“The end of the Golden Lands,” Caydras announced, standing at the edge of the cliff as if there wasn’t a drop of a towerlength a step away from him. “There’s only ocean past this point.”
Saia savored that word, ‘ocean’. It was a pity it didn’t look bigger than the mountain’s sea from where they were standing. She remembered her bottle-diary and promised herself to fill it with that view at the first chance she got.
“Please don’t tell me we’re stopping here,” Serit said, standing a few steps behind. For a shilvé, they were surprisingly unnerved at the idea of falling, even if Saia suspected a short drop where they could see the bottom scared them more than a long one.
She turned around and walked toward the nearest patch of trees. Mayvaru’s unconscious body was draped across her shoulders like an expensive fur. In those five days of voyage from the ruins to the edge of the Golden Lands, half by foot and half by carriage, Serit had been administering her a tough sedative in addition to Saia’s manipulation, to make sure she’d stay asleep regardless of any contingency. Caydras had accepted, no, insisted to join them when they asked him at the ruins. He’d been the one to suggest the paths that were less likely to be guarded by soldiers and the carriage drivers who wouldn’t betray them.
The news of Mayvaru’s defeat hadn’t yet reached far from the outpost, at least officially. Still, Saia had been wearing her neighbour’s disguise as an extra precaution and Serit was using clothes and scarves of an incospicuous light brown, as much as it pained them. Caydras was dressed as usual, but had accepted to carry the hat with the triangular brim in one of his bags.
He started setting up the fireplace and bedrolls, lending Serit his spare one. The evening was becoming dark: Saia was disappointed she’d missed her first twilight on the ocean by just one hour.
“So,” Caydras broke the silence once the fire was flickering and everyone had settled around it, with Mayvaru’s unconscious shape to Saia’s left. “I think you should kill her.”
“Repeating it every day won’t make me change my mind,” Saia said. “We need answers.”
“Then how do you plan to stop her from telling everyone that we’re here the second you awaken her?”
Saia pointedly turned her head to look at Serit. They took out a map of the Golden Lands from their bag and opened it on the ground in front of them.
“We don’t know anything about the range of her powers except that it’s huge,” they said. “But we’re more than five days of voyage from Aressea, so hopefully she can’t reach the city directly. She doesn’t know where we are, only that we stopped somewhere along the coast. There aren’t any outposts immediately nearby that she can use to send messages or gather information. In this situation, there are some precautions we could take.”
They looked at Saia.
“Don’t let her talk too much. Put her to sleep every two minutes and every time you perceive her patterns change. She shouldn’t have time to get her bearings. Every animal she manages to send away will forget about her commands as soon as she’s asleep. We saw it happen after we defeated her.”
Saia nodded. She remembered the rats and dogs going about their business as soon as they were freed from her influence.
“I’ll keep an eye on the area,” she said, and circled a finger in the air, a new gesture she had coined to mean ‘domain’. The ample rotation suggested she’d have kept it expanded to the absolute maximum.
Serit hesitated at that, but they couldn’t say anything about her viss in front of Caydras. The hunter didn’t even suspect the full extent of her powers, and for the moment Saia was inclined to not reveal anything more.
“And you…” Serit began, turning toward him.
He raised the armed crossbow that they had handed him after the fight.
“I’m ready to kill her as soon as she tries something.”
Saia saw Serit glance at her, but didn’t turn her eyes to meet their gaze openly. They had told each other that bringing the hunter with them was the sensible thing to do, because he knew the area, he wouldn’t have betrayed them, and was good at surviving in the wilderness. The truth was that neither of them liked the idea of killing a helpless enemy. Saia thought she could if it was necessary, in a fight maybe, but by then it would have been too late. So they had accepted Caydras’s enthusiastic help.
“Well,” Serit said, “The sedative should wear off any moment, now.”
Saia checked that Mayvaru’s hands and feet were tied tight. She observed her viss in the meantime. Soon the slow waves of a deep slumber were replaced with a light buzzing. Mayvaru didn’t move.
“I can see you’re awake, you know,” Saia said.
Caydras aimed with the crossbow.
“Sit up and answer or I’ll blow out your head.”
Her ears twitched with surprise at the sound of his voice. She seemed to realize the movement had betrayed her, because she sat up with a groan, her fur mixed up with grass and fallen leaves.
