Wolf's-own: Weregild (52 page)

"Yeah,
oh
,” Malick muttered, pushing Joori along, dragging him into a run, away from the barracks and up the incline. Their pace an increasingly faster clip, they wove in and out of intermittent copses of pine and larch. They kept to the shadows and moved much more stealthily than they'd been doing down at the barracks in consideration of all the eyes now no doubt looking for anything that didn't belong there. An ambush in the dark tended to make those ambushed a little more cautious.

They ran until they reached a stand of pines about fifty paces from the closest building, just outside the ring of fence enclosing an empty paddock. Joori didn't even protest when Malick turned him roughly so they were facing each other. Panting, they both bent over, clutching their knees.

"Look,” Malick finally said, too obviously forcing calm into his tone, pausing another few seconds to catch his breath, “I know you don't like me much, and I know you don't trust me.” He straightened, pushing at Joori's shoulder until Joori stood straight to face him. “I don't care if you like me,” Malick told Joori evenly, “and I don't need your trust. What I
do
care about is Fen walking away from here tonight with everything he needs to keep his mind—that means you and your brother alive and walking, your mother put to rest, and Yakuli with a gaping hole in whatever part of his body will bring death the quickest. If you want to help him get all that then you will do
what
I tell you,
when
I tell you, and you won't take another chance like that."

Joori wouldn't have believed it if he wasn't looking right at it—Malick was pissed,
really
pissed, but underneath that, way down deep, he was scared.
Malick
was scared. And Joori had done it. Joori kept staring. Because he couldn't seem to do anything else. It was, he thought, quite possibly, the first time he'd actually
really seen
.

To save Jacin, he needs to save you, he needs to save Morin, he needs to save your mother's soul.

This was
Malick
he was looking at—not Kamen, not Wolf's
Temshiel
, and not the smirky smartass who'd cavalierly flirted and bickered with immortals at Yakuli's gates.

The man who still lived inside the immortal. The man who'd set his sights on the pretty Untouchable, and ended up with his heart and soul wound too tightly about Fen Jacin-rei.

Damn Shig and her annoying insights, anyway.

Abruptly, somewhat shockingly, there was nothing Joori wanted less in the world than Malick dead. Not that Joori had particularly wanted Malick dead before, he'd only wanted him
gone
, out of his brother's life altogether, but now he really wanted Malick
not
dead.

"It was....” Joori hesitated, pretending he needed to catch his breath, but it was more to stall, because he hadn't really meant to speak at all and now he was caught. He licked his lips, tightened them. “You looked like you needed help,” he said, tentative. “I'm supposed to be your key, and you told me to run. What's the point? And if you haven't enough magic to go around, it seems like—"

"I've exactly enough magic to do exactly what I need to do,” Malick snapped. “And speaking of which.” He peered closely at Joori in the dark, glaring. Then shocked him by abruptly giving Joori a firm clap on the shoulder. “Good going back there. Be careful how you use it—you're about as elegant with it as Shig is with mine—but
damn
, you've a lot of it, and you could too easily take yourself out next time. Just because it comes from you doesn't mean you're invulnerable to it."

Joori was... annoyingly touched and ridiculously pleased. Still, even through his irritation with himself, it pinged something in the dark part of his heart he hadn't known was there until tonight. “Why can't you direct it?” he asked Malick, a little rush in his chest winding out as the idea took shape in his mind. “I mean, take it like you did before, make it stronger, and we could just crumble the whole place, open it right up, and everyone—"

"And everyone here would go down with it,” Malick finished for him. “Which would be fine, if it were only Yakuli and his men, except it's not.” He paused, grim but strangely sympathetic. “Your mother's not the only one in need of saving, Joori."

Oh. Right. As Malick had said before—kinda the point.

"Anyway,” Malick went on, “I can't actually kill Yakuli."

He could tell Malick was seething about it. Joori didn't blame him. It seemed so... arbitrary. So unnecessarily complex. Malick could walk in and direct chaos and destruction, but he couldn't actually kill the one man who desperately needed killing. He could give his magic to Shig to do whatever the hell it was she was doing with it, but he couldn't let her use it to kill Yakuli.

