by Rin Chupeco
Sumiko’s healing was different from what Lan and other Catseyes have done for me in the past. I would normally feel the warmth along my chest, where they would concentrate their patterns, targeting the black hole above my heart I had long learned to live with, and because of which I had learned to accept that my life would be shorter than most.
But Catseye Sumiko focused somewhere higher, and I felt a lightness gathering around my temple, as if all the worries that had been festering in my mind in the last few weeks had been temporarily expunged from my soul.
“This isn’t permanent,” Catseye Sumiko warned me, taking her hand away. “It never is. But I’ve found that this helps in times that demand the most strength from us. If you ever feel the need to bolster your spirits, Your Holiness, please find me again.”
“I will.” I glanced over to Lan and the others. “Have you offered this to them? They have more burdens on their mind than I do.”
“Lady Tianlan, you mean?” Sumiko shook her head sadly. “She turns me down every time, Your Holiness. I wish she wouldn’t. Hers is a more serious affliction than most.”
“What do you mean?”
“May I sit?” At my nod, Sumiko gathered her skirts and set herself down on a log. “There are physical sicknesses,” she said. “Injuries that one can see and observe, such as broken bones and open wounds. But there are other kinds of sicknesses that go beyond visible form, all the more dangerous because they are not so easily detected.
“And sometimes the people who suffer these injuries don’t believe they have them, or are unwilling to seek treatment for many reasons. Sometimes it’s pride. Sometimes it’s a sincere belief that there is nothing wrong. But more often it is because of shame. To accept that they need assistance implies that they are weak, that they cannot take care of themselves.”
That sounded a lot like Lan. “I see,” I said softly.
“Lady Tianlan . . . is a stubborn woman, and in her line of work that quality works very much in her favor. But her strength cannot always be constant. To protect, she believes that she cannot ever be vulnerable. She is a very proud lady. That is also a disadvantage.”
“And that’s why she’s refused your help? Since returning from the wildlands?”
“She suffers much guilt over the deaths of her comrades.”
“But that’s ridiculous!” As able a fighter as Lan was, she couldn’t have saved everyone. That she had survived was a miracle on its own.
Sumiko shifted. “I must admit that I do have a motive for approaching you in this manner, Your Holiness. I know that Lady Tianlan is your guardian, and that you two are close. She will not listen to me, but I hope that she would listen to someone she trusts more.”
I snorted. I was the last person Lan wanted to see right now, especially after our fight.
After our last kiss.
The memory still thrilled me, made my breath catch. I ducked my head down to hide my heated face. “I’ll try,” I said roughly. “I can’t make any promises, though. As you said, Lan can be very stubborn.”
Sumiko smiled her relief, rising. “That’s all I can hope for, Your Holiness. You have my deepest thanks. If you will excuse me, there are others who also need consoling.” She inclined her head respectfully at Cathei, before picking her way to the others.
I wasn’t sure how successful I was going to be. But if Sumiko was right and Lan was suffering . . .
Tell her you love her, idiot.
Gracea saw me stand, glared before deliberately turning away. Even now, I thought, anger growing, she was trying to usurp my position. She must have been persuading the other Devoted that I was too young, too impulsive, too reckless. She didn’t care about Cathei. She’d denigrated me in front of everyone else, abused her staff, mocked Lan. . . .
I wanted to break her.
I would have to do something about her soon.
I turned back toward Cathei and stopped.
The body was gone. Where there should have been a definite human shape underneath that faded cloak, there was nothing lying beneath the cover but even ground.
I whirled, about to shout my discovery, but everyone else was gone, too. The small bursts of light that Gracea used for illumination had disappeared. Even the Brevity, once a looming silhouette against the silver of the lake, was missing.
“Hello?” I called out, attempting my own flares of light, then dispelling them immediately. The galla wouldn’t hurt me, but there were many other demons in the wildlands not as accommodating. As terrifying as the darkness was, any light out here would be a beacon for them to find me.
