The Wrath of Rivers, page 25
Even with the glass in the way, getting near enough to the fiend to shower sand on it struck Maena with more heat than she’d ever felt, the very air seeming to lash against her skin, steal away any breath, and force her eyes shut to keep them from boiling. The only spot with any relief was the thing’s head, the obsidian blocking the flame, a lone barricade whenever the fiend looked her way.
“Stop,” Maena said after one last toss, fusing the monster’s neck in the shimmering deep brown glass. “Not all of it.”
“No?” Svarde asked, on the monster’s other side, body a sweaty sheen. Both had ashen ends where their hair had come too close, caught a spark. Their clothes, what little they had, sizzled on the edges. Maena’s own skin crawled with a red ache, but they lived.
“This thing came from the Dark Below, Svarde. We have it trapped.” Maena stumbled back, legs drawing down as the battle’s thrill faded. “We might be able to learn from it.”
Or, as the Rana might otherwise say, use it. A key commandment of the isle was just that: a raider must seize anything of value, miss no opportunity to claim a resource.
Svarde accepted her logic, gave the fiend a wide berth as he came around to her side. The fiend watched them, sparks writhing the obsidian in a dazzling, angry dance. The glass prison crackled, melting and hardening over and over again. At least, for now, the monster seemed stuck.
A look north towards the city saw its people fighting back. Water brigades, or Jochi’s soldiers pressed into civil service attacked the sandbags and burning buildings, beating back the scattered flames. The winter snow kept up its mild assault too, the flakes filtering around the pair and the dunes.
“We should search for our friends,” Svarde grumbled, lurching to his feet.
“Go,” Maena replied. “I’ll watch this one.”
“Yell if it’s breaking free.”
“You’ll hear it, Svarde.”
“You say that like my ears haven’t been burned away.”
Nevertheless, with a lone hand landing on Maena’s shoulder, the Foti warrior stomped off towards the ruined tower and the bodies that likely lay inside.
Maena kept her look on the fiend, watching those sparks. Fascinating in the night.
What do you think it’s saying? Free me?
Weapons, a vessel. These fiends were far from mindless. Svarde had fought smoke creatures when they’d first come to Whent, fiends organized, and, so the man had said, able to speak in a vague form. The memory thief below also worked with more than a predator’s instinct.
And don’t get me started on those awful eyes.
What was so different this time? Why were there so many fiends reaching beyond the snarling savagery that’d been their status for so long?
“What are you?” Maena asked the monster.
The sparks stopped. Pure black rock looked at her.
She repeated the question.
A single burning line, white-gold, carved up the obsidian’s center. The spark went to the stone’s absolute middle, glowed for a long second, then burst into seven motes. Those seven spun around the smoldering center in a lazy arc. As they moved, the motes began to dim, while the center, again, grew brighter.
Until, with an orange flash, only the center remained, hot and alive, until it too disappeared into the stone.
Well what do you know, Maena. You might’ve been the first to talk with a fiend.
“You understand me?” Maena asked, trying at the same time to press what she’d just seen into her memory. “You know our words?”
This time, though, the fiend offered nothing. Only its dark stare. Maena, again, repeated the question. The fiend did not respond. The glass crackled, melted, cooled in its endless cycle.
Maena tried one question after another, a barrage with everything she could think of while the snow began piling up around her. The fires in the city dwindled, the people gaining the upper hand. Behind her, Svarde called out every successful extraction. Kivi, Pennifer, Rasslebeck, wounded but alive.
The fiend did not answer.
Till dawn threatened, her throat long parched, the questions only rasps, Maena asked, and still the monster didn’t reply. Only when Svarde, returning to her side, pointed out that the glass no longer broke and crackled, did Maena stand to see the reason, or at least one, why the obsidian stayed dark: the fiend’s fire had gone out, and all that remained were its massive, charred bones.
