by Tara Janzen
“Bring them to me.”
“Aye, milord.” The captain turned on her heel and marched back across the platform, her new epaulets catching the last rays of sunlight, winking and glittering on her shoulders.
“Cachi hwch,” Vishab swore, and spat by his side, surlier than usual since the last messenger had come to Magh Dun, though she seemed to have enjoyed the captain’s death as much as any. “Your new piggish sow of a captain will not last a fortnight. Too proud, she is, too proud and pretty. Give the bitch to me for humbling and mayhaps she’ll yet do you good service.”
Corvus slanted the old crone a sideways glance. Vishab usually reserved her name-calling for the priestesses of Claerwen. Ignoring her advice for now, he turned his attention instead to the Lyran in the alley below. She was a powerful beast, pacing along the line of soldiers and skraelings, her flaming orange hair flowing over pale green shoulders. Heads would roll before the sun sank, and she was making her dinner selection. Only one lucky man would be allowed to fight her to his death. The others would not fare so well. Half would go to Vishab, and half he would deal with himself, creating a spectacle of death unlike anything Pan-shei had ever seen.
It was no more than the Third Guard deserved, the whole wretched lot of them, but he couldn’t afford to kill the whole wretched lot. By all accounts, there had been only two men with the thief, and no more than a half score of Night Watchers with Avallyn Le Severn. Yet all had escaped two days earlier.
But not for long.
The Second Guard was on their trail, heading west into the desert. If nothing else, they’d been smart enough to get out of Pan-shei before he arrived. The Third Guard had no such strategist in their ranks. They had stayed and leveled the Quonset hut, and for that misjudgment, they would pay in lives.
Van the Wretched would demand some payment for the skraelings Corvus was going to destroy, but their failure had been no less than his own soldiers’, and the lives of skraelings came even cheaper than guardsmen. Maybe next time, Van would send only the best of his line.
“Milord Most High, Warlord of the Waste, and Exalted Ruler of Magh Dun,” a muffled voice came from the vicinity of his feet.
Corvus cast his gaze downward at the prostrate messenger who had been waiting on the deck, his face pressed into the riveted planks of twenty-aught steel.
“Aye?”
The battle lackey rose to a kneeling position. “The most honorable captain of your Second Guard sends his greetings and would have you know that he has tracked the thieves to Craig Tagen and is even now scouring the ridgeline for their rover.”
Corvus’s mood, never overly bright, took a dark turn. Craig Tagen was over two hundred miles long and twenty-five miles deep, big enough to conceal a whole battalion of rovers.
“For your sake, I pray you have better news than that to relay,” he drawled, arching a brow. The lists for the evening entertainments were already full to bursting. One more death would only drag the night out too long.
“Their rover is damaged, milord, and sure to have run its last.”
“The skraelpack lieutenant who lost the transport told me as much on his dying breath,” Corvus said dryly, giving the commissionaire fair warning and one last chance.
The messenger continued on, undaunted, his next words proving him ripe for promotion. “My captain has sent troops to the two caravanserais nearest to where the trail was lost, Rabin-19 and Cere. The slackers have no other choice for repairs or supplies, and we are assured that they will need one or the other if they are to cross the Waste. The captain vows to have them before nightfall tomorrow, milord.”
“As well he may, or face my wrath,” Corvus promised with a dismissive flick of his blackened hand.
The messenger paled at the gesture and backed away, his gaze never leaving the black and wispy thing that had bade him go.
“Tell your captain I will have the two I seek, or I will have his head. Nothing less,” Corvus added more loudly, watching the commissionaire slink out of sight into the gloom and shadows of the upper deck.
“Heads.” Vishab spat again, her voice rusty and cracked from too many hours spent over her cauldrons, inhaling smoke and vile emanations. “It’s hearts I’ll take this night and drain them into my pots, and in that boiling blood I’ll find what ye seek—but for this, Corvus, I’ll have a boon.”
