Mercurial Page 10

  No. No. “NO,” he bellowed into the darkness, with his voice that was not a voice here in this dreaming place. He wasn’t sure if his god could hear him—there had never before been any real indication to that effect—but Tal suddenly, fiercely hoped he could. “I will not listen to you any longer,” he said, his silent voice rebounding throughout his sleeping self. The words built quickly in him, roiling like a tsunami headed for a disastrous landfall, one that he could not and, he found, did not wish to stop. “I will not be manipulated by your purpose any longer. I am not the naïve boy I used to be, to still believe that you are good. How could you be after what you have done to me? Is it only the Destroyer who you care for? Am I but a tool to you, too?”

  The emotion rending through him was no longer fury, but a dark and sudden pain. It had been trapped beneath the layers of his soul for two years and would be denied no longer. Like an old, badly-healed wound, it had broken open under new strain, and now he was bleeding out.

  A sob tore from him. It startled him, and he realized that the tsunami of his pain was indeed making landfall but not in the way he’d thought it would. His ghostly dreaming self didn’t move, but faintly he felt his real body double over, his head knocking against the stone as another sob wrenched through him and then another, until he was weeping without relent.

  The weight surrounding him tightened slightly but it did not feel like a reprimand. It felt like being held. That was worse. Tal tried to shove it away, but moving beyond this place and avoiding the waiting vision would take more concentrated effort and he was too emotionally compromised to summon it.

  Then, from outside of his dream, he felt a hand land on his arm. The touch was familiar in a way that thrust him immediately into consciousness. He opened his eyes.

  The Destroyer stared down at him, those impossible brown eyes framed by the loose dark curls that fell across her shoulders as she knelt over him. They looked at each other silently for a long moment while Tal registered the tracks of wetness on his cheeks and the way his body shuddered with the aftereffects of weeping.

  He’d been sobbing here as well as in his dream. Had he been shouting here, too? Quickly, he retraced his words, trying to recall if he’d said anything that might have alerted the Destroyer to her true identity or to his purposes for her.

  Her hand was still on his arm, warmth slowly seeping from it into him. “You were having a nightmare,” she said unnecessarily. “I hope I didn’t offend in waking you from it. I…I was having a nightmare myself earlier and I know that I would have wanted to be woken.”

  There was no censure in the words, only an awkward sympathy. She pulled her hand back quickly as if she’d just remembered she was still touching him, and that he had asked not to be touched.

  Humiliated to have been found in such a condition—especially after years of successfully hiding the majority of his tears—he opened his mouth to snap at her. Was there no part of his life that she wouldn’t insinuate herself into? Could he have no privacy even in his own emotions?

  Then suddenly his plan returned to his mind, and he closed his mouth. He was supposed to win her trust. There was a wary set to her mouth already, her weight balanced so she could stand back swiftly in case he shouted at her. Which he had indeed been about to do.

  He needed to change her opinion of him if he was going to put her off guard, if he was going to give himself and the Saints the best chance of success. So he tried to make his expression and his voice mild and said, “Thank you.”

  She tilted her head and raised a sardonic brow. “I might almost believe you mean that.”

  “I do mean it.” He tried to soften his voice further, but even he could hear how false it sounded. He barely held back a wince. Although he’d hidden much of himself from the Destroyer over the last two years, he had rarely been openly untruthful with her, preferring instead to stay silent and distance himself. He had little practice with falsehoods.

  Elodie snorted and stood up. “You are far too honest to make a good liar, Tal.” She found a long stick—the last of their firewood—and poked at the smoldering embers with it. “Who was he?” she asked abruptly, her back turned to him.

  Tal blinked blearily and dragged a hand across his face, trying to wake up more fully so he could focus. He had never had so much trouble concentrating after sleep before; it had to be an effect of the phage. His deterioration had begun already. “Who do you mean?”

  “The Destroyer.”

  Tal froze.

