A man right behind them drew in his breath sharply. “Imp!” he accused, pointing at Kirin’s exposed ears. “Spawn of Salim!”
“No!” Kirin denied, snatching his hood back up as a prickle ran up his spine. He shivered. Not here, Father Haroun, I beg you! Not now!
“Half breed,” another man said with contempt, and turned his back on him. Several others in the crowd turned to look at him with doubtful expressions on their faces.
Kirin grabbed Ammin’s hand and hustled them both away. The boy had a bewildered look on his face and had to scamper to keep up as Kirin practically ran back to the wagon. There he tossed the boy up to his father and scrambled up and inside as fast as he could.
“No need for that much haste,” Chiaver laughed. “We start slow and don’t move faster than a walk all the way across. Settle yourselves.”
A second gong pealed out, two strikes this time, and the lead wagon lurched into motion. One by one all the rest followed it. Most of the crowd had returned to their own wagons. The plazas were nearly empty by the time Chiaver’s wagon reached the water. The big yellow horses waded right in with the calmness of experience. Water rose around them as Kirin stared from side to side. The heavy wheels threw up rooster-tails of spray and waves lapped the bottom of the wagon. The river surrounded the moving train and its immense power pressed on their fragile wood and flesh.
The spells closed in as well.
The ethereal webs spun out from the silver globes delicately wrapped the wagon and horses. Kirin stared, dismayed by the shifting rainbow of power holding the wagon against the strengthening current. The magic crawled over wood and cloth like the shimmering threads of Dona D’Illbinth’s dress.
Oh no! It reaches inside the wagons too! Seraphs help me!
Kirin retreated among the sacks of sponges to hide from the relentless magic. It did no good. The webs crawled over the awning, between the sacks, reaching closer and closer. His Shadow groped for the magic and he fought it back. One shining tendril of the shimmering web touched him. His Shadow bit off part of the spell before he could prevent it.
The wagon shivered in the current. Ripples spread up and down the row of other wagons as the entire web twitched at this sudden maiming. The downstream rapids roared. Chiaver gripped his reins harder and darted frowning glances up and down the line. The horses tossed their heads uneasily, tried to stop, but he urged them forward.
Behind them Kirin saw the silver globes flicker. He could see the entire web stretch and start to deform. The mages on the plinths were casting furiously, trying to patch the damage before it spread.
Kirin screamed silently at the monster inside him. You’ll kill us all! His mind grappled it with renewed terror. Father Haroun, lend me your strength! The wounded spell leaked power into him to feed his darkness. He could only match it with his willpower.
The whole row of wagons trembled, and several horses neighed. Shocked voices were raised in fear in the other wagons. The pilgrims in the wagons ahead began to pray loudly. Chiaver muttered under his breath and squeezed the reins. He glanced back over his shoulder into the wagon and his eyes widened as they met Kirin’s.
Kirin curled into a ball, trying to fold his Shadow inside. He shut his eyes and battled it with all his concentration. Slowly he squeezed it inward.
Then the spells crawled across his skin as the mages strengthened their web. Over his eyes, through his hair, in his ears, up his nose, and down his throat—
He nearly lost control then and the whole web shuddered. The horses squealed, and the wagon jerked. Somehow, he held the Shadow back and locked it down, refused its raging hunger and held it fast.
The web stabilized. The wagon master urged his beasts onward, tension in his voice as thick as the rapids’ spray. Past the river’s midpoint, past the canyon of the deepest channel where the water fell right off the road-edge between two bollards. Past the three-quarter mark, the east bank growing closer with every step.
Kirin stayed curled into a ball until the sound of hooves on pavement told him they’d arrived. The spells fell behind as they clattered up the eastern ramp. Only then did he dare relax his fierce internal grip on his personal monster. He sat up and blinked in the suns’ light.
Chiaver reined the wagon to a stop and turned in his seat to stare at Kirin. “What did you do?” he demanded in a voice that shook. “What are you?”
