The Fire Eye Chosen_Sequel to The Fire Eye Refugee Read online

  Kay gave Abi a smile, knowing it probably made her look a little foolish from her position on the ground but unable to help it.

  “Oh, darling,” Abi said, kneeling down beside her and folding her into a tight hug. Abi wore a long dress of winding green and gold. Her hair was pulled back and pinned into place with jewels Kay had no doubt were worth more than her apartment. Abi looked just as out of place on a dirty street as Enos did in his finery as she examined Kay’s injuries with a practiced eye. “Where’s the doctor?” she asked in a worried tone. She looked around, her face darkening as she took in their surroundings. She glared at Enos.

  “We—” he started to say.

  “You what?” Abi asked, rising to her feet and facing him down. “You came upon an obviously injured Kay and decided to question her as she lies on the dirt floor of a squalid vendor stall, in full view of your guards and everyone else along the street who wants to sneak a peek? Look at her face, Enos. If you had one tenth of her injuries, you’d be swaddled in bandages and ointments and the best doctors in the city would all be called to your side. And you all are sitting here questioning her?”

  “We didn’t have a chance yet—”

  “Well here’s your chance. All of you, give us some privacy. I will clean Kay’s face and do my best to attend to her while you fetch a doctor. I assume you’ve already sent for one?” Seeing the looks of dismay on Enos’s and Yamar’s faces, Abi rolled her eyes. “Well, that will be the second order of business, won’t it? First order being back up and give us some space.” Abi didn’t wait on Enos’s reaction, instead spinning back towards Kay with an abruptness that made the hem of her dress flare out and hit Enos across the legs.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “You can’t talk to me like that.”

  “Oh, I can’t?” Abi asked, voice dangerously quiet.

  “No, I’m a member of the Dynasty. Just because you’re dating Hammond doesn’t bring us anywhere close in rank.”

  “You’re right, Enos.” Abi was close enough to Kay to drop a wink no one else could see before she turned to face the little Lord. “I am only dating Hammond. And when we have drinks tonight on the Starlight Balcony, I could mention to him that his — well let’s see, your family tree gets so complicated, given everybody wants to be on it — but you’re his grandnephew, right? I could mention that his grandnephew put on quite an expedition the night of the Opening in a barefist boxing match outside the walls. Or I could mention that his grandnephew formed a full committee with the Dynasty seal of authority in order to keep tabs on his crush, who has repeatedly asked him in far nicer terms than I would use to leave her be. I can think of five or six more things I could mention to Hammond, Enos. And I think he might be having dinner with Tems later tonight? And that’s your father, right?” She looked at Kay and shook her head. “So hard to keep that family tree straight.”

  Kay fought a smile as Enos spluttered. Finally he gave up trying to marshal a counterargument. He turned and walked out into the busy street, his men following him and forcing all the foot traffic to the other side of the thoroughfare. Yamar delivered something like a bow to Abi. “We’ll hold the perimeter and give you your privacy. But I will need to talk with her.”

  Abi sent him off with a wave of her hand and again knelt beside Kay. “Darling, you look absolutely awful.” She produced a compact mirror from her purse and held it up.

  Kay barely recognized the face staring back. She groaned, realizing the paint from the mask that her abductors had slapped on her face was still all over her. It had dried into flaky shades of black and dark blue, with orange around one eye. The paints were scuffed and scraped off at various places, where hands had gripped her head, where her forehead had struck the ground as the blackness claimed her.

  “Now, I didn’t want to say anything,” Abi said theatrically, “but we simply have to talk about how you’re applying your make-up. I thought you put it on a little heavy last night, but you’ve really gone for it today. Are we worried it’s too much?”

  Kay glanced up at her friend. “I got your note. Thanks.” She gave Abi a smile and looked away into the mirror, suddenly embarrassed to be on the dirt floor with a dirty face and a broken arm.

