Outlaw: A Dark Fantasy Novel (On the Bones of Gods Book 2) Read online

  Snowdenaelikk walked beside him, narrow and dark and silent. Thinking. Angry, according to Briel’s uneasy impressions. Although what might have angered her, in this barely-morning, the svartjagr did not know. Briel’s concern did not stretch much past her own close interests. She might not like Snow’s mood, but she would not fret over the cause.

  That was Snow’s partner’s job.

  “Does your arm hurt?” he asked finally. Expecting temper from her, sharp denial.

  Got back quiet and the slow turning of her head in her hood’s shadow. He could see the pale smear of her hair. The Dvergiri-dark wedge of her face. Blue eyes, too, with enough light. They were dark holes now, bottomless.

  “This place.” Snow stumbled over something. Swerved into him, gentle bump that must have hurt her, from the hissed and indrawn breath. “Fucking Illharek.”

  It is your home, he almost said. Didn’t, being wiser now than he had been. Dvergiri was not an easy language. The Illhari were not an easy people. And because Veiko traveled with three of them, and two had a habit of arguing about things long since past changing: “Do not let Dekklis hear you say that. She did not want to come.”

  Snow glanced ahead. Frowned. “Dead if we stayed in Cardik. She knows that.”

  “Yes.” Leave off the obvious: that Dekklis might have preferred dying to running, and that the only reason she had come south was that Illharek itself—republic and city—was also in danger. Tal’Shik’s vengeance wouldn’t stop with Cardik. The goddess would come south, and she would take back everything that had been hers before the Purge, unless Szanys Dekklis, senator’s daughter, could convince the Senate to act. Then the legion could deal with the Taliri while Veiko figured some way to put his axe between the dragon-goddess’s eyes. He owed her that. “This is the wiser choice.”

  “This is the necessary choice,” Snow shot back in the same tone she had said be sure to draw the stitches tight.

  A wise man would let that silence hold and keep walking.

  CHAPTER TWO

  No one noticed them.

  Dekklis had worried about that from the instant they set foot on the road. She wasn’t concerned for herself, or Istel. They wore no armor, no legion insignia, and a pair of Dvergiri might go unremarked just about anywhere. Even Briel might go unremarked, feral svartjagr being common enough around Illharek. But Veiko was half a head taller than anyone else on the Riverwalk. Head full of straw-colored braids, an axe in one hand, a bow on his back, that big red wolf-shaped dog beside him—he’d catch some attention. And Snowdenaelikk. Half-bloods weren’t especially uncommon, but she was damn near Veiko’s height, and the Academy topknot would draw stares.

  But no one looked twice. Not the merchant women, with their bondies and their wagons. Not the farmers, pushing their produce in handcarts. Everyone in her own world, occupied with her own tasks, and to a Purged hell with everyone else. It was only just past dawn, and already the Riverwalk was crowded. Handcarts, oxcarts, overburdened bondies staggering in their mistresses’ wake. Pole boats and rafts choked the Jokki River, keeping mostly good order, never mind all the shouts and cursing.

  So perfectly, painfully Illharek, and so typically Illhari. Dekklis caught herself smiling. You got used to Cardik’s rhythms. You got used to

  courtesy, Dek, that’s the word

  life in a city where half the population weren’t citizens, where a good chunk of the traffic on the streets was traders or hunters, not merchants or highborn. Where people locked eyes and nodded and checked for weapons—only citizens having the right to wear metal.

  Illharek had no such rules. The city trusted its resident aliens and visitors to behave themselves, or face Illhari justice.

  Dekklis imagined Snowdenaelikk’s lip curling, her razored Illhari injustice, yeah? That’s what you mean. Dek felt heat crawling under her skin, as if Snow were looking at her now, with those words hanging between them.

  Years since she’d been back here. She hadn’t expected to return until the Sixth did, and maybe not even then. She had three older sisters. Had planned to retire

  hell you did

  in Cardik. Take her pension plot of land and what, turn farmer? Sell it, more likely, and turn sellsword.

  All of those plans had gone to smoke and blood and ashes, like Davni and a dozen other villages. Like Cardik itself by now, unless the gates and the Sixth had held it against the Taliri and Tal’Shik.

