The Spirit Stone

by Katharine Kerr

  ‘Then I won’t say anything.’ He grinned at her. ‘But I’m not going to tell you the truth, either. Don’t bother to try to pry it out of me.’

  ‘Laz—’

  ‘Although—’ He hesitated briefly. ‘Now that I think of it –’ He turned and walked out without another word.

  Sidro ran to the door and yelled insults after him until she realized that Faharn stood within earshot. She stepped back in and slammed the door shut, then stood fuming in the centre of the cabin. As her anger receded, she noticed that trouble seemed to be brewing outside. She heard men’s voices shouting in anger. Over them rang Laz’s laughter, a shrill croak like a raven’s call. She hesitated, afraid to go to the camp-side window, then got an idea.

  Since the cabin floor lay below ground level, she found it easy to slip out of the forest-side window. The rough wall of the cabin proved easy climbing, too, with its untrimmed logs providing steps and handholds. She squirmed onto the roof, then lay on her stomach to look down.

  In the centre clearing of the camp sat a big fire-pit, cold and empty at the moment. The men had gathered in the bare ground around it. They stood silently, spears in hand but held upright, as if they were merely waiting for trouble. Thanks to his horse’s mane of hair, Sidro could pick out Pir easily, standing right next to the stone circle. He had a protective arm around Vek’s shoulders. Faharn paced back and forth at the front of the mob. Even from her distance Sidro could catch the scent of his fear—fear for Laz’s sake, no doubt, because some yards apart Laz and Movrae stood facing each other, both of them yelling challenges.

  Next to Movrae Laz looked slender, even weak, but while Movrae had the trained soldier’s muscle, Laz had speed. Movrae struck first; he launched a flat-handed slap at his leader’s face. Laz ducked under, but the blow caught him on the side of the head and made him stagger. Movrae rushed in and swung hard to keep his advantage, but Laz had recovered enough to dodge to one side. For a moment they circled; then Laz darted forward and struck back with two quick blows, one a clip on the face, the other a fist thrown hard into Movrae’s stomach. The bigger man staggered and doubled over. Laz chopped him hard on the side of the neck with the side of one hand. He fell, grunting, to his knees.

  Faharn dashed forward. He carried leather thongs, and he bound Movrae hand and foot while Laz watched, breathing hard and rubbing his bleeding knuckles. The other men moved back out of the way as Faharn dragged Movrae to the fire-pit and slung him in like a log.

  The wind sighed through the surrounding trees as if in pity, but none of the men said a word. Laz stepped into the pit, stood looking down at the bound man, then knelt. He drew his knife from its sheath at his belt with his right hand and grabbed Movrae by the hair with his left. Movrae screamed, yelled, twisted as he tried to get free. Laz yanked him back by the hair, then struck. Movrae lay still. Blood soaked Laz’s sleeve and flowed from the Horsekin’s throat into the sand and ashes of the pit, a scarlet trickle in the sunlight. Laz wiped his knife clean on Movrae’s shirt, then stood up, looking at the assembled men. They looked steadily back and said nothing.

  Sidro let out her breath in a sob. Her pulse fluttered in her throat, and sweat beaded her breasts—whether from revulsion or excitement, she couldn’t say at that moment. She slid backwards to the edge of the roof, then climbed down. For a moment she stood outside the window and stared at the dark forest, looming over her like a wave of shadows. She considered escaping into it and trying to make her way back to Zakh Gral, but she lacked the courage to face the wilderness alone. She climbed back in through the window and sat down on one of the tree stumps by the table.

  With shaking hands she pushed her sweaty hair back from her face. She had just watched Laz kill a man for looking at her in the wrong way. He had told her the truth about one thing, that the scholarly First Son had disappeared, hidden somewhere inside a savage tribal chief. The door swung open. She got to her feet and involuntarily laid a hand at her throat when Laz stepped in. His shirt sleeve had turned stiff and rust-brown.

  ‘I saw you watching.’ He shut the door. ‘If you were a savage tribeswoman, you’d be as pleased as a mare with a new foal.’ He paused, studying her face. ‘I take it you’re not.’

