Xivan stalked out of the Black Dolphin, fury coursing through every part of her. She ignored the startled or terrified looks of restaurant patrons, most of whom were reacting more to the undead crew she’d brought with her than herself.
She’d been so close! The idiots had marched right into the meeting, completely unprepared, with no idea what they were stepping in. Sheloran had been right there. Right there!
But so had Talea. Xivan had no idea how the woman had managed that particular miracle. Talea should have been back in Quur. How the hell had she ended up in the middle of the ocean?
“So, um, you don’t need me anymore, yes, Captain?” Boji said, his voice tremulous. “It’s been such a pleasure, but I’ll just take my leave—”
Xivan grabbed the back of his shirt before he could run off. “I’m not finished with you just yet.”
“Ah, of course, my captain. It’s my honor to serve.” He bowed as best he could under the circumstances.
“You really are a fawning little toad, aren’t you, Boji?” She kept heading toward the ship. Once they were outside, most of the others shrugged into sallí cloaks and pulled up their hoods. In the dim light of Tya’s Veil, they were basically indistinguishable from any other sailor out for a night of fun. Only Xivan and Boji were recognizable as anything other than mannequins—which happened to be closest to the truth.
His laughter was surprisingly genuine. “My mother always said if you’re good at something and it makes you happy, you don’t just have a job, you have a calling.”
Xivan almost laughed. Fuck. She hated it when the little bastard reminded her that he’d once been a child. That someone, somewhere, might have cared what happened to him.
Xivan stopped in the middle of the street. People swirled around her in the night, full of pent-up energy and eager for entertainment. Night vendors in stalls lining the sides of the road offered delicacies to anyone with the metal to pay—some of it was even Quuros. If she’d still been capable of enjoying food, she’d have been salivating. As it was, this was a street filled with life. Shipowners shouted and customers haggled. A child screamed, which quickly transformed into the sound of a child laughing, the initial shriek indistinguishable from a more anguished noise. Xivan was surrounded by people; she had never in her life felt so alone.
It had been a mistake to track down the Lash. She knew that now. She just hadn’t suspected—
She’d been stupid. Of course Grimward could be used to control undead. Of course Grimward could be used to control her. The Lash didn’t need to gaesh Xivan, because Xivan came already bound, the control automatic and unbreakable.
So here she was, playing decoy because the last person playing the role had ended up so damaged he’d been all but useless, begging for the solace of a real death. Xivan’s own wishes in the matter had been inconsequential.
“Would you like me to find someone for you?” Boji’s voice was as soft and hesitant as a man trying to pet a shark.
“No,” Xivan answered. She turned to him. “When did you eat last?”
“Oh, I—” He grimaced and made a dismissive motion. “I’m fine.”
Xivan studied the man. Too thin. “We should buy you dinner—and some extra provisions for the trip. I’m sure no one on board is used to having passengers who still need to eat.”
Boji seemed shocked. “Uh … thank you? Your generosity humbles me beyond—”
“Shut up, Boji. You’re no good to me if you die from starvation.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Xivan stuck around just long enough to make sure Boji didn’t try to run. Not that she blamed him. He had to be wondering if his reward for this misadventure would be a one-way invitation to join the Lash’s crew as a mindless husk—which was a possibility. Unfortunately, Xivan needed someone who knew their way around the various factions of the ocean communities. Boji, for better or worse, filled that role. She couldn’t trust him, but that would have been true of anyone. Almost anyone.
She had to stop thinking of Talea.
How had the woman found her? She hadn’t been following Xivan. She’d somehow embedded herself with Sheloran, and the only way that made any sense was if …
Xivan did start laughing that time.
“Captain?” Boji eyed her as if he was contemplating whether or not running was the safe bet.
“She knew what I would do,” Xivan murmured. “She knew I’d go after Sheloran. She must have contacted Qown and used … no, not Var. Perhaps Senera? Maybe even Thurvishar. But used one of those damn wizards to get ahead of me. And then she just had to wait.” A warm, strange feeling filled her, and Xivan laughed again. Oh, but she was proud of Talea and more than a little rueful of how she’d underestimated the woman. She of all people should have known better. Talea was much more dangerous than she appeared.
