Wings of Power

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Senmut’s forefinger poked Gard’s ribs like a javelin. “Look.”

  If Gard had not had the old monk beside him he would have thought Senmut was walking across the maidan, robes fluttering, beard bristling, muttering to himself—no, Senmut could only hobble. “Bhai.”

  Senmut said nothing. His gray eyes glinted from an expression armored by hatred. Chinked very faintly, very briefly by regret . . . Gard blinked. He might not have seen the regret. He led Senmut into the crowded maidan.

  Down this street, past the stolid flanks of Hurmazi’s temple—they dodged a timber falling from the construction site. The god no doubt sat smugly upon his throne, reigning over the world while Raman gnawed his spite in the basement, while Vaiswanara sulked in the ruins of Ferangipur and Saavedra sat serenely waiting . . . I am coming, Gard thought testily. Down that alley, twist, turn like dancing feet, Senmut huffing to keep up. The temple of Saavedra lay before them.

  It was even shabbier than Gard remembered. The tumbled gardens looked as if they had not been weeded in years, and now, in the autumn, bush and stalk and naked branch were all varying shades of brown.

  Or perhaps the temple was threadbare by comparison with the refined figure standing in the portico. Tarek looked critically up at a peeling bit of fresco, smiled with his teeth, not his eyes, and loped down the steps. If he had had a cloak, he might have swirled it dashingly about his shoulders; as it was, his boots left whorls of dust hanging like sprinkles of gold in the air. The dragonet’s hackles rippled. The pentacle hummed against Gard’s chest, a firm hand pushing him back, containing his aura. He visualized himself as something insignificant, a pomegranate peel, and Senmut a bit of straw.

  Gard waited until the unhurried click of footsteps had died away before daring to breathe. “Insufferable arrogance,” he snapped. “You would think he was in command of the Mohan.”

  “I daresay,” said Senmut, “that when his plots are fulfilled he will be. That is what he is buying for Raman, or Raman for him, with blood.”

  “Or does he dare even to use the gods?” Gard could see Tarek sitting upon the stone khaddi of Apsurakand, Bhai crouching at his feet, wearing a studded collar and a leash. The Rajah, the Padishah, would contemplate the nesting cities of the Mohan with eyes that pierced like flint arrowheads, with a smile of chilling maturity; blood buys wealth and power, what else is new?

  In a sweetly scented breeze the temple wavered like the concealing end of a sari fluttering to reveal a beautiful face beneath. Gard saw fluted marble columns and friezes painted in colors so bright they breathed. He saw tiles glistening with constellations of jewels. He saw women, all of them lovelier than Yasmine could ever hope to be, beckoning from the porch.

  Well, yes, a woman did beckon from the porch. But she was unprepossessingly middle-aged, and the temple was still drab. Dyspepsia of the imagination, Gard told himself, shaking his head. The dragonet burped, eyes protruding. “What did you see?” Senmut asked as they hurried across the street, past the tottering gateposts, up the steps.

  “What am I, a conduit for supernatural information?”

  “If you cannot accept your role with gratitude, boy, then accept it with grace.”

  “Hah!” Gard replied. The interior corridor of the temple was dark, misty with incense and cooking bread. But Gard was not hungry for bread. The song of the pentacle became, not a single note but a chord in his mind.

  The escorting priestess threw open a pair of doors. Thousands of silver lamps blazed with white candles. Great silver urns overflowing with white lilies ringed a basin of the purest alabaster. Frescoes covered the walls, painted with delicate strokes of crimson and sapphire, emerald and gold. An armillary sphere hung from the ceiling, its arms sweeping silver scythes spotted with garnet and jasper, agate and onyx, representing the stars.

  Gard slitted his eyes. Every shape had a halo, a shadow of light, not darkness. The air itself shifted and sparkled with the smoke of the candles, trailing an odor of something no doubt hallucinogenic.

  “Ah,” Senmut muttered, squinting up at the model of the heavens, “yes, I thought so—the moon comes around so, and the sun reaches equinox . . .”

  In the midst of the splendor stood two figures. One was both cadaverous and commanding, like the ghost of a general refusing to relinquish his authority. Eyes like pools of black lacquer reflected the lamplight in a thousand unfocused points. “Persis-ji,” Gard murmured politely. The eyes continued their contemplation of infinity.