Chapter 39
Prisoners
In Kitaye, justice ran two ways. If the elders found you guilty of a crime, you were offered a chance to labor to make up what you owed. Harvest, fish, hunt, or do what your skills allowed to benefit the community until the city agreed you had repaid the debt. Anything too severe for such remedies ended in exile. Banishment into the jungle or across the seas.
The Najahn were always willing to take in stragglers, reform them or, so Bliss heard, send them swiftly beyond this life to the next.
The Rana town took a harder tack. Both Bliss and Torny, once the bandit had been disarmed by Blinthe, were hauled to the town’s center and given an immediate, late night trial. Bliss, who’d only seen a few sentences, who had no way to respond to the questions asked by the town’s watch, let Torny deliver their defense.
“The only thieves here are these three,” Torny began, a stiff declaration to the half dozen or so civilians bothering to watch, alongside all three Kance.
Torny sprinted through the story, adding in choice invectives as she reached moments, like the casting of the Renewals into the sea, that earned the expletives. The bandit impugned character, wound up the tale with the dire consequences of killing a would-be Aegis, and ended on a plaintive note, asking the town to understand they were merely trying to restore honor, as Guardians, to their slain charge.
That last shook Bliss, a hollow ringing marching in as her own exhaustion mingled with the shock at hearing her brother called dead. Surreal enough with Pan, with all the bodies in the fiend-ravaged town, but to hear the same state given to Wax . . . her head dipped, she pushed back tears. An emotion shifting quick to red anger, and if her hands hadn’t been bound, Bliss might’ve charged the Kance guards right then.
“If your story is what you say, then why not come to us?” asked the leader of the watch, a stout man with more gray in his hair and beard than not. “If these three are heinous criminals, then why skulk after them in the darkness? We might have helped you, or at least offered a fair hearing for both sides.”
“That’s what I’m—” Torny’s wind-up died as the man drew his saber, leveled the curling point her way.
“We’re not some regal court, equipped with police and judges, jails and juries,” the man said. “Out here we make our calls quick, as there is other, more pressing work to be done. You shattered a window, you assaulted a paying guest, and some suspect the fiend we saw tonight might have had its origins with you.” The man waited a breath, his eyes boring into the pair. Torny glared back with equal measure. Bliss kept her face blank, her attention still on Wax. “Regardless, this isn’t a time for deliberation. The innkeeper has taken what she is owed from your satchels. I would cast you out of this town, but these three have agreed to take you into their charge.” The man motioned at the Kance guards.
“You mean the ones I just accused of killing our Renewal? Our friends?” Torny asked, and even Bliss’s mouth dropped at the idea.
“Accusations only,” the man sighed. “And they have offered to pay for you, a trade we can hardly refuse.” To his dismal credit, the man didn’t seem too proud at where the trial was heading. “They’ve promised to take you south to the Riroca, where you can press your claims in a place where they’ll matter.”
“They’ll slit our throats as soon as you’re out of sight,” Torny countered.
The Kance trio, throughout all this, kept their faces stern, their voices quiet. Even when the town’s leader looked their way, hoping, perhaps, for some refutation of Torny’s remarks, they shifted not one bit. Iron and strong.
“They will not,” the leader said, straightening. “We have one last trader, who would have waited until spring to make the journey, but who can go with you in the morning. Her boat will follow yours, and should your bodies find the water, justice will at least find these three.”
At that, at last, the Kance resolve cracked. All three sent sharp glares the leader’s way. Blinthe even dropped his hand to his rapier, though Silvrin twitched her own hand and stalled the draw.
“Agreed,” Silvrin said, “though we won’t forget these last additions.”
Weariness suffused the leader, “I assure you, I don’t care. Between fiends, the winter, and people like you, the Isles are fast becoming a place I no longer wish to be.”
* * *
Akido and Blinthe stuffed Bliss and Torny, hands tied, into their boat’s bow. Neither, pressed against one another back-to-back, could find much comfort in the hard wood. The cold air snuck around and between them too, their shivering at least giving a measure of warmth. Their captors, with one staying aboard to keep watch, returned to the inn to snatch what sleep they could.
