The Carnelian Throne (6 page)

“Kreesh,” said the whelt, flapping wildly, its claws fastening around his wrist.

“Kreesh,” he whispered back to it, bringing his wrist slowly toward his chest. The whelt, cobalt crest raised, humped its wings up and sidled to, his shoulder, where it perched, silver beak clacking.

“Kreesh, breet,” said the bird dejectedly, and rubbed its head against his. The fire crackled. The whelt started, half-spread its wings, and shifted from foot to foot.

“Ssh, ssh,” he soothed, reaching up to smooth its crest. The whelt shivered, stretching out its neck until one green eye was level with his. The eye blinked.

Among the strange ones, all converse had ceased. The woman half-hid behind the lighter man, staring.

Self-consciously, he further quieted the whelt, whose talons still twitched and trembled. A big bird, this; not the whelt he had expected, nor any of his. His questing fingers found its banded right leg, traced there the sign of the Vahais, Benegua’s high council.

“Go on,” he advised softly. “Why get involved?” The whelt, as he, knew better. But it only cocked its head.

“Breet, iis,” he accused it. It ruffled its feathers, shifting its weight from leg to leg. “Go on,” he advised, pushing his wrist insistently against its chest.

Again it stretched its neck and rubbed its head against his cheek. The jicekak scrapes, irritated, began itching, The woman hesitantly approached. He closed his eyes and took the whelt’s message. Here was his omen, come unasked. Mahrlys’ face hovered before him, and from her mouth came the words of death and waiting. Of death, the whelt was better informed than he: ptaiss, quenel, and whelt.
Whelt?

With a disparaging screech, the whelt took sudden flight from his shoulder, talons digging, wings battering his head. Reflexively, he ducked down and away. It climbed the air, screeching, wingtips nearly brushing the woman’s face. She screamed, and threw herself to the ground. The men rushed to her aid, but the whelt was gone, heavenward, safe from their blades.

None of his would have behaved so, he thought, fingering his punctured shoulder. Under his tunic, the clawed flesh throbbed wetly.

He brought his fingers to his lips, licked the blood. She rose up, slapping ashes from her hands, and stood there, at arm’s length, her whole body an eloquent demand for explanation.

He raised his head high, under that scrutiny, then grinned uncertainly.

“Whelt. One of Mahrlys-iis-Vahais’.” His whole body turned hot, as if the fire had caught his flesh. He could not look away, but he could think of nothing to say to her. He merely stared back, with every pore of his body. He was dimly aware that the dark one shed his outer garment and then his inner, and replaced the outer alone. The inner layer he offered up to her. She, hardly seeming to notice, took it and slipped it over her head.

Deilcrit breathed a sigh of relief.

Then she said: “You are hurt,” and he wondered whether anything mortal could have voice so soft, as she rolled up the dark sleeves and pulled her thick braid over her shoulder. “Take that off, and I will dress it.”

She was pointing at him. He backed away, shaking his head, toward the ptaissling; surreptitiously chancing a glance at her companions. They leaned close together, talking quietly. Thus he stumbled over his own spear. Glad for the respite from her flame-colored eyes and his confusion, he reached down to retrieve it. He dared not do what she asked. And yet he dared not disobey her. Miserably he retreated into the cloaking dark beyond the fire’s circle.

“Iyl-Deilcrit”—she laughed, following him—“stop and let me see to your wound.”

He stopped, in the blessed shadows, and leaned his forehead against the flare of the spear’s head. His eyes strayed to the ptaissling. He could just make it out. There was no question, now of escape: by way of whelt, that had been forbidden him. Waiting, he could endure. But the deaths to be met by more of the same ...

At her touch, he jumped as if scalded. It was all he had conjured it to be, that touch. Hopeless, at her repeated command, he fumbled at the strap tied about his waist, fingers plucking clumsily at the knotted, damp-swollen cord.

“Here,” she murmured, “let me do it.” He stood, not daring to breathe. When the knot was freed, the belt, with its pouch and scabbard, fell to the ground.

“Well?” she urged, smiling. He was glad he could not see the starlight on her breast through the fine cloth. He peered over her head, at the two lounging in the fire’s glow. Then he stopped thinking, in response to her stamped foot, and pulled the tunic upward quickly, before he could turn and run. And if he ran, he would have Mahrlys to face ....

His chin caught in the headhole. He struggled with it. When he could once again see, she was searching something from the wide belt she wore. Naked but for a strip of cloth—and it old and threadbare—wound around his loins, he crossed his arms over his chest and squatted down. Not ever had he been naked before a woman. He hoped that the whelt was gone, and not spying on him from the trees.

