Flesh and Bone

by Robin Lythgoe

  “I didn’t want to kill him.” He shivered and his eyes stung.

  “Did you try to think of another plan?”

  Had he? Running had been his best answer, but that had not been enough. Iniki had found them. Knocking the man unconscious was too risky. Finally, he nodded, then changed his mind and shook his head. “I should have asked him to leave us alone.”

  “Would he have agreed? He was Bairith’s in every respect.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true. Sometimes he said things as if he were—”

  A popping noise came from further up the road. Mimeru lifted a hand as though to warn him away. Instead, she fell backward, arms outflung. Sherakai turned to her in surprise. The fat, ugly haft of a crossbow bolt protruded from one eye. The horse shied and Mimeru fell.

  “Ru!” Sherakai caught his sister’s shoulders as the horse went out from under her. Her feet slapped into the mud. Slight as she was, her weight unbalanced him, pitching him onto his knees.

  Bright blood flowed over Mimeru’s milky skin and ran into her hair. She did not move or speak or breathe. He stared in stupid incomprehension. Mimeru? Say something. Get up! A roaring filled his ears, and the world froze its motion, suspended for a small eternity. His fingers hovered above the monstrous bolt. The roar shifted character, eventually sorting itself into the sound of hazy voices. A touch settled on his shoulder. He trembled, transfixed by death and the abominable spill of crimson into the uncaring mire.

  “Come away, son,” said a gentle voice, and someone pulled him up into an embrace. His rescuer stroked his hair.

  Slowly, the distinctive scent he associated with Bairith Mindar penetrated Sherakai’s senses. It incinerated his crippling horror and propelled him to motion. His fists punched hard up into the mage’s gut. When the jansu bent forward in reaction, Sherakai followed with a blow to the jaw. Bairith slipped away. The youth spun on one foot, lashing out with a backhanded strike that landed solidly enough but set him off balance. He did not regain it. He did not even see how Bairith swept his feet out from under him. On his back, he grabbed for an elegant boot, ready to do murder.

  The jansu kicked him in the head.

  Sherakai wasted no time howling in shock or hurt, or trying to shake away the wave of darkness. He knew where he was. He knew where Bairith was. The kick knocked him over and he rolled with it. Blood ran down his face. He scrambled to his knees and dug into the mud to throw handfuls of the stuff. The ruin it made of Bairith’s fine clothing gave him a perverse satisfaction, but it didn’t stop the man from kicking him in the belly.

  His breath left him entirely, and his lungs refused to draw another. He didn’t want breath, he wanted his tormentor dead. His stomach burned like a fury and the useless act of sucking in air added insult to injury. Bairith, his beautiful mouth twisted, bent toward him. To hit him? To help him? Sherakai didn’t care. With the bleakstone still strapped to his hand, he caught the mage’s wrist. Gratifying surprise shaped Bairith’s face, but it wasn’t nearly enough. He pulled hard, his other hand bunching into a fist aimed at the half elf’s exposed throat.

  His tormentor pivoted—and came down with his knee in Sherakai’s stomach. Agony replaced breath. A twist freed Bairith’s arm, not that Sherakai had strength remaining to hold on to it. His vision dimmed with astonishing swiftness and force. As he floated through a muzzy, indifferent nothingness, he heard voices. He could not at first make out the words.

  “—no sense taking any chances.”

  “There, he’s stirring.”

  “That’s it. Breathe, my son.”

  My son? He struck out instinctively and met resistance. A grip like iron curled around his throat. The pressure promised further insensibility. He growled in protest, his voice rough as tree bark. The smudge over his eyes persisted, a semi-opaque veil keeping him from useful action. Blinking and squinting, he clutched at Bairith’s wrist to drag the hand away.

  Bairith let Sherakai struggle without a word. When at last he lay unmoving and breathless, the mage lifted a brow. “Are you finished?” In spite of the scuffle, he had not a hair out of place.

  Finished implied surrender. “Not while my heart still beats.”

  “That’s my little dragon. Such a spirited thing.” He released his hold, brushed the backs of his knuckles along Sherakai’s jaw affectionately, then got to his feet. “Can you stand?”

