“Dinner at sunset,” Gard returned. The door shut. End of Act One.
And would Act Two be another comedy? Or a romance, as he hoped? A corner of his mouth tucked itself into a wry smile.
He changed his towel for soft cotton breeches of a clear emerald green. The caress of the material against his limbs was sensual—so much so, it was disconcertingly annoying. But not as annoying as the heaviness of the pentacle in its pouch, a chunk of ice against the gently steaming skin of his naked chest.
With an aggravated sigh, Gard scoured the carpets for every last cut end of his hair and beard, lifting each with a gesture, holding them suspended in a crimson pinwheel with a glance. He was being paranoid, he thought as he released them into a tiny brazier lit to dispel the chill of the bath. He should go further, and melt the pentacle down and sell it.
But he had power. He could well attract the attention of stronger magic-users who would never have noticed him before, just as he had attracted Tarek’s attention on the day that Jofar left. Of course he had been prying at Tarek’s shell as clumsily as though the sorcerer were an oyster . . .
Know a little magic, fear a lot. The coals in the brazier flicked into tiny red flames, devouring the red hair scattered over them.
He drew up a pillow, plunked himself down upon it, and peered into the spitting fire. Pyromancy—concentration, posture and breath . . . All he could see was Senmut’s bristly face, the lumpish buildings of Dhan Bagrat nestling in his beard, his hand raised in either blessing or warning. Riddles, always riddles.
Gard remembered with a furtive pleasure Senmut’s reaction to Tarek’s mention of his brother. At that moment the old monk had seemed almost human.
The hair was gone. The coals slumbered beneath their coating of ash. The dragonet lay curled beneath his heart. It watched him, pointed ears twitching, eyes bright over its folded paws, tail gracefully coiled with just the end tapping to betray some slight irritation.
Once, Gard had held the hand of a wounded legionary as the man’s lifeblood seeped inexorably away, bringing first a chill dullness, then unconsciousness, and, at last, death as a welcome release. On the month’s journey from Dhan Bagrat to Chandrigore Gard had both hoped for and dreaded a similar draining of his new knowledge, leaving him in his former torpor of denial. But the quicksilver in his veins had not turned to dross, and the diminutive dragon, his private daemon, had not faded into hallucination. With a rueful chuckle he thought, I think I am getting to like the little beast; he is the only thing I have which is truly mine.
The daemon smirked. Gard rose, stretched, and smothered a yawn.
The rental of his bed no doubt included a female body to warm it; those maidservants had brushed by him more times than necessary to deliver a pitcher and a tray. But although they were cleaner, they were otherwise little different from the dancing-girls on the caravan from Dhan Bagrat. Those women had assaulted his newly polished perceptions with more than their smell. Their coarse manners, their masks of paint and sophistication, had been thick but not quite thick enough to conceal brutalized souls bled white by despair. He could not have touched one even if he had known for certain she would quell his renewed nightmares. He needed to break his fast with someone, not a rented mite of flesh unattached to a real human being. Senmut, he thought, you have purified me. I am not sure I appreciate it.
Gard poured himself another goblet of wine. Seduction, not purchase—that was the intellectual challenge. But after this last winter he probably could not seduce a gourd. Maybe it was just as well there was a distinct shortage of seducible women. A shame he could feel so little virtue in abstinence, but even in Senmut’s world-view, male gods were paired with female.
And—not at all by chance, he suspected—tonight was the full moon of the spring equinox. Surely the heavens owed it to him to open and drop the perfect woman upon him. Gard imagined a woman drifting down from the sky, buoyed by her skirts, landing upon him and knocking him to the floor in a flurry of silk and a jangle of bracelets. He grinned. Setting down the goblet, he danced a few steps, intrigued by the feel of his own body.
Lord of the Dance . . . His father, Eldrafel, had danced. Gard stumbled, his glee damped. He turned purposefully to his exercises. Bend and stretch, knot and loosen, postures held for certain counted breaths, movements to focus and concentrate his power. Balance, he ordered himself, teetering on one foot. Strength. He leaped, changing abruptly from one set of stylized gestures to another.
But for once he could not rise above his awkwardness. He chided himself. Trying pyromancy while seated on a soft cushion, he chided himself. Exercising with a stomach full of wine. No self-discipline at all. What a treat!
