The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (26 page)

Pikes broke against his stony skin.  With the Guardian as his bulwark, metal no longer seemed to shake him, and between one swipe of his tree and the next, he concentrated on the pikes themselves.  The nearest dead wood burst into leaf, and he heard oaths and cries of surprise as the sprung metal fittings scattered into the crowd.  The soldiers were too armored for him to feel them properly—their heartbeats, their stress and fear muted by metallic resonance but even more so by the noxious scent he caught in their blood.

Concentrating, he sent his senses out through the roots and found their source.  Two monsters riddled with spiritual scars, twisted, bastardized, their essences like frantic fireflies caught under glass.  He reached out with his fingers of grass and loam and clenched around them, felt them panic, and the soldiers around him staggered in response.

Among those soldiers, he felt other twisted creatures.  Abominations of bone and fang and ichor, weighted with steel—and another one.  A familiar one.

He glanced back to find him.  Instead, his eyes fixed on a female face underlaced with the hideous fibers he recognized.  In her hand burned a well-known enemy.

Darilan?
he thought, turning toward her defensively.  It was impossible; he had seen the life go out of him, seen the dagger lying in the snow.  The world seemed to slow, to dampen, everything around them just shadows and noise, and there was a fist clamping hard in his chest.  Fear, anger…

Relief…

Then two lines of fire hooked beneath his shoulder-blades and tore his feet from the earth, and all his senses fell away.

*****

Dasira could only shriek as the chains wrenched Cob into the sky.  His roar fractured into an all-too-human scream as he was lifted, the Guardian antlers shattering from his brow, the armor raining down in ephemeral shards.  Arik leapt too slowly, claws scraping the air below his feet, and then he was hauled high as the wraiths on the backs of the black raywings reined up out of reach.

Ahead of her, Ilshenrir had come visible, his hands shaping a spell, but he faltered as the raywings climbed higher. 
Kill them!
she wanted to scream, but with the loss of the Guardian the grass had drooped around her legs and all the soldiers were rallying; blades came at her from every side and it was all she could do to fend them off.

A bolt of blue-black lightning lanced through the crowd then, forking and jumping among the soldiers to send them convulsing to the ground.  It diverted around her companions’ wedge, giving Dasira just enough space to break through and join them.

‘Get after him,’
Enkhaelen snarled in her ear. 
‘I’ll clean this up.’

“
Shoot down the flyers!” she shrieked, but heard no response.  In the sky, the haelhene riders had already shrunk to flecks, and the shape in the chains that hung between them was not moving.

Ilshenrir turned toward her and she nearly ran him through.  He held out his hand instead, the mist rising around his feet, and beyond him she saw Lark and Fiora with hands clasped, both wild-eyed.  Arik was already a grey streak in the distance, wolf-shaped and racing in pursuit.

Casting Alandian aside, she reached out to clasp the wraith’s hand, and the mist swallowed them again.

*****

As he surveyed the wreckage of the battlefield, Inquisitor Archmagus Enkhaelen struggled to maintain his calm.  He had to think clearly now that he had tipped his hand.

With no targets and with their controllers incapacitated, the Gold soldiers he had shocked remained on the ground, expressions dazed.  Just looking at them told him that the Gold Army was putting too much emphasis on thralling—easy, iron-fisted, but exactly what he had told them not to do.  Sometimes he wondered why he even bothered to give advice.

The three journeymen and the Master Scryer from the Cantorin watchtower—that oaf Arloth—lay dead at his feet.  The tower itself should be burning; he had tossed a parting shot through the portal right before disrupting it, and that blast should have been enough to trigger a cascade failure among the tower’s many Weave-knots, frames and arcane paraphernalia.

Beyond the perimeters of his arcane dampener and teleport-block, his minions had opened their own portals and now poured out like a black-robed tide.  Key-runes flared within their deep hoods as they crossed his barriers to subdue the few Gold mages who had not tried to call Sanctuary and thus not been knocked out by the teleport-block.  Warring flickers of gold and black energy played along the fringes of the crowd, the last resisters.

He tried to think if he had missed anything.  He had been keeping an eye on this situation since the first report of Cob’s reemergence, though he had done his best to pretend annoyance.  As the Inquisitor Archmagus, he was contacted about almost every arcane or spiritual anomaly in the Empire, and though it ate up his time, sometimes the pestering was worthwhile.

