CHAPTER EIGHT

THE MAP’S EDGE

What are you saying, Kaggawa?” I asked.

Dai pressed his hands along the side of his desk as he stared in silence, chewing on the corner of his lips. I took a moment to consider how different he was acting now than when I had first met him out on the streets. Out there, he had been more sombre, stiff; here, he seemed more pensive, expressive. And the light in his eyes looked different—I could’ve somehow sworn they were brown out there. Now they appeared blue, which I didn’t think was possible. Based on what Nor had told me, his father was Jinsein. Even if his mother was Kag, his eyes should still be brown. “I think I will let you sit on my words first,” he said with a grimace. “You’ll have plenty enough time to think them through during our trip to the Sougen.”

“I am not going to the Sougen,” I hissed. “This little side journey just to see you has already cost me too much time. Our lives are at stake here.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“The events in the Zarojo Empire…” I started.

He leaned back. “You made enemies out there, didn’t you?”

“You could say that.”

“You made enemies, and suddenly your people refuse to help you,” Dai said with a heavy sigh. “I’ve been wondering why the Oren-yaro never went after you. It’s worse than I feared.”

“Da—” Lahei began. I glanced at her in confusion. Da, not Father? Da was a Kag affectation.

“My son’s life is at stake here. I will not allow Thanh to be feasted on by vultures,” I murmured. “You need him alive, too, don’t you?”

“Tell me what’s happening. You’re going to have to trust me, Queen Talyien.”

“My son is in danger. That’s all you need to know.”

His nostrils flared. After a moment of silence, he inclined his head to the side. “She sounds sincere enough. Frightened, even. Not what I expected from her at all. What do you think?”

“The queen, indeed, had her fair share of troubles in the empire,” Lahei agreed. “I suspected there was more to it than she let on.”

“And Faorra can’t very well marry a dead boy, can she?”

“No, Da.”

Dai pressed his hands on his desk, blue eyes gleaming in the shadows in such a way that it felt unreal. Inhuman. That, and the expression on his face, sent a chill up my spine. “A proposition, Beloved Queen. Consider it a token of goodwill so that you can begin to trust us.”

“I’m listening,” I bristled.

“I have men,” Dai continued. “Something we’re both aware you’re short of. I’ll take care of extracting your son from Oka Shto and his Ikessar guardians, away from this danger you claim he’s in. In exchange…”

“I go with you to the Sougen,” I finished for him. “You bastard.”

He smiled. “If you remain this compliant, then we don’t have to be hostile at all, do we? Our daughter did tell you we are your servants, did she not?”

“Servants who blackmail their queen,” I grunted. “I don’t know your men, Master Dai. I don’t know if I can trust them so easily, even if you give me your word. You seem to be forgetting that my son is surrounded by both Oren-yaro soldiers and Ikessar retainers. Do you think you can wrest him from them so easily? The safest way is for me to be there, to get him out myself.”

“I disagree. I believe your presence there is problematic. The Ikessars already mistrust you—who knows what will happen once they know you’ve returned to Jin-Sayeng?”

“The Sougen is still Jin-Sayeng.”

“In that you are wrong, Beloved Queen. The Sougen was the heart of Jin-Sayeng, but that was a long, long time ago. Your forebears have neglected it, and you nailed the coffin shut yourself.”

“How do you plan to get him out?” I asked.

“Your city has a network of sewers,” Dai said.

“None lead to the castle. Our sewage is dumped straight to the river.”

“The forest, then. The cliffs.”

“Your people cannot possibly have the plans for every nook and cranny in Oka Shto. You worked for the Ikessars, not my father, and my father kept Oka Shto’s construction a secret. Even I don’t know everything there is to know about the castle, and I can tell you this much: every entrance you can think of will have guards.”

“We can find a way, Beloved Queen. Our daughter got you out of the empire, didn’t she?”

“Then send her,” I said.

He grew serious. “No.”

“If you won’t send your daughter, then I know for a fact that an escape attempt will also be dangerous for my son. You don’t have a deal, Kaggawa.”

