The White Dragon (95 page)

Zarien blinked at him. "What are you talking about?"

Teyaban nodded to where the courtesan was entering a house as palatial as
Torena
Elelar's. "The perfume of Kintish courtesans. They've got all sorts of womanly arts, you know."

Zarien watched her disappear into the house. Her servant—a huge, hairy, scarred Moorlander—waited outside. "Oh. Uh-huh."

"Ever been with a Kint?"

"Yes, of course." Zarien answered absently, thinking of Kintish ports and seafarers and passengers. Then he realized what Teyaban meant by "been with." His truthful answer to
that
would be quite different, but he decided to let it go.

Teyaban, however, had a few tales he wanted to share. Zarien mostly ignored his conversation and followed his nose to the port of Shaljir, leading the servant assigned to lead him. Soon he could hear the sea birds, taste the salt on his tongue, see the salt-air stains on tattered
jashareen
hanging in doorways and grimy shutters bordering windows left open to benefit from whatever stray breeze might be bold enough to waft through the narrow streets. Soon he could recognize sea-brought goods from the mainland being carted up from port and see the tallest ships' masts rising proudly above the city's Kintish red-tiled roofs.

"Ugh!" Teyaban grimaced as they turned into a narrow street with slippery cobblestones. "Fish market."

The thick, briny scent pervading the air here smelled wonderful to Zarien, despite being different from the sweetly plump smell of freshly-caught fish which he was used to in sea-bound life. He smelled seaweed now, too, and could hardly wait for the longed-for feel of a boat deck rocking beneath his feet.
 

The fishmongers of Sileria were tattooed, like their sea-born kindred. Zarien laughed with relief, with a sense of homecoming. Now, for the first time since he had died in the jaws of the dragonfish, he was among his own kind and no one would stare at his tattoos with avid curiosity.

A moment later, he realized he was wrong about that. Already, tattooed fishmongers were indeed staring at him. Staring hard.

"What are
you
looking at?" Teyaban challenged one. Typical of the landfolk, he had deliberately provoked the biggest, meanest-looking person in sight.

"It doesn't matter," Zarien said quietly, dragging Teyaban with him as they passed the big man and left him behind. He knew what everyone was staring at. Unlike the drylanders, these people recognized his tattoos, identified the primary pattern and knew what it meant:
sea-bound
. A sea-bound lad walking the dryland. An unheard of anomaly. Something they were unlikely to see twice in their lifetime. Of course they stared.

"What's going on?" Teyaban asked.

They reached the end of the street and came upon the port. Zarien ignored the question as he stared in astonishment.
 

What had
Torena
Elelar said? "The port is..."

"A mess. I know," Teyaban replied.

"Earthquakes did this?" Zarien stared in shock at the wreckage of smashed boats, collapsed docks, and damaged warehouses.

"Yes." Seeing Zarien's bewildered expression, Teyaban elaborated, "You know. Surely a sea-born fellow knows."

"I've never... There haven't been any earthquakes in my lifetime. None that I remember, anyhow."

Teyaban made a clucking sound. "Oh, I hadn't thought of that. Before all the recent ones, I guess it
had
been a quite a few years since the last one. And now they're coming close together, and they're pretty bad—"

"But that's land," Zarien protested. "How did
this
happen?"

 
Teyaban looked surprised. "Well, after all, there's land under the water, Zarien." He pointed out to sea. "When Dar moves the mountains, She moves a lot of
that
, too." Teyaban nodded. "The water responds."

"By the eight winds," Zarien murmured. "Waves big enough to do this..." He had been caught in some terrible storms. Waves so big they blotted out the sky, and you soon forgot which way was up. His clan had lost a boat and four family members in such a storm two years ago. When Zarien was younger, he had seen two boats of the Kurvari clan smashed against the sacred chalk cliffs of Liron. No one survived. He had thought he knew what waves could do. "But I've never seen anything like this..."

"That's the destroyer goddess for you," Teyaban said philosophically. "If the Valdani had any sense, they'd never have tried to conquer Her in the first place, eh?" He pointed west. "Just the other side of Mount Shaljir, as you leave the bay, a Valdani ship was hurled against the rocks during the most recent earthquake. A bunch of the passengers lived, but the salvageable cargo was all plundered." Teyaban grinned. "So I guess the survivors from that wreck will be empty-handed when they reach Valda." He shrugged and added, "If they ever do. They might have been slaughtered by the mob when they came ashore."

Zarien now deeply regretted eating the
torena
's food, since it was threatening to come right back up. He didn't want to think about the killings, nor about the heads displayed on the city gates. However, even that wasn't as bad as the fear rushing through him. He had never realized—had never had reason to know—that the earthquakes which so terrified him on land were equally devastating at sea.

"I need to find out about my family," he said.

Teyaban slapped his forehead. "Darfire, I'm sorry Zarien. I didn't realize..."

Zarien ignored the apology and started forward, barely aware of Teyaban close at his heels, still babbling.
 

Now they were mostly surrounded by sea-born folk. The short hair, the tattoos, the clothing—tighter and more colorful than that of the
shallaheen
—were comfortingly familiar. Many of the grown males carried
stahra
, so no one stared at Zarien's. They stared at him, though. Oh, yes, they stared at
him.

