At last she collapses into some unused niche, sobbing and breathing hard, clutching the Buhr’s talisman around her neck as the featherwolves howl and scratch, the blackjackals bite and claw their way upward, through her. Down, she tells them. She feels the buzzing of the amulet again, doing it’s work, and they settle for now, waiting.
She tries to calm herself so that she can find some rags, can bind her wounds, and find some clothing that isn’t streaked with blood. But her side is throbbing and it seems like that piece of mind will be a long time coming.
Especially as she knows, deep down, that boy is right.
She is one of them.
And sooner or later she will have to come home.
25.
W
hen Kjat finally makes her way back again, to her old familiar sink and bucket and mop that seem almost welcome now, it’s nearly dawn. She picks up the mop, grateful for the rough feel of it in her hands, and turns to the dump the bucket.
And suddenly Rehdr is there, as if he’d appeared from nowhere. There is a large bruise on the right side of his face, and his lip is split and bleeding. He falls to his hands and knees, when he sees her, and struggles to catch his breath.
“It’s Ava,” he says. “They, they…” He looks up at her, and then looks away. “They found us. Birds. You have to help. You’re… you’re a mage, aren’t you? I saw your scabbard in the shiptown …”
Kjat bends and helps him to his feet, holding her arm tight to her left side to keep the rough bandage she put there in place. “Did you go to Eeg?”
Rehdr shakes his head. “There’s nothing she can do. They’re
Birds
, Kjat. She’s a steward. They could rip her apart and no one on the upperdecks would even blink. We all know it. Come on, Kjat. You have to help us. Help her. Help
Ava
.” He looks at her, and his eyes are full and wet. The bruise is swelling up like a blue and purple cloud.
Kjat curses. “Show me,” she says.
Rehdr nods and runs out into the corridor. He makes a series of turns back towards the dormitories, opens a door into a small storage room and goes inside. She follows, tucking her arm against her side. He opens up part of the wall in the back of the room, and leads her into a side passage that Croah hadn’t shown her yet. It’s low and dark and doubles back on itself at times, but Rehdr speed through it, hardly looking back to see if she is following. Then in a low spot, Rehdr stops and pushes at the ceiling.
“Help me,” he says, “I think they’ve put something over the top.” Kjat runs to join him, but it isn’t any use—whatever is blocking the door is too heavy for them to move from down here. She can hear the muffled sounds of what she thinks are sobs, and awful sounds of men’s raucous laughter.
“Get behind me,” she says, and takes out the old drone’s knife. She draws power out of the walls and throws a burst at the door. It blows up and into the room above, and then she has Rehdr boost her up through the charred opening and the remains of a heavy crate.
Two young Akarii men, dressed in elaborate bird costumes, stare back at her with open mouths.
They have their knives out, and behind them, in a corner, is Ava. Her face is streaked with tears and she grips what is left of her nightshift in an attempt to cover herself. Kjat can see she’s bleeding from multiple cuts on her hands, arms, and legs.
“What’s this,” says one of the men. “More downbelow trash for us?” His voice is high and reedy sounding, and the white feathers and jewels attached around the edges of his pale powdered face quiver when he speaks. His eyes are wide and nervous despite the insolent tone in his voice. He flips his knife into the air and catches it. Then he pulls power out of the wall and spins up a small matrix with the other man, who has stepped back a bit. He whistles eerily, a strange succession of birdcalls. His partner answers each whistle in return.
Kjat frowns. “I don’t want trouble with you. I just want my friend.” She hears Rehdr climb into the room behind her.
“The hatchling brought us back a magelet,” the other man says, in a singsong voice. He cocks his head to one side to study her. “Now where’d you find a magelet?” This one is painted in blue and gold, with dark, downward slashes across his eyes. His tiara is platinum and studded with small gems, and his hair is long and carefully coiffed, interwoven with streaks of metal. They both smell strongly of sweat and jekelpepper.
The second man points his jewel-encrusted knife at Kjat. “Come and play, magelet.” He pushes a tracer at her knife.
Kjat catches the tracer. “I just want my friend,” she repeats. She fills out the conduit between them, and it hangs there, gold and crackling in the air between them. Ava’s eyes are wide, staring at her, and behind her she hears Rehdr pick something up off the floor.
