She had worked her magic on a garden pool, looking across the world as if through a mirror. Although she could spy the frosty peaks of the northlands and the Giant forests of Uduria, even the dry streets of parched Uurz, she could not bring the capital of Khyrei into focus. There was indeed some great power there, something that blocked her magical vision. It could be that Gammir the Undying had actually returned. She called for Iardu on the night winds, but he did not come.
D’zan was unsurprised at the failure of her sorcery, as if her lack of childbearing had proved her ineffectiveness in all areas. Yet he did not chastise her when she stood powerless to confirm the Khyrein rumors. He only kissed her forehead and stalked off for another conference with his generals.
She heard them speak of an embassy to Mumbaza. They would draw the Boy-King to their war by exploiting his eagerness to prove himself a man. Undutu was about to claim the throne from his mother the Queen-Regent. The Son of the Feathered Serpent would be a Boy-King no more. Now he would be the King on the Cliffs, the Jeweled One, as his fathers were before him. She had little doubt that Undutu’s young ego could be stroked enough to end Mumbaza’s long peace. An ambassador from Uurz had already pledged King Tyro’s allegiance to Yaskatha, supporting whatever action they might take against the Khyrein pirates. For the second time in her young life, Sharadza sensed the reek of war rising on the air, the scent of warm blood flowing through street and gutter, dripping from the gnarled fingers of dead men.
So it went for months on end. Squabbling ambassadors and rumors of sea battles. It seemed Uurz could not commit itself to war after all, for the Twin Kings were in disagreement. Lyrilan the Scholar checked the martial ambitions of his brother Tyro the Sword. The King of Mumbaza was not as eager to prove his war prowess as expected. He was a thinker, this dark-skinned youth, raised by his Queen-Mother to be cautious, and counseled by Khama the Feathered Serpent to maintain the harmony of the Pearl Kingdom. Meanwhile the depradations of the Khyrein pirates continued, and ships were lost in every season. Perhaps it was these frustrations with political matters, added to his fears of remaining heirless, that drove D’zan into the arms of Lady Cymetha.
At first she was only a whiff of perfume, a sweet odor that lingered on D’zan’s skin when Sharadza came near him. The scent of another woman’s lust. The reek of betrayal. She followed him one night in the form of a black cat, gliding between the columns of the great hall and skirting the hems of tapestries. Earlier, he had claimed that a meeting with his advisors would keep him late into the night. He told her not to wait up for him. Several times now he had done this, slipping into the royal bed much later with that strange scent lingering on him.
She followed D’zan into the domain of the courtesans, directly to Cymetha’s chamber. She listened at the door with her feline ears pricked, and heard the sounds of their passion. It was the sound of what she had lost. Something precious gone forever. A sparkling diamond dropped into the ocean’s dark abyss.
She did not confront him the next day, or the next. Yet no longer did she let him touch her. He would never touch her again; not until he admitted what he had done. What he continued to do. So months passed in icy silence, as politics and infidelity claimed the King’s attentions, and the pages of ancient tomes wrapped a protective sheath about her heart. Everyone at the court knew of D’zan’s affair; yet he would not insult her by speaking of it directly. Likewise, she uttered not a word to spoil her mother’s happy existence among the courtly idylls of Yaskatha. Yet even Shaira must have wondered why her daughter would give her no grandchild to coddle. Sharadza evaded her mother’s deft questions on the matter.
Three months ago she saw Cymetha’s round belly for the first time. The pregnant courtesan was roaming the halls outside her newly appointed private suite in the company of seven serving maids. Cymetha’s status had improved greatly. And why not? She carried the King’s only heir inside her ambitious womb.
Sharadza confronted D’zan that night, marching openly into a meeting of his advisors. She brushed aside their blather of war and justice, sweeping them bodily from their chairs with a great wind. Sensing her anger, fearing her power, they fled the room. D’zan was outraged and fuming. He rose from the table, yellowed maps rustling in the air like mad Yaskathan pigeons.
