Seeking Sorrow (Guardians of Terath Book 1)

by Zen DiPietro

  “I’m sorry you lost her.”

  “I am too. She was strong and loving and remarkable. Still, we must accept what is. If I hadn’t joined the order, had not received this assignment, I might never have met you. Or Will, or Meli. Or met Luc again. I definitely wouldn’t be a manahi, and that’s already changing me. I can’t wish for the things I don’t have without wishing away the things I do have.”

  “Do you believe in destiny?”

  “No. I believe people make the best of what they have, and sometimes, the result is pretty amazing.”

  His grin lit his whole face as he realized she was talking about him. The fact that she had inspired the expression gave her a pride of accomplishment far out of proportion to the actual deed. She loved his easy manner. His openness disarmed all of her instinctive self-protections. She liked that she could make him happy.

  “I’ll handle being in Umi Cabal just fine. Later, when Anguish has been handled, I’ll allow myself time to reflect, if I need it. I really think I’ll be just fine.”

  Calls to pile into the carts and prepare to move rose in the air. Kassimeigh and Arc shared a look of commiseration and straightened up, pushing away from the cart they’d leaned on.

  “Maybe you’ll tell me about your life in Umi Cabal then?”

  “Of course. And you can tell me more about climbing trees and punishing bullies.”

  “There was also the time I ran away from home and lived in the hinterlands for a week when I was nine. Want to hear that one?”

  “Definitely.”

  She really did.

  The battalion arrived at Umi Cabal just as evening fell, and lined the carts into four relatively straight rows a short distance away from the would-be ruins. No one was sad to abandon the vehicles. Most of the troops walked away without a single look, but Kassimeigh noticed one young fellow give a tire a vicious kick when he thought no one was looking.

  While most busied themselves with setting up a perimeter, pitching tents, or doing maintenance on their weapons, Ina Trewe’s original contingent broke away and set foot on the exact location of the former ruins of Umi Cabal. Izzy had warned that they couldn’t count on Meli’s help, but Kassimeigh had hope. Meli had progressed so well. She remained naïve and a bit childlike, but she cared about them and wanted to help.

  Kassimeigh’s apprehension about how Meli would handle her return to the site of her abduction proved to be unnecessary. Meli surveyed the site of her former home with only mild curiosity. “There’s really not much here. You’d hardly know anything ever happened.”

  Kassimeigh, Meli, Izzy, Arc, and Luc had converged on the former center of Umi Cabal. There had been no rebuilding, and the area had been released back to nature. As a result, there was little to see besides gently rolling grassy slopes cavorting across the landscape. A few young trees dotted the grounds, while a line of mature trees formed a ring along the edge.

  Something Kassimeigh had never seen during her childhood, though, were the invigorating, shimmering streams of mana that thrummed through the air. The former location of Umi Cabal radiated energy.

  “To look at, it resembles just about any spot in the mid-lats,” agreed Kassimeigh. “But you said Anguish would come here if we brought you. Are you still sure?”

  Meli tilted her head to one side as if listening for something. “Yes. He probably already knows I’ve left the fortress. He’ll find me here.”

  “Will he be angry with you?” Luc asked. “Will he try to hurt you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never left before. I didn’t have any way to leave before you came to get me.” Meli hesitated. “I know you all are hoping I have answers, but I don’t. I want to help, but all I know is that when Anguish took me away from here, he told me I belonged to him and would never get away. I know he’ll want to take me back.” Her shoulders drooped.

  Izzy put her arm around Meli. “We know you’re doing all you can to help us. Why don’t we set up a tent for you so you can rest? It’s been a long day.”

  Izzy excused herself and Meli from the site and rejoined the troops, who had a camp just beyond the edge of the former cabal. Kassimeigh had thought it oddly superstitious that the troops did not want to be on the actual ground where the homes and buildings had stood, but a few yards were unlikely to make any difference to their plans.

  By the time Izzy rejoined them, Kassimeigh, Arc, and Luc had joined Will near a small cook stove. In the mid-lats, they no longer needed large fires to keep warm. They also had the well-being of the land to consider. They had no interest in the vulgarity of a blackened circle of char on a pristine field of grass. Chemical tinder confined to a small cook stove easily handled their meal preparations.

  Izzy wore a pensive frown. “She’s losing a little of herself, regressing. She’s less aware of her emotions and wishes. It’s unfortunate I didn’t have more time to work with her before subjecting her to this.”

  “Using her as bait for a monster can’t make her feel good, no matter what she says about wanting to help,” Will remarked.

  Luc held up a hand in a quelling gesture. “No one is pleased about that, but we’re doing the best we can. We had no other leads, and we’ve been chasing shadows for weeks.” He cast a look about the group. “Will, is the battalion in position?”

  “Yes, they’re deployed in companies along the tree line. Since we’ve no idea where Anguish will appear, we have lookouts at all points, both with visual contacts and a network of hand comms. Once anything happens, everyone will know within seconds.”

  “So our little group makes itself obvious next to the town while the cavalry waits in the woods,” Arc summarized.

  “The so-called cavalry also includes the manahi,” Luc reminded. “We’ll be linked and searching for mana. We’re as prepared as we can be at this point. We must simply wait.”

