A memory of war and sola.., p.18
A Memory of War and Solace, page 18
From behind those walls, a squad of archers could rain death down upon any army who breached the outer wall before they could possibly batter down the gate. Faint light spilled from some of these, but others were dark—they were not all manned. I found one just beyond the stacked barrels that was dark, and made my way around until I was across from it.
My eyes still tracked the two guards at the main door, and when they turned towards the men clustered atop the wall, watching Sem’s uncanny melee, I moved swiftly across to stand against the inner wall, screened now by the barrels.
Gauging the height of the arrow slit, I pulled on my memory of loss, of death, and of pain. I filled my limbs with it and held some in reserve, ready to pour into the stone above me.
I leapt, catching the narrow sill with my power-strengthened fingers and softening the stones to either side of the arrow slit with my power, remembering the way the Reft stonemasons grew new tunnels deep into the mountain. The hand-wide opening flowed open to either side like an eyelid turned on its side and I pulled myself lightly over the sill and into the darkened room.
I returned the stone of the wall to its original shape and peeked down out of the restored arrow slit, confirming that I had gone unnoticed.
The room was a narrow chamber, little more than a watch-post, stocked with arrows and a small heating grate waist-high in the inner wall that sat cold. A wooden door under a low lintel—barely more than a plank on iron hinges—led deeper into the keep. I peered through the finger-width gap between the door and the stone to find a narrow hallway, empty and lit with oil sconces on the wall. I watched for several moments before stepping out.
The walls of the keep were cut from the same purple-tinted gray stone used in the outside wall, though the interior walls were more finely dressed with smooth faces and tight joints. Under the flickering light of the lamps, I could see small flecks of quartz inclusions in the stone. They caught the lights from some angles and glittered subtly.
The hallway to the left ran to two more narrow doors on the outside, and one other to the right. At the end of the hall on the right, an alcove opened into a tight spiral stair up and down, and opposite this, a normal-sized wooden door, stout and bound with iron. This, I guessed, led from the guard rooms into the living areas of the keep.
I drew on my power and Delved through the nearby chambers. I felt the reverberations of living minds to the left, perhaps in both watch posts. I felt more above and below me. To the right, there was no one behind the small door there, and no one beyond the heavy door.
I moved towards that door, tracing my fingers over the latch and lock of iron. I let my power run through the metal, finding the shape of its inner workings and the tension that held the latch fast. Working metal was similar to stone, though subtlety was much more difficult to achieve. Metal was like stone that had been distilled, purified, hardened. It had been forced far from its natural state and locked away from whatever affinities it might once have held.
But subtlety wasn’t necessary here. There was a bolt that kept the latch closed. That bolt was strong iron, but as strong as it might be, metal was also brittle. I poured heat into it and just as fiercely drew it out. I repeated this process several times, as quickly as I could. There was an audible snap as the metal cooled for the fourth time. I lifted the latch and pushed open the door just wide enough to peer through.
Here was another hall, wider and more finely appointed. A lush woolen carpet ran down the center, and the dark stone walls were layered with rich panels of polished wood and tapestries that had a feel of time upon them. The lamps were larger here, hung in filigreed brass mountings.
As I closed the door softly behind me and stepped out, I heard a door open further down to the right, beyond a turning. I held still, listening for footsteps that would tell how many I had to deal with.
There were none. I breathed deeply and tried to slow my heartbeat, but on hearing the voice that called out, it set to racing again. It was a voice I hadn’t heard in many years.
“Enough with the skulking. I know you’re there; I watched your entry through a Delving.” There was a lightness and humor in the voice, and a sharp edge of mockery. I could hear the knowing smirk that I knew was on their lips and could swear I smelled lilac and spice. “Come, let’s see what you are and what you expect to accomplish here.”
I took a deep breath, calming my nerves as well as I could, and walked around the corner to confront Eelie.
