The Riddled Night

by Tricia Sullivan

Genres: Science Fiction; Genetic Engineering; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

As the Sekk threaten Everien and the tribes squabble over the spoils of the Empire, Istar is given a message by a legendary Raptor: the massive Snowfalcon. It is a message that holds the key to the mystery of Tarquin of The Company.

Release date: May 29, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

Thietar and the Sekk faced each other across the white void. Falling snow blew over the icy crust with a scoffing sound, like dry laughter. Thietar closed his eyes.

‘I will not love it,’ he chanted to himself. ‘I will not love it. I do not have to hate it but I will not love it. It is only a stone. It is only a piece of shadow on the snow. I will not love it.’

Yet he couldn’t take his eyes off the distant figure. The Sekk did nothing. It was out of earshot anyway, although Thietar supposed it might possibly be influencing the tenor of the wind with its song. It had not moved for hours; neither had Thietar. He kept hoping the others would realize what had happened and come up Tyger Pass looking for him. Surely they could put two and two together: the ruined caravan lying half buried in the gully, the absence of any enemy, the silence of the hills and the whiteness of the sky. Now, of course, it seemed so obvious to him that the Sekk had been watching him all along, maybe had even been calling him. It seemed so obvious. It had taken the caravan and then lain in wait for whoever would come along next. Sekk didn’t need food like people. They didn’t need heat like people. They could lie underground for years, like corpses, like hidden pools of water, unknown to light or time. And now this one had him in its sights, and he would either freeze to death or be Enslaved. It was only a matter of time.

O great Hawks of my ancestors, thought Thietar, who was relatively unversed in the Animal Magic and usually disinterested in spiritual matters. O killer Hawk saviour, O taloned one – please let the cold come quickly. Please let my heart be frozen. Do not let me love it. Please!

His toes and fingers had no more feeling. It was said that when you froze to death you felt warm and comfortable and sleepy, but he was shivering violently, and he was hungry, and his teeth ached. Death was not close enough to rescue him from the Slaving spell. Suicide was a possibility but he didn’t think he had the will to do violence to himself. Did that mean the Sekk was getting to him, even at this distance? Why could he not move his hand to his dagger, draw it swiftly across each of his own wrists, bleed himself to death here in the snow? Was he Enslaved already? No, it was merely that he could not move his arms. He could not move anything, but his teeth chattered.

I will not love it. I will not love it. I will not love it.

Like a ceremonial chant he repeated it. If you said something enough times you had to believe it eventually. Right?

The expedition had been ill-advised from the start. Thietar and his brothers had been hunting snow lion in Tyger Pass for the past several days. It had been his brother Birtar’s idea. Birtar was besotted with Lyntar the outbreed, who was going to be rich now that the Elder Mintar’s fortune was passing to Lyntar and her twin sister Pietar, already all but promised to Grietar whom nobody wanted to cross. So, like every unattached Seahawk man with eyes in his head. Birtar was applying his whole imagination to the problem of impressing Lyntar.

He had recruited his younger brothers to his cause, saying, ‘We will bring back the pelt of the snow lion, and when I spread it across her shoulders and arrange her braids on its fur, I will say. “Here is the most elusive, the rarest, the most beautiful of creatures. I found her in the lonely snows, and I told her that I was your hunter, and she threw herself upon my arrow that she might adorn you rather than live.” Then I will look in Lyntar’s eyes and say, “Do not let this snow lion’s death be for nothing! Make my words true, Exquisite One. Make me yours.” ’

After Birtar’s brothers had finished groaning and throwing their socks at him, Birtar had reminded them that if bound to Lyntar he would be one of the wealthiest men in the Seahawk Clan and could repay their favours ten-fold. So it was that they had gladly set out through the ice and snow in search of the shy snow lion. Three weeks later, they were still looking. Thietar was the youngest but also the best hunter, and on a hunch he had gone off on his own up Tyger Pass. He had seen no tracks, and he knew it would be a long shot finding a snow lion so close to a trade route. But it was the dead of winter, and the snow lions would know that weather closed the pass from October to April or May every year, making the territory safe for them. Thietar always played his hunches, and Tyger Pass seemed to be calling to him.

