Warrior's Touch (Deadly Touch book 2)

“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Anya threw her pen down, sending flecks of ink flying out from the fountain tip, decorating the pages splayed before her. The pen rolled, settling in the spine. She sneaked a look over her shoulder, but there was no one to bear witness to her defacing of a sacred tome. Sacred to someone. Completely useless to Anya. Still, she tried to blot up the ink drops as best she could with her handkerchief and quietly commended herself for choosing to conduct her research in the privacy of her room. This hadn’t been her first outburst, and she couldn’t have forgiven herself for breaking the sanctity of silence within the military base’s library, no matter how underutilized. So, it seemed, she had made a very smart decision. Smart to study where her outbursts wouldn’t offend, perhaps. Less so to be attempting to make sense of the volume before her.

It wasn’t even written in Rilish. While a smattering of words seemed familiar enough for her to make some sense of them, the sentence structures and frequency of completely unfamiliar words made it impossible to piece any real information together. At least the words Aenuk and Karan seemed to have been conserved across languages, and another word, Imeniss, appeared alongside them enough to hint that it might be the language’s word for Immortal. This assumption did little to help her understand what any of it meant, though.

Of the few books Gaemil had managed to procure since Aris’s burning of his own collection, this was the only one that seemed to hint at a recorded history different from that taught within Quaver, Brurun, or Aghacia – the little island across a narrow sea that had been Anya’s home until recently. She wished she could access Turhmos’s libraries. She was almost certain they had a different perspective, but they hadn’t been forthcoming before Anya had had to dash to Quaver to ensure her friend was okay and more than merely alive. And so, all she really had, was a book full of gobbledygook. And pictures.

Something told her that the simple fact that she couldn’t read this one meant that it contained exactly the information she needed. She narrowed her eyes at the text, cursing it silently.

“Eldemaire.”

Anya nearly leapt from her seat.

“Sorry.” Gaemil stepped up behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders. He squeezed the balls of his hands against her shoulder blades, giving her a slight tingle, but also inviting her to relax into his touch as he leaned forward to give her a light kiss on the cheek. Almost scandalous, but no one else was there to see. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

“Eldemaire?” Anya fought against a faint but growing desire for more unseemly behaviors. Llew was in more need than ever for her to find answers. And she could wait. One day she would marry Gaemil and none of this carry on would raise an eyebrow. Well, not entirely true. There were always some eyebrows just looking for an excuse.

“The language of Eldem,” Gaemil supplied, keeping his hands in place, though his touch lightened. Absolutely platonic.

“Oh. Yes, of course.” It made sense he would know the language of the book’s country of origin. Her brief excitement that he might read it evaporated.

“Any luck?” Gaemil grabbed another chair and sat down beside her.

“Well … no.” Anya half stood, gripping her chair’s arm rests to turn it to face him. “At first Llew and I were trying to find something that might help her learn how to control her power, but ever since this business with Aris, I feel there is so much we don’t understand. We’ve made this assumption that he’s Immortal, but even that doesn’t make complete sense. I mean, how could he keep that kind of secret?”

Gaemil smiled warmly. “You forget what little attention people pay one another.”

“Really? You think people just never asked?”

“I haven’t, and I’ve known him, what? Twenty years?” Gaemil splayed his hands in an exaggerated shrug. “I guess it helps he’s already of an age where appearance isn’t expected to change much. And goes to show people don’t make a habit of looking past their own noses, no?”

Anya gave a short giggle. “No, I suppose we don’t at that.” She returned her attention to the book, satisfied enough for now. “Alright, then. My next question is: why does this book keep referring to the Aenuks and Kara alongside the Immortals, when those variants of the races didn’t exist until after the Immortals were destroyed?”

“Hmm. I suppose we also need to ask if the terms Syaenuk and Syakaran would have been used if there weren’t the stronger and diminished races to distinguish between.” Gaemil pursed his lips. “Maybe what we call Syakaran was simply known as Karan a thousand years ago.”

“Or …” Anya flipped through the book, looking for an image she’d glimpsed earlier. Somewhere past halfway through the book she found it. A half-page woodcut showed two people standing by a tree. One person had one hand on the tree and the other wrapped around the wrist of the other. Around the hand gripping the wrist were clear symbolic bolts of lightning. Magic.

Anya had spoken to the guards in Llew’s cell the night of the attack to find out everything she could about what had happened, and they had described lightning in blue and purple zigzagging from Llew’s belly, slithering up the knife and disappearing into Aris’s skin. Magic.

“That tree must be significant, which makes me think it’s an Ajnai. And we know Aenuks have a special relationship with Ajnais, which makes me think this person is Aenuk.” She pointed to the figure with a hand touching the tree. “What if a regular Aenuk took power from an Immortal, and became a Syaenuk?” She turned to Gaemil. Then hefted a disappointed sigh. “But that doesn’t explain the Syakara.”

Her hand brushed the page, looping it in a soft fold, and let it fall, showing the next page.

“And it doesn’t explain Aris.” She looked down at the page now displayed. “Oh! What is that? Ew.” She made a face.

Gaemil made a strange noise in the back of his throat.

Taking up one whole page of the book, a woodcut depicted what Anya could only describe as a person exploding. A pair of legs were where they should have been, as was an arm holding a knife buried in another person. But the rest of the … Well, Anya could only assume it was the Aenuk from the previous page, the rest of whom seemed to be flying about the page. “How did that happen?”

“Well, I guess, um.” Gaemil shifted to the edge of his chair, and studied the image, his brow deeply furrowed. “I guess the power contained within an Immortal is quite immense.”

They looked at each other. Gaemil looked as disturbed as Anya felt.

Anya peered at the image again. There was nothing to suggest anything special about each of the people – or bits of people – shown, but the words Aenuk and Imeniss both appeared in the caption. She reminded herself that Llew, Jonas and Aris all looked like normal people. Her mind was making unpleasant connections.

“So, what it’s saying is that if Llew ever found herself with the opportunity to reclaim Aris’s powers and did so, then …” Boom. She may have been able to stop herself saying it aloud, but the word was so clear in her mind, along with the image of Llew being blown to pieces.

“What if it was a Syaenuk, rather than an Aenuk?” Gaemil asked.

Anya turned to him; her mouth slightly agape. He made a good point. If the Sy versions of the races hadn’t existed in the times this book discussed, then it would never have posed that question.

She clamped her mouth shut and turned the page. So many words she couldn’t draw meaning from. She turned another page. Another full-page wood-cut illustration showed the tree again, this time with the lightning appearing to have an outward motion, leaping out at two figures. One was of a running man, laden with spear and shield. Doubled, no, tripled lines along the figure’s shins seemed to indicate speed. At least, that was how Anya interpreted it. The other figure knelt by yet another person, prone. The healer. But nothing to prove superior healing.

She scanned the caption, finding the words Aenuksi and Karansi. Syaenuk and Syakaran.

Somehow, the powers of an Immortal had been absorbed through an Aenuk, into an Ajnai tree, then spurted back out into another Aenuk and a Karan, creating the augmented versions of those races. But the Aenuk conduit who first stole the Immortal’s powers had been destroyed in the process. As a method of subduing Aris, Anya thought it stunk.