The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  The crew had ceased trying to turn the ship. Some stood on the deck watching, as she did, too transfixed by the impending disaster to move. Most knelt and wept, or prayed. Ian stood behind the ship’s wheel, berating the gods in a loud voice, and alternately threatening them and bargaining with them.

  A Wizards’ Circle. One of the places where the worst and largest of the spells cast during the Wizards’ War had fallen. Most likely a city had once stood where the Peregrine now sailed; a target for the vengeance of power-hungry madmen. Where unfathomable ocean lay, humans had once worked and lived and loved and hoped, in houses built on hills or plains—solid ground, now gone. And gone with it the lives of those who had lived there, and everything they held dear.

  Humans outside the range of total destruction when the spells fell had become the Scarred, and the viable offspring of those poor damned creatures were Scarred still; monsters born of evil not of their own making. Within the hell-charmed circles, land, buildings, and people had vanished. And what had become of them, no one knew. The circles remained potent. And to Kait’s knowledge, no one who ever went into one came out again.

  Mist wraiths blotted out the sky and closed the ship in on all sides as if they had packed it in cotton. Kait heard a series of splashes, followed by voices coming through the fog. The magic-born cloud had thickened to the point where day became night; only if she looked straight up could she find any proof that somewhere the sun still burned and somewhere light still existed. The fog changed the character of sound, making everything seem equally distant, or perhaps equally near. The praying crewmen on deck and the parnissa mourning the souls of men and women not yet dead sounded neither nearer nor more distant than the liquid, gobbling, gurgling cries that almost formed recognizable words. Because they were hidden within the embrace of the fog, Kait’s mind created images of the owners of those horrible voices: corpses long gone to rot, their vocal cords shredded and their bloated lungs almost full of water. The fear she’d felt when she faced Hasmal’s magic paled next to the formless dread that washed over her at that moment.

  The mist began to move onto the ship then; light tendrils dropped down from overhead and crept up onto the deck from below. In the mist-born darkness, these looked solid, like white vines, or the tentacles of the corpse of some sea monster. The gibbering voices grew louder.

  But the mist fingers did not reach out to anyone or touch anyone. As soon as they came within reach of the ship, they lost all form and condensed into mere drops of water.

  Kait watched that happen again and again, and let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. She almost laughed. Something about the ship kept the horrors at bay. Hasmal, perhaps, working some great shielding spell from deep within the heart of the ship. Or . . . it didn’t matter. The ship continued to speed on its course, and the animated mist continued to dissolve before it could attack, and soon—soon—they would have to sail beyond the reaches of the Wizards’ Circle.

  She watched others realize that the magic of the circle was impotent. She listened as the weeping stopped, as the prayers changed from terrified pleading to gratitude, as imprecations to the heavens became nervous laughter at death narrowly averted. A few of the crew members embraced.

  A light breeze caught the sails and they filled slowly, and the ship, already moving quickly, picked up speed. At that, the Peregrine’s crew sent up a jubilant cheer. All they needed to make their joy complete was to see the fog lift and the islands on the other side of the circle come over the horizon.

  Perry the Crow yelled, “So much for the legends,” and danced across the deck.

  Through a growing puddle of water.

  Which rose up to embrace him as he touched it.

  Crawled over his body lightning-fast, covering him with a bubblelike film.

  Inside of the film, he began to dissolve. Liquefy. As he melted, he wept and cried out, his voice increasingly indistinguishable from the voices echoing out of the fog. Several of the crew members tried to help him. Tried to dry him off, to free him of the thing that killed him. As they touched him, the bubble whipped across the bridge of their arms and coated the would-be rescuers.

  They glistened in the darkness—glistened, and screamed. Their anguish and their fear infected everyone, including Kait. Shift surged through her blood, and in spite of every trick of mind control she’d ever learned, her body betrayed her and altered into its Karnee form.

