The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle)

by H. Anthe Davis

  The bolt blasted her away, tearing Serindas from its mooring.

  Trailing smoke, Dasira fell into the sea.

  *****

  At the moment Ilshenrir took to the sky, Lark had risen, thinking she could somehow assist in the aerial fight. But in their eye-straining native forms, the two wraiths moved with the deftness of minnows, and though she took aim many times with her bow, she never found a clear shot. Sometimes the wraiths even seemed tangled, their materials interlocked as if they were fighting over some invisible object.

  Despite what Ilshenrir had said about her arrows, she still wanted to be of use. When a burst of light illuminated the top of the spire, she cautiously moved closer, Arik pacing her in barely-controlled fury. Whatever was occurring there was only inside the spire though, and her fingers started to itch on the bowstring.

  For what seemed like a long time, nothing happened.

  Then a broad swath of the spire’s top disappeared like it had when the flyers docked, and she glimpsed figures up there and the flyers flexing their wings again. As they took flight through the clear space, she saw the cocoon that held Cob. Her heart sank.

  A last figure leapt through the air and hit the back of a raywing. A chain snapped. The cocoon swung wildly as it came half-free.

  That was all the sign Lark needed. The raywings hovered close to shore and the tiny figure up there was still moving, so she grabbed a handful of arrows from the quiver and planted them by her feet, then drew back on the one she had kept nocked. Taking aim at the flat underside of the flyer, where the red vents made clear targets, she set it loose.

  She did not look to see if it hit, but pulled the next arrow from the sand and did the same. The figure hung on the wing of the creature, scrabbling up, and she aimed for the beast’s other side lest she hit her comrade. The arrow flew and she pulled the next.

  A flash from the sky. The figure fell, twisting in midair. Lark steeled herself not to watch it and aimed for the flyer again, sensing Arik rush from her side toward the water.

  Third arrow in the air. She thought the flyer flinched. She pulled the next and drew it back, her arms already aching like fire.

  Fourth arrow. That one she saw clearly as it pierced the flyer's underside. The beast wobbled in the air, flecks of ichor falling from it, and the white-robed wraith on its back yanked at the reins to drive it further out to sea. Grabbing another arrow, Lark ran to the edge of the water, sea-foam around her boots, and buried it to the fletchings in the black flyer’s underbelly.

  It jolted once in the air, then started to spiral, the cocoon swinging like a pendulum beneath it. Lark reached back and found another arrow, but as the beast seemed in its death throes, she aimed for the white wraith, which had leapt from its back and now hung in the air, gathering threads of pallid energy from all points of the sky.

  A tingle of static ran across her, fuzzing the fletchings of her arrow, and she swallowed and backstepped but could not escape it. Oh shit, she thought.

  Then a bright streak crossed her vision and struck the wraith with force—the Ilshenrir-thing, pursued closely by the other white wraith. Ilshenrir curved in the air to evade his chaser and they darted into the sky again, but the wraith he had hit was hanging in tatters, visibly mangled. Below it, first the cocoon and then the flyer plunged into the sea.

  Despite the damage, the hovering wraith began gathering energy again. Grimacing, Lark ran the fletchings between her lips to rid them of the static, then nocked the arrow anew. The bands of red and black paint on the long shaft seemed to squirm, and on impulse she whispered, “T’okiel, guide me,” then let fly.

  The arrow sped true, hitting the wraith in the shoulder and sticking fast. It screamed like breaking glass, its white robe scintillating around the spot as if trying to repel it, but a small black shadow rose from the shaft as the wraith reached to yank it out. The shadow struck at its hand, then flew against its mask, beating tenebrous wings.

  A silvery shimmer surrounded the wraith then, and it vanished, leaving a falling arrow and dissipating shadow.

  Panting with excitement, Lark nocked another arrow just in case, but there was nothing to shoot. As if the disappearance of the damaged wraith had been a signal, the other shimmered and vanished in mid-flight, leaving the Ilshenrir-thing to glide a cautious circle around the spire before alighting in the sand at its base. She saw him set a hand on it and gritted her teeth as the structure hummed a disharmonic chord. A greenish pulse ran through it then concentrated in Ilshenrir’s grip.

