A Fray of Furies, page 39
part #2 of The Waking Worlds Series
And then she’d seen the girl’s companion paraded past. She couldn’t help but feel she’d seen the boy somewhere before...
“Sounds like they’re serving the mussel soup downstairs,” the clerk commented. It was Watch-speak. It meant the below-ground lock-up was turning into a shit-show. She bent an ear that way.
“I think I’ll go and have a word with the chef...” she mused.
She almost collided with Histil, who was coming up the stairs.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“Watch where you’re going!” he cussed, shaking off her grip.
She raised an eyebrow at him, waiting.
“Sir,” he amended.
She hated idiots like Histil, who needed constant cowing before they’d do as told, “Report.”
She watched his need to boast win out over his smarting ego.
“Caught us a witch, didn’t we?” he chortled.
A cold hook set in her stomach.
“What?”
“We should o’ known, right?” he enthused, echoing her whisper. “What with that getup and the heathen face paint? Never thought nobody’d be brazen like that!”
She looked past his shoulder, down the flight of steps.
“You put her in the condemned cells?”
“Oh, aye. Magistrate signed the order hisself. Expedited-like.”
“And the boy?” she queried, not daring to hope.
“Little witch magicked his brain to mush. But before that?” Histil leaned conspiratorially. “Turns out he used to be a novice, from the Holy Seat, right here. The inquisitor recognized him.”
“The inquisitor?”
“Uh-huh. He’s taking the lad back to the Temple right now– Hey!” he cried after her. “Somethin’ wrong, lieutenant?”
She saved her breath for dashing among the desks.
“Move! Move!” she commanded, clearing space for her flash up the stairs. She didn’t bother knocking, simply burst in the door.
Commander Greyson gathered her into his granite gaze, a quill pinched in his grip.
“Quickly, please, sir!” she implored, speeding across his office.
Chair legs scraped as he joined her by the window.
“See the wild-looking boy?” she pointed down to the street.
“I do.”
“Imagine him in Temple roughspuns, hair cut into a bowl...”
“Milo,” he supplied. “Madeyo. No. Something more Heli...”
“Marco!” she recalled triumphantly.
“Yes. Why do I know him?”
“Remember the two docker deaths, a few years back?”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“The, um,” she cleared her throat, “feral dog attack, sir?”
He stiffened, “Not Keeper Justin’s wayward boy?”
“The same, sir. I just put it together. But I wasn’t sure.”
“That’s an Inquisitori carriage,” he noted the sleek conveyance trundling up. “And is that Inquisitor Mattanuy himself?”
“Aye, sir.”
“And the Keeper. Still away in the far-off Kingdom?”
“Correct, sir.”
“This was the closed tribunal? The one I was turned away from? In my own Watch House?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” he mused, hands throttling each other behind his back. “We’ll just see about that, won’t we…?”
* * *
“Lucky neither of us is scared of enclosed spaces, eh?”
The barge-cum-sluice had held. Turquoise Lake had glugged nearly dry. There’d been water enough – just – to float a laden skiff down a hidden waterway. Daylight was a fond memory. Preternatural night held sway beneath the mountain.
It had been peaceful, at first, peopled by echoes of plinking water and the slow growth of stalactites. But as the air grew close, the mountain’s weight made itself felt.
At Nomparal’s insistence, he’d hunted up a lantern. There wasn’t much to see. The water-carved cave ran anything but straight. At times, the current carried them through caverns too vast for their light to penetrate. At others, the ceiling hung close and their keel scraped bottom. Nomparal lipped at some lightless lichen but found it not to his liking.
Then came the noises. The ones that didn’t belong.
Barely noticeable at first, they’d blended with the pulse of the water. Nomparal’s ears had pricked at the evidence: slumbering sighs and shallow breathing. The near-silent pad of clawed feet. As these gathered together, they stood out above those of the cave system. The imagination supplied the rest: the scrabble of talons, the fanged snarls and the impact of furred bodies.
