“Criyiyi!” The little toad assured her that he was ready.
Flap, flap, flap, like running in the air, she reached for the dream world and suddenly, there she was.
“Criyi-kit!” The toad politely informed her that he had not fallen, though she would have known it anyway by the weight on her back.
“Bolghai!” she called. “Bolghai! I’ve found Eluneke, but I can’t free her without you!”
She thought it might take a long time to find him, but he heard her call and appeared on the dream landscape that passed below her flight. When he stood on his hind legs and signaled her, she spiraled down to a landing made clumsy by the toad on her back.
“You have to come right away,” she said. “Qutula has placed Eluneke at the mercy of a demon! We need your help.”
The stoat looked for a moment as though he couldn’t decide whether to leap on the raven and snap her neck for dinner or swallow the little toad whole. With a tremble that shook his fur from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, however, he turned back into his human form and squatted on the grass. “Tell me everything,” he said. “With a little effort, we should be able to get back before you left.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
IF THE PLAN HAD GONE perfectly, Jochi would now be descending on Qutula’s camp with three thousand of Tayy’s own horde. The attack would have drawn off Qutula’s forces, leaving his small cohort free to rescue the princess.
Tayy’s part of the plan had gone smoothly enough. Mangkut had led him to the tent where he promised they would find Eluneke. “Prepare yourself for a shock,” he had warned them with a smirk. “She is not the beauty you remember.”
Tayy wanted to hit him, but he couldn’t afford the commotion. “Bind him, and cover his mouth,” he whispered to his companions. “Then tie him to a tree for his master to find.”
Mangkut’s eyes widened in terror. For betraying him, Qutula would surely have him killed as slowly and horribly as the prince had threatened. He gathered breath for a shout to rouse the camp but Tayy was there first, clamping a leather-gauntleted hand to his mouth. “There is more to this plan than you know,” he whispered. “Be quiet and you may yet live. Make a sound and my companions will happily crack your ribs like a pigeon and draw your struggling lungs out through your backbone before they go to their own doom. Don’t think Qutula will help you to a swifter end when he finds you.”
Mangkut nodded to show that he understood. Tayy didn’t trust him, but before he could draw another breath, one of the Qubal rescuers stuffed a cleaning cloth for his sword into his mouth. Another secured a thong between Mangkut’s teeth to hold it in place while a third tied his feet. They had never released his hands; Tayy left them to complete securing their prisoner and slipped under the tent cloth.
He didn’t see her at first. When he did, he couldn’t control the instant recoil.
Eluneke covered her distorted face and moaned softly into her hands. “Don’t look at me,” she whispered. “Leave me here—you have to go. He means to kill you.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you,” he promised, and cursed himself at the hesitation in his voice. Eluneke still had the general shape of a woman, but her face had been grotesquely transformed into the features of a frog. Thin strands, a travesty of her own thick dark hair, fell across large, protuberant eyes and partly covered the mouth stretched in a debased parody of a grin. Her hands, where they tried to hide her features, were mottled green and brown, her fingers gnarled and covered with warty yellow knobs of skin.
From the first time he had set eyes on her in Toragana’s doorway he had loved her natural beauty. He loved her spirit more, however, and had accepted her totem animal long ago, conversing with the king of the toads and carrying Eluneke herself as a toad near his heart. But in all their past encounters she had chosen the form she wore; he found it impossible to accept the shape Qutula’s demon had forced on her.
Eluneke watched him through her fingers and wept when it must have appeared to her that he could not look at her face. She flinched when he reached out to hold her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Her fear of him pierced his soul like a dagger, but he refused to be deterred. “I’m getting you out of here; Bolghai will know what to do when you’re free.”
“I can’t. The demon . . .” She bobbed her head like a toad, refusing to accompany him while she urged him to his own escape. “Go, while you can.”
“Not without you.” Patience, he told himself, and was rewarded with her hand, tentatively reaching for his.
“Not so fast there, toad lover!” Between them, the form of a serpent materialized, fangs dripping vaporous venom.