With a shrug and a sigh, he walked out onto the balcony.
The daemon hunkered down warily. Gard eyed the marketplace of Chandrigore with the predatory intensity of a starving man inspecting a banquet table. The Mohan at last. Chandrigore was small border outpost, feeding upon the caravan route, a satellite of neither Apsurakand nor Ferangipur. Free, Gard told himself, like me.
The sun sank down the western sky; the date palms outside the caravanserai cast long, frail, gold-flecked shadows across ground, building and human body alike. People swirled like the colored bits in a mosaic, dogs barking, children shouting, babies wailing. An ingeniously painted elephant cut a swath through the crowd and lumbered on its way. The vendors packed their piles of oranges and almonds, their bolts of cloth, their teetering piles of pots and bowls. A snake charmer enticed his toothless cobras back into their baskets. A rope climber coiled his props. Several monkeys and a mongoose clustered chattering around their master, receiving their evening rations. Cooking odors curled sinuously through the still air. Someone blew an emphatic trill upon a shenai.
The people coalesced into a crescent ranged before the low buildings opposite the caravanserai, one end anchored by a weird many-legged banyan tree, the other by the brightly striped canopy of a tavern. A boy moved two donkeys and a gray horse out of the way.
The music of the shenai ceased. Oh. Gard frowned. It was a slave auction. He had last seen such an auction when he had lived where the workers were slaves, on Minras. At the age of eight he had not really appreciated what he saw. Now he did. He leaned on the cool whitewashed brick of the balcony parapet, head cocked to the side, watching and yet holding himself aloof.
The first item was a squat but muscular man. “A field worker,” said the slave-merchant, a wizened individual swathed in greasy robes and drooping turban. “Sorghum or cotton fields. Look at his teeth, his shoulders.”
Gard’s frown deepened. The first deal was concluded and the merchant waved a plump old woman onto the auction block. “Good for an ayah, to watch your children,” he said. “Sews, cooks, grinds wheat.”
The old woman was bundled aside. Gard began to turn away. To a murmur of interest from the crowd another woman stepped onto the block. Stepped, Gard thought, spinning back like a lodestone tweaked by the North Star, as the Queen of Sabazel mounts the steps of Ashtar’s temple. Cool. Self-possessed. Regal.
Gard’s senses spread themselves, a net cast into deep water. He caught the slaver’s grumbling aside to his goods—well, your Splendor, I will not have to put up with your airs much longer—nothing but a demoness, a shakhmi, you are . . . He began extolling his wares to the crowd.
His voice was obliterated by the rush and foam of the blood in Gard’s ears, breaking against the shore of—no, not lust. Recognition. She was the woman of his dreams.
Every fiber in his body vibrated. The little daemon leaped to its feet. The pentacle rang like a gong inside its pouch, not warding but welcoming. Shakhmi? That was the khu-word Senmut had given him. The word to focus his attention, his abilities. It was a sign, by Hurmazi’s forelock. It had bloody well better be a sign.
She glistened like an icon in the lush light of the sun. The simple cotton sari outlining her body was spun gold, her waist-length hair the sleekest sable, her eyes large and deep, reflecting azure and
green and amethyst. Gard clutched the parapet, its gritty surface scoring his fingertips. The dragonet planted its front paws against the inside of his ribs and pushed, panting, tail flicking. Surely his bones were dissolving like pearls in wine, becoming some rare substance that was neither solid nor liquid.
Someone bid on the woman. Someone else offered more. She stared out over the heads of the crowd as if they were of no concern to her. Those eyes, those incredible eyes, met Gard’s; something moved in their serene blue abyss, something prickling sparkling quick, furrowing his own senses . . .
He knew what she saw, a man-shape etched by the full light of the sun, standing in sharp relief against the shadowed facade of the inn. Red hair, green trousers, naked torso, scarred arm, weirdly lit eyes.
Her head tilted. The moist curve of her lips parted. She smiled. That smile was his alone.
So much, he thought, for drinking two goblets of wine on an empty stomach—a fever dream . . . His thought sank beneath the flood of his ardor. The dragonet floated upon its crest, paws tucked comfortably behind its head, wings paddling.