But that was just the imagination.
“Steady on,” he whispered, crouching by the donkey. “It’s just the way sound travels in this maze. The beasties are a long ways off and no danger to us.”
Nomparal rolled a doubting eye at him. They huddled together as the sounds faded, slowly exhausting their store of sugar lumps.
At some point, he dozed off.
The screech of the skiff’s bottom on sharp rock catapulted him awake. And, incidentally, into the bow.
“Already?” he wondered, as wood juddered beneath him. “But I was having a most wonderful dream. You were in it,” he told the nonplussed Nomparal.
Snatching the lantern, he turned the wick up. The skiff was stuck fast in the shallows. A speedy current was trying to drag it over ribs of razor-edged rock.
“Please remain calm,” he addressed the wide-eyed mule. “We seem to be experiencing some turbulence. Kindly remain in your–”
The skiff jumped and canted. Something splintered.
“–hold on to your asses, we’re all gonna die!”
Putting word to deed, he threw his arms around Nomparal’s neck. Around them, planks cracked and tore loose. Rivets pinged. Finally, with much groaning and screeching, they ground to a halt.
He opened one eye, “Oh.”
Very little remained of the skiff. Bits and pieces were still trundling downstream. The planks they’d been sitting on remained.
The wagon, standing halfway to its axles in water, seemed completely unscathed. A dark passage winked, off to one side.
“Told you we’d make it,” he said to Nomparal.
The donkey leered at him disbelievingly.
“Oh, like you were such a rock of calm,” he scoffed, gathering the reins.
Chapter 14 – Snatched
He’d lost Peat.
The witch had found them.
Careening around the crazed corners of the catacombs, he’d looked over to find Peat gone. He’d hunted for any sign of her, heedless of the witch’s footfalls.
He’d wandered alone for a long time, in the loud silence that followed.
He’d lost Peat and his mind threatened to follow. He couldn’t bear this place, with its irrational rhythms and shifting scenery, without her. When she started haunting the corner of his eye, he knew insanity wasn’t far off.
He’d catch glimpses of her, always in the distance, always in the darkness: passing among the false temple pillars; wading along the flooded waterways; wending through the dripping caverns.
When he spied her specter, ghosting just beyond the bars of an abandoned prison, he’d been unable to help himself.
“Peat?”
She’d whirled toward him, face lit by her improvised torch, as much as by her sudden smile.
“Shhh!” she’d hissed, loping over. “She’ll hear you!”
The gaps in the grid had been just big enough for their grasping hands. Her touch had been a visceral relief.
“I thought you were dead,” he’d sobbed.
“I’m too good a poacher for that.”
“Poacher?”
She’d nodded seriously, “Used to be, there was a poacher, hunting the forest near Hedrick. I saw him sometimes, when I was out gathering herbs. He was kind – not like the men from the village. He never talked much but he could mimic every bird and name every tree. I asked him, once, if he ever worried the governor’s men would come hunting him, in turn.”
Merciful Helia, how he missed her stories! They’d been a salve to his tortured senses.
“What’d he say?”
“He told me: ‘The lord of the land ain’t got no one knows this wood better’n me.’”
She’d smirked at him, “I’ve been here almost as long as her. And she’s got other things on her mind than explorin’. She may own this place but she don’t know it.”
“Have you found a way out?” he’d pleaded.
He’d seized on her guarded look, “You have!”
“You’re hurting me.”
Though it’d hurt him worse, he’d let go of her hand.
“It’s not an escape,” she’d grimaced. “But I found my way into the sun. It blinded me. One more step...” she’d shaken her head. “Nothing but sheer mountainside. High enough to make eagles dizzy.”
So far, everything he’d seen was subterranean.
“We can climb it,” he’d insisted.
She’d grimaced a negative, “Smooth as soap.”