  Dekklis’s smile dried up and fell off. She had nothing behind her but ashes, and nothing in front but Illharek. From here, the city looked like a great black hole in the earth, like the rock had grown a mouth and teeth and frozen in the act of biting. The Jokki coming out, the broad paved road beside it, like twin tongues in a dragon’s throat. You could call the city of Illharek the heart of that dragon. It had been, in Tal’Shik’s time.

  Dek’s memory supplied the vault of Below, the witchfires that wreathed and ran along the silhouettes of buildings and glowed blue and cold in lanterns. Memory supplied the tall twists of stone, buildings stacked close on the narrow streets. The lattice of bridges over river and pool and chasm, adding layers and height to the city, so that the highborn might not touch foot to cave floor for a week, might not need to descend to the Suburba at all. The damp cave-cool that did not vary with seasons. The absolute black where the light would not reach.

  Had been a time she’d missed all that, when she’d first marched north with the Sixth. So proud of her new posting, and so terrified of open sky and the wide Wild. Now she slowed down and looked up at the shredded blue overhead, where the mist gave way to sun. Felt another stab under her breastbone.

  Call that a heart, Dek.

  “You look like a tourist, Szanys.” Snow’s voice, gravel and razor, from just off Dek’s shoulder. “You miss this place that much?”

  Dek turned to look at her. Took in the half-blood’s mocking smile, the eyes grim as northern winters. Shrugged. “I did once. You?”

  Flash of teeth. “It’s home, yeah?”

  “Right. Home.” A fourth daughter’s rebellion had made her seek the legion, which she had compounded by seeking a scout’s posting in the Sixth. Dekklis imagined the accumulated years of her mother’s disappointment. “Snow. I can’t take you with me.”

  “To House Szanys? No? You saying your mother wouldn’t welcome me?” The half-blood chuckled. “No intention, Dek. Trust me there. Is that where you’re staying?”

  “I don’t know yet. Barracks, maybe. We’re still legion. Send Briel if you need me.”

  Snow raised both brows. “All right.”

  Dek made a grab for Snow’s arm as Snow began turning away. “Where will you be? In case I need to find you?” Expecting prevarication. Argument. Evasion.

  Got a midwinter smile instead. “My mother’s house. The Street of Apothecaries, seventeenth shop from Tano docks. There’s a hammered-copper sign out front that looks like a bundle of sweetleaf.”

  Whatever that was. “I’ll find it.”

  “Better you don’t. It’s not safe down there for the highborn, Szanys.”

  Because the Suburba relied on the cartels to keep order. Collections of criminals who held down neighborhoods and ran drugs and, “Aren’t they your friends?”

  The half-blood’s smirk this time was bitter, and the edge cut both ways. “Not sure where I have friends anymore. Like you said. The God doesn’t love me any better than Tal’Shik does.”

  “Then be careful. We need to know what they know about Tal’Shik. That doesn’t happen if you’re dead.”

  “I’ll handle the cartels, Szanys. You handle the Senate. I’ll check the Archives, too. See what I can find about godmagic. I’ll send Briel when I know something. You need me, send a bondie with a message. I’m sure even House Szanys has people who know the Suburba.”

  Dekklis thought that might be an insult. Dredged up the wit to say something back. Too late.

  Snow was already turning. She threaded her arm through Veiko’s. The skraeling had his free
hand locked on his axe, as if he meant to pull it out and cut himself a path out of here.

  Skraeling manners, skraeling superstitions, that damn direct stare that he had—you forgot how young the man was. A few years past twenty, maybe. Cardik had, Dek recalled, been the largest place he’d ever been, and all of Cardik would fit into the Suburba’s dockside.

  “Dek.”

  Istel didn’t look any happier than Veiko. Cardik-born, surface-bred Istel. He was Illhari, pure Dvergir. He could pass as a city native until he opened his mouth. Border accent. Border manners. And what the native-born Illhari would forgive an outlander, they would not forgive in another Dvergir.

  Right now, Istel didn’t like the new attention being paid them—because what skraeling and conjuror had not earned, stopping to talk in the middle of the Riverwalk had. Eyes on them now, mostly hostile. Strangers breaking around them, muttering unkind assessments of their ancestry.