  She looked around for a place to hide, where she could die unseen, away not just from the danger but from the crew. Both the human and the animal parts of her cowered at this horror that she could not understand—mist that hunted, water that devoured its prey. She feared death, and she didn’t want to die as a beast. More than that, though, she didn’t want anyone to see her as a beast, to know that she was as Scarred as any of them, but in ways that made her an outcast wherever she went.

  But then Ian shouted, “Off the deck! Get below, everyone, and close the hatches. We’ll seal the doors with wax. Hurry.” In the stampede that followed, one of the growing puddles of water enveloped the parnissa. Ian lunged for her without thinking.

  Kait was faster. Across the deck in two bounds, she catapulted into Ian’s chest, preventing him from touching the dying, dissolving parnissa. She growled and sank her teeth into his upper arm and dragged him toward the hatch down which the rest of the crew fled.

  “A monster has the captain,” someone screamed, and others took up the cry.

  “Kill it!” Kait heard. “Kill it!” And interspersed with those cries, one voice that yelled, “It’s too late to save him. Just don’t let it in here.”

  One voice cut clearly through the rabble. Rrru-eeth yelled, “She saved the captain! Don’t touch her!”

  Kait dragged Ian to the hatch and tried to shove him in, but hands reached up and grabbed both of them and pulled them down into the gangway.

  Already the crew had gathered the ship’s stores of candles and wax, and when the hatch closed, men and women were already shoving tapers lengthwise along the space between door and doorway, and melting the wax into place with the flames from oil lamps. Kait had no hands, and so got herself out of the way. She found a dark corner and huddled there, miserable, ashamed of what she was and humiliated to have been found out.

  No one paid her any attention—they all were too busy sealing the door and checking belowdecks for leaks.

  She wondered if they would kill her when they finished taking care of their own safety. The humans among the crew would surely want to, and the Scarred were no more likely to want her in their midst—she knew of no people in the world who did not revile skinshifters. The fact that her sort could appear to be one thing but in truth be something entirely different made them universally hated, or so it seemed to Kait.

  The wax in the doorway seemed to work. Nothing came through, no one else screamed or began to dissolve. Silence reigned belowdecks—everyone listened for some sign that more danger came, or that, conversely, the danger had passed and they could return to the deck and their work. The voices of the sea still cried out, their anguish muted by the barriers of wood all around the survivors. Kait heard them without difficulty, and knew that Rrru-eeth did, as well. Rrru-eeth took it upon herself to keep the rest of the crew informed that they were still out there—the sounds were apparently too faint for human ears to pick up over the creaking of the ship and through the barriers of wood.

  Kait fell asleep while still in Karnee form, her head tucked beneath her paws, her hind feet along the tip of her nose, her tail held close to her belly. She woke in human form, aching from the inhuman posture she’d retained even after she Shifted back. Ian sat beside her.

  “I wanted to thank you for saving my life,” he said.

  She nodded dully, in no mood for thanks or kindness. Post-Shift, the depression and the hunger overwhelmed her, and the fear of attack, now that everyone knew what she was, gnawed at her. She wanted to eat, and hide, and sleep. Nothing more. Outside, she could still
hear the lost-soul wailing of the sea; it had taken on more ominous tones, and the ship rocked and heaved from side to side, tossed by the angry water.

  “Are you sick?” he asked.

  “Hungry. One of the symptoms of my . . .” She paused for thought, then said, “Of my curse. I get hungry . . . after.”

  “Go down to the storeroom and get something to eat. Whatever you want, as much as you want. I’ll be here when you get back.” As she nodded and rose, he added, “Be careful. If the water can get in anywhere, it will be down there.”

  “I’ll be careful.” She felt dull, slow, dim-witted. She thought if any of the deadly living water had leaked aboard the Peregrine, she would be too sluggish and stupid to evade it. But hunger overrode any dim sense of self-preservation she could muster; she went past the crew, who stared silently at her, and climbed down the narrow gangway to the deck just above the bilge.

