by Janine Cross
Correct assumptions, both.
Yet however much I’d suspected him of suspecting me, he’d not turned me over to his superiors during Temple’s interrogation of the Dead Zone’s living inhabitants. With his silence, Oteul had therefore become an accomplice to my crime.
A brooding, unwilling accomplice.
Thus my first instinct upon seeing him descend Temple Ornisak’s tiers, tunic besmirched with soot and hem entangled with twigs, was to distrust him, to remain hidden in shadow. But he noticed me immediately despite the gloom, despite my stillness and silence.
It wasn’t until he was several feet away from me, long-fingered hands outspread as if to appeal to yet another beggar to leave him be for one night, that he could see my features. He stopped still in his tracks.
“You.” Said in a voice taut with loathing.
I rose to my feet. “I’m waiting for Daronpu Gen.”
“You’ll have long to wait, then.”
“Why?”
“He’s gone. Disappeared.”
“What! When?”
“Several days ago.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He was incredulous. “We were there, at the lane. We saw what you did. He’d harbored you, healed you, and you repaid his kindness by defying Temple so openly? By daring to join the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship? By shedding your clothes in public … ?” He looked away, swallowed hard, and looked back at me with great effort. “The daronpu acted bizarrely after that.”
But he always acted bizarrely, I thought to myself dizzily.
“He was agitated, restless, unhinged. He feared you’d be traced back to us, at Temple Ornisak.”
“And he’s gone,” I said stupidly.
“To save his own life.”
“Where?” I asked hoarsely.
A derisive snort. “I wouldn’t tell you if I knew.”
A cold draft slid across my nape like the steel of an Auditor’s blade.
Daronpu Gen, gone. The Scroll of the Right-Headed Crane, gone. My execution therefore a certainty.
I turned about, not seeing my surroundings, unconscious of my movements.
“He saved my life, once,” Oteul said, voice low behind me. “I would never harm him over you. But hear this: I know what you did. I know why the people of this zone suffered the losses they suffered. You were the cause, hey-o. If not for how it would implicate Gen, I’d inform Temple about you.”
His tone turned as dark and bitter as the thin black juice of an unripe walnut. “He should have turned you in instead of hiding you. His kindness is his weakness.
“But Temple will execute you soon enough,” Oteul continued, voice now fat with certainty. “The day fast approaches when Clutch Re will be cleansed of your evil. I pray for that day. I pray for your death.”
I fled the temple.
EIGHT
Wheezing and devoid of all rationality, I staggered toward the little side door in the apprentices’ hovel well past middle-night, the same door from which I’d left the stable domain at noon. In the starlit chill, my hand looked sallow and slight as I reached to shove the door open.
A boulder outside the door lumbered upright.
“Not that way,” croaked a voice thick with anger and sleep. For a wild moment, I thought it was Oteul. I stared dumbly at the person that had risen from the ground, and only after long moments did I recognize him as Dono.
“This way,” he said, and though the face belonged to Dono, the bitter tone belonged to Oteul.
Dono turned and started walking alongside the stable domain’s sandstone wall, his shoulders hunched, his stride impatient. He stopped when he realized I wasn’t following.
“You can’t go through there,” he hissed. “You’ll wake everyone. This way. Komikon’s waiting for you.”
The Komikon was waiting for me.
How much fear must a person experience before the heart collapses with dread? For certain, fear addles the mind. Leastways, it addled mine, for I could not shake the impression that the lithe young man before me, clad only in a worn breechclout, was not Dono, but the robed acolyte who’d stood before me at Temple Ornisak. A young man who wished me dead.
Dono strode to my side, grabbed one of my arms. Pulled. “I’ll break your arm if I have to, Zarq. Now come.”
I struggled; he neatly pinned my arm behind my back. The flash of pain cleared my head somewhat and I realized it was not Oteul leading me to certain death, but Dono acting upon the Komikon’s orders.
“Walk,” he snarled, shoving me in the back, propelling me forward.
