Black as diamond, p.12
Black as Diamond, page 12
Paths coalesced in her mind, lines on a map. Repeated steps and remembered passages formed a rough outline of Kumadrai, layering the image of its secrets over the city like a translucent sheet. They descended rarely used steps, caked in dust up to the ankle, and slipped into thin passageways that led to the mines in the heart of the Ausran mountains. Striated stone softened to dirt as Rishé herded them through an empty cavern long stripped of ore.
A pinprick of light shone ahead. The cavern tilted up, a strenuous vertical climb aided thankfully by stairs cut between walls. The light at the end of the shaft grew ever closer. On the other side, they emerged from a cave at the edge of the Kingswood. There, wood bled into the jewels of the Necklace, reedy islands that dotted the southern Darandell River.
As she stepped into the forest, Rishé drew in a breath. The pleasant scent of petrichor arose with each step as soil sank underfoot. The murmur of the Darandell River whispered into her ear like a long-forgotten promise. She hadn’t left the Screen since she was hired, and she didn’t know just how dearly she’d missed the country.
Once they were well away from the claustrophobic labyrinth of the city, Rishé fell to the back of the pack, following the others into foliage that enveloped them like a descending smog. Gazing around, taking the world in as if with new eyes, she found herself smiling. Her mother’s face came to mind, framed by sunrays with the murky sea rolling behind her, and Rishé’s hand rose to her pendant. She let herself wonder, illogically, if there was divine in the natural. If there were deities. And she was struck by the impossible thought that, if there were, perhaps her prayers had been answered.
Asaru
The curse. That smell. The smell of the curse was in the air.
Asaru wasn’t losing his mind—the chants, his mother’s voice—nor was he confused. The smell of the curse was in the air, wafting from somewhere nearby. Growing stronger the longer they walked, dampened not by the slow-moving river at their side. He wiped the back of a hand across his nose, scanning the forest. Everything felt alight—agitated nerves, a sense that he was close to something. Something he thought, maybe, he should have recognized.
Grunting, the same hand shot to his shoulder blade against a particularly strong pulse through the brand. The ridges of the wreath rose beneath his touch. A woven bond, unfortunately, ever more familiar to him.
“What’s wrong?”
He glanced back and found Wren watching with those sad, wet eyes. Concern flooded through their bond; Asaru wanted to shy away from it, like a troglodyte from the sun. Filtering through his feelings on that matter was like sticking one’s hand into an oil-slick pool, rummaging around, and coming up with a viscous, sloppy sludge.
“I think an eresh keyel is here. Was here,” Asaru said instead. He hoped, to all end, praying to the Triumvirate—and those rare few other gods he had come to know—that it wasn’t who he feared.
He jogged ahead and looked around the swampy forest. Behemoth trees towered like giants with broken backs, branches hanging low to kiss the river gently. Dotting the river were reedy spots of land, most half sunken, the rest too small to be considered islands. The water, a misty green, occasionally gave way to crystal clarity along the embankment by which they walked. Near the surface, silver-gold fish slowed as if to observe them before darting off.
A sharp crack broke the silence. Leaves rustled in the disturbed aftermath, then the swooping call of a bird. Each sound was a possible sentinel. Trailing. Watching. Waiting.
The sky faded to orange, a linen screen painted with blue and indigo following. Minutes streamed by and with them, the visibility in the woods. Thin light broke through the canopy, enough to brighten the middle distance and to guide Asaru’s sight to a nearly indistinguishable lump under the leafy veil of a willow.
Gasping, he rushed ahead, the calls of the others falling behind, coming to his ears as if through spread fingers. Across the water, muck tugging at his thighs, he scrambled onto the spit of earth where the river’s three tributaries merged to one.
“Khensu?” he gasped, eyes roving over the face of the missing member of the Tetrarchia.
Khensu rested against a large trunk, barely clinging to life. The curse covered her head to toe, every part of her rotting in her own filth. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves, brushed the long strand of hair away from Khensu’s face as she peeled her eyes open.
