Cast In Fury (29 page)

They were carrying a stretcher.

From this distance, the smell was almost overwhelming. Severn moved toward Kaylin, and caught her arm. “They don’t have mages,” he told her, his voice quieter than a whisper, but clearer somehow. “They have no easy way of preserving the corpse.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t burn it.” Or eat it.

“I believe they were waiting for the trial,” he replied.

The scent of rotting flesh in the humidity of Elantran night made Kaylin really regret the meal she’d rushed through on the way.

But she’d seen worse. She tried to remember that. The Elders laid the stretcher with care at Sanabalis’s feet and withdrew. Sanabalis bent, crouching just above the corpse’s chest. His hand hovered over it.

Kaylin waited, watching him for signs of familiar magic. He lifted his head. “First Son,” he said quietly, “step back, and tell the Elders to join you.”

There was murmuring now, but it was low, too low to catch. The First Son hesitated for just a moment, and then he obeyed what was barely a request.

Sanabalis rose, and gestured. It was not, to Kaylin’s eye, a familiar magic at all—but it was clearly magic. The ground absorbed the glow that emanated from Sanabalis’s hands, swallowing it as if it were liquid. He began to speak, and when he did, he dispensed with the pretense of frail mortality: his voice was a Dragon’s voice.

Kaylin glanced involuntarily over her shoulder. Sanabalis was loud enough to wake every sleeping Leontine in the Quarter. He was loud enough, she thought, to wake the dead.

And, to her horror, he did.

“Do not move,” Sanabalis said, in harsh Leontine. He didn’t turn to look at the Elders; his attention, as Kaylin’s, was on the corpse.

She heard Severn’s weapon leaving its sheath; heard the clear, soft sound of the chain at his waist being unwound. He backed toward Kaylin. She couldn’t see what he was doing, and didn’t look; he wasn’t the danger here. Her daggers were in her hands, and her knees were slightly bent.

The corpse rose as if it were liquid falling upward. The jerky, stiff movements that were the delight of zombie stories everywhere were nowhere in evidence. The bloodless gashes across the dead Leontine’s chest and throat—the wounds that had probably killed him—were gaping, wide, the only graceless thing about him. She knew his fur wasn’t black, but in the night, with only the primitive torchlight at his back, he looked all of one color.

“So,” Sanabalis said, in the thin voice that she thought of as “normal.”

The dead Leontine leaped. He had been looking around, his body tensing—but the leap itself was in the wrong direction. He sailed
over
Sanabalis, and landed in front of the Leontines.

They were standing, tense, behind Adar, and Adar…folded his massive arms. From this distance it was hard to tell, but Kaylin thought his pale fur was standing on end. He did not move. He did not leap to the side; he stood and bore witness.

She wasn’t sure that she could have done the same.

Sanabalis cursed and turned, but the dead Leontine was hampered by the magical barrier that Sanabalis had erected between the corpse and the Leontines. She knew this because he jumped toward Adar and
bounced.

For a moment, the corpse staggered, awkward as it fell away, as if the force that animated it had been dislodged. But it was only a brief floundering. He turned to Sanabalis, and Severn swept in, his hands on chain pulled taut by the spinning movement. The Leontine corpse gestured, and lost his hand.

It didn’t slow him down at all.

“You!”
it said, its voice a hiss.
“Do you think you can stop us forever?”

But if Sanabalis was not a Dragon in form, he
was
a Dragon. He opened his mouth and roared, and with the roar came a plume of flame that was wider and taller than he was.

Fire enfolded the corpse and the corpse burned. It wasn’t the slow burning one would see on a pyre. It was sudden, hot. The flames, orange at the edges, had a white heart, a blue core.

The creature screamed in fury and, burning, it grabbed hold of Sanabalis, its jaws opened unnaturally wide to lodge themselves in the Dragon’s chest. The handless arm flailed; the other did not.

The head rolled free as Severn leaped up behind the body, and shadow gouted, like blood, in the air.

Where it touched ground, where it touched the ground that Sanabalis now occupied, it sizzled, black flame, and only black.

