Shield (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #2): Bridge & Sword World

by JC Andrijeski

  Terian gave a harsh laugh. “Yes. This is practically the Ritz. But I’m not here to spank you for your housekeeping skills, Fraulein.” Even so, he realized in some surprise that he was angry. Beyond angry. He was furious. His hand shook as he pointed it at the two “monks.” That they would keep any seer in such a place, much less a seer like this, with structures like he had––it was inconceivable.

  That Galaith could have been a part of such a travesty…

  “Unchain him,” Terian said, motioning towards the boy with the gun. “Now.”

  The woman’s face drained further of blood. “Sir?”

  “You heard him. He’s coming with me. Now unchain him.”

  “Sir! You don’t understand! His collar… the restraint wire on his sight is attached to his chain. It was a safeguard, so no one could ever leave with him!”

  She trailed when Terian raised the gun to point at her face. Terian cocked his head, staring at her. The woman stared at the boy, then back at Terian.

  “You can’t possibly understand what you are doing!” she cried. “He cannot be allowed to leave this place!”

  “The boy won’t hurt me. Will you, lad?”

  “No. I won’t hurt.” He paused. “…You.”

  Terian smiled. “See? We’re going to be pals, me and this handsome devil.”

  The old man with the bleeding hand laughed, stopping only when he broke into a paroxysm of thick coughs. He spat a gob of phlegm in the direction of the boy. Wiping his mouth on his dirt-encrusted robe, he spoke up.

  “I’ll unchain him.” His voice had a note of finality to it. “I’ll do it… I’ll let the little bastard go. It’s mine to do.”

  “Merenje, no!” the woman cried, but Terian swung the gun back on her, stopping her from going after him.

  The old man stumbled across the room, still holding his hand to his robes.

  The boy stood perfectly still as Merenje reached him. He didn’t move as the old man fumbled with the metal collar around his neck. Terian hadn’t seen it until then, since it blended so perfectly with the color of the grimy neck.

  Now that he saw it, however, Terian realized the thing was an antique.

  Instead of the light, thin organic hybrid metals used on the seers in the pens upstairs, the boy’s collar weighted his neck with several inches of what appeared to be iron. The organic skin on the outside looked like it came from some kind of reptile.

  The back end, instead of having a thumbnail release valve triggered with retinal or other scanner, consisted of an iron ring that connected to a thick chain bolted into the wall above the palate of rags where the boy slept. The chain didn’t even give him the full range of the small cell. No wonder the bucket remained by the bed.

  Feeling his anger return, Terian watched the old man grasp the chain, which was also coated in organic skin.

  “Use the key,” the old man said. His pitted eyes stared at the boy’s. “Use the key now! I’ve triggered the lock.”

  “No!” the woman screamed.

  But Terian already understood.

  Chuckling, he entered the Barrier space, and found himself facing an elaborate structure that had Dehgoies’ and Galaith’s aleimic fingerprints all over it. A golden weaving of light, it configured in a kind of delicate beauty around the boy, strangling his aleimi through the organic components of the collar.

  Recalling the symbol he’d found in Dehgoies Revik’s journal, the same one he’d used to fool the woman into thinking Galaith had sent him, Terian imprinted it on the Barrier structure. It fit perfectly into the missing piece woven into the restraint collar around the boy’s neck and its organic tissue.

  As he withdrew from the Barrier space, Four heard an audible click.

  His vision cleared, leaving him back in the pitch-black dungeon.

  The boy met his gaze, and smiled.

  6

  DISTRACTION

  I JERKED AWAKE, half in a panic.

  It took me another few breaths to realize why. I’d dreamed that he’d gone, that he’d left me alone again, before I even saw him.

  I lay curled into a half-moon, wedged in a cushioned seat next to a window with no glass. When I first opened my eyes, I gazed up at a wooden ceiling supported by thick crossbeams. Galaith’s journal lay open by my hand, where I’d let go of it when my fingers loosened in sleep.

