by Rachel Dunne
Joros stared at the jar, turning it in his hands, felt the mage’s eyes following the motion. She’d been working on this for years, she said, and this the first he’d heard of it. Secrets were the lifeblood of Mount Raturo, the currency of the Ventallo, and yet, somehow, a soft smile had made him think otherwise. He was very careful in how he said, “I wasn’t aware the Ventallo were looking for slaves.”
Silence stretched out. The mage’s breathing was loud, even. Haro stood against the far wall, his eyes alert, muscle-thick arms flexing over his chest.
“There are many things you’re not aware of, Octeiro,” she said softly, turning the title into a faint insult. “You would do well to remember that.”
Joros met her eyes, and didn’t break the contact as he inclined his head ever so slightly. “As you say, Tredeira.”
The silence stretched again, their eyes locked, and she was the first to weaken. He’d known she would be. Her face shifted into a pout, and she draped herself across his lap, finger tapping against his chest. “Why do you have such trouble accepting gifts?”
Joros bit back the first three replies that came to mind and said instead, “He seems like more trouble than he’s worth.” His hand moved up her back, fingers burying in her thick hair. Across the room, Haro silently drifted away. The mage still knelt before them, eyes flickering.
“He’s a good boy. I’m sure you’ll find use for him.” Her hand flattened against his chest, the smile returning to her lips. “And I’m sure you can think of some way to thank me properly.”
The mage, Anddyr, was a mumbler. He ducked through the doorway to Joros’s chambers, peering into the corners and muttering to himself before settling his back against a wall and curling his long arms around his knees. He sat there, staring and mumbling and flinching, and the only time he did anything different was when Joros would move. No matter how small the motion, the mage’s eyes would focus on Joros with the intensity of light through a pinhole.
It was unsettling, to say the least, and it put Joros strongly in mind of the damned boy-twin. The only difference was that this particular maniac could tear him to pieces with a twist of his fingers. Dirrakara had assured him that her skura would keep Anddyr docile, but Joros didn’t like the risk of the mage gaining his mind back and turning first on his new master.
He had to pen a quick reply to his shadowseeker in the capital, Mercetta, before he could turn his attention to the mage, and by the time he sealed the missive, the muttering was already beginning to grate. Joros reminded himself of the mage who’d called fire from the sky, took a calming breath, and said in the most pleasant tone he could manage, “Anddyr, why don’t you come here.”
The mage startled, blinked owlishly, and then slowly rose to his feet. He walked like a new-birthed foal just learning the skill, tottering to Joros’s side and standing there blinking like he’d just woken. “Sit,” Joros said, gesturing to the other chair nearby, and the speed with which the mage hurried to comply reminded Joros of Dirrakara’s words, a susceptibility to suggestion . . . He settled into the chair, and almost looked like a normal person again, something small changing in his face. “How did you come to be here, Anddyr?” Joros asked, still trying to sound pleasant. It didn’t come easy to his voice, but he considered it worth the effort—a small amount of kindness might be enough to stay the mage’s powerful hand should he ever fly into a maniacal rage.
The mage blinked again, opened his mouth. Nothing came out right away, but Joros resisted the impulse to prompt him. Finally he managed, “I was accosted.” His voice was rough, likely from all the screaming he’d done under Dirrakara’s supervision. “On the West Road. Where am I?”
“Ah . . .” Joros gave his answer some thought. He wouldn’t have chosen to keep a virtual slave, but it seemed he had little choice in the matter, and this would be the first step in breaking the news to the broken man. Potentially, the first chance to see what explosive form the mage’s anger took. “You’re from the Highlands, yes?” An easy question with an obvious answer—something in the Highlands blood made mages. Any children born of mixed Fiateran and Highlands stock had a tendency to not make it to the Academy quick enough to tame the boiling of magic that came on young mages so suddenly. With his powers already proven, this mage had clearly trained at the Academy. Anddyr nodded a vague affirmative to the question. “You’ve seen the Tashat Mountains?” Another nod. “This is a mountain as well, though more impressive than any of the Tashats. It’s where you’ll be living now.”