“You talk like someone who has a choice.”

I tapped the desk before letting my hand graze the sword on my side. “I do. I can choose to kill you where you stand, or die trying. Either way, you lose something.”

I felt those blue eyes grow cold. For a moment, I had the distinct sensation of standing in front of a beast that wanted to mow me down, and my fingers wrapped themselves around the hilt of the sword. But then his eyes changed colour, turning dark again. Brown. He slowly sat back against his chair.

Lahei leaned over to him and whispered in his ear.

“You know Torre,” he said at last. “If I send him to scout the area and keep an eye out for your son, will that suffice? We will not intervene until you can personally make a decision yourself.” His voice was different again, back to the same old firmness from earlier. “You can stay in the Sougen with the assurance that if there is any danger to your boy, we can do something about it.”

I sucked in my breath.

“We are being gracious here, my queen. Acknowledge it, or let’s all end it here.” It sounded like he meant it.

After a moment’s reflection, I nodded.

Lahei bowed and stepped out of the room.

I didn’t know if it was relief or dread now running through me. “What happens when you have both of us in your custody?”

“Worries for the future.”

“Don’t play coy, Kaggawa. We’ll become your hostages, won’t we? You’ll want me to announce Thanh’s betrothal to your daughter right after, I’m sure. Between the warlords and the Zarojo army…”

His eyes brightened. “A Zarojo army?”

“I am not in the mood to play games. This is more serious than you realize. Do you have enough sellswords to stop the nation from burning?”

He laughed. “Sellswords! And where did you hear that from?”

I smirked. “I have my ways.”

“The warlords will not attack us. This land’s concerns go beyond your royal squabbles. But come—we’ve talked enough. The day grows shorter, and we have a long road ahead.”

I followed him out of the building, where I saw my guards, Khine, and Cho on the street with Lahei. I wasn’t sure what she told them, but Nor gave me a look as I passed by. “Later,” I grumbled. “I’ll explain later.”

We continued down the street, which led to the outskirts of town. A low wooden fence surrounded one of the buildings. There were horses tied in a row along the street. Dai whistled and a young man ambled up to us, a straw hat set at an angle on his head. He was thin, more bone than flesh. “Your horses are ready, Master Dai,” he said, speaking in Kagtar, although he looked Jinsein from the distance. On close inspection, I could see a brown sheen to his hair. His eyes were quite light, too—almost yellow. I wasn’t surprised. Children of mixed lineage were common in that region.

Dai walked towards a large bay horse, the kind with a light feathering along its forelegs, and his face broke into a grin. He greeted the horse with the sort of fondness you reserved for a special friend, then turned back to the stable hand. “We’ve got company. I brought my daughter’s horse, but please find something for the rest of them. Put it on my tab.” I noticed his eyes were glowing blue again. He glanced at me, as if unaware I noticed it. “Perhaps the queen will want to pick her own horse. I’ve been told she’s fond of them.”

The young man bowed. “Everything outside is spoken for, but maybe something in the stables?” His face muscles twitched. He quickly slapped at it, as if it was an affliction he was used to. And then, wringing his hands, he led me down the path, straight to the run-down building. He indicated the available horses with haphazard flailing, and I went down to inspect them. I wasn’t looking for anything particularly special, but I wanted to keep an eye out for the sort of horse that might be able to outrun Dai’s mount if I needed it to. I caught a couple that looked like they had the legs for it, though they were flightier than I liked.

I heard the young man clear his throat. “Have you decided?”

“A moment,” I said. I patted the nose of an amiable dappled grey before moving on to the next stall. A shaft of sunlight from the window crossed my path. As I glanced away from it, I noticed the stable hand’s shadow on the ground. It looked like a forked tree branch, the edges hard and angled.

It gave me pause. I felt my skin crawl as I took a second look. The shadows where his fingers should’ve been ended in points, like claws. Higher up, his hair looked like it was standing on end, and the head was twisted, the silhouette of his mouth and nose upturned.