  The other figure . . . “Hello, my dear,” said Senmut. “You look well.”

  The dragonet climbed rampant up Gard’s chest, its tail coiled around his spine. His senses bulged. Never had he seen Deva so beautiful. She opened her exquisite mouth and a voice like a deep, rich shenai said, “Well, it is about time you got here.”

  “We walked,” Gard told her, and swept her into an embrace. Maybe Saavedra would strike him with lightning for taking such a liberty with one of her priestesses, but he did not care; Deva had come to him first. “You are here at last,” he said, his throat filled with the heady scent of patchouli.

  “I am here, yes, if not quite as I had intended. But prophecies have a way of working themselves out.”

  “Do they?” said Senmut. “Some would say that Jofar brought glory to Apsurakand—it is the kind of glory Apsurakand craved. But how are you, Deva, going to bring about its downfall?”

  “Not the downfall of Apsurakand,” Deva corrected, “but of Menelik.”

  She was warm and firm, a steady handhold in a reeling world. Her hands stroked Gard’s flesh, smoothed the fluffed wings of the dragonet, drew sparks from the pentacle. Her voice caressed his ear, but she was not speaking of him, she spoke of the damnable nets of fate and circumstance that entangled them all. “I see Menelik brooding upon his khaddi. He got what he wanted, the ruin of Ferangipur. And yet Jofar’s golden shield, hanging above the hearth, is already blackened by soot. The shield is dead, only a piece of metal. Jofar is dead. Menelik lets gold and jewels drip between his fingers and throws them down. He touches Srivastava and turns away. Everything is rich, and everything is cold. Shikar preens himself before him, filled with wife and children, booty and ambition.”

  “You,” said Persis. Her eyes focused into jet projectiles. “You, the warrior.” She stepped forward and plucked Gard’s sword from his sash. “A warrior’s sword, suitably blooded. Yes, it will do.”

  Senmut tapped his temple with a forefinger and glanced at Deva. She shook her head pityingly.

  “Blood buys blood,” Persis crooned. “Ferangipur lies like a slaughtered animal and Menelik laughs, his hands stained by the blood of Jamshid and his children.” She turned toward a slab of obsidian on the other side of the basin. The three black candles that burned there, only their flames reflected spectrally in its slick surface, emitted a faint odor of—nightshade? Gard’s back chilled; she was calling the souls of the dead.

  Persis laid the sword before the candles and turned back to Deva. Her voice dropped into eerie rationality. “Zoe, when Menelik and Srivastava have sons, you will no longer be important. When they have sons to rule the Mohan, you will no longer find a good marriage.” She seized Gard’s jacket. Her breath, rank and sour, seemed to melt his face. “I bore sons who died—they do not count my daughter, they want sons . . .”

  For a moment Gard saw a face hanging in the thin smoke of the candles. Not one of the Ferangi dead, but the unformed, innocent face of a young girl. Zoe, an unsatisfied ghost if ever there was one.

  Deva took Persis’s arm. “It is time for your draught,” she said.

  “A soothing one, I hope,” whispered Senmut.

  “Zoe,” Persis murmured, caressing Deva’s cheek with her hand. Her fingers crooked into claws. “Zoe, do not leave me again, do you hear me?”

  “No, Mother,” said Deva.

  The middle-aged priestess took Persis away. The woman’s voice lingered in the corridor, “Sons, he wants sons—blood and water and death . . .”
>
  The dragonet tried to bury its face in Gard’s liver. He shuddered.

  “Tarek brought me here to serve her,” Deva said. “That is what he told me, at any rate.”

  “Do you believe him?” Senmut asked.

  “Not necessarily. But then, he has shown us all great respect.”

  “Well now,” said Gard, “I would not put much faith in that.”

  “Hardly subtle enough for him, is it? My father . . .”

  The dragonet’s claws left oozing furrows in Gard’s stomach. He swallowed hastily. That was all he needed, to be jealous of Tarek. Unless he had always been jealous of Tarek, ever since he had seen the man’s fine clothes and finer manners at Dhan Bagrat. “He knows,” he said lamely.

