“Enough!” bellowed a voice that only with an effort did Gard recognize as Jamshid’s.
The wild-eyed dragonet floundered to a halt. Gard fought to the surface of his intoxication and seized coherence, mouth open, eyes bulging. So this is power, sobbed his thought. So this is its temptation. Drawn on and on by a bright desire, like thrusting repeatedly into a woman’s body, unable to stop. He felt himself slowly deflating. Magical coitus interruptus, he told himself with a sardonic sigh. He was cheated of the climax and yet was vastly relieved that there would be no gut-searing mind-wrenching soul-blasting spasm to consume him and everything he touched.
The sentries sidled back to the door. Bogatyl threw down the scimitar. “Has he proved himself yet, Father?” Rajinder inquired dryly.
Vijay applauded. Tarek glided forward, retrieved his sword, began wiping it on his sash as if it had shed blood. Deva exhaled in such an extravagant sigh Gard sensed the sweetness of her breath across the room, cooling his heat. He summoned a shaky smile for her. The dragonet propped itself on his ribs, wheezing.
“Kundaraja,” said a voice in the back of the room. “Gard ed Minras, Kundaraja.”
Other voices, priests and nobles alike, it appeared, took up the word. It became a breeze setting the lamps to swinging, shadows reeling across the tables and chasing themselves around the columns. The room expanded and contracted as though the stone itself breathed. “Kundaraja.” Deva frowned slightly and set her fingertip upon her sapphire.
What the hell did Kundaraja mean? Gard asked himself. They spoke the word with approval, and yet Deva did not approve.
“Nazib-ji,” prompted Rajinder. “He has proved himself. Reprieve him.”
Srivastava bent double under her despair. The little daemon peered out at her, frowning sympathetically.
Jamshid looked doubtfully about him, as if a servant would bring certainty heaped on a platter. Gard straightened, breathing calm into his frenzy. “Nazib-ji,” he said, and was pleased at how steady his voice was. “You have celebrated the Festival according to the letter of the law. The gods are pleased with your faith.” Arrogant, to speak for the gods, but what gods had ever spoken for him? “Now they have sent me to serve you, as a token of their esteem.”
Jamshid blinked, his hands curled empty upon the cushion at his side. Gods indeed, the man could not always have been so indecisive. The light in his eyes flared and faded like sunflash on the muddy waters of the Mohan, an uneasy mingling of thought and torpidity. A typical divine jest, to give a great warrior a life long enough to see his powers wane.
One last sign, then, out of pity for Jamshid’s age and out of enthusiasm for his own youth. Gard prodded the dragonet, spun, raised his hands, and shot a quick bolt of fiery darkness at the jar waiting in the garden. It rocked on its base. Its terra cotta sides were traced with thin branching lines. Slowly, with a clattering chime, it disintegrated. Dust eddied in the translucent evening light and then settled.
“Spare the Fool,” said Jamshid. “Appoint him court wizard.”
“And moderate the Festival in future years,” Rajinder added.
“Yes, yes.” The old man’s eyes suddenly cleared, and fixed Gard with a piercing gaze. You do not fool me, young man. We shall see what you do now.
Gard made a sweeping bow, overbalanced, almost toppled over. The onlookers applauded and cheered. The priests bowed sagely. Deva skipped away from Vijay’s side and joined Gard. Not at all what I had intended when I left here, her quick blue sideways gleam said to him. But I guess it will do, lacking anything better.
He groped for a retort and found none. A cool draft was blowing annoyingly on the back of his neck. His knees kept trying to bend backward. The dragonet, its limbs knotted, its clear gaze scummed with exhaustion, plunked itself down in the pit of his stomach.
Bogatyl turned abruptly and strode away, his face a leering mask. I have made an enemy, Gard told himself.
Tarek helped himself to a sweetmeat, his eyes hooded and expressionless. Gard shot a halfhearted probing thought in his direction. It was casually repulsed. Another enemy? If Tarek had not known him before, he did now. But Tarek was much subtler than Bogatyl.
The room was oddly cold. In a moment his teeth would start chattering. He leaned on Deva’s shoulder—she, at least, was warm.
