M A R Barker - [Tekumel- The Empire of the Petal Throne 01]

by Flamesong (v0. 9) (epub)

  “So. What must we do?”

  “Get the Yan Koryani princess, the boy, and the one other person, a wizard named Aluja who’s the boy’s teacher, and leave. The lad claims this Aluja can help the Gaichun defeat every foe from here to the Plains of Glass. This doesn’t sit well with Prince Tenggutla. You get rid of the lot, and you walk free.”

  “Back to the tubeway car in the Many-Chambered Sanctuary?”

  “Ai, and his piss-dripping highness will help you there as well.” He turned and warbled in Tka Mihalli. The Prince blinked and gave them a dazzling smile—literally. He even had little diamonds set into his front teeth.

  “I told him you were willing and ready to go, now that the new Gaichun doesn’t plan to take up his post. The governorship isn’t supposed to be hereditary, but here it’s been so for centuries. If the old turd dies. ...”

  “To the point,” Tse’e demanded. “What aid can he give us with the tubeway car?”

  “Well, now.” The translator jangled his chain-hamess and beckoned to one of the guardsmen, who advanced to lay a stack of thin metal discs, like breast-pendants about a palm’s breadth in dia/neter, into his hand. Qkkuru held one up so that they could see the whorls and squarish letters incised upon it. “The Prince says every car has a little slot under the front housing—the box with the ten knobs on it. Slip one of these into the hole, and the car goes to the ten places on the disc. Change it, and you’re off to ten new destinations.” Tse’e asked wonderingly, “But the symbols—no one can read the languages of the ages before the Time of Darkness ...?”

  “True. But these folk took this set off a dead wizard they trapped somehow. By trial and error the magicker had found where every little mark took him, and he scratched the modem names on the discs in Classical Tsolyani. He must have come here that long ago—”

  “A fortune!” Thu’n marveled. “The temples would pay—” “Shut up,” Trinesh snapped. “Look you, Okkuru or whatever your name is, why do this for us? What’s the Prince’s price—and yours?”

  The helmeted head bobbed from side to side. “I told you what this twig-sucking degenerate wants—that and mayhap a little extra Dm/'-sugar in his mother’s milk. As for me, 1 want to go with you. I’ve had it in Ninue. Being a noble lord in Mihailu is lovely for them as like total boredom, but I’m still young, and with the fortune I’ve amassed here I can live out my days back home in Tsolyanu.”

  “An escaped slave!” Chekkuru made a sharp downward gesture. “The impaling stake!”

  “Oh? Mayhap in Fasiltum, mayhap even in Jakalla. But who knows me in Tumissa? Mrelu? Thraya? I’ve a yen to see the Empire again, and money makes folk blind, even to these.” He displayed the pale cicatrices upon his wrists. “More than one slave has bought his freedom. Like they say, ‘Money sings, and the bureaucrats dance.’ ”

  Tse’e glanced over at Trinesh. “Some of the hunted can indeed be forgotten,” the old man murmured. “Others cannot.” The Tsolyani exchanged jubilant glances. Trinesh said, “Tell the Prince that we agree. We’ll do what he asks.” “Hold.” Horusel glowered. “With a little help we can take the Lady Deq Dimani and the boy. But this wizard— Aluja—?”

  “Your kind friend, Prince Tenggutla here, also offers you an ‘Eye’ to replace the one the little Salarvyani and his dirty-arsed High General stole from you when they confiscated the things you had in the tubeway car-—and your personal property.”

  Trinesh snatched at his belt-pouch. His money and toilet articles were there, but the “Eye” was missing! The slavegirl they had sent him had done more than just sleep on the black couch!

  “Never mind, soldier. This one’s probably better: guaranteed against wizards, magicians, and catamites!”

  “Oh? What does it do?”

  The blind eyes of the dragon-mask glittered. “He says he’s not sure. Nobody’s used it for a century or two. But it’s supposed to ‘repeal the powers’—that’s what the record in the Gaichun’s trophy room said.”

  Trinesh reached for the “Eye”; Horusel for the discs. Okkuru whipped them both back out of reach. “Ai, lords, there’s still the sweetening.”

  “And what may that be?” Saina raised her sword again. Trinesh had a premonition that he knew what the Prince would ask.

  “The girl. The furry little sewer-worm wants the girl. That one there, beside your captain.”

