Mourning Cloak

I am undone by Kato Vorsok’s anger, his sorrow, his despair. They’re knotted into his muscles and dug into his bones and flooded into his veins. Adrift inside him, my bonds break apart. Senses disappear first, then judgment, and memory last.

Who am…?

What…?

Hold on.

Lalita vey lalita vey…

Old routine and deep faith arrest the flow, slow the dissolution, gather, hold.

Brings myself to myself. Holds myself to my myself.

Not that there is much to me now. I’m a bundle of energy, a collection of particles, hiding inside a body in pain, a body frozen in mid-transformation.

I hear the skitter-click of spider legs, see half-unraveled tissue, taste the change of living matter into crackling energy.

I flee, not because I have a plan, but because something terrible is happening and I’m trapped in here with it. Already, the spiders have grabbed particles from me—or else I left some behind in the room, when Kato Vorsok called to me and I fled into him.

I’m going to be rather short if I ever return to myself.

Dry humor. Understatement. I stop at the familiar lemon taste of that thought.

This. This is me.

I have a personality.

What happens to Kato’s as he transforms? Does he lose himself in metal and energy, just as I lost myself in dissolution and darkness when I became—was made into—a cloak?

I run into what looks like a frenzied group-coupling of spiders. Several attach together to form another creature, something dark and biped. I dodge into arteries and stay in his blood as long as I can, but it is more light than liquid and does little to hide me. I leap on to nerves stretched fine and silver, up the spinal cord, up to the neck…

And right into alien sentries, bristling with weapons of undoing. Jagged stars, spiky caltrops, nets with cutting strands. These don’t belong here. They hold Kato Vorsok a prisoner in his body as much as they do me.

Disperse. I scatter into nervous points, my components so much less than the sum of the whole. Remember! I tell my fleeing particles. Remember…eilendi…Taurin…

Taurin.

My God.

Remember.

Surely even the smallest part of me will.

I am cut so small, spread so thin, that the sentries don’t notice me as I flow past them.

For one moment, I think the hard part is over.

Smack. Like a wave breaking onto shore, I hit a wall.

His mind, so tight that even the smallest part of me will not slip through.

But it is still a wall. And walls usually have doors. He’s not had time to brick himself up completely.

I coalesce and flow around until I find the one doorway in his wall.

They are the same bronze gates th unnze gatat lead into Tau Marai. The same gates that resisted Kato and a dozen Champions before him. The most impenetrable things he knows.

Gates such as these can only be opened from the inside.

“Kato Vorsok. I wish to talk to you.”

Nothing.

“You cannot give up and die. If you do, you take me with you.”

He doesn’t care.

“If you surrender now, your life will have meant nothing.” Even as I say it, I know he doesn’t care about his legacy. Love, and the memory of love, kept him living. Now even that has been taken from him. Who has he truly cared for, besides Sera? Everyone knew of Kato Vorsok, but who actually just plain knew him?

Scritches in the dark. His jailers come, hunting me. I could scatter and run, but I cannot keep circling his body forever, shedding pieces of myself. No, my stand is here at these gates.

“Kato Vorsok! Your spider guards are coming for me and they will shred me to pieces. If you want to stop Sera from doing this to herself, you need my help.”

The doors don’t open, but shift a fraction. I turn to mist, dodging mandibles, and slide through.

I gather myself together on the other side, and stop in surprise. The landscape of his mind is not Highwind nor the desert where the eilendi live nor the broken valley outside Tau Marai. Instead I am on the steppes, a world of wind-scrubbed rock and short sparse grasses. Sky rolls blue on every side, and the wind chills my ears. I shiver and tuck my hands into my wide sleeves.

Wait. I look at my hands—they are as I remember them, brown and small and normal. Nothing drags at my shoulders and arms, nothing flutters out behind me. My feet are encased in sandals.

I set off for the one living thing in this entire expanse—a figure in unbleached sheep’s wool tunic and dark pants.

Distance and time work differently in this mindscape. I walk a long time, but never get any nearer. And then I climb out of a hollow, and there he is. Not looking at me, but turned away, gazing across the steppe.

I join him and we both gaze at the empty land together. No animals, no birds, just the sighing of the wind.

I wait for him to speak. It is his head after all.

“I looked after sheep and goats here,” he says, finally, absently. I take that as permission to look at him. His face is sad and weary, but young, not as lined with bitterness and failure as what he shows to the world. “I had a hawk, too. I thought I would marry Nettina from the family that camped next to ours at the winter grounds. I thought I’d go to market in Banarkand and admire the clothes and flags one day. I never thought I’d leave the plains.”

“Life never goes the way we expect it to.”

Now he looks at me. The sharpness of his gaze makes me wish for my cloak-wings to shield myself with.

“What is it?” I ask.

“You’re young.” There is pity in his voice.

“So are you, here,” I point out. “Here we appear as we still think of ourselves. It is not truth, but our own perception. Here you are the Shepherd and I am the Novice. But that’s not who we are, anymore, are we?”

“No. Too much water has passed by for that.&, ay for t#8221; Pain tightens his features, casts pallor over his face. “I wonder how Sera sees herself now.”

I wait.

“I failed her,” he says, finally. “I failed them all. I was not Taurin’s Champion, after all. I didn’t have it in me to sacrifice myself, in the end.”

“Perhaps you were saved, just for today.”

“Why? Sera will win. She has her army and the transformation. The gates will not stand against her.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I say, softly.

“So, it was you. Up on the cliff that day.”

No need to ask which day. “Yes. It was me.” I betrayed you.

And I still stand by the choice.

“We had the chance to crush Tau Marai. Defeat all the golems, take on the Garguants. Tear down the gates and enter the city.” He says it all without emotion, like going down items on an inventory list. “She—” He pauses, swallows. “She said that Toro told her the Seeing was stronger than it had ever been. What did it show you, Weaver?”

I make myself hold his gaze, though I would rather look at his shoes, the ground, anywhere else. “I saw how the gates and the Garguants and the golems were connected, as if they were one thing, built to keep separate those within the city and those outside it.” I shake my head. “I didn’t trust myself to crack the gates open and let whatever was inside come out.”

“That’s what Taurin showed you.”

“That’s what I think he showed me,” I correct. “Another eilendi—your friend Toro for one—might have seen differently.”

He looks thoughtful rather than angry, but I sense he is keeping emotion at a distance, locked down. He knows about prisons.

“The golems,” he says, slowly, thinking out loud. “They came from holes in the cliffs all around the valley. From structures built on to the wall itself. Same with the Garguants. I never saw anything go in or out of the city. Not in the three months I laid siege to it. We saw no Masters, just the horde of golems.” His mouth twists.

“And how many of those did you destroy?”

“Dozens. Hundreds. It doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it?” I toy with the sleeves of my robe, and somehow I know that this is a habit of mine, to keep my impatience at bay and let him reach his own conclusions.

He frowns. “You think the guardians of the city were at the end of their resources?”

“Yes. I think you breached their last lines of defense. I went to the libraries, afterwards. To see what our histories said about the origins of Tau Marai.”

“It was built by the Dark Masters who withdrew into it after the time of Shivering.”

“Nothing I read indicated that they built it or went there willingly.”

“You think Tau Marai is their prison, and the golems their jailers.”

If I’m wrong… I nod.

His mouth hardens. “And Sera’s about to let them out.”