He’d never been to an archeological dig, but he’d always imagined them far more orderly and severe—this looked like a professor’s desk had just exploded. He cleared his throat again, loudly, and the man finally looked up, his eyes widening at the presence of another person in the room.
“Good afternoon,” Michel said.
“Who are you?”
Michel pulled the Gold Rose out of his shirt and let it dangle for a moment before returning it.
“Ah.” The man nodded happily, as if Michel’s visit were as normal as the heat. He crossed the room, snatching Michel’s hand and shaking it, leaving Michel’s fingers covered in ink smudges. “Professor Cressel. So good to meet you. You’re here to review our work?” He gestured across the seemingly endless stacks of paper. “I’m afraid it’s a little unorganized, but I tell you this is all very exciting!”
“Professor,” Michel said coolly, “I’m not here to review your work. Just the, uh, excavation site.”
“Of course, of course,” Cressel responded. “I’m afraid I’m not Privileged Robson, but the Privileged was called back to the city rather suddenly.” Cressel squinted at Michel curiously, then waved it off as if what was going on back in Landfall was of no real consequence. “Things are going swimmingly here, however. The madness takes a few more people every day, but the monolith is almost entirely unearthed. We’ve been prepping the move for weeks and should be ready within days.”
Michel tried to wrap his head around all the information and mentally ticked through what he knew: This was an archeological site of some kind; it was heavily guarded against outsiders; and something very important was located in the pit at the center of the camp. Michel’s mouth was suddenly dry as he considered the implications.
“Where do you plan on moving it?” he asked faintly.
Cressel seemed surprised by the question. He tilted his head. “Dalinport, I believe. We need someplace better to conduct our experiments than the middle of farmland!” He scowled to himself, jotted a few things down on a scrap of paper, then smiled back at Michel.
Michel slowly sidled toward the window on the far side of the room, moving a box of papers out of his way before leaning to get a look outside.
About fifty yards away, perfectly framed by two mounds of excavated dirt, was an immense pit. In the center rose an obelisk, perhaps twenty feet above the ground and surrounded by scaffolding, with old men and women in suits clambering all over the face of it—taking impressions, writing down notes, and sometimes standing and staring as if they’d been overcome by something unseen.
Michel heard a whisper in the back of his head, like the sound of a curtain being drawn aside, and turned toward Cressel. The professor seemed oblivious, his nose back in his notes.
Michel licked his lips, squinting at the obelisk. He heard the whisper again, but ignored it. Was this the very godstone Taniel was looking for? For some reason Michel had envisioned something … smaller—something easily moved, like the size of a bread box. He remembered that Taniel had used the plural when he spoke of the godstones.
“Are there any others?” Michel asked.
Cressel looked up. “Hmm?”
“Any other go—” Michel caught himself. “Any other stones like this?”
“I don’t believe so,” Cressel said, though he seemed immediately caught up in the idea. “Could you imagine, though? We’ve already learned so much from this one, if there were more …” He trailed off, fiddling with his pencil, and turned back to his notes.
“Imagine,” Michel murmured to himself, looking back out the window. The whispering grew louder, and he was certain now he wasn’t imagining it. “Do you hear anything?”
“Oh, that’s just the artifact. It talks sometimes.”
Every hair on the back of Michel’s neck stood up on end. He wanted to grab Cressel and shake him, demanding whether he really thought it was normal for an inanimate object to talk. He leaned closer to the window, pressing his nose against the glass, and stared. Whatever this thing was—it did not seem friendly. He scratched at his arm, feeling like the whispers were crawling beneath his skin.
“The madness?” he asked.
“Oh,” Cressel said, unconcerned, “it just takes the laborers. We keep our researchers on a strict regimen. No more than two hours beside the monolith at any time.”
Michel’s eye twitched. This was not normal. Every sense screamed for him to flee, to get away from this thing. He focused on the laborers moving around beside the pit and noted the harried, sleepless looks on their faces, the wide-eyed stares. They felt it, too, but they had no choice but to work. Hence, he decided, the army.
