M A R Barker - [Tekumel- The Empire of the Petal Throne 01]

by Flamesong (v0. 9) (epub)

  Trinesh followed Gireda’s pointing finger. Two or three of the strange helices had already been hit; they were dark and had ceased to revolve. More metallic volutes glittered there behind the vertebrae-like ridge.

  Still Arjasu wavered, undecided. He looked toward Aluja, then back to Gireda.

  Trinesh sprinted forward to snatch the “Eye” from the man’s hand. He aimed and fired. Two of the constructions dimmed, flashed with tiny sparkles, and died. He went down the row, clicking the “Eye” until all of the helices were dark.

  He saved his final shot for Gireda, but it was not needed. The Mihalli cast his blue globe away upon the sand and spread his six-fingered hands.

  “Leave be, Tsolyani,” Gireda said. “I do not use my magic against you. Aluja told me of the strange ‘Eye’ you carried, and 1 brought you here with just this purpose. 1 knew when you arrived, where you hid—I had only to find a reason to cause you to use your weapon upon the Gayu, the snares built by Lord Fu Shi’i to hold me and my comrades in servitude. Now we are free!”

  Trinesh took no chances: he fired one last time, not at Gireda but at his globe. The thing turned dark and became a ball of dull, cloudy glass, as empty as a lamp without oil. Trinesh aimed the “Eye” at the Mihalli but did not shoot.

  Gireda’s expression changed. “We are free—free!” he marveled. He felt of his limbs, his face. He exulted, rejoiced, flickered, and became a succession of beasts and beings. He elongated, shortened, stretched and shrank, and danced like the pale blue flame above an alchemist’s crucible. He vanished, then reappeared. “Free!” he sang, and became a black stick-figure upon a banner of bubbling yellow. “Free!” he cried, and gamboled upon a nimbus of scarlet scintillations.

  He sprang forth into a thousand dimensions all at once. He was gone.

  Lord Fu Shi’i retreated, away from Trinesh and Aijasu, away from Chosun, who had stooped to see to the Lorun woman. His lips were contorted, and he mouthed incantations; he fumbled with a welter of amulets and periapts which he drew from his garments. None of these produced any result, and he flung them aside one by one. Chosun rose and stalked purposefully toward him, hefting his monstrous cleaver as he came.

  Lord Fu Shi’i squalled one final curse and fled back toward the entrance to the sea-chamber.

  Trinesh turned his attention to the others. Aluja and the boy had drawn apart from the two women. The Lady Deq

  Dimani leaned against the massive worktable, long legs braced to hold herself erect, her head back and her breasts heaving. He followed her eyes over to the Lady Jai.

  He knew at once. The girl was radiant, lovely, full of animation.

  She was becoming Flamesong again.

  “No! My Lady!” Aluja’s pleading cry made the older woman turn her head. “Not here! It is too dangerous!” She ignored him and motioned to Jai.

  Trinesh pressed the stud of the “Eye.” At this range he could not miss. The Lady Jai staggered. Tiny tongues of flame licked her outflung arms, caressed her thighs, touched her hair with cusps of blazing yellow-orange fire. The work-smock she wore was gone within the instant, and she flexed her naked limbs with sensuous delight.

  He clicked the “Eye” again, but this time it did nothing. Was it exhausted, empty of power?

  He no longer cared.

  There had never been anything more glorious than Flamesong, not since the Egg of the World was shattered upon Thenu Thendraya Peak, not since the immortal Gods had warred upon Dormoron Plain. Trinesh did not need to touch her. It was as his Tumissan court-poets declaimed in their lyrics: one look, and the lover’s loins turn to coals of fire, his heart to flame, his soul to incense that must bum itself to ashes in order to pleasure the nostrils of his beloved!

  Flamesong gazed upon Trinesh. He moved forward, a humble Karai-beetle rejoicing in its imminent, gladsome doom in the candle flame! Armuel the Verse smith had never rhymed it so sweetly! The Bard of the Age, Mikkonu of Butrus, could not have immortalized it with greater eloquence! Wondrous-tongued Elue must throw away her sonnets and begin anew! He, Trinesh hiKetkolel, now experienced in the flesh all of that painful, heady, rapturous, divine bliss to which those poor versifiers might aspire but could never attain!

  His joy was wondrous. He was transported, exhilarated. Beyond the crude, physical couplings of the Goddess Dlamelish, beyond the cold glories of Lord Hnalla’s Pure White Light— beyond the Flame of Lord Vimuhla Himself!

  There was a note of disharmony.

