Courage of falcons

by Holly Lisle

  You don't need to tell me. I'll hurry. What am I to say to her?

  Tell her, "A daughter is her father's greatest blessing, his greatest weakness, and his greatest fear." She's young, Ry, and has been raised entirely out of her father's influence. She's an innocent.

  I won't hurt her.

  Protect her.

  I'm on my way.

  Dùghall broke off the connection with Ry. He waited a moment Ry would tell Kait and Ian something, surely, before he raced out the door, and Dùghall wanted to make sure Ry was well on his way before he contacted Kait. What would happen next would be dangerous perhaps deadly and he didn't want Ry to hesitate when he discovered that Kait would be facing danger he would no doubt prefer to take on himself.

  Either Kait or Ry could have activated the Mirror and done what needed to be done with it but the girl, Ulwe, was expecting a man to come after her, and if she had ever seen an image of him, she would be more likely taken in by Ry's appearance than by Ian's.

  Finally enough time had passed that he felt sure Kait and Ian would be alone. He grasped Kait's viewing glass and reached out for her.

  Chapter 7

  Kait leaned against the slatted shutters, staring through one gap at the place where Ry had been only an instant before. He had run out the door after only the thinnest of explanations, leaving her and Ian dumbfounded.

  Behind her, Ian paced and fretted. "Where are we going to hide a little girl? We won't be able to use her papers her father will have the city in an uproar finding her. And the first checkpoint we pass, she'll scream for help, and the weight of the city will descend on our heads."

  "I don't know what we're going to do." Kait sighed and watched the unending stream of strangers that hurried along the harbor boardwalk. She wished one of those strangers would suddenly become Ry that she could know he would return safely to her. "We'll figure it all out when the child gets here."

  "Maybe I should buy a sleeping draught from an apothecary," Ian said. "If we fed her a healthy dose of nightbell or Phadin's elixir, we could get her to Galweigh House with only a bit more trouble than we'll have getting ourselves there."

  Kait turned and stared at him. "You would truly pour Phadin's elixir into a child?"

  She watched with some satisfaction as his face flushed. "No. I suppose I wouldn't. But we're going to have to do something."

  "We will. But we don't have to do it now. Wait. We'll meet the girl and when she arrives her actions will dictate ours."

  "She's Crispin Sabir's daughter. If we're going by actions, we'll probably have to kill her."

  Kait gave him a hard look. "Don't even say that in jest."

  Ian sighed.

  Kait turned back to the window.

  Kait.

  "What?"

  Ian said, "I didn't say anything."

  Kait. It's Dùghall.

  Kait grew still and inhaled slowly. She felt the faintest of touches through the talisman embedded in her skin.

  I hear you, Uncle.

  It's time to use the Mirror, he said. It's time to send the Dragons through the Veil.

  Kait turned to Ian. "Help me get the Mirror out," she said.

  He frowned at her. "You think you should be tinkering with it here " he started to argue, but he faltered as he looked at her. "You're listening to him, aren't you?"

  "To Dùghall," she said.

  "He's telling you what to do."

  "He says Hasmal found out how the Mirror works. We're going to get all of the Dragons out of Calimekka now."

  "We?"

  Kait nodded.

  "Oh, shang!" Ian went to the wardrobe and, with Kait's help, dragged out the Mirror of Souls. "I suppose I never saw myself as an old man, anyway." When the three of them had arrived, they'd taken the spare blankets from the wardrobe and wrapped them around it; neither the blankets nor the wardrobe would do much to hide the Mirror if it decided to betray them as it had in the Thousand Dancers, but wrapping and hiding it had seemed more sensible than leaving it sitting in the center of the room. "Let me look out the window," he muttered as he shoved it in front of her. "I want to get a last look at life."

  Kait managed to give him a small smile as she pulled the blankets off of the Mirror. She stood before the artifact, hands trembling. Its creators had made it beautiful; the beauty went far in hiding its evil. Her skin crawled as she looked at it; it could rip her soul from her body and fling it into the Veil and give her flesh to a stranger. She knew what it could do, and she was flatly and totally terrified of it, and now she alone would have to touch it and manipulate its jeweled glyphs and put herself at its mercy to send the Dragons away.

  She became aware that Ian was standing across from her, watching her, and she realized she had been poised motionless in front of the Mirror for quite a while. "What are you waiting for?" Ian asked.

  "Courage." She clenched her hands into tight fists. Altruism was a fine and noble sentiment, but when it came down to stepping into fire for strangers, or even for friends and colleagues and love, Kait discovered that the desire to survive rose kicking and screaming from the dark recesses of the mind, demanding second thoughts.

  You don't have to do it, Dùghall told her.

  I know.

  She stared at the cool, sensuous curves of the Mirror. It represented evil and the foul path that the future would take without her intervention, as Solander had represented the path of hope and joy. She steadied herself with thoughts of Solander she remembered what it had been like to touch his soul. For the first time in her life, someone had known her totally and still completely accepted her for what she was. She had not been a monster to Solander. She had been Kait, woman and Karnee, and he had loved her without reservation.

