61
~ EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO: AKELLA ~
Akella woke with the sound of her own choked screams in her ears, heart thundering in her chest. It took several moments of staring at the rushes woven into the roof of her primitive hut to reassure herself that everything she’d just seen had been a dream. Only a dream.
Adriel had been in that dream, along with the Empress of the Empire of Dorsa and her concubine–Commander of the Palace Guard. Their faces had been so blank and empty, their eyes as glassy as a doll’s eyes. Akella had tried to rouse them from their complacency, first with words, then with the dagger carved with the symbols of sorcery. The blade was supposed to sever shadow from host. But when she went to wield it, it had been like trying to move through a vat filled with honey.
In the end, Akella had fled.
She fled because she’d had no other choice. If she didn’t flee, she would become like them – shadow infected and doll eyed.
Akella sat up. Her bed, like the low ceiling above her, was made of woven rushes. It wasn’t as comfortable as a real bed, but she’d certainly slept on worse. Careful to protect her still-healing arm, she dressed and gathered her supplies for the day – a fishing spear, a basket, a cracked but serviceable clay jug filled with fresh drinking water.
There was a rationality to retreat, Akella reasoned as she hiked through the ruined husk of a city towards the shoreline. Some people viewed retreat as an indication of a bankrupted moral character, as utterly honorless. Some people thought it better to martyr oneself than to retreat, as if death held an intrinsic nobility that life somehow lacked.
And by “some people,” of course, Akella was mainly thinking of the bloody Commander.
It was the face of the Commander in that last moment of their battle with the Order of Whatever witches in Persopos that haunted Akella’s nightmares most frequently, that moment when the Commander realized that Akella was running, abandoning them to save her own skin.
You gutless coward,the Commander’s face had said. You fish-bellied traitor.
Yet what choice had Akella really had? She’d run from Persopos the first time because if she hadn’t, she would have been as doomed as her crew. How was she supposed to help them if whatever had happened to them also happened to her? She couldn’t, obviously. The Empress and Commander might see some sort of glory in fighting to the very last, but Akella didn’t. She saw it as stupidity. A living rizalt was a rizalt who knew when to abandon a sinking ship, when to lower a life raft and row away. So she was still here, master of her own body and mind, and they weren’t. The Commander could suck on that the next time she thought to call Akella a coward.
Besides, there was a difference between running and retreating, a truth she tried to impart again and again to the Commander in her dreams. If she’d simply run away, she would’ve taken the sailboat from its hiding place and found a southwest wind to carry her all the way to the Adessian Islands, all the way to Perrintot. If she’d wanted to run away, she’d be holding her brother’s new baby by now, bringing fresh coconuts each morning to her aging mother. If she’d wanted to run away, she would have left those two idiotic Imperial fools to their fate.
But had she?
“No. I’m still here,” she said aloud. “So’s the boat.”
She nodded to herself. That was right – Akella was still here, biding her time, gathering her strength, preparing for her one-woman invasion of the city of Persopos.
“Who do you think you’re kidding?” said Akella’s other voice aloud, the voice that knew better. “One-woman invasion? Ha. Try fooling yourself, if you like, but you can’t fool Preyla.”
She saw the Commander’s face again, that look she’d given Akella when Akella fled the battle.
Akella wasn’t quite sure how much time had passed since the fight outside the walled compound at the top of the city of Persopos. She’d counted about three months since the battle against the sorceresses, but something told her it had been longer than that. Normally, she relied upon the positioning of the stars to tell her the month, and when she was in parts of the Adessian Sea she knew especially well, she could narrow down the time to the precise hour of the precise day.
But the night sky in this place confused her. Granted, Akella had only sailed this far east once before, so she was less familiar with the sky here than in other places, but there was more to it than that: Not only were the stars in all the wrong places based on where they were, their configuration changed with a rapidity that didn’t make sense at all.
Either Akella had been knocked on the head harder than she’d thought by one of the sorceresses during the skirmish and had utterly lost her ability to read the stars, or the passage of time in this place was very strange.
Neither possibility was one that Akella particularly wanted to think about; both reinforced the alien nature of this land.
Akella wound her way through the abandoned city, its overgrown streets as familiar to her now as Negusto’s or Tak’u Sai’s. Like Persopos itself, which was about two days’ hike south of here, this place was eerie. But at least Persopos teemed with life, the way a city was supposed to. Men, women, and even the occasional child thronged the streets there, moving to and fro with whatever their day’s business was.
