DragonThrone02 The Empire of the Stars

by Alison Baird

  His round black eyes gleamed. “Very good, my lady . . .” Suddenly he fell silent. Puzzled, she looked at him and then realized he was staring at the window next to which she stood. The night was dark behind it, and in its surface was mirrored her true form, clad in the apricot-colored chiton. Ailia drew in a sharp breath.

  She had forgotten all about reflections.

  It was too late now to extend her glaumerie to the window. The tengu’s eyes widened in surprise and puzzlement and he backed away slightly as she turned toward him.

  “Yes, I concealed my true form from you. I am the Tryna Lia, Ailia Elarainia,” she told him. “And I am on a—an urgent mission. Do you understand? If you tell no one of my flight until after I have gone, I give you my word you will be paid for my passage—you may demand it from the royal treasury of Arainia itself. If . . .” she looked away again. “. . . if I should fail to return, they will make good to you the cost of your ship. Is that agreeable to you?”

  He hesitated; he would not agree to such a bargain; he would refuse, and she would be able to return to the guesthouse, her moment of madness over. But he did not refuse. “Highness . . .” the bird-man murmured. He seemed about to ask a question, then apparently thought better of it, picturing the riches of a royal trea-sury. He bowed his green-plumed head and backed out of the cabin, and the door closed upon him. It might have been the door of a prison slamming shut upon her. She felt herself locked into this course of action now.

  Ailia twisted the eagle-shaped knob, then laid her hands upon the sphere of crystal. It was cool beneath her hands, but she felt a surge of power in her mind as she touched it. There was a force within it, something strong and alive that was not of this plane, that could move between matter and Ether as it willed—and take her along with it, once she joined her power to its own. A tremor ran through the little ship. Then it rose, spinning slightly as it ascended, and she saw the lights of the city beyond the window begin to drop away. The wing-sails beat the air, the dragon’s-head prow pointed toward the stars like a compass needle swinging to the north. Within minutes sea and land had vanished from her view.

  So fast!

  Clouds wisped past the windows like steam: bulbous cumuli, then a flat layer of cirrus like thin ice. Alfaran and its moons loomed huge before her, and the nebula grew brighter as the sky between them deepened. She watched as it darkened, within minutes, from blue to black. Her flight no longer seemed to her like an escape, but had become an adventure: her heart raced with exhilaration as she gazed on the blackening heights. More stars appeared: not in slow-blooming groups as at nightfall, but springing into view even as she watched. Whole stellar hosts came crowding out of spaces that had been dark and empty before. A part of her—the draconic side, perhaps—knew a heady moment of fierce joy that swept aside all her fears. She was flying by her own will for the first time, soaring where she wished to go and not where another chose to take her.

  Ailia reached out to the pulsing force within the globe. “Take me to the portal in the sky,” she said, “and show me the way through the Ether to Nemorah.”

  Part Two

  THE GAMES OF GODS

  11

  The Zayim

  ROGLUG HASTENED ALONG A CORRIDOR in Khalazar’s palace.

  Murky gray light fell in long beams from the tall windows, but rather than illuminating the gloom of the halls the subdued and isolated shafts seemed only to emphasize it. Live snakes coiled and slithered on the floors, causing the goblin to take care where he stepped. He could stop a striking snake with sorcery, but if one bit him before he saw it the venom would spread through his veins too quickly for any remedy. Mandrake’s new pets were all venomous—indeed, he had obtained them for that very reason: their presence discouraged spies and assassins. It seemed to Roglug that the snakes were restless today, hissing and lunging peevishly at one another. Mandrake’s odd menagerie was almost an extension of his mind: they reflected, like so many empathetic familiars, the mood of their master. Roglug felt a stab of dread at the thought of facing the prince. Mandrake, by the look of things, was in no humor for bad news.

  He paused before the door that led to the prince’s tower room. It was ajar. He knocked softly: still no answer. The goblin opened the door, and peered in.

