by Лиза Смедман
"We're no farther ahead than when we started," Quenthel said. "You should have kept questioning Belshazu about gates. This rothe-dung story about a ship of chaos was obviously just a lie to throw us off the track."
"Off the track of what?" Pharaun asked, glaring back. "The only gate around here is the one in your imagination. And it was your bright idea to have me summon a demon in the first place."
Valas didn't like the look in the mage's eyes. Once again, Pharaun and Quenthel were on the verge of coming to blows. The Master of Sorcere let a hand drift behind his back and had his fingers flexed, ready to cast a spell. Jeggred crouched behind his aunt, clearly ready to spring at Pharaun's throat if any suspicious move was made. Danifae, meanwhile, folded her arms across her chest and stared defiantly at Pharaun?while simultaneously edging out of the path of whatever spell he was about to cast.
Valas, sick of their endless bickering and ready to die anyway, having delivered his report, slammed the flat of his dagger against the stone floor of the tunnel. Sparks exploded out from the blade like ripples from a rock hurled into a pond, crackling against both Pharaun's and Quenthel's feet. Each jumped back?Quenthel immediately drawing her whip.
"Insolent male," she sneered.
The vipers spat, their fangs dripping venom.
Valas could see she was itching to use the whip against him.
Please do, he signed. It is the swiftest way.
Quenthel frowned, confused by his reply, but Pharaun's mind proved the quicker again.
"There is no need for that, valued mercenary," the wizard said. "I can restore you to your proper, air-breathing, drow form."
Valas blinked, all thoughts of the viper whip driven from his mind.
You can? the scout signed. But you don't have healing magic.
"That's true, but I can?"
Quenthel spun?an awkward movement, forced to crouch as she was by the low ceiling?and said to the mage, "You can do nothing. You will do nothing. Valas will return to the lake and continue to search for the ship."
"He'll only be captured if you send him back," Pharaun objected. "He has no way to protect himself. The aboleth will eat him this time."
He paused, and a thoughtful look crossed his face.
"Just as," the Master of Sorcere went on, "they have eaten others who dared trespass in their waters. Including, perhaps, any manes who survived after the shipwreck. And if they did eat any of these petty demons and thus acquired their memories. .»
Quenthel at last understood.
"The aboleth would know where the ship of chaos sank," she finished for him even as her vipers writhed in anticipation.
Pharaun turned back to Valas and asked, "What is the name of the city's matriarch?"
Using sign, Valas spelled the name out phonetically. O-o-t-h-o-o-n.
Pharaun nodded, then stared out over the lake. It was clear to Valas what the mage was thinking. Pharaun intended to meet with Zanhoriloch's matriarch himself, to ask her for information. Pharaun had powerful spells, including one he seemed confident would shield him against the aboleth's mind magic. The scout was certain the mage could handle the situation, but then Valas had thought the same of himself.
Then came a surprise.
"I will go, too," Danifae said.
Quenthel started to object, then gave the Melarn battle-captive a long, pondering look. After one glance at the uncertain motions of the vipers in the high priestess's whip, Valas could guess the questions that must have been coming to Quenthel's mind.
Was Danifae offering to keep an eye on Pharaun to ensure that he remained loyal to Quenthel, in the hope of regaining her superior's favor? Or did she have some ulterior, even more selfish motive in mind? In the end it seemed not to matter, for Quenthel nodded.
Valas ducked his head for another breath, then he reached out and tapped on the mage's boot.
You said you had something other than healing magic that could help me, he reminded Pharaun.
Pharaun's lips parted in an "ah," and he nodded. He reached into a pocket of his piwafwi and pulled out a small brown cocoon. Crumbling it between thumb and forefinger, he let the fragments drift down onto Valas's head. Then, waving his hands over the flakes that stuck to the mercenary's wet scalp, he began a spell.
Kneeling, Pharaun leaned over Valas and shouted in his ear, "Exhale! Quickly!"