It was almost noon when he came across the remains of the caravan overturned in a gully halfway up the Seahawk side of the pass. It was not a large vehicle; probably the tail end of a longer train crossing back to Snake Country from Seahawk Country last autumn. It was laid deep in this year’s snow, and at first Thietar thought it had merely been emptied of its cargo and abandoned. He headed toward it, being careful to stay downwind in case a snow lion had chosen it as a place to shelter; if one had not done so, Thietar himself might use the caravan as a hide. He shuffled toward it across the icy crust on his snowshoes, head down and eyes half closed against the midday glare.

There were no tracks anywhere near the caravan. He could not get at the doors for the snow was too deep, so he cut the ropes that held the hide roof to the frame and peeled it back. The cargo was still there: sacks of whalebone carvings, a couple of casks of the best Seahawk mead, tins of fine lamp oil and even finer caviar, and enough mink skins to make cloaks for an entire family.

Thietar let out a whoop. He capered in the snow, then ate some caviar and thought about breaking into the mead. But it was too cold up here for drinking. Instead he focused his mind on how to remove all the plunder. It was not a fortune, to be sure, but it was better than one blessed snow lion skin, especially when they hadn’t even seen a lion in three weeks, much less caught one.

He couldn’t understand what had happened. Surely if the traders had come back down the Seahawk side of the pass after abandoning their caravan, he would have heard the tale. The style of the vehicle was Snake, but when Thietar searched further he found Pharician coinage, and he thought it more likely that Pharicians could afford such a haul than the Snake Clan. Besides, the Snakes would never be caught up here once the snows were falling.

Then again, Pharicians usually did their trade with Seahawk by ship. Why labour over the pass when they could sail up the coast from the Floating Lands? It was a puzzle. Thietar thought about going straight to the rendezvous and waiting for his brothers with the news of his find; but he was curious. He got a spade out of the caravan and began digging through the snowdrift, wondering what other treasures might have been left behind.

Things started to make a little more sense when his shovel hit frozen bone.

The scavengers had not left much. There were skeletons of men and mules, and pieces of armour and clothing; but it could not have been the case that the caravan had been halted by snow, or the bodies would have been frozen and covered, protected from the buzzards until spring.

Thietar could not stop digging. He worked up a fine sweat, and the noon hour passed, but he kept finding things. The men had been Pharician according to their equipment. He was compelled onward by a macabre curiosity. After a time he uncovered a wooden chest, and although he was tired and hungry, the sight of it excited him so much that he cleared all the snow around it. Then he pried it open.

The bird that flew out was big enough to set him tumbling by the force of its wings beating the air alone, and it exploded out of the box in a blinding flash of light. Thietar spun ass over head and saw the bird silhouetted against the sky, wings fully outspread and threatening with their great span. At first he thought there was some trick of the shadows, and then he thought he’d seen lightning, for the feathers on the falcon’s wings seemed white for a moment, and then just as quickly they were black; and then, as if the bird itself had rent a hole in the sky, he saw no feathers at all, but a distant view of a green and sunlit forest cut out in the shape of the falcon. It was a small perfect world, utterly incongruous in the snow and wind, and it drew his gaze like a gem. He stumbled after the bird as it ascended, trying to see what was moving in the trees of the unlikely vision, for he thought he’d glimpsed a figure, possibly a horse. But the falcon rose into the air as quickly as other things could fall, as if gravity were reversed for it alone. Thietar watched the falcon becoming a glittering mote and then disappearing altogether. His eyes ached with the effort.

Someone said his name. It was his own voice, saying ‘Thietar.’ He turned.

‘Who’s there?’ he said, unnerved. As he turned back toward the empty box, the snow before him rose up in human form and confronted him with eyes that dragged him toward their own emptiness.

‘I am here,’ said Thietar’s voice to himself.

There was no hope now that the others would come for him before he froze. And if they did, what would he do? What could he do?

I want to live, he thought.

But he must pray for the cold to take him quickly. The Sekk, motionless, worked its spell. Invisible, silent, still, the Slaving spell must surely be descending on him. Just because he couldn’t feel it didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.

Thietar tried to stir. His vision was growing dark. Was it night settling in? Was it storm? Was it the frost? Was it the Slaving? Did it matter? Why did he persist in having to know what was happening to him when he was so obviously doomed?

