Nine years had gone, in the teeth of a kind of ratlike dirsrepute, since Ceddleria Vedova had last been in Zedarja. It had a sharp scent of salt. It was arid, even surrounded by sea. It was arid as the desert just a narrow strait away, but here, even crouching amid the austere foundations of the city, they were without the safety of the vast waste. Here, they were far more exposed. The set in her jaw and the grit of her teeth would not let her forget it.
Nine years gone made nine years too short. Never would have been too short to suffer the sight of the heart of the Holy Empire again, where it stood like a talon over her throat. Zedarium was forged of conquest. In its oldest histories, it alone survived the fall of an empire the world over. Given lease by the Gods, it stood only to take the whole of Doleri beneath imperium.
There had been histories for her, her and hers, once. Before the House of Ronodor called the elven houses to the call of Empire again, and drove them once more to the deserts. Bitterly, Ceddleria knew, they were merely to be Dadzhvoy. They were not to inherit the blessing of starlight, as Zedarium imagined of itself. They were to accept that lot– root among the rocks and die beneath the hot suns, or flee, and seek hollow prosperity elsewhere.
Ceddleria detested one who could forget. There had been history too at Mežižan, when the Euclija Katarinija Ronodor had crushed it beneath her heel. At her mother’s breast, she’d heard it, and heard it since, until the Petroviches had brought Zedarium to her, too, and shuffled their hopes beneath Doleri’s sands. The only conclusion that did not betray it held that someone had to remember, even if memory was torment. She thought longer, ghosting the threshold of a squat building in the armpit of the city, and grew angry. Then she thought of Effrosyni’s words, and grew angrier. Finally, she sighed. First light was coming.
She’d tucked inside again, not deigning to be so exposed by day, when the red of the suns started to trace the edges of the buildings. The momentary doubt– the sheer bafflement she’d felt at coming back, even with the dream of rebellion to fuel her– had put her mind in a spiral. Now she wondered, now that the dream had quit her, this hour and change before the carriage, if she’d come back at all. If the danger and the proximity of Zedarja wasn’t merely imagined. The memory of coming was stale enough that she could hardly pick it out as her own.
It was another scar she bore, given by that irredeemable Petrovich daughter, the attacks, and the visitors. It was easiest for her to think of them as ghosts, ghosts that twisted her memories about their own, and thoughts which were altogether foreign from her mind. In the nine years since, Ceddleria found the visits milder, but she had long before learned to dread their coming, which so confused her good sense. Which placed her in the cart rather than at the reins of her own mind, and precluded all sanctuary therein. But not this morning. Her mind was still, which meant this was real– her doubts, the mission, and Zedarja. The first, the doubts, she could make an enemy of, and work to flush them out of her mind. It didn’t bear thinking about any longer. The others, she could only live with. It made her feel like a toy. Which, and she grudged it, had been near to accurate once.
It was no surprise that Effrosyni was the first to emerge from the corridor of the building, and to join her in the shabby front room. Ceddleria was at the counter, looking through a crack in the drapes, which kept much of the room dim, when she did. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a brief, sad, look from Effrosyni. The whole look had been a packaging of statements– an impassive nod as a greeting, and one brow lagged behind to tell her it was a pleasant one; the look in her eye was the closest thing to an apology for her words the night before that Ceddleria was like to get. It was an apology Ceddleria had made up her mind to accept, but she was still dragging her feet in the mud on the follow-up.
What Effrosyni said was, “The weapons need to be out on the table, wrapped and set for bear. That was the job of the morning guard.”
Thus went the cadence of their romance. She could only really allot the one brief moment to the thought; wherein, paradoxically, the maddening question of Effrosyni, even though they both were far too grown for the infatuations of youth, was not snuffed out in her heart by the way she’d felt. Biting back words she’d had waking hours since an early rising to ponder, to her own chagrin. Fighting for a girl who patronized, who needled her to spill guts to the rest of the crew, fighters all that ought to trust her. Fighting for a girl who meant it. Ceddleria had yet to pick one who wasn’t half-hostile. Like the desert. Well, at least with Effrosyni there was something of care, there.
She’d been staring, watching Effie’s jaw start to tighten, as she maybe pondered whether to say something, caring or entrenched. Ceddleria sighed. “The oils were still wet, on the blades, last I went to try,” she said. No, there wasn’t going to be a rehash it over this morning. Not while they were kissed up to the wire. “So I went to meditate.”
Ceddleria expected a riposte, something fueled by something residual, lingering in the tank when they’d cut it off. There was something laughable to it, Effrosyni’s efficiency; the timepiece had passed the hour, and all her force waned, and then she was sleeping an arms-span away. But Effrosyni nodded and started grabbing up the tarps. “Meditation. Good,” she said. The hairs between her brows, like a soft undershadow between her horns, seemed to mingle as she slipped into momentary thought. “We will all need clarity of mind ere long. I’ll set the gear—”
Ceddleria suddenly found her perch by the window stifling. She cut in, “Good. Then I’ll wake the others. They’ll need not be drowsy.”
“Yes,” Effrosyni said, but there was a sliver of exasperation in her voice. Her brow set. Effrosyni caught her out a pace from the corridor. Stifled. That was the word for it, what felt like a swarm was stifled somewhere down her throat. Effrosyni put a hand on, held her fast. Her face was blank for a few seconds.
“I’m good for it,” Ceddleria said, flatly, and part for her own doubts. “Give it time, give it the day.”
Effrosyni let out a sharp sigh. “And this is me listening.”
Ceddleria put a hair behind Effie’s ear, but jumped her hand off. It wasn’t either, infatuation, care. Frustration, a stifling. It was both. Effrosyni’s eyes caught hers for a second longer. They made her nostalgic for the sort of thing she immediately wanted to be anything else about. It was an awful idea to be pissed off and nostalgic for other girls. Especially as… Ceddleria detested someone who could forget. Then she really looked at Effrosyni, and finally, withdrew.
It had not been hard to coax the others from rest. Sleeping in hostile territory bred a light slumber, one for which one’s full kit was kept close at hand. Not twenty minutes passed in dead silence, after Ceddleria had noted those already awake, and rustled those who still slumbered. The silence was only broken by a few grunts of exertion and the shifting of weight on groaning planks as they shuffled into stiff leather kits and wound on their gear. In the front room, Effrosyni had labored swiftly to bag all the weapons in black tarpaulin, muffled with scrap wool to silence their movements. As each hitched the bags to their rigging, Ceddleria nudged the curtain open. Five sets of bleary eyes watched a coach, drawn by a pair of camels, lose a wheel in the middle of the road perpendicular to the alley.
The driver was Zedari. If all was well, Ceddleria knew, it’d be a glamour, or maybe a turncoat. Cezona had called the infiltrator ‘Nefeli’. It sounded Dadzhvoy, but that was no reason to leave behind her concern. The driver came down from the front and into the alley a ways, then pulled open the back of the carriage for a pack of tools. Ceddleria peered longer, through the slit in the curtain, even while Effrosyni came up to her back and hitched what felt like an axe inside the rigged tarpaulin to her kit. She let the ropes hang by her side. If she had blinked, she would have missed it when the driver left a small, tatty scarf on the back lip of the coach, where the pulled tools were. She took out a small lens. The knit was unmistakeably the fashion of Mežižan. This was the signal.
Ceddleria pulled back from the window and let it fall shut. When she turned, all four sets of eyes fell on her. She pushed down her doubt.
