“Dunno.”
“Has Vesha seen him since coming here?”
“Dunno.” She looked toward the bunkhouse door, remembering how bony he'd looked once stripped down and washed—like he'd lost half his body-weight. And the marks all over, dark as bruises but rough with feather-patterning… “Can ask. He sleeps though, I think.”
“No time for sleep, if our piking Prince is—“
Gale's hand halted his policeman's diatribe. “We need to know. If it's just speculation on his part, we can spread it as a rumor—rustle up more support from the long-time Crimsons, push Rackmar to explain himself. But if the Emperor is gone and he's imprisoned the Prince, then this is another coup. Worse than the last.”
“You think he wants to rule?” said one of Koll's women.
Gale smiled tightly. “Of course he does. He always has. It's why he's banned from Darronwy.”
Normally when they talked Imperial politics, Sanava tuned it out; she had no interest in their leaders or their clans. But after Vesha's idea that Rackmar had triggered the Corvish Eradication, she was all ears. “Why?”
With a sidelong look to her, Gale said, “Well. He led the Gold Army for a while, which holds lower Darronwy plus Wyndon and Amandon, and used to hold upper Darronwy too. Couple years ago, he decided our Lord Regent wasn't doing enough against the Kroviks or the Corvish, and needed to be overthrown so a proper commander could take over.”
“Himself,” said Koll flatly.
“He tried to arrest the Lord Regent, but he escaped and warned the mountain clanholds. They're all Firebird-worshipers up there, not Rackmar's crazy sect, so they banded together to protect the Lord Regent, and there was fighting up and down the mountains for months. The Emperor finally stepped in, pulled Rackmar out of the Gold Army and set him as the Field Marshal, gave him the White Flame to mollify him. Told our Regent to keep doing his job.”
“So he abused his power and the Emperor gave him even more?” groused one of the women. “Typical Imperial crap.”
“But he's Darronwayn too, isn't he?” said another. “Why was he attacking his own?”
“He's low northern Darronwayn, from the Krovichankan border,” said Gale. “Things are...different there, what with the constant fighting. I hear he's actually the Regent's third cousin, but the family disowned him for being even worse than they usually are about ogre-bloods.”
Beside him, Koll snorted and rubbed her jaw.
“That's why my men and I are here now,” he continued. “After the Gold Army and the White Flame, I don't want to see what he'll do to the Crimson—and I definitely don't want him on the Throne. He'll burn out the Firebird cults for sure, and then what? Make us all cut off our dicks to be White Flames? He's a lunatic.”
Sanava nodded grimly, looking over the crowd again. The women gathered here showed the full span of Imperial disaffection: Riddish criminals, Darronwayn defectors, Amandic debtors, Illanic and Kerrindrixi and Padrastan prisoners. Very few Wynds, for which Sanava was grateful; she didn't want to have to cut some fool who might have been useful if not for their permanent state of war.
The ones who feared to fight had already been shifted to other bunkhouses, away from the secret circles. The rest…
They knew what was happening. Rackmar's policies had already done away with many of their sisters. Eventually he would turn his eye on them.
“We wake Vesha,” she decided, nodding to Gale and Koll. “Learn what he seen. Yeh ask what yeh need t'know. I dun have the right questions.”
“You've done fine,” said Gale, as if this had been his idea. That irked her. “If he's right, and Rackmar's been lying about the Emperor and holding the Prince prisoner, we'll have a real insurrection on our hands.”
That made Sanava smile.
*****
Once, Haurah's pack had ruled this swamp, and eaten their fill from the villages and the pilgrim road. Those cocooned snacks and travel-weakened prey had been easy kills.
Perhaps that had been their downfall. As she fled through murky water and across thin ice, over tussocks and roots and half-frozen earth, she felt as much as heard her packmates falling behind her. She'd cobbled them together from the cast-offs of the Palace, augmented with stray skinchangers, native swamp-creatures, half-mad thread-infested animals—and they had flourished in this place where prey lined up to die, where there was no shortage and no predators to fight them.
