Kei's Gift Read online

  It drove him to long walks at night around and around the perimeter of the camp, desperate for the physical exhaustion that would let him sleep without dreaming of smiling bright eyes, or hearing again the last, agonised breaths. Every blond head in the camp caught his eye, every clear, light voice drew his attention. He could simply not school himself not to look or be fooled for that tiny moment in time.

  He was neglecting his duties. Jozo had come the closest yet to a complaint about it today, and then only in the mildest way, but if they were in the middle of a serious fight, Arman would be a major liability. Not even for the honour of his name could he bring himself to care.

  His thoughts turned to the village they had taken over today, and he gritted his teeth in disgust at the calm way the people had given up their hostages, as if their children and their brothers and sisters were nothing to them. Savages, every one of them, unfeeling, incapable of deep emotion, without honour or decent creed.

  That...what was the cur’s name? “Fedor,” he spat. Hadn’t even hesitated to push his son forward. It would serve Her Serenity better to cut all their throats, so they stopped being a burden on the Empire. The gods forbid the blood of Prij and Darshianese ever mixed. The barbarians were an offence against nature. Even their colour marked them as defiled.

  But that made him think of purity and innocence, which led him back to the subject never far from his mind, and the callous Fedor and his worthless village slipped out of his thoughts.

  Once he returned to Utuk, he would ask Her Serenity to relieve him of the necessity of ever setting foot in this cursed land again, and perhaps then he would begin to heal. It would at least mean he would never look at these dark-eyed murderers again.

  Chapter : Darshian 10

  Kei wondered if he would ever again know what it felt like to not be exhausted and hungry and thirsty. After nearly three weeks on the move, his whole world had narrowed to the simple task of merely keeping up right and moving. The first few days were raw hell for all of them. He had to treat and bind blisters the size of tuktuk eggs on all their feet, and sleeping on hard ground, wrapped only in thin army blankets and each other for warmth against the frosty clear skies, meant they started each day more tired than when they went to sleep. Their escorts weren’t cruel, and moderated their pace to fit the weakest members of the group, but they were still relentless, keeping them on their feet from dawn to dusk, with infrequent breaks, inadequate water and indifferent food. This on top of the anxiety and the fear everyone felt, and which Kei had to endure ten times over.

  As they grew used to the hardship, things were a little easier, although they were all worn very thin. No one spoke as they walked, needing the energy just to keep moving. The rainy season had started, and there were days when all they could do was trudge through the mud and the wet, protected by their oilskins. It seldom rained all day, and there were only two nights when they’d had to sleep sitting up, a single piece of oiled canvas over their heads as shelter. It could have been so much worse. At least they weren’t bound or chained, and the escorting soldiers, while on the whole not being particularly friendly, did what they could to help the hostages survive their ordeal. A couple of them, those who spoke slightly better Darshianese, even lingered to talk to them after the communal evening meal. From them, Kei learned his first words of Prijian, and encouraged the soldiers to keep teaching them the language. The hostages were determined to take every scrap of advantage passed to them, to learn what they could of their enemy, and most of all, to survive. Even those with him he heard weeping quietly into their hands at night, were determined to get through this and one day go home.

  Kei and Fedor had tried to choose the toughest, the strongest and the most stable of the available adults to carry out the role of hostages. Kei had known every one of them all his life. Peit had even seen him being born. Urki had given him his first kiss and told him she would marry him—although when he was five, and she seven. At twenty, Kei was the baby of the group, but as clan head’s son, even if only by adoption, and as healer, he found himself their unofficial leader. It was a role with which he was uncomfortable, but it was inevitable they would turn to someone to take the position. To him Peit was a more natural choice, but even he deferred to Kei. He couldn’t argue with them over it without causing them more distress.