Helia is my harbor, he’d fought despair with a well-worn mantra. I float in the reflection of her calm…
“Do you, at least,” he’d pressed, “know how to get around this?”
The hatchwork of bars between them.
“That,” she’d smiled, “I can tell–”
She’d halted mid-word, eyes faraway and expressionless.
No! he’d thought.
“Run,” she’d instructed in sudden fear.
No! Not now!
“Run!” she’d commanded, putting word to deed.
“Peat!” he’d beat at the bars, watching her torchlight dwindle.
He’d heard it then: faint footfalls, measured by tinkling bells.
“Helia preserve me and keep me safe,” he’d pleaded.
And his nerve had held… Until he saw the golden mask, drifting down the hall towards him.
He ran.
Time behaved strangely in the witch’s demesne. Barring Peat’s assertion, sunlight did not exist here. And constant terror was no aid to calculation.
He could not remember the last time he’d eaten.
He kept time based on his encounters with Peat.
They’d once stumbled upon each other, separated by a deep chasm. They’d passed bells in whispered conversation, starved for connection and unable to touch. Though they’d discussed nothing of consequence, it remained one of the most meaningful conversations of his life. Peat’s pronouncement, that they part, had torn at his sanity.
Once, she’d been no more than a disembodied voice, carried by chance among the convoluted ducts and chimneys. Fickle currents had stolen her stream of directions away. He’d nearly added his howl to that of the inconsolable wind.
He’d risked a shrill whistle once, among the birds’ nest balconies. Too far away to be heard, she’d mimed that he should stay put, that she was coming to him. But as soon as she was out of sight, his nerves had begun to gnaw him raw. He’d had to move, to escape their jaws, and they’d missed each other. He hoped she’d found his message, scrawled on the stone:
Looking for you.
He didn’t even know if she could read.
He no longer sought the witch. He was after survival and escape. But he’d settle for reuniting with Peat. Loneliness was its own kind of insanity. He steeped in it.
And, every moment, the threat of her, hovered.
The witch.
He even thought the word in a whisper, afraid she would hear.
He was slowly coming to grips with this place. Though the barrier mountains were vast, he doubted they hid soaring balconies, sunken waterways and the half-a-dozen other demesnes he’d traversed. He’d come to believe these were separate prisons, somehow chained together by the witch’s art. And that there was a navigable way to pass from one to the other.
He’d taken to mapping the maze, devising myriad ways to mark his passage: stacked stones, scraped walls, strips of clothing... He’d thought he was making progress.
Until he came upon the shrine.
It had taken him too long to recognize his own handiwork. All his signs – all his scrapes and stacks and strips – clustered in a space no more than a dozen paces across. In the middle of it, the message he’d left for Peat:
Looking for you.
A monument to futility.
After that, he wandered aimlessly, working deeper into the dungeon and his own mind.
When he stumbled into the snow, he thought at first he’d made his way around to the ash pits again. He stood, stunned, as a gray-blasted sky scowled down on him. Blizzard-borne flakes drove into his eyes and froze the tears on his cheeks. It took his disbelieving laughter and hurled it to the wind.
Out! He was out!
Relief kept him warm where his rags did not. Triumph stripped the stagger from his step. At least, for a while. He would not stoop to begging for a second miracle. Instead, he gave praise.
The Mother’s Benediction had thirty-six verses. It was the first prayer novices learned. He was rounding the thirty-second when faint firelight wavered among the falling flakes.
“Help!” he cried. But his disused voice would not carry, and his legs nearly didn’t either, weak with cold and unfamiliar hope. He collapsed, even as he stumbled into the rude shelter – little more than an overhang, shorn up by snow. A fire crackled merrily, lapping at the belly of a fat, cast-iron pot.
“You’re alive!”
Small hands took him by his shivering shoulders and guided him to the warmth.
“Peat…” he managed through his chattering teeth and utter disbelief.
