Path of Blood

by Diana Pharaoh Francis

  He’d been infected then. Reisil sighed and followed the others to the edge of overlook. Every memory she had of Sodur was tainted. Had he ever really been a friend? Or had it all been the urgings of the growing nokula influence on his mind?

  ~He was Sodur. He was our friend, Saljane said, dipping her head and nipping Reisil’s fingers in her beak.

  Was.

  ~It would be nice to think so.

  And then she forgot about Sodur.

  She gazed down at Mysane Kosk, peering between Juhrnus and Soka. “By the Lady,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Pretty as an ice storm,” Nurema said, leaning on her walking stick. “ ’Cept more deadly. And hungry. It’s going to swallow up the valley before long.”

  The diamond mist drifted on unseen currents, like a deep-bedded river. It was constantly in motion, lifting and falling. Not like a river, Reisil thought, unease gripping her. The motion was more like breathing, as if the mist below were merely the skin of a living thing—a dreadful beast lying in wait.

  The sun glittered on the crystalline shapes that surrounded the mist in a sparkling bezel. The leading edge of a storm. Those twisted, sculpted, tortured figures hinted at what had become of Mysane Kosk, gulped down by that slothful beast.

  “I didn’t realize how big it was,” Reisil murmured, her hands clammy. She knelt, trying to see more clearly.

  “It’s been growing. When I was first here, it hadn’t reached but halfway to that stand of trees, and look now; it’s almost swallowed them entirely.”

  Reisil followed Juhrnus’s pointing finger to a stand of aspen along the far edge of the valley.

  “How long before . . . ?” She waved at the stockades.

  “At the rate the mist is growing now?” Juhrnus shrugged. “Metyein figures we have a year at most before we lose Fox. But it’s been expanding faster than it was. I figure it’s only going to go faster, so late spring is more likely. Right around the same time we expect the Regent. It’ll be a grand party. We’ll have cake and ale.”

  Reisil’s lips quivered with the beginnings of a smile at Juhrnus’s gallows humor. She swiped her hand over her mouth, pinching her lips in a hard grip. By spring the world would end or she’d save it. And she still didn’t have the slightest idea how.

  Maybe doing what she’d come up here to do would help. She sat, resting her elbows on her knees. Taking a breath, she blinked into spellsight.

  She flinched and gasped.

  “What is it? What do you see?” The others bent over her, searching.

  “Magic.”

  Solid waves piled up in rainbow colors. They mounded up as if held by a dam. Then the layers slowly dissolved, melting like wax into pools, swirling and running through the realm of Mysane Kosk in slow, spreading rivers. The colors themselves never mixed, but pooled inside one another and then stretched in skeins, twisting and curling, knotting and stitching together, creating intricate patterns of lace and filigree.

  Within this tapestry of raw magic, sparks flashed. They grouped, moving in unison, separating and reforming in elaborate patterns. They reminded Reisil of flocks of starlings . . . or schools of fish.

  In the middle of it all, directly over where the city had stood, swirled a sluggish hurricane. Here the colors smudged into a muddy red. It turned, turbid and slow, like an enormous screw. Even from the overlook, Reisil could feel its power. Its pull. Its wrongness.

  She concentrated, narrowing her gaze. Shock turned the marrow of her bones to ice. She bent closer, hardly believing. But yes . . .

  The rocks beneath her shifted and she wrenched forward into thin air. Saljane screeched and leaped into the air even as hands caught Reisil by the shoulders, dragging her back to safety. Reisil clutched her stomach, breathing hard, ignoring the questions that peppered her. She looked at Baku, who watched her with his half-lidded, knowing eyes.

  “You see them too? The rinda?”

  He whuffed and she felt a tickle in her mind that might have been his attempt at a reply. She swore and scrabbled over to him, setting a hand against his hide.

  ~Well?

  ~The spell words? Of course.

  Reisil gritted her teeth. Baku had a right to his antagonism, she reminded herself. No matter how infuriating his bare-bones, and uncooperative answers were.

  ~All of them. Can you see all of them? Even . . . the wrong ones?