She slapped him. One of her jeweled rings left a tiny cut across his cheek. It gleamed scarlet, a mark of shame. He said nothing, protests dying in his mouth. She stared at him, and again her eyes betrayed her with tears.
“I must have an heir,” he said. His voice was ragged with arguing, weary as that of an old man, though he looked not a day older than when they had married. Golden hair fell about his shoulders as her magic winds died away, and the gems in his crown sparkled. “A King must have an heir, Sharadza.”
“She is a whore,” Sharadza whispered. The child in Cymetha’s belly could not be D’zan’s, would never be his. She wanted to tell him now, to shatter his illusion and strip away his arrogance. But she could not. She could not tell him plainly that Cymetha had lain with some dozen other men. That one of them had substituted his own potency for D’zan’s powerless seed. Of course Cymetha knew this. Of course she had ensured her pregnancy. Such was her path to Queenhood. The child would be an imposter, raised to be the next King of Yaskatha, with only its mother to know it was a fraud. A bastard, like Sharadza’s own brother Fangodrel.
Bitter, unhappy, wicked Fangodrel. The thought of him stung her like the point of a dagger. Suddenly a flame lit inside her skull. A fear blossomed in her stomach where D’zan’s seed could not. She turned and walked away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. She pretended not to hear.
She spent that night in the library, reading by the light of a dozen fat candles. She studied the ancient accounts of sorcerers rebirthing themselves, forming new bodies from vapor, ice, earth, or shadow. The spirit was eternal… Sorcerers could not die because they had embraced this truth. In fact, many sages claimed that a sorcerer could not truly rise to power until he had shed his earthly body as a moth sheds the cocoon. The new body, the one built of sorcery and raw elements, that was the sorcerer’s true self. As such, it could never be destroyed, only created and re-created. She knew this firsthand, as Elhathym had re-formed himself upon the stolen throne of Yaskatha after falling to D’zan on the field of battle. Yet she had helped Iardu capture Elhathym’s life force. A dark vapor trapped inside a crystal prison.
Seven short years ago she had watched in a reflecting pool the scene of slaughter that destroyed Shar Dni. She saw one brother slay another to gain revenge for the death of a third. Vireon cut the head from Fangodrel’s withered body. Poor Tadarus, her oldest brother, was avenged. She watched as Vireon the Slayer wept over the corpse, realizing himself now as much a kinslayer as Fangodrel. She had seen, and yet she had not realized.
Fangodrel had inherited the sorcery of his true bloodline. The son of Gammir the First, the Prince known as Gammir the Second, was Fangodrel’s true father. Thirty years ago Shaira had been raped by the Khyrein Prince, and Vod had repaid the offense with death for both the Emperor and his son. Yet a seed of darkness had been planted in Shaira that grew into Fangodrel. A viper curling in the bosom of the north until one day it struck, delivering its poison to the heart of her family. Tadarus had been the first to die.
Could Fangodrel truly be dead? Or could this new Khyrein Emperor be her depraved brother reborn via sorcery? If Vireon had freed him from his earthly body, Fangodrel might have formed a new one. He might have taken on the name of his true father and grandfather, neither of whom he had ever known.
He might be this new Gammir. The Undying One.
She brooded on the possibility for weeks, cloistering herself in the library or her bedchamber. D’zan no longer joined her there. He took a separate chamber for himself and his other Queen, the one who would bear his child. Perhaps he hoped Sharadza would eventually forgive him and accept her place as Second Wife. She cared nothing about losing the title of Queen, a
lthough it would surely happen. It was the loss of D’zan that pierced her heart. But she put that aside during the researching of her new theory.
On the night of the bastard child’s birth, she went into the gardens alone. She breathed deeply of the citrus air tinged with a salty breeze. The labor cries of Cymetha rang from an upper window where torches guttered and midwives worked to preserve the bloodline of Yaskatha.
It’s all a lie, she realized. All of this… the riches… the power… the world that Men build to hide themselves from the touch of Reality.
Honor… loyalty… love.
All lies.
She needed Truth. It was the only antidote for the poisoning of her soul. She wiped her eyes. The sounds of a squawling newborn drifted through the tower window.
