The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  She edged back to the way she'd come in. Alna was gone.

  Raxa never saw her again.

  Alone, she grew reckless. Stealing coin purses, whole meat pies, packets of spice. She knew the city well enough to get away—most times. Other times, she caught a beating, but it almost felt good. And now and then when she was running or hiding, the dimness came over her, and it was like they couldn't see her at all.

  She was jogging away from one such escape when she bumped right into a pair of legs. A woman stood over her, tall and tanned, looking as calm and strong as one of the statues outside the big cathedral where the monks shooed her away with brooms.

  "Do you like this life?" the woman said.

  Raxa turned to run. The woman made a subtle gesture. Invisible hands seemed to grab hold of the bottoms of her shoes—the shoes Alna had given her—locking her in place.

  The tall woman gazed down at her. "I can give you a different one."

  Raxa thought about spitting at her. "Different what?"

  "A different life. No more hunger. No more stealing. No more being hunted."

  "And what do I have to do for you?"

  "The hardest thing of all: you have to learn."

  Raxa should have been afraid, but she'd come to hate the city. If she tried to leave it, and something happened to her, then maybe that was okay. Maybe that was what was supposed to happen after what she let happen to Alna.

  The tall woman's name was Yona. She had a horse. They rode out of the city through fields, pine forests, and hills full of huge, watchful men. Next came mountains, a valley of lakes and another city; past this, a grassy plain. Then black cliffs like storm clouds strung across the end of the world.

  Yona called it Pocket Cove. There was no city, just the cliffs, the beach, and the ocean beyond. A few dozen women and girls lived in the cliffs. For the first time since her dad had died, she was given proper food: crab soup in salty broth; mussels mixed with crispy, brackish reeds; chunks of whitefish on beds of seaweed mixed with tiny orange eggs that popped between her teeth in salty little snaps.

  If the food was the best thing, the second best was that she no longer had to look over her shoulder every second she was awake. There was no town watch. No bigger kids looking to rob her. No frozen-faced men with spiders tattooed on their wrists.

  "Why did you bring me here?" she asked after a few days.

  "Because I think you can do something special." Yona softened her face in what was almost a smile. "You're starting to look healthy enough. It's time to begin."

  And then she taught Raxa to shadowalk.

  Raxa had already been touching the fringes of the other world. But only enough to hide herself from view, and only if she didn't move. Under Yona's tutelage, Raxa learned to enter the netherworld itself. To walk in a land of blazing silver and deepest shadow. Finding it was like finding home.

  "That was almost too easy," Yona said after a few months of honing her skill. "But that's only a small fraction of what I think you can do. The nether you follow into the darkness—you're going to learn to wield it."

  It was nearing the end of the year, the waves lashed by wind and rain. Even so, Yona took Raxa out on the beach and told her things about the shadows. Raxa already knew how to see them, so Yona tried to show her how to touch them. Lesson after lesson, Raxa tried, and she failed.

  The rains turned to snow. One morning, with the wind biting Raxa's ears, Yona told her to strip down to her skin and swim out into the waves until Yona told her it was okay to come back.

  "But it's so cold," Raxa said.

  "That will bring you closer to the nether."

  "Why?"

  "Because it will help you to understand death."

  Raxa didn't understand any of that. "But I don't want to."

  "When you agreed to come with me, you made a vow." Yona stood over her. "Now strip. And swim."

  Raxa looked up and down the beach. There was no one to go to. The cliffs hemmed them in; there was nowhere to run. Hating Yona, trying not to cry at the unfairness of it, she took off her clothes.

  The water was so cold her muscles locked up like rocks. Yona yelled her onward. She paddled into the waves, the breakers smashing down on her head. Salt water flooded her lungs. She turned back for shore, fighting to keep her head above water. Another wave swept her into the icy, swirling madness. Just as she was ready to let out her breath and inhale the cold water, sand scraped underfoot. She heaved herself ashore, bedraggled with kelp.

  "I didn't tell you it was time to come back." Yona's voice was low, the warning of a growling dog. "Go inside."

