Shadowed By Wings (23 page)

I turned my head, cheek rasping over the Auditor’s incense-perfumed robe. Dono still stood on the threshold of my stall, his eyes looking as if they were forged from pewter.

He’d told Temple.

Furious because I’d spurned his offer to flee with him to the coast, insulted that I favored a dragon’s tongue over his phallus, outraged because I preferred to risk death by staying in the dragonmaster’s stables rather than become his roidan yin elsewhere, Dono had informed Temple of my interactions with the Komikon’s destrier. And Temple had come for me.

Despair flooded me, and grief and loss. Dono’s betrayal was like losing my childhood all over again. I was outcast. I was forsaken.

The Auditor threw me atop one of the winged dragons and four Temple acolytes leapt forward to hold me there.

“No!” I howled, tears streaming down my cheeks, and the agitated dragon shivered and pranced beneath me. “Dono, you don’t know what you’re doing!”

Or maybe he did.

Like most Malacarites, I’d heard rumors about Temple’s prisons for women. I’d heard how the women were little more than kiyu, sex slaves for the Retainers who guarded the prison doors and windows. I’d heard how the Retainers were but criminals themselves, serving their sentences in a jail located adjacent to each of the prisons for women. Every imprisoned man who showed piety and displayed recalcitrance for his crime was awarded with Retainership duty at a women’s prison.

The hard light in Dono’s eyes suggested that he knew very well what he was doing, that he knew precisely what my fate would be from that moment on.

Sobbing, I writhed, bucked, and bit. The Temple acolytes caught my flailing fists and legs, and they lashed my hands and ankles to the dragon’s saddle while the Auditor climbed up behind me. The Auditor leaned atop me, his weight pressing me hard into the saddle as he assumed the half-lying position of a dragon rider.

“No!” I shrieked, and then the ground lurched away from me so violently, I briefly thought my head had been separated from my body by the Auditor’s blade.

I was in flight.

Massive wings beat the air on either side of us, fighting the sky down, thrusting us upward. Dragon muscle lurched and heaved beneath me. I pitched forward, then sideways, and felt as if I might be tossed off at any moment. All was noise and heaving motion.

I scrabbled for a handhold along the dragon’s neck, grasped knobbed hide instead, and clung tightly to that. I relented to the Auditor’s weight, so that I was pressed flat against the dragon’s dorsal ridge. But with each lurch of the dragon’s wings, the Auditor’s body likewise lurched. What if he fell and pulled me down with him?

“I’m falling!” I yelled, but the wind devoured my words. I held my breath and pressed my cheek against the dragon lunging beneath me.

Something violent occurred within me, as if an unseen fist buried behind my liver and diaphragm punched outward, toward my navel. At once cold rippled over the skin of my abdomen and a sulfurous taste coated my tongue.

Mother. Her haunt. I was leaving Clutch Re and, in doing so, was entrapping the haunt within my psyche.

I struggled to sit up. “No, we have to go back; stop, stop!”

The Auditor thumped my nape with the heel of one hand. “Stay still, else we both fall to our deaths!”

The haunt roiled within me. Clenching my teeth against the invasive struggle, I clung tight to the dragon and closed my eyes while the dragon’s great membranous wings battled the air.

An eternity later, the violent wing thrusts stopped. My eyes snapped open and I tensed for the fall.

Nothing to see to either side of me but cold, damp darkness that sucked the blood from my marrow. I raised my cheek a little. Beyond the dragon’s outstretched wing to my left, I saw only darkness below. To the right, more darkness.

No. A thin, silvery ribbon that for a moment I could not comprehend. I then realized it was a river.

“Lie still,” the Auditor barked, and he shoved my cheek hard against the dorsum of the dragon to make me lay flat again. Then: an explosion on either side of us as wings battled air once more. I clung tight to the dragon’s hide as we lurched up and down.

After flapping a few times, the wings fell still and stretched out in another glide. Wind rushed past.

The horrific flight went on and on, until I was drenched from chill mist and I shuddered from cold, until I lost all sensation in my hands and lower legs. The Auditor occasionally shifted, yarding back this way or that on the reins he held, his arms stretched along the dragon’s neck.

The dragon began huffing.

I stiffened; her strength was flagging.

