The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4) Read online

  "No word from any other source?" he asked.

  The mage shook his head, not daring to meet his gaze. Around them, all was silent, the infirmary empty but for his aides and guards. All men, of course. While some of the camp's comfort-women had once worked here as medics, he would not have a Dark-loving whore tending his wounds. His lost eye and hand throbbed abominably, but they were his punishment for failing his god.

  "No word at all?" he repeated, aware of a growing tension in his chest. To have so many doors slammed in his face made his position difficult, never mind that he firmly held the Crimson Army and had made contact with his surviving White Flame soldiers on the Krovichankan border.

  None of his priests though. The ones in Krovichanka were all reported dead—collapsed during Midwinter rites—and there was no way to reach any stranded at the Palace.

  "No, sir. Though..." He saw the mage gulp. "More of our mentalists have...vanished."

  "Vanished."

  "All the ones assigned by the Inquisition and a few others, sir. Yes."

  Rage surged hot through his veins. The Inquisition—Enkhaelen's former purview. "I thought we had them put in collars! Restrained!"

  "Yes, sir, but antimagic doesn't neutralize mentalism. We believe the Inquisitors convinced the others to free them."

  "When was this?"

  "Some marks ago. We... There was no damage, no conflict, sir, and we were already attempting to trace them, so we saw no point in waking you. I apologize fervently on behalf of my team, but you must know that we rely on you utterly, and thus your health is—"

  "Silence!"

  The mage whimpered once, softly, clutching the mirror to his chest. Rackmar stared at him—marveling yet again how young some of these fools were, and wondering which archmage's catspaw this one had been. He looked barely twenty.

  "You think that you know best?" he growled into the hush. "You should have come to me immediately. Your silence has aided them; it is tantamount to treason.”

  Watery-eyed, the mage opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  Rackmar sneered. If there was one thing he hated more than Enkhaelen's childish sniping, it was weaklings who couldn't speak up for themselves. "Guards, take this one and—"

  The doors on the far side of the infirmary banged open, admitting the sound of many boots. Scowling, Rackmar wedged himself up on his good elbow and nodded for the curtains to be drawn back. No enemy could intrude upon him in force—not here—so those must be his own men. And with them, perhaps...

  Rings clattered along rails as the curtains opened, and for a moment the thing marching up the center aisle ahead of his soldiers was a grotesquerie: a mask of twisted flesh over a vague bipedal outline, like something shrugging on a suit of human skin. Then it adjusted itself in just the right way, and he recognized the face.

  "Lord Chancellor Caernahon," he called out, surprised. Though an unfathomable wraith, Caernahon had been of regular use to him, as an ally against Prince Kelturin's soft-headed antics and Enkhaelen's hideous heresy—and also as an expert in the arcane arts. While he resented the wraiths' appetite for human test subjects, he appreciated their output in the form of akarriden blades and the occasional magical intercession.

  His incipient smile turned to a snarl, though, as he remembered his last glimpse of the wraith: flying away with Prince Kelturin's sword, having dared to assault the Emperor for it.

  "You think you can just walk in here after what you've done?" he roared. "Traitor, I will have you—"

  "Cease," said the wraith with a ringing force that blew the air from his lungs. His guards took involuntary steps back, the mage cowering further; even the curtains rippled, their rails humming from the word. "You will not challenge me. You will hear me, and when I am done you will beg for my aid."

  Baring his teeth, Rackmar started to rise, but only managed to sling one leg off the cot before the throb in his head became a scarlet vise. Gasping, he lapsed back down to an elbow as the wraith drifted near.

  The false face that looked down upon him was the same as it had been for Rackmar's whole career: spare, cold, deeply cut by age-lines yet somehow eternal, with eyes that could have been glass or ice for all the feeling they held. He wore a white robe plain even by Imperial standards—not a stitch of embroidery on it—with white gloves masking his slightly overlong hands. Not a fold nor hair was out of place.

  Slowly, impassively, he drew off one of those gloves to reveal fingers distorted by small crystalline nodules. As Rackmar watched, the tips refined themselves into needles.

