Then this.
One moment, blissful ignorance. The next, he was here, apart, separated from his body and, if the way Dina and the mage ignored him, invisible. Perhaps he was a ghost. Maybe the mage’s drug had done what hundreds of years and countless battles hadn’t managed—kill the Immortal Soldier.
Yet, he couldn’t believe this was the Shadows. The Shadows was supposed to be a refuge for weary spirits, a realm of tranquillity and healing. The spirits of the dead would rest and when ready, be reborn into the light. After being denied the peace of the Shadows for so long, David would be incredibly disappointed if this was it. Logic said it wasn’t. Surely no other dead people had to watch their remains be sewn back together.
He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t entirely alive either. This new state of being was interesting. Sadly, the pleasantness of the drug hadn’t come with him. Other things hadn’t come either. The constant tug of the link to Duke Ibarra and the drawing need to continue with his duty were gone. That alone made up for the lack of the drug, leaving him lighter and relieved.
Sitting in a chair in the corner, Castillo watched Dina work. His face was haggard and pale, hands tucked into his armpits to keep them from shaking. If all of the survivors of the ambush in the tunnels had come here, then it was a miracle the mage was still conscious.
“You should go to bed.” Dina didn’t look much better than Castillo, her once neat hair coming free of its braid and faint bruises beginning to show under her eyes.
“There’s more wounded.” Castillo struggled to his feet. “We’re all exhausted so it’ll take all of us to see to them.”
“They can wait. You need to sleep. Nacio and Manuel can get them comfortable for the night and Agata can take over in the morning.” She stood back from the table, considering her work. “It’s the best I can do.”
Castillo grunted. “It’s more than he deserves for what he did to you earlier.”
Dina went to a tub of water and washed her hands, scrubbing at the dried blood around her nails intently. “I wasn’t the one he hurt. I’m fine.”
“Dina,” there was a touch of weary command in his voice, “you can’t ignore what he did to you. He threatened you. I’ve never seen you so scared before.”
The Sacerdio grabbed the soap and lathered up even more. “I was scared, yes, but now I’m all right.”
Behind her, Castillo looked as if he was ready to shake her until she told the truth. She wasn’t all right. Tears brimmed in her eyes but she kept her back to Castillo so he wouldn’t see.
The door opened and a male Sacerdio poked his head in. “Mage, one of the wounded would like to talk to you.”
“In a moment, Manuel,” Castillo said, waving him out. When the door was shut, he continued. “Dina, just talk to me. Don’t worry that I’m Second Estate and you’re Third. It doesn’t matter to me, you know that.”
The interruption had given the Sacerdio the chance to get herself under control again. She rinsed off her hands and turned to Castillo, giving him a tired smile.
“It’s not that. I’m fine, truly I am.” She ushered him toward the door. “You see to that patient and I’ll get someone to take the body to the death-hut.”
Castillo resisted but her smile didn’t falter under his glare. With a sigh, he turned and went out. Dina took a moment to straighten her hair, suck in a deep, trembling breath, then followed him.
David went with them, finding he could walk through walls. Dina brushed past Manuel and Castillo and kept going out of the hospital. David stopped by the two men.
“—one of the last brought out of the tunnels,” Manuel was saying. “I patched up her wounds and said you’d see her in the morning, but she insisted on talking to you tonight.”
Castillo went to the bed Manuel pointed out. It was the corporal from the tunnels. A surge of relief washed through David’s incorporeal body.
“Thank you for this,” the woman said as Castillo sat on the edge of her bed.
“Is there something you need? Are you in pain?” he asked.
“One of the Sacerdios gave me a dose of something,” the corporal said, her eyelids drooping. “I’m not in pain but I’m very sleepy.”
“Don’t fight it. You need to rest. We’ll see to your injuries in the morning. It’s been a hectic day and none of us are quite up to healing—”
“Mage, it’s not me I wanted to talk to you about.” She glanced around the ward, beckoning him closer when she saw a couple of soldiers still awake. In a lower voice, she continued. “I need to pass this on before I fall asleep and forget. You’re the highest rank here. You have to listen to me.”
