Shadowed By Wings

by Janine Cross

  “Eat.”

  I did so, his sleep-heavy eyes watching my every move. I thought it ridiculous, though. If I wanted to poison the lot of them, what was to stop me from tainting the slop while they all slept? Perhaps the same thought occurred to Ringus, for he sighed and helped himself to some gruel before I was even halfway done.

  My exhaustion increased a thousandfold with the warm food in my stomach. Ringus placed his empty bowl on the table and nodded at me. Together, we hefted the cauldron’s heavy wooden lid over it.

  I was done, free to go.

  It was then that she came to me.

  I didn’t recognize her at first, understand, so deep was my fatigue. I saw only the benign form she took. A pigeon.

  The pigeon flapped across the courtyard, pearly gray in the moonlight. It landed an arm’s span from Ringus and me, cocked its head, and began approaching, walking in a jerky bob, its beady eyes as red and waxy as incarnadine berries.

  Closer it came, unafraid. Unnatural.

  “What … ?” Ringus said, and a blue mist oozed up from the ground beneath the pigeon, viscous and sulfurous.

  Both Ringus and I backed up. Our rumps jarred the butchering table behind us. Without turning or looking away from the pigeon, I fumbled on the table for the machete I’d used to slaughter the renimgar.

  “Kwano the One Snake, the First Father, the progenitor and spirit of all kwano everywhere, I bid you begone,” Ringus gasped. He was uttering the Gyin-gyin, the Dragon Temple chant every child, every father, every mother and Holy Warden knows. “I evoke the powers of Ranon ki Cinai, governed by the exalted Emperor Mak Fa-sren.”

  The pigeon began swelling. The blue mist rose into the air in a column and began swirling about the bird in a tight spiral. My fingers closed over the machete.

  “I evoke the authority of the Omnipotent Dragon,” Ringus breathlessly intoned, eyes bulging, “the One Dragon, the progenitor and spirit of all dragons everywhere.”

  The pigeon swelled to the size of a melon. Its feathers stood out like quills; its eyes sank deep into its flesh. Its beak gaped as wide as the mouth of a fish out of water.

  “Shut up,” I hissed at Ringus. “You’re making it worse.”

  “I evoke the power of Re, holy bull of Clutch Re—”

  The obscenely bloated pigeon emitted a strangled squawk and exploded. Shreds of flesh splattered against our shins. Feathers rained down upon us, charred and smoking. The blue, sulfurous mist coalesced and turned into the flickering form of … my mother.

  “Re help us,” Ringus squeaked.

  Her long ebony hair fanned out behind her like wings, and the green and brown pigmentation of her Djimbi skin glowed, the green as bright as fireflies, the brown as ruddy as a lit kiln’s bricks. The bitoo she wore fell in blue luminescent pleats to her feet, shivering as if alive. My heart swelled and pounded painfully in my chest.

  She reached a trembling hand out to me, an uncertain smile on her face. “Zarq?”

  I dropped the machete and ran into her embrace.

  I buried my face against her bosom and wept. She was warm and soft and real, and her arms about me were forgiving and loving both.

  Oh, Mother, you who used me so cruelly in your madness, who’d led me to mutilation at the convent and then abandoned me through death, why did I crave your love so?

  She lifted my hair from my nape, pressed her lips against my skin.

  “Forgive me, forgive me,” she murmured, and her tears ran sweet and warm down my back. “My baby girl, forgive me.”

  “Mother,” I wept. I held her tight against me, the curve of her spine welcome and familiar beneath my hands.

  “Hush now, child,” she murmured. “You know I love you.”

  But I didn’t know such, not after the Sa Gikiro of my ninth year, when my sheltered world in the pottery clan had shattered.

  “Mother,” I said, inhaling the soft warmth of her neck, below her left ear, her glossy black hair draped over me like a benediction.

  “Listen to me, Zarq.” Her voice became a little sterner, the strong, gentle tone so familiar from my infancy. She held me at arm’s length, studied me as tears sparkled like stars upon her cheeks. “My beloved. Listen.”

  “Mama—”

  “Listen.”