Bodiless, the jaws still worried at Dragon flesh. This was the thing Kaylin most hated about the undead—nothing stopped them. They didn’t need to be attached to their limbs.

Beneath her boots, she ground the hand Severn had cut off, and felt it struggle to get a grip on her heel. Cursing—in Leontine—she reached out and yanked a pole from its moorings and shoved the torch end into the hand, watching as flesh smoldered. She wasn’t a dragon and she wasn’t a mage—but the hand itself didn’t seem to care much for burning. She held it in place, and black smoke—the greasy smoke of flesh charring—rose heavily in the still, humid air.

Sanabalis had pried the jaws from his chest. They were red with his blood, but the loss didn’t seem to faze the Dragon. He grunted as he tore the bodiless head in half and tossed it aside. Then he reached down and pulled the claws from his chest; they were longer; there was more blood.

He shoved the body away and pointed one hand. Blue light flew from his finger, enveloping what remained of the headless, handless corpse.

Sanabalis’s robes were a mess.

“Corporal,” he said heavily. “Private.” He turned to Adar, whose arms were still folded across his chest. “So,” he said quietly.

Adar nodded.

Kaylin turned to Sanabalis. “What the
hell
was that?”

“What you suspected, Private Neya.”

“No. What
I
suspected was that the mage—the Leontine mage—had somehow possessed him. I’ve seen a possession in Records,” she said, “and it bloody well wasn’t like this.” She added a few colorful Leontine phrases as the fingers that weren’t charred struggled with the torch.

“Very well, allow me to be more specific. What you saw is what I expected to see.”

“Sanabalis—”

He gestured her forward. She gave the corpse’s hand another savage stomp and joined him. “Do not touch me,” he said, quietly. “I am not in danger of expiring.”

Since she hadn’t intended to heal him—for one, she was wearing the damn bracer—she frowned. She would have added words to the frown, but he lifted a hand. It was red and glistening.

“Do you understand what you’ve seen?” he asked.

“No.”

“Corporal?”

Severn said nothing.

“Very well. The story you first heard me tell,” he said, looking at Kaylin, “was only one such story. There is another, and it was told to this Leontine.”

“It killed him?”

“No. Your Sergeant did that—and were the death not intended, I think, to entrap him, he would have had much less success. We do not understand why some of the Leontines are more susceptible to…changes…than others. But they are all susceptible to it in some fashion. It is why the only race that was born in this fashion
is
the Leontines. The Old Ones did not choose to take that risk again.

“They were, creator and corrupter,
all
Old Ones. All Ancients. And what they did, for good or ill, no Dragon and no Barrani could hope to achieve.”

“But
you
told them—”

“I told them what they
are,
” he replied. “There are very, very few alive who could tell them that story.”

“But—”

“This, too,” he said, gesturing at the burning pieces that remained of the corpse, “is part of what they are. It is part of what all mortals are. This one could not contain
enough
of the chaos to tell the story to another. No more could the Elders who stand beyond you.”

“Adar?”

“No.” He paused. “But the Leontine you met—the one you called mage?”

“He could.”

“So it appears. There is a reason why those marked are destroyed at birth,” he said. “If, in the end, one is born who can contain enough of the shadows that lie beneath Elantra, the whole of the Leontine race cannot help but hear his voice, and know it. That Leontine, the one you mistook for a mage, had to hear the story—and it is
not
in any sense of the word what you mean when you say story—to come into the power he has shown.

“There is nowhere else in the Empire—to our knowledge or Barrani knowledge—where such a story could be told.”

The child…

She swallowed. “The…corpse…recognized you,” she said.

“Did he?”

“He said—”

“Enough. I have said before, and I hope not to have to repeat myself often, that there is a reason the Emperor chose to build his city in this place. You have seen the shadow’s power and you recognize what you see. Believe that they are not less intelligent.” He gestured with his hands and what remained of the corpse burned, blue and white, for just an instant.

There wasn’t enough left to bury when the flames disappeared into that deadness of vision bright light causes.

He gestured again and nodded toward Adar. “First Son, I believe you have your answer.”

Adar bowed. “Eldest,” he said, his tone gravelly and grave at the same time. “We have much to deliberate this eve. Will you join us?”

