But Menelik’s wife, Persis, stood checked by her women as she strained forward. Her hair straggled across her damp forehead, her eyes stared, her features were contorted with horror. Gone was that authority only partly eclipsed by feminine docility; her armor of pride had been stripped away as surely as soldiers strip the bodies of the dead, brutally exposing the mortality of the flesh.
Gard shuddered, cold fingers tracing patterns upon his spine, hearing Tarek’s voice, even though in his image the man’s lips did not move. “You ask for my advice, Nazib-ji? But I am only a poor servant of the god, and my divinations depend upon his generosity.” The voice was a blade scraping a whetstone. “So great was the insult to Hurmazi, that a woman given in his rites should be kidnapped and contaminated by heresy, that he sulks in his palace. He will not release the monsoon until his rites have been purified. By giving him a pure woman to be his wife.”
As if Hurmazi did not already have enough wives . . . Persis struggled. Menelik shot an exasperated scowl at her. The gathered priests began a chant that drowned out her cry. Something small and slender, like a willow branch, swayed in their midst.
The dragonet plummeted into Gard’s bowels, its wings a bilious green. Zoe. Persis’s and Menelik’s daughter. Clad in the white gown and waxy camellia garland of sacrifice. Her small face was more puzzled than frightened, her eyes swimming unfocused from her father and her uncle to her mother. They have drugged her, Gard thought. They are going to kill her. He started to leap up.
And stopped. Whether this was happening now, or had happened already, or would happen soon, he could not intervene. For someone so powerful, he was maddeningly powerless . . . He slumped, his fists clenched upon his knees, the dragonet flailing helplessly in his gut.
He could not escape. He stood just at Tarek’s elbow, the wizard’s wolfish profile framing the scene. He saw Bhai among the priests, swinging his censer dreamily. He saw Jofar behind Menelik, armor gleaming, expression set. Perhaps some misgiving hid querulously behind that rigid face; perhaps, conquered by faith, none did.
Menelik hissed to Persis’ hoarse protests, “Be quiet, woman! I have a son now, who will bring glory to the Alliance—no thanks to you. I no longer need a daughter to bargain with. I no longer need to win allies upon earth, but in heaven. And Hurmazi will not demand a dowry.”
The bride of the god. Gard scowled. Tarek remained grim, frost gathering upon the crags of his face. Did he genuinely believe Hurmazi demanded this child for his pleasure? Or was it Menelik who used the prophecy to impress his followers with the strength of his resolve and to strike a particularly nasty blow at his ambitious wife?
Bhai flourished a tiny silver scythe, his face twisting in malign glee. The priests dragged Zoe into the dark, smoke-filled interior of the temple, her tiny feet jouncing like those of a doll over the sill.
Menelik and Shikar followed, jostling for precedence. Jofar paced behind, looking into the middle distance as if only his body were present. Persis broke away from her attendants and darted toward the doorway, only to have the huge wooden panels slammed in her face. Tarek, oddly enough, remained outside. For just a moment something twisted in the depths of his stony eyes, casting an ominous shadow across his face. His aura snapped faintly around his shoulders and then faded.
Remorse? Gard wondered. Or satisfaction? He laid his hand on his pentacle and muttered a garbled prayer for the dead. The dragonet struggled to be free of consciousness, wings beating, sharp teeth glinting.
The temple of Hurmazi reverberated with the chanting of the priests, louder and louder, thudding like a drumbeat. And suddenly the chant stopped. The silence thickened, shrouding Apsurakand and the waiting crowd. It was broken only by a pitiful mewling sound that Gard, after a moment, realized came from Persis. The women released her. Grasping herself as if broken, tears flooding her cheeks, she staggered off down the street with no more majesty than an old ragpicker and disappeared into an alley.
A faint moan stirred the watching Apsuri. Gard’s flesh crawled as if touched with Bhai’s sickle, and the scar on his arm ached. His vision dwindled into nothingness; he was in the drought-devastated garden, alone. Deva? he called silently. Gods, demons—Deva!
She was hesitating upon the steps of Vaiswanara’s temple, looking narrowly across the maidan, toward the gates of the city. She thought she recognized someone but was not quite sure.
