into judgment. I hate that about him, because when he is on an opposing side, it means he has thought things through, not reacted from emotion, but after examining his own prejudices.

He denied Sera her last rites and he was right to do so—based on the precepts of Taurin’s faith.

It doesn’t mean that I loathe him any less for it. No prayer flags for Sera, no incense, no
finality.

Sera had come to Highwind because of me. If not for the fact she entwined her life with mine, she could have been back in Jalinoor even now, dressed in the gold robes of office, pronouncing judgments from behind the ceremonial mask.

Her lightning-bright mind, her quicksilver wit, her sun-bright heart—all had been lost because she chose to follow me into exile.

Curse Taurin for the day Sera crossed paths with me. And curse Toro for the way he turned his back on her when she was only trying to scrape a life of meaning for herself here.

Let him deal with the problem of a mour a em of aning cloak who claims to be
eilendi.
What theological knots he’ll be tangled into trying to explain that one.

Toro bows his head, right hand splayed on Flutter’s chest, the index finger of his left hand against his lips and the palm facing to his right. He hums, softly, and the
itauri
take up the healing chant, without question, without complaint.

They are good at following, the Taurin-worshippers.

Who did you follow, Toro? Which
eilendi
turned you against us at the moment of our victory, so that you saw from your perch and did nothing? Did the Dark Masters reach out their long arms and blind your eyes as we laid siege to their city?
My throat and tongue is thick with the words of the healing chant, words in an old, half-known language, words that I had learned at my mother’s knee. Curse them, but they are branded deep into my memory. But I cannot, will not, say them. They gather in my throat and crowd behind my lips, and for a while, I cannot say anything at all.

Does the prayer magic work? It has always been uncertain, but Flutter sighs, moves. She no longer sprawls, but curls on her side, in a more natural position. The chant falters, grows ragged, as the
itauri
turn away and leave, one by one. Finally, only Toro is left, his humming threading the space between him and the cloak.

And then he lifts his hand from Flutter’s chest, and looks up at me. His eyes are shadowed, weary.

“She has been hurt much,” he says, quietly, “but life moves in her still.”

“She says she’s one of you. An
eilendi.
What do you make of that?”

The firelight catches in Toro’s eyes. He smiles, sadly. “I think she’s probably right.”

I wake to the Five Lesser Rakayas, the prelude to the Dawn Prayers. I wake to tears on my cheeks and praises on my lips. I rise from my pallet and join the center circle of
eilendi.
It seems only right that I should.

They don’t like it, these unknown
eilendi
—I see the astonishment and disapproval on their faces—but they shuffle aside, give me a place, and let me be.

I ignore them. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they think. Together they—we—are the circle of worshippers. I lift up my arms and turn my face toward the ceiling, imagining the lightening dawn sky of the desert rather than the damp, drab stone above. My voice remembers the words, my body the dance. Never mind the unnatural fluidity of my limbs, or the drag on my shoulders and arms, the extra twirl of my movements. I am part of worship again, I am with my people, I am
eilendi.