“Peat–! Oh, my god–! Oh, Helia–! Have mercy–!”
“Shhh. Hush, it’s alright.”
“S’not,” he shook his head vehemently. “Oh, Peat, forgive me–”
“Quiet now,” she commanded, chafing his hands between hers and blowing on them for warmth. “I’m sure I have nothing to forgive you for.”
Guilt and relief boiled poisonously in him. He hunched around their searing pain. Bile rose in his throat, buoying his confession.
“I left you,” he cried. “I got out and left you. Should have gone back! Should have gone back!” He rocked with the force of the words. “Coward! Craven,” he sobbed, tears and snot thawing. “Oh, Peat, forgive me…”
“Hey, hey,” she soothed, interlacing their fingers, “it’s alright. I got out too, see? Everything worked out fine.”
“Swore an oath,” he wept miserably, “‘to fear not the denizens of the Dark Places.’” The words sounded hollow. “‘To carry Helia’s torch into the trenches of evil. To guide the flocks of the faithful to the fold. And to burn… to burn–’”
“There now,” she consoled, dipping a bowl into the steaming cauldron. “Here,” she placed it between his fingers. “Eat. Rest. We have a long walk, come the morrow.” A smile entered her voice, “We can’t–”
Guilt aside, he hungered for her voice more than any meal. So when she didn’t continue, he forced himself to meet her eyes.
Cold, that had nothing to do with the snow or ice, pierced him.
“No…” he denied. “She can’t. We’re out. We–!”
“–can’t stay here,” she interrupted, knocking the bowl from his hands to pull him up. “We’ve got to run…”
He was being drawn to the entrance, back into the blizzard.
“You’re wrong!” he insisted. “You have to be wr–”
A new sound arrived, carried above the howl of the wind. Thwarted peeve and petty spite scythed through their shelter, spraying them with snow and hissing embers.
He could feel her, out there in the white, drawing closer.
“Come on!” Peat cajoled, seizing his collar. They plunged into the sightless swirl. Deep drifts mocked their hurry, swallowing them past the knees.
“She’ll be able to follow our tracks,” he gasped, as he took the lead, breaking trail for the slighter Peat.
“No choice,” she echoed his thought. And then there was no more breath for exchange.
Shielding his eyes from the stinging motes, he forged on, the plume of his breath lost to the wind.
At some point, Peat’s hand slipped from his numb grip.
* * *
She’d been so arrogant.
Unable to think past her honor, she’d given them a grin, filled with catastrophe and bloodshed. And they’d picked their truth from the gristle between her teeth.
It had been many years since someone had looked on her as a child. With no Hunt nor beasts nor bow, she must have looked like exactly that, playing at make-believe with stick swords.
Ancestors, she’d been so stupid! The histories had warned that the Old Masters’ offshoots had lost the lore. Why, then, had she thought the title of ‘Herald’ would hold any water with them?
Because, she castigated herself, she’d fully expected the force of her will to carry her through. To convey and convince where words did not. As it always had in the past.
But, in the past, she’d been Kassika Blackwater – chief’s daughter. Here and now, she was not even Cussbird – slayer of saplings. Her all-eclipsing will – source of all her success! – might be little more than her father’s long shadow.
She ground the heels of her hands into her eyes.
If they’d but allowed her to quicken the krin, they’d have seen.
In a backwards, bitter way, she was glad they had not. And not only because she’d have died, screaming, right alongside them.
With the sifter’s powders lost to her, she may well have failed in undoing the seal. After coming so far, that failure would have been hers, not theirs. The shame of it would have been unbearable.
This way, at least, she’d voiced her warning and she’d have her vengeance. Time would vindicate her. When the krin finally shed its skin, the unbelievers would die.
But not, it seemed, before her.
She slumped back against her cell wall.
If the ancestors were kind, her fate would never be known by her people. She’d rather they remember her, lost to an avalanche. Not bested by the butter-soft hands of citymen. She’d prefer they think her final resting place a pile of bulkbear dung before that!
