The Land's Whisper (32 page)

~

After some deliberation, the two opted to
walk Trilau for the morning—with the intent of re-supplying—before
taking their leave, and they found the town even more lively than
it had been the prior evening. Stands bursting with crops, tools,
wares, and breakfasts lined the market. The inn had already
provided a hearty meal, leaving the two with an appetite only of
curiosity. They ambled and watched the juile maneuver about in
their synchronized music. Urchins now joined the throng, and their
movements became the accented allegro in the wash of robed
song.

The two soon found themselves in a public
square. A strange statue, a large bronze eye, stood in the center
of a clear, stone-paved area, with juile rushing by and booths
cornering the streets. The eye rarely caused pause among the crowd,
but many hands smoothed its surface in passing. The gesture carried
the air of ritual and esteemed respect.

A carved stone dais also rested in the
square. At first, it seemed simply a hindrance to the thoroughfare,
but it was soon utilized. A child, looking to be about ten orbits,
stepped upon it and began reading from a score of loose papers he
held in hand. His voice did not match his mousy figure: it was
seasoned and poised and carried out into the street with power. He
articulated with an educated air. The two checked their steps at
once to listen with intrigued expression.

Brenol laughed after a moment. “The
news?”

Darse said nothing, but his blanched face
was as effective as a gag. Brenol snapped to attention, straining
now to actually listen to the words.

The voice echoed out, “—population. The
attack occurred during visnati VelsFest in Coltair, with the fire
taking the tents and then raging through the town. Fifty-two are
dead from the fire, and twenty-four are critically injured. Motives
are still undetermined, but there have been speculations made
regarding attempted genocide. The unidentified assailant was killed
during the attack, falling under one of the tent fires. Sources say
he was about fourteen
caltran
, thirty-eight
braens
.
Brown hair and eyes, brown apparel. Any relevant information on the
man or murders should be reported to the local polina. Any visnati
outside the district are asked to return to Garnoble as soon as
possible, or to contact the board.” The boy rotated his head
slightly—a professional tilt evidencing a change of topic—and began
the next piece. “Two children missing in…”

“I knew it. I just knew it. I had that
feeling…and I just knew it,” Darse mumbled to himself.

“I missed something. What happened? Who was
killed?” Brenol asked. His face was still scrunched from the effort
of attempting to piece together half of a story. “Visnati? I really
didn’t hear most of that.”

Darse’s voice was faraway, like the third
reflection of an echo. “And more…” He closed his eyes tightly, but
when he opened them, it was as if his golden orbs saw nothing.
“Let’s get out of the plaza. I can’t breathe in here.”

Brenol followed Darse through the
hard-earthen streets past robes and eyes and commotion. On the
edges of town, Darse swapped his determined stride for maddening
pacing: back and forth and back again.

“Darse?” the boy nudged.

“Fingers.”

“What?” asked Brenol.

“He attacked the visnati. At least that’s
what I think happened,” Darse replied.

“What?” roared Brenol. His eyes bulged out.
“Did the kid say genocide?”

Darse wrung his hands. “He must have gone
after them.”

Brenol’s face fell grim. After a moment, a
sickening thought came upon him. He tilted his head and asked,
“What do you mean ‘
you knew it
’?”

Darse sighed wearily and paused his pacing
to give Brenol a pained glance. He returned to his march again as
he spoke. “I’ve been mulling it over, day and night—even in dreams.
What happened to Fingers that night?
What
?” His hands flew
up. “I didn’t know! I just… I kept thinking. Fingers knew the
visnati. He knew them and knew they had been significant to me—at
least I think they must have been. He knew… Ugh. He had giggled, so
tickled over those memories… I figured he woke enough to move from
the front of the barn, but was too drugged to figure out what was
happening, and went somewhere to recover. I…I…”

Darse met Brenol’s face with his own
pleading glance. “I couldn’t just stroll around the woods looking
for him. I was broken. So I left…but…” He trailed off and his voice
was subdued as he mumbled to himself. “When he found Crayton later
he must have wanted to destroy me—or at least something I cared
about.”

