The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Galand sent beetles to the safehouse," Raxa said. "They were full of nether. I could feel them trying to get inside the shutters. At the time, I didn't know exactly what they were, but I had a hunch. I had Anya pretend to be me. Fed them a false story about how she was headed to some meet. When they showed up to take her down, that confirmed the beetles were spies."

  "Quick thinking you got."

  "I'd heard Galand was looking for me in person. That's the only reason I put things together so fast. And all for nothing. Now that they know what I can do, ambushing them's going to be ten times as hard."

  "Third shits." Vess flicked snow from the top of the wall. "They're hunting you. They know who you are. And they got powers to hurt you before you can hurt them."

  "Is this going somewhere? Or are you just rubbing it in?"

  "If I look at a fight with those odds, I drop it like I picked up a turd."

  "That's disgusting."

  "And so is the splatter they are going to make with your pretty little face." Vess narrowed her eyes. "Leave town. Soon, they'll go back to their stupid little war. That's when you come back, and we continue our war on them."

  Raxa paced across the courtyard. Snow was sifting from above, but at least they were out of the wind. "Can't. I've only been in charge of the Order for a few months. If I leave now, somebody who thinks they got screwed at the election will take over."

  "You come back, you kill them too. Good chance to take out the trash."

  "Not if they resume the war with you in the meantime."

  "Citadel won't stop hunting you. They kill you, someone else takes over the Order anyway. Only there's no you around to take it back and set things straight."

  Raxa tipped back her head, blinking at the snowflakes sticking in her lashes. Maybe she should go. Or turn herself in. They'd kill her, but if she confessed, and told the others to lie low, maybe she could avert a war between the Order and the Citadel. Running away wasn't going to cut it. The Citadel wasn't going to be happy until they had a body.

  Then again, who said it had to be hers?

  "You're smiling," Vess said. "Why?"

  "How would you like to go back to war?"

  "With the Citadel? Right now? That's your funeral."

  "Not with the Citadel," Raxa said. "With me."

  ~

  Finding a body would have been a snap. Finding a body that resembled Raxa closely enough to fool somebody who'd only seen her from within the eerie glow of the shadows would have only been slightly trickier: as a commercial and religious hub, Narashtovik had drawn a non-trivial population of foreign merchants, pilgrims, and refugees, but most of the population was as pale and dark-haired as Raxa.

  Even so, killing an innocent young woman to take the blame for Raxa's crimes felt like the kind of sleaze that would bring down the wrath of the gods. Not just on her head, but upon her entire house. Rather than taking the easy route of finding a lookalike and killing her, they had to wait for one to drop dead.

  Then again, their plan was going to need a few days to unfold anyway. Raxa relocated to an old cabin the Order kept in the pine forest outside the city. There, she spent every waking moment focused on the nether. Partly to try to learn more than the couple of minor tricks she'd put together, but mostly to watch out for any more nether-bearing bugs.

  While she was away, Vess reopened the war between her Little Knives and the Order. It would be a thin bridge to walk down—they could only trust their inner circles with the knowledge the war was a fake—but after two falsified skirmishes, the two groups ordered their people into hiding. Meanwhile, agents on both "sides" fed a steady stream of gossip to the pubs.

  Within days, the entire city knew about the resumption of the war. In the meantime, the agents they'd installed in the bodywagons that picked up the dead for the carneterium found their mark: young woman, dark hair long enough to be tied behind her head, bit of muscle to her.

  Raxa was called in from the cabin to take a look. Disguised under a bundle of scarves and coats, she walked into the city with a heavy limp, coming to a rickety old house on the outskirts.

  Vess' two guards let her inside the front door. Vess sat at a long table drinking something steamy. The body rested on the table. Its throat was cut wide open.

  Raxa frowned. "I thought you said she died of greencough."

  Vess gave her an irritated look. "We have to make it look real, don't we? The Citadel's going to believe you happened to drop dead of greencough?"

  "She doesn't look anything like me."

