‘This is going to hurt,’ she says.
Vander nods his head. Raine holsters her pistol and puts her arms around his chest. She takes his weight, and then lifts him, slowly and surely off the spar of metal. It snags against bone and muscle, making Vander cry out as she pulls him free. She sits him down again on the floor, then takes off the sash she wears and winds it as best she can around his wounded shoulder. When she pulls it tight, he curses. Then Vander gets to his feet unsteadily, without her help, and the two of them go to find a way back to their regiments.
‘The manticore,’ Lydia Zane hurls the words at Ommatid. ‘Who is the manticore?’
Ommatid laughs. She is bleeding from her nose and around her crystal eyes.
‘The one who holds your leash will learn his name,’ she says. ‘The outsider clad in shadow-black. Ask her, if you truly want to know.’
Zane snarls. The grass stirs and brushes against her and her robes snap around her like wings. The singing tree shakes. She pushes harder on the blade at Ommatid’s throat.
‘You will tell me now,’ Zane says.
Ommatid does not flinch at the knife’s pressure, she merely smiles all the wider.
‘Oh, my sweet,’ she says. ‘Do you think that you can intimidate me? Do you believe that you have me trapped here, on this ghost of your beautiful world?’
Zane feels a deep cold run along her bones, then, that locks her in place. Frost begins to pattern the trunk of the singing tree around Ommatid.
‘I am here because I want to be,’ Ommatid says. ‘I am here because of you, and your little birds.’
Zane does not mean to say the words. They just boil up from inside her.
‘You can see them,’ she whispers.
‘Of course I can. Pretty little things they are too. One black. One white. Mirrors, and opposites.’
‘They are just echoes,’ Zane says. ‘Made by the things I have done, and nothing more.’
‘They are so much more than echoes, just as you are so much more than Epsilon.’ Ommatid reaches out and puts her cold hands on either side of Zane’s face. ‘I have watched you for a long time, in the years gone by and the ones yet to come. Your fate lies not with the Antari, or the blind. You are destined for enlightenment, but you must choose. Place your feet on the path to truth and follow it.’
Zane sees herself clearly in Ommatid’s crystal eyes, then.
‘No,’ she slurs, through her teeth.
Because in the reflection, she too has crystal eyes in place of her silver ones.
‘Your kin would have you break others until you yourself are broken,’ Ommatid says. ‘The manticore would spend your strength like coin to change his own fate. They only seek to use you until there is nothing left to use.’
Zane moans through her locked jaws, because those words, at least, are true and Zane knows it. She has known it since the day she came into her powers.
‘The path awaits. The Nine await,’ Ommatid says, sing-song. ‘You need not be lonely, or hated. You need not be bound, or caged. You can be strong, and free, as I am.’
‘Free,’ echoes Zane’s crow. ‘Free!’
‘Choose,’ Ommatid says, again. ‘Think of all that you could be.’
And Zane does think of it, and it scares her more than the manticore or the fate-engines, or even death itself.
Because there is a tiny part of her that sees the beauty in it.
‘No!’
Zane screams the word, and the ice in her limbs shatters. She cuts Ommatid’s throat with the darkwood knife, but Ommatid does not choke, or spasm or tremble. She does not die. Instead, Ommatid sighs with blood running freely onto her many-coloured robes. Her fingers trace Zane’s face gently as she lets go.
‘Until next time, then,’ Ommatid says.
And then she vanishes, and Zane finally allows the dreamscape to collapse. A peal of thunder splits the sky as the sea boils away and the singing tree burns and splinters and turns to dust.
And then Zane’s eyes truly open to the Sanctum of Bones. To Nuria Lye and Ari Rath and Yuri Hale. Zane draws a breath that burns and makes her cough. Her kinfolk let go of her arms and she falls to the floor, hard. She retches up blood and bile onto the tiles.
‘Hag’s teeth.’ Rath’s voice is an underwater murmur.
‘Zane,’ Hale drops to one knee. ‘Where is she? Where is the traitor witch?’
Lydia Zane looks up, with blood running down her face and the taste of acid and ocean in her mouth.