He ventured far out onto the docks, hoping to find someone he knew, someone he could trust. Adalian was his clan's home port, not Shaljir, but they were related to other clans and were friendly with a few more.

He heard the lap of waves against wood, felt the salt on his tongue, and rejoiced at being home again, even as he worried about his family's well-being. Even as he wondered how to explain everything now that he was here.

"Are you a Kurvari?" someone called in sea-born dialect.

Zarien turned into the wind to find who had asked the question. He saw an old sea-born woman and a boy, together in an oarboat.
 

"No," he replied. "Lascari."

"Oh. Saw the tattoos. Sea-bound." Zarien nodded, seeing from her tattoos that she was not sea-bound. She shrugged and added, "Thought you might be Kurvari."

"Why?" he asked.

"There are three Kurvari boats at the floating market today."

His heart started pounding. "We're related. Could you take me to them? I can pay you." It felt wonderful to speak his own dialect again and to listen to someone without having to concentrate.

She looked at him and the drylander standing beside him. "Both of you?"

"No," Zarien said, "just me." He turned to Teyaban and added in common Silerian, "Wait here."

"No, we're supposed to stay togeth—"

"I'll be back," Zarien said, nimbly scrambling into the old woman's oarboat and pushing off before Teyaban had time to cause trouble. "Just wait for me here."

"Zarien!"

Zarien waved, then turned his back on land. Darfire, it felt good to be in a boat again! He courteously reached for the old woman's oar. "Shall I row?"

She smiled. "What nice manners you have."

He dipped the oar into the water, felt the sea ease to his stroke, and began paddling. He grinned, despite his worries, so happy to be here at last.

"Is your boat anchored at the floating market, too?" he asked the old woman.

She shook her head. "Our boat was destroyed in the second earthquake. My grandson and I happened to be ashore for trading, or we'd have died with everyone else."

"I'm sorry. What happened?"

"We don't know." She looked at the distant horizon, where the azure waters of the Middle Sea met the brilliant blue of Sileria's sky, now drenched in the gold of the sun. "They never came back from sea. No one ever saw them again." She brushed a weathered hand across her face. "Maybe a big wave capsized them and sent them under straight away. Otherwise... Well, my son was a fine sailor. He could have survived anything that was... survivable."

"I'm sorry," Zarien repeated.

After a long pause, she said, "May I ask what you were doing ashore?"

"It's a really long story."

"I believe that."

"And I don't know yet how it ends."

She considered this. "Do the Lascari still accept you?"

"I don't know that, either."

"The sea-bound shun anyone who—"

"Yes," he agreed.

Still curious, she prodded, "It must have been something very big, to make you abandon the sea and go ashore."

He thought of the scars, now concealed beneath his tunic, which the dragonfish had left on him. "Oh, it was big, all right."

"This is unbelievable," Cheylan murmured to himself, looking around at the hundreds of people on the road to Mount Darshon.
 

One might have thought that the advent of the Firebringer, followed by his death, would have forever destroyed the cult of the
zanareen
, those fanatics who worshipped at the snow-capped peak of Darshon and occasionally flung themselves into the volcano in doomed attempts to become the Firebringer.
 

"But this is Sileria," he muttered wryly, pushing against the flow of traffic on the decaying Kintish road that ran all the way through the war-torn lands of the Lironi, the most powerful clan in the east. Whereas the
zanareen
would probably never have even existed in a more sensible country, they continued to thrive here even after the ignominious death of their Awaited One.

Poor Josarian—he was surrounded by those dreary fanatics day and night after surviving the leap into Darshon's volcano to embrace the destroyer goddess. Being the Firebringer had so many disadvantages—an early death being the most obvious one—that Cheylan would always be thankful that it had been that mountain peasant and not him.

Now the
zanareen
were preaching about Dar's fury over the Firebringer's death. The dancing clouds and flashing lights around Darshon's summit frightened the masses, as did the earthquakes. And every foaming-at-the-mouth
zanar
in Sileria seemed to have a different explanation for it all. Cheylan wondered if Kiloran, the chief villain in many of these theories, believed a single one of them.

The offerings and the prayers were old news around Darshon, nothing Cheylan hadn't seen before. However, all the fevered chanting, mournful singing, and euphoric warbling was a new habit, and it was getting on his nerves: pilgrims everywhere were trilling, ululating, wailing... It was a non-stop cacophony which Cheylan had a feeling would still be ringing in his ears when he was halfway back to the western districts and far from Darshon—which he hoped would be soon.

He had left Mirabar alone, under the influence of other men, for too long already. His business for Tansen was nearly concluded here, and he had only a little more personal business to attend to. If all went well, he expected to head west on the Adalian coastal road, riding a fast mount, in a few more days.

Meanwhile, he made his way past the pilgrims who were streaming toward Mount Darshon to worship, praise, and pacify Dar. They brought generous offerings. Some of them were so heavily burdened with worldly goods, it looked as if they were offering Her everything they owned. Others came barefooted and empty-handed, having already lost everything—to the Valdani, to the Society, or to the recent earthquakes. Strangely, these were often the most ecstatic of the travelers, and some of them were feverishly determined to ascend Darshon, despite the heat vents now opening on the mountainside, the terrifying colored smoke spewing from the caldera, and the strange light dancing around the volcano.