Wishful thinking combined with dreaming, probably, she thought. Because much as she hated to admit it, she welcomed “him” when he arrived and felt bereft when he was gone, and that was a combination both unnerving and embarrassing. As if she were some village maiden mooning over an imaginary dream-lover. At least I’m not getting so soft as to hallucinate him in daylight.
For one moment she entertained the possibility that her father had somehow enlisted the aid of his Valdemaran cousin—for his cousin most certainly did have mental powers, and quite formidable ones according to Beshat.
But no, that was highly unlikely. What could her father offer his cousin that would entice him to try to find her? And besides, what good could he do from within Valdemar? He certainly wouldn’t leave Valdemar; he had a family, as well as duties there. Besides, she got the distinct impression of someone her own age, not the age of her father.
But . . . one of the cousin’s children, perhaps? That might account for the feeling of kinship.
But no, again, what possible enticement could her father have offered that would suffice? And besides, the family resemblance ran strong in Beshat’s bloodline. All of his children looked powerfully like him, and not at all like their mother, and it was reasonable to assume it did in the cousin’s line as well. And this young man she saw in her mind’s eye looked nothing at all like any of her kin.
I just hope this doesn’t mean I’m going mad, or that the Karsites are somehow playing a trick on me.
She listened as hard as she could for any signs of what the afrinn was doing out there in the prison stronghold, but she heard nothing. She had already run through her usual exercises three times today, and truth to tell, she was tired. And she would have liked very much to have a real bath. And she really wished that she had her own clothing again—
Wait . . . maybe I can do something about that.
She was able to apport bread (or dough) and dried beef and water because the bread and dried beef and water she was using as her apportation anchors had come from a larger supply and thus were connected, magically.
But she was connected to her clothing and weapons. Maybe she could use that connection to apport those here!
It was certainly worth a try!
* * *
• • •
By late afternoon, she was absolutely exhausted, and it was a good thing that the afrinn was fully occupying the attentions of the Karsites, because if she’d had to fight off another attempt to take her down, she’d have lost. She’d eaten every bit of bread and had apported more (evidently either the afrinn hadn’t blown out the fire or the oven had been hot enough to bake in before it did, because there actually was bread to apport) and more dried beef. And she was back in her own clothing, with her own weapons and possessions around her again, not the least of which were her exquisitely made boots that fit her feet like no others. And thanks to the blankets and warm woolen cloak, she didn’t need to expend any energy keeping herself from freezing.
She still wasn’t anywhere near free, but at least she was comfortable again. And she had a much better arsenal to defend herself with.
She tried not to regret all of the clever Sleepgiver weapons she hadn’t brought with her. The caltrops she could have spread in front of the door that would have pierced even the stoutest of boots. The poisons she could have used on her weapons. The garrotes that could slice off a man’s head—or be strung across the door to slice him off at the ankles. The wire saw she could have used to cut through the bars on the window. Or the acids she could have used to eat through bar or stone. The smoke she could have used to fill the cell so no one could see her. If she’d had her usual bag of tricks, she could have made a dummy out of the clothing she had discarded, cut through the bars, climbed down the tower, stolen a horse and been halfway home before they realized she was gone.
Well . . . if she could just get something to take a single bar out, she could still do that. But she didn’t have anything, and careful examination had proven that the bars were too tough for anything she could improvise, even now that she had her things with her again.
Watch and wait, and who knows? Maybe one of the other afrinns in the Talismans will be able to do something.
Even as she thought that, something roared in through the window, spun up a wind-devil in the middle of the room that sucked everything loose into it, sending dust flying all around her as she held down her belongings with her body.
And then the something resolved itself into the afrinn she had released, and the wind died down to nothing. She got to her feet, bowed a little, and approached it as it hovered in midair.
“Are you having fun?” she asked it, dryly. She hadn’t really expected an answer, but she got one. The thing opened its jaws in a toothy grin. A very, very toothy grin.
“Are you making their lives miserable?” she continued, encouraged.
The creature nodded once.
“Are they afraid of you?”
A very emphatic nod.
Then, a brief moment of hope. “Can you do anything about getting me out of that window?” she asked.
The afrinn turned its monstrous head to look at the barred window. Or at least, she thought that was what it was doing. It was hard to tell, since, like its predecessor, the water afrinn, it had completely blank eyes.
It cocked its head sideways for a moment, and she let herself hope a little more.
Then it turned back to her and shook its head.
She sighed. Well, it’s only air. There’s only so much it can do. “Thank you for considering it,” she said, politely, trying not to show her disappointment. Then something else occurred to her; this thing had had time to go all over the prison. Maybe she could get some information out of it. “How many humans are there within these walls?” she asked.
The creature stared for a moment, then began to nod. It had reached ten when she realized that it was counting for her, and she held up a hand. “More than twenty?” she asked.
