Cast In Secret (36 page)

Let. Them. Burn.

Later: the burying of her kin.

The barbarians revered the dead. Her people had never understood why. The dead were dead. Once the spirit had fled, the flesh was just flesh, like any other. Cruel flesh, to invoke the spirit of loss, and quicken the memory. But flesh nonetheless. Ask the carrion birds if it tasted different than the dead flesh of Feladrim gryphons, and the answer would be no.

But touched by their madness, broken by it, she wanted to give the bastards a different answer.

And so, the burying of the dead.

The city of the Feladrim – one of their many – was upon the plains, where gryphons might feed from the wild herds that grazed under the open skies. Around her, her kin gathered, and their number had grown. Their metalsmiths had turned their hands to weapons, and if their work was rough, it was good. They burned with the fires that she had started on the long night, and they reveled in them in this false light of day. She would never know day again.

But freedom? She would have freedom for the Tha’alani. She could hear their voices, carried by the winds. She had called the air and it had come like a gale, but here, she forced it – barely, barely – to be a breeze.

For the people of the Feladrim, she was not so kind; they could not leave their city. And they tried. But gryphons, beasts of war, could not fly easily in a wind that was elemental, and those that tried lay broken and bleating upon the ground like sheep, circled on high by the shadows of vultures too wise to dare the currents.

She let the wind take her words; let it fill her people with its roar. Wind also swept up the corpses of the fallen, as it had swept the flies and carrion creatures from their still faces, their closed eyes. She heard the gasp of her people as the dead rose, carried with infinite care to heights that not even the winged would dare.

She wanted them to
see
. She wanted them to remember. Her people. The people whose kindness, whose mercy, had failed these children. She wanted them to
understand
.

And she wanted the Feladrim to understand, as well. They lived in a city of the dead, and the dead were now returning to them, vengeful ghosts, instruments of justice, on winds that
would never again
carry their warriors, their spears, or their savagery.

Uriel – there are children there
–

“There are children who will grow to be warriors,” she had answered, the words smooth with long hours of practice. No quiver in them, no hesitation. Just truth. Had she not seen the truth for herself? Had she not felt it in the bewildered terror of the dying?

They will grow to hate us and fear us, as their fathers hated and feared us before them. Uriel, do not do this.

“Old man, they will never grow.”

And the voices in her head had fallen silent, and if the silence was the silence of fear, she didn’t care. She wanted peace. All she had ever wanted was peace. And how she achieved it in the end was no business but her own.

But she heard herself speaking anyway, breaking silence as she had sworn not to do. “We failed them,” she told him. “If we chose to fail
only ourselves,
it would signify nothing. But we hesitated, and we wept, and we begged. I am done with begging. I
am done with failure.
”

Were there children there? Yes. Foreign, ugly children, held by their weeping mothers, their ancient grandmothers, foreheads smooth for all that they wore the whirling tattoos of their clan. She could see them with the wind’s eye, but she could not hear their voices. Their pain did not call to her, did not accuse her.

And she called the earth, as the bodies of the dead Tha’alani children settled into the streets of the distant city, having been carried there by elemental air, and laid to rest among the screaming, weeping Feladrim. The earth, the ancient, slow earth, came as she woke it. She felt its tremble in her upraised arms, felt the weight and the authority of its slumbering muscle.

Her people watched, and all voices, even the voices wind
could
touch, were silent.

“Today, we bury our dead,” she shouted, forcing her voice to be heard across the very plains. And she let the earth go, then, but only toward the city.

She watched as the towers shuddered and trembled; watched as the foundations were broken away, like the roots of weeds in a small garden. The walls, the buildings, the lives of the Feladrim and the bodies of the dead – all were one, to the voice of the earth. She would bury her dead, yes, and there was no more fitting burial ground than this.

And the broken buildings – if in truth the earth left them there – would be all the markers their graves would need.

Of the weariness and the fatigue, she would speak little, although it was great. The voices of the fire and the air and earth would haunt her memories in a way that not even the dead could. She was strong enough to bear it, the ancient wilderness of voice, the familiar territory of desire.

The first city was not the only city she would destroy.

And after each city, her own kin would return to her and ask her,
What now?
The voices of the young burned bright, like steel new tempered and in need of quenching, and she would quench it in blood, time and again, and
this time
it would not be the blood of her people, but their enemies’.

She would call herself
king,
and she would be called
king,
this foreign, ugly word. The enemies of her enemies would come, bearing offerings tainted by fear, and because the fear was good, because she could use it, she would accept what they offered.

But when the voices of the children were raised in ugly glee, she would stop for the first time. Because this, too, was death.

This was not what she had wanted to save.

She was strong enough to call the fire and the earth and the air – but in her youth there was only one element that she had been encouraged to summon, only one that she had been unwise enough to trust. And in that youth, her own voice had not been raised to war and pain and death; that would come later.

But later was now, she realized. And she lived in the Night of war. She had never emerged from it, and she realized that she never would. What she was – all that she was – was built on death.

But all that she
had wanted
was not.

Her pride, however, was possibly as strong as her power, and she could not now turn to the men and women whose voices of gentle horror she had ignored. Time had whittled them away, taking at last what she would not surrender to their enemies.

But those that time had not taken? She could not bear to prove them right. To acknowledge that her own failure, more subtle than theirs, was still a failure.

