by Jenn Lyons
“Hello?” I tried standing, discovering to my pleasure I could.
I didn’t remember seeing anyone like her on the ship. She looked human. Well, she mostly looked human. Her metallic hair hinted at other origins.
As I walked toward her, I noticed something. The tide water was rushing out, but where it should have stopped and came back in again, it continued its retreat. The entire ocean had decided it wanted to be as far from the island as possible. The little girl squealed as the retreating tide revealed pools, seashells, and flopping, confused fish.
“No, that’s wrong,” I muttered. What’s wrong about that?
Stories of the ocean. Tales from Surdyeh’s knee, tales of lethal waves . . . “Get away from there!”
“Fishies!” The little girl pointed down.
“NO! Get away from the water!” I ran toward her. We were too close to the ocean, far too close.
As I scooped her up, the water began to build into a wall. That wall grew higher and higher while I could only stare, knowing I was too late. There was nowhere I could run to safety before the tidal wave came crashing down.
The wave was gigantic and black, formed from the darkest, deepest waters of the ocean abyss. The wave’s shadow swept over the beach, as it rose so high it blocked the light. I shut my eyes and turned away.
And stood there, notably not being washed away and not dying.
Don’t think I wasn’t grateful or anything: I was just surprised.
I looked back at the wave. The water hung suspended, perfectly still and motionless. Neither growing nor shrinking, the wave hunched over the land like a doom that had changed its mind at the last minute and hadn’t quite decided who to destroy instead.
The little girl stuck her tongue out at the tidal wave and made a rude noise.
“Are you okay?” I looked at the kid, then back at the wave. “Why isn’t it falling?”
She threw her arms around me and kissed me wetly on the cheek. She smelled sweet, like vanilla cakes floating in whipped cream. “It is! Silly. Too slow for you to see it. It’s been falling for a looong time.” The little girl wiggled, the way a cat will when it wants to be put down. I let her go and she jumped back down to the wet sand to oooh and aaah over confused starfish.
“I don’t—” I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s okay. It’s been a long time for you, and you don’t remember anymore. It’s hard to see something that big or old. Most people can’t see it at all, won’t see it until the final crash. And that will happen fast. Really fast. And then—” She tossed around sand. “Everything is swept away.”
“When will that happen?”
“Not too long now.” She bent down and picked up a seashell. “A sea spiral. Pretty. No two are ever the same. Chance shapes them. The waves, the sand, the sun, the wind.”
“Who are you again?”
The little girl grinned. “You already know.”
I swallowed and looked around. The day was beautiful and crisp, kept from being too hot by the marine layer of fog hovering just offshore. The air had a fresh salty sweetness that always eluded major port cities like the Capital or Kishna-Farriga. Overhead, seagulls cried out, hyperventilating in excitement over the uncovered fish. Everything around me seemed real if I ignored the hovering tidal wave hanging over my head. I set my teeth against each other and looked back at the girl. “Why?”
If she was who I thought, then I didn’t need to be more specific. I needed no qualifiers with my goddess.
“Isn’t it funny how short questions have long answers?”
“Give me the short version anyway.”
“There’s a war. It’s a very old war, it’s a very bad one, and it’s one that we must win at all costs.”
“A war? Against who?” I’d have heard if Quur was involved in an old, long war. “You don’t mean the vané, do you?”
“No, I mean the demons.”
“Demons? But . . .” I blinked. “The gods won that war. We won that war. That’s the whole reason that demons have to follow our commands when we summon them.” It felt odd, too, to treat this like something that happened a few years ago, maybe a generation at most. If there had ever been a war with demons, it was so old and distant that it had become the stuff of myths.
But I thought of Xaltorath. I thought of an Emperor who primarily existed to banish demons or show up when a demon managed to summon up enough of its ilk to create a rampaging Hellmarch. The people of Marakor and Jorat likely didn’t have any trouble believing we were still at war with demons.
