In the Shadow of the Rook (The Sons Incarnate Book 1)

by JDL Rosell

  His father slowly turned from the sail, then bent down over him. “Yes, Erik?” he said, his warm tone only slightly cracked.

  Erik couldn’t keep his gaze and looked over to the still-slumbering Persey and Tara. “Back in Zauhn, when the mooneyes surrounded us, I… I beat them back. With…” He waved his hands indistinctly. “With my mind, I guess, or wherever those waves were from.”

  “Yes,” his father said. “Oscillation, it is called.”

  The word seemed to fit. “Moving back and forth, like a pendulum?” That had been like the motion inside of him, rapid and fast and energetic.

  “Not quite.” His father moved slowly to sit next to him, groaning and muttering, “That used to be easier.”

  Erik managed a small smile.

  “It is somewhere between the swing of a clock and the bowstring after it has been released,” his father continued. “It still hums with energy as it vibrates back and forth, smaller, finer, faster. But with oscillation, the faster it moves, the more potential power it builds, and it need not stop or be limited by the laws of physical reality.”

  “Then it’s more like swinging a slingshot,” Erik interjected, seizing upon the idea. “The further out it swings and faster you swing it, the more power it seems to have. But it’s not like it all disappears in one release, so it’s not quite the same.”

  His father shook his head. “We try to understand it, but it is not a thing of nature. It is beyond it. A manifestation of the Void.”

  Cold prickles started down Erik’s neck. “But—” He struggled to find the words. If it had no parallel in the natural world, how could they understand it? Still, he had to try. “But what starts the oscillating? And what is oscillation? Is it me, myself? Why does it grow faster and bigger? And how can I do anything with that energy?”

  His father sighed. “We know so little of magic, my Tower and its syndics. We have studied far’egan before,” he looked everywhere but at Erik, “but to little avail. In demonstrations of their power, it seemed to follow little reason. No two abilities were the same, and few did more than dally with the laws of nature. Their descriptions of what happened were the only consistency. Oscillating is the same: a vibration within and a propelling of that which is within to the without, to exert their will in whatever form they can manage.”

  Erik tried not to imagine what his father studying the far’egan entailed, tried not to imagine him doing the same to Persey. He even glanced guiltily over at the girl and her caretaker, but they hadn’t stirred. “That matches what I felt.”

  His father nodded. “I began diagramming their descriptions, and Vodrun postulated theories. My task, though more straightforward, proved the more difficult of the two. The oscillation never seemed to take place in the same location in each person's body, though it remained consistent for each instance. Vodrun guessed this meant an aberration occurred at that location, perhaps some rift to the Void, and that this somehow enabled the thing we call magic.”

  A bitter, burning sensation rose in Erik’s throat at Vodrun’s name, but he swallowed it back down. “An aberration? Could you…” See it, he’d been about to say, but then he realized what it would mean if his father had.

  The formulaist’s head hung low. “We searched with scalpel and knife,” his father whispered. “And we found nothing. Nothing at all.”

  How many has he killed, my father? How many has he tortured for his insatiable curiosity? “Well, glad you made good use of their lives,” he said sarcastically, tasting acid in his mouth. But the contrarian voice in his head said, But aren’t you benefiting from his morbid fascinations? It took the bite out of the chastise.

  His father didn’t raise his head, but his voice continued, steady as before, if a bit flatter. “Vodrun believed it was not a physical manifestation then, but a mental one. A phantom sensation, like when a man feels a limb he has lost. Perhaps it is spiritual as well, but the Crow never did abode by anything so vague and undefinable as that.”

  Erik hadn’t, either, though he doubted his confidence in it now. Something beyond our understanding, that breaks the limits of all we know, and is best depicted in Amodism... Perhaps I’ve been wrong about the religion’s truth after all. But what he was describing, it didn’t quite fit.

  “I didn’t feel it in one spot, though. It moved all throughout me.”

  He bit back his real question—Is that bad?—but his father seemed to sense it and dismissed his fear with a shrug. “It does not mean there is anything wrong with you.” Though what did his lingering look mean then?

