The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  Ry winced. Perhaps he was the sort to go mad; he remembered nothing of the incident, but he would not disbelieve Yanth.

  “What happened?”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Going up the stairs in Galweigh House. Some sort of explosion, and a terrible smell. Pain. Darkness. Then nothing.”

  Yanth sighed and settled himself back into the chair. “There was no explosion in Galweigh House. No smell, no noise. You were running ahead of us and suddenly you dropped to the floor and held your head. Your eyes were open, but you said nothing to us, and no matter what we did, you would give us no sign that you heard. We tried everything we could think of to wake you, but at last we realized nothing we knew to do would help, so we carried you down the stairs again. We left your father’s man in charge with explicit instructions that if a girl like the one we were looking for showed up, he was to save her for you. He said he would. His men were already killing the nonessentials by then and dragging out the bodies to be burned, but he said he would watch for such a girl, and that he would not permit her to be killed. We tried to take you home for help . . . but . . .” Here his face clouded, and he fell silent.

  “But what?”

  Yanth said, “I wanted one of your Family’s physicks to see you, but none were available. Something terrible happened to your Family.”

  Something inside of Ry knotted, and he swallowed. “What sort of terrible thing?”

  “The physicks don’t know. One of your younger cousins went to the White Hall. He told the physicks that something had drawn him there. He found many of your relatives . . . dead . . . and many more . . . ah . . . changed, the physick told me, but he would not tell me how.”

  “My parents?”

  Yanth seemed to shrink. “Your mother is badly injured, though she lives. Your . . .” He sighed deeply, and said, “I’m sorry, Ry. Your father is dead.”

  Ry paled. His father had led the Wolves, and through them the entire Sabir Family. If his father was truly dead, then leadership of the Family came open. And the new leader would be chosen by maneuvering among the strongest of those who survived. The maneuvering would likely kill as many as the disaster had, though in cleverer ways. “How many others are dead?” he asked. “And who still lives?”

  “I don’t know. The physick I spoke to spared me only the time he needed to look at you and tell me he could do nothing for you, and that further he had others in desperate need of his services. I found out about your parents and the little I did hear while he checked your breathing and your heart, and then he told me to take you away from the House and hide you someplace safe, because he didn’t know what had happened to your relatives, but he could not promise that it would not happen again. And until any of the survivors of the White Hall could wake up and talk, he told me to assume the worst.”

  “Was it some trick of the Galweighs?” Ry mused, but of course it had been some trick of the Galweighs. They had discovered the Sabirs’ true plan for their destruction and had countered it.

  No, that wouldn’t answer it. If the Galweighs were to blame, their corpses wouldn’t be burning in piles on the grounds of Galweigh House. The Dokteeraks? No again. They had no Wolves among them—the Sabirs and the Galweighs alone among the Five Families knew the old magics, or dared to use them. Yanth hadn’t said Ry’s relatives had been attacked by magic, but the physick would never have dared admit that to someone who wasn’t even Family, much less a Wolf. He had told Yanth those who survived the attack had been changed, though—to Ry, who had seen the Scars wrought by spell rebound, nothing more needed to be said. And nothing but magic could have destroyed his father and injured his mother in the same attack. Nothing else—he was sure of that.

  Not the Galweighs. Not the Dokteeraks. He couldn’t entirely rule out a play from the inside—he would have no trouble believing, for example, that his cousin Andrew and his second cousins Crispin and Anwyn would kill off whatever relatives they could in order to take over leadership of the Family among themselves. The only problem with that theory was that neither they nor any other faction that he was aware of currently held a majority among the Wolves. No one within the Family would be able to muster the sort of magical support it would take to subvert the energy of a spell against the other Wolves in the Family—and to attempt a takeover without a majority would be suicide. Crispin, Anwyn, and Andrew weren’t suicidal. That he was sure of.

  So the destruction had come from another player. A powerful player. Who, though? And how? And what did this other player hope to gain?

