The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle)

by H. Anthe Davis

  Arik growled, “You were fools.”

  Cob set a hand on the skinchanger’s arm, gaze not moving from the wraith. Incipient quills receded at his touch, but Arik’s anger rippled through him like a stream disturbing a lake. The Guardian was a dense mass in his chest, the forest darkening around him—not real, he knew, but the slower inception of the visions that had struck him before.

  The wraith inclined its hooded head. “We know that now. There were civilizations active at the time of our descent—the Teria, the Nimir—but both were situated underground, hidden from our perceptions. All that we saw were the furred things, the nomadic packs and herds. We were surprised when they advanced upon our ships instead of fled.”

  Darkness converged upon Cob. He closed his eyes, and the full memory spread out before him.

  Thick forest stretched in all directions, cladding the hills like fur. The wind was wet and rich with scent, the night sky banded by the familiar glow of the Chain of Ydgys but also by other stranger streaks of light. Like stars falling in formation, three groups of three, they descended into the distance while he and his herd watched in fascination.

  Then came the flare, the heat, the furious quaking of the earth. The screams of his harem, his children; the flashes of terror from the other creatures of the forest like pinpricks on his skin. A ghastly wind swept through the trees, flattening flowers and grasses and bending branches until they snapped. It felt like an eternity before the ground stilled, even longer before the leaves fell silent again.

  Ash and mist coiled in the air. Though he feared fire, he knew that this was nothing natural, nothing right. As the Antlered King, he had a duty to the forest and all of its denizens, not only to his herd—and the stars had fallen into the very center of the woodland, where the rivers converged into the sharing lake. Where all the herds and clans and packs came to drink. The one place of peace.

  Swift of foot, he sped through the trees, his herd at his back, until he came to the place where there were trees no more—only splinters pulverized by some great impact, the air thick not with mist or smoke but steam that glowed with strange colors. The wind struggled to part the veil, its manifold spirits aswirl in confusion.

  Inch by inch, the bleached belly of the lake came bare before his eyes. Seared rocks, boiled fish, smoldering plant-life. He stepped cautiously among them, feeling the heat through his thick hooves, watching as the diaphanous layers of vapor dissipated. Their colors did not fade with them, but strengthened into nine narrow slices of light, taller than the greatest tree, arising from the heart of the murdered lake.

  And then, from those tall lights, tiny ones detached like a swarm. He watched them flicker through the steam in all directions, seeking outward, and some of them sought toward him.

  He raised his crowned head, awaiting.

  They grew larger on approach, but despite their firefly-glow, he could see no shape to them. Troubled, wary, he squinted as they emerged from the steam. It might have been the residual vapor, but the air around them shimmered strangely as if there was more to them than the solidity at their centers, the tight buds of radiance that unfurled into five-lobed, vaguely bipedal forms to regard him.

  He lifted his hands toward them in question, the palms hard-callused, the three fingers keratin-sheathed.

  They responded with fire.

  The vision ended.

  “What we did was unconscionable,” Ilshenrir said as Cob opened his eyes. “I do not wish to excuse us: we saw you as a threat. We had fallen so far and in such fear that we were not willing to compromise, to become just one of many peoples. We had to be in control.

  “But there were too few of us. Four flights—forty-two thousand caiohene in all—escaped our realm to reach yours, and the last flight did not arrive until we had already begun the war. Oh, we were powerful compared to you, and united in our goals while you were split into many tribes, many struggling alliances, but it did not take long for our aggression to turn your world against us.

  “Still, we fought hard. We found that many of you were bound together by communal essences—what you call ‘spirits’—and that we could break the will of entire tribes by destroying them. And so, for a time, that was our tactic.”

  “It almost wiped us out,” growled Arik into Cob’s ear. “When our spirits die, we Forget. We become mindless animals or soulless humanoids, empty, alone—trapped in one form forever. Sometimes we pledge to other spirits, but it alters us. We can never be what we were.”

  Cob squeezed the skinchanger’s arm and tried to keep a lid on his own boiling temper. “What happened to the stag—the Antlered King?”

