Maybe Clair was trying a hostage exchange. Jilo could have told her it was futile, that Wan-Edhe would sooner see him dead.
Let the Mearsieans find out the hard way. His report to Wan-Edhe would have to begin with scoffing about the ruffle-edged cover on the bed over there, and the awkwardly drawn sketches of animals and people affixed to the dirt walls. Waxer sentiment was also evident in the fact the girl the room belonged to had set the single candle high on a shelf so it wouldn’t worry at Jilo’s magically altered eyes.
Clair’s cousin Puddlenose was another contradiction. Jilo couldn’t understand anyone who’d keep a ridiculous name because (he said) it was so much fun to see officious clerks writing it out. Puddlenose seemed to regard that shameful, humiliating name as a badge of triumph.
The kind of mind finding triumph in that was as incomprehensible as the Mearsiean perceptions of the Chwahir. Jilo could not reconcile them. His head hurt inside as well as outside when he tried. How could the Mearsieans laugh at Wan-Edhe’s given name, Shnit, one passed down by many Chwahir kings? In Chwahirsland it was now dreaded so much that no one whispered it out loud, as if he had spells that spied if anyone said his name, the way Norsunder was supposed to have. Everyone referred to Shnit Sonscarna as Wan-Edhe, The King.
* * *
—
While Jilo stewed as their prisoner, in the tunnel directly above him, Clair, CJ, and Puddlenose debated what to do with him.
CJ was in full rant mode. A short, skinny figure even for twelve, she stamped barefooted in a circle around the cousins, who sat on the brightly colored woven rug that covered the smooth cave floor. Nothing about CJ’s moods was ever subtle.
“. . . and so, I think it’s a big mistake to let Jilo go free.”
Another quake rumbled through, as if in emphasis to her words. Instinctively they all looked up, though all they could see was the dirt ceiling overhead, marbled by tree roots.
“That one was different,” Clair said. “I’d better check.”
“Again,” CJ sighed.
Clair heard the sighed word a heartbeat before the transfer took her. She could understand CJ’s puzzlement. Clair wasn’t sure why she had to keep checking. There was nothing she could do, and for such a monumentally dramatic event, there actually wasn’t much to see: the white palace seemed undamaged, as far as she could tell, and all one could see of the city was a lot of white fog extending eastward from Mount Marcus. A fog that was lower every time she looked at it.
With Clair gone, CJ scowled down at Puddlenose, who lounged in the middle of the brightly colored patchwork rug on the smooth dirt floor. “You shouldn’t have brought Jilo here,” she said, fists on her hips.
He only shrugged. As usual. He rarely took anything seriously—not with a wild past like his. He didn’t even have a real name, or at least if he did, it had long ago been forgotten, along with his real parents. Puddlenose had heard nothing but insults from Wan-Edhe from his earliest memories, the one used most—for a sniveling, frightened little boy—having been Puddlenose.
After CJ had stamped around the edge of the rug three times, she pointed to the floor, below which their prisoner sat. “I just wish Jilo wasn’t here. For one thing, I’m scared Clair is going to just let him go.”
“What else should she do? Execute him?”
“That would make us just like the Chwahir,” CJ retorted. “I think, oh, we should find some spell and turn him into a petunia for a hundred years. Let someone else worry about what to do with him.”
At Puddlenose’s skeptical look, she relented. “Ten years, maybe. Look, you know as well as I do that Jilo is nothing better than a villain-in-training.”
Puddlenose shrugged. “Don’t know anything of the kind.”
CJ scoffed. “He’s a friend?”
Puddlenose shrugged again. “Don’t know what to call it, except maybe a truce. Once or twice. When Wan-Edhe had us both under death threats.”
CJ scowled down at the rug.
“It was either truce or—” Puddlenose drew a finger across his neck. “And we talked. Sort of. And he looked the other way when I escaped. I don’t claim to know much of what he thinks, but I do know he hates Norsunder as much as we do.”
CJ jerked her skinny shoulders up and down. “So he hates the eleveners! That just makes sense. But what about us? If we let him go, what’s to stop him from coming after us just like Wan-Edhe has sixty billion times?”