  "She not as pretty as you think you are?" Vess reached out and patted the dead woman's leg. "She'll fool 'em. You wait and you see."

  Using the various oils and powders that were typically used to hide facial flaws, but which outfits like the Order and the Knives used to disguise themselves, Vess made a few small adjustments to the woman's face, then dispatched a messenger to the Citadel and Raxa back to the pine forest.

  A day and a half later, the crunch of snow woke Raxa from her pallet. Someone knocked on the door. Good sign. A murderous High Priest wouldn't knock. Raxa opened the door. Vess strode inside, smirking. She went straight to the stove, stoking it and placing a metal cup of spiced rum on top of it to warm up.

  Raxa moved behind her. "Well?"

  "Well what? Never seen a woman celebrate selling a corpse before?"

  "They believed you?"

  Vess removed a heavy pouch from inside her coat, jingling the coins inside. "Paid me for it, see? Either they believe it, or they want me to think they believe it."

  "How did they seem? Happy? Reserved?"

  "Pale one was smug. Cute blond one was happy. Or maybe just drunk."

  "What about the war between us? Think they bought it?"

  Vess gave her an exasperated look, then sighed and got out a cloth to pick her cup up from the stove. "I told them all that I was supposed to tell. You broke the peace, I took out your throat. The Citadel's reward was just a happy bonus. I don't know what they bought and what they sold."

  Raxa found a second cup and poured herself a slug of what Vess was having. When the drinks were properly heated, they bonked their cups together and drank to Raxa's freedom. Could it be as simple as that? Feed them a plausible body, then keep her head down until they dropped their guard? If she was smart, even when it was safe to move against them again, she wouldn't come in flashy and violent. No, she'd poison them slowly. Arrange accidents. Make it look like it wasn't her that hated the Citadel, but the gods.

  To be on the safe side, she stayed in the cabin for another week. Before returning to the city, she cut her hair short and choppy, and got Gurles to bring her one of the heavy hooded dresses worn by the women who pushed sledges of firewood through the winter streets, delivering their goods to houses and manors, or simply selling them to passers-by. When she actually tried the dress on, with its heavy folds weighing down her arms so badly she could hardly swing her blade, let alone throw one, she immediately sent Gurles back to a tailor to rush-order the same cut in a lighter fabric.

  By the time that returned, and was deemed satisfactory by herself, she'd been away from Narashtovik longer than any time since her aborted apprenticeship at Pocket Cove. Returning to the city—the smell of horses and wood smoke; the trampled gray snow; the spires and walls and all the excellent things locked inside them—Raxa's heart lifted like the coming of a southern heartwind after weeks of freeze.

  As nightfall neared, which she loved best of all, especially in winter when the air was so hushed and clear it was like the whole world was made of nether, Gurles rushed through the door of the pub, veered toward her table, and grabbed her arm. Raxa drew back her hand to give him a stiff-fingered jab in the armpit, but the look on his face dashed her anger. She skittered out the back door with him.

  After a couple of minutes of rabbiting through a warren of alleys, Gurles came to a stop, glancing behind them. "Blays Buckler was right up the block. And he's asking about you."

  "But they thin
k I'm dead. If they don't think that, they wouldn't be dumb enough to make their disbelief so obvious."

  "Oh, he wasn't looking for you. He was sniffing around for places you used to live."

  She stared blankly, steam curling from her mouth. Then it hit her: he wasn't looking for her. Just the places she'd inhabited. The places she might have stashed the book and the sword. Blays and his master would never give up the hunt until they had them back.

  She turned and crunched through the snow.

  Gurles hustled up beside her. "Where are you off to?"

  "Away. I'm endangering all of you by being here."

  "So you're runnin' back to the woods? How long you mean to stay there? Until we're all so old the only thing we're fit to steal are glances at pretty young girls?"

  That had been her plan, more or less. Remove herself from the city until it was safe to come back. But there was more than scorn in Gurles' voice. There was anguish, too. She suspected it wasn't so much for her as for the Order she was supposed to be leading.