No, she thought grimly. My work is not yet done; I will not give it over or abandon it. Half-done, and it has all been in vain. While our enemies live or rule, there is no safety, and if our children are not what they were, they are
alive,
and in life, there is hope and possibility.

She told herself this, and perhaps because she had been riven from the voices of the elders, she could believe it.

But when she came at last to the heart of the Empire of her enemies, the city that rested upon the harbor at the edge of the sea, there were no dead children to bury, and the voice of the earth was not strong enough. The voice of the winds could keep the ships in harbor, but they had weathered such storms before, and the storms here were laden with water.

There was only one element left her.

The oldest, the easiest to summon.

And she hesitated for the first time, while in the city, the people panicked. That much, the air had given her.

But the water, when it came, gave her nothing. It took a shape and a form that was most like her own people’s, translucent like the story of a mortal ghost, strands of hair falling wayward into its deep, dark eyes, tracing the contours of a hollow face.

It has been long since you summoned me,
the water said gravely.
Has it been a harsh season of drought?

She faltered, for the voice was an old voice. The fire and the air, she simply released to their own desires. The earth was heavier and slower, and harder to work with, although she could speak with its rumbling cadences.

But the water simply waited.

“You have drowned men in your time,” she said at last, using her voice, and only her voice. “And it is that time, now.”

I have drowned men
, the water replied.
Even your own kin, in the end. But of them, I kept memory and story and message to carry until the end of time
.

“I desire you to carry no message,” she told the water. “No message save death.”

But the water remained where it was.
Will you order me to destroy this human city?

“I will.”

It is not my desire.

“I have heard your desire,” she said, speaking sharply now, while her kin gathered around her. “You lie.”

You have heard my desire, but you have not heard all of my desire. You have heard your fear, my anger, the place where both dwell.

But I have heard your sorrow, and your joy, your anger and your fear. You are
alive.
The gift of life is not all of one thing or another – you are not only what you hate, not only what you love, not only even what you are aware of. You are all of these things, and will be more
.

Kaylin felt the words as a physical blow. Winded, silent, she listened to the cadences of the water. She had no choice; the wind couldn’t snatch
these
words away. She had called the water for all of her life. Her grandmother had called the water before that, and in tribes scattered across this world, others had done the same.

They had called the water in times of drought, in times of desperation; they had fought the voice – the most ancient voice – of water, denying it death and drowning and the floods that would make the plain a graveyard. They had asked, instead, for the water of life, and the water had acceded in the end.

That was the teaching. The old teaching.

But in her long life, the water had seldom fought her; if it had come at her call – and it always did – it had come in the end to succor the fields, or to hold an infant just a little longer in the safety of a womb. It had spoken, and she had replied.

And she realized that this was why she had had no desire to summon the water: it was not, had never been, a voice of death for her people. If she had heard death in its depths – and she had – it was the voice of a history that she had had no part in.

But the rules were still rules, and the water would obey her if she fought it. If she fought its impulse, if she denied it its will.

And there, a mile or two below her feet, lay the last obstacle: one city. One city that the water could destroy. It would be easy, this close to the ocean. Even the great ships that had been built to withstand the storms would founder and break; they had not been designed to survive below the water.

“Destroy the city,” she said. “Take it into yourself and hold it fast.”

But the water had not yet done.
I cannot take it into myself
, it replied.
Only you and your kind, child. There, in the city that hovers just at the edge of your ocean, no one can hear my voice, no one can give me the words of their kind. They will drown, yes, and some will die before that – but I will hold nothing but corpses.

I will not have their songs. I will not have their odd acts of frailty – the things you call
kindness,
or
mercy.
I will not know their laughter, or the bright savagery of their children. I will take, but I will offer nothing in return. And I say again that this is not my desire.

You who have come to the edge of the abyss so that your kin might have choice, at last – can you ask this of me?

“What choice will they have? While this city stands, our enemies can rebuild their armies, and peace such as we can make will be undone, time and again. The lessons that have been so costly will be forgotten, and in a hundred years, we will again be at the mercy of those who seek to make our very essence a weapon they can use against each other, because they are insane. They think that
knowing
each other is, in effect, destroying each other. It is always a game of power.

“Destroy the city, and we will have peace.”

You have called me, who have touched your children at their birth, and sung your songs of healing as they made their way into the world. You have called me, who have struggled to bring water to parched, summer lands, when all of the wind and the fire stood against me, ancient foes; who have heard the
voice of your farmers raised in supplication and in thanks for the miracle of simple plants. You have called me, who have heard the whispers of your elders in the dark of nights, who have moved rivers in their passage over your lands to preserve life.

And I have listened to your voices for all these years, and I have held your lives in my hands, again and again, and I have heard
those
voices, and I say again, that I do not desire this.

But I tell you more, because you will force it and I would yet see the madness fall from your eyes. Your people do not desire this. You seek to preserve them – but at what cost? You call yourself
King –

“I do not – ”

You allow it, and those that fear you – with just cause – fashion a true likeness with their words. But you will wake in your kin the ghost of the dead here – for they will see what you have made, and forced, and done, and you will be a race of warrior mages from whom
no secret is safe,
and your gift to them will be this – they will become what you cast down. They will become murderers and warriors who seek ever better weapons to use against those they have chosen to call
enemy.

That is all you will achieve.

That is what you are building now.

But you have given me song, have trusted me with life, and with its keeping. And I have kept what was given me, and I return it to you now
.