The Other Lands (64 page)

“What totem would you take?” Mór asked, sorting through the instruments on a small table.

“I will take what you feel I deserve,” he said.

“I don’t know what you deserve.”

“If it was my choice I would wear the face of the Shivith. Spots, like yours.”

“You jest,” she said, glancing up at him.

“No.” Dariel said. He knew it sounded strange, and he knew people would stare at him back in the Known World, but this he could answer truthfully. “I find the effect quite pleasing. I’m not ready for whiskers just yet, thanks. Some spots, though—if they look similar to yours—might be interesting. But, as I said, if that offends you, choose another totem. Or … someone else could do this.”

Instead of looking at him, Mór closed her eyes and absorbed his choice within herself. “As you wish. And, no, I’ll do it.” She lifted the tattooing needle like a stylus in one hand and turned to face him, a tiny bowl of black ash ink pinched in the fingers of her other hand. “This will hurt, but pain is transitory. Only our legacy endures. Come, sit here before me. This will take a while.”

Dariel did as she asked. She was right, of course. It did hurt. And it did take a long time. But every painful moment of it was tempered by the nearness of Mór’s body, by the scent of her and the fleeting moments when her elbow or wrist, hip or breast brushed against him. He tried to remember Wren, but it was hard. When he pictured Wren’s face, he saw it overlaid with tattoos, indistinguishable from Mór’s. They were both from northern Candovia, after all. By the Giver, he could not tell them apart anymore.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered as she worked, “about … the People not being able to have children. I didn’t know. We should have asked. I’m so sorry we didn’t. If we had, I swear to you things would have been different.”

By the way she paused it was clear to Dariel that Mór was considering what he said. Her only answer, though, was to continue piercing his flesh.

“There,” she eventually said. She picked up the bloodstained towel she had used throughout the procedure, wet it in some liquid, and used it to clean his face. Despite himself, Dariel flinched at each touch: the liquid stung. She stepped back from him, setting down the needle of torture and contemplating her work. She smiled.

“So you’re amused?” he asked.

She laughed into the back of her hand, trying to squelch it. Holding up a mirror, she said, “Perhaps you should see yourself. See how you look, now and forever.”

Dariel reached out and accepted the mirror. He turned it toward his face. He expected to see a stranger staring back at him. A beast, perhaps. Something strange and perhaps frightening. He expected—despite the curious anticipation he felt—to be frightened by what he saw and sickened by the permanence of it. He was not. In fact …

“What are you thinking, Akaran?” Mór asked.

“That I make a fine Shivith,” he said, speaking his thought aloud.

Mór made a sound low in her throat. “We’ll see.”

L
ate the next afternoon, he moved as one of a group of ten. Unbound completely now, he followed Skylene’s slim form through the maze of subterranean passageways that had been his home for weeks. This time he was not being shifted to another cell. This time they came to a door, opened it, and stepped outside.

At first his eyes shot across the field beside them. It had been a long time since he had taken in the open world from ground level. The sky hung ominously huge above them. Rows of strange vegetables—bushes about a man’s height that bristled with long arms, each ending in a fist-sized bud of some sort—seemed to be marching toward him in military lines. Blinking, it took him a moment to confirm that they were, in fact, stationary, but a moment after that he detected movement coming from another quadrant.

The wall above him was alive with a sickening, slithering, unnatural motion. The first sight of it made Dariel’s skin crawl. He stopped and stared up at—Well, it was hard for him to say at what. The entirety of the long, high structure seethed with limbs. They were thorny tentacles, many ten or fifteen feet long, looking like the underbellies of a thousand giant octopuses, reaching out with arms lit greenish orange by the dying day’s light. For a breathless moment Dariel thought them creatures that might rush down toward him, snatch him up, and tear him to pieces.

“What are those?” Dariel asked.

Tunnel followed his eyes and took in the wall, unimpressed. “Plants,” he said. “You don’t have plants over there?”