  “Aeruhtali Tanrant….Tan. Your forefather. Raun’s beloved enemy.” Arik exhaled heavily. His hot breath made the hairs on the back of Cob’s neck prickle. “He was the first to feel their wrath, before they knew how to kill our spirits. When they shattered him, his shards infected the deerfolk with his terror, and they scattered to the four winds—always fleeing, always feeling the fire at their backs. They used to be so strong. When his last shard died, it was a relief.”

  For a moment, Cob remembered the fear that had chased him through the streets of Bahlaer, through the Illanic countryside and all the way back to his childhood. The terror that froze him in place when he knew he should act, the panic that had possessed him in the Kerrindryr quarry—made him fight blindly with nothing but a rock in hand. All those instincts he had struggled to suppress, to control. The persistent sense of being hunted.

  He ran his hand across his mouth and stared at Ilshenrir, weighing blame against pragmatism.

  “Keep going,” he said finally.

  The wraith nodded. "For a time, we held our own, but your people were learning our ways—learning to mimic us, to harness a terrestrial version of our magic, to join together as one force. And we had our schisms. By the time the fourth flight descended, we were deeply torn between those who believed we had wronged you and those who would see you annihilated. Our holdings had spread far across this northern land, but thinly, and even with the influx of power from the fourth flight, we found ourselves endangered—our army fractured by assaults from every angle, every element, every beast and tree and vine.

  "The sanwy—the…captains—of the first and fourth flight were driven east toward the fourth flight's flagship, Hlacaasteia, along with many of their followers. They were weary, tied more and more to wretchedly physical bodies, and the native races pursued them relentlessly. Perhaps this is why the first sanwy did not recognize that they were following the shore instead of turning inland toward the flagship.

  "The end came when they ran headlong into native forces marching from the east. Between those and the pursuit from the west, they were pushed to the beach, to the water's edge at what is now called the Wrecking Shore."

  The darkness nibbled at Cob's vision, and he closed his eyes again. A long shoreline rose before him, with shining figures ankle-deep in water, fighting with crystal blades and whips of pale fire. Serpents snapped at their heels, and great dark beasts leapt from the dunes to die impaled on bright lances, drawing shimmering ichor with the last thrash of their claws. He turned his head to see a great hulking ogre next to him, armored in white, with beady black eyes gleaming beneath the hooked beak of the raptor-helm and a bone-tipped spear clutched in huge gauntlets.

  Looking down, he saw that his hands were ogre hands, jet-black and thick-fingered, his body a massive woman's draped in jewel-toned snakes. Vina? he thought, and felt the faint warmth of her presence.

  A wraith with a blue-white blade fought hard in the front ranks. Pallid, androgynous, but far more humanoid than the wraiths that Aeruhtali Tanrant had encountered, it tore through the beastfolk as if gliding through smoke. Pearly ichor streaked its face, and its hardened crystalline flesh was riven in many places to show liquid light within. The blade itself did not look like a sword, but was whorled and curved and etched bizarrely, more like a flat length of slag glass.

  In the rear of the shining rank
s was another wraith, its petal-like outer layers taking color from the fiery red blade it bore. Standing atop the water with snakes roiling beneath its delicate feet, it unleashed streams of energy into the beastfolk with calm indifference until, abruptly, it turned its head to look out to sea.

  Cob stared that way. Far out beneath the glooming sky, a patch of water had gone pale, phosphorescent. Something approached.

  “We fought with all we had,” came Ilshenrir’s distant voice, “yet we were betrayed. The fourth flight had been…changed. They left us.”

  As more defending wraiths fell, shattered beneath hooves and claws, the ones in the back ranks looked away and stepped onto the surface of the water—first ten, then a hundred, then the majority. Snakes and slick sea-creatures writhed beneath them, snapping their jaws futilely before turning their wrath on the wraiths that still fought.

  One by one, those on the surface of the sea walked away, following the bearer of the red blade.

  Cob saw the blue wielder look back, screaming a name. Its red counterpart never paused. The radiance beneath the water had grown stronger, vaster, nacreous and undulating, and as the line of deserters approached it, they seemed to dwindle and vanish into its glow. Those abandoned on the beach clustered tightly, fighting to stay on their feet, but the tide of beastfolk was too great.

