Across the Divide
Tigai’s furs caught enough flakes of snow to wreathe his face in white. Around him, the leaders of the warband wore the same: thick coats, hoods ringed with white-speckled fur. But for differences in height he couldn’t have told them apart.
“Sixty-two,” one of Isaru’s lieutenants said as another pair came trudging across the frozen river. Or perhaps it was a narrow sea; difficult to tell, in the bank of thick fog clinging to the shore. Isaru nodded and repeated the count, with Mei and four more lieutenants standing at his side. Tigai and Yuli stood a few paces away, but close enough to hear the numbers each time new faces were spotted. It served as a mundane distraction, after the horrors of the morning.
The Divide loomed through the fog, a low hum emanating from its shadowy mass. Behind him, the tundra extended as far as he could see, a flat wasteland of snow and ice. Ahead, where the rest of Isaru’s warband had appeared one at a time through the fog, there was only shadow. They’d lived on the other side for weeks, lodged in tents in plain view of its jet-black heights. It felt different, here. More deadly, more present in his thoughts, after he’d spent the morning traversing the jagged turns and crevasses joined together to make the passage through. Sixty-two meant there were two more yet to finish the crossing. They’d set off from the warcamp with a firm count beforehand—repeated twice to be certain of their numbers—and after being among the first through, Isaru and his closest had stayed here, accounting for the rest.
“There.” Mei’s voice, pointing into the fog.
“Sixty-three,” the same lieutenant said, as a lone figure shambled into view.
“Another quarter hour,” Isaru said. “If the last hasn’t come through by then, gather us and make a count to determine who we’ve lost.”
Murmurs of agreement, then Isaru left their circle toward Tigai, laying a hand on his shoulder. He managed not to recoil as Isaru used the gesture to guide him a few paces away, toward the frozen shore.
“Your brother’s wife has the utmost confidence in you,” Isaru said. “Do you feel ready?”
“I know my part,” Tigai said.
Isaru smiled; a false, easy expression born of confidence and power. Men like the warband’s leader were common enough at court. Schemers, who imagined their attentions were uniquely suited to any listener’s circumstance. Little wonder how the man had convinced threescore magi of various persuasions to join him, even here in the wastes.
“Humor me, then,” Isaru said. “How does the Dragon’s gift function? I know it only from observing our enemies; the workings remain a mystery.”
A lie, almost certainly, designed to give them a connection that flattered Tigai. No surer way to charm one’s way into a mark’s smallclothes, proverbial or otherwise, than to get them talking about something they knew well. But for the moment he had to play his part.
“I’ve read your aura, among the strands,” Tigai said. “You have strong connections to three stars, which means you visited them recently, or have a strong need connected to your time there. As I understand, in this case it’s both. A child with my gift could take us there.”
“I see,” Isaru said. “And how do you know one from another? Which ‘star’ is Buzhou, which Sidai, and which Kye-Min?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s up to you. The strongest will be the one you visited most recently, or the one you have a stronger connection to, or both. Rank them for me, and I can guess which will be which.”
“The strongest will be Kye-Min,” Isaru said. “Next, Buzhou. Sidai last.”
He nodded. “Simple enough, then.”
“And how long must you recover, between uses?”
Tigai shrugged. “If I use the strands too often, I’ll get nosebleeds, headaches, or worse, but I can use them again immediately if I have to. It’s worse the farther I travel, and the more I bring with me.”
“Our enemies seem to need rest, sometimes for days between their shifting. It’s been our one advantage—goading them into committing the Dragons, then striking elsewhere.”
“It’s not like that, for me.”
Isaru clapped him on the shoulder. “We are fortunate, to have you joined with our cause, Lord Tigai.”
This time Tigai showed him teeth, though he was spared the need to reply.
“Sixty-four,” Isaru’s lieutenant called out. “That’s it—all accounted for, my lord.”
