by Martin Frowd
“Am always right. You will see. Soon, we sail.”
“We’re sailing at last?” a new voice said behind them. “Well, it’s about time we left this wretched place and headed back to civilisation!”
“Two-legged puppy off leash again,” observed Kitithraza.
“Hello, Farouk,” Anjali said, turning to face her fellow apprentice and rolling her eyes. “No, we’re not sailing yet. The Master isn’t back yet, Farouk. Hopefully he will be soon though, and then we can set sail. Aren’t you supposed to be watching the younglings?”
“The brats are being supervised,” the newcomer shrugged haughtily, fastidiously smoothing down his black robe and pointedly ignoring Kitithraza.
Anjali sighed and exhaled smoke up to the cloudless blue sky. “You persuaded one of the crew to keep an eye on them? Again?”
“Well, they’re only sailors, it’s not as if they have much to do while we’re sat at anchor out here,” the other apprentice retorted defensively. “Once we’re on the way home, I suppose the Master will have us helping with these benighted brats’ education, when he’s not continuing our own training, but for now, some common sailor is good enough to stop the brats from getting into mischief or killing each other. You seemed perfectly happy to shove them off on me earlier!”
“Farouk, we’ve been through this,” Anjali sighed. “I had to come up on deck to renew the illusion and the repulsion charm, as I’ve done every day since we’ve been here, so that no-one spots us or the ship sitting out here and so the zombies don’t happen to wander straight into us while we’re invisible. I can do that, with my Gifts. You can’t. And these so-called benighted brats are the entire reason we’re out here. Have you forgotten?”
“It surely hasn’t taken all that time to renew a couple of spells,” her fellow apprentice objected petulantly. He stepped closer to her, accentuating his few inches of extra height over her. “You’re avoiding me. I can tell.”
“Even dumb puppy can sniff what is in its face,” Kitithraza purred, stepping between them. Although the black-robed apprentice was a little taller than the felis, he instinctively flinched and stepped back a pace from her. The felis smirked at his discomfort. Her whiskers twitched with mirth.
“Well, I was,” Anjali shrugged. “It’s a lot easier to avoid you when you aren’t standing in front of me,” she smiled sweetly.
Kitithraza purred with amusement, took a deep drag on her cigarette and blew smoke directly in Farouk’s face, making him cough and step back another pace. “We go below, so you can avoid him again?”
“What an excellent idea, my Kitiyeh,” Anjali smiled radiantly at the felis. She finished her cigarette and tossed it overboard into the water, leaned into Kitithraza and deliberately kissed her. Kitithraza responded in kind, Farouk standing and watching sourly as the two women, human and felis, kissed, tongues flickering in and out of each other’s mouths, wisps of smoke rising from them both. Eventually, they broke off the kiss, stepped around Farouk and went below deck, hand in hand, leaving him staring after them as they went, shocked, angry and aroused in equal measure, Anjali could tell.
◆◆◆
A few hours later, Anjali and Kitithraza lay together in the bed in Anjali’s cabin – their shared cabin since early in the voyage – cuddling and basking in the afterglow of their recent lovemaking. The setting sun bathed them in a reddish light through the cabin window, dappling Kitithraza’s black fur and imparting a ruddy glow to the light sheen of sweat that glistened on Anjali’s light brown skin and dampened the sheets tangled around them both.
“That…was amazing,” Anjali sighed with pleasure. “It always is with you, my Kitiyeh.”
“Is,” the felis agreed with no trace of false modesty. “Am good at mating. But still you are troubled,” she observed.
“I was just thinking about the future, my Kitiyeh. Soon the Master will be back and we’ll sail home to Maraport. We’ll go back to the School. Then what becomes of us? You and me, I mean? You’re only contracted to the crew for the duration of this voyage.”
“Future is future,” the felis shrugged. “Now is now. Now, while we are on ship, you are my mate. Future? Who can say where fate will take us.”
“You could come with us – to the School, I mean – when we return, my Kitiyeh,” Anjali suggested. “You have enough magic to qualify for apprentice, for certain. If the Master won’t take you on – and he might well – there are other masters at the School. You could apprentice to one of them, and we could be together.”
