Harmond put his huge hand gently upon Ghemma shoulder. “We must trust her.”
She looked once back at Geart, shuddered, and hurriedly unbundled Clea’s wrap. I cut my daughter’s heel before other instincts could take hold, and I squeezed her blood into my palm to the sound of my daughter’s most desperate scream.
I smeared it upon Ghemma’s forehead and lips, kissed her cheeks, and said, “Sing your nouns, if you wish to be free. Just the nouns.”
She growled and then sang them, one and after another and my ears popped as they banged away amidst Geart’s powerful verse. The air began to warm. The rowers and the rest yelled for joy, bashed at the ice, and got us moving.
Geart bellowed. The sound was the rumble of a metal drum filled with iron ore. He and his two dozen halted their march across the ice and fixed their eyes upon us. The dark tingle upon my flesh grew. They needed only stop her singing and we were doomed.
“Quickly,” I shouted, and began to paint the faces of the rest. “Sing the words with her. Sing them together. We must sap the strength of their song.”
They followed Ghemma’s lead and as each new singer added their voice, the darkness diminished. When Harmond joined the song, all that was left was the rising warmth of the river water. The men at the oars got us out beyond the edge of the reaching sheet.
Behind us, Geart changed his magic again, and we could hear the deep crack of ice as the lake froze deep beneath his feet. His Hessier started running as the reaching ice began to encircle our boat, and their dark touch tickled our flesh once again.
“A third word,” I said. “Who knows another word?”
Harmond immediately added a third and a fourth, and with each the group gasped as if kissed. They chanted all four in unison and our circle grew.
“Sapphire and breast?” the priest said. “Such words you surrender?”
“Sing you fool,” I said, and had to slap the man to get him to rejoin to choir.
I cheered them on as the ice reached further around us and we continued to gain on the other boats. I yelled at them to row for their lives.
Behind us, one of the Hessier fell through the ice, but the rest kept coming and our circle of open water shrank by half.
“More words,” I said and looked for reluctant faces. A man from the town offered a fifth, and while the group folded it into their chant, I turned to the reluctant priest.
“Birch?” he said. The endeavor was beyond him, and I could not abide his weakness. I rewet my fingers with Clea’s blood and painted his teeth and his eyes.
He screamed and wept. He lost his breath and looked slowly around.
“Grandfather, you were wrong,” he said, and spoke one word after another before singing it to the group.
My ears shot with pain. My vision vibrated and the blood upon my hands began to burn. All the many terrors around me fell away and the words cut their way into my head. Clea was looking into my eyes when the words found their way inside. Once after another they struck like fists.
flesh man sapphire breast birch wolf raven rabbit maple
The group lost their cohesion as the priest’s words crashed through our skulls. I slumped into Harmond, who sat unmoving. Several of the singers collapsed as if they’d been torn open. Only Ghemma kept singing and the long cadence of the nine nouns made the air vibrate.
I pressed Clea into her arms. She stood and she sang loud enough it seemed that the entire world must hear her. A cheer rose from the other boats, and I turned to see another group of Hessier falling through the ice.
Behind them, the warm river began to flood across the top of the sheet, and along the southern and northern shore, the warm dry rocks refused to anchor the ice. The sheet broke free along one edge and began to split apart.
“One more,” I said. “Anyone? One more?”
There were no more reluctant faces. All I saw was fatigue.
Geart’s song.
“His magic. The one that is freezing the ice,” I said. “Can any of you hear it? Someone take their noun. Someone steal the noun for water from them.”
Ghemma could not stop singing and the rest were out cold. Sweat poured down her face. I stood, hugged her close with Clea clutched between us. I worried she would lose her will, but her head came up and she sang the word she’d taken.
water
My ears keened with pain and my vision blurred white as the powerful word stabbed me. The others gasped and then belted out the purest joy of laughter before Ghemma began to sing the great song once again. She repeated the verse, faster and faster until their song was the shriek of a storm.
