Diadem from the Stars

by Clayton, Jo;

  “If you try to run,” she called, “I’ll send Daimon after you. He’s no retriever and would make a bloody mess of you.”

  Talek grinned weakly and shook his head. “Never thought I’d see a tame tars.”

  Aleytys rested her hand on the beast’s shoulder. Eyes glinting in amusement, she-said softly, “Taine? Don’t fool yourself, hunter.” She walked quietly toward him, sending the horses into an uneasy dance as the predator neared them. Talek turned pale. “Now,” she said crisply. “Get down. Unpack my things and take them back into the cabin. Strip the horses and let them loose.” She scratched the tars around his ears and smiled dreamily at his answering purr.

  Shrugging, Talek slid out of the saddle. “Easy come, easy go.” With a cheerful smile on his tanned face, he unroped the packs and carried them toward the cabin.

  “Where’s your own mount?” she asked abruptly, frowning around at the empty meadow.

  He lifted a foot and swung it in a graceful arc. “Walking on it, bint Horli.”

  She chuckled involuntarily, startled at being called daughter of the sun. “Your pack?”

  He hefted the two packs. “Tied up with these.”

  “You may take your own things out.”

  His eyebrows flicked sardonically, up, then down. “Yes, abruya sabbiya, right abruya sabbiya, anything you say.”

  She suppressed a grin as he disappeared into the cabin. In a minute he was out again, slipping his arms into the loops of a backpack. He stopped a short distance from her, hands on hips. “All right, abruya sabbiya, what now?”

  The tars gave a deep rumble at the sound of his voice. He slanted a wary glance at the beast “Am I breakfast for that handsome creature?”

  “Talek, yod’re … you’re … I never knew men like you existed.” Aleytys laughed, then sighed. “I almost hated to stop you.”

  He sighed. “Ah, sweet witch, it’s a terrible old world after all; bad enough to be a rogue, but to be an unsuccessful one!” He flashed an unrepentant grin at her.

  She shook her head and returned his smile. “Let me tell you something,” she said lightly. “I wouldn’t trust you. But I like you. I really like you. And not just for how you pleasured me last night. All the bad men I knew before were so self-righteous that it lifts my heart to meet one who takes neither himself nor anything else so seriously.” She held out her hand.

  “I thank you, my dear, but I’ll not come a step closer to your friend there.” He waved an expressive hand at the tars. “I doubt he’s had breakfast yet. There’s a wishful, hungry look in those big eyes of his.”

  She laughed and scratched the tars on the side of his jaw. He opened his mouth wide and grinned at her. At the sight of those awesome teeth, Talek paled again and swallowed hastily.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Hai. You can say that.”

  Aleytys sent her scratching fingers under Daimon’s chin. “Just keep an eye on his tail. When a dog waves his, that means he’s friendly.” She moved her hand down the tars’s back, scratching vigorously at the lumps of his vertebrae. “When Daimon gives a twitch to his, it means he’s about to take a bite out of something.” She went on exploring his fur with busy fingers until his eyes narrowed to lazy slits and his purring escalated to a rumbling roar.

  “Just like an overgrown gurb,” Talek said, shaking his head, but he was quite careful not to move from where he was standing.

  Aleytys looked up. “Speaking about breakfast, I’m afraid you’ll have to go without yours,” She chuckled. “But you were about to, anyway, weren’t you?”

  He whipped up an eyebrow, flashed his teeth at her, and started away across the meadow.

  Aleytys watched him a minute, then called, “Talek.”

  He turned. “What now, my dear?”

  “I don’t care what you do, but I won’t want you around here the next day or so. I’ll send Daimon hunting through the trees every day. He won’t be polite if he meets you.”

  “I believe you,” Talek said dryly, eyeing the beast.

  “I don’t care who you tell about me. It’d be nice if you let Vajd and Zvar know I’m alive and well.” She rubbed her nose. “Might let them know about Daimon, too.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let him see how well off he is with a nice ordinary sabbiya for consort.” He grinned impudently at her.

