by Janet Morris
And she nodded to someone I did not yet see.
But I recognized Eviduey’s touch as he spun me around. And I saw Sereth, head lolling, strung as was I on a chain from the ceiling.
“What think you now of your most formidable companion?” Mahrlys hissed from beside my ear.
“I think,” I croaked, then spoke clearly, “that you had best kill us both quickly.”
“Kill you?” She chortled. “I have promised you to Eviduey. And besides, I have only started amusing myself with him.”
I squinted through the drug’s haze and saw what amusement she meant. And the fury and doubt that assailed me brought me new clarity: “You have disastrously overreached yourself, saiisa,” I snarled, not caring that she could not know the word’s meaning. “If he should wake, even as much as I, he will bring this dungeon down upon your head.”
She laughed a barbed laugh, and even Eviduey chuckled.
“Do you think”—she leered—“I did that to him while he slept? What satisfaction, if he had not the sense to struggle? What value pain, if its recipient is not conscious to endure it?”
It was then I realized that Mahrlys was not woman, but wehr. No woman would have ordered those weals and bruises, not upon such as Sereth.
“Wake him, Eviduey.” And the winged one, like a shadow, did as she bid. Then I realized what had ravaged Sereth: the like of the ossasim standing beside. There came from Sereth, as Eviduey’s claws raked out, in answer to Mahrlys’ command, a low groan. A shudder racked him, and his head swung slowly upward.
I watched him swim up through the drug, as I had done, and sort the sights before him. “Again,” spat Mahrlys.
His eyes shut momentarily, his nostrils flared, and he leaned his head against his upstretched arm. Only that.
We hung there, for an interminable moment alone, our antagonists forgotten, staring across the man’s-length gulf that separated us, through the miasmic mist the drug threw out.
“Estri. Good,” he whispered.
I tried to make him know, with my eyes, that I also was heartened that he lived, for my voice would never have held. When he fell limp in his chains, as the undertow of the drug reclaimed him, I hissed a prayer to my father, Estrazi, that I would endure long enough to see Dey-Ceilneeth a smoking pile of rubble in which no thing lived.
This from me caused Mahrlys to command Eviduey’s violence upon Sereth anew. The pain woke him, and sweat broke on his brow and dripped down his corded frame.
She asked me many questions, most concerned with Chayin and our respective origins, all of which I answered with some degree of truth that I might save Sereth what I could.
Once when Eviduey came close, I spat upon him, and he, rather than strike me, took vengeance upon my couchmate. I did not again show temper, but answered numbly all that Mahrlys asked. In me was the surety that if indeed Wehrdom could triumph over us three, the fate of Silistra was sealed. I cared little. The kindness I did Sereth mattered more to me than the fate of a thousand worlds.
When Mahrlys tired of the sport of posing questions, she departed, and there were only Eviduey, and Sereth, who seemed barely conscious, and I, in that small cavelike prison cell.
He studied me in the torchlight, walking around me where I dangled, suspended. Then he gave Sereth a drink of the bitter liquid, holding his head up by the hair. And me also he watered, gifting me with the slight increase in the clarity of perception the drink provided.
I found I could almost taste his thoughts, almost gather my wits, almost seek action upon the time. But hesting, that alteration of what exists by mind’s command, eluded me in the thick drug mist, and after a while I realized Eviduey yet loitered, limp wings draping him like a cloak, long-taloned nails gleaming against his biceps, and that our chains had been winched downward so that my feet rested upon the straw.
It was a dangerous game he played, restoring me sufficiently that I might understand what he did and be responsive to him before Sereth’s eyes. But he seemed not to care, and I was not the one to caution him.
I begged him to release me from my fetters, when all else was passed.
He laughed softly in answer, ran his sharp nail down me from throat to belly, took the torch, and left us in the darkness.
“Sereth?”
“Ci’ves, try to rest,” he advised, his voice low as straw rustle in the utter blackness of the cell.
“Sereth.”