I felt I might join her. The pain and joy sliced and swirled through me—a thing waiting and wanting to be born from me. My lips began to move.
“Look there,” someone called, and I was shocked awake.
Geart and his Hessier had turned around. The open circle of water around our boat remained, while the sheet of ice turned in the current. One Hessier after another was crashed through, leaving only Geart.
He looked back at me once before turning slowly and walking back toward the town.
Ghemma let go of her song, and the storm came to an end.
We were away.
55
Sikhek Vesteal
The long walk back to Cyaudi did not clear my head. I hurried in, hoping for distraction.
The city was larger than I remembered. As large as Alsonelm, perhaps as large as Alsonvale. It had outgrown its walls, built new ones and was close to outgrowing those as well.
I wandered for a time but did not have to go far before I found a long avenue of noisy taverns and brothels. I found a man with seven slaves and coin to spend. I guided him to an alley, killed his guard and liberated him of his coin, clothes, and his slaves. I sold them the next morning and found a brothel on the other side of the city that bragged on its selection of wine.
The first taste of it came as the Khrimish girls I’d chosen slid from their clothes. Their hands caressed my healed body and I lost track of myself in red hair, red wine, and laughter. Food came. Then more wine and more girls. I used up the ones from Khrim and made due with a trio of devils from Berm while my redheaded angels rested around my bed. I slept while being kissed and woke up to the same. The exercise added a human color to my pale flesh, and I became strong enough to take hold of a waist and feel the glorious smack of my hips against opened thighs. All my hurts faded, the wine flowed, and days rolled by.
“Can you get off of me?” someone said some time days later. “Long enough to breath?”
I wasn’t sure which redhead in the pile said it. I was fucking her, but that didn’t help solve the mystery. I laughed, finished as fast as I could for her sake, and let them sort out the puzzle of limbs.
“We’ve been in here for days,” another said. “Need a break. I’ll end up with a child at this rate.”
“More than you bargained for, if that’s the case,” I said, drank down the rest of the bottle and rolled onto my back. “Get out then. All of you. Come back in the morning.”
They took the coin due them from the stack on the table, and I ate of leg of something. Lamb, I think. I closed my eyes in hopes death or sunrise.
It was never a quiet street at that time of night but the bedlam below bit at my ears. I made for the window armed with the leg of mutton.
Several men were taking turns hitting a Bermish vagabond. He didn’t put up any fight, but kept yelling at the top of his voice and only yelled louder as they hit him.
“Let the noisy fucker be,” I shouted down and struck one of them with a well- aimed fling of the leg bone.
They cursed up at me but decided to move on. The Bermish man, though, didn’t stop yelling—likely the reason for the beating in the first place.
“Cinnabar,” he shouted amidst his ravings, and I stood up straight. It was a word no one was supposed to know, and I remembered saying it during my own mad ramblings aboard the Kingfisher. The crew may have heard me. Soma had used thi
s knowledge against me. Geart may have heard me, too. He would have a hard time finding my mines, if this was the best he could do—a thrall screaming the word in hopes of drawing the attention of someone who knew about my mines. He was two provinces away from Aneth and the valley that hid my secret. He might as well be searching for my source of mercury upon the bottom of the sea.
“Could you keep the peace?” I said down to the doorman and tossed him a gold quarter. He tipped his hat at me, led the men down a thin alley, and the yelling came to an abrupt stop.
I lounge in the peace and fell sound asleep for the first time in—forever, perhaps.
I woke with calendars swirling in my mind and sat up with a start. It had only been 27 days since I witness Dia’s escape. For Geart’s to already have thralls in Yudyith, he would have to have come straight down off the mountain. He’d taken Verd, and was already on the move north. I’d made that march myself when I’d first come to Zoviya. I’d had five hundred Hessier when I’d done it and mercury enough to replace them all thrice over. What did Geart have that he could be moving so fast?
