The White Dragon (105 page)

Time was hard to measure in the tunnels beneath the city, but Tansen guessed that they only spent a few days with the Beyah-Olvari before Elelar devised a way for them to escape Shaljir—and escape the Outlookers searching everywhere for them. Although Tansen had found this sojourn in the secret world of another race fascinating, he wasn't sorry to leave. In fact, he was starving and could hardly wait to get some decent food into his stomach!

"The glowing worms didn't appeal to you?" Armian asked dryly as they rode away from the coast on mounts provided by Elelar.

"Not even the glowing mushrooms," Tansen replied without looking at his father. Then, wishing the doubt didn't even occur to him, he asked Armian, "You will keep your word, won't you?"

"Hmmm?"

"Your promise to the
torena.
Not to tell anyone about..."
 

"About our little friends living underground?" Armian didn't seem offended by the question. "Yes, I'll keep my word."

Tansen knew it was rude to persist, a slight to Armian's honor, but he had to be sure. The Beyah-Olvari seemed so helpless, despite their own special power. "Not even Kiloran?"

Armian smiled slyly. "You surely don't imagine that Kiloran's going to tell me everything
he
knows, do you?"

"I, uh..." Tansen hadn't thought about it.

"The most powerful secret," Armian advised him, "is always the one that the fewest people know."

"Oh." It wasn't quite the answer Tansen had hoped for.

"This secret," Armian explained, "can add to our power someday."

"Our
power?" Tansen asked, puzzled.

Armian looked faintly surprised. "Yours and mine. Our influence.

"Oh. Yes." After a moment, he asked doubtfully, "How?"

"I don't know yet, son," Armian admitted. "But until I do, I'd be a fool to share it with Kiloran, wouldn't I?"

Tansen sat uncomfortably on his plodding horse, staring at the spot between its ears.
 

After enduring his silence for a while, Armian asked, "Is something wrong?"

"Huh?" Startled, Tansen nearly slid off the horse. He grabbed at a handful of its mane, then stared at Armian, unsure of what he wanted to say—unsure, even, of what he was thinking. "I... No. I'm just hungry, father."

Armian smiled. "I'll ask the
torena
how soon we can stop." He rode ahead to join Elelar, leaving Tansen alone with feelings too chaotic to shape into thoughts or pursue to conclusions.

They headed deep into western Sileria and searched for Kiloran as the dry season began to squeeze the land in its cruel grip. For a while, much of Tansen's concentration was devoted to staying atop his horse. He had never been on one before, and he found the experience awkward and smelly when it wasn't downright frightening. The humiliation was worst of all, though. He was slow and ungainly about mounting—and, on several occasions, he had been fast and noisy about dismounting without having planned to do so.

While they traveled, Armian helped him improve his horsemanship; the years in the Moorlands, where men practically lived on horseback, had made Armian a fine rider, wise in the ways of these skittish, snorting beasts. When they stopped for the
torena
's rest, Armian taught him to fight. Born to a violent clan in dangerous times, Tansen had already learned as much as most
shallaheen
knew about combat, but now he realized how little an ordinary peasant knew in comparison to an assassin—to an expert like his bloodfather, who had been taught by assassins.
 

Armian was the first person to teach Tansen that violence was a skill, and that practice and discipline were more important than passion and rage. It was Armian who first taught him about surprise attacks, ambush tactics, misdirection, feinting, and conserving his strength. Training with his father in the mornings, in the evenings, and sometimes in the sleepy shade of the afternoons, Tansen became increasingly fast and effective with his hands and feet, and he learned to swing his
yahr
with deadly skill and precision.

"But you should have a nicer one than this," Armian said, idly fingering Tansen's
yahr
one day. "I'll find you a better one."

Tansen nodded, pleased.
 

"And after you kill someone with it," Armian added, "perhaps Kiloran will make you a
shir."

Tansen froze. Armian noticed.

"Isn't that what you want?" Armian asked him. "Didn't you tell me—" 
      
"Yes, father." It must be what he wanted. It was what he had always wanted. Now it was so easily within his reach.

All he had to do was kill a man. He didn't know whom yet, though he had no doubt Armian would choose someone for him to murder, when the time came. Or perhaps Armian would let Kiloran choose the victim.

All he had to do was kill.

"Tansen?"

"Yes, father?"

"You look strange."

Tansen blinked. "Um. The horse. It smells." He dismounted, sliding down as Armian had taught him. "I think I'll walk for a while."

Ronall was used to Elelar's favorite horse by now, and it even seemed to have resigned itself to his company, so he saw no reason to abandon it when he deserted his dear wife's estate and set off again in pursuit of... Dar and the Three only knew what.

Death? Maybe. Maybe not. He still had moments—even whole days—when he was so despairing that death seemed to beckon to him like a lover. He was so lonely, lost, and afraid.

