Spirit’s End loem-5

by Rachel Aaron

  As she began to panic, her eyes drifted up, squinting against her darkening vision to see Sparrow standing over her, his mouth curled in a smile. One hand held the knife, still dark and dripping with blood. Her blood, she realized with a twinge, but she dismissed the thought as soon as it came. None of that mattered. Her eyes darted to Sparrow’s other hand, the one clenched in a fist. A deep red, viscous liquid dripped between his fingers, and Sara’s burning blood went cold.

  Sparrow’s smile widened at the realization in her eyes.

  “What?” he said, opening his hand. “Looking for this?”

  A chain dangled from his fingers, and at its end was a shattered glass shell no thicker than a soap bubble. Deep red liquid dripped from its broken edge, falling into the water below. Sara blinked in disbelief. She hadn’t even felt him take it. But then, she hadn’t felt the knife either.

  “You never were any good at seeing what was around you,” Sparrow said, dropping the remains of the broken orb into the water. “Especially when you have your spirit open.”

  Sara stared at him, her mouth moving to shape a word. Why?

  “Why?” Sparrow sneered. “Because I’m done taking your orders. Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as the Council’s errand boy. And because, in the whole Council, you’re the only one who could ever be my jailor.” He wiped her blood off his knife, smearing it across his dull pants. “I’d say it’s nothing personal, but I can’t think of anyone who deserved that stabbing more than you. And the best part of this is everyone will think he did it.” Sparrow pointed his newly clean blade at where Banage was lying.

  Sara rolled in the water, gathering her spirit as she struggled to breathe. Sparrow just sheathed the knife in his boot and dropped to his knees beside her.

  “Catching Eli was your fatal mistake, you should know,” he whispered, leaning down so she could hear. “Banage was bad enough, but the minute you decided to reason with your son instead of handing him over to Whitefall, I knew I had my chance at last. All I had to do was make sure Whitefall knew enough to push you. Of course, the idiot Oseran king almost ruined everything. How was I supposed to know he’d move that fast? But everything worked out in the end.”

  Sparrow gave her a blinding smile. “Eli was sent back to his cell with no more reason to stay. True to his reputation, once he decided to escape, he was out in a matter of minutes, and with both Banage boys on the lam, you were far too busy to keep your eyes where they should be.” Sparrow’s smile turned cruel. “On me.”

  Sara’s mouth began to work, trying to form any of the biting responses she had to that, but Sparrow was already rocking back on his heels.

  “I’d give you some parting advice about the dangers of hubris,” he said, his voice so glib it was almost singsong. “But since you’re not going to be around to use it, I don’t think I’ll waste my breath. Good-bye, Sara dear, and remember—you deserve every bit of this. Let that be the last thought that takes you to the mists.”

  He patted her cheek and straightened up, his face leaving her field of vision. Sara tried to follow him, but her body had gone rigid. The pain was finally starting to bleed through her shock, and it was quickly crowding out every other concern.

  Powers, she hurt. The world was spinning now. She blinked hard, trying to see around the dark shape swimming across her field of vision, but it wasn’t until she heard his voice that she realized the shadow wasn’t an illusion caused by her failing eyes. It was Banage.

  He was on his feet, hands out, his rings shining like miniature suns. Of course, she realized, her spirit had closed when she’d fallen, freeing him. Banage was shouting something. She couldn’t make out the words over the ringing in her ears, but his voice was full of command and, unexpectedly, rage.

  She was still trying to puzzle it out when stone hands burst from the floor, breaking through the water with a great crash. They grabbed for Sparrow, but he dodged them neatly, laughing. Sara frowned in confusion before she remembered Banage’s spirit couldn’t see Sparrow. None of the spirits could. She heard Banage swear above her, calling another spirit as he dropped to Sara’s side.

  His hands, surprisingly hot, pressed into her back, fingers fumbling to stop the blood. A shock of pain went through her as he touched her wound, clearing her mind. The world, which had seemed so far away only seconds before, suddenly snapped into focus, and she knew with absolute clarity that if she did not pull herself together right this instant she was going to die.

