They would place the Dragon Queen on her throne.
* * *
Sulema had agreed to alliances and concessions which she only half understood, looking to Ani, to her brother, and to Yaela for guidance. She promised lands which may never be hers to give to the Quarabalese and to the river pirates; her brother and the sorcerer’s apprentice dreamed, it seemed, of building a splendid city at the mouth of the Dibris. She even conceded lands and riches to Sharmutai the whoremistress, though in Sulema’s estimation that woman deserved no more land than would be needed to build a funeral pyre. Much as it galled, Sulema had to admit that Yaela had not precisely lied to her about her niece, and that the whoremistress had access to fighters and weapons that they sorely needed. She had to temper her anger and focus in ways her training had never prepared her to endure.
The fate of the world depended on it.
By the time they were done, though, round and round in her head like sand-dae, there swirled the words of a poem— or the end of one at least. Ani had forced her to recite it when she was young and the world was full of hope.
When the Dragon wakes at last,
Who will rise and who will fall?
Shaman, sorcerer, lover, liar,
Who will rise and rule them all?
Sourly she thought, If I had ever suspected that the poet might be talking about me, I would have run away, far away, and never looked back. The only thing that could possibly be worse would be if the dragon were to truly wake.
The earth rumbled again, mocking her and all her grand plans. If the dragon woke, all the planning in the world would not save them.
FORTY - FIVE
Jian could not have said for how long he stood in the tiny cell he shared with his dead mother, his Issuq eyes cutting through the gloom. He could feel the passage of time, the ebb and flow of it, moons rolling overhead like waves over a coral reef. Several times the world around them had been gripped in a violent shaking, as if it, too, shared his grief.
The dragon is waking, he thought. Only let me avenge my mother, my Tsali’gei—and my son, my murdered son— before Sajani destroys the world, and I will be at peace.
The sharp stink of death burned in his nostrils as the indignity of Tiungpei’s unwashed, untended body burned in his heart. These things were to him as the flames of a funeral pyre, cleansing his spirit for the fight ahead.
His ears twitched. There were footsteps in the hallway, furtive and soft. Not the iron-nailed bootsteps of imperial soldiers, but the hurry-scurry-shush of sandaled feet. So it was to be a secret assassination after all, and not a public execution. He growled low in his throat, skin prickling.
Cowards.
He bared his teeth but breathed softly, gently stifling a snarl. If this was to be the end of him, let him make such an end that poets could only speak of it in hushed tones, and scribes would write his name in blood ink. Let him die not as his mother had, a bright flame pinched out without so much as a wisp of smoke to protest the dying of her light, but as Sajani herself, whose waking would consume them all.
Metal scraped against stone and there was a faint snick as a key was turned in a lock. The door cracked open, so carefully as to be silent to all but an Issuq’s ears.
Come for me, then, he bade them silently. I am ready. The door swung wider and he sprang—then twisted midair, giving a soft yelp of surprise at the pale face which stared up at him, dark eyes wide. Giella stepped quickly to one side, and Jian landed in a crouch at her feet, bristling and trembling all over.
“Hush,” she said in a voice softer than a flower’s death. “Hush now. Come with—” She took a deep breath, and let it out again in a long hisssssss. Her eyes widened, flashing crimson in the netherlight.
“Oh, Jian,” she whispered. “Oh, Jian, I am so sorry.”
She reached out a tentative hand to touch his shoulder, but he flinched back. Turning instead to the still and shrouded form of Tiungpei, he stooped to gather her into his arms. Giella said no word—not to hurry him along, or to suggest that he leave his mother’s body behind in their haste to be gone from that place. She waited for him to do what he must, as if they had all the time in the world.
For this act of kindness, Jian would be forever grateful.
There was a faint light in the hallway, effective as the midmorning sun to Jian’s preternatural eyes. He stopped short, clutching his precious bundle, when he realized that Giella had not come alone. A girl was with her, dressed in raptor-hide armor, young but hard-eyed. She flashed a quick smile, and Jian saw that her teeth had been filed to sharp points. She made hand-signs to him and the White Nightingale, signs with which Jian was not familiar but which clearly said, Come. Follow me. This way.
