“You’d have had some explanations to give the Tarxin, I think, had I died in here.” Her voice sounded rough and remote through the blood that still pounded in her ears.
“Please, Tara Paledyn—” It seemed she’d been upgraded from a Xara. “I don’t know how this happened—an accident in moving the kinglera, I will have the slaves responsible killed. And you—” Loraxin turned on Remm Shalyn. “You are dismissed, how could you let the Paledyn come into such danger?”
“You will kill no one,” Dhulyn said, blinking. “After all, this was an accident.” I should sit down, and quickly. As if in response to her thought, Remm lifted her right arm and swung it around his shoulders, bracing her. Her knees steadied. “Remm Shalyn, you are now in my employ.”
“Yes, Tara Paledyn.”
Nine
AT FIRST HE COULDN’T breathe, and his lungs hurt, and his head pounded, and that part of the nightmare seemed to last forever. He knew it was a nightmare because Dhulyn was not there. He thought he saw her once, her pale face and her steel-gray eyes, the scar that made her lip curl back when she smiled in a certain way, her hair the color of old blood, held back from her face in loops of tiny braids, thick with ribbons, feathers, and hidden wires.
“My soul,” she said, trailing her fingertips over his face before disappearing once again into the dark that was the whole world for him now.
An immeasurable time later he felt he was not alone.
“Dhulyn?”
#Calm# #Well-being#
Parno fell asleep.
He woke up to damp darkness. His eyes were sticky and his mouth strangely dry. Great rushing gusts of air swept around and past him; deep creakings and groanings throbbed like the skin of a drum and made his bones shiver. The skin crawled on the back of his neck. He was not alone, but he couldn’t pinpoint any specific life around him. He blinked for what seemed like hours and achieved nothing but sore eyes. Parno forced himself to focus on the Lizard Shora, feeling the warmth of sun on rock, until he stopped twitching and even the muscles of his face relaxed.
As if it had been waiting for this, glimmers of light began to form around him. Soft luminescence illuminated a small cavelike chamber, the size of the cheapest private room at an inn, with smaller tunnels leading away from it in several directions. The substance of the walls and floor was damp and spongy, but dark as basalt. The air smelled of fish, brine, rot, and some unidentifiable musk.
#Stay#
He recognized the mind touch of the Crayx. Were they asking him, or telling him?
“Where am I? Where is my Partner?”
Parno sensed a shift in the consciousness around him, feelings and sensations that were just short of full thoughts, and once, the fleeting image of Dhulyn preparing herself by meditation and focus to read an old book in a foreign tongue.
#You were the only Pod sense in the water# came the answer to his question. A small part of Parno felt the exhilaration of knowing that he was sharing full thoughts with the Crayx for the first time, but he pushed it away. He had more important things to consider just now.
Dhulyn had gone into the water. Parno was sure of this, though he didn’t know how. He had confused memories of tumbling through raging waves until his sense of direction—even his sense of up and down—had deserted him; of great winds, and of holding his breath until it seemed his lungs would burst. Like all Mercenary Brothers, Dhulyn had superb breath control, but Parno’s had been augmented by years of practice with his pipes.
He rubbed at his upper arms. He was cold and his hands felt as though they didn’t belong to him. He understood with acid clarity what had happened. Dhulyn had gone into the water after him. But she wouldn’t have been able to hold her breath as long as he could, and the Crayx wouldn’t have noticed her; they wouldn’t have saved her as they’d saved him. Nothing, no one, could have survived the waterspout without such help.
Dhulyn was gone.
#Calm# #Let the pain flow through and past you like a cold current# #Do not hold it within#
Parno took a deep breath of salt-and-seaweed-flavored air and felt the calmness pass through him, pushing his loss before it, sweeping it like dust from his heart and soul.
“Don’t,” he said. His sorrow might be the only thing he had left of her. “Leave me my grief.”
#Should you not release it# #Do not allow the despair you feel to kill you#
“Why not?”