“Sounds like they’re serving the mussel soup downstairs,” the clerk commented. It was Watch-speak. It meant the below-ground lock-up was turning into a shit-show. She bent an ear that way.
“I think I’ll go and have a word with the chef...” she mused.
She almost collided with Histil, who was coming up the stairs.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“Watch where you’re going!” he cussed, shaking off her grip.
She raised an eyebrow at him, waiting.
“Sir,” he amended.
She hated idiots like Histil, who needed constant cowing before they’d do as told, “Report.”
She watched his need to boast win out over his smarting ego.
“Caught us a witch, didn’t we?” he chortled.
A cold hook set in her stomach.
“What?”
“We should o’ known, right?” he enthused, echoing her whisper. “What with that getup and the heathen face paint? Never thought nobody’d be brazen like that!”
She looked past his shoulder, down the flight of steps.
“You put her in the condemned cells?”
“Oh, aye. Magistrate signed the order hisself. Expedited-like.”
“And the boy?” she queried, not daring to hope.
“Little witch magicked his brain to mush. But before that?” Histil leaned conspiratorially. “Turns out he used to be a novice, from the Holy Seat, right here. The inquisitor recognized him.”
“The inquisitor?”
“Uh-huh. He’s taking the lad back to the Temple right now– Hey!” he cried after her. “Somethin’ wrong, lieutenant?”
She saved her breath for dashing among the desks.
“Move! Move!” she commanded, clearing space for her flash up the stairs. She didn’t bother knocking, simply burst in the door.
Commander Greyson gathered her into his granite gaze, a quill pinched in his grip.
“Quickly, please, sir!” she implored, speeding across his office.
Chair legs scraped as he joined her by the window.
“See the wild-looking boy?” she pointed down to the street.
“I do.”
“Imagine him in Temple roughspuns, hair cut into a bowl...”
“Milo,” he supplied. “Madeyo. No. Something more Heli...”
“Marco!” she recalled triumphantly.
“Yes. Why do I know him?”
“Remember the two docker deaths, a few years back?”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“The, um,” she cleared her throat, “feral dog attack, sir?”
He stiffened, “Not Keeper Justin’s wayward boy?”
“The same, sir. I just put it together. But I wasn’t sure.”
“That’s an Inquisitori carriage,” he noted the sleek conveyance trundling up. “And is that Inquisitor Mattanuy himself?”
“Aye, sir.”
“And the Keeper. Still away in the far-off Kingdom?”
“Correct, sir.”
“This was the closed tribunal? The one I was turned away from? In my own Watch House?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” he mused, hands throttling each other behind his back. “We’ll just see about that, won’t we…?”
* * *
“Lucky neither of us is scared of enclosed spaces, eh?”
The barge-cum-sluice had held. Turquoise Lake had glugged nearly dry. There’d been water enough – just – to float a laden skiff down a hidden waterway. Daylight was a fond memory. Preternatural night held sway beneath the mountain.
It had been peaceful, at first, peopled by echoes of plinking water and the slow growth of stalactites. But as the air grew close, the mountain’s weight made itself felt.
At Nomparal’s insistence, he’d hunted up a lantern. There wasn’t much to see. The water-carved cave ran anything but straight. At times, the current carried them through caverns too vast for their light to penetrate. At others, the ceiling hung close and their keel scraped bottom. Nomparal lipped at some lightless lichen but found it not to his liking.
Then came the noises. The ones that didn’t belong.
Barely noticeable at first, they’d blended with the pulse of the water. Nomparal’s ears had pricked at the evidence: slumbering sighs and shallow breathing. The near-silent pad of clawed feet. As these gathered together, they stood out above those of the cave system. The imagination supplied the rest: the scrabble of talons, the fanged snarls and the impact of furred bodies.
But that was just the imagination.
