“Talo… It’s not a good idea to go after him.”
Talo grunted. “Not like we have a lot of choice. I don’t think he’ll let us follow him again, even if we were stupid enough to try. We’ll have to find another way.”
This last statement Talo said more to himself than to Kal. There was much that the atherian had said that didn’t sit well with him, every word binding together to form this entrapping hold that made him feel almost ill.
“So you’re going to try again?”
Talo hesitated, then nodded.
Kal sighed. Then he took a few steps forward and offered up his arm.
Talo looked around at him. “Home?” he asked.
Surprising him, Kal shook his head.
“You’re not going to let this go,” he said. “On top of that, I get the feeling your man would have my head if I so much as implied I intended to leave you to your own devices when it comes to Arro, especially after he hears about the fights.”
Talo raised an eyebrow, but took the offered arm. “Where to, then?” he asked.
“First to a woman I know who has a talent for toy making, then somewhere you can get the answers I can’t give you,” Kal said, starting to walk in the direction Arro had just gone. “Though I think I might actually have a few.”
“You do?” Talo asked sharply. “Wait. Why toys?”
Beside him, Kal nodded, then seemed to hesitate. Again Talo saw the inexplicable sadness on the man’s face, the same sadness that had been there when Kal had looked down on Raz i’Syul in the pit.
“As for the toys, you’ll see. But Talo… Your trip south, the one you took with Syrah… What year was it?”
Talo frowned, confused, but thought about it.
“854?” he muttered after a moment as they took the same corner the atherian had vanished around, heading south once more through the streets. “Or ’55. I don’t recall exactly. Why?”
Kal frowned, then nodded.
“Going on eight years,” he muttered to himself. “I guess it would make sense…”
He looked up, gazing into the winter sky. The clouds patchworked the heavens like a great gray quilt, lumpy and dark as it shifted overhead.
“I never finished telling you,” he said quietly, “how he got to be called ‘the Monster of Karth…”
CHAPTER21
“What happened, Raz? Where did our family go? Where did they all go?”
—Prida Arro, 857 v.S.
Raz felt as though he’d been knifed in the gut. As he made his way south, his feet taking their familiar route home without so much as a conscious thought on his part, the only thing he could feel or think about was the stabbing ache just below his chest, too hot and too deep. It wasn’t an unfamiliar pain, by any means. He knew it well, in fact, having lived with it for months, even years.
But it was a pain he’d hoped was long forgotten.
Damn Priests, he thought bitterly, turning onto the road home and feeling the sensation twist at the memory of the two men he’d left in the alley. It was a corrupt feeling, laced with directionless fury and hate, the kind of sensation that had led him dangerously close to madness once in his life already.
It wasn’t fair to blame them. He knew that. The fault of the massacre of the Arros was on the armed mercenaries who had poured into the caravan’s camp that night, swallowing the lives of Raz’s family like a black tide. It had taken him some time to come to that conclusion, to let go of the guilt and self-hate that had plagued him the years following Karth, but eventually Raz had managed it. The weight of those crimes fell on the heads of the men and women wielding the blades.
Men and women who were dead to the last, butchered one after another over the next few days, until the only one left had been Crom Ayzenbas.
And Ayzenbas had taken a long, long time to die.
But if the Priests hadn’t been there, it would never have happened.
That was a fair thought, Raz convinced himself. If the Laorin had stayed out of the South, keeping to their own business in these frigid Northern hills, then Raz might never have known they existed, much less had to intervene on their behalf. And if he’d never intervened, then Ayzenbas might never have sentenced the Arros to die.
Then I have reason to feel like this, Raz told himself fiercely. I have reason to hate them. It’s their fault. It’s THEIR FAULT.
No. It’s not.
Raz stopped short. He realized dimly that he stood at the base of the steps of Arrun and Lueski’s little home, looking up at the heavy timber door. What he was seeing, though, was a face he only rarely thought of anymore.
Turning away from the house, Raz kept walking as though he’d never paused. For several minutes he continued on, ignorant of the cold and wind.
When he got to the stairs, he took them three at a time.
The steps were worn slate on lime, built into the city wall itself. At the top one could see the woods that spread south, west, and east, the land a cascade of rippling hills.
Raz, though, turned his back on the forests to face the city, and with a running start leapt from the wall itself.
He landed with a light crunch on the rooftop of an old granary, kicking loose a couple wooden slats as he found his footing. He balanced there for a moment, two feet and a hand on the incline of the roof, Ahna held snug over his shoulder with the other.
Then he ran.
Raz was not as familiar with Azbar as he had been with Karth all those years ago, not to mention he’d never been carrying the dviassegai. Several times he had to correct himself in a split second, leaping and rolling to avoid plummeting to the roads below, or dodging left, right, and over as dips in the roofs and chimneys added obstacles to his path.
