21. TWENTY-ONE #2
Another nod.
Thinking quickly, Calver knew there was only one option that would leave him with the least regrets.
Sharing with Niklaus what had happened in Kaidech had felt like removing a heavy pack he’d worn for half of his life.
When Calver had first heard allegations that Kaidech had fallen to Strikapa—not a scourge—he’d wondered if he’d imagined everything.
But he had two souvenirs as firm reminders that it had happened.
The first was the stump of a tongue, clumped uselessly at the base of his mouth.
The second was the Ratka, carved by Cul’Mon into his chest. A third affirmation had come later, when he was rescued by Fankalo.
But Niklaus… Niklaus had been the first who commiserated.
It seemed Calver wasn’t going to have any more time to investigate the plates.
“But… Meyernes?”
Dex didn’t make any moves. “Will he be alright?”
If there was one thing Calver understood, it was having a monster that needed to be overcome. He would have given anything for someone to exorcise him of the Survivor.
Dex stared in contemplative silence at the shelf where the moss tin hid. “How long have you known?” he finally asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why did you keep teaching me?”
Calver crossed his arms. Then uncrossed them.
His signals were met with a hard swallow.
NIKLAUS
Dex had disappeared. Niklaus was sure that something had gone terribly wrong.
He searched the encampment in sweeping circles.
By the time he made it to the merchants’ quarter, he was sweating stones from moss descent.
Panic clenched his gut. He’d already had a full tab today.
He well understood moss hunger: once acclimated to more, it would only get worse.
And half a ten-day remained until the next rally.
He wasn’t even sure that his reserves would get him to that, at this rate.
But nearly two months of Red Wing stipend might be enough to patch him through.
Shaking legs drove him to the same out-of-the-way tent with the same sweat-slicked dealer.
A wordless exchange was made: he lost his stipend and gained three full tabs.
They remained clenched in his fist. It was the safest place for them until he returned to the wagon, presuming they didn’t dissolve from perspiration alone.
Three tabs. Combined with his reserves, that would last him to the rally without rationing. No one would know how much the dependence had worsened.
He swept the merchants’ quarter in search of the boy without success. He turned back toward the southern rim. He would have to tell the mute. Something about this absence was wrong. Dex might very well have turned against them. He slipped a third of a tab—just enough to steady him.
“Meyernes.”
The voice over his shoulder was cold, demanding, and familiar: the man who had confronted Calver after the first rally.
Chevek Balfida, the paper had read. Only then did it occur to Niklaus how strange it was that a groundling of Balfida’s age had written anything at all. Niklaus froze mid-step and pivoted.
The young recruit leaned against a water station some five meters away. He tilted his head at Niklaus in greeting. “I need to speak with you.”
“Speak to me.”
Niklaus backpedaled until they were face to face. Standing beside a stranger, he became acutely aware of how quickly his heart pounded. Of how cold he felt. Of the dryness of his mouth—and the stench of his breath. It would still take a few minutes for the moss to kick in.
Chevek lowered his voice. “It’s about the mute.”
“The mute?” It would seem descent had reduced him to a parrot.
“Dallard Friyal.”
Niklaus shifted. “Friyal, eah?” Fates, it hadn’t even been intentional that time. He glanced around. They were in a quiet section of the encampment, between the merchant quarter and the southern rim. A place for coming and going. They were well alone.
“Aye.” Balfida seemed equally uncertain about the encounter. Their eyes lingered on each other: his shrewd and calculating, Niklaus’s insipid and bloodshot, he was sure. “And my brother, too.”
Covern Balfida. Leader of Seraphinden’s Groundling movement. The man Latouda had used the front and back of Niklaus for just to cozy up to. Niklaus nodded.
“For some time now, my brother has been tracking the Shadewalker’s movements.
He’s a menace to the Groundling movement.
Pulling men away from our cause. They abandon Nelfindar under a pretty lie of deliverance.
” Niklaus didn’t respond. It was all he could do to remain vertical.
“You know why Dallard is on restrictions here?”
