When, several minutes later, Draven finally curled up to sleep on the forest floor, a twig poking his cheek, his horns digging into the dirt, it was to the sight of his brother’s turned back. In his chest, his heart shuddered.
How much had he given away? How much had Kinrae seen to have reacted with such disgust? How much had he just ruined between the two of them because of his own sick desires?
By the time Artysaedra shook him for his watch, he wagered he’d rested for only a handful of guilt-ridden minutes. The muteness of a dead world greeted him as he rose for his watch, and he walked his dark perimeter. He walked until the arches of his feet ached in his boots. He walked until he started shaking—terrified of every inch of darkness that lay behind him, terrified of every uncertain inch that lay ahead.
STOCK & STEEL
_______________________________
The oldest languages recorded in the Infinity are Su’net, the language of the dead; Lu’va, the language of the light; Makvt, the language of the darkness; and Common Tongue, the language carried by migrating demons across the Infinity. There are languages of which no one speaks, however, ones spoken in the shed of blood and in the caress of hands. Those I know best, but speak the least.
excerpt from autobiography of travelling historian Cristina Donhoff
THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF THE MAUVEPRAIRIE
MARYSE FARMS, OUTSKIRTS OF AHUAFEN,
CENTRAL QI SHO PROVINCE, CENTRAL TUA
Svahta sang an old war song to herself as she waited for the Society of the Watchers to show up. Either they were late or the intel the High King had given her was a lie.
She and Nori-Rin had been camped out beneath a ward for nearly two hours now. They were crouched between two damp rows of a stock field. The smell of the flowers was thick and fragrant, suffocating with their perfume. Around her and Nori-Rin, groups of rudimentary, rusted droids were wandering the rows in silent regimens, water spewing from their palms. The droids’ heads kept snapping to where Svahta and Nori-Rin were supposed to be invisible, but Svahta paid it little mind: while the lenses of the droids’ eyes focused in tighter, the droids themselves did nothing. It seemed they could see the warding but still didn’t know what to do about it. Instead, they meandered jerkily down the rows and continued their daily routine.
“When you weep, darling, think of me. When you sleep, darling, dream of me,” Svahta sang. “When the night frosts your blood, darling, cling to my voice. When their boots pound the dirt, darling, hear my heart.”
A white windmill creaked in the distance. Every once in a while, a small drone or a sleek ship sailed overhead, beeping along its way. Evening settled in, a full moon blazing in the east, and insects began to chitter. A vibrant sunset oxidized the wide, clear sky. Svahta glanced over at Nori-Rin, who was making a crown of stock flowers. Her dark hands fiddled with the stems, weaving them together.
It was hard not to compare her strong hands to Tavin’s.
Svahta couldn’t help herself sometimes. There were days she missed her husband with a dull ache—like an old injury nagged by the cold—even though three centuries had passed since she’d last seen him. She missed the way the sun had turned his eyes from chestnut to honey. She missed his timid smile and his cracked reed hat. How he’d carried her on his back when they were children to wade through the swamps. How his fingers had never faltered on a rifle trigger. How his sashes for his family name had always been tied crooked and how his badge had hung from them instead of being pinned to his tunic like it was supposed to be.
She missed their twin boys, too, their mouths full of breast milk. She missed the wrinkles on the bottoms of their feet and their cries in the middle of the night. She missed the warm clutch of their hands around her finger.
She missed it all. She missed it in ways that made no sense. She missed it like how cicadas buzzed at the edges of her hearing—like how the last lick of a sunset’s fading warmth stayed behind, even after the cold of the night set in—like how an empty farmhouse in the countryside gaped around its fading photographs on the walls, devil’s finger growing through the cracked floorboards. She missed it in ways she couldn’t put into words. There were no singular words for grief. There was no singular poetry in heartbreak.
“Bear me toward death, darling, at your side. Let me be your steel, darling; let me be your life,” Svahta sang, finishing out the verse. “When horns sound and hounds cry, I’ll carry you through it all. When the flags fly and dead sleep, my darling, I’ll bear you home.”