Torny didn’t bother. Like Bliss, she worked at her bindings. Unlike Bliss, she gave up soon.
“They’re done too well,” Torny said, the bandit’s head lying, like Bliss’s, against the ship’s forward rail. The boat bobbed in the tiny bay given over to the town’s docks. “These aren’t ones we’ll be escaping.”
Bliss wanted to tell the bandit to keep trying. That to do anything else was to damn themselves to a quick death. No matter what the leader said, the Kance guards could kill the two of them, and any following idiots, without much effort. So she tried, rubbed the ropes against each other, against the wood. The knots had to fray, had to give, had to . . .
The knock woke Bliss up, her head banging against the wood rail as the other two Kance guards loaded up the boat with fresh provisions, their own satchels. Torny’s curses rose with the birdsong too, the bandit lighting into the guards.
“Shut it,” said Silvrin, finally. “You called it right, rat, when you said we were going to slit your throats beyond the town. Keep up the talking and we’ll do it anyway.”
“As if you won’t, you wind-spitting murderers.”
Silvrin took a long stride over to them, while the other two cast the boat off the dock. She bent down, clad in her glittering Kance armor. A gauntlet hand reached out, snared Torny’s ragged shirt. Lifted her up from their narrow stick.
“Say that slur one more time, and I’ll gut you right here.” Silvrin’s other hand made its way to Torny’s throat. “We didn’t outright kill your Renewal because we’re not the devils you think we are. You and your friend don’t fall under that protection. If I snapped your neck and threw you overboard right here, nothing would happen. That trader, she won’t say a word. Your bodies would be picked over by whatever sad fish swim in these waters. By sunset, only your bones would remain. So choose, rat, whether you want to live another day.”
Torny started to move her mouth, gathering up for a spit. Bliss shoved her elbow into the bandit’s side, an awkward move, but anything to get Torny to reconsider, just once, making their captors mad.
A quick death here wouldn’t get Wax revenged.
“Why?” Torny croaked. “Why bother leaving us alive?”
The woman flicked an irritated look back towards the town, “Because I think that man meant what he said. Because we’re Kance, through and through, and word will travel. Reputation matters, rat, though it might not to you. Stay quiet, and maybe we’ll even let you live. Keep talking, and I’ll not give you another warning.”
Maybe it was the prospect of life, maybe it was Bliss’s ribbing, but Torny held her tongue. Kept her mouth shut as the day wore on, as the Kance guards rotated turns at the oars, speeding down the river. The following trader fell behind, all but disappeared.
Yet the Kance didn’t kill their hostage pair. Fed them, slipped water skins to their lips, and all the while Torny kept her insults quiet.
At least till night fell, when most boats would’ve sought refuge and a camp on the river. Instead, the Kance kept up their rotation, the ship cruising down the thin, winding water, always heading south.
Bliss had spent the time nursing her own anger, toying with revenge, mingling it with breakaway daydreams of home, of a life spent without swords and solemn oaths.
“It’s easy to be brave when you have nothing to lose,” Torny whispered, stars glittering above, water lapping at the boat’s sides. “I’ve spent so long there that it’s habit, you know?”
Bliss offered a shrug. Something that’d pass through their touching shoulder blades.
“When Wax died, and you started this little crusade, I fell back into that habit. Kill’em or be killed. But that’s not the way it is, right?”
Another shrug.
“I mean, there’s still a life out there. Maybe not as Guardians, but what you told me. Going back to Vis, showing me Kitaye. That can still happen. When she had me by the throat, that’s what I thought about, Bliss. That’s what I say going away when you shoved your damn pointy elbow into my ribs.”
A nod this time, hair brushing hair. Torny had it right. Vengeance was a must, but if Bliss could keep herself alive in the process, well, that would be nice. Would be ideal.
“So that’s what I’m saying. You and me, we see this out. Maybe we get off this boat alive, get onto another. Go home.”
