Flesh and Bone

by Robin Lythgoe

  And with that, he brought his head forward as hard as he could. Even as he felt the satisfying crunch of cartilage breaking, he drove his fists upward into his tormentor’s belly.

  Bairith staggered backward.

  The guards yelled as they rushed to their liege’s aid.

  Sherakai followed Bairith, turned, and slammed his elbow into the jansu’s cheek. As he finished the spin, his foot met the belly of the first guard, doubling him over. He caught the man’s head and twisted viciously. Spun and smashed his forearm into the second man’s throat. Every part of his body and every lesson he’d ever learned was dedicated to crippling and killing his opponents. He had nothing to lose. He had no time, either.

  All four of them went down in a matter of seconds. He took a knife from the nearest. Wearing the bleakstone had not kept Bairith from throwing Sherakai into the wall before. It would happen again if the mage had even the slightest cause, and this attack far surpassed “slight.”

  He was not wrong.

  Backed up against the desk, blood streaming down his chin, Bairith punched the space in front of him.

  Sherakai’s grip on the hilt tightened in the instant before the fist of air struck. Propelled backward, he tripped over a downed guard and fell. He’d been knocked down too many times on the sands to stay down now. Pivoting, he got up on one knee. He loosed the knife just before the mage hurled another blast. It sent him crashing into the corridor. A scream of shock and pain followed. Never had agony sounded so musical.

  On his knees, he shook his head to clear it, then leaped up to charge back into the room. This time he picked a sword up off the floor. A whoosh of air warned him that Bairith was not yet out of the fight. His mouth curled into a snarl and he charged. Lifting the sword in both hands, he brought it down hard to cleave the hated mage—

  Only to run into a wall he could not see. The impact robbed him of breath and made spots dance in his vision.

  “So tenacious, my dragon.” Bairith’s crimson smile came from above Sherakai, and he realized he’d fallen. The hilt of his knife protruded from the jansu’s chest where most men kept their hearts.

  Sherakai searched for his sword. There… He rolled toward it and Bairith kicked him in the ribs, the force of magic behind it.

  A black, ugly gift.

  He heard himself grunt. That was the trigger. Embrace the pain. Draw upon it. Transmute it to energy, to power.

  The results were not as intense as he was used to, but instead of blocking the strategy, the bleakstone merely restricted it. And he still had every ounce of his righteous fury. He grabbed the sword and came up on his knees again. With all the considerable strength Bairith had bequeathed him, he swung it in a vicious arc.

  Bairith screamed something unintelligible.

  The blade bit through cloth enough to draw blood, but stopped before it killed. Bairith took two unsteady steps sideways and crashed into the desk. Books and papers tumbled to the floor.

  Sherakai swore and yanked on the sword, but it would not come free.

  “Take him,” the jansu spat, holding himself upright on the desk.

  One of the guards had gained his feet. He should have seen or sensed him coming, but without his inherent magic to rely on, he reeled beneath a solid punch to the jaw. Catching himself on one arm, he swung the sword, only to have it blocked by a book. A chunk came off the corner and a hundred little scraps swirled behind.

  All the shouting brought more guards. A hail of angry, terrified kicks and punches fell upon Sherakai, but he gave as good as he got.

  “I said take him, not kill him.” Bairith’s Voice slowed the beating.

  Men quivering with nerves straightened cautiously. One man on each limb held Sherakai down. Most of them sported broken noses, black eyes, cuts, and bruises. Three of them lay unmoving on the floor.

  “If you were not so stubborn and rebellious, dear, dear boy, I would not have had to withhold our bond for such an endless time. You would not have suffered the pain and confusion of its continued absence.” Bairith’s broken nose gave a nasal quality to the words. He held a cloth to his face; blood accentuated his pallor. The other arm hung limp at his side.

  Fury and magic boiled through Sherakai, the latter trapped and useless except that it kept him conscious and sharp as a blade. He bucked against his captors.

  “Restrain him. Get him to his feet.” Moving like a frail elder, Lord Chiro limped around his desk and eased into his chair.

