His prayer was simple, that Raine not lose anything in the battle with the Dark, that she survive and prosper and love and find all she needed and deserved. He visualized that for her. Himself as loving husband, homes, land of her own, a shipyard of her own. Being valued by the Seamasters. He set the images within his mind to solidify and bolster himself and Raine when he linked with her. Prayed for them to become reality.
The sun lit the window and brilliant color exploded through the room.
A woman’s voice lifted in a glorious Song to the morning. Jikata.
Everyone turned to stare at her and they learned the Song she’d crafted and Sang with her.
A blessing.
The door opened quietly and Raine was there. Faucon heard her intake of breath. Linked with her, he felt the Song wash over her, suffuse her with hope.
That was what she needed most. Simple hope.
He stood, and still Singing, he went to her, put an arm around her and brought her to the pew and they sat, looking at the window.
Filled with hope.
The Echo, Brisay Sea
With Raine standing by Faucon at the helm, they sailed into the open Brisay Sea. She paid attention to her crew and her two lieutenants—Lucienne Deauville and the man she’d first met in town, Jean, who’d sailed a good part of the world. Everything went more than smoothly, her sailors were optimistic, buying in to the whole “great adventure” thing. Ella was enthusiastic enough for ten people.
The remaining Exotiques hung over the rail of the great Ship waving at people on shore—well, Jikata propped a hip against the starboard side and raised a languid hand.
There was a good turnout of folks: merchants from the fair, townsfolk, dignitaries from other cities invited by Bri and Sevair. The Seamasters were there, even the two who’d begrudged their apologies. They were smiling smugly and Raine didn’t like it, but was glad she’d be out of their sight.
On The Echo, many of the landsmen and women were unpacking and exploring. Flights of volarans were circling, landing, playing.
The Echo was using a small portion of the Power spheres, was under full sail, and handling well.
She visualized the course. To hug the coastline would add many miles to their trip, and the course was set to go beyond all land. They’d angle to a point where they’d sail through the middle of a smaller sea, and directly to the relatively narrow strait between continents. That cleft had opened eight centuries ago when the Marshall Guardians had developed the fence posts. Lorebooks told the story of Amee causing an earthquake to ensure her warriors access to the Dark’s Nest.
When asked the name of the strait, Jean had grimaced, avoided Raine’s eye and swayed with the Ship, finally saying gruffly that it was called the Strait to Doom, because it led to the Dark’s Nest.
The voyage itself would take four weeks, one week longer than the volaranback expedition the year before. But this was an invasion force, with fighters and weapons and stores.
She’d anticipated being less anxious on the Ship, where she was in control and command. That had happened to some extent, but the reason for the Ship always lurked at the back of her mind. She grimaced, nothing to do but endure. Survive.
41
Jikata didn’t like the Ship. Nothing about it. Not the overly rococo flourishes, the masses of volarans standing on the quarterdeck, and especially not the large closet of her cabin that she shared with Luthan. At the start, she’d contemplated selfishly keeping the cabin and the bed to herself, but even a closet with Luthan was better than sleeping without him.
And the Ship was surrounded by water, a very strange sea that would open into a very strange ocean that would narrow to something called the Strait to Doom that sounded the strangest of them all.
She’d paid her dues on a couple of cruise ships at the beginning of her career. All right, two voyages, but the water hadn’t been this…active, almost alive. The moment she’d stepped aboard, she’d experienced an ominous feeling that she couldn’t shake, a depression of her spirits.
A loss of her composing ability.
It was now the end of the first week, and the nightmares were back with a vengeance, always ending in visions of mass slaughter of herself and her friends. Difficult to throw off even during sun-bright days.
The others loved the Ship. Bri, the most well-traveled, was on the deck all the time, talking to the sailors, learning a little of their craft. Alexa had been sick for the first three days and nights, adding her moaning to Jikata’s dreams, but now she’d bounced back and hung over the rail, looking at the water, the land that had changed from peninsula to islands to the open sea, all with towering mountains in the distance to the east.
