Witch King, page 37
Kai sighed, and wrestled it back on. At least it seemed to make the soldiers happy. He told Salatel, “It’s good we have to wait. I need to make an intention, and … that’s going to take a while.” The water intention had been all other expositors’ work, and the flame intention was apparently the first thing they taught baby expositors. Kai was going to have to search Talamines’ memories, and that wasn’t going to be easy. He sat down on the side of the bridge, one of the pillar supports at his back. “Just leave someone here in case I need help and everyone else can get some sleep,” Kai told Salatel and the rest of the cadre.
He expected her to take the order without argument; she had been doing everything else he had told her to do so far. Salatel said, “No, Fourth Prince. We are your cadre, we guard you.”
That just seemed a waste of their time. “If Bashasa’s wrong and the legionaries arrive, there’s not enough of you.”
Salatel lifted her brows. From the other soldiers’ expressions, he had just said something naive. Salatel said, “It isn’t the legionaries we are guarding you from.”
Ah, Kai thought. After the confrontation with Dasara, he should have thought of that. He didn’t want to have to kill any Arike, it would upset Bashasa’s plans. He said, “Right. Do what you think best.”
Salatel was placing her soldiers in guard positions when the wallwalker went past. In the lamplight, most of it was invisible, just clawed feet and giant furred legs striding back the way they had come. Kai tucked himself up beside the pillar, though there was plenty of clearance on the wide bridge. He had until the wallwalker came back to do this. He took a deep breath, and sank down into darkness.
* * *
Kai didn’t want to grasp at the first possible solution only to realize later there was a much better way. But sorting through fading, elusive memories that weren’t yours was confusing and exhausting. He came out of his trance twice, just to breathe and remember that he was a living being, that this was still him, even if this wasn’t the body he had been born with or the body he had been gifted. The first time Salatel and Cerala were watching him worriedly, and he asked, “What?”
Salatel pressed her lips together. Cerala said, “Your face looks like it hurts.”
That … wasn’t a surprise. The training the conscripted expositors had received had not been kind, even seeing it in these fitful, deteriorating images.
The second time, the soldiers stood further back, and someone had set a wooden water flask near his hand. He drank some water, rubbed a handful on his face, and went back in.
He wanted something like the water intention, already devised and ready to go, except maybe including a way to stop it when it had fulfilled its purpose so it didn’t try to burn both banks of the river and the fields and the entire world. But the fragments of memory he could dredge up told him how intentions were constructed, how to devise a new one. He pushed harder; what he needed was the little flame intention, but with heat, with combustion, and larger, but still confined to a specific object.
The bridge vibrated under him and he opened his eyes with a jolt. A wallwalker appeared out of the darkness on the far side. As Kai shoved to his feet, Salatel stepped to his side. “It’s Arava returning, Fourth Prince. The scouts on the other side signaled.”
“Good.” Kai felt sweat soak the back of his tunic, an ache in one knee. The night had advanced, they were running out of time. “Call the scouts back, anybody else who went over there.”
The beast strode by, its long legs making nothing of the distance. Kai caught glimpses of faces looking down from the palanquin, catching the lamps the Arike had set along the bridge. A small hand waved, and Kai waved back.
It had occurred to him that he could ask the Witches for help. But he knew their abilities tended to be tied to specific spirits, like Ziede’s control over air. But if he had to ask someone else to do this, then Dasara and the other Arike would know Bashasa’s demon was powerless. Kai wasn’t worried that they would kill him; if he didn’t want to die, he would walk away into the dark now and the Arike would never catch him.
He wanted to do this. To personally teach the Hierarchs another lesson in destruction.
After the wallwalker passed, Salatel walked into the center of the bridge and lifted a lamp, moving it in a quick pattern.
More lamps sparked in the darkness on the far side of the river: scouts passing the signal back. Not long after, Arike soldiers trotted toward them across the bridge.
Kai paced, wiping his hands on his skirt, until the last scouts ran past and Salatel said, “That’s all, Fourth Prince.”
Kai took a deep breath and stepped to the center of the bridge. “All of you get back.”