  Before he could react, they sank into his wounded arm.

  He tried to scream, but the other hand was at his throat, forcing him back onto the cot, and the air stuck there as if it had frozen solid. Dimly he saw his men advance on the wraith, but a pale barrier sprang up in between, leaving them to batter on it uselessly. He felt his bladder let go—a humiliation they would all pay for witnessing—and then—

  The pain dulled. The incessant ache where his hand had been transformed into an odd cool sensation, as if he was resting his palm on metal. Faint awakening tingles ran down his missing fingers.

  He turned his head enough to see Caernahon drawing fibers from his mangled flesh, needle-like fingertips clicking back and forth to weave a fine lacework in thin air. As he stared, blood flushed several of the translucent strands, circulating to the pounding of his heart.

  "I am a fleshcrafter," the wraith said in his cold, flat voice, "preeminent among my people and employed by your Emperor for this talent as much as any other. Though I cannot rival Enkhaelen for creativity, I can replicate many of the functions he taught to the Palace, including the reworking of its threads. You require me for this, for as you saw, the Light is gone. It may be some time before we can bring it back."

  Rackmar tried to speak, but his jaw was locked in place, his tongue stuck. Caernahon continued, "Enkhaelen is placing Seals upon this world which block the Light out. These Seals also hamper my people by keeping us bound here—trapped on this ball of dirt with you disgusting flesh-creatures. We desire our freedom. You desire your god back, yes? Both these things require Enkhaelen's death. I imagine you are only too happy to oblige."

  More veins spun out from his stump, delineating fingers. He could feel the air against them, and saw them move slightly when he thought about curling them. But Caernahon's needles didn't pull just from his flesh; they spun out strands from his white armor as well, interweaving them with vein and nerve, so that he suddenly felt the armor like another limb instead of the slow, reactionary covering it had been.

  "For this collaboration, I will provide you certain resources," the wraith went on. "Your hand and eye, to start. My adjustments to those White Flames you select. Several of my subordinates to perform what arcane tasks you need. In return, I require your spies' attention upon Aekhaelesgeria in the Khaeleokiels, Howling Spire in the Thundercloaks, Du'i Oensha in the Border Forest of Jernizan, and Varaku. These are the Seals that I trust you can reach and surveil. The last is at sea, untouchable by mine or yours but equally dangerous for Enkhaelen. We shall hope that if he goes to it, he does not return."

  The blockade in his throat vanished, and Rackmar sucked in a chest-distending breath before replying in a rasp, "Just...spies? Not troops?”

  “Perhaps,” said the wraith with a stiff shrug, “but for the most part mere humans will only feed Enkhaelen's powers. Perhaps to suppress the locals in the mountains and Jernizan.”

  Rackmar managed a nod. Troops were vital. He could not allow Caernahon to act alone. “And you're sure he'll go for these Seals?”

  "Yes. He has long planned for this, but your foolish Emperor favored him too much for me to intervene. Now, however, we can strike him down at will. If he succeeds with his Seals, you will never have your Light back, and this world will die in darkness, trapping my people forever. It is in all of our interests to end him and remove the Seals."

  “And this will bring back the Light? Imbue a new Scion as Emperor?
”

  “Of course.”

  Rackmar stared at him, not sure if he believed it. That Caernahon had betrayed Emperor Aradys was clear; he'd seen it firsthand. Additionally, he was a wraith and a mage—two things Rackmar had used for expedience but was determined to see eradicated once the world belonged to the Light. But if Caernahon in fact wished to leave this world…

  "You need nothing else?" he rasped. "Supplies, slaves?"

  The wraith's false face crinkled into a mockery of a kindly old man's. "So generous. Yes...perhaps we could make use of a particular prisoner of yours.”

  The Crown Prince, Rackmar knew instinctively, and sneered—half amused, half offended. He felt no personal attachment to the fool, particularly not in the state he'd fallen to, but as the Emperor's son... “We shall see. And you can remake my eye? Like my hand?”

  Caernahon smiled and drew a small crystal sphere from his robe, its color fluxing from red to violet to near-black. "More than that," he said. "More than you could possibly imagine."

