Bittersouls, p.9
Bittersouls, page 9
A warm breeze brushed across Dela’s cheek, causing her to grit her teeth. The right side of the tunnel seemed to vanish up ahead, replaced by a deep darkness their torches could not penetrate. The ceiling disappeared just as suddenly, peeling away into some unknown hollow. Dela braced herself for the view that was sure to accompany their emergence into whatever cavern was up ahead. Whatever was living down here had to be in there. They were sure to run into it, weren’t they? She had to be ready for whatever happened.
But as they stepped out beyond the end of the right wall and ceiling, nothing but a vast, vacuous expanse of blackness yawned back at them. The air seemed to hum with a chittering whine coming from every direction. No matter how hard Dela tried to peer into the darkness, the torchlight and wisplight they carried could do nothing to puncture its void. Their walkway had grown no wider, but now a huge empty pit waited to swallow them should they somehow stumble.
“This?” Dela whispered to Talon.
He nodded carefully, not even pausing to take in the rapturous lack of a view. “This is the Vaults.”
She stared out into the blackness uneasily. “What do we do now?”
“Now?” He pursed his lips. “We keep walking. And we talk.”
“Talk?”
“Will help us stay awake,” he explained. “Safest to keep talking. Silence… silence is not good here.”
She nodded hesitantly, following him into the maw of the darkness around their little pathway. He wanted them to keep talking. Did that mean she could ask him questions? Would he answer them? She doubted he would be able to keep it up very well on his own, given his proclivity for short answers and curt substitutes for conversation, but there was nothing to do but try.
“So, then…” She bit her lip, trying to think where best to start. She wanted to know more about him. To understand him, why he was here and why he had decided to travel with her. But he seemed so secretive. So closed in. She didn’t know what she could ask that wouldn’t risk upsetting him. “How long have you been a Bittersoul?”
He walked silently ahead of her for a few moments before his shoulders slumped ever so slightly. Perhaps he’d conceded to the fact that he would have no way of talking without answering at least some of her questions. “This will be… fifteen winters.”
She nodded slowly, though he didn’t see it since she was walking behind him. If she guessed his age right, that would mean he was rather young when he’d started—likely even younger than she was. She wondered if she could ask about that. About how it started. He’d said he’d chosen it, hadn’t he? But to choose something so dark and terrible as becoming a Bittersoul… it couldn’t be a happy memory for him.
Did he have any happy memories?
“Your madness,” he said, apparently taking his turn to ask a question. “How old were you?”
“Wispsight,” she answered.
He cocked his head, but didn’t turn to her or slow down.
“It’s not madness, Talon,” she insisted. “I think we should call it wispsight.”
“We?” He chuckled, the scraping sound of his voice echoing off some distant wall in the emptiness to their right. “You can call it what you like, Dela.”
She pursed her lips, trying to decide if she should count that as a victory. Either way, she hadn’t answered his question. “It started just before my sixth winter. One year after I saw a Jackal outside our camp at the Festival of Three Flames.”
He stopped suddenly, turning to look her in the eyes. The flame reflected off the black pools of his eyes like water at the bottom of an abyss. “You do not jest?” he demanded.
She shook her head. “Why would I lie about something like that?”
His eyes narrowed, but he would find nothing amiss in her face or features. “Very young. Hm.” He turned, striding into the darkness once again. She followed. “Your friend. The boy. How long did he have his… wispsight?”
Dela hesitated. She could always try to infer, but she couldn’t be certain. Still, Freja’s concerns had come on suddenly. “I don’t know. It might have been… only just before.”
The Bittersoul nodded. “Much more typical. Eleven or twelve winters. Six? And a Jackal before that?” He clicked his tongue doubtfully. For a moment, she thought she heard the thrumming, buzzing darkness match his rhythm, then return to its shapeless drone.
It was her turn. “How about you? You wear the skin of a Jackal. What can you tell me about them?”
“About Jackals?” he clarified.
“Yes.”
“Hm.” Talon gave it a moment’s thought, then paused as the road split ahead of them. One pathway kept to the wall, moving essentially in the same direction they had been moving. The other curved to the right, shooting out into the open cavern with no apparent support beneath it. Dela frowned.
“That’s not the way, right?” She hoped not. “Right?”
“Not as naïve as you look.” The Bittersoul gave a gentle smirk, then stepped up to juncture. He lurched downward, swinging an ice axe in a wide, sweeping arc at the ground. She expected it to bite the rock and be ripped from his hand, but it cut through it, not like stone or dirt or ice or water, but as something soft but crisp—like snow. It was far too warm for that, of course. Plus, it was the color of the stone around it, from what the torchlight could tell her. The wound he’d cut remained for a moment, gaping open like a wound of the flesh. Then, as a roughcloak refastened with its hooks, the earth stitched itself together again, erasing any semblance of having been marred.
“I…” Words failed her. She could only stare as Talon turned back to her expectantly.
“You have questions,” the Bittersoul said.
“Yes, well—”
“So do I.” He turned to begin down the safer path. “This place is old. Old and dangerous and strange. Answers take time, and we haven’t the time to ask for them.”