He sat back with a groan. I stole Yasmine, true, but I am not stalling the monsoon—poor innocent Zoe, of all the people involved in this farce the least guilty. The dragonet sank down, ears listless, wings slack, great blue-gray eyes starred with tears. Who was more capricious and cruel, god or man? The gods used men as pawns, and men blamed the gods for their own callousness and greed—perhaps the gods were only distorted reflections of man’s desire . . .
Shakhmi, shakhmi. Gard’s spine wriggled. The dragonet jumped suddenly to its feet, bouncing off his heart. His eyes flew open. There, standing before him, in what passed for reality and not in the murky verities of his own mind, was Senmut. Deva stood at his side, smiling wickedly and beatifically at once. No wonder she had recognized the old monk. They had both claimed their portions of Gard’s flesh, mind, and soul.
“Hail, mighty wizard,” said Senmut with a smile that was too toothy to be beatific.
Gard clambered to his feet. His little daemon pressed against his rib cage, wagging its tail in greeting. “Hail, O my conscience,” he responded. “Have you come to see how I have profited without your guiding hand? Or are you curious about what crimes your brother Bhai is committing?”
Deva glanced brightly from man to man, like a spectator at a pulkashi match. Senmut’s thick brows clashed. “Mind your own business, boy.”
“Still a boy?” Gard did not wait for an answer. “No, Senmut, it is my business now. I bloody well asked for it.”
The monk looked long and hard at him from the thicket of his face. Gard sensed his thought reaching, stroking his . . . No, Senmut could not read him anymore. That privilege was Deva’s.
The old man’s gray eyes closed and opened again; for just a moment they were those of a hunted animal. But you are the teacher, Gard wanted to cry. You woke this power in me, power that attract predators like the fluttering wings of a wounded pigeon . . .
What if, he wondered suddenly, Senmut had only the most rudimentary power? What if the pupil had begun to outstrip the teacher long ago?
Senmut winked and summoned a smile. We all need our illusions, boy. Be courteous to an old man, and let me keep mine.
While mine are dashed to bits? Gard embraced his mentor, inhaling the memory of dust and beans and peace. Unable to tell whether the old man was supporting him or vice versa, he wrapped his other arm comfortably around Deva and took Senmut to meet the Ferangi. The dragonet, slightly cross-eyed, groomed the tip of its tail and purred.
* * * * *
Gard stood draped over both Deva and the damp stone of the parapet. They were here at last. Strange, that that was actually a relief.
Watery sunshine gleamed off the puddled farmland as if torches surrounded the city. The turbulent waters of the Mohan, licking almost to the walls, were too rough and muddy to reflect any light. But the sail of the ship rounding the northern curve of the river shone for a moment like amber in the setting sun. Then the sail fell, and the ship docked at the Allianzi encampment, dun-colored tents, crimson banners and soldiers festering on a ridge of high land just beyond bow-shot.
Blue-black cloud boiled up and consumed the sun. Egrets spattered in blinding white motes across the face of the storm. A faint rumble lingered in the air, either of thunder or of chariot wheels. The odor of mud and weeds hung as heavy as Apsuri incense in Gard’s nostrils.
Hurmazi, he reflected cynically, must have found poor Zoe a toothsome morsel indeed. Although why the god of the Alliance, upon receiving a sacrifice from the Apsurakand, would bother to send rain to Ferangipur . . .
“Because,” said Deva close beside him, “if Fer
angipur is defeated, Hurmazi will profit.”
“I wonder if there really are any gods,” muttered Gard.
“You yourself saw Hurmazi’s wives.”
“I wonder what I saw. Some illusion cast by Tarek to serve Menelik’s lust for war?”
“Saavedra,” she began, “the all-powerful, the all-seeing . . .”
“Deva,” grumbled Gard, “faith becomes credulity all too quickly.”
Her sea-deep blue eyes were, if not unfathomable, at least unplumbed. The dragonet lay, chin outstretched, wings draped fetchingly, as close to her lap as it could get and still remain Gard’s daemon. Gard would not have minded assuming that posture himself, his face buried in her cool tart embrace, despite her annoying certainty. But not now.
With a toss of his head he turned away. Below them, guards tapped their spear butts upon the battlements. Horned and armored Apsuri horsemen cavorted before the closed gates of the city. What an effort that had been for sweating Ferangi soldiers to shut gates that had not been closed for a generation!
