The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

Ry came behind her and rested his hand on the small of her back. “It’s hard to believe how beautiful everything is, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, not speaking.

  “I wish we could be Karnee together one last time. I would have loved to have hunted these hills with you, to have run the cliffs with you.”

  “I know. But we . . . had good lives. We flew together in many ways.”

  “I would have loved you forever if forever had been ours.”

  They stopped at the bottom of the stairs that led up into the broad front doors of Galweigh House, and kissed slowly. “And I, you,” Kait told him quietly. “I wish forever had been ours. I like to think we would have spent it well.”

  Dùghall came up behind them and stopped. They looked into each other’s eyes, and then, with sad smiles, moved apart. “It’s time, isn’t it?” Kait asked her uncle.

  “I’m sorry. It is. The Army of the Thousand Peoples approaches the city. My son Har was waiting here for me—he tells me that he alone of our army survives. Costan Selvira fell the day after we left it and the Scarred raced here. We have little time.”

  “The Falcons are casting their shield over those who survive in Calimekka?” Ry asked.

  “They have begun. They waited only for us to arrive before they started their work. When Luercas tries to draw on the souls of Calimekkans to fuel his magic, he will find only his own troops. That may slow him, at least a bit. It should weaken him.”

  Kait said, “It won’t change our outcome, will it?”

  “No,” Dùghall said. “That we already know. Either the three of us win together and die together, or Luercas wins and all the world dies separately.”

  “Well . . . I suppose we should get started,” Kait said.

  She took Ry’s hand in hers and together they ascended the stairway.

  Chapter 53

  The Falcons ringed the outside of the wall around Galweigh House—nearly a hundred of them, all sitting cross-legged with their backs against the smooth, translucent stone-of-Ancients, their eyes closed, their bodies so still they seemed not to breathe. They had said they would cast a shield over the people of Calimekka to protect them from the coming battle. Ian couldn’t feel anything, but he assumed they cast the same sort of shield Kait had cast over those within the longboat that time they had escaped through the Thousand Dancers with the Mirror of Souls. He found their silent sitting unnerving—he would have felt better if magic looked more like doing something useful and less like taking a nap. Or being a corpse.

  Ian set his own men in a loose guard at the head of each of the two roads that led down to the city. Like them and the Falcons and even Alcie and the children, he stayed outside the walls of Galweigh House—Dùghall had asked that none but the three who went in to fight Luercas enter through those gates until after the battle.

  Inside the House, he knew Kait and Ry and Dùghall prepared for war. It being a magical battle they would fight, they were probably sitting, he thought. Sitting with their eyes closed, looking like they were napping.

  He hated magic. He couldn’t get his mind around it; he couldn’t get past all the strangeness of it to the place where it became a fight between two people. I wish I could fight the bastard with swords, he thought. I wish I could call him out like any other man and cross blades with him and run him through. Or have him run me through and that be the end of it.

  That was the way men should fight—with their hands and bodies and minds. The one who was faster or smarter or stronger won, and the loser died, and the issue was settled forever. It didn’t crop up again a thousand years later when the bastard stole somebody else’s body and came back from the dead to fight again.

  Ian paced the semicircle around the back of the House, from east cliff edge to west cliff edge and back, stopping in the center each time to look at Rrru-eeth, who sat, shackled at throat and wrists and ankles and waist, with her chains bolted into a huge whitegum tree right at the edge of the clearing. Four men guarded her—all four were those who would speak against her in her final sentencing. Only one of the four was human. The other three were Keshi Scarred.

  “You know I love you,” Rrru-eeth shouted at him as he passed her yet again. “I was jealous of her. I wanted you to love me, not her. You can’t hang me for jealousy.”

  He looked at her and said nothing. Mutiny wasn’t jealousy, and she knew it, but she sought to win his pity and the pity of the others she’d wronged. She wanted to twist things, to reshape the past so that it became favorable to her. He thought of the young girl who had risked her life to save the lives of all those slave children, and he wondered how that girl had become a woman who could abandon her comrades to die in a hostile land and who could betray the man who had given her sanctuary and a new life and her freedom—a man she claimed to love.