“We see. Not so good at taking stupid orders I am. But learning is good. We see,” the felis wrapped both fur-shrouded arms tightly around Anjali.
“Most of the masters are fairly sensible,” Anjali laughed, but decided not to press the point further for now. She snuggled into Kitithraza’s embrace as the red glow of the setting sun gradually faded and night fell. The lovers basked in the silence and near-darkness, exchanging slow, tender caresses, until a ringing bell sounded somewhere close by.
“Is dinner bell,” Kitithraza observed. “Best go, before two-legged puppy and younglings everything eat. Avoid him is good, but not if starve.”
Anjali laughed and extricated herself from her lover’s arms, sitting up in bed. Reaching for the chair that stood beside the bed, she found her discarded purple silk robe, with the help of the thin slice of silvery moonlight that shone in the cabin window, slipped it on and tied the belt. As she strapped bejewelled sandals onto her feet, she smiled at the felis. “I do love you, you know.”
“Am knowing,” was the felis’ only acknowledgement as she shrugged into her harness of crisscrossing leather straps, adorned with sheaths and pouches, and they left the cabin together.
SIX: CAPTIVE
Zarynn gaped at the Druid who stood before him and had just pronounced judgement upon him. The Druid who had only seconds earlier worn the form of an enormous, fearsome lion, but now stood as a man in the brown robes of the hateful Druid Order.
As Zarynn stood staring, men appeared on the crest of the hill behind the Druid. More hard-faced hunters of the People, clad in hide and armed with long spears like the men who had ambushed him and the necromancer Glaraz earlier in the day. But unlike those two earlier groups, this band of hunters was mounted, riding the small, sturdy ponies favoured by the People of the Bear for their surefootedness. The riders began to spread out to his left and right as they crested the hill. Prowling by the flanks of the ponies came no less than four of the hunting cats of the People, two to left and two to right, long and lean beasts covered in mottled brown fur. They snarled as they prowled closer, showing long fangs that glinted in the fading light of sunset.
Behind him, Zarynn could hear the squawks of the hookbeaks perched on the ledge above the cave entrance. The birds rose up in an agitated flutter of wings and sharp piercing cries in response to the presence of the cats, but a wave of the Druid’s hand calmed them, and they alighted again on the ledge at Zarynn’s back.
“Your life is over,” the Druid repeated. “Your witch-tricks will not save you this time, abomination. Whatever Gift you used to hide from the cats in the cave will not work here in the open and in the sight of the Great God! Take him,” he ordered the approaching hunters. “Bind him well, that he does not escape this time. Gag him, that he can work no magic.” The Druid turned back to Zarynn. “Were it up to me, you would die here and now for the lives you have taken, deathcaller. Many hunters of the People have died to your shadow magic and your foul necromancy, here and among your own clan. It is an abominable sin to force the dead to walk! But the Law says that an example must be made of you, where all your clan of the People can see it, so you shall be taken back to the execution ground from which you escaped, and there rightly stoned to death.”
Zarynn was too stunned to move as several hunters dismounted their ponies and advanced, bearing coils of rope, but his mind was racing. The Druid thinks I killed the hunters? Thinks I called up the walking dead men? Then they don’t know ab
out Glaraz. They haven’t caught him!
“Never in all my years have I seen a necromancer so young,” the Druid continued as the hunters seized hold of Zarynn and began to roughly tie his wrists in front of him. “Your parents will burn forever in Hell for hiding you away.”
The wicked Druid’s invocation of Zarynn’s beloved parents, murdered at the command of another Druid, finally broke Zarynn’s paralysis. Twisting out of the hunters’ grasp, he ducked under the ropes and attempted to run. But he had taken only a few paces when a phenomenal weight crashed into his back, sending him sprawling to the ground, and pressed down on him when he tried to rise. He tasted dirt and blood in his mouth and spat it out as the warm, muscled weight atop him flexed and pushed him down. Hot breath blew through his hair. Paws nearly the size of his head slapped the ground on either side of his face, and sharp teeth pressed against the back of his neck. He froze instantly as the cat snarled in his ear, shifted its weight and settled more firmly on top of him.