‘Gone,’ she manages to say. ‘Ommatid is gone.’
Awd’s flamer roars, lighting the corridor. Wyck feels the heat of it at his back like the balefire breath of the hounds from the witch-dream. The reflected light glimmers in the gemstone eye of the Sighted fanatic who is trying to kill him, turning the crystal red. The fanatic is built big. As big as Crys. Wyck cuts him deep. Arms and chest. Those kinds of cuts should slow the fanatic, but they don’t. He grabs Wyck by his throat and slams him up against the wall of the Sanctum. It knocks the air clean out of Wyck’s lungs and shifts his cracked ribs. Makes him drop his knife from numb fingers. Wyck struggles for air with his vision dazzling.
‘What do you see, Antari?’ the Sighted hisses, through pointed teeth. ‘The edge of death?’
Wyck’s vision is crowding with shadows. Howling echoes in his ears, louder even than his heart can beat.
‘Not mine,’ he manages to say.
Then he curls his off-hand and punches as hard as he can into the Sighted’s gemstone eye. Something in his hand breaks, but so does the Sighted’s eye socket. Wyck feels the stone push in, and the fanatic screams and drops him. Wyck falls hard, air rushing back into his lungs. It burns like several hells, but Wyck gets to his feet, picks up his knife and cuts the Sighted’s throat. Cuts his screaming short. Blood paints a line through the air, glittering like stars.
Like stars.
Wyck takes a ragged breath and looks around himself. The corridor he is standing in is deep into the Sanctum, far from the rest of the regiment. Right on the edge. The walls are arched and wrought from dark iron. Flickering, erratic lumens illuminate the corridor in stuttering bursts, showing up the ironwork jutting from the walls like teeth and the puddles of black water rippling at Wyck’s feet as the Sighted’s twitching body shakes itself still. At the end of the corridor is a massive set of engraved doors. The carvings on them are of bodies laid open to the air. Of cables and bones.
Wyck goes cold from the inside outwards.
He’s seen this place before, in the dream that Zane shared with him. Her voice bounces around in his head, unwanted and unpleasant.
Blades, at your back.
Wyck turns on the spot with his knife raised in guard and finds himself looking at his Wyldfolk, and at Justar and the five that are left of his damned Dragoons. There are no Sighted. No blades.
Just those who run the edge.
Wyck lowers his own knife and tries not to laugh. He’s not sure which of the two things is more of an effort.
‘Yulia,’ he calls out to Crys. ‘Get those doors open.’
‘Got it, sarge,’ she says, with a grin.
She heads over to the doors and starts to set her charges. Despite her new scars, and everything the Sanctum has done to her, she still whistles as she does it. It’s always the same song with her. Something from home. It echoes strangely around Wyck, making his ears ache. He moves away from the door and puts his back against the wall.
‘You might want to do the same,’ he says, to Justar.
The Kavrone sergeant looks at him with that same disdain as before, but he doesn’t argue.
‘Your kind really do revel in it, don’t you?’ he says. ‘Fighting. Burning. Breaking.’
Wyck’s smile goes no deeper than his teeth. ‘There’s precious little else to revel in with lives like ours,’ he says.
‘Might as well take what you can while you’re standing.’
Justar shakes his head.
Crys sets the detonator line and rolls it out as she takes her place opposite Wyck, beside the Kavrone. She whistles out the last bar of that song and then thumbs the trigger. The explosion happens slow to Wyck. Light first. White to yellow, like a captured sun. Then the dust and plaster in clouds. Then solid chunks of wood land all around him, clattering off the ironwork. The noise of it rings out and Wyck hears Crys laughing, loud.
‘Spectacular,’ Justar says, flatly, dusting debris from his fatigues.
‘Your words, highborn,’ Crys says, with that grin she gets from breaking.
‘Let’s go and see exactly what it is they are hiding,’ Wyck says.
He runs through the mess that’s left of the doors. Over debris and through the smoke. Motes of fire spiral past his eyes as he tracks his rifle side to side, looking for Sighted to kill, but Wyck finds no Sighted. No contacts.
