Bells of the Kingdom (Children of the Desert Book 3)

by Leona Wisoker

  A pair of grey eyes opened, casting a brilliant light across her, like a hazy lantern. She stared, transfixed, as a face took form around those eyes: a slender, pale young face, so like her own—but he wasn’t looking at her. He was near but not in the cell with her. He was following someone, some human, some man.

  She screamed and reached out, slamming her whole body into unyielding stone in an effort to reach him. Only one creature could have those eyes, that face—he wasn’t dead at all.

  My son! My son, alive, and just out of reach—don’t go, don’t go, come back to me!

  For a moment, she thought her cry might have reached him. He blinked and turned his head, looking almost at her. Then he blinked again, and the vision faded, leaving her alone in the dark once more.

  Ellemoa lost control then, screaming and writhing and battering herself against the walls; uncaring if this was another of the torment-dreams teyhataerth so often sent to test her. The vision had split open her mind, cleared the mist, awakened a vast hunger for freedom.

  She would escape and find her son. She would. And she would get them both free of this evil, stinking place, where humans turned ha’ra’hain into slaves and animals to torture; they would go home. To Arason. To the cottage by the lake. And they would be safe.

  Darkness and silence answered. She had no idea how long she spent screaming. She collapsed, finally, and wept for a while more, then slept.

  She awakened to the sound of a sledgehammer hitting the door of her prison: the sound of escape.

  Chapter Eight

  There was a servant waiting patiently outside Idisio’s room when he returned from his bath. Idisio’s first thought was: Scratha must want to talk to me; followed, dimly, by a habitual tickle of anxiety: I didn’t do anything wrong! Did I? Maybe he was about to be taken to task over some impropriety during that bath after all. Anada had seemed perfectly serene and content as he left—but then, kathain were obviously trained to look happy even when—

  He stopped that train of thought, fast. He really didn’t want to get upset right now. The bath and the conversation had left him with a drowsy contentment he’d rarely felt before. He didn’t want to lose that.

  Two steps later, perspective shifted: the servant wasn’t standing in front of his door, but Riss’s, and was watching Idisio’s approach with a quiet alertness that clarified the situation. Not messenger, but watcher—someone important was in Riss’s room, and the servant was here to be sure that someone wasn’t harmed or bothered.

  The list of names that Riss would allow into her private quarters was short, in Idisio’s considered opinion; and as he was standing in the hallway and Lord Scratha almost definitely occupied elsewhere, that left only one real possibility: Gria, heir to Scratha.

  He nodded vaguely to the servant and went into his room, unwilling to test whether his status would get him past that direct, unafraid stare. No reason to try, anyway. Something about Gria always made him deeply uneasy.

  He considered the book laid out on the small writing desk, then shook his head, stretched out on the low bed, and let drowsiness intensify into a light doze.

  Some unmeasured stretch of time later, he opened his eyes to find Riss letting herself quietly into the room. He propped himself up on his elbows, smiling, more rested and relaxed than he could ever remember being before, and said, “Enjoy your talk with Gria?”

  She shut the door behind her, slowly, then turned to face him. Some of his ease faded at the expression on her face.

  “Enjoy your little visit with the kathain?” she said blackly.

  He sat up the rest of the way. “What—”

  “I heard her,” she snapped. “They wouldn’t let me in—they said the room was closed to all but the chaal—the important people. Desert lords. And you. But I heard plenty from outside. Plenty. I heard you laughing. I know you were in there! And I heard—her—them—I know what was going on.”

  Idisio drew in a long breath, shaking his head. Anada had told a series of lively jokes; he’d laughed without worry about volume or being overheard. He’d even planned to tell Riss a few of the jokes. That seemed like a bad idea now, given that he’d have to admit the provenance eventually.

  “Riss, there were other desert lords in the room. Lord Ondio of F’Heing, and, and—” He paused, unable to remember, exactly, who else had come and gone. Anada had captured his attention, as promised, so thoroughly that the background noises hadn’t even mattered.

