Wings of Power

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  At least, Gard moaned, Vijay’s eyes were closed. Pathetic man, gored by the horns of his own folly. Who to blame? Poor docile Yasmine? Vijay’s loneliness? My own ambition? But my ambitions were so modest . . .

  The roach that was Gard slumped against the stone as if squashed by a great boot. He was tired. So tired. The flea that was the dragonet was a spiky ball in his gut, wings furled tightly, immobile. The mote of gold that was the pentacle was inert.

  Tarek stood in the maidan, amid heaps of booty—teak and ebony furniture, bales of silk, sacks of spices, vials of aromatic oils, piles of gold, jasper and lapis. And women—Srivastava sat next to Ladhani, saris pulled around faces so cold as to be catatonic.

  Gard moaned again. The sorcerer appraised Deva, who stood before him with arms crossed and head tilted. With his forefinger he stroked her cheek. “Will you add incest to your other crimes?” she asked tartly.

  He smiled that uncanny vulpine smile. “Oh no, my daughter, I think not. I have other plans for you.” His stony eyes turned to inspect the devastated city, dispassionately, as if to say, “sorry, nothing personal.”

  And he will not even quiz Deva about where I am? Why should he? My power is so drained that he can no longer sense me, and no longer cares. Gard gulped, his tiny cockroach shape quivering. Everything was gone. Men, women, and children were roped together as slaves; bloody bodies lay in drifts along the maidan; the gilded temple of Vaiswanara, the child’s toy of a palace, the fine ashlar blocks of the city wall and the sky-defying tower, all were piles of rubble burping smoke and flame. Love and hope and even anger, all wasted.

  No. Rajinder and Narayan were still alive. They sat side by side in a dark hole beneath the ruins of everything they had known. Their faces were different versions of the same one, silent and resolute. It was Senmut who paced up and down on the muddy floor, muttering imprecations, prayers, magical formulae—Gard, what shall we do now? Gard?

  Cling to anger, at least, Gard screamed silently. Cling to anger.

  The clouds stilled themselves, shredded, and blew away in a blast of sea-tanged cold wind. It was noon. The waxing moon had not yet risen. The clarity of the autumn sunlight was a jeer.

  I did it, Gard told himself. I murdered an entire kingdom, just as my father did. And I did not even intend to. Hard to believe that a body as small as a roach’s could hurt so badly. But he was no longer a roach. He lay against the pedestal of Harus’s statue as against Deva’s body, arms twined tightly about himself.

  Noon, afternoon, evening. Footsteps passed the door of the shrine but no one entered. Hoofbeats raced up and down the maidan, cartwheels creaked, officers shouted orders. The stench of burning flesh stained the cold air.

  Gard’s face was wet. He was crying. He could not remember the last time he had cried. As an infant, perhaps, long years ago in the evil reek of Minras. But it was not sulfur he smelled now, not the reek of evil, but incense. Patchouli and jasmine, a woman’s perfume, Deva’s scent. He saw women with wide faience collars. The temple of Saavedra in Apsurakand. Deva, why haunt me with this now? Why?

  The woman who turned and peered into his waking dream was not Deva but Persis, Menelik’s spurned wife, her dark eyes simmering with madness.

  Apsurakand. Saavedra. The vision faded. Gard wiped the tears furrowing his cheeks. “If I have to go alone to Apsurakand, I will. If I have to fight Menelik alone I will. Rajinder will have his inheritance if I have to spit in the faces of the gods themselves! By all the wings of power, I swear!”

  The dragonet laughed derisively in his belly. Too weak and tired even to stand up, and you swear to cancel out a war. Spare me your arrogance.

  Gard laid his hand upon the pentacle on his breast. Too tired, yes, to grasp it. But still the gold wings trembled to his touch, power straining toward redemption.

  The sun crept down the western sky. Ferangipur’s dying embers spread upon the air rich gusts of wealth.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The stream burbled cheerfully along its conduit, almost concealed among frills of fern and hyssop. The stonework was old, the algae-matted blocks hollowed by generations of running water. “Are you sure?” Gard asked Senmut.

  Sunlight danced with shadow upon the surface of the stream. Somewhat less light sparked in the old monk’s gray eyes. “When was the last time you saw water run uphill, boy? Many of these old cities have water tunnels—even Iksandarun. You told me so yourself. This conduit has to lead into the city.”

