Oathkeeper (6 page)

Twisting and writhing in the dark, Cadence tore with her egg tooth at the wet sack of protein from which she must emerge or die; the tiny thing with rust-colored scales she had become in this vision burst free into the sultry atmosphere of the egg crèche. Tasting the air with a minuscule gray tongue, she/it sensed danger. Fighting the urge to eat the rest of her shell casing while it was still fresh, the newborn quested, her (his?) yellow eyes barely open, for the source of alarm.

Behind you!
hissed a voice in her mind, high, haughty, and filled with hate . . . but accurate.

The newborn spun, skittering to the right, sliding back between the wall and the rough apple-sized egg of another Sri'Zaur struggling to be born. A wedge-shaped head darted after her, reptilian death wrought in miniature, striking once, but missing. Chemicals flooded the little newborn's brain; every nerve ending screamed for Cadence to flee, to run, to hide, to—

Up and over your fellow broodling's egg
, the voice snapped.
The egg tooth is much better than our claws or teeth now. Your brother is big, but stupid. Eat him first and then your egg
.

Scrabbling up and over the nearest leathery sac, tiny claws finding easy purchase in the rough brown casing of her yet-to-be-born brood mate's current home, the newborn started in terror when she was greeted with the hissing jaws of the larger broodling. Striking despite her fear, the newborn used her egg tooth like a mighty horn, first to batter then to pierce. Her brother scratched and mewled, but the newborn could see, as if on a set of designer's schematics, where to strike to find blood and bring death. As she feasted upon her brother, the voice in her head chuckled, soft as a whisper.

Eat the brains and heart, then move on to our other brothers
, the voice ordered.
If you kill all twelve and emerge as sole survivor we get to pick a name. I refuse to be called second hatchling of the Twelfth Brood of Lagara
.

Hunt.

Eat.

Devour.

Tired, clawed, and bitten, the slight reptile small enough to fit into a human's cupped hands emerged from the crèche, slick with dark blood. Even the voice in her mind sounded tired. Both breeds, Zaur and Sri'Zaur, were born speaking three languages: Tol, Zaurtol, and Eldrennaic. One in ten thousand hatchlings stepped out to face the crèche guardian, a sole survivor of his clutch . . . but only one in ten thousand years of births and deaths hissed, “I am Xastix” before killing the crèche guardian, too.

*

“Xastix,” Cadence coughed as the vision released her. “Who?”

Her ears popped, followed by the same sensation at the center of her skull. Bright sparks of light swam before her eyes. As they cleared, the room drew into a level of pristine clarity the likes of which she had only ever experienced twisting crystal.

Eyes wide, Sedric backed away.

Panic.

Fear.

Power.

Hate.

But not from Sedric. Well, not all from Sedric. Just the first two. The last two were—

Sedric
, she meant to speak, but thought instead,
I had a vision and—

Without meaning to, she sent the vision directly to his mind, showing him, letting him feel exactly what she felt and saw.

“A moment, child.” He reeled. “Be still. Let me process this.”

And to prove you are not limited to the past . . .
, Aldo's voice echoed.

Cadence screamed as her mind jerked free of her body and flew across the Junland Bridge and just beyond Castleguard where four Aern ran from King Mioden's knights.

“The Aern,” she choked both on the knowledge that filled her mind and the words as she tried to speak rather than think them at Sedric. “Four of them. Overwatches. They're going to kill them. Tell the kholster of the Token Hundred at South Gate. They belong to Rae'en. I can see the connection stretching all the way to Oot.”

As she spoke the words, the world went away, but as it did, the panic left her, replaced by a muted calm.

*

“Overextended at last.” The old Long Speaker knelt over the young woman, grimly checking for a pulse. She was warm under his hands, feverish in fact. He found her heartbeat: a faint but steady rhythm beating far more steadily and slower than his own racing heart. She would live. Terrifying as she was, she would survive.
If I let her
.

“Curse you, Kholster,” he muttered, forcing himself to his feet, back creaking as he rose. “Leaving me this with which to contend.”

