"It is not so," Kirraak said suddenly, shifting his head to regard them all. "I am as I was. I am myself. I remember our homelands, summer and winter. Take me home."
The other strix exchanged wordless, uneasy looks. The old one never looked at Kirraak at all, though, and by that Isiem knew that she believed him.
"He will lead your enemies to your home if you let him go back with you," Isiem said. He lifted his empty hands in a gesture of surrender. "I am one of those enemies. I know this to be so. It's why Oreseis did it—to give you a poisoned foundling to take home. He will betray you, given the chance."
"He will have no chance," the old one said. "Itaraak Fierce Spear. Make his ending quick." The named strix was swift to comply. He flipped his wooden mask over his face, raised his flint-tipped spear, and drove it into Kirraak's neck. The crone watched without expression, although the other warriors muttered and shifted their weight.
When the dying strix's throes subsided, the ancient one turned back to Isiem. "I will think on your fate. Most want you dead. Perhaps the cold and the stones will kill you before I have to decide. That would make the deciding easier. But if you survive, it will not be easy. For any of us."
"I plan to leave," Isiem told her.
"You will not leave until permitted. Flee this kotarra place of wood-roosts and you die. But it will be a quick end, if you find you cannot stand the emptiness. Many kotarra cannot. We will give you that mercy if you wish it. All you need do is try to leave."
"And if I don't?"
"I make a difficult decision." The crone waved him off. "Go. But not too far."
Isiem did not wait to be told twice. He left them with Kirraak's corpse in the ravine, walking back to his folded-tent bed and the scraps of a life he'd salvaged from Crackspike.
He had no intention of staying put longer than he had to. Just long enough to finish picking the dead town's bones, and then he would be gone. His magic would hide him well enough to evade the scouts' eyes, he was sure. But until then, it could not hurt to let them believe he took their threats seriously.
It was only when he'd returned to the town, and the strix were long out of sight, that Isiem realized the spear-wielder who had confronted him—the most hostile of them all—had been the very same strix he'd saved from the collapse of the boarding house.
Gratitude, he thought, and laughed.
Chapter Sixteen
The Gift of Trust
Western Cheliax was a beautiful land, and a hard one. Isiem learned the truth of both those things in the weeks after Crackspike's fall. The striated ridges of red stone and sere winter plains were lovely to the eye, but they offered little shelter and less nourishment.
Nevertheless he managed to make a kind of life for himself in the ruins. Every morning, as the first touch of sunlight gilded the spires of Devil's Perch, Isiem emerged from his tent and cast two minor spells to conjure tiny downpours: the first over himself, to wash away the night's grime, and the second over an array of scavenged bowls and pans, to provide drinking water for the day.
It would have been easier to pray to Zon-Kuthon for water, but Isiem preferred his cantrips and his motley dish collection. There was something peaceful and pure in the sound of raindrops striking clay—something unsullied by the Midnight Lord's touch. It was as if every morning he washed a little more of Nidal's clinging shadow from his body, and stepped a little further into the cold, lonely, clean world of his exile.
That was how he slipped into apostasy: not with any single grand gesture, but quietly, over a procession of days, simply by letting the rituals of faith fade away.
With no one to enforce his obedience, Isiem neglected his prayers. He left his spiked chain buried among the ashes, and eventually forgot where it lay. He accepted the desert nights' bitter cold as his due, and bundled himself in bearskins instead of beseeching his god to shield him from the elements.
And day by day he felt his soul grow lighter, his sight grow clearer, as if he were emerging from a darkness that had blanketed him so long that he had come to accept it, wrongly, as the natural way of the world. It filled him with wonder and fear as profound as that which he had felt while taking the communion of the burning chain—but although this fear was greater, for he faced it alone in an unknown land, he had no wish to give it up. Hungry and weary as it was, Isiem felt a vast peacefulness in the ascetic's life.
The brown dog became his constant companion. It might have been his gifts of food and water that finally won the animal over, or it might just have been that she—for the dog was female—was as lonely as he was. Neither of them had anyone else in this barren place.
