The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (9 page)

*****

Traveling by hog-caravan, Dasira arrived in the small town of Tarwood by nightfall.  It was halfway between Thynbell—her point of origin—and Cantorin on the border, and not for the first time she wished for a horse.  Riding alone, she would already be in Cantorin despite the ice on the road, but this was the Imperial East; horses were rare enough that her only options were stealing or murdering for one, neither of which was currently practical.

Tarwood was little more than a collection of lumber yards, longhouses and a single tavern tucked into the forest just north of the road.  The snow sat thick on the canted roofs, thicker in the alleys, and icicles dangled from every possible edge.  From her vantage on the tavern porch, she could look down the full length of the broken trail to the empty Imperial Road.  Part of her wanted to start down it now, and curse the chill of the night.

But she was not an idiot.  She was a bodythief, an aenkelagi in Enkhaelen’s parlance, and though that made her resistant to the cold, she was not impervious.  Her black bracer could circulate chemicals through her bloodstream to keep her appendages warm and mobile, her reflexes keen, her mind unfogged—but not forever, and the effort of maintaining peak performance in freezing conditions was exhausting.

Thus she was not using it now, relying instead on her layered clothes to keep her warm.  They were traditional Wyndish winter-wear: a loose wool dress over a blouse, undershirt, breeches and leggings, plus a headscarf, floppy hat, knee-high boots, gloves and braided leather belt—all undyed but for a few bits of colored trim.  Anything brighter was reserved for the Wyndish nobility.  Serindas was strapped to her thigh under the slit of her dress, its pulsing presence tangible even through the cloth, and she had bundled everything else useful from the laundress’s apartment into the rucksack on her back.  It was not much.

She knew she should sleep.  The caravan would not move until full light, and the glow from the tavern behind her beckoned.  Tomorrow evening would bring Cantorin and the true start of her mission, and she needed every scrap of energy she could stockpile in case the Guardian was hostile.

Not that it would do any good.

But she could not move from the porch railing.  She did not want to be among people, especially not since the caravan had filled the small tavern to bursting.  There would be no single rooms, not even for a traveling woman, and the thought of being crowded in a bed with a bunch of drunken carters made her fingers itch for Serindas.  She could stake out a corner of the common room and try to nap, but even that pricked her paranoia.

It had been a long time since she had worn a female body, and she felt too agitated by it.  She could not rest.  Not here, not now.  Perhaps not ever.

Maybe alcohol
, she thought grudgingly. 
Shut off the bracer’s filter and try to get drunk for once.  Throne, I don’t even remember what kind of a drunk I am.  Angry?

Probably.  I’m an angry everything, aren’t—

A tingle on her skin.  A faint astringent whiff through the muffle of the scarf.  A shiver in the air as mist resolved from nothing.

She leapt the railing instinctively and hit the snow of the tavern yard in a crouch.  Mist coiled across the porch where she had stood, thinning and spreading as it reached toward her, turning the light from the tavern into a milky haze.  Teeth gritted behind the scarf, she backed off further and drew Serindas carefully through the slit in her dress.

Crimson runes lit up along the akarriden blade's ugly length, but in place of its hunger, she felt a startling trepidation.  A reddish corona hung about it, and its glow reflected hazily beside and behind her.

More mist.

Another step back, and the snow around her heels disappeared.  The icy slate pavings became dry stone.  The mist thickened, blotting out the town.

Something loomed abruptly, a shadow in the grey, and she lunged for it despite Serindas’ weakness.  The shadow yelped and tried to pull back, but her strike was true.

Pale golden sparks spat in all directions as the akarriden blade deflected off an arcane ward only inches from a familiar dark face.

Dasira recoiled, shocked by the unexpected sight.  “Lark?”

“Who are you?” said the southern girl, still cringing, her voice sharp with panic.  Then her wide eyes flicked to the akarriden blade, and her expression grew baffled.  “Wait.  Trevere?  Darilan Trevere…?  Why are you wearing a dress?”

“
Oh, pike me,” Dasira mumbled.