  Because he picked up Prijian quickly and was careful to cultivate any sign of friendliness shown towards them, the soldiers treated him as the spokesperson for the hostages. The increased interaction meant he learned even more of the language, which wasn’t that different from Darshianese in structure and even in some of the words. The coincidence intrigued him. The difficulty with Prijian was that it was so bound up with the highly stratified, that there were many words for the same thing, with different intonations conveying quite different meanings for the same word, often with insulting effect. He wasn’t exactly learning Prijian at its purest or most elegant from the soldiers, who were all illiterate and as superstitious a group of men as one could ever meet.

  Their religion baffled him, and the fatalism about everything being down to the whim and will of apparently capricious deities was frustrating. It was a subject which occupied his thoughts a good deal on the apparently endless march, offering some distraction from his physical misery. He couldn’t understand how apparently rational humans could honestly believe cutting a bird or an urs beast’s throat would alter the mind of one of these supposed super beings, nor why no one questioned why two people making the same sacrifice with the same wish, should get such different results. What kind of society did the Prij have that was sustained on such a basis?

  The Prij knew nothing of Gifts. This he’d been taught at the academy, along with the fact the Prij had no gifted folk at all. It wasn’t in their blood, apparently. The Prij had heard rumours about some of the powers of the truly Gifted, and dismissed them as useless barbarian myths, which was all to the good in the present situation. But Kei couldn’t help resenting it a little that simple provable facts such as Gifts were considered fantasies, while the capricious, contradictory gods worshipped by every Prij were thought as real as their own parents, without the slightest evidence to prove it. He’d have to learn diplomacy if he was to survive in such an irrational culture.

  They passed by the villages taken under Prijian control, but weren’t allowed to approach them. Instead they camped a mile or so beyond the village itself while some of their escort were sent to resupply and presumably retrieve any messages. Kei had no sense of how many soldiers were actually scattered across Darshianese territory. The force that had surrounded Ai-Albon seemed enormous, a sea of men and weapons, but their day-to-day contact was with the same twenty men who refused to discuss the army with them at all, beyond simple explanations about ranks and forms of address. There might be thousands and thousands of Prij invading. Equally there might only be a few hundred. Kei wasn’t a military tactician, so he had no idea how many were needed to subdue a continent. All he could tell was that, apart from their irrational religion and rigid social structure, the Prij were a war-like and aggressive race. Individually, they were much like the Darshianese. He couldn’t help but wonder what made the difference when they gathered together.

  Although it felt like they had been walking for years, it was only four and a half weeks after they left Ai-Albon that they stumbled, cold, wet and exhausted, into a fort at the foothills of the Treyk Mountains. It was coming up for nightfall, so only the moon and the flames of the sentinels’ torches lit the fort. It looked terrifying, with jagged edges that looked like the teeth of an enormous beast. Kei had the sickening feeling he was entering hell and would never leave again. He sensed his comrades felt the same. It didn’t exactly encourage him.

  Unmoved by their fear, their escort let them inside the high wooden walls. Kei could only catch an impression of the actual size of the structure, and of the numbers of soldiers within it. They were taken to see what he now knew to be a sergeant. Their names were recorded, and
their condition assessed by the army medic, who was mainly interested in whether any of them were sick with communicable diseases.

  Kei’s box of supplies was handed over, explained and then sealed in his presence. The medic told him, in perfectly wretched Darshianese, that if Kei needed the things, he had only to ask, but the medic would have to supervise any dangerous procedure, to which condition Kei agreed in words with no intention of obeying in spirit. Prijian medicine was as hidebound and riddled with myth as their religion, and he was damned if he’d let a Prijian doctor interfere with proper treatment of his people.

  The sergeant told them they could wash themselves and their belongings tomorrow. For now they were taken to a large barracks where the other hostages were being held, and left there, the door being locked behind them.

  The room was dim, lit by a few oil lamps, and in the corner, the faint red glow of a stove. All the waiting hostages were standing as they came in, clearly expecting them. A man stepped forward. “Welcome, Ai-Albon. I’m Gonji of Ai-Rutej.”