He had done everything he could to resist. As soon as he had taken in the Sekk’s white face and white hands, its white braids and white cloak made all of snow lion pelts, its green eyes and its silver voice and its wavering form that made it seem no more substantial than a candle or reflection on water, he had ripped his sword from the scabbard on his back and charged. Thietar had lived all his life with the threat of the Sekk an ever-present, shadowy possibility. His father, his uncle, and his two eldest brothers had joined Ajiko’s army and were marched off to their deaths, all of them, in the thrall of Night. None had returned from Jai Pendu.

He screamed as he attacked. His heart was hard as he drove the sword into its belly.

The Sekk did not cry out. It was bleeding. It looked at him.

As his sword came back toward him, it somehow swung wide and cut across his own leg. He didn’t feel pain at first, but he was surprised and angry at his own clumsiness, and he was afraid. He went after the Sekk again, but it had fallen into the deeper snow and when he tried to pursue, his snowshoes got tangled and he almost fell.

He looked down and blood was gushing from a deep gash in his thigh. The sight of his own blood made him want to faint. Thietar hid his eyes from the Sekk and began to run, clumsy in the snowshoes. His sword was dripping. His leg screamed at him. Blood soaked his fur boot inside and out. The Sekk should be finished after that blow. Any man would be mortally wounded. Oh, but it had been waiting in the snow, it had risen before his eyes like smoke, like material light. What was blood to a Sekk?

He had not run very far before his leg gave out a second time. He broke through the crust as he fell, lying in the soft, deep snow that had been protected by ice. He looked back.

From this distance he couldn’t see any blood on it. The Sekk was crouched in a hollow in the snow just as Thietar was: his opposite watching him across a chessboard. But all the squares were white, and the other pieces were gone. Thietar bound his leg as best as he could, desperate to stop the bleeding. He intended to get up and keep going, limping, staggering – crawling if necessary to get away from the Sekk.

But he didn’t move.

He didn’t know how much time had passed in the stalemate. Too long. Too long. He could not end it. He was angry. An animal would never panic like this. An animal would not equivocate. It simply would not think. If it was given to an animal to die, then it would die; and if it was given to it to fight, then it would fight. There would be none of this miserable inner debate.

Oh, but he was cold. Would his companions really leave him to the elements? Were they so stupid that they could not find his tracks? Or did they not care?

It was getting so dark, soon he would not be able to see his enemy. Would he then be released? Or would it move in to finish him?

Voices. In the stillness they sounded metallic and strange, but he recognized them all the same. They had come for him!

His brothers were approaching him from behind and he began to panic again. What was he going to do? An animal would not give its soul. An animal would fight. I will not love it, he said to himself again but they were only words; it was too late. He belonged to the Sekk.

They were almost upon him. Turning in the greyness of his own vision, he reached out feebly with his knife and tried to slash it at Birtar, but the other man took the knife away, grabbed his hair, and hauled him to his feet.

‘Look into my eyes!’ commanded Birtar brokenly, and Thietar saw that tears were streaming down his cheeks. ‘Oh. Ysse, tell me you are not Enslaved, my brother! Look into my eyes.’

Thietar had no choice; he was half frozen, and Birtar used the hold on his hair to jerk his head into position. When he saw the expression on Birtar’s face, Thietar knew he was lost. Birtar, crying harder now, turned Thietar’s own knife around and cleanly slit his throat. As Thietar fell into the deep, warm snow, he heard Birtar say to the others. ‘Let’s get out of here before it has us, too.’

And as he was dying the sound of wings beating came to him, as if he were with the silver skyfalcon on its flight above the dizzy snowfall and the massed clouds, where everything was light and clear. Going home.

It was late morning in Jai Khalar when the bird delivered its message. Its wings thrummed with a deep whirling sound as it came diving into the aviary in a madness of silver feathers, its eyes like raindrops, its talons extended. The Pharician messenger doves had risen up in a white-and-grey panic before the predator, which grasped the wire roof of their cage and gazed at the doves hungrily. The message was tied to its leg with the red cord of urgency. The bird itself was a species now disappeared from the world, the Everien skyfalcon.

