The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  Ry nodded solemnly. “I won’t.” His accent was pure hillslogger.

  The guard said, “You think you won’t. But you’ll do something equally stupid, I’ll bet you, and lose your ship fare—and then you’ll be stranded here like the thousand other yokels who thought they knew what cities were about.”

  He studied Ian’s papers next. After an equally quick glance, he shrugged. “You’ve made it to the Territories and back already, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then maybe you know a bit about the city. Keep them smart, would you?” He returned his attention to Ry. This time the glance was intent, not cursory.

  Kait felt a chill crawl down her spine.

  Ry shrugged.

  The guard finally said, “You remind me of the last hillslogger I warned to stay out of trouble. He ended up back at the guardstation the same gods’-damned night, weeping about his lost life savings and wondering how he was ever going to reach his claim in the Territories.” The guard gave a disgusted snort and stepped down from the carriage. “As if—in this city—we could find the trickster who gulled him out of his gold and get the whoreson to give it back.” He slammed the carriage door and waved up to the driver. “Move it. Next!”

  When they were through, Ry sagged against Kait’s side.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I knew him,” Ry said. “He was one of the gate guards at Sabir House before I came after you. His name is . . . damnall. What is it. Lerri? Herri? No, but that’s close. Guerri? That’s it. Guerri. What’s worse, he knows me, too. He hasn’t connected my face with who I am yet, but he will.”

  Ian grimaced. “We should have killed him, then.”

  Ry shook his head. “No. We wouldn’t have made it past the checkpoint. We may have time to lose ourselves at the harbor. We’d better get new papers, though.”

  Kait looked from Ry to Ian. “He knew who you were, Ry,” she said. “He knew. I saw an instant of surprise in his eyes when first he looked at you. I didn’t know what to make of it, and when he didn’t say anything, I thought perhaps I’d imagined it.”

  “Nonsense,” Ian said. “If he’d recognized Ry, he would have sounded the alarm. He could have been a wealthy man for turning him in—a fact I know he knows. The decree of Ry’s barzanne is posted in all the guardhouses, in the dorms, and on the public posts.”

  Kait looked at Ry. “I’m sure he knew you,” she insisted.

  Ry leaned his head against the wooden headrest and closed his eyes. “I was good to him when he worked at the gate,” he said thoughtfully. “Nothing spectacular . . . but I remembered his name, and I gave him small gifts for Haledan’s Festival and the Feast of the Thousand Holies.”

  Ian raised an eyebrow. “Considering what the rest of our Family is like, you must have seemed a veritable saint to him.”

  “The Sabirs earned their bad reputation for their dealings with other Families,” Ry said stiffly. “They weren’t cruel to those who served them.”

  Ian said, “It was my Family, too, brother. Remember? I spent my first years in that House, and saw plenty of cruelty aimed at those who served. My mother was one of those who served.”

  Ry shrugged. “Perhaps you’re right. In any case, he didn’t turn us in, and if Kait’s right and he did recognize me, I don’t think he will turn us in.”

  “I hope she’s right. He knows the names we’re traveling under, our faces, our cover story, and our general destination. If he sends the Sabir guards after us in the next few days, they won’t have any trouble tracking us down.”

  Chapter 4

  Hasmal’s last words still rang in his own mind like the pure tones of a meditation bell. Dùghall, hear me. I want more time. I am not done here.

  He was dead, he knew—and he could feel the pull of the Veil still tugging at him like the waves of an outgoing tide pulling at a piece of driftwood. But the light that infused his soul gave him strength to resist the pull, and his mind remained his own—not confused, not lost and uncomprehending as he had heard minds became when people died suddenly by violence. He knew exactly what had happened to him. Crispin Sabir had finished killing him. And Vodor Imrish had heard his summons and answered his prayer. Even dead, Hasmal now had at least a little time to finish the things he had left undone, and though he was not sure of how everything worked in this new state of being, he knew that he had within his grasp the means to effect change.