He called her Honey, after a vaguely remembered Keleshite tale about a desert monk who subsisted for a hundred years on Sarenrae's gifts of honey and locusts. Isiem had no god and no divinely granted sustenance, but in Honey, he had one friend in his exile, and that was one more than he'd ever had before.
The dog was pure in her motives. She never lied to him, and she never hid anything. Honey wanted food, shelter, a safe place to sleep—and affection. Love. That was what Isiem believed he saw in the dog's liquid eyes: devotion. As if he, with all his sins and cruelties, could be worthy of such faith.
It was as much a revelation to him as the sunshine. More so: the sun did not care if he lived or died, and it gave him no reason to struggle through the hardships of another day. Honey did. The dog needed him, and trusted that he would meet those needs. And so she pulled him through his moments of despair, and gave him the strength to push onward.
But she couldn't stop winter from coming.
The sun rose later each morning, and dusk crept up on him earlier. What Isiem had initially taken for winter in western Cheliax had only been the fading days of fall. A month after Crackspike had burned, the true cold was coming, and he wondered if he and the dog would survive.
Isiem preserved and kept as much food as he could, storing grain in stolen pots and drying what little meat he managed to hunt or trap on racks built from the boards of fallen houses. Often, while dreaming of dumplings and eating thin gruel, he found himself wishing that the Dusk Hall had taught its students to conjure food. Spells that summoned shadowy monsters and blasted their victims with supernatural pain might be better for maintaining Zon-Kuthon's reign, but during those gut-gnawing nights in Crackspike, Isiem would have traded them all for one grilled spinefish in a crust of spice.
He was painfully aware that his scavengings were unlikely to see him through the cold months, and while he still hoped to reach Pezzack, he doubted that it would be possible to make the journey before spring. Enduring the winter in Crackspike would be trial enough.
Although the season was already upon him, Isiem did what he could to prepare. Each morning, after conjuring water to wash and drink, he went scavenging through the remains of Crackspike, or wandering far afield from the town in search of survivors—human, strix, or animal.
He never found any. The strix had reclaimed their own injured, finished off any human stragglers they could reach, and butchered the livestock for meat. By the time Isiem found the bones and bloodstains on foot, the winged ones had already made off with the rest. They'd even eaten the dogs.
On one such expedition he found the remains of Erevullo and the other Hellknights, shot down by the strix over half a mile of barren ground. There was little left of them. Some scraps of armor, a tattered black cloak pinned to the earth by a spear, Oreseis's holy symbol on its tarnished silver chain. The rest had been taken or destroyed by the strix.
No one else, it seemed, had disturbed them. Citadel Enferac, locked behind walls of snow and unable to rely on its usual network of winged spies, might still be ignorant of their fate. Erevullo never had gotten the chance to complete his magical device.
Isiem buried the few bones he found, but said no prayers as he did, and left no marker on their grave.
That night, like every night, he returned to his makeshift dwelling, a shell of a house that he had patched with canvas
to keep away the wind. He ate a sparse meal and slept with Honey curled beside him for warmth, and he did not dream of the dead.
A week later, on a frosty morning when the ground crackled silver with every step and the air seemed nearly as brittle, Isiem ranged far from the town to forage. In the distance, across a far blue ridge, he glimpsed three hooded riders on tall black steeds.
Slowly he sank to the ground. It did not appear that they had seen him, but Isiem still felt a thrill of fear run up his spine. He did not know who those riders were, but he recognized their steeds: unliving creations of spellbound shadow, siblings to the black-eyed horses he himself had conjured so many times in Nidal.
The horsemen might be Hellknights hunting strix, or they might be shadowcallers hunting him ...but that they were wizards, and hunting someone, Isiem had no doubt.
He watched them a while longer, waiting to see where they turned—west, as it happened, away from Crackspike and toward the place where Erevullo and his signifers had fallen—and then he crept quietly back to his own lair.
For days he had been working on a compact bundle of food, clothing, tinder and tools to use on the journey to Pezzack. Isiem took it now, along with a walking stick and a few dishes, and whistled for Honey to join him as he started north. He wanted to be well away from Crackspike when the riders arrived.