#Wavetreader Pod awaits you#
Parno shrugged, wondering if the gesture would translate mentally. “I’d just as soon die.” In Battle and in Death. That was more than a mere salutation. It was a promise.
#Very well# #Resignation# #If this is what you wish, you may remain with us# #Release your self, let your awareness float as though you were about to sleep# #We thank you for the nourishment, and we welcome you to ourselves#
Suddenly, as if his mind were a dark room and someone had thrown open a curtain, he saw, felt, knew what he was really speaking with.
The Crayx were not just the creatures that could be seen from the ship’s rail, they were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of consciousnesses, all sharing, all one, a vast storehouse of memories, of . . . personalities? Of souls? Neither word seem to quite fit what he could sense. This was what Darlara had been trying to tell him. He had an impression that these beings occupied an enormous space, but not like an arena crowded with people crammed into seats, rather like a vast sky full of stars, or an endless meadow full of flowers. With a little effort, he could come upon, contact, speak with, any one individual. Or he could simply share with all. And he was being offered a place in this garden of beings.
“Wait.” Parno struggled to sit upright; the material on which he was lying gave under his hands. “Am I injured? Am I dying?”
#We understood you wished to die# #If your grief is too heavy a burden, and you will not let us lift it . . .#
Was it too heavy? Parno rubbed his face with his hands. How could he live without her—easy to know how he didn’t die with her, the Crayx had saved him, unknowingly interfering with the natural process that would have allowed them to die together.
#Sorrow# #Regret#
“You couldn’t have known.”
#Your soul may rest with us, if you wish it# #As long as the seas have salt and the currents flow#
What about Dhulyn’s soul?
#She will go to her own place#
“Without me?”
#Should you stay with us, then without you, yes#
Parno’s hands formed into fists. Partners were Partners, “in Battle and in Death.” And this death wasn’t going to part them, not if he had anything to say about it. He tried to stand, but found his bare feet sinking into the softness around him.
“Then I won’t stay, thank you just the same.”
#As you wish#
Malfin Cor was on his knees, head down over the broken foresail stay when he felt Darlara closing in on his port side.
“Can’t be fixed,” he said without looking up. “Not to hold any kind of strain anyway. Have to save the bits for something else. ’Least the rudder’s all right.” He glanced up and frowned, though he’d known she hadn’t been paying attention. “What’s more important than the ship?”
“Not more important. But, Mal, he’s found.”
“Not—the Lionsmane?” Mal dropped the pieces of wood to lie unnoticed on the deck and straightened, resting his hands on his thighs. That meant that one would return, at least, of the thirteen missing from the Wavetreader and the even more damaged Skydancer.
Dar nodded, barely able to speak, licking dry lips that still showed edges of salt. They had both of them been wet to the skin for the hours it had taken the winds and waters of the spout to finally pass and settle, and their clothes, hair, and skin were still coated with a fine dusting of dry salt. They would wash it off the first chance they got, but the ship came first.
“Blown so far by wind and wave that Skydancer Pod found him and is passing him back to us,” D
ar said, gripping him by the shoulder. “Mal. They offered him a chance to one with them, and he refused, wanted to come back. Told you I’d have him for my own, told you he’d stay.”
“But you didn’t—”
She cuffed him on the back of the head. “ ’Course not. How could I? They can’t find to save her, so they can hardly find to drown her.”
Mal blinked at the serenity in his sister’s tone. “ ’Course not, no. But seeing you were so set on it . . .”
“Not that set on it.” She cuffed him again. This time he raised his arm to block it. “How could you think it?”
“Don’t really.”
And he didn’t, not really. He didn’t really think Dar would ask the Pod to kill for her.
“Wouldn’t have asked for it, no,” she agreed, squatting down on her heels next to him. “But not sorry for all that.” She shrugged. “Without Pod sense after all.”
“All thinking life’s important.” That was the real lesson of the Crayx, what made them all different from the landsters.
