The Rising Tide

by Sarah Stirling

  “Rook-wei,” he murmured. “How nice to see you once more.”

  “Where are you hurt? Let me see if I can help you.”

  “You should not remain here. It is quite dangerous.”

  “Hush.” Her hands roamed the edge of his desk, searching for somewhere to grab hold onto. Channelling just enough energy from The Rook to give her an edge, she pushed it off his legs with a sharp intake of breath, the pain so dizzying she nearly dropped it on him. She felt the way Sandson gasped as it lifted, shakily at first, and then more steadily until she could toss it onto the pile of broken things. Blood gushed from the wound across the meat of his thighs and she winced, taking as much care as she could when she slid a hand beneath him.

  “Rook, you’re injured. You can’t –”

  “Where can we go that’s safe? There has to be somewhere.”

  Sandson’s breath turned frantic when she hoisted him into her arms, shoulder screaming in pain. The more energy she pulled up from the bond, the easier it was to ignore. Still she gritted her teeth against it, jaw clenched so hard that it was its own kind of pain, a welcome distraction from the relentless throbbing down her back.

  “There is a safehouse in the industrial district. I do not know if it still stands.”

  “How do we get there?”

  Sandson began to babble through ragged breaths, rattling off directions.

  “Are you witless? Rook, we can’t go tearing off across the city.”

  She looked at Viktor and something in his expression changed at whatever he saw in her eyes. “What else do we do, Viktor? Where do we go?” If she stopped for one moment – if she let the sweep of her thoughts crash over her – she would be pulled beneath them and never resurface. She could only keep marching on and hope that it would make a difference. Somehow.

  His hand found hers again and squeezed tight.

  *

  “Something is wrong.”

  Janus blinked, turning from the restless waves of the ocean to the half man, half spirit that had crept up on him as he lost himself in the hypnotic motions. Sometimes it was the only time when his mind stayed truly quiet.

  “Something’s always wrong.”

  “I mean, there’s a lot of energy coming from the direction in which we travel.”

  Janus waved a hand. “World’s falling apart, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “And I don’t suppose you really mind.”

  There wasn’t much one could say to that. Janus, who had made his business in not saying things, pulled out the last dredges of his tobacco and rolled it into a cigarette. Using a worn piece of flint to light it, he leant back, savouring the burn of smoke in his lungs. The wind threatened to extinguish the flame so he cupped it in his hand to shelter it, willing to take his chances for the release it gave his twitching fingers.

  “I don’t really understand why you came with me.”

  He shrugged, feeling the weight of a gaze upon his shoulders. “Nothing better to do.”

  Ziko snorted. “I suspect there is more to it than that.”

  “Not a very complex man.”

  “Somehow I find that difficult to believe.” His grip tightened around the railing, white knuckled. “I remember you, you know. We spoke, down in those cells.”

  “Mm.”

  “I have been nothing but an adversary to you until now.”

  Janus turned to look at him, cocking a brow.

  Ziko sighed, shaking his head. “Ignore me. Sometimes I still find myself running back down that path, even when I have promised myself that I will never look back.”

  “Let me know how that works out.”

  Gulls sang their songs above, riding the cool wind as they circled in a grey sky. A chill lingered in the air, creeping beneath the pathetic remains of Janus’ coat and seeping down into his bones. His fingers curled stiffly around his cigarette, numb to feeling, but he couldn’t find it in himself to move. Upon the deck he was not squashed between the raucous crew of the ship, free of the questioning looks thrown his way from ally and stranger alike. Ships were all the same. Abreast of the ocean, time and place seemed not to matter. He could be anywhere in the world and he only need close his eyes and let everything fade away.

  “You are not Myrish born, are you?”

  An eye cracked open. Janus grunted.

  “I was born in a village with no name. In the middle of the Silvera desert, far from any real civilisation. If I was to tell the boy I once was where I would be standing today, well, I’m quite certain he would not have believed me. Do you not find it strange, how our lives spin out? It might have all been very different for me. For you as well, I imagine.”

  There was something itching at his skin, nibbling away until he was forced to give it thought. His fingers drummed on the railing. “How’d you survive? Should have died. You were…”

  “Dying? Yes.” Ziko’s smile turned wry. “I thought I was going to die, too. Maybe I should have. But it was the first time, in all my years, where that thought frightened me so much that it hurt more than the pain. To think, all I had fought for and gained, to die now? That was some cruelty for the Reaper to bestow upon me. I just could not accept that it was my time to go, so I crawled on my hands and knees to the rift. To be quite honest, I do not know how I made it. I suppose there’s little that cannot be achieved when you so desperately will it to be.”

  His fingers stopped. “You went through the rift?”

  “Yes. I entered the otherworld. The Freelands, as it is known there.”

  Janus turned to look at him properly then, eyes raking over the mask covering his face, only the gold of his irises peeking through the slits. The lines running down his neck looked more like claw marks in the grim light of day, cutting into skin so pale he could be a wraith. He was a wraith. In this moment he possessed no true physical body, light shining through him if caught in the right position, and his tangibility waxing and wading sporadically.