Castillo made to stand. “I’m not sure I’m the right person to hear whatever you have to say. I can get Captain Meraz if you wish.”
The woman caught his arm. “No. I can’t wait. I’m going fall asleep very soon. Please. Just listen to me.”
Clearly uncomfortable, the Bone Mage nodded.
“My name’s Rayen par Torin, corporal of Aguila Company.” She grimaced. “What’s left of it. Do you know how many made it out?”
Sighing, Castillo said, “No. We haven’t made any final counts and the last I heard, they were still looking for people in the tunnels.”
She nodded. “That man they brought in with me, the one who should have been dead but wasn’t. I owe him my life. If any of my unit made it out, it’s because of him. He arrived just when I thought the Alarians were going to win. I don’t know what it was about him, but the moment he joined the fight, things changed, as if he’d brought a light into the dark. He gave us hope that we would live.”
David frowned. He’d only being doing his duty.
“He really saved you?” Castillo asked.
“Then, and later, when the last of my unit were killed. They were there one moment, gone the next. I took shrapnel in my leg and was down. But when the Alarians fired another bomb, he kicked the mortar so the bomb went into the wall instead of right at me. He didn’t have to. He was on his feet, he could have run away, but he didn’t.”
“But why was he was there?”
“He was looking for someone. I don’t know his name, but he always kept close to Demetrio. They were two of the new recruits that joined us in Graciela before we shipped out. The man knocked the boy out, had two of my people take him out of the tunnels. I don’t know if they made it but I think the boy is important. The man said Duke Ibarra was after him.”
With the loss of his link to the Duke, and the odd circumstance he now found himself in, David had forgotten about the boy. Had he made it out alive? If he had, where was he now? Free and making another attempt to run?
With the story told, Rayen’s strength seemed to desert her. She sagged back against the pillow, her hand slipping from Castillo’s. Barely keeping her eyes open, she said, “The man saved my life. The least I can do is make sure his job is completed. Will you find the boy and have him sent back to Ibarra?”
Castillo leaned over and pulled the blanket up to her neck. “Of course I will.”
The mage was lying. He had the same look in his eyes as he’d had when he claimed to not know the boy.
Assured the woman was asleep, Castillo left. David followed him. The mage didn’t go to the command tent or to Captain Meraz’s private quarters. He went to his own tent and dug around until he found a packet of cigarillos. Lighting up, he drew back on the cigarillo like his life depended on it. On a cloud of grey smoke, he muttered, “Just what have you got me into, Rafe?” Then he stubbed out the smouldering end of his cigarillo and flopped down on his cot.
Castillo knew something. Was he part of the boy’s scheme, whatever it was? A de Roque would have little loyalty to Ibarra, it was possible the mage was helping the boy.
Annoyed at his inability to pry answers out of the mage, David left the tent.
Somewhere, music was being played. A slow, steady drumbeat, soft chanting and a throbbing, aching voice weaving through it, singing in a language David didn’t know. It was
hypnotic but at the same time it moved something inside him, awoke an unknown desire for something he didn’t understand. David followed the music. It drew him around the side of the hospital and to a Valleyman hut. He pushed through the wall and found a bland, dimly-lit interior. A circle of natives knelt around the wall, the men with drums, the women swaying in time to their chanting. Kimotak was the singer, sitting cross legged in the middle of the circle, head tipped back, throat pulsing out the resonating song.
Lying next to Kimotak was David’s body. It was covered with one of the native wraps, just his torn face showing.
David knelt down opposite Kimotak, leaning close to his body, trying to find any signs of life. Never had he been this mutilated. He’d lain in cold mud for two days once, while his shattered spine healed, and spent several hours at the bottom of Lake Zarate Este trying to free himself from chains holding him to a boulder. His fingers and toes had frozen during a hard winter trek through the Talamhian Ranges, requiring amputation, but they had regrown within days. Then there had been all the blade wounds, the arrows through his chest, a poisoned dirk slid between his ribs from behind. None of them had slowed him for long, his cursed body repairing itself without a Bone Mage’s aid. The only time he had ever thought he might actually die had been when a Duchess of Navarro had tried to have him beheaded. David still wondered sometimes if it would have worked, but a messenger from Ibarra had arrived just as the headsman was about to swing. David’s life had been bought for a high sum that day, which made him think the dukes of Ibarra didn’t know themselves if beheading would kill him.