“Steady on,” he whispered, crouching by the donkey. “It’s just the way sound travels in this maze. The beasties are a long ways off and no danger to us.”
Nomparal rolled a doubting eye at him. They huddled together as the sounds faded, slowly exhausting their store of sugar lumps.
At some point, he dozed off.
The screech of the skiff’s bottom on sharp rock catapulted him awake. And, incidentally, into the bow.
“Already?” he wondered, as wood juddered beneath him. “But I was having a most wonderful dream. You were in it,” he told the nonplussed Nomparal.
Snatching the lantern, he turned the wick up. The skiff was stuck fast in the shallows. A speedy current was trying to drag it over ribs of razor-edged rock.
“Please remain calm,” he addressed the wide-eyed mule. “We seem to be experiencing some turbulence. Kindly remain in your–”
The skiff jumped and canted. Something splintered.
“–hold on to your asses, we’re all gonna die!”
Putting word to deed, he threw his arms around Nomparal’s neck. Around them, planks cracked and tore loose. Rivets pinged. Finally, with much groaning and screeching, they ground to a halt.
He opened one eye, “Oh.”
Very little remained of the skiff. Bits and pieces were still trundling downstream. The planks they’d been sitting on remained.
The wagon, standing halfway to its axles in water, seemed completely unscathed. A dark passage winked, off to one side.
“Told you we’d make it,” he said to Nomparal.
The donkey leered at him disbelievingly.
“Oh, like you were such a rock of calm,” he scoffed, gathering the reins.
Chapter 14 – Snatched
He’d lost Peat.
The witch had found them.
Careening around the crazed corners of the catacombs, he’d looked over to find Peat gone. He’d hunted for any sign of her, heedless of the witch’s footfalls.
He’d wandered alone for a long time, in the loud silence that followed.
He’d lost Peat and his mind threatened to follow. He couldn’t bear this place, with its irrational rhythms and shifting scenery, without her. When she started haunting the corner of his eye, he knew insanity wasn’t far off.
He’d catch glimpses of her, always in the distance, always in the darkness: passing among the false temple pillars; wading along the flooded waterways; wending through the dripping caverns.
When he spied her specter, ghosting just beyond the bars of an abandoned prison, he’d been unable to help himself.
“Peat?”
She’d whirled toward him, face lit by her improvised torch, as much as by her sudden smile.
“Shhh!” she’d hissed, loping over. “She’ll hear you!”
The gaps in the grid had been just big enough for their grasping hands. Her touch had been a visceral relief.
“I thought you were dead,” he’d sobbed.
“I’m too good a poacher for that.”
“Poacher?”
She’d nodded seriously, “Used to be, there was a poacher, hunting the forest near Hedrick. I saw him sometimes, when I was out gathering herbs. He was kind – not like the men from the village. He never talked much but he could mimic every bird and name every tree. I asked him, once, if he ever worried the governor’s men would come hunting him, in turn.”
Merciful Helia, how he missed her stories! They’d been a salve to his tortured senses.
“What’d he say?”
“He told me: ‘The lord of the land ain’t got no one knows this wood better’n me.’”
She’d smirked at him, “I’ve been here almost as long as her. And she’s got other things on her mind than explorin’. She may own this place but she don’t know it.”
“Have you found a way out?” he’d pleaded.
He’d seized on her guarded look, “You have!”
“You’re hurting me.”
Though it’d hurt him worse, he’d let go of her hand.
“It’s not an escape,” she’d grimaced. “But I found my way into the sun. It blinded me. One more step...” she’d shaken her head. “Nothing but sheer mountainside. High enough to make eagles dizzy.”
So far, everything he’d seen was subterranean.
“We can climb it,” he’d insisted.
She’d grimaced a negative, “Smooth as soap.”
Helia is my harbor, he’d fought despair with a well-worn mantra. I float in the reflection of her calm…
“Do you, at least,” he’d pressed, “know how to get around this?”