  * * *

  They’re dead, Kait. They’re all dead, and you will be, too, unless you get away from this place.

  Stifling air and the stink of alcohol. A soft, heavy weight that covered her entirely and pushed her to the ground. Her head pounded, and her eyes refused to work. The voice inside her head would not be still; she wanted to return to the comfort of darkness, but some woman she did not know insisted on talking to her.

  They’re all dead—the Sabirs are burning their bodies now. You could smell the fires if you got up.

  She blinked, but what she saw with her eyes open remained the same as what she saw with them closed—exactly nothing. The perfect blackness of blindness swallowed her. Something bad had happened. Something had taken her out of the security of the world she had known; something had changed the rules of the world as she understood it; something dangerous had opened a door and stepped through it.

  She recalled pain, and a sweet, rotting odor. She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her throbbing skull, and tried to recall as much as she could of those last moments. The feeling of growing evil that had been so strong at the Dokteerak party, which had worsened in the following days, had abruptly overwhelmed her in the air above the ground; and for just an instant she had felt the elation of a beast caged that had at last broken free of its bars; and then she had, impossibly, smelled some sickeningly sweet smell—and what had it been? The name eluded her, but she would recognize it again if she ran across it. And then an insane babble exploded in her skull, as if a thousand madmen began shouting all at once, each trying to get her attention, and the pain of that bedlam drove her into the dark escape of unconsciousness. And now?

  Airible fuel, she realized. The alcohol smell was airible fuel. She was still on the airible, but no longer in the passenger part of the gondola; instead she lay in the space just to the fore of the fuel chambers, tucked under folds of emergency cloth kept on hand for en route repairs on the airible’s outer skin.

  Someone had hidden her. Had the ship landed safely, Dùghall would have carried her to a physick—or taken care of her himself, knowing what he knew. Instead, she had been carefully placed in concealment in a part of the ship that was easy to reach from the passenger section, but intentionally difficult to find. Further, she’d been hidden within that carefully chosen hiding place, which implied that whoever hid her expected hostile others to perform more than a cursory search.

  Which they did, the unidentified woman said. She spoke inside of Kait’s head, which made her either a sign that Kait had gone mad, or a sign that the world had. Kait, who didn’t consider herself prone to the weaknesses embraced by many of the women of her class, preferred to assume the latter.

  For the time being, she would accept the presence of the stranger in her head. She offered information, and Kait needed information. Once Kait reached safety, she would question the other woman’s presence, and her identity, but at that moment, simple curiosity was a luxury that Kait couldn’t afford.

  “So they searched the ship for me,” she whispered.

  For anyone who was left. They got the other three.

  “And who are they?”

  You already know that.

  Yes, she did. “When you woke me up, you said the Sabirs.”

  Yes.

  That made sense. They were the only Family who would dare attack the Galweighs on their own ground; they were the only ones so evil or so desperate to expand
their power that they would take such a risk. Apparently they’d succeeded.

  So hostile forces held the airible. Kait ran her left hand along her thigh and felt the comforting shape of the sword pommel. Armed in human form, she might successfully protect herself without the dangerous exposure of Shift. She had at least some hope of vengeance. She listened, and was rewarded with muffled night sounds and distant but unintelligible voices, and the creak of the airible as it tugged against the mooring ropes.

  She squirmed out to the edge of the bale and breathed slowly. The stink of the fuel got worse, but the air instantly became cooler; a more than even trade. She heard breathing just above the trapdoor that led into her hiding place—rapid panting interrupted by soft whuffles. “Who’s out there?” she whispered, and received a low whine and a moment of soft scratching at the trapdoor in response.

  A friend of yours, the woman said. He jumped into the airible when everyone else was gone, and has been lying on the door ever since.

  Kait’s skin crawled. “Gashta?”

  The whining became louder, the pawing at the door more insistent.

