Rai-Kirah - Transformation Part 17

"My lord, I'll say nothing more until I have your word. You may do as you wish with me-as always." I held my arms out straight to the side, and I did not look away.

This time it was Aleksander who dropped his eyes. "Of course you have my word."

"In the central market of Capharna is a bronze statue of a dying warrior who has just slain a mythical beast-a gyr-beast." I closed my eyes and forced away the singsong refrain of Llyr's dying. "Do you know it?"

"I do."

"Go there. Clear your mind of every distraction and touch the gyrbeast. The way will appear in your head, something like a map. Follow the direction it gives you, and you will be met and taken the rest of the way. They won't like you. They won't like it that you-a Derzhi-have learned the way. But you must tell them you are fyddschar-enchanted-and that you come seeking their help.

They need to know everything about the demons, about the Khelid. And tell them you've been told you bear the feadnach. They won't refuse you."

"I can't remember all that. You can tell them your magic words yourself."

"I won't be there."

"But of course you will. If not to your own people, where . . . Druya's horns, you don't think to stay here? You've blood on you already-wages of this night's adventure I would wager. You'll be dead an hour after I'm gone. And that's if you're lucky."

Curse the man for his stubborn heart. "I'll put you in greater danger. A missing Ezzarian slave will bring the Magician's Guild into the hunt," I said.

"Paltry as their skills are, there are a great number of them, and they are good hunters. Your father and the Khelid can't mount too noisy a search for you.

How would they explain it? But for me ..."

Aleksander soothed the restless Musa with a gentle hand and stared at me until my voice dwindled away. "You are perhaps the worst liar I have ever encountered," he said at last. "You shouldn't even bother. Your eyes won't stay still. Your skin turns yellow as if you've eaten poison. Your eyelids twitch.

Now begin again and tell me the truth or I'll not budge a step from this palace, demons be d.a.m.ned. Why will you not take me to your own people?"

I wrapped my hands about my clammy, bare arms and stared at the ground.

"I cannot. Or rather I can, but it will do neither of us any good. They will look past me as if I don't exist. They will hear no word I speak, and if my words come through your mouth, they'll not hear you, either. I could strike one of them, and he would not flinch. From the day I was taken captive, I've been dead to them-irredeemably, unspeakably corrupt. I can never go back."

That moment of my speaking was, perhaps, the blackest moment of my life.

No matter how often I had voiced them in my mind, I had never said the words aloud. The utterance made them real, in the way a gravestone manifests the hopeless truth that breathless bodies, still wearing the aspect of life, cannot confirm.

"Corrupt? You? Are the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds blind and deaf or are you all infected with some priggish disease?"

"It is our law. There are good reasons."

Aleksander put his hand under my chin and forced me to look at him. Even in the dark his eyes burned. "Do you have the least bit of an idea of what you've done to me, Seyonne? I can't take a p.i.s.s without you watching me, forcing me to look through your eyes at what I do, judging my ridiculous temper, daring me to be better than I am. Fifty times I've come an ant's p.r.i.c.k from sticking a knife in you, because I could make you neither envy nor fear me, and I couldn't understand it. You were only a slave. And now you're going to let my father slit your belly and hang you up by your entrails because some imbeciles say you're not good enough to talk to them?"

"My lord-"

"Corruption cannot make a man travel in ways he's unwilling to go, make him see bits of himself, however minute, that are worthy of true honor-not this pomp and mouth-music we attach to honor's name. If you are corruption, then I am already one of these ill-begotten soul-eaters, and I'd best stay here and watch you die." He planted one boot in Musa's stirrup, swung his leg over the saddle, and extended his hand. "But neither of us is what others claim. If I cannot be afraid to fight my war, then I'll be a wh.o.r.eson demon forever before I let you hide from this one of yours."