“Ben doesn’t think Jilo will,” Puddlenose said, glancing around the room for the boy who could shape-change into birds or animals. “Ben’s the one who listened to Kwenz and Jilo most.”
CJ’s scowl eased for about a heartbeat. She liked and trusted the boy who had spied on the Chwahir for Clair, but Ben wasn’t present in either boy or beast shape.
CJ crossed her arms. “What you want to bet Ben’s not coming anywhere near the hideout until we get rid of Jilo, any more than the girls are coming out of their rooms?”
Her goading tone caused nothing more than another shrug. Puddlenose was used to CJ’s moods. He thought of them as personal thunderstorms, loud and messy for a time, then soon gone.
“Jilo is our responsibility.”
The two turned at the sound of Clair’s voice. She walked down the tunnel and plopped on the rug beside her cousin. “As far as I can tell, the cloud city seems to have settled along the east side of the mountain and a ways beyond.”
Puddlenose said, “Who wants to bet your plateau was what got lifted into the air in the first place?”
“I think it is too obvious for betting,” Clair said in her careful way. “As far as I can tell, many of the buildings lost their windows, and probably glass things inside, and the streets are a jumble of brick and cobblestone. But everything else is still there.”
“The white palace?”
“Not even a window broken,” Clair said, and returned inexorably to the issue at hand. “Anyway, I think it’s time to let Jilo go. I don’t see what else we can do.”
CJ smacked her hands over her face. “Let him go?”
Clair said, “But we don’t have to tell him everything—”
“We shouldn’t tell him anything,” CJ burst out, and around they went again.
Clair knew the argument was going in circles, but that was often the only way to achieve consensus. She could see she wasn’t going to get it this time.
Everyone knew the final decision was hers, so when she got to her feet, CJ and Puddlenose both fell silent.
Clair said, “I can’t do a wrong thing just because I think Jilo might.”
She took a step in the direction of the tunnel leading to the lower levels, then paused, arms lifting wide as another strong quake rolled through.
“Wow,” CJ exclaimed. “It’s been, what, three years? Four? Since I escaped from Earth, and I know you said that magic is supposed to take away the dangerous quakes, but those things still scare me.”
“I don’t see why the people of Earth don’t control quakes with magic,” Puddlenose said as they tramped down the tunnel, which curved around, with rooms leading off to the left and right; as they passed, a couple of Clair’s gang peered out, saw where they were going, and vanished again behind their tapestry doors.
CJ grimaced. “Reason five thousand four hundred and thirty-two why I hate remembering living on Earth: no magic.”
“I find that so hard to believe.” Puddlenose shook his head. “No magic. Huh.”
“But plenty of smog.” CJ snorted.
They reached the flower-and-vine tapestry door to the room Jilo was kept in. CJ and Puddlenose stood aside so that Clair could remove the ward spell protecting the doorway. It vanished with a flash of glittery light, then the tapestry that served in place of a door was batted aside.
Jilo lifted his head and squinted their way as Puddlenose entered, his tanned, square face—usually
good-humored, even in a scrap—rueful. At his shoulder was Clair, square-faced like her cousin, but there the resemblance ended. Most noticeable was that weird white hair.
Last came CJ, shorter even than Clair, scrawny and glowering. CJ was, and looked, ready for verbal battle. Jilo hated her more than all the rest of Clair’s irritating, obnoxious gang of girls.
“A lot has happened,” Clair said abruptly. “I’ll start with what everyone knows: your king is gone.”
As always, as soon as the enemy was nearby, Jilo found it difficult to think, even difficult to see. It was like thoughts were reduced to one or two fireflies bumbling around in fog. The more he tried to follow them, the worse they winked in and out of existence.
“What?” Jilo couldn’t help it. He saw the contempt in CJ’s face, emphasized by the scornful crimp in her black brows, but it was no stronger than the contempt surging through him. Why couldn’t he think? He really was as stupid as Wan-Edhe constantly claimed.
