A Dying Land Read online

  “It’s getting worse,” Mercer said as he coiled rope and stowed the sails away. “Used to be lush here. Just like the rest.”

  Ling eyed the pools of deeply colored, steaming sludge and tried to imagine trees and grass and birds. She couldn’t picture such lovely things ever having existed in this twisted landscape. “When were you here last?”

  “Not too long ago.” His voice was grim, and she wondered what would happen to everyone once the magic was gone. Brielle would be fine—they were used to living without magic—but she wondered at the implications for everyone else. The Bremen used magic to grow their crops, and the Brisians used it to communicate with their livestock. Even the Vosh used it in their subterranean wanderings. What would happen to them when the last of the magic had gone?

  For the first time the realization of just was at stake settled over her. Even if her people themselves were fine, they would not escape unscathed. Brielle relied on the Bremen for most of their food. If they could no longer grow it, her people would go hungry. If the Vosh lost their ability to find and work with the minerals in the earth, there would be no more tools to cut down the zildeschor trees, to strip the fine strands from the inner bark, to process them into the fabric that was the mainstay of the Brielle economy. Even if they found a way to continue making schor, who would be able to buy it if their own economies were in a shambles? Whether or not Fariss’s actions immediately killed people, it would be the end of the world as she knew it. What would her people do without schor?

  “Have they tried to seal it, Mercer? Surely there’s some way to stop it.”

  He stared out at the twisted landscape and sighed. “Maybe they would have found a way together. But Fariss destroyed any chance of that when he killed off the Mari. Together, we were always stronger. But now…”

  “Not all of them though, right? There are still some Mari.”

  She could see the muscles in his jaw twitching as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. He turned away from her, his movements stiff and awkward, not answering. She knew some Mari still lived. She had seen Alyssum, tall, beautiful, and alien, but there was one other. Fern. Alyssum and Drake has spoken of her in the cabin. She couldn’t tell from his reaction if Mercer knew them or knew of them.

  They traveled in this lurching, gliding manner until the sun sank below the horizon, each lost in their own thoughts and fighting their own demons. She had expected that they would travel far into the night as had been their habit, but to her surprise, Mercer stopped them just before darkness settled. She turned around to ask him why, but clamped her mouth shut on her words.

  Tight lines stretched from either side of his mouth, and his face was drained of all color. He moved quickly, efficiently, but the smooth confidence he normally exhibited when working his boat was gone. His hands shook, a fine sweat beaded his forehead, and he was constantly glancing out at the landscape around them. She watched as he tied and retied the same knot three times before getting it right. He was scared and upset about something, but about something out there, not her or something she had said. Uneasy, she followed him with her eyes as he worked, ghosting after him as he moved around the boat and never letting him out of her sight.

  He finished tying everything down, then brewed a large pot of black coffee. He drank cup after cup of the black liquid as he paced. Walking up one side and down the other, stopping every few feet to stare out into the gathering darkness, head tipped to one side as if listening. Ling listened too, but there was nothing to hear other than the sound of her own tongue cleaving and un-cleaving to the top of her fear-dry mouth.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mercer hadn’t shown the slightest bit of nervousness on the river. Even when Ling had messed up and almost gotten them eaten alive by the river jackals, he’d been cool in his handling of it. His behavior now was entirely different, and she didn’t know what to make of it. She could smell the fear coming off of him in sour waves, and it infected her. As evening rolled into full dark, she felt twitchy, paranoid. The silence took on a menacing air, and she imagined shapes everywhere she turned. The lack of all sound was disconcerting after the raucous noise of the jungle.

  Is anything alive out there? Or is it ghosts he fears?

  Ling watched his pacing until she forced herself into her cabin out of fear she’d fall asleep right on deck and reveal herself to Mercer when she awoke terrified the next morning. She barred the door shut the best she could, terrified that whatever it was Mercer was looking for would come for them while she was unconscious.

  In the end, the night passed without incident. She awoke the next morning, terrified as always. Reading through the grimoire did not fully assuage her fear. What was Mercer so afraid of?

  Having just read them in the grimoire, his words from a couple days past were fresh in her mind. Not animal, but not human either. Almost exactly the words Treantos had uttered about the sirené aboard the Courser. Not human, not animal, and not Mari. She thought about the statues she’d seen in Malach, the abandoned houses, the missing Mari, the sirené. Could the Mari be there now, raging through the very heart of Marique in new and terrible forms? She’d written that question in the grimoire. The idea that there might be some type of sirené that lived on land, lurking out in the darkness, left her in a cold terror. She lingered in bed, unable to bring herself to even walk around the tiny cabin.

  When the Mincon once again picked up its lurching gait, she mustered the courage to leave the cabin behind. She settled near the wheel, watching as Mercer continued brewing pot after pot of coffee. He looked haggard, the shadows beneath his eyes telling her louder than words that he hadn’t slept the night before. It was clear he had no intention of sleeping today either. The rotten smell didn’t help. It clung to her clothes, to her hair, to her very skin. Inside or outside, there was no respite from it.

