The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (83 page)

He looked down at his hands and they were clawed, furred, matted with red.  His arms bled from the dogs’ tearing jaws.  They lay at his feet, gurgling out the last of their loyal lives, throats shredded.  He ached all over, muscle and sinew and bone strained from his skinchange, but he realized dimly that he was not small.  Not as he should have been.

It’s just a memory
, he told himself furiously.

He looked up and all was ruin, just how he had left it.  The hutch torn open, the coop a mess of feathers and blood, small bodies littered everywhere.

And larger bodies…

“
No,” he whined through a mouthful of fangs, recognizing their shapes.

He padded forward cringingly, desperate for this not to be, but the bodies smelled all too familiar.  The one lying by the coop, throated, was Fiora.  He saw her empty eyes, the torn hanks of her dark hair, the claw marks that had tattered the flesh of her sides and chest into red rags.  The one at the garden, slumped over the edging stones—that was Ilshenrir, face down, grey garments shredded and pale hair glossed with pearlescent wraith-blood.  And across the stoop, beneath the shack’s shattered door, Lark lay like a broken doll, left arm and half her face gone.

Arik’s throat hitched.  He coughed hard and a piece of bone flew free, still flecked with meat.

The taste of flesh, human flesh, filled his mouth.  He refused to remember having done that.  He had fled the real shack while still in a frenzy, and when it passed and he crept back in desperate hope that he had imagined it, the scavengers had already come and gone.  There had been little to tell him if the taste had been truth or delusion.

He crouched in the yard, shuddering.  His jaws had reshaped to beast-form on their own, and his tail swept the dust as it tucked between his shivering legs.  The door hung from one hinge, splintered and scored by claws, and he remembered the hollers of fear from behind it.  Remembered flinging the dogs from himself with one hand while tearing at the wood with the other.

He dared not go in.  From the interior of the shack, the stench of blood and death was too thick, too horrible to bear.

But there was a dark voice inside him, a nasty thing embedded deep in his mind that whispered,
Go on.  See what you have done.

Cringing, he reached over Lark’s staring corpse and pulled at the broken door.  It crashed down beside him.

Inside, all was wrecked, the table overturned, the bunks slashed, crockery smashed, bedding-feathers everywhere.  Blood, rotten food, smoke, herbs and excrement mixed in an overpowering stench.  Panic hammered in his chest, but he had to know.

The doorway was too small, so he ducked cautiously, ears folded flat to his skull.  Last time, he had been just the right size—a cub bulked out to the size of a man by the change, walking on his razored toes, all teeth and tormented fury.

There were no windows.  The huntsmen had spent little time in here—sleeping, wintering, not much else.  It was all so small now.  Feathers ghosted up around his paws, flecked with red.  He squinted, trying to see and not imagine.  Knowing there were bodies but daring not to think.

Scraps of clothing.  White, brown.  A glimpse of green and gold on the floor, like a snake’s shed skin.

A pale shape on the far bunk.

He took another step, then froze.  There was more than blood-scent here.  He clamped a paw over his nose but had already caught it: the reek of exertion, of terror and rapacious lust.  In the shadows the white flesh was striped with red lines.  Shoulders, thighs.  A ragged dark hole at the belly.

The bile surged and Arik wrenched back, skimmed his skull on the door-frame and nearly fell off the steps.  Desperately he bent low and let his stomach heave out the evil, trying to blot it from his mind.  Trying not to feel the scrape as it came up, or see the shards of bone, the fingers among the unidentifiable slurry.

Can’t be real.  Can’t be.  I wouldn’t—

I wouldn't kill her.

But he recognized that other urge, and trembled piteously.  He had been too young for such things the first time, his fury spent on the imperative of a predator when the prey is trapped and stinks of fear.  Now he smelled her scent on his fur, the venom, the half-healed punctures in his sides, and knew that it was more than possible.  She was a predator too—a worthy mate despite her corruption.

But Raun, the raging wolf, would not agree.  Would not condone such a mix.

So he had…

A footstep on the path.

His ears swiveled and he raised his head, wiping shakily at his stained maw.  What he saw made him want to cry.

Cob stood at the open gate, staring.  In his face Arik read horror and disgust.  But he was alive, and that lifted the skinchanger’s heart on a fine thread of relief.  The rage was gone, making him no longer a threat.  Cob would curse him—would kill him, probably—and he would welcome that.  He would beg for it, for what he had done.

He tried to speak, but the words came out a snarl.  Cob’s face twisted, and he took a step backward.

A whiff of fear reached Arik’s nose.  Stag fear.

Delicious.

“No, no,” he tried to say even as his legs tensed automatically.  His tail untucked and his ears came up.  Human thoughts, human emotions held no sway over this predator’s body.

Another retreating step.  Cob wore no antlers, no trace of the Guardian, but still he was rich with the scent of his bloodline, the one that made Arik happy to stick so close and roll in his blankets when he was not looking.  The one that all wolves adored.  A lifegiver, an elusive lover, the staunchest of fighting prey.  The running deer.

Another step, then Cob turned and fled.

Arik could not help it.  Eons of instinct triggered instantly and he was on four feet, tearing across the soft soil as he gave chase.  It was not rage now, not hunger but joy, a terrible desire, the predator’s passion.

And he was faster, so much faster than a deer that ran on two legs.

His soul sang with it, as did his throat: the howl, the hunting song.  His thoughts were wolf thoughts.  No right or wrong, no reason, just chase it because it runs.

Bear it down.

Do as you will.

*****

Lark walked the cobblestone street, squinting back and forth in the mist.  Her steps fell near-silent on the stones and she strained to hear any others, fearing how easily someone could creep up on her in this morass.

Not just someone.

Her uncle.

