by Kari Cordis
“A quarter tirna?!” Rodge said, with much more animation than dismemberment or impalement had aroused. “That’s outrageous!”
“Shut up, Rodge,” Loren urged. “What happened to Dreu?”
A shockingly violet lizard suddenly landed with a splat on an empty platter, took one startled, embarrassed look around, and scurried off the table. No one paid any attention to it.
“Well, Nerissa is leaning over Dreu. Her hair brushes his face.”
Snickers. Someone jibed, “Is this Dreu’s story or your dream last night?”
The taleteller ignored them. “You are in grave danger,’ she says.”
“Dreu gasps, ‘Nay, Lady Ivory, these wounds are nothing…`”
Sentinels laughed softly around the table, some almost choking in the attempt to stay quiet. Rodge put his face in his hands.
“Your wounds are grievous,’ she says, ‘but I mean rather that you are in the very path of an ambush, intended to breach the Tor and capture the Daphenian merchant that visits just inside.”
“Then you must leave me, Lady, and hurry on your way to warn my countrymen,’ Dreu gasps out.”
“Nay, noble Sentinel, for you shall surely perish without care,’ she says, then there’s this interruption…and Tamaren walks up, to see why things are off schedule.” An almost reverent silence fell, privates looking at the tale-spinner with hushed awe. Rodge, in the face of all this silence, asked grudgingly, “Who’s Tamaren?” A sea of tanned faces swiveled to gaze on him in disbelief. One of them said, as if he just needed a reminder, “Of the Swords of Mercy.” Rodge threw up his hands.
“Nerissa explains to the Hand what’s going on, Tamaren agrees they can’t leave what’s left of Dreu, so they put him up in a tree and build a blind—apologizing the whole time that he still may be in danger from stray arrows!” The privates grinned again, enjoying things about this story that were a little obscure to the Northerners.
“So, Dreu’s up there trying not to die too loudly and to stay conscious long enough to see what’s gonna happen, when sure enough, down the trail comes a group of men. They’re moving quietly, obviously on full alert…and wearing shadowcloth, blades, axes, crossbows strung.”
Everyone was staring at him, puzzled, and he paused in satisfaction, letting them absorb the implications, stew over his meaning. The Northerners, mystified before, were now absolutely lost.
“Then Tamaren steps out of the trees. ‘Halt,’ she cries, ‘and turn from thy foul path. Desist, go back to thy swamps and thou wilt go unharmed.’”
“Swamps!” one of the listeners cried grimly. “Mercs!”
Ari’s head snapped around. Mercs? Not…not the White Asps? Surely there were lots of mercenaries around…but why were so many suddenly popping into his life? All around the table, the privates’ eyes were hardening, jaws setting angrily in the brown faces. “They dare to attack Cyrrh,” one said, low and threatening.
The storyteller rolled on: “They just laughed when they saw one lone woman. And then they proved they were NOT Cyrrhidean, for they’d barely got their bows up before she’d fired a bolt right into the leader’s chest. Vashti and Nerissa joined on their flanks, brandishing steel, and the fight commenced. Dreu saw the whole thing before he passed out again—said it was the prettiest little skirmish he’d ever seen. Three shining blades against a dozen…like sunrays among slugs.”
Contented sighs went around the table. Several privates were nodding in satisfaction, others had looks of almost comical longing on their faces.
Rodge, glancing at Ari and Loren, muttered, “Great. This is just what you two need to bring you back down to earth.”
“That’s when the warning went out about unannounced parties at the Gates,” the taleteller continued in a final kind of tone. “No one ever knew where the dead mercs came from or that the Ivory had saved the Torque, because Dreu died right after telling my brother.”
“Your brother could have told the authorities,” Rodge pointed out. The private looked offended. “He’s a Fox. It was told him in confidence.”
“But,” Loren protested, “there was that dead Whiteblade.”
Shocked looks bombarded him from tables away. Weighty silence suffused their whole end of the hall. You would have thought he’d profaned the Torquelord’s mother. Embarrassed, he stuttered, “I…I suppose they carry off their dead…” This didn’t seem to help things.
