She reached into her boot and twitched out the lock-picks. Leaning back against the stone, she began working on the cuffs of her manacles. The crude locks were no problem; she caught the manacles as they cracked open and set them on the bench beside her, then dealt with the chains on her ankles. Pick in hand she moved silently to the door.
The Sleykyn was still alone, head fallen on folded arms, the mug on its side with a small spill of wine by its mouth. His shoulders moved and she heard a sputtering snore. Hastily she began work on the door’s lock; with one Sleykyn gone oft somewhere and the other far gone in wine and asleep she had her best chance. No time to waste, no time at all. The door lock was worse because it was bigger and more complex, but she forced it as silently as she could, her breath caught behind her teeth, her heart juddering at each squeal.
After checking the Sleykyn a last time, she eased the heavy door open just enough to let her slip into the corridor. There was a torch set in a holder by her cell, but that was the only one, confirming her sense that the other cells were empty. She ran on her toes beyond its light, then sank into a crouch, supporting herself on her toes with fingertips touching the filthy floor as the Sleykyn muttered heavily, lifted his head for a bleary look around, then dropped it back on his arms. As soon as he started snoring again, she stood very slowly, making no sudden moves. She drifted like a shadow down the three steps to the cellar floor, then circled around behind the Sleykyn.
She was halfway across the place of torment when the uncertain light from the low-burning torches and the clutter on the filthy floor betrayed her. Focused too intently on the Sleykyn, she stumbled over a hardwood rod lying beside several enigmatic instruments of torture. It bounced off these with a clangor like the ringing of the war-bells and bounded away across the stone, clattering loud enough to wake the dead.
The Sleykyn bounced up, swung around, the whip snicking out of its pouch, the tip slashing her arm before she had time to move. She dived behind a rack, scrambled along it, narrowly avoiding a second slash. At the end of the platform, she looked back along the crank and nearly lost an eye to the flickering whip. It coiled around the crank until the Sleykyn jerked it loose, giving her time to scurry away. He was still hazed with sleep and half drunk, his timing just a fraction off. She crossed to the other side of the rack, looked rapidly about, then dashed for a pair of heavy whipping posts. The lash tip caressed her ankle. She pulled free, then straightened, using the thick posts as protection.
The Sleykyn carne rapidly down the side of the rack, stumbling and bleary-eyed. She shifted to keep the posts between her and him, searched frantically about for some kind of weapon, saw cutting tools in a frame on the wall. Ducking and weaving, gasping with pain as the whip found her twice, she darted across the open space and slid behind another article of torment. Flaying knives, high over her head. She dived at the wall. The knife was in her hand as the whip coiled about her hips, cutting through the thick material of her trousers, searing her skin, drawing more blood. Whimpering with pain, the knife held away from her, she crashed to the floor, her weight freeing her from the whip. Before the Sleykyn snapped the whip back, she was up again and running, ignoring the pain, bent low, weaving and elusive in the smoky torchlight.
The Sleykyn’s boots were loud behind her as she dived once more behind the rack. He drove her from this shelter, chased her a second time around the room, getting closer and closer to trapping her as the drink wore off. While she fled, twisting, weaving, running full out from point to point, she tested the balance of the knife At the point of exhaustion, bleeding from dozens of cuts, there was no way she could get close enough to use the knife on him. She had to throw it. If she missed, she’d have to try fighting him with bare hands, something she didn’t like thinking about.
She circled the rack a third time and dived for the twin posts; the Sleykyn was so close she could almost feel his breath hot on her neck. Praying that she read the knife right, she circled the posts, seeking the intangible feel of the whole, forcing herself steady, slowing her breathing. She saw his whip hand go back, saw the triumphant glare in his bloodshot eyes, saw the thick column of his neck rising from his unbuttoned shirt. With a breathed prayer to the Maiden, she threw the knife, saw it turning in a silvery wheel through the air, saw it thud home in his throat.
Filling the cellar with an absurd soft bubbling sound, he crumpled onto his face, blood running from his mouth, his eyes glazing over. Serroi clutched the post, knees shaking, sick to her stomach, gasping for breath. Slowly the room steadied for her. She pulled herself up, feeling pleased with herself for being alive. She kicked out one leg, then the other, testing her knees. They seemed capable of holding her, so she pushed away from the post and tried standing. She took one step then another, then laughed aloud with the sheer joy of surviving.