Intervening here had been a necessary gamble.  He could not afford to have Cob taken by the enemy, even though this fiasco exposed him to more potential danger than he had seen in centuries.  Not from the Gold soldiers and mages, of course, nor from the haelhene or even Cob and his friends, but from those with whom he had shared the scry-discussion.  The Gold Army’s prime Scryer Archmagus; the Crimson General; the Lord Chancellor.  All of them were formidable, but worse than that, all of them could tattle on him.

So he had opted for subtlety, though it was not his strong suit.  He had monitored the scry long enough to know when the others stopped watching, and activated the Cantorin watchtower’s portal-frame remotely so no access-request could be recorded on the Weave.  Not difficult for a mage of his skill.  Intimidating the watchtower’s occupants into silence had been easy even during the build-up to the assault; Watchtower Cantorin was a small cog in a large machine, and the Scryer Archmagus and Gold General Lynned had been too busy organizing their troops to pay much attention to each watchtower’s reports.  He had even switched bodies to mask his energy signature, knowing that if this went badly, he would have to eradicate all evidence.

And ‘badly’ turned out to have been an understatement.  Why Cob would rush into the middle of a horde of soldiers, he could not fathom, but it had forced him to join the fray.

Admittedly, it seemed the boy was getting a handle on his powers.  That boded well for the plan.  Serving himself up to the haelhene, however…

“
Maker,” said one of his black-robed minions.

He glanced over, sieving his memory for the man’s name.  The changing bulges and discolorations that deformed their bodies made them hard to identify sometimes.  “Yes, Shuriathe?”

“There is a bodythief asking for you, Maker,” said the man, bowing his head deeply.  Tumors distended his lower jaw and throat, straining his voice—though not as badly as most.  “One of the Golds.  And we found this.”  He held out a long, thickly-wrapped bundle that Enkhaelen sensed immediately was an akarriden sword.

The Inquisitor Archmagus’ mouth tightened in anger.  If there was anything he liked less than the haelhene, it was their wretched work.

“Thank you, Shuriathe,” he said, taking the bundle.  “My compliments on your proper handling of it.  Now get the soldiers rounded up and herded into the lair.  I don’t know how much time we have.”

“
Yes, Maker.  The bodythief is there,” said Shuriathe, gesturing toward one of the more blood-soaked areas of the battlefield as he backed away, still bowing.

Enkhaelen strode for the bodythief, unwrapping the blade as he went.  It twisted in his grip as if understanding who held it, but he could not hear its psychic scream or feel the frost on his corpse-flesh.  Clamping one bare hand on its hilt and one on its frigid blade, he frowned absently and snapped it like a twig.  Pale energy sheeted from it like cold rain, pattering to the ground in momentary humanoid form before dissolving to nothing.

He cast the pieces aside and crouched by the bodythief.  The snow around the man was soaked crimson from the wound in his gut and the stump of his arm, the threads at both sites dead.  For a moment, Enkhaelen could not fathom why, but then he saw the cut in the man's other sleeve and the greyness of the bracer beneath.  An actual killing strike, by akarriden blade.

Vedaceirra.

But she had not succeeded; the bodythief's face was clenched with the effort to live even as threads unraveled beneath his skin.  Though Enkhaelen knew from a glance that he had not had a personal hand in this one’s making, he still considered all of them his work, and when he touched the bodythief's face, a bit of clarity came back to the man's eyes.

“
Maker,” he rasped.  “It is good to meet you at last.”

A marginal smile touched Enkhaelen’s mouth.  “And you are?”

“Gereth.  Jenn Gereth.”

“
Jenn.  You’ve served our Emperor well.  I can mend you or give you rest.  Which do you choose?”

The bodythief's eyelids fluttered.  He was on the verge, his breath short and fast through blood-stained teeth.  “The Light, Maker," he whispered.  "Release me to the Light."

Enkhaelen's lips thinned, but he nodded.  "Close your eyes," he said, pulling a string of clear beads from a pocket of his coat.  Gereth obeyed, and with careful fingers the necromancer drew up the sleeve on the remaining arm to reveal the black bracer.  It was split in the middle, much of its material gone grey, yet it clung tightly to the flesh with its remaining hooks.  At Enkhaelen's touch, it seemed to relax.  He stroked it once, like a pet, then removed a bead from the string and set it to the bracer's surface.