“Go in pairs, stagger exits. Don’t be seen, even by Cez’s turncoat. I will have words,” said Ceddleria in a hush. “Spryesh, Islijna first. Get settled, and partly detach your gear once you’re in. Effrosyni, Neroz, you’ll push their gear in, keep the floor of the wagon flat, then detach.” She unslung the gear-bag from her back. Neroz took it and slung it over his front. “I’ll come in when I’ve spoken to the turncoat. Keep the floor flat, then pull the crates over.”
“And if we can’t manage to get it to lie flat?” Spryesh asked.
Ceddleria fixed him in a gaze. “It’ll have to. We’ll have two chances to adjust. I’ll put the final look together. If there are no other questions…” she waited a beat. “First two. Go.”
The dim red dawn beyond the window was briefly interrupted Spryesh and Islijna, just along the wall. If this ‘Nefeli’ saw them… well, it was hardly damning. But it worried her nonetheless. They were either lucky, or the driver was well-directed; the driver was intently focused on the wheel, eyes cast towards the camels. There was a slight shudder to the cart as Spryesh clambered up into the back. It became obvious, then: the driver, head bowed over the wheel bearing, pretended not to notice. Ceddleria nodded.
Neroz left. When Effrosyni started to pull away, Ceddleria caught her arm. She said, knitting her brows over feelings which were working their way through her face, “I should have made better use of our leave, however brief. This isn’t an armistice, but I should have.”
Effrosyni let a breath slip. “Armistice.” She shook her head. “By Ay’yramox, you’re still pissed off.”
“No,” Ceddleria said, clinging onto the wrist. “I’m just slower. But I wanted you to know I can recognize that. And I’m sorry I didn’t.”
Effrosyni pressed her lips. Then, her gaze grew stern, buttressed by her raised, prominent brow. Her hand twisted to brace Ceddleria’s arm, then pulled away. “You’re worrying. Just nerves.”
Once they had all laid down inside the cart, crammed in on their bellies, braced under hollow crates and tied-down fixtures. Clairvoyance would be foiled– the official shipment, for which the manifest remained, listed esotericists’ paraphernalia, with which it was easy to intermix talismans foiling magical sight. Sturdier scrutiny could be turned away with the assurance that such power would damage the spellwork, which dated back to the Axtadum. It had been a stroke of luck capturing this coach and manifest so early into the year, far enough from its destination that plans could be set and times could be adjusted within reason, might take sole credit for the viability of the plan if not for the foil against visual inspection. The younger Ronodor Euclija, the second Ceddleria had the misfortune of ever once thinking of, would today receive a jubilee. If not for the fact of a handful of complacent zealots, it would not have been possible to force a delivery today.
They each lay there in the dark of the coach interior. Their cloaks, which were also dark tarpaulin, formed a floor for the goods stacked up. Even though they were empty, in number they were quite heavy. At the same time, the slightest shift would be obvious when viewed from above, which left Ceddleria with the sole option of total stillness. It made her tired. It had made her tired when they’d tested the fit, back in the desert.
It was a relief, then, when the coach finally slowed to a halt. There was a big shudder as the driver came down from the front. She could just scarcely hear the footsteps against the road through the floor of the carriage. Then another. Distinct, heavier. Erratic, though, so she interpreted two sets of boots.
A voice, muffled, came in Zedarijuce, “Oljebuc Doleri.”
The response– “Magnjstrac. Oljebuc,” and in double, “Oljebuc.” The latter was simply a greeting, Ceddleria knew, but the first had been a rank. A higher one. Their turncoat driver had the rare audacity to play at being Secret Fire ascendancy.
She wondered, momentarily, just how deep Cezona’s infiltrator had managed to get. It didn’t sound at all the first time. The next Ceddleria managed to hear was in the driver’s voice, what she assumed was the driver, and she hadn’t heard much of what preceded it. “...Had said the delivery was paramount and time-sensitive.”
Another stretch went by. Ceddleria strained her ears to hear. The darkness seemed to help, lidding the rest of her awareness. Finally, she caught another stint of words. “...An overnight crew,” one of the other voices was saying. They could only be referring to the token defense of the archive, which would mean Cezona’s intel had come through. Another one of the thousand things weighing on Ceddleria’s mind, bloodying themselves up against the sides of her skull, slid into place without fanfare. A bead of sweat caught between her and the tarp.
Suddenly, the three sets of footsteps were circling the back of the coach. One or two of the pairs had real weight, a kit of armor, or the drag of fastened weapons. The back heaved open. Through the canvas she could feel the dawn air brush up against the interior. She willed herself to stillness, willed the others to more than stillness. The darkness, the lid over her senses, was pierced by dim light.
Less muffled now, the second voice returned, “Do you have the manifest on you?”
“Yes,” the first voice answered. That of Cezona’s infiltrator, she now surmised. “Give me a moment.”
The light dimmed further. Ceddleria heard a wave of breath hit the canvas just to her left, accompanied by the faint rustle of heavy fabric moving. A hand probed the canvas next to her. That of ‘Nefeli’, she could only pray. Without warning, the hand closed around something. Ceddleria felt the canvas drag at the touch. That she’d be so careless!
Her breath was still seized in her lungs, she hadn’t dared go for the tarp over her weapons, when the hand withdrew.
There was a long silence as the sentries read over the manifest. Finally, their driver interjected. “I really wouldn’t worry over it. Your captains got a copy when the delivery was confirmed. It’s just going to sit in the compound until tomorrow, regardless.”
For the briefest of moments, before she remembered to thank her good fortune, Ceddleria was blindsided by the complacency of the Zedari machine, at the nucleus of their imperial might. The back of the coach shut, plunging them back into disquieted darkness, and the coach trundled a few minutes longer.
They emerged when the driver’s footfalls had gone away, and two hundred counts past. Each wore a mask and headwrap, and dark colored leathers, with dark tarps over their weapons lashed to their backs. Then they were up against the wall, just under a window, with only a faint limning glow to betray them. Zedarja was cold without the suns high above, and the light that was only starting to bathe it was cold too. She remembered, as in a faintly-remembered dream, the cold of the desert at morning. The banner of the Haruta flapped unceasingly against the walls of the compound. Unlike the sun, Zedarium did not cease in its cruel radiance, burning across miles of sand.
It was profoundly ugly, gaudy as jewelry, as a polished shell where it was hunkered over the rock it sat on like a predatory beast rearing back. The walls and gates were huge blocks, almost bruise-blue in the dim, though turning a salt-pink as the morning grew. Here was one of its apices, visible from anywhere within the city’s walls. The city itself was visible from the whole of the coastline, so that none may be spared the affront of its visage. In her youth, it had never been a happy reminder, but it had not always seemed to regard her with such an open cruelty.
In a fugue, she’d given the go-ahead. She’d hardly needed to give word. As soon as she put the end of the rope in Spryesh’s hand, he helped her skitter up onto the juts between the first and second stories. She jammed her body, with her leg to brace, within the hollow of a window, first glancing into the corridor beyond. As she scanned across, it was deserted until the very end, where she caught an armored figure with a chain in hand. She went still. Dogs!
Ceddleria pulled herself from the window, but remained splayed across the upper wall. It hadn’t been out of the question, but they’d thought it unlikely in a library, even given the reduced schedule. They’d smell the naphtha, maybe even through the bottle. The reduction in time it would lead to weighed heavy on her mind as they turned the topic over in furtive signs.
She pulled back against the wall, and prepared to lean back over the window, counting breaths as the figure, or another, passed again with the dog. She wet her lips, under her mask, and signed down, in a few one-handed moves, I’m not calling it off.
The archive had seven sections, of which only five had shelves. There were doubtless other storage rooms, but the five main libraries comprised the vast majority of volumes in the building. Moving quickly, they might be able to put the rooms to flame without raising any prior alarm. Unnervingly, they hadn’t been able to see the real size of the reduction in schedule for the Euclija’s jubilee, they merely knew that only security personnel would be on site, and at about half-strength. That they hadn’t known about the dogs now called that into question.
