Chapter 54
Fire and ice, crawling through her wounded arm like slugs in a garden. Darkness folded and then drifted away, ash on a strong breeze. Ilahe thrashed as the heat intensified, pouring through her veins, as though someone had distilled that foreign sun and fed it to her thirsty heart. And then it was cold, burning, but bringing clarity.
The hallway snapped into focus around her, as though everything had been pressed flat and folded. A world of angles and lines. A world of clarity. At the end of the hallway, the multi-faceted figure of white. Ayde, watching.
Ilahe sat up, and she heard Ayde let out a breath. With her good hand, Ilahe plucked the arrow from her throat first, then her shoulder, then breast, then side. It was like plucking a bramble free—a pinch, and then relief. Next to that inferno of ice within her, Ilahe felt nothing.
Letting the arrows fall, their perfect planes clattering against the floor, Ilahe pushed herself to her feet and regained her swords.
“What are you?” Ayde asked. “One of the Innervated? You have no power here. What do you want from me?”
Ilahe ignored her. The wounds had vanished; even her knee felt like new. Pushing up the sleeve of her dress, Ilahe found the burnt-orange star tied to her wrist broken. The colored glass was completely gone, leaving only the silver wire frame. Ilahe left it there for the moment. No need to give them any clue of how it worked. With one finger, she brushed the flower cam-ad, under her dress, and let out a small breath. Still whole; the arrow had not struck the glass. Ilahe shook her head in anger; only blind luck had saved her this time. If she had landed on her other side, or if the cam-ad had not shattered against the wood floor . . .
Pushing the thought away, Ilahe took a step forward. Everything felt better; as though she had slept a week, as though she had never been wounded or tired in her life. Moving between the harsh-edged lines of light against planes of shadow, Ilahe advanced on Ayde, swords low and ready.
“What are you?” Ayde demanded again, the lines at her eyes tightening as she squinted.
“I’m a woman who wants to be left alone, blackness take you,” Ilahe said.
Before she could say anything else, Ayde disappeared, only perfect white lines, which faded even as Ilahe saw them, revealing her movement. Ilahe grimaced. That first sarkomancer had not been hard to handle, but Ayde was proof enough that Ilahe’s salt-blades, no matter how effective, were not enough to ensure success. By the black, it was a good thing the others had been fools enough to be surprised by the salt-blades.
Ilahe ran toward the far door. After a step, she shook her head. She moved no faster than she had before, unlike with the other cam-ad. But then, the other had done nothing to heal her injuries. Ilahe wished she understood the strange magic better. She glanced down at her arm, as though her gaze could pierce flesh and examine the small, hard pieces of cam-ad that, even through the bright chill, she could feel working their way through her flesh. Nothing to do about it now. If it kept her alive, that was what was important.
As she passed through the door, Ilahe threw herself to one side, passing through a flat panel of shadow and rolling to a stop against the far well. Twin thunks sounded behind her. Two daggers, buried almost to the hilt, quivered in the doorframe.
There was no light in this room, aside from the defined pillars of starlight that came in through the windows, but Ilahe could see well enough. Although the cam-ad cast everything around her in sharp angles, it made navigating the darkness easier, in some ways, for it was forced into discrete shapes. Ilahe crouched behind a sofa—she was in some sort of sitting room, it seemed—and winced as an arrow punched through the fabric to catch her in the side.
The pain was like a horsefly’s bite, and Ilahe tugged the arrow free easily. She scrambled away from the sofa, behind a pair of stuffed chairs. Arrows popped through the leather, but they did not reach her. A quick scramble, swords scratching the polished wooden floor. She sheathed one blade, then crawled forward again. Ilahe flipped a tea table on its side and crouched behind it. Nothing.
Gripping the table’s legs, Ilahe rose—surprised to find that, though it had not granted speed, the cam-ad had certainly given her strength. With an easy toss, she sent the table flying across the room, toward where the arrows had come from. The crack of wood and a grunt. Ilahe ran, moving between the fine lines of darkness and light, and reached a set of stairs hugging the far wall. The splintered ruins of the table cluttered the steps, but no sign of Ayde. Ilahe charged up the steps, throwing herself clear of the stairs as she reached the next floor.
Not fast enough, for a faint tug across her back told her that she had been hit. Ilahe hit the ground on one shoulder and rolled twice before she came to a stop. A pair of heartbeats to take in her surroundings: heavy oak tables loaded with books and sheaves of paper. Oil lamps at the center of each table, casting perfect blocks of light. Well-padded chairs. Bookshelves lining the walls.
Ayde stood on the far side of the room, a brace of throwing daggers laying across one hand, a bare blade in the other. Ilahe did not wait. She charged into the closest table, knocking it on its end to block Ayde’s throw. Thuds and a crack as the books and lantern flew across the room, and the sudden smell of oil. Ilahe tossed the table up and kicked. The force of her blow sent it speeding through the air, spinning as it caught on the edge of the next table, knocking over chairs and lamps before it struck Ayde and sent her stumbling into the wall.
Smoke—a fine network of crystal facets in the strange vision of the cam-ad—rose from a clump of papers, and flames suddenly burst into life. Ilahe darted through the knife-edge smoke, but Ayde was already moving, flitting away down another hall as Ilahe drew close. Daggers, flying with unnatural force, scored Ilahe’s arm, but she barely felt them.
