Shadowed By Wings (32 page)

“That’s right, you’re a prisoner. A difference, there.”

She pointed a trembling finger at me. “You’re a serf, aren’t you? A filthy second-rate cur.”

“I’m no different than you.”

“You aren’t worth the spit in my mouth!”

“For what little spit you’ve got right now, I’ll warrant you’re right again,” I muttered, dragging myself upright. “I’m worth more.”

“How dare you!”

“Fighting amongst ourselves will achieve nothing,” Misutvia snapped. “Zarq is right. We need to trap rain. Those that help will drink, regardless of their status outside these walls. Understand?”

No one replied one way or the other. After a moment, Misutvia ordered two of the new women to help move a divan beneath the casement.

My suggestion didn’t work, though. The casement was too narrow to thrust a crock through. Instead, we pulled a drapery from a wall, shook dust from it, rolled it into a rope, and fed it outside. When it was heavy with water, we hauled it back in and wrung the water out. It was laborious work and fetched little to drink. Sutkabde sucked the cloth each time after we’d rung it out, but didn’t offer to help, and therefore was given nothing to drink. Greatmother sat resolutely with her back turned to us.

Evening fell.

Exhausted and at the cusp of lapsing once more into passive despondency, we abandoned our efforts. Outside, rain blew in gusts against the surrounding foliage. Less than two spoonfuls of water we’d each drunk, yet just beyond our reach water fell in delirious profusion. I shuffled to my burrow and curled inside, stoppering my ears to block out the mocking sound.

At once I became aware of the haunt trapped within the cocoon in my belly.

The membranous walls surrounding it were as thin as a newborn’s skin. I’d been many days without venom, and the haunt had grown strong within me. If all had gone as normal in the viagand chambers that day, the eunuch would have led Misutvia, Greatmother, Sutkabde, the new women, and me to the stables. Sensing the abrupt change in the unscheduled lack of venom, the haunt roiled within my psyche the harder.

It would overcome me soon, and incarcerate me within the walls of my own flesh. I would be imprisoned twice at once, then: by stone, and by the invidious spirit of a deranged haunt.

I crawled out of my burrow, too fearful to be alone.

Misutvia hadn’t retired to her burrow for the night. She sat against the wall beneath the casement, beside the stacked divans, a rug draped over her shoulders. Without a word, I collapsed beside her.

Outside, rain slapped the jungle. Wind blew in gusts.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Misutvia said, stirring me from stupor. “Why enclose us if they wish us dead? Why not decapitate us, or abandon us to the whims of the Retainers?”

I shrugged. I was too exhausted to think. I closed my eyes, but all I saw was stone. Stone walls above me, beside me, surrounding me, keeping me from water and light and life.

My eyes snapped open.

“They’re hiding us,” I said, and I sat upright with the truth of it. “They’ll have done the same to the brooder stables, walled them off.”

“What do you mean, hiding us?” Misutvia said bitterly. “From whom? No one knows of this place; the entire fortress is hidden in jungle.”

“Someone’s here. Someone who shouldn’t be. Someone who can’t be murdered to ensure silence. They’ve walled us in to hide us, to hide the purpose of this place.”

“As if the very seclusion and impenetrability of this place doesn’t suggest its true function.”

Her scorn made me feel defensive toward my conjecture. “Not necessarily, no. Daronpuis and Temple officials are always secluding themselves behind walls—”

“Not in the heart of the jungle. Holy Wardens like their comforts, Zarq. Such an austere place like this would hardly be a retreat of choice for any but the most zealous of—” She abruptly broke off, and then I felt her quicken, as if lightning rippled over her skin.

“A mobasanin,” she gasped. “They’ve walled us in to make this place look like a mobasanin.”

“A what?”

“A retreat for zealous daronpuis seeking purification through seclusion. They’re reputed to be austere places, isolated always in dense jungle.”

“That’s it, then,” I said. “That’s what they’ve done. But who’s found this place, that they need to conceal its real purpose?”

Silence, the both of us thinking furiously.

“My brother,” Misutvia tremulously breathed. “Malaban has come for me.”

She turned, clutched my wrist with a bony hand.

“I told you he would, Zarq. He’s found me!”

Her excitement was infectious, but I was afraid to believe such was possible, was afraid to be duped by blind hope.

“How?” I asked.