  But he continued. “There was something else many of our subjects could do—”

  Subjects—Erik shivered at the word.

  “—related to, but different than, magic. They described it as hearing the world all around, through sounds described like crossed-sense synesthesia—hearing colors, scents, sights, the like. We called it sounding, and what they heard, echoes.”

  That, too, he remembered, just before pushing back the mooneyes. Even the stones seemed to sing, and he heard the echoes of his companions’ thoughts. If it’s a delusion, it’s a shared one. Somehow, the thought was still vaguely comforting. “Sounding,” Erik repeated. “Echoes.”

  His father held up his hands helplessly. “It is all we have learned of it. We never replicated it ourselves, nor has it accelerated our attempts at Recarnation.” He glanced at Erik. “Unless we were responsible for its manifestation in you.”

  He felt numb all of a sudden, like a slept-on limb just after waking. “What?”

  They made you alive again, that voice said again. Why not turn you into a freak? He felt a pit in his stomach for thinking it as he glanced over at Persey. But still…

  “I have exposed you to voidic influences since you were young,” his father said, sounding as if he were saying his last words to an executioner. “Then you were subjected to brutal and voidic procedures in what Vodrun supposed was Recarnation. It might be enough to trip the far’egan process, even if you were not otherwise subject to its influence.”

  He wanted to feel angry, but was it any worse than what he’d done before? And this at least was useful. This had saved his, Tara’s, Persey’s, Wil’s lives—his father’s life. Wasn’t that worth a bit of freakishness? And you thought yourself a monster before, the voice still laughed within him. He couldn’t say anything, reduced to gasping at the salt-bitten air, ears filled with the sharp whistle of a sudden gust.

  His father’s gaze lingered on him, but as it drifted away, he suddenly sat stiff and upright as a hare. “We have arrived,” he announced, slowly rising to his feet and adjusting the rudder. “Wake them and make ready to go ashore.”

  Erik, still half in a daze, stayed put, but looked over to Tara and Persey. The girl’s gray eyes peered back at him, wide and alert. As if she hadn’t been sleeping after all. He could hardly blame her. What his father had said—oscillation, sounding, echoes, and the rest—was as relevant to her as him. But he hoped she hadn’t heard the implications behind his father’s knowledge or she’d have trouble trusting either of them. Though, perhaps her not trusting was for the best.

  They soon pulled into a cove, and Erik groaned as he tumbled out of the boat. He limped to the shore, stones jabbing at his feet through his boots and his ribs jerking painfully, where he collapsed, more exhausted than he had any right to be. The other two adults pulled and pushed the boat onto the pebbles, and Persey tried to help, but mostly fell down against the waves.

  As he rested, he looked around him. Everywhere about the shore grew the tall, gray grim pines the woods were famous for. They loomed over them, like a clan of giants looking down on their puny intruders, and frowning to see them on their shores. Branches were sparse except in the upper regions, and Erik could see why when he scooted up the bank to peer further into the forest. Everything was shaded and dead beneath the upper canopy. Whether it was a lack of light or some other insidious influence, things simply didn’t grow in this forest.

  The
others soon joined him, bearing bags of bread and water skins. Persey looked comical with how she was loaded down, but everyone had to do their fair share, he supposed. Which is why you carry nothing.

  His father outstretched a hand. “Come,” he said. “It’s time to walk. We must make use of the day while we have it.”

  Erik hesitated. Now that he thought about it, he didn’t know exactly why they’d landed here. “I thought you said the Ose was at the end of the peninsula, beyond the Drifts.”

  His father smiled and—Did he just wink? “So it is,” he said, more life to his voice than Erik had heard in years. “So it is.”

  Erik wasn’t nearly as amused. “Then why don’t we just sail there?”

  His father sighed, and Erik almost felt guilty at how he seemed to deflate. Almost. He might not hate his father, but he hadn’t forgotten everything he’d done as the Rook. “Things are not as they seem around the Drift Ose,” his father said. “You only know you are there when you have arrived.”