Marian, the other “fire” person, seemed to have no problem at all, either. Of course all the women were born and raised in Colorado, stayed there mostly, so an ocean voyage was a novelty.
Calli spent some time in the air with different volarans, and Jikata envied her, though it was obvious that keeping up with the Ship put a strain on them, so those flights were short. Easier on the beasts at night.
Furthermore, some of the sailors kept giving her sly glances, and Chasonette picked at her and whined.
The only time Jikata’s mind felt clear and focused was when they were Singing, whether warm-up exercises, or the actual unknotting ritual. That was going well. All knew the chorus and the opening verse. Each was making progress on their individual verse, which spoke of segments of the Lladranan culture that were finally coming together: “I of the Volarans, lovely in flight”; “I of the Tower with Knowledge Bright”; “I of the Townsfolk, valuing right”; “I of the Marshalls, ready to fight…”; “I of the Seamasters and ocean’s might”; “I of the Singer, music and sight…” As usual, tailor-made to the Exotiques. Or the Exotiques had been specifically chosen for their culture and thus the Song. Which they had been.
Bri was the one who was having the hardest trouble with memorizing her verse, and Jikata was considering changing the beat for her. To Jikata’s surprise, Raine had somehow incorporated a rock-and-roll beat that also echoed the sea. She was Singing well, but remained afraid.
Marian had tried to foist the weapon knot on Jikata and she’d refused it. The thing looked like an artery, pulsing red with a drumbeat that was disturbing.
Time and again, Jikata would sit down to compose and someone would interrupt, or her inkwell would be sliding around and the notes just wouldn’t come. It was a never-ending irritant.
As day waned into night, depression and anticipation of nightmares settled on her like a polluted, foggy gloom. She usually picked at dinner, then retired to bed. Sex with Luthan stayed the nightmares, but didn’t stop them, and he didn’t seem to be sharing them, so she supposed her Power was that much stronger than his.
Visions didn’t come during the day anymore, were as scarce as her composing ability.
Occasionally Ishi walked through her dreams like a balm, and Jikata welcomed her. Amee had failed to show after the first night, but she’d been dismissive of Jikata’s mild complaint about the Ship and the water, had seemed to beam with pride at the Ship and her Exotiques.
It all set her teeth on edge. She should have stayed at the Abbey.
Disaster struck in the middle of the second week. Not to The Echo, but to Lladrana itself. The Marshalls’ Castle sent an urgent message and Alexa announced with a serious face but vibrating with anger. “I have news.”
Everyone gathered, everyone quieted.
Alexa paced, hand on her baton, jutting it forward in its sheath. A bad sign. “As you all know, we’ve been replacing the ancient fence posts as they’ve fallen, raising new ones so the northern boundary is a solid magical shield to repel the horrors.” She stopped, sucked in a deep breath, addressed the crowd. “Early this morning all the old fence posts, those we didn’t raise in the last two years, fell.” Her jaw flexed. “There are holes in the fence. Five gaps, to be precise. And horrors are steadily coming through.”
“T
his is what the Dark has been planning,” Marian said. “It caused the old posts to fail and fall.”
“Ayes,” Alexa said. “The new Master of the monsters likes notes, he had one delivered in one of the incursions, gloating.”
“He doesn’t know of this Ship, the invasion?” Jaquar asked sharply.
Alexa shook her head. “It seems not. However, we are the primary team.”
“We must turn back!” someone shouted, and Raine couldn’t pinpoint the person.
“Ttho!” Alexa’s voice resounded over the deck. Her face hardened. “We are not returning to Lladrana. The others must cope without us.”
There was muttering, some grumbling.
Alexa ignored it and went on. “A discreet call has gone out to those Chevaliers and Marshalls who have retired. Chevalier classes are being sped up. Pascal and Marwey and our understudies must handle this.” Her skin stretched tight over her cheeks. “None of you will be allowed to return.”