"That's....” Joori shook his head, teeth tight. “That's really stupid,” he muttered.

"Yeah,” Malick agreed. “All right, the good news is that whatever Xari's up to, she didn't warn Yakuli we were coming. Or at least it looks that way. The bad news is—” Malick stopped abruptly. His eyes went vague for a second, narrowed, then widened, and he shot his glance up the hill.

Joori turned to follow it, scanned the rise but saw nothing. Joori was just about to turn back to Malick, ask him what was wrong, when a brief flicker caught his eye to his right, disappeared for a second, then flared up like an unfurling fist. It took a moment for Joori to make out the shape of another barracks through the flames, another moment for him to realize that what he'd been unconsciously waiting for wasn't happening—there were no men stumbling from the building, aflame and screaming.

"That,” Malick said slowly, “was not supposed to happen yet."

He was selfishly sorry he'd given Malick's ring to Morin. The Ancestors were loud, insistent, the chaos a crescendo that would have deafened him, had he been hearing it with his ears, and it was making it too difficult to think, to track, to do anything at all but what his body told him to do. The residual pain of mostly healing injuries couldn't cut through it all like it had always done before.

not be thwarted Wolf acid to the skies Raven duplicity only one only on

A big man, Yakuli—younger than Jacin had thought, and not nearly as revolting-looking as he'd imagined. Men like this should be ugly, twisted out of shape and plagued with growths, so people could tell just by looking that they should turn and run the other way. This man was almost handsome, with his sandy-blond hair, and eyes nearly the color of winter pine. Wide and fit, a full head taller than Jacin, and with a voice that could either command or seduce, depending upon how he wielded it.

Jacin remembered the voice. It had been seared into his memory that night when he'd watched and listened from a hallway window as that voice demanded more ammunition against his family. And Asai's response had delivered the first real blow in the violent deconstruction of Jacin's life. And so to hear Yakuli nearly
cooing
at him, trying to pretend to be a friendly, reasonable man....

It made him sick. It burned through the noise where thought and pain could not. It nearly sent him screaming just as loudly as the Ancestors, who wouldn't
shut
the fuck
up
for even a bloody second.

"Ever had your body move to someone else's tune, like you were a puppet?” Caidi asked. Jacin could barely hear, because the Ancestors were singing,
singing
, loud and nearly painful in their harmonic perfection—
clinging to corpses Wolf leers through a veil of burning skies to Raven's duplicity
—and Caidi grinned at him, like she heard it too, so Jacin grinned back.

Look at them
, Asai whispered.
Alive. Your mother is still alive. You can still save her, you can save them all.

Asai told Jacin everything he wanted to believe, and Caidi told him everything he feared. Even now, he wanted to believe his beishin, wanted Asai to lead him, tell him, show him, but Beishin lied, Beishin told him things he wanted to hear, wanted to believe, and all of it was lies.
I know he loved you in his way
, Yakuli had said, all sincerity and somber compassion, but Yakuli lied, too, and Jacin knew better, had finally learned better. Beishin had never loved him, Jacin would never be perfect, and so he would always fail. It still hurt, but at least now he knew what to expect.

He widened his smile at Caidi, flicked his glance up to Samin, surprised and not at all pleased to see that Morin hadn't listened to him and run when Jacin had told him to. Some part of him had been weirdly relieved when Morin had emerged from Asai's carriage and Jacin had realized he wasn't Joori. Joori would argue with him and lose precious seconds, if Jacin told him to run, always trying so hard to be the protector, but Morin didn't like Jacin much and wouldn't have to be told twice to abandon him. And yet there he still was.

Then again, where was he supposed to go? Xari was maijin, and Yakuli apparently had complete control of enough magic that he could keep Blood flowing through the veins of corpses and animate them to strike a lopsided “bargain” he likely had no intention of honoring anyway. Malick had sworn protection for Morin and Joori, but Malick couldn't kill Yakuli, and Yakuli had no such restrictions when it came to killing Malick. If Jacin wanted to keep Joori and Morin alive, he'd have to keep Malick alive, and to do that, he'd have to kill Yakuli.

"Where is she?” Jacin grated.

Yakuli smiled, that kind, condescending thing. “She is waiting for you. Let me take you to her."