Boji paused from eating a kelp-wrapped piece of fish. “You … know those people? The Quuros people we just left?”
“Yes, I know them.” Xivan clasped his shoulder. “But we’re not going to let that stop us. Let’s head back to the ship.”
“I was going to buy sweet-glass grapes,” Boji whined.
“Hurry.” Xivan moved her hand to the hilt of her sword only to remember that someone had wrecked it. Her father had made that sword—it had been his finest work.
She’d have to find a replacement, but that was a problem for later. For now, she concentrated on buying food for her single living crew member.
Xivan found no small amount of irony to the fact that they had to keep Boji alive. The Lash could and did use Grimward to astonishing effect when it came to puppeting undead, but she was terrible at creating them. It was the very quality that had made Xivan so valuable—she still possessed all her mental faculties. If the Lash raised Boji, he would lose the skills they needed.
Part of her was tempted to free him. What did it matter? But it mattered to the Lash. The only reason the pirate queen hadn’t already killed the little shit was because Xivan had reminded her that Boji would be more useful if he still had a pulse. If the Lash had been hoping Xivan could also create undead of the same caliber as Xivan herself, well, Xivan had quickly disabused her of that notion. Although politely, because if the Lash had ordered Xivan to slowly dismember herself, Xivan would have done it without hesitation.1
The Lash’s control—Grimward’s control—was total. Already she could feel the Lash’s impatience, the creature’s will looping around her limbs like skeins of invisible thread pulled taut. The Lash wanted Xivan back. She began moving again toward the harbor and the ship. It didn’t matter if Xivan didn’t want to go or not. Go she would.
Xivan had tried to convince herself that this wasn’t so bad. Xivan had explained that Sheloran was from a rich family and could be ransomed—she already knew that the royal princess was looking for the Lash, so it was simply a matter of arriving at the harbor to which Captain Rima Latemé was most likely to take them. The Lash had been intrigued enough by the idea to agree.
“Leave Boji in his room,” Xivan told one of the men when they’d both returned to the ship. At least she hoped that’s what she said. Her Mazhei was still a bit rusty, although she’d had quite an immersive introduction in recent weeks.
“That’s not really necessary,” Boji said. His mouth was sticky with fruit juice.
Xivan quirked her mouth and didn’t dignify that with a response.
“Come talk to me.”
“Now?” Xivan looked around. They were still in the harbor. They’d left the Lash quite a distance away, because no matter how cosmopolitan and sophisticated a pirate haven might be, the Lash—the real Lash—would never be welcome.
“Now.”
The dead sailors around the ship didn’t even wait for orders, although to be fair, they weren’t truly under Xivan’s control. They were nothing more than puppets controlled by the Lash. So they began casting off, immediately readying to sail right back out of town. Xivan couldn’t contradict the Lash’s orders. She was a mouthpiece and nothing more.
She sat on the prow of the Cruel Mistress and watched the lights of Da’utunse fade, the low creak of wood as the wind caught the sails. The ship pulled out of the harbor on its way to make the Lash’s rendezvous.
Find me.
Xivan didn’t send for Boji. He wouldn’t be coming along. Instead, she stripped off her most fragile finery and dove over the side. They’d left the Lash in a cave she used whenever she visited the pirate haven. It was large enough to accommodate her and even held a small pocket of air the Lash could use if she felt like having a conversation with guests less well adapted to life underwater.
Xivan, for instance.
When she reached the air pocket, Xivan pulled herself out of the water and looked around. As lairs of pirate queens were concerned, it fulfilled every cliché Xivan had ever heard—treasure littered every inch of the place. It very much struck Xivan as the sort of thing she might have expected to see created by an immortal being who had been told it was important to collect gold and jewels without anyone ever stopping to explain to her why. The Lash liked to pretend, but she wasn’t human and never would be.
The Daughter of Laaka pulled herself out of the water.
The kraken looked a little like an octopus, if an octopus were pulled straight from a nightmare. She was the darkest abysses of the ocean brought to life, a rolling, squirming mass of tentacles flashing with glints of blue and green. On the underside of those writhing limbs, bony spikes made it easy for the monster to climb up on to ships or cliffs or anything with a surface to rend and crack. And there was one more detail that became noticeable only upon close observation.
