Shadowdance (50 page)

Veydon agreed and picked Innowen up in his arms. They made it halfway to the door, moving around the edges of the assembly, before Minarik stopped them.

"Where do you think you're going, Innowen?" Minarik called firmly, and Veydon turned so that Innowen could face his father. "My son will carry his share of the load around here, like everyone else. You may not be able to walk, but there's nothing wrong with your eyes. You'll take a shift at watch on the wall." He looked to Veydon. "See that a chair is placed at a proper post for him."

Innowen peered at his father, stunned by the pronouncement, as he attempted to read that inscrutable face. Minarik, though, had already turned his attention to another man.

"He honors you," Veydon murmured as he carried Innowen out of the room. "It elevates you in the soldiers' eyes if he treats you no differently from anyone else. Minarik knows this."

Innowen hugged his mother's sword to his chest with one hand. "I don't object," he answered. "I'm merely surprised."

They encountered a household slave who hurried past them with a sloshing bowl of bloody water. Veydon attempted to stop him, but Innowen interrupted. "Let him go," he said. "If he's seeing after the wounded, that work is more important." They found another slave a few moments later who agreed to come after them with a suitable chair, and Innowen spent the rest of the afternoon on the wall above the main gate, where he could watch the chaos in the village, or turn and watch the slightly more organized chaos on Whisperstone's grounds.

The sun went down almost too quickly. The watchfires were lit, and when Innowen's shift was done, he walked away from his post. Even after nightfall, the preparations continued. The grounds bustled with activity. Huge, eight-foot-tall torches were planted in the earth to add light to the dozens of campfires that burned. Groups of soldiers cleaned and prepared weapons and armor. Other soldiers, working right alongside villagers, made hasty trips back and forth through the gates, hauling anything that might be useful. Innowen weaved among them, eventually made his way inside the great keep, and went to his room.

There was no indication at all that Rascal had returned. The room was exactly as Innowen had left it.

He set down his mother's sword, which he had carried all day. Then, with a sigh, he went to the window and stared outward at the flicker of the watchfires and torches and tried not to worry. Rascal could take care of himself. So what if there was an army massing out there?

He should have been hungry, but he wasn't. He poured a little of the wine that remained from the night before into a kylix and carried it back to the window without drinking. There he leaned against the sill.

He stood like that for some time, watching the scurryings of the people below, waiting for Rascal to return. Finally, he grew tired of the darkness, and he realized, too, that the kylix he held was the same one Rascal and he had shared last night. No slave had come to take it away, and no one had come around to light the lamps.

He picked up his oil lamp from where it sat on a small desk in the corner of the room and went into the hall. The lamps there blazed brilliantly. Careful not to spill the contents, he held his lamp up to one of the flames and took fire from its burning wick.

Back in his room, he placed the lamp down on the table by the bed, climbed onto the soft mattress, and leaned his back against the wall where he could see the door when it opened. Then, by the door, he noticed the two forgotten bundles where he had left them. He got up and carried them to the bed, sat down cross-legged in the middle of the mattress, and began to undo them. Each contained half of the Witch's armor and two of his dolls. He rolled the armor back up in the Witch's white cloak and pushed that bundle under the bed.

One of the dolls, a small ceramic male figurine, had broken under the weight of the breastplate. When Innowen picked it up, its carefully painted head teetered back, fell to the sheets, and rolled down between his legs. He gave a small moan as he picked it up and tried to fit it back onto the doll's body, but the break was too severe, and anyway there was another crack across the doll's left arm. Frowning, he laid the pieces carefully back on the bed and called up good memories of Shaktar, a city-state far to the east where he had bought the doll.

A wan smile parted his lips as he remembered. It seemed fitting somehow that it was the one to break. The doll was an image of
Hopit,
a minor spirit who was supposed to bring good luck to travelers. Innowen had had precious little good luck lately.

