“Isn’t it fate?” the little sylph asked reasonably and vanished again. Zalia felt a small gust of wind in the otherwise still air as Airi swept into the hovel to join her master.
Still blushing furiously, Zalia made her way to her own hovel and lay there for a long time before she was finally able to sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the harems, the worst possible crime for a concubine was to cause a battle sylph to fall in love with her. They could play with her, or have sex with her, or even kill her if they so wanted, but they couldn’t love her. Love took their attention away from their duties, from their masters, and so it was forbidden. To have a battle sylph in love with only her was the next worst thing to a death sentence for a woman. She would be dragged from the harem the instant it was found out, her battler lover under orders not to follow, and her tongue would be cut out so that she could become a feeder for an elemental sylph instead. She would spend the rest of her life sitting in a cage like an animal, feeding a sylph, and waiting to die.
One woman had been living out that fate in the feeder cells when Eapha became queen. While the rest of the battle sylphs had been gathering around the queen or killing the men who’d once owned them, the battle sylph once known as Five-Eighty, now called Haru, had gone smashing his way into the deepest levels of the feeder cages, looking for a woman he hadn’t seen in thirty years.
Fareeda was a tiny thing, her face gaunt and heavily wrinkled, her hair gray and coarse. She’d long since lost all her beauty and hadn’t spoken once since she was carried out, her eyes glazed with madness. She didn’t seem aware of anything, but if her battle sylph tried to leave her, her scrawny little hands would grasp his arm with a strength it wouldn’t have seemed possible she still had.
Haru doted on her. He brushed her hair and kept her clean, held her glass to her mouth and fed her by hand with great patience. He carried her from her bed to her toilet to her couch by the windows, never leaving her and rarely saying anything either. To see them, they looked bizarre, Haru being so beautiful while Fareeda was such an ancient wreck, but Eapha had an empathic ability beyond normal compassion, forced on her by her queen status. She could feel people and whenever Haru was more than a few feet away from her, Fareeda’s emotions turned into an endless sort of screaming inside of her. However, when he was at her side, they calmed. Not quite to happiness, since Eapha had the feeling that emotion was forever gone from the woman, but certainly to something of peace, and he loved her. Absolutely loved her.
Not everyone felt comfortable around the woman though and Kiala leaned over toward Eapha, sitting beside her in the palace’s great room on a silken cushion. “Why do you let her stay here?” Kiala whispered. “She’s so creepy.”
A few of the other women there nodded, but Eapha shook her head. “That could have been any of us,” she reminded them. Fareeda wasn’t hurting anyone and she deserved to have this. Eapha hadn’t let just anyone into the palace with her. Except for Fareeda, they were all members of the Circle that had worked together to hide from the handlers the fact that they’d each taken a single battler for a lover. Without it, they all would have ended up like Fareeda.
Kiala’s lips firmed. She’d come closer than anyone else in the Circle to being a feeder. She’d been dragged out of the harem along with Lizzy Petrule, and she would have ended up in a cage with no tongue herself if Eapha hadn’t become queen that very night. She didn’t look understanding now, but then Kiala wasn’t a woman known for her compassion. A few of the other women looked contrite though.
Sorry, one of them gestured, using the sign language that had let them form the Circle and had allowed their battlers to communicate with them despite their orders to never speak. She is a little scary though.
We would be too, Eapha signed back. Just leave her be. Maybe she’ll get better.
I doubt it, Kiala added, her gestures rough with annoyance. She’ll die that way.
Probably, Eapha thought, though she didn’t say it aloud. Haru didn’t know sign language and he wasn’t looking at them anyway, though he had to know what they were feeling. He didn’t care though. He was with his love and her mental state meant nothing to him. Eapha sighed, missing Tooie.
She hadn’t thought Tooie would be so busy. She’d imagined he’d be more like Haru, never leaving her side. There were other sylphs around who could run things; it didn’t have to be him. Still, he seemed to enjoy it and the other sylphs appeared to expect it of him, so she didn’t say anything. Still, seeing Haru with Fareeda made her miss him again and she hoped he finished up with whatever it was he was doing and came home soon. He was supposed to be at her side; everything else would take care of itself, or at least so her friends kept assuring her.
Eapha lounged on her pillows with her friends and watched Haru feed Fareeda some porridge, patiently spooning it into her mouth and scooping up the excess from her chin. She ate mechanically, staring at nothing. Fareeda was lucky she had him, Eapha thought. How many other former feeders were out there? She shuddered at the thought, but the sylphs would be taking care of them, wouldn’t they?
While her friends started gossiping, Eapha wondered about that. What was being done about the feeders? Were they just dumped out on the street or were the sylphs taking care of them? She honestly wasn’t sure, but after a minute, and before the others could notice her introspection and start teasing her again, she pushed the thought away. It wasn’t her place to be poking her nose into anything. The sylphs in Meridal had spent centuries as slaves and the city was theirs now. They were fully capable of making all the decisions themselves and they didn’t need someone like her second-guessing them. Who was she anyway? The sylphs called her their queen, but she was really just a concubine at heart, with no education or prospects. All she was good for was sex, not running a city.