Valas did and an instant later felt a powerful wrench shudder through his body as the spell took effect. His tail sucked back into his rear like a snail retreating into its shell and his fused fingers sprang apart, the webs disappearing. Hair erupted on the top of his head, and the skin of his arms, legs, and chest tingled as he membrane that had been cloaking his body disappeared.
The scout was coughing violently, retching the last of the lake water from his lungs. Even though it hurt, he didn't care. Instead he was filled with relief. Pharaun had restored him to drow form?his body was his own once more.
Except for one small detail. Staring down at his hands, Valas saw that his scars were in all the wrong places.
"What spell," he wheezed as he climbed out of the river, "did you just cast?"
Pharaun, still kneeling, was directing a second spell upon him, one that requited no arcane material component to cast. Valas saw the mage's shoulders slump as he completed it and knew it had cost Pharaun a piece of himself.
"I polymorphed you," Pharaun said when he was done. "I shaped your body into a pretty good likeness of its old self, if I do say so myself. Until something dispels it, that is. Be thankful that Ryld's not around, waving that greatsword of his."
Valas, still standing chest-deep in water, spread his fingers to admire their shape and nodded.
"I am thankful," he said aloud.
His eyes met Pharaun's, making it clear he was speaking not about the absence of the weapons master but of the presence of the mage.
Pharaun nodded, then gave Quenthel a bow that just bordered on insolence.
"With your leave, Mistress, I will begin studying the spells I need. Then I?then Danifae and I?will set out for Zanhoriloch and speak to this Oothoon."
Chapter Sixteen
Ryld shivered as he walked through the forest. Night was falling, and with it came a chill in the air. His piwafwi was still damp from the rain of the night before, and a full day of steady walking hadn't been enough to dry it. Overhead, above the branches of the trees that crowded Ryld close on every side, the cloud cover was breaking up. The sky was a mottled grayish purple, the color of an old bruise.
The air around him darkened as the last of the sunlight faded, but after a time, Ryld noticed it was getting brighter again. His dark-vision was giving way to the pale gray light that filled the surface world at dusk and dawn?even though the dawn was still a long way off. Confused, Ryld paused, and looked up through the lacework of branches.
The full moon was rising.
As it peeked above the treetops, filling the air around him with a silvery light, Ryld was suddenly no longer cold. A flush warmed his cheeks, and he felt his blood quicken. The hairs on his arms stood erect, as if he had just shivered, yet at the same time he felt hot with fever.
"Lolth protect me," he whispered in a strangled voice, glancing down nervously at the bite mark on his wrist. "That brat did infect me."
The moonlight continued to grow brighter, and with it, Ryld's anxiety rose. Flashes of red swam before his eyes, and his pulse pounded in his ears. Already he could feel his control slipping. His clothing felt tight, constricting, heavy. He pulled it away from his throat, barely able to contain the urge to tear it from his body. He looked wildly at the forest that surrounded him, wanting to plunge into it and run and run and run. .
Struggling to maintain control, he plunged a hand into the breast pocket of his piwafwi and pulled out the sprig of belladonna that Yarno's grandfather had given him. It had dull green leaves and a single, bell-shaped flower. Ryld ripped off a leaf, stuffed it into his mouth, and chewed. A bitter taste filled his mouth, and his tongue
went dry. He followed it with another leaf, then another, then the flower. . then he threw the bare twig away.
He waited.
The urge he'd felt a moment before?the urge to tear off his clothing and run away into the woods?disappeared. Ryld felt lightheaded. He tried to take a step, stumbled, and nearly fell. At the last moment he grabbed a tree for balance. All the while, the forest was becoming brighter, the moonlight flooding his vision. Something was wrong with his eyes.
Pulling his short sword clumsily from its sheath, he stared into its polished surface and saw that his pupils had dilated to the point where the red of the iris had all but vanished. Grimacing, he lowered his sword, stood a moment, then remembered he hadn't sheathed it. He tried to shove the short sword into its sheath but missed, instead shoving it point-first into the ground as he stumbled. Unable to catch himself again, he fell flat out onto the soggy ground beside it. Above him, the trees seemed to have turned to pale gray shadows, wavering back and forth as though they were under water.