The blue-faced man-bird clacks his teeth at her, like a heron would snap its beak at a frog, and throws fire.
Kjat catches it, holds it at the edge of her knife.
She pulls more aether out of the walls, fills out the conduit even more and pushes it back down at them.
The man struggles with it, shunts it sloppily back and forth between himself and his friend, and threw it back at her again.
They weren’t very strong, she realizes. They're just kids, really. Kjat can see them starting to sweat, and the paint on the blue-faced one begins to streak and run. She catches their energy easily, and lets it spin on the edge of her knife for a moment. She closes her eyes and envisions one of the smaller Bakarh constructs that Josik had taught her, and imposes the form onto the energy. It spins to life like a slow moving whirlpool there at the end of her knife. She opened her eyes again and sends it slowly down the conduit at the men.
They watch it approach, terrified. Kjat wonders if they had even heard of the Bakarh tradition—maybe it had been somewhere deep in a leather-bound textbook they had neglected to crack open. The construct hits the tip of the blue-faced man’s knife, slows, but then continues down the blade, up the hilt, and then up the man’s arms and into his chest. The feathered robe he wears begins to smoke, and he begins to shake; his lips pull back in a grimace and his eyes go wide. All of his carefully-shaped hair lifts up and stands on end. The matrix collapses. Yellow tendrils of energy stretch out from him and crackle on the walls, and the pale-faced man drops his knife and backs slowly away towards the door. The cloak of the blue-faced man bursts into flame, and then he screams and drops his knife.
“Get her, Rehdr. Quickly.”
Rehdr drops the piece of crate he’s been holding, runs forward and grabs Ava. The two of them crawl to the opening to the passage and drop down into it.
The pale-faced man opens the door and runs, calling for help.
The blue-faced man struggles out of his cloak, picks up his knife again and advances on Kjat.
The room smells of smoke from the cloak and his singed underwraps, and his face is streaked with sweat. Parts of his tiara are melted and misshapen.
He moves his head jerkily to the right and left, the way a hunting bird might to get a good look, and he holds his knife in an overhanded grip, thumb on the pommel and the blade down close to his forearm.
He clacks his teeth at her and snarls.
Kjat pulls more aether out of the walls, but before she can do anything with it he leaps at her. He pins her up against the wall, and his jeweled, expensive knife is close to her cheek. Her knife hand is pinned, and he is stronger than he looks. Bursts of pain shoot up her left side as he knees here there, where the bandage has come loose.
Despite her, he pushes his blade against her cheek, and the edge of it slices her, shallowly, from the top of her lip up over her cheekbone.
They struggle, neither of them gaining ground.
Kjat can feel and taste her own blood slipping into her mouth. She brings her knee up into the man’s groin, hard, and pushes him back away from her. He crouches and whistles strangely, and then leaps again, but as he does she brings her knife up and slides it smoothly into his rib cage.
It goes deep.
The man’s eyes go wide and he falls on top of her, gasping and clutching at his chest. Blood boils up through his mouth, flecked with air bubbles, and he makes a terrible moan before she pushes him off. He falls to the floor, his legs dangling half into the opening of the secret corridor and twitching erratically.
There’s noise beyond the main door, now; running, heavy feet, and shouting.
Kjat lowers herself into the corridor and runs. She hears the door burst open in the room above, and the hiss and splat of magefire, and she throws herself against the floor of the passage as a hot tracer shoots down into the corridor and sweeps low over her. She runs, taking turns at random. She hears someone getting close behind her as she stumbles blindly, throwing open doors and running down passageways, through holds filled with boxes and boxes of cargo, through more drone pits, and even at one point through a room filled with hammocks and sleeping Talovians.
They’re still close behind.
Finally, she collapses against a porthole on a lower upperdeck and tries to catch her breath. Dawn is here, the sun is rising—she can see the light filtering in. A man with a tall orange topknot passes, staring at her strangely, but he says nothing. She lifts up the window seat here, ducks into it and slides down a ladder there that Croah had showed her, under the floor of some sort of art gallery, and through a door into another hallway and from there to a long, narrow chamber over the engines.