“Take them to the rooms in the south wing,” ordered Rajinder. His salute and Ladhani’s grave smile were also warm, Gard told himself, and I have made friends. Several, if Vijay’s easy grin could be accepted at face value.
Servants were bowing and scraping. Deva was pulling on his arm. The dragonet’s snores permeated his body so that his legs trembled beneath him and his hands seemed to float beyond the ends of his arms. Reason wafted to and fro, playing tag with dream-images through which poked one sharp spire of thought; If Senmut and Andrion and Jofar could see me now. If everyone from my former life could see me now. They exiled me, but I made something of myself despite them. I made myself a place among the powerful, on my own merits, not on Sumitra’s name or Andrion’s blood . . .
What a triumph. Later, when his bones stopped trembling, he would appreciate it.
* * * * *
The rooms assigned to them, if not luxurious, were several cuts above a cell in Dhan Bagrat. Gard’s short nap there had been very pleasant, despite the brief stirring of evil dreams. When he awakened no one had questioned his demand for more food, or asked for the return of the accursed goblet. Everywhere servants leaped to do his bidding. He could grow accustomed to that. He had been accustomed to that, once.
The dragonet inspected its claws, fastidiously cleaning each one, venting an occasional yawn. Deva stepped daintily across the flagstones, the hem of her sari brushing the low banks of azalea and hyacinth beside the path, which, in the darkness, appeared to be shades of gray.
Ah, the gentility of fresh air, free of the crassness of incense and sorcery . . . His nostrils flared. That elusive odor of something stale, almost rotten, must be caused by the proximity of either Tarek or the river.
In the city below the palace ramparts, the festival went on. A flash, followed by the oohs and aahs of children, showed where some charlatan was dispensing petty tricks.
Deva plucked a blossom of asphodel and tucked it behind her ear. In the wavering light of the cressets spaced around the walls, Gard saw that she had once again abandoned her beauty and was clothed in homeliness. Disappointing, but when he touched her she would feel the same.
She had named herself his wife—well, he could grow accustomed to that, too. A helpmeet, just what he needed . . . Gard reached for her and drew her close. His lips brushed her cheek and aimed for her mouth.
“Are you not tired?” she asked teasingly, evading his kiss.
“Me?” he responded. “With my natural resilience? In such a place as this? Ferangipur is everything I anticipated!”
The cressets upon the walls were gold, and the stars silver, and the bonfires leaping upon the banks of the river were garnet and bronze; it was a scene in an enchanted mirror. Above the dome of Deva’s sleek black hair was a dome of the palace, repeating the same shape, its whitewashed walls glistening like alabaster in the starlight. The fate that had hounded him had relented at last, and was rewarding him for his hard work. Maybe it was not blasphemy to tell Jamshid he had been sent by the gods.
Suddenly, with a cold gust of wind, the mirror shattered. Wings stirred in the night. Power sparkled in his veins, an undeniable and perhaps unquenchable lust—a fiery shadow like that which had consumed Minras . . .
The dragonet glanced up with a scowl. Deva shifted in his arms. “No,” she whispered, “it was only a peacock crying, and the priests singing a hymn.” Her body moved against his, thawing his perceptions.
But wings, he had heard wings. He turned and saw a man standing with a little boy a few paces away. Fool indeed! It was Rajinder, a hooded shape stirring upon his upraised arm. Harus, the benign falcon god, sitting upon the wrist of the heir of Ferangipur.
“Forgive me, Gard-ji,” said Rajinder. “But my son, Narayan, would not go to sleep until he had seen you. His ayah told him rather too much of the day’s events.”
Gard released Deva and shoved the giggling dragonet down into the most inaccessible part of his stomach. “Rajinder-ji,” he responded politely. “I would be delighted to meet your son.”
The boy was about five, he saw, with the luminous eyes of his mother and something of his father’s intelligence in the line of forehead and mouth. He gazed up at the magician soberly, only bowing when his father nudged him.
Gard dropped a sugared almond down his sleeve and pulled it from the boy’s miniature but meticulously wound turban. “This,” he confided, “is a magic sleeping nut. If you eat it right now and then run to your ayah, you will dream of—” he remembered the toys in Rajinder’s chamber, “—horses with the wings of swans, sweeping through the clouds, drawing your chariot of sapphire and silver.”