  As she studied her reflection, the smoke crept back from the corners of her eyes, wrapping around her face. The remainders of the paint were supplemented by the smoke and together formed a mask much like those who’d taken her had worn. And then the memories came, triggered by the image or the drug or something else and it washed over her in a flood she was helpless to resist. The mask being placed over her face. The Gyudi looking down from their high thrones, dark like ravens lording over the little mouse they’d captured. The rows of faces, staring dispassionately as Jyurik attacked her in the center of a spinning spectacle. The pain and shock of the snake breaking her arm. Jug-Desh hunts the children, feasting on the helpless who have no one to protect them. The smoke rising in her eyes, her speaking out into the darkness, no idea if she was being heard.

  Kay dropped the mirror and burst into tears, surprising Abi by pulling her close into a desperate hug with one arm.

  “Easy now,” Abi said, trying to find her balance so as not to topple onto and further injure Kay. “Easy now. You’re safe. You’re alive. You’re every bit as marvelous as you’ve always been.” As Kay sobbed into her dress, Abi stroked her hair. “I’m sorry I made fun of your make-up. I’m sure I can learn to love it.”

  Chapter 12. Shadows on the Grass

  The day nearly spent, Kay left the Palace, walking west towards the setting sun. Enos, and by extension Yamar, had insisted she be transported to the Palace in a carriage after the doctor had treated her. The Wrang had set to hunting for the Gyudi’s lair immediately after hearing Kay’s story. The tunnel she’d been found in led to a nest of other tunnels, no rhyme or reason to them. The search was underway, but would take time.

  Yamar noted that the Home Guard reported no new leads on Ewan’s murder, no surprise there, and the committee had met earlier in the morning, before she’d been found. They had noted her absence — to a meeting she’d never been informed of or formally invited to — as a problem of ongoing disrespect. She’d kept her mouth shut on that one.

  She’d put up with Enos’s awkward attempts at ministration and Yamar’s relentless questioning about the previous night until she’d snapped and driven them both away. They might not have gone, but the scolding Abi had given them in Sellers Pocket seemed to have softened them.

  And then, somehow, after all the drama of her abduction, she’d managed to find herself spending most of her day stuck in a room full of clerks.

  Kay had nearly made it out of the Palace before being captured by them. A pack of clerks bearing commands to interview her and collect her body of evidence on the missing children. They’d been set on her trail by the committee and emboldened with authority. Kay’s pleas for rest fell on ears deadened by a lifelong devotion to bureaucracy, and she found herself recounting detail after detail about her caseload to the clerks in a windowless room while scribes captured the whole thing whilst fighting not to yawn. The one time she could have used Enos he was nowhere to be found. The scribes also passed along the news that Mylor and Bola Weiss, parents of Jenna Weiss, had been to speak with the committee. They had left a resoundingly bad review of her services, going so far as to clarify they had fired her, which was the first time she was hearing it.

  It had been a long and trying afternoon and Kay needed to get back to the sofa in her office and rest in a bad way. Her arm was tightly wrapped in a professional sling, the pain for the moment subdued. She marked the Fire Eye, still soft in the lingering daylight, and set off down the hill. This time she checked whether she was followed at least three times before reaching Headwaters, fingering the brass knuckles Yamar had returned to her.

  As she entered Headwaters, her eyes were drawn just ahead of her, where she saw a man standing still in the center of the street, a brimmed hat in one hand held over his fac
e. There was something to the pose. A dramatic sensibility. His legs were spread a little too wide, his back a little too straight. Motionless on a bustling street. She slowed, watching the crowd stream past him, a feeling of foreboding sliding over her. The man lowered the hat, revealing the thin, handsome face of a Gol with a tightly trimmed, narrow beard. It was a face she’d never seen before. She knew it anyway. Jyurik. And in case she needed any more evidence, she noted he was carrying the same scepter, though this time no black smoke streamed from its end.

  Kay slid her hand into her belt, pulling her brass knuckles over her fist. She glanced around her, recalling their tactics in her abduction, but it appeared he was alone. As she watched, Jyurik fitted the brimmed hat on his head, gave her a slight flourish, and then turned to walk away. Kay sensed a dare to follow. And she did.