  “It’s possible.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Hard to describe. Imagine a world where even the slightest thought makes a ripple. It is a world without true rules. Every creature can affect it at will. The limitations of our physical forms are stripped away, leaving nothing but pure possibility.”

  There was a reverence to the way Ziko spoke, a soft curve to his lips as his gaze turned wide, clearly deep in his memory. From the thick barrage of clouds a few fingers of sunlight clawed their way through, shining down upon the grey, churning waves just beyond the prow of the ship. Janus could see it; whatever it was that had captivated Ziko so about the place. What he had undergone was a complete rebirth. He had truly died and been reborn, almost unrecognisable from the forlorn soldier he had once been. Nameless. That was the way of those who followed the Pillars. Janus had known a few, back when he had still lived in his own village amongst the Bluestone Mountains. To him they had seemed terribly pitiful, completely afraid of simply being.

  Not that Janus had known how to do that, either. Not really.

  “Not nameless anymore,” he said, catching that golden gaze out of the corner of his eye.

  “No, I am not. Somewhere along the way I realised it was not something anyone else could give me, other than myself. Until I believed in it, I would always remain nameless. Unworthy of anything more than a namesake after a Pillar I could not even relate to.”

  “Interesting choice you made.”

  “Yes.” A soft laugh that could have been the wind through the sails. “I believe someone told me it meant the, hm, the respite after the storm. It felt fitting. It stuck with me, anyway. Even as I lay dying, I couldn’t help but cling to the notion that I had nearly found some sense of meaning, out of all the chaos the Myrliks have brought me.”

  There was more Janus wanted to say. Words he could not voice, as if he was still fresh faced off the boat, carrying the tender wounds of his days on the continent and unable to speak more than a few phrases of a tongue he tripped over. Even in his native l
anguage he had never been one for oration. In foreign lands he had been content to retreat into this part of his nature. But now that there were ideas he wanted to give voice, he found himself frustrated, mouth pinching as he scrambled for fragments of speech that would never sort themselves into some kind of meaningful order.

  “Oh, there you are.” The colourful scarf around her head flapped free in the wind and the faint sunlight shone on the soft texture of the antlers parting Hika’s black hair. Her eyes were inky and impenetrable, a mark of what could happen to those who messed with the forces beyond the physical world. “I’ve been looking for you. The captain says we’re due to reach the edge of the city soon.” Her nose wrinkled, face angling away towards the direction in which the ship pointed.

  “Something feels strange.”

  “Yes, I said so, too.”

  Janus looked from wraith to demon and shrugged. He might have sworn allegiance to The Rook in some undefined contract they had agreed between themselves, but he was not privy to the energies that ran between rifts. All Janus had to rely on were his very human senses and they hadn’t let him down yet. Even so, he could not help but turn to the horizon line, eyes narrowed for the first sign of land in the distance. Things going wrong merely felt like typical weather for the season. If there were more problems on the other side of that hazy line, well, at least they would keep him occupied. Maybe scratch the restless itch beneath his skin.

  “They keep looking at me. I think they are afraid of us.”

  “Of course they’re afraid,” said Ziko. “I have no real body and you have black eyes and horns. This guy here barely speaks and seems to be seconds away from shooting every last one of them for so much as looking at him the wrong way. I’d be wary, too. Honestly, if this had been before all this started happening to me, I’d be trying to get us all thrown overboard.”

  Hika deflated with a long sigh. “It is not so bad, is it? We paid a hefty price to be taken to Tsellyr as soon as possible. I thought that was all men really cared about.”

  “More to it than that.”

  He felt both their gazes and resolutely ignored them. There was only so much reassurance one could give and Janus had none within him. More than likely, they would face prejudice and worse in a city so overrun with the Empire’s soldiers. The natives would react just as strongly to those who messed with spirits. There were reasons, after all, that interacting with riftspawn had been left to the Order of the Riftkeepers throughout history.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Ziko. “Their opinion means less to me than a drop of water to the ocean. It is they who should look for my approval and not the other way around.”

  “Fancy yourself a god now?”

  Gold stripes on his mask winked as his head turned to Janus. “What else would you call it? If I am master of my own fate. If I can shape the world to my will, would I be anything less?”

  Hika frowned. “That is not what the bond is about. It is supposed to be about protecting –”

  “Protecting who from whom?”

  “It is dangerous. The riftspawn could destroy this world completely. You are only concerned about the power it affords you.”

  “Says the woman who nearly destroyed herself in pursuit of it.”

  “To save my sisters!”

  “Whose motive is right? When the outcome reaches the same conclusion, do those intentions really matter?”

  Janus sucked in his last desperate lungful of smoke, squeezing the cigarette between his finger and thumb. An unpleasant notion burned in the pit of his stomach. Voiced, it sounded something like, maybe he’s right.

  “So you would see this world destroyed for your own gain?”

  “No sooner than you would to save your brethren.”

  Hika huffed, turning away. The scarf clutched in her fist rippled like a flag, a vibrant red splashed with black and white. “I knew it was stupid,” she muttered, “but I was desperate. They won’t let us bond. They won’t give us the power to save ourselves. I was angry, so I took it for myself. Just enough to keep us alive.”

