At exactly the same moment, driven to a fever pitch by her surging emotions, the two lamps behind the stage burst into flames. Everyone in the room gasped as one. Perhaps they thought it planned.
The painting was a half-length portrait of Garthion in his Hammers dress uniform, drawing back his arm to strike, but he held a whip in his hand rather than a Sylakian war hammer. Behind his head, deliberately drawn in a similar posture, was the head and body of a windroc striking with its claws, wings outspread, although their victim was off-canvas. She had blended the two torsos together, so that they seemed to belong to one creature.
“Extraordinary,” breathed Yolathion.
Garthion seemed taken aback. He stared at himself; after a time, however, Aranya saw a perverse smile creep around the edges of his mouth. He said, “I see authority and strength in this man. You’ve captured my power perfectly.”
What others saw as cruelty, the Sylakian viewed as strength and authority. Aranya exhaled. Now she knew she must go through with her plan.
The Supreme Commander began a slow boot-tramp of approval. The sound picked up in the hall until the rafters rang once more. Aranya bowed her head stiffly and held her palm upward to acknowledge the crowd’s approval.
Garthion drew unexpectedly close. He hissed, “So, this is what slavery means, Princess of Immadia. I see you have understood the lesson well.”
Aranya touched her tongue to her lips. “My lord, I haven’t told you how the painting was executed. You have probably noticed how deep and dark is the red of your robes. I used real blood mixed in with the red paint to create the precise effect. It will continue to darken with age.”
“Real blood? How innovative. You’ve produced a masterpiece.”
“My lord, all of the blood in this painting came from the Princess of Remoy. I hope you like it.”
Garthion’s whole body jolted, but his reply was cool. “I do indeed, Immadia.”
Aranya sensed that she had touched the core of something deep and abhorrent within the man; he indicated nothing outwardly, but his animosity was roused toward her. This challenge to his authority would not go unpunished.
She shuddered.
* * * *
“That was foolish,” Yolathion remonstrated with her. “You’ve made yourself a very powerful and dangerous enemy.”
Just outside the doors of the banqueting hall, chained to him, Aranya had no choice but to stand and listen. “How is what he did acceptable, Yolathion? Tell me that.”
“Aranya. You’ve a fever again. Please.”
“I’m mad, that’s what!”
“There are different rules for the son of the Supreme Commander.”
She almost choked. “You’re defending him? That sadistic–”
“Hush.” Yolathion covered her mouth with his hand. Aranya bit his finger, not gently, but he did not relent. He said, “Here he comes now. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll apologise.”
Her anger burned against Yolathion. But for Garthion, she knew only hatred.
“Yolathion,” said his superior, “a word with you concerning the security arrangements for this evening.”
They drew aside to an alcove, Aranya following like a chained pet. She heard a dull thud. Aranya froze.
Yolathion’s eyes rolled up in his head. He collapsed, dragging her down on top of him. She realised he had been struck with a hammer. Aranya kicked out and began to scream, but a warrior’s hand clapped a cloth over her mouth. A sickly sweet smell filled her nostrils; her head spun.
“Hurry.”
A posse of Crimson Hammers surrounded them. They were swiftly dragged onto a square of canvas. Strong hands gripped the edges. They jogged deeper into the Tower–not far, because the next thing Aranya knew, was they were in a room. There was a bare bed, no mattress. The door slammed. Aranya had no doubt a dozen Sylakian Hammers stood without, ready to repulse any curious guests from the Supreme Commander’s ball.
The warriors dumped Yolathion and Aranya together upon the floor.
“Strip her,” said Garthion. “I’m going to teach this Immadian wretch a lesson she’ll never forget. First the father, now the daughter. Will Immadia never learn?”
Aranya’s head cleared. She sensed this was a plan well executed. She lay on her Jeradian flame’s lap, still chained to him. But there were warriors all around her, burly men who knew how to grip her arms and legs so that she could not fight back. A dagger ripped the cloth of her sleeve. Another started on the hem of her long dress. She balled up her fists and tried to wrench her arms loose.