Corvus turned fully to meet her gaze, and was surprised to find it boring into him with untoward intensity—a feeble witch trick unlikely to wield influence in his quarter. Something had set her off kilter for her to even try it.
“ ’Tis no more than you can spare, lord. No more, and for certes no less than you dare give,” she went on, holding him with her yellowed eye.
“A threat, Vishab?” He would not have the old woman forget who held the reins of power.
“No threat, lord, a request only, from one whose heart’s desire is the same as your own, to destroy the priestesses of Claerwen and all their line.”
“My desires are not quite so simple, woman. I would have some salvation with my vengeance.”
“And so you shall, so you shall.” She nodded her bony gray head in obeisance. “Together we have killed many a priestess, lord, and with the vision I will seek this eventide to find the Lady Avallyn, we will kill again, mayhaps for the last time. This is all I meant, nothing more.”
Avallyn, was it? Whatever the stakes, Corvus didn’t like the sound of his nemesis’s name on Vishab’s withered lips, but this was not the time to press her. The captain of his Home Guard had returned on deck with the prisoners.
One was a giant of a man, bald and muscular and bound in chains. Blood ran from the wounds he’d taken in the battle for the Quonset. Even when the place had been leveled around him, he’d kept up the fight. A woman stood by his side, the chai wallah, small with graying blond hair, her gaze fearlessly meeting Corvus’s despite the lasgun wound on her arm.
There was something familiar about her, something he could not place. Not her face, he decided, but perhaps her expression. It wasn’t often that someone met his gaze. Certain zealots managed it, secure in their salvation from whatever hells awaited nonbelievers. Yet the woman didn’t have the look of a religious zealot. No manic fire lit her gaze, only a steady, glowing ember.
Which he would soon extinguish.
Her fearlessness would pass quickly enough, he thought, casting a glance at the third prisoner, a Pan-shei rumrunner from the looks of him. Narrow-faced and pockmarked, his surfeit of fear more than made up for the woman’s lack.
“Have they been questioned?” he asked of no one in particular.
“Thoroughly,” came the captain’s reply.
“And?”
“They have told us nothing.”
“Not true! Not true!” the rumrunner cried, lunging forward to the end of his chains. “I have told all, lord, all! And if you desire, I will tell you more! Anything!”
“He knows nothing, milord,” the captain said over the man’s protestations.
“Then he’s mine.” Vishab reached out and marked the man down the side of his face with a clawlike fingernail.
Within seconds, the scratch began to bubble and froth, with the rumrunner’s blood turning blue. The man fell to his knees, his eyes growing wild, his limbs twitching, until he collapsed in a heap.
“Take him below,” Vishab ordered.
One of the guards strode forward and hauled him away, and Vishab turned her gaze on the woman.
“You,” she said, her voice a wicked rasp. “You’ve run your last, and well you know it.”
The crone sidled closer and sifted her fingers through the woman’s fair hair, then grabbed a fistful and pulled it up, revealing a pale streak of hair and a matching scar running the length of her neck—the mark of a time-rider. Corvus stared at the scar, thoroughly intrigued.
The wallah didn’t flinch, but the giant lunged forward and would have crushed the witch with his bare hands, if not for the electric shock a guard sent through h
is chains.
The man roared, and at that Corvus noted the first sign of distress in the woman’s eyes. The giant was her companion, he realized, her consort. He would have to thank the witch for the revelations about his prisoners. Certainly his new captain had not ferreted the information out. Maybe Vishab had been right in that quarter as well.
As the witch left to go below, his gaze went over the woman again, and an unsettling thought came to him. He’d gotten a description of his thief months ago, and the man had a white stripe in his black hair. An insignificant fact by itself, given the sycophantic fashions of the Old Dominion, but of disturbing import if he should prove to be a time-rider as well.
“Are the crowds assembled?” he asked, ready to be done with the night’s work and on his way to Craig Tagen.
“Aye, milord, from every quarter of Pan-shei,” the captain replied.
