by Monte Cook
“I’m clean,” she said. “Not to worry.” She touched the ends of the wires, laughing. He wasn’t surprised to hear that the sound was a little bit mad, but not as much as he might have thought. It was mostly rueful, and mostly sane.
“You’ve come from Rillent?” Aviend asked.
“Just this soon,” she said. Her Truth was broken and split. Not her first language, but he couldn’t place the lilt, the tongue-to-teeth sound of her ths. “I thank Toev.”
“How did you escape?” Kyre could hear, not suspicion, not yet, in Aviend’s voice, but something that mimicked his own sense of… disbelief. They trusted Toev’s judgment, but something felt jangly about this.
“The kubrics go up and up,” she said, matter-of-factly, setting the water jug and three mismatched glasses on the table. “Rillent only look down.”
Even Aviend had to snort at that, a snort that turned into coughing laughter as she tried to take a drink.
“Thank you, Nitar,” Toev said. The woman nodded and slipped away, as quiet as she’d come. Kyre watched her go. She moved with the deliberate stillness of someone who didn’t want to be noticed.
“She came to you?” Kyre asked.
Toev nodded. “I had that response at first, too,” he said. “But her story makes sense – she was Rillent’s personal tailor for years until–”
“Until the fingers,” Aviend mused.
Toev splashed water into his glass, but didn’t drink. “It didn’t change her skills much – she can whip together anything out of fabric that you might need – but he found someone new after that. She faded and then got out.”
“How did she find you?”
“We found her, half-dead, on a hunting run. Brought her back.”
They sat as long as they were able.
“We should go,” Kyre said, even though he didn’t want to.
“I know,” Aviend said. “It’s just so nice to sit here for a moment with an old friend.” She touched Toev’s hand, and he lifted his fingers and caught hers in a quick squeeze. “Be careful,” she said. “All of you. This is going to get very bad.”
It was unlike Aviend to be so sure of things going wrong, and listening to her made the hairs on the back of his neck tighten. It was going to get very bad, he thought, and there was no way they – not they the Night Clave, not they the survivors trying to make a life here in this clearing – there was no way any of them were ready for it.
“On your way, then,” Toev said. His voice was light, but the tone didn’t match his steady, sad gaze. “The young ones will appreciate the treats, I’m sure.”
He didn’t say anything more about Rillent or preparations, but his gaze had already gone backwards, toward the people gathered in the center of the clearing.
They left him, far quieter and more somber than when they’d arrived. They’d brought things with them that were heavier than supply packs, and they were taking them home too.
“I hate that,” Aviend said as they made their way back. “I hate showing up and leaving bad news and then just, well, leaving. It feels awful.”
Kyre stepped carefully over the half-buried strips of metal that crisscrossed up from the ground here. If you weren’t paying attention, the mottled yellow-green bits looked like moss or fallen leaves, but they were sharp as well-honed blades. There were multihued vertical strips here and there too, that leaned and shifted side to side, even when there was no wind. It was beautiful, but deadly if you weren’t careful. “He wouldn’t have taken weapons, not that we have many to give.”
“I know,” she said. A moment later, “Something’s wrong.”
“With the Nitar situation?”
“Yes. Rillent is just letting people leave? No, that’s not his way. The destriatch were at the kubric, and so they went after Quenn. But I don’t think that’s why they were there in the first place.”
“Why would they be there?”
“Guarding something?” she asked. She moved lightly over the metal pattern, barely watching her feet as she went. A strip to her right shifted suddenly, nearly touching her, but she bent her body out of the way at the last moment. “Watch that one,” she said. “So what were they doing? Why did Rill–”
She stopped, lifted a finger to her lips. Canted her head to the left. He heard it then. The snaps of twigs. Footfalls. Voices. Too close to have come from the clearing. Maybe some of them on their way back from hunting or…
But no. That voice. He knew that voice.
He lifted his hand, rested it on top of his head to make a crest. Aviend’s eyes went wide.
Faleineir. Rillent’s right-hand man. Out in the woods. Looking.
They went down at the same time, onto their knees in the moss. Careful to find a spot between the strips. Kyre was grateful they’d already gotten rid of the pilgrim packs. The packs were big and heavy enough that they would have made it hard to crouch, and almost impossible to stay in a still position for very long. Kyre gently moved one of the loose strips over with the tip of his blade, giving himself a little more room.
They weren’t close enough to the clearing to use their pre-set defenses. Which was both good and bad. Doing so might save them, but it would also reveal the location of Toev and everyone else.
They both pulled their hoods up, slow and quiet, covering their heads. The hoods worked simply by color, a green mottle that made it harder for them to be seen. Aviend touched the side of her mouth with her thumb, tapped it twice. Kyre nodded, once, in agreement. No devices. They would wait it out, see if they could remain unheard and unseen.
It was only a couple of careful, quiet exhales before Faleineir came into view. The varjellen’s skin was hued in shades of magenta and violet. A thin crest of similar colors ran down the length of its head. Bulbous yellow eyes blinked slowly in their direction. Looking at those eyes, it would be easy to mistake the varjellen as slow or dull, but Kyre knew firsthand what mind worked behind those globes.