The hatchwork of bars between them.
“That,” she’d smiled, “I can tell–”
She’d halted mid-word, eyes faraway and expressionless.
No! he’d thought.
“Run,” she’d instructed in sudden fear.
No! Not now!
“Run!” she’d commanded, putting word to deed.
“Peat!” he’d beat at the bars, watching her torchlight dwindle.
He’d heard it then: faint footfalls, measured by tinkling bells.
“Helia preserve me and keep me safe,” he’d pleaded.
And his nerve had held… Until he saw the golden mask, drifting down the hall towards him.
He ran.
Time behaved strangely in the witch’s demesne. Barring Peat’s assertion, sunlight did not exist here. And constant terror was no aid to calculation.
He could not remember the last time he’d eaten.
He kept time based on his encounters with Peat.
They’d once stumbled upon each other, separated by a deep chasm. They’d passed bells in whispered conversation, starved for connection and unable to touch. Though they’d discussed nothing of consequence, it remained one of the most meaningful conversations of his life. Peat’s pronouncement, that they part, had torn at his sanity.
Once, she’d been no more than a disembodied voice, carried by chance among the convoluted ducts and chimneys. Fickle currents had stolen her stream of directions away. He’d nearly added his howl to that of the inconsolable wind.
He’d risked a shrill whistle once, among the birds’ nest balconies. Too far away to be heard, she’d mimed that he should stay put, that she was coming to him. But as soon as she was out of sight, his nerves had begun to gnaw him raw. He’d had to move, to escape their jaws, and they’d missed each other. He hoped she’d found his message, scrawled on the stone:
Looking for you.
He didn’t even know if she could read.
He no longer sought the witch. He was after survival and escape. But he’d settle for reuniting with Peat. Loneliness was its own kind of insanity. He steeped in it.
And, every moment, the threat of her, hovered.
The witch.
He even thought the word in a whisper, afraid she would hear.
He was slowly coming to grips with this place. Though the barrier mountains were vast, he doubted they hid soaring balconies, sunken waterways and the half-a-dozen other demesnes he’d traversed. He’d come to believe these were separate prisons, somehow chained together by the witch’s art. And that there was a navigable way to pass from one to the other.
He’d taken to mapping the maze, devising myriad ways to mark his passage: stacked stones, scraped walls, strips of clothing... He’d thought he was making progress.
Until he came upon the shrine.
It had taken him too long to recognize his own handiwork. All his signs – all his scrapes and stacks and strips – clustered in a space no more than a dozen paces across. In the middle of it, the message he’d left for Peat:
Looking for you.
A monument to futility.
After that, he wandered aimlessly, working deeper into the dungeon and his own mind.
When he stumbled into the snow, he thought at first he’d made his way around to the ash pits again. He stood, stunned, as a gray-blasted sky scowled down on him. Blizzard-borne flakes drove into his eyes and froze the tears on his cheeks. It took his disbelieving laughter and hurled it to the wind.
Out! He was out!
Relief kept him warm where his rags did not. Triumph stripped the stagger from his step. At least, for a while. He would not stoop to begging for a second miracle. Instead, he gave praise.
The Mother’s Benediction had thirty-six verses. It was the first prayer novices learned. He was rounding the thirty-second when faint firelight wavered among the falling flakes.
“Help!” he cried. But his disused voice would not carry, and his legs nearly didn’t either, weak with cold and unfamiliar hope. He collapsed, even as he stumbled into the rude shelter – little more than an overhang, shorn up by snow. A fire crackled merrily, lapping at the belly of a fat, cast-iron pot.
“You’re alive!”
Small hands took him by his shivering shoulders and guided him to the warmth.
“Peat…” he managed through his chattering teeth and utter disbelief.
“Peat–! Oh, my god–! Oh, Helia–! Have mercy–!”
“Shhh. Hush, it’s alright.”