  The old friend was a wolf, a sometimes-comrade of the hills with whom she had run deer and peccaries when in her Karnee form. She had saved his life once, and he rewarded her with a loyalty she didn’t think existed in humans. He was, however, no pet, but a fully wild wolf who ran the mountaintops through and around Calimekka, and she could not understand how he came to be aboard the airible. Either the ship had come down somewhere outside the walls surrounding Galweigh House, or the walls themselves had been breached and something had drawn him inside.

  Out from under the piles of cloth, her eyes had adjusted to the dim light. She’d been unconscious for a long time. Night had fallen; otherwise, light-prisms that ran all along the top of the work areas of the gondola would have brought in daylight.

  What should she do? Attack whoever she found outside the airible and kill as many as she could before she died? Try to escape to bring help? Or to raise an army to attempt retaking the House? Or should she surrender and die without a fight?

  “‘Before action, discern the situation,’” she murmured. Some of Nas Madible’s wisdom—and unlike her uncle Dùghall’s beloved Vincalis, the Family as a whole held Madible’s works in high regard. Her tutors ground him into her skull from the moment she began diplomatic training.

  Discern the situation. The stranger said the wolf was the only one except for Kait aboard the airible. So she should be safe for the moment. She brushed her fingertips lightly over the hilt of her sword, seeking reassurance, then pushed up on the trapdoor. Gashta resisted only for an instant, then moved off. She slid the trapdoor out of her way, vaulted into the passenger compartment, and pushed the door back into place. While she crouched beside it, Gashta nuzzled her, licked her face, and whined again.

  The stranger had been right. No one occupied the compartment. Now, though, she could hear more clearly the voices on the ground outside. And she could smell something that the fuel stink had completely covered: the rich, roasting-pork scent of burning flesh. Human flesh. She’d witnessed the burning of a Scarred spy in Calimekka’s Punishment Square as part of her diplomatic training. What she smelled then, she smelled again.

  They’re all dead, the stranger had said. She’d been right about everything else so far. The Sabirs were out there burning the dead bodies of her relatives. So Kait had to entertain the possibility that she was the last surviving member of her Family.

  No. She couldn’t think that. Despair was too close, and her chances of survival slim enough even without it. They’re not all dead, she told herself. If I act well, and quickly, I’ll save some of them.

  Before action, discern the situation.

  She stood, and Gashta growled.

  “Hush,” she whispered, and drew her sword. First she had to find out where she was.

  She crept to the airible’s windows and looked out. And her heart nearly broke. The airible was moored on the landing field of Galweigh House, and even from where she watched, she could see that the great gate stood open—that gate which had, in her memory, never stood open for more than the time needed to permit passage of any approved entrant. She could see the gate clearly in the dancing light of the flames from a massive pyre that burned beside it, and she could see, too, the pyre. And the black silhouettes of the bodies that fueled it. And outside the edge of the flames, soldiers. Sabir soldiers, with the twin trees of the Sabir crest clearly outlined on their cloaks.

  Galweigh House had fallen.

  She swallowed the tears that came, and she and the wolf crept out of the airible and down onto the airible field. She took her sword and killed the two men who guarded the field—silently, without either warning or remorse. The House lay under heavy guard, and she knew that no matter how swift or fierce she was, she would not be able to rescue any survivors alone. She could choose to die with them, or she could find help.

  Goft lay only twenty leagues to the north and east, and the city of Maracada held one of the Lesser Houses of the Galweighs, Cherian House. The Family in Cherian House traded, and held tremendous riches, and owned an armada of ships and men by the hundreds who would be strong and fierce and able to fight for what the Family had lost. She had to reach them.

  You haven’t much time, the stranger said.

  Kait already knew that.

