Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (10 page)

Not while she lived.

He had been so terrified, that first year, and the second, that she would die like his mother had. That had been his nightmare, before he had become the keeper of hers: of wandering in terror through the city streets, searching for her the morning after she hadn't come home on time. Searching, and afraid—gods, paralyzed now—of what would end that search.

When had he gotten so complacent? When had he let go of that fear until it wasn't even a distant nightmare?

He should have known better.

He felt the tears start down his cheeks, and he was so numb with dread he didn't realize what they were until Finch touched them gently and wiped them away.

"Teller. Finch." The Terafin was dressed in the plainest of robes; those robes were lined with dust and splinters. She was comfortable on horseback; she had been here for the better part of an hour, searching as if she were the least of the members of House Terafin, and not its Lord.

But Teller understood it the moment he saw her face. She needed to do something.

"Angel and Arann are to the west. Carver and Jester are just up ahead, near the permanent stalls. Near where they stood. Bodies are being brought to the west end of the Merchant Authority; there are healers there in number. Morretz is there. Daine is with him. So far no one has unearthed Jewel. Join Daine if you like. Join the others if you feel that you're better used in the search, And if you discover anything—let me know immediately. That's all."

"Terafin," they said, speaking—and bowing—in unison.

There were
so many
bodies.

To his left, men and women were grunting under the weight of stone and wood. Fabric, stretched between poles, awaited whatever it was they could retrieve from beneath that burden. They didn't judge the condition of whatever it was they found. They left that to the healers.

But in some cases, it was impossible not to know death.

He looked across what had been the beginning of the Common's circle. The ground was broken now, like dry, old loaves.

At a distance, across the fissures made by split earth and ruptured stone, he could see the royal blue of the highest ranking Kings' Swords. He could not tell what their relative ranks were, but years ago, rank would have meant nothing: they served the Kings. Their job, he thought bitterly, being to protect the people who had money and means from those who didn't.

The momentary resentment surprised him; it was so old, he had thought it buried by the present. Destroyed.

The rubble. The wood. The bodies.

But so many things were coming back to him. The feel of stones like this beneath his feet, the harsh, painful dryness that grew in the walls of his throat, the unseasonal, bitter cold. Even then he had had the wits to take what little of value his mother owned; a dagger, a knife, a small handful of coins. He had never intended to desert the room he had shared with his mother.

Death changed all plans.

Jay.

The Kings' Swords were not here on their own; they did not venture out of
Avantari
in these numbers and these uniforms unless they accompanied a member of the royal family. From where he stood, he could not see which member, but he was fairly certain it would be the Princess of the blood, Mirialyn ACormaris. The Kings themselves rarely left the Isle; the Queens only slightly more often, and usually for functions that involved the powerful guilds or the churches. Ah, yes. There she was. She wore armor, although the day was warm; her visor was up, her face exposed. The horse beneath her moved carefully over the rubble of broken street, upturned cobblestone, soft dirt. He had never much liked horses.

"Carver,
shut up
." He was brought back to himself by the sharp crack of Finch's high voice.

Here and there, Arann, Angel, or Carver stopped to lend arm and back to the lifting of heavy stone; they worked in silence at the side of the magisterial guards, as if they were part of the Terafin House Guard. Once, they would have run from them, and with reason; the magisterial guards were not paid to smile cheerfully at hungry thieves.

The other Houses had sent small contingents to represent their interests—or their concerns, if one was not being cynical—but only one House had lost one of its governing council in the inexplicable attack on the market.

Years ago, fifteen or more, on a Henden as dark as any story could make it, demons had dwelled beneath the city of Averalaan, in the tangled web of tunnels and ancient passages at the heart of the old city. The fear their presence evoked had nearly broken the city's spirit. Then, he thought, the princess had ridden, in the Queen's party; so had Commander Sivari. They had drawn swords; they had taken arms; they had spoken against an enemy that could be seen by no one, and felt by all. Songs were still sung of that ride, fiercely, passionately, tearfully. Teller sang them. How could he not? He had been alive in that Henden; he had heard the demonic voices. He had
seen
the demons in the flesh.

Princess Mirialyn ACormaris presided, as she had then, over ruins. The city had seen its demons, and it knew, it knew now, that they had returned. He wondered, idly, if the magi were clever enough to make political use of the fear. The old woman who ruled the Order was, to listen to Jay talk.

Jay.

He did not run. He felt no need to run. He knew that whatever there was to be found would be found here. And he wasn't alone here; he was a man of means, surrounded by his den, with a House name to back him up. But, as if he had run the same frenzied run as he had the day he became an orphan, his throat was constricted and dry; breath came with difficulty.

The men led by Mirialyn ACormaris pulled a body from beneath the fallen slats of what had been a permanent stall in the Common. Stalls such as these were handed down from parent to child; they were rare and highly prized, although from the wreckage it would not be clear why to a casual observer. Wood had splintered, cloth had torn, both acts revealing color the sun seldom saw: pale, unstained wood grain, unfaded burgundy.

Other things caught and held his attention. Not the stall itself, but the flagpole that had made its presence known from a distance: metal, not wood, the pole looked as if it had been crumpled, like so much cloth or paper.

He turned again, this time to the center of the Common.

Men and women worked there who wore the robes and the emblems of the Order of Knowledge. He did not choose to approach them closely enough to see if they were mageborn; where the magi were concerned, sanity, and therefore safety, was always in question—and besides, they were busy. They stood, some dozen or so—fourteen, he thought, as he counted more precisely—in a loose circle. They did not touch each other, but they were clearly connected in purpose.

And that purpose: a tree.

Funny, that so many people lay dead or broken, and yet the magi were consumed by this: Giants had fallen.

