Break the Chains

Chapter Forty

“Hold them.” Aella ordered no one in particular as she wiped wine from her eyes with the back of her wrist. Detan danced back a step and waved the clay jug through the air as if it were as deadly as a sword. Aella snorted.

“Try not to embarrass yourself too much, Honding.”

“Bit late for that, don’t you think?”

“Was too late before we ever met.”

Tibs chuckled.

“Traitor,” Detan said

“She’s not wrong.”

“Honding.” Pelkaia’s voice cut through his rising mood like the Larkspur’s prow through a storm, and he winced. Wonderful. In one stupid word – never mind that it was his name – she’d encapsulated all her annoyance, all her questioning. Though he kept his gaze snapped on Aella he could practically see Pelkaia with her arms crossed, foot tapping out an impatient staccato as she waited for him to come up with some way to fix this. He looked at the wine carafe, at the maroon dribble snaking down its side, and tried to ignore the sound of nice military boots stomping through the halls, surrounding them.

“Err.”

“As entertaining as you are, I’m afraid I’ve rather had enough of this.” Aella tipped her chin toward the doorway behind her, and through it spilled a half-dozen guards looking like they’d had their lunch interrupted. One even had a smear of oil and vinegar at the corner of her lips. Didn’t hamper her ability to point a crossbow at him, however.

Despite her obedience, the salad eater looked a touch confused. She squinted at Pelkaia-Thratia. “Begging your pardon, mistress, but the commodore…?”

“Oh, that.” Aella held out a hand and clenched a fist. Detan felt nothing, he had his sel sense reined in tight, but Pelkaia staggered to one side. Coss barely got a hand out in time to hold her upright, and her face melted clear off, leaving the sand-dune cheeks she’d been born with.

“There. That’s better. Now, say hello to our latest additions,” Aella said, and there was a soft muttering amongst her people.

“Don’t look keen on it,” the woman with the spear said.

“Are you still here, Misol? Go and collect the other two,” Aella said.

Misol rolled her eyes and strolled out the door. Detan found himself wishing he could tag along with her. “If it pleases you, Aella, I’d be happy to retrieve my wayward companions–”

“You’re not getting out of my sight. Nor you and your friend, Pelkaia.”

“Who is this girl?” Coss asked.

“Just another collector.” Aella flashed Coss a smile.

“Enslaver, is more like it,” Pelkaia’s voice was a soft growl. “Did you come here for Ripka’s list as well?”

Detan and Tibs exchanged a nervous glance. In all the commotion, he’d forgotten to let Pelkaia know that Ripka harbored no such thing.

Aella’s brows shot up. “List? Never mind – I will discover the truth of that soon enough. If you must know, I’m here looking for our ilk.”

As Aella’s six guards spread out, Detan shifted his weight and cast a glance at Tibs, who only shrugged. No ideas there, either. The room was small, the door behind him of average size, but the windows were quite large, if partially shuttered. His mind raced, grasping for a solution while Pelkaia and Aella postured like overfeathered cockerels.

“In a prison?” Pelkaia scoffed. “It suits you.”

Aella’s smile was small and coy. “You’d be amazed how many deviants find themselves on the wrong side of imperial law without being caught out for what they are. Most have more tact than you, after all.”

He let the truth of Aella’s words settle in his bones and cringed. Their six new friends were deviants, then, and he had no particular way to know their type. Despite Pelkaia’s assurances that his line was rare, he could be surrounded by six people just as jumpy and prone to making things go boom as he was. He didn’t even like being surrounded by himself at any given time.

And there was that blanket of sel, hiding away the whole of the house. So close, drifting above… Beads of sweat crested his brow, memories of how elated he’d been in Aransa when he’d finally let loose. At how calm he’d been in the days after, his anger burnt up with the boiling of the sky.

“You really don’t want me in here right now.” He angled himself straight at Aella, stared at her until the strength of his gaze made her look away from Pelkaia.

She rolled her eyes. “You are no challenge for me.”

Emptiness washed over him like a shroud, and for a moment he felt bereft, desolate. And then positively cheery, a refreshing weight off his shoulders. A shudder of relief stretched through him. His arm didn’t even itch anymore. “Oh, that’s nice.”

“Do be quiet.”

“Never been very good at that.”

“I am aware.”

Pelkaia’s hand darted out, gathering the selium that had escaped her face in one outstretched hand. Aella scowled, and Detan’s awareness of the cloud above all their heads came crashing back as Pelkaia’s globule floated free once more. He staggered, nausea threatening to rise. Tibs grabbed his shoulder to hold him steady.

“You can only shut down one of us at a time, then,” Pelkaia said, and though he couldn’t see it her smirk was palpable.

Aella sighed and gestured toward her arrayed guards. “And yet you are hopelessly outnumbered. Please, do not debase yourselves by attempting to fight. You are welcome here, could even come to be treasured here. I can offer you knowledge and training beyond whatever small truths you’ve been forced to scrape together.”

“Knowledge earned with a whitecoat’s scalpel,” Detan snapped.

She inclined her head to him. “Yes. My methods, however, are not that of my adopted mother and her colleagues.”

“The way you treat your mother tells me all I need to know about your methods.”

“And you disagree with my treatment?”

Detan winced. From the little smile quirking the corners of her lips he could tell she’d seen his momentary pleasure at Callia’s pain. “She deserves punishment, not cruelty.”

“I do not see the distinction.”

“Then we will never be in agreement.”

“You will change your mind in due time. Kneel, all of you. I’m afraid chains are necessary until I can come to trust you all.” Aella flashed a truly pleased smile. “Though I hope they will not be needed long.”