Salatel frowned but waved the rest of the cadre to obey. Kai waited until they retreated. He crouched down and put his hands on a broad plank. It felt as solid as rock. He pulled the pain out of Talamines’ body, his death at Kai’s hands, his weak memories of his conscription and training, but it wasn’t enough. He hissed out a breath. There was no avoiding this. He held out a hand. “I need a knife.”
A quiet step on the bridge and Salatel was there. She put the hilt of a knife in his hand. It was a short, practical blade meant for a tool, not a weapon. She probably thought he needed to cut something with it. Well, he did. Kai pulled the closure of his tunic down, and before he could think about it too much, drove the blade into his chest.
The next part was almost harder. He took a grating breath and yanked it out. He heard Salatel gasp as he arched forward, curling over the pain. He slammed his free hand down on the plank and put all the pain into the fire intention.
For a heartbeat nothing happened. The wound was closing, a little spray of blood dripping from the knife. Then just under Kai’s hand, the dark wood glowed cherry red.
That’s not enough, he thought. But then the red glow turned black and crumbled at the edges and started to spread.
It touched the hem of Kai’s skirt and the fabric started to smolder. Sense caught up to him and he shoved to his feet, stumbling backward. Salatel caught his arm to steady him. The glow spread further. Flames suddenly leapt up from below, from the heavy supports. Kai said, “Run. Run!” and he and Salatel pelted toward the end of the bridge.
He didn’t slow until they were all the way down the ramp, until it was the stone of the road under their feet instead of wood. The rest of the cadre, the scouts, and a scatter of other soldiers waited there, holding lamps, wide-eyed and shocked. Obviously thinking of the flooded Summer Halls, Salatel asked worriedly, “Will it stop?”
“Uh, probably.” Kai looked back at the leaping flames, the red flowing like water over the wood. He had limited the design to just the center part of the bridge. Or at least he thought he had. And he wished he had taken the time to search Talamines’ mind for water intentions. Just a little water intention. He wondered if the Cageling Demon Court’s intention would overflow the earthwork and flood the whole world. Or what would have happened if he had dropped it in a river instead of a pool in an enclosed space. Probably it didn’t work like that, or the Hierarchs would have used it to flood whole valleys somewhere. But maybe they had done it somewhere, what did Kai know.
A tremendous crack made him flinch. Something gave way in the bridge’s undercarriage and the middle part slumped sideways as beams detached from a stone piling. A soldier muttered something gleeful in Arike. Kai glanced at Salatel. She watched him with a tense, worried expression. He guessed his demeanor was not engendering confidence. She said, “Should we warn the camp?”
That wasn’t a bad idea. The fire still spread from plank to plank with that inexorable liquid intensity. “It might…” Kai began.
With another loud crack more beams gave way, and the fiery center section toppled sideways and crashed into the water.
Kai darted forward into the shallows, brushing past the reeds to see. With sparks and steam, the planks and cracked beams sank into the water. The fire on the two still-standing sections winked out abruptly. With a certainty that came from Talamines, he knew that once disconnected from the placement of the initial design, the fire had lost its fury and power. But it had worked: large pieces of the middle part of the bridge floated down the river, and the gap between the two surviving sections was too wide for a fast-moving legionary force to repair on their own. They would need engineers, scaffolds, material. It would slow them down.
Kai reached up to rub his face and winced; his chest and right arm hurt, were going to hurt all night, probably. He still felt the ache in his back from the spear wound yesterday.
He turned and sloshed his way back up the bank to where the cadre was expressing relief by talking loudly in Arike and slapping each other on the back. They quieted when Salatel asked, “Fourth Prince, why did you stab yourself?”
Kai might as well tell them. “I’m not an expositor. I don’t want to be one. Using the Hierarchs’ Well would make me … like them. I use pain instead. My pain.” They were all staring at him and he didn’t want to see what was in Salatel’s gaze, horror or worse, sympathy; it was too much. “Let’s go tell Bashasa it’s done.”
Salatel turned to take the lead and they walked down the road. The scouts dispersed, taking up positions along the river to keep watch.
