Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows Read online

  And maybe that was wise.

  He heard the rumbling anger of Cook, a man who would never have made it to the Ospreys had it not been for the unexpected savagery of his hidden temper. He was speaking, and Auralis, having somehow made Decarus again, knew he should be paying attention. Even Fiara had fallen silent.

  It should have been easy. Cook was saying what they all felt. All of them but her.

  "Kiriel?"

  She turned as if he hadn't spoken and left the grounds. It wasn't hard to do; she was never comfortable in crowds and when forced to join them, stayed on their edges. One place where edges didn't cut.

  "Kiriel!"

  He realized he was in danger of interrupting Cook, and hesitated a minute on the edge of the crowd that he had chosen to stand apart from as well.

  Then, cursing quietly, he followed.

  Isladar was everywhere. There was no place in which his memory did not exert power. The streets of Essalieyan were almost literally alive; the stone broken by weeds and the roots of great trees which would have found no purchase in the dominion of her father. And around those trees, odd creatures: cats and dogs; spindly-legged red-furred things that seemed a cross between the two; birds of all manner that in the poorer quarter were still hunted for food. On a bad day she enjoyed killing them, but she was beyond bad now; no simple death would serve.

  There were places in Essalieyan that were dangerous. It had taken time to discover them, and once she had, she hoarded the knowledge. Although it pained her to admit it, the magisterial guards were more efficient than Kialli at weeding out the men and women who posed the danger she craved.

  Simple things.

  The fight for survival.

  She thought of the succubi. Considered the weakest of the Kialli who could still remember their ancient choice, all of their power resided in their ability to beguile, to convince their victims to surrender, through desire, what nothing else might convince them to relinquish. In the Hells it was their only option; they could not take by force what they required from the kin.

  She pitied all but a handful of them; they did not seek the glory of simplicity because they were not certain they could survive it.

  Cowards.

  They are not cowards. Coward is a simple word, and the subtlety required of a succubus is complex. They understand the limitations they labor under and they use the guise of helplessness in order to achieve their goal.

  But—

  They no longer care if they are seen as weak, if they ever did. They have risen above the need to swing sword and display the momentary corpses of their enemies.

  Although his tone was quiet—as it always was—she had been unable to ignore the criticism in the words. You told me that I could never afford to be seen as weak!

  She could still see the color of his eyes as he condescended to look at his unsatisfactory—his sole—pupil. That is because what is seen, in your case, would be truth. You have learned to lie the way a mortal learns to wield a great ax—as a blunt and convenient weapon. It is far more than

  that. Yes, there can be a particular beauty in the starkness of simplicity, but your use of the art succeeds only because you choose enemies of little intellect.

  Assarak and Etridian are not—

  They chose you. There is a difference. No student of mine would make the mistake of choosing the Generals of the Lord's Fist as enemies. Not yet. And not until they had mastered the art and the artifice of subtlety.

  His tone clearly implied that he thought her incapable of such mastery.

  Her hands closed around the hilt of her sheathed sword; her steps were quick and light and loud as the streets became both narrower and emptier. He haunted her, and he wasn't dead.

  And he would be. He would be. Dead as Ashaf was dead.

  Around her neck, the stone that had been Ashaf's parting gift, in a fashion, made the chain heavy. She felt a flash and a warmth against skin, in the hollow between her breasts. Against the building rage came another pressure.

  He is dangerous, Kiriel. I know that he cares for you in his fashion, although I would never have thought it possible—but he is Kialli.

  And you're not.

  Meaning that I can't understand what Kialli are? I have eyes, and ears; I know how to think. I observe them. Her smile had been a bitter twist of lips, there and gone as she met the face of her almost-daughter in the cold, clear light. That's what Ashaf had called her. Almost-daughter. And Kiriel had called her Ashaf.

  But in the shadows where night was darkest and the tower was empty of everything save the old woman's breathing, she had called her mother.

  The sword was heavy, the pendant burned, the. day was bright as it hovered on the welcome edge of night. She could not think of Isladar and Ashaf together; the thoughts overlapped and burned; they made her mad with the frenzied desire to grab memory—as if it were solid, as if it were an enemy—and rip it out, challenge it with sword and shield, and butcher it slowly, slowly, slowly…

  Ashaf.

  I never thought you were stupid.

  But it was a lie, and Kiriel—as Isladar had often pointed out—was not a master of artifice. She had thought the old woman stupid.

  He will change you. He has changed you. He is not interested in what makes you human; he is interested in what makes you…

  Yes?

  Kiriel…

  But that's what I am, Ashaf. Can't you understand that? How can you tell me that you love me and not understand that? You can't separate me from me. Isladar—at least he knows.

  Does he?

  Yes.

  The silence was heavy. The old woman had turned away, as Isladar often did, but with a very different expression. Perhaps, she had said, you are right. After all, it was Lord Isladar who chose me to raise you.

  And without him, you would raise me as if I were merely mortal.

  Yes. Yes, because that's all I am, and I've willingly given you everything I am, Kiriel. She had bowed her head, and— gods, no—Kiriel felt it: that rush of pleasure, that warmth for which words were a pale expression, that came with pain. Even Ashaf's. Especially Ashaf's.