Dar nodded, but in her mind she was shrugging, and Mal knew it. Of course, all thinking life was important, it was just hard sometimes to remember that the others, those without Pod sense, could think.
“She wouldn’t have wanted to stay,” his twin said finally. “And he might not have stayed without her. Have our new bloodline, for certain. A good wind and a fair current, for us at least.”
Mal nudged her with his shoulder. “He’ll feel her loss, remember that.”
“I’ll help him.”
“If he wants it.”
#We are ready now# #Move as we show you# #Patience#
The lambent patches in the chamber where Parno had waited as patiently as he could dimmed and died out as he got to his knees and was ready to crawl. He waited, having been warned what to expect, and when finally one of smaller passages began to glow, Parno moved into it. Following that cold luminescence, he crawled for some time in a direction he felt as “forward” before he began to go “up.” The colors of the tunnel walls varied from the almost black of the place in which he had regained consciousness to a rich dark pink. The air was an even temperature, hot enough to make him sweat now that he was moving, and as humid as the jungles north of Berdana. Twice, as he crawled, his ears popped, as though he were climbing in the mountains. Just where was he, exactly? A system of underwater caves where some magic of the Crayx kept air to breathe?
Finally, he arrived at a pale green tube in which he could stand upright.
#Are you ready#
Somehow Parno must have said he was, for the next thing he knew he was slammed by a wall of moving air and water, and propelled upward, as an arrow from a bow. He tumbled once, and before he could right himself, he shot out into daylight so bright it stabbed his eyes before he could squeeze them shut. Then he was falling, and felt water around him again, and the rough, scaled hide of the Crayx.
Parno was alone when he woke up. Really alone, no one in the room with him, no Crayx sharing the mental space in his head. The first night after his rescue, after he’d shut the door in Darlara Cor’s face when she’d tried to come into the cabin with him, he’d tossed and shifted until he’d finally gotten up and gone on deck. There the Wavetreader Crayx had spoken with him, gently, and finally he had allowed them to smooth the sharp edge from his grief at least enough to allow him to sleep.
Last night, he hadn’t even tried to sleep in his own bunk but had rolled himself in Dhulyn’s bedding—and fallen asleep almost immediately. Her blankets still smelled of her, that unquantifiable essence that told the deep layers of his mind that she was still here, that he did not need to stay awake and keep watch. He had not dreamed of her again, not after surfacing from the belly of the Crayx. He wasn’t sure whether or not he wished to.
He noted the amount of light that entered through the larboard shutters and briefly considered simply rolling over again and going back to sleep. But something told him that if he did, he’d find his dreams invaded by the Crayx. For all that he didn’t wish to succumb to the offer made by Skydancer Pod, for all that he wasn’t ready to die until he could figure out how that would allow him to join Dhulyn, he couldn’t just lie here. He had to do something.
But when he finally rolled out of the bunk, straightened the clothing he’d somehow neglected to take off, and pushed his fingers through his hair, sweeping it back from his face, he found that his determination had deserted him. There would be people out on deck, and they would speak to him. And even if they did not, he would see that look on their faces. The look that said “We are sorry,” “We are here for you,” “We understand.” When they couldn’t possibly understand.
And not just the looks. If he went out and joined them, he could feel them, their compassion, and their pity echoing his own sense of loss back to him. And underneath it, a sense of puzzlement, as some in the Pod wondered why so much fuss was being made over what they saw as a temporary loss. To the Nomads, their afterlife was concrete and real—it swam beside them every day, and in some sense shared their lives. Oddly, it was only the young man Conford, the one who’d been tricked into jumping him that first day, who looked at Parno with any real understanding in his eyes.
No. Much better to stay in the cabin. His glance fell on Dhulyn’s packs, neatly placed, ties tied, straps strapped. All according to the Common Rule and the dictates of her own personal neatness. Carefully not thinking too deeply about what he was doing, Parno opened the pack nearest him. Much of their heavier gear had been left behind in Lesonika with the horses—Parno grimaced. He wasn’t looking forward to what he would say to Bloodbone when the mare realized he had come back without her mistress.
