~
"You're hurt."
"It's nothing." Raxa took a step toward the bench, limping hard. "That's not true. Hurts like Gashen whacked it with an axe handle."
"Let me see." Vess kneeled beside her, undoing the cloth Raxa had wrapped tight around her bare foot and lower leg, revealing an ankle so swollen you couldn't tell where the calf ended. "Broke good. Or else you need to start eating less frybread and more fish. What happened out there?"
Raxa stared through the darkness of the sweet-smelling courtyard. She'd considered stashing the book on her way there, claiming she hadn't been able to find it. If she had what she thought it was, it was worth killing for.
But if she was going to pay back the Citadel for what they'd done to the Order—and what they'd tried to do to her adoptees—she was going to need help. If Vess had inclinations to betray her, she'd had plenty of opportunities already.
Raxa gave Vess the rundown, altering everything that had to do with shadowalking. At the end, she shot Vess a dark look. "What happened to your end of the deal? Not a great time to cheap out on the wagon."
Vess shook her head. "We put the wagon where I said the wagon would be put. The guards, they ran us off. I dumped out some straw for you. Best I could do."
Vess offered her a drop of whiteweed to help with the pain. Raxa swallowed it, working her tongue around to be rid of the bitterness.
"Guess a broken ankle is a great excuse to get some reading done," she said. "Want to take a look?" She removed the book from the makeshift sling she'd wrapped around her back.
Seeing the white tree on the cover, Vess' face went as sober as a Mallish priest. "Sure this is safe?"
"It's a book that can supposedly turn ordinary people into sorcerers. It's about as safe as swinging a sword by the wrong end."
"Well, we got it. Waste of good taking not to check it out."
Raxa propped the heavy tome on her knees and opened the front cover. There were no signatures in this copy. She flipped through a few freakish illustrations to the first page of text.
She frowned. "What the hell is this?"
Vess leaned over, neck extended as she examined the page. "Mallish."
Raxa paged forward. "Why would the holiest book of the Gaskan region be written in Mallish?"
"Don't know. Want to complain? Or to hear me tell you what it is that it says?"
Raxa examined her for signs she was joking—Vess couldn't even speak Gaskan right. With nothing to lose, she handed the heavy book to the other woman. "By all means."
Vess ran her finger over the first few sentences, muttering under her breath. She cleared her throat. In slow and sometimes backtracking words, she began to read. Within the first minute, Raxa knew what she was hearing: the story of how Arawn came for and eventually spared the life of a man named Janth.
Vess stumbled here and there, complaining that she hadn't seen several of the words before and doubted if they were Mallish. Despite this, Raxa got the gist of nearly everything, helped by how often she'd heard the story before.
After they talked briefly, concluding that there was nothing that stood out to them, Vess read onward, telling tales of kings, heroes, sorcerers, and gods. After the better part of an hour, Raxa stopped her.
Vass raised an eyebrow. "Feel anything?"
"From what?" Raxa pinched her upper lip. "These are just…stories."
"In the church every week, what do they do? Tell stories."
"How is any of this going to teach us to throw the nether around?
"Don't know. How do stories teach you how to live? Act? Be?"
Raxa quashed a sigh. Vess read on, but it was more of the same. As dawn neared, Raxa was having a hard time keeping her eyes open despite the steady throb of pain in her ankle.
Noticing this, Vess tucked a ribbon into the book to mark her place and closed the covers. "Think we done for tonight, yeah?"
"Yeah." Raxa rubbed her eyes. "Question. When we go our separate ways for the day, who gets the book?"
"I do. You can't even read it."
"But I'm the one who snagged it. At great personal risk."
Vess shrugged. "Don't have a head full of dumb. You're the master thief in this city. I take it from you, and you just take it right back."
"Ha," Raxa said. "We'll split it."
"Cut it in half? Good thinking." Vess reached for a knife.