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” he whispered to himself, but that was too cynical and too bitter. The children she had saved and that he had transported to safety had gone on to live free lives. Some of them he’d watched grow up in the Thousand Dancers. Some had moved on. None of them had grown rich yet, but none of them had ended up the sex toys of perverse and brutal old men, either, to be thrown away when they were broken.

  I got the good from my risk, he thought. If it wasn’t all good, well, nothing is.

  It was like Kait. He’d loved her, fought beside her, wanted more than anything to make a life with her, and then she had turned away from him and found someone else. It didn’t change a minute of what they had shared. Now Kait said she would fight and die in a battle in which he could not even lift sword to help her, and he was left feeling useless and wasted; he would gladly have fought in her place. He would gladly have died if she might live. But he could not do what she had to do, and so he paced from road to road, looking for threats that didn’t materialize and enemies that didn’t come.

  What he and Kait had shared together had been good, but it was gone forever. He tried to accept that, tried to come to some accommodation with the reality of his world.

  He wouldn’t have changed the past, he finally realized. He would have simply made it last longer.

  Chapter 54

  The wings of the Army of the Thousand Peoples overflew Calimekka and returned to Luercas and Danya to report.

  “The city seems almost empty,” the captain of the Gold-Fire wing reported. He shifted his leathery wings awkwardly and ducked his head into his left side to arrange an errant fold of skin. When he lifted his head, he continued. “Gray rags hang over most of the doors to houses and shops, and most shops are closed. The wharves are deserted, the harbor empty of all but dead ships, and great smoking piles of bones lay in every square and empty lot.”

  Luercas frowned. “I wonder why the city would be empty. That doesn’t make sense—everyone from the towns and villages to the south has been running toward Calimekka ahead of us. The city ought to be bursting at the seams. There ought to be mobs camped outside the walls.”

  Danya said, “Gray rags, you said?”

  The captain nodded.

  “That’s your answer, then.” She turned to face Luercas and said, “Plague is loose in Calimekka. The gray rags are the signal that someone within a house is dead or dying of it. Gray rags will hang on all the gates, warning all those who come that if they enter, they will die. The people who fled ahead of us to this city will have kept on running—most likely they will have scattered west to Crati or Manale or Halles, or gone on north to Radan.” She stared at him and started to laugh. “All your planning, all your care, all your grand designs, and you’ve brought us at last to a pest-hole, a plague-hell, a disease-ridden cesspool.” She stood and began to laugh at him. “You who would be king—can you be king of corpses? Can you chain the souls of the dead to your will?”

  Luercas smiled slowly and his eyes narrowed. “So funny you should ask me that—it is, in fact, something I have long planned. But you, bitch-mother—tell me, how will you exact vengeance on the dead?”

  Danya frowne
d. “Surely the plague did not reach the great Houses. The Families have stores and walls—at the first word of disease, they would have closed their gates and waited out the sickness as they have always done. Those who owe me their lives will be waiting in comfort in the midst of their riches when I go to claim them.”

  “Will they?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why don’t you seek them out? Why don’t you see for yourself?” He smiled at her, smug and secretive. His eyes said, I know something you don’t know, and she wanted in that moment to drive her dagger through his heart and watch him writhe and die on her blade. But she had not the power to kill him. She knew that.

