The Nomad (22 page)

Something on the ground caught his eye, and he stooped to pick it up. It was a piece of dagger plant leaf, but it had been torn very carefully lengthwise, peeled to make a strand… A strand, he thought. It would be a very strong strand. Something that could be used to bind together the branches the antloids had snipped off from the pagafa trees… “A
raft?”
he said aloud.

And suddenly, it all came together. Sorak and Ryana had come to the grove, and there was no sign of a trail leaving it. It was as if they had simply disappeared into thin air. Or else flown up into it! Raised up by elementals conjured by the pyreen.

With disgust, Valsavis tossed the strand of dagger plant leaf back down onto the ground. Of course, he thought. Now it all made sense. So that was why they had left the kanks behind. They had not gone on foot, after all. They had a much faster means of travel, on a wooden raft constructed by the antloids at the pyreen’s direction and held up by the air elementals she had raised. And that also neatly solved the problem of taking all that time to circumvent the silt basins. They didn’t need to go around the basins. They would simply fly over them. There would be no catching them now, he realized bitterly. He had failed. And it was his own fault. He had underestimated them. He had grown overconfident. Now he would have to pay the price.

Well, he thought, never let it be said that Valsavis did not accept responsibility for his mistakes. He raised his hand, gazing at the gold ring on his ringer. For several moments, he stared at it, concentrating. Then his hand began to tingle and the golden eyelid opened.

“
You have something to report?”
the voice of the Shadow King asked within his mind.

“Yes, my lord. I fear that I have failed you.”

There was a momentary stillness in his mind. Then the voice spoke once more.
“How?”

Valsavis quickly told the Shadow King what he had discovered, without omitting his responsibility in allowing them to get away. When he had finished, the Shadow King did not reply at once. The golden eye stared at him for a long moment, then blinked once.

“You have made a mistake, Valsavis,”
Nibenay said.
“Fortunately, it may not be irreparable. See that you do not make one again. Remain where you are. I shall send you a means to follow them.”
The golden eyelid closed.

A means to follow them? Valsavis wondered what Nibenay had meant by that. How could he possibly follow them? Could the Shadow King bestow upon him the ability to fly? And at such a distance? Nibenay was a powerful sorcerer, but surely not even he could cast a spell clear across the Great Ivory Plain and the Mekillot Mountains! Obviously, however, he intended to do
something.
And he was apparently willing to forgive him for his mistake. That was no small thing. One thing was for certain. Nibenay would not forgive him twice.

Remain where you are, he had said. Well, he could do that. Especially since there did not seem to be anything else he
could
do. But how long was he to remain? Until Nibenay did whatever it was he was going to do, quite obviously. Valsavis had not had any breakfast yet. He went to his kank and took out some of his provisions, sat down on the ground and began to eat.

An hour later, he was still waiting. Most of a second hour lapsed. And then a shadow passed over Valsavis. He looked up. The shadow passed over him again. It was a roc. The huge bird was fifty feet long from head to tail feathers, with a wingspan of over one hundred feet. It circled, cried out once, and swooped down.

Valsavis grabbed for his sword. Then he realized that the creature was not stooping at him. It was gliding in for a landing. This was the means to follow them that Nibenay had sent, all the way from the Barrier Mountains. Valsavis grinned. The creature landed and stood there, cocking its huge, fearsome looking head at him.

“One moment, my feathered friend,” Valsavis said, as he removed some of the supplies from his kank and slung the pouches over his shoulders. He would have to leave the rest behind, along with the kank, of course, but he could only take what he could carry. It would suffice. He no longer had to cross the desert and go around the inland silt basins. He would fly over them, just like Sorak and Ryana and the pyreen.

He climbed up onto the massive roc’s back, straddling its thick neck with his legs. The huge bird cried out and beat its giant wings, lunging up into the air. The others would arrive in Bodach, thinking they had lost him, confident that he could never catch up to them in time.

Valsavis smiled. They would be wrong.