  Resentment for the familiarities brought a snarl. He rolled onto his side and levered himself gracelessly upward, staggering like a drunk. Bairith caught his elbow to steady him. His head throbbed, the pain centered on a knob just above his temple. His belly offered up a harmony of hurt. In the midst of covering his mouth, he discovered the bleakstone was gone. A quick check told him he’d lost his remaining knife as well. He jerked his arm free and lifted his chin. “I’m fine.”

  Humor glimmered in Bairith’s eyes. “Excellent. It would have put me out to find you completely incapacitated.” He glanced around, then gestured for a soldier to approach.

  Where the man and his companions had come from Sherakai had no idea. His head hurt so bad it made counting soldiers tricky. Ten, maybe. As if one mage with multiple gifts wasn’t sufficient to control him. He squinted up at the overcast sky, but it gave him no indication of the passage of time. Did it matter? While he lay insensible on the ground an entire troop had arrived. The Children of the Wind had disappeared, but other, commoner horses nosed at the winter grass on the roadside, grazing like nothing exceptional had happened.

  Mimeru remained where she’d fallen. She was so exposed and vulnerable—he did not understand. Muddy, shivering, and dizzy, he hunched his shoulders and closed his eyes, yet the horror persisted, seared into his senses. He swayed.

  “Hold him up.”

  The ringing in his ears muffled the order but certainly didn’t prevent men from obeying. Bairith held his face in cool, dry hands. The words he murmured made no sense, but the darkening of the jansu’s aura did. He was working magic. Dusky smears slid into Sherakai’s peripheral vision. Sudden pressure on his skull drew a gasp. With the weight came a flow of cold so intense that surely his eyeballs and brain must freeze. He couldn’t move, couldn’t even scream. Shadows filled his view completely, obscuring the mage’s features. They crawled along his scalp, drilled through bone, crept through the space beneath. Horror had never been so tangible.

  Bairith's magic continued to enfold Sherakai even after the darkness faded and the chills stopped chasing each other up and down his spine. Skin to skin and eye to eye, Bairith held him as easily as he’d hold a basket of wrung out rags. The intimacy unnerved him. An attempt to break eye contact got him nowhere. There was still a wrongness to the jansu’s aura, but after a few minutes, warmth began to steal through him. Bairith cradled him, intense and humming with aro, with magic. The men holding him shifted, but only slightly, as if afraid to shatter the mage’s concentration. Beyond them, the others stood by their horses, studiously looking the other way.

  Finally, he stepped back, waving at the guards to release Sherakai. “Better?”

  The reality of the moment rushed over him: the whisper of wind across his cheeks, wet and muddy clothes, the crisp edges of snow giving way to the strength of the sun, the sharp tang of copper on the air… He pressed a hand to his head, but only the dregs of physical pain remained. “Yes.” Hollow.

  “How did you kill Iniki dan Sorehi?”

  He swallowed down the gorge that rose with the memory. “Why would you think I did?”

  “He is not here. You have blood on your shirt. One can make certain conclusions with such evidence. Besides that, I have faith in you. Ah, but your first kill—I should have been there. I would like to have seen that.” A hand on Sherakai’s shoulder conveyed pride in his student’s accomplishment.

  Bairith didn’t know about the stablehand, dead now because Sherakai could do nothing to save him and still escape Nemura-o pera Sinohe. Yet here he was, caught despite his best effort, and the man dead in vain. Neither dea
th had done anything to convince him to become a warrior, and Bairith’s morbid pleasure revolted him. “You murdered Mimeru. Why?” Hands fisted, he imagined throttling the mage, choking the life out of him. A tendril of comfort shocked him as much with its existence as with the fact that he could feel it again. Free of the bleakstone, the energy of magic quivered around him—for all the good it did. What truly useful thing could he do with it in this moment of need?

  “As it happens I did not. But perhaps it is for the best. Come, you will ride.” He took Sherakai’s elbow to steer him toward a horse.

  “How can you say such a stupid thing?” he demanded, yanking free. “What could she possibly have done that you’d need to kill her like—like some poor dumb beast?”