  “Of course,” she said. “Right. Obviously.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall by the door, her glare unrelenting. “I’m not stupid, Idisio! I hear the servants talking, you know. It’s, it’s like some, some scheduling matter to them—make sure there are two women available for this desert lord, make sure there are two boys for that one, oh, and we probably don’t have enough to satisfy the ha’ra’hain, but we’ll have to do our best and hope they forgive the discourtesy of the situation! Discourtesy!”

  Idisio swung sideways and set his feet on the floor, rubbing his hands over his face. “Riss,” he said, looking up at her, “I didn’t. I promise. I swear. What you heard was those desert lords.”

  “You took a bath with a, a kathain, though, didn’t you? That’s custom here, isn’t it?” Her lower lip trembled; she bit it hard and put her shoulders back a little more, defiantly. “And you were laughing.”

  Underneath her words, silent frustration swirled: You never laugh like that around me.

  He decided to ignore the unspoken subtext.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but all we did was talk, Riss. I swear. It’s not—I couldn’t avoid having her around, it would have been—this place has some weird customs. But nothing happened. Come on, you know me better than that, right? I—” He intended to say love you, but his mouth and throat seemed to freeze. He cleared his throat and instead offered, “I wouldn’t do that.”

  She stared at him, her dark frown easing a little. “No? I don’t think you know yet what you’d do or wouldn’t do, Idisio. You’re going on the road with Deiq and Lord Alyea. I doubt Deiq particularly cares about morals or relationships—word has it he’ll fuck anything that moves.”

  Idisio flinched, startled to hear such coarseness from her. Who had she been listening to, that she’d picked up that sort of language?

  She went on without pausing: “And Lord Alyea’s—well, she’s a desert lord, so she’ll be—like the others, northern upbringing or not. As I’m hearing it, it’s not going to be a matter of choice.” Her jaw tightened; he thought he could hear her teeth grinding together, but it might have been the sound of his own fingers digging into his palms. “With that sort of company guiding you around, you’re not going to hold faithful to me. You won’t be able to.”

  He opened his mouth, shut it again, helplessly. “Riss,” he said. “Come on. Of course I will.”

  She turned and left the room without answering or looking back. A few moments later, he could feel her, hunched up on the bed in her room, on the edge of tears.

  “Oh, hells,” he muttered, his perfect calm perfectly shattered.

  After a long moment of furious indecision, he sighed and went after her. It took rather longer to settle her down, and even more time for the inevitable, if enjoyable, tension-breaking follow-up.

  Once Riss fell firmly asleep, Idisio slipped from the room and went to find Deiq: relieved, again, to be out of Riss’s presence, and feeling as hauntingly guilty over it as before. Especially since she’d been very attentive; he’d actually been a little disappointed when she drifted off.

  I wonder if Anada is still in the baths... I wonder if she’s too busy to... talk....

  “Godsdamnit,” he muttered under his breath, and quickened his step, forcing himself to think only about finding Deiq.

  Chapter Nine

  Racks of weapons and practice dummies had been shoved into every available alcove in Captain Ash’s office. His desk was little more than a wide board across two sawhorses, and the inkwell—a sturdy blu
e glass jar that had originally seen another use entirely—had a crust around the rim of the seal, suggesting that the contents had long since dried out. The captain himself sat on a wobbly three-legged stool that would have been more suitable for a ten-year-old than a man of his size and weight.

  Tank stood in front of the desk, habit prompting him to memorize his surroundings, and tried to avoid the Hall captain’s gaze; not from fear, but out of an uneasy awareness that he needed to visibly treat Captain Ash as a superior.

  “Huh,” the captain said, watching Tank narrowly, then sighed. He pinched his nose, as though debating whether or not to say something, and finally shook his head. “Tank. Huh.”

  Tank risked a quick, puzzled glance at the man. “Captain?”

  “Rested enough? You sleep like a damn rock, you know that?”

