by Rachel Aaron
“Writes what?” Miranda said, still looking at the river.
“A variety of things,” Lelbon said. “Histories, travelogues. You might have heard of him, actually. His books are under the name Morticime Kant.”
“Are you kidding me?” Miranda roared, nearly launching out of her chair. “The West Wind is the source of that overwrought, misleading, misinformed, horribly written nonsense about wizards? The books that say we wear pointed hats and robes and do nothing but brew frogs into potions all day? That Morticime Kant?”
“I hadn’t heard the bit about the frogs,” Lelbon said, trying hard not to laugh. “But yes, that Morticime Kant. It was part of a long-running experiment to see if he could influence human behavior through suggestion.”
“That’s absolutely insane,” Miranda huffed. “You don’t see any members of my Court wearing pointed hats.”
“Not in your Court,” Lelbon’s grin widened. “Others are less prejudiced.”
Miranda snorted. “Thank goodness other spirits aren’t as curious as your master or we’d be up to our noses in ridiculous ploys.”
“It’s not that spirits aren’t curious,” Lelbon said, his voice growing suddenly bitter. “Curiosity isn’t a quality the Shepherdess values. She prefers obedient silence to questions, and since she is the Power, what she prefers becomes the way of the world.”
Miranda frowned, tucking that knowledge away for future use. “That still doesn’t explain why Illir runs the brokers, though,” she said. “You’d think he could learn everything he needed to know about people from watching. He is a wind, after all.”
“Knowing what people want to know tells you more about them than any simple observation,” Lelbon said sagely. “Watching a man bake may tell you he’s a baker, but learning what he would pay to know tells you infinitely more about the man himself.”
Miranda sighed. “Well, it seems like an overly elaborate setup to me.”
“It is,” Lelbon said. “But my Lord Illir enjoys it immensely. Plus, it keeps the winds busy. They can be a handful if left to their own devices.”
Miranda thought of Eril and agreed heartily. “So,” she said, scooting to the edge of her chair. “Now that we’re on the subject, how do the big looms work? Since the brokers are spirit deaf, I’m guessing the machines help them interpret the winds without hearing them? Do they read combinations from the symbols on the cloths?”
“That I certainly could not tell you,” Lelbon said. “Industry secret.”
“Seems like a lot of hassle,” Miranda said. “Why not just use wizards?”
Lelbon closed his eyes as the warm sunlight drifted over his face. “Because that would defeat the whole purpose.”
Miranda flopped back into her chair. “Are you deliberately being infuriating?”
“Quite the contrary,” Lelbon said. “I’m being very open. More open than I should be. You, however, seem to be making an effort to be thick.”
Miranda glared at him and said nothing. Finally, Lelbon sighed. “I’ll add this, and no more. The Shepherdess watches her spirits closely and her wizards when they catch her fancy, but she completely ignores the spirit deaf. They are beneath her notice altogether, and she certainly would never take the time to learn any sort of code a wind or other spirit could devise to communicate with them. With that in mind, consider, if the winds wanted to pass on information they usually couldn’t say without attracting her anger, what would be safer? Whispering to a wizard or flipping a piece of cloth?”
Miranda’s eyes went wide, but before she could say anything, Lelbon cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Let’s leave it there.”
She nodded, and they lapsed into silence, listening to the howling wind on the other side of the wall.
CHAPTER
8
After five minutes of listening to the wind howl in the broker’s room, the urge to get up and peek was almost overwhelming. Miranda desperately wanted to see with her own eyes how the pieces of cloth on ribbons worked, but she stayed put, fingers locked on the battered arms of her chair. The West Wind was already doing her a lot of favors; now wasn’t the time to press her luck.
To get her mind off the sound, Miranda leaned back in her chair to contemplate what she’d learned of Illir. She’d always known he wasn’t a spirit that did things in the normal way, but using the spirit deaf to pass information right below the Shepherdess’s nose was brilliant, and the more she thought about it, the more brilliant it got. How many other events had Illir influenced through his brokers, feeding the right information to the right people at the right time?