He paced slowly around the unconscious woman counterclockwise, chanting very softly in Yvagg, a language he had created solely as a linguistic game when he was a novice. “
Ossec issep ojeg roh. Ilmer issep ojeg soh.
” The words meant very little, merely a mnemonic device to focus his mind, but they helped to make his actions seem mystical, and he was used to them. Speaking the phrase had become a well-worn path through his mind to exactly the portion upon which he needed to call.

Cadence rose lightly into the air, levitating over and settling gently upon her small cot. The old Long Speaker gazed down at her, his face contorted with indecision. If he let her live she would be trouble, but she had been entrusted into his care by the Aern who had scant days ago become the god of death.

He uttered a few more words, extending his left arm. Air rushed around his hand, sending his sleeve flapping. A loud snap sounded, and a long, thin staff appeared in the air. It materialized core first, the outside slowly forming counterclockwise. When it was complete, the staff was six feet tall and held at its tip a cat's-eye stone the size of a hawk's egg, black with a vertical vein of gold running through it. He dug his staff's steel-capped bottom into the trainee's meditation mat and muttered in an irritated tone, “Tell the kholster of the Token Hundred at South Gate? Because they are within walking distance, I presume. Bah! If there is one thing I cannot abide, it is young Long Speakers who do not accept that the world is much smaller than they presume it be.”

He turned the staff's eye to face him and peered into it deeply. A small horizontal slit opened in the center of his forehead, revealing a stone exactly matching the one mounted on his staff. When he spoke, a blue nimbus surrounded it, glowing more brightly the longer he continued. “From Sedric, dean of the Guild City Long Speaker's College and Possessor of the Seventh Eye to whomever is currently stationed at the North Gate Relay.” He pictured the predetermined geometric shape currently used to designate North Gate. “I have it on . . . good authority . . . that four young Overwatches who have recently passed through your gate have or will shortly run into trouble in Castleguard. You are to relay this information to the kholster of the Token Hundred on the Dwarven side of the gate immediately.”

Blue light, visible only to those with Long Skills coalesced around the staff's head, then fired into the air. The energy pierced the wall along the most direct path to North Gate and vanished into the night. After a few moments, the Third Eye closed, and the adrenaline rush that accompanied all successful transmissions pulsed through him.

He paused.

Technically that was sufficient. Technically.

Sedric gazed down at Cadence's slowly breathing body and considered his Seventh Eye. Most Long Speakers had a Third Eye. Advanced Long Speakers had a fourth and perhaps a fifth for discreet communications and for projecting boards and game pieces for the various amusements in which the idle rich liked to engage with one another over long distances. If the Long Speakers used these moments to glean bits and pieces of information from the unprotected minds of the merchants and royals to whom they sold their services at the same time . . . well, that knowledge was kept within the Long Speaker hierarchy, so whom did it actually harm?

Each stone or crystalline eye was implanted into the psychic space every collegially trained Long Speaker housed in their brain, a practical merging of magic and mental power.

Only those with the most calculating, focused minds could survive the implantation process, and though Khalvadian Long Speakers had been long renowned as the best, the Hulsite school of training was finally coming into its own, largely because of Sedric's rise to power in the Guild Cities' school.

Few had a Sixth Eye; it was reserved for messages so secret that no chance of interception could be risked. The Sixth Eye allowed a handful of Long Speakers to communicate directly mind to mind, instantaneously. It was also incredibly draining.

Only three Long Speakers in the whole of Barrone possessed a Seventh Eye. One was the Guild Master of the Khalvadian Long Speakers Guild; the second was the Headmaster of the Khalvadian Long Speakers Academy. The third was Sedric.

The Seventh Eye burned like a tiny sun, so bright it was difficult to look at. At times, its presence drowned out all surrounding thought, granting sweet yet disturbing moments of complete mindquiet.

Sedric's own father had died trying to accept the Seventh Eye, but Sedric had succeeded where every Long Speaker in fourteen generations of his family had failed. The Seventh Eye was a weapon, pure and simple. It was also the reason the rate for Sedric's services was twenty times that of a Revered Master Long Speaker.

Sedric calmly invoked the eye but did not open it. Even so, it illuminated the stone cell with a hellish red light. A thin crimson line pulsed an inch above his wispy eyebrows.

It could be used to kill, to maim . . . it could also be used to purposefully burn out another Long Speaker's abilities. And yet Kholster had placed this woman in his care, under his protection, to be trained . . . not handicapped and discarded.

