The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Read online

  When it had been Weshker misbehaving, Cob had just smacked him upside the head and Weshker had gamely handed back whatever he had nicked. But a stranger stealing from him that smoothly while he was running for his freedom?

  That pissed Cob off.

  Suddenly, intensely, he missed the army camp. It had never been ‘home’, but he knew how it worked. This city—this whole land—was like another world to him, where the rules as he understood them no longer existed. Jasper was strange, and Ammala had been strange too, but at least they had been helpful.

  Now he was alone.

  He struggled to his feet. His legs and sides ached, making him wonder just how far he had run. The alley-mouth gaped nearby, showing glimpses of buildings no different from any he had already seen. Down the other way, the scene looked the same.

  Choosing the nearer exit, he edged to the opening and peeked around the corner.

  This street was surprisingly populated. Despite the darkening of the day, men and women and even children lingered outside, chatting or tossing dice or running errands. A flock of little kids and a few older ones chased a kickball, laughing and shoving.

  And that was odd: the older kids. Some of them were boys. Not quite Cob’s age, but he had seen conscripts in the army who would not shave for a few more years, and that meant these ones should be vulnerable to the same recruiters who had chased Cob here.

  Maybe these kids only come out at night. Maybe it’s safe now.

  Cautiously he emerged from the alley, aware that he was being watched. No one stared blatantly, but there was a moment of stillness along the street—a sort of studious not-looking—before the comfortable ebb and flow of the place returned. Cob realized he was still holding the stick like he meant to hurt someone, and jammed it awkwardly into his belt.

  Should ask for directions back to that Whitemane’s place.

  He nodded to himself and looked around. The dice game would be bad to disturb—he knew that from the army. The chatting women too. There were a few trinket-sellers on the street though, rugs rolled out and wares glinting in the fading sun, and he angled toward the nearest of those: an older fellow half-napping on the shady side.

  As the man lifted his greying head, Cob stopped short, his stomach lurching in alarm. Black marks marred the man’s features, circling his eyes and outlining the leathery creases of his cheeks, and his eyes themselves were whiteless orbs the color of pitch, like holes in his face. The marks continued down his jaw and neck to extend beneath his bright woven poncho.

  Dark plague, Cob thought, and stepped back. The kickball whooshed past his heels, followed by the horde of kids, and for a moment he was penned there, staring at the ghastly old man.

  Who cracked a cheery, gap-toothed grin and said, “First time in the Shadowland?”

  “The…”

  Sitting up straight, the old man gestured wide to indicate the street. His nails were dark down to the quick, but did not look rotten. Just dull, sheenless black. “This territory. Bahlaer’s Shadowland. Where the Shadow Folk live.”

  Cob swallowed, heart tripping faster as he flicked a look to either side. Kids, city-folk, merchants. Normal-looking buildings. A normal sky. Not what he had expected from an enclave of the Shadow Cult or anything called ‘the Shadowland’. No obvious atrocities, no black-limbed monsters reaching from the alleys.

  But—

  The kids rushed by again, laughing and howling, and he caught sight of a few faces stained with black. Not all of them, and not all to the same degree; some just looked like they had lost a recent fight, while others wore stitchworks of markings on their cheeks and arms and legs like black veins. And there were plenty that just looked like normal little sun-browned Illanites.

  But they were Dark-worshipers, part of the biggest and most vicious, most organized resistance to the Imperial Light.

  “The Shadow Folk, the Kheri,” the old man was saying, “us what got the blood of Morgwi in our veins. Horny old bastard, him.” Cob darted a wary look at him. With a finger on one of the black patches that marred his cheeks, the old man added cheerfully, “Ain’t too subtle neither. So we keep to ourselves. You’re not from around here, eh boy?”

  “Um. No,” Cob said, and eyed the alleyways. He wanted to run, but his imagination conjured all sorts of horrors waiting in the shadows.

  “Well then, you ought to—“

  “How do I get back to Whitemane’s?”

  The man raised shaggy brows, then gestured vaguely down the street. “You could find the city wall and follow it southwest, but you don’t want to be walking the streets after dark. The Empire’s got a kennel here, and they set their hounds out at night. Even we don’t go far from the Shadowland then.”

