Wings of Power

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Rajinder set down the hoof that he had been inspecting, patted the horse’s shoulder, straightened. And looked up directly into Gard’s face.

  Gard’s heart jolted in his chest. But the eyes watching him were warmly lucid, intelligence balanced by common sense. He had never feared those eyes. Rajinder started slightly—night-demon indeed—then, deciding that the man he saw was simply the occupant of the room roused by the horsemen’s arrival, he saluted a jaunty apology and strode off toward the tavern.

  Tarek. Shikar. Rajinder. Senmut. Damn them all for their tangled skein of chance and guile and overwrought perception . . .

  Deva. Her warm hands closed on his arms and pulled him away from the parapet. Her upturned face, a perfect oval of light and shadow, gazed up at him. Her lips mimed a kiss and his body shuddered with an altogether different perception. “Hey,” Gard murmured in sudden amused indignation, “I am piloting this seduction!”

  Deva laughed. She tickled his poor harsh ribs with her forefinger, turning them to barley mush. The dragonet began to preen the diaphanous folds of its wings.

  The wind was cold, and the full moon cast dense black shadows across building and ground. Something fluttered overhead. The bedroom inside was soft and inviting. Gard snugged Deva close against his side and swept her over the threshold, slamming the door against the prying eyes of darkness.

  Chapter Eight

  Gard looked suspiciously about the room. With a distracted pat on Deva’s shoulder, hating himself for his distraction, he moved silently to the doorway. A bar, good; he shot it home. Muttering incantations, he paced the circumference of the room, climbing over the bed, skirting the upended bathtub, squeezing behind a chair, lingering over the frames of both doors. The dragonet’s foreclaw sketched symbols in the air, glowing letters suspended just at the edge of sight: gatepost, doorway, fence and stile; latch and lintel, portal and shield; watch and ward and warn.

  Gard finished his circuit of the room back at Deva’s side. The dragonet tapped on the barriers they had raised, making an odd reverberation in his mind.

  Deva knelt by the table, selected a few morsels of fruit and refilled the goblets, carried the plates to the bed and arranged them on a taboret nearby. One of the gymnasts had left a small vial warming in the base of the lamp; opening it, she sniffed at the contents and smiled.

  Gard followed, inhaling a carefully counted and ordered breath. His hand traced her forearm to where it disappeared into the fold of her sari.

  “Look,” she said. “They left this aromatic oil. Let me rub you down.” Her voice was a ballad in tone and accent. Her eyes were mysterious multifaceted gems. Her long, graceful fingers held the vial enticingly before him.

  He smiled as fatuously as the dragonet had; so she was succumbing to his charms. “Yes,” he told her. “Yes, please.” She lifted the garland of marigolds from his chest, causing a shower of orange petals. Odd, how the blossoms that had been dewy fresh when placed upon him were now dry and brittle, as if subjected to great heat.

  He himself lifted the pouch from his neck and hung it upon a bedpost, within arm’s length, before lying down and burrowing into the faintly musky scent of the pillows. A soft mattress, like a woman’s all-enfolding embrace, and the woman as well. Bliss!

  His daemon settled down with a sigh of contentment, tail wrapped primly around toes, claws concealed. Only the prick of its ears betrayed its alertness. Ssh, Gard told it. Keep out of this. I can handle this by myself.

  Warm oil, fragrant with cloves, was poured onto the small of his back. Hands kneaded it into his skin. Her hands were as strong as a Sabazian warrior’s, plucking every fiber of his body, sending subtle melodies from the top of his head to his toes, and back again.

  Male voices gusted from below, the jackal barking some jocularity. I should have tried a damping spell, too, Gard mused. But that might have drawn Tarek’s attention . . .

  Feminine fingertips probed his shoulder blades and the back of his neck. The fire in his belly flared. Its light extinguished the shadows of the outside world. One of his hands snaked sideways; finding Deva’s thigh, he pressed it gently through the smooth fabric of her sari. Nice and firm. What a lovely belt it would make, looped around his waist.

  “Warding spells,” she said suddenly.

  Gard blinked up at her. “Yes.”

