Leon felt his battler go limp in his arms, and the terrible, screaming draw stopped. Ril’s head fell sideways, his eyelashes dark against his pale cheeks. The sylph’s skin was covered by deeply grooved lines—lines that Leon somehow knew went all the way to his core.
Save Lizzy.
Leon heard the battler’s final words and wanted to listen. He didn’t want to leave, but it didn’t seem there was much alternative. And it looked as though Ril might fall to pieces if he tried to carry him.
Around them, only seconds had passed. The flecks of light that were all that remained of the huge blue battler continued to drift down around them, and the crowd was on its feet, screaming. The guardian battlers still floated above, circling the ornate box where a man was announcing something Leon couldn’t make out through the roaring in his ears and the pain in his heart. Only a few dozen feet away, a hole gaped in the wall of the arena, and he saw the street outside. No one was there to stop him.
But he couldn’t leave Ril.
Then again, if he didn’t escape, his sylph would have died for nothing. Only his battler wasn’t dead—he would be flecks of light if he were. But that didn’t mean Leon could save him. And he could still save his daughter.
Gently, Leon lowered his battler to the sand, brushing the hair out of Ril’s eyes and folding the sylph’s hands on his chest. He wiped a bit of dirt off the battler’s cheek and stood, grabbing up his sword. Gasping, nearly crying—wanting to cry—he turned and ran through the hole and a cloud of dust.
Outside, he found slums. In this square behind the arena, all of the buildings he could see were run-down, their walls gray with soot. There was garbage everywhere, and the air stank of trash and urine. Wretched people wandered, some standing at small stalls filled with withered fruit or fly-covered meat, others with pottery wares or textiles. It was a market, Leon realized, one for the desperately poor.
Everyone was gaping at the hole in the arena wall. As Leon appeared, a naked sword in his hand, his eyes wild and his blond hair sticking up everywhere, they screamed in terror and fled.
Leon ran down the street. No one leaped out at him or gave chase over the top of the arena wall, and he dove for the first stall with textiles. It was mostly stocked with carpets, but it did have some robes as well, loose, billowy things that would at least keep the sand off.
The garment would also hide him. Blond haired, bearded, and pale, he’d stand out too much otherwise. Quickly, Leon grabbed one and pulled it on. The robe was hot and clung to the sweat on his body, but he ignored that and trotted down the street, his sword hidden beneath. It wouldn’t do him any good to carry it openly, not with so many battlers around.
Three miles south and underground. Leon focused again on his daughter, sticking to the shadows and trying to find a populated area again in order to blend in. He couldn’t go looking for Lizzy until he was sure that no one was tracking him. He kept his thoughts schooled to things that wouldn’t draw the battlers, his emotions calm and relaxed. It wasn’t until very late that night, hidden in an alcove deep down a filth-covered alley, that he let himself grieve. Then, alone except for a feral cat that ignored him, he wept until well past dawn.
Chapter Fifteen
The emperor was very pleased. Rashala wished she’d seen the fight. Apparently it had been amazing. Shaking her head, she made her way down an ornate corridor, her brother at her side. Battlers were her speciality, but feeders were his, and they would need feeders indeed.
They stepped through a doorway guarded by a battler numbered 52 and into a large room with a soft carpet and windows open wide to soft breezes. The battler that had defeated Eighty-nine lay on a padded couch, the emperor’s personal healer bent over him. It was only due to her that he survived—or perhaps it was better to say that he survived at the emperor’s pleasure. It amounted to the same thing.
Unconscious on the couch, the wounded battler’s body was covered in deep lines, fading now as the healer drew her hands over him. The sylph regarded Rashala and her brother calmly and said, “Feeders?” It was strange to hear her speak, but she was allowed for the sake of her work.
Feeders. As none was bound to more than a single sylph, that meant new ones. No matter what the local populace thought, they weren’t so cheap or easy to find. And for battlers, feeders had to be men. She didn’t envy her brother the task. It had been barely an hour since they received the news.