  ‘Part of me is. Part of me feels sick to her stomach.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with our mixed blood.’

  ‘No, it’s got nothing to do with that. We could be full-blooded Horsekin, and I’d still feel torn in half.’

  Among the tattoos on the left side of his face a purple bruise was rising into a swelling. She touched it with her finger tips.

  ‘It hurts, but not too badly.’ Laz pulled off the blood-stained shirt and tossed it onto the table. ‘Do you realize that the sun is a long way past its zenith, and I’ve not taken you back to bed yet?’

  ‘I don’t want—’

  He caught her by the shoulders and drew her close. ‘Yes, you do,’ he said. ‘I can smell it on you.’

  The horrible truth, she realized, was that he was right. She found herself remembering the silent way his men had done nothing to save Movrae. None of them had dared to cross Laz, their commander, their dominator. The memory rose of Movrae, twisting in terror, and of Laz, so quick to strike, and the blood, that flash of scarlet in the sun. Something deep in her soul had responded to the sight. Something was responding now, revelling in the memories like a dog rolling in carrion.

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Alshandra help—’

  Laz kissed her before she could finish the prayer. He pulled her close, kissed her again, then walked her backwards until they fell together into the tumbled blankets, soaked in their scent. The world shrank to his body and his bed, as it always did once he had his hands upon her.

  As the drowsy days passed, her years in the temple began to seem like a story she’d told herself rather than memories of a time when she’d been happy. Even her worries about damnation receded into the distant mist of the future. Yet she had a new fear. How would he react when she got pregnant again? Laz had his own view of what had happened the last time, a much rosier picture than her memories of his temper tantrums and sulks. When, after an eightnight, her moon flow began, she danced around the cabin in joy.

  By Gel da’ Thae custom, that flow marked her as forbidden to him. The dangerous blood reminded men that women came and went as they wished, not as the men wished, and that men must wait for what they wanted from their women. For the first four days Laz shared Faharn’s shelter, and while she was secluded, he flew. She looked out of a window on the first morning to see the raven swooping up from the clearing and heading for the open sky beyond. The dragon! What if the dragon sees him? The thought filled her with such terror that for a moment she laid a cold hand over her heart and gasped for breath. Yet he’d flown off so confidently—the fear vanished in a stab of anger. He’d lied to her, no doubt, about the silver dragon, when he was trying to persuade her to come away with him.

  ‘Why do I ever believe him?’ she whispered.

  Laz returned safely that evening. She saw the raven land, and in a while he came to the door in his man’s shape. He brought her a carefully packed basket of food, setting it down outside, then retreated while she brought it in. From the doorway she saw Faharn, waiting some yards away and smiling as Laz walked over to join him. For these few days, at least, he would have his teacher back.

  With Laz gone, the sexual scent in the cabin air slowly cleared. Sidro began to realize how much his raw smell had intoxicated her, trapped inside as she’d been. It had muddled her thoughts far worse than any ale or mead could have done. She began to remember various odd things that she’d accepted without much of a struggle. What had Pir meant, anyway, that she’d have to know sooner or later? And where had Laz found the white crystal? Where did he go when he flew as the raven? She decided that from then on she would spend part of the day outside or at the least, at the window. The stinking air of the camp seemed preferable to losing her reason for days on end. After what had happened to Mo
vrae, none of Laz’s men would dare accost her. She could be sure of that.

  To occupy her time apart, Laz had opened the locked box and given her a pair of thick books, written on pale leather. Even though she’d been born a slave, Sidro had been taught to read. In the Gel da’ Thae view, reading helped set themselves and their slaves apart from the savage tribes of the far north as well as from the farm slaves who fed the cities. During the day she sat at the table and read bits and pieces of magical lore from the Pseudo-Iamblichos Scroll, a book bound in black leather and decorated with a white dragon on its cover. Laz himself had translated it from the language of the Black Isles into the Horsekin tongue.