What he finds makes him stop and lower his rifle, slowly. He goes cold again from the inside out. Nine great, grey caskets sit in the chamber, linked by cables and patterned with frost. The sigils etched into them burn like phosphor flares. The caskets connect by oil-slick pipes and tubes to a throne that bristles with needles. There is broken glass and blood on the floor around the base of it. The blood is old, and painted into a shape that Wyck can’t keep looking at. One that seems to move. One that feels as though it looks back.
‘No good,’ Wyck says.
He hears something else that Zane said, then, clear as a springtime sky.
Worse than death.
‘What is this?’ Awd has fear in his voice, honest and open. He is standing shy of that bloody spiral. They all are. Not one of them will cross it.
‘A witch circle.’ Crys isn’t laughing now. ‘That’s a witch circle.’
She is right. Wyck knows it. Even if he hadn’t seen Zane’s dream, he’d be able to feel it in the air. Around him, the Kavrone move.
‘Secure the chamber,’ Justar is saying. ‘And the machines.’
Wyck turns and stares at him. ‘What in the hells are you doing?’ he asks.
‘Our orders are to capture and preserve,’ Justar says. ‘So I am capturing. Preserving.’
His speech is slow and deliberate. It’s not just the stimms making it sound that way. Justar is doing it on purpose, as if Wyck is stupid.
‘No,’ Wyck says. ‘Our orders don’t extend to heretic machines. To witch circles. This isn’t the kind of thing you preserve, it’s the kind of thing you burn.’
Justar steps up to him. The Kavrone is of a height with Wyck, but much broader. Built like a boxer. From the look on his face, he is used to using that to get his way.
But then going by his unbroken nose, he hasn’t had to back that look up very often.
‘You don’t get to decide what the orders extend to, Antari,’ he says. ‘You shut up and enact them.’
Wyck thinks about those toy soldiers that High Command sent after Zane and about the caskets and the terror she felt in the dream that she shared with him.
‘No,’ Wyck says. ‘I don’t think so.’
Justar goes for his sidearm. Wyck sees the movement in half-time, just like the explosion, and he snaps the butt of his rifle into the Kavrone’s face before Justar can raise his gun. It knocks the Kavrone reeling, making him drop his pistol. A welter of blood hits the floor. Wyck kicks the pistol away and lets his rifle swing by the strap. He gets Justar in a hold and puts his combat knife up against the Kavrone’s throat. The rest of Justar’s squad draw on him, but they can’t get a shot without going through their sergeant. Wyck doesn’t have to look to know that his Wyldfolk have drawn their own rifles on the Kavrone in turn. Tension fills the air like the charge before a storm.
‘Drop your damned guns,’ Wyck shouts at the Kavrone. ‘Or I cut to kill.’
‘He’s bluffing,’ Justar says, through his teeth.
‘I’m really not.’ Wyck presses on the blade enough to draw blood. ‘But please, test me.’
Justar is breathing quickly under that blade. He has the heartbeat of something afraid.
‘Do what he says,’ Justar orders his squad. ‘Lower your guns.’
The Kavrone do as they are told and allow the Wyldfolk to disarm them and put them against the wall. Haro and Jey keep their rifles drawn on them. Wyck feels curiously proud of the void-born in that instant.
They are truly Wyldfolk now.
‘You will hang for this,’ Justar says to Wyck as he eases the blade from his throat. ‘You’re a damned traitor.’
‘Traitor,’ Wyck says. ‘Funny, I could say the same about you.’
Then he hits Justar hard enough to put the Kavrone on the tile floor, unconscious. Wyck orders Haro and Jey to take the rest of them into the corridor where they can’t interfere.
‘You take Justar,’ he says to Awd. ‘I’m going to help Crys set the charges.’
‘Dav,’ Awd says. ‘Would you have done it?’
‘Done what?’
‘Cut to kill,’ Awd says.
Wyck glances down at the blade in his hand. There is blood dried into the serrations. He blinks and looks back at Awd.
‘I didn’t have to,’ he says.
Awd has got that same expression on his face as before, only this time Wyck thinks he understands what it is.
Disappointment.
