The Silver Lake (17 page)

Brax joined him.

“C‘mon,” he said gently. “We don’t wanna be anywhere near this place when the Watch finds Drove, and besides, we’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”

Spar turned, a questioning frown on his face.

“We have to get to Estavia-Sarayi,” Brax explained, feeling the imperative in the unfamiliar shifting pressure of the God’s touch. “And it’s a long way over ... there someplace.” He waved one hand toward the tall minarets of the Temple Precinct just visible to the southeast.

Spar’s expression grew cynical.

“Don’t worry,” Brax assured him. “They have to take us in. She rescued us, and it’s Her that’s sending us there. It won’t be like what Oristo’s temple does. They won’t try to put us to any menial work. We’ll be city guards, or maybe even ghazis or something.”

Spar gave a very unchildlike snort.

“Sure we will,” Brax insisted. “That’s what they do there. It doesn’t matter who we are, were,” he amended. “We’re Hers now, and She’s a Battle God so we’ll go into battle—with weapons and armor and everything. It’ll be great, you’ll see.” Draping one arm across the younger boy’s shoulders, Brax drew him past Drove’s body and up Liman-Caddesi. “I heard that when they’re not out killing people,” he began in a conspiratorial tone, “they eat huge mounds of lamb and fish and curried rice off golden plates. And those olives that you like so much, they eat them every day, sometimes two or three times a day if they want to.”

Spar gave him a faint, disbelieving smile.

“No, really,” Brax continued. “They’re rich, all of them. Nothing’s too good for the Warriors of Estavia ‘cause they risk their lives to protect the city from the Yuruk and all our other enemies—whoever they are,” he added. “So when they’re not out killing people, they sleep on beds made of goose down covered with silk sheets, and they wear leather sandals on the street and satin slippers inside the temple. There’s rooms piled ten foot high with gold and jewels and, in the courtyards, the trees throw so much fruit that they can’t keep up with it and it falls into piles all over the place. They have special gardeners whose only job is to pick it up. I even heard a garrison guard once say that the kitchens alone were as big as Oristo-Cami. They could feed the entire city if they wanted to, so, don’t worry about anything, all right? We’re never gonna go hungry again. This is gonna be the best thing that’s ever happened to us. I promise.”

Turning them toward the dockside market, Brax glanced up at the overcast sky.
As long as you make it there in time,
his mind observed darkly.
So don’t mess around today or you’ll fail him again. He won’t survive another night of Havo’s Dance on the streets and neither will you.

Brax clenched his teeth. We won’t have to, he retorted. We’re Estavia’s now and
She
won’t let those
things touch us ever again. We’re not gonna end up like Drove and Graize, or even like Cindar either. We’re safe now, safe forever. So shut up and think about food.

Leading them to the nearest stall, Brax pushed away the memory of Graize fighting off a dozen ravaging spirits as they dragged him into the air.
I said, we aren’t going to end up that way,
he repeated. “Not ever.”

Spar gave him an inquiring glance and Brax shook his head.

“Nothing. C‘mon, let’s eat.”

Far away, crouched on the edge of a small rise on the Berbat-Dunya, Graize blinked at the strange thought that someone was thinking about him before staring out at wild lands, his pale eyes misty and unfocused, one pupil distinctly larger than the other, and a dazed expression on his face. His newly expanded abilities scrabbled to make some sense of the chaotic swirl of images called up by the vast expanse of power and possibility stretching out before him, but quickly became overwhelmed once more.

“It’s like piles of yellow-and-green carpets,” he murmured. “But where’re the carpet sellers, hm? It’s long past dawn. They should be up and opening their stalls for the morning trade.”

Looking down at the dead beetle clamped in his fist, he brought it up to his ear, then nodded.

“Ah, the market’s closed today,” he said gravely. “There’s been a death in the family.”

The beetle said no more and he closed his hand, pressing it to his chest. It was the only possession he had left and he didn’t want it to leave him, too. Everything had left him, even the buildings. His eyes narrowed as he tried to remember how that had happened. The night before was a confusing jumble of images and sensations; in fact everything before that morning was a confusing jumble of images and sensations. Everything except the spirits, he amended; he remembered the spirits. They had ... fed him? No, something had
made
them feed him, something cold, like ice water with a terrible consciousness behind it, something just beyond remembering. As he strained to bring the memory into focus, a dull ache began to throb behind his left temple and he abandoned the attempt. It didn’t matter anyway.

Catching up one of the wispy creatures that still clung to his cheek; he pressed it against his teeth. Its tiny allotment of power and prophecy trickled down his throat and his eyes cleared for just an instant. Yes, they had ... fed him with their own shining, ice-cold life force. That morning. Slowly, his sense of time and space began to return.

