The Ruin of Kings (A Chorus of Dragons)

by Jenn Lyons

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  He looked up at her with wet and shining eyes. “Morea, I didn’t say it wasn’t safe for me.”

  She sat back in her chair in surprise. “Tell me,” she finally said. “Tell me what happened.”

  “He…” Kihrin inhaled, shut his eyes, and started over. “He put thoughts into my head. Terrible thoughts. Memories. Some of them mine, but twisted. Others not mine at all. No one hurt me. I was the one hurting everyone else. I was hurting people I know and people I’ve never even met before. Doing things to them. Killing them and worse. I liked it.” His voice was rough with horror. “Those thoughts are still there. Those memories lurk. I can’t—I don’t trust myself.”

  “No,” Morea said. “No. That’s the lie. He was tricking you. That’s not you. You’re good. You could never enjoy anything like that.”

  His laugh was half a sob. “Morea, you’ve known me for a few weeks, and only done more than exchanged stares with me today. Have you forgotten this afternoon already? You don’t think I have it in me to be mean? To be petty?”

  She looked away.

  “What if it wasn’t a trick? What if my reactions were my own and I really do enjoy hurting people? What if he only showed me what I truly am?”

  “No,” she protested. “Someone like that wouldn’t have ordered me to not touch them—for my own protection. I have known evil men. I have known men who love no sound so much as the screams of their victims. They don’t feel guilt about the hurt they cause. They don’t obsess about whether or not they are good people. This demon wasn’t trying to show you the truth about yourself. He wanted to hurt you. What could cause more lingering pain than this?”

  His smile was awkward. “I pray you’re right.”

  Morea looked at the rim of the wine cup. “You said he showed you doing terrible things to people you’ve never met?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Except there was a girl—” He scowled and didn’t finish.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not what you think.” Kihrin shook his head. “She probably wasn’t real. She looked so strange. I don’t think she was human.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “She had red hair,” Kihrin said, after an uncomfortable silence. “Not hennaed red hair, like yours. Her hair was either black or the color of blood, depending on the angle, and she only had a single stripe of it running from her forehead to her neck. Her eyes were fire, all flickering red and orange. And her skin was odd. Most of her body was normal enough, but her hands and feet were black, like she wore gloves and stockings.”

  A strange thing happened to Kihrin as he talked about the phantom girl; a faraway look caught in his eyes. He released some of the tension, some of the horror, that had kept him a trembling prisoner. He didn’t seem to notice.

  Morea frowned. Just exactly what had that demon done to this poor boy’s mind?

  “From the hair I’d say she sounds like a girl from Jorat,” Morea said. “My old master bought a slave girl from that dominion once. Everyone told him not to; they make poor slaves. The old bloods—the ones who trace their ancestry back to the Jorat god-king—they aren’t human anymore. There’s something in them that’s wild, and stays wild, and will not be broken.”*

  “What happened?”

  “She ripped out my master’s throat with her teeth and took her own life. My master’s daughter didn’t want to own a seraglio, so she sold us off. That’s how my sister and I were separated.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Now you know not to ever buy a Joratese slave.” Morea leaned forward. “Is she beautiful, this demon-brought Jorat-girl?”

  His expression faltered for a moment before he smiled. “Not as beautiful as you.”

  “You’re lying. I can tell.”

  “Jealous?” He was trying to tease, and not succeeding.

  “Can’t I be? She is, isn’t she? Very beautiful, I mean.”

  “Maybe a little,” he said, looking away.

  “Ah, and to think just this afternoon I was the girl who made you blush.”

  He looked guilty then, and Morea chided herself for teasing him when he’d had so much horror in his day. “Is that some sort of game?” she asked, looking at the silk-clad block and the dice cup on the table.

  “Not at all. Fate cards. Ola uses them.” He picked up the silk pouch and withdrew a deck of cards. Kihrin pulled a card off the top and showed her an intricately drawn miniature of a silver-haired angel flipping a coin: Taja, Goddess of Luck.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Ola sells more than sex here.” He shuffled the cards with one hand, flipping them in front and behind each other with nimble fingers.

