Carnivores of Light and Darkness (7 page)

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Authors: Alan Dean Foster

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BOOK: Carnivores of Light and Darkness
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“This is a serious business you speak of, Etjole Ehomba.”
“Very much so, Rael.”
“As to your question, there are boats that call regularly at Kora Keri. They ply the trade routes along the Kohoboth, traveling west with the current and returning eastward with the wind. But none that I know of would think of daring the wild currents of the Semordria. There are delta-based merchants who do leave the safe confines of the river. You might travel to its mouth in hopes of meeting one of them, but even they trade only along the coast. The idea of actually crossing the ocean would horrify them. They are interested in making money, not in noble exploration.”
“I see,” he replied resignedly. “Then I will have to continue northward until I find a captain and crew whom the notion of undertaking such a journey does not fill with terror.”
She wagged a warning finger at him. “There is trouble in the north.”
“So I have been told.” Idly, he wondered if the gate guards had stopped running. At his feet, his spear stirred slightly, as if it were part of a cavernous mouth that was flexing in its sleep. “I do not fear trouble.”
She eyed him intently, and he wondered at her purpose. With an effort, he forced himself to think of his wife. “What
do
you fear, Etjole Ehomba?”
He formulated a reply. “Ignorance. Prejudice. Eromakadi.”
Her perfect eyebrows rose slightly. “So you are more than a mere herdsman.”
“No. Nothing more.” He waited silently.
After a moment, she grunted softly. “You are a tracker of certain things. I am a reader of certain things. I will give you instructions that will let you find the best route north, if you are determined to continue on. But first, for my interest, and because I like you, I will attempt to see what the future holds for you.” Her expression conveyed a professionalism that worked hard to conceal a seething, underlying sensuality.
From a cabinet behind the desk she withdrew a crystal. Not round, as was the norm, but perfectly square. It was filled with embedded bits of other minerals. Rutilated quartz, he decided, or something even more exotic. Without waiting to be asked, he drew his chair close.
Setting the crystalline cube down on the desk between them, she began to make passes over its surface with her hands, caressing the transparent material with the tips of her fingers. Unwillingly, he found himself envying the stone. Within, the embedded shards of darker material twitched, shuddered, and began to move, realigning themselves according to cryptic patterns that meant nothing to him, but whose very activity he found fascinating. As near as he could tell, the stone cube was solid. Yet the deeply rooted inner crystals were clearly shifting their position within the rock.
The quartz cube grew cloudy as it embarked on a sequence of color changes. One moment it was morion, the next citrine, then amethyst, a squared succession of gemstone properties. Through it all Rael sat almost motionless, wholly intent on her task. Ehomba could only look on, equally entranced by the doer and the doing.
At last she looked up, closed her eyes, sighed deeply, and seemed to slump in on herself. The cube became colorless again save for the rutile and other inclusions. Opening her eyes, she blinked at him. Expecting a smile, he was disappointed.
“Go home, Etjole Ehomba.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Go home.” She laid one fine hand atop the cube. “It is all here. I saw it. Disaster, complete and entire. You are doomed to unremitting misery, your quest to failure, the rest of your life to cold emptiness. Unless you end this now. Go home, back to your village and to your family. Before it is too late. Before you die.”

 