“I told you before! He’s well connected, owns lands and factories, a fleet of ships. Are you sure you haven’t heard of the Caranku Bri of Lireh? Our guild clan is mighty, our family influential. Malaban is here, I’m sure of it!”

I dared allow the conviction in her voice to instill a modicum of belief in me. “We must summon him, then. Make noise, hang draperies out the casements. The daronpuis will have kept your brother in their living quarters under some pretext or another while the Retainers walled us in.”

“He may have toured the fortress already,” Misutvia said, nervous energy spilling from her in an almost visible flood of prismatic color. “He may be convinced this
is
a mobasanin. Quick, we must make noise and summon him!”

My turn to grab her. “He won’t hear us, not with this squall outside. Conserve your energy for morning.”

“And risk him leaving here without me?!”

“Nonsense. Think rationally. How did he arrive?” She shuddered and pulled herself together with difficulty. “The only way possible is upon dragonback.”

“And you said he owns winged dragons?” I remembered that much from our conversation in the medic’s den. It was a fact hard to forget.

“Five escoas, yes.”

I nodded slowly and hope as hard as a full moon’s light shone within me.

“If he’s here still, he won’t be flying out until day-break,” I said, thinking aloud, heart beating fast. “Why fly at night, during a squall, if there’s no need?”

“Oh, Zarq. We
can
survive this; we will.”

I realized, then, that neither of us had truly believed we’d escape the fortress or survive the surrounding jungle. We’d been willing to chance death for attempting both, but we’d not truly believed we’d succeed at either.

Until now.

“So we wait,” she said, twisting her fingers together in agitation. “The moment the squall dies, we climb the divans and scream out that casement.”

“We’ll call his name,” I said. “More likely he’ll hear. One hears one’s name, no matter how muted the cry.”

She studied me, head cocked to one side. “You’re clever, for a rishi.”

If she meant ill by it, I didn’t hear it in her voice. She placed one hand over her belly, the center of a woman’s being, and offered her other hand to me. I took it and placed it over my womb, as if we were two strangers meeting for the first time and exchanging our trust.

“I am Caranku Bri of Lireh’s Yenvia,” she said. “My brother and friends know me as Jotan Bri. Please call me such.”

“Jotan? You’re known as Teacher?”

“I was an academician at Ondali Wapar Liru. I was apprehended after organizing a demonstration in protest of the arrest and disappearance of a colleague.”

“I don’t know what this Ondali Wapar Liru is.”

“You’ve never heard of the Wapar?” she said in disbelief. Then she remembered. “Oh. Forgive me. You’re rishi.”

She gave me a moment to recover from the shame of my ignorance.

“Ondali Wapar Liru is the Academia Well of our nation’s capital,” she murmured. “It’s a place of great learning. Sciences, arts, foreign religions, and great philosophies, they’re all discussed and taught there.”

“To whom?” I asked, for it was my turn for disbelief.

“To any who pay to learn such.”

“Of course I’ve never heard of it, then. It’s not a place for rishi.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said defensively. “Certain patrons support the impoverished who possess a true desire to learn.”

“Do these patrons travel to Clutches, gather interested rishi from the kus laboring within?”

“No,” she admitted slowly. “But surely if a rishi has that much drive and interest, to attend the Wapar, he’ll find a way to reach a patron.”

“Surely a prisoner who has the drive and interest to escape her dungeon will find a way to flee,” I murmured in response.

She drew in a breath.

“Poverty and circumstance can be as immutable as a stone prison, Jotan Bri,” I said. I touched her knee to mitigate a little of the harshness of my words. “But please, tell me more of this place, this Well of Knowledge. Women attend?”

She shifted, clutched her rug about her shoulders as it started to slip. “There are more now. There’s been a contentious battle over the issue of whether women should attend, let alone teach. The women of influential merchants, as well as those of the Emperor’s militia stationed in Liru, have much sway when in mass. Together we’ve won against Temple in this regard: We can attend the Wapar. And, recently, teach.”

“Yet women teachers are arrested on charges of committing vice with other women,” I said. “Many of the names in Prelude list that as the reason behind their arrest.”

“I was protesting such a thing when
I
was apprehended.”

I studied her pale face, bit my tongue to hold back a question, then found myself asking it regardless. “Didn’t you realize
you’d
be arrested?”