The sight pained him, but Asaru couldn’t look away. His pupils constricted, and his nails dug ruddy crescents into the meat of his palms. It was all he could do to keep it together.
“Ah . . . Asaru.” She broke into a coughing fit. “Why are you . . . Have you c-come to, come to help us?”
Of the Tetrarchia, Khensu had always treated him, if not well, with at least a nominally detached neutrality. She acknowledged him as he was. And that had been enough.
“What happened at the embassy? What happened to you?” Asaru knelt, unable to focus on anything but her fluttering eyes. Splashing water burst like shadowflies in his ears as his companions crossed the river to join them.
“An eresh keyel? All the way out here?” Rishé signed, shutting her compass with a click.
“Alvarys.”
Asaru’s head shot back to Khensu at the low mutter. “Where is he? Why are you not with him?”
Khensu moved to sit up straighter, and he helped her the rest of the way. Black liquid stained her teeth as she grunted. It pooled in her lap, invisible against the same dark mineral that encased her. She wiped at her mouth but only succeeded in smearing the back of her hand with wet black.
“We w-were separated. My . . . my fault,” she croaked. Her voice was the scratch of steel on stone. Clearing her throat, she rubbed her halo. Her claws brushed a misshapen ring of stones, gaping holes that stared back at Asaru as if a premonition—what could come to be for him, for every eresh keyel. “What were we . . . We were t-trying, trying to . . .”
Guilt and compassion warred within Asaru. There were two warm presences at his back. Beside him, Rishé leaned closer, but he snarled to keep away her intrusion. Her curiosity was not of any worth. Unabashed, unashamed curiosity was not of any merit in this.
Gulping, he reached out to Khensu, his eyes softening, though tension tightened the line of his spine. His hand curled back in an aborted motion, before it landed on the edge of her armored shendyt near her thigh. He hated that he hesitated.
“Do you remember . . .” He clicked in their tonal language.
Khensu’s face twisted. Black and graying gold spilled from under her blunt and broken fingers.
It began with a survey to Saite, she told him. For a moon, there had been no activity from the border town. Nothing in, no one out. When the Tetrarchia had investigated, they found nothing but a scar and the Phiari River tainted black. It was, at first, assumed to be an incursion of remnants. They had been spotted roaming more at night on Oprekhet’s islet, sequestered on the opposite side of the mountains. The Tetrarchia brought this suspicion to the warden, and she had believed them enough to send them past the Sea Gate. Find the Chronicler, uncover the truth of what happened, stop it from spreading. The task should have been simple.
It wasn’t.
As she recounted the story, Asaru recalled how Alvarys had spoken of his departure, voice suffused with thoughtfulness and, he realized in retrospect, apprehension. An assignment he couldn’t detail. There seemed to be a lot he couldn’t—hadn’t shared. Such as Saite, a secret Asaru hadn’t even known of.
Why hadn’t the warden told him about the occurrence in Saite? Why hadn’t his own brother even mentioned such a devastating discovery?
That struck him. Deeper than he cared to admit. Cleaved him almost in two.
“And what of the embassy?” he asked quietly. “All that blood. Those bodies.”
She continued her revelations. When they arrived at the embassy, the vial had been there for a day. They could do nothing to stop it from cracking as some mechanism shattered the glass from within. It hadn’t seemed consequential at first—nothing ever does. But that was the purpose of its insidious nature, foul as its assumed creator and twice as cruel in its uneven progression. The ambassadors succumbed quickly, then half the Tetrarchia. It was all she and Alvarys could do to grab the beacon and flee before the curse overcame them too.
Her face morphed into a grimace, and thick streams of saliva rolled down the sides of her mouth.
She coughed out the next part. They had flown, but the curse was merciless, ceaseless in its progression. She’d fallen from the sky, able only to watch Alvarys’s wings disappear into the blue above the canopy. While she had wandered lost in the woods, he hadn’t even seemed to notice she was no longer with him. Too focused on the beacon and too ravaged by the curse.