  Until she'd met him, she'd thought of Solander as a god; she had been stunned to discover that he was a man purely human. Yet in spite of his human limitations, he had found within himself a beauty that allowed him to love without reservation, and he had insisted the potential for that same beauty existed within her, and within all people, human or Scarred.

  I have that potential in me. I can love like that.

  From Dùghall, she felt a brief sharp stab of shame. That is where I fail Solander's teaching. Where I have always failed, he confessed. Even now, what I do I do for myself more than for anyone else.

  Kait would have argued with him, but he stopped her.

  I know what I am, he told her. I know I must be more someday. Somehow. But right now, I don't matter. You do. And the Mirror does. And what you can do to save us all.

  Kait inhaled slowly, and took the single necessary step forward that permitted her to rest her hands on the smooth metal of the Mirror. The Mirror of Souls still made her think of a giant flower: a bowl formed of platinum petals resting on a tripod of delicately curved, swordlike leaves. What had been the stem when first she had seen the artifact a slender pillar of golden light that rose upward from the base through the center of the tripod and swirled into a radiant pool at the heart of the bowl was missing at the moment. It would return when she activated the Mirror... and once that light again flowed, Kait knew she would be in danger.

  If you're ready, we'll begin. I'll look through your eyes, Dùghall said. But I won't try to take over your hands. You are the one who will be in danger when we start this; you must be the one to decide at each step whether or not to continue.

  You could guide me

  I could. But I won't.

  I understand.

  She felt Dùghall's excitement, and also his fear. Then let us begin.

  Through his eyes, she saw the rows of carved gemstones inside the bowl differently. No longer merely pretty decorations, each gem with its incised hash marks and curlicues suddenly meant something: "first power" or "drain" or "connect" or "increase" or "draw" or "modulate." She realized that she was not looking at the Mirror only through Dùghall's eyes she had connected to the memories of a Dragon, too. She could feel the Dragon's connection to Dùghall could feel a link, as we
ll, to Hasmal, though she could not understand how that could be.

  She took a few steadying breaths and let herself relax. She strengthened her connection with Dùghall. For an instant, she felt resistance as he pulled away, but she felt she needed a deeper link with the Dragon memories he held in his mind. When he let her reach past the buffer he'd created, she felt a sudden flood of recognition as countless other memories connected with hers. She discovered that the Dragon had been the one who had claimed to be her ancestor Amalee the one who had led her across the sea in search of the Mirror. She discovered that he'd intended to take over her body, but had been denied access by the shield Hasmal had taught her how to cast. She discovered that the body he'd occupied that of Crispin Sabir had been one of the men who had tortured her cousin Danya, and had been the very one who had fathered Danya's child, who would have been the Reborn. She felt the full weight of Crispin's evil life, of Dafril's thousand years of plotting and manipulating, of Hasmal's many fears and great love and agonizing death, roll over her like a freight wagon pulled by a hundred galloping horses. The connections were dizzying, the memories Hasmal's, Crispin's, Dafril's, and Dùghall's were overwhelming. Brutal, conflicting, incomprehensible images flooded into her mind, and her knees went weak. She sagged against the Mirror, queasy and sick.

  Strong arms wrapped around her waist and pulled her back.

  "Kait. Are you all right?"

  The voice she heard from so far away was a real voice, and she rose out of the darkness that threatened to consume her and clung to that.

  "I will be." She closed her eyes and hoped that was true. "Give me a moment."

  "Let me use the Mirror," he offered. "Tell me what I have to do, and let me take the risks."

  She took a steadying breath, then got her knees under her and locked them. Standing under her own power again, she turned her back on the Mirror of Souls. "I can't. I know you'd do this if you could, but to use the Mirror, you have to be able to reach and channel magic." She rested a hand on his forearm and said, "Just keep me from falling over if this gets to be too much for me again."

  He stared into her eyes, and took her hand in his own. "I'll do that if that's all you'll let me do," he said. "But if you find that I can do more... please... let me."

  She turned and looked at him. The love in his eyes was too clear and too painful. She hurt for him. She wished she could be the woman he wanted her to be. She nodded and felt a lump forming in her throat and tears beginning to burn in her eyes. Unable to find words, she gave him a quick hug, then turned to face the Mirror again.

  Chapter 8

  Crispin woke to blackness and ringing in his ears. For a long, painful moment he thought that he was still in the Veil, and that his memories of reprieve had been nothing but a dream. But the scent of his body was musky in his nostrils, and the sweetness of night-blooming jasmine reached him from somewhere in the distance, and from nearer he caught the stink of drying blood and piss. Then the ringing ceased, and he realized that in each of the city's hundreds of temples and parnisseries, the bellringers had been clanging out the Invocation to Paldin to mark the end of day. Twilight had come.