  Hounds, Cob thought, and shuddered. The memory of their belling cries, the scrabble of their claws on the rocks below him, brought on a surge of paranoia and guilt. He crammed it away.

  “It can’t be that far,” he said. “The sun’s still not—“

  “Less than half a mark and the light’ll be gone, boy. You won’t get there walking. Might get there running, but if you run, you’ll get chased. Trust me, new or not, you’re safer sticking around here. We’re not gonna eat you. People ain’t that tasty.”

  He grinned broadly, not exactly trust-inspiring. Cob set a hand on his clobbering stick and eyed the street again. A few folk had already withdrawn into the buildings, and lights were being lit behind shutters and panes of bubbly glass. The kickball game had turned into a tussling melee, drawing women away from their gossip groups to haul the children apart. Street-vendors pocketed their wares and rolled up their rugs, and tavern doors were propped open.

  It seemed so normal. Except now that he looked, he saw the details of the houses were different: the curtains beyond the windows thicker, the shop-banners absent, the mosaics darker in color and with strange figures featured--no longer animals but spiderwebs and spiky things and big cabochons of black glass.

  Not subtle is right, thought Cob, and wondered how the Imperials could have failed to cleanse this place. The bulk of the army had marched straight down the main road--the one on the more prosperous west side of the city that paralleled the river—but there had been scouts. They must have found this ‘Shadowland’.

  And there aren’t even walls around it, or guards or anything. Like these’re just normal, harmless Illanites.

  “Give an old codger a hand, eh?” said the man. He too had stuffed his pockets full of his trinkets, and now waved a wiry arm insistently. Cob stared, then with great trepidation pulled him to his feet.

  He came up with a crackle of vertebrae and a grunt, and grinned to Cob as he flexed bony shoulders beneath the woven poncho. “You’d think godsblood would do more for a fellow, eh? But age comes on anyway. Perhaps old Morgwi’s been spreading his seed too far, too thin. We’re none of us like the Shadows of old.”

  Cob held his tongue. It would not do to start arguing about the so-called gods with a Dark cultist.

  “And get my rug, eh?”

  “I— Fine,” Cob said, and knelt to roll up the rug. A trinket fell out. He picked it up, frowning; to his eye it looked like trash, just a lopsided marble of slag glass on a twist of tin wire. Not pretty, not shaped as jewelry. He had no idea why anyone would buy it.

  He turned to offer it to the man, but the fellow was already hobbling across the street toward the light of the nearest tavern. Cob stared for a moment, torn between fear of the Shadow Cult and fear of the hounds, then followed with a sigh.

  Children skittered out of their way. The game had broken up but not all of them had dispersed, particularly the older boys who stood now in clumps, watching the alleys. They had rocks, Cob noticed as he trailed the old man to the porch steps.

  For the hounds, if they come?

  Suddenly he felt sorry for the kids.

  “Listen, I shouldn’t be here,” he told the old man as he followed him up. “Isn’t there somewhere outside this ‘Shadowland’ I can get to before dark?” />
  “Nope!” said the old man cheerfully. “Nothing but empty houses, boy. Come along, come along!”

  Grudgingly, Cob trudged after him into the tavern. It was already heavily populated, with men and women of all ages gathered around the trestle tables or crammed into booths, the air abuzz with conversations. The lanterns on the low ceiling-beams cast swaying shadows across the floor. Cob tried to focus on the old man’s back, feeling eyes again upon him, but could not resist a few sneaking peeks. One black-marked face…

  Two…

  Five…

  Twelve…

  A man at a nearby table sneered at him and he looked away, tense. They were everywhere: shadowbloods scattered through the room with no pattern, no seeming need to clump together. Some were Illanites, some more northern-looking, some with the dark faces of the southern Zhang, and they were all watching him. He just knew it. They could tell he was an Imperial and at any moment they would—

  “Boy. The rug.”

