The Shadowed Sun (Dreamblood) (60 page)

But it was the creature’s head, which rose from the muck on a long, thick shaft of a neck, that made the man begin to scream—for it was
his father
.

The face was the same, though distorted with a kind of gleeful, sadistic hunger. In that face the man saw all his father’s madness made manifest.
This
was the monster who had nearly destroyed his own nation to feed his ambition—and who had devoured his son’s future with the same ruthless greed. A more terrible monster than
ever the Reaper had been, for both ate lives, but only one did so knowingly.
Lovingly.

But as the man screamed, the woman blazed bright with sudden fury. “
You
,” she snarled.

Startled out of terror, the man flinched silent as the woman beside him took shape—but it was not a shape that matched his memories of her. When he sought those memories, what came to mind was softer, somehow: gentle fingers, a flood of coiled hair the color of wet sand, a stammering voice, ripe brown-nippled breasts that tasted of sea salt and sweetness—though how he knew all this he could not recall. But the woman who appeared was different from his imaginings. She had dressed herself as a man, in loindrapes too starkly straight for her curving hips, a collar too broad for her narrow shoulders, with her flood of hair dammed away behind bindings and bun. And some things about her actively bothered him, for they felt wrong somehow. The loindrapes she wore were red, but there were darker wet spots all over them. Thick redness coated her gentle hands—blood? The thicker, bitter stuff of this place? He could not tell, but it flexed like fine gloves when her hands became fists.

“
Take that face off
,” she said. Her voice was a whisper—but so filled with rage that it made the whole of the red world ripple. A wind, sudden and cold, swirled out of nothingness and whipped across the bone plain. The woman’s face blurred with it, doubling. Beneath her angry face: a weeping, wailing figure. When she shrieked the next words, there was a scraping edge of madness in her voice. “How dare you pretend to be Mni-inh-brother when you killed him?
Take that face off, you abomination!
”

She is forgetting herself
, the man thought. He knew it was true, even if he did not know how.

And the woman was gone, running across the red muck as if it were packed earth,
toward
the monster. Which reared up—it was a
hundred times her size—and raised its many fists, roaring challenge in a bull elephant’s trumpeting voice.

Leaving behind the man, who stared after her from the muck, distracted from his own misery. But as his earlier despair faded, he began to understand.

Not just his father. The beast wore the faces of
all
fathers, any father, the void left by a father’s absence, for whoever dared to look upon it. It used those faces, and the memories they elicited, to strike silent blows and leave unfading bruises. But beneath this nightmare face—

—nightmare, nightmare, gods, wait, this is a dream—

—What face did it truly wear?

The beast’s fists struck the earth. The red substance quaked and heaved beneath the man, throwing him onto his back into the muck. When he struggled upright, he was shocked to see that the beast had gone down. Several of its dozen arms on one side had crumpled beneath it, shriveling even as the man watched. And there—moving among the monster’s flailing limbs, screaming like a beast herself, was the woman. She touched another arm and it went dead, the muscles knotting and snapping with a sound like cut rope. When she set her feet and shouted at the thing’s face—“
TAKE IT OFF! TAKE IT OFF!
”—something rippled forth from her mouth, and her very voice made the thing’s neck twist and turn black with gangrene. Its head sagged to the ground, its face—

—my father, no, no, not him—

—Contorting in agony. She was killing it with every touch, making its flesh sicken and die by will alone.

And that was
wrong
. The man felt it down to the core of his being. She was not the soft thing he had considered her, that had been a mistake—but neither was she this wild, avenging death-bringer. He knew as well as anyone how grief could flense the soul,
leaving wounds that festered until nothing eased the pain but anger and violence. But this was
not her
. She was—

—the stone within a ripe fruit. Flint and metal, blood and tears. A prayer at the height of lovemaking—

—Aier. She was Aier.

And he, he was not some nameless coward; he had not been lost in this realm for seasons, centuries, eternities. In waking he was a warrior. He lifted a hand, made a fist, remembered the feel of a sword-hilt within it. As he did so, the sword appeared. Yes. His father’s sword, Mwet-zu-anyan. The sword of the Prince of the Sunset Throne.

