The Past The Choice #3
Kai felt a lump rise in his throat and bit his lip to control the abrupt rush of emotion. It struck him that he had somehow not expected anyone to care about him like this again, that it was something he had accepted as lost the day he had seen the smoke rising from the burning Saredi tents.
Going into a negotiation with a powerful and deceptive enemy would not be helped by tears in his eyes. Much as it might confuse the dustwitches. His voice was still rough as he said, “I’ll be careful,” and started forward.
The dustwitch didn’t move as he crossed the field toward her. Kai stopped about five paces away, and said, “Are you the Doyen?”
“I am her … officer, called Nightjar.” She used the Arike word for officer, perhaps because she didn’t know the Imperial word.
At least it was confirmation that they had been right about the dustwitches embracing a hierarchy.
She wore Arike women’s dress, pants and a long shirt in faded blue-gray, under a gray veil that went nearly to her knees.
It was an ostentatious size, for a veil that was so transparent that Kai could see her features, her lighter skin and long straight nose.
Was the Doyen’s veil even longer? It was such a funny image that he almost laughed.
Something in his expression must have given that away, because her voice hardened as she asked, “What are you called, demon?”
“Kaiisteron, Prince of the Fourth House of the underearth.” Kai kept his voice even, though in the western grasslands—and the Arik, for that matter—that wasn’t exactly a polite way to ask for someone’s name.
He already had the feeling that this wasn’t going to go the way Bashasa hoped. “Why did you attack us?”
Nightjar’s smile was a faint movement of her lips, barely visible past the veil. “And who is your master?”
Kai quelled his first and second impulse, and said only, “Why do you think I’ll answer your questions if you won’t answer mine?” Then he felt the rise of power under his feet.
Kai had taken the precaution of stabbing himself before he had left the encampment.
He had done it low in his right side where it wouldn’t interfere with his ability to walk.
The wound had already closed but he was getting better at holding the power it gave him in reserve, like the lives of the expositors he ate.
He started to reach for one of the intentions on his coat, but nothing happened.
His arms had gone rigid, his muscles frozen.
Whatever was coming out of the ground at him, there was nothing in it to grasp, nothing to use the pain on.
It wasn’t a cantrip or an intention, there was no design to pick apart, no shape to pluck whole out of his body, if he could have managed to move a hand to do it.
He had a moment of wry despair; Tahren would get to see Ziede rip out someone’s liver after all.
A tendril coiled around his wrist. He thought it must be trying to wrap around him, shatter his bones.
He peered down at it, but could still see nothing like the mark that gave away the presence of an active design.
It felt like water on the bare skin of his wrist, a little dank and cool and gritty from passing over the ground.
He squinted hard and thought he saw a shadow, hard to make out in the twilight.
A tangible darkness, curling up around his legs, tangled around his other arm.
The scent was rich loam and decay and death and the potentiality of life about to sprout in the spring.
Ziede had said the dustwitches’ power was different, it came from the earth, not like the animate spirits that other Witches could interact with, but from the earth itself, from rockfalls …
From decay? What was dust but dirt, and every living thing that had died in it, ground to a fine powder?
Dust was transformation. And demons were born of transformation.
Kai took a little of his stored pain and imagined pulling at the cloud of darkness like it was a shroud.
A tug of resistance, and it came free of the ground, spread and resolved into a fine mist of dust. Like the cloud Hawkmoth had surrounded him with last night.
It explained why the dustwitches hadn’t been able to clog his throat and lungs, the way they had the mortals. Stealing life was just drawing energy out of one place and putting it somewhere else until it was used and transformed again. Dust was the final form of that process.
Kai took a breath, inhaled swirling dust, and blew it out again. His hands pricked and his muscles warmed and he could move. He lifted his hands and the dust cloud lifted. He guided it up into a spreading canopy, thinner and more diffuse. The mild evening breeze caught it and scattered it away.
He looked back to Nightjar. The light was failing slowly but he could still see her expression. It was dismayed. Her lips curled in frustration and she said, “How did you do that?”
Kai laughed aloud this time. “I’m beginning to think you don’t know what a demon is.
” The trick now was to continue to seem confident.
Nightjar should have brought a few companions with her and tried cantrips; the one he had been hit with in the dark last night would have killed this body and left Kai drifting in the ether with nowhere to go, if he hadn’t stopped it.
A dozen at once would work too quickly for him to pluck out.
But maybe they didn’t realize that. If the dustwitch who had cast that cantrip had survived, all she would know was that it hadn’t worked, that he had turned it back on her. If she hadn’t survived, all the others would know was that one of their number cast a cantrip on him and died.
He and Ziede had to make time for more witchcraft lessons; putting it off in favor of working on intentions was only exposing him to more situations like this.
Nightjar’s expression hardened into an opaque mask. “Perhaps we don’t.” She stepped back and started to turn away.
She was leaving? Kai was incredulous. And furious. “Take one more step and I will eat your life and send your body back to your sisters as a handful of your own dust.”
She stopped, her back a rigid line of tension. That threat hit home.