  “A’fi!” She frowned horribly at him, then went on with amusement bubbling through the words. “Anyone else you tell, be sure you let them know about my little friend. Or you’re likely to have their blood on your hands.” She smiled. “Just think what it’ll do for your reputation. You had the bad-luck witch of the Raqsidan and lived to tell about it.”

  “And a pleasure it was, too.” He tilted his head to one side and examined her body with an appreciative glint in his amber-brown eyes. “You sure you wouldn’t like to continue the experiment? I wouldn’t mind hanging around a few days.”

  “Don’t press your luck, hunter.”

  He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Ah, well, I can dream. When may I be allowed back? It is my house, after all.”

  “I’ll be gone in a week; after that, feel free.”

  “The Madar bless you, little tars,” he said, suddenly serious. He wheeled and started for the trees again. At the edge of the meadow he stopped and waved to her.

  Smiling, she waved back.

  Two arrows snapped out of the trees and thunked into his chest. A third cut past his neck, pulling after it a spray of blood. With a ludicrous expression of astonishment on his face, he toppled to the ground.

  Alytys watched frozen with horror. She wheeled to face the trees on the other side. A herdsman rode from the shadow, a crossbow pointed at her breast. The tracker. She gasped and jerked out of her paralysis, slamming her hand on the tar’s shoulder. “Go,” she shrieked. “Kill! Kill that.…”

  Daimon leaped forward, covering the space between him and the herdsman with two great bounds, pausing almost in midleap to snap a crossbow quarrel in half. Landing beside the panicking horse, he swiped at the tracker, tearing him into bloody shreds with a double blow from his razor-sharp claws. Ignoring the ragged mass that had been a man, he trotted contentedly back to Aleytys.

  She bent over Talek. He was just barely alive, but life was rapidly flowing away. Blood welled out of his neck and frothy red bubbles piled and popped around the quivering shafts in his chest as he struggled to breathe. He smiled at her, a flicker of his lips. A trickle of blood slid out the corner of his mouth. His lips moved.

  She bent down. “Bad … luck.…” The thready whisper faded. She leaned closer as his lips worked again. “… worth it.” His eyes closed and he went limp.

  Aleytys gasped. She pressed her hands down over the spurting wound in his neck, cursing her stupidity as she let the healing force tear out of her. The blood seeped through her fingers, then the flow lessened and finally halted. She breathed more easily for a minute, before she looked at his face. His mouth hung open, his eyes were rolled back, the whites gleaming dully. A sob tore from her throat. “No!” she whispered.

  She pressed one hand around the arrow in his chest and pulled it out, then the other. Hastily she pressed both hands over the wounds. “Come on,” she sobbed. “Live, Talek. Live, man. Ahai, abruya Madar.…” She probed into him deeper and deeper, seeking some remnant of life-force to foster and only gave up when she felt his presence flaking away as his brain cells died.

  Rocking back on her heels, she stared at the body, dazed and hurting. “Ah, Madar, why?” Tears welled up in her eyes and began dripping down her face. “Why …?” She wrapped her arms around her legs and hid her face against her knees as helpless sobs racked her body. Why …?

  8

  Aleytys turned and looked back. The ache inside her stabbed bitterly as she watched the smoke from Talek’s cabin-funeral pyre rising in a black column that bisected the red half-circle that Horli was thrusting above the line of trees. Aleytys smiled through her tears as Daimon sensed her unhappiness and
rubbed comfortingly against her side. “At least I still have you, my friend. For a little.…” She sighed, then mounted the mare and started riding upstream, following the river to the trade road.

  The days melted one into another. There was no hurry now. The last pursuer was really off her trail this time so she felt little pressure to get on with the long trek ahead of her. Thinking was so painful that she refused to think, keeping her hands busy and letting her mind sink into a thick lethargy.

  On the fifth day, though, she could no longer ignore Daimon’s uneasiness. With a wrench that left her torn inside she sent him back to his family. For a long while she kept touch with him as he trotted in fearless majesty through the trees. Then the touch faded and she was alone.