“When I have decided on a moment, little one, you will be the first to know.” I could hear his pain.
“What of Chayin?” I blurted.
“If we live, and he lives, we will ...” He stopped midway, and I heard the chain rattle, and a grating as of teeth. “... consider ourselves anew. Now, let me gather my wits, and you try the same.”
I was a long time doing his bidding. I was close, so close that I was on the verge of speaking of it, when a wingless ossasim shone a blinding torch in our dark-accustomed eyes and pried apart my clenched teeth and thrust something chalky and gagging into my mouth and I lost all I had gained.
How many days passed thus, I can only vaguely calculate. Once Sereth hissed an oath at Eviduey, and I thought he would die as the consequence thereof. Once Mahrlys tortured us both. Once, when Sereth could not respond to her, she flew into a rage that brought me for the first time truly under the claws and teeth of an ossasim. They must toy with their kill in the wild; they are cruel beyond mortal conception and inventive beyond mere human skill.
I fastened my eyes upon those red fires that were Eviduey’s, and at first my silent pleading weakened him, but the heat of the game won him back. I was not so brave as Sereth: the fiery scourging of my flesh, coming ever dreaded from behind, from my side, from before me, divested me of all pride.
It was my lesson at the ossasim’s hands that raised my pulse and sharpened my mind so that I could again, as I had not since my first recollection in the cell, plunge through the stepsisters’ mists in search of my skills.
When I had found them, and begun to test the time, the hinges had not yet creaked, the cell had not yet flooded with torchlight as it did once “nightly” when some one of Mahrlys’ servitors appeared to give us our food and then more of the drug.
“Estri,” he said to me, just as I was about to speak, “I want you to try to reach Chayin’s mind.”
“And you?” I talked to the dark.
“I am going to see what might be done to unlock these fetters.” In his tone I could hear that grim humor which signifies a chancy venture. But previously, I had heard only drawled queries as to my faring, and softer comforts when I whimpered in the night.
I wondered if my arms would still function if indeed he was, successful, if they could ever recollect their former function. They had been held above my head so long that they had ceased to ache.
Then, as he requested, I fixed my attention inward and sought Chayin’s thoughts through the corridors of Dey-Ceilneeth ranged above my head.
It was not long until I located him, and thus verified what I had not wholeheartedly believed: that he lived and had not moved to aid us. My mind sniffed around the chamber first, in search of evidence of incarceration; then around the edges of the cahndor’s awareness. I had thought that if he lived he might be sedated, as were we. Even when first I caught his accents upon the wehrwind, I presumed that he was acting under pressure, constrained. With a troubled mind, I withdrew, and said only, “I have him. What would you like me to say?” into the utter darkness of our cell.
It was a moment before he husked an answer, long enough for my heart to leap and thump about my ribs. But he was not dead or unconscious, only deeply absorbed: “Determine his location, his condition. Do not let him sense you. More, do not let Wehrdom catch your thoughts.”
I nodded, and tried once more for Chayin. Then I told Sereth what I had seen there.
Even as I did so there was a blaze of agonizing heat at my wrists, and I was falling. Arms caught me in the pitch dark, eased me to the straw.
“Ci’ves, quiet, be quiet. It is all over. I was not about to go through that again.” He made reference to an earlier captivity we had shared. “It was just awaiting the moment. Now it is here.” And I could feel his probing attention invading me, aiding my system’s attempt to throw off the effects of the fahrass.
When I felt more myself, I felt pain. He moved to untangle us, but I gripped him tight, lips pressed to his throat in the darkness. “I did this,” I confessed dully. “I could not control my temper. Wehrdom ...” And I shivered, then started again: “I saw the result, but I did not care. Please, do not hate me.”
“Estri ...” His fingers gripped my shoulders, pushing me back. I knew what look he must bear, beyond the dark. “Why do you always gather up everyone’s blame and try to heft it? I was on the brink of something similar myself. It might have happened from my slaying her berceides. Better thus ...” And he fell silent.