  Jyurik moved swiftly, popping out far down the street, the hat making him instantly identifiable across the crowd. Kay gritted her teeth and kept after him. He moved west, sticking to busy streets. When she pressed forward, seeking to catch up with the jester, he always vanished for a few moments and then reappeared far ahead. He knew the streets well, and before long they neared the city gates.

  She lost him at the gates, as he no doubt intended, but as she looked out, she saw his silhouette in the distance beyond the walls, walking the westward path. Kay had a moment of doubt. Stalking Jyurik had been well and fun in the crowded city streets, but was she prepared to follow him through the gates? Into the quiet lands outside Celest? Into the old Farrow refugee camp if he didn’t veer from his current course? With her message delivered, Kay may be expendable. He may be here seeking revenge for the crime of defeating him in the circle last night.

  Of course, the balance to that was a chance to learn more about the Gyudi. Something she needed if she was to find them again and liberate Jenna Weiss and the others they held in their cult-like grip. Trap or no trap, Kay passed through the gates and followed Jyurik down the path, the setting sun behind them making their shadows long on the dirt and grass.

  …

  When she finally caught up to him, Jyurik was perched on a tombstone in the Pathfinders’ section of the graveyard. Kay was relieved to see it wasn’t Amos’s grave marker he’d chosen as a chair. She wasn’t sure what she’d have done if she’d seen that. But why had the jester come here? There were easier ways to speak with her. He seemed at ease, his feet dangling, backlit from a lantern he’d placed just behind the tombstone he sat on.

  The light had not quite failed, affording Kay a close look at him as she halted on the dying grass several paces in front of him. He had a handsome profile, as she’d noticed earlier. He was undersized, perhaps a little shorter than her, and slight. His dress and grooming were fastidious and careful. A thin beard was not quite hiding a deep bruise on his jaw. As he turned in the dim light, Kay could see his left eye was missing. The lid was drawn down flat, perhaps sown into place, creating a look more tidy than gruesome. He held his head with a tilt to it. His face had a pinched look of arrogance and his teeth shone bright white among the drab greys and greens of the cemetery.

  “You’ve got something on your face,” Kay said, gesturing at the bruise on his chin.

  His single eye tightened and he gave a mocking bow, halfway through pretending to fall from his perch. His arms wildly pinwheeled before he caught himself. A small performance for her benefit.

  “If you wanted to speak with me, we could have found a way that didn’t involve so much walking,” Kay said.

  “Who said it was you I wanted to speak with?” Jyurik asked. His voice was high, a musical singsong quality to it. Then he sighed. “No, alas it is true. I did wish to speak with you. I wish to know more of Kay the fetch, the little mouse of streets and Palace.”

  “That’s convenient. I like nothing more than telling people who’ve recently kidnapped me, drugged me, and broken my arm all about myself. Especially in graveyards where the light is dying.”

  “You were brave to follow me out here. I wasn’t sure you would.”

  “Well, if I’m going to be a messenger, I should know where to deliver my messages. How do I find the Gyudi again? When the Melors give me a response.”

  Jyurik let out a small giggle. “Not necessary. We both know there will be no response. They will be obstinate. They will blind their own eyes, and they will die. And neither you nor I will be worse for it. Hard to think of who will be, beyond the Melor. But we should speak of other things. Specifically, how did you move the smoke?” Jyurik raised his scepter and gave it a small rattle. A thread of black smoke immediately began streaming out and upwards. “I had not seen that before. And many have been tested.”

  Kay watched the smoke climb, an excuse to glance up at the Fire Eye above them, slowly taking over the sky as the sun sank deeper. “You should see what I can do with a deck of cards,” she replied.

  Jyurik looked at her, hesitant, as if uncertain how to proceed. He fiddled with the scepter, rotating it. As he did, the smoke began falling, pooling on the ground.

  “You seem to have a measure of control over it,” Kay said cautiously.

  “But I cannot do what you did. Which makes me curious.” He stared at her an uncomfortably long time.

  Kay stared back, looking at the bruise on his jaw, thinking about how good it had felt to lay him out. How much she’d like to do it again. This fool who’d broken her arm. Who’d no doubt had a part in luring and hiding the children she’d been searching for under her feet. Kay clenched the fist of her right hand, feeling her newly healed cuts straining as her skin tightened across her knuckles. Something fluttered at the edge of her mind and she glanced down at her hand. The cuts ran in a straight line, more or less, just below the knuckles of her index, middle, and ring fingers. She’d seen this exact cut before. On Ewan Silas.

