Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  Cerallius's flaming blade lashed out, unexpectedly fast. It opened a searing gash across Isiem's side and shoulder, and only the defensive spells he'd cast earlier deflected the blow enough to keep it from inflicting a mortal wound. Isiem was already bent over awkwardly, and the paralictor's attack knocked him into the ground. Dirt filled his mouth; stones scraped his chin. The strike was so sudden, and so hard, that he did not even feel any pain initially. Black flashed across his vision.

  The pain soon came, however, and the confusion cleared. None too soon—Cerallius raised his sword to finish the shadowcaller. Isiem rolled to the side and wove a swift spell, vanishing from view, as the Hellknight brought the weapon arcing down.

  This close, Isiem could see that the paralictor was standing by dint of sheer will. The man was gray-faced under his helm, his eyes blank and glassy with fatigue. His breastplate was scored with spear marks and soaked with blood from his wounds. Isiem's previous spell continued to sap his strength along with those itaraak-inflicted injuries. The Hellknight was struggling for breath, seemingly on the brink of collapse ...and yet he still stood, and fought on.

  "Face me," Paralictor Cerallius growled, scanning the battle-torn ground where Isiem hid behind his magic. The flaming aura of his sword flared and dipped, reflecting the Hellknight's desperate fury. "Fight!"

  The wizard held his breath and willed himself not to twitch the smallest muscle. After an agonizing moment, Cerallius turned away, unable to ignore the battle raging behind him.

  Isiem exhaled explosively. Biting back a grunt of pain, he pushed himself to his feet and scrambled toward the fallen rokoa.

  She was dying. What bones hadn't been cracked by Uskonos's force punch had shattered during her fall. Her pulse beat frenetically through the paper-thin skin of her wrists and neck, as though the aged strix's spirit were frantic to escape its failing shell. She let out a weak moan as Isiem, wincing silently at the fragility of the rokoa's body, lifted her head.

  He uncapped a potion vial with his teeth and poured the pungent-smelling liquid down the rokoa's throat. Her bruised eyes opened as she swallowed, and she raised her head higher despite Isiem's efforts to keep her still.

  "We have not won," she said in a threadbare rasp. "The fight goes on."

  "Hush," he urged. "The itaraak are fighting bravely. The battle is well in hand."

  It was almost true. Uskonos bled freely from several spear wounds and was swarmed by itaraak. Velenne, too, was surrounded, although her gaav kept her assailants at bay. The dust-blinded Hellknights were steadily losing men and ground to the strix, who whooped in glee at the prospect of victory on the horizon. Only Maralictor Adarai's knot of soldiers, fighting defensively behind the cover of their shields, had kept all their numbers.

  And yet even as he spoke, a deafening boom from Uskonos's direction made them both look over in horror.

  In each hand the sorcerer held a glass vial, one filled with fine white powder and the other with virulent yellow liquid. He smashed them together furiously, heedless of the glass shards that slashed his palms. Gold and green energy coruscated around him, intensifying rapidly. As the itaraak continued to harry him, Uskonos charged ponderously toward Velenne. "Traitor!" he roared. "Scheming wench! If you will not aid me, you'll die with my enemies."

  "Oh no," Velenne said, half shocked and half mirthful. She backstepped lightly away from the enraged sorcerer, her devils shrieking and spinning around her. Her voice rose, pitched to carry over the fray. "You've gone mad."

  "Help me up," the rokoa whispered to Isiem as the Chelish battlemages turned on each other. Her milky white eyes fixed on his face, unseeing. She clawed at the dirt, trying uselessly to rise on her own strength. "I am too broken to stand alone. Help me, please."

  "My lady, you must not," Isiem protested. "Your people need you."

  "Now more than ever," the rokoa agreed. "Help me stand."

  Reluctantly, he did so. The rokoa gasped and teetered, clinging to his arm for support, but eventually managed to balance precariously by folding her good wing against the ground. She reached into the tangle of braided ropes and talismans that draped around her reedy neck and fished out a slim wand of frosted crystal, which she held out to the air.

  It was Isiem's wand. The itaraak had taken it from him when they first found him among the ashes of Crackspike.