And continued again: “Wehrdom makes my guts crawl, and I cannot deny it. See to your body, as I must to mine. There is much to do.”
“Chayin?”
“At the very least. I cannot do less than confront him, after all we have shared. There is a testing in this for him. We must be most tolerant.”
“Ebvrasea, however you want it,” I whispered, and he drew me against him and we shared strength further, until he tossed his head and whispered: “Someone comes. Be ready to relocate to Mnemaat’s hall.”
“Sereth ...”
“I will do it. Just allow me.” His fingers explored the lacerations on my back.
“You?”
“If we need it. The flaw in your method might complicate things. We cannot afford to be separated by time. I am untried, but conversant with the procedure.” And I heard in his voice that determination before which no words have worth.
“If we do not need it?”
“Then we are going to walk Dey-Ceilneeth and gather up a little satisfaction on the way.”
“Restrictions?” I queried him, beginning to feel the agony in my arms.
“None at all, although I may ask you for some snychronization.”
“None at all?”
“That is right. We are going to kill some wehrs.”
I must confess I felt nothing but eagerness, and a weary, wise joy that adversity had built a bridge over the growing chasm between us. I sought his hand in the dark. He enclosed my fingers in his fist and I drew it to my lips and kissed it, even as the door opened in a blinding spill of light.
When I could see, I saw the wingless ossasim, choking, torch in mid-drop toward the floor. Its hands were around its throat and it gagged and heaved, falling to its knees and then to the straw, retching blood.
“What did you do?” I gasped, lunging upright. Staggering, I almost fell. I had a difficult time making my limbs obey me, and only half-heard his reply:
“I threw an envelope around it and sucked out all the air. No one argues long with a vacuum.” He said it in a clipped, hard way that made me know that he considered any weapon meet, and everything he had a weapon.
The torch was guttering. He knelt to retrieve it: slowly, very cautiously, weaving on his feet. His scabbed, scored back betrayed little of the peculiar alert ease with which his body responds to battle. And when he turned, one hand on the stones to steady himself, I knew that the drug still held him in its fervent embrace; that he, as I, was in little shape for what lay before us. And I saw how much the simple envelope he had cast about the ossasim had cost him. But I saw a thing I had not expected, also: that inward, death-dealing laughter behind his eyes that had been the last earthly sight of so many adversaires.
“You will bear some scars this time, ci’ves,” he assessed, half-staggering to his feet, torch in hand, and leaned against the wall for support.
I think I said: “It is no matter,” but the drug lay like new snowfall in my ears, and I am not sure. I recollect realizing that he was right, that I had not the energy to spare upon the half-healed wounds Eviduey’s claws had dealt me. I sought his side over a distance that was mere lengths, but seemed to stretch ever longer with each step I took to close it. I noted the wingless ossasim, for I stepped carefully over its outstretched arm; but I gave it little more importance than my own befouled state, or Sereth’s, or the two chains that hung swinging from the cell’s high ceiling. The manacles that had once depended from them were no more: their molecular structure, by Sereth’s will, had become volatile in the air about them: they no longer existed. All that remained was a slagged link at the end of the chain; and long, risen blisters encircling my wrists, and his.
He took me under his arm, and though he was greatly weakened, I felt a share of his strength come into me.
“Chayin,” he muttered. His body was stiff against mine as we sought the corridor. There he threw the bar on our prison’s door, that door like a score of others in the vault.
Even while he hesitated before the cell next to ours, as if he might open it and free the occupant, a low growling rose in the back of my mind. My ears did not hear it, for it was Wehrdom’s growl: they acknowledged their dead.
All the hairs on my body stood away from my skin. My heart pounded loudly, and by its efforts chased back the drug mist until it was a shroud wrapped about owkahen’s disclosures. Under my shield, awkwardly, I reached out and tried to disperse the mist. I had foreseen this moment: the stone like frozen ocean deeps and the straw-strewn corridor and the two of us, naked, weaponless hips brushing, his arm about my shoulders, as we assayed the climb out of the bowels of Dey-Ceilneeth. But I had not seen the “how” of it: owkahen shows me only fragments of what is coming to be, not always how the thing takes shape. What it showed me then by way of the wraithlike mist wrapped around the schematic of my days caused me to shiver and pull him closer.
