Spy, Spy Again

by Mercedes Lackey

He’d never been on a caravan before, but things went pretty much as he had expected from his reading. All of them made up their packs and bedrolls and threw them in the back of one of the wagons. Then the mercs ate first while the merchants got their horses in harness—and the merchants ate while the mercs got their horses saddled. Everyone made sure that every single vessel that could hold water was filled and had no leaks. Then Tiron mounted his horse and took the lead with Birk beside him, directed the three of them to cover the rear, and the caravan moved out with the rest of the mercs arrayed on either side of the line of wagons.

  Once they were out of the canyon, Kee kneed his horse to bring her briefly to Ahkhan’s side. “Sira’s still all right,” he said. “She had . . . something with her, something big and powerful, not an animal or a human. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but it seemed like it was protecting her.”

  “Really!” Ahkhan was taken aback. “That—seems unlikely.”

  Kee shrugged. “Without touching Tory, I couldn’t make out much.”

  “But you could make out something. Huh.” Tory scratched his head. “This is unexpected.”

  “But welcome,” Ahkhan said. “All right, I want you both to keep your eyes on the horizon to either side of us. I’ll watch the rear. You’re looking for—”

  “Anything,” Tory interrupted him. “Movement of birds particularly. Dust. The quick glint of sun on metal.”

  “Exactly.” Ahkhan nodded, relieved. “All right then, you know what to do, so do it.”

  The morning passed uneventfully. Except that it got steadily hotter, they were eating a lot of dust in the rear, and Tory found that the headwrap kept his head a lot cooler than even a hat. They paused just before the Border to water the horses, eat, and give the horses a rest. Kee and Tory took Birk’s place at the front, and Birk took theirs at the rear. Ahkhan went to take up a position on the right side.

  There was no sign just when they passed the Border, but Tiron assured them that they had and that now they had to keep their senses sharp for both would-be bandits and Karsite patrols.

  “I have all the proper papers,” he said, “But as I said, that won’t stop stupid patrols from being stupid.”

  “Exceedingly stupid,” Ismal added sourly, from his seat driving the lead wagon. “Even if they succeeded in killing us all and taking our goods, they can’t sell any of it. They don’t know where, or to whom, and that’s all information Father keeps in his head. Spices and medicines are not like cloth or gemstones; you can’t sell them to just anyone.”

  “Especially in Karse. Some of this stuff you have to have a special license for.” Tiron shook his head. “Well, let’s—”

  But Kee, who had been watching the horizon, whistled sharply at the same time that Birk did, both of them pointing at a mere whisper of dust hanging in the air. The caravan stopped. After a moment it became obvious that whatever was making the dust was coming toward them.

  Tiron sighed. “Not bandits, not moving that slowly. Well, now we find out what kind of Karsite bastards we’ll have to deal with. Let’s just hope they’re not complete idiots.”

  13

  The earth afrinn took a little journey down the tower and back up again in the morning. When it returned, it moved briefly over to the corner farthest from the one where Sira slept, and then coiled up in the center of the room and looked at her expectantly.

  Curious now, she walked around it to see that it had deposited a pile of brightly polished arrowheads in that corner. A little confused, she picked one up and looked at it. The wooden end of the shaft was still in the arrowhead, but it looked as if it had been sanded flat to the socket.

  “What—” she said, and then it struck her, and she chuckled. She turned to the afrinn, which had shifted its sand so that now its head was pointing at her. “They shot at you, didn’t they?” she asked.

  The afrinn nodded.

  Of course they had. And since the afrinn was just a giant pile of constant and swiftly moving sand, the wooden shafts of the arrows lost in it had been abraded away to nothing, leaving behind the metal arrowheads.

  “They really are unobservant.” She sighed and looked into its eyes. Did it see out of them, or did it just see with all of itself, and the shape of the serpent was just a convenience? Earth afrinns were mostly rumor and deduction to the Mages of the People. No one had ever seen one that she knew of—other than the highly dangerous and legendary Stone Man, and this certainly wasn’t one of those. They just knew that since air, water, and fire afrinns existed, there must certainly be earth afrinns.

  “I wish you could talk,” she told it. “I wish I knew what it was you were seeing. And how.”

  Abruptly the sand stopped moving, and the afrinn went from a serpent made of dancing sands to a vaguely sand-shaped pile. For a moment, she feared she had somehow offended it—but then, as close to her as possible, two vaguely hand-shaped depressions formed, then filled in again.

  So—it wanted her to put her hands on, or in, it again? The way she had when she’d given magic to it? Well, why not? If it had wanted to harm her, the easiest thing for it to have done would have been to leave.

  So she knelt down next to the sand and put her hands in it.

  Nothing happened for a while, so she closed her eyes experimentally.

  And suddenly she was engulfed on all sides by sight. It was as if she had eyes everywhere; she saw herself kneeling in front of herself (and that was disorienting), but she was equally aware of the door behind her, the window to one side, the floor and the ceiling.

  But then her “vision” expanded.

