And there it was.
Framed in the archway to the alley was the brilliant white flank of the creature. If it was the same creature, it had moved from its previous position. Now it crouched on taloned feet directly before the tunnel, a huge hip and leg filling the space, though its terrible owlish face still remained out of view to the right.
One cellar remained unchecked no more than twenty paces from the Aerie.
Harric pressed himself flat against the right-hand wall and proceeded very slowly on his stockinged feet. As he drew upon the cellar door, the Aerie stirred, and Harric froze. A bright strand of spirit had dipped lazily down beside the creature and curled against it. Harric stared for several long heartbeats before he recognized it as a Web Strand.
Cobs. He swallowed, hoping this one would not move toward him. He did not want to have to retreat. But the strand paid no attention to his nexus. It appeared to be floating around the Aerie and rubbing against it like a cat seeking attention.
Had the Aerie called it down? Maybe Aerie fed from them. Then a hopeful idea occurred to him: maybe Fink had drawn it there—either intentionally, or because he was in such a state of terror that he’d neglected to send it away. And if so, then maybe the Aerie weren’t attracted to Fink at all, but to the Web Strands he unintentionally drew.
Emboldened by this notion, Harric stooped to examine the dust of the last threshold. Sure enough, there in the dust was the sharp line of a scrabbled claw.
Fink.
Relief bloomed in Harric, then wilted as he noticed dark liquid on one corner of the threshold. Did Fink have blood? Harric’s breath stopped in his throat as he dabbed it with a finger and smelled it. It had a faint odor of fish. Rubbing it between his fingers, he found it slippery. Fish oil. Harric smiled as he imagined the scene as it must have unfolded: Fink clawing a jar open; Fink oiling the ancient hinges of the cellar door so heavily that he left a puddle.
Novice.
Silent hinges confirmed Harric’s guess about the oil. He slipped inside then closed the door gently behind him, and the crawling sensation in his oculus stopped.
He found Fink huddled beneath a loaded shelf, staring and hugging his knees to his fat belly. He appeared to be alone. He was not bound. No Aerie pounced.
“Fink, it’s me,” Harric whispered as he crossed to the imp. “It’s all right. They don’t know where you are.”
Fink stared at him, unseeing.
“Fink. Snap out of it. We can slip away from these things.”
“Kid…” Fink’s voice was barely audible. “You see them? You see them out there?”
“Yes. On top of this house, four stories up. And, well, one in the alley. But they don’t know about you. I think they’re here for Web Strands. Do you attract Web Strands?”
Fink dropped his forehead behind his knees and groaned. “They know.”
Harric pressed his lips together, struggling for patience. “Fink. If they do know, they aren’t stopping you, so let’s get out of here.” When Fink failed to respond, Harric took hold of one of Fink’s wrists and pulled it gently from its death hug on his knees. Fink resisted at first, then let him take it. Harric clasped the imp’s other hand and raised him to his feet.
“Come on,” Harric said, turning around and stooping. “Climb aboard.” After a long hesitation, Harric repeated himself, and Fink climbed onto his back, hooked his feet in the straps, and gripped Harric’s shoulders. Harric handed Fink the nexus, and the imp took it without comment. Closing his eyes, Harric entered the bright world of the Unseen, and felt Fink shoulder the burden of it. “That’s more like it,” he said.
Fink’s talons pricked Harric’s shoulders. “What was that?”
“Ouch, Fink. Hold on to the straps. What was what?”
“Hush!” The prick of his talons did not let up. “What the White Moon was that sound?”
Harric froze and listened. Then an odd murmur stirred in his mind. It wasn’t sound, exactly, because it didn’t seem to come through his ears, but instead directly into his mind. In spite of that odd sensation, its source did have a direction, which was right beyond the door.
Heart suddenly leaping against his breastbone, Harric sprang for the cellar ramp and hurried up through the open door at the top, with Fink clutching tightly. Hoping to close the door at the top of the ramp behind them, Harric tested it by moving it fractionally, only to feel the hinges resist with the beginnings of a squeak of complaint.
