Mourning Cloak

I can move fast, but not as fast as lightning, even if I were completely transformed. I have only time to shout a warning as the bouquet of glass balls—a new addition to this most ancient of places—flashes. Flutter flies apart inside a flare of white light. I cringe, spiders painting my vision dark to compensate. I see particles of her, points of winking color, and make a futile, desperate gesture out to them with one hand.

And then I have no more time to worry about Flutter, because night walkers are upon me. A pair of them, one jade, the other lapis lazuli, their lean, elongated bodies glistening. They are all wrong in this chamber of curves and arches, of heavy warmth and old light and earth colors. Their knives slash at me and slide off my strengthened forearms and wrists in sparks and screeches.

Spiders burrow into my core, scurrying to armor me fully. Normal vision is completely gone, replaced by heat signatures and energy patterns. My focus zeroes in on one that flashes hot and violet and familiar. Liquid fire zings up my nerves.

Sera. Here in this room.

The night walkers are no more than bugs. I swat them aside, send them clattering to the floor in a tangle of stick-like limbs. One whips its blade at my knee, and I stake it through its narrow chest. My sword bites deep into the floor as it writhes, then falls still. Its companion’s knife stabs for my neck; I sever its head in return. Black fluid, smelling of pepper, leaks onto the floor.

No interruptions. Not after all this time. I walk toward that knot of purplish energy, now gone dark like a bruise.

“Sera.”

She crouches against a pedestal of rough-hewn rock. My heart is a pump, pistons moving with well-lubricated hissing. My stomach burns—I force the spiders back from it, drive them away. I lift my hands and peel the armor back from my face. I want to see Sera, really see her, not as a collection of points or a bundle of energy, but as the woman I’d fought beside, slept with, lost for too many years.

She raises a pinched and grayish face to me, her once-sparkling eyes darkened and depthless. Her honey-and-brown hair is thin and snarled, tight against her scalp. But she is still human and she is still Sera. My Sera.

She rises to her feet, shakily, as I reach her. She is too thin, too wasted, and I hang back, not wanting to touch her without her permission. Not after leaving her alone and hopeless in a hellish existence for three years. Not after taking so long to come to her.

Sera stares at me a long moment, reaches out to touch my naked face. Her fingertips are butterfly-soft and I shiver.

It’s been so long since I’ve been touched with love.

Sera steps forward first, into my embrace. Metal recedes from my body, my arms almost close around her. Then something pricks me, small and sharp, in the stomach. I jerk back.

“Sera?”

Her perfume wafts to me, the scent of jasmine, but under it is sourness. Her gaze on me is empty, leached of all emotion. She looks at me, but doesn’t see me. A cold and constricting current travels through my veins. All my nerves flash pain. I double over, retching. Sera’s arms fall away, dropping me as if I were rubbish.

“Sera, what are you doing?” I plead, between gasps. My body goes numb. I cannot think. I expect her to come to me, the way she’s always done, but instead she tosses a syringe into a container and turns away.

Turns away. She’s never done that before. Not when I was just a shepherd-boy, not when the Circle rejected me, not even at Tau Marai.

But she does it now, and her manner is not that of a prisoner but a mastermind. Her clothes, I see now, are simple but smart. She puts on a pressed white coat, tugs down the sleeves. Rings wink on every finger. The jewels set in them flare to life as Sera raps them in an impatient staccato. The door crashes open. More monstrosities, weird hybrids of night walkers and eerie men bound in.

Sera speaks to me, over her shoulder, without even looking at me. “Finishing what we started all those years ago, Kato. You were too weak to see it through. You weren’t the man I thought.”

Oh, Taurin. That hurt. Hurt more than the convulsions, more than the transformation, more than the pain of mere physical wounds. I hadn’t been the man she wanted me to be. I hadn’t fought to the end. I hadn’t died for the cause. I’d run when we couldn’t drag victory from that debacle.

But she hadn’t been at the front, on the line of battle. She didn’t know what it was like, those Garguants and those cold bronze gates, sucking out all the life from you.

“No, Sera! The gate… It’s too…” Fresh spasms wring me dry. I can’t speak.

