The Lightless Tree

by J. A. Comley

  The Nightstalker shrugged. “It is a title his followers have given him,” his tone making it clear that it was of no importance what the man was called. “He is our leader, but as he did not want to be seen as starting up a new tribe, he refused the title of Chief. So his followers chose one from our neighbouring planets.”

  His voice brought more nagging familiarity, demanding attention. Did they somehow know each other? “And which group would that be, Outcast?” she asked instead, keeping her mind on the important task of returning to what remained of her tribe. The longer she left them alone, the more chance they would be picked off by some feral pack of shimbak or cargon. His talk of tribes had reminded her of his leader's admission of being 'formerly' of the Cyrali.

  A small crease formed between his brows at her tone and his lip seemed to curl back involuntarily, baring his sharp canines. Then he sighed. “Mukori is no Outcast, Valana. He and the others were not disowned for committing a crime. He chose to leave his tribe, and we all chose to follow him,” he finished, lifting a hand to the feathers in his hair, marking him as a Hitori.

  The way he had said her name brought with it a nearly overwhelming wave of memories, but she shoved them firmly away. It didn't matter if she knew him or not. Karicha and the others were in danger. She could not fail them, too.

  Her body was almost ready. Only her core muscles wouldn't hold the positions she tried to put them in. She prayed her weight wouldn't set her legs quivering again.

  “Fine, fine,” she said, placating him even as she began to ready herself. “But you didn't answer my question. Which group is it that you belong to?” She surveyed her opponent. If she could knock his head back into the wall with enough force, he'd be out cold before being able to raise the alarm. The desperate need to get back to her village was like a live creature in her belly. She feared for them. Too many acted without honour these days for her to be absolutely sure of their safety.

  Could she move faster than him? He was a pure-blood like her. Their natural gifts should be fairly even.

  He didn't answer. Instead, his lips curled down. “Going to try and kill me again?” he asked, his tone mocking despite the disappointment that rang out in his eyes. “You won't even hear us out?”

  “In a fair fight, with no spineless tricks, I would win,” Valana spat out between her clenched teeth as she fought with her core muscles to hold their position.

  He shook his head ruefully, flashes of forest green glimmering in his silky hair as it caught the light.

  “I know.”

  Valana stared as she collapsed on her belly, the moment of surprise breaking her concentration. His voice held no lie, it had been an honest admission. She watched the chagrin colour his alabaster skin beneath his dark beard.

  Who are you? she thought, deciding to try sitting, first.

  Before she could ask or allow herself to pursue the thought, their ears twitched in unison to the doorway, where a single set of footsteps approached. She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The Nightstalker took a slow, casual step back, giving her space. Her legs shook violently as she tried to place her weight on them and forced her to sit back on the edge of the bed.

  He eyed her attempt with curiosity rather than fear, despite his earlier admission. Valana suddenly thought that he probably had a hidden dagger on him, laced with more laricori.

  “I have no right to ask,” he began, his eyes suddenly burning with some familiar emotion, “but I want you at least listen to what Mukori has to say. Hear him out. After that, you may do as you please.”

  Valana paused a moment before answering, struck again by the open sincerity in his voice. “And you'd all just let me leave, after all the trouble you've taken to get me here?”

  “Yes.”

  Another voice joined the Nightstalker's in answer, a little higher than the deep bass of her guard.

  The smooth voice preceded its owner into the room.

  “You are not our prisoner, Nightstalker Valana, Protector of the Kazori. I am Mukori,” he added, placing a hand over his heart and nodding politely.

  Valana's ears twitched and she resisted the urge to snarl. It was the speaker from the battlefield, his mix of Hipotarali and tribal accents unmistakeable. She looked him up and down slowly. His dark cloak was gone. Instead, he wore the soft breeches and tight sleeveless shirts fashionable in Hipotarali. They clung to and embellished his lithe figure. His short, inky hair glinted with traces of purple and fell in a wave over the top of his head. He bore no weapons and his turquoise eyes held a genuine smile. She would have considered him attractive if it weren't for the fact that he had kidnapped her, preventing her from returning to the remaining members of her tribe.

  “Then I want to leave, now,” she said, managing to rise, although her legs still shook a little. The room swam alarmingly and a strong hand grabbed her upper arm, steadying her. Her vision steadied and she shook off the Nightstalker's hand. He raised his hands and took two steps back. She didn't miss the fact that this brought him into a position of defence, for both his leader and the doorway. She turned her gaze back on the leader.

  “As you pointed out, I am the Protector of the Kazori and you are preventing me from doing my duty.”

  Both men grimaced and exchanged a glance. She knew she had missed something, but the knowledge only fanned her need to return to her village.

  “Where are my clothes and weapons? Well?” she demanded when neither answered.

  Mukori took a deep breath. “The owner of this way-house would not allow you into a bed covered in blood as you were. She had her servants cut your clothes from you and clean you.”

  She felt her own colour rise as the Nightstalker blushed. “You were there?”

  Mukori looked from one to the other.