Fink almost backflipped off the pack. “Leave it, kid!”
But Harric was already moving through the kitchen, which had a similar layout to the other he’d entered, and from there to a front room with an enormous trellis-tree in a great drum of stonework. This home had more windows and balconies perforating the drum at various levels, and Harric headed directly for one of these.
“We’re dead, we’re dead,” Fink moaned. “They know. We’re dead—”
A noise from somewhere seemed to confirm this—a thump, perhaps of a door?—but with Fink moaning in his ear, Harric couldn’t tell if it came from above or back in the kitchen or cellar.
“Hush,” Harric said. “I can’t think.”
“It’s no use. We’re dead.”
Harric stopped before a pair of squat, windowed doors to the balcony, and peered through the dirty glass. The balcony beyond hung over a trellised walkway connecting houses. It wouldn’t be a difficult climb down to find the tunnel below the next row of dwellings. But if the Aerie still perched above him, they would easily see him leave.
“Diversion,” he muttered. “We need a diversion.”
Biting his upper lip, he ran to another balcony on the opposite side of the great room and pushed open the doors. The hinges didn’t squeak, but the door scraped across dirt from several weedy pots that had fallen from a railing. He opened it just far enough to reach through and shove a pot from the railing.
When it shattered below, he was already sprinting to the opposite balcony.
The odd murmur brushed across Harric’s mind again. Aerie below him. In the cellar.
Turning the door latch, he shoved against the doors, but they wouldn’t budge.
Another murmur moved through his mind, stronger this time, and it stirred a wave of nausea in him.
This time he hurled his weight against the door once, twice, and it finally opened enough for him to squeeze through, bumping Fink’s wings on either side as he went. Without looking up to see of the Aerie were there—it wouldn’t matter if they were, as he had no choice but flight—he leapt from the balcony into a gap in the trellis. Bars of trellises flew past him. He managed to get a hand on one or two, in a sloppy version of the controlled fall he’d seen Brolli do, and hit the ground upright.
Feet stinging from the landing, he darted across the gap between rows and into an alley.
During all of this, Fink emitted a faint but sustained whine, and it wasn’t until Harric crouched inside the alley’s service tunnel that he stopped.
Harric risked looking back for signs of Aerie, but saw nothing. None followed them into the tunnel. They must have left their perch to investigate the shattered pot on the other side. The diversion had worked.
Harric let out a long sigh of relief. “Fink. My shoulders. Hold the straps?”
He waited a moment, and then helped Fink unclasp first one hand, then the other, and replace them on the straps of Harric’s pack. Tiny spots of blood smeared Harric’s skin where the talons had bitten. “Tricked ’em, Fink. We’re safe.”
Fink’s blank eyes stared.
“It’s all right, Fink,” Harric said. “We made it. They’ll think it was Kwendi lovers looking for a place for a tryst.”
He hoped. It had been a sloppy escape. If the Aerie understood tracks, they’d know the tracks he’d left were not from Kwendi feet. And in his hurry to cross the gap between houses, he’d left the balcony doors open, indicating the direction of their flight.
Time to move. He retraced his steps all the way to the foot of
the square, checking for Aerie before crossing each alley, and finally peeked back around the last house to be sure the Aerie hadn’t moved before they returned to the passage that brought them to the abandoned city in the first place.
But they had moved. The monsters had mounted into the air to circle above the house he’d just left. Harric jerked back behind the house.
“What is it?” Fink whispered, his voice so faint that Harric barely heard it.
“Uh. Probably nothing. They just left their roost.”
“They’re coming for me!”
Harric peered around the corner again. The Aerie’s circling flight had expanded, each pass drawing steadily nearer. “Moons, Fink! Did you take the strand with us?” Harric scanned the sky, and sure enough, one of the bright Web Strands drifted toward them across the empty square like a filament of spider silk on a breeze.