  They waited through the evening and all night. Then the next day. And for three days after that. The burgeoning sense of impending tumult flattened out into an elongated period of languishing. Meli was by turns upbeat and nervous. As time stretched on, she spent more time in her tent alone.

  Kassimeigh wondered if Meli doubted herself in bringing them here or felt she was blamed for the lack of activity. All of Meli’s friends tried to engage her with puzzles or talking about dance, but her moods grew increasingly fretful and brooding.

  “She’s not doing well.” Izzy’s diagnosis surely resulted from deeper knowledge, but offered nothing the rest of them hadn’t concluded for themselves. Their fifth morning brought nothing new, besides a growing sense of frustration. Even the pleasures of being back in the mid-lats had dimmed as a result of the perceived failure.

  “Perhaps we should get her away from here,” Izzy suggested. “Nothing has come of our being here, and she’s becoming more and more like she was when we first found her. She might be wrong about Anguish coming to find her, and why should he? Surely it would be easier to grab some other person to mind his fortress.”

  “No one wants to see her suffer,” Luc snapped. “But we don’t have anything else. We wait. For now. If she reaches a crisis point, we must reconsider. Until then, we wait.”

  “Is it right to subject her to this?”

  “Is it just for her to suffer for a greater good? Perhaps, but I’m not the one to judge. She was the one to suggest this. She had to know something of what she was offering, far better than any of us.”

  Small talk seemed frivolous after the exchange, and they separated for the rest of the day, only to reconvene to eat dinner together in silence. Kassimeigh began to doubt their efforts. Perhaps Meli was more mentally damaged than they’d thought, and her perceptions and decisions were completely delusional. That would leave them without a single way of tracking Anguish. Perhaps Anguish didn’t even exist. He might be a figment of Meli’s fractured mind. Did they
even know anything real at this point?

  The unusually humid evening stuck to Kassimeigh’s skin. Once the sun set, some of the stifling warmth bled away. Meli had gone to her tent before dinner.

  “I think I’ll go to my tent too,” Izzy sighed. “It’s been a long day.” They were the first words any of them had spoken during the meal.

  “I’ll do the same.” Kassimeigh gathered her dishes and rose to her feet. Spirits sagged and no one had a better plan than to retire. The combination of ennui and humidity chased them all from the night air. Tension and the beginnings of dissent among them had soured the mood to an uncomfortable degree, which made breaking from the group some small relief.

  Sprawled across the top of her bedroll rather than inside it because of the humidity, Kassimeigh drifted toward sleep. A thud brought her back to awareness and she opened her eyes, wondering if she’d dreamed it. Another heavy impact resonated against her eardrums and echoed in her chest. She bolted upright and listened. No, she realized, it wasn’t actual sound but mana sense. She felt massive energy pooling. It thickened the air around her and made her flesh quiver.

  A whistling sound rent the air, followed by a crash. A brief scream quickly strangled off.

  Kassimeigh sprang to her feet, instinctively grabbing a sword as she hurtled out of her tent. The sky above her was black and shadowed, unlike the starry evening she’d seen before closing her tent flap behind her. Inky blackness squeezed out visual landmarks, rendering her nearly blind. She held her sword defensively across the front of her body and stole toward Meli’s tent with only mental geography to guide her.

  Her hand grasped the flap of Meli’s tent just as a pressure wave burst outward. The force knocked her off her feet and she dropped her blade. She rolled and came back up, scooping her sword up in the process. With sudden inspiration, she used a touch of mana to secure her sword to her hand. She’d keep her grip no matter what.

  Something moved behind her. She pivoted, sword raised. Then she checked herself, recognizing Luc’s mana signature. The massive deluge of mana had blunted her burgeoning ability to discern his subtler aura.

  “Trying to get to Meli. What do you sense?”

  Luc’s jaw clenched. “The black dust kind of mana.”

  “Anguish?”

  He shook his head. “I have no sense of a person, only the mana.”

  Kassimeigh managed to grab hold of Meli’s tent flap and tear it open.

  “Meli!” she called.

  She sensed Arc approaching them from outside, just as another pressure wave burst. The impact rent the shelter and sent it sailing end over end. Tangled within, Kassimeigh and Luc landed hard.

  Clanks, shouts, and barked orders reached her ears between bursts of wind. Kassimeigh gripped the fabric that trapped her, but the gale ripped it from her hands. She instead employed her sword in fighting her way out of the tent fabric. She saw Luc free himself with a few deft touches of transmuting.

  I should have thought of that. She mentally tucked the technique away for future use.

  “Where’s Meli?” Kassimeigh shouted over the din.

  No one had an answer. Wheeling around, she moved toward the nearest shouts. As she approached, a suffocating pressure pushed her down to the ground, which vibrated with wild energy beneath her. She felt the energy ooze into her spine, her joints, and the back of her mind. It pulsated and crawled along her nerve endings, invading the depth of her thoughts. She knew this energy, this rogue, unchecked mana. She’d discovered it the day she turned herself into a phoenix. Her senses flapped frenetically in the wake of the blistering energy, until she clamped metaphysical fingers into it and grabbed on.