  She felt sure that the Galweighs and the Sabirs would be intact behind their walls, waiting out the devastation that was claiming the rest of Calimekka. She determined that she would prove this to Luercas. Raised a Galweigh Wolf, trained to the darkest of known magics and, hardened by bitter experience, she felt the slick, seductive channels of Wolf magic coursing through muscle and blood and bone like black fire. She welcomed that flow into her mind, and out of it she spun around herself a globe of white light, and into that light she sent her vision. She cast globe and vision away from herself, toward the city, toward the Houses of the great Families. She went first to the citadel of the Sabirs, and saw the gate on it closed. But gray silk bunting hung across the smooth white stone-of-Ancients on either side of the gate, and as she guided her vision-light inward, she found funeral pyres in which blackened fragments of bone lay like sticks of shining coal. She found servants scuttling through vast, empty halls and hiding in storerooms. She found the body of an old Wolf-woman, Scarred beyond any remembrance of humanity, bloated and rotting, left lying on the floor where it had fallen, fingers still clutching the ripped throat of a dead man. She found a blank-eyed man lying on a bed staring at nothingness, alive and whole but lost in the darkness of his own mind, and elsewhere a starving child locked in an empty storeroom, too far gone even to cry or claw at the door anymore.

  But she did not find Crispin, and she did not find Anwyn, and she did not find Andrew. She cued her magic to them—to her memory of the shapes of their bodies and the form of their souls—and she sent her vision-light questing beyond Sabir House. She found nothing. She grabbed one of the Scarred who stood beside her throne and dug her two talons into his throat, and as his blood gushed across her hand and onto the floor, she drew power from his life and sent the vision-light farther. But still she found nothing. The Unholy Trinity were dead.

  She searched next through her own House, and there found strangers ringing the wall, and behind that wall . . . emptiness. In a central room she found her cousin Kait, her uncle Dùghall, and a stranger kneeling around a silver bowl in the center of the floor, but in all that vast House they were the only living things.

  Goft, she thought. The Family has fled to Goft. She sent her vision farther. But the gates of Cherian House had been ripped from the walls and traders and vagabonds had set up a market within the walls, and tramps and thieves and whores camped inside the House itself.

  Gone. They were gone. Her Family, the Sabir Family, all those who had wronged her and abandoned her. Gone not just from their Houses but from the face of Matrin. They were dead. All dead.

  She had sworn her life to see them grovel at her feet, to hear from their own mouths their pleas and their contrition; she had killed her own child in sacrifice to her oath, and now here she was, outside the gates of the very city where they should have been, her army around her, her time for vengeance at hand—and her enemies were all dead and gone.

  She shattered the vision-light with a scream, rose from her throne, kicked the corpse of the creature she had sacrificed away from her, and turned on Luercas.

  “You knew,” she raged.

  He smiled at her and said nothing.

  “You knew they were all dead! You knew!”

  “Of course I knew. If you had paid more attention to what was going on in Calimekka, you would have known, too.”

  “If you knew of the plague, why did you come here?”

  “There was no plague. The breaking of the Mirror of Souls killed a few people—that’s all. No one within the city is sick. No one is dying of some dread contagious disease.”

  “A few people! The city is nearly empty.”

  “The citizens thought it was a plague,” Luercas said, and shrugged. “Stupid people. Those who could, fled. Those who remain are too poor or too weak to run away, or they have simply ceased to care whether they live or die. That suits me well enough.”

  “We were to get the riches of the city,” one of the Scarred said. “We were to become lords of the greatest city on Matrin.”

  “And so you shall,” Luercas said. “That you’ll have little resistance before you claim what is yours is no great tragedy. The city itself is the prize—the people who inhabited it were merely obstacles.”

  “And what of me?” Danya screamed. “What of my vengeance?”

  “What can I say? You made a bad bargain. Those who live only for revenge usually do. They never get the satisfaction they imagine; that you didn’t, either, is no surprise to me.”

  She attacked him then, two claw-tipped fingers slashing for his throat, and the guards who stood at either side of Luercas’s throne grabbed her and pinned her between them. She howled her rage, and Luercas laughed. “That took a bit longer than I’d anticipated, but it was as delightful as I’d hoped it would be. How charming to see you exhibit some spine at last. Themmias, bring the chains.”

