FIERCE: Sixteen Authors of Fantasy

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Yes, ilittum,” the class intoned.

  Taya shrugged. Why did they even have to offer a choice? Her mind was made up. Who could possibly want to take kimat? Why would anyone not join the Coalition?

  Chapter IV

  Hrappa

  MANDIR TRIED NOT TO STARE as Taya vaulted, lithe as a dancer, onto the back of a delicate black mare. Every move she made drew his eye. Where was the self-control he’d worked so hard to develop? What had the Coalition been thinking, pairing him with her when they knew his history, and hers?

  Rasik walked up, leading Mandir’s blood bay gelding. Mandir grunted acknowledgement and took the reins. Seizing a hank of mane, he vaulted up, not quite as gracefully as Taya. Mounting was trickier for men than for women; he had sensitive body parts to protect.

  When Mandir was a child, his mother had owned a tomcat who’d spent hours staring up at the pigeons in the barn rafters. The cat had no way of reaching them, yet he couldn’t stop watching. Mandir felt like that cat as his gaze slid inexorably back to his partner. Flood and fire. Seeking a distraction, anything at all, he scanned the streets for danger, half hoping he would spot a threat, but there was nothing.

  “What’s his name?” called Taya.

  “Whose name?” said Mandir.

  Her head dipped to the blood bay. “Your horse.”

  “He doesn’t have one yet. I just got him.” After a moment, “Yours?”

  “Pepper.” She stroked the mare’s silken neck, and the mare nodded contentedly.

  Jealous of the damned horse, Mandir turned away. He’d been fifteen years old the day he first laid eyes on Taya, and he’d been obsessed with her from that day forward. If his fixation had been sweet and innocent, it might have been manageable. But it wasn’t. His desire had never been to hold Taya’s hand and write her love poems. What he’d wanted to do with her, to her, even at that tender age...well, he couldn’t blame her for being frightened of him. He’d tried everything to free himself of the obsession, from tormenting her and pushing her away to, later, reversing tactics and actively pursuing her in hopes that one torrid night might satisfy his twisted lust. The torrid night had never taken place—she’d refused him repeatedly—and nothing had tamed the beast within except to leave Mohenjo Temple entirely.

  To see her now, after five years...bantu kasu annasi, it was hard. He couldn’t explain why Taya fascinated him. Her beauty was earthy rather than exotic, her dark hair, golden eyes, and sun-bronzed skin appealing but far from unique. Her curves were spectacular—that he would grant her—but he’d never known a woman more inept with clothes and hair. She couldn’t seem to get her hair into the headdress tightly enough, and it was always half falling out or lopsided. In fact, it was lopsided right now. His fingers twitched. He wanted to ride over and fix it, but if he laid a hand on her she’d burn him crisp as a jerky strip.

  Her flaws both irritated and mesmerized him. The little bits of hair sticking out of her headdress drove him crazy, yet they also fed his fantasies. It was all too easy, seeing the partial disarray, to imagine her hair out of the headdress entirely and spread out, fan-shaped, on his pillow. Furthermore, he suspected that women who insisted on their hair and clothing and makeup being perfect all the time were reluctant to engage in certain activities that involved getting messy. A woman like Taya, on the other hand...

  Rasik mounted a brown gelding and circled in front of them. “Let’s get on with this. Where to? Hunabi’s murder site, or do you want to see the city first?”

  His question seemed to be aimed at Mandir, so he answered, “Ask Taya. She’s in charge.”

  Taya’s eyes met his with a look of surprise and gratitude. Then she turned to Rasik. “Where is the murder site? The magistrate said a cotton field. I take it that’s outside the city walls.”

  “We don’t run irrigation canals into the city,” said Rasik.

  “Take us to the murder site then, and you can show us the city along the way,” said Taya.

  Mandir let Taya and Rasik set off first and took up a protective position, guarding their flanks. He’d watched Taya like this, from behind, far more than she knew. Indeed, he’d practically stalked her for years. He wasn’t proud of it. Even as a child, he’d been ashamed of it—not that his behavior was ugly but that his obsession targeted a girl so ridiculously beneath his station. When his ruling-caste friends had laughed at him, he’d gone out of his way to tease Taya and be cruel to her, trying to convince them he didn’t secretly love her. Now those friends had flown, scattered to the winds like dandelion seeds, and the only person whose opinion mattered to him, Taya herself, despised him.

