Courage of falcons

by Holly Lisle

  And heard the hungry thoughts of uncounted dead who rose against the living, who sought those they called enemies, and grappled with them, and lifted them into the air. They longed for the flesh of their living enemies and for their blood, but magic constrained them they could do no harm; they could neither maim nor kill, but only remove.

  She had only an instant to decide, and only an instant to act. She leaped to her feet and raced back to her father. "I love you," he had said, and above all else she had felt the truth of those words. "Papa!" she shouted, and threw herself into his manacled arms, though the spirits of the dead had surrounded him. She clung tightly to him, and he to her, as the chill fingers of ghosts tried to pry them apart and when the dead things left off and lifted both of them into the air, they held each other tighter.

  Whispering, hissing, seeking for ways to break the oath that bound them, the spirits of Galweigh House stole away with their captives out of the House, across the long swards of green, over the wall, onto the road that lay beyond Galweigh House and out of reach of the boundaries of Dùghall's spell. There they deposited them, and then they retreated.

  Ulwe opened her eyes.

  She and her father lay on the floor of the jungle. The earth beneath her spread hand quivered with coming death. And the protective wall of Galweigh House lay to the west of them; it's great gate, which would have kept them safe, now closed against them.

  Chapter 36

  The litters arrived for Ry and Jaim and Yanth promptly at the tolling of Dard three fine open-sided seats with extendable mud ramps, each borne by six sturdy locals, which answered the question of who was expected for dinner. Ry had seen the litters in the streets before, and knew them to be for hire, but in his guise as a poor commoner, he thought he would be best to walk in the mud. Now he got into the litter with gratitude; how pleasant to ride instead of slogging, to be above the mud and the mire instead of right in it.

  He and his two lieutenants rode to the bay, where a fine longboat nestled against one of the little docks, brightly painted in blue and red, with the top strakes and the high, arching stemposts carved with fanciful beasts and gilt. All the men waiting to row them to their dinner date were human, but the reptilian smell of the Keshi Scarred was strong on the wood and on the oars. Ry wondered if the fact that they were greeted by only humans was simple chance, or an attempt to hide the presence of the Keshi. He and Yanth and Jaim rode in silence, seated on the central thwart with eight rowers behind them and eight in front, two to each oar.

  As he had expected, they rowed out to the ship he had identified earlier as the Peregrine. He reminded himself not to slip and use that name under any circumstances. He and Yanth and Jaim had discussed their options and decided that they would best serve their own interests by feigning ignorance of the true identity of the ship, at least until they could find out why the captain had sought them out.

  A slender, dark-haired human woman greeted them as they clambered up the allus ladder and onto the deck. She bowed deeply in the fashion of the Wilhenes, and said, "Salanota. I am Katanapalita, your servant for this evening." Her accent was thick, markedly Wilhene. "If you have for needs, you have only for asking I will do all I can."

  Ry watched her carefully. She added no innuendo to that the way the captain's concubine had earlier. He bowed in return and answered her in the primary Wilhene dialect, Tagata. "Our needs will be light, and our gratitude plentiful."

  Her face lit up and she answered him in her native tongue. "You speak Tagata? It's been so long since I heard it."

  Jaim bowed and spoke in turn, also in the Wilhene dialect. "My friends and I once spent some time touring your fair city. We were there when the cherries were in bloom and every street was pink with their blossoms. It was quite lovely." His Tagata was, if anything, better than Ry's.

  She smiled broadly. "There is no place more beautiful, I think; now that I have seen so much of the world, I am sure of it." Her smile became wistful. "I had a little house near the Temple of Winter Passing I could hear the waterfall through my back window and watch the priestesses as they tended the sacred gardens."

  Ry did not ask why she did not go back people who made their lives on the sea often did so because something in their past had driven them from the land. Few wished to be reminded of what they had left behind. Instead he said, "I hope you have such joy again if that is your wish."

