Bells of the Kingdom (Children of the Desert Book 3)

by Leona Wisoker

  “No?” she shot back. “You were just thinking that your precious Head of Church should have exterminated the lake-born, not encouraged tolerance of us!”

  Breath hissed between his teeth—but of course she’d be able to see his every thought, with or without him knowing about it.

  “I was thinking about what you did to me,” he said, low and fierce. “Are all ha’ra’hain like you, Ellemoa? Or are you the Rosin Weatherweaver of your kind?”

  She came forward two fast steps at that, and ghostly blue flames flickered along her fingers for a heartbeat, then went out. He held his ground, entirely unafraid all of a sudden; what more could she do under the open sky, after all, than she’d already done in the depths of the earth?

  He deliberately brought the encounter with Fen to mind; she smiled a little, then retreated.

  “You should have killed him,” she said. “You would have enjoyed it.”

  “But I didn’t,” he said. “And I won’t kill for enjoyment, nor to save myself pain. That’s based in weakness, not strength, no matter what Rosin told you.”

  “I don’t know why I never killed you,” she said, amusement vanishing into a sneer.

  “You were never told to kill me,” he said. “And you took orders, didn’t you? Anything Rosin ordered, you jumped right into doing.”

  “I didn’t have a choice!” she snapped. Starlight caught golden flecks from her eyes. “I was trying to survive!”

  “What price survival?” he retorted. “I took the pain for refusing to do what you wanted.”

  In a blurred leap, she stood right up against him, her eyes streaked with luminescent gold now; a bare finger’s breadth from actual physical contact, she paused: rigidly still, glaring like a maddened asp-jacau.

  “Your refusal cost me pain,” she snarled. “Don’t you throw that in my face as though it makes you godly! You saw what he did to me—every time—”

  “Yes,” he said, unflinching. “I saw. And I saw what you did to the humans he brought you afterwards. Didn’t it ever occur to you—Rosin set you at me knowing I’d refuse to follow your least wish, planning to punish you for my obstinacy, and then giving you victims to vent your rage and frustration on—in front of me, every time. Supposedly to teach me a lesson, wasn’t it? To make me obey your commands. Only it had nothing to do with me. It was all about bringing out the worst in you. Didn’t you see that? Didn’t you see what he was doing? You must have, by the end.”

  Her eyelids slid over dimming gold in a slow, measured blink; when her eyes opened again they were a flat, whiteless black.

  “Yes,” she said, low in the back of her throat. “I saw.”

  She stepped back and turned away, then knelt on the ground, hands splayed out across the stone. He waited, watching the line of tension working through her back and shoulders; he’d seen her in enough versions of agony to know when staying very, very still was the only safe course.

  At last she rose and turned to face him again, features composed and eyes human-normal.

  “You’re a fool,” she said. “You ought to be trying to kill me.”

  He laughed. “Why? So that you’ll be able to call killing me self-defense? No. I won’t make it that easy on you, Ellemoa. I’ve never raised a hand to stop you from hurting me, and I won’t now.”

  “You swore you wouldn’t let anyone hurt you ever again,” she said. “Hypocrite! You’ll attack a helpless thief, but not someone who overmatches you.”

  “I’ll defend myself,” he said, “but not against you. Never against you. That would make it too easy for you. I intend to keep your actions on your own conscience, not mine.”

  “You think I have a conscience?” she said bitterly. “Again, you put me among the humans.”

  “If you didn’t have a conscience,” he said, “you wouldn’t have sought out your son. You wouldn’t have simply walked away when he disappointed you.” Something in the way her head moved just then made him ask, sharply, “You didn’t kill your son—?”

  “No,” she said: a truth with a lie attached. He could feel it, even in just one word. “He’s alive.”