Bliss hesitated. Waited for Torny to come round to what really mattered. When the bandit didn’t, Bliss shook her head. Heard Torny’s soft laugh.
“Okay, okay. We kill these bastards first, then home. Right?”
A nod. A promise.
She started working the binds again.
Chapter 40
To The Sea
Riroca, Rana’s southern metropolis, gilded and flush with returning raiders hunkering down for a winter’s reprieve, welcomed the Najahn boat with little more than a murmur. The river piers, largely emptied as ships slipped into dry dock, seemed stunned to see another craft coming in from the north, much less one from an outpost little seen, little heard.
Reathe guided the slim craft in, several others onboard gathering up satchels flush with tradeable goods, a couple others with their packs ready to relocate for the cold season. The stay would be short, the path back up north growing more perilous every day.
Not that Wax, Eujo, and Quik would ever go that way again.
“Once in the Whirlpool was enough, thanks,” Wax said as Reathe bade goodbye.
The trio did pick up one clue from their docking, though: two more recent arrivals, a trader already making ready to leave, and another group that’d sold their ship as soon as it landed, a sale Reathe invalidated when she claimed the boat as their own. Stolen from the Najahn, a taint no Rana trader would accept, and one Reathe mollified with repayment.
The thieves didn’t look as such, vanishing into the city with their glittering armor and two serving girls, or so the dockmaster said. When pressed, he didn’t have more to add, claiming he wasn’t some spy.
“With their gear,” the man offered, “and attitude, I’d say they were heading to the sea port, though good luck getting a real vessel this late in the season.”
“Obvious,” Eujo said as they left, descended into the town with a straight on objective. “My captain won’t let them take my ship without me, so they must have another plan.”
“Where would they even go?” Quik asked, Wax’s brother recovered well enough from the Vis skar and the long ride down. The man’s gauntlets hung at his waist, ready to draw real blood. “All the way back to Kance?”
“With the stolen skars?” Wax added.
“I don’t know,” Eujo replied. “Silvrin must have a buyer, or some other plan.”
“Doesn’t tell you everything, does she?”
Eujo grinned, wicked and cold. “If we talk, it’s a war of words, Wax.”
They reached the port near midday, the hustle as constant as ever, though, like the river docks, less effort went towards unloading and more towards wrapping sails, oiling wood, and tamping down ships for turbulent winter storms. Sailors, some already many mugs deep into their offseason, sang and laughed. A loud scene, a happy one.
“Celebrating what they stole,” Eujo muttered as the trio passed by one crowded tavern after another. “Rana’s not only raiders, but Noctia ought to clamp down on them. Blockade this city until they put away their arms.”
“Why allow it at all?” Wax asked.
“Near as I can tell, it’s tradition. Whispers, though, suggest Fassle and the Circle collect tribute in bribes to let it continue.” Eujo nodded at a war-going galley, svelte and still bearing its grapples, a deck-born ballista. “Foti makes the weapons, Rana and Whent use them.”
“Kance makes the sails, and Tamas brews the ales,” Quik added. “It’s an industry.”
“And Vis gets what?” Wax asked.
“Left alone,” Eujo replied, steering them to the pier leading to their own vessel, the nicest one left in the port. “Nobody cares what you do, because you’re not a threat, nor a player.”
“Thanks, I think?”
Eujo’s captain, a stalwart, silver-and-blue uniformed, man introducing himself as Deux, claimed her guards had tried to buy him off the day before. They’d come by with satchels, with two women they called servants but that looked, with their angry stares and filthy clothes, more like hostages. Or worse.
“So you did what?” Eujo asked, the four sitting in Storm’s Edge’s mess, around a refined beachwood table. “Let them go?”
Storm’s Edge had beauty from afar, but up close its craftsmanship forced a reevaluation of everything Wax had seen before. Kitaye’s treehouses used to seem incredible for him, nestling as they did between every curling branch and wrapping trunk. Next to the ship’s clean lines, her glistening silver-painted body, though, the finest Vis construct seemed a haphazard folly.
