The Prophet of Panamindorah - Complete Trilogy

by Abigail Hilton

  Archemais didn’t recoil. Instead, he stepped forward and pulled his son into an embrace so tight Corry could hardly breathe. He struggled for a moment, and then he really did cry.

  * * * *

  “His name is Jubal?” Sharon-zool clasped her hands and rubbed them together. “Of course! Of course! Why didn’t I think of it before?”

  “The conference?” pressed Danthra.

  “Yes, yes, I’ll send you back with terms in a moment. You are dismissed.”

  Danthra retreated with reptilian swiftness. His visit with the cliff fauns had left him shaken, and that pleased Sharon-zool. High time he realizes what will happen to him if we lose.

  She paced her makeshift headquarters. She knew the court rumors about Jubal and Istra, but Sharon-zool also knew something else. A year ago, one of her archers had shot a raven with a suspicious object on its leg. The shelt had suspected some fealidae plot. Foolishness. Every plot-monger in Kazar believes the fealidae are preparing to murder us in our beds, when in fact those brutes can hardly find their way to the privy. The bird must have been blown off course, because it was certainly not intended for anyone in Kazar. The fauns did not use ravens as messengers. It was said the wolflings had once, but no one had seen messenger ravens since the dissolution of Canisaria. The message was coded, and when her cryptographers broke the code, she learned a most interesting bit of information about the captain of Danda-lay’s palace guard.

  Jubal was ideally positioned for spying, but something kept her from attempting to blackmail him. That sort of shelt is likely to have a twisted sort of honor. Sharon-zool wasn’t certain that he could be blackmailed, and exposing him would have served no purpose at that time. So she’d tucked the information away for a time when it might be useful. A time like this.

  If Jubal is in command, Shadock is certainly dead or fled. He would never suffer his rival any real authority in his presence, but to leave Jubal in charge of a sinking ship—that has Shadock’s mark. Daren told me there was a secret passage out of Danda-lay. Perhaps he was right. She thought back over the last day and felt certain. Everything that’s happened since the barricade has been Jubal’s doing. I wonder how many fauns he actually has. A few dozen?

  Her mind raced over the possibilities, discarding them one by one. I have a weapon, but if I don’t use it in just the right way, it will do me no good. This conference must be the place. His honor—that twisted sense of honor—will be the key.

  Chapter 4. Laylan

  To define treason we must at some point define loyalty.

  —Archemais, Treason and Truth

  Shyshax barreled around a corner, nose to the ground, and fairly ran into Ounce. “They let you out!” Before Ounce could say anything, Shyshax continued in a rush. “I thought they would. Capricia’s here. She came in last night on a griffin’s back. Rumor has it he’s a slave from the fighting pits, and that means you were right: they really did take her all the way to Iron Mountain. I’m sure she confirmed everything you told the fauns. Meuril is white with rage. He’s declared Syrill a traitor. I think he’d hang him today if he could.”

  Ounce growled. “You little dog-cats prattle as fast as you run.”

  Shyshax huffed. “Like I said: nice of them to let you out of your cage this morning. I, of course, was never in one. Have you seen Laylan? He went to the wolfling quarters and hasn’t come back. I don’t know if he’s heard the news.”

  Ounce dropped an enormous paw on the stone floor and started on his way again. “No, I haven’t seen your—” He seemed to think better of his words. “I haven’t seen him.”

  Shyshax matched Ounce’s pace easily in spite of his shorter legs. His broken tail was pinned awkwardly at his side. He kept forgetting and trying to twitch it. “Where are you going?”

  “To council.”

  “They’ve asked for you?”

  “No, I thought it would be a good place to hunt down breakfast.”

  Shyshax shook his ears. “Something’s wrong with my hearing. I thought I just heard you make a joke.”

  Ounce smiled—just barely. “You appear to be completely healed.”

  “Not at all! Look at my tail. The bandages itch worse than fleas, and it still hurts when I take a deep breath.”

  “Doesn’t seem to stop you.”

  “Are you always this pleasant?”

  “Only when I’ve been in a cage for two days.”

  Shyshax laughed. “That’s a lie.” He jumped over the snow leopard and put his nose to the ground again.