She bent her head and grew smaller, sprouted black and gray feathers from her flesh, flexed her sharp talons, and flapped her owlish wings. The palace and its gardens grew small beneath her. She flew into the dim east, toward the festering marshlands where loneliness was but one of many dangers.
A gardener found her sitting there among the roots. It was a young Khyrein slave girl carrying a pitcher of water to feed the blossoms. The slave gasped, clutching the container to the breast of her white tunic. Her dark eyes were full of fear below her shaved pate. She had obviously never seen a stranger in this place. Certainly not a green-eyed maiden with northern skin dressed in robes of Yaskathan purple.
Sharadza calmed her with a smile. With a wave of her hand she left the girl sleeping on a bed of moss. Taking now the girl’s form, she wandered toward the wide marble steps where the scarlet tigers lay purring between rigid sentries. Carrying the water vessel, she walked timidly up the steps, and the guards did not spare her a glance. The tigers, too, paid her no attention. No beast would, unless she willed it.
Inside the vaulted hall of the palace she walked on thick carpets between rows of onyx pillars. Mosaics and tapestries adorned the walls, inlaid with blood-red rubies, sky-blue sapphires, and starlight diamonds. The patterns were mostly arcane, abstract. Khyrei’s artisans did not celebrate their great thinkers, warriors, and sages inside the palace. Instead they carved and sculpted only images of the Emperors and Empresses that had reigned over the jungle kingdom throughout the centuries. She entered a colonnade where the statues of past tyrants and their imperious wives stared down at her with eyes of obsidian. She supposed Gammir the First and Ianthe the Claw must stand among them, but she did not scan the graven pedestals for their names.
Arched corridors led in every direction from the central chamber, and the skylights glittered with brilliant stars. Night lay heavy over Khyrei now, and the palace interior was thick with dancing shadows. She felt unseen eyes at her back, but turned to see nothing. She picked a corridor at random and fled down it as a tiny black rat. The water pitcher sat unnoticed on the flagstones behind her.
Rodent senses came alive; she smelled blood and sweat and roasting meat. Hunger swelled in her tiny belly, but she denied it. Skittering through frescoed galleries and winding passages of polished jet, she found a black stair spiraling up. From its position she guessed this was the central tower, the thorn-crowned immensity that dominated the entire structure. She took the stairs one at a time, staying close to the wall. Now she smelled what she was looking for… an odor of the foulest sorcery. It called her upward, toward its secret source.
As a rat she passed demon-faced guards standing before doors of archaic iron. A quintet of slaves came rushing down the stairs carrying the body of a sixth one, a pale youth with a red gouge in his throat, like a dripping blossom that had opened in the flesh. It reeked of the sorcery she scented. Yet the stronger odor came from above…
She climbed past floor after floor of arched entries and locked chambers. At last she found the great iron door at the top of the winding stair. It stood wide open, and a bloody glow flickered into the stairwell, staining the black basalt to crimson.
There, in the doorway, limned in scarlet torchlight, stood a tall and thin figure. A long robe hung about the gaunt frame, glittering like a shroud of dark jewels. Here was the man-sized version of the great stone effigy that towered over the plaza. A spiked crown of onyx and rubies sat upon his brow.
In the lean face a pair of eyes gleamed like specks of tarnished gold touched by moonlight. They peered down the stairs at her, and she stood once more in her true form, one hand against the cold wall to support herself. The yellow eyes burned.
She had no voice. She wanted to become an eagle again, to fly from this place. She should never have come here.
“Sister,” spoke the voice, “I had almost forgotten your great beauty.” It flowed into her ears like honey, sweet and laced with clear venom.
She studied those cruel wolf-eyes. It could not be him. This… thing… was too different. Too inhuman. Too beautiful and deadly.
“Fangodrel?” she whispered.
The shadowy King shook his head.
“Gammir,” he corrected her. “I’ve always been Gammir.”
A wide grin showed white fangs.
She turned and leaped down the stairs, body melting, feathers sprouting, heart pounding. But it was too late.
Spreading leathery pinions, he struck like a great jungle bat, a sable wind wrapping her in darkness.