Fortunately, his two favorites remained undamaged. He picked them up, one in each hand, and his smile widened. They were incredibly ugly little creatures to look at, with their naked rag bodies made lumpy with hard bean stuffing. Their arms and legs hung limp and much too long for their small shapes, and their fingers and toes were fashioned from oddly-weighted lead pellets. Careful stitches had been sewn into the faces to cause wrinkles and folds around features which had been fashioned from cracked seeds.

The dolls had been made ugly deliberately, and as if to add insult to insult, thin bronze poles had been shoved up their tiny anuses.

Yet Innowen loved them best of all. No other dolls he had seen or collected in all his travels had fascinated him as these had. He held them up to the light.

"What in hell are those things?"

Innowen jerked around to see Rascal standing by the door, apparently healthy, not a scratch on him. There'd been no need to worry about him at all. Therefore, Innowen decided to be mad. "Well, they're not dead rats," he snapped, "so you needn't frown as if they are. Where have you been?"

Razkili grinned and grabbed a towel from the stack Veydon's soldier-friends had left behind earlier. He rubbed his chest and armpits briskly, and the towel came away damp and filthy. He tossed it in a corner. "Preparing a present for you," he explained. "By the way, I've asked for some food to be sent up. I ran into Veydon, and he explained what's been going on." He came closer and rumpled Innowen's hair. "Can't I leave you alone for a little while without things turning crazy?"

"It's my curse," Innowen answered sarcastically, brushing the offending hand away. It was so like Rascal, Innowen thought.
He worries the hell out of me by disappearing, then tells me it's because he was making me a present!
Well, Innowen wasn't going to feel guilty about being mad. He wrinkled his nose. "Gods, you smell!"

Rascal flashed a big smile, bounced down on the bed, and took one of the ugly dolls. "The aroma of hard work in a hot sun," he replied. He squinted at the doll for a moment, then attempted a comical imitation of its tragic face.

Despite himself, Innowen almost laughed. He managed, though, to keep a straight face. He'd shown only a few of his dolls to Rascal, and never these. He'd bought them in Spyrid in a little town on the coast of the Tasmian Sea before he'd met Rascal.

"I call them my Shadowdancers," he said quietly. "They were the only dolls I bought that weren't supposed to have some magical property. They didn't make the corn grow, they didn't bring you luck, they didn't improve sexual prowess...."

Razkili put on an expression of mock disdain. "Well what good are they?" he interrupted. "Oh, I see." He held his up by its brass rod. "You stick this in a pot of dirt, set it on the window, and they scare away the flies!"

"They teach a lesson," Innowen said simply, ignoring his lover's teasing. "Look." He held up his own doll. "Wretched-looking, I admit. But look there."

He pointed beyond the foot of the bed where the doll's shadow fell on the wall. Razkili had to twist around to see as Innowen set the brass pole against his right palm and began to roll it slowly between his left fingers.

On the wall, the shadow began to turn. Its weighted arms lifted gracefully from its body. One leg lifted higher, too, as if the doll were somehow alive and in control of its limbs. Then the turn slowed, and the arms sank down, and the leg resumed its natural position. It stopped for a moment as if on the points of its toes, seeming to quiver as the oil lamp flickered subtly behind it.

Innowen rolled the metal rod between his fingers again, faster this time. The doll's shadow-arms flung up in a dramatic posture, the one heavily weighted leg lifted high, and it appeared to spin that way on the point of one toe.

By controlling the speed with which he twisted the pole, by stopping and starting it suddenly, Innowen made the shadow dance. "Now you do it with that one," he said to Razkili, indicating the other doll with a nod of his head. Rascal picked it up and began to play. Soon, there were two shadows dancing side by side.

"Don't stop," Innowen said after Razkili had gotten the hang of it. "But here's the lesson. Remember how ugly the dolls are?" From the corner of his eye, he watched Razkili nod. "Yet look how beautiful and graceful the shadows are. Which, then, is the true essence of the dolls?"

"I see!" Razkili exclaimed. His doll danced excitedly as he spun the rod in his hands. "Only their surface features are ugly, but when you understand what they really are, what they can do, and what they're capable of, they're wonderful! That's a marvelous lesson!"

