Moontide 02 - The Scarlet Tides (47 page)

she replied.

Her face flashed across his inner eye, intent, unwary.

Her voice trailed off. A series of images flashed inside his head, a train of thought he couldn’t seem to switch off. They ended with Ramita screaming, and Antonin Meiros collapsing at his feet.

And a soul like mist flowing into his own mouth.

Elena spoke aloud.
‘Oh.’

She opened her eyes as she let the link fall. His were already open.

She looked down at the knife he’d pressed to her left breast and went utterly still.

*

I am so blind.
Elena stared at him, at his striking young face with its beautiful bone structure and haunted eyes.

Dokken. Souldrinker. Shadowmancer.

No wonder he hated his own power. What she’d seen inside his mind played out again in her memory as she tried to hope she might emerge from this moment alive. Vivid, harrowing images surfaced: the blind and burned father he’d never really known, and who’d never told Kazim what he was. An old woman,
Sabele
, manipulating him into becoming what she wanted: a weapon for her ambitions. Emir Rashid, enacting the crone’s plan for his own gain. And his beloved sister Huriya, turning into a monster before his eyes.

And most of all, the girl he’d loved.
Ramita
. He’d crossed a continent to find her, only to lose her by the very act of killing the man who’d taken her from him. She saw the Lakh girl as he did: the personification of goodness and gentleness, too dutiful to ever think of herself, too virtuous to not return kindness with kindness, love
with love – but also too judging to ever forgive him. Without her, he didn’t know what to do.

He’s a lost soul.

She wanted to hold him, to soothe him, but there was the point of a dagger gouging the flesh above her heart. She remained motionless.

He can’t replenish because that’s not how Dokken recover energy. He needs to kill. But he doesn’t want to.
She felt her regard for him deepen.
All the power in the world and he doesn’t want it. It’s burning him up, and he
hates
it.

She’d grown up hearing the legends of the Dokken.
Kore’s Rejects
, the Church called them. Every so often someone found and killed one. But she’d never encountered one herself before now.

She realised that her next words would either save her or kill her. He believed with all his heart that at this revelation, she would attack him, and yet he’d not fled her, because he knew she would have found him. So he’d confronted the matter head-on instead, with a secret edge that she’d never suspected until too late.

She clung to the fact of his remorse, his self-loathing at what he’d done and what he’d become, and gambled on the right words to say.

‘Kazim,’ she said softly, opening up herself entirely to him, letting the truth of herself flow through her hand and into him, giving him back as much as she’d stolen. ‘It’s okay. I believe in you.’

*

I believe in you.

She might have been lying to him.
These magi lie
. But it didn’t feel that way, not when he was suddenly drowning in her, and all that she was. It was as if he’d already killed her and this was her soul, flowing into him. The wild girl playing in the woods around the big house –
Anborn Manor
, the vision told him – and a brilliant and fiery elder sister, her best friend and most spiteful rival:
Tesla
. Tears and laughter, and then shock at her sister’s horrific disfigurement. A new grimness of purpose: months and years of blade-work that made what she’d put him through look like child’s play. The triumph of awards, and then the Revolt. A massacred city: Knebb. Gurvon Gyle …
he reeled at the intimacy of her memories, leapt ahead, to Javon, to Cera … to betrayal.

She is sincere. She wants Gyle dead, even though he was her lover. She wants the Crusade to be destroyed, even though it might cost the lives of her people.

And she doesn’t hate me, though I deserve to be hated.

He dropped the blade and fled to his room before he shamed himself in front of her.

Opium

The wealth of the Sultans of Mirobez, Gatioch and Lokistan is based upon one thing: the drug trade. From their high mountains, the poppy-seed flows westwards, out into the plains of Kesh and even to northern Lakh, conquering all before it. Gold and riches beyond imagination flow the other way.

O
RDO
C
OSTRUO
C
OLLEGIATE
, H
EBUSALIM

The seed of the poppy is the greatest curse to befall this land, worse than the Crusaders.

S
ULTAN
S
ALIM OF
K
ESH

Isle of Glass, Javon Coast, Antiopia
Shawwal (Octen) 928
4
^th
month of the Moontide

Ramita clung to a slick outcropping barely five yards above the place the last wave had crashed. She was drenched in sea-spray, her salwar kameez clinging to her ungainly form as she clambered awkwardly down the face of stone. Beside her, Justina was walking as confidently as if this were a path through the gardens at Casa Meiros, her feet apparently glued to the rocks – which they were, through the gnosis. Supposedly Ramita’s were too, but she could not yet learn to trust them. They were here, according to Justina, to go ‘fishing’, whatever that was.