  Her smile held gratitude. "Let me take you to the captain's dining room. She awaits you now."

  The three men glanced at each other, surprised. She?

  Katanapalita's back was to them, though; she did not see their reaction. She led them across the bleached stone-polished deck and down a gangway. Ry noted little places on the ship where the wood bore scars of previous fittings, where something new clearly adjoined something much older. The ship had been refitted recently the work had been done by skilled shipwrights, but he saw a few places where corners had been cut, and most of the changes he could identify were cosmetic in nature.

  Katanapalita led them to doors carved with fanciful beasts and heavily embellished with gilding, and stopped. "You must leave your boots outside," she said. Ry noted a rack built into the wall, scuffed from much recent use this rule hadn't been created just for the three of them. He nodded, pulled off his boots, and slid them into one of the slots. Jaim and Yanth, after a barely perceptible hesitation, followed his lead. When they stood in their stockinged feet, she ushered them into a captain's dining chamber unlike anything Ry had ever seen. The table, built into the floor and with the traditional rim around the edge to keep plates from sliding off in high seas, had nonetheless been made to look like something that would have been at home in any of the great Houses of Calimekka. The wood, hand-rubbed to a beautiful sheen, was inlaid with as much detail and delicacy as the puzzle-box he'd received earlier that day tiny patterns of leaves and flowers formed a border around the scene of a village nestled in the mountains. Every leaf of every tree was complete with veins and edges; each tiny person on the inlaid streets wore a different expression and a detailed outfit, and carried out a different task. Their flowing white hair had been worked in ivory, their iridescent skin in rare, black mother-of-pearl; they were not representations of humans, but were Scarred of the sort that Ry had seen sitting at the table with the Keshi earlier that day.

  The tabletop had been the masterwork of a genius Ry wondered how the captain could bear to set her plate on top of it.

  Nor was the table the only thing in the room to catch the eye. Panels of pale gold raw silk and panels of deep carved black velvet alternated along the walls and a deep, plush rug of amazing softness and intricate design covered the floor, its black mazes, gold background, and red accents perfectly harmonizing with the silk and velvet wall coverings. The ceiling boasted a central light fixture that was clearly of solid gold, with the light itself of Ancients' make a coldlamp that would prevent any use of open flame in this tiny mirror of palatial splendor. The pale cypress ceiling glowed with hand waxing and made the room seem both larger and more subdued. Ivory silk reclining couches in the Strithian style flanked the walls, the perfect final touch.

  Opulence. Decadence. Power. The room spoke of all of them and even, Ry thought, of good taste, something he hadn't noted in the rest of the ship's decoration.

  "Please be seated," Katanapalita said, still speaking in Tagata. Ry noted that she had removed her shoes, too, and had replaced them with little satin slippers. She handed a pair of soft black doeskin slippers to each man and bowed her retreat. "I shall tell the captain that you have arrived. And while you await her, if there is anything I could bring you, please don't hesitate to ask."

  "We await your captain's pleasure," Ry said, and took a seat on one of the couches.

  Katanapalita left them with another bow, closing the door behind her.

  "She didn't ask us to leave our swords outside," Jaim said.

  Yanth snorted. "Or to bond them."

  "She seemed quite charming."


  "A bit old for my tastes." Yanth shrugged. "But nice enough, and certainly taken with you you and that Wilhene jabber of yours."

  Jaim gave Yanth an exasperated look. "Must every woman you see first pass through the filter of whether or not you want to bed her before you can decide on her other qualities?"

  "What other qualities does a woman need to have?" Yanth ran his finger along the tabletop and raised an eyebrow. "It's the first thing you think, too, Jaim you've simply spent so many years hiding the fact from yourself that you don't notice it anymore."

  "And now you know what I think."

  "I know what any man thinks." He waved a thumb in Ry's direction. "He'll tell you. Pretending you're some fine, civilized exception to the rule doesn't make you better. It just makes you silly. Isn't that so, Ry?"