  And where else? Gard asked himself. He peered through a tangle of acacia toward the beetling walls of Apsurakand, much as his diminutive daemon peeked between his ribs. Yes, the city lay slightly below them, beyond gold and brown strips of farmland punctuated by the clustered mounds of tombs.

  Senmut shoved aside a cascade of bare, ruined honeysuckle. “There. The entrance to the water tunnel.”

  Gard frowned at the man-sized crevice, edged by cut rock and capped with a slightly tipsy keystone. It was a fissure of darkness, emitting a chill and musty breath that raised goose flesh on the back of his neck. Nightmare, come to seize him at last . . .

  The dragonet shrugged. The incessant keening of the pentacle, a sound that emanated less from the amulet itself than from the hollow where his skull met his spine, did not change tone. The cave might be dark and damp and cold, but it was not evil.

  Senmut, clutching the forked ends of a stick, started off through the honeysuckle. The stick waggled, pulling him onward. “Yes,” he called over his shoulder. “The water continues underground, like so.” He stepped across a boulder which, Gard realized, was the toppled and weathered drum of a column. This stony outcropping and the spring in its flank must once have been a shrine. To whom? Saavedra?

  Gard turned his back upon the cave and ignored the itch between his shoulders. The still, cool air of the glade held only a faint resonance of power. If Saavedra had lived here, she was long gone. To greener pastures in the city, and in the minds of women.

  The dragonet shifted irascibly in his gut. The glade where he and Vijay had encountered Hurmazi’s wives had reeked of occult power—whether divine or human he had never decided. Since that gray and smeared morning twenty days ago when he had waked on the floor of Harus’ shrine, he had dreamed repeatedly of the goddess Kyphasia’s tinkling laughter, so like Yasmine’s. He had dreamed of Yasmine herself, a petulant wraith of the lush and rosy girl Gard had seduced in Muktardagh, who tolerated her husband’s physical attentions with icy apathy, just as Srivastava endured Menelik’s.

  He had dreamed of Srivastava. The more the Shah raged at her, daring her to fight him so that he could assert himself even more contemptuously over her, the frostier she became. Frustrated, he was already tiring of his lewd sport with her, but would not give in to Shikar’s entreaties to have her for himself. “She is mine, spoils of war,” the Shah bellowed at his brother. “She will bear me sons to replace Jofar.”

  Senmut crashed through the underbrush, muttering to himself. A coppersmith bird hammered away in the distance. Gard paced the banks of the spring that fed the conduit. A nasty jest, that he had waked in the shrine to find his powers fully replenished. A blessing.

  With diabolical energy he had freed Senmut, Rajinder, and Narayan, levitating the charred stones that had sealed their cellar. He had helped to organize the few survivors. He had befuddled the Apsuri garrison with ghostly apparitions so that they hunkered on the riverbank and allowed those ragged figures who built hovels upon the ruins of the city to do so in peace.

  He had dreamed of Ladhani, and was able to tell an almost recovered Raj that she worked as a laundress for the temple district in Apsurakand, and while she had been pawed about, Menelik had not allowed any man to use her. Had she been made a prostitute in the bazaar, Rajinder would still have wanted his wife back. He agreed that Gard should go to Apsurakand to finish what he had begun—where? On Minras, in Iksandarun, in Ferangipur itself? Gard was not sure even Rajinder would have dared to disagree with him, not now. Not when he
dreamed of Deva.

  He kicked viciously at a rock that rolled over and became the smooth, blind face of an archaic statue. Sometimes he saw Deva with Menelik’s spurned wife, Persis, who dared to light candles of purple and indigo and black before the basin of Saavedra. The woman’s eyes burned like dark tapers when they looked at Deva, seeing not a mature woman but a girl, her daughter Zoe, sacrificed to the god, the monsoon, the war. She hovered solicitously, making sure the sweep of Deva’s sari did not catch the flames.

  Deva’s eyes were lapis lazuli, reflecting the tiny fires leaping before them, waiting, still waiting. No, Tarek had not touched her; he had defended her from Shikar’s grasp— “I have other plans for you,” he had said to her . . .

  Tarek, too, waited in Apsurakand. For the fulfillment of his plots.

  “All right,” said Senmut at Gard’s elbow. “I have found it.”