The window Ceddleria was braced against led into one of the antechambers, between the first library wing and a wing deemed low-priority: merely a loading dock, the intended destination of the shipment they’d diverted. The useless cargo still waited in the courtyard for hands who would not come until the next morning. With fires set, it would be worthless as an escape route. She put down a hand for Islijna to pass up a charm, to abey the alarm doubtless placed on the windows. Then Ceddleria jimmied the lock and tumbled down from the sill onto a worn rug. She hooked the other end of the rope under the sill, then made down the hall to watch the prior door, where the guard and the dog had come from.
Neroz was the last to enter, when Ceddleria’s hackles started to rise, even as the hall beyond remained silent. With the window open, the air wouldn’t be dead. Scent would carry, which would be worse than otherwise– which was bad already, they’d need to hope it dissipated enough for the dogs to not raise alarm. At the least, she could let her breath go when Neroz shut it and locked.
From there, they made down the corridor the other way, following the two loops’ patrol Ceddleria had seen. With a shoulder to the door, she beckoned Neroz to enter, and report back with a brief sweep. They’d reached the first archival room sooner than she’d had cause to expect: a wraparound tier at the second level. The middle, by the brief description Neroz offered by way of sign, was nearly bare, with most of the volumes in shelves along the walls. The fortune of their immediate proximity was made worse by one factor, however. He’d caught the faintest hint of footsteps approaching from the other way. The patrols went both ways. For a disquieting moment, Ceddleria decided she’d simply missed the opposite rotation, between the two loops she’d caught at the window.
How long do we have? She asked, deft on her fingers.
Two minutes, and that’s just one out of sight, Neroz guessed.
Ceddleria shifted gently past the bend, back towards their entrance. In an instant, she caught a flash of mottled fur and flattened herself against the wall.
She tucked back by the others. Anyone below? She signed to Neroz.
He simply gestured a negation.
Down, Ceddleria said, then tucked up and over the bannister, to fit herself into the crevice between the highest shelf and the second-story platform. Slowly, and with her foot braced against the highest shelf, she helped Spryesh first down and over, prising the tarp-wrapped weapon from his back to wedge it atop the shelf.
He hung there awkwardly at his perch until they managed to hook his foot between the back of the shelf and the wall, and he slipped back on his belly. Islijna came next.
As Islijna’s weight hit Ceddleria’s shoulder, Ceddleria felt her foot give from its purchase. Spryesh caught Islijna’s ankle. Ceddleria’s other leg started to slip from atop the shelf, her left hand having only an inverted grip on the platform above. Wildly, she grasped with the other for the bannister, and caught it, gouging a nail deep into the wood. Her finger protested, like knives in the nailbed. She could feel herself starting to lose grip again.
Effrosyni’s hand caught hers. She let her breath go, and folded herself back under the lip of the platform, just as a patrolman passed underneath. It had been thirty seconds of their apparent two minutes, and one minute without line of sight. Ceddleria didn’t know how long they had in the other direction. It was best not to wonder, except, perhaps, in that it was better to be certain. The others clambered down without incident, now having Spryesh and herself prepared to ease the clamber down.
As the seconds wound down, Ceddleria heard the footfalls growing louder, from the way they’d come, and the low snuffling of the dog. The platform began to creak above them, as weight set where they’d just been.
Ceddleria felt for the corks in her pots of naphtha, through the tarp on her back. As though she could really do anything about it now. As the footfalls neared the edge of the platform, she felt her heart skip a beat. That must be a diversion of the usual course.
Now mere feet from where they’d jammed themselves, she heard the low breathing of the dog. She swore she could feel the wetness of its breath. She held her own, as it began to sniff the bannister.
Gingerly, she felt for her nail. On her right ring finger, the bed was tender. The nail was jagged. It had broken off in the wood. Ceddleria squeezed her eyes shut.
“That’s enough,” a sharp voice came, in Zedarijuce. “I won’t have you sniffing out any reports for me. The captain will have my hide for the extra work.” The chain went taut, with a clattering of metal. “And I’ll have yours for that.”
Then, as if all at once, the footsteps began to recede, around to the right, to continue to the right, towards where Neroz had heard the other patrolman approaching.
We can’t move fast enough as one, Ceddleria said, just where her hands had enough light to be seen. Islijna should be with me. We set and move.
Spryesh’s fingers jumped into motion, still on one hand only, as his other steadied his large frame atop the shelves. His eyes roved the platform, even as he signed, this is no time to make hasty calls. The dogs call for more care, not swifter movement.
Effrosyni raised a hand, and made a few curt gestures. Her word goes. It’s too tight between the patrols, and the ones with dogs will raise the alarm too fast.
For nearly a minute there was stillness, then at last footfalls began to approach, from the opposite direction. Without any hint of a sniffing dog. Spryesh’s brow furrowed. The tightness in his face betrayed a short stint of calculation, then he lifted his fingers in faint submission. Slowly, he started to shift forward. With the other hand, he began to bare his weapon, a thick cudgel strapped to his back. He was preparing to climb up. Wait, Ceddleria signed. We do this quiet until the oil’s down.
Tension left Spryesh’s face, but Ceddleria knew, in some measure, she’d gone against his better wisdom. It’s decided, then, he signed. His grizzled face looked grave in the shadow of the platform above. Ceddleria glanced from one to the next. The calm of the score had set in, putting the crud in her mind to a clean burn. She recognized the look on each face– anticipation, but the truer look was that of veiled fear. She felt it too. Felt them waiting on her word. It gave her chills, even if she had, then, wanted it. She felt half-mad to think it.
That leaves Spryesh with Neroz. Skulks should be separated– she signed, and nodded to Neroz. You all go to the last, come back. We meet in the third.
Effrosyni jerked her hand into her field of view. Where do you need me?
True, Ceddleria had hesitated. Had just been winding up for it. The logic was simple, any way she could cut it. Islijna was veteran. She was also a mage. Neroz and Spryesh were a proven combination, tested in frontier raids, but neither had that capability. It made sense that Effrosyni should go with them. She rolled the bare apology she’d received this morning over in her mind, the twinge in Effrosyni’s eye. Even here, Ceddleria struggled to think of words to put to why it had worn her down as much as it had. Her hands spoke for her. With them.
Soundlessly, Spryesh and Neroz clambered back up. Ceddleria held the rope as they rose back over the bannister, and Effrosyni lingered.
And that was when the visitor came.
It started as it always did, with an unbidden breath, filling the crevices in her lungs with something cold, then out through the blood, and back through the veins, like a thick haze. The thoughts started to flow, infant and unformed, first unnoticed, and then with breaching awareness, as through a hole drilled in the base of her skull. They engulfed her own, like an encroaching glacier.
Ceddleria looked at Effrosyni, as her brain buzzed with a deep, foreign disorientation. She remembered the desert of her youth, but she wasn’t much younger. Rather, both suns were orange on the sky, she was nowhere, but the strongest feeling that came from the memory was that she was, pressingly, free. Most pressingly, Viktoria, the Petrovich monster, was not there. Her mind shuddered at the name.
Effrosyni scowled. Some distance in her eye must have given her pause, because concern was etching into the look. It put her off. Ceddleria felt her jaw set, even as her vision split between places. She’d insisted to Effrosyni that she was happiest when they were her problem and hers alone. It was better that way; there’d be no need to chafe at platitudes of care, or propositions of a cure. The genocidal caveman king’s scion with her psychotherapy, or the Temeryon queenling with her quack medicine. She struggled to care about that right now. It sapped her energy, even as committed as she was to preventing the episode from coming between them and a successful mission. Ceddleria was rarely capable of swallowing her pride, and this was bigger than pride.
