“I’m sure you do,” she replied tartly.
Jairus stood up, and both Leofric and Nikko matched the movement. Leofric’s hand hovered over his sword again.
“Please, gentlemen. I swear on my gods and yours that I mean you no harm,” the blind man said. “I will return at sunrise to collect you, should you wish to come with me. If not, I’m afraid the person in question might send someone who does, in fact, have a desire to hurt you. I shouldn’t like to see that happen.”
“That is not much of a choice,” Megrithe said.
“Everything is a choice, Miss Prinsthorpe,” Jairus replied, bowing again before he left the room.
“And I think we should choose to trust him,” Nikko said when he had gone, settling back into his seat and picking up his glass. “Or at least to use him. The man he is working for calls himself Bartolo. Is that not the name you’ve been wanting to hear?”
“It is,” Megrithe said. “But how do you know Jairus will bring us to him?”
“Because Jairus is not quite as crafty as he may believe himself to be. Or at least I am craftier,” Nikko told her. “You can tell many things from a first meeting with a man. He is Paderborn-raised, by his speech, and not from too high a place. How many paths are there to winning tourneys for a blind man with no fortune? The attention of some society patron, perhaps. But such a man seeking fame for his charity would not go to great lengths to hide his name, I suspect.
“The Guild or the Divided are more likely to train a misfit like that for their own needs. Jairus has been purchasing large quantities of food and supplies, which naturally leads us to the cult. And the cult leads me to plenty of sea-folk willing to spread gossip about a group of sorcerers who are not very well liked.”
“We tried all that,” Megrithe said. “No one could tell us anything.”
“You didn’t ask in Emyer-Ekvori,” Nikko said. “The neneckt don’t have the same fears of recognition that your humans do. It took me less than an hour to find someone who recalled him, and hardly more than that to find a quiet little apartment by the harbor with a talkative young woman stationed on the corner. She was glad enough to tell me the owner, after I fed her a few coins.
“I don’t know what you two were doing that took you all afternoon,” Nikko said, failing to hide a rather self-satisfied smirk, “but I was glad enough to have some time to spend in my favorite tea house before meeting you here.”
“Tea house, indeed,” Leofric sniffed, nettled by Nikko’s success. “I know exactly where you were, and I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
“I’d have been happy enough for you to join me, love,” Nikko grinned.
Megrithe didn’t know what they were talking about, but she didn’t care. If she could make her way to Bartolo, she would be more than half way towards her ultimate goal: finding out what had happened to Arran, and what Tiaraku was really up to, and how to stop all of it.
“I’m going with him tomorrow,” Megrithe said.
“Not alone, you aren’t,” Leofric said. “I will come with you, at least. Though Nikko might be too busy at the tea house.”
“Oh, stop,” the neneckt said. “All I did was spend an hour in the steam baths. After so long on that horrid ship, I needed to relax. There wasn’t even anyone interesting there. It was nothing.”
“It’s always nothing,” Leofric said under his breath.
Nikko sighed again and handed his glass to Leofric as a peace offering. A sip seemed to settle his hackles, and he turned his attention back to the problems at hand.
“What is this tourney everyone is talking about?” Megrithe asked, trying to change the subject. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“A competition among the locals,” Leofric explained. “Very bloody, and very difficult to win.”
“So he’s dangerous?”
“Extremely, I should think. If he is playing the nice one, I can only imagine that someone like Habur is Bartolo’s insurance. It might not be wise to go tomorrow, but I don’t think it would be any wiser to be forced into it.”
“I’m going,” she repeated firmly. “I have to. Bartolo is the key to everything.”
“Then we will go, too,” Nikko said. “And maybe they will be surprised to learn a thing or two about who’s dangerous.”
Halfway through a night filled with dreams of invisible talons clawing at her throat and the echoes of terrified screams doused by spurts of searing fire, Megrithe gave up on the notion of sleep and wandered over to the window. The cold air quickly wicked away the sweat on her brow as she opened the shutters and then the pane, desperate to clear away the remnants of her disturbed imaginings.
There was no moon and few stars, just the soft swishing of little waves against the buttressed shore and the muted night noises that attended any large city: a lone cart rumbling over the cobbles; a flock of sleepy pigeons cooing to themselves under the eaves. Her window faced the hulking bulk of Tiaraku’s palace, and there was a bell in one of the towers that was barely swaying after its last exercise of the evening, the clapper nosing up against the ringing side to waft a memory of sound over the rooftops.
Despite its peaceful contribution to the resting dark, Megrithe felt her stomach turn in revulsion and fear every time she caught sight of the shadowed gables of the neneckt fortress. Nothing but death dwelt in that house, and it had come for her once already. It would be coming again as soon as the sun rose, she was nearly sure, and she could not master her fear of it.
“May I have a whisky, please?” she asked the man behind the bar downstairs in the common room, who was using the quiet time after most people had turned in to take stock of the barrels and bottles that remained after the day. But he wasn’t about to turn down a customer, even in the small hours of the night, and he paused his tasks to pour her a generous serving. “Thank you.”