  It was another half watch before he found Laylan. The fox shelt had gone to the roof. Shyshax was puzzled to find his friend sitting there, silent, far from the buzz of news in the castle below. He approached slowly, not wanting to startle him. Laylan was sitting rather close to the edge. Shyshax cleared his throat, but Laylan did not turn. “Laylan?” He padded up beside him. Laylan had something clutched in one fist. Shyshax could smell his distress.

  “Laylan?” His whiskers were tickling the tufts of Laylan’s ears, but Laylan did not look up. “What’s happened?” asked Shyshax. “Did you hear about Capricia? I know you’re not happy about Syrill. Perhaps there’s some mistake. We won’t know until he’s here to defend himself. Laylan, what’s wrong?”

  Shyshax nuzzled his neck, but Laylan wouldn’t even look at him. With mounting unease, Shyshax tried to paw his friend back from the edge of the roof, but Laylan wouldn’t have that either. “Talk to me,” pleaded Shyshax. Laylan had never refused to speak to him before.

  At last, Shyshax backed away, bristling with frustration and alarm. “Alright. Fine. You stay there, and I’ll go get—” He tried to think of who he would get. It should have been Syrill. Syrill had always been their truest friend in Laven-lay. Who else? Chance? Perhaps. Chance owes us. Laylan didn’t abandon him when it would have been prudent, and I think he’s fond of us, of Laylan anyway. “Fond” seemed entirely too strong a word to apply to Chance, but Shyshax was growing desperate. Who else? Fenrah? Laylan likes her. She— An idea occurred to him. Laylan went to talk to her; that’s the last place he went.

  Shyshax growled low in his throat. With a final look at Laylan’s back, he darted down the stairs. By the time he reached the wolfling quarters, he was fairly boiling. The guards couldn’t seem to decide whether he had clearance in the area, but when he began to snarl, his fur standing on end, they changed their minds. No one was paying them enough for this.

  Shyshax bounded into the wolfling rooms. He found Fenrah in the courtyard and began shouting at her. “What did you say to him, wolf bitch? After he spared your life in that courtyard! Do you really think he couldn’t have shot you? He couldn’t bear to kill you, and now you’ve said something to make him wish he was dead! Well, let’s see if it works on me!”

  Before he could think about it, he lunged at her, jaws clicking on air as she stepped back. Dance was on his feet in an instant, white teeth bare to the gums. His chest was a mass of bandages, but he moved as though he didn’t feel them. Shyshax thought for a moment the wolf would rip his head off.

  Then Fenrah shouted, and a warning arrow thumped down from the guards above. Dance paused, legs stiff, tail straight, hackles as high as his ears. Fenrah stepped out from behind him. “Where is he?” she asked.

  “On the roof,” he grated. “On the edge of the roof.”

  “Oh dear.” Fenrah stroked Dance’s hackles down. “He left so suddenly. He wouldn’t let me finish. I told the guards someone should go after him, but they said they couldn’t—”

  “Finish what?”

  Fenrah sighed. “Come inside, and I’ll—”

  “I have to know now!” Shyshax’s voice broke. “He won’t talk to me. He won’t move. He just sits there staring at his hands—at whatever he’s holding. Did you give him something?”

  Fenrah winced. “Not exactly.”

  * * * *

  “Long ago,” said Archemais, “when the Creator made our world and everything in it, he made the creatures we
call wizards. They were the lords and stewards of our world—the gods of Panamindorah. They were protectors, judges, mediators. Their ability to shift meant that they could sympathize with all races. The wizards could understand fauns because they could be a faun. They could understand wolflings, because they could be a wolfling.

  “Some say the wizards abused their power from the beginning, others that they went bad very slowly. It is perhaps a blessing that our women can bear a child only once in a hundred years. There were never many pure bloods. By the time I first looked on the world, Middle Panamindorah was embroiled in half a dozen wars. Every town and city had its wizards, and every one of them wanted more power. Wizards started the wars, but it was shelts and talking beasts who bled for them.

  “Our temple was one of the oldest in Ariee (that city is dust now, forgotten even by the stones). I was standing at our Monument one day in the autumn twilight, when the Firebird came to me. He gave me the flute—the Muse, he called it.”