His
sword. Because in waking he was Wanahomen, leader of the Yusir-Banbarra hunt. And in dreaming—

(Hanani. Her name was Hanani, and she was his lover and his healer.)

—In dreaming he was Niim.

And Niim was a dreamer of portents and omens, nephew of Gujaareh’s greatest Gatherer, scion of brilliantly mad and madly brilliant kings. He was the Avatar of Hananja. He would be Prince someday, and when that ended he was destined to sit at the right hand of the Goddess of Dreams Herself.

The Prince of Gujaareh got to his feet, sword in hand, and headed across the red world to bring Hananja’s Servant back to herself.

*  *  *

Yanya-iyan’s garden was the secret stronghold of the palace. It was accessible only by a single glass door—an actual door rather than the useless open entryways Gujaareen thought of as doors—that could be locked shut. It contained a small shed full of gardening implements: sharp-bladed hoes, wicked-tined pitchforks, axes, long knives. Its walls were lined with thick plates of obsidian, meant to hold the garden’s warmth at night—but also too hard for any battering ram to
easily break. The plates allowed the growth of exotic plants from faraway lands, including poisonous herbs that could be used against an enemy or for a final escape, should all other defenses fail.

The Gatherers and Sentinels had taken it in half a breath. Anzi had lined his men up to defend the Protectors, directing his archers to fire at the door in waves as the Sentinels began their assault. They had not expected the glass door to hold of course, and it had not; a stone was thrown through from the corridors beyond the garden, and Anzi’s soldiers braced themselves as the glass shattered and fell apart. But instead of a battle cry, Sunandi had heard then a familiar, chilling sound: the high-pitched whine of a jungissa stone.

When Sunandi woke, she lay sprawled in a bed of liti flowers and moontear vines, and Nijiri stood over her.

“I am told,” Nijiri said quietly, “that a force of soldiers has invaded the Hetawa, taking my brethren, our children, and other Gujaareen citizens as hostages.”

That brought her fully out of sleep with a gasp. Sitting up, she looked around and saw Anzi and all the Kisuati soldiers kneeling bound in a corner, surrounded by hard-eyed warrior-priests. Sunandi, the Protectors, and the other Kisuati courtiers had been left free in the bed of vines, but the Gatherers were their guards—and, apparently, interrogators.

But if the Protectors had been stupid enough to attack the Hetawa, they would all be lucky if
interrogator
was the only role the Gatherers played tonight.

Nijiri stepped closer to her, and despite their long association Sunandi found herself shivering under his regard. There was no compassion in his face, no friendliness in his eyes at all.

“You didn’t know of this, Speaker?” he asked.

“I did not, Gatherer,” Sunandi said. He knew full well that she would have tried to stop it if she had. Bad enough the Hetawa was involved at all. The new Gujaareen Prince—for he had won, wherever
he was—had a vested interest in keeping the Protectors alive. The Hetawa had no such motivation, and now they would be furious beneath their cool, peaceful facades.

Nijiri nodded to himself. Beside him, the other Gatherer—the youngest, she thought his name was Inmu—looked angry as well, though Sunandi was less unnerved by his anger. The anger in Inmu’s face was hot and human. The anger radiating from Nijiri was something different.

“Which of you orchestrated this offense against our Goddess?” he asked, looking down the line. “Speak, and present yourselves for judgment.”

Aksata scowled at this. “You have no right to judge us,” he said. “We’ve committed no wrong, and—”

Nijiri’s hand darted forward, and an instant later Aksata sagged to the ground unconscious, a humming, dragonfly-shaped jungissa stone attached to his forehead. Nijiri jerked his head peremptorily at Inmu, who crouched and laid his fingers on Aksata’s eyes.

“Oh, gods.” Sasannante, his voice rising in pitch as he understood. “You can’t kill him, you can’t!”

But after several breaths Inmu stood and handed Nijiri’s dragonfly-jungissa back to him. As an added gesture of contempt, Inmu left Aksata’s corpse in an undignified sprawl. Sasannante let out a little moan of horror and fell silent.

