by Alec Hutson
Oh, gods. Of course this is what would happen.
The women of Vel must cause chaos wherever they go – preternaturally beautiful, known as insatiable companion lovers to the greatest of men . . . what talented warrior would not try and impress a lamias?
These two aspirants suddenly come together in a clash of steel – whirling axes push back the overdressed Zimani, but his slim silver blade flickers out, scoring the pale man’s side. They separate again, the Zimani smirking as a thin trickle of blood seeps from a tear in his opponent’s armor of spotted hide, but the wound doesn’t seem to slow the warrior at all as he comes in again, axes flashing. A chorus of gasps goes up from the onlookers as the Zimani is pressed back, his rapier a blur as he turns aside the crashing ax-blades.
Fools.
I’m pushing my way through the crowd when Deliah spots me. She leaps to her feet, upsetting the bottle of sap in front of her, red fingers fluttering to her purple lips.
Her reaction doesn’t go unnoticed. My eyes are on the warrior goddess, but from the sudden absence of grunts and shrieking metal I can tell the duel has stopped.
“Talin!” she cries, rushing to the edge of the balcony and leaning over.
Silence. I can feel the gaze of everyone slide from Deliah to me in mild astonishment.
Slowly, I turn back to the crowd, already knowing what I’ll see.
The pale warrior and the Zimani fop are striding towards me, nearly shoulder to shoulder, their enmity forgotten. From the looks on their faces, they are not pleased with Deliah’s reaction.
Sighing, I draw my green-glass sword, and uncertainty flickers in their expressions as my blade slips from its sheath accompanied by a crystalline chime. The crowd is scrambling back now, realizing that the somewhat civilized boundaries that were in place for the duel have now been breached. I set myself in a defensive stance, reaching for the core of calm in my soul.
A thump from behind me, and surprise shows in the faces of the warriors. Then I’m being grabbed roughly, whirled around so hard I nearly drop my sword, soft lips pressing to my mouth. Despite knowing that I’m now open to being skewered from behind, I can’t seem to extricate myself from Deliah’s embrace. Her kiss is hungry, and I can feel every curve of her body.
Finally, she pulls away, and I’m immediately swallowed by her eyes.
“You look older,” she says finally. “And you smell different.”
“I was in the sewers.”
A loud throat-clearing makes us turn. The two hapless duelists are standing there, weapons in their hands. In a few brief moments their faces have gone from determined to angry to surprised . . . and now I just see a look of uncertain confusion. Blood is trickling from the cut on the ax-man’s side, making a small puddle in the dusty road. He’s swaying slightly, and I don’t think he has very much fight left in him. The Zimani appears to be more ready to continue, his silver rapier raised.
Deliah glances at them dismissively. “Go away,” she says, and it’s like two bladders of air have been pricked. All the bravado and bluster of this pair leaks away as Deliah turns back to me, ignoring them. I give them a final shrug just before they slink back into the crowd. How humiliating.
All thoughts of those two vanish as Deliah enfolds me in another embrace. Her mouth finds my cheek and my neck, and she asks me excited questions between quick little kisses.
“Where have you been? What happened? Did Xela find you? Why were you in the sewers?”
From over her shoulder I can see the crowd gawking at us. Xela is standing in front of them with her arms crossed, wearing a look of bemusement.
“Let’s go inside,” I tell the lamias, and without another word she turns and starts dragging me towards the looming jaws. I stumble through the entrance, and am immediately plunged into a hazy gloom. I get a brief glimpse of many surprised faces clustered around a few low tables in a common room, and then we’re clattering up a rickety set of stairs and hurrying down a hallway.
When she bangs open one of the doors lining this corridor I’m half expecting to be flung down upon a waiting bed, but though there is a rumpled pile of tattered blankets on a sleeping pallet, that’s not why she’s dragged me up here. Bell is seated at an ancient desk facing an open window, her back to us. Books and papers are strewn across it, and she doesn’t turn around at the commotion we’ve made.