The Pharician handler knew nothing of this pedigree, of course – he had never heard of the skyfalcon. He was a byrdman imported from Jundun a few months after Tash’s conquest of the Citadel, a skinny, shifty-eyed, dark-skinned little fellow called Hrost who could imitate the sound of any bird but spoke only a broken dialect of Pharician with a thick accent. He could not read the message but he examined it anyway, as it had all but come apart in his hands: the hide was brittle and frozen. There were a few lines of text, then running around the edges of the square were symbols that he didn’t think were words. They looked more like pictures.

The bird was screaming in hunger. It was a beautiful thing, but Hrost did not feel safe in its presence. It might not be large enough to prey on humans as a matter of course, but the animals of Everien did unnatural things sometimes. Hrost provided a box of live mice and watched almost reverently as the raptor devoured them. He waited until the skyfalcon was settled and grooming itself before turning his back on it. He trotted down the stairs from the aviary to the grand concourse, deserted at this hour. From here there were any number of routes to Tash’s audience room, but thanks to some caprice of the castle – curiosity, perhaps – the first available door admitted Hrost to an antechamber of the main hall. He had never actually been inside.

He put his ear to the panel. Like everybody who lived in Jai Khalar, Pharician and Clan alike, he was terrified of Tash. Now he was torn between the red urgency identifier on the message, and the fact that he had never entered Tash’s presence in this way. Belatedly, he realized he should have found a servant to take the message. Someone whom Tash knew. For if this were Jundun, Hrost would never even walk on the same ground as his ruler, let alone enter a room when he was present.

Yet he felt urged on by a kind of compulsion. The floor almost seemed to propel him forward, nudge him toward the door separating the deserted antechamber from the audience hall. He leaned on the door and pressed his ear to the wood. He could hear a soft voice speaking. It was a girl’s voice, and her accent was neither Clan nor Pharician.

His fist had been raised to knock; now he thought better of it. Red cord or no red cord, he did not want to walk in on Tash uninvited. He turned to go, but the door leading from the antechamber to the main gallery had disappeared. Jai Khalar! It was a frightening place. He looked at the door again, but did not dare enter. He sat down and put his back against the place where the exit should have been, but wasn’t. He could wait.

It is a night like every other night, riddled with stars. My horse’s crystal white breath explodes the dark way ahead while his hooves make a soft bass beat on hemlock needles thick with seasons and rain. I do not know where I am and maybe I never will again. In my memory something itches and I feel sure I ought to be carrying scrolls, or scribestones, or some other medium inlaid with the messages to you that I have composed year in and year out, never failing, never forgetting. But the messages exist only in my mind: I have no saddlebags and no luggage, nor ink, nor even language I could say with certainty that you would understand. All the careful filigree of my love is wrought in nothing but time, and tonight in the counting of these hoofbeats, in the tilt of the visible constellations, in the indefinite darkness I have come to inhabit like skin, now I feel sure time is running out.

Where are you? I am searching everywhere, but it is you who must find me, and I am buried in a night I cannot part with.

Once I was bold, but now I am afraid. Please come.

Tash snapped his fingers and the Impressionist fell silent. She was only a girl, and an ugly one that that: Her straw-coloured hair hung lank and lustreless from her thin skull, and her features were bulbous and ruddy. While she had been speaking, a kind of dignity had crept into her scratchy, Snake-inflected voice, and she had stopped shaking and sniffling. Now, that dignity was gone. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

‘She whines too much,’ Tash said. He stabbed a forefinger at the Carry Eye cupped in the Impressionist’s nail-bitten hands. ‘She will break it in her adolescent stupidity. I asked about the firethrowers. What is this nonsense about scribestones and love?’

The girl would not meet his gaze. Another tremor went through her, and a glimmer of moisture appeared below her left nostril. Kivi was hovering protectively nearby, as if the Impressionist were a baby sparrow and not a receptacle for Everien’s greatest power, the Knowledge. Tash refused to feel guilty for merely expecting the girl to do her job, and he resented the implication that he was abusing her. He was not a tyrant!

‘What’s the matter?’ he queried, forcing himself to make his tone more gentle. ‘Come on, explain your meaning, girl!’

She sniffled again and seemed to shrink, her white fingers catching at the edge of her cloak. Kivi twitched a helping hand in her direction and then caught himself. Tash glared at him and muttered. ‘Twit.’