“Well?” he asked. His shadow opened its mouth. I saw fangs.

I looked up at him.

Maybe it was the expression on my face, or maybe because my hand had dropped to my sword, but his eyes grew bright. The thin line of his lips turned into a sinister smile.

Without another word, he changed.

I felt my hair prickling as it happened, the feel of the air before a lightning storm. His mouth split open, revealing long white fangs. His body contorted, ripping through his clothes. His flesh darkened, and patches of hair appeared all over him, like a flea-bitten dog’s fur. His arms grew longer, lean muscles and veins popping through throbbing skin. There was a thick, oily sheen over him that smelled like rotting blood.

My observations ended there. He lunged.

There was little room to flee between the stalls, especially between the panicked horses and thundering hooves. I dodged the first attack, watching in horror as the creature crashed into the gate. The wood exploded into several pieces. A frightened horse raced past us. I was almost expecting the creature to go after the hapless beast, but it only had eyes for me.

It reached out again with claws the length of my arm. I ducked a second time and managed to wrench my sword free from the scabbard. I struck its leg. It howled and smashed me with the other leg, and I quickly realized my mistake in engaging something strong enough to send me flying to the wall.

I hit a board, my left shoulder taking the brunt of the fall. My head spun. I tasted blood from a split lip and spat out straw. Before I could even think about getting up, the creature was on me, claws dancing above my skin. I gazed up to its slavering jaws and stabbed it in the roof of its mouth with my sword.

It threw its head back with a roar. I pulled my sword back and struck it across the chest several times. The blade went through a thick swath of hair and muscle before the edge struck bone, sending a spray of black blood hissing through the air. The creature responded by pressing back until I could no longer swing my sword, until my blade was the only thing standing in the way of it squeezing the breath from my lungs. Blood mixed with saliva dripped down my face, making it harder and harder to see.

I heard Khine’s voice call for me. “Get out of here!” I screamed as I removed my left hand from the sword. Before the creature could crush me, I pulled the smaller dagger from my belt and stabbed it in the neck. I was hoping to hit its jugular, but I felt bone instead. The creature roared and tossed me to the side like a rag doll.

Both blades slid out of my grasp as I hit a bale of hay. I coughed as I got up, and then found myself retching at the stench and feel of the creature’s blood. When I finally caught my breath, I wiped my eyes and returned for my sword. It was half-hidden under clumps of straw and congealed blood. Slime coated the hilt. I wrapped my fingers around it as tight as I could and blindly rushed forward.

The creature had left me for Khine. He was keeping it at bay with a pitchfork. Before I could reach them, the stable doors slid open and Dai’s thundering voice broke through the air like a whip.

“Out here, you piece of shit!”

The creature hissed as sunlight struck it. Small pockets of burning flesh appeared on its skin. Unfazed by its injuries, it bounded through the door. I limped past Khine just in time to see Dai take it down with one clean upwards stroke.

The creature’s body shrank under the sunlight, cracking like a wilted flower as it slowly turned back into the stable hand—a stiff, grey, desiccated shadow of him.

I managed to swallow. Somehow, my own saliva tasted vile—some of the blood had gotten into my mouth. “How inconvenient,” Dai said. “I suspected he was one. Had hoped I was wrong.” He had on the curt voice and brown eyes. There was no ounce of surprise or regret in his expression.

“What the hell is happening here, Kaggawa?”

“Knowing your reputation, you would’ve fled from me the first chance you got. I had to show you what was wrong here. My apologies if I had to use you to bait him to reveal himself.”

I wiped my face. “Explain yourself.”

“This is an unstable region,” Dai said with a snarl. “Right before your father’s war, Rysaran’s mad dragon was destroyed in the mountains. The act ripped through the fabric.”

“What does that have to do with that…thing?” I gestured at the corpse.