She gave me a pitying look. “No, we didn’t win. Everyone lost. It wasn’t an end to the war, just a pause, an armistice, while both sides retreated to their shelters and recovered from wounds so dire it’s taken us millennia to catch our breath.” She sighed. “And now we’re ready to start the whole thing all over again, except this time we have nowhere to retreat.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and stared out at the sea. “How am I involved in this?”
“Big waves start from small ripples. Avalanches begin with a single pebble.”
My breath hitched. “I’m—I’m your pebble?”
“Yes. Also, you volunteered.”
I stood there trying to remember if, somehow, I might have. Had I? Finally, I said, “I don’t remember volunteering.”
“Of course you don’t. You hadn’t been born yet.”
“Hadn’t been born—” I stopped myself from raising my voice. “And if I don’t want to be your ‘pebble’? You’re the Goddess of Luck. Don’t you have servants to fetch your dinner or kill your enemies? I don’t want to be your hero. Those stories never end well. The peasant boy done good slays the monster, wins the princess, and only then finds out he’s married to a stuck-up spoiled brat who thinks she’s better than him. Or he gets so wrapped up in his own majesty that he raises taxes to put up gold statues of himself while his people starve. The chosen ones—like Emperor Kandor—end up rotting and dead on the Manol Jungle floor, stuck full of vané arrows. No thanks.”
The little girl tossed the seashell over her shoulder. It shattered against the rocks. “So walk away.” Her voice did not sound particularly childlike, but then it hadn’t for some time.
I twirled around and spread out my arms to take in the beach, the island, the sea. “Is that really an option?”
“It is. They’ll bring in a ship. You could sneak out.” The little girl smiled, her eyes sad. “Do you think I wouldn’t give you a choice?”
“You haven’t so far.”
“So I control your own decisions? I forced you to free those slaves on The Misery? How interesting. I had no idea I had so much power over you.” She bent down to pick up another shell. “Choose to disbelieve me if you wish, but you can walk away. If you want. Go buy that inn, drink ale, play with bar wenches. Leave all those people behind you. Maybe you can hide from your enemies if you abandon your friends.”
I angrily kicked a few rocks. “Damn it. That’s playing dirty.”
“The truth usually does.” The little girl walked over and looked up at me with wide violet-colored eyes. “I picked you because of sentimentality, because of nostalgia, but not because you are indispensable. I could choose another. Walk away, if you want. Surdyeh’s stories would say that I’m giving you a gift. You say it’s a curse. I’ll tell you something not one in a thousand would-be-heroes ever realize: it’s both, and always will be. Good luck and bad luck. Joy and pain. They will always be there. It won’t be better if you follow me. A hero who has never had a bad thing happen to him isn’t a hero—he’s just spoiled.”
“So, this is what? A character-building exercise?”
“What do you think life is? Everyone gets their share of pain, whether they follow me or not.”
“Oh, really? It wasn’t until I turned away from you that my life went to shit.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Your attitude did. Look around. Are you the gaeshed sex slave of some slobbering
merchant? The castrated musician of a Kishna-Farrigan lord? Owned, however briefly, by dear old Relos Var? Becoming a slave saved your life. You were convinced you were cursed, and so that is all you saw. You turned your back on the good fortune, on the lucky breaks that came your way.”
“What about Miya?”
“She doesn’t need rescuing.” She put her hand in mine. It was small and warm. “No matter what happens, no matter what chains you wear, you decide if you are free. No one else.”
“Excuse me while I allow my gaesh to argue otherwise.”
She rolled her eyes. “Your gaesh is nothing. You will always be free to decide how you react to the world. If you are always free to act, even if it’s to decide on your own death by defying a gaesh, then you are free. You may not have a lot of options, but you still have the freedom to choose.”
“What are you saying? I should stop being so whiny?”
She grinned. “Yes.”
“Ah, well then.” I crouched down, looked at the seashells, then up at the dark wave. “Can I really leave all this behind? Make a new life for myself?”
She squeezed my fingers. “No.”
“But you just said—”
“You can walk away. I didn’t lie. You have that choice. But choices are rarely clean creatures without entanglements and complications. Just because you decide to run, don’t expect your enemies won’t chase, or that they will believe you have no interest in hindering them.”