  Sergeant Tezi—with a long cut down his face and the promise of a bruise on his jaw—motioned to one of his men and murmured instructions to fetch the healer. Several others secured Sherakai with considerably less deference than they’d shown earlier. Tezi gave him a reproachful look as he checked the knots. Two of his companions lay dead and a third moaned in pain. Eight wounded in all. Sherakai kept his head up, features impassive. He regretted having to attack them, but who knew how many lives would have been saved in the years to come if he had succeeded in killing the jansu? The world would be a better place without Bairith Mindar even if death was too good for him.

  As the men finished securing him, Mage Tylond appeared in the doorway, a bright blue patch over his eye. His inspection of the room was more stilted than it once had been. He paused when he reached Sherakai, taking in the collar around his neck. “So uncivilized to bring your practice to the jansu’s quarters.”

  “Tylond,” the jansu said. Just that word.

  The healer inclined his head to Sherakai as if in apology. They both knew better.

  “That will be all, Tezi. Take him down to the Heart.”

  “My lord.” He bowed and nodded to Sherakai. Move, lad.

  He moved.

  Chapter 35

  Writhing and twisting, purple smoke obscured the details of the Heart. The circle of brass runes glinted with an ill light, refusing to hide. Sherakai sagged in the ropes binding him to one of the great pillars, eyes closed against the burn of the constant vapor. It crept into him through his mouth, his nose, his ears, and even through his skin… He could do nothing to stop it, nor the way it affected him. For endless days, the magic had tossed and spun him like a cork adrift on a restless sea. It shouldn’t be able to touch him while he still wore the bleakstone, but he hadn’t the clarity of mind to figure out why it did.

  Shadowy figures attended to his most basic needs. They’d stripped him bare to make their job easier. The sting of such humiliation had faded a long time ago, but resentment sat back and waited for opportunity.

  He listened to the intermittent moans that shook the keep. They rumbled through the stone into the soles of his feet, and up the pillar to wind around his spine. Deep as he imagined the ocean must be, the sound reverberated through his bones. He had never heard anything so sorrowful, so wounded. It diminished him.

  An abrupt tug on his hair raised his head. “Open your eyes.”

  Lord Chiro waited behind the scant protection of lashes and lids. He frowned and spoke to a servant in a mask beside him. “This is worse. Has Mage Tylond not attended it lately?” he demanded. His displeasure alone might flay skin off a man.

  His companion flinched. “He has, Master, just yesterday.”

  “After three days, one would think his special treatment would have achieved an improvement.”

  Wisely, the servant said nothing.

  Three days should give shape to the length of time Sherakai had spent in this place. It did not.

  A thumb pulled up one eyelid, then the other. “Can you see me, boy?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated. “Mostly.”

  Bairith’s mouth curled in displeasure. “Why?”

  The question sent waves through the restless sea. “The smoke—?”

  “Yes, yes.” He waved his hand as he stepped away, the motion blurry. “It’s made your eyes swollen and red. Pus has turned that lovely green putrid. There should be no pus at all, and it is astonishing you can see anything.”

  Sherakai smiled without conviction. “I coul
d await your pleasure elsewhere.”

  “I’m sure you would, but here you will stay. When Mage Tylond ministers to you, can you see better for a time?”

  He tried to remember. “I don’t know.”

  “Look up.”

  Obediently, he lifted his head for Bairith to examine his nostrils.

  “Open your mouth.”

  He licked chapped lips and complied.

  “Is he getting plenty of water?”

  “He doesn’t drink it all.”

  Sherakai closed his eyes and let them discuss him as if he weren’t listening. He thought about straightening, but even the idea robbed him of strength.

  “Why not?”

  The servant shifted uneasily. “I couldn’t rightly say, master. He acts confused and—and stupid.”

  “But not pliable,” he murmured. “Not yet.”

  “He’s stopped fighting us when we come to feed and clean him.”

