Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (57 page)

"Duster."

"Na'jay."

"Jewel."

The first person she'd met in the Deepings had been her Oma. That had felt so right she hadn't really questioned it.

But the second person… funny, that it would be Duster. She lost Fisher and Lefty to the maze beneath the old city before Duster had met her end at the hands of the demon. She had lost her parents between her grandmother's death and theirs.

But truth? Even though she had cried for days after her father's untimely and unexpected death, something about Duster's death had been sharper, uglier, more painful.

Awful confession, that. She was glad she'd never had to make it out loud. The slender knife that glinted in the moonlight was Duster's trademark threat. Not that she wasn't big with words; she used 'em, sometimes to good effect, sometimes to bad. She had the worst temper because it ran so deep and it was so hard to turn
off
.

And she almost never pulled that knife when she wasn't angry. Truth. "Duster," she said, her voice as dry as the name. She wanted to say more, but the real words couldn't get past the true ones:
I sent you to die
.

"Yeah," the shade said. "You sent
me
. To die. And I did." She took a step closer. "You want to see?"

Jewel saw her clearly enough; the shadows robbed her of nothing. There were times when you saw something—and Jewel knew this was one—and it became the only thing in the world. She'd heard love talked about, in syrupy, stupid words, just as if it were like this: She couldn't breathe, couldn't move, could barely think.

If this was love, she'd give it a miss. A wide miss. In fact, she'd turn her back and walk away as quickly as dignity allowed. When she remembered how to breathe. If she ever could again.

There was no blood on Duster's face. No slash across her skin, no scars that hadn't already been there. She wore what she'd worn the last time Jewel had seen her alive—something she hadn't thought about much until she'd known for certain she'd never see her in it again: Undyed wool, carded by the hands of a sour old woman who'd managed to find the mangiest sheep in existence to shear. It was rough in texture, and too large. Jewel bought everything too large back then, because she hardly ever had money to buy clothing and everyone grew out of everything so damn fast.

"Bloody miracle," Duster said, "considering how much we had to eat. Hear you guys did real well for yourselves after you got rid of me."

She came closer.

Jewel stood her ground. She'd almost run out to meet her; at least that's what she thought she'd done. Stupid. Stupid move. She could see that now. Dagger and Duster. Duster and Death. Avandar's unwelcome hand was on her shoulder, a reminder of the life that Duster had had no chance to be part of.

"You here to kill me?" she asked quietly, shrugging that unwanted hand clear.

"Na'jay," her Oma said, voice as sour as vinegar.

"Maybe." Duster's shrug was more pointed than Jewel's, less useful.

"Maybe?"

"Maybe."

Silence. Heavy with the unsaid. Jewel struggled for that elusive breath. This
is
what love was like. Damn foolish. Be honest. Be honest, for once. You didn't love her in spite of the fact that she was a killer, you loved her
because
she was one.

Because she could do the things you were afraid to without thinking twice. Because she could do the things that
had to be done
without flinching, or throwing up, or looking over her shoul-der and waiting for the hand of Mandaros to descend from the heavens in judgment.

Because her mother, some backstreet whore who had gone home with the wrong man and had never come out again, hadn't invested her with the same guiding principles that
Oma
and Jewel's mother had; because Duster, wild and dark, eyes and hair like shadow, voice like fire, was a freedom that seemed like power.

She looked it, now: Thin and unbowed, her lip dimpled by some old knife fight that had happened before they'd met. Her eyes, gods, her eyes, larger than full crowns, expressive enough that you watched them no matter what they told you. And they told Jewel a lot, almost as much as the dagger did.

"Yeah," she said, was saying, as Jewel stared. "I think I want to kill you."

"Too bad."

Duster raised a dark brow. "You and me in a fight, and you think you'd win?"

"Not much. But I couldn't have won then, either. See the big idiot to my left? He's smaller than Arann, but still. Mean sonofabitch."

Duster spat. "Too pretty."

"Well, yeah. But he's mean anyway."