  “My former mistress, Amathe—Saavedra rest her soul—was a witch of some renown. The Ferangi nobles sneered at her in public, and sneaked to our back door under cover of night, standing in line with the poor, for love potions and strengthening draughts and castings of the evil eye. Although she disdained black sorcery, you understand.”

  “Ah,” said Gard, listening politely.

  “She did not die a natural death, but was poisoned by Vizier Bogatyl, who thought her too powerful.”

  Amathe could not have been all that powerful, Gard mused, to have let a dose of poison take her by surprise.

  “I was only fifteen,” continued Deva. “Bogatyl, profiting from his crime, took me to live at court. I learned a great deal there; amazing, what nobles will do and say in front of servants, as if servants were only articles of furniture.”

  Like seducing the Khan’s daughter, chirped the dragonet. I was young and foolish then, Gard retorted.

  If Bogatyl freed Deva to fulfill her vow to Saavedra—if he had been devoted to Saavedra why had he killed Amathe? If he had hated Saavedra why would he let Deva go to her? Gard tightened his hold of her thigh and its comforting stability. “I had heard that Saavedra suffered a certain lack of respect in the Mohan.”

  “In Ferangipur she is at least tolerated. In Apsurakand, the home of her greatest and most ancient shrine, she has come to be scorned as a demoness, and those women sworn to serve her there must prove their devotion by running a blockade of harassment and worse. I was fortunate to have been enslaved and not executed as a witch.”

  “And yet Menelik employs a sorcerer such as Tarek.”

  “Tarek,” she said with a tight shrug, “is a man. Few Allianzi would treat a woman as more than a bundle of trade goods. Except, perhaps, for Persis, Menelik’s wife; she rules the Alliance when he is off raiding his neighbors. But even she knows her place is behind the khaddi, not upon it.”

  Gard stroked Deva’s thigh. She moved a little closer. The conversation took place most inspiringly in two aspects, words and flesh. The dragonet sat quietly, just the tip of its tail flicking up and down, raising little clouds of sparks . . .

  With a momentary qualm, sleet sizzling in the heat of his belly, Gard asked, “Saavedra does not demand virgin priestesses, does she?”

  Did Deva pinch him, or did her fingers slip on the succulent leather she was making of his skin? “No, she does not demand virgin priestesses; she celebrates the quarterly rites. But neither are her priestesses prostitutes, as some Allianzi would have them.”

  Gard squirmed—and who had had Deva? “Why did you promise yourself to the temple, knowing what trouble it would bring?”

  “The honor of serving a god is worth any amount of trouble,” she said. Her hands left his back. Her weight shifted and from the corner of his eye he saw her take a sip from her goblet.

  His hand fell from her thigh. The palm cold and empty, he clenched it upon the coverlet. “No,” he said under his breath.

  “And I did not promise myself,” she continued serenely. “I only confirmed the vow when I came of age. My parents promised me at birth. It is my fate to serve Saavedra.”

  “Fate?” Gard retorted. “An easy excuse for laziness.”

  She set down the goblet, picked up a morsel of apple, and turned back to him, eyes not indignant but amused. Waiting for his cynicism to dissipate? Then she would wait a long time.

  “You said your parents were so poor they sold you into slavery as an infant. So how could you know what they vowed?”

  Deva placed the apple between his lips. The sweet juices cleansed his mouth of the sour taste of divinity. Her hands slapped against his shou
lders, shoved him determinedly back into the pillow, began less to massage than caress him. The daemon rolled onto its back, paws paddling in the air, a senseless grin upon its snout.

  “I was not sold by my parents,” she said. “That is only a convenient tale, like your denial of the sacred hand of fate.”

  Gard snorted.

  “Amathe rescued me from a massacre, the Last Rites of the Innocents, as it has come to be called. When Persis convinced Menelik that because of a prophecy he must murder all children born on the day of the Sun’s Awakening.”

  God’s beak! Not that again! Gard jerked around, looking at her. Her face was sheened with loveliness, and revealed nothing. Fate? Hah! Some damnable divine plot.

  Or a mortal one. Tarek had bid on her. What had he known, what had he inferred from the exercise of his evil arts? One of the babies was Jofar. And the other? “I suppose you, too, were born on the day of the Sun’s Awakening?”