I knelt and pressed my palms against the soil. The ground was a series of networks that I could access, every pathway of vine and plant a point on an invisible map that I could feel. In my heightened state, I could feel every possible seed and plant nestled beneath, and I let my newfound bond with them draw my mind farther out, using the ground as a map to guide me, to alert me to anything else that moved in this silence.
There was something farther north; not a movement I would define as human, but something that slithered, crawled. The idea chilled me more than the cold winds blowing through the area, but I had no choice. There was nothing else that suggested life here; if I were to escape this nightmare, I had to look for anything that might bring me out of this trap.
I formed sharp vines around my arms and manifested a sliver of light as a makeshift sword, wishing I’d thought to procure one of Noelle’s weapons. “I’m a goddess of Aranth,” I muttered to myself. “Mother has faced worse. I can survive this. I will survive this.”
So dark, though. So cold.
The ground broke apart beneath me, and I shrieked, leaping back.
Lan had never told me the particulars of what she’d had to face in her last mission, but I had heard enough of the gossip spread about, even from my lonely perch in the Spire. There’d been shadows the size of rogue waves climbing out from the ground, slicing the men and women into ribbons with their claws and feasting on them with their fangs. This new monstrosity rising before me was one of them.
I attacked first. The vines on my arms uncurled, lengthened, whipped out. They punched a hole right through the giant, but it shrugged off the assault. It reached for me again, and this time I saw that what it lacked in a face, it more than made up for in incisors; black as night, yet still shining, sharp and gleaming and obsidian, in the near night.
I conjured up everything I could think of—blades of air, jagged ice walls to impede its approach, more vines, but it brushed off the blades like they were nothing, tore down the ice walls like they were made of paper, and ripped away the vines. I was running by then but knew it would catch up to me before long.
Inanna’s shadow. The thought crossed my mind out of nowhere, born out of fear rather than logic. This is Inanna’s shadowed self, angry that I take the gifts intended for her!
A spark of light up ahead. The shadow this time was a familiar one; another ox-horned demon, a glittering brooch of sapphires coiled on its breast.
I ran toward it, even as the malignant darkness pursued, the shuddering of the earth a testament to its rage as every step brought it closer. I could feel the tips of its claws grazing my cloak, and I whipped a hand back without thinking, gathering the first patterns I could detect and lobbing them behind me. I heard it yelp in pain for the first time, enough to convince me to look back.
Parts of the creature were on fire. I stumbled, mesmerized by the sight of flames I had never been able to command in such volume or magnitude. And then my survival instincts kicked in, and I managed the last few feet separating me and the sapphire-studded demon practically on my knees, my fingertips brushing against the shadow’s own outstretched hand.
The world disappeared around me again—the flames, the shadow—and I was left in total darkness. Come, that now-familiar voice intoned in my head.
I knew what was coming. Another sacrifice, another gift. My fourth galla; the galla of life. How appropriate.
Come.
As always, my mouth formed the same word, took the same risk. Yes.
I could feel unseen things brushing against me, jerked at a sudden cold touch across my chest, and it felt like something that had been locked away, a part of me I had always restrained and held back, was finally set free.
And Cathei. Oh heaven and below, Cathei.
She stood before me, a formless wisp with features I nonetheless recognized. Poor Cathei, who had been so eager to be part of something greater, beyond the daily drudge of a Devoted’s clerkship. Cathei, who had trusted in me, believing I was strong enough to protect her from harm. Nobody paid much attention to Cathei back when she was alive, for all her eagerness to please—I hadn’t, and I was sorry for it now.
I reached for that silvery figure. When I touched her cheek, she felt almost warm.
And then she shimmered back into nothingness, and I was alone.
Be satisfied. A divine power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You must not open your mouth against the rites of the underworld.