Immediately the black material softened, the spikes and hooks on its underside melting, the threads disintegrating.  Jenn Gereth hissed a last breath and sagged into the snow as the bracer's connection to his brain failed.  A thin miasma oozed up to collect in the bead, and Enkhaelen waited until the bracer had collapsed to sludge and the bead had gone black before he lifted it away.  For a moment he stared into its confines, eyes unfocused, then returned it to the string.

He hated lying to them, but even more he hated allowing souls to go to the Light while he could still make use of them.

Rising, he tucked the beads away and drew his gloves from his pocket.  From the look of the battlefield, his minions had things well in hand.

As they should.  He had drilled them for these inevitabilities, and now came the real challenge: dodging responsibility and obscuring his motivation for as long as possible.  As many times as he had played this role, it was different now.

This time, it was not a game.

For a moment he let his fingers play over the thick silver ring that graced his left hand, then pulled his gloves on determinedly.  He could dwell on those memories later.

“
You!” he called to the nearest black-robe, who straightened to nervous attention.  “I’m returning to the lair, so I name you acting coordinator.  From this point forward, you are personally responsible for seeing that every soldier, mage and convert gets brought through and inspected by my mentalists.  Remember, the mages need to be unconscious before you remove them from the teleport-block."

"Can't we just kill them, Maker?"

"That would be a waste of good material.  And as you're now responsible for them...”

“
I—I won’t fail you, Maker!”

Enkhaelen nodded and strode away, the perimeter and the teleport-block yielding to him easily.   Beyond stood one of the portals, exhaling hot sulfurous air onto the frigid field.  Not bothering to check which chamber it led to, he passed through, already lost in plans.

So much to do, so little time.

“
This is your doing, isn’t it!” Dasira snarled as they ran through the Grey.  Not even the thought of being lost into the endless mist could quell her anger.  In her grip, Ilshenrir’s gloved hand was strange and hard, nodular, and hurt her fingers as she clenched tighter.

His voice seeped back to her, flattened by the mist.  “Were it my doing, I would have left you to the soldiers.”

A muscle jumped in her jaw.  Serindas bloodied the haze around her, seething runes reflecting off the realm’s swirling substance, and she felt his hunger as always—felt it right in tune with her rage.  But she could not deny the wraith’s point.

“
Then how did the haelhene find us?” she yelled.  “How were they right piking there?”

“
Perhaps you should ask your master.”

Dasira glanced sidelong to where Fiora and Lark should be, hoping they had not heard him.  The mist concealed them; for all she knew, Ilshenrir could have let them go.  The urge came again to sink Serindas into his side, to stab with manic fury until nothing remained of him, but she squelched it.  She had to save that anger for the real villains.

Still, it troubled her to sheathe the blade.

“
He was as surprised as we were,” she said, betting on the mist to swallow her voice the same way it swallowed any trace of the girls.

“
Then the haelhene have been eavesdropping on your Armies’ scrys.”

She winced without surprise.  The haelhene were already deeply involved in the politics of the Empire.  With a delegation at the Palace, outposts scattered across the Heartlands and control of Akarridi itself, they comprised as powerful a force as any of the Armies, their influence only limited by their meager numbers.  That they were tapping into the communications between Palace and Armies was a threat but not a shock.

“What the pike do they want with him?” she said.

“
At a guess, to destroy the Guardian or ransom it to the Palace.  As they are flying, I believe they will stop at one of their bastions to access a portal.”

“
You’re a mage, aren’t you?  Why not portal us there first?”

“
I can not yet tell which bastion they seek.  Hlacaasteia, Erestoia, Akarridi…”

Please not Akarridi
, she thought.  “How long before you can tell?”

“
Spatial proximity in the physical realm does not translate in any calculable manner to perceived proximity in the Grey, especially when pertaining to higher-realm structures, as they and the Grey are both folded transdimensionally—“

“
How long before you can tell
?”

“…
I will know when they arrive.”

“
That’s it?  That’s all you can do?”

“
I am currently following them by sight, but due to the constraints of cross-dimensional perception I can not extrapolate which—“

“
Get us out of here and open a piking portal!”

Ilshenrir went silent.  For a moment Dasira wondered if she had offended him by interrupting his mage-babble, but then his steps slowed, allowing her to draw close enough to just glimpse the girls at his other side.  They looked nervous and confused, but Lark gave her a half-smile past Ilshenrir’s shoulder, as if relieved to see her.  Dasira returned it absently.