FOURTEEN
Eelie stood on a large formal landing at the top of a wide staircase. They wore the same sleeveless black tunic slashed with Savat’s colors and slender flowing trousers. A wide belt sat low on their hips and held a longsword in a black-lacquered scabbard. Their face was exactly as I remembered. Sharp, vulpine features in cream-colored skin. Hair so light it was almost white, falling in a straight, fine line past their shoulders.
They were still beautiful.
Some distance behind them stood the other nyssa I had last seen when Savat had come to Reft and I had helped him find Cal. When I had murdered Cal. I cast back in my thoughts, trying to remember their name. They were broader of shoulder and darker of hair than Eelie, but had the same pale skin—almost alabaster—and wore a similar uniform. Their build ran more to muscle and brawn than Eelie’s lithe elegance. Tanith, I thought suddenly, remembering the name.
I shifted my stance slightly, right foot back and turned so my weight was on the ball of my foot, ready to spring. My muscles were already primed to move quickly.
“Arin, you’ve got something on your face…” Eelie said with feigned concern. “Sort of… here,” they said, touching their nose.
Reflexively, I raised my hand to wipe at the tip of my nose, and noticed I was still carrying the shadows I had spun about myself on my incursion into the castle. I felt my face go hot, and was glad I didn’t show the blush on my skin.
I took five slow breaths, letting the tension in my shoulders relax, and willing the flush in my face to recede. I twisted something within me, and the deep purple-gray of twilight evaporated from my skin, my clothes. From one breath to the next, I looked like myself again.
“That’s so much better,” Eelie said. A satisfied half-smile quirked on their lips. “You’re looking good Arin. It’s been a while.” They turned to their companion. “You remember Arin, Tanith, yes? Arin of Reft?”
Eelie took a small step forward towards me, their face open and bland with mild concern. “What have you been doing with yourself all these years, Arin? Murder anyone else lately?” they asked sweetly.
I kept my face as blank as I could manage, though I grimaced inwardly. They were trying to put me off balance; get under my skin. The kernel of disgust and shame that resided ever at my center warmed at their words.
They were succeeding.
“What is this war, Eelie?” I asked, finding my voice at last. “How many have you killed for whatever aims you drive at?”
“Me?” they replied, their eyes wide and face innocent. “Me? I’ve killed no one.” They turned and stepped casually across the wide landing, tracing an arc through the space as if walking a large circle around me. “I’d guess, of the two of us, you’ve killed more men. How does it feel, Arin, to take a life?”
I flinched, but held my ground. “Tell me, do you truly do Savat’s will? Or does he do yours? Whose war is this, really?” My eyes now danced between Eelie and Tanith, trying to keep them both in my vision.
“What war?” Tanith said, their voice gravelly and low. “My lord Duke is only bringing justice to the nation of Torfall. Long overdue justice.”
I kept myself focused on Eelie; only glancing at Tanith every few seconds. “You can’t believe that, truly.” I said, speaking to Eelie. “You know the world won’t long stand for nyssén seizing control of the affairs of nations.”
They laughed, a low, throaty chuckle that set my teeth on edge, but also made my heart skip. “Oh Arin, you never were too quick to figure things out. Strong, yes. Brilliant, absolutely.” They took a sudden step towards me, closing the distance. “Tempting…” Their eyes danced up and down my body, “Oh, yes. But always just a bit too slow to catch on.”
My cheeks warmed again, and my hand was on my sword before I could control my movements.
They turned their back on me, and spoke calmly as they walked back to stand beside Tanith. They didn’t seem to care that I was primed for attack.
“The world is broken,” they said fiercely. Somehow, it seemed the first words they had spoken with any real feeling of truth. “It is broken! And we mean to heal it.”
I struck out at their mind with all the power I could draw on, striving to learn what I could. These words, full of emotion, were an anchor into their memory. I poured my power into the space between our minds and bridged that divide.
