by Victor Poole
"You're mean," Coren announced.
"If you run now," Ajalia told the boy, "I will beat you until you submit." Coren scoffed.
"What does that mean?" he demanded. "Submit," he said ironically. Ajalia regarded him with a solemn expression on her face. She was thinking of her master in the East, and of the only time she had ever seen him beat a slave.
"It means that I hit you until you beg me to stop," Ajalia said. Coren looked at her with hard eyes.
"That's stupid," Coren said.
"It means that I hurt you in a way that makes you jump when you see me coming," Ajalia said. "And, if you are as hardened as I think you are, it means scars."
She saw Coren's lips tremble a little. His eyes went to the place where he knew she kept her knife.
"You wouldn't really hurt me," he said in a low voice. The grotesque black shapes in his skin looked like an awful infestations of insects.
"Your mother cut you," Ajalia said, "but you have never really been hurt. I would hurt you in a way that you have never been hurt before."
"You're an ugly savage," Coren told her angrily, but his eyes had the light of fear in them.
"If you stay here, but are intolerable," Ajalia continued, "I will call up all of my household boys, and they will drive you out of my house, and they might kick you a great deal. They'll certainly trap you, and attract the attention of many people in the city, and if the people of Slavithe see you in the street in the daylight, you might not live."
"We aren't savages here, like you are," Coren said furiously. "We don't hurt people here in Slavithe."
"They will try to kill you," Ajalia said, "if they see the marks on your skin, and know what they mean."
"No they won't," Coren snapped. "You're just saying that to frighten me. No one would get killed."
"No," Ajalia agreed, "just you. My boys would kick you until you couldn't walk, and the men would stomp on you as well, and many of the women would throw things. Maybe they would take you to the quarry in a great mob, and burn you there." She looked at Coren, who was looking at her doubtfully.
"They wouldn't kill me," Coren said.
"All right," Ajalia said. "You're probably right. After all, when I killed Beryl in the street this morning, and no one put up a fuss about it, that was different to you walking around the city with witchcraft scrawled all over your face and arms." Ajalia looked at Coren, and Coren looked back at Ajalia.
"That's stupid," Coren said. "That's a stupid thing to say. Beryl hasn't got anything to do with my face."
"Which ones did Beryl make?" Ajalia asked, pointing at Coren. Coren got up off the floor, and straightened his burned clothes.
"Tell me about what will happen when I'm a slave," Coren commanded. Ajalia smiled.
"Are you bypassing the beating, then?" she asked in a friendly voice. Coren curled his lip at her.
"You're disgusting," Coren said. He looked around the room. "Where's Delmar?" he asked petulantly. "This is boring, and nothing is happening, and I want to go to bed." Coren looked around, and Ajalia saw that the boy was hungry. She did not think that Coren's mother had withheld food from him, the way she had from Delmar.
"You could go home," Ajalia suggested. Coren sighed.
"All the things will be gone by now," he said, sounding grumpy. "I won't have my bed anymore."
"Why?" Ajalia asked. She had seen the halls and rooms of Simon's empty house, but she had not realized Coren would know that the people of the city would come so promptly to steal his parents' belongings. Coren looked at her with disdain.
"My parents stole things," Coren said. "People would always try to take things from the house, when they visited. Everyone figured it was fair, since my mother wouldn't pay for anything."
Ajalia remembered the first time she had met Lilleth; Delmar's mother had attempted, quite determinedly, to steal the pale cover that the Eastern slaves used to protect the silks from dust.
"I knew people would come to the house," Coren said miserably, "as soon as my father was dead. My mother wouldn't stop them, if they came," he added.
"She's dead, too," Ajalia reminded him. Coren gave a sniff.
"Tell me about being a slave," he commanded her. Ajalia swallowed a smile.
"Are you making up your mind about what to do?" she asked. Coren looked at her seriously.
"Yes," he said. "So far, I can be beaten to a pulp, or chased and stomped on in the street. I want to hear about being a slave."
"You wouldn't like it," Ajalia told him.
"I bet I would," Coren said stoutly.
