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Azkhantian Tales

Page 5

by Ross, Deborah J.

She shook her head, Azkhantian style. “I am promised to a term in the Ar-King’s army. And I cannot read.”

  Slowly he smiled. “We require no breaking of old vows or pledging of new. Come to us as you can and we will teach you.”

  o0o

  I’m dreaming, she thought, even as tendrils of ice squeezed her heart. Any moment now, the shadows would begin to drift together, to take on arcane substance. And then would come the deadly glint of razor-honed silver . . .

  In the next instant, Seylana sat upon her war onager in the middle of a crossroads. She blinked to clear her vision. Her companion, a priest she knew only slightly, knelt on the dusty road, absorbed in his prayers. Fields too poor and pocked with rain-eaten boulders for farming stretched along the dusty ribbon road. A few short-legged mutton picked at the slivers of yellow grass.

  Stationed at Mherivar, she had acquired a lover and a reputation for looking into strange happenings. From the priests, she learned to read and even write a little. So when a priest asked for an armed escort to Foresthold, she volunteered. Despite the inducements of bonus pay, few had offered, even the most hardened veterans. The captain would not send any of his people unwilling to such a place, out there on the border of myth and madness, not with the growing rumors of a nightmare, insectile shape glimpsed in shadows or dreamsmoke.

  Now Seylana waited for the priest to mount up. She noticed the creases in his age-worn face, deeper than before.

  “Whatever it is,” she promised, touching her sword, “it will have to pass my steel to reach you.” She said nothing of the pull that grew stronger within her every hour.

  The priest looked doubtful. “We at Foresthold will protect us.”

  They continued down the little-traveled trail; the natural pacing gait of the onagers covered the leagues. Late in the afternoon, a line of ancient trees loomed on the horizon. They passed the first solitary trees whose straight trunks bore no kinship with the tangled, knotted giants ahead. The sun dipped below the horizon, leaving an eerie green dusk-light below the canopy of leaves. Shadows took on the texture of clotted ink.

  In the gloom, Seylana’s vision lost its focus. Misshapen figures seemed to move beneath the tree trunks. Her palms itched inside her leather gloves, a warrior’s certain omen of fighting ahead.

  Sometimes, in the chill hours of the morning, lying alone in her barracks bed or beside snoring Tomas, she wondered if it had not all been a dream, that night on the Knoll. Sometimes she could not remember the name of her sister or her voice or the touch of her hand on the harp.

  And sometimes it seemed like yesterday, that loss hot and raw and bleeding. Wounds of the body healed; as a soldier, she knew this well. But there were other wounds that did not.

  The onager shifted sideways, tossing its head. A tremor rippled through its body. Seylana took the reins in her left hand and drew her sword. The blade whispered as it left the scabbard.

  “Stay back,” she whispered to the priest. She could smell the sorcery in the air as she urged her mount forward, the familiar pungent smell of leaf mold overlaying something else.

  They rounded a bend, past a cluster of ashleaf trunks, all growing from the same massive bole. Filtered moonlight shone on the smooth bark.

  Foresthold stood before them, a block of stone. The flames of its lights glittered unnatural blue against the night. Keeping control of her prancing onager, Seylana approached obliquely, circling through the night and curling shadows.

  She completed a circuit of the hold and swung in for a closer look at the portal. It was closed tight, but the barred windows to either side were unshuttered. Seylana pulled the onager to a halt and peered inside. Within the hall, blue-green phosphorescence clashed with normal flames from an ordinary wood fire in the floor hearth. Five white-robed priests stood in a ring around it. Something about them, their erect stillness, reminded Seylana of the circle of stones on the Knoll.

  A siege, raced through Seylana’s thoughts, but she could see no invader, no enemy, not threat except the unnatural stillness of the place.

  Seylana wheeled the onager for a better look at the door. From the corner of one eye, she caught a movement in the center of the ring. A robe flickered white as one of the acolytes dashed toward the portal.

  The heavy wooden door swung open, wide enough for a mounted warrior to pass. Seylana glimpsed the panic-blind face of the acolyte, little more than a child, eyes and hands lifted in appeal. The acolyte rushed past her, into the arms of the Priest.

