“It grows late,” Hamran noted. “Akari turns his face from us.”
Duna made a show of looking up at the sky. “So he does. I find it pleasant to ride by the light of the moons. Surely you do not fear the dark, Dreamshifter? Are shadows not your companions of choice? Surely you have faced worse than slavers in the Dreaming Lands.”
Kemmet shrank farther into his saddle at the look on Hamran’s face. It was dangerous to anger a dreamshifter, everyone knew that. Worse than the anger, though, was fear. Kemmet saw it in the way the old man gripped his reins, could see it in the way his mare played with her bit. If the dreamshifter was afraid, Kemmet figured the rest of them should be terrified.
Fear nibbled at the edges of his mind, as well. Kemmet had been apprenticed to the dreamshifter for six years now. He had grown up on tales of Shehannam fit to make the blood run cold, but nothing he had seen or experienced in that green world had been much cause for alarm. Until now, Kemmet had begun to think that neither this world nor the other was as dangerous as he had been led to believe.
As this day breathed its last, however, the old tales of war and wickedness seemed more real. The air grew cold, and still, and stale, and not just because Akari Sun Dragon had flown beyond the horizon. There was a smell on the wind that was unfamiliar to him, and which caused the chillflesh to rise on the backs of his arms. All day they had been riding hard, hunting a pair of slavers who had crept into their territory. They had passed the bloodstone spires that marked the foothills of Jehannim just before midsun, and ever since then Kemmet had felt a prickling at the back of his neck, as if he were a rabbit watched by a circling hawk. He had not wanted to say anything to the dreamshifter, or to the warden, lest he appear less than a man among men. Now he wished he had— and he wished harder that he could turn and ride for home, even if the warden mocked him for it and called him coward.
Duna Ja’Sajani was a champion among the people and a terror to outlanders. The boundary-stones around Nisfi were ringed with stakes set with the heads of their enemies, laughingly called Duna’s Wall, and their pride had not lost a child to the slavers since before Kemmet was born. Duna was the very picture of what a warden should be—tall, strong, and fearless, his skin baked dark by the sun despite the indigo touar which covered him from hair to ankles, his arms big around as a maiden’s waist. Duna rode the stallion Rudyo Fleet-foot, and he was Zeeravashani. His vash’ai queen, Tallakhar, was back in the village nursing a litter of fine new cubs. There was no reason to feel fear, if such a man as Duna was in charge.
Yet the fear was there just the same, and it would not be banished.
“The duty of a warden is to keep the pride’s territories clear, and you have done that,” Hamran pointed out. “They are well out of our lands and still running. If the boy cannot feel them, they are long gone. Our duty now is to return to the pride and tell the Ja’Akari what we have seen.”
Duna paid no heed. “Tell me, boy, do you feel anything? Anything at all?”
Kemmet glanced toward the dreamshifter, but his master’s face was a mask of stone. “There is something…” he hesitated.
“Yes?”
“Not human, but… something. Just past that tangle.” He pointed to a tangle of brush and debris, a dark smear against the coming night.
“Not human? What then? Is it a greater predator? Kin? A herd of tarbok?”
Kemmet wished he could follow Akari over the horizon. “I do not think it is kin. It is like nothing I have felt before.”
Duna snorted and pulled his veils back over his face. “You are as useless to me as the old man. Well, let us go see what this feeling is. I wager we will find a pair of pale-assed slavers, and I will have two more heads on my wall before morning. Het!” He kicked his stallion into a brisk trot.
Kemmet looked to Hamran, who scowled and gestured for him to follow the Ja’Sajani. The old man brought up the rear, cussing under his breath. When he heard his master utter the phrase “titless idiot,” he picked up the pace. Whatever was ahead, it could not be more frightening than a dreamshifter in a fell mood.
The night took hold. The moons Didi and Delpha graced them with plenty of light by which to ride, and the stars danced bright overhead. The land on this side of the spires was dark and unfriendly, and the dunes lay mute in the bitter wind. Kemmet thought longingly of a bright fire, and warm food, and a game of shenu after the evening’s chores. Why had he ever thought he would like to be an adventurer?
