He looked at Nasaan. “Don’t kill him. Not yet.”
The prince raised an eyebrow, then nodded.
Colivar leaped up onto the windowsill. Outside the palace a crowd had gathered, drawn by the sound of combat, but they were keeping a safe distance. Or what they thought was a safe distance. He stood for a moment on the broad stone sill looking down at them, knowing what a sight he must be to them in his bloodsplattered clothing, his long black hair unbound and whipping free in the wind. He found it perversely pleasing.
Are you sure you want to do this? he asked himself. For a moment he shut his eyes. and a shudder ran through him, and he was not certain at all. In fact, this was possibly the stupidest thing he had done in his life. Only a madman would even consider it.
Then looked back, saw Nyuku lying there, and he remembered the night the man had killed his ikati. He remembered walking into the Wrath, his arms held out as if inviting its embrace, tears frozen on his cheeks as the screaming voices of murdered witches filled his head, as he begged them for death . . . and the last vestige of his doubt disappeared, drowned out by a hunger for vengeance more primitive and powerful than any human doubt could possibly be.
The gods have given you this opportunity, he told himself. You cannot pass it by.
Bolstering his courage as best he could, he stepped off the sill, into the open air. A few of the spectators gasped, but he shapeshifted so swiftly that he had no chance to hit the ground. It was not a difficult transformation; his soul remembered this form as though it had actually been his own. All he had to do was shut down every part of his mind that was human and let the ancient memories possess him utterly. Surrendering everything he had become in the last few centuries and returning to the one state he feared—and hungered for—the most.
Those few locals who hadn’t run screaming in terror when they first saw him change now watched as a large and powerful Souleater rose up over their city. It flew one wide circle above the desert plain surrounding it, then headed out to the west, following the scent trail of its brothers. And soon was out of sight.
Two dozen Souleaters screeching their mating challenges overhead was a sound piercing enough to bring pain to human ears. The creatures seemed oblivious to the human presence beneath them, and occasionally one even dropped down low enough that the turbulence from its wings rippled the sand at their feet. Ramirus saw some of the witches cringe when they got that close, but the Guardians were eager to do what they had come here for, and they kept looking at Salvator and Favias, hoping to get permission to fire. But no one was going to sanction an attack on the ikati until Kamala had made her attempt to draw them away from Jezalya; a wounded Souleater might well focus his attention on his attacker and thus get left behind.
Much to all their relief, the Souleaters did follow Kamala when she finally reappeared, and she led them off on a chase to the west; their cries of lust and fury echoed across the landscape with decreasing volume until they could be heard no more.
After such painful cacophony, silence was welcome.
Ramirus had conjured a spell of his own to supplement that of the witches, using Siderea’s scarf as a focus. It hung about the barrier like a thin mist now, ready to detect any spell of Siderea’s that was sent out into the desert. Now, even as Ramirus watched, his sorcerous construct responded to something. Apparently many small spells had been sent out at the same time, and they pierced the witch’s barrier—and his own creation—simultaneously. He could see his spell ripple briefly as they passed through it, like water into which a handful of pebbles had been cast; by the time the surface settled down again, he had determined what the spells were and the purpose behind them.
His expression was dark as he turned to Salvator. “The tribes have all been alerted. They’ve been told to head in toward Jezalya immediately, and to kill anything in their path that doesn’t belong there. In short, us.”
Favias cursed under his breath. “How far out are they?”
Ramirus shook his head. “Don’t know yet. I got a mental impression that she expects them to be able to move in pretty quickly, so we should assume the worst until reconnaissance says otherwise.”
“They’ll be coming from all directions at once,” Salvator muttered.
It was not an unexpected development. In fact, it was the reason that they had brought so many common soldiers with them, just in case something like this happened. But that did not mean that an attack by the tribes wouldn’t put their people in danger, not to mention complicate the portions of this operation they had yet to launch.
We must find the Souleater queen quickly, Ramirus thought, frustrated by the new complication. This is all a wasted effort otherwise.
Salvator opened his mouth to speak . . . and then closed it. A dark shape was rising up from Jezalya, and the sudden realization of what it must be appeared to have banished all other concerns
The queen was rising.
Ramirus could hear the Guardians preparing to fire at her, archers nocking their arrows while witches prepared to lend added velocity to their fire. But something was wrong. It took him a moment to realize what it was, but when he did, he called out “Hold!” with all the power his voice could muster. Apparently Salvator trusted him to make such a call, for the High King held up his hand and nodded his approval of the termination. Shina shut her eyes, presumably to began to pass the message along to the Seers at all their relay points. Thus far not a single arrow had been fired.
“It’s not a female,” Ramirus said.
It wasn’t a real Souleater, either. Its body looked proper enough, but its presence lacked that disquieting power that was a hallmark of the species. And he could see that the Guardians were having no trouble focusing their attention upon it, which would not have been the case with a real ikati.
