Daughter of Ancients

by Carol Berg

  Paulo closed his eyes and tugged at a clump of his sandy hair, as if to focus his thoughts. “I’ve got linen bandages in my pack.”

  “Good. You can bash away the shellstone while I look at the bolts. But first”—I really hated to ask him—“you’ve got to tie up my arm, or I’m going to pass out and be no help at all.”

  He did it, and gently enough, considering the circumstances. Fortunately he appeared to be uninjured. From the blood decorating his shirt and breeches, I didn’t have to ask about the other fellow.

  “What about that?” he said, pointing to the spinning ring. “If I was to stand on the table, I could grab it . . . stop it maybe . . .”

  “No! Don’t touch it. Don’t even look at it. I once saw a slave touch one of the rings back in the Lords’ house, and it withered his hand. We don’t have power enough to deal with it. We just have to get him away from it.”

  To my relief, what I’d seen as bolts through Gerick’s hands and feet were, in fact, long spikes attached to the metal straps, like those I’d seen in D’Sanya’s lectorium. Barbed, I remembered, thus wicked enough. Only the straps were bolted to the rock. If we could get them loose, then the spikes could be eased out of his flesh. With luck, there would be no damage to his bones. With luck, we could stop the bleeding. With luck, removing the straps and the shellstone and getting him away from the oculus would leave him free of enchantment. With luck. I had never considered myself a particularly lucky person.

  Warning Paulo to stay back, I touched one of the metal straps with my finger. The gut-wrenching slap of power convinced me instantly that we needed a tool with which to get them loose. D’Sanya’s enchantments were far beyond me. Setting Paulo to chipping at the thin layers of shellstone with a fist-sized rock, I cast my handlight again and explored the adjoining rooms.

  Several of the rooms had collapsed walls and were completely filled with rubble. One was littered with piles of old bones. I spoke words of peace sending and apologized for having no incense, then left quickly.

  A skull sat in a niche above the doorway of the innermost chamber. The lintel was cracked and the doorway skewed to one side, the heavy wooden door hanging by one hinge, but the room itself was intact. I had never been inside the Vault of the Skull when I lived in Zhev’Na, only heard tales of cruel and restless spirits who inhabited it. But someone more substantial than a ghost had been here . . . and fairly recently, too. A torch in a wall bracket still smelled of oil. I whispered the spell to set it aflame, then let my handlight die. I’d best hoard power for the spikes.

  The chamber was a Metalwright’s workroom, containing tools and materials similar to those I’d seen in D’Sanya’s lectorium. I dared not touch the shaped scraps on the worktable, but in one corner lay neat stacks of metal bars of all lengths and sizes. They looked fairly innocent. I grabbed a long flat bar of black steel and a few of the tools and stuffed them under my arm. Grabbing the torch from the bracket, I then hurried back to the larger chamber.

  Paulo had created a mountain of stone chips. His face was coated with chalky dust. In a few places the sweat held enough of the shellstone dust that a thin white glaze had formed, like the skim of ice on a still pond. He wiped his face with his upper arm. “He’s bleeding again,” he said as I came in, “but the knife wound has started to close. As you said.”

  “Good. I knew she wouldn’t want him to die. As long as he doesn’t heal too fast . . .”

  I found a bracket for the torch on a nearby column, gave Paulo the steel bar, and warned him again not to touch the metal straps with his hands. “When you get the straps loose from the rock, I’ll get the spikes off him.” He nodded and set to work, levering the black bar under one wrist strap and prying with all his strength, his shoulders bulging. I took up his rock and carefully chipped away the brittle stone that had molded the young Lord’s cheekbones.

  After a seemingly interminable time, the bolts holding the strap to the rock finally gave way.

  Paulo wiped the sweat from his face and moved to the other side. I took D’Sanya’s pincers and sharp little trimming knife and, swearing at the uselessness of left hands, awkwardly removed the barbed spike from Gerick’s cold flesh. Foul-smelling black fluid gushed from the wound in his palm, and only when it ran healthy red again did I bind his hand tightly with a strip of linen.

  It seemed to take us an eternity to free his wrists, head, and right ankle. The torchlight was wavering. Paulo was straining at the last strap, his body shaking with the effort, and I was trying to stanch the flow of blood from Gerick’s right foot, when my vision blurred and a musty scent enveloped us.

