Song of the Dragon (15 page)

But the voice . . . he knew that voice.

Tsi-Shebin's voice.

“You left me here with nothing to comfort me,” the elven princess pouted, “and nothing with which to occupy my time in this forsaken frontier.”

Drakis felt the brush of silk against his right arm. The pinched face of the elf woman drifted into view as she sat next to him, leaning across him as she rested her weight on her hand.

Tsi-Shebin was young for an elf woman . . . impossible to guess in actual time but easily placed as equal to human females of sixteen or seventeen years. She was far from a child and yet not quite acceptable in elven adult company—an age of being between. Her head had the characteristic elongation of her race, though the back of her skull had a gentle taper to it that other elves found quite becoming. She wore her long, silver-white hair up after the royal fashion, exposing her shoulders while at the same time covering the baldness of the female elven crown with carefully pinned curls. Indeed, her angular features, narrow face and long, tapered ear tips were, Drakis had heard, considered stunningly beautiful by elfkind.

She looked revolting to Drakis.

“So, I suppose you're wondering what you always wonder about now,” Shebin said through a crooked smile. She had been in a flowing household dress when he had last seen her in the throne room. Now she wore a vibrant blue silk robe wrapped with a wide sash about her narrow waist. She sat upright and placed her bony hand on Drakis' chest. “There isn't much time, so I'll just tell you.”

Drakis was suddenly, horrifyingly aware that he was completely naked.

“We are in the healing room in the avatria,” Shebin continued in languid tones. “You're lying on a bed of Healer's Blade, and thanks to the Aether Well of my father, your wounds are being bound back together. I managed to stop Father's little self-indulgent rage before you were of no further use to anyone ever again. I had the servants bring you here, and I dismissed them so that I might tend to your healing myself. They've never told on us before . . . so they certainly won't now.”

She moved her hand lightly up his chest. “The door is barred, so no one will bother us.”

His breaths came more quickly. He tried to think; Shebin was Timuran's only child, a pampered young woman whom he could only recall having seen watching the combats from the wall around the training arena. She had applauded him once some years ago—this much he could recall—but beyond seeing her smiling at him as she stood next to Sha-Timuran at court for the presentation of each bounty, he had no recollection of her at all.

“You were always my favorite,” Shebin said, the long, carefully manicured fingernail of her right hand scraping across the skin of his wide chest. “Tsi-Narusin—she's that insufferable girl over in House Tajeran—she always used to brag about her little games with a
hoo-mani
from her father's stables. Her father found out about it, though, and burned that slave to ash right on the spot.

“Narusin was devastated about it for weeks.” Shebin giggled to herself with a strange gurgling sound. “It still galls her that I've got you to play with—and I remind her of it every chance I get.”

By the gods!
Drakis thought.
This can't be happening to me! Mala!
He had to get away, but he could not. His body remained unresponsive to his mind, the nerves working, his heart beating, his lungs dragging in air, but he could not willfully move. None of this made sense to him—it was a bad dream from which he could not awaken.

The dwarf! His world had turned upside down ever since they found the dwarf. Perhaps the dwarf was the key to ending this horrible nightmare. Maybe the dwarf was cursed or was a wizard or a deity or demon who came into the world to plague him.

“I know you'll come to me tonight when you're better healed—it takes time to knit the tissue back together properly,” Shebin cooed. The young elven woman reached down and began to unwrap the sash at her waist. “But we have a little time right now . . . and you've been away too long.”

The sash fluttered down out of her hand. The silken robe parted slightly, revealing the skin of the young elf female from her narrow neck down past the hollow of her stomach.

“I know I should have waited until after House Devotions,” she said through a sigh. “But why wait?”

Shebin pulled her knees up under her, kneeling next to the human warrior's immobile form. She unpinned her hair, which fell down around her shoulders, revealing the long bald strip typical of her race between her forehead and the back of her elongated crown. Shebin laughed darkly, then slipped the robe from her shoulders.

Drakis drew in a sharp breath.

Shebin was easily numbered among the greatest elven beauties in all the Western Provinces.

To Drakis, her wraithlike, angular, and bony form appeared hideously cadaverous—a living corpse whose fingers now lightly stroked his chest and body.

“Tell you what, Draki,” she murmured. “Why don't you just think of that
hoo-mani
woman you're always going on about—that precious Mala of yours—and know that
I
was the first to have you . . . that I am
always
the first to have you!”

Drakis could not—
dared
not—scream.

D
RAKIS STEPPED FURTIVELY through the archway and into the ornate hallway beyond. He noted with shocking clarity the pastel-colored walls curving upward from the polished stone floor. He felt the stones cool beneath his feet. Drakis concentrated on each of these aspects in turn with fierce single-minded determination, because if he did not, he would start to think . . .

“Has she quite finished with you?”

Drakis looked up into the face of Tsi-Timuri, Timuran's wife and the mother of Tsi-Shebin. He shook at the sight of her.

“Answer me, slave!”

“Yes, Mistress,” Drakis mumbled.

The older elven woman folded her narrow arms across her chest, her long fingernails, filed to sharp points, digging slightly into the flesh of her upper arms. She leaned back slightly, her face all angular plains of displeasure around tight lips and glistening, featureless eyes of black. Her iron-gray hair may have been luxuriously long, but it was tightly constrained into an almost rigid form close to her long head.

“Can you walk?” she asked at last.

“Yes . . . no . . . I think I can, Mistress.”

“Go on, then. Walk,” she said, nodding down a long, curving hallway.

The elderly elf woman gave him a shove, pushing him down the curve of the hallway. He saw clearly the disdainful curl of her withered lips and her accusing eyes. He tried to navigate the hall, but his legs were still weak and required his full attention to remain under him. The best he could manage was a staggering gait as he moved painfully before the contemptuous elf prodding him forward.