“Begging your pardon,” Tibs drawled, “but it occurs to me to mention that I’m a square peg in your round hole.”

Detan stifled a frantic giggle.

“Guilt by association, I’m afraid, Tibal. Now kneel.”

The six stepped forward. Detan took an involuntary step back, hands held palms-out toward them. “Hold on a tick, we were just starting to get friendly, I’m not ready for you to bring the ropes out yet.”

Pelkaia said, “Coss, now.”

Vertigo washed over him. The room shifted, the atmosphere thickened, as if the whole of reality were bunching up, dragged toward the pinprick of stability that was Coss. Tibs’s fingers dug into Detan’s shoulder, minute sparks of pain grounding him, keeping him upright. He gasped for air like a starved fish and bent over his knees as sparks of white light encroached upon his vision.

The world around him lit, nacreous brilliance falling like a curtain, cutting him off from all those around him. Sel. All the tiny bits of it drifting through the air. All the miniscule intrusions it made upon their world every day, too small to be noticed or made use of, brought to brilliant flaring life.

For the barest of moments terror shook him. He was transplaced, pushed back to that terrible moment a year ago when Callia had thrust a needle in his arm and allowed him to see the truth of what he saw now – and what he’d done with it. The heady control as he fine-tuned his power and shattered the table beneath his back. Pelkaia had said he was capable of harnessing that finesse still. Had seemed certain of the fact.

Black skies, but he wanted that power back.

The glittering tore away from his eyes, coalescing around Pelkaia, and perverse jealousy shot through him – how dare she strip his treasure from him. How dare she command that which was his birthright. Coss dripped sweat, his narrow face slack with effort.

Detan’s ears popped. All the sel pulled away from him, a receding tide that he wanted to wash him away. Someone screamed, and the sel began to splinter – to fling outward from Coss as if it were broken glass. Detan reached out for it, fingers trembling. Tibs shook him, punched his arm. He hardly felt it.

He pushed out, stripped the sel away from whoever held it with the force of his will, slammed it against those shuttered windows, and let loose.

His ears rang. His eyes filled with grit and his mouth felt stuffed with wool. He lay on his side, Tibs blanketed over him, a burning ache in his legs and a dull throb racing from his head down to his toes. Blackness encroached upon his vision and then he was standing, Tibs grabbing him by the collar, jerking him along as if he were a marionette. Dust filled the air, acrid, choking. He coughed and spluttered and they heaved themselves over the stone rubble of the wall, out into the cold breeze and the annoyingly cheerful sunlight.

Somehow he gained control of his feet and staggered alongside Tibs to the other side of the rubble. He expected to feel light, free of his burdens, as he had after Aransa.

And yet hunger still consumed him.

“Not your best plan.” Tibs brushed chalk-white dust from his coat and slapped his hat against his thigh. Somehow the ties had torn off his wrists during the blast, leaving rashy smears across his skin. A thin trickle of blood leaked from his temple. Detan looked away, stomach clenching. It was all he could do to ignore the siren call of the sheet of sel blanketing the building. Whatever Coss had condensed from the air, the raw mass of Aella’s defensive measures remained. He suspected, though the memory was hazy, that it’d been Aella’s ability that cut him short before he made use of that thick cloud.

Great bells rang out, clanging from atop the towers of the Remnant’s five buildings.

“Desperate times.” He tried to keep his voice light, but it creaked over the dusty dryness in his throat and his grin was limp.

Pelkaia staggered out behind them, Coss’s arm thrown around her shoulders to keep her upright. Detan looked away from the anger in her eyes, tried to stifle the firestorm of guilt building in his chest. He’d been careless, as usual. Throwing around his power to suit his need. Could have been a load-bearing wall, he realized. Could have brought the whole thing down on their heads.

“Sirra,” Tibs said, and the use of his nickname brought his head up sharp. Tibs was frowning at him, the blood from his temple having found a smeared path through the stubble on his chin. “Still with me?”

“More or less,” he grated, looking around at the disaster he’d wrought. Stone groaned, the ominous, grating sound loud to his ears even above the peel of the Remnant’s alarm bells. The whole windowed face of the yellowstone house was blown clear off, the rectangular shape of Aella’s desk the only stick of furniture left standing, its presence made ridiculous by its normalcy.

Through the drifting clouds of dust, figures began to stir. He was a little disgusted with himself as relief washed over him. They were his enemies. He should crow victory at their defeat, be angered that they still lived. But he didn’t want them dead, not really. Didn’t want any more blood on his hands. He glanced to Tibs, to the guilty smear down the side of his head, then sharply away. Too late for clean hands.

Pelkaia and Coss stumbled up alongside them, and they all knelt down behind the false shield of the rubble he’d wrought, praying to the sweet skies Aella hadn’t spotted them yet.

“What now?” Pelkaia hissed, all business, not willing to delve into a finger-pointing match until they were safely away and she could take her time clobbering him.

Behind them, the Remnant’s doors began to disgorge a stream of disheveled, confused guards. Detan dared to hope the distraction was at least enough to give Ripka a clearer path to safety.

“I suggest you put the mean face back on,” he said.

“Why bother? She can yank it away at any moment, blasted girl has grown too strong.”

Detan caught Coss’s eye. The rumpled man’s brows shot up as understanding passed between them. Coss nodded.

“Not,” Detan said, “if we can keep her busy, and hope Ripka can get the Larkspur pointed our way in a hurry.”

“Bad plan,” Tibs said.

“Only one I got.”

“Honding,” Aella’s voice rang out, sing-song, through the dust and destruction, “you’ve been a very naughty boy.”

He gathered himself, and stood to face his fears.