Faleineir was the only varjellen Kyre had ever known. After meeting Faleineir, Kyre had assumed all varjellen were as ruthless and horrid as this one. He didn’t know for sure that it wasn’t true, but he’d long ago come to believe that Faleineir was its own special kind of hatred in a bottle. Perfectly suited to carry out Rillent’s horrors without question or remorse. Faleineir was in Rillent’s thrall, to be sure – there was no mistaking the metalworks beneath his neck. Rillent’s handiwork – but Kyre doubted it was necessary. The varjellen seemed to want to do nothing more than everything Rillent asked of it.
Kyre resisted the urge to touch his own neck. He had no such scars. No such excuses for his behavior beneath Rillent’s clever hand.
Faleineir was followed by three glaives. No one that Kyre recognized, but clearly Rillent’s. They walked with purpose, but also with attention. Eyes scanning the forest. They were looking for something. Or someone.
Aviend’s quick fingers, pointing to herself and Kyre. Yes, he thought so too. The only good thing was that if Faleineir and the glaives were out here still, they hadn’t already found the base. They were moving away from it, not toward. Keep going, he thought. Keep walking. As if they heard him, they did. Nearly past. Kyre allowed himself to breathe, a quiet release that he felt in his gut. If he and Aviend could just–
From behind them, the call of a child, followed by laughter. All heads turned in the direction of the clearing. All heads except Faleineir’s. Varjellen had notoriously good eyesight, and horrendous hearing. One of the men filled him in, and his crested head also moved toward the direction of the sound.
Skist. So much for that plan.
Aviend’s response was a silent tightening of her fist. He saw that she had something in it. She slowly opened her fingers, showing off an image module. Her face was a question.
He took it from her – he was better at aiming long distances, and this was going to be tricky. He needed to find a way to wing the module past the hunting party without drawing attention to himself. How to do that without standing o
r making noise was a problem.
Aviend clearly saw the problem too. She picked up a stone from the ground, turned it around in her hand, and then looked into his eyes.
He nodded. She tossed the rock up in a high arc, not caring where it landed. Kyre watched it as it crashed into a tree not far from them, but far enough away. Even the varjellen heard that. All heads turned toward the tree. In a moment, their attention would certainly be drawn toward the two of them.
Except that Kyre used the split-second of their distraction toward the tree to roll into a crouch. He hurled the module past them and over their heads, and then continued the roll until he was upright again. A twig snapped as he came down, making far too much noise.
If any of Rillent’s glaives noticed the sound of Kyre’s rough landing, they quickly forgot it as the module kicked in. It projected the image of a humanoid… something or other. Kyre could barely see it, but he was sure that he’d never seen anything quite like it. Probably the image of some creature familiar to the people who initially made the device, who knew how many years ago. Millennia ago. Longer.
Most importantly, however, the image came with weird sounds. Soon, it projected the illusion of the thing running away. Just like Delgha said it would. Kyre watched the men stare after it. The varjellen’s voice was a harsh whisper. “Go!” The four of them bolted after the image, Faleineir bringing up the rear, looking all around, warily.
They disappeared from sight. Soon the sound of their crashing footfalls began to fade into the distance.
Kyre and Aviend waited, crouched and listening. When they heard nothing further, they slipped out of the ruins carefully, keeping watch for any sign of the hunting party. None came.
When it seemed clear they were safe, Aviend said, “That kind of thing only works once. Especially with someone like Faleineir.”
“Rillent likes his people smart,” Kyre said, thinking about all the people the Aeon Priest had wrapped into his hold. Smart, all of them, each in different ways. It was a testament to Rillent’s power that he managed to bring so much willing intelligence to his side.
The sound of the river tumbled into his consciousness. They’d been walking toward it, he realized. When they got to the bank, Aviend dropped to one of the flat stones and held out one hand. “I know you have some kind of food in that pack of yours,” she said.
He laughed as he sat beside her, then opened the small pack that hung at his side, and unwrapped a few bits of dried meat for them. Aviend set a canister of Thorme’s special tea between them. They ate in silence, the sounds of the river and the forest seeming to grow up around them the longer they waited.
“Kyre,” she said. “What did you want to tell me the other day? Back in Delgha’s room.”
He saw his hands were trembling, and he twisted them together, fingers knotted pale, until he wasn’t sure he could untie them again. Trembling hands reminded him of his father. Not because his father had been old, but because he had been weak. And Kyre had been weak with him. Less weak, perhaps, than his father ever had been. He could claim that, at least. Small comfort, that, once. No comfort now.
“I feel…”
What would he say, what would he admit? He should have thought this through before he’d started talking. But if he had, he knew he wouldn’t be saying any of this. He would have stayed silent and let her walk away, let her carry all of the burdens that were rightfully his.
“When Quenn showed up…”
Two starts, neither of them right. Aviend waited for him, breaking apart bits of the jerky, and letting them fall into her palm. The metal ring he’d given her, oh so many failures ago, circled loosely around her finger from the weight she’d lost.
Those were the things he noticed, sitting there, preparing to break her heart. And his.
