Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (77 page)

He wasn't there.

She cursed. Cursed and concentrated, turning her body against the tide; moving out of the way of rocks that she
knew
were coming. It was cold in the water. The cold would kill her.

But the failure would be a worse death.

She could move. She could think. She could react. She did these things, all of these things, her muscles crying out against cold, against the things she could not quite avoid.

Jewel!

Avandar's voice. Distant, distinct.

I'm fine
, she shot back, the verbal equivalent of a slap.

She heard his curse; it was brief and elegant, as unlike the stag's as a voice could be, and still be inside her head. The rock that struck the side of her face would leave a bruise that lasted a week. The rock that struck her knee and her thigh on its way around the bend did less damage. She managed to avoid the large rock. Hard to move, to gauge the speed of movement.

No more, she thought, no more rain.

And then she saw him, coming up across the water, something awkwardly draped across his back. She would have called him by name, but she had no name to give him.

You will never survive for long enough to name me
, he said, with an anger that was much like Avandar's, but wilder.
We have the boy. Climb, now. Viandaran has cast a magic that is difficult to maintain, here in the stronghold of shadow. If we do not reach him
—

Don't
. She caught the antlers he bowed in her direction. Scrambled up the side of his neck; almost sat on the heavy, limp body across his back.

The stag was as good as his word, perhaps better; although the body was not tied in place, although it was strewn across fur and sinew at an awkward angle, she knew it would not fall off.

She held on, felt warmth again, felt movement.

Wait
, she said, pressing her knees into the sides of the stag almost instinctively.
Wait
.

For what?

I don't know. But wait.

And then she saw the shadow cross her path where no shadow should have been cast, and she looked up. The underside of a great wagon loomed above, welcome as all other things the sky produced could not be. The glow of firelight danced across its walls, but the wood did not burn.

A ladder rolled down from its side, its rungs wild in their dance against wood. Above it, clothed head to food in wet, wet silk, knelt a single woman. "Aie, stranger!" she shouted.

Jewel looked up; she could not see the face of Elena, but she knew the voice. "I have Adam!" she cried back, but her voice broke between the last two syllables. "Send a rope down. Take him—I'll search for the others."

But the woman shook her head. "No!" she shouted back. "We have the others."

"All of them?"

There was a pause. It was brief. "Yes. All. You are bid to return, at once, to your servant."

The use of power was costly.

Even to Avandar. Especially to Avandar.

She knew it before the stag carried them back to where he stood before a wall of stone. She could see, now, where lines of green and gold ran through gray; could see how they were strengthened by him, how they held the water back while the Arkosans struggled, broken and wet, to the ground around his feet. Some clutched bags, some tents, but most came empty-handed.

Among them were the Serra Teresa and Yollana of the Havalla Voyani. She noted them; they were the outsiders. The ones who were here on sufferance, or for a greater purpose, but who did not share blood and history with the Arkosans; of course she noticed them.

She slid off the back of the stag; the ground around Avandar was merely muddy. Water sluiced past, slapping the air and the ground as it thudded into the walls of the tunnel to either side.

"Serra," Jewel said, voice a rush of breath. "Where is the Serra Diora?"

The old woman answered. "With the Matriarch. Safe."

"And your seraf?"

Silence.

Teresa lifted her head, turned her piercing gaze to the storm whose water raged on all sides. She mouthed a word. A single word. Jewel could not hear it.

Could not hear it, but knew.

She hated magic. She hated mages.

She reached for the antlers of the stag, and it lifted its head.
No
, he said, almost gently.
No
.

We must
—

/
will go. I will search for him
. His eyes met hers, large and unblinking, darker than night.
Do you understand, Jewel of Terafin, that I was once Winter King
?

She nodded. Nodded, and then shook her head, No.

No
, he said,
is the more truthful answer. I do not understand how a child could stand against the host of the Winter Queen, and wrest from her anything that she claimed. Had she better understood how vulnerable you have made yourself, you would have stood for seconds. Perhaps less
.

Patience. If he can be found, I will find him, and I will return him to you.

He leaped, lightly, back into the storm, and she noticed, as he ran, that the water did not so much as dampen the fur made silver-gray by night sky.

Although he had never been in the middle of an elemental storm before, Kallandras knew it from its natural counterpart almost instantly. It had a voice that was deafening, wordless; it destroyed the nuances of other sounds. Like: the flexing of great muscles. The movement of leathery wings folding and opening as they gathered wind beneath their pinions. The movement of air over tongue and teeth as the creature inhaled—or exhaled—in a rhythm of muscle and motion.

Lightning flashed and lingered; Lord Celleriant's signal. White air. Black Serpent. Red blood.

Come.

Kallandras called the wind.

The master was wrong.

It was not his ability to listen that saved him; it was his ability to
speak
. To
command
. He had displayed it very, very rarely—it was a threat, and he knew it was exactly that to his brothers, no matter how much they might say otherwise.

Use the voice on an enemy and it was a thing to admire, like any other weapon. But like any other weapon, turn it upon a brother, expose a brother's weakness, and it was a betrayal.

He forced himself to listen. To be calm. Heard the soft click of multiple objects across stone. They stopped. Became much slower. He had heard no unsheathing of weapon.

Listen, he thought. He could hear—or perhaps feel—the beat of his heart; the pulse kept perfect time near the base of his throat. He could hear the rise and fall of chest as air entered his lungs, and left it.

Only his.

What came out of the shadows was not a brother.

Was not the master.

What? What is it?

He had been forced to hold his breath before; he knew that any other brother would be capable of doing the same.

But although the sounds of something striking the rough stone floor were quiet, they were too rhythmic to be the product of
Kovaschaü
stealth. Whatever it was that hunted in the darkness did so with confidence.