He’d come back to consciousness some time after dawn, lying facedown in a gully, knife gone, money gone, and his clothes hanging off him in bloody rags. The gout of power that had saved his life was long since used up and the path it had torn through his body spasmed every time he’d tried to move or even think. The pain had threatened to overwhelm his mind with a flood of cold, silvery shards that almost seemed to be alive, they were so bright. He shivered. They were alive, he’d realized. Alive and hungry, but so very tasty, like silvery sweetmeats on a confectioner’s tray.

“They’re tasty, but they’re deadly,” he warned himself, feeling the truth of his words in the ebb and flow of the spirits’ power within his veins. “You can’t eat too many of them or you’ll go mad. You can’t even look at them for long or you’ll freeze to death. But, maybe, you could look for just a little while.”

He stared at them until the silvery shards became the kaleidoscope of brilliant white lights he’d seen above the wild lands and he nodded triumphantly. He’d thought they’d been hiding back there.

He bared his teeth at them experimentally, but they just twinkled back at him and he remembered. The silvery lights and the powerful new future he’d tasted had kept the spirits at bay until the dawn. Somehow weakened by the sunlight, the spirits could no longer attack him, but they still clung to him, unwilling to let go, covering his mouth and nose in a sticky, white mass. He breathed them in and felt their now familiar power flowing down his throat to warm his chest and limbs with potential. He’d begun to scoop them up from the pools of power all around him then, cramming them into his mouth and, after only a few minutes, he grew strong enough to scramble from the gully and clamber up the rise.

But once there, there was nothing to see but miles of empty landscape and the vast, cloudy sky. Anavatan had disappeared. He was alone.

He cocked his head to one side. Hadn’t he always been alone?

The image of a dark-haired boy, watching as he was carried into the air on a tide of agony hovered before his eyes and he swiped at it impatiently. He didn’t know who that was. Scratching angrily at a dirt-smeared scab on his chin, he frowned. Or maybe he did know, but he didn’t care; it could be either.

The dark-haired boy became an older, larger youth and Graize shook his fist at it.

“No, no, no,” he whispered as he stared into its empty eye sockets. “Fly away, Drove. They ate you. You lost the game and you’re dead now. Fly away.”

The image vanished in a puff of silver dust and Graize swayed dizzily in its wake. Sucking at a tiny spirit entwined around his fingers, he tasted moisture, then turned. There was a tall tower in the distance. He squinted. No, in the future, he amended, standing on a rocky ledge overlooking a storm-tossed sea. He licked his lips. The sea. Water. He needed water. He was so thirsty. But he couldn’t get water from the tower. Not yet. Nor from the sea. He had to find it somewhere else. With the allotment of prophecy he’d gained from the tiny spirit, he knew that water lay to the north and he began to make his way down the rise, his mind consumed with the need to drink.

He wandered aimlessly until the cloud-obscured sun began its downward journey to the west, drinking from the rapidly shrinking puddles on the plains, then moving on to search for food, guided this way and that by the silvery lights and the new knowledge in his mind. The spirits swirled about him, whispering to each other in their own sibilant language, and every now and then, if he listened hard enough, he could almost understand them. But the concentration made his head ache, so after a while, he stopped trying. Then their world flowed over him like the tide, transforming the wild lands into a vast sea of darkly shaded dunes that looked like islands in the distance, islands dappled with pools of silvery orange and yellow light. He tasted the cast-off power of insects, birds, and burrowing creatures, felt the spirits’ insatiable hunger for the deeper, richer power growing stronger with every passing season behind its distant barriers of steel and stone, and knew their frustration as that power was denied to them over and over again by shepherds, warriors, and Gods. By the time the black dots on the horizon caught his attention, he’d forgotten that anything except the hunger had ever existed.

The dots became a host of riders and, as his accompanying spirits fled, Graize stared fixedly down at them, feeling the growing interest of the silvery lights. The dots wavered in and out of his sight like distant waves sparkling in the sunlight, first near and then far away, many becoming few, than breaking up into many again. As they drew closer, he was able to discern ten figures dressed in black boots and pantaloons, brown sheepskin jackets under boiled leather cuirasses, with iron-strengthened leather helmets on their heads and curved swords at their backs. They carried bone-and-wood bows with quivers of black-and-brown arrows at their hips, lances tipped with horsehair and nasty-looking iron hooks, and their shaggy little mounts wore braided feathers and tiny bells in their manes. A single memory came to him from the Anavatanon docks: Yuruk riders from the Berbat-Dunya, powerful, dangerous, and unpredictable, people to be feared and avoided, the greatest of all challenges to the game, but a challenge he’d never taken up. Until now.

As he watched, one figure, riding before the others, carrying a tall stick with a white animal’s tail attached, became as familiar and yet as unknowable as tomorrow’s dawn, but it was the one who rode in the very center that drew his attention like a moth to a flame. His new vision saw strands of pale, multicolored power emanating from his chest like the spokes of a misty wagon wheel, ending at the chest of each of the other riders. The shining lights whispered his name: Kursk, their leader, their wyrdin—the word flowed over his tongue as if he had spoken it a hundred times—their seer. Captivated by the strength of his abilities, Graize reached out.