“Not at all. This stone mirrors our world exactly. If the Dibris were to bleed dry, the little vein of lapis would disappear. If Atukos were to crumble into the sea, this bit of onyx would disappear as well.”
“Ai yeh,” she said again.
“Exactly. So I ask you again, what caused this damage? To the stone… to our world?”
“The Sundering?”
“Well, yes. And no. This damage, the cracks here, and the burns, and the brittle nature of the surface, all happened at the same time. The Sundering was not caused by a human war, Sulema—the war was a part of the Sundering. Humans are not big enough, not powerful enough, to effect such change.” He placed the stone carefully back into the bowl. “Only a dragon could do such a thing. That seared and broken place is where Akari Sun Dragon breathed fire upon our world in an attempt to wake his mate, to make her hatch. He very nearly succeeded. Kal ne Mur nearly died trying to sing the dragon Sajani back to sleep. As it was, the draik’s efforts tore the world in half, creating two worlds that are part of and yet separated from one another. These two worlds have been drifting farther and farther apart since that day.”
Sulema blinked. “Two worlds? The Twilight Lands are real?”
“As real as ours, and in as much danger. They have no sun, save that light that filters through the veil to them, and we have no magic save a pale shadow of past glories. If the dragon wakes, the veil will be shredded, and…” He held his two fists together, then drew them apart with a jerk and held them open, palms-up. “Neither will survive. Nor would we survive the physical act of the dragon hatching, any more than an egg survives the chick.
“Do not doubt, Sulema, the dragon is waking. All the signs are right here for us to see.” He tapped the globe with one finger.
“If the dragon wakes, we die. Can we kill the dragon?”
“Spoken like a barbarian warrior.” He laughed. “Just how big do you think a dragon is, Sulema?”
“Well, bigger than a lionsnake, I imagine—”
“Yes, bigger than a lionsnake. Bigger than Atukos. Bigger than the world, Sulema. Our minds are too small to hold such wonder. We have no more hope of killing a dragon than an ant has of killing us for stepping on its anthill. Even if we could kill her, what then? If the chick dies within the egg…”
“It rots.”
“It rots,” he agreed. “Our only hope is to keep the dragon alive and asleep for as long as we can. She has been asleep for as long as our world has existed, and she can sleep until the end of time, as far as we know. The only way to keep the dragon from waking is to sing to her through atulfah. The only one who can do this…”
“Is you,” she whispered.
“Is you,” he corrected gently. “My time is nearing its end, sooner than I might wish. Truly, daughter, you are our only hope.”
“Za fik,” she swore. “There is no choice for me, is there?”
“There is always a choice,” he told her. “I cannot compel you to learn atulfah, or to use it to sing the Dragon to sleep. You could choose to deny your birthright and return to the desert, free as a sparrow in the wind.
“I cannot, however, allow you to leave untrained or able to wield atulfah, a sword for whomever chooses to claim it. Your mother kept you shielded from atulfah for all the years you were gone. You could be shielded again—sealed for all time. But you would be cut off from the song as if you had been born surdus, unable to sense sa or ka. Cut off even from the smallest magics— you would be unable to seek water in the desert, unable to bond to one of your great cats.”
“The Dragon would wake.”
“And destroy the world, yes. Most definitely.”
“This is no choice, this is horse shit.” Sulema scowled, not caring whether or not one was allowed to say “horse shit” to a king.
“I never promised you a good choice,” he replied. “Sometimes your only choice is, as you say, horse shit. Sometimes it is a choice between death and death. Sometimes it is a choice between two different deaths. But there is always a choice.”
“So. Remain in the trap and die, or chew off my leg and bleed to death.” Sulema thought that the skulls were mocking her, safely dead and exempt from the struggles of the living.
“I said much the same thing, when I was your age.” Wyvernus clasped her hands between his, and his eyes were full of moonslight and sorrow. “None who bear such burdens as ours do so lightly, or without pain. Are you the woman I think you are—the warrior your mother claims? Will you bear this burden, knowing that you alone must pay the price?”