So I walked. Dono, warm and tensile with strength at my back, cursed me roundly as we followed the sandstone wall. It was clear from the way he moved, despite the welts and ruin of his flayed back, that venom still thrummed in his veins from the draught we’d shared that morning.
“What’d you come back for, hey-o?” he growled at me. “He’s going to whip the piss out of you; you realize that, don’t you?”
I trembled from exhaustion and chill. My thighs and calves were inflamed beyond endurance from my mad run from the Zone of the Dead. Dono walked too fast for me.
“Slower,” I gasped. “Please.”
A snort that conveyed disgust and incredulity both. He didn’t slow down in the slightest.
“I couldn’t find it,” I said through chattering teeth. “It wasn’t there; he’s taken it; it’s gone.”
“What?”
“The scroll. I’ll have to find another one; Re save me, they’ll execute me …” I turned boneless, vision reeling. Stars fell about my head like strewn shards of glass.
My senses cleared as pain shot sharp through the arm Dono held pinned between my shoulder blades.
“Here,” he said, coming to an abrupt stop. He reached forward with a free hand and rapped on a wooden sally port inlaid in the sandstone wall. Knock, knock, knock!
Dono’s three brisk raps sounded puny in the deep of night. On the other side of the sally port came the splintery rasp of a wooden bar being lifted.
The small door creaked open. Dono shoved me through it. The dragonmaster stood on the other side, his bandy simian form silhouetted against one of the ubiquitous courtyards of the stable domain.
The dragonmaster reached forward, snatched the front of my tunic, and roughly pulled me through the sally port. Dono followed, shutting the creaking door and barring it behind me.
The dragonmaster was practically quilled with rage. His entire body quivered from it. He thrust his face into mine.
“Where went you today?” he breathed.
I swallowed. “I worked this morning in the Tack Hall—”
“I didn’t ask what you did,” he snarled, and I recoiled as his spittle landed like hot steam on my face. “I asked where you went.”
I hesitated.
Immediately he grabbed one of my hands, spread my fingers, and before I could comprehend what was coming, he rammed something small and sharp underneath one of my nails.
I screamed. His free hand jammed sideways in my mouth to mute my cry. I writhed, struggled, tried to bite; his grip on my violated hand was as tensile as steel and the fist in my mouth was too big to exert much pressure on with my teeth, and what little I could exert mattered not a whit to him.
He jammed me against the sally port and pinned me there with his considerable strength.
“You go nowhere without my permission,” he hissed into my face. “You do nothing, nothing, without my authorization. You understand that? Do you?”
The pain was deafening; I could scarce comprehend his words.
“Do you understand?” he hissed.
I nodded, tears streaming down my face.
“Did I not tell you that I’ve been dealing with Temple in regard to you?”
Again I nodded.
He withdrew his fist from my mouth and reached beneath his loincloth. A flash of metal: I cried out. He slapped me and lifted my fiery hand to his chest, brought the metal instrument toward my alread
y swollen finger, and yanked.
Blood spurted in a thin line against his skin. My blood.
He stepped away from me, grinning, holding like a trophy a bloody bamboo splinter pinched in his slim pliers. Clutching my hand to my chest, I melted to the ground and folded over my lap.
After a while, I realized that the dragonmaster was crouched on his haunches before me, asking a question. Impatience and ire were stark in his voice.
“Where went you today?” he said.
“Temple Ornisak,” I responded quickly. “In the Zone of the Dead.”
“That was stupid.” His voice was as tart as an unripe lime. “You say, ‘Yes, Komikon. I was stupid.’ ”
“Yes, Komikon. I was stupid.”
“Hold out your hand.”
My head flew up to meet his eyes. I clutched my hand closer to my chest. “Please, no, I won’t go again. I was only trying to find the scroll that would stay my execution; I thought—”
He rapped my forehead hard with his knuckles. “You weren’t thinking. You have nothing to think with. You are a rishi via, the witless girl child of some lowly Clutch serf. Repeat that.”
