Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

Across the yard, Voushanti pulled the cleaned blade from the snow and wiped it on his cloak, awkward as he favored his injured arm. He sheathed the sword and snapped his head around to look at me, a spark of red piercing the gloom. He raised one hand, and a flare of red light blinded me. I blinked and squinted and turned the scrap over and over in my hand, trying to remember…

“Can you lead us out of here, pureblood”—Voushanti squatted beside me, sword sheathed, clean, dry ax snugged in the strap looped over his belt. With one hand and his teeth, he finished tying off the bleeding wound in his arm with the strip of hide that had been in my hand—“and not through a conflagration?”

My stomach heaved at the unnerving gap in my perception. How had he gotten here so quickly? A blast of wind pelted my face with snow. I wrapped my arms tightly about my churning gut. No pain this time. No answering ecstasy. The raw threads of my spell lay in my mind unquickened as I’d left them.

Voushanti tilted his head, watching me, his half-mutilated mouth twisted upward. “Our master waits. Or is your word as valueless as your family insists?”

I gathered the scattered bits of sense enough to speak, not daring to look at his eyes. “I swore I would not run, Mardane, and I will not. But I never said I would drag others into slavery with me. What does your prince want with him?” Osriel, who stole the eyes of the dead.

“This is not the time to discuss our master’s intents. Care you so little for your Karish brother that you would abandon him untended or drag him into this battle that rages around us without hope of succor?”

Melting snow under my knees soaked my wool hose as I feverishly discarded one plan after another. My father would not allow me past his house wards; neither would any other pureblood answer a recondeur’s plea. Certainly not on this day. Thalassa would likely help; she knew the little chancellor. But the temples were halfway across the city, and if the sacred precincts were not already burning, they would be overrun with wounded and frightened people. The others I knew in Palinur were tavern keepers, whores, alley rats, many of them kind and generous, yes—I had ever called them friends—but none knew more of me than my name and favorite songs. On a day when every man and woman’s survival was in balance, how could I command enough trust to shelter a man snatched from the gallows?

Voushanti scrambled to his feet and extended his hand, the gold wristband gleaming brightly in the murk. Brother Victor lay wrapped in the cocoon of my cloak, struggling to breathe. Of all the facts in this failing universe, one stood clear and invariant. The monk would die if I did not get him help soon.

Cloud and smoke had grayed the midday to little more than dusk. Wind flapped my soot-grimed sleeves, drove flying snow down my collar and up my billowing tunic, and stung the burned patches on my hands and legs and face. Without my cloak, I was already shivering. My mind was numb, my reservoir of schemes barren. “You cannot expect me to believe the Bastard Prince will heal him. He must have some use for him.”

Voushanti whipped a knife from his belt. I jumped when he tossed it on the ground in front of me. “I have risked my own survival to preserve this monk’s life, which should demonstrate something to a man with limited choices and half a mind. Have you some other plan to save him? If not, then take my knife and one simple thrust will save him from my master’s depredations. A second thrust will take care of your own problem.” Cold, blunt. He did not care what I chose.

Every tale of Osriel’s depravity swirled in my head, yet he had sent me to rescue good men from a terrible fate. Voushanti himself had shown naught but courage in the fight. I could read nothing from his dreadful visage save icy challenge. Perhaps it was weakness or some other consequence of my shameful state, but I trusted his word.

He nodded as if I’d spoken it aloud. “The storm has come early upon us, Magnus Valentia, and much of Palinur has yet to burn. We’d best be moving before we are consumed.” The Evanori scooped Brother Victor into his powerful arms, handling him as gently as Brother Robierre would have done. “Now, tell me the way out of here.”

Osriel had an interest in Brother Victor’s life, and for now my master’s will would prevail. As for later…we would see. Pressing forehead and palms to the fouled earth, I reached out to find a path through the dying city—through layer upon layer of building and burning, of births and deaths, of commerce and art and piety, of cruelty and war, the footsteps of centuries. A simple route revealed itself. I raised my head and pointed down an alley that would lead us back to the house where the Duc of Evanore waited.

Indeed my course was clear, as nothing had been clear in all my life. The day had scribed two images on my soul, images that demanded I answer for my ill choices: Jullian, quivering in his silent terror, and the wise and passionate abbot of Gillarine splayed and gutted like a beast. Both my fault. Because I could not think. Because I could not act. Because I had clung to mindless pleasure to dull the pain of living. Always I had insisted my perversion harmed no one but myself. Who was there to care if Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine, lack-wit recondeur, burnt out his senses or locked his useless mind away in a ruined body?

I clenched my fists and wrapped my arms about my eyes and ears, miming that deadness as if to silence conscience for one last time. But Jullian’s terrified silence and Abbot Luviar’s cry of agony gave my shame a voice I could no longer put aside.

And so, as I stumbled to my feet and followed Voushanti out of the tanners’ yard, I left a litter behind in the filthy snow: a fragment of a mirror, a silver needle, a linen thread, and a few black seeds that rapidly vanished into the muck. I threw the empty green bag into a smoldering house. Never again. Ever.

“You are not forbidden illumination, Cartamandua.” The lamplight from the passage set Mardane Voushanti’s freshly polished mail gleaming, delineating his bulky shadow in a bronze glow as if he were Deunor Lightbringer himself. The warrior quickly dispelled the illusion by stepping out of the doorway, only to return with one of the passageway lamps, giving me full view of his half-mangled face and worn leather. He displayed no sign of bandages or discomfort from his wounding.

Illumination. Upon our return to Prince Osriel’s dismal dwelling, Voushanti had whisked Brother Victor away, declaring the monk would be cared for, while two of Osriel’s warriors had deposited me into this fusty little chamber. In the hours since, as the gray daylight faded beyond the slot window, I had sat with muddy boots propped on a dusty clerk’s desk, and unshaven chin propped on my curled fingers, seeking illumination. The woolly tangle that had snarled my thoughts and actions throughout the day had at last unraveled, and the mysteries of past and present now surrounded me in stark, immutable stillness like a ring of standing stones: my grandfather, my master, the Danae, Gillarine, the end of the world.

“Unless you’ve brought me dinner or answers, I would prefer you take your lamp and go,” I said, too tired to mask bitterness and self-loathing. I did not expect answers any more than I expected word of Jullian’s fate or Brother Victor’s health. Everyone I’d met since Boreas had deposited my dying carcass outside Gillarine had excelled at keeping me mystified and on edge. Tonight, though I had defined and bounded these myriad puzzles, I could declare none solved.

“You’ve not cleaned yourself. Are these breeks not fine enough to cover your pureblood arse?” Voushanti prodded the stack of neatly folded fabrics he’d brought along with a water basin and towel soon after our arrival. A mardane, a landed baron and warrior of more than average skill, both military and magical, serving me like a housemaid—one of the lesser standing stones, but a curiosity, nonetheless. Why was I so sure that deeper investigation would reveal this man had no home, no family, no history or ambition that linked him to anyone but Osriel?