Lying there, watching the forest spiral in circles above him, Ryld wondered if he was going to die. The belladonna had halted his transformation into a werewolf, but at what cost? His heart was pounding at an alarming rate, and his skin felt dry and hot. He tried to wet his lips, but even that effort was too much for him. All he could do was lie on the forest floor, inhaling the smell of wet earth and rotting leaf with each halting breath. His breath. That was the one thing he still could control.
Ryld cast his mind back to his training at Melee-Magthere. One of the tests initiates had been required to pass involved maintaining concentration in times of physical duress. The initiates had been instructed to strip off their clothing, sit cross-legged on the floor of the practice hall with their eyes closed, and focus on their breathing. At the time, Ryld thought the test was designed to teach them to ignore the cold of the stone floor?but he was wrong. One of the masters strolled between the rows of meditating pupils, dropping centipedes onto their skin. The insects were each as long as a finger and bit immediately when they landed, injecting a venom that raced like fire through the students' veins. Those initiates who cried out or gasped were given a sharp rap on the head. If they cried out a second time they were hit harder. A third, and they were told to leave Melee-Magthere and never return.
Ryld had been dimly aware of the student behind him gasping a third time and listened with only a portion of his mind as he was ordered to leave. He heard the choked sob he made as he obeyed. Ryld forced his mind deeper into meditation, at the same time bracing himself for what he knew was coming next. When the centipede fell onto his thigh, he didn't flinch. As the centipede bit into his flesh like the stab of a fire-heated skewer, he told himself to remain calm, to breathe in through his left nostril, out through his right, in through his left nostril, out through his right. .
Then the centipede scurried across his groin, its hundreds of legs tickling, its head moving from side to side as if it was looking for a second spot to bite. In the space between two heartbeats, Ryld nearly forgot how to breathe. He felt his heart begin to race, while instinct screamed at him to leap to his feet, to brush the foul insect away.
Then he remembered his life before Melee-Magthere?his life in the Stenchstreets, and the time, years before, when the nobles had come on their hunt. He was only six years old then, but he remembered lying there, blistered from the fireball that had left corpses strewn all around him. In order to survive, he'd been forced to lie utterly still, to play dead while the hunters claimed their trophies: teeth, ears, and occasionally an entire head. Ryld had learned then to control his breathing, to make it shallow and slow, inaudible above the sawing of blades through flesh. Thankfully, they did not deem any parts of a small, scrawny boy worth taking.
Remembering that trial, he found the strength to ignore the tickle of the centipede and its second painful bite.
When the ordeal was over, the masters nodded, silently acknowledging the fortitude of Ryld and the other five students who had passed the test. Ryld had been almost unable to walk for an entire tenday afterward.
Lying in the forest, riding the waves of the war between the belladonna and the disease, Ryld used what he'd learned that day. Focusing on his breathing, on the drawing in of air, the slow filling of his lungs, and the slow exhalation that followed, he slowed his racing pulse. He drove the heat from his skin, imagining it flowing from him with each breath. Slowly, his body returned to normal, and he shivered.
His eyes, however, continued to see the fantastic images the belladonna had limned on the world. The trees remained grayish-white against a sky studded with impossibly bright stars. The moon, trailing brighter stars in its wake, hurt to even glance at. Wavering shadows danced in the forest. One of those shadows stepped out from the others and coalesced into the form of a woman.
"Halisstra. ." Ryld breathed, then he saw that he was mistaken.
The woman was a drow but was not Halisstra Melarn. She was naked, her white hair hanging well past her hips. As she moved closer to Ryld, his fevered eyes saw that her skin was covered in evening dew. Drops of it covered her body, sparkling in the moonlight like stars against the sky-black of her skin.
She stood before him a moment, staring down with eyes that reflected the light like twin crescent moons. Then she touched the hilt of the sword he'd accidentally speared into the earth. Slender fingers traced a lazy circle around the leather-wrapped hilt. To Ryld's eyes the fingers looked as if they were dancing. Her lips parted, but instead of speech Ryld heard the notes of a flute. Its tune was somehow both welcoming and harsh at the same time, as if the flautist was of two minds about what tune to play and was able to play both at once. All the while, the woman stared deeply into Ryld's eyes, as if she was trying to see into his soul. Her hand closed around the hilt of the sword.