  I bit my lip, held my breath. Silently, I prayed that she wouldn’t break this magic spell of love and sanctuary by uttering the last name I wanted to hear right now.

  “Waivia needs you, Zarq.”

  I closed my eyes and felt my insides wither, felt the sanctuary and certainty of her affection draining as swift as a gutter torrent away from me.

  “You need to find her, Zarq. Leave this place. Forget this apprenticeship madness of yours and find her.”

  “Mother.”

  “She’s all alone.”

  “Mother.”

  “She needs me.” Her voice turned gravelly; her hold upon my elbows became a grip. I dared not open my eyes, wanted to turn back time to moments before, when she’d wept and whispered love against my neck. I wanted to lock myself forever there in her embrace.

  “They hurt her, Zarq. She was only a baby and they hurt her.” No more was it the voice of my mother, but a gritty rumble of earth and rock. “I thought that my kindnesses to their own children would protect her, but I was wrong. I chose wrongly. I should have fought them. Despised them. They were no clan of mine, those pottery women. They hurt my Waivia.”

  “Mother.”

  “Leave here, Zarq.” She abruptly released me. “Find her.”

  The smell of sulfur burned my nostrils. The light behind my closed eyelids turned a luminescent blue. The stench of carrion began souring the air.

  I opened my eyes. No longer did my mother stand before me in the shape I loved, but in the shape of my mother’s haunt, large and nacreous, a six-foot-tall buzzard with scaly legs the slick reds and whites of viscera, strips of rotted flesh impaled on hooked talons. Luminescent blue feathers bristled upon a breast inflated with growing anger. Red eyes above a beak lined with tiny shards of teeth glared at me.

  “Find her.”

  “She’s dead,” I whispered.

  “She’s not!” the haunt cried, and somewhere a mouse shrilled as an owl snapped its spine. “She lives.”

  I backed away from the haunt, weeping. “She was sold as kiyu almost ten years ago. Sex slaves don’t live long. She’s dead, Mother. Dead.”

  “Find her!”

  “No.”

  The haunt shrieked rage, and its eyes sank into its head and rattled like pebbles down its throat, so that I stared at dark caverns instead of eyes. Maggots writhed within those pits, and they dripped over feathered cheeks and wriggle-fell down a feathered breast to gray talons.

  “Go away!” I cried, tears streaming down my face, wanting her to stay, but stay in the form she’d once been, long ago, the mother who had sung lullabies to me, laughed like the clear trilling of a bunting bird, tenderly picked splinters from my palms and kissed away all tears. “I won’t look for her, Mother, not now, not ever! Let me live my life—”

  “You waste your life here!” the haunt shrieked.

  “No. I can change things, I know I can. Just listen to me; just believe me: I can make it so no daughter is ever sold from her mother as kiyu again. Please, let me try.”

  “I don’t care about other daughters! I care only about Waivia!”

  “Waivia is dead!” I shrieked. “She’s dead, understand? Now, go; leave me alone. Go!”

  The haunt shook its feathered head at me, clacking its beak. With a hiss, it launched into the sky and flapped upward, into the night, luminescing like a lost star.

  I shuddered, soaked in chill sweat, and wept tears of anger and frustration.

  Beside me, I heard a gasp. I turned.

  Ringus stood there panting, eyes glazed with fear. He was pressed against the edge of the butchering table, fingers gripping the thick wood for dear life.

  “Eidon,” he breathed, ineffectually t
rying to call the veteran to his aid. “Help me, Eidon.”

  “Tell no one about this,” I said, my voice choked with threat.

  He nodded, eyes locked on mine.

  “Now, get out of here,” I said. “Find your Eidon and throw yourself into his arms. Get.”

  Ringus turned and fled toward the hovel, stumbling as if his knees no longer worked. He fumbled with the gharial hides draped over the hovel’s entrance and nigh on tore them down in his desperation to get inside.

  I watched him go, the fingernails of each of my clenched hands digging flesh from my palms. I watched him go, knowing that he’d tell Eidon of what he’d witnessed tonight. But really, I didn’t care.

  I’d remain a dragonmaster’s apprentice and become a dragonmaster myself one day, no matter what obstacles were hurled at me. Just to spite the haunt and prove that I could do it, I’d stay. I’d show Mother that I was every bit as clever and worthy as her precious Waivia, and then some.