I had made peace with fate, resigned myself to exist alone in captivity until nature finished what the Derzhi had begun. Now Aleksander was asking me to take up the battle again ... and the immensity of grief and pain that would come with it. Chances were we'd never get so far as the gyr-beast, much less the rendezvous. Chances were I'd be dead and Aleksander packed off to Khelidar long before I saw any Ezzarian turn away from me. Before I saw her.

I s.h.i.+fted my senses and found the feadnach yet burning within him; then I sighed, s.n.a.t.c.hed Boresh's cloak from the ground, and took the Prince's hand.

Chapter 19.

"Urgent message for Lord Jubai!" screamed Aleksander, not slowing Musa's gallop by even a heartbeat as we raced across the final courtyard toward the solidly closed palace gates. I hid my eyes in his back, deciding I would rather not know at exactly which moment two men riding a Derzhi warhorse would be flattened against the two-hundred-year-old oaken beams. But the impact did not come, and a smell of burning oil and a glimpse of torchlight past the edge of the Prince's cloak told me we were through. Aleksander laughed and shouted over his shoulder as we thundered down the lane, "No hesitation.

Dmitri taught me that."

I didn't answer. I was working to get my balance before discovering the exact measure of the considerable distance to the ground. The prospect of an arrow in the back or smas.h.i.+ng into closed gates did nothing to ease the difficulties of remaining astride the galloping horse. I had been an adequate rider in my youth, but on smaller, less aggressive beasts. I had no place to put my feet, too many qualms about gripping Aleksander as tightly as I would like, and a dreadful problem in that I was most inadequately dressed for riding. Slaves were not given undergarments. I had only a few scratchy folds of Boresh's cloak caught between bare skin and the saddle, and I was already raw after only five minutes going. Unable to keep a firm grip on the horse, I felt like the next jolt would send me flying.

We streaked across the causeway and into the town, dodging deserted wagons and shuttered market stalls, galloping precariously fast through narrow lanes and about sharp corners until we reached the grand marketplace of Capharna. The banners of celebration hung limp in the cold, damp air, and the broad expanse of pavement was littered with the remnants of the townsfolk's dakrah feasting, interrupted before it had really begun. Hastily sewn mourning draperies were nailed over every doorway, while shadowy figures scurried about, looking for sc.r.a.ps of food or cloth, or dragging away the collapsed plank tables and booths to burn for a night's warmth.

Aleksander reined in his mount beside the towering bronze monument to bittersweet victory. The bronze warrior slumped lifeless beside the legendary monster he had slain, his sword forever on the verge of slipping from his graceful hand. The warrior's face was cla.s.sic Derzhi. Aleksander could have sat for it.

"Shall we?" said the Prince, offering me his hand. I managed to dismount without a.s.sistance, though my wobble-kneed landing and subsequent grimaces as I stretched out my nether regions gave him pause. "I'd have thought a slave would develop a thicker skin," he said.

The ground under my feet rumbled ominously, and the night sky glowed from the direction of the palace as if a second moon was waxing in the north.

"We've only moments, Your Highness. We must be away from here before anyone sees what we're about."

"Well, go do it then."

"It would be better if you did it, my lord. You know the land hereabouts. The map will make sense to you." I dared not have both of us use the enchantment. I had no way to know what limits or wards had been placed on it. And, of course, if something happened to me, Aleksander had to know where to go. I could not yet convince myself that there was any real possibility that I would ever walk into an Ez-zarian settlement, else I could not have continued. "Just clear your mind, touch the beast, and say 'dryn haver.' It means 'show me the way.'"

I could hear the shouts of the searchers and hear the horses now, not just feel them. Aleksander could, too, for he didn't argue. He ran to the sculpture, scrambled up the stone block on which it rested, and laid his hand on the gyrbeast's tail.

"I don't see anything," he called. "Or feel it, or know it, or whatever the devil I'm supposed to do."

It had to be there. Llyr had wanted me to know how to find the Ezzarians.