Shouts of dismay. Bastien stepped forward and put one hand on his wife’s shoulder, the other on his baton. His gaze swept the crowd, but Raine didn’t think he identified the dissenters.
“You all know what you signed on to do. It’s more vital than ever that we kill the Dark.” He gestured to the cluster of Circlets—Marian, Jaquar, Bossgond, others. “The Circlets speculate that once the Dark is destroyed, the new Master of the horrors, the monsters themselves, will stop invading. They may even collapse.”
Lifting her chin, Alexa said, “This endeavor is the best permanent solution of the problem of the Dark.” Another audible breath from her. “We must pray and Sing that Lladrana will weather this.” She glanced at Jaquar. “None of the scenarios that I ever saw speculated about how long it would take for a steady stream of horrors to overrun Lladrana.”
“The Circlets of the Tower community are already working on that. We will have the information for you later today.”
“Good.” Again Alexa scanned the crowd with her cool, military stare. “What we are going to do is invade the Dark’s Nest and destroy it!”
A cheer went up. Alexa fastened her gaze on Raine. “And we’re going to wring every bit of speed out of this Ship that we can, right?”
“Right,” Raine said, calculating course, speed with and without sails, and how she could shave time off the voyage without risking all.
There was plenty to worry about on the voyage. They had updates from the Castle daily, and the remaining Marshalls were doing well, but some monsters were slipping into the country. There were mutterings on the Ship about this and no one could determine exactly who started them. Raine was pushing herself, the Circlets and the crew as hard as possible, and the Ship was speeding through the waters, at a rate that the volarans could not match, not even at night, so the ship was crowded with them all the time except for brief flights. The two herds—humans and volarans—were irritated with each other.
But Luthan worried about Jikata. He said nothing to the others—not that they were unaware of the changes in her. Of all people, Bossgond the Circlet had informed the Exotiques that she was not to be confronted, that she must come to the realization that she was being influenced by the Dark itself.
When Alexa demanded whether that would happen in time, Bossgond had turned to Luthan and flat out asked about his visions of the battle—and of Jikata.
Of course they’d all stared at him. The odds for them all had gone up, and he was grateful for that, for the shining few that showed all the Exotiques living. But the visions came more often, and more vividly. He hated that he couldn’t discuss them with his lover as he’d had. So, in the face of Bossgond’s challenge, Luthan narrowed his eyes and examined Jikata’s actions in the visions. He was unsurprised to find that when the battle outcome was the Dark living and most of them dead, she’d been an uninspired Singer.
Luthan had stared at Alexa and said, “Twenty percent of the time, Jikata is affected by the Dark and we fall.”
Alexa blinked. “Twenty per cent?”
“Ayes.”
“Oh.” She gave him a brilliant smile and walked away with a bounce in her step, and that caused a little clutch of his heart. He’d come to love this woman his brother had wed, and he didn’t want to lose her. His heart would be torn irrevocably if he lost his brother, too. As for Jikata…he already knew that if she perished he would, too. They weren’t bound together in a ritual blood exchange ceremony, but they were close enough that he thought his mind and will would shatter if she died.
“Jikata…” Ishi’s face was lined with concern. “Who are these people? How do you know them? Why do you trust them?” Ishi’s standard questions for any friend Jikata had spoken about, wanted to associate with.
Jikata had nearly forgotten those questions, now memory came rushing back, along with annoyance and teenaged anger. She’d been in with a good crowd when in school. It was only when she had the first flush of success that she’d traveled with bad companions for a time, then she’d gotten smart.
In the dream, she and her great-grandmother were standing on a rocky point of land, covered with a sheen of ice. Ishi gestured and Jikata looked across the slate-gray ocean to a mountain rising out of the sea. One mountain, an inactive volcano, though Jikata sensed molten fire beneath it.
She sensed something else—the Dark. Close enough, terrible enough, to chill her insides and make her shiver.