  “An improvement.” Bairith combed his fingers through Sherakai’s hair, then stroked his cheek, his chest. Finally turning his attention to his arms, he pinched biceps between thumb and forefinger. “I want you to double the dosage of elixir. And the food as well.”

  “And if he don’t take it?”

  “He will.”

  He did.

  Mage Tylond had exactly the tool needed for prying Sherakai’s mouth open to pour semiliquid meals down his gullet, bitter with the taste of herbs. The concoction dragged him further from reality, yet he remained tethered to the unyielding stone of the Nemura-o pera Sinohe.

  Mage Tylond also brought a new herbal wash for his poor eyes. It stung fiercely, which came as no surprise. The healer soaked a strip of cloth in the stuff, then tied it around Sherakai’s head with instructions to the servants to keep it wet. Eventually, it produced a measure of relief. Eventually, though, Lord Chiro returned…

  “It’s such a shame the horns didn’t work out.” Tylond Corlyr bent close to examine a hand, head tipped to accommodate his one-eyed sight. “I’m afraid the talons won’t, either. We’ve had to remove too much of them to make them fit. Look at this.”

  He lifted Sherakai’s arm as far as the ropes allowed, showing his companion.

  Behind the blindfold, Sherakai squeezed his eyes closed and pressed his head against the pillar. It steadied him as shadowy memories surfaced. What had they done to his hands? His back? His legs…

  He remembered glittering copper disks. A cracked, faded shard like a tooth or a claw, but bigger. Leather stretched across a winglike frame of bone. None of it made sense except the pain. There was always pain when Lord Chiro allowed Tylond to exercise his creativity.

  “Unfortunate, but not unexpected. The others responded to the essence with similar improvements. We’ve prepared him better. I expect better.” There was no mistaking Bairith’s voice, nor the quiver of possession through the link.

  “Mm, true enough, but it bothers me that he’s rejected our efforts out of hand.”

  “I can say with some certainty that he didn’t do it deliberately,” Bairith said with a note of amusement.

  The healer shifted away. In his wake came the smell Sherakai always associated with Tylond: bitter herbs, alcohol, and earth. As if he’d crawled through dank tunnels. “It would not surprise me in the least.”

  If he could reject anything they did to him, he would do it in a heartbeat.

  “Sherakai. It is time.” Bairith drew his fingers down Sherakai’s jaw with a tender expression.

  “Let him go.” A voice from the past spoke behind the jansu.

  Sherakai’s brow wrinkled. He pried his eyes open with an effort. “Papa?”

  “I’m here, son.”

  “How is it,” Bairith puzzled, still stroking his pet’s face ever so tenderly, “that I can give you everything; teach you, house you, feed you, clothe you—spare no expense in these endeavors!—and you cannot call me ‘Father’? And yet the man who gave you little more than a name and a crude start in life is ‘Papa’.”

  Sherakai drew back a fraction. “Do you want the truth?” The jansu’s touch, as much as he loathed it, anchored him in a world that refused to solidify. His vision of the pillars, even the floor, wavered and shifted colors in a most disconcerting way.

  “Always. You know this.” So soft, so tender.

  “You demand my love. He won it by loving me before I ever knew what the word meant. By showing me what it meant.”

  One finger trailed down Sherakai’s throat and chest to tap on his breastbone. “You withhold your affection because you did not grow up at my knee? I have shown you love. I have made the hard choices a father must make. I have let you into my home and my heart.”

  Among all the misty dreams and memories, putting a blade in the jansu’s breast remained crystal clear. “How long have I been here?”

  “Long enough to have learned how much you mean to me.”

  “You cannot possibly have a heart,” he whispered, “or my knife would have pierced it.”

  The open-handed slap cleared his head. Made his face sting. He was glad.

  “No!” Tameko dan Yasuma lunged against ropes that bound him to the pillar across from Sherakai.

  Bairith ignored him, eyes gleaming like beautiful, unyielding gems. “Your sire has made a nuisance of himself. What does one usually do with pests?”

  He lifted his chin, meeting that icy gaze without flinching. He did not answer.

  “Shall I kill him?” Bairith inquired.

