Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  It burned at a slow smolder, giving off little light—an advantage to hunters and raiders who could ill afford to have campfires shining like signal lights from the high pillars of Devil's Perch or across the low bald hills. And it sufficed to keep Isiem warm and fed, although the one time he'd made the mistake of trying to grill meat over a dungpatty fire, he had quickly learned why the strix preferred to cook their food in tightly covered pots.

  Without Kirii's gifts of dungpatty, he would surely have frozen or starved. He wasn't a horse; he couldn't eat raw grain. The cabin was too far from Crackspike to raid the abandoned houses for wood, and there was nothing else to burn in this desolate corner of the world. The supplies she brought him saved his life—and he had repaid her with nothing but words. Isiem felt a twinge of shame at the thought, as he always did.

  Kirii didn't seem to notice. When her pack was empty, she slung it back onto her shoulders and belted it around her waist. The strix's pack was made of dusty leather in an exterior frame of long, lightweight bones. Strix bones.

  Truly, they were a frugal people. Kirii's explanation of why the itaraak had butchered the unfortunates of Crackspike had surprised him only in the extent of the strix's hatred for humans, not in the detail of how they treated their own dead. She had already told him earlier that their ancestors bequeathed their bones to their kin.

  The strix made everything from spear hafts to tent poles from their dead. Few materials in their world were as strong as bone, and none were as light as strix bone. In past ages, conquering tribes had taken the bones of their enemies, but as their numbers dwindled, and the clans turned their spears away from each other, the only bones to be had were those of their own kin.

  "The world changes, and our customs change to fit," Kirii had said. "Old taboos fail, new honors arise. We waste nothing. Not even our own deaths."

  Clearly she saw no taboo in wearing her grandmother's bones. When her pack was secured, the strix blinked her bright yellow eyes at Isiem. "You need anything else?"

  "No," Isiem said. "Thank you. I wish I could repay your generosity."

  "You tell us of the black riders and the men in iron horns. This is repayment enough." Kirii shrugged, looking to the sky, and Isiem shielded his eyes in anticipation of the dust that would be thrown up by her wings. "I go now."

  Alone again, Isiem carried her gifts into the cabin. He stored the food inside a leaky old rainbarrel the previous inhabitant had abandoned. It was no use for holding water, but it would keep scavengers from getting at his supplies. The dungpatty went in a stack outside, with a square of canvas to protect it from wind and the distant possibility of rain.

  Enough daylight remained for Isiem to bring his spellbook out and study by the setting sun. He had not realized what a luxury the simple act of reading could become; in Nidal it had seemed just a wearisome chore. But here, as winter tightened its grip and the sunlight grew shorter day by day, Isiem seldom had time to pore over his spells. The work of survival occupied him from dawn to dusk, and burning dungpatty gave too little light to read.

  He owed this, too, to the strix. Without Kirii's gifts of food, clothing, and fuel, Isiem would have had to gather his own, and that would have left him no time for study.

  He regretted, now, that he had thought of the captured strix—of all their kind, really—as monsters. Creatures to be referred to as "it," rather than the individuals they were. Isiem had never been particularly sensitive to such nuances, but in his conversations with Kirii he had become more conscious of words, phrases, the cadences and rhythms of language—and the ideas that it clothed. Those ideas took their shapes from words, and his had been sorely lacking. He had considered the strix worse than beasts, when they saved his life every day.

  Even the little he could tell them about Nidalese customs and Chelish magic—information that might help them find some weakness in their enemies—seemed pitifully small against that. He owed them more.

  Preoccupied by such thoughts, Isiem found himself unable to concentrate. He stared sightlessly at the spellbook's open pages until twilight descended and hid the words. Even then he remained outside, sitting motionless, as the night's chill crystallized around him.

  It was Honey who finally brought him in. The dog nipped at his ankles, tugging at his clothes mercilessly until the shadowcaller stood up and opened the door for them both. Without a backward glance, the dog rushed in and flopped beside the tiny hearth, waiting impatiently for Isiem to light the night's fire. As soon as he did, Honey exhaled an enormous, satisfied sigh, and fell asleep within minutes.