It would’ve gone on like that had Effrosyni not lifted her fingers again. As near as Ceddleria could tell, Effrosyni had caught on to the slip in her expression no sooner than she’d felt it coming on herself. She signed, what’s the matter?
As though she didn’t know.
I’m fine, Ceddleria responded, curtly, though she was certain what she was seeing was not Effrosyni, but the desert. I’ll be fine.
Effrosyni pressed her lips. She fixed Ceddleria in what felt like a long look, though both were conscious of how much time was going by. It was short, needless to say. Effrosyni’s look was disbelieving, and not altogether cold. A rarer look, in that. She signed, simply, you made the call.
That took the wind out of her anger. The stillness it left was gnawing. Ceddleria was standing on a hill. Whenever it would be, when she finally worked up the nerve to look over to one side, she knew she’d see someone she didn’t recognize anymore. Ceddleria was wedged under her platform. To the other side, there was just Effrosyni.
It was hard to make it feel real when Effrosyni’s expression finally softened. Dimly, Ceddleria realized, she was making up for it. With her hands, she said, I’m going up. I’m not going to nag. You heard what I needed you to hear. So: say it one more time, will you be fine?
Yes, Ceddleria responded. It was hasty, so she paused, and made the same sign again. At last, Effrosyni crawled out, but before she did, she clung to Ceddleria’s wrist, and gave her another long look. Effrosyni, who was so rare to touch, sex being the occasional, and it sometimes felt sole, exception. Ceddleria met the look, as best as she can. Then Effrosyni was gone, and sand filled the floor of the chamber, blown in through some crevice in the wall she couldn’t pick out.
When the other three had vanished, after she and Islijna hunkered down while the patrolman passed over head, they clambered up. Just adjacent to this room, there was a stair linking the platform down to the ground. It was completely enclosed; for the whole minute in descent they had no ability to see the archival room beyond. It made sense that none of the patrols would pass through these stairs, at least before the guard changed. Still, the two of them were swift to descend, pausing only briefly for the ground level to clear. There was a door at the bottom. When they’d passed it, the sand seemed to flee away from wherever she planted her feet. Ceddleria shut the door and jammed it with a screwdriver.
The room itself was almost daunting when viewed from the ground. Shelves scaled the nearly fourty feet of wall uninterrupted before stopping just below the platforms, where they had wedged themselves. Ladders on tracks spanned to just below the highest shelf. She met Islijna’s eyes, midway through circling the room. There were crows’ feet pressed into the greyish skin at the corners of her eyes. Islijna signed out the time, insistent, then turned around. She hiked up the tarpaulin-bag on her back. Ceddleria jostled it until she could bring the pots of naphtha up and out of the wrapping. With them held close to her nose, even sealed, she could smell the faint stench of oil.
Ceddleria looked back. She searched for some acknowledgement in Islijna, acknowledgement that she knew the next step was irrevocable. Islijna simply repeated her dwindling count of time. They both pulled their corks.
Arson was easy, when one got down to it. An archive full of dusty tomes ranks somewhere near hay when it came to flammability. The role of the naphtha becomes insurance, a way to control the spread, and a way to spike the heat. Ceddleria was careful to keep herself flicking it out in little spurts, circling the room.
It shouldn’t have taken the effort it did, but Ceddleria could not trust the archive around her. It had been amorphous for a time now. She still felt the naphtha-bottle in her right hand, but by her left, there was a limp form slumped on the ground. There was a feeling of some profound amusement in the feelings of the visitor when she went for the wrist and started to drag it, even as she took pains to shut it out, and to keep her attention on the shelves.
She was dragging a heavy, limp form down a long corridor, fenestrated on the right by windows which let in the last light of a sunset on the far side of the building, light on its second bounce. She was still near Zedarium. She could smell the desert. There was oil on the air, yes, but she didn’t need to note that. She already knew that was real. She, or the visitor, was walking with a profound sense of amusement through an estate house which she planned to inherit, one of a few.
At the end of the hall there would be a stairway. At the top of the stairs, there would be her idiot brother. But she wasn’t here to see him, she was here because of the other boy. The thoughts came in waves as she finished with the shelves.
A hand closed around her shoulder and yanked her to the wall. Islijna’s, interrupting her as she followed the turns of the narrow estate halls. She held a beat, where Islijna had put her. A flash of momentary horror set her nerves on fire. Then, aghast, she could see the patrolman in the next room. She’d nearly walked out before it. Its armor was tinking faintly as it walked the perimeter of the archive floor just next, merely through a short connecting hall. It was approaching, and sooner than either her or Islijna’s count.
Ceddleria’s face had started to run hot. She kept her eyes cast away from Islijna, even as she felt the veteran’s eyes on her. With a hand held aside, she signed, I don’t see a dog. You don’t see a dog?
No, Islijna replied. Ceddleria nodded, finally starting to lift her chin. The shame of it sat like manic anticipation in her gullet. Exacerbated by the words shared with Effrosyni. She stashed the naphtha-bottles, let her own tarp-bag fall to her hand, and pulled Islijna’s sword from the rest of her gear. With her tongue-tip to her teeth, she glanced into the next room, the patrolman was starting to turn around. She’d have a moment to spring across the passage, to hunker by the archway. Islijna pulled her sabre from the tarp. When the sabre-grip hit her hand, she crossed and put her shoulder to the wall.
Listen for a dog, she signed to Islijna. The older woman shut her eyes. They were gently lidded in the shadows of her headwrap, which laced around the bases of her horns and covered her lower face. Ceddleria clamped her off-hand around the flats of her sabre, letting go of the lump she’d been dragging. Islijna had seemed to glance straight through it.
Have you figured it out yet? The thought arose, fully-formed. It hissed as she smothered it. Once, it would have easily bought her disdain, that the visitor made no attempts at burying itself within her cognition. A lazy parasite, flaunting its trespasses. Ceddleria couldn’t stomach the thought of rewarding such cheapness with real thought, but even now, her grip tightened where it clamped the sword. Islijna shook her head. No dogs.
The patrolman exited from the mouth of the passage not moments later in a trance-like lockstep. Islijna, folded in the crevice of the turn of two walls mere feet from where he passed went fortunately unnoticed, but he made it only a handful of steps into the room before he paused, seeming to catch the smell of naphtha on the air. There’d be a moment of confusion; a moment which would have to be long enough. She signalled to Islijna, who slowly lifted the tarp, her chopping sword in the other hand.
Ceddleria nodded, and they both crept from the wall. The hall of the estate stretched out in front of her, even as the patrolman in his light brigandine started to turn, as though to look through one of the walls. She felt every bunch as the rubber of her soles curled beneath her tread. Islijna was almost on him. She clutched one end of the sword in her armpit, reaching out with the handle, like a snare. Ceddleria closed, almost within reach.
Pick yourself back up, the visitor said.
The patrolman turned. He spotted Islijna first, and stumbled back in surprise. She struck his helmet with a dull clang, with the handle of the sword, then shot her elbow over his shoulder to get its length around his torso, and the tarp over his face. Ceddleria scrambled to help her pull the sentry back to the passage. He heaved as his shoulder hit the ground, shooting past Islijna’s grip. She still had the tarp over his face.
Ceddleria scurried, probing for the lip between plates in his jack. She found it with the tip of the sabre and rammed it home. Bone cracked when she plunged her sword through. She wrenched it back out and dove to his shoulder, helping Islijna keep the tarp taut until the nerves died down. They left the sentry’s body in the passage. They weren’t going to worry at getting the blades back in the rigging, so they doused the tarps in a bit of oil and jammed the threshold to the stair.