  Finally she climbed to her feet, pulled out a mug of her own, and went to stand next to Mercer, her shoulder just touching his. It wasn’t much, but the contact brought her some comfort. He didn’t look her way, and he held his silence, but he didn’t move away from her. Neither of them could utter the words, but she felt that small point of contact grounded them both and held their fear in check.

  The sky was big and blue, and in the distance she could see the green haze of the Colli Terra. It was stunning. The blue sky stretched out above them, and the rich rusting colors of the landscape spread out below. Ling could hardly believe that something so beautiful could harbor such terror. It was quiet, but not in a peaceful way. There were no insects buzzing about their business, no birds singing. Her instincts clamored a constant alarm, and she had to fight back the urge to launch herself over the side of the boat and just run for it.

  Pressure began to build around them as if a storm were forming, but the sky was as clear and blue as ever. A feeling of doom hung in the air, thicker than the fog she’d sailed through to get to Malach. With every second that passed, she became more certain that something terrible lurked just out of her sight, just behind her shoulder, just behind that crate. There was no movement, but she had no doubt that it watched them as they lurched unevenly across the tortured landscape. It was the feeling of being hunted. Of knowing your death waited in the darkness that gathered even now to the east.

  Somehow the silence deepened further—even the metallic creaking and stomping of the ship seemed strangely muted. Ling’s eyes moved restlessly, searching, unable to pause for even the briefest moment. She and Mercer began pacing, moving in opposite directions to allow their eyes to cover more ground. They paused briefly when they passed, resting shoulder to shoulder and refilling their coffees.

  Mercer brought the Mincon to a stop as the last rays of the setting sun vanished behind the horizon. As that last prick of light vanished, the silence that had followed them for the last two days vanished as well.

  A high-pitched scream pierced the dusky evening off to the left side of the boat.

  Ling dropped her cup, spraying coffee in every direction
as her nonexistent heart seized in her chest. It was the sound of deepest loss and profound desperation. The feral sound of need. Of a deep, grinding, relentless hunger that could never be satiated. It was the most horrifying sound she had ever heard, and it rattled through her head long after the sound itself had faded. If she had been human, she would have wept as her bladder emptied itself where she stood. She reached out a hand, placing it over the top of Mercer’s where it clenched the railing. After a moment, he shifted his hand to clasp hers. They waited.

  Shapes flitted through the darkness around them, too many to count. Heavy breathing erupted out of the silence right beside her, and she spun to find only emptiness where she’d been convinced she would find feral eyes glowing.

  “Can they get on board this ship?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  “I don’t know.”

  It was not a comforting answer. “What are they?” she asked.

  Mercer’s fingers spasmed against her own, clenching her hand tight. She could hear his breathing beside her, ragged and gasping, as if he wept. Or struggled against weeping. She could see little of him in the darkness.

  “Can’t see them at night, and they never come around during the day. I’ve never seen one. I expect no one has.”

  “I didn’t ask what they looked like,” Ling said gently. “I asked what they were. You must have some idea.”

  “I don’t know what they are now. But I know what they were.” The emotion he’d kept reined in broke free, and she could hear the hard edge of grief as he spoke. “They are Mari. And warlock. The lucky ones died in the early days. Assassinated, mostly. This was never an openly acknowledged war, you see. No clean and honest battles to be found. It was all done quietly with a well-placed poison or an unfortunate accident.

  “Death came quickly to anyone who opposed Fariss—warlock, Mari, or anyone else. For most it was a quick death, but many were less fortunate. Fariss found a way to use them. Or, more rightly, to use their magic. He stopped killing them, then. Instead he drained their magic, warlock and Mari alike, leaving them to live as long as their physical bodies drew breath. It’s worse than death, being emptied that way. It makes them…it makes them that.”

  His words broke something inside of her. The agony and hollowed need in the creature’s screams, the grief, as if they had lost something more precious than life itself. Mercer’s words made it all so clear. Those things out there, they were the future that waited for every being on earth if that breach remained open.

  “The Forsaken will eat you if they get you. But what they really want is your magic.”

  He meant the basic sort of magic all people had, she knew. But his words meant something to her he could never have understood. She stared at him in shock as the realization washed over her. His eyes glimmered in the darkness. She could see the deep lines carved along the sides of his mouth. His cheeks were hollow, the area beneath his eyes dark and bruised. She swore she could see the ghosts of the things he carried with him.

  “Terrible things happen when you lose what is most precious,” Mercer whispered.

  “Malach is so empty now. But it wasn’t always that way,” Ling said, thinking back to the deserted streets and the empty houses. There had been many once, and now, so few. “The sirené…what about them?”

  Ling looked out over the rail of the boat and tried to will her eyes to see through the opaque darkness as more screams split the night. She wished she didn’t know what they were. The truth was so much worse than anything she could have imagined.

  Sweat slicked their palms where they were pressed so tightly together. She could feel Mercer trembling beside her.

  “No.” Mercer confirmed her suspicions. “There were so many, once. And yes, the sirené lived among us once. They, too, were Mari, though they lived in the water. They were not always as they are now.”