  “You’re good at that.”

  “Ola’s better. She’s the one who taught me.” He paused. “She didn’t mean it, you know. About letting me see the General. She’s as set against it as Pappa. I know her too well.” He offered her the deck, fanned out so he couldn’t see the faces. “Take a card. Don’t tell me what it is.”

  She smiled and plucked a single card from the deck. “She did seem upset.”

  “Mad as old Nemesan.* And I don’t know why. But I know her. Hell, I was her apprentice when I was a kid. She’d never tell me not to do something, not if she was serious about it. She’d just fix the odds. You picked the Pale Lady.”

  Morea laughed and flipped the card over, revealing Thaena. “How did you do that?”

  “I fixed the odds.”

  Kihrin shuffled the cards and dealt, this time dealing cards on the table in a cross pattern with a card in the corners to form a square. He started turning over cards, the scowl on his face only increasing as he did. She studied the pictures with interest, but she didn’t know enough about fate cards to understand what they meant.

  “That good?” she finally asked.

  Kihrin stared at the cards blank-faced. “You know, I think that’s the worst reading I’ve ever seen. With a day like this, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “But what do the cards say?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual stuff. Death, loss, pain, suffering, slavery, and despair.” He started gathering the cards back up. “Not even a nice reward at the end of it, just this.” He picked up the card in the center: a solid rectangle of blackness. “The cold void of Hell. Nice.” He snorted and put the cards back into the bag. “Now I remember why I hate these things.” He refilled his wine goblet, stood up, and put the wine jug back in the cabinet.

  “How do you think Ola is going to fix the odds?”

  Kihrin glanced down at his cup of wine. “We’ll find out soon enough if I’m right. Come on. Ola’s bath is through that curtain. We’d best get this over with.”

  13: THE DETERMINED WIZARD

  (Kihrin’s story)

  I jumped up onto the railing and kept myself from falling overboard by grabbing the rigging. “Are those whales? I’ve never seen whales before.”

  “Oh, those?” Teraeth looked over the side of the ship with a bored expression. “Nothing but several dozen sixty-foot-long limbless blue elephants going for a swim. Pay them no mind.”

  “I’ve never seen so many.”

  “Apparently you haven’t seen any, so that’s not saying much.”

  I looked out over the ocean, watching the long, elegant forms breaking the surface, hurling themselves into the air to come crashing back down. After a few minutes, I stopped smiling.

  “Are they always this jumpy?”

  “It’s called breaching.”

  “And the blood?” I asked. “That’s normal too?”

  “What?” Teraeth turned around. I pointed behind the ship to where the whales jumped and churned. A streak of dark red spread out against the blue tropical water. The whales were racing, panicking, trying to overtake The Misery and swim past her.

  They were trying to escape.

  The vané knelt on the deck and put both hands against the wooden planks. He cocked his head to the side and c
losed his eyes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Listening.” He opened his eyes again. “Damn it all. Go bring my mother here. The whales are screaming.”

  “Screaming? But what could—” My voice died. A tentacle wrapped around one of the whales and pulled it under the waves. The water nearby churned a fresher crimson.

  I started to do as Teraeth ordered. He may not have been carrying my gaesh anymore, but just this once I was willing to make an exception. His mother was on a first-name basis with the Goddess of Death herself; she could only be an asset on an occasion like this. Then I stopped, because a second problem had manifested.

  “Tyentso’s headed right this way.” I stood caught between the approaching witch and the monster lurking in the ocean behind us.

  “I don’t care if she wants to ask me to dance, she can wait—” Teraeth looked up and paused.

  The ship’s witch, Tyentso, was marching aft, with Captain Juval close behind her. Sailors scattered as they advanced. It wasn’t the Captain’s presence that made them jump back as if they were about to touch a diseased corpse.

