Shadowborn (26 page)

“While unable to control them,” the archduke said. Balthasar turned in appeal to Olivede, but the archduke said, “Miss Olivede is your sister, and I am barely acquainted with her. Her efforts to try to save Mycene’s life and ease his passing speak well of her—but I cannot take her word regarding you.”

“Your Grace,” Balthasar said intensely, “
am
I the man you would send on an assassination? My marksmanship is risible. I am no mage. I may know drugs, poisons, and anatomy—but I would be entering a Lightborn court where assassination is a mechanism of succession and their brightnesses surround themselves with layers of secular and magical protection. The fact that Floria had to carry a talisman to the prince suggests that such magic cannot be centered in a living body, and therefore I argue that I cannot be carrying such an ensorcellment. If you are concerned about anything else I might be carrying with me, then have me stripped and searched before I go.

“You
need
the Lightborn to accept the existence of Shadowborn, Your Grace. I am the best proof you have.”

A
hand on his shoulder woke Fejelis, a hand that snatched itself back as he snapped upright. His head connected with a chin; she thudded back on her rump on the floor. “Ouch!” Watering, honey-gold eyes squinted at him.

Wit finally overtook reflex, and Fejelis recognized his hostess and surroundings: Jovance, mage turned railway woman, in the hut in the Darkborn Borders that she shared with three others—her brother, Jade, and a young couple, Midha and Sorrel. Rather too few hours ago, by the way he felt, he had stretched out and gone to sleep on a pallet on her floorboards. He had simply trusted to Tam’s judgment, and his own assessment of her—which was admittedly not unbiased, another unexpected aspect of the situation. He tried to untie his tongue for an apology.

“Sorry to startle you, your brightness,” Jovance said. “But we’ve been asked to mount a guard outside for some Darkborn trains coming through. How are you with a rifle?”

“. . . Isn’t it still . . . ?” He just avoided asking the obvious question; of course it was still night, and of course she knew that. “. . . Depends on the size and speed of the target. Overall, fair to middling.” Against a target, anyway; he had never had a taste for hunting live game. “Jis—Orlanjis—is better than I am.”

“Sooner have a crossbow,” his younger brother said. He was nervously finger-combing his long red-gold hair, trying to worry loose a snarled residue of his ornate coiffure. His face was pale beneath his desert tan. But Orlanjis had spent seasons in the desert with their southern kin; he had hunted and bled his kill, dressed, cooked, and eaten it.

“If we need one of you, we’ll need both,” Jovance said, rising smoothly on strong legs and reaching down a hand in a worn leather glove to draw Fejelis up. He tried to convince himself that the shirt he had slept in was long enough to preserve decency, groping drafts notwithstanding. Her eyes glinted with mischief, noting his knees-together, slightly hunched posture.

The need to distract her, as much as the need for information, prompted him. “Trains, you said?”

“Yes. It’s an hour after sunset—again, I’m sorry I had to wake you so soon, after you walked all that distance, carrying Tam.”
Which my body doesn’t need to be reminded about—thank you, Jovance.
He felt nineteen going on ninety. “The Darkborn manor of Stranhorne reports being overrun by what they describe as an army of Shadowborn, which seems to have swept through some of the outlying territories. They managed a retreat to Stranhorne Crosstracks just before sunrise last night—they’re ferocious fighters and well organized, which means anything that could overrun them is thoroughly bad news. Now they’re trying to evacuate wounded and noncombatants by train. They’ll have armed guards, but they want us to mount a watch in between trains. It’s good we’re six.” She did not count Tam, who had been incapacitated by his exertions getting the three of them there, and was lying unconscious in the small bedroom. Her lips compressed. “Not quite what Tam was hoping for, bringing you down here to supposed safety.”

Another, less stupid, question occurred to him, about how they could shoot, looking out into darkness from light, but he decided he would let that, too, answer itself. As well as the one after that: if she were able and willing to use magic offensively, they need only wait to find that out, too. He suspected she was strong, but did not know how strong.

Jade lobbed Fejelis underwear and a pair of trousers that were short in the shank but otherwise a passable fit. His own clothes were impregnated with the dust of the fallen tower. Fejelis pulled the clothes on, tucked in his shirt, ran his hands over his unkempt hair, and accepted a rifle offered him. He confirmed it was unloaded, noting that it was of Darkborn manufacture.
The blind Darkborn are certainly accomplished at killing at a distance,
he thought grimly. The rifle had an interesting attachment, a long tube set parallel to the barrel with a lens mounted inside. Peering down it, he could see the glint of curved glass, the wink of focused light at its center. “One of Tam’s artisans thought that one up,” said Jovance, “attaching a telescope to a rifle.”

