The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (84 page)

Thunder, so loud and close that it blotted out all else.  She was buffeted, battered, slammed to the floor, falling debris stinging her everywhere.  Shards of wood from a support beam spattered across her cheek.

For ages, the world shook, while something pressed down on her shoulders and a welling strand of heat ran down the side of her face.  She breathed stone-dust, choked, then covered her face with the sleeve of her blouse.  Rian’s fingers clenched on her own.

Slowly the roar subsided.  The pebbles stopped dropping.  She opened her eyes to darkness, hearing nothing but the ringing in her ears.

But she could move, slightly, with care.  A beam had shoved her down but become wedged at an incline, pinning only her skirt, and when she pulled away, the ragged fabric tore to the waist.  Rian’s fingers squeezed hers again, and she shifted to a sitting position and tried to pull him into her lap.

But he would not come.

A needle pierced her heart, but she told herself,
You’re wrong.  You always think the worst, but it’s never true, is it?  He didn’t go after your sisters.  Everything turned out fine.

Her fingers found the goblin’s wrist, then followed the long, thin line of his arm to the shoulder.  To his pointy little face.

To the rocks that encased the rest of him.

A sob welled up in her throat, and she fought to swallow it.  She could fix this.  She brushed the rocks from his cheek blindly and felt his little face moving—felt the shattered bones beneath the skin, the shiver of his mewling breath against her palm.  She dug at the debris and felt a fingernail snap, but that meant nothing.  He was her baby and he was hurt and she would get him free.  She would!

His thin fingers loosened in her grip.

She tore at the stones, dislodging some only to have others tumble down upon her.  One stung hard against her scalp and she felt blood seep through her braids, felt her face twist in a snarl, but she could not stop.  The support beam shifted downward with a spine-rattling thump, pushing her lower to the ground, almost flat.  She bared her teeth and entertained the crazed idea of shoving it all up with her shoulder, as if she could lift the tons of stone by sheer will.

Then something pulled away a rock by her feet.  A scrap of light gleamed through.

She squinted at it hopefully.  Surely it was the Shadow Folk.  They could help her extricate her goblin, because he was only unconscious—no, asleep.  He was asleep, dreaming, and he would wake up in her arms and all would be well.

The hole in the rockfall widened into an opening broad enough for a man.  A lantern came through, gripped by a dark hand.

Then a dark head with close-cropped, age-salted black hair followed.  Broad shoulders.  A fine tunic.

Panic curdled in her chest.

He raised his head and she saw the scalded scars across his cheek and jaw, on his neck and ear, the milk-whiteness of one eye.  The ivory shine of his teeth as he bared them in a terrible, feral grin.

Her uncle crawled through into the space just large enough for two to lie flat, and the shadows deserted her.

*****

“
Vaiosh ylevai
,” Ilshenrir whispered, but the mist did not clear.  It did retreat enough for him to know that he was right—this was a spell, a caiohene working—but why such a thing would be here, in the middle of skinchanger territory…

He shook his head and brushed back his hood, needing a full range of sight.  The others had vanished when the snow drew down, and though he guessed this was some sort of illusion, he was not naïve enough to think the knowledge made him immune.  Far from it.  Sometimes it was easier to trap the clever than the dull.

He stepped cautiously onto the flagstone path.  There were other options beside illusion, such as dimensional dislocation—which would explain how he had been severed so cleanly from the others without feeling a wisp of magic.  This was not the Grey, but other realms worked the same way, and without physical contact he could be blind to the others’ presences even if only a pace apart.

That was a grim thought.  It meant he could do nothing for them—and perhaps nothing for himself, if the power that had made this mist was too strong.  They would wander until they died, and though their souls would go to their gods and spirits, he would stay, unable to find a beacon to guide him home.

“The province of despair,” he murmured, then pushed the thought away.  He needed evidence, not dire assumptions.

Another step and a wind rose, stirring the fog into strange patterns.  He breathed in and tasted salt sea air.