  He sat and ran his fingers over his face. His face. He touched his hair, his neck, his chest, pressed his palms hard against each other and felt the blood pulse in his fingertips. He sucked in air until his lungs began to ache from holding so much, then let it out with a joyful whoosh.

  He wiggled his feet and felt them move, stretched his arms high over his head, flexed his spine and felt the satisfying crack as joints popped all along it.

  "Back," he whispered, and grinned. "Damn the Dragons to darkness, I'm back."

  His eyes adjusted to the nearly lightless room, and he realized that he was in the torture chamber in the Citadel of the Gods, the Dragons' city-within-a-city in Calimekka. A body lay on the table, still strapped down; it was from that body that the various stinks emanated.

  That body....

  Memories deluged him not just his own memories, but those that had belonged to the corpse on the table, and those of the Dragon who had stolen his body and ridden him like a cheap nag, and those of a terrifying wizard hiding in the distant hills a wizard, he realized, who could still see everything he did and who could, without warning, invade his body and listen to his most secret thoughts.

  He snarled. Because of those memories, he knew much of what the old wizard knew he saw how he could travel in trance to the place where the Falcon Dùghall hid with his followers, simply by following the energy strand from the talisman that the dead man had embedded in his skin. He could watch them; perhaps he could find a way to destroy them.

  But even as he entertained that pleasant thought, he knew that he didn't have the time to persecute his persecutors. They'd found out about Ulwe. And they intended to kidnap her and use her against him.

  He snarled again. The cold white fury that he felt toward the spying Falcons and the manipulative Dragons metamorphosed into something else something hotter and redder and more primitive. His blood began to simmer and his muscles burned and grew liquid beneath his skin. He had spent his life mastering the beast that dwelt inside of him, but now he wanted no such mastery. He embraced the animal that bayed for blood inside his Shifting skull; he offered himself up to its hungry, wordless passions.

  Quickly he stripped off his clothes. He bundled them neatly, took a bit of cord, and slung the bundle around his neck. His clothes were light silk they made an unobtrusive burden.

  He lusted for the taste of blood in his mouth, for the feel of bones crunching between his jaws. He yearned to maim, to rend, to destroy whoever sought to kidnap his daughter. He slipped into four-legged Karnee form, and the world became hard-edged and clear, scents sharper and suddenly full of meaning, sounds broader and richer and louder. He panted, tasting the air, and turned his muzzle to the door.

  He had to hurry. The kidnapper would certainly already be on his way to get Ulwe, and she would not know her danger. She was only a child, ignorant of the dangers of the city and those who dwelt in it. She would go trustingly with the first man who uttered the right phrase and Hasmal had learned the phrase from Crispin's own mind. He had no hope that Hasmal's agent would get it wrong. His only hope was to be fast enough to get to Ulwe first.

  Or that the scent trail remain unsullied long enough that he could track the kidnapper back to his lair.

  Crispin loped through the long white corridors of the Citadel of the Gods, avoiding the hurrying Dragons, ignoring their obvious agitation and dismay. He would deal with them later.

  First, he had a kidnapper to kill and a child to save.

  Chapter 9

  Silk Street after twilight seethed with life.

  The silk shops for which the street had been named were closed, and om-bindili bands were set up in front of them on the high sidewalks above the cobbled road. The inhabitants of the apartments above the shops moved out to their balconies to enjoy the cool evening air. They drank and danced to the music or sang with the bands' singers, or made their way down to the street itself, where they bet on rolls of the dice or strolled hand in hand in the nightly promenade, wearing their finest to see and be seen.

  The songs of Wilhene and Glaswherry Hala and distant Varhees, sung in the original tongues of those places and those people, blended into a rich and oddly comforting stew. The outlanders' ghetto would make a surprisingly good place to hide a little girl, Ry realized. These people accepted each other and looked out for each other because they knew that they were all they had. Not citizens of Calimekka, they wouldn't have access to the many protections such citizenship offered. They had become neighbors and friends out of self-defense.

  The promenaders were watching him. He was a stranger to Silk Street's nightlife; they were remembering his face, his clothing, the way he walked. He couldn't help being memorable. He couldn't make himself someone they knew. Inwardly he cringed, but outwardly he nodded politely, and made his way as quickly as he could through the gamblers and t
he chatters and the strollers.

  His main landmark, the Black Well, sat in the midst of a square of greenery. Carefully shaped shrubs and sweet-scented flowers grew in boxes at the four corners of the square; the boxes themselves bore mosaics reminiscent of the bold, stylized street paintings that decorated the thoroughfares of the city-state of Wilhene. Benches surrounded the well itself, and on those benches old women sat talking to each other and watching the spectacle of the promenade, and old men told their old jokes and slapped their knees with laughter at tall tales they'd heard a hundred times already. As he walked past the square, their voices dropped to whispers, though, and he felt their eyes, too, fixed on his back.