“Why do I even have enemies?” I pressed. “I’m sixteen. Faris is the only enemy I’ve earned. What right do these other people have to want me dead?”
She almost smiled. Almost. “Do you realize you’re on the verge of telling me how unfair this all is?”
“It IS!”
“Okay. I’ll tell Relos Var and all the others to stop picking on you. I’m sure he’ll listen to me, since we’re such good friends.”
“You’re a goddess.”
“And he’s the high priest of the one being in the universe who makes me wake up screaming from night terrors, so it all evens out.”
I wanted her to be joking. I wanted her to smile and tilt her head and stare at me with a merry twinkle in her violet eyes as she said she was teasing, but she didn’t. Her eyes emptied, spilling all that impish delight into darkness. What was left was haunted. It was not an expression I ever wanted to see in a woman I cared for; to see that horror reflected in the eyes of my goddess was like a bludgeon to my gut.
My goddess.
Well, hell.
I guess she’d forgiven me. I guess I’d forgiven her.
I picked up seashells and turned them over in my hands. Neither of us spoke for a time.
“I don’t want to be a pawn,” I said.
“Good. This is a war, not chess.”
“What do you want from me?”
She exhaled slowly, almost shuddering. “This world is dying, Kihrin.”
“Dying? What do you—”
“The sun should be yellow and it isn’t. The sky should be blue and it isn’t. I am old enough to remember when our sun was not bloated and orange. I am old enough to remember when we did not need Tya’s Veil to keep out the radiation.* This world is dying, and we’ve been doing what we can to save it, but we are running out of sacrifices. Soon will come a day when we have nothing left to give, and when that day comes, the end will follow close behind it, and it will not be a conflagration, but numbing cold and darkness that never ends.” She stood up and looked at the looming wave. “If we follow the path we’re on, what we have always done, we lose. We only prolong the inevitable. Everyone loses the war. Everyone.”
“And you want me to do something about that?” My voice absolutely cracked that time.
“You’re my wild card, Kihrin. My ace up my sleeve. I’m going to trust you to do what you do best—find a path that no one else has thought of, break in through the door that no one thought to bar. Find another way.”
I sat down on the wet sand. “I don’t know how.”
She hugged me. “I have faith that you’ll figure it out.”
I laughed bitterly. “That’s playing dirty, Taj. How am I supposed to tell you no when you say a thing like that?”
“I don’t play fair,” she admitted as she wrapped a silver curl around her finger. “But then, neither do you.”
“Not on my good days.” I gestured up at the wave. “What do we do about that?”
“Here? Nothing. This is just a dream, and that is just a metaphor.” She looked up with big eyes. “Sooner or later, everything falls: waves, empires, races, even gods.”
The wave shifted, moved.
“Taja!” I whimpered.
The little girl held me tight. “Don’t worry, Kihrin. I won’t leave you.”
The dark wave fell, and brought night with it.
20: VALATHEA
(Talon’s story)
A raging fire burned in the fireplace at the end of the Milligreest library. The night wasn’t cool, and so the interior air seemed more suited to baking bread than breathing. Jarith left Kihrin with a dual promise to find the High General and to send a servant to bank the fire.
Different colors of woods forming intricate patterns paneled the walls and ceiling of the large library. None of the books matched, but had the worn and well-thumbed air of regular use. Kihrin felt a bit of grudging respect: he had stolen into too many houses where the “library” was a room whose only purpose was providing the maids with something to dust.
Before he poured a drink or checked to see if the High General had a fascination with smutty morgage romances, Kihrin decided the fire had to go. He circled around an overstuffed leather chair that faced the blaze. Even he found it too hot for comfort and he possessed a tolerance for heat bordering on the magical.
As he grabbed a poker, he heard a throat clear behind him. He flushed, embarrassed as he realized someone was already in the library, sitting in the chair where he couldn’t be seen from the entrance.
“I’m sorry, my lord, I didn’t see—” Kihrin turned and stopped. It wasn’t the General, or any member of the Milligreest family.
