The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3)

by H. Anthe Davis

  Watching Cob's face, Dasira saw a muscle jump in his jaw. His dark eyes no longer reflected the light, and she glimpsed a stir in the earth beneath his feet—a subtle buckling. Nearby, Lark looked ill, and the stone Ilshenrir placed in her hands lit up so fast that it cracked.

  Fiora looked from Cob to Dasira, plainly uncomfortable. “I didn't mean to offend anyone. I just, um... So many women just won't fight back. I can't help it. I'm glad you did what you did.”

  “Should've castrated them,” muttered Lark.

  Arik, ears tucked back and fur bristling defensively, said, “Can we talk about something else? Something...nice? I'm not comfortable with this anger in the pack...”

  “Herd,” Cob corrected absently, then shook himself from his near-Guardian state. The way his face sagged with weary disappointment almost made Dasira wish he had stayed mad. “I dunno. What can we possibly say now?”

  “Maybe we should just sleep,” said Fiora. “We have a lot of ground to cover.”

  No one seconded that. From their expressions, Dasira gathered that she had summoned nightmares in more than one.

  “I...have cards, if anyone wants to play,” Lark said. She cast the broken stone into the pile and leaned to rummage through her pack.

  “Good idea. What do we play for? Um, pebbles?” said Fiora, sitting forward. Cob did too, though with reluctance.

  “Apologies,” said Dasira dryly, leaning in as well. “Everyone who drops out has to apologize for one of the shit-stupid things they've done recently. Light knows we've got plenty of coinage in that.”

  “I apologize for marking all of your packs,” said Arik sadly.

  They all looked at him, blinking. Then comprehension dawned, and Fiora said, “Ew! Ew!”

  “Morgwi's balls, and we're stuck out here with no bathhouse in sight,” said Lark.

  “Why would you...?” started Cob, baffled.

  Arik hung his head. “Boots too.”

  What followed was a flurry of flung footwear, a quick deal of cards, and then an alternately awkward and raucous game with apologies for everything from rummaging through each other's stuff to hoarding food to acting spoiled. When Ilshenrir confessed to being the wraith who had shot Cob in the forest half a year ago—thus triggering his possession by the Guardian—everyone went still and silent, but Cob simply stared for a moment then shrugged it off.

  By the time they called it quits, hair full of sand from bombarding each other, the tension had somewhat dissipated. Lark came over to sit by Dasira and nudged her companionably. “Now that everything's out...do you want me to cut your hair or something, to be more jeten?”

  Dasira looked up into her open, interested face and bit back a laugh. “Jeten wear their hair long. All Riddish do.”

  “Oh.” Lark considered, then eyed her robe. “I guess we can't get anything more manly for you right now. Um...”

  “It's fine. Really.”

  “But if you've been suffering all this time as Dasira...”

  She held up a quelling hand. “It doesn't matter. This is just another costume. I've gone through dozens, and male or female, they all feel the same. They're not me. Nothing is me.”

  “That's grim.”

  “It is what it is.” She shrugged, thinking of all the bodies she'd worn, all the memories she'd swallowed. Bits and pieces of other people's lives. “Bodythieves go rogue all the time, you know. After a while, this kind of existence gets to you. You forget who you started as, and the costume takes over. I never fell too deep—maybe because I'm a prototype—but I've seen infiltrator-types just lose it. I used to think, 'poor weak things', but I don't know. It hasn't been so bad to be Dasira.”

  “She's a mean one, but I like her,” said Lark.

  Dasira tried to smile but it came out twisty. The corners of her eyes itched. She looked away to find Cob watching her from across the stone-pit, Fiora trying to catch his attention to no avail.

  A knot tightened in her gut as he rose and beckoned.

  “Sorry, I... He and I need to...”

  “Yeah, go,” said Lark. “It'll be all right. He likes you too.”

  I doubt that, she thought.

  She trailed him into the ruins, keenly aware of Fiora's stare on her back. The mother moon had not yet risen and the child moon was in its dark phase, leaving only starlight as a guide; more than once she tripped on a stub of pillar sticking up from the salted earth.