‘She’s cold,’ said Kivi quietly, and Tash exploded.

‘Cold? We’re all cold, damn you. Kivi! If she’s cold, imagine how I feel. At least you two are born to this frigid climate.’ The Pharician surged from his seat, fur cloak billowing behind him like a tawny wing as he strode down the length of his audience hall. An enormous fire had been built on the hearth at the far end, but the oval windows that looked out on the cultivated valley of the Everien River kept mysteriously blowing open; or rather – Tash corrected himself, for in Jai Khalar nothing was ever so simple – the coloured glass in the windows intermittently appeared and then disappeared, admitting the icy alpine wind. Outside, a splinter of sunlight had pierced the soupy clouds on the southwestern horizon, casting Everien in a range of deep greens and purples and blue-white that made the landscape seem vivid and alive. This wouldn’t last. At most the sun would grant an hour-long respite from the long winter night and its grey cousin, day.

‘We are all fighting the gloom!’ Tash shouted, as if volume could make his words more true. ‘I have not called this child here to remind me of what I already know: that it is always night. Tell her to forget her own miseries and conjure a true vision of the making of the heavy weapons firing mechanism, as I have asked. And if she cannot do that, then she will have no fire or soup, and I will give her something to cry about.’

The outburst improved his mood. He reached the hearth where the heat struck him in a burst, like a soft blow from an enormous pillow. He picked up the goblet of mulled wine he had been drinking prior to the entrance of the two wizards and quaffed the rest of it, aware that he had become rather too dependent on his spirits in recent weeks. He didn’t care. This place was so frustrating at times, and yet he was forced to hold it in order to keep it from the rebel Clansmen, who had been a thorn in his side since the initial coup that had given him Jai Khalar. The Clans had few men and fewer resources, and they had no system of Eyes at all to help them – and yet they managed to put Tash under constant pressure. Until he thoroughly cowed them, how could he hope to possess Everien? The valley with its backward people and tortured geography had resisted him almost as much as this mad castle. But the Knowledge of the ancient Everiens could make him strong. No Clan could stand against that. This conviction had become the fire in his belly, the flash of certainty in his dark eyes, the source of the smell his skin exuded that made other men instinctively fear him and race to do his bidding.

He turned to judge Kivi’s reaction to his threats. The Seer had thrown his own cloak over the ugly girl’s shoulders and was helping her to her feet. The Carry Eye that had once been Kivi’s rolled unnoticed on the floor as the girl stumbled and caught herself, falling against the Seer. It had suddenly gone dark two days ago – that was when his troubles had begun.

‘What’s the matter with her? Is she sick?’

‘She is not a trained Seer,’ Kivi said. ‘She is only an Impressionist, a child. She does not understand how to use the Eyes.’

‘I would not have to use young girls to do the work if you trained Seers could do it properly yourselves.’ Tash didn’t trust the Seers, and had purged their ranks of all but the most essential personnel when he first took over Jai Khalar. He needed them to manage the Water of Glass and monitor the ground across Everien, but he had a low opinion of them generally. He had retained Kivi because, of all the Seers in Jai Khalar, he seemed the most capable when it came to tasks other than lurking around the Eye Tower being pompous and flatulent. Anyway, Kivi was willing to explain things to Tash without being patronizing, and Tash wasn’t so arrogant as to think he could run Everien without some kind of understanding of how its Eyes worked. He had even taken Kivi’s Carry Eye for a time, hoping to spy on the Seers at their work; but it had only had the same bizarre effect on him as the first time he had tried to use it. A kind of swoon had come over him and he could remember nothing of what he’d Seen.

Then Tash had experienced a great piece of luck, in that a young girl he had taken to his bed had picked up the Carry Eye one night and idly looked into it. Within five minutes she had completed an exact sketch of an object such as Tash had never seen. When he showed it to one of his engineers who was working in the Fire Houses making crossbows, the man had become unreasonably excited.

Four weeks later came the prototype of a flamethrower to be used from horseback. Tash’s chest swelled at the prospect of sweeping across Ristale with a cavalry force armed with such demonry. Who could stand in his way?