The Lash was very dead.
As dead as Xivan, anyway. She had acquired the same gray cast to her skin, the same festering injuries, the same cataract eyes. It’s just that the Lash was an undead creature the size of Arena Park. Breathtaking, in more than one sense.
Xivan sent a gold cup tumbling to the floor in her passage, the sound of water dripping off her clothing melding with the wet sound of the water from the cave. The kraken opened her glowing eyes and stared at her.
“You failed to bring back the princess,” the Lash said. Not a question, of course. She already knew.
“She was more heavily protected than I anticipated,” Xivan said. “We can find other marks…”
“It has nothing to do with treasure,” the Lash said, slamming a tentacle against the stone hard enough to make the ground jump. “What intrigued me about the princess wasn’t treasure, it was knowledge. You said her family included powerful wizards!”
Xivan paused. “I did, but…” She frowned. The Lash didn’t want treasure? Xivan had promised wealth because she’d been trying to convince the Lash that ransoming Sheloran would be profitable. “What would you want with a Quuros Royal House?” She’d misunderstood something. Xivan knew very little of the nature of kraken, but she’d always assumed that they’d been created by the god-queen Laaka, who, as far as she knew, was very much still around. With that kind of close relationship with a god-queen, why would a kraken, basically immune to magic, anyway, need wizards?
Well, since she didn’t have Senera in her pocket, there was only one way to find out. “May I ask what you needed her for? Perhaps someone else can help…”
The kraken’s thrashing tentacles stilled, and she settled back into the water. Her eyes glowed like moonstones in the reflected illumination of the mage-lights set up in the chamber. “I have a lover,” the kraken explained. “She’s been acting oddly. I … worry.”
Xivan blinked. It was a toss of the dice as to which idea was more shocking: that the Lash had a sexual partner or that she’d worry about their welfare. “Another Daughter of Laaka?” It would have to be, wouldn’t it? Few things in the ocean were large enough to compete with a kraken for size.
“No. I need to know what’s wrong with her. I need to fix her.”
Xivan looked away. “What if she doesn’t want to be fixed?” she whispered.
“What was that?”
“I’m sorry. It was nothing. You think a wizard might know how to help?”
“Unless you know how to contact a god-king?” the Lash snapped. “Or an Immortal? Are you good friends with Argas?”
Xivan cleared her throat. She found herself extremely grateful that Grimward—which she could see twinkling like a small star just above the Lash’s right eye—seemed to only give its owner the power to control undead, not the power to read their minds.
“Argas is dead,” Xivan said.
“Dead?” The Lash once again demonstrated why she was named such. The cave was lined with the scratched evidence of years of this behavior. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.” Xivan was certain. Xivan had, after all, been the one who’d slain him. Which had seemed like a good idea at the time. Xivan was starting to wonder.
“Doesn’t matter,” the Lash finally muttered. “I just want my Drehemia back.” The monster stared balefully at Xivan. “Make that happen and I will give you anything you want.”
**ANYTHING? BECAUSE I THINK WE COULD WORK SOMETHING OUT.**
Xivan turned around.
They weren’t alone, impossible as that idea should have been. A woman sat on one of the mounds of treasure, leaning back against gold plates and trinkets as if they were pillows in a royal princess’s boudoir.
The woman was unfamiliar. She had very pale skin, nearly white, and hair red as arterial blood. What she wore on her body could only laughably be called clothing.
**XIVAN, MY DEAREST. HOW ARE YOU?**
Xivan froze.
A demon? What was a demon—but there was only one demon who would know Xivan by name, who would greet her as someone familiar.
There was only one demon this could be.
“Suless,” Xivan whispered. She reached for her sword, only to remember she didn’t have one anymore, thanks to whichever one of those children had dabbled in sorcery enough to know how to warp metal. Probably Sheloran.
The demon grinned—a far wider grin than a human face should have allowed, done deliberately to be unsettling. A long, too-red tongue wagged at her before retreating into that black orifice. **AH, XIVAN. HOW WONDERFUL TO SEE YOU. I WAS JUST STOPPING BY TO CATCH UP WITH THE LASH HERE.**
“Catching up implies that we’re friends,” the Lash said. “We’ve never met.”
