by Holly Lisle
I killed the Gretons because they would have killed the men I fought with. Cared about. Loved. Loved as friends, as comrades, as mine. The men of the Taag were my men. All the family as I had. Those were my people, and they were the whole of our war to me.
I searched everywhere. I did not want to leave anyone who could race out into the streets screaming for help.
And it was as I was making sure I had missed no one that I found we were already too late.
I came to the cell where the traitor had been hidden. I’d planned to kill him as well, so that he could never tell anyone anything. And he was already gone. I thought of the open door. The men about the stairs. I had not looked at them; there had not been time. But I did not think any of them had been Tonk. They had, I was almost certain, worn the short-cropped hair favored by Gretons, and not the nine-strand braid of Ethebet. The braid he had betrayed.
If he was gone, then the man who had come to meet with him was also gone. Out the open door, in some direction I could not guess. Out of sight, perhaps already out of reach. My Eyes could not make out a Greton and an Ethebettan walking together at any distance in any direction.
We had been quick. We had been tremendously quick. And still we had been too late.
If I could have let go of my single moment in time, I could have pushed my way back up time’s stream to find out where the two of them had met and drifted with them to find out where they had gone. But I could not do that. The weight of the moment I held crushed me closer to my breaking point with every breath I struggled to take. I would not be able to do that and still get back to Aaran and the waiting rescuers.
I could not tarry.
We had to save the rest of our people. Even if all else was lost, we could not leave the crew of the Ker Nagile in the hands of a Feegash diplomat. We could not abandon them.
I had not missed any of the Gretons in the building. I could do nothing more right then. So I turned and fled, the breath sobbing in my lungs, and fought my way back to the gate.
I grabbed Aaran’s arm, let go of the moment that I’d held, and felt the warmth and thickness of sound roll over me, felt the air fill my lungs easily.
“The Obsidians can track to where I was,” I said. “You and your men follow them. Run. Something has gone wrong, and if I am not at the dock when you get everyone aboard the Ker Nagile, presume I am dead, and the traitor is dead with me. And sail without me.”
“Without you? We can’t. We have to have you.”
“No, you don’t. I’m only one person. Don’t argue. Just go. The Greton got away with the traitor. I have to track them down. I’m the only one who can.”
“Then we’ve lost already and there is no need to hurry.”
“Yet hurry anyway, as if we still had hope. Fight as if we still might win. And pray with all your heart I find a miracle.”
35
Aaran
They split into three groups, each taking a different route and hurrying with a different Sera Obsidian. Aaran ran behind Redbird. The streets were almost empty, the groups were small, and no one paid them any attention. In Aaran’s group, they acted as four simple traders within the walls; no one pursued them, and they pursued no one. They exhibited neither fear nor guilt.
He could only be grateful no one could see his thoughts.
Hawkspar was back there somewhere, knowing already that they’d lost everything. As Aaran knew it. The rest of his crew and Hawkspar’s people still thought they fought a battle they might win, though; nor would he tell them otherwise.
He didn’t know that he had it in him to pray for a miracle. She’d been his miracle. He’d pulled her out of her cage, and she’d given his people a truth they needed and a way to conquer it.
Now that was gone. He had the cold night air, and the warm steam of his breath puffing out into the cold night air. His hands, his body, his mind—they all still belonged to him.
His future, though, that some inconceivable Tonk traitor has sold into the hands of the enemy, knowing he was selling the destruction of all the Tonks as he did it. Knowing, and thinking that he knew better, that his handful of traitors would still go on with their lives enriched by the gratitude of those who’d bought them.
Traitors never did seem to see the price they would end up paying before it actually overran them.
Aaran couldn’t understand that.
They reached the door of the prison to find it open just a crack, and one of the Onyxes guarding it on the other side. “Your men are finding keys and unlocking cell doors,” she said. “The Obsidians are looking for the best way to move so many people at once through town without drawing attention.”
“The other prisoners?”
“Seeing every guard in the place fall dead at the same instant with his throat cut, and no sign of what cut it, has made them a well-behaved lot. Your men have convinced them they’ll be best served to sit in silence well away from the door in their locked cells and wait for rescue by the day guards. They wouldn’t want to be thought to have had anything to do with us.” And she smiled a smile that would have looked at home on a wolf.
Everything was working well. Incredibly well. And yet, they had already lost. If all of them died here, they would no more affect the outcome of the war, for good or ill, than if they tried to take their fight to the walls of Ba’afeegash.
It was over, and the captives grinning as they hurried to freedom were as doomed as the families back home who did not suspect the horrors that would roll over them when the Feegash spun out some tale of Tonk barbarity to convince their allies to overrun Hyre.
But she’d said, Hurry anyway, as if we still had hope. Fight as if we still might win. And pray with all your heart I find a miracle.
He’d pray for her. He thought he’d used up his miracles.
One of the Obsidians had pinpointed the location of the impounded Ker Nagile, and was sketching out for the archers the locations of the handful of men who guarded it. Aaran could not look at her as she did it. She had her head up and her black eyes stared off at nothing while her hands moved one of the warden’s pens across the back of a sheet ripped from the prison ledger.
