by Carol Berg
Kasparian drew his knife and slit my breeches. An ugly gash on my thigh oozed blood and the serpent bird’s sticky black venom. Only now that I saw the wound did I realize how wickedly it hurt. The Madonai began to sponge it clean with the hot water, and I pressed my back to the wall.
“I am forbidden to speak of the past,” he said as he worked. “You possess strength of enchantment that I do not. One may chafe at such a matter, but it changes nothing.”
He reached out and dragged a chair close by my left hand. “Grab onto this and the chest on the other side and hold still. We need to get this poison out, or you’ll lose all feeling in this leg.” Indeed my toes tingled ominously at the end of my throbbing limb. While my bloodless fingers gripped the carved seat of the wooden chair and the brass handles of the clothes chest on my right, Kasparian, with the skill of a surgeon, used his knife to enlarge the wound and allow the blood to wash the black vileness out of it.
The prospect of a body that could fight without pain was extremely attractive at that moment. I needed to think of something else as he blotted, squeezed, and swabbed. “If you could wield this power, Kasparian, shaping dreams and traveling through them, what would you do with it?”
“Better for all that I never have such power.”
“But if you did?”
His answer was not at all what I expected. “I would remove those you brought back to this land—send you and them back to your cursed world—and I would seal the last gate forever.”
Not set his master free. Nor himself. Nor wreak the vengeance that I yet believed was Nyel’s true desire. “But the rai-kirah somehow make him stronger,” I said, “and clearly he wants me here. I thought you loved him.”
He washed the last blood and venom from my leg with uncomfortable vehemence. “You know nothing of love.”
I wondered if he was right. Surety in any matter was a thing of the past. “I could use some advice,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”
His head remained bent to his work. I could not see his face, but only his long dark hair, thick and threaded evenly with iron gray. “You should question,” he said softly, winding the clean linen about my thigh along with some enchantment that eased the most acute discomfort. “Seek answers beyond this house. Love speaks with many voices.” He tied off the bandage with a yank that made me wince, then gathered up his materials.
“I’m sorry for whatever came between us, Kasparian.” Such antagonism was not developed at a distance.
He shot me a glance of purest hatred. “Save your sentiment. You are the most despicable of beings, and I will curse your name until the end of time.”
At some time I crawled out of my corner and into the bed. Thus do fear and mystification often yield to more mundane concerns. The floor was very hard. I could easily become spoiled with sleeping in a bed again.
My dilemma was not resolved by sleep. When sunlight crept through my windows, I washed, but in some childish show of truculence, I ignored the fresh shirt provided and put back on the bloodstained one of the previous day. I contemplated the weapons that were again laid out for me, but turned my back on them and went downstairs. Unready to face either of the Madonai, I was relieved to find myself breakfasting alone. Though fiercely hungry, I ate lightly, forcing myself away from the table and its inexhaustible supplies of meat and bread and fruit before anyone else showed up.
The day was brilliant, the kind of clean-washed morning that can only come after a rain. The sunlight and sharp air drew me outdoors, and, my wound already on its way to healing, I headed for the path that led up the mountainside. I had always sought clarity on mountaintops. But as I crossed the garden, I caught sight of the black wall. Kasparian had advised me to seek answers beyond the house, and despite his hatred, his recommendations were not carelessly given. Could he have been telling me to cross the wall?
The wall’s surface was not so damaged as I remembered, only crazed with a network of threadlike cracks, like pottery with an imperfect glaze. As when I had come there in the siffaru, I laid my palm on the stone, carefully probing the enchantment of the wall, hoping to feel its shape and consequence, and so to learn of it. Somehow I expected the wall to be cold—enchantments often had that effect, as if they drew the substance from the artifact they touched. But the black stone was, in fact, quite warm, far warmer than the stone benches that stood nearby in the sunny garden.
I yanked my hand away. I would have sworn the stone had moved ... bulged ... swelled, perhaps, around my fingers. At the same time I was stricken with such riotous emotion that I threw my head back and laughed even as tears streamed from my eyes and terror burst from my skin in acrid sweat. A fearful thing, this wall. A wondrous thing.