  Seylana dug her heels into the onager’s sides and the animal leapt forward. Its shod hooves clattered loudly on the glazed tile floor. The nearest priest looked up, his face etched with despair.

  Seylana’s war-cry died in her throat. The shadows drew her eyes, caught her like a hapless bewebbed insect. They encircled — no, strangled — the hall. Slowly they began to take on solid form.

  As they had before, so many years ago. As they had in her nightmares.

  The natural orange fire of the hearth died in a billow of lung-searing smoke. Metal gleamed in the darkness. The nearest priest screamed once, horribly. Seylana whirled the onager and slashed diagonally upwards. Her sword pierced the swirling mist, a mist that immediately healed and condensed.

  The onager coughed, a soft pathetic sound. It swayed, then toppled to the floor. Seylana jumped free and landed on her feet.

  Seylana drew back into ready position, her heart hammering in her ears. She felt as if she had been training all her life for this moment, for what lay beyond that darkness.

  The shadows deepened soundlessly. Suddenly, a curved sword appeared at chest level in the depths of the darkness, a blade held by a hand with seven taloned fingers.

  Seylana parried the lethal sweep of the blade. She danced away from its instant riposte. Her body responded as a second sword appeared, then a third. In the flickering ember-light, she glimpsed the outline of a head and shoulders. On the brow of the head was an emblem with armored pincers and a curving, stinger-tipped tail.

  Cold fire sizzled through Seylana’s veins. She wheeled and slashed, sweeping one blade away and stabbing past another. Death cries shivered the air. Summoning all her skill, she fought her way toward the tallest of the scorpion-badged figures. It drew back from a fallen priest, the last, and turned toward her. The hall fell silent, not even the slither of a leather sandal over tile.

  Only the steady beating of her heart as she stood alone against the shadows.

  Without thinking, she had taken up a two-handed grip, sword raised in a posture of power, her legs bent and body centered, one shoulder toward her opponent.

  Meri, she thought.

  The figure came at her.

  She waited, staying on balance. The scorpion shape seemed to glow, to burn itself into her mind. Another shape, deeply buried, echoed it. This was the very creature that had haunted her nightmares. Still it came, shambling now as its form grew more and more solid.

  Closer . . . closer . . .

  It bent its arm, bringing its nightmare blade into position. Seylana sensed the opening before it appeared, felt the creature commit to the attack — and lunged.

  A war-cry splintered the air, hardly recognizable as her own. Power surged through her body, drawn through the point of her sword. The tip slid through flesh as if it were gauze.

  She twisted, using both hands to guide the blade down and sideways for a killing stroke. Inky smoke poured from the wound, charring whatever it touched. Tears flooded her eyes. Her legs trembled. Breath caught and stuttered in her lungs. Vision wavering, she clung to the sword hilt and jerked with all her strength.

  Suddenly her blade was free, slipping through empty air. She staggered, caught her balance, blinked her eyes clear.

  Tatters of colorless fog melted. The hold was gone, the firepit, the body of the onager and the fallen priests. Even the surrounding forest, all gone as if they had never existed. She stood in a shallow depression of smooth-grained stones set so close that not a blade of grass could pass between.
A dense silence pressed down on her. Her clothing had disappeared along with everything else. Instead, she wore a garment of some filmy stuff that clung to her body and yet did not hamper her movements. A braided strand of light, winking with a hundred points of liquid brilliance, ran from the center of her body into the distance.

  Only the sword in her hand remained the same, familiar, battered, serviceable. Deadly.

  Real. Perhaps the only thing in this eldritch place that was.

  Slowly she turned to survey her surroundings. Gray stone stretched in every direction, forming a low horizon. But there were two twisted ropes of light, one stretching ahead of her, the other from her back, from the direction she had come.

  With her free hand, Seylana brushed a fingertip against the light. Instead of heat, or perhaps a crackle of dry lightning as from silk rubbed over amber, her hand met only a pleasant coolness. She curled her fingers around it, testing its thickness and elasticity. A step forward was as easy as gliding over ice. Sideways, though, brought pain lancing through her body, so hard and fast her muscles locked and her breath froze.