  If he could do it over again, he’d play out his life differently. But wishes were river mist; they had no substance and only obscured one’s vision. Still, he could apologize for what he’d done, and he ought to. He planned to, at the first opportunity. Taya might not respond well, but if he accomplished nothing else he would at least ease his conscience.

  Rasik was gesturing at some building for Taya’s benefit. Mandir had seen the city already, having arrived a day earlier, and even if he hadn’t, Hrappa was like every other agricultural river city in the Valley of the Lioness. They were all laid out in the same pattern: well planned, with city walls surrounding three separate districts. The farmer caste lived nearest the gates, the artisan caste in the middle, and the ruling district in the rear. Since the city gates were the first point of failure when the Lioness flooded, the back of the city was the most desirable real estate. But the less fortunate could always retreat to the Citadel, the great fortified building on high ground in the middle of the city, if floodwaters breached the walls.

  Rasik said something Mandir couldn’t hear. Apparently it was clever or funny, because Taya flashed him a grin. Jealousy and anger flooded Mandir.

  No, he told himself. No, no, no. There was his beast again. For four years as a troubled initiate he’d wrestled unsuccessfully with it, damaging himself and damaging others. And then one night he’d almost killed Taya. It was an accident. He would swear until the day he died that it was an accident. He’d meant to scare her, intimidate her, not harm her. But he’d lost control of the situation. She had suffered burns and nearly died of smoke inhalation, and the Coalition had intervened.

  At the time, he’d resented his punishment, but since then he’d learned to appreciate the way it changed his life. During his Year of Penance, he’d come to terms with and tamed his beast. Then he’d finished his training at Rakigari Temple and became a fully trained ilittum. Finally Taya had ceased to haunt him. Sure, he fantasized about her at night sometimes, and often when he made love to another woman, he imagined she was Taya. That was probably why his affairs so often ended badly. But at least he was no longer out of control.

  Or was he? The moment he’d laid eyes on Taya here in Hrappa, all the old feelings had come rushing back.

  “Murderers!” The voice jolted Mandir from his thoughts. “Betrayers!”

  An elderly peasant was running at them with a knife in his hand. Mandir kicked his horse into a gallop, driving the animal in between the peasant and Taya. There he reined up sharply. With a few harsh words of the mother tongue, he called fire into the hilt of the man’s knife, turning it red-hot.

  The man yelped and fell to his knees, clutching his wounded hand to his chest. The knife fell into the dirt. Mandir glanced back at Taya. She appeared stunned but unharmed. A knot of onlookers gathered about them, some of the faces worried, others angry. While Coalition law permitted Mandir to punish the old man for the unprovoked attack, even burn him to death if he chose, Mandir didn’t have the stomach for it. And he didn’t like the look of this mob. The attack had been so inept it might have been a suicide attempt, or a setup of some kind. He wasn’t going to take the bait, not with Taya at risk.

  “Someone fetch water to soak his hand,” Mandir called to the crowd. He nodded to Taya and Rasik, who clucked to their horses, and they cantered away.

  “What was that for?” asked
Taya when they were out of the mob’s range. “Is hatred for the Coalition so strong here?”

  Mandir’s eyebrows rose. “It’s strong everywhere.”

  “Not where I grew up,” said Taya. “I mean, yes, people didn’t like the Coalition. But they weren’t murderous.”

  “How often did the Coalition pass through your village?” asked Mandir.

  “Almost never,” she said.

  “Hrappa is a farming town,” said Mandir, “but it sits on the Silk Road. Coalition ilittu pass through here all the time.”

  “That shouldn’t make people angry,” said Taya. “The Hrappans can sell them supplies. It ought to be good business.”

  Rasik swung his horse around. “Three Coalition men passed through here last season on the Silk Road. They grabbed two farm girls and ravished them. One of the girls didn’t survive.”

  Taya was stunned into silence. After a moment she recovered her voice. “But men of all sorts commit atrocities. Not just Coalition.”

