“And what of survival?” Harrow Fox said. “By your own words, it is better to endure.”
“For you,” she said. “I am old, my son. Let me die with my teeth deep in an imperial throat rather than wasting away in the bowels of some moldering holdfast.”
He kissed her brow. I groaned beneath the strain of holding the whirlwind, and roused them from a long, shared silence.
“Farewell, mother,” Harrow Fox said. “And farewell, nephew. You have proven your quality, today. If you survive this, find me again, and we may yet learn to trust one another.”
I could answer only with a nod. He became an eagle-hawk and took flight, wheeling once above our heads before riding the thermal up and away. When his wake faded into the pattern of the world, I began to release the spell.
“Not yet, boy.” My grandmother lowered herself to the ground beside me. She cupped my chin, then wrapped me in her arms, and I felt wetness on my cheek. “Oh Foolish Cur. Oh my child. I doubted, and I am sorry that I doubted. You have saved our hope.” She clasped my hand and traced the scars she cut, long ago. “From the moment I named you, I have asked too much. Let this be my last request. Show them the fullness of your power. Let our deaths be legend.”
The fullness of my power. The winds of An-Zabat, the fires of Nayen, even the lightning of the Girzan steppe, though I had known it stripped and constrained by the canon of sorcery. I reached for them all, wove them together, as the disparate strands of those places and people had been woven into me. The upper reaches of the cyclone collapsed till it formed not a cylinder, but a dome of wind. And within those winds I conjured flame, which caught and danced like spirits of living fire. Last, into the pattern itself, unmediated by canon or pact, I made what I could of battle sorcery, wild bolts of lightning ripping through the air.
I shut my eyes against the searing wall of light that spun around Grayfrost Keep. Heat washed over the courtyard, melted the frigid earth to mud. I collapsed and poured out everything of me. All my rage. All my grief. All my need for redemption. It blazed like a star, and for a heartbeat the world aligned to its gravity.
With a final push, I spun the hurricane of wind and flame and surging lightning outward, into the valley between the peaks. In the pattern I felt ancient pines burst from the heat and snow boil into steam. Soldiers screamed and fled and died, entombed in the molten ruins of their armor.
And then it was past. The fires went out. The conjured winds faded. The last bolt of lightning buried itself in the earth. Piece by piece, the pattern of the world rebuilt itself. Winds--natural winds--swirled in, stirred by the sudden heat. I rolled onto my back, stared upward at the round scar my cyclone had dealt the sky, which was slowly being closed by the drift of brush-stroke clouds. Snow began to fall in a gentle downward dance.
“Yes,” my grandmother said, and I felt her hand on my shoulder, firm and strong. “That they will not forget.”
She cradled my head, and I let myself believe that this would all end well. That my display had frightened off the Sienese. That my uncle would soon return, and embrace me, and give me the life among his people I had always been meant to live.
Footsteps sounded on the causeway beyond the gate, and raised voices shouted in Sienese. I lifted my head as the gate squealed open and a dozen figures spilled into the courtyard, led by a man I knew at once by his wispy beard and his smile, small and ghostly and twitching with rage.
“Well now,” Voice Usher said. “If it isn’t our pollical cat.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Hand of the Sun King
I tried to stand, but exhaustion held me. Usher took slow steps toward us, his hands folded behind his back. The tetragram on his brow was bright with mercurial fire.
“Oh Alder,” Usher said. “You should have stayed away. We sought you, and hoped to find you here, but did not know that we would until you came diving out of the sky like the fool you always have been.”
“That is not his name,” my grandmother said in Sienese.
Usher regarded her with disdain. “Another witch?” he said, then turned to the men who had followed him. “Only an old woman. A good first test, wouldn’t you say?”
I followed the line of his eyes and saw two faces--one that gave me a moment’s pause, while the other drove an icy blade into my heart. The first was Cinder, the left side of his face a mass of wet, fleshy scar. The second was achingly familiar, with the same keen eyes I had watched over many a stones board. But paler, thinner, and now dressed in the gilt armor of a Hand of the Emperor. His gaze met mine and there was a moment’s hesitation before he lifted his hand to my grandmother.