“Didn’t your tutors teach you anything?” Dai snapped. “Ah, they wouldn’t have. I forget how stuck up you royals get over these things. The agan…look…” He made a ball with his hands, oblivious to the blood that dripped down his arm—the creature’s, not his. “A fabric separates our reality from the other side, which they say is the source of the agan. Rysaran’s dragon created so much damage that it began spilling from that side into ours, causing instabilities. Dageian mages came to stop it. They erected spells around the mountains near Cairntown to contain the spill.

“But they couldn’t repair the fabric and restore it to the way it was. Instead, their spells created a blockage, stifling the flow and creating a lake. A stagnant cesspool. I don’t know much about it myself, but…we are all part agan. Do you know that?”

Khine cleared his throat. “I’ve been told it flows through every living thing. People who train as mages are more connected than most—they can see and manipulate these threads.”

“So they can. When we die, our souls travel through the agan stream and return to Sheyor’r. Who knows what happens after?” He paused, then, his face contorting. His eyes glowed and turned blue. “Maybe some of us don’t want to know. Those souls linger near the surface like rats at a pantry, waiting for the door to open. Those who found themselves at that torn fabric? They went through, straight into the dammed lake of agan the mages had inadvertently made. Something went wrong with the agan inside of it, as if it was tainted. It changed them. It changes…” He stopped, his face tightening. “What do you mean I’m not explaining it properly?” he asked with an irritated expression. He wasn’t looking at me, or anyone, and his eyes were rapidly switching between blue and brown.

“Father,” Lahei called out.

“It’s not a problem,” Dai replied. I wasn’t sure if he was replying to her or talking to himself again, but his voice had changed once more. He turned back to me. “She has to know. How long will we pretend this isn’t a problem threatening to consume us all?”

“What by all the gods are you both going on about?” I asked.

“Souls travel on the agan,” Lahei said softly. “The creature you have seen was a man who somehow attracted the soul of a corrupted thing. We’ve been trying to understand how it works, to predict what causes possession, but all these years, it seems to be completely random. A neighbour can be masquerading as normal for years and later be discovered eating babies and children in the night.”

“And this sort of thing only happens in these parts?” I asked.

Lahei nodded. “It caused the mad dragons.”

I paused, letting that sink in. “They appeared right after the demise of Rysaran’s dragon.”

“During your father’s war, yes. We believe the flow of agan through the tear in the fabric was enough to attract a few dragons back to the northern mountains. We think that the mages’ botched repair attempt drew them straight into the cesspool. These corrupted souls came through and possessed them, causing them to turn into vicious, mindless beasts who kill beyond the need to eat. A second group of mages contained the area soon afterwards, and for the first few years only that first group of dragons was afflicted.”

“The dragon that attacked me and Prince Rayyel as children,” I broke in. “It was young. It wasn’t one of those.”

“No,” Dai said. “I brought it with me. I wanted to show you that you had a growing problem out here. But you were a child. What did you know? How could I have explained all of this to a mere mite of a girl who had been far too busy worrying about her prince?”

“You could have tried.”

“Like I didn’t try with your father, girl,” he said. “It’s too late for regrets, now. It was bad then, and it’s getting worse. We think the spells the second group of mages made are wearing off. The corrupted souls are escaping. Now they’re possessing people, too.”

I felt my fingers begin to shake, and carefully crossed my arms so it wouldn’t be so obvious. My eyes darted towards Dai. “Are you saying that Jin-Sayeng will soon be overrun with mad dragons and these bloodthirsty monsters?”

His face broke into a smile. “You catch on fast. Perhaps we have hope after all.”

On the road, the Kaggawas gave me the sort of education on the agan that my tutors had denied me all these years.

They spoke of its abundance in another realm, the one the Zarojo called Sheyor’r, and the fabric that separates it from our world. Across this fabric, agan flows freely, and everything there is made of this substance, which has resulted in a world of agan attempting to mimic a solid form—the trees, the water, the ground, and even the people.