It is broken…
I was standing on the edge of a wood, thick and dark with densely-packed trunks and interlaced branches. The treeline ran to the horizon in either direction, and under-foot, the ground shifted suddenly from an indeterminate mix of gravel and dry, gray-green stubble of grass to thick leaf litter in damp, spongey piles underneath that darkening canopy.
I pushed my way between the trees, threads of my cloak catching on scratchy bark and grasping fingers of low branches. Before long it was caught fast in a snarl of branch and I was forced to shrug it off and continue without it. The chill crept into my bones as I moved deeper into the wood. The light faded from dusk to twilight to the deepest oppressive night.
I found my path blocked by a thicket of bramble, dense and matted with interlocked tendrils of needle-sharp thorns. At first, I tried to pick the wall of briar apart, but no matter how careful I was, my hands were soon torn and bleeding, and the vines grew back faster and thicker and sharper than I could tear them away.
I knew I had to press on. What I sought was deep in the heart of this wood. I stepped back and focused my thoughts on fire. An angry inferno, a blistering wave of bright blue fire that blackened the tendrils and spread as the charred remnants of the vines became coals glowing fiercely with their own shimmering heat. New growth tried to fill that space, but it soon began to catch and feed the conflagration.
…I felt their mind lurch…
I stood before a wall of stone. Its color was a sickly mauve shot with rust. Starlight filtered sullenly through the leaves above and picked out flecks of mica in the stones, sparking in dull silver.
The wall ran to either side of me through the wood, seeming to curve gently away in both directions so that I lost sight of it as it diminished. It was no taller than my waist, but I couldn’t see anything past that wall. It wasn’t darkness it enclosed. It wasn’t mist or fog or foliage. It was simply nothing. There was nothing there to see.
I knew I couldn’t climb over that wall because until I breached it, there was no over.
I began to walk, choosing at random to follow it to the right. The stones were sharply cut and finely dressed, interlocking in neat staggered rows. The joints were so tight that I thought not even a sheet of paper could be slid between.
As I rounded the endless perimeter of the wall, a twist of thorned creeper occasionally reached out from the woods to my right, lying across my path or catching at my boot. I fed them to the fire that I carried within me, the same fire I had left behind to burn down the bramble wall.
The wall ran on and on, still curving gently away to my left. I realized that I was getting nowhere. I had the deepest belief that I could walk the entire circle and never know when I came back upon my own path. Perhaps I never would.
I thought back over what they had said. “A bit slow to catch on,” they had said of me. “The world is broken.”
…the world is broken…
I stopped and turned slowly in place, letting my eyes wander the wood and get lost in its depths.
A green tendril was wrapped around the toe of my boot. I burned it away.
…the world is broken…
I knelt down in front of the wall, leaning my left hand in the soft leaf litter and running the fingers of my right over the stone. The blocks were finely cut. The edges were sharp and tightly joined. But my fingers found a stone that bore cracks.
They were fine, barely perceptible even as I looked at them, but cracks. The stone was on the second row from the ground, just to my left. I had almost walked past it.
…the world is broken…
I moved to stand and found my fingers caught in a twirl of bramble. I pulled, shaking drops of blood from my pricked fingers. I almost burnt the creeper away, but changed my mind.
When I was a child, one of the monthly chores that fell to me was tearing out weeds and briar that had established itself near the goat pen or along the walls of the house, or among the river stone walls of the spring house. Father’s voice came to me, the memory bringing fresh tears to my eyes.
“Gotta root them out, Pips. If you let the creepers get a hold, they can tear down a wall in time. Yes, Pips, even stone.”
I wiped tears from my cheeks and gently, delicately laid my hand on the thorn-covered vine. I squeezed slowly, feeling each thorn pierce my flesh, feeling the warmth of blood run through the creases in my clenched fingers. I drew on the pain and fed it back to the briar encouraging its growth, leading it to the wall, showing it the fine cracks.