“Garthion,” groaned Yolathion. “What are you doing?”
“This Immadian whore is an enchantress,” he replied. “I intend to extract a confession out of her. She might be beautiful now, but she won’t be by the time I’m through with her.”
Yolathion was speaking next to her ear, but Aranya heard nothing over the crackling in her ears caused by Garthion’s words. Flames hissed into being, roused by the pitch of her dread and distress. A whirlwind of fire sprang to life and whirled briefly in the corner of the room.
“See?” Garthion shouted.
Beneath her, she felt the giant warrior’s body tense.
The perverse pleasure writ on Garthion’s face as he uncoiled the whip was unbearable. Aranya bucked, fighting the restraining hands and the chains, but they were too many and too strong. Her skin prickled unbearably as the fire fought to find a chink in her armour. She flailed; fabric ripped along her torso.
Yolathion bravely tried to raise his silver hammer. Would he defend her? “Aranya?” he asked. “Is this accusation true?”
He would not defend her.
Heat gathered within her as though superheated winds blew into her body from all directions, a furnace of white heat building in her torso, sparks spitting off her fingertips and from her eyes. One of the men holding her jerked back with a shout as his tunic burst into flame with a soft ‘whoosh.’ Aranya tried desperately to deny the blaze, but her fear for her life had fuelled its savage domination. Wildfire ravaged her being. Somewhere, the Black Dragon roared at her.
Garthion cracked the whip across her torso. “Take that!”
A weal of pain seared her body. The flames surged. Aranya realised she was roaring like that Dragon. Roaring her fury.
Yolathion. She’d kill Yolathion!
No!
Aranya rammed the fire outward.
The concussion blasted the bed up against the wall. It blew the door off its hinges. Garthion, sheathed in flame, was slammed into the opposite wall with appalling force. The warriors holding Aranya’s arms and legs fared even worse.
She faded.
Somewhere, far in the distance, she heard a voice say, “You melted my boots.”
* * * *
When Aranya’s eyes cracked open, it was to light upon the stars nestled between Jade’s crescent arms. A night bird flew by overhead. She saw that she wore the remains of her dress, and a mountain of chains.
For the first time in her life, she felt cold.
Torchlight flickered nearby. Drawn by the light, she turned her head on the cold stone. A grim throng rolled into view. Mostly Sylakians, they wore heavy red robes against the pre-dawn cold. She realised where she lay.
The Last Walk.
“We await the hour of judgement.”
Her eyes flicked to Yolathion. He stood ramrod-straight nearby; it was he who had spoken, but his voice had never sounded so devoid of life, Aranya thought. She could not speak. Her mouth was stuffed full of cloth. A rope tied it in place, pulling her lips back cruelly. They would not care for the comfort of a proven enchantress.
All she could do was watch and wait.
She would fly.
Now there was an irony.
Slowly, a perversely exquisite dawn fired the eastern sky. The stars became indistinct. The crowd stirred slightly to allow Beri, Zuziana and Nelthion through to the front. Aranya could not bear what she saw in their faces. She closed her eyes.
Her thoughts were choked with regrets. The dawn, her last dawn, had never seemed so evocative. She feared to watch it.
But when boots tapped the flagstones, approaching her, Aranya opened her eyes. From a distance of twenty feet or more, the Supreme Commander glared at her. It was a cold comfort that he kept such a distance for his safety. Aranya could not have summoned so much as a puff of smoke. Her inner fires were mute.
“My son lives,” he announced.
The crowd murmured. Aranya let out a breath she had not known she was holding.
The Sylakian spat, “But you burned him, Immadian enchantress. You cast the fires of your magic into his face and burned his sight from him. You killed four Sylakian Hammers.” The Supreme Commander addressed the crowd. “The penalty for an enchantress is death. The penalty for burning my son is death. Accordingly, I sentence you, Aranya, Princess of Immadia, to walk the Last Walk until your body is seen to fall into the Cloudlands. May there be nothing left for the vultures to pick over.”