And, as always, so hungry for... something. Evermore longing for a fulfillment he couldn't even define. His wife's love, perhaps? Hah! The next person that Elelar loved would be the first—and Ronall had no illusions that it would be him.

Poor Zimran. He never had a chance. Not against Elelar.

He could sympathize with, rather than hate or resent, the
shallah
who had lived with his wife. Somewhere along the twisted path of his life, Ronall had lost any desire to take vengeance on his wife's lovers—probably because he knew better than anyone that loving Elelar was its own punishment.

And what, he now wondered, would Dar's vengeance against Elelar be for plotting against the Firebringer? What would the volcano goddess do to her? What would be the penalty for such a sacrilege, such a dark and terrible betrayal?

Ronall's religious training as a boy had been mixed, contradictory, and rather indifferent. As a man, he prayed impartially to Dar and to the Three, but only in moments of fevered desperation. The rest of the time, he just hoped the gods would leave him alone if he left them alone. Which was more or less how he treated the waterlords and their assassins, too.
 

Now he wondered with a chill if Elelar expected the Society to protect her from the wrath of Dar. Were the strange events at Darshon related to his wife's transgression? Were the earthquakes evidence of the destroyer goddess reaching out in search of Elelar, all the way from Mount Darshon? Would he beat Elelar to the Otherworld, or would Dar send her there first in a fury of fiery rage?

He pondered these and other depressing questions as he wandered south, idly taking whatever detours appealed to him, and stopping often. By night, he drank whatever was available, usually to such excess that he blacked out and awoke in uncomfortable (even embarrassing) situations with little or no memory of what had passed. He mostly kept away from women, not so much because of his recent disastrous experiences with Yenibar, but mostly because sex started to seem like too much effort for too little ease of his desperate longing, his gnawing loneliness—especially here, deep in the mountains, where the bloodthirsty
shallaheen
were so quick to punish any insult to their women.
 

He had taken enough money from Elelar's house to supply his taste for Kintish dreamweed and Moorlander cloud syrup, but there was very little of these luxuries to be had in Sileria these days. There were plenty of beggars, though, and sometimes he even tossed them a coin or two, just because it was easy.
 

There were also an extraordinary number of pilgrims on the crumbling roads and narrow mountain paths lately. More every day, it seemed. It was almost as if everyone who wasn't busy plotting, scheming, and fighting in Sileria's civil war (better known, in select
shallah
circles, as Tansen's bloodfeud against Kiloran) was rushing headlong to Mount Darshon to...

To do what? Commune with Dar? Become a
zanar
? Die in the massive eruption that any sensible person could plainly see was a very real possibility? Suffocate in the clouds of gas—or whatever it was—swirling around Darshon's summit? Get swallowed by the lava which was starting to force its way out of cracks in the mountain's rocky skin, just as deadly vapors were doing?

"Dar has Called me to dance on the blood of her heart,
toren!
" a proud young
shallah
proclaimed one to him one day on the road.

"And that would mean
what
, in ordinary language?" he asked.
 

Ronall was astonished to learn it meant lava-walking, or some such insanity. People who weren't even Guardians were racing headlong to Darshon to dance on the borning lava flows and thereby prove themselves beloved of Dar.

"And the singing?" Ronall asked someone else one day. "All that singing and chanting and wailing..." Which was making his aching head want to split open under the blazing sunshine. "It couldn't wait until you get to Darshon and actually start dancing?"

No one answered. They were too busy ululating.

"Dar is Calling us to inhale the scents of her womb!" two wild-eyed Sisters told him early one evening as he entered their crowded Sanctuary and requested a place to sleep for the night.

"That doesn't sound pleasant," he replied, desperate for some wine or ale in the absence of anything stronger.

"To breathe in the fire-blessed perfume of her secret places!"

"Are you sure you want to do that?" he asked skeptically.
 

"All who survive will be beloved of Dar!" promised a painfully skinny
zanar
who was helping the Sisters pack up their meager belongings.

"And all who
don't
survive will be smelly corpses on the mountain slope," Ronall pointed out. "I don't think inhaling those vapors is going to be a nice way to die."

The
zanar
seized him by the shoulders, looked deep into his face with eyes which appeared less than perfectly sane, and cried, "Not all deaths can be the pleasure which Dar has proclaimed yours to be,
toren!
"

Ronall wiped the
zanar
's flecks of spittle off his cheek. "Isn't that a shame?"

"Each will serve Her in his own way! Each will rise or fall according to his merit in Dar's heart!" the
zanar
shouted.

"Yes, yes, I know." It was the sort of thing the
zanareen
were always saying, and one of the reasons he was glad the Imperial Advisor had banned them from Shaljir years ago. "Is there anything to drink around here?"