The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  “Considering that we have no other weapons with which to fight this monster . . . yes.”

  Dùghall became aware of the fact that the two of them were standing in the center of a road. That Ian, the soldiers, Alcie, and Ulwe surrounded them, staring at them. That not a single listener seemed to dare to even breathe.

  “Well,” he said softly. “I still don’t know what decision I’ll be called upon to make, but at least I know what will happen if I fail to make it correctly.” He gave a grim smile to those who surrounded him and said, “A bit of pressure is good for the soul, I hear. Come. Let us get to Costan Selvira; maybe we’ll find better news there.”

  Chapter 47

  The Army of the Thousand Peoples swept out of the pass and down the good mountain road that led toward Ibera and civilization. The way lay clear ahead of Danya and Luercas and their throng—the first three villages they passed were ghosts, the houses abandoned with every belonging still inside.

  The soldiers hunted for occupants and found none—deprived of a fight, they looted the homes and shops and took in stores of food to add to their supply wagons, and kegs of wine and beer, and tiny caches of silver, and even smaller caches of gold. They were satisfied enough with those things. But the quality of the household goods they found disappointed them—these were little different in quality from what they’d had at home, and the exotic shapes and patterns couldn’t change the fact that the treasure everyone had been hoping to uncover eluded them.

  So far the Green Lands, the Fields of Heaven, looked as bleak and rocky as any mountains, and the troops began to whisper to each other when they thought they were well away from their Ki Ika and their Iksahsha.

  Danya told Luercas, “They’ve lost children and lovers, and they’re beginning to lose faith.”

  “Nonsense. Their natural greed hasn’t been slaked by tempting prizes. They’ll perk up when we reach a good city. A hard fight, some rape and murder and a good haul—and the sight of rich green farmland and fine city houses—and they’ll be ready for more.”

  “You’re loathsome.”

  “Perhaps. But I’m right. We’ll get to Calimekka, and we’ll take the city easily. My prediction.”

  “I’ll laugh at you when you prove wrong.”

  “Will you? But if I’m wrong, you won’t get your revenge.” He smiled, jabbed his heels into his lorrag’s ribs, and rode away.

  And the army moved on.

  • • •

  Glaswherry Hala fell in less than a station, and every human being still within its walls when the Scarred took it died at the hands of the invaders. Brelst stood no more than two stations, its wall crews at last succumbing to the aerial attacks of the Scarred flying forces, and to the tunnelers who breached the walls from beneath and permitted the waves of Scarred to pour into the heart of the city and kill from the inside out as well as from the outside in.

  Humanity fled in a steady stream, pouring northward ahead of the implacable, unstoppable tide that rolled toward it. Villages and towns along the Great Sea Road offered no resistance; their populations—less fond of their belongings than their lives—raced toward the promised safety of the great city of Calimekka, whose greatest walls had been made by the Ancients, and whose soldiers were acknowledged the fiercest and most skilled in the world. If Calimekka could not stand against the horde, what place in all the world could?

  Chapter 48

  The refugees from Calimekka got the news from the first of the southern refugees a week after Glaswherry Hala fell—and the news was bad. A few tatters of the army that Dùghall had placed in the pass still survived, leading guerrilla attacks against the outer edges of the Scarred army, but the damage they could do was minimal and the effect they were having was minimal, too.

  “When will they be here, then?” Dùghall had asked one man.

  “Our army—what there is of it—in a day. The leading edge of the enemy forces only a few stations later than that. The full army of the damned—two days. Maybe three. I won’t be here when they arrive. They don’t take prisoners and they don’t leave survivors.”

  Dùghall, seated in a small inn near the harbor, rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes.

  “What’s wrong with him?” the man asked Kait.

  Kait did not go into detail. “His sons lead our army.”

  “Yes? Good men, them—but if they want to be living men, they better lead it to Calimekka and get inside the walls there. The only way we’re going to live to see another day is if the Families take these monsters out.”