The mage’s wide eyes fixed on Joros with an unsettling clarity, and though he spoke only one word, it was layered with understanding: “Why?”
It was rare that Joros ever spoke with full honesty. Past attempts had taught him that doing so rarely worked to his own benefit. There was a crackling in the air, though, a strange hazing between Joros and the mage that made the hairs of his arms stand. So while he didn’t speak with full honesty, it was with more than he afforded nonmages, who couldn’t set the very air afire. “I don’t know why you were taken, or why I was chosen. I don’t know why we’ve been thrown together, and that’s the honest truth.” Claiming something as true was more likely to make the listener believe it—that was a wonderful trick he’d learned. He claimed all sorts of things were true. “I know it’s a poor lot you’ve been given, and I’d set you free if I could, Anddyr.” Saying the mage’s name seemed to sharpen his eyes, and Joros wanted the mage focused on the sincerity he made sure was dripping from his words. The tone was just as important as the words themselves. “But we’re bound together by something beyond my understanding, and I don’t think there’s any getting away from it. We’ll both just have to make the best of the shit hands we’ve been dealt.” The mage was still staring, the air still crackling; a voice in Joros’s mind whispered, a susceptibility to suggestion . . . “I’d like us to be allies, Anddyr.” That sharpening of the eyes again, and then a softness spread through the mage’s face, the dry air dissipating like a storm.
“Yes,” he said in his scratchy voice, and after a beat added a whispered, “cappo.” The title meant master, in the Old Tongue. He wondered where the mage had learned to use it.
“Good, Anddyr. Excellent.” He didn’t know if this had been enough to save him from the mage’s fiery wrath, but it felt a start. “There’s something we should do, if we’re to be true allies.” Joros rose and found a pair of attuned seekstones, one of the old magics lost to time. They seemed a simple enough thing, allowing the holder of one stone to see through the eyes of the one who held the other. Easy to use, yet apparently impossible to reproduce; in the centuries of history covered by the ancient tomes carefully stored in the bowels of the mountain, none had ever been able to create a new seekstone. Luckily, those long-ago Fallen who’d had the trick of making the seekstones had thought far enough ahead to fill a literal vault with the things, so there was no shortage; still, the knowledge would have been nice.
Joros hesitated, not sure how this would go. He held a small knife in one hand, sharp-tipped, not unlike the one Dirrakara had stuck in that same hand earlier. “Anddyr,” he said softly, “I need your blood.” The mage’s brows knit, but he showed no other reaction. “Give me your hand,” Joros tried instead, and the mage promptly stuck out his hand. Useful, that. Joros pierced the pad of Anddyr’s thumb with the knife, pressed his thumb briefly to each seekstone—a smear of blood to spark the magic, the red dissipating into both stones with a swirl. The magics of those original Fallen seemed to rely heavily on blood.
Stringing one stone on a leather thong, Joros passed it to Anddyr and, still using the pleasant tone, commanded, “Put that around your neck, and cast a spell so it stays there.” Joros narrowed his eyes briefly. “Something so complicated even you can’t undo it.” The mage did as he was told, muttering and waving his fingers around, and by the end of it Joros couldn’t pull the seekstone from around his neck no matter how much force he put behind it; nearly strangled the mage trying.
Per
haps there was some value in Dirrakara’s gift . . . He wouldn’t say he was thankful for being a part of her experimenting, but the mage might have some use, and there was a simple way to put him to the test. He rose, and the mage stumbled along dutifully in his wake.
Deep within the mountain, the impressionability still proved useful enough; at a word, the mage was scrambling to move the pile of bones until he knelt before the tunnel mouth, gaping like a fish in the faint wash of sunlight.
“Anddyr,” Joros said, speaking slowly as he would to a child, “seal up this tunnel.”
