‘They are.’ She moved closer. ‘Who’s behind all this, Derrick? The Kardise Brotherhood? Who is it that’s making it worth your while?’
His lunge nearly finished her. She hadn’t seen him work his right hand free. She certainly hadn’t felt him take a knife from her belt. The only warning was the flash of metal as he drove the blade towards her, aiming beneath her ribcage. She twisted aside, and the knife glanced off her body and cut deep into the flesh of her upper arm. Her pistol was still on the desk; she grabbed it before retreating out of his reach. In the same instant, he cut his left hand free and sprang back, kicking the chair out of the way. They faced each other warily.
‘You’re not a warrior,’ Sorrow said. ‘Put that down before you hurt yourself.’
His teeth showed in a snarl. ‘Not everyone who lives in Charoite is soft and idle, Naeve Sorrow. I was being trained in the fifth ring when you were still a babe in arms.’
He flicked the knife at her, spraying her own blood into her eyes. She wiped it away with the back of one wrist, stumbling back so he couldn’t close the gap between them. Silently, she cursed herself. She’d underestimated him. And, clearly, it was a matter of importance to him not to reveal his paymaster – which meant it was equally important that she get it out of him.
Which, in turn, meant she couldn’t shoot him. Not yet.
Perhaps recognising her hesitation, he lunged forward. She knocked his arm out of the way, then transferred the pistol to her left hand and drew another knife with her right. He was fighting with his non-dominant hand. That would give her an advantage, though perhaps a small one. She slashed at his broken fingers, making him cry out.
‘Who’s paying you?’
‘No-one.’
He raised his knife again, but she spun and scored her blade across his inner elbow. Swearing, he dropped the weapon, stumbling backwards away from her. Then she had him pinned against the wall with her pistol against his temple –
I trust you, Caraway’s voice said somewhere in her mind.
Her finger tightened on the trigger – and stopped. Fuck. If she was going to shoot him, she’d have done it by now. Captain bloody Caraway had done a number on her, and now she was going to drag this bastard up to Darkhaven alive, like a good little girl.
She began to say something, and that was when Tarran’s foot hit her in the side of the knee, loosening her hold on him. His good right hand came up over her left, the one holding the pistol. She strove to keep it pointed at his head, but gradually he forced it round towards her. Shit. He’s stronger than me.
But she had the use of a second hand.
Even as his fingers pressed down hard on hers, she dropped the knife and brought her right hand up to clasp his, wrenching the pistol back round. Heat scorched her cheek. Tarran slammed into the wall and slid down it, leaving a thick smear of blood and brains in his wake.
Dead. Sorrow shook her head in a vain attempt to relieve her ringing ears. The fucking bastard. He’d been determined not to reveal who’d paid him to betray his overlord, which meant it was the one thing Caraway probably needed to know. Worse – she’d done her very best not to kill him, and he’d bloody well died anyway. How was she going to explain that one?
Still, for now the important thing was to get out of this house before the servants came to find out if anything was wrong. She holstered her pistol, picked up the pieces of cut cord and her discarded knife, and slipped out of the room.
TWENTY-ONE
Since the attack on the fort and her subsequent retaliation, Ayla had found herself eating more and more quickly, sleeping less and less, and spending as much time in her creature skin as possible. She’d begun to feel the wildness of it even when she was human; her emotions were fading, becoming starker and less complicated. It was easier that way. Easier to become the ice and ebonwood of which her Alicorn-self was made than to stay human and keep caring. People were destroyed by war, but Changer creatures throve on it. War was what they had been made for. It would have been foolish not to use that.
Sometimes she wondered if this was how her father had felt, all the time. If that was why he’d been how he was. She’d never thought of it, before. Never realised how the Change could alter her, even when she was human. Maybe she couldn’t return to who she’d been before. Maybe she’d discovered her true nature here on the battlefield.
Her children wouldn’t know her. But somehow, that didn’t matter so much any more.