In moments, the hunters had caught up with him, and tied his wrists in front of him with rope, adding a few kicks to punish him for his escape attempt. Zarynn tried in vain to resist as his hands were bound, and again as his jaw was yanked open and a foul-smelling rag stuffed in his mouth and tied behind his head. Only once Zarynn was bound and gagged did the cat let him up. One of the hunters jerked on the rope, pulling Zarynn awkwardly to his feet, with the hunting cat still snarling behind him and more hunters surrounding him. The Druid watched as the men yanked Zarynn upright and one of their number knelt to wrap more rope tightly around his ankles. They lifted him then, draping him facedown over the saddle of one of the ponies, and he felt more rope wrapping around him, trussing him up in a near-cocoon and securing him to the saddle.
“We ride now,” the Druid commanded. “To the silent vale, we shall camp there this night, and make for this abomination’s clan at first light.”
With a chorus of trills and squawks, the hookbeaks lifted off into the air, circled once and flew away, scattering in different directions. From his upside-down position, draped over the back of a pony, Zarynn saw the hunters remount. Each man appeared to have a steed, so they must have brought a riderless pony for him. Zarynn fancied that he glimpsed a hint of disquiet in the hunters’ expressions at the Druid’s mention of the silent vale, but if so, it was quickly wiped from their faces. The Druid moved around behind him, and Zarynn lost sight of the man. Moments later, he felt as much as heard a deep rumbling growl and gaped anew as the gigantic lion paced slowly into his line of sight again. The enormous beast fixed him with an amber-eyed stare and growled again, and Zarynn knew without words that the transformed Druid was warning him that any attempt at escape would be futile.
The lion-Druid growled a third time, and the hunters seemed to take it as a command to move, nudging their ponies into motion. A line of ponies began to trot along the dirt path in single file, flanked by the far swifter hunting cats pacing back and forth along the column. From his limited upside-down vantage point, Zarynn had the impression that his pony was halfway along the column, guarded by hunters ahead and behind as well as the flanking cats. He had lost sight of the transformed Druid, but from time to time could hear the deep leonine growls, sometimes seemingly coming from the head of the column and sometimes from somewhere further back.
As surefooted as the pony was, it was still far from a comfortable ride for Zarynn, bound across its back, bouncing and jostling with every step. The ropes bit into his wrists and ankles, reminding him of the iron chains at the execution ground, and the foul smell of the gag made him feel nauseous, made worse by his inverted position across the pony’s swaying back. Zarynn desperately tried to keep the gorge from rising in his throat, terrified of choking on his own vomit. Zarynn’s head began pounding from the stress of his situation as the sun finally sank below the western horizon and all was dark. He tried to struggle, but the ropes were too tight and held him fast.
A globe of light flickered on the edge of Zarynn’s vision and he realised dimly that the Druid had called forth a magic light to guide the column of riders in the darkness. The sudden bright firelight hurt his eyes and made his headache all the worse as the pony plodded onward. Through the pounding pain in his head, Zarynn tried to remember what it was about the silent vale that the dead man had said to Glaraz the necromancer. Something about Druids and…wolves? Doomwolves, perhaps? Zarynn was finding it harder and harder to concentrate through the pain, but he thought Glaraz had been alarmed or worried at the notion of a silent vale, whatever that was.
Then the pain became too much for him and he blacked out.
◆◆◆
Zarynn opened his eyes and found himself once more on the featureless plain of eye-searingly bright orange rock, under the eerie pale green sky. Darker green lightning flashes raced across the sky from one horizon to the other, and bolts of dark green discharged sporadically from sky to ground. This time, Zarynn knew that he was not truly awake.
Fledgling. Zarynn. As before, the booming voice seemed to come from everywhere around him, carried across the strange pale green sky. This time, Zarynn expected it, although the force behind it still made the ground reverberate beneath his feet. Your predicament is…unfortunate.