  Kait did not tell him that Calimekka had fallen from the inside or that if any remnants of the Families survived there, they would be powerless to stop the approaching enemy. He left, thinking that he headed toward safety, toward a place where someone else would look after him and his children and make sure that they survived.

  “Dùghall,” she said when he was gone, “to that bad news I can at last add a bit of good news.”

  “You’ve met up with Falcons who’ve answered my call?”

  “No—not yet. But Ry just sailed into the harbor.”

  “Thank you, Vodor Imrish,” Dùghall whispered. “For that at least we can be truly grateful.”

  • • •

  Neither Kait nor Dùghall had told Ian what waited in the harbor for him. They had decided between themselves that since Ry had found the ship and won it back for his brother, he deserved the honor of returning it to its rightful captain. Ry wasn’t sure whether he anticipated the moment when he would tell his brother what waited for him with dread or pleasure.

  They met at the Copper-Walls Tavern, Kait bringing Ry from the dock, Dùghall leading Ian from the inn where they’d all stayed.

  Ry saw the pain in his brother’s eyes in the instant when he first saw Kait with Ry and noted their arms around each other; he hid it quickly and completely, but Ry knew Ian still loved her. His jumbled emotional response to that knowledge surprised him—he felt triumph and jealousy and fierce possessiveness and a sharp stab of guilt, all at once. More than that, however, he felt a deep, quiet current of love for his brother—something he would never have expected he could feel. They had been through so much together, and at every turn Ian had deferred to Ry. Now, finally, Ry could do something for Ian.

  By way of greeting, Ry told Ian, “I brought something back for you from my travels, brother.” He did not use the formal, Family term for brother, sibarru, but the informal and affectionate boshu.

  Ian looked surprised. “Considering the troubles you faced on the trip, I’m surprised you found time to think of me.”

  Ry shrugged, suddenly awkward at having to express this newfound affection for Ian. “You’ve become a real brother to me.” He looked away, and said with a gruffness that attempted to mask embarrassment, and probably failed, “We must be going. Come—I’ll give you what I found.”

  He would never forget the moment when they stepped onto the dock together and Ian’s eyes focused on the refurbished Peregrine sitting at anchor in the bay and his mouth dropped open. Ian turned and stared at Ry, then looked back at his ship. “Where . . . ?” His face was pale as death, his eyes glittered, and for a moment Ry feared that Ian might topple to the dock in a dead faint. But he said, “You brought her to me?”

  “Your ship. And Rrru-eeth. She’s in the brig. The crew helped me win the Peregrine back for you—they’re your people now. Captain.”

  Ian’s lips pressed together in a thin line, and his eyes glittered with unshed tears. He rested a hand on his brother’s upper arm and squeezed. “Thank you,” he said softly.

  Ry only nodded—the words he had thought he would say when he presented his brother with his ship fell away and left him mute.

  The crew standing by the longboat for the final trip out to the ship were the survivors from the mutiny of the Peregrine. Each of them bowed deeply and formally when Ian entered the longboat, and the first mate, Bemyar, hugged him and whispered, “He paid more than you know to bring her b
ack to you,” into Ian’s ear. Ry’s Karnee hearing caught the words easily, but he gave no sign. “We tried to kill him and his friends, thinking they meant to aid her in getting her way in Calimekka—we did kill one of them. He forgave us and worked with us. For your sake.”

  Ian’s face betrayed nothing, but his soft response—“Thank you for telling me. I didn’t know”—betrayed an intensity Ry had only thought his brother possessed in relation to Kait.

  Ian strode back to the longboat’s tiller and displaced the man sitting there. When Dùghall, the last passenger to board, took a seat on the thwart, Ian put a hand to the tiller and said, “Take us home, men.”

  And the men said, “Yes, Captain,” and dug in with a will.

  In the instant he regained his ship, Ian changed. The bitterness he had carried since Ry rescued him from Novtierra fell away. His eyes looked clearer, his head lifted, and the faintest of smiles curved at the corners of his mouth.