“I was so relieved,” he said. So much for that locked box. Apparently it could tumble open at any moment, without so much as a turn of Aviend’s key.
“That I didn’t have to kill someone. I’m responsible for this, for our failure, for all of it. For the fact that Rillent’s looking for us. That he knows you’re alive.” The words were tumbling out, mixing together, making no sense. He felt himself wanting to stop them, but couldn’t. It was like he’d opened a portal to the truth and everything was rushing through. He didn’t say the word guilt, but it was woven into every word. A mantra. His mantra now.
“No,” Aviend said calmly, interjecting the word into his ramble without so much as a breath of delay. As if she’d been ready for him. She rested the bit of meat on her thigh and rubbed her hands together as if to clean them. “You aren’t.”
He wanted to take her in his arms, to feel the exhale of her denial against his face. It took everything he had in him to keep his face from falling, to keep himself from falling, into her promise that he’d made the right decision for the right reason. That he’d saved Quenn because it was the right thing to do and not because he’d been selfish, scared, afraid of becoming the monster. That would be the easy way out. He’d taken it before, probably more times than he could count, and he did not want to do it again.
“Kyre, I can read your mind, remember?” she said. Her words carried no joy or love. But they also carried no blame or hatred. Just the softly spoken broken pass of time and space, the weight of the knowledge of how people hurt each other all the time in the promise of doing good.
She put her palm on his thigh, and leaned into him. That movement carried all of the emotions her voice hadn’t. How much effort it took for the body to fall, and yet, wasn’t it what they did their whole lives? Fall before one another in pain and despair and longing and love?
“Do you remember me telling you to choose?” she said. If only he could say no, shake his head and pretend that it wasn’t something that he carried with him always in his mind, like mourners carried locks of their dead lover’s hair.
Aviend didn’t fiddle with anything. Not the pendant. Not her too-loose ring. Not her hair. Her fingers were steady on his leg. In her stillness, she was absolutely beautiful. And so unlike herself in some ways that it made his chest tighten. She looked like her mother. She looked like a leader, like the woman who had listened to the pleas of men and women, drowning and dying and destroyed, and knew before they opened their mouths that she didn’t have a way to save them.
“And do you remember what you told me when we came up with that plan?” she asked. “To kill Rillent?”
He didn’t. He’d said so many things, he was sure. Some of them soft truths meant to help Aviend, some of them harsher truths meant to help himself, others just mouthfuls of stones that he had no other way to get rid of so that he could breathe again.
“That’s because you said nothing. You went away for a day and when you came back, you said you were resolved.”
He remembered that now. He’d gone to the valley, to his father’s grave. He’d walked the town that was there no more. He’d tried to remember the world before Rillent and found himself unable. It had always been like this, he’d decided. There was no before.
“There was only after,” he said. At her questioning look, he added, “That’s what I decided. That’s when I decided it was all right for me to kill another person.”
Aviend’s stillness broke finally. She arched her back and something inside Kyre’s chest lifted. Like a heavy tree being pushed back up into the air.
“But you didn’t,” she said. Her gaze was unwavering and true.
He shook his head, unwilling or unable to see what she was trying to show him.
“Killing a man to save something? That’s Rillent’s way. Not ours,” she said. “I wanted you to save Quenn. And you ended up saving yourself. And me. All of us.”
Words were good for so many things, but not for everything. There were no words in the history of words for what he was feeling right now. No words for everything he wanted to give to her, as they sat there in the dappled shade and waited for things to be safe.
He touched the circle of her
ring. Felt heartened that she did not pull away.
“What are we going to do?” he said. “How are we going to destroy Rillent once and for all?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I know that we will. I believe that we will. All of us. Together.”
3. Not Everything Light is Good
The first time Rillent entered Aviend’s head, she was barely more than a child. Running around the Steremoss talking to ghosts and asking her mother ridiculous questions. Hiding out in caves with Kyre and making up finger language. She hadn’t known yet that she was in love with him, or even what love was, really. She certainly hadn’t known fear or danger, at least not like she understood both now.
The first time Rillent came to her head, he hadn’t yet arrived in Ovinale to take over the Stere. Her mother was still alive. Still head of the clave. The leader of Ovinale. Arch Enpelia. Aviend had understood so little then, although she’d of course believed that she understood all of the most important things.
She’d known her mother was the leader of the clave, but hadn’t been entirely certain what that meant. She just knew it was made up of people like her mother – Aeon Priests, who understood the devices they fiddled with and who kept the town, the whole forest, safe and secure. Whose job it was to help the people in Ovinale have better lives – her mother’s words, not hers.
Aviend mostly knew that it meant lots of boring meetings in Celedan Hall with people who had no interest in a young, active girl. Particularly not one who’d rather be throwing rocks into puddles than sitting still and looking at machines and saying polite things to people she didn’t know.
Rillent, Rillent was never boring. Rillent came to her head in the late night when she couldn’t sleep and during the sitting that went on and on and when she was supposed to be keeping still and quiet and not touching any of the very important devices. He asked her about things – about her mother, the clave, Ovinale, others – and she told him everything she knew.