  Kolan exhaled hard, debating whether to push for the details of the matter. Her head moved again, in slow negation. She wouldn’t answer. He shrugged, letting that go, and said instead, “You have a conscience. You could have killed me before I knew you were behind me, just now. You still could. But you’re—”

  Once more the golden eyes glared into his, the heat of her body a bare hands-breadth away. “Don’t presume,” she said. “Don’t dare think you understand me. It’s not your place.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Kolan said, shifting tactical ground with the ease of long practice. Keep her off balance, keep her confused, keep her intrigued: that strategy had kept him alive so far.

  “What question?”

  “Are all ha’ra’hain like you? Is this how you were taught to behave by your mother?”

  A stretched, fragile moment of stillness followed that; then she was gone, silent as she’d come, ghosting off into the darkness.

  “Ellemoa,” he said, not moving: he knew this game, too. But this time she didn’t have the constraint of stone walls bounding her movements. “Come back here and face me. Answer my question. Or are you afraid of the answer?”

  “You’re deliberately provoking me,” she said, low and hoarse, from somewhere behind him. “Do you want me to kill you, Kolan?”

  “I want you to come back and face me,” he said. “I want you to tell me the truth about yourself. Were you truly born to maim and kill? Is what Rosin taught you the way all ha’ra’hain aspire to behave? Is this the way you want your son to act—seeing humans as beneath you, as slaves and animals to slaughter and torture for your own enjoyment?” He paused, then dropped his volume to a scant murmur, knowing she’d hear it clearly: “Do you really want to treat humans the way Rosin treated you?”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  “And more. Were you listening? Under Rosin’s control, fine—you were compelled. I’ve always understood that. That’s why I never fought back: there was no point. But those days are over. You don’t have that lash on your back any longer. It’s your choice to hand out pain, now; your choice to follow the path Rosin set before you.” He paused, then said, with carefully measured inflection, “Your choice to be just like him.”

  Silence. A long, dark silence; after a time, he began to wonder if she’d ghosted off completely, freed from the boundaries that had always forced her to return before.

  “No,” she said from close by his right side, very quietly. “No, I’m still here.”

  He put out his right hand palm up, slowly, without making any other move at all, even to turn his head; then waited. After another long, long stretch of listening to nothing but crickets and frogs, there came a faint scuffing sound, like a heel kicking lightly against stone.

  “I can’t, Kolan,” she said, nearly a whisper. “I’m not—stable. Not sane. I’m still so angry—I so desperately want to pass the pain along.” She paused. “My son told me I should kill myself. Maybe he was right—”

  Kolan sucked in a distressed breath.

  “Oh, gods, Ellemoa,” he said, understanding her pain and her son’s point all at once. He bit his lip before he could blurt out something unwise.

  “I was so angry,” she said. “So hurt. My own son... All I wanted was to protect him. To save him. And he... he can’t get past seeing me as a monster. He doesn’t want to understand.”

  Kolan closed his eyes, steadying himself. “The Creeds tell us,” he said unemotionally, “that within every man is a monster and within every monster is a man; and that before we pick up our knives to attack one another we ought first to look within to excise our own evil.”

  “You and your Creeds,” she said, wearily. “Don’t you ever stop reciting those washed-out pieties? What’s your own evil, then, Kolan? What’s your monster within?”

  “You are, Ellemoa,” he said, a
little surprised at his own ready admission of it.

  “That’s nonsense,” she said, sharp and hostile. “I can’t be your inner monster. I’m out here, not inside you! Stop trying to confuse me.”

  He smiled, his eyes still closed, and said, “No, you’re not inside me, Ellemoa. Not literally. I’m sorry; I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean to confuse you.”

  “What did you mean, then?” she demanded.

  “I mean that in spite of everything you’ve done—to me, to others, to yourself—Ellemoa—” He opened his eyes and stretched his left hand out into the darkness, so that he stood with both arms outspread. “I still love you.”

  She hissed and spat; he could almost feel her bristling with outrage. “Your stupid little human notions of love are meaningless to me!”

  “Are they?” he said. “So it means nothing to you that I understand you completely—”

  “You don’t—”

  “No?” He reached into memory for a trick she’d shown him long ago, before their shared captivity.