"Well," Ajalia said, standing up and going to the lamp. "This was fun. Maybe I'll see you tomorrow. If you go out in the city, you'll be attacked. If you stay here, my boys will beat you. Have a good night." She put out the lamp, and the room fell into darkness.
"What am I supposed to do?" Coren complained.
"Whatever you like," Ajalia said.
"I don't want anyone to hurt me," Coren said.
"Then you'd better hide," Ajalia said. "And the priests will have set a watch outside. They'll want to know what I'm up to, and they might try to kill you, if they think they can get away with it."
For the first time, Coren was silent at her words. He seemed to be thinking unhappily of the priests.
"Do you not have anything to say about that?" Ajalia asked. "Aren't you going to tell me that your priests are all kindly and nonviolent men, and that they would never raise a hand to you?"
Ajalia could hear Coren's shallow breathing; she thought that the boy was about to cry.
"The priests are awful," Coren said. He sounded genuinely unhappy. "They wouldn't kill me, I think," he said, "but they'd take me through a silver door, and then I'd be sick."
"The door at the back of the temple?" Ajalia asked.
"Which one?" Coren asked. "The temples are all like that, they all have silver doors." Ajalia thought that her own dragon temple did not have a door covered with silver light; she wondered if the silver required maintenance, or if her own temple was different to the others somehow. "My mother put a piece of her soul in me," Coren said, sniffling a little, "and I would get torn up inside if I went through a silver door." Coren's snuffling breath filled up the darkness, and he rubbed hard at his nose.
"You're a liar," Ajalia told Coren. "I told you you wouldn't last long." The sniffles stopped at once; Ajalia thought she could hear the boy's angry frown.
"You don't do anything right," Coren said bitterly.
"Am I supposed to be weeping over your predicament?" Ajalia asked. She went to the door of the room, and leaned against the frame. She could still get a good bit of sleep in, she told herself, if she went up to bed now. "You don't have a piece of your mother in you," Ajalia added. "There's nothing wrong in you anymore."
"Yes there is," Coren said instantly. "You don't know anything about it." Ajalia was sure that the boy was trying to impress her, or to convince her that he yet held mysteries in his spirit. She had no doubt that there was no remnant of Lilleth in the boy. She thought of Rane, and of how that man had lied to her. She was not ready to leave Coren alone yet; she thought he was nearly to the point of becoming either decidedly useful, or utterly without hope. She thought that the boy was stalling, and trying to get her to become invested in him. Ajalia thought that Coren wanted her to protect him, and to feel motherly things towards him. She wondered if Coren would be like Rane was, if the boy managed to grow into manhood. Something about Rane's quiet duplicity reminded her of Coren, and of Coren's wide and disingenuous eyes.
"Rane burned up," Ajalia said. "He was going to trap me, and tie me up. I think he wanted to use me as leverage against Delmar. I did some magic, and Rane's whole soul caught on fire." Ajalia watched the shadow in the room that was Coren. She could not see his face clearly, but the scars and depressions in his skin made dark smudges in the dim light that came in at the window. "I didn't mean for him to die," Ajalia said.
"Do you know that I'm an orphan?" Coren asked agg
ressively.
"I don't care what you are," Ajalia said. "You're an awful boy. Now that your mother's magic is emptied out, and the magic of all the other witches is gone, you can go out in the streets. I hope you know," Ajalia said, "that your mother's friends will be looking for you now. I don't think you've realized how angry the other witches will be, and how afraid. They'll know you're with me, by now. There are bound to be witches outside the house. If you leave, they'll take you."
Coren had gone very still, and very quiet.
"I think you know," Ajalia said, "that the witches will kill you, to keep you quiet." Coren said nothing; his silence was different to the sulking way he had refused to speak before. This silence was telling; it was perturbed, and a little gruesome. A new thought occurred to Ajalia, and she turned towards Coren in the darkness. "You have a soul now," she said. "Would they take you, and make you into a shadow child?"
Coren said nothing, but his body was still, and unpleasantly quiet. Ajalia looked at the bare gleam of moonlight that was reflected through the open window.
"Will they try to get you in here?" Ajalia asked. Coren nodded; she saw his head move in the darkness.