After a time, though, old habits returned, and even with one hand indisposed Raz made easy work of the unfamiliar skyline.
For nearly fifteen minutes he ran, jumping, leaping, soaring, rolling. Clawed feet and fingers found good anchorage in wood and the gaps between stone, swinging him from lip to lip, roof to roof. His tail whipped about instinctively, avoiding colliding with walls and windows, or else shifting to keep his balance along the narrow apexes and slanted edges. His body at last falling into the familiar cohesion he had never realized he missed so much, Raz ran as though he could outdistance his thoughts themselves.
When he finally stopped, the view he’d sought did indeed grant him a brief moment of reprieve.
There was no wall between Azbar and the canyon at its back. The fissure seemed almost endlessly deep in the fading light of the afternoon, and was wide enough by far to discourage raiders who might think to cross it for an easy sacking. Instead, the architects of the city seemed to have had a vision to conquer the chasm for their own enjoyment, extending semicircular platforms out at the limit of every road that ended along the lip of the canyon. Built into the cliffs themselves, the views from these little extensions offered the thrill of looking the abyss in the face, staring straight down to find the rushing river that raged far, far below.
Despite this, Raz thought he rather preferred his vantage.
He stood at the top of the highest building he’d been able to find along the edge of the fissure, a narrow five-story tower that—had it been made of mudbrick and mortar—would have made any Southerner curse the stupidity of the builder for shaping something so vulnerable to the winds. Raz didn’t know as to what purpose it might serve, though he suspected it to be some sort of tannery, judging by the smell of oil and hide cast about him in the wind. Regardless, it put him twenty feet higher than anywhere else in the vicinity, opening up the world for him as he had not experienced it in a long, long time.
Yet more woodland clung to the far lip of the canyon. Trees of all shapes and sizes hung out and over the emptiness, their roots clinging to mossy earth so tightly they appeared like men desperate not to fall. As they did southward, the woods seemed to extend infinitely north, hushing the harsh edges of the world in green.
Beyond the endless trees, though, clawing at th
e lip of the horizon, the ghosts of white-capped mountain ranges were still visible beneath the gray of the sky.
It was as he followed the sharp outline of these distant titans that the face Raz had been running from finally caught up to him. The mountains were everything that was the North, just as she had been.
A pretty girl, with skin so pale it hurt him to think of the Sun reaching it, and hair so white it looked to have been painted to frame her deep, pink eyes.
A girl who had nearly vanished from the world for the simple fact that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time…
Just as we’d all been…
Gently, Raz eased himself down, tucking his mantle beneath him so as to have a warm place to sit along the highest edge of the roof. Ahna he placed beside him, hooking the bottom of her blades between the slats so she wouldn’t slide away to plummet down on some unfortunate bystander below.
That’s what we’d all been, wasn’t it? Raz asked himself then, pulling what loose layers of his furs were left around him in an effort to beat the wind. In the wrong place at the wrong time?
If he was going to be angry at the unfortunate nature of man to be exactly where he shouldn’t be when he shouldn’t be, then Raz had more to blame than just the Laorin. The Arros should be at fault simply for being in Karth, not to mention rearing him to have the skills and willpower to intervene on the albino girl’s behalf. Raz himself, of course, should be at fault for being in the market street that day, looking for food, wood, and a butcher’s knife.
And the girl, in particular, should be at fault for tempting the slavers with her presence.
No.
As he sat there, high above the heads of the oblivious citizens of Azbar milling about below, Raz felt the wretched ache start to fade from his chest. He let it go, holding tight to a conviction he’d always had, but never acknowledged.
The girl was not at fault. Blaming her for the death of the Arros would be equivalent to blaming her for her own abduction. He might as well have claimed she was asking for it, dressed the way she was.
Raz snorted.
How utterly stupid.
No, the albino could not be made at fault for the wickedness of the men who had taken her. She could not be made at fault for the massacre, and—if she was not at fault—neither could Raz or the Arros.
Or the Priests, those men of cloth of Laor, whom the Grandmother thought had only been in such a doleful place as Karth so as to offer aid to the poor and needy.
Raz let this conclusion sink in, let it wash over him like the wind. As he did, he let go of the bitterness, of the rage that had swelled in him so abruptly upon encountering the Priests, in particular the man who called himself Talo Brahnt.
Brahnt was as the rest of us, Raz thought, this time with refreshing conviction. Wrong place. Wrong time.
It didn’t mean he had to like the man.
Still, with the release of his anger, Raz felt the knife that had been twisting into his heart be drawn out in full. It left a sort of emptiness there, a hole that felt like it could not be filled, but Raz suspected it was a space that had been there for a very long time.
A space that had once been filled by the love of parents, and the love of a sister.