He knew Tam’s artisans, or some of them. He considered them
his
artisans, too, since, in a guise other than heir, he had been an irregular visitor to their cafés and workshops. Jovance said, “Tam described the design to my”—a small flinch—“grandfather.” The grandfather who had died in the destruction of the tower. “Lukfer arranged for some samples to be made up and sent them down for us to try out. He worried about us. If you can tolerate having your eye right up to the end of the cylinder, it gives remarkably good magnification, and cuts out ambient light.”

Fejelis sighted the grain of the scarred wooden floor, the knobby edge of the carpet. The prickling around his shaded eye grew into an ache like severe eyestrain. “. . . I think I can do this,” he said. “. . . But the fog . . .” When Tam had set them down, the fog had been too dense for them to do more than find and follow the railway track itself.

“Still there. The telegraph says Stranhorne’s had snow, wind, violent rainstorms; a mage in their party said it was mage weather. The first train left Stranhorne an hour and a half ago, so it has roughly another hour before it reaches here, and another half to reach the Crosstracks. It’s carrying a couple of the Stranhorne family themselves. There’s another about half an hour behind it. So we’ve time to go out and drill getting the lights and ourselves into and out of place fast. We’ll get a signal as it passes each station, so we’ll know when to close up.”

She glanced at Midha, who did not speak, and went on. “Everyone get four lights and sling them to either side, and then take up ready positions.” Midha opened the door on darkness. Fejelis’s mouth went dry, remembering the hallucinatory chiaroscuro of the night before as they hunted for survivors in the rubble of the fallen Mages’ Tower, but Orlanjis all but threw himself down the black maw, and Fejelis had to follow. The hut stood on a platform, fifteen feet in the air, with a covered deck all around, so that—in light, without fog—they should have had a fair vantage. Now they could barely discern the line of the railroad tracks.

“Too slow,” said Midha to Jovance. Fejelis guessed that he would ordinarily have been in charge, but he, like the other two, would rather Jovance deal with their unnerving guests. She had once been a Temple mage. Thus prompted, she had them try their deployment in pairs, with two riflemen covering the diagonals while the others slung lights; that went better. While Sorrel went back into the hut to monitor the telegraph and put on the kettle for what promised to be a long night, Jovance had both Fejelis and Orlanjis shoot several rounds at a marker, the nearest of those they used for target practice, and the only one they could make out in the fog. They established that though Orlanjis was the better shot, he could not use the closed sight. Jovance exchanged Orlanjis’s closed sight for an open one, warning Orlanjis of the difficulty he might have seeing.

“I’ve night hunted,” Orlanjis began . . . and in the middle of the sentence brought up his gun, squinted through the sight, and fired, lurching a little at the recoil. In the mist across the tracks, something howled its outrage. Orlanjis fired again, steadier now, and the howl ended.

Jovance said to Midha, “Let’s ask Sorrel to telegraph the Crosstracks, get details of what we’re up against.” To Orlanjis: “What was it?”

“Don’t know. Large . . . animal.” On the last word, his teeth chattered and he clenched his jaw.

She clapped his shoulder. “Bigger target, then. There’s too much light for Darkborn out there, and too much darkness for Lightborn, so feel free to drop anything that’s not us.”

She has a vigilant’s gallows humor,
Fejelis thought, exchanging glances with Orlanjis along the length of the platform. Bright though they were, the lights were chill and dim compared to sunlight, and Orlanjis’s face was wan and damp with the lack of sunlight, settling mist, and fear. With his vivid imagination, the night must be full of horrors. For Fejelis, the greatest horror was the possibility that he might have brought Orlanjis here to die. After years of having had his brother held up to him as the southern faction’s favorite and his nearest rival, the last thing he had expected was that a single, impulsive act on his part would have won Orlanjis’s loyalty.