As Ceddleria moved on the next room, Islijna caught her shoulder and rapped twice, lightly, on the wall. Ceddleria put her back against it and turned.
Are you holding? Islijna signed, on the hand held away from the mouth of the passage. You keep looking about.
I’m holding, Ceddleria replied. She pressed her lips and made an effort to look Islijna straight in the eye. Coming here, she signed. It’s difficult.
Islijna didn’t verbally question the half-truth, though a furrow in her brow remained. It was, perhaps, uniquely true for all Dadzhvoy. Her head turned, already roving the next room, but for a moment, she glanced back. Then you’ve learned the first lesson, she signed, curtly. When you lead, you have doubts, you keep them down. You make a call, you hold to it. Then she put her hand back on her sword-hilt, and entered.
Casting naphtha over this room felt as though it went by quicker, at least with Ceddleria’s efforts to smother any foreign thoughts from her mind. It wasn’t the same as stumbling through a mirage; it felt more akin to throwing out half of everything she saw. Whenever she’d look to one side, the body– her body– was slumped on the floor, even as she drew further across the estate hall. She stared down at it once she’d finished her side, biting her tongue until the patches of red skin through a threadbare set of rags went blurry.
Then she dragged a rope doused in oil from the prior room, and found herself side by side with Islijna before the estate staircase. She pushed stubbornly to look through it, the swimming scene, to see the archive around her. Islijna was readied to move on to the next room.
This isn’t cute, arose a thought. The visitor’s. The worthless leech’s, spewing nonsense into her inconsolable daydreaming hindbrain. Ceddleria found it suddenly all painfully obvious. The awful bind in it all being, of course, that this was one that she struggled to ignore. It caught her far too close to the heart to shut out, for the directionless rage it inspired. Ceddleria would not let herself think it, because thinking was ever what fed the ghosts, but she would not so easily have forgotten the presence of Viktoria Petrovich, even as she struggled to scrape that acrid being from herself.
The visitor’s memories came clear back around in her mind. She staggered forward down that estate hall. Ceddleria hated to admit it, even to herself, but she needed a second in peace. She busied herself with tying fuses along the wall, until Islijna started to beckon from the landing ahead, haste plain on her face. Ceddleria had already banished the stairway out of mind. The visitor in her head railed against her, mounting in indignation. The thoughts were starting to dizzy her. She was wasting time, standing here dumbstruck. She buried it under the little effort of picking up another rope, doused in oil, and hustling to the archway.
You’re wasting time. I don’t have time to waste, the ghost of Viktoria thought into her head. You’re wasting time you could be doing something pointless with. Ceddleria looked on: Effrosyni, Neroz, and Spryesh emerged moments later from the opposite hall, taking cover by a low shelf. Dragging a body on a tarp. The blood sat on top of it, not saturating the cloth. The ground was clean, but the score…
She and Islijna climbed halfway up the estate hall’s stairs, and hunkered down in the mouth of the passage into the third archival room. At the top of the stairs, there would be her idiot brother. She wasn’t here to see him. But she was here because of the other boy.
Spryesh signed to Islijna, who responded. Both uncorked bottles of naphtha, and started to push towards the interior of the room.
A small patrol– a pair of sentries, came in from a third entrance, towards the center of the compound, perhaps drawn by two sentries now unresponsive. Any second now they’d look, see Spryesh, or see Islijna.
One didn’t have the chance. Neroz caught it just under the helmet with a crossbow bolt, and it dropped like a shot bird. Neroz ducked, reloading the crossbow. The other, stupefied for a bare moment…
Ceddleria considered the gun she’d taken from her tarp. It was loaded. The living sentry had started to back up, but he was meandering towards a node ensconced in the wall. An alarm. She started to circle out, careful to keep out of sight, but Spryesh was now behind his field of view. Spryesh had his cudgel in hand. It would have rang far too loud for comfort, had he swung for the patrolman’s head. Instead it crunched straight through the ribcage, and he crumpled. Spryesh followed him down.
Ceddleria caught his eye. She signed, with as much emphasis as she could, oil!
For a moment, there was relative stillness again. With all five of them present, laying out the naphtha as a starter proved trivial. Islijna had knelt a moment over the body of the sentry Neroz shot, then dragged him to the tarp with the others. Ceddleria and Effrosyni had nearly joined the fuses, Spryesh had started to pull the other, the man he’d cudgeled, away, when Neroz straightened up, stock still. He signed out, patrol! And at once there was the rush of five bodies and several corpses tucking in the passage the other team had come through, the one that led to the fourth archival room. There was no chance Spryesh could make it over with the body. He tucked the sentry beneath a case.
Faint, from above, there was the clinking of a chain, and the low sniffing of a dog. Ceddleria risked a short moment leaning out. The armored figure was taking a slow circle on the second tier. If the dog didn’t smell them, she worried, it might catch scent of the oil. If the sentry looked, it wasn’t subtle, the splashes of black tar over tarpaulin at the thresholds, or smeared on the shelves. Then she saw another, just behind the first. One was just starting to swivel his head. Ceddleria retreated beyond the lip of the passage.
That was when she saw it. Spryesh’s kill had crawled out from under the plinth, now nearly reaching the node he’d sought before. The alarm. His breathing was ragged as he started to bend up, partly clawing at the apron of the wall. It was grotesque, his chest had been crushed, and Ceddleria doubted he could cry out. But if shot again…
The patrol on the upper tier was starting to come around. Her tongue went dry. Ceddleria was about to alert Neroz when the patrollers above glanced towards the archway. She went still, trusting in the distance and poor lighting. She swore she saw one of the dogs lower to sniff through the bannister.
When she looked again, the surviving sentry was nearly to the node.
Ceddleria nearly took Neroz’s hand and indicated. Instead, she tipped her head to the others. Death or absolution, she said, on her hands, and lit the fuse. Four sets of eyes caught the sentry, his hand inches from the alarm. They caught one of the dogs, approaching the bannister, snuffing faintly. Effrosyni nodded.
They dove right, barrelling through the passage to the complex’s hub as the third archival room went up like a grain fire. The tall, cylindrical structure of the room channeled a column of roaring flame swirling up to the ceiling until the pressure burst shattered one of the high windows and the column, spinning like a top, began to flood through the vent left behind. The complex came aroar with fire and barking in a matter of moments.
The grand archival complex of the Secret Fire, testament to the mandate of the Gods to conquer, spat black smoke into the sky.
It mattered extremely little how quickly Ceddleria ran. Climbing the estate staircase took as long as though she had simply walked, dragging a limp body in her left hand. She closed her left hand around the handle of her pistol and drew.
They were waiting when they made it to the lobby, some of them singed, but massed, and with dogs. The complex’s stair was a mere rush left and behind. They’d need to make it back to the window above the cart, to there, then to the rendezvous.
At the top of the staircase in the estate there was a door. She didn’t remember what had been said after the door opened. Viktoria Petrovich’s ghost gave no clarity. The room beyond was something like an attic, but it had an opulent circular window, framed by a chest of drawers and a wall table. The rest of the room was sparse. It was only faintly lit.
There was her idiot brother. He had just drawn a crossbow, clutched in his scrawny blue hands, pointed directly at the other boy, Sorin Petrovich, who was smiling with cruel abandon. The sight of it filled her with a terrible and foreign conceitedness.
Mircea pulled the trigger and shot out a pane of glass. It streaked out into the night.
Ceddleria aimed. Spryesh had already leapt over a secretary’s desk, his cudgel pounding one of the men-at-arms to the floor. Abject chaos had broken out. She fired. A marksman fell, and she led Islijna and Effrosyni across, towards the stair. Beside her, heat streaking from her hands, Effrosyni nullified a mage’s spell.