  Kei let his hand be shaken warmly. “I’m Kei.” He quickly introduced the others from his village. “Gonji, we’re hungry and sore. Can we rest? We can give you what news we have.”

  “Of course, there’s only the pallets, but it’s better than the ground. We have food waiting for you.”

  The pallets, stuffed with straw, were the softest things Kei had sat on in a month, and his clansmen groaned in relief as weary bodies were eased down. The other hostages took their oilskins away to dry, helped them stow packs, told them where they could relieve themselves (in latrines in an adjoining building), and brought them bowls of hot, tasty stew in wooden bowls, apparently carved from the same trees cut down to make the fort.

  As they ate, their hunger making them greedy, Gonji introduced the other Darshianese. The last person he brought forward was Jena, the Ai-Rutej mind-speaker, also their healer. Through her, the hostages in the fort had been kept fully apprised of the events in the north. She confirmed Ai-Kislik had fallen as they had expected, and that an enormous fortification was under construction just to the north of the village.

  “However, I have better news,” she said with a smile, and behind her, Gonji also smiled. They’d clearly been looking forward to imparting this. “Every single person sent away to Darshek has arrived safely. Everyone from Ai-Albon is safe. They arrived three weeks ago. They’re well and being cared for.”

  Kei’s grip on his empty bowl tightened as he clutched at his chest with his free hand. He was suddenly overwhelmed with such a barrage of happiness and relief he couldn’t think at all. It wasn’t all his own, but in his weariness, and with so many people suddenly so close after weeks on the march, he had nothing left to use to protect himself.

  He struggled to stay upright, and might have managed to force the dizziness down if Urki had not, right at that moment, flung her arms around him. “Oh gods, Kei! Pito is safe!”