  Elodie kept her back to him, poking the stick into the remnants of their fire, making it hiss and sizzle. She said nothing. He realized belatedly that her silence, her turned back, was an offering. She was giving him the space to think about his answer and whether he wanted to make one. She was not insinuating herself into his privacy, but offering herself as a confidant. And he had no idea what to do with that.

  Use it. He should use it. She must have heard him crying out in the midst of his would-be vision, and now she wanted to know what—who—it was that tormented him. She had assumed the Destroyer was a man. Perhaps he ought to let her believe that, mislead her so she wouldn’t accidentally stumble onto her own identity.

  You are far too honest to make a good liar, she’d said earlier. Which meant he had to risk the truth.

  “The Destroyer is…the Lady I guard,” he answered gruffly.

  Elodie’s stick didn’t pause in its scraping through the stones and coals. Outside, the wind whistled, though it wasn’t as wild as it had been a few hours ago. “And you were having nightmares about her?” she asked.

  “All my nightmares are of her.”

  “Is she the body you asked me to look for earlier?”

  Tal was confused for a moment until he recalled describing Nyx to her, asking her if any bodies matched his sister. “No. That was…someone else. Someone I love. Someone who is alive,” he added fiercely, as if he could make it be true.

  “Oh,” Elodie said in surprise, turning around. The end of her stick glowed red and traced afterimages through his vision as she gestured with it. “So this ‘someone else,’ she’s your lover, then?”

  “No,” Tal said shortly.

  Elodie tilted her head again and squinted. Tal waited, and now he was the wary one. The Destroyer had a foxlike mind, canny and calculating, and had always been quick to spot patterns that might remain hidden from others. If she guessed too much of the truth, his plan would be over before it had begun.

  “A sister, then. Or perhaps a close friend. She’s the one you hope lives.” Elodie glanced back at Tal and apparently his expression was confirmation enough, because she nodded in satisfaction and dropped her stick on the fire. “But you didn’t ask if I’d seen the Destroyer’s body earlier, which means either you know she’s dead, or you hope she is. Unless she wasn’t on the train with you at all…but you’re her bodyguard, so you won’t have left her side. Which means she was on the train. So which is it: dead, or hopefully dead?”

  Tal ground his teeth, searching for an answer that wouldn’t sound dishonest. He eased himself up further to sit braced against the wall and ignored the responding burst of pain from his leg. “She was injured in the wreck,” he said at last. “She will not survive long.”

  The angles of Elodie’s expression sharpened. For a moment, the ghost of her old malice settled over her like a veil. “If she was cruel enough to cause you nightmares, then I am glad for her death, and I hope that it hurts.”

  Tal had no response to that.

  Elodie blinked and one corner of her mouth curved up, rueful. The trace of the Destroyer in her features vanished. “My apologies. I suppose I could have found a kinder way to say that, but, as it turns out, I don’t seem to be a kind person.”

  Tal felt wrong-footed, off balance. The Destroyer had just apologized to him: one more impossibility in a day full of them. It didn’t help that he was still recovering from his almost-vision. The urgency of it lingered in his mind, tainting his emotions, making him unsteady. He t
ried to keep his focus on the conversation before him—it was like a chess match against a master, trying to anticipate what she might ask and how she might corner him, or how he might inadvertently corner himself—but he was distracted by the worry that the vision might have been warning of something dire.

  He tried to push the nagging uncertainty from his mind. The Unforged God’s warnings came with strings attached, and Tal was done with trusting him. “We’ve discussed my nightmare. What of yours?” he said to Elodie, trying to put her on the defensive. “You said you’d had one too.”

  Her rueful half-smile fell and she bit her lip, an expression that made her seem strangely young. “I’m not sure if mine was a dream or a memory,” she admitted. “There was a man standing over me and my mouth was full of blood and I was screaming.” She lifted one shoulder, clearly uncomfortable.

  Tal shifted. He’d never known what her nightmares were about, as she’d never talked about them to anyone, and certainly never to him. Knowing even this bare sketch of their content now made him as uncomfortable as it did her. He had no wish to be her confidant.