“S’not,” he shook his head vehemently. “Oh, Peat, forgive me–”
“Quiet now,” she commanded, chafing his hands between hers and blowing on them for warmth. “I’m sure I have nothing to forgive you for.”
Guilt and relief boiled poisonously in him. He hunched around their searing pain. Bile rose in his throat, buoying his confession.
“I left you,” he cried. “I got out and left you. Should have gone back! Should have gone back!” He rocked with the force of the words. “Coward! Craven,” he sobbed, tears and snot thawing. “Oh, Peat, forgive me…”
“Hey, hey,” she soothed, interlacing their fingers, “it’s alright. I got out too, see? Everything worked out fine.”
“Swore an oath,” he wept miserably, “‘to fear not the denizens of the Dark Places.’” The words sounded hollow. “‘To carry Helia’s torch into the trenches of evil. To guide the flocks of the faithful to the fold. And to burn… to burn–’”
“There now,” she consoled, dipping a bowl into the steaming cauldron. “Here,” she placed it between his fingers. “Eat. Rest. We have a long walk, come the morrow.” A smile entered her voice, “We can’t–”
Guilt aside, he hungered for her voice more than any meal. So when she didn’t continue, he forced himself to meet her eyes.
Cold, that had nothing to do with the snow or ice, pierced him.
“No…” he denied. “She can’t. We’re out. We–!”
“–can’t stay here,” she interrupted, knocking the bowl from his hands to pull him up. “We’ve got to run…”
He was being drawn to the entrance, back into the blizzard.
“You’re wrong!” he insisted. “You have to be wr–”
A new sound arrived, carried above the howl of the wind. Thwarted peeve and petty spite scythed through their shelter, spraying them with snow and hissing embers.
He could feel her, out there in the white, drawing closer.
“Come on!” Peat cajoled, seizing his collar. They plunged into the sightless swirl. Deep drifts mocked their hurry, swallowing them past the knees.
“She’ll be able to follow our tracks,” he gasped, as he took the lead, breaking trail for the slighter Peat.
“No choice,” she echoed his thought. And then there was no more breath for exchange.
Shielding his eyes from the stinging motes, he forged on, the plume of his breath lost to the wind.
At some point, Peat’s hand slipped from his numb grip.
* * *
She’d been so arrogant.
Unable to think past her honor, she’d given them a grin, filled with catastrophe and bloodshed. And they’d picked their truth from the gristle between her teeth.
It had been many years since someone had looked on her as a child. With no Hunt nor beasts nor bow, she must have looked like exactly that, playing at make-believe with stick swords.
Ancestors, she’d been so stupid! The histories had warned that the Old Masters’ offshoots had lost the lore. Why, then, had she thought the title of ‘Herald’ would hold any water with them?
Because, she castigated herself, she’d fully expected the force of her will to carry her through. To convey and convince where words did not. As it always had in the past.
But, in the past, she’d been Kassika Blackwater – chief’s daughter. Here and now, she was not even Cussbird – slayer of saplings. Her all-eclipsing will – source of all her success! – might be little more than her father’s long shadow.
She ground the heels of her hands into her eyes.
If they’d but allowed her to quicken the krin, they’d have seen.
In a backwards, bitter way, she was glad they had not. And not only because she’d have died, screaming, right alongside them.
With the sifter’s powders lost to her, she may well have failed in undoing the seal. After coming so far, that failure would have been hers, not theirs. The shame of it would have been unbearable.
This way, at least, she’d voiced her warning and she’d have her vengeance. Time would vindicate her. When the krin finally shed its skin, the unbelievers would die.
But not, it seemed, before her.
She slumped back against her cell wall.
If the ancestors were kind, her fate would never be known by her people. She’d rather they remember her, lost to an avalanche. Not bested by the butter-soft hands of citymen. She’d prefer they think her final resting place a pile of bulkbear dung before that!
