Shadowed By Wings (34 page)

I flew toward it, tripping over cushions. I staggered, almost fell, floundered on. Sutkabde came through the door.

Astonishment crossed her wan face, making human her blood-soaked, pustulant eyes for the first time since I’d known her. I slammed my bludgeon broadside across her belly. She folded over with a shuddering sigh and collapsed onto the floor.

Chest heaving, I gestured to two of the new women. “She won’t stop us now. Lift Misutvia between the both of you and come. We’ve little time.”

I was gripped in a delirium of panic.

Flee, flee, flee!

Across the rubble of the ruined wall, ankles cut by spars of mortar, soles bruised on rock. Splashing through puddles, hems dragging like sodden tails along slick earthen floor. Unnerving dark, alarming uncertainty of what lay ahead. Pelting rain deafening us each time we passed a casement, our hearts thundering louder in our chests. Misutvia a dead weight dragged between the two women who followed me.

The corridor branched.

Left or right? Which way was shortest, which way had Greatmother gone? I couldn’t remember in my panic, had not thought to bring Misutvia’s cloth map with me.

Left, I decided, and I lurched down it, the women who followed me wheezing under their burden.

Slower now, slower. Surely we’d run across a Retainer soon.

The corridor branched again.

I came to a standstill, stupefied. There shouldn’t have been another fork, not according to Misutvia’s map! But alas, none of us had ever walked that part of the fortress: She’d not known. We were lost in the night-shrouded maze of stone, would never find an exit before we were discovered.

Slap of feet approaching at a sprint.

I gestured wildly to the women. We ducked into the branching corridor and cowered against one wall, exposed save for the sable cloak of night.

Heavy breaths, approaching feet, and a Retainer dressed in an acolyte’s tunic and scapular shot from the adjacent corridor and sprinted down the corridor we’d just traveled. Several heartbeats later, a second, third, and fourth Retainer dashed after him, bearing spears.

Greatmother had reached the daronpuis’ quarters already. They knew we’d breached their seal.

“Quick, down the corridor they came from,” I said, and we started to move, and then we heard heavy breaths and rapid footsteps approaching: A fifth Retainer, running last in the pack sent to check the viagand.

“Back, back,” I hissed frantically, and we staggered back into the shadows of the branching corridor, dragging Misutvia with us.

We froze. The sound of running feet drew near. A Retainer dressed as an acolyte, in pursuit of his cohorts, shot into the corridor leading back to the chambers. His back passed a hair-raising body length from us as he ran. I could smell his filthy sweat.

Misutvia groaned.

The Retainer lurched to a stop.

“Quick, attack!” I cried, and I flung myself toward him even as he was turning and raising his spear. I heard the soft thud of Misutvia’s body dropped to the floor as the two panicked women obeyed me, and I bent, head down and chin tucked to chest, and barreled into the Retainer’s soft belly like a battering ram. He staggered back a pace with a gasp and his spear clattered to the ground. Then all was a blur as we flew at him, frenzied and silent, gouging, hitting, biting, kicking. He faltered under our onslaught. My teeth found the soft cartilage of one of his ears and I bit. I drove a fist again and again into the soft flesh above his left kidney, and one of the women clawed at his face, shredding skin with nails as if it were cold lard.

He buckled over his testicles and fell to his knees. Hysterical, we kicked him into unconsciousness with our bare feet.

Quaking at our own brutality, shaking with battle lust, panic, and a macabre triumph, we stood over the body. Misutvia groaned again and retched. We looked at each other.

“Pick her up,” I wheezed.

“No,” one of the women panted. “We leave her.”

“I’ll help carry her, then.” I nodded curtly to the woman who hadn’t spoken. “You help me.”

“We leave her,” the first repeated, but I was already walking back to the albescent puddle of cloth on the floor of the branching corridor.

I bent and draped one of Misutvia’s clammy arms over my neck. My legs felt boneless and weak. Still bent, I looked up, waiting for the other woman to join me. She hesitated.

“I won’t leave her behind,” I said angrily.

“We part ways, then,” the dissenter said, and she tugged her undecided companion’s arm, pulling her down the corridor without me.

“I don’t know,” the second woman began, and then she was picked off her feet by a spear and thrown backward several paces, to the ground. The dissenter cried out, turned, and broke into a run. A swift whistle: Her body jerked and she was thrown against a wall. She slid down it, fingers clawing stone. The oiled shaft of a spear protruded from her back.

I dropped Misutvia, turned, and ran.

