Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts) (15 page)

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Authors: Holly Lisle

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BOOK: Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts)
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“She liked to bite?” Kait was intrigued. “Sounds like a difficult sort of thing to explain to your mother.”
“Which is probably why men don’t tell their mothers about their sex lives.” He stared off into space, his eyes wistful. “Alarista knew
all
about sex.”
Kait snorted. “So does a cat, but that doesn’t make it an ideal partner.”
Hasmal leaned back and put the boot on the bunk beside him. He looked into her eyes and said in an even voice, “When you aren’t killing yourself avoiding the one man in the world you think you can love, feel free to comment on my romantic life. In the meantime, I’ll trust my own judgment on who’s right for me and who isn’t.”
* * *
Ry paced the deck, Trev at his side. Trev said, “I’m worried about our route.”
“Why? It’s the safest one this time of year. Most of the pirates are going to be harbored along the Manarkan coast riding out the last of the storms, and running close in will give us harbors against the squalls that come up.”
“I have to tell you, Yanth and I have been checking omens the way you showed us. We’ve seen things that make this seem a bad time to be near Calimekka. Even the harbor in Goft seems dangerous.”
Ry stared at him, startled. He’d taught them as much simple magic as he dared, but he hadn’t considered the possibility that they might be using it without his supervision. Sailing out from the Thousand Dancers toward deep water would be dangerous, but it would keep them away from Calimekka and Goft. And from any temptation any of his friends might have to send word to their families. Families which might well be dead.
“We were still going to go to Calimekka,” he said.
“I . . . we . . . all of us think you should reconsider trying to take her and her artifact to the city when we land. We think all of us should go with her where she wants to go. Brelst. Or even farther south. The omens seem to point that way.”
Ry was startled. Weren’t you counting on seeing your families? he wondered. But he didn’t say that, of course. The odds were too good that his friends’ families were dead. “I had a reason for wanting to go to Calimekka,” he admitted. He never looked up. He didn’t think he could meet Trev’s eyes and still say what he had to say.
Trev waited. And waited. Finally he said, “You’ve been acting so distant lately, I wondered if you didn’t have some secret you were keeping.”
All sorts of secrets, Ry thought. “I was going take the Mirror to the Potter’s Field outside the South Wall. My brother is buried there—my brother Cadell. You never met him. His ghost came to me the night we left Calimekka. He died when I was a boy.” Ry fingered the medallion he wore, which had been a final, posthumous gift from his much older brother. “He was my hero, and my friend, and he was Karnee like me. The day he died, he had been found in beast form out in the streets of the city. I still believe my cousins Crispin, Anwyn, and Andrew betrayed him. City guards captured him, and dragged him to Punishment Square, and tortured him publicly. He never confessed his family; never said anything. So the parnissa passed immediate sentence and had him drawn and quartered right then. Had he admitted anything about us, I don’t doubt but that my mother and father and my sisters and I would have been sacrificed, too. But no one claimed to know him, and . . . he had no identifying jewelry or insignia on him. . . .” Ry touched the medallion again, and felt the lump rise in his throat. “He left this with my mother, as he did every time he Shifted, telling her that if anything happened to him, she was to give it to me.”
He swallowed hard, and Trev rested a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I don’t. But if I don’t tell someone, I think I’ll go mad.” Ry took a deep breath, then continued. “Anyway, his ghost came to me in my room the night all of us sailed from Calimekka. He told me Kait’s name, and that she was searching for the Mirror of Souls. Later, he told me that if I could get the Mirror from her, and take it to his grave—it’s unmarked, but I know where it is—I would be able to bring him back. Give him life again.” Ry clenched his fists and blinked back the tears he refused to cry. “I could have my brother back.”
Trev was silent for so long that Ry finally did look up. He was surprised to see his friend, wetness glistening on his cheeks, staring out at the sea.
“Trev . . . ?”
“I’m fine,” Trev said. “I didn’t know about your brother. Didn’t even know you had anyone but your two sisters, and I know you were never close to either of them. I . . . didn’t know what you’d lost.”
Ry said softly, “But that’s just it. If I could take the Mirror and go back, I wouldn’t have lost anything. Time . . . of course I would have lost that. He would be . . .” Ry stood and shook his head, startled. “He would be younger than me now, instead of my older brother. He was . . . twenty when he died.”
“He must have been very brave, to keep from revealing who his family was.”
“He was the bravest and best person I’ve ever known.”
Trev said quietly, “I’m going to tell you something you aren’t going to want to hear, Ry. I’m going to say it because I’m your friend, and you can make of it what you will. There’s an old saying that keeps running through my head as you tell me this, and I can’t silence it, even though I have sisters who are my world, and if I put myself in your place, I can understand why you feel the way you do.”
Ry waited.
“It’s,
Let the dead stay buried.
I know you want your brother back, but something about this feels wrong to me. I can’t point to the wrongness in what you tell me and say, ‘There, that’s the problem,’ but my gut says something is wrong.” He turned to face Ry, and looked up at him. “I’m your friend. I will help you in every way I can, with anything you need; if you need me to die for you, I will. But please, Ry, for me, consider what I’m saying. I don’t know why this is so important, but I believe it is. Let the dead stay buried.”
Ry watched the waves falling away behind them. Calimekka drew closer every day, every station, every moment, and Cadell drew closer, too. Once the Mirror was in the hands of the Reborn Kait spoke about, his chance to get his brother back would be gone forever. He would have this one opportunity. Cadell’s ghostly voice still sometimes whispered in his mind, begging for rescue from his beggar’s grave.
And the hidden enemy still watched Ry as he slept.
His mind said,
Only a coward would leave his brother in the grave.
His gut said,
Let the dead stay buried.
He turned to Trev. Would he advise me this way if he knew his sisters were probably dead? he wondered. If we could take the Mirror and bring them back to life as well? Probably not.
Which changed nothing. The omens said he should avoid Calimekka. Kait said danger waited for them there. His gut said he should head south as quickly as he could. What he
wanted
to do probably wasn’t what he
needed
to do.
He gripped the brass rail with both hands and gritted his teeth. “I’ll tell the captain to run for deep water,” he said.
* * *
The captain shrugged. “We can avoid the resupply in Goft; I have no problem with that. We can turn out of the Thousand Dancers early if you wish, and run farther from the coast. If you truly wish to take the girl and her friends to Brelst instead of Glaswherry Hala, I can do that, too. We can resupply farther on and we’ll be fine. But we can’t turn south now. You see the horizon?”
Ry looked to the south, where the captain was pointing. A dull greenish haze blurred the line between water and sky to invisibility. “Yes.”
“That’s a storm brewing. The mercury is falling in the glass—we’ll outrun it easily enough if we keep heading west for now, but I’ll not sail us straight into it.”
Ry let out a slow breath. He might be Family, but the captain was a captain—in his ship he was powerful as a paraglese, subject to the orders of no man, and answerable only to his god, Tonn. If he would not take them through the deep water by choice, Ry could not compel him by force, threat, or cajolery.
And he wasn’t fool enough to try.
“Well enough. Then just keep us as far from Goft and Calimekka as you can, and keep us on the shortest path to Brelst that you can manage.”
The captain tipped his head and stroked one side of his beaded, braided mustache thoughtfully. “Any particular thing you wish to avoid?”
“Only that I don’t want to find out in person why the omens are bad.”
“That’s a good enough reason for me.”
Ry had to leave it at that, and hope it would be enough.

