by J L Forrest
Nyahri wondered, as well, about yw Sabi’s purpose at Swyn Templr. She wondered, still, what had happened at Abswyn and at the smile it left on yw Sabi’s face.
The Atreiani slivered her eyes, drawing her fingertip along the cracked, liquor-stained tabletop. “You create fiefdoms, Shwn Jhon, and impose agrarian lordships. You put the heads of lawbreakers on poles at your hall’s gates.”
“We have the rule of law,” he said, “and every man is treated equally by it. Those men broke our laws.”
“I cannot judge you for killing men, but such petty laws to behead petty men for petty offenses. This is a world regressed.”
“Did you not kill men?”
She tilted her head, a gesture of concession.
“The histories also say—” His words rumbled. “—you killed plenty of your kind.”
“Enough.” Yw Sabi’s jaw tightened.
“Atreiani, I am sorry, but will you not aid us now, this very day?”
“Today? No.”
“Atreiani, please—”
“I won’t do a thing for you in any way till I reach Sojourn.” Yw Sabi smiled, not the few genuine tokens Nyahri had thus far seen, but a calculated simper. Her lips parted enough to hint at her fangs.
“What happens if I let you leave this place?” Shwn Jhon set his mouth in a fleshy arch. “I fear you will abandon us, goddess. If you march on your way, perhaps even with my help, then what? You turn your back on us and we never see you again?”
Yw Sabi folded her arms. “What choice do you have? We aren’t your guests here,” yw Sabi said, “or your hostages. Rather I hold you hostage, Shwn Jhon, because I have what you want—knowledge of medicines beyond anything you ever dreamt—and there is no way you can wrest it from me.”
He stood, trembling as he lifted his weight, and slammed his bulky hands onto the table. “We are dying here! Can you appreciate that? Dying!”
Shwn Jhon’s men stepped back and one looked at Nyahri, his knuckles white on his blade’s hilt. She rested her palm on her longknife, locking eyes with him. Yw Sabi made no move at all except to flick her gaze upward, meeting Shwn Jhon’s.
“We are plagued!” he shouted. “Every winter it gets worse!”
“Not my responsibility,” the Atreiani said.
“It is mine, and we have no medicines which meet the threat. I wager, Atreiani, you do. You have the power to heal us and I must garner your help, not in some vague future but as soon as possible.”
“Best hurry me to Sojourn then.” Her voice remained tempered; her body, relaxed. She took another sip of whiskey. “It is my will, and only my will, which counts. I’ll do nothing for you till after I reach Cohltos, till after I meet with the Templarii.”
“What do we do in the meantime?”
“I recommend you look to the E’cwnii. I’ve seen their medical practices and, Iron Age or not, they’re better than yours. Work with their women and you may stave off the bleakest of this year’s losses.”
Shwn Jhon scoffed, looking at Nyahri, his lip raised in disgust. “You jest, Atreiani? The filthy E’cwnii are nothing but horse breeders and dung burners. Creatures such as her,” he said, pointing to Nyahri, “can give us nothing compared to the magics you possess.”
Yw Sabi sat forward. “Careful what you say, chieftain. I’m becoming quite fond of this one.” She tilted her head toward Nyahri.
Nyahri held back a gasp, as surprised by the Atreiani’s words as by her own reaction to them.
Becoming fond.
“Then mayhap we take this E’cwni filly as insurance?” Shwn Jhon said.
Nyahri deepened her stance, hand on her longknife’s pommel, ready to draw.
“Take her from me?” The Atreiani’s gaze darkened. “How do you imagine that’d end?”
“If you are fond of her,” he said, “it might motivate you.” He raised his voice. “Watchmen!”
The chamber’s upper doors opened, vomiting men onto the mezzanine. Nyahri figured two dozen, each armed with blade and longbow, arrows nocked. Despite the fearful trembling in some of their arms, Nyahri had no doubt of their training.
The Atreiani sat still as before, leaning with her arms folded against the tabletop. “You’re a fool,” she told Shwn Jhon, “and you and all the men in this room will perish.”
His eyes widened.