Kai said, “You came to this meeting thinking to take me prisoner? What, you’ve seen the expositors and their enslaved demons and thought what a good idea it was?
” Belatedly, the memory of Hawkmoth’s reluctance to give her name hit him, and he didn’t know whether to laugh or set something on fire.
“You thought that would work because I told you my name.”
She turned to face him, her posture now stiff with offence. “They say you were a demon in the Hierarchs’ lair and you took the power of an expositor to escape.”
“We didn’t escape,” Kai told her, his voice sharpening almost against his will.
He didn’t want her to know the barb had hit flesh.
We left the Summer Halls a ruin where the bodies of legionaries and Hierarch nobles rot in flood water, Bashasa had said at the Kagala.
It was the truth, and it was the source of Bashasa’s power, the foundation that everything they had done since was built on.
“We destroyed them. And if you’ve heard that version of the story, you’ve been talking to legionaries and servant-nobles. ”
Her voice was cold. “We do not consort with Hierarch kind.”
“Neither do we. We kill them. We’re going to kill them all and drive them into the southern ocean.” This was pointless and he was impatient to get it over with. Clearly she hadn’t really come out here to negotiate. “Do you want an alliance or not?”
He expected a flat no, but that question seemed to annoy Nightjar more than anything else, like it was a ridiculous thing to ask for. “Why do you want an alliance with us?”
“So we can kill the Hierarchs and expositors faster.” How could she even ask that question?
What else was there right now? Did the dustwitches mean to hide out here in the grass and dirt forever, until the legionaries stumbled on them and slaughtered them all?
“Why did you attack us? Why do you attack mortals?” Witches stealing from people was almost as unbelievable as Witches killing unprovoked, but Lahshar’s drovers had been right about that caravan.
“Did you think you were going to steal from us?”
As if it was a child’s question, she said, “It is how we survive.”
Kai reined in his temper with effort. He didn’t want to disappoint Bashasa, to go back and say he had been too angry to talk to her.
Because Bashasa was right, there was something very odd here.
At least he had Nightjar talking, and apparently convinced his questions were ridiculous, so there was no reason to stop asking them.
“What did you want with Amabel? The Witch you tried to capture? And the three mortal vanguarders?”
Something changed in her expression; Kai had struck some nerve. Had they been after Amabel all along? The dustwitches couldn’t know them; Amabel’s family had never been this far northeast. They didn’t even speak Arike.
Nightjar had said that stealing was how they survived, but she hadn’t said what it was exactly that they were stealing.
The dustwitches had killed the other vanguarders that Amabel had tried to save, but then took three alive.
And someone had removed the deadly cantrip from Amabel after it had rendered them too weak to fight.
The dustwitches had seen that Amabel valued the lives of the vanguarders, so they took hostages.
Three hostages, so they could kill at least one or two if Amabel resisted, Kai thought.
The dustwitches might have originally crept up to the camp to steal food or supplies, not caring how many people they hurt in the process. But they had encountered Amabel and decided to steal them, instead.
“We won’t attack again,” Nightjar was saying. “You need not fear us.”
She was trying to prod him into anger, but Kai was too interested in unraveling this puzzle now. “You never answered my question about an alliance.”
“We have no need for an alliance. We are strong, we—”
Kai didn’t want to listen to a justification. “Strong, like carrion birds and lizards. Feeding off helpless people.”
This time there was real heat in her voice. “And why do you care what happens to us?”
“Because you could be so much more.” The words came out almost without his volition. Kai wasn’t even sure he believed it or wanted to believe it, but it was Bashasa’s answer.
Nightjar huffed a breath that sounded like contempt, or despair. She turned sharply and walked away.
Kai allowed her to go this time. He stood there for a little, just enough to make sure it wasn’t a trap, that no cantrip would come at his back. Then he returned to Ziede and Tahren.
He would bet his life that that trick with the dust hadn’t been meant to kill him.
It had been meant to catch him, like they had caught Amabel.
How they meant to ensure Kai’s good behavior, he had no idea.
But then they had thought that knowing how Kai’s name was spoken on the mortal plane gave them some power over the essence of a being born of the underearth.
Even if names had some effect on Witches or mortals, which he doubted, it was ridiculous to expect it to have any effect on him.
Kai thought about the destroyed caravan that Lahshar’s drovers had seen, the rumors of more. Amabel’s family had come west from the borderlands, fleeing the Hierarchs. They wouldn’t have been the only ones to escape.
It was foolish to think that Amabel was the first Witch the dustwitches had tried to capture.
“Are you all right?” Ziede asked as soon as he reached them. She was frowning in concern and some frustration. Tahren’s level gaze was on Nightjar’s retreating back.
“I’m fine,” Kai said absently, still making plans.
They couldn’t use the wind-devils; the dustwitches had taken control of them once already.
Ziede was alert to that possibility now, but it still meant that the dustwitches must be able to tell when the wind-devils were near.
“Can you make a chimera to hide us, and maybe some of the vanguarders? Something the dustwitches can’t see through? We need to find their camp.”
“Maybe, probably.” Ziede’s frown deepened. “Why do we care about their camp?”
“Because I think they have more prisoners.”