  ~Wrong ones?

  ~Yes!

  Baku lifted himself up, his eyes wide-open now. Reisil followed him as he paced to the edge of the cliff.

  ~I see chains of letters and words. They are like . . . bricks and water. He sounded baffled. What should they be that they aren’t?

  Reisil settled next to him so that her thigh touched his extended foreleg. Saljane flapped down from the tree branch where she’d perched when Reisil had nearly fallen over the cliff. The heavy weight and firm grip on Reisil’s shoulder were welcome.

  Reisil opened her mind to Baku, picturing the rinda from the book she’d borrowed from Kvepi Debess. Then she pictured the various spells she’d encountered in her sojourn in the wizards’ stronghold.

  ~Do you see? The letters, the words? See how they are so rounded and fluid, like fancy script? Now look down there at Mysane Kosk. See how some of the rinda are different?

  They seemed sharp-edged and oddly shaped. They had abrupt lines, rather than the scrolling fluidity she was used to. Some were so small that they seemed no bigger than rosemary seeds. Others were larger, nearly readable. She could see what Baku meant in calling them bricks and water. Every shape below was formed from rinda. The spell-chains were both skeleton and flesh to even the nokulas.

  Without warning, Baku swept inside Reisil’s mind and dragged her into his. Reisil clutched at him for balance, her stomach twisting at the sudden disorientation. She tasted acid and gooseberries on the back of her tongue and swallowed hard. She felt him pause, as if waiting for her remonstrance. Not far under the surface seethed a boiling pool of resentment and rage. The slightest challenge from Reisil would trigger a volcano. Instead she waited patiently for Baku to show her what he wanted her to see. At last he gave her a gentle mental push. Suddenly she was looking out at Mysane Kosk from his eyes. She gasped and strained forward.

  Baku’s eyesight was much sharper than her own, and he had natural spellsight. It was almost as if she hung a few feet above the crystal-floss landscape of Mysane Kosk. She could see the nokulas, could see the rinda that shaped their flesh and bone, that shaped everything inside this magically constructed land. Inside that ugly, slow-turning hurricane, she could see the spell-chains twisting and breaking. They whirled and floated and fit together in random patterns. Here and there, a knotted tangle fell out of the twisting, sucking mass, as if too heavy to remain inside any longer.

  “Blessed Lady,” Reisil breathed, feeling a thrill of excitement. She was beginning to understand at last. . . .

  “What? What is it?” Nurema demanded, grasping her wrist in a wiry hold.

  Reisil closed her eyes, slowly withdrawing from Baku’s mind.

  ~Thank you.

  ~You’re welcome.

  His tone was testy and accompanied by a shove that sent her precipitously into her own head. Reisil smiled, patting his neck.

  ~You have helped me a great deal. I may have learned the key to figuring out what to do.

  Baku snorted and turned his head. But he did not draw away.

  “Well? You gonna moon all day or tell us what’s going on?”

  Reisil opened her eyes and picked up a twig. She brushed a flat, clear space on the damp ground with her hand and carefully scratched a figure in the dirt. It was angular and with sharp points and protruding stubs. It looked nothing like any of the rinda she’d learned from the wizards. But it was rinda; Reisil was sure of it. And she had a feeling Nurema would recognize it.

  “Do you know what this is? Have you seen it before?”

  The poleaxed expression on Nurema’s face was worth gold.


  “It is the ancient language of nahuallis,” Nurema said slowly. “It is one of their most closely guarded secrets.”

  “Do you know what it means?”

  Nurema shook her head. “Only those who had passed the highest trials were taught the language. I had not yet progressed so far. How can you know this?”

  Reisil jerked her chin at the edge of the cliff. “They’re called rinda. The language of spells. Only this”—she pointed to the design in the dirt—“this is different from the rinda that I learned from the wizards. Everything in Mysane Kosk is constructed from a combination of the two rindas. Somehow spells from Cemanahuatl have fused with the spell the wizards cast here.

  “Which means,” she said slowly, “that trying to get to Cemanahuatl is the right step to make after all.”