Cinder grabbed Pinion’s wrist. “You promised me revenge, Usher.”
“You will have it,” Usher said. “But Hand Pinion deserves the opportunity to prove himself, does he not?”
“You rest, Foolish Cur,” grandmother said, and gently lay my head upon the ground. “It is my turn to make them bleed.”
She conjured flame, poured it into her gnarled staff, and hurled it like a javelin at Usher. The wake of the canon hammered at the world as Usher raised a shield of shimmering light. Her staff struck it, shattering to burning cinders, putting Usher on his back foot. While he recovered, she leapt into the air on an eagle-hawk’s wings and dove for Cinder.
A whip of battle-sorcery lashed out from Cinder’s hand, but she veered from hawk to mouse and the whip cut only the air around her. Cinder moved through the canon and curled his fist like a blade-of-the-wind. She veered again and fell on him with the bulk of a mountain wolf. Her jaws closed around his throat, and she hurled him to the mud.
Cinder rolled, spraying crimson, and she rounded on Pinion. Her teeth flashed with white foam speckled red. The boy staggered away, and I saw a vision of Oriole, broken and battered, caked in his own blood.
I cried out, delirious, unwilling to watch my friend die a second time.
Grandmother hesitated. Only for a heartbeat. Enough time for Usher’s will to race through the canon, casting a wake like a held breath and a heavy weight on my shoulders. Ribbons of light flicked out from his fingers and wrapped her, like chains, at elbow and knee.
A spasm worked through the muscles beneath her iron-gray fur. She howled in pain--increasingly human--as the ribbons of light contracted, forcing her back to her natural form. Her will drove into the world, reached for flame in a last desperate attack, mirroring her husband’s fate so many years ago. In three strides Hand Usher reached her. The toe of his boot thudded into her jaw. She rolled, lay limp, and the spike of her witchcraft faded from the pattern.
I rolled onto my stomach, my arms pushing at the mud, trying to find purchase, to lift myself in her defense. I reached for witchcraft, for windcalling, but I had poured myself into the hurricane of fire and lightning. All I had left was a candleflame, sputtering at the tips of my fingers, reaching out to Usher, who turned toward the wake of my witchcraft with a look of pity.
“Oh, Alder, my poor, brilliant, foolish boy,” he said, and drew a knife from his sash. “I wish I could be kind.”
He stepped around me, kicked away my attempt to set fire to the hem of his robe. His knee pressed between my shoulder blades. A soft hand gripped my left arm, and I felt a cold bite below my elbow, then fire, then dribbling wetness. He released that wrist and grasped the other, repeated the strokes of his knife, and I felt the sudden absence of the windcallers’ pact. An emptiness that seemed to swallow every memory of Atar, of the Valley of Rulers, as though the part of me built in An-Zabat had been carved away.
“Grit your teeth,” he said. “This last will hurt the most.”
Pain lanced down from the joint of my right wrist. A scream roiled out from the heart of me, broke against my teeth, and stripped my throat raw well before Usher’s task was done. I felt the last blow as on a raw nerve, and then the soothing, mocking warmth of healing sorcery.
“I’m sorry, Alder,” he said, his words a distant echo. “But the Empire still has a use for you.”
The last of my strength seeped into my wounds, and I fell into blackness.
* * *
The echoes of clanging steel and agonized voices drew me up from the depths. There was no pain, though that had been my last memory--pain, and Oriole standing over my grandmother’s corpse.
I blinked against torchlight. I was back in the map room, seated in a chair, my arms bound to my sides by ribbons of flickering light. Other ribbons wrapped my grandmother, who lay sprawled on the table. I tried to stand, but the light held me as surely as iron chains.
“The fourth sorcery--actually the first added to the canon, though much more difficult to learn than lightning or healing, and most useful,” Voice Usher said. He stepped between me and the table, holding a small silken bag and the knife.