  “I could not risk leaving you unguarded in case you woke and chose to act as you did on the battlefield. He assured me that you wouldn't mind.”

  Valana's mind screeched several insults before she finally spoke in a voice that promised pain.

  “And what gave him that impression?”

  “You really don't recognise me, do you?” He shrugged, scratching at his unruly beard. “It's not like it would be anything new,” he said, smirking at her and meeting her eyes from under his dark eyelashes. “Besides, I kept my back turned, I swear.”

  “Okano—” Mukori chided, looking between them with new interest.

  In that moment, all the tugs of memory and flashes of familiarity came crashing together. Okano. Her first lover. A childhood romance begun at the Games at Moon Lake that turned into a deep love affair that had been snatched as often as they could both be spared from their duties as Protectors and eventually ended by a mutual desire to keep peace between their tribes. She had bested him in every challenge and won the title of Champion that would otherwise have been his. He was smiling at her now, long lost memories hidden in his eyes. She found herself grinning back. The beard completely hid his strong jawline, his face was harsher, his eyes colder than the ones in her memory, and the scars going over his shoulder were new. Her grin faded.

  “Bastard,” she muttered, shaking her head. “You need a shave, too.”

  Okano huffed a laugh, running a hand through his beard.

  Mukori watched their exchange intently, his intelligent eyes sharp. Two things were plain on his face. One, he hadn't known about the details of their history and two, the lack of that knowledge seemed to bother him. His eyebrows mashed down in annoyance as Okano laughed with her.

  The levity faded quickly as the wind tickled Valana's back, reminding her of her loss and those she had to find.

  Okano nodded once, mostly to himself, readying his body. It was her move and he was going to wait and see what choice she made.

  She could lunge at Mukori as a feint. Even on her wobbly legs she might win a race to the window, or she could just hear the man out and hope he kept his word. Okano said Mukori was trustworthy and unless Okano had changed entirely, she had
no reason not to trust the man she had once loved.

  She sat down on the bed and Okano relaxed, leaning his giant frame against the door.

  Mukori smiled brightly, clearly accepting Okano's judgment on whether or not she was going to attack him. “You are welcome to choose any clothes you wish from the wardrobe,” Mukori began as if there had been no interruption to his answer, waving a hand behind him. “Your weapons and shield are safe and will be returned to you as soon as you make your choice.”

  She met his eyes and found them to be patient and intelligent. He exuded an aura of self-assured calm, like a man who knows his path exactly and has only to keep putting one foot before the other. There was something else, too, behind his smile. A secret of great power that he was eager to share.

  With her mind unclouded by the detachment of the Killing Calm, she accepted Okano's words. Mukori wanted to talk, no more, and then she could leave. He waited, watching, never shifting beneath her scrutiny. He was certainly unlike any man she'd met before. Few were strong enough to remain still under a Nightstalker's weighing gaze. In fact, he seemed not only unperturbed, but to be weighing her in return.

  “Thank you,” she nodded. “I understand that you have something you wish to tell me.”

  “Yes, I—” he stopped as she raised a hand.

  “It will have to wait. I am a Protector. You were there. You know my people's warriors are gone.” Grief tried to choke her but she swallowed it, keeping her voice level. “I must return to my village and see the remaining Kazori to safety. After that, I will be happy to meet with you and hear your words.”

  She watched them exchange another long look and felt her heart sink.

  “Your village is gone, Valana.” Mukori's voice was soft, kind and consoling, but it barely broke through the ringing in her ears.

  Okano straightened and tensed again, but his face was full of sympathy. “I am so sorry.”

  She swivelled her wide eyes to him as the ringing grew louder. The room began to slide into a different light, a sharper one of fine detail, but no emotion.

  Okano stepped between her and Mukori, his eyes still full of sadness even as he cautioned her with his hands.

  She didn't want to fight him. She wanted to scream, to denounce their words. Instead, she launched herself across the bed and out of the window, the softly-glowing night wrapping around her. She raced to the edge of the way-house's grove and paused.

  In the room, Mukori sighed heavily. “Follow her. If she wishes to return, you can guide her. We will keep on the Wheel for another two weeks.”

  Okano nodded and pounced out into the night tracking Valana's scent.

  He found her pacing the edge of the grove. She looked up at him, her eyes holding only one question.

  “North-east,” he whispered.

  She was gone before he finished the words. He followed easily enough. After all, they were both pure-blood Nightstalkers. He knew why she had to see it for herself, but, remembering his own visit, Okano wished he could somehow spare her from the reality of it.

  ***

  The village lay quiet under the light of another moon. They had raced for four days without pause. Okano felt his strength failing and ate another hurik. If it weren't for their destination, he may have found it funny that they had both thought to take some of the fruit from the grove. She was as still as a carving at the edge of the burning. A piece of charred wood cracked under his boot and broke the spell. Walking at normal pace, she stepped across the border of the village towards the charred remains of the houses that stood out in the soft light of the crescent moon.

  It looked different by moonlight but no less horrifying. Okano paused as her shoulders hunched over and chose to stay put as she moved further in. Sometimes, being alone was a gift.