  Tank’s face heated rapidly. “Not normally,” he said before he could think, then stuttered under the man’s withering stare. “Sorry. I... didn’t think I was that tired.” He was afraid to ask how long he’d slept; he vaguely remembered sunlight in his face at least once, and moonlight coming through the open window another time, so it had been at least a day, maybe two.

  It was embarrassing, and frightening, that he’d gone so solidly out; on the other hand, he felt more rested than he had in a long time.

  “Sleep like that on the trail, you won’t be a hire here long,” Captain Ash said. “Or alive, come to that.”

  “I don’t. Won’t.”

  “Best not.” The captain squinted a little, then said, unexpectedly, “Tank. You familiar with another name, maybe?”

  Tank’s blood turned to ice. “No, Captain,” he said, staring straight ahead. “Just Tank.”

  “Huh,” the man said again. “Well, rules first, questions later. Main points: you don’t steal, rape, swindle, or bully. I get credible complaints, you get a mark against you and hauled in for a talk next time you’re in town. I get proof, you’re out, whether you’ve faced me or not. You don’t like those rules, you try finding a hall that doesn’t hold that line, and good luck with it. Or you turn unsworn and lose the protection of that marker.

  “Once you go unsworn, it’s damn unlikely you’ll live long; that’s a brutal life, that way, with your companions apt to stab you for your socks. Hall hires are bound to respect each other, help when they can, whatever hall you’re from. They have standards. They carry the reputation of their hall with them. They carry the protection of their hall—of all the halls in the kingdom—with them. You’ve got definite refuge and resource and training chances in any town with a hall. Unsworn just kill for money, and they get nothing more than money—and damn little of that, compared to a Hall hire. Bits to the round.

  “You can sign with who you want, long as you register the contract with the Hall first, but there’s names I’d warn you against having anything to do with—so check with me before signing if an offer doesn’t come through the Hall. Check any contract offer with the local hall, same reasoning. We clear so far?”

  Tank nodded. Any other response seemed likely to provoke another lecture.

  “Local law ain’t the same as kingdom law, and that ain’t the same as Hall law,” Captain Ash went on; Tank nodded dutifully, hoping to speed things up, but the captain continued at the same deliberate pace. “Local custom gets into a tricky grey area between enforceable law and common courtesy. I’ll send you to Ten, next, he’s the expert on all of that. You listen to what he has to say. Other than his advice, stick to the basics, like I told you—no raping, stealing, swindling, bullying—and you shouldn’t land in anything you can’t get out of. I’ve got an even longer speech for the dullards, but you have more wits about you than most I’ve seen come through those doors.”

  In the following silence, the captain’s eyes seemed to bore into Tank with unusual intensity.

  “Thank you,” Tank said awkwardly, looking away to keep the moment from becoming a confrontation, and prayed the man wasn’t about to resume questioning him about his background.

  The silence hung, dragged, stretched.

  “Go see Ten,” Captain Ash said abruptly. “He’s in the room back of the library. Come back here when he’s done talking to you, and I’ll go over your options for contracts. Get.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Tank said, and very nearly tripped over a small crate of rusted dagger blades as he backed up.

  “Forgotten how to dance, have you?” the captain inquired sardonically as Tank staggered sideways, wobbling frantically off-balance.

  Tank hopped back to solid footing. “Nah,” he said, deciding brash was the best answer to give, “just practicing a new style.” He grinned at Captain Ash and left before the man could throw the inkwell at him.

  The “library” was so small as to very nearly be a corridor. Tank put his arms out to either side as he walked by the bookshelves, testing; his fingertips reached less than a handspan away from the neatly arranged shelves of bound books, scrolls, and stacks of paper. The air was dry here, and smelled of leather, glue, and dust.

  He paused to read a few titles: Histery of Swordemakin, Once Uppon A Blacesmith, Care of Weppens. He smiled at the misspellings and resisted the impulse to check other titles for mistakes.