Raxa slapped at Vess' hand. "Are you crazy? If this is what we think it is, we can't desecrate it. Arawn would burn us to a cinder, then send a plague of locusts to eat the ashes. We'll alternate nights with it. You can have it first."
"You got more trust than most of us."
"Maybe. Or maybe I'm just that sure that if you run off, I will find you."
Vess grinned and helped Raxa to her feet. The other woman whistled softly to one of her goons, ordering him to send for a horse. He came back with a donkey. Raxa didn't care. At that point, her ankle hurt so bad she would have ridden home on a flatulent goat.
Before sleeping, she had the Order's physician set her ankle. Wasn't fun. A hefty swallow of rum and whiteweed helped.
When she woke up, she grabbed a mug of tea, spiked it with more whiteweed to take the teeth from her pain, and tore through the day's business. As soon as she was done, she sent a runner to Vess, who showed up an hour later.
Raxa smiled. "You didn't run off with it."
"Decided it wouldn't be fair." Vess nodded at her splinted leg. "With that, you'd never catch me."
They retired to Raxa's office. Vess opened the book and began to read. As she narrated stories of Jack Hand and Stathus the Wise, a weight mounted in Raxa's gut. Even when the Cycle was talking about the feats of the greatest nethermancers in the history of the shadows, there was no mention of how they did what they did. What if the rumors she'd heard about its power to train you were as wildly off the mark as most rumors were? What if they reached the end of the book—a process that could waste weeks, given how long it was—and found they were no different from when they started?
"That's that." Vess closed the book, standing and stretching her arms about her head.
Raxa glanced at the window. It had gone dark, which was a surprise, but it couldn't have been that late. "Come on. There's way more night than this."
"Got a thing needs doing that needs me to do it. Keep the book. Maybe you can't read it, but it's thick enough you can use it to prop your foot on."
Raxa grinned. "See you tomorrow, asshole."
Once Vess was gone, Raxa hobbled to her door, locked it, and sat down across from the book. Sitting in front of her, the Cycle didn't look like anything special. Old, yeah. But nothing like the nethereal hellstorm that had nearly gotten her trapped inside a doorless room that was hardly big enough to sit down in. Had that been the book itself? Or a boobytrap set to protect the book?
Grimacing, wary, she eased into the shadows.
As before, light spewed from the book like a lord expelling his fourth bottle of wine. Tendrils of darkness lashed from her to the pages. The shadows poured from her like blood. Her instincts were to jump out of the darkworld as fast as she could, but the book didn't seem to be hurting her. And this time, there was no danger of getting trapped.
Specks of darkness floated in the air, like mist churned up by the torrent of nether. She looked closer. The specks were tumbling toward her. Landing on her skin and sinking in. The book was draining her, yes.
This time, though, it was also giving something back.
Within moments, the book had sucked her dry, booting her out of the nether. Compared to the shining silver of the other world, the room around her was as dark as a cave. The weight on her stomach eased up. There was something potent about the book. All she had to do was find out how to unlock it.
~
They fell into a comfortable if frustrating routine: handle their responsibilities each morning, meet up by early afternoon, read the Cycle together until well after the sun had set. Day by day, Raxa's ankle hurt less
and less. In the normal world, she still couldn't walk without a crutch, but in the netherworld, she was so light on her feet she felt no pain at all. If anything, visiting the other realm seemed to hasten her healing.
"Feel any power?" Vess asked a few nights into their efforts. "Any feel like you could clench your fist and make the walls fall down?"
Raxa shook her head. "The only thing I feel is the urge to go ask a priest why all their old heroes were so murderous. How about you?"
"Feel like I need to get one of my lowlings to write a book about me. Maybe we call it The Cycle of Vess."
It was like being dumped overboard far from sight of land. No way to tell which direction to head in. No way to tell if they were even getting close to something. It didn't take long before she was frustrated. Angry. Ready to toss the book in the bay and forget it.
But she had to press on. Until the nether was hers, she'd never be able to protect her people from the Citadel—or to take her revenge.