  “It appears that I was.” Her hands continued their swirling across his back, seeming to draw the skin from the bones beneath and tease it into aching alertness. “Even Amathe did not know for sure. But since it was she who made the prophecy to begin with, she felt responsible for the foundling she discovered in a garbage midden outside her door. And she decided it would be wise to leave Apsurakand for the more salubrious air of Ferangipur.”

  “I daresay,” Gard said drily, “it is your association with Amathe and Saavedra that made the slave-trader call you a shakhmi?” And drew Tarek’s eye to you, he grumbled to himself. For a vast world, he certainly moved in small circles.

  She laughed ruefully. “I am only a poor apprentice. Those who name me evil do not know what evil is.”

  Gard saw the ghastly caverns beneath the temple of Tenebrio, he heard the screaming of children mangled by bulls. And yet Eldrafel, demon-son, demon-father, had been beautiful . . . Deva’s beauty, while contradictory, was not evil. If he knew nothing else, he knew that.

  She smoothed the shiver from his back and continued stroking the serpent of power in his spine, molding his flesh into a new and different form. Something rather like a marmoset, he thought. Small, stubborn, and bug-eyed with tension. This was not happening at all as it should. The dragonet snickered.

  “Raman,” Deva said, “is the demon half-brother of Hurmazi, the bane of the house of Allaudin. It was the forefather of the Allaudin who destroyed the demon’s temporal existence. Some say it was Raman who put the words of the prophecy into Amathe’s mouth, wishing to stir up trouble. Vengeful Raman is the one the Allianzi should fear, not Saavedra.”

  “Why,” Gard asked, cursing himself for asking, “would Menelik listen to a priestess of Saavedra?”

  “Persis listened, and believed, and asked Tarek to confirm the omens.”

  “But surely Tarek serves Hurmazi.”

  “Supposedly. But mostly he serves himself, I think.”

  “I can sympathize with that,” said Gard.

  “It was only when Tarek added a corollary, that Menelik would be ruler of all the Mohan if only he believed Amathe’s prophecy, that Menelik agreed to the massacre. What motives, human or divine, are really behind the prophecy have yet to be revealed.”

  “The gods play so subtly they play against themselves.”

  “Who are we to say what it is the gods are playing at?”

  “We are the playing pieces!”

  Deva laughed softly. Her fingertips ruffled his hair, drew probably arcane patterns on the back of his neck, circled his shoulder blades, danced down his spine, traced tiny crosses on the small of back. Ridiculous, Gard told himself impatiently, to think Deva might be the other child of the prophecy. She might not have been born on the right day. Or if one child survived the massacre, then several might have. Tarek was only lurking about Chandrigore because it was in the nature of wolves to lurk.

  Gard’s closed fists struck the pillows with a hollow thump. Prophecy, coincidence or plot, it was no concern of his! Enough was enough! He boosted himself up, turned, seized Deva and, with a flurry of silk, bore her down beside him. His hands moved across her body, became tangled in the flowing folds of cloth, freed themselves and hunted again. Someplace to hide—the shelter of a woman’s arms, the sanctuary between a woman’s legs. Simplicity beyond complexity—a familiar and comforting liturgy, man and woman, mouth to mouth, palm to palm . . .

  Suddenly he broke the roiled surface of his awareness and seized rationality. He lay alone on the bed, in the gently flickering pool of lamplight. His pentacle emitted a low, querulous note from its pouch on the bedpost. The dragonet sat, chin on paws, smirking; you do not need me, eh?

  Gard noted that his mouth was hanging open. He shut it. His flesh crawled. Even this most elementary of activities had been tinged with magic, like rye tainted with ergot. She really was a shakhmi, and had slithered out of the depths of his own need, to mock him.

  There she was, sitting quietly at the foot of the bed, her mouth crumpled, her brow quirked, her eyes as bright as a tiger watching a mouse. No, no, she was not evil. But how dare she try such a trick on him?

  Her expression wavered among amusement and dismay and a certain wry resignation. And something else, he realized. A tiger watching a mouse and beginning to fear that the mouse will grow into an elephant and crush it with one step. “I doubted from the beginning that I would be able to work that illusion on you,” she murmured. “Your aura is silver, edged with purple; of royal blood and divine mingled.”