Brenol’s face jumped alive. “What?” His
voice boomed out in heat. “Darse, you killed Crayton?” The cold
dream-fingers of the man had haunted him for many septspan. This
was information he would have preferred to have known.

Darse started, realizing he had been
speaking aloud. “No,” he replied quietly.

Brenol’s eyes widened at the implication.
“But I…I…” He waved his hand as though swatting away a large bug.
“Doesn’t matter. He would’ve killed me. Didn’t even mean to. Saving
myself.” Yet the rationalization could not impede the stone
settling into his gut.
I killed a man.

“I never questioned the rightness. I just
feared the implications,” Darse said.

“Why did you never say anything?” Brenol
asked. “Especially when Gartoung made you speak about it over and
over?”

“I wanted to shield you from knowing,” Darse
replied softly.

Brenol shook his head, hoping to dislodge
all the thoughts, all the guilt.
I killed a man.
A voice
snaked around and whispered darkness in his heart:
You meant
to.
He thought back to the words of the urchin: genocide. The
black serpentine tongue spit silent words again:
Your fault.
Yours alone. You didn’t stop him. You failed.

Brenol swallowed. “And Fingers?”

“The boy said the attacker died in one of
the fires he made.”

“We can’t know if it really was Fingers,”
Brenol said.

Darse nodded. “You are right. But the
description matches. We will have to talk to the polina to be
sure.”

“But the visnati?” asked Brenol,
incredulous. “How do we know who? How can that even be?” The faces
of Rook, Spence, Colvin—they were still fresh images smiling,
singing.
Can’t be. It can’t.

“The boy said there were fifty-two dead in
Coltair.”

The number caused Brenol to reel. The
visnati population had not been more than several hundred
there.

“But Darse, there is only one other visnati
town. That is it.”

Darse’s face paled further. “Why are there
so few of them?”

Brenol swallowed at the gravity of how much
Fingers had stolen from Darse’s memory. “They have a smaller
population anyway, but the black fever came through a few orbits
ago. Many were lost.”

Darse’s face disappeared into his immense
hands. “I should have… I just…” The grown man fell to his knees in
the dusty street. They thudded painfully, but he was oblivious to
all. His golden eyes stared ahead while shaky fingers fell and dug
absently in the loose dirt.

The sight was a sharp slap to Brenol.
He’s still broken. I have to be strong. Darse needs me to be
strong.
I need to help him this time.

So he abandoned the awful ache within and
steeled his heart. There would be no night of grief for the
visnati, no dwelling on his own guilt and fear. There would be
nothing, nothing but hatred for the awful man who had done this to
them.

Brenol crouched and scooped up Darse’s
clammy hand. “We’re not traveling today. We’re going back to the
inn for the night. It will give you a breath, and we’ll be able to
think about what we have to do. We’ll leave in the morning.”

Darse nodded absently and followed him.

I’ve never seen him look so old,
Brenol thought.
I hate Fingers. I hate him.

I hope it was him in the fires. He deserved
to die. He deserved it.

Health is not merely the absence of disease.

-Genesifin

One day rolled into a septspan, then two.
Their funds slowly thinned and Brenol itched in the wait, his
anxiety wearing him as raw as an ulcer. The ripping greed for the
nuresti connection took him regularly but there was not any relief
to be found. All he could do was gnaw his cheek and hope he could
withstand it all. At least within the city, among the juile
,
Selet’s eye seemed to gaze with bored loathing instead of the
hungry malice he had known in the wilderness. Brenol did not even
attempt to speak with the terrisdan. He barely spoke to anyone.

He would wander the city and allow the
movements of the people to wash over him, but there always remained
a dark burrowing hole in his core. He refused to look down that
chasm, for it would only lead where he could not go: death,
Fingers, Crayton, Darse crumpled and weeping like a child, hatred.
So Brenol waited, and tried to bear it.

Brenol eventually heeded Darse’s pleas—and
example—to talk to the polina, but found little closure or peace.
Yes, the attacker had been Fingers—they had several well drawn
profiles—but the knowledge did not ease his mind as he imagined it
would. He felt riddled with shame at how he had tarried and not
done anything while Darse had convalesced. It had eventually been
Gartoung who had spoken to the polina. He had done nothing but idle
back in fear.

