The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (79 page)

“Yeh!” he called down, because otherwise she'd climb up.  He could catch a few more moments alone, maybe, before he absolutely had to return to his job.

Which was another thing that boggled his mind.  Though he'd been slotted among the scouts, when the time finally came to receive a mission it hadn't been about scouting at all.  It was just observing: marks upon marks spent at the edge of the training yard, staring at the soldiers as they came and went and reporting any weird sights to his two handlers.

He barely knew what 'weird' meant.  The mentalist who had explained his mission hadn't been any more helpful, talking about 'auras' and 'presences' and spirits as if he should know what they looked like.  So far, he'd spent three whole days squinting at Crimsons, and the most spirit-like things he'd seen had been the crows on the rooftops, watching him back.

Broken crows.  Twisted crows, their chests deformed like the tattoo on his shoulder.  He'd pointed them out to his handlers but neither woman could see them.

Sometimes, though, he'd look at a person and catch a stroke of dizziness, or feel his eyes try to cross—as if he couldn't focus on them right.  He'd point those people out to the women and they'd make a note, but what happened after that...he didn't know.

Nor did he know what had happened to Sanava.  After their disastrous last encounter, he'd avoided the women's district like the plague.  He'd even climbed up a different infirmary, needing the vantage but not daring to visit the place they'd shared.

She'd be all right.  She was a survivor—more so than him.  As long as he kept Nerice and Pendriel away from her, everything would be fine.

“
Weshker!
” came a second voice, and he realized they were both down there, waiting.

With deep reluctance, he swung a leg over the edge and felt with his foot for the gap in the brick wall.  The climb was easy enough now that he was in practice again, and somehow this kind of danger had never scared him like the danger inherent in other people.  A wall was just a wall; it held no spite toward him, and couldn't ambush him while he slept.

The instant his feet touched the ground, Nerice had him by the ear.

“I turn away for one moment and you're gone?” she barked, fair face twisted with anger.  He quailed.  “I had to pull Pendriel from her business, had to bother a piking Houndmaster...”

“'M sorry, 'm sorry,” he said.  “I jes' needed to get a breath.”

Her scowl didn't lessen, but she released him.  “You shouldn't run from us.  It's not wise.”

“I know.”

“We've been summoned.”

“Eh?  What?”

She took his arm; he didn't resist.  “The Field Marshal wants a word,” she said, starting a brisk walk.  “About our work, maybe.  It wasn't specified.”

“I dunno any more than I told yeh—“

“Doesn't matter.  He asked for you.”

Weshker fell silent and let her lead him along.  The anxiety crawled in his veins, spider-like, itching at him to run—fight—hide.  Anything but stand before the Field Marshal and report on his failings.

The buildings passed too swiftly.  Soon, the command-post hill loomed before them, and Nerice half-led half-dragged him up the brick steps that had been hammered into the soft ramp, to the cabin with its broad view of the camp and the kennels at its flanks.

She rapped on the heavy rune-marked door, then pulled it open at the signature hiss of parting seals.  Amber-colored mage-light spilled out from the interior, and the fear rose in Weshker's throat like beating wings.  His legs locked.  The two women had to push him in, their nails pinching at his neck.

The main chamber was broad but nearly empty, its floor painted with sigils.  A great inkwood desk stood opposite the door, neatly stacked with papers, and to the right were a line of heavy wooden trunks and a gold-embroidered priest's robe on a stand, but at the left wall was the real focal point: the altar.

It was huge—at least six feet long and three wide, carved of gold-veined white marble with a winged-light effigy rising from it as if grown there.  The gilt and glass of the phoenix-like figure caught the mage-lights and cast them back across the room, painting myriad streaks and sparks on the rough wooden walls.  Incense braziers on both sides filled the room with a faint veil of sweet smoke that smelled like nothing Weshker recognized.