Shouts from behind me. I staggered into the dark, my spine crawling with dread, awaiting the bite of a spear in my back.

“Down there, that way,” a voice cried behind me, and I knew I’d been spotted. My viridescent bitoo was like a beacon in the dark, and I understood then that all the viagand women had been purposely clothed in pale gowns, that we would always stand out in the fortress’s gloom.

Hopelessness engulfed me. I could not outwit them, could not outrun them, could not escape. Yet even so, I stumbled down the corridor.

Dim light ahead, cast from a flickering sconce situated in a junction where the corridor forked yet again. Two silhouettes appeared in that pool of light, one bandy-legged, one cloaked in a cape. I was trapped, front and behind. I stumbled. Fell.

“Mother!” I hoarsely cried, willing the haunt to appear and endow me with inhuman strength, even at the cost of being imprisoned forever within my own flesh.

Opalescence danced before my eyes, stippling the dark with blanched blue. Shattered into a thousand grains throughout me, the haunt incandesced, tried to coalesce. It felt as if hot drops of wax were trying to join together in my veins, yet cold water solidified them as isolated beads. The haunt was depleted, hadn’t had sufficient time to renew its strength.

“Mother, save me!”

“That’s her,” one of the sconce-lit silhouettes cried, and they broke into a run toward me. I looked wildly to the opposite end of the corridor: A Retainer dressed as an acolyte emerged from the darkness. He stopped and raised his arms, elbows akimbo.

I would be impaled on his spear.

“Mother!” I cried again, and metal streaked through the air like a blade of lightning, a dagger thrown by one of the two sconce-lit silhouettes. The dagger glanced off the Retainer’s left shoulder just as he loosed his spear; the spear sailed drunkenly through the air and hissed onto the ground a hand’s breadth from my body.

The scent of perfumed oils rushed by me as the caped figure launched itself at the Retainer and engaged in combat.

The second of the sconce-lit silhouettes reached me. A familiar face leered at me beneath a bald and scarred pate. I reeled, incredulous.

“You’ve led us a merry chase, rishi whelp,” the dragonmaster cackled.

I looked wildly at the wrestling shadows: Sconce light glinted upon golden locks. Kratt.

“No,” I said, baffled. “No.”

Sinewy fingers bit into one of my arms and hauled me upright. “We’ll be leaving now, hey-o,” the dragonmaster said.

“But Malaban Bri. Where’s Malaban?”

A thud: The Retainer fell to the ground. Kratt bent over him and a minnow of steel flashed in his hand. With a grunt, Kratt straightened, wiped his bloody dagger upon his cape, and approached us.

“To our dragons,” he grunted, barely casting a glance my way.

“Wait,” I gasped. “We can’t leave Misutvia.”

“Shut your lips, rishi get,” Kratt snarled, and I thought he’d strike me.

“She’s sister to Malaban,” I cried. “From Caranku Bri of Lireh.”

Kratt paused. A muscle in his jaw clenched like a fist. “We have the Dirwalan Babu,” the dragonmaster hissed, calling me Skykeeper’s Daughter in ancient Malacarite as he held up my arm as proof. “We leave
now
.”

Kratt ignored him and pierced me with battle-bright eyes. “You’re sure the woman hails from Caranku Bri?”

“She was imprisoned with me,” I answered breathlessly. “We talked. She’s at the end of this corridor, unconscious.”

“We waste time!” the dragonmaster growled, eyes rolling.

“I’d have the Caranku Bri of Lireh beholden to me, Komikon,” Kratt said, sheathing his dagger.

With a swirl of cape, he raced down the corridor. The dragonmaster twitched and gnashed his teeth until Kratt reappeared, Misutvia draped over his shoulders like a gharial carcass.

“We leave this place,” Kratt said shortly.

We reached the sconce-lit fork at the end of the corridor just as three daronpuis lumbered into view, robes and coiled braids askew from hasty dressing. Their collective bulk formed a wall in front of us. Beards trimmed into sharp arrowheads glittered with oil in the light of the torches they held.

“You should not have come, Waikar Re Kratt,” a daronpu with an aquiline nose growled.

“This is no mobasanin,” Kratt said, his voice as smooth and muscled as a python’s body. “This is a den of deviance, hidden from the eyes of all but a few. Now, step aside.”

“You’ll have to remain here a while longer, I’m afraid.”