  He rose slowly, feeling an unnerving pull as his spirit separated from his body. As his flesh fell away, he felt both lighter and cleaner. But he also felt the first wave of terrible loss. His heart cried out for Alarista; he knew he would never hold her again; never touch her; never kiss her; never make love to her. The last words they had spoken were the last words they would ever speak; the last kiss they had shared would be the final one. His dreams of having children with her, of growing old together—those were gone.

  He hoped their souls would reunite beyond the Veil—that they would share their afterlife, or that they would be reborn into other bodies where they could share other lives. It was something to hope for. But the happiness of this moment, this love, this life, was now behind him.

  He hung in the air for a moment, staring down at his dead self lying on the table, and he grieved. He had wanted so much more.

  Then he drew himself together. Vodor Imrish had not given him this second chance so that he could mourn his own death. He was a Falcon—he had sworn himself to the service of good, and while he existed in any form as Hasmal rann Dorchan, son of Hasmal rann Halles, he had work to do.

  He felt certain that Dùghall had heard his last words. He’d felt the old master’s presence just before the Dragon soul of Dafril was ripped from Crispin’s body. He felt equally certain that Dùghall would realize that he intended to bind his soul to the plane of the living as Solander the Reborn was rumored to have done, so that he could carry out the destiny that had been stolen from him by the Dragons. Now he had to hope that Dùghall would find a way to provide an open channel for him, as the Secret Texts said Vincalis had provided an open channel for Solander after his death.

  Hasmal would not try to become another Reborn. Not for an instant did he believe Vodor Imrish had intended any such destiny for him. But his god had put him in the hands of Dafril, a powerful Dragon who had bragged to him that he and he alone had been the creator of the original Mirror of Souls. And his god had allowed him to see Dafril captured and rendered helpless, while the body Dafril had inhabited had remained close at hand. If the rightful occupant of that body, Crispin Sabir, had killed him, Hasmal believed Vodor Imrish had allowed it for a reason. He believed he had died so that he could achieve the one form which would allow him to obtain the information the Falcons needed to conquer the Dragons once and for all.

  Vodor Imrish was not a god of war; he didn’t destroy perfectly good worshipers to take pleasure in the spectacle of their deaths as did the gods of war. He had no love of blood for the sake of blood, nor of pain for the pleasure of pain. He would make good use of the dead as he made good use of the living.

  Crispin Sabir still stood in the spot from which he had killed Hasmal. Hasmal could tell that Crispin could see him, too; the Wolf’s eyes were fixed on the place where he floated, and his breathing was faster than normal, and shallower. Hasmal could feel Crispin’s fear vibrating in the air.

  He found that he could will himself to move in any direction with a thought. He began to float slowly toward Crispin, not certain of what he would do when he reached him, but certain that Crispin needed to be his first destination.

  The Wolf hummed with magic—power, Hasmal realized, that he had drawn from the energy of Hasmal’s death. As Hasmal moved toward him, Crispin attacked with that magic.

  The magic that Crispin had intended to be a weapon, however, did not act like a weapon when it encountered Hasmal’s insubstantial form. It flowed through Hasmal, but didn’t harm him. Instead, it fed him back the life-force that Crispin had stolen, making him s
tronger and further clearing his mind. The spell attached to the energy, though, rebounded on Crispin, and the rewhah energy that came from the death-powered spell hit the Wolf at the same instant. The combined forces of spell and rewhah stunned the Wolf, pinning his feet to the ground. Hasmal felt the vibration of Crispin’s fear rise in intensity.

  He continued floating slowly toward Crispin. At the last instant before they touched, Crispin regained control of his body. He turned and tried to run. Hasmal enveloped him, and their souls connected.

