The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (45 page)

He did not need the reminder.  Nor did he care to sympathize.  They were not the same.

As the distance shrank, the thread of smoke became a cord, then a column.  He squinted, puzzled; it was Enkhaelen's little ship, which had skipped out of Erosei's watery grip like an ice-dancer every time he drew close.  More sail than vessel, almost, and now the whole thing was burning.

His hands fisted on the swords' hilts, breath coming shallow as he tried to guess what it meant.  Perhaps Enkhaelen planned to kill him and steal his ship, but he had countermeasures for that; he knew how water affected the fire-blooded freak and had already planned to anchor far off-shore, then take a rowboat in.  He doubted Enkhaelen could manage to row back.

And the island itself was just a dot in the Lisalhan Sea.  It had taken a tall stack of coins before Erosei's captain had agreed to this route, since most wise captains hugged the coastline lest they be sunk by the dwellers beneath the waves.  This whole sea was cursed, and no place in it more so than this island.

The Seal of Water.  The shattered remains of the Pillar of the Sea.

Enkhaelen had already opened the five landlocked Seals, and now his ship burned in a place where no ships dared come without a well-paid cause.  In his pursuit, Erosei had seen no evidence of accomplices to Enkhaelen's crimes—only victims, like the climbing team Enkhaelen had hired then devoured along the way to Howling Spire's summit.  He imagined that the ship's crew burned along with their vessel.

“Do you mean to die here?” he murmured to the wind.  “For I would be pleased to oblige you.”

But he had to wonder—

Blinking, Cob halted, trying to make sense of the thin light that had taken the place of his seafaring vision.  His feet and the cracked sands reminded him, and he pulled off the eye-guard and squinted fiercely against the glare from the salt.

“What?” he said, turning to the others, but they were not looking at him.  He followed their attention southwest, to where something small and greyish wove drunkenly across the salt toward them, emitting short, pained cries.

“What is—“ he started again, but then he felt it: a small life pattering through the dust, familiar.  “Rian!” he said, and broke from the column to intercept the goblin.

The others followed but his legs were longest and he felt no weariness.  He reached Rian well in the lead and fell to one knee, laid the tectonic lever down and scooped the goblin close.  Even from a distance he had sensed suffering, but seeing it now—the huge eyes bloodshot, skin abraded and peeling, dark hands and feet cracked from constant contact with the salt—was like a stab in the gut.

Rian knotted skinny fingers into his robe and clung, whimpering when Cob tugged at his harness to check the sunburn on his back.  His entire scalp and what patches of skin were not covered by straps or scraps had gone a weird ruddy grey, and Cob felt the feverish heat even without touching.  A glass bottle hung from the harness, empty.

“Rian!  Oh Shadow, Rian!” cried Lark as she rushed up then half-collapsed against Cob in shock and relief.  Her hand trembled as she reached to touch the goblin's cheek.  A mewl, then Rian raised his head from Cob's chest and held an arm out for his surrogate mother.

Cob relinquished him to her, grimacing as she burst into tears.  The creak of cart-wheels approached, and he turned to rummage through the packs in the cart for a cup.  The water elemental in the keg raised a tendril in greeting as he lifted the lid, and he smiled wanly and dipped the cup.

“Gonna need some swaddling for him,” he told Fiora, who nodded and pulled down a pack.

Cautiously he approached the two again.  The Shadow girl had the goblin cradled in her arms, tears still streaming down her cheeks though her mouth held a wavery smile, her back to the sun to give him some shade.  Rian's fingers were locked in her robe-front, head nestled against her chest, and the half-blind adoration he turned on her was nothing short of childlike.  It twinged Cob's heart, and he moved to add his shadow to hers, offering the cup.

“Sip slowly,” he said.  “Don't wanna bring it back up.”

The goblin whined, then squirmed upright enough to take the cup.  He looked exhausted.  Cob could not fathom how he had gotten here, let alone found them.

Then he saw the silvery glint beneath the harness.

