Wings of Flame

by Nancy Springer

  “Kyrem is dead,” he whispered over and over again. “Kyrem is dead.” The word he used for dead was nihil, unbeing. “Kyrem does not exist.”

  “Kyrem is dead,” the young bird peeped mindlessly and obediently. The old man stroked it and put it back into its wicker cage to await the nighttime, when he would undertake the magical ceremony that would transform it into a thing fit to strike terror and consternation in those to whom it took its message. He chose another raven to work with meanwhile. There were dozens, perhaps as many as Auron’s horses. Their stench filled the place. The old man spent all his daytime hours feeding them, training them and caring for them tenderly—far more tenderly than he cared for his prisoner. It was not by choice that Seda sat against the wall. A leg iron secured her to the rock.

  “Kyrem is dead,” the old man instructed the next bird.

  If he were Suth, then Suth was a liar. Kyrem had been alive and well when she left him, Seda knew. So the old man had to be a liar. How she hoped he was a liar. Why was he keeping her, she wondered. All the others had been killed. And he never looked at her except to curse her. He was fluent in his cursing, far more so than his birds.

  “The devil take you and leave his clawmark in you and bend all your bones,” he would intone, handing her a meager daily ration of food. “My curse on your eyes, your legs, your sexual organs. May this food grow fangs inside you and do you no good. May your teeth rot until your breath smells like that of a carrion dog. May your fingers grow together and your ears fail you. Shuntali! Shuntali! Devan dog. You are dead. You do not exist.”

  She listened to him impassively, pulling her shuntali’s toughness like an invisible cloak around her, letting the curses bounce off her like flung stones that did not break the skin. Bruises did not matter unless one noticed them, cried about them, and she had given up crying some years back. Besides, the old man lied. Why then should his curses be true?

  “Liar,” she said softly sometimes, and he would strike her, cuffing her on the head, and take away the food before she had touched it.

  It did not matter. She sat with her back against the cold rock, expecting nothing, caring for nothing, wanting nothing. For until she let something matter to her, he could not hurt her overmuch.

  The magical transformation of raven into demon took place within the dark penetralia of the cave, the darkest of darks, cave within a cave, where no one could see, neither the sorcerer nor his prisoner. It involved the invocation of the simurgh, primeval god-rival of Suth, and of Suth as well, the dark Suth to be joined with the dark spiritous bird, raven become more than raven, soon to be demon. Vibration of great wings filled the cave, and the bell-like ringing of hooves. The sour air grew tense with the conflict and uneasy mating of invisible presences. And with the dawn, a wicker cage stood empty and a black demon took wing. “Kyrem is dead,” it shouted, then flew off toward the sunrise, toward Deva.

  Within a few weeks an unaccustomed visitor thundered into Avedon. Townsfolk screamed and scattered before the hooves of his steed. Kyrillos the lion, king of Deva, was a big man, dark and heavy-bearded, and he sat a thick-necked charger. Although he came with only half a dozen retainers, his sudden armed and helmeted presence struck terror in Avedon. Alarm bells began to ring.

  Even as the seven riders pulled up before Auron’s stately dwelling, Auron himself came gravely out to meet them, weaponless as always, walking down the long ascent of shallow stone risers in his buskins and his gently flowing robes. Kyrillos dismounted to speak to him and had his men dismount also.

  “My son,” Kyrillos demanded, his tone urgent.

  “He is not here.”

  “Where then? You swore to me—” The king of Deva checked himself with an effort, waiting for Auron to answer.

  “He is off on a quest in the hills yonder.” Auron looked back the way Kyrillos had come, and Kyrem’s father shouted in reply.

  “Off roaming? But of course he has his men with him?”

  “No, my lord,” said Auron steadily. “They were all slain on the way hither. And Vashtins do not ride horseback. He went alone.”

  Kyrillos snatched at his sword, and every man of his did the same. But the king of Deva froze with his hand on the hilt.

  “Draw if you like,” Auron told him. “My guards are under orders not to defend me. We stand outside the household walls.”