  "Take it," the rokoa croaked, and he did. The slender crystal rod was cool to the touch; a film of condensation clouded its glistening whiteness. The magic was still there.

  "We should have trusted you with it from the beginning. I pray it is not too late. Now go." The ancient strix turned away from him, toward the signifers who had seen her rise and were already advancing upon her.

  "My lady —"

  "Go."

  Duty silenced him. Bowing respectfully—even knowing she could not see the gesture, invisible as he was—Isiem withdrew. The paralictor and his surviving Hellknights closed on the solitary strix, beating back the itaraak's attempts to block them, but the rokoa made no attempt to run.

  "Ancestors defend me," she said as the Hellknights came. "Ancestors protect me. I am rokoa of Windspire, and I call upon you now. Avenge the itarii. Cleanse these interlopers from our land. They have spilled the blood of your children. They threaten the sanctity of your bones." A signifer hurled a flurry of frigid motes at her, knocking the gray-feathered strix to the ground, but the rokoa continued her feeble chant. "We are your bones! Your blood! Your kin! Kirraak!"

  A whirlwind rose around her. It picked up dust and flint shards and the black feathers of the dead, whipping them higher and higher until the rokoa was engulfed completely. Ghostly gray figures appeared in the wind: strix, but taller and gaunter than the ones Isiem had known. Their feathers were sharp as layered dagger blades; their claws burned white at the tips. The rokoa moaned and collapsed in their midst, and the spectral strix struck out.

  They tore the Hellknights apart. Paralictor Cerallius raised his shield to fend them off, but the spectres were undaunted. They ripped through steel as if it were fog; they cut through leather like empty air. Only flesh posed any obstacle to their claws, and that not for long.

  When the storm of ghosts subsided, collapsing back into loose feathers and fragments of broken spears, the paralictor was dead on the ground. So too were the signifers who had been caught in the rokoa's invocation, and the rokoa herself. An obsidian dagger lay near her hand: she had cut herself deeply to spur the ancestors' wrath, and either the wound or the magic itself had drained her too far.

  Isiem had barely registered the deaths when a thunderous detonation knocked him off his feet. A crackling nova of blue-white frost exploded outward from Uskonos, obliterating the itaraak around him in a cold red mist of limbs and feathers. Several were frozen solid instantaneously; their bodies shattered like dropped icicles. Velenne staggered unsteadily away from the explosion, bleeding from a dozen shallow lacerations, her dark hair rimed with frost.

  Uskonos, too, had suffered from his own spell. A glassy coat of ice cracked over his robes, and his fingers were blue-black with frostbite. He did not seem to care. "Die!" he shouted again, crushing another pair of vials between his palms and resuming his elephantine charge at the diabolist. Maralictor Adarai ran toward him, but the Hellknight's charge was in vain; he was much too far away to reach Uskonos in time.

  Velenne continued to back away, lifting her hands in preparation for a retaliatory blast—but as she tried to utter the words to shape it, her expression changed from contempt to raw terror.

  Somehow the sorcerer had silenced her. Isiem saw it clearly in her choked attempts to voice a spell that would not come.

  She turned and ran. Uskonos lumbered after her, roaring and sloughing chunks of ice with every step. The gaav converged on him. They dropped from the air, grappling the tattooed sorcerer and beating their scabbed vultures' wings frantically to hold him back. One bit the Chelaxian's face in a macabre kiss, burying its fangs in his fleshy lips and twisting its head vi
ciously to keep him from uttering another incantation. A second gaav sank its yellow teeth into the man's knee. Blood spurted from the nostril holes in its skull; cartilage twisted and popped between its fangs. Uskonos fell heavily.

  Isiem didn't waste his chance. Leveling his crystalline wand at the devil-besieged sorcerer, he drew upon the magic trapped within the stone. Threads of frost wrapped around his hand, numbing his fingers, but he did not let go.

  A torrent of elemental cold burst from the wand's tip, enveloping Uskonos and the gaav in a whirling, conical white blizzard. Something screamed in the flurry, but Isiem could not tell whether it was the sorcerer, the devils, or just the screech of metal and fiend-bone surrendering under the strain of so much cold.

  When the last snowflakes fell, nothing moved. The gaav were gone. Uskonos was slumped under a mantle of magical snow, his death agonies mercifully concealed.