He glanced toward Giella, but she had already fallen into step with the girl, moving at a fast lope down the hallway. What choice had he, after all? Hugging his mother’s body close to his chest, his heart, Tsun-ju Jian de Allyr followed.
They did not travel upward, in reverse to the direction Jian’s handlers had brought him, and from which they would soon come to drag him to his death. They moved down into a maze of twisting, narrow passages, all of which seemed alike.
Deeper they went as the passage became narrower, the roof steeper till Jian had to jog bent nearly double, the robe that was his mother’s shroud dragging on the ground between his feet. On they ran till it seemed to him that they must have been swallowed by Sajani Earth Dragon from the old stories. Perhaps he was sleeping and caught in a nightmare— or perhaps he had already been executed, and this was one of the levels of Yosh, in which he would run forever carrying his mother’s dead body.
Holding onto his Issuq-form as they ran began to exhaust his energy, so he let it slip. Once he had shifted, however, it felt to him as if he could do so again with far less effort than before. It was there, part of him, swimming beneath the surface of his flesh as the creatures swam in the sea.
Padding near-silently along the stone floor, passing hallways on this side or that, they were joined by people the likes of whom Jian had never seen. They came singly or in pairs or even small groups. Most, but not all of them were young, grim-faced, no few of them scarred, all of them dressed and armed for battle. If they glanced at him at all it was with the kind of look used by one hunter to acknowledge another, without indicating deference or challenge. One older man grimaced when he saw what Jian carried, and made a hand-sign near his heart that might have indicated sorrow. Aside from that brief gesture, Jian might as well not have been there at all.
Eventually the path ended in a wall. The girl with the raptor armor held up a hand, indicating that they should stop—though with no passages to either side, there was not much else they could have done. Then she held her hands up to her mouth. Jian noticed with some surprise that she was missing the middle finger on either hand, and that these wounds appeared to be recently inflicted. Her cheeks puffed out and she blew gently, so that a high warbling trill almost like a bird’s call rose up and danced around them.
A crack appeared in the wall and widened. Cool air curled in to meet them, as a cleverly hidden door swung wide. What looked like a small round room lay beyond. When they had all gathered together in that space, the door shut again. The air eddied around them and up, drawing Jian’s eyes toward the pearl-gray sky of first dawn high above their heads. They were at the bottom of a pit, or—
“A well,” Giella whispered, her words quiet and dark. “A witching well, long covered and forgotten.” She reached out and grasped the end of a long, thick rope and gave it a tug.
“Witching well,” Jian said, and he shivered. “Wicked.”
“Yes,” Giella agreed. She waited for Jian’s nod of assent before beginning to wind the rope about his waist, securing Tiungpei’s body to his as she did so, and then giving the cord a series of sharp tugs. Jian fought the urge to struggle against them as they tightened and then began to draw him slightly upward. “Very wicked. Let us go now and grant the darkest wishes of our hearts, shall we
?”
Jian bowed his head so that he pressed a kiss to Tiungpei’s cold, enshrouded forehead, and allowed himself to be raised up into the dawn.
Heart of Illindra, Soul of Eth,
Blood of the innocent condemned to death.
Under the moons, combine the three,
Coin enough to set you free.
* * *
As it turned out, the witching well had been bricked up, buried, and lost beneath the garden path of one of the emperor’s most exclusive comfort houses. Ancient and fell-hearted, Jian could hear it talking to him, wicked whispers that tickled the back of his mind, but he was Issuq, not human. Such things held no sway over him unless he wished to let them. Still, Jian was aware of what the thing was, what it could do to him.
What it could do for him.
“Vengeance,” he murmured as he reached the mouth. He sat on the edge and the rope was removed. Hands reached to take his mother’s body and he let them, the fabric of her shroud slipping wetly through his hands, anointing his palms with her blood.