  For an instant tom out of time he perceived the face of a much less splendid being amid the rapture of Flamesong: the Lady Jai Chasa Vedlan. She cried soundless words to him, her lips wide and distorted with terror, her eyes imploring, her arms out to warn him, to ward him off, to push him away. Then she was Flamesong again, and his ecstasy returned with redoubled fervor.

  A pace, another, and he felt her heat. His body shuddered as he reached involuntary climax, then relaxed. The lascivious, searing, delightful agony began to build all over again. He knew now how Kadarsha had felt.

  There was a second disharmony, a melancholy chord in this paean of exaltation. Furious, helpless, he felt his attention dragged forcibly away from the goddess in front of him.

  Tse’e crouched there. He clawed at Trinesh’s shoulder with one skinny hand, the other pressed to his red-sodden breast. The old fool was singing his death-song again! Trinesh slashed at him with his own steel sword. He missed, but it did not matter. Flamesong was too near, too resplendent. She reclaimed him utterly.

  “Go!” Tse’e gasped to Aluja. “Take Trinesh—the boy, the others. I will delay her!”

  Flamesong had begun to assume her final form, the mighty column of roaring incandescence of which the epics sang. Tse’e looked up. The ceiling, the unthinkably ponderous, immeasurable weight of the ocean above them, sagged and trembled. Lady Avanthe, Tse’e’s own goddess, ruled the waters, as she did the seasons and the crops and all that was life. She hated fire.

  He squinted with his one good eye and walked forward.

  Chosun’s well-planned blow caught Trinesh neatly upon the crown of his head just where the steel of his crested Engsvanyali helmet was thinnest. Aluja swung around, gestured, and brought forth a Nexus Point.

  “No!” the Lady Deq Dimani implored him.

  Aluja glared. “No more!” he snarled. “No more! Flamesong belongs not to mortals but to the gods! You have gone too far! She is lost to you!” He seized the woman and thrust her into the Nexus doorway. Then he took Trinesh from Chosun and pushed him, stunned but still bedazzled, through after her. He motioned, and the rest scrambled to follow.

  Aluja hesitated for a last look. Tse’e—no, give him his true title, the noble name his Imperial father had bestowed upon him: Nalukkan hiTlakotani, Prince of the Petal Throne— stood before Flamesong, arms open, feet wide-spraddled, his one good eye alight with the knowledge that now the Weaver would end his Skein with the nobility for which he had yearned all his life.

  Flamesong embraced him and roared high with fiery triumph.

  The roof groaned and bellied down above her.

  The Mihalli could save neither the Lady Jai nor the old man. Regretfully, he stepped over the verge of the Nexus Point himself.

  He was just in time.

  25

  I have seen no other ‘Eye’ like it,” Aluja said. The magenta sun was westering now, dulled and dim, a dying coal. He held the device up to catch the rays of the second sun, a marigold-yellow orb bigger in size and appreciably warmer. Their hues had led Chosun to call them the “Dlel-fruit” and the “Mash-fruit,” and these names had stuck during the three long—oddly long—days of their stay upon this alien world to which the Mihalli’s Nexus doorway had brought them. Even the Lady Deq Dimani had emerged from her grief long enough to smile.

  Trinesh took the “Eye” back. “It sucks Other-Planar power from its target?” He would never be comfortable with sorcery.

  “Yes. From any mechanism fueled from the Planes Beyond. It also drains such en
ergies from an animate-being’s Pedhetl. Do you know what that is?”

  He did not answer. The word reminded him of Tse’e, and he did not want to remember.

  “The Pedhetl is like a pot set beneath a leaky roof; when

  emptied, it soon fills again. After you struck me with this ‘Eye’ in Ninue I could neither change shape nor cast spells. The first ability quickly returned, but the second took days.” Aluja pinched thumb and forefinger together as though firing the device. “Had you done thus to a human mage, he would have been as empty as a beggar’s bowl for a six-day—perhaps a month or more. We Mihalli have larger reservoirs—Pedhetl— than your species, but even so this weapon would wreak havoc upon us.”

  “The ‘Eye’ grew hot when I used it upon Flamesong.” “Of course. The Other-Planar energies by which she manifested herself upon Tekumel were immensely powerful. Whatever she was—demon or demi-goddess—your ‘Eye’ siphoned off no more than a portion of her presence each time you hit her. Yet I doubt that it could have emptied her, even had you fired a hundred shots. It took the mighty waters of the Northern Deeps to vanquish her and expel her from your Plane. The,Baron must have witnessed a maelstrom in the

  ocean below Ke’er that will keep him marveling for a time indeed!”