Yet nothing had been close to this. It wasn’t just a missing hand or toes, a hunk of steel through his guts or poison eating away his muscles. Parts of him were unrecognisable, whole parts were missing.
Would they bury him?
A sting of fear went through him. What if they buried him? It would be all his fears from the tunnels brought to life; the heavy, cloying weight of the earth, the suffocating darkness, the loneliness all too similar to when they locked him away once they were done with him. If he didn’t die but his body was lost, would he be stuck in this bodiless, directionless half-state forever?
“No.”
David sprang to his feet. A dark shape moved in the corner. Man or woman he couldn’t tell. It was simply a darker shape against the dark.
“This,” the shadow said, raising a handless arm to encompass the hut, “is transitory. An odd effect of the Bone Mage’s sympathy. It will pass and soon, we will be back together again.”
Cold coalesced in the middle of David’s being. “Who are you?”
“Don’t you remember me, David? We have been together for so long. You used to call me Ciro.”
For all his cursed life there had been something other within him. Something aware of things he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, that directed him when he fought, that reminded him of his Name when he forgot it. From the very first time he’d been aware of the other, he’d hoped it was Saint Ciro. A hope that turned to belief when the full reality of his new existence as Ibarra’s unkillable slave slammed home. Alone, confused, tortured, he’d needed something to keep him sane and there was comfort in thinking his saint cared for him when no one else did. It had been the thought that saw him through so many horrible tasks, that made him struggle on when every fibre in him protested what he was made to do.
Now, even that faint hope was destroyed. “That doesn’t tell me who you are.”
“Who is immaterial. What is more important.”
“Then what are you?”
“Am I not the Immortal Soldier?”
The cadence of Kimotak’s song changed, taking on an urgency that startled David. What had been a mournful melody became frantic, the drumming rising in a chaotic crescendo, the chanting losing definition, becoming wailing. It rose in volume and speed, battering at David, physical against his insubstantial body. He vibrated with the sound.
Then it stopped. An abrupt, ringing emptiness. It left David hanging, suspended in the final throes of the song and he felt it. The familiar tug on his core, the leash holding him to Duke Ibarra. David turned to where the shadow had stood. Nothing was there.
The Valleymen stood, stretching their long, lean bodies and one pushed back the cloth hanging across the doorway. Brilliant dawn light flooded in. Taking their drums the natives left the hut in single file. Kimotak was the last to leave, standing in the doorway, looking at the body. When he lifted his gaze, it settled unerringly on David’s ghost.
“Not wait long now.”
Kimotak was gone in a swish of the door-hanging. David dove after him. Perhaps Kimotak knew what was happening to him.
Something held him back. The weight of the duke’s task increased, the pull of his curse grew stronger. He strained against it, held his place for a hopeful moment, but was jerked backwards. Falling, he heard a hollow, whispering laugh and then cold, heavy flesh formed up around him.
His eyes were blind. His mouth ruined, teeth broken, tongue shrivelled. Couldn’t move, muscles torn and shredded. But he could feel; feel the exposed nerves in the chill morning air, the gaping chasms where flesh and bone had once been. He was trapped again in a body that didn’t work, that didn’t respond to his frantic, silent screaming.
Dead, but not.
Chapter 12
“There have been several attacks by Talamhians this season.” Duke Galo’s lazily lidded eyes contradicted the grim nature of his words. “Though only one resulted in heavy losses to a caravan, due to the merchant’s lack of protection. He’d thought the stories of greenmen raiding our caravans exaggerated.”
“Still,” Isabel said, “trade benefits both our countries. Why are the Talamhians causing mischief in the first place?”
Galo tugged at the lace cuff of his shirt. “The greenmen have good memories. They remember Duchess Rolon’s attempt to tax passage through the Soledad Pass. I’ve done my best to convince them I am nothing like my aunt and that the tax will never be revisited, but...” He shrugged elegantly.
