The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (44 page)

No!
he thought.

The staff shuddered in his twitching hand.

Then he gripped it fiercely, thinking of the swelling of dampened wood, and thrust himself down into the shallow sea.  Opening his mouth, he breathed in the brine until it flowed through his lungs, his veins, every empty space—kept swallowing it until the pressure of the black water forced the fangs from his skin, then the poison.  Soon a morass of venom and blood and snakes swirled around him, and with one hand he pulled at the water, dragging it toward the endless sea behind him.  His other held tight to the staff.

The sea moved.  It pulled at him like he pulled at it, raking its black fingers across his shoulders and down his back, but he locked his arm around the staff and though the water yanked his legs out from under him, the staff’s roots held.  The snakes swirled away like so much detached seaweed.  The floor of mud and sand and pebbles shifted beneath him, then slowed as the water receded.

Shakily, coughing water, he regained his feet to find Vina watching him from atop another wall.  Her tusked face was creased in thought, her heavy body nude but for jewelry now without her usual drapings of snakes, skin black as pitch.  After a moment, she nodded approval.

“
You might want to move before the wave returns,” Jeronek said faintly.

Cob glanced back to see that his pull had stripped the water from the ruins for nearly a mile seaward, showing not only broken stones and plants but wrecked ships, drowned buildings.  It looked like a harbor town that had succumbed to the sea—a fallen civilization pocked here and there by the white of a skull.

Beyond the destruction, the water rose like a wall of black glass.  Haurah and Erosei were already moving toward the shore, discomfort on their faces, but all Cob saw of Jeronek was his back.  The southerner’s eyes were fixed on that wave.

—
and he was hanging in the air over the white tower as a shivering wall of water approached, red light racing across its glossy surface from the glow of the Seals in the sky, higher than mountains, too high too escape
—

He blinked and took a step across the bare seabed to grasp Jeronek’s shoulder.  For a moment even his full strength would not budge the southerner, as if Jeronek was not a man but a pillar of stone, anchored eternally to that spot.

Then a shudder went through him and he responded to Cob’s pull, staggering along though his eyes never left the wave.  With a grunt, Cob yanked the tree-staff from the mud and turned toward shore.

Vina had not moved from her wall.  Her dark gaze stayed on Cob.  “This is your mindscape,” she said as he dragged Jeronek past her.  “You are in control, not him.  Do not let his memories, his fears, overwhelm you.  There is no wave if you do not permit one.”

“Then why are they running?” Cob said, watching Haurah and Erosei charge up the beach.  Beneath him, the seabed shivered, and behind him he felt more than heard the rumble of the incoming water.  It made every nerve scream with instinctual fear.  He wanted nothing more than to be that bird and fly.

“
They are slaves to memory,” said Vina, “as is Jeronek.  As am I.  But I know that I am dust.  My pain is over.  I do not need to relive it through you.”

“
It never ends,” said Jeronek in a voice hollowed by despair.  “The wave always returns.  Bones upon bones.  We will never be free.“

The wave closed in.  He felt it in the earth and air, an oppressive sense of doom against his back.  The day had never been bright—there was no sun in the pale sky—yet it had dimmed, a broad shadow thrown over everything.  Even the shore was bleak in the grey light, Haurah and Erosei just specks racing away.

The mud pulled out from under his feet as if to refute his escape.  Jeronek was a dead weight in his grip.  In his mind’s eye he saw the wave crashing over the tower, breaking the crenels and pulling down the walls, dashing it all into oblivion.

He set his staff in the mud, angry at the memory—barely comprehending it but furious that this was happening.  His flying dream had given him Jeronek and the doomed Pillar; Erosei speeding toward his death on the island; Haurah awaiting hers in the forest.  His father in their cave home.  All of them were fatalistic, stuck to their final moments as if nothing else defined them.  Only Vina had carried him with her at a moment of action, her army on the move toward an uncertain yet optimistic future.

