by T L Greylock
“She’s all yours if you let me go,” the first man said.
The second man shook his head and clicked his tongue behind his front teeth. “That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. She’s mine no matter what. But first I’m going to hang your guts out to dry.” The man paced forward.
“Don’t come a step closer,” the first man shouted. He took three hurried steps backward, dragging Eska with him. “Or I’ll slit her throat.”
The pursuer held his hands, as though one was not holding a knife, out to the side. “Which is it? Do you want to fuck her or do you want to kill her? Make up your mind.” He kept walking.
“I mean it,” Eska’s captor shrieked.
“So do I,” the second man said softly. And then he leaped.
Three things happened in that moment. Eska bit down hard on her captor’s hand. Then she elbowed him in the kidney. And then a flash of light blinded all three of them. Of the three, the third was infinitely more impressive, but it was the first and second that freed Eska from the man’s grip. Acting on instinct, her eyes bursting with white light, Eska slipped out of his loosened hold as he clutched at his side. She turned and ran, feeling more than seeing the form of the woman next to her. A hand slipped into hers and together they raced through the dark, Eska relying on the women’s sense and knowledge of the tunnels to lead her to safety.
Eska was out of breath long before they stopped and she continued running on will alone, heart pumping, lungs burning, until at last the woman slowed and then came to a halt at a dead end lit by a single stubby candle placed on a small wooden crate. A rotten trapdoor hung askew from the ceiling. Eska closed her eyes and leaned against the tunnel wall, fighting to catch her breath.
“I thought you had left,” she managed at last. “Thank you.”
The woman let out a deep exhale, her own breathing returning to normal unnervingly quickly. “I would have if I hadn’t thought you would fight back.” Eska glanced over at the woman and would have sworn she saw the hint of a smile on her face.
“What caused the light?”
“Trade secret,” the woman said, and there was no mistaking the smile then. It vanished quickly. “You’re bleeding,” she said, gesturing to Eska’s face.
Eska felt her cheek. “Not mine.” She hesitated. “My name is Eska.”
The woman studied her for a moment. “Isaure,” she said, then nodded and looked up at the trapdoor. “Come on. We’re nearly there.” Eska boosted her up through the hole, and then Isaure reached down to help her.
Eska emerged inside a hollow tree wide enough to contain three or four crouching people. Following Isaure’s lead, Eska crawled over a bed of mushrooms and out through a vine-covered hole. Standing up straight, she saw Lake Delo spreading out in front of her, calm and blue, through a fringe of branches smothered with pink blossoms. The water lapped against the rocky shore and Eska closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. The air was layered with the subtle sweetness of the lady slippers at Eska’s feet and the deeper scents of pinesap and cedar. Eska walked through the flowering branches to the water. To her left lay Cancalo, tucked between the lake and the steep hills behind the city. Snow-capped, forbidding mountain peaks loomed above.
“Where are your people?” Isaure asked from over Eska’s shoulder.
“I can find my way from here.” Eska turned to face her. “Better perhaps that you don’t know exactly where I’ve gone. That way if anyone asks, you can tell the truth.”
The woman gave a slow nod. “Very well.”
Eska glanced back at the city.
“He’s clever,” Isaure said quietly, reading the direction of Eska’s thoughts. “And not without friends.” The words were meant to reassure, but it was what she didn’t say that Eska heard loudest—she didn’t say Eden San-Germain would be all right. She looked back at the other woman and tried to smile. “He must care for you.”
It was simply stated, but it set Eska’s mind tumbling. Eden’s smile. The silver ink on his bronze skin. The way his fingers curled in her hair. The way he seemed to know what her body wanted before she did. It was care of a sort, she decided. But that wasn’t fair. She remembered the way he listened as she spoke of the attack on her mother, how he accepted her ire toward Carriers without feeling a need to defend himself, how he dove back into the waters of Lake Delo and risked his life for her dream. That suggested care of a different sort.
“We hardly know each other,” she heard herself say. Eska looked down at her borrowed clothes. One set of bare toes looked back up at her. “I lost a shoe,” Eska said, “but I will send these back to the city.”
Isaure shook her head. “Don’t bother.” She turned to step back behind the curtain of pink flowers.
“Thank you,” Eska called after her. And then she was alone on the shore of Lake Delo.
***
“So we are now fugitives in two of the Seven Cities.”
The Firenzia Company crewmembers and Perrin stood in a circle around Eska. Gabriel’s statement hung in the air as Eska looked at their faces. They had given her no cause to question their loyalty, but Eska could not help but wonder if any had reached a breaking point.
She smiled. “While I appreciate your willingness to share in this, I’m afraid I alone am the fugitive.”
Gabriel brushed this away and asked the crucial question. “Where are we going?”
Eska looked across the lake at the city and sighed. She had been wrestling with the question since parting ways with Isaure. And if she were honest with herself, she would admit her mind kept slipping away to Cancalo and a man with silver tattoos. Not knowing Eden’s fate was gnawing a hole inside her.
“Surely Arconia,” Perrin said. “Your family is there. They will protect you.”