  The realization was like another knife in her chest. At once, with the discipline she’d learned as a Spiritualist and perfected in her own work, she forced everything out of her mind and turned all her power, all her will, toward the only two goals that mattered.

  From the outside, what happened next probably looked like a miracle. All at once, Sara’s convulsions stopped. She lay still, her eyes closed, and then, quietly, she took a deep, deep breath. Banage froze. Gingerly, he lifted his hands from her back. Her wound was still open, but the flow of blood had slowed to a trickle. When Sara took another breath, it stopped altogether.

  But a few feet away, the story was very different. Between the stone hands that were still blindly looking for him, Sparrow fell to his knees, grasping his throat. His handsome face turned red and then blue as his mouth opened and closed, desperately trying to force air down his throat.

  It didn’t work. He started to flail, his eyes bulging as he fell onto his back. He rolled in the water, but as the seconds ticked by, his thrashing slowed until he lay still, his head slumped beneath the dark, dirty water. He didn’t move again.

  Banage stared at Sparrow’s still body for several seconds, and then he looked at Sara, his face pale as paper behind his graying beard. “What did you do?”

  Sara shook her head and closed her eyes. Each breath came easier than the last, but she didn’t dare relax her control. She kept her focus inward, turning all her concentration onto her own soul now that Sparrow was down. She wasn’t nearly as good as Tesset at this sort of thing—her initial panic proved that much—but she’d learned enough from him to patch up a little knife hole. Ah, Tesset, she thought longingly as the pain began to fade. How I miss you.

  She opened her eyes just enough to steal another look at Sparrow’s still body. If Tesset had been here, this never would have happened. Despite the fact that she had saved his life, it was no secret that Sparrow hated her. Still, they’d worked through it for a decade thanks to her vigilance and Sparrow’s refusal to take any opportunity that wasn’t a sure win. But between the extra workload Tesset’s death had left and this business with Banage, she’d gone sloppy, and now look at things. Sparrow was dead, her workshop was destroyed, Eliton was gone off who knew where, taking her answers with him, and her Relay was crushed under the weight of Banage’s moral hardline.

  All her work, everything she’d dedicated her life to, had been washed away in a matter of minutes, and all she had left now was Banage hovering over her like a mother hen. Sara blew out her hard-won breath in a huff. He was probably staying only because he couldn’t stand the thought of her dying before he’d dragged her before the Court, the pompous, self-righteous fool.

  Even so, her frown softened a little, it was nice to know Etmon still cared.

  When she had her bleeding under control, Sara opened her eyes to find herself lying on her side on a dry stretch of stone. Etmon’s roots had surrounded them again, blocking off the flood, and Banage himself was using his mist spirit to evaporate the last of the water over the barrier. His rings glowed as he worked, lighting him in a rainbow of color. It was a nostalgic sight, and Sara smiled before she could stop herself.

  Gingerly, she rolled onto her back. It didn’t hurt as much as she’d feared, but the movement sent her into a coughing fit. Banage jumped at the sound.

  “Sara?” he said, grabbing her hand as he knelt beside her.

  “I’ll live,” she muttered, glancing at their entwined fingers. She thought about breaking free, but then
relaxed. Etmon’s hand was warm. Comforting, she realized, lying back. How long had it been since she’d felt his hand like this? Not since Eliton was a baby.

  Sara winced. Her brush with death must have taken more out of her than she’d realized if she was getting sentimental. She was about to tell Banage to help her up when he rolled her onto her side without so much as a warning, peeling back her ripped coat to examine her wound. His breath hitched when he saw it was closed, and Sara smirked. It was about time the man was impressed by something she’d done.

  “Let me down,” she said, forcing her voice to be stern. “I told you, I’ll live.”

  “How—” Banage began.

  “A trick of Tesset’s,” Sara answered, cutting him off for time’s sake. Whitefall’s troops would be down soon enough, and she wanted to savor the pleasure of explaining her cleverness before she was forced to order around a bunch of frightened guardsmen. “If the only human soul a wizard can touch is her own, then it’s a shame not to control it thoroughly. I never quite managed his level of mastery, but I can stop small things like this.”