  Through the haze of destruction, Velenne's eyes met Isiem's. She nodded imperceptibly.

  Drawing a shaky breath, Isiem began what he hoped would be his last spell of the day. He pulled a bit of fleece from his sheepskin vest and rubbed it between his fingers, then concentrated on visualizing a flight of itaraak as vividly as he could. Their masks painted in powder and clay, the shrilling of wind through their wings, the clatter of spears rattled to threaten their foes ...in his mind's eye he saw it all, perfect in every detail.

  And when he opened his eyes, he saw it in reality, too. There was his illusory flight of reinforcements, distant but dark on the horizon. He had never woven shadows so skillfully.

  "Retreat!" Velenne called to the Chelish soldiers. Many of them had survived, but of the Hellknights, only Maralictor Adarai and one of the signifers remained standing. Isiem could not tell how many of the fallen were dead and how many were merely insensible.

  The distinction hardly seemed to matter to the Chelaxians, though. The defeat of their Hellknights had visibly demoralized them, and they were all too willing to flee.

  Maralictor Adarai took up her cry. "Retreat! We cannot stand against so many! Retreat in formation!"

  "Let them go," Isiem called to the strix as the Chelaxian soldiers began their withdrawal. The Nidalese wizard sank to the ground, too weak and exhausted to stay standing. It was all he could do to sustain the spell, and the illusion of reinforcements, until the last of the Chelaxians had turned tail.

  Then he released the weave, and closed his eyes, and let his head rest against the broken stones. He was too tired even to mourn the dead. Let them go, he thought. Let them all go.

  Epilogue

  This is what my mother died for?" Kirii gazed at the parchment in her hands.

  Put that way, it seemed a woefully inadequate thing: a single sheet of thin-scraped calfskin marked with the imperial seal of Cheliax in red and black at its head. It flapped violently in the wind, as though the desert itself were trying to tear the thing from Kirii's hands.

  But the treaty was much more than that. "It's safety," Isiem said.

  "Truly?"

  "If it holds."

  Kirii curled the parchment tightly in a white-clawed fist. She looked away, squinting into the sand-flecked wind toward the west, where the Chelaxians were tiny specks receding into the distance. There seemed to be a haziness to her golden eyes, as if the cataracts that had blinded her mother were somehow being passed down to her. "Will it hold?"

  Isiem wondered that himself. It seemed such a fragile vessel for Windspire's hopes of survival.

  Fifteen paragraphs, four signatures: Paralictor Adarai on behalf of the Order of the Gate, Provisional Governor Parsellon Alterras on behalf of Cheliax's civil authority, Velenne to represent its military authority and Asmodeus's approval of their bargain ...and Kirii's mark, alone, for the strix. It took three signatories to bind Cheliax to the treaty, but only one to bind the other side.

  The substance of the bargain was fair, however, even if its form reflected Cheliax's habit of skewing every deal to the empire's advantage. Isiem had made sure of that.

  For a hundred years and a day, the Chelaxians would be free to take the silver in the hills of Devil's Perch. But their numbers would be small, their settlements impermanent, their activities watched. Tokarai Springs was inviolate to them; the strix's hunting grounds were forbidden.

  It wasn't a victory, exactly. Isiem knew that. The treaty would hold because the Chelaxians didn't care about Tokarai Springs. They didn't even really care about the strix, or Isiem himself, as long as their mines went undisturbed. It was the silver that interested them, and what that silver meant for their ambitions.

  The rebels of Westcrown would suffer for the bargain he'd struck here. Pezzack. Sargava. No doubt there were other people in other places, beyond Isiem's ken, who would soon feel the increased might of Imperial Cheliax.

  And in that fact, he thought, there might be something the strix could use. "You guided that collaborator from Crackspike to Pezzack."

  Kirii turned back toward him and blinked sideways. The knotted tangle of charms and necklaces she wore, many of them taken directly from her mother's body, jangled with the movement. "Yes."

  "You could guide rebels back."

  "Yes." She blinked again, then flicked her tongue out between her sharp little teeth in annoyance. "That is not an answer to my question. There was much bargaining before they signed. It is different now than what we spoke of. Will the treaty hold?"

