Havemercy Page 33

  I managed little sleep for myself that night, and what rest I did manage was laced through with nervous anticipation, the sound of the dragons in the air, and the explosions that shortly followed their arrival. I’d forgotten how reverberant such things sounded through the long, complicated system of tunnels the Ke-Han had twice used to overpower us; I’d forgotten how loud it could get, how bright, how nightmarish. I was losing my touch, I told myself wryly, and had best reacquaint myself with the peculiar sensation of having the ground shake like an earthquake beneath my feet by the time I was thrust into the thick of things long before this hour on the morrow.

  There was also the troublesome matter of my headaches.

  They had come and gone all throughout the trip, and while I told myself they were no more than my way of adapting to the shift in temperatures and altitude, I knew this for the flimsy lie that it was. Quite simply, they’d begun before I ever left for the Cobalts at all. The first, unprecedented and dizzying, had occurred during my exile, and it had taken all my skills at playacting to hide from Hal how greatly it distressed me.

  Now, the only man I had to hide it from was myself—and the entire rest of my garrison of Reds, their captain, and the Ke-Han Blues. It was only a headache. I’d been getting them since the night before my return to the city, and I’d managed to find ways to function despite the discomfort. Undue stress could have brought it on, or my own entrenched fear of returning to battle.

  Yet it was accompanied by a certain mind-numbing lack of equilibrium, as if someone had quite suddenly jerked the world out from underneath my feet and I was left to suffer through a maddening spin of blindness. I’d never suffered such headaches before, and there was absolutely no warning for them—merely a sudden onset of pain, pinching sharp at my temples, followed by that whirlwind of confusion.

  If I were to suffer from such a headache during the battle to come as I was suffering with more and more frequency these days, I did not want to think of the possible ramifications—not only for myself, but for my entire garrison as well.

  A combination of my headaches and thinking about my headaches kept me up most of the night. So it was that I rose early and joined Achille for breakfast, both of us talking with sparse, low words that anticipated too many possible outcomes.

  “We’ll take their tunnels,” Achille said. “Use their strongholds against them. We’ve been working out the system the past year now and we’ve finally got it figured. We send a distraction up one side of the mountain to keep them busy, and meanwhile the rest of us from all the other positions take our mark through the tunnels and advance on them. Before they know it, we’ll all be out. And, the way they’re depleted, there won’t be any stopping us.”

  He was repeating the plan to comfort himself.

  I, too, was doing much the same, mouthing this speech of his that I had memorized.

  It was a simple plan, a good plan. There was no foreseeable reason why it shouldn’t have worked.

  But the unforeseeable was what undid us in the end. The Ke-Han had been waiting all this time, waiting for us to grow cocky, and we’d done exactly that. We couldn’t have suited their plans better than if we’d been working with them toward their own victory.

  In some ways, it was my own fault. That is not to say that I was egotistic enough about my vital position among our Reds and the other magicians along with us, but one must always accept responsibility for his own actions, and in that way a great deal of the fault was my own. The troublesome headaches—I realized it too late—hadn’t been my own private suffering, but rather the indication of something much larger involving many more than myself.

  There was no such thing as a singularity. It was what we’d learned first as magicians. It was the most important truth of who we were and what we did, and I’d forgotten it as swiftly as a dragon’s pass through the air.

  My headaches were no more mine than they were harmless, and once we’d passed through the tunnels to the other side, that much became painfully evident.

  The first sign was that the distraction wasn’t working as it should have been. Achille had sent several magicians with a detachment of Reds to aid it in hanging together, but the magicians were the purpose, all with Talents made for flash and destruction.

  When we exited the tunnels, we should have been able to hear the results of our ruse, or see them at least, great colorful fireworks and rumbling earth, or even the warrior cries of the Ke-Han that indicated battle was at hand. There was none of this reassuring evidence, however, and I felt an uneasiness heavy in my chest as I caught myself scanning the jutting blue rock face of the Cobalts, which were stony and impassive and gave nothing away.

