38. THIRTY-EIGHT #2
The conversation with Mastico the week prior brought a new question to mind, though: why had the Survivor beckoned him there all those years before? Because he had Ruxian blood? What use could Calver possibly be to it as a conduit? He was only a passive gene carrier.
The desert suddenly seemed to shrink until it pressed in on Calver’s chest.
Moments of premonition.
The constant twisting in his gut that something was going to go badly wrong.
The void space.
Not passive. He’d been the one with powers all along.
The Survivor didn’t stop him from feeling.
It didn’t make him faster or deadlier. It was surfacing the abilities Calver had always had.
He had a second sight. A broken one. One that only predicted destruction.
He’d only ever been able to access it from the void state Calisto had taught him.
The state the Survivor pushed him into.
Calver might have spiraled, had he been alone.
Had Dex’s horse not come to a stop, just then, ahead of him.
He shook himself free from his mental sludge.
The rust-colored butte Dex had pointed out now towered beside them.
They dismounted soundlessly and watered the horses, watching the sun steadily climb into the sky, painting the grasses with gold.
Unless Calver’s measurements were wildly off-target, the town of Thaligan was no more than a night’s ride away.
His stomach still churned.
Void.
“Have you noticed the clouds?” Dex asked, finishing what was left of his canteen.
Since the tail end of day prior, a subtle haze had hovered on the western horizon. It was more noticeable now in the glow of the morning. Haze like this meant fire. And fire meant nothing good. Calver lowered his chin.
“What do you suppose that is?”
Calver shrugged. We might not sleep again, he didn’t say.
He took the first watch, using the opportunity to tamper with two Aetech lamps he’d tasked Dex to pack.
Muscle memory moved him, adjusting Aetech’s stratum to the one he felt compatible with.
He remembered the long months on the Rollard Isles, where he’d processed what must have been thousands of ruxechorin cores.
Confined in a dark warehouse, fingers bloodied, he’d worked core after core until someone forced him to eat or sleep. With the lamps keeping him busy, the Survivor had fallen to a steady hum—like a film over his mind, instead of the crushing weight it always had been. It had almost been bearable.
How had he forgotten?
Fankalo had been so proud of him. He’d been glad to have something to do with his hands. He’d thought he was getting better. Those had seemed like good days.
The higher the sun grew, the deeper the smog became. Calver stared at it, fighting sleep. It shifted and changed like a lucid dream. He kept seeing Fankalo on the beach in Pazir, smoke rising all around, screaming his name. He squeezed his eyes shut.
Some time later, something nudged his side. His eyes snapped open and he grabbed it—Dex’s boot.
Calver released him and shook his head.
Dex’s forehead furrowed. “I’m just ready to not sit on a horse.”
They crested a grassy hillside at highmoon and Dex whooped in triumph.
When the geometric shapes of Thaligan’s squat buildings grew clear against the midnight blue of the coastline, Calver released a sigh of relief.
They were not the source of the smoke. He’d nearly expected to find a shell of a town—smoldering buildings, a city square piled high with its dead.
This was just a normal town. With not-normal smoke clouding the sky.
The sun rose and they made their way down into Thaligan.
Perhaps a hundred residences, at most, clustered together in orderly rows.
Early morning goers gave them overlong stares as they clopped through the earthen streets.
He and Dex were smattered with the desert: dust and sweat, dirtied hands and cracked lips.
They were likely the only outsiders to have come through the Jiradesh—not the port—in months.
They made their way to the dock, a single broad stretch of planking with two dozen boats, where Dex bartered the horses to an enthusiastic dockhand in exchange for a skiff and renewed supplies.
“There’s a good wind to get you north. Ten knots,” he assured them.
Calver shifted. They would make it to Steila in three days.
That left them with another two days between theirs and the Red Wing’s arrival.
They would need to time things carefully.
Take the tower too soon and the Tera’thian forces would realize what they’d done and find a way to rectify it at best, capture and enslave them at worst. They would need to make their advance the night before the Red Wing’s arrival.