  I wondered how long I’d been lying there.

  Monkeys screeched from tree branches that sagged and swayed under their weight. Meanwhile, seers play-fought in a stone and crabgrass courtyard a few hundred feet below my window.

  I saw my adoptive brother Jon there, standing with lingering awkwardness among a crowd of seers, watching them fight, eyes serious as he studied their moves. He’d been a fourth degree black belt in Choy Li Fut in San Francisco, but here I knew he still felt kind of lame. Even apart from his hand, seer fighting arts included a lot of work with sight capabilities that he simply couldn’t do. I recognized the look on his face as he watched them scuffle, though; he wanted to be in the middle of it.

  “Yes,” a voice behind me said. A soft clicking sound punctuated the quiet, low enough to be a purr. “It’s all right now. I need exercise…”

  The voice grew lower still, until I couldn’t make out words.

  I held my breath.

  I recognized his deep voice. I probably would have even without the German accent.

  Hearing it affected me more than I expected, but he wasn’t talking to me. In fact, we hadn’t exchanged a single word yet.

  Cass met me at the helipad again that morning.

  She and I had gone to Seertown market, wandering through the maze of booths where humans and seers hawked blankets, clothes, prayer beads, handheld mechanical prayer wheels and Tibetan momo, a stuffed dumpling to which I was fast becoming addicted. Cass bought a scarf and a pair of earrings. She and Jon were doing pretty well here, in terms of money. Both worked a few hours a day, teaching English to seers.

  By the time I came back to the compound, most of the seers had finished their morning rituals of chai and meditation and socializing in the wide gardens below the complex.

  Jon refused to meet me on the platform, convinced I’d turned suicidal in my sudden need to see the front lines “every damned day” as he put it. I think Jon was really angry because he’d expected it to stop as soon as Revik got back.

  Which he had, the night before.

  Admittedly, Revik was part of the reason I’d decided to go that morning.

  They’d drugged him for the flight, which was standard in security transports, but he hadn’t woken up when they expected. They timed that kind of thing to the minute, especially where infiltrators were involved, and I’d already been told that Revik had the opposite tendency, meaning he was more likely to wake up early from a dose than late.

  In fact, they had to calibrate personalized doses for him, to make sure he slept at all.

  I worried they’d given him too much, but the seers attending him said no. They explained he’d suffered some kind of “hit” during the last leg of the flight––meaning, he’d been tagged in the Barrier by another seer, or seers.

  Whoever had done it, they’d drained his light almost to a dangerous level.

  When he still wasn’t awake when I got back, I was a lot more worried.

  They told me he was fine.

  His vitals had stabilized and he was replenishing light normally again. I tried lying next to him, thinking I might be able to speed that process along, but with the separation pain being what it was, I only lasted about ten minutes before I retreated back to the window seat.

  I’d already spent most of the night there, anyway, my head propped on a cushion to stare out the window while I waited for him to wake and told myself I wasn’t worried.

  I must have fallen asleep myself.

  Revik had company now. Vash must have come in while I was dozing.

  Listening to the tone of their voices, I found myself wishing I’d slept somewhere els
e. I didn’t want to interrupt, though, not even to leave.

  The old seer’s voice grew audible. “…I am so sorry, my son.”

  I heard him say more, but I lost his words in the emotion I felt around them.

  Revik answered him, but not in a language I knew.

  Vash moved on the bed, making the springs creak. “Is it true what they tell me? That you remember more now?”

  I swallowed, wishing more than ever I’d slept in the other room.

  I didn’t want to overhear anything he wasn’t ready to tell me himself, but it was hard not to strain for his answer. Revik had lost most of his memory when he left the Rooks. Now, reading Galaith’s diaries, I had a better idea of what those years had looked like for him.

  I was also increasingly wondering if his memory loss had been such a bad thing.

  He’d been married in that life. To someone else, I mean.