  Finally only the blue wielder remained. It threw itself into the crowd like a bolt of lightning, barely physical, its limbs molten, its blade a crackling blur, and none could touch it. The skinchangers drew back and it pursued them up the shore, its steps turning the sand to glass.

  In Cob’s ear, Arik growled, “They don’t die when you break them. They just come back. The Ravager ate some, but others are too big for his appetite. So we set a trap.”

  In the darkness, the beach grass writhed. The faces of the gathered natives were lit by the glow of the crystalline blade. Wolfish, bearlike, vulpine, bird-beaked, bat-fanged. Wooden, crackled and boled and toothless. Clay-masked, with hair of plaited silver wire. Painted, tattooed, decorated.

  Angry.

  Vina lifted her hands, and he saw the others do the same. Torches flared, and in those torch-flames danced sinuous figures. Wisps of water coiled from the sea, reaching toward the wraith like fingers. The Ravager raised white-clad arms, laughing a low, horrible laugh.

  The wraith’s blade-dance slowed as ropes of water and sand lashed around its legs, sizzling into steam or annealing on contact as they robbed it of its light. Vines added swiftly to the drag. From the torches, sparks leapt to ignite a circle of grass, and as the smoke rose in greasy coils, the air stirred them into strange hieroglyphs. The metal-haired creatures—the Muriae—cast handfuls of iron and silver to join the sand, and though the wraith slashed furiously after them, it could not reach.

  The native folk closed their circle, and the elements gathered. The earth trembled underfoot; the ocean shrugged forward to stretch hungry fingers toward the wraith’s light. Air clenched, flames rose, and within the bodies of the skinchangers Cob felt the spirits of the beast-lords open their eyes. He recognized them somehow, like grown children—his kin with their own lives, their own hatreds and desires, yet all as close as blood.

  Beside him, the Ravager blazed with a mad passion, his laugh booming over the sparking sand. Within Vina, the Guardian raised its head and flexed scaly, subterranean limbs. Their eyes—all eyes—were fixed on the wraith in the circle, the strangeness of it as it fought to shine, to shake free of physical constraints. Its essence was a piercing light almost too bright to look at, fine and high and far away.

  Together, the Guardian and Ravager and all their child spirits, all their beast-kin and elemental comrades, reached out. Air and earth and sea shivered, hardened, warped around the circle as they closed their fists, full of such rage that Cob could feel it in the back of his throat—the acid, the vindictive fervor he knew like a friend.

  With one convulsive gesture, the native spirits slammed the wraith to the earth.

  It screamed as it was crushed beneath that colossal force, the sound bright and sharp like nails on glass. Vines and sand-ropes lashed it down, and when Vina stepped forward, the weight of the Guardian’s presence pushed its twisted limbs deeper into its prison. Still it fought, luminous ichor dripping from its broken places, but though pain twisted its almost-human face, Cob felt no sympathy from the dark spirit or the ogress it rode. To them, this was no fellow creature. It was a monster.

  She waited silently, hands out, pressing down as the wraith’s struggles weakened, its cries ebbing. At last it fell still, its flesh bleeding opacity until it was nothing but a clear glass shell with a little light trapped inside.

  Then the Ravager stepped forward and drove his bone-tipped spear through the wraith’s chest, through the trembling light, into the earth below.

  The light shattered, split by the spear. Motes scattered within the body, returning color and life to the flesh, and as the Ravager pushed down harder, Cob felt currents of energy bending beneath his will—flowing down the weapon into the wraith. Twisting it. Shaping it.

  Vengeance, he thought, and shuddered.

  Ichor bloomed from the wraith’s lips, at first pearly, then pink and then bloody red as its glass cage became mortal flesh. It screamed in torment, ragged, terrified, but could not move, not even lift its head as the encroaching surf tugged at its fine hair. Thorny tendrils rose from the earth to clinch its torso, digging into the wound around the spear, tearing it open, and the screams became gurgles, the once star-like eyes glazed with pain.