  “No, Urki, don’t,” he protested but it was too late. Her physical touch was the last straw, and his vision faded, the waves of emotions dimming suddenly, and then...nothing.

  ~~~~~~~~

  His head pounded, dark red flowers blooming behind his eyelids in time with his heartbeat. He felt sick, nauseated to his core. He curled up and wished the pain in his head would stop.

  Something cool was placed on his face, and a very gentle touch on his face failed to bring a renewal of the emotional input.

  “Kei.”

  The voice was in his head, rather than in his ears—very soft, calming. “It’s all right, Kei. It’s Jena.” The soothing hand stroked his face again, and it lessened the pain a little. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you were a soul-toucher, or I’d have been more careful how I told you that news.”

  He fumbled a hand up to touch hers. “S’all right,” he mumbled, and winced as the sound of his own voice rang unpleasantly in his ears.

  “Speak this way, Kei, it won’t hurt you so much. We have some pijn.”

  “No, keep it for something serious. We don’t have any way of replacing it.”

  “Very wise. You must be Erte’s son. I was sorry to hear of her death.”

  He risked opening an eye to squint at her, but she was just a dark blurry haze backlit by an oil lamp, so he closed it again. It wasn’t worth the pain it caused.

  “You knew her?”

  “I knew of her. Your mother was well-respected among healers, as was your father for his discoveries. A great loss.”

  There was nothing he could say to such an obvious statement, so he didn’t respond. Her hand seemed to be leeching the pain away, although he suspected it was something she was actually doing with her mind.

  “Were you not taught better control than this at the academy?”

  “It’s only a minor gift, Jena.”

  “Not so minor, that I can see.” Her ‘voice’ held a note of dry reproach. “It’s also one strengthened and affected by many things, such as the profession of the person with the gift, and their emotional state and those around you. You’ve been careless, Kei. You, a healer, are at most risk if you do not protect yourself, and that’s even without your parents’ deaths and this most recent event. You must have been taught some protective exercises—all soul-touchers and mind-speakers are.”

  Kei had been taught them, but as he had once had a good degree of natural control, his gift had rarely troubled him and so he was rather lax about carrying them out. He hadn’t been able to stay for the full course of training in Darshek as news had come of first his father’s death, and then a month later, the suicide of his mother, which meant he’d to come home and take up the role of healer before he was quite ready or fully trained in his gift.

  He’d known his emotions had been badly battered after his return from Darshek after his mother died, but he had accepted this as normal. He hadn’t realised how he had let things slip, how he had repeatedly exposed his gift to greater and greater insults.

  The parting from Myka and the others had been the last blow. Jena was right—he’d been careless. “I’m sorry. Can anything be done? Everything hurts now. I’ve been hurting for weeks.”

  “Yes, I can see,” she said kindly. “Of course I can help you. For tonight, sleep where you are, away from the others. I’ll warn them to leave you alone. Rest, get some proper food, regain your physical well-being. Then we’ll begin your exercises again. We need you well. We two are the only healers our people will have while in the hands of the Prij, and I dread to think what will happen if a Prij physician has to treat any of them for something serious. Their idea of a good dressing for a burn is roasted snake fat.”

  Kei shuddered in disgust. “Yes, I know. Why doesn’t your voice hurt my head?”

  “Because I am making it so, and buffering your gift. I can only do it when I‘m touching you.”

  “Are you a mind-mover too?”

  He felt her surprise. “No, of course not. Are you saying that you are?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “Don’t you know how rare it is for someone to have two gifts? Do the people at the academy know?”

  “Um. No. Ma knew but she never said it was special, so I didn’t think anything of it. The instructors were only interested in training soul-touchers and mind-speakers. If you don’t have a true Gift, they don’t really care what else you can do. I don’t talk about it much because no one understands it, and I can’t do anything spectacular with it. I just...you know, move small things in the body. Broken bones, bleeding, that kind of thing, I can deal with a little easier than most. It helps, but it’s not all there is to my healer craft.”

  She took the cloth from his forehead, and he heard her wetting it. She put it back on his face. It helped the throbbing in his head a good deal. “Well, you’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” she said fondly. “Rest now. Everyone’s safe for now. We don’t know what the future holds, but we can only do what we can do.”

  Kei agreed wordlessly. He was so damn tired. There was one more th
ing before he could rest, though. “Have you sent word of our arrival to Darshek?”

  “I will as soon as you’re asleep.”

  “Could you...just this once, send a message to my sister, Myka? Say I am safe and well and missing them all.” He hesitated to ask since all the hostages would want personal messages sent in this manner. The network of mind-speakers was thinly stretched. To cover such great distances, each of them had to work very hard to send and receive the thoughts of the others.

  Jena didn’t seem at all disturbed at his request. “I’ll do that. I’ll collect all the messages from your people, and send them at the same time. We all know how hard this is for everyone. We mind-speakers have to do our best for you all.”

  Kei squeezed her hand in gratitude. It eased his mind to know Myka would have direct word of his welfare. And Reji and Banji too. Even though they would not hear from Ai-Albon itself, it would help them a little, he hoped.

  Jena covered him with a blanket and changed the cloth again. “I’m going to send you to sleep for your own good. Please, stop fighting your need to rest.

  He opened his mouth to argue, and shut it. She was right. He let her touch send tendrils of relaxation through his painful head, and as the pain disappeared, he felt able to let go, slipping gently into oblivion.

  ~~~~~~~~

  When he woke to dim sunlight coming in through the high windows, his thoughts were much clearer and he felt calmer. He still had a bit of a headache, but nothing he couldn’t handle easily, and the need to piss outweighed the desire to lie still for a little longer. Throwing the blanket back, and turning over, he found he was on a pallet in a far corner of the room, away from where his fellows apparently had spent the night. There were only two other people in the barracks—one of them was Urki. She saw him standing up and she came over to him with a worried, apologetic look on her face. “Kei? Are you better now?”

  She kept her distance. Jena must have impressed them with the need to give him space. “I’m much better. I’m sorry to worry you all.”