"One that can be applied to people," Innowen agreed. "One that got me through a lot of years of self-doubt." He stopped his doll, cradled it in both his hands and peered into its seed-eyes. "Funny that we need a doll to teach us that, isn't it?" He looked thoughtfully at Rascal, then began to make the doll dance again. "Rather sad, too. There's one more thing that bothers me when I play with them," he added.

"What's that?" Razkili asked without looking at him, without taking his eyes from the pair of shadows on the wall as they pirouetted together.

Innowen stopped again and put his doll down on the bed. "It makes me wonder—whose hands spin us?"

Razkili made a face and put his down, also. "Did I ever tell you that you
think
too much?" he said. He turned back around on the bed, and his knee brushed against the fourth doll, which had lain ignored all this time. "What's this one do?" he asked, picking it up.

It was a slender doll, as long as Innowen's forearm, a lady, all carved from smooth, bone-white wood with a clinging sculpted dress and streaming sculpted hair. Her arms and hands were pressed against her sides in a regal, yet delicate pose. Her eyes were two tiny spots of blue paint, and her cheeks were daubed with red, as were her lips.

Innowen took the figure from him. "That's a gift for Dyan," he said. "You remember. You were with me when I bought this one in Ashmorn." He put the doll's head in his mouth and blew. A high, clear tone shivered through the air. "It's a flute. The Ashmoors believe the music their priestesses make on it brings blessings from their gods."

"I remember," Razkili said, nodding. "Speaking of gifts, it's time you saw what I've prepared for you." He glanced toward the door and frowned. "I'm hungry, though, and I'll bet you haven't eaten, either. I asked for our meals to be sent up."

Innowen got up from the bed and placed his shadowdancers on his pillows. The doll-flute he set on the table. "I wouldn't expect things to run too smoothly around here," he warned. "No one lit our lamps, either. The servants have their hands full."

Razkili got up, too. "We'll stop in the kitchen and grab something ourselves. Let's go."

Innowen hesitated. "Are we leaving Whisperstone?" he asked, remembering that Rascal had been gone all day.

"Yes," Razkili affirmed, "but not the way you think."

"Then I'm taking a sword," Innowen said, snatching up, not his mother's blade, but the sword Baktus had given him in Parendur. He strapped it around his waist. As an afterthought, he picked up the doll-flute and thrust that into his belt as well. If they were going to the kitchens, he might find Dyan somewhere along the way.

The lower levels of Whisperstone were a marked contrast to the quiet upper levels. Nighttime had not slowed the frantic preparations for war, and people rushed about. The halls were full of strangers. One corridor was lined with cots and pallets for the wounded. Innowen thought he glimpsed Dyan on her way to the courtyard, and thought she glanced his way, too, but before he could call out to her, she hurried around a corner, and Razkili steered him down a different hallway.

The kitchen was nearly abandoned. All the cooking had been moved outside. Still, they managed to find half a loaf of bread, a few crumbs of cheese and some turnips, which they washed down with ladles of water from a bucket. It wasn't very good fare, but they laughed about it.

When their bellies were sufficiently full, Razkili led the way again. Down into the deepest levels of the keep they went, down to depths few visitors ever discovered. They took the last lamp from its niche on the wall and carried it to light their way.

At one particular door, Innowen stopped. In that room he had killed Riloosa to end the poor man's misery. He had killed again since then. Yet the Syraean's death had left a strange, bitter taste that lingered still.

Down more stairs and through dusty corridors they went. Innowen had not visited this level before, and he wondered silently what lay behind the locked doors they passed. There were mysteries to Whisperstone he had not yet explored. Apparently, Razkili had.

Recent footprints marked the soft gray pounce that covered the floor. Mysteriously, those footprints led straight to, seemingly
through,
a solid wall. Barely visible on the discolored stone was a face someone had painted there. The pigment and the once-horrible visage had faded with the years, perhaps with the centuries. It was possible, though, when Razkili held up the torch, to make out the green, twisting snakes which formed the face's hair, the razor-sharp fangs, the eyes that once had burned bright red.