  “I do not understand,” said Kyrillos tightly. “Has it not been well between him and you?”

  “It has been very good.”

  “I thought as much. And between us as well. I trusted you. Yet you have let him go off alone, into danger—”

  “Your son is not a sheep, my lord, that can be tethered by the foreleg,” said Auron rather sharply. “He has grown since last you saw him. I had to let him go or else put him in chains—and we both know that would not have served our purpose.”

  “Do not speak of that,” Kyrillos muttered.

  “I swore to you that I would cherish him as my own,” Auron went on, “and I have done so, even to the point of letting him be a man. If you judge that I have broken faith with you, then my body is at your disposal. But I must warn you, Kyrem would not think kindly of you for slaying me.” Auron spoke so evenly, he might have been discussing a matter of mere ritual.

  Kyrillos glanced back at the mountains as if already searching for his son. “He might yet be alive,” he said grudgingly.

  “Indeed, I should fervently hope so! What has made you think otherwise?”

  “Horse-headed birds.” Kyrillos heavily took his hand away from his sword. “Black demons of ill omen, spreading rumor of his death around my kingdom. Have you seen or heard of any such creatures here?”

  “Both heard and seen.” Auron stood looking away toward distant Mount Kimiel with narrowed eyes. “I have spent men upon men seeking the enemy on that mountain,” he declared, “and hour upon hour, day upon day, and to no avail. It is time and past time that I went to beard this mystery myself, in my own person. Take me your prisoner, king of Deva, so that I may ride with you.”

  Kyrillos shook his shaggy head with a slow smile. Challenge was in that smile. “I have no horse for you,” he said. “You must find your own.”

  “Why, then, I will.” Auron turned toward the sacred stable.

  “And you will never be able to manage it in those things,” Kyrillos added, staring meaningfully at Auron’s buskins. “Have you no boots, or sandals even?”

  “I will find some.” Auron kicked off the buskins, sending them flying up into the air, but he had to grasp at Kyrillos’s outstretched hand to do it; his legs nearly collapsed under him, and he gasped with the pain, his calves fully extended for the first time in thirty-seven years.… His eyes closed and his head swam with the sickness of his agony. Then he brought the forces of his mind to bear on his body. Slowly he straightened, opened his eyes, stood with stockinged heels flat on the pavement. He let go of Kyrillos and faced the Devan king, standing quite erect.

  “Come in,” he snapped, “take refreshment, make provision.” Then he stalked up the many stairs and inside, giving orders as his servants gaped at him in greatest consternation.

  Half an hour later, in breeches and Kyrem’s spare boots, his smaller feet swaddled in wrappings to fit them, he walked to the stable and took Nasr Yamut’s white-headed favorite from its regal bay, and no one halted or gainsaid him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The brigands—criminals and mercenaries and outcasts of all sorts—who lived on Mount Kimiel understood vaguely that the power of the Old One made it a refuge for them. They served him. Their encampments formed defenses around his mountaintop cave, defenses nearly impossible to penetrate undetected. They brought him food and young ravens from the nest and oddments to feed the birds. These offerings might as well have been their sacrifices placed on an altar, the old man their god rather than their master, for they feared him and bowed to him as much in worship as in service. Nameless One, they called him. Odd that things most holy and things most d
espised were similarly shunned. Seda also was nameless in that place.

  There were perhaps fifty of them, the brigands, enough to fill a sizable village, but few people knew of their existence. When they found it necessary to rob, they struck quickly and at scattered places, leaving alone most of the villages that stood nearer and the travelers who journeyed close at hand. The few priests who wandered the mountain for the sake of the sacred horses knew of them, but they kept silence, for Nasr Yamut had commanded silence. Nasr Yamut sensed the power on the mountaintop, and he liked to study power; he watched, waiting for events that could be turned to his own advantage. Always he took care to withhold all thoughts of such possibilities from his mind when he was near Auron. The Vashtin king sensed only the presence of an enemy, not that of his minions, for his presence masked theirs.