Pretty Boy sat there, reading a book.
“Shit!” Kihrin dropped the iron poker and ran.
The door opened as he reached it. The hulking silhouette of the High General blocked Kihrin’s only escape.
“Please, I—” Kihrin tried to get around the man.
“What’s going on here?” the High General demanded.
Pretty Boy’s all-too-familiar voice answered dryly from the other end of the room. “I have no idea. Normally people require at least five minutes in my presence before they run screaming. I believe I’ve set a new record.”
The High General frowned at Kihrin. “Calm down, boy. No one’s going to hurt you here. Jarith said you were waiting. What are you doing here, Lord Heir?” The question was addressed to Pretty Boy.
Kihrin hid his shudder and tried to pull himself together. “I’m sorry, sir. He startled me. I thought the room was empty. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I’ll just—go.”
The General chuckled. “I can’t blame you for being skittish after that demon, but the Lord Heir D’Mon is quite human, no matter what his family name sounds like.”
“What was that?” Pretty Boy asked.
Kihrin swallowed and threw a wary glare at Pretty Boy, who stood up and walked toward the pair. The man’s hair formed a perfect series of dark chestnut waves breaking over his shoulders. Just as he had been at the Kazivar House, Pretty Boy dressed as royalty, and wore an embroidered blue silk misha over blue velvet kef. These were tucked into tall, black, leather riding boots. Sapphires and lapis lazuli beadwork sparkled from the embroidery of a hawk in midflight, laying on a golden sunburst field embroidered on his agolé.
No, Kihrin corrected himself. Pretty Boy wasn’t dressed as royalty. Pretty Boy was royalty. House D’Mon.
Kihrin’s heart skipped a beat from shock.
General Milligreest purse
d his lips in disappointment. “I invited High Lord Therin to attend me at dinner tonight, not you, Darzin.”
Pretty Boy bowed. “My sincerest apologies, High General, but my father sends his regrets. I believe he’s meeting with a fellow who’s put his hands on a vané tsali stone, and you know how obsessed he is about his collection.” His gaze flitted idly over to Kihrin as he spoke.
Kihrin clenched his fists and tried to slow the rattle drum of his heartbeat. Oh hell. Butterbelly’s buyer. Butterbelly said he had a man who collected the gems. If Butterbelly told them anything, they’d know who’d broken into that villa. They’d know where to find him. I must leave. I must leave now. Oh shit. I’m as good as dead . . . He calmed himself.
“Hmm. Yes, I remember.”
“What was that about a demon?” Pretty Boy asked as if unfamiliar.
“You must have heard,” the High General said with a pronounced growl.
“Oh no. I’m woefully ignorant of the important happenings of the Empire.”
Kihrin found himself wishing he could carve away Pretty Boy’s smug expression with a shiv.
General Milligreest narrowed his eyes. “This young man, Kihrin, was attacked by the demon prince Xaltorath earlier today. I lost a good man before the Emperor could arrive to banish it. We’re still trying to locate the summoner.”
“What? Why would a demon prince go after a boy?” Darzin looked at Kihrin with undisguised confusion.
Kihrin was startled: Darzin D’Mon’s bemusement seemed genuine, and not some faux emotion worn only for the General’s benefit.
Darzin hadn’t sent the demon to attack him?
“We’re still investigating. Xaltorath may have acted on a whim. He can be capricious in his cruelties. We’re still trying to locate the party responsible for summoning the demon.”
“I imagine the summoner was eaten. Isn’t that kind of summoning terribly hard to control?”
“I wouldn’t know.” General Milligreest threw the nobleman a look of ill-concealed disgust.
Kihrin edged toward the door. If he could leave quietly, maybe they’d forget about him. He hadn’t expected this. He wanted to tell the General that he’d witnessed Darzin D’Mon and Dead Man kill that vané and summon a demon, but the General knew Darzin. He knew him well enough to invite him over to dinner. Milligreest wasn’t going to believe Kihrin’s accusations.