The crowd murmured approvingly. Someone was bidding on her. Several men were bidding on her. The merchant nodded and grinned, his face turning from side to side, counting his profits.
A lackey scurried out from the tavern with a new bid. The merchant bowed in that direction. And Gard heard an oddly familiar voice call, “Five imperial solidi.”
The hare-like proprietor and the barber stood on the steps below him. Their round faces looked up at him like sunflowers. No wonder. It was he who had bid. Was that honey or wine or corruption in his mouth? He did not care.
“I hear five solidi!” declaimed the merchant.
The lackey ran again from the tavern. “Seven Apsuri rials!” the merchant shouted, elated.
“Nine,” called Gard. Odd, how all the other bidders had dropped out.
The anonymous figure in the tavern bid ten rials. The woman turned her back on the striped awning and focused, like Senmut’s glass lens, on the balcony of the caravanserai. Her smile was subtle, full of promise; Gard’s heart sizzled like a crisp in a fire and was consumed. “Thirteen solidi!”
In the ensuing silence he heard a faint rattle of crockery from the nether regions of the caravanserai. Lamb, and saffron, and apples to drip prettily down over her chin—a firm chin, strength of character—one woman, served up on a platter, fate’s temptations held delicately between her lips.
The dragonet bounded about gleefully, making Gard feel as if he had swallowed an aggressive butterfly. The pentacle burned his chest like a brand. The crowd waited. Not one baby so much as hiccupped. The lackey stood at the door of the tavern, hands dangling at his sides. Silence.
Then, like an abrupt peal from a herald’s trumpet, the merchant shouted, “Sold, for thirteen Imparluzi solidi, to the Nazib on the balcony of the caravanserai!”
Everyone in the crowd cheered. Children shouted. Camels bellowed. A gust of wind shivered the leaves of the palms. Something fluttered among the grotesque limbs of the banyan. Bats, not yet awake, waiting for nightfall? But the flutterer was stolid, brown and feathered. Gard braced himself on the parapet like a seasick sailor upon a ship’s railing and darted a look of irritation—spying again?—at his great-grandfather the falcon.
The falcon ignored him. The merchant and the woman stepped down, he bustling, she gliding as if the stained and littered ground were mother-of-pearl tiles. The crowd parted before them. Gard shook his head and his perceptions whirled like confetti in a breeze. Oh gods, what have I done?
He ducked back into the room, dumped out his purse, and counted out thirteen solidi. His hands were trembling, he noted with mingled distaste and excitement. The purse was almost empty. By the time he settled his account with the hare he would have almost nothing . . .
To hell with it! He dumped out the last unspoken for coin. He sauntered back onto the balcony and threw a handful to the proprietor. “Pay the man,” he called. “And here, take this and buy her a silk sari, gold bangles, and lapis lazuli earrings.” Gold and blue, flesh and eyes. Oddly enough, his voice was quite steady, as if he bought women every day.
The merchant took his money, made an elaborate bow, scuttled away. The lackey outside the tavern sat down in the dust. The proprietor turned the remaining coins over to the barber, who took the woman by the arm. “Shall I have her washed, Nazib?” she called, teeth dazzling.
The slave-woman stood quietly, looking straight ahead, hands folded. From above, Gard saw her foreshortened, the line of her cheek repeated like a khu-word by the sweep of her shoulder and the curve of her hips. Shakhmi, the dragonet breathed in his ear. Imkhash, shakhmi. Goddess, demoness.
The caravanserai’s serving-maids, thought Gard in a flash of manic foresight, would be disappointed at being passed over. They would tease her, pinching those smooth cinnamon flanks and pulling that sleek ebony hair. And she would stand in the bath submitting to their attentions with such dignified forbearance, she would make monkeys of them all. He laughed at his own absurdity and at the daemon tickling his liver with its claws, and threw the paise down as well. “Buy trinkets for the maids. With my compliments.”
The crowd cheered again. Giddily, Gard saluted the watching faces with his deflated purse and watched them disperse. Well, I have certainly introduced myself to the Mohan! The sun sank beyond the horizon. A boy lit cressets outside the caravanserai and the tavern. Another returned to the street the two donkeys and the gray horse, ghostly pale in the twilight.