Eapha sighed and turned her mind back to her friends and their suggestion about starting a card game. That she was good at, and soon enough, her mood was back to normal, happy and content with whatever life was able to give her.
Zalia was gone by the time Devon managed to stumble his way out of the already overheated hovel and into the even worse heat outside.
“I’m never going to get used to this,” he groaned while Airi tried to cool him down, though all she really succeeded in was to move the already hot air around.
Maybe we should get you a hat, she suggested uncertainly.
Devon put a hand to his sunburned, peeling face. “I think it’s too late for that,” he sighed and made his way over to where Xehm sat by the fire pit they’d used the night before. Devon’s feet were sweltering in his boots again and he didn’t even want to consider what he smelled like.
Xehm handed him a waterskin, beaming at him. “Good morning, young sir.”
“Morning,” Devon grumbled, barely able to stop himself from guzzling down all of the water. His lips were so dry and cracked that they were painful and his skin burned. He was undoubtedly red on every inch of exposed skin and he’d never been so filthy in his life. Xehm just continued to happily smile at him.
He thinks you might marry his daughter, Airi told him.
Devon managed not to spit the water out at that revelation. Marriage? He’d only met the woman twice. Marriage wasn’t something that entered into his thoughts, especially not with everything else that was going on.
Still, he thought almost without realizing it, he did miss having Zalia there, even after only a few hours. Dirty, sweaty, and hideous though he was, he wanted her there.
“Let’s get going,” was all he said.
“Of course, sir,” Xehm agreed.
They walked to the place where the gate was rumored to be. There were some men trotting along the streets and towing small carts that passengers could ride in, but Xehm didn’t pay any attention to them and Devon didn’t want to know how much they would cost.
At first, he’d had the impression that
Xehm just sat at the hovels all day, leaving his daughter to work her insane hours bringing in money. In actuality, the old man went into the city every day, looking for any sort of temporary work he could find and haggling for food and other necessities with the money Zalia brought. They did some of that as they made their way along, Xehm putting the bread and porridge he bought into a sack he carried on his back, and Devon was shocked at some of the prices the staples were going for. There was no regulation of costs at all and corruption was rampant.
There were battlers in the markets they passed, watching for threats, but they did nothing for any customers being cheated. Instead they descended on anyone who became irate about it, which actually served to protect the merchants and help keep the prices high. Devon was disgusted to see it, but not too surprised. Battle sylphs generally weren’t any good at comprehending things like money. Devon knew that Leon had spent years getting Ril to grasp the intricacies of the concept—thanks to the battler’s indifference, not his intelligence—but Ril still didn’t care and the other sylphs were just as bad. Humans had to be in charge of things such as finances and infrastructure, which was why there was only one sylph on the Valley council. Devon sighed. He supposed it was two now, since Ril had taken Devon’s old position as Solie’s majordomo.
If Eapha had turned over the running of Meridal to the sylphs, and he was strongly suspecting that she had, then she was a fool.
By the time they got where they were going, the morning sun had risen high in the sky and it was witheringly hot. This time though, Devon took the opportunity while Xehm was buying his groceries to purchase an overpriced linen shirt that was much lighter than the one he had been wearing, knee-length pants, sandals that felt strange on his feet, and at Xehm’s suggestion, a thin cloth to wrap around his head and part of his face to keep the sun off. The rest of his body he covered with an exorbitantly expensive healing cream that made him sigh so deeply in relief that Airi started giggling again. His old clothes he carried in a sack, remembering how cold it got once the sun went down. His sword he left on his hip. Few men around him carried their own, seeming to prefer knives instead, but no one did more than glance at it either.
The entrance to the place where the sylphs had their gate was a small building the size of a shed in the center of an otherwise empty square, one with openings in the roof that were shaped like mouths. No one was guarding it and the door was not only open but long since ripped off its hinges.
Xehm and Devon walked up to the doorway and looked in at a dim staircase. Both men were silent for a moment, studying it.
“Perhaps we should ask the battle sylphs at the market for help?” Xehm suggested at last, a little nervously.
“No,” Devon said and went in first, Airi flowing past him to lead the way down the stairs. After a moment, Xehm followed.
The stairwell came out in the middle of a corridor that stretched to either side of the steps. To their right, they could see a shattered door leading to a chamber with broken furniture in it, and beyond that, more broken doors leading into another, seemingly larger room. To their left, it ended much closer at another broken door through which cages could be seen. The floors were already starting to become obscured with sand, the stone beneath stained black. It smelled faintly of copper.
“Which way?” Devon wondered.
“The stories say the gate is below where they keep the feeder cages.” Xehm nodded to the left. “They must be that way.” He looked to the right. “That must be the way to the concubine harem for the battlers.” His voice turned sad. “They took my wife to be a concubine.”
Devon was stunned. “What? That’s awful! Didn’t she come back when the queen rose?”
“Oh no. I suspect she died in there many years ago. She always was delicate.” He sighed. “My Zalia is much stronger than her mother.”
“Yes,” Devon murmured and led the way to the left. He didn’t want to see the harem.