They hit the first step, and Spryesh fell in line behind them. At the top of the stair emerged six more sentries and three dogs on chains. Islijna led them up, close to the railing. Neroz’s bolt dropped one of the dogs. As Islijna advanced, she brought her sword arcing around. Another dog drew back, and she locked blades with the foremost sentry. Ceddleria stashed and drew another pistol, pulling back.
Spryesh rushed to the front. His cudgel was a thing apart, breaking the slapdash line of them, even as Effrosyni slung bolts of malignant heat into their scattered formation. Ceddleria dropped another marksman to their rear and let the pistol rest. They shouldered, themselves ragged, through the breach in the row. She held her sabre like a ward as they passed toward the mouth of the hall linking this antechamber to the first archival room, where they’d entered.
Ceddleria and Spryesh had been first through, which left them the work of ensuring the others made it. Even as they stood little chance of cutting down on the sentries’ numbers in any real way. The breach had been short lived, and Neroz, Islijna, and Effrosyni were still reaching their position. There were two nearing them, both with swords drawn, and she didn’t see the remaining dog. That left out the marksmen and mage below, plus the forces now pushing up the stair.
She got her momentary opening. Spryesh brought the cudgel down on one of them, ringing the helmet like a bell. There was another, beside.
Of all of the despicable things that the Petrovich had made of her, there were a rare few that had occasional benefit, though, Ceddleria seldom did so with any thought. In this case, had she, she would have suppressed it, in hopes of preventing the trespasser spirit of Viktoria from sharing in an ounce of her gain.
She put her sabre through the side of the sentry’s chest, beneath the underarm. As she stuck him, she called out with that awful hollow in her, the crevice Viktoria had dug out, for the visitant ghosts to crawl into, and found the sentry beside him. When she dug her sabre out of the first’s ribs, both went down. Neroz rushed past. A bolt whizzed from his crossbow, finding no purchase, and as they retreated, orderly as they could, Islijna and Effrosyni drew close.
Standing there in the threshold, leading to their entry corridor, or rather, the third floor of the estate, before that opulent window, she reached down and grabbed the limp body’s hair. Her own hair, and pulled her gaze up. Mircea reloaded his crossbow, still shaking. Sorin put his arms wide, now with an expression of mock sadness. Mircea loosed. The bolt leapt into the meat of his shoulder. Suddenly, Sorin’s hand went to his shoulder, and his expression turned to genuine sorrow.
“Hey, little lark,” Ceddleria remembered Sorin saying. “Hey, let’s stop playing now. Let’s just go home,” he said. “You’ve been talking with my sister. How… awful of you.”
He kept saying it until Mircea had loaded another, and he started to stagger forward, sluggish from some curse or some poison on the bolts. He reached out with both hands, like for an embrace, her brother staggering back. It was, for some reason, abjectly funny. For all the effort of procuring the crossbow, he couldn’t procure a shootist of any talent.
Mircea’s back hit the wall and he squeezed down. When the bolt hit this time, Sorin staggered back. Suddenly, Mircea was advancing on him, as he stood there motionless. He heaved with all of his strength, as Sorin’s boots groaned, nearly tipping over. With a final burst of strength, Mircea shoved him through the broken window.
Suddenly, Ceddleria felt the front of her skull split open. Lifting her sword, she put one hand to her forehead, and it came away clean. It felt as though a great mass was prying through her head, battering it into chunks. As though her life was snuffing out, like fainting, or drowning, but she could feel every inch the mass moved inwards. If you wanted to know what it felt like, a sole thought arose, screaming with rage, with all else drowned out by the agony. When he does that. And when that round-eared slut cut my head off.
Ceddleria punched through it. She was coming around on the left, Spryesh on the right, matching the lines of sentries, as they reinforced, when a dog leapt from the dizzying chaos at their feet and caught Islijna by the arm. Without a moment to intervene, one of the sentries put his sword across her torso and pulled her back down the stairs. The dog’s mouth came away and bit down again and again, reddening each time. The lines of them converged, as if to swallow her up.
Effrosyni whirled, still feet from the line of them. Her hands opened and she threw out a gout of flame. For a moment, between the fire bursting from the adjacent halls, archways straining as the supports began to fall, and Effrosyni’s fire, the hub was a vibrant orange. Then a spear came out of her back.
Spryesh’s club fell on the spear and it splintered into pieces. In a mad dash, they rushed down the corridor to the window. Ceddleria could not remember whether it had been her or Spryesh to carry Effrosyni, bleeding badly. The air was thick with smoke. And Islijna was gone.
Spryesh bashed out the window. Ceddleria took the brunt of a score of jagged chunks of glass, wrapping Effrosyni as best as she could. The spear-tip was cold beneath her left hand. When she landed– and somehow, perhaps by Neroz’s aid, it was on her feet– she could not say which wounds had been sustained in the fighting, and which by the glass. A bolt which had found itself in her other shoulder was more obvious. Then Spryesh took Effrosyni from her shoulder onto his.
Then, Ceddleria remembered splitting, and running block after block through the daytime streets of Zedarja, and harrowingly, by the gate. She darted in the shadow of the aqueduct to the lower city, before they found the hatch to the temporary shelter. The backyard cellar of some paid-off hotel with no appreciation for what they were abetting.
The mage, Cezona’s man and their way out, wouldn’t arrive until sundown. The sudden switch from a pitched escape to utter stillness was an affront– it stripped her ability to flush her mind, even as she yoked it to the task of plotting a route further and further, by the wharves, or to the slums. And Islijna was gone!
She was pacing again when they laid out Effrosyni on a coffee table found in that same cellar, but Ceddleria was watching her brother run his hands bloody on the broken shards of the opulent attic window. Her body was crumpled in front of the window, like it had just come careening in. She was, Viktoria was, laughing. Ceddleria went to Effrosyni’s side, and started undoing the ties of her armor, and replacing the panels of leather that came away damp, red, and copper-smelling with bandage cloth. She was doing this without any real strategy, until Neroz gently rebuffed her and went to clean the wound.
Neroz had a mite of magic. Ceddleria doubted it would be enough, but when she looked at Neroz to say it, there was a pain, a small kind of begging in his eyes. She wiped her hands on the quilting under her armor until they hurt.
She was starting to spin out when Neroz straightened up and said it. The spear had punctured her right lung. She had hypoxia of the blood, and was still bleeding. Ceddleria was near sick when he’d finished saying it. A cold sweat had started up at her neck.
“Can you buy her a few hours,” she said, scarcely thinking through the implication of her words. Neroz had stripped his armor down to a simple shirt. There was a halo of sweat around his neck, on his hairline. His shirt nearly black with it, and blood ran up his arms. His sandy skin looked flushed. Something close to stricken had hit his expression.
“I care about her too, Cedd,” Neroz cut in. For a moment, he sulked, then his eyes came up. “We all do. So don’t think for a second I’m not trying.”
Ceddleria chewed on her cheek and started to puzzle over their contingencies. There was no returning to the initial safehouse. Her focus, her temper was focused to a pinhole, as Neroz rolled Effrosyni onto her side. She’d opened her eyes, eyes darting, for a moment, but lost consciousness again just as fast. The tarp she was on was slick with blood; it burgeoned from around the spearhead. Her complexion had gone from ash near to stone.