She stared at the Dragon King, his face deeply lined with strain and worry, aged before his time like dates left too long in the sun. His hands, cradling hers, trembled like an old woman’s. His eyes, it seemed to her, had seen far too much. Those eyes said that when death came, it would not be too soon. Because she had her mother’s stubborn chin, and her father’s stubborn red hair, because she belonged to both of them but belonged, at last, to herself, she drew her hands away and stood.
“It may not be much of a choice,” she told him, “but you say it is my choice. I will not make it until I have had time to think.”
He stood as well, and bowed to her as if she were king and he a stubborn child.
“As you wish.”
THIRTY - TWO
The wind was born of a dreamshifter, playing a leg-bone flute. Fingers as nimble as a young girl’s danced across the smooth bone, its owner now gone to song and dust and tears and the memories of her children. But the sunlight that warmed her back was still the same. Akari Sun Dragon spread his wings over Atualon just as he did over the Zeera, blessing the mother, the child, and the murderess alike.
Born of pain and betrayal and the ferocity of a mother’s love, the wind danced in defiance and grace along the walls and ramparts of Atukos, sparking it to dark flame and a life of its own—a small life, snuffed and smothered as quickly as it kindled. The little fires deep within knew that theirs was a false life and short, and burned ever the brighter for it, for such a life has no time for regret.
The wind whistled and hissed through the wide, arched windows and doorways of the dreamshifter’s rooms. Red spidersilk curtains billowed in the wind, they writhed like wraiths from Tai Damat come for the blood of men. Cruel shadows, still warm with the day’s lifeblood, caressed the dragonstone floors and walls to a semblance of life, ran sharpened claws gently over the thick white fur upon which she sat, even dared to ruffle the long black feathers dangling from her cat’s-skull staff. Yet for all their muttered curses and promises of death, they never quite dared touch the dreamshifter. They wailed in defeat down the wide corridors, off in search of softer prey.
The wind was sickly sweet with sweat and laughter, and the day’s long dying, and the dreams of young girls pregnant with song. Though the dreamshifter was past caring about such things as babies and shared meals and wishing-wells, though her heart was dry and gritty as a sandstorm, the sound of children singing in the streets—singing Sajani Earth Dragon to sleep, as they had done every night for time out of mind—caused her breath to catch and her fingers to slow. Thus the timbre of her music shifted, its intent grew less dark, and it lifted the heart to light and life.
Akari Sun Dragon furled his wings at just that moment. He plummeted into the warm clear waters of Nar Bedayyan in search of his sleeping mate, plunging the world into a soft twilight and the scents of moonsrose and jasmine.
Hafsa Azeina’s dreaming eyes opened wider to catch the last redgold rays, her nostrils flared in appreciation of the night-flowers’ ardent celebration of life, and her intikallah unfurled, soft and scalding petals glowing white-hot with song for any echovete to see. She let the song take her where it would—when all paths lead to death, one might as well stop and watch a sunset.
The song carried her sa out the window and into the wide twilight. She spread herself thin upon the evening breeze and floated across the yard. Torches had been lit and they wrote their names in soot across the indigo
sky. The light of the flames danced upon the oiled skin of a pair of massive wrestlers from the Black Isles as they stared at each other and roared like young bulls. But their violence was all lies and foolery, and she turned her mind back to the music.
The dreamshifter focused her dreaming eyes. She gathered herself in so that she was almost substantial and let herself drop like a stone, like a stooping hawk, down through the filtering starlight. She skimmed over a riotous mess of plant life, through the open window, and into a brilliantly lit room, and then she let herself go again to mist and memories and the faint smell of smoke. Her dreaming eyes did not see the world in the same light as her waking eyes, but Hafsa Azeina had been doing this for a long and bloody time.
She absorbed the bright songs, the loud blocks of color, the rich insistent pulse of life swirling about the floor like tide-pools seething with life. If she had been corporeal, she would have nodded in satisfaction.