  And the Ravager twisted the spear, and the wraith changed. Muscle roiled beneath the skin, then tore free in thick bands; fingers dug into the sand and took root, wrists curving into knots, skin bristling with thorns. The blood on its lips blossomed into tiny flowers as its features separated into coils of vine, the scream fading to a rasp and then dying entirely. Soon all that remained was a ground-hugging mass of thorny, blood-colored vines twined around the spear.

  “We cursed their leader,” Arik growled, as the Ravager released his spear and waved toward the wraith-bodies that littered the shore and sea. Slowly, dazedly, the vine-entity responded to the gesture as if it was a command, reaching out to extend runners over the fallen wraiths. The twisted shaping-magic still radiated from it, and as its thorns engulfed the crystalline corpses—each with its own imprisoned spark of light—Cob felt the fallen wraiths' essences struggle, then go still.

  “We made it their jailer,” said Arik. “To keep them from mending or making new bodies. To keep them dead. It was meant as something we could feed them to and not fear their return.”

  The Ravager stepped back to survey his work, a broad smile on his ugly face, then stooped to pick up the wraith’s slag-glass sword. Perhaps to claim it, perhaps to break it, but Cob felt fear dispel the pride in Vina’s chest, felt her mouth open to cry out.

  Too late. As the Ravager’s hand closed on the weapon, radiance lashed up from it, driving into every crack in his armor, pouring into his eyes and nostrils and gaping maw. The way it jumped and coruscated on his shoulders reminded Cob horribly of Morshoc’s power, and with every moment it amped up higher until the white armor broke with a sound of splintering bone. For an instant he saw the spirit flinging itself from the big ogre’s roasted flesh: a six-winged shape of talons and teeth and lustrous fire, not so different from the fallen wraith. Then it was gone, and the ogre collapsed, twitching as the current that had killed him slowly ebbed.

  Vines slithered out and snatched the blade from his spasming hands, and tucked it into the swiftly expanding blanket of thorns and corpses.

  Cob felt Vina’s grief and the Guardian’s confusion. Then, as the thorn-mass sent out runners toward the legs of the retreating skinchangers, the vision ended.

  He blinked rapidly as his companions came back into focus. They watched him with varying looks of concern, and he tried to smile reassuringly but it came out as a grimace. “I don’t think it worked.”

  “No,”
said Arik. “Not the way we intended. The wraith leader was powerful even before the curse, and afterward it was strong enough to drive the other spirits from the coast and claim a vast territory as its own. Now that territory is Haaraka.”

  “Haaracan il’Ninsyc’haithe,” said Ilshenrir. “The Realm of Lost Souls. The airahene, my people, sent reinforcements for our leader’s army but we were too late; our sanwy had already become the Carad Narath, the Thorn Protector. The spirits’ curse lets the Carad Narath lock our souls in its inescapable coils or bind them to mortal flesh—indeed, most of the folk of Haaraka are caiohene in soul but human in body, a wretched existence.”

  Cob stared at the hooded wraith, trying to sort through everything he had just learned. It hurt his head. “You’re tellin’ me I’m supposed to go into a place full of wraiths in human bodies—wraiths the Guardian helped trap, who now happen to be powerful necromancers—and ask them nicely to free us without eatin’ us?”

  “We would not eat you,” said Ilshenrir. “We are not carnivores.”

  “No, I meant…eat our souls.”

  “We are not the Ravager.”

  Cob scowled and looked to the others. “Anyone else know a friendly necromancer?”

  No response.

  “Fine. All right. Couple questions.” He looked to Ilshenrir again, who gestured his openness to them. “The wraiths that ran off…they’re the haelhene?”

  Ilshenrir nodded.

  “Where’d they go?”

  “To Ylwenna, the White Isle in the Atharenix Sea. They come out sometimes to harry the coast and the forest, and to aid your Emperor when he hires their services.”

  “Why?”

  “They…” Ilshenrir trailed off, mouth flattening under the shadow of his hood. “They are sick,” he said at last. “Deranged. Lured and enslaved by the entity that is the Isle. We would see them freed, but they do not agree with our judgment. They would see us made like them.”

  “Are there any of them in Haaraka? Their, uh, trapped souls.”

  “Yes.”