"And he's hanging with you? Not that bright. Or didn't you tell him what happens to most of your followers?"

She flinched. Shouldn't have. Knew it. She'd had to walk the edge with Duster more than once, and Duster knew how to find all the weak spots. "Not most of 'em."

"No." She shrugged. Threw heavy hair over her shoulder. "Just the killers."

"You want to get this over with?"

"Nah. I'll keep you guessing. You have to walk past me sooner or later." Duster laughed. "Besides. You can't call the hired help. They can't
see
me."

Jewel grimaced. The starlight was as clear as the knife's edge, the walls of the cliffs to either side sheer and daunting in their barren beauty. "Avandar," she said quietly, not taking her eyes from Duster, which wasn't hard. "Please tell me I'm not talking to myself."

"Not only will I not tell you that," he replied, "but I will also insult your intelligence by pointing out that it is extremely easy, in the Stone Deepings, to commit suicide. In fact," he added softly, with an edge to his voice that she'd always disliked, "it's the only way to die here."

"Great." She shrugged. Started to walk. "I hate you, you know that?" The knife's edge shadowed her face.

Duster laughed. "Yeah. I know." She fell into an easy walk beside her. "Hate me enough, and I won't be able to kill you. Hate me too much, and you won't be able to kill me."

"You were never this smart," Jewel snapped back.

"Of course not. I was never
you
." And she pulled the knife back and shoved it forward so suddenly Jewel only had time to bleed.

14th of Scaral, 427 AA

Desert of Sorrows

The night was not very black. It seldom was in these lands; no cloud seemed to settle across the sky for long, and the stars were piercing in their clarity. Nor were the nights long. The Northern Wastes had that as their advantage, although the Lord Ishavriel preferred the Southern desert to the Winter one. For one, there was life in the South that the Wastes did not boast, and where there was life, there was hunting.

But at night, the life was hidden.

Lord Ishavriel turned from his contemplation of the night sky. The constellations, unlike the world itself, had not changed much in the long absence of the
Kialli;
he therefore took some obscure comfort in naming them all. Humanity named the stars, attaching the brightest of their lights to the oldest of their stories. Even when the stories faded, the names remained, shorn of the depth of meaning.

But not shorn of all power.

The longest night was coming.

He had witnessed it, time and again, in the isolation of the Northern Wastes. He had marked its passing in the Lord's basin, while the Lord devoured what he had forbidden them: mortal souls. Lord Ishavriel had seen the brightest and the darkest of souls offered as sustenance to Allasakar. He had also destroyed a handful of his followers when the sight had driven them to the edge of madness. None of them were among the
Kialli
.

The
Kialli
had memory to sustain them. Memory of those places. Memory of these ones. Memory of the coming night.

But although they had marked the night, they had not
used
it. The seasons had been slow to return to them. The Northern Wastes, in particular, seemed a continuous piece of winter and winter's unchanging cold. But sooner or later—sooner, in Ishavriel's case— the sense of the old seasons returned.

The Winter road would be at its strongest when the night was longest.

In the South, they called it the Lady's Night. Arianne, in all of her glorious finery, might have approved. He wondered, briefly, where she was. If she still survived. They had warred, her people and his.

But never on Scarran.

No, on Scarran, they had often turned their time and attention to this: the desert. Because once, once before mortal memory, where the desert now stood there had been
life
. A gathering of mortals so vast it was almost impossible to believe it had dwindled into the pathetic Southern Terreans and the inscrutable Voyani caravans.

It was almost enough to cast all memory into doubt. Almost.

And that was a direction in which he did not wish to travel. He had much work to do, and little time to do it in. There was power here, buried in the same way a human heart is: beneath the flesh of the world and the cage of the desert. The other
Kialli
had not been wakened sufficiently; they did not seek from the desert what he did.

But in
this
desert, and only this one, all memory played him false. His Lord had decreed, and in anger, the desert had responded. The Cities of Man had been devoured. Lost to the world, lost to the men who had graced both wall and home, they had become part of the desert's heart.

And no one, perhaps not even the Lord Himself, knew where that heart now lay.

