Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (79 page)

The sheikh got to his feet, with never a glance towards Jemel. He walked the few paces to the pillar's centre, where a few stones rose above the general level as though in a cairn. Topmost of those was the one that Jemel himself had laid there, one that he had brought back from the other world and carried up here in defiance of the Dancer Morakh and everyone else, in defiance of the world it had felt at the time; and it was that stone that the sheikh reached to lift.

He staggered, under more than the stones weight; his face was suddenly flushed and glistening with sweat, and his breath came in brutal gasps. He lurched towards the pillar's edge — and stopped, finding Jemel suddenly between him and the drop.

'Take another,' Jemel said softly. 'You can cast down
any stone else, you can dismantl
e the Pillar entirely and consign every man that helped to build it into hell, for all I care - but not that stone. That's mine, my oath, and it stays here until my word is broken. Put it back.'

The sheikh seemed not to understand the words, not actually to hear them; his expression didn't change, until he set down the stone quite carefully at his feet. Then the twisted pain left his features, and they fell into a neutral, assessing stare.

For a moment his eyes seemed entirely black, and Jemel couldn't suppress a shiver.

Then the sheikh drew a scimitar, and Jemel laughed.

'Those don't work,' he taunted, 'didn't you know? They cut, but it doesn't keep. Besides, you and I, we have a promise to meet. I have your knife, you have mine

The sheikh responded not at all to that, only moving forward with the wary confidence of a skilled swordsman. Better than skilled today, Jemel thought: inhumanly strong, inexhaustible, as the Dancers were.

As he was himself, today.

But he had no sword to meet and match the sheikh's blade, only a heavy knife that he found ill-balanced and unnatural in his hand. This couldn't be a fight. He tossed the knife in his hand, and then from one hand to the other, testing the weight of it and its balance in flight; then he took the blade between his fingers and cocked his arm, cocked all his body in readiness to throw.

An alert man, a watchful man can dodge a thrown knife, if he sees it thrown. Less easy from this close distance, perhaps, but the sheikh was alert, watchful, would be abnormally fast. Jemel feinted once, twice; the sheikh swayed side to side, never fully committed, eyes never leaving the hand that held the knife.

Then Jemel made his move. One more feint and he threw not the knife but himself: he rolled forward over the cobbles while the sheikhs arms were both stretched out to the sides, while his scimitar was so far out of line. Rolled inside the reach of that scimitar and came neatly to his feet like a tumbler at a fair, with the knife gripped by its haft now and the blade a bare hand s-span from its owner's chest.

A bare hands-span, and then not so much; then nothing at all, less than nothing, buried its own length deep between his ribs.

Jemel thought he would not recover from that. He twisted the blade in the wound in any case, for satisfaction's sake; and saw more than the life-light die in the sheikh's eyes. He saw a wisp of black smoke eddy from his lips and seem to quest a moment before it dissipated into the heat of the desert day.

Jemel threw the body over the edge after he had stripped it of anything valuable, silver rings and ornaments, a buckle of gold. Then he restored his rock to its place on the cairn's height and stood staring at it for a while, wondering what was its importance here; remembering how Esren would not come near any rock fetched to this world from the other, for fear of being trapped again as it had been in the Dead Waters.

When he was tired of puzzling over that he gazed west and southerly, feeling
the
jereth's
edge begin to fade now, so that his sight was
little
better than it ever was. That was very good, though, and this was a high spot, and the desert air was clear, he would see someone coming from a distance, from a great distance off. Whether it was a figure running or a figure flying by a djinni s courtesy, he would see it against the sand or against the sky, so long as he was looking. So he would look, and so he did, and gave not a thought to leaving this place, to seeking water or shelter as any man of sense would have done. He looked for someone to come, and when he was tired of straining his eyes to see a dot that was not there, he turned back to his stone again and looked at that, and the puzzle of it.

Jemel had dropped the flask after he had drained it. Julianne picked it up after he had left.

A last sticky dribble had accumulated in the bottom. Julianne was curious but reluctant; Elisande insisted; the flask was at last uptilted, and the residue dripped out onto Julianne's waiting tongue. One precious, cherished moment to linger over the taste of it
in
her mouth, and she swallowed.

Elisande was there, at her side and somehow inside her also, both at once. She felt her like a sprite, a spirit of mischief: wicked but not malign, alien but welcome, tender and sharp and surprising.

Then Elisande touched
the
jereth
to life inside her, such a tiny drop of it there was, and it was like touching fire to the finest tissue, a flame that overswept everything at a gasp, except that it left no harm where it had passed. Rather it lingered, consuming only what was drab or weak or tired within her. She felt unexpectedly well, and better than well; she felt bright and clear, both as sparkling and as strong as the water in the river: fresh from a mountain spring, deep and full of character, understanding the darkness and breaking into light.

She felt Elisande slip outside her skin again, and could almost have gone with her, simply for the fascination of the thing. She thought she could see how it was done now, she thought she could do it herself at need. Another time, though: for now she had her own whole body to explore. She felt as though she'd barely been here before, as though she'd lived all her life in purdah and was suddenly free of the harem and all a busy city lay before her.

She became aware that Elisande was looking at her a
little
doubtfully, a
little
quizzically; she laughed, and found it unexpectedly hard to stop laughing.

‘I’
m sorry,' she said, chuckling still. 'This is
...
a revelation.'

Elisande shook her head. 'And all this time we've just been using it as a drink. Think how much we've wasted
...
But no one ever told us. Can we use that as excuse?'

'Sweetheart, I don't believe that anyone knew. Even the Sharai
who brewed it. Jemel was - startl
ed, wouldn't you say?'

'Mmm. Jemel had a flaskful. If it's done this to you, what in the world has it done to him?'