I should have known he was involved, she thought. The loremaster is drawn to stories like a mantid to flowers.
Deep in Shehannam, she felt Khurra’an shift into wakefulness. He was irritated with her, and with his empty belly, and with the dark stone walls.
I should eat you, he grumbled. It would solve many of my problems.
She ignored that. Look what I have found.
He looked through her eyes, and gave a mental shrug. You should have known… he is a liar, after all.
That he is.
Loremaster Rothfaust sat as he often did, surrounded by an astonishing variety of flowers and an even more astonishing variety of children. His linen shirt was rolled up to reveal powerful forearms, and he had abandoned the robes of office for a gardener’s tunic and vest heavily embroidered in green and gold and brown with a riot of red and blue flowers along the hem. His hands were black with dirt almost to his elbows, his beard was so littered with twigs and leaves and flower-petals that he looked like a bird’s nest.
He was potting a young orchid, patting the bark and mosses gently into place about its roots, touching the pale leaves and talking to it as if it were one of the children who stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to finish settling the plant so that he might tell them a story.
“There you are,” he said, as he gave the moss a final pat and lifted the red pot with both hands. “Pretty little thing.” For a man his size he moved with surprising grace as he turned and set the little pot with its spray of tiny white and pink blossoms among a dozen or more of its kind.
“Here, Loremaster.” One small boy held a bowl of water so full it sloshed over his dimpled hands and soaked the front of his grubby tunic. Rothfaust smiled and took the bowl, but set it aside and wiped his hands on a bit of cloth.
“It is rest she needs now, rest and time to get over the shock. Orchids do not like to move from place to place, even when their feet are cramped. Now, who wants a story?” He laughed at the enthusiastic response and walked over to sit on a low wooden bench. The children arranged themselves on the floor around him, and Loremaster Rothfaust smiled at them. “What would my little flowers like to hear tonight? A sad story? A funny story?” He tweaked the nose of the grubby child with the wet tunic. “A scary story? No?” He laughed as the boy shook his head vehemently. “Not a scary story, then.”
“A love story!” giggled one of the middle-sized girls.
“A hero story!” one of the bigger boys countered. “And no kissing!”
“Hmmm. A heroic love story with no kissing. Hm.” He stroked his beard, hiding a smile behind his hand. “I believe I know just the tale. Have you ever heard the story of Zula Din, and how she learned the name of the sun?” He stretched his large, sandaled feet out in front of him, crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned back with a smile.
“Everyone knows the name of the sun,” complained the older boy. “It is Akari.”
“Nobody knows the real name of the sun.” This from one of the smallest children, a dark-skinned girl with the look of the Zeera about her almond-shaped eyes. “Our mouths are too small to speak his name.”
“Just so, Annana, just so.” Rothfaust nodded. “But Zula Din was a warrior and a storyteller, and she was a daughter of the First People besides—she was made of sterner stuff than you or I.
“It so happens that in the First Days, the world was a cold place and dark. Illindra had not yet hung the stars in her web, and the moons were young and shy, so the First People hid in the dark, cold and afraid…” His voice sank into the low singsong of a true storyteller, wrapping the children in a web of his own.
Excellent. This would make her work so much easier.
As the loremaster wove his tale of love and adventure, Hafsa Azeina breathed her own song into it. As she wove the music of the leg-bone flute into and through and around his story, the children began to fidget, and then to droop, and finally to slump one after the other, eyes glazing over and breath leaving their little bodies in long, reluctant sighs.
Rothfaust never ceased in the telling of his tale, never broke the line or the cadence of his words. He leaned forward and gathered the grubby child into his lap. He stroked the boy’s drooping curls, and with gentle fingers, closed his dark eyes.
“And this is how Zula Din pinned Akari Sun Dragon to the sky using his true name, and how he came to love her. But there was no kissing.” Rothfaust looked up from the child’s face, his mouth a straight hard line and his eyes snapping with fury. He looked directly at her. “If you harm them…”
Hafsa Azeina was so startled that she almost dropped the tune.
