CHAPTER ELEVEN
C HAPTER E LEVEN
The fourth night comes without seeing the end of the Chasm and the people slump to the ground, forfeiting the pretence of conversation. Dawsyn sees their faces and feels their defeat, and the guilt in her gut screws deeper. They’re dying, she worries. And they don’t yet know it’s by my hand.
Yennes and Dawsyn walk amongst them for a time, as they’ve done each night before, but they find very few they can help. More than half are now plagued by whatever cruel affliction the Chasm has meted out. They splutter in their sleep as she passes, the force of their coughing still not enough to rouse them. They have not paused to catch their breath all day.
“Miss Sabar?” says a voice in the dark.
Dawsyn turns to her left, holding her torch out to reveal a woman sitting cross-legged on the black earth, an infant in her lap. The woman has bundled the baby in layer after layer, and even so, the child’s cheeks are reddened by the chill.
The mother’s own cheeks are leaked of colour. Her eyes are haunted, forehead marred by the dust that has collected in her frown lines. Her cracked lips part, and she coughs soundly.
“My son,” she finally says when the coughing abates. “I have no more milk for him.” She touches her chest as she says it, her eyes glistening. “There is nothing left.”
Nothing left.
Nothing left.
“There is always something,” Dawsyn says to herself, to the woman, to the voices that hound her.
The baby stirs in the woman’s arms but doesn’t open his eyes. The small whining he utters sounds listless to Dawsyn. It chills her. “Has he taken ill?” she asks, praying as she says it.
“Not yet, but he needs milk.” The woman’s voice shakes as she says it, her eyes too dry to release tears. “He needs me.” And then she coughs again, and something wet and dark loosens from her chest, spat out onto the rock-strewn earth.
Dawsyn feels how stretched and thin her magic is, how huge the resistance, but it matters very little. What is her magic for, if not this?
She looks down at the sweet face of the baby in his mother’s arms, disturbingly still in sleep, breaths rapid and uneven, and she turns to the mother.
Dawsyn places both hands to the woman’s chest, above her heart, and with every ounce of her might, she coaxes whatever vestiges of her power remain, intending to ring it dry if she must.
“Relencia,” she says clearly, bidding that the woman be replenished. “Ishveet,” she says next, repairing something unknown and unseen, knowing full well that it will not do. It won’t be enough.
But the woman’s cheeks have pinkened when Dawsyn opens her eyes and looks up. She breathes a deep sigh of relief, her shoulders slumping.
“Drink as much water as you can,” Dawsyn tells her, knowing the risk it may hold. “Feed your son.”
Dawsyn passes the woman a waterskin, then lingers while the mother latches her baby, her own weeping now replacing the sound of her son’s. “Thank you,” she tells Dawsyn, shaking her head in disbelief. “A walking saint.”
“If only I was,” she says ruefully, but offers the woman no more.
Saints martyr themselves, lead their people to safety. What will this woman call her, should Dawsyn lead them to their demise instead?
Spent, she can no longer expend her magic to relieve the sick or heal even the smallest wounds. She is a stranger to this craft. An amateur. These people do not need a saint, they need a true healer, someone of far more power than what Dawsyn is capable of. Someone like Baltisse.
How it would comfort her, to be beside the mage once more. Her teacher. Her friend.
There was too much to learn and she is not half the mage that Baltisse was. It suddenly seems unbearably cruel of fate to have taken someone so strong and leave Dawsyn as consolation. A sorry substitution.
Dawsyn finds Ryon in the dark. They always sleep ahead of the group, finding spaces tucked away against the wall. He waits for her there, his eyelids falling as soon as she descends into his arms.
Dawsyn watches his chest rise and fall for a long time before she submits to the drag of her heavy eyes. He coughs every so often, just small expulsions that do not rouse him, and yet it spills a pool of dread into Dawsyn’s belly. She puts her palm to his chest.
“Ishveet,” she whispers, and feels the magic intertwine in her palm, escaping through her fingertips and into Ryon’s chest.
His breathing eases, becoming quiet and even, though Dawsyn knows it will not hold. It never does.
She drifts into unconsciousness, her mind full of a great unravelling. She can no longer picture the Chasm’s end and all it may behold. It occurs to her, not for the first time, that it might be more painless to simply lie here and let the Chasm claim…
Jarring sounds rouse her. Voices grow louder and more fervent. Then suddenly, the air explodes with a chorus of screaming, shouting.
Ryon is torn from his sleep at the same time as Dawsyn, though her own reactions seem slower, more sluggish. As he hurls himself into the middle of the Chasm, she hurries to follow behind, trying to pull her ax in front of her. She is not even aware of the direction of the noise, only that it tears through them all, glancing off the walls.
She thinks – no more. Please, no more.
They run back through the rousing mass of humans, stumbling over rocks, retracing their steps from the day before. They splash through the shallow stream to better avoid colliding with bodies and keep running down its length. Ahead of them is a brilliant glowing, though Dawsyn cannot think of its source.