  Finally, Cob stopped to sit on what might once have been a door's lintel, eroded smooth by wind and sand. She hesitated, then cautiously moved to settle at his side—not too close, yet not beyond arm's reach. She'd already decided that if his anger rose, she wouldn't run.

  “Shoulda told me,” he said.

  She smiled bleakly, eyes on the ruins. “When? Back when I was Darilan? Or when I first returned and you didn't know I was me?”

  “Y'know what I've been through. With my mother and the quarry and Fellen. We coulda talked. Instead we jus' sat, and were silent.”

  Her smile fell. It wasn't hard to remember those times spent planted outside a tent, staring into nothing, content in each other's presence like they couldn't be now. “Those were the best moments of my life, Cob. Why would I have spoiled them?”

  He turned his head slightly, and by starlight she thought she saw water in his eyes. “Because I never knew you. Because I was too scared to ask. Why you, why me, why us? I didn't know why you were there and I didn't want you to go away, so I didn't dare. I'm sorry if that was wrong, but...it goes both ways.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but something was stuck in her throat. This wasn't what she had expected. “You didn't need to know,” she managed. “You weren't allowed to. The mentalists could've picked it from your head.”

  “I didn't need specifics.”

  “Any sort of sharing could've gotten back to Enkhaelen.”

  “Is that really what you were scared of? Because I don't buy it.”

  She looked away, grimacing. He continued, “Y'talk like it was no big deal but I'm not blind. I can see when you're calculatin' whether you can get away with a bad thing. It was there at the village and when you were pickin' your words. Y'don't feel guilty?”

  “Why should I?”

  “You've killed people, and stalked and...and raped them.”

  “Why should I feel bad if they didn't?”

  “Because—“ He broke off with a frustrated gesture. “Because it's not right, is it? Hurtin' people 'cause they hurt you.”

  “You killed a man with a rock—“

  “And I was wrong. And I piked up my life because of it.”

  “You piked up your life, Cob, because you felt guilty about it and turned to the Light. It was self-defense. You had every right to kill him.”

  “No, I didn't.”

  “Well, have it your way then.”

  “That's not the point. It's...” He exhaled through his teeth. “How can I work with you if this's what you are?”

  She felt a bitter smile crease her face. “So I shouldn't have told, after all?”

  “No. No. I jus'...wanna know that it's not you anymore. We went over this with Fendil, how that wasn't...in any way acceptable. And I wasn't thrilled with your answer. I don't understand how you think. But if you can guarantee me that it's over and done...”

  A bubble of vitriol rose in her chest. “Or what, you'll kill me? You'll toss me away?”

  “If I have to. I'm tryin' to give you another chance.”

  “At what? Redemption?” She laughed coldly. “There's no such thing. The Empire lies about it, the Light lies about it, and the rest of the gods lie about it too. All that matters is whether you can sleep at night, and I won't let your delicate piking conscience—“

  “Stop it.”

  “—hold me back. This is reality, Cob. This is the world. This is what goes on behind those closed doors you guard, and if you don't want to face it, that's your own piking problem!“

  The look he turned on her was unforgiving. She k
new she'd put her foot in her mouth, but the venom still surged through her veins, making her want to spit more bitter truths. Everything she'd learned in these long, wretched years. Everything she'd done.

  “I know what goes on,” he said quietly. “I know what happened to my mother, and in Fellen, and now about you. I know I've been lucky. That doesn't mean I can't sympathize. But you've gone too far.”

  “Not far enough,” she snarled.

  He blinked. “Not far enough? What else could y'do to be satisfied?”

  A panorama of massacres danced through her head—the same bloody visions she'd had since her rebirth. She'd played a few out, but the reality had been grey in comparison. “Plenty,” she said anyway.

  “Why haven't you?”

  Because I can't muster enough hate anymore. Because it's all sour and pallid and piteous and stupid. Because I'm just the tattered remnants of a person, and I don't matter—not even to myself. Because I'm tired.