“Hells,” he cursed, dismissing the Seventh Eye. “Hells. Hells and triple hells besides. I'll likely boil in the Bone Queen's bathwater for it, but . . .”

He opened his Sixth Eye and reached directly into the mind of the Head Long Speaker positioned at the Castleguard Relay:
Cassandra, this is Sedric, dean of the Guild City Long Speaker's College and Possessor of the Seventh Eye. I ask this very respectfully as you are a Revered Master Long Speaker and Possessor of the Sixth Eye, not to mention the fact that your mother is a Possessor of the Seventh Eye, my senior and mentor: What in all the Maker's creation is going on up there in Castleguard?

CHAPTER 5

DEATH WALKS ALONE

Under the same moon, deep in tunnels hidden from its light, reptilian hordes clashed with rank upon rank of sentient Aernese armor beneath West Watch. The death god, Kholster, formerly the leader of the Aern, walked among them. Kholster moved through the three main prongs of battle winnowing the souls of the fallen. He hurled spirits of the dead into the Horned Queen's clutches without comment, question, or pause. Each step took him to a new dying mortal.

None saw the grim-faced deity in his bone-wrought armor until their souls were gripped in his pale white gauntlets beneath the crimson scrutiny of his warsuit's crystalline eyes. He did not wonder whether they knew there was a face behind that Irkanth skull helm with its leonine lines and curving horns. The Harvester came when needed, warpick across his back.

It hadn't always been that way. Only days ago, he'd been burning, wounded by Ghaiattri flame through the bond he'd shared with Bloodmane, his warsuit . . . his former warsuit. Over the six-hundred-year exile since the Sundering, they had grown apart, a chasm that only widened when it came time to redeem Kholster's oath to slay his former masters, the Eldrennai . . . the Oathbreakers. Bloodmane had believed that a way should be found to forgive them.

That rift had become strong enough that when he'd finally been reunited with his warsuit, his second skin, when Kholster touched the armor with his hand, his palm had sizzled. Used to being able to flow back into his armor if slain, the warsuit protecting and preserving his soul until his body could be repaired, the bones stripped of meat, interred in the warsuit and the warsuit filled with blood, protein with which he could rebuild his body, Kholster had not realized the true extent of the problem until the last moment. When the fire slew him and his soul pulled free, rocketing across the miles between him and his warsuit, as his soul touched the warsuit, he had begun to burn, to Bloodmane's dismay.

Torgrimm, the god of birth and death, had stepped between them, giving Kholster the option to choose his death or Bloodmane's. When he opted to die rather than slay his own creation, Torgrimm had presented Kholster with a second opportunity, to fight Torgrimm for a portion of his power and then use that power to try to set right a wrong growing within the heavens.

In many ways, being a god was no different than being Armored and First of One Hundred. Variations of temperature meant nothing to him. But as he trod from death to death, his path led him not only into the dark tunnels where the warsuits of his former people the Aern waged war upon the reptilian Zaur, but to the jungles of Gromm where the envenomed fangs of an hourglass spider found the unprotected flesh of an explorer's ankle, aging its victim to dust, to a sickbed in Darvan where the God Speaker's husband lay stricken by the weeping reds, and elsewhere to harvest the souls of peoples and in places of which Kholster had not even dreamt when he had been mortal.

Odors and sounds assailed his senses in the way he imagined his closest friend, Vander, Second of One Hundred, or one of the other Overwatches might feel as they leapt from mind to mind in battle gathering data and relaying it to their kholster—would his name remain both a verb and a rank, he wondered, now that he was death?—in a cohesive broadcast, allowing him or her to make judgment calls, alter strategy, and . . .

When he collected the soul of the Root Tree Tranduvallu, Kholster sighed, taking only minor solace in the six little Vael lives who had escaped the slaughter. It seemed only right that the young Vael who charged heedless of the flames to clear the wreckage wore a face so similar to his own, the same hard jaw and wolfish expression. Even though Kholburran, like all Vael, had much longer ears almost akin to a donkey's, they were similarly placed: set higher up on the head than a human's or an Eldrennai's, much the same as an Aern's. Kholster's own ears looked more wolfish, with the same shape and motility though without the furry coat.