by Carol Berg
“Can you remember all that?”
“Yes ... west tower ... kitchen garden ... don’t panic. ...” He rolled to his side, smothering a groan in the thin bedding. Sweat burst from every pore of his skin, dripping from his face and neck and instantly soaking his shirt. Even as the tower room grew deathly cold, heat radiated from his body as if he were the sun in his own small universe. “Be there, Seyonne.”
“I’ll be there, my lord.”
As his torso began to stretch and blur, he wrapped his arms around the bedding and fought to keep from screaming.
“You are in control, Prince Aleksander. Your mind is not gone away. ...”
In fifteen long minutes the shengar stood before me, a low, angry, gravelly rumbling coming from its throat as it stretched its tawny limbs.
“Well-done. And now we go. Do not let the Khelid recover from their surprise, my lord. Make for the kitchen garden. No panic. I am going to scream in just a moment, and you must not be startled by it. You will run through the palace, killing no one, and you will get outside and find a place of safety. Are you ready?”
It was indisputably strange to be talking to a beast that could kill me with one blow. Though, as I thought about it, it was not so different from talking to Aleksander any other time.
With no little trepidation I began beating on the door. “Help! Guards, please help! I beg you.” I let out a dead-raising yell.
The Aleksander-beast bawled its fury, sounding like the screams of a dying woman. It was not entirely pretense when I hammered on the thick wood. When the door opened, I jumped aside and the wildcat leaped outward through the doorway. One of the two Khelid had a moment to yell before he was tossed against the curved tower wall. The other one had already been batted senseless by the great paws. A golden blur disappeared down the curving stair.
I snatched the sword and threw it out of the tower window. No surer way for me to get skewered on the way out than to be seen carrying a weapon. Though I was likely to die soon enough. It would not take them long to learn which slave had come to succor Aleksander. Perhaps I should have kept the sword, I thought, as I crept out of the door. It would be quicker and less painful overall.
The Prince had not killed either of the Khelid. That was good. Their resident demons would have been set loose and ended up in someone else. Someone we didn’t know.
I slipped quickly down the tower stair. The alarm was raised through the palace, like fire racing along a trail of spilled lamp oil. “Run, Aleksander,” I whispered as I scurried like a rat through the labyrinth of back passages across the vast bulk of the Summer Palace. By the time I got to the kitchen courtyard, torches were blazing throughout the palace grounds. Shouts of terror and amazement rang from every quarter.
“What was it?”
“I heard that it came from the west wing.”
“How could it have got inside? Was there some entertainment planned with it?”
“There’s three guards down. Drak thought he got a shot at it, but it didn’t slow down.”
“The monster’s headed for the north parkland. Careful in those woods.”
I crept around the edges of the kitchen courtyard, behind the refuse bins, between stacks of wood and barrels of ashes, ducking into corners and crevices every time I heard a step. Two groups of men-at-arms ran through the courtyard brandishing swords and crossbows, but soon the dark expanse fell silent. By the time I reached the alleyway that led from the courtyard past the carpenter’s shop, the stonemason’s workroom, and the other palace workshops and storehouses toward the kitchen garden, I was convinced the way was clear. But no sooner did I step out from behind a broken-wheeled cart, than I felt a flesh-ripping whip across my shoulders, the stinging tail tearing a streak in my right cheek. I stumbled on the broken cobbles of the lane and fell heavily to one knee.
“Where are you going in such a hurry, slave?” asked Boresh.
I moved to get up, but the whip cracked on the wet paving, scattering broken chips of rock that pelted my side and flew into my eyes. I stayed on my knees, bent forward.
“Well, well, it is the sneaking Ezzarian who knows not his place.” The diminutive under-chamberlain grabbed a fistful of my short hair and yanked my head back. “It’s time you learned it. The mad prince will have no say in your future, so you will have to put your ambitions aside ... starting now.” He spit in my face, jammed his whip handle into my stomach, and shoved me forward. “Face down, vermin.”
I forced myself to submit. It was not yet time to take the step I could never retract. His boot on the back of my neck ground my face into the cold wet grit of the cobbles, and I braced myself for a beating. Get it over with. But I felt a quiet scuffling at my back and heard a muffled expulsion of air, just as the weight was lifted from my neck. Quickly I rolled to the side, just in time to see Durgan pull his knife from Boresh’s back. So the step had been taken for me.