Somewhere off in the distance, a bintshi screamed.
Rudyo stopped, and Kemmet urged his silver mare alongside, giving her a little kick when she reached over to bite the stallion’s rump. As Hamran joined them, Duna shouldered his bow, kicked a leg over his stallion’s back, and slid to the ground.
“What are you doing?” Hamran asked.
“Just past this tangle, right? Better to go round it on foot.”
The bintshi screamed again, farther away this time. Duna’s eyes crinkled over his touar at them. “You old men stay here, if you wish. I am going to kill some slavers.” Then he slipped away into the night.
“That man’s mouth is going to get him killed some day soon,” muttered the dreamshifter, but he dismounted. “Well, come on, boy!” With that, Hamran was off after the warden. There was nothing for it, then—Kemmet hopped off his mare and followed them, though every bone in his body told him it was the wrong thing to do.
He heard the men before he could see them.
“There is something here,” Hamran whispered. “Something…” and then as if to himself, “I have never felt that before.”
“Surely even you have not felt everything there is to feel in the world, or seen it either,” Duna replied in a low voice. “Look, there, I see something.” He moved forward at a quick half-crouch, bringing his bow to the fore and reaching for an arrow. “Men!”
Not men, Kemmet wanted to tell him. Whatever those are, they are not men.
But it was too late for a warning.
The figures they found, seated round a dead campfire, certainly looked like men. Two of them looked like the pair of slavers they had chased from the pride’s territory, and the other three were dressed as slavers as well, all in sand-colored linen with bits of leather armor, the better to remain unseen. They shone oddly against the dark, as if they had been draped in moonslight. They did not stir at the man’s approach.
“Dead!” the warden shouted, when he reached the cold fire. “I thought you said your apprentice could tell the dead from the living, Dreamshifter.”
The hairs rose all along Kemmet’s arms, his legs, up his back and the nape of his neck. He felt a sudden urge to piss.
“These are… they are not…” and he began to back away. These had been men, but now…now they were something else, something wrong.
They were not men, and nor were they dead.
“Boy!” Duna called to him. “Feel about with your magic, see if we are alone besides our friends, here. What do you suppose killed them? Poison, maybe?” He gave one of the still forms a shove with his foot, so that it toppled over sideways and slid to the ground. “Auck, these are covered in… what is this?”
Hands shaking, Kemmet prepared to unfurl his ka as he had been taught, but his master gripped his arm, hard enough to hurt.
“No,” the dreamshifter whispered, his voice urgent. “No. Those are reavers.” Louder, he said, “Warden, we must leave this place. Now!”
But it was too late to leave.
The glistening man-shape that had slid to the ground shuddered and writhed like a beast that had been shot in the head. It struggled to its feet as the moons peered down, and as it did Kemmet could see that the thing was shrouded tip-to-toe in some white, filmy substance.
It looks like corpse linens, the boy thought, gorge rising. Like spiders’ webs.
A man’s hands tore through the bindings, peeled them aside. A man’s face emerged, and a man’s shoulders and body, but its skin looked pale and hard as a scorpion’s chiti
n, and the eyes that glared at them from burned and bloodied pits glittered in the thin light like an insect’s. As it freed itself, the thing cast about with its hands like a blind man feeling his way in the light… and then it turned toward them, and hissed.
Not a man, Kemmet thought, his mind gibbering with fear. Not a man, not a man.
Duna nocked an arrow, drew and released in a single movement. His shot was true, and took the not-man dead between its fell eyes.
Or should have.
There was a sound like metal on stone and Duna’s arrow skittered along the slaver’s face before falling away into the dark. It left a deep score from eyebrow to temple, and a pale ichor oozed out to drip down into the glittering eye. The thing that had once been a man opened its mouth wide, too wide, and a hissing laugh crackled forth. Then it moved. It scuttled sideways and leapt, crossing the distance between itself and the warden in two great leaps, and as it hit it wrapped its legs and arms around him so that they went down in a tangle. It opened that mouth wide, wide, and Kemmet saw a mouth full of needle teeth and a writhing black tongue. It sank those teeth into the side of Duna’s neck, and he shrieked.
