Vultures

by Luke Tarzian

  “The others?” Serece asked.

  “Lighting pyres in the east,” Sharya said. “What of the west?”

  “Abandoned,” Serece said. “Save a couple of lokyns.” She looked at the corpses. “Were there any survivors?” Sharya heaved a sigh, and Serece understood. Her chest tightened and her free hand balled into a fist. “This is the third village this week. I—”

  “Should suppress what anger you have stewing and refrain from asking why,” Taür suggested. “The lokyns kill for sport. It’s as simple as that.”

  Serece frowned. “I know, and I’ve never questioned that. What strikes me as odd, sister, is their very existence. The Ariathans claim to have finally slain Te Mirkvahíl, yet its progeny infest our lands like the plague does our flesh.”

  “You assume the demons’ lives are bound to Te Mirkvahíl’s own,” said Sorin, “but there is no evidence to give credence to that belief. Te Mirkvahíl was the puppet master, the head of the serpent if you will, and when you rend a serpent’s head from its body it will cease to function properly. For just a moment it will writhe, its actions uncontrolled.”

  Serece looked to Sharya for support, but the captain offered nothing more than a shrug and small shake of her head.

  Serece turned her back to the women, grumbling. “Father believes me.”

  “Of course he does,” Sorin said. “Now that Rejya’s dead who better to indulge his theories than the royal bastard, hmm?”

  Serece wheeled around and smacked Sorin across the face. The shorter woman yelped and staggered to the side, strands of silver hair peeking out from beneath her hood. She glared at Serece, cold blue eyes shifting back and forth between shock and anger.

  Sharya stepped between the two, glancing disgustedly at each in turn. “You are childish with your words,” she said to Sorin. To Serece, “And you are quick to give yourself to anger. In doing so you both disrespect the phantaxian tenets and put us in danger of provoking Yssa’s wrath.”

  “Idiots,” Taür muttered, rolling her eyes.

  Serece drew her hood further past her eyes. Rejya’s narrow-eyed image took shape in her mind, chiding her with pursed lips and a tilted head.

  I know, I know, Serece thought. Temper Yssa.

  Temper fury.

  Rejya’s image arched an eyebrow. “If you know,” she seemed to say, “then why do I still sense Yssa feeding off of you?”

  To that, Serece had no answer, and she let the memory of her fallen sister dissipate with shame, a centuries-old emptiness welling in the center of her chest. A void created first by her infant daughter’s death, followed by Rejya’s death, then widened by the gradual loss of friends and family as the years had passed. She chewed her lower lip, sniffing back tears, then finally let a ragged breath escape and linger in the air.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Sorin shrugged at the apology—she was prone to holding grudges. She brushed past Serece and set to helping a trio of newcomers erect the funeral pyre. Taür followed suit, the pair whispering back and forth.

  Half an hour later the pyre blazed, and thick, acrid plumes of smoke carried fallen spirits upward to the Second Life. Or so Serece had always been told they did, and in this instance, liked to believe.

  “Burn the buildings,” Sharya ordered, handing Serece a torch.

  Serece made for the structures north of the square, their pane-less windows not unlike the lifeless eyes of the bodies charring on the pyre behind her. The timber had begun to rot, its soul and structural integrity compromised by the degenerative nature of the mirkúr. To leave the village standing was to sow a plague.

  She set fire to the building nearest her, listening to the rot and darkness crackle as the flames began to feast. Black smoke rose to meet the night. Serece walked the village at a measured pace, leaving conflagration in her wake and ash to fertilize the earth. She hoped, in time, something beautiful might grow, though in a frozen hellscape like the Phantaxis Mountains that was little more than wishful thinking.

  An hour later they withdrew, the ash-dusted snow the only hint of what’d transpired.

  The descent into the Érahnjë Valley was a silent, single-file down a switchback stairway in the rocks. Serece trailed several yards behind the rest, ears twitching madly, fingers dancing on her daggers’ hilts. The air smelled mostly of virgin snow and pyre smoke, but beyond that, past the hint of pine, hiding in the darkest crevice of the night, Serece discerned the source of her unease—a scent like kindling aflame. It stoked her still-simmering agitation toward Taür. The atmosphere crackled and Serece cursed.