It was like hearing a story, a fairy tale. Amusing enough coming from someone like Agos’s mother on a cold winter’s night with cups of hot ginger tea in our hands. To listen to it out here, among grim faces, with the knowledge that what had attacked me in that stable could very well be among us…

It seemed that when we died, our souls would slip into a stream and make their way to the nearest hole in the fabric, where we would then make our way to an afterlife in Sheyor’r. Our souls were made of agan, too, the exact same substance, only different enough to retain wills of their own. Dai and Lahei’s arguments gave me a glimpse of how little people really knew of it and why there were different schools of thought and interpretations on the subject.

The Dageians, for example, considered the agan to be nothing more than an endless natural resource. They created channels to tap into Sheyor’r, draining what they could from whatever little pocket they could find. Sheyor’r, from what Dai could explain, was not a seamless land like ours. If our world was a boulder, Sheyor’r was about a hundred blankets of various weights and fabrics stitched together and wrapped around it. Some fabrics were thin, others were thick; some were riddled with holes, others impenetrable. Attempts to map Sheyor’r from our world had been met with abject failure. Even the flow of the agan was difficult to predict. What the Dageians called a “natural connection” was one that flowed on its own, requiring no mage or spell to draw it out.

The destruction of Rysaran’s dragon created one of these natural connections. But instead of a small pocket of easily usable agan, the flow in the area was erratic and unstable. If fabrics were blankets, then the one here was woolen and full of ticks. Lahei told me about the contingent of mages Dageis had sent to take care of the problem. Dageis was concerned about the state of the agan fabric in those days, especially after reports came that the Dageian Empire’s overdependence on mages was creating an abundance of holes that encouraged instability. As far as Dageis was concerned, they were just cleaning up.

No one knew exactly what happened. Somehow, the entire contingent was wiped out. When the reports stopped, a second group came looking for them and found creatures in place of the mages. They were still clad in the mages’ robes, and some even attempted to initiate conversation with the second group, pretending to be the missing mages themselves.

The new mages, of course, knew exactly what they were dealing with—the idea that a soul from Sheyor’r could slip into someone’s body was well-known. But it was always accepted that only those with natural connections to the agan themselves were vulnerable. When they discovered that the soldiers and servants that accompanied that first group of mages were also possessed, they panicked. They threw up more spells to try to fix the problem, but that was all they could do—bandages over a wound. And now the bandages were falling apart.

“Have you asked Dageis for help?” I found myself asking. We were around a campfire that same evening—one of the five that Dai’s men had erected as soon as we got off the road. It was the most well-lit campsite I had ever seen in my life.

Dai shook his head. “They’ve fixed it, as far as they’re concerned. Do you think Dageis cares what a handful of small towns and villages experience? An official inquiry might’ve worked better, but you can understand why we’re not in a position to send out a request.” He turned to me with a steely blue gaze.

I smiled at him. “I understand what you’re implying, Master Dai, but do remember that this is an incident that happened years before I was born. Furthermore, it is not officially within Jin-Sayeng borders.”

“Those mountains border Jin-Sayeng. You’d let brushstrokes dictate what you do or don’t care for?”

“I have no jurisdiction—”

“It affects your people,” Dai said.

“It’s not that simple. Do you know what the warlords would’ve done if I had made an effort to reach Dageis at all, let alone on anything agan -related? No…” I paused to look at his face through the flickering flames. “I think you do know. That’s why you never sent word.”

“We have made requests to see you, Beloved Queen. Many times.”

“You and others, on so many things. My council goes through them first. They picked what was most important for me to see.” Saying this made me feel self-conscious. They had accused me of not caring. They weren’t…wrong.

Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of one of his men. “We’ve scouted the perimeter, Master Dai,” he said. “Nothing’s amiss.”

I glanced at the burning torch in his hand. His sharp breathing and the colour of the skin on his face betrayed his fears. I also caught sight of an amulet around his neck. I didn’t recognize it, but it looked like a piece of wood carved to resemble the branches of a tree. I remembered the god of the Kags in this area, Yohak, who was said to roam through the deepest parts of the Kag wilderness, where he battled beasts and spirits alike. While some people said that he took the form of an old, bearded man, others said he appeared as a walking tree. Bits and pieces of the legends I had read about over the years seemed to come together in my mind.