The false beast circled low overhead, following the circumference of the witch’s barrier. Ramirus held his breath, hoping he had not made the wrong call. Then, just as it passed over the royal party, a wind whipped up about Ramirus’ feet, raising enough sand to blind them temporarily. But his sorcerous senses still functioned, and he was able to catch a glimpse of the power that had conjured the wind, as well as the metaphysical signature of the man behind it.
The Souleater was Colivar.
Ramirus was torn between being furious with him for his insane recklessness and being afraid for him. Had he discovered something in Jezalya that merited taking this kind of risk? Or had he simply lost his mind? Ramirus remembered back to the Colivar he had known back in the days before the Law, so close to a wild beast in manner and spirit that others had remarked upon it. Now that he understood the reason for it, he knew that the last thing Colivar should be doing was taking on the very form that would encourage his ikati side to express itself. What if, after knowing such freedom, it did not wish to return to the shackles of human existence?
When the great beast turned away from Jezalya and began to head west, Ramirus looked down at the place where Colivar’s wind had scoured the ground. A map had been impressed into the sand, he saw, with Jezalya at its center and the mountains on two sides. A wide circle had been drawn around the city, no doubt representing the witch’s barrier. Outside that were a dozen cryptic marks, each one a cluster of tiny imprints such as a fingertip might make, arranged in neat rectangles. Troop markings, Ramirus realized. Much too close for comfort. There would likely be fighting soon, and a lot of it. He looked closely at the mountains and saw similar imprints there, but they were single points, arrayed in no particular pattern.
Below the map were two hieroglyphs. They were from the written language of a culture that had died out so long ago that few men knew how to read them. Ramirus did. So did Colivar.
“What does it say?” Salvator asked him.
“The first one signifies a woman in power. The second signifies death.” He looked at the High King. “It would appear that Siderea Aminestas is dead.”
“Good news if it’s true, but who sent this to us?”
<
br /> Ramirus drew in a deep breath. “I believe that was Colivar, your Majesty.”
It said much for Salvator that he didn’t look as surprised as he must have felt. Or perhaps he wasn’t surprised. Perhaps his faith had prepared him for the thought of a Magister turning into a Souleater. Didn’t they both stem from the same corruption, in his eyes?
Favias looked up from the map. “If Siderea just died, shouldn’t her ikati be going insane right now?”
“That is the theory,” Ramirus agreed.
They had all hoped that if Siderea were killed her Souleater would appear right afterward. Screaming in rage or anguish, as her cousin had done outside Danton’s castle, perhaps even attempting to attack Siderea’s killers. That’s what precedent suggested would happen. That’s what they had prepared for.
Not this silence. Not this mystery.
The queen is young, Ramirus reminded himself. Colivar guessed that she would be dependent upon the bond with Siderea because she’d had next to no life experience before it. But what if youth in fact makes her more adaptable? Humans can learn some things easily in childhood that they must struggle to grasp when they are older.
“We have to find her,” Salvator said. “And if we can’t find her—” He bit his lip and did not continue. Gwynofar was ready and willing to challenge this Souleater queen as she had done in the Spinas, but Salvator loathed that option and would only consider it as a last resort.
We may come to that point soon if the queen does not show herself.
“What are these things?” Favias asked, indicating the isolated spots in the mountains.
“Most likely the places where riders are hiding,” Salvator said. “If so, we need to send in troops to deal with them. If what Colivar told us is true, they won’t be in shape to resist right now. Send witches in also, to search out any who aren’t accounted for on the map. We must get them all.”
Ramirus looked westward, remembering the flock of maddened Souleaters who had set off after Kamala. If their consorts could be killed, so that the Souleaters lost their human intelligence, she would be in much less danger. Was that a good or a bad thing?
“With the tribes so close—” Favias began.
“I can hold off their warriors,” Ramirus told him. “You see to the riders, and focus on finding the queen.”
Salvator’s eyes fixed on him. There was a question in them. Ramirus did not flinch, but nor did he answer. After a moment the High King nodded gruffly and turned away.
You are learning, High King.
The warriors of the Tukrit tribe were thundering across the sands when their leader suddenly pulled up short and signaled for the others to do the same. Their compact, tightly muscled horses had been bred for maneuverability, but even so they were hard pressed to come to that quick a halt in neat array; the sand that was stirred up by their hooves was taken up by the wind, veiling the air in a gritty mist as the man who had called the halt peered off into the distance.
Then they heard him curse under his breath, a long and picturesque curse that combined unclean animal parts and the sexual habits of enemies. Even the horses knew him well enough to know that was not a good thing, and several pawed the ground nervously.
Then he said simply, “Sand,” and they all understood the cause.
It was barely visible to the east, masked by the brightness of the rising sun, but those with the most perceptive vision could just make it out: a thin gray cloud in the distance, stretching from the land upward to the sky, and as far from side to side as the eye could see. It was moving quickly toward them, which was not a good sign. In fact, it was the worst possible of all signs, short of the earth opening up and sending them hurtling down into the Abyss. An option that some of the warriors might have preferred.
