The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle)

by H. Anthe Davis

  Swallowing, Cob nodded slowly. He did not understand much about the dynamic of the Great Spirits, but the Ravager was right; the newer Guardians like Haurah and Erosei were not like the ones that had come before Enkhaelen. He had started to wonder if they merited the name.

  But he did not like this. He was not surprised that the Ravager would turn on its host, yet something nagged at him, something that slipped through his fingers when he tried to grasp it.

  Something was not right.

  “Ko Vrin,” said the Ravager softly, “he is everything that we oppose. A corruptor of bodies and souls, a maker of monstrosities, of creatures that should never have walked this world. He has conspired with the Outsiders and with the wraiths to ruin this land and destroy its spirits. He uses our knowledge and power to spitefully undo everything we have wrought. He has imprisoned the Guardian in you and made a cage of the armies he leads and the Empire he controls. Worst, he is the firebird, the false Light—using our form to wrest worship from the true spirit of Light that once held the people's reverence. You must release us from him, or this world will surely fall to his madness.”

  Closing his eyes, Cob saw Morshoc at the Riftwatch towers, sending bolts of energy out as casually as swatting flies. He saw Enkhaelen in Haaraka, raising the dead to do his bidding, and saw him in the forest outside Daecia City with the still-living head of a skinchanger in his grip.

  He saw him in the cave-mouth, lightning streaking the black sky behind him, his eyes lit by some feral glee.

  “I already wanted him dead,” he said softly. “You don’t need to convince me.”

  “We only wish you to know that you have allies in the true Light,” said the Ravager, leaning forward. Its wings flexed oddly against the back wall, and its smile seemed at once carnivorous and strained. “We will give you what openings we can make. That is why we brought you here.”

  “What’s here beside nightmares?”

  The Ravager opened its mouth to speak, but as it did, the light spilling in from the low windows went out, and the creature flinched backward. In the loss of the light’s illusion, the wings became dingy, rotten things, its body desiccated and riddled with holes. With a look of alarm, Lerien flickered into his hawk-form and vanished.

  A black gauntlet clasped Cob’s shoulder. Another clutched his arm. They pulled him back into a forest of dark-armored bodies. Erosei and Haurah stepped before him, raising swords and claws with grim purpose.

  “What did it tell you?” said Dernyel, holding onto him as the two vicious Guardians advanced on the Ravager. The creature hunched forward, its long claws spread to fight, its wings wide and teeth bared in a monstrous snarl. In the dimness, Cob glimpsed thin filaments running from its wings to the cocooned ceiling like puppet strings.

  Cob looked at Dernyel, who was armored for war like the others, the oddly blurred silver blade clasped in one hand. “Father,” he said. “It was tryin’ to—“

  The Ravager’s pale gaze fixed on him, ignoring the Guardians. “That is not your father,” it snarled.

  “And you’re not our Ravager,” said Erosei.

  His blades flashed down, and Cob felt the impact in his gut just beneath the end of his breastbone, like the swords had been driven into him instead of the Ravager. It shrieked—a horrible sound, part raptor’s scream, part man, part metal being riven—but only strained forward with its claws as Erosei’s blades rose again, Haurah following.

  And Cob saw that strands of webbing held its arms too, and its wings, its ribs and thighs, all pulled taut by the creature’s straining. They kept it pinioned, unable to do more than thrash and scream as the blades and fangs tore through rotted feathers and weak bone, sheared muscle, sent shards of claws and talons flying as it tried to defend itself.

  It was not a fight.

  It was an execution.

  Cob tried to step forward, bile rising, but Dernyel’s grip was like stone. He could only watch as the two Guardians reduced the Ravager to a shrieking bloodless rag of feathers, and only when Haurah tore out its decaying throat did it cease its awful keen.

  But it did not stop fighting. It was a long, long time before the last joint snapped and the creature finally slumped, struck from its strings.

  The Guardians turned to Cob then, Erosei grinning in that fanatical way, Haurah panting through her thread-striped muzzle.

  “Go on, we saved the last shot for you,” said Erosei.