If he made it back. He might figure out how to join Dhulyn before that. In Battle and in Death. That’s what he was counting on.
He smiled, lifting out Dhulyn’s second-best sword. Its balance was off by a hair—not enough to bother anyone else, but enough that any Mercenary Brother would notice it. He laid it to one side. A short sword with a very elaborate guard. Seven throwing knives. Her spare dagger. Two wrist knives, one of Teliscan make. A dozen steel arrow shafts. Two dozen crossbow bolts. A short double-recurve bow, taken to pieces for traveling, and the tools to reassemble it. Likewise a crossbow.
And a small olive wood box in a velvet bag so old much of the nap had worn away. Typical that Dhulyn kept it in among her weapons.
“Sun, Moon, and Stars,” he said, unconsciously using his Partner’s favorite expletives. He slipped off the velvet bag and stroked his fingers along the wood grain. Dhulyn’s vera tiles. Not the ones she would use for gambling, but a set with extra tiles. The set she used to focus her Sight.
Parno sat back on his heels. That was what had been nagging at him since he’d regained consciousness in the belly of the Crayx. Dhulyn was a Seer, why hadn’t she Seen what was coming? She’d even used the vera tiles several times on board without his prompting her. Usually he had to nag her.
Had she Seen this outcome? Was this the real reason she’d tried to stay off the Wavetreader? Had she Seen her own death?
But then, why hadn’t she told him? Parno scratched at the beard growing in along his jaw. Demons and perverts. He would have let Huelra die, and his blooded crew along with him—
Why didn’t she tell him?
Parno picked up the box and threw it across the cabin. It bounced against the wall with such force that it popped open, scattering tiles all over the floor.
The full horror of it swept over him in one clear wave of comprehension. What was the one thing he had made her swear, over and over, on their Brotherhood, on their Partnership, never to tell him? It hadn’t been her own death Dhulyn had seen, but his. And somehow, she had not Seen that the Crayx would save him.
And that meant that Dhulyn had saved Huelra and his crew, had jumped into the sea herself, rather than break her oath to him. Just for that, nothing else. Parno let his head fall into his hands. This was too much. How could he live having caused h
er death?
But had he? Now he knew the reason for her odd behavior, her watchfulness, and her occasional abstraction. They’d seen the outcomes of Visions change before—perhaps this one, too, might not have come to pass.
Except for the Storm Witch.
Parno knew the storm that had killed Dhulyn Wolfshead was no natural occurrence—and he knew who and what to blame for his Partner’s death. And what to do about it before he joined her.
He was just placing the last tile back into the box when Captain Malfin Cor knocked—and Parno grimaced when he realized he’d known who it was without asking. He didn’t want this, any of this. He just wanted to be left alone to take his vengeance. But he was beginning to realize that among the Nomads—as part of the Pod—you were never alone.
“Lionsmane,” came Malfin’s voice. “Sit in council. Join us, please.” Now Parno could hear all the missing pronouns, the “we,” the “you,” that the Nomads took for granted, since they could not mistake one another. He heaved another great sigh, placed Dhulyn’s tiles in the center of her bunk, and opened the door, blinking at the light, though the day was still gray with cloud that hung heavy and hot overhead.
Familiar as Parno was with councils both political and military, he was unprepared for how quickly the Nomads came to order, and how thorough was the silence which fell over the crowded deck. As before, younger children were sent below, out of the way, but this time Parno could sense that their minders were linked through the Crayx with the rest of the crew.
Crews, he realized. Skydancer Pod was also present, though he could see neither Crayx nor what was left of the damaged ship. Skydancer itself was on its crippled way south and east, Parno picked up the thought, to be repaired in one of the havens where the landlocked Nomads lived.
The Storm Witch Page 13