Another massive valley of water opened up beneath them, revealing the depth of the pillar of volcanic rock, as smooth as the
glass that had lent its name to the place. Then abruptly it boiled up again and another wave slammed down. All visibility was lost as spray engulfed them and Ramita shrieked in fright and locked herself to the rock. Justina laughed aloud, apparently purely at Ramita’s discomfort.

As the spray fell about them like rain, the jadugara shouted through their mind-link,

Ramita tried, casting her mind into the alien depths of the water. Her mind’s eye filled with darkness, and the water on her skin seemed to wrap itself about her.

she called to Justina.

Ramita groaned. Part of her was still aware of her body, locked rigid to the walls of the pillar of stone. The rest of her was casting about, seeking …
seeking …

There!

She felt something, another being, cold and utterly alien, but it had a heartbeat and it slid through the water as a bird flew through the air. Then abruptly she found another, and another, and then there were hundreds of them swarming about, made silver by the light gleaming from above, darting about her as she flitted from heartbeat to heartbeat, all kindred, each the same yet different, all a part of a whole that barely comprehended itself. The ocean was alive with calls, shrill squeaks and whistles that she could almost comprehend. She felt as if she were dissolving into them, feeling every sensation in a dim palette of experiences:
hunger bite swallow better hunger hunger hunger
…

Justina touched her arm.

She chose one and with difficulty separated it from the others, and then began to pull, using the telekinetic gnosis, the mental muscle that Justina had been building in her these past weeks with her repetitive exercises. She felt the creature panic, heard the alarmed calls of its fellows as she wrenched it upwards. The others scattered,
alarmed by the frightened movements of the captive creature, scared its uncontrolled thrashing would bring a predator.

A minute of pulling slowly on the invisible cords of her gnosis saw a dark shape break the surface. She quailed a little as she saw it, almost letting it slip. It was massive, with great heavy-lipped jaws and a body that was as big as her own, with lantern-like eyes as large as her hand. Its greenish belly-scales gleamed but its upper body was dark.

Justina yelled triumphantly and a great bubble of water rose and wrapped itself about the fish. ‘It’s a fish the Yuros men call a “Groper”,’ she shouted above the waves. ‘I’ve got it now! Come on!’

Together they ascended the side of the pillar of stone, Earth gnosis enabling them to cling to it so it was as easy as if walking upstairs.
It is still tiring
, Ramita thought;
there are a great many ‘stairs’
. Beside them, wrapped in water and gnosis, floated the great fish. Every so often it tried to break out of the bubble of water, and Ramita could feel its fear as the light of the sun shone brilliantly through into its clear prison. She sent soothing energies, tried to calm it, which perhaps worked as its movement became less frantic.

Justina called, her voice unusually cheerful.

Together they got the fish all the way back up the one hundred yards or so to the viewing platform. Getting it inside was harder, down all those flights of stairs, and they left a trail of seawater behind them as they moved it into the seldom-used communal bath, which Justina had filled with seawater through a special tap. As they released the groper into the water, it flashed about in fright seeking an exit, before gradually subsiding into watchful stillness.

Justina turned to Ramita. ‘Now, try and do what we’ve talked about.’

Ramita looked down at the fish and back at Justina, and then cleared her mind of all things but the link she still shared with the fish. Trying to ignore her fear, she waded into the icy water, just down to the second stair, and sat, dangling a piece of defrosted raw fish from the ice-room. She lowered it into the water.

It took a long time to coax the creature from where it hid, and when it did come it almost snapped off her fingers as it wrenched the chunk away. It gulped down the meat and shot away.

By the third piece of fish, she had managed to convince it to stay. She stroked its head, staring back into its huge eyes, not realising that she’d submerged herself until she felt water in her throat and panicked, thrashing for the surface, spluttering, while Justina hooted derisively. The groper flashed away, and could not be lured back all day.

By the end of the week, she was swimming with it and had learnt to change her skin to fish-scale, and breathing underwater no longer held any fear.

*

Justina whispered into her mind from the side of the bath.

Her mental voice was trembling with suppressed tension.

Ramita kicked awkwardly through the water, feeling the groper beside her, sensing its confusion at her ineptitude. She couldn’t ignore his concerned bleatings: to him, her movements were distressed, and they might draw danger. There were other fish he feared, and the terror was ever-present: monsters that were little more than massive tubes of teeth and appetite. She cast its fears aside along with her own and decided to have faith.

My hands are fins. My legs are a tail. I have no fixed shape, only a form that I am moving from and one I move towards … I move like … this …

Justina’s voice sounded stricken.