He had a piece of a Vesteal, if not the whole child, and he was coming to find me.
I ordered food and a washerwoman while I pondered, but the dizzying calculations fell away like a bad dream when her hands and her sponge slid down my back and arms. Wine followed, and my girls returned.
Days rolled by. Drunk, fucked, and well fed, I lived without remembering. Pleasure. Black currant wine. Brazed calf shanks. Divonte served between bosoms. Long legs. Warm, dark tumbles.
I snored loud enough to be billed for the rooms on either side of mine.
My coins ran low and then they were gone.
I’d not paid enough attention, and it earned me a stab in the guts before I could secure more. It hurt enough I felt as though I might actually die. I was tossed out the window. I crawled into an alley while the effect of wound and wine faded.
I found myself sprawled upon the greasy cobblestones where the thrall had died days before. The stink of his corpse was upon the dark stones. When I stumbled out, the doorman gave me a thin coin in farewell.
I walked my way free of the uncaring city and sat down along the river’s edge. The farmers hadn’t returned to their fields. No rice had been planted anywhere as far as the eye could see.
The province’s drunken orgy was going to last, it seemed, until it ran out of coin or got itself stabbed, too.
I decided that doing something else in another town in another place was in order. A while later I noticed that I had not moved. I woke up there and fell asleep again. My guts stopped hurting.
I was still sitting there when I saw a hawk circling the city. It kept at it through the afternoon, and continued to be there the next morning. A smell caught my attention while I watched its endless circling, and I looked down to see that a blue-gray mold was growing upon the shaded side of every plant and tree. Had I missed this detail? Was this why the fields were empty and the province had chosen to exhaust itself by pillaging its neighbors? It was blight like none I’d ever seen.
Standing up was hard after so long. I was hungry, too.
The hawk was still there. This was as impossible as the blight, and I began to wake up. The vivid ghost, the spirit beneath the sea, and the volcanoes. Magic was tumbling across the land, unbidden by songs.
The spirits were stirring. Something had woken this third spirit—the Vastness. Me, perhaps? The spirits as I knew them no longer made sense. Who was this third? Was it the father of the Earth and Shadow or their escaped prisoner?
It did not matter much, though. I did not have the faculty for mystery, or for self preservation. I’d been fool enough to repose in the path of advancing Hessier, while a bird that would not tire circled overhead.
“I need that bird,” I said and started back toward the city.
I found the tallest gatehouse along the city wall, and spent the rest of the afternoon goading the lieutenant on duty to take a shot at the hawk. He missed as did one of his men. His captain arrived, looking up at the bird, and before long they were taking bets against each other.
Several hundred arrows went up, some at the risk of those below. Entire troops started shooting at the same time, and when the bird was finally struck, I was the first man moving to fetch it. But it didn’t fall. It kept circling with an arrow stabbed clean through its breast.
Hessier.
But it couldn’t be. A few from the crowd called the soldiers to hit it again, and I added my voice to theirs. The hawk shrieked once and again, twisted itself in midflight, and broke the arrow in its talons. It swooped around, pulled the broken halves free, and dropped them above the soldiers.
They wouldn’t shoot at it after that, and soon the bird was being watched by the entire city. The sun began to set and the city’s celebrations came to an end. I watched for two days from my spot along the river while men who needed to be tending to fields began to return.
Still the hawk circled.
“I’ll get you, yet,” I said and wandered beyond the city walls until I found the plot of land where the city burned its nameless dead. The Shadow was strong there, and I pulling hard upon him. I could not get any more hold of his power at first that I could aboard Soma’s ship, but the struggle was not in vain. I needed only the smallest song. I waited for the hawk to pass overhead, sucked the Shadow from the ash piles, and sang my small song.
feather burn
A tail feather burst into flame and the rest of its greasy plumage became a bright ball. It shrieked, fell like a stone, and hit a muddy patch of field nearby. I could hear the city cheering while I hurried to find it.