  The uneasiness spread throughout my arms and legs, too swift to be the onset of anything that I could tie back to a simple worry about our progress. No, this was entirely physical, and I occupied my mind with trying to gauge exactly how bad it was and how I might be able to go on standing so long as we kept moving. None of the others seemed to be exhibiting any discomfort, and I thought that even if we couldn’t hear the various noises indicating that our distraction was under way, that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t. It was quite possible that the men and magicians on the other side were at that very moment experiencing the full flush of victory.

  Then Alcibiades collapsed.

  He’d been a soldier before he was a magician, and the latter was only due to the Esar’s deciding some fifteen years prior that any man with a Talent fighting in the war would damn well learn to use it whether he wanted to or not. Still, he had some skill with water—once he’d got past his initial prejudice—and though we’d never interacted for any particular length of time, he was a singularly competent man.

  Achille called us all to a halt with a silent gesture, signaling for someone to check on our fallen comrade. Marcelline, standing closest to me, adjusted the warm collar of her coat with fingers that shook almost imperceptibly.

  “Do you feel it?” she asked, but I had no idea to what she was referring.

  I shook my head. She looked a little green against the white and red of her clothing.

  “That’s what I mean,” she said softly, more because it seemed as though she couldn’t bring herself to speak any louder, rather than any caution toward being overheard. “There’s nothing there.”

  I thought that perhaps she meant the wind, and certainly it was odd the Ke-Han hadn’t begun to attack us with it yet. Then her eyes rolled up toward the back of her head, white and startling. I caught her before she hit the ground.

  Someone shouted the warning, and even as I felt the headache begin like a battering ram at both of my temples, I turned to see the Ke-Han forces coming in from all sides, closing the net of the trap we had walked right into.

  Out front, I saw a great gushing blast of water come exploding from the rock. There were veins of sulfurous hot springs running below the Cobalts, and I guessed that they were what now spewed forth from the land beneath us, scalding the men from the second midrange fort and giving our men some time to rally around a common point. I wondered if perhaps Alcibiades had regained consciousness, after all; this seemed something I should feel pleased over, if only I could bring myself to feel anything at all beyond the pounding in my temples.

  I couldn’t. Rather, it was more like what Marcelline had been describing, an absence of that familiar, constant presence—my Talent—which left me feeling vulnerable and hollowed out as a man made from straw husks. It was akin to the strange, flooding loss of strength I experienced when I had a fever.

  I should have moved, or tried to do my duty as both a soldier of the realm and a magician of the Basquiat, which made the code all the more important: I must necessarily do whatever was in my power to stop the Ke-Han’s advance. As a magician, whatever I had in my power was considerably more than the average man, and as such I knew that the soldiers had come to depend on our help, our protection.

  As far as I could tell, however, after that first show of defiance from A
lcibiades, everyone seemed to have been taken with the same affliction as I, for I saw no telltale rumbles of destruction, nor streaking jets of fire. Instead, the Ke-Han rallied around their injured, then surged forward once more, blue coats the very color of the mountain rock.

  I placed Marcelline on the ground behind me, for I would need both my hands free, and even as I wavered on my feet, I drew a deep breath to draw on the place where my Talent rested, hidden deep within. My stomach gave a lurch in revolt against what I found there, and at last I understood what Marcelline had tried to warn me of.

  There was nothing there.

  It was as though someone had gone into my chest and scooped out something infinitely more vital than my heart or stomach, and the sensation brought me to my knees.

  I heard around me all at once the clang and crash of metal as used in battle, the hoarse cries of men I’d known and eaten with as they fought on, despite the sudden onset of our debilitating handicap.

  Achille wasn’t in plain view, for even my vision had blurred distressingly for me, as though, with the absence of what anchored me, everything else was falling apart. Maybe I was falling apart. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I had no way of knowing.