  Out on the water, the fallen flyer lay like a black blanket, unmoving. Nothing else was visible.

  “Arik?” she called, suddenly nervous. “Das? Cob?”

  A wolfish muzzle pierced the surface briefly, out by the flyer. Shading her eyes, she moved along the shore toward it, trying to spot it again. The green light had faded from the spire but she noted Ilshenrir picking something up from the sand and tucking it in his cloak—something flat.

  Then she glimpsed the muzzle again, closer. “C’mon Arik!” she shouted to the waves.

  Moments later, the great beast arose from the shallows, water streaming from his silvery-grey coat and from his nostrils as he snorted hard. In his arms was a limp, sodden shape, and for a moment Lark’s stomach dropped. But then it coughed, and she saw a hand grapple weakly at Arik’s arm.

  The skinchanger waded up to the shore then went to one knee, gently setting down his burden and pulling a crystal chain away. Cob, freed from the cocoon, blinked blearily and coughed again, then spat a dark red wad onto the sand and groaned.

  “Thank the goddess, he’s alive,” said Fiora as she brushed past Lark to crouch at Cob’s side. She patted his face, and his eyes shifted toward her but did not focus. Still holding him, Arik growled softly.

  “Is Das—“ Lark started, then glimpsed movement on the sandbar: a bedraggled figure slogging up from the sea and tearing off ruined clothes with characteristic fury. Elated despite herself, Lark waved vigorously to the distant assassin, who raised a hand in reluctant acknowledgment.

  Wraith and assassin joined them quickly, and Dasira gazed down on Cob’s battered, half-conscious form with a strangely bleak expression. Scorches marred her cheek, neck and left arm, and much of her clothing had been burnt away, but she seemed indifferent to it.

  As for Ilshenrir, he looked bleached, his face as porcelain-blank as when she had first met him. His movement had lost fluidity, even his grey cloak stiff, and she guessed that this was the wraiths’ version of exhaustion—inability to maintain the illusion of mortal life.

  “We must depart,” he said in a faint, inflectionless voice. “Two of them remain, though they are injured, and their portal will bring more.”

  “Can you bring us into the Grey? Or open a portal?” said Lark, looking around nervously. The crowd of animals still watched them from a distance, a few of the more daring ones attempting faltering steps within the boundary of the spire’s aura, but beyond was only sand and sea and grass in all directions. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  “No,” said Ilshenrir. “I do not have the strength for a portal, and the Grey is not safe from my kind.”

  Biting her lip, Lark looked over her companions and considered their options. Run, hide, or…

  Her hand fell to one of the pouches on her belt, the one she had filled while in Kanrath-Neirai. She had not known then how thoroughly she would be abandoned by her folk, had just been working on instinct—to gather objects the eiyets might like—and had almost used it a few times during her trek with the Corvish. She was glad to have saved it for now. “I have an option, but you won’t like it. A shadowpath.”

  They looked to her in question and she continued, “I can’t open the way to the Shadow Realm myself; I’m unblood. But I can catch the attention of the eiyets. With enough incentive, they’ll help us.”

  Unless the eiyensuriel stop them.

  No, don’t be ridiculous. They might want ‘blooded control of Bah-kai, but not at the price of al
ienating the Guardian. Pikes, their silence might not be about Bah-kai at all.

  Dasira grimaced and turned back to Cob. Ilshenrir shook his hooded head. “I can not pass through the dark realm,” he said faintly. “Not as I am. It would devour me.”

  “You can track us though, right? We have the arrowhead.”

  “No we don’t,” said Dasira. “He said to take it off Cob but when I went to do that, it was gone.”

  “As a...lighter material, I believed it might restrict the Guardian,” said the wraith. “If my kin have claimed it, then they can track him as well as I could. This makes it imperative that you go now, while you can.”

  “But if you can’t find us—“

  With a sigh, Ilshenrir pulled his left glove down to expose a span of white forearm deformed by strange, faceted nodules. He snapped one off and offered it to Lark, the wound welling a pearly fluid. “Take this. Now I can find you.”