"I hadn't thought of them coming for me," Coren said, "but yes, they will. They will want to recover what they can," he said, "from the loss of their spells. Many of them," he said, with an involuntary shudder, "put a lot of effort into me."
"Well," Ajalia said, taking Coren by the arm, and leading him into the shadowy hall, "you have two choices." Their footsteps echoed over the large and empty hall. Coren's eyes were turned nervously towards the length of moonlight that still fell over the entrance hall, between the white pillars.
"What are my choices?" Coren asked. He looked jittery. "I forgot that they would come after me," Coren said. "I was thinking of my mother being there. They wouldn't have dared, if she was still alive."
"She's dead, so that means they'll come for you," Ajalia said. She led Coren into the center of the great hall, and then she sat down on the floor.
"What are you doing?" Coren demanded. Ajalia patted the floor next to her. "I'm not going to sit there," Coren said angrily. "It's all dark in here. You won't even see anyone, if they come."
Ajalia took the blue stone that Daniel had fetched for her, and twisted a length of brilliant light from the earth into the center of the stone. The stone ignited within, and then gave off a strong white gleam. The light from within the stone grew brighter and brighter, until a wide circle of light, about twenty feet in diameter, grew around Ajalia. The sudden, eerie gleam of many eyes appeared in the shadows of the temple.
Ajalia's lips drew together in displeasure; she was irritated that her home had been invaded. She got her knife into her hand, and began to gather lights from deep below the earth. She sent her mind deeper, to the same red-hot seams of gold that she had used, with the silver star lights, to ignite Coren's infected soul with burning blue light. The eyes, which formed a ring around Ajalia and Coren, came a little closer. Ajalia looked about her as she thought up towards the sky; she saw seven pairs of eyes gleaming in the reflected light of her clear blue stone. The blue stone, she saw, gave off a stronger light than the red stone from Lily's soul had done.
"Sit down, please," Ajalia told Coren. The boy sat down with a vigorous thump; Ajalia did not look at his face, but she imagined that the boy was in a paroxysm of terror now. "I only just realized that you would come," Ajalia told the eyes that belonged to the witches, who still stood entirely in darkness. The rim of the white light extended in a gradual glow; beyond the edge of the light was the deep darkness within the dragon temple hall, and in this darkness, circled around Ajalia and Coren like a pack of attacking wolves, were the eyes of the seven witches. "It seems I thought of you just in time," Ajalia added cheerfully. She was thinking of the lights from the stars. She found two small stars, and quickly unwound lengths of shimmering silver light from both of them.
An idea flitted into her head, and she reached her free hand into the bag that hung around her body, and fished out the falcon's dagger. She swept the dagger free of its blackened sheath with a swift downward motion, and then gathered the red-gold and silver starlight cords around the blade of her knife, and the dull edge of the dagger.
"Are you going to say anything to me?" Ajalia said to the witches. She thought she heard two of them murmuring to each other. "I'm not willing to release Coren at this time," Ajalia added. "I haven't finished getting information out of him."
An angry hiss went around the circle of eyes. One of the witches stepped forward, just into the rim of soft white light where the stone's glow dissipated into shadow, and Ajalia saw that the witch's face was broad and keen. This witch glared at Ajalia with hard, determined eyes, but she did not speak.
Ajalia turned in a tight circle slowly, holding her knife and the dagger at her sides. She was busy winding the mixed star and earth light around the two blades; they had begun to shimmer with the same ocean-blue lights they had made before. Ajalia did not look down at the blades, but she could see the iridescent blue shimmering strongly from below the range of her vision. She turned, keeping each of the seven pairs of eyes in view. She knew that the witches would not play fair; she knew they would attack her from behind, if they could. Coren was sitting stock-still beside her. She wondered if he had often sat thus, or if he had held court beside his mother when he had seen these women.
"Is Ullar here, too?" Ajalia asked. The lead witch, who had stepped a little into the light, frowned with displeasure.
"You must stop moving, and speak with me," the witch said loudly. Ajalia had finished putting the cords of light into her blades; she now drew on the cords of light she had gathered, pulling more of the lines down from the sky and up from beneath the earth, and she began to build a strong net around herself and Coren.