A small trail of smoke guided me, and I found the thing struggling to get free of the mud. It froze as I approached and looked at me.
It was Hessier. Its eyes. The soul of a man was bound inside. It radiated the cold touch of strong magic. It looked at me as though it knew me.
In all my 1,400 years I’d never been strong enough to consider such an unnatural magic. A million vile things done in my name but never an abomination like this.
I crushed the bird’s head with a rock, sat down in the dirt, and cried.
Geart was perfect. The names of the animals alone had eluded me for a millennium. He had eclipsed me.
“Damn you!” I yelled and struck the bird again and again until all that was left in the mud was bits of guts and feathers.
Had Geart caught Dia? It seemed she had escaped, but this magic—
No. If he had Dia and the children, he would not have thralls here searching of the cinnabar mines. One Vesteal child’s bones were enough to make a score of perfect Ashmari and sweep Zoviya aside.
The eyes of the bird would be his. He has seen me kill his bird.
You fool. Geart has seen you. You are Vesteal. All he needs is to catch you.
I stood and I ran. I found a man with a horse, killed him for it, and I rode it until it went lame and collapsed. I kicked it and ran down the road until I became aware of how utterly lost I was. I was not certain which direction I’d gone. The forested road could be anywhere.
Overhead, two hawks circled.
Then I heard the snort and crash of a charging caribou.
56
King Barok Vesteal
The Middle Third of Spring
The living wore ribbons and the dead broiled with wafts of black ash. Down the ancient road we moved like a bejeweled and angry snake. I was not sure who was mad and who was sane—the boy-king playing with death or the cult that followed him.
To the right and left of my carriage rode the undead shells of my best friends. Rain puttered their burning armor and hissed on the hundred, it added a rolling menace to the dancing snake.
I would have screamed if I could have sat up to get breath enough for it. Ugly sleep stole me instead.
Days rolled as we wove down into Trace’s wide Kogan Valley and the spring mud of it fields. Yet the men sang and found new ways with each sunrise to add color to t
heir armor and the horses.
All of us were mad.
The line of carriages came to a halt beneath the fortress of Almidi, and I did not want to open the door. I waited in the dark, hoping for quiet.
They opened without me and sunlight blasted in.
“Isn’t it marvelous?” cried a woman.
I was squinting to get a look at her when a second figure rushed in to take me by the hand and tugged me along.
“Were you there for it?” The large man asked as he hauled me out into the drizzling rain.
“Kuren?” I spluttered. “Madam Oklas?”
“Dear boy, so good to see you. Were you there when the Chaukai set fire to the mountain? Of course you were. You should have seen it from here. It lit up the entire coast. It must have been blinding up close.”
The pair was accompanied by the Oklas brothers and Nace. Generals from Thanin, Khrim, and Abodeen stood nearby looking out of sorts.
Their greeting had me on my heels, and while Regent Oklas looked apologetic, he did nothing at all to prevent it or the hugs that followed. Madam Oklas took me in her arms with such vigor my back cracked and my feet came off the ground.
“Oh my,” She said. “I need to be more careful, baby and all.”
I could not tell by looking at her, but the Regent’s smile was flushed and beaming.
“Barok was there when it happened, sis,” Kuren said, genuinely embarrassed. “No need to go on about it.”
From my left around the carriage Fana approached saying, “I think it’s marvelous.”
Evela, Lilly, and the rest of those in the carriages enveloped us. There was much hugging and carrying on. Evela took center stage for a time, accepting greetings from the Arilas and generals before demanding a hug from Madam Oklas.
“Thank you so much for all your letters,” she said to Evela. “I treasured every word. The Pormes will be overjoyed to attend Rahan’s coronation.”
The conversation moved quickly to the health of Evela’s son, baby names, and other such things. When at last there was a gap in the conversation, I heard the hissing of the nearby soul irons. I’d considered a new name, Chaumari, but “free warrior” did not ring true to me. Soul-iron was more fitting.
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