“And the sacrifices chosen to join the doomed Guard?”
“Aye, milord, from every quarter of Pan-shei.”
The next time he or his Guard came to this rat hole on the edge of the Old Dominion, no one would bar his door, and no one would offer safe harbor to his enemies. He had left Pan-shei alone all these years, seeing little profit in the ragged market, but now they would pay tribute directly to him. They would know who their true master was—as would the woman facing him. Ferrar was her name, and if he had known there were time-riding souls of such courage in Pan-shei, he would not have dismissed the place so lightly.
With a sweep of his left hand, he lofted a wisp of smoke into the air, a wisp of his own corporeal being; with another gesture he set it to twisting, a black and noxious funnel that sucked the very light from the sky.
It would cost him, this deadly deed he contrived out of his own destruction, and for every soul he took another piece of his own would be lost. But the price—a spark of fierce, raw power flashed up his arm and through his body, riveting him to a razor’s edge between ungodly pleasure and torturous pain. Ah, the price had its own sweet rewards.
~ ~ ~
From deep within the warship, Vishab heard the terror begin. Corvus unleashed was a sight not soon forgotten. In truth, none of the populace of Pan-shei would ever be the same again after witnessing the Warmonger’s dark power. ’Twas enough to lift the hairs on her neck, but no more than that. She had been to the depths of nightless chaos, been to the depths of sunless, unformed worlds, cast there by White Ladies who had found her own colors too impure, and she had survived.
The priestesses would not.
The fools had taken their most precious jewel and set it adrift on the sands with no more protection than a peach blossom on the open sea. Vishab would pluck the hapless gem from the dunes, grind it into dust, and let it be blown to the four corners of the earth.
She could think of no sweeter revenge.
Chapter 11
Avallyn woke with a start. She’d fallen asleep in a chair, but was now in the sick bay bed. Besides herself, the bed was empty—or rather, almost empty. Morgan’s tracking bracelet lay on the rumpled blankets next to her, its lights turned off.
Her heart plummeted.
He’s gone. She slipped off the bed, ready to race through the door, but was stopped by the sight of the wild boy leaning negligently against the hatchway.
“Morgan?” she asked, knowing all too well that she’d lost. She only prayed that reason would work where physical restraint had not.
“He’s taking a bit of a stroll,” the boy said, his mischievous grin telling her his earlier deference had not gone beyond the hold she’d had over his lord, and that he was the one who had broken that hold.
For no good reason she could think of, she relaxed. Morgan had won, but he hadn’t abandoned her, and what was written was written. On the other hand, for all intents and purposes she’d been kidnapped and her rover pirated by a band of tech-trash thieves from Pan-shei.
“Can I see him?”
Aja’s grin widened. “Aye, he’s waiting for you up by the spring,” the boy said, and pushed away from the doorway, sweeping his arm out in a gracious bow.
~ ~ ~
Morgan shrugged into a clean shirt he’d found in the rover and towel-dried his hair one more time. The sinkhole was spring-fed with cool water rising from an aquifer deep below the desert floor. He’d submerged himself in it naked, letting the coldness seep through him and clear his brain.
’Twas well past time for clear thinking.
Floating down through the sinkhole, he’d looked up and seen beams of sunlight shimmering through great cracks in the ridgeline above, trails of golden light that reminded him of his dreams. He’d gone through the wormhole again in the night, but in a way far more real than any Carillion memory run. He’d felt the glaciation of his body, the bitter, numbing cold. He’d seen the clouds of wind-borne frost and the jacinth bolts of lightning—and the golden worms swirling like liquid light below him, waiting for him.
The dream had been simply linear, one moment turning into the next with no intrusions from other times or other places, and the whole of it had unfolded with a clarity he could not fault. Thus it had been, down to the last crystal of ice formed in his veins. Avallyn’s potion had done him no favor in that, but neither had it done him any harm. He felt more whole than he had since the battle for Balor. Her father was a great mage indeed, and she was—He looked up as her shadow fell across the sunlight’s path. She was the death of him.