  The chamber within was also poorly lit. He entered and looked along its gloomy length with trepidation. He saw no sign of the prince, but Mandrake did not always take a human form, and if he wanted to cow his servants he would appear as a beast: a giant serpent perhaps, or a dragon. As Roglug walked forward something moved with a dry rustle in the prince’s great thronelike chair: he glimpsed a scaly coil gleaming dully in the light from the doorway and shuddered.

  He scuttled forward and knelt before the throne. The serpent in the chair lifted its head with a hiss, its neck flaring into a wide hood. Yes, the prince was in an ill temper. “Forgive the interruption, Highness, but I’ve just had word—” he began, choosing an even humbler posture and a quavering tone in order to stave off more anger.

  “Who are you talking to, Roglug?” It was Mandrake’s voice—coming from behind him! The goblin jumped and whirled.

  “I thought that was you in the chair!” he gasped, the tremor in his voice now quite unfeigned.

  Mandrake laughed. “No, that is my latest acquisition—a king cobra. Magnificent, isn’t he? I found him down by the river.”

  “Is he—it—poisonous?”

  “Extremely. You are lucky you weren’t bitten: you would have died almost at once. But tell me why you are here.” Mandrake picked the serpent up carelessly, and it grew calm and flaccid as a piece of rope in his hands. Hanging its scaly length about his neck, he took his seat in the throne.

  Roglug began his report, trembling as Mandrake’s fingers began to beat an ominous tattoo on the armrests of his chair.

  “And that is the last that was seen of her,” Roglug finished.

  Mandrake’s hands clenched on the armrests. “What!” The goblin cringed as Mandrake rose to his full towering height. The cobra spread its hood again, striking at the air. “She has truly fled her keepers? For the life of me, I can’t say if this be good news, or bad.”

  “I think it’s good news,” said the goblin nervously. “I expect she’s lost her nerve and run away.”

  “Or else she has grown impatient at her confinement, and seized her freedom. But what does she mean to do now? She knows she has not the power to challenge me directly, not yet. Does she think she can raise an army on her own?” Mandrake spoke as if to himself; then he turned to the goblin king again. “Send out your goblins and some firedrakes to search all the worlds where she might have gone. And let me know immediately if they find her.”

  KING TIRON LOOKED OUT from the highest balcony of Halmirion, at the varicolored, granular-looking mass of innumerable bodies massed together on the hillside. The crowds anxiously awaited word of the Tryna Lia. In her absence he was the figure to whom they looked for solace, and he tried hard to throw himself into the role. But the terrifying news of his daughter’s disappearance, at first feared to be an abduction, had left him sleepless and haggard. And now it transpired that she had not been captured, but had run away.

  He raised his arms in a benediction gesture, then went back inside and went to his daughter’s room. The sight of her possessions and the girlish innocence that still clung to them brought tears to his eyes. My daughter, my Ailia—what existence have your mother and I cursed you with? To what life—or what death—have we doomed you?

  “Poor lamb, poor lamb!” the nurse Benia had sobbed on hearing the news, until he at last sent her off to bed with a soothing draught. Lamb indeed, he thought grimly. It was a fitting word, with echoes of ancient Meran custom. The sacrificial lamb . . .

  And what was his part in all this? Merely to love his wife and daughter, and then to lose them? Only that, and no more?

  “You stand for all of us,” Marima had told him, “the symbol of every mortal: you are the Beloved of the Goddes
s.”

  “A limited role, that.”

  “The noblest role of all. For without you, Elarainia would not have descended from the heavens. Without you, the Daughter of the Mother would not have become enfleshed, to walk in our midst as one of us. You are the door by which both Mother and Daughter entered our human world. When you stand forth on the balcony, we are all present and reflected in you.”

  But Tiron wanted no glory and never had: he wanted only the two women he loved.