  But he wants everything for me.

  Ashaf had turned back, her expression concealing nothing although it was now smooth as the tower walls. There were always evil men, Kiriel. And in the end, if you walk Lord Isladar's path, that is what you will be: an evil mortal. Not more. Not less.

  I'll be much more. You have no idea what kind of power I do have if you can say that!

  Does it matter? Does it matter if you kill a man by riding him down with a sword and a small contingent of bored young clansmen, or if you kill him by shadow and darkness? In the end, he belongs to the wind either way. Does it matter if you can consume a whole village by your own hand, where the clansmen might need tens, when in the end, the villagers are still dead?

  You are just a different kind of weapon. That's all. But in the history of the darkness, how many have served their own beliefs and their own cause?

  Kiriel's anger destroyed her pleasure in the old woman's pain, and she clung to it. She remembered that clearly: clinging to anger as if it were her only salvation. We all serve our own cause. How can you tell me that you're paying attention to the Court if you can't see that?

  You serve his cause.

  My father—

  Lord Isladar's.

  Silence. And then, you mean I serve his cause instead of yours. I have no cause, Ashaf. I survive. I enjoy surviving when my enemies don't. Sometimes I feel like a bone that the two of you are struggling over. Except that the struggle is all yours; he asks nothing except that I survive.

  There is more to life than survival.

  What more?

  And she had turned to the tower's window; the window past which the wind's voice was a continual howl and shriek. Here, she had once said, her voice drowsy with sleep and heavy with fear, the damned wailed hardest, and the sun was cold. She now said, I hated the sun in my youth; I hated the heat. But having s
pent fourteen years in the North, Kiriel, I'm not sure that death by fire is any worse than this. She had looked down at her hands as they touched the sill that would outlast her. Outlast them both. God's work.

  She had a strange dignity that Kiriel found beautiful only now, now that it was lost.

  And it had been lost.

  No matter what their intentions were, no matter how brave they thought they could be, pain destroyed a person completely. Pain. Fear.

  Kiriel was burning, now. Burning. The pain was terrible.

  Your pain makes you foolish, Kiriel.

  You told me to pay attention to it.

  To listen to it, yes, but never to give in to it. Only the weak do that, and they lie a moment at your feet before they become ash and dust at the whim of the mortal world. Listen. Take care. Pain tells you where your weakness is.

  And, Kiriel, child, I do not have to say this, but I will, again and again, because you must learn it. Never reveal that pain.

  She had learned every lesson that he had cared to teach. But she had not been the perfect student of his desire; she had been marred by the mortal need for comfort, and she had sought it, again and again, in the lap and the arms of an old, weak woman that even an imp could have killed with impunity.

  The only woman now alive to whom Kiriel had gone for comfort had disappeared in the streets of Averalaan, under attack by Kialli. Kiriel, less than half a city away, had not even sensed their coming. The den had called her, and called her late, as an afterthought, a grudging duty; she had walked through the rubble and the roots of upturned trees; the cracked, great branches like the broken limbs of ancient guardians that have finally fallen in the act of fulfilling their duty.

  The demons, of course, were gone. She could sense their shadows lingering in the small fires that the magi struggled to recapture and return to the elemental plane. Duarte AKalakar, terse and pale, had walked by her side, and directly in front of her—in a position that only one other would have dared to occupy less than a year ago, Verrus Korama.

  Once or twice, the magi glanced up.

  One stopped at once.

  "AKalakar," he said, bowing to Duarte. It took her by surprise; Duarte was called many things, few of them polite. "AKalakar." And then he turned his steel-gray eyes to her and bowed again, just as formally. "Kiriel."

  She did not return the bow. There was something about this mage that she would never like. Circumstance might force them to be allies. But circumstance was capricious; she looked forward to the day when it forced him to raise sword and test himself against her in the only way that mattered.

  He offered her no challenge. Instead, he quietly said, "It is my belief that Jewel ATerafin survived this attack."

  As if he knew that she was weak enough to care, to need the answer.

  She was. She was.

  She ran; the streets were too narrow, the buildings too small, the people in them too soft, too weak, too many. She held her sword; she couldn't remember drawing it, but it didn't matter. It was not technically illegal, but she had learned quickly that that law did not prevent fear or timidity in the people it was designed to protect.

  They made as wide a path for her as the streets themselves allowed.

  He understands who I am.

  But, ring on her hand now dull in the dying light, the truth was different.

  The truth had always been different. Ashaf had hated the cruelty and aggression that was essential to her nature; her father's gift; the power of his blood. Lord Isladar had, in protecting her from her weakness, denied her the other half—but with subtlety.

  For her own good.

  And it was for

  Ashaf

  Her own good; she was weak

  Jay

  And she had always been weak

  Falloran

  And weakness was the single unforgivable sin; there were no others

  Father

  She knew it now. She was sweating in the heat, and the comfort of a simple thing like breath eluded her. Her lungs would not fill with this salty, humid air. And she needed it, although she hated the sea and swore that she would see it evaporated when she ruled the—when she—

  She was running. She forgot why; struggled with memory and found an answer, any answer. There were fights to be fought. Men to kill. Yes.