Gone.
A chill crawled up Asaru’s spine. “Gone” could mean many things. He wished for her to be wrong—knew her to be wrong. He kept certainty in his heart that his brother had reached the Chronicler. There was no alternative to be considered.
A violent cough shook Khensu, and she spasmed, clutching her mouth to catch the bile and blood. Her hands—black, black up to her neck, up to the ridges of her cheekbones—bore the twilight effects of the curse.
“I—I can’t see it anymore.” She clutched her cheek softly, appearing to seek what little tenderness she could, even if it came from her own touch. Her eyes widened. A milky haze settled in them, silver over a dark ocean consuming the sclera. “I can’t see khetry anymore. It’s gone.” She sobbed, covering her mouth as a tear slipped down her cheek. “All g-gone.”
Asaru tracked the wet line on her face before looking away. He did what he could, what little he could, and wiped the tears away.
Delirious, staring past him into the middle distance, Khensu devolved into incoherent mutterings, her lips forming silent words in their language. Trilling calls and avian clicks to something she could no longer see, could no longer feel. She was fading in and out of lucidity, snatches further and fewer between as she struggled for the words with a throat full of phlegm.
Was this Black Diamond at its apex? The loss of one’s own self?
The khetry around her faded from bright red to a weathered gray with each passing second. A string slowly cut, a rope pulled taut as life struggled against its end. The few threads that still clung to her were but fibers. In grievous contrast, the crimson living world shone around him.
Asaru imagined a shadow over them both. It stood, jackal mask lowered in sorrow equal to his own, maroon eyes glowing as it slung strands of death from its arms to the veiled horizon. To a place Asaru could not yet see but feared he soon might.
“The best thing for her”—Rishé’s stilted voice at his side—“is a quick death. No more suffering.” She stared at him, amber eyes dripping unwanted empathy as she rubbed her pendant between two fingers.
“No,” Palenisa said firmly at his back. “A natural death is better, always. No matter the cause. It’s only right to let her go when she will.”
On his other side, Wren remained silent. Watching. Hand over his heart, just watching.
The curse filled Asaru’s nose, blotted out all sense. He and Khensu were alone in this suspended chalice of time. All he saw was Khensu. A blink, and Alvarys rested there in her place, looking at him with somber eyes that rivaled the depths of the sea. A blink, and there was Khensu again, looking nowhere, seeing nothing as the light in her eyes died in reverent silence.
Mercy.
Feeling almost possessed, he reached out.
Mercy.
He pressed a palm to her neck, her remaining colorless halo stones like raw ore beneath his touch. Blood crusted around the gaps left by the missing ones. Her fleeting heartbeat existed only in rare moments, and only if he held himself still as a corpse could he feel it.
Mercy.
Asaru’s fingers spread, wrapped around her neck. And squeezed. Squeezed. Squeezed. Until he had given her mercy.
Then, all at once, everything was still.
It was mindless, rote work to bring his hands to his jaw and cast the spell. Flame bloomed across his tongue in sorrowful prayer. Her body went up like a pyre. Diminishing shadows raced across the ground, between the willow leaves dancing over the water like burning stars.
What was once Khensu took to ash in a matter of minutes, piled before his knees and untouched by khetry. He gathered her ashes, ducked his head, and whispered, “Your mind by Hukhetyel, your body by Chert Ouadjet, your aether by Khertote. Return home to dwell in the Red Web of Life once more.”
One last time, past the unnatural end of her life, Khensu took to the flight that had been so cruelly wrenched from her as he released her ashes to the wind. Let the sky take her. Let the world take her. She should have been in an urn, decorated with her halo stones and lovingly stored within a charnel house. She should have been with the scores of their dead kin back on Aedyton. Instead, she was here. Forever would she be here. And there was nothing he could do to bring her home.
For a moment, Asaru let himself sit. His throat was smoke and his eyes were sand. Lowering his head to the grass, he formed a cage, a shield, with his wings. The world was too much all at once, everywhere and unending. Everything just persisted.
