The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (85 page)

“Perhaps you have been misinformed.”

“I consumed the accursed man.  I know what he knew, and he was an insider.”

“Hm.”  Another poke, another faint spill of magic.  Lark feigned a grimace and fluttered her lashes as if just waking.

She heard a creak of sinews, felt a sudden faint warmth, and opened her eyes to find the scythe-creature's bizarre face barely inches away.  It had carapace there too, from the hairline to the upper lip: smooth, faintly radiant, almost pretty.  The eyes bore long marks that looked like vertical pupils, but were actually just darker spots in the pale hexwork.  A twist of slightly pinkish material gave it the illusion of a lower lip, but as she watched, the pink unfurled into two tiny grasping limbs and the creature's maw opened into corrugated darkness.

She stared, then said slowly, “What are those extra bits for?”

The creature's head tilted, but the black spots in its eyes stayed fixed on her.  “...What?”

“Your little mouth-fingers.”

“...Are you certain you do not wish to scream?”

She did.  Oh, she very much did.  But there was no point, so she said, “No, thanks.  They look like they'd be useful to pick your teeth, only you don't seem to have teeth.”

The creature swiveled its head almost the whole way around to stare at Maevor, whom she glimpsed past its shoulder, trying to hold a straight face.  “Is the Shadow Cult normally this...accepting?” it said.

“We—  They see some strange things,” said Maevor dryly.

Lark almost smiled, because it was true.  There were the eiyets and the eiyensuriel of Oretcht'ke, the stranger things in the shadows, and their allies: goblins, elementals, skinchangers, other faiths.  Coupled with what she had seen at Cob's side, this creature's face was peculiar but not inherently forbidding.

But it meant an end, for her.  She felt weirdly calm.  Perhaps it was the lingering lassitude of the samarlit, or perhaps the effect of Rian's death, but the thing inside her that had been vacillating between possibilities for a future and moody reflection on the past now stuck at not giving a shit.  She had been tricked.  Trapped.  She was going to be dragged into Imperial custody to confess and die.

There was no need to make it easy for them.

“Would one of you untie my legs, please?” she said.  “This is undignified.”

“You're not here for dignity,” said false Maevor.

“No?  Then why?”

“I know you were listening.  I saw your breathing change.”

Lark smirked.  Whoever he really was, false Maevor was at least competent.  The creature he had called Kyleen still crouched over her with what she supposed would be a puzzled expression if its face could change.  It kept tilting its head back and forth, staring at her body.  She hoped it was looking at the robe.

“Fine.  I recognize why I'm here.  But why are you?” she said.  “You don't seem to like it.”

“I hate being around humans,” said Kyleen.  If not for its comment about thirty years of service, she would have pegged it as an adolescent.

“Job is a job,” said false Maevor.  “Don't make me gag you.”

“And why would you do that?”

“Woman—“ he started, then sighed and turned to rummage through a crate.  “Maybe they left us some alcohol,” she heard him mutter.

“He is here to lure you,” said Kyleen, pointing a scythe-finger at the bodythief.  “And I am here to protect him, in case you are difficult.  Also to fly the sands and find you if you are still in the Salt Wastes.  Which...you are not.”

She dredged for a lie that would convince it that the others were still in the desert, but she had told Maevor too much earlier.  Still, there was no reason not to try.  “I'm not, true.  But the others know better than to come to town.”

The creature looked to Maevor, who had indeed found a bottle and was wrestling with the cork, his back to them.  To her, it said, “I am not so foolish as to believe that.  You smell of foreigners, and recently.  If this place was not so filled with the stink of wolves, I would track them down personally.  Instead, you must tell us where they are.”  It traced its scythe-finger up her robe, between her breasts, to the hollow of her throat.  “Or else.”

Against her will, she swallowed.  “Or else what?”

“Don't ask,” said false Maevor.