Breathless and too fearful to be humiliated, I obeyed. “Without my instruction and training, you are unable to think for yourself. Understand?”
I nodded.
“I will do your thinking for you from now on, until you’re ready to enter Arena. If such a scroll is needed to prove you can serve me, I will procure it. Is that clear?”
I nodded again.
“Yes, Master!” he roared in my face.
“Yes, Master!” I gasped.
“Now hold out your hand so I can bind it. Wounded apprentices don’t agree with me.” A grimy cloth lay over one of his knees.
He was insane.
He bandaged the finger, wrapping it so tight that the digit instantly felt as cold as stone despite the consuming agony steadily pulsing from beneath the nail.
“Now,” he said, dropping my hand and lifting my chin so that I looked into his eyes. “You will return to your hammock and sleep the night away. You’ll tell no one where you went today, but you will fashion a credible reply for them if they ask. And you will never again leave my domain without my permission. Understood?”
“Yes, Komikon,” I whispered.
“Good.” Wiping away the spittle that had gathered in the corners of his mouth, he rose to his feet and gestured to Dono.
“Take her back.”
And Dono obeyed, helping me to my feet with a surprising, and much needed, amount of gentleness.
The next morning, I explained my previous day’s absence to Egg by way of the bees that had swarmed us. I told him, with a face sunburned and swollen from my mad journey to the Dead Zone, with my damaged hand swathed in bandages, that I had been stung repeatedly by bees, and that I’d suffered some sort of fit, whereafter I’d blacked out beneath the verandah of the Tack Hall.
“Didn’t you think to look there for me?” I said to him, in a tone replete with wonder that he could have been so obtuse. “I could have died there!”
He grumbled an apology, and my absence wasn’t remarked upon again.
That day, after feeding and watering the dragons, we inductees labored long and hard mixing mortar and repairing the walls of whichever stalls had been too oft gouged by talon or battered by dragon bulk. Masonry is exhausting work that requires the use of two hands; by dusk, the hand that the dragonmaster had violated was swollen and hot, and I clutched it to my chest and walked lopsided, for it felt like the pain was radiating down that entire side of my body.
Near to tears with pain and fatigue, I collapsed outside the apprentices’ hovel while Ringus stirred the communal cauldron of gruel.
“Hey,” a voice grunted above me, sometime later. “You have to eat, else you’ll be no good to me tomorrow.”
Egg stood over me, a scowl on his oily face, a bowl of gruel in his hands.
“I ain’t gettin’ whipped just ’cause you let yourself get stung by bees,” he said petulantly. He crouched and thumped the bowl down beside me. “Eat.”
I ate.
Despite my exhaustion and pain, I found that once I started eating, my appetite was huge. I scraped my bowl clean and looked toward the cauldron. It was empty, obviously, for no one stood queued before it. With a weary sigh, I gingerly moved my swollen hand into a more comfortable position on my lap and looked over the apprentices sprawled about the hovel.
As with all other previous nights, they were engaged most seriously in games of darali abin famoo. Eidon and Ringus glanced my way several times; on the fourth glance, Eidon barked something to Ringus, who took a deep breath and nervously approached me.
“This is for you,” he said, stopping a goodly distance from me. He tossed a dusty twig at my feet. “For your hand. Chew it slowly.”
A maska root.
I murmured my thanks and picked it up. Ringus returned expediently to Eidon’s side.
With a thumbnail, I scraped most of the skin off the root, then warily began chewing one end of it. It had the bitter, milky taste of maska wine, highly unpleasant to my palate, for I’d rarely imbibed in the fermented drink. After several minutes of dragonish chewing, a great lassitude dulled my mind and, by extension, the pain in my hand, so I continued to suffer the chalky, bitter taste in my mouth. Maska imparted nothing of the bright, light analgesic properties of venom, though; this was a heavy, cloddish substitute, with no accompaniment of giddy puissance. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why men so readily drank the stuff.