  Pale orange flames flickered along his fingers for several heartbeats, then faded away.

  She hissed briefly: he couldn’t tell if she were angry, amused, or startled. Then she said, in a burst of raw agony, “Why? If you’d only done that—even once—for me—to show Rosin that I wasn’t lying, that I could teach him—I tried so hard to give him the abilities he wanted. He called it my failure—just like my failure to give him a child—He wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t listen—”

  Kolan shuddered at the thought of Rosin Weatherweaver learning how to summon flame to his hand, or any of a dozen other tricks Ellemoa seemed to regard as trivial. Bright Bay wouldn’t be torn up; it would have been leveled.

  “You listened. You learned. I gave you—so much—you don’t even know. Even now, you don’t really understand what I gave you, back then. You think your strength comes from your gods!”

  Kolan sucked in a sharp breath, shaken by the implications of those words. She’d never spoken of that time, in the darkness; talking of moments spent under sunlight had been too painful for both of them. Before he could think of a response, she went on:

  “But then—you ran away.” Her tone turned distant, hazed with recall. “You ran away from me for showing you what I could do—and that you could do it, too. That humans weren’t so very different from the lake-born.”

  “No,” he said, seizing the chance to press his point, “we aren’t all that different, are we?”

  She was silent.

  “You’re a fool,” she said at last. “You truly are. I know what you’re trying to do, Kolan; but it isn’t going to work. I’m not that—that foolish any longer. I’m a monster; my son had it right, and I’m slipping—”

  She stopped, her breathing harsh and labored.

  “Go, Kolan,” she said suddenly. “Please. Go. Walk—don’t run, never run, but go. Get away from me. I won’t remember—who you are. Please.”

  “There’s that conscience you keep saying you don’t have,” he said. “Come back here and face me. If you’re going to kill me, have the grace to come at me from the front. Look me in the eyes while you do it.”

  “Kolan.”

  “Come here.”

  She stood before him, eyes more white than black, and shivered all over as she stared at him.

  “You’re being very strange,” she said in a small voice. “Why aren’t you afraid?”

  He brought his arms around with infinite caution and pulled her into gentle contact: torso, hip, and thigh just touching. He waited until her shivers faded to an oddly relaxed stillness, then said, “Because there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  She stirred, then leaned slowly forward against him, her own arms wrapping around his waist, and rested her head against his shoulder.

  “Your faith again,” she murmured.

  “Yes.”

  She sighed, a long exhalation that seemed to draw a heavy weight from her thin body with its passing. “There are no gods, Kolan,” she whispered. “Your faith is a lie.”

  He smiled ruefully, recalling years of agonized doubt while writhing in the dark and the fire: asking himself that very question, for if the gods existed, how could they possibly allow Rosin Weatherweaver to exist alongside them?

  The answer he’d arrived at, in the end, had been astonishingly simple.

  “It doesn’t matter if the gods truly exist or not,” he said. “At the end of the day, gods are just a convenient hook to hang right behavior upon. My faith, these days, is in that; not in invisible, voiceless forces I can’t prove or disprove the existence of.”

  “You’ll get yourself hung for heresy one of these days,” she said, then broke into sudden laughter that washed over Kolan like the clear, cold waters of a snowmelt-thick stream. He joined in; something twisted and black inside of him loosened and let go, drifting away on the wave of their shared laughter.

  “Oh, it’s been so long since I laughed,” she said after a while. “So long.”

  “Stay with me,” he said into her hair. “Stay with me, Ellemoa.”

  She shivered again; he kept his hold light and loose and himself very still. At last she said, “Would you obey me, if I stayed? Now that Rosin’s gone?”

  “No,” he said. “Never. But I’ll do what you ask of me, if I see it as right.”

  She was quiet for a while, evidently thinking that over. At last she said, “And if I kill again?”

  “I’ll stand in your way,” he said. “You’ll kill me first, before you touch another. If you can live with that—well, I’ll be beyond caring at that point.”