  Sleep was slower to come for Isiem. He lay awake puzzling over the strix's dilemma long after the night began to wane toward dawn. However he turned the questions in his mind, he could not find the many choices Kirii had spoken of. He could find only one.

  The strix could give up their land, or they could give up their lives. That was all. And that, he believed, was a snake too vicious for any of them to swallow.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Secrets in Silver

  A week later, Isiem went back to Crackspike. A brief warm spell in the weather made the idea of travel tolerable, and he believed that the Hellknights would not yet have returned after the strix's attempt to drive them off. It seemed safe, or as safe as it was likely to be until spring came, and by then the elements would likely have destroyed the things he sought.

  He hoped to find something in the ruins that would reveal more than he already knew about the Chelaxians' numbers, resources, and level of determination. Maps, diaries, scraps of unfinished spell research—anything that might offer a glimpse into their plans or the tools they might employ against the strix. Enemies they knew, they could defeat.

  Isiem was no longer troubled that his allegiances had shifted so completely. He owed Abrogail II no reverence. Seven years in Westcrown had taught him that the soul of Cheliax was in conflict with itself, and that House Thrune was but one side in the war. It was not a war he hoped to see them win.

  And so, bundled in the hides of deer and hares, Isiem walked to Crackspike.

  Even from a distance, he could see the town had changed. Great furrows rent the ground, as if a swarm of tremendous ants had begun burrowing a nest under the settlement and then abandoned it half-built. The blackened bones of a boarding house tilted drunkenly into the gaps, its foundations destroyed—and in some places, Isiem saw as he came nearer, eaten.

  Heavy claws had splintered beams and boards; massive teeth had gouged holes in cast-iron cauldrons. In one of the shallow, crumbling tunnels he saw a clump of pebbly scat that contained bent spoons, a pick head, and three mangled, acid-eaten horseshoes. Honey sniffed the tunnel's side once and backed away, whining, her eyes wide and tail tucked.

  Landshark.

  Said to be stomachs on legs—bottomless, sharp-toothed stomachs on prodigiously armored legs—landsharks were notorious for their appetites. They tunneled through the earth in constant search of things to eat, and they defined such things liberally. Any whiff of food or flesh on an object would entice them to swallow it. For breakfast, one might eat a cast-iron pot that had held stew a month earlier; for dinner, a bedframe where someone had slept six weeks ago. Landsharks could digest almost anything, and they were always willing to try.

  Fresh meat, however, was a favorite. And while landsharks were voracious scavengers, they were even fiercer on the hunt.

  The sight of the scat gave Isiem pause. He couldn't tell how old it was, nor did he have the skill to read the creature's tracks. The landshark might be long gone, or it might yet be lurking among the toppled buildings. There might even be more than one.

  But he'd walked a full day to search the ruins, and it seemed foolish to let fear turn him away so easily. He had, after all, seen no proof that the creature was still here.

  "Go," he told Honey. The dog flattened her ears and continued to back away. She barked once, when she realized that Isiem was not coming with her, but—although plainly baffled by her human's foolishne
ss—she did not follow him in.

  Wary, and alert to the slightest tremor that might warn him of the landshark's tunneling approach, Isiem made his way into the town.

  Almost nothing was left of it. What the fires hadn't destroyed, the landshark had. It had eaten the canvas and cowhides of the miners' tents and demolished the few standing buildings. What it hadn't devoured or torn apart had fallen into the tunnels it had bored through Crackspike, so that it seemed the land itself was absorbing the feeble scratchings of civilization on its skin.

  Wind whistled over the tunnels' mouths. Isiem's feet sank into loosened soil; the smell of fresh-turned earth, already going to dust, surrounded him. In each of the open tunnels he could see piles of dung marking the landshark's progress in a dotted line. As continuously as the creature ate, so it excreted.

  It didn't look promising, but Isiem climbed into the nearest furrow anyway. The partly collapsed tunnel came to his chest, but it was not difficult to traverse. Even as he poked around the landshark's leavings, the shadowcaller wondered what, exactly, he hoped to find. The damnable creature had eaten everything.