Now there were. She had seen these bug-things before: more of the Palace's monsters, usually just glimpsed in the trees as they traveled from Palace to villages to places beyond the swamp. But they'd never fought her pack before. Never hunted them—ate them.
Now they wouldn't stop.
She understood seasonal pressures. When she had been a pack-leader in the Garnet Mountains, she had scavenged carrion in the winter, and led her kin to attack human and hogfolk settlements—places they wouldn't have chanced in summer. Deprivation wrought deep changes in the mind, leading to desperate, sometimes lunatic acts.
But this swamp had been her shelter. In it, she'd found a good use for her teeth—a second life after the Guardian that felt redemptive. She couldn't tear out Enkhaelen's throat, but she could aid him in whittling down the Emperor's chattel, perhaps some day to collapse them both.
That day had come without her. Now there was only this seething, freezing night.
The bear-monster, Sogan, was on her heels; she could hear his heavy breathing and the crunch of ice under his paws. Hounds yawped and wailed further back, but the others made no sound, and she wondered how many of them remained. None, soon, if the dim shapes springing through the trees ahead had their way.
So this is my end, she thought grimly. It was, in a way, a relief. The moment the Palace went dark, her mate's skull had breathed his last, his imprisoned soul finally escaping. Her only regret was that, split from the Wolf-spirit as she was, she could not join him.
Where she would go, she did not know. Wherever humans went, she supposed.
Still the breath burned in her lungs, blood pumping toxic through her veins, and as moonlight glinted on something above, she leapt aside from the attack. The bug-thing cracked into the ice behind her, keening angrily, only to be cut off with a snap and crunch as Sogan barreled into it.
She sneered, glad to have ended another of them.
To her left, the wall of the city loomed in tatters, great sections sagging outward nearly to the water. She'd come here deliberately, hoping for some point of entry; the interior wasn't entirely unfamiliar, and the wealth of buildings and bridges and faux parks and pathways would give her pack some shelter.
Death would come regardless, but she could drag it out. Make it difficult for the bug-things and maybe kill more Imperials. The prospect of eating her way through the city brought a grin to her face despite the chase.
Ahead, she saw a potential opening: an outspill of city material that made a sort of twisted ramp, its end hanging over the frozen water. She angled that way, clawed feet crunching on ice and bracken. The trees thinned the closer they got to the city, as if they couldn't put down roots among the white threads that surely clogged the water; her bug-pursuers became more separated, leaping longer distances to try to stay above her.
With luck, she and her pack could outpace them on the ground.
Another bug hit the ice and immediately scrabbled for purchase instead of whatever attack it had intended. She barked a laugh but kept going.
Fifty yards...thirty… She glanced back, the moonlight just strong enough for her crepuscular eyes to pick out the remains of her pack. There were five: Sogan the bear, the mad boar, the spider-limbed woman-thing and two hounds. All were injured, as was she—three gashes on her side and upper arm from where a bug had nearly skewered her—but pain was no impediment.
Behind them came the bug-things, scuttling and leaping whenever they found purchase. For a moment, she considered turning on them. Down here, they were vulnerable, and if her pack killed enough, perhaps they would run o
ff.
But those razor limbs were too dangerous to chance.
She approached the outspill at a run. It didn't quite touch down, long white tendrils of unraveled material drooping a few feet short of the ice, but she could jump it—and it looked latticed enough for her claws to catch. Above the tattered end, it rose in a warped ramp toward some plaza or walkway beyond.
Trusting in her strength, she sprang for the tendrils, and hit them claws-first a yard beneath the lip of the ramp. As she'd hoped, her grip held, the material soft but tight-woven, and with a yawp at her pack, she clambered up to the edge and hauled herself over.
The bugs shrieked. Gaining her footing, she looked back to see them slow their approach, her packmates racing out of reach. The spider-thing followed her, scrambling up the tendrils with ease; the boar skidded to a stop then hopped determinedly but could barely brush the tendrils with its crest.