Saia expanded her domain to the maximum, looking for the shining shapes of animals in the wilderness. A bird changed its trajectory mid-flight and started beating its wings faster. She was about to stop it with her winds, then realized it would have revealed the limits of her domain to Mayvaru, so she just put her to sleep, supporting her upright by the fur of her neck. The bird flapped around, confused, then found its way again and disappeared into the trees.
“Let’s make some things clear,” Saia said after awakening Mayvaru again. “You shouldn’t bother trying to escape, because we have your viss.”
Serit raised a thick piece of Mayvaru’s fur they had cut out of the tail.
“I will know it if you lie,” Saia continued. “And he can’t wait to kill you.”
The hunter raised his eyebrows when Mayvaru’s eyes fixated on him.
“So, first question,” Saia said. “Why were you and Beramas looking for Dan and Morìc?”
“It was an order of my master.”
Saia waited, but nothing more came. She thought that maybe Mayvaru was focusing too much on the animals to answer, but they didn’t seem to behave in any different way. It didn’t mean much: maybe Mayvaru was acting outside of her range, maybe she was just looking out from their eyes, without actively controlling them.
“Who’s your master?”
“One of the weavers.”
“We already knew that. If you don’t start telling us more, there’s no point in leaving you alive.”
“Those two damned kids… They’re part of the Lauhas, the main dynasty of the weavers. Mine and Beramas’s task was to kill them, since they were a danger to my master’s legitimacy. They disappeared, so after a while we were called back. Then the master learned that the Lauhas were the only ones to know a powerful pattern and sent us out again to find them. Alive, this time.”
“Beramas wanted to kill Morìc.”
“Beramas always wants to kill.”
Saia was a bit surprised by the disdain in her voice and viss. But the answer was over, so she put Mayvaru to sleep and waited a bit.
“Which pattern?” she asked once she was awake again.
“It’s called ‘holder’. It stores viss, as far as I know, and if you connect it to another pattern, you can use the viss it contains in addition to your own. But they deteriorate fast if they’re full of unused viss for too long.”
“And nobody else knows that pattern in the entire world?”
“Some weavers of minor branches of the Lauhas knew specific variants of it, yes. The one for the carpets is famous. But they can’t be applied to anything else. It’s a complicated pattern: you need to know how to create it, change it to fit the material, and then adapt it to other patterns and their variants.”
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A furious scribbling distracted her. Serit was writing down her words on the back of the map with a piece of graphite.
“Ignore them, look at me. You mentioned that your master is a weaver, but we want to know who they are. How did they replace the Lauhas, and why? What’s their role in the government?”
Saia realized as she spoke that she didn’t know anything about how the families in power actually governed. She tried her best not to make Mayvaru aware of it.
“The Lauhas were evil and corrupt, like all the families. All they care about was growing their riches and power.”
“And your master sent you to kill two children. That’s pretty evil too.”
Mayvaru lowered her ears and closed her eyes.
“I can’t talk about him. Even if I wanted, I… This body is too loyal.”
“I can kill her now, right?” Caydras said, a finger already on the trigger. “You said I could kill her if she refused to answer.”
Saia saw an instant of genuine terror in Mayvaru’s viss, immediately followed by hesitant acceptance; she was ready to die to preserve that secret.
She put her to sleep.
“No, we still have more questions to ask.”
She waited for Serit to finish their tiny treatise on the holders. Her mind was crossed by the silly image of them discussing viss properties with Aili. Provided she didn’t realize they’d been the one that kept Saia away from the mountain, otherwise she’d have ripped them in half.
“Thoughts?” she asked them when they raised their eyes from the map.
“Dogs are loyal to their owners. They consider them family, they can actually feel love or something akin to it toward them. If Mayvaru was a dog and not a person before becoming this…”
“Maybe she was this man’s dog,” Saia concluded.
Serit shrugged.
“Could be. Or maybe it’s another manipulation of the beastforgers.”
Saia nodded, observing the half-person half-dog she was holding upright with a hand on the back of her neck.
“Whatever it is, I don’t think she’ll reveal anything about him.”
She tried to press the matter anyway, once Mayvaru was awake again.
“What about the rest of the family, then? What can you tell us about the weavers?”
Mayvaru shook her head as much as Saia’s grip allowed it.
