by Jenna Rhodes
“I don’t want to look at him.”
“Try it anyway. You are Vaelinar, yes, but you have a Kerith River Goddess bound into your very being and . . . something else. You should be able to see what I can only sense, and most others are blind to. Study him, Rivergrace.” His words were low, pitched for her ears alone, but there was steel tempered in them, steel that made her flinch as he uttered them.
“Anything you can see in him, any weakness, may be our key to surviving his intentions.”
“Escaping is our survival.”
“Not all things are escapable.” His embrace left her ribs as he lifted his hand to under her chin, forcing her to focus on Quendius. “Look.”
She swallowed tightly. Viewed mostly from the rear, a little to the side, Quendius sat tall in his saddle, broad-shouldered, silver-gray bared arms freed by the sleeveless vest he wore. Those same arms were corded with muscle, strength learned from decades of working at the forge and in the field with the weapons he tempered. The legs were equally as strong, no weakness in the calves as the leather pants curved tightly to them. Grace closed her eyes a moment, and then reopened them. She was not at all sure what Narskap asked of her. Healers could look at a person and sometimes pick out the thread that did not belong in their complex weaving, that thread being the illness or injury that plagued them. But she wasn’t a healer in Vaelinar terms. She could heal and did, by virtue of touch, absorbing that into herself that she found wrong when she touched someone. It was not a skill she practiced often, and her vision had little to do with it. Narskap removed his hand from her throat and chin, sun moving to dapple her chilled skin where he had touched her. Quendius had none of the lines of refined strength that attracted her in Sevryn. Instead, his was a crude and demanding strength, one that she found intimidating to look at. And, yet, it seemed that portrait was one that Quendius fought to project: hardened strength, not one of refinement or power coiled in waiting. Head on, strong-as-a-bull qualities.
“Lily was a weaver. Tell me how that man is woven.”
“I can’t do that!”
“I think you can. Try for me.”
Rivergrace made a small sound of exasperation before narrowing her eyes at Quendius. He wasn’t a man she wished to be on the same continent with, let alone within riding distance. If he were a weaving on Lily’s loom, he’d be threads of arrogance, crossed by others of violence, the warp and weft of his existence. There would be other threads to fill in the pattern: anger, hate, a sly intelligence, a joy at the pain of others, all these things she knew about him. There was much she didn’t know about him and never would want to: those areas were huge, gaping holes in the weave. But as she worked in her mind and then looked at him, she saw.
Saw the bared threads of the man’s existence. She sucked in a long, slow breath, her hands dropping to her father’s arm and gripping tightly to steady herself.
“What is it?”
“I can’t describe it.” She took a breath that quavered as it filled her lungs. “He’s coated with this oily darkness. It slithers around him as though it were alive. There are huge gaps in his weave, and among all the darkness, all the wrong and knotted patterns, there are silver-and-gold threads that don’t seem to belong. I can’t . . . I can’t see anything else.” Nor could she bear to, she thought, no matter what her father asked of her. The sight of Quendius stuck in her throat with a sick, stinking coating that threatened to suffocate her as if merely by looking she drank it in. She shuddered.
Narskap put one scarred hand over her eyes. “Do not follow his web.”
She closed her eyes behind the coolness of his palm. “The silver threads are Vaelinar. I’ve seen them before.”
“His heritage. But why gold? There is nothing of light about the man at all.”
“I don’t know.” She put her hands up to bring his down.
“You didn’t see the magic in him? His Talent?”
“No.”
“He has the eyes! He has to have a Talent in his blood.”
“Sevryn doesn’t have the eyes, yet he does have the magic. It could be the reverse with Quendius.”
“No. I smell it on him from time to time. Magic has a stink to it.”
She took his hand from her eyes to look at the man riding several horse lengths ahead of them. “If he does, then it comes from the abyss.” Her head throbbed, but she picked at the essence of magics about them, and when she touched again upon the oily, dark strings emanating from Quendius, her heart took a leap that felt as though it landed at the back of her throat. She examined the web carefully, even as doing so repulsed her.
Then she spoke ever so softly. “Narskap. He sees, but he does not see as we do, and he hasn’t discovered it yet. We see the threads of life that weave our world about us. He sees only the thread of death. If he learns to tug on those threads, to weave them as he wills or to snap them entirely, he will learn to destroy at will. Can’t you see it on him?”
Narskap didn’t answer for a very long time, until he had breathed again, and his breaths were so far apart she could barely discern them, and would not if she hadn’t been leaning against him. The Undead breathe, but very rarely. “Are you certain?”
“Yes, as you should be. I have died once, and you stand on the threshold between. If anyone can be certain, it should be us.”
“He’s had centuries to learn himself and although he creates tools of destruction, he’s never shown an inkling that he needs no tools. He seeks chaos and thrives in it.”
“He may be blind to his abilities, but he won’t always be. He has been content to use you, but what happens when that no longer satisfies him? We need to leave him dead behind us.” She said it barely audibly, the words disgusting her as she uttered them, but she knew they were true.
“Not yet. I don’t know what we might unleash if we do. I’m not saying that you’re not right. I’m saying only that the universes have their laws and I don’t know yet what kind of backlash we invite when we deal with Quendius.”