  “When the Coalition do harm, we have no recourse against them,” said Rasik.

  “Of course you do,” said Taya. “Rape is proscribed by law, even for the Coalition.”

  “Coalition members are subject only to Coalition justice,” said Rasik. “We reported the crime to your organization. They took no action. Why should they? No money in it for them.”

  Taya shook her head, disbelieving. “I’m sure you’re wrong about that.”

  “I believe him,” said Mandir. “I’ve seen cases like that before.” Poor Taya. Part of her charm was that she’d led a rather sheltered life, the first fourteen years of it in a remote farm village so backward it made Hrappa look sophisticated, and the remaining nine secluded in a Coalition Temple. It had made her easy to tease, back at Mohenjo.

  “Even if that’s true,” said Taya, “and I’m sure it’s not, we’re not all like those three men. I would never hurt somebody like that, obviously, and Mandir...wouldn’t either.”

  Mandir heard the hesitation in her voice. Did she think he might force himself on a woman? Her opinion of him must be low indeed.

  “Maybe you don’t commit the atrocities, but you’re part of the organization that allows them to happen,” said Rasik. “Your organization also takes children from their families and burns people alive if they don’t comply with your laws.”

  “I’m hardly going to apologize for enforcing the Coalition’s laws,” said Taya. “When people use unlawful magic to commit murder, as someone has done here in Hrappa, they must be stopped. And you’re forgetting the good work the Coalition does. We heal people and plants and animals. And we keep the mountain tribes at bay.”

  Rasik rolled his eyes. “The mountain tribes are nothing but starving, disorganized savages—hardly a threat. As for your healing, it’s not charitable. To heal a sick animal, you charge half the animal’s market value. To heal a person, you charge so much that he must choose between death or poverty.”

  “We must cover our expenses,” said Taya. “Healing may seem like a simple procedure to you, but it took years of training for the ilittum to learn the skill.”

  “Also,” said Mandir, “the mountain men are neither disorganized nor savages. You only think they’re harmless because you’re not the one out there fighting them.”

  “Are you telling me your people lack for gold?” said Rasik, pointedly looking Taya up and down.

  Mandir spurred his horse forward, placing it between Taya and Rasik. “She’s under my protection. You keep your eyes to yourself.”

  “Is that a new Coalition law?” said Rasik. “I’m not allowed to look at your women?”

  “Leave him be,” said Taya to Mandir.

  Rasik sent his horse into a trot, heading for the city gates. Taya followed.

  Mandir cantered after them, annoyed at everyone, including himself, but he couldn’t remain in ill spirits for long. A gentle breeze brushed his face as he passed out of the city gates into the river lands. Taya’s black mare, seeing the fields open up before her, threw up her head, opening her nostrils wide to take in the scents. She half reared, eager for a run.

  “Easy,” Taya soothed, turning her in a tight circle to regain control.

  Mandir rode up beside Taya and murmured, “That mare’s as spirited as you are.”

  Taya’s brow furrowed with suspicion.

  Mandir sighed inwardly. Could he not pay her a simple compliment, tease her in the most harmless way, without making her think his intentions were ill?

  “This way,” said Rasik, clucking to his brown horse and sending him eastward, away from the river.

  Taya’s high-mettled black mare followed him, and Mandir fell in line behind the two of them. He despised floodplains. There were never any roads because every year the Lioness overflowed and destroyed everything. It was the curse and gift of Agu the Water Mother, who humbled mankind by laying low his works. But after the inundation, the soil was so rich the farmers could grow anything.

  The farmers had been industrious. Although the season was early and the young plants had barely emerged from the ground, the land was already a mazework of irrigation canals, sluices, and gates. Mandir gave the bay his head, letting him pick his way through the mess.

  “I had not realized so much cotton was grown in Hrappa,” said Taya.

  Mandir blinked. How did she know what the farmers were growing? The plants were just tiny things, and they all looked alike.

  “Many of our farmers have contracts with our cloth merchant requiring them to grow cotton,” said Rasik.

  “Are you sure these aren’t banana plants?” said Mandir. He hated it when Taya knew more than he did, which meant it was time to tease her. He could always get a rise out of her with a reference to her banana-farming past.