I tried to clear my mind before I touched it again, but to no avail. As I brushed my hand along its flawed surface, faces came alive in my mind, and with them the continuing barrage of sentiment: a woman with startling blue eyes, a man with a bald head that shone like polished leather, a heavy-browed man who carried a giant bow and laughed until the earth rumbled, a round, pink-cheeked young woman of serious mind, a fair-haired young man—oh, gods, I could not remember his name, but in some long-ago time beyond the barriers of memory, he had been my dearest friend in all the world. More of them ... ten, eleven ... the twelfth place unfilled ... No. I was wrong. One more face appeared—a wry, narrow face with a well-trimmed beard, who grinned at me over his shoulder, then vanished in a blaze of blue and purple and swirling gray green. Vyx. Though every face was familiar, he was the only one of them I could name, the only one who had been with me in exile in Kir‘Vagonoth. Twelve places ... Vyx had always intended to come back here. His choice had not been a whim of the moment. Were the others the same, friends of mine who had given everything to keep this wall secure? Damn your stubborn pride for destroying any chance to remember more. You should know these people.
I walked in the sunlight beside the wall, dragging my hand along it, fumbling in the many-roomed house of memory where such friends should have been safely tucked away. Halfway around the garden, I stopped abruptly. A single, deep crack split the black surface from ground to top. Though ugly and gaping, the crack had not yet broken completely through to the outside. My finger traced the jagged split. Was someone else waiting to come and fill it? I feared not—twelve seemed “right” somehow, complete—and yet I would not wish this wall in anyone’s future. A terrible fate. All these things I knew, but did not know.
“Explain it to me,” I said, sitting on the damp ground beside the wall, leaning my back on it, closing my eyes, and turning my face to the sun. “One of you come and tell me, so I’ll understand what you did. I’ve got to know if this gift I’m offered is the grace you’ve earned or the very act that makes your sacrifice a waste.”
I sat there a long time. I summoned the faces one by one and twisted my mind into knots trying to retrieve some memory of them, but I uncovered very little. The young man I’d called my dearest friend loved sleeping in the open under the stars and swimming in the deepest pools of the world—staying for weeks in the deeps, shifting himself to make it possible. The serious young woman had bested me in some contest of wits, and I had resented it very much. The bowman was a superb hunter and a merciless taskmaster, both loved and hated by everyone who knew him, and he had taken my friend and the serious girl and me on some magnificent adventure that entirely escaped my memory.
Of course I remembered more of Vyx than any of the others, for I had lived with him in exile. But he should never have been in Kir‘Vagonoth. I could not shake that conviction ... which made no sense at all. No one had planned that we, the rekkonarre, would split ourselves into two beings. And why would any one of us have been exempt from the price we had paid for the prophecy—the seeing that had induced us to forsake Kir’Navar rin and destroy ourselves?
As in Kir’ Vagonoth, I felt the shame of what I had done to Denas. A man of strength and duty who had known fully what he was doing when he took my hand and yielded his own life
. Though his voice was silent, I once again vowed to heed whatever of him remained in me.
When I gave up at last, no nearer to a resolution, I lay back on the grass and embraced the peace of noonday. A gold-brown bird soared high above the mountain, graceful, majestic as it caught an updraft and held almost perfectly still for a moment, poised on the cusp of the wind before disappearing behind the peak. The bird led me to think of Blaise, and then of the other friends I’d left behind in the human world ... the real world as I thought of it. They seemed so irretrievably remote, almost as distant as those whose faces I envisioned when I touched the wall. Yet the wall had been here for hundreds of years, while Catrin, Fiona, Blaise, Aleksander—
I sat up with a sudden start. The fifth day. If time ran anywhere near the same in the two worlds, this would be the day of the raid on Syra, the day when Aleksander’s world changed for good or ill, for life or death. I should be there. I might manage easier to walk on the star Elemiel, I thought, so impossible was the distance between Aleksander and me and so unyielding the tether that bound me to Tyrrad Nor. Were he to be on the other side of that wall, I doubted I could have found my way to him. But then, of course, I remembered Nyel’s offer and the promise that it gave. Perhaps I could be there. And that led me to consider Nyel’s hatred of Aleksander and the Madonai’s ability to influence dreams. With an explosion of dismay, I leaped to my feet and ran for the castle, yelling for my host.