  But not everything it had eaten had been destroyed.

  In one of the piles Isiem glimpsed a pair of silver cylinders no bigger than his thumbs, their surfaces worn smooth by acid and corroded solid black. A hair-thin line around the center of each one showed where they could be unscrewed.

  Most likely the cylinders had been meant for some winged carrier, but only the clasps of the birds' cages had survived the landshark's stomach. Isiem hoped the cylinders had done a better job of protecting their contents. Pocketing them to be examined later, he moved on.

  Among the flinders of a jewelry box was a round bronze medallion stamped in the blocky, ornate fashion of Korvosa; a few steps past that, he found the muddied remains of a traveling spellbook. The trampled pages didn't look legible, but Isiem took it anyway. He was sifting through the next pile, hoping to find something better, when the ground suddenly shivered underfoot.

  Fifty yards to his left, the boarding house's beams shook like grass stalks in the wind. A long, low rumble sent pebbles jouncing along the bottom of the landshark's troughs. Moment by moment it grew louder, until it sounded like thunder trapped under the earth. Rills of dirt spilled down the sides of Isiem's tunnel; small stones pattered across his feet.

  Isiem cursed silently. He didn't have the magic to escape into the air. The best he could do was try to outpace the beast on land.

  Shoving his left hand into a pocket, he fished out a curled shaving of licorice root and closed it in a fist. Magic gathered in him, following the shape of his words. Isiem's muscles thrilled with unaccustomed speed; his body felt impossibly light. The world around him seemed to blur and slow, as if everything but himself was trapped in invisible treacle. He felt quick enough to dodge through raindrops—and as long as his spell lasted, he almost was.

  But landsharks were deadlier than raindrops. And faster, too.

  Thirty feet away, a gray-green plate spiked through the earth, scattering stones and soil. The thunder in the ground was deafening now; the tunnel he stood in felt like an open grave. Frantically, Isiem grabbed at the trough's lip and tried to pull himself out, but his grip crumbled into sand.

  The dorsal fin vanished. The rumbling stopped. Isiem hauled himself out of the hole and, kicking away the encumbrance of his deerskin cloak, broke into a flat-out run.

  Behind him, the earth exploded. Broken shingles and spidery-clumped grass roots fountained upward along with an enormous, improbably bulky shape: the landshark, leaping impossibly into the sky.

  Fifteen feet long from snout to tail, it was a massive beast, heavy yet streamlined, armored in thick gray plates. Its carapace was worn smooth where it rubbed against the landshark's tunnels, caked with packed dirt elsewhere. Long claws capped each of its feet. Pressed together, those claws made curved shovels ideal for swimming through the earth. Separated, they were killing weapons.

  The landshark's bulk blotted out the sun. And then, as quickly as it had flung itself into the air, the beast came down. Isiem saw its shadow fall over him and threw himself desperately to the side.

  He almost dodged it. The landshark landed with a bone-jarring thud, its blunt claws splayed to crush whatever it could.

  Two of its hind toes caught Isiem on the left arm, tearing deep gashes in the flesh and cracking the bone. The blow knocked him hard to the ground, and a flare of pain dizzied him; he choked on a scream. But he kept his senses, barely.

  The landshark's huge heavy-browed head swung toward him. Its breath was hot, musty, redolent of steaming earth and acid. Its tiny eyes were garishly orange and utterly wild; its dull yellow teeth, worn down by years of eating rock and metal, were still more than capable of crushing puny human bone. It lifted its foot and began to turn around, chuffing hungrily.

  Swallowing his agony, Isiem scrambled away as soon as its foot came up to release him. He thrust a hand at the landshark's open mouth and uttered a short phrase. A ray of pale blue energy streaked from his fingertips, leaving an ephemeral twinkle of frost hanging in its wake. It struck the landshark squarely on the tongue, spreading a starburst of ice across the flat pebbly flesh.