Wyck watches from a safe distance as the machines go up. The explosion isn’t white to yellow this time. It burns blue and it sounds like screams. In the aftermath of it, he hears Justar laugh. The Kavrone is sitting against the wall with his hands bound. That broken nose of his has swollen up badly.
‘Here we are,’ he says. ‘Now you really will hang.’
Wyck follows where Justar is looking to see Yuri Hale and the others approaching them. Zane is on her feet now. The witch comes close, stopping just short of arm’s length away. Her face is painted with blood that is only broken by the tear trails from her false eyes. She is still crying now, somehow.
‘You burned the fate-engines,’ she rasps.
Her words make him flinch. ‘You mean the caskets,’ he says. ‘What were they, really?’
‘The Sighted use them to cheat the After,’ Zane says. ‘To trick death.’
She looks at him sidelong.
‘All for the price of your soul.’
Wyck can’t quite believe her words, because he knows for a fact you can’t trick death. Not indefinitely.
No matter what price you pay to do it.
‘Wyck.’
Hale’s voice pulls Wyck’s attention from Zane. The captain has his laspistol drawn, and his eyes look cold as lakewater. Awd is stood behind him. Lye too.
‘Drop your rifle,’ Hale says. ‘The sidearm and the knife too.’
Wyck doesn’t drop a thing. He just puts his hands up to show he won’t use them.
‘Yuri,’ Wyck says. ‘The machines had to burn. They were witch-work.’
‘I know what the machines were,’ Hale says. ‘Zane told me. This isn’t about that.’
Wyck feels sweat run between his shoulder blades. He wonders how obvious the double-dose he took is right now. Hale raises his pistol and points it for a kill shot.
‘Now drop your damned weapons like I ordered you to,’ he says.
Do as he says.+ Zane’s voice in his head is like a heated needle. +If you fight or you run, he will kill you.+
Wyck is dizzied by the words, because he can see the truth of them written in Hale’s face. He slowly unslings his rifle and puts it down. Then the sidearm, then the knife. Wyck is acutely aware of all the eyes on him. Of being unarmed and vulnerable.
‘Bind his hands,’ Hale says.
It’s Lye who comes forwards to do it. Wyck tries to catch her eyes, bu
t she won’t look at him. She just snaps the bindings shut around his wrists and steps away as if he’s something dangerous.
‘Captain, wait,’ Crys says.
The combat engineer steps up beside Wyck. All that blood and time spent has made her fiercely loyal.
‘Come on, now,’ she says. ‘Whatever is meant to have happened, there’s surely no need for this.’
‘There’s a need, Yulia.’
The words come from Awd. He stands there with dread in his eyes as if he’s the one with a gun pointed at his face.
‘Because he is a murderer,’ Awd says. ‘He killed four souls, sworn to the Throne.’
Wyck realises then what this is about and why Awd asked him about the bodies in the water and cutting to kill.
He realises what Zane actually meant when she told him to watch for blades at his back.
Crys laughs loud. ‘Shut up, Ger,’ she says. ‘That’s not true.’
She looks at Wyck, all of that loyalty written in her grey eyes. All of that faith.
‘Tell them, sarge,’ she says.
Wyck has been lying since he learned to talk. Keeping secrets and carrying them with him. Especially after Cawter. It should be easy for him to lie to Crys now, too, but he finds he can’t.
It’s that damned silver aquila around his neck. It is so heavy.
‘Sarge,’ she says, again, and her voice breaks a little.
And Wyck watches as the loyalty and the faith drains out of her eyes and is replaced with that same look he gets from everyone else.
Disappointment, and disgust.
Fourteen
Failure means death
It has been hours.
Or at least to Daven Wyck it feels like hours.
Hours of sitting with his back against cold, bare stone, waiting. He spent the first fw minutes staring at the rough-coat walls and counting the tiles on the floor. Fifty-six. Then counting the loops in the chain connecting the binders on his wrists. Ten. Then the comedown hit him, and counting became too much. The headache first, pressing in like a stormfront and pushing on the back of his eyes. The ringing in his ears. The shaking. Though some of that could just as well be down to the waiting.
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 29