  In their case, though, it had been more what I’d call a “real” marriage. Thanks to Galaith, I’d even seen the tail end of their wedding ceremony from the Barrier, and Revik looked pretty damned good in a tux. From how happy he’d appeared in my one glimpse, he seemed pretty comfortable with the whole idea of being married, too.

  In other words, his marriage to Elise hadn’t consisted of a night where two near-strangers got too immersed in each other’s light and accidentally started the energetic bond that formed the first stage of seer marriage.

  Nor had it likely been followed by a few weeks of anger, misunderstandings, friendship, no sex, a request for divorce, and finally, infidelity.

  No, that had been his marriage to me.

  Through the window, I watched seers continue to scuffle as their dirt ring turned to clomping damp patches, then to mud. They seemed oblivious as they faced off against one another, sparred, clinched, repositioned, faced off again. Laughter rolled up when the smaller of the two swept the other’s leg, landing him on his back.

  I tried not to hear the emotion that clouded Vash’s words.

  “I should never have let you go. You were so determined that it be you.”

  Revik answered, his voice too low for me to make out words.

  He lay wrapped in furs, propped up on pillows. Feeling glimmers of his light, I realized again how long it had been since I’d seen him, and how short a time we’d had together then. At Gatwick Airport in London, right after everything had gone down, we’d only had about ten minutes alone to say goodbye before the infiltrators took him away.

  That had mostly involved us kissing.

  He’d asked me to wait for him, though. It was the closest he’d ever come to telling me anything, in terms of the two of us.

  I got to India via plane and train, on a roundabout trip through Eastern Europe.

  Revik, on the other hand, traveled most of the way by cargo ship, going all the way around the Cape of Good Hope at the southernmost tip of Africa and up the Suez before being transported by land to Cairo.

  It took four months. They’d promised me it wouldn’t be more than three. I found myself remembering the look on his face as they had led him away.

  I was still staring down at the sparring seers, not seeing them…

  …when the door shut softly behind me.

  I stopped breathing, but for a long moment, there was nothing.

  I wondered if he was waiting for me. I steeled myself, trying to decide if I should speak.

  “Allie?” His accent was stronger.

  I took a breath. I some things I wanted to say to him, assuming he even wanted to talk about it. I felt pretty strongly that the conversation needed to happen.

  I also knew whatever he might say in the next few minutes could very easily derail me completely. I kept my aleimi wound tightly around my physical person as I slid off the window seat, letting my bare feet touch the floor.

  Even so, seeing him awake, and sitting up, made me pause.

  His black hair had been cut.

  It was short, maybe shorter than I’d ever seen it. He still looked thin, although the bruises on his face and neck were mostly gone. I saw scars too, and not all of them were old. A faint, reddish ring was still visible around the base of his neck, and it was more than a fading bruise; it looked almost like a burn.

  But it wasn’t really the differences that threw me.

  It was where he was the same.

  His pale, almost colorless eyes studied mine expressionlessly. His narrow face didn’t seem to move, never seemed to age even though his cheekbones stood out more than they had before he’d been imprisoned by Terian. The lines of his jaw and the outline of his face appeared more angular, but his narrow mouth looked the same. He wore the soft gray T-shirt he’d been wearing when they first brought him in, and his arms looked smaller but the same as well, sinewy and somehow less young than his face.

  I took a few steps in his direction and stopped. I folded my arms.

  I knew it probably came off as somewhat aggressive to do that, but it felt more defensive––especially since I couldn’t think of a single argument I’d won with him in the year plus I’d known him.

  “Are you okay?” I hesitated. “Do you need anything?”

  I saw him wipe his eyes with the heel of his hand, and swallowed, realizing it hadn’t only been Vash who’d been crying. Damn it. I felt myself soften, more than I should have. Gently, he patted the furs next to where he lay, his eyes carefully on mine.

  “Can we talk?” he said. His voice was polite, like always.

  I shook my head, exhaling in a kind of humorless laugh.

  “No. Not yet. Not like that.”

  “You’re angry,” he said.