On the fourth day after the burning of the fort, a cry went up that the beacon fires to the east had been lit. Ayla led a small fleet of airships to investigate, and discovered that a larger fleet of Kardise airships had crossed the border into Mirrorvale. The patrolmen left in the watchtowers had seen them coming and raised the alarm.
Fall back, Ayla told her own pilots. Await my orders. And then she went to meet the enemy.
The Kardise ships were armed with guns, but that was of little account to her. If anything, she was amused by the fact that they had thought to outwit her with such fragile toys. Though the envelope of an airship was strong, it tore like paper beneath the diamond hardness of her horn. She ripped three ships from the air, sending them and their crews to crumple and burn on the ground below, before the rest of the fleet fled. Then she led her own ships back to the Whispering Plain, exulting in the fact that not a single one of her men had been lost.
When they got there, they found carnage.
While she was gone, the full Kardise army had attacked. The Mirrorvalese army had stood their ground, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. They were dying. Everywhere Ayla looked, they were dying.
She flew straight over her own people and landed in the middle of the Kardise troops, trampling men beneath her hooves. Her horn pierced flesh and armour alike, catching people before they could charge towards her and throwing them bloody and broken to the ground. A ring of riflemen surrounded her, lifting their weapons to their shoulders as they took aim. She rose up on her hind legs and opened her wings to their fullest extent, presenting herself in defiance. Let them try to shoot her. They would soon discover their mistake.
A hundred miniature explosions. A hundred flashes of light. The air grew thick with the smell of gunpowder. She felt the sting of the bullets as they struck her and bounced off, but they mattered as little to her as the buzz of flies. She flung back her head, letting loose a piercingly sweet cry. And then she ran at them, stabbing and kicking and biting and trampling until they and their weapons were nothing more than twisted flesh and metal beneath her feet. She tore at them and raged at them until, finally, the Kardise army turned and ran.
Victory. She flew back to join her own people on their side of the border. Yet when she landed, she turned and screamed defiance at the Kardise once more. They couldn’t defeat her. They would never defeat her. She was invincible.
Later that night, once the bodies had been removed and the wounded taken to the medical tent, Ayla returned to human form for some food. Yet she couldn’t stop shivering. People had died. Some she’d killed. Some she’d failed to protect. In a single day, she’d seen more blood spilled than she’d seen in a lifetime. And it could happen again. It would happen again. Because she couldn’t be everywhere. Because one Changer creature, however powerful, was not enough to defend an entire country.
In the end, she had to retreat to her tent to eat, so that no-one would see her shaking hands. And when she came out, she Changed straight back into her Alicorn form again. It was easier that way.
Accompanied by a handful of his men, Caraway had just carried out his usual checks around the perimeter of Darkhaven, prior to locking it up for the night, when he heard his name being called. He turned to see Naeve Sorrow striding up the hillside towards him, the front and one sleeve of her shirt splashed liberally with scarlet like a warning flag.
‘Is that your blood?’ he asked her. She gave her left arm a cursory glance.
‘Some of it.’
Caraway followed her gaze to the ga
ping hole in the fabric and the raw, glistening wound that showed through it. ‘I’ll send for the physician –’
‘It won’t kill me,’ Sorrow said impatiently. ‘This is urgent.’
‘Understood. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather you didn’t pass out before you’ve finished telling me.’
He followed her through the postern gate into Darkhaven’s central square, ordering one of the Helmsmen with him to run for the physician. Then he turned to her.
‘Well? Did you speak to Derrick Tarran?’
‘I have evidence for you,’ Sorrow said. She handed him a sheet of paper. ‘A signed confession from Tarran himself. From what he said, it seems clear enough that your murdered maid was the traitor within Darkhaven. But there’s also a man we should try to find, somewhere out there in the city. The one who killed the girl, supplied the antidote and masterminded the entire plan. I think he’d have some interesting things to tell us.’