Instinctively, Tayy pulled his sword, but the viper swirled away in a mist when he struck at it, leaving nothing behind but the hissing bark of its laughter.
“What difference does it make whether you still want her?” the creature hissed in his ear. “You’re here, aren’t you? Soon enough you’ll be dead, and I’ll be free.”
His sword raised, Tayy whirled, tracking the sibilant voice. But the viper drew its insubstantial neck out of reach.
“Frankly, I didn’t think you’d be such a fool,” it taunted.
Tayy brought his sword down in a slicing move that should have severed the head from any material beast, but it slid right through the vaporous scales.
“That wasn’t very friendly.”
Before he could pull his hand back, the serpent found the thin bracelet of flesh exposed between the prince’s riding gauntlet and his coat. Grinning, it sank its dripping fangs into his flesh. Venom pulsed fire into the wound. When the viper withdrew, one sharp tooth remained in the wound, lodged between the bones.
“No!” Eluneke screamed.
The effect of a demon’s sting didn’t always parallel the creature whose form it embodied. This time, Tayy realized, it did. Already his arm had begun to blister and bleed. His heart beat in strange rhythms and his breathing came in short, rapid gasps. He didn’t have much time and, alerted by the sounds of struggle, Qutula’s warriors had come boiling through the door of the tent.
“Ugly, isn’t she?” Qutula stood smirking in front of him, his clothes hastily tied and his sword held carelessly in his hand.
Swaying on his feet, Tayy painfully raised his sword and charged, though he knew that the desperate action hastened his own death. It scarcely mattered now. Jochi hadn’t come, and there were too many against his handful of guardsmen. But he could defend Eluneke until he fell. He moved in, feinted left, and cut Qutula a slashing blow that left his sleeve dangling but did little more than scratch the arm beneath.
“You son of a bitch!” Qutula snarled, and struck back.
Tayy intercepted the blow. Their swords slid blade against blade until they came to rest in a clash of cross guards. The prince’s arm trembled, blood-choked from the serpent’s bite and swelling with blisters from the venom. His sword grew impossibly heavy, but damaged muscles refused his commands to disengage.
Where was Jochi? Around him, weapons rang against each other as Tayy’s small raiding party held off the tide of the opposition. Though Qutula’s forces vastly outnumbered them, they had limited their approach to the doorway, so far at least not thinking to unmake the tent around them and so come at them from all sides. They might go on like that until their arms tired; eventually the prince’s small cohort would stagger and the overwhelming numbers against them would triumph. But Tayy wouldn’t be there to see it. He fell to his knees, blind and breathless, the pain in his arm so overwhelming that he hardly knew if he still held his sword.
Qutula’s blade followed him down. “Your line is dead,” he said, “You have no place here anymore.” Then he plunged the sword into the prince’s undefended back.
Tayy fell, arms spread on the dirty carpets, his life’s blood adding to the stains that already crossed them. The last sounds he heard were Eluneke’s sobs, mingling with the keening wail of his hounds somewhere out on the grasslands and the bea
ting of drums in the distance. Too late to save the prince’s life, Jochi had arrived. It had been too late since the serpent had struck, of course. He couldn’t breathe: couldn’t find the air to fill his lungs and his last sucking breath seemed to be leaking away with the blood flowing from the wound in his back.
His mother was frowning and he waited patiently for the scolding that didn’t come. She was dead, of course, and he was long past the age when she might correct him like a child. He would have liked to know what had displeased her so, but lacked the energy to ask. But he easily went into her arms when she offered them, and laid his head against her heart the way he had as an infant. How he had missed her. Chimbai was there too, looking thunderously angry. He said nothing, however, and might have sighed, but Tayy’s senses were fading. . . .
Chapter Forty
THE PRINCE’S MEN had fought with desperate energy and his own dead and wounded lay scattered among them, but Qutula’s superior forces had won the day, killing or overpowering the little band of rescuers. The fighting hadn’t ended, however; battle drums sounded in the distance. He wasn’t surprised that Tayy’s army had followed their prince, but the serpent-demon’s failure to throw them off the track disappointed him. He would have to devise a suitable punishment. In the meantime, he took a moment to savor his victory over his cousin before mus tering his army.