“Would you like a tour of the excavation?” Cressel asked cheerfully.
“No thank you.” Michel headed for the door. He had to tell Taniel about this. And he had to get as far from it as possible if he was ever going to sleep again.
CHAPTER 47
I don’t know how you’re doing it,” Vlora said, “and I don’t want to know. But I won’t talk to you while you’re wearing someone else’s face.”
She sat across from Tampo in the hackney cab, studying the unfamiliar face. This was Taniel; she knew it was. She should have known the moment they talked last week in the Yellow Hall but that face was too different and strange.
Over the years she’d seen sorcery the likes of which most Privileged could only dream, but she’d never witnessed anything like this. Her skin crawled, stomach turning. She should have been able to sense a fellow powder mage. She should have been able to feel the sorcery that hid his face in the Else.
She could do neither.
“Vlora,” Tampo began in a gentle, reprimanding tone of voice that she’d heard a thousand times when they were teenage lovers.
“I’m serious,” she snapped, trying not to throw up.
Tampo snorted, turning toward the window. “This isn’t like putting on a mask,” he said. “It takes hours to put back.”
“I don’t care.”
“Damn it, Vlora …” Several moments passed before he finally put his face in his hands and drew them downward, like a man washing his face in the basin first thing in the morning. When his fingers withdrew his face had altered, a series of subtle changes to his eyes, cheekbones, chin, and nose that left him a different man; Taniel Two-shot, hero of the Fatrastan Revolution and Adran-Kez War. Godkiller.
Vlora opened the cab door and vomited onto the passing cobbles.
She straightened, wiping her mouth, the taste of bile on her tongue, then ran a hand through her hair to find she was sweating horribly. That’s out of the way, she told herself. You’ve seen strange things before. Why does this bother you so much? She forced herself to examine Taniel closely, searching his face. This was definitely him.
“You haven’t aged,” she said.
“A side effect of Ka-poel’s sorcery,” Taniel said.
Taniel drew a pair of black gloves from his pocket and pulled them on over his fingers, drawing Vlora’s attention to his left hand. The hand must have also been hidden behind this glamouring sorcery, because it was now smooth and hairless, the skin the color of fresh blood. Vlora snorted, hardly allowing herself to be surprised. “You’re the Red Hand?” she asked.
Taniel gave her a wan smile.
With all the strangeness Vlora had just witnessed, she found herself especially drawn to the red skin. “How did that happen?”
Taniel put his hands in his pocket, pulling a sour face. “Also a side effect of Ka-poel’s sorcery. I had a run-in with a very powerful Privileged. He almost won. The kickback from Ka-poel’s protection turned him into a smear of blood and dyed my skin red. No idea why.” He touched his elbow. “Goes all the way up to here.”
Vlora shook her head in wonder. Taniel Two-shot was both the Red Hand and Gregious Tampo? A million questions went through her head, so many different things she wanted to say that it made her dizzy. Yet when she tried to speak, nothing important came out. “You’ve been busy.”
“You could say that,” Taniel agreed.
“So what? Are you immortal now?”
“Not that I’d like to find out.” He pulled down the collar of his suit to show a healed scar beneath his neck. “Getting shot still hurts.”
“Glad to hear some things never change, even when you ascend to … whatever it is you’ve become.”
Taniel frowned, looking back out the window and not responding. She could see the emotions leaping across his face, his lips twisting as he opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, then tried to do so again with the same results. Vlora wanted nothing more than to reach across the space between them and punch him right between the eyes.
She managed to restrain herself. “You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?” From the startled look on his face, that wasn’t exactly what he was expecting her to say. She continued: “That shit you pulled on me in the Yellow Hall. Yapping at me from behind another’s eyes about our past. Telling me that the Palo hated me because they loved you so much.”
“None of that was a lie,” Taniel said.