“Are we ready?” Aaran asked.
“We’ve found a problem,” one of his men said.
“What?”
“The traitor is gone.”
This was the moment when he could not fail them. He put a confidence into his voice that he did not feel, and said, “That’s not a problem. Hawkspar is killing him now. And the Greton, too. That’s why she didn’t come with us.”
They accepted that. He said it, he was the captain, he had evinced no shock at the news.
He was a fine liar, wasn’t he?
But if everyone around him had to die, he’d as soon they did not do it at the hands of a Feegash pervert and torturer who’d styled himself a diplomat. He could focus on that and, if all his people reached the safety of the Ker Nagile, snatch some small victory from the fangs of defeat.
The victory of the moment.
He sent another prayer to Ethebet in Hawkspar’s name. Give her blade a perfect edge and her feet wings.
Hawkspar
Time was my enemy. Implacable, hateful. And yet I had to win it as my ally.
I crouched inside one of the two gatehouses, out of sight, my head beginning to throb and my body aching already. I slipped into time, pushed against its currents back to the moment where I’d found the Greton official, did not think about the pain. It was a hard push; I was weaker than I should have been.
I did not have to push for long, though. Once I found him and marked him, I followed the Greton back downstream, flowing without any pressure on me at all. I watched. He hurried up the stairs of the prison at a run, snapped an order to a guard as the man opened the door for him, and they ran—ran—down the corridor. The fat, puffing little official then had the Tonk prisoner bound hand and foot, and shackled. And taken through a service passage out of the prison proper, and into the building next to it,
and from there, down stairs into a room with two chairs, one table, and the sort of paraphernalia that would make a man think he’d chosen to side with the wrong people after all.
One part of me hoped the Gretons would amuse themselves no end hurting him. The other part of me knew I dared not let them.
But the Tonk had already talked. I could feel the shape of what he told the Greton. I could feel its ripples in the shifts of the currents around me, the inevitability of the Feegash victory over the Tonk that grew with every word he’d spoken. I could feel the river that sprawled before me widen and deepen until, where the Feegash and the Tonk were concerned, its course became the only course. Little trickles might slide a tiny way away from the main stream, but they led nowhere.
Still I marked the Greton and the traitor, and as the Greton rose and opened the door to allow entry of a third man—still not the Feegash diplomat—I marked him, too.
We had lost. All we had done so far had come to nothing. Meant nothing.
War would come to the Tonk, flooding over them as Feegash allies slaughtered them wholesale to eradicate the dangerous vermin. They would die because they clung to families, religion, and loyalty to their own people, as things with worth. Because they insisted their own ways were better than those of the Feegash, who had already managed to convince much of the rest of the world that common men could not be trusted to have a voice in their own governance, or a say in their own futures.
The idea that common men might not only wish to decide their own lives, but might also have a god-given right to do it, was an idea the Feegash intended to kill. And now they were going to succeed. Quickly.
I should run to the Ker Nagile and let them know that we had nothing left to do but gather those we could save and flee. Find some hiding place, and hide the books and the culture and the religion and the lives of a whole people who had created a civilization that had endured ten thousand years.
Hide it all away, and hope that someday the world would have a place for men and women who stood in Aaran’s beloved Hends and spoke their thoughts as equals.
And I knew that the world would never make room for such people, because the powerful of the world always had need of more slaves. And free men did not take well to the yoke.
I should have gone back to the ship. I could see the spread of time before me, and it held no hope. I’d found no miracle for Aaran.
Still, I could not give up.
I rose, shook off time, and kept my Eyes focused on the three men in that room. Three men who were still the only ones who knew the truth.
I trotted through town, keeping my eyelids down and my face averted whenever I drew too near anyone. I went to the back door of the building where the three men still talked. Checked to see if it was locked. It wasn’t.
And then, already hurting, with my head aching, I pulled myself into the river and seized my moment and held it. Anchored it as tightly as I could.
The bone-dead-deep cold stopped everything, and the air fought my lungs. I did not have it in me to run through the weight of time anymore. I walked, already weary, through the building. I did not kill any of the men around me. Not this time. I had no need. They did not threaten me, and they did not threaten my people. The threats lay below, and I moved down steps that seemed to stretch into infinity, pursuing them.
Because … because …
I had no because. I had seen time, and in time, no hope remained. No thinnest trickle of that mighty river flowed in a direction that might let me think I acted for the greater good—for the Tonk good.
All the people I loved—Aaran and Redbird, Tuua and Eban, my flock of little girls sailing toward what should be safety, the Obsidians who stood by me and fought because I told them we had to fight, and they believed in me—all of them were walking dead. In every rivulet of time I saw them dying, dying, dying, and me helpless to stop their deaths.
The Feegash had already won the war and the whole of the world would bow to their evil, fall into slavery, and serve as Feegash toys to be broken and discarded at will.
It is no gift to see the future when the future has been lost. That which I was about to do was nothing but useless action. I knew it, and yet I took it.
