Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Read online

  He nods. ‘Until I know what they have done. If they have broken faith.’

  ‘We will find out,’ Raine says. ‘And then we will drag it all out into the light so that it is plain to see. If faith has been broken, then those guilty of it will be broken in turn.’

  ‘Including Sylar?’ Fel asks.

  Raine nods. ‘Including Sylar.’

  ‘What could be worth it?’ Fel says. ‘Worth breaking faith over.’

  Raine thinks about what she had heard about Kaspar Sylar. About how his cruelty is only outstripped by his ambition.

  ‘Power,’ she says. ‘Glory. The stars, and everything in between them.’

  ‘Said that way, it sounds like something from the old stories,’ Fel says. ‘Like the King of Winter.’

  Raine rolls the parchment neatly and starts to turn it in her own hands.

  ‘Our next posting is to fight alongside the Kavrone,’ she says. ‘High Command are sending us to the primary city.’

  ‘Seems like fate’s work,’ Fel says.

  ‘Or something like it,’ Raine says.

  She puts the roll of parchment into her inside pocket and gets to her feet, suddenly unable to sit still. It is because of Sylar. Because of the Kavrone. Because they were Lucia’s regiment, before.

  And that really does feel like fate’s work.

  She thinks of Lucia’s words in the chapel that day, so long ago, and the fear in her sister’s eyes as she spoke about change and ambition. For a moment, Raine wonders if Lucia could have seen this corruption taking root, and earned her death by trying to stop it. That thought stirs a dangerous hope inside her, long extinguished. One that she should ignore, or smother. One that she should know better than to heed.

  Raine puts her hand in her pocket, and her fingertips brush against the timepiece. She has put the datacrystal back inside and bent back the casing to hide it again until she finds a way to unlock it. It feels heavier now than it ever has, that timepiece. Heavy and cold.

  It is a lot to carry, alone.

  She looks at Fel, sitting there on the step under the mist of rain that comes in through the shattered ceiling.

  ‘Do you trust me?’ she asks.

  ‘With my life,’ he says, without even a pause.

  ‘Despite what I am?’ Raine asks.

  Fel gets to his feet now too. ‘Because of what you are,’ he says.

  ‘And what is that, to you?’ Raine asks him.

  He stands there unarmed and unarmoured, without his pins or his colours. For a moment, they are both just souls.

  ‘Strong,’ he says. ‘In all of the ways that it matters.’

  Raine thinks that she should know what to say to him then, but she cannot find the words. It is a strange feeling, to not know. Ill-fitting, like clothes made too large.

  ‘Something is troubling you,’ Fel says. ‘Something more than the Kavrone or the guns or the Sighted.’

  She wants to take the timepiece out of her pocket and explain it to him. All of it. Her father, and his coward’s blood. Her mother, a dead hero.

  Her sister, the traitor.

  But Raine cannot make her hand close around the timepiece, and she cannot find those words either. It takes her a moment to recognise the feeling.

  Fear.

  She is afraid of seeing that look on Fel’s face that she saw on the faces of those at the commissariat conclave, and the scholam before it. She is afraid that once he knows about the failings of her blood he will not trust her anymore. He said that she was strong in all the ways that matter, but in this Raine finds that she cannot be.

  Not yet.

  ‘We need to return to camp,’ she says, instead. ‘It is a story for another time.’

  He smiles, just barely, and nods.

  ‘Another time, then,’ he says.

  Daven Wyck stands halfway down the steps of a ruined habitation block looking into the deep, dark water that has flooded the hab’s lower levels. It looks black, like the lakes of the Vales. The hab block is a part of the collapsed cityscape, out in nowhere between the Antari encampment and the tankers’ lot. It’s a place that nobody would care to go until the crusade front moves on, which makes it good for hiding things.

  Like bodies.

  All of that black water swallows up the dead blank and his soldiers with ease, and as Wyck watches them go he thinks about the water wraiths, and wonders if they take those who are dead already, or if they just like to drown the living.

  He wonders if Raf found one all that time ago, down there in the dark.