“You think I fear your archers?” yw Sabi said. “The E’cwni and I will walk out of here, but not before everyone in this building dies.”
With a casual backhand, she slapped the priceless carafe. It fell, spilling the rest of the whiskey, and careened off the edge of the table. The glass shattered across the floor.
“I’ll destroy Aukensis,” she said, “lay waste to all you ever built, and nothing will remain, erasing even your name. I’ll kill every man and woman, every child, every suckling babe—or you can come to your senses and arrange my escort to Sojourn.”
Shwn Jhon gaped at the broken glass, his horror and offense evident. “You’d choose an E’cwn foal over our entire nation?”
“Her father offered me good food and a warm welcome. You offer me deceptions and bald threats.”
The archers anchored their bowstrings at their cheeks. Nyahri shifted her attention to Shwn Jhon, ready for the barest sign he’d order the attack, preparing herself at best to dive beneath a table.
“Decide,” yw Sabi said.
Shwn Jhon’s eye twitched. “You must away to Sojourn Temple?”
“Immediately.”
“Archers,” he said, “lower your bows.”
“Wise.”
“Are you really so cruel,” Shwn Jhon said, “as to murder children? If you can care for one human girl, might you care for others?”
“You cannot guess what I care for.”
“May I show you something?”
“Tell me,” yw Sabi said.
He stood and stepped from the table, setting his fists on his enormous hips. “I can show you much better. Please? If you will?”
“All right,” she said, “but be quick about it.”
{13}
Shwn Jhon ascended wide stairs to the topmost level. Twice he rested on his knees, catching his breath. Yw Sabi followed, Nyahri behind her, with guardsmen trailing. Narrow south windows admitted a ration of daylight, but a bitter autumn wind chased the warmth. By the time Nyahri reached the top stair, her teeth chattered.
Standing at the uppermost landing, she smelled what her mistress already had: a rotten-sweet sickness. Beyond a set of double doors, a wide chamber held rows of rough-sheeted beds, curtains hanging between them. A copper vat boiled on an open-stone hearth. Two nurses stirred laundry in it, and bed sheets dried on iron rods.
In the beds lay men and women and children, some beaten by disease, their lungs rattling. A few twisted in unconscious throes. In others, a pre-death stillness loomed, an impotent rise and fall of their raspy chests.
“These,” Shwn Jhon said, “and more in the village. Every year and no break in the cycle.”
“I’ll tell you this,” yw Sabi said, “clean Orÿs and every other building. You live in filth. Open everything to the sun. Make soap, scrub this edifice from the rafters to the foundations. Repair the shutters and doors. Raze any sickly domicile and rebuild. Get your sewage as far from here as you can and implement a practical drainage system.”
He shook his head. “We haven’t labor to spare or the means to move the people while this work is done. Assuredly you realize this, Atreiani? You saw the shorthanded harvest, and winter will be too cold. It is in these very walls we will stay, as we always have.”
“Then within these walls even more of you will die.”
“What choice do we have?”
“You want easy answers, Shwn Jhon, but you won’t get them from me. Rally your people and work.”
Yw Sabi strolled between the sickbeds, looking upon young girls, old men, and adults afflicted in their prime. She examined the cauldron.
“You’ve developed no medicin
es?” she asked.
“Certain distillates,” Shwn Jhon said. “The Templarii gave us formulas, some of the ancient medicines, but we cannot master them. Even the Templarii can produce only small doses. What little we have, we give to the children mostly.”
“As you should,” yw Sabi said.
“We have stronger tonics, yea, but they are often as fatal as the sicknesses. The Templarii say these diseases were beaten before their time, and they know little of them. They told me, if they could enter Sojourn, they might learn more.”
“The Templarii cannot enter any Citadel.” Yw Sabi allowed herself a self-satisfied smile.
“An Atreiani could.”
“That’s right.”
“One such as you. If there are medicines in Sojourn, you could retrieve them.”
“I could.”
She paced from the cauldron, and the nurses retreated from her, their eyes wide. Firelight danced on everything but the Atreiani’s unnatural black hair.