  Ry knew what they still faced—he knew that likely the only fate they would find in Calimekka would be death. But for the first time since Ry had known his half-brother, he saw Ian as an equal and understood both the power Ian held and the loyalty he had earned.

  The trip had cost him his friend Jaim. He could not forget that, though he truly had forgiven the men who thought only to serve Ian. But Ry realized in that moment that it had won him a brother who was family, too, and not merely Family—and that was something he had never had.

  • • •

  Kait didn’t know the boy who stood outside the door of the cabin she shared with Ry. He was one of the crew that Rrru-eeth had hired on to replace those killed or abandoned for dead in Novtierra. Thin, waifish, and poorly dressed, he didn’t look like he had profited from the riches that had spilled over onto the mutineers. He stared up at her with wide, worried eyes.

  “What do you want, boy?” she asked, but kindly.

  “Your uncle sends an important message. He requests you meet him in his cabin as soon as you can.” He glanced over his shoulder, then back to her. “He’s really your uncle, the themmuburra Dùghall?”

  “My mother’s older brother.”

  “Then you are a themmuburra, too,” he whispered. He quickly kissed her hand and ducked his head to his knees in a low Imumbarran bow. Then, without looking back up at her, he turned and fled.

  Ry had come up behind her. “And that was . . . ?” he asked.

  “One of Uncle Dùghall’s worshipers,” Kait said softly. “They show up in the strangest places.”

  “He really is a god in the islands?”

  “Fertility god.” Kait went to the cabin wardrobe, and pulled out the only really decent outfit she had, and started putting it on. “Forty years ago, the birth rate in the islands had fallen far below the death rate. The men fathered no children, the women were barren. The Imumbarrans prayed that they be delivered from extinction—and then Uncle Dùghall was assigned to the islands as part of his diplomatic rotation. He . . . got along well with the natives. And he apparently produced a few miracles for the girls he got along well with. So young husbands sent their wives to him, and they became pregnant, too. And then more came, and they went home happy.” She pulled her tunic over her head and tugged the beaded belt into place. “He was the answer to the islanders’ prayers—which was the answer to Galweigh House’s prayers. In exchange for his services, which he apparently enjoyed rendering, we received exclusive trade with the islands, and first pick of all the caberra they grew. Then, when the first of the daughters born to Dùghall reached the age of childbearing, the islanders discovered that she could be fertile with an Imumbarran. The other daughters were, too. Dùghall’s miracle was complete. At that point they declared him a god.” Kait shrugged. “He has hundreds of children. By now, perhaps thousands. Uncountable grandchildren. In another generation, most of the people in the islands will be related to him to some degree. And all of them seem to have inherited the Galweigh fertility.”

  “They breed like rabbits.”

  Kait sighed. “Yes. In a few more years they’ll be everywhere.”

  Ry laughed. “Think how the islanders will react when Dùghall returns to them as a young man.”

  Kait laughed, too, but then she shook her head. “He doesn’t have any reason to go back anymore. There is no Galweigh House in Calimekka for him to represent.”

  “He could go back to be with his family.”

  “I’ve never gotten the feeling that it worked that way . . . that there was much feeling of family involved in his . . . duties. He talks about his children, and I’ve met any number of my cousins when he brought them to the city for visits, but Dùghall was never really a father to them. Their mothers always had Imumbarran husbands, and their husbands raised the children as their own. My cousins called Dùghall ‘father’ while they were visiting with us, but I didn’t learn until years later that the word they used when they spoke to him in Imumbarran was the formal one, ebemurr—or that the word children affectionately call their fathers in the Imumbarras is peba.” She finished dressing and quickly brushed her hair. “I don’t think anybody ever called him peba. And I think he’s felt the lack of that his whole life.”

  “That’s rather sad.”

  “It is. I have always suspected that he looked on me as a replacement for the children he fathered but didn’t get to keep.”

  She and Ry tapped on Dùghall’s door only a few moments later. He greeted them with a grim expression, ushered them into the cabin with some haste, and bade them be seated. He was pale, Kait noticed, his eyes were red-rimmed, and he smelled of grief and despair.