  ‘Someone will know,’ Zane says. ‘The blank and his men will be expected or missed by those that sent them, and then they will come for us.’

  The witch is sitting next to him on the step, watching the water lap against the stone.

  ‘Not for me,’ Wyck says, with a shrug. ‘For you, maybe.’

  ‘What was done was both of ours,’ Zane snaps. ‘Your hands are as bloody as mine.’

  Bloodier. The word surfaces in his head like a bloated thing breaching the skin of a lake.

  ‘So that is it,’ she says, bitterly. ‘We make a secret of it.’

  ‘Unless you want to die,’ he says, then turns to go up to the surface and back to the forward camp.

  Zane doesn’t move from the spot. She just keeps watching the water. Wyck is careful to keep half an eye on her as he goes, because of what she is.

  ‘You have so many secrets,’ she says. ‘It is a wonder there is room inside you for another.’

  Wyck stops on the steps. His knife is in his hand, though he can’t remember drawing it.

  ‘Get out of my head,’ he says. ‘Or I’ll put you in that water too.’

  Zane gets to her feet, leaning on her staff to do it. She finally turns away from the black water.

  ‘I am not in your head,’ she says. ‘I do not need to be. Your mind sings loudly, especially when that poison you take is burning your blood.’

  Zane has known about the stimms since Gholl. Since they went into the mountains and the Maw, and he made the mistake of trying to drag her to her feet to stop them all from dying. It was touching her that did it. You should never touch a witch.

  ‘If you say a word about it–’ he starts to say.

  ‘I will not,’ Zane says, interrupting him. ‘Because I owe you a debt.’

  Wyck scowls. He knows the value of an owing, but he doesn’t want that from her kind. It seems more a curse than anything else. Zane tilts her head. It reminds him of a bird, the way she does it.

  ‘And because we are kin,’ she says. ‘That is what you said, back there.’

  ‘They were just words,’ Wyck says. ‘And they didn’t mean a damn thing.’

  ‘It is the truth, though,’ she says. ‘That we are kin, in more ways than you think.’

  ‘You’re a witch,’ he says. ‘Save for where we call home, I am nothing like you.’

  ‘Death,’ she says. ‘That is what makes us the same.’

  Wyck snorts a laugh. ‘We all make death. We all know it.’

  Zane smiles, and it kills the laughter in his chest. Her smile is a cold thing, as if she has only ever watched one happen and never tried it herself.

  ‘You are followed by it,’ she says. ‘And by what happened on Cawter.’

  Wyck finds himself frozen there on the steps. Not by her witch’s power, but by her words and the things that come back to him as she speaks them.

  Jungle heat. Sweat on the walls of the transport and everyone inside. Keller, humming.

  ‘Shut up,’ he says.

  ‘You were the only one to walk away, when that transport was torn to pieces,’ she says. ‘Death took a look at you, and it passed you over.’

  ‘Shut. Up.’

  He says the words through his teeth as he remembers what came af
ter. The bloom of light. The noise, that he thought had made him deaf until the ringing came back. Blood in his eyes and his nose and his mouth. The heat of the fire as it burned everyone else but him. Keller and Heyn and Duni and all of the others. He had to write their names in the ash that was made of them because he was alone and lost and the tinderbox and the paper had been with Duni. He never speaks of Cawter, not with Awd, or even Lye. Not with anyone. But now he finds he can’t stop himself, because she won’t shut up and he can’t make her because if he touches her she’ll take even more from him than she already has.

  ‘You talk as though you know of it, but you don’t. You couldn’t.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ she says, with that tilt of her head again.

  Mists and moors, he wants to hit her.

  ‘I wrote my name, back there,’ he snarls. ‘I wrote it in ashes in the list of the dead because I thought that soon I would be too, but when the Sighted came I kept killing them until my gun went dry and my knife went dull.’

  ‘You were afraid,’ Zane says.

  ‘I was angry,’ he says, though there are times when the two are hard to tell apart. ‘I wanted to bleed them for what they had done to us, and I did. They cut me back for my trouble. Badly.’