  He blinked up, and the wizened old man snapped fingers at him then pointed at the floor by a barstool. They had made it to the counter, behind which stood the bartender—a heavily scarred man, one corner of his mouth upturned by a horrible gash, with eyes like chips of sea-glass. No shadow marks, though. Cob looked from the old man to the bartender, then slung the rug down where ordered.

  “Y’dropped a thingy, too,” he said, offering the trinket. The old man snorted and pushed his hands away.

  “Keep it. Only good for appeasing the eiyets. You might need it.”

  “…The what?”

  The bartender already had a mug prepared, and slid it to the old man while looking Cob over critically. “Lost soul?”

  “Yup,” said the old man, grabbing the mug up happily.

  “Mind if we school him proper?”

  “Nope.”

  “Hoi,” Cob protested, looking between them nervously. “He brought me in, said I couldn’t leave. I didn’t wanna be here, I jus’—“

  “Lark!”

  Cob followed the bartender’s gaze to one of the booths, where the curtain had been drawn aside. A young woman, southern-dark, leaned out questioningly. Upon spotting Cob and the others, she slid free, smoothing her skirt over her hips as she approached.

  “Yeah, Cayer, what?” she said, her words directed to the bartender though her eyes stayed on Cob.

  “Take this one. Tell him what he’s just got himself into.”

  “I’m not goin’ anywhere with you,” Cob said, backing away from the bar. “I don’t want any of your Dark…anythin’. All right? I’m jus’ gonna pike off and you can do whatever crazed Shadow Cult things y’do.”

  He heard a bench scrape back, and his mind suddenly caught up to his words. Oh pike me, I’ve done it now. He looked slowly behind him and saw shadow-faced thugs rising from their seats, the normal blur of conversation now hushed.

  At the bar, the girl whistled low and stage-whispered, “He said ‘cult’.”

  “Then do your job and get him before someone else does, Lark.”

  Cob’s feet felt glued to the floor. He longed to run that gauntlet, to flee through the open door and escape into the street, but knew he would not reach it. There was a lot of muscle in the crowd, a lot of visible weaponry—short studded clubs, small blades—and they all stared at him now as if he had just pissed on their grandmothers.

  He opened his mouth to say something—he knew not what—but then a hand caught his arm and yanked him away and all that came out was ‘ack’. He tried to pull free but she pulled harder and he found himself hauled into the booth the girl had vacated, with the whole tavern staring daggers at his back.

  The booth was empty but for a bowl of cherries and a table lamp. “Get in and sit down!” she said, shoving him toward the bench seat, and Cob did so, temporarily meek. The girl slid in on the other side and yanked the curtain blessedly closed.

  Outside, the quiet mingle of conversation began again, but slowly.

  “Morgwi’s balls,” the girl swore, and kicked Cob under the table with a pointy-toed boot. “What were you thinking? Do you think?”

  Pulling his legs up defensively, Cob just glowered at her. She was a pretty young woman, plush-lipped and deep-brown of skin like the Zhang, her fine brows drawn down in annoyance over her wide, tilted eyes. Though her hair was done in myriad Zhangish braids, with two at her temples tied back to keep the waterfall of them somewhat tame, she was dressed like an Illanite in a violently red blouse and tight embroidered vest over a paneled, multicolored skirt, the neckline of her blouse exposing a deep ‘v’ of cleavage Cob tried to ignore. No shadow-blackness marred her complexion, and her accent, now that he focused on it, was all Illanite. Curt and clear.

  “Obviously you don’t,” she continued. “If you had, you’d realize that calling the family business a cult is stupid.”

  “The family business?” he echoed incredulously.

  “The Greater Oretcht’kelian Trading Consortium. Or the Kheri if you absolutely need something short.” She crossed her arms under her bosom and sat back, frowning. “Most people can’t say Oretcht’ke correctly so they just spew out whatever comes to mind—“

  “But it’s a cult. You worship a Dark spirit. That’s what cults do.”

  “Who said anything about worship?”

  Cob blinked at her. There was an odd twinkle in her impenetrably dark eyes. “Um,” he said, feeling suddenly on shaky ground and unsure how he had got there. “But…that’s what happens with Dark spirits.”

  “Who says?