  Beyond them, the Ravager lifted its battered head, its face half gone. The torn flesh revealed an eye-socket huge like a bird’s, and the shattered jaw hung from a strand of sinew, exposing more pallid tongue and inner throat than Cob had ever wanted to see. Its teeth were shattered, its wings no more than mangled stumps, its arms gone along with great chunks of its torso.

  One cold eye remained, and it stayed locked on Cob as Dernyel pressed the blurry sword into his hands and pushed him forward. Cob stared at the distorted blade, then at the Ravager, who somehow, in some ghastly manner, seemed to smile.

  “These are the bonds on you,” said Dernyel. “This is their source. Destroy it.”

  With a silent nod, Cob raised the blade and brought it down on the Ravager’s skull.

  The blade clove through with a sickening crunch. Then white light flooded from every inch of the Ravager—searing, blinding, invasive light that jabbed its fingers past Cob’s eyelids into his head. He squinted hard against it, because despite the glare he sensed that something was still there like a shadow in the radiance, caged inside the empty husk. A form; a figure kneeling—

  Something wrenched in his chest, as if someone had gripped his sternum and given it a firm yank. From it came a searing pain, singular at first before radiating outward in a stinging net. He gritted his teeth and felt it peel away like a layer of skin, and for a moment knowledge and sensation poured into the gap, filling him with flashes of lands unknown, of hidden cities, ice and heat and endless labyrinths, stone spires like needles, pain, glory, that first abhorrent sundering—

  It cut off like a slamming door. Darkness descended, the shapeless afterimages dancing on his retinas. Darkness and absence; no crippled Ravager, no cocoons, no twining threads. No sword in his hands.

  No floor beneath his feet.

  He acted before he understood, sheer instinct making him grab outward in mid-fall. A slap against his palms, a near-dislocating shock through his arms and shoulders, and he hung perilously in the gap where the garret floor had rotted through. Empty air stirred beneath his kicking feet. Through the dissipating blindness, he saw the nearest intact floor: the stone foundation three stories down.

  Swearing in panic, he looked around. Dim light slitted through holes in the roof, and above where the Ravager had crouched there was no roof at all, only blackened spars piercing the sky. The tight staircase he had climbed was in ruins, only a handful of steps still clinging to the central pillar. He had grabbed onto one of the few remaining floor-planks, not more than an inch thick and two inches wide and slanted from where it had broken off its old mooring to nestle in a lower cross-brace. The floors below had thoroughly collapsed, depositing a mass of splintered timbers and rotted furnishings into the basement beneath a thin dusting of snow.

  The Guardians leaned over the gap above, no surprise showing on their faces. He wanted to spit at them.

  "You coulda warned me," he called instead, trying to stay calm. The plank could not hold him if he gave in to panicked thrashing. He had to feel through it, awaken it like he had awoken other broken branches...

  “We were not here,” said Haurah, crouching at the edge. “We only surfaced when the nightmare ended.”

  “If you say so,” Cob muttered, and concentrated on awakening the plank. It burst into life so quickly that he nearly lost his grip, the grain writhing under his hands as it produced new bark. By the time he told it to stop, it had already embedded roots and branches into both walls, a horizontal sapling.

  He hung there for a long moment, blinking, then said, “Are the bonds
broken?”

  “Yes.” He looked up to see Jeronek at the edge, and wondered where he and Vina had been while the others were mangling the Ravager. Probably behind him. “The large splinter is destroyed. It is what maintained the soul-hooks. The little one remains, but it is no longer a threat.”

  So they can leave whenever they like, thought Cob. Hanging here in empty space, that felt more like a threat than a victory. He glanced up to Erosei, who grinned in response—an avid grin like a spectator’s at a duel, certain of his entertainment.

  Next to him, Dernyel stood with sword in hand, the weapon no longer a blur but a keen Muriae silver blade. Cob’s gaze stayed fixed to his father’s face, though. It was like staring at a mask: dark eyes allowing no window into his thoughts, weathered features showing neither approval nor concern.

  ‘That is not your father.’

  He twitched, but it was just an echo in his mind. Not the Ravager, not anything but memory. Still, he swore he saw Dernyel’s eyes narrow.