“Sogan, boost him,” she called down. The bear was the smartest of her followers, a vestige of his mind still alive in that mangy body; she saw him swat the boar to make it stop, then hook arms underneath it and lift. Though the boar squealed indignantly, it barely struggled until one of the hounds tried to run up Sogan's back, making him jerk away and drop the boar in surprise.
She sighed through her teeth. At least the bugs had stopped.
The spider hissed behind her.
She shot a glance at it, but its many-eyed attention wasn't on her. It was looking up the ramp. With a sense of trepidation, she turned.
Three figures stood at the top, outlined against the starry sky. No—not stood: hovered. Two were an odd pinkish-white, faintly radiant; the third was pale-garbed but dusky-skinned, harder to pick out from the night.
Haurah's gut clenched. Wraiths. And...a mage?
Below, the boar squealed again, and claws scrabbled on ice—a scuffle. She cursed them silently.
“What do you want?” she called to the figures, well-aware that she couldn't escape a pair of wraiths. Their presence made no sense; she'd never seen their ilk here, not in the city or the swamp, and even if she had, she'd have expected them to be gone with the sun.
“Answers,” came the response from a female voice clearly not a wraith's. “What are you and why are you here?”
“I could ask the same,” she replied, squinting.
The middle figure alighted upon the ramp and began descending, the others trailing like twins. “I am Mariss Ysara, and this is my city now. —Our city,” she corrected, gesturing back toward the wraiths. “You look like a skinchanger. Why is a skinchanger here?”
Haurah showed her teeth. She didn't like this woman's imperious tone any more than she liked being pinned between wraiths and bugs. “To hunt,” she snarled. “To kill Imperials.”
“What for?”
“They oppress us. Murder us, try to breed us out. They force us into the woods and mountains, away from our ancestral hunting grounds.” It was strange to give these answers—the old reasons for her hatred. Impulsively, she added, “We have permission to hunt here.”
“From who?”
“The Ravager Enkhaelen.”
She'd expected the wraiths to react, though whether positively or negatively, she could no longer be sure; the Ravager had courted many strange bedfellows since it devoured its first wraith. Instead, the woman in the middle froze, and a blue-green glimmer outlined her right hand. “Enkhaelen?” Her voice was cold, controlled.
Haurah's brows furrowed. She could hear her packmates still struggling below, and was suddenly glad they weren't here. “He nested here before the dark. Did you chase him off?”
“Here. He was here?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Many years. Twenty at least.”
The woman's head turned slowly to regard one of the wraiths. It said something in a weird, fluting language that she responded to with a snap; the other made a sound of support and she rounded on it with another sharp syllable. For a moment, a strange shiver filled the air, the pinkish wraiths brightening until Haurah had to squint.
Then the woman looked to her again, and said, “Where was he kept? How firmly?”
“Kept?” said Haurah. “He came and went as he pleased. He made monsters for the Emperor and brought me the cast-offs. My whole pack is—“
*****
Twin beams of Hlacaasteia-tinged energy shot past Mariss, one from each side, and she cursed. Her night-vision, mediocre to start, failed completely in the dazzle—but she didn't need eyes to hear the dying scream or catch the reek of scorched flesh.
Something else shrieked and leapt for her, and she reacted automatically, the power she'd gathered blazing from her hand. It immolated the thing—probably that many-legged horror—which collapsed between her and the wolf-woman's corpse, twitching. A chorus of wails rose from below the ramp, causing the wraiths to drift forward.
“Stop,” she told them in their own tongue, furious. Bad enough that they'd followed her like minders when she'd gone to explore the city. Worse that they'd tried to dissuade her from interacting with the humans who clustered around Hlacaasteia—though with reason, she supposed, considering how blood-covered some of them were. Disgusting flesh-things.
But this was too much. Destroying someone who knew about her father?
Someone who'd said her father had been here?
She'd flown over to investigate the howling, hoping it would be something interesting to spectate upon. A distraction from the intolerable waiting and the frustration of losing her father's portal-trace.