“Backlash?”
“What if meeting death is all it takes for him to learn what he is capable of? We could unleash the very Talents we fear. You’ve reminded me that I ought to be able to see more than you of his potentials. I’ve been studying him from the living side. Now, I need to walk among the ashes.” Narskap raised his hand again, to place his cool palm on her forehead. “Now rest a bit.”
His touch felt oddly soothing as she closed her eyes and relaxed in her father’s hold. She remembered days from so long ago she barely knew how to walk, exploring the vast underground river in the mining cavern where they lived, the three of them, her mother and father like silver flames in the semidarkness. Her singing. His strong arms rocking her to sleep. Protecting her. His strong voice talking with her mother, planning on how to free them. The horse moving in a swaying walk that lulled her back to sleep, despite her worry.
“Mik is nearly dead.”
Rivergrace stirred at the gravelly voice. Narskap put a heel to his mount’s flank, swinging him about to watch.
The raider speaking reined his horse up and lifted his short sword, prepared to hasten the event, knowing his commander would demand the man abandoned immediately.
Quendius put his hand up. “Leave him. I have a need for him yet.”
The blade halted in midair, a silvery splinter that caught the sun and looked as if it could part the sky itself. Quendius smiled at it as if in memory of his forges and his men, and of their workings in fine weapons. He wheeled his horse around to block the horse next to him, threading his way through the pack to clasp his hand upon Narskap’s bony shoulder. “It is your turn.” He ignored Rivergrace as though she did not, for the moment, exist. He had been ignoring her for days.
Her Undead father moved his head about slowly, bones creaking under paper-thin skin. “For what?” A peculiar tension brought his shoulders back.
They all of them smelled of campfire smoke and sweat and horse lather, odors that overwhelmed Grace, all except for Narskap who smelled of horse, a little, and . . . what? A dried herb and perhaps a faint, musty smell, like something which had been put in a trunk long ago and just brought back to light. He no longer smelled of the living. Grace felt him shift behind her. “And you believe this is something I know how to do.”
“I have the proof before me.”
“You assume it was voluntary. And, even if it were something I knew how to do, why would I wish to curse another being with this?”
“Your wishes hardly matter to me as long as Rivergrace’s welfare concerns you. I thought we had an agreement, you and I.” Quendius tilted his head as if listening to the lifeblood rattling in the throat of the dying man. “We have little time. This isn’t a choice you get to make, I’ve made it for you.”
Narskap’s attention went to Mik and flicked back to Quendius. “If you would be a God, be a compassionate one and let him go. If not, do it yourself.” He raked a hand over his face, welts tore through his cheek and then sealed, all without pain or blood. Quendius watched the gesture hungrily. “I would wish this on no man.”
“And I,” Quendius said, leaning out of his saddle and into Narskap’s face, “would do it to any. Give me an army, Narskap, an army that does not feel pain or stop fighting to bleed. If you don’t, your precious daughter and her family will suffer as long as they have a thumbnail’s worth of skin upon their bodies and a drop of blood to lose. I will enjoy finding ways to keep them alive while I invent their torture.” Then and only then did he drop his hot gaze on Rivergrace, and she found her heart quaking as he did. She thought of the short sword sheathed on her father’s hip and the palm of her hand itched.
She could feel him straighten and raise his chin. “You don’t want to threaten me.”
“Oh, but I do, dear hound. I have spent many a decade threatening you, and it simply binds you closer to my heels and my wishes. Now do this for me, or Mik will spend the last candlemark of his life in more agony than a dying man deserves to be, followed shortly by your girl.”
Narskap shifted away from him, from his hold on his shoulder and putting his sword out of Rivergrace’s reach as though he had read her desperate thought to take it from his hand and drive it home, and swung down from his mount. The horse dropped his head to the ground and began to lip dispiritedly at bruised grass sprouts. They traded a long look. She shook her head ever so faintly. Narskap’s only response was to lift a bony shoulder and drop it, nearly imperceptibly, as if to negate her concern. He looked to Quendius. “As you wish.”
Quendius smiled thinly in triumph.
The raider chief and another of his men cut the lashes that had bound the mortally wounded brigand to his saddle and lifted Mik to the ground. Narskap’s shadow fell over him, a casting hardly more substantial than he was, thin and wavering. Mik’s eyelids batted wildly as he groaned and then subsided into the choking rattling noise he had been making. Rivergrace saw Narskap’s eyes widen and a glint lit them, a gleam from deep within him that shut her, and all else around him, out. She put her hand over her mouth as she realized how lost he was. The metallic smell of fresh blood flooded her senses and she realized it would drive away the other’s control. She dug her hands into the saddle to steady herself as she watched his face and lost all that she knew of the man who had been her father and the being who had been her nemesis as he became something else altogether.
Narskap went to one knee beside the injured man’s sodden flank. He forgot Quendius. He forgot Rivergrace. All he could remember was fresh blood.