  She tightened her grasp on her sword and took a step forward, then another. The stone beneath her bare feet felt neither cool nor warm, neither rough nor smooth. The horizon grew no closer, nor did it recede. She glided along the rope of light in unbroken silence.

  Gradually, she became aware of a thickening in the air, as if shadows gathered there. These shadows, however, were composed of light instead of darkness. At first, they hovered at the corners of her vision, disappearing whenever she turned to face them. When she called out, her voice came as a tinny whisper. She went on, watching as the diaphanous shapes grew thicker and took on a semblance of form, even as the Qr shadows had.

  Abruptly, she reached the end of the stone depression. Before her, a hundred paces away, stood a half dozen figures, not these ghostly shadows but flesh like her own. She could not call them men, not with their narrow shoulders and too-many-fingered hands. Some kind of dark gauze wrapped their rounded heads, obscuring their features. But on each brow, a white band shone with the scorpion badge of Qr. No, she saw now it was not a true scorpion but a symbol of some sort, like the Meklavarans used instead of ordinary writing. It was only human imagination that had given it the form of a deadly insect.

  The ribbon of light ran straight into their midst.

  Seylana raised her sword, felt the answering surge of power. Battle-fever pulsed through her veins. Her heart leaped eagerly, hungrily.

  The figures waited, giving no sign of fear.

  An instant before she was to begin her charge, they drew back, parting around her rope of light. Her sword lowered, and it was only by long hard training that she did not drop it entirely. She rushed forward, half afraid that the image would vanish as she neared.

  A mirror it was, and yet not, that figure unscarred by the years, clad in the same filmy garment.

  Meriadess.

  Seylana’s twin stood as if blind, her face giving no sign of either recognition or despair, joy or pain. She simply waited.

  Seylana had thought to avenge her sister, not to free her. Heedless of the waiting Qr, she rushed forward. “Meri! Meri, come with me!”

  She reached out her free hand . . . and met only air. Her fingers passed through the solid-looking form. Was this an illusion, a vision born of smoke and light?

  No, she could feel the tie between them, the pull that linked the empty place in her heart with this mirror of her sister.

  Seylana brought her sword once more to ready position. She turned to the nearest Qr. “Free her or die!”

  “We cannot,” a hollow voice rang in her mind. “. . . cannot, cannot, will not . . .”

  “Why? What have you done to her?”

  The creature lifted its shoulders and shivered.

  “Cowards and liars! You owe me kin-blood! You struck down my sister, along with the boy and the enaree of my tribe! I say again, free her now!”

  “She is held by bonds we cannot sever.” Again came that voice with its chilling echo. “. . . sever, sever, never . . .”

  Seylana took a gliding step toward the nearest Qr. “Then we will see what I can sever.”

  “. . . leave, leave, bereave . . .”

  One of the figures stepped forward. A sword, no more than condensing cloud, appeared in its hands. Seylana slashed diagonally, starting at the join of neck and shoulder. The razored sword cut cleanly.

  Solid-looking flesh healed itself.

  Seylana parried its returning thrust. She lashed out, low and straight through the creature’s belly. Again there was no wound.

  She drew back, breathing hard. If she was not here to kill, what then?

  She glanced down at the braided light joining her on one end to her sister, on the other to — what? She had thought it was to her own death in the blood-spattered Fortress. Now the thought crept into her mind that she was tied to life.

  And life itself linked through her to her twin-bonded sister.

  And through Meri, evil now had a gate into the world.

  Qr had burst through the walls between the worlds, doubly thinned by solstice and eclipse, on that night on the Knoll. In the natural order, the priests taught her, such a thing could last but an hour. But now they had a door that could not be closed as long as she and Meriadess were still linked.

  It would be a simple thing, to cut the cord to the world of the living, to stay here with Meriadess. Perhaps she would spend all eternity battling the Qr. As long as they were together . . .

  Meri?