  Inside its plain green binding, the other book held a copy of the chronicles he’d mentioned on her first day in the camp, an account of the War at Highstone Tor in Slavers’ Country and its aftermath in the Freeland city of Marshfort. The latter tale she knew well. In Marshfort the holy witness Raena had died, slain by the man known as Rhodry Aberwyn, whom Vandar had then transformed into the silver dragon. Laz saw the chronicle of these events as a weapon to destroy her faith, Sidro knew, and at first she left it unopened. But curiosity—it’s your besetting sin, Sidro, she told herself. That and lust.

  Finally, on the fourth evening, after she’d eaten the dinner Laz left outside the door, she surrendered to her sin and opened the chronicle. By dweomer light she read until her back was cramped from leaning over the book and her swollen eyes could read no more. She dragged herself away from the table and leaned on a windowsill to look through the trees at the night sky. Judging by the wheel of stars, the dawn lay close at hand.

  ‘He’s not the only liar in the world, is he?’ she said aloud.

  For a moment she wept, then returned to the table. She banished the dweomer light, shut the book, and turned away to fall upon the mattress, exhausted. When she woke to a sunny room, Laz was sitting at the table and smiling at her. The book lay open in front of him.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘I’ll sleep over at Faharn’s again tonight, but I figured it was safe for me to be here during the day.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is. I’m barely bleeding at all.’

  He touched the tips of the fingers on his right hand to his forehead, a sign of submission and warding both. She sat up and considered him.

  ‘For all that you love to mock,’ she said, ‘you still cling to the old ways.’

  ‘In some things.’ He grinned again. ‘I brought you a couple of buckets of wash water. I’ll go get some food.’

  Once he left, Sidro took off her dress and shift, then considered the buckets of water. There were prayers to be said while she purified herself, but she’d have to choose between two sets, the ancient ritual she’d learned as a young girl, and the new ritual that Alshandra’s priestesses had devised to replace it. She’d not used the ancient set in years. For a moment she considered chanting the prayer to Alshandra. Perhaps the chroniclers were wrong. Perhaps she would answer and forgive her priestess her broken vows. Sidro hesitated, then remembered Laz, touching his fingers to his forehead in a gesture as old as the Horsekin race.

  ‘Rinbala, goddess of the sea,’ she began. ‘Wash me clean now that my blood time is ending.’

  When she finished the chant, she gathered up the bloody rags she’d been using. Later she would go into the forest and wash them in running water. When that time came, she knew that she would pray not to Alshandra, but to Kanz, goddess of the moon.

  Sidro wasn’t the only person wondering about the whereabouts of the two dragons. Salamander was beginning to worry about their absence. The army, led by Maelaber and his escort, had been making its slow way west into the roadless grasslands for nearly a fortnight. With so many men and horses to tend, making and breaking camp took hours out of the day’s travel. Much to the frustration of the dwarven carters, the long grass kept catching and winding itself around the strakes on the cartwheels. The army would have to pause while the swearing carters removed it. The old-fashioned wooden wheels of the Deverry carts broke just as often as they always had, and again, the army would have to stop. On three different days it rained, forcing the army to huddle in its tents.

  Salamander felt that they were crawling, not marching. Every now and then the raven mazrak would fly overhead. Salamander worried constantly that he’d flap off to warn Zakh Gral.

  ‘I wish that wretched dragon would get herself back here,’ Salamander said to Gerran.

  ‘Where is she, anyway?’ Gerran said.

  ‘Looking for Rori—the silver dragon, that is.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll not be forgetting him. Don’t trouble your mind about that!’

  ‘Well and good, then. He was supposed to have joined us long ere this.’

  Gerran started to say more, then stopped, glancing away, biting his lower lip as if he were chewing over some difficult thought. Salamander waited. They were standing at the edge of the camp on the morning of their twelfth day on the road. Although the sun was already a good distance above the eastern horizon, the servants and pages had just begun to load the carts for another day’s march. The men of the warbands were bringing in the horses from pasture and saddling them.

  ‘Tell me somewhat,’ Gerran said at last. ‘About Rori, now. He truly is your brother, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is. I’d not lie to you about a thing like that.’

  Gerran let out his breath in a sharp puff, but his expression remained perfectly calm.

  ‘What made you change your mind?’ Salamander said. ‘I know that you thought me daft for saying he was my brother.’