  The flare of cold did no significant damage, but it made the landshark recoil. Its saliva froze into a stringy web; it grunted at the unaccustomed shrilling of cold upon its teeth. The creature pawed at its snout, briefly distracted, and Isiem sprang away, yanking open the satchel that held his food.

  He swung it in a wide arc as he ran, scattering dried meat and cakes of boiled millet across the ruptured ground. The motion of the flying food caught the landshark's eye, and it lumbered off to investigate, abandoning its unpleasantly frigid prey. Soon it was savaging Isiem's deerskin cloak, flapping the hide from side to side like a rat in a terrier's jaws.

  Isiem didn't wait for it to finish. Clutching his injured arm to his chest, he fled. Every step sent a jolt of pain shuddering through his left side, but terror gave him wings. He raced past the spot where Honey waited, pulling her along in his wake, and the bones of Crackspike were far in the distance by the time his spell-granted swiftness faded.

  It was a long walk back to the miner's cabin. Without his deerskin cloak to blunt the wind's bite, the cold was merciless. There was no road, and walking across the uneven ground jostled his arm unbearably. From shoulder to wrist, it felt like one constant red-hot throb. In his hurry to get his satchel free, he'd torn his thumbnail, too, and the dull pain in his right hand made an irksome counterpoint to the drumbeat of agony on the left. The landshark didn't follow him, but Isiem found himself bitterly wishing it would, just to put an end to his pain.

  Finally he reached the weather-beaten shack. Utterly exhausted, Isiem gazed longingly at the heap of furs on his cot. He wanted nothing more than to collapse into dreamless sleep ...but his wounds needed tending first. He lit a small dungpatty fire and set a pan of water over it to warm, then gingerly unwrapped his arm.

  Blood caked his sleeve. Isiem had to cut it away and wash his arm, gritting his teeth all the while, before he could examine his injuries.

  They didn't look good. The landshark's dull claws had pulped the flesh instead of cutting it cleanly. A deep ring of bruises, freckled with dirt, surrounded each of the lacerations.

  Worse, the bone was broken in at least two places. Isiem grimaced as he probed it with his fingers. After years at the Dusk Hall and more in Westcrown, he knew the feel of a fractured limb. And he knew, after weeks of living on his own, just how much a crippled arm would hurt him in the wilds.

  If he'd stayed loyal to the Midnight Lord, the injury would have been but a minor inconvenience. A few prayers, an evening's obeisance wrapped in his needled chain, and Isiem would have been a whole man again.

  But the shadowcaller had abandoned his god, and his god had abandoned him. Zon-Kuthon would not help him now.

  And, Isiem thought as he sponged the wounds with a steaming decoction of comfrey leaves and isschis
root, he was at peace with that. In a way, it was even reassuring to know the strength of his convictions—and he was well accustomed to paying his price in pain.

  In the morning, however, bravery was harder to come by. The pain had kept Isiem from sleeping, and his wounds were ugly even in the soft light of dawn. The rush of energy from his near-death escape was gone; nothing softened his suffering.

  He wept, then, alone in the cabin. He wept out of pain and loneliness and despair, and out of self-pity for the life of exile he had chosen. He wept because he had forsaken the god of his country and childhood, and he had not faced a true test of faith until now.

  What becomes of the souls of apostates? Isiem didn't know. He knew what his teachers at the Dusk Hall would have said—that such directionless souls were left to wander the empty plains of the shadow realm forevermore, lost and unclaimed, unable to feel or affect the world around them—but he didn't know whether he believed that any longer. Nor did he adopt Velenne's belief that those who reneged on their faith were consigned to Belial's forges, where their souls were melted into raw material and recast to serve the needs of Hell.

  Where did they go? Isiem feared he might soon find out.

  His choices were stark and limited: beg Zon-Kuthon's forgiveness and return to the fold, hoping that the Midnight Lord would accept his contrition and heal his broken arm; turn to the strix for help; or linger on as a cripple and, most likely, die.

  The first was unacceptable. The last was unpalatable. That left one option.

  Isiem washed and rebandaged his throbbing arm, then wrapped a coyote pelt around his shoulders and went out to study the scraps he'd picked from Crackspike.