  The world went white in from the edges, erasing the scene before me as surely as if I’d lost consciousness—not a blackout, but a whiteout—with the sharp, blinding force of a lightning bolt.

  Everything that followed was a blank, clean slate.

  When I awoke, I was in a tent that, from the lack of light streaming in through the fabric, must have been in the garrison at the foothills.

  I ached all over, and the headache pounded still in my head, as though it wished to force my eyes from their sockets. Something smelled very strongly of blood. I sat up at once—a grievous error, as nausea rolled through me so that I had to lean over one side of the cot I’d been placed on to divest myself of the meager contents of my stomach. In a streak of wild luck, someone appeared to have placed a pan there for exactly that purpose.

  To my right someone chuckled weakly, more of a pathetic coughing than anything else, and I lifted my head—slowly this time—to examine my surroundings. Alcibiades lay prone on the cot next to mine, nose like the prow of a dying ship and bandaged quite heavily about the head.

  “Where are we?” I said, and swallowed to work the saliva into my mouth, which felt as dry as sandpaper. My throat hurt as though I’d been shouting.

  Had I been shouting?

  It took him a very long time to reply—so long that I thought he’d fallen asleep. When he did speak, the sound startled me and set all my nerves jangling as though I were a high-strung horse. “Base camp, med tent. ’Til we get moved, anyway.”

  “Ah,” I said, and surrendered my head to the cool softness of the pillow below it. There were troublesome thoughts floating across my skull, but not a one of them seemed strong enough to break through the red haze of throbbing in my brain. “We’re to be moved?”

  “Soon as possible,” said Alcibiades, in the same scratchy voice as mine. “Head doctor, she nearly had a fit when she saw us.”

  I didn’t feel as though there were anything visibly wrong with me, and that surely the head doctor of a medical unit during wartime would have seen a great many terrible things. “Am I missing a leg?” I said at last, as it was the only thing I could think of, and might have gone a long way toward explaining why I couldn’t feel either one of them.

  “No,” he said, without a trace of humor in his voice. “It’s because we’re magicians.”

  I overlooked the contempt in his voice as he said this last, because it had set something else turning in my mind, like a great, if slow-moving, waterwheel.

  The Reds had gone on fighting when we’d been stricken, that much I did remember. It was just that they went on fighting without us. The others who’d been . . . taken, I supposed I could call it, by this infernal numbness, were Alcibiades and Marcelline, both of them magicians. When I tried to think on it now, I found that I could not remember having seen any of the ordinary soldiers fall prey to whatever strange illness had taken hold of us. If it had struck magicians and magicians only, I thought against the pain in my head, then . . .

  Then I had to be sick again, and I very nearly didn’t make it to the pan this time around.

  I’d never heard of anything that could debilitate so selectively. There were illnesses that were intrinsically magic, of course, but they ravaged those with Talent and those without equally. That whatever had hit us in the mountains had hit only magicians was a curiosity I might have found fascinating if it had happened hundreds of years ago instead of just a handful of hours before.

  An unsettling thought occurred to me, and I looked once more to Alcibiades. “The others. The captain?”

  He shook his head, very slowly from left to right, and I felt a wave of sadness overtake my heart. “They thought we were all dead, I think—you were certainly lying there like you were—and I got pinned under Emeric while I was still out of it.” Alcibiades paused to clear his throat, as though he’d got something caught in it all of a sudden. “When I woke up, it was all quiet—they’d moved on—and I’d have gone right past you too if you hadn’t made a noise like you weren’t dead but dying, maybe.”

  “Then I owe you my thanks,” I said, speaking more to distract myself from the memories I had of those who were now gone: of the easy companionability I had with Achille, and the idea of his kind eyes open and lifeless in the far reaches of the mountain range. “It’s fortunate that you were able to overcome whatever’s attempted to bleed us of our senses.”

