The Imbued Lockblade (Sol's Harvest Book 2)

by M. D. Presley

  “Do you have any idea what we do here, Luca Dolphus?”

  Luca found his mouth answering before his mind even registered the question. “No. I only do as I am told.”

  “Very good. Remember that as well as your place. But know, though we walk in the darkness, light is always our goal. Sol’s Breath must always continue to flow.”

  Without another word, she released him and hopped off her horse. Luca was happy to see her go, and it was not until her train was many miles away that he wondered why one of the luminaries of the Weaver order would choose to use a phrase favored by the Renders.

  ***

  Simza’s list awaited him when he awoke the next afternoon and her missions began in earnest. Instead of simple runs to town for supplies, she now sent Bo and Luca off on their own for journeys that took up to a week. But first, they were required to memorize her cyphers, Simza creating a list of fake names and businesses Bo and Luca sent false orders to. Each combination spelled out a different eventuality, ranging from success to outright failure, with a dozen contingencies in between. Experienced at memorizing messages from his time on the ley, Luca took to the task and quickly outpaced Bo. Neither gave voice to it, but Luca knew both understood only Dobra plucked the lines of ley, which informed them who they would be hiding from on their missions.

  The first was to another Dobra wolari belonging to the Koli tribe. Luca did not mind it in the least when his distant Wanderer kin plied them with wine and dancing until Luca could not tell which made his head spin. The next morning, the wolari’s healer-woman plucked a particularly bitter leaf and bid Luca chew it to see straight again. He fought against the vomit several minutes as she picked farther through her herbs. She explained she did this in their presence so they could swear to Simza that she only chose the best to send back with them. His Listening talents nullified by his diminishing headache, Luca could not tell if she told the truth. But, as Dobra decorum dictated, he swore until Solday he would relay the message and that her choices were most certainly the best.

  Simza’s second mission took him and Bo far south until they almost reached Ingios territory. There, in a town that reeked of wildness blown in from the Ingios Territories, they met a man with one white eye that traded them a heavy bag of stones for more steel knives than Luca had seen, including his time at the Hottenkof School of Tshi. Unlike their previous trading partner, this man did not swear to the authenticity of his wares, and when Luca examined the bag’s contents, he found black stones that shone like glass. He believed they were being taken in, but Bo nodded and they headed back home the next morning.

  The third mission Luca knew was different the moment they left the camp. Although Bo was a conversational spendthrift who treated his words like gold, Luca’s silver tongue could coax them well enough by now. Alone on those nights with only the two of them sharing a single fire, Bo opened up when flames died down to embers. His mind only resided around whatever task Simza gave him, but he was an honest man, one that Luca trusted with his life. And Luca knew Bo now trusted him because the taciturn man would spend his golden words with abandon when the two were away from camp.

  This time, Bo refused to speak as to their goal, Luca unable to crack into his skull with his Listener talents. Luca therefore turned to teasing, verbally jabbing at Bo to make the man drop his mental guard. Bo thoroughly ignored his insults, and without a conversational partner willing to spar with him, Luca finally fell silent.

  After a single night’s travel, they reached their destination, a dusty mining town dug directly into a stripped hill deep in Nahuat. As soon as Luca saw it, he knew it to be a crumbling burg built on an unsteady base. It was a woeful thing, far from any ley or sense of civilization, and full of lamentable men. Some were Shapers, content to sacrifice years of their lives to the rotter’s cough in exchange for some shiny metal they ripped from the earth. Yet as he watched them tiredly trudge from the mine with their prize, the silver did not shine to his eyes.

  “What are we picking up?” Decked out in their Dobra gads, the two of them stuck out, and Luca wanted to be clear of this place as soon as possible.

  Bo considered a long time before answering. “We’re not here to receive anything. We’re hunting.”

  “For what?”

  “Athichis,” Bo answered, using the Dobra word for justice borne from blood. Spitting as if the word offended his tongue, Bo led them to the mining town’s company bar. Securing their horses to the post, they waited outside, Bo’s eyes only leaving the door to check his watch as the hours filed slowly past.