Whenever Vess hit a point where a nethermancer was doing his or her thing, Raxa took notes, quoting anything that might point to their methods. At the end of each session, she and Vess went back over everything Raxa had jotted down, phrases like "When Eyosa's breathing matched the nether, at last she felt it on her fingers" or "and so Kamrates spilled his blood, and the darkness flocked, and his foes fell before it."
Each night she had the book to herself, she stood before it in the shadows, watching it pull the nether from her body and into its pages, the black dust rising from it and settling into her skin. The first time she'd encountered the book, the process had been almost instant. After having four nights with it, though, it was taking twenty seconds before the Cycle drained her to nothing. And each time took a little longer than the last.
Because she was making progress? Or was the opposite true, and the book was slowing down because it was petering out, like an unbunged barrel getting down to its last few drops?
Midway through the night's reading session with Vess, Raxa stood, stretching her back. "Gonna hit the privy."
She walked into her office's front room, opening and shutting the door to the hallway. She shifted into the nether and moved back into her main office, where Vess was hunched over the book. Dark tendrils stretched between Vess and the Cycle, but they were much thinner than Raxa was used to, more like threads than yarn. There were hardly any dark specks in the air, either. Though the specks were sinking into Vess' skin, they seemed less excited about it. Like snow landing on cobbles and taking a long time to melt.
Whatever was happening to the two of them, it was happening at different rates. In hindsight, not that surprising. Everyone had the nether in them. According to some people, everyone could learn to use it, but in practice, the talent varied widely. Most could train for years and never learn to summon more than a drop.
That thought exposed a hundred others. Like ruins unearthed by a sudden flood. Funny how much you could forget if you tried. You didn't have one life, you had many, as separate from each other as towns strung out along a road. People liked to think their lives were a progression, a building-upon, as cohesive as a song, complete with crescendo. But it was more like a bard who'd gotten so drunk he couldn't remember which story he was telling. Every ten minutes he'd switch to a new one, leaving his audience annoyed and confused.
Vess turned a page. Raxa blinked. Still in the shadows. She returned to the foyer, dropped back into the plain world, and rejoined Vess at the table.
Vess glanced up. "Ready to go on?"
"Where else am I going to hear about how Jack Hand killed another rat?"
Vess smirked. She launched into a new story about one of the nethermancers who'd been imprisoned in a tower or a dungeon and was fiddling around with the rats in it. Raxa tried to listen, but it felt like her mind was ready to vomit. And her whole dinner was on its way up.
She closed her eyes and let it come.
~
Her mom had died giving birth to her. Her dad was a woodsman and they lived in a log shack in the pine forests outside the city. She remembered being happy. She remembered little else except for the way the sunlight pierced through the pine needles. The feeling of a blizzard outside while you had a fire and blankets inside. The spicy smell on her father's breath that she would recognize, years later, as rum.
When she was five, he cut himself while felling a tree—he'd probably been drunk—and the wound became infected. She told him to see a priest. He said they didn't have the money. He lay in bed with his rum, which he said would drive the infection out.
Within five days, he was too weak to get out of bed. He was pale and had dark streaks on the arm where he'd been hurt. He asked her to go get their neighbor, a young farmer named Garren who always talked about finding a wife. She did so. She brought Garren in and her father sent her outside. After a few minutes, Garren exited, gave her a tight smile, and headed to the city.
It was hours before Garren came back. Raxa's dad sent her outside again. When Garren walked out, he told her that her father wanted to see her.
The inside of the cabin smelled funny. Her dad gripped her hand tight. "Your aunt and uncle will be here tomorrow morning. They'll care for you."
"What about you?"
"I'll come for you when I'm better." He smiled. "It won't be long."
By morning, he was dead. Raxa waited all day, and then the next. Then she went through the forest to Garren's and told him what had happened. He said he was sorry to hear that.
"I can take care of you," he said. "And when you're older, we can take care of each other. After all, time turns stems into flowers."