“Off with you.” He wiped the blade on the under-chamberlain’s breeches. “I’ll take care of this refuse.”
I got to my feet, wiped the muddied nastiness from my face, and bowed. “Thank you, Master Durgan.” Then I started down the lane again.
“Ezzarian!”
I paused and looked, just in time to catch a wad of cloth. It was Boresh’s cloak. I bowed again, this time deeper, and ran toward the gardens.
The dark kitchen garden was as silent as a burial ground after a plague. I couldn’t tell where the hunt had gone. Half the palace was lit up, and there were cries and shouts from far more places than Aleksander could possibly be. It sounded as if he’d got outside, at least.
I couldn’t go chase him. If he had kept his wits, he would come. If not, I didn’t want to be near him anyway. But it was very hard to wait. Twice I heard running footsteps and shouts close by, and I ducked into the corner of the garden and pulled a pile of rotted netting over me. Another hour fled past. If he didn’t come soon and change again, he wouldn’t have the cover of night to get away. His “episodes” had lasted between two and four hours each time. Longer would put us right at dawn.
It was another hour until a quiet, ominous snarling from across the garden told me that Aleksander had arrived. I peeked out from my hiding place and saw the dark shape creeping through the starlit garden, pausing every so often to smell the wind. I stepped out and called softly. “My lord.”
The amber-eyed cat loped across the dead earth and circled about me, as if to make sure who I was.
“Are you all right?” I said, sitting on the bottom of a splintered wheelbarrow. He slunk toward me and settled on the ground. “You set up quite an uproar.” I talked of nonsense, dreading to see the dark midnight start to pale. But it was less than half an hour until he began to change. Even coming from beast to man, he was silent this time, smothering his agonies in his throat so no uneasy sentinel on the palace grounds could have heard him. “Come,” I said, wrapping Boresh’s cloak about him as soon as the transformation was complete. I helped him to his feet and led him, shaking and miserable as before, toward the copse behind the washhouse. I trusted that Durgan had managed what I’d asked. “It’s time for you to leave Capharna for a while.”
“I’ll not run away,” he said, shaking his head and struggling to force words through chattering teeth and the remnants of confusion and enchantment. “I’ll go to my father. ...”
“And what will make him listen to you? You’ve told him you killed his brother—a lie he believes. You’ve told him the Khelid are demons and that they changed you into a beast—a truth he discounts. Why would he believe you now?”
“I’ll be calm this time. I’ll explain about Dmitri. I’ll show him. Touch a sword and let him watch.”
“And if Lord Kastavan is there, I’ll be unable to help you; he would see instantly what I was doing. If you can’t control the beast—and with a demon watching, that would be quite likely—you could end up killing your father. Is that what you want?”
I had thought his face could get no paler. “I ca
nnot run away. I’m a Derzhi warrior. I am heir to the Empire.”
“They’ll not allow you to be anointed until you are theirs. You must rid yourself of this enchantment or you’ll be a demon emperor.”
He had no answer.
We slipped into the copse—a thick little stand of barren alders that had grown up where the dirty water from the washhouse ran downhill and got caught in a shallow bowl of land. There stood the Prince’s own Musa, happily munching on a pile of hay. Three filled saddle packs hung over his back, and a large cloth bag hung from a thick branch. I pulled down the bag and helped the Prince get on the dry clothes: a thick shirt, sturdy breeches, and a good, heavy cloak to replace Boresh’s thinner one.
Now it was time. I steeled my heart and wished I believed in a god from whom I could beg forgiveness for the betrayal I was about to commit. “Your Highness, the only return I ask for this night’s doings is that you not ill-use what I’m about to tell you. There are those who can help you ... but they are those that Derzhi law requires to be held captive. I must have your word that you’ll not do so.”
“You must have my word? How dare you bargain with me?” Even after all, he rankled at my boldness.
“My lord, I’ll say nothing more until I have your word. You may do as you wish with me—as always.” I held my arms out straight to the side, and I did not look away.
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.
Alek
sander 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 ...