Darse gradually emerged from the stunned
torpor that had taken him in the plaza, but he was changed
nonetheless. He disappeared every day for long, silent walks by
himself. He would even sneak away in the night sometimes, when he
thought Brenol sleeping.

It irritated Brenol, but everything
irritated him.

“Where do you go all day?” he finally
snapped one afternoon. They had been dining at the inn, and the
fare was anything but memorable.

Darse pushed his plate away. His lunch was
barely touched. “The river.”

“What’s at the river?”

The man’s face was strained, but Brenol did
not have the patience to care.

“Gartoung,” Darse answered slowly, realizing
he was no longer embarrassed. “He showed us. Speaking out in the
waters…” Darse pondered a moment, attempting to pair words to the
experience. “You remember the summer you got bit by that
dodgernose?”

Brenol nodded. The asp had struck without
warning, not even giving its usual faint hiss to alert a person to
its presence. Darse had barely blinked before unbelting his knife.
He had sliced Brenol’s arm with swift precision and sucked out
whatever the asp had pumped into him.

“It’s like that. When I say all the terrible
things inside, the venom floats away with the current, no longer
harmful to me. Inside it festers, but out—freedom.”

Brenol ran his fingers over the old bite
scar. “Huh. Is it working?”

“Slowly. These things don’t seem to heal as
quickly as bones. Do you want to try?”

Brenol shook his head. After a moment, he
met Darse’s gaze. “Are we…”

Darse looked at him knowingly, and finished
his words. “Ever going to leave? Get to Colette?” He shrugged. “I
certainly hope so. But we also cannot rush into anything. As much
as I know we have to move, I’m half broken. This is where I need to
be right now… You too, Bren.”

The boy swung his legs away from the bench
and rose hastily. Lacking speech, he rushed out into the sweltering
sun.

Brenol wove through the crowds until he
reached the city center. He stared at the moving throng, musing on
their movements and the sweep of hands that slid over the plaza’s
statue. No matter where he stood, the bronze eye seemed to always
be gazing into him. It was strangely alluring yet utterly
unsettling.

Definitely not Selet’s eye,
he
thought wryly.
Doesn’t hurt enough.

Before he even knew it, he was standing
beneath the bronze sphere, staring up. His hands crept forward
hesitantly, unsure. Just as his fingertips met the sun-warmed
surface, something deep within him swelled. All the dark emotions
he had been burying rose and threatened to erupt. But Brenol met
the tide with a fierce and powerful determination, yanking his
outstretched hand back with a snarl. The sweep of grief cowered
before the fury and slowly tucked itself into a hard knot deep
within. The boy felt his chest grow colder, tighter.

The statue stared down at him, and defiantly
Brenol glared back, tingling with an odd sensation of regret.

“I won’t,” he spat, but the statue merely
gazed back silently.

He left the city center and paced the busy
streets, finally winding his way back to the inn to sit and sulk.
Within the span of a few hours, Brenol began to forget what it was
like to not carry the stony, chilling knot inside.

~

While Darse’s soul did not mend as swiftly
as his leg had, healing nonetheless came. It was as apparent as a
child’s face maturing into an adult’s. Darse’s countenance opened,
he ate more heartily, and his features flushed in expression. The
shadow that had hovered over his soul dissipated. Darse was
becoming Darse again.

Why am I so annoyed, then?
Brenol
asked himself, not allowing a response.

Now Brenol was the one taking long daily
walks, but his sojourns through the city only left him more
agitated and confused. Nothing seemed to reduce the anger that
gnawed through him. He felt laden with questions, and his feet
longed to be free and journeying again.

Brenol recalled Gartoung’s words in their
last meeting, for they rattled in his ears as an unending echo. He
wondered if Darse was well, but even more, he began to wonder if he
himself was well.

It took Brenol several days, but one night,
just as Darse was about to fall asleep, he whispered into the
dark.