Finally someone said, hushed, “Ivory don’t die…they’re sworn to Il for all time.”
Three pairs of Northern eyebrows rose. They stared across the table at the aghast masses of privates. “You don’t think the same girls who joined the Swords of Light hundreds of years ago are still around?” Rodge said carefully, as if he might push unstable minds over the edge. No one answered, but the looks spoke volumes. The two cultures stared at each other with a mutual, incredulous, faint contempt.
Loren said hurriedly into the strained silence, “Why would mercs attack Cyrrh? I mean, they’re still Realmsmen.”
“They don’t have any loyalty,” one private drawled, and the air became a muddled hum as everyone threw out their ideas as to why and how such a thing could happen. Tensions dissolved. The private who’d been sharing such an inspiring story with them mused, “The only real clue is the Lady Nerissa’s comment. For whatever reason, they were after that merchant. Maybe they thought he was a runaway slave—he had the red hair.”
Ari felt the blood drain from his face. His palms broke out in a sweat. He couldn’t have felt any more conspicuous if everyone in the Hall had turned to look at him, which nobody had. In fact, to his visceral surprise, the talk turned with great excitement to the contraband picture of Nerissa, issues of interrealm sabotage apparently set aside for the night.
Barely able to concentrate, he followed Rodge and Loren up between the narrow, damp walls of a stone staircase. The hushed whispers of the privates and the flickering, leaping shadows from the lone and very insufficient candle combined rather unpleasantly with the paranoia tightening his shoulders and the horrific mental pictures of the night’s entertainment. The room they all finally entered didn’t help much, either, a close, dark barracks stultifying with the day’s heat and crowded with beds and the furtive press of Sentinel bodies.
“It wasn’t from the Book of Ivory,” he reassured Loren and a still-outraged Rodge later, referring to that lovingly guarded, tattered piece of paper drawn so carefully from between layers of mattress. They were alone in their own room, spacious compared to the personal space (the width of a mattress) allotted a Sentinel private.
“You don’t destroy books,” Rodge said, for the dozenth time. “Only primitives destroy books.” None of them had been very impressed with the contraband. For all the vaunted skill of Cyrrhidean artists, the picture hadn’t shown much evidence of it. Cartoonish, it was just a woman’s face and the long, dark, rippling black hair that cascaded fancifully out of the frame. What Ari didn’t say was that it was a close enough rendering, laughable as it was as an object of adoration, that he recognized the girl from the Book that had sat in Harthunters…she’d been the last to join the band. A pain of longing shot through him, for the days when his daydreams had the possibility of being memories, for the memories of dreams. And for Selah, who would understand all of this. Who was a girl, to boot.
“They’re lonely,” he said. “They don’t get too many girls through here, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, you can tell by the way they stare at Cerise—and she barely counts.”
“She’s pretty,” Loren objected. “She’s just got the personality of a cactus.”
Ari was too morose to join in on the ensuing assessment of Cerise’s dubious charms. He was still jittery from the night’s conversation, from the accidental insinuation of the taleteller. Were there mercenaries after every misplaced Sheelman wandering the Realms—and how many could there be anyway? He’d never seen anyone that looked like him… But if there were other foundlings, maybe there was someone wanting to g
et rid of them, clean the Realms of any potential threat, any possible Enemy spy when worry over war was starting to nibble at the collective Realm consciousness. And…an escaped slave, the private had said. Ari’s mind went blank with that. Where…how…?
Questions piled up in his mind, and time pulled uneasily at him, heavy and ominous as the drop in pressure that precedes a storm.
CHAPTER 18
On the Royal maps of the Empire, the Shimmering Downs were a thin line of bumps demarcating the fuzzy border between her Realm and that of the Rach.
On horseback, it was a full day’s ride from one side to the other, and a full day in the saddle with the Rach was a full day. It was almost sixteen hours of sweltering in the shallow, stifling clefts and wilting on the unprotected rises. All day long, Sable watched the dogs being sent after small game flushed by the party, their lean, muscled bodies streaking like arrows over the sparse brown hills. Several times riders were sent out to fetch a steer from one of the great herds that came into view, looking like a mass of grazing ants in the distance. The land was relentlessly sere, burnt to a crisp by a merciless sun that Sable was profoundly grateful to see finally set.