  She anchored herself against the foreign energy, letting herself become permeable to it. She focused her mind to her calmest center and fashioned herself as a conduit, laundering the wild mana current flowing through her. She harnessed the unfettered power, forced it under her control, and tempered it. As the chaotic energy became inert, she released it.

  Aware of the wind screaming by her ears only when it ebbed, she regained her feet and stood. Her nerves danced with vitality. She felt larger and more nimble. She felt invincible. With effort, she resisted the urge to touch the world with her mana. Ruthlessly, she restrained the mana inside her, keeping it idling like an engine.

  She shoved her sword into its sheath and set her feet in a wide stance. “I’m not getting knocked off my feet again,”

  She wrapped tethers of mana around her legs and feet, which anchored her to the ground. Her legs would have to be severed before she fell again. She sensed the warm glow of Luc’s mana approaching and glanced his direction. He touched her forearm, and drew mana from her.

  “Release. You’re holding too much.”

  She felt entirely in charge of the maelstrom within her, but deferred to his greater experience. She exhaled slowly and made herself soft and permeable. The mana eased away. Once her own glow was lesser, she sensed the gentler emanations from the other manahi, who spread throughout the area. She felt Joss’s strong harnessing not far away.

  Her other senses, the ones she’d had all her life, reasserted themselves and she surveyed the landscape. The blackness had receded and the stars again twinkled overhead. Small skirmishes with a few remaining twisted creatures came to their violent ends. Kassimeigh hadn’t even noticed the creatures before that.

  “I’m fine,” she reassured Luc. “Centered and in control. Gather the manahi. I’m going to find Will.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “You know as well as I do that the person who caused this is gone. Meli was right, Anguish came. We thought we were ready but somehow, he got right by us. Now we need to find Meli and figure out how we’re going to find him and take him down.”

  “So there’s no reason I shouldn’t come with you to talk to Will. The other manahi can regroup on their own. They’re big boys and girls.”

  He had a point. “Let’s go, then.”

  “Meli’s gone,” Will told them before they even reached him near the parked carts, many of which now lay on their sides or even upside down. “No one saw her after she went to her tent. What’s more, no one saw the person who took her, whom we all presume to be Anguish. All we have left are a few dozen corpses of his twisted creatures and a lot of broken equipment.”

  Kassimeigh frowned. How had no one seen anything? They’d been waiting for this. It wasn’t as if they had been struck unaware. Anguish must have conceived a precise plan to extract Meli that somehow allowed him to approach undetected, and culminating in leaving his creatures behind to create confusion. How had he hidden his mana signature from them, until it was too late? It shouldn’t be possible. Kassimeigh knew that if she hadn’t wicked away the mana he’d conjured, everyone in the battalion would have died, possibly in the same way as the people in Umi Cabal.

  “Finding her shouldn’t be hard,” Luc observed dryly. “Any mana-holder could sense the hot streak of mana angling away from here. All we need do is follow it.”

  Which made Kassimeigh wonder why Anguish no longer concealed his mana signature. Was he unable to, or had he simply chosen not to bother? Perhaps he assumed they were all dead and he had no reason to hide.

  “Point us in the right direction, Luc. Nothing could keep me from tracking him down.” Will’s voice remained low, but it vibrated with menace. “First, I want all manahi to focus on repairing the carts. You can see that most have been damaged. They also need to be fully charged, to avoid stops. While you’re working on that, the rest of us will break down camp. I want everyone ready to move within the hour.”

  The battalion’s unified fervor gave them speed as they worked. Kassimeigh’s intense focus on helping to repair the carts failed to quell her disappointment over their failure. They’d dangled Meli like bait, waiting for the monster to snap at it. W
hen the monster finally complied, they had missed the thing entirely. Now Meli was gone and a madman, whose purpose no one knew, was on the run across Terath. Any town he came into contact with along the way was in danger of disappearing in a poof of ash.

  The mana signature she felt streaking away from them differed greatly from the ones that belonged to the manahi within the battalion. This one was stronger, yet less refined. It felt to her like giant angry fists as opposed to the clever, articulate fingers of the manahi she knew. As Luc had said, no manahi could possibly fail to recognize the inelegant blot of energy that moved away from them rapidly.

  Competence and determination had them underway in half the time Will had dictated. Every single person within the battalion now saw this mission as a personal matter. Their collective failure to capture Anguish smoldered inside them, aching for redemption.

  No hand comm chatter broke the silence as the carts charged north along the mana trail. No one cared any longer about the rough travel. In fact, they drove fast and hard, heedless of any discomfort. They’d never ridden so hard during night hours, but the little hurts of travel meant nothing to any of the troops. Mana lamps inset on the fronts of the carts shined just enough light to lead them.

  Gradually, Kassimeigh and the other manahi began to realize that they were unlikely to overtake Anguish and Meli on the run. Although the battalion kept a relative pace with the blazing mana signature, they failed to close the gap. Twice, they were forced to detour around a town rather than plow the battalion through it. So far, the comm had not lit up with reports of strange activity. Kassimeigh only hoped that situation continued.