Teller watched, as he always did, struggling to find words that made sense. Jewel had named him because he spoke so rarely. He could not explain why, and if he understood it now—at two decades remove—the knowledge served little purpose. It had become his habit to think before speaking, and he could not be hurried through either thought or speech, but when he did speak, his words were always measured, always calm, and always to a purpose. He did not curse or swear, did not vent rage or frustration in useless arguments or fights. He had learned that at his size it was worse than pointless. Instead, he observed, hidden, as unseen as he could make himself, and he bound his thoughts with words, when words would come. Sometimes they came quickly. Today, they would be a long time in arriving.

Those trees had stood in the heart of the Common since before the founding of Averalaan.

"Angel, for the Mother's sake, can't you be more careful!"

Angel's reply, half grunt, half spoken word, would have earned him a swat to the head, but Finch didn't have Jay's temper. She frowned. "I
know
it's heavy, but you're supposed to be helping the victims, not adding to them!"

Like Teller, she was slight of build and slender; they didn't expect her to be of much help. So she fluttered; he watched; they bore witness in their own way.

"Teller?"

He lifted his head, and as he did, strands of brown hair parted like a curtain. He did not, in principle, like long hair—but during his convalescence, it had grown, and Finch had been too busy to nag him to have it cut. So had Jay.

Jay.

"Teller?"

Turning, he saw that one of the Terafin Chosen was navigating broken ground; here, the damage had been concentrated in the earth. He nodded at one of the two captains who between them commanded The Terafin's Chosen. Wondered briefly if his face was as expressionless as Torvan's. He doubted it. "I've come from the west," he said quietly.

Teller waited.

"There's no sign of her."

He exhaled. Spoke a safer name. "Avandar?"

"None." The Captain of the Chosen turned away, hiding his expression by exposing his profile. Not a look that Teller liked, it was so unusual.

"What happened?"

"You know as much as we do. There were a number of demons present in the Common itself; they attacked a large group of people and destroyed just over a third of the market in the process. There is some evidence of struggle; some evidence that resistance occurred before the magi were summoned. But that resistance… crumpled. The attackers were eventually destroyed by the Council of the Magi."

"But Jay—"

Torvan turned to face him. "Yes."

"Yes?"

"She was here."

"But—"

"There are a lot of dead, Teller. We've… questioned the magisterial guards; guards were apparently in the Common during the battle."

"And?"

"There were no survivors in either the first or the second group to arrive here."

Not hard to believe. Not hard at all.

"Witnesses outside of the Common place her close to the center of… the attack."

"You think they were trying to kill her."

"We know they've tried before."

But never like this.

And the last time, he thought, they had sent only one creature. One creature, and Angel and Jay had ended up in the infirmary, bleeding to death while The Terafin and Alowan argued about which of the two was worth saving. He looked away.

"We'd like your help," Torvan said quietly.

"Help?"

"There are other witnesses."

"Yes, yes, sir," the young boy said, obviously flushed with excitement at the importance of his story, but just as obviously intimidated by the arms, armor, and size of those who questioned. "There was fire."

"Fire?"

"In the sky."

"And the—"

"They were demons. My grandma said so. Demons."

"There were many?"

He held up his right hand, extending his fingers. Then he held up his left hand. Teller knew the boy couldn't count, but that didn't mean he was stupid.

"What were they doing?"

"I don't know. They killed all the magisterians, though."

The old woman with her hands on his shoulders frowned; the boy winced as her nails bit into his collarbone. "Uh, the magisterial guards."

"How?"

"I think," the old woman said, her face frozen into a harsh series of lines that could not be mistaken for permission, "that that can be best determined by the magi."

The House Guard started to speak, and the old woman added, "They're still looking for his mother. My daughter." Her voice made ice seem warm.

Teller very deliberately stepped on the man's foot.

"How did the demons die?" He asked the boy, while the House Guard reined in the frayed temper of a long day without answers.

"The magi came," the boy replied. "On the wind." And he looked up, up again, as if between sun and cloud, between cloud and ground, they flew there still, circling the city.

One mage did.

It had been a risk that he had not wished to publicly acknowledge to summon the wind. To ride it, to summon the air and to give it commands that it followed was more than a skill; it was an act of seduction; it required a delicate balance, an intuitive understanding of the bargaining done by men of power that could not be separated from the elemental ability itself. He could cajole the wind with the whisper of its own voice; could stand at the edge of its storm before he earned a place in its eye, watching as it destroyed at its leisure. He could promise it many, many things—but making such a promise to a wild element was not a matter of words and contract, not a matter of human law with its labyrinthine clauses, its its and ands, its laughable penalties. The price was written in blood, paid in blood. Old laws.

Aiee
, one considered the cost carefully when one summoned the past. Carefully. Delicately.

The wind's voice was a roar; he could literally hear nothing else.

To summon the wind as if it were a kept, tame creature— to demand that it carry not only himself, but the cadre of the elite who had been trained to fight, and to fight creatures such as the kin—was entirely different. It required not bargain, but force.

He was powerful enough that he could force the element to his bidding, but not so powerful that he could escape its wrath. Costly. Costly, these acts of desperation. Beneath his feet, blind to his flight, the beneficiaries of that desperation crawled across the broken surface of earth, excavating by slow degree the bodies of their dead. He was not a master of the intricacies of life; had he been, he would never have survived the great wars of his youth. But he knew enough to know that the men and women who toiled would find little worth their time and their worry beneath the bodies of the great trees and small buildings that lay broken.

He felt the loss of the trees keenly. Men passed on to some majestic hall and some hidden destiny at the whim of Mandaros when they died. But the trees that had existed for millennia—the last of their kind, although only the Order of Knowledge seemed to have a deeper appreciation of this fact—had been reduced to mere sap and wood; they represented a true loss, a profound loss.