"Where's Ullar?" Ajalia said, still turning. She made a tight mesh of the dancing blue light; the net that she made grew up around her waist, and then up to her shoulders. Coren was beside her, within the net. She saw his eyes, as she was turning, and she saw that he was staring at the shimmering blue net with enormous eyes. His mouth was drawn open, and the ugly black marks on his face were shining hard in the light from the blue stone. Ajalia tied off the net of mixed magic above her head, so that she and Coren were enclosed in a dense dome of the flickering blue light. Ajalia took the remainder of the cords she had taken from the earth and sky, and built a second mesh beneath the floor, so that a globe of the blue lights wrapped securely around them both.
"Ullar is not worthy of our ranks," the lead witch said finally. She was watching Ajalia narrowly, and her lips were pinched together. Ajalia could see that the lead witch did not perceive the net of blue mixed magic she had woven; when Ajalia turned, and looked at each of the six other pairs of eyes, she saw that none of the witches looked at the net. Coren, she thought, was the only one present besides herself who could see the beautiful blue light.
"What do you want?" Ajalia asked. She still turned, but her shoulders had relaxed, and her jaw was not so tight. She was sure now that she would have warning of some kind, when the witches attacked her. In the very best case, she thought, they would destroy themselves against the mesh of blue light, and she would be free to kill their bodies without danger. Ajalia was sure that if she set foot outside the blue mesh, or if Coren went out, that the witches would infest her with the horrible black cords of reaching light that she had seen emanate out of Beryl, and out of Lily.
Coren, Ajalia saw, was still, and quiet; he had grown very calm, and was watching the lead witch now with some measure of scorn in his eyes. Ajalia saw that Coren felt safe behind the mesh. She found that Coren's disdain, when it was turned onto a body aside from herself, was oddly satisfying to her. She wanted to egg him on, and to watch him expend some of his bad temper on the witch. Ajalia told herself she was being petty, and she smiled.
"You have come into my house without invitation," Ajalia said. "You must leave now."
"Y
ou asked me what I wanted," the lead witch said. "I haven't told you yet."
"You didn't answer when I asked you," Ajalia said. "Go home."
"Not without the boy," the lead witch said coldly.
"This boy?" Ajalia asked, gesturing to Coren. She was still turning carefully, taking in the other six pairs of eyes that gleamed in the darkness.
"Face me to speak to me," the lead witch demanded.
"No," Ajalia said simply, continuing to rotate.
"You're being ridiculous," the lead witch complained. "There is not a reason to be otherwise than civil."
"You entered my home, and threatened me," Ajalia said. "You have not exhibited civility."
"I want that boy," one of the other witches exclaimed. She stepped forward a little. Ajalia did not turn out of her slow circumference to look at this new face; when she had finished her regular rotation, she saw that this witch was shorter, and young than the leader.
"And what is your name?" Ajalia asked mildly, continuing to look steadily out at the others, one after the other. None of the other five had stepped forward yet. The second witch who had stepped into the light gritted her teeth, and clicked her tongue in irritation.
"Don't say your name," the lead witch said hurriedly to the second.
"Jane," Coren said in a bored voice, as though he were reading out from a list, "Pollan, Esther, Vinna, Fran, Charm, and Luka."
The two witches who had stepped into the light froze; Ajalia saw their cheeks, pale with anger, when she turned towards them. The other five witches stepped into the light; Ajalia continued to turn, her hands gripped carefully around the hilt of the dagger, and of her own knife. The falcon's dagger, she thought, would be little help, as it was dull, but she wanted something in her hand, and she knew she would need the shaped blade of light that she had coated around the form of the dagger. Her own knife was exceedingly sharp, and she had made a lighted facsimile of that blade as well. She did not know yet how the witches would attack her, and she held the blades cautiously in her hands. The blue net of light flickered and spun around her, casting a pleasant blue and green glow against the witches' eyes. To Ajalia, it seemed as though she and Coren were encased inside a bubble of clear ocean water. She half expected to see fish darting about in front of her face.