  His arms hurt. He knew he should pull himself up to the garret and the Guardians, not just hang here like an idiot, but suddenly the idea of standing among them felt reprehensible. Is that what changed him? he thought, still watching his father. Being among the predator-Guardians? Do I really want to follow his path?

  But he had come this far.

  No point in going up, though. Got to get down, got to find my friends.

  It took effort, but he forced his gaze from Dernyel to the splintered wood around him. Bit by bit, plank by plank, he force-grew his own ladder through the ruined space, hands aching, arms shaking from the strain of suspending himself. He knew it was far more rapid than any work he could have done before being released from his bonds, but still it felt like an eternity before he could look down and see the tangle of debris in the basement only a few feet below.

  He started to grow a branch sideways, thinking to clamber across it to a gap in the ground floor wall, but then glimpsed something glimmering in the shadows at the far end of the basement. Something silvery.

  Glancing up, he saw that the Guardians were gone, even Dernyel. He frowned, but looked back to the glimmer and lowered himself onto the pile of furniture and ice.

  His feet did not skid on the slick surface; he felt as steady on it as on flat earth. Through the ice and old wood he felt the stone floor, then the earth beneath it and all the wood and rock of the manor, all the residual magic that kept it standing. Is that how I got up there? he wondered, peering into the hollowed garret again. The Ravager working old magic through me?

  Creepy.

  Beyond the collapsed flooring, the basement was relatively debris-free. Ice covered the ground in a thick translucent sheet and icicles rimed the tomb-like rows of stone slabs, but the chamber stretched otherwise unharmed for over a dozen yards, with rune-covered steel beams latticing the ceiling—obviously why this part of the structure had not failed. Moving among them cautiously, Cob noted rotted straps hanging from steel rings in the slabs, and remembered waking up on such a one in Thynbell.

  Not tombs, then.

  Past the slabs were a few feet of bare space and then the rear wall. A doorway gaped like an empty socket, rusted hinges hanging from the stone. The dim light of the broken ceiling barely slid a finger in this far, but the glimmering thing he had seen was there.

  He stepped in cautiously, and his breath caught in his throat.

  That single shaft of light had struck a corner of the glimmering object and refracted through it, making it fairly glow in the confines of the narrow room: a coffin of faceted glass, nearly transparent and raised on a silver bier. Motes of light danced on the walls like stars as he moved around it.

  The lid was askew and partially shattered. Shards glistened like tears on the cheeks of the woman inside: the Muriae Jessamyn, Enkhaelen's wife, her long silver hair loose about her shoulders and her eyes closed as if in sleep. A thin ice-blue band glinted on her left ring-finger. No mark of time had touched her though she must have died long ago; her face still held a suggestion of stern will, as if she might sit up at any moment and lecture the one who had been so unmilitant as to unweave her war-braid.

  She might have worn a funeral dress once, but the fabric had rotted away with the shattering of the lid, leaving her bare but for a corselet and girdle of silver-edged steel. Above the corselet, cracks ran through her dusky skin to expose silver veins.

  Cob knew the story of the Muriae—that they were pure living silver masked in human façades, that they emerged full-grown from the earth and never died. He did not know if it was true, but this woman was gone. What remained on the bier was a husk.

  Her lifeless hands clasped the hilt of a silver sword.

  His shoulders tensed, and he squinted out of the room as if he might see the Guardians there, or the Ravager. Or Enkhaelen. In his heart, he knew that the blur around these silver swords had been the necromancer's doing—that there was something about them that Enkhaelen needed to smudge out. And now he knew.

  He did not want to do this. Not after the nightmare. And stealing from a revered Silver One left a foul taste in his mouth.

  But he had been drawn here for a reason.

  "I'll bring this back when I'm done," Cob whispered to the cold, stern face. "I promise."

  He reached down to part the hands from the hilt, hating himself, expecting that at any moment those closed eyes would snap open and those hands would grip him by the throat and crush it. But that did not happen. A skin of ice crackled off the metal as he pulled the blade free, and with great care he drew it through the shattered lid. The woman never stirred.