  Sherakai’s lips drew back in a snarl. “Why do you ask for my opinion on something you’ve already decided?”

  “Kill me,” Tameko agreed. “Let my son go free.”

  The turn of the jansu’s head gave Sherakai a view. A mere shadow of the man he had once been, Tameko’s gaze remained dauntless. For what Sherakai saw there, he could not bow to Bairith’s will. Not even if he drove a knife through his father’s beating heart while Sherakai watched.

  For his father, it was better that way.

  For Sherakai, knowing this was the last time he would see Tameko alive, it was terrible. It filled him with a flavor of agony he had never imagined might exist. Bound hand and foot and magic, he could do nothing.

  Lord Chiro stalked to Tameko’s side, fury in every line of his body. His aura crackled with it, little bursts of red lightning prickling up and down. “He is not yours anymore, old man.”

  Tameko’s mouth bent in a one-sided smile. “He will always be mine.”

  “Not when I am finished.” Each word was filled with venom.

  “No matter what you do,” came the calm reply.

  The mage spun away, robes snapping. “Begin!” His Voice cracked through the hall like the sound of a whip.

  Figures came into view at the end of the chamber, the smoke half concealing them. They opened a set of wide doors to allow six men to haul in a cage, wheels creaking in protest at the weight they carried. Vaporous fingers curled around it and around the men. The metal construction shimmered with a pale orange light. The beast inside lashed a long narrow tail and hissed in impotent fury, throwing itself at the bars. A rakeshi. How had Bairith captured one? The highest point of its shoulder would reach the chest of an average man, and they were said to be supernatural. Demonic. They could slip in and out of the shadows between this world and the netherworld, camouflaged by their mottled hides. They were incredibly fast, incredibly strong, and almost impossible to kill. It resembled nothing so much as a brawny cat with slate-gray reptilian skin. Its tail continued to thrash back and forth while a snarl revealed two rows of vicious fangs. Flat black eyes with no whites at all appeared flecked with blood red. Someone went too close, and knife-like talons tore his arm to ribbons. The thing dropped to the floor of the cage, growling and reaching for more as the man tumbled away, screaming and clutching the remains.

  “Gods,” Sherakai’s fractured heart plummeted into his belly.

  “Sherakai. Sherakai, look at me,” Tameko ordered. “We haven’t much time.”
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  The stench of burned flesh filled the air, competing with the incessant smoke. It took an effort to tear his gaze from the awful beast. “You—you found me.” Such a stupid waste of words.

  “I got your message.”

  He had no recollection of sending one, or how he might have done it.

  “The king’s minister?” Tameko prompted, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I never stopped trying to bring you home, Kai. Fighting for you. You’ve grown so much…” he murmured, wistfully. “You still look like your mother, though not as pretty.”

  Was his father making jokes? Now? “He used magic on me. To make me bigger. Stronger.” Nightmares lay that way, ever ready to drag him into the depths of despair.

  The rakeshi let out a coughing roar that shook the entire chamber. The men shouted and retreated, but Lord Chiro wielded his Voice with implacable authority. He forced them back to wheeling the great cage to the center of the rune-carved circle.

  “He hurt you?” Tameko asked, gaze steady on his son.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sherakai echoed. “You’re here now. I thought you’d—” He stopped, shaking his head helplessly.

  “Never,” his father said. “I never gave up, though Bairith did his best to stop me.”

  Sherakai swallowed a knot of emotion. “I don’t think you will leave this place, Papa.” He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, but he didn’t want to miss one second of seeing his father’s face. “I can’t help you. Not now. I’ve made him so angry…”

  “It will be all right, son. Promise me you’ll never give up. That you’ll remember the things we taught you, and that we love you.”

  “Papa…” A sob wrenched through him.

  “Isn’t this tender?” Lord Chiro inquired, placing a hand on Sherakai’s shoulder. His mockery cut through the moment like a blade.

  “It was an unexpected gift.” Tameko straightened and braced himself as if for a blow. “Do what you will with me, but if you truly love him as you claim, let him go free.”