Ammin, staring with eyes wide as saucers, whispered, “A man at the shore called him an Imp.”
Belatedly Kirin noticed that his hood had fallen back and his ears were exposed. He snatched it back up. “I’m not an Imp, just a man! My father was a Gwythlo, that’s why I have pointed ears. That’s all!”
“I saw that dark spell you cast,” Chiaver answered angrily. “You almost killed us! Get out of my wagon!” He reached under the driving seat for Kirin’s knapsack and threw it at him. “Go!”
Kirin scrambled over the tailgate and dropped to the pavement, driven as much by the fear in the wagon master’s voice as by the lash of the man’s anger. Other wagons were rumbling past them. He ducked between two and ran to the verge of the ramp. An especially large pair of lotus palms and an untrimmed bougainvillea created a shady nook next to the stone-lined ditch that watered them all. He stopped to fill his water bag from the chuckling canal and take stock. Chiaver’s wagon had disappeared up the road.
Kirin looked around the huge stone ramp, twin to the one on the west bank and full of busy strangers. Had any of them connected the near-destruction of the crossing spell with him? He wanted to hide in the nook until nightfall. But Pieter wouldn’t get freed if he didn’t free the Prince.
Kirin shouldered his pack, made very sure his ears were covered, and began walking.
The ramp ended with a pair of head gates that gushed water into the flanking irrigation ditches. He crossed a bridge over a large canal and the pavement ceased, replaced by a pounded clay surface whose shoulders were sandy dirt splashed with bits of grass and weeds. Plenty of manure coated the road and two industrious farmers shoveled it into a goat-cart while their harnessed goats nibbled weeds. A big campground opened on his right beyond the curb. He avoided that and headed up the road, drawing a bit of cloth across his face to keep out the dust.
An hour of sweaty walking brought him to a crossing where a battered road ran south toward huge clay pits along a broad sandy wash stippled with acacia and cedar trees. Smoke trickled up into the brassy sky from the ovens that made Guglione’s famous amphorae. Another road ran west up the valley of the wadi into sere desert. The last turned north and curved under the frowning walls of the big battlemented city itself. His goal lay past it.
Other men walked north from the clay pits, many pulling small handcarts piled high with fresh amphorae. He stepped into an empty place between two of the carts and tried to be inconspicuous. There were hours yet before sunset.
The closer he got to Guglione, the less he liked it. A dry channel liberally scattered with sharpened stakes moated the city and the walls held dozens of gibbets, every one dangling a corpse. Some had been nibbled by carrion birds till they were more bone than flesh. A fresh one had been stripped naked to display the marks of a whipping that nearly flayed the man. Crows quarreled over his eyes. Nauseated, Kirin looked away.
Most of the men plodded straight ahead onto an iron-bound drawbridge that served the city’s open gate. A side road paralleled the moat; Kirin turned onto it to circle the place. Surly guards watched him, their hands on their swords, and for a moment he feared they would seize him and drag him inside the brooding maw. But they let him go without comment. He didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until he got far enough around the curving city wall to be hidden from their gaze. Another road branched off paralleling a canal that watered the city; he gladly followed it away into farmland. The pavement soon leaped the canal on a sturdy stone bridge and bent north again at a stone obelisk with an arrow and the name Isernia carved on it. Heartened to know the right direction, he picked up his pace.
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The road cut through irrigated fields where green growing scents tried to wipe away the memory of rotting flesh. The arrow-straight road boasted little traffic. He thought he could see Chiaver’s wagon a few miles ahead and slowly leaving him behind.
His heart hurt. The man and his son had been kind to him when they thought him a Silbari like themselves.
Until Chiaver saw my ears, and my Shadow. Bitterness welled in Kirin like a black tide and for a moment he wanted nothing more than to be home in Aretzo with Maia and Pieter and all his family. But Maia was dead, and his father would be, if he didn’t rescue the Prince. He dashed tears from his stinging eyes and kept walking under the hot afternoon suns.