  “I was a soldier before ever I was a magician, Margrave,” he said, breathing shallow through his clenched teeth. “We learn how to go on through a little discomfort.”

  I resented the implication that all magicians were soft, untested warriors, but I thought that it might be ungrateful to pick a fight with a man who’d in all likelihood saved my life. And besides, my headache was making it hurt to speak.

  I grunted, instead.

  Alcibiades went quiet after that, and I drifted into sleep, more passed out from the pain in my head than any kind of a real rest.

  When I awoke a second time, it was to the sight of a silhouette in the open tent flap, and I’d no concept of the amount of time that had been lost to me while I was unconscious.

  “Margrave Royston,” said the newcomer, in the curt, official voice of a bureaucrat or one of the Provost’s wolves. “And Alcibiades of the Glendarrow, by order of the Esar you are to accompany me to the Basquiat with all due haste.”

  “Charming,” I said, just as soon as I could work up the energy to speak. “I cannot speak for my colleague at present, but rest assured we will follow you as soon as we are able to get up.”

  The man didn’t laugh, but I was thinking more about what it meant that the Esar had become involved and what it meant that there was already a system set in place to cart us off to the Basquiat, of all places.

  The Basquiat wasn’t the Esar’s province.

  I thought of who had been missing at the ball, and came up with the same answer every time, that each of them—whatever other qualities they possessed—had been some manner or other of magician. Were they in the Basquiat, as well? If only I could have made myself think, think, beyond the dull arrhythmic pounding between my ears.

  “You are not to speak with anyone,” the man went on, rolling his proclamation up as larger, burlier men with stretchers came in. “You will have no contact with the outside world. Any discussion of what occurred in the Cobalt Mountains will be viewed as inciting undue panic among the people and thus an act of treason.”

  The thought of Hal came to me then, smiling and sudden and so vivid that it almost stopped the ache that plagued me.

  “My . . . apprentice,” I said, too weak and out of sorts even to demand information from the medics. “I should get a message to him.”

  “Your family members and associates will be informed of your situati
on,” said the man as rote, weary, and bored as if this were an everyday occurrence. I had to wonder how many times he’d recently said the same thing, rolled off the same reassurances. It was by no means a comforting thought.

  “How long before we can leave?” From a ways off I heard the familiar voice, laced with irritability. Alcibiades had either just regained consciousness or chosen this particular moment to speak up.

  Our only answer was the click-slam of twin carriage doors.

  “Fucked as not,” Alcibiades said wearily.

  I was slid off my cot and onto the stretcher, and another period of emptiness claimed me.

  THOM

  I left the medic room with ash on my hands and grease on my mouth and my heart clamped round with iron wire, the sort they used to keep urchins out of the shops in Molly.

  I knew no other way to say it and there was no hiding from it, either. Rook was my brother; I had no doubt in my mind. It made a sick kind of sense, really, and the more I turned it over in my head, the more I found that I could get around it. This was the reason I could never just walk away from him, or couldn’t ever just let the matter lie, not even in my own head. I’d thought at first that it must have been some wild, proud streak in me that Marius had neglected to stamp out: a professor’s instinct to impart wisdom, or my own stubbornness in having wanted desperately to be right about him, right about my own theory that within everyone was some capacity for change.

  What Rook had given me instead was the knowledge that, at the very least, I had better reason than the Isobel-Magrittes of the world to follow him around like a stray. After all, I’d begun doing it since birth, despite what obstacles and separations in the road between us had fallen since.

  His name had once been John, almost too ridiculously simple for what he’d become since I was told he’d died in the fire. Mine had been Hilary; the whores who raised me called me Thom, and because it was a name my dead brother never called me, I allowed them to use it. Subsequently, it had stuck. I assumed a part of myself had died in that fire—the part of myself named by my parents—and I left it at that. Sometimes I dreamed of him, my dead brother, but he was always faceless, the features blurred. Understandable, since I’d been no more than three years old when the tragedy struck us.