By the light of a huge moon, Kore called for a bloodhawk, inviting her up to the crest of a nearby hill to watch its release. She should have been better prepared. The fact that the children, despite pleading that normally turned the indulgent Rach to butter, were firmly denied the pleasure of accompanying them should have been a warning.
Sable watched it curiously on the ride up. It was a big bird, half again the size of the hunting falcons, which were no hummingbirds. Kore murmured lovingly to it while the huge, taloned feet dug into his arm brace and the beautiful, dusty peachish wings fluttered restlessly. The Palace was well-stocked with bloodhawks, of course, but it wasn’t within her list of daily tasks to personally send them off to the Hilt.
“We’ll just let Kyr know we’re through the Empire,” Kore crooned to it when they reached the crown of the hill. With gentle, sure fingers, he checked to make sure his message was secure in its tiny leg canister, then almost lovingly pulled off the hood.
The bloodhawk helped him with an impatient snap of its head. Underneath the hood, a well-shaped head with a powerful, hooked beak and an eye the color of claret swiveled in on Sable, fixing her with such a shockingly ferocious glare that she involuntarily drew back. But that was nothing to its scream, a shrieking challenge so chilling that she felt goose bumps come up on her arms and her heart start to pound.
Kore, completely misreading her reaction, murmured, “Aye, he’s a beauty, isn’t he? And afraid of nothing…fly now, fierce one, back to your hunting ground—” and he threw his arm up in the air.
Powerful wings flung out to either side of it as the bloodhawk grabbed at the air, climbing with dizzying speed before leveling out. Once, twice, it circled, looking like he was considering them for dinner to Sable’s eye, before power-stroking his body into a thermal and away from them. He disappeared with quick, deadly grace, almost invisible against the sky. But his moonshadow drifted, eerily defined on the sand below, straight south. Sable, a little unsettled at the vicious savagery of its eyes and voice, realized she was following it, in a sense. Following that savage shadow into a savage land, that, judging by the reverent looks on Kore and his warriors’ faces as they followed the bird’s flight, was deeply admired for its savagery.
What was she doing?
The featureless landscape spreading out in front of them by the mystical light of the moon was much more impressively so by the harsh light of the sun—featureless, not mystical. There was nothing the least bit romantic about, in fact. Occasional soft mounds of orange-ish sand had drifted in over the brownish-grey, gravelly earth. The Idon had plunged under the Shimmerings, evidently to stay, if the absolute lack of greenery in the desolation before them was any indicator. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything that wasn’t horizon in sight that next morning.
It made one most appreciative of the indomitable cheer of the Rach…though there was a subtle change in them as well. There were no more races or separating from the group, and a permanent detail of warriors rotated out at the head, rear and flanks of the procession. A serious and patently more watchful guard was posted whenever they stopped, and they stopped earlier, taking advantage of the coolness to reenergize from increasingly exhausting days. The sun was so relentless on the unprotected plains that she felt like she was on slow broil in a kitchen oven.
The good side was that there were fewer distractions. She could finally nail Kore down on some of these colorful Aerach social eccentricities. A little guiltily, she determined to get some proper classifications going—so far the journey had been little more than an unconscionably pleasurable holiday. Besides, she told herself without much enthusiasm, what better to take one’s mind off the suffocating heat, flies, and smell of horse than market analysis and import tariffs?
“So, the Rachar is made up mostly of Shagreens?” she was querying Kore by mid-morning.
“Entirely.” Kore was making no effort to hide his merriment at her struggles to understand Aerach government—or the lack thereof.
“There’re no merchantmen? No craftspeople represented?”
“No…” he scratched his chin thoughtfully. “We don’t really have any.”
She looked at him in thorough objection. “How about the saddlemakers? The people who—who—who make these tents, and your cookware and who weave your blankets?”
“Secondary occupations. Hobbies.”
“The cattlemen!” she cried in triumph, remembering the huge Aerach herds they’d left behind them in the Shimmerings.