  “I should check the perimeter,” he said, starting to gingerly push himself up to standing, leaning on the wall for support.

  “Oh, I can do that,” Elodie said, stepping toward the cave’s entrance. The oath latched onto him painfully, about to thrust him toward her like a puppet.

  “No!” he said quickly. “No, let me. There could be…something dangerous out there.” The urgency of the vision rose in his mind again, and this time he couldn’t shake it off. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to be more cautious than usual until he could ascertain if there was indeed a threat.

  Elodie scoffed but paused. “And if there is, what, you’re going to fight it off? Let me help you.”

  He stooped carefully to sweep up his sword from where it had been lying at his side and re-sheathed it. “I can fight it off well enough if I need to.”

  “Give me my dagger back and I can help,” she insisted.

  “No.” It wasn’t so much that he was worried she would hurt him if he armed her—he’d seen the amateurish way she’d held the dagger earlier—but more that it was viciously satisfying to see her defenseless. To see her fearful, even if it was him she was fearful for.

  He shook his head, disgusted with both her and himself, and hobbled to the cave’s entrance.

  The snow had stopped falling. It was a deep, quiet hour of the night, and stars glimmered icily through the gaps in the thinning clouds. Shafts of viscous moonlight dappled a landscape made new: snowbanks heaped in unfamiliar patterns, carved and reshaped by the blizzard’s gales. As Tal was observing this, the gusting wind wailed one last time and then died, and all was calm and still and picturesque.

  “The snow will have buried the bodies,” Elodie said from behind him, sounding regretful.

  Tal didn’t turn. “You wished to have done it yourself?” His words were biting but he couldn’t help it. There had been innocent servants among the dead, people like him who had no choice but to serve those who oppressed them. It angered him to hear her treat their loss so casually—and unlike any time before in his service to her, he could now speak his true feelings aloud without fear of reprisal. It felt like lancing a wound: painful, but carrying with it an unexpected relief.

  “Of course not,” Elodie answered. “I only wish there’d been more time to search them for anything useful first.”

  Tal wasn’t sure what expression he made then, but it must have shown in the tension of his shoulders and back, because Elodie sighed deeply and said, “What? You wish I would mourn them? Weep and gnash my teeth and perhaps sing some poetry over their poor sad corpses, bury them with my own two hands six feet deep in the permafrost? We have already established that the girl you care about is not among those bodies, and I neither remember nor grieve any of them. If they were alive right now, I’m sure you would convince me to rescue them too, but they are not, and we are, and I will do what it takes to keep us that way.”

  Tal spotted the mostly-buried edge of the sled just outside the entrance to the cave. He leaned down to grab the rope and pulled, careful not to upset his injury further in the process. “You were right before,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “You are not a kind person.”

  Elodie didn’t respond, but there was a scuff of stone. She had taken a step back. “Not kind, no,” she said softly, almost to herself. “But I can only be what I am.”

  “That is true,” Tal bit out.

  Elodie stepped forward and snatched the rope from his hands, yanking it with all her strength—which wasn’t a lot, as the Destroyer had rarely done physical work of any kind. But she was still more capable than him in his current condition and also very determined, and after a few moments, the sled slid free.

  “Lucky for you,” Elodie panted, dropping the rope and sweeping her hair up into a loose knot that she tied with a shred of fabric, “what I am, is willing to drag you back to civilization on this sled. Get on. The storm is over, and we need to leave before whatever predator that lives here returns.”

  Tal drew a breath to argue but then released it without speaking. She was right. He was in no condition to go traipsing across the mountain range. He’d barely been able to make it to the front of the cave, and he had had a wall to brace himself on then. And they did need to leave the den as quickly as possible. Time was running out, and not only because a predator might be on its way back. “Very well.”

