Restoration

by Carol Berg

  At midday, Malver returned from a scouting trip. “The Karn‘Hegeth road lies just over the next rise, Your Highness. We needs must take the road from here, as it’s too odd otherwise. They’ve got lookouts all about the walls and only the main gates open, with at least fifty soldiers manning them. I asked a drover why the heavy watch, and he said there’s rumors coming in from traders about bandit raids, and they’ve been alerted to look for ... ah ... particular outlaws.”

  “Then let’s get to the road,” said Aleksander, nudging his mount. “I’ve no time to dawdle.”

  Though I could scarcely lift my eyelids for the breathless, glaring heat, I caught the hesitation in the soldier’s report. “Wait,” I said, squinting in the glare. “These ‘particular outlaws’ ... They’re watching for Prince Aleksander, is that it, Malver?”

  Malver ducked his head in acknowledgment. He still refused to look me in the eye.

  “My lord, you must not be recognized,” I said.

  “These rags aren’t fit for a slave and haven’t been clean in two months. My chamberlains, servants, and warrior legions are conspicuously absent. And I’ve neither banner nor herald to announce my coming. I could hardly be mistaken for a visiting Emperor, riding on this cart horse.”

  Indeed Kiril had been wise enough to send us mediocre horses, offering his apologies along with his conviction that mounts of Aleksander’s preference would be too conspicuous. But clothes, horses, and servants were only part of the royal personage. Aleksander couldn’t see that even his annoyance was revealing.

  “You must unbraid your hair,” I said, “you and Sovari both. And, my lord, you must remove your ring and cover the hilt of your sword. Captain Sovari—”

  “Unbraid my hair?” Aleksander pulled up sharply. “You jest.”

  I continued, hoping he would get my point soon, so that we could move on and find shade and something cool to drink. The gritty dregs in our waterskins would scorch the tongue. “Captain Sovari, you must remove your imperial sash. It didn’t betray you in Zhagad, where imperial troops are common, but everyone will know what captains are garrisoned here. We must display no imperial connection and no heged identification for a man with a broken leg. Better if neither of you can even be recognized as Derzhi. Give them no reason at all to associate this boot with Prince Aleksander. Do you understand me?”

  Sovari grimaced and dragged the embroidered sash bearing the Derzhi lion and his badge of rank over his head. He stuffed it in his saddle pack, and then untied the strip of leather that bound his long braid. Malver sat quietly watching the Prince, who glared at me in fury.

  He had to hear it. “You’ve a price on your head, my lord. You must act like it or you’ll suffer for your folly. All of us will.”

  Aleksander’s red hair had only just grown out enough to make a stump of a braid on the right side of his head. His whole posture had changed on the first day he had managed to twist it into something that would stay put—the way a man walks when he steps onto his own land after long journeying. He wasn’t going to enjoy being a fugitive.

  I sighed and made a futile swipe at the sweat that dribbled endlessly down my neck. “There are other things. We must agree on a story... tell him, Malver. You know how Derzhi guards behave, and what they’re likely to do when hunting a king-slayer.”

  Malver nodded slowly. “We must ride no more than two together. Gate guards will likely question any man of fighting age, as will any warrior of the local houses we chance to meet in the streets. With four together they’ll have swords drawn before asking—”

  “As well they should,” said Aleksander. “I’d not have my warriors fail in their duty.”

  Malver threw me a quick glance and continued. “The Fontezhi have the greatest holdings here. Their warriors are among the most ... They may strike you at any time, my lord, if they don’t like your answers or the words you use to make them, and they’ll cut you or give you a taste of the lash if you so much as look at them crossways.”

  “And if I do anything untoward, I might as well stick a crown on your head and shout your name to all,” I said. “I’m going to have to mask my features as it is—try, at least. You daren’t be seen with an Ezzarian. If they recognize any of us, we’re dead men.”

  Aleksander tugged his horse’s head about furiously as if to ride back the way we’d come, but he stopped as soon as he was facing away from us. After a long moment, he reached up and yanked out the thong holding his braid. “You would have me unmanned.”

