The Prophet of Panamindorah, Book One Fauns and Filinians (20 page)

And then a day came when the guards entered
at an uncommon hour. Char and Crimson were playing a card game.
They’d been talking and stopped in mid-sentence.

Daren came in behind the guards. Char’s
stomach rose at the sight of him, though he’d thought he was
through hating. Daren looked around serenely. He glanced at his
kennel master, who’d come in last. “A lovely arrangement. You say
we’ve got half a dozen like this?”

“Yes, m’lord.”

“Build a dozen more. I’ve already got some
dams in mind, and my chief overseer has at least two sires on his
list.”

His eyes fell on Crimson, sitting with her
eyes downcast at the little table. Daren strolled over and placed
one hand on her round belly. He glanced at Char. “Well, done. If
these whelps have your courage and her temper, I’ll be
pleased.”

He glanced at his guards. “Take him to block
seventeen.”

Char gaped. “B-but, my lord! Why are you—? I
have done as you asked!”

Daren took two steps and stood nose to nose
with him. “Indeed.” Then he hit Char so hard across side of the
head that his ear rang. Daren hissed into the other ear. “Did you
think that I would ever allow a slave to draw a sword on me and die
in his bed? Brave you may be, but still a fool, more so to think
I’d forget. Now go join your sister.”

The guards dragged Char from the hut. Over
their shoulders, he glimpsed Crimson’s pale face, heard her scream
his name. He thrashed, roared, bit, but they had him secure, and as
they loaded him onto the wagon a paralysis descended.
Daren knew
all the time what he planned to do with me. From the moment he
whipped me on the plank road. He didn’t think I had enough to lose
then, so he gave me something. Just so he could take it
away.

Colors seemed to drain from the world. Even
smells had less meaning.
I am already dead,
he thought.
The earth is already forgetting me.
His children would never
know him, perhaps never know Crimson.
How many generations will
Daren want between his soldier slaves and me?
His offspring
would be bred and then discarded, and probably theirs and theirs
after.

Much later, as the wagon was passing through
the ugly iron gates of block seventeen, as the gray buildings
appeared like poison mushrooms from the swamp, as he caught the
first smells of blood and death, Char thought of something else.
A shelt who has nothing left to lose has nothing left to
fear.

* * * *

Corry stood back and watched the council
members stream past. The first had to be Shadock. The king was tall
for a faun, broad-shouldered, with dark hair only faintly grizzled.
He must have been as old as Meuril, but he wore his years better.
His clothes were ornate—a cape of purple samite lined with wolf fur
over a light wool robe, white and slashed with purple silk. A dress
sword in a jeweled scabbard hung from a silver belt at his waist,
and a slender crown of white gold encircled his temples. His family
came behind him. The crown prince looked very like his father,
except that his hair was still ink black, and his cheeks full and
smooth. Two girls and five more boys followed.

Chance came last. Among all the royal
children, he was the only golden head. Corry knew the fact must
contribute to the rumors about his pedigree. Most cliff fauns were
fair-haired. Dark hair ran mainly in a few noble houses.

Queen Istra, however, was also golden. She
walked behind the last of her children, talking to a cliff faun
Corry did not recognize. Istra was beautiful in a faded sort of
way. She had Chance’s pallor and also his defiant tilt of the
chin.

Meuril looked plain in his blue and green
robes. He was talking to Shadock. Capricia trailed a little behind
Chance. She looked tired, Corry thought, but beautiful in
fur-trimmed cream silk with dagged sleeves so long they nearly
swept the floor. Her hair fell down her back in a cascade of
cinnamon curls. Syrill was walking with her and talking earnestly,
his green plumed hat his only nod to Danda-lay’s fashions.

Corry saw a dark fauness walking with
Capricia and Syrill and decided she must be Sharon-zool, the swamp
faun queen. She had smooth, straight black hair, cut short to her
chin in the swamp faun fashion, just visible under an ornate
headpiece that Corry recognized from books as the swamp faun badge
of royalty. It looked more helmet than crown—iridescent scales,
said to be dragon skin, that lay smooth against her head and
cascaded down to her shoulders. They caught the light with every
turn of her head. Her clothes were white leather worked with scales
of lapis lazuli that matched the turquoise and green of her crown,
and she wore breeches rather than a dress according to swamp faun
custom.

