The Secret Texts Read online

  Ry froze. “Identify yourself,” he whispered.

  How many dead older brothers do you have?

  “I suppose that depends on how many mistresses Father had that Mother never found out about, and how careless their bastards were.”

  Half a dozen that I know of. But I didn’t say half brothers.

  “You’re Cadell?” He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t. That babble of voices in his mind when he first woke up after the debacle at Galweigh House had been in some language he’d never heard. This voice spoke clear, unaccented Iberan. And what would his dead brother be doing inside his thoughts?

  It would take too long to explain, and we don’t have much time.

  “We have enough time for you to prove who you are.”

  We do. I am—or was—Karnee, like you. We shared both a room and a bed until my death. When I left that last day, I had the feeling I might not be coming back, and I left my medallion, which you even now wear around your neck, for Mother to give you. And when you were four, I carried you across Red Bridge on my shoulders every time we had to cross it because you believed a man with purple eyes lived underneath it, and every time we got near it you insisted he was staring at you.

  Ry remembered. Tears started in his eyes, and he closed them. “I’ve missed you.”

  And I, you. But if you don’t hurry, you’re going to lose Kait. And you don’t dare lose her. This is important, little brother. More important than anything you’ve ever done, and maybe more important than anything you’ll ever do again.

  Ry was puzzled. “Who is Kait?”

  Kait Galweigh. A picture formed in Ry’s mind: the compelling creature he’d first met in the back alley in Halles, whom he had viewed standing atop the tower there watching the executions.

  “Fine. You know her name. Tell me, why is it so important to you that I find her?”

  Because she knows where to find the Mirror of Souls. And she’s set sail to get it. I’ll tell you why the Mirror is so important later. For now, suffice it to say that it must not end up with any Family but the Sabirs.

  “I’ve heard a legend about it.”

  Not important. Just go. Trust me, little brother. You have no spare time. Do what you have to do to get away from here. And we can discuss the importance of all of this when you are at sea. Agreed?

  “Agreed.”

  Ry turned his attention to the staging of his own death. Carefully and quietly, he rearranged the furniture, overturning a chair, breaking one of its legs, pulling the covers off the narrow bed and dragging them partway to the door. He took out pen, ink, paper, and blotter from the desk that sat against the north wall and wrote the beginning of a note:

  Esteemed Uncle Grasmir,

  I have accepted the burden of my Family responsibility; after discussing the matter with Mother, I feel as she does that my bid to lead the Wolves will be most beneficial to meeting the Family’s needs and goals. Though I do not seek this position gladly, for I have neither wife nor child and will be barred from such once I begin to walk the circle, I feel I am the most likely candidate to prevent Crispin, Anwyn, and Andrew from taking over.

  With that goal in mind, may I ask for your support, as paraglese as well as beloved family member? I’ll need your

  He let the letter stop in midsentence, blew on it to dry the ink, and dropped it down between the wall and the desk, making sure that an edge with handwriting on it showed clearly. Whoever discovered the blood and the disarray of the room would bring in the Family, and Grasmir would insist upon an investigation. The letter would point blame or at least suspicion in the direction Ry desired, while the signs he left behind would make everyone sure he’d been murdered.

  He drew his knife, dipped the blade in the wine bottle he’d been drinking from—for everyone knew that a blade soaked in spirits prevented the spirits of sickness from entering the body—and sliced into his arm. The pain woke the Karnee madness in him, and he growled as he let his blood pour onto the floor. He smeared it on his hands and grabbed the blankets, then left trails on the floor as if he’d been dragged by his feet. He soaked the broken leg of the chair in his blood, getting most of it on the very end of the leg. Then he pulled out a few strands of his hair and soaked them in blood and caught them in the splinters. He thought that would give anyone enough to go on.

  He let himself skirt the edge of Shift. He didn’t need it yet, not in the way he would in another half month, but he was in enough pain that the changes came readily. He felt the fire flow into the wound and sighed. It healed itself as he crouched there, waiting. Then he pushed himself further and deeper into the Shift, letting the hunger build. He stripped off his clothes as quickly as he could and bundled them tightly together. With them he bundled his letter of credit (worthless if he were barzanne, equally worthless if he were dead; but he and the ship would be well away from Calimekka before the news of his death had a chance to affect credit), his rings, his purse, and his dagger and sword. In the little time he had, he made the bundle as tight and neat as he could.

  Once he was fully Shifted, he leaped out onto the balcony and climbed up the wall, digging claws into the spaces between stones, hanging on to the bundle with his teeth. When he reached the top, he ran along the roof tiles, compromising between speed and stealth to get himself to the north end of the House. There, the wall lay less than a man’s height from the roof, and the jump down, though not easy, would be more easily accomplished than elsewhere, and with less chance of his being seen by the guards or servants.

  Once he was safely outside the wall, he found a dark, deserted alley, and there he relaxed and calmed himself until he was able to welcome back his human form. He dressed, strapped on his weapons, and stepped out into the street again.

  A worried Yanth met him on deck. “I thought you’d been killed on your way here, or that something had kept you from coming.”