  Valana crashed out of the protection of the Void and felt her shoulders hunch under the weight of her failure. The whole village had been burned. The crops, the umera pens, the houses... the people.

  She shook her head in denial. Who would do such a thing? Why? What reason could anyone possibly have for killing innocents or even just destroying food and water when supplies were so scarce? She could smell the poison in the Ever-Spring just as she could smell the cloying scent of death. How had she failed her people so thoroughly? What madness had resulted in the Kazori being wiped from the world in a single, fateful night?

  She collapsed in the ashes next to tiny bones and felt everything she was break apart. Tears ran freely as she screamed her denial to the sky until she was hoarse.

  A faint whining began as the winds kicked up the ashes and blew her scent eastward towards the battlefield and more corpses.

  Valana drew herself out of her own tortured mind long enough to process a pack of about six creatures approaching from the east. Some small, unimportant part of her mind noted that it was daytime and that the searing pain in her feet, from where they had been rubbed raw in her journey here, had faded. She hadn't noticed the changes.

  She heard Okano coming closer, too, no doubt in response to the creatures. She had been thankful for the space and silence he had granted her.

  She longed for her swords, but if whatever was coming bore riders even remotely responsible for the chaos at her feet, her weapons would not save their lives.

  Her anger flared, stuttered, and went out as the small pack of mirri came into view. They bore the purple collars of the Kazori. She had often trained young warriors in riding mirri because it was the only way they could match a Nightstalker's speed. The pack knew her well and had been drawn back to this place of death by her familiar scent.

  They whined plaintively as they approached, each coming right up to her, seeking the safety of the familiar and sniffing her skin, seeking food. She patted them absently, wishing her own people would return over the horizon in the same way.

  But they won't. I am the last of the Kazori.

  Okano waited silently at her side, offering a hand in greeting to the mirri pack and earning their trust swiftly by offering up a small bag of meat strips.

  She felt empty. She could no longer call herself a Protector. She had failed them all. She was nothing, now. The last surviving member of a decimated people. For the first time in her life, she found herself reaching out for someone, wanting to borrow their strength until she could find a way to rebuild her own.

  Okano took her hand and pulled her into a tight hug, as if he could read her mind. Or perhaps the way she'd begun to tremble had alerted him to her silent distress. He held her there, held her together, as she accepted her failure and felt all she had been crumble and vanish.

  She did not know how long had passed before he spoke. It could have been minutes or days, but his voice was welcome, strong and soothing.

  “They're not all gone.”

  She pushed away and eyed him, knowing her desperation for his words to be true was etched into every line of her face.

  “Two survived this.”

  His silver eyes flashed briefly over the carnage and then back to her face and read the question there. “They are with Mukori. He did not know what else to do. So we kept you all together. That way, you could decide what to do with the young ones. Your people still survive.”

  Valana couldn’t yet find her voice, but she nodded, showing him she had heard and understood. They must have come here, then, to the village. Had they driven off the attackers? Could they point her blades in the right direction?

  Okano read the emotions as they played over her face and sighed. “It won't help,” he murmured, then pulled away.

  She tried to pull her mind back from the edge. His eyes were filled with a deep sadness. It seemed that somewhere in the nearly seventeen decades since they had last seen each other, he had known loss, too. Deep and terrible loss like hers. The sort that unmakes you.

  “Take me back,” she said, mounting one of the mirri. The alpha was not here, but she knew the others would follow her, anyway.

  Okano kept her gaze a moment longer, th
en nodded, noting the small ember of life that had sparked back in her eyes. She wasn't completely lost any more. If even one Kazori were still alive, then she was still their Protector. She still had a purpose. Mounting the most docile of the available mirri, he urged it back in the direction of the Wheel, grateful that he wouldn't have to race all the way back, too. Mirri were as fast as any Nightstalker, even with a rider, and certainly faster than two over-stretched, sleep-deprived ones.

  ***

  This way-house was much like the first, but it had no hurik grove. A series of small rectangles all connected to a larger one, with a big, grey-wood stable outside. The journey back had taken a little longer, with the mirri fatigued from lack of proper feeding. Valana dismounted and watched the mirri race past the startled stable master to another mirri that stood in the paddock beyond the stable.

  Senna. She realised the survivors may have saved themselves, fleeing on Senna.

  She looked to Okano, and he nodded, waving the angry stable master away.

  “Come. There will be rooms waiting for us.”

  Valana opened her mouth to protest, but Okano stopped her, turning her to face him, his big hands swallowing her shoulders. “I know. Truly I do. But it is barely moonrise. They will still be sleeping. It took the elder one a while to be able to sleep at all. I swear I will bring them to you when they wake.”

  She eventually nodded, loss and fear still clawing at her soul. Only two had survived. They were here. They were safe. She could wait to soothe her own soul.

  5

  An Invitation

  Valana stood by her window, watching the sliver of moon make its slow progress to crest the horizon. A small part of her brain noted that she hadn't slept properly in nine days, that there was a large soft bed just behind her that would serve nicely. She ignored it.