“We’re under attack,” he advised his closest followers who sorted their wounded while they waited for his next orders. “Tie the prisoners and throw them out where the good General Jochi’s horde must pass.
“And leave this for him to chew on.” With the last words, he picked up Tayy’s sword from where it had fallen.
He would have liked to keep the weapon for the jewels in the hilt. Its presence with the prisoners—proof of the prince’s death—would slow the horde now descending upon him, however; he needed that time to muster his own troops. With any luck, General Jochi would accept that his mission had failed and give his allegiance to Mergen’s true son. Qutula didn’t count on that, but any delay worked in his favor.
“Throw him in the pit.” He nudged the body with his toe, rolling it over so the prince’s unseeing eyes stared up at him. “Cover it and tether a horse or two to trample the ground; We don’t want anyone digging him up again, now do we?”
No one answered—he’d expected no less—but the dead prince was taken up by his arms and his legs and carried out of the tent. Presently the satisfying sound of muddy earth falling heavily on leather half-armor reached him.
In the recent wars in the Cloud Country, Qutula had seen the result of allowing a hero’s soul to return generation after generation in search of justice. He had no intention of letting Prince Tayyichiut’s vengeful spirit disturb his rest now or in any future generation. Imprisoned in the carrion of its own buried corpse, Tayy’s soul would make easy prey for the hungry spirits. Those unhappy tatters of captive souls would devour the living essence of the prince and turn him into one of their lost kind, devouring other luckless spirits in a never-ending circle of torment.
So caught up in his own thoughts, Qutula almost forgot the toad-girl sniveling in the corner. Though it pained him to look at her, he needed something to trade for his life if it came to that. With Tayy dead, he didn’t have many options.
“Are you carrying his child?” he asked.
She controlled the darting of her tongue with an effort, but gave no answer by word or the tremor of even an eyelid. That told him something in itself. She hadn’t always been this hideous, of course, but the prince had suffered from more honor than sense.
“So in all those nights spent on the river he never rode you at all. Pity. Pity you aren’t prettier or I’d give you a taste of what you’ve been missing.”
Her eyes burned and he was glad of the demon he’d bound in the talisman at her fat toady throat. No gratitude at all for the fact that he’d just decided to spare her life. For the present. He might have to reconsider that decision, though. She had powers that amazed even Bolghai. If she ever got loose, he figured Jochi’s army would be the least of his troubles.
But right now the general was his problem, so he turned and left her there to listen while his guardsmen entombed her hero’s soul.
The Durluken would meet the general’s horde out on the grassland, well away from his own tents thanks to the spell his tame demon had cast over the camp. Qutula therefore directed only a small force to patrol his perimeter. For the rest, he sorted them with little confusion. Duwa’s thousand he took under his command, in addition to ordering the movements of his whole army. As for Mangkut’s company . . . the patrol had found his captain. They had freed his ankles so that he could walk under his own power, but his hands remained bound.
“My lord.” Mangkut bowed deeply before he added, “I understand you have found the gift I brought you, and have dispatched it as you intended.”
“You betrayed me to save your own skin,” Qutula pointed out reasonably enough. The warriors who held the prisoner paled with fear, but Mangkut answered with a cocky grin.
“Not at all, my lord. Your orders were to bring the prince. Our plan for doing so unfortunately met more obstacles than I could overcome, so I had to improvise on the spot. He would not come as my prisoner, but I easily led him to your justice by making it seem that I believed myself at his mercy. Either way, I knew the outcome would be the same.”
“And so it has been,” Qutula agreed. He waited a moment to give his judgment, wanting to see Mangkut sweat for the risk he had taken—or the betrayal he had plotted. But he needed captains and Mangkut had followed him since they were on leading reins.
“Go,” he said. “You made one error in your calculations. The general followed you with his army.”