As they flew on the rushing wind, the moonlit desert spread out all around them, a wide and all-encompassing vista. The light of the twin moons, Ral and Guthay, sparkled on the salt below, giving the Ivory Plain a ghostly and ethereal appearance. It was much cooler at this higher altitude, and the wind rushed through their hair and clothing, making them shiver as they huddled together on the airborne raft.

“It’s so beautiful!” Ryana said, enchanted by the sight despite the cold. At first, she had been frightened as the ground had dropped away, receding farther and farther below them, and she could not resist the rising panic that they were going to fall. But the air elementals were strong, and with Kara there to hold them together and guide them, Ryana soon relaxed and gave herself completely to the experience.

Beside her, she heard a sudden burst of utterly joyous and completely unrestrained laughter, and she glanced at Sorak to see his face shining with delight. His lips were stretched wide in a grin of pleasure, his nostrils flaring, his entire face animated in way that told her this wasn’t Sorak anymore, but Kivara, his mischievous, childlike, female entity, whose personality was ruled by the thrill of novelty, the hunger for pleasure and stimulation of sensation.

“I’m flying!” she shouted, happily. “Oh, Ryana, this is wonderful!”

Despite knowing that this was not really the Sorak that she loved, but another personality entirely, Ryana could not help feeling a lightness at seeing “him” so transported. Normally taciturn and stoic, sometimes grim and often moody, Sorak had never really given himself over to the emotion of joy. Perhaps because whatever part of him could do that had been the basis for what became the entity Kivara. She had none of his other qualities. They were two completely different people, of different ages, different genders even, who just happened to share the same physical body.

Kivara was like an irrepressible young girl ruled only by her passions and her curiosity. She didn’t know any better and seemed to lack the ability to learn. Or perhaps she simply didn’t care. Of all the personalities who made up the tribe of one that she knew as Sorak, Kivara was the most unpredictable.

The Guardian could always be counted on for her wise and thoughtful council and strong, maternal, stabilizing influence. The Ranger rarely spoke and remained largely self-contained, the hunter and the tracker, the strong and able male who played the role of the provider.

Lyric was the innocent, the naive and playful child who was content to look at the world with constant wonder and express himself in song. In some ways, he was the male counterpart to Kivara, save that he lacked her stubborn willfulness and amoral instincts. Of all Sorak’s personalities, Lyric was the closest to the Inner Child, who slept cocooned deep in the collective subconscious of the tribe.

The Shade was the complete opposite side of that coin, the dark and menacing, terrifying, beastlike entity contained within all men, submerged for the most part deep within Sorak’s subconscious, emerging without warning only when the tribe was severely threatened. Sometimes Sorak could control him. More often, he could not. Rarely did Sorak even remember what had occurred while the Shade took control of his body, but Ryana had seen on a number of occasions what the Shade could do, and it was frightening.

Screech was that part of Sorak that was closest to the animal kingdom, an evolutionary throwback to a time when they all were little more than animals themselves. He could commune with beasts and speak to every Athasian species in its own language, understanding their instincts and behavior and capable of mimicking their behavior patterns.

Eyron was, in some ways, the most human of Sorak’s varied aspects, even though Sorak had no human blood. At least, Ryana thought, not to her knowledge or his. Eyron was coldly pragmatic, the thinker and the planner among them, but his nature was often cynical and pessimistic. He was the cautious side of Sorak’s personality, developed into a discrete identity. Much of the time, Eyron could be supremely aggravating, especially given his intelligence, but he was a vital part of the whole, without which Sorak would have been incomplete.

And then, of course, there was the mysterious Kether, whom none of the others could explain. Kether was a part of them, and yet not a part of them. Sorak insisted that Kether did not spring from within him, but came, somehow, from without, an ethereal and powerful, serene and spiritual otherworldly entity that came upon him like a visitation from some other plane of existence. But Kivara…

Ryana knew that there was never any way of predicting what Kivara was liable to do. The Shade was easily the most frightening of Sorak’s personalities, but at least Ryana knew what to expect of him. With Kivara, she was never certain, and so Kivara made her feel the most uneasy. She did not come out often, but when she did, her behavior was usually willful and irresponsible. And Ryana suddenly realized that a fragile wooden raft, held together by nothing more than dagger plant fibers and antloid spit, buoyed up high above the ground by the swirling vortices of air elementals, was hardly the best place for Kivara to emerge suddenly and assume control of Sorak’s body.