  Revolted yet intrigued, Lark accepted it. Warm to the touch, it was like a crystalline version of a bone spur, a few scraps of porcelain flesh still clinging to it. She opened her mouth to ask about it, but as if anticipating the question, Ilshenrir made a simple gesture and vanished in a shimmer of air.

  With a sigh, Lark tucked it away and looked to the others. “We need to move into the shade of a dune. This won’t be pleasant, but I don’t see any other options.”

  Arik nodded and lifted Cob again, cradling him like a child. Cob’s eyes had fallen shut, but his chest still moved; despite the blood he had hacked up, his breathing sounded normal.

  Lark took the lead, picking out the tallest dune nearby. It was outside of the spire’s repellant aura, and as they moved toward it, the masses of animals followed them, starting a chorus of questioning yips and calls that would have swiftly built to deafening had not Arik answered them with a roar. The sound nearly made Lark leap out of her skin, but it backed off all but the most persistent animals: two deer that, wild-eyed, seemed more than willing to brave the wolfbeast to reach the Guardian.

  Fortunately, Dasira intervened before the deer could trample them by stepping up and hissing. Simple though it was, it made both deer recoil, and after a few shaky backsteps, they fled.

  Relieved, Lark unlaced the pouch and shook its contents into the sand: dozens of striated obsidian beads. The eiyets loved shiny things, pretty things; returning what they stole to their victims was a constant drain on the Shadow Folk’s manpower. Settling down cross-legged before them, she said, “Das, do you happen to have another coin?”

  She heard Dasira grunt in annoyance, then a thin gold coin made an arc into her pile of beads. “Make it count.”

  Lark nodded and arranged the beads into the rough spiky shape of an eiyet, then drew her utility knife to make a shallow cut on her arm. She dabbed the gold coin in the blood then held it before the obsidian figure, wiggling it back and forth enticingly. “O ye who watch,” she intoned, “O thousand thousands of ancient eyes, hearken to me. I, named in shadow Lark of Bah-kai, call to the heart of the City of Dusk. I—“

  The sand of the dune shivered, and suddenly the weak shadow was a pane of dark glass through which hundreds of glossy black eyes stared. Lark felt the hollowness of the air, the basement-chill, and heard the others draw startled breaths.

  She was sure she looked just as surprised. She had not even finished the ritual. But though she squinted, she could see no shadowbloods beyond the mob of eiyets—no indication that her folk had helped.

  Pain to be here, hissed the black gathering in a voice that sent shivers up her spine. Pain to be near fallen stars.

  “I’m sorry. I really am. But my friends and I need a shadowpath to Turo. Guardian, Trifolder, skinchanger, Kheri, we are your people and we beg your assistance.”

  That one is not our people, they hissed, and Lark was glad they spoke in their own sibilant tongue, because their beady eyes fixed on Dasira as they spoke.

  “She offers gold again,” Lark said, holding up the coin. The darkness reached out in response, hundreds of tiny spiky hands meshed into a matte black mass, but she lifted it away. “We need a path for all of us to travel safely. Please. For the Guardian’s sake.”

  Their gazes shifted to Cob, then to Lark again. Yes, they hissed after a long silence. We open path. Then you run.

  Lark winced. That was far from a promise of safe conduct, but it was the best they would get without a shadowblood. She sheathed the knife and gestured for the others to come close, and after a moment felt their hands gripping the back of her coat. Holding the coin out to the reaching darkness, she said, “Thank you, little siblings. Here is our offering.”

  The tiny hands engulfed the coin, then her hand, her arm. They reached toward her face and she ducked her head to let them, their tiny pinching fingers running over her scalp and neck and clothes. They pulled insistently and she felt herself pitching forward, stumbling—

  —then her feet struck the white road of the Shadow Realm, its luminous ribbon forming through the orange-tinged dusk before her. The plucking fingers diminished, the gold coin gone.

  She paused just long enough to reach back and clasp hands with Dasira—the assassin wild-eyed, eiyets in her hair and hanging by her collar but not biting, not tearing, not yet—and then she was running the shadowpath as it unspooled into the dimness, the others' footfalls sharp and fast behind her as a great curtain of blackness ate up their backtrail.