“These people will get you killed.”
Another graceful wave of Ishi’s pretty hand and the base of the volcano was littered with the fragments of a great battle…humans, volarans, monsters all dead and heaped together.
She saw Luthan, body shattered in a way that hurt her soul, saw herself, flung far from him, hair singed, face still. Saw all her friends in a hideous pile, each death wound more obscene than the last so that she couldn’t look closely, not that she could tell one from the other except for the size and hair color.
Which shouldn’t happen because they were disguised, all with black hair and golden skin, like Lladranans.
The breath went from her lungs. Her chest constricted as realization blazed through her.
This being was not Ishi, had probably never been Ishi. She felt sick from more than the carnage she saw, the horror of the dream. She had been so gullible! Played so very well. Because she’d wanted the dream woman to be Ishi.
But Ishi would never, ever call her “Jikata.” It had been that last change of name that had Ishi sending her a note of disinheritance. The old woman had seen it as a betrayal of everything Jikata was, when Jikata had felt it was giving herself a true name.
She widened and rounded her eyes at the fake Ishi. “Ishi?”
“Yes, Jikata?”
It wouldn’t have been “yes.” They didn’t speak English in Ishi’s home.
“Why do you scold Jikata?” She made her voice plaintive.
There was a flash of real anger in those eyes—red-tinged eyes?—that Jikata had always ignored before.
“Because you do not listen, Jikata child. You should not be here. You should not join with these people.”
Ishi would have called her Fujiko. So she replied in Japanese, “Why don’t you call me by the name my parents gave me?”
Ishi’s face went blank, as if the thing that lived behind it had had no clue that there was more than one language of Exotique Terre, spoken in the States. Jikata could have switched to Spanish, or French, made her accent Canadian or British, and the result would have been the same. No effing clue.
She smiled a terrible smile. “Just what are you?”
Ishi’s laugh started tinkling, then mutated to an awful rasping, gargling gurgle. Then the mask, the total illusion, was dropped and Jikata retreated a couple of steps in surprise before she settled into her balance and stood her ground.
The thing had once been a man. It was not the hideous thing shown in graphic 3D in Marian’s Lorebook, nor the before-and-after pics that Sevair had imaged of his former assistant in Bri’s Lorebook. Swallowin
g, Jikata could see that he’d warped from that man. No nasty tentacles around his mouth, but a knot of them growing out of each temple of his head that had a row of yellow spines front to back. Eyes a pupilless red.
She swallowed again, put a hand on her hip, examined him up and down. He was furious and his mind worked fast and loud, broadcasting information. Smiling, she sneered, “Go back to your hole, you disgusting creature.” Then Sang the banishing chorus that was part of the weapon knot.
He snarled, raised deformed, clawlike hands to rake her, but vanished, leaving the smell of corruption.
Jikata woke, blood pounding in her head. She reached for Luthan but he wasn’t there. He had taken to wandering the Ship in the night, soothing volarans.
When her breathing steadied and she could hear more than the rush of her pulse, she noticed rustlings in her mind from the other Exotiques, who were gathering in the cabin. She yearned for their companionship, but had the lowering thought that they might not want hers. She rose anyway, and left her cabin.
Alexa was already sitting at the table with a mug, hair sticking up. Calli was there with trembling hands folded on the table. Bri had her head propped in her hands, massaging her scalp. Raine was walking to a chair and drawing it out and Marian was preparing drinks on the tiny counter space of the galley. “Bad one,” Marian said.
“Yeah.” Alexa hunched over her drink.
“What are you having?” Raine dropped heavily into the chair.
“Tea and mead,” Alexa said.
“Mead,” Marian said.
“Ale,” Calli said.
“I’d like jasmine tea,” Raine said.
“Water’s here and hot,” Marian said.
“I’ll pour it.” Jikata moved from blocking the doorway.
They all froze for a moment, their thoughts checked, too.
Echoes in the Dark Page 39