“Pike me,” he muttered, suddenly ill at ease.  He found the cord around the goblin's neck and tugged it free, and there it was: the crystalline arrowhead.

Superstition screamed for him to throw it away.  No matter how many times he lost it, it kept returning.  The last time he'd seen it was when Lark shot it into Enkhaelen's back.

But Rian had come a long way with it—and it was his.  A token of survival, even if that survival had in truth been the Guardian's work.  With a sigh, he hooked the cord over his head and let it fall down under his tunic, to its proper place against his skin.

Sudden impressions hit him like a hammer between the eyes.  Black basalt walls, magma, corpses, books in piles, skittering constructs, a portal-frame, a mirror that worked like a window, misshapen men and women in black, a maze of white walls and howling floors, a vicious scathing light—

And Enkhaelen.  Myriad Enkhaelens—working, watching, laughing, furious, frustrated, afraid—

'I hope this will help,'
whispered a half-familiar voice. 
'I only wish I could do more.'

Rattled, Cob sat down in his tracks.  The visions ebbed, but he felt them like a pulse on his skin, emanating from the arrowhead alongside its usual chill. 
Geraad
, he recalled. 
The mind-mage I left with Rian.

His mouth quirked up.  He didn't know how Geraad had come by this information, but he could already tell that it would be useful.  Maybe enough to have hope.  And it was good to learn that the mage had escaped, and was well.

“Cob, you all right?” said Dasira, and he looked up to find her frowning over him.  They had all crowded around him and Lark and Rian in an impromptu rest-break, and he knew it would be a while before the goblin was in any condition to move.

“Yeah, fine,” he said, pushing to his feet.  His mind was swarming; he wanted to take a long walk and examine the arrowhead, revisit Erosei's memory, mesh it all together.  But he had obligations, so he lifted the tectonic lever and tried not to be bothered by the way everyone flinched.

Carefully he cracked through the salt with the chisel-end, then pushed down into the sand.  It felt like a network, the grains compressed together but not yet cemented, still malleable—and deeply reassuring.  After the vision, he'd been half-sure that the black water was lurking below.  Focusing on his intent, he started deep and then lifted, bringing the tectonic lever up into an arc with a wave of sand following its tip until he forced it solid.

He opened his eyes to find a quarter-dome of glittering new rock above them, eight feet wide and three thick at its base.  His friends stared at him, including the goblin, and he said defensively, “Ilshenrir's no good at makin' shade.”

Dasira sighed.

They rested in the concave of the wave for a while, Cob at one edge and Ilshenrir at the other, as Lark and Fiora and Arik coddled the goblin shamelessly and Dasira looked on with blank disinterest.  As much as Cob would have liked to join in the reunion now that it was less tearful—the girls having cobbled together a salve from mashed oats and some residue scraped from the crossbow bolts Lark still carried—he couldn't figure out how to fit into that group.  As the Guardian, his aura could aid the goblin from a distance, and he didn't have anything to say.

Meanwhile, the arrowhead demanded his attention.

Pushing their chatter from his mind, he focused on it.  Beneath the initial swarm of impressions were layers upon layers of compacted information, and with some effort he figured out how to peel them apart and experience them singly, like memories with psychic narration.

Some took place in a warren of black chambers beneath what Geraad indicated was the Citadel at Valent, including a laboratory full of corpses and arcane tools.  Others occurred within the white walls of the Imperial Palace.  As he examined the latter, he felt the Guardian tugging for his attention, and opened his eyes to find Haurah leaning over him.  The scenery behind her made his stomach lurch: a panorama of swamp, matte-white paths, bridges, plazas and low outbuildings, with the grander struts and spires of the Palace looming in the distance.

'I thought you might like to see the outside as well,'
she said, settling cross-legged before him.  As far as he could tell, they were alone on a soft mossy hummock.

“Thanks,” he muttered, less than pleased.  Already a part of him was on alert, as if the swamp might rise to eat him.  “After the thing with Erosei, I thought you'd all be hiding.”

She sat back on her hands, smiling crookedly. 
'Erosei needs a good spanking now and then, and I'm pleased you gave it to him.  He just likes to be obstructive.'