It flared to life, sprawling along the face of the stone, fine points of budding tendril finding the spaces between those cracks. The cracks were wider now, still fine as a hair, but several shoots had found purchase in the surface of the block. They were spreading along its face, finding its edges.
A flood of bramble coursed over me, wrapping my neck and face, lashing my arms, pulling me back and trying to drag me away from the wall into the wood. I let the fire in me rage and the tendrils fell to ash around me. I urged on the little shoot climbing the wall, pushing all my urgency into it.
A snap rang out as a small flake of stone fell to the forest floor.
The vine was twisting now, curling inward on itself as it hungered to bring down the wall. A grinding sound, and the cracks widened further. The block crumbled before my eyes, and soon the briar was a lush thicket of thorn and white flowers and spiraled green.
…the world is broken…
The stones of the wall collapsed inside and out, and a staggered “V” opened in its forbidding boundary. The stone blocks extended beyond the wall; a narrow, dark alley. I stepped over the low tumble of stone, hoping to find some hint as to Eelie’s plans.
The sky was visible high above only as a thin strip of dim gray, scudded with iron clouds. The walls of the alley were dingy, stained with years of soot and muck and filth, and the rough cobbled ground was slimy with moss and mold and unidentifiable refuse. Here and there, small windows above were shuttered tight, and beneath each were the spreading stains of emptied chamber pots and washing tubs.
The smell was overpowering.
Ahead, just where the alley opened into some wider space, I saw movement—two children crouching in the shadows. The younger was perhaps ten years old. The older only a few years more. They had the same pale hair. It would be nearly white except for the muck and dirt that covered them head to toe. They looked nearly as if they had rolled in the alley.
I watched the older child push the little one further back into the alley and then dash out. As I neared, I could see the opening spilled out into a broad street full of hawkers and pedestrians. Carriages rolled by on the street, the horses and the drivers both seemingly unconcerned about the people who milled about beneath the hooves and wheels. The street ran north and south with multiple large intersections visible from where I stood. Far to the north, large buildings rose to crenelate the sky, their roofs flashing in gleaming tile and copper.
I leaned against the opposite wall, and looked down at the child. They were rail-thin, all baby fat burned away so their face had the narrow, sharp features of a fox. Hunger was evident in every line of their body. I turned out to scan the street, looking for the older of the two.
There was a shout some ways down the street, and calls of anger rose above the clatter of the city. Then I spotted the older urchin, dodging recklessly between the wheels of a cart to escape the grasping hands of the pursuing stallkeeper.
The child made it to the alley, flashing past me and grasping the younger by the arm to flee deeper into the shadows.
This was not what I had expected to find. I followed them, trying to understand what I was seeing.
The two children squatted down in a shallow alcove along the wall—a former doorway, long-ago sealed up with mismatching bricks. The older of the two pulled two loaves of steaming bread from under their filthy tunic, passing the smaller to the young child.
“Eat fast, Medi. We need to move quick now.”
The child didn’t need a second prompt, and they both were soon tearing into the stolen bread with a kind of steady desperation, wasting no time or energy on further talk.
With them both now sitting side-by-side, I could see the same vulpine faces, the same lithe frames, the same coloring. They were siblings.
Footsteps sounded near the opening to the street. With each loaf half-eaten, the two rose from their niche and scrambled deeper down the alley to emerge on another street. I followed, my curiosity urging me on. The sky darkened above, and a sense of foreboding filled me.
“El, where are we going?” the little one said.
El’s lips quirked into a half smile. “We’ll find a place, Medi.”
I saw it now. Their narrow fox-like face. White hair, hacked short and stained with dirt, but gleaming nonetheless. Their cold eyes scanning the street for threat or mark.
Eelie.
…the world is broken…
I felt their body close to mine, the heat of it warmed me and drove me on with a pressure I couldn’t stand. My face was hot and my heart was racing. Their left hand rose to touch my face, their thumb tracing the scar from my temple to my chin. I could feel their breath against my lips.