The creature gave a dry cackle, mouth-fingers twitching.  “Or else many things!  Or else I nip off unnecessary parts.  Or else the Inquisition takes your memories.  Or else I plant the reaper's seed in you, and you become one of us.”

“That takes too long,” said false Maevor.  “Drink?”

“I'll have one,” said Lark.

Kyleen sat back, mouth-fingers curling tight inward.  “You make light of me.”

“Never,” said false Maevor.

“Yes, you do!  Always!  I hate city assignments!  I wish to return to the Daecian nest, or to the northern front where I may fight with honor, but no, I am assigned to you again!”

Maevor poured a slug of liquor into his teacup wordlessly.

“And you, as always, are being erratic!  A new body, I understand, but—“

“Look,” said the bodythief, “I'm still adjusting.  I've had to absorb more from this one than usual.  Pikers are hard to mimic.”

The creature hissed its disdain, then turned to Lark and jabbed her vigorously between the ribs.  “Tell—us—what—you—know!”

Lark's robe shimmered with protections, absorbing most of the force, but she curled up anyway, wincing in fear as much as pain.  “Stop, stop, Kyleen, shit,” said false Maevor at the same time, and stalked over to grab the carapaced creature by the shoulder.  Shaking it briskly, he said, “If you kill her, we are piked.  So calm down.”

“You're a bitter lot, aren't you,” Lark gritted through her teeth.

Maevor gave her a hard look, and pulled at Kyleen's shoulder until it reluctantly unfolded itself to move with him.  Even with its legs partially bent, it was a good head taller than him, and its weird gait would make it impossible to pass as human even if covered-up.

She almost felt sorry for it.  If what Dasira said was true, then it had been a person once.  And so had false Maevor, though as a bodythief he was now just that bracer.  How someone could go through such a horrible transformation and still retain their loyalty, if not their sanity, was beyond her.

But then, Dasira had also mentioned how bodythieves went rogue...

“Fellows.  Fellows,” she called to them, taking a chance.  “Look, you don't have to keep doing this.  Maevor, you ate up a comrade of mine, but there's still a piece of him inside you, right?  The Kheri have always taken in strays.  They might take you in, too.”

Mid-sip, he gave her a wary look.

“And you, Kyleen, you want a life?  We have enclaves everywhere, not just in human territory.  Goblins, scorpion clan, spider-folk—I hear they're, uh, nice.  Places in the world where you wouldn't have to hide.  If you help me, we'll help you.  Trading is what we do.”

The abominations looked at each other, then Maevor broke out in snorting laughter, one mangled hand pressed to his mouth.  “Girl, I can honestly say I've never been offered sanctuary by the Kheri.  But no.  No thank you.  The Light is our god, and soon the world will turn toward him.  When it does, those like Kyleen will walk the streets openly.  We fervently await that time.”

“Soon?” said Lark.  “Soon as in next week?  Next century?”

“The east is being cleansed,” said Kyleen, knocking its knuckles together idly.  “The people converted, the cities hollowed out to be refilled with our kin and progeny.  The west will be cleansed too, when there are enough of us to descend upon it.  We have finally begun.”

A chill went through her.  All her life, the Empire had lurked there at the fringe: a threat, yes, but a human one.  Even when the Crimson Army marched through Bahlaer, she had not been afraid, for its agents could be bought, its rules subverted, its leaders bargained with.

But now, with the Shadowland fallen and the words of the Light whispered to her from Cob, from Dasira and from these others, she knew better.  She was not among enemies who thought like people; she was among fanatics.

They might not kill her now, but they would surely be her end.

Chapter 22 – The Sense of an Ending

“I don't understand,” said Geraad Iskaen as he handed another white-wrapped bundle to another mottle-faced woman.  “Where are we going?”

At the sixth portal-frame, Enkhaelen paused, a half-drawn sigil under his fingers.  “Not important.  Keep on task, please.”