Something crackled in the forest. Startled, the woman looked up, just as a small black wolf burst from the underbrush. Teeth bared, snarling, it leaped for her chest. When it struck, the woman exploded into a million motes of starlight. The wolf continued its leap as if she had never been there. Watching it disappear into the forest once more, Ryld confirmed his earlier thought. It was all just an hallucination. The woman, the wolf. . neither were truly there.
Something warm and moist nuzzled his ear. It was a nose. Then a warm, furry body lay down next to him. A tongue licked his cheek, and dark eyes stared into his.
Ryld didn't move and didn't speak. Instead he continued to concentrate on his breathing, forcing the last of the belladonna's poison from his body with each slow breath.
Eventually, he fell into Reverie.
When he became aware of his surroundings once more, it was daylight. He heard a crackling noise and smelled roasting meat, and rolled over to see Yarno squatting beside a small fire. The boy was holding a stick on which had been impaled the body of a small, four-legged animal. It had been gutted and neatly skewered, but Ryld could identify it by the tail. It was a rat. Yarno lifted the stick from the flames.
"You'll need strength," he said. "Eat."
Ryld sat up, shaking away the last of his lethargy. Rising to his feet, he moved his shoulders, his arms, his fingers. All were in working order; the poison was gone from his body. He squatted and accepted the rat.
"Thank you," he said. "I haven't eaten rat since I was a child."
Yarno studied him through narrowed eyes. Ryld realized the boy was trying to decide if he was being mocked. Ryld smiled and bit into the fire-seared meat, chewing it with gusto.
Yarno flicked back the lock of black hair that hung across his forehead and smiled.
"It's good, isn't it?" asked the boy.
"It is indeed," Ryld answered, wiping grease from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.
Yarno stood and scuffed soil over the fire with a dirty foot, turning his back to the fire and scraping the ground like a dog.
"Grandfather is feeling better now," he told Ryld.
"My masters taught me well," Ryl
d answered. "That?and I've had lots of practice binding wounds." He eyed the smudges of dirt that covered Yarno's pale, naked body, then added, "The first thing you need to do with a wound is clean it with hot water, as I did for your grandfather. Then bind it in a clean, boiled cloth. Remember that?it could save your life someday."
"I'll remember," the boy said.
Ryld wrinkled his nose, doubting it. Yarno seemed to attract dirt like a gutter attracted night soil. And he had fleas?as Ryld found out to his disgust a moment later when he felt the needle-sharp twinge of one of the vermin biting his chest. His memory of the werewolf sleeping beside him must have been accurate. How much else of the past night had also been real?and how much hallucination?
Ryld rose to his feet and glanced around at the forest floor. Aside from the paw prints of a small wolf and the footprints of a barefoot boy, he could see no other tracks.
"Yarno," he asked, "when you found me last night, was there a woman standing next to me?"
Yarno shrugged.
"What did you leap at?"
Yarno stared at the ground.
"I don't remember," he answered finally, shrugging again. "I never do."
Ryld nodded, understanding. Driven into a frenzy by the light of the full moon, the boy hadn't been in control of his actions?or his mind. Strange, then, that he had sought Ryld out and protected him?his bloodlust should have caused him to tear Ryld's throat out, instead. Perhaps the stench of belladonna had driven him back?but why then did Ryld remember the boy lying beside him, keeping him warm throughout the night?
He drew his short sword from the ground, cleaned the mud from its tip, then re-sheathed it.
"Which way is the temple?" Ryld asked.
Yarno pointed, then met Ryld's eye in what the weapons master would have taken as a challenge, had the boy been a trained swordsman.
"What will you do when you reach it?" Yarno asked.
"Rescue Halisstra," Ryld said. His eyes narrowed, and he added, "If she's still alive."
"And if she isn't?" Yarno asked. "Will you kill the priestesses to avenge her death?"