“
Mark that, why are you alive?”  Then Lark looked over her shoulder at someone unseen and said, “You’re sure this isn’t the underworld?  Because I saw this guy’s corpse.”

“
That is not a male,” said a voice almost too faint to hear.

Lark looked Dasira up and down, blinking.  “Shit, you’re right,” she said, then stared hard at the assassin’s covered face.  “How did you get that dagger?”

Gritting her teeth, Dasira forced Serindas back into its sheath and yanked down her scarf.  “It’s me.  I don’t feel like playing around.  What is this and what are you doing here?”

“
I—  We’re looking for Cob,” said Lark, nonplussed.  She was dressed in the bear-skin coat Dasira had bought for her on the road, plus layers of ragged fur garments, with a bow and quiver slung over her shoulders and red Corvish war-paint on her cheeks and eyelids.  Crow feathers stuck out from her tangle of braids.  “You’re really Darilan?  The wraith said the arrowhead was supposed to track him, but…”

Dasira squinted into the fog behind Lark.  The more she stared, the more she could make out the shape of someone there—someone gripping Lark’s hand with a grey glove that nearly blended with the nothing.

“Come forward,” she said sharply.  “Who are you?”

“
Ah.  The abomination from the forest,” said the soft voice.  “Newly embodied.  Interesting.”

Her hackles went up. 
One of the wraiths that watched Cob kill me?
  “Who sent you?”

Silence.  Lark shifted nervously, looking between Dasira and the unseen wraith, but after a long tense moment it began to resolve from the fog.  Dasira squinted.  Grey cloak, grey hood, milk-white skin…

Her blood chilled.  It was a mist-wraith’s garb, but that was not a mist-wraith inside.  She bared her teeth, hand on Serindas’ hilt again.  “Haelhene.  You want him for the Isle?  Another bargaining chip against the Emperor?”

“
He’s not—“ started Lark, then shot a wary look at the wraith.

It stayed silent, hooded head slightly tilted.

“Answer me!” Dasira snapped.

Nothing.

Snarling, she freed Serindas and lunged past Lark to slash at the haelhene.  The blade sheared through a golden shield, sending sparks and fragments everywhere, and then—

—
cut through empty fog.

Lark and the wraith were gone.

“Hoi!” Dasira shouted into the grey, but her voice went nowhere.  Serindas hung weakly in her grip.  She lashed it through the fog anyway, furious and frightened, but hit nothing.

“
Hoi!” she called again.

No movement.  No answer.

Her heart sank into her stomach.

Though she had met many haelhene at the Imperial Court and in Akarridi, she knew little about them.  They were secretive creatures.  They came from the White Isle in the Atharenix Sea off the southern coast of Amandon, and were allowed to fly their black raywings all across the Imperial Heartlands due to their treaty with the Emperor, in which they kept the grey wraiths pinned in the forest in exchange for human subjects for their experiments.

As the bearer of an akarriden blade, Dasira had witnessed some of these experiments, and liked them no better than Enkhaelen’s.  But at least Enkhaelen was human.  He had emotions, fickle though they were.  He could be swayed.

There were no footholds for dealing with the haelhene.  They answered to no one, not even the Emperor.  They had no obvious agenda beyond gathering test subjects.  And they cared nothing for anyone or anything beside themselves.

Now she was caught in one of their traps.

She pressed Serindas to her cheek just to feel a solid presence in the grey.  The nasty blade’s essence wrapped around her like an embrace, over-familiar yet comforting in the emptiness—and strangely clinging, as if it too needed support.  That troubled her, but its very existence made it easier to think clearly, to push away the panic that threatened.

I’ve never seen a white wraith use the mist before
, she thought. 
It’s always been the forest wraiths.  Maybe I was wrong.  But that pallor…

Forget it.  How do I get out of here?

Lark had mentioned ‘the underworld’.  That did not bode well.

Crouching, Dasira touched the ground, but it felt like nothing—a solidity without texture or temperature.  Not even artificial, but as if some underlying reality had been robbed from it, rendering it all but imaginary.  Even without moving, she had the sense that she would find nothing else here.  No tavern walls, no trees, no caravan wagons.  Only the mist.