  Corry frowned. “What are the Monuments, anyway? What is the Firebird?”

  Archemais shrugged. “Some say he is the Creator or one of his aspects. Others say he is a spirit-child of the Creator, born at the moment of our world’s appearing, bound to watch over us. Many believe he is the keeper and judge of the dead and that he guards the gateway between this world and others. Some say he is the personification of the best in all of us, others that he acts independently. The Monuments are his sigils.”

  “You don’t sound like you know what he is,” said Corry.

  “I’m not sure I do. Or perhaps he is all of these things. He asked me to be his prophet. I was young and idealistic, and I wanted to save the world. I accepted.

  “The flute is a powerful tool, but it is only a tool. It has no mind. Like any tool, it can be used or misused. The Firebird gave the flute one special quality to keep it safe. He made it visible only in the hand of the prophet. At all other times, it cannot be seen.” He hesitated. “May I—? You do have it, don’t you?”

  Corry reached inside his tunic and drew out the silver chain with its invisible weight. His fingers closed over the smooth, metallic surface of the flute. Archemais reached out, and Corry handed it to him.

  Nothing happened. Archemais shut his eyes and leaned back, cradling the flute in both hands. He looked sad enough to cry. “I thought so. I am a prophet no more. I failed the Firebird...and all of you.”

  “What did you do?”

  His father smiled wanly. “I fell in love. But before I talk about that, you should hear about your uncle, Gabalon.”

  Corry glanced at one of the pictures, in which Archemais and Gabalon were little older than himself. Gabalon looked at that age eerily like his nephew. His eyes were the true green, not the gray cast of Archemais’s, his hair the true coal black, not the dark chestnut that shone across from Corry in the lamp light. Corry remembered the picture in Danda-lay. Even Syrill had noticed the likeness. “Why don’t I look like my mother?” Or you.

  “The wizard blood is stronger than any shelt’s,” said his father. “Wizard features are always dominant in an iteration. Perhaps your children...or your children’s children—”

  Corry cut him off. “Tell me about Gabalon.”

  * * * *

  Shyshax lay next to Laylan, half curled around him on the roof. They’d been sitting like that for a quarter watch, and Shyshax had calmed down a little. He knew now what Laylan was holding. Even if Fenrah’s story had not been enough, Shyshax knew Laylan’s hands as well as his own paws, and a close inspection showed him the lighter band of skin where his mother’s ring should be.

  “Fenrah told me,” he had informed Laylan. “It’s nothing. I told you what Cleo and Ounce said about me, but I’m not agonizing about what we did for Syrill during the cat wars. It doesn’t make any difference who your parents were. You never gave allegiance to anyone, so you never betrayed anyone. Even if you are the heir to that broken throne, it was wolflings who sent your mother away to die in the wilderness. If you owe them anything, it’s exactly what we gave them.” Shyshax watched Laylan’s knuckles whiten around the ring and decided to change tack.

  “Most of the wolflings we killed were real bandits, anyway—thieves and murderers, shelts who wouldn’t scruple to kill for a few white cowries. You were never the kind to torture wolflings, never the kind to bring them in alive for the fauns to kill. And you never left them in the traps for days to starve. Laylan, at least look at me!”

  But Laylan would not look, and he would not speak. At last, Shyshax put his head in Laylan’s lap, forcing his nose under the clenched fist, and was silent. He tried to remember everything Laylan had ever told him about his past. Laylan had not spoken of it often, and as far as Shyshax could make out, there wasn’t much to tell.

  Laylan had been abandoned when he was five years old on the porch of a wood faun farmer in the far, lonely south, hundreds of miles from Laven-lay. His mother was a fox shelt, but Laylan had only one memory of her—a tearful good-bye in the chill dark of night, before a strange house, with the smell of fauns all around them. She had been injured—Laylan guessed by a wild animal. He now suspected the foaming sickness.

  Before she staggered away into the woods, she had slipped the gold band from her finger. “Keep this, child, and remember that your mother loved you.” His fingers were too small for the ring then, but he had held it in his fist as he watched her limp away. Laylan never saw his mother again. Shyshax had never seen the ring off his finger.