Once he entered the area where the feeder pens were kept, he realized he didn’t want to see them either. There were thousands of cages, layered upward and outward in a chamber so large it boggled his mind, all connected by catwalks and stairways, each enclosure hardly big enough for a single man to move around in. All of the doors were destroyed and the cages in the center of the great chamber were torn completely away, forming a massive well. Devon walked down the black-stained catwalks, remembering Leon’s brief about Ril’s battle to get to Lizzy, and had to shudder at the thought of what all the dark stains and the faint copper smell had to be. Ril wasn’t powerful enough to have destroyed the center of the pens though. Devon could only guess that a group of battlers did that.
They’d done a pretty thorough job of it as well. After a few minutes of walking, making their way over or around the wreckage, Devon and Xehm came at last to a place where the catwalk and all of the cages were simply gone. There was nothing but fifty feet or more of air between them and where the catwalk resumed on the other side.
Xehm looked nervously over the side, hanging on to part of a cage as he did. Devon didn’t blame him. He was hanging on to the closest intact cage himself. “I didn’t realize it would be like this,” the old man said, his voice echoing a bit in the emptiness. “Can there be anyone down there?”
“This wouldn’t stop a sylph,” Devon said. “There could be hundreds of them.”
“Are you sure? I know I suggested coming here, but perhaps we should go back.”
And ask a battle sylph to introduce them to his queen? Not a chance. “We go down,” Devon said, even as he wondered if it was possible. There didn’t look to be any way to climb safely.
I can carry you, Airi said.
Devon shuddered at the thought. Airi was strong enough to lift him and could even manage two people for short distances, but the experience was terrifying. Devon loved Airi and trusted her with his life, but his dread of heights…His dread of battle sylphs was worse.
“Okay,” he gulped. He turned to Xehm. “Airi will get us down.”
The old man looked puzzled, staring at him in confusion. Devon just took a deep breath, stepped to the edge of the catwalk, and raised his arms over his head.
Airi wrapped her winds around his arms, getting a good hold, and lifted him off the ground. Xehm yelped at the sight, but Devon had his eyes squeezed tightly shut, afraid to look as she carried him forward and then lowered him, dropping him down quickly as his shirt hunched up and air much cooler than that on the surface chilled his sweaty skin.
I’m going to set you down, she told him.
Devon opened his eyes. He was near a stone floor, only a few inches above it as she waited for him to prepare himself. He braced himself and she lowered him that last little bit, setting him on his feet.
“Thanks,” he told her and her winds swirled around him, hugging him warmly before sweeping his head wrap off and spiking his hair into a single ridge from front to back. Giggling, she left to get Xehm.
Devon took the time to get his racing heart rate under control and look around. He seemed to be at the lowest level of the pens, the metal cages torn to shreds around him. A minute later he heard a nervous yelp from above and looked up.
Xehm was falling slowly toward him, though he seemed instead to be racing down an invisible hill as his legs churned madly, running in place while he kept his arms above his head in what looked like a victory salute. Devon had to hide a smile. It looked silly, but he knew how terrifying the experience was. It appeared that Xehm wasn’t any braver than he was.
Airi set Xehm down and he dropped to his hands and knees, panting. Devon hunkered down beside him, putting one hand on the old man’s bony shoulder. “Sorry about that,” he apologized. “It’s easier if you keep your eyes shut.”
“I was afraid she’d drop me!” Xehm gasped.
Never.
“Airi would never drop you. She hasn’t dropped me yet anyway.”
Devon blinked and finally decided he really didn’t want to know. “Come on,” he said, standing again. “I think they must be this way.”
They walked across the scrapped remains where the cages had originally been bolted into the floor, heading toward a corridor clear of the wreckage on the other side. A dim light glowed down it, but Devon wasn’t entirely sure that meant there was a sylph down that way. A fire sylph in a central location could light up miles of tunnel using carefully placed mirrors.
“I’m not sure we’re going the right way anymore,” Xehm said uncertainly behind him.
Devon shook his head, not completely sure himself, but too curious not to look now. They’d come too far to turn back. “What do you think, Airi?” he asked.
I can feel a sylph, she said. I think.
“Airi says there’s someone down there,” Devon said and walked into the corridor, small and nearly claustrophobic after the huge area where the cages used to be. The corridor was square and squat, with sharp man-made angles, but there were periodic areas of destruction along the walls and floor, spots no more than a few feet wide where the smooth stone was pockmarked. Devon walked around the strange holes, not sure what they were. Xehm just followed after him, his lips firm, and Devon wondered suddenly if the old man was frightened by the closed-in spaces.
Before he could suggest that they go back, despite his own personal curiosity, the passageway opened up again into another room. It wasn’t anywhere near the size of the cage room, but somehow, it was far more grandiose. The walls were covered in frescos of colored stone, showing hundreds of years of the subjugation of sylphs by the people of Meridal. The pictures didn’t present it that way, all of the sylphs depicted instead as being blissful with the chance to serve, but the rest of the room proved the lie to that.
The Sylph Hunter Page 7