  “We would have you live, my lord.”

  Karn‘Hegeth was a sprawling city, built on the steep slopes of a broad and barren ridge in the territory of Basran, just beyond the western border of Azhakstan. Basranni were close kin to the Derzhi, related by intermarriage, culture, and long alliance, but a misdirected assassination had doomed Basran towns and villages to destruction and its people to enslavement some thirty years before. Karn’Hegeth had survived the razing of Basran because there was so much wealth to be had nearby—gold and silver mines, salt deposits, major trade routes that led deep into the western Empire—and the Derzhi would only have needed to build the city up again. Aleksander’s uncle Dmitri had battered the palace of the Basran warlord into rubble, mounted the heads of Basran nobility on pikestaffs at the city’s ten gates, enslaved the Basran people, and called it good enough.

  We emerged from our sheltered dune just as a long caravan passed out of sight along the broad Karn‘Hegeth road, a well-traveled strip that stretched straight across the desert to the hazy heights just visible in the west.

  As my horse plodded dutifully along behind my companions, I let the scarf of my haffai droop down low over my face, and I considered transformation. Eyes first—Ezzarians were instantly recognizable by eyelids that made our eyes take on a downward angle. And then skin color—even in a city of desert dwellers, our copper coloring and lack of beard were distinctive, and I would need to mask the royal mark burned into my left cheek. I drew up an image of Ezzarian eyes in my mind and worked out what changes would make them appear like those of other races: tighten the eyelid, draw the outside edge upward and inward, reduce the prominent cheekbone and brow that set them off. With a quick estimate of the variance needed in skin color and a determined avoidance of my proclivity to think too much, I summoned melydda and relaxed the boundaries of my flesh.

  A cool prickling rippled across my face and neck, spreading quickly to torso and limbs, redefining the edges of my physical being as it touched air or cloth ... easy ... little more than the flush of long exertion in cold weather. Grinning in relief at this unexpectedly pleasurable experience of shapechanging, I nudged my horse a little faster. I wanted to catch up with Aleksander so he could tell me if I’d done enough.

  Get to thegateway ... The whisper came from inside me, along with a sudden swelling pressure of anger and frustration. One of my hands jerked brutally on the reins, while such a conviction of imminent catastrophe filled me that my other hand flew instinctively to my knife, caressed its hilt, considered its balance. My arm and eye readied themselves to judge distance and speed and angle. These were a warrior’s instincts when confronted with danger, but not my own instincts at that moment. While you play with these useless companions, waste our time ... the danger grows ...

  I recognized this voice, unheard since I lay dying at Dasiet Homol. I forced my hand away from my knife and refused the demand to kick my horse southward toward the entry to Kir‘-Navarrin. “So tell me, demon,” I said, gritting my teeth against the nauseating intrusion. “What danger do I face? Tell me its name if it is not yours.”

  It’s from the past, he said. And inside you. It is the reason for everything.

  “Why now? All those weeks I listened for you. I left myself open, tried to talk, to come to some resolution”—left myself exposed, vulnerable to corruption until I had been almost sick from it—“but you never deigned to answer.”

  I told you that you’d win. You have the soul. What more was there to say? But
now, after seeing the prisoner ... hearing him. Listen to me. When you pass through the gate, you must yield control of this body. Let me guide you. His hurried words grew louder, more desperate, a trickle grown quickly to a flood. It’s something about the prison... it’s so close... let me remember ... you are already compromised ...

  Even as we spoke I felt the storm building, the paraivo on the horizons of my mind ready to flay any human within the reach of my hand. “You want me to trust you, yield to you, when you’ve driven me to murder?” I could scarcely squeeze out the words for the rage hammering my skull, deafening me, driving me to violence and madness.

  ... wasting time... I won’t apologize for it... your own mind’s weakness ...

  The din grew louder. My eye fell on Aleksander’s back, and a flush of hostility burned my skin. Humans were so stupid, so ignorant. Captives of their flesh.

  Listen to me!

  My hand crept toward my knife hilt. I needed to rid myself of these distractions. Hot anger boiled and surged ... the heat thrumming... the glare of sand and sky blinding... confusing ... while cold, creeping darkness gnawed at my soul...