A delirious sort of freedom swept over me, and then I found myself returned to the wildlands. The galla that had chased me was gone, and so was the hulking giant of a shadow, though the faint smell of char and smoke remained, stealing into the air. I had traveled a considerable distance from the campsite.
I placed my hands on the ground again, was rewarded by irregular beats and patterns of feet on soil, a few hundred yards away; I made it back, I realized, relief sweeping through.
“Where have you been?” Lan all but screeched the instant I stepped back into the light. Her face was wan, and I felt terrible.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, “but it’s not my fault.”
She had every right to be angry, but the arms that folded around me were gentle, trembling. “Tell me everything.”
I tried to be as brief as I could. The other Devoted listened with furrowed brows and worried faces. “That must have been how they took Cathei,” Graham finally said. “This is troubling. We could remain within the safety of our circle and they could still pick us off.”
No, I thought. The Galla sought out only me this way, for the gifts they owed me. This is not how Cathei died.
“Where is Cathei now?” Noelle asked suddenly.
The body was still missing. “If this is a trick—” the Starmaker threatened.
“There is no trick.” My palms were drenched in sweat, as I began to shiver. “I—I know where she is.”
“Did you hide her body? Your Holiness, this is not a game—”
“Shut up and let her speak, Gracea,” Lan snapped.
“I brought her back.”
They stared at me, uncomprehending. “What do you mean, ‘brought her back’?” Lan finally asked.
A shuffling sound nearby was as sharp as a twig breaking, arresting all our attentions. It reverberated from the opposite side of the camp, away from the ship.
I was not surprised when she slid into view. The horrified gasps around me, though, said otherwise.
Cathei looked nearly the same. Her eyes were still gray and her brown hair had lost none of its luster. But her skin had acquired a glossy sheen that looked almost transparent, and she seemed to slide in and out of the shadows—there one second and then not in the next, but so quickly that you could only observe a strange jittering of her body, the way one’s vision blurred in the middle of a heavy rain.
“Cathei?” I heard Janella cry out.
The newly resurrected woman said nothing. Her gaze was a careful blank, as if emotions were a luxury she no longer needed. She turned toward me, inclined her head respectfully as she would have done days before, and stepped back out of the light and into the blackness.
Immediately, Lan dashed forward, stopping at the spot where she had vanished. “Gracea,” she barked, and needed no other words as the Starmaker increased the luminosity of her patterns. “She’s gone. It’s like she was never here. Odessa . . . ?”
It didn’t matter. She was here in some form, and that was all that counted. The galla of life, indeed. She was as alive as she could ever be.
“I brought her back,” I whispered, terrified and strangely exhilarated. “Oh, Lan. I—I brought her back.” And then I threw my head back and laughed wildly at the storm clouds gathering ominously above.
Chapter Sixteen
Haidee and the Pirates
I WAS IN BIG TROUBLE.
I knew it from the moment I woke. I could still view the Sand Sea from where I lay, the mounds of fine dirt moving back and forth along the boundary like they were waves crashing against a shore. There was no sign of the other dolugongs.
But Parrick—oh, my beautiful Parrick. The dolugong was clearly dead, hanging from a small scaffold to be butchered for food. I scrambled for him, only to discover that I couldn’t move.
I was heavily bound. My arms had been tied behind my back, and for good measure a shackle encircled one of my ankles, its other end chained to a wooden post behind me. Faint laughter from somewhere nearby told me people were present; the sand nomads from before.
They were camped a hundred feet away from the edge of the Sand Sea—the solid construction of the outpost and tents suggested that the encampment was more permanent than I would have expected for nomads in the desert. Most were hauling in the gigantic sand creature we’d encountered, or at least a huge portion of it. They strung up heavy chunks of its body, but the pieces were smaller than the monster I’d seen out there. They’d either left most of it out in the sea to rot, or the rest of the creature had gotten away.