The taste of it lay on his tongue though he never brought his fingers to his mouth as he touched the man, the warmth of it warmed him like a banked fire, and the sticky, silken sensation of it washed over him as though he’d bathed himself in the man’s essence. He could feel a life stirring in him that he had not felt in weeks, not since he had died, or nearly died, on the fields of Ashenbrook. It awakened and stretched rasping claws through him from the inside out and he knew that this thing, this obscenity that kept him pretending to live was hungry. It had him and it hungered for more.
And as it did, he finally knew what it was that had kept him alive, and Narskap mourned the knowledge as Cerat, Demon Souldrinker and ancient nemesis, reached through him and hooked a claw in Mik.
It slurped at the dying man. It ripped hanks of flesh from him, though no one could see it but Narskap, as the victim groaned and let out a shriek and drummed his heels on the ground with the last of his strength. Even as Cerat devoured, the Demon offered a deal to its meal. A life for a life, more or less, and Narskap could feel a burning at his fingers as the power to consummate filled his hand. A touch, a tacit agreement, and the tattered man would become what Narskap was. “You don’t want this,” Narskap whispered hoarsely, in a voice low enough for only the two of them to hear. Mik’s eyelids flung wide open and he stared into Narskap, raised his hands and grabbed Narskap by the collar, forcing him down into Mik’s face and for the briefest of moments, Narskap saw Cerat’s white-hot gleam burning back at him. Mik opened his mouth, working for words, and never found them.
He batted Mik’s hands away and let the Souldrinker take what it could. The man went still immediately, and the warmth left him as if it had never been, Cerat sucking what he could from the dead corpse but not finding the anchor it needed to stay and reanimate him, because Narskap blocked him from that last, satisfying morsel.
Narskap rocked back on his heels. Bloody sweat dotted his brow before he wiped it away on the back of his arm. He looked up to find Quendius watching him closely. “I almost had him.”
“I know.” The corner of Quendius’ mouth drew back wryly. “Better luck next time.” He straightened. “Bury what you can, shallow, we’ve got ground to cover.”
Narskap struggled to his feet and none of the raiders put out a hand to help him. Blood drenched his fingers, and he looked at himself, but the urge to lick them clean had fled. He dumped part of his waterskin over them and wiped himself as best he could, the warmth gone, the stickiness gone, the aching promise gone.
Quendius held his horse’s reins out to him. “No matter,” he said. His glance ranged over his remaining men, those hale and those wounded. “You’ll have more practice. You’re almost certain to have it right before I decide to kill Rivergrace.”
CEYLA FELL AS MUCH as she dismounted from the fork of the tree that held her tired, punished body, dropping to the underground with a crackle and a snap of breaking twigs. At least, she prayed they were twigs. She stayed in a crouch while she took an inventory of her body—aches, bruises, and all—before moving cautiously to her feet. The sweeping branches of the tree enveloped her, almost as though she had wings, and kept her hidden in the early evening shadows. Deep in sleep during the day, she heard, or thought she had heard, horsemen moving through at a distance and listened intently now, wondering if she could still hear them. Or even if she had heard them at all. Only the muted sounds of twilight reached her, that time when wildlife of the day began to seek shelter and the nocturnal citizens began to rustle awake. Like those caught in the dusk, she needed to find water and she drifted out of her leafy wings to search for it.
She’d been untroubled by visions the last two days, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted when she’d found shelter, which Ceyla welcomed, but at the same time she felt cast adrift. Other than the singular destiny burning inside her, she was now more or less on her own. It was times like these that left her wondering if she knew what she thought she knew or if she were simply insane. She squeezed a fist closed. No use thinking that way, or any other way, because she had little control over what happened to her mind. It guided her, it obstructed her, but she di
d not know life without it. What others thought, how they thought, she could only suppose because she was different and would always be different. Her nails bit into her palm.
It came to her that she heard no sounds of the horse. Nothing. She’d left him lightly hobbled so that he could graze, but no cropping or any other sign that he existed met her listening. Horses were not noisy creatures, but they had patterns of sound Ceyla could expect to hear.
A breeze ruffled through the edge of the forest, bringing with it the furtive sounds of those awakening into the night. The touch of wind felt good on her face although she knew she might be chilled and damp before dawn rose again. She took cautious steps toward the noise, thinking she might be tracking those headed for water even though she could not yet hear the water itself. The horse would surely have sought out water; she’d just be following. Ceyla kept moving, stretching her sore muscles, feeling the scabs on her various scratches tug on her legs as she did. Her stomach knotted in a hunger cramp. She needed food, more than roots and berries if she could find it, but even a quantity of those would fill her growling need. She pushed forward faster, eager to find water and perhaps a fish in its depths.
Ceyla heard a distinctive noise. She moved in its direction, listening intently as she did, unable to identify just what it was she heard. Hooves? Or something else? She stilled again, frozen in her footsteps. A leaf, dangling from an overhead branch, tickled her forehead. She batted it away irritably. Then the smell came to her. Tentative, weak, coppery. Could it be . . . ? She inhaled again, gently, mouth half-open, tasting as much as she smelled. Yes. Blood on the air. Ceyla turned her head, undecided which direction to go. She needed water. Predators hunted those who moved to water instinctively, day after day. Inevitably. Predators went where the prey went.