They run until they are clear of the Ledge people, following the cracks and bursts of light and the screams accompany it.
Ryon stops, and Dawsyn follows suit. Before them is a raging fire.
There have been no campfires along their venture; the torches and oil have been saved for travel. There is nothing to burn here at the bottom, so it bewilders Dawsyn at first, to see tall, licking flames, and the stricken faces of a dozen people basked in its glow, staring into its centre in horror.
“Mother help him,” Ryon mutters, aghast, hastening forward.
Him? Dawsyn thinks, peering at the scene, blinking wildly until it comes into clearer focus.
A man lies ablaze on the ground. A blanket, thrown over him in an apparent attempt to smother the flames, is quickly disintegrating. Some are trying to beat the flames with their coats, scooping armfuls of dirt onto the blaze to no avail. Two men run toward the fire to throw buckets of water onto the poor soul within, but it only sizzles when it meets the flames.
“WES!” Nevrak is screaming, his hands reaching into the flames only to be hauled back by the others. He beats his hands into the earth by his sides, his breaths ragged, full of anguish. “MY SON!” he bellows. “Help him!”
But Dawsyn knows no spells to extinguish flame. She only knows of the way fire consumes. The way it destroys. It is too late to save Wes. He is nothing but blackening flesh. The smell of meat fills the Chasm, assaulting them all.
Dawsyn goes to Nevrak, who wails incessantly, staring into the pyre as though he might lay himself atop this last child. She finds nothing to say. What words could mend this?
“Gone,” Nevrak whimpers. A stream of tears running into his dirtied beard. “They’re all gone! ”
And Dawsyn sees again his girls, their bodies wrapped and waiting in the snow. She knows what he feels now is the terrible, yawning understanding of utter aloneness. She lays a hand upon Nevrak’s quaking shoulder.
The fire crackles and spits as it devours, an insatiable beast.
“Who did this?” Ryon demands, the timbre of his voice not to be ignored.
At first there is no answer. Just the appalled silence of the bystanders, watching the flames lash at Wes’s flesh.
And then comes the young voice of someone to Dawsyn’s left. Someone Dawsyn hadn’t noticed. “He… he did it to himself,” the girl says. “I saw him. He – he doused himself in oil.”
“Abertha?” Dawsyn asks.
The girl’s auburn curls quiver as their eyes meet – hers wide, fearful, and full of the firelight that consumes Wes. The boy who, not so many hours before, had been her assailant.
“Abertha?” Nevrak pants, peering up at the girl suddenly, his voice quieter. “Abertha.” His jaw tightens. His eyes vacillate between his son and the girl.
Dawsyn can practically see the conclusion being drawn in the man’s mind. She can hear the cogs of his thoughts turning in one direction.
“Nevrak,” Dawsyn warns, pulling her ax handle against the man’s throat. “Wait–”
Nevrak goes to lunge for Abertha, slowed only by the pull of the ax handle against his windpipe. Dawsyn wraps her arms around the man, wrestling him back onto the ground.
The breath is pushed from her lungs as he scrambles back on top of her.
“BITCH!” Nevrak shouts, despite the pressure against his throat. “SHE KILLED MY SON! SHE KILLED MY–” the sentence is swallowed by the strangled sounds of his cries.
“Calm yourself, man!” Ryon is shouting somewhere above. Dawsyn can barely see around Nevrak’s body atop hers. “The girl did not do this.”
“My son!” Nevrak wails. “He… he…”
“He is gone,” Ryon finishes for him. “He’s gone.”
“We were going to get out of here,” Nevrak rasps, the fight finally beginning to leave his body. Dawsyn knows he will be unconscious in moments.
“The girl didn’t do this,” Ryon tells him again, but Dawsyn’s grip against Nevrak’s throat has stayed too long, and the man’s body slumps.
Dawsyn groans as she releases her hold, the weight of the man nearing unbearable. Ryon takes Nevrak’s shoulders and lifts him off her at once and deposits him on the ground, then he looks down at her anxiously, turning her chin in either direction with his large hand to check her over. He mutters something fierce in the old language.
“He’ll come to in a few moments,” Dawsyn pants, looking for Abertha and finding her. “Go. Now.”
Abertha scrambles to her feet, stumbling away into the dark, face stricken.
Ryon holds out his hand, then heaves Dawsyn to her feet. His eyes run over the length of her. “Do you believe what she said?”
Dawsyn doesn’t know. She is assailed by the smell of burning flesh.
Nevrak’s son slowly disintegrates in the unnaturally vehement flames, and she cannot imagine anyone choosing this as their end.
But then she hears again that silken voice that wheedles and worms its way into her mind.
Take up the reigns and belie your fate.
Climb the walls of Mother’s gate.
Rid the ache.
Rid the ache.