  ‘Well, all this cursed dweomer. What else? I’ve learned it truly exists, and you hear all those old tales about dweomer turning men into frogs, so what’s to stop it from turning someone into a dragon?’

  ‘A good point, but, I hasten to add, it was only the greatest dweomermaster in the world who managed that particular trick. And, if I remember the tale a-right, working the transformation killed him.’

  ‘Well, that’s some comfort, then. I didn’t like the thought of waking up one morning covered with scales and sprouting wings.’

  ‘Fear not! You’re perfectly safe from such a fate.’

  Salamander had the somewhat crazed thought of confessing that he could turn himself into a magpie, just to see Gerran’s reaction. Fortunately, common sense took over, and he held his tongue.

  Arzosah returned to the army late on the same day. She circled high above the camp, then headed east to land about a quarter of a mile away, far enough to keep the horses from panicking at her scent. Salamander made his way through the waist-high grass and joined her. She’d used her long tail as a scythe of sorts to cut and beat down a circle in the green. In the midst of this clearing she sat with her front paws tucked at her chest and her tail laid neatly against her shiny black haunches while she looked up, studying the sky. When he approached, she lowered her head and contemplated him with her copper-coloured eyes, slit vertically like elven eyes to reveal a deep green pupil.

  ‘Greetings, oh perfect pinnacle of dragonhood!’ Salamander said in Elvish.

  ‘Same to you, oh maudlin minstrel of many words,’ Arzosah said. ‘Flames and fumes! Your army travels so slowly that it’s enough to drive one daft. I’ve been waiting for you out here for days.’

  ‘It’s driving me daft, too. The Roundears can’t seem to unpack so much as a saddlebag without it taking forever.’

  ‘How like them! Now, as for me, I’ve tracked Rori down.’

  ‘That’s grand news! Is he willing to join us?’

  ‘Oh yes. As soon as I mentioned slaughtering Horsekin, he became quite tractable.’ She sighed with a lift of a wing. ‘He really is splendid, when he’s himself, anyway.’

  ‘Is that wound still troubling him?’

  ‘Oh yes. He wants revenge for it, he tells me, and so do I, after having to live with it all these years. There have been times I’ve felt like biting him, just to make him stop all his licking and worrying at it! Let’s
hope Dallandra can heal it.’

  ‘I shall hope indeed. Where is he?’

  ‘Off to the west, scouting the fortress. Your description of its whereabouts was more than a little vague, you know.’

  ‘Well, I was confused when I arrived there and even more so when I left.’

  ‘Your natural state, no doubt. Now, I’m going to chase after Rori when I leave here, but we’ll both return and join you once you meet up with the Westfolk muster. It’s quite near.’

  ‘Splendid!’

  ‘Keep a watch for us. We’ll fly overhead and then land some decent distance away.’

  ‘It’ll probably be easier for Rori to meet with us without everyone watching.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Arzosah cocked her head to one side and considered this. ‘You’re quite possibly right. For now, however, I’m off to look for my dinner.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll go back to camp and get my own.’

  Salamander waited until the camp had quieted down later that evening before he tried contacting Dallandra. As soon as his mind touched hers, he knew she was deeply troubled.

  ‘I heard from Niffa earlier,’ Dallandra told him. ‘Cerr Cawnen won’t be sending us any troops. They need every man they’ve got to stay home and guard their walls.’

  ‘Are the Horsekin prowling around?’

  ‘Not yet, but messengers rode in yesterday from Braemel. The council there has broken its alliance with Cerr Cawnen.’

  ‘Ye gods! What does Grallezar say about that?’

  ‘I haven’t been able to reach her.’

  Simple common sense frightened him as much as any dweomer omen might have. ‘Do you think she’s dead?’ he said.

  ‘No. I’d feel that. She’s merely too upset about something to hear me. She’s more angry than frightened, though, which gives me hope. Her adoptive mother was the one who forged that alliance, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t know, actually. But no wonder the daughter’s furious.’

  ‘Just so. But the evil thing is, there’s no use counting on troops from Braemel, is there? Ebañy, I have to go. Here comes Prince Dar, and he needs to know about Cerr Cawnen.’