  She was left alone in the darkness of her room. After three days of solitude, Yona brought her back to the beach. Again, she tried to show Raxa how to touch the shadows. Further down the beach, a young girl swam in the swells, vanishing under walloping walls of gray water. She was watched by a grown woman standing among the kelp stranded above the tideline.

  In time, the woman waved her in. The girl crawled in on hands and knees. She was nude. Her sodden black hair was stuck to her face, but Raxa identified her as Luru, who'd been brought to the Cove a few weeks before her. At the woman's orders, Luru stood naked to the wind. She shuddered so hard she fell to her side. The older woman made no effort to help her up.

  Day after day, Raxa got no closer to being able to touch the nether. Yona, once so optimistic about Raxa's potential, grew puzzled, then short. She sent Raxa out on another swim, then a third. Raxa tried her best to do as Yona said, but the shadows always seemed to be just out of her reach.

  Two months later, with the worst of the storms behind them and hints of spring in the air, Yona told her she was to go up to the Fingers, the black cliffs above the bay. She would be there alone for three days. It would be tough, and it would be painful, but it was that same fear and pain that would help her understand the shadows.

  Raxa thrust out her lower jaw. "It's going to be cold and wet, isn't it? How come you make me do these things?"

  "Our ancestors were hunted for years before they came to Pocket Cove. Since then, they've fought off half a dozen Gaskan invasions with no more than a hundred people. We have to be tough, Raxa. Tougher than everyone who might want to kill us."

  Raxa lowered her head. They took her shoes, but at least they let her keep her clothes. The Fingers were named like that because the of the rocky spires that stuck up into the air, slick with moss and mist. Between the mist and the spires, you couldn't see more than sixty feet around you, which was terrible, because the banks of moss were full of centipedes as big as rats.

  Going back to old habits, the first thing she did was try to find food. When her feet started to hurt—scraped by rocks, numbed by cold—she found a place in the lee of one of the spires where the wind-driven mist wasn't so bad and sat down.

  It wasn't that much different from winters in Narashtovik, but it was still awful. On the second night, she broke down in tears. Why were they so mean? Were they bad people? Was she? Was that why her aunt and uncle hadn't come for her? Was this meant to punish her? For not saving her dad? For not stopping the man with the spider tattoo from taking Alna away?

  When the time came, starving and half frozen, she limped down the staircase to the beach.

  "Well?" Yona asked. "Did you find any answers?"

  "Yeah." Raxa accepted a blanket from her. "Maybe all I can do is shadowalk. Maybe I won't ever be able to use the nether."

  "Careful, Raxa. This world isn't as firm as you think. Sometimes, believing something is enough to make it true."

  Raxa nodded, but she didn't believe that. Adults weren't always right. Especially the ones here. They were weird. And cruel. She thought they liked hurting kids. She hoped a giant wave came and washed them all away.

  A few days later, while she was outside hanging wet laundry, Luru stole up beside her. Luru's eyes were all lit up like when people had a fever.

  "Raxa." She reached for Raxa's arm. "They're sending me to the Fingers."

 
Raxa clipped another dress to the line. "It's not that bad."

  "Not that bad? I already been up there once. I got stung so many times." She lifted her shirt, revealing a dark crater in the skin below her ribs. "It still hurts. When I tried to drink the water, it made me so sick I saw things. I thought I was going to die."

  "But you didn't. You won't die this time, either."

  "You don't know that! It isn't just the Fingers, Raxa. It's making us swim in the cold without any clothes. It's making us work all morning and practice until night comes. I hate it. We have to leave. We can run away together."

  "How? There's no way out from here, you dummy."

  "We can find a way down the other side of the cliffs. Or try to swim around them. We have to try!"

  "We can't," Raxa said. "We agreed to this. We vowed it. 'Sides, if we try to run away and they catch us, don't you think they'll hurt us even worse?"

  Luru stared at her, eyes awash with some inner fire. She turned and ran away.