She sighed loudly, causing Lelbon to look up in alarm. Miranda shook her head. No need to tell him how much it stung to finally realize how little she actually knew about the spirit world she’d given her life to. If Illir was secretly behind both the brokers and Morticime Kant and she hadn’t known, how much else was she missing? She didn’t even want to think about it, but it all came down to the same mistake: underestimating the spirit world.
Every time she thought she had spirits figured out, they did something that turned her on her head. Even seeing the truth of it in her servant spirits every day, it was easy to forget in the rush to do her duty that spirits weren’t some faceless mass to be saved but a complex network of individuals all trying to make their way in the world. They had their own ambitions, their own wants and needs and likes. Thinking of it like that, the fact that she could control them, overpower them with her will, just seemed… wrong.
For some reason, that thought sent her back to the vision the Shaper Mountain had shown her, his memories of the world that had existed before the Shepherdess. There’d been no wizards then, no people at all, just spirits and the demons who preyed on them. The spirits had been awake then. All of them, even the little ones. Miranda closed her eyes, trying to imagine a world where everything was as awake as her own spirits. A time when the world was enormous, and spirits fought their own demons. A world of free, independent souls without a Shepherdess or her stars to watch over them. Unbidden, Miranda’s hand sank down to brush her rings. If such a world existed now, would humans have any place in it?
She was still mulling this over when the wind on the other side of the wall died out, falling from a roaring gale to nothing in less than a breath. Miranda blinked and turned to look at Lelbon. It couldn’t be time yet. They’d been sitting here less than half an hour, but Emma was already walking through the door with a surprised look on her face and a sheet of paper in her hands.
“Luck is with you today, Spiritualist,” she said, handing the paper to Miranda. “Here you are, names and locations, just as requested. The ones missing are marked with asterisks. I think you’ll find everything to your satisfaction.”
Miranda snatched the paper from her hand. As her eyes ran frantically over the scribbled names, the first thing that struck her was how long the list was. There must have been hundreds of names, each with a place listed beside it, just as Emma had said. The only star without a location was the one at the very top, Eli Monpress.
Reading that name was harder than she expected. All at once, she was back in the Tower at Osera, staring across the dark, still water as the white arms tightened around Eli’s throat, pulling him out of the world. Miranda shook herself out of the memory, scrubbing her blurry eyes with the back of her hand. There was no sense worrying about the thief. If there was one thing Eli Monpress excelled at, it was looking out for himself. Setting the past firmly out of her mind, Miranda plunged ahead, reading as fast as her eyes could move.
All the names from her own investigations, the Shaper Mountain, the Great Ghosthound, and so on, were listed, with one exception. The Immortal Empress’s name was missing. Miranda read the list twice over, searching for Empress or Nara, the name Mellinor had mentioned on the ride down to Osera, but she found neither. That confused her, but Miranda didn’t have time to worry about the Empress.
As she read the list through again and again, a realization began creepi
ng over her mind. From the very beginning, she’d known there must be several stars. A few dozen, maybe a hundred, but the list in her hands was well over that. And then there were the missing stars. Coming in, she’d expected to see the Deep Current and the Allva’s tree, plus a few more. Now, staring at the paper between her shaking hands, Miranda felt like she’d stepped off the edge of a bottomless pit.
“How is it?” Lelbon said, peering over her shoulder.
Miranda shoved the list at him. He took the paper from her shaking hand, his wispy eyebrows climbing. Of the nearly two hundred listed names, a full thirty had the sharp, black asterisk beside them.
“I thought four, five at the most,” she whispered. “Ten at the very worst. But thirty? How do thirty stars vanish without our knowing?”
Lelbon’s pale face went a little paler. “Look,” he said, pointing at a cluster of names marked with the black asterisks. “They’re mostly stone spirits, or spirits involved with the sea.” He glanced at Emma, who was still hovering. “Have there been reports of earthquakes?”