The creatures that used to be people began to stir, began to move with lurching purpose, and it made Jacin's stomach flop about, but he didn't move, didn't react. Samin would protect Morin, and Malick still had him shielded. Yakuli was trying to distract him, and Jacin was already too distracted as it was.

The Ancestors
shrieked
, agonized and wordless, the volume nearly crowding out everything else, but Jacin couldn't let it. He kept his hands from flying uselessly to his head to try and block them out. Fire flared, right at the spot Jacin knew Morin and Samin were trying to hold their ground, and he let his concentration slip just enough to hope Samin knew what the fuck he was doing, before he trained all of it on Xari and Yakuli again.

"Tell me where she is,” Jacin rumbled.

"Do you know what Asai wanted?” Yakuli asked, like almost-corpses weren't closing on Jacin's brother down at the other end of the hut, and the hut itself wasn't going up like a candle. “How much did he tell his Ghost, I wonder...?” Yakuli sighed, leaned casually against the bunk behind him, eyeing Jacin thoughtfully. “Asai was an ambitious man. He wanted to provoke chaos and then rein it in, make himself the hero of the Jin as he was the hero to the Catalyst."

It was all Jacin could do not to flinch, but he might have paled a little. Perhaps he did, because Yakuli's smile got a touch more smug. Smoke curled into Jacin's nostrils, and he forced himself to breathe shallowly, not to look at what was happening down at the other end as Samin snapped out orders to Morin, and Morin answered them in breathless mumbles. The
thunk
and
thud
of butchered meat and falling bodies battered at the back of Jacin's senses, rising bile that he willed away.

"I don't want chaos,” Yakuli went on. “I want order. Do you know why my careful plans, half of my painstaking
work
is now lying in smoking heaps about my estate?"

burning skies clinging to corpses our boy liste

Smiling wider, Yakuli held up a hand when Jacin curled his lip and tightened his fists about the hilts of his knives. “It is because I cannot see
you
, Wolf's Catalyst. The Voice of the Ancestors. The Abomination that should have never been at all."

once only once our boy we've chosen only say it once

"Look around you.” Yakuli waved his hand back over his shoulder to the fire that steadily ate away the other half of the long hut, creeping closer, then to the blank wall behind Jacin, presumably to indicate the encampment in general. “Asai is now dead because he could not see you clearly enough to know the knife was coming for him. Such treachery he must have felt in his last moment, betrayed so profoundly by the one he loved so well.” He grinned. “Your comrades even now waste precious magic with each of my children they cut down."

will not be thwarted cast acid to the sky

"And all because the Abomination wants his mother back.” Yakuli's teeth tightened, and the friendly facade vanished. Those of his “children” that had still been on their feet abruptly dropped like dead things.

balk batter baffle them all crushed and craven Wolf will not be thwarted he sees the Eye and calls the Prime to his own leers through a veil of burning skies to Raven's duplicity the gods speak no more silent silent dead and quiet

"Tell me where she is,” Jacin said evenly, “and I'll go.” And he wasn't even sure if he was lying or not. He couldn't think clearly enough.

Yakuli pulled out of his slouch against the bunk, leaned in. “She is merely one more spirit-bound to me. Her worth does not approach what you have cost me tonight. But do you know what
your
worth could be?"

"He doesn't know about Malick,” Caidi told Jacin. “If he did, he wouldn't be piddling about here, he'd be trying to add him to his ‘fold'. Xari didn't warn him."

Relief washed through Jacin, and he hadn't even known he'd been anxious about it. Good. As long as Malick stayed alive, so would Joori and Morin.

Yakuli took a step closer. “A blank spot, Untouchable even to Fate, defying sight by your mere presence.” His brow creased, and he peered at the lifeless bodies littering the floor, cooking slowly, then turned a thoughtful glance on Xari. “I wonder if—?"

"You cannot touch the Untouchable,” Xari told him, her expression unreadable. “The gods—"

"The gods approve,” Yakuli cut in, his tone derisive. “If they did not, they would have moved the
Temshiel
, and we would not be here talking about it."

"He wants to make you one of his ‘children',” Caidi whispered. “He wants to see if the magic that took their spirits from them would work on you."