  “Tarek came here to Amathe when he was only eighteen, affirming his power in a rite of wizardry which produced that, that . . .” Deva’s brows tightened—oh, so she has tired of that god-rotted prophecy, too? “When Amathe found herself pregnant she feared that her child would be caught by the omen; hoping to mitigate its full force, she left the temple to free-lance. Tarek says that he knew there was something about me, but not that I was Amathe’s and therefore his daughter, until he saw me posing as Yasmine. It was, of course, the power of the prophecy that called him.”

  “I hope he was properly inspired,” Gard growled.

  Senmut said, “Tarek was just here.”

  “There will be a public ceremony of thanksgiving tomorrow, conducted by Tarek on the flank of Hurmazi’s temple. He wants priestesses of Saavedra to attend, to show that Hurmazi rules all the gods. A command performance.”

  “And Persis?” asked Gard. He saw his sword lying beside the candles. He heard, as faint as the wings of doves stirring upon the roof outside, a voice. A voice that sounded like hazelnut tasted, sweet with an aftertaste of decay. Revenge, Persis-ji. Ensure that he can never take your daughter away again. Revenge for his arrogance in refusing your counsel. Your daughter, Persis, your daughter . . .

  Senmut looked from Deva’s face to Gard’s and back again. “What now?”

  Deva told him.

  “So he is inciting Persis to assassination?” Senmut asked. “We must make sure she is not at the ceremony.”

  The dragonet sank down in Gard’s stomach, its wings wrapped like a shroud across its face. Its eyes were great blue globes, blue like the sea that indiscriminately sweeps away life and love and ambition like trash, blue like the sky that absorbs cries of sorrow and of joy equally.

  The dragonet’s eyes frosted gray. “No,” Gard said. He reached toward his sword. The smoke coiled like little red tongues around the blade. He closed his hand and let it fall. “Let her fulfill her own destiny. Let her fulfill Menelik’s, if she must.”

  “Like Tarek,” said Deva, “you will let others do your dirty work?”

  “That is half a wizard’s talent.” Gard released her and blinked. The sanctuary of Saavedra changed between one wink and the next. Two tarnished lamps held ordinary beeswax candles, a limestone basin was shadowed by a few sprigs of chamomile in a pottery vase. Frescoes did line the walls, but they were so faded that Gard could see only the dimmest shapes of women and animals, fields and forests. Black candles sat on a plank of wood. The armillary sphere was tarnished brass and faience beads.

  And Deva—he spun back to her so fast his neck snapped. No, Deva was unchanged. She was still beautiful, even wearing a collar of chipped beads.

  “You are growing cynical in your old age,” said Senmut sarcastically.

  Gard bared his teeth in a humorless laugh. “It is when I stop being cynical, Senmut, that I shall know I have reached old age.”

  Deva set her hand on his face and turned his head back to her. In the corner of his eye silver flashed and lilies bloomed. “Let Persis dispose of Menelik?” she whispered. “And then what, O wizard. And then what?”

  “And then you and I try to dispose of Tarek,” he told her.

  “Try?”

  Gray eyes met blue. The pentacle skreeled faintly. The sapphire sparked. The dragonet extended a paw from beneath the cover of its wings and grasped at the trailing amethyst blue of Deva’s aura, holding it to its tiny face like a child clutching a blanket. “It shall end,” said Gard quietly, deliberately, “one way or another, tomorrow.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Rajinder greeted two women planting vegetables in the rubble strewn maidan. Their implements, sticks and slates, clattered like teeth in a chill south wind. Raj turned to the old man following him and said, “Let me see it.”

  The man handed over a broken roof tile. Raj inspected the charcoal marks upon it. “The temple granary has two and twenty measures of untouched grain, and a further forty measures of singed grain—we will want even that before winter is over.”

  The old man nodded. The other tiles he held clicked together.

  “And the palace storerooms still have twelve measures of dried rice.” Raj looked from the tile to the maze of charred stone walls that had been the palace. Tottering fretwork racketed into a cloud of dust even as he watched. “Clear away the debris,” he said to the scribe. “Build thatched roofs over the shells of the rooms. Someone here must know how to build a thatched roof.”

  “Yes, Nazib-ji,” said the man. “The baker claims that his neighbor the vintner is claiming too much of the alley between their shops . . .”

