by Tom Deitz
Nothing.
Nothing.
Either the gem was not strong enough; he simply did not want to return badly enough; or he was too fearful that he might return and strand his truest friends here. In any case, nothing occurred.
“Give me another,” he demanded, opening his hand but not his eyes, and sensing as much as anything Rann removing one bloody gem and replacing it with the next larger.
As soon as Avall closed his fist around this one, he knew it was different. Oh, it still contained the same “things” and the effects were the same, but the proportions were clearly altered. And it contained less of Kylin’s presence than the previous one had, but more of a new presence he thought might be Rrath.
And so it was with the next larger stone, and the next.
Which only left the largest.
Barrax was waiting in that one—without any protective insulation. Or much warning.
What little remained of Barrax, anyway. And while death still lurked there with Ixti’s former king, that death was not so all-encompassing. Or maybe it was simply that Avall had now learned what to expect. Or that he, himself, was stronger.
Which was not to say that the invisible combat that ensued was either pleasant or devoid of risk. Far from it. It was only that Avall was able to free himself this time—or flee himself. And, for the first time ever, able to break that contact without also breaking contact with the gem.
He was shivering when he opened his eyes, and more when he opened his fist, inverted his hand, and let the fragment fall to the sylk.
“I couldn’t,” he breathed through his shudder. “I didn’t. I can’t—not yet.”
“Barrax?” Rann murmured, his face tense with concern.
Avall nodded, shuddered again, then paused, as he recalled something he hadn’t noted before. “But maybe not as much of him. And below him—or beyond him, or however you want to say it, is—I think—still a fair bit of that old familiar power.”
“And the next step?” Bingg asked bravely.
“To try combining the fragments,” Avall replied. “But not now. And maybe not tomorrow. Not if I’m going to be able to do anything else useful.”
“And the rest of today?” From Rann.
Avall looked troubled. “I’m—for some reason, that left me more drained than it ought. In fact, much as I hate to suggest it, I think I’d better stay here with Kylin while the rest of you explore mid-level. My advice in that would be to head north along the trails we know and try to maintain a roughly equal distance between the shore and the peak. Proceed until the afternoon’s half-over, bring back anything you find that might be eatable, and try to get back here by dark. I’ll make small forays and try to get through to Kylin.”
“Not with the gems you won’t!” Rann snapped.
“Not unless I have to,” Avall agreed with a yawn. “But he’s still my subject, damaged in my service, and I am—still, by Law—his King.”
“Law,” Rann echoed softly. “I wonder if there is any real Law left in Eron at all.”
CHAPTER VII:
FREEDOM—AT A PRICE
(SOUTHWEST OF ERON–HIGH SUMMER: DAY LXXV–LATE AFTERNOON)
… the soft, desperate snuffle of thirsty horses, now alarmed …
… the clatter of nervous hooves on dusty stones scoured with steel horseshoes made in an alien land …
… the thud of anxious flanks against unyielding oak …
… the glint of waning sunlight filtered through broken glass to mirror itself in dulling equine eyes …
… the scent of hot tile, hot stone, hot wood, and hot, sweating bodies that could ill afford to render up more moisture …
… and another scent entirely …
… well-fed, reptilian—and free …
… another snuffle …
… another stomp …
And then, like a whip crack in thunder-heavy air, a scream.
And then another …
Merryn woke to the sound of horses screaming.
Almost, she ignored it. The Eight knew this wasn’t the first time the beasts imprisoned in the adjacent suite of stalls had indulged themselves in a round of noise. Panic did that—or fear. Or raw animal need—like thirst.
She didn’t blame them, either: penned up like that in expectation of care and feeding that was unlikely to occur unless Merryn herself provided it—and her plight was the same as the horses’, the same as Krynneth’s, with whom she shared what had been built as a tack storage room adjoining a stable, but which had proved as sturdy, and impervious to escape, as any prison cell.
The only difference was that she had known early on that their sole chance of survival depended on husbanding their resources. The horses didn’t. They had drunk all the water their Ixtian masters had given them; there was no more; and now—amidst stifling desert heat—they were dying.
At least they didn’t know that.
At least they continued to live in now.
Unlike herself and Krynneth, who had no choice but to lie on the floor (because it was cooler) and try not to think about starvation, desperation, and their own mortality.
Merryn therefore ignored the horses—and might have returned to slumber, had Krynneth not chosen that moment to flop over in his sleep and utter a loud and forceful “no!”
It was nightmares again, she assumed—probably about the Ixtian army, which Krynneth chose to call “the burners.” The Eight knew she’d had plenty of bad dreams about them herself during the ten days of captivity by a renegade band of that number that had culminated in their present incarceration. She stared at Krynneth idly. Dirty, smelly, unkempt, and stubbly, he didn’t look like much—like a rangy, dirty scarecrow, if truth were known—but Merryn knew that properly cleaned and dressed, and with his pale blue eyes free of fear, he was one of the handsomest men in Eron.
And one of the tastiest, if they didn’t get out of here soon, and he died before she did.