She was slipping, and Neroz was too proud by half to admit he didn’t have the talent to fix it. Any longer like this, Ceddleria wagered, and she’d be gone. Up and vanished like Oskar, again and again, dragged off like Mircea, like Islijna, and if any of them came back again, that’d be for the worse. Another turn of Zedarja’s crushing wheel. She felt the thought burn down like a fuse. Another eaten to fill Doleri’s boundless ravin. She flushed the thought out with her breaths. There’d been…
There’d been a list of healers, with the plans, Dadzhvoy all, slum-dwellers with applicable training, keeping the few sad dregs who fled behind enemy lines to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that Zedarja wasn’t a declaration of existential war forever. Her hand twitched at her side. Ceddleria brought her head up to look at Neroz again, and scoffed, “But this isn’t about love, Neroz. Admit it. If Islijna were here, the both of you could fix this. But they dragged her off. I’m taking her to a doctor.”
She really guessed Neroz might have chafed at it. She hadn’t been worried about being cruel, not now of all times. Neroz dipped his head, shaking it slowly. Finally, he snorted, faint. “Alone?” His eyes fell to the body. “Yeah. There’s little I can do for her now. She’s been on the brink since we got here, anyway. But you’re more like to aggravate it, or get caught on the way.”
“I’ll not be idle,” Ceddleria said. “I won’t. So if she’s meat either way, I’ll take my chances.” On her second thought, she grew angrier. “Are any of us going to take defeat lying down?”
“This is victory,” Spryesh cut in, with a grizzled wisdom in his voice that may as well have been a hand of nails down a chalkboard. “Your victory, and it’ll seldom be but bitter and filling. Pray, and come the worst, at least this way you say farewell.” He added, “But not another life.”
She let her tongue sit behind her teeth for a moment, then squeezed her eyes. “Will either of you stop me?”
When she rounded her glare on Neroz, something in his eyes shrank. So she glanced sidelong to Spryesh, working the anger around in her mind. She felt well boneheaded enough to punch through any opposition he raised, but at last, he lifted his fingers. That’d be the leave Ceddleria got. It was more than enough for her to pick Effrosyni up onto her shoulder and stalk out.
For the first hour, after the dash from the shelter to the solace of alleys, Ceddleria traveled by burying herself in tight, winding streets. The leathers she’d worn now changed for baggy rags, like a bum, with Effrosyni draped across her shoulder. Even where the streets tightened, and the walls around changed from blocks of polished white capped with gold to dilapidated structures, braced with rotting wood and battered by sand, the sun was constant. Worse, the streets had been near-deserted as she wandered, emptied for the jubilee.
Empty save for the occasional patrol of soldiers, brought on by the ripening reports of arson in the upper city. Blood had saturated her shoulder. Hers, Effrosyni’s, it hardly mattered. It stuck against her neck and darkened the rags. Effrosyni wasn’t stirring anymore. The whitish cobblestones had grown as bright as the late morning sun, like a sunstroke. Ceddleria’s eyes roved for a landmark, to steer her on towards the ghettoes where she was bound. The rowhouses had long since turned to small, loosely-arranged conglomerates of blocks, the alleys between them growing dizzying, or turning into loops.
On a whim, for the pointlessness of it all, she turned out onto the road. It was wide, all around her, and bare as in the dead of night. All around, a thousand sparkling flagstones threatened to blind her. The whole world was rendered in an unwholesome, all-consuming brightness. She loped on, with Effrosyni’s unmoving body slung over, like a hunch in her back. She felt at once unmoored, like the ground rising up to meet her. Slowly, she laced her hand around to grip Effrosyni’s right, limply hanging over her shoulder. It twitched, it still felt faintly warm. What little warmth remained.
The survivors had been right, of course. It was the only conclusion she could draw, as Effrosyni’s blood continued to slowly saturate her shirt. Effrosyni was going to die. Islijna was gone, and perhaps that had been the moment which doomed her. Like her father, the moment he’d shackled himself to her kind. Death was fated, again, and again, as it came to Mircea, to father, the moment he’d shackled himself to her kind, to Nestor, to Eleni. To Mežižan. The sand would eat them all. That was the choice she’d made, the price she’d agreed to, to save her ego, to die on her feet, wasn’t it?
That was the command she’d given to press on, the dogs be damned, the Secret Fire be damned, Zedarja itself be eaten by the sand. To watch all the others drown in it first, to see how much blood it took to slake a desert. What a nice dream it had been to rebel. This was the life, as Ceddleria imagined it. Effrosyni would be gone, too. To lose until you finally couldn’t any longer, and died, or worse, lived. Because that’s what so many had done, right? Stopped walking against the tow, stopped running themselves into the ground, ad infinitum. She gave the hand another squeeze. Perhaps Viktoria had gone. Parasites were always quick to quit the dying. She’d once blamed them for it all. This morning, she might have said all of Zedarja.
Ceddleria Vedova looked up. Four soldiers were approaching, on horseback, gendarmes, in tabarded armor and visorless helms. She stared at them for a time, dimly aware that they were growing nearer. She stilled, the whirling of her thoughts growing into a feeble hope they wouldn’t notice her. She started to stagger to the side, to rest Effrosyni near the wall. She turned her head in a lame attempt to hide, so plainly caught out. The hooves drummed on the cobblestones.
One spurred his horse on. He was scarcely far now, and she hadn’t made it to the streetside, much less cover. She knew she hadn’t the will to flee now, to stymied by her agony, by the corpse or the near corpse on her shoulder. The survivors had been right, Spryesh and Neroz. Perhaps she could have prayed and waited and said farewell. She might have lived on.
The horse drove by, and its rider spat at her feet.
Effrosyni’s right hand was nearly cold when she staggered into a clinic, the first she could find without a boarded-up door. She clasped onto it like a vise, as though the moment she let it go, it would at last lose all warmth. Perhaps indeed it would.
The front room was empty, save for an unattended reception desk. There was only a sole other door in the building, so Ceddleria shoved into the next room. A Dadzhvo physician stood over a sickly-looking man, with drawn breathing. There were trays about the space, with surgical tools, poultices, and medicines. The physician, a woman in an apron with dark ashen skin, stepped back from the bed, eyes shot wide.
Her hands were halfway up when she saw Ceddleria’s horns. Then her face turned to incredulity. “I’m with a patient,” she cut in.
Ceddleria nearly dropped Effrosyni into the chair by the door. She was pale as a ghost, and the fabric around the spearhead had grown hard and black. An instant later, the physician was beside her, with a few glances cast back to her own patient.
She was already asking what had happened when she caught sight of the spearhead, and froze. Her hands started to shake. “Get out,” she started to say. Her breath came fast. “I heard rumors, an attack in the upper city. That the perpetrators were, that you were one of us. Get out! Get out, before you bring them here!”
Ceddleria rounded on her, despair forgotten. “Is she dead? Tell me if she’s dead!” It was all coalescing in her head, into a black spiral. “I’m not leaving. Not until she can walk out with me!”
“You’ll bring them here!” the physician wailed, but she was already starting to step around Ceddleria. She craned her neck to get a better look at Effrosyni. “Oh, ancestors,” she said, caught up in a breath. “I… I can’t tell.” Ceddleria’s eyes were near to bulging when the physician rounded on her, terror, exasperation, and all haste forgotten. She looked at Ceddleria with a black rage she’d only seen a handful of times, in inductees to the Order, those who had the most grievances to toll from Zedarja. “You,” the physician redoubled with a contempt that shook her. “Watch my patient. He has children, a wife. If they lose a father, a husband, what little prosperity they’ve managed to eke out, it is not Zedarja’s doing. It’s yours.”
The words hit her like a blow from Spryesh’s club. She let her eyes drift to the man, drawn in his illness, with gurgling breaths. He’d been naive to imagine there’d be anything for him here. Anything, for any of them. He’d sold out millennia of hostility to cozy up to the enemy, to stick his head in the mouth of a dragon and pray that he would not chance its whim to bite down. But the look in the physician’s eye was unflinching. Ceddleria slinked over to his bedside and stared up as she moved Effrosyni to another bed and drew the curtain.