Isaru and the rest of them turned to see a silhouette cut through the fog. Exhalations and relief spread across the riverbank. A count of sixty-four meant none had been lost to the shadows during the crossing, a difficult enough feat when touching the wrong wall or stumbling a pace in the wrong direction meant vanishing into its depths. But they’d come through, and Isaru was already beaming, calling for the rest of them to gather around him and his lieutenants.
Mei—no, the creature wearing Mei’s face—approached him with a look of determined pride. The look Mei herself would have worn, giving Tigai an opportunity to showcase his worth.
“Dao will be there, in the city,” Mei said. “We’ll be together again soon. And we’ll take up the hunt for Remarin’s captors.”
He made a noise he hoped would pass for tempered excitement, and forced himself to wear a grin. A thousand times harder with her than with Isaru, but he did it. He’d told lies enough to know how to make them feel like the truth. Yuli, strangely enough, was the weakest point of his façade. He barely knew the northern clanswoman, but she’d been finding excuses to hover near him, to be there, when he’d been too long alone.
“My people,” Isaru bellowed over the cutting wind as his followers assembled. “Gather here.” Then, as an aside to Tigai and Mei, he said, “How close must we be, for the Dragon’s gift to work?”
“Close,” Tigai replied. “I’ve never tried at greater than twenty or thirty paces away.”
Isaru nodded, gesturing for all to approach. They came with a mixture of battle-hardened and wide-eyed faces, all stung and reddened by the ice and snow. Not all magi, but the better part by far, at least among those whom Tigai had met and shared revels. Easier to bond with them when he’d believed them to be Mei’s cohorts. Easier to see them as more than tools of a man who intended to tell him lies.
“We go,” Isaru said once they were assembled, “to the city of Kye-Min, the jewel of the peninsula. We will find it already under siege. Our first true strike, to test the arm of our enemies. We have trained for this! We are ready. Follow my lieutenants, once we are there. They know our objectives, and will guide you through the action to come. Do not shy from using your gifts—we are there to remind the populace that the Great and Noble Houses do not have sole grasp of magi powers.”
Tigai watched as the crowd shuffled together into smaller cadres. No one had given him any direction on whom to follow, so he stayed near Isaru and Mei, with Yuli at his side. Isaru turned to him when they were finished.
“We are ready, Lord Tigai,” Isaru said. “Take us into battle.”
A deep breath served to center him, and he closed his eyes. The starfield presented itself at once, a million points of light, surrounding him like a sphere on all sides. Faint strands extended outward as he pushed the sphere, projecting his will to envelop the company. Most of the strands were pale, thin streams of light extending out to wherever home would be for each of them. Isaru’s three points shone brighter, for his three cities of Kye-Min, Buzhou, and Sidai.
He pushed, snapping the strand into place. Isaru had packed his sixty-four magi close enough that Tigai didn’t have to strain. He enveloped them all, then chose a star as far from Kye-Min as possible, a blinking redness far, far to the west. He hooked them through it, and the icy chill on the air vanished, replaced by a furnace blast of parched heat.
A wave of nausea racked his body, and he fought it down, blinking for the barest fraction necessary to reset the strands, catching a glimpse of where he’d taken them. A vista of empty sand dunes, extending toward a shimmering horizon
as far as he could see.
A purple light flashed, and a shout of anger. Breath constricted from his lungs, accompanied by burning pain.
He found another star, hooked a strand around himself and Yuli, and shifted again.
Thunder boomed, rattling the frames of nearby buildings. Jun construction, with Jun paved streets, lined with shattered glass and quiet corpses, caked in blood.
“Where are we?” Yuli said. “How did … what did …?”
Tigai retched, doubling over as the strands took their toll.
“What did you do?” Yuli demanded at last.
“Come on,” Tigai said, struggling back to his feet, taking her arm and pulling her toward the husk of a nearby building. Cannon shot had struck and collapsed it on one side, leaving a heap of rubble where the upper floors fell through.
“What is this?” Yuli said as she staggered behind. “Where is Lord Isaru?”
“Somewhere far the fuck away from here,” Tigai said. “And you’re better off for it, I promise you. He wasn’t what he seemed. None of them were.”