Swallowing his questions, Geraad nodded, then forced a smile for the next man in line.  The fellow smiled back, his thick neck and lower jaw covered with growths like some bizarre lumpy beard.  Like all the others, he accepted the parcel then moved off to join the line for the portals, pulling off his black robe as he went.

Geraad lifted another parcel from the repacked crate.  He had filled five of these crates over the course of the past four days, and then redone them all when Enkhaelen had suddenly added a shipment of indoor slippers and face-cloths to the bundle of robe, blade, note and cord.  In his opinion, it all added up to some kind of secret invasion, and he wished he could talk about it with someone—if not Enkhaelen, then maybe one of his neighbors.

But he had some experience in subterfuge.  The more a conspirator knew about their mission, the easier they were for watchful mentalists to pick out.  Whatever this game was, he did not want it to be given away because he had made a black-robe think.

Yet he couldn't help but worry.  The laboratory was barren but for the portal-frames, the crates, and the bodies on the mortuary slabs; everything else had been packed away.  His own possessions were bundled up behind him: a few spare robes, a comb, some tooth-sticks, a strap from Rian's halter.  His little room was empty now, just like all his neighbors', and breakfast had been the last scraps left in the cleaned-out kitchen.

While a part of him hoped that Enkhaelen had come to his senses in regards to Valent—that he had decided to move somewhere less ominous and volcanic—he didn't feel optimistic.  This was an evacuation, not a transfer.

But to where?  All six portals opened into different places: simple inn-rooms or basements or alleyways that looked out onto half-familiar cityscapes.  He thought he recognized the architecture of Andrisden, or perhaps Keceirnden, and he certainly knew the black basalt walls of Valent's civilian outskirts, but the others were less distinct.

All with access to the Imperial Road
, he thought. 
Smooth transit to the Palace.

Amid it all, Enkhaelen kept his face turned from his minions.  He hadn't looked at Geraad since he'd entered, and answered questions while either staring into nothing or fixated on the portal-frames.

“Busy morning, eh?” said a familiar voice, and Geraad turned to see his erstwhile neighbor Tarren Enwick digging through a crate.  Tarren flashed a distorted grin at him, and Geraad returned it cautiously.

“Is this farewell, then?” he said.

Tarren snorted and came up with an armful of parcels.  “Nah.  Boss says me and the lady are to look after you while he's elsewhere.  Shift over, will you?”

Making space, Geraad handed his last parcel off to a black-robe then took the armful from Tarren.  “He couldn't have assigned you to help me pack these?”

“Hoi, I don't question the boss.  Even if he's holding me back while all my brethren get the best seats.”

“You'd rather be...”  Geraad waved a parcel at the crowd, only to have it snapped from his hand by the next woman in line.  She gave him a scolding look and he cringed automatically.  “I mean...I'm sorry, but...”

“Out with it, man.  Hoi, Korroly, travel well.”

Geraad's gaze followed the woman as she moved toward the portals.  Like all of them, her frame beneath the robe was distorted by the growths she bore—which had swelled for everyone over the past few days, as if they were retaining the poison they usually expelled.

Except for Tarren.  Though the side of his mouth was still twisted, his growths lay nearly flat, like old bruises.  He caught Geraad looking and said, “Handsome, aren't I?”

“Um...”

“It's no shame to wonder.  Keep your voice low, though.”  He pitched his own at a mumble, dark eyes flicking to the necromancer then the crowd before returning to Geraad.  “Boss said not to say anything important in his presence.  The lot of 'em, they're all plumped up so they can make the trip.  Me, I had to purge it.  Too much can kill you, y'know.”

“I didn't.”

“Well, any of it could kill you, since you're not a new mage.”  Tarren grinned.  “Or metastatic—that's what he's calling us now.  Had to give us a formal name before he scattered us to the winds.  Anyway, this stuff, it's alive—it drinks up energy and feeds it back to us when we need it.  But it's only as smart as our behavior.  If we starve it down, it starts chewing on us, and if we take too much, it's like an overfed tick.  Pop!”