The fire in the hearth had mostly gone out, but the ashes were still warm enough to attract her. She curled up in a deep, wide leather couch with her shawl tightly tucked around her, cradling her drink and thinking aimlessly about what she might say to Bartolo should she encounter him the following day.
The next thing she knew, Nikko was taking the glass from her hands, startling her bolt upright with his touch.
“It’s only me,” he said, placing the cup on the table beside her. “You nodded off and were going to drop it.”
“Oh. You can’t sleep, either?” she asked as she settled down again.
“Not very much. I am used to sharing a bed. It feels wrong when I am on my own. But Leofric thought it best.”
Megrithe nodded and fell silent for a while, fidgeting with the fringe on her wrap as she tried to bring some order to her exhausted, melancholy thoughts.
“Nikko, I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said eventually, her shoulders sagging under the crushing weight of her uncertainty.
“There now,” he said softly, taking her hand, giving her a bit of a reassuring squeeze as a little sob escaped, followed soon by a modest flood of tears as Nikko made meaningless, soothing noises while he stroked her hair.
“You have a shadow in your heart,” he said, turning to look into her eyes as she sniffled to a halt. “No one could face the Siheldi like you did and survive it without damage. You have been trying so hard to pretend it didn’t happen – you are trying to convince yourself that finding Arran will help you close that wound before you have to face the truth of it. Am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong,” she whispered.
“Then that’s what you are doing,” Nikko replied simply. “It is not for me to say whether or not you are being wise.”
“I can’t be wrong about this,” she said, wiping at her cheeks. “An eallawif can’t lie. She told me that he is alive and that I need to find him, so that’s what I must do. Even if it means facing Bartolo,” she added, her nose wrinkling in disgust. “I am not afraid of what he or anyone else can do to me. I’m not afraid of the shadows.”
“That’s my brave little
liar,” Nikko laughed, hugging her tight again for a moment.
Megrithe tried to smile. “It doesn’t help to tell myself what I want to hear. I know it’s all false.”
“Maybe you are too smart for your own good, then. But do you know what my people say about land-dwellers who have been touched by the Siheldi?”
“What?”
“That if they have the strength of spirit to survive such a thing, they have the power of will to make anything they dream come true.”
“What do they say about children born of an eallawif’s bargain?” she asked after she had thought for a while. “Do their dreams also come true?”
“We say they are beschk-ekch’hlott,” he told her, a lilting hitch to the foreign sound making it both intriguing and harsh. “They are divided in two. They are what those Siheldi worshippers wish they could be, which is why they call themselves after the name. But those brought to the world by an eallawif’s spell are closer to that darkness than any other man or beast – even the neneckt, who are kindred of the Siheldi from ages ago.”
“The – the besh…”
“Beschk-ekch’hlott.”
“Yes. Are they evil?”
“Not by nature. But when the Siheldi get inside the heart of one, like they got inside of you…there will always be sorrow following. There will be great power, but there will always be death.”
“Arran is an eallawif child,” she said quietly.
“How do you know that?”
“His mother told me.”
“But you didn’t tell us,” Nikko said, a shade of upset in his voice.
“I’m sorry. It seemed like her secret – and his. Does it change anything?”
“Everything. It makes it even more important to find him. An eallawif will always protect her children, even if that means keeping them alive when, by all rights, they should die. If what you say is true, then I have fewer doubts that we will find him living. But if the Siheldi have breathed their spirit into him, or scoured his soul away, then his remaining life may do nothing more than hasten the unwinnable war that you fear.”
“But he doesn’t want that.”
“He didn’t want that,” Nikko corrected her. “He may not be capable of wanting anything of his own will anymore.”
“I don’t believe that. I can’t. He is a damn bloody fool, but he isn’t a weakling or a coward. He will fight them until I find him. He has to.”
“I hope you’re right. But I must tell you, Megrithe, that if he is nothing more than an empty husk doing the bidding of the Siheldi, and if that puts you or Leofric or anyone I love in danger, then it will be my duty to put an end to him and any designs that the Siheldi might wish to work through him. I won’t want to, but I can do it and I will. Do you understand?”
“It won’t come to that,” she said. “I know it won’t.”
“But do you understand?” he persisted, and eventually she nodded.
“Yes. I do.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
From the number of times Arran had drifted in and out of sleep, he thought several days must have passed. He hoped they had. If it took so long just to crawl through a couple of hours, he was sure he would die of boredom long before the slow decay of his flesh could claim him.
He didn’t feel like he had gotten much better, but neither did he think it was worse. He had gingerly tried to explore the crusted, scabbing edges of his wound, which crackled and oozed under even the lightest of touches when he slipped his fingers under the bandages, now so sodden as to be irrelevant. It didn’t take long for him to leave the site alone, focusing instead on rest, stillness, and trying to parse meaning from his convoluted dreams.
He knew that was probably a hopeless task, but the image of his weeping mother haunted him whether his eyes were open or closed. The Siheldi who had spoken to him – the only time it had spoken to him – had told him that there was a reason for the heartbreaking vision, and he was determined to find out what it was.