Behind them, one of the horses screamed in answer, and then Kemmet heard the heavy thud thud of hooves striking flesh, followed by the sound of hoofbeats fading away. Their horses were gone.
He jumped when a heavy hand closed upon his shoulder, and a hand across his mouth muffled his scream. He blinked and shuddered. There was a sharp smell in the air, and his trousers were warm and heavy. Kemmet had pissed himself, and he did not even care. One of the other pale shapes began to move, and the warden’s shrieks had been replaced by a wet sucking noise worse than anything he could have dreamed.
“Come, boy,” the dreamshifter whispered. “It is time for us to go.”
Kemmet pushed the hand away from his mouth. “But the horses…” he whispered.
The second man-shape turned its pale face toward them and hissed even as a third began to struggle against its bonds.
“I am going to take you through Shehannam.” The old man firmed his grip on Kemmet’s shoulder, and raised his fox-head staff trembling into the air. Kemmet grabbed onto the old man’s tunic, daring to hope as the air before them brightened and shimmered with the false light of the Dreaming Lands.
The man-shape laughed at them, and crouched, and leapt.
It was too late for hope.
ONE
“It is only trouble if you get caught.”
Akari Sun Dragon had long since flown beyond the horizon in search of his lost love, and the night unfurled velvet-soft. A hundred girls and half again as many women had left Shahad at daybreak and traveled to the Madraj, the meeting-place of all the prides.
Sulema stood tall among her yearmates, surrounded by Ja’Akari, warriors stern-faced and proud. When next the sun rose, she would be one of them. It was the first day of spring in her seventeenth year, and the last day of her childhood.
The Madraj lay cradled in the bosom of Aish Kalumm, the City of Mothers. Larger than any three villages together, built as a semicircle of stone seats curled like the Sleeping Dragon above a raised stage and the red-stained grounds beneath, the great arena was where babies were named, where hayyanah couples were pledged and leaders elected, and where criminals came to die. Most importantly, this was where Zeerani girls were selected to become healers, or Mothers, or blacksmiths. Where a favored few would become Ja’Akari, beautiful and fierce and beloved of Akari Sun Dragon.
In the days of their glory, hordes of mounted Ja’Akari had rolled across the Zeera like thunder and the songs of the Mothers fell like gentle rain. But war, and slavers, and the failure of the Mothers to bear live young had left the people a shadow of a remnant. The voices of their ancestors echoed in the halls beneath the seats of the Madraj. As she looked upon the small crowd of girls that had gathered this year, Sulema shivered to think of the Madraj staring with empty eyes across an empty desert.
Conspicuous in their absence were the girls from Nisfi. Sulema had overheard talk that the northernmost pride had been hit hard by slavers this year.
Her sword-sister Hannei thought that the people would never be able to regain their former glory. Too few children were born, and each year fewer warriors found favor with the vash’ai, the great saber-tusked cats that lived among them. The world had simply become too hostile for a return to the long ago of war and plenty.
Ehuani, she would say, meaning there is beauty in truth.
Saghaani, Sulema would argue. There is beauty in youth. They were young, they were strong and unconstrained by the failures of their elders. They would find a way to secure a future for the people. If there was no way to be found, she would make one.
First Mother insisted that the pride’s best hope lay in moving more of the people into stone houses along the Dibris, like those of the outlanders to the north. For most of a generation the craftspeople had been hard at work building and fortifying Aish Kalumm. Sulema privately thought that First Warrior had the right of it, and that their future was rooted in the past, in seeking out and joining with those Zeeranim who still lived a purely nomadic life. But such thoughts, as she had been told repeatedly, were too big to fill the mouth of a mere girl.