Caraway noted the we and us, but made no comment. He was too overwhelmed with relief. Surely this would be enough, if not to make peace, then at least to end the fighting …
Gil arrived at that point, ready to patch Sorrow up, which gave Caraway a chance to fight down the embarrassing lump in his throat. It wasn’t long before he was able to ask, quite normally, ‘And Tarran?’
‘Dead.’ She shifted a little under his stare, the closest she ever came to showing discomfort. ‘Not my choice, I assure you! I did my best to keep him alive. But the stupid man wouldn’t accept defeat. He tried to kill me, and during the struggle …’
‘It was an accident?’
‘That’s what I said.’ Her expression hardening, Sorrow folded her arms, ignoring Gil’s faint protest. ‘Should I take it, then, that all your bullshit about trusting me was just that?’
Caraway shook his head. ‘Of course not. I believe you. But for him to be ready to kill you, even though he knew you were there on Darkhaven’s behalf … he must have been keeping a massive secret. Something that would have ruined him completely, if it had come out.’
The defensive expression faded as she considered that. ‘Yes. And my best guess is …’
‘The Kardise Brotherhood?’ Caraway said it with her. ‘Mine too. If it was ever revealed that Tarran had conspired with the Kardise to bring Mirrorvale to war, the people would be clamouring for his head. Ayla would have to execute him; no way around it, for that sort of treachery. And we would be within our rights to seize every factory he owned – the distillery, too – which would leave his family with nothing.’
‘If you find the softly spoken man, you might uncover the truth,’ Sorrow said. ‘He played a key part in it all, and I got the impression that Derrick knew more about him than he let on. Perhaps he was a representative of whoever was paying Derrick.’
Caraway nodded. ‘I’ll set some of my men on it. We need to find out as soon as possible. Because if the Kardise Brotherhood were behind the war, I don’t know that any amount of evidence will be able to stop it.’
He hesitated, not liking to ask the next question when Sorrow had already been wounded – but it was important.
‘Naeve, will you take the evidence to Sol Kardis for me? And tell Ayla everything that happened between you and Tarran. I think she needs to know.’
The physician looked up in alarm. ‘Sir, I really don’t think she should be going anywhere so soon after –’
‘Rubbish,’ Sorrow said. She hesitated. ‘Is Elisse all right, Caraway? And Corus?’
‘Fine. I had another report from their guard today.’
She nodded. ‘Then I’ll take it. First thing in the morning.’
Miles fidgeted uncomfortably in the shadows of the Sun Lord’s temple. It had already been night when he’d received the summons, and he didn’t like being in Luka’s temple at night. A temple without its god was a strange and lonely place. Not only that, but after greeting him, his contact had fallen into silence. It was only after what felt like an endless wait that the faceless man finally spoke.
‘We have a problem. The war may end sooner than we expected.’
Relief washed over Miles like clear spring water on a summer’s day. He wanted to leap up and shout his thanks to the absent Sun Lord. The war would come to an end. And since Miles hadn’t been the one to reveal the truth, surely the faceless man wouldn’t take it out on Art. Unless …
‘What happened?’ he asked anxiously.
‘A man signed a confession. Never fear –’ this with an edge to it that suggested the faceless man knew very well what Miles was thinking – ‘Parovia was not implicated. But we need to strike now.’
‘Strike?’
‘This is the only chance we will have to discover the secret of the Change.’
Miles frowned. He knew, of course, that Parovia wanted the secret of the Change. The closer he’d become to Ayla Nightshade, the more pressure he’d been under to supply it. Yet like collars that protected ordinary soldiers from bullets, the secret of the Change was too vast a power to be attained by a large country like Parovia – a country that could use it to conquer the world. And so he had fed back bits and pieces of his research, giving the Parovian alchemists enough to work on without ever revealing some of the most fundamental truths he had uncovered. But if the faceless man thought the secret could be discovered soon …
‘How?’ he asked cautiously.
‘We need those documents. The ones you identified. We had thought there would be time for you to smuggle them out, piece by piece, but if Ayla returns … no. We need to act fast. Seize everything in a single raid.’