Blood of the innocent, he thought. There was not a child in Sindan who did not know that rhyme. He grasped the object that he wore threaded on a thong about his neck, a trinket gifted to him upon his arrival in the Twilight Lands. It was a red disc a bit smaller than his palm, taken from the carcass of a shongwei. It was a powerful talisman worth more than the combined wealth of three or four villages the size of Bizhan. Enough that it would have bought his freedom from the emperor, were he still a slave. Such a thing was called daes-olouru, in his father’s tongue. In the lands of men, it had a different name.
Blood penny.
Jian held the blood penny up to the light of the full moons. They were fading with the dawn’s first light, but his need was great, and he called to them with all the power of his sea-born soul. He paused, ignoring the hands that still tugged at him, the voices imploring him to hurry, hurry. Closed his eyes and flung his challenge.
“Vengeance best served hot,” he growled. The blood penny burned in his hand with a hungry, eager heat.
“Vengeance best served cold,” he continued, louder now, and his voice broke as he thought of the cold, still body of Tiungpei. My mother. The blood penny shifted in his hand like a live thing, and then burned his flesh again, this time with a searing chill.
“No!” Giella cried, as if from a great distance. She grabbed at him, but he was stronger than she, and determined to do this thing no matter the cost to himself.
“Serve it up with meat and wine,” he finished, opening his eyes and staring into the horror-stricken face of the White Nightingale. “One day old.” For that was how long it had been since they murdered her.
One day old, the well crooned. One day cold.
One day dead.
Jian held his fist over the well’s hungry mouth and forced his fingers to uncurl. Even in the dying moonslight the blood penny shone bright and eager with malicious intent, a thing of terrible beauty. It pulsed for a moment and then burst into light like blood made fire, a living flame that seared his heart but not his flesh. The witching well burst into song, a dirge, a canticle of bone and ash.
Then Jian smiled at Giella, a smile that tasted as bitter and sweet and full of promise as the last dawn of Khanbul. Bitter as his mother’s blood, smeared on his lips with which he had kissed her. Sweet as the innocent child she had raised, and who had died with her in the emperor’s dungeons.
Giella let go of his arm and nodded.
“I see you,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said. The moonslight and the bloodlight of a new day floated across the surface of the blood penny as he turned his hand over and let it fall down… down… down into the blackness, carrying with it the darkest wishes of his heart.
“Let them burn,” he said, thinking of his mother, of Perri, even of Naruteo, who had only been what they had made of him. “Let them all burn.”
* * *
Though such things were generally expected of the Daechen, Jian had never been inside a comfort house. His mother had been wealthy by village standards, but he had had no experience with things such as magical colored lanterns of spidersilk and wormsilk, of fine robes and golden harps, of sandalwood floors soft as a woman’s skin.
All these things and more he would have traded for one stern look from Tiungpei, and in that moment none of them was worth a handful of goat shit to Jian. For she stood there, bathed in light, surrounded by beautiful girls and boys like a lotus among lesser flowers, and she was holding their son in her arms.
“Tsali’gei!” he cried aloud, not caring who heard, not caring about anything but that she was alive, alive, she and their son both. He crossed the floor in half a dozen strides, swept her up in his bloody arms, buried his face in her neck, and burst into great gulping sobs fit to tear the heart from his chest. His son, displeased at being dislodged, burst into howls of outrage.
“Tsali’gei,” Jian said again, this time a harsh whisper. “Tsali’gei, oh my love, oh my heart, you are alive.” It had not occurred to him that this might be so. He had buried all thought of her fate and that of their son deep in the bitter soil of his heart.
“I am here,” she answered. “We are here… but you are squishing the baby.”
Jian pulled back a little. Not much.
“The baby,” he said, and frowned at a distressing thought. His son might have died without so much as a name. How could they have found one another along the Lonely Road, if his son had had no name? It was a ridiculous notion, perhaps, which once lodged in his mind would not let go. He reached up and stroked the infant’s fat little cheek, grimacing at the smear of blood he left behind on the innocent skin. His son met him stare for stare, bared his gums in defiance, and wailed all the louder.