But those with the magic waking—waking quickly with the passage of days—were developing ambitions of their own. He knew that now he could find the resting place of at least one of those cities.

He began to cast.

To his great surprise, the desert resisted.

14th of Scaral, 427
AA

Tor Leonne

She woke from her troubled sleep with a start and rolled out of the bed, coming up against wooden planks on her heels, with both daggers gleaming in the moon's light.

"Steady," a familiar voice said.

The shadows resolved themselves into the shape of Elena. Elena with two daggers and no lamp.

She took a deep breath, and the daggers found their sheaths again. It would be minutes before her heart's beat returned to the steadiness she was familiar with. "What are you doing here?"

"You obviously didn't hear yourself shout," her cousin said, snorting at either end of the sentence. "I'd imagine we'll see—Ah."

In the moonlight, Kallandras the stranger had pulled back the flaps of her wagon. He stood like the definition of shadow, his face hidden, his hands free of the daggers that Elena had armed herself with.

Weaponless or no, she knew he was the more dangerous of the two.

"Matriarch," he said, and he offered her a Northern bow. "You are well?"

"Well, yes, and half-naked. Do you mind?" She stumbled into the edge of the pull-down table the wagon boasted, cursing. Her mother had never left it down.

"Here," Elena said, handing her the shirt that had become a pile beneath that table. "And here." She paused. "It's freezing, Margret. Are you wind-taken?"

"No. I'm tired of wearing last week's shirt."

Kallandras had not moved.

"Bard," Margret said, as she struggled into the shirt, teeth beginning to chatter as the truth of the night's chill bit a little more deeply. "If you were one of mine, I'd've broken your jaw by now. Can you learn to take a hint?"

"I can," he said. "Do you know what you said, Margret?"

"Said? I was sleeping!"

And then, at his back, she heard a voice that made his sound welcome. "You were sleeping, yes, but in sleep we're at our most defenseless, and the visions we can ignore while waking strike then."

She cursed as she struggled into her shirt and wound the sash over it, but she cursed
quietly
. Elena had already bent, albeit briefly, in two. "Yollana."

"Tell him," Yollana said.

"There's a slight problem with that," Margret replied, catching her unruly hair and knotting it.

"Which is?"

"I don't remember myself."

"You spoke in the old tongue," Elena prompted her softly. "And you sounded—"

"Terrified," Kallandras supplied, when Elena's groping for an appropriate word extended that hair's breadth too long.

"He's right," her cousin said. "Terrified. I didn't recognize your voice at all."

"You thought I was murdering someone in the privacy of my wagon?"

"Wouldn't be the first time you'd come close."

"Ha ha ha." She closed her eyes. Opened them almost immediately. Narrowed them. You could do a lot with eyes. "Matriarch," she said, to the oldest woman in the crowded wagon. "There is no circle here."

"No."

"And if someone listens to what we say?"

"We will be heard."

Margret nodded. She was silent for a long time, but it was obvious that she was thinking; her eyes had closed again. When she opened them, Elena, Kallandras, and Yollana were still waiting, clustered around her, and she had a sense, suddenly, that she had been in this room before, and would be again, with these three. There was a fourth shadow that was indistinct but present. She wondered whose it was.

"I was fighting for my life. I was bound," she added, "but the binding itself did not make me feel entrapped. It was as if—as if the binding were clothing or armor; I couldn't move while I was in it, but the fact that I couldn't move made me feel safe." She shrugged. "Not something I'd try when I was awake. I take no responsibility for any stupid thing I do in my dreams."

"Start," Yollana said unexpectedly.

"Pardon?"

"Start taking that responsibility." The old woman's voice was pinched and grave. Much as her own mother's had been when she was being peculiarly serious.

She
knew
that tone of voice. It was Matriarch business.

Frustration made her bite her lip, and then chew on it. Yollana knew it was Matriarch business, but Margret
hadn't
. Hells, Yollana wasn't even Arkosan.

"And finish," Yollana insisted. "The dream."