“Not like those,” Dariel said.

“Don’t worry.” Tunnel nudged him on the shoulder. “They won’t eat you. Plants in the inland
… they
may eat you, but not these ones. Come.”

They moved on along the wall, undisturbed by the writhing limbs. Dariel stayed close, trying to match the other’s composure. Failing at it.

They cut around buildings and ran through fields and climbed, for a time, over rooftops. Dariel had to keep his focus on his progress, on the placement of his feet and hands and on keeping up with the others, but he took in the panorama that was Avina in quick glimpses. Enormous. Never ending, it seemed. Buildings jutting up into the distance.

Tunnel had sworn to him that Ushen Brae was a land of mountains that rose up straight out of great lakes, of jungles that stretched from horizon to horizon, with insects the size of antoks and flightless birds that hunted the Free People in packs like wolves, of arctic regions thronging with snow lions and white bears. There were creatures out there so fierce that the Auldek feared them, beasts with massive jaws or stinging parts that could drain life after life out of them. These animals, he claimed, were the reason that the Auldek built coastal cities even though they turned their back to the sea. Tunnel admitted he had never seen any of these wonders or horrors himself, but he hoped to one day.

Dariel thought it sounded exciting, dangerous in all the ways that set his boy’s fancy tingling.

Twice, the group had to split up to navigate crowded streets. Dariel walked beside Tunnel on one occasion; behind a young Wrathic named Birké on the other. Birké had no tattoo work that Dariel could see, but he did demonstrate the wolflike qualities of his clan totem with thick facial hair that covered his cheeks and forehead. He also sported canine teeth so large they showed in bulges against his lips even when his mouth was closed. They looked completely natural, in a strange, unnatural way. When he smiled—which he did first on seeing Dariel’s new facial tattoos and then again after they had walked through a crowded thoroughfare and rejoined the group in the shadows of an alley—he was simultaneously terrifying and hilarious. Dariel thought he might quite like the young man as a friend, should he be provided the leisure of friendship again.

The sun had fully set and the sky had settled in to early evening dark by the time the group gathered in the corner of a warehouse. Dariel could smell the sea. It was so near, just a wall away, he thought. It smelled like freedom to him. Skylene sent Birké and another man to check the last bit of the route to the destination. The rest waited. Dariel found himself standing beside Skylene. She pressed closed to him, closer than seemed necessary. He knew why. She was staring at his freshly tattooed face.

“I can’t get used to seeing you like that,” Skylene said. “You look like one of us, but I sat talking to you so long I know you’re not one of—”

“Perhaps I’m becoming one of you,” Dariel cut in. His face was still sore, and he could not help but feel the touch of her eyes as a physical pain. “Give me the chance at it, at least.”

Skylene kept looking at him. “Mór must have enjoyed doing that work. Did she make it hurt?”

“What do you mean? Of course it hurt.”

Smiling, Skylene said, “It doesn’t if you chew kenvu root. It deadens the sensations on the skin.” She touched a spot on his face with a fingertip. “Makes the markings painless. She didn’t mention that?”

“No, she didn’t mention it,” Dariel snapped. “What’s wrong with her, anyway? Does she just enjoy hurting me? Slapping me. Sticking me with needles. Insulting me every chance she gets. Is she like that always? With others?”

“Mór has been one of the Free People for many years,” Skylene said. “Her problem is not cruelty. It’s that she loves too much, cares too much. She’s missing half her—” Skylene stopped, shook away whatever she was going to say. Instead, she lightened her tone. “Anyway, she doesn’t enjoy hurting anyone. I think she likes you, actually.”

“Tell him,” Tunnel said, staying her. “Give it.”

Skylene looked at him sharply. “We’ll talk later.”

“Please,” Dariel said, “tell me. What don’t I know about her?”

“Ah … Mór wants nothing for herself, except one thing.” Though she had committed, it still took Skylene a moment to continue. “She had a brother. A twin named Ravi. They were taken together but were separated when they arrived in Ushen Brae.”