  She knew her way to the storeroom; that was, after all, where she and Hasmal had magically touched the Reborn. When she thought about the Reborn, her mood lifted a little; that in itself seemed like a miracle to her. She considered him and found hope within herself, even in her worst moment.

  She should have realized earlier that she hadn’t seen Hasmal. Only when she found him sprawled on the floor of the storeroom, bled white, did she realize she hadn’t seen him since the fog began to build. He’d been doing magic. His implements lay in disarray on the deck beside him; mirror, empty blood-bowl, tourniquet and bleeding knife, and several objects she hadn’t seen before and thus didn’t recognize. At first she thought he was dead. But she saw the faint rise and fall of his chest, and felt the breath barely moving from his half-open mouth.

  She shook him, but he didn’t respond.

  “Hasmal! You have to wake up! Hasmal!”

  Still he made no sign that he could hear her—no sign that he was anything but a man one breath away from death.

  She closed her eyes in resignation, gathered his things together in his bag, and hid them among the bags of yams. If the ship escaped the Wizards’ Circle, she would retrieve them for him. She didn’t think she would have that opportunity; nevertheless, she was not so sure of their demise that she would let anyone else see what he had so carefully kept hidden. Once his magical tools were out of the way, she rolled him over on his stomach, then worked her way beneath him so that she could line up his shoulders with hers. She thought she heard scuffling as she was trying to get to her feet, but when she held still and kept silent, she could hear nothing but the creak of the ship and the moaning of the ghost-damned sea.

  With Hasmal’s head draped over her right shoulder and his arms pulled like a stole around her neck, she struggled to her feet and, bent double, half-carried, half-dragged him out of the storeroom and to the gangway. She called for help, and several crewmen appeared above her.

  “I found him in the storeroom. He’s breathing, barely,” she told them, “but I don’t know what happened to him. He looks pale to me.”

  Without a word, they lifted Hasmal up and carried him away.

  Kait didn’t try to follow; she saw no need to attempt to offer an explanation for what she’d found. She knew what had happened to him—at least in part—but anything she might say would only further incriminate her and cause problems for him, too. She had no reason to know why he was in the storeroom or what had happened to him. Let the crew come to their own conclusions.

  She returned, instead, to the storeroom, and ate. She gorged on salted pork and dried fruit and beer. Only when she finally felt full—and so sleepy that she wondered if she would be able to make the trip to the deck above—did she pull out the yam sacks to make sure Hasmal’s belongings were safe.

  She moved bags back and forth; at first she’d been sure which one she’d hidden the little bag behind, but her certainty faded as they all began to look alike. She frowned, and began from one end of the yams, working her way methodically to the other. And only when she had moved every single bag did she allow herself to believe the disaster that had befallen her and Hasmal.

  Someone had stolen the bag.

  * * *

  Outside, the wind screamed and rain slashed the ship and the waves tossed it as if it were a child’s toy. Ry stayed below through the worst of the storm; he discovered, to his dismay, that he got seasick—something he had been sure would never happen to him—and that only lying still in his bunk kept him from feeling his death was imminent. From time to time either Karyl or Yanth, both of whom proved to be immune to the ship’s heaving, would come in to check on him and Trev and Jaim and Valard, and tell them how much their course had changed, and offer them food. Ry suspected they offered food out of some mild impulse toward sadism, since at the very word, the four men in the makeshift infirmary turned green. He hoped he would live long enough to repay the favor. Sometimes. And sometimes he just hoped he would die before the storm could get any worse.

  His one consolation was that his connection to Kait had grown stronger during the storm. She was in the middle of troubles of her own, and he supposed he could be grateful that his ship had been forced to sail north to miss the worst of the weather. They would have a huge amount of distance to make up, but they would not end up in the middle of a Wizards’ Circle.