  He didn’t know how to reply to that, so he stuck out his hand, and his father pulled him to his feet. But instead of pulling away, he leaned close to his father’s ear. “I’m trusting you,” he said. “Don’t let me down. Again.”

  He pulled back and looked into his father’s placid eyes. Still, untouched, like a dead man's. “I will not,” his father murmured, then turned away.

  The clouded sun was just past noon when they came to the forest’s stark edge. Erik blinked at the drastic change. The grim pines stopped in a line stiff as soldiers, with barely two trees venturing beyond it, and those were blighted and stunted. Beyond Grim’s Wood existed even less life. Miles and miles of muted gray and tan sand extended out of sight, all fresh water left behind. They’d reached the Drifts.

  Erik swallowed to see it, and his companions had similar reactions. Tara stared with a wrinkled brow at the sand, perhaps wondering just where an oasis would be in all that dry waste. His father scanned the horizon with drawn eyebrows, his weary eyes searching. Persey, though, simply seemed bored, not much impressed at the wide sweep of nothing before them.

  She does have a point, Erik thought. “So where is the Drift Ose?” he asked his father.

  The formulaist squinted into the distance as he answered. “Deep within. Far beyond where most men would be inclined to walk, or where any living creature should care to venture. But not so far that we will not reach it by evening.”

  That seemed far enough to Erik as he took stock of his body. “Well, I won’t get any stronger waiting here.” He limped determinedly towards the desert.

  His father’s hand arrested him. “Wait. I know only one path, a direct path from the tree line. Any deviation from that, and we might pass within a mile of it and never know.”

  Never know, until it’s too late to turn back. “Show us the way then.”

  The formulaist set to walking and muttering for the next hour, going back and forth, back and forth, treading the same ground so much that his footsteps melded into a jagged line. Meanwhile, the sun decided to come out, and Erik wiped at the foul sweat beading on his skin. It seemed all the rot in his body came out now, and there was no hiding what he was. He could only imagine how Persey and Tara must be suffering from it. They were standing a bit further away from him than seemed strictly necessary.

  Finally, his father found the path. “The trees,” his father pointed, and Erik saw a vague V formed out of two of the trunks. Like some marker from a god, he thought. And considering where they were going, it very well might be.

  They set forth. As walked forward, each step becoming more difficult in the sand, Erik looked back and saw the enormous grims had shrunk away, seeming as ordinary as tomato stakes in a garden or barley in a field. The measureless, featureless landscape became their solemn reality. Soon, there was nothing to see but sand.

  Dunes rose under their feet. Taller ones rose along the southern edges, walls built by the vortex winds that wound around the earth, or so had written the ancient explorers, and no one in recent memory had bothered to confirm or deny their claims. As they went further—north and a bit west, as far as Erik could tell—the dunes grew smaller. His father chose the smaller rises to go over, thankfully, and they found themselves in a mind-numbing rhythm of barely rising, then barely falling. They walked in a line, his father in the lead, Erik just behind, and Tara and Persey taking up the rear.

  It was all painful monotony until his father fell back in step with Erik. He felt his gaze on him, though he couldn’t risk meeting it. He was busy enough keeping track of where he was stepping.

  “I never meant for this to happen.”

  Erik might have stopped, might have been shocked into stillness, before all this. Before he’d died. Before he’d been murdered. Those words might have raised up a terrible anger, a deep sense of righteousness he felt could only be resolved through vindictive words. But now, he felt none of those things. He only felt thirsty, and in pain, and too tired to respond.

  His father let out a heavy sigh. “Vodrun acted alone in this, I swear by Qeth’A’Laqed.”

  Qeth’A’Laqed. He invoked the Sudenian prophet’s name like it meant anything to Erik. Still, he kept the bitter words behind his teeth.

  “Perhaps you cannot understand how I could do this to you. Perhaps you can and will not agree. But Erik, there was a reason I raised you as I did. That, for all these long years, I administered the elixir to you.”