Silently, Yolathion limped to her side. Aranya wondered how badly he was hurt. She had tried to protect him; trying to direct the fire outward while shielding him with her own person. Yolathion untied the rope and pulled the wadding of cloth out of her mouth. He helped her stand up. But he immediately put his dagger to her throat.
Yolathion proclaimed, “Let the last words of the condemned be heard.”
What could she say?
Aranya’s mouth was terribly dry. She rasped, “I regret not killing the Butcher of Jeradia as he so richly deserves.” Well, that certainly captured their attention. “Beri, you were a mother to me when I had none. Zip, a beautiful friend, when I had none. Take care of each other. Please tell my family–” she choked up. What could she tell them? “Tell them how much I love them, and how much I wished I could fly.”
She turned to face the Last Walk.
Yolathion put his hand on her shoulder. At the end of the walkway, Aranya saw a block of stone with a chain attached to it. They really wanted to be sure she’d drop straight into the Cloudlands, she thought. The old stories still held weight. No graceful dive off the edge for her. No enchantress transforming herself into a bird and flying away.
It should have been called the longest walk.
Ten Crimson Hammers processed with her and Yolathion. Perhaps they thought she’d make a break for the rajal pit. Her feet brought her alongside the block of stone. Her body and her mind seemed to belong on different Islands.
Yolathion knelt, clearly in some discomfort, to fit the manacle depending from the stone about her ankles, locking them together. “I’m sorry, Aranya,” he said, unexpectedly.
“Me too. I think I could have loved you, Yolathion. But your loyalty and your heart lie with Sylakia. I could never love that.”
Her words hurt him; she read it in his eyes. Just another regret she would shortly leave behind.
Yolathion lifted her in his arms. Two of his fellows hefted the block.
“On the count of three,” he said. “One … two … three.”
He tossed Aranya over the edge.
* * * *
The heavy block yanked her feet downward. The watching faces receded at an incredible speed. Suddenly Aranya was alone in the world, plummeting from the Island of Sylakia, bound for the Cloudlands far, far below. The air whistled in her ears. Her eyes watered with the wind’s buffeting.
The unending fall matched her fall from grace. Once, she had been a Princess of Immadia. Then, Ignathion’s captive, and later, a hostage in the Tower of Sylakia. Now she was captive to the physical forces of nature. She might live to find solid ground beneath the Cloudlands–at least, for the fraction of time she would have to realise she had struck rock or earth, before she died. She might not make it that far, choking to death long before she passed through the clouds. She might fall forever.
Her headscarf tore loose. The wind whipped her hair above her head. The rushing in her ears became louder and louder. Her dress, sliced apart by Garthion’s stooges, flapped upward behind her.
But she was free. She was flying.
Aranya had dreamed such a dream, only in those dreams she was flying across the Cloudlands, dodging the puffy white thunderheads and arcing gracefully around cloud towers and monuments and diving into cloud valleys, circling the moons at will and never falling like she was falling now.
She was free, because the world no longer mattered. Everyone thought she was dead. Her friends and family would mourn, for a time. Life would continue. She could not begrudge them that.
Her greatest regret was that she did not want to die. She had living to do, yet. At sixteen summers of age, Aranya of Immadia should be flirting with tall, handsome young men and attending balls and painting pictures, rather than falling forever from the Island perches of Humankind above the Cloudlands. It seemed an awful waste.
She wanted to run and leap and eat and sleep and love and cry and dance and fly.
She knew that the air was rushing past her speeding body, but somehow, the Cloudlands hung unmoving beneath her feet. It was a league from the Last Walk to the clouds. That was a long, long fall, she thought. Strangely, the air seemed to be growing thicker and warmer as she fell, as though it were reluctant to allow her past. The friction increased. Now that she was aware of it, Aranya became aware of a warm, almost foetal heat enveloping her body. She twisted to watch the cliffs blur by. Such speed! The motion hypnotised her senses, making her imagine she was flying toward the cliff.