Miles wasn’t sure if the faceless man could see him in the moonlight, but he nodded to hide his relief. The documents he had identified to his contacts in Parovia were valuable and old, kept not in the library but in the treasury, under lock and key. They’d been written in the time of the first Changers and were almost impossible to translate – so much so that he had been able to claim his inability to do so without calling down suspicion. But based on what he had managed to decipher of them, they wouldn’t reveal the deep secrets that Parovia desired.
All the same, a raid on Darkhaven …
‘You are not going to hurt anyone?’ he asked. Then, hastily, because the question revealed too much of his weakness, ‘No suspicion will fall on me?’
‘Not if you are clever,’ the voice said. ‘But either way, you could not have hoped to remain detached forever. You have done a good job of supplying us with information, Miles, but this time we need more. This time, you will be required to get your hands dirty.’
‘W-what do you want me to do?’
The faceless man told him. Afterwards, he held out two bottles and said, ‘If you do this, we will release you from our service.’
‘Really?’ That sounded too good to be true. ‘Why –’
‘Because you are no longer of much use,’ the faceless man said acidly. ‘Just make sure you keep our secrets, Miles, if you want your weaponmaster to live a full and happy life.’
‘I will.’ Miles took the bottles. He noticed his hands were shaking. Freedom. At last. He could put his guilt behind him and make a real, forever life for himself here in Mirrorvale. In Darkhaven. With Art.
You have this one last job to do first, he reminded himself. And this is not simply a matter of sitting back and letting a war happen. This is actual treachery …
Still, no-one was going to die this time. That was something.
TWENTY-TWO
An airship was approaching from deeper in Mirrorvale. The patterning on the envelope indicated that it was the morning’s courier ship arriving as usual from Arkannen, so Ayla didn’t rise to meet it. She remained in place, patrolling the front line, while some of the Helm went to investigate.
When they returned, it was in somewhat more disarray than they had left. There was scuffling and jostling, a good bit of swearing, and Ayla heard Naeve Sorrow’s voice above the rest.
‘Get off me, you blithering idiots! I was se
nt by your captain and you know it!’
The Helm parted, and Sorrow stumbled out from their midst as though she had been pushed. She shot a narrow-eyed glance back over her shoulder at the offending Helmsman, before turning to find herself face to face with Ayla. It was the first time Ayla had ever seen fear in her eyes.
‘I …’ She backed away a step, then caught herself and squared her shoulders. ‘Lady Ayla. I bring you news from Darkhaven.’
Go on, Ayla sent into her mind. The woman’s eyes widened still further.
‘Fuck. I mean – fuck. I didn’t know you could –’
How else would we command our troops on the battlefield?
‘Right. Of course.’ Sorrow visibly took hold of herself. ‘Captain Caraway sent me. I have the evidence you need to prove to the Kardise that you didn’t kill their ambassador.’
Ayla gazed at her. Even in creature form, even frozen and resolute, she couldn’t deny the hot emotion that surged through her. It was relief. Utter, glorious relief.
No more death.
No more killing.
She Changed, and as she did so the emotion intensified. By the time she was in human form, with a Helmsman handing her a robe, her eyes were full of tears.
‘Thank you,’ she managed, blinking them back. She wanted to kiss the woman. But she was still a leader, and still at war; no time for softness. ‘Come to my tent, and we’ll discuss it.’
Once they were alone, Sorrow handed her the evidence and told her everything that had passed between herself and Derrick Tarran. It was almost overwhelming, but one thing was clear: this was a chance. If the Kardise didn’t accept it as enough reason to at least call a temporary truce, there was little chance they’d accept anything.
‘I brought you something else, as well.’ Sorrow took another package out of her pocket. ‘From Captain Caraway.’
Ayla unfolded it. The topmost sheet of paper was grubby and a little crumpled. In Marlon’s uneven handwriting, it proclaimed we love you mama come back soon Marlon. Underneath that, Katya had printed her name in large wobbly letters, and there was even a faint W for Wyrenne.
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