  Bairith regarded him pensively. No regret tainted his aura. No sense of bereavement marred his expression. Perfectly poised, he motioned Sherakai toward a shaggy brown mare. “I am not certain we could have kept her alive much longer, and she was distracting you.”

  “Distracting me?” Sherakai echoed. “She was my sister and you were hurting her. You shot her!”

  Between one breath and the next, the mage caught the fabric of Sherakai’s filthy tunic and hauled him close. “You do not understand the true concept of hurt, my pet.” With his free hand, he caressed the youth’s jaw. The contrast was no less sharp than its underlying message. Sherakai stiffened. With his senses he reached out to discover how near the soldiers were, how attentive, and if he might get to a horse. They had horses, too. But he was so close to home! Would any of Tanoshi’s patrols hear him if he cried out? Where were the people that lived and worked nearby? The last thought troubled him. Surely someone should have come up or down the road by now. What if Bairith had had them killed? The suspicion fueled his anger. He gathered magic to himself as hard and as fast as he could—And found himself on his knees with his arm twisted behind his back. Protesting muscles wrung a cry from him.

  “You must learn that you are mine, Sherakai.” Bairith’s breath feathered across Sherakai’s ear and his cheek, as warm and intimate as the man’s torso pressed against him.

  It seemed foolhardy to protest, but words were all he had left. “I will die before I will submit to you.”

  “Spoken with all the enviable but shortsighted passion of youth.” He held Sherakai down without difficulty, studying him at leisure.

  Cold seeped into the knees of his trousers. The soldiers readied their mounts, either blind to the fate of the master’s quarry or looking the other way. His shoulder burned. The slightest effort to relieve the pain produced more pressure. It didn’t take much until he battled juvenile tears. He refused to ask for release.

  With a sudden, casual wrench, Bairith dislocated Sherakai’s shoulder.

  He screamed as he toppled into the mire, clutching his arm and sobbing.

  “Stop bawling like a child. If you haven’t yet, you will soon learn that actions have consequences. You must think, boy, and when you can accept the results of your actions and bear them with grace, we will call you a man.”

  “I hate you.” The tears in his voice made a mockery of the loathing in his heart. He sounded like a petulant child and the knowledge shamed him.

  Bairith snapped his fingers, and a soldier hurried to him. “Help the boy onto a horse and make sure he doesn’t fall. It’s a long ride back to the Gates of Heaven.”

  Back to the Gates of the Abyss.

  Chapter 2

  Once within the keep’s walls, an indifferent soldier snapped Sherakai’s shoulder back into the socket. The jansu wove black shadows into him. A length of cloth wound around him kept him from moving his arm. Bairith said nothing during the procedure, and Sherakai refused to bring up the healer's name lest he inadvertently suggest the sadistic shader should be summoned. It came as no surprise when the soldiers escorted him to the Hole. In that barren privacy he let out all the pent up emotion—grief for his siblings, fear for those who still lived, homesickness, terror for his future, despair over his failures. No one saw, no one heard, no one cared.

  Head stuffy and sore, eyes swollen, shivering from the cold, he stared into the blackness. He wished Bairith had killed him, too. Why should he live and Mimeru and his brothers die? The off-hand way the jansu fixed and then broke him again frightened him. Surely it wasn’t for the sole purpose of demonstrating his madness. No, it was power he showed. Whatever his motive, Bairith wanted total and complete control over Sherakai. A worthless, reckless boy.

  The stark memory of Mimeru’s body lying in the road dragged him through grief again with soul-wrenching disregard for his composure. She did not deserve the mud and the cold. She did not deserve such a ruthless, brutal ending. Had Bairith simply left her there? She was his wife! He prayed with all the fervent desperation of his battered soul that someone would find her. That wild animals would not maul her. Throat tight, he struggled to sing the Farewell that would send his sister into the afterlife. The words eluded him. He knew some of them, and he knew the tune…

  He must have slept after that. When he became aware of his surroundings again stiffness and cold had claimed his body. His shoulder ached. A sound had awakened him, though, he was sure. Here in the depths of quiet?

  Little rabbit, hiding, hiding.

  Sherakai stiffened. “Who is there?”

  Does it matter? Were you expecting company? Have we interrupted?