  Gard inhaled, exhaled, inhaled again. Deva did not move. “Royal blood, yes,” he said. “And divine. And demonic. Most of it on the wrong side of the blanket, just to add to your amusement.”

  Her lips tightened. “I am not amused, I assure you.”

  Gard swung himself to the edge of the bed, poured himself a goblet of wine, sat with his back to her. The dragonet cavorted in his belly, chasing its tail. The wine was vinegar in his mouth. Should have settled for one of the serving-maids, he thought irritably. Cheap and dishonorable and uncomplicated.

  Her voice poured like honey over him, honey flavored with magic. “I was only fifteen when Bogatyl took me. One night, two, and three, and I decided I would have no more of such distasteful business. He was one of those men who not only uses a woman’s body, but adds insult to injury by demanding that she feel pleasure at being used!”

  I am not that self-centered! thought Gard indignantly.

  “So I perfected the mirage-spell. And it worked quite nicely, if I do say so myself. It was most instructive to watch Bogatyl panting and heaving at the bedclothes. Of course his own lust made most of the illusion; I needed only to refine it to suit the occasion.”

  Gard gagged; what an image!

  “I also gave him nightmares, making him believe Saavedra was punishing him for the murder of Amathe. I convinced him that the dreams would end only if he let me go to Apsurakand to fulfill my vow. So he did. And I assume he is free of the nightmares, being free of me.”

  Gard set the goblet down with a crash. The woman was sadistic; to give a man nightmares! He felt a sneaking sympathy for Bogatyl, to be so used. And yet he had been using Deva, and before her, Amathe.

  “The mirage-spell came in very handy when I belonged to Shikar,” she added primly. “He was so convinced I was a demoness that he sold me very cheaply to that little weasel who vended me to you.”

  Shikar, gnawing at thin air. Now that was a glorious image, the best joke he had heard in months! Gard laughed, turned around and looked at Deva.

  Her eyes were downcast. The sapphire in her nose twinkled. He stared, the laughter glazing his lips. That sapphire. The dragonet made a warding gesture and tapped its forehead with a hind paw. Wizard’s foot. A third eye. The sapphire was the equivalent of his pentacle, warding sorcery, concentrating strength. Probably Amathe had given it to her. No wonder no one had stolen it from her; what was it to other eyes, a cheap faience bead?

  “Why did you call me?” he asked, still breathless.

  “Your au
ra. I thought your power would reach out to mine.”

  “Because you wanted to use me?”

  “Because I knew you would not use me.”

  “Not for lack of trying,” he growled.

  Her head tilted up again. Her face flushed with a beauty so compelling Gard’s heart heaved in his chest and whacked the dragonet sprawling. “You could aid me in fulfilling my vow,” she whispered, soft as the muted trill of a shenai.

  “I might have a fragment or two of magic power,” he protested, “but I have no temporal power at all.” Something in her guileless eyes drew him on. “I was once the heir to Minras. I was once briefly the heir to the Empire.” She blinked at that, but he plunged on. “My father was a demon; not content with Minras, he used me to gain the Empire. In losing, he lost all—and left nothing for me. No realm, no riches, none of his infernal grace, only the dregs of power.” He stopped with a self-deprecatory laugh. Now she would pity him, as did everyone who knew that story, even Andrion in his own acerb way.

  “Grace that you malign?” Deva asked, curious but not pitying. “Power that you deny?”

  He should get up and stamp away from her perception. At least she could have disbelieved him—all youths feel their parents to be demons. But she trusted. He should warn her not to trust so easily.

  But it was him she trusted. Her hand rose from her lap and opened to him. Eagerly, reluctantly, he set his palm against hers. Ah, yes, the murmur of power mingled with that of desire. His poor abused body stirred yet again, ever hopeful. The dragonet picked itself up and ruffled its wings.

  “At least you know who you are,” she told him. “I have never known myself.”

  “But you move, you speak, with such certainty.”

  “Part faith,” she sighed. “Part illusion.” Her lips remained pursed around the long vowel of the word. Gard leaned forward and kissed her, thoroughly and not particularly gently. Somehow she managed to laugh, a deep burbling in her throat, as she kissed him back.