Judging from the preparations around the campfire, I presumed it was supper. They were roasting large slabs of meat, and for a brief moment I panicked, wondering if they were cannibals and if I was next, before spotting a long, skinned tail and realizing it was the rest of the sand creature. I was silently glad they had elected to start with the monster and not with poor Parrick.
One of the men spotted me, made a gesture for the others to be silent before making his way over to where I sat. He was an evil-looking man, heavily muscular, with an eye patch and an overly large beard to compensate for his bald head. He crouched down before me and said something in a language I was unfamiliar with, but with a tone I understood all too well.
I glared at him. “Release me,” I snarled, trying to look my most intimidating.
The man shook his head and asked me another question.
“I said release me!” I pulled against my restraints. I tried to gate, reaching out expectantly for the patterns—and found nothing.
A sudden, sickening wave of exhaustion washed over me, and I collapsed on the ground, my breathing uneven.
The sandstorm I had summoned. I had never channeled that powerful an incanta in my life, or called up something of such immense scale. Even my mother, who had more strength and aptitude than I did, would never have created one on her own; when sandstorms strayed too close to the Golden City, she would recruit me or one of the other Devoted to dispel it with her.
I was utterly drained. I was useless.
I couldn’t fight my way out of this.
I was in big trouble.
Eye Patch shook his head and continued to talk, occasionally pointing at what looked to be the hulking remains of one of their sand buggies, no doubt a direct consequence of my experiments with said sandstorm.
I kicked sand in his direction in response. They’d killed Parrick. And Arjun was missing, and I was terrified that something had happened to him, that he was dead somewhere in this camp and they were going to spring that surprise on me to break my spirit.
Because it would.
Don’t you dare die on me, you stupid ass. Don’t you dare die on me!
Eye Patch pointed at my hair and raised his eyebrows.
“Yes, it’s my natural color, you killer,” I spat out. “I’m the goddess of the Golden City. The rightful ruler of Aeon. And if you don’t let me go, I’ll do more than destroy your rides. I’ll end your whol
e tribe, I swear it.”
Eye Patch laughed loudly, silver teeth gleaming, then rose to his feet. He said a few more words that sounded more admonition than threat, before departing to help his fellow murderers divide up their monstrous prize.
How was I going to get out of here? I didn’t have any of my mechanika equipment. I had no rig, no dolugongs, no Arjun.
Don’t you dare die on me, Arjun. If you die and show up as a mirage, I’ll chase you as long as I need to so I can strangle you. Because you’re not dead. I won’t let you be dead!
I glanced back at Parrick and allowed myself a sob. Some savior I turned out to be. I couldn’t even save a dolugong.
Once the tears had ebbed, I rattled at my chain. It felt solid enough, and if I’d had enough strength to gate, I could have burned the metal off in a minute. I gave it a good hard yank again, but it refused to give.
I studied the wooden post it was wrapped around. Parts of it had rotted away from insects and old age, and its total diameter couldn’t be bigger than two inches. Easier to destroy than the shackle, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take without any incanta on hand.
The sun above wasn’t as glaring, at least, and I could even feel a cool wind coming in from somewhere. We must have traveled far enough west for the change in climate to become obvious.
I stole another glance back at camp; despite the display of power I’d shown them at the Sand Sea, none of them seemed inclined to station a guard over me, like some girl come whirling out of the desert blasting sandstorms was something they saw on a frequent basis.
They’d have their meal soon enough. When most were asleep would probably be the best time to escape.
But first I had to figure out how.
I struggled to a sitting position, waited until the dizziness had passed. I focused on the part of the wooden post I deemed the flimsiest, a section that looked easiest to snap off.
The blade of Air I conjured was smaller than even a needle, thin because that was all I could manage without throwing up. I let it hover in the air briefly, until the faint vertigo disappeared, then introduced it to the compromised wood. A faint buzzing whirred through the air, too low for the others to hear, and small chips flew out as the Air dug greedily into the surface, slowly but surely whittling it down. I paused to take a breather every few minutes, annoyed by my weakness.