A white-robed mage stood to either side of the desk, one of them the mentalist-woman who had scanned and attempted to train him.  Between them was the great bulk of the Field Marshal himself, in a quilted white tunic and shining pectoral, sleeves folded back from brawny forearms to avoid the ink of the pages he had been perusing.   With his hair slicked back and his silver-flecked beard cropped short, he looked more like a nobleman than a soldier or priest.  Thick fingers weighted with rings drummed a tempo on the desk.

On his knee perched a little Illanic girl in a white dress with white ribbons in her hair, staring into the middle distance like a doll.

“My good ladies,” the Field Marshal said, his grin as wide as a canyon.  “And my interesting new acquisition.  You look well.  Have you mended?”

“Uh, more or less, sir,” Weshker mumbled, rubbing at the light splint that still bound his right wrist.  Nerice and Pendriel hadn't stepped out from behind him, and he felt exposed.  “Itches a lot, but I'm told that's normal, sir.”

“Good, good.”  The Field Marshal beckoned him forward, and Weshker looked at the space between them—at the rings of sigils—and swallowed, but obeyed.  “I have heard your reports.  Your spiritist talent is having difficulty manifesting?”

“I, uh...”  Weshker halted when the Field Marshal raised his hand, and found himself at the center of the rings.  His hackles went up.  “Uh, I dunno, sir,” he said, “see, the crows only seem to come out to attack, and we dun want that, right sir?  But I dunno what else they can do, sir, like when they're not out, sir, and I'm supposed t' look at people fer somethin' now and sometimes I kinda...not see things, sir, but see like that there's somethin' I can't see, right, and I think that's the crows doin' somethin' in my head but I never done this before, sir, so I—“

“Yes, yes,” said the Field Marshal, making a quelling motion.  Weshker shut his mouth.  “We've reviewed the men you identified.  But you can't see anything at all?”

“No sir, jes' feel that I can't see it.  I think maybe the brand is foxin' things up fer the crows, but I dun suppose there's anythin' yeh can do fer that.  Sir.”

“Indeed not.  Well...”  The Field Marshal glanced to the mages, and it seemed to Weshker that something passed between them: another twist of his mind or his eyes, seeing-not-seeing a thread of communication.  He blinked.  “Well,” the Field Marshal repeated, “I'm afraid we've not much use for that outside the camp, and the camp itself won't matter soon.  Search him.”

Weshker's hands went to his uniform jacket, under which his knives were hidden, but suddenly his limbs tightened and he couldn't move.  The two mages stepped out from their place at the Field Marshal's side, the man trailing bright runes from his fingertips while the woman reached out to clasp Weshker's head in her hands.  He flashed her a hopeful don't-hurt-me smile, which she ignored.

Needles drove into his mind, and he was falling.

His time with Blaze Company blurred by, voices and actions meshing, landscapes shifting in a dizzying whirl.  Then the walls of the siege camp returned, and he fell backward through his freedom, through the Crown Prince's judgments in the gathering-hall, to a moment that echoed this one almost perfectly.  Fingers in his mind, peeling his memories apart.  A lady mentalist, and behind her a mage in black...

Several times, as if looped, the moments repeated themselves: the crow bursting from him to attack the intruding mentalist, the black-robed man catching it and snapping its neck, the murmur in Corvish:
You will be useful.

He hadn't understood then, and he didn't now.

“Just the one contact, sir,” murmured the mentalist.  “Nothing before or since, nor any tangential knowledge.”

“Feh.  I need to get my hands on the mages, then.  That mentalist or the ogre-blood—one of them has to know something of value.  The entire company can't be useless...”

“Sir?”

“If you're certain of your results, then release him.”

“Yes sir.”

The needles left him and his limbs returned to his control.  He rocked forward, woozy; this hadn't been as bad as that first time, but it still made him ache from the inside out.

“Specialist Weshker,” said the Field Marshal.

Weshker raised his head, startled to see the big man looming before him.  He didn't quite come up to eye-level with the steel pectoral.  “Yessir?”