  As he moved the red sphere toward Rackmar's blind side, the Field Marshal felt it: a tingle on his skin that grew in intensity until it touched him like a finger of fire. Kaleidoscope light burst through his head and made his spine seize; if not for the wraith's control, he would have flopped himself from the cot like a landed fish.

  Instead, he lay rigid as the rainbows tightened to a dark, swirling redness, blotting out the view of his good eye until he was awash in a universe of blood. Glimpses came to him of night-washed battlefields, colossal gyres turning in the storm-thick sky, towers of red thorn reaching like hands toward a shining pillar...

  Then they fractured, and he saw his army camp in multiple, burning—flooding—swarmed by enemies wielding green and gold fire—teeming with white-armored soldiers in the tens and scores and hundreds of thousands. Sweeping over the land like a vast wave, a great radiance growing behind them: the coming of the new dawn.

  He clutched at that image, grinning fiercely through the skull-deep pain. That was the future he wanted. The future he would take.

  "Granted," he gasped. "Make me— Make me worthy of my god."

  If Caernahon smiled, he could not see.

  *****

  Vesha didn't know how long he'd waited, but after what felt like marks, the infirmary doors opened—and out came Field Marshal Rackmar.

  His first instinct was to boil out from under the steps on hundreds of wings and tear that monster apart. Under his clothes, he felt the knife-like pain of feathers sliding out and skin splitting in anticipation. But Rackmar wasn't alone: with him came the wraiths and a ridiculous number of guards. Attacking now would get him blown to feathery bits.

  So he steeled himself to just watch his enemy through the slats. It was the first time he'd been this close since the trap at the portal, and by the radiance of mage-lights he saw that Rackmar's left arm, which should have been a stump, had somehow regained the hand he'd bitten off. Bandages covered it, with more tamping down the uncombed mess of his salt-and-pepper hair—but where those crossed over the cheek and eye Vesha had mangled, there seemed to be a redness. A glow.

  Biting down a confused curse, he stared after the cavalcade as it moved up the road. While he'd seen the quick patch-job the white armor had done on those wounds, he'd hoped he'd put Rackmar out of commission for at least a week—or given him wound-fever. Getting a claw jammed into one's eye-socket should do that. Yet there he was, shuffling ponderously but purposefully along, his should-be-missing hand flexing and clenching at his side.

  The command-post cabin was in that direction. If that monster reached Jesalle without him intervening, he couldn't live with himself. But there were so many enemies…

  Perhaps some would break off along the way and go back to where they belonged. Certainly Rackmar wouldn't let them in the cabin. He could sneak after, wait until most of the crowd was gone, then go in for the kill. Or he could slink into the infirmary and wait in ambush—but there was no guarantee that Rackmar would return.

  Split the difference. Spy on them but wait here, he thought, and reluctantly raised his hand to his right eye. Though he'd done this before, it still sickened him to feel feather-fuzz where his eyebrow had been, and to dig his nails in until the flesh parted from his eye to his ear-canal. His sight jerked and tilted as he pulled the darkened chunk of his face away, sense of balance reeling, the edges throbbing briefly before subsiding into numbness. In his grip, the flesh fluttered and twisted, reshaping itself into the distorted figure of a crow: its head taken up almost entirely by a single brown eye, its chest deformed by a series of deep welts that read 'V11', the middle portion of his slave-brand. They always carried that mark.

  He set it carefully in the dirt and closed his remaining eye. Through the one it bore, he saw himself as no more than a lumpy shadow, and slowly let his senses shift until they were all within the bird.

  The crows in his mind guided him as he hopped cautiously free of his hidey-hole. Through them, he knew how to leap into the air, flare his wings and mount the sluggish breeze, beating hard to rise above the barracks before settling into a long, slow glide. The Field Marshal's illuminated entourage was easy to spot from above, and he trailed them from a distance, swinging side to side to stay aloft as they trekked toward the cabin.