  Ry hugged his friend and sighed. “More truth to all of that than you’d believe.” He watched the sailors raising sails while the captain stood at the helm. Both tide and a light breeze favored their departure, but wouldn’t for much longer—if he’d taken any longer to figure out what he had to do, his delay might have cost them half a day, and that half-day might have cost them everything. “But I’m away, and we’re free to carry out our voyage.”

  “She understood? I’m surprised.”

  “She didn’t understand. But there are other ways of reaching an objective. I chose one of them. The dock log didn’t list this voyage in my name, did it?”

  “The captain did what you told him—registered out in the name of C. Pethelley, Merchant, cargo of fruit and equipment for the colonies.”

  That was a relief. Sometimes people forgot details when it came time to act, but Ry had chosen the captain as much for his reputation for intelligence under pressure as for his equally solid reputation for discretion. “Then we sail away happily and find Kait.”

  “That’s her name?”

  “Kait Galweigh.”

  Yanth grinned. “Makes her a little less magical, an ordinary name like that.”

  “Not to me.”

  “I suppose not.” He shrugged, and his smile was unapologetic. “So where is your Kait going?”

  “East by northeast right now. We follow.”

  Yanth chuckled. “East by northeast. That’s vague enough to point us at the tip of one continent and the whole of a second . . . and the second almost entirely unexplored. Plus all of an ocean, and not a friendly ocean, either. I hope your nose is working well, or we’ll have a long search ahead of us.”

  “Which will give us enough time for me to teach you those few tricks of mine you wanted to learn, and for you to teach me that dagger move of yours that disarms the opponent; I’ve long envied that move.”

  Yanth’s face was a study of conflicting emotions. “You want to start that tonight?”

  Ry was tired enough that he thought he would be able to sleep through the night and all of the next day as well, and already
ravenous from his brief Shift. “Not tonight. Tonight we’ll sleep. Tomorrow, or maybe the day after, will be soon enough to be industrious.”

  * * *

  Dùghall frowned over the oracle cast on the table. Had it been any less clear, he would have been tempted to use his own blood to summon a spirit to confirm its message. He could find no room for doubt, though, in the pattern made by the silver coins spread across the embroidered silk zanda. In the quadrant of House, the terse message of two coins: Flee and Betrayal by trusted associates. In the quadrant of Life, the equally terse Present danger. The quadrants of Spirit and Pleasure lay empty, while the quadrant of Duty held the complex message Home overlapped partially by Seek new allies and conjuncted with Keep your own counsel and The gods intervene. Wealth, Health, Goals, Dreams, Past, Present, and Future all lay empty, and he could not remember having seen such a strange throw in his entire life. The coins that should have landed within the empty quadrants had, to a one, rolled on their edges to fall outside the embroidered periphery of the zanda, where they gleamed on the black silk, haunting him with their silence. The gods intervene, indeed.

  He’d planned to stay on in Galweigh House, to assist with the Family’s business until the survivors of the massacre pulled themselves together and put the House back in order. But as he stared at the zanda, he realized that would not serve. He would have to pack a small bag, leave without explanation, and put as much distance as he could between himself and the rest of the Family. And he would have to do it immediately.

  Betrayal by trusted associates. That distressed him. Which associates? His personal staff, who had come with him to Calimekka? His aide, who had served at his side for most of his life? The Family members whose lives he had saved when he routed the Sabirs? The pilot? Who would betray him? And why?

  Certainly not all of those in the House with him were traitors—he knew there were those among the survivors who would help him, who would do what needed to be done with him. But what he could not know was who they were, or who they were not. And the message on the zanda told him he was not to try to sort them out. He would leave silently, immediately, as if he had been spirited away, and both the guilty and the innocent would remain behind to wonder what had become of him.

  He fixed the placement of the coins on the cloth in his mind, then brought his arms up in front of him and pressed his palms together and pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. With eyes closed, he released the energy he’d drawn around himself to cloak his activities, murmured his words of thanks to Vodor Imrish, patron god of Falcons, and added the subtle plea that this newest demand for his services would spare the lives and honor of any loyal members of his staff who were left behind.

  Then he gathered up such of his belongings as he could carry in a small pack on his back, spun around himself a guise that said, I am only someone beneath your notice, and someone you expect to be here, and he stepped out into the hallway.

  He would flee, he would seek new allies, he would keep his own counsel, and, for the time being at least, he would head home to Jeslan, in the Imumbarra Isles, alone and without questioning the orders that had sent him there. He had known from the day that his mother initiated him into the Falcons that the gods had a special mission for him. He had waited all his life to find out what it was, and he had begun to believe that the early oracles had been wrong, and that he would be only another Keeper of the Secret Texts, and that in itself had been special. He’d tried to convince himself that it had been all.

  Now . . .

  Now . . .

  His gut told him that his moment was coming. That the world had changed, and that now he was being called upon to be a sword for the gods. He had been hardened by tragedy, tempered in blood; fat and old and slow though he had become, he finally had within him the clear-burning, ruthless flame that he needed to be wielded by an eternal hand. Vincalis would have been satisfied with his qualifications.