“That was worse than usual,” Timuri said behind him. “You should stay out of his way until Devotions. For now, try to remain as unnoticeable as possible.”

“Thank you, Mistress,” Drakis managed to say. “That is most kind of you.”

“Kindness has nothing to do with it,” Timuri snapped. “I will have order in my House. If that means pandering to my daughter's sick perversions—or my husband's for that matter—so be it. Someone has to pay for these indulgences for the sake of this House, and better you than me, slave . . . better you than me.”

Tsi-Timuri's voice trailed off behind him, but Drakis did not mind; the words had only been spoken to fill an empty place and never meant for him at all.

“Now, get out of my sight until Devotions, or I will kill you with my own hands,” Timuri hissed, “no matter how much my daughter considers you her personal pet.”

He realized with a start that he had come to the end of the hall and was staring out from the framework of the Servant's Portal.

“Go!”

“Yes, Mistress.”

There were four portals that accessed the avatria as it floated above the walled garden, each one connected by a delicate and ornate bridge to four matching towers that rose up from the walls of the subatria below. These towers were of varying heights, the two tallest reserved exclusively for the use of Sha-Timuran's family and the third for elven guests or officials as well as the elven servants of the avatria
.
These were each comprised of smooth, vertical shafts and relied on the small pedestal fountains at their bases—small Aether springs linked to the House Well—to levitate or descend according to the blessings of the elven gods whose powers they invoked. The fourth—and lowest—of the towers contained the only physical staircase between the avatria and the subatria.

This was the same staircase, he suddenly recalled, that he had bounded up so hopefully just a few hours before, the same rope-woven bridge that he had crossed gladly into the lower floors of the floating elven home with dreams of a better future bright in his mind.

He placed one foot in front of the other and then frantically gripped the railing of the bridge. The cedar planks that had been roped together to form the suspended bridge had once passed so surely under his feet, but now they felt shifting and treacherous. He swallowed hard, closing his eyes for a few moments, hoping for a momentary respite in the darkness within himself; then he opened them and peered over the side.

The Servant's Bridge was just over thirty feet above the floor of the garden below, he judged. Surely that was sufficient room to insure his death. All he had to do was vault the flimsy railings of the rope bridge. It would all be so easy and so quick. Mala would never have to know why he had done it.

Mala.

The thought of her gave him pause. She would not know why, indeed—and the not knowing would hurt her, too. So he looked away from the siren call of oblivion and made his way on unsure feet the rest of the way across the bridge.

He would have to find a way to keep his shame from Mala—because he would rather bear the pain of it himself than be the cause of pain to her.

Somehow, he made his way down the long, interminable circles of the spiral stairs until they ended at one side of the House Garden. He turned at once, keeping his watering eyes fixed on the curve of the garden wall, his left hand reaching up to feel its surface as he made his way quickly around its perimeter.

He bumped suddenly into the hulking form of a manticorian gardener—a fat brute he remembered as RuuKag—who snarled at him. Drakis mumbled his apologies and ducked past the lion-man quickly.

He had to get out of the garden. Mala often was assigned to work here, and he could not bear to see her, not yet at any rate. He had to think through this, figure out how it was that his good life and prospects for a better one had suddenly turned to ash in a single day.

No, he realized: not in a single day. Things had been going wrong ever since he had departed for the Battle of the Ninth Throne three weeks before. The terrible losses in the battle—friends and comrades with whom he had shared innumerable campaigns—as well as the loss of their Proxi at the climax of the battle itself and the subsequent loss of the crown. Then there was the bizarre dwarf whose endless prattle had suddenly, terribly come true and turned his blessed life into a cursed one . . .

“Hail Drakis!”

Drakis snapped his head toward the sound. The wall of the House Garden had ended abruptly at a long, vaulted hallway curving back around to his left. The walls were covered with the picture-writing of the elves and lined with enormous elven statues of each of the previous masters of the line of Timuran. The figures looked down with disapproval on the two figures coming toward Drakis from its far end: a short, squat figure and a manticore.

Drakis did not immediately recognize the dwarf, for he was shaven after the fashion of slaves. His once long and luxurious beard was gone, as was his mane of hair. His jowly and receding chin gave his face an almost infantile appearance, like a fat human baby who had been too well fed. His extravagant clothing was replaced with the common tunic, and his newly shaved head now bore the tattooed mark of a House slave.

“It is good to see you again, Drakis,” the dwarf said with careful lightness in his voice, his eyes fixed on the human. “I have been worried about you, you know.”

Drakis could only stare at the dwarf.

“Drakis? Are you well?”

Only then did he realize that the manticore was Belag. Drakis took in a long, shuddering breath and looked up into the face of the towering manticore.

The creature's yellow eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Is there something wrong?”

He doesn't know,
Drakis realized.
Sha-Timuran has not told any of the Impress Warriors about my beating . . . no one has told them. Perhaps Mala doesn't know either . . .

“No, everything is fine,” he lied. “Sha-Timuran was . . . was pretty upset about losing the crown, especially to his neighbor . . . but everything is fine.”

Belag considered this for a time and then nodded with a grunt. “You are square, then?”

“Yes—I am square,” Drakis replied, but he looked away as he spoke. “What are you doing with the dwarf?”

“Jerakh told me to bring him for shearing and branding.”

“Ah,” Drakis nodded. “I see. So he couldn't stand him either. Where are you taking him now?”

They both turned to look at Jugar. He had wandered back down the long curve of the great hall, staring up at the wall above him with both of his thick hands clasped tightly behind his back.

“It's back to the barracks with him until he is impressed this evening at Devotions,” Belag said although his furry brows were knitted in thought. “I don't like him, Drakis. There's something unsettling about him.”