The Dead Falcon (The Eastern Slave Series Book 4)

by Victor Poole

  "What are you doing?" she asked. He shook his head.

  "I'm not doing anything," he said, his eyes fixed on the fire. "You said it would burn inside."

  "You are hurting yourself again," Ajalia said. She shook Delmar hard by the shoulder. "Stop it," she said.

  "I'm not doing anything," Delmar muttered. Ajalia wanted to smack him. She looked in the lights within his body, and she saw great, horribly cruel cuts, like the deep slashes of a knife, within him.

  "Why are you cutting yourself?" she demanded. His eyes went to her for a moment, and then flicked away.

  "I'm not," he said. "I'm not doing anything."

  "Stop," Ajalia said. She took Delmar's face, and made him look at her. "You're hurting yourself," she said. "It isn't helping. Stop it."

  "I'm not," Delmar insisted. "I'm doing what you said."

  "I never said to hurt yourself. Stop," Ajalia said. She watched Delmar's soul; he watched her warily. "Are you trying to cut out the pain?" she asked slowly. Delmar watched her. He nodded. Ajalia wanted to laugh; she saw now what some of the tears and holes in Delmar were; she saw that he had tried to purge his parents out of his body, and that he had maimed himself. She saw that she had been right; he was weak, and he would need her. She felt reassured of her power, and of her position in Delmar's life. She turned back to the fire, and pushed the fragments of books deeper into the flames.

  "What?" Delmar asked sharply. She looked around at him. "You were all intense, and telling me to stop hurting myself, and then you stopped," Delmar said. "What happened?"

  "I see what you're doing now," Ajalia explained. Delmar waited.

  "Well?" he said. "What am I doing?" Ajalia shook her head.

  "You wouldn't listen if I told you," she said. She prodded the last large chunk of book into the base of the fire, and poked at the flickering, licking flames. Delmar looked at her with his mouth half-open.

  "Are you serious?" he demanded. "We're out here in the forest, and I just exploded some piece of magic or something from my mother, and now you're telling me that you won't explain things, because I'm not ready to hear it?"

  "Yes," Ajalia said. She went to the nearest tree, and pulled some drying bark away from an old branch. The trees here were old, and some were decaying rapidly. "Do you often have forest fires out here?" Ajalia asked, as she fed the pieces of shredding bark into the fire, and watched them curl. The flames were licking merrily; she got a long stick, and began to lift up the chunks of pages within the flame, so that the individual leaves were exposed to the fire. She stood up, and watched the flames. "Do you?" she asked again.

  "We don't have forest fires here," Delmar said.

  "Why aren't there forest fires?" Ajalia asked. She watched the scraps of cloth covers burn, the yellow flames licking at the twigs and broken branches.

  "Why don't you believe in me?" Delmar asked moodily. He took Ajalia's stick, and dug at a smoldering book.

  "I wouldn't be out here," Ajalia told him, "if I didn't believe in you."

  "You don't think I can do anything," Delmar said. "You think Ocher is better than me." Ajalia fed the last pieces of bark into the fire. She was sure there was enough wood now, to burn up the remnants of the books.

  "Here," she said, and took Delmar's stick from him. She maneuvered the last pieces of books so that their flammable pages were exposed to the hottest part of the flames.

  "You think that," Delmar insisted, "don't you." It was not a question. Ajalia looked at Delmar, and saw that he was scared, and tired, and weak. She saw that he was not ready to believe what she could tell him. She looked at the fire, and thought of what to say. "And now you aren't even talking to me," Delmar said acidly. "Great. I might as well have stayed in Slavithe."

  "Yes," Ajalia said. "You should have."

  Delmar looked up at her, as though she had wounded him deeply.

  "You should have stayed," she said. "I had to negotiate without you. It was very complicated and ticklish, and I needed you there." She prodded the fire. "Rane would have killed me, after you left," she said. "I talked him out of it."

  "Why?" Delmar asked. He looked numb and surprised.