No orders were required, because only one course of action was possible. Dismounting, the men began to force their horses to the ground, their flanks to the east. The animals sensed what was coming and jerked nervously at their reins, but it was a token defiance; this was not an operation in which there was any room for compromise or delay, and deep inside they seemed to understand that.
The storm moved swiftly, a demon of sand and wind that towered over them as it approached. If any of these men had ever seen the sea, they might have likened it to a massive wave, whose rolling crest seemed poised to crash down upon their heads. But these men knew only the shapes of sand and heat. And they knew that there was no way to fight such a storm, or run from it, or do anything other than take shelter as best they could, until this demon of the desert passed them by.
By the time the first sand-laden winds struck, the men were huddled down behind their horses, wide desert robes spread over the animals’ heads as well as their own bodies, to offer what protection they could. But the wind whipped about them with typhoon force, driving sand into every possible opening and crevice; even with fabric held before one’s mouth it was impossible to breath without inhaling some of it. Those who could draw enough clean breath to speak muttered prayers under their breath, asking the gods to dispel the storm. But few expected their appeals to be answered. For such a storm to come upon them just as they were riding toward Jezalya was a clear sign that the gods of the city did not approve of their mission; only a brain-damaged child could mistake a message like that.
Apparently the gods were not yet content with their understanding, for the sand demon that had come upon them with such great speed now settled down over their huddled forms and did not move on. And it seemed to some of them that in the sound of the wind there was laughter.
The scent of ikati rivalry hung heavy in the air, leaving a clear trail for Colivar to follow. The conflicting odors of two dozen males were spread across an area half a mile wide, each one as distinct to his ikati senses as a human name. A few seemed vaguely familiar to him, though he could not remember them clearly enough to identify their owners. But it was very possible that some of the ikati he was chasing now were among those he had flown with—and fought with—before. The thought was both exhilarating and unnerving.
Rising above all those odors was the rich, musky-sweet scent of a queen in flight. Breathing it in awakened memories that he would rather not surrender to, but there was no way to deny them now. In taking on this form he had opened the floodgates of recall and thrown away the key.
It is worth the price, he told himself stubbornly. The words had become a mantra to him as he flew, a mental drug with which he subdued the human portion of his soul. The ancient hungers that were stirring in him now threatened to drown out his human awareness, but he did not resist them. He let them fill him and drown him and drive him to the edge of madness, because he knew there was one hunger that must be satisfied—that he had waited centuries to satisfy—and there was no other way he could do so.
Today he must become ikati.
Sunlight played across his wings, fostering a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain. It was a sensation he was not prepared for. He had known all along that the Souleaters thrived on sunlight, but that knowledge had been a thing of human words, sterile of personal experience. His own ikati had been trapped in the north for so long it had forgotten the feel of tropical sunlight on its wings. Even at the peak of the arctic summer, when the sun never set, fear of the long arctic night lurked about the corners of ikati consciousness, filtering that sun through a veil of fear.
But now! Sunlight blazed across the jeweled panels of Colivar’s wings and lent him strength—it warmed his blood and bolstered his heartbeat—it intensified his senses so that every breeze that touched his skin made him tremble. Flying in the sunlight sent his spirit soaring to heights that human experience could not hope to replicate. If his faceted eyes had been capable of tears, he would have wept from the sheer pleasure of it. What human passion could begin to compare with this?
What fools he and the others had been, to search all over the world for the ikati! Of course the creatures would come to a place like this in the end, to bathe in this glorious su
nlight! Why had Colivar not realized that from the beginning?
As he flew, he began to alter his ikati flesh, altering it in much the same way he had done just before fighting Nyuku. If Kamala was leading the males in a straight path away from Jezalya, it would take every sorcerous trick he could muster to catch up to them. If, on the other hand, she had fallen into the flight pattern of a true queen—if she had picked up enough details from the memory he’d shared with her in Coldorra to realize just how complex the mating flight could be—then the whole colony might have turned in another direction entirely, or at least lost some time weaving tangled patterns in the sky before moving on.
Tangled patterns . . . .
Memories from the past washed over him, images from forgotten flights crowding about him like the ghosts of jilted lovers. The last queen he had known had been a master of the dance, and she had led her suitors along a serpentine path whose essence was beauty and death combined. How could Colivar ever explain to a mere human the maddening arousal that came of such a flight, so far beyond any simple concept like lust or bloodthirst that one lacked words to describe it? Human language could not possibly do justice to such a transcendent intimacy.
Now he could hear a murmur on the wind, mating cries muted by distance. He could feel his heartbeat quicken at the sound, and fire shot through his veins. This was not mere lust-born energy, but something even more driving. Lust was an ephemeral thing. Finite. The hunger he was feeling now was so much more than that. It had gnawed at his heart for centuries, without any hope of surcease or satisfaction. Until now.
Soon he could see dark shapes moving in the sky before him. Many of the males seemed to be engaged in one-on-one combat; apparently Kamala had figured out how to turn them against one another. That she had been able to do so with no more than a snatch of his memory to learn from filled him with awe. How appropriate it was that such a woman should be the one to drive the Souleater colony to its final destruction!
Legacy of Kings Page 48