  “Hurry,” I said. A quick check of the knife wound revealed only an angry, seeping scar on Gerick’s chest. With a furious growl, Paulo pressed again, and I tied off the ankle wound.

  “This way! They’ve trespassed the fortress!” The shouts filtered down the stair. Boots trampled overhead.

  “Ignore whatever you hear and see,” I said. “You’ve got to keep working even if you can’t see the strap.”

  Footsteps on the stair. “I’ll sup on their entrails!”

  The strap snapped loose. We were out of time. Reality was flickering before my eyes and I didn’t know how long Gerick could hold back his lethal visions. Without skill or delicacy I slit the flesh around the spike and ripped the vile implement from his left foot. Paulo tied off the wound without waiting for the poisonous flow to end.

  “We’ve got to get him away from here,” I whispered.

  “Away from that.” The ring still spun its evil magic overhead.

  “Lead the way,” said Paulo. “He won’t die in this place at the least.”

  As Paulo hefted his friend into his arms and then over his shoulder, the torch guttered and died. The faint gleam of the oculus danced on the shellstone rubble, but on nothing else.

  Stale, fetid air . . . a whispering evil that crept around us, moaning, sighing . . . Entombed with madness . . . danger . . . You are our instrument . . . Destroyer . . .

  As panic threatened to choke off the wail rising in my throat, one small part of my mind continued to function. Where is the door? I felt my way forward, waving my uninjured arm ahead of me . . . holy Vasrin, how did Aimee manage this every day of her life? Ten paces . . . fifteen . . . how large was this chamber? Think. I crashed into the stone door frame, almost knocking myself senseless.

  Light . . . you’ve got to have light, idiot girl. Cursing my stupidity and my incapable sorcery, I cast a feeble handlight. It wouldn’t last a quarter of an hour.

  On our way up the stair we had to step through piles of moaning wounded, begging us to stop and give aid, clawing at our legs with handless arms, weeping with the dreadful wails of lost souls. “Not real,” I mumbled. “Not real.” The farther we got from the spinning oculus, the more transparent the visions became, until they faded away altogether. No murderous apparitions awaited us at the top of the stair.

  Stepping out of the ruined temple into the desert air was the closest thing I’d ever felt to having my slave collar removed, a burden of vile oppression lifted so that the world came to life once more. The sky curved above us pure black and studded with stars, and the wind that rolled the thornbushes through the ruined courtyards was the natural cold of a desert night.

  Nim had kept her promise, and she and her wrinkled friend were waiting beside the fallen gates. When they glimpsed Gerick, eyes sunken, skin pale, body slathered with drying blood and shellstone dust, it was all we could do to keep them from abandoning us. Only my threat to bring back the smoke demon kept them with us.

  Paulo draped Gerick over one of the horses and tied him securely. Pesca’s back might have been the surface of the moon for all the likelihood of my climbing so high, so I took the reins and started walking away from the ruin, my left arm wrapped tightly over the bound right one.

  “Wait!” Paulo grabbed Pesca’s halter and dragged the two of us toward a granite block, fallen from the broken wall. “Step up.”

  I
stepped onto the knee-high block, and Paulo grabbed my waist and leg and heaved me into the saddle. I almost passed out. The stars smeared across the sky as I wrapped my left arm about Pesca’s neck.

  The desert dwellers led us across the plain and up a steep, twisting path into the jagged cliffs, outlined like dark teeth against the stars. For every jarring step of that journey I prayed that my arm would fall off. After the mostly invisible track through the cracks and hollows of the ridge leveled into a wide trough between two high walls, Nim stopped and pointed into a small pocket of night on our right. “You can stay here.”

  I bent my head down to Pesca’s mane and sobbed in gratitude and terror. Though happy to stop moving, I just couldn’t comprehend how I was going to get off of that horse without coming completely apart.

  By the time Paulo had taken Gerick deeper into the dark hollow in the cliffs and laid him on the dirt, Nim and Rab had pulled my feet out of the stirrups and, as gently as four trembling hands could manage a cursing, weeping wreck of a woman, dragged me from my mount and sat me down. They pointed at a muddy waterhole under a rock overhang and shoved a pile of thornbush scraps at us. “The riake vontu can make fire, yes?” asked the old man, his voice quavering. Before I could answer, they scurried off into the night.