  Taya sent him a look of contempt. “A banana plant would be higher than your head. And they’re never grown in floodplains.”

  He grinned at her. “My mistake. You’re the expert on bananas.” Flood and fire, what was he doing? He should just leave her alone.

  “For your information,” said Taya, “this is cotton, and that, and that.” She pointed to several vast fields. “Over there is a melon field. That’s wheat, behind it is mustard, and to the right is naked six-row barley. But you can see it’s mostly cotton.”

  “As you say,” said Mandir, disappointed she hadn’t responded with as much indignance as he’d hoped.

  “This is where the boy was killed,” called Rasik.

  He’d ridden ahead, so Mandir and Taya hurried to catch up. Rasik sat his horse in the middle of a large bare patch of ground, a neat rectangle bounded on all sides by irrigation channels and sprouting with young weeds.

  “I don’t see any evidence of fire,” said Mandir, dismounting from the blood bay for a closer look.

  “The ground was still wet from the inundation and had been freshly tilled,” said Rasik. “It was little more than bare, damp soil. Only the boy himself was burned.”

  “What was done with the body?” asked Taya.

  “He was given to Isatis,” said Rasik.

  Taya hopped off Pepper. Mandir involuntarily moved toward her, mesmerized by the motion. She was lovely enough when standing still, but when she moved, she had the grace of a gazelle. “Are you going to scry?” he asked.

  She jumped, apparently unaware he’d been so close. “Yes, of course. I can’t guarantee Isatis will tell me anything, but if she does, we’ll know it’s the truth. Agu mostly lies.”

  Taya ground-tied Pepper and headed toward the murder site.

  “The Water Mother lies?” said Rasik. “What does she mean by that?”

  “Exactly what she said.” Mandir took one more look around the horizon for possible enemies—unlikely in such open country—and settled down to watch Taya work.

  Chapter V

  Hrappa

  TAYA PACED THE BARE GROUND, searching for hazards, anything flammable that might catch while she scried. Scrying required great concentration because of the
high level of language proficiency Isatis demanded of her, and she didn’t want to have to devote even a corner of her mind to worrying about safety and keeping the fire under control. She also looked for signs of Hunabi’s death, anything to indicate where his body had lain, but time and weather had erased the physical evidence.

  “Where was the body found?” she called to Rasik.

  “Move to your left.”

  She obeyed.

  “Back a step. There—more or less.”

  Here Hunabi had burned to death. She called fire out of the air in front of her. In the distance, Rasik gasped. She smiled at his naiveté. Calling fire in midair was an easy trick; even untrained jackals could do it. Scrying was the difficult task. Come in power, Mother Isatis, she called in the mother tongue. Come in greatness. She rotated in a circle, slowly, with her hand outstretched. Fire flowered from her hand, blossoming into a great wall that encircled her in a sweltering wheel of death.

  She was in the world of Isatis the Fire Mother. The heat was brutal; she could not survive long in the Fire Mother’s embrace.

  She spoke in the mother tongue, her words crisp and clear. Mother, you are death and you are rebirth. You are the seed of vengeance, the lioness in the grass, the light that shows the way in the darkness. I am your humble daughter, who loves and fears you. I come to ask a favor.

  Isatis responded, filling the wall of fire with images. A pack of onagers galloping by. A flood so vast it tore down trees. A pair of lovers sneaking away for a tryst in the fields. All images from the past. Some of them might be centuries old.

  Taya spoke again. A boy died here, your prey, when the soil lay dark and heavy from Agu’s receding. I would know more of how he died.

  Images followed: men burning on stakes. A woman flung onto a burning funeral pyre. A man struck with a flaming arrow.

  Taya paused, momentarily flustered. These were images of anger. She’d offended Isatis, but she was not sure how. Even the slightest mispronunciation or misuse of a word could draw her ire. Taya would try again. Great Mother, it was not the boy’s time. He had many fields yet to sow. This was a slight deception. Hunabi had been destined for a bureaucrat’s life, not a farmer’s, but Mother Isatis was old-fashioned. She liked farmers.