  There was no adequate way to explain it, but she “saw” the four floors of the prison beneath her, then the wings to either side, the next two corner towers (much smaller than the prison tower), the other two wings, forming the second two sides of the square, and the final small tower opposite the prison tower.

  And that was the moment she understood exactly how the afrinn had mapped out the entire prison in its sands for her. Not by crawling all over every bit of it, as she had assumed, but because it could see the structure and was aware of every nook, every storage place. In fact, she got the distinct impression it had only gone physically as far as the base of the prison tower.

  And she soon was aware of more, because as she concentrated on any one area, she sensed the lives in it, from the horses down to the mice and beetles. More than sense . . . if they were making a noise, she sensed that too, as a vibration. And when the life was a human, if it was talking, she could understand it.

  I can scry without scrying! she realized with excitement.

  She sensed the afrinn’s approval.

  Now she moved her area of concentration slowly, from room to room, determining by the sounds what was going on in them. Nearest the prison were the armory on one side—tenanted only by someone mending his armor and grumbling about it under his breath—and the kitchen, or at least, a kitchen on the other. And that made sense, actually; it meant the shortest route to get food to the prisoners, and the kitchen would never, ever be empty. In most garrisons she had ever seen, there would be one or two specialist cooks, but the rest of the staff would be soldiers, often assigned there as punishment. Anyone trying to escape that way would be going through a room full of soldiers who weren’t happy about being there in the first place as well as things that could be used as weapons.

  She found nothing of any interest in the wings nearest the prison tower, but in the corner tower opposite the prison she found what she was looking for: a large, luxurious suite of rooms with its own small kitchen and one room that absolutely reeked of power and prestige.

  And two humans in it.

  “. . . . and how should I know?” said a querulous voice as she sharpened her focus. “I’ve never heard of one of those sand things either! The men tried shooting it with the arrows I put Vkandis’ Blessing on, then they used the ones
with the poisoned heads, and they might as well have been shooting it with sugar candy for all the effect it had!”

  Without words, the afrinn conveyed its contempt of these creatures and that the reason they had never seen afrinns before, even though the afrinns had dwelt here for longer than the humans, was that the afrinns took great care never to be seen by these god-botherers.

  She almost choked at that “description.” But it was certainly apt.

  “Well, I’ve sent for the High Brotherhood,” said the second voice, in tones of barely suppressed rage. “They should be here soon enough. And when they arrive, the de—I mean, the Terrible Swords of Vkandis will make short work of that thing and will overcome the Sleepgiver. Assuming the High Brothers don’t just want her finished off, which I would say is a fate too good for her.”

  “She should be debased and tortured and bound with every means we have in our disposal and taken to Sunhame and burned alive in the Holy Fires!” the querulous one said, and he spat. “When will they arrive?”

  “However long it takes to get back from the Northern Border. That’s where they went after they captured her in the first place. You know the priority is to keep the Swords on the border as much as possible. They told me they had gotten my request and were on their way this morning, that’s all I know.”

  Sira shivered. This is what I had been afraid of.

  She felt the afrinn nudge her mind. You should withdraw, was the feeling, with the sense that while the afrinn knew it could observe these Mages safely alone, it was not certain it could do so linked so intimately with Sira.

  She withdrew her presence, but not her hands, and she opened her eyes, seeking not the surroundings but the afrinn itself; she probed delicately at the creature’s physical self.

  “You still need sustenance,” she declared to the pile of sand, and once again she poured her magic into it. After all, how could she do less, given what it had just shared with her?

  * * *

  • • •

  Two more attempts by the afrinn to eat through the bars or the stone of the window resulted only in metal and stone polished to a mirror gloss. Either the prison tower was reinforced somehow with magic she could not see, which was possible but not likely, or it was made of something much harder than anything she had ever come into contact with. She was beginning to think it was both, that special magic had been used to reinforce the window but that the window itself was extremely robust. Now that it was polished, it revealed a structure that didn’t look like any rock she knew. And the metal of the bars was certainly not the relatively brittle cast iron it would have been if the Sleepgivers had made it.

  There was a hard, cold spot deep inside her now, and she was not ashamed to admit that it was fear.

  She should have been a lot more terrified. She probably would have been, except that every night when she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, there was someone there reassuring her. Telling her that she could get out of there. Promising that she was strong enough and smart enough to do so. It wasn’t the promise of some nebulous rescue, which she would not have believed, but rather the surety—from someone unknown—that she would find a way. Was it just her mother’s wisdom in her Talisman? No, not possible. Was it something or someone in the last four bronze Talismans? She didn’t think so. It was all bound up with that nebulous dream personage, the young man she could not identify, yet felt she could trust.

  Which was ridiculous. Things like that only happened in tales other people told each other, not in the lore of the Sleepgivers, who were practical and hard-headed and knew there was no such thing as lovers you first saw in dreams.

  So when the afrinn showed signs of being restless and anxious to leave, she sent it on its way and decided to try something different. She would release two of the afrinns at once, one water, and one air, and see what happened.