  "You left," she said. "Rane and Ocher are very motivated, for different reasons, to have a new Thief Lord in place. You left, and I had to talk them down from killing me, and pinning me with your father's death."

  "They wouldn't have done that," Delmar said easily. "They both saw me kill him." Ajalia looked at Delmar again, and once again she felt herself unable to think of anything to say. She did not know how to respond to Delmar's willful ignorance of power, of deception, or of human nature.

  "How can you say things like that?" she asked him. "How do you know what Rane would or wouldn't do?"

  "Because they saw me kill my father," Delmar said. "They watched me. They even helped. They couldn't say it was really you."

  Ajalia felt as though a white, foamy film of stupidity was passing down over her skull. She felt as if she couldn't breathe. If Delmar had been a slave, she would have beaten him for being so stupid. She stared at him, and she tried to think of how he had managed to live to the age that he was.

  "How old are you?" Ajalia asked Delmar. Delmar turned red. "You cannot seriously tell me," Ajalia said slowly, "that you don't know."

  "But I don't," Delmar muttered.

  "No," Ajalia said. "You know enough to get wild bandits to babysit me in the middle of the night in the mountains. You know enough to sneak me out of the city without anyone knowing."

  Delmar opened his mouth to protest; Ajalia held up a hand for silence, and pressed on. The books at her feet snapped and crackled in the fire.

  "You know enough to fight me off, and to lie to me about your grandfather in Talbos," Ajalia said. "You know enough to be fully aware of Philas, and of what Philas wants from me. You are not an idiot. You cannot tell me that you seriously think Ocher or Rane would go out into the street and admit that they held the Thief Lord down while you cut through his neck."

  Delmar's face had turned a funny shade of purple; his lips curled to the side, and his nose seemed to rise up in a great, indignant twitch.

  "Those things are different," Delmar said finally.

  "And I had your father send assassins," Ajalia said. She was beginning to grow angry. "You sent them away laughing. And that's not including the two men we met on our way to the poison tree," she added.

  "Those weren't really assassins," Delmar said in a muffled voice.

  "Let me guess," Ajalia said, "they only kill witches." Delmar looked up at her, startled.

  "Well, yes," he said. "Someone has to." Ajalia could not stop herself from laughing this time. She kicked at the flames, which were flickering over the final scraps of paper. The covers of the books were curling violently into black shards. Ajalia kicked at the dirt so that it sprayed into the fire, which spat angrily.

  "So do you admit now," she asked, "that your mother is a witch?" Delmar started in shock.

  "My mother is not a witch!" Delmar exclaimed.

  "Does she have the white brand?" Ajalia demanded. Delmar's face puckered.

  "No," he said.

  "She's dead now," Ajalia added. "I should have asked if she had a white brand."

  "Well, she didn't," Delmar said.

  "Then how did she do magic?" Ajalia asked. She felt as though she were pressing Delmar back against a wall; she could see him trying to think of a way out of her questions. She could see that there was still a fragment of the real Delmar within him somewhere; she thought that he was still suffering from the effect his father had always seemed to have on him. "How did your mother manage to do magic?" Ajalia asked again.

  "She couldn't do any magic," Delmar said, but Ajalia saw his eyebrows quiver a little.

  "Then how do you explain Bain?" Ajalia asked. She was calmer, now that she knew Delmar was trapped by his own admission. Delmar lying purposefully was one thing that Ajalia felt perfectly capable of handling; it was the mysterious blankness that came into
his eyes when he was haunted by his father that frightened her.

  "There are other witches, then," Delmar said.

  "Bain said that your mother helped to make him the way he was," Ajalia said. She felt ruthless. She thought that Delmar's father was still in him, hiding somewhere behind his ribs, or lurking in his heart. She was determined to chase down those remnants of the former Thief Lord, and to squelch them out of Delmar forever. She looked at him now, and saw that he could mention his mother without giving vent to the shudders of strange pain that had manifested out of his eyes before the white block had been exploded by his blue lightning. Ajalia began to suspect now that Delmar's father had similarly hidden pieces of himself in Delmar. Ajalia saw Delmar's colors vividly, and saw the deep, cruel scratches and rents where he had torn away at himself.