The little face stared upward. A hand lifted, snatched the almond, popped it between flashing white teeth. “Thank you, wizard Nazib,” Narayan whispered, and hurried away to where a sari-clad shape hovered in the doorway.
Another light spatter of wings, doves circling above the palace dome. Rajinder lifted the falcon, raised his hand to its hood, then stopped. The doves landed cooing on the roof. Rajinder lowered his arm, his fingertips stroking the soft feathers of the falcon’s breast. “It is too lovely a night to kill anything.”
“Even me?” Gard asked.
“Especially you,” said the prince with a similarly flashing smile. And he added, “You have an Imparluzi accent. Have you by any chance encountered my sister Sumitra, the first wife of the Emperor?”
Deva cleared her throat. The letter lay crinkling gently next to Gard’s heart. “I have seen her at ceremonies, Nazib. A beautiful woman, with beautiful children, the pride of her husband’s eye—I, er, would imagine.”
“Good, good,” replied Rajinder. “I am very pleased for her, even though I miss her.”
Shouts and ululations echoed from the riverbank, repeated in diminishing waves of sound across the water. Dancing figures began to throw brands from the bonfires into the stream. Each flame left a glistening trail through the air and then winked out in the broad dark indifference of the Mohan.
“The ceremony of light and darkness,” said Deva.
Gard shivered. “Is the darkness meant to win, then?”
“No, no,” Rajinder said. “It has something to do with the water of life absorbing our tribulations. The immutable cycle of life and death. The defeat of Raman by all-embracing Hurmazi, or the submission of Saavedra to the will of Vaiswanara. Actually,” he confided, “I think the theological hairsplitting came later, and the priests and acolytes simply enjoy throwing burning sticks into the water”
“You are probably right,” agreed Gard. Yes, he did like Rajinder. Deva muttered something about secular impertinence, but it was mercifully brief. In the depths of Gard’s belly the dragonet settled down, paws concealed under its belly, wings furled, eyes silver needles.
The Ferangi prince leaned over the parapet, his profile against the light of the fires not unlike the falcon’s. He inspected the sentries gathered on a walkway below. The men were gossiping and spitting, oblivious to the ceremony beneath or the face peering at them from above. “My father had to decree recently that the men be allowed only two blankets apiece while on guard. Do you suppose there is such a thing as being too civilized?” His expression was suddenly heavy, pulled down like shoulders bowed under a yoke.
If Andrion’s centurions found a legionary on guard with any blankets at all, the retribution was swift and effective. “Perhaps,” Gard said noncommittally, nudging a pebble with his toe.
Rajinder shook himself, regaining his poise. “But I am keeping you from your rest.”
“I am yours to direct, Nazib-ji.”
“I rather doubt that. And call me Raj.”
Gard grinned and bowed as gracefully as he could. “Thank you, Raj. For more than you shall ever know.”
If nonplused at that remark, the prince was too well-bred to show it. He made a courtly bow over Deva’s hand—even he did not recognize her, Gard noted—and vanished into the darkness.
A fever bird, startled, set up a yammering cry. The sound thudded through Gard’s head like the clangor of the morning bell at Dhan Bagrat; fever, fever, fire and foolishness. The dragonet was asleep. The pentacle, wings and all, was inert. “I am tired,” he admitted. “Come to bed, Deva.”
Once in their own room she pointedly shot the bolt on the door before reaching into her bundle for her fortune-telling bones, setting the solitary candle on the floor, and crouching down beside it. The dried and painted bones clattered across the marble and she frowned.
“What are you doing?” Gard asked.
“I wonder how long it will be before I arrive in Apsurakand.”
“Oh, by the teeth of Harus . . .”
“Falcons do not have teeth,” Deva said equably. Gard pulled her up, spun her about and dumped her on the bed. The sudden movement made the candle sputter and go out. Smoke curled wraithlike into the twilit room. The abandoned bones were small lumps marring the smoothness of the stone floor. Perhaps they shifted in the corner of Gard’s eye, making new patterns.
