Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (48 page)

If that was where I was headed, I didn’t want to get there.

I’m not a power. It’s not possible.

One of the books about the S-Em Yellin had given me said that powers generally saw through between forty and sixty years of age. Something had caused me to see through before my time, yes, but surely not by
that
much.

Plus, Cordus was packing me off to the ice men. In the Seconds’ mixed-up mentality, power was everything, and Bob’s death couldn’t possibly be worth an infant power as a solatium.

No, I would end up like Callie. Like Mizzy. Very strong but not a power.

I could accept that. I’d still be a person. People could choose to be good or bad, or do their best to choose, anyway. But the powers transcended all that. They were
other
— human bodies optional, human feelings forgotten.

Twenty-three is a long way from forty, much less sixty
.

Seventeen years.

Seventeen years is forever.

I burrowed into my bedroll and thought it over and over, like a mantra.

Despite our panicked departure from Emden, our travel was uneventful. We saw no sign of pursuit. Maybe Kevin hadn’t gone to Mary of the Flowers, after all. Maybe he’d just run off with his mistress.

Ever paranoid, Williams steered us away from inns. We had good weather, so camping was comfortable enough. What wasn’t so comfortable was the watch the man kept on me, now that his tracker was gone. He set a barrier around our campsite every night. If I needed to go to the bathroom, he came right along with. It was beyond annoying. And also pointless. I might fantasize about running away into the woods and living off the land, but I knew I couldn’t pull it off. I was no survivalist.

The weeks passed, and we settled into a steady routine. We got an early start, rode for five hours, and then stopped for lunch. Then we continued on for another four hours, stopping by early evening. We covered twenty-five to thirty-five miles a day.

When we passed through towns, we laid in dried foodstuffs and other gear we hadn’t had a chance to buy in Emden.

I named my new mount Joe. Getting used to him was easy — he was as friendly and mellow as Copper had been nasty and anxious. And he had lovely gaits, very smooth. Riding him was a pleasure.

Of course, the easy travel meant my mind had plenty of time to dwell on the things that were bothering me.

Flashbacks to the rape attempt started happening during the day. I’d be riding along, everything fine. Then out of the blue, my heart would start racing, nausea would sweep over me, and I’d break out in a cold sweat.

At those moments, Williams would rein in beside me and say my name in a quiet, steady voice. That was all, but it helped.

One evening he sat down by our campfire with one of the packsaddles on his lap.

“Cleaning tack?” I said. “I can help.”

He jerked his head at my bedroll, sending me off to sleep like a nosy kid.

I lay down and watched as he took the saddle apart. He unscrewed, greased, and retightened the bolts holding the bucks to the crosspieces. Then he oiled the wood, drenching the boreholes in particular, and all the leathers. He left it all out to dry overnight, then oiled it again and reassembled it in the morning.

I didn’t have any flashbacks that day. Or the next. It took me a week to realize the saddle’s creaking had been setting them off. The thing had sounded just like the door to my cabin on Rykthas’s ship.

Unfortunately, Williams was a lot less helpful on the question of what I was. The day after I realized Mizzy thought I was a power, I rode up beside him, told him we needed a barrier, and asked him directly.

He didn’t even bother looking at me. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“So Cordus hasn’t said anything to you that suggests I might be a power?”

He still didn’t turn. “Nope.”

I tried again. “Well then, hypothetically, at what age —”

“Hypotheticals are pointless,” he said, and rode ahead.

Honest to god, I’d never felt so alone.

With no outside input, and no one to share the burden, my mind worried the idea endlessly. I went back through every interaction I’d had with anyone, looking for the strange and the suggestive. Stuff like Miss Sturluson saying I might be the other person, besides Cordus, capable of destroying the youngling fragment of the Thirsting Ground. Like Graham telling me not to mention the mouse. Like looking through the strait in Dorf and seeing and being seen by Limu on the other side. Like Eye of the Heavens being my sister-in-law. Like Williams thinking I could have a vassal. Like Ghosteater’s interest in me. Like my being taught Baasha.

Like being able to break the mind-working Cordus had done on me, without even knowing I was doing it.

That last one took my breath away. For some reason, I’d never thought of my realization in Free as the destruction of Cordus’s working. But that must have been what happened. Enough seeds of doubt got planted, and I started questioning the ideas he’d given me, and eventually, they lost their hold.

It shouldn’t have been possible for me to do that, especially not in a matter of days.

I had once watched Cordus force an extremely powerful green man to dismember itself, a handful at a time. Saying Cordus’s mind-working was strong was like saying a neutron star was heavy. But it’d rolled right off me.

More than any other thing, that tipped the scales in the wrong direction.

But the solatium thing — I clung to that. I just couldn’t believe Cordus, finding he had a baby power in his hands, would throw her away. What were the chances he’d ever get me back? They say possession is nine-tenths of the law, and a baby power was a once-in-a-century prize. Maybe even rarer than that, now that the F-Em was so heavily populated. Graham had told me strong Nolanders don’t survive unless they “grow up in the boonies” — the presence of the unseen in urban areas drives them mad, as it almost had me. Who knows how many more human émigrés would survive to maturity on an Earth where the boonies were harder and harder to come by?

