Shadow (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #4): Bridge & Sword World

by JC Andrijeski

  Is that why he had to go to those caves following the second split? I sent, frowning. He told me he had years of light restructuring, even after his memories were erased.

  Vash nodded. Indeed. That is exactly why. We did not wish to leave the same door open to the Dreng. It was an attempt to rectify that original mistake, as it was clear they would try and bring him over to their side again.

  Vash conjured a new image, this time of an underground series of caves.

  Inside that smaller movie, I saw Revik sitting cross-legged on a mat, palms resting on his thighs as he listened to someone speak. He looked tired, thin, worn out, but the expression on his face had a kind of peace to it.

  We were very afraid of killing him at that point, Allie, Vash added. Or of taking so much of him that too little of the man remained. His time with Galaith spanned almost as many years as his time with Menlim. Together, his periods with the Dreng have taken up more than half of his life.

  Vash clicked softly, a lulling sound when it came from his lips.

  He is strong, Allie. Most seers would have died from what he’s been through, in either one of those lives. It is what gives me hope that this plan of yours might work.

  Why him? I sent, before I’d thought about my words. Why would you send him on that mission with Galaith? Why would you let Syrimne become a Nazi, for the love of the gods? Couldn’t you have assigned someone else to infiltrate the Rooks, given his past?

  I fought to keep the anger and accusation out of my light.

  I doubt I succeeded.

  As he looked at me in that Barrier space, Vash’s smile grew heartbreaking.

  He volunteered, Alyson. His thoughts grew soft. I could not refuse him. It is a mistake I will never stop regretting. Never.

  Closing my eyes, I shook my head, taking a deep breath.

  Focusing back on the room where I sat now, I tried not to think about what had already been done to the mind of the man in front of me.

  Neither Vash nor Tarsi vocalized it outright, but I knew that was the biggest risk. Revik simply might not be able to handle having any more surgeries done to his light, even the relatively non-invasive kind.

  When I closed my eyes the second time, I half-expected him to say something else, to try to break my concentration.

  But he didn’t.

  My last glimpse of him was a wary stare from the far wall. He sat with arms crossed and resting on his propped up knees in front of his chest.

  The image didn’t stay with me for long.

  As soon as I closed my eyes, I found myself immersed in black clouds.

  That didn’t last long, either.

  After all, this time, I knew who I was hunting.

  And I knew exactly where he was.

  16

  BEGINNINGS

  …LIGHT EXPLODES INTO flickering shadows and bursts of brilliance. I find myself thrown into a movement of arms and legs and hands, smiling eyes and lips…

  Beginnings live here.

  The beginning is light.

  So very, very light.

  The lightness brings relief, an inhaled breath that catches in my throat, that catches me off-guard. It is too light for me to take in at first. It has been so long since I felt so light myself. I find myself thinking of people, places, memories.

  Things I haven’t thought of in such a long time––

  Revik laughing up at me from a blanket spread beside a river, horses tearing at grass from where they’re tethered nearby. Watching him laugh harder as I show him the ridiculous jazz routine I did for one of my dance classes in college, until he is nearly crying, begging me to show him another…

  …My father grinning under a lit model of the planets and the stars, the size of the room. His large hands, spinning them around on their brass rails, so that they sing to us…

  …My mother, Cass and me at the beach, wearing our bathing suits and sunglasses with the big rubber noses. My mother giggling uncontrollably when someone asks us for the time, unable to stop laughing even when Cass pokes her in the ribs…

  …Jon and I climbing rocks at Big Sur, singing at the top of our lungs.

  This feels like all of those memories, but it is lighter still––so light I can barely stand how good it feels. I want to run and jump and climb and laugh. I want to be here with him, but I don’t know how to be in such a breathlessly light-filled place.

  He is happy here––so happy.

  His thoughts cascade into me, a child’s thoughts, settling like a butterfly’s feet only to whisk away at the first whisper of wind, the first new smell, the first high-cheekboned face.

  A woman’s face appears before me, a woman with black hair and clear eyes.

  She is so beautiful.

  She smiles at him, and the love in her eyes makes my heart hurt, makes it hard to breathe. It is too much; her love is so open, so unrelenting, so completely guileless, it fights to break my heart. I hurt for him, but he takes it in, and it washes over his small form, leaving him lighter than before. Even when she scolds him, I see that love there, shining at him, her light encasing his in warm, gentle tendrils that reach through every structure around his body.

  He rests there, without needing it explained, without questioning it or distrusting it or worrying about its permanence or when it might go away.

  Another form stands in the doorway.

  A simple thought enters his mind, and then his hands are outstretched, grasping at air.

  “Up!” he exclaims. “Please up!”

  I feel a dizzying thrill as larger, male hands grasp his middle, throwing him up in the air, making him gasp and choke with laughter.

  “Again!” he shrieks, and I find myself watching him half-incredulously with the man, pulling my light apart from his to look around their three-roomed, tile-roofed home with the long, horizontal windows.

  The floors are wooden and clean. Thick rugs cover the polished planks, along with hand-painted, wooden furniture and the threshold of a stone fireplace, wide and smoke-blackened, so used for cooking and not simply warmth.