The mage’s brow furrowed, eyes staring hard at the tunnel. Finally he raised his hands and began moving his fingers. It was like watching him weave on an invisible loom. The Highlanders guarded the secrets of their magic jealously, so Joros had no idea whether the finger-waving was actually doing anything, or if the mage might just be playing him for a fool. He jumped as a loud grinding noise filled the storeroom, chains clanking and carcasses shaking as they jolted on their hooks. The rock itself seemed to melt, flowing down like mud to cover the tunnel opening, and then the room slowly settled back into silence. The mage looked up to Joros, face hopeful. “Like that?”
“How did you do that?” Joros demanded.
The mage flinched, trying to curl in on himself. “It’s a simple merging,” he whimpered. “Like calls to like.”
Joros glared distrustfully down at the mage—true, Anddyr had done exactly as he’d asked, but Joros hadn’t really expected it—until those words bumped up against something in Joros’s brain and set off a small cascade of ideas. A single, shining thought dropped into place.
For the first time in many years, Joros laughed.
CHAPTER 7
All of Keiro’s life had been walking.
Walking with his father, from town to town to town, looking for work, any work that would put coin in their pockets or food in their bellies. Walking the same roads and same towns even after his father died, until he’d realized his feet could walk him where he pleased instead.
Walking alone, more often than not, though there were companions, for minutes or hours or days, as long as their feet happened to walk the same roads. A tinker, who had taught him how to put an edge back on a knife so dull it couldn’t cut soup. A scribe, who’d patiently taught him his letters. A mercenary, who’d taught him all the bawdy songs she knew, just to watch Keiro’s cheeks flame red. A carpenter, who’d taught him how to make the best sort of walking stick, one that could be used as a weapon if it came to it on the long lonely roads. And then there was the preacher, who’d taught him his life’s true path.
Pelir, his name was, and they’d met the same way it always went. Feet coming together on the dusty road, pleasantries exchanged, conversation started. He was an old man, Pelir, wearing a black hooded robe that dragged around his feet, so that the hem was swirled brown and red with dirt, and he wore a black cloth bound about his eyes. Keiro thought he was blind, but the old man laughed at that. “I’m not brave enough, boy, or learned enough, not yet,” he’d said, and Keiro hadn’t understood. But the road had kept them together, and Pelir had spoken of his gods, the ones trapped beneath the earth, and Keiro had listened, and learned, and began to understand.
They had walked together, all the way to the foot of Mount Raturo, where Pelir had told him he must make the rest of the journey alone. A stone door had opened at his touch, and closed after him before Keiro could do more than gape. Then Keiro had walked alone again for a time, the long and twisting journey up the mountain, armed with the ancient words to send the Sentinels back to their sleep, with naught but the cold and the whistling air for company. His feet and his sturdy walking stick had brought him safely to the top, and Pelir had been waiting for him within.
Walking, then, the twisting halls of hollow Raturo, learning from all who would teach, learning all he could, until they sent him back out into the world with a black robe and a small seekstone strung around his neck.
Walking as a preacher, with Fratarro’s gentle heart and Sororra’s unyielding purpose held close. Walking, again, the same paths he’d walked with his father, though it was different now, more different than he could have imagined.
He’d gotten used to the scorn and the mockery, the petty cruelty, had even come to accept the blind hatred. “They are who they are,” he would tell himself on the long road out of town, “shaped as they have been shaped. It is not their fault.” It didn’t make the jeers and the beatings any easier, but it made the too-rare spark of understanding, of recognition, that much more precious.
He would never, though, get used to the drownings.
The first one he’d seen had sent him walking farther than he’d ever walked before or since, to the edges of the Northern Wastes, as far as he could get from Mount Raturo and all those within. He’d gone as far as he could, trying to escape one faith that could drive a village to drown two innocent babes for the crime of being born together, and another faith that couldn’t stop it. But he had walked back, eventually, because he believed still—and more, he believed that the drownings could be stopped. That the Long Night would come, that he could help bring it about, and that no more twins would be drowned thereafter.
But still the sun rose, and still twins were born, and still they were drowned by the heartless followers of the Parents. And still, staring eyes danced in his memories, eyes too big for such tiny faces, eyes full of terror and innocence.