Niklaus might have told Chevek to get lost, but the question had tugged at him since the beginning. If Thyatira knew the mute was here—and who he was—why just put him on restrictions? Why let him live at all? He shook his head.
“He murdered the key Shadewalker informant I’d been working on extracting information from for months. An ex-Blue Wing officer. Deshpian Thacklore.”
Learning that was worth more than a gilded blade.
Thacklore may have been a title short of a god during the Grey Period, but he had never been famous for his quality of character.
“I had wine with Thacklore once. Said he didn’t like dogs, and that sort of put muddy boots on my table, if you know what I mean. ”
Chevek frowned like he didn’t. “Meyernes. You understand what I’m getting at?”
“No, frankly I don’t.” He wiped sweat from his forehead.
“Are you a journalist or aren’t you?”
A journalist: so simple a word for a man who had put every ounce of himself into seeking truth. What he was was no longer an act of reason: it was art. “I am a poet.”
Chevek’s eyes rolled toward the heavens. “Fates, they weren’t lying. You really are a fucking lunatic.”
“I’d agree no man in his right mind ever sat down to write poetry. Only a lunatic would commit such wrongs to paper instead of simply letting them be.” Ah. His edge had returned. It had only needed a little polish.
“Meyernes,” the young man said a third time. “Friyal is hunting the Shadewalker. And I guarantee that in Chira’na, he learned what I’ve been trying to dig up. I need you to connect us and translate.”
Niklaus might have anticipated a Jiradeshi rain before doubting that the mute was a bounty hunter.
Chevek must have mistaken his pause for unwillingness. “If you ever cared an iota for Latouda”—and there it was, the name that turned his composure to mud—not that it had been particularly solid to begin with—“for anything she was doing, help me recruit him to our cause.”
Latouda’s cause.
Niklaus’s thoughts sharpened, his ailments dulled. Whether it was moss or epiphany, he couldn’t be sure. Latouda’s cause, which he was quickly discovering was Thyatira’s cause—or the less perverted version of it. His blood heated, thinking of the veil that had been pulled over his eyes.
It was a cheap trick, using her to make use of him—and for something he was sure would not support the best interests of his only ally.
Supporting the Groundling movement under Thyatira equated to supporting violent revolution.
And while Niklaus stood by the former, he dared dream it could be achieved without the latter.
Whatever the mute was, he was not one of Thyatira’s sympathizers.
He could say something clever. He could say something that would irritate Chevek so much it would make him want to shed his shratten skin.
But in this moment, no words seemed justified.
Not even a forced smile found its way to Niklaus’s lips.
He looked Chevek Balfida in the eye, turned from the water station, and walked into the soft call of the night sands.
I’m changing, he thought dazedly. Evolving in a way so subtle, it was hard to articulate.
He’d always thought words were the most valuable thing a man could have; that proverbial dictation would always cut deeper than proverbial dowaga.
There were words so sharp they could wound.
Words could be poison. Words could be a cure.
So how was it that a man without words had more sway over him than any before? If words were a weapon, then perhaps true lethality came from their lack. A man without a weapon was desperate. And if there was one thing only to be learned from this desert, it was that desperate was deadly.
Niklaus made the trek back to the mess storage wagon and pondered the things men spoke of.
All this time, he’d had his ears pricked for talk of Roskaad Thyatira.
He’d hardly focused on the talk of the Shadewalker.
But talk there had been. Some were keen to speak of him, the way men were keen to speak of aethersprites, phantoms, and djinn.
The Shadewalker had been leaving his mark for two decades, described as a man who took in the lost, the weary, the desperate.
And, in the same sentence, he was described as a man with a bloodlust that could not be tamed.
Others shushed those who breathed the Shadewalker’s name altogether.
Niklaus quickened his pace, thinking more clearly now than he’d been able to all day.
The similarities between the Shadewalker and Thyatira suddenly seemed too many to dismiss.
Though, given the pressure, a man might find the same number of similarities between water and flame.
Still, considering the repercussions from his speculation that Thyatira may not be Nelfinden, and the mute’s credence that Thyatira had been a Tera’thian informant…