  They stopped short though, among the military police buildings, and he was surprised to hear the sound of a fist on wood. Circling, he saw the guards and wraiths plant themselves outside the door, only the Field Marshal and one companion going in. No one looked up, too blinded by their lights to catch his silhouette against the dome-ward. The building looked like a jail, L-hooked with its military-police booth at the door and the cells down the long end; he flitted through the alley behind it and saw that there was indeed a row of small, barred windows.

  The lights passed by the first one, shone briefly into the second—from which came a murmur of female voices—then proceeded to the fourth. Something caught the glow in there and refracted it as if through thick glass.

  Carefully, Vesha alighted at the edge of the roof. Landing on the windowsill was too obvious, plus he could tell that it was warded—but he'd learned other ways to spy. A moment's rest, then he adjusted his little body until he hung bat-like from the edge, feathery neck twisted all around to turn his head the right way up. It was uncomfortable, but it put him at enough distance from the window to be just another shadow in the alley.

  Within the cell, a translucent, chitinous monstrosity unfolded itself to face the Field Marshal.

  "He's been falling apart since late Darkness Day,” came Rackmar's voice from beyond the heavy door. “Don't know why, unless it's Enkhaelen's spells failing. How does the evening find you, my dear Crown Prince?" he called into the cell, half-taunting, half-anxious. "Still can't pull yourself together?”

  The creature planted spur-covered forelimbs to either side of the door's viewing port. At the contact, runes lit up along the walls of the cell, a faint sheen of energy barring the creature from reaching through the gap. It didn't speak, just stared out, and Vesha heard the Field Marshal's grunt.

  "This is your prize,” he told his unseen companion. “Not fit for much—unless you think you can fix what Enkhaelen broke?”

  The creature hissed, radiant fronds unfurling from what had once been its shoulders. The arms below had devolved into shimmering multiplicity, their unevenly-jointed lengths bound together like bundles of branches, each tipped in a claw or feeler and lined with spines. Across its back, enough stability remained to see muscles bunched beneath translucent skin, light-filled veins throbbing against the darkness of organs—and runes, archaic and familiar, pulsing sullenly in time with the thing's harsh breaths.

  Gheshvan pictograms. Vesha hadn't seen them in years, could barely read them except for the one that said 'Stop'—or 'Close', or maybe 'Lock'.

  Whatever their meaning, they ran down the entire length of its spine, preserving a humanoid torso even though the legs below had split and twisted l
ike its arms. More fronds showed on its bare flanks and buttocks, presaging further breakdown.

  "I am uncertain," said a smooth, melodic voice. “It is possible, but it might be better to destroy him."

  The entity's spinal runes flared brighter, and the hair-like quills on its scalp bristled and shifted. Tortured fluting sounds arose from it, but they were nothing like language—not even close to translatable.

  Rackmar chuckled, but the sound was uneasy. "Destroy him… Well, he was Enkhaelen's work, so I suppose that's wise. But he is also his father's son, and might have become Scion of the Light in his own time..."

  "Don't tell me you have some sort of attachment to the thing—some loyalty," said the unseen companion. "He is far more likely to attack you than he is to regain any kind of coherence. No, this is no proper vessel for the Light, nor a tool of any use. It will only bring disaster.”

  The Field Marshal made a doubtful sound. "In this state?”

  "Look for yourself, Argus. Unveil your new eye.”

  A grunt of unease or perhaps distaste, a long silence—then a red light bloomed in the viewing port, refracting bloody flecks through the Prince's translucent substance. Vesha caught the Field Marshal's raspy inhale, then all was quiet again, only the dance of radiance hinting at something being done.

  At last, a low moan broke the tension, nearly animal in its confusion. “The future...the futures, converging and twisting...oh...”

  "Steady. Brace yourself,” said the unseen man as the red light wobbled. “Here, let me fix your bandage. It is not wise to look too deeply into probability—but you see? Many dangers.”

  "Still...I…” Vesha heard the Field Marshal gulp, his voice shuddering as he tried to shake off whatever vision had taken him. “I would not...cast away a potential Scion so swiftly. If he can be cleansed, repaired...”

  “We shall see. Now, Argus, you should rest.”