Some lamps had gone down with the bridge, but Nirana and Telare had grabbed a couple, enough to light the way to the camp and the wallwalkers. The scent of woodsmoke mingled with something that might be seared onion made Kai’s stomach cramp. He had the bad feeling this body was going to need feeding more often than Enna’s had.
He hoped someone was watching Bashasa’s back.
The chorus of insects had started up again. Different insects than the grassplains or the hilly borderlands, a familiar-not-familiar song. They left the stone-paved road for the field, the tall grass catching in Kai’s skirts. A little distance away the wallwalkers loomed in the dark, sleeping while standing up, breathing like wind-filled caverns. Three large tents had been erected, the same sort of tall domed structures that were used in the temporary earthwork forts the legionaries built. Dim lamplight shone through the dark canvas. From the smell of smoke and cooking, fires had been built but kept low and concealed to prevent the light from being seen at a distance. Salatel explained, “These wallwalkers were loaded for a Hierarch High Noble to take somewhere. So there were tents, and bedding and food.”
Kai could hardly tell one mortal from another in this light, but none of the shapes wandering around in the dark was absurdly tall. “Do you know where Ziede and Tahren—the Immortal Marshall—and her brother are?”
Salatel called softly to someone in Arike, then reported, “Either scouting, or in the perimeter guard. The young Lesser Blessed was told to stay with our dependents, I think.” They headed for the tent at the end, where a lamp shone on two unfamiliar Arike soldiers standing on either side of the flap door. Their sashes were in elaborate folds, their tunics had more embroidery and trim than Bashasa’s soldiers. Behind Kai, Arsha muttered something critical and Cerala shushed her.
Salatel stopped when she reached them and said, “The Fourth Prince needs to report to Prince-heir Bashasa.” One guard replied in Arike. The tone was aggressive in a way that made Kai want to bare his teeth. Her voice flat, Salatel said, “Speak Imperial or stand aside now.”
The second guard said, “They don’t want to be disturbed.” There was a hint of satisfaction in her voice that said this wasn’t a misunderstanding of orders.
Kai saw the tendons in the back of Salatel’s neck stand out with tension. She said, “Prince-heir Bashasa wanted the Fourth Prince to report when he was finished.”
Neither guard moved. The first curled her lip and added, “We don’t take orders from whatever that is.”
They were pushing again, like Dasara. Kai might have no standing among the Arike but Salatel did and this was an insult to all of Bashasa’s people. He stepped up beside Salatel and in Arike said, “Move.” It was an easy word to pick up; people had been shouting it at each other constantly over the past day.
One guard’s eyes widened and the other twitched her hand toward her belt weapon. Kai took a step forward well into their reach, making it clear he wasn’t afraid of them. He could get into the tent whether they liked it or not, but the trick was to make them let him. In Imperial he added, “Stabbing me won’t stop me, but it will make me angry.”
Salatel stepped forward to stand at his side again. Now her voice was relaxed and easy, but laced with contempt. “Don’t be stupid. Prince-heir Bashasa wants our report. What do you think will happen if you deny the Fourth Prince and he has to fight you? Who will take the brunt of that?”
The first guard, the one who had started it, broke and stepped aside. She looked away, staring off into the dark. The other hesitated, flustered, then grimaced and said, “Go ahead.”
Salatel moved first, shouldering her out of the way, and lifted the tent flap for Kai.
He stepped inside to a large lamplit space, sectioned off from the rest of the tent with dark-colored curtains and gauzy drapes. It gave him an unexpected chill; the richness and colors of the fabric were like the room where he had found Raihankana and the Hierarch. But voices speaking Arike sounded from behind a curtain, an agitated argument. Kai pitched his voice to carry and said, “Bashasa, are you in here?”
The argument cut off abruptly and Bashasa lurched out of a curtained doorway. “Fourth Prince! I heard you were successful!”
He didn’t look well. His skin had gone sallow, and his gaze was bleary. He stumbled and Kai stepped forward and caught him, one of Bashasa’s arms going across his shoulders. A soldier who had been with Bashasa on the wallwalker burst out of the curtained doorway behind him, then stood there helpless as Bashasa leaned his weight on Kai.