  Erik finally stopped, finally looked up. His father’s face was open, naked. Sweat poured down his face, running down his cheeks like tears. Erik felt something sharp in his chest, something very much like how Oslef’s dagger had felt. “Why?” he whispered.

  “So you could save us,” his father whispered.

  He couldn’t help it. Laughter bubbled out of him, gurgled in his throat, racked his body. “Me?” he choked out and gestured to his broken body. “Save you?” It was all some sick, twisted joke—or deep delusion.

  “Not in your present form. You were never meant to be this. When you had become more, become Recarnate.” His father, usually so steady of tongue, stumbled and rushed over the words. “We knew not how to accomplish it, but we had to try. You must understand, we had to. We have as little choice as you in this, if anyone is to survive this.”

  “Survive?” The laughter extinguished like a candle in a cold gale. “I’m having a spot of difficulty with that myself. Because of you.”

  “Erik,” his father said, and he stood up straight, almost looking angry. “Listen to me. He is coming, and if we cannot make you Recarnate, we will not be able to stop him.”

  “Who?” Erik snapped. He couldn’t hold himself back, not even with Persey and Tara looking on behind them. “Who do we need to stop so fucking badly that you would do all this?”

  But his father had grown cold as a glacier before his anger. “A’Qed,” he said softly. “A’Qed is who we need to stop.”

  Erik didn’t feel amusement. Didn’t feel anger. He felt the horrible realization set in, one that so finely explained everything so much better than his father ever could. “You’re mad,” he murmured to the man he’d once called Fafa. “Delusional. And I never knew it.” Not until you were in the middle of the desert, hoping he would resurrect you from death itself. The devilish voice in him was giddy with delight. Mad—like father, like son. He looked to Tara, expecting to see disbelief reflected in her eyes and was surprised to find mortal fear there instead. Her, too, he thought. The whole lot of us, mad.

  His father turned away. “You have come this far, Erik. Come the rest of the way and see the truth of it for yourself.” He looked around, looked over at the sun nearing the horizon. “We are not far now.” He set off walking.

  He was right. Erik had come this far, and he hardly had the strength to turn back. And even if there was no god returning to the world—and how could there be? What gods could there be in a world like this?—there was what Oslef had become. There was some sliver of hope, however slim, that hi
s father was not completely wrong. That Erik didn’t have to die like this. And if there was a chance, he couldn’t help but seize upon it. He’d murdered and let others die to find his cure. Would he let it slip away now?

  He looked at his father, receding over the top of another dune, a trail of bare footprints behind him. Tara and Persey walked up next to him, and she put a tentative hand on his arm. “Let’s go,” she said, her voice cracked with thirst.

  You’ve even sacrificed them for this, the voice mocked as he met her eyes. He tried on a smile, but it didn’t rightly fit.

  The few wisps of clouds remaining in the sky had begun to tint pink. The Shining Mother was near pushed out of the sky, A’Qed’s dark night returned upon the earth, and the broken Er’Lothe of the sky was dark as well. True Dark was upon them, and just in time. Erik couldn’t help a bitter smile as he looked at the faded moon.

  Then, another step forward. Then, a blink.

  The moon was whole.

  Heart hammering, he looked about and saw everything was swiftly washing away. The sands receded from around them, and water rushed in so that now he stood on a little peninsula. The blue in the sky leeched away, and scarlet, orange, and aubergine leaked in. The sun sped downwards like a watch being set, then stopped just shy of the horizon.

  And as suddenly as the transformation began, it ceased, and Erik swallowed. Nothing moved. No wind, no calling gulls, not even the waves, still and sparkling as glass, as if the whole sea had frozen over. And with the stillness came a silence so deep and complete Erik’s fast breathing seemed loud and vulgar.

  Then he looked at the peninsula again and saw he’d missed something before. A shallow pool was set in the sand, and it alone moved in the whole landscape. From its surface curled white wisps of vapor, lazily trailing into the air a long way before dissipating in the sky far above. Lit by the red sun, it almost seemed a pool of fire.