“No. I have other business in the Quarter which will not wait. I will take my companions, with your permission, and we will adjourn. It is wearying, to speak the oldest of tongues. I was not born to it.

“But gather your people, First Son. Gather those you feel are at risk. I will speak with them all tomorrow.”

“Eldest.”

“Wait, what about Marcus?”

The First Son was slow to acknowledge Kaylin. “As I said, we have much to deliberate this eve.” It was a dismissal.

Kaylin ground her teeth in frustration.

Sanabalis took a few moments to straighten out what remained of his robes. It didn’t help, much. The robes themselves were scarred by claws and fangs, and the center portion hung in a loose drape of tatters that wouldn’t have looked at home on a beggar. The Dragon Lord frowned. “Wait here,” he told the Hawks. “I was prepared for difficulty.” He left them and headed back up the stairs of graduated concentric ovals, in the direction of the carriage. Kaylin watched his back.

She was silent. Still. Severn touched her shoulder and the warmth of his hand was almost a shock. But she didn’t look at him. She was calculating distance and time.

“He told you to wait,” Severn said, correctly divining the direction her thoughts were heading in.

“Sarabe and Marai—” She stopped for a moment. “Marai,” she whispered.

“She is not dead.”

“Severn—he must have spoken to her. The same way he spoke to the Leontine who for all intents and purposes was dead when he tried to kill Marcus.
We have to
—”

“If she had been…possessed like that, you would have known.”

“How?”

One dark brow disappeared behind his bangs.

She shrugged, restless.

“He wanted her to bear a child,” Severn said, when it became clear that she would not speak. “How much could she change and still accomplish that goal?”

She nodded stiffly. “We don’t know where he went.”

“No.”

“Maybe Sanabalis intends to find him.” She held on to that thought as the Dragon Lord returned—in simpler and lighter robes. They were not as fine, and they were not as obviously official—but he didn’t really need much in a culture where loincloths were often considered more than enough.

“Kaylin,” he said, “I believe it is now time to visit the Pridlea of your Sergeant.”

Hope withered.

They left the carriage. Sanabalis wanted to walk. He probably had good reasons for doing so; Kaylin didn’t ask. She was a little too alert, a little too ready to fight or flee. He appeared to be watching the streets.

“We don’t know where the—the mage went,” she said.

“No.”

It was like fishing with a club. She gave up. The night streets—and it was night, now—were as quiet and preternaturally silent as any jungle. The moonlight was bright and silver, reducing everything to shades of gray.

“They might be sleeping,” she said, aware that she was trying too damn hard but unable to stop herself.

Sanabalis didn’t dignify the words with a response. He walked as if he knew where he was going. She followed in his wake, because she
did
know, and even the hope that she could somehow get lost—and that had the advantage of being something she usually did a few times—left her.

She was miserable. Marcus would be found innocent—he’d better bloody well be or she’d raise hell—but he wouldn’t be
home
when a Dragon came to visit his wives.

She stopped walking.

Sanabalis, a few steps ahead, stopped as well and turned. He looked older and wearier than she had ever seen him. “Private?”

“What do you intend to do?” she asked.

He could have pretended ignorance—not that it would have worked—but ignorance, apparently, was beneath the dignity of a Dragon Lord. “I intend to visit,” he replied. “Just that.”

“And Sarabe?” She couldn’t bring herself to mention Marai, not yet.

“You refer to Marcus’s youngest wife.”

“Yes.”

“Her fate is not in my hands,” he replied. “Unless she chooses to attack me, which I think unlikely, I intend her no harm.”

“You promise?”

A pale brow rose, was obvious even in the silvered light. “Kaylin, you are
not
a child.”

She didn’t even bridle.

“I spoke with the First Son while you spoke with the Sergeant,” he said at last. “And I am aware that the ruins of the home we visited belonged to the…mage. I am
also
aware that Sarabe’s sister lived there. There was no body,” he added, “and you have failed to tell me what I need to know.” His gaze was sharp. “I was only peripherally aware of Sarabe, but the fact that Marai lived with the mage has taken on new significance to the Elders. You will, of course, understand why.”