  Seylana gazed into the eyes that were so like her own. There was no response, not even a flicker. Sadness swept through her like a wave. The old wound throbbed, subsided. She could never take her sister into her arms, hear her voice, share the breath from her lungs. Whatever happened now, Meriadess was lost to her forever.

  To save the living world, Gelon and Azkhantia and all the wide lands beyond, she would have to release Meriadess. To let go of the emptiness she had hoarded like a precious treasure over the years.

  Seylana looked down at the sword in her hand, at the bonds of light. With a single movement, she brought the sword down and slashed through the tie between herself and her sister.

  The image of Meriadess winked into nothingness.

  Seylana’s sword shrieked, as if in human agony. Light exploded around her. The air splintered with sound. Stone shattered, bursting into flame. The dangling cord shriveled. She felt herself moving backwards through space at breath-taking speed. Her mouth opened in a soundless scream. Qr receded in the distance, swept up in the maelstrom.

  Wind howled in Seylana’s ears. She tried to cover them, but her hands would not obey her. Her body twisted and bucked, yet still she went faster. A shivery weakness seeped along her veins. Her head lolled, her heart faltered.

  She landed in a graceless clump on a hard cold floor. The sharp edged stones bit into her palms. She blinked, shook her head. She was in the middle of the hold, morning light sifting through the eastern windows. Her sword, its blade blackened and warped, lay beside her. With a snort, the onager scrambled to its feet. Moans came from across the room. The priests held out their arms to one another, their cries like the cooing of doves. Seylana’s priest and the child acolyte rushed in through the portal.

  Seylana watched them, apart. When the onager ambled up to her and thrust its whiskery nose at her shoulder, she patted it absently.

  The eldest priest, a man with skin like leather and eyes bright as garnets, held out his hands. His fingers, strong and warm, encircled hers.

  “We have closed the gate.” He did not mean the priests had done it, but that they now included her in their midst.

  Seylana saw then how she had moved through her own life like a Qr shadow, defined only by what she had lost. By her own choice, she could never go back.

  Outside the hold, a bird burst into song. The first rays of dawn sifted through the unshuttered windows. One by one, the priests sank themselves
to their knees and held up their hands to the golden light.

  Something inside Seylana rose to meet the new day, whole and strong. She no longer felt empty, but overflowing with grief and joy, anger and contentment, all jumbled with the sudden discovery that her half-sized soul had somehow grown to fill the entire world.

  The Phoenix Blade: A Tale of Gelon

  Linned Ar-Veddris arrived home with an Azkhantian horde thundering at her heels.

  She had spotted their camp just before twilight from the slopes leading to the Plain of Thirst. She’d planned on camping at the little spring only a league into the Plain. Now a circle of orange pinpoints glimmered against the ghostly pale of the alkali crust. She was too far away to catch the sounds, there would be singing around those fires, and dance, and k’th, fermented camel’s milk, flowing freely. She knew these things because her teachers at Borrenth believed no young woman of noble blood, not matter how impoverished, should be ignorant of her enemies.

  Bird of Fire! Studying the encampment, Linned cursed under her breath. Her onager tugged at the heavy braided reins. Linned had pushed it hard, driven by news of her grandfather’s sudden illness and rumors of new Azkhantian raids along the border.

  On the vantage point, Xun waited beside her, silent as a lump of granite. Part bodyguard, part chaperon, the giant Pithic slave had been a wargift from the Ar-King to Linned’s grandfather. No one knew why he shaved his head or refused to ride an animal or how old he really was.

  She had no choice but to try to sneak past the nomad camp. The Plain of Thirst was narrow here, with Veddris’s rocky pastures only a day’s ride across. Lengthwise to the west lay fields of green-wheat, sorghum, and azimed. A richer prey, but a longer ride.

  Linned divided the last of the water between Xun and her onager with the fervent prayer it would carry them through the night. Without a word, Xun reached into her saddlebags, took out her second-best shirt, and ripped it into five pieces. Four he tied around the onager’s feet and the fifth he twisted into a loop around the animal’s nose to prevent it from whinnying in greeting.

 

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