Yuli snatched her hand back from his grip. “What’s going on? I saw, for a moment, sand … You took us somewhere, then …”
“That’s right,” he said. “I took them to the desert and I bloody left them there.”
“You betrayed Isaru Mattai?” she asked. “You betrayed your own sister?”
“No. She wasn’t my sister. Or, my sister by marriage, but—look, never mind. She wasn’t Mei. That fucking bastard used her face, tried to lure me into supporting his cause, but that was never Mei in his camp, only some magi trickery. That meant it was all lies, do you see what I’m telling you?”
“My father pledged me to his cause,” Yuli said. “We were meant to fight against the Great and Noble Houses, and now I am run away like some dog. Where was this desert? Where are we now?”
“Technically you can still join the fight, if you insist,” he said. “We’re in Kye-Min, unless he played me false there, too. I don’t have a clue where I left Isaru and his people. Somewhere far from any water, if the koryu are good.”
Yuli’s skin had paled to a shale gray; he hadn’t noticed before, but now her eyes seemed to be bleeding, tracing droplets of blood down her cheeks.
“Yuli, whatever he told you—are you all right?”
Her limbs had grown thinner, and longer, elevating her above him by a few inches, where he’d had the advantage before.
“You tell me he played you false,” Yuli said. Her voice had thickened somehow, seeming to come from all sides, though her mouth still moved to form the words. “Explain how my clan’s sworn lord is my enemy, and not you.”
By now she was a full head taller than she had been, her arms and legs elongated to form a stooping posture that was difficult to see in full beneath her heavy furs. Her face had grown longer, more angular, exaggerating her already-too-prominent nose and jaw, and when she spoke it revealed her teeth had been replaced by jagged points. Her skin was full gray now, as though her too-thin body had been wholly carved from stone.
“Oh bloody fucking fire spirits,” he said. “I took you with me to save you from a fate you didn’t deserve.” He took a step back into the rubble, and she followed, leaning toward him like a hunting hound sighting a fox. “You didn’t bloody—though I suppose, for you to be a magi, too …”
Metal points had pierced the fingers of her gloves, long and thin as knives.
“Look,” he continued, “my brother, Dao, and his wife were captured by the magi, when they took me. Isaru’s Mei wasn’t her. I tested her, used something she should have known. It meant the whole thing was lies. His Mei wasn’t mine. Some kind of skinchanger, or illusion. If he was lying, then I wasn’t going to help him do a damned thing. I don’t give a fuck about his war, or the magi or anything else. I just want to find the prisoners they took. My brother, his wife, and our master-at-arms.”
He blinked by reflex, looping a strand between Yuli and somewhere far away in case she took another step.
Instead she stopped.
“Hyman Three Winds warned me,” Yuli said. “The day my father came back from the hunt, with Isaru Mattai at his side. He claimed my father would never pledge a Clan Hoskar warrior to a foreigner. He insisted some devilry had bewitched our chief; that it could not be the same man.”
Tigai exhaled sharply. “It probably wasn’t,” he said. “It was probably the same creature that made me think Mei had gone over to support him.”
In an eyeblink Yuli was back to how he’d known her at the camp: tall, but only almost of a height with him, blond-haired with a too-large nose, her face covered with tattoos, with no sign of the ash-gray skin, jagged teeth, and metal shivs for hands.
“You say your family, they were taken as prisoners?” Yuli asked. “How can you be sure?”
“I can’t,” he said. “But what other choice is there? If they might be alive, I have to find them.”
Yuli nodded, and the building frame shook again, this time from thunder landing closer, spilling dust from the half-collapsed floors above.
She stepped away, looking upward with a mix of uncertainty and awe.
“I’ve never been to any of the hundred cities,” Yuli said. “Where should we begin?”
“There are two armies here,” he said. “And one of them is expecting magi reinforcements. Let’s be what they expect, and see if we can learn whatever they might know.”