Clair looked doubtfully down at their prisoner, who stared back, his magically altered eyes squinting, which was a mercy. At least when he squinted they didn’t have to see that unnatural blackness, as if he were an empty shell containing only darkness. She didn’t like to think that about anyone, but it was hard to tell your mind not to notice what your eyes saw.
Puddlenose said, “Clair asked me to go to the Shadowland under white flag to look for you or Kwenz. And tell your people to evacuate. Kwenz was dead, someone said. Dropped down clutching his heart when the quakes started. I found you lying in Kwenz’s book room. So I brought you here.”
“As what?” Jilo found his voice. “Wan-Edhe wouldn’t trade for my life.”
“Wan-Edhe,” Clair repeated, “is gone.”
“And so is the Shadowland,” CJ said in a gloating voice from behind Clair’s shoulder.
“Gone?” Jilo repeated, wincing as a pang shot through his forehead. He tried to recapture the sense that he’d been here before, that the conversation had come full circle.
“Squashed flat.” CJ clapped her hands, grinning smugly. “The cloud city came down on top of it. All your people skedaddled.”
He became aware of the quick patter of footsteps, and opened his eyes to discover a thin, shaggy-haired brown boy more or less CJ’s age. Ben was dressed in a rumpled gray lace-up tunic and old, baggy gray kneepants, his feet bare. Ben didn’t like to admit to strangers that he could shape-change. He was not about to tell Jilo that he’d been wearing the form of an eagle; that he’d seen Jilo fall, and if Puddlenose hadn’t found him, Ben would have seen to it that he’d be found.
“Kessler came for Wan-Edhe. Straight out of Eleven-Land,” Puddlenose said.
Eleven-Land, Jilo knew, was the waxer euphemism for Norsunder. He still didn’t know why they called it that, and on impulse said, “Why?”
Three faces looked at him as if he’d sprouted wings. “Why what?”
“You say ‘eleven’ for Norsunder. I’ve heard you.”
Clair’s face reddened, and she looked away. Definitely a euphemism, then.
Puddlenose said, “Insult.”
Clair glanced at him, then said earnestly, “My aunt says that Norsunder used the number themselves, at first, as a kind of nasty hit against the Ancient Sartoran Twelve Blessed Things. They were going to destroy them one by one. But they never got past eleven for some reason or other, maybe the Fall of Ancient Sartor.”
“Or maybe our side lost count,” Puddlenose said cheerfully. “At least, if anyone knows what those Twelve Blessed Things are, they do seem to be pretty much . . .” He drew his finger across his throat and made a squelching noise.
Clair finished, “So ‘eleven’ became the word to say if you didn’t like to speak of Norsunder. It’s bad manners in some places.”
Jilo had asked because he wanted to know if they would answer. Having no interest in Norsunder, old theories of magic, blessed things, or bad words, his thoughts went straight to Prince Kessler, who was the only person Jilo found more terrifying than Wan-Edhe. Warning tightened his neck. Kwenz dead, and Wan-Edhe now in Norsunder? Wan-Edhe had always claimed autonomy from Norsunder, hiding in his fortress protected by decades of carefully interlocked, deadly wards.
But though he was a powerful mage in his own right, eventually you had to pay. Norsunder never forgot bargains.
“Does that mean Norsunder is taking over Chwahirsland?” Jilo asked, though why he asked the Mearsieans, he wasn’t sure. But his thoughts seemed to come from farther away than ever, now more like little wormy things groping around in the dark, and less like flies.
“Not yet,” Clair said. “But this is what we know,” she said, gesturing for Puddlenose to loosen the bonds around Jilo’s wrists. “Right now, the Land of the Chwahir has no one on the throne.”
Jilo’s head felt like it did when someone clapped him over the ears, only this was worse, like an invisible vise was squashing his brain.
Jilo’s hands were now free.
Puddlenose tossed the binding onto the bed, and stood back against the curved door frame, his arms folded, the old enemy. Though once or twice, just for survival, they’d had almost what could have been called a truce. Never acknowledged by either afterward.
Jilo hesitated, then with a mental shrug reached to untie his ankles. The Mearsieans didn’t stop him.