  Bo finally sighed. “Wait outside and waylay the first man that lets out.”

  He then disappeared inside, Luca still close enough to the doorway to see Bo order a drink at the bar. It arrived in moments, but Bo let it remain untouched, his eyes scanning the crowd that stared back at him and his clothes with open hostility. No one moved, not until Bo called out loudly in the Dobra tongue:

  “Black justice has come.”

  He scarcely finished before a man in the back stumbled up to race away. Bo watched him go, sipping his drink as the man charged through the door to meet Luca’s awaiting fist.

  Luca examined the unconscious man, who was older than his father and could have been old enough to be his grandfather. Despite his lack of gads, upon closer inspection, the man showed the tell-tale signs of the Dobra. Though Luca could not exactly put his finger on it, he knew his own.

  Bo stepped outside to become the first of the quickly swelling crowd. Without a word, they hauled the old man to his feet. He moaned, but did not regain consciousness, and the crowd murmured alongside the two as they dragged their captive into the darkness. Bo simply glanced over his shoulder at the crowd with a matter-of-fact tone:

  “Dobra business.”

  No one followed.

  ***

  As soon as they left the flickering torchlights, the man came awake. First, he whimpered then made a feeble attempt at escape they thwarted without much exertion.

  “No, brothers. Brothers, no. Please let me go. Please!” He spoke in Acwealt, but used the Dobra word for brothers. Bo shoved the man away, who tottered unsteadily on his feet.

  “You want to run, then run.”

  The old man hesitated too long. Luca did not even see Bo’s lockblade’s appearance, the blade catching its victim in the thigh. Luca knew it to be a superficial wound, but the old man screamed as the blood spurted.

  “Run,” Bo said. “I told you to run.”

  Hobbled, the old Dobra only made it three steps before his run reverted to a tortured walk. Bo slashed his other leg, another superficial slice.

  “Run, I said.”

  The man tried again, but could not muster even a second stride, and for that, Bo punished him again, and then again. Luca had never witnessed this cruel streak in Bo before. Even in his own beating at Bo’s hands, there had been a savage efficiency to it. But this time Bo drew it out, intentionally torturing the staggering old man.

  “Bo?—”

  “You’re a traitor. A traitor among traitors.” Bo lashed out another time, wetting his lockblade again in the old man’s blood. “Stained by Dobradab’s first sin, we are. Born to be hated by everyone everywhere. We truly have nothing except for what we scrape. That and each other. It’s not much, but it’s ours. But you, you stole from us, the poorest of the poor. And you dare call us brothers? You are less than a bug. Only a tsor with a price on his head.”

  His life slowly spilling out, the old man no longer made the pretense of walking. Soon, even his crawling ceased as he collapsed. Only his shallow breathing and the lack of dead Breath alerted Luca that he still clung to life.

  “But the price for you is a single penny, tsor.” Bo laced his fingers through the man’s thinning hair to haul him up to his knees. “A single penny that I will treasure my entire life.”

  Bo held the man’s head a little higher, neck exposed for the awaiting blade. His eyes then flicked to Luca, and through his Listener’
s ability, Luca knew what Bo saw in him. To Bo, Luca was still a bietala, a child despite all his lockblade studies in Polis.

  Because Luca had never truly wetted his blade.

  “Do you know the proper way to slit a throat?” The confusion evident on Bo’s face forced Luca to display a grin he did not feel. “They taught us the proper technique, if you’d like to learn.”

  Bo stepped aside, Luca taking his place behind the whimpering tsor. His whines were the only defense he offered, the man too weak to resist or too resigned to his fate. With a click, Luca’s blade popped free.

  “Most slide the blade from one side to the other,” Luca said, his blade tracing the path too lightly to draw blood. More than anything, he wanted to get the feel of it, to go through the motion of actually killing a man. He had practiced before on pig carcasses and knew the feel as a blade slipped through flesh, but they were corpses of animals, and this was a living, breathing man—an old man with no defenses. True, he was a tsor and an anathema to the tribes that needed to be done away with, but Luca did not know if he had it within him to be the instrument.