  9

  Aleytys watched dreamily as the edge of the sunlight ate into the shadow beside her big toe. She yawned and turned over on her stomach, moving her feet farther away from the sun. The tufan sheet wrinkled under her so she humped up and spread it out again, settling back with a sigh of contentment. Over her head the solitary horan thrust its shining head into the sky and threw its thick shade across her body. She reached out and ran her fingers affectionately over the rough silvery bark. The horan was in its brightest midday phase, glittering like a jewel in the middle of the browns and greens of the surrounding trees.

  She coughed and spit out the phlegm blocking her throat, then rubbed her clogged nose, wincing as she touched the raw flesh. In the breaking cold her eyes felt stiff and sore, her bones ached, and her head felt as if it were stuffed with raw avrishum. “What a miserable time to have this happen,” she muttered. Dropping her clean damp head on her crossed arms, she stretched out and let tiredness flow over her. Gradually, as her top nostril drained so she could breathe, she drifted off to sleep, her head nestling in among the horan roots, more content today somehow, with the horrors of the past fading into washed-out images on the backdrop of her consciousness.

  A burning pain snatched her awake some time later. She jerked her foot out of the searing light of Hesh. With a sigh, she sat up and looked to the west. Horli’s edge was brushing the gray line of the mountaintop, but Hesh was still high. The afternoon was clear and pleasant, with a brisk breeze stirring the hot air.

  Suddenly Aleytys shivered. She curled up against the horan for comfort and searched the small clearing with her eyes. There was a dead spot around her, a feeling of foreboding she couldn’t explain, like black wings hovering in threat over her head. Absently running her hand over her sore foot, she scanned the empty sky, then traversed the clearing again. Even the horses were invisible, sheltering under the trees, though she could feel them off to one side—uneasy too, restless, not cropping grass, standing still, heads twisting about, ears flicking nervously back and forth. Aleytys probed further, feeling with her emphatic sense for sign of other life or other cause of the oppression in her soul. Nothing. Just the peculiar image in her head of horrible black wings beating nearer.

  The man walked out from under the trees and stopped a few paces away, looking at her. Aleytys relaxed as she recognized him. “Tarnsian,” she exclaimed, relief making her voice a little more welcoming than it might have been. “Give me news about the vadis. I haven’t even seen a person, let alone talked with one, for over two months. Caravaner, am I glad to see you!” She sat up and thrust her arms into the sleeves of the abba she had pulled over her. As she tied the ties she went on. “Do tell me what’s happening in the valleys. Have you tried protecting yourself as I showed you? You look different.”

  Her voice slowly died as he stood there in stolid silence, cold black eyes fixed on her. Smothering force flowed out from him, driving her back against the trunk of the horan. “What’re you doing, caravaner?” she said hoarsely, rubbing the back of her hand over her forehead. “Leave off, will you?”

  Blackness beat at her. She froze against the tree, her arms and legs congealing into helpless lumps. Belatedly she fought back, but it was like battering smoke. Blackness blanketed her, smothered her, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move. Thought flowed slower in her mind, the words and images growing sticky so that they were increasingly harder to shift, to string together. Blackness swirled until she tumbled over, falling down into the swirling smoke.

  An unknown span of time later she blinked her eyes open. Flat on her back in the grass, she could see Horli half gone behind the mountains with Hesh, a finger-width north of her, touching the horizon line. I’ve been out a long time, she thought. What happened …?

  Panic washed through her. She struggled to sit up and discovered that her hands were tied behind her, feet tied too. Hobbled like a calf for slaughter. Pale-faced and shaking, she tugged wildly at the ropes, but the caravaner knew his knots too well.

  After tipping over twice, she rolled onto her knees and looked around. Her pack was roped on Mulak’s back and he was tied beside Pari to a young bydarrakh. Several other horses stood dejectedly beside them. Tarnsian walked around the stallion, trying the ropes holding the pack to see if they were firmly in place.

  Aleytys shook her head tentatively, trying to clear away the cottony feel that didn’t come from her cold. She reached out for the animal minds and nearly plunged back into shuddering panic when she found herself locked inside her own skull, the shock sending her heart hammering against her ribs. With tears of frustration and fear flooding her eyes she panted, struggling with the ropes on her arms—pulling, tugging at them, scraping the skin from her wrists until the blood ran.