  Ry was looking around the room, only half-listening to this latest incarnation of their oldest argument. With senses sharpened to the aching point by his increasing nearness to Shift, he smelled fresh air and felt its movement over his skin even after the door was closed, but sitting where he was, he could see no place where it might originate. He suspected, too, that the three of them were being watched; he felt the little burr of tension that raised the hair on the back of his neck and on his arms, though he could hear nothing that would help him locate any watchers.

  He rose and walked to the table, saying, "I suppose it's the first thing that most men think. I can't say all." He didn't look directly at either of his friends, but he could see them plainly from the corners of his eyes. They had taken positions on two of the other couches; Yanth struck a casual pose, leaning back against the couch's headrest-arm, with one slippered foot on the couch and the other trailing on the floor. He appeared to be completely relaxed, but his right hand rested near the hilt of his sword, and Ry had seen him leap from that pose to full fight before. Jaim, on his couch, sat with both feet on the ground, back stiff, hands on lap. He looked the part of a yokel out of his element, and that was as much a pose as Yanth's posturing.

  "But isn't it the first thing you think?"

  "Of course."

  "There. You see?"

  Ry ran his hands over the tabletop and said, "This is beautiful workmanship," all the while following the scent of that fresh air.

  Yes. The back wall, the central carved velvet panel. He didn't look at it directly, but he'd bet his life that no wooden wall lay behind that panel that it was, if not a passageway through which fighters could move with ease, at least a niche into which a single spy could drop from the deck above.

  He smelled nothing that would tell him a spy already hid there, and he heard nothing out of place. But his senses, refined though they were, were not perfect. And the crawling skin on the back of his neck suggested that he and his men were being watched.

  From the known hallway, a chorus of tiny bells jingling, and the light tread of several pairs of feet.

  The door opened, and all three men stood and turned to face it.

  Katanapalita came first, bowing again in greeting. She stepped to the side and said, "I present Captain Rrru-eeth Y'tallin, Princess of the Jerrpu of Tarrajanta-Kevalta, and her first concubine, Greten Kastawoehr."

  Ry returned her bow and said, "I am Ry dem Arin, and these are my friends and colleagues, Jaim dem Naore, and Yanth dem Fanthard."

  The captain, dressed gorgeously in fitted red silk tunic and breeches and soft black calf-high suede-soled boots, was the iridescent-skinned creature they had seen in the inn eating with the humans and the Keshi Scarred. She smiled and said, "Sonderrans by name, with Calimekkan accents and the faces and bearings of those Family-born. What unusual birds you are who have flown into my nest. Greten brought you my gifts, I trust?"

  Greten bowed and looked directly into Ry's eyes, her expression one of both challenge and seduction. The bells sewn to the hem of her nearly transparent silk dress jingled softly.

  Ry looked from captain to concubine and back, and without a word held out his right hand the ring adorned his index finger.

  Rrru-eeth smiled more broadly this time, revealing small, pointed, perfectly white teeth. "And the other gifts?"

  "Those as well, though I could not begin to guess their meaning." He held out his left hand and displayed the pearl, the tree, the coin, and the little box. "My gratitude they are exquisite and they were presented exquisitely." He bowed slightly in the Calimekkan fashion and gave both Rrru-eeth and her concubine Greten a warm smile.

  He had a hard time reading Rrru-eeth's face its configuration was nearly human, but her expressions were something other. He had an easier time reading her scent. She was excited, aroused, even... triumphant. He wondered who she thought he was; he wondered what she hoped to get from him. And he wondered how he could deliver her to the people she had betrayed.

  Chapter 37

  Rrru-eeth and Greten led them through every form of small talk as the dinner progressed; they discussed travel, trade, the weather, the odious condition of Heymar, and adventures they had experienced on the sea though these last Ry suspected were carefully edited by each teller to reveal nothing of importance. By the time dessert arrived, Ry had noted that everyone who entered the room was a woman, and human, and that none of the women bore any sort of weapon. Each server wore a dress similar to the one worn by Greten, though without the bells they could as easily have hidden a weapon on themselves when they were naked and fresh from the bath.

