Transformation (29 page)
Authors: Carol Berg
This time it was Aleksander who dropped his eyes. “Of course you have my word.”
“In the central market of Capharna is a bronze statue of a dying warrior who has just slain a mythical beast—a gyrbeast.” I closed my eyes and forced away the singsong refrain of Llyr’s dying. “Do you know it?”
“I do.”
“Go there. Clear your mind of every distraction and touch the gyrbeast. The way will appear in your head, something like a map. Follow the direction it gives you, and you will be met and taken the rest of the way. They won’t like you. They won’t like it that you—a Derzhi—have learned the way. But you must tell them you are fyddschar—enchanted—and that you come seeking their help. They need to know everything about the demons, about the Khelid. And tell them you’ve been told you bear the feadnach. They won’t refuse you.”
“I can’t remember all that. You can tell them your magic words yourself.”
“I won’t be there.”
“But of course you will. If not to your own people, where ... Druya’s horns, you don’t think to stay here? You’ve blood on you already—wages of this night’s adventure I would wager. You’ll be dead an hour after I’m gone. And that’s if you’re lucky.”
Curse the man for his stubborn heart. “I’ll put you in greater danger. A missing Ezzarian slave will bring the Magician’s Guild into the hunt,” I said. “Paltry as their skills are, there are a great number of them, and they are good hunters. Your father and the Khelid can’t mount too noisy a search for you. How would they explain it? But for me ...”
Aleksander soothed the restless Musa with a gentle hand and stared at me until my voice dwindled away. “You are perhaps the worst liar I have ever encountered,” he said at last. “You shouldn’t even bother. Your eyes won’t stay still. Your skin turns yellow as if you’ve eaten poison. Your eyelids twitch. Now begin again and tell me the truth or I’ll not budge a step from this palace, demons be damned. Why will you not take me to your own people?”
I wrapped my hands about my clammy, bare arms and stared at the ground. “I cannot. Or rather I can, but it will do neither of us any good. They will look past me as if I don’t exist. They will hear no word I speak, and if my words come through your mouth, they’ll not hear you, either. I could strike one of them, and he would not flinch. From the day I was taken captive, I’ve been dead to them—irredeemably, unspeakably corrupt. I can never go back.”
That moment of my speaking was, perhaps, the blackest moment of my life. No matter how often I had voiced them in my mind, I had never said the words aloud. The utterance made them real, in the way a gravestone manifests the hopeless truth that breathless bodies, still wearing the aspect of life, cannot confirm.
“Corrupt? You? Are the bastards blind and deaf or are you all infected with some priggish disease?”
“It is our law. There are good reasons.”
Aleksander put his hand under my chin and forced me to look at him. Even in the dark his eyes burned. “Do you have the least bit of an idea of what you’ve done to me, Seyonne? I can’t take a piss without you watching me, forcing me to look through your eyes at what I do, judging my ridiculous temper, daring me to be better than I am. Fifty times I’ve come an ant’s prick from sticking a knife in you, because I could make you neither envy nor fear me, and I couldn’t understand it. You were only a slave. And now you’re going to let my father slit your belly and hang you up by your entrails because some imbeciles say you’re not good enough to talk to them?”
“My lord—”
“Corruption cannot make a man travel in ways he’s unwilling to go, make him see bits of himself, however minute, that are worthy of true honor—not this pomp and mouth-music we attach to honor’s name. If you are corruption, then I am already one of these ill-begotten soul-eaters, and I’d best stay here and watch you die.” He planted one boot in Musa’s stirrup, swung his leg over the saddle, and extended his hand. “But neither of us is what others claim. If I cannot be afraid to fight my war, then I’ll be a whoreson demon forever before I let you hide from this one of yours.”
I had made peace with fate, resigned myself to exist alone in captivity until nature finished what the Derzhi had begun. Now Aleksander was asking me to take up the battle again ... and the immensity of grief and pain that would come with it. Chances were we’d never get so far as the gyrbeast, much less the rendezvous. Chances were I’d be dead and Aleksander packed off to Khelidar long before I saw any Ezzarian turn away from me. Before I saw her.
I shifted my senses and found the feadnach yet burning within him; then I sighed, snatched Boresh’s cloak from the ground, and took the Prince’s hand.