When Ezzarians wanted to keep a location hidden, they would embed the direction in a map enchantment. Chances were that only a handful of their own people actually knew the entire way to their refuge. The path would be masked, hidden under layers of spells, so that those sent out into the world would not be able to lead others back to the rest of them. Llyr had said that the gyrbeast would lead the way. This was the only gyrbeast I knew of outside of ma.n.u.scripts and stories, though I had seen things in the domain of demons ...

...the soft rain fell like tears of grief, was.h.i.+ng away the purple blood of the monster I had slain. Wisps of steam curled from the silver knife I wrested from its leathery neck. I stepped along its back and gazed upward, letting the rain cool my face, was.h.i.+ng away the sweat and blood and foul sputum of the beast. Even as I watched, the clouds broke, revealing brilliantly clear stars in no pattern that would ever be visible in the realms of men. I felt the wafting breeze, tasted its shape and strength, and judged it enough. It would carry me to the portal easily. I was tired, but it had come out well, and soon I would be in her arms...

Fires of heaven, why could I not keep it buried? Aleksander was poised on the stone, waiting. The boy had been dying. What if I'd misunderstood him?

"Clear your mind and speak the words," I said harshly. " 'Dryn haver.' Let the image come. Don't try to control it. They wouldn't have left it simple."

Aleksander leaned over to the beast again and was quiet for a moment. An eternity. Our pursuers were only a street away. The scavengers had already fled into the dark alleyways.

"Druya's horns!" Aleksander's hand flew into the air as if the bronze beast had stung it. He bellowed in laughter, then leaped from the stone block right into Musa's saddle. It made my backside throb to watch it, but not as much as it did when he hauled me up behind him again and kicked the obedient stallion back to life.

"Extraordinary!" he shouted as we wheeled and shot out of the southern gate of the marketplace just as the torchlit chase entered from the north. I could almost hear the leather of their armor creaking. We raced madly through the sleeping lanes. I couldn't imagine how Aleksander could see where we were going, as the buildings melted together in a blur. Perhaps he didn't. Perhaps it was all the horse. But every time I thought we must emerge from the city into the countryside, Aleksander would take another turn, and we'd find ourselves deeper in the old part of the city. I was sure we were lost.

I thought my fears confirmed when the Prince halted Musa in a dark, narrow lane near the river. It stunk of pigs, dead fish, and rotted cabbage. Sour yellow light spilled into the lane through the smoke-grimed windows of a tavern.

He'd got it wrong. The map enchantment would not lead us to the Ezzarians themselves, only to a meeting place where we would take on a guide. But Ezzarians would never use such a den of filth, of excess, of impurity. Besides, it was right in the middle of the city. Much too public. I should have envisioned the map from the gyrbeast enchantment myself. "My lord, this couldn't be the place-"

"It's not, but we need to stop here anyway. Come on."

A man staggered out of the door and p.i.s.sed in the lane, then collapsed in his own puddle. Aleksander stepped over him and pushed open the door of the tavern. Exasperated with the willful Derzhi, I followed, mystified, wondering if he had decided he couldn't proceed without a drink or a woman.

The air inside the dark hovel was thick with smoke, and smelled of burned grease and sour ale. The eight or ten ragged men and slovenly women slouched on stools about the room goggled curiously at us. It was not the sort of place a Derzhi warrior would frequent. The proprietor, distinguished from the others by his possessive hand on the single ale barrel, had only one yellowed tooth in his gaping mouth, and his lip was birth-cleft all the way to his nostrils. He jerked his head to a vacant stool for Aleksander, then curled his lip at my bare feet and the steel bands about my ankles. Slaves did not usually patronize taverns, either.

Aleksander did not sit down, but circled the room, examining each man carefully until he stopped behind a slender, long-legged fellow who had his face buried in a buxom woman's bodice and his hand up her skirt. "This one,"

he said, then wrapped his left arm about the man's neck and dragged the poor victim out the door. The frowsy woman who had been sitting on the man's knee collapsed to the floor with a florid curse, one breast hanging out of her bodice and her skirt bunched around her waist.