  She arched her shoulder to show him, ignoring the painful hitch of the wound that was not quite as closed as she was making out. Banage, however, just folded his arms over his chest. “That much I can understand,” he said. “What I don’t get is him.”

  He nodded across her, beyond the wall formed by his roots where, Sara knew, Sparrow’s body lay still in the water.

  “A wizard cannot touch another human soul,” Banage said. “It’s the core rule of magic. How in the world did you break it?”

  “Are you sure you want to discuss this now?” Sara asked. “The guards are coming.”

  “I might not get another chance,” Banage said. “And I’ve blocked the guards for the moment.” He sat on the ground beside her. “Humor me.”

  Sara frowned, searching for the best way to describe what she’d done without sending Banage into one of his fits of morality. She didn’t want to destroy the momentary truce that had grown between them, and she actually relished the idea of explaining Sparrow. He was, after all, one of the most interesting puzzles she’d ever stumbled across, and bombastic as her husband could be, Etmon always had been one of the only people who could understand the intricacies of her work. Provided she could distract him from his moralizing, of course.

  “Sparrow is, was an anomaly,” she said finally. “Most human spirits encompass their bodies naturally, and these are what spirits see when they look at us. Wizards shine brighter, so I’m told, but even the spirit deaf have some kind of presence. Not so with Sparrow. For whatever reason, he was born with a soul so small, so faint, as my spirits would say, that he’s basically invisible. Unless he wraps himself in something they can see, spirits look right through him.”

  Banage eyes widened. “The hideous clothes?”

  “Exactly,” Sara said, nodding. “A simple, elegant solution. Though even wrapped in bright spirits, he’s hard to focus on. Or so I’m told, anyway. But that wasn’t what I was interested in. The most interesting part of Sparrow is that, when he wears dull clothes, he’s basically invisible to humans as well.”

  She stopped to let this knowledge sink in. Banage hovered over her, his brows knotted, deep in thought. She could almost see him putting the pieces together—click, click, click—in rapid succession, coming to the same conclusions she’d ended on. It made her smile. Ah, if only he weren’t so stubborn. What a pair they would have made.

  “If humans have trouble seeing him just as spirits do…” Banage trailed off. “Sara, are you implying that, on some level, we see as spirits see?”

  Sara’s smile spread. “That’s exactly what I’m implying. Sparrow is a known blind spot for all of us. If we share this blindness with spirits, then perhaps humans are not completely unseeing as spirits say we are. Maybe we do see, but we don’t know it, or something blocks our sight.”

  “It makes sense,” Banage said, scratching his beard. “The spirits call us the Shepherdess’s creations, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Miranda told me that the Shaper Mountain claims the Shepherdess does not truly create. If we can see as spirits see at all, even if it’s only in a shared blindness, then maybe we’re not newly created spirits, but changed ones, modified to fit whatever it was the Shepherdess wanted us to be.”

  “Slorn told me much the same thing once,” Sara said. “Though the real question now is, if we could see at the beginning, why would this Shepherdess go through so much effort to take the sight we already had away?”

  “Make us blind, you mean?” Banage said. “If you’re right, then all we have are more questions. Why would the Power who was created to watch over the world make a race that can control everything else and then actively take our sight away? That sounds more like destruction than preservation.”

  “It’s a heady problem, isn’t it?” Sara was grinning now. Talking like this with Banage, exploring the possibilities of magic freely, without his dogma getting in the way, made her feel like a teenager again. She gripped his hand. “Now do you see why I risked so much to keep Sparrow with me?”

  Banage’s face darkened. “I see,” he said. “But I don’t understand. You must have known from the beginning that that man could not be trusted. I can see keeping him for research in a cell, but what possessed you to let him roam free?”

  “Because he was useful,” Sara said. “And I was always in control.”

  He gave her a suspicious look. “How?”