  Wouldn’t dare, Dek thought, if she were in uniform. None of them would dare. But she was slinking into Illharek in travel-stained wool and leather, in the company of skraelings and half-bloods. Didn’t look like a trooper. Sure as hell didn’t look highborn.

  “Dek?” Istel asked, a little more urgently. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she lied. “Come on.”

  Illharek was an old city. The newer parts had been conjured out of living rock, shaped and slick and graceful, but the garrison came from the time before the conjurors had learned how to shape the stone, before the Academy grew out of the walls above First Tier and the highborn moved their houses higher still. The garrison was Old High City solid, great granite blocks stacked together so that a child’s fingers wouldn’t fit into the cracks. It occupied most of the First Tier, barracks and buildings and training plazas, all walled off. A city within a city. The solid line of defense between Suburba and the rest of Illharek. You wanted to get into the Tiers, you had to come past the garrison’s gates.

  What about the Suburba, Szanys? Who protects those people?

  Foremothers defend, if Snow’s subversion didn’t persist when the half-blood was nowhere near. Dekklis had called Snow contagious once. Might’ve been truer than not.

  Foremothers knew she’d infected Istel. Turned a good partner

  don’t you mean silent?

  into someone who argued, into someone who’d threatened—

  I’ll go if you won’t, Dek.

  —desertion. Dek had no doubt at all that he’d’ve come south with Snow and Veiko without her if she’d insisted on staying in Cardik. Had no doubt it would’ve come to blows between them if she’d tried to make him stay.

  So ask why she was in Illharek, then. Ask if it was loyalty to the Republic or a simple reluctance to cross swords with Istel that put her on the road to

  home

  the garrison gates. Statues of Illharek’s heroes lined the road at intervals. There, Tuovi the Tyrant. There, Ana the Just, and Ragna Half-Blood. All of them in legion kit, the modern stuff, with the short sword that had not been widespread until the Purge, which came after Tuovi and Ana both. They had been founding foremothers. They had been godsworn. And they had remained from that darker time, having stories more important than their heresies. But the others, names and statues who had also been godsworn—they had been dragged down and melted for steel to forge the first swords of the Republic’s legion.

  That’s rot, Szanys. You know that. Propaganda. They used the same weapons before, during, and after the Purge.

  Snowdenaelikk’s wisdom, no doubt from the Archives, which the Academy kept in violation of Senate order.

  Toadshit, Dek. Senate knows about them. Senate wants them around. It’s more propaganda—see the Purge, see the scrolls burning, see Illharek casting off its old ways. That’s theatre. Any Suburban street-singer can tell you that.

  Dekklis hoped Snowdenaelikk was right about that. Hoped that the Academy had the records that might tell them how to turn aside a godsworn army. How to fight godmagic.

  And Dek hoped, with a dark little kernel of spite, that Snow was wrong. No archives. No answers. One moment of oh toadshit to erase the habitual, arrogant smirk on her face, that half-blood heretic who had a knack for landing on her feet, who couldn’t even stay dead. Be nice, just once, to see her fail.

  Except if Snow failed here, if she was wrong about what the Academy knew, then it was the legion who’d bleed first.

  The legion said death in defense of Illharek was honorable. But the legion hadn’t seen what Dekklis had. There was nothing honorable about dying spiked and bled out in a godsworn rite like K’Hess Kenjak. The legion oath said life and honor for the Republic. That of the two, honor was the more precious. And maybe Dek was a heretic, too, now, because she wasn’t sure she believed that anymore.

  Damn certain she didn’t want trooper bodies stacked up like cordwood. Damn sure she didn’t want more dead like Kenjak.

  It was always the green ones died first in a war. K’Hess Kenjak had been green as they came.

  There’d be a lot of Kenjaks if Snow was wrong.

  She and Istel hadn’t been green when they’d become partners, because scouts came out of experienced ranks; but they’d been young. They’d gotten older because they were

  lucky

  good at what they did. Because they could trust each other. Because, until Snowdenaelikk, Dekklis had never doubted her partner’s motives. Until Snowdenaelikk, she wouldn’t have thought to look and see if he was still following her.

  Which he wasn’t. Hell and damn. Hanging back now, Istel, arms folded and shoulders hunched. Only his voice came after her, bitten to the quick.