As she lingered there, listening to the weak breathing of an old man, she strained to hear any whimper from Effrosyni through the curtain. Time to time, the room seemed to drift around here. Time and again, her efforts were met with nothing. But neither did the physician emerge.
At some point, the awareness filtered in between her thoughts that the visitor, that Viktoria, had not left her. The ghost lingered there, cruelly, bringing the estate house back around her, transposing the little clinic back into that attic, the Mircea that returned to her standing by the window, running his hands bloody. She looked down at herself on the floor, her ruddy skin filling back in. The head was starting to raise.
In her memory, Viktoria said, “Tremendous work, ’little lark’. I do wish you luck getting out.”
Say it. Say I should have killed him right then, a thought welled up. Oh, it would have saved me a lot of pain.
Ceddleria would have shot her dead in that forgettable Temeryon port, had it not been for Adara Teghraid. And Adara Teghraid had been Mircea’s fault.
You’re a terrible host, the ghost said. I suppose I have no choice but to take fault for that. It’s not like any of you sand rats was going to come up with any kind of manners, otherwise. But he always was the interesting one, to me. Sorin got to be the favorite, and that means he got to snap him up. Leaving me stuck with terrible little you. You, though. Killing you just would have been smart, wouldn’t it have been? I was always too reticent to give up my consolation prize.
And you were a parasite before you died, too. Ceddleria looked back down at the patient. His breathing, though laborious, hadn’t morphed into anything she’d consider unstable. For a moment, the room spun, until she shook her head. Her stomach was rising up towards her throat again.
Ceddleria had come to standing in the estate house attic. She stood not three feet away from herself, where she was in Viktoria’s memories. Ceddleria felt… she felt pinned between them, between bodies. Ceddleria in the memory was coming off of the narcotics Viktoria had pumped her full of. She’d started when she saw Mircea, run over, put her arms around him and pulled him kicking from the window, like if she squeezed hard enough it’d suddenly be the same. But she was standing where Viktoria had been, and Mircea…
There was a blinding flash of light, and Oskar came, back from nowhere, soon to slip back to nowhere. He walked up, slow, put his arms around both of them, and there was another flash. Ceddleria lifted her hand to her chin, smothering a splitting grin. I never saw this part, she said to herself.
No. Viktoria did.
Then there stood a dune, the highest in the featureless desert around. It looked like a rumpled blanket in the language of her seething mind, even as she pushed to keep one eye on the patient. Mircea was standing, blue against orange, at its crest, talking to Oskar. Ceddleria started to push up it, pacing around what she dimly knew to be a small clinic. The sand slid around her feet as she walked, climbing though she knew such a thing was impossible, and stumbling though she knew there was nothing to slip upon.
Ceddleria remembered perfectly what she said, then. She’d demanded to know where Oskar had been, but nothing he said could have satisfied the hatred that saturated her. It was unfair and bestial in its heat, for the mere fact that he had vanished, and not been destroyed with the rest of them, by sword, or by survival. She’d stood there upon the dune a while, with the wind brushing the sand around her feet. Words had been difficult, even as the sky started to burn with that first awful new dawn. It had been a long time, then, since she’d had a memory that made sense. This one, the one that had tangled itself so inexorably around Viktoria that it spun around in the confines of her skull at the presence of her ghost, was the first.
When she’d finally got to talking, plumbed the root of the whole awful fact that neither Oskar nor Mircea had the will any longer to stand beside her, take their lives back, to kill her tormentor any longer, to free mother, she’d driven them both off. Oskar had fled, weeping, when his Gods, potent enough to grant their decree unto the might of Zedarja, to whisk him away from the killing field where Ceddleria and her brother had lost any semblance of a home, could not save him from a little nagging. She’d thought of it that way for a long time. But it had been Mircea to betray her, all the more severely.
He’d slain his captor. She’d watched him do it, in a daze, but it had been obvious. But when she’d put the case before them, to go back, to finally end the whole awful lot, he’d proven himself the coward, laying down before the memory of their mother, and left her to go about her vengeance alone. When at last he saw the light, when he slaughtered Viktoria, ended Isabella, he had long since stopped fighting. The brother she’d known, bright, driven, the most like father… had died with the rest of them. With Nestor and Eleni. Oh, if Nestor could have seen it, her, alone, with the whole of their awful absolution on her back. Mircea may as well have forgotten the lot of them.
When Viktoria’s thoughts welled up again, Ceddleria put her face into a towel and bit down on her tongue until, howling, the room spun and there were no thoughts, hers or otherwise.
When the slightest rattling came from the next room, the physician found her bleeding into the cloth and staring down at the sleeping body of the old man. “Your accomplice is awake,” she said. “She’s through the worst of it, but I wouldn’t wager all.”
She thought again of Effrosyni’s words the night before. She’d reassured her of her love, but rebuked her questions, and rebuked her for seeking something to tie her down, a link, a surrogate home. Her mother had spoken of Mežižan, and that had long been her anchor, but if she was truthful with herself, she had not felt that cord since before Oskar had fled, since before Mircea had abandoned her. Mežižan had been a ruin already when she was born. When she was taken, it ceased to be worth remembering.
Ceddleria had a hard time feeling it, love, when it was there. Now she looked at Effrosyni. She’d clearly been unconscious when the spearhead had come out of her, because Ceddleria hadn’t heard screams enough to match the bandage over her chest that fanned out across the whole of her body. Her right arm had bruised a purplish color, and gone black near the fingers. If she survived, she was likely to lose them, if not the whole hand, the physician had said. The rest of her was drawn and pale.
Ceddleria came to her side and drew the curtain part-way. As she did, she caught a sliver of concern in the physician’s eye, but thought little of it.
You’ll pull through, she signed. You think?
“I can’t… feel that hand,” Effrosyni said, dry in the voice. “I can’t see well, either. Repeat that last.”
“You’ll pull through,” Ceddleria repeated, aloud. “I carried you here, from the rendezvous. We couldn’t get Islijna back, but you’re going to survive. I’ve fought for it. I’m not going to stop.”
Effrosyni exhaled, and it was awful. Then she hushed Ceddleria. “They’ll feel it,” she said, “what we did to them. For years. Forever, perhaps.”
“Not my point,” Ceddleria cut in. “I’m no idiot, damn you. Perhaps
you’ll be quick to leave me, yet. But I don’t want to lose you, yet,
Effie. I want a win to chew on, and this… this has all felt far too
close to defeat for me.”
Effrosyni’s other arm twitched. She tried to elevate it across her body,
to probe with her fingers. But her hand was struggling to raise.
Ceddleria leaned down and clasped it, careful to keep her weight off of
her chest. As she settled into the sort of splay, her vision blurred.
She shook her head. “This is a death march, love,” Effrosyni said. “The
reward,” she went on, her voice low. “It’s not for us… just the act of
it. Failing to ever stop. Beyond all sense, all reason, all hope of
home. Someday, maybe someone will have a fair fight out of it. A good,
clean win. But not us. We’ll always lose something.”
“All I’ve wanted, for years,” Ceddleria said, low beneath her breath. She laughed, a little. The room had really picked up spinning, now. She couldn’t be sure, but she felt like she was swaying. Perhaps only just a bit. Her stomach was starting to turn again. “...Something to keep.”
She hit her head on the gurney when she went down. The curtain’s rod started to groan when she caught the waist of it. In a ruffle, the physician threw the curtain open. Dimly, Ceddleria could pick out the shock on her face.
“Your—” she heard the physician blurt. “Your shoulder! You were shot?!”
And then she went under.