“What is it, lad?” He stood on the wide steps beside the garden, just outside the doors to his sitting room. His old young eyes were red-rimmed and tired, and the creases alongside them were deeper than I’d noticed before.
I stood on the garden path at the bottom of the steps. “Tell me of your crimes in the human world, Nyel. Did you shape a Frythian assassin’s dream? Did a Rhyzka bully abuse his child wife to death because of you? Where was your hand in all this trouble?”
“Why does it matter? You know I have no love for humans. I confess it freely.”
“Do you know what’s happening today? Have you manipulated someone, done something to make it fail?” I was on fire with my conviction. Somehow he was going to get Aleksander killed.
He shrugged. “I can only share your dreams and visions, not read your thoughts to learn of your affairs. And I keep no tally of the other dreams I touch. I seek out dreamers that are interesting. So many dreams are fragments or too odd or of too little substance to be useful. But, yes, I’ve found fertile ground in these warring Derzhi. They are everything I despise, and I take great pleasure in confounding them.” He started for the door.
“Send me there,” I called after him.
He paused, but did not turn. “Where?”
“To Aleksander. To Syra. If you care for me as you say, if your gift is meant for good, for love, for the world’s hope—and my heart believes you, Nyel, though my reason screams at me to be afraid—then I beg you do this for me. Let me help them. I won’t ask again. Afterward I’ll choose yes or no, but if you fail me now, I swear the answer will be no.”
“You threaten me over this human wretch!” He whirled about, and if the brow of an angry god could launch thunderbolts as sto rytellers claim, so his would have done.
“No. Not threaten. Never that.” And “never” was the truth. Even in my fear of what he had done, I could not bear the thought of harming Nyel. “But I’ve told you of my belief in Aleksander’s destiny. If you allow him to be harmed, then I can’t believe you fit to judge your gift good or evil, right or wrong. If you wish me to make things right, to substitute my judgment for your own, then you must begin now and not only when I allow you to make me other than human.”
He was quivering in his wrath, his presence swelling until I felt it loom as huge as the mountain itself. I was ready to take wing should he burst with his fury as I feared. But as the moment slid past us, he turned for the door again, merely human-sized. “I will not send you to this prince, nor to the rekkonarre who flies with you. Someone else. A stranger.”
“As long as it is someone who wishes this venture to succeed.” No tricks, old man.
“You will remember that you are still vulnerable. I would not have you dead.”
“I will return here and settle this.” Fully aware of how vulnerable I was, no matter which side of the dream I walked, I climbed the steps and entered the game once more.
CHAPTER 32
The desert was littered with corpses . . . vultures feeding ... The birds glared at me as if I were intruding on their private amusement. The broken bodies were chained together and facedown, save for a few . . . the naked boys... turned so you could see what the birds had done with their razor beaks ... the mutilation ... though now the children were dead, the savage ruin of their manhood was only another twist of the heart. Too late ... too late ...
“This is the one you want?”
“Yes. This one.” We had touched a number of dreams, some fearful, some incoherent, some wholly unrelated to the coming events, but this one ... Surely this dreamer had seen the slave caravan at Andassar to shape this horrific image of what might be discovered on the Syra raid.
“And you choose this path freely?”
“Yes, yes. Get on with it.”
“So be it.”
I waded through the bodies, thicker now, piled one upon the other... knee high, everyone dead. “This time we’ll save them, ” I said. “This time ...” Over my head now, blotting out the sun... the choking stench... and so dark... down, down underground and everywhere were more slaves ... all dead ... Where had he gone, the dreamer? Down deep into the cave ... There... hacking at the chains, cursing as his blows shattered the iron links, only to have them flow back together like slips of tin in a smith’s fire.