She licked her dry lips.  “I apologize for the attack,” she said into the grey.  “It will not happen again.  I would like to parley.”

Silence.

“Pike me with a ballista,” she muttered, and tapped Serindas against the communication stud in her ear.  Maybe if she chipped it, Enkhaelen would sense it…

The mist writhed suddenly, and she tensed as darkness and cold rushed in.  Within moments, she was ankle-deep in snow, staring up at the amber squares of the tavern windows.  Another figure appeared as the mist receded, and she clenched her hand on Serindas, then relaxed as she realized it was Lark.

“I got him to bring you out,” the southern girl said as Dasira looked around for the wraith.  “He wasn’t happy with it.  He says you’re dangerous.  But I already knew that, right?”  She laughed nervously.  “You don’t still want to kill Cob, do you?”

Dasira grimaced and slid Serindas back into its sheath.  “I don’t want to kill him.  Or you, or your wraith friend if he means no harm.”

“But I bet you wanna come with us.”

Dasira eyed Lark.  “You…would work with me?”

Lark glanced around as if for eavesdroppers, though it was obvious by her sudden unease that she knew the wraith could be anywhere.  “I’m not sure what’s going on,” she said.  “And I’m not gonna say that I trust you.  But I know what you are, and that’s more than—“

She stopped, and Dasira nodded.

“Anyway, you’re a girl now!  I’ve gotta hear how that happened.”

Smiling flatly, Dasira said, “Trick of the trade.  Look, if you want to talk, we can talk, but if the wraith can trace Cob—“

“He said he’d try again.  His name is Ilshenrir.”

“
And he won’t go without us?”

Lark opened her mouth, then closed it and shrugged helplessly.

Dasira considered throttling her.

“
Is this a tavern?” Lark said, cocking her thumb at the building.  “Come on, it’s freezing out here and I could use some civilization.  Been in the mountains so long, I’m probably starting to smell like a fox.”

“
Just keep your scarf on,” Dasira said grudgingly.  “We’re in Wyndon, the land of the blond.”

“
I’ll be fine,” said Lark.  “Oh Shadow, hot food!  You have coin, right?  Treat me?”

Dasira smiled over clenched teeth and followed the southern girl as she traipsed up the porch steps.  The thought of being stuck with Lark and a wraith—haelhene or otherwise—infuriated her, but she had to admit the value of a tracer.

If it worked.

What followed was a night of exasperation and little sleep, though somehow no trouble.  Within moments of entering the tavern, Lark tore her scarf off and headed for the crowded hearth, giving everyone there a fine view of her foreign features and the Corvish war-paint on them.  Following on her heels, Dasira had set a hand on Serindas, anticipating some kind of riot, but upon the first spluttered question—"Where the pike'd you come from, girl?"—Lark launched straight into a fantastic tale of being kidnapped by the Corvishfolk.

In short order, Dasira had to admit that the girl knew how to bullshit.  It helped that they were in the downlands, near the Amandic border; Wyndish uplanders did not laugh at tales of Corvish antics, they sharpened their axes.  Suddenly there were drinks on the house, though, and a gathering crowd of bored caravaners, and Lark's stories veered from madcap escape to fanciful tales of the serpent-south.  As much as the subject-matter made Dasira nervous, none of the locals started an uproar; all seemed rapt by the thought of endless sand shimmering with heat, cliffside caves full of pirates, and dragons taking wing over the night-cloaked dunes.

Considering the wintry weather, she almost understood.

She snatched a bit of sleep in a corner while Lark talked.  Near the end of the night, the girl made a show of drunkenly hiring her as a bodyguard, which Dasira nearly refused out of bafflement until she realized that Lark had never acknowledged they were together.  She accepted grudgingly, and only had to sprain one drunkard's finger when the man insisted that she was too small and dainty to be anyone's bodyguard.  After that, Lark fended off advances on her own, flirting yet demurring, while Dasira kept a glower on all involved.