  The airible was the way to reach Goft, of course, but without a crew of men to cast off the mooring ropes smoothly, she had a problem. She had to get off the ground and obtain some height before the Sabirs noticed her. She lay in the dew-damp grass beside the wolf, watching the men who moved back and forth in front of the flames tending the fire. She studied the round lines of the airible as it tugged against the mooring ropes in the breeze. She tested the wind. She frowned. Too much of it to loosen the ropes one at a time; if she did, the airible would swing around and face into the breeze, or perhaps even unbalance and hang tail-up—and she would be discovered.

  There was a way, of course. The Galweighs and their researchers and implementers held both the secret of airible construction and the secret of the great engines that powered them. According to her father, a single Ancient manuscript, which survived through the whole of the Thousand Years of Darkness, came to rest at last in the Family’s hands—full of secrets, that manuscript, many of which it still kept locked within cryptic comments and diagrams for machinery whose uses no one in these latter days could discern. But the House artisans and inventors, moved to a safe, hidden location, had pried out the facts about powered flight one by one, and had at last succeeded in giving the Galweighs wings. And for the last ten years, the Galweighs had guarded those secrets jealously. Should any airible fall into enemy hands, the pilot knew to release a hidden lever that would break off all the mooring ropes simultaneously at the envelope and cast the ship loose. It would still be flyable, though not landable—the pilot would have to survive a crash once he found a place away from the enemy to bring the ship down—but keeping airibles out of enemy hands meant more than retrieving a single airship.

  Kait knew where that lever was; she had some experience flying the ship; she could get herself to Goft. Getting safely to ground once there held its own risks, but she would deal with them when she got that far.

  She ran her fingers along the wolf’s hackles, wondering why he’d sought her out, and how he’d found her. She could not take him with her, but she feared to leave him within reach of the Sabirs. When she began to creep back to the airible, though, he solved her dilemma for her; he licked her nose once, and bit very gently on her ear. Then he growled, rose, and trotted along the wall toward the gate. She watched him for just an instant and realized other wolves waited at the gate for him.

  She wondered if she would ever see him again. Then she crawled along the ground to the gangway of the airible, launched herself up and into it as if she were wolf herself, and quickly slid her hand under the polished wood of the control console to the hidden lever. She
jerked the lever, heard for a fraction of an instant the whine of cables slipping, and felt the jolt as the airible leaped upward in an unpowered, awkward lift—and then the wolves began to howl.

  Breezes that blew along the clifftop buffeted the airible; Kait feared that she would strike the trees or the wall before she could rise above them, so swiftly did the airible move across the ground. Miraculously, though she felt the gondola scrape along the top of the wall while the airible shuddered, she lifted free, and floated upward into the blackness of the night.

  Below her the city blinked and shimmered with the soft illumination of countless thousands of candles glowing forth from countless thousands of windows; with the brighter fires in the lamps set by the lamplighters each night as twilight fell; with the sharper glow of the gas flames in the foundries where, even after dark, men toiled and sweated; and . . . with the stark bonfire that sent its greasy coils from the grounds of Galweigh House down into the already smoke-scented city below, taking with it much of her Family.

  But not all. Not all. She would not let herself believe the voice of the stranger in her head, the voice that said All gone. All gone. She would make the Sabirs pay for the life of each loved one they took from her. She swore by all her gods that she would destroy them, or die in the attempt.

  Chapter 16

  Dùghall permitted himself the smallest of smiles when the wolves began to howl. He tightened his fist over the cut in his palm; the tiny magical spell that had drawn them to the fire hadn’t been as difficult or cost as much as he had anticipated. His call had been general—to any creature that would slip within the walls of Galweigh House and watch Kait until she got safely away, then signal her escape. He’d expected a bird—birds responded well to him. But the wolves answered first, and seemed eager to come, as if they were familiar with the House and its confines . . . or with Kait. He didn’t let himself worry about the strangeness of that. The night was full of magic, even yet, and as a Falcon he knew that all forms of life responded in their own way to it, and for their own reasons—but that those summoned from good responded with good. They wouldn’t hurt her.