He leaped away, taking care to make no noise. The steps ceased; the almost hypnotically musical clicking stilled.

When it resumed, he learned two things: that his opponent had some method of tracking him in the darkness, and that it had nothing to do with sound.

He
moved
.

Felt the fabric of his shirt split and grow wet. The cut was so clean it took a moment for pain to follow—but there was no doubt that it would; the cut was deep.

First blood
. He turned to look at the ring of flame. The master had said that the contests were over at the shedding of first blood. But the darkness remained unbroken.

The silence did not.

His opponent made a visceral sound in the back of an unseen throat. Had Kallandras been any other
Kovaschaü
, he would have heard a simple growl. But he was not; he was the brother who had lost his family because of his gift. He heard more.

Anticipation. Pleasure. Laughter.

The fear that had almost taken root had no further chance to grow. In its place, but stronger, was anger.

He had heard every lecture about the stupidity of temper the masters could offer, both singly and jointly; he had seen examples made of students who could not learn from anything but personal experience—
the folly and privilege of youth
, his master had said—that demonstrated clearly the ways in which it made one vulnerable.

Such lessons were dim and quiet compared to the immediacy of fury. He had never understood the brothers who, exposed to such wisdom, had chosen folly in its place; he understood it now.

He
shouted
.

The force of the wordless cry left a silence that spread outward from Kallandras like the concentric circles that mark the passage of a stone through still water.

The silence did not last; it was broken by a roar that might have been twin to his own. But it was devoid of amusement. Of condescension. The vicious satisfaction this fact gave him was costly; the roar had been almost deafening, and he did not appreciate this fact until the creature was almost upon him.

He bled again; he bled freely.

Underestimate your opponents at your peril.

Claws and a lack of obvious language had lulled him into an assumption about the intelligence of his attacker. It was not a mistake he had ever repeated.

The rain
, he thought. The rain had stopped. Disoriented, he looked down to see a river wending its way across the barrens, carrying rocks and sand in currents that slammed into the walls of a once dry tunnel.

Light drew his attention back to the sky. Against it, within its stark and unforgiving glare, stood Lord Celleriant. He was suspended in the silent sky yards away. Kallandras watched dispassionately until he saw the power of the Green Deepings waver. Serpent's foreclaws were gathered close to its chest, taut with tension; its tail was beneath its hind legs, coiled and waiting. Its mighty head rose with a snapping curve of neck, its jaws widened, it inhaled.

He
spoke
.
"Hold."

The rawness of anger, the unharnessed power of fury, was given its only expression in the single soft syllable. All motion in the room was his, but he could not be certain how long the stillness would last.

He ran. His stride grew longer, faster; he gathered his shoulders, holding his blades at his sides as he took advantage of momentum to break gravity's hold. He spun, somersaulting in air as he felt the sluggish passage of claws beneath him.

His own movements were not bound by compulsion; there was nothing slow about them. He brought his blades down and crossed them in front of each other in a brief passage through flesh.

In the darkness, sound was a sensation. The only sound the creature made was in the involuntary response of scale to blade. Kallandras heard something strike the ground; it was followed by another, heavier, noise.

Silence was once again broken only by the sound of his breath. He waited five beats before he turned toward the lightless flame and bowed. "Master."

The flame was extinguished.

He did not reply; instead he wiped the edge of his blades against his sash and sheathed them. He dropped to his knees, straightened his back, bowed his chin toward his injured chest and sat, waiting with the patience of a student of the Labyrinth.

Light returned, like slow dawn, to the round chamber. He saw it first along the walls as torches released the illumination they had withdrawn; saw it next in the shadows their meager light cast. His eyes became accustomed, again, to the minute differences in the gray and black, the color of stone and night.

The master was no longer standing within the ring of fire, although Kallandras had seen no evidence of his departure. He approached, walking slowly and carefully between the lines drawn across stone.

"Well done, Kallatin. You may retire to the healer. And you may tell Arkady that if he does not practice
silence
for the next three days, I will deal with him personally." He bowed. And then he stopped.

"That is not a test that any other member of your year could pass." He walked toward the arch that was now visible. "There was some debate about your survival. You did not disappoint me."

But Kallandras waited. He knew, from the tone of his master's voice, that the lesson was far from over.

And that it could end in the blink of an eye.

"If we were different men," the master said, his robed back toward his student as he turned toward the arch, "it would be simplicity itself to train you. I would merely tell you that any man who could defeat you would be executed, and I would return you to the testing grounds in search of those upon whom you place a particular value."

The student waited.

"But we are not those men, not yet; the Lady has given no such commands, and indeed they would be difficult to follow. Therefore it is up to us to make our own choices, to offer ourselves—as we age and become less efficient— in the Lady's service in other ways.

"It
is
my duty to the Lady to train you, Kallatin. To see that your potential, profound and untapped, does not go to waste." He reached into his robes, and drew a dagger.

Kallandras was on his feet, was in motion, his own weapons drawn, the moment that blade breached its sheath. But he was too slow, far too slow.

The wound the master offered himself was to wrist; blood flowed.

"The lesson, this day, is over. There will be one other, Kallatin. One final lesson. You have earned that much with your performance today. Fail, and you will survive, but I will not. Succeed, and you may decide how deep a cut you offer, how much of an injury I retain."

"Master—" Kallandras took a step forward, and the old man lifted a palm—and more—in denial.

Do not. You are too weak as it is. I will not accept any aid you offer.

For a moment, Kallandras stood suspended above the barren grounds, the wind whispering in his ear, the voice of the Serpent a deafening howl of rage. He had been born to
listen
. He had been born to
hear
.