“You’ll see,” added Karlan after a while. “You may doubt me now, but in time you will witness the true glory of Tarviss and regret your lack of faith.”
Taneem was clenching his fists so hard, it hurt. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry.
“I hope you’re right,” he croaked.
He wished he could believe it.
Chapter 7
I didn’t follow Myar Mal’s suggestion. Instead, I headed straight to my tent. It was a sterile cocoon of silk and protective spells, small and cold, almost suffocating at times. Saral Tal once told me it reminded him of home, but I couldn’t fathom why. I tried to adorn it with various trinkets to make it seem less empty. Sadly, my attempts at keeping a plant had been unsuccessful; the magical compression killed everything unfortunate enough to be inside the tent when it folded. A shame, it would be a great help, especially while exploring worlds with no native life.
When I was dismissed, the sun gate was halfway to closing. With Maurir’s twenty-something-hour long days, I still had some time before nightfall. But there was not much to do. The bleak landscape discouraged any thought of wandering, and my mind was too troubled for reading. So I lay on my cot, chewing on dried meat, thinking about everything that had happened that day. Going through every conversation, turning around every sentence I’d uttered, smoothing them, finishing them, wondering if there was anything else I could have said to have changed how things turned out.
It was late into the night when I finally managed to fall asleep.
I was awakened by a tingling of magic. For a moment, I lay with my eyes wide open, trying to figure out what was happening.
A doorspell.
I sprang from my cot, twisted my fingers in a cleaning spell, then quickly put on my suit, and grabbed my weapons. When I pulled away the flap, I faced Saral Tal, with no trace of his usual smile.
“Myar Mal wants to see you,” he said simply, and the coldness of his tone woke me up.
I glanced up: the sun was barely a thread across the sky. But even in the half-light, it was clear no one else was up yet.
“What happened?” I asked, but Saral Tal only shook his head.
“You should ask him yourself.”
That smothered all the questions I had. Without a word, I followed him to the outskirts of the camp where a peculiar construction stood—half a sphere of white plastic. From what I saw yesterday, we used it to store our kites.
Many people, usually outworlders, believed the kites were the pinnacle of Dahlsian technomagic. In truth, they were flying garbage. Gravity put a limit on the weight that could be lifted, and it topped at about one Dahlsi. There was no way to equip the kites with any kind of useful machinery: motors, steer, weaponry—forget it. They could only glide using natural streams of ae, the magical energy. Still, we kept them for aerial reconnaissance, and passing messages.
The kites were gone.
The chains we used to keep them down lay crumpled on the ground, while Myar Mal and other vessár-ai paced around, arguing and cursing. It didn’t take much to figure out the kites had not been deployed.
A quick glance up revealed black triangles, barely visible against the dark blue sky. Luckily, the skydome in Maurir was pretty solid, otherwise they would have floated Out and disintegrated.
But whatever comfort I drew from this quickly died when I saw the expression on Myar Mal’s face. His lips were pressed tight and brows furrowed, casting shadows over his dark, angry eyes.
A figure I hadn’t noticed earlier sprang from the ground: a kas’sham. Almost humanlike but strangely proportioned, with a longer torso and shorter limbs and a large, expressionless face. Their uniform was puffed out by fur and cut around the joints, allowing greater range of movement. They strode toward me with the soft, dance-like steps of a natural-born predator. Their pink nose fluttered when they leaned forward and started sniffing.
“Ith not him,” the kas’sham announced.
“Are you sure?” asked Myar Mal. His arms were crossed, and his face pursed in discontent.
The kas’sham regarded him with disdain—although that seemed like their default look—and drawled, “If you don’t trutht my ekthpertithe, why do you even athk?”
Confused, I turned to the kar-vessár, “What’s happened?”
He clenched his jaw, but didn’t answer. For a moment, no one spoke, and even I could feel the tension rising in the air.
“Someone released our kites at night,” said Laik Var from somewhere on the side.
This much I had deduced, but before I spoke, it struck me.
They thought it was me.
At first, I felt nothing—just a vast, all-encompassing emptiness. I was a statue with no feelings or thoughts. All around me, there were real people, watching me, expecting… something.
But what could I give them?
“Aldait Han?” Laik Var’s voice broke through my stupor.
“I was ready to die for you,” I stammered.
“We wouldn’t have let you die,” protested the kar-vessár, and his tone commanded me to listen.
“But you didn’t bother telling me,” I snapped, the betrayal still raw in my memory. “And I did it anyway, and now you—”
“Who else could do it?” Myar Mal cut me off, looking me in the eye for the first time, and I felt like he had poured oil on my smoldering rage.
Yeah, I know! I wanted to scream. You’re a perfectly normal, well-spoken man, while I struggle to form a simple sentence. Trust me, I know that better than anyone, dipshit; you don’t have to rub it in.
But my jaw was frozen, and my thoughts jumbled. I barely heard the next thing he said.
“Give me one person in the entire camp who would have a reason to sabotage our efforts and aid Tarvissi rebels?”
“Why the fuck would I aid them? They were ready to kill me!”
“People do many things out of a misplaced sense of duty,” remarked Innam Ar, but I didn’t even look at him—my gaze locked with