He smiled. It was a selfish smile. When he went out to tend to his fields, Raxa ran into the city.
She looked for her aunt and uncle every day. As she searched, she learned the city was a place where if you wanted to eat, you had to steal. She got used to the taste of hard bread and soft cucumbers. There were other children there too, filthy and quick-footed. Most would steal from her if they saw she had something, but some became her friends. They helped her look for her aunt and uncle, warned each other when the city watch was coming, shared crusts and cheese when they'd nicked more than they could eat.
The streets had a fleetingness to them. People came and went. Sometimes they came back after a few days, but sometimes she saw them months later, servants in the retinue of the rich. Often, she never saw them again.
Often, she was cold. Always, she was hungry. In winter, which in Narashtovik lasted nearly five months, she was both. She still wasn't sure how she'd made it through the first winter. By the time the air began to warm, the points of her hips and shoulders could pierce leather. Before the snow melted, her shoes rotted off. She tried to eat them, but her jaw got sore before they were soft enough to swallow.
The snows still hadn't thawed. Ice cut the soles of her feet, leaving bloody tracks behind her. Every day, the pain got worse; soon, she might not be able to walk at all. In the streets, your feet were your life. Couldn't walk, and you couldn't steal. Couldn't run, and someone would catch you.
And the kids and the crazies weren't the only ones out there. Men walked through the crowds, faces as cold as a blizzard. Hunting those like Raxa. The children of none that no one would miss. If your feet hurt too bad to run, they'd take you. You'd be one of the street people who disappeared and never came back.
She tried to hole up, giving herself the chance to heal, but if she hid out for more than a day, her stomach hurt worse than her feet. She limped from block to block, trailing blood through the snows that fell every afternoon. Raxa prayed to Arawn to melt the ice, but it only got worse.
One day, on her way to the alley where Waldon the baker sometimes took pity and gave them his old bread, the hurt got worse than it had ever been. Like nails were being pounded up through the bottom of her feet. Her vision speckled over from pain. She dropped to her knees, palm braced on the freezing ground.
She could get up. Maybe she could get home. But that
would be it. The only question from there was whether she froze or starved.
She hung her head. Footsteps crunched in front of her. Raxa opened her eyes, expecting a beating from a city watchman sick of yet another of Narashtovik's fleas falling in the middle of a public street. Instead, she saw another girl, a year or two older, too dirty to be from anywhere but the streets.
"Take these." The girl held out a pair of shoes.
Raxa frowned. Trap? But it didn't matter anymore, did it? She reached out, took the shoes. They were worn and cracked, but they were only a little bit loose. She smiled and tried not to cry.
The girl's name was Alna. She helped Raxa until Raxa's feet healed up. Like that, they were best friends. For a year, they roamed the city together, fishing coins from pockets, nabbing broccoli and apples and squash from stalls, ducking the older kids. Alna was keen-eyed, fast to make a decision. She could read the mood of the street like a farmer read the weather.
The day it happened was sunny, warm, a day and a season after Alna had saved Raxa's life. Raxa had only been away for a minute—running back to one of their stashes to pick up their fishing hook to try in the bay—but when she jogged back to the alley where Alna was waiting, it was empty.
She ran into the street. Her eyes leaped at once to a tall man striding down the street, a young girl held limply in his arms. Raxa sprinted after them. She hadn't gotten three steps before another man turned. His face was as cold as all the other takers. He strode toward her, hands open by his sides.
Raxa turned down a side street. Empty except for a few vacant stalls merchants had parked out of the way. The man was almost on her. He lunged for her. His sleeve pulled back, revealing a tattoo of a spider on his wrist. She dived behind a stall.
Footsteps moved around the side of the stall. A shudder racked Raxa. A shadow and a shimmer seemed to pass over the world, dimming it. The man swung around the side of the stall. He seemed to look right through Raxa, then swore and ran further down the alley. As the world brightened around Raxa, the man's steps faded to nothing.
The Wound of the World Page 12