  “This—this ‘Eye’ is very rare?”

  “The rarest. Alas, its charges are now exhausted. It is useless—unless you were to find a ‘Thoroughly Useful Eye,’ which is what the Ancients called that variety they made to recharge depleted devices. Such replenishers are less common than this one of yours. They were delicate and most have now failed or are lost to us.”

  “Still, this ‘Eye’—call it the ‘Eye of Imparting Other-Planar Impotence’—can be recharged?” Trinesh was half minded to fling the thing over the edge of the bluff upon which they sat. The red-green bracken covering the alien landscape below was a fitting repository for something so repugnant to his warrior traditions!

  Aluja made the strangled coughing noise Trinesh had learned to interpret as laughter. “I do not know. It might imbibe all the power you put into it, swell up like a puff-bladder, and occasion a serious dehiscence in the continuum!”

  Trinesh grimaced and put it away in his pouch. “Whatever that is! I shall keep it then.”

  Did the scholars of the Flame Lord’s Temple possess a—what was it?—“Thoroughly Useful Eye?” If so, they might want this one—and pay handsomely to get it. Let the priests worry about poking holes in the cosmos! His little internal voice would have uttered a sharp protest, but he savagely slammed a mental door shut upon it. He was weary of sorcery and enigmas and all rest of the baubles of the Flame-scorched Ancients!

  “ ‘Eyes’ were created as tools,” the Mihalli continued placidly. “Most had obvious, workaday purposes, and it was only after the Time of Darkness that the lords of the Latter Times had their savants devise new ones with unusual functions—some appealing to very perverse tastes. It is to this second period that your ‘Eye’ belongs.”

  “Would that none of them had survived!” Trinesh grumbled. “What good is a warrior when battles are as easily won by deviants and weaklings?’ ’ He leaned over and spat into the red-flecked brown soil.

  Aluja raised his long head. “It is almost time.” The two suns made a double halo around him, blood-red on one side and amber-gold on the other. “When the shadows merge into one, I can return you to Tekumel. The—” he fumbled for a word “—the alignments of the Planes will be exact, and you will reappear shortly after you left—in your own places.” His tone was determined; this time he would make no mistakes!

  Trinesh glanced down at their campsite in the glen behind the promontory. The pool, the lean-to, the cooking fire, ail were tranquil. Chosun sat upon a log there, ostensibly on guard though Aluja had sworn that this world held no inhabitants: “a gentle place, near the farthest apex of the cardinal conflux,” he had styled it, mystifying everyone but himself. He was correct; they had seen nothing larger than the rodent-things Arjasu shot for dinner with his improvised pellet-crossbow.

  Ridek’s shining black head appeared in the entrance to their shelter, then the Lady Deq Dimani’s. Chosun arose to greet them, but Arjasu was not visible.

  “You still insist?” Trinesh said. “The Petal Throne will pay handsomely for the woman. —Oh, take the boy home— but give the Lady to me. She is an officer of the Baron’s army and Tsolyanu’s foe.”

  “She offers much the same for you,” Aluja replied archly. “No, don’t bother bidding! We Mihalli are not business-folk. We neither buy nor sell, nor do we hold auctions like the slavers of your human markets. She—all of you—go home.”

  This was the hardest part for Trinesh—and apparently the Lady as well—to comprehend. Everyone had needs. If the Mihalli did not desire gold, then they ought to want other things: food, land, power, wisdom—something! Nonhumans! Cha!

  Indeed, the Mihalli were more alien than Thu’n’s Pygmy Folk. The little creature’s avarice had earned him no .more than a long walk home across the Desert of Sighs—or possibly a less arduous post in Prince Mirusiya’s entourage if the Tsolyani sentries had not slain him on sight! Thu’n’s motivations were intelligible. So, to a greater or lesser degree, were those of the other nonhuman races: the Shen, the Pe Choi, the Hlaka, the Pachi Lei, or even the rank-smelling, uncouth Ahoggya.

  Aluja’s race, on the other hand, shared few emotions with humankind. After hunger, sex, and a desire for security, the Mihalli traveled off in other directions. They felt no affection as humans knew that sentiment. He and Gireda had made it easy for Trinesh to follow them to Ke’er—the green map-stone had facilitated the focusing of the Nexus Point—and Trinesh had then used his “Eye” to destroy Lord Fu Shi’i’s cruel Gayu, thus freeing the twenty or so Mihalli held in bondage to Yan Kor. The action profited both Trinesh’s and

  Aluja’s people; nothing was owed, therefore, as the Mihalli understood the concept of indebtedness. No thought of gratitude crossed Aluja’s mind, much less of payment. He did thank Trinesh, yet this was visibly no more than politeness, lip-service to the expected human response. Gireda, who had also benefited from their efforts, had not paused to offer even that courtesy. He had simply vanished.