  Yssa was about to go berserk.

  Serece hissed, chiding herself mentally as she shoved past her pale-skinned kinsfolk to inform Sharya. She was almost there when a guttural shriek destroyed the midnight calm, like a thousand children screaming their demise. A half dozen plumes of smoke javelined from the sky, making impact in the valley at the stairway base. Snow and rock flew all directions; the phantaxians drew their blades. From the flurry manifested six slender silhouettes with eyes like full moons—the Shades of Yssa, phantaxian rage and frenzy made manifest. Each held a broadsword. Each reeked of flames and death. Each had been present thirteen years ago the night that Rejya died.

  The Shades erupted toward the phantaxians. Normally a narrow corridor or stairway such as this would have offered a distinct advantage, but the Shades’ fluidity and incorporeal nature negated this.

  Serece danced beneath a cleave. Using the momentum, she thrust upwards and sheathed her dagger in the lower jaw of the Shade, its ethereal composition beginning to harden at the touch of her crystalline blade.

  It shrieked and kicked Serece square in the chest, knocking her back. She slipped on the icy stone, lost her footing, and tumbled over the edge of the stairway. She hit the ground with a thud, the force of impact from the near ten-foot fall knocking the wind from her lungs. For a moment the world swam in and out of focus, the skirmish above a swirl of black and white, light and dark as crystal screamed through smoke.

  A deep baying snapped Serece from her trance, just in time to see Sorin’s body soar past her into the valley. Serece screamed and scrambled to her feet. Equilibrium not yet intact, she tripped and rolled down the hill, coming to rest a yard from where Sorin’s body lay sprawled. Serece bellied herself to her sister’s side, a ragged gasp escaping her mouth.

  Blood stained Sorin’s pale skin and silver hair. Her eyes, once the coldest blue, were a swirl of fog. Serece could see no wound, the little good that did. She brushed her hand over Sorin’s eyes, closing the lids. Then, choking back tears and swallowing the lump in her throat, she rose and started up the hill.

  She crested, teeth bared, lips curled back in a rictus of rage, and—

  * * *

  Taür lay bleeding in the snow, her entrails hanging from her gut. She was not long for the world. With every blink the darkness became more profound. Every breath came weaker than the last. She rolled her head to the right, toward the stairway in the rock, and watched the Shades pin Sharya with their blades. Taür reached weakly, desperately for her friend, though there was little use in doing so. ‘I see, and I feel,’ was all it meant.

  She started, wheezing at a breath on her neck, but she kept her eyes on Sharya, now limp and bleeding in the snow. Taür knew what had found her and she felt no inclination, no desire to gaze upon the thing that’d come to take her life.

  Yet still she turned, if only to look her spellbound bastard sister in the eyes and curse her name, to rue the day their mother’s faithlessness and general loathing of Serece had brought this pawn of ire to life. Behind Serece loomed the puppeteer, a black wolf wrought from smoke. An Avatar of Yssa, Serece’s unbounded rage made manifest.

  Taür grasped for the buckle of Serece’s cloak and pulled her close so that their noses touched, so she could see coherence flood her sister’s eyes as clarity left her own. “I…h-h-hate you.” Taür coughed blood, taking care to spit a generous amount in Serece’s face. “Always…did.�
�

  The first blade entered just above her hip, the second through her gut and into her spine. At the very least her physical pain had dispersed. I hope this night haunts you for the rest of your days. She closed her eyes, a muffled shriek the final sound she heard before the darkness took her home.

  * * *

  Serece blinked. The night was still and she lay sprawled on her back, daggers clutched in her hands. The pain came first to her chest, then to her head, like a blade sheathed slowly in her flesh, then twisted. The image of a black wolf in blood-spattered snow flashed across her mind, followed by her sister’s battered corpse. The scent of iron clung to the air, to her skin and garb, and Rejya’s words rung loudly in her head: “Temper Yssa. Do not let it harness you.”