“That doesn’t make it any less of a shitty thing to bring up after ten years.”
Taniel rolled his tongue around in his cheek. “I’ll admit, there was some old anger there.”
“Get over it,” Vlora said. “You’re supposed to be dead. And now I find you here, half a world away, up to your neck in … I have no idea what you’re up to your neck in. But I’ve been working for Lindet for over a year and a little warning would have been nice. I’ve been hunting the Red Hand. It would have been nice to know it was you!”
“You’ve been working for Lindet killing the people I’m trying to protect.”
“So I’m your enemy?”
Taniel pursed his lips.
Vlora went on. “You’re a Palo now, then?”
“My wife is.”
Vlora snorted. “Ka-poel—I assume you mean Ka-Poel—is Dynize. I remember that much. I’ve still got your letters. Been using them to navigate this stupid place and …” She let out a sudden laugh, unable to help herself. The irony of using Taniel’s letters to aid in her campaign against people he was fighting for was just too much. She got herself under control, trying to get her mind to focus. A million questions, but only some of them were truly important. “The Palo getting organized. All the grief and worry they’ve been causing Lindet. That was you and Ka-poel?”
“Most of it,” Taniel admitted. “And Pole considers herself Palo. She was raised here, you know.”
“If that was the two of you, why didn’t I run into more resistance when my Riflejacks were putting down uprisings in the swamps? Even you could organize the rabble better than what we faced.”
If Taniel noticed the backhanded compliment, he did not acknowledge it. “By my count, there are over seven hundred Palo tribes stretched across the whole of Fatrasta. Probably more that we don’t even know about. Uniting them is a giant pain in the ass. We barely have a line of communication to those out in the Tristan Basin, let alone the wilds beyond them.”
“Just enough to get them riled up, eh?”
“Not intentionally,” Taniel said.
One question down. “All right, so that wasn’t you out in the Basin. Then what the pit are you doing here? You say you’re protecting the Palo? Uniting them? Why?”
“To give them a fighting chance against the Kressian incursion.”
“You are Kressian,” Vlora said. She could hear the anger in Taniel’s words, and she felt her own rise to match it.
“I’m dead, remember?” Taniel said. “Besides, the Palo need all the help they can get. They’re not stupid. They’re not lacking in courage. They just don’t have the training to stand up against Lindet.”
“So you’re fomenting a revolution?”
Taniel’s face twisted. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“Indulge me.”
“First of all, Lindet is brilliant, and I don’t use that word lightly. In terms of planning, she’s on par with my father.”
“Everyone knows she’s smart,” Vlora conceded.
“No. She’s brilliant. She has all of Field Marshal Tamas’s ability to plan and none of his moral qualms.”
“Tamas had moral qualms?” Vlora asked, half-joking.
“Compared to Lindet? Yes.”
“You’re Taniel-bloody-Two-shot. Why don’t you just put a bullet in her head and be done with it?”
“That’s what makes this complicated,” Taniel said. “Lindet has contingencies for everything, including powder mages. She’s accompanied by at least two Privileged at all times. Yes, I probably could kill her with Ka-poel’s help, even though she’s also got contingencies against blood magic. But this country is a tower of cards, and killing Lindet will make the entire thing fall down—she’s made certain of that.”
“I thought you’re only worried about the Palo.”
Taniel made a frustrated sound. “I’m worried about Fatrasta, both the Palo and the Kressians. The fates of everyone who lives here are tied together. I won’t cut off my nose to spite my face. Ka-poel and I have spent the last five years trying to figure out how to remove Lindet from power and the best we’ve come up with is outright revolution.”
“And here I thought you were trying a peaceful route,” Vlora said sarcastically. She wasn’t sure what to make of this—any of it—but she didn’t like it. It seemed almost funny that ten years ago she would have been on board with a coup in a heartbeat. She would have been idealistic, hopeful, determined—just like Taniel sounded. She was the one who’d changed, not him. No, not funny, she decided. Terrifying.