  Some women are worth staring at because of their beauty. When men stared at Tyentso, it was not admiration or lust but shock that the gods would be so unkind. She was a dark, thin woman, scarecrow-like, who dressed in a shapeless robe of layered rags and stained sacking. Her eyes were hard and arrogant; she held herself with the straight-backed poise of an aristocrat—one who could order the death of anyone who displeased her. Her tangled, unwashed nest of hair was the color of dirty sand and bleached driftwood; her nose and chin long and sharp enough to polish on a grindstone; her lips little more than a razor’s gash across her face.

  It would be impossible to guess at her talismans, not because she had none showing, but because she had too many. Bones, dried kelp, seashells, and bird beaks hung from her staff of ocean-washed, twisted pine. Similar flotsam found a home in that tangled hair. The staff made a noise like a rattle as she walked, as if to warn people to get out of her way.

  Which they did if they were wise.

  No, she did not radiate beauty. Instead, her aura was fear. She took the superstitious dread most people felt for the idea of a witch and wore it like a crown. No one who saw her doubted her profession, or that she could curse—would curse—any man who crossed her.

  The first mate, Delon, liked to use the threat of a night spent in her bed as insurance on good behavior from the crew.

  I liked her.

  Yes, she was the one responsible for summoning the succubus who gaeshed me, but only under Juval’s orders. She had been my single and only ally on board The Misery. Her spells were the only reason I’d survived Delon’s attentions. When not otherwise occupied, she’d spent the voyage locked away from the rest of the crew, studying her books, casting the myriad minor spells designed to keep the ship safe or detect danger.

  This was why the purposeful strides she made toward us, her storm-cloud eyes giving hard examination to the blooded ocean, made me so uncomfortable. She wouldn’t have left her cabin—worse, dragged the Captain with her—if the situation wasn’t every bit as serious as I feared.

  She saw me and stopped dead in her pace. “Just what in Tya’s name are you doing here?”

  “Never mind them,” Captain Juval said. “They’re passengers. They can walk the deck if they stay out of the way of the sailors. You two—” He gestured toward Teraeth and me. “Get out of here. We’ve business.”

  Tyentso ignored the Captain and continued to stare at me. She was, I realized, waiting for an answer.

  I looked over at Teraeth. Taja, I thought. The illusion isn’t working on her. She recognizes me.

  “I—” What could I say? How could I answer her with Captain Juval right there?

  “Never mind. Later.” She waved away any chance of response and moved to stand above the rudder. She paled as she looked out over the bloodied waters.

  Tyentso raised her staff into the air and spoke in a language that tugged at the back of my mind—something almost but not quite comprehensible. She moved her free hand in the air, and I couldn’t so much see as feel the faint traceries left behind. Complicated skeins of mathematics and arcane notation lingered behind my eyelids before releasing, with a rush of imploding air, out the back of the ship. The energy trails arched into the water: dozens, no, hundreds of tiny pulses created visible splashes.

  Teraeth joined me at the railing as we both watched the water. For a long pause, nothing happened. Every sailor on the ship was holding their breath. Then the waters around the whales began to fleck and boil with new bodies: smaller, silver flashes that converged on the blood smears growing faint in the distance as The Misery continued her trek. Another tentacle flipped out of the water, and the whole ship seemed to gasp. Hundreds of white water trails rolled over the waves toward the monstrous form.

  “Dolphins…” Teraeth whispered.

  Tyentso proclaimed, “THUS will I destroy the creature!” Her theatrical gesture was overdone, performed for the audience behind her.

  There was an audible sigh of relief, a sense of reprieve. The first mate, Delon, began snapping at the men to get back to work.

  Only Teraeth, the Captain, and I saw Tyentso’s expression held no such promise. She lowered her arms and glanced at Juval. “It’s a delay,” she said, “and nothing more. That is a Daughter of Laaka in those waters, not any mortal being.”*

  I felt ill. I was enough a minstrel’s son to know the songs and stories of the great kraken, the cursed daughters of the sea goddess. They were immortal beings and deadly foes of any ocean creature large enough to be prey, including ships. I had wanted to believe they were nothing more than stories.