**NO, I SUPPOSE NOT. TRUTHFULLY, I WANTED TO SEE XIVAN. SHE’S ALWAYS GOOD FOR A LAUGH.**
Xivan felt herself start to shake with anger.
**AND ANYWAY, I THINK WE COULD BECOME FRIENDS. ESPECIALLY SINCE I HAVE SOMETHING YOU WANT.**
“Do you?” The Lash pulled herself up.
“She’s lying,” Xivan said. “She’s always lying. Her greatest pleasure in life is to sow chaos and pain.”
**YOU SAY THE NICEST THINGS.**
Xivan ignored the demon and focused her attention on the pirate kraken. “Anyone she has ever claimed to befriend has come to a foul end. She is a vindictive monster who exists to manipulate others and cause malice.”
**WELL, I WON’T DENY IT.** Suless cocked her head and smiled at the Lash. **SPEAKING OF VINDICTIVE MONSTERS, HOW IS YOUR GIRLFRIEND?”
“If you’re trying to convince me to let you live, you need to do better.”
**I’M A DEMON,** Suless explained as if to a child. **YOU CAN’T HURT ME.**
“Is that so?” The Lash reached out with a tentacle and very delicately moved it toward the demon.
At the last minute, Suless stepped away, her expression disturbed.2
Xivan paused. This visit had just become interesting. She’d assumed a kraken could only affect a demon as much as any physical creature could—destroy the temporary physical shell and the demon would be forced to retreat back to the Afterlife. The level of Suless’s hesitation, though …
**YOU SAID YOU WOULD GIVE ANYTHING TO HAVE YOUR DREHEMIA BACK,** Suless said. **I CAN MAKE THAT HAPPEN FOR YOU.**
At this, the Lash drew herself fully out of the water. Half her tentacles latched on to the stone wall of the cave, while the other half waved in the air. “What do you know of it?”
**I KNOW IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. DREHEMIA ISN’T ACTING THIS WAY BECAUSE SHE HAS ANY CONTROL OVER HERSELF. SHE DOESN’T. THIS IS ALL HAPPENING BECAUSE VOL KAROTH IS AWAKE. HER CONDITION WON’T IMPROVE.**
The waters stilled and grew silent. The Lash had not moved at all.
“Go on,” she finally said.
**THE MONASTERY AT DEVORS HAS THE LARGEST COLLECTION OF BOOKS ABOUT PROPHECIES, DRAGONS, AND THEIR CREATION IN THE ENTIRE WORLD,** Suless said. **THEY WOULD KNOW EXACTLY HOW TO RESTORE DREHEMIA. AND IN EXCHANGE, I ONLY ASK FOR ONE TINY THING.**
“No!” Xivan said. “You can’t listen to—” Her whole body froze. Her throat ceased to function.
The Lash had paralyzed her.
Suless smiled at Xivan. It wasn’t her normal broad grin. This was a tiny smile, just at the corners of her mouth, her eyes shining with delight. A real, genuine smile.
“It seems to me that all you’re doing is giving me a suggestion and then asking me to do all the work.”
**OH, BUT IT’S SUCH A GOOD SUGGESTION. AND I DON’T WANT A FAVOR YOU WOULDN’T BE WILLING TO GIVE ME.**
“You don’t?”
**NO. I WAS GOING TO ASK FOR XIVAN HERE,** Suless admitted. **BUT WHAT YOU’RE DOING HERE IS WORSE THAN ANYTHING I COULD DEVISE.** She paused. **WELL, NO. BUT I’M TOO BUSY AT THE MOMENT. IT’LL KEEP ME WARM AT NIGHT TO IMAGINE XIVAN HERE, TOTALLY UNDER SOMEONE ELSE’S CONTROL … ** She walked in a circle around Xivan, trailing a finger around her shoulders, her back, the front of her body.
Then Suless looked back at the Lash. **ALL I ASK AS REWARD IS THE SAME YOU WERE GOING TO DO FOR XIVAN HERE. I WANT SHELORAN. YOU WON’T NEED HER ANYMORE. YOU’LL HAVE THE ENTIRE LIBRARY AT DEVORS.**
Xivan ground her teeth. No. Because even if she could never claim that her own intentions toward the royal princess had been pure, she knew that it would be better than what Suless would do to her. Turn her into a witch-mother at the very least. Possibly something quite a bit worse than that, given how little Suless probably cared about spare bodies now that she’d made her ascension.