Frustration mounted; without the cam-ad’s speed, Ilahe was at a definite disadvantage—and when the cam-ad ran out, Ayde would kill her. If Ilahe used the flower cam-ad, killing Ayde might be easy, but it would leave Ilahe helpless.
Ilahe ran down the hall, the way Ayde had gone. More arrows—blackness take her, the woman had prepared well for any sort of attack by a salt-blade—that Ilahe plucked out in irritation. The dress Esmer had given her was ruined—held together only by scraps at places, torn and blood-stained. One more reason to kill Ayde.
Rolling through the door, Ilahe heard the twang of the bowstring, but Ayde’s arrow did not find its mark. Ilahe sprang to her feet, and two feathered shafts struck her in the belly. Hard and low, knocking her back a step. Grateful for the cam-ad’s numbing effect, Ilahe kept her feet and locked her gaze on Ayde.
The woman, her white dress unstained, her white hair still perfectly coiffed, glared back and drew the bow again.
With one over-hand heave, as though launching a spear, Ilahe threw a bared sword at Ayde with all the strength of the cam-ad. The pink, shimmering blade sped through the air like a dart. For a moment, Ayde blurred, as though she would run, but the blade was too close, and she settled back into her normal form as the sword cut through skin and flesh to pin her thigh to the wood panel behind her. With a gurgled shriek, Ayde threw her head back, and the smack of bone on wood sounded through the room.
Ilahe flinched; that sounded like it hurt worse than the sword.
Plucking the arrows from her gut, Ilahe advanced on Ayde. “That’s a lot of blood you’re losing,” Ilahe said, gesturing at the rapidly spreading pool at Ayde’s ankle. The dress was stained pink and red now, in some places almost as dark as the old woman’s lips.
Ayde grabbed the blade and tried to pull it free, but Ilahe caught her by the throat and slammed her against the wall again.
“I told you I wanted to be left alone,” Ilahe said. She ripped the blade free and set the edge against Ayde’s gut. Ayde let out a small scream when the blade left her flesh, but her glare never left Ilahe’s face.
“Kill me,” Ayde said. “It will make no difference. Your gods will never be able to pass the Atasi, not even if all the tair are dead.”
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Ilahe stared at her in confusion. She recognized the word Atasi; it was the Khacen name for the Danma Mountains, the range that separated Nakhacevir and Cenarbasi. It meant something like, ‘The Father.’ But Ilahe did not understand the rest; what could her gods ever want on this side of the Danma when they had the entire nation of Cenarbasi? And why couldn’t they cross?
She pushed the questions aside and stared at Ayde, trying to bring herself to kill the woman. In spite of the lines around her eyes and mouth, there was little else to indicate Ayde’s age. She stared back at Ilahe, hatred in her eyes, and the same sort of madness Ilahe had seen in the priests in Cenarbasi. A fanatic. Someone who deserved death, for all the lives she had taken in the name of her god-made-flesh.
And yet—Ilahe was tired of killing, tired of fighting. A few hours of friendship with the women, Hash’s touch and, more importantly, his words. Very little compared to her days of suffering at the priests’ hands before she escaped; almost nothing compared to the months of self-loathing, the loss, the desire to die. And somehow, those few hours of happiness had poured balm into wounds Ilahe thought could not heal. Like rain on parched soil, they had brought forth the stirrings of new life. And Ilahe realized, as she stared at Ayde, that she did not want to kill.
“If I leave you now,” Ilahe said, “you will survive, especially if you tie a tourniquet around that leg. I imagine your magic will make sure you survive, so long as you don’t bleed out.” Ayde’s eyes widened, but Ilahe did not stop. “So I’m going to leave now, with my salt-blades, but remember this—I could have killed you, and I didn’t. If you follow me, if your eses hunt me—or any Cenarbasin—I will not hold back next time. I will hunt you down and kill you.”
Ayde licked her burgundy lips and eyed Ilahe for a moment. “It will be difficult,” Ayde said. “We have fanned the flames against Cenarbasi for a long time now; such a thing is not quickly undone.”
“Find someone else to pin your troubles on,” Ilahe said. “I mean what I said. No more. And don’t even think about trying to find me after I leave. I’ll consider spying a prelude to having me killed, and I’ll react accordingly.”
Ilahe could feel the pulse in the woman’s neck, fast but even against her palm. A cold one, Ayde. Calculating. When she nodded, Ayde’s eyes did not leave Ilahe’s face. It was a look that promised nothing.
Ilahe led Ayde to the closest window, where a luminous grey square of starlight entered the room. When the window was open, Ilahe crawled onto the sill, sword still at Ayde’s throat.
“Remember—don’t even think about looking for me.”
Ayde nodded again, her face hard. Without waiting for further response, Ilahe threw herself into the sharp edges of light and darkness that mixed outside.
She fell two stories, and when she landed, Ilahe felt a ripple of pain through the numbness of the cam-ad. A moment later, with a pop, she felt the bones in her legs realign themselves, and then she was running through planes of darkness and starlight. The pieces of the cam-ad burned through her flesh, like stars, like hope. Ilahe had a new life.
It was time to start living again.