“Oh, no more depressing songs, tiki,” Nori-Rin chastised with a whine. “I’m going to cry like an old war widow now. Sing something lively. Like the one about Old Man Mill and his one-eyed mutt. Or I could sing. My pap taught me one about a tavern girl and a rooster. Really big rooster. Woke her up every morning.” Nori-Rin gave a lascivious wiggle of her brows, and Svahta choked on a laugh. Nori-Rin placed her completed stock crown on Svahta’s head, but it was too big, slipping down Svahta’s forehead, petal-soft. “Smile, tiki. I can see you thinking really hard about something.”
“Gonna fault me for usin’ my brain?” Svahta asked. “Explains why because a’ your bright ideas I’m sittin’ in a field waitin’ on a cult a’ murderers to show up.”
“I plan the best outings, don’t I?” Nori-Rin said wistfully. “Probably why my last padpadrii broke up with me. Turns out women don’t consider night-tiger wrangling a romantic evening out. Then again, the baboor did lose a finger and got set on fire. I should probably light fewer candles next time.”
“Should probably date someone who likes your outin’s,” Svahta muttered, ignoring any mild jealousy.
At that, Nori-Rin broke into a bright smile, white teeth glinting through full lips. She looked beautiful like that, Svahta thought, all ink-black skin and wild hair cast in the evening’s golden light, a stunning mix of rounded curves and sharp angles. She looked like the goddess she was, right down to the gilded chains woven through her eyebrow piercings. It took Svahta a moment to tear her attention away.
From her boot, she pulled out an old tempus and checked the time in the Realm: five twenty-four. It wasn’t the same time in the High Realms of Sands, she knew. She’d checked the times against each other several times already. While the High and Low Realms ran on the same schedule, the Multitude was unpredictable. This Realm had a familiar twenty-four hour schedule, and it didn’t line up with the higher Realms at all.
Svahta tucked away her tempus. From her other boot, she pulled out something else: a small metal cube, less than an inch wide on all sides. At its top was a lens that pulsed blue light.
Svahta had little familiarity with technology. She’d once heard it described as manufacturable magic, but it made it no less strange to her. Technology could sense magic to some extent and magic could sense technology, but they seemed to run on parallel systems, unable to cross over into one another’s territory. She’d once met an electric elementus—a strange mutation of his demonic branch to begin with—who’d blacked out an entire city’s power grid, but he’d told her in his prison cell later that he could only flip things on and off like a switch. He couldn’t make machines obey his whims, only malfunction.
She wondered if machines had the same power over her magic but ultimately pushed the idea to the side. She had bigger concerns right now, like hoping this society depended more on magic than on technology, as demons were wont to do. No spell this society might perform would detect her warding.
She flattened her palm for the cube to sit on and activated its voice command by telling it to display. From its lens, a blue hologram stretched out and unfolded. It was a map of the Realm of the Mauveprairie. Lines of latitude and longitude sliced across it, lifting and lowering with the topography. There was a vast quantity of water on the map, inset with twelve small continents. Blocky names hovered over oceans, rivers, seas, and land.
“Recall flagged location,” she commanded.
The High King had shown her how to work the device a
full day ago now. He’d told her it had been delivered to him by his masters. On his orders, a specialist in his city had studied the device. The woman had claimed it was incapable of listening in on conversations or tracking location, but Svahta didn’t know if that was true. There was a chance she and Nori-Rin were walking straight into an ambush, and just in case they were, they’d left letters with both of their chiefs of staff detailing their whereabouts. The letters were only to be opened if Svahta and Nori-Rin didn’t return home by the following night. Svahta had included a second letter for her aunt Serayah that Nori-Rin didn’t know about, one with instructions for her burial if her body was found.
“I promise,” High King al-Loriaris said, cupping his hand around Svahta’s, the cube hard in her palm, “if you arrive at the location on the map at seventeen hours past the dimension’s midnight, all your questions will be answered. Just stay hidden and listen. The highest members of our society will be meeting together for the last time.”