Gloved hands clamped on his shoulders.  He hadn't seen the man don them or draw down his sleeves, but now he was covered in white from collar to boots.  A perfect Imperial.  “Do you wish to retain your status as one of the favored, Specialist Weshker?” the Field Marshal intoned, his deep voice resonating through his grip and into Weshker's bones.  “Do you wish to rise further and join the blessed?”

There was something hypnotic about the man's deep eyes.  He found himself nodding—not thinking, really, but obeying the dim pressure in his head.  The urge to do the easy, agreeable, painless thing.

“Your Dark spirits can not be divided from you, I fear, and so you can never bask in the full gaze of the Light.  But you may still be purified.  We will cage this Darkness so that it taints only the least portion of your soul, and purify the rest.  Are you prepared?”

Weshker mumbled something—he wasn't sure what.  He'd already lost track of the Field Marshal's words; they sounded too much like the religious blather he fell asleep to every time his handlers dragged him to the temple.  It wasn't that he didn't believe; it just didn't seem to matter.  The Light and Dark were too big and too removed from his messy little life for him to care.

“Strip.”

The hands released him and he blinked, head clearing just enough to comprehend the command.  He opened his mouth—to question, to object, or maybe to laugh just in case this was all a big joke, not a nightmare about to crash in on him.  But these weren't the joking types, and he didn't trust his voice for it.

He undid the buttons of his uniform jacket.  He'd never been shy, and no one else was taking their breeches off so it was probably safe—though the little girl was still there, standing like a statue beside the desk.  That made him uncomfortable.

The others watched him expectantly.  He thought of the crows: those twisted, broken things.  If they were the Darkness to be caged, would he stop seeing them?

Maybe that would be for the best.  He felt ashamed every time they appeared, like he'd failed them somehow.  Failed his people, even though he'd been the property of the Crimson Army for almost as long as he'd lived in Corvia.  It wasn't fair of them to judge him for his imprisonment, his branding—all those punishments that hadn't been his fault

He shucked his jacket and knife-harness then squirmed from his undershirt.  Briefly, as he tugged at his belt, he was aware of the scars on his stomach and chest: nothing concerted, just the evidence of a lifetime of small beat-downs.  Over now?

Being blessed sounded good.

A hand fell to his neck as he straightened from pulling off his breeches.  Nerice's, her nails nipping in lightly.  Warmth and well-being flooded him.  He tugged at his loin-wrap.

“Just a moment.”  His hands stilled.  “Seal the crows.”

The other mage moved in, a web of white light between his fingers, and pressed it to Weshker's shoulder.  It seared like the original brand, and Weshker gritted his teeth and clenched his fists hard against the impulse to jerk away.  Something struggled within him—in his chest first, then shifting sideways as if being dragged—until finally it was subsumed by the burn in his arm.

For a moment he felt guilty.  Sanava would be furious with him.  Probably she'd never speak to him again.  But they both knew he'd never been much of a Corvishman, so maybe he'd find himself on the other side, in the Light.

And he could set her free, whether or not she'd have him.  He could—

“Finish disrobing, face the altar and kneel.”

He did so, fixing his gaze on the altar.  It stood just at the edge of the outermost circle, and staring up at it, he was dazzled by the reflections from the cut-glass wings.  The former-infirmary temple had its own winged-light effigy, but with bronze and silver fittings, not gold—and somehow seeing it from among hundreds of other soldiers was not as imposing as being stared down by it alone.  He wondered if it was true that the Light could see out through the radiant glass, or that words spoken to the effigy were taken straight to its ears.

His heart thrilled a little, skin prickling with nervous sweat. 
Will it...will it like me?

Heavy treads moved in behind him.  He glanced around briefly to see Pendriel and Nerice now bracketing the door, the two mages back at the sides of the desk.  Then a white cord fell past his face to hook around his neck.

He reached up in panic as it cinched tight, but the Field Marshal's voice boomed from above: “Touch it not.  You are deeply stained by the Darkness.  This leash is necessary to keep you from being a danger to us.  If you do not fight, you will not be harmed.”