  Kait looked past the lavish decorations of the room to Dùghall’s zanda, spread out on the room’s little table with its coins scattered in a pattern that meant nothing to her, and she felt her heart skip a beat.

  “I apologize to you both for calling you away from your other activities,” Dùghall said. He carried himself like a man who had been told he must die the next day. “You have had only a little time to be together, but what I have to tell the two of you must not wait any longer.” When they took the two seats beside the table, he turned away from them to stare out the room’s tiny porthole.

  Kait watched him, hating his stillness and the cloud of doom that emanated from him.

  “You finally got the answer to your auguring,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You know the choice that you will have to make when the moment comes.”

  “Yes.”

  Kait reached for Ry’s hand under the table, and held it tightly.

  Ry said, “Kait told me about the oracles you sought. About the confusing answer you received.”

  Dùghall turned and faced the two of them. “It is no longer confusing. It has become terribly clear.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And I am Vodor Imrish’s sword. I have sworn my life to serve him, to serve the Falcons, to serve the good of the world. I am making that choice now.”

  Kait felt a soft burning on her instep, where she had been branded by the Falcons. In the back of her mind, like the tugging of the moon on the tide, she felt them pulling on her. She, too, was a Falcon—different, apart, but still sworn to serve. Listen, they were telling her. Listen.

  Dùghall, still staring out the porthole, said, “Luercas approaches with allies so numerous they make the earth tremble when they move; with magic honed during a thousand years of waiting; with an appetite that will devour the world. Every zanda I have cast in these last few days has been clear about one thing—we cannot beat him in a straight fight. Even if we could get all of the Falcons banded together and hit him force against force, he would still annihilate us.”

  Kait nodded. “We suspected as much. Tell us what you know.”

  “That we will die,” he said quietly. “But we will try to do it in such a way that the world will survive behind us.”

  Kait and Ry both grew very still at those words—so still that Kait was uncertain if either she or Ry s
till breathed. Or could. They both waited for Dùghall to qualify his statement, to give them some hope, to offer anything beyond that flat statement of their coming death. But he said nothing.

  Finally Ry said, “You mean we may die, don’t you? I mean, you cannot be certain of the outcome until we fight our fight—”

  But Dùghall shook his head. “I am certain. I have entreated Vodor Imrish himself for a path that did not end in our certain death . . . and there is none. If our world is to live, the three of us will die together.”

  Kait gripped Ry’s hand harder, and felt his fingers tighten around hers. She turned to him and said, “I’m sorry I cost us the last real time we could have had together.” She moved around the table and dropped to her knees, resting her head against his chest. She could feel his heart pounding beneath her cheek; she could hear the smooth, sweet sound of the air moving in and out of his lungs. She could smell his pain, his grief, his longing for her. He held her; one hand to stroke her hair, one arm to pull her close.

  “From the time we knew who Luercas was, we thought this might be our fate. The only thing that has changed is that now we know. Don’t waste the little time we have left in this life blaming yourself, Kait. You were no more wrong than I was. I’m sorry I left.”

  Kait wiped at her cheeks, startled to find that they were wet; she had not realized she was crying. She felt almost as if she were outside of her body—as if already she were moving toward the Veil and the next life.

  Ry rested a hand on her chin and gently turned her back to face him. “We will die together,” he said. “And beyond the Veil, we will live together again. I did not find you at last and after such difficulty to let such a small thing as death separate us. You and I are forever.”

  She gripped his hands in hers. “Promise me,” she said fiercely. “You said you would never leave me again.”

  “I promise. Not in life, not in death, not beyond eternity.”

  “Nor I, you.”

  Something was wrong with Dùghall. Kait could sense it, and when she turned away from Ry, she could see it. She could almost smell it. His cheeks were streaked with tears, his eyes would not meet hers, his hands gripped each other as if fighting for their lives. He was hiding something—something important.