Ah, Gard told himself, existence can be most amusing, dropping women from the sky upon the parched and grateful flesh below. Humming a light Rhodopean reel, he went inside the room and closed the doors on the groping fingers of twilight and uncertainty.
Chapter Seven
Gard paced across the shadowed room, caught himself, stopped, started pacing again. The dragonet paced across his stomach. The print of each clawed foot was outlined by lust and apprehension, certainty and guilt. You bought not the use of a mite of flesh but a woman, you idiot. You are so desperate to hide from the night, you bought a woman.
But there is something—something odd about her. The trader called her a shakhmi. If Senmut gave me that word knowing what it meant, then his sense of humor is refined indeed . . .
A knock at the door. The daemon pricked its ears. With a shuddering sigh, Gard clasped his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels as he had so often seen Andrion do when his legions paraded before him. An interested but slightly detached expression, a hint of sternness about the eyes.
A street fair spilled into the room. Fire-eaters lit the lamps. Jugglers spun dishes and cutlery and pitchers through the air and onto a low table. A sword-swallower flourished his knife and cut succulent slices of basted lamb. Dancers threw back the bedcovers and plumped up the pillows. Acrobats tumbled across the floor, deposited a woman’s body, and with various feminine flutterings, lascivious glances, and giggled comments, tumbled away.
The proprietor, his nose twitching as though it totted up his profits, stood beaming amid the human tide. He proffered a small clay tablet impressed with a seal—oh, the slave dealer’s receipt. Gard thrust it into his pouch as someone draped a garland of marigolds around his neck, tickling nose and chin.
He sneezed. When he opened his eyes the entertainers were gone. The scent of sweat masked with perfume died away and the sounds of revelry faded. The brass filigree lamps shone like bonfires. Gods, it had been dark in here!
One solitary figure stood stranded before him. Her eyes were fixed upon his face, not demurely upon the floor. Her hands held a bundle of belongings with the easy grace of an actress receiving a bouquet of lilies. The dragonet dissolved in a fatuous grin.
Gard’s heart, his breath, his reason crashed up against her expression; serenity edged by irony and an odd sort of—acknowledgment? Fire and water, stammered part of his mind. Fire and water make a thunderstorm.
She was Raisa. Dark tip-tilted eyes, tu
mbling waves of sleek black hair, features like an incised topaz, hands and shoulders poised elegantly and body curving . . . He blinked. Her body curved more lushly than a sixteen-year old’s. This woman was his own age. Her eyes were Khazyari onyx at one moment and then were alternately blue and green and violet, like the sea lapping at and withdrawing from a glistening white beach.
Lapis lazuli earrings danced against her cheeks, and what looked like a star sapphire was inserted in the side of her nose; it winked at him like a third eye as he moved around her, as she moved around him. He had given the innkeeper enough money to dress her in cloth of gold, but hardly enough for such a sapphire.
She wore a sari of deep turquoise silk shot with flecks of malachite green. The fine material might as well have been canvas against the satin of her skin, the colors faded and drab against the glow of her complexion. Such vivid colors would have suited Raisa, too, but would have eclipsed a blond imperial courtesan.
This woman probably did have Khazyari blood. It had been almost forty years since the Khazyari had swept through the upper reaches of the Mohan. She might be a bastard, just as he was. “What is your name?” he asked.
Her lips parted. Music purled from her mouth; only a brief chord, but enough to set his nerves singing harmony: “I am called Deva, Nazib.”
“Deva,” he repeated. Embarrassingly, his voice squeaked like that of a boy in his early teens, uttering one syllable in his usual register and the next one several notes higher.
Her fault, of course, for eyeing him with that warm, even amused, appraisal. But then, she was accustomed to being inspected like a beast of burden. Perhaps she had been living in dread of being sold to a fat merchant or an aged nobleman with jaded and peculiar tastes. Gard was young, and to her, perhaps exotic; that was why she had exerted her powers to draw him to her . . .
Powers? He stiffened. His bones twanged, and his blood rushed sparkling over a precipice. The dragonet sat unmoving, wings half extended and shivering very slightly, wide gray eyes unblinking.
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