'And where's he gone, and what's he doing with it? I thought that djinni of yours had taught you not to ask questions. There's no point in them - or no point in putting them to me. I can't give you answers.'

'Are you sure? Have a look, see if you can't spot him. He went north, and he's chasing after Marron.'

The suggestion was absurd. However much the valley was laid open around them like a bowl, however much the war was displayed in smudgy smoke and distant figures' manoeuvrings, it would be impossible to tell individuals at this distance, which figure was who. Hard enough, almost impossible to say that those to the north there were Ransomers, hard beset by 'ifrit
...

Except that it wasn't impossible at all, now that she looked more carefully. Those were clearly Ransomers, the dress was unmistakable, and the way they fought. She could see that as clearly as she could see Sieur Anton, filthy with blood and work, standing high on a mound of dead horses and exhorting his troops to another greater effort, she could almost hear his voice
...

It wasn't possible, and yet she was certain. She could see what forms the 'ifrit had taken, where they had been evil shadow-shapes before, blurred and unreadable; she could see how the men had built themselves a crude defence
-
work of slaughtered horseflesh, which Sieur Anton bestrode with the artful balance of a natural sailor; she could see every separate man fighting for his life or his brothers' lives as they sought to keep the 'ifrit penned in. She wondered why the spirit-creatures didn't break out further down the wall, where there were no men to oppose them; and even as she wondered, she saw the wall bulge and fall at half a dozen sites at once, and a horde come forth.

Julianne gasped at the size of that army, so many, enough to swamp all the defenders she could see. Those Ransomers must be lost, surely - unless the hard work of last night could pay off even at this late hour, this desperate time. There was a movement, a line of darker blue amid the blue smoke-haze horizon to the east; it broke through and rolled in across the plain, like a ripple of shadow sliding across the still surface of a pond. Behind it came another such ripple, and then another.

Julianne stretched her new acuity of sight to another degree of impossibility, to confirm more than what she'd already guessed. Beside her, Elisande didn't need such clarity of vision to be equally certain.

'It's the tribes, Julianne. The tribes are riding.' And then, a moment later, 'Can you see him?'

It was Jemel she was supposed to be looking for, and she didn't misunderstand her friend for an instant; the question was
can you see Marron?

And when she answered, 'Yes,' she knew that she would be equally understood. She didn't need to add
of course, Hasan is leading, where else would he be?

'That's good,' but it wasn't, plainly it wasn't. Elisande wanted to be Jemel, invigorated and away to search for the boy they both loved. She'd had to give the best gift she had to her utmost rival; she'd had to give the last least trace of it to her friend, who would of course misuse it in searching for the wrong man entirely. The wrong men: Julianne turned and gazed southerly, searched all the southern slopes of the valley from riverspout to marshbeds, as far as she could see in every direction, far up into the trees beyond the palace, and still could not find her Imber. Jemel had suggested that he might be far to the west, beyond where the valley bent; she tried to bore her sight through the elbow of ancient rock, but even these new eyes would not oblige her there.

Even so, 'This is like standing on your grandfathers terrace,' she murmured. 'I can see whatever I want to see. How did you know?'

'Because everyone gets what they want, except me.' Then Elisande laughed at herself, and the laugh was as bitter as her words had been; and she said, 'No, but I could feel it flower inside you like it did in Jemel, only it wasn't so powerful. I'm not sure it would have been even if you'd drunk a flaskful like he did; I think perhaps it reacts to the strengths of the user, or else to what they desire. So Jemel can pretend to be Marron for as long as ever it lasts, and you — you can stand back and watch, and understand it all.'

'Is that what you think I do?'

'I know it's what you're best at. It's what your father trained you for.'

It was true. She should have been a woman high at court, scheming and manipulating behind a curtain of modesty and obedience, dancing men to her father's tune. Because it was true didn't give it any sweeter a taste. 'So what would the
jereth
have given to you, Elisande?'

'What, if I didn't have to give it all to others? I don't know, my love. Not the thing I wanted, that's for sure. Not any of the things I want, my country safe and my father living and
...'

A wave of her hand implied a whole list. She didn't name Marron; again, she didn't need to.

'It might have given you what you most want on this island.'

'What,' ruefully, 'Marron back, and free of the Daughter? I don't think so, Julianne.'

'No, I meant an understanding why we're here, why the djinni left us here.'

'Something to do, you mean - it's you who always wants to understand it. And haven't we answered that anyway, wasn't I here to heal Jemel and wake the
jereth
in him, so that he could go and do whatever heroic thing he's doing?'

Julianne had seen him suddenly, thought she had, snared in the claws of a flying ghul: not so heroic, more doomed to die. Her father had been taken the same way, and she had saved him; she didn't think she'd be given the chance to do so again.

Nor did she mention it to Elisande. She might have been mistaken, after all; she might have been deceived. Instead, 'I don't think so. That you could have done anywhere, Marron would have sought you out wherever. I think this place has a purpose, and so do we.'

'To sit and watch, most likely, while everything happens all around us. It's very good to watch from, you said so yourself, like Grandfer's terrace; and now you've got the eyes to see with. You'd better tell me everything.'

Elisande could see most of it for herself, but Julianne was happy to oblige; it gave her the excuse she needed to stare and stare, to watch her man at work, at war.

One of her men, at least. There was still no sign that she could see of Imber.

The great waves of tribesmen had broken up rapidly, even before they met the 'ifrit, as soon as they had seen them. Those who had raided horses yesterday - or killed their riders in battle, and so claimed them - were faster anyway than those still on camelback, and so outpaced them with something like excuse; but there was nothing about the Sharai that could make them fight in regiments. It was like watching surf rise and shatter against a rocky shore, she thought: all that power, all that waste and loss.