She looked at Shalatar questioningly. “They’re coming,” he said. “They’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Where did you find them so quickly?” Rashala asked.
“There wasn’t time to buy any, so I had to grab some from the arena. They’re not perfect, but they’re available. Their tongues are being removed now.”
She nodded, looking back at the comatose battler. “How is he doing?” she asked the healer.
Except for the lines, his sunlit form was flawlessly human, if pale and yellow, but he had a strange sort of transparency to him. Rashala could almost convince herself that she was seeing right through the creature. He’d been badly hurt in that fight, though Rashala had heard he’d taken only one hit. Granted, Eighty-nine had taken only one as well. It was a loss, but Rashala couldn’t pretend she was unhappy to see the crazy, woman-wasting monster gone.
The healer bent over him again, working her magic. “He’s damaged,” she volunteered at last. “Very old damage. He’s extremely limited in what he can do. To change shape would be an agony for him, and he can’t take his natural form without dying.” She glanced up. “He nearly killed himself.”
Rashala frowned. He wouldn’t be much use to them as a cripple, but he was the emperor’s newest darling. “Can he be made whole again?”
“No.”
Rashala shook her head, sighing. A foreign battler—she’d love to know how he got into the city without anyone knowing!—who was crippled as well. How had he even come here, and where was his master? Rashala had heard about him as well. Rumor held that he’d cut Eighty-nine’s leg off, though she found that impossible to believe. She did believe that he was loose, though, and the battlers assigned to guard duty were all under orders to find him. So far they hadn’t. It was almost frightening. Surely it wasn’t the start of an invasion, though. No enemy would have sent an infiltrator who was so obviously broken. Rashala looked at his yellow hair and tapped her lip with a finger, thinking of a certain straw-haired concubine in the harem.
“Here they are,” Shalatar said at last, looking contentedly toward the doorway, and Rashala turned to see five pairs of guards, each supporting a stunned man.
The feeders were still in the clothes they’d been wearing in the arena. Their eyes were wild with shock and pain, and they stank of sweat and dirt. Rashala wasn’t surprised, given that each had just had his tongue cut out and the wound cauterized. But no feeder could be allowed to speak, not when they would otherwise control a battler. Even with an unconscious sylph like this they couldn’t take the chance. Rashala was truly unhappy that his master had escaped.
Her brother stepped forward, taking over. The feeders were shoved to their knees in a line before the couch and its occupant. Two of them were older, white-haired. The other three men were younger, the youngest of all a boy that her brother confided had been captured with the battler. It was too bad no one had thought to question him before they cut his tongue out. The boy stared with eyes widened by horror, still trying to talk even though his tongue was gone. Tears poured down his face, and he reached for the battler as though wanting to wake him. The battler didn’t move, though, his energy so low that only the healer was keeping him alive.
Shalatar started to chant, working on the ritual that would bind the men and the battler together. Rashala stood clear, watching him wind them together, putting the pattern of those men into the battler so that he could feed from their energy. It took time, but Shalatar was an expert. He made the bond without the sylph even stirring, then stepped back and wiped his brow.
“Nicel
y done,” Rashala told him.
The healer beckoned to the first man, who was pulled forward by his guards. She laid her hands on both him and the battler. The energy flowed, and the man was nearly fainting before she gestured for the next. She repeated the process, leaving all the feeders drained, pale, and shaken. All except one. Then, though the lines on the battler’s body had vanished and that odd translucency was gone, the healer touched the boy and took his energy as well. The youth stared at the battler throughout, tears still trailing down his cheeks and an expression on his face Rashala easily recognized as hatred. It didn’t matter. Most of the feeders hated their charges.
Finally, it was done. The feeders were taken out again. Shalatar would see that they were fed and cared for, so they could continue to energize the battler. Not that Rashala knew what the creature would be good for. Perhaps the emperor planned to keep him as a pet. Already she could see issues, though, if he couldn’t change shape. How was he even to get to his feeders? She couldn’t bring them to the harem. That simply wasn’t done.