If that’s what I was, Cordus would know my value, yet he’d let me go. Some other power could take me from the ice men.

Or maybe I’d never even get there.

On the night I’d had that realization, I’d rolled over in my blankets and looked at Williams, sleeping just a few feet away.

Too damn many powers
, he’d said of Emden. The same seemed to apply to all of Demesnes.

If Mizzy was right, I was traipsing through the lion’s den.

In the deep darkness under the trees, Williams was little more than a large, lumpy shape with a pale smudge for a face.

His attitude toward Mizzy had struck me as excessive from day one. But if I was a power in the making, his concern made more sense. If I were a power — or if she could just convince someone like Mary of the Flowers that I might be one — I’d buy a whole lot of protection.

It was best to err on the side of caution. I would hang onto Mizzy’s fealty for now.

Step one on the slippery slope
, whispered a small, disapproving part of me.

I couldn’t argue. I knew it was wrong. But I was too scared to let her go.

As the days passed, I tried to establish a more comfortable relationship with Mizzy by chatting with her. Because she was a collector of stories, she knew a lot of fascinating tidbits. For instance, when I asked her about the Thirsting Ground, she ended up telling me about a scholar in New Alexandria who hypothesized that a strong enough gravity worker might be able to spawn new universes.

But our conversations were limited because I didn’t dare ask about the things I most wanted to understand — Eye of the Heavens, for instance, or Limu and his supposed weapon, or how I could start seeing workings, or what made her think I was a power. I didn’t want to tell her more than I already had.

Plus, our liege-and-vassal relationship meant our exchanges were full of landmines.

For example, one evening, when Mizzy and I were untacking and grooming our horses, I asked her in a low voice how relationships of fealty were enforced.

I’d been thinking about Williams and Cordus, but she saw my question differently. She stilled, her hands halfway into a saddlebag.

“I don’t break my oaths.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not asking about … you know … about you and me. I wasn’t thinking of that at all. I just want to know in general. Or, you know, because of Kevin.”

Mizzy studied a buckle on her saddlebag. I squirmed, wretchedly embarrassed and uncomfortable.

When she finally answered, her voice was flat.

“Fealty is a relationship of mutual benefit. It’s not supposed to need enforcing.”

“How does the vassal benefit?”

She looked up at me, clearly perplexed at my ignorance. “Support. Protection. Sometimes gifts or rewards, like the one you gave me.”

“Protection … from other powers?”

“Sure. Or even just other workers who happen to be stronger. Oath-breakers lose all that. They can be taken by anyone.”

“And that’s it? Everyone values protection so much they toe the line?”

“Well, no. There’s also the threat of stricture.” She saw my confused expression. “Stricture’s a sign a vassal carries so they can be tracked by anyone who knows their liege’s signature.”

“It contains the liege’s essence?”

She nodded.

I frowned, confused. “But your essence is, you know, your body.”

“That’s right.”

“So, what? The vassal wears a vial of his lord’s blood around his neck, or something?”

“No, a vial could be removed. Strictures are more permanent. I’ve heard implanting a tooth deep in the body is a popular choice.”

“A
tooth
?”

“Enamel holds up well.” She tilted her head, studying me. “It’s no more disturbing than a dozen other things we’ve seen here.”

“It is more disturbing. It’s awful.”

Mizzy shrugged, looking away.

I felt cold. Was she scared I was going to do that to her?

A powerful impulse to release her came over me. I suppressed it.

“How common is it?”

“Common enough. I’ve heard some powers stricture all their vassals as a matter of course.”

“What does —”

I noticed that Mizzy was looking past me a moment before Williams’s heavy hand landed on my shoulder. For a second, everything froze. Then he held his other hand up in front of me. From it dangled two full nosebags. I took them, and he moved away to feed the rest of the horses.

Mizzy watched him go. “He’s probably under stricture, if that’s what you were wondering.”

“How do you know?”

“Kevin says he has a good deal of Lord Cordus’s essence about him.
Said
, I mean. Kevin said.”

Williams glanced our way, glowering. I didn’t know if he’d heard or just sensed we’d been talking about him. Maybe neither. “Glower” was his default expression, after all.

I gave the horses their rations, then went back to my saddlebags and pulled out my gun-cleaning kit. Next came my toothbrush and hairbrush.

I wet my toothbrush and popped it in my mouth while I mulled over what Mizzy had said.

If Seconds could be placed under stricture, why didn’t Cordus have more reliable Seconds working for him? He certainly needed additional people in the F-Em. Why not put them under stricture and bring them over?

Plus, Elanora Wiri and Kibwe Okeke had cut and run during Cordus’s absence, so they probably weren’t under stricture. But why not? Or maybe they were counting on another power to remove the stricture.

I spat and rinsed out my mouth, then went to my bedroll and sat down to brush out my hair.

Williams finished up with the horses and headed over to Ida with an extra package of dried meat for the stew.

I watched him go.

Had Cordus really LoJacked him with a tooth? The idea was so appalling it seemed absurd. I felt a nervous laugh on its way up and coughed to cover it.

He glanced up, catching me staring.

I looked away, feeling oddly guilty, as though I’d trespassed on his privacy.