Aye, he’d seen that too.
“Malashm,” she said in the Quicken-tree tongue, and he knew all his dreams to be true.
“Malashm.” Without taking his eyes off her, he finished buttoning his shirt.
“Did you sleep well?”
He laughed and sat down on a rocky ledge to pull on his boots. “There was no sleep in what I did in the night.”
“Dreams then?”
“A thousand of them.” He looked up from his boots. She appeared rested, her hair rather wildly sticking out where it had been pressed into the bed. She also appeared distinctly ill at ease—as well she should. “We are to be lovers.”
“My mother says not.”
“Then your mother is wrong.” He reached for his lasgun holster and buckled it around his waist, then stood and wrapped the lower strap around his thigh.
“She won’t be glad to hear it.”
“For what your mother asks of me, your virginity is a small price to pay.” He tightened the strap and straightened to his full height. “Or would you have it otherwise?”
“No.” She shook her head, which gave him no satisfaction. Whether he made love with her or not, there was no winning in the dreams he’d had, only a steady decline into desperate danger.
“Would you have someone else?” he asked, picking his munitions belt up off the ledge. He shrugged into it and settled his carbine and scabbard down the middle of his back. “There are other time-riders in the Old Dominion. Ferrar is one, and so is Jons. Or have you already been through the wormhole?”
“No, not yet.” She shook her head again.
He walked down the path toward her, his expression as grim as his thoughts. To her credit she held her ground and even tilted her head to give him a better look when he lifted a swath of her hair. There was no scar on her neck, only a silken expanse of skin, creamily smooth, and he had to resist the urge to run his hand over it. At such close quarters, her scent filled his nostrils, the green grass smell of her, the freshness so at odds with the desert.
She was meant to be his—unless he walked away. Thanks to Aja, he had the choice.
Or did he?
He pulled his hand back without touching her.
“How did you get the bracelet off?” she asked.
“The boy. He’s more than he seems.”
“Much more,” she conceded, “if he can undo Tamisk’s magic.”
“And what magic is it that would send us both to our deaths?” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Your own mother would send you into that hell?
Into the dark night I saw? And for what? To save one corrupt and pathetic world when there are so many others?”
“It is our world,” she said, a weak defense, to his way of thinking.
“And there are thousands upon millions more.”
“None like this.”
“Aye, mayhaps none with such decay at its core.” He turned away in disgust.
“If you are afraid—”
“And you are not?” he cut her off, spinning around. “Christ save you, Avallyn, going through the wormhole alone is nigh unto death. As for this black chaos locked in the earth, I say leave it there. Live your life here, where you were born, and leave the past to its own making.”
“There are other lives at stake.”
“More important than yours?” His voice rose on a harsh note, his anger barely controlled.
At that she looked away, and he felt needlessly cruel. If her own mother and father gave her such little worth, what was she to think?
But he had underestimated her.
When she raised her head, it wasn’t self-pity filling her eyes, but anger of her own.
“Aye, there are lives at stake more important than mine, and I do not count myself lightly. But with you at my side, I had not planned on dying. You were to be my protector, a barbarian from out of the past sent to save the future, a great warrior sent to help me.”
Her protector? No wonder she’d kissed him as if her life depended on it. Her life did. He held his own in a fight, but “great warrior”? Even at his best, the designation didn’t hold true. Dain Lavrans had been a great warrior, capable of killing with more grace than most people prayed. Morgan would give himself no higher marks than efficiency and enough success to have kept his head attached to his shoulders.
“You’ve been deceived.” The words tasted like dust in his mouth, but he would say them, and he would have her kisses given for another reason.
“You got us here,” she reminded him, her gaze meeting his square on.
“The only fight I’ve had all week has been with the Lyran, and you were the one who saved me.” Dustier and dustier, he thought, hating the truth for what it was, and hating even more so what he’d seen in his dreams.