Instead, she raises her arm in a gesture that looks like she’s shooing us away. “I’m busy,” she says, not glancing from the open tome in front of her. “This translation is like trying to get a cat to –”
“Bell.”
At the sound of my voice she leaps immediately from her chair and flings herself into my arms from across the room. I’m staggered, and only Deliah’s hand on my back keeps me from falling over.
“Talin!” she cries, and there’s wetness where her face is pressed into the hollow of my shoulder. Then her small fists are beating against my chest. “Where have you been, you fool?” she snarls, and I catch her wrist just as her open palm is about to slap me across the face.
“I can explain,” I tell her. She glares at me angrily, then tries to hit me with her other hand. I catch that one, too.
“I think we all want to hear that tale.” Xela has slipped into the room and is leaning against the wall, her arms across her chest.
Still holding the scientist’s daughter’s wrists, my gaze travels from Xela to Deliah to Bell. They’re all watching me expectantly. I let go of Bell, and she finally lets her arms drop.
“So, a lot has happened . . .”
The women listen rapt as I describe everything since being swept off the cliff and into the river below the mountains. Bell returns to her chair, sitting on it backwards with her head resting on her arms. Deliah settles herself cross-legged on the sleeping pallet, staring up at me with wide eyes. Xela stays where she is, smirking as she leans against the wall in the shadowed recesses of the room. I tell them of being discovered half-dead by the slavers, about the circlet that Ximachus had fitted on my leg and which kept me from trying to escape, the terrors of the grasslands and our entrance into Zim. Bell asks a few questions about the muckers and the undercity – apparently, those who delve beneath Zim have something of a legendary reputation outside the Twilight Empire. I tell them of Bright Eyes and the other muckers, the rescue of the Orthonos scion from the Pale Man, and my initiation into the Swords. Xela seems intensely interested in the Pale Man – questions are clearly on her lips, but she lets me finish my tale. She does snort, however, when I gloss quickly over my time as a Sword in the Orthonos household. Clearly, she’s well aware of all the duties Shields and Swords perform for the matriarchs and patriarchs of Zim. I can see interest kindle again in Bell’s eyes when I describe what happened in the court of the Purple Emperor, and the revelation that Valyra was now a ward of the Umbra.
When I finally finish, Deliah’s face crinkles in confusion. “I don’t understand – did Xela find you in the Orthonos manse?”
I glance at the shadowdancer. “Yes.”
Deliah turns to her. “What were you doing there?” She pauses for a moment, as if seeing her for the first time. “And what are you wearing?”
“You look like one of the Prophet’s Daughters,” Bell says.
A hint of embarrassment flickers across Xela’s face. Her fingers clutch at her pink robes. “If my mother saw me in my shadowdancer garb that would have been like putting my hand in the lion’s mouth.”
“Mother?” Bell asks, staring at her blankly.
Xela sighs. “Auxilia Orthonos, matriarch of the Orthonos family.”
A moment of stunned silence, then Deliah slaps her thigh hard. “I knew it!”
“You’re the daughter of Auxilia Orthonos?” Bell’s voice is heavy with shock.
“Estranged daughter,” Xela adds quietly. “We haven’t spoken in years.”
Deliah makes a show of looking around the dilapidated room. “Wait, why are we staying here if you’re a noble?”
&nbs
p; Xela shifts, frowning. “When my mother found that I was blessed by the Darkness she refused to let me join the Umbra. I was young and rebellious and ran away to the monastery. She traveled there, actually, and we had a terrible fight, with dozens of my fellow disciples watching. She demanded I return to Zim, and it was only the intervention of the abbess that kept her from dragging me back home. She disowned me after that.”
“Then why . . .”
Xela cuts off Bell’s question. “Because I was desperate. We had been in the city for nearly a month looking for any trace of him.” She jerks her chin in my direction. “We’d asked questions in every inn and hostel and tavern and gambling den, but it was like the trail had just vanished. My mother has powerful connections, though, and I had finally worked up the courage to ask her for help.”
“And there you found him,” Deliah says in mild astonishment. “How fortuitous.”