The hologram in front of Svahta zoomed in on a pointed continent near the middle of the map. It was labelled Hyu-ong. As it zoomed in further, dotted boundary lines appeared, along with the words Province of Qi Sho. The map continued zooming until it froze on the field Svahta and Nori-Rin were currently sitting in, the exact coordinates displayed in clear numbers over the top of it that had helped her reconjure here, if nothing else.
“They’re late,” Svahta said, and shut down the hologram, tucking the cube away. “It’s almost night.”
“What’s the old saying? Evil acts precisely when it means to?” Nori-Rin asked. Her dark eyelashes fanned over her cheeks as she smiled. “Old King Lori probably got the time wrong, tiki. I doubt he swindled us. I mean, we know exactly where to find him later if he has. It’s not like he can flee the country. He’s in charge of it. Surely, he’s not stupid enough to forget that. Or at least I’d hope not. For the sake of his people at least. Then again, the saucy tit did join a murder guild. Can’t be very smart.”
As soon as Nori-Rin said it, there was a disturbance in the air. Their attention snapped outward toward the field, and sure enough, a cloaked figure was now standing amongst the lavender flowers, just two rows away from them. Svahta leaned up onto her knees to get a better look through the tall bunches of flowers and the distortion of the warding.
The figure’s hood was pulled down, but not enough to obscure anything about its wearer. The wearer had on a wooden mask. It jutted out in a fox face, the wood lacquered blood red. Svahta scanned the stranger as closely as possible, tightening her warding into place as she did so. The stranger’s eyes were too dark through the shadowy eyeholes of the mask to distinguish their colour, but underneath the stranger’s tailored white robe, Svahta could make out an ascot knotted high on its neck. His neck, Svahta decided. The man had wide, stubby fingers dappled with freckles, noticeable when he straightened his cloak.
She pulled the crown of stock from her head and let it fall to the dirt. At her side, Nori-Rin hadn’t shifted, still crouched low between the rows of flowers, but she’d produced her sword from somewhere soundlessly. Svahta’s flail was lying in the dirt behind her. She could feel it with the tip of her boot.
One by one, other cloaked figures began to appear until there stood seven in the field in total. They didn’t talk. They didn’t even look at one another. From what Svahta could glean by stature, curves, and visible features alone, there were four men and three women in the group. She tried to commit everything she could to memory, wishing she’d brought paper to write her observations down on.
High King al-Loriaris was the most obvious of the group, the only person Svahta could identify for certain. His mask was pearlized and embellished with little white roses, covering only the top half of his brown-skinned face. His dark curls spilled free from his hood. The smile on his face was slanted.
Next to him was a man opposite him in appearance. This man was rigid like stone, his skin the type of pale that meant it never saw the sun. His hair was long and fair, perfectly straight, and a full mask of ice glittered over his face, catching the last rays of the sunset and some of the full moonlight. At his neck was an arrowhead.
Next to him was a woman with a half-mask of fur. Her lips were painted black, and golden ringlets cascaded down the front of her cloak. Her eyes were the most intense blue Svahta had ever seen, like the sky over a prairie on a clear day. The darkness and her mask did nothing to dim their eerie light.
Very little was discernible about the man beside her beyond that he was slender, his mask was polished copper, and he reeked of blood. Something under his cloak ticked.
Next to him was a short, plump woman with tan skin and a half-mask that had been sown with patterns of beads, and the last of the group—another woman—was old for a demon, probably nearing the end of her lifespan. Underneath her half-mask of stone, her wrinkled cheeks hung from her face as though they might simply fall off. Her hands, with faded tattoos decorating the backs of them, were boney and gnarled. Her fingers ended in curved talons.
Behind the seven of them, the last of the evening finally slipped below the hilly horizon. The light of the full moon drowned the field and washed the sky in a deep navy.
