The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (4 page)

“It's an akarriden life-drinker, forged from flesh.  My bracer can connect to it like a body.  Except since it's not a complete body, the life it steals stays loose within it, so I can actually harvest it—inject it straight into myself.  Can't do that with any other source.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged.  “Enkhaelen explained about the...resistance of souls once, how you can't affect an enemy's life-force unless you overpower them spiritually.  Maybe I don't have enough leverage in the bracer.”

“But you can cut someone, and then heal yourself with the blade?”

“Basically, yes.  I—“  She shot a look at him.  “Don't you dare.“

He stuck his arm out to her.

“No.  Absolutely not,” she said, and tried to lurch up only to have her legs crumple beneath her.  Cob spilled the wolf from his lap but couldn't move fast enough to catch her, and she sprawled across the rock, cursing feverishly.

He tried to help, but she slapped at his hands, snarling.  Her makeshift hood fell back to show the green-and-gold sash she'd wrapped around her head to cover her missing ear and ravaged cheek, and when he hooked a finger into the fabric, she clamped her hands on his arm and hung there to keep him from pulling.  Fury knotted her face so thoroughly he thought she would bite him.

“Don't interfere!” she snapped.  “It was my fault, my foolishness.  Don't you dare try to take it on yourself.”

“Jus' let me help.”

“Not like this!”

“What else can I do?  Pikes, like you said, you stabbed me plenty already.  As long as I have the Guardian, you can't hurt me.”

She stared up at him with her broken eyes and for a moment he thought she might snap, or cry, and had no idea what he'd do if either happened.  But then a twisted little smile formed on her mouth, and she said, “You don't know me.”

“Maybe you don't know yourself.”

“Cob, just—  This is a bad idea.”

“It's practical.  And you don't have to actually stab me.  A little cut would work, right?”

She gave him a look of pure aggravation and he knew that he had won.  As she drew the red-runed black blade from its hiding place under her furs, though, apprehension banished his triumph.  Beside them, Arik flattened his ears and growled low, staring at the blade as its runes kindled with hungry light.

“All right, Your Cleverness, roll up your sleeve,” she said.  “Arm is less painful than hand.”

He obeyed, and she shifted closer, careful to hold the blade at a distance.  Hooking her left arm in with his right, she braced his forearm and steeled her expression, and he looked away, not wanting to see the cut.

Nothing happened.  After a long moment, he dared to glance back.

She was staring at his arm, fingers tight around his wrist to keep him from flinching, but had switched her grip on Serindas to point the blade away.  “What's this?” she said, tapping her thumb against a dark mark on his skin.

“It's...dirt?” he guessed.

“It's not dirt.”  She scratched at it with her thumbnail to no effect.  “Guardian residue?”

“Doesn't leave residue.”

“Then what?  It's under your skin.”

Eyeing it, Cob tried to think of what it could be.  Straight and narrow, it ran a few inches along the outer edge of his forearm like a stripe of charcoal, but—

Suddenly he remembered another akarriden blade, black-on-black, cutting toward him as he raised his arm in defense.

He swallowed.  “You, um, remember Erevard from camp?”

“Fendil's lover, with the scars.  What—“

“I saw him at Akarridi.”

Her eyes narrowed to steely slits.  “And?”

“...And he's one of you now.  Not the bracer people,” he said as she opened her mouth, “a different kind.  Scary teeth, looked like he'd been bleached.  He had one of those black swords, almost cut my arm off but Fiora whacked it away.”

Dasira's face clenched, then smoothed.  “Glad she was there,” she said tightly.  “The sword was all black?  Runes too?”

“Yeah.”

“And he cut you here?”  She tapped the black smudge.

“Yeah.”

“This is a problem, Cob.  Black runes mean rotblade.  It decomposes anything it cuts—flesh, wood, stone, metal—and you still have its trace on you.  The Guardian hasn't purged it.”

A chill ran up his spine.  It had been nine days since the fight by Akarridi.  If the Guardian hadn't managed to mend it in that time...  “Sometimes it itches,” he admitted.

She glared up at him, then fumbled Serindas awkwardly back into its sheath and took his forearm in both hands.  “No way am I stabbing you now,” she said, pressing at the line with her thumbs as if trying to split it apart.  “Flesh is sealed, no scar, and it doesn't hurt when I do this?”

“Well, now you're diggin' your nails in...”

“Sorry.  By all rights, your arm should have fallen off days ago, but...”

“So it's fine then,” he said with forced certainty, trying to pry himself from her grip.  “Guardian'll get rid of it eventually, nothin' to worry about.”

“Maybe.  What about Erevard?  Did he say anything?”