She crossed to the Sleykyn. He was dead. The blood was no longer flowing from his neck. She rubbed her hand across her face, wiping away beads of new sweat, then knelt beside him. Grunting with the effort, she turned him over onto his back and started working on the buckles to his knife belt. She had to have a weapon. With grim distaste she pulled the belt from around him and rebuckled it; it was too big for her but she could wear it like a baldric. Succumbing to a sudden intense curiosity, she drew the blade from its sheath and turned it over slowly, very carefully. A Sleykyn poison knife. The blade was bone rather than metal, the tip, discolored for about an inch above the point. She was very careful not to touch the stain. “Enough,” she murmured. The knife back in its sheath and the belt draped across her narrow torso, she leaned over and gently closed the Sleykyn’s eyes. “Maiden give you good rest.” She stood, stretched. “I think I’m very tired of this killing.” Again she rubbed wearily at aching eyes. “I’m a fool; let me get back to the Biserica and I’ll do what they’ve always told me I should, start studying to be a healer.”
As she neared the exit she heard a rumbling drunken singing echoing down the corridor. Sliding the knife from its sheath, she ran on her toes to the pall, then flattened herself beside the opening. When the second of her guards came unsuspecting through it, cradling a wineskin in his arms like an overplump baby, she slashed a deep cut in the back of his hand, then darted away.
She watched him die with foam on his lips and twisted horror on his face. The hand that still held the bone knife shook; she looked down at the death-white blade with revulsion, wanted to hurl it away from her; instead, she replaced it carefully in its sheath and crossed to the dead man. After closing his staring eyes and sending him to rest with the blessing for the dead, she picked up the wineskin and walked into the corridor. As the fever from her own poisoned wounds began to work in her, she searched out the panel that would let her back into the maze of passages within the walls.
In stifling darkness, somewhere deep within the maze of hidden passages, she worked the stopper loose from the wineskin and drank, then drank again. She could feel the heat from her wounds whenever she held her arm close to her face. The lash tip was infected some way, she thought. I hurt, but the wounds aren’t that bad. I shouldn’t be so sick, not so soon. She drank more wine, then settled herself onto the floor and leaned against the cool stone, wondering what she should do. I can’t stay here. Domnor Hern… at least I’m inside the Plaz. She giggled. I told Coperic the Daughter would get me inside the Plaz. Not quite like this though. Dinafar. I wonder what she’s thinking. Maiden keep her safe-and don’t let Coperic get tricky with her. She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead. Fever. I wonder what the hell they put on those tips. Domnor, better find him. She got heavily to her feet, drank again from the wineskin, then wandered off along the passage, turning and twisting, stumbling up and down crazy flights of stairs until she had no idea where she was or what level of the Plaz she happened to be on.
When she was too exhausted to keep moving, she sank down, sat with her back against the wall, her legs stretched out across the width of the passage, the wineskin like a child cuddled in her lap. In a few moments she was deep asleep.
She woke with small feet pricking over her legs, small wet noses pushing into her. It was too dark to see; she was dizzy, her brain on fire, forgetting where she was, forgetting what she had to do. She reached down and felt about with shaking hands. She touched a quivering snout, slid her fingers past large delicate ears, then down a knobby spine to a hairless tail. “Rat,” she muttered, then giggled, then caught her breath. Rats came pattering along the passage, crawling over her until her legs were covered by writhing furry bodies. They kept coming. She could feel their small wet noses nudging into her, the pinpoint claws scrabbling at her. Given what she knew about rats she should have been terrified; she wasn’t. It seemed to her that in her sleep she’d called them to her-or something had called them.
Behind her aching head the stone vibrated with tension, the air around her was thick. The rats huddled close to her, half-maddened by it, licking at the blood dried on her cuts, pressing against her, more and more of them as the minutes passed until the passage was full of them. She pulled the wineskin free, heard the rats she knocked loose chittering with fear and irritation. She drank, drank again. Her head throbbed. She reached up, screamed when she touched her eye-spot, it bulged out from her brow, hotter than the fever that coursed in her blood. Something held her; something held it, called the rats to her, was burning her, burning the fever out of her. She blinked, she could see again, her night sight, could see in tones of green and grey and black. Could see the lumpy shifting carpet of small bodies crawling over each other, crouching, trembling, her body was covered by them, covered to the waist, they were behind her, on her shoulders. Warm pulsing vermin. Around and over her. She should have been terrified, she knew that distantly as from a part of her standing far off looking down on herself. She was hot with fever, hot with the thing in her fighting the fever. She couldn’t remember, there was something she needed to remember, she couldn’t remember, it was important… she slept again.