  "Bain was a liar," Delmar said.

  "Not about that," Ajalia said.

  "How do you know?" Delmar asked. He looked angry.

  "Because I can tell," Ajalia said. "And because I saw your mother and Bain together."

  "I didn't know that," Delmar admitted.

  "He helped me to kill her," Ajalia said.

  "You never told me that," Delmar said. His voice held an accusing tone.

  "You never asked me anything about it," Ajalia shot back, "and anyway, you have to admit she was a witch." She had glimpsed a pair of dark shadows, just behind Delmar's collarbone. She thought that here, at last, were the bits of Delmar's father that drove his odd behavior. She thought of the time she had met Delmar, and how odd he had been then, and she imagined the dark shadows making dank stains beneath Delmar's skin.

  "I don't think my mother was a witch," Delmar said. Ajalia looked speculatively at the sky. The sun was growing hot, and the fire between them was growing smoky. The flames had lessened, and the fragments of the book covers, and bare scraps of blackened pages, lay under the burning wood. Ajalia picked up a stick, and began to separate out the pieces of wood, so that the flames would die out.

  "You don't have to worry about fire out here," Delmar said.

  "And how often do you start fires?" Ajalia snapped. Delmar's mouth closed up tight, and he glared at the black horse, who was scratching his shoulders against a tree.

  "Why did you bring the horse?" he asked.

  "I'm going East," Ajalia said.

  "Wait, what?" Delmar demanded. "Why are you going East?"

  "I'm not really going East," Ajalia said, "but it would look odd if I left my horse." Delmar thought about this for a moment.

  "Oh," he said. Ajalia did not mention that she had not gotten her saddle, and that she was thinking, a little, of going East after all. She did not think Delmar would respond well to such a statement.

  "Wouldn't my father need a saddle?" Delmar asked. "And a horse?" And supplies, and a whole mass of food and water, Ajalia thought to herself, but did not say so.

  "Ocher will manage things," Ajalia said. "Everyone will know that he's dead within a week, but this buys us all some time."

  "What?" Delmar half-shouted. "You told me that there was this whole secret plot!" Delmar told Ajalia. "You said I was bad for leaving the city, and that you had to work out this whole elaborate plot with Rane and Ocher, so they wouldn't kill you, and that I should have stayed, and that now Ocher is going to be the Thief Lord."

  "Yes," Ajalia said, "all of that is true."

  "But that is not what you just said!" Delmar exclaimed. "You just said that everyone will know about him being dead next week. Those are two different things!"

  Ajalia was looking up at the blue sky. She drew up a cord of green light from below the ground, and opened her other palm towards the sky.

  "So which one is it?" Delmar asked. "Is everyone going to know he's dead, or is he supposed to be on some long journey to see your master?"

  "It doesn't matter," Ajalia said. She pictured the sky, and she imagined that the air was full of roiling cords of shimmering blue light. She fixed her eyes on a sparking line of electric light, and closed her fingers around the blue cord.

  "Of course it matters," Delmar blustered. "You have to say one thing or the other! You can't just say things, and trick people!"

  "I can," Ajalia murmured. She twisted the blue light against the green cord of color that she held in her other hand. The mixed lights crackled violently, and then a vivid white burn rose up where the blue and green lines met. Delmar hadn't seemed to notice this light; Ajalia did not know how he couldn't see or hear it. The magic in her palms was crackling like a wildfire. She looked at Delmar, at his indignant eyes, and at the stains of dark shadow below his collarbone.

  THE STRIPPING OF VALOS

  "What did you say?" Delmar demanded. He looked down at the scraps of burned books. "Those books were all that I had left of my father," he added. "You shouldn't have burned them. And what were you going to do with them in Slavithe?" he asked.

  "I was going to burn the books publicly," Ajalia said. She was still studying the shadows under Delmar's skin; she saw that the shadows ran in long strips all down his sternum, and through his rib bones. Ajalia's skin crawled at the sight of all the darkness; she did not know how she had never seen it plainly before. The shadows made her feel sick to her stomach. "You needed them more," she said, "so I burned them now."