She, too, crouched in the grass, palm outstretched. Her eyes appraised every inch of him, calmly. The tiny smile upon her face fanned bright.

Ptaissling or no ptaissling, Mahrlys’ whelt’s orders not-withstanding, he almost ran, then. At length, he crouched before her like a man set to jump, palms flat to the ground between his feet, weight well forward.

Never afterward, though often he tried to recall the truth, could he determine if her touch alone had healed him or if the sticky brown substance she applied to the trough the whelt had dug in his shoulder provided the cure. Her palm’s proximity caused his flesh to turn cold, then so hotly cold he flinched. Then the touch was gone. And back a second time, smoothing the sharp-smelling gel into the wound. At that moment, he paid the healing process little mind: her gaze had found what he had hoped that she would not see. But when she raised her face there was no censure, no fury in it. She merely stretched toward him and repeated the same procedure on his right cheek. As the evil-smelling unguent began stinging, he tried not to flinch, but his flesh trembled under her hand. He studied the ground, biting his lip, so desperately did he want to look at her.

“I have found another scratch,” she said, touching him upon the belly. He groaned softly. “What did this?” she asked, as if she had not heard.

“Jicekak,” he answered, first knowing he did so when the sound surprised him. She stared intently at his scratched cheek, nodding. Then she leaned closer. Her thinly clad breast brushed his arm.

“Please, Most High,” he begged, holding the surging inside him. His fingers ached in their trenches newly dug among the weeds.

“Does it hurt so much?”

“Yes,” he admitted, very low. He longed to touch that strange, glowing skin, unwind the thick braid of copper hair.

She sat back, inspecting him critically. “Let me see the back of you. Go on, turn around.”

He was glad to do so, that he could not see her.

“Who is Mahrlys-iis-Vahais?” she asked, her strong fingers rubbing salve into his back.

“Mahrlys,” he repeated, pulling away from her. If Mahrlys knew that he had been naked before this creature, messenger of Mnemaat or no, the iis’ retribution would be terrible. But he remembered the slain quenel and ptaiss, and the whelt’s message, and he realized that no worse could befall him.

“Mahrlys-iss-Vahais rules Benegua,” he said simply, when she asked again. “Please, do not amuse yourself with me. It is not permitted.” His voice even to his own ears, came thick and hoarse. Her hands turned to soothing, to kneading the thrice-knotted muscles of his back. “Most High,” he moaned, driven to desperation. “No!”

“Turn around.” And when he did not: “Now! Face me!”

Slowly, he obeyed. Her face was unreadable, eyes half-closed.

Implacable, she reached out a hand to him. He squeezed his own eyes shut, kept them shut, but he knew what he did. He simply could do no different.

When it was done, when he had committed the final, most heinous sacrilege, he groaned softly and pried his lids apart. His fingers, digging into her arms, would not at once heed his command that they release her.

He allowed himself the further iniquity of appreciating her, as he waited for death to come. He had earned it.

She rolled aside, and he felt her finger run the length of his transgression. Pulling her legs under her, she put her finger to her lips and licked it, her eyes huge over her hand. Then she laughed and scrambled to her feet. He followed suit, naked, his belongings forgotten in the grass.

“Most High, who are you?” he asked, taking her proffered hand. Behind her back, the two firelit figures hovered, blades drawn, at either edge of the blaze, stone-still, listening.

“Estri,” she replied firmly. “But that is not what you meant. Chayin once observed that we are more than men, yet less than gods, and sometimes used by the latter to mold the former. Will that do?” She smiled, touched his lips.

Deilcrit, then, heard what softly rising sounds had so concerned Sereth and Chayin. He pushed her toward them awkwardly, unable to answer her bright smile. From behind her he said, “In that case, you three may yet survive.” He could feel the breeze of them, the restless air that always accompanied the gathering of wehrs in numbers.

“What do you mean?” she demanded, then stopped dead so that he stumbled into her. This time, it was she who gripped his shoulders.

“That I did not tell you all that the whelt told me. I was forbidden to. But I cannot ... What we have done ... Most High, forgive me, but I am trying to tell you that the whelt told me to await the wehrs’ justice, to keep you here. Wehrs’ justice is that of death. Can you not hear them? See?” And he pointed to where pair upon pair of glowing eyes bestarred the forest’s blackness from ground to treetops.

