The Empire's Ruin, page 46
“So … what?” she demanded. “You walk around everywhere holding that knife to his neck?”
“It would look strange,” Talal agreed.
The other alternative, of course, didn’t need to be spoken. With a quick snick of the wrist Ruc could open the soldier’s throat. Goatface wouldn’t be pleased, but Talal wouldn’t be the first person to die in the yard. Bien’s secret would be safe. She might not learn to use her skills, but they could find another way to escape. For a moment, he thought he could feel Kem Anh’s eyes on him, the weight of her golden gaze, patient, measuring, waiting for him to finish the kill.
“You are a priest of Eira,” Bien growled.
“Am I?” he asked. “The temple is burned. The others are dead. We’re training right now to fight to the death for the greater glory of the Three.” He nodded toward the window. “If we want to survive in here, we can’t be what we were.”
Bien shook her head, crossed to him slowly, put a hand on his wrist. “You are a priest of Eira,” she said again. Her voice was softer this time, but no less firm.
He met her eyes. “Maybe. But he’s not. He’s Kettral.”
“And he has his own choice to make,” Bien said.
“That choice might be to betray you.”
She nodded. “Then he betrays me.”
“And you die.”
“And I die.”
They stood there for what felt like a long time, gazes locked, her hand on his wrist. Talal was silent, motionless. One of the most dangerous soldiers in the world, and he might as well have vanished. There was only Bien, the heat of her skin, the depth of those brown eyes, the faith she had in him, in Talal, in all of them—that unreasoning, unreasonable faith—drawing him back from the teetering brink.
He nodded finally, lowered the knife.
She smiled wearily.
Talal glanced over his shoulder at Ruc. “Are we good?”
For a simple question, it felt strained to bursting.
“You tell me,” Ruc replied. “I’m the one who put a knife to your throat.”
The soldier shrugged. “It’s not the putting that matters so much as the cutting.” He raised a hand to rub the stubble at his neck. “No damage done.”
Ruc studied him. “Not all damage draws blood.”
“Still. There’s something strangely reassuring about knowing you had the chance to kill me but didn’t.”
“You’re both insane,” Bien said, shaking her head in disbelief.
Talal raised an eyebrow. “You were the one who thought it was a good idea to tell an enemy soldier you were a leach.”
She glared at him. “Was it?”
“Let’s find out.” The soldier rose to his feet, crossed to the window, glanced outside, then pulled closed the wooden shutters. He opened the door, scanned the common room, then closed it behind him. Despite those precautions, he still lowered his voice when he spoke. “Tell me about the first time you used your power.”
Bien shook her head, as though to deny the truth of the story she was about to relate, then began.
“I was eight. One of my jobs at the temple was watching the babies.”
Talal shook his head. “Babies?”
“People came to worship sometimes, to pray or speak with the priests, and they had no place to leave their kids. I would watch the babies for them.” She smiled at the memory. “I liked that job.” The smile darkened, then disappeared. “One day we were down at the docks. Normally I wouldn’t have gone down there, but it was so hot and I only had the two kids with me. The older one—she was maybe three—got a nasty splinter stuck in her foot. It took me a while to get it out—she kept squirming—and when I finally looked up, the smaller one was gone.” She stared into memory’s dark well. “I never heard her fall into the water—didn’t even hear the splash. She was too young to swim. Too young to do anything but float. When I finally found her, she was bobbing beneath the surface maybe a dozen paces away, facedown.
“Normally I would have jumped up, dove into the water after her, but I had the other girl in my lap, holding me down, and without thinking I threw out a hand toward the baby and…” For two or three breaths she searched for the words. “The current stopped. Everything stopped—the water and whatever junk was floating on top of it. And the baby. And then I lifted her out of the water.” Tears streaked her cheeks. “Not with my hand. She was almost to the middle of the canal. I lifted her out with”—she shut her eyes—“that power. My power…”
A moth gyred toward the flame, then away, then closer. Ruc found himself following it, as though it were the path of the creature’s flight and not Bien’s revelations that truly mattered. For the moth, he supposed, it was.
“What about the older girl?” Talal asked. “Did she notice?”
Bien nodded, then shook her head. “I don’t know. The baby looked dead when I set her down on the dock. I was hunched over her, trying to clear out her lungs, trying to get her to breathe again. The other girl was only two or three. I don’t think she understood what was happening.” She dragged in a deep, unsteady breath. “I tried to tell myself that it was the goddess working through me, that it was Eira who saved the baby. But it wasn’t. When it happened again, I knew.”
“When did it happen again?”
“A couple of weeks later. I was over in the Weir bringing food to the orphanage when some drunk started pawing at one of the boys. I asked him to stop, to go away. He wouldn’t. He knocked the basket out of my hands, turned back to the boy—just a little boy—had his hands all over him.…” Bien shuddered. “I shouted at him, shouted for someone to help, but no one helped. Finally I shoved him.…” She trailed off, caught in the unyielding talons of her memory.
“You defended the kid,” Ruc said gently.