  “Didn’t I say so? Well, then, you’ve seen all there is to see. Let’s go fix them wards,” Nurema said.

  Reisil rolled her eyes as the other woman marched off, stabbing the ground with her walking stick.

  “I didn’t say that was a good idea,” she muttered, clambering to her feet and dusting herself off.

  Nurema halted, swinging around, her smile stinging. “My gift is t’ see the future. Course yer goin’ to Cemanahuatl. And ye’ll fix the wards. Should’ve saved yer arguments and just listened.” She turned and started down the path. Juhrnus grinned at Reisil and followed after.

  Reisil resisted the urge to stick her tongue out. She sighed, leaning into Yohuac, who slid an arm around her waist.

  “If she can see the future, why doesn’t she just tell me how to fix this mess?”

  Yohuac tightened his arm and smiled at Saljane, who chirped at him. “She’s nahualli. But she wishes the safety of Kodu Riik and Cemanahuatl. She is doing all she can to help. She would not withold information that would help you.”

  “I’d like to believe that,” Reisil said darkly. “But she could have told me a lot more, and sooner.” Sodur had kept secrets and manipulated her “for her own good.” For the sake of Kodu Riik. He’d caused more harm than not. Nurema might very well be doing the same.

  “Perhaps.”

  “But she’s right. I guess we go to Cemanahuatl. I hope the rest of the nahuallis are more eager to talk to me.”

  Yohuac smiled grimly. “Don’t wager on it.”

  Chapter 15

  Evening had fallen on Honor after a busy, but blessedly uneventful day. Reisil and Nurema had reestablished the wards around each stockade, anchoring them to swollen flows of magic from Mysane Kosk. The people of Honor had worked hard to move the hospital to Hawk, build funeral pyres for the dead, clear the fields of arrows and debris, and make repairs to Raven. And then they went about the regular business of preparing for war.

  Much against protest, Reisil had visited the Wolf captain.

  “If I see him, I can confirm he’s got the plague,” she declared.

  “We’ll know soon enough. You get too close, you might end up with it,” Kebonsat argued flatly. “We can’t afford to lose you.” He looked gray and sort of deflated, as if something had gone out of him. His eyes were sunken and smudged, and a hard, glittery desperation swam in the dark depths.

  Reisil disliked seeing him in pain, but couldn’t scrape up much sympathy for his predicament. Much as she agreed that Emelovi’s life in Koduteel under her brother’s thumb would probably have been hideous, Reisil couldn’t help feeling disgusted with Kebonsat. Emelovi was no child. She knew what staying in Koduteel would mean, what it would cost her. Stupid, maybe. But her choice to make. Except Kebonsat had decided she was wrong—wrong enough that he felt compelled to trick her. And now he was learning the cost of his duplicity. It was steeper than he imagined.

  Why was it that perfectly honorable men chose lies when they couldn’t have their own way? First Sodur, and now Kebonsat. But not this time. Not today. This was a choice Reisil had made and was determined to accomplish.

  “Are you going to get out of my way?” she asked, hands on her hips, her brows lifted.

  For a moment she thought that Juhrnus, Kebonsat, and Soka, who formed a gate across the doorway, were going to wrestle her into submission. But then Juhrnus stepped aside, his expression stoic. Soka followed suit.

  “As we are to take a journey together, I’d rather you didn’t catch the plague,” he said sardonically.

  Reisil grinned. “I will do my best to oblige.”

  “Hmph,” was Soka’s only reply.

  She cocked her head at Kebonsat, who remained boulderlike in the doorway. At last he moved aside, his teeth gritting audibly.

  “This is stupid. There’s no point to it,” he said.

  “The point is that we will be certain.”

  “What difference will it make if we know now or in a week? We’ve quarantined him. Knowing for sure won’t change anything.”

  “If he’s got it, then I will check everyone I can before I leave tomorrow. We may be able to cut off the head of the snake and control the outbreak before it’s too far out of hand.”

  “It’s a waste of your strength,” Kebonsat argued. “You need to save all you’ve got for this journey. If you fail, we’ll all die anyway.”