  He started violently, the dragonet somersaulting into his breastbone.

  “A water tunnel feeds the baths you told me about, and probably the wells also. You would rather go that way than try to sneak in as beggars?”

  The pentacle trilled. Gard smiled humorlessly. “Tarek is in Apsurakand. He thinks my powers are spent. I shall show him how I spend my powers.” A gesture, and a stalk of vervain shriveled into dust.

  “So in your pride you go into Apsurakand single-handed?”

  “Seen any Ferangi armies lately?” And, a moment later, “I have you, I am not single-handed.” Faces swam in the lambent depths of the spring—Jofar, Vijay, Jamshid. How strange, to dream of souls other than his own.

  Gard made an about face and contemplated the honeysuckle vines swaying over the opening to the water tunnel as if some great beast exhaled fetid air. Scowling, he settled his turban upon his head, rubbed mud into his beard to darken it and said, “Let us go now, before I have time to think.”

  “You intend to use your temper as a torch, boy? Bring me some cattails. Over there.” Senmut lit the end of the plant with his glass lens. It made a feeble, smoky flame, almost eclipsed in the daylight. He struggled to his feet and grasped his walking stick. “Now we can go.”

  Gard took off his boots and tucked them behind his sash with his legionary’s sword, which he had found unscathed in the rubble of his and Deva’s room. He rolled down his sleeves, covering the cross of Saavedra cut into his arm. All right, he said to the cocked ear of the goddess. Now is your chance to write an affecting epilogue, turning tragedy into farce. He scooped the vines away from the opening and stepped into the stream. The water chuckled, leaving cold kisses upon his toes.

  But I would have settled for a romance! he shouted in wistful anger, and collided with the low ceiling of the tunnel.

  “Hardest head I have ever seen,” said Senmut at his back.

  Gard growled something, rubbed his forehead, forced his feet to carry him into darkness. The shadows were only disturbed, not dispelled, by the guttering light of Senmut’s makeshift torch. The passage was barely tall enough for him to walk upright; the damp roof brushed his hair. A time or two he had to turn sideways to slip through a particularly narrow cleft. The water numbed his feet so that he stumbled over rocky projections and Senmut stumbled against him, singeing his shirt with his cattail. The last vestige of daylight wasted and died. The dank odor of the underworld clogged his nose and throat.

  His shoulders shivered, his senses trembled. The splashing of their steps was uncannily loud in the silence. Senmut’s breath was hot on the back of his neck—he stopped and whirled. The light of the cattail painted the monk’s hirsute face with black and yellow. His eyes glittered in the underbrush of his beard. “Yes?”

  With a muttered curse, Gard started up again. The dragonet kneaded his heart. The passageway opened into a cavern. Its walls were myriad shades of gray, the ceiling impenetrable velvet blackness. The clammy air teased the sweat beaded on Gard’s forehead into gelid drops of mud. Doggedly he lifted one foot, and the other. The water splashed in cold banality around his ankles—follow the water—cool spring, warm baths, purification . . .

  Senmut’s cattail went out. Gard stopped dead. But he could still see. The cave danced in the corners of his eyes, swirling into black and gray banners like monsoon clouds. That breath, that wheezing breath—that was his own. The dragonet knotted his viscera so that he could hardly walk . . . He was not walking. He started again—follow the water—steps splashed behind him. If it was not Senmut, he did not want to know.

  Suddenly, with a thousand chittering cries, the ceiling dropped. Constellations of red sparks rocketed through the darkness, leaving glowing trails—eyes, mocking eyes, watched him. Leathery wings slapped his face and chest. The dragonet ducked, its own wings flailing. Gard screamed. His cry echoed into smothering black streaked with red fire and died.

  A talon seized his shoulder and bit, hard. “Bats, boy. What do you expect in a cavern? Shut up and go on!”

  With a sound altogether too much like a whimper Gard stumbled forward, head down, hands raised. His eyes clouded—darkness, only darkness, only the icy water sucking the warmth, the life, from his flesh—hoofbeats following, following, and great wings beating the air . . .

  His pentacle sneezed against his breast. His thought detonated. He shouted, “I am sick and tired of this nightmare!” His voice rolled away down the cave and returned in crystalline clarity.