After some time, I felt as sleepy and dumb as a sloth, and I watched those around me with heavy lids. Eidon and Ringus continued to glance at me throughout their game of dice, and several times the apprentices gathered about them inhaled sharply and looked my way as well.
My curiosity was piqued. With leaden limbs, I hauled myself upright and shuffled toward them.
I stopped close enough to Eidon’s game of prognostication so as to watch but not intrude. He looked up. The servitors and inductees who were clustered about him likewise looked at me, many with amazement shining in their eyes, some with flushed cheeks.
After several long moments, Eidon nodded at the two dice he’d just cast.
“You played this before?” He had a rich voice, deep and low.
“No,” I said, my own voice maska-slurred.
“D’you understand it?”
“No.”
“Watch, then. Ringus’ll explain it.”
And Ringus did. In a soft murmur that I had to strain to hear, he explained how the fall of the destiny wheel, which was not a wheel at all but a spindle with an octahedron atop it, announced whether the prognostication was good, evil, indifferent, or divided, depending upon which direction of the compass the spindle pointed to upon falling. Each face of the octahedron bore a different crude picture, the interpretation of which varied, depending upon the compass direction the spindle pointed to and the numbers of the accompanying tossed dice.
“What are the images on the spindle?” I asked, for Eidon’s destiny wheel was so worn, the carvings on the octahedron were all but obliterated.
“Earth, air, water, fire,” murmured Ringus. “Dragon, grain, stars, snake.”
He explained the dice next.
Each digit on the dice not only had numerical value but represented the hierarchy within our society: One, the lowest number, was feminine, while six was masculine. Number two was rishi; three, bayen. Four represented a warrior, and five, ludu fa-pim, or landed gentry of dragon-blessed pure blood.
“Look. There you are again,” Ringus said as the spindle Eidon had just spun landed in the dust. The spindle was pointing in the Season of Fire direction, the octahedron facing east, the spindle pointing west. The face on the octahedron was that of a dragon, the number on one of the dice two, for rishi, and on the other, one, for feminine.
“It’s a good prognostication, according to the destiny wheel’s direction, which counters the low numb
ers on the dice,” Ringus explained. He looked at me with cautious expectation. “That’s the eighth time tonight Eidon’s spun those exact combinations. Last night, too. You know the odds of that happening?”
It was a rhetorical question.
I looked about the other veterans and servitors. They had paused in their games. They were watching. All of them.
“Everyone knows he’s spinning this,” I murmured to Ringus.
“Yes. It’s … never happened before. This kind of combination, over and over. Eight times.”
Eight. A portent number, that. Eight for the number of talons on a dragon’s forelegs. Eight for the number of battles the Pure Dragon had won against the One Snake. Eight for the number of Skykeepers that guarded the Celestial Realm.
A breeze suddenly stirred dust about the seated apprentices, an alarmingly chill wind that smelled slightly of carrion. A blue phosphorescence glittered over us all in its wake, then dissipated into the dark.
Beside me, Ringus shivered.
“Eidon wants you to sit with us tomorrow eve,” he whispered, voice hoarse, eyes nervous. “And every eve thereafter. For as long as the wheel dictates, you sit with us.”
I nodded.
By whatever peculiar gravities that guided the fall of the destiny wheel, I now had an ally.
The days bleached into weeks under the relentless Fire Season sun, and my life in the dragonmaster’s stables settled into a routine of hard labor, intense training, and wary camaraderie with my fellow apprentices. While labor and stable politics filled my days, my nights were governed by visits from my mother’s haunt. I would dream then.
Of Waivia.
The dreams were always harrowing, fraught with sexual degradation and torture, or replete with all the cruelties Waivia had suffered, as a child, from the Djimbi-despising members of the pottery clan. I woke from the former sweating and gasping in horror, and from the latter subsumed in guilt that Waivia had suffered such a miserable childhood while mine had been the blithe, carefree one of a child without piebald skin.