He had a point, the exact point Eska had been making to herself. And Albus was in Arconia. She needed to know what else he had learned about the god discs. She looked down at the ivory and gold reliquary in her hands.
“I can’t risk my father and mother’s positions. Or the Company’s reputation. There is more at stake here than my future,” Eska said, voicing the other side of the argument. “If I return to Arconia, I will be too visible, too close, and my parents and my uncle will be dragged through the mud with me. If I don’t,” she trailed off. “If I don’t, there’s a chance they come out of this unscathed. Relatively.”
“Then where?” Gabriel asked.
“The de Caraval estate in the Vachon Valley. It’s secluded and remote. From there, I can marshal my case against the accusations from Toridium.” She looked around the circle once more. “Any of you who wish to go home, you are free to do so without any fear of losing your place with the Company. I have already asked more of you than I have any right to do.”
Bastien bristled. “Anyone who abandons my lady now is a coward.”
“Bastien,” Gabriel began, his voice stern, but Eska broke in.
“There is no cowardice in choosing a simpler path, Bastien,” she said. “I can make no guarantees of safety from this point on, no promises of when you will see our city again. It is no small thing to follow a woman wanted for murder, even an innocent woman. Your loyalty will make you complicit even though you knew nothing of my actions in Toridium. Those who wish to bring me down, to bring my family down, will not feel guilty over any collateral damage.”
Bastien’s gaze had dropped to his feet as she spoke, but he raised his head again. “That may be, my lady,” he said, his voice less fierce but perhaps all the more meaningful for that, “but who am I if I stand aside now? I am with you.”
Eska smiled sadly. The young man, barely more than a boy, who had raced up to her bath chamber to tell her the Barca ship had sailed was gone, replaced by a harder man who was beginning to understand something of the whims of the world. “Thank you, Bastien,” she said.
In the end, not a single crewmember chose to leave her. Some expressed their choice boisterously, others quietly, but none gave Eska reason to doubt them.
/>
The decision made, the crew dismantled the small camp quickly, loading the two wagons efficiently. Perrin helped Eska pack up her tent, wrapping the skeleton bone by bone in linen and then securing the reliquary, which Eska had not even had a chance to examine, in a small chest. Perrin paused with his hand on the ornate ivory before they closed the lid of the chest, a distant expression on his face.
“What do you think is inside?”
If he felt her hesitation, he did not reveal it and he removed his hand for Eska to shut and lock the chest.
“I don’t know,” she said, tucking the key in her leather satchel. It was the truth—she didn’t know with any certainty the reliquary contained another god disc. But Perrin had asked her to speculate and she was choosing not to, not in his hearing at least, though she could not have said exactly why. Habit, perhaps. She was accustomed to dissecting every one of her theories with Albus, and Perrin, despite his attentiveness to the skeleton and his eagerness to learn, was no Albus. Perrin did not seem bothered by her answer. His expression was still that of a man who wasn’t truly present, but Eska could not fathom where his mind had wandered.
Eska turned away and shoved the last of her belongings into a large oiled leather bag, then bent to trade Isaure’s remaining leather slipper for a sturdy pair of boots. When she finished lacing them up, she straightened and saw that Perrin was still standing motionless in the middle of the tent, staring at nothing. He looked pale.
“Perrin?”
He seemed not to hear, but when Eska walked over to stand in front of him, he stirred the moment she entered his vision. Frowning, he put a hand up to the back of his neck.
“Are you all right?”
The nod came slowly, haltingly. “Yes, I think so. Just tired.” He ventured a smile. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”
Eska put a hand on his forearm. “Manon?”
He nodded again, his gaze on Eska’s hand. “I can’t put her out of my mind, though I would like nothing more than to forget.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “Just for a moment.” When he opened his eyes, Eska was reminded of how young he was. “You are very kind,” Perrin said. “I don’t know why. I am a Barca. Barcas do not have friends, not any more.”
Eska smiled a little. “Are we not friends?”
She had hoped for a lighthearted reply, a quick quip. Instead the question seemed to confuse him and he looked at her, lips parted slightly, a crease between his eyebrows.
“I do not know,” he managed at last. He bowed his head, the formality of the gesture surprising Eska. Without thinking, she stepped closer to him and put a hand on his cheek.
“Perrin. We are friends. I did not expect to say such words, but whatever is between my family and yours, believe that. Trust that. You do not need to be alone in this world. You are not alone.”
He seemed to lean into her words, as though he needed their strength—and then his knees buckled and he collapsed to the ground at Eska’s feet.
***
Perrin was sweating profusely by the time they got him loaded into one of the wagons. When Nahia examined him—after Eska had run from her tent shouting for help—and pronounced him not to be in immediate danger, the rapid decision was made to continue their departure from Cancalo. She sat in the back of the wagon as Bastien encouraged the horses into motion, Perrin’s head in her lap, his long legs stretched out next to her. They had wrapped him in two thick blankets, though the evening was warm.
Nahia had given her verdict to Eska with a wrinkled brow, concerned because, though he presented some of the physical symptoms of a fever, his forehead and armpits were not hot to the touch. In the end, they had agreed to treat it as a fever, assuming the heat would come later.