  I would.

  FIVE

  “Get up, deviant.”

  Dono stood before me, where I lay on my hammock in my stall. Splash! He upturned a bucket of cold water over my face.

  Spluttering and gasping, I bolted upright.

  The servitors and inductees gathered at the threshold of my stall snickered. Dono turned and walked out, his audience hastily parting to let him pass.

  I had not the energy to leap after him. Every part of me was stiffer than old rawhide. I glowered at my unwanted audience and swiped water from my eyes.

  “What are you looking at, hey-o?”

  They muttered and returned to their hovel, where others were just starting to stumble from its depths and stagger across the courtyard to the latrines. My latrine, roofless, looked decapitated.

  I remembered my mother’s visit. Shivering and sodden, I buried my face in my hands.

  There was so much to fight, within and without me, and it would always be that way. Every moment of the life I’d chosen as a dragonmaster’s apprentice would be a fight, a fight for respect amongst my peers, a fight to survive the dragons while serving, a fight to survive Arena, when that time came. I needed to daily battle the iron will of my mother’s haunt, and would also need to fight against the conventions of society, the formidable laws of Temple, and the hatred of those rishi whose lives I strove to change for the better, even while defying the conventions they held so dear.

  And where, in all that fighting, lay my goal of revenge, of ousting Waikar Re Kratt from his own Clutch, of ruining his life? I had not the spirit for any of it.

  I was so desperate for sleep, my eyes felt like clots of clay-sodden straw, my bones like glass pipettes, my muscles like heavy, rotten melons.

  What had I been thinking, to undertake such an impossible journey? I had been naïve. My situation was outrageous. Perhaps I should just give it all up, follow my mother’s bidding, seek a sister long lost and most likely dead.

  Oh, Re. I needed venom to stave the haunt off. I needed venom to fight, to continue.

  No sooner did I think it than the tang of the dragons’ poison was suddenly sharp in my nostrils. Startled, I pulled my hands away from my face, then reared back from the dragonmaster, who was standing right next to my hammock. His palms cupped a filled gourd.

  He didn’t say anything. Didn’t have to. That effervescent, citric tang said it all. As if it were a fragile glass bauble, he proffered the gourd.

  I shook my head. Pain from yesterday’s labor ran down my neck and across my shoulders like hot oil.

  He proffered the gourd again.

  My heart beat a little faster.

  “No,” I whispered, meeting the dragonmaster’s blood-rivered eyes.

  “No,” I whispered again as he stood there still, but no conviction was in my voice, none at all. Indeed, a rush of saliva was filling my mouth.

  “No,” I said a third time, my voice husky. In answer, the dragonmaster lifted the gourd to my lips.

  I drank.

  With venom singing through my veins, I cobbled together a roof for my latrine before the sun was even full into the sky.

  Temporarily freed from the bondage of my mother’s will by venom’s shield, and my aches and uncertainty eradicated by the same poison, I stood back and regarded my building with pride. It would serve its function admirably, regardless of its extreme lean to the left and the fact that a crawl-hole at shin level stood in lieu of a door. All the humble structure required to validate it was the monthly purification rite of a daronpu.

  A glimmer of green and purple up under the roof’s overhang caught my attention. I shielded the sun from my eyes with one hand and squinted.

  I was looking at a dartanfen.

  Such spiders were considered a sign of luck, understand, a sign of favor from the Pure Dragon, for they bore the same colors as a bull. I grinned absurdly at the spider as it spun fine silk in the shade of the slanted roof I’d built.

  “You’ll not learn how to serve Re, standing there like a fool,” a voice growled behind me. I turned and met the gaze of the dragonmaster. His bald head gleamed in the sun’s glare, and for a moment, the venom in my blood made his pate look like a mosssplotched chestnut.

  “Think you that I’ve angered Temple just to have you gawk at insects in my stables? That’s not why I’ve spent the last days arguing with the Ranreeb over ancient scrolls and debating with Temple fools!” He jerked a calloused thumb to the east. “Get you to the vebalu course with the other apprentices, or I’ll whip you for your sloth.”