But she didn’t want to think about that now, and so she remained as she was: resigned to lying on the flagstone floor, staring at the seam where whitewashed limestone walls a quarter span thick butted against a vaulted roof of that same stone, above which tiles lay athwart oak boards that would have dulled any knife by now, presuming that she’d had one.
As the door—oak, well made, and leading to an exercise run before the stalls—would likewise have resisted such assault.
There was light because there were two windows no wider than her outstretched fingers and thrice that high—too narrow to crawl through unless one went a bone at a time—which seemed increasingly likely.
There was heat because it was summer and the cooling effect of yesterday’s freak late-evening shower had long since dissipated, along with most of the surface water.
There was clothing because they’d been imprisoned in the clothes they had worn when that same cadre of Ixtians who terrified Krynneth had captured them—minus armor, weapons, and jewelry, unless one counted manacles at wrists and ankles among the latter.
And there was water, because the stable’s pump was in their room and—blessedly—still functioned, if only at a trickle, recent rain notwithstanding.
There might be food, if they could catch a rat, or stall-snake. Or if straw could be chewed long enough to coax forth some nutrition.
But mostly there was despair—and weariness—and sleep.
… dust drifted within golden shafts between window wall and floor …
… and the horses abruptly screamed louder.
Merryn blinked to full alertness, cursing herself for letting complacency rule her. For hiding within the sounds of panicked horses were others, from the courtyard beyond the stable: sounds which had not been present before: mostly a kind of sporadic grinding crunch, coupled with heavy, thudding footsteps and an occasional raspy hiss. She blinked again, waiting for the dizziness that had ambushed her upon waking to disperse.
Fine, then: She knew.
Geens: man-sized lizard-things that
generally hunted in packs of four, and which she was more convinced than ever might be intelligent.
But now that she had identified their low-pitched vocalics, she was both cheered and alarmed. Cheered because anything alive moving around beyond their prison was likely to change something, which might result in them not being stuck there for good; and alarmed because geens, though they were perfectly willing to scavenge, as these were clearly doing, preferred live prey when they could get it.
All of which took Merryn maybe five breaths to assess before she was on her feet and staggering, somewhat unsteadily because of the manacles, toward the wall in which the windows were set. The nearest showed nothing, but the other was quite a different matter.
Framed by limestone walls as thick as her forearm, she gazed out upon a sand-paved courtyard maybe twenty spans square, with the bulk of a collapsing hold-house barely visible to the right. It was late in the day, and the westering sun was painting the far wall an attractive shade between purple and red, and the snowcapped mountains beyond a nicer shade of pink. It was edging the leaves of the fruit trees along that wall with red, too, but more to the point, it was casting its light upon four healthy-looking, full-grown geens, three of which were tearing vigorously at the corpses of the five dead Ixtians—who, as recently as yester eve, had been full of dreams of conquest and extravagant passions. The last time she had seen those men alive, they had been relaxing around what had once been a campfire, recently bathed after days on the nonexistent road, and getting happily drunk while they plotted how they would take the magical royal regalia Merryn was supposed to be in the process of concealing and use it to depose Ixti’s new king, Kraxxi, after which it would serve to spearhead a march north into Eron on the second war of conquest in half a year, only this time they would be victorious.
They hadn’t. In the manner of disaffected soldiers, they had quarreled, and then one of them had killed all the others—the ones who were being eaten now. Whereupon the sole survivor—a man named Orkeen, who had been fool enough to don the entire achievement of regalia in a moment of drunken, vain, madness—had blithely doffed that regalia and, still under its influence for whatever reason, strolled casually into the campfire. His blackened corpse lay athwart the ashes now, where even the geens seemed disinclined to touch it.
They were proving to be picky eaters, too. Most carnivores went first for the organ meat; these seemed to favor the big muscles of hip, leg, and lower back. Even as she watched, one planted a three-toed foot on the torso of the man named Inon (who had been nominal leader of the crew), bit into his thigh, gave a savage wrench, and gained not only the chosen morsel, but the entire leg, which it transferred to its short forelimbs. Looking oddly human, it proceeded to gnaw the meat to the bone. It had been a bare leg, Merryn noted. They were having little truck with meat that had been clothed.
“Merry?”
Krynneth’s voice startled her so much that she yipped in alarm and jerked back from the window, rattling her chains in the process.
Nor was she the only one who heard that noise. Geens could hear better than most reptiles, and before she could steady herself, the nearest one squatted down on its haunches, then leapt with blinding speed toward the window behind which she had been crouching. Its lizardlike head filled the narrow slot, yellow eyes distorted by the wavy glass set behind the heavy bars. Claws drew streaks on the pane. And then, with another oddly human gesture, it drew back a claw and flicked the pane—hard. Cracks starred out from that impact, and Merryn was more than glad that the opening was too narrow for any part of a geen to insert itself far enough to do damage.
Not that it didn’t try. Another flick sent glass rattling against the stone sill, and brought a hint of breeze, atop which rode the musky scent of reptile. It also brought the scent of sun-ripened carrion. Merryn was grateful that the glass had been intact ere now.
The commotion further roused Krynneth, who blinked once, saw what was transpiring, and retreated to the opposite wall, where he recited his entire vocabulary, which consisted of yes, no, shit, piss, damn, key, and Merry.