CHAPTER 39: TERRELL
Dawn woke Terrell. Fenman brought him water in the morning and water and a morsel of food in the evening. By then his stomach was growling so badly that he wolfed it down gratefully. He had spent all day alternating between straining at his bonds and stretching his magical sensitivity, and accomplished nothing with either.
But five separate times during the day, the spider on his head had let him hear Chisaad speaking.
He’s ordering someone around, but he’s being very precise in his wording, and very cold. As if whoever he talked to wasn’t even human? I wonder what that’s about.
The aches bred by his forced position on the floor made sleep harder that night. The Moon of Calm sent a sliver of its light through the dome’s ocular to creep across the wall.
Sound caught his attention, a peculiar rasping that echoed softly. Something scraping against stone? He thought it sounded like fingernails on slate, or maybe claws. It came a third time, louder now, and definitely from the east entrance.
He turned his head to look, careful not to shake the spider atop his head. For a moment he thought he saw a dog moving in the darkness beyond the door, then he remembered the monumental scale of the ruined building and his breath quickened. Whatever moved there was as big as a pony.
Then it came into the moonlight. He gasped.
A twisted asymmetric nightmare of a beast stared back at him. A forked tongue licked at the ward spell, then withdrew behind double rows of fangs longer than his fingers. Seven legs upheld the lumpy body, four on one side and three on the other, and a long scaly tail swept back and forth behind. It raised itself up, lifting the front pair of limbs entirely off the floor as it sniffed the ward spell.
No, he realized with sick certainty. It smells me.
More scales glittered on the belly. The raised limbs pawed at the ward spell, which glowed blue and repelled them. It tried again, leaning its weight into the spell. The ward glowed brighter, trying to push it back, then slowly dimpled as the beast lifted two more legs off the floor and leaned with more of its weight.
It’s trying to get at me. He shuddered at the thought of those savage teeth. It might almost be a mercy if it goes for my throat first.
The ward began to bow inward as the monster pressed harder.
Terrell’s mind grasped for the thin edge of the guardian magic. It wasn’t terribly different from using a message sender or the Stone Throne itself. When he had it, he called forth his Light. It flooded into the spell, strengthened and stiffened it until the monster had to retreat. The creature uttered a low throaty growl that scraped Terrell’s nerves.
Its stench reached his nose and he gagged.
What is it? The body looks a little like a bloated crocodile, save for the extra legs. But that head! It’s as bad as anything Aunt Klairveen conjured to send against me in the river battle. Is this what has corrupted the node? Or has the corrupted node made this beast?
For a while the scaly nightmare plodded back and forth, lashing its tail in slow waves of cold frustration while it stared at him. There were two eyes on one side of the horrific head and one on the other. Branching growths like soft antlers waved from the top of its skull. Moonlight bleached its color, but the hide looked leprous. Dark patches blotched the pale scales.
Terrell nearly gagged from the stench, but he kept feeding the ward spell. Finally the creature turned away and vanished into the darkness. He heard a faint slithering sound as it moved, then a distant thump and splash. The ward spell faded to its normal transparency.
Sleep eluded him the rest of the night. When Fenman appeared the next morning, Terrell warned him about his night visitor. The Gwythlo laughed at him.
“There’re plenty of those things prowling around this place. You can spear them if you’re quick, though the meat’s no good. Guess that’d be no consolation to you if it had gotten through the wards, hah!”
He didn’t seem much worried by the possibility. When he left, whistling, Terrell came as close as he’d ever come to cursing someone individually.
No, he sighed after a struggle. If I’m ever to be King I must rise above that sort of temptation. The King’s curses have weight; I won’t be worthy to wear the crown if I waste them on personal vengeance.
Restraint offered little comfort.
Terrell concentrated on the metal spider atop his head, listening to every quiet sound within it. He discovered that he could hear other voices than Chisaad’s. One sounded like Fantillin, another like Dona Seraphina. Both baffled him.
They don’t sound like they’re talking to Chisaad. I’d swear Dona Seraphina said my name! What is going on?