  The earth afrinn nudged her once, quickly (to avoid abrading her), and left through the prison rather than through the window, leaving behind the impression that it intended to terrify as many of her captors as it could on its way out. And as soon as it was gone, she took two of the Talismans, laid them side-by-side, and spiked the spells.

  But this time the result was not as impressive.

  The air Talisman gave barely a shimmer as it released its captor, and the creature that emerged was a mere ghost of the first air afrinn. Literally a ghost; it was scarcely a sketch of a little winged lizard hanging in midair, listlessly. And the water afrinn was not in a much better state, a sort of finned hound composed less of water and more of fog.

  And neither of them moved after she made her little speech; instead, they looked at her mournfully, as if trying to say, “You’ve given us our freedom, but we’re too weak to take it.”

  A wave of bitter disappointment crested and crashed over her. But she did her best not to show it. After all, it wasn’t their fault they were too weak to help. Besides . . . she should probably be able to do something about that.

  She cupped both hands around the place in the air where the air afrinn hovered, scarcely visible, and poured magic into it, closing her eyes to concentrate. It wasn’t until she felt her knees buckling that she stopped and opened her eyes to see if her work had had any effect.

  She did let her legs collapse under her when she saw that it had. The winged lizard was larger now and more “present,” and not just a sketch in the air but a delicate, detailed thing like a sculpture of blown glass. And she was not at all mistaken, she was sure—it was looking at her with a real expression on its reptilian face, and that expression was gratitude and even adoration.

  The water afrinn also had an expression, much easier to read on a face that was not at all unlike a delicate gaze-hound’s—it was hope.

  “I need to rest,” she told it. “But yes. I’ll help you, too.”

  It looked as if it was too tired to do anything at all but very much wanted to express itself with enthusiasm.

  She rested and ate, and by midafternoon she was ready to try to help the water afrinn .

  Meanwhile, the air creature had left—but not, she sensed, deserted her. After she opened her eyes for the second time that day, with the water afrinn in much the same state of “repair” as the air afrinn, the air creature returned. She had no idea what it had been doing . . . but there was a definite aura of satisfaction about it.

  By this point she was truly ready to drop and was very glad she had a stockpile of food and water, because she certainly would not have been able to apport a drop or a crumb. She was so tired her jaws were sore, and she was barely able to chew. In fact, she fell asleep with a half-finished chunk of bread in her hand, conscious only of the fact that the air afrinn had taken up a station between her and the door, and the water afrinn was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  • • •

  The first thing she did in the morning, after cleaning herself as best she could, was to strengthen the two afrinns again. This time wasn’t nearly as draining; it seemed that besides gaining power from her, the two were finally regaining it on their own. And it was just after lunch that two new and surprising things happened.

  The first was when the water afrinn literally herded her over to the latrine hole and then, without warning, unleashed a literal torrent of pleasantly warm water on her, drenching her and her clothing.

  She spluttered, standing there paralyzed with confounded surprise, and with the sense that she shouldn’t react until she figured out what was going on. It increased the temperature of the water somehow and continued to drench her while looking at her expectantly.

  It took her several moments to realize—the afrinn was actually cleaning her! Or trying to, anyway.

  Well, she was no stranger to bathing or washing clothing without the aid of soap, so she stripped down, used her wrappings to scrub herself off, then, while the water continued to cascade over her, scrubbed all
of her clothing against the stone of the floor, scrubbed all of her purloined clothing and rags, and finally gave her short hair as much of a scrubbing as she could. And meanwhile, apparently unlimited warm water (in a desert!) continued to pour over her in a glorious stream.

  I wish we could get this at home, she thought, a bit giddy with how good it felt. Nor was that all—when she finally (with regret) signaled to the afrinn that she was in no more need of its services, the air afrinn immediately took its place and began blowing hot, very dry air over her. In no time, she was dry, her clothing was dry, and she was the cleanest she had been since the time she’d stayed at the Amber Moon enclave, where they had a hot spring one could soak in for blissful ages.

  “Thank you,” she told them both, when she was dressed again, and smiled wryly. “Well, I may be about to die, but at least I’ll die clean.” The afrinns didn’t react to that; she assumed it was because they simply didn’t comprehend her. What they understood seemed to be very hit and miss.

  “I wonder if they’ve moved men back up into the prison tower,” she mused. “After all, you two aren’t all that impos—”

  She stopped, because the air afrinn was . . . shimmering. The other afrinn hadn’t done that, at least not in front of her.

  The shimmering became a blur, and the blur, a mist that expanded into a sphere, and then the mist cleared—and she was looking at herself. But this was a version of herself that would have struck terror into the heart of the most hardened demon-summoning Karsite priest or the most foolhardy and brave Karsite soldier.

  Just to begin with, “she” was two heads taller, had three-inch-long fangs, and was wreathed in fire. She was armored from head to toe in what looked like the same sort of black chitin that armored scorpions, she had an actual scorpion tail complete with sting, and in her hands were matched great swords.

  She gaped at the vision, which stared at her out of expressionless eyes. Then the figure shimmered and blurred, the mist rose and cleared, and the air afrinn was back.