  “I've been with you,” she said.

  “I'm keepin' you from doin' that stuff?”

  “More or less.”

  He looked to the ruins again, hands knotted together, and she remembered the splints on his fingers after he'd broken them while pulverizing his old team-leader's face. The Fellen riots had been bad for everyone, but for him, they'd meant guarding a door while his comrades took their pleasure inside.

  She didn't know what it had cost him to watch their backs, and turn on them only after the danger was over. In his shoes, she would have followed them in and killed them.

  “We're all failures,” she said quietly. “We're all cowards sometimes. Victims and victimizers and monsters and fools, just one big rolling ball of shit.”

  “Maybe it's best that we go in together, then. 'Cause I don't think we're comin' out.”

  She looked at him but he was still staring at the ruins, his face in profile, mouth a dark line. Behind them was silence, the others having settled down to sleep, while above the Eye of Night rode high among the stars.

  “Probably not,” she said.

  He tilted his head, and she thought perhaps he smiled—sad and faint and too old by far.

  “Tell me everythin',” he said.

  So she did.

  *****

  The next day passed in dull progress. It grew difficult to navigate a path between the Trivestean border and the encroaching salt-flats, and with reluctance Dasira let the group stray northward, their steps cracking the undisturbed panes of white salt. Their eye-guards became essential, and when the wind kicked up, they hunkered down behind ogrish ruins or Ilshenrir's wards to avoid being raked by the blowing salt.

  As the crust thickened, it became like walking on ice: difficult to tell whether beneath it was solid ground or loose sand just waiting to collapse. It also fuzzed Cob's Guardian perceptions and irritated Arik's nose and paws, so Dasira did the scouting—not so much because she trusted her knowledge as because her bracer could see her through most dangers.

  At first, she called her party over to observe the aberrations she found, because any distraction was a good one in this endless waste. The withdrawal of the ancient sea had not been uniform, leaving broad swaths of crusted, pock-marked terrain and occasional deep pockets of salt, like frozen lakes among the dunes. Some were white but many blazed with color, from a wide span of reddish pits to a sulfuric-yellow pool filled with deep green shadows like petrified plant fronds, to a murky brownish-black fingerlet they steered wide from, to two cyan circles of the exact same size, separated by half a mile.

  Wind had sculpted other formations from compacted sand and salt, creating wedges and needles and blades that keened with every gust. In the northward distance, such pillars could be seen descending toward the center of the salt, a haze hanging thick above them. The further north they turned, the drier and more briny the air became.

  Other aberrations, however, slowly began to find them. At first it was just one six-limbed burrowing lizard, flat and attenuated and coated in razor-sharp crystals, which observed them through nictated eyes and tried to follow as they moved on. But then it was more lizards, and yard-long yellow tortoises that breached the salt with their beaks then struggled through to paddle futilely with flipper-like forepaws, then a flock of bandy-legged chafed-looking birds that hopped and hissed and scuttled in their wake, and scores of tiny glassy things that might have been scorpions or crabs or spiders.

  Finally, when a gelatinous mass full of debris and sand pushed up through a hole in the salt and began globbing toward them, Cob called a halt.

  “It's a salt-slime,” said Dasira. “Just leave it be.”

  “It's a water elemental.”

  “It— What?”

  “I can feel it.” He planted the lever in the salt, where it stood as if rooted, and moved to run his hands through the globby thing. Salt-crystals and chunks of stone came free of its watery membrane, and as Cob continued to comb them out, the glob grew less viscous, more lively. Finally it wrapped around his hand and flowed up under his sleeve, leaving a sheen of salt on his skin that he brushed off absently.

  “So it's joining us, then?” said Dasira, nonplussed.

  Cob shrugged and retrieved the lever. “Gonna give it time to shed s'more salt, then I figure we can put it in the water barrel. Might be helpful.”

  “Are we going to adopt everything that tries to follow you?”

  He looked past her to their entourage, scales and carapaces glittering in the sun. “Maybe.”