  It was a long weapon, longer than the one his father had wielded: over four feet from pommel to point, with a hand-and-a-half hilt wrapped in braided wire. The crossguard was short, the whole blade straight as an arrow, almost no taper to it and only a stub of pommel at the end of the grip. Almost aggressively plain, it bore no etchings or decorations, only the sheen of its high polish. The upper quarter of the blade was unsharpened, ricasso, but the edge on the rest looked as keen as if whetted yesterday.

  He lifted it reverently, hardly able to believe that he was touching a Muriae blade. It was a comfortable weight in his hands. He had never much liked swords, but this one...

  "I will return it," he said again. "If not to here, then to Muria where it belongs. I will show my respect."

  All was silent in the sepulcher, no answer returning. Resting the flat of the blade on his shoulder, he bowed to the bier, then moved out of the chamber, past the slabs, to the fallen ceiling.

  Through the crumbling walls he felt the roots he had made already digging in at ground level. They responded to his touch, weaving into steps that led into open air at a point where the manor wall had been breached. He stepped through into the yard and surveyed the broken masonry, the exposed foundation-stones, the corners full of windblown snow and the beds of winter-dead weeds. Everything before had been illusion.

  Questions lingered, but he was tired of thinking.

  A flash of light came from beyond the hedges, cobalt blue stitched with white, like sudden lightning. Then another.

  He grimaced. That would be Enkhaelen.

  Bolting down the steps into the maze, he let the hedges direct him to the wrought black gate. Through its bars he saw his friends at bay and the unmistakable form of the necromancer.

  As much as he wanted to rush out there, he dared not. He saw Dasira on the ground unmoving, Ilshenrir not far from her, the other three cowering. If he attacked while they were near, Enkhaelen would kill them as surely as he had obliterated everyone at Riftwatch.

  Then he thought of the nightmare, and of the Enkhaelen-echo’s panic and confusion, and smiled grimly as the Guardian’s black armor surged up to protect him.

  He had a plan.

  Chapter 25 – Force Counterforce

  Lark hid behind Arik as the necromancer passed, though the skinchanger was no less cringing than her. Enkhaelen rushed by without a glance, and as he
disappeared through the gate, Lark looked mournfully to the fallen.

  And saw both stir.

  Her heart leapt into her throat. Indecision held her for a moment, then she rushed to Dasira’s side, wincing at the mangled state of the assassin’s face. The bone that showed through the place where her ear had been was deeply scorched and cracked, her jaw dislocated, her right eye twitching in its damaged socket. Yet both eyes turned toward Lark as she crouched nearby, and despite being unfocused, they showed sentience; her lips shifted slightly as if she meant to speak, but her damaged jaw would not allow it.

  “Just…just stay still. You’ll be fine,” Lark told her, eyes watering in visceral discomfort. Thin white threads peeked slightly from the borders of the damaged flesh but had yet to begin restitching her. It seemed she nodded marginally and let her gaze slide away, so Lark rose again, weak in the knees.

  She saw Arik and Fiora pull Ilshenrir to his feet. The wraith looked less human than ever, his eyes just crystal circles in a mask of a face, but that alien mien did not negate the horror of the ragged gashes that scored his cheeks. The teeth-marks. His fine hair looked like spun glass, two hanks of it sheared away to show ichor-welling furrows along his scalp. A faint yellow light pulsed at the base of his throat like a candle-flame seen through milky glass, not strong enough to return any color or detail to his frame.

  “He didn’t finish?” Lark said. “I thought he was— He tried to eat you. Your face—”

  “Drained me,” said Ilshenrir, the words coming hollow and stilted through a mouth that did not move. “Could have bitten through my shell and devoured me, but…no.”

  “Probably just lack of time,” said Fiora, looking toward the hedge-maze gate. “We need to follow them. We can still—“

  “Die?” said Lark sharply. “Arik can’t do anything against him, Ilshenrir looks like he’s about to break, and I have one arrow left.” She flicked the arrow to make it rattle sadly in its quiver. “What do you think we’re gonna do?”