by L. W. Jacobs
This trip was probably the most interesting thing she’d ever done, and so far it was pretty boring. Except for the shamanic exercises.
Just then Feynrick trotted past them. “Mind the elk, would ya?”
Feynrick was nice, for a hill tribesman. Had funny stories to tell too, when he opened up, but right now he looked pretty serious.
“What’s going on?” Ella asked.
“Tracks,” he said briefly, way too nimble for his heavy form in those snownets. “Going to make sure Tai saw them.”
Marea shared a glance with Ella. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Me neither.”
Tai and Nauro came back in a bit, and Feynrick had them stop to look at some depressions in the snow.
“There are tracks here?” Marea asked. “I don’t see anything.”
“That’s because you grew up in the city, lass,” Feynrick said. “Three or four days old, I’d say, and someone moving like they wanted to watch but didn’t want to be seen. See how the tracks stay behind that first row of trees?”
Tai nodded. “Still a long way from anything out here, though. Sure it isn’t just some hunter from an outlying village?”
“Hunter would use the road,” Feynrick said. “Easier.”
“It could be a monk,” Marea said, remembering her cartography lessons.
Everyone looked at her like she was stupid.
“What? There’s a monastery near Ninefingers. Two, three days that way,” she pointed west, “along the top of the ridge. Who knows what those monks could be up to?”
“Meditating on the saints, ain’t they?” Feynrick asked, poking at one of the supposed tracks with a stick.
“The monasteries don’t follow Yati beliefs,” Ella said. “Or any belief system, as far as I’ve read. Though there isn’t a lot of scholarship available on them.”
“Monks come through Ayugen sometimes,” Tai said. “I think on their way between here and somewhere in the ice sheet. If that’s who this was, I don’t think we need to worry. They seem pretty harmless.”
Nauro rubbed his chin. “They might be more of a threat than you think, if their ire was raised. But still, no, I doubt this was the renunciants. As I recall they spend most of the cold months in meditation, rarely leaving their compounds. This was more likely a journeyman or other shaman, searching for revenants to thrall somewhere away from competition.”
A shiver ran down Marea’s spine, which was pretty amazing since it was already freezing. “Like the one that attacked Tai and Ella?”
“Could be like that, yes,” Nauro said. “Or it could be something different entirely.”
That was helpful. They started walking again, but by common agreement Tai and Nauro stayed close, which was great because it meant she could listen in on Nauro’s lessons. Tai’s ghost had seated a few days ago, and Nauro had been trying to get him to see the ghosts ever since.
It was fascinating and infuriating. She was good at the exercises that didn’t need a revenant, better than Tai as far as she could tell, and she was dying to try doing what he was, with a shamanic revenant. But according to Nauro they were hard to find, and he didn’t have any, and on and on. She didn’t believe a word of it, but what was she going to do?
She hated that feeling. Powerlessness.
So instead she listened along and tried to imagine what the revenants looked like as Nauro taught Tai, tried to overlay ghosts on the otherwise never-ending sameness landscape of snow and trees and broken rocks.
“It should look like a human figure distorted by water,” Nauro was saying. “Elongated, maybe, and perhaps glowing on the edges. This one is Needles.”
Marea smiled at this—everyone had taken to using her names for Nauro’s ghosts.
“It’s a relatively recent death, which means it hasn’t had much time to emaciate. Something like Chill, on the other hand, has been without an uai stream so long it looks insubstantial even to a full seeker.”
Tai grunted, eyes strained and resonance humming faintly from him.
“Why do you keep it then, if it’s so starved?” Marea asked.
Nauro looked peeved, which was one of the reasons she interrupted him so often. She might be powerlessness, but she could be annoying at least. And maybe learn something.
“Because this is one of Semeca’s old thralls,” he said.
“Meaning if you can sic it on someone, then it’ll start feeding you power?”
“Yes. Now quiet, Tai is trying to concentrate.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to find someone to sic it on if we weren’t in the middle of nowhere?”