  I felt nothing like a demon vanquisher, but did feel my humiliating performance of the last hour was somewhat balanced by the wan yellow light that still glowed from my numb fingers. As Paulo settled Gerick on the sand and whipped two blankets out of our saddle packs to bundle around him, I managed to spit one small spark from my handlight to set the dry brush afire. Hiccupping, trying not to moan too grotesquely, I rolled onto my left side and let my light die. I would leave it to Paulo to organize the blaze, while I concentrated on not moving or screaming.

  “Here, let me look at that,” said Paulo after a moment, dropping to his knees next to my face.

  He touched my shoulder, and I threatened to gouge his eyes out amongst other things. From out of the blinding red haze, I heard him say that my arm seemed to be pulled out of its socket instead of broken, and that he had helped some stableman aid a fallen rider who had the same condition. I heard myself sobbing and saying something like, “Well then do something about it before I take an ax to it!”

  “All right, then. Hold on.” And he held my wrist firmly, bent my elbow, and did something that seemed to plant a hook in my stomach and draw that organ right up through my chest and out through my shoulder. I yelled and collapsed in a gibbering heap. All in all, a fortunate outcome for both of us. The pain was miraculously reduced, and I had no strength left to kill him.

  CHAPTER 26

  Over the next hours, the wound on Gerick’s left foot swelled horribly and oozed thick black fluid that smelled like putrefying flesh. He lay in a feverish stupor, and, despite Paulo’s application of the healing salves Aimee had sent with us, black streaks stretched up Gerick’s leg, farther by the moment. I had seen a number of such wounds . . . all of them made by blades forged in Zhev’Na.

  “You must let me try this,” I said to Paulo, once I had regained my composure and a measure of lucid thought. “You’re right that I’m not a Healer, and I’ve little enough power, but an enchantment of purification might help neutralize the poison. By my father’s head, I mean him no harm.”

  “He hates magic being done to him as much as he hates doing it himself. You wouldn’t understand.”

  No, I didn’t understand his argument, but I felt the heat of Gerick’s fever even from several body-lengths away. “You lived in Zhev’Na, Paulo. You saw the results of Zhid poison. Putrefaction. Sepsis. A mortification of the surrounding flesh that kills more often than not. Purifying such a wound is more likely to help him than easing the pain, and it certainly won’t make things worse. He won’t ever have to know I did it.”

  I edged closer, scooting my backside across the sand and gravel, and laid my left hand on Gerick’s chest. His heart was fluttering wildly. Calling up the ritual steps my mother had taught me in a childhood when I was forever falling out of trees and tumbling off the rocks behind our house, I reached out for the three purest elements I could find—the starlight, the sharp wind of the heights, the clean strength of this odd fellow Paulo’s love for his friend—and I drew them close to hand and wove them together, infusing their essence with the meager scraps of my power. The simple enchantment that my mother had called “hurt’s ease” smelled like clean soap and, if I did it right, should settle on the young Lord’s swollen left foot like a Healer’s balm and a soft bandage.

  Paulo didn’t stop me as I laid my thumb on the bandaged wound and let my other fingers enfold both thumb and ankle to focus the little spell. “Why is the Lady’s enchantment like Zhid poison?” he mumbled as he jabbed at the blazing brush. “Don’t make sense.”

  He had retrieved my cloak along with our packs and laid it over my shoulders. Once my pitiful spellmaking was finished, I pulled the garment tighter and lay down by the fire, only to find myself too uncomfortable and too overwrought to sleep. I lay watching Paulo drip water on Gerick’s lips and bathe his friend’s face and arms with a grimy rag dampened in the mudhole. Every hour for the rest of the night he repeated his ministrations. Gerick did not wake.

  Daylight revealed that our shelter was not truly a cave, but only a shallow concavity scooped out of the gritty red rock by a long-vanished river. A few scrubby plants and a stand of stiff gray grass survived in the old riverbed, thanks to the shade of the overhanging cliff and the sluggish mudholes underneath it. All we could see from our location were the silver sheen of desert daylight and more layered red rock.