The centaurs came behind, dwarfing the fauns.
Corry knew their king at once. Targon walked with the fluid
movements of a deer in spite of his bulk. His fur was blood
red—almost the color of the centaur flag. His bobbed, glossy black
tail swished restlessly. On his human torso, he wore only a short
black cape with red trim and elaborately embroidered high collar,
which covered only part of his heavily muscled belly and chest. His
human hair was the same color as his tail—black with no trace of
gray. He had sharp, deeply intelligent green eyes and a neatly
trimmed goatee. Corry noticed that he wore a coiled battle whip as
shelts might wear a sword.

Lexis was talking to Targon, and for once he
looked small, his head coming only to the centaur’s horse
shoulders. Other cats walked behind him, all of whom Corry
recognized: Ounce the snow leopard, Nolfee the black leopard,
Liliana the lioness, Loop the lynx, and Cleo the ocelot. They were
the same council members who’d fled with Lexis to Meuril in the
dead of night to broker a treaty, and they’d been frequently in an
out of the wood faun court since then. A number of other fauns
milled around the edges of the party, each wearing chains of
office.

Corry’s eyes kept returning to Targon.
Something about him is familiar.
He looked nothing like the
centaur Corry had left in the Otherwhere, but still… The
almost-human head turned, and Corry ducked back into the shadow of
the staircase. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t want to be seen.
He breathed a sigh of relief as Targon moved into the next
room.

“Corry!” Syrill had spotted him. “You must be
starving!”

Over his shoulder, Corry saw a palace guard
leaving the meeting hall. It was Jubal.

Chapter
10.
Furs and Filinians

A Filinian throne may be inherited, but
Filinian loyalty never is.

—Demitri Alainya to his heir

Liliana the lioness swerved into a passage
and set off at a brisk trot, the noise of the other councilors
fading rapidly behind her.

“Lily.”

She turned. The ocelot had followed her.
Cleo’s eyes were green-gold and they filled her exquisitely marked
face. The eyes looked soft and shy, but the voice had claws. “Where
are you going?”

Liliana’s lip curled. “Attend to your own
affairs, slant-eyes, and let me attend to mine.”

Cleo’s voice dropped to a hiss. “If your
affairs
threaten my life, I will most certainly attend to
them!”

“Have a care, Cleo,” rumbled the lioness.

“No,
you
have a care. Listen to me: he
won’t do it, not if you let it be. We can all live. Do you hear me?
Let it be.
Otherwise, you will get us killed!”

Liliana took a step towards her,
stiff-legged, lips pulled up in a noiseless snarl. “You stuttering
mouse-catcher, I was gutting deer when you were still kneading your
mother’s belly, so don’t talk to me about killing! We’re dead,
right now unless we
act
.”

Cleo backed off a pace. “Lexis is not
Demitri.”

“Pough!” Liliana spat. “You know nothing.
He’s his father’s cub, and his father had impeccable timing. This
festival is it. Have you seen the way Syrill looks at him? The war
debts aren’t paid. You can wait to be spent like a cowry if you
like; I won’t.”

They parted growling. Cleo was nonplussed as
she emerged again in the foyer by the council chamber to see a
palace guard. She glared at him, half inclined to ask how much he’d
heard, then thought better of it and trotted away.

Jubal watched her, frowning.

* * * *

“This,” said Syrill as he and Corry stood on
a wide, stone-paved walk, “is Chance’s famous statue, commissioned
in honor of his promotional ceremony after fighting bravely with us
in the cat wars. I think it was the first and only time Shadock
paid him any attention.”

Corry looked at the statue—a life-size image
of Chance in full battle dress, atop a stag. “They’ve repaired it,
of course,” continued Syrill, “but you can still see the line where
the wolflings gelded the buck and took off the antlers.” Syrill
laughed. “I doubt they even knew who Chance was at the time, but
he’s made sure they know since.”