5
Among the Eyeless Ones
A strange aroma raised him from the brink of oblivion. It was not unpleasant. No more offensive than the sweat of workhorses he had known in the cornfields. For a moment, right before opening his eyes, he imagined himself lying in such a field surrounded by green stalks. Yet his back lay against hard, uneven stone, not the soft and rich earth of the plantations. His eyes fluttered open stubbornly. He stared at the rough granite ceiling awash with firelight and shadows.
That he lay somewhere deep beneath the ground was immediately apparent. Although he had never seen a cave or cavern, he had been told such hollows in the earth existed. Where were the Deathlands, the fruiting meadows, and the wide-open sky of Eternity? Where were Matay and his unborn son? Some fiery underground had claimed him instead of the blessed afterlife promised to slaves by their own desperate faith.
He groaned at the discovery, twitching his anguished muscles. Invisible flames seared his chest, left leg, and side. He recalled the bite of the poison arrows. The demon visages of his pursuers. The pale beasts that had spilled the blood of the Onyx Guards across the jungle. Lastly, he remembered their claws upon his skin.
He forced himself to sit upright. Gritting his teeth and peering through a curtain of pain, he examined the place that was not Death. A hole in the earth’s bowels no bigger than a slave’s hut. A single round exit with only flickering darkness beyond. A tiny fire of twigs and moss gleaming near the wall of the threshold. Carmine furs and animal skins hung from the crude walls, along with implements of wood made for cooking and tools of stone wrapped in sturdy vine. Shuffling toward him from the far recesses of the cave, a hunched figure entered the fireglow. One of the pale beasts, long of arm and leg, fantastically clawed, with curling horns instead of eyes, and a horribly wide mouth full of fangs. There was no sign of the great tongue that lay coiled inside that maw. The creature’s gaping nostrils sniffed at him, pink and flaring. Instinct ignited, and he tensed, ready to leap away from the beast.
The cave swirled about him and he fell hard upon a mat of woven reeds. The arrows had been removed from his body, yet his wounds were still fresh. And they were deep. The venom sang its painful melody in the current of his blood. He could not sit up again, let alone stand. He lay at the mercy of the quiet creature. His eyes swelled, dripping salty excretions onto the cave floor, and his reopened wounds seeped.
The squatting beast loomed over him. The stockyard smell of its flesh had awakened him. It filled the entire cave… a tang of loamy musk. In the firelight its smooth white skin took on a golden sheen. Unlike the others he had seen, a pair of pendulous breasts hung from its chest. The pink nipples reminded him of Matay’
s body, and his stomach churned. He might have retched then, but there was nothing in his stomach to expel. The creature placed a single hand upon his heaving chest. Its touch was gentle, the palm of the hand soft as a human woman’s. Its other hand went to his forehead, where a second tender caress calmed his spasms.
As he fell again into lonesome darkness, the beast opened her mouth and sang.
Matay waited for him beyond the living world.
Perhaps now he would die and join her.
Yet he failed to see Matay, not even in his poisoned dreams. He wandered lost in the crimson jungle, swam through pits of ruby-eyed cobras, swam dark waters that clutched and drowned him. He ran from the laughing heads of demons that hung from the branches of dead trees. There was no rest in his sleep. He fought to survive the poison, and something deep inside him decided to win that fight.
He opened his eyes again, no way of telling how much later, and stared once more at the glimmering cave roof. The female beastling squatted near him already, spooning a hot broth into his mouth. It ran down his cheeks and her long pointed tongue extended to lick it from his face. The flavor was a mix of root vegetables and mushrooms. His odd caregiver cradled his head in one massive hand as the other spooned the broth from a broad steaming bowl. Why could he not die? Despite this grim thought, he lapped hungrily at the soup. His wounds were cleaned, wrapped in mud and ruddy leaves… a poultice resembling the earth medicine of his own folk. He did not resist the feeding; his belly ached with hunger. He sipped from the big wooden spoon, and the she-beast cooed, then trilled a weird melody. Somehow he knew these were the sounds of approval.
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