“Stay calm, Kryn,” Merryn hissed. “They can’t get in this way. And there’s a wall and a door between them and our door.”
“Damn,” Krynneth repeated, which seemed to be more than sufficient.
Somehow Merryn managed to hold her ground, though it took all the willpower she possessed to make no sudden moves that might rouse the geen to greater exertions.
Abruptly, it was gone, bounding away out of sight to Merryn’s right. Scarcely daring to breathe, she returned to the window and gazed out, fearing every instant to find herself facing the claws of a very cunning beast that had lain in wait outside.
In that, however, she was fortunate. More to the point, she got close enough to renew her investigation, and that revealed two things. One was that the beast had moved on, to judge by the way the others had ceased their munchings and were gazing toward something out of sight to their left. The other was that the already fractious horses, which had been housed in the other end of the stable, had now gained confirmation of the fact that four of their primary predators were not only skipping about three spans and a wall away from their stalls, but were also now cognizant of their existence—with the result that the poor, trapped beasts had redoubled their already cacophonous—and probably suicidal—ruckus.
Which only served to fix the geens’ attention squarely upon them.
Horses whinnied and screamed. Even six spans away, Merryn heard thumps of bodies against stone and hooves kicking sun-hardened wood.
The geens were a fury of movement as they hopped, leapt, and scurried toward the source of that noise, which clearly proclaimed fresh meat. A terrible scrabbling sound ensued, coupled, incredibly, with the heavy smack of one leaping atop the roof. Tiles shattered; wood groaned and splintered. Dust shifted down from the ceiling.
But the geens, for the nonce, were thwarted. Certainly three of them came stomping back into view.
And then Merryn saw something that froze her heart indeed. The geens were stalking around the courtyard, peering intently about, as though in quest of something particular. One picked up a limb that had fallen from one of the fruit trees, shook it experimentally, then smacked it against the wall, as though to test its strength. It shattered—but the more supple limb that same geen wrested from the tree did not.
Another followed its example, while the third one—the one that by the pattern of spots mottling its hide was the one which had tried to get at her and Krynneth—prowled through the human detritus around the fire, reached down, fumbled for something on the ground—and to Merryn’s abject horror, rose again with the Lightning Sword clutched in a scaly, black-clawed fist!
“Damn,” Merryn muttered, only then aware that Krynneth had crept over to stand beside her. “Damn, oh damn, oh damn,” as she clutched his arm for comfort that would have shamed her any other time. Krynneth was sweating profusely, but saying nothing.
As for the geen …
Something was clearly occurring within its narrow, scaly skull, because it was standing absolutely frozen, with a startled expression—if something with so little flexible flesh on its bones could be said to have an expression—on its face.
Thought roared out at her so strongly that she flinched.
Geen thought.
It was thought, too.
Not the raw ravening instinct she would have expected from a beast.
Except, perhaps, from a birkit—if what Avall, Div, and Rann had told her about their sentience was true.
As to what the geen thought: That was hard to determine, if for no other reason than because it proclaimed itself so loudly. Mostly she sensed surprise, overlying an endless pit of hunger like froth upon a sea. But there were images along with it, the bulk having to do with eating horses—which made Merryn cringe in revulsion.
Yet along with those baser impressions came a keen curiosity about the world at large, and especially about these other two-legged predat
ors that were so strong and weak by turns.
“You want free.”
The thought was a jolt in Merryn’s mind. Had the geen “thought” that at her? More to the point, if it had learned that from her, what else had it learned? Maybe how to get in to where she and Krynneth were trapped? How to secure a free meal of humans at its leisure?
“The long claw will not let me,” came the unexpected answer.
And that was all. The contact shattered as though it had been smashed with a hammer. Merryn uttered a cry, and reality came whirling back, only to vanish once more as what sounded like lightning slammed into the stable to the right. Light flared through every chink in the doorjamb; the walls shook and trembled, and another healthy cascade of dust poured down from the ceiling. One arch cracked but held. The rattle of sliding tiles filled the yard.
There followed the worst sounds Merryn had ever heard: the screams, wails, and cries of seven horses having their throats torn out and their bellies opened.
Or maybe not, for there was another sound as well: one full of anger and fear combined, as at least one doughty equine proved unwilling to surrender its life without cost. Hooves sounded loud on stone floors as the beast lurched from side to side. And hard on those noises came the dull thud of something large being kicked, followed at once by the clear crack of bone breaking and the long shivering screech of a geen in pain. Wood ripped and splintered.
But then—miraculously—hooves clattered in the yard. Forgetting the geens, Merryn dashed to the window—to see that one bleeding horse had indeed broken free—her own faithful Boot, in fact—and was careening around the courtyard. Once, twice, the mare made that circuit, but on the third, Boot found sense and charged through the gate that the geens had conveniently left open.
As for her fellows, they were surely all dead now, or at least they had all stopped screaming. But that wasn’t the worst sound anyway. Indeed, for a fair long while, Merryn had to put her hands over her ears as she waited for the slurps, grunts, and tearings of the geens’ grisly feast to cease.