“Hello!” I called.
The man whirled about and raised his ax. Smoking tears streamed down his face, eating deep grooves in his cheeks. His face was not familiar, but, then, who dreams of his own face? I blocked the descending blow; what would happen if he killed me in his dream? “I’ve come to help. Wake up. ” He looked puzzled and reached for my extended hand ...
Brutal heat pressed me to the gritty rock. I blinked my eyes, trying to clear my head of the transition, carefully not moving anything else until I had a better idea of my surroundings. The desert, most certainly. The red rock under my nose felt like a baking oven, and though my head cast a long shadow to my left, the sun, whether rising or setting, drew the moisture from me. Further to my left, at something of a distance, were more rocks, jagged pinnacles of red, walls rippled like the dunes, but pressed hard together by the years. The ocher cast of the light falling on the rugged cliffs told me it was afternoon. Cautiously I rotated my head without lifting it, until I could see to my right.
Sharp steel pricked my neck, and a boot smashed down on my hand as it flew instinctively to my weaponless belt. “Who are you?” The nervous man with the high-pitched voice did not sound like anyone I knew.
“A friend. Can I sit up and introduce myself before you break my fingers?”
“Slowly. And stay on the ground. Put your hands on your head.” The timbre of his voice signaled no moderation in either his ferocity or his sincerity. Obediently placing my palms on my hair, I sat up and turned around to face him. No, not familiar. A stranger under his black-and-white paint. Perhaps he had only heard stories of the raid on the slave caravan at Andassar, to set him dreaming so vividly. His dark beard and ringlets strung with beads named him a Suzaini, and his sleep-heavy eyes blinked at me in uncertain recognition.
“I’m a friend of Blaise just arrived here to help,” I said. “You’ve probably seen me at Taíne Keddar, or perhaps ... did we meet three nights ago at Taíne Horet? I was with the Aveddi.” He could be one of the Suzaini palatine’s men. One of the palatine’s sons who had escorted us to the great tent ... yes, the proud bearing hinted at it.
The brawny young man withdrew his sword, but did not sheathe it. He held the weapon with a practiced hand, but the nervous excitement that gave
edge to his voice and tension to his movements suggested that he had never faced a true battle. “How have you come here?” He glanced uneasily down a steep track that seemed to be the only way down from the flat red rock on which I sat. “Why did no one signal me that you were on your way up?”
We had an awesome vantage from the rock, and as I peeked over my shoulder, I saw what the man had been sent here to watch. Far below us, a fortress had been built right into the side of the cliffs. “Perhaps someone was dozing off in the heat,” I said. “Maybe they noticed that I’m not armed and didn’t look inclined to push you off the rock.” I jerked my thumb at the fortress. “I’d recommend you get your head down and your weapon out of the sun or you’ll have someone less friendly than me up here.”
I suspected he flushed under his paint as he dropped into a crouch. With a wary eye on me, he sounded the harsh chucking cry of the cave swallow. Only when he heard an answering call from down below did he relax a bit, cram his sword back into its sheath, and stretch out on his stomach to resume his watch.
“I’ve come to take a last look around on behalf of the Aveddi,” I said. “Make sure everyone’s ready. Have you seen anything?”
“Naught. All’s been properly quiet since well before dawn.” One might have thought the young man had ordered it that way by his own watching.
He was correct that the fortress showed no signs of alert. No signs of life at all. Not even those it should have. “You’ve seen no servants? Herdsmen? Hunters?” The fortress fronted a dry, steep-walled gorge. The water stores would be deep inside the citadel, where it delved into the rock, but most of the garrison’s supplies would be brought in by caravan. And if a hundred and fifty men lived here as Aleksander claimed, then surely there would be small herds—goats for milk and sheep or pigs for fresh meat—kept back in the shady nooks of the rocks, where springs or seeping moisture allowed sparse grazing. Either that provender or fresh kill from a hunt would be brought in at least once a day. “It seems very strange that no one’s brought supplies to so large a garrison.”