He doubted they'd stay long. Three arcanists, on magical mounts with no baggage train, were not an occupying army. They would find their prey quickly or not at all, and then they would depart.
But until they left, it would be unwise to linger where he might be found.
There was a small cabin in the hills where one overly optimistic miner had tried to work his own stake. The miner was long gone, his dreams defeated, but his cabin remained. It was a full day's walk from Crackspike, mostly along snake-infested dry gullies lined with sharp rocks, so Isiem had considered it of little use while he was still scouring the abandoned town. But as a refuge from troublesome visitors, it was nearly ideal.
He reached it at dusk. Winter had driven the snakes to ground, making the gullies safer but the cabin more dangerous. Any shelter—whether an old boot or a rickety shack—made a tempting place for serpents to hibernate.
Isiem pried open the rope-hinged door cautiously and peered into the chilly gloom. He picked up a pebble, crushed the tiny body of a dried firefly against it as he breathed a word of magic, and threw the softly glowing stone into the center of the cabin. Its light bounced unevenly against the warped plank walls and fell, illumining a heap of small gray snakes that lay tangled in a corner.
Rock vipers. Not aggressive, as a rule, but easily startled and exceedingly venomous. Isiem sighed inwardly. He would almost rather have found a knot of rattlesnakes in the cabin; at least then he could have taken consolation in the fact that if he died of snakebite, it would have been because something wanted to kill him, not just out of frightened reflex. There was something insulting about dying like that.
But rock vipers were what he had to deal with, so Isiem went back outside and unshouldered his pack. He could only hope that the shadow-mounted horsemen he'd spotted earlier were not in a position to see his light peeping through the cabin's many cracks.
Signaling for Honey to stay back, he pulled the largest of the water-collecting buckets from the dog's pack. The miner had left a balding broom lying in the dirt outside his doorway, which made the chore of snake removal much easier. With the broom and bucket held outstretched like sword and shield, Isiem ventured back into the cabin.
The vipers had barely stirred. Quickly, before they revived from their torpor enough to react, Isiem swept the entire scaly ball into his bucket and threw it outside. The snakes might return, unless they froze to death first, but he hoped to be gone by then.
Shoring up all the cracks in the cabin's weatherbeaten planks was beyond his means at the moment, so Isiem drew upon a minor spell instead. He broke a fine silver wire into eight pieces and scattered them around the shack's walls, then stood in the center of the marked area and rang a tiny sterling bell. Instead of ringing audibly, the bell sent out a thrum of silent magic that tingled the hairs along Isiem's forearms and made Honey cock her head to one side.
If anything crept into the cabin overnight, a similar alarm would wake him—hopefully in time to avoid being bitten. In the morning the spell would end and the silver wire would bind itself back together, ready to be used again, but until then the magic would keep him safe. With luck. Isiem unpacked his blankets and bearskins, snuffed his pebble's magical light, and sank into uneasy sleep.
No snakes troubled him that night. In the morning he rose, stretched, and went outside to relieve himself.
While squinting into the frosty sunrise, Isiem glimpsed a tantalizing tuft of green tucked between the hills to the north. Water. Where there was enough water to sustain greenery, there would be animals—hares, copper-headed quail, perhaps even larger game. Hunters had sold the meat of scrub deer and antelope in Crackspike, and the animals had to have come from somewhere.
It was worth looking. He didn't want to go back to Crackspike yet anyway.
Isiem had only gone a quarter-mile from the cabin, however, when Honey spun and raced back toward the shack, barking furiously. He tried to call her back, but the dog was deaf to his cries. Annoyed and alarmed, Isiem chased after her.
When he was a few hundred yards from the cabin, he saw something explode from a nearby gully in a burst of black-feathered motion. Honey went berserk, charging at the creature with a ferocious display of growls and barks. Isiem stopped short, baffled.