  The scars are such pale lines now, all those years later. Shoulder, collarbone. Chest. Stomach. That one had been the worst. All of the bloodstains had spread so much they joined up and painted him red.

  ‘But you did not die as you had thought,’ Zane says. ‘Death passed you over again.’

  Lye had been the one to find him. Wyck hadn’t recognised her at first. He’d taken her for Sighted too and tried to cut her before she’d knocked him down.

  Enough, she’d said. That’s enough.

  Then Lye had stuck him with a needle and put him under so he’d stop fighting her. Her lakestone eyes had been the last thing to go when the darkness rolled over.

  ‘I kept trying to tell Lye, but she didn’t listen,’ he says, half to himself.

  ‘Tell her what?’ Zane asks.

  Wyck can see it then, written in ashes under the jungle canopy.

  ‘That I hadn’t scrubbed out my name,’ he says. ‘I left it for death, and now it knows me.’

  Zane nods. ‘That is what I meant,’ she says. ‘When I said that we are more kin than you think.’

  ‘What?’ Wyck asks.

  Zane laughs, and it echoes in the hollow space. She goes to leave, turning into no more than a shadow as she goes up the stairs.

  ‘Death,’ she says. ‘It knows me too.’

  Ely Kolat watches Grey Company’s witch come up and out of the collapsed hab through a set of grubby magnoculars that paint her in shades of green and make hollows of her eyes. Kolat can’t help the face he pulls. He can’t abide witches. He waits, though looking at her is turning his stomach. He knows it’d be worse were he closer. She might be able to hear his thoughts, and he can’t have that.

  Can’t have her spoil his fun. His payback.

  Kolat sits and waits a bit longer for Wyck to follow her out of the darkness. Just like he thought, they were using the place to hide those bodies they were moving. The ones in carapace plate and officer’s colours. That’s bad. At least for Wyck, anyway. Kolat has no quarrel with the witch. Not that he’d have the heart to do anything about it, even if he did. Wyck’s the one who damn near broke his leg. Stole from him. Laughed at him. Wyck is the one who thinks himself free of consequence, but he’ll learn the hard way once word gets out about those bodies.

  Kolat can’t help but grin now either. He slides off the collapsed wall he’s sitting on and stows the magnoculars. Then he limps back towards the tanker’s lot, whistling softly. A song from home.

  One called The Hangman’s Wish.

  When she returns to the Antari encampment and her command tent, Raine makes a request for information from the office of Lord-Commissar Mardan Tula for all deployment and materiel requisition in relation to the eastward arm of the Bale Stars Crusade.

  ‘This will take time,’ Tula says, over the secure hololith link. His image flickers, but his gaze is no less discerning for it. ‘It is a substantial request.’

  Raine nods. She asked for everything, because it is the easiest way to hide that you are looking for something in particular. Dragnets always catch more than just their intended quarry.

  ‘I understand,’ she says. ‘But it is necessary.’

  Tula’s eyes narrow. ‘I doubt you would ask otherwise,’ he says. ‘I will get what you need, and send it with Curtz. The boy is diligent, and trustworthy.’

  There is something in the way Tula says trustworthy that gives Raine pause.

  ‘It is a valuable thing, lord,’ she says, carefully. ‘Trust.’

  ‘And rare,’ he says.

  Tula’s image flickers as thunder rumbles overhead. Raine hears it through the hololith too, a moment later.

  ‘There is a storm coming,’ he says. ‘It will make the next days more difficult. Be watchful in the primary city.’

  At the scholam, Raine spent long hours learning to read others. To find their weaknesses and their fears. To catch a lie when it is being hidden, or a truth, in equal measure.

  ‘Always,’ she says. ‘Emperor go with you, lord.’

  Tula makes the sign of the aquila as the hololith crazes and flickers.

  ‘And with you, Commissar Raine,’ he says.

  And then the connection fails and Tula disappears. Raine sits back in her seat.

  ‘He sounded wary,’ Fel says.