“A Druid caught me!” Zarynn called out to the green sky. “I tried – I tried to run – Glaraz – I don’t know what happened – they think I raised the dead men!”
We are in your head, fledgling. I know all that has transpired.
“Tran-transpired?”
All that has happened to you, fledgling. To Zarynn’s dreaming mind, the booming voice sounded almost impatient. This is not the ending.
“B-but – Glaraz – they think I have the big magic but I don’t!”
You are Gifted, fledgling. Strongly, by the meagre capabilities of your kind.
“B-but I c-can’t c-call it! It c-comes wh-when it w-wants t-to!” Zarynn stammered up at the green sky. “I c-can’t g-g-get away on m-my own, they’ll just find me again! C-can’t y-you h-help m-m-me?”
Long have I waited for one such as you to be spawned, fledgling. One with magic strong enough to do what must be done. Your story must not end here! The dark green lightning slammed into the orange ground with such force that Zarynn toppled over backward. As he regained his footing, Zarynn realised dimly that the fall had caused him no pain, which he supposed made a certain sense if this was not his true body.
“Th-then y-y-you’ll help me?” Zarynn dared ask of the now churning sky.
This is not how it ends, the booming voice reiterated. Your custodian shall find you yet. Look for him at the silent place.
“Gl-Glaraz? Th-then he’s alive?” Zarynn questioned the sky, but the voice had fallen silent. The churning of the sky and the crashing of the lightning grew more intense, until all went black once more.
◆◆◆
Zarynn woke, and immediately wished he had not. The pain in his head had subsided, but the swaying beneath him and the clopping sound of many hooves told him, even before he dared open his eyes, that he was still draped face down over the pony’s back and that more ponies preceded and followed his. He could feel the ropes still biting into his wrists and ankles, and taste something foul in his mouth where the gag yet remained. The musky smell of cat was strong in his nostrils, and the snarls close by confirmed that the hunting cats still accompanied the column of riders. A deep, rumbling growl from further ahead suggested that the Druid was still leading the way in his lion form. Zarynn had no way to tell how long he had been unconscious, but it was clear that he and his captors were still in transit to their destination.
His eyes still closed, Zarynn tried to process all that had just happened, if indeed he could trust that any of it was true and not merely a fevered dream. The voice had said that the necromancer Glaraz was still alive, and that Glaraz would come for him, at the silent place. That must surely be the silent vale, he realised, the place to which the Druid and his hunters were taking him now! The voice h
ad been insistent that this was not his end, and it had said something about his magic and how he was strong enough to do what must be done. Zarynn did not entirely understand that part, and thought perhaps he should have asked about it, but it had all seemed to take place so quickly.
Zarynn still had mixed feelings about the foreign necromancer. Glaraz had saved him from certain death on the execution tree, and from the hunters in the hills. Zarynn recalled how the hunters had hurled their spears at him as well as at the outlander, and how Glaraz’s magic words – the earthbone ward, Zarynn recalled – had made the spears rebound harmlessly from both of them. The outlander clearly had his own plans for Zarynn, with his talk of a school of skulls and teaching Zarynn to master his magic, but surely it must be better than dying? His murdered parents had never had much chance to teach him about the world beyond the plains of the People of the Bear – not that they knew much to teach, although they knew, and hid that they knew, more than most of their clan. Thus, Zarynn knew next to nothing of foreign lands and ways. He did not think raising the dead up to fight was the sort of magic that Heldor, the God of his parents, would have smiled on. But the Druid clearly hated it, and people who practiced it, too, and right now perhaps anyone who was an enemy of the Druids was an ally, at least for the moment. Zarynn apologised silently to the Protector and to the spirits of his parents, but for now the necromancer was surely his best hope.
The bouncing sensation was making Zarynn nauseous all over again, in his inverted position over the pony’s back, and Zarynn tried hard to keep from throwing up, fearing he would choke with the gag still in his mouth. The Druid had insisted he was to be taken back to his clan alive, but what if the hunters were not quick enough and he choked to death? Even as the thought crossed his mind, however, Zarynn felt the pony slowing, and dimly heard the voices of the hunters as commands were barked and responses given.