Well, Persopos teemed with a kind of life. The fact that they moved to and fro without speaking, all of them wearing those blank expressions on their faces, was at least as unnerving as the abandoned city’s unnatural silence.
Some days, she liked to imagine this abandoned place filled with people, in part to soothe her loneliness, in part because imagining it thriving made the goosebumps covering her skin fall for a few seconds. It must have been really something once, this place. Its avenues were all paved and perfectly straight; its every two- and three-story building a work of art. When she imagined the streets filled with merchant carts, women in fine silks, and noblemen riding on proud horses, she could almost ignore the way vines pushed through the pavement and crawled up the blackened, crumbling statues that decorated each building. She could almost ignore the suffocating silence that not even a bird’s song interrupted.
Over the months she’d been camping on its outer edge, Akella had explored almost every inch of the city, both because she was looking for something that might help her win a rematch against the sorceresses and because her naturally curious nature drove her to search for clues that might reveal what had happened to the people who had once lived here.
Whichever people had been here, they’d clearly been advanced. As advanced as the Empire, if not more. And she was sure that if she were capable of reading their language, whose odd, triangular letters had been carved into virtually every wall of every official-looking building, she would’ve been able to piece together where they had gone and why. Because it was obvious they had abandoned their city rather than being forced out of it. Akella knew what the remnants of battle looked like; she’d seen it clearly in Pellon, after all, not to mention other cities. Battle looked like scorched and broken boards, rubble strewn in the streets, and the rust-colored stains left by blood. This place had none of those signs. It appeared as if one day, the city’s residents had simply gathered up their belongings and walked away.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that some of the same doll-eyed, expressionless men and women she’d seen in Persopos had once lived here, the city that was every bit as beautiful as Persopos but two days’ journey north.
It wasn’t just intuition. The city’s apex held a long paved area which Akella assumed had once been its main market square. A huge fountain stood in the center; tall stone columns lining both sides of the open space supported broken wooden beams and the tattered remnants of a fabric awning. But what cemented the connection between this place and Persopos was the faded mural painted on a wall at the market’s far end. The mural showed a man with serious eyes who radiated light. Surrounding him, tiny compared to his giant stature, were dozens of women wearing black cloaks. Each woman wore a small silver pendant around her neck.
Exactly as the seven witches who’d attacked them had.
Exactly as the women who’d greeted Akella and her crew at Persopos’s docks had some two or three years before.
Seeing the mural once had been once enough for Akella; she’d avoided the place ever since then, because it made her skin crawl, made her feel watched.
Instead, she made her way to the long stone-and-sand mole that reached out into the city’s harbor. It was a good place to fish from, she’d learned, and she needed at least one good catch today to replenish her food supplies.
“Two good catches, and you’d have more than enough to hike down to Persopos and try to get those fools free,” that other voice said aloud. Taunting her. Knowing she wasn’t ready to go back to Persopos yet.
Akella’s heart began to thump at the mere suggestion that she would return to the white city.
“I need more time,” Akella told the other voice. “Time for my arm to heal – at least another week.”
“That’s what you said last week,” said the other voice.
But the other voice was wrong. Some days, Akella’s head still ached from being slammed against the stone wall. And Preyla knew her broken arm was still recovering. She could hardly wield a dagger.
Besides, what if she came across her crew? Seeing them might startle her enough that she would forget to keep her face blank and her eyes dead. Then the witches would notice her, and they would be on her like sharks on chum, and this time she might not be lucky enough to retreat.
“Retreat,” sneered the other voice. “You mean run.”
“I didn’t run. I retreated.”
“You used to be less of a coward,” said the other voice. “At least it seemed that way. But maybe the Commander was right about you all along, Rizalt. Maybe you’re just another gutless pirate.”
“I retreated,” Akella told her other self again. Her self of doubt, disgust, and hatred. “I’ll go back. I’ll go back as soon as I’m ready.”
But a one-woman invasion? How would she ever be ready for that?
Sighing, Akella set her woven basket down on the end of the mole and bent down to roll up her pant legs. She would let Preyla decide what she did next. If she caught two fish, she would hike south for Persopos at first light the next day. If she caught only one fish today, it was a sign she had more preparations to make before she returned to the city carved from the mountain.
“Preparations,” she muttered, disgusted with herself.
But it was up to the goddess of the sea now.