  He was quiet while she spoke with Tula, because protocol dictates he should not have been there at all. Given everything she has come to suspect, Raine finds that particular breach doesn’t bother her all that much.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ she says. ‘And that is troubling in itself.’

  ‘Do you trust him?’ Fel asks.

  If Fel had asked her a week ago, she would have said yes. Now the word won’t come, no matter how badly she wants to say it.

  ‘He will get the records,’ she says. ‘If nothing else, he is a man of his word.’

  ‘Often that is good enough,’ Fel says.

  Raine nods. ‘Until we know what we face, this must stay between us,’ she says.

  ‘I know,’ Fel says.

  ‘It might mean lying to your kin,’ she says. ‘To your Duskhounds.’

  He nods. She sees the way he crosses his hand over one of the tattoos on the inside of his left arm. The shadowy shape of the duskhound made in ink there. The mark his kin all bear too.

  ‘I won’t speak of it, not to them or anyone. You have my word.’

  She knows what these choices mean for him. How hard they are to make. Andren Fel is Antari, his identity rooted in the place he was born and made. She is not. Not Antari. Not a soldier. By rights, he should not choose her at all.

  ‘So, what now?’ Fel asks her.

  She looks at him. He is mud-spattered and soaked with rain. The sleeves of his fatigues are rolled back to the elbow, so Raine can see blood soaking through the bandage from the cut he took in the forges.

  ‘Let me look at that,’ she says.

  Fel shrugs. ‘It’s not so bad,’ he says.

  ‘It wasn’t a question.’

  Fel smiles at that, despite everything. That easy smile of his was strange to her at first. Over time, though, she has come to find it a comfort. Raine fetches her medical kit and moves to sit on the edge of the folding table, close enough to look at the damage properly. She cleans her hands with counterseptic, then takes hold of his arm and unwinds the old bandage. The cut is bleeding badly. Too badly just to bind it.

  ‘That story you spoke of earlier,’ Raine says. ‘I don’t think I know it.’

  ‘The King of Winter?’ Fel says. ‘I must have told you that one.’

  Raine
shakes her head. She takes a clean wad of gauze and holds it in place on his arm with enough pressure to stop the bleeding. She can see where he’s taken a dozen other cuts on that arm. Old scars under and over the tattoos he has of scripture and of the wicked creatures from his stories.

  ‘I would remember it if you had,’ she says, with a smile.

  He laughs. That was another thing that surprised her to start with, until she realised that he doesn’t share that laugh with everyone.

  Just with those he trusts.

  ‘True enough,’ he says. ‘The story of the King of Winter is one of Morrow too.’

  Raine nods. ‘The first and most revered of Antar’s saints,’ she says, as she checks how badly the cut is still bleeding. Too badly to stitch, yet. ‘That name, I do know.’

  She knows the look of Morrow, too, because she is the subject of one of Fel’s tattoos. Morrow looks strong, the way she has been inked into his skin, with fierce dark eyes and her pointed fingers held steepled, in that Antari gesture for oaths.

  ‘The story is old,’ Fel says. His voice has softened the way it does when he tells stories. ‘Even for Antar. It goes that when the world was first made, the winters were fierce and long, and it was a king who brought them. One with claws and wings, but that wore the face of a man. Because the Emperor, wisest of all, knew that the forests would die if winter did not pass, he made Morrow to balance winter’s king. She was a fierce creature, with thorns woven into her hair and a cloak of leaves.’

  ‘That is why you call her Our Lady of Thorns,’ Raine says.

  Fel nods.

  Raine takes away that wad of gauze now, and sets to cleaning the blood away. Fel doesn’t flinch, though she knows it must hurt. That is how he is in all things. Unflinching.

  ‘When the time came for winter to pass,’ Fel says. ‘Morrow would go to fight the king in the heartwood of Antar’s oldest forest. As they fought, the sky would grow fierce with fire and thunder, but after three days, Morrow would always emerge triumphant and the King of Winter would retreat to the mountains, where he kept his castle and where winter never passed.’

  Raine goes back in her medical tin and takes out her suture kit. She sets about stitching that cut closed while he talks.