“Aye,” she said. “Several, mostly down south.”
Lelbon shook his head, muttering under his breath.
“Look here!” Miranda cried, pointing at one name toward the bottom of the list. “It’s the coral reef I sent Eril to check on just this morning.” She looked up at Emma. “Are you sure this one’s missing?”
“Everything you see there is correct as of five minutes ago,” the woman said, insulted.
Miranda mumbled a quick apology and turned back to Lelbon, who was reading the list over again. “Sea spirits, corals, a rain forest, bedrock, the humans,” he muttered, resettling his spectacles on his long nose.
“Is there a connection?” Miranda said.
“There must be,” Lelbon said. “These are all spirits whose loss won’t be felt by the world at large immediately.” His frown deepened, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s like she’s picking off the hidden ones, the stars whose spirits are either isolated or locally clustered. And since human souls can’t dominate each other, we wouldn’t feel the loss of Eli or the Empress.” The paper list fluttered as his hands began to shake. “She’s taking the ones who won’t be noticed.”
“Hold on,” Miranda said. “You’re saying that the Shepherdess is out there grabbing stars, and she’s trying to keep it secret?”
“There’s no one else who could,” Lelbon said. “Not on this scale. But what could she be hiding from? Nothing in this world can stop her from doing whatever she wants.” He scratched the white stubble on his chin. “Maybe she is trying to prevent a wide-scale panic after all? But then, if she cared enough to show that kind of caution, you’d think she’d say something before ripping a star away from its spirits.”
Miranda had no idea. The more she tried to think about what all this meant, the heavier the feeling of being helpless, useless, became. The weight grew and grew until it physically forced her back down into her chair.
“It’s hopeless,” she whispered, shoulders sagging. “Even if every wizard in the world mobilized, thirty stars vanished in one day. How can anyone stop that?” She scrubbed her hands over her face. “You were right. I’m in over my head. I can’t do anything.”
“Now hold on,” Lelbon said. “It’s still possible we’re jumping to conclusions. After all, we don’t know for sure how long this has been going on, or if the Deep Current was first. Maybe this has been building slowly.”
Miranda didn’t believe that for a second, but she had no proof, so she kept it to herself. Instead, she studied the list, paying close attention to the stars who weren’t yet missing. “If she’s trying to keep things quiet, she can’t do it for much longer. Look, she’s already pulled every ocean and stone spirit save the Shaper Mountain itself.”
“You’re right,” Lelbon said, pulling the list toward him. “She’s finished the easy targets.”
Miranda shook her head helplessly. “Whatever goes next, it’ll be big. But there are, what, a hundred and fifty, hundred and sixty stars left to choose from? There’s no way we can cover them all before the next one vanishes. But if we wait until the next one pops, we’d most likely arrive too late to do any good, just like you said.”
Lelbon looked at her sadly. “I didn’t tell you these things to weigh you down, Spiritualist.”
“No,” Miranda said. “You told me the truth.”
“At least you now have the proof to convince the Spiritualists that the world needs them united,” Lelbon said. “If the list isn’t enough, the panic and chaos following whatever spirit goes next certainly will be.”
Miranda blanched. “Forgive me for not jumping for joy at that thought.” Even the idea of sitting back and waiting for a panic to galvanize the Court felt like a betrayal of everything they stood for. “It can’t be all dead ends,” she muttered. “There has to be—”
A sound exploded before she could finish, stabbing into her mind and cutting every other thought free. It started like a shot, an arrow of pain plunging deep into her flesh before widening into a high, keening wail of loss. Miranda gasped and clutched her head, trying in vain to keep her skull steady as the scream vibrated through it.
The sound was cold and sharp, but the terror in it turned Miranda’s bones to jelly. She would have fallen if Lelbon had not been there, catching her arm even as he grabbed his own temple in pain. The sound went on and on, changing and deepening from a keening scream to a roaring torrent of sorrow and abandonment, and Miranda realized that she had to pull herself together. If she waited for the sound to end on its own, she’d be here forever.
Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to stand. Lelbon was still clutching her chair, his wrinkled fingers wrapped around her arm. Across the room, Emma was slumped against the door frame, and behind her, Miranda could see the other women were doubled over as well, clinging to their machines for dear life.
That threw her. The scream going through her certainly belonged to a spirit. How could the spirit deaf be crippled by it as well? But before she could puzzle over the impossibilities, the floor began to shake under her feet.
The windows bucked in their frames, and the walls shook and groaned as the tiny, sleeping spirits within them woke. Woke, and began to scream, their tiny voices joining with the wail that was still hammering through her skull. When the air itself joined them, the atmosphere tightening like the empty space was bracing for impact, Miranda’s blood went cold. She’d seen this before.
“Lelbon,” she whispered through gritted teeth. “Demon panic?”
It had to be. Nothing else could wake this many spirits with such fury. She cursed loudly. This was just what they needed now. But Lelbon was shaking his gray head.
“No,” he whispered hoarsely. “The river.”
He jerked his head at the window, and Miranda’s eyes followed on instinct, her breath catching in her throat. Outside, the Whitefall River that flowed behind the broker’s had stopped. No, she realized, not stopped. The river was pulling upstream, the water sucking in like a breath. It roiled and foamed as it flowed backward, taking the boats with it, and as it churned, the river rose.
Brown, frothy water spilled over the narrow channel, flooding into the street. Screams went up as street carts vanished under the muddy flood. Still lurching under the endless wail, Miranda pulled herself to the window for a better look. She’d barely made it to the wall when the floor under her feet stopped shaking and started to groan.
She looked down in alarm. Brown water was welling up between the floorboards. It rushed up in little gushers, flooding over Miranda’s boots, but even this was wrong. Miranda had dealt with floods before, but she’d never seen water behave like this. The river’s water wasn’t just rising; it was spitting up, almost like the water itself was jumping to escape something.
Outside the window, the river was screwing itself into knots. Whirlpools spun all across its surface, all turning different directions in a terrifying, unnatural spectacle. But worst of a
ll was the scream.
It was still going, still stabbing through Miranda’s mind, growing louder and louder, harsher and harsher. Each swirling eddy and gushing spout added its voice to the rest, flowing faster and faster as the sound rose. The building was screaming as well now, the stone foundation babbling in fear as the water overwhelmed it, and Miranda realized with a start that she had to do something before they were all swept away.
Purpose pulled her out of her panic, and Miranda slammed her eyes shut. The practiced calm fell on her like a stone, and her spirits rallied to her silent call, each going still and ready in its ring. When her mind was quiet, she opened her spirit.
Grief hit her like a wall. Grief and loss and fear and all the things that had been in the initial scream were still there, only now they battered against her naked spirit rather than the shell of her flesh. Miranda stumbled under the onslaught, but she found her ground again and opened her spirit wider, throwing her arms out to take in the full wave of the scream. As it broke over her, she realized with a shock that it wasn’t a single, nonsensical wail, but a word. One word, repeated over and over and over.
“Gone!” it shouted. “Gone! Gone! Gone!”
“Who is gone?” Miranda shouted back, kneeling in the water, which was now up to her calves. “Rellenor!”
At the sound of her name, the river pitched, sending its water even higher.
“Our source, our guide,” the water sobbed. “Our everything, the mother water, the mouth of the world.” The names came on top of each other, tumbling together like flotsam in the flow of the river’s panic. One word, however, was crystal clear. “Ell! Ell!”
Miranda knew that name. She’d seen it on her list just moments ago. Ell, star of the rivers, whose water wound from the plains through the rain forests before finally spilling into south sea in a delta so wide you couldn’t see its end. But Ell’s name had been one of those without the asterisk, one of the stars still present. Miranda cast a frantic glance at the backward-flowing river. It seemed that had changed.