“Stay close,” said Ilshenrir.

Ahead, the mist began to clear.  The black trunks of trees resolved, thick with icicles and snow, and for a moment Dasira was sure that the treacherous wraith had yanked them back into the Mist Forest.  Then she glimpsed deer hightailing it away from the dimensional shift, enough to prove that they were elsewhere.

“Step carefully,” the wraith instructed, moving forward as the Grey continued to evaporate from around them.  “It would not do to be caught inside a tree.”

“
What?” said Lark, then squawked in surprise.  Dasira glanced over to see a low branch from an inkwood materialize right above the Shadow girl’s head, the rest of the tree resolving as the mist faded from around it.

“
As we shift between realms,” the wraith said calmly, “objects that exist in one can become entangled with those passing from the other.  This is why we restrict our exits from the Grey to well-known areas.  It is difficult to extricate oneself from solid objects.”

Dasira shuddered and walked in Ilshenrir’s steps as the strange ground became snowy earth again.  The mist evaporated, leaving them in a small clearing in a deciduous forest, the trees so slender and tightly packed that she knew it was new growth.  Icy branches interlaced above like a ceiling of frosted glass.

“Great place to come through,” said Lark with a shudder.

Ilshenrir crouched and began sweeping the snow from a small area.  He had reverted to inhuman form and his original coloration, grey cloak fanning out like a remnant of the mist.  Dasira squinted when his hand paused.  In the unbroken snow before him was a tiny speck of fresh red, like a berry.

She looked up and saw redness on the glassy ranks of icicles.

Sickening fear latched her throat shut.  Automatically her hand went to Serindas for the comfort of his sadism; no matter how much he annoyed her, they had been together so long that she measured her equilibrium by his madness.  As it washed through her, the visions behind her eyes changed from Cob on the Thynbell laboratory table, Cob being taken by the chains, to her blade embedded in a wraith’s skull.

She took a deep breath, exhaled, then looked back down to find Fiora staring at her.

The girl appeared little worse for wear despite her lunatic rush into the fray on Cob’s heels.  Dried blood speckled her dress and armor, none of it her own—in stark contrast to Dasira’s tattered self.

For the first time in ages, Dasira felt jealous.  This Trifolder child had come through the fight unscathed, while under her skin Dasira felt the threads still working to knit her up, make her as whole as they ever could.  Forty-five years of living as a bodythief and yet she could not walk through the thick of combat like the girl had.  The goddesses protected Fiora, but they had turned their backs on Dasira long ago.

And now the little bitch had the audacity to regard her with concern.

“Are you all right?” said the girl.  “You look, um…  I have a salve…”

“
I’m fine,” Dasira snapped, and turned to Ilshenrir lest she leap over and stab the girl.  Ilshenrir had settled cross-legged in the space he had cleared, and now withdrew a circle of silvery glass and four crystalline spikes from the folds of his cloak.  She recognized them as portal stakes; flat at one end and tapering to a triangular point at the other, they made it possible for mages to anchor a portal either in soft soil or on hard ground.

“
How long will your magic take?” she asked as he set the stakes aside and clasped the glass circle between his hands.

“
It depends upon the bastion we seek.  They will all have watchers, and to avoid alerting them, I must fix my scry upon an outlying area rather than the resonance of the bastion itself, which is substantially more difficult.  Additionally, I have lost visual contact with them, and therefore do not know which bastion to scry first.”

“
Which is most likely?” said Fiora.

Ilshenrir shook his head.  “Without knowing their intentions, I can not know their destination.  Should they wish to trade him to the Palace, Hlacaasteia is their best option.  Should they intend to remove him to the White Isle, it is Erestoia By-The-Sea.  Should they be inclined to study him, perhaps experiment on him, then Akarridi—“

“No,” said Dasira sharply.

Her three companions turned to look at her, Fiora in puzzlement, Lark worried, Ilshenrir with brows slightly raised.  Annoyed by her own outburst, Dasira picked her words carefully.  “We can’t think of it that way, guessing at their motives.  If you don’t have any insight, Ilshenrir, then we have to consider what we can actually accomplish.  Hlacaasteia…”

The wraith nodded.  “Hlacaasteia is a flagship.  Its defenses are nigh impregnable.  Should they travel there, we will have only the most fleeting chance to intercept them.”