“Until the Orthonos discover he’s gone missing,” says Bell. “I take it you didn’t ask your mother for his freedom.”
“She is no doubt raging right now,” Xela says. “In fact, I would suggest we leave the city as quickly as possible.”
“The sooner the better,” I interject.
“Well, we’ll have to wait till Fen returns.”
“She’s returned.” We all turn in surprise at this new voice. Fen Poria is crouched in the open window, her features shadowed. Her white hair has grown out since last I saw her; it nearly touches her shoulders, long enough that she almost looks like a young woman rather than an urchin boy. “So you’re back,” she says flatly.
“I am.”
She sniffs loudly. “You smell terrible.”
“I was in the sewers.”
Her large green eyes blink in surprise. “I guess that’s why I couldn’t find you.” She uncoils from the window frame and slips into the room.
I glance uncertainly from the murderous feral to my companions. They seem unperturbed by her presence. “So . . . she’s been helping you?”
“Fen tracked you,” Deliah replies brightly. “After you went off the cliff, we didn’t know what to do. We thought you were dead. But we had the Cleansing Flame behind us and no one really wanted to go back over the mountains. Bell thought we should try and find the girl you were looking for, the healer we’d heard rumors of in Ysala. So we decided to go to Zim. We’d just entered the grasslands when Fen here showed up at our campfire. At first there were a few grudges that had to be settled.” She glances meaningfully at Xela and Fen Poria. “But after that, she explained why she’d come to us. She said she’d smelled you on a riverbank, but given that your body wasn’t there she thought you must still be alive. Fen found other little traces as we traversed the grasslands, but when we arrived at the gates of Zim it was like you’d vanished.”
I squint suspiciously at the feral, once again wondering why she’d taken such an interest in us. Fen keeps her green eyes lowered and scuffs at the floor with her boot. “Why did you do all this?”
She shrugs, looking uncomfortable.
Bell rises from her chair. “Fen has proven herself, at least to me. She’s loyal and has tried her best to find you. We might not have made it to Zim without her help navigating the grasslands.” A vigorous nod from Deliah, and even Xela inclines her head at this.
Apparently, Bell has forgiven Fen for abducting her father for the Marquis. Well, if she can move past that, I suppose I should also put behind me getting knifed by the feral in the manse of the Red Trillium Trust.
“Thank you,” I say to Fen, holding out my hand. She hesitates for a moment, and then clasps my arm briefly. “For everything.”
I’m sure I see a touch of red in her alabaster cheeks. “Never mind it,” she mutters, then shoves her hands in her pockets and recedes into one of the corners of the room.
Silence falls. I realize that everyone is looking at me expectantly.
“So . . . what do we do now?” asks Xela.
I’m quiet for another moment, trying to put into order all the things I’ve learned. “You said Auxilia will be angry?”
“Enraged,” Xela affirms. “Mother is proud and vengeful, and when she feels like something has been stolen from her she’ll use all her considerable resources to get it back.”
“Wonderful,” I reply with a sigh. “We seem to make friends wherever we go.”
“We have to leave the city, then,” Bell says. “Go north.”
“And what’s there?”
Bell gestures at the pile of books and papers covering her desk. “The Umbra, the monastery of the shadowdancers. And apparently the girl you’ve been searching for ever since you came to our lands.”
“The abbess won’t just give her up, if this stranger truly has powers,” Xela says slowly. “You said the Prophet was also interested in her? There’s no way she’ll be allowed to leave if she could fall into his hands.”
“Then we steal her.”
We all turn to Fen Poria, who still has her hands in her pockets, her shoulders hunched. She seems to hunker down a bit more under our attention.
“The Umbra is not a place you can simply stroll into,” Xela says. “The shadowdancers have abilities that can barely be comprehended. My powers are only a tiny sliver of what the abbess and the senior nuns are capable of doing.”
Fen Poria shrugs. “Seems like our pack has some talent, too. We go in fast and hard and snatch this girl away before they know what’s happened.”