  He and Jaim and Yanth found it easy to be charming and entertaining; but all of them remained cautious. They did no more than sip their wine, though both the captain and Greten drank freely. They always made sure their swords hung unencumbered at their sides, the hilts loose in their scabbards and easy to reach. They ate a food only after the captain or Greten had taken bites of it and swallowed them.

  With the dessert behind them, the captain sighed. "You are fighters, ever wary, while we are women born to the arts of pleasure and love. Will you not relax just a bit and let us entertain you?"

  Jaim, sipping cordial, inhaled it and choked, and emerald-green droplets sprayed from his nose. Yanth turned a startled laugh into a cough.

  Ry, however, showed the women and the guards he suspected of watching from behind the secret panel nothing but a faint smile. He said, "Captain Rrru-eeth, I find your offer both generous and tempting, but we are strangers to you, and you to us. We have no idea why you've invited us to dine with you, nor what you hope will come from this meeting. Please... tell me why you have given me such fine gifts, why you have welcomed me as if I were a prince, why you have sought the three of us out to be your guests for this evening."

  Rrru-eeth rose and walked to the back of the room, to stop in front of the panel that Ry suspected held the watcher he couldn't hear or smell. She stood with her back to the table, so that he could see the way her braid hung down her back nearly to her knees before looping back up to tuck in a coil into her belt. From the back, the narrowness of her shoulders, the almost stemlike quality of her waist, and the rounded flare of her hips were evident. "You would find it so hard to believe that I saw you sitting at that table and wanted you?"

  "I remember how I looked and how I smelled sitting at that table, and I would have to say that if you saw me then and found me desirable, I would have to question your taste." He gestured at the room. "And from the appearance of this place, I would not dare to question that."

  She turned and laughed. "What a very pretty way to call me a liar." Her pointed little teeth gleamed in the soft light. "And perhaps in a way I am, though not in the manner you might think." She settled on one of the white couches and sighed. "Ah, my lovely fellow, my story is such a sad one. I loved a man once the previous captain of this ship, in fact. And he loved me. We sailed together for long years, and in those long years I never knew a moment of sorrow. We found a city of the Ancients on the far shores of Novtierra together, and gathered unimaginable treasures, and when our holds were full to brimming, we sailed back toward Ibera, hoping to sell our riches. From them we ho
ped to acquire the wealth to buy an island we both loved, far from the world that would never have accepted our love. Ian had promised me he would give up the sea. But fate was... cruel. We sailed into a Wizards' Circle, and the magic within it first becalmed us, then devoured many of those aboard the ship. He died trying to save the life of one not worthy to scrub the decks he walked on."

  A tiny tear crept from the corner of her eye and slipped down her jewellike cheek, and the quaver in her voice sounded heartfelt. Ry was almost impressed. "I'm sorry," he said, managing to sound both sympathetic and genuine.

  She smiled bravely, and her upper lip quivered the tiniest bit. Even the scent she gave off suggested absolute sincerity. Had he not known the truth, he would never have suspected her of lying.

  "When I saw you sitting in the Long Comfort, I thought at first that I had seen a ghost. Then, that perhaps my eyes had deceived me, and I had not seen him devoured by the wizard-water. I tried to tell myself that he had, instead, been swept overboard and had somehow managed to survive, and had even more miraculously found his way across the vast expanse of the Bregian Ocean and into my waiting arms." She looked down at her hands lying still and small in her lap, and she shook her head sadly. "And then I realized that you only look very like him, and I had to hurry away from there before I started to weep in front of my officers." Her tiny smile when she glanced up at him offered to share a confidence with him. "That sort of thing is very bad for shipboard discipline."