Cob remembered the look on Erevard's face: pure murderous hatred.  He shook his head.  “No, but he didn't have to.  He knew me, I knew him.  He wants me dead.”

“Then he'll be coming.”  Dasira tapped the mark.  “The rotblade left a piece of its essence in you.  It will be able to track you.  And when he arrives...”

She trailed off questioningly, watching him.  He looked away.  Whether she was asking if he would give her up as Fendil's true killer or if he would kill Erevard, he didn't know, but he couldn't answer either.  Their fates were his fault.

“We'll jus' have to keep an eye out,” he said.

Dasira's mouth compressed slightly, then opened.

Before she could speak, a sound of rushing footsteps came from the cave above.

They both looked over to see Lark striding out, face clenched with misery, an orange robe slung over her shoulder and Fiora and Ilshenrir close at her heels.  Cob glanced past them but saw no angry horde of wolves, and the ones that lounged at the cave mouth seemed indifferent.  Shaking Dasira's hands off, he rose and said, “What's wrong?”

Lark halted a few paces away, chest heaving as she tried to gather words.  Her dark eyes glimmered in the fading light, and the way her lips trembled made him want to hurt whoever caused it.  At her side, Fiora looked grim and unusually pale.

When the Shadow girl tried and failed to speak, only managing a weak choking noise, the Trifolder supplied quietly, “Bahlaer.  The Crimsons destroyed its Shadowland.  Dropped some of it into the goblin caverns.”

In his memory, Cob saw domes glowing in the dark: his one glimpse into that deep place where civilized goblins like Rian dwelt untroubled by the sunlit realm.  He saw the tavern and the dark-touched faces, some curious, some hostile.  And he saw Lark herself, in the tunnels after the massacre in the tavern, screaming at him about her friends.

“Pikes.  I'm sorry,” he said, stepping closer, and though she recoiled from his first touch on her shoulder, at the second she flung herself against him and buried her face into his chest, sobbing wretchedly.

He hugged her tight and let her cry, biting back his own emotions, and thought bloody thoughts toward the Army he had fled.  As of now, he regretted nothing.

Chapter 2 – The Plan

There was little conversation after the news of Bahlaer.  Instead, they sat together under the cave-mouth's overhang and tried to be there for Lark, who had a hard time stopping her tears.  Fiora did most of the comforting, and Arik—still in wolf-form—offered his shaggy shoulder to be wept into; Cob, Ilshenrir and Dasira provided a shield from the other wolves' prying eyes.

Though he knew there was nothing he could have done, Cob still felt guilty for drawing attention to the Bahlaer Shadowland.  Lark's accusation in the wraith forest kept bobbing back up:
'You ruin everything you touch.'

Regarding his dirt-flecked hands, he had to wonder if she was right.  Fendil, Erevard, Weshker and the others.  Paol Cray.  Geraad the mage.  Rian, still missing.  The caravaners he had traveled with.  The Haarakash civilians.  His friends.

All innocents swept up in his wake.

Enkhaelen's fault
, he told himself, but the accusation couldn't stick.  The necromancer hadn't initiated anything.  Even at the Riftwatch towers, he had been reacting to Rian's discovery.  He was a massacring bastard, but he'd done it to cover them.

Still, Cob knew his path.  As the hitching sobs turned slowly to sniffles, then to murmurs behind him, he focused on the snowy forest spread out below and the myriad figures slowly filtering through the trees.

The wolves had spread their net wide for this council.  In addition to the hog-folk and the cat-man, he watched a group of bears amble up and be diverted toward the makeshift campsite, followed by two large-eyed people in huge white feather cloaks, a yawning lizard-faced person, another of copper leaf and wire, and several dozen bark-covered individuals with knobby feet and twisted fingers.  All looked up the hill to Cob and bowed their heads in varying degrees of sincerity, and he made sure to nod back.

By the time the sun dipped behind the trees, the snow had been trampled to mud, and Cob's stomach was growling.  He hadn't eaten since his arrival—not inclined toward the sausages they'd offered—and though the Guardian sustained him, it couldn't quell his hunger.

He was just starting to consider the local shrubs when he spotted the female from the welcome party loping toward them from the hogs' camp.  Even in humanoid form she moved with a wild grace, and the sentinel wolves parted for her as if they knew the import of her business.  As she started up the hill, Cob put on his official Guardian face.  Something stern but welcoming, in command yet not overbearing.  Dignified.

He was sure he looked like he had a stick up his ass, but by the obsequious way she approached, it worked.

“Guardian, I am Ressah,” she said in her rough, low voice.  “We have assembled all those who would come.  Please, join us.  ...And your companions, if you wish.”

Cob nodded, then raised a hand.  “Before that, I should...  D'you know if those are poisonous?”  He gestured toward a patch of shrubs, some still enticingly leafy.