  Her nose dripped, her upper lip was sore and crackling, her mouth dry and leathery from the leaching air passing through on its way to her laboring lungs. The dull misery of her head, oddly enough, cut through the panic, steadying her.

  She made a great effort and wiped her nose on her shoulder, spit put some of the obstructing mucus, and tossed her hair out of her eyes, waiting in grim silence for Tarnsian to tell her what he wanted.

  Arms swinging arrogantly, a satiated smile curling his lips, Tarnsian sauntered over to her. He bent down and checked the ropes on her wrists, pinching the raw flesh with a shrill giggle. The high-pitched sound woke a cold, hard terror in the pit of her stomach. She licked her lips and twisted her head around so she could see him. “Why, Tarnsian? I never hurt you. Why?”

  Without answering her, he seized her around the waist and grunted her up onto his shoulder. Stumping heavily through the sun-bleached grass, he carted her to the mare and slid her over the animal’s back until she lay atop her, legs on one side, head and arms dangling on the other.

  She tried a few delicate probes at his mind, trying to worm her way through the flannel muffling her own. Again the image of black wings fluttered at the edge of her bound-in awareness. He laughed and slapped her buttocks. “No use, bitch. I know too much.”

  Her nose began to clog up again. Opening her mouth, she gasped for air. In seconds her whole head was stuffed until it felt like solid bone. “Tars’hn,” she blurted. “C-can’t brea—”

  Startled and annoyed, he circled the mare and wrapped his hand in her hair, jerking her head up so he could see her flushed, congested face. At the sight of her distress he gave an irritated exclamation and eased her off onto the ground. Straightening, he stood back and glared at her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve got a bad co’d. My ’ead’s all stobbed ub.” She coughed and spit the mucus out on the ground at his feet. “I. ’ad to sleeb i the rain and I caught this co’d.”

  “Silly bitch.”

  She sniffed and spit again, her head beginning to clear a little while her mind worked better. “Dammit, man, I can’t ’elp it.” She gulped in a few mouthfuls of air as she looked uneasily at him. “You taking me back to the Raqsidan?”

  He smiled at her and let his eyes travel slowly up and down her body. “You refused me once.”

  The fear lying cold in her stomach spread through the rest of her as the evil in his face intensified. “No, I won’t take you back,” he whispered. “A lot of things be changed i
n the past weeks.”

  “So I see.” She pasted a sweet, enticing smile on her face and wriggled her body suggestively. “Why keep me tied up? I can’t hurt you.”

  He snickered. “Silly bitch, I read your lie like that!” He snapped his fingers in front of her nose. “I keep you tied because that’s the way I want it I keep you tied till you be tamed.”

  Anger flashed the fear out of her. She tugged futilely at the ropes for a second, then fury turned into a cold rage that fueled the patience of a gurb at a mousehole. She watched him calmly.

  He grinned at her. “So. No use wasting your strength, whore. A gryman knows his knots.” His grin turned into a giggle. “And the other thing—I tied you in your head. Other men’s feelings don’t bother me now. I find them very satisfying.”

  She examined his face. Once, thin, almost haggard, now it was full and puffy. His nervous bony body was developing a pronounced pot around the middle so that he looked like a bloated spider. Sick inside, she refused to think about what was feeding him.

  As she watched, he chirruped softly. A red lusuq crawled out of his sleeve to sit on his thumb, staring with opaque black eyes at Aleytys. The poisonous thing clung there and preened its wings. Tarnsian looked fondly at it. “My army. See, I learned what you started to teach me.”

  “Why not let me loose?” she coaxed. “Don’t you owe me?”

  “Oh, no. You belong to me.” His fist closed slowly. “I keep what’s mine.” He chirruped again and the lusuq crawled back inside his sleeve.

  After saddling the mare, he walked back to Aleytys, two pieces of rope dangling from his soft hands. Kneeling beside her, he rested the knife point on the ropes that bound her feet and looked intently at her. “Try running, bitch, and when I catch you, I play with you with this.” He sliced open the top two fastenings of her abba, turning back the edge with the point of the knife so that he bared one breast. He wrote his initial on the soft flesh, a hairline of blood following the moving knife point. Then he touched the point to her nipple. “You understand?”