He continued to listen, and by the time his jailer returned with his third evening of water and food, he understood. Sheer loneliness led him to blurt it out.
“Someone is masquerading as me,” he declared to his captor. “Using this spider-device to raid my memories so he knows what to say and do.”
Fenman chuckled. “You’re mostly right, darkie. Now drink up.”
Terrell had to swallow his questions with the water, and then chew up the dried bit of beef as best he could. Fenman doused him with the remaining water again and left, whistling once more. Terrell gritted his teeth and endured the chill while the water drained away through cracks in the floor. He resigned himself to another long night.
Sometime well after midnight he awoke to find Madness shining through the dome’s western windows. The little moon bathed him in its ill-omened light. Then movement warned him that the beast had returned.
This time it immediately reared up and clawed at the eastern ward spell. Again, Terrell strengthened the ward until the monster gave up trying. Instead it squatted on its haunches and stared at him unnervingly, blinking now and then. Terrell wanted to turn his face away but didn’t dare. Once his gaze had locked on the beast’s, he suspected that he had better convince it he wasn’t prey, though only The One God knew what really went on inside that horror of a head. The staring contest continued until Terrell’s control grew ragged. He wanted to scream at the thing but did not dare. Abruptly the creature turned its head away and slithered back to the water. Terrell found his heart racing and lungs panting as if he’d run a mile in full armor.
Father Haroun, hear me! he pleaded. Give me the strength to face that evil thing. I beg you to intercede with The One for me. Send me a way to escape this prison.
He prayed a lot as the night dragged on. Moonlight crawled across the floor and wall to eventually expire against the inside of the dome. He finally fell asleep only to wake to another dreary dawn.
The fourth day offered no change.
And the fifth.
And the sixth and seventh, each so much alike that he feared for his sanity from laying there in his own filth and pain. Every night the monster tested the wards, stared at him for a while, and then left, as if it found purpose in depriving him of another hour’s sleep.
But the morning of the eighth day was different.
CHAPTER 40: KIRIN
The city of Isernia made a walled oval spiky with towers. It squatted across Kirin’s route like a giant hedgehog. He circled it at a distance through farm roads and canal paths, wary lest the wagoneer Chiaver had alerted the local priestesses against him. Rich farm country sprawled around him, well-
irrigated and at the height of harvest season. Everybody wanted workers and some weren’t picky about their appearance.
Hungry, he paused at an outlying farm to trade work for food, and spent a whole afternoon climbing date palms to cut free their ripe burdens. Then for half a candlemark after nightfall he picked itchy bits of dry palm-frond out of his clothes. He finally fell into exhausted sleep in a hayloft above two plow-mules. In the morning the farmer paid him with breakfast and a double handful of hard-baked traveler’s biscuit plus a small sack of shelled almonds, both of which Kirin crammed into his pack. He bowed to the man in gratitude, but the farmer waved him away—and made the sign against evil.
He’ll hire an imp, Kirin thought sadly. Even feed and pay him, but nothing more. I guess I should be glad he didn’t try to cheat me. His heart ached anew. He pulled the hood over his head as he returned to the road.
Several miles north of the city he crossed a decaying bridge over the last working canal. Beyond sprawled the wrecked lands that had been torn by the rise of the Scarp.
The road immediately fell out of repair, patched only by windblown dust and sheep dung. People still used it, for there were clear trails winding along the route, even marks of wagon wheels, but plainly no one maintained it. The land heaved up in wrinkles and gullies that broke up the old irrigation ditches and repeatedly cracked the road. Most buildings were little more than heaps of rubble, trees long since decayed to stumps or simply depressions where the roots had been gnawed away by ants. He found a lonely living date palm standing in a hollow next to the collapsed remains of a shrine. There he applied his new skill to help himself to a meager harvest. This prickly experience feeding himself in bare countryside without inns or farms warned him that he’d better collect any food he found. The travel biscuits would not last long.
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