“They’re part of my master’s plans. You can kill me if you want, but he will create someone else like me as soon as he’s sure that I’m dead. A lesser creature. It will certainly take time and the result won’t be as loyal as me, and he can’t create too many without immediately having all the other families against him. But if I die, he will. And you might not be so lucky next time.”
Her words managed to worry Saia a bit, but she was determined not to let it show.
“So what you’re telling us is that if we kill you, we have to bury your body so deep nobody will ever know?”
Mayvaru’s ears lowered, but she didn’t answer.
“If you die, the weavers will still have Beramas,” Saia said, remembering the distaste she had perceived when Mayvaru was talking about him. “Don’t you think he’ll be enough? He’ll probably take over your duties too.”
“I know what you’re trying to do, but it won’t work. Beramas’s master isn’t the same as mine. Contrary to me, he doesn’t share any connection with them.”
“Really? He seems more powerful than you, though.”
Mayvaru’s nose was trembling.
“He’s an exhibitionist and a sadist. He would only use his powers to hurt people, if he could.”
Clearly, her loyalty didn’t extend to Beramas at all.
“He can’t?”
“No. His master keeps him in check.”
“Who’s his master?”
Mayvaru didn’t answer. Another weaver, Saia guessed.
“How do they manage to control him?”
“I don’t know. I’ve asked myself this question a thousand times, but he threatened to kill me if I pried.”
“Would he be able to? Defeat you, I mean. Kill you.”
Mayvaru didn’t answer, but it was a silence different from the one she had maintained when refusing to talk about her master: she was considering the question, choosing her words.
“He is powerful,” she said in the end. “I have to admit it. He’s the perfect human: he generates more viss than normal and controls it perfectly. He’s immune to manipulation. He can hear, smell and see better than any human, even if not as good as some of my animals. His body regenerates constantly, it’s impossible to tell his age or hurt him. And he has a perfect memory.”
“Which is a problem,” Serit murmured. “Who knows how many patterns he can use. And he can trace them anywhere, at any moment.”
Saia put Mayvaru to sleep, but waited only a little while before awakening her again. She needed to know more.
“How did he become like this? Or was he born with these powers?”
Mayvaru showed her teeth, an expression that could be the start of both a growl and a laugh.
“He’s a cannibal. He’s more than a human because he takes the best traits from all the humans he eats.”
Saia didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t that. She put Mayvaru to sleep on instinct, as an act of self-defense from anything she could say next.
Serit stood.
“Oh goddess, I’m going to throw up.”
They didn’t, but kept their face turned to the sky, with both hands crossed over it, as if they wanted to hold inside tears, screams and vomit at the same time.
“And you want to fight him,” they added, voice muffled by their fingers. “He’s an immortal cannibal and we’re going to fight him with six years of viss and a crossbow.”
“How is that possible?” Saia asked no one in particular. “It doesn’t make sense. He eats humans, so he becomes more… Human? What does ‘more human’ even mean?”
Serit laughed. It was a bitter sound, tense and maybe more than a little insane. When they finished, they lowered their hands abruptly and looked at her with a blank expression. For a moment, they seemed the one made of stone.
“He’s on our tracks, you realize that, right? Since the moment the guards at the outpost told him about Mayvaru, and you can bet someone did. We have to find the nearest big city, hope a méze extends a ladder to trade, find a way to be accepted on board and leave.”
“Can you please calm down?” Saia said, tone rising to a yell.
“You saw how he looked at me at the sculptors’ palace. I bet I’m a rare delicacy to him.”
“He won’t eat you.”
“Says the one with the body of stone!”
Saia was very tempted to just put them to sleep. Then she realized they could feel her nervousness in addition to their own, through the link that connected them.
“We have Mayvaru hostage,” she said, keeping her voice calm. “Even in case he hates her as much as she hates him, they have goals in common, so it’s in his interest that she doesn’t die. And believe me, after using six years of my life to fight Mayvaru, I don’t want to face him at all. We’ll keep out of his way and look for Dan, then we’ll decide how we’re going to free Morìc. With Mayvaru unconscious, we can go anywhere without being immediately spotted.”
Serit sighed and dropped down next to her.
“I want to go home.”
“Me too.”