The girl rubbed her temples with her left hand as she followed. What if they’d stepped out onto the bridge? Would they have simply fallen through? What if the next time there was a false path, they didn’t recognize it?
“How could you tell it was wrong?”
“Memorable,” Talon mumbled over his shoulder. He’d seen that one before, then. What had happened there? How long ago? To whom, if not himself? Or had he been the one who had fallen? “You wanted to know about Jackals.”
Dela nodded as he was still looking at her over his shoulder. The path continued to descend into the pit below, and now looked to be doubling back on itself in its descent. What was this place? Why was it so huge and so dark? And what was making that terrible racket?
“What do you already know?” he asked.
She pursed her lips, trying to recall the stories from her girlhood. They hadn’t been spoken of very often, given the superstitions surrounding them, but her own encounter with one of them meant she probably had been told more than most children in the congregation.
“They’re the instruments of Bale,” she finally said. “Wild, evil, foreboding. When I saw it, my mother warned me to never speak of it. And she warned me that…”
Her mother. Was she even safe? Was she even alive?
No. She couldn’t think like that.
“She warned me that if I started seeing anything after having seen the Jackal, that I should keep that to myself. I guess she meant… the madness? I always took it to mean that. I followed her word, and maybe it’s the only reason I could keep it hidden for so many winters.”
“Your mother warned you not to reveal your madness even before it arose?” Talon raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps your mother was mad as well.”
Dela hesitated for a moment. Could that really be true? Her own mother, just like her, and all these years she’d never seen it? She was such a kind woman. Quiet. Content. She never raised a fuss or instigated an issue. She’d even chosen to put up with Dela’s father, wrathful as he was. Was that why? She was mad, and knowing that she might be discovered if she ever drew attention, she carefully never did?
If that was true, Dela didn’t know her at all. Didn’t appreciate her at all. If it was true, her mother was the strongest woman she’d ever met, and she had seen her as weak. Enabling her father and refusing to stand up for her daughter had seemed like a betrayal, but if his anger was great enough to overshadow anything odd about the two women of the family…
“Tell me about the Jackals.” Dela gritted her teeth. This wasn’t the time, and this man was no confidante, even if he did share her curse.
The Bittersoul shrugged, as if everything they’d discussed had been little more than idle conversation. “Fathers to the Bittersouls, some say. Like us, they carry wisps. Have the madness. Hunt for Warmth.”
“Hunt for Warmth?” Dela frowned. “Like a Shade does?”
The man stopped and turned in a fraction of an instant, bringing them face to face. “What do you know of Shades?”
She stopped as well, frowning at his over-reaction. “My congregation encountered one… a couple weeks before the storm.” She hoped his gaze would dissipate with a little information, but it didn’t waver. “It was chasing little wisps flying through the air. One of my people tried to make a run for it, ended up getting chased down instead.” She remembered how scared she’d been. How it had seemed like her entire world was coming apart at the seams. Looking back on it now, she’d had no idea. “The Shade must have had enough, because it looked at the rest of us and then left.”
“Shades don’t get full. They are insatiable.” His tone rose, the fervor of his eyes burning in the firelight. “No. You saw one. You survived. This was not the Shade’s choice. Something else chose, hm? Something protected you. Something that didn’t…” He snapped out of it as suddenly as landing from a long fall, whipping his head back toward the path they were following and starting off again.
Dela blinked. That was too strong a reaction for it not to have been emotional. He’d encountered a Shade in the past, or at least the carnage one had left behind. Perhaps what he’d said was true—that the One had protected them, just as the Ministers had said. What fortune had afforded her people, it had not afforded to others. She thought about what she knew about him. He said he’d chosen to become a Bittersoul, and apparently from a young age. He’d said he hadn’t been exiled, but that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t been left without his people. Had a Shade killed them? All of them? Leaving him alone with the same two choices Nolam had?
“I’m sorry,” she heard herself saying. She was surely crossing a line, but she didn’t care. He might have been alone ever since his entire congregation was wiped out, left to the Bitters without friends or sympathy. “It’s hard,” she went on. “Losing people you care about.”
The Bittersoul shook his head, but didn’t turn to her. “Don’t. Let the dead stay dead.” He breathed slowly for a few minutes, trying to regain control of himself. “Hunting Warmth,” he started back where he’d left off, his voice as unassumingly jagged as when they’d first started talking, “makes a Bittersoul a Bittersoul. In the Bitters, nothing is for free. Warmth is life. Warmth is survival. If you are alone and you want to live, you have to take.”
Dela nodded. She thought of the gaping burn wound on Hunter Bombash’s back where his wisp had once been joined to him. It was the work of a Shade, she knew, and the Bittersouls were likely not quite like that, but her horror was no less pronounced. In order to live apart from the congregations, the Souls had to kill. This was Bale’s design, after all. For man to turn upon man and slay him for his own greed. Even nature itself had taken up that command with Jackals and Shades. Their frozen world could not allow any being to live unsullied by the Omnivolent’s demands.
“Wait.” Talon stopped, prompting Dela to do the same. He cocked his head, listening, but the girl heard nothing over the droning buzz of the void before them.