Biting off a curse, Harric crept from behind the house and beelined across the square for the passage. The arch was only thirty paces away. He reasoned that even if the Aerie could see the Unseen, they still might not see him from that distance. But if he hesitated and let them take up a new roost at the foot of the square, he and Fink would never get by.
He hadn’t gone four steps before one of the creatures veered from its circling path and landed with a thump on the house he’d just left. Harric’s heart nearly leapt from his throat as another departed its circle and dove directly at Harric. He dove to the ground, gritting his teeth in anticipation of impact. But the thing merely swooped. Its wingtip passed directly overhead, followed by a rush of soft wind.
“They can’t see us,” Harric whispered.
Fink answered by jerking frantically at the straps, and Harric sprinted for the archway. Only ten strides to the corridor. A glance back showed all the Aerie circling closer, and the Web Strand drifting lazily after Fink. But Harric’s fear had already begun to subside, for he now knew one thing for certain: that the Aerie could not see them in the Unseen.
When he’d put a good fifty strides behind them down the passage, he slowed. “Moons, those things are weird,” he said between panted breaths. “Fink? You there? We did it. We got away. They can’t see us in the Unseen.”
Fink said nothing. The imp clutched the pack straps with a grip like death.
After eight intersections, Harric found himself back at the map room’s corridor, which he’d marked with the lightless mushroom lamp.
Fink extended a trembling hand and pointed to the map room.
Harric shook his head. “Fink, I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen where Brolli went. I can’t leave yet. He must have gone down one of these other two passages.”
“You were gone all that time and you didn’t find him?” Fink’s voice rose to a squeak. “What the White Moon were you doing?”
“Heh. Tell you some other time. A little surprised I made it back to you at all.”
Fink groaned.
“Come on, Fink, you have to admit it: the Aerie were so close, but still didn’t know you were there. They were there for the Web Strands. Did you attract the strands?”
Fink groaned again. “Maybe. Yes, sure. That makes sense.”
“You have to pull yourself together, Fink. That kind of mistake will get us killed.”
Harric began scanning for clues to the way Brolli had gone. “Come. Let’s try again. This is your chance to impress your moon if they still have you on probation or whatever. Or you can stay and wait in the map room for me. But decide now, because I’m going to find Brolli.”
As bluffs went, it was a pretty thin one. To do any reasonable exploration, Harric would need to be in the Unseen for a long time, and much longer than he could support himself. Fink knew it too, but he did not climb down. Harric felt him take a couple of shuddering breaths and shift his weight on the pack straps.
“You’re right, kid. Can’t face my sisters without learning something here. Maybe if we learn something, Missy won’t be so mad when we stand her up.”
“And the Aerie?”
Fink let out a hissing breath. “You’re going to make me say it? All right, they can’t see us.”
Harric nodded. “I’m glad you’re coming.”
“Wouldn’t get far without me.”
Harric grinned, but his eyes flicked back toward the empty city, where he’d left two Kwendi who could blow their cover. But those two were days from help, their cries muffled deep in a cistern underground. And he needn’t tell Fink about it yet. No need to worry him more.
“Where to?” Fink said.
“Not sure.” The floors here weren’t so dusty, and Brolli didn’t use the floor anyway. Harric reached up and ran a finger along a rung of the trellis from both of the corridors they hadn’t yet explored. The one opposite the map room came away with a small smudge, but the other came back with a fur of gray dust. Another unused corridor. Harric couldn’t help but wonder if it led to another valley of empty houses.
“This way,” he said, trotting down the hall with Fink on his back, and in a couple of minutes they stood at the edge of another a deserted square—only this one was actually circular, with its fountain in the middle of a ring of deserted houses.
“Don’t go out there, kid,” the imp whispered. “We know what’s there: nothing, and no one but Aerie.”