Senmut hobbled up and down like an animal pacing in its cage. He held a long bamboo tube at each end of which was placed one of his glass lenses. Gard, allowed one brief glance through the contraption before Senmut’s gnarled hands snatched it back, had been amazed at how distant objects leaped closer—the sea that writhed drab and forlorn to the horizon, the clouds behind which the sulking moon lingered at the new, illuminating neither night nor day, the camp and the milling group of cavalry below.
The Apsuri exchanged genial insults with the guards upon the walls. Raindrops pocked the water of the river and pattered up the banks. Somehow the evening was both chilly and muggy at once; Gard’s body shuddered with goose flesh even as sweat oozed down his forehead. Deva leaned against his shoulder, eloquently silent. Senmut stopped dead by an embrasure in the wall.
The gates opened. A troop of Ferangi horsemen, their gilded armor dull in the half light, pranced splashing through the rills of rain. Vijay. Gard stiffened and the dragonet sat up, twitching an ear.
Rajinder rushed up to the wall and seized it as though it were Vijay’s throat. Srivastava hurried beside him, spectral in a dark sari, eyes burning.
A trumpet sounded. The Ferangi cavalry rushed forward. The Apsuri gathered itself in response. A shape looming behind them must be Jofar, his glorious shield a blotch of phosphorescence upon his arm. Lances clashed, horses squealed, men shouted.
The battling men were only indistinguishable shadows in the damp twilight. As one, Gard and Deva leaned forward, dragonet alert, pentacle and sapphire sparking, senses winnowing the haze. Raindrops steamed from them.
There he was, an ornate helmet with a bobbing plume in the midst of the fray. Maybe Vijay’s courage indicated a dim apprehension of his own role in this war. Maybe it was just foolhardiness. He shouted a wordless epithet. His horse either slipped on the mud or was dragged down. Vijay rolled clear. An Apsuri—not Jofar—bore down upon him.
Gard’s teeth clenched so tightly his jaw ached. His eyes extended from their sockets, his fingers left prints upon the stone. The dragonet danced across his bones. Deva’s body was as steady as a drawn blade in his grasp. Power and passion . . . The dragonet writhed. Gard’s thought wrenched with an expulsive thrust. An imperative struck the field. The Apsuri warrior crashed against an invisible barrier. His horse reared and he fought for control.
Vijay clambered up behind one of his companions. Gard released the Apsuri horse. The end of Deva’s sari fluttered across his face. Just a trick, he told himself. Nothing that would stop the war.
Amid the clamor of the skirmish came a voice, Senmut spitting curses more voluble than any Gard had heard since his days among legionaries. The dragonet’s tail thrummed his spine in the rhythm of the words, and yet the words themselves were powerless.
Two robed figures whisked behind the clashing horsemen. Gard shot a tendril of his thought toward them. The tendril snapped back and slashed his mind like a whip. The dragonet yelped. Gard gasped and Deva’s hands caught him as he recoiled. Tarek. And, no doubt . . .
A sudden flare of light silhouetted the struggling figures. Rajinder and Srivastava leaped back. Deva emitted a cry, less of astonishment than of anger. The daemon ducked. Lightning? But it had come from the ground, not the sky. Only Gard’s eyes were dazzled, not the wings of the pentacle; it was a concrete blast, not the dissipation of a spell. A thud echoed from the walls and went rolling across the river. It was Bhai’s mysterious powder.
“Bhai?” Deva repeated. “Senmut’s brother?”
After the stroke of brilliance the twilight seemed midnight dark. Four sprawled shapes upon the mud were Ferangi horses and riders. The others, Vijay standing rearguard, tumbled in disarray back to the gates. The huge portal slammed behind them.
“Look,” said Deva. Jofar stood below the walls. His face, illuminated by the glaucous light of his shield, was a pale oval peering upward. His hand waved his sword in gestures less military than lyrical. Did Jofar hope for Srivastava’s presence upon the parapet? Did he resent her refusal of his marriage offer, or did he hope for a change of heart? But Gard knew that the Shah had no intention of letting his only son marry a Ferangi; he used Jofar’s blunt trust as he used Shikar’s acerbity as he used Yasmine’s beauty as he used the name of the god as he used Tarek’s and Bhai’s disparate skills. Unless Tarek was using Menelik . . .
His head spinning, the dragonet muttering dyspeptically, Gard watched as the robed figures swept like bats down upon Jofar. Their shapes blanked out face and shield and shooed him away as too important an actor to be wasted in the prologue.