“Yes. But there are a lot of sacrifices I’m making on this journey.”
Meaning having to put up with her. Very funny. Gods, she wished she had a revenant like Tai, so she could beat him at his own game. Or that she had any resonance at all. Maybe Nauro would think twice about insulting her if she could get as strong as Feynrick, or as fast as Ella.
Instead she was a blank. And an orphan. And barely being allowed to tag along, even if they were taking the slowest and most ridiculously roundabout way to get home she could imagine. It would make a story to tell her cousins when she got home, at least.
If they cared. She’d never been close with them, and it had been years now. But who else did she have?
They are family, her mother would say. The only people you can rely on in this world.
Mom. Marea shoved down the twinge of grief in her and shut up. The second revenant she’d defeated, in her stupid quest to try to prove that she wasn’t a blank, that maybe yura just didn’t work for her, had been pretending to be her mother. It was awful, but she hadn’t really been nice to her mom before she died, so it’d been good too. Forced her to realize she’d been a brat to a woman who meant well, despite her shortcomings. So now she still heard her mom sometimes, in her head, but not as a revenant. Just as a memory, something she hadn’t appreciated when it’d been real life.
They made camp that night right by the side of the road. Marea gave Bellows and Farts their daily ration of precious barley before finding a patch of wintergrass to tie them up in for the night. Much as she was ready to be done with this journey, she was coming to love their daily routines: Nauro setting up the guyo, Feynrick scouting the area and laying his little traps, Tai and Ella going off to ‘gather firewood’ and probably make out. Much as the thought of kissing Tai was disgusting, she still envied Ella. A lover would make this trip so much better.
Or so she imagined. She would find someone when she got back to Worldsmouth. Especially now that her parents wouldn’t have any say on who.
They shared a pot of hare and wintergrass soup around the fire that night, guyo pleasantly hot after another freezing day. The thing was basically a tent made of furs with a hole in the top for smoke, but it was as warm as any house she’d ever been in. It probably helped that it was designed for two, maybe three people max, so they slept more or less on top of each other all night. She quickly discovered Feynrick was a heat box, even if he snored.
“So what’s our story?” Marea asked, after one of Feynrick’s extended and very likely made-up stories of personal bravery in the Councilate army.
“What’s that, lass?” Feynrick asked, seeming stirred from his own dreamland. The man took his lies seriously.
“When we get to the waystone,” she said. “Or anywhere bigger than a village, really. You don’t want other shamans to recognize Tai, right? So what’s our story? You don’t see two lighthaired ladies traveling with a bunch of darkhaired men every day.”
Feynrick cleared his throat. “That’s red hair, young miss. Not to be mistaken for dark.”
Same difference. “Right. But still.”
“With any luck,” Nauro said, still holding his cooling bowl of soup, “there won’t be anyone there, and we can just be who we are.”
“With as much as you’ve been talking up the waystones and how power-hungry all your friends are, that seems unlikely.”
&n
bsp; Tai set down his bowl. “When we went to Gendrys, we said we were all guards for the Lady Aygla—” Ella snorted at this “—and that seemed to work fine.”
“Really? I heard it ended up with the town burning and you almost dead.”
“Not our fault,” Feynrick said. “It was a good story.”
“But you’re right,” Ella said. “If there are people at the waystone, they are likely to be well-educated, and suspicious of anyone showing up who isn’t aware of recent, um, shamanic events.”
Marea looked around. “So we tell them we’re the Ayugen cell?”
Nauro cleared his throat. “I don’t think that would be wise. Cells can be… aggressively competitive. But sometimes the best lies are those closest to the truth.”
“Meaning what?” She swore the man said the most vague thing possible on purpose.
“We tell them Ella and I are scholars, writing a treatise on the waystones, and investigating reports of a disturbance recently. Ella and I can speak scholarly Yersh, we stand out most in terms of hair color, and it will put other shamans at ease while allowing us to gather information, should they know any of interest.”
He sounded doubtful about this last. “And me?” Marea asked, annoyed that she wasn’t even included in his obviously well-thought-out plan.