A short time later, the Auditor barked at the dragon, shifted the position of his legs, and flexed his arms. The pitch of the dragon abruptly changed, pointed sharply earthward. We were landing.

I clung to knobbed hide, hardly daring to breathe from tension, and kept my eyes shut tight. Our descent was so steep, I was glad of the weight of the prone Auditor pressing me against the dragon’s back, for I felt sure I’d slide right off and dangle by the ropes binding me to the saddle if not for his bulk.

Down we flew. I espied a flickering light below: A fire atop a cliff.

The dragon abruptly changed direction and flew toward the light. Her wings exploded into action again. I’d had no idea flight was so violent, such a battle. All was motion and sound and muscled chaos about me, and suddenly I was smelling jungle, the damp, earthy smell of rotting bracken, the astringent smells of sap, leaf, bud, and bract. The air grew warmer as we neared the firelit cliff.

The dragon’s wings beat in short and furious movements and she changed position, her neck and breast rising upward, pointing skyward, her hindquarters pointing down in an almost vertical position.

“Hold strong; we’re landing!” the Auditor bellowed in my ear.

There was a violent lurch beneath us, a coiled sort of impact as we landed.

I stared about me, shaking as if I had palsy.

Some distance from us stood a ring of torch-bearing men. One of them came forward and handed the Auditor his torch. He wore no Temple garb but only a frayed hempen tunic that reached just below his knees. Both his face and midriff looked pudgy and soft. In a stupor, I watched him untie my ankles from the saddle, watched my wrists likewise unbound.

“Dismount,” he ordered in a voice oddly sweet.

A eunuch. The man was a eunuch.

I was exhausted to the point where I felt sapped of all fight. I obeyed. I dismounted.

My knees buckled upon my feet contacting the ground. I didn’t fall, though, but merely slumped against the dragon’s heaving flanks. The eunuch clucked and pulled me upright. His pulpy hand about my biceps held me firmly but did not crush, did not bruise.

He propelled me forward, into the circle of torchlight. Thick eyebrows, hooked noses. Stern mouths set in dense, groomed beards. Hair meticulously oiled and plaited in the many looping braids befitting a Temple warden of high stature.

And one face recognizable to me, an impassive face set above a multitude of turgid chins, upon a broad-shouldered, corpulent body: the Ranreeb, the Holy Overseer of the collective of Clutches to which Clutch Re belonged. I recognized him from the Mombe Taro parades of my youth; Mother had always pointed him out to me.

“That’s her,” the Ranreeb rumbled, his voice dredging from the pit of his vast belly, his inset eyes steady upon me. “Bring her closer.”

The eunuch tugged on my arm and brought me to stand directly in front of the Ranreeb, so that the Holy Overseer’s torch bathed my cheeks with warmth and ochre light.

Over the terraced hills of his chins, the Ranreeb looked impassively down at me as I looked up at him. The smell of incense cloying to him was so powerful that I could taste the scent as if I were sucking on a cone of oily tree gum.

He studied my face. I should have dropped my eyes but did not.

“The apprentice-informant spoke truth,” the Ranreeb rumbled, and my chest vibrated as if the sound of his voice were rocks tumbling atop my breast. “Look to the eyes. She knows dragons.”

The circle of men drew closer about me, their torches a constellation of crackling light. The eunuch obliged those gathered by firmly grasping my chin and tipping my head this way and that for all to examine me.

“Dragon eyes,” one of the gathered daronpuis muttered. His tone carried both disgust and satisfaction.

“Dragon eyes,” the others one by one confirmed, silk gowns rustling.

Dragon eyes.

Suddenly I was back at Tieron Nask Cinai, the sanctuary for retired bulls where I’d served since the age of nine. And the Convent Elder, whom I’d named Yellow Face for the color of her jaundiced skin, was standing before me, bidding me farewell as I fled the upcoming visit by Temple Auditors.

“Mind, now,” Yellow Face had said, fussing with a bladder of venom she was about to give me. “It marks you. Your eyes, understand. Anyone who knows anything about dragons will see how much you’ve used, and anyone who knows of the rite will guess how intimately you’ve received it.”

Dragon eyes. She’d had them, Yellow Face. Bloodshot eyes with unnaturally small pupils. Eyes that were stationary as they looked upon you. Eyes that blinked slowly, rarely. Like a dragon’s do.