  “And?”

  Luca looked to Bo, his reticence obvious when Bo took a step towards them. As he did, Luca knew he had no choice.

  His blade slipped in point-first, through the artery and into the windpipe without resistance. His thrust was so swift he scarcely felt the old man stiffen before he extended his arm, thrusting the flat of the blade out of the old man’s throat perpendicularly, exactly as Erro taught him at the Hottenkof School of Tshi.

  Luca felt the hot splash of gout of blood coat his hands and silver lockblade, staining black rather than red in the dark. But he was finally wetted in blood—a killer. Bo nodded his approval as the blood quickly cooled on his hands.

  He released the old man’s hair, the body crumpling bonelessly. Luca’s strike had been sure, and seconds later the man’s dead Breath escaped his husk—four of them, marking him as a fellow Listener. Luca refused to watch the four Breaths break apart to their different directions. Instead, he gazed at his darkened hands until Bo shoved something in them.

  It was a single penny, Luca staring at it and realizing it equaled a man’s life.

  “You did good.”

  Luca did not feel good though. He felt evil, but not because he had killed. Death was an eventuality everyone faced, especially those who traded in the tshi. But those were meant to be battles between equals, those who chose to gamble their lives when they rolled the dice on a fight. This old man was not Luca’s equal in the least and had few years left in him by the look of it—few years that Luca just stole with his lockblade. He was now a thief, a thief whose victim already had little. It made him worse than a killer because he stole from the poor.

  Such a state Luca could not abide. It made him worse than a tsor, and for that alone, he tossed the bloody penny to the ground and swore he would not kill again unless it was a fair fight. And never, Waer take him if he did, would he harm a woman.

  Chapter 15

  Blotmonad 17, 567

  Their four stolen horses carried them south as swiftly as the darkness allowed. After the first hour, Marta steered their course east along the Sawmill Foothills, which would eventually give way to the Ichuguk Mountains. After the third hour, she called a halt for the horses. She knew she should have done so earlier, but she wanted to avoid what she knew was coming from Luca. Their flight aborted his apology, and as soon as his feet hit the ground, he started in.

  “I don’t… I don’t know what I can say. My Mind…”

  Marta ignored his stuttering to turn her attention to Caddie. The girl’s breath came in short, rushed huffs as Creature ruffled his feathers and cawed from her shoulder. The bird dared to peck at her as Marta hefted Caddie from the saddle and hunkered down beside the girl. Luca continued to babble as Marta stared into Caddie’s eyes. Unable to put a finger on any emotion hidden in those orbs, Marta still did not care for her odd breathing one bit.

  “Give her your sticks.”

  Luca produced the bix sticks and Caddie immediately tossed them before beginning her unfathomable pattern of picking them up again. The rote repetition calmed her, though the bird kept squawking and strutting among the sticks. He pecked at them, and Caddie’s hands as well, but the girl ignored him as she continued her precious pattern. Only then did Marta realize Luca was still speaking.

  “To have my Mind shoved aside like that. It beggars belief. I’ve never felt a Whisperer before. Is that what it’s like?”

  “No. Nothing on Ayr was like that.” Her statement started off as the truth, but by the time she finished, Marta knew she lied: she had felt something overwhelming like this before.

  “Then it’s like the stories of old when Waer—”

  “There is no Waer.”

  Marta could not keep the weariness from her voice, yet Luca still had the energy to appear appalled. “How can you be so intentionally thick, woman! Even hounded by Waer’s own black Breath, you refuse to believe what your own eyes see! Even the damn bird recognizes it. Why can’t you?”

  Although he was wrong about Waer, the man was right about the bird. Creature had been agitated both times they encountered the black Breath, and Marta dared hope the bird would alert them when they encountered it again.

  Luca’s thoughts too seemed focused on this eventuality. “Why Conroy and Mowery?”

  It was a good question, one that might ensure their survival, but Marta found herself wishing Luca would let the subject drop. Her own lack of curiosity was a curiosity, and Marta briefly considered picking through her mind for another mental weed.