“Look at me!” Kivara shouted, leaping to her feet and throwing out her arms like wings. “I’m a bird!”

The raft gave a lurch as the balance shifted, and Ryana became alarmed. She grabbed Kivara by the leg. “Sit down, you little fool!” she shouted. “You want to upset the raft and send us both plummeting to the ground?”

“What’s the matter?” asked Kivara tauntingly. “Afraid?” It was Sorak’s voice, only it was pitched higher, and it had a completely different quality—coy and mischievous, challenging and stubborn. It was the voice of a child dancing on the edge of a precipice, completely oblivious to the risk it faced.

“Yes, I am afraid,” Ryana replied, “and so would you be if you had any sense! This raft is all that keeps us from plunging to our deaths. Now sit down and stop acting like a child!”

“Oh, pooh!” Kivara said, petulantly, but she sat down again. Actually, she plopped down, simply dropping to a sitting position the way children often do, and the raft gave another violent lurch. Ryana grabbed her for support as the raft rocked dangerously on the wind currents, and Kivara giggled.

“I ought to pull your breeches down and spank you!” said Ryana, angrily.

“Oooh, that sounds like fun!” Kivara countered, giving her a coy sidelong glance. “Why don’t you?”

Ryana glared at her. “Because I know you too well, that’s why. You would never feel it. The moment I began to warm your bottom, you would duck under and I’d find myself in the embarrassing situation of spanking Sorak.”

“Oh, you never know, he might enjoy it,” said Kivara. “And so might you, for that matter. Maybe it’s what you really want.”

“Ohhh, you’re insufferable!”

“And you just don’t know how to have any fun.”

“
Fun?”
Ryana said. “Do you even have any idea what we are doing? Where we are going?”

“What difference does it make?” Kivara asked, looking around at the spectacular view spreading out below them. “Look at this! Is it not incredible?”

“Kivara, we are on our way to Bodach, the city of the undead,” Ryana said firmly.

“Undead?” Kivara said, glancing at her uncertainly.

“Yes, undead. An entire city of them. There will be hundreds, perhaps thousands.”

“Well, what we going
there
for? That’s stupid!”

“We have to go there to find a talisman known as the Breastplate of Argentum and take it to the Sage.” Kivara made a face. “Him, again. All we ever do is go here, go there, running all over this dreary desert like a stupid erdlu, and for what? What has the Sage ever done for us?”

Ryana tried to fight down her mounting irritation. In the past, whenever Kivara had come out, the others would allow her some freedom, but her unpredictable and willful nature eventually made it necessary for the Guardian to exert control and force her to duck under once again. Lately, however, the last several times Kivara had come out, she had resisted the efforts of the Guardian to hold her in check. It was a worrisome development. And Ryana did not wish to antagonize Kivara at this point by calling for the Guardian. This was certainly not the place for Kivara to respond with one of her violent temper tantrums.

“The Sage works for us all,” Ryana explained patiently. “He is the only power that stands between us and the dragon kings, the only hope for the future of our world. And he is the only one who may be able to help Sorak learn the truth about himself.”

“Well, I don’t see why that matters,” said Kivara stubbornly.

“It matters to Sorak,” replied Ryana, struggling to control her temper. Kivara could be absolutely infuriating.

“It wouldn’t change anything, you know,” Kivara replied. And then she gave Ryana an uneasy sidelong glance. “Would it?”

“I do not know,” Ryana said. “That is a question the tribe shall have to answer for itself when we confront the Sage. Wouldn’t you want to learn where you came from?”

“Why? I am already here.”

That was, of course, vintage Kivara, thought Ryana. Living only in the present. “Perhaps it does not mean anything to you,” she said, “but it is important to Sorak to know and understand his origins. And perhaps to some of the others, as well.”

“Important enough to risk going to a place full of undead?” Kivara said. She shook her head. It looked odd to see him evidence her mannerisms. Even though Ryana had grown up with him, it was something she had never quite gotten used to completely. It always threw her off a bit.