Mangkut grinned at the news. “And doubtless wanders in amazement outside your demon’s glamour,” he scoffed. “Until you fall on him as if from the sky, and disappear again to terrify his horde and send them running for their tents to hide their faces under their blankets. With their hero dead, who but our own Lord Qutula can win?”
“With such confidence, who could lead us into the fray but our own Captain Mangkut?” Qutula ordered the Durluken’s hands released and returned his grin with malice lurking at the corners of his eyes. “I honor your thousand, who will lead the assault,” he said.
Mangkut paled, understanding as Qutula knew he must the perilous role he’d been given. But he was the sort of captain who led by driving his men from behind rather than drawing them after him in the charge. He would consider his losses well spent if they accounted for his own survival. “My lord.” He bowed his head in submission before heading off to locate his company and give his orders.
Qutula watched his departing back for only a moment. His horse in full caparison stood for him to mount. The sun shone brightly, a light breeze played with his braids below his cone-shaped helmet, and Jochi awaited him on the battlefield with an ulus already half lost. It was a fine day for a slaughter.
Bolghai followed Toragana through the dreamscape. Blind to Eluneke’s spirit, he depended on the raven, with the little frog guide on her back, to find their pupil. Suddenly a darkness rose up across the horizon. Bolghai flinched, but the little toad urged the raven on, through the dark storm that blotted out all dreams and all the worlds of the living and the dead where shaman freely roam. He trembled, knowing the blight for a demon’s spell, but trusted Eluneke’s totem creature to lead them through.
It was a bumpy ride, filled with the voices of hungry spirits, and the lost, but then it ended, tumbling them into the bright light of their spirit-senses. They had passed the boundary of the demon’s spell. The toad had brought them to Qutula—below, the soul of Mergen’s blanket-son roiled the dreamscape with his dark purpose. It was this more than anything of the demon’s own devising that had fed the shadow spell.
Though Bolghai now saw the tents of the enemy clearly in the dreamscape, Eluneke remained hidden from him. With the aid of her toad passenger, howeve
r, Toragana quickly found the tent where the demon held the shaman-princess prisoner and leaped into the mortal sphere. Bolghai thought himself inside the tent and scampered, nose twitching, into the world of the living on Qutula’s soiled carpets.
Toragana fluttered helplessly around the girl’s head a moment before landing on one of the umbrella spokes that held up the roof. Like the raven, Bolghai remained in his totem form, drawing power from the creatures of the earth to protect him from the demon whose presence he sensed in the tent. Even here, so close to her, he caught no reflection of Eluneke’s bright soul in the misshapen creature, half toad, half girl, pressed weeping against the single lattice.
A tear welled from his little stoat eye. Disaster had struck, and it was his fault. If he had guided her more rapidly through the trials of her training, she might have fought off the demon who possessed the talisman around her throat. Or perhaps he was just being a fool.
She noticed him then, looking up from red-rimmed eyes that clashed vilely with her brown-and-green skin. “You’re too late,” she said, barely able to make the human sounds in her toady throat. “He’s dead. My half brother murdered his own cousin and threw him in a pit. For all your vaunted powers, your prince’s very soul lies rotting in the mud while horses pound the dirt over his head.”
Bloghai shuddered and the fur rose on end down the length of his spine. The despair in her tormented voice chilled him, so that his liver quivered in his belly.
“Prince Tayyichiut?” He twitched his beady little nose questioningly, though she could mean no one else, with such wrenching tears.
“His soul is perishing, even now torn to pieces by the hungry spirits!” Eluneke clutched the thin strands of her hair with gnarled fingers. “I have to help him!”
Her anger shook Bolghai in his dismay. He had a task to do, a princess to rescue, and a prince to save from a fate more terrible than the death that presaged it. Toragana had explained to him that the demon would stop a human enemy of Qutula’s from freeing the girl. So Bolghai must be something other than human when he approached the golden thread that bound talisman to spell.
Lords of Grass and Thunder Page 46