An emphatic nod.
“Fifty?”
Another. Her heart sank. She’d hoped she had taken out a substantial percentage of the potential guards here when she’d killed eight. It appeared not.
“A hundred?”
Another emphatic nod.
“Two hundred?” This was not good.
This time the nod was not so emphatic. In a few moments she had established that there were two hundred and fourteen humans within these walls. A number that did not give her sanguine thoughts.
Now, at least ten of those would be tied up—the Karsite priests certainly each had a retinue of five apiece, and those servants would be utterly useless for fighting. And some of the others would be cooks and stable hands and a blacksmith, and the like. But that left at least a hundred seventy-five fighting men she was going to have to put into her calculations, one way or another.
And it meant this prison was a lot bigger than she had thought. It meant that there wouldn’t be a few men pursuing her if she escaped, there would be a small army.
And it meant that unless she could keep them occupied with afrinns, they could just keep sending men up here to try to take her and wear her out. And if these Karsite priests couldn’t conjure demons, they could send for ones who could.
“Have they tried to let you out yet?” she asked.
The afrinn grinned again and nodded. She got the distinct impression that it was getting a great deal of enjoyment out of tormenting the Karsites. But—
“Are their barriers still down?” she asked. It nodded again.
Huh. “Would you stay here overnight? Long enough I can get a real sleep?” Right now, aside from escape, that was the one thing she wanted the most. A good sound sleep that lasted the entire night all wrapped up in her warm woolen cloak. . . . More than a dinner of something other than bread and dried meat. More than . . . well, about the same as
a real bath.
The afrinn nodded, again, emphatically.
“Can you keep the priests busy for—a while?” she asked, unable to think of a way to ask “for about a turn of the glass” in a way the afrinn would understand. “Then come watch up here at sunset while I sleep?”
The afrinn grinned and nodded, twisted in midair, and flew out the window.
She gave it a good long wait, then stripped down to her skin and gave herself as good a bath as she could with just a rag and clean water. It wasn’t the best bath she’d had, but at least she got the first layer of filth off, and her own clothing was still reasonably clean, so she didn’t feel bad putting it back on.
At least I’ve got the blood off me. That stuff got everywhere. It had been so long since she’d killed anyone the way she’d slaughtered her guards that she’d forgotten how it would get into her hair, behind her ears, caked under her fingernails. Ugh.
By the time the afrinn got back, she had eaten and was rolled up in her cloak, with her blanket and the torn clothing between her and the cold stone of the floor. It stationed itself in the middle of the cell, just hanging in midair, the plumes of its tail swaying back and forth, lazily. And for the first time since she had left home, she allowed herself to relax and was asleep immediately.
She awoke at dawn, with confused memories of something that didn’t feel like a dream. That young man again, clearer this time. He kept staring at her earnestly, as if he were trying to tell her something, but he didn’t speak. His lips didn’t even move, which would have been useful, since she could read lips perfectly well. It should have been annoying, but when he finally faded away, she was disappointed. And found herself wishing he’d come back, even if he wasn’t much better company than the afrinn.
Maybe he was the afrinn?
But no, no, she’d had him plaguing her thoughts since before she released the afrinn.
When she woke at last, she felt better than she had since all this began. But the first thing she noticed was that the afrinn, although it had not changed position, had a little more restlessness in its posture.
“I’m awake,” she said immediately, and it rotated to face her. “Do you want to go?”
It nodded.
“Then go, with my thanks,” she said, and without any hesitation it whisked out the window and was gone.
She didn’t even stop to think; she pulled the next Talisman off her necklace—another she thought represented water—and cradled it in her hand, studying it. No giving the Karsites any breathing room this time.
Satisfied that it worked like the other two, she tossed it into the center of the room, “spiked” the spell, put up her shields for the third time, and waited for the flash, then dropped them.
But nothing seemed to happen.
She stared at the spot where the Talisman lay, puzzled. The binding spell was certainly broken. The flash of released energy had been correct, and the spell was no longer in effect. Had the Talisman been empty, for some reason? But why was the binding spell still active? Had the afrinn somehow . . . died? Or gone irrevocably asleep?
She had just gotten to her feet when she noticed that the Talisman had suddenly disappeared.
No! It hadn’t disappeared! It was buried under a little heap of sand! A little heap that doubled in size with every heartbeat, until it wasn’t a “little” heap at all, it was a mound, then a pile, then, as she backed up in alarm, a big pile—an enormous pile!—a pile that filled the cell!
And then the pile of sand began to move. It somehow managed to writhe, like a live thing, and as her heart accelerated, it took on . . . shapes. A flattened sphere. A series of fat disks. Then a spiral—
And then, a spiral mound whose upper end terminated in the enormous head of a serpent. A Horned Viper, but one made of continuously moving grains of sand, one whose coiled body was as tall as she was, and whose head was bigger than her entire body.