“I am,” Taniel insisted. “Mostly. Uniting the Palo is the first step to a peaceful revolution. Our goal is to force Lindet into a corner. I’ve studied her moves for the last twelve years and I readily admit she’s smarter than me. But I’m not an idiot, either. I can see patterns. Everything she does is for Fatrasta. Not the people, or the country, but the concept. She wants this country to work and so far it’s done so by her will alone. If the whole of Fatrasta turns against her, she will abdicate.”
Vlora was not convinced. Something was bothering her about this whole exchange, and she couldn’t quite figure out what. “Was Mama Palo one of yours?” she asked.
“She was,” Taniel said.
“You let her die.”
Taniel’s eyes tightened. “Technically, you killed her.” He paused, blowing out softly through his nostrils. “I did not see you coming. Four powder mages accompanied by a Palo guide, right into the center of the Depths? That was ballsy, even for you. I would have stopped you if I had known it was coming.”
“You could have rescued her from the gallows.”
“To what end?” Taniel asked.
“To save an old lady’s life! To rescue the one person who’s been uniting the Palo against Lindet! To stop the Blackhats from having another victory. To …” Vlora trailed off, suddenly angry with Taniel for his lack of action, and angry with herself for being complicit in Mama Palo’s death. Taniel tilted his head to one side, and Vlora narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“The old woman who died wasn’t Mama Palo.”
Vlora opened her mouth, then closed it again. “You … son of a bitch, it’s Ka-poel, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is. The old woman who went to the gallows was named Cherin-tes. She’s been a figurehead from the very beginning, and she knew it. And before you call me a monster for letting her die, a sickness in her blood would have seen her dead within the year anyway. She knew the risks.”
“And Mama Palo?”
“It’ll take Lindet a couple of months, but she’ll eventually figure out that she missed.”
“That I missed,” Vlora corrected.
“Yup.”
Vlora scowled. She didn’t like the idea of leaving town and having rumors spread over the winter that she’d botched a job. It would be terrible for the Riflejacks’ reputation. The intangible thing in the ba
ck of her mind was still bugging her. It was floating just outside her awareness, like a moth tapping against a windowpane. Suddenly, she reached out and snagged it. “The Dynize,” she said. “Meln-Dun. The dragonmen. What’s the connection?”
For the first time since their cab ride began, Taniel’s face went stony, his eyes narrowing. “That’s something entirely different,” he said quietly.
“Is it a problem for you?”
“The Dynize are clever. They’ve been very subtle about their infiltration of the Depths. We’ve been watching them, keeping our distance, but if I’ve put the pieces together right, and Meln-Dun tricked you into helping him remove Mama Palo …”
“He did,” Vlora growled.
“ … and Meln-Dun has some sort of deal with the Dynize …”
“Seems little doubt of that,” Vlora interjected.
“ … then Ka-poel and I are going to move against them soon.”
Vlora did not envy the Dynize who would be caught up in that purge. She knew what Ka-poel was capable of when she was angry, and if the sorcery disguising Taniel was any indication, she’d progressed even further since then. “Why are they here?” Vlora asked.
“We don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”
“Both. We have our suspicions, but …”
Vlora waited for him to finish the sentence. He didn’t. “You don’t trust me,” she finally said.
“You’re working for Lindet.”
“You just told me a lot more damning information than a few suspicions over Dynize spies.”
“Compared to our suspicions, all of this is inconsequential. Besides, nothing I told you could help you fight us. The Blackhats have been trying to catch the Red Hand for years. The only way I survive is by making certain there’s nothing to capture.”
“Taniel Red Hand, huh?”
“Just Red Hand. Taniel’s dead, remember?”
Vlora found herself troubled, wondering what suspicions Taniel could have about the Dynize that were even more sensitive than his war with Lindet. “The Riflejacks don’t work for Lindet anymore.”
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