“The wehr-rage. Sereth, do you feel it?”
He nodded. “It is a pity the guard had no weapon. I would rather fight my battles with sword. It is less taxing. Perhaps the next ....”
The next was not long coming, but yielded no weapons to us, for the ossasim and their wingless siblings are well-armed by nature and only strap blades about them when in ceremonies concerning their human kin. Three ossasim, two wingless, skidded down the tall, narrow staircase, to fall lifeless at our feet.
It had been so smoothly done that I had not noted them until they had started to tumble, but Sereth sank down on the stairs, shaking his head savagely. His chest was heaving, and the hand that held the torch shook. “Curse this drug, and these ... things,” he muttered.
I blinked back tears.
“Sereth, there must be hundreds of wehrs in Dey-Ceilneeth. We cannot fight them all. Please ...”
He glared up at me. “Please what, Estri? Leave Chayin sunk in Wehrdom’s slime? We owe him more than that, no matter what he has come to feel about us. If by our actions we have driven him to seek elsewhere for what comfort we could not provide; then whose fault is that? I told you, long ago, that we would one day come to contest over you.”
“Over me? Sereth, you do not understand.”
“I understand what he wants with Mahrlys, what he sought in her arms.”
“It is not just that.” I stepped over the tangled corpses and sat beside him on the narrow stair, though every nerve in my body pleaded with me to flee, though my hands shook and my mouth was dry as the Parset Desert.
“Sereth, you lump us together; Chayin and me, and call us lacking in compassion and ascribe that trait to the Shapers who sired us; but when it counts, you do not see. He is his father’s son: Raet was a ... being to whom Wherdom would have been irresistible. He and I are cousins, it is true, but my father’s folk would not condone such as this.”
He snorted, and pushed to his feet. “Estri, some intelligence has been at work here, and what it has wrought sickens me. I could not care less
whose hand was turned to the task, but you can be sure your father and my predecessor did not raise a hand against it.”
“And you will?”
“Watch me.” His breathing was regular. His eyes were clear. I did not doubt him, but only matched him up that odd staircase, which could be best climbed diagonally, for the height of each step was uncomfortable to the stride and the breadth would not support a human foot other than lengthwise.
“Sereth ...”
“Estri, I know what I can do and what I cannot. I am not unaware of what the time will and will not provide. Down!”
And I threw myself upon the stairs as a wind ruffled my tangles and with a rushing noise a winged wehr dived feet first, talons gleaming, at Sereth from the vaulted dark above. He cast the torch. It rolled down a dozen steps, the light from it dancing crazily.
He had no footing there, on those stairs barely the width of my hand. He pressed back against the wall, and the dark shadow whirled and dived again, but he was rolling upon the steps when the wehr struck the wall, and on the thing’s back before it recovered from the concussion of striking unyielding stone.
Mind skills take a moment, or two, or three, to bring to bear. He had not had them. They grappled, rolling down the sheer staircase. I heard the whooshing sound, even as I leaped to follow, and reached without looking up into the wehr-awareness that hunted me, not caring that all of Wehrdom might enter into battle with me through that door I had opened. No, I did not care, only assayed my descent, searching my pursuer’s nature. Then I saw through its eyes, saw my flight, sensed its dive, talons, extended ready to plunge into my back and dash me against the wall. I felt its urge to gut me. Then I severed its optic nerves, and threw myself left.
My shoulder hit the leftward wall of the stairwell with a crunch, echoed almost immediately by the thud of the blind wehr striking the stair headfirst.
I rubbed my shoulder, shaking, deep in the wehrthought, and threw a blast of outrage into that buzzing network that stopped the wehr-converse as if it had never been. In that silence, I could not promulgate the deafening effect I had used previously.