  Were the Mihalli ignoble? Their humanoid form and obvious intelligence made it easy to expect too much of them. They were alien. Still, Trinesh thought, any species ought to respond to affection, and in this Aluja seemed truly unnatural. The most glaring instance was the casual way the Mihalli had hurt Ridek. As soon as they were settled upon this empty world, Aluja had declared in front of everyone that once the boy was safe in Ke’er, he would depart and never see Ridek again. That was unexpected; even an adult would have been taken aback at his abruptness. One did not dismiss friendship as nonchalantly as one brushed dust from one’s boots! Not if one were human. . . .

  When Trinesh and the Lady Deq Dimani later reproached Aluja for his callousness, the creature responded with puzzlement. His people were the Chri-flies of the Many Planes, he said; they fluttered here and there, observed, tasted, enjoyed, and then danced away to seek ever newer sensations. To be tied to any one Plane, even momentarily, was as constricting to them as shackles to a human. He intended no coldness to Ridek—and in truth felt the same affection for him that a Mihalli parent did for its own child—but that was very little when compared with human attitudes toward parents, children, and families. There were no permanent bonds: one went one’s way, did as one wished, cooperated or not as whimsy dictated. Intellectually, Aluja’s words made some sense to Trinesh and his companions. At a deeper, emotional level, they were incomprehensible. The nature of the Mihalli mind remained obscure.

  Aluja’s willingness to return them to Tekumel also had no connection with either kindness or camaraderie. It was a means of setting the Skeins straight, laying out the threads, and repairing the rips and tears created by Flamesong’s intrusion into their Plane. When this was done, he would go his way.

  Yet, Trinesh asked him
self, in the last analysis, were the Mihalli really so very different from humankind? Ridek was too young to see the selfishness that cemented human dealings: treaties and policies, friendships and social bonds, marriages and families—even protestations of love! Self-interest was humankind’s greatest god; the true altruist, the martyr, the philanthropist who made no display of his giving—those were rarer even than Trinesh’s “Eye!”

  Cha! He was fast becoming a thoroughgoing cynic! it was not Ridek's idealism that showed the flaw; it was Trinesh’ own nature, his lack of trust! Did he not have the evidence of Tse’e, Sain£, the Lady Jai, General Kadarsha, and even poor Horusel, who had died for what he sincerely believed? Trinesh’ little inner voice would doubtless harp upon those examples until it wore him into the grave proving that the world was not completely venal. Whatever their various—and oft-times opposing—objectives, those folk had behaved nobly; they had set aside their personal interests to serve what they considered higher goals. That, he supposed, was the ultimate purport of Tse’e’s counsel to Prince Mirusiya. That was the best a limited, fallible, and very insecure little creature like Trinesh hiKetkolel could hope to accomplish.

  He had much to ponder.

  Someone hallooed, and Trinesh got to his feet to reply. Chosun clambered up to the top of the bluff, red-faced and puffing. Behind him came Ridek and the Lady Deq Dimani. The shadows cast by the two suns were well nigh one, and it was time to depart.

  The woman was beautiful once more. Whether through the

  Lady Arsala’s doctoring or Aluja’s sorcery, the Shon Tinur had receded to become only a dark shadow upon her cheek and temple. That, too, would vanish in time, the Mihalli said. Bronzed by the waning red sun and washed with gold by its mate, she was lovely as an arrow is lovely: graceful, sleek, and purposeful. Their sojourn here—days, months, in Teku-mel’s time? —had done her good.

  She and Trinesh had not spoken of their mutual griefs and shadows. Yan Kor and Tsolyanu, the deaths of friends, the hatred her Vriddi ancestors bore for the Petal Throne—all of those stood as firm as the walls of Avanthar between them. Even were they to be breached, dismantled, and made fair, one insurmountable rampart would still remain: the Lady Jai Chasa Vedlan. He himself could never forgive the Lady Deq Dimani. Jai’s sad wraith came with the sleep-demons to hold out yearning arms to him, begging him to take her to Tumissa and give her the love and security he and his clan might have provided. The little clan-girl had been made to bear too great a burden—indeed, how many mighty warriors or learned mages could have supported the intolerable presence of Flamesong?