  Elodie smiled. “At last, you see sense.” She kicked at the snow atop the sled until its surface was mostly clean, then she went to fetch the bundle of clothing that comprised all of their supplies for survival.

  “We are going to need food,” Tal said, easing himself down to sit on the sled.

  Elodie dumped the stained clothing atop him. “Maybe I can wrestle another stoat.”

  To Tal’s surprise, a quick chuckle slid through his guard. Elodie grinned in unabashed triumph at the sign of his humor. The expression was dazzling, and so unlike the Destroyer that for a moment Tal felt like he was seeing double. So disorienting was it that he smiled in response. Before he could return to himself and wipe the expression from his face, Elodie had turned her back and moved to the front of the sled.

  He bowed his head, confused and ashamed. He shouldn’t be smiling with her. How could she rouse any emotion but hatred in him? But at least it might have had the effect of softening her further toward him, which, he reminded himself, was the goal he was supposed to be working toward.

  She picked up the rope and dragged the sled away from the cave. Tal lifted his head, scanning for potential threats, but all seemed peaceful. “Do you know where to go?” he asked, trying to sound normal.

  She gestured at the steep mountainside that loomed above them. “I assumed we would follow the train tracks. They have to lead somewhere.”

  “A good plan,” Tal allowed, because that much was true. “But those tracks are carved into the sides of mountains and go across bridges that would be inaccessible by foot. Or sled, for that matter. It would be better for us to use the pass just east of here. There is a township that should be about two days’ journey beyond it.”

  Elodie stopped and turned all the way around, pinning him with her stare. “You know how to get to a nearby township,” she said, enunciating each word slowly, “and you are only now deigning to inform me?”

  Her anger was familiar, and though it was toothless without her fire to enforce it, it could still mean the ruination of Tal’s plan if he didn’t allay it quickly. This was it: the first test. “We wouldn’t have been able to make it anywhere until the blizzard was over in any case,” he told her, trying to sound apologetic.

  She pursed her lips. Her anger passed. “True enough. But if you have any more key information that can boost our chances of survival, please tell me immediately.” She paused. “How do you know about the pass and the township, exactly?”

  “I grew up in the mountain wa
rd. Here, in the Skyteeth,” he explained. “I don’t have all the geography memorized, but I know enough to have a general sense of direction.”

  “The Skyteeth,” she mused, picking the rope back up, her gaze faraway. “That’s right. I couldn’t remember the range’s name before.”

  Tal’s senses went on high alert. “Do you remember anything else?” he asked cautiously.

  She frowned. “No. Or…maybe? I’m not certain. I have these flashes of familiarity, of recognition, but nothing specific. I keep waiting for things to snap back into place but it hasn’t happened yet. I thought yesterday that it was merely the trauma of the crash, some sort of shock state, but if it was it would have passed by now, right?”

  Tal hid his relief. “I can’t be sure. I have little medical knowledge.”

  She smiled over her shoulder at him. “That is one way we are the same, then, at least.” She trudged through the snow and moonlight in silence for a few more minutes, then said suddenly, “There are a few guesses I can make about who I am. Or at least, what I’m like. I know that I’ve rarely felt proud of myself before. I know I have few survival skills—few practical skills of any kind, really—which indicates I led a privileged life. Or perhaps simply a sheltered one. Maybe I was a nun,” she mused. “I could have led a life of silence and prayer, cocooned by the walls of an isolated monastery.”

  “I can see you neither praying nor being silent,” Tal contended.

  “Keep your opinions to yourself, unbeliever,” she said playfully.

  That struck a bit too close to home, and Tal looked away. She caught his hesitation.

  “Oh,” she said, realization dawning. “Oh. But you’re not an unbeliever, are you? You’re the religious type. Ah, it makes so much sense now. The dutiful nature, the care for the dead—”

  “That is a normal quality of decent humans,” Tal interjected.

  “Yes, yes, we have established that I am not a decent human,” she said impatiently. “But we are discussing you right now. So tell me: is it true? You believe in the Unforged God?”