Shape is an illusion.
She felt the change as it shivered and shimmered through her. The core of her remained the same: a womb, a heart, lungs, a spine, a brain, a skull … but the peripheries became fluid as she filled them with the gnosis and then persuaded them that they were something else. She thrashed her tail, jetted through the water and smacked into the far wall. She shrieked in pain, sending her fishy companion into a paroxysm of anguish.

Justina whispered into her mind, but
Ramita barely comprehended the words in her current state.

Meiros’ daughter was shaken.

Ramita swam with the groper a while longer, before Justina persuaded her to retake her own form. For a moment she was scared she wouldn’t be able to do it, but it flowed back to her as naturally as breathing. Justina had taken days to reassure her that it would not harm her unborn children, and she prayed the jadugara was right.

She climbed from the water and wrapped herself in a towel. She swallowed twice as she tried to recall how speech worked. ‘How is it that I have done this so quickly?’ she asked eventually. ‘You told me it could take months.’

Justina was awed. ‘Most animagi can learn to visualise the shape of a creature they have chosen long before they are capable of infusing enough gnosis into their flesh to make it mutable. But it’s as if you are made of the gnosis.’ She bit her lip. ‘I think Father may have been right in his predictions. You are very strong.’

Ramita exhaled, pleased but puzzled. ‘Strength is not skill. You’ve told me so yourself.’

‘I know. But part of that skill is learning to trust your own powers. Most people are afraid of what they are doing to themselves, and hold back – even Rondian magi who believe that their powers come from Kore. But you seem to have no fear.’

‘I trust my husband,’ Ramita said simply. For it was true: ever since seeing and hearing his message, she’d felt as if his hand were upon her. She felt safe, somehow, as if he were watching over her from the heavens. Which she prayed he was.

‘Then you’re a more trusting soul than I am,’ Justina said tartly.

*

Another day, another lesson. They were sitting cross-legged inside a circle of melted silver painstakingly painted onto the surface of the landing area at the top of the pillar of stone.

‘This is a risk,’ Justina reminded her. ‘You do understand that?’

Ramita nodded, a little impatiently. Justina had said this twice already and it was beginning to get on her nerves. ‘I understand:
I am opening myself up to the outside world. I need to keep that controlled, or I will lead others to our hiding place.’

‘If someone detects you, they may be able to follow you back. The circle we’ve drawn will make that harder, but not impossible. If anyone senses you, you have to stop the spell instantly.’

They’d been practising this for weeks. Clairvoyance was one of Justina’s affinities, but not something Ramita could do at all – but she had to be able to defend against it. She needed to learn how to be open to the world, to receive messages from afar without giving anything away, and to do this, Justina would have to link minds with her and take her with her as she scryed into Kesh.

Justina sent, holding up her palms.

Ramita held up hers.
Perhaps.

They touched, and Justina’s chilly steel-edged mind invaded hers. She was used to the feel of her daughter-in-law’s mental identity by now, uncomfortable though it was. She was brittle and closed-in, not the open and soothing presence her husband had exuded. But she wrapped herself about that sharp coolness and gave over control.

They flew – not bodily, and not even their souls, which remained locked inside their bodies, but their perceptions altered utterly as they soared instantly over the seas, past the cliffs and the deserts. Abruptly they were over a city: Hebusalim, which was lying in ruins, smoking and semi-desolate.

Justina blanched.

Ramita sought the white tower of Casa Meiros and felt an acid burn behind her eyes as she saw it broken and burned out, her husband’s sanctuary, entirely smashed. She wished herself closer, but Justina’s jagged presence seized her and held her fast.

Ramita wailed.

Justina added in a worried voice,

They hovered above the city a while. Then Justina turned her mental eye eastwards and they seemed to flow above the landscape,
mostly in a grey mist, before reappearing in odd places, like a wrecked room in a clay-brick house, or beside a badly churned watering hole.

<
Where are we?>
Ramita asked.

,> Justina replied.

Ramita was awed: they were seeing the whole world, or so it seemed.

There was no derision in Justina’s voice, just a statement of fact. It was frustrating to any mage, Ramita had come to realise, that they could not do everything.
It is good that there are limits,
she told herself.
It keeps them human.
She had to remind herself that ‘them’ also now meant herself.

Justina replied.

Ramita tried to take this in. A longing to see her parents filled her. <
Could you show me my mother?>

Justina shook her head.

She paused, considered.

Justina sent her mind questing, and Ramita gasped as her inner eye was suddenly sent darting every direction at once. She felt as if she was being painlessly ripped apart as images flew about her, light and colour and sound and tastes filling her senses. Then with a swirling like water going down a drain-hole, she was sucked towards one image in particular. She clutched onto Justina’s mind like a limpet.