At the sight of the knife, I looked down at my arms. My sleeves were torn. My windcaller’s tattoos had been replaced by jagged scars, and my right arm ended at the wrist in a pink, puckered stump.
“I warned you, didn’t I?” Usher said. “This is the fate of all failed Hands.”
“Why haven’t you killed us?” I said, my voice dry and throat raw.
“Would that I could, Alder,” he said, and placed the bag on the table beside my grandmother. “As I was saying, binding sorcery does more than hold the body. In fact, it derives from the sorcery of transmission. It muddles the will and makes magic more difficult to use for the bound but allows the binder an unprecedented insight into the motions of that will. Enough to trace the working of any primitive magic. This--you will have realized, for you were always such a bright, bright student--is how the Empire learns the magics of the conquered. The An-Zabati proved resistant to this method, able to withstand any torture even unto death rather than work their magic while bound. But you well know the…unique solution we devised.”
“You would prise me for magic,” I said, and sagged against my bonds. “What magic? I have none, now. You cut them all away.”
“There was lightning in that storm you conjured,” Hand Usher said. “I am not a fool. I cut away the marks of your pacts to deny you the ease of familiar weapons, but I think you are more than capable of giving me what I need.”
“And what is that?”
The ghostly smile, tinged with anger, rose to his lips. He reached into his sleeve and produced a small bowl. Its face glinted silver in the torchlight as he set it on the table between us.
“Water, Alder. The better half of An-Zabati magic.” He clapped his hands and motioned toward someone behind me. “Which reminds me, I’ve forgotten hospitality! Would you like tea? Or something stronger? I didn’t bring the plum wine you loved so much, sadly.”
A soldier placed a tray on the table beside my grandmother. Steam rose from the neck of a teapot, but there were no cups, only a bottle of the same harsh sorghum liquor Oriole and I had shared on the first night of our friendship.
I shook my head, let myself laugh at the absurdity of his gesture, and of his demand. “I saw them draw water from the desert many times, but they never taught me how.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Usher said. “But perhaps they taught you some of their reticence as well. Once the…prising, as you say, has begun, we shall see how that seal on your lips endures.”
Two fingers dipped into the silken bag and withdrew a dried seed. “This is a simple plant. A crawling vine common in Toa Alon.” He held it up, inviting me to examine it. “The Toa Aloni call it nor kuhol, which translates to something like carrion creeper. One need not master their language to grasp the subtleties of such a name. It much prefers to grow in rotting carcasses than in the soil, you see.”
The seed fell softly back into its bag. Usher set down the knife and draped his fingers on the handle of the teapot.
“Carrion creeper is common enough. Much rarer to find a drug that addles the mind without dulling pain. But when one scours the whole of the world, one can find anything.”
He lifted the teapot, and I flinched away from him. But he reached for my grandmother, and the blood drained from my face.
“Already?” Usher said. “Cinder would be so disappointed. Ah, well, I much prefer things to end here, before the screams and the blood.”
My mouth opened, seeking a way to save her without betraying the last secret and hope of the An-Zabati.
“She’s an old woman,” I said. “How can you torture her? She is shielded by propriety.”
“But she is not Sienese, and has rejected the Empire, along with its doctrine,” Usher said, and lifted the teapot. “Shall we dispense with the moral debate, and get to the point? Show me how to call water from the earth, and she need not suffer.”
“I told you,” I said, seeking a way of escape. My will went to windcalling but found no well of power, then to witchcraft, but there was only void. “It is a secret I never learned.”
“Such a shame,” Usher said, and grabbed my grandmother’s jaw, where a bruise had blossomed at the join of her skull. He set the spout to her lips. She sputtered, spraying tea across the table. Usher pushed her head back, forcing her airway closed and her gullet open. He poured till the pot was empty, then set it aside and reached for the knife while she gagged and spasmed against her bonds.
“Not only healing, but the sixth and seventh channels, like the third, are from Toa Alon,” he said. “A country rich in useful magics. The sixth channel is the sorcery of dowsing. Originally, the Toa Aloni used it to find veins of precious minerals in stone, which became the hearts of their idols. But it can be used to find any number of things.”