“They attack, yet they also trade,” Marquis Sarabia mused.
“Different clans, old boy. We trade mainly with lowlanders, the Ciarain and Suibhne. But the highlanders are the ones who disagree with the trade.” He consulted his page, who whispered in his ear. “The biggest protesters are the Fidhne. Terribly fierce and passionate, I’m afraid.”
Sol listened with half an ear, trusting to Sergio and Eloisa to note anything of import and to prompt him if he needed to speak on behalf of Roque. He’d spent a restless night with Eloisa, sending messages to Abbess Orellana in the hopes it would prompt a reply. Nothing had come back and Sol had sent the Earth Mage to her bed in the early hours, just as Sergio was returning from Bolivar and Karyme’s party. He’d listened to Sergio’s slurred account of the night. Sol’s absence had caused a stir but thankfully Ibarra hadn’t hinted as to why.
After hearing everything Ibarra had to say about Gabe, Sol hadn’t been in any sort of mood to socialise.
Alamar had spun a tale of secret trysts and impossible magic. Sol wasn’t certain he believed it all, but he knew Gabe; knew the lengths his friend would go to to save a life and the loyalty Gabe had for those he loved. Yet he wasn’t sure Alamar had told the truth.
Retellings had a way of growing and changing, whether through faulty memory or a need to impress. Alamar hadn’t been present for the incident, only coming on the scene when all that remained was a mutilated corpse, Gabe’s lover Evellia bloody and unconscious, Princess Beila a weeping, panicking mess and Gabe, sprawled across the stable floor, exhausted. There had been a fifth person present, but none of the survivors supposedly knew who it was. Though Alamar was not a man given to flights of fancy or settling for half-truths, Sol could only imagine what the duke had told him was an unconscious exaggeration. Alamar admitted to intense rage, which Sol could well understand. His daughter had been so traumatised by what she’d seen she still couldn’t talk about it. Sol forgave Alamar his ini
tial anger, but he found he couldn’t rely on the duke’s testimony due to it.
Yet that first burst of anger hadn’t been Gabe’s undoing. That came later, when Gabe had been able to talk. He too hadn’t been there for the whole thing, simply wandering in to a bloody aftermath, knocked aside by the fleeing fifth person, the alleged murderer. Inside, he’d found Beila beside Evellia, her handmaiden. Evellia had been mortally wounded, her last breath escaping before Gabe reached her. Not far away lay the body of her brother, murdered by the unknown participant.
It was what Gabe had done then that caused him to be sent to the Valley. He’d saved Evellia.
Sol wondered if perhaps the handmaiden hadn’t been dead at all. Just very close to it and Gabe had performed a damn near miraculous healing to bring her back from the edge of the Shadows. Or perhaps she had been dead and it was a miracle. There had been no recorded miracles since the last of Luz’s saints, Aciano, had died but the church investigated several possible miracles each decade. What if Gabe had performed a miracle? What if Luz had used Gabe as his vessel to bring Evellia back? Yet the church, and Alamar, refused to even consider the possibility. Just how Gabe had brought the handmaiden back was not a miracle, they said. It wasn’t even magic, Alamar said.
Just the thought of Alamar’s description of what Gabe had done made Sol’s stomach twist and a sweat break out on his hands. Abbess Morales had called it the work of the Fuerza Oscura, declaring Gabe a demon. She had been about to claim him for her inquisition when Alamar had stepped in, pleading for clemency. So Gabe was sent to war.
Compared to the inquisition, Gabe’s punishment was the best they could have hoped for. Alamar had refused Sol’s request to bring Gabe home. If he didn’t serve a year in the Valley, Morales would have every right to take him down under her cathedral.
Sol had hoped Orellana would know how to bring Gabe home before he killed himself, but without Morales getting her hands on him. The lack of a reply had left him confused and uncertain. He wanted to hate Ibarra for doing this, but could see the logic of it. If only Saint Sevastian would offer up a morsel of wisdom instead of predicting the rise of a myth.
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