His feet took him home now, as was his habit after a drowning. By his count, it had been nearly two years since he’d last set his feet inside the mountain—he preferred the open places, where a man could always walk toward the horizon and never touch it. His heart was heavy, though, like a stone dragging down a fishing net, and there was a comfort to home. His feet took him through the trees and the fields and the wild places, far from the kind of people who could kill an infant and call it holy. Through the farmlands where preachers lived a simple life, tending the flocks and fields that kept Raturo’s storerooms stocked. He heard them call out as he passed, greet him in the name of the Twins. It would have been welcoming, another time. Now, though, he only wished to be done with walking for a time. He finally reached the only place he could name home, Mount Raturo, and he began the climb with Sororra’s Eyes watching him, and all the babies’ eyes haunting him.
The mountain knew him, remembered Keiro’s scent and the blood he’d shed on his first ascent, but it took long hours of climbing to find a door that would open to his touch. The doors were keyed to ranking, and Keiro was a preacher of no great repute: a preacher who couldn’t bear the darker side of that which he preached, who crumbled inside at the sight of tiny pale bodies bobbing in the water. It was a wonder the Sentinels had ever let him pass to begin with. “You’ve a gentle heart,” Pelir had said, but he’d said it sadly, the night before he sent Keiro back out into the world with his new black robe and his black eyecloth. Keiro hadn’t understood the sadness in that then.
The halls of Raturo were dark, dark as they always were, with lights the barest glimmer. Keiro’s feet knew the way to his old teacher’s room, and he watched them take it, unable to lift his eyes for the shame and the grief that swirled within him. He didn’t knock at the door, but simply entered; Pelir turned his cloth-bound eyes up as Keiro stepped into the room and knelt before the blinded man. Leathery, unshaking hands rested on his head as Pelir murmured a greeting, a blessing, and it was the simple kindness as much as anything else that broke Keiro.
More tears still for the dead babes, for all the staring eyes he could never forget, for all the tiny twins he’d laid to rest over all his walking years, and through the tears he managed to say, “I will do it, brother. I will make the sacrifice.” He didn’t know he meant to say the words, but there was a rightness to them. It was a small thing, after all, and a fitting punishment for all the babes he hadn’t saved. Perhaps he would finally stop seeing their eyes, staring with a simple grief that was harder to bear than recrimination would hav
e been.
Things moved quickly, then, in the sacred halls of Mount Raturo. No one could fault the disciples of the Twins for being ill-prepared. With Pelir at his side, and as many preachers as could hear the shouted news trailing behind, Keiro made his way down and down to the deepest parts of Raturo.
The Ventallo were waiting in their black robes with Sororra’s Eyes blazing over their hearts, as many of them as could be found or bothered to attend. Seven sets of their feet, Keiro counted, and it was more than enough. Uniro himself was there, Delcerro Uniro with his thin neck and shaking hands, who had lasted as Uniro longer than any had expected. Keiro supposed it was an honor, but still his eyes stayed on his feet. He couldn’t seem to bring himself to look at anything else.
The assembled Ventallo parted, making way for Keiro to walk through their ranks and into the cold chamber beyond. The ghost lights flickered there in the big cavern, their icy light making the air seem even colder. The others followed after him, the Ventallo and Pelir and all the others who had come to bear witness. They walked until they came to the edge of the frozen lake, and then Keiro walked on alone, watching his feet take him across the ice. They stopped before the Icefall, water long ago frozen midtumble, and Keiro reached out to wrap his fingers around a cold spine. It came away with a snap that echoed throughout the cavern, the sound of a bone shattering. He carried it before him in his two hands, as the youngest midwife had carried the girl-child, and he knelt before the black robes and held it up for their inspection.
“I dedicate myself to the Twins,” he said simply. He couldn’t remember the worlds Pelir had used, years ago, but he didn’t think it mattered. “I am theirs, and they shall guide me through the dark.”
“Let it be so,” Uniro said in his high, querulous voice.
Finally Keiro turned up his face, looking into the dark heights of the cavern, and he raised up the icicle, and with a sigh of relief brought its tip down into his right eye.