The floor throbs and pulses, the drone of the engines fills up the small space, and the air is thick with aether and ozone. The ceiling is low, and the room is mostly dark, lit only by the light coming up through the floorboards.
It's only after her eyes take a minute to adjust that Kjat realizes she isn’t alone here.
There’s Blackwell.
He lies, asleep, off toward the other end of the room, next to a pile of clothing that might have been his.
Or that might belong to the woman sprawled on top of him, like he’s a great rug.
She is wearing nothing but a set of silver bracelets on both her arms.
Kjat feels her breath freeze in her chest, and a deep sadness sinking through her gut.
They are both asleep, their breathing slow.
She shakes her head, closes her eyes and backs slowly out of the room. She closes the door gently behind her as her eyes filled up with water, and she stumbles away. She turns and turns again, running at random, until at last she runs right into a set of three Tel Kharan mages that have been pursuing her.
They draw their knives and spin up a matrix, and demand she throw down her own knife immediately, and lay down on the floor before them. Now.
Kjat stares at them, not quite getting it. Why are they so blurry?
She takes out the old drone’s knife and looks at it, curiously.
The lead mage, a human, yells at her again.
Kjat feels a tracer settle on her chest.
She looks up at the woman with tears streaming down her face now. “I’m having a very bad night,” she tells the woman, numbly.
Then something dark rises up in her. She reaches up with the knife, and slits the cord around her neck that’s holding the Buhr’s totem. The amulet falls to the deck and bounces away.
Penned for too long, the featherwolves and the blackjackals surge upwards, ready to burst free.
And as they explode within her, she hears her lips tell the Tel Kharan woman quietly, in a voice filled with blackness “And your morning is not going to be any better now, is it.”
26: Nadrune
N
adrune sits up in bed, moves the concubine’s steaming hand off of her expansive waist, and touches a finger to the knife on her bedside table. It had been her mother’s knife, and her grandmother’s before that, and even now Nadrune hates it. It has the sinuous curves and the jeweled embellishments of a much more indulgent age, back before the Grohmn-Elite’s invasion had forced them all to get focused, sharper, to become the family the Akarii are now. But it’s her family’s knife, and so she carries it. But when it lets Bakron reach her directly it pisses her off all the more.
She makes him wait, and tells the concubine to get dressed and to get out. This one was her current favorite, sinuous and smart, nimble and eager like a monkey, with pale white skin and bright green eyes and a prick the size of the Alabaster Tower.
She pats it thoughtfully on its bare rump as it dresses, enjoys seeing her handprint scorched there in red, enjoys seeing the concubine’s resulting grin. He likes the heat, or is smart enough to pretend he does. Later, she’ll have another tube of burn cream wrapped and delivered to his room.
The great black heron in the cage beside her bed shifts to watch her. The bird and the concubine are probably to two closest things she has to allies now. It’s a shame she’ll have to have the concubine’s tongue removed soon. It is so…artful…with it.
She touches the knife again, but doesn’t take his image. Voice only. “Lieutenant-Marshall. I think instead your men are drunk. You seriously expect me to believe…”
Bakron cuts in. “I want that Beast, Nadrune. I want that Beast dead.”
“You’re not getting it. I thought your men are claiming it was some sort of giant black bird-thing?”
“It killed one of the tiAkarii family. And then it killed several of my mages. I have a witness, Nadrune. It's on your ship.”
“The Beast is bound, Bakron. Declawed and defanged. Your own men did the binding, and Semper oversaw it himself. Yes? And he’s watched all of the time by someone, whether he knows it or not. All this noise you’re creating with your men all over this ship, the lockdowns on downbelow, are getting in the way of preparing for our mission. I will have you focused on the invasion, Bakron. Not chasing monsters in the bilge.”
Bakron pauses. “I’m logging all of this to my records, Nadrune. I will bring it before your father if I must. He, at least, respects tradition.”
Nadrune feels her face grow hot and the flames lick at the edges of her eye sockets. “Log this, Lieutenant. In six days when we reach Tamaranth, I will expect your men to be completely prepared to take and hold the city. Any mistakes, any failures, any errors of even the smallest magnitude and I will
gut
you and
string
you alive in your own rigging and let the gulls have at you. You can call my father all you want to from up there.”