Chapter 19
“Urgent message for Lord Jubai!” screamed Aleksander, not slowing Musa’s gallop by even a heartbeat as we raced across the final courtyard toward the solidly closed palace gates. I hid my eyes in his back, deciding I would rather not know at exactly which moment two men riding a Derzhi warhorse would be flattened against the two-hundred-year-old oaken beams. But the impact did not come, and a smell of burning oil and a glimpse of torchlight past the edge of the Prince’s cloak told me we were through. Aleksander laughed and shouted over his shoulder as we thundered down the lane, “No hesitation. Dmitri taught me that.”
I didn’t answer. I was working to get my balance before discovering the exact measure of the considerable distance to the ground. The prospect of an arrow in the back or smashing into closed gates did nothing to ease the difficulties of remaining astride the galloping horse. I had been an adequate rider in my youth, but on smaller, less aggressive beasts. I had no place to put my feet, too many qualms about gripping Aleksander as tightly as I would like, and a dreadful problem in that I was most inadequately dressed for riding. Slaves were not given undergarments. I had only a few scratchy folds of Boresh’s cloak caught between bare skin and the saddle, and I was already raw after only five minutes going. Unable to keep a firm grip on the horse, I felt like the next jolt would send me flying.
We streaked across the causeway and into the town, dodging deserted wagons and shuttered market stalls, galloping precariously fast through narrow lanes and about sharp corners until we reached the grand marketplace of Capharna. The banners of celebration hung limp in the cold, damp air, and the broad expanse of pavement was littered with the remnants of the townsfolk’s dakrah feasting, interrupted before it had really begun. Hastily sewn mourning draperies were nailed over every doorway, while shadowy figures scurried about, looking for scraps of food or cloth, or dragging away the collapsed plank tables and booths to burn for a night’s warmth.
Aleksander reined in his mount beside the towering bronze monument to bittersweet victory. The bronze warrior slumped lifeless beside the legendary monster he had slain, his sword forever on the verge of slipping from his graceful hand. The warrior’s face was classic Derzhi. Aleksander could have sat for it.
“Shall we?” said the Prince, offering me his hand. I managed to dismount without assistance, though my wobblekneed landing and subsequent grimaces as I stretched out my nether regions gave him pause. “I’d have thought a slave would develop a thicker skin,” he said.
The ground under my feet rumbled ominously, and the night sky glowed from the direction of the palace as if a second moon was waxing in the north. “We’ve only moments, Your Highness. We must be away from here before anyone sees what we’re about.”
“Well, go do it then.”
“It would be better if you did it, my lord. You know the land hereabouts. The map will make sense to you.” I dared not have both of us use the enchantment. I had no way to know what limits or wards had been placed on it. And, of course, if something happened to me, Aleksander had to know where to go. I could not yet convince myself that there was any real possibility that I would ever walk into an Ezzarian settlement, else I could not have continued. “Just clear your mind, touch the beast, and say ‘dryn haver.’ It means ‘show me the way.’”
I could hear the shouts of the searchers and hear the horses now, not just feel them. Aleksander could, too, for he didn’t argue. He ran to the sculpture, scrambled up the stone block on which it rested, and laid his hand on the gyrbeast’s tail.
“I don’t see anything,” he called. “Or feel it, or know it, or whatever the devil I’m supposed to do.”
It had to be there. Llyr had wanted me to know how to find the Ezzarians. When Ezzarians wanted to keep a location hidden, they would embed the direction in a map enchantment. Chances were that only a handful of their own people actually knew the entire way to their refuge. The path would be masked, hidden under layers of spells, so that those sent out into the world would not be able to lead others back to the rest of them. Llyr had said that the gyrbeast would lead the way. This was the only gyrbeast I knew of outside of manuscripts and stories, though I had seen things in the domain of demons ...
... the soft rain fell like tears of grief, washing away the purple blood of the monster I had slain. Wisps of steam curled from the silver knife I wrested from its leathery neck. I stepped along its back and gazed upward, letting the rain cool my face, washing away the sweat and blood and foul sputum of the beast. Even as I watched, the clouds broke, revealing brilliantly clear stars in no pattern that would ever be visible in the realms of men. I felt the wafting breeze, tasted its shape and strength, and judged it enough. It would carry me to the portal easily. I was tired, but it had come out well, and soon I would be in her arms . . .