  An immediate wash of sensations assaulted his heightened senses and sickened him. His first impression of Crispin’s soul was of foulness layered upon foulness; of perversion and delight in perversion; of hatred piled upon rage stacked upon lust twisted up with greed and hunger for power. Each part of Crispin’s soul yammered its desires in an unending stream; each separate memory and each separate perversion added to the babble. Hasmal tried to shield himself from the disgusting cacophony, but in this new form he could no longer summon a shield. Frustrated and overwhelmed by the noise of Crispin’s mind, he pushed against the din, intending only to give himself a peaceful space in which to study his surroundings, unbothered by them. The blanket he created, however, did something to Crispin; the Wolf toppled to the floor, rendered senseless and still. He breathed and his heart beat, but his chaotic mind grew quiet, the many conflicting voices in it hushed completely or forced to whisper.

  Which was an improvement, Hasmal decided.

  He spent a few moments learning to read the shapes of the tumultuous thoughts, and sorting those which belonged to Crispin from those deep imprints which remained from Dafril’s presence. Hasmal felt he was digging for diamonds in a river of filth, but he persisted. And he began uncovering his diamonds.

  His first gem of information was that Crispin lived in paranoid terror of the discovery of the single secret he kept hidden not just from the rest of the world, but also from his brother Anwyn and his cousin Andrew. He had fathered a child, a daughter, a baby born to him by a woman about whom he had actually cared. The mother had been involved in an intra-Family intrigue; when Crispin discovered her treachery against him, he’d killed her himself. But the child the two of them created he had spared. Fearing that a member of his own Family or one of the other Five Families would use the babe as a lever to move him, he’d bought a wet nurse for her and sent wet nurse and infant to Novtierra. For years, he’d kept the child hidden in the city of Stosta in the Sabirene Isthmus. She had been there, in fact, until he discovered the existence of the Mirror of Souls and first decided to make himself a god. On the day that the Wind Treasure had sailed into the Thousand Dancers and into his reach, he marked three albatrosses with the compulsion to fly across the sea to her, and banded each with the message that she was to come home, and was to wait for him in a secret apartment that he had prepared for her. She was not to try to contact him—he would come to her.

  Of course Dafril had taken over Crispin’s body at the moment when he had thought he would ascend to godhood. He’d never experienced his moment of triumph. His vision of being the god-king welcoming his beloved child into the realm that would become her own personal possession had not materialized. She had arrived in Calimekka, and was in the apartment at that moment. Dafril had noted her arrival, and had kept a spy checking to see that the girl had the necessities and that she didn’t stray, but he had not come up with any compelling use for her yet. So he had left her alone.

  And because Dafril had controlled Crispin’s body until the moment Dùghall exorcised him, father and daughter had not yet met.

  Hasmal knew her name; he knew where she was hiding; he knew the words Crispin had given her that would identify him to her and let her know he was the one person in all of Calimekka she could trust.

  Within the dark, strong traces of Dafril’s presence, he found memories far stranger than Crispin’s, memories that shook him to his core. Dafril and a colleague named Luercas had been the wizards who took the life of Solander more than a thousand years earlier. He and Luercas had worked out many of the details of the immortality engine. Dafril had been the sole leader of the Dragons in Calimekka, too—for in returning from their long hiatus inside the Mirror of Souls, something had happened to Luercas. Hasmal could find Dafril’s concern on that score. Dafril had believed Luercas might be working against him, or working on his own. Hasmal felt an uneasy chill at that thought, but kept digging.

  His greatest find waited amid the foulest of Dafril’s thoughts. The Dragon Dafril had been the primary designer of the Mirror of Souls. He and Luercas and a few other Dragons had created it when they began to suspect that they might not win the Wizards’ War. Dafril knew the meaning of every sigil inscribed on the Mirror, the use of every inlaid gem, the nuances of every spell the Mirror could build and channel.

  And as he knew those things, so did Hasmal.

  Hasmal recalled suddenly and with crystal clarity the words of the Speaker he had summoned long ago—the Speaker who had launched him on his flight away from the safety of his home in Halles and into the path of Kait Galweigh and the fates. She’d said, “You are a vessel chosen by the Reborn, Hasmal. Your destiny is pain and glory. Your sacrifice will bring the return of greatness to the Falcons, and your name will be revered through all time.”