The fact the group was directly facing Svahta made her uneasy. None of them was looking straight at her, so she had to assume her warding was still in place, but still, she still felt oddly on display. She snapped her fingers to see if they could hear her, but no one so much as twitched.
Not a trap so far then.
This had to be the Society of the Watchers the High King had told them about. She didn’t know how many members there were in all. The High King hadn’t furnished that much information. He’d simply said that it was safer for him and more reliable for them the more they observed on their own.
The group seemed to be waiting on something, but on what, Svahta didn’t know enough to even guess at. The air was fraught with tension. Long minutes passed with the only sounds being the titters of insects. The beat of patient hearts. The tick underneath a cloak. Nori-Rin’s hand creaking against the wrapped leather grip of her sword.
Then suddenly, to Svahta’s left, there was a noise—one she knew all too well. It was a shriek followed by a glacial crack. It cut through the near silence of the growing night and sent Svahta’s heart skittering in her chest. Her eyes widened. The sound was unmistakable. But it was impossible.
No, she thought. No, it can’t be.
Svahta turned her head, and there it was.
A forming portal.
A Guardian’s portal.
The seams of the air fractured in spiderweb patterns like a sheet of glass Svahta couldn’t see was spanning the field. The cracks branched out and gaped. Svahta could hear wind whistling through them. Salt carried on the breeze. With one last boom and a small shockwave that shook the ground, the cracks split and a crevice was ripped in the multiverse.
Terrified, Svahta could see the stock field on either side of the portal as plain as day, but through the broken fissure, another Realm was visible entirely. Sunlight poured out from the wide crack, and saltwater flooded out into the flowerbeds. Svahta watched the water roll unhindered through her warding where the edge of its small dome met the ground. The water kept coming until it soaked through the knees of Svahta’s leggings and silk battle asa, as cold as ice.
In front of them, every cloaked figure dropped to their knees and bowed their head, and Svahta finally understood what was going on here. It wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t a raid by the Order. It wasn’t anything she might have considered. This society wasn’t running in fear. They were bowing in respect. Fury crashed over her like a tidal wave. She got to her feet, her hands itching for her flail.
Our own hands move the pieces here? She wanted to scream at them all. A Guardian is your master? A Guardian is the one murdering the Order?
From the portal, a man stepped out. He was still in his traditional asa, which Svahta had seen him in the day prior. It belled out around him i
n a waterfall of baby blue silk. Spotted wings unfurled from his back and then resettled into place.
Svahta recognized him with ease: Robin Eisyedl, the Guardian of Trees.
You. She seethed. You. You murdered your own brothers and sisters. You betrayed us.
When a second Guardian stepped from the portal, Svahta gritted her teeth. The woman had slanted eyes and tanned skin, her head shaved and painted with dots and arrows. Her asa was bright yellow, embroidered in black. Svahta knew her, too. The woman had been part of the Order longer than even she had. They’d served on an assignment together months ago. She’d been kind then, with a musical laugh. She’d sang to the village children and taught them to make spears.
Na’warri Ogombe. The Guardian of Peaces.
A third and final Guardian stepped through the portal, and Svahta couldn’t think anymore. Her head was spinning. Her heart was heavy with betrayal and rage. This Guardian she didn’t know, but he was a cat demon and wore the silks of the Order, a pure white.
Behind him, a large beast lumbered through the portal. It heeled at the man’s side with a croak. Svahta could only stare.
The beast’s size and legs reminded Svahta of an elephant whereas its front half was muscular and narrow, its body thin like a serpent’s. Its head was nothing more than a vacuumous mouth of leech teeth—no eyes, no nose, nothing but a black void and fangs. The beast as a whole seemed to be made of fog, but it was dense enough Svahta couldn’t see through it. She’d never seen anything like it before.
What is this monster? she scrambled, but then a more important worry dogged her: why do they have it with them?
When the third Guardian waved his hand, the portal closed behind him. The cracks in the multiverse mended themselves back into nonexistence, and then there was only night air and the field of stock once more. The cloaked figures rose to their feet.
A Shard of Sea and Bone Page 28