He traced the line of my grandmother’s arm with the tip of his knife, slicing through the sleeve of her shirt but not breaking skin.
“For example, the body has certain nodes. It is these that doctors feel to find the pulses. The pain dealt to such nodes is quite excruciating.”
All the while, the canon of sorcery had hung in the room, binding Usher to the Emperor and his power. The iron spike of his will moved through it, carving the pattern of the world under the Emperor’s guidance. The knife in his hand began to gently vibrate. A quiver that intensified as it moved past my grandmother’s elbow.
“There we are,” Usher said, and released his dowsing sorcery. He made a small incision, drawing only a bead of blood, and set the knife aside.
“After our conquest of Toa Alon, after we learned dowsing and healing and thought the Toa Aloni had learned subservience, the bountiful terrace gardens of Sor Cala began to die,” he said. “There was a great deal of starvation, though not so much as An-Zabat now suffers.
“We thought it a pestilence, but it seemed not to touch the rural highlands, which we found odd. Until we caught one of their priests waving his hands over their fields by moonlight. Thus, we discovered the sorcery of cultivation, which they had denied us, and ceased to work in the lands we occupied. Cultivation has done more to spur the Empire’s growth than any other magic. Though, sadly, it still requires water, else An-Zabat would thrive and there would be no cause for this…unpleasantness.”
He pinched the seed between thumb and forefinger and held it above my grandmother’s wound.
“Last chance,” he said.
“No matter the pain you inflict on her, or on me, it will not give me knowledge I do not have,” I said. “You must believe me, Usher.”
“How can I?” he said and pressed the seed beneath her skin. “You have worn so many lies, layered like the masks of a Face-Changer.”
Usher splayed his fingers over my grandmother’s arm. His will moved into the seventh channel of the canon, and the silver lines of his tetragram flickered, then glowed golden as the summer sun. The room filled with the smell of fresh air and blood and the new growth of spring. A tendril sprouted from the wound and grew to maturity before my eyes, draping itself from the edge of the table. The skin of my grandmother’s arm wriggled like wet, wormy earth. A groan bubbled from her throat, then became a scream, then a howl of pain that filled the room and echoed from the stone walls long after Ush
er released his spell.
My voice rose to join hers, begging Usher to stop, insisting that I had told the truth. That this cruelty was needless and would gain him nothing.
“Her suffering is yours to end,” Usher said, and gestured to the silver-gilt bowl. “We took that from the wreck of a pirate windship. I realize it might not function properly without being buried in the sand, but you can work the magic nevertheless.”
I could not tear my eyes from the distended ruin of my grandmother’s arm, with the bright green tips of new-growth vines sprouting from a dozen seeping wounds. Her howls had been replaced by muted, hiccoughing sobs.
“No?” Usher scowled at me, opened the bottle of liquor, and took a long swallow. “This is your doing,” he said, wiping his mouth and the wisps of his beard. “Her pain arises from your stubbornness, and nothing else. If you would only tell the truth!” He thumped the bottle onto its tray and reached again for the knife.
A knock sounded at the door.
“Enter,” he said, with the knife dangling in his hand.
Pinion walked into my field of view, his sharp eyes glancing off the horror on the map table, drifting over me, and settling on Usher.
“The last holdouts have surrendered,” he said. “The captives are in the courtyard. What should be their fates?”
“Let them stew a while,” Usher said. “Come, Pinion. You should learn this, distasteful though it is. Hold her shoulders and be ready with healing sorcery.”
Pinion positioned himself beside my grandmother’s head. His hands shook as he grasped her and held her writhing frame to the table. Usher began to dowse her other arm, the knife gently vibrating in his hand, and as I watched them a mirthless, spasming laugh began to work through me.
“You laugh at her misery?” Usher said.
I shook my head, fought the laughter, swallowed it. “You told me the Emperor wanted an end to war. A lasting peace. Does he truly believe he can win such a thing like this? With cruelty layered upon cruelty?”
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