  Lie, Kiriel. Lie.

  No. She was driven by ghosts. By the dead. By the living she'd sworn to kill. By her failure to even consider any vulnerability but her own. The word 'protection' hadn't even been a part of the singular vocabulary that had been built for her by her sole teacher. And had she not understood what it meant?

  Yes: the thing you must get around if you desire to kill something that has sworn service to a creature more powerful than itself.

  She had been so good at that.

  She had been taught by a master.

  No. No. Why was she thinking about this now? All she wanted—all she needed—was a real fight. All she wanted was a fight.

  But all they wanted was a fight as well, the Ospreys. They feared her. Some desired her. All accepted her, in spite of who they thought she might be—when they bothered to think at all. And they were raging, shouting, or silently weeping because of a flag. And she wanted—she wanted for herself what they exposed themselves by giving to a piece of handworked cloth. She wanted the weakness.

  Roaring filled her ears: she knew the sound even though it had been so long since she'd last heard it. Her voice. Her true voice.

  Her hand was burning. She ignored it; it was painful, but it was a type of pain she understood. It was the type of pain she had been nurtured by when she was growing up in the Hells.

  Better, better by far, than this new, this other, pain.

  Auralis knew the sound.

  Recognized all the sounds that followed it, inevitable as water after thunderclap and lightning. Voices made pale and thin by the contrast with the richness of hers, full of wordless fear. Footsteps; boots and flat sandals against the cobbled and pocked roads. Send for the magisterians. Send for the magi. Some clear heads among the lot.

  A demon was loose in Averalaan. No one was close enough to stop it. And the damage done in the Common made clear what that meant to a normal person. The fact that the demons were destroyed by the magi didn't bring back the dead.

  But this was different.

  He knew whose face the demon wore. And he had to admit that the grandeur of her voice made the thin screams of everyone else sound pathetic. Faceless. Dead, or as close to it as made no difference.

  Dammit, Kiriel, were in the Hells are you?

  She knew the rules of the City. The human laws. The first thing she'd learned. No magic. No killing.

  // the only thing you learn is how to kill, the only thing you'll be is a killer. Ashaf's voice. Pendant at her neck wanner than the ring around her finger, but without the resulting pain, the searing of flesh.

  But in the Shining Court, that had been enough. More than enough. I am learning other things. I am learning about power, Ashaf, about politics. About the human court.

  To what end?

  To rule.

  Silence.

  In the world my father builds, she had continued, the words leaving her lips in the past mirrored by a similar movement of lips now, the action a bridge between past and present. In the world my father builds, what I learn will be more than enough. What else do I need? What else do I need to know? I kill them before they kill me. I grow powerful enough that they don't waste their lives even trying.

  What else do I need?

  All the lies. All the lies she had been allowed to believe.

  She roared now, because now she had her answer.

  Because she had had her answer the day—the night— that she had, convulsed with pleasure, discovered what it was.

  Ashaf.

  And there was no place for Ashaf in any world her father would build.

  It had been eight years since Ashaf had carried her. Years. Ten years, more, si
nce she had comfortably fit beneath the sagging curve of the older woman's chin; years since the burden of her weight had not been so great that the older woman could no longer bear it. But she remembered it. In dreams, she was wrapped in warmth, and in dreams, the woman whose voice was balm and sweetness and sustenance—all weakness, all of it—came back to haunt her, like the dead woman herself.

  The sun has gone down, has gone down, my child, Na'kiri, Na'kiri dear…

  "ASHAF!"

  Auralis heard it. He was not the closest, but unlike the woman who stood in shadows, he did not hesitate, did not freeze. He lifted his head, his eyes widening, his mouth opening in surprise and something akin to fear. It didn't last. He had run from the moment he had first heard her voice; now he sprinted, throwing his head and shoulders forward, bending into his knees, lengthening his stride.

  Awkward as hell to do that with a sword that long strapped across your back.

  She knew it; in her youth, she had tried.

  Youth was long gone. What remained, implacable as ever, was duty. She turned to her companion. His perfect profile was motionless as he watched a man who wore Kalakar colors and armor break through a crowd that was already becoming sparse.

  "Well?" she said quietly.

  Pale hair, longer than Evayne's had ever been, had been braided and fell in a straight line down his back, bisecting the fall of emerald-green robes. "You ask me to judge?" he replied at last, aware of her scrutiny. "Any insight I have is inferior to the talent you've developed over the years. You have walked the Oracle's path." He turned to face her then, his slate-gray eyes slightly narrowed. "You did not summon me from my Tower in the Order to ask me for my opinion."

  "No."

  "Good. I have been… restless of late."

  "Maybe you need another student."

  "The last one was more than enough." His lips thinned as he spoke; his eyes narrowed. The humor in the words was sharp and cold. "Why did you call me?"

  "I don't know. You used to counsel patience, and you have so little of it."

  "Little enough that I resent the waste of—"

  They heard it: Wind, and within its folds, a name.

  Evayne had heard people die in less pain, with less anger, with less fear.