“Will I, now?” Kratt said softly. “I doubt that very much. Unless I return to Clutch Re by tomorrow eve, the outriders who accompanied me here are instructed to inform not just my brother of the location and suspected purpose of this stronghold, but the Lupini of Clutch Cuhan and the Roshu of Ka as well. All will learn of the Ranreeb’s secret then, holy man, and Emperor Fa will be ill pleased.”

Eyes narrowed.

“I propose instead that you stand aside,” Kratt murmured. “Alert the Ranreeb to what’s occurred here. He’ll deal with me as he sees fit. I’ve no intention of sharing what I know with other Clutch lords once I’ve returned to Cafar Re. Better Temple competes with just one man to learn the dragons’ secret, than with all the Clutch lords in Malacar.”

“No one would believe you,” sneered a daronpu, though he twitched as he said it.

“Shall we lay a wager on that, hmm?” Kratt murmured. “Now, step aside. You’ve no skill in combat, I’m sure.”

Nostrils flared. Hate was an acrid taste in the air.

A daronpu flicked a hand and ordered his colleagues to stand aside.

The journey back to Clutch Re lasted several days and a lifetime, knotted together like a ball of twisting, nested snakes. Starved and dehydrated, I swam in a sparkling fever, drowning, surfacing, sinking once more. I knew the exact moment we reached Clutch Re, though, for the thousands of incandescing grains of the haunt, scattered throughout me, burst from my skin in a visible cloud, and my psyche rushed into the gaps left behind from the haunt’s departure.

My body was mine, truly mine.

My anima stretched into my form with aching ease, too-long cramped by the haunt’s invasion. A bluish buzzard coalesced from the cloud, some distance to the right of the dragon I rode. The buzzard glided on an up-draft, carbuncled neck outstretched.

The haunt.

When next I awoke, I lay on a bed of dusty featon chaff, surrounded by lantern-lit stone.

I bolted upright with a cry. It had all been a dream; I was in the viagand chambers still!

A dragon snorted.

Heart pounding, I tried to place where I was. I struggled to my feet, using the stone wall beside me as support.

I was not in the viagand chambers, no. I was in an underground stable comprised of three small stalls, all of which were empty, save for the last, and in that stood an old destrier. She watched me with melancholic, sage eyes. Her wings trembled, folded tight over her dorsal ridge.

“Where am I?” I asked the old destrier, my tongue swollen from want of water.

Her cant eyes blinked slowly, slitted pupils not moving from mine. The diamond-shaped membrane at the end of her twiggy tail slapped against stone.
Slap-slap. Slap-slap.
The sound of blood and flesh imprisoned in stone. My heart beat in synchrony, blood and flesh imprisoned in rib.

I knew where I was, then.

In the gloomy stables beneath the domed pool of Cinai Komikon Re’s domain.

Home.

The dragonmaster woke me sometime later, and gave me broth to drink, paak to eat, a blanket to wrap myself in, and an enamel pot to use when the need took me. I pushed the paak aside, turned my nose up at the broth, and slept again, dreaming of dragonsong.

Again the dragonmaster woke me. Again the broth, the paak, the insistence that I eat and grow strong. I pushed the food away, teeth clacking together from cold. Chill slimed my skin.

The smell of the old dragon housed beside me was a maddening tease. It enticed, seduced, whispered of divine grace and union. The licorice-and-lime scent of venom was a memory of wholeness, of isolation transformed into unity and joy.

“Venom?” I asked the dragonmaster, though I’d not meant to; the words tripped from my self-willed tongue.

The dragonmaster stared at me, displeased. “You look to have enough of it in your blood, girl. I won’t give you more.”

A great weariness overwhelmed me at his words. I turned away from him and curled onto my side in the bedding chaff.

“You have to eat, hey-o,” the dragonmaster growled. “Your sole purpose from this moment on is to recover, to train, to survive Arena! Are you listening?”

I was listening, but his words evoked nothing but weariness in me. I saw no reason to recover, to train, to survive, if I were to be deprived of venom the rest of my life. A harsh admittance, that, and one I’m not proud of, but it is the truth nonetheless: I had escaped the viagand chambers only to imprison myself in the desire to further my decline into addiction.

I was, once more in my short life, utterly dependent upon the dragons’ poison.

Perhaps you would not blame me, if you could but once experience venom’s numinous embrace, coupled by the stupendous passion of dragonsong. To hear such power and through the hearing
become
the power is a lure I’m certain no mortal could refuse. And how much more powerful a lure for one such as I, who had stood so close to understanding the dragons’ divine music!