A memory snuck into her mind, a sweet voice telling her that she should be flying. Freedom was flying.
It was the voice of her mother.
Mother? But what did Izariela mean, freedom was flying?
Aranya saw her mother’s face above her. She was lying in a child’s bed, beneath the Helyon silk hangings she remembered so well. “Fly away to the Isle of Slumber,” sang her mother. “Fly away, little one. You were born to fly.”
The heat enveloping her body became a blaze. The blaze became molten. There was power gathering around and in her now, a power drawn from the environment and from the Cloudlands quickly rising to meet her, although she knew she was the one who was falling. She shone like a meteor streaking across the night sky. Whatever her fate, it no longer mattered. Even the chains binding her body no longer mattered.
Aranya gave herself over to the dream.
She saw the Black Dragon tearing the storms apart with the thunder of his bellowing, crying, ‘It is time. It is time!’ She hearkened to the magic in his call.
She became one with the wind.
Cool grey closed over her head and around her. Aranya knew she had to stretch to fly, but she was constrained, bound in the metal of man. She sloughed those things away as her old life had been sloughed from her.
Suddenly, the rush slowed, as though she were a Dragonship which had snagged its anchor on a tree. A terrible pain flared in the muscles of her shoulders and arms. Aranya banked instinctively, easing the strain, still making a tremendous speed as she swooped through the endless realms of corrosive acid gases, holding her breath for an age without need for thought. Abruptly, she broke out into the suns-light, which reflected ferociously off the unbroken field of cobalt-hued clouds before her.
Now the dream consumed her. Nothing else existed. This was the flying above the Cloudlands Aranya had always dreamed of.
She spied a flight of windrocs, as yet leagues away, in detail that astounded her. She angled her dream-flight away from them. She perceived the golden light of the twin suns as beams of glorious energies that tingled against the foundations of the Island world. She raised her eyes to the moons, and rejoiced in the wondrous rings surrounding the Blue moon, which she had never noticed before. She looked to the habitation of creatures known as men, far above her, a band of men who lived in caves halfway down the side of Sylakia Island. They climbed the vines with the agility of monkeys. She wondered if the men on the flat land above even knew about the cliff-dwelling men.
Aranya knew she had to rest. She had to let death take her. Surely that was what falling into the Cloudlands meant?
Again she changed the angle of attack, slowing as she soared upward instinctively, traversing the cliffs toward the sky. For the first time, she was truly able to manipulate the direction of her flight. Aranya struggled for an endless time, fighting the pain that threatened to overwhelm her, rising higher and higher, working not to stall and fall, tearing from herself every possible ounce of effort and reserve and even the fire that had filled her, to make it to the top.
It seemed impossibly far. But she knew that if she stopped now, she might never be able to fly again. At last, scraping her belly over a final, jutting set of rocks, Aranya hurtled onto level ground. She juddered to a halt.
She closed her eyes, and thought to die.
Chapter 7: Reborn
A great mountain of wool-covered meat wandered nearby. Starving, the creature flung itself upon the ralti sheep, rending it with tooth and claw.
Aranya bounced off the mildly startled giant ralti sheep. She had a mouthful of wool and a single thought in her mind that had to be even more sheepish than the sheep she had just assaulted: Huh? The sheep, taller than her by several feet, patiently cropped a patch of grass. Aranya had the distinct impression it was waiting for the crazed Human to stop trying to attack it with her bare teeth and start acting like the rest of her kind.
What? She was alive? Aranya lifted her arm to pinch herself, but that hurt–both the pinch and her abused shoulders. She groaned; tears sprang into her eyes. She felt as though a giant had dislocated her shoulders and carelessly screwed them back into their sockets.
Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons) Page 9