  “We’ll outrun it,” Juval said. “By the time it’s done with your sea dogs, we’ll be long gone.”

  “I’m afraid,” Khaemezra said, “that would only work if the whales were ever her true quarry.”

  Captain Juval looked annoyed at the interruption. He didn’t notice how Tyentso’s eyes widened as she saw Teraeth’s mother, or the way the sea witch’s knuckles turned white as she gripped her staff. Tyentso’s gray eyes moved to Teraeth, then to me, and finally back to the Mother of the Black Brotherhood.

  She saw all of us for who we really were. No illusions for her.

  “Blooded shells!” the Captain snapped. “What is it with the passengers on this run? You three got no business here. Now get back to your damn cabin and leave this business to folks who know what’s what.”

  The rest of us looked at each other. I felt an unexpected sympathy for the Captain. I had been so scared of him once. He had been so angry with me; done terrible things to me in the heat of that anger. He was a towering figure, full of brooding violence that had never been just for show. Now—he was unimportant. He was all but dismissed, and just didn’t realize it yet. Tyentso and Khaemezra would decide who was in charge. The slave captain possessed no power to decide his destiny.

  “Juval, these are not normal passengers. It would be best if you leave this to me.” Tyentso’s tone belonged to a queen and allowed no room for argument.

  “Witch—”

  “You must trust me,” Tyentso hissed. “We are not yet out of danger.”

  I watched the battle going on under the waves. Even though the ship outpaced the original site of the whales and their attacker, I saw shapes moving in the water, sometimes jumping above it. Through it all, the long slithery tentacles slammed up above the waves to come crashing back down. The creature that owned those arms had to be enormous.

  I felt bad for the dolphins. I doubted Tyentso had politely asked them to throw their lives away fighting that thing, that they had volunteered.

  Tyentso turned to Khaemezra. “What did you mean about quarry?”

  “She comes for the ship,” Khaemezra explained. “It was Taja’s good fortune that she crossed the path of her favorite meal, and so gave us warning.”

  “She chases you.” The nest-haired witch stopped
and narrowed her eyes. Then Tyentso turned to me. “No. The Laaka’s Daughter chases you.”

  “Me? It’s not me. They’re the ones that upset the wizard.” I pointed to Teraeth and Khaemezra. “He didn’t like being outbid.”

  Juval scowled. “You lot are the cause of this? I’ve a mind to throw you all overboard and let the damn sea monster take you.”

  “That would be stupid,” Teraeth hissed. His whole body tensed. He had the look of a man mentally fingering his knives.

  “Enough!” Khaemezra said. “It does not matter why the kraken chases or whom it seeks. What matters is that she was summoned. I underestimated the resolve of the wizard responsible. I was sure the gate would lead him astray.”

  “I’ll have to destroy it,” Tyentso said. She surprised me by smiling, the first time I recalled her doing so. “I’ve never killed a kraken before.”

  “Aren’t they immune to magic? Isn’t that what all the stories say?”

  Tyentso smiled at me with grim, dark humor. “So is a witchhunter, but I learned a long time ago that everyone needs to breathe air or walk on land or swim in water. Those elements are mine. Let’s see how our kraken likes acid.” She pushed her sleeves up her arms.

  “No,” Khaemezra said. “You cannot.”

  “Oh, I very much can.” Tyentso raised her hands.

  “You should not then. You would be making a horrible mistake.”

  Tyentso sneered. “If you have a better plan to deal with this bitch, by all means share.”

  Khaemezra sighed with exasperation. “The wizard who did this was ignorant as to which ship we used to leave port. He didn’t summon a single Daughter of Laaka: he summoned one for every ship that left Kishna-Farriga. He knows I can destroy a kraken. He is counting on this very thing. Now he sits like a bloated spider, linked to each monster by a thin line of magic, waiting for the right thread to snap—for the kraken who does not survive her hunt. He knows that on the other side of that thread, he will find his prey. He will find us.”

  Tyentso stared at Khaemezra.