  When they’d found the body of Kay’s friend and mentor, the long cut on the knuckles of his right hand had been the least significant of his injuries. The deep stab wounds in his back, the wounds that had leaked out his life, had drawn far more attention. They had assumed the relatively small cut on his hand was defensive and left it at that. The old man had dished some out before getting his. But now it fell under a different light.

  A hot surge of anger rushed through Kay as she looked at her hand. Ewan had faced someone, probably several someones, who wore a mask. A slate mask which ended in a sharp edge right at the jaw line. Ewan’s last line of defense had been to land a punch on one of the Chosen. The Gyudi were responsible for Ewan’s murder.

  Kay saw fire. It seemed a lot more blood needed to be spilled. Out here the ground would soak it up. In Celest it could fill the streets. She stared at the jester, still up on his perch. She might not be able to take him with one arm. But he was a walking dead man.

  Ignorant to her sudden insight, Jyurik playfully twisted the scepter again, creating patterns in the rising line of smoke. Kay watched, her mind racing through different ways to draw out the location of her enemies, coming up blank.

  Mistaking her quiet for something else, perhaps boredom, Jyurik said, “I must apologize if I am not such an interesting conversationalist during our time together, Kay the fetch. But, as I mentioned earlier, I am not really here to speak with you.”

  “Who then?” Kay asked. A moment later she felt it, just as she’d felt it before. The silence deepening. No longer the quiet of an empty graveyard. It was the quiet of a graveyard full of people willing themselves to silence. Along with their horses. The Pathfinders had arrived.

  Chapter 13. The Fool No Fool

  Gillis Stern guided his horse off the graveyard’s winding path and weaved delicately through the tombstones over to the watching pair. His face was somber. He stopped just beyond the glow of Jyurik’s lantern. “Who is your friend, Kay?” he asked.

  “No friend of mine,” Kay glanced warily at Jyurik. A sense that she’d made a mistake by coming here had started gnawing away in her gut. Jyurik had set this table thusly for a reason.
/>   “General Gillis Stern of the Farrow Pathfinders, a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” Jyurik spoke formally, punctuating the words by leaping off the tombstone and bowing. Kay could almost hear the bowstrings around them tightening as the jester moved.

  “And you are?” Gillis asked, his tone cold.

  Another bow. “Jyurik Desmoden, servant of the Court of the Gyudi Dynasty. I have the honor of bearing a message for you.”

  “I am not familiar with the Gyudi Dynasty, Mister Desmoden.”

  “Jyurik, sir.” He returned Gillis’s gaze for a long moment, then slowly turned to face Kay, his lone eye a pinpoint of light in the darkening graveyard.

  Fuck. He’d brought her here to verify his status. He’d known her name, knew something of her history with the Pathfinders. And had probably learned it all today. The fool was no fool. Her presence here advanced his cause. She’d played right into his hand by following him beyond the gates. And now it would be her, not the jester, explaining who he was and who he represented.

  “This is the piece of shit who killed Ewan Silas.” She didn’t have to make it easy for Jyurik, at least.

  Jyurik stared at her a long time, expressionless, before offering a slow shrug. The silence carried forward, nothing to save Kay from providing Gillis with confirmation of Jyurik’s position.

  “Fine,” she sighed. “He’s a representative of the Gyudi Dynasty, the ruling Dynasty before the Melor. You haven’t heard of them, I hadn’t either, because the Melor basically erased them from the history books. The Gyudi have recently made threats on the Melor Family and have a cult which he refers to as a court hidden somewhere below the city. At my count, their assets number at least a hundred of what they’d classify as soldiers, maybe another three hundred civilians, and no shortage of gold. They’re untrustworthy, murderous, kidnapping scum. He’s their dancing monkey, here to fill your ears with lies, no doubt. If I were you, I’d cut his tongue out now before he gets started.”