Finished, the healer stepped back, regarded them placidly, and drifted out of the room. The brother and sister were left alone with the battler.
“What will you do with him?” Shalatar asked while Rashala studied the creature. He truly looked human, which was abominable, but at least he was easy to spot. She’d brand him anyway, while he slept.
She glanced at her brother. “Until they track his master down? Not much. Who knows what orders he has.” They had to find the escaped man no matter what it took. Until he was dead, his commands would be primary over any other master’s. The battler would have to be kept locked away, just in case. Rashala was afraid the emperor would send for him, though, and if he did, they’d have to take all kinds of risks.
“At least he’s weaker than the rest of them.”
“True,” Rashala agreed. “He can’t do much.” She sighed. Until the situation was resolved, she’d just do with him what they always did with new battlers, to counter both their hatred and defiance: let them know that there was a place for them here, a happiness in this life. “I’ll put him in the harem.”
Four-seventeen padded slowly down the street, his claws ticking against the stone. He made his way directly along the center of the thoroughfare, not caring as animals and humans struggled frantically to get out of his way.
It wasn’t supposed to be his turn on guard duty, not again. That was all he ever did, though, mostly on the docks and in the quarters of the city where foreigners were allowed. That made him special, his handlers said, attempting as always to soothe him. Also, he’d been one of the battle sylphs to bring in the foreign battler and his master. He’d be able to find that master again. So they’d dragged him away from Kiala and back to work, despite the respite he was supposed to have.
He was forced to silence and bound with so many rules he could barely function, but Four-seventeen wasn’t made stupid by them: He knew he’d also been pulled out of the harem as punishment, for bringing in a battler without realizing it. All of the battlers involved that day were out searching now. But how was he supposed to have known the creature was a battle sylph? Only hatchlings and yearlings hid their patterns. This one hadn’t seemed different from any other criminal in the half second it had taken to knock him out. None of them had been given the chance to explain, of course. They never were. Four-seventeen sighed silently and stalked in front of a pair of camels, who rolled their eyes and spat fearfully, though not at him.
Now he had to be away from Kiala again, and he hated that. He was hers, both of them members of the same circle as Eapha and Tooie. None of the other battlers sent out to search were, which meant he couldn’t even commiserate with them through the sign language he’d learned. Not that he talked much to the other battlers in the circle. Not if he could avoid it. For now, he just had to follow orders: find the man who’d come with the captured battler. The sooner he did that, the sooner he would be back with Kiala.
He’d started at the gaping hole blown in the side of the arena, which the earth sylphs had left up for that very purpose—all the battlers had started there, glaring at each other as they split up. But with no idea which way the man went, Four-seventeen followed emotions. A foreign man lost in a city where he’d just had both his companions taken? Four-seventeen searched for fear just as much as he sought pale skin and yellow hair. Find the terror and he’d find the man. Perhaps there’d even be hatred.
The problem, Four-seventeen discovered with disgruntled certainty, was that there was already too much fear. Wherever he went there was dread. Only the lower classes walked here: the poor and the slaves, the untouchables and the diseased. And every one of them knew intimately that to disobey meant death in the arena or life in the feeder pens. Four-seventeen couldn’t track anything through the background noise of their unrelenting fear.
He changed to malice—rage, hatred, determination, any of that. Surely those emotions would be present in the man. How could he not feel hatred when so much had been taken from him? This was how they always found the rule breakers. Either fear or anger. One or the other always gave them away.
Four-seventeen padded down the street and through an intersection, glancing from side to side. He was in a more affluent area now, most of the garbage gone. There were restaurants and markets here, hundreds of people making their way to and fro. Most were better than slaves but not rich enough to live on the island. They looked at Four-seventeen in fear but not terror. They still got out of his way.