  She stopped and looked up into his dark eyes. "I'm not going off to hide like a sick cat. I'm going there to come up with a new plan. Until then, I need you to keep a steady hand on the Order. For just a little longer. Can you do that?"

  He nodded. Raxa smiled. She turned and ran away, disappearing into the darkness and the snow.

  ~

  The remains of the old wall reached up into the night like the arm of a heretic repenting to the heavens as he died—and getting denied.

  Most of the ruins were much lower, no more than uneven piles of rubble. In two places, great stone blocks stood like dumb sentinels. Their sides were carved with what had once been runes or pictures, but time had worn their meaning away into dust.

  Raxa had found the place a few days into her exile during one of her walks, which she told herself were about learning the surrounding terrain, but were mostly about staving off the boredom before it grew lethal. She'd asked Gurles to find out what the ruins were, and after looking into it, he reported they'd once been a fort. The big upright blocks had been part of a temple inside that fort. The fort itself had been built to protect Narashtovik, or at least to get some of the fighting outside the city itself, which in days of yore had been ransacked more often than the Order's liquor stocks.

  She'd found it a good place to think. Especially on nights like this, when you could pretend that the entire world was empty ruins, every bit as barren and decrepit. A little morbid, but it also lent her a sense of distance she found helpful.

  That night, though, she was distracted. Had it been time that had ruined the fort? Or had it been destroyed during one of the many, many wars? Looking for answers, she walked through the snow, which had only been disturbed by herself and a few birds that had left trident-shaped tracks in the white. Many of the walls had fallen into shattered piles. The result of sorcery in a heated battle? Or the work of an old thing falling and busting into bits?

  She leaned in for a closer look at a slab of black rock, wiping away the snow with a gloved hand. The edges looked broken but worn. Its surface was patchy with pale green lichen. Too old to tell. All of it. Even if it had fallen down yesterday, she wouldn't have known what she was looking at.

  She stood and pulled back her hood, unmuffling her ears and expanding her field of vision. What was she doing? Distracting herself from her real problems? Then again, her problem was that she'd gotten into a war with one of the most powerful orders of sorcerers on the continent. And she wasn't anything more than a trumped-up thief dabbling with the nether. So why not spend her time contemplating what had brought down this ancient old fort? At least that was a problem she had a chance in hell of solving.

  Something about the place was bothering her, though. Setting aside the matter of what had destroyed the fort, if Narashtovik really had been getting attacked that much—and supposedly, it had been sacked more times than a field of potatoes—why hadn't it ever occurred to its people to go somewhere else? Had it really been that much easier for them to build the Citadel, then the walls of the Ingate, then the Pridegate, then these forts out here in the middle of nowhere? Even if their mighty defenses had prevented them from utter annihilation, how many lives had they lost clinging to this particular scrap of dirt?

  The thought hit her so hard she stood up straighter: if she tried to hang around and duke it out with the Citadel, she'd be committing the exact same idiocy the city once had.

  She hustled back to Narashtovik. The gates were closed, but the walls weren't; she shadowalked through them. She sent a messenger to Vess, then headed for the temple of Urt. Vess showed up an hour later. Her eyes were puffy and her cloak was dusted with snow.

  Vess scowled. "Even for one of us, you keep late hours."

  "This was a mistake. We can't fight the Citadel. It was naive to ever think we could."

  "Eh? You got the book. You got the magic. That was the plan."

  "That makes one of us who can use the nether. How many do they have? Sixty? A hundred?"

  Vess shrugged one shoulder. "So you get strong, then you find more like you and you train them. And when you are enough, boom. No more Citadel."

  "That's exactly what I'm afraid of," Raxa said softly. "The only way to beat them is to recruit people like them. Train those people like them. Become them. If we do that, we've lost the very thing we're fighting for."

  The other woman instantly grew thoughtful. "You speak like that, and you make sense."