Furred ears cocking quizzically, she looked to the shrubs then back to him.  “I...do not believe so.  Why?”

“Well, your hospitality's been good, but as the Guardian, I can't, um, eat meat...”

“Oh!”  She clapped her hands together, then gestured toward the hogs' camp.  “Yes, of course, Guardian, we know your needs.  We do not keep plant-foods, so we asked the Gnashed Tusk to provide for you.  They were happy to oblige.  We all shall feast!”

“Oh.  Great,” he said, and looked back to his friends.  Their faces ran the full spectrum from amusement to fear, but Arik helped Dasira to her feet and Fiora kept an arm hooked around Lark, and together they all followed Ressah down into the trees.

As they passed through the thin forest, Cob began to catch glimpses of firelight and figures ahead, and his gut tightened with apprehension.  He willed up the Guardian's antlers, then the whole of its armor: black bark and stone that covered him from hooves to collarbones, a semi-fluid encasement that felt at once embracing and suffocating.

Right now, both feelings were welcome.  They reminded him that this was temporary—that he didn't want the spirit to stay.  As soon as the hunt was done, he would be free.

'If you insist,'
said Haurah.

He flinched, and glanced sideways to find the wolf-woman Guardian ambling casually at his elbow.  Her chestnut-brown hair hung loose about her shoulders and her pale eyes gleamed with reflected light.  Catching his gaze, she smiled broadly.

So you finally show up
, he thought at her, knowing she was just a vision.  One of the Guardian's many fragments. 
I thought you'd stopped talking to me.

'We've been conferring amongst ourselves,'
she said, and turned her gaze ahead.  He looked her over briefly, marking how similar her garb was to that of the wolf-folk: rough leather and fur, cut close but tied loosely, allowing for protection from thorns and rocks but easily removed.  She seemed bigger than her kin, but as a hallucination he imagined she could look like anything.  Which was probably why she hadn't furred up to compensate for the minimal coverage of her vest.

She made a warning sound and he looked forward just in time to avoid breaking his nose on a tree.  Behind him, one of the girls snickered.

'We thought you might need some time alone,'
she continued calmly. 
'Our partnership has been stormy, and we did not wish to seem overbearing.'

So instead you let me get paranoid.

'That was not our intent, little bird.  We are simply concerned.  We have never had a vessel we did not thoroughly mesh with, and while we want what you want, we are not certain that you are our best option.'

He was about to ask why, but the trees ended in a fire-lit clearing and he halted, surprised.

It was not a small space but, bordered on two sides by rock and the rest by trees, it had an insulated feeling.  The hog-folk had pitched tents against the low cliff wall and were now gathered at the bonfire with their cook-pots, the cat-man and the lizard-person lingering among them.  On the other side were the wolf-folk, a span of empty ground separating them from the hogs.  The bears made an island of dark fur within their ranks; further out, the wood-folk lingered in the shadows of the bare boughs.  The pair in feather cloaks—which Cob now realized were closely folded wings—perched atop the rock wall over the hogs' camp, their huge eyes glowing with firelight, and the copper person stood stiffly amid the scree of stones at the far end.

Scattered throughout the gathering were short, broad-bodied, flat-faced people with striated skin and eyes like garnets.  As Cob hesitated, heads turned, and the short people stood respectfully, their shale-like layered clothing clacking with their movements.

Cob couldn't help it.  He froze.

A part of him scoffed.  They were here to meet the Guardian; his Stag-ancestor's fear had no reason to rear its antlered head.  But logic meant nothing to it.  So many people, so many predators—

The wolf-folk glanced past him to his friends, showing their teeth in disdain, and a spasm of anger broke the paralysis.

That's right.  This isn't about me.  It's about gaining knowledge and keeping my friends alive.  And I can do that.  I could crush these wolves in my rocky fist, but I won't, because we all want the same thing.  We have to.

At his side, he thought he saw Haurah smile.

“Friends,” he said loudly, because that was what he needed them to be.  “I'm glad you've come.  I need advice.”

With that, he strode through the gap toward the rocky slope on the far side, where a few big slabs sprawled like fallen altars of old gods.  Wolves leaned out to sniff at him, and the stony people reached with their spade-like hands to brush his armor, but he ignored them, hoping they'd give his friends more space.

Reaching the slope, he clambered up the loose scree and surmounted one of the slabs.  His black stone hooves adhered to it easily; with the Guardian awake, nothing short of the Ravager could knock him off a rock.

From that vantage, he found himself above all the crowd but the owl-folk, who watched with inscrutable sharpness.  His friends split around the slab to rest in two groups, all close on the slope: Lark and Fiora on the left, Arik and Ilshenrir and Dasira on the right.  He wondered if they'd discussed it—if they'd thought this was safest.  Humans on one side, outcasts on the other.