VI
S
TUNNED
,
HE SAT BACK IN HIS CHAIR
. O
UTSIDE
,
THE
cacophony of the bazaar continued to rage raucously, the piquant odors of frying food still drifted up to the upper floors of surrounding buildings. But within the room something was different. Something had changed.
Despite her fervor, she was as beautiful as ever. Briefly, he wondered how that intensity of intellect might translate into physical passion. The moment passed, as circumstances compelled him to concentrate on other matters.
“I do not understand.” He indicated the crystal cube. “What did you see in that thing to render so dire a warning?”
As she spoke, her eyes changed from black to green. “A woman of great—no, of supernal, beauty.”
He pursed his lips. “That is not a sighting I would call a prelude to disaster.”
“Then you know little of the real world, traveler.”
His head dipped in barely perceptible acquiescence. “I cannot argue that. I am but a poor herdsman.”
She eyed him shrewdly. “Are you, Etjole Ehomba? Looking at you, sitting here across from me, far from your animals and your village, I find myself wondering. A herdsman to be sure, and poor in the false coin of commerce perhaps, but there are other kinds of wealth, other means for measuring riches and the true worth of an individual. So, I wonder.”
As always, he was uncomfortable when the subject was him. He gestured anew at the cube. “If your intent is to turn me from my chosen path, you will have to come up with a threat greater than the sight of a beautiful woman.”
“My ‘intent’ is to do no such thing. I desire only to try and see what the future holds for you. The path you choose is your own, and only you can decide whether or not to walk it. Life is a noun, Etjole, and living it no more or less than a matter of adding adjectives.” Her petite, fine-skinned hand brushed over the top of the cube. “I am here only to show you what adjectives may be added.”
“The woman you saw is the Visioness Themaryl,” he told her.
Her eyes widened. “So you have seen a little of the future yourself.”
“Nothing of the sort.” He crossed his arms casually over his chest and leaned back in the chair, rocking it gently. “It is the name of the woman abducted against her will, and was confided to me by the dying soldier Tarin Beckwith. It comes from my past, not my future.”
“Well, it lies here in your future as well.” The sensuous seer bent forward over the cube. “She is being held captive by a small man who commands great evil.”
“Hymneth the Possessed.”
“Yes.” Rael frowned as she studied the rutilated innards of the crystal. “There swirls about him an air of great confusion. I cannot tell if he possesses this evil or is possessed by it.”
“I would think the two would go together,” Ehomba commented.
“As often they do, but the confusion and uncertainty here are profound beyond anything I have ever encountered before.” She glanced up from the cube, and her eyes were a pale yellow, like those of a cat. “I am a strong woman, Etjole. Confident in my abilities, secure in my knowledge. But I would never, never consider challenging a power like this that I see here. Because its body is hidden from me and impenetrable to my arts, I can discern only its effects. There are many methodologies of evil, and this one exceeds my comprehension. It frightens me even to apperceive it. I don’t think I want to look into it any deeper. I might come to understand how it works.
“If you continue onward and manage to confront this Hymneth person-creature, you will be utterly destroyed. Try as I might, I can foresee no other outcome.” She sat back from the cube and closed her eyes. With her sigh, the air in the room seemed to surge around him and then relax, like a wave rushing onshore only to lose all its substance and energy to the thirsty sand.
“I would have hoped,” he told her in a small masterpiece of understatement, “for more encouraging words.”
Her eyes opened. They were blue again. “I like you, Etjole Ehomba. Simple or not, smelly or not, it would trouble me to see you come to harm. But I can’t stop you, nor would I if I could. Each of us chooses our own adjectives, our own modifiers. I choose to sit here, in this comfortable, sunny place, and parcel out my learning to those who will listen and pay. It’s a good life.” For the second time he saw the twinkle in her eyes. “I don’t suppose I could convince you to stay with me a while. Given enough time, I might be able to talk you into saving your life.”
Her body manifested itself in quiet ways that could not be ignored, not even when she was revealing matters of great import. He had been aware of it ever since she had entered the room. Now her gaze metamorphosed from penetrating to inviting, and the way she shifted in her chair produced sounds he could only hear with organs other than his ears. They were loud, and forceful, and they threatened to drown out his own inner voice.
“I can think of nothing that would please me more,” he told her frankly, “if only I was not committed to fulfilling this obligation, and if I did not have a woman waiting for me in my house.”
“Your house is a long way from Kora Keri, Etjole. Who is to say what your woman does to keep boredom from her door when you are not there?”
“I cannot worry about that.” He rose. “I prefer not to create pain without foundation.”
Smiling insidiously, she fondled the crystal cube. The inclusions within seemed to torque slightly in her direction. “I could look and try to learn the answer to that question for you.”
He turned away from her. “I would rather not know.”
The seer Rael sniffed, unable to mask her derision completely. “So you choose blissful ignorance. It strikes me a poor way to go into battle.”