  At the far end—although as the room barely measured longer than wide, “far” was a relative term—an archway led into a slightly larger room. This one had walls covered with maps that would have had Tank’s former mentor Allonin on his knees in awe. The largest spread over one entire wall, and showed the lands from north of the Great Forest to the foothills of the Scarpane Mountains, and from the Stone Islands east to the beginning of the Wastelands.

  It was a massive amount of land, and a stunning achievement, especially as it appeared to be drawn to scale. Tank could see faint lines and measurement symbols scattered across the map.

  In the center of the room, at a desk more elaborate than Captain Ash’s only in that it had legs instead of sawhorses, sat an impossibly thin man with unnaturally large eyes. He looked up at Tank without any sign of surprise, blinked slowly, and said, “Ah. Pleased to meet you, Tanavin. I’m Tendallen, better known as Ten.”

  Tank felt his throat close off and the blood drain from his face. He took a step backwards, hands up in front of him as though to ward off a blow.

  “Oh!” Tendallen said, looking distressed now. He stood up, proving himself to be considerably taller than Tank; his narrow skull nearly reached the ceiling. “Oh, I’m sorry. It’s Tank now. Of course. I’m so sorry.”

  “No,” Tank said, barely audible even to himself. He was having trouble breathing. “No. Not here. No.” The Freewarrior’s Hall was supposed to be his haven, his place away from that name, that person he’d been. Now it was tainted.

  He backed up another step, the fire to run surging through his muscles: held still after that single step only because he had nowhere to run to. One panicked, blind flight through Bright Bay had already landed him in enough trouble for a lifetime. He wouldn’t do that again.

  Tendallen stood still, watching Tank with a strange, bright stare. His eyes were a pale grey-blue, and the sunlight shafting in from high windows and ceiling tubes caught odd, golden glitters from the irises.

  “If it helps,” he said quietly, “Captain Ash doesn’t know your... background.”

  “He knows my name isn’t Tank,” Tank said bitterly.

  Tendallen shook his head. “Not from anything said by me. I don’t speak to him often, I’m afraid, and I tell him... very little of what I know. It’s safer that way, even now, for both of us.” He paused. “It’s something of an accident that I know that name. An unintentional eavesdropping incident. And I shouldn’t have said anything, I really shouldn’t have. It’s simply not relevant to your contract with the Hall. So please, stay. I do need to tell you some things, or the captain won’t let you go out on a contract.”

  He sat down again, folding onto his stool gracefully; laced his hands together on the desktop, then waited, his strange stare ne
ver leaving Tank’s face.

  “You’re not human,” Tank said flatly, not moving. A horrid shiver fought to work up his back. He held it back with iron determination not to show fear in front of this—creature.

  “I’m quite human,” Tendallen said. “Believe me. My appearance is something of a genetic accident. A throwback, if you will, to an ancestor who wasn’t entirely human. And my knowledge of you comes from nothing mystical, simply a moment of unintended eavesdropping, as I said, and some obvious connections from there.”

  The pressure in Tank’s throat eased a notch. He hesitated, doubting: it could all be a lie—

  “I’m not lying,” Tendallen said. “Oh, I’ve done it again. No, I didn’t read your mind. I’m far better at reading facial expressions and small movements. Not that you’re particularly challenging, in any case. A blind man could have figured that one out.”

  “What the hells are you doing here?” Tank burst out. A thoroughly educated, intelligent, and perceptive librarian wasn’t what he had expected to find in a freewarrior’s training hall.

  “Well, who else would have me?” the strange man asked dryly, motioning to his face. “In recent years it was worth my life to walk out on the streets, given that something as minor as a visible wart could get one accused of witchcraft and executed in numerous horrible ways. Captain Ash was kind enough to let me stay here, and I’ve done what I could to repay that.”

  He waved one thin hand towards the library room behind Tank, and around at the maps plastering the walls.

  “Speaking of which,” he said, folding his hands together again, “may I please tell you what you need to know at this point? Then you can be free of my frightening company sooner than later.”