She bends. I look into her cold eyes. “I finally have my army ready. The Dark Masters can’t stand against us. And I have the power to open our way.”

Hard hands grasp me, pull me up. Sera takes hold of my wrist, pushes aside the tattered remains of my sleeve. My arm is limp, and I can barely feel my fingers, rubbery and fat at the end of my too-heavy hands. I can’t move my limbs, can’t keep myself from falling, can’t do anything as she plunges a needle into my vein. Can’t take my eyes from the syringe filling up with red-gold blood. My blood, caught mid-transformation, bristling with tiny invisible spiders.

Sera motions to one of the eerie men. He slaps a gauze pad, then an adhesive bandage to the pinprick in my arm. Sera rolls up her own sleeve and injects my blood into herself.

“No!” It takes so much effort to get that one word out through my numbed lips that it should’ve come out as a bellow, echoing off the ceiling. But only a whisper reaches my ears. “My blood will kill you!”

Sera’s eyes are closed, her head tilted to the side. She smiles as the death-tide of spiders washes through her system. When she opens her eyes, they are weary. “I’ve built up an immunity to your blood, Kato,” she explains, as if to an exasperating child. “I’e b8220;I&;ve been giving myself some of it every day for months now. Weeks apart before then.”

How?

“The ward woman.”

The ward woman. Even my emotions are muted. I want to feel angry and hurt, but instead of lashing out, the feelings are coiled into knots inside of me. The soft-voiced, soft-skinned ward woman coming every month for my blood, explaining how she needed it to keep the wards strong. How I’d accepted it without question and let her bleed me.

“You sent the cloak.” My words come out in a mumble, but Sera’s mouth tightens.

“No.” She clips the word. “She slipped her leash. I sent a flash to destroy her but she was too strong for it.”

So Flutter had escaped. Poor confused, falling-apart Flutter. My laugh comes out bitter and ends on a sob.

Sera’s eyes narrow. “You care what happens to the cloak, Kato? You hunt cloaks for more than a year after I left you, yet you care about this one? Do you even know who she is?”

“Eilendi,” I manage.

“So you know that much, do you?” Her voice is low and angry. “Did you know that she is the eilendi who did nothing the day we fought and lost at Tau Marai? They made a Seeing as had never been before—oh, yes, Toro told me later—and she watched us burn and die instead of tearing open those gates and taking the fight to the Masters inside.”

So. Flutter had been the Weaver of that Seeing. I am too tired to feel the rage that still boils within Sera after all these years.

“They kept their secrets well, the eilendi,” Sera goes on. “It took me years to find who the Weaver was, but I tracked her down at last, the traitorous jackal-whore. And yes, I enjoyed watching her suffer, the way she made all of us suffer that day.”

What do you know about the suffering, Sera? You were not at the vanguard of the attack. You did not feel the acid eating away at your skin or the scalding breath of the Garguants on your face. I am too heartsick to say any more.

“Well, I don’t need them.” Sera tosses her head. “I don’t need Taurin and his gifts, nor the eilendi and their Seeing. Highwind taught me that power is for the taking and I will take it and use it the way it should’ve been. I will be the one transformed.”

Sera strides toward a console of sleek metal and square lights and fiddles with the buttons. Wires attach it to a crystal pedestal that looks like it grew out of the very floor. Highwind technology merged with Kaal Baran arcana.

Her minions drag me to one side as if I’m a sack of flour and prop me against a wall. I sag, one shoulder lower than the other, and can’t sit back up again. My mouth is slack. I feel saliva drip down my chin and pool on my chest.

Taurin’s Champion. Taurin’s joke, more like it. And I hate myself as Sera steps into the sunken pool, as the nozzles vibrate and screech to life, as their beams of light sear into my eyeballs because I cannot close my lids nor move my head. I loathe myself as I try to stir my spiders to life, but they are beyond my reach, smoked into unconsciousness by Sera’s drug.

Sera screams with the agony of it—and don’t I know how much it hurts, that first time!&n="first t#8212;and I can do nothing.

I can do nothing at all.

I think my cheeks are wet.

And then the sleep that’s overcome my spiders pulls me under, and I fall into its embrace.