  While refilling our water flasks from the slow-to-replenish mudhole—a task that looked to occupy the entire day—I spotted something metallic protruding from a notch in the rocks across the riverbed from the overhang. Closer investigation revealed a jumble of metallic rubbish: old nails, rusting harness, bent shields, and broken tools. The scavengers’ treasury.

  Paulo had not left Gerick’s side all night and demonstrated no intention of falling asleep, despite my admonitions and avowals of good intent. He paced; he hammered his hands on the rocks; he fumbled with cooking pots and tack and spent hours grooming the horses we’d tethered where they could crunch the stiff grass. Gerick was never out of his sight.

  As Paulo wouldn’t allow me to do anything more for his friend, I had little to occupy my time once I had filled the water flasks. Thanks to his skillful manipulation, I could pretty much move my right arm as I wished, but I had him bind it tightly to my chest again to ease the constant ache. My fingers were only gradually regaining sensation. Being one-handed for very long was going to drive me to distraction.

  The sleepless night and my aching shoulder made our ration of dried bread and greasy meat, no matter how well preserved, singularly unappetizing. I tried again to sleep, but could not find a comfortable position. Not a wisp of a breeze found a path into the old watercourse. The afternoon was stifling.

  Only after the wretched day had long expired did Paulo succumb to exhaustion. His head lay wedged between two rocks—an entirely appropriate place as far as I was concerned—and his long body blocked the way in and out of the sheltering overhang. He would have been more comfortable farther back under the rocks where it was sandier, but I couldn’t move him by myself, and I had no heart to wake him.

  Though Gerick’s fever yet burned, the sepsis in his foot had not worsened in the past few hours. I kept the water going down him, and soaked the rag in the smallest puddle and laid it on his forehead. With too little to distract me, I thought a great deal about the rescue and about what we had left behind in the ruins. No matter how I tried to convince myself otherwise, no matter how terrified I became at the thought that insisted on planting itself in my head, I could not shake the sense that our work was dangerously unfinished.

  On the next morning, while Paulo yet slept, I rummaged through Nim’s hoard of metal objects and picked out a shovel and a sword with a broken tip.
Then, with much swearing and difficulty, I unstrapped my arm and saddled my horse.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” A bleary-eyed Paulo stood at the edge of the overhang as I fastened the implements to my saddle. He looked more filthy and bedraggled than threatening—though I would have thought more than twice before challenging him.

  “I’m going back to retrieve the oculus. We can’t just leave it there where anyone can find it. Innocent people like Nim—I promised to protect her—or others like real Zhid, or the one who put it there . . .”

  “Absolutely not. You can’t—”

  “I’ll not bring it anywhere near him.” I jerked my head toward Gerick. “I’ve no desire to participate in your friend’s nightmares again. I’ll take it down, bury it where no one can find it, and be back by nightfall.”

  I verified that the two water flasks in my rucksack weren’t leaking, crammed an empty bag of thick canvas in beside them, and fixed the pack on my saddle, anxious to get going before he got some notion of stopping me.

  “I thought a person couldn’t touch the thing,” he called after me, stepping out into the sunlight. “I thought it would hurt you. I thought you didn’t have power enough to deal with it.”

  “Then you won’t have to worry about me killing him any more, will you?” I yelled back at him.

  Neither phantom nor villain came anywhere in sight as I descended the ridge and crossed the searing plain into Zhev’Na. Yet even with no imminent physical threats, I felt jittery and sick as I entered the charred chamber with the rubble-strewn stone block in the center of it. The oculus still spun in the air above the stone table, weaving its horror from the light of my torch. All the bravado I had donned for Paulo evaporated. I had no confidence at all that I could do this.

  With only one able arm and no talent to work with, everything took far longer than it should have. I tried every simple unlocking and detaching spell I’d ever heard of to loosen the enchantment that held it suspended, but none of them seemed to work. Finally I climbed onto the table, kicking some of the debris onto the floor. Taking as firm a stance as I could hold, I held the broken sword in my left hand and used my right arm to brace it. Then I stabbed upward to snare the ring, fighting to keep the thing from sweeping me off the table. I held on, and after a few moments, it dropped onto the sword with a clang. I pointed the sword downward and let the ring slide to the floor. Shuddering, I bashed the sword hilt against the shellstone that had already formed a brittle rim around the sole of my boots and jumped down from the slab.