Hate—he felt it from one of the stalls. Four-seventeen turned at once, glaring, and a dark-skinned man at a water seller’s booth blanched in horror. Four-seventeen padded close, glaring and sniffing until the man backed into his booth and his bladder let go. Dropping to his knees, the merchant started babbling in terror.
A new anger rose behind him, so Four-seventeen turned, especially as it was accompanied by pain. Forgetting the water seller, he ran across the market to where a man struck his wife and was now shouting at her for being stupid, unaware he was being watched. Not that there was a rule against beating women. In Meridal, females had fewer rights than sylphs. But there was a rule against fighting, and more men who beat their wives had ended up in the arena for breaking that specific rule than any other.
While the woman, a pretty fat thing, was still cowering from her husband’s anger, Four-seventeen darted in and grabbed him, his claws digging into the man’s arms as he hauled him up off the ground. The husband howled in terror, trying to get away, but Four-seventeen just tucked him under his arm and trotted back toward the arena pens. The yellow-haired man wasn’t here, so he’d ditch this one and keep looking. Even if he didn’t find him, he knew that eventually they’d have to send him back to Kiala. No one wanted the battlers upset. He just had to put up with this for a while longer.
Behind the battler’s retreating back, the beaten woman quailed, not understanding what had just happened. Seeing her husband being hauled off, she gasped, her hands flying to her mouth.
“Are you all right?” she heard.
She glanced up. Standing over her was a man in a plain brown robe, his hair dusty with soot and his skin dirty. The darkness almost seemed to be sweating off him.
“Are you all right?” he asked again.
She ducked her head. Women didn’t talk to strangers—not if they wanted to be thought better of than the women in the battler harems. She hadn’t loved her husband, but she was alone now with far fewer prospects than ever. Angry and afraid for her future, she scurried to her feet and away, not looking back. It wasn’t until much later that she had cause to realize that the man who’d spoken to her had blue eyes.
Lizzy was learning to dance from Eapha and the other girls, giggling as she swung her hips first to one side and then the other to the beat of a small drum. Tooie watched with great interest, sitting cross-legged on a pillow. But as the main door opened, Lizzy looked up, no longer laughing; it was the wrong time of day for food. Two brown-garbe
d handlers came in carrying a body, one holding him under the legs and the other by his shoulders.
Lizzy stared in amazement when she saw those legs. They were definitely a man’s, dressed in long pants and boots like the clothing back home. She backed up into Eapha, whose mouth was also hanging open, but there was no chance to speak, not as Rashala followed the handlers, directing them in the soft tones she always used near battlers. The pair carried their burden to the nearest alcove, moving him as gently as they could.
Lizzy saw a flash of blond hair, and she felt her legs go weak. She fell to her knees, one hand over her mouth. This caused Rashala to look right at her, but Lizzy was barely aware of the woman’s scrutiny. She couldn’t see the man’s face clearly, but she knew who it was, the only man it could be. The man it had to be.
The guards carried him into the alcove, and Rashala followed, letting the curtains fall back into place behind her. The group was in there for several minutes, while all the concubines whispered and the battlers sniffed the air, shifting aggressively. Eapha dropped to her knees beside Lizzy, asking if she was all right, but Lizzy could only shake her head, afraid to speak. Finally, the handlers came out, headed for the door. Rashala emerged next, and she considered Lizzy for a long moment. However, she finally followed the others. The door shut behind her, locking.
Everyone surged for the alcove except Lizzy. Even the battlers went to peer in at the newcomer. “It’s a man!” one woman shouted. “He’s got hair like Lizzy’s.”
They all looked at her. Slowly, Lizzy rose to her feet and stumbled forward, her throat so thick she could barely breathe. Her head felt light, her fingers trembling as she clasped them together, and the women and battlers parted to let her through. She walked into the alcove, knowing full well that Rashala would be watching through a peephole, but she couldn’t stop herself.
The Shattered Sylph Page 14