  It reminds me of that other place, too, where we were married, and I wonder if that was deliberate, or simply the fragments of some long-repressed memory that fought its way to the surface, trying to be shared.

  The woman smiles from that smoke-blackened hearth, watching as the man tosses the boy again, and her eyes are clear, slanted at the edges, almost entirely colorless. I stare at those eyes, still trying to get my footing in this new place, when the boy’s feet return to the floor, and he runs from the room at top speed, darting through the open door and towards a sound it takes me a moment to identify.

  Hoof beats.

  Horses, and they are coming closer, moving at a steady walk.

  I am outside with him then, and an older girl holds him back, grasping his shoulder in insistent fingers. She smacks his head a little when he squirms, whispering in his ear, and he laughs, butting into her with his back and head and feet.

  She stands two heads taller than him, and she has the same colorless eyes, but her face is rounder, more like her mother’s. It is a strong face, almost Asian, but with that same odd mixture that always made it so difficult to pinpoint her brother’s exact ethnicity.

  They watch the riders approach together.

  His eyes are excited, and focus only on the horses.

  Hers are worried, almost somber as she stares at the riders.

  Older seers sit on the backs of tough-looking beasts who blow through their noses from the long, steep climb to the little wooden house. Four of those scruffy horses stand there, with four riders. The newcomers wear monk’s robes, a pale amber color, and one the color of sand.

  They look at the boy with great interest, smiling at him, speaking to him in a tongue that is like his, but so different he can barely make out their words.

  They speak to him in his mind also, and there he understands them.

  Syrimne d’Gaos! We honor you, most Illustrious Sword. We bring you blessing
s from the lower heights, our most cherished and beloved intermediary!

  Their words make him laugh.

  They also make him hide behind the skirt of his sister, whose sun-browned face wrinkles in a frown. She grips his tanned arm in strong fingers, pushing him further behind her, away from the curious eyes of the monks.

  “Go away from here!” she yells, motioning with her other arm in seer sign language. “He is not your holy man! He is a boy who still eats grass and snails!”

  The boy laughs hysterically at this, still holding her shirt.

  Grass and snails!

  Elashi, his sister, is always funny.

  His parents, who come to the door, are somber, though, and do not laugh at her words. They bow to the monks as the latter dismount from their horses and they shush Elashi, who is still complaining that they are messing up the stone footpath she mended only the day before.

  Elashi is upset.

  The boy feels in her light that it isn’t all about the stones. She wants to take him from there, away from the monks. She doesn’t like them.

  He grips her clothes tighter, trying to warm her with his own light, to reassure her.

  He can barely tear his eyes off their horses, though. The black one blows out air from its nostrils, staring back at him with one large, liquid brown eye.

  He looks up at his mother, then his father.

  He tries to understand the fear he sees in his father’s face, the somber look as he listens to the monks speak in their odd tongues.

  His father’s face is long and straight, with the angularity I know from his son’s adult face, the same narrow mouth, the same broad-shouldered height and athletic frame. There is an easiness in the angles of his face, however, wind-worn and set differently with dark blue eyes that seem to be forever scanning the horizon.

  I see his arms and realize they are Revik’s arms, just as the woman’s eyes and smile and thick black hair are Revik’s, too.

  Something in the simplicity of their biological sameness clutches at my heart.

  They leave gifts, these newcomers.

  Scrolls and fine fabrics, loops and coils of what look like organic chains, an urele made of clear crystal––all are placed with grave care on the kitchen table inside the small house.

  I’ve only ever seen an urele once before, and then Terian claimed it once belonged to Revik. Briefly, I wonder if it could be this exact same urele. Long, crystal wands cut in elaborate patterns, urele were used for training young seers.

  The monks give his father a rich-looking tapestry, bearing the symbol of the sword and sun.

  They give his mother and sister delicacies to eat and money from the people in the land from which they have come.

  They praise the boy, again and again. They tell him they had seen him come, from very far away. They say they will be back soon, with even more presents.

  After a time, the monks ride off.

  The boy watches the black horse walk back down the slope, and wishes it was his.

  Since the strange men seem to like him so much, he wonders if they will bring him a horse next time, if he asks. He wishes he thought to ask them before they left.

  When he asks his father though, his father doesn’t answer.

  No one speaks to him of the mysterious horsemen again, not at dinner, nor at breakfast the next morning. The boy hears his parents talking, though, using the hand language and the longer words, that other dialect they think he does not know.

  More will come, he hears his father say. More now, that they know of him.

  She shrugs with one hand.

  She hides it better, but her eyes reflect the same fear.

  “It is too late, husband,” she says, in that other tongue.

  She stares ruefully at the collection of gifts. Her pale eyes hold no attachment to anything in that pile of rich-looking items sitting on the floor by their kitchen table. She looks at it like it crawled into their home and died there, and now she is stuck dealing with the corpse.

  The boy watches her, puzzled.

  He does not want them to notice him listening, though, so he doesn’t ask.

  “We could move,” his father says, in the same tongue.

  She shakes her head, her eyes holding a whisper of sadness.