  “No.” I shook my head, surprised. “No, I’m not angry.” I paused, thinking about his question, then my own words. “I just need a minute, I guess. And we should talk, yes, but I’d rather do it from here. If that’s okay.”

  He nodded, leaning against the wall. He seemed to have expected this, too. Or maybe he was reading me. It was so hard to know with him.

  “You want to talk,” he said. “Is it about the divorce thing, Allie?”

  His words hit like a blow. I swallowed, looking away.

  He was back on that––the divorce thing. I don’t know why it should have surprised me. It was the last thing he’d asked me for, when we talked on the ship.

  Still, it pretty much silenced me. I wasn’t sure where to go from there at all.

  I saw him realize his mistake.

  Hesitating, he folded his arms, shifting his weight on the bed. His eyes narrowed up at mine.

  “Then what?”

  “Look.” I bit my tongue.

  I hesitated for a minute, trying to recollect my thoughts, which had pretty much scattered as soon as we were face to face. I looked away, refolding my arms tighter. “I’m not assuming anything. I’m really not. But I don’t want you to think things with us are just going to…”

  I stopped, rethinking that approach.

  “I don’t know what you want… or what you think I…”

  I stopped again, rethinking that approach, too.

  “Look,” I said finally. I exhaled in a near sigh, raising my eyes. “We can talk about the divorce thing if you want. That’s fine. And I’ll do whatever you want in that area.” I swallowed, meeting his gaze. “But I’m in love with you, Revik. You must know that.”

  I felt his shock. It stopped me in my tracks.

  I opened my mouth, about to stammer something to cover over what I’d said… when his aleimi sparked out.

  “Alyson.” Emotion filled his voice. “Alyson… gods. Come here…”

  Seeing the look on his face, I couldn’t breathe. An intensity had risen to his eyes; they were nearly bright. When he leaned forward, reaching for me with his light, I sidestepped him, holding up a hand.

  “Wait.” My shoulders unclenched. I was relieved at his reaction, but also completely thrown. I forced my tone level. “I love you… so that’s clear. I don’t know if anything else is with us, though.
” Shaking my head slowly, I refolded my arms. “I really don’t think I can do this anymore. Not the way we were.”

  I glanced up, nervous at his silence.

  He was still staring at me, still clearly in some stage of disbelief.

  “You need to tell me what you want,” I added. “Don’t soft-pedal it. I don’t need that, I really don’t. Just be clear. Please… try to be clear. Before we get all…” I flushed a little, motioning with my hands. “…you know. Friendly.”

  Waiting for understanding to reach his eyes, I refolded my arms once it had. I kept my voice calm, matter-of-fact.

  “Okay. So I guess I should ask this first. Do you still want a divorce?”

  “No.”

  It came out at once, without doubt.

  I relaxed a little more, nodding. “All right. So what does that mean? To you, I mean.” I hesitated, watching his eyes. “…and if there’s any seer custom or subtext involved that has to do with being raised seer, could you please explain it to me? I can pretty much guarantee I won’t get it.”

  I took a breath as his wary look faded.

  I watched him take a breath, too, even as he pulled his light back around his body. He stared at the foot of the bed, his thumb rubbing his bare arm as he thought. He cleared his throat then, glancing up. His jaw tightened as he studied my eyes.

  “I want to make love, Allie.”

  I felt my face warm. “Okay. Well, I sort of knew that part. That’s not exactly what I…”

  But he was already shaking his head.

  “What?” I said, folding my arms tighter.

  “I don’t think we should,” he said.

  I flinched a little. “Oh. Okay.”

  He added, “Right now, Allie. Just right now. A few weeks. Possibly longer. We should give it some time.”

  I pulled my aleimi a little closer to my body. “Sure. That’s fine.”

  “Allie.” He waited for me to look over. “You don’t understand.”

  “Okay.” I nodded, fighting the tightening of my jaw. “Could you explain it to me then? Is this one of those custom things?”