  Perhaps in the nest of clever obfuscations and intentional cloudiness she had spoken, she had told him that one clear truth without ornament or trickery. If Hasmal could be quick enough, and if he could hold his incorporeal self together long enough, he could hand the Falcons the keys that would rid Matrin of the Dragons for good, and in the same stroke could give them a way to control Crispin, who now led Ibera’s remaining Wolves. Before he fell into the Darkland, before he heard the karae sing their welcoming dirges into his dead ears, he would seek out Dùghall. If he could transmit his message to the Falcons, he would not have died for nothing.

  He focused his energy, located the talismanic connection that bound Crispin to Dùghall’s viewing glass, and launched himself along it.

  Chapter 5

  Luercas said, “A little faster, Danya. It would not be seemly for you to trail behind me when we make our triumphant return to the village. You are, after all, my mother . . . and we know how the Kargans revere mothers.”

  They rode giant lorrags—bigger versions of the deadly predators who hunted the Kargans across the tundra of the Veral Territories. Luercas had lured two of the beasts to In-kanmerea, the citadel of the Ancients buried beneath the tundra near the Kargan village. When the two predators skulked down the steps and into the huge, vaulted entry chamber, they had been of normal size. Luercas had used one of the Ancients’ magical engines to steal energy from the lives and souls of the Kargans, and had twisted that energy into a spell to increase the monsters’ size and suppress their will. They were still vicious brutes, and still deadly, but now they could do nothing to harm either Luercas or Danya.

  Luercas added, “This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, girl. You needn’t sulk.”

  Danya nodded, but did not speak. She rarely said anything to Luercas anymore; he took delight in turning her words back on her, in humiliating her, in making her feel like a fool. He never did anything of the sort when anyone else could see them; his plans for the Kargans demanded that both he and she become not just beloved but actually worshiped by the furry Scarred tribe. But when they were alone, he goaded her mercilessly for her weakness, her cowardice, her lack of foresight, her poor magical abilities, and anything else he could think of to remind her that no matter what their outward appearance might be, he owned her.

  She glanced over at him. Luercas looked about twelve years old, though he’d been born only half a year earlier. His golden hair hung down his back in a short braid, his blue eyes studied her guilelessly. He was as beautiful as any human child she had ever seen, and she hated him with a depth and a ferocity she did not even have words for. When she slept, she dreamed of hurting him; when she woke, she sometimes wept to dis
cover that he had not died at her hands.

  She comforted herself with the fact that she had sworn revenge against him at the same time that she had renewed her vows of revenge against the Sabirs and her own Family, the Galweighs. She had sacrificed her son to seal that oath—and if Luercas’s soul now inhabited her dead son’s body, her dead son’s blood would see that the Dragon wizard would suffer and die for doing so.

  They rode through a stand of fireweed, the flowers in full and glorious bloom. Had she been on the ground, they would have towered over her head. Astride the lorrag’s gaunt back, she could just see above the waving sea of fuchsia blooms.

  “So, Danya Two-Claws, are you ready to become a goddess?” Luercas asked.

  She said nothing.

  He turned and stared at her. As he did, she felt his gaze take on weight and form. Her throat tightened, and continued to tighten. She gasped, and her airway closed completely. Invisible fingers squeezed it shut, and though she grabbed her neck with both hands and opened her mouth and tried to suck in air, nothing happened.

  “I’m tired of riding in silence,” Luercas said. “I want someone to talk to . . . and since the lorrags can’t talk, that leaves you. Are you going to talk to me?”

  A faint film of red glazed the world, and darkness moved toward the center of her field of vision. She nodded.

  He laughed. “You’ll learn that you can’t fight me, Danya. You might as well become my friend.”

  He still held her airway closed. She nodded.

  “You’ll be my friend?”

  She nodded again, frantic. The world reeled around her and her skull felt like it would explode.

  “Well, good. I’m so glad.”

  Suddenly air rushed into her starved lungs. She sagged forward, relieved and terrified at the same time.

  He was staring at her, that same fixed, humorless smile stretched across his face. “Don’t you feel better now that we’re friends?”