“So, what … she’s looking for him?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. He didn’t become a slave. He was eaten. His soul was taken from him and given to an Auldek. Mór wants to find him. I don’t know what she thinks she can do. I don’t think
she
even knows. But they were twins. Understand? They were in the womb together. They are two halves of a whole. She can feel that he goes on somewhere. Even though he lives in an Auldek’s body, she wants to face him … perhaps to release him. Now, let’s stop wasting time. Let’s go. There’s Birké. Let’s be quick.”

She pointed at the shadowy figure who had just reappeared at the far side of the warehouse. He waved, indicating that the area was free, at least temporarily, of divine children. Dariel asked no more questions. He fell in step behind Skylene, with Tunnel and the others behind him. The rest of the journey was brief. They walked for a time through a dark corridor, then wove through another jumbled warehouse, and finally stepped out onto a seaside dock. The salt air off the water was wonderful. Dariel sucked it in, loving the moist touch of the sea breeze on his face. It instantly reminded him of Val, the man he met as a feeder of the palace furnace, who later saved him from death in a lonely hovel and raised him to be a raider, to love the sea. His second father.

Out beyond the edge of concrete pier, the sea moved, black and shimmering. He caught the hulking, jagged shapes of outcroppings of rock near shore through which water sieved. Jets of white foam burst up at regular intervals, ghostly in the darkness, frightening and full of danger. Perfect, Dariel told himself. Just as I like it. Just as Val would like it. Wild.

“Dariel!” Tunnel called to him from the edge of the pier. “Come. See it.”

He jogged forward and looked down, for the water was well below the level of the pier. There, tethered to a lower platform at water level, was the boat. A very peculiar boat, similar to the sailless craft he saw slicing the water beside the
Ambergris
out in the barrier islands. Walking down the ramp toward it, his eyes took in every line and shape of it. It was so sleek, low to the water, covered all over with that white coating particular to league ships. It ran more than a hundred feet long, but was narrower than any seagoing vessel he had seen before. A water arrow. The steering wheel was in a raised, semi-enclosed structure near the back.

The others waited for him, standing uneasily beside the rocking vessel, seemingly at a loss. This, after all, was where Dariel’s expertise was supposed to take command. As yet, he had no idea how to make the thing work, but that was a small detail, certainly. Spratling could sail any vessel, even one, he hoped, without a sail.

Dariel inhaled a deep breath, filled his chest with it, and leaped across the narrow gap. What began as a graceful move, however, did not conclude as one. The slick surface of the deck shed the leather soles of his sandals so completely that he spent a few frantic seconds dancing as if unexpectedly thrown onto ice, his arms wheeling. He just managed to get down to his hands and knees, where he paused, breathing heavily.

The others watched him, perplexed and more than a bit concerned.

“It’s slippery,” he explained.

Skylene squinted one eye, raising the brow of the other.

Dariel had felt the slippery surfaces of league ships before, on Sire Fen’s league warship, the
Rayfin
, and most recently the
Ambergris
. This one felt even slicker. It may not have been so, but he needed to keep his feet under him now more than ever. Remembering that some of the sailors on the
Ambergris
had worked barefoot, he sat and unlaced his sandals. Barefoot, he rose to stand again. It helped. His skin clung to the coating in a way leather did not. He almost felt he could squeeze the deck with his toes.

Looking at the Free People watching him, he said, as if impatient, “Come on. Take ‘em off and climb aboard.”

Inside the steering cabin a few moments later, Dariel gripped the wheel and said, “What powers this?”

Birké stood next to him, wolflike, waiting, and then confused. “What do you mean?”

“What—With the boats I know, we use the sails and the wind to push the vessel across the water. Or we use oars at times. Understand? There has to be something to provide the power, but here is nothing but—but the wheel.” He stared at it, as if his explanation made him even more confused about the situation.