All of you pikers do.
  “But why?”

'Perhaps he's sensitive about what happened.  I know I used to be.  I suppose...'
  She ducked her head, letting her dark hair shade her expression. 
'I suppose I was ashamed that I defied the Guardian and abandoned my pack, my cubs, for a mission that came to nothing.'

Cob suppressed his annoyance.  It wasn't charitable.  “I get that.  Not like there aren't things I don't want brought up.”

She gave him a faint smile, then gestured to the arrowhead. 
'So that thing knows the Palace's insides?  Can you show me?  I never got that far.'

He nodded and focused on it, trying to push the memory outward.  It unfurled more easily than he had expected, dispelling the swamp-scape in a tide of eye-straining white that solidified into the smooth, strangely organic curves and filigrees of the throne-room—then vanished beneath a miasma of colors.

Confused, Cob tried to sweep them away only to find that they were emotions: bright mists of joy and reverence, strong yellow spikes of fear, and spots of coiled grey scrutiny.  Somewhere ahead in the mist was a presence like a barricade, rigid black with suspicion and a faint blue tinge of hope, while above shone a figure too bright to look at directly, even in memory.

And behind it, like a halo, a blood-red hatred veined with spite...

Haurah sidled through the image as if it was real, wolf-tail held low and wary.  He noticed how the mist separated around her almost like people making space, and wondered if this was dangerous.  Wondered what else would change if they nudged it.

Mentalism had always terrified him.  Staring out from the perspective of a mind-mage—for he could feel Geraad's own emotions like a shroud, cold control and quicksilver anxiety stitched tight—did nothing to dispel that fear.

'You can't make this any clearer?'
called Haurah from among the misty figures.

“No idea.”

'Well, could you try?  I think I see—'

“Cob?”

Again, Cob blinked back to reality, this time to find Fiora watching him.  “What were you looking at?” she said, nodding past him to the desert.

“Jus'...memories.”  He held up the arrowhead.  “Sorry.  Are we ready to get goin'?”

“I think so.”  She looked back, and Cob followed her gaze to Rian: asleep in a sling Lark had rigged across her chest, his long-toed feet twitching slightly in dreams.  “Poor little fellow, but I think he'll be all right.  He just needs some rest.”

“He told me he's been traveling for days.  From Valent,” said Lark, looking up from the goblin at last.  Despite red-rimmed eyes, her expression held more peace than he had ever seen in it.

Cob nodded and was just getting to his feet when he felt something odd through his bare soles.  Grabbing the tectonic lever, he focused through it to find the source.

Footfalls.  Half a mile southwest.

Making a silencing gesture, he leaned out past the frozen wave to squint that way, and caught the glint of light on metal.  “Soldiers,” he said, drawing sounds of alarm from the others.  “Either followed Rian or finally found us after the village.”

“He did say something about a watchpost,” Lark hedged, “but who would follow a goblin?”

“I told you that would come back to bite us,” said Dasira.

Cob scowled.  He would not apologize for his actions.  From the increasing presence of footfalls, he estimated thirty armored men and five individuals with lighter boots—maybe mages.  Not a great threat, but still problematic.

Which way do we go?  Straight west would let them intercept us, and I don't want to kill them—they're just following orders.  Northwest toward Dasira's snake-lands?  Who knows how far they'd follow.  We might have to run all the way to the Palace.

Or straight north?  Try to lose them in the bad salt.  They might have mages but we have me and Ilshenrir, and Das to spot the dangers.  Unless they call in the haelhene, there would be nothing to fear but the terrain...

“We can't run with the cart,” said Dasira, pulling her pack from it.

Fiora sputtered, “We can't leave it!  We need water!”

“What do you propose, then—a fight?”

Cob opened his mouth at the same moment a bright blue bolt of energy lanced out from the approaching soldiers.  Ilshenrir sprang forward, hands raised, but it skimmed right past his wards to slam into its target: the water barrel.  Splinters and fine mist sprayed everywhere.