  Trembling, Serece lolled her head to the left, met by the moonlit dead and a massive wolf formed from smoke. It approached, each footfall leaving threads of shadow in its wake. It sniffed Serece, then raised its nose and bayed. The sound exhumed bits and pieces of a fractured memory. She had heard this howl the night that Rejya died; she had bathed in the blood drawn by her blades.

  Not again, she thought. She tried to scream but was too weak. Fuck. Not again!

  Tears dripped slowly from her eyes. Tears of sorrow and despair. Tears wrought by fear of an old truth she’d done her best to bury and the guilt that’d festered all these years. She had to tell her mother and father now, for her sake and for theirs. But how would they react? How would they look at her when she told them she had slaughtered Rejya and Taür?

  3

  Wretch

  Wine and whiskey were an awful mix.

  Theailys tossed the wretched cocktail back, then wiped the dribble off his chin. It was a day for drink. A week, propriety be damned. He’d searched for Anayela’s corpse until the sun shone bright and all he’d found was misery and worry in a mystery that never should have been.

  What, he snarled inwardly at Faro for the umpteenth time, did you make me do? What happened at the burial mounds last night you sadistic prick?

  And, for the umpteenth time, Faro held his tongue and refused to manifest, undoubtedly amused by the desperation his cruelty had wrought. Had the implications of his silence not been so severe, it would have been a welcome change.

  Theailys growled and started from his chamber at the Hall. There was still much to do before his departure tomorrow and Keepers knew stewing in the darkness with a drink or five would accomplish little, if any, of the tasks at hand.

  “You reek something fierce,” Mistress Khal said when he approached her in the courtyard several minutes later.

  “Good old liquid vigor.” Theailys wiped his nose with his forearm and cleared his throat.

  “A shit brand I’d guess,” Khal scoffed. “You look like you’ve not slept in days.”

  Theailys relayed to her the previous night’s events as best he could.

  She nodded. “So that’s what’s got the Faithbringers in fits today.”

  “By ‘fits’ do you mean they’re going door to door and snarling at the dissident again?” Theailys said. Khal’s grimace confirmed his assumption. “Great. Don’t suppose they’ll overlook me just this once?”

  Khal shook her head. “Not a chance.”

  They started on their way.

  “You’ve spent time trying to interpret dreams,” Theailys said.

  Khal shrugged, the late-morning sun a glint in her amber eyes. “I have. Certainly not enough to have mastered illumancy, but enough to more or less make sense of what I see. Something on your mind?”

  Theailys told her about the raven, silhouette, and flames.

  Khal thumbed her chin pensively. “There are some who believe dreams are more than dreams. That they are cries from the subconscious, distortions of truths, either yet to come or those that have already come to pass.”

  “Funny,” Theailys said. “The bird said roughly the same thing.”

  “Interesting,” Khal mused. “Considering.”

  Theailys arched an eyebrow. “Considering…?”

  They passed into the shade of the oak-lined campus entry lane. Khal took a deep breath, savoring the fresh air. “Considering,” she said, “ravens are often times depicted as tricksters. In illumancy they are seen as omens of ill tidings.”

  Anayela’s missing corpse certainly qualified as such, but it didn’t necessarily fit the narrative of his dream. Theailys frowned. “Maybe it’s just old wounds unstitched. Old wartime fears.” This wasn’t the first time he’d had the dream. It’d been a regular affair with the occasional variation when Searyn went away to fight, and after Anayela’s death. Now? Maybe it was the dread of failure—what would happen if The Keepers’ Wrath didn’t work? Thoughts of civil war, of Helveden choked by flames and ripped to shreds by demons turned Theailys’ skin to gooseflesh underneath his robes.

  “Maybe,” Khal said, giving Theailys’ shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Probably. Keepers know these last years have been rough. For all of us.” Like Theailys, Khal too had lost her wife, and occasionally they would share a drink or eight and reminisce about the days before the shadows had begun to laugh.

  They passed beneath the archway, nodded at one another, then departed opposite directions, Theailys southward for the farmlands and the sanatorium manor in which Searyn resided. A spur of the moment detour before wartime responsibility: it was the five-year anniversary of their older brother’s death.

  * * *

  “I was half sure you’d forgotten,” Searyn said. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a braid, making apparent the myriad scars on her pale face.