“Fine. But you will help with the attack.” That wasn’t a question either.
Suless shrugged. **SURE. WHY NOT?** Suless leaned over and kissed Xivan’s cheek. **SEE YOU AROUND.**
“What?” Thurvishar straightened. “Suless? What’s Suless’s involvement with all this?”
“Trying to have the Monastery of Devors destroyed, apparently,” Senera said. “But why is the question I’d like to know.” She paused and stared down at her paper as if contemplating the idea that it might have the answers that she was seeking.
“You’re forgetting petty revenge and whimsy,” Xivan pointed out.
“Janel has always claimed the Devoran Prophecies are Xaltorath’s work,” Thurvishar said. “Do you suppose that might be the connection?”
Senera narrowed her eyes as she regarded the other man. “You think Suless knows the truth? That she’s figured out her connection to Xaltorath?”
Kalindra shook her head and walked over to the two wizards. “What are you two talking about? Fill it in for the rest of us, because we were never given the target briefing.”
Senera scratched her forehead, sighing. She looked like she was searching for the words. “That monk you met back on the island. Linyuwan.”
“What about him?” Kalindra narrowed her eyes.
“He’s right.” Senera pulled a blanket off one of the couches and wrapped it tightly around herself. The fire had burned low, and it was growing colder in the room. “Xaltorath has claimed that they are looping time, replaying events until they’ve manipulated the result they want. Which means your Linyuwan’s theory about the prophecies truly being records of previous histories has validity.”
Thurvishar didn’t seem surprised. Instead, the look on his face suggested he agreed with Senera’s statement.
“What does that have to do with Suless?” Xivan asked.
Senera looked helplessly over at Thurvishar. “Would you like to try this?”
“Fair,” Thurvishar said. He pondered the matter for a moment. “So assume Xaltorath was telling the truth. That they have some way of traveling back in time. Clearly not to whenever they like. Were that the case, they’d have defeated all their enemies long before any of us were born. But there is some period of time—millennia, probably—that they can loop and start over when some as-yet-unknown condition is met. We have a rough idea of when the entry point is, because we have no prophecies earlier than that date.3 But—according to Janel—the non-time-traveling not-yet-Xaltorath who is native to our version of history is Suless.”
Everyone in the room was silent.
“Never mind. I should have explained it,” Senera said.
“You’re saying Suless is Xaltorath?” Xivan growled.
“More like Xaltorath’s little sister who’s never really going to be able to compete,” Senera said. “Suless is the person who might have become Xaltorath under different circumstances. Not now though. Xaltorath won’t tolerate the competition.”
Kalindra ran the edge of a nail along the bottom of her lip, eyes lost as she gazed at something far away. “So I have a theory.”
“All right,” Senera said.
Xivan waited. Everyone waited.
Senera slammed her hand against the table. “Kalindra!”
The Black Brotherhood assassin visibly jumped. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine. We’re all tired,” Talea said.
“What is your theory?” Senera asked, sounding like she was trying not to grind her teeth.
Xivan saw Kalindra start to answer. She also saw the moment when Kalindra stopped herself, a flash of mischief dancing across her dark eyes.
“Oh,” Kalindra said, smiling. “So you’d like to hear it, then?”
Senera growled.
“Because I wasn’t sure,” Kalindra continued.
“Kalindra, don’t tease the short-tempered wizard,” Talea scolded gently. “She knows dangerous spells.”
Kalindra cleared her throat. “Whenever Jarith wanted to memorize something, he’d make a little game of it. Turn a list of things to be memorized into a sentence or a poem. ‘Rebellious Kids Eager for More Justice Killed the Yellow King’ becomes the Eight Dominions of Quur: Raenena, Kirpis, Eamithon, Marakor, Jorat, Kazivar, Yor, and Khorvesh. Make it a mnemonic device. If Suless has always been in a habit of doing something similar to that, what if she recognized the same behavior in the prophecies? Looked at them and thought: oh, I know what those are. Enough to know that if she destroys those notes, Xaltorath loses their playbook.”