Well, it was certainly distracting.
“Did the Master tell you to do this? That boy—he said he'd met my father too. I thought it must have been a spirit thing, Ravager to Guardian, because surely Master Caernahon would never lie to me. But now...”
The wraiths said nothing. They all knew she couldn't make them talk.
But then, they didn't need to. If her father had been here in the city—which held the Palace, where Caernahon went for Imperial business...
She couldn't take it. Pushing up from the ramp, she triggered her flying spells and drifted toward the swamp-monsters' bodies, until she could just glimpse their comrades huddled on the ice below. Their bug-like hunters lurked in the trees, glossed by moonlight. If she left, they would be overtaken; if she approached, her escorts would kill them.
Thus obliterating anything they might know about her father.
Instead, she leveled a hand at the nearest occupied tree and called up a surge of blue-green flame. The carapaced things called out in alarm as she loosed it; she saw her target leap free just before the tree went up in a blast of fire and steam.
One of her escorts sang a confused note, but she ignored it and floated forward. Down below, the wolf-woman's companions were running, following the line of the city wall; ahead, the bug-like hunters called furiously amongst themselves, preparing to fight or flee.
Mariss wanted a fight. Her wraith escorts would be obligated to back her up. Together they could take out any number of shiny bugs.
And then, some other time, she could slip away and find the pack's survivors.
Chapter 10 – Approach and Withdrawal
Time was difficult to tell, but not impossible. Since making the deal, Sarovy had been given marked candles with which to measure it and organize the shifts. By their consumption, he judged it had been two days.
Two days since Scryer Yrsian had been allowed to place her scry-mirrors on display, with their confirming view of the ever-dark sky. Two days since a brief opening of one such window had let a frigid wind into the complex and made all but the hardiest wince.
Two days since the doors of the prison-complex had been opened—more doors than he had expected. The main one, yes, plus two more in that central meeting-hall, and another at the far end of the infirmary. These new doors led not to the concrete halls and spiraling stairs of the first, but to other chambers. Other refugees.
It felt strange to use that word for his
company, but it was the truth. With their agreement, they had turned their backs on the Empire and placed themselves in the Shadow Folk's hands. So far, results had been largely positive: Enforcer Ardent's people had brought clothes and gear as promised, from dark red jackets cut similarly to their Imperial uniforms to piles and piles of piecemeal armor which the men were cobbling together into full suits. They'd also supplied a few decks of cards and the promise of more, plus payment—not that there was anything to spend it on but gambling. This irritated Sarovy, but he'd disbursed it anyway, aware that it lent a sense of security to some of the men.
Blaze Company had also met their new neighbors—an interesting experience. Mostly Bahlaeran women and children and old men, they had been moved here by the Shadow Folk to escape the cold and danger above, and lived in similar barracks-style arrangements. Each chamber seemed to house a separate neighborhood, connected by tunnels, and they were busy setting up their own little local councils.
Sarovy had already met with two to discuss concerns about the soldiers and civilians intermingling. Their northward central-hall neighbors were the non-governmental Civic Wedge residents, which included the prostitutes of the Velvet Sheath and the debtors of Latchyard. Lancer Stormfollower had apparently found his girlfriend among them, and he and the other Jernizen now spent most of their off-duty time in that area—not what Sarovy had hoped for when he'd reported 'access to women' as the Jernizen's request of the Shadow Folk. The Sheath's matrons had been brisk and professional though, and with the Sheath and Latchyard guards backing them, he'd grudgingly declared himself satisfied.
Still, he disliked civilian entanglements. Dealing with the Shadow Folk was one thing, but there were far too many Bahlaerans out there who might want Blaze Company's blood.
Not least the women whose husbands Sarovy had executed.
One of them was in the infirmary-adjacent chamber: Mistress Rynher and her children. He knew he should approach her and give a real apology, not just the blood-price he'd offered before, but the words wouldn't come. He'd done what he'd thought needed to be done, and no amount of regret would change it.
The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4) Page 25