Was it simply a reflection of her lifelong sorrow, magnified by his own? Someone had told him once that dreams were the gods’ way of touching human minds, but that not all the gods had good intentions when they did so. Perhaps Kashni, the trickster, was merely toying with him. It would not surprise him. He was beginning to feel like his entire life was nothing more than a token caught up in someone else’s game.
At some point during the endless night, he woke up from a blank slumber with his heart suddenly pounding, like he did when he felt a change in the seas during the long middle watch. He opened his eyes, but that hardly helped. It wasn’t until he heard the groan of the stone slab moving backwards and the shuffle of feet in the dust above him that he realized he was no longer alone under the silent Siheldi’s watchful gaze.
“Arran? Are you awake?” a voice called.
“Faidal?”
“Yes. Wait just a moment,” the neneckt said, dropping over the side to land nimbly near Arran’s head. “Are you well?”
“That is a very stupid question.”
“Well, you’re better, at least, if you’re sassing me again,” she said, feeling his forehead for fever before opening the tin door of an oil lantern, flooding the space with a dazzling light that reflected strangely from the smooth, cream-colored walls.
“Where did you go?” Arran asked, shutting his eyes quickly as the blaze burned through them.
“To get you this,” she replied, taking a bottle out of a leather bag slung around her shoulder. “It should help.”
“What is it? And why didn’t you take me with you?”
“Medicine. Here. Drink it,” she said, holding it near his mouth and waiting for him to open up, which he didn’t. “Arran, do you think I would willingly come back to this place if I was trying to poison you?” she asked patiently. “I could have left you to the Siheldi in a heartbeat, and yet here I am.”
“What is it?” he said again, sullenly.
“Neneckt medicine. From an oughon I know. It will help you heal quickly enough to get out before they –”
“Before they what?”
“Just drink,” Faidal urged as she glanced upward at the pale speck of light hovering on the pit’s edge.
Arran did as he was told, certain that if he resisted, the neneckt would simply overpowered him. It was deeply, bitterly unpleasant, like a rotted lemon doused in salt and vinegar, but the only thing he could do was swallow it with a garbled noise of disgust as Faidal firmly ensured that he drank it all.
“Now this one,” she said, pushing a smaller vial at him.
“No,” he groaned, but his protests went unheeded. It was not quite as bad, and tasted much more like the salty, vaguely sweet drink she had given him before his first foray into Emyer-Ekvori.
“Now go to sleep,” she said when the potion had settled in his sloshing stomach. “Sleep through it. It will be all right.”
“I don’t want to sleep. I want to – oh,” he said, changing the thought before he could finish it. A sudden, leaden exhaustion washed over him at the same moment that a sharp, silver ache bloomed in the region of his ribs.
It hurt like a brush fire, enough to make him scream, but even before he could express his pain, he had tumbled into oblivion and had never been more thankful for it.
He didn’t dream, but when a trace of the lantern’s glow gently reappeared in front of him, ages and ages later, there was barely any strength left in him to pull him back up into the world.
“What did you do?” he mumbled as his sluggish thoughts caught up with the notion that he was meant to open his eyes.
Faidal didn’t answer, and Arran started to panic a little, afraid he had been left alone again. The thought propelled him into a higher degree of wakefulness, and he realized that the neneckt hadn’t gone anywhere: she was just asleep herself, pressed up against the curving walls of the pit, which cast a dim shadow in front of her, as if the light was coming from the stone itself instead of the lantern at her feet.
He relaxed
again and drifted for a while, waking again with a slightly greater clarity of mind. Faidal was still at rest, and he turned himself slightly so he could study her unfamiliar face.
Arran had never, to his knowledge, spent time with a single neneckt that cloaked itself in multiple guises. It seemed a bit odd that there would be some sort of shared thread between them that he could see in her plain but approachable features – an indefinable essence that marked her as the same individual as before. Perhaps she had done it on purpose for him.
She looked tired and sad, he thought, without the animation of her waking mind to mask her emotions. She looked as raw and frightened and weary as he felt. She looked lonely.
She had told him that she was Tiaraku’s slave, and for the first time since he met her, he could see that sorrow graven deeply inside her, the watchfulness of her coiled posture making it look like she was expecting a blow at any moment. It didn’t make him want to forgive her for her treachery towards him, but he wondered if it wouldn’t, eventually, help him to understand it.
“Faidal?” he whispered when she started to stir, and she smiled sleepily when she saw him.
“You survived.”
“I think so, yes. What exactly did you do?”
“Something I didn’t think would work,” she said, scooting over to his side and pulling back his bandages. He didn’t want to risk moving too much, but he craned his head to look the best he could.
There was a puckering, wickedly red slash and a deep, throbbing tenderness when Faidal gently pushed on the spot, as if the surface had healed but the damage inside still remained. He flinched away when she pressed a little harder, but she just nodded and looked perfectly satisfied.
“It will do for now,” she said. “Rodnei will be thrilled that it actually works. He had not been able to try it on a real human before.”
“That’s…not very comforting,” he said, wincing as he tried to sit up for the first time.
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