Nyahri met the eye of a bedridden boy. Her heart wrenched, and she looked away. When she raised her eyes again, she met Shwn Jhon’s jaundiced glare.
He returned his attention to yw Sabi. “We need your miracles, Atreiani,” he said.
“Sojourn Temple is a Pandora’s Box.”
“Pandora’s box?”
She shrugged. “Get me there and I’ll attempt what I can.”
He stood between a pair of beds, his arms outstretched. A half-conscious boy lay in one cot, his mouth drawn thin, sweat matting his hair. In the other cot a pale girl shivered, her eyes shut. Blood gathered at her lips, staining her pillow. Nyahri edged closer to yw Sabi, her gut knotting.
Few E’cwn children die this way, she thought.
“These,” Shwn Jhon said, “are my grandchildren—lovely Niki on my left, and her older brother Tohmas. Their father, Andreo, who would have been my heir, is dead. You ask, Atreiani, for me to accept your denial and let them die too? I cannot.”
Yw Sabi pointed. “You want to improve their chances? Get me on my way.”
He bowed his head, coughed, and laughed. “You are more solidity and practicality than I had imagined, Atreiani. I had expected a creature of air and fire, and instead I find you all flint.”
She gestured to the children. “Your choice—help me or turn me against you.”
“Seems I have no choice whatsoever.” He caressed the boy’s brow. “It is true what Templarii say of the Atreianii, you know.”
“What do they say?”
“You have no love in you.”
Nyahri wondered.
He cocked his head, a gesture similar to his son’s. “Come morning, Dhaos will escort you over the mountains, with his men, to bring you safely to Cohltos.”
“Good,” yw Sabi said.
“Tonight, I can give you a room, food, a bed.”
Nyahri clicked her tongue. “Mistress?”
Yw Sabi nodded to her, then said to Shwn Jhon, “My companion nurtures an over-particular love of her horses and doesn’t like to be separated from them. On her account I insist on riding tonight. On my account, I’m concerned she may catch an illness here, and that won’t do.”
“That fondness you spoke of,” Shwn Jhon choked out the words, shooting a glance at the E’cwni.
Yw Sabi turned to Nyahri. “The small bag, give it me.”
Nyahri unslung it, a bladder-sized sack of black Atreian cloth. Yw Sabi slid a finger along one seam, opening it. She lifted from it a tiny glass phial and held out her closed hand to Shwn Jhon.
“Take it,” she said.
He approached her tentatively, raised his arm, and opened his palm. She dropped the phial into his hand.
“It’s the most I can spare you,” she said.
His gaze widened at the transparent cylinder. “What do I do with it?”
“A drop on each child’s tongue, once every three days, no more.” She gave him a long stare. “It may not be enough to save them—their own immune systems will have to do that—but it will improve their odds.”
He looked at the phial, looked at her, and gaped.
Yw Sabi returned to the landing and began down the stairs. Nyahri took her place at the Atreiani’s right shoulder and the guardsmen started behind them.
“Your peons,” yw Sabi called back to Shwn Jhon, “needn’t show us out. Their efforts would better serve the nurses. More clean cloth and soap, fewer weapons.”
◆◆◆
From the fields, Nyahri took several bunches of carrots, eating one root as they descended the trail, keeping the rest for the horses. She breathed easier as she and yw Sabi rode away from Aukensis. They left Dhaos and his men behind, expecting the troop to catch them by morning.
“Will we actually wait for them?” Nyahri asked.
“We’ve bought a semblance of safe passage—we’ll wait. I would have preferred to put more kilometers behind us, tonight, but Dhaos babbled something about letting his men spend a night with their families.”
By evening, Nyahri led yw Sabi to the cedar hollow and the path which would return them to the Bhar. Before they set camp, the moonslight graced the treetops, Lwn and Stashwn a sliver past full, Trwl nudging farther from her sisters each night. Nyahri lit a generous fire, and yw Sabi settled by it, absorbed in her own thoughts while Nyahri tended the horses.
As she brushed him, she whispered to Kwlko, “Gods! The insults she heaped upon Shwn Jhon—she has a way about her.”