“I like her thinking,” Deliah agrees, reaching among the tangled blankets she’s sitting on and pulling out a piece of her carapace armor, a long greave of gleaming black chitin.
I meet each of the women’s eyes in turn. To my surprise, there’s not a hint of doubt that I can see. They are all willing to throw themselves against the Umbra, one of the great powers of Zim, to rescue a girl they’ve never met before. A wash of emotion goes through me. Weeks of being alone, sleeping on the wooden floor of the wagons, eating gruel, fighting monsters . . . and now I finally feel whole again, surrounded by these women.
“We should get ready, then. We leave on the morrow.”
19
I’d hoped to depart Zim before the daughters of the Prophet raised their voices in supplication to the dawn, but despite my best intentions the sun has nearly crested in the sky by the time I finally stumble down the stairs to the inn’s common room. I slept well, when I’d slept, though Deliah had seen that I’d gotten little enough of that. The lamias had been sharing a room with our other companions during their stay at the Mouth, but she’d demanded we secure our own space when it was finally time to turn in for the night. Our lovemaking had been of a different flavor than I remembered – slower and more tender, as if in our time apart she’d come to realize something.
I’m turning this over in my thoughts when I reach the bottom of the stairs and find myself confronted by a Zimani in ornate bronze armor. I blink stupidly at him, unable to understand in my befuddled early-morning haze why a fully-clad warrior is standing stiffly at attention holding a spear of black wood. Without meeting my eyes, he jerks his head towards the doorway to the common room.
Oh, no.
Tentatively, I step inside the darkened eating hall; the few windows are so begrimed that the day’s light barely suffuses the glass, draping the room in shadows. Almost all of the long trestle tables are empty, but dozens of Zimani soldiers line the walls, the tapering points of their spears nearly brushing the low ceiling. Seated at one of the tables is Auxilia Orthonos, resplendent in a dress of sleek black feathers that shimmers in the gloaming. Behind her loom her collection of Swords. Jalent sneers at me in unabashed contempt, while the northman Romen looks pained, as if he’s embarrassed at having to be a part of what is coming. The other Swords – powerfully built Zimani bristling with weapons – have all adopted various menacing expressions.
I wish I hadn’t left my sword upstairs.
“Talin,” Auxilia calls out, gesturing towards the bench across from her. “Sit down.”
I consider dashing up the stairs to find my blade, but I feel several large presences moving behind me to block my way.
Grimacing, I step into the common room. “I’m not your slave anymore. You can’t command me.”
The matriarch sighs, and I think she may have even rolled her eyes. “You’ve lost your circle, but by the laws of Zim you’re still a slave. Actually, an escaped slave now, which means you’ve abrogated the terms of your life debt. I will be expected to have you put to a slow and painful death.”
I hesitate halfway to her table, and Auxilia makes a little noise of frustration.
“But that’s not why I’m here. If I wanted you dead, I would have had my warriors kick down the door to your room and stab you in bed.” She pauses for a moment. “Though that thought did cross my mind. I don’t particularly like being betrayed, Talin.”
“I didn’t much care for having my life constantly threatened if I dared to disobey a request,” I reply, but still I slide onto the bench across from her.
Auxilia regards me with a slight frown. “I tried to make you comfortable. And I don’t think our time together was . . . unpleasant.”
“It wasn’t,” I concede. “But the simple fact is that I was your prisoner.”
“Hm. Any warrior in Zim would have cut a bloody swath to my door if I offered them the life I gave you.” She taps her lacquered nails on the table. “But I understand. Some beasts wither when they are yoked.” Auxilia glances around the room, as if distracted by something. “Show yourself,” she suddenly calls out loudly. “I thought I taught you that it’s rude to eavesdrop.”
A long silence follows this pronouncement, and then a dark leg steps from where shadows have clotted behind a post. Xela emerges from the darkness, peeling away the few tenacious wisps of blackness that cling to her. The soldiers arrayed around the room mutter and shift, and I can see from the expressions on the faces of the Swords that they recognize the shadowdancer.
“Mother.”
“Auxela.”