I stepped into the room and found the three of them there. The two Gretons and the Tonk traitor, frozen in a tableau meaningless to me because I could not see their faces. I could not see if the Gretons hated this treasonous Tonk, or if they liked him.
It did not matter. I was no longer there to win a war; I was there to mete out justice to the man who had sold his own people into oblivion. Because of him, the river had shifted wholly against us, and we would not gain from his death. But he would not profit from his betrayal.
I killed them all. I would have hoped for quickness and efficiency, but I could not manage that. The cold was freezing me, slowing me, making breathing too much to manage. I dragged myself from one to the next, lifted my arms that weighed more than trees, dragged with the knife that felt frozen to my hands across throats harder than iron.
I succeeded, and knew they would die.
But I knew I was going to collapse, as well. I could feel the world narrowing in on me, and the pain crashing down on top of me. I had only a little more time.
I shoved the knife with which I had killed them all into the outstretched hand of one of the two Gretons. That would give them all something to puzzle over.
And then I opened a box that held torture implements, and crawled into it, and pulled the lid down on top of myself.
For a moment I lay with time’s swirling waters around me, and looked to see if, against all hope, I had changed the future. If I had managed to create the miracle I’d told Aaran to pray for—the miracle the Tonk needed to survive.
I had not. The Tonk traitor and both Gretons who knew what he had discovered lay dead just outside the box, and still the Feegash owned the future.
36
Aaran
Hawkspar wasn’t back. Aaran and his people and the crew of the Ker Nagile had successfully infiltrated the ship, killed the three men who guarded it, quietly lowered the corpses overboard into the harbor in weighted shrouds, and then made ready to cast off. Everyone was present and accounted for, save the traitor and Hawkspar.
He knelt on the deck and drew out the Hagedwar, and sought her through it. Gerstaggen was the biggest city in Greton, and one of the largest Aaran knew. But he knew Hawkspar—he was certain he would be able to seek her out, to identify her even among the hundreds of thousands of others who filled the walls of the city.
But he couldn’t. He could find no sign of her. If she were dead, he wouldn’t be able to find her. Nor would he find her if she were somewhere that he didn’t know to look. But she could have gone anywhere; he didn’t know where the Gretons would have taken the treasonous Tonk. Having no starting point, he had to look everywhere, and in the end he feared that there was simply too much area filled with too many people for him to succeed.
If she were dead, he wouldn’t be able to find her. That thought hit him again, but for the second time he pushed it away. He didn’t need or want it.
She had told him if the hour when they were to meet came and went and she had not arrived, that he was to presume she and the traitor were dead. To go on without her. She had told Aaran to hurry as if they still had hope. And to fight as if they still might win.
He’d always been good at finding people. He was a tracker. He could find anyone, anywhere.
Except in death.
If she were dead, he could not find her.
He couldn’t make excuses anymore.
He blinked back tears, and around the knot in his throat walked back to the Ker Nagile’s captain. “All are aboard who are coming aboard, Maar. We dare not wait any longer.”
Maar was a good man. “She’s the whole reason we know we have traitors in our midst. She’s the entire reason we know the name of our enemy, for the first time in uncounted years. We should go back for her. At least for her
body.”
“She said to leave her. She’s the one who can see the future, Maar. She told me if she wasn’t here, to presume both she and the traitor were dead, and to go. To fight the war as if we intended to win it.”
Maar gave a long look at the docks. Then he signaled his men, who silently cast off, and the Ker Nagile sailed away.
Aaran found himself relegated to the position of passenger. He took his lack of purpose while on the Ker Nagile without complaint; at the moment, he needed quiet and answers, if such answers might be had.
He went first to the temple. Unbraided his hair, separated out a single sacrifice lock on his front temple, braided that, rebraided the rest of his hair into Ethebet’s braid.
The keeper said, “Do you need anything?”
Aaran nodded. “I have a sacrifice to make.”
The keeper went to his cupboards and pulled out a sacrifice bowl, a handful of cedar shavings, and a small cake of incense, and carried them over along with a small lamp, already lit.
“Thank you,” Aaran said.
The keeper was studying Aaran’s face. Not too hard to miss the tears that kept welling at the corners of his eyes, no matter how hard he fought to blink them back. “Prayer for the dead?” he asked softly.
“I hope not,” Aaran said. The words were sticking in his throat. “Prayer for the … missing. I won’t believe dead until I must.”
“Jostfar hear your prayer,” the keeper said, “and Ethebet speed the words.” With the grace of a man used to dealing with the grief of others, he sensed he was intruding, and moved out of the way to leave Aaran to deal with his dread and grief as best he could.
Aaran set the sacrifice bowl into the depression in the altar before Ethebet’s shrine. For a long moment he stared at her ikriis. Her eyes were painted a rich, deep sea green. Unlike the ikriis of her in his ship, which had been painted originally for a temple on land, this Ethebet was horseless. She stood in traditional warrior’s garb, feet wide to balance her on the back of a great black whale, proportionally tiny to demonstrate Ethebet’s power.