  They sent Luru to the Fingers the next day. The day after that, as Raxa and Yona stood on the beach practicing the same old things for the two hundredth time, something fell from the cliffs to the north. It hit the rocks with a hard smack.

  Yona's face went as gray as the waves. She took off at a sprint. Raxa followed. And saw Luru's body, bent and bleeding, draped over the rocks.

  Yona bent over her, nether swirling to her hands and flowing into Luru. As she worked, the redheaded woman who bossed everyone around ran toward them from the caves. Face twisted in a grimace, she drew a knife and cut open her arm, showering the body with blood. Raxa yelled out in horror:

  Clouds of nether surrounded her. Far more than Raxa had ever seen. But when they went away, Luru was still dead.

  They sent Raxa back to the Fingers the next week. She walked to the far end where the cliffs overlooked the prairies below, then walked north until she found a staircase carved into the rock.

  And then she ran away.

  ~

  "Raxa. Hey, Raxa!" Vess snapped her fingers under Raxa's nose. "You listening, girl?"

  Raxa glanced at the book spread across the desk. "Sure."

  "Then repeat to me the words I just said?"

  "Some boring stuff about some boring guy."

  Vess scowled at her, then chuckled. "Not wrong. But if I have to suffer through this, so do you."

  Vess cleared her throat and continued reading. Raxa quit listening almost immediately. It had been sixteen years since she'd left Pocket Cove; she'd only been a child. They'd taught her to enter the world of light and dark. She gave them credit for that much.

  She'd tried, and mostly succeeded, to forget everything else they'd done to her.

  As Vess droned on, Raxa frowned. When the redheaded woman had cut herself, shedding her blood over the body, Raxa had thought it was some perverse ritual, a way to prepare the body for death. Or maybe to profane it. She'd never been sure.

  But a line from the Cycle echoed in her mind: "Kamrates spilled his blood, and the darkness flocked, and his foes fell before it."

  Raxa rubbed her jaw, then got out one of her knives—at that moment, she was carrying four—and pressed its point to the back of her arm, same as she'd seen the redheaded woman do. The steel bit through her skin, cold as a winter dip at Pocket Cove. Blood welled from the wound.

  Vess looked up from the book. "What's that?"

  "It's a red fluid known as blood. Don't want to alarm you, but your body's full of it."

  "Why get out your blood?"

  "Got a hunch," Raxa said. "Either that, or listening to this book all day has scrambled my brains."

  The blood slid down her arm, gathered, and fell, hitting the wooden floor with a sound like a finger tapping at a door. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  After returning to Narashtovik, it hadn't taken her long to realize how useful her Pocket-honed talents were. Moving in and out of the shadows, she could steal as much bread and vegetables as she liked. When she got a little older, and tired of the simple food they sold at the markets, she started to sneak into homes and churches to steal pastries and fresh-cooked slices of venison and beef.

  One day, coming out of a cobbler's with a new pair of moccasins—ones she'd paid for, not stolen, though if you wanted to get technical, the money had come from stolen goods—she bumped into a tall man with a grim face, his hair tied back behind his head. Casually, wordlessly, he cuffed her, knocking her down.

  The blow gave her a good look at his wrist. And the spider tattooed there in black.

  She waited for him to go on his way, then followed, heart beating hard. There was fear in it, but there was something else, too. The man had a club on his hip. People got out of his way without seeming to know they were doing it. He headed for the Sharps, one of the neighborhoods Raxa tried to stay away from. He took long strides and sometimes she had to run to keep up.

  In a square that smelled like pee, he stopped to watch the people come and go. After a while, his eyes set on a young girl. Dirty-faced and stringy-haired, she couldn't have been more than five, and was trying to use that to pry loose a few iron coins from the people going about their business.

  After scoring a handout, she smiled and ran into an alley. The man with the spider tattoo followed. Raxa trotted after him, entering a tight space carved between two tenement buildings. She'd only meant to watch him, but as the man drew the club from his belt and closed on the little girl, anger clapped through Raxa like thunder.