  “Tell them,” Rajinder said, “that if they have enough strength to squabble over such petty matters they can go to work mending the walls.”

  The old man rattled his tiles. Raj rubbed his temples with his fingertips. A few black strands of his hair escaped their binding rag to flutter across his forehead.

  A petitioner scurried forward, his feet crunching in the debris—someone from a client state, whining that they had backed the wrong side, that Ferangipur now owed them food for the winter—Rajinder squared his shoulders and summoned a smile both courteous and stern to his ash-smudged face.

  A falcon coasted across the noon sky, not deigning to move its wings; it was a child’s paper cutout against the sky. Or it was a vulture sated with the flesh of the dead. Or it was . . . The bird spun as if transfixed by an arrow. It disintegrated, feathers and dried bones skipping hither and thither across the floor.

  Gard opened his eyes. It was dawn in Apsurakand. He would find Vijay combing his mustache and chattering about the embassy to the Alliance, Menelik’s arrogance, Shikar’s corrosive strength, and the legendary beauty of someone named Yasmine . . .

  Vijay was dead. This was the temple of Saavedra. Deva sat throwing her fortune-telling bones, their skitterings invading his dream.

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Not bad omens, none at all.” She looked up, and her face relaxed. Her beauty was breathtaking.

  If Gard had had a breath to take. The dragonet yawned and stretched, filling his chest with its wings, tail, limbs. His heart dripped butterflies into his stomach. His faculties were as sensitive as a broken tooth, curling at the cool breeze from the window, quaking at the odor of bread and beans permeating the air. Every heartbeat made his eyes bulge. “It is up to us, as it has been all along,” he managed to say, and he extended his hands.

  Deva sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed her henna-painted palms against his. She was already dressed for the ceremony; peacock blue silk sari, headdress of tinkling gold leaves, a strand of filigree extending from the sapphire in her nose to the emerald in her left ear, carmine on her lips, kohl lining her eyes. All of which paled beside her cinnamon skin and her superb blue-green-violet eyes lit from within.

  Something hissed between their palms, not unlike the miniature lightning bolts that had danced along Senmut’s wax and turpentine disc. Gard’s spine tingled. Deva’s sapphire flashed. The daemon inspected its paws, releasing one claw at a time, its wings tucked in tidy iridescent folds.

  Reluctantly Gard set Deva’s hands aside and sat up. His head spun briefly—no, he told himself, I have no time to be dizzy. He stood.

 
“Come and eat,” she said, tucking her fortune-telling bones into her bodice. “You shall need your strength.”

  Strength. Passion and magic balanced at last. He took the winged pentacle from its pouch and let it dangle against his chest beneath his shirt. The dragonet blinked up at the amulet swaying like a pendulum before its eyes.

  In the hallway Gard encountered a set of brown eyes that peered from the fine bones of their owner’s face like a trapped creature peering from its cage, clinging to dignity when nothing else is left. “Ladhani-ji,” he said with a bow. “Rajinder and Narayan are alive and well and await your return.”

  Ladhani’s features cracked into a smile. The bars of the cage melted. “My thanks, wizard-ji,” she murmured.

  Not yet. Even if Menelik, Shikar, and Tarek were to obligingly disappear, their officers and councilors would have to be threatened, cajoled, or duped into—well, not necessarily a surrender but certainly a truce.

  From the porch of the temple the sun was a rosy blur beyond clouds as diaphanous as Deva’s sari. Senmut sat on the top step amid concentric rings of pebbles and pottery shards, muttering, “. . . the sun here, approaching the equinox, and new moon here, hiding its face in the glare of the sun . . .”

  A drumroll of hoofbeats. Chariots swept up the alley, the plumes on the horses barely clearing the side walls, and with many flourishes of whip and helmet halted before the gate. Gard and Senmut ducked inside. With a lingering backward look Deva glided through the garden toward the waiting chariots. Every place her feet touched a small green sprig of mint or basil sprouted. Several other priestesses, their saris draped modestly around their faces, followed.

  Persis waited inside the door. Her white sari was more of a shroud than a garment, its pleats stiff as sculpture. But her eyes glittered, her tongue darted repeatedly between her lips, and her cheeks burned, ravaged by fever. Draped over her shoulders was a magnificent tiger skin cloak.