  I flared my nostrils. Alas, venom brings out the worst of my temper. Always.

  “Temple can’t refute my legitimate claim to serve Re,” I argued. “The Scroll of the Right-Headed Crane clearly states that anyone who has been rendered clean by a holy knife and has been chosen by a Temple-sanctioned dragonmaster may serve a bull.”

  “I don’t need reminding what the scroll says, girl. And what is stated in the scrolls and what actually occurs in Malacar are frequently two different things!”

  “Temple can’t deny me this position. It can’t.”

  The dragonmaster’s face turned puce as he struggled to retain his anger. I remembered, then, how precariously balanced he was upon the knife-edge of insanity, after years of venom exposure.

  “But I’m sure that your clever arguments will have swayed even the dullest Temple minds in my favor,” I hastily added, to assuage him.

  His teeth chattered briefly, as an excited cat’s do before it pounces upon a bird, and then he shuddered and his shoulders convulsed once, violently.

  “We’ll see if I have or not,” he rasped. “Doesn’t matter now, anyway.” He smiled maniacally. “There was an uprising last night. Several Hamlets of Forsaken joined forces and launched an attack on Clutch Maht. The Ranreeb flew out this morning to deal with the rebels.”

  “So I’m safe.”

  “Safe, gaah! Unless you train hard and survive this year’s Arena, you’ll not be safe. Re will gut you with one swipe.”

  “You’re not sending me into Arena until I’m ready!” I cried, alarmed.

  “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do! There are rules, Temple governs Arena… .” He sputtered angrily, then pointed wildly to the east, as if he could fling me away with the gesture. “Get to the vebalu course and start training. Now!”

  I bit my tongue and turned from him to pack the tools back into the crate.

  As I crouched to open the lid, a hot ember snapped against my back, burning through the cape I wore into the flesh of my left shoulder. I yelped, leapt to my feet, and spun around in one movement. Venom-tainted, my vision spun several heartbeats after my eyes did, and I swayed like one drunk.

  The dragonmaster stood with a short braided whip dangling from one hand.

  “Yes, Komikon!” he shouted.

  I licked dry lips. “Yes, Komikon.”

  “Don’t forget it again!”

  “Yes, Komikon.”

  “And never turn your back toward anyone,
understand? Ever.”

  “Yes, Komikon,” I replied. But he was already walking away.

  I walked east, in the direction the dragonmaster had pointed, into the adjacent stable courtyard. I say walk, but it felt as if I drifted, my venom-oiled muscles moved that easily. As I passed stalls of frisky dragons, some growled at me, while others merely stared intently at me with their still, slitted eyes. The diamond-shaped membranes at the ends of their short, twiggy tails slapped against stone at my passage. Slap-slap, slap-slap.

  It took me several moments to realize that the sound synchronized with my heartbeat, that the sound of muscle and blood caged behind the bars of my ribs was in precise rhythm with the dragon muscle and blood caged behind the stable’s gated stalls.

  Slap-slap.

  The synchronicity unnerved me, even while under the spell of venom. I didn’t want to be one with the dragon in that manner, didn’t want to experience the dragons’ captivity deep within my breast.

  I hurried on, averting my gaze from the dragons.

  The vebalu course was located behind the grain silo in the third courtyard of the stables, the same silo I’d hidden behind during my first day in the stable domain. The grunts and cries of young men hard at work acted as my compass. No sooner did I appear at the dusty outdoor gymnasium than Egg lumbered over to me.

  “Sit there!” he bellowed above the activity, pointing to a group of inductees squatting on their haunches. “And watch!”

  I knew at once by Egg’s manner that Ringus hadn’t told him of the haunt’s visit last night. As I joined the inductees, I scanned the gymnasium for Eidon. There he was, locked in a wrestling match with Dono while other veterans wrestled in pairs around them. Eidon hadn’t seen me. Yet.

  Overhead, the sun blazed like it had a vendetta against all things green and living. The ground of the gymnasium was as dry and red as a brick, and the peculiar equipment within the gymnasium was so thickly furred with rufous dust that in the heat it seemed to glow like live coals.