  One of the Dethu Scarred ran from the tent and returned a moment later with heavy chains and manacles. The guards put them on Danya and chained her to Luercas’s throne, though some of them looked askance at Luercas as they carried out his orders. Luercas said, “I think you’ve had your weapons long enough.” He touched her with his index finger, and her right hand, Scarred by the two talons, began to melt. The white heat of fire raged through her hand; no matter what she did to try to shield herself from his magic, he simply shifted his spell’s approach and kept burning her. The pain drove her to her knees—she screamed and begged; she shamed herself and her Family . . . but no, she had no Family. She had nothing.

  He did not stop until her right hand ended in a stump at the wrist.

  “Enough for now,” he said, and patted her on the head. “You may sit at my feet like the good little lapdog that you are, and later perhaps I’ll think of some amusing tricks to teach you. I think humiliation is good for the soul, don’t you?”

  She could only whimper. The pain where her hand had once been was still so great it nearly blinded her.

  “And now,” she heard him say, “if I am not mistaken, the time has come for my enemies to challenge me directly. I feel their magic building—they should be summoning me at any time.”

  “Why do you not go into the city and take the fight to them?”

  “I have a single task I must take care of when we enter the city—a little thing, the matter of a moment. When I’ve finished it, I will lead you through the streets as the conquerors of Calimekka, and we shall all be declared kings and lords. But if I do not destroy them first, they might strike at me as I am about my business, and hit me in the single moment when I will be . . . vulnerable. I choose, rather, to meet them in a time and place of my choosing, and at a moment of strength.” His voice grew soft and solicitous. “After all, I don’t want anything to stand between you, my people, and your well-earned triumph.”

  Chapter 55

  Dùghall stood across from Kait and Ry. “You’ll cross into the Veil, and immediately after you arrive, you’ll see a dark sphere surrounded by lights. This is the void that I’ve created to destroy Luercas. Under no circumstances allow yourself to fall or be pushed into it unless you can pull Luercas in with you. If you cross over in Shifted form, you may have an edge against him—he will not be expecting predators like the Karnee to meet him.”

  “What difference will it make? We have no true bodies w
ithin the Veil—only seeming bodies as insubstantial as light,” Kait said.

  Dùghall said, “Your mind acts upon what it knows. If you cross in human form, you will take human senses with you. If you cross in Karnee form, you will take Karnee speed and Karnee talents.”

  “And Karnee temper,” Ry said.

  Kait nodded. “In Karnee form, I am easily enraged, always hungry for blood and flesh, wild and barely able to control my own impulses.”

  Dùghall knelt across from them and leaned forward, his eyes focused intently on their faces. “I know. This is part of why I believe the two of you were chosen by the gods for this task. Luercas will have fought against many things, but he will never have challenged a pair of Karnee—your kind did not exist in the world when last he lived as a man. You will control all the magic you ever did as humans; you will be able to communicate in thought as only the two of you can, without any touch or taint of magic . . . and you will think as Karnee think—as wild things hungry for the hunt and free from fear. This I believe is the key that will give us the battle if anything can.”

  “And yet you have doubts.”

  “You are overmatched. The three of us together are overmatched. Even if we give everything we have—even if we lose everything we have—we will almost certainly fail. And yet we must fight.”

  • • •

  Kait held the faces of those she loved before her in her mind. Her sister Alcie and Alcie’s two lovely children; Ulwe, who was so young and frightened and brave in the face of loss and disappointment; Ian, who would have done anything for her. These were the people she could save. And there was Ry, whom she loved more than breath, and Dùghall, who had become friend and father figure and inspiration to her. These two she could not save; they would fight with her and die with her. Around them lay a world, her world, which she loved from blade of grass to ray of sunlight to grain of sand, and the people who were to her faceless and nameless—they, too, would benefit from what she did, but in the end she would not fight for them, and she would not die for them. She would die for Alcie, for Ulwe, for Lonar, for Rethen, for Ian, for Ry, for Dùghall. For the memory of Hasmal, who had died a hero that she might live. For the memory of Solander, who had given his life twice for love of all of life.