Her hands were in fists as if she still held the pot, and in some way she could feel the heat radiating along it from the stove and the boiling water.  And his phantom fingers sliding under the edge of her blouse, her mother’s voice:
‘Leave your chores, girl.  Show him how much you appreciate his efforts on our behalf.’

Her breath was loud in the fog, but no matter how she tried, she could not slow it.  Her heart skittered like a frightened hare.  She wanted to run but knew not where.  Running the first time—out of the house after flinging the water, pursued by a surprisingly high-pitched shriek and her mother’s shouting—had been pure reaction.  And now she was…

Where was she?

Pausing in the road, fists raised as if to punch the close-gathered fog, she tried to think.  She was…

In Fellen, obviously.  That was where her family lived.

Only she remembered Bahlaer, though she had never been there.  It was a bigger city, a lengthy ride away, and beside that, she had never left the shelter of Fellen’s walls.  She was barely old enough to leave the Zhangish part of town.

But then why did she see those streets before her?  Those dark mosaics, so different from Fellen’s whitewashed or ocean-blue walls.

Was that a sound behind her?

Fear pushed her deeper into the mist.  Her skirt swished around her ankles, its patched fabric a poor match for the new blouse she wore.  The new blouse from her uncle.  Yes, she would appreciate him.  She had never asked for it, nor asked that it be taken off her.  She would appreciate him with the hot bottom of the pot.

But still, she wore it—not because she had been commanded to but because it felt nice.  Soft, almost silky, not like the rough clothes that were all they could afford here.  She liked it.  She hated that she liked it, but wore it anyway.

She wanted to go home.  Wanted her sisters around her.  Even now she could see her uncle in among them, though they were younger than her by a handful of years, and she winced.  She should go back and pick up the pot again.  Finish what she started.  And if her mother raised her voice again…

That old hag would get what she deserved.

But she could not go back.  She was right; this wasn’t Fellen.  She had crossed the dry plainsland in fear of her uncle’s associates and now it was too dangerous to return.  But surely her uncle would not bother her little sisters.

I should have cast the boiling water at his crotch
. 
That would have sealed the deal.

She looked down at the street and recognized it now, and wondered how she could have forgotten.  The cobbles were rugged and broken, a sign of the old Riverwatch district beyond the Shadowland.  She had come here to hide from her uncle’s thugs, because Bahlaer belonged to the Shadow Folk and did not welcome other organizations in its territory.

She was safe.  She was far away and would no longer disrupt her family with her willfulness.  Surely her sisters would be quiet and meek, and her mother would have no reason to punish them.  Surely her uncle had lost his interest in such things.

It was not her fault.

Something small and grey scampered past and vanished into the mist, and her heart tripped over itself.

Rian!

Rian?  Who was that?

But it was the goblin, of course.  Her goblin, the newt she had saved from the collapse of a Riverwatch tunnel.  And there, as the mist peeled back, was an entry into those depths.  A cellar opening, its door rotted and in-fallen, the cold breath of the underground wafting up from its maw.

There were footsteps behind her.  Her uncle’s thugs?  She had to hide.

The cold, hollow air of the cellar beckoned inward even as the darkness took her sight.  And this was welcome, comforting, for she realized that she had done this for ages.  Traversing the darkness with one hand on the damp stone wall, fingers finding the etchings the Shadow Folk left—their secret language that told of all the twists and turns of the underground, the traps and pitfalls, the storage rooms and safehouses.

No one could catch her down here.  She was safer than she had been since the womb, before that brutal hag popped her out.  A princess of the shadows, one of the nobility of the under-realm.  She and her goblin could go anywhere, and no one could stop them.

Rian brushed past her leg again, and she lowered her hand to trail along his knobby spine.  His tail wrapped lovingly around her wrist.  He was her darling, her surrogate child, and she loved him more than she had ever loved anything.

Except her sisters.  But she could not think of them now.  It was not her fault.

The goblin skittered onward.  She heard his hard digits on the stone, and in her mind’s eye she saw him leap and gambol among the turns of the tunnel, his tail curled like a happy cat’s, his wide eyes seeing where she could not.  He was her little light in the darkness, and she missed him sorely.

Missed him?  But he was right here…

And then, beneath her fingertips, the wall of the tunnel shivered.  A growl, soft but deep, echoed from all around her.

Her stomach tied in a knot.  Bahlaer was closer to the Rift than Fellen and felt more of the tremors that regularly rocked the Riftlands.  Most did no damage, but everyone knew to keep out of the tunnels when they happened.  With the goblin cities hollowed from the rock below and the warren of sewers and watercourses and cellars and bolt-holes beneath the surface streets, there was always the fear of a grand collapse.

She could not step through shadows.  She had no easy way out.

She ran her hand along the wall, trying to find the etchings that would tell her of the nearest exit, but found nothing.  She reached further, more frantically.

Another shiver in the tunnel.  Another groan from the rocks around her.  Dust sifted into her hair and made her sneeze.

Rian rubbed against her shin, his small hand reaching up to take hers.  “Ys way!” he said.

Her breathing steadied.  She trusted him.  She let him pull her forward, one hand still on the wall for stability as she splashed through shallow water and stumbled on rocks.  Another shudder and something heavy hit her shoulder, making her hiss in pain.  Rian tugged insistently and she ducked and tried to pick up speed, for his sake.

Another rock splashed down at her heel.  Pebbles bounced along her scalp and down the collar of her blouse.  The world shook and creaked and roared suddenly, reverberating so loudly that it seemed she and Rian were trapped in the throat of a dragon, trembling with the vibration of its vocal cords, the tunnel heaving, the walls crunching with sounds like detonation.

A slab hit her across one shoulder and she screeched in the din.  Stones stung her face, dust billowing everywhere.  The goblin tugged again, and she pressed forward, and then—