  Trinesh had been right. He cried, “Never!” at the same time that Horusel grunted, “Take her and welcome!”

  The two men glared at one another.

  “The Lady Jai is a prisoner of war—” Trinesh began, but Horusel interrupted with an angry sweep of his sword.

  “We’ve had enough, Hereksal" the older man rasped. “All I’m taking anyhow! You can dandle some other doxy when we get back to the Legion. This Prince what’s-his-name wants her, he gets her! Fair trade for the discs, the ‘Eye’-thing, the Lady, the boy, the Nininyal, and the wizard! Home and reward, you said? Well, so it shall be!”

  “I say no,” Trinesh rapped.

  “Don’t bother, Hereksa," the Lady Jai said softly. “What he—or you, or anyone—does to my body makes no difference. He can do as he likes for an hour or two. Just so I can return to my Lady Deq Dimani. ...”

  “No—”

  “Yes!” Horusel said. Dineva and Chekkuru echoed agreement.

  Even Saina lowered her weapon. “If she doesn’t mind, then—”

  “No hour, alas,” the burly translator said slowly. “He wants her for permanent. To stay with his other womenfolk.” “Now that I forbid!” Trinesh cried in fury. “She—”

  The Lady Jai addressed Okkuru directly. “And what if I make no resistance but give him no joy? Among his other eccentricities, does this Prince take pleasure in coupling with a limp sack of Dna-flour?”

  Okkuru tilted his mask back to reveal a coarse, flattened nose and tiny, shrewd eyes. “Why—? If you don’t do as he wants, he’ll strip you bare naked and stuff you into that little cell there. After you’ve danced for the beetles for a time, you’ll sing, whistle, or play music to whatever tune he calls! Don’t be a fool, girl! I know this sweaty little monster! Take my advice: he’ll only pester you for a little while. Then he’ll forget and look for some new toy. Life in the Gaichun's palace may be dull, but it’s not too bad.”

  “She goes with us.” Trinesh had endured all he could. He looked to the others for support. Tse’e, Thu’n, and Saina were clearly with him. Aijasu watched with the cool gaze of the professional soldier who cares neither one way nor the other. Mejjai said nothing.

  Chosun rubbed his paunch and shuffled his feet. “Uh— Hereksa, best let the girl weave her own Skein, eh? She’ll have to make do. We can’t keep her against all of those soldiers out there.” The big man refused to meet his eyes.

  The Lady Jai came to stand before Trinesh. “I will stay with this Prince, Tsolyani. Do not fear. I may yet be able to persuade him to let me leave with you and my Lady.” Her eyes glinted flame in the ruddy torchlight.

  Trinesh did not want to think of the limp, damp hands of the creature in the doorway caressing her smooth limbs, her breasts . . . His little inner voice would have spoken, but it was drowned out by the pounding of his heart. He swung around, sword raised.

  —And discovered something hard and sharp against his throat. Dineva’s dagger scraped against the coliar-flange of his breastplate. She could use the knife, he knew. But would she?

  “We want to go home, too,” she pleaded in his ear. “The girl’s not worth the death of any of us. And she’s willing to stay. Don’t turn this into a mutiny, Hereksa. Please!”

  “Kill him! Kill him!” Chekkuru squalled. “He offends the Lord of Flame—refuses sacrifices—disdains the gods—makes sport of their servants—!”

  Chosun swept an arm around in a broad arc, and the priest’s voice shut off as though chopped with an axe. “I’ll not see him slain! Take him alive, get him out of this wench’s power, get us home—but no harm to the Hereksal He’s never been un
fair to us.”

  Trinesh slid his fingers up along his breastplate, found Dineva’s thin, sinewy hand, and gently pushed it and the knife away. “This lies between Horusel and myself,” he said. “He is the one who leads this dance.”

  He planted his feet and began to circle. “Translator, tell your people to make room. Chosun, Saina, see that we are not disturbed by the priest or anyone else. Come, Horusel, you know the penalty—and the shame—for mutiny.” The words of the dueling masters in the Red Mountain clanhouse came back to him, and he added formally, “ ‘Let our swords be our advocates, the Lord of Flame our judge!’ ” Confidence buoyed him up; Horusel was a veteran, the survivor of more barracksroom fights than anyone could remember, yet he was no duelist. If Trinesh could stay beyond his reach and use Tse’e’s slender steel blade as his teachers had instructed him, he ought to win.