They sat a bit in silence. Caydras was pretending to polish the already shining metal of the crossbow, eyes fixed on Mayvaru’s unconscious body.
“Have you ever had to deal with anything similar?” Saia asked him.
He lowered the weapon.
“I’ve heard of a couple of similar cases. Bodies that were found with traces of bites and missing parts. My colleagues had been called to investigate, because the local authorities believed it was some sort of beast. The culprits didn’t live long: that much power is addicting, they have to eat more and more to keep up. One of them went too long without eating human flesh and whithered away on their own, despite ingesting normal food as well. The other became careless with their murders and was killed during a capture attempt. Either way, I was glad I wasn’t on the case.”
“Really? It was that simple to get rid of them?” Saia asked.
Caydras looked at the flames, as if trying to remember something.
“Now that I think about it, I don’t recall anything about them using magic. I guess being employed by one of the families has its advantages.”
“Corpses and patterns,” Saia said bitterly. “All he needs to keep going forever.”
Serit hugged their legs to their chest, eyes fixed on the flames.
“My guess,” they said, very quietly. “Is that their body uses the information in the viss of the people that they… In their victims, to better itself in some way. Repeat the process enough times, and you get a person with superhuman abilities. The transformation is faster because it doesn’t require the adapting process animal people constantly go through, but the changes are still extreme, so if they don’t keep up with them they die.”
“Look at the bright side,” Caydras said. “If you manage to cut off his provision of food, you might kill him without a fight.”
“Yes, sure,” Serit replied. “Except his provision of food is one of the most powerful families of Aressea.”
“What about you, Caydras?” Saia interjected before the hunter could take offense at Serit’s snarky tone. “Don’t you want to kill him now that you know what he is?”
He raised the crossbow to examine its surface more closely.
“I would love to take out another abomination from this world, but I have other plans. Contacting my ex-team members, the ones who are still alive. Recruit more people. Mayvaru has allowed her monsters to prosper for ten years, I bet there’s a lot of work for me out there.”
Saia nodded. She focused on Mayvaru again.
“Well, let’s get this interrogation over with.”
Once awake, Mayvaru sniffed the air and showed her teeth again, looking at Serit.
“Scared, are you?”
“Look at me,” Saia said. “Do you eat humans too?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you despise Beramas for doing the same?”
“We are not the same. Mine is a necessity: only in this form I can talk to my master and understand him. The thought of going back to a time when I couldn’t is sickening.”
Caydras looked at Saia with a bitter smile.
“Told you.”
She ignored him.
“When you couldn’t? Do you mean when you were with the Dulrirs?”
“Yes.”
“What do you remember about them?”
Mayvaru only looked at her, without answering. Saia understood it had something to do with her master. Was he a Dulrir? There was no point in asking. Her silence was the best answer she could obtain.
She put her to sleep, then released her grip on the back of her neck.
“Done.”
“So now I can kill her?”
“No. Didn’t you hear what I said? It’s our hostage.”
“You’re making a mistake. She’s dangerous.”
“Believe me, I know. But we don’t have much choice.”
Caydras shrugged. He started gathering the few things he had scattered around the fire. Serit reluctantly took their bedroll and handed it to him, but he refused by shaking his head.
“Keep it, it was superfluous anyway. I want to be as far away from you two as I can before morning. I’ve been inside those damned ruins for too long.”
He returned the crossbow to Serit. They took it with the tip of their fingers, as if it could bite, or somehow shoot the dart at their head instead of the fire it was aimed at.
“So the monastery is here, you said?” Saia asked, pointing at a little unlabeled square on the map. It was on the coast of the inner sea, some days of voyage into the Golden Lands north of Aressea.
Caydras leaned forward to get a better look, then nodded.
“Don’t expect much, though. The Arissian religion is in the hands of the families, they have their own people for it. Those monks are just an old order that has fallen in disgrace. They’re only allowed to exist here because they help spread the religion to the locals.”
Saia nodded. They said their goodbyes, briefly; as soon as Caydras had realized he wasn’t allowed to kill Mayvaru at all, a sense of urgency had started to flourish all over his viss.
“We shouldn’t go to the monastery,” Serit said once he was gone. “Too close to Aressea.”
Saia didn’t want to start another discussion, so she focused on the sound of the ocean in the distance.
“Rest a bit. We’re leaving tomorrow.”