  One other person knew of the brigands: the prince on horseback who moved quietly between the black-trunked trees, searching and always searching for an opening. But he was only one, and no fool, and he could do no more than guess what awaited him.

  Sometimes he could hear the talk of the guards, but it did not help him much. Their master kept them mostly in the dark.

  “I wonder why the Nameless One would not let us attack the foreigners,” a sentry asked his companion.

  “He wanted them to get through to Avedon. He is hoping for trouble.” The other laughed. “He likes trouble, that one.”

  “Then why will he not let us go looting if he likes war so much? And what is his game with that shuntali?” The sentry shook his head. “I don’t understand him.”

  “We have only his word that she is a shuntali. I thought at first that she was a Devan. And she acted like one, she had that damned pride of theirs. For a while there he couldn’t touch her.”

  “Well, he has touched her now.” The man laughed nastily. “Oh, yes. He has touched her.”

  The old man had found a way through Seda’s defenses to the needful center of her being.

  There, at the core. By cleverness and a malicious persistence and the mad insight of sorcery he had found it, the tender place, the still-bleeding scar of the umbilical that had been torn away too soon. Seda could say and say to herself that it did not matter, but to her young, half-grown body it did matter, very much; one needs a mother at least until the bones are fully formed. Mother love.… The Nameless One could scarcely remember mother love, and to him it truly did not matter any more. Only for that reason had it taken him so long to understand. When at length he did discover, did comprehend, he smiled slowly, a cruel smile. And when he spoke to the girl thenceforth, he began in the name of that abandonment.

  “Where is your mother?” he would chant, his words as offhand as villagers’ flung stones. “Were you not born of woman, that you have no mother? She flung you away with her curse, like the offal you are. Where is your precious prince? Where is your lover? Bastard, you have none. Dung of Suth, all turn their backs on you. May your eyes cross. May your breasts droop and your bones bend. I curse you with the curse of your mother and your god. May you have a hump on your back and warts on your face. May you be as withered and sterile as Vashti, as harsh as Deva. The curse of all who worship the name of Suth be on you. Bastard, shuntali! You are dead. You do not exist.”

  His coldhearted intensity stunned and bewildered her. His words struck deep now, deeper than any stones of passion. Why would he not kill her more simply? What had made him hate her, Kyrem abandon her, her own mother hate her, everyone hate her? She was accursed.… But it was more than hatred in him, something even more chilling. Something made the lawless robbers heed him, listen to his ravings, do his will. There was a certainty in him that seemed almost supernatural, some secret knowledge.… Perhaps he was Suth. Had she not always borne the curse of her god? But why had he chosen to reveal himself to her now?

  “Shuntali! Shuntali! Devan dog! You are dead. You do not exist.”

  “The dead do not wish for death,” she whispered back at him once. The god lied. But he did not bother to strike her any more. He knew that his words now hurt her far more than blows.

  At first Auron stayed on his horse only by reading its thoughts and anticipating its movements, then hanging on with hands and heels. That first day of riding was the most grueling physical trial he had ever endured. The sacred stallion was wild with freedom and ran like a crazy thing, with Kyrillos and his men urging their own steeds after. It made, as Kyrillos drolly said, a merry chase. Only a body softened by years of inaction kept the white-headed stallion from leaving them behind entirely in its mad career toward Mount Kimiel. It ran itself into a lather. By evening of the first day the company had covered nearly half the distance to the foothills, albeit erratically.

  In days to follow, Auron learned to guide the horse by the movements of his body to some extent, and by a tug at the long lead rope still attached to its headstall. He never learned to control the animal very well. Most of the time it simply trailed after the other mounts. But it was all new to Auron and both exciting and unsettling to him, even this small experience of his own powers of the body, he the sacred king who had never had much parley with his body, his self. In the discovery of this new facility, he hardly noticed how his other powers were gently fading away from him, how he seldom slipped into a visionary trance any more, how he scarcely noticed Kyrillos’s thoughts even when the Devan king stood at his shoulder. There was small occasion for the use of such powers those days, among those he trusted, and even in his court days he had always employed them with discretion.