He floundered through the material of Deva’s sari, only to discover that her thighs were ice-cold from sitting on the marble. He quailed from exploring farther. Levering himself above her, he covered her body with his own and lay quietly, hoping for warmth. Her breath fanned his ear, her soft cheek lay against his bearded one, her arms twined around his shoulders. “It will be all right,” she murmured.
“And why should it not be all right?” he demanded testily. The faint but evocative voice of the fever bird continued, fever, fever, fire.
The billows of Deva’s body went hard beneath him. The light of her eyes, the purest sapphire, fell perceptibly upon his mind. “They named you ‘Kundaraja’. It is only a minor attribute of Vaiswanara, but it means, Gard, ‘Lord of the Dance’.”
Like a stone thrown down a well, his heart plummeted into his belly, crashed with a hollow thud into memory and sent up a wave of horror that mounted into his throat and choked him. Lord of the Dance. A title of Eldrafel, King of Minras, the son of a demon. Who had succumbed to the temptation of power.
He heard his own voice saying. We are more likely to start . . . The dragonet twitched in the throes of nightmare.
Gard had no strength left to seek reassurance in Deva’s body; not surprising, that he had been unmanned by his own magic. He raised his head with a long shuddering sigh and set his lips against the sapphire in her nose. The stone sizzled against his mouth.
He had no strength left to seek reassurance in Deva’s magic. He could only cling to her like an ordinary mortal, flesh-weak, bone-weary, passion drained, as she rocked him like a child.
Even in his sleep he could hear the stealthy skipping and sliding of the fortune-telling bones.
Chapter Twelve
He ran, gasping and sliding upon the slick marble. The beast followed him. Not that he could see it now, any more than he ever could, but he knew it was there. Its breath, foul with sulfur and decayed flesh, lashed the back of his neck. Its great wings flapped with a martial drumroll, deafening him.
He ran. But the corridors through which he struggled were white and featureless. They twisted like entrails spread across an altar draped with sickly pale camellias, and he was lost . . .
Gard! It was a silent call thrown from one mind to another, like a rope thrown to a struggling sailor.
Gard! His hands scrabbled for purchase on something paradoxically both firm and yielding. The vision of pallid terror dwindled behind him, the breath of the beast whistled past his ear and died, the reek of putrefaction dissipated in a sweet jasmine breeze.
“Gard,” said Deva. “You are
dreaming again.”
He was, he discovered, clasping her naked body in his arms. That was certainly pleasant. But whether it was compensation for the nightmares that had become more and more insistent during the month since they had arrived in Ferangipur, since he had acknowledged his powers, he could not say.
The dragonet peeked warily from the shelter of its wings. Only its own wings, not those of bats or falcons or doves or all the infernal avian appendages that followed after Gard like a smoke trail from a burning pyre. He licked his lips. He was growing sick and tired of the constant stickiness of honey in his mouth. Not surprising, that the sweetness of power had turned so quickly rancid.
“Perhaps if we went on to Apsurakand,” Deva suggested somewhat too diffidently, “we would outrun your visions.”
So she knew about the journey Jamshid had proposed for Vijay and the tame wizard Gard. It might be a month, depending on how long the embassy lasted, before he held her again.
She was a polished mahogany idol against the pale linen of the bedclothes, every curve dusted with rosy dawn. Her hair streamed over them both, black silken strands binding them together . . . He blinked. No, just hair. Just a face unsurpassed in loveliness, just eyes as deep as the sea where sailors drowned.
She gifted him with her beauty to help erase his dream, even as she let him know that beauty slipped maddeningly from her grasp. Just like a woman; she assumed that her own vulnerabilities reimbursed the intrusion into his. No wonder she could no longer dispel his dreams.
The dragonet emerged from the cloak of its wings, stretched, yawned, scratched one ear with a hind paw. Its gray eyes were altogether too perceptive, too amused.
Gard pulled away from Deva and sat on the edge of the bed. Let her win him for a change. There was no longer any challenge in winning her. There was no longer any challenge in winning Ferangipur.
Surely her smile faltered. No, it grew indulgent. She draped herself over his back. Tiny kisses danced across his cheek and jaw.
Wings of Power Page 15