  In his heart and in his soul, he could hear the bell-clear ringing of metal on metal. He had been unsheathed.

  He wondered who the true enemy could be.

  Chapter 21

  Snow-blind, half-starved, freezing, and sick, Danya Galweigh pushed herself to take one more step across the unending tundra. And one more after that. And one more after that. She drifted in and out of awareness; when she was awake, she could recognize the voice that urged her on as the voice of her guardian spirit, assuring her that salvation lay just over the next rise. The voice metamorphosed into dreadful things when she became confused: It became Crispin Sabir coming to torture her again, and it became the chanting Sabir Wolves in the center of a huge circle; it became the voices of all of those she had seen suffer but had not helped; it became her dead grandmother, and a favorite cousin who had died in childhood.

  She rose out of the mists in her mind one more time, and into the temporary clarity, and the voice said, Almost to shelter, Danya. Almost to friends, who will help you take care of yourself and the baby. Just a little farther. Just a tiny bit farther.

  She said, “Baby?”

  Yes. The baby. You knew, didn’t you? She remembered the torture. The rape. The brutal laughter, the cruel stinking faces shoved close to hers, grinning while they hurt her, delighting in her humiliation.

  “Baby?”

  There could be, would be, no baby from that horrid union. The gods could not be that cruel.

  But now that the voice had told her, she could feel, through her magic, the truth of what he said. The vomiting, the weakness, the dizziness, the wrongness, were not just symptoms of the Scarring, nor were they entirely signs of her nearness to starvation; a new life grew inside of her. She reached into herself with what little magic she could summon, and felt that life. Small and weak as the flame of a single candle in a drafty room, it pulsed inside of her.

  She wanted to hate it, the way she hated whichever of the three monsters had been its father. She wanted to hate it, she wanted to find a way to be able to kill it, yet when she touched it with her mind, something pure and genuinely good reached back and touched her. She pulled away from the first tentative touch of the stranger inside her and stood in the snow, staring down at her feet, sickened. How could anything good come of so much evil? She didn’t want to know, and she didn’t want the child. But that tendril of goodness—and not a little of her own momentary weakness—stopped her from twisting the growing infant away from its delicate link to her and purging her body of it.

  She sensed satisfaction from the one who watched over her. You have done well, dear child. And you will continue to do well. Only hurry, now, and I’ll get you to safety.

  She hurried, for what little good it did her. The promised safe haven did not lie only a few more steps ahead of her. She walked for another half-day before she finally toppled into a hole in the snow and found herself face to face with a Scarred family. The family drew weapons, but she, surrounded by unexpected and marvelous warmth, by the rich scents of cooking meat, and by relief that someplace existed away from the endless awful cold and hellish snow, fainted.

  She had no way of knowing how much time had passed when she finally woke, but she found herself still in the warmth, lying in the flickering light near a small open fire. The creature that crouched across the fire from her held a long, bone-tipped spear in one hand. He stared into the flames, narrowed eyes almost hidden in the deep fur that covered his face. His flat, glossy gray nose and the narrow slash of his thin lips were the only other breaks in that thick white pelt. His ears, if he had them, were so small they were hidden within the thicker ruff of gray-white fur that circled his face. Danya thought him odd-looking, but his appearance was not unpleasant. When he saw Danya looking at him, he waved the spear at her in a warning fashion and said something unintelligible. What he said didn’t sound as if he had hostile intentions, though. His voice held kindness, and reason. And only the gentlest of warnings.

  She imagined him saying, “Don’t do anything stupid. I want to help you, but I can’t if
you attack me.”

  Close enough, the voice in her head whispered. Given time, I can make sure you can talk to them. For now, eat the food he’s made for you.

  She sat up slowly and held out her hand to show that she carried no weapons. None other than her claws, in any case.

  The creature said something else, and pointed to the large fired-clay cook pot that hung over the little fire. Danya reached forward slowly and took it, carefully trying to look as unthreatening as possible.

  He’d cooked some form of stew. She said, “Is this for me?” She didn’t understand his reply, and she couldn’t read the expression on his fur-covered face, but his tone furthered her belief that he meant her only good.

  She reached into the pot and speared a cube of meat on her claw. She knew she didn’t dare eat too much or too quickly, but aside from the few hares and snow-pigeons she’d managed to catch and eat raw, she had not had food since her last meal, the night before she became a sacrifice. She ate the meat cube, wishing she could lower her muzzle straight into the pot to lap out the contents in a few quick gulps. She didn’t want to be sick, though. So she forced herself to take dainty little bites, and to hand the pot back to her host even before it was empty, because she could feel uncomfortable pressure in her stomach.

  The two of them sat looking at each other across the fire. She recalled the others that she’d seen in the house before, but she could not hear them or smell them or get any sense that they were still present.

  He made his family leave. They went to one of the other homes in the village until he could be sure that you weren’t dangerous.

  Danya considered that for a moment. Why didn’t he just kill me when I fell into his house? Why take any chance on me at all?