I closed my eyes so that those about me could look no further.

Pointless, really. They knew.

Dono had told them: I lay with dragons.

After a grueling march along a rutted, overgrown trail, I was taken into a stone labyrinth of unlit corridors. No one walked those mossy corridors but me and my retinue. No sound but the swish of robe, the phlegmy wheeze of Holy Warden, and the soft crackle of torchlight in those stooped passageways.

The eunuch leading me stopped, fumbled with a set of rusted keys at his waist, and opened a wooden door.

Hands grabbed me from behind and shoved me forward. Immediately I was assaulted by a musty stench, like that of a long-abandoned latrine. I spun about and caught a last glance of the Ranreeb surrounded by a torch-lit circle of daronpuis, before the door was slammed closed upon me.

Shock paralyzed me for several moments. My enclosure was dark, the only light a meager strip shining beneath the doorway. Beneath my feet, the wooden floor was soft and wet with rot. Small stones poked through. My head grazed the ceiling, which was also constructed of rotten wood. I threw myself at the door and attacked it. It relented not in the least to my pounding fists, my gouging nails.

I screamed like one gone mad.

Sometime later—long after I’d fallen asleep slumped against the door, and woken and shuffled to a corner of my prison cell to urinate—the door in front of me rasped as if it were being opened.

It was not.

A rectangle of light appeared in the closed door, at chin height. A leather bladder was shoved through an opening. Something else was shoved in after it, a white block that landed with a squelch atop the bladder.

I smelled the unmistakable scent of paak, baked egg whites, and saliva sprang painfully into my mouth. That’s what the damp white block was, see: paak. I staggered forward and snatched up the food.

The paak was cold and outrageously salted, and I devoured it eagerly. With trembling hands, I then unscrewed the lid of the bladder and drank.

“Hand back the bladder when you’re done,” a voice barked on the other side of the door.

“Let me out,” I gasped. “Please.”

“Hand back the bladder.”

I knew instinctively that once I handed it back, the portal in the door would slide shut and I’d be enclosed in darkness once more.

“I’m not finished drinking,” I lied. My jailer responded with only a grunt.

By the flickering torchlight coming through the portal, I slowly examined my wooden cell.

It looked to be a perfect cube, six feet long, wide, and high. No cot existed for sleeping on, no pot to urinate in. Other than the rotting floor and walls, the dark, and the spiders that crawled about the place, I was alone.

Then I noticed how the walls appeared to shift in the torchlight. Something writhed over them.

Wait. No. Writing: The walls were covered in coarsely rendered glyphs that flickered in the torchlight.

Trembling, I read the verse nearest to me:

Twenty-two years have I, and the name Bayen Lutche Rit’s Limia. But, too, I have an unnatural interest in ancient Malacarite literature.

Or so I was told by the Auditor who waylaid me in Wai Bayen Temple square.

He also informed my smirking claimer that I displayed wanton tendencies, that I would be imprisoned for life. My claimer held a scroll, and though it was rolled, I recognized the broken seal as my own. He’d intercepted my last letter to X. I pray X learns of my fate and flees.

Directly beneath those lines, carved into the wood by another hand:

Two years into her imprisonment, Bayen Lutche Rit’s Limia expired in the Retainers’ bunks. I now voice her name and free her spirit from these walls.

Heart thudding, I moved on to the next verse carved on the wall.

I am twenty-seven years old, and my name is Bayen Ka Ryn’s Tak. While speaking from the lectern in Ondali Wapar Liru Third Lecture Hall, I was arrested and charged with teaching subversive literature. I have no intention of remaining imprisoned for long. Any who read this must have courage and believe they can endure and escape.

But again, beneath the lines, glyphs that slanted in a different direction from the original writer’s finished the woman’s history.

Six years into her imprisonment, Bayen Ka Ryn’s Tak died in the medic’s den during her third medic-induced miscarriage. I now voice her name and free her spirit from these walls.

A shiver raised the fine hairs on my nape. Almost every surface of my cell was carved with epitaphs.

That meant two things. One: All who had been imprisoned here had been able to write. They had, astoundingly, been educated women from elite bayen families. Yet they, too, had had lives controlled by the whims of Temple and powerful, displeased men.