“I didn’t make that kinda wave,” he muttered.  “I pushed the water back.  So then I just…”

Letting go of Jeronek, he closed his eyes and let the roar fill his ears, focusing on how the water had felt while pulling away—and on bringing it back in the same manner.  Swift but smooth, washing past his feet then his ankles then his knees to lap against the shore like a common tide.

The roar faded.  The sense of weight melted from his shoulders.  Cool water rose up his legs, tangling seaweed around his calves, and stopped just at the knee.

Behind him, Jeronek made a choked sound then fell silent.

“Very good,” said Vina from her wall.  “Accept the consequences of your actions.  Fix what you break.  But do not let others place their burdens upon your shoulders, not when bearing them is needless.”

“
Not needless,” Jeronek rasped.  “That memory can not be allowed to fade.”

“
All fades with time,” said Vina.

Cob looked back at Jeronek.  The southerner stood staring into the distance where the black water had loomed, the set of his shoulders resigned yet solid, like a weary sentinel awaiting the horde.  His khopesh and shield were gone, his armor faded.

Surrendered
, Cob thought. 
I won’t let that happen to me.

“
Come on, kid!” shouted Erosei from up the beach.  “You wanna learn this shit or not?”

Cob turned his back on Jeronek and waded to shore.  As soon as he got there, the fight was on: Erosei charging swords-first, Haurah on his heels in full wolfbeast form.  Cob welcomed it, the sand flowing up him to form new armor, his staff cracking against shoulders and knees as he batted them away.  When Haurah’s fur grew thorns and bark plates, he discovered that just hitting her was not enough to keep her away; he had to dig his heels in the ground and force her down with the staff, make the sand reach up to hold her.  It rarely worked for more than a few moments.  In her true form, she was too powerful to chain.

Erosei was a different matter.  Swifter than Cob, he stabbed those twin blades like needles to constantly chip away at the armor, but there was not enough weight behind his strikes to cut deep.  Cob remembered a snippet from their discussions: Erosei was of metal, not of wood or water or stone, and that seemed to hamper him in the scuffle.  He was vicious though, always going for the eyes or the throat, always moving, his dark warrior’s crest streaking the air behind him, and while his blades could not break through Cob’s armor, Cob’s own strikes rarely connected.  Even when they did, Erosei just bent away, then swung back with the same fervor as ever.

Were he fighting in the physical realm, Cob would have exhausted himself early on, but there seemed no end to his energy or that of his foes.  His anger certainly continued unabated; for all that Jeronek had cautioned him to be calm, he could not restrain the gleeful rage whenever he tried to break Erosei’s face.  Erosei seemed to like it, always taunting him, always trying to draw him out for Haurah’s attacks, and only the greater reach of his staff kept Cob from being constantly mauled.

It was fantastic.

Finally, he managed enough control to hook a rope of sand around Erosei’s ankle at the same moment that Erosei tried to dance aside from his staff.  The ancient Kerrindrixi went down hard on the shore, and Cob swept the staff around to fend Haurah off, then lunged forward to press its end to Erosei’s throat.  With a strangled laugh, Erosei let his swords fall.

“Got me,” he said.  “You’re gaining technique.  Now let’s see what you can do against a real enemy.”

He pointed up the shore, and Cob looked that way to see a dark forest stretching into the distance.  Within the forest glimmered a faint yellowish light.

“What kind of enemy?” Cob said.

“
The kind that almost killed you, idiot.”

Annoyed, he jabbed the staff down but Erosei had already rolled aside, laughing.  He glanced over his shoulder for Vina and Jeronek but found that both were gone, along with the ruins and the sea.  In their place lay the slow slope of a valley tangled with weed and briar; when he looked forward, the strip of sandy shore had likewise vanished beneath the green.

The pale light danced among the trees as if taunting him.

“
Come, Ko Vrin.  We hunt the wraith,” said Haurah through her mouthful of fangs.  Then she leapt forward onto four legs, a great dark wolf racing for the trees.