They took the northwestern route away from Lake Delo, following the shore road until it began to curve back around to the southwest. Night had fallen by the time they left the dark lake waters behind and turned onto a smaller track, this one bumpier and made dangerous by ankle-deep holes. As such, their progress was slower than Eska would have liked, both for Perrin’s sake and to put as much distance between them and whatever authorities might be searching for her in Cancalo.
Perrin had passed in and out of consciousness in the moments before he was lifted into the wagon, and now he dwelled in a fitful sleep, made all the worse by the condition of the road. He cried out after one particularly rough jolt, his fingers scrabbling at the blankets at his throat. Eska tried to keep him comfortable, but there was little she could do other than wipe the sweat from his face.
He became lucid once in the night, shortly after Gabriel had called a halt to water the horses at a stream before turning from their cart road and crossing a stone arch bridge. Across the bridge, they would join up with another narrow track, this one leading up into far-reaching, heather-rich moors. Eska and Gabriel had conferred on the best route to take to the remote Vachon Valley, and chosen the moors for the isolation. The route would grant them little in the way of civilization, which would necessitate hunting and foraging and perhaps a little fishing if they were lucky, but it would keep them from unwanted eyes.
As the horses drank and the crew stretched their legs and argued good-naturedly over who would have to drive next and who would get to sleep, Perrin stirred.
“Manon?” he asked, his voice a mere whisper. He opened his eyes as Eska looked down at him.
“Are you comfortable?”
“Eska,” he said, recognizing her. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. How are you feeling?”
Perrin shut his eyes, as though keeping them open was too difficult. “Tired. Is there water? Where are we?”
Eska reached for the flask tucked in the corner of the wagon at her hip and helped Perrin lift his head enough to drink from it. When he had enough, his head sank back to her lap and Eska was quite certain he looked paler than before.
“We’ve left Lake Delo. We’ll be passing into Revellion moor soon.”
“I’m sorry to be a burden,” Perrin murmured. “The last thing you need is an invalid.”
“I’d hardly call you an invalid,” Eska said, making sure he could hear the smile in her voice. “You just need to rest.”
Perrin’s lips formed a ghost of a smile. Gabriel gave the order to continue on and the wagon lurched forward once again. Perrin dropped into a more restful sleep shortly after, but Eska did not sleep that night. Her mind roamed across thoughts of the Hands of Fate, of the ivory reliquary that lay in a chest at her feet, of the Regatta Master of Lake Delo, of Alexandre de Minos, of the dead man in Toridium, of her family and the uncertainty that lay before her. Even had she not wished to remain awake should Perrin need anything, she could not have found enough stillness within her mind to succumb to sleep.
When they halted again in the darkest hours before dawn, she extracted herself from beneath Perrin, walked a bit to get the blood flowing in her legs, then dug into her satchel for a small packet. The raw harrow root powder burned her tongue, but Eska welcomed the sensation, welcomed the taste, unmarred by water or tea or herbs, and she felt, when she returned to the wagon and took up a perch next to Cosimo on the driver’s bench, that she could forgo sleep for one hundred nights, that she could, even, climb among the stars in the night sky and rattle the dreams of the gods who slumbered there.
Interlude 14
Excerpt from the confiscated journals of disgraced scholar Dionus Barrachio
Day 62
Subject 7 appears to be developing muscle spasms, concentrated in, but not exclusive to, his left arm and leg, as well as the left side of his torso. His heart rate slows tremendously, dangerously, one might say, in the aftershock of these spasms, though not if orally dosed with the harrow just prior to the event. In those cases, the subject’s heart rate accelerates beyond a state of moderate exertion and maintains this state, and yet the subject shows no signs of exhaustion or other ill effects during this time. Two components of this must be further examined: the window of time in which
an oral dose can produce this effect after a spasm, and how, and for how long, the state of exertion might be maintained.
Day 64
Subject 3 has died of self-inflicted wounds. Dissection reveals blackened liver and inflamed intestines, as well as a curious sticky substance in the lungs.
Day 67
Subject 6 can no longer tolerate ingestion of the harrow due to the breakdown of the muscles that allow her to swallow. Further doses will be administered topically. See diagram.
Day 71
Subject 7 entered state of extreme violence, made all the more destructive by enhanced strength. Three assistants harmed. Subject tortured the third until she provided him with the purest harrow currently in the laboratory’s possession. Subject ingested dose five times greater than any yet administered. Subject currently appears to have entered a wakeful sleep: eyes remain open, but he shows no response to stimuli.
Day 94
Subject 7 escaped.
Day 103
Subject 7 found. The subject was hunted down after rampaging through the City, killing at random. Subject demonstrated enhanced strength and endurance, and retained intelligence and presence of mind, unlike Subject 1. I tried to lure him back to the safety of the laboratory, but the Celestial Knight Armira, who led a contingent of elite soldiers at the express order of Archduke Nimicus, thwarted my efforts. Subject 7 was cut down in the middle of the Decadronum. I will redouble my efforts with the last of my charges, Subject 6, though I do not expect her to live long.