44
SARINE
Waterfront
The City of Kye-Min, the Jun Empire
Shelter sprang up around them as the war canoe slid onto the rocks. Acherre was out first, with Ka’Inari close behind. They’d veered away from the harbor using a combination of Shelter, Red, and Body in lieu of lost oars, pushing off against miniature barriers to propel them through the waves. Only a few shots and arrows had come their way; the strange, square-sailed ships had seemed intent on hurling projectiles at each other, or trying to ram their enemies, and hadn’t shown interest in pursuing the tiny war canoe materialized from nothing in their midst. Though now their canoe had reached the shore, and drawn soldiers out of hiding to face them.
“Stay down,” Acherre shouted. Shelter hissed between the roars of gunshots, sending up wisps of smoke where it dissolved projectiles into heat. The beach where they’d made landfall had seemed no more than a plot of gardens and villas overlooking the sea, but soldiers swarmed from its buildings as soon as their canoe ran onto the rocks. They wore painted armor in reds and blacks, their domed metal caps reflecting the sunlight as they took up firing positions on the far side of a waist-high stone wall.
“Magi,” Sarine heard the soldiers shout, a cry raised from twenty voices at once. “Magi on the shore.”
“We shouldn’t—” Ka’Inari began, his words drowned into a thundering roar of smoke from their guns.
Acherre had loosened her carbine, somehow still slung on her belt, even after their fall through the void of the Divide. Her back was pressed against Shelter’s blue haze, and without warning two more Acherres sprang into being, exact copies, each one seeming to be preparing to fire.
Sarine blinked to add her Shelter to Acherre’s. The leylines here shone like glittering gemstones, seemingly endless reserves of every energy, from the green pods of Life to Faith’s shimmering haze. The bellows of gunfire shattered thoughts before they could form. They’d stumbled into a battle, but there was nothing to give an inkling of who was fighting whom, or why.
Acherre shouted something, perhaps no more than a wordless cry, and the soldiers along the villa wall threw down their guns and ran.
Axerian stepped from the boat, wearing his familiar grin.
Yellow, Anati thought to her. That was Yellow.
Sarine blinked. She should have thought of that. Damn if the crossing hadn’t muddled her senses.
“Trouble with the landing?” Axerian said. “We shouldn’t let—”
A cocoon of white energy flared around him, and he staggered
backward, knocked off-balance into the rocks.
“Axerian!” Sarine shouted.
All three Acherres leveled their carbines, belching a shot over top of the Shelter barrier, and the lone soldier left manning the villa wall snapped his head back, his helmet flying backward as a spurt of blood fountained into the air.
A high-pitched whine sounded in her ears as Sarine rushed to Axerian’s side, tethering strands of Body and Life into him, probing for sign of injury. He waved her away, and she read his lips and gestures before she could hear him say, “I’m fine. Bloody heavens, I’m fine.”
“You missed one,” Acherre said, rising from behind her barrier and reloading her carbine. The rest of the beach had cleared in an instant, all sign of the enemy soldiers scattered by the terror of Axerian’s Yellow.
Sarine pulled Axerian to his feet. “We need to move,” she said. “Even if only to get away from here.”
“Wholeheartedly agreed,” Axerian said. He spat for emphasis. “Just my sort of luck, to meet a magi in the first detachment of their soldiers.”
“More coming.” Ka’Inari pointed behind them, toward the harbor. Sarine turned to see three of the massive ships converging toward them, their decks swarming with men in yellow and white armor, lowering boats already rowing toward the shore.
“What did we stumble into?” she asked.
Axerian turned back, scanning the harbor as though it were no more than a minor object of interest. “A war, I expect. Though who can say which side these soldiers think we’re on.”
“What can you tell us about them?”
He gave an exaggerated shrug. “Too many differences each cycle for there to be anything reliable. But if there are magi on the field, that means the Great and Noble Houses are here. Just the sort we came looking to find.”
“Ka’Inari?” she asked.
The shaman shook his head. “Things are clouded here … I need time to consider what the spirits’ sendings mean.”
“A guess, then. Anything at all.”
“Danger. Hope. A woman in a tower. A mesh, dark with points of light, like a pattern woven from the night sky.”
Blood of the Gods Page 40