His chest was close to bursting, held closed by the feeling of dangling from a cliff over water. A suffocating darkness filled him, cradled him, consumed him.
“How are you feeling?”
His shoulder blade prickled at Wren’s soft voice. A nerve of pain shot through his healing wing, and the sound of shadowflies forced his mind to stagnant silence. Standing, Asaru folded his wings away and turned from the tree.
Eyes bored into his back, a haze, a silver beam, a blackened pool. Alight no longer.
“I need to keep going.”
“Asaru—”
He stared blankly at the other man, quieting him. Then he looked at Rishé, who crouched, watching him like one does a wild beast. But he was not wild. He was perfectly in control of himself, a tool of singular pointed purpose.
“Someone may have seen the smoke.”
Rishé nodded hesitantly and opened her compass as she ducked from beneath the willow. After Palenisa, Wren lingered. His mismatched eyes brimmed with emotions nameless and needless.
Asaru barely registered his stare. A storm raged between his ears as he crossed the river. His hands were speckled black to the elbow, the curse in living motion. The darkness would continue to eat at him. Eat away at him until he was just like Khensu.
Like thrice-worked steel, like diamondglass, Asaru hardened himself. He would do what he was sent to. For the sake of himself, find his brother. For the sake of his brother, find the Chronicler. For the sake of Aedyton, stop the curse.
There was no other path to walk but this one alone, for time was a finite resource, and it was running out.
Wren
Wren contemplated all he knew and all he had yet to learn.
Objectively, he knew Asaru was a warrior who had killed remnants. Other people. The king. But seeing it framed as mercy? He squeezed his wrist to hold himself from touching his heart. Wren was a healer—could have been a healer—and he wasn’t sure what mercy was when it came to Black Diamond. Curses were unbreakable, but was it right to not even try?
As they trekked through the Necklace, he found himself glancing over at Asaru occasionally, receiving flares of annoyance from the bond in response. He couldn’t help the urge to peer at the black speckling under those arm wraps. The progression of the curse was unstable, unknown, and it wrapped a cord of fear around Wren’s heart the longer he let himself look. The longer he let himself think and stew and overthink. The disparate parts of him longed to help, longed for absolution—longed, maybe, for further punishment.
Wren’s unsteady gaze flitted over to Rishé. Her focus was locked on the horizon, she guided them on paths well-trodden from years of constant, consistent travel. Paths he had traveled maybe once, when he was very young and his mother was still part of their birth clan. Since then—and the guild—he’d lived in Sika for most his life, easily forgetting that Trinacrios was a much larger continent than a single province. The world was big. And it was full of horrors. Failures. Regrets.
Exhaling, he sped up to walk beside her. She looked different, her once waist-length hair chopped messily short. Older than him by a few years at sixty-five, though still very young for both human and lulaik, there was a sense of new maturity about Rishé. Still young, but the kind of young that knew what direction her life needed to take and was able to climb through a window to grab it by the reins. She spared him a sidelong glance before turning to her compass dismissively.
They hadn’t spoken in years, and he ached at the thought of trying to fit back into her life. To slip into easy conversation like a peg in an ill-fitting hole. His mouth felt full of cobwebs and rusty from disuse.
“Why”—Rishé began, signing with a single hand—“are you really going to the guild?”
His thoughts already in shambles, Wren ducked his head. “It’s for . . . Asaru. His, um, the poison.”
Her cutting stare was an amber bolt. “You almost died there, and you’re desperate to return?”
He wasn’t desperate. But he didn’t want to talk about it either. He let his mind ruminate instead on all that he’d ruined. “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he said quietly as his fingers wrung themselves into nervous knots. His nails were caked with dirt. “Yes, it was my fault. I know—I know.”
Rishé kissed her teeth. Her jaw worked, her gaze roving over his face. It lingered on his scar a moment, and he held back from touching his cheek. Failure always left its physical marks.