And if they plan to bargain with the Palace, Enkhaelen will involve himself
, thought Dasira. 
I have to trust him with that.  Monster though he is, he doesn’t seem to want Cob dead or in custody.

“
As for Akarridi,” the wraith continued, “we would have no chance.  You are correct.  Considered in that light, our only option is Erestoia.”

“
But what if we’re wrong?” said Fiora.  “If we go to the wrong place and end up just standing around while who-knows-what happens to him…”

Slanting a look to her, Dasira said, “If we assault Hlacaasteia or Akarridi, we die.  If we lurk around their border and accidentally trip their wards, we die.  If we attack the flyers within message range, guess what?  We die.  Your goddess might have saved you from a bunch of soldiers, but her power doesn’t mean shit to the haelhene.”

Fiora’s face went red, and she took a step toward Dasira, hands fisted at her sides.  “My goddess stands strong in the face of all adversaries.”

A sneer curled Dasira’s lip.  Under her hand, Serindas pulsed with hunger.  “Your goddess is a little girl who wanted to play at soldiering and got herself killed for it.  See the parallels?”

“We can’t just guess at this.  There has to be some way to be sure.”

“
Oh yes, because certainty is central to life.  There’s always an answer.  Nothing happens just because the world decides to crap on you.”

“
Have you already lost heart?” said the girl, moving closer.  Her eyes held a hard fire, her voice tempering from childish bluster to challenge.  “Or were you only along for the ride?  We are here to see the Guardian freed from its chains no matter the cost, because if it dies, the world becomes that much more broken.  I’m not afraid to follow in my goddess’s footsteps if it means I’ve done a service to the world.”

She was close enough to slap now, close enough to stab, and the desire to do both was so strong that Dasira had to force her hand from Serindas lest she act.  “So you understand the stakes,” she said through her teeth, “yet you still want to throw your life—all our lives away.  Which would you propose we choose?  The flagship, so you can die in idiot glory and tell your goddess you took on the biggest threat in the field?”

Fiora glared at her.  “I’m saying we should find out for sure—“

“
Morgwi’s balls, can we not do this?” said Lark.  “I know you’re all crazy but this isn’t the time to tear each other apart.”  Dasira shot her a look, and she held up her hands defensively but did not back off.  “You’re both serious about rescuing him, all right?  So can we work on making that possible?”

With a curt nod, Fiora turned away.  It took all of Dasira’s strength to let her go.  Lark gave her a ‘what the pike is wrong with you’ stare which she ignored, and as if by mental accord, each woman retreated to her own corner of the clearing to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

What magics Ilshenrir did, Dasira could not tell.  He spoke quietly to himself in his own language, sometimes looking into the mirrored glass and sometimes into space, and though the four stakes glimmered beside him, he never moved to place them into portal position.  The sun shifted slowly beyond the ceiling of ice, casting soft shadows and faint rainbows on the snow, and at some point both Lark and Fiora gave up their sentinel stances and cleared their own spaces to sit.

Dasira did not.  The tension in her shoulders would ebb no more than the tension in her mind.  She kept seeing flickers of the future, the past—wraith spires, blood, dark eyes empty of life—and hated the girls for their ability to rest.

She was so deep in those visions that the first crunch of snow barely registered.  But then came the snarl, and her eyes flew wide from their half-lidded state.  Through the trees, a great shaggy form bore down on them, tongue dangling in exhaustion between bared white teeth.  Its pale eyes were not fixed on her or the other girls but on the wraith at their center.

“
Arik!” she shouted.

The massive wolf’s charge did not falter.  He slammed into Ilshenrir, sparking and obliterating a sphere of wards and burying the wraith beneath him.  The stakes scattered, the mirror flipping away as snow flew in all directions.

Blood like ice, Dasira rushed forward to pull Ilshenrir away from the tumbled wolf.  The wraith came along with a hiss of pain, three lines of pearly blood welling from deep gashes on his cheek, and when the wolf took a bristling step after, Fiora stepped between them.

“
It’s all right,” the girl said soothingly.  “Ilshenrir’s on our side, remember?  We’re making a portal to go get Cob.  It’ll be ready very soon.”

The wolf growled harshly, but the words seemed to get through and after a moment his ears lifted from their skull-tight tuck, his lips lowering over his teeth.  He backed up a few paces and stood, head ducked, gaze still locked on them as his flanks heaved.