She stared into darkness and remained silent for so long that I thought I’d offended her terribly and that she wouldn’t answer me.

“I’d not expected this, Zarq,” she finally murmured. “Not this.”

Another question pushed at me. “Would you do it again, if you could reverse time? Would you protest despite knowing where you’d end up?”

Her head swung round and her eyes looked as bloody and granular in the gloom as pulped meat. “If no one protests an injustice, it becomes ordinary and acceptable. In time, a greater injustice creeps in on its heels. Society is shaped by dissent, Zarq, justice birthed by complaint.”

It was then that I remembered my vow to become a dragonmaster and use my influence to oust Kratt and bring a measure of equality to the rishi of Clutch Re. That ambition was so great, my current situation so far removed from it, that I was dazzled by the disparity and by my former naïveté.

I shook my head and spoke to myself more than her. “I don’t know if I want the strife and instability that comes with dissent. I don’t think I’m capable of being a martyr for my beliefs anymore.”

“I’m no martyr,” Misutvia hotly replied. “Don’t compare me with Greatmother.”

I started at the vehemence of her response. “I wasn’t thinking of Greatmother. Nor you.”

She hung her head and inhaled jaggedly several times.

“I hate that woman,” she whispered at last. “I’ve dreamt of strangling her many times, of staving in her lunatic skull with a rock.”

“Lunatic?” I murmured. “Or pious? Is she a mad-woman or a martyr?”

“Her faith is merely an excuse for her passivity. She is no heroine.”

“Are you sure of that?” I looked at my glycerin hands, my protruding bones looking as delicate as those of a fish. “You’ve heard the dragons. Do you really believe they aren’t divine? Perhaps Greatmother is right. Perhaps that’s why you hate her so. Her faith is formidable. Yours is nonexistent.”

“Close your lips, Naji,” Misutvia said, reverting to my prison name in her anger. “I need sleep now. We both need sleep. Let’s not waste our energy discussing a delusional old woman who’s on the brink of death.”

Although I slept, I did not rest. My stuttering, relentless dreams grew hale in the night’s void, pulsed systole and diastole, mutated, propagated. I was surrounded by cocoons that were stacked and compressed above and around me. I moaned in my sleep, opened my eyes and saw the maturing dark as traitorous, saw pillow and divan as proxy for oscillating star-spume forms that crouched and coupled with malevolent vim. The haunt within me roiled, assonant with my breath rhythm.

A claw shredded the cocoon asunder and punched forth into my being.

I gurgled and scrabbled at Misutvia, slumped in oblivion beside me. Another claw ripped its way free of the cocoon in my psyche, and my mother’s haunt erupted from the involucre, splattering my soul with septic fury. My shattered, darkened mind howled as the assimilation began, as my mother’s haunt oozed through my tissues, obsessing and possessing.

I convulsed on the floor.

“Venom,” I cried.

A pillar of melting wax dripped over me: Briefly, I knew it to be Misutvia.

Then I saw no more, my sight stolen by bilious, otherworldly eyes. My body was hollowed out as I was infected; I felt myself draining out of finger and arm, rushing waterfall down neck into chest cavity. All of me was draining into one place, a polyp embedded within my own womb. I was compressed. I was darkness folded in on itself.

From that cramped prison, I felt the body that held me move. Fury, spasm, hectic fever. Violence and great effort. Wreck and ruin, purpose in disorder.

The haunt couldn’t hold me within the polyp, not with its berserk energy so focused on destruction. I writhed, felt the polyp about me turn as viscous as fruit pulp. I struggled harder. The pulp turned as thin as serum and evaporated in the heat of my determination. Triumphant, I surged back into my body. Depleted from her rampage, my mother’s haunt splintered into thousands of minute shards and scattered to the far corners of my frame.

Sight. Sound. Sensation.

My chest was heaving, air scoring down my throat and lungs as if sucked from a hot kiln. My legs could not support me, and I crumpled against a wall. Splayed out before me, I saw that my shins were blood chipped, fragments of mortar and rock embedded in my calves. Slowly, I looked up.

Dust floated upon dark air, a thick, gritty texture that filmed my eyes. About me lay a jumble of stone.

I was slumped in the corridor outside the viagand chambers. Misutvia stood at the chambers’ door, gripping it for support. Clustered about her stood the new women, gaping fearfully at me.