Corry and Syrill were strolling on the Sky
Walk—a scenic broadway along the very brink of the cliff. A
waist-height wall ran along the edge, fashioned from the same warm,
rose-colored stone as the pavement. Syrill had wanted to catch the
sunset before dinner. Other shelts and animals came and went around
them, enjoying the view or selling things to those who were.

A cliff faun child, one of a number of
urchins, sidled up to them. He was dressed in a ragged tunic that
might have once been yellow. He held a stringed instrument that
looked like a cross between a banjo and a violin. “Would sirs like
a song?” He noticed Chance’s statue and added, “Perhaps the Lay of
the Prince’s Magical Gallows?”

Corry shook his head. He had heard the Lay of
the Prince’s Magical Gallows in more versions than he could
remember. The song had grown popular in Laven-lay, where minstrels
were less careful to veil their references to Chance. The most
recent version Corry had heard made the observation that “princes
with small towers are like to build high gallows” and finished with
the cunning remark that, “like a certain statue in Danda-lay town,
the prince’s tall gallows came tumbling down.” The statue, of
course, had never fallen, but everyone knew what part of it
had.

“We’ve heard that one a few times,” said
Syrill.

Corry could tell Syrill was about to send him
on his way, but he felt sorry for the child. “What’s popular in
Danda-lay?” he asked. “Something we wouldn’t have heard in
Laven-lay.”

The young minstrel-hopeful considered. Corry
doubted he’d ever been anywhere near Laven-lay. “The Unicorn Maid
and the Monster?” he hazarded.

Syrill rolled his eyes. “Yes, there’s one
from my childhood. They only sing it cliff-side to frightened
children away from the swamp. It’s classic, though. Sing away,
kid.”

“Very good, sirs.” He settled himself at the
foot of the statue and began.

In the dark of the moon in a time long
ago—

“I was wanting to ask you something,” said
Corry. “While I was sitting in our room, two cubs came running up
the stairs.”

“
Cubs
?” Syrill bristled. “As in,
feline cubs?”

—
a maiden rare, with eyes of gold and
silver hair—

“Yes, and they—”

“In
my
room?”

“Syrill, just listen to me. They didn’t know
the room was occupied. They ran when they saw me.”

“They’d have run a deal faster if I’d been
there!”

But the guide he sent to bring his bride

Lost his head where the bandits ride

And a storm blew up the mountainside

And darkened the all halls.

“They were tiger cubs,” continued Corry
patiently, “one orange, one white.”

“How typical,” muttered Syrill, “for him to
let his brats run wild in the palace.”

“They belong to Lexis then?”

—
wandered far, she wandered wide,

lonely steps on the mountainside,

fleeing the place where the bandits ride

until she slipped and fell

Syrill was still grumbling. “And he’s brought
both of them! That striped cur is determined to bathe the wood in
blood. And they were prowling in
my
room! Shadock will hear
of this.”

Until his ears bleed,
thought
Corry
.
“I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘prowling,’ Syrill. How
can two cubs running around at Lupricasia bathe the wood in
blood?”

Deep in the swamp where the trees crouch
low

hard in the dark of the moon,

the unicorn maid crawled into a cave

And found she was not alone.

Oh! She found she was not aloooone!

Syrill shook his head. “It’s an old Filinian
custom. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

—
saved her from their fearful
jaws,

He shattered snouts and crushed their
paws

And carried her away.

‘
But worse than lizards prowl the
swamp.’

The stranger came to say,

oh, the stranger came to saaay!

“Traditionally, the tiger kings separate
their alpha litter as soon as the cubs are weaned and rear them in
different parts of Filinia or at least in different parts of the
palace. They never see one another until their second birthday,
when they fight to the death, one by one, tournament style.
Whoever’s left standing is the heir. Often, the second and even
third litters are kept separate in case the winner dies of
wounds.”

And some say the stranger had her to
dine

And some say he had her to wife.

But all agree, nevermore she

walked in the realms of the light.

The minstrel finished, and Corry and Syrill
stopped their conversation to give him polite applause. He stood
and bowed. “Would sirs like another?”

“No thanks, kid. Go find someone else to
strum for.” Syrill tossed him a white cowry and turned back to
Corry. “I told you that you wouldn’t understand.”