Erosei followed her, and with nowhere else to go, Cob gave chase.  He did not relish the idea of hunting.  Sparring with a pair of vicious allies was educational, almost fun, but running down an enemy—even one that had tried to kill him—felt strange.  Like he was turning the order of nature upside-down.

This is what I want
, he told himself. 
Once I’m free of the Guardian’s bonds, I’m hunting Morshoc.  This is good experience.

Still, it sat oddly in his stomach, like he had swallowed a stone.

Into the dark forest he plunged, bare feet beating on the living soil, and within instants he felt a connection to the trees around him.  Their roots dug deep, their branches spread wide, and every one was a new limb—millions of hands outstretched to the sun or delving for water, millions of fingers testing the breeze.

And more than that.  He sensed the light ahead like the heat of a candle-flame, a tiny danger that could yet spark a conflagration.  Every tree it passed told him of its proximity, of their fear of its fire.  It did not belong.

He would remove it.

At his side raced his companions, wolf and man, keeping time with his strides.  He felt their fury but his had ebbed.  Painful as his time in the spire had been, it was over, and the thought of tearing into his captors with tooth and claw was distasteful.  He would shatter them, drive them from this place, but not descend to barbarity.  That was not his way.

As if sensing the cooling of his temper, the forest around him gained a layer of frost.  His footfalls crunched on brittle leaves, and icicles shimmered as he passed.  The light still danced ahead, enticing, but he felt he was gaining on it.  Felt its essence behind that pinprick of heat—another radiance made neither of fire or light but of unearthly life, ephemeral and infinitely vast.

Threatening.

He reached out through the roots and branches, struggling to grasp it.  The flame it carried made the trees quail but they obeyed him, twisting limbs after it.  Too slow.  It danced away, fleet-footed and flowing, so he turned his will on the smaller plants—the bracken and thorn-brush, the ice-crusted weeds and grass.  They moved more quickly, and after a few snags he felt them catch and keep.

He picked up the pace, concentrating on keeping the light imprisoned.  It struggled but not as violently as Haurah or Erosei had, and it occurred to him that opponents who faced him on his own turf were fools indeed.  By touching the ground, the water, the forest, they had submitted themselves to him.

Soon he could see it with his own eyes, not just the senses of the trees.  It huddled among a tangled mass of thorns, clutching the little flame like a weapon of last resort.  He stopped a pace away to regard it—a featureless inhuman entity, no more than a bizarre conglomeration of glass and glow.

He raised the staff to destroy it.

Something grabbed the end.

He looked back but there were only shadows.  Haurah and Erosei had gone, leaving the forest frigid in his wake, the snow high between the trees.  Wind whispered among the icicles, and as he turned toward the light again, he thought he heard his name.

He shook it off.  He was alone.

Again he raised the staff.

Again, something grabbed its end, pulling it backward.  He cursed and turned to find the shadows thicker, moving.  Humanoid.  One of them clutched the end of the staff, and he swiped at it with one hand, saw it leap back.

‘
Cob,’
said another.

“
Go away,” he told them, annoyed.  Here in the dream, he doubted they were his enemies.  Maybe they were like the water: some weird manifestation of the other Guardians, or his fears, some nagging old memory.  The first one grabbed for his staff again, and he shoved it off.

Felt cloth under his hand.  Heard it yelp faintly as it hit the ground.

‘Don’t hurt him,’
said the other shadow. 
‘He’s a friend, Cob.  He’s a friend!’

Cob looked to the light, which still shuddered beneath its mesh of thorns.  When he squinted he could just make out a shape to it.  Limbs, garments.  A face where there had been blank crystal.

The shadows both grabbed for his staff again, and this time he let them.  As it left his hands, their shapes sharpened.  Coats, scarves, gloves.  Alarmed eyes staring at him from among the cold-weather garments.

Lark.  Fiora.  Wolf-Arik beside them.