“Who said anything about bliss? And is this a battle I am fighting here? If so, whom am I battling? There is no one present except you and I, and I do not want to think that I am fighting with you.”
Her lips, which in another time and place he would gladly have stilled with his own, tightened. “What a maddening man you are, Etjole Ehomba! You must pardon my forwardness. In my profession I am not used to dealing with men or women of principle. So I am having difficulty deciding what you are, and how to deal with you.”
“I told you,” he explained patiently, “I am—”
“A simple herdsman; yes, yes!” Rising abruptly from her chair, she turned away from him and stalked toward the rear portal. “A simple herdsman with an answer for everything. Worse, you are right.” Whirling around, violet eyes blazing, she wagged a warning finger at him. “If you insist on pursuing the course you have chosen and succeed in following it to its end, you are going to die, Etjole Ehomba! Do you hear what I am saying; do you understand my words? You are going to die! What, finally, do you have to say to that?”
His voice was as calm and controlled as ever. “You have a very pretty finger.”
Dropping her arm, she inhaled sharply. “I think you’re right, and that I was wrong to ever think otherwise. You
are
a simple herdsman, uncomplicated and disingenuous. You’re too naïve to be frightened. That—or you are the most subtle of sorcerers I have ever met.” Her tone thawed. “Many are the men who have pursued me for months, years even, without success, but you have ensorcelled me in a matter of moments, and with me doing most of the talking at that.” She shook her head slowly as she regarded him, a baffled look on her face.
“Who are you, Etjole Ehomba? What are you?”
Before he could reply yet again that he was but a simple herdsman from the south, she had spun on the heel of her slipper and vanished through the rear-facing beaded portal. The meeting was over. For an instant, he considered following her, to try to explain further, to do his best to assuage her upset and unease. But it might very well be dark in whatever back room she had vanished into, and the walls would certainly be closer to one another, his options for flight narrower. Nor was he entirely sure he would fight very hard to escape. Best not to place himself in a position where he might be forced to find out.
The entrance beckoned behind him. Leaving himself no more time to think, which might prove unsettling, or to feel, which could prove worse, he turned and departed.
It was only later, when he was safely back among the boisterous, jostling crowd in the bazaar, that he was struck by the realization that she had not charged him for his visit. Dipping one hand into a pocket of his kilt, he absently fingered the little sack of gravel from the beach near the village. The simplistic, repetitive activity always helped to remind him of the village and to strengthen his memories of home. The more he thought of the dazzling seer Rael, the more he needed that reinforcement. And if her words were to be believed, he had exerted as profoundly unsettling an effect on her as she had on him. Their lovemaking would have been volcanic.
But it was not to be. He pushed on through the crowd. There were preparations to be made. If, as she had told him, he would find no boat master in this country willing to attempt an ocean crossing, then he would have to seek farther north. That meant restocking the few basic supplies he could carry on his back. Salt, sugar, a few carefully chosen spices, some basic medicinal powders, and whatever else he could afford that might prove useful over the duration of an extended overland trek. If he was fortunate, he might learn of a caravan of some sort traveling north and join them for guidance and mutual protection. But since he could not count on doing so, he had to be prepared to press on alone.
Of the lands to the north of the Kohoboth he knew little, only what village oldsters like Fhastal and Meruba mumbled around communal campfires. Half and more of that might be as much sheer invention as literal truth. Fhastal in particular could be exceptionally imaginative when it came to telling tales of distant lands and strange peoples. He had never paid more than cursory attention to such ramblings because they had never functioned as anything other than stories, related for the entertainment of adults and children alike.
Now he struggled to remember what he could of those babblings, hoping to winnow a few kernels of fact from the dross of speculation. The region north of the Kohoboth was called the Unstable Lands. He did not know why. Was it because knowledge of it was so limited, or were there reasons more sinister? He would know soon enough, he realized. In the absence of access to an oceangoing ship, that was where he had to go next.
But first, restocking. And something else. He turned, heading back toward the inn that had provided him with such good food and sleep. Not because he was hungry, or even because he was ready to choose a place to spend the night, but because of something the beauteous Rael had told him. A small matter he intended to take care of even though she would not experience the resolution of it.
He did not think that he smelled, but he was willing to take her word for it. After all, she was a seer, and her word was to be believed, and until he left Kora Keri behind he would be forced to suffer the company of others whom he might not want to think the less of him. So he would sacrifice, and have a shower.

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