“A forced rotation,” he confided deflatingly. “No Rach voluntarily leaves the Sheel.”
“Medical personnel,” she said, half-laughing in exasperation.
“Every adult is a healer.” He was grinning openly.
“You can’t run a Realm based solely on the interests of the military!”
“Correction, Lady Queen,” he chortled. “YOU can’t run a Realm based solely on the interests of the military!”
She laughed with him, shaking her head and firmly ignoring the ferocious scowl from her Queensknight. “So, the Rachar…” she continued encouragingly. “They make the laws, serve as the legal courts...?”
Kore shook his handsome head. “They will Stand in judgment at the behest of the Rach and they will Stand when a new Rach must be elected, but otherwise their purpose is purely to serve as council at the Rach’s request.”
She suppressed a pang of envy. Simplicity had its benefits. “And what is their leader called?”
“The Rach,” Kore said, dead-pan.
“You know what I mean,” she accused him, a chuckle gurgling up in her throat.
“Aye,” he admitted good-naturedly, “but I can’t satisfy your curiosity. They are all equal—it is for the Rach to decide whose voice he heeds most.”
She shook her head, saying playfully in the oddly formal tones the Rach sometimes adopted, “You honor me with your honest replies.”
His face grew serious. “It is you who honor me, and I will never forget it.”
She paused, glancing at him doubtfully. “The Kingsmeet,” he prompted her, which didn’t clarify the situation at all. “It is for the great rulers to speak at such a table, and yet you addressed me personally, with the respect of equals,” he explained quietly, dipping his head to her with more affecting homage than she was quite comfortable with.
This was awkward—she didn’t want this stiff formality between them, not when she was just getting used to the sincerity, the easy inclusiveness of her hosts. “That was quite a table, wasn’t it?” she said wryly, trying to change the subject. “Prime Council Channing provided just the perfect touch of zip to the party.”
His face lightened again. “I’ve had few dealings with the North, but my understanding is that most of her people are much more like him than unlike. You are unusual…we are lucky to have you.”
Which was unaccountably embarrassing and not much improvement at all.
“It’s significant,” he mused, saving her from having to reply, “that now, at this time, we have such rare gifts in our leaders—the Wolfmaster, King Kane, yourself…”
“We might have to leave Lord Khrieg off the list,” she remarked drolly, more unguarded with this simple man in the middle of the desert than she’d ever been with her most astute advisor in the privacy of her audience room.
“Do not underestimate Cyrrh,” he cautioned soberly. “The Skylord seems impotent, but Cyrrh will stand if all other Realms were to fall. From the time of the Four Brothers, she has stood inviolate. Lirralhisa has never been taken, her Torques never permanently breached. When all the Realms crawled with Tarq before the Great Peace, Cyrrh was still clean. She will stand to the end, mark my words.”
“Are her people so much stronger and fiercer than the mighty Rach?” she teased outrageously, and he grinned.
“Durable, I’d say. And Cyrrh has some terrain advantages.”
“And do all the Rach share these sentiments, or is this your highly valued opinion?” This was only half in jest. The Rach seemed to look at the world in a whole different way than Northerners, and it fascinated her.
“It’s mostly Kyr’s opinion,” he confessed, shooting her an apologetic grin like he’d been caught plagiarizing.
Something flip-flopped in her belly. “The Lord Rach?” she said casually, as if she hadn’t thought of him in years.
“Aye. There’s never been a Rach like him either…so involved with other Realms, so aware of what’s happening outside the Sheel. A Rach’s eyes are always turned South…Kyr’s seem to rove the world.”
“How do you mean, ‘involved’?” she pressed quickly, unwilling to dwell on that naked adulation in the Shagreen’s voice.
“Well, he’s got the Sharhi-Tir—the westernmost Wing—working with the Fox to find the ’Shard. He’s forced the Faracens, the Wing on the Sea, into boats (of all things), to join the Merrani in patrols of the Eastern Sheel. He’s even sent an emissary up to see if he can find the Ranks of the Ram, wanting to delve into their knowledge of the Tarq.”