Fires of heaven, why could I not keep it buried? Aleksander was poised on the stone, waiting. The boy had been dying. What if I’d misunderstood him? “Clear your mind and speak the words,” I said harshly. “ ‘Dryn haver.’ Let the image come. Don’t try to control it. They wouldn’t have left it simple.”
Aleksander leaned over to the beast again and was quiet for a moment. An eternity. Our pursuers were only a street away. The scavengers had already fled into the dark alley-ways.
“Druya’s horns!” Aleksander’s hand flew into the air as if the bronze beast had stung it. He bellowed in laughter, then leaped from the stone block right into Musa’s saddle. It made my backside throb to watch it, but not as much as it did when he hauled me up behind him again and kicked the obedient stallion back to life.
“Extraordinary!” he shouted as we wheeled and shot out of the southern gate of the marketplace just as the torchlit chase entered from the north. I could almost hear the leather of their armor creaking. We raced madly through the sleeping lanes. I couldn’t imagine how Aleksander could see where we were going, as the buildings melted together in a blur. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps it was all the horse. But every time I thought we must emerge from the city into the countryside, Aleksander would take another turn, and we’d find ourselves deeper in the old part of the city. I was sure we were lost.
I thought my fears confirmed when the Prince halted Musa in a dark, narrow lane near the river. It stunk of pigs, dead fish, and rotted cabbage. Sour yellow light spilled into the lane through the smoke-grimed windows of a tavern.
He’d got it wrong. The map enchantment would not lead us to the Ezzarians themselves, only to a meeting place where we would take on a guide. But Ezzarians would never use such a den of filth, of excess, of impurity. Besides, it was right in the middle of the city. Much too public. I should have envisioned the map from the gyrbeast enchantment myself. “My lord, this couldn’t be the place—”
“It’s not, but we need to stop here anyway. Come on.”
A man staggered out of the door and pissed in the lane, then collapsed in his own puddle. Aleksander stepped over him and pushed open the door of the tavern. Exasperated with the willful Derzhi, I followed, mystified, wondering if he had decided he couldn’t proceed without a drink or a woman.
The air inside the dark hovel was thick with smoke, and smelled of burned grease and sour ale. The eight or ten ragged men and slovenly women slouched on stools about the room goggled curiously at us. It was not the sort of place a Derzhi warrior would frequent. The proprietor, distinguished from the others by his possessive hand on the single ale barrel, had only one yellowed tooth in his gaping mouth, and his lip was birth-cleft all the way to his nostrils. He jerked his head to a vacant stool for Aleksander, then curled his lip at my bare feet and the steel bands about my ankles. Slaves did not usually patronize taverns, either.
Aleksander did not sit down, but circled the room, examining each man carefully until he stopped behind a slender, long-legged fellow who had his face buried in a buxom woman’s bodice and his hand up her skirt. “This one,” he said, then wrapped his left arm about the man’s neck and dragged the poor victim out the door. The frowsy woman who had been sitting on the man’s knee collapsed to the floor with a florid curse, one breast hanging out of her bodice and her skirt bunched around her waist.
“I don’t like his looks,” Aleksander shouted to the curious drinkers who crowded up to the door to see what was going on. None dared step outside to get in the middle of it. I pushed my way through them, just as confused as the rest. What could Aleksander be thinking? Hooves and shouts echoed through the nearby streets.
The Prince shoved his besotted victim against a wall. “Remove your clothes. Boots and all.” The man gaped in uncomprehending surprise until Aleksander grabbed his ear and pulled the slack-jawed face onto a level with his own. “I said, remove your clothes. Your Prince has need of them. And be quick about it. If you take more than half a minute, I’ll pop your left eye from your head like a pit from a cherry.” He flexed his thumb and forefinger in front of the man’s face. Well short of half a minute, Aleksander tossed me a pile of clothes and boots that smelled like tar and wine and piss, and the man was running naked down the street wailing as if a Derzhi hangman was at his back.
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