  “Almost did,” Theailys said, as they started for the apple grove behind the house.

  Searyn smiled softly. “I suppose I don’t blame you, considering.” A Faithbringer general, she was undoubtedly privy to what’d transpired in the burial mounds. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Somewhere in between exhausted and drunk,” Theailys said. “Garnished with disgust and fear. The usual, pretty much.” He yawned, and his breath tasted like a foul amalgamation of liquor and bile. “How about you?”

  “Well enough that Warden Mira granted me this walk,” Searyn said. “Sniffed my smoke this morning, so the voices are asleep. Sky’s not falling toward me anymore.” She heaved a sigh. “War’s a bitch. Phrenzka’s worse.”

  Theailys took Searyn’s hand, giving it a sympathetic squeeze.

  They entered the grove a short time later, halting in the center before a polished black stone embedded in the earth: their memorial to their brother, Mar. Searyn knelt and caressed the stone, chewing her lower lip. Eventually it began to quiver, and she choked back whatever she’d been about to say.

  Theailys sat beside her, legs crossed, gazing at his reflection in the smooth surface. “I think we were about seven or eight years when we found this stone on the beach. D’you remember?” Searyn tensed her jaw, nodding. Theailys sniffled, then chuckled. “You thought it would be a stupid birthday present. Said it was too pretty, and…” Again, he sniffled, sighing raggedly. “Shit.”

  The tears came steadily, silently. This time, Searyn took his hand and squeezed, hard enough to make it go numb. It’d been a dark day, Mar’s death; Searyn had watched him fall. Theailys still had her tear-stained letter, splotchy ink and all. ‘Went a hero,’ she had written. ‘Saved us all.’

  “I’m sure he’s watching over us from Rapture,” Searyn said finally. “With mother and father, no doubt.”

  Theailys nodded, despite the pain radiating from his skull down into his back and arms. Despite the ethereal giggle signaling Faro’s presence. He clenched a fist at the tickle of frigidity in his fingers, breathing deeply just as his mother had taught him as a child. To his relief, Faro faded back to the corner of his mind from whence he’d come.

  “Promise me you’ll be careful,” Searyn said. “When you leave the city.”

  “My neuroses forbid me from being otherwise,” Theailys said.

  Searyn turned and looked him in the eyes. �
�Promise me, Theailys. Things are dark these days, even with Te Mirkvahíl dead, and the last thing I need is for my light to burn out.” Her nails dug into the top of his hand. Her left eye twitched. “Please.”

  “All right…all right.” He pulled Searyn into a tight embrace. “I promise. You too, yeah?”

  “I swear,” she whispered into his shoulder. “I swear.”

  * * *

  Clouds had gathered by the time they returned to the sanatorium—so had the Faithbringers. Adorned in bone-white plate they approached, hands resting on the hilts of crystal swords, the air about them tense with zealous ire.

  “General Khoren has called for your arrest,” the first proclaimed, voice distorted by a faceless helm. “For your desecration of the burial mounds.” Then, snidely: “Imagine my shock—the dissident at the root of such abominable affairs. I never would have guessed.”

  Searyn gaped at Theailys.

  “I wore that very expression just hours ago,” the Faithbringer said. “A strange and horrible thing to learn your commanding officer is the very wretch her people swear they are not.”

  Her people.

  It was Theailys’ turn to gape. Had he heard the Faithbringer right? He looked at Searyn, whose expression was a cross between disgust and incredulity, peppered with unease. “…What proof do you have?” he asked. It was an inquiry, the strength of which accompanied his sister’s mien, which was to say that neither was particularly confident. The Faithbringers had something, lest they wrongly swarm a wartime sanatorium. But what?

  The lead offered a writ. “General Khoren’s command, complete with testimony from Wardens Mira, Lee, and Drahl.” Searyn’s handlers, as it were. “They spied you dragging bodies from the burial mounds. They found you hanging corpses in a barn.” The Faithbringer paused. One produced a pair of shackles and the others drew their blades, as if anticipating noncompliance. “They saw you wreathed in and wielding mirkúr.”