  “No! You will not have me.” I squeezed the words through clenched teeth. Appalled at what I was about to do, I threw every protection I knew between my soul and my wakened demon, wrestling him into silence, stilling the cacophony in my head. At last I understood, and with clarity, my newfound hopes came crashing to earth.

  Denas’s anger fueled my madness. His outrage drove me to bloodshed, and his fury shredded my self-control. But Nyel surely chose my victims. The Madonai’s long grieving had turned into virulent poison that tainted everything he touched. He had infected my dreams, and like dry cedar in a lightning storm, his hatred of the human race had become tinder in my warrior’s hand. I had fed on his hatred: when looking on Gaspar and Fessa’s bodies, when watching Edik beat the slave, when seeing how the namhir had mutilated Gordain. It had festered in me as I watched Aleksander suffer from the folly and injustice of his own kind, until it burst like a suppurating boil to foul my sleep. Creeping darkness.

  Your strength will be your downfall, fool, cried the demon’s fading voice.

  “I’ve not forgotten how you feel about those who wear flesh,” I muttered under the cover of my scarf, shoving my half-drawn knife blade back into its sheath, commanding my trembling hands still. “When we ventured this joining, you claimed that the danger in Tyrrad Nor was your enemy. But even if you don’t share his purpose, your anger does nothing but feed his power. You caught me napping today, Denas, but never again. I control my own soul, my own hand. Neither you nor the one in Tyrrad Nor will shape my future.” Now I knew it was both of them, doing battle in my soul, each trying to manipulate me to his will. I would not yield to either one, not now, not if or when I ever ventured Kir‘Navarrin.

  “Seyonne?” My eyes blinked open, and I found Aleksander not three paces from me, his hand poised casually above his own dagger. Malver and Sovari were just behind him, looking puzzled.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “Doing no more than I asked of you.” I threw back my hood and stared the Prince in the face, thrusting my pale bare arms out from the dusty haffai. “Is it done fairly?”

  Startled, wary, he examined me as a Derzhi horse-broker reviews his newest purchase. “Done,” he said at last. “But not fairly, I think. You look as if you’ve eaten something off.”

  We rode for a while in silence. I felt my heart settle back into its normal rhythm. The sweat dried quickly. When the two soldiers pulled ahead of us, Aleksander spoke quietly. “Is it the rai-kirah, Seyonne?”

  “It is nothing.”

  “Always you’ve been a private man. I respect that.” He wrinkled his face wryly. “A new thing I’ve been working on. But these things going on with you—When you lay so ill after the matters at Dasiet Homol, you asked me to look at you and tell you what I saw, as if you valued my word on it. I told you then that despite this demon joining, I saw only the man I knew, the one who fought with the hand of the gods to save my soul.”

  Despite the sunlit noonday, my skin grew cold. I wished he would stop.

  “You’ve not been the same since this siffaru. Healthier, I’ve thought, more at peace than any time since you came to Zhagad, and I’m glad of it. Yet I’ve realized that since you came out of the cave, I see only the seeming and not the truth. Three weeks you were buried in that cave, yet you’ve said not a word of it. I can’t read you anymore.”

  “The seeming is the truth,” I said. “Denas is silent and will stay that way. The prisoner is still locked away. My ... problem ... is under control. When you’re safe, I’ll settle it once and for all.” Exactly how, I wasn’t sure. I could not speak of the siffaru. Nyel and the feelings he had raised in me, my conviction that somehow I was destined, not to destroy, but to salvage something marvelous—I buried deep. I didn’t trust my feelings anymore, and I had other business to attend.

  We did not enter Karn‘Hegeth until sunset. Though we lingered outside the gates all afternoon, as if we thought to camp there for the night like the scores of others who disdained roofs or could ill afford the price of an inn, we merged back onto the road as soon as the shadows grew long. Night might mask our features better, but it would cause closer scrutiny by the troops of Derzhi warriors who patrolled the gates and streets. We stood a better chance of losing ourselves in the confusion of late-arriving caravans at the outer margins of day.