  They exchanged tentative parries. Prince Tenggutla Dayyar scuttled out of the way, eyes ashine and lips drawn back. Blood sports must be rare in Mihallu, Trinesh thought fleet-ingly: Another blow, a downward parry. Their hilts clattered and locked together. The older man flung out his left arm, a dagger glittering in his fist. Trinesh knocked it aside, shoved, leaped back, then in again. His blade clacked and skipped across Horusel’s. breastplate to tear a lappet off the man’s right shoulder-pauldron. It did no real damage. He blocked a following swing and jumped away once more. He realized that he was holding his breath against all of his preceptors’ sternest warnings. He let it out in a warcry, thrust left, dodged a riposte, and slashed low and right. Horusel’s embroidered Engsvanyali kilt began to change from white to red along his left thigh. Was this to be so easy, then?

  The Tirrikamu was no fool; he knew both his weaknesses and his strengths. As they turned, he reached out, cuffed Saina with his clenched dagger-hand, and sent her sprawling over onto Trinesh. Without pausing he leaped in after her. In this kind of brawl he would be the victor.

  Trinesh wasted a long moment shouldering the woman aside; no time to see to her now. He stumbled backward, out through the door. To grapple with Horusel was almost certainly to die.

  Something sharp pricked Trinesh in the right arm, just above the elbow where his mail sleeve left off and the vambrace began. Amazed, he spared a glance to his flank.

  Prince Tenggutla Dayyar crouched there just outside the door, eyes bright with gleeful malice. He clutched a tiny needle of a dagger in his beringed fingers.

  He would have cut the man down, but Horusel swarmed over him, and for the next few heartbeats they wrestled this way and that amidst a maelstrom of squealing blue and white guardsmen. Trinesh thought he saw Saina leap through the door and into the fray, then Chosun after her.

  Horusel’s dagger clattered against Trinesh’s cuirass. Something was wrong with his sword-arm. He struggled to bring the blade around and set it against the straining sinews of the Tirrikamu's neck, but his muscles refused to obey. The stench of sweat filled his nostrils, and he was surprised to find that he was dizzy. Had he lost so much blood, then? He did not think so—he did not even remember being wounded! He got his left hand free and clawed at Horusel’s staring eyes, an ignoble trick, but then how much more ignoble would it be to die?

  He felt as though he were as far away as the moons. Kashi, Lord Vimuhla’s red moon of fire and blood, loomed above him, and he scrabbled to catch it. Gayel, the green moon, must not have risen yet. Kashi bellowed and retreated back out into space. Farther, farther, beyond the sun, beyond the four planets, beyond the luminous spheres wherein dwelt the omnipotent gods. . . .

  Farther.

  Trinesh winged away into a black and trackless sky.

  He was disappointed; this was not the sort of afterlife the priests had promised after all.

  16

  The footsteps grew louder, racketing away into the shadows like the tympani of an advancing army. Aluja had no choice: the metal walls kept him from taking any other shape; he must meet his visitors as himself.

  He had no idea how long it had been. After Ridek left, he had husbanded his strength, performed mind-exercises to keep from thinking about food and drink, and cursed himself for all kinds of a fool.

  The Baron would be angry indeed, and now Ridek would not be the only one to be punished. Concealed somewhere within the most secret recesses of the fortress of Ke’er were kept the Gayu, the matrix patterns that held Aluja and others of his species in bondage to the master of Yan Kor. Created for the Baron by Lord Fu Shi’i, those delicate linkages resembled flower-shaped grids of interlocking golden filaments—on this Plane, at least. A Gayu could be broken, which caused its subject’s death on several Planes if not on all. Worse, it could be distorted, and that inflicted agonies that no dweller upon just one Plane could ever imagine or endure.

  The Baron might not do that to a loyal servitor, but Lord Fu Shi’i would have no qualms about it.

  Lamps and torches, unnecessary in the soft, unchanging light of the sorcerous globes illumining his prison, came nearer. They stopped, bobbing and swaying, before the adjoining cell, that in which the dead Shunned One lay.

  “Hold!” That was Ridek’s voice! “Wait here. The mage Aluja will wish to prepare himself to greet you.” That was clever! The Mihalli repressed a surge of pride, almost as though the boy were his own offspring.

  A woman said something in a foreign tongue, arising-falling language full of vowels. It sounded like Saa Ailaqiyani.