  Ela . . . in his mind he saw her again: not the queen and goddess of Mirimar’s adoring masses, but his wife, the woman he had loved. He saw again the blue sun-sequined bay, the lush green forest that grew almost to the water’s edge, the towering rock plateaux of Hyelanthia with their cloud-hung summits. The sea was a pale turquoise color this close to shore, and transparent as glass: one saw through it to the smooth sand and the colorful fish that idled to and fro, each accompanied by a black distinct shadow like its dark twin. Ela was sitting on a rock combing out the golden cascade of her hair. It was half-dry, rippled with damp, waving in the sea breeze. She looked like a mermaid. Later she would wear silk and satin and cloth of gold, with jeweled diadems upon her head: transformed into a living idol, she would be paraded through city streets. But here she had been a wild goddess of the woods, and he her sole votary. He strove to hold the moment in his mind.

  She had turned to him, he remembered, and told him of the child.

  “You’re with child?” he had exclaimed, sitting up on the sand.

  Her laughter rippled, like her hair. “Not yet! One day. It will be a daughter.”

  “How do you know this?” he asked.

  “For me, knowing is like seeing. You see these waves approaching the shore, one after the other breaking on the sands. You cannot say how it is that you see: you merely open your eyes and do it. That is how it is with me and the things that are to come.”

  “Then is our fate fixed?” he asked frowning. “Are there no real choices, is everything we do predestined? Were we fated to meet, Ela, and fall in love?”

  “Fated?” she repeated, as though the word were unknown to her. “You chose to seek me out, did you not? And I saw you coming, from far off—like the wave. But one may walk away from shore, away from the wave; or one may go gladly to meet it. Our child is born of choice, my love. We met like the swimmer and the wave, and from that meeting she springs forth, like spray.” She leaped lightly from her rock and ran over to entwine him with her arms and sea-washed hair. “And now we have this time, my love, this moment of happiness. Cherish it!”

  She had not meant merely to live for the moment, as he had then thought. She had wanted him to treasure this scene in memory, he realized now, so that he might call upon it again for comfort. Had she foreseen her flight and death then, he wondered, as well as Ailia’s birth? And their daughter’s ultimate fate—had Ela known that also?

  His thoughts turned again to sacrifices, and the tales he had heard of old Zimbouran ways. It was said that they had once chosen young men and women of unblemished beauty, and given them lives of luxury for one year, clothing them in finery and feeding them delicacies. But when the year was out the young people were led in procession to the temple, like fattened calves, there to yield up their lives on the altar of Valdur. And Ailia—was she also a victim like them, pampered and cosseted at first in this palace of Halmirion, only to go on from here to some terrible foreordained contest in which she was likely to perish? Bitterness filled him. She was no mere tool of the gods: she was his daughter, flesh of his flesh. Even if it were true that she was some sort of divine being incarnate, yet by that very incarnation he had a claim on her.

  “Ailia,” he said aloud, “if your guardians do not find you soon, I swear I will go myself and search every world for you.”

  JOMAR PEERED OUT THE OPEN DOORWAY of the hut in which he and his friends had been confined.

  All around the Mohara village, here in the heart of the oasis, stood ruins covered in fearsome-looking stone figures. In one ornate alcove the form of a man sat cross-legged with his hands resting on his knees. A small fire burned before it—a votive fire, Jomar had thought last night when he first glimpsed the figure, imagining it to be an image of stone. But by daylight he saw that it was a living man who sat there, elderly and emaciated, clad only in a loincloth. His eyes were half-open, but he had not stirred, not even to stretch a limb. Every handspan of the ancient facade above him was carved, so that the stone seemed to writhe and dance with life. The features of the statues were Moharan: proud wide nostrils and pursed lips, hair arranged in tight stylized curls.

  So it’s true, Jomar thought.

  He remembered the elders in the work camp telling of the Lost Cities of the Mohara: as a child he had been entranced by the tales, but once he had grown to manhood he dismissed them as wishful thinking. Vanished cities and realms—buildings filled with the treasure of long-gone kings—surely, he had thought, these were fables to comfort the wretched slaves, to make them feel that their race and lineage were honorable even if they were not free. Yet here were the stone faces, gazing back at him with a fierce and breathtaking dignity. It’s true. We had all this once, long ago.

  “Can you still not hear any voices in your head, Lori?” he heard Damion ask behind him.