Geraad snipped the gruesome image from his memory and discarded it.  “So it's like...a food supply?”

“Yeah.  Can't eat on the pilgrimage, that's one of the rules.”

He'd heard that.  One of the many reasons he'd never been interested in going.  From what he'd seen, only fanatics and supplicants had the drive to walk from Keceirnden to Daecia City without supplies.  Everyone else took a portal or a caravan.

But during Midsummer and Midwinter, even those were banned, and it was three days until Midwinter First.

“You know this can't end well,” he murmured as he passed out another few parcels.

“What, you think it was meant to?”  Tarren shook his head.  “Look, none of us've got illusions about this.  We're dead folk walking.  The boss said he can alter our diseases but he can't eliminate them, and those who refused to become what we are...  They just die.  He doesn't kill them—don't think that.  He lets them leave, though sometimes he has to rehome them in the process.  Move them out of the Empire so they can't tattle on us.  But even with that, it's...”

He sighed.  “It's something.  Not ideal, no, and when I first came here, I was scared.  Angry.  I didn't ask for his intervention; his agents just came to my door, said they knew I was sick and had a proposition.  But I thought about it, and I accepted it, so now I'm following through.”

Geraad grimaced, uncomfortable.  Tarren's words reminded him too much of his own state when he'd finally met Enkhaelen.  Terrified, blinded by pain and ready to die—then suddenly rescued, but with conditions.  “So you always knew...?“

“Someday the summons would come?  Yeah.  Part of his terms.  And this's been better than coughing my lungs up in front of my family.”

“You don't miss them?”

“'Course I do.  But who wants to watch a loved one die in agony?  So in exchange for my service, I'm already dead to them, and they've been paid blood-price.  And moved to safety.”

“Mine as well,” said a woman standing in line.  Geraad looked to her, surprised, and realized that a small crowd had gathered while he and Tarren talked.  “His agents placed my children with a Trifold temple,” the woman added.  “I'm no Trifolder, but at least I know they're alive and cared for.”

“They moved my wife to her relatives in Ycinth,” said another woman.  “At her request.  She was afraid to be alone.”

“Mine too.  Not Ycinth, though—Wyndon.”

“They got my husband transferred to the Crimson Army in Averogne.  The quietest post of all, I've heard.”

“My old mother went in with the Trifolders.”

“I asked them to get my son out of the Army.  He wasn't happy about it.  Now he's a mercenary in Gejara, the young fool.”

Unsettled, Geraad held up a hand to cut into the gossip circle.  “Why is he sending everyone away?”

The crowd of lingering metastatics looked at him like he was mad.  Then one of them—so misshapen it was hard to tell which gender—said glottally, “We all come from the shadowless circle, the land most touched by the Imperial Light.  This—“  It indicated its swollen cheek.  “—Only happens there.  I love the Light, magus, but it is toxic, and I won't have my family become what I am.”

“How do you know it only happens there?  Just because Enkhaelen says so?”

A few of them looked at each other, but the misshapen one shook its head.  “No.  I was a merchant before this.  I traveled widely, and knew many people it is...not quite legal to know.  When I fell ill, I sought all forms of healing, medicine, knowledge.  The Trifolders could do nothing but ease the pain; the Shadow Folk knew of the epidemic and considered its source the Daecian Swamp..  No medicine worked, though the Light priests promised the pilgrimage would.

”So I called upon families of those who had gone on the pilgrimage.  Far more had died or disappeared than had returned, and those who did return—I met a few.  They were healthy.  Vividly, almost radiantly so.  But their relatives told me that they had changed.  Some spoke of it as praiseworthy, blessed, but there was fear too.

“Soon after, some of the families took the pilgrimage en masse.  I don't know what became of them.”

I do
, thought Geraad.  It sickened him to revisit that memory.  What had happened to those women, the bear-man and all the petitioners, he could not bear to consider—but he remembered the plagues from his histories, and the closing of Daecia's gates, and could not suppress a shudder.  Was this illness some kind of hook that the Palace used to drag in victims?