I would never.
“You would, if you thought you had to. You would. I am warning you now—if you bring harm to these children, I will hunt you as you have never been hunted in this life.”
She allowed herself to take a more substantial form and floated down to hover near him, careful not to brush against the sleeping children.
I will not. His mind was hot to the touch, his thoughts the blue-white of a flame’s heart, and they smelled of things that grew in the warm shade.
“What do you want?”
She saw no benefit in lying. An ally.
“Ah. And why would you seek an ally in me, Dreamshifter?”
The air shuddered at her laugh. We have a history, you and I. We were friends, once.
“You came to me then as a frightened little hare, desperate to save the life of her child. You return now as the hawk. Indeed, if the stories I hear hold any truth in them, you have become a monster. What need does a monster have of friends?”
I am a monster, she agreed, though not the monster you imagine. And my daughter is no monster at all—she is innocent.
“If by ‘innocent’ you mean ‘ignorant,’ I have to agree. You cannot protect your daughter by keeping her in the dark, Queen Consort.”
The queen consort is dead. I killed her myself.
“Indeed?” He raised his eyebrows.
There is no escape from Atualon save through death. It was necessary.
“A pity, that. I would dearly have loved to have a long talk with her… a very long talk. There are things I cannot tell anyone else, and especially not to a barbarian dreamshifter who comes to me with blood on her tongue.” He reached up to stroke his beard, and looked down at the child in his lap. “It occurs to me that the way out is often the way in, as well. If the dreamshifter were to die…”
Die again, live again. Scorn dripped from the words like venom. Do you think it is so easy?
“As easy as falling asleep and waking to the sun of a strange world. I risked much to help the queen consort, and I would do so again—but I cannot do as much for a foreign sorcerer, no matter how much she may look like an old friend. I am bound to serve the rulers of Atualon, and some rules even I will not break.”
Are you not bound to protect my daughter, then? What if I were to tell you that the Nightmare Man is real, as we had suspected? That I believe he was involved in the Araids’ attack on Sulema? I may be a monster, but I have my limits. I
do not eat children.
His hand tightened spasmodically on the boy’s tunic, but Loremaster Rothfaust shook his head, stubborn as ever.
“You have no power here, Dreamshifter. Such things as I might know, such things as I might say are for the ears of the queen consort.” He looked straight at her then, and his eyes held a warning. “Or for the ne Atu, if they were to come asking. As I said, I am bound.”
Bound by whom? she wondered, but there was no time to ask. The song trailed off into wind and memory, calling her back, carrying her home. Loremaster Rothfaust and his tender little flock faded from her vision as if they had never been.
As she sped back to her chambers on the wings of a dying song, Hafsa Azeina came upon her apprentice Daru sitting on the wide steps of the Queen’s Tower, sitting cross-legged and playing a strange little tune on his bird-skull flute. His eyes were closed, a look of serenity lit his thin face, and his intikallah spat and glowed with sparks like a campfire made from too-green wood. The boy’s knives lay to one side, and shadows thick as poisoned syrup gathered about him, so much like the children had gathered about Loremaster Rothfaust that she paused in her flight, though the song had grown dangerously quiet.
Daru, she sent softly so as not to startle him, what are you doing?
I’m playing for them, he answered in kind, never pausing in his playing. They are hungry.
Yes, but… why? That is very dangerous.
I am used to it. His music shrugged and took on an amused violet-green tint. Better they follow me than the other children. Besides… if I play for the shadows, they let me throw my knives at them.
She felt her dream-self flicker. Throw your knives at them?
Ashta says that a knife dancer practices even in his sleep, and they are the only things that come into my dreams besides you. They think it is funny.
Ashta said you should throw knives at shadows?
His music took a dark turn. Ashta said I should throw my knives at birds… and small-cats. But she also said I should never throw my knives if I did not mean to kill. I like birds. His whistle piped plaintively. And cats… I do not think Khurra’an would like it if I started killing cats. Even the little ones.
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