“There’s no place for you here,” Clair said. “I think most of Kwenz’s warriors left the Shadowland, under the command of someone from Chwahirsland. They crowded onto the ships the invaders brought from Chwahirsland, and sailed away on this morning’s tide.”
Jilo felt the last knot give, and he kicked free of the silk.
He looked up. “Wan-Edhe will come back if he can.”
CJ crossed her arms, her scowl now a glare. “We know. But if we smell that grunge-bearded old geez, we’ll be ready.” She flexed her bare toes and made a kicking motion.
Clair said, “In the meantime, let me point out again that there’s no one on the throne in Chwahirsland.”
“Prince Kessler has to be there,” Jilo said.
Clair said, “As of yesterday, no one is. Some friends went to scout, but they only stayed a short time, because there are so many wards and traps. In spite of this.” Clair held out a small black circle, and Jilo felt at the base of his little finger.
He hadn’t even noticed his ring was gone. Jilo blinked at her as he slid the ring back into place. Though he was taller than the Mearsiean girls, roughly the same age as Puddlenose, Clair and her noisy, irritating gang had always managed to combine and defeat him when he’d tried to find and take this hideout, a perfect retreat where Wan-Edhe would never have found him.
His private conviction was that Clair’s gang was more like a Chwahir twi—a group of eight, the fundamental unit of Chwahir life—than the false twi, spies all, that Wan-Edhe had formed around Jilo. Now all gone, leaving him to be found by an enemy.
Jilo retrieved enough thought-flies to realize he’d been staring.
His heart thumped as he stood uncertainly, waiting for their laughter if he tried to make a break for the door. What then, the knife? That was a favorite ploy among the Chwahir, to let prisoners think they’d escaped just long enough to make it really hurt when they were brought down again. And again. And again, until they gave up.
So he stared at his enemies, and the enemies stared at his strange black eyes with no hint of white, his lips chapped from too much biting, his greasy black hair hanging lank and unkempt on his brow.
Clair took a step back, holding her hand out toward the doorway.
Jilo took one step. Then another. A third. He heard CJ mutter to Clair, “It seems so weird to let a villain just go.”
A villain. She meant him. Jilo snorted. A meaningless term, ‘villain’—at least, when applied to someone like Jilo, who had always done what he’d been told, and tried to survive.
Villains were Norsundrians, the ones with power, the ones who tried to take whole worlds, who consumed souls. Or they were Clair’s gang, so galling with their fast talk and incomprehensible private jokes and smug superiority about their underground hideout.
Five, six, eight steps . . . Twenty. Jilo passed CJ, who held her nose, her fierce blue eyes a scowl above the pinching fingers. Much as he despised her, her obvious hatred was oddly steadying. He didn’t trust anything else about this situation, but he could trust her hatred to be real.
Clair said, “Before you go, I’d like to ask you a question.”
Jilo shrugged. Here was the expected ploy, the slammed door, the real end. “See me stopping you?”
“Are you coming back here with an army?” Clair asked.
Jilo snorted a humorless laugh. “If I understand you, the Shadowland is now crushed under your city. Kwenz is dead, everyone else gone.”
Unless she meant . . . She couldn’t mean . . . They all expected him to transfer halfway around the world, walk in and take the throne of Chwahirsland itself.
The magnitude of the idea defeated him at first, and he stared at the floor, trying to think, and found that—as always—when he needed clear thought, it would not come.
He looked up. Clair stood before him, waiting.
He remembered her question.
A few facts squirmed their way to consciousness. He said, “It never made any sense to come months’ journey by ship just to take this tiny country.”
“No,” Clair said.
“But that never stopped King Beardo the Stink in Human Form,” CJ put in.
“Prince Kwenz said that that was Wan-Edhe’s preoccupation with the old enmity between the Chwahir and Tser Mearsies,” Jilo said. “I think. If he had any other purpose, he never shared it.”
The Mearsieans stood in silence while he grasped that the old goal had gone with Wan-Edhe. He didn’t have to do anything that Wan-Edhe had ordered.
He was free.
A Sword Named Truth Page 7