Its tongue—made of sand—flickered out and touched her face. And for all her control and training, she winced. She couldn’t help it.
I—must have grabbed the wrong Talisman. . . .
This was certainly an earth afrinn.
The tongue touched her face again. Like the others, this afrinn had featureless, blind-looking eyes, but she had no doubt it saw her perfectly well. As an involuntary shudder came over her, she took a deep breath, straightened her spine, reminded herself that the first two afrinns had been disinclined to kill her, and spoke her little speech.
The sand-serpent, which seemed to be constantly rebuilding itself, simply lay in its coils while she stammered through her speech, betraying nothing. She held her breath, waiting for some sort of response, because even if the other two afrinns had been friendly, there was no guarantee that this one would be.
Finally, with a hiss of shifting sand, the afrinn raised its triangular head above its coils. Then it turned its head away from her.
And waited.
For a moment, she couldn’t imagine what was going on, but then it dawned on her, as it shoved its nose forward, in a gesture that seemed impatient. The door! It wanted her to open the door! Of course—unlike the water afrinn, which had been able to pour itself under the crack beneath the door, or the air afrinn, which could go wherever the wind could, this creature needed an actual egress.
She edged around it, grabbed the handle, and shoved the door open, backing quickly out of the way. It moved much faster than anything that big had any right to, pouring itself out of the door and down the stairs with an accompanying ssshhhh of the shifting sands of which it was made.
And then it was gone.
But the screams coming up from below were, if anything, more horrified than she had heard before.
Well . . . it’s a giant snake. She couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying to see coming down those stairs, other than an equally large spider. The other two afrinns had been somewhat monstrous, but that was the thing about a monster, it was something you didn’t have an instinctive reaction to. But a giant snake? An entirely different story. Everything about a snake made every creature she had ever seen react in fear, and humans were no exception.
I’d better get some bread before the kitchens are abandoned, and the bread burns to coals.
* * *
• • •
The afrinn announced its return in late afternoon by bumping the door with its nose. At least, that was what it sounded like. Since human guards would certainly not have bothered to knock, she assumed it was the afrinn and went to open the door to let it in. It still looked like a giant horned viper, and she wondered if that was its natural form, as the fish thing and bird thing appeared to have been the natural forms of the water and air afrinns. She thought about asking it if it could take any other shape, but before she got a chance, it filled up the center of the cell again, and then . . .
. . . collapsed.
Panic hit her; had she done something to kill it? Had the Karsite priests figured out a weapon to use against it? Had she just lost the only thing that stood between her and them but her own skill?
But then, before she could do more than utter an inarticulate groan, the sand started moving again. And before her amazed eyes, it took on an entirely new shape.
The shape of a building.
And not just any building. This one was a square structure with a single, tall tower rising from one corner, as perfectly formed as if it had been cut from (somehow moving) sandstone by a master sculptor. Every little detail was there, from windows, to tiny figures of humans and horses in the center of the structure, in front of what she assumed were stables. But why—
And then it hit her.
This was her prison.
As she realized this, she filled with an excitement as powerful as her panic had been moments before, and she paced around the “sand castle,” drinking in every detail.
The
outer walls, judging by the thickness and the little windows on the inside walls, weren’t just defenses, they were living and storage places. The inside of the square structure was a big courtyard with a well, a stable, and what she thought might be a smithy. There were other, smaller structures there too, but they probably weren’t important for her purposes. Privies, probably, and storage sheds. As she watched, the roofs of everything inside the courtyard melted away, and showed her the details of what was in them. There were stalls for no more than twenty horses, so most of the troops here must be foot soldiers. So this was a garrison, not just a prison.
Now the interior buildings melted away, and she transferred her gaze to the tower. As she had guessed, it was five stories tall. The walls and roof melted, and there were the walls of her cell with a little sand-figure in it that stood for her, and a stair up to where the roof had been. So besides being her prison, this was a watchtower.
Presumably there was no watch up there now. The afrinn had almost certainly terrified them into flight.
The fifth story dissolved, revealing an empty fourth story, then the third, all empty. So she was the only prisoner here, after all.
And now the roof of the entire complex melted away.
She bent over the sand castle with furious concentration, burning every room, every door into her mind. There were no corridors here. Rooms led directly into one another, and there were only four entrances into the building itself, all on the courtyard. And only one way out, a passage all the way through the first story next to the stable. If she was going to escape, it was going to have to be either by climbing down out of the tower or by getting to one of those doors out into the courtyard. Either way was fraught with danger. Climbing down the wall, all the Karsites would have to do would be to get archers out into desert outside the garrison, and she’d be an easy target. But to get out the other way—she’d have to make her way through half a dozen rooms that might or might not be occupied—
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