Ah yes, the White Isle
, he thought, lips forming a bitter smile.  Ahead, the fog separated like curtains before a stage, showing a glimpse of unnatural brightness.  He advanced upon it, fighting his aversion—the sickly nostalgia that warned him to turn and run.

Shale pavings became bleached coral beneath his feet, flattened and polished to resemble white marble.  Ahead, a half-circle balcony protruded from the dim room he was crossing, daylight washing over its coiled railing.

He stepped into the light and looked out upon the white city that stretched to the sea, its coral towers and palaces descending tier by tier to become apartments, then hovels, then the grey-green reefs that lay submerged at the very edge.  Figures moved below: lesser nobles in their courtyards, commoners in the streets, raywings basking in the sun while their trainers made the rounds.  The dark shapes of created slaves waded in the shoals, scrounging for fish and cast-offs.

Ilshenrir rested his hands on the railing, feeling the warmth that seeped up from the wrought coral.  This was a place drawn from memory, true in every detail.  Behind would be his chamber, shaded and cool: the room of the youngest ‘child’.  No frills, no lavish appointments, no desperate-eyed lowborns debasing themselves at his whim.  Those were for the elders, his adopted sisters and brothers.  His so-called father’s heirs.

It was so distant in years that to Ilshenrir it felt like contemplating the life of a stranger.  A character on a stage, dauntingly opaque.  Though he knew where everything would be—the robes with their marks of rank, the tools of his profession, the few personal items he had kept—he felt nothing for them now.

A scuff behind him like a hoof on stone.  His personal slave.

“I am not inclined to revisit this,” he said, and stepped through the railing as if it was nothing.

The city dissolved around him, and for two strides he walked on empty space.  Then a wooden walkway materialized beneath his feet, and he sighed as the light changed its tone to springtime sun filtered through new leaves.  “No, no,” he said impatiently as the trees and spires of Syllastria emerged from the mist.  “This is already tiresome.  Shall you show me my fall to the Wrecking Shore next?”

No answer but the whisper of leaves in the breeze.

Ilshenrir sighed again and looked around.  The path he stood on was cut in to the living limb of a massive drassil, and like all drassili, it was more a tower than a tree, fifteen yards wide in the trunk and with a vast network of branches and frond-like leaves that cast dense shade to the forest floor a hundred yards below.  Walkways ran in a double spiral up its bole, the steps a mix of flat-carved knots and specially grown shelf-fungus.  Dangerous for the fumble-footed or those who could not fly, but merely a convenience for the airahene.

Periodically the paths came to flat-topped limbs that served as landings, at which stood huge greenwood knots that unfurled into archways at the touch of a wraith hand.  They led to hollow chambers grown into the drassili, just large enough for living quarters; other dwellings hung suspended from the boughs like strange nests woven from the living wood.

Here and there Ilshenrir saw the brightly-colored airahene moving through their city, either flitting like birds or climbing with the tenacious grace of spiders.  The glow of the nearby crystal spires, though paled by daylight, still gave each direction a particular ambient color.

Thirty drassili.  Two spires.  Eight thousand airahene and two thousand loyuhene—the refugees from Tantaelastarr and broken Anlirindallora in the Forest of Night.  All that remained of Tirindai-
airasanwy
’s people since the push to the sea and the cursing of Haaraka.

And this certain branch, with the doorway that irised open at his glance and the shadow that approached from the hallway beyond…

He looked away.  “I know this game,” he told the air, even as the soft footsteps approached.  “Do you think I have not dreamt these things a thousand times in the years I have spent alone?  The past is gone beyond retrieval.  I will not wallow in it for your pleasure.”

With that, he turned sharply and stepped off the branch.

The empty air sounded like shale beneath his feet.  Syllastria dissolved into mist.

Ilshenrir paused, awaiting the next assault.  He did not bother to question.  Like with torture, it was conjecture and imagination that made this torment effective.  He had seen it in use often enough; caiohene could not affect minds directly, so the lords and ladies of the White Isle twisted their lessers to their will through the use of expectation and paranoia.  To turn an enemy’s anger against him, to use love and fear as equal weapons…

It was the haelhene way.