The girl had forgotten the episode entirely and denied having drawn the sketch. Subsequent efforts to make her repeat the feat ended in failure; but Tash was fascinated. He began to collect pliant young girls who, though inexperienced with the Water of Glass, soon proved their genius with Kivi’s Carry Eye. Before long the Impressionists were inventing weapons and other machines that could be built in the Fire Houses, seeming to pick their ideas out of the very air while they looked into Kivi’s mysterious Eye. Tash had come to count on the flow of information from the Carry Eye to the Impressionists to the Fire Houses to provide him with the necessary weapons to command Everien.

Until the day before yesterday, when in mid-Impression, the girl he had been using had made a choking sound and begun to cry. ‘No, no! I can’t see. Leave me alone! Help!’ Tash recalled her distress with disgust. She had pretended to be blind, but later had startled when a mouse ran across her path and her fakery had been exposed. Yet, when he replaced her with a newer, fresher, even younger girl, the new Impressionist could not finish the diagram of a war machine component that her predecessor had started. When she gazed into the dark Eye, she, too, had collapsed after utterances similar to this blond chit’s in both tone and substance.

‘She’s faking,’ Tash accused, scuffing the flagstones with a booted toe. He had few compunctions about killing other men, as was necessary for discipline and control; but it ill suited him to bully a helpless, pathetic creature such as this. Yet the Impressionists had the power he needed, small and weak though they might be.

Kivi said nothing. By now he knew better than to argue with Tash when the Pharician conqueror was in such a mood. Kivi had taken to keeping his mouth shut except to answer direct questions. So Tash asked one.

‘What’s the big problem? All she has to do is See into the Eye and write down or draw the weapons she learns how to build. Why does she have to go all funny and get sick? I’m not putting her to work in the mines! I’m not having her beaten or raped or tortured! Yet she behaves as though suffering the most cruel violence, when she is in truth among the luckiest of my subjects.’

Kivi began to lead the girl toward an antechamber separated from the main hall by an unobtrusive door tucked between frescoes depicting the Everien Fire Houses. Tash moved to refill his goblet, but the skin was empty. ‘Answer me, Kivi.’

‘It is difficult work,’ Kivi said shortly.

‘I will make it more difficult if I don’t see some results soon! This is unacceptable. Ah, I can feel it in my guts – something is wrong in Everien.’

Kivi’s face drew tighter with concern. ‘It is deep winter. The Eye has gone dark, but the days, too, are disappearing. Mayhap in the spring these things will move again.’

‘No excuses!’ Tash flared, whirling and flinging the empty goblet into the flames. It clanged and rolled out again. The glass came back into the windows and suddenly the wind died. Tash lowered his voice in the abrupt silence. ‘How hard can it be to get to the bottom of this? Even I have looked into your Carry Eye.’

Kivi stopped, turned with the girl’s head lolling against his shoulder, and cast a piercing look at the dark Pharician warlord.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember.’

Tash ignored the irony in the Seer’s tone. ‘I was not afraid! Perhaps when I spoke I made no sense, but I was not afraid to try.’

‘Nor is she,’ Kivi answered, indicating the swooning girl. ‘It is for you to interpret what she says. She cannot control the Impressions she receives.’

‘But what she says is not interesting,’ protested Tash, now pursuing the pair across the hall toward a side door near the far end. ‘It has no military value! It gives me nothing I can use, not against the damned rebel Clansmen who beleaguer my men, nor against the Sekk and their fell deeds. I will rule this country and I will not be made impotent by that!’ He tossed his head at the Carry Eye once again. But the expression of frustration had broken the back of Tash’s anger, and now his tone bordered on the pleading when he added, ‘What do you think it means, Kivi?’

The Seer glanced away. He reached for the door but Tash was quicker, planting one large palm on the wood to hold the panel shut. The girl moaned and sagged in Kivi’s arms. His expression was pinched and pale.

‘I don’t think she has the strength to penetrate the darkness,’ Kivi said at last. ‘It’s not the girls, it’s the Carry Eye itself. I don’t believe we are wise to use it, now that it has gone dark.’

‘But why does the darkness come? Was it something we did in the Fire Houses? What has changed in this last day and a half? I suspect you Seers of somehow aiding the rebels, and using the Eyes to do it.’ He studied Kivi intently as he spoke. Tash knew that his personality was excessive, and he shrewdly used his own flamboyance as a cloak with which to hide the fact that he was always observing the people