  The dragonet surged upward. Its wings unfurled in sheets of blue and violet, orange and gold. Its eyes blinked sapphire, like Deva’s. Gard jerked upright and his head hit Senmut’s nose. The old man yowled indignantly.

  Gard spread his fingers—no, no nightmare, not ever again—Tenebrio, you are dead and gone and forgotten. The dragonet peered ahead, frowned, and made an arcane gesture. Its little paws filled with light. Gard’s stomach filled with light. Sparks cascaded over his vision. Fire glowed from his fingertips, gathered in his hands, flared outward to fill the cavern with radiance. The pentacle blazed, sheathing his flesh, his senses, in light.

  The cave was the inside of a giant’s jewel box. Frozen rills of travertine draped one wall and hung in folds from the ceiling. Boulders of striped porphyry sparkled. The stream giggled over smooth rocks like fire opals, glinting red, green, blue. A tantalizing odor of bay leaves filled the air. In the laughter of the stream Gard heard the distant shouts of men.

  The cavern narrowed again, just ahead. “Well,” he told Senmut, “what are you waiting for? Come on!”

  The monk rolled his eyes. The dragonet flirted with its own wings. A brick wall constricted the stream. Gard nodded. With little smacking noises the bricks pulled apart and cascaded splashing and foaming into the water. Senmut and Gard eased through the aperture into a low corridor, where a series of pools sorted the stream into different conduits. A doorway softened by steam beckoned them to the left, into the shifting light of a huge domed room.

  “The bathhouse, I presume,” said Senmut.

  “Hmm,” Gard returned. There, right there, he and Vijay had played. How dare those Apsuri nobles laze about now, gossiping and drinking, when Vijay was dead?

  Gard took a towel from a nearby pile, dried his feet and slipped on his boots. He led Senmut around the periphery of the room, past a few men dozing upon stone benches, then out to the stumpy columns edging the portico. The sun was still high in a clear blue sky; they had spent barely an hour underground.

  In the bowels of his nightmare. It had at last become real, he had walked through it, and he wondered now what all the fuss had been about. He wanted to laugh, to cling to a column and whoop insanely as flecks of iridescence bubbled in his senses—being awake and alive, that was more terrible than any extinct god. He confined himself to a shake of his head, flicking away a burden. His little daemon smirked up at him. Of course, it grinned, and began to preen its wings with its little serpent tongue.

  Menelik’s palace squatted gaudily just ahead. A knot of laborers were building a platform on the sloping side of the temple of Hurmazi, beyond the maidan. Sentries s
tood at the gate of the city, lifting turbans and pulling the beards of everyone who sought admittance. Exchanging a significant look with Senmut, Gard sidled casually down the steps.

  The maidan was filled with concentric rings of people and soldiers. Vendors strolled about offering snacks. Children were hoisted onto parents’ shoulders. Several horned helmets glided out from the palace, followed by an elephant. “What is it?” Senmut said in Gard’s ear.

  Gard quelled the surge of his stomach. “An execution.”

  Shoved along by several spear points was the prisoner. His flesh was a sickly taupe, hanging loosely on his large frame as if he had been for some time in a dungeon deflating. It was Bogatyl, his eyes darting from side to side as the mosquitoes of old plots whined past his face.

  The dragonet in Gard’s gut sat up, its head shooting forward. Senmut sighed. “Menelik is cleaning his cupboards of witnesses.”

  The crowd went suddenly silent. A gibbering, pleading voice ricocheted off the sheer walls of the temple. The elephant trumpeted, soldiers shouted, the crowd cheered. Gard said hoarsely, “Bogatyl murdered Amathe; he raped Deva. I cannot feel too sympathetic.”

  “No,” said Senmut. What little of his complexion could be seen around his hair was artichoke green.

  The crowd dispersed, leaving a clot of Ferangi slaves to clean up the pitiful mess upon the ground. Gard scanned the faces. No Menelik, no Shikar; they had used Bogatyl and thrown him away like a bit of garbage. He sensed them both in a room of the palace, arguing over women and precedence and the wealth carried back from Ferangipur. “I have sons and you do not,” snarled Shikar. “If you will not make me your heir, make them.”

  “Certainly,” Menelik sneered. “And as soon as I named an heir, I would not survive a week.” They had been altogether too successful in their war; they no longer had a common enemy.