  She had wandered through Malach with Fariss. Had conversed with him aboard the Courser. She felt filthy from her contact with him. She looked at Mercer again. His eyes were open wide, and his mouth worked as if he chewed his own tongue bloody. For a split second she thought he was going to throw himself over the edge right then and there. His grip on her hand tightened painfully as if it were the only thing keeping him on board. He shuddered, his entire body shaking beside her.

  “My wife is out there. My son, too.”

  She couldn’t speak for many long minutes, and even when her tongue regained feeling, she didn’t have anything to say. She pulled Mercer into an embrace, and to her surprise he came willingly. His body shook with emotion, but he didn’t weep. Ling’s body shook too, but with rage. It seemed like everywhere warlocks went they sowed death and suffering.

  Another scream split the night just behind her, and she felt herself yanked backward. She cried out, holding tight to Mercer. The grip on her was strong, lifting her off the deck and almost pulling Mercer from his feet. She felt bony arms wrap around her waist, her throat, and grasp her arms and legs. Fleshless fingers gouged her eyes and reached into her mouth as they struggled to pull her away.

  Ling screamed again, struggling against their hold. Mercer heaved and, for an instant, let his grip on her fall. As if he were moving in slow motion, she saw Mercer slip a knife out of his waistband and slash it across one wrist. Blood spurted from the wound as he reached for a glyph, barely visible on the deck below their feet. He shouted words she did not recognize as he lunged to grab her hand one more time.

  But he moved too slowly. His fingers grazed hers, but missed their grip, and then she was moving fast toward the rail. The Forsaken had her.

  She could see Mercer’s bloodied palm pressed hard on the glyph, and his shouting grew louder. A shockwave burst out of him, and she felt the wind whip past her, tearing at her clothes, at her hair. And then silence.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ling flipped the grimoire closed, stared at the door to the narrow cabin, and listened. She was chilled despite the warmth already in the day. She’d expected to wake up and join her mother for breakfast, but instead she had awakened to find herself in a cramped and grimy cabin on a boat somewhere in the Colli Terra of Dreggs. Or Marique. Whatever they called it. The things she’d read in that book, the grimoire, seemed too fantastic to be believed. If it weren’t for the proof of it right in front of her, she probably wouldn’t believe it.

  Bright light leaked through the gaps around the door and the cracks between the boards of the cabin. The book had said nothing about those things being around during the day. She tried to convince herself that meant she was safe, but she wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

  She was a changeling. Not Evelyn. And she traveled through the Colli Terra on the island of Marique. Never had she ever thought she would do such a thing at all, and most definitely not alone. But alone she was, and would be, for as long as she existed now. She couldn’t hear the beating of her own heart because she didn’t have one. She didn’t need to eat. She didn’t need to breathe. She couldn’t even bleed. She was a monster in the eyes of everyone she loved.

  Ling clenched her hands into fists, shifting her gaze to the worn gray ceiling above. Her own mother had tried to kill her and had chased her all the way downriver to Middelhaern. All those people—friends she’d known her entire life, shared food with, gone to school with—none of them had lifted a hand to help her. Not even Rudy, who had been her best friend for almost longer than she could remember. He’d wept, but what good were his tears to her? She was the one being tortured. She was the one who had been chased away from her home like a criminal even though she’d done nothing to deserve it. She was the one traveling alone in the land of magic and monsters.

  And Witch. She choked back a sob, a giant hole yawning open inside of her. Witch had exposed herself to help Ling escape. Not knowing if Witch was alive or dead ate at her relentlessly. Even if she were alive, Ling had no way of knowing where she was or if they’d ever see one another gain.

  Anger and guilt and self-loathing warred insid
e of her until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She climbed off the bed and moved to the door. She’d never see her home again either. She would die on this journey, and if she was lucky, Evelyn would get her life back. But regardless of how it turned out for Evelyn, there was no happy ending for her, for Ling. What did it matter what monsters lurked on the far side of the door when that reality sat right beside her?

  She cracked open the door, poking her head out to look around. The sun was still low, but shining brilliantly out of a clear blue sky. She crept out onto the deck, eyes darting left to right, her fear refusing to give over control of her body to her brain. Her nerves were strung so tight she wondered that the weight of the sunlight didn’t break her.

  She saw Mercer slumped against the wheel. It looked like every bone had been sucked out of him, leaving nothing but his skin and slack muscle behind. He had tied a filthy rag around the wrist he had sliced the night before. His hand was crusted with dried blood, with fresh red blood still dripping from his lax fingers. A pool had formed beneath his hand over the night.

  He had done that to save her, believing her a mortal woman. She had no idea what sort of magic he’d done, and she wondered now if it had cost him his life.

  “Please don’t be dead,” she said quietly. She didn’t know if she could stand another person dying for her, not when she’d just learned of Witch’s probable fate. She lifted her left foot to take a step forward and gave a squeak as Mercer shifted where he lay, moaning loudly.

  She ran to the small kitchen and put on a pot to boil some water. She started a pot of coffee and cut several thick slices of salted pork. As the coffee steeped, she collected rags, the cleanest she could find aboard the grimy ship, some fishing line, and a hook. She gathered all these and the food and coffee together and hurried back to Mercer.