  Sly and slick the voices sidled through his thoughts, one lapping over the other. The short hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He remembered these awful creatures with sudden, terrible clarity. Shadow demons. Bairith had used the things when he’d worked the binding spell and tattooed his mark on Sherakai’s arm. “Go away.”

  Make us. Their laughter slithered up and down the cell walls.

  Sherakai held himself rigidly, not wanting to provoke them. Without Bairith here to control them, what would they do? Had the mage sent them? “What do you want?”

  You. Just you. Always you. All of you.

  He squeezed himself tighter. “You can’t have me. Go away.”

  And leave you all alone? By yourself? In the dark? We couldn’t do that! they cried, mocking.

  He had power in his Voice, did he not? “Go. Away.”

  Little rabbit, tasty rabbit. So frightened. So forlorn.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” he lied.

  Oh, yes, you are. Scared of shadows. Their laughter clattered and grated like dry bones.

  Sherakai rubbed his arm, trying to chase away his growing dread. The cloth binding his wounded arm to his chest made him feel trapped and he thought about taking it off. What good would that do? He drew upon aro, hoping he might at least be able to see them, but no matter how he strained he perceived nothing beyond the awareness of their shadowy presence. “Leave me be!” he hollered.

  Striking at them was a strange experience. His blows connected, slowed, then passed right through, hardly affecting them. He could not tell, could not see.

  Their amusement scraped his senses raw. Worse, they picked and poked at him with sharp claws as if they could will themselves in and out of existence. They chortled and harassed him in a cascade of scratchy voices.

  Huddled in a corner, Sherakai covered his head and shouted at them. They did not care. He’d lost his voice entirely before they abandoned their taunting. The experience left him trembling and exhausted. It was a long time before he uncurled himself to rub the sore muscles in his shoulders and neck. Flexing his hands made them sting. The impenetrable darkness hid the damage the kathraul’en had done, but that didn’t make it any less real. He discovered the extent days later when the guards came to haul him out of his prison. Ragged and smeared with dried blood, hunger and thirst threatened to overcome him. Cuts and scratches marked his arms and legs, burned his face and throat.

  Into blinding light and up the countless stairs to Bairith’s office he marched. He wanted to collapse into the nearest chair when he at last arrived. Wordlessly, the guards deserted him at the edge
of the thick rug. Not only did the mage await him, but Tylond Corlyr and Deishi dan Arunakun as well. The healer's casual lean against a bookcase belied the anticipation gleaming in his eyes. Deishi was another story. Feet braced and arms folded, anger knotted his jaw. It did nothing to detract from his appearance. If anything, it lent him an enviable air of uncompromising strength. Clean, handsome, and intense, he was the perfect foil to Sherakai’s failure. He felt as uncouth as a worm.

  Bairith Mindar sat behind his desk, elbows resting on the empty, polished surface. Fingertips tented together, features neutral, he said nothing.

  The click of claws on the tiles announced the arrival of Fesh and Teth. Sherakai checked them sideways from under his lashes. Teth limped and one eye was swollen shut. Fesh, just as battered, perked up when he saw Sherakai. Even his muddy-colored aura took on a surprising tinge of pink. It took a moment to work it out as tenderness and pleasure. The pair stopped several feet away.

  “You beat them!” Horror sent a chill down his spine.

  “Did I give you permission to speak?” The mage rose from his chair to walk around Sherakai. He flicked at the youth’s tattered, muddy clothes.

  Sherakai could only clench his teeth as he endured a slow, thorough inspection. Finally, Bairith came to a halt, tucking his hands into the sleeves of his long embroidered tunic. He continued his study for an interminable time. The other men said nothing either, twisting the tension in the air to an uncomfortable pitch. Fesh dropped to his haunches, wariness twitching the skin over his shoulders. Teth, with typical stoicism, focused his unnerving gaze on Deishi. The young man shifted uncomfortably at the attention. Whether Teth did it for Sherakai’s benefit or not, he admired the creature’s unyielding spirit. Little by little, he straightened.

  “I expected better from you.”

  Sea-blue eyes displayed numbing disappointment. It stole his breath. He was grateful for the inconvenience; it prevented him from blurting an apology.