He rubbed his chin. “Ella’s daughter, perhaps?”
Ella’s back went straight at this. “My daughter? My younger sister, more like.”
Nauro raised his eyebrows noncommittally. “Younger sister, then, perhaps by marriage. The Ayglas are known for frequent divorcings, are they not?”
They certainly were, or had been in the last few years, but Ella didn’t blush at it. “I suppose,” she said noncommittally.
That was strange. The Ayglas were also known for their fiery defensiveness, one of the reasons Marea hadn’t brought it up to begin with.
“That settled, then?” Feynrick asked. “Got a mind to get some shut-eye while the star’s down.”
They all settled in, Tai banking the coals as Ella painstakingly undressed beneath a large sheet—all part of their nightly ritual. Marea was shattered if she was going to undress in a tent full of men, so she slept in her clothes, even though the fabric was starting to itch. Thank the prophet she was between moons, at least. Her eyelids grew heavy.
She was just in the middle of telling a handsome and roguish young man she’d rather have sweet tea than flavored ice, given her recent encounters, when Feynrick twitched, startling her awake. She jerked her arm back from him—how had that gotten there?—then realized Tai was standing with a dagger in his hand.
“What’s going on?” she asked, and was met with furious stares from Tai and Feynrick.
Scatters. Something not good then. Snow crunched outside and a chill shot down her back. Who was out there? It could be anything. Attackers. Shamans. Wolves. Tribesmen.
Thoughts were still shooting through her brain like wildfire when Nauro rose, bare chest muscled in the dim glow of the coals. He held up a hand, then a voice spoke outside.
“I know you are in there,” it said. “I can see you.”
“Whattheshatters,” Marea whispered, clutching at Feynrick’s leg.
“And I can see you,” Nauro replied, voice raised but calm. “An impressive little collection you’ve built, friend, but I advise you to move on.”
“And I advise you to kneel,” the man said, growling the last word.
The guyo ripped apart around them, frigid air rushing in, revealing a single figure floating in the moonlight. At the same time something pressed down on Marea, hard, and Tai and Feynrick stumbled down.
Marea screamed, trying to push up, but her blanket had turned to stone. Stone that pressed down, like it was growing heavier by the second. Furs flew like a spooked flock of gulls, though the night was dead still. The torn pieces of the guyo had a will of their own, wrapping Tai and Feynrick, piling onto Ella, pressing down on Marea.
Only Nauro remained standing, somehow impervious to the furs circling him. “I advise you to move on—” he was saying, till a fur wrapped his face, muffling his voice.
Oh, Gods. They were going to die. She was never going to see home and they were going to die, right here, right now. This guy, whoever he was, had taken their uai like the other attackers, and he was going to kill Nauro and Nauro was their only chance and—
He is an amateur, Nauro’s voice came in her mind, clear as a bell. Powerful but simple. I can divert his uai stream, but it will take time. Use your resonance. Fight him. It will get easier.
“I don’t have a resonance!” Marea screamed, just as she felt two resonances ring her bones like a struck bell. Tai and Feynrick—they must have heard the voice too. Nauro probably wasn’t even talking to her. She struck anyway, needing to do something, able to do that at least. Maybe her resonance would help with a chord, even if she was blank.
Feynrick roared beside her, and she could feel him pushing up, even as more furs slapped down on him.
“Kneel I said!” the man cried, and even through her fear Marea could tell his voice was a little too high for the tone he was using, like a man pretending to be a god. It was just the slightest bit pathetic, even if she was going to die.
Marea focused on that. Anything was better than this crushing fear, than the feeling her lungs couldn’t draw breath. Pathetic. The man was pathetic.
In the dim light of the swirling embers and moon, she saw Feynrick struggle to his feet, shouting something about being rude, swinging his axe wildly at furs flying from the darkness. Tai was faring worse, in the air now but being buffeted around by furs, trying to pull him back down.