  Ridek’s black poll appeared around the corner of the cell. He grinned when Aluja glided over to meet him. Then he stooped and concentrated upon a massive silvery key. The door opened.

  “All hail, Aluja!” the boy cried. He flung both arms up so that his long mantle swirled out like the wings of a Hu-bat. Aluja saw what he was about at once. Cleverer still!

  The cloak hid the Mihalli as he emerged from the cell. By the time it had settled down over its wearer’s shoulders again, those in the dimly lit corridor behind the boy saw only a gentle, elderly, human scholar dressed in a tattered brown robe, a sage with a beard as long as his forearm and feeble, pale-veined hands. Surreptitiously Aluja adjusted the semblance to include a bulging forehead and bushy eyebrows; his red-glowing eyes were the one feature that no Mihalli shape-shifter could change, and these folk might have heard the legends.

  “Oh, master Ridek,” he whined.

  “The Governor of this land graciously permits me to free you.” Ridek motioned him to maintain the disguise.

  “I give thanks, Lord, both to him and to you.”

  Was he overdoing this display of senile gratitude? He squinted over the lad’s shoulder and saw two women in the passage beyond. Farther back a squad of blue-and-white-liveried soldiers waited nervously with a middle-aged man wrapped entirely in what resembled bandages of coarse ebon cloth. One of the women wore a puffed, flounced, gray skirt, an overblouse of smoke-hued gauze, and a bird’s-head mask of ashen feathers. The other was not masked, and her garb consisted of an overtunic of green with a sash of orange-red fastened diagonally across her breasts with jeweled brooches. Beneath these upper garments he caught the gleam of chaised and engraved dress-armor. Aluja had seen enough of the Planes of Time to recognize Engsvanyali garb. If this were ancient Engsvan hla Ganga, then his interplanar senses must have been asleep when he chose this particular Nexus Point!

  There was something familiar about the second human female. His eyes snapped back to her face, and he almost shouted for joy.

  The woman in green was the Lady Deq Dimani.

  He essayed a dotard’s stagger—and found that it was not much of a pretense after all. Hunger, thirst, and the discomfort of sleeping on the bare metal floor had taken their toll.

  “Most noble sage.” The Lady Deq Dimani came up to join them. Ridek must have warned her in advance. She gestured, and one of the soldiers edged forward with an ewer of water and a platter of food. Aluja ate without even noticing what it was.

  “Oh, Aluja!” Ridek clutched his hand. He knew enough not to show surprise at the fee
l of aged, papery, human skin instead of the Mihalli’s own smoothly textured hide. “You are safe? I could not come before—”

  “No matter now. Where are we?”

  “Mihallu—a place where they think the Engsvanyali still live. The ruler here calls himself the Gaichun—that means ‘governor.’ He says that he serves the Empire of Ganga. Nobody dares tell these folk that the Priestkings have been dead for centuries! It’s like living in the past!”

  The story poured out in a rush, but Aluja cut him off. Well he ought to know of this strange relic of a land! Mihallu had been the home of his people before the Priestkings’ legions brought slaughter and devastation along with the glories of human civilization. This was not a good place for one of Aluja’s race.

  He bent close to Ridek. “Do you still have your staff?” The boy smiled. “He holds it.” He jerked a thumb toward one of the waiting guardsmen. There were advantages to being a prince upon the white Klai Gal “And the ‘Eye’?”

  “Here. In my belt-pouch. Do you want it back?”

  “Not now. Keep it. My own powers are greater.” He raised his head. “Come, both of you stand close to me. Now that I am out of that metal dungeon, it is only a matter of a moment until I can create a Nexus Point. Then we are gone—home to Yan Kor.”

  The Lady _Deq Dimani shook her head. “The scholar Thu’n—you remember him, Aluja?—and the Lady Jai Chasa Vedlan are still captives of the Tsolyani who brought us here. I do not leave without them.”

  “I shall return alone later.”

  “No. Take Ridek and go. Come back for me.”

  “That I cannot. I was commanded to find you.”

  “And so you have. I am in no danger—now—and I will not abandon my comrades. I brook no argument!” She nodded toward the other woman, who still stood farther back with the black-clad man and the soldiers. “This lady, Dayetha Fashkolun, is the Gaichun's best translator of Yan Korayni. She is charged with our safety. She says that Thu’n and the Lady Jai cannot be far away.”