Tsali’gei laughed a little, despite their circumstances.
“He howls like a storm out to sea,” she remarked. “He is your son, blood and bone.”
“My son. My little son. The delight of my heart.” That he could even feel joy at such a time was a wonder. It felt like treachery.
“And of your mother’s, as well. Jian…” she began.
“I know,” he said. His eyes met hers, storm and sea, and the world around them disappeared. He was there, she was there, and their tiny son, who had remembered he had a thumb and was sucking it noisily. “She died in my… in my arms.” His last word broke on a sob and he was weeping again, hot tears dripping down his face and soaking the thin undershirt. He thought of the yellow silk robe she had made him so long ago—just this past spring, in the world of men. The realization that even that was lost to him now was more than his heart could bear.
“I have nothing left of her,” he said. “Not even a pearl.”
“You have you, and you were her greatest treasure,” Tsali’gei said, gently as morning in the Twilight Lands. “And him,” she continued, bouncing the child on her hip. “And those two damned goats, still back at her house.” She was trying to tease a smile from him, Jian knew, but her big eyes were red and deep with grief.
They clung to one another like humans who had been lost at sea, with no shore in sight. Finally he pulled back a little further and held his arms out for the child, who came to him willingly.
“My son,” Jian said again. The words still felt strange to him. He had been but sixteen when the child was conceived, and though he had spent five years fighting his father’s wars in the Twilight Lands, still he felt much too young to be a father. How much worse it must be for Tsali’gei, he realized, who bore and cared for him all alone?
“I was not there,” he began.
“You are here now,” she said firmly, putting one hand on his shoulder and the other on their son’s. “You are not alone. We are your family.” Her eyes held every treasure Jian had ever wanted.
“We will not forget Tiungpei,” Tsali’gei went on. “I loved her, too.”
Jian looked from her to their child, and back again. “Maybe…” he began but then stopped, unsure how to
go on. His heart was heavy.
Tsali’gei looked at him and said nothing, waiting for him to continue.
“Maybe,” he said at last. “I was thinking… thinking we could name him Tiungren,” he finished all in a rush. “I know it is too early for a name, but—”
“Tsun-ju Tiungren,” Tsali’gei said, gazing thoughtfully upon their son. “First of his name.” She looked up at Jian, and there was fire in her eyes. “It suits him.”
“First of his name?” Jian stared at her. His Issuq-self growled approvingly at the fierce look she gave him. “You make him sound like an emperor.”
“Do I?” she asked. “Perhaps I do.” She turned to look over her shoulder and clucked her tongue at one of the painted girls, who hurried over and took little Tiungren up in her eager young arms. “Do you mind watching him for me?” she asked unnecessarily as the courtesan was cooing and gurgling in an attempt to charm a smile from the baby.
“Where are you going?” the girl asked, never looking up from her charge’s face. He had Issuq eyes, like those of both his parents, and she was obviously smitten. “Will you be long? Shall I heat some goat’s milk?”
“Yes,” Tsali’gei told her, “and take him to the estate, the one in Bizhan. Wait for us there. Take as many guards as you like, and protect him well.”
“I will guard him with my life,” the girl proclaimed solemnly, glancing up. Jian saw that her eyes were golden-green, much as a cat’s, and that her face had a faintly feline cast to it. She was Daezhu, then, not human. This notion was borne out when she smiled a predator’s smile. “If anyone but me touches him, I will eat them.”
“You do that,” Tsali’gei said approvingly. “We will meet you at the estate when we can. There are servants there, and guards… You and Tiungren will have everything you need until we can join you.”
“Tiungren?” the girl’s voice rose with delight. “He has a name, then? So soon!”
“Yes. He is named for Tiungpei, his ah-ma.”
“Tiungren.” The girl’s voice softened to a contented purr, and she cast a quick look at Jian. “Hai-bao Tiungren de Jian. A warrior’s name. It is good.”
The Seared Lands Page 39