  Reisil bit her tongue. She drew a breath and let it out slowly, counting to ten. “Thank you, but I believe that I can manage well enough,” she said in a carefully bland tone. But Kebonsat felt the point nonetheless. He flushed. He stepped aside jerkily.

  “As you see fit.”

  “Exactly so,” Reisil said tartly as she walked out the door. He was right. But so was she, and as an ahalad-kaaslane, she couldn’t walk away from Honor without trying to do something about the plague. If it was here.

  The captain from Wolf was infected. He was still in the innocuous first stage, with a low fever, dysintery, body pain, and nausea. It would not be long before his fever increased to blistering and any light would cause him extraordinary pain. He would be too dizzy to stand. Within a few days after that, the horrors would begin. First the rash and jaundice, then bleeding from every orifice, including his gums and fingernails. After that . . . his fingers and toes would begin to rot from the inside out. It would travel up the arms and legs, killing him inch by inch as his blood pathways deteriorated.

  “So I’m a goner, am I?” the captain asked when Reisil sat back, pulling her hands from his chest.

  She nodded her head wearily.

  “Demon-blighted Pease was right. That’s the real bite of it.”

  Reisil smiled with effort. He had his pride and didn’t want her to see his struggle with the bleak fear sweeping him. Not of death. He was a soldier, and Reisil had enough experience with such men to know that death was not the horror to them that it was to most people. But such a death. That was the dragon he was fighting.

  She spread her hands and turned them over. She tried to imagine them swollen and black, blistered with yellow, seeping pustules—Reisil shuddered, crossing her arms and tucking her hands beneath them. Her eyes burned with tears of anger and frustration. She refused to let them fall.

  “I’ve heard some have survived,” the captain said, his thick fingers tightening around his cup of kohv.

  Reisil looked at him squarely, not wanting to offer him false hope. “There have been a few, here and there. A very few. The plague made them blind. That happens in the second stage, when light becomes so very painful. But when it goes past that into the third stage . . . you will certainly die.”

  “That be a blessing, to my thinkin’,” he said.

  “I believe you are right.”

  With nothing else to do and no comfort to offer, Reisil left him. A tark was looking after him as well as or better than she could have.

  She brought the news back to the others as they settled in to eat supper. It was a sober group, with Emelovi seething quietly at one end of the table, and Kebonsat as far away as possible at the other end. Between sat Metyein and Soka, with Reisil perched opposite of Emelovi, Nurema and Juhrnus flanking her.

  Silenc
e drowned the room. All that could be heard was the scrape of knives, the clunk of mugs returning to the table, and the merry crackle of the fire. At last Metyein pushed back his trencher.

  “All right. I still don’t like it. Reisiltark just arrives, and in the nick of time, I might add, and already she’s leaving. We have two unfinished stockades, a fifth of the crops were destroyed in the battle, and we will be once again without means to fend off the nokulas when they attack.”

  “The nokulas wouldn’t have attacked at all if it hadn’t been for me,” Reisil pointed out for the twentieth time. “And I doubt you’ll have trouble from the wizards. The nokulas aren’t going to let them come stealing power from Mysane Kosk. Sodur was in my mind. He’s seen what the wizards do to the nokulas. They’re not going to stand more of that.”

  Truth be told, the night before, when Nurema had first declared that Reisil would have to leave Honor immediately and return with Yohuac to Cemanahuatl, Reisil had been astounded.

  “Go to Cemanahuatl? Why? How? Now?” The words burst from her lips in stuttering staccato.

  “You’ve got no choice. I’ve seen it.”

  There was no arguing with a foretelling. Nurema had proven herself and her abilities, and she’d never been one to lie or muddle the truth for her own ends. Reisil believed her. And after seeing the mix of nahualli rinda in the spells today, she was more than convinced.

  The others had been harder to win over, but at last they’d agreed, grudgingly. Not that they had any choice. No more than Reisil.

  At that thought, Reisil found herself studying Emelovi across the table. The other woman was eating, her movements jerky and graceless. She clearly was having to force the food down, keeping herself from throwing it back up again by will alone.