Thus Ilshenrir had learned to examine his reactions rather than their stimulus, to ignore the mask in favor of the face it hid.  His life on the Isle had trained him to stand in the shallows, to feel only the most limited of emotions and perceive passion as a weakness.  Whether or not that had been their intent, he could not say.

The mist thinned, and vague shapes came visible through the veil.  He surveyed the area cautiously.  The ground beneath him was flagstone again: the original path, running crooked along level terrain toward a dimly-seen obstruction ahead.  Snow lay thin on the ground, and thinned further as it approached the blockade until it disappeared into a strip of frosted grass.

Ilshenrir focused on the shapes.  Humanoid, unmoving.  The retreating fog made them ghastly until they came clear, and Ilshenrir recognized his companions.

Dasira, closest to his left, huddled with her arms upraised in self-defense, the black blade in her hand somnolent, its usual fire absent.  Further leftward, Arik lay on his side in wolfbeast-form, limbs lashing as if running.  To the right, Lark convulsed on the ground, making weak sounds of distress, while Fiora stood rigid nearby.

Ilshenrir started to turn, sensing that this was reality and that he should awaken the others.

But his feet would not move.

“
You keep walking away from my artistry,” said a voice from ahead.  “I can’t have that.”

Ilshenrir squinted.  The mist had drawn back enough to expose the obstruction—a dense hedge, seven feet tall with black wrought-iron gates in the middle, the bars shaped like twining vines.  Perched on the hedge beside the closed gate was an unfamiliar youth, pale-skinned and cool-eyed, with fine features and swept-back hair that held an odd faded-rose tint.  He sat with ankles crossed, fingers laced among the snow-cloaked branches, and seemed quite comfortable in only his dove-grey robe.  The look, the demeanor reminded Ilshenrir immediately of—

No.  Not an airahene.  His skin was a shade too pale, his crystalline eyes a fraction too wild.  Haelhene.

Which made him...

“Daenivar.”

And this a dream.

The once-wraith godling inclined his head.  “You recognize me.  I'm flattered.”  His voice was calm but arid, subtly edged.

“
All caiohene know of the False God.”

“
Then I would expect you to know that the proper way to greet a god is on your knees.”

Ilshenrir felt no pressure, no arcane force, yet suddenly he was kneeling in the snow, cloak puddled around him.  He looked up, quenching the spark of anger.  This was not reality, after all.  It was the Nightmare Lord's realm.

“Much better,” said Daenivar, and smiled an awful smile—self-satisfied, predatory.  “I do prefer submission in my acolytes.  You are an acolyte, yes?”

“
You are a puppet upon the hand of the Blood Goddess.  None of us would worship you.”

Daenivar’s lips curved downward.  “Of course,” he replied with frost.  “You think yourself clever, Ilshenrir sa Mallandriach.  You and all your kind.  Too clever, too powerful to submit to another, no matter that you subjugate each other endlessly.  No matter how far you have fallen from your origins.  Tiny candles arrogant enough to think they can stand before the sun.”

“And you are the sun?” said Ilshenrir.  “You who fade in the glare of your false mother?”

Daenivar’s eyes narrowed, and the mist thickened, rolling like waves across Ilshenrir’s thighs and licking tendrils over his shoulders.  He reflected briefly that taunting a god, especially this one, might not have been wise.

Daenivar the Tormentor they had called him, Daenivar the Terror, back when the wars between haelhene and airahene still threatened to tear the world asunder.  He had tricked, subjugated and imprisoned so many of the mist wraiths—and his own kind—that with their chained power he had thought to challenge the gods.  Loahravi the Blood Goddess, the Lady Reaver, had been his first target and thus his vanquisher.  She devoured him, but when she could not digest his wretched core, she tore him from her flesh and tossed him into the sea.