"I don't like his looks," Aleksander shouted to the curious drinkers who crowded up to the door to see what was going on. None dared step outside to get in the middle of it. I pushed my way through them, just as confused as the rest. What could Aleksander be thinking? Hooves and shouts echoed through the nearby streets.

The Prince shoved his besotted victim against a wall. "Remove your clothes.

Boots and all." The man gaped in uncomprehending surprise until Aleksander grabbed his ear and pulled the slack-jawed face onto a level with his own. "I said, remove your clothes. Your Prince has need of them. And be quick about it. If you take more than half a minute, I'll pop your left eye from your head like a pit from a cherry." He flexed his thumb and forefinger in front of the man's face. Well short of half a minute, Aleksander tossed me a pile of clothes and boots that smelled like tar and wine and p.i.s.s, and the man was running naked down the street wailing as if a Derzhi hangman was at his back.

"Well, get them on. I didn't go to all this trouble to have you gaping at me like these hod-carriers. Unless you've developed a steel a.s.s and leather feet, you'll be glad of them and not care that I was ungentlemanlike while acquiring them. We've no time to visit my tailor."

Refusing to wear the clothes wasn't going to put them back on the man they belonged to. And, in truth, the closing chase did nothing to make me think generously. The Prince would be coddled and escorted back to his demon guardians. I was the one who would lose one of my feet and half of my face ...

if I was lucky.

In the matter of one minute, I was wearing the first boots and breeches I'd put on in sixteen years, and we were flying through the streets again, sparks shooting from Musa's shoes as we headed for the western gates.

A Derzhi prizes a fine horse above every other possession, and my presumption that Aleksander would have none but the best was fully justified.

No pursuer came any closer to us that night. We raced out of the city and across the open valley floor toward the heavily forested mountains to the west. Even carrying the two of us together, Musa never faltered. About the time the darkness thinned to the color of watered milk, the road narrowed and entered the trees, and the Prince slowed his steed to a walk. The lolling gait made me drowsy....

... they kept coming, wave after wave. A Derzhi warrior leading his four cadre brothers, and behind them a troop of Manganar foot soldiers and mounted Thrid mercenaries, ivory talismans dangling over painted breastplates. A scream from behind me. Verwynn, my father's friend, fell, a Thrid spear in his gut. My leaden arms were covered with blood. Still they came. . . unending waves of blood and death... I had to hold until the others got away. I was a Warden, sworn to protect them...

"Daughters of night!" Aleksander's exclamation as we jerked to a halt startled me awake. The Prince was bent forward, pressing his head into his hands that clutched at Musa's mane. Clawing s.h.i.+vers crept along my spine, more than could be explained by the icy droplets dribbling down my neck from the thick branches overhead.

"Is it the change, my lord?" I said, ready to scramble from the horse rather than share it with a shengar.

"No." Aleksander straightened up again and spurred the horse to a walk.

As soon as Musa settled, so did I. My head rested heavy against Aleksander's back. I could not seem to keep the dreams at bay ...

... the sunset stained the sky red as if the earth could not hold all the blood. I whirled about, kicked the knife from the hand of a Derzhi youth, and slashed at the grinning Manganar, who was sneaking up my blind side, his last thought amazement at how I knew he was there. To my left the brothers Giard and Feyn-Searchers called in from their rounds-struggled with at least eight warriors. To my right all was silence-though as I flung the lifeless youth onto the pile of bodies behind me and rushed to Giard's aid, I strained to hear the sound of reinforcements. Ten or twelve other Ezzarians were similarly engaged, and coming up the narrow valley were more Derzhi. . . another wave. .. how had they found us? We had been sure that no one knew of this route. We were hoping to surprise the main body of their force before they could slaughter our left flank, but before we could get out of the shallow valley, we were trapped. Feyn gasped in astonishment when the arm that had slain fifty warriors dropped from his shoulder, severed by a Manganar ax.

When the sword released his entrails from his belly, he toppled slowly onto his arm as if to reclaim it. I roared in madness and raised my sword again .. .