“They’re actually out there in the woods, aren’t they?” I asked.

Dai glanced at Lahei before nodding. “Is that too much to believe, Beloved Queen?”

“I’m bearing gifts from the last one I encountered.” I glanced at my wounds. “More wouldn’t be a stretch.”

“Most of them seem to prefer living among us,” Lahei said.

“You mean—as people?”

Dai smiled, eyes gleaming in the dark. “And why not? If you’ve been in darkness for so very long, wouldn’t you want to see the light? Wouldn’t you desire a whiff of fresh air? A taste of clean water?” He made a motion towards the fire. “If you have never known entrapment in your life, I can’t imagine you could understand.”

“I do know,” I said in a low voice.

Dai looked at me curiously. “These souls…try to get along with their host for as long as they can, experiencing everything their host experiences—the joy of food, warmth, comfort, even the pleasures of lust. On the surface, it doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world, to share these things with another bereft of them.”

I listened to the soft patter of his voice before nodding. “What I saw, however…”

“That is where the corrupt nature of these things comes into play,” Dai continued. “For some reason, these souls want more. They are not content with living out someone’s life. And so their hunger exceeds the limitations of the body and they attempt to sate the lust through flesh. They distort their host into these creatures whenever they can get away with it. They especially love to eat children—something about the purer nature of their experiences.”

“When discovered, some of them just take over the host, like the one you just saw,” Lahei added. “As you can imagine, this leaves little choice but to kill the creature, including the host. In a last-ditch attempt to save themselves and the body that had been so pliable to their demands, they flee into the woods.”

I itched to stare into the darkness of the forest beyond us, but I stopped myself. “If this has been going on for the last few years, then these woods must be crawling with them.”

They both nodded. “It’s nothing these parts don’t know how to deal with, you understand,” Dai said. “Deeper into the Kag, the wilderness has been home to similar creatures. But they’ve kept there for centuries. These ones are right here, among us. If this spreads deeper into our cities…” He trailed off, letting me fill in the details.

I felt a shiver run through my skin. “Will they attack during the night?”

Dai got up and beckoned. I followed him to the edge of the camp, right where the light crossed into the shadows. They had fenced the area in with thin rope, about knee-high, threaded through bells. “That’s it?” I asked. “You’re protecting us with tripping hazards?”

“The simple things work best,” Dai said. “Hopefully whoever’s on watch calls an alarm if a bell rings, and it flees back into the woods. If we’re lucky, we can kill them.”

Agos looked like he wanted to laugh. “It won’t just walk over it?”

“I dare you to try walking about in the dark without triggering a bell or two.”

I rubbed my wrist. “The thing back in the stables was very strong.”

“They can be killed—you’ve seen it. You have to let their strength become their disadvantage. They lack finesse, and they’re afraid of light.” Dai swept his torch towards me before bringing his sword down with his other hand, stopping a hand’s length from my neck.

Agos’s own blade was out. “You—” he snarled.

“I was only showing the queen one of the many stances you take when you’re facing these creatures,” Dai said, stepping back. “I’m the last thing you should worry about here.” He nodded at me. “You didn’t flinch.”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” I admitted.

“You were. It didn’t bother you because the movement was too slow.” He crossed his arms. “I was told you were a pampered brat.”

The words amused me more than anything. “Are you saying your extensive spy network was wrong?”

“Information is different from firsthand knowledge. They train you Oren-yaro well. Maybe too well. Wolves, you call yourselves? Dogs, more like it.” He glanced at Agos, who bristled.

“Watch your tongue.”

“Why take offense? The queen doesn’t. And well will that serve you, if you remember to think beyond what your clan expects you to.”

“You said you tried to talk to my father about these,” I commented. “He lost my brothers to Rysaran’s dragon. Surely he would’ve believed you.”

“Like I said,” Dai murmured. And he left it at that.