  Malver and Sovari ventured the gates first, leading our four horses. Malver’s dark features blended easily with the crowd as the two soldiers pushed their way into the noisy press. But even though he was afoot—unlikely for any Derzhi—Sovari’s height, light hair, and confident bearing marked him out of place in the streams of peasants and merchants, horsemen and slaves, chastou, goats, chickens, beggars, carts, and wagons. Malver must have noted the same, for he stopped, held a quick conversation with a ragged herdsman, and then threw a bleating goat across the Derzhi captain’s shoulders. The two soldiers moved slowly with the crowd and disappeared through the gates. We noted no disturbance among the guards who stood stiff and alert on the gate towers above us or on the ramparts to either side, and no mustering of the mounted warriors who bulled through the milling travelers, staring into faces and poking their spears into carts.

  “Time to venture forth, my lord.”

  “Must I, too, carry a goat? Perhaps I could take it to Mardek as a bribe.”

  “Though the goat would add a certain charm,” I said, unable to control a grin at the thought of it, “your crutches will be enough to manage. Hunch over them, as if your back were twisted, too. And remember to keep your eyes down. Never look a Derzhi in the eye, especially when he challenges you. Keep your hand away from your weapons, as Malver told you. Remember our story, and let me talk.”

  “Is my education quite complete now?” The Prince jammed the crosspieces of his crutches under his arms.

  I picked up our two grimy cloth packs from the ground and dropped their rope ties around his neck, tied an old rag of Sarya’s about his head to mute the telltale of his red hair, and yanked on the folds of his filthy haffai to make sure its long folds covered the unusual boot. Then I motioned him toward the gate, mumbling to myself. “I don’t think we’ve even begun.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The girl was no more than seven or eight, a thin, leggy sprite with sparkling eyes, brown curls, and bare feet, a dirty, ragged, dancing child lost in her own fancy. She was with the man just in front of Aleksander and me—a gaunt Manganar dragging a two-wheeled cart to the gates while herding five small girls and three goats alongside it. The long-handled cart was crammed with two emaciated pigs, a flour barrel, an iron pot, and a pile of dingy bundles, one of which was producing a thready wailing.

  “I’ve naught for such a fee, your honor,” the man said to the burly Derzhi tax collector who was inspecting his pitiful cargo. “The childer’s mam died birthing, and I’ve brung them to her folk. Her kin won’t take the c
hilder without the goats to feed ‘em. My pigs are most dead, but if you’d take one for the fee ...”

  Two imperial officials were collecting entry tribute on any carts or livestock passing the gates, assessing the value of the goods and requiring a proportional fee or a share of the merchandise. This was profitable duty for a tax collector, but with Karn‘Hegeth’s other nine gates locked against the threat of bandits, and more and more stragglers trying to get into the city before the gates were closed for the night, the two Derzhi were harried and short of temper.

  I cursed my timing. Sovari and Malver had moved straight through the gates, but the Prince and I had gotten snarled in the hot, stinking crowd, crammed between the poor Manganar and the agitated horses of a Fontezhi baron’s traveling party. After a tedious hour’s delay while a massive caravan was assessed and its gonaj argued every zenar of his taxes, we were only now getting close to the gates. The annoyed baron’s servant pushed forward to have a word with the gate guards, and soon the party was let through without stopping for the tax collectors.

  “A Fontezhi sixth-degree,” murmured Aleksander, keeping his head down and his voice low. “Likely a half-wit. The Fontezhi are so inbred they can see up their own asses. They’re afraid to lose a bit of their property as bride gifts, so they marry their own sisters.”

  The baron’s place was quickly taken by a prosperous-looking and very impatient Suzaini rider and a pair of Kuvai lute players on donkeys, who decided to while away the time teaching themselves some annoyingly repetitive passage of a popular saga. For a while I thought the lute players were most likely to get us in trouble, as Aleksander began muttering something about smashing their instruments and inserting various small pieces into the musicians’ ears, noses, and other bodily openings. But that was before the burly tax collector began eyeing the little girl.