“Stop this!” Anzi shouted from across the garden. Sunandi glared at him, willing him to be silent, but he ignored her. “How dare you? The Protectors of Kisua are—”

“Hananja’s City obeys Hananja’s Law,” Nijiri said. He actually raised his voice; even Anzi subsided at the edged fury in his tone. “If you had no wish to be judged by that Law, you had no business coming here.”

Mama Yao, with a bravery that Sunandi might have admired under saner circumstances, straightened at that. “This is war, Gath
erer,” she said. “There is no law in war. Your own people have committed atrocities; will you judge them too?”

“Yes. And those whose souls have been corrupted by this violence must die. Their peace can be used to soothe and heal the rest, and thus shall the Law be upheld.” Nijiri’s eyes narrowed at Mama Yao. “Did you order the attack on the Hetawa?”

“I did not,” she said, frowning and blinking. Nijiri’s statement that he intended to kill Gujaareen citizens had unnerved Yao; this was the first time Sunandi had ever seen the old woman nonplussed. “But I support the right of my fellow Protectors to do as they think is best for the good of Kisua.”

Nijiri did not nod, but Sunandi thought she read a lessening of the anger in his face. He focused on Sasannante. “And you?”

“I knew nothing of the planned attack,” he said, his voice low and miserable. Nijiri narrowed his eyes at him.

“You suspected, though.”

“Yes, but I never thought they would go through with it! Taking children as hostages… I would never have condoned such a thing. But Aksata didn’t bring this idea to us, Gatherer, before he decided to go through with it! He acted on his own—probably because he knew we’d say no. Or perhaps to protect us from the repercussions.” Sasannante shook his head bitterly, gazing at Aksata’s body.

After a moment, Nijiri nodded and moved on to Moib.

“I had nothing to do with it,” said Moib, and again Nijiri set his jungissa on the man’s forehead, dropping him like a stone. As he crouched beside Moib’s body to do the Gathering himself this time, Anzi shouted again.

“He said he wasn’t involved, gods damn you!”

“He was lying,” Nijiri said flatly. He closed his eyes, and ten breaths later Moib was dead too.

Rising, Nijiri turned to Anzi. “Will you go to the Hetawa and call off your comrades?”

Anzi ground his teeth, trembling in rage. “I do not answer to you!”

To Sunandi’s surprise—and intense relief—Nijiri only nodded. He turned back to Mama Yao. “Please order General Anzi to do as I’ve asked,” he said. “You have lost. It is your choice whether to stay and face our Prince and his barbarian allies, or begin the journey back to Kisua. If you choose the latter, we will escort your people to the gates and give you supplies for the desert journey.”

Mama Yao looked deeply shaken. They had all known Moib was lying; he and Aksata had been two of a kind in their plotting. That the Gatherer had sensed the lie was a more devastating display of his magic than any sleep-spell.

Yao looked at Sasannante, who nodded; with a heavy sigh Mama Yao nodded as well. “General,” she said, “please convey our orders to Captain Bibiki at the Hetawa. The hostages are to be released, and he and his men are to return here, along with any remaining Kisuati in the city. We shall leave at once for home.”

*  *  *

Tiaanet stumbled as she ran across the flagstones of the Hetawa courtyard, nearly spilling both Tantufi and herself amid the bodies there. She righted herself and saw that a Kisuati soldier lay at her feet, his neck broken and face frozen in an expression of surprise. Bibiki’s forces had not yet returned to gather the bodies from their battle with the Sentinels, and she had tripped over this one’s outflung arm. Like Bibiki, the man wore an animal’s pelt as a cloak: tawny gold short fur patterned with faint white rosettes. Another hunter. She had no idea what animal had made the pelt, but a wickedly long bone-handled dagger lay across the man’s palm. Without thinking, Tiaanet shifted Tantufi over one shoulder and crouched to claim the weapon for herself.

The pause reawakened her wits. She had headed toward the House of Children in the vague hope of escaping through there
into the city, exploiting the same means the Kisuati had used to enter the Hetawa complex. Now there were shouts behind her, and answering shouts ahead—Kisuati soldiers, raising the alarm. Of course they would have guards in the House of Children, and every other way in or out of the Hetawa. There was no way for her to escape. She needed to hide.