  “No—not a thing. It’s as though the back of my mind is empty. And when I try to send a thought out, there’s no answer. There is something very strange about this place,” said Lorelyn. “If there are Nemerei here I can’t reach any of them.” She moved to stand at Jomar’s side. “Did your ancestors build all of that?” she asked, gesturing at the ruins.

  “Of course. Do you think a Zimbouran could make something that magnificent?” returned Jomar passionately.

  Lorelyn stared at him in surprise. She had never heard him speak like this before, with such pride and intensity. For a moment he looked almost like one of the carved stone warrior-kings. She stood silent for a moment, pondering this new Jomar.

  He remained facing the doorway and the city. “The Mohara had a great kingdom here once. The old people used to tell me about it. Valdur put a curse on my people, they said, dividing the tribes and making them fight one another, to make it easier for the Zimbourans to come up from the southern steppes and enslave them. When King Andarion declared war on the Zimbourans thousands of Mohara slaves rose up, and Zimboura was conquered. But our cities had fallen into ruin, and we never went back to them: they still had a curse on them, people said. The Mohara tried to live off the land, the way we did before the time of the cities. Then Zimboura rose again. Now all my people build are roads and bridges for the God-king. Slave-work.”

  “What was it like in the labor camp, Jo?” asked Lorelyn. “You’ve never talked about it much.”

  “I can’t describe it. You would have to live it yourself to understand.” But Jomar realized he wanted to tell them: about his mother dying of the fever while the witch doctor stood over her, gravely shaking his head despite Jomar’s tearful pleas; of the old man who had cared for him after her death falling ill in his turn, and being left to die in the dirt; of the flies and the heat and the beatings, and hungry children crying through the night. He told them of these things now, and they listened quietly.

  “They worked the people to death—literally. Anyone who got too old or too sick to work was abandoned to die. Sometimes the soldiers would just kill someone, at random, to keep everyone else afraid and obedient. I just—endured it, as everyone else did. And then—”

  “And then the lion came,” said Damion, his voice gentle.

  Jomar touched the trophy claw dangling from his earring. “The lion—yes, I had to go and kill that blasted marauding lion.” And he had been hauled off to the arena to fight more lions, and other beasts, and men; and afterward he was taken into the army and forced to be a spy. He had dared to hope, then, that he might escape. But Zefron Shezzek had been assigned to keep a close eye on Jomar: Shezzek the half-breed, the perfect spy with his r
uddy complexion and his pale greenish eyes that were unlike any true-bred Zimbouran’s. Shezzek was dead now, but in his dreams Jomar still sometimes saw that face, those eyes watching his every move.

  “Jo, how could you bear to come back here?” exclaimed Lorelyn.

  Jomar set his jaw. “Because I wanted to stop it: the camps and the slavery. Forever.”

  Damion looked at him: the Mohara man’s face was becoming hard and closed-in, as it had looked when they first met him. Now at last he understood why. “Who are the figures on those ruins?” he asked, changing the subject. “Do you know?”

  “I don’t know all of them. That one near the top is the Zayim—the one with the spear in his hand. He’s supposed to be a kind of warrior who’ll come some day and save Mohar. They used to talk about him a lot in the camps: it gave the slaves hope, I guess. All I can say is, he’s taking his sweet time coming.” To each side of the statue of the Zayim stood a winged figure, guarding him. “Angels,” said Jomar, nodding at the two images. “My people believe in them too. The other statues are Mohara gods, I think. Akkar and Nayah, and Kaliman, and the old kings.”

  Lorelyn looked at him, incredulous. “Your kings were worshiped, just like Khalazar?”

  “No!” Jomar’s tone was scornful. “Only the Zims worship living kings! Mohara kings were supposed to become gods after they died. It’s a lot of rubbish, but no Mohara has ever been revered while he was still alive.” His eyes turned to the huts again, looking long and hungrily at the community beyond the open door, at the women carrying clay pots filled with spring water, their babies in pouches at their backs; at the children laughing and playing with sticks, pretending to be warriors; at the young men sharpening their swords and spears and talking together. Moharas as they should be: free, happy, bowing to no one. This should have been his home.