  “I do not believe that these organisms are suited to life beyond this habitat,” said Ilshenrir. “The elemental, yes, but the biological creatures are not likely as adaptive.”

  Dasira nodded. “What he said.”

  Cob looked at them, then shrugged, retook his grip on the cart, and kept walking.

  More amused than aggravated, Dasira moved into the lead again, taking care to dodge anything that emerged to visit with the Guardian. She had thought the desert more sparsely populated—but then everything seemed to live underground. Perhaps it was damp down there, or had tunnels and caverns and other safe spaces. The surface was not the whole of the world.

  Now and then, she caught a strangeness in the air, the sensitive apparatus at the back of her mouth tingling with warning. At those times she would signal the others to stop and head up a dune or a ruined wall, spy on their surroundings, break a bit of salt from the ground and taste it. Her bracer filtered unwanted chemicals and minerals from her blood, and if it found something hazardous, she felt it like a static shock. It helped her navigate them away from the invisible dangers: bad air, particulates, the ever-threatening haze.

  There was only so much she could do, though, and as it grew drier, first Arik and then Lark developed a cough, followed by intermittent nosebleeds. Overnight, they slept in a protective bubble of wards, but the morning of the third day found Fiora coughing as well.

  In response, Cob let the Guardian out. He had been containing it through most of the trip, since it provided little benefit to Dasira or Ilshenrir and had at times been hostile toward them, and when it manifested now, it did so as a coating of black salt and sand. Even his antlers showed crystallization. He did not move with any greater speed than before, but his presence eased the others' symptoms.

  With him in the lead, Dasira fell back to pull the water-cart beside Fiora. She would have preferred any other partner, but Arik was still suffering—though not as much as before—and Lark and Ilshenrir trailed the group in a cloud of arcanobabble. Initially she kept her eyes on the Trivestean plateau until she realized that it was receding; from then on, she tried to watch the salt without acknowledging Fiora's presence, in the hope of extrapolating Cob's destination. He was too difficult to talk to in this state.

  Fiora would not ignore her, though, and kept up a constant stream of chatter.

  “Maybe he's sensing pursuit,” she said. “Or wraiths. Do you think the Guardian would make him attack the haelhene if he spotted them?”

  Dasira gru
nted.

  “I hope not. Especially if they're on those flying things. Ilshenrir is the only one who could shoot back—oh, I guess Lark has arrows but these conditions can't be good for her bow...”

  “Mm.”

  “He probably can't sense things in the air anyway. That's unfortunate. And if we had ground-pursuit, he would have told us by now, or done that running trick. Unless he's concerned about you. You probably couldn't keep up.”

  “Eh.”

  “Is there anything else out there?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.”

  Fiora made a sound of frustration, and Dasira shot her a bland sidelong look. The girl wore her hood up and eye-guard on like everyone else, but her scarf hung loose beneath her chin, showing cracked lips and a few loose tendrils of curly dark hair. Her grimace made a crack split, a bead of blood welling up and smearing away.

  They were all like that: wind-chapped, borderline dehydrated, constantly abraded by the sand and salt that snuck into their clothes. Cob could ward off the chill but not the rest of it. After a month on the road, Dasira had become accustomed to being dirty, but this lifted discomfort to a level in which she fantasized about bathtubs and comfy chairs. Civilization of any kind.

  Yet by her estimation, they were less than halfway through the desert. Then on to Finrarden, and Keceirnden, and the Imperial Road...

  The girl sighed heavily. “What else could he be looking for? More water elementals?”

  Dasira made a noncommittal noise.

  “I think we'd need a bigger barrel. And it worries me. What if we drank it?”

  “Summoners do it all the time.”

  “Really? It doesn't hurt them?”

  “Mostly.”

  She worked to suppress a smile at Fiora's deeply dubious look. They didn't get along any better than before; no amount of apologies could bridge the gap. But they were functional. The realization that they were all willingly racing toward their doom made Dasira less inclined to smash the girl's face into a salt-pillar.

  A refreshing silence fell, only to be broken again by Fiora's voice. “Do you think he's angry with me?”