  “No similarities. The two couldn’t be more different.”

  “Both were men,” he offered tentatively. “Perhaps Waer came to them as the beguiler.”

  “Both also spelled their names with y’s,” she shot back. “Probably breathed air too.”

  “Don’t be so dismissive. Nothing but Waer herself could explain what Mowery did in there. She… she was said to have given the gift of Listening to Dobradab. Perhaps she gifted Mowery as well.”

  “But not Conroy? If she can bestow Blessed gifts, why not make them Shapers to kill us in our sleep? And why not attack us straight by taking root in one of us?”

  The idea took Luca aback as he touched two fingers to his forehead to ward off evil, but Marta was more concerned by Creature. The bird squawked occasionally during their conversation, but suddenly he launched a new barrage. Marta wheeled, sure the black Breath had found them again, but all she found was the black bird squawking alone amongst the sticks. Caddie was nowhere to be seen.

  Isabelle’s knife appeared in her hand as Luca’s lockblade clicked into place.

  “Caddie? Come on out, girl.”

  Only Creature’s caws broke the silence.

  Marta summoned her cold flame, shoving the light close to the ground for Isabelle to examine.

  “Nothing,” Luca said for her. “It’s like she flew away. How...”

  The how did not matter to Marta any more than the why. Her central pillar had been wrenched away, and her mind trembled on the edge of collapse as panic ran roughshod down her spine. It threatened to overwhelm her, and so she pleaded for rage to come and drown out the fear with its clarity. Closing her eyes, Marta sought deep within herself, just as she had for the plans regarding the odd Armor. But instead of its tempting strength, she sought some sort of answer. The girl was gone, her daughter stolen from her, and that realization added to her rage and allowed her to push through rational thought until she found what she sought.

  Her daughter’s survival was her only purpose, and upon embracing this, Marta swore she could sense the girl off to the west and receding. The idea made no coherent sense, but she clung to it as she summoned her rabbit legs.

  “Marta!” Luca called after her, but she could not understand the word. Some part of her realized it was desperation that drove her and this mad idea, but she crashed through the brush nonetheless. This all-cons
uming fear, she realized, this was hope in its purest form: a rejection of reality in favor of clinging blindly to the impossible. There was no chance she would succeed in finding Caddie, but Marta pressed herself all the harder.

  Her rabbit legs ended up a hindrance as the tree limbs clawed her. Without hesitation, Marta summoned her odd Armor to tear through the trees. Her new designs encasing her legs were just as strong as the rabbit constructs, and the added sensory organs of her extended Breath allowed her to feel the branches as big as her arm give way beneath her inhuman form. She knew these new sensations should not matter to her on her hunt for her daughter, but they spurred her on and made her feel more savage—truer to the monster inside and out.

  With that final realization, the last remnants of what she called Marta retreated to the back of her mind as her need took full control. The rational part that argued with Luca over the existence of Waer had no place here, and so she rejected it to fully disappear into the hunt. And with the release of logic, so went her fear and doubt as to the result of her pursuit as she fell on all fours to race on. She knew, sure as her true name, she would find and slaughter the real monster.

  She found her quarry along a draw, the blonde glassman carrying the child over her shoulder like a bag of flour. Seeing the sight and the sin visited upon her child, Marta bellowed. Her bestial cry drew Bernice’s attention as Marta barreled on, their eyes meeting. The glassman’s went wide in recognition, but Marta did not know her. All she saw was the threat she must eliminate.

  The glassman dropped the girl and ran. Marta hoped it would be towards her and ensuing carnage, but the woman fled instead. The beast in her wanted to pursue, but she hunkered beside Caddie. The girl brushed at something unseen, but unclean on her dress over and over. Marta could not release the monstrous Armor in case the glassman returned, so it was with an arm encased in an alien appendage that she connected to Caddie with.

  The girl still struggled to brush away at her dress, Marta feeling Caddie’s resistance though her unnatural limbs. Usually the child quieted at her touch, but not at her Breath, and Marta considered dropping the Armor again before scooping the girl up in her oversized arms and loping off the way she came.