Sheets of rain blotted out the churned mud, the twitching figures, the prowling Apsuri. Raj and Srivastava, Gard and Deva, swam through rain as warm as a soaking bath, as cool as sea spray, toward the palace. The gathering darkness muted the white dome, and the confectionery porticoes and railings seemed chewed and bedraggled.
Senmut still stood by the parapet, hands outstretched toward—his brother Bhai, thought Gard, whose cleverness won the first skirmish for the Apsuri. Cleverness learned, probably, to spite his own lack of magic talent and his brother’s skills.
They went inside, down marble corridors as wan as the ghostly passages in his new nightmare, to the audience hall. Gard scooped matted strands of hair off his forehead. Deva smoothed the folds of her sari; if she were chilled, she steadfastly refused to shiver. The dragonet tucked its wings primly about its toes.
The lights in the vast chamber were garish but ineffectual against the streaming darkness outside. The faces of the courtiers were even more featureless than usual, quick sketches of humanity, plans left upon the floor of some celestial workshop, not real souls.
A muddy but unchastened Vijay stamped about before the khaddi, defending himself in gusts of rhetoric. He held his helmet under his arm and the short strands of his hair stirred upon his neck.
Rajinder watched him, stonily silent. Srivastava sat at her father’s feet, enveloped in resentful gloom. Gard warily sieved the room with his thought, wondering if the spirit of the girl Zoe haunted them all. But she had been too young, too weak, to haunt anything but memory.
Behind the zenana screen Ladhani sat holding Narayan in her lap, her expression not unlike that when she had seen him threatened by the cobra. Beside her, Yasmine sat twirling a strand of her golden hair, stroking her arms, inspecting her nails, twining her legs beneath the embroidered folds of her sari. Her beauty had been somewhat mildewed by the change of climates both geographical and emotional; her mouth was no longer as soft, her cheeks no longer bloomed so rosily, her intelligence groped along its frontier but found no border crossing.
Deva should have been behind the screen. But surely the chamberlains had matters other than protocol on their minds tonight. Gard seated her before the blatant gleam of the saltcellar.
Vijay sputtered out. Raj’s turban nodded, but his face said nothing, his eyes like shuttered windows in a blank wall. Jamshid glanced befuddl
ed from son to son. Bogatyl skulked ponderously along the rim of light.
Gard submitted with as good a grace as possible to Rajinder’s nightly questioning: How many now in the Allianzi camp? Are they healthy? Do they still bow to Menelik? What is Shikar’s mood? Has he quarreled with the shah? Do their respective soldiers move as one?
The dragonet made an exasperated gesture. Trying to sense the enemy camp was like searching for a black cat at night; probably any information that Tarek did not bother to conceal was useless. Unless Tarek intended for him to know some things—if he knew Gard knew what he knew but did not care, then . . . The equation guttered like a spent candle. Gard would have spat frustration but he was in too polite a company to spit.
Deva’s thought wafted through his. Yes, he told her in mute testiness, I am able to sense the concoctions of evil herbs that Bhai is brewing. When the battle is joined, the Allianzi will have every advantage—free movement, greater numbers, warriors drugged into mindless frenzy. Should I tell Raj and make his nightmares even worse?
Deva subsided. Vijay snorted, “Talk, it is only talk, now is the time for action.”
“Indeed,” said Rajinder dryly.
Jamshid mumbled something about a pitched battle, the shining armor of the Ferangi, painted elephants, Allaudin and his young sons fleeing on stolen jackasses. Srivastava gazed dolefully into the middle distance.
With a cordial if distracted nod Raj dismissed Gard. Servants placed platters of olives and pistachios, currants and candied chestnuts on the tables, shoving aside bowls of rice, plates of sliced duckling, trays of jellied eel. Death, then dinner. The Ferangi concept of wartime rations.
Deva chose a morsel of bread, placed one crumb between her lips, pulled the rest apart and rolled it into pellets. Bogatyl leaned over her to sprinkle salt upon a mound of cracked wheat, his arm brushing her shoulder. She twisted away. Turning, Bogatyl came face to face with Gard’s belligerent look. He paused only a moment; then his mouth shivered in a sneer and he carried the dish to Jamshid.
Wings of Power Page 25