  She speared into the nether and broke into a run, silver motes winking past her face. The man was almost upon the girl. As he reached out and grabbed her blouse, she broke back toward the mouth of the alley, spinning him around.

  Raxa leaped into the air and back into the plain old world. She had a knife in her hand. Iron. Nothing special. It punched through his chest all the same, sticking in his heart.

  He gawked at her. Tried to say something. The knife twitched once, twice, a third time. With a rattle of lumber, the man collapsed onto a pile of scrap. Blood leaked from his chest, hitting the boards beneath him.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  "Girl," Vess said.

  Raxa heard her, but it didn't register. She was still in the alley, watching the man's blood drip from his chest and onto the boards. It was scary and it made her want to faint.

  But it also made her feel like maybe she could be scary, too.

  "Girl!"

  Raxa nodded vaguely at Vess.

  The man with the ponytail had been the first. He hadn't been the last. She followed the next one she saw back to an old building deep in the Sharps. Everyone there had the spider tattoos. Later that week, in the middle of the night when they were too drunk to wake up, she burned the place down. That got rid of most of them.

  The survivors went to ground. It was a couple months before they turned up again. Raxa hunted them down one by one. After five deaths, they left the city. It had been twelve years since then. She hadn't seen a spider tattoo since.

  "Raxa!"

  Vess shoved her so hard Raxa staggered to the side. The other woman was on her feet, jaw dropped. The room was so dark that, for a moment, Raxa was afraid she'd walked into the shadows without meaning to, exposing her secret to Vess.

  Nope. Wasn't the netherworld. The nether was in their world, flocking around her blood like bees on honey or flies on shit, climbing up her arm to reach the blood still trickling from her vein.

  "Look at that." She smiled at Vess. "The Citadel's got a problem on their hands."

  10

  Itiego's words hung in the air, as final as the turning off of a hanged man.

  Boggs rose, eyes as hard as flint. "You can't take it with you, Itiego. All that money won't do you no good on Arawn's grassy hill beneath the stars."

  "Arawn takes us all," Itiego said. "But Carvahal finds those who spent their lives to spread the light."

  The members of the Hand filed out of the room. Dante gave Blays a small nod, stopping at the door.

  Alone, h
e turned on Itiego. "I get why you're not interested. For all the times that Collen's rebelled, it's never held onto its independence for more than a few years. Why would this time be any different? And when Mallon brings them back into the fold, and sees you gave them a hand, why wouldn't you be next?"

  The Prime Navigator of Cavana gave a small shrug. "There are many reasons I have declined your deal. That is among them."

  "A good leader protects his people. Always. But what's happening now will be different. Just as it was for Gallador. The Norren Territories. And for Narashtovik."

  "I know your record, Galand."

  "Then you know what happens to those who cross swords with me."

  Itiego's gray eyes stared into his. "They say you summoned the sea against the Mallish. Drowned them all. I wonder the terror they felt. The pain of it. Crushed under so much water. Helpless to swim back to the sunlight. If Despot Boggs truly cared for my soul, he would not have brought you into my home."

  The merchant-prince bowed over his knee, drawing his right hand to the side. Dante walked away.

  "Well?" Blays said once Dante caught up in the courtyard. "Any luck?"

  "I might as well have asked him if he wanted to gargle into each other's mouths."

  Gareno angled toward them, smiling broadly. He expressed disappointment their business was over so soon, but informed them that Itiego would be happy to house them on the grounds until they were ready to depart Cavana. As soon as they were shown to their lodgings, they convened on the balcony outside Dante's room, where afternoon sunlight dazzled yellow from the blue sea.

  "So," Blays said. "That was a disaster."

  "He is a coward." Cord glared at the dome rising above the rooftops of the compound of House Itiego. "Money's made of metal, but it's so fragile it should be spun from gossamer. That's why men like Itiego love it. Even the threat of war can smash it like crystal thrown on a stone floor—and the fear of its loss gives them the excuse to throw away their principles the instant they get too dangerous to follow."

  "To him, his money is his faith," the Keeper said. "What principle can be stronger than faith?"