  “Uh…”

  “Listen,” she said, sitting forward to jab the tabletop with a red-tinted nail. “We’re a family business. The blood of Shadow are the family end. Those of us without it are the business end. Kherus Morgwi is our boss. People call him the Shadow God, and yes, he’s a real god—second only to the true Light—but we don’t do any praying or kowtowing, all right? We don’t dance around bonfires and hold secret ceremonies or whatever. It’s not about that. We work for him. We get paid. And, fortunately for you, we don’t kill people just because they act like idiots. Now let’s go back to the beginning.”

  Cob blinked, utterly confused. As far as he knew, there was only one god, and it was the Imperial Light. All others were Dark spirits masquerading as gods: the various False Lights, the dragon-gods of the south, the beast totems and elemental powers venerated by the old tribes. Liars, tricksters, corruptors.

  “Did you jus’ say you acknowledge the true Light?” he managed.

  Ignoring it, she stuck out her hand in the smugglers’ way and said, “Good evening, sir. My name is Lark, and I am the external liaison for Bah-kai, the Bahlaeran Shadowland. A pleasure to meet you.”

  “…Cob,” he mumbled after a long hesitation. Realizing he was still clutching the trinket the old man had given him, he stuck it down the top of his boot and reached to clasp her forearm uncomfortably. Beneath her sleeve lay the shape of a small, unobtrusive knife. “Nice t’meet you, I guess.”

  “So, what can the Greater Oretcht’kelian Trading Consortium do for you this evening?”

  “Nothin’. All I wanna do is get back to Jasper and get outta this town.”

  “Jasper?” said Lark, brows rising. “You mean the Trifold’s Jasper?”

  “The…Trifold?”

  “You don’t know the… Morgwi save me,” she sighed, then said, “The Church of the Trifold Goddess. Big customers of ours these days, which is splendid because they have a much better reputation among the common folk than we do. We move a lot of supplies for them—food, medicines, texts, sometimes priestesses…”

  Another Dark cult. “What does that have t’do with Jasper?”

  Lark fixed her mischievous eyes on him, mouth pursing into a hint of a smile. “Big old fellow, pretends he’s a traveling tinker, has this really shaggy dog with him all the time?”

  “Toivo,” Cob said with a sinking feeling.

  “Right. He’s famous. One of the best-known Hammers of Br
ancir—the justiciars of the Forge Goddess, third of the Trifold. You’ve been traveling with him and you didn’t know? Seriously?”

  Tired, lost, surrounded by enemies of the Empire, with only half an idea what Lark was talking about and even less desire to understand, Cob just sat back and stared at her. Of course Jasper was a cultist. Deep inside, he had known it but had been fine with ignoring it. Now, with the words spoken, he could not. Everyone around him was Dark.

  Lark must have caught his dispirited expression, because her grin faded into puzzlement, then dawning shock. “Oh Shadow,” she said, “you’re a real Imperial, aren’t you.”

  “I said I shouldn’t be here.”

  “No, you shouldn’t. But if Jasper let you tag along…”

  She trailed off speculatively, and he frowned. His temples and the bridge of his nose felt tight, the headache compressing slowly, and in the flickering light of the little table-lamp, Lark’s eyes seemed to gleam.

  “You’re not as old as you look, are you,” she said.

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “Really? You look like a full-grown man.”

  “I am a full-grown man!”

  She made a scoffing sound. “Are you on the run? It’s just like him to pick up some Imperialist boy out of misplaced kindness.”

  “I guess,” he said, then corrected himself: “I’m on the pilgrimage to Daecia City, to submit myself to the Light. And if you really acknowledge it, you should shed your Dark faith and—“

  “What?” she interrupted, then blinked and narrowed her eyes. “Are you proselytizing to me?”

  “Y’said you acknowledge the Light. That’s the first step to—“

  “Yes, I acknowledge the true Light, the one who cooperated with Morgwi to create the world. Not your Imperial Light with its claims of freeing us from the oh-so-evil Dark. But regardless of that, I follow Morgwi, not the Light, and I sure as pikes don’t follow your vicious, manipulative Imperial usurper.”