He would need to mask himself before they advanced so that Cul’Mon didn’t see him coming. How quickly would the boy notice he was no longer him? How well would he control the Survivor?
Killari swooped from the sky, interrupting his melancholy to perch on a dock post beside them.
She leaned toward him, proudly displaying what might have been the remains of a frog in her beak.
Dex mumbled something along the lines of “Wish I had a bird” as Calver stroked her.
She gulped the remainder of the carcass and nestled her wings into his touch.
He pulled the paper from the canister with his spare hand. Relief coursed through him when he saw it was a new note. Something about the smoke had made him expect the worst.
He stared at the short inscription in disbelief.
Fankalo had invited him to see her.
It was everything he’d wished for. Two years of yearning… Could a person want something with body, brain, and blood and still be entirely at enmity with it?
Dex sidled over to him. “Everything alright?’
Yes.
No.
When had anything ever been alright? Never more than right now. Right now, when he had a plan, and the crazy belief that things were going to go his way. And Raimee.
But he’d been invited home. Should a man pray in thanks for getting everything he wanted in life right when he’d decided he wanted something else?
That sounded stupid.
“You’re already in your head most of the time. I’m not here to chat.”
Dex shrugged like he’d asked him to unsaddle the horses. “If you say so.”
Everything was Chaos.
Calver paced the dock. He paced it again. He kept moving until both Dex and the dockhand looked at him like he might wear a hole in it. He stopped, crouched, and began to pen a response on the back of Fankalo’s paper, using the charcoal from their supply sacks.
‘I will not watch Thyatira aid the Tera’thians a second time. We know Cul’Mon’s plan. We know where he’ll be, and what he wants. So why wait for the coronation when we have an opportunity to stop Tera’thu’s advance now?
‘The Red Wing will arrive in Steila on the first day of spring. Meet me in Steila, not Casowhatan. We can take him down. We can use their trap against them. If you sail your fleet in from the south, we pin them against the Nelfinden forces.
‘Are you still with me?’
Calver rolled the paper, stuck it in Killari’s canister, and uncorked the vial of lemon oil.
Killari gave an offended shuffle at the promptness of his response, but took off nonetheless.
He watched her fly over the ocean for the first time in nearly two years, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt a burgeoning brightness inside himself.
With Fankalo’s aid, with Dex, with Raimee, this might actually work.
This might actually work.
NIKLAUS
The Jiradesh was no more remarkable from horseback than it was on foot.
Not even the hope of the ocean shimmered on the horizon.
Windswept plains stretched in every direction, broken by occasional buttes or ravines.
The air pulsated with a torrid heat that grew sultrier the closer they came to spring.
Niklaus made do with keeping his mouth shut for the full day he rode beside Corporal Limtush toward the coastline.
The aridity stole moisture from his tongue each time he tried to speak.
He couldn’t help but think about how nice it would be to have a companion that could signal.
Maybe pass a game as they traversed the endless desert.
Anything to distract him from the continual reminder that he was in no way suited to horseback.
With the pace they kept, Niklaus was sure he’d lost all ability to father children.
His earlier attempts at conversation had not been well received.
“How is the pharmaceutical business?” had elicited a grunt.
“How is your sister?” was rewarded by another grunt.
And Niklaus’s favorite: “What is the first thing you’ll do when you get back to Seraphinden? ” fetched an insufferable sigh.
Fine and well. He’d never cared for Limtush, and his father certainly hadn’t. His service to Limtush had been born of obligation—an obligation he’d struggled to remove himself from for years. But as the day stretched, the silence seemed more and more like an assault. The man was hiding something.
Was it possible that he was also frustrated? Did he know something? Niklaus rode his horse up beside the corporal’s, not bothering to call to him from behind as before.
“Speculate with me, Corporal Limtush. General Prime Thyatira has sent us out on a rescue mission. But I need you to think rationally on what’s really happening here. He says this Curtaim is a Tera’thian-allied mercenary. How would he source that evidence?”
“We’ve had a tag on him for a long time.”
“How long? Since before the grey period? When he was a small child?”