Raz looked up, then, away from the fissure and the trees and the mountains. It was more instinct than conscious act, but he realized as he did so that it had been some time since he’d sought out Her Stars, or looked for his family in the heavens. Even had there been clear skies, he doubted it was late enough for them to have appeared just yet.
He was surprised, therefore, when a glint of white caught his eyes against the gray.
“What the…?” Raz asked himself quietly, taking Ahna up in one hand and climbing to his feet.
He thought at first that the point of paleness was a trick of the light, or perhaps a minute shift in the clouds that would correct itself rapidly enough. The white didn’t fade, though, and Raz followed it carefully, realizing it was moving in a lazy, swirling pattern, like a falling leaf.
In a silent dance it fell closer, until Raz—against his better judgment—reached out a clawed hand to catch it gently in his palm. The pale thing reminded him of a tiny fluff of cotton, like those his mother and the other women of the caravan used to work until they could be spun into thread and clothing. He brought it up to his face to examine it more closely, realizing as he did that the thing seemed to be shifting, moving in his hand.
No. Not moving. Melting.
Within seconds the little flake of snow was gone, leaving nothing but a tiny spot of wetness along the cool skin of Raz’s hand.
CHAPTER 22
By the time Raz turned back onto the road leading to Arrun and Lueski’s home, he had realized two things. First: snow was wonderful. It flew and darted around, dueling wind and gravity, until it settled with utter silence upon any surface it reached. As more and more started to come down, the sounds of the world became hushed, easing away the dull headache that constantly threatened to bloom whenever Raz was around people and all their noises.
Second: snow was horrible.
Deciding to return home by way of the roofs, Raz nearly killed himself twice before realizing the roads were a safer option. The snow made everything wet and slick, turning what had been safe hand- and footholds only a half hour before into sly little deathtraps. More upsetting even than that, snow was cold. It clung to him as he walked, sticking to the line of his furs and rolling off the steel of his armor. Where it found skin was the worst, though, melting quickly and leaving Raz’s feet and tail frigid and stiff. His wings were warm enough, for once, tucked and bundled beneath the heavy mantle, but the snow even managed to slip its way beneath his hood, wetting his cheeks and the tip of his snout.
“Good thing we didn’t try our luck in the woods, huh, sis?” he muttered to the evening, watching the mist of his breath cut a swath between the falling flakes.
Reaching the house stairs, Raz took them carefully, not wanting to slip on the thin layer of white that had already started to build on the coolness of the granite. When he got to the top, he pounded on the door, then turned to look over his shoulder as he waited for it to open for him.
The world was gray and white, hinting at the green of the firs and pines scattered along the road. The lamp-men had already been by to fill and light the street lanterns, and the warm glow of the flames cut a staggered pattern through the quiet curtain of falling snow. Nothing moved, everyone having ducked into their homes to wait out the first storm of the freeze. Not even the wind spoke now, as though the world was intent on utter silence, if only for a night.
Raz was so taken by the scene that he nearly jumped out of his skin when the door screeched open behind him.
“Oh,” said Arrun, his face falling as he saw the snow. “And here I thought we might go the whole winter without this shit.”
“Arrun, how many times do I have to tell you to watch your mouth around—?”
Before he could finish the sentence, though, Raz froze.
As the warm air of the house rushed out to meet him, something unfamiliar came with it. He knew every smell of the Koyts’ home, including that of Lueski and Arrun themselves. He was greeted by it daily, and it had become a comforting thing, a soft reminder of the peace and tranquility he could always expect when returning home.
But now something new twisted amongst the familiar scents.
“Who’s with you?” he asked sharply. Without waiting for a response, he bulled past Arrun, nearly knocking the boy over in the process, and turned to face the room.
In the far wall the fire burned as always, filling the space with the sort of heavy warmth that eased its way comfortably into the body. Lueski’s and Arrun’s bedrolls had been piled up against the right wall, and the girl herself was sitting with her back to the flames, playing with what looked like a new doll, all colored cloth and dry straw. As soon as he stepped through the door she looked up, and the familiar smile leapt across her face.
&n
bsp; “He’s here!” she shouted with a laugh, clambering to her feet and running to greet him. “He’s here! Told you he’d be back soon!”
She leapt and grabbed him around the waist, as was her fashion. Raz took her head gently in one hand, careful with this steel claws, and pressed her to him.
His eyes, though, didn’t leave the two men standing together by the hearth, both turning to face him at Lueski’s shouts.
“Perhaps I should have been clearer,” he growled, “regarding exactly what would happen if you followed me again.”
The Laorin exchanged a look. Talo Brahnt looked calm enough, though he had one hand on the edge of the fireplace to keep the weight off what Raz was sure had to be a bad leg. The other one—Yu’ri, if he remembered—looked less so, but despite this it was he who spoke up now.
The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1 Page 55