  “Dek.”

  “What?”

  “What are you doing?”

  She could hear the shouts behind the garrison wall. Training noises. Thwack of wooden swords, a centurion bawling abuse at new milae.

  She pitched her voice to carry. Hell if she’d walk back to him. Let them shout like debating senators. “Obvious, isn’t it?” and pointed.

  He threw a narrow-eyed stare at the garrison walls. Cut the gap between them with quick strides. Came a hairsbreadth from taking her arm, hell and damn, that was how much Snow had corrupted him. He caught himself at the last. Splayed stiff fingers, palm out, sorry and wait together.

  “We don’t have any orders, Dek.”

  “So?”

  A flash of the old Istel, eyes sliding off hers. He stared at the garrison walls. Worked his mouth around stillborn sentences. Then: “The praefecta will ask to see them.”

  “What, now you’re fretting protocol? Orders? The consequences of breaking the rules? Didn’t bother you back in Cardik.”

  “I didn’t think we were coming here! I thought we were going to warn the Senate!”

  “You didn’t think!” hissed between teeth, because the guards had noticed them arguing by now, because passersby had. “How do we warn the Senate? I talk to my mother. I don’t go up there wearing fourteen days of road dirt and a scout’s uniform. You listen to me. This isn’t Cardik, savvy? You lay hands on a woman here, you shout at her, people notice. You’re in Illharek, and you need to remember that. You have no family here. No property. And the legion won’t risk the Senate’s temper defending one border-born man. Listen, Istel. Most of the command here is highborn. To them, you’re nothing.”

  And there was the rebel Istel, the one Snowdenaelikk had created up north. Sudden direct stare and raised chin that would get Istel on report if he pulled it with any other officer, that would get him flogged if he tried it on any other highborn.

  And what are you, Dek?

  Just as infected as Istel, clearly, because she didn’t mind the stare or the defiance half as much as she worried she might’ve said too much. Hurt him, foremothers defend her, insulted him, and when did a daughter of Szanys care about either? But if he walked away from her now, she might not see him again. If she lost him in the Suburba, even Briel wouldn’t find him.

  She could grab his arm and r
aise no attention. Did, and gripped hard enough to bruise. “Listen. Before you do something stupid. The praefecta’s an old friend of mine. We came up together. She will never think I’ve gone absent without leave.”

  It took him a few heartbeats. “You’re going to lie to her.”

  “I’m saying I won’t have to lie. I’ll say we were the best chance to get word out of Cardik, which is true. That we ran damn near fourteen days overland to get here. That’s true. That we found more Taliri in the woods than just normal bandits, and they came after us. Also true. I’m not going to say Cardik’s smoke and ash by now, because we don’t know that it is. I’m not saying anything about godsworn, or Snow, or Veiko. That means you don’t.”

  That should have fixed it. Should’ve patched the gap between them, gotten her Istel’s best no shit, Dek face when he knew she was teasing him.

  But this was an angry Istel, sullen, who dropped his eyes to the street. Bitter, quiet: “I don’t say anything. Let you do the talking. That’s how it works here, yeah? Do I savvy?”

  What did you expect, Szanys?

  “Yeah,” she muttered, and swung toward the gate and the guards. “You savvy.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Snow had warned him about Illharek. She had told him no sky and no light and no green things. She had described Illharek in broad gestures. Made models of it, out of fruit peels and pips and crockery, on the table in the flat they’d shared at Aneki’s.

  There’s the main cavern, that’s here, but there’s all these side passages. Tunnels, too.

  That go where? he had asked, fascinated by the spoons radiating out of the central bowl. He could not imagine a place that matched her description. It was fantastic, impossible, like the noidghe’s hearthside stories had been in his childhood.

  Deep pits. Streams that feed into the lake. Paths to other cities. Sometimes nowhere at all.

  He knew there was a deep lake called Jaarvi, at the bottom of the cave where the underground rivers collected. He knew the Jaarvi fed the Jokki, which was the main river coming out the cave-mouth, the one with the massive road beside it, and the barges and boats clotting its surface. Snow had told him that the buildings in Illharek clung to the stone and stretched up, stacked in layers. That there were bridges connecting levels and walkways that stretched between layers over the basin and the lake.