  *****

  Unnoticed, a tattered trellingil fell from its perch among the thorny scrub, the power that had possessed it gone.

  *****

  Dasira had almost been in the Shadow Realm before. In Bahlaer, the cultists had tried to pull her through, but she had managed to fight free.

  Now she saw what she had been fighting.

  The path they traveled was nothing rational, nothing bound by material law. It corkscrewed through emptiness, yet somehow her feet stayed on it like magnets. In the murky distance, other paths branched and crisscrossed like the web of a drunken spider, and at their nexus hung a massive solid shape like a black spindle, riddled with buildings and marked by the glow of myriad lamps. Sometimes it was above them, sometimes below, as they ran the crazed curve of the path.

  The eiyets had receded, but she still sensed their attention. She held onto Lark with one hand and Fiora with the other, their living chain necessary even though it made running difficult. Their path seemed to create itself in front of Lark’s feet and disintegrate not far past Arik’s tail, and she had the bad feeling that if she let go, the path would cut off after Lark instead.

  “What the pike is this?” she hollered at Lark’s back.

  “A temporary road,” Lark said, glancing over her shoulder briefly. In the weird light, the whites of her eyes stood out as if aglow. “We’re lucky. The first part was an eiyenbridge, and if we’d stayed on it, it’d piking kill us. I think we’re headed for the Turo depot. Just keep running.”

  Dasira grimaced but obeyed. She had expected to be ripped apart by the shadow things, but being in here was not much better. She kept an eye on the specks that moved in the hollow space not filled by paths or spindle, their motions like char aswirl in the wind. They might have been eiyets, but they looked distant—very distant—which meant they would be much bigger up close, like raywings flying the unfelt currents of darkness.

  Her adrenaline was ebbing. On her arm, the bracer clenched and unclenched spasmodically, injecting its chemicals as best it could in its scorched state, and she tried to ignore the creeping resurgence of pain. There was no chance to drain Serindas, after all, not here and probably not in Turo. She would have to suffer through.

  Their run stretched on. The view shifted constantly as the path twisted and coiled, and it was difficult to control the sense of vertigo. For a brief while she ran with her eyes closed, feet hammering unerringly on the path, but though that quelled the rolling nausea, she could not sustain it. She could not bear to be blind.

  Finally, their self-creating path converged with a
more permanent one, and Lark led them onto it. Dasira glanced back to see the old road disintegrate into eiyets, which leapt up to cling to Arik’s silvery mane and to Cob, whom Arik held in a cross-shoulder carry. They covered the wounds in Cob’s back with their bodies, and Dasira bared her teeth, afraid of what they might be doing, but had no way to intercede.

  “Not much further!” called Lark as she led them up the path, which pointed straight into darkness with no sign of branching.

  As direct as the route was, it still went on forever. By the time the black door approached, Dasira was on the verge of collapse. The others were still plodding forward, and she knew that half of her fatigue was from the darkness itself; shaped by Enkhaelen and forged in the Imperial Light, she could not survive here. Her bracer had long since subsided into uneasy sleep.

  Lark slowed them to a walk as they drew close to the exit. Dasira eyed it past her shoulder. It was not really a door, just a rectangle of deepest darkness at the end of the path, its edges spiked like an eiyet. For all she could tell, it might have been the start of a corridor into eternity.

  “Whatever you do, don’t let go of each other,” Lark said, casting one last glance over everyone. Her face was stiff with fear, which sent an answering coil of anxiety through Dasira’s stomach. Fiora’s hand tightened on hers.

  “All right, here we go,” said Lark, and crossed the black threshold.

  Dasira followed to find herself in a tunnel of whispers and tiny hands. They tugged and pinched like when she had entered, but harder, and after only a few moments she felt the sting as they drew blood. Instantly the whispers became a hiss, and the tunnel pressed in around her, the hands clutching everywhere, digging in, shredding—

  Then Lark shouted something in a strange tongue, and Dasira flinched as several small hard things hit her in the face and chest then bounced away. The hissing walls split into fragments, struggling over whatever Lark had thrown. Fortunately none had gone down her shirt.