Harric stared in wonder. Not one abandoned township, but two. How many more might there be? The explanation that the Arkendians had killed entire cities worth of Kwendi now seemed even more preposterous. The scale of slaughter required to exterminate so many—and not just warriors, but women and children and elders, too—was unthinkable. There simply weren’t enough Arkendian warriors among the settlers of the north to make the sort of army required. And as Harric understood it, Arkendians in the Free Lands had been on the defensive against Kwendi until the current truce was declared.
When they returned to the intersection, he faced the only passage they had yet to explore.
“Now we get some answers,” he said. “Last one’s lucky.”
“Way to jinx it, kid.”
There is no secret so close as that between a rider and her mount. How much more, and yet less, between rider and Phyros.
—Sad Bella
53
Fireflies
Caris rode down the yoab run behind Willard through the dark and smoky halls of the forest. The giant boles of the trees loomed out of the murk in the light of her lantern. In some ways, the movement of the lantern on its pole threw more confusion than light, but it was enough for Rag to see by. She’d known some horses that were unable to travel by firelight because the flickering made every root seem a snake.
She leaned forward to rub Rag’s chestnut neck. The mare glanced back and watched her. She had opened to Caris a little. But it seemed she was testing Caris, and her trust would not come easy. Nevertheless, it was enough for Caris to submerge herself in the mare’s senses when she needed, and the gradual closing of the rift gave her hope it would indeed be mended.
“You’ll see,” she murmured often, stroking Rag’s mane.
Willard’s pole lantern bobbed above him on the trail ahead like a will-o’-the-wisp. He still hunched over his saddle, silent since they’d left camp.
When they’d set out, she’d intended to return to the topic of the wedding with him. It had been the first thing on her mind. But now it couldn’t be farther from her mind—indeed, it made her sick to think about, though she couldn’t guess why. She hadn’t touched Molly’s mind. She hadn’t been blooded. In one moment she’d decided to wed at the first Common House they found, and in the next, the wedding fever vanished, and she knew instantly the influence of the ring had been bending her to wed.
I will never marry that deceitful roach.
A wave of nausea crossed her stomach, and she recognized it as the enchantment of the ring, but this time it was weak. Nothing like the stomach-wrenching convulsions she’d known that morning whenever she resisted its power.
Shame washed over her as she recall
ed how the ring had turned her into a single-minded wedding fool in front of Kogan and Willard that day; how she’d accosted them one after the other, like she’d picked up some new horse-touched fixation. And this brought back other shames, like when her mother tried to explain love and marriage to one person for life as something like the bond between a horse and rider, and Caris fixated on marrying Rag.
Her cheeks heated and she let out a small sound of disgust.
So why had the ring suddenly weakened and allowed her this clarity on the matter? It couldn’t be the nearness to Molly, because Caris had ridden beside Molly that very day during the height of her wedding fixation. And it wasn’t because she was far from Harric, either, for he was only a mile away, sleeping next to Snapper, and that sort of distance had never affected it before.
She shook her head and sighed. Whatever it was, she needed to discover it, so she could employ it in lieu of Molly’s touch.
*
Willard chose a tree for his binding and tied Molly’s lead to another. Without a word, he laid out the iron hobbles Caris would bind him with, and set about bleeding his Phyros.
Caris watched, chewing her lower lip as Molly resisted him. The Phyros reared or pulled away so he couldn’t cut the vein, and Willard responded by hauling down on her halter and pummeling her mouth with brutal blows of his fisted gauntlet. Even more disconcerting was the indifference with which Molly greeted these measures, and the fact that, through it all, her gaze never budged from Caris.
“Girl! Give me some space.” Willard sent her a dart of a glance, and it pierced a cord of guilt in Caris.
He’d seen Molly’s look, and he blamed Caris for his Phyros’s resistance. Maybe that was Molly’s game, to torment Willard and make him jealous or enraged against Caris. Just as likely, she was trying to make the task of bleeding her so difficult that he’d insist Caris do it, which would give her another at blooding her.
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