Marshaling his thoughts, he said, “First, does everyone here speak Imperial?  I don't want to be misunderstood.”

The wolf-woman Ressah, who had been joined by a wolf-man and now stood a cautious distance down-slope, said, “No, Guardian, nor is it the most comfortable tongue for us.  But we can all speak or understand Thiolanc, if it pleases you.”

'The wolf-tongue,'
said Haurah.  He flicked a look at her, then blinked when he spotted the other Guardians arrayed around the slab, among his friends.

Can you translate again?
he thought.

'Easily.  Simply speak, and it will be as if you are a wolf.'

“Then I speak your tongue so you know my will,” he said aloud, and was less surprised by the clacks and yips that came from his mouth than by the simplification of his words.  “I am the Guardian Ko Vrin.  These of my pack are under my protection, and you will not harm them.  You will also listen to them, for they are wise in things beyond the forest.  The quillwolf will speak for them and you will not interrupt him.  Understand?”

A rumble of assent went through the crowd.  Cob glanced to Arik and said, in Imperial, “You all right wi' that?  Bein' everyone's voice?”

The big man stared at him with flattened ears, but nodded.

Returning his attention forward, Cob said, “Now, I am hungry.”

A ripple of laughter went through the crowd, and he blushed; he'd meant to mention food, not demand it.  He could feel the ground through his stone-shod feet, though, and beyond it the gathered people: hungry and nervy and uncertain themselves.  As the hog-folk began pulling pots and pans off the bonfire, the general mood shifted toward anticipation.  Much better.

Below, Ressah and the male retreated to their pack, and he watched as they held a whuffed conversation then traded an odd packet up to the front.  Ressah sniffed it, then nodded to her kin and skittered up to the slab to present it from a cringing posture.

Cob crouched down, puzzled.  In the waning light, it took a moment for him to recognize it as a cut of meat wrapped in skin.

“For the quillwolf, if you approve, Guardian,” said Ressah, still quailing as if expecting a blow.  “In deference to your blood and the Gnashed Tusk, we took neither deer nor hog but goat.”

Cob frowned at the implication that he might be violently offended by venison.  Back in Kerrindryr, the villagers had considered the local deer too sacred to hunt, but that hadn't stopped him from eating it when it was available—mainly scraps while he was enslaved at the quarry.  It wasn't cannibalism.  The Stag was dead, permanently dividing its animal descendants from the humans that bore its blood.

But if avoiding it made the wolves feel better, that was fine.

“It's acceptable,” he said, and watched as she turned toward Arik.  The big skinchanger had donned his chiton again and stood as if guarding Dasira and Ilshenrir, but as Ressah approached, his ears flattened and his tail tucked.  By the time she was close enough to present the meat, they had both hunched defensively, the fur on their shoulders half-hackled.

The meat changed hands, then Ressah backed away.

“Thank you,” Cob told her.  She glanced to him and inclined her head, ears settling back to a calm position, and at the breaking of the stare the pack behind her seemed to exhale a common breath.  Hackles smoothed, gazes turned away, and even Arik relaxed his stance.

'Not bad, for a Stag,'
said Haurah.  He glanced over to find her crouched beside him, smiling without showing teeth.  With her dark hair spilling over one fur-trimmed shoulder and the late light in her slanted eyes, she looked exotic and feral—and very close.  Had she been real, he would have felt her breath.

He looked away quickly.

Might work better if you advised me during the situation instead of commenting after
, he thought, then cursed himself for how sulky his inner voice sounded.

'And how would you learn, if we did it all for you?'

That why you didn't join me in the spar?

'Yes.  We can not carry you.  You must learn to use your own feet—to dance.  All life is a dance: hunt and flee, mate and part, endless convergence and separation.  We can not know each other until we have tangled and unwound.'

Cob reddened.  Hearing this advice in Haurah's husky voice was not helpful.  But she looked away as she spoke, and he saw no teasing in her face but something wild and sad.

At a loss for words, he glanced to the crowd and saw two hog-folk approaching.  He straightened and tried to regain some semblance of the Guardian face.

Both easily topped eight feet in height, their large heads planted squarely between heavy shoulders with only the merest suggestion of neck.  They wore the armor-like garb from earlier, but now, closer, he realized they were not as covered as he had thought; some of the patches that had seemed like rough-worked leather were in fact their own thick skin, marked with whorls of paint.  Far heavier in the upper body than in the gut or almost-delicate legs, they walked as if at any moment they might fall to all fours.  Strings of beads and old, yellowed tusks adorned them like chains of rank.