Then he saw Orlanjis swing his rifle toward him and thought for a brief and terrible moment that he had won nothing. Orlanjis fired, and just behind Fejelis something scraped against the railings. Fejelis threw himself flat, rolling, and stared up at the man-sized but not man-formed creature clinging by one hooked talon to the rail. Its chest was deep, with a prominent breastbone and hollow belly, and its pectoral muscles worked as its wings fluttered. The jaw and lower face were a man’s, but the eyes were barely visible. A fine pelt covered the head and torso. Orlanjis and Jovance fired together, each from their corners. Skin split, blood gushed, and the Shadowborn thudded down to straddle the railing and slither like a half-filled bag of sand off the railing to the ground below. “For the Mother’s sake,
watch
,” Jovance yelled at him. “The fog conceals them!”

In the doorway, Midha said, “Stranhorne Crosstracks says that some of them can fly—”

Panting, Jovance said, “We
noticed
. You want to take this corner? I’ll cover the front, get us ammunition. Your brightness—”

“. . . Yes, fine,” Fejelis said, before she or Orlanjis turned to look. He climbed to his feet, picked up his rifle—thanking the Mother of All Things Born it had not discharged—drew a deep breath, and stepped up to the rail. The mist roiled, its motions disorientating; he fired twice at phantoms before he saw his first creature and spooked it into Jovance’s line with his misses. He heard several shots from Orlanjis’s direction, followed by an unnerving pause. From between them, Jovance rasped, “When you’re reloading, say, ‘Cover me,’ so we can.”

Fejelis shot at ripples of mist, at dark, solid, moving shapes on the ground. Twice he left a wounded Shadowborn that Orlanjis or Midha dispatched. “Reloading,” he croaked, and had just realized he had nothing to reload with when she pushed a pouch into his hands. “Your little brother remembered
his
ammo,” she chided him, before Jade’s
“Cover me,”
summoned her around to the far side.

The mist seethed, though his adrenaline-sharpened vision and even the uncomfortable sight found nothing solid. Orlanjis yelled alarm and shot wildly. Fejelis broke discipline to throw one swift glance over his shoulder—

—To see one flying Shadowborn tear two of Orlanjis’s lights from their hangings, even as another dropped on him from the roof. Orlanjis pitched forward, without a sound, beneath its weight. From the far side of the hut, Jovance shouted, “Hold your posts!” Fejelis remained mesmerized as the falling Shadowborn seemed to rebound, thrust skyward against gravity, and then both Shadowborn simply burst as though an immense fist had crushed them. Meat, bone, and gore spattered the platform, the roof, the ground, Orlanjis. The unstrung lights whirled above Orlanjis’s head.

“Fejelis—
outward
!” Jovance shouted, dropping to her knees beside Orlanjis. “I have him.” He whirled, eyes raking the mist, his finger twitching on the trigger. He had no idea how many hours later it was that Jade said, quietly, from his side, “They’re gone.” He pried the rifle from Fejelis’s grip and turned him to face Jovance, who was supporting a trembling, blood-spattered Orlanjis. Jovance released Orlanjis to his embrace; under his hands, he could feel rent fabric part over whole skin. “Thank you,” he breathed over his brother’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

“I, for one,” Jade said, “might have wished she’d done that sooner. That was a bit close.”

“Easy for you to say,” said Tam’s tired voice from the door. “It wasn’t your magic.”

“I didn’t want to find out they could sense me when I couldn’t sense them,” Jovance said to Jade. “But, yes, I nearly held back too long.” To Tam she said, “What’re you doing up?”

“Well . . . ,” said the mage, burying his hands in the pockets of a ragged dressing gown. “I might have slept through the shooting, but when one of those things landed on the roof above my head—you have no idea how vile that magic is—and you let rip . . .” Fejelis hoped his face wasn’t as green as he felt at the reminder. Yet he grinned with relief at seeing Tam awake and upright, if as heavy-eyed and ashen as a man recovering from a three-day bender. The mage smiled back with a rueful shrug of the shoulders as he glanced around them, apologizing for the failings of their haven.

The bell, loud, insistent, made them all jump. Jade said, in horror, “Mother’s milk, the train—” The Darkborn train, which they’d all forgotten, with Darkborn guards riding outside. “
Inside
, now.” He and Jovance dove right and left, harvesting lights, while Fejelis half carried Orlanjis into the hut, lowering him carefully into the chair nearest the fire. He’d apologize for the stains later. Orlanjis’s eyes were dilated, black pupils in dark irises. He looked as he had looked when he learned of their father’s death in darkness.