Xivan leaned back and stared at the ceiling. It was … possible. She liked to think she was reasonably familiar with how Suless’s mind worked by now, although it was like sticking her hand in a bucket of slime. And Suless would never, ever let herself just be “Xaltorath’s little sister”—if she knew that Xaltorath was competition, she would do whatever it took to eliminate that competition.
She straightened as she remembered how seriously Relos Var had taken Suless when almost no one else had. Like he had known …
Xivan turned to Senera. “You knew. You already knew the connection between Suless and Xaltorath.”
Senera pressed her lips together in a thin, tight line. “No,” she said. “If the Name of All Things doesn’t work on anything prior to its creation, it certainly doesn’t work on events that happened in the shadowy realms of might-have-been or has-been. We didn’t know for certain—”
“But you suspected,” Xivan said. “That’s the real reason Relos Var wanted me to kill Suless so badly. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t fighting two Xaltoraths.”
Senera slowly nodded. “Yes.”
“Oh, wow,” Talea said. “We’re really going to need to do something about her.”
Senera laughed. “I’ve been saying that for years.”
Galen and Qown didn’t break their embrace so much as stumble backward from it. Galen shook his head and laughed. “Talk about your mood killers,” he said.
“Why yes,” Janel said, nodding, “Suless often has that effect on people.”
“Does this ‘whatever we’re doing gets interrupted by a vision’ thing ever grow less annoying?” Galen asked the group at large.
Teraeth and I exchanged a glance. We both started laughing.
“What?” Galen asked.
We didn’t elaborate, but I thought the meaning was obvious enough:
No. No, it never did.
“Vol Karoth has a marked tendency to act quickly after he ends a vision,” Janel said. “We should relocate before he … Oh. Never mind.”
A group of statues, mostly lions and a few thriss drakes, loped up the boulevard toward us.
“What do you think the others are doing right now?” Qown asked, brushing marble dust off himself.
The battle had been short but fierce. We picked our way out of the field of rubble we’d created with care. No one wanted to survive an attack by stone monsters only to fall because we twisted an ankle on their remains. Not permanently crippling—not here, anyway—but downright embarrassing, under the circumstances.
“Senera’s probably asking her magic rock something that really doesn’t matter right now, but she just can’t resist the urge to learn every bit of minutiae involving something—,” Sheloran said, flicking away dust from her shoulder.
“Kalindra’s growling about something,” Galen added, shaking gravel from his hair. “And she’s probably found a way to blame Xivan for it.”
“And Talea’s saying something cryptic but profound,” Qown said with a grin.
The rest of us stared at them. Then Janel asked slowly, “Is … is everything … all right … back there?”
Teraeth frowned. “What the fuck happened while we’ve been gone?”
Sheloran made a dismissive wave with her fan. “Place that many people with massive ‘I’m always right’ complexes in the same room, and one’s bound to have personality conflicts.”
“So anyway,” Galen said, “what are you all up to? I mean, before you went looking for me. Anything exciting?” The blue eyes were full of sharp mischief and irony.
“We’re looking for gray spots,” Teraeth said.
Galen stared at him for a moment, trying to decide if the vané man was joking or not. Finally, he said, “So … that’s a no, then?”
I chuckled. “We’ve discovered that some locations in the city are even grayer than others, with all color missing. Those spots seem to be memories or … something … important to Vol Karoth. They’re usually dangerous, but we think that exploring them is weakening him.”
“How dangerous?” asked Qown.
“It varies, but they tend to fall somewhere between ‘a half-dozen Dedreughs’ and ‘Relos Var’ on the catastrophe scale,” Janel opined.
Qown blanched.
“My, then. So what are we waiting for?” Sheloran asked brightly. “We’re here, you’re here … shall we make a party of it?” She pointed her folded-up fan at Kihrin and said, “No chicken costumes this time.”
“Party found us,” Teraeth said, pointing.
Vol Karoth had raised an entire army of marble soldiers, complete with shields and pikes, and they were marching up the street toward us in perfect formation.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, sighing. “Run!”
We were still running when the inevitable vision hit us.