  They traversed the thorny foothills and gradually entered on the steeper land of the true mountains. It was autumn at this height, the blackthorn leaves rustling and turning the color of copper. Auron knew that Kyrem had come hither from Avedon, but farther he had not been able to follow him with his farseeing sense.

  “Can you scent the spoor of the lad now that we are closer, friend Auron?” Kyrillos asked him.

  Already Auron’s face and clothing had taken on a weathered look, and he straightened on his mount and glanced around him with a new keenness. Then he closed his eyes, still seeking just as keenly. All the men waited expectantly, and even the horses stood quite still. But when Auron opened his eyes at last, he shook his head, and his face looked haggard.

  “One presence on this mountain masks all others,” he said, “and it is not Kyrem’s. It is both powerful and malevolent.”

  “Could Kyrem yet be here then, even though you cannot find him?” asked Kyrillos.

  “He could yet be here.”

  As long as there were villages or even scattered homesteads on the mountain slopes, it was not difficult to trace Kyrem’s path. A horseman was no common sight in Vashti, and even weeks after his passing, folk still talked of him. He had gone straight up into the thickest of the black-trunked forest. There no one dwelt, or at least so it was thought. Though these folk lived peacefully enough, there was a certain cautious unease on their thoughts, and few men ventured to take the way that Kyrem had gone.

  “Why not?” Kyrillos wondered aloud as they rode. He was a shrewd man, never one to hold back where something might be gained, if only knowledge. Nor would he shrink from challenge; his was a bold spirit. “Is this the Vashtin way, to sit tight always?”

  “Perhaps.” Auron gave him a tilted smile. “You have seen how long I sat tight. But it is more than that, I think. Those folk know surely enough what I have also sensed, though they will not say it.”

  “But what sort of sorcery is it that we will face here?”

  “Hsst,” Auron told him, softening his tone. “Enemies ahead.”

  Kyrillos gave his men the signals for caution and silence and the unsheathing of weapons. Quite softly they drifted forward, for the rustling leaves had not yet begun to fall, and the horses moved quietly on the thick bed of duff and dropped thorns beneath the trees.

  Archers. They did not see them all at once. Bows and plentiful arrows at the ready, the brigands sat eating a midday meal from their satchels,
each with his back against the black trunk of a tree. One outlaw they saw, and then two more, and then more again, a dozen or thereabouts, and there might have been more yet. Then one of them saw Kyrillos. He did not shout in alarm, but grinned and gave a sort of happy hunting call and fitted arrow to his bowstring. Kyrillos pulled his horse back sharply as the shaft thudded into the tree beside him.

  “Retreat,” he ordered.

  They galloped off. Arrows flew after them from rearward, and they could see that even in the short time since they had been sighted, they had very nearly been taken on three sides. Auron looked frozen with fear.

  “Stop,” he said. “There are more ahead.”

  “Are you sure?” Kyrillos demanded, pulling his charger to a plunging halt.

  “Reasonably sure,” Auron said tersely. “I can sense them only at quite short range.”

  “Which way should we go then?”

  Auron pointed downhill.

  “Of course,” said Kyrillos dourly. But he went, and the others followed.

  They rode around the base of Mount Kimiel and tried it the next day from another approach. Kyrillos sent two scouts ahead this time.

  “You cannot spare the men,” Auron said, worried. “You are likely to lose them.”

  Kyrillos glanced back in some annoyance. “They are canny men. They will not be taken unaware.”

  “Yes, but how can they hide themselves? Perhaps on foot—”

  “Horses roam these parts, you say?” Kyrillos interrupted, his tone one of utter serenity.

  “Young horses, yes.”

  “Well, there. We are simply horses, nothing more, from a distance. We are not likely to be trailed, at least not if we leave few human traces. And our mounts given us the advantage of speed.”

  “Enemies,” said Auron tensely, and in a moment the two scouts came hastening back to warn their master.