  They would only come again, she sends softly.

  His father sees him then, and pings her light.

  The two of them turn, and the boy watches them stare at him, thoughtful looks on their strangely serious faces.

  The boy is not made nervous by this. There is no fear. Yet something in those looks brings him into his mother’s lap for a hug, right before he lets his weight fall into the cradle of her arms. Touching her hand, he plays absently with a silver ring she wears around her thumb.

  “Go outside now,” she says gently. “Go on, Nenzi. Find your sister.”

  Sliding off her legs, he pauses only to kiss her cheek and press his against it.

  Then he scrambles for the door outside.

  As he hits the sunlight, something jerks me, and I fall––

  WHEN I OPEN my eyes, I am lying on a thin pallet on a hard floor, the green walls of the organic cell around me. I am fighting to breathe.

  Tears run down my cheeks.

  Choking, I gasp for air, but I am still in the Barrier, still surrounded by sounds and that bright, blinding light.

  Somewhere in that, I hear Vash’s gentle voice, talking to me somewhere behind the shadows, his voice in my ear through the headset I wear.

  “Go back, Allie,” he urges softly. “Go back now. See it all, while you can.”

  Before I make up my mind to obey his soft words…

  I am already there.

  LIGHT ERUPTS BEHIND my eyes.

  Blue sky. Tearing into the space above me.

  It shifts, tilts––

  The shadow morphs in wind over a broken world, tearing holes in the light, drifting deeper into the sun.

  Everything is jerking, moving wrongly.

  The world spins too fast.

  I am sick from it. I can’t breathe. A weight sits on my heart and ribs, crushing me slowly.

  I see trees around me. Grass on the ground, along with moss and ferns. It is green––so green everything washes into breathing soil and plants, water in quivering beads dotting every frond. Towering white clouds fill a distant horizon, visible through the tree line to the valley below. The earth smells rich and mulchy, drenched in mold and mushrooms, dotted with moss-covered rocks and the water-soaked trunks of trees sprouting ferns like sharp green beards.

  There is screaming.

  Screaming fills the clearing, but not loud enough to cover a woman’s agonized grunts, as if something is being torn from her, ripped from her insides.

  It goes on and on. There is no end to it.

  He is lost there, in that moment that will not end, but they hold him off. He screams and screams, fighting to be free while the animals laugh…

  And then, when there is no breath left, no time, no wind, no blue sky or winging birds…

  It is silent.

  Not a sound touches me, nothing but breath reaches me from the being sitting on the ground. He breathes hard, concentrating on each in and out breath. There are no words, no thoughts, no feelings. A blank slate rests there, holding his hands to her chest.

  But the blood is cool now.

  It is cool.

  The world tilts faster, bringing a gradual darkening, and alien sounds from the trees. The rain starts, but the boy doesn’t notice. The monsoon season is only a few weeks away, but for now, it brings only spurts of thunder and rain, the threat of more to come. The rain drenches his hair, his clothes, forcing him to blink and cough as he holds on.

  It drenches the woman. Her chest does not move.

  He is alone.

  He watches the water as it pools in the hollow at the base of her neck, pools at the corners of her eyes, in the dimples by her mouth and in her clothing. The rain washes her skin, washes her
dress and hair and lips, but his hands remain on the front of her embroidered apron, feeling for a heartbeat in stiffening, hardening flesh.

  The clearing lay in darkness but for a few lights swinging in a half-ring, obscuring shadowy forms. The sun has already disappeared. I don’t remember it leaving and the rain hasn’t stopped, but it has grown colder. I try to move…

  And a shout rings out.

  He is found.

  Someone sees him there, with the woman. They call to other someones, holding a lantern higher to illuminate a bearded face. Other bodies lay on the ground beside the boy, but it is to the woman that he clings. She is the one whose clothes he put back on, who he washed.

  The others…

  He looks at his sister’s wide face, the boots of his father.

  But they aren’t real. They are nothing but dead animals, broken dolls.

  He can pretend. He can look at them, not see them.

  With the woman, it is different.

  Look away, Nenzi-la, she whispers in his mind. Don’t watch. Don’t watch, my love.

  They hurt her. He doesn’t understand what they are doing, but they hurt her, like animals. They rip at her, tear at her clothes, laughing. He sees her eyes understand, knows she is reading them, but they don’t seem to read her, or understand the anguish in her high-cheekboned face.

  He is screaming.

  He doesn’t know this then.

  His father’s boots already lay inert on the soil, and the growling, snapping, laughing animals, the beings with dense, cloudy light, with nothing but blank eyes and hungry mouths, they look at him, and they laugh again.

  In the silence, he can pretend.

  He can wait for them to return.

  But now… now… the silence is invaded.

  It is dark and he’s alone, lights swinging in the wind through the tunneling tress.

  There’s only one being left to rip and tear and break and laugh at. He doesn’t run though, or let go of the woman lying in the rain-soaked ground still covered in boot-prints from the last set of trampling feet. He doesn’t move. He remains there, kneeling at her side as the new danger comes to him in his clearing.

  For it is his clearing now.