She found a place not far from Hannei and sat upon the ground, beneath the rising moons. Even as she settled herself, the girls from Nisfi filed in and took their places. The sky faded from dove to lavender, and then from indigo to deep, silent black. She could hear the breath of her yearmates in the wind, feel their combined heartbeats through the ground, smell the sweat of anticipation and fear. As the wind shifted she breathed in the cat-musk of the vash’ai, and her bones sang at the touch of their rumbling voices. They were out there, in the dark, watching.
See me here, she thought to them. Find me worthy.
A great fire roared to life, shattering the night. Sulema’s heart leapt like a startled hare, and one of the girls shamed herself by crying out. Far away as she was, Sulema could feel the heat of it on her face, and blinked back tears.
The pride’s most powerful dreamshifter stood before them, above them, wreathed in flame. Her skin, dappled from long bonding with her vash’ai, had been rubbed in precious oil and gold until she gleamed. She was naked but for the golden armbands of Zeeravashani bondage.
Hafsa Azeina held her cat’s-skull staff of charred blackthorn in her hands and all the heat of the sun in her pitiless golden gaze. As the dreamshifter raised the staff above her head, Khurra’an, First Sire of the vash’ai, threw back his massive head and roared. His gold-cuffed tusks had never seemed so deadly, nor the dreamshifter so terrible, as in that moment.
Sulema felt her ka, the breath of her spirit, quiver like a trapped bird.
Show no fear, she reminded herself. The woman was her mother, after all.
“Yeh Atu,” she whispered. “You would think she might have tried to do something with her hair.”
“Hssst!” Hannei elbowed her ribs. “Already you get us in trouble.”
“It is only trouble if you get caught.” But she fell back into silence as those bright eyes found her, sought to burn her into submission. Sulema raised her chin and met that golden stare with her own. Saghaani, she thought. There is beauty in youth. This is our world now, Mother.
Her mother’s spell had not been broken, but its hold on Sulema had been tempered. As torches were lit all round the Madraj she felt anticipation begin to win its battle against dread. This was the night she had dreamed of, fought for, lived for. No longer would she be a child, with a child’s voice lost in the howling wind. No longer would she be that freckled outlander girl, daughter of a great and terrible dreamshifter. She would be Sulema Ja’Akari, a warrior under the sun, free to choose her own path.
The wind picked up, and the Zeera sang.
Three Ja’Akari stepped into the light. One held a dagger, the second a bowl, and the third held nothing at all. They were naked, oiled and dusted in gold just as the dreamshifter, for on
this night all women were equal under the moons. They had painted their faces with streaks and whorls of black and white and gold, transforming themselves into snarling creatures half-human, half-vash’ai. Their dappled skin glowed with feral health, and elaborate headdresses framed their faces like many-colored manes.
Wordless, they stalked the young women, catlike in grace and intent, and as they pulled the first girl from the crowd Sulema’s breath caught in her ribs. The girl, a short Nisfi, trembled like a hare as the empty-handed woman stripped her plain garb away, as the woman with the bowl painted her face in deft strokes, and as the woman with the knife shaved the hair from her temples, all in the space of time it took Sulema to find her breath again. The girl’s clothes—and her hair—were handed to her and she was shoved toward the dreamshifter, even as the three women turned to their next victim.
Three craftmistresses stepped into the light. One held a stylus, the second a bowl, and the third held nothing at all. Their skin glowed in the firelight, their eyes flashed with pride, for on this night every woman was a pillar of her community. Their hands had been painted with whorls and swirls of henna, it stained their skin with beauty and proclaimed their place in the world. Wordless, they advanced upon the young women, sure in themselves and their choice as they drew a stout girl from Uthrak to her feet.
The woman with a stylus dipped it into the bowl of henna paste and then drew it across the skin of the girl’s outstretched hand, a few simple lines that would stain the skin for a short while, but mark her forever as a blacksmith. The empty-handed woman stripped the girl of her linen tunic and then gave it back. The clothes of childhood would be fed to the flames as the pride’s newest apprentice took her turn before the dreamshifter.
Three herdmistresses stepped into the light. One held an awl, the second a bowl, and the third held nothing at all…
The Dragon's Legacy Page 3