  "I've been going about this the wrong way. Mistaking anger for wisdom. Getting hold of the Cycle was a good idea. But the power inside it—I should be using that to protect my people, not to provoke a war against them." She had a sudden vision of the six children she hadn't risked seeing since she'd rescued them from the bowels of the Citadel. "No one else will ever care about them. It has to be us."

  "Lots of talk. What's the doing?"

  "If I was smart, I'd get the fuck out of here. Move the Order to Yallen. Or Setteven. Or all the way to Bressel."

  Vess wrinkled her brow. "Would be smart. But you talk like you don't want to be smart. Why not?"

  Raxa shook her head, wandering toward the middle of the snowy courtyard. "Why do people kill themselves? Why not leave the city? The country? The continent? Find out if there's something better out there?"

  "I don't know. Why not do that?"

  She turned to face Vess, frustration boiling up from her gut. That was the logical next question—she'd asked it of herself—but people didn't just leave, and their decision didn't feel wrong. Why? It wasn't a connection to the land, was it? That might be a small part of it, but it wasn't the main cause. Then what force could be so strong that it made you stay even when you were certain that staying would destroy you?

  "Because we want there to be justice here," Raxa blurted. "If we run away, we admit that there isn't. And if there isn't justice here, why would we believe we can find it anywhere?"

  "Oh, that's the worry? Simple answer: no justice anywhere. Deal with it."

  "I'm going to try. In exchange for peace, I'll ask them for Cee. She was in bed with Gaits; literally, for all I know. She tried to get my kids killed. We can't have someone like that running their town watch."

  "And we really can't have her escape the punishment."

  "Naturally." Raxa began to pace. "But there's more to it than revenge. If they hand her over, it will prove they respect us—and fear us—enough to honor the peace."

  "If they say okay, and you go there, and they betray you?"

  "Then I kill them."

  Vess rolled her eyes. "Just like the last time you tried that and ran away and barely lived?"

  "I've got a new idea. Based on that fight."

  "What if this new idea is also bad? What if this idea gets you killed?"

  "Then I'm dead!" Raxa made herself take a deep breath. She lowered her voice. "And they have no reason to come after the rest of you."

  Vess pursed her lips, taking a hard look into Raxa's eyes. "Y
ou think they're going to kill you, don't you? That's your plan. You sacrifice yourself, all our problems go away."

  "I don't know what they'll do. All I know is that if I play my hand right, there's three outcomes, and we win each one of them. Either I die and the rest of you live. Or I kill them, and maybe we take this war after all. Or they give me the kidnapper and no one has to die."

  "Except her."

  "Except her."

  Vess absorbed this, then chuckled. "Okay."

  "That's it? No lecture about how stupid I'm being?"

  "If I want to waste words, I'll ask my people to quit getting drunk so often. Always, you do what you do, and then tell me why it had to be so."

  Raxa laughed wryly. It was the middle of the night, but she got straight to work on preparations. For one thing, she was already in the city. Beyond that, now that she'd made her decision, she couldn't stand to sit around waiting.

  First thing was to speak to Gurles. She would rather have told no one at all, but the Order deserved better. He bore a flat expression as she explained that she was about to end the conflict with the Citadel—and it was going to be dangerous.

  "If something happens," she finished, "I need you to hold the Order together. Don't elect a new leader until they're ready for it."

  He looked her over. "You don't think you're coming back."

  "I don't know. But for once in my life, I'm trying to be smart."

  She put her endorsement of Gurles down in writing, then penned a letter to Galand laying out her terms and instructing them to meet her at the ruined fort the following night. She assumed he wouldn't be stupid enough to kidnap or torture the runner she sent to make the delivery.

  After that, there was only one thing left to do. She hurried to the Pridegate, shadowalked through it, and slogged down the southern road, putting the city behind her. She stopped at the edge of the woods. She didn't think she'd been followed—she hadn't felt so much as a flicker of nether—but maybe all that meant was that he was too powerful for her to even notice he was there.