The horse nuzzled her, nibbling for a treat. So long as she gave him carrots, he agreed with her every word.
“He could have killed us.”
“He would not have,” yw Sabi said.
Nyahri looked over her shoulder. “There anything you do not hear with those ears of yours?”
“I established dominance, showed Shwn Jhon I go and do as I wish.”
“You risked much.”
“It was vital he believed in my strength, in what I may offer him. It’s also important he believes the only way he’ll get what he wants is by pleasing me.”
“How much did you bluff him, Atreiani?”
“Oh, somewhat.”
Nyahri slipped the brush into her bags and returned to the fire. Along the way down the mountainside, she shot a single skinny rabbit—she was growing tired of rabbit—and it now cooked over the embers. Yw Sabi ate little, just as she slept little.
Nyahri asked. “Is there a cure at Swyn Templr?”
“And many other things besides. If there’s Prosee, there’s a cure.”
“Prosee?”
“Adaptive immunogenic. Bacterial, viral, fungal, in some cases even mechanical or chemical—if it’s invasive and deleterious, Prosee kills it.”
Nyahri understood fungal, and planned to ask about bacterial and viral. “A cure? You will give it to them, nay?”
“Remember, I did not promise Shwn Jhon anything.”
Nyahri hugged her knees. Ay! What of the children, of so much blood on the girl’s pillow?
The Atreiani sighed. “Listen, I’m not heedless of their suffering, but it cannot be my primary concern. If it bothers you, saddle Kwlko in the morning and go back to the plains, back to your father.”
Nyahri shook her head. “Goddess—”
“Don’t goddess me. The nonsense which slips through your teeth!”
“Mistress—”
“Stop mistressing me too.” Yw Sabi lifted her chin, gazing at Nyahri. “The medicines I gave them won’t last long and they weren’t made for humans. I cannot conjure any other cure to save those dying children, or anyone else. It would take years to get the Oudwnii producing even twentieth-century medicines. I don’t have the time. For them it is the medicines of Sojourn or it is nothing.”
“Why did you not promise them those medicines?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I am not stupid.”
“No, you’re not. Promises are tricky, the giving of them heavy, and the future after them unclear.” Yw Sabi’s smile flicke
red and vanished.
“Mistress?”
Yw Sabi gave a soft growl, frowning. “Once upon a time, if some human mistressed me the way you insist, they would’ve suffered for it, I assure you.”
“I do not mean disrespect.”
“You’re willful, testing me on purpose. You’re also still ignorant, even if you’re not stupid.”
“Then every day we ride together, every day I am with you, my ignorance becomes more your fault, less mine.”
The Atreiani’s eyes flashed, then became black razors. “Careful, Nyahri.”
“I do not wish to be ignorant, mistress, and in all the world only you can teach me, nay? You are the only one who can teach me anything more which matters.”
Yw Sabi frowned, then asked, “What was your mother’s name?”
Nyahri blinked, taken aback. “Lorahdi.”
“What did Lorahdi teach you? What was in those rituals you and your sister witnessed? What did your mother say to you that you keep insisting on mistress?”
“Some men and women,” Nyahri said, “they existed beyond the wrath of the Atreianii. This is what the songs say. Such people lived with the gods and goddesses. It was true, nay? They honored an oath?”
“Some men and women? Less than one in twenty thousand. The oath could exist only between an Atreiani and her Exemplarii, never more than three. It bound each to the other, a conceit which fettered the Atreianii to humanity, to remind us forever of shared responsibilities. We designed it to transcend time, a phenomenon not you nor anyone else could understand without experiencing it.”
She sat forward, her heart quickening. “How might I experience it? I could—”
“Tsk! What makes you think I’d choose you?”
Nyahri winced, sitting back with her palms against her thighs. “You said you were fond of me.”
“Fond and oath are a world apart.”
“Then you would never—”
“Ah!” Yw Sabi held up her finger, silencing Nyahri. “Stop jumping to conclusions. What makes you think I wouldn’t?”
This hung between them.
Nyahri’s heart tore in opposite directions, and her cheeks warmed. “What must I do?”