"... for the moment, but they'll bring in Janque as soon as they can get him sober."

I didn't know where the first part of the conversation had gotten off to.

"Janque?" My tongue was thick with sleep.

"The finest tracker in Capharna. As I said, it's why I went west when we're supposed to go north. He'll have a harder time following us through here. I've left him six false trails. He'll eat his hounds for breakfast."

Hounds. Trackers. What was I thinking to lead the Derzhi down on the remnants of my destroyed people? "My lord, we can't-"

He knew exactly what was in my mind. "I know what I'm doing. They'll not be able to follow us. Even Janque. Go back to sleep."

"I wasn't-"

"Are you arguing with me? Just because I gave you boots, you think you can say what you please?"

"No. Of course not." We rode on and I lost track of the day again.

The shadows were angled in a vastly different direction when we stopped and I fell off the horse. Well, I didn't exactly fall. Aleksander pulled me off. But it was the same gut-twisting sensation, and I... I had been deep in that other place.

"Ho, Seyonne. All's well." He caught one flailing hand in his steady grip, but I wrenched it away, whirled about, and aimed for his neck with the side of the other hand and for his gut with my knee. It was only his own impeccable reflexes and my lack of practice that kept me from breaking his neck.

"What in Athos' name... ?" His eyes were huge, and when the thunder in my blood quieted enough to realize what I'd done-and almost done-I was appalled.

"Forgive me, my lord. I was dreaming ..." I could scarcely speak for the shadows crowding one upon the other to escape my head before I could capture them and remember the fading vision.

"Dreaming? I've not seen three men who could move so fast and so ... deadly ... when they were fully awake." He looked at my hands that were clamped in his own, then released them and moved his gaze to my face.

"Happily one of them was you," I said, drawing my cloak about me against wind that was not half so cold as my soul.

"I've heard people can do amazing things in their sleep that they couldn't possibly-"

Aleksander held up his hand and closed his eyes. "Don't. I told you, I'll hear no more of your pitiful lying. I'd rather you say nothing at all."

"As you wish, my lord." We were stopped in a small clearing away from the road. I climbed up a pile of rocks beside the trail and looked out on a high mountain valley still locked in the embrace of winter. Frost snapped a limb somewhere deep in the trees, and the screech of a hunting falcon split the bitter air.

"What I wish is to know what you are, Seyonne. A slave held sixteen years who moves like a Lidunni fighter.... Were you in service to one of them, or someone who studied their ways? You watched them, didn't you? Someone allowed you to see, or you spied on him and learned it."

"No, my lord. No one is responsible for teaching a slave things that are forbidden." The Lidunni Brotherhood was a secretive sect of Derzhi who mixed religion and the art of hand combat.

"You snapped my grip as if I were a five-year-old girl. I will know how you learned it. If you knew this from before ... how in Athos' name were you taken captive?"

The taste of death was in my mouth. It was all too close. "Please, my lord. Not now. I'll tell you some day if you insist, but not now." I tried to keep the moment's disturbance out of my voice, the inexplicable dread that constricted my throat and made my heart race when I dreamed. That battle was long lost.

There was no reason for it to take on new life just because I was going to see Ezzarians. The dead were dead. The living ... had survived. "Is this the place that was shown to you?"

"d.a.m.nation, you're stubborn," said the Prince, cheeks and eyes blazing. "You try my patience, and I've little enough of it in the best of times. If I weren't asleep on my feet, we'd have it out right now. After what I've seen ..."

"You've seen nothing but the remnant of a dream, my lord. Please tell me if this is the place."

"No, not yet." He propped his hands on Musa's saddle and leaned on it tiredly.

"And just as well. I'd not be awake to greet anyone."

"We need a fire," I said, shaking off the lingering shadows. The sun was low over the mountains. It must have been weeks since I'd gotten more than three hours' sleep in a sun's turning. The Prince was still staring at the saddle, and it came to me that there were a number of things he had never had to do for himself. "I can take care of the horse, so you can sleep."