Worried, Kai asked, “Are you all right?” Bashasa must have been awake through the whole long ride here, while Kai and many of the others had managed to sleep.
“I’m fine,” Bashasa assured him, mumbling into Kai’s hair.
“You don’t seem fine,” Kai argued, as the curtain was shoved aside and Prince-heir Lahshar stepped out, her face set with distaste. In the room behind her a carpet and seating cushions had been put down, and there were metal plates and cups and the remains of a meal on a round tray. Sitting around it was Dasara and a few other Arike nobles that Kai hadn’t met. None of them looked happy.
Lahshar demanded, “What is he doing here?”
She was obviously talking about Kai but not to him, implying he wasn’t important enough to speak to her. But that was her problem, not Kai’s. He said, “Bashasa wanted to know when the bridge was down.”
She grimaced. “Get out.”
Bashasa’s head jerked up, his voice suddenly hard. “Do not give orders to my allies, Lahshar. You have the diplomatic gift of an angry goat.”
She didn’t like that. She bared her teeth in a way that reminded Kai of the Overlord of the Fourth House. “Do not insult me in front of servants, cousin.”
Bashasa countered, “Oh, don’t make me fight you with words, cousin. It will get out of hand, as once started I lose the will to stop. You should retire.” He made an airy gesture with his free hand that almost caught his soldier in the face. “I should retire.”
That was the most rational thing Bashasa had said yet. Kai asked the soldier, “Where is he supposed to sleep?”
She pointed toward another section of draped brocade and Kai hauled Bashasa in that direction. Salatel hastily stepped forward to lift the curtain for them.
Inside was a room with a hanging lamp and a padded bedroll, so thick it was almost knee-high. Kai suspected the space was intended to be much more lavish if it was meant for a Hierarch’s servant and his attendants, but the Arike obviously had only unpacked the bare minimum of the tent’s accoutrements. There was also a finely carved wooden case with some maps piled atop it and a leather pack, and the same long wrapped bundle that Kai had seen Tahren carrying before they left. Bashasa’s sister’s body.
He steered Bashasa toward the bedroll, but Bashasa stumbled and Kai half collapsed trying to help him sit down. Releasing Kai, Bashasa flopped over backward. “Ah, thank you, Fourth Prince.” He sounded exhausted.
“You can call me Kai, remember.” He supposed he should get up, but his skirt was caught under Bashasa’s leg. And the bedroll was just as comfortable as it looked, sinking down under his weight.
Obviously disturbed, Salatel yanked the curtain back into place, and in a low voice asked Bashasa’s soldier, “Trenal, where is the rest of his personal cadre?”
Trenal nodded toward the map case. “Prince-heir Bashasa came in here to study his maps and plan our route, and Prince-heir Lahshar sent the cadre away.” Trenal appeared to be trying to communicate something else to Salatel via facial expressions. “I was busy bringing in the Prince-heir’s things for the night and she neglected to order me to go with them.” She threw a worried look at Bashasa. “He said it was all right.”
“And so it was all right,” Bashasa contributed, flopping one arm around.
Salatel’s jaw tightened. Kai had little to no idea how the Arike did things but even he got that ordering Bashasa’s cadre away from him was against the rules. As well as being a terrible idea under these circumstances. He said, “Is he safe here?”
“You are all worrying needlessly.” Bashasa sat up on an elbow. His still somewhat bleary gaze fell on Kai. “Sister Witch has been scouting, up in the air. Did you know she could fly? I knew she could float, I didn’t know she could fly. It involves communion with some sort of air or wind creatures.”
“That’s how Witches work,” Kai told him. He couldn’t tell if Bashasa had actually been drugged, or if he had had some of that horrible rancid fruit liquor while nearly too tired to stand up and it had affected him badly. “Why don’t you go to sleep?”
“No, I have to wait for her to return with her intelligence,” Bashasa protested, sounding more alert. “I have to know if the route to the southeast is clear. The Immortal Blessed did not go with her.” He sat up a little more. “Do Immortal Blessed fly like birds? I know they can travel swiftly.”