“Deilcrit.” With a shudder she released him, whirled, and scrambled up the hillock in a dash that ended her in Sereth’s arms, babbling urgently.

He turned his eyes from their frantic embrace, and sought the ptaissling, who slumbered fitfully now that ptaiss-mutter filled the air. He had to pass by the dark one, Chayin, to get there.

That one fixed him with a piercing glare, half-pitying, half-contemptuous, and spat in Deilcrit’s direction.

“Well, will you fight, ungrateful whelp? Or will you meet your death like you have spent your life, cowering before gods and spirits and even dumb beasts?”

Deilcrit, his face buried in the ptaissling’s neck, felt at last the first spray of horror cool his skin. The wave surged close behind. A shuddering racked him. When it was gone, he pushed the youngling away, and uncurled himself to stand straight before the glowering Chayin, in whose unwavering extended grasp was a white-bladed knife.

A ptaiss roared, a cough answered, and a high-pitched cry silenced both.

“I cannot lift weapons against the ptaiss,” Deilcrit got out. “It is not ... not possible. Please ...” His arms, of their own accord, stretched out to encompass the fire, the clearing, the denser shadows of forest cushioning the moonless night. “I cannot.”

Chayin, with a shrug, flipped the knife and cast it between Deilcrit’s feet. Then he turned his back and joined his companions.

Silently the three walked to a stretch of level ground, and there, halfway between fire and slope, formed a triangle, back to back. Their alien weapons gleamed. Sereth spoke tersely, very low, and Chayin grunted an assent. And then they stood like statues, unmoving, for an instant.

Even as Deilcrit bent to still the ptaissling’s sudden bleat, even as the knife jumped of its own accord into his fist and every vestige of his composure fled, the black forest exploded. Into the light leaped and bounded and flapped the wehrs. Ptaiss predominated, and their roars, deafening, were only a background for more terrible cries. A wall of diverse creatures erupted out of the dark.

Deilcrit had no time to survey them, only a moment for the incredulity of their numbers to sink in, and then a spirit-white ptaiss was upon him. Blindly, his face contorted so that his teeth lay bare, screaming without knowing that he did, Deilcrit stabbed about him. No law, no question of submission stayed his furious thrusts, though he had knelt a hundred times while the wehrs passed ravening among the folk of Benegua, striking dead whom they chose. This time his palms lay not on the ground with his forehead upon them. In one fist he grasped a ptaiss’ ear, in the other the blade that tore again and again into the beast’s belly. The claws of one forepaw raked the ground by his head as the awful weight bore him down; its mates sank deep into his right shoulder and scraped bone. Up into its vitals, again and again, did Deilcrit plunge his weapon. His grip on the beast’s ear slipped, and the slavering jaws thrust toward him, drenching his face in drool and spittle.

With all his strength, he thrust his free arm down the ptaiss’ throat, gouging the soft palate with his nails. Halting momentarily in surprise, the suddenly choking creature arched its back, threw its head up, and Deilcrit’s knife hand was no longer skewered to the ground by the claws in his shoulder. He thrust the knife upward, deep into the ptaiss’ jugular, even as those hideous jaws closed upon his elbow, and the ptaiss’ frenzied convulsions snapped him up into the air. He had only enough time to drop the blade and hug the beast’s neck as it reared up, shaking its head. Gorge rose in its throat, spilled from its mouth, but the ptaiss would not release Deilcrit’s arm, now torn half from its socket. For a moment, swinging free of the ground, the whole clearing was revealed to him.

Sereth, Chayin, and Estri, still back to back, stood amid a growing circle of corpses, over which new assailants vaulted. He saw the wing-flutter of an ossasim, its manlike body strewn uppermost on the pile. Then, as a screaming ptaiss launched itself over the barrier, Estri uttered a hoarse cry, she and Sereth both threw their weapons—he at the ptaiss and she at a tusked, long-bodied campt, and the three joined hands. Then they were gone. The campt, with a roar of pain, fell aspraddle where they had just stood; and Deilcrit’s vision went red with pain as the ptaiss jerked him to the ground. His lungs emptied, his head struck a stone. And while he hung limply, gasping, the ptaiss, fangs locked around the limb choking it, blood spurting from the gaping slash in its neck, snapped Deilcrit first to the right, then to the left. Then, with a growl and a bound, it dashed him to the grass, raking his torso with its hind talons. He did not even feel the creature’s grip go slack as it collapsed on top of him, nor its huge heart pumping out a final jet of blood that spilled over his face, into his ears, and from there trickled down upon the sedge grass.