  Sara bit her lip. For a moment, she considered lying. It had been so long since she’d had a civil conversation with her husband, she’d forgotten how pleasant it could be. But Banage was glaring at her now, and she knew the look well enough. He’d never let up until he had an answer he was satisfied with, and she didn’t have a lie ready that was good enough to trick him. The truth, then, she decided with a sigh. Such a pity. Their truce had been nice while it lasted.

  She settled back on the ground, bracing for impact. “I could control him because I’d bound him as a servant spirit.”

  “What?”

  Sara winced at his roar. Banage loomed over her, dark and terrible, his rings glowing like multicolored suns. Then, unexpectedly, he eased back down.

  “How?” he said as curiosity finally overcame his inherent rage. “Even if it was as faint as you claim, his soul is still human. How did you bind a human soul into service?”

  “I didn’t bind his soul,” Sara said. “Remember what I said earlier about how a human’s soul usually encompasses their entire body? Well, Sparrow’s didn’t. It wasn’t large enough. This meant that the vast majority of his physical body wasn’t actually part of his soul.”

  “Impossible,” Banage said. “Everything has a soul.”

  “It did,” Sara said. “Just not a human one. As I said, Sparrow was an anomaly. He had a human body, but not enough human soul to fill it. So his body developed a unique coping mechanism to keep itself alive. Each organ developed a tiny soul of its own. That was why spirits never saw Sparrow as human. To their eyes, he’s closer to a pile of pebbles.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how you bound him,” Banage said.

  “I told you,” Sara huffed. “I didn’t bind him. I bound his lungs.”

  Banage blinked. “His lungs?”

  Sara nodded emphatically, smiling at the memory of that genius idea. “It was really simple, actually. I called in Whitefall’s surgeon and took a tiny piece of Sparrow’s lung. I kept it with me, feeding power into it just as I would a Spiritualist spirit. I had to fudge things a bit, but in the end I basically made Sparrow’s lungs into a servant spirit who was always out of its ring. That way, if I ever needed to find him or discipline him, I could just tug on the thread connecting us. After all, he can’t go anywhere without his lungs, can he?”

  She finished with a grin, but Banage wasn’t smiling. He just stared at her, his face horrified. “You made a Spiritualist pact with a spirit too small for consciousness, with a man’
s lungs…” His voice trailed off.

  Sara put up her hand. “Before you start to lecture, remember, the lungs were a part of Sparrow, and he gave his consent to be my servant in exchange for salvation from the Whitefalls. I just took him a little more literally than he intended.”

  Banage’s face grew even more severe. “Then I suppose the red orb he crushed was the equivalent of his ring?”

  “More or less,” Sara said. “But as you saw, I didn’t need it anymore. His lungs still knew who their mistress was.” She set her jaw at Banage’s scornful look. “Powers, Etmon, it wasn’t like I wanted to kill him. After all the work I put into that man? But he tried to kill me, and he would have died anyway when Whitefall—”

  “Enough,” Banage said, running his hands over his face with a long sigh. “I don’t want to hear any more about how you’ve twisted the most sacred bond of the Spirit Court. Honestly, Sara, how can you be so clever and yet understand nothing about what’s actually important?” He shook his head. “Truly, Eliton is your son.”

  Sara arched an eyebrow. “Really? From his stubbornness, I’d say he’s more yours.”

  Banage laughed at that, and the noise made her jump. It was such a nostalgic sound, and such a sad one.

  “We’re a miserable excuse for a family,” he said, leaning back on his hands beside her. “A traitor, a thief, and a woman who’d give her right arm for a hint at the secrets of the universe.”

  “Left arm,” Sara said, fumbling for her pipe before remembering she’d left it upstairs. “I’m right-handed.”

  “Left arm,” Banage repeated. “Or another man’s lungs.”

  “It is all a bit monstrous,” Sara admitted. “But it was necessary, Etmon.”

  “Was it?” Banage said, his voice soft in the dark. “Did you ever think about maybe not striving so hard?”

  Sara’s only answer to that was a scoff, and Banage sighed.

  “You know,” he whispered, “I didn’t set out to be Rector. What I really wanted was to live with you and Eliton together. To be a family. A real one.”