  The fauns were not openly hostile to wolflings then. Canisaria was still a wealthy and respected nation, if growing increasingly embroiled in Filinian politics. However, faun/wolfling relations had always been strained along the borders, where wolflings occasionally poached deer. Fox shelts were one of the little races, living on the borders of everything. They had a reputation for thievery and tricks, and the fauns could not decide at first what to do with Laylan. They took him to the town council, and Laylan could remember sitting in a corner, crying while the fauns argued about him.

  A family in the community had finally agreed to raise Laylan, as they’d recently lost a son and needed the help. They did not treat him as their own children, but better than a servant. From what Shyshax could glean, his friend had begun very early to be a kind of shadow—drifting around the edges of the faun community, more often out than in, and bothering no one. That fact seemed to be a hallmark of Laylan’s life among the fauns: that he bothered no one. He required little care, little food, and little love. He was never welcome, but he was tolerated.

  Laylan worked hard for his foster family, but he was a clumsy farmer. He was, on the other hand, a first-rate hunter. He began making his own traps when he was eight from wood and woven leaves. By the time he was twelve, he was buying metal traps, and when he was fourteen, he began making them himself. By that time, Canisaria was in serious trouble, and wolflings were pouring over the border—hungry, desperate, and frequently armed. Deer were killed and some shelts as well.

  In the small towns, Laylan found himself more and more unwelcome. He looked too much like a wolfling. One day he came home and found his possessions packed and waiting on the porch, together with a few cowries and several days’ supply of food. Laylan had taken his things and left without saying good-bye.

  Shyshax had never been able to deduce from the story whether Laylan felt bitter about this second abandonment. He never bothered to name the fauns when he spoke of them. Certainly, he never called them anything like “father” or “mother.” They were never his family, thought Shyshax. They never wanted to be.

  Soon after leaving the farm, Laylan had found Shyshax. He was only a cub, small and frightened, crying beside the corpse of a female cheetah. Shyshax himself had no memory of his mother or her death. His first memories were of playing tug-for-tug with a bit of rawhide around Laylan’s campfire. He’d turned back flips, trying to make his solemn master laugh.

  In time Laylan acquired a crossbow and a sword, and he practic
ed until he was proficient at both. Shyshax grew to be a speedy mount. They traveled east, trapping and hunting as they went. Laylan sold his furs in the towns and villages. Sometimes he was allowed to trade, and sometimes he was chased away with stones and arrows.

  Laylan soon learned that the larger cities were more tolerant and brought higher prices. By the time of Shyshax’s first clear memories, the bounty laws had been instated. Laylan discovered that if he concentrated on wolflings and wolves he could nearly double his profit. But we did have scruples, Shyshax told himself. We always went after known outlaws. We left plenty of wolflings alone.

  Not that there hadn’t been more than enough known outlaws. Laven-lay’s refusal to come to the aid of Sardor-de-lor left a bitter taste in the mouths of wolflings. The refugees were desperate and angry. Many had not the least idea how to survive as an outlaw, but for a time they still ran circles around the clumsy wood faun hunters. Not so Laylan. In the beginning, he took whichever wolflings he decided to go after. Soon, however, the bandits improved in skill, and so did the faun hunters. Shyshax could remember an evening when Laylan sat by the fire and turned a leg-hold-trap over and over in one hand, while, in the other, he held a lock and key mechanism. “How to hold a shelt,” he’d muttered.

  Shelts escaped easily, if painfully, from the traps normally used to catch wolves. Laylan introduced a lock into his traps. Plenty of wolflings knew how to pick a lock, but Laylan continued to perfect his mechanism, changing the locks frequently. Without access to smithies, most wolflings were in no position to find a solution to his increasingly sophisticated traps.

  They weren’t the only ones. Laylan caught a few fauns in his traps and earned himself a royal reprimand. For a time, he was forbidden to set them. Even so, he’d developed a solid reputation and was no longer in danger of being set-upon by most fauns. Laylan worked his way to the very gates of Laven-lay and the region around the Triangle Road. Bandit activity was rampant here and bounties high. He stayed in the region.