“Talon, I—”
“Shh.” He shook his head. A few more moments passed.
There it was. The sounds carried like thunder, rhythmically rumbling, one after the next. Whatever it was, it was coming this way from below, moving straight up the cliff face. The pair stared out over the edge for only a moment before Talon retreated to the center of pathway and sat with his feet facing down the slope. He waved her over, prompting her to sit next to him. His eyes were wide with recognition and fear.
“What’s happening?” she whispered urgently. The rumbling had begun to shake the ground now. It was very close, and very large.
He handed her one of the stoppered horn vials he’d prepared in the cave the morning after she’d met him. She stared at it in disgust, knowing full well what faerat saliva would do to a person. Did he think she was that stupid? That she would just drink something like that because he asked her to?
“They don’t see wisps,” he told her quickly, unstoppering his own vial of the stuff and holding it near his lips. “They don’t see heat. They see movement. Twitching. Breathing.”
“What?” Her mind felt scrambled. The buzzing was growing more intense, and the rumbling of whatever approached continued to grow louder. “What doesn’t?”
“Worst thing in the Vaults.” He urged her to drink. “Will kill us.”
“I’m supposed to hold my breath?” she demanded. She knew she shouldn’t be arguing. There wasn’t time. But his plan—to drink a paralytic that would kill them in order to avoid something that might kill them—seemed insane.
He held up his vial and downed it in a single swallow. “Venom will hold it for you,” he whispered. He lay back carefully, slipping the little vial back into a pouch on his belt.
There was no time. She’d trusted him this far. What would she gain if she didn’t trust him a little further? She swallowed the contents of the vial, grimacing at the taste, and lay back beside him, turning her head so they could study each other’s faces. The torches flickered on the pathway nearby, bathing the two prone figures in sputtering orange light.
She could already feel the venom working its way through her body. Her chest grew heavy, her eyelids stuck open, unable to blink. Her fingers and toes were distant memories, refusing any contact. She stared into the eyes of the madman as her body slowed to a halt, every sensation blocked by a wall of hazy gray. His eyes dimmed as she felt hers do the same, unable to move, only able to see what was right in front of her. If she was going to die like this, she would die looking into the face of the man who had killed her—and had died in turn.
The silence of her mind was only vaguely interrupted by something enormous looming over them. Perhaps it stopped to look at them. Perhaps it was merely passing by. She couldn’t look, no matter how she wanted to. She couldn’t hear its feet—if feet were even what it had. She never learned the shape of its form, nor the nature of its horror. If there was only one, she could not say, nor if there were many. All she could do was stare into Talon’s eyes while he did the same, silent and still and suffering.
It might have been hours they laid there, unable to move or breathe or think. Their torches began to wane, their wisps glowing a bit more brightly than they had since they’d entered this wretched place. Her eyes moved first, finally able to glance around and blink. Her mind followed, informing her of its alarm at the fact that she still couldn’t breathe. A few moments later, that followed as well. She heaved a gasp as large as any she’d experienced in her life, as if coming up from an eternity underwater. Talon stirred as well, sitting up at nearly the same time she did.
Her throat felt scratchy and coarse, like her air passages were filled with salt and sand. She studied the pathway in awe and horror even as Talon worked to start the next pair of torches from those that were dying. All around them, the stone was marred with deep gashes several inches thick and nearly a foot deep in some places.
“Does it—” She cleared her throat. “Does it have a name?”
He crawled back over to her, handing her one of the fresh torches. Neither of their legs were working enough to stand yet, so they’d have to give themselves another few minutes. “No,” he said. “Not even the wisps know them.”
“Well,” she mumbled, trying to reclaim her scattered thoughts. “At least tell me what happened. With the venom, as you called it.”
Talon nodded. Of course she had questions. No one in the congregations was stupid—or perhaps clever—enough to use a faerat’s spitbag for a stunt like that. And yet he had prepared it for this very place, for this very occasion.
“Warmth is not just warmth,” the Bittersoul explained. “Warmth is survival. Warmth can keep you warm when cold. Warmth can also keep you from dying when your heart and breath are stopped.”
She thought about it for a few moments before nodding. Somehow, put that way, it didn’t seem half as crazy. But she knew better than to think that a trick like that could be performed for free. Warmth was spent when it was cold. Warmth must have been spent—in who knows how great a quantity—to sustain her during those minutes or hours of stillness. If a Bittersoul hunted Warmth, perhaps they could afford such costly survival practices. But for her, it would mean years she wouldn’t be able to spend with her family. Her children, if she ever had any.
They kept moving. The switchbacks eventually brought them to the floor of the grand cavern, some hundreds of feet below the place they’d entered. The way was rougher here, pockmarked with the same wounds the unnamed horror had left in the cliff face. Dela shivered even as the air grew warmer still. They both sloughed their gloves, tucking them into their clothes carefully. Their hands were slick with sweat.
“The heart of the Vaults,” Talon whispered. “Halfway now.”
That was all. Halfway. They only had one more vial of the paralytic venom, didn’t they? What would they do if they encountered another one of those things? She already knew, of course. But worrying about that wouldn’t do her much good, would it?