It was a strix. The creature perched on his roof, staring at him. For some reason it had a handful of short ropes dangling from one fist. He couldn't see if there was anything in its other hand. It did not appear to be armed, though, and it did not seem alarmed at the possibility that he might be. It just squatted there, apparently waiting for him to approach.
Uncertainly, Isiem did. Honey bounded to his side, pausing every few steps to growl a warning at the strix on the roof. A stiff line of fur bristled on the dog's back from her neck to her tail.
As Isiem got closer, he saw that the strix was a juvenile female, and that it was indeed unarmed. The "ropes" in its hand were dead rock vipers, probably the same ones he had scooped up and thrown out the night before. Their heads had been smashed flat.
The strix held up its other hand in a closed fist as he approached. It squinched its eyes shut and squeezed its fingers tight ...and nothing happened. The strix opened its hand and stared at the tiny clay ziggurat in its palm, obviously disappointed. The feathers at the ends of its wings fanned out and dipped downward.
Isiem laughed, unable to help himself. He had never expected to see a strix so literally crestfallen.
"It isn't enchanted," he said, although he suspected the strix had stolen his ziggurat precisely because it couldn't understand a word of Taldane. "It only focuses the spell."
True to his guess, the strix gave him a blank stare. Isiem opened and closed his empty hand in front of him, hoping it would take the hint to throw the ziggurat down. After a moment, the strix made a trilling whistle and, instead of tossing the object gently, whipped the miniature ziggurat at him with a sidearm throw.
Its speed and accuracy were impressive. The ziggurat hit Isiem's shoulder like a slingstone, causing his entire arm to go numb before the pain kicked in. He sucked in a breath and clutched his arm, trying to assess the extent of the injury.
Nothing felt broken, but he'd have a bruise that went down to the bone. A flicker of relief broke through the throbbing pain. A broken arm could have been a fatal injury to a man trying to survive off the land; it might well have driven him back to Zon-Kuthon in hopes of healing. But this lesser wound wouldn't kill him, or even threaten his quiet apostasy, and for that Isiem was grateful. It could so easily have been much worse.
The strix was watching him with open surprise. Not amusement at his pain, as far as he could tell, and not sympathy, eithe
r. Only puzzlement. Isiem exhaled and picked his small clay ziggurat from the dirt, finishing the spell at last.
"Why did you do that?" he asked.
The strix went very still. Its nictating membranes slid sideways across its eyes, perhaps in the equivalent of a human's startled blink. "I did not realize you were unwell," it said. Initially the strix's words were hesitant, but when it realized that the spell was translating for both of them, its mouth opened slightly in surprise and then made a small, toothy smile.
"Unwell?"
"You are slow because you are sick, yes?" The strix canted its head at him. Again the semitransparent membranes sheeted across its eyes in a wrongsided blink. "No? You are not unwell?"
"I'm fine, apart from this bruise on my arm."
"Oh." The strix chirruped, hopping a short step sideways on the roof, and raised the dead vipers. "Then why did you not take these foods? They are good meat. But you threw them away. Why?"
Isiem blinked. "You were watching me last night?"
"Yes."
"I didn't see anyone."
"Nor does the mouse see the hawk, unless the hawk shows its shadow. Your eyes are small, and my shadow well hidden." The strix tucked all but one of the snakes into its belt, then began casually gnawing on the remaining serpent's head. Bones and scales crunched between its teeth. "But you are a hungry one who throws away good meat, and this is a puzzlement."
"It didn't occur to me to eat snakes," Isiem answered truthfully. He'd only worried about them biting him.
"That is stupid."
"Evidently so."
"I will share." The strix flung three dead snakes down from the roof, one after another, although this time it took care to land its serpentine missiles at Isiem's feet. "This is a hard land for kotaar. You are starving. Why do you not go to the black riders in the dead place?"
It meant the trio of horsemen he'd seen near Crackspike, Isiem guessed. He scrutinized the strix's face, but saw nothing to suggest it was trying to bait him. That flat inhuman face and those wolflike yellow eyes gave little away, but to the extent he could read anything from it, he thought the strix was genuinely curious. Hoping he was right, Isiem decided to gamble on honesty.
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