  "As long as that seems to be in Cheliax's interests," Isiem said, taken aback by her intensity. "And as long as they have no reason to believe you've reneged on the bargain. It's the same as we discussed before the battle."

  "It is not the same." The parchment in Kirii's hand trembled. With her other hand she rubbed a thumb over her right cheek, where the first of her rokoa tattoos had recently been inked. The flesh was still swollen under the blackened curlicues, giving the design an angry red shadow. "Now I am rokoa. Now the survival of our tribe is my burden. What we agreed ...that was with my mother to guide the itarii. Now it is only me, and our numbers are small. Much of Windspire died at Tokarai Springs. What is left is the old, the hatchlings, and the wounded."

  "Will the tribe survive?"

  "Only if we can compel more of the itarii to join us," Kirii said bluntly. "We have not enough of our own. Even with a peace, we cannot lay eggs quickly enough to restore our numbers. If Windspire is to survive our losses, other itarii must leave their own tribes to join ours. This is not a thing done lightly. To give up one's kin lines, the bones of one's ancestors, the teachings of one's own rokoa ...as we did not wish to give up our traditions to join Ciricskree, so others will be reluctant to join us."

  "What would draw them to join you?" Isiem asked.

  "Something they cannot obtain in their own tribes."

  "Such as the chance to strike at humans who cannot hit back?"

  Opaque membranes veiled Kirii's hawk-yellow eyes as she blinked. "Explain."

  "The treaty prevents you—not only the strix of Windspire, but all the strix in Devil's Perch—from attacking the Chelaxians. Open aggression would break the bargain."

  "This I know. We have talked of it already." Her small, slitted nostrils flared. "It will be difficult to keep the other tribes from taking up their spears. The rokoa of Ciricskree is a strong voice for killing the humans, and the itaraak of the Screeching Spire have many spears. They do not accept humans as true-people. Convincing them to change those views will be ...difficult. Very so. My mother might have done it. But I ..."

  "...will have another choice to offer them," Isiem finished for her. "One that allows you to harass the Chelaxians without risking the lives of your own people."

  "How?"

  "Use the rebels." The idea had ignited his imagination; the words spilled out almost faster than Isiem could utter them. "House Thrune has many enemies. Pezzack is rife with them. Show the rebels where and how to strike, and they'll do the fighting for you. It will be humans who sabotage the mines and rob the silver wagons. Humans who die.
Not strix. And as long as you take care to cover your tracks, so that the Chelaxians do not suspect you had a hand in their misfortunes, the treaty will hold. You'll have to be careful—very careful—but it may be a useful strategy for Windspire. And for Ciricskree. Even if they don't accept humans as ‘true-people,' they surely understand how to make use of an enemy's enemies."

  Kirii blinked twice in rapid succession. "This is acceptable to you?"

  "Whether it's acceptable to the rebels in Pezzack is the real question. I believe it will be. They understand what such an inflow of silver to the imperial treasury means for them. They'll want to stop it. They may even be willing to pay you for information, if you let the rebels believe it's their own idea and that you are but a reluctant partner in their schemes."

  "How am I to make them believe this?"

  "Let me do it," Isiem said. "They'll listen to a human more readily than a strix."

  Slowly Kirii nodded. After considerable practice, her gesture looked almost human. "And so Windspire will become not the first tribe to surrender, but the vanguard of the battle against the humans."

  "A secret vanguard, in a secret battle. And not against all humans. Only the servants of Imperial Cheliax. The others will be your allies—necessary allies, and ones that I hope you will find worthy of respect."

  "Perhaps," the young rokoa said. "The chance will be theirs to earn it."

  Isiem inclined his head in acceptance. It was all he could ask of them. "Will that draw the itarii?"

  "Some. The restless and the vengeful." Kirii gazed into the distance, then ruffled her wings in approximation of a shrug. "Not a solid foundation for a tribe, but perhaps they can be made one. My mother could have forged them into strength."

  "You can do the same." He smiled slightly. "You taught me to eat snakes."

  "Yes." She made several quick, huffed exhalations, imitating a human laugh. "A good skill for us both. So: you go to Pezzack. Recruit some rebels. And then?"