  She sent a long knot of violent white lightning into Delmar's chest, at the point where one of the long shadows twisted around his sternum. She saw the shadow shrink back, like a snail sucking back into its shell, and she directed more bolts of shining white light into Delmar's chest and ribs. The black shadows shrunk away; she could not see at first where they were going, and then she saw that they were moving slowly up into Delmar's skull, and wrapping around his brain. She could not have said out loud how she saw this; somehow she could feel the movement of the dark shadows, as if the lightning she had sent had touched the darkness, and she could feel now where the darkness moved to.

  "Your father is not your friend," Ajalia said to Delmar. He still seemed oblivious to the crackling light that was sinking, like angry, whirling sparks, into his skin. Ajalia wanted to ask Delmar if he could feel what she was doing, but his eyes were still angry and distant. She thought that he would turn and run away from her, if she startled him. Delmar looked like a spooked deer; he wanted, Ajalia saw, for things to calm down, to go back to some way they had been before. She saw that he wanted something familiar to happen.

  "I don't know what you mean by that," Delmar said. "He said he wished he had killed me. I don't think he's my friend." But you're protecting him, Ajalia wanted to say. She was watching the blackened shadows swim, like angry, translucent leeches of murky red and green, up Delmar's neck, and absorbing comfortably in around his brain. The white light she had sent into him sank away into his skin, and vanished. Ajalia saw that she had not killed Delmar's father. She thought that perhaps the fragments of books that lay in the remnants of the fire held the key to driving Delmar's father out.

  Ajalia looked down at the charred pieces of wood that she had separated out from each other. She knocked the hot wood into a heap with her feet, and then kicked the scraps of covers and ash-black paper against the wood. She sent the rest of the violent white light that she held into the pile of wood and scraps of books, and a bang, like the distant boom of a gun, echoed through the forest. A cry of birds went up through the trees, and an unnatural silence followed. The pile of hot wood and scraps of burned books had been reduced to a shallow hole in the ground. Only a dusting of ashes remained. Delmar looked around at Ajalia, and at the hole. Ajalia kicked dirt over the shallow depression, her heart pounding. She felt as though she had done something wrong; she was sure that Delmar was going to shout at her for putting magic into the pile of burned books.

  "I don't know what that sound was," Delmar said, "but I hope you didn't do anything to cause it."

  "Why?" Ajalia asked defensively.

  "Because they track magic like that," Delmar said, "in the city."

  "What kind of magic?" Aj
alia asked.

  "Mixed, from the earth and sky," Delmar said. "It's more powerful that way."

  Ajalia watched Delmar speak; his eyes were different. She could see scraps of the blackened shadow seeping, like ancient, dying weeds, from the sides of his head. She saw that she had killed Delmar's father's dark stains, and that they were dropping now from where they had nestled, deep in his brain. She saw that she had been right about the books, and that the magic she had sent at the scraps of the books had broken the hold Delmar's father had had over him. She saw Delmar breathe more easily; his ribs expanded beneath his arms, and his jaw seemed to have been released from some long-held pressure.

  "How do they track that magic?" Ajalia asked.

  "They use Beryl," Delmar said. He snatched at the black horse's rope, and grabbed Ajalia's bag from where it lay on the ground. "Come on," he said, pulling the horse into the trees.

  "No, wait," Ajalia said. Her mind was beginning to fill up with ideas. "How does Beryl know about magic?" she asked.

  "Because she's a witch," Delmar said impatiently. "Now come on."

  "Hang on," Ajalia said quickly. Delmar turned and stared at her, impatient fire in his eyes.

  "We have to leave," Delmar said. "We have to get away from this spot before they come."

  "Who's going to come?" Ajalia asked. Delmar's face pursed up; he pressed his lips together, and his eyebrows drew into a line. Ajalia saw that he did not want to admit to her that he knew things about his father's way of doing business with magic.

  "My father's men," Delmar said.