“No!” she shouted. She had seen Tai in action, the man was amazing, and Feynrick was great, so much better than this pathetic thing attacking them. They needed to win. She needed to not die, and oh Gods there was the fear was coming up again—
“Kneel now or the women die,” the man shouted, still in his pathetic voice, and suddenly the weight on her was double. The breath squeezed from her lungs. Across the scattered coals Ella screamed, furs pressed down on her too. Timeslipping wasn’t much use in this situation, a detached and rational part of her brain noted. You needed raw strength.
She had neither. Then panic clawed through even those thoughts. She tried to scream but there was no air.
9
Tai slammed sideways, another fur tearing at him. He restruck his uai and tried again to push forward. If he could just reach the man—
A fur tore at him, wrapping around his neck and squeezing. Tai responded with a shove of his own, air intended to blast the thing off, but there was no air between it and his skin.
Use your resonance, Nauro had said. Fight him. It will get easier, he said.
Easy to say when you weren’t choking.
Tai shot himself left and up in the air, spinning, two furs pulling at one leg while others slammed into him like stone hammers, managing to loose the fur from his neck. Whoever this man was, he didn’t play by normal rules, like Ydilwen hadn’t, but he wasn’t invincible. Tai wafted air again, creating a swirling sphere around himself, trying to keep the furs tangled and off him.
It sort of worked, but he made no progress forward. Below him Feynrick bellowed, swaddled almost too thick in furs to make out the man, but still struggling forward, arms completely trapped at his sides.
What was taking Nauro so long? Was the man actually not any good at shamanism?
Tai shoved forward again, but the furs pressed in despite his attempts, stopping him, buffeting him, forcing him ever downward.
“Kneel, I said!” the man shouted. “Kneel now or the women die!”
Below him Ella screamed, and for a moment he almost lost it all in fear. She was going to die. He couldn’t kill this man in time and Nauro didn’t care and Ella was going to be crushed to death, or smothered.
Maybe that was Nauro’s plan all along.
Anger sparked hot, that anyone would try to harm her, that she who was s
o precious would end just a pawn in the games of men too powerful to be stopped.
No. This man was powerful but Tai had killed a god. He just needed to get smarter. Wafting wasn’t working. So what? Shamanism? But he could barely see revenants, let alone try to control them.
Mindsight. The resonance Naveinya had left him. Semeca’s resonance. Tai struck it even as he kept swerving and dodging and spinning air around him, trying desperately to stay off the ground, because he knew it was over if he was forced down. Struck mindsight and peered.
There. Amidst the waves of fear and anger and resolve was something like glee. Glee?
Tai peered in closer, stream of thoughts rushing under his eyes, but yes, the attacker was gleeful. Drunk on power. Cedrig, his name was. A minor Galya functionary stationed in Seingard. A secret ninespears member. Someone who had left everything as soon as he heard Semeca was dead, realizing the potential.
A man who wanted to be a god.
Tai slammed down, a fur blasting through his vortex to hit him in the face, pushing him toward the swirling bed of coals. He responded with his own blast, sideways, twisting, ripping free.
Not good enough. He pushed deeper into Cedrig’s mind, upstream, back from his thoughts to his intentions, his plans. Ella screamed again, but it was muffled, Marea’s voice almost inaudible in the roar of wind and flood of thoughts. They were dying. He needed something better, some trigger, needed it now.
There. A face Cedrig feared, a stern-faced Galya higher up, shouting at him. Teterwel. Shaming him in front of the entire Seingard contingent. The latest in a long line of men shaming him. The last. The reason Cedrig would become a god.
“Teterwel!” Tai shouted, trying to shock the man, trying to get past his façade. “You are no god! I know! Teterwel!”
For just a moment, the winds stopped. The furs dropped. The man’s mouth opened in an O in the moonlight. Tai shot forward, seizing the chance, pulling the dagger he kept on him even in slumber.
Then Cedrig responded, screaming something lost in the confusion, and a hundred furs flew at Tai, surrounding him, wrapping him in crushing stone.