  The wizard who traveled aboard the ship with her—the one whose shields had made sensing her presence and her location such a difficult proposition—had dropped his shields to cast some sort of immense spell. Ry didn’t know where he’d gotten the power for it, but he seemed to have singlehandedly conjured a wind that was blowing Kait’s ship through the Wizards’ Circle toward the safety of the water beyond. Ry had felt the other wizard casting the spell, and he’d been both fascinated and horrified by the amount of personal energy the stranger had put into it. That amount of energy, drawn from his own body, should have killed him, but though the stranger had drained himself to the point that he was near death, Ry could feel that he still lived. He wondered what coin the other wizard had paid for the spell he’d cast.

  Something I can discover later, he decided. Not something to lose sleep over now.

  The wizard’s secrets were secondary to the artifact Kait hid—the artifact she was crossing the ocean to find. That he would have to claim at the same time that he caught up with her; she was his ultimate prize, but he intended to claim her prize, too. He’d paid a tremendous price to come after her—the price of his Family, his honor, his own life, and the lives of his friends, which could never afterward be the same as they had been. His dead brother Cadell whispered in the back of his mind, in the rare moments when Ry dropped his shields, that the artifact she sought was worth any amount of effort and any sort of sacrifice. Ry believed him. Still, he found himself hungering for some proof that he had not chosen a fool’s path, and at that moment, knowing he was declared dead at home, he felt certain that only a massive prize would repay him for all that he had lost.

  Chapter 28

  “We’ve all discussed this, Cap’n, and we want something done about her.” Rrru-eeth stood at the head of the small cluster of crewmen, all of whom stared at Ian Draclas with an intensity he found disconcerting. Gone was the mild, diffident young Scarred woman he’d known for so long, replaced by someone who resembled a frightened animal. “We don’t have to have one of her kind aboard, and we won’t.”

  He understood the fear. In the moment that Kait had changed, he’d felt it himself. The gods had not intended skinshifters to live in the midst of men, or they would not have made the creatures so terrifying. He thought about the nights she’d slept beside him, and tried to imagine waking to find that mad-eyed, long-fanged beast at his throat instead of the woman he found so compelling. His skin crawled. Nevertheless, he did not intend to give in to the demands of the crew; they wanted him to let them unseal the door and shove Kait out on the deck to act as an offering to whatever demons inhabited the Wizards’ Circle.

  “She saved my life,” he said. He didn’t bother to mention that she’d caught hi
s imagination or that just seeing her set his pulse racing; that wouldn’t help his cause, which was keeping her on the ship.

  “And when she turns into that monster again and eats one of the crew, will you remind us of that again?” Rrru-eeth had no tolerance for anyone who fell outside of her definition of normal. He’d known this for years, but her prejudices had never bothered him. Now they became a problem, because the crew liked her and she would stir them up if she didn’t get what she wanted.

  He said, “I’d think you would consider a woman who carries a death sentence on her head because of an accident of birth an ally, not an enemy.”

  Rrru-eeth curled her lip in a disdainful snarl. “You think you can compare us because neither of us would be welcome in Ibera? You cannot. I am exactly what everyone sees—no more and no less. I have never masqueraded as a human for the benefits of privilege and Family that doing so could give me. She is a liar, a blood-hungry monster who moved among us pretending to be a friend. And worse, she is in collusion with Hasmal.”

  “You don’t like Hasmal, either?”

  “He’s a wizard.”

  Ian looked at her to see if she was serious; then he burst out laughing. “A wizard? He’s a competent enough shipwright, and evidently he used to be a shopkeeper of some sort. But a wizard?” He laughed again, but Rrru-eeth didn’t respond to his merriment with a smile of her own. Instead she shoved a cloth bag at him.

  He took it and studied it. It was made of fine leather, carefully stitched; inside it were a silver-lined wooden bowl, a mirror, a variety of powders in packets, all labeled in a language and script he didn’t recognize, a bloodletting kit, and other oddities. And a book. The Secret Texts of Vincalis. He’d never heard of the book, and didn’t know what to make of the bag and its contents.