  She broke out laughing again, a wild sound that rolled over into more honest amusement. “You’re as mad as I am.”

  “Yes.”

  Her arms tightened around him. “All right,” she said. “For as long as I can.”

  She straightened, pulling away a little. He loosened his embrace, his fingers barely touching each other behind her back now, and let her choose to come to him.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Night’s blackness didn’t exist: Idisio moved through an oddly lit world, as though an amber sun shone across everything at just the right angle to remove all shadows. There were no secrets under this new, hard-edged vision. Corners angled sharply enough to cut, walls bulked strong as mountains—and at the same time, it all seemed fragile as a child’s dollhouse made of thick paper and fingernail-thin sheets of wood. He felt he could walk through anything in this new world without pause, and leave behind only as much damage as he cared to show in his wake.

  On that thought, he turned and walked straight through a thick-trunked stone pine: suffered only a momentary blurring of vision and a brief itchiness across his entire body. Three steps clear of the tree, he stopped, turned, and studied the unmarked stone pine with a deep satisfaction; then walked back to it, sank his fist into the wood, and withdrew a thick chunk. The gaping hole began to weep sap instantly. He stuffed the broken piece back into the hole, where it sat crooked, like a squashed cork in a bottle neck too large for it. Sap coated his fingers; he held his hand out in front of him and willed the sap to slide off like water from oilcloth.

  A series of thin splats rattled against the ground before him as the sticky tree-blood simply melted from his hand, leaving no residue behind.

  This is what it means to be ha’ra’hain. I can do... anything.

  Exultation filled him. He broke into a loping run and found the ground whipping by as though he were back in the teyanain’s clee trance; leapt, and landed halfway up a tall tree without effort. Too fast; he twisted sideways to avoid slamming into the very solid trunk approaching his face, intuition warning that it wouldn’t yield to him this time.

  Holy gods—

  Thrashing and falling through densely-needled side branches, he grabbed for purchase. Every branch he managed to grip snapped instantly. His feet caught on a wider limb; he staggered sideways from the impact and slid through something damp and sticky. Godsdam
n birds—

  He began to fall again; kicked out at the trunk, shoving himself clear of the tree, and tumbled backward, managing—just—to land in an upright crouch, hands splayed on the ground. He stayed there for some time, panting a little in reflexive shock. That’ll teach me to be arrogant....

  He hauled himself back to his feet, aches flaring across his body in another reminder of unexpected consequences. Apparently, being able to do anything didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt... But even as he had that thought, the pain faded away into a ghost-echo, then a memory.

  Wide-eyed, he stared at the amber-tinted, shadowless world around him. This is what my mother was trying to explain. This is... incredible. I’m practically invulnerable. A moment’s attention dispersed the sap and needles clinging to his clothes and skin; as he watched, the assortment of small scratches and larger cuts closed over, the blood from each wound seeming to simply absorb back into his skin.

  How in the hells did Tank lay her out with a chunk of wood?

  That brought recent events to mind, though, and the dying scream of an innocent girl: rage flared, quick to catch as a long-dry torch. The edges of his vision turned an odd, hazy white. His mother had taught him to find an inn simply by thinking of it; now he turned his attention to finding her.

  Southeast. Not far away. He set off again, more slowly, a stalking pace now. For whatever reason, she wasn’t moving. There was no hurry.

  In a matter of two dozen steps, he could smell her: a distinctive aroma of rot overlaid with pungent spices. He’d never noticed it before, but he had no doubt that was her scent; it belonged with her, the way sour belonged with an unripe sunfruit.

  Another scent wove through hers: a soft, deep note that somehow conveyed male and malnourished.

  Idisio slowed even further, placing each foot with the intense care he’d used when stalking Deiq in the ruins—it seemed so long ago! But he’d proved his point, back then: he could sneak up on Deiq. He’d be just as capable of surprising his mother, especially if she was distracted with a new victim.