“How big is this shadowless circle?” he said aloud.

The misshapen one shrugged.  “Measurements vary, but the last I heard, it stretched from Thyda in the east to Fort Krol in the west, and from Keceirnden to the Volske-Jek foothills.”

Geraad pictured it in his mind.  If the Imperial City was at the center, then the circle included several Riddish cities, a great big patch of northern Amandon, and all of Darronwy and Daecia.  More than a million people lived in Darronwy alone, and he had no idea how many might dwell in the affected area north of the Daecian Swamp, in hostile Krovichanka.

“You know the wraiths keep chasing us farm-folk north,” said Tarren Enwick.  Around them, the crowd had become an audience, a few at the fringes grabbing parcels from the crates and moving on but most listening, their swollen features thoughtful.  “They have since the fire-season when all the coastal cities burned.  Cantorin, Silverton, Turo, they tried to open their gates to us but there were too many refugees—and then there was Daecia City, making its offers.  I remember my mother talking about that.  How we were going to go there, but had to stop in Keceirnden when my father got too sick.  So we bought some land there from some other folk who were going on the pilgrimage.  It was supposed to be safe, but still the wraiths came sometimes to snatch people away.”

Geraad just shook his head.  All his life, he had lived in Varence County, situated a stone's throw from the wraith-infested Forest of Mists, but until Cob's appearance he had never seen one.  Meanwhile, Keceirnden stood hundreds of miles from the forest or any other source of wraiths—and yet was harassed by them.

“We all know who the enemy is,” said Tarren darkly.  “If this gives us a chance to strike back, then I'm glad for it, no matter what it costs me.”

A murmur of agreement went through the crowd—broken a moment later when Enkhaelen snapped, “No dawdling!”  Geraad glanced over to see him opening a new portal in the sixth frame, candlelit brickwork visible on the other side.

Amid a flurry of parcels, goodbyes and handclasps, the gathering dispersed, leaving a line of stragglers.  One flung herself bodily at Tarren, nearly toppling him into a crate, and Geraad stared scandalized until it occurred to him to clear his throat.  The woman released her lip-lock and unwrapped her legs from Tarren's waist, smoothed her black robe and dimpled at Geraad, offering a fist.  “Wydma Renyer.”  Tarren beamed behind her.

“Geraad Iskaen,” he said, cautiously tapping her knuckles with his.  “I've heard a bit about you.  So you're staying behind with us?”

She wrinkled her nose—pert in a well-tanned and unmarred face, her metastatic marks beginning beneath one ear to trail down that side of her neck like fungal scales.  “That I am.  I don't mind it, but with everyone else on the march...”

Geraad nodded, though he really didn't understand, and together the three of them emptied the crates of parcels.  Soon enough, the last one was distributed and the last white-garbed agents crossed over, and Enkhaelen closed down the portals.

Then he turned and beckoned.

Geraad grabbed up his bundle and saw that Tarren and Wydma both had their own.  As they fell in at Enkhaelen's heels, the necromancer said, “I've laid up some provisions for you.  Hopefully everything will go as planned and I can join you afterward, but just in case...”

“After what, master?” said Geraad.

Enkhaelen gestured forward, and his office door slid open.  “I can't talk about that.  But should the worst happen, you'll have food, blankets, heat sources and the like, so make yourselves comfortable.”

The office had been rearranged.  No longer did the great desk stand in the center, or the bookshelves sit within the iron ring; all had been pushed against the walls, and a cloth-draped shape that was probably a body lay on the emptied desktop.  Other things had been added: bedrolls, cushions, several stacks of flat-topped chests and crates, unlit braziers, a pair of lanterns, and a variety of items that looked to Geraad's eye like camping supplies.  Three parcels wrapped in different-colored cloth were set at the edge of the desk, by the shrouded body.