  “Who are they to tell you what you can and cannot do?” Ziko’s eyes blazed through the mask. “Why should you bow before someone who knows nothing of your situation? All I care about is a world where we can be equal and free. I want a world where we can decide on our own lives. Is that so terrible an ask?”

  She looked torn, gaze on the scarf dancing in her hand. Her shoulders slumped, the shadows beneath her eyes dark enough to be bruises. “It is not. But there must be some kind of order. Mustn’t there? What would become of us if there was no rules at all?”

  Janus had asked himself that question many a time but it had always been an unformed musing without the breath of possibility. Until now. He pushed the remains of his cigarette between his fingers, stewing upon thoughts he could make no sense of. Freedom was a lofty pursuit, one he might have aimed for in his youth, but could he honestly imagine what that world would look like? The rifts and their spawn had brought more horrors upon these shores than they had beauty. Janus was not one to weep over those he did not know but something did not sit right in his chest when it was the innocents who always seemed to find their way into the crossfire.

  Some part of him longed to agree with Ziko, he realised, because Ziko had done something Janus had only ever dreamed of: he had rebirthed himself into someone new. Not a facade still clinging to a past long gone but a new being with completely new hopes and dreams and a sense of purpose. He was faced with the startling reality that Ziko was a god he could believe in; he just could not agree with him on every point. That was something he did not know what to do with.

  “Look! There it is.”

  Around him he was aware of the stirring of the crew as the first statues loomed into view. Tiger, dragon, serpent. Phoenix. Those statues had guarded the bay of Tsellyr for centuries, the tiger looking worse for wear with is crumbling ears, eyes nearly worn from view. The phoenix was missing part of its beak, green creeping up the stone legs of the statues from the vicious waves below.

  The water of the bay was eerily calm, only the faintest ripples disturbing the endless grey that met a colourless sky, heavy with clouds. The closer they came to the statues, the more the sight stirred in his mind until he realised it was more than just clouds. Great columns of smoke were rising into the air, filling the bay with a thick smog that hit them as soon as they crossed the entrance between the cliffs on either side that protected the city from the worst of the storms in the more tempestuous seasons. The stench of burning tickled his nose.

  “What is happening?” Hika leaned over the railing, antler jabbing into his arm.

  Some of the crew of the Herdan gathered around them, a murmur rising as they exchanged looks, some running off to consult the captain of the ship. There was no guarantee of safe harbour here, not if the city was burning down. He met Hika’s worried gaze and shook his head, motioning for her to cover her hair with her scarf. Bulky as it might have looked, it was better than leaving herself exposed.

  A small schooner parted the smog, drifting in their direction. Stripes of indigo revealed it to be a Sonlin ship and he could feel the men around him stiffen as conversation faded into quiet. The captain of the ship, a younger man named Kell who had been hired by a shipping company, parted the crowd so he could speak to the men across the short distance between ships. “What seems to be the issue here, boys?” he said cheerfully in the common Myrish tongue.

  “I’m coming across!” shouted one of the soldiers as the others lowered a gangplank and held it firm for him to cross over, jumping down amongst the crowd with little for concern for being surrounded. His hand remained on the handle of the pistol strapped to his naval uniform. Stripes on his coat marked him as a commanding officer but Janus did not know the hierarchies of the navy the way he did the Sonlin army.

  “Which of you is the captain?” he said, looking around despite Kell standing before him. His black hair had been pulled back in a short pleat tied with a
red ribbon. It fluttered in the breeze.

  “You’re looking at him,” said Kell. “With whom am I speaking?”

  “Captain Tam, of The Mighty Swell. What is your business in the city?”

  “I am to deliver firewood to the West Myrish Shipping Company. My contact is supposed to meet me by the docks. What is the situation, Tam-all?”

  “The city is under lockdown right now. It will be some time before anyone is allowed to enter or leave.”

  “I still don’t understand the situation here.”

  “That is strictly confidential.”

  Kell spluttered, looking amongst his wary men. “I beg your pardon? Are my crew and I supposed to simply sit back and lose our fee? We have a lot riding on this contract.”

  “Business is taking a break for now. I suggest you do the same, Sir.”

  For a long moment the two of them squared off, tensions rising amongst the crew circling around the naval officer. Hand on his own belt out of instinct, Janus eased forward so he had a good eye on the proceedings. He could see the moment the man realised his position, glancing around himself before he took a step back. “I suggest you stay away until it is deemed appropriate for you to enter the bay, perhaps in a day or so.” With that he hopped back onto the gangplank and marched away.

  Janus shared a look with Ziko who was almost vibrating with tension. He seemed moments away from sparking up a thunderstorm.

  “Captain! Captain?” came the cries of the crew around him.

  Kell waved them off. “No matter. We should turn around.”

  More protests followed. The captain hadn’t seemed like a fearful man in the days he had been travelling with him; something was amiss. Kell looked entirely too jovial as the reluctant helmsman turned the ship around and pointed them in the direction of the vast, listless ocean beyond the welcoming arms of the guardian statues.

  “Captain, what are we going to do? Are we really just turning away?”