 

Chapter
17
F
or two days the storm lashed them, a mad and screaming thing that kept them anchored to the lee side of one of the tiny islands of the Thousand Dancers. When it passed, though, it passed completely, leaving the sky clear as crystal, the breezes cool and clean, and the sailing smooth. Kait stood on the starboard deck of the
Wind Treasure,
watching islands slipping by.
Ry joined her, and because she couldn’t think of a good excuse to leave, and because there were plenty of other people on the deck, she stayed where she was. He said, “This is the beginning of the Thousand Dancers. The chain runs all the way in to Goft, but the captain says we’ll turn out of it and bear south long before then. You see the tall island with smoke spilling from the top?”
Kait nodded.
“That’s Falea. She was supposed to be the daughter of one of the local goddesses, back before Ibera claimed these islands. Thrown to earth and sentenced to burn from the inside out forever in punishment for some sin or other. Seducing the lover of another goddess, I think.” He shrugged.
Kait stared out at the water, without warning as sick as if she were trapped on a storm-tossed ship. “How much longer until we turn out of the islands?”
Ry didn’t seem to notice her distress. “Captain said if the wind keeps up like this and he runs the sails the way he is right now, he could reach Merrabrack by late tomorrow. That’s the best place to head south.”
Late tomorrow. Kait hadn’t realized they were so close to Goft. To Calimekka. To the danger that had been plaguing her dreams.
By tomorrow, they would reach the turning point, they would begin to increase the distance between themselves and the faceless danger that waited in Calimekka, and the sick feeling in her stomach would leave. Perhaps she would be able to sleep nights again without being haunted by the hunter who watched Ry through her eyes.
She sighed and leaned against the ship’s rail and stared out at the islands. She turned forward, to catch the wind full in her face and to look at where they were heading. It was then that she saw the airibles.
They were two round white circles on the western horizon. If they’d been running north-south, she would have seen them as two long ellipsoids. Since she saw them as circles, they ran east-west, their course parallel to that of the
Wind Treasure
.
Her heart skipped a beat and her breath caught in her throat. Airibles. Airibles were Galweigh devices, massive lighter-than-air airships built from designs patiently and laboriously culled from the records of the Ancients. She had flown in them, had flown them herself, had known many of the Family pilots, had been friends with one of them. She thought wistfully of Aouel, now certainly dead.
And what of the other pilots she had known? What of the Family’s fleet?
The circles of the airible envelopes were getting bigger, which meant they were heading east. Toward her.
She bit her lip, staring at the oncoming airibles. When Galweigh House fell, what had become of the airible fleet? Had the Sabirs claimed it, or had the corollary branches of the Galweigh Family managed to keep it within their possession? Were those aboard the two great airships friends? Enemies?
The airibles rarely ran to the east of the Iberan coast. Kait did not know of any instances where they flew through the Thousand Dancers—the easiest way to reach the colonies in Manarkas was to fly due north across the Dalvian Sea, and no one but a madman would try to take one across the Bregian Ocean to the Galweigh colony in South Novtierra. They weren’t yet reliable enough.
So what were these two doing, coming to the end of the Thousand Dancers, beyond the edge of the civilized world?
Kait’s nerves jangled at the sight of them, and fear crawled beneath her skin.
“Ry . . . ,” she said, “do you see those?”
He glanced in the direction that she pointed and froze. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
Kait could make out the gondolas strung beneath the huge envelopes, and the catch-ropes trailing like a hundred spider legs beneath. “They shouldn’t be out this far, or headed this way,” she said.
“I know. But we still have leagues until they come level with us.” Ian, standing on the other side of the deck with Hasmal, had noticed what they were looking at. He squinted, frowned, and after a moment’s hesitation, came over to them. “Airibles?” he asked.
The advantage of Karnee eyesight. They were perfectly clear to Kait. “Yes.”

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