She rounded on him, her face crumpling. “I threw a man across the street, Ruc. I threw him so hard that something crunched when he hit the wall.” Her lips moved silently, helplessly. She raised a hand, as though there were something to grasp, then let it fall. “There was blood,” she went on finally. “His head sat on his neck the wrong way. He didn’t move.”
Ruc put a hand on her shoulder. Whether it steadied her or weighed her down, he couldn’t say.
“What did you do?” Talal asked.
“I ran,” Bien whispered.
“And after that? How many times did you use it?”
“Never,” she replied, then closed her eyes against the truth. “No. That’s a lie.” She glanced up at Ruc. “I used it once more, just before we were captured. When the men came to burn our temple.”
“What did you do to them?”
Bien buried her face in her hands. Her voice was choked when she responded. “I murdered them.”
“It wasn’t murder,” Ruc said grimly. “They were the murderers.”
He saw again Old Uyen, cloudy eyes blank, the axe lodged in his skull.
“Love those who loathe you,” Bien replied—a line from the Tenth Teaching. “Love your worst foe as you would your own child.”
“How did you kill them?” Talal pressed.
“I reached out. I crushed their skulls.”
The Kettral nodded, calm as a man listening to a story about laundry or fishing.
“Do you know what your well is?”
Bien raised her eyes. Her face was smeared with tears.
She shook her head. “I never thought about it. I tried not to think about any of it.”
“A lot of leaches have that response.” Frustration flashed across the soldier’s face. “The world would be so much safer if we trained these children instead of telling them that they’re monsters—”
Bien stared at him as though he were insane.
“I crushed the skulls of two men, broke them open like they were rotting fruit. That is monstrous.”
Talal shrugged. “It’s unusual. Most of the leaches I knew back on the Islands would have cut off their own arms for that kind of strength and precision. And I’m talking about trained leaches, men and women who had been studying for years. You’re powerful, Bien.”
“I don’t want to be powerful.”
“What do you want to be?”
“I want to be good.”
“They’re not incompatible.”
She shook her head helplessly. “I can’t even control it.…”
“I can teach you. The first step, though, is figuring out your well.”
Bien studied him warily. “What could it be?”
“Almost anything. Salt. Blood. Some kind of animal species. Pain. Fear.”
“Fear?” Bien’s eyes widened.
“Some leaches draw their strength from emotion.” His voice was bleak. “It’s a dangerous, unpredictable well.”
“You’ve fought them,” Ruc said.
Talal nodded. “One. He almost killed me several times. He killed people I cared about.”
“I don’t want to be like that,” Bien said.
“So don’t be. I’ve known plenty of leaches who weren’t twisted by their power, but you have to understand the danger.”
“What danger?”
“Leaches become attached to their wells. Some people would say we become dependent. Most of us feel naked without our power. Afraid. Paranoid. Frightened people do desperate things, sometimes horrible things.”
“I don’t feel desperate for my well,” Bien said. “I don’t even know what it is.”
Talal nodded. “You’ve resisted it almost entirely, so you haven’t come to rely on it.”
“But I can’t resist anymore,” she replied, voice trembling.
“Probably not. Not if you want to survive this place. Not if you want to escape.”
Ruc shifted his gaze from Bien to the soldier. “What’s your well?” he asked.
Talal pursed his lips, exhaled slowly. “There are only four people living who know the answer to that question.”
“I take it this is the paranoia you just mentioned?”
“It’s not unjustified.”
“That’s what the paranoid tend to say.”
Talal snorted a half laugh. “Everyone wants to kill leaches. We have only two defenses: secrecy and the power itself. No leach shares their well if they don’t have to. It’s too easy to get cut off from it, to be attacked when you’re weak.”
“But the adamanth,” Bien protested. “You’re cut off from your well all the time in here.”
“I don’t plan to be in here forever.”
“And you think what?” she asked. “If we escape, we’re suddenly going to turn on you? What about working together? What about being allies?”
“I’ve had allies before. Doesn’t always work out.”
“You’re asking a lot,” Ruc said. “To know Bien’s well without sharing your own.”
“I’m not the one asking,” Talal reminded him. He turned to Bien. “I was sitting here eating soup when you told me you were a leach. You want help. I’ll try to give it. To do that, I need to know certain things about you, about your power and how it works. That’s just the way it is. Or if you’ve changed your mind, say the word and I’ll go back to my soup, and none of this ever happened.”
So much, Ruc thought grimly, for mutual trust.
Beneath all the talk of friendship and alliances, the man was an Annurian soldier trained to hunt and to kill. If he helped Bien, it would be for his own reasons.
“All right,” Bien said.
Talal raised his brows. “All right, what?”
“I don’t care what your well is. I just want to learn.”
The soldier watched her a moment, then nodded.
“Keep in mind, I can’t do anything like what you’re capable of.”
“How do you know what I’m capable of?”
“Crushing a skull, let alone two at once—most second- or third-year cadets on the Islands wouldn’t be able to manage that much.”
Ruc stared out the window into the night. Somewhere beyond the yard’s wooden wall, across the mudflats, a group of what sounded like very drunken revelers were singing raucously and out of tune. Ruc felt a sudden, powerful craving for a slug of Monster’s quey.
“So,” Bien asked. “How do we figure out my well?”
“It’s something that was on the dock that day, when you first used your power. And in the Weir. And in the temple.”
Bien stared down at her hands. “That could be anything. Wood. Air. Water…”
“It’s daunting, but with the right method it’s possible to sort through the possibilities more quickly than you’d think.” He cocked his head to the side. “Can you feel your power now?”
She stared at the Kettral for eight or ten heartbeats, then shook her head. “I don’t … How do I know if I can feel it? What does it feel like?”
Talal chuckled.
“What?”
“The Kettral trainers have been asking cadets—ones with the power—exactly this question for hundreds of years. They’ve got all the answers in a massive codex back on the Islands.”
“What do they say?” Bien asked.
He shrugged. “They all say something different. It’s like sun on your eyelids. Like the feeling of dreaming but knowing you’re dreaming. Like voices you hear on the other side of a wall or a door, when you can follow the sense of the conversation without actually making out the words.…”
“I don’t feel any of that.”
“The codex runs to about six hundred pages.”
“And your cadets,” Bien asked. “They just … know?”
“Most of them.” Talal frowned, studied her from across the table. “Some people, though, are so filled with self-loathing that their minds refuse the knowledge.”
“I’m not refusing anything.”
“It’s not something you mean to do. It just happens. Like breathing.”
“But I’ve used … whatever it is.”
“Reflexively. Mostly in self-preservation. Or the preservation of others.” He shook his head. “You need to control it. To direct it.”
“So what do I do?”
The leach hesitated, then stood up, took his chair, planted it half a pace away from Bien.
“Turn toward me,” he said.
Bien stared at him. “What are we doing?”
“Something I saw back on the Islands. I don’t know if it will work, not with the adamanth. But there’s no harm in trying.”
“Trying what?”
He sat down with his elbows on his knees, leaned forward, opened his hands in the space between them.
“Sometimes leaches describe their power as a kind of vibration. Not a sound, but something you feel in the flesh. Some wells seem to … resonate with one another. No one understands why.” He gestured. “Take my hands.”
Bien glanced up at Ruc. For a moment, he didn’t know what to do with his face. Whatever road they were about to tread, it was one he could never follow. In the past, whenever he’d thought about time he’d imagined it as a delta channel, the current stretching off and away into the future, carrying the world along with it. In that moment, however, standing awkwardly to the side of the room, he realized the vision was wrong. Time was a knife, or an ax, or a sickle, something with a blade, anyway, always carving its silent slices, severing this moment from the one before, unmooring people from what they’d been and believed in, from whatever it was they thought they’d known. He managed a nod, and Bien turned back to Talal, stretched out her hands. They were scabbed, Ruc realized, nicked and scratched with a dozen cuts from the unrelenting training. The soldier took them in his own, the motion surprisingly gentle.
“Close your eyes,” he said quietly. “Rest your forehead against mine.”
Hesitantly, Bien leaned forward until her brow touched his just at the hairline. Ruc shifted, glanced toward the window. It was closed, just as Talal had left it.
“I’m going to delve into my well,” the soldier said.
“I thought you were cut off from it,” Bien protested.
“Not exactly. I can feel it, even with the adamanth—I just can’t draw from it. Does that make any sense?”
“Not at all.”
Talal chuckled, and a moment later Bien was laughing with him, their heads still pressed together.
“Focus,” the soldier chided her.
“Focus on what?”
“On the places we’re touching.”
Bien’s laughter subsided. Ruc could just make out the sliver of an expression, the tightening of her lips as she tried to concentrate. Her face was warmer than it had been—her whole body was warmer—as though she’d been running laps around the yard.
“I can feel your skin,” she said. “Your scars.”
Talal gave a slight shake of his head. “Ignore the scars. Go deeper.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “You do.”
For a long time, they sat like that, eyes closed, her brow resting against his. Ruc expected the Kettral to say something else, to continue with the instruction, but he didn’t speak. The only movement was the slow rise and fall of his chest, the flutter of Bien’s black hair as it tangled with her breath. She was breathing more heavily now, clutching Talal’s hands, the skin tight around her knuckles. Her lips twitched, as though she wanted to whisper something but couldn’t arrive at the words. Somewhere outside, one of the guards began tolling the midnight gong, but the two figures didn’t move. They might have been painted there, save for the heat baking off of them—smoldering red instead of the usual orange and yellow. Ruc felt suddenly that he should look away, that this was a private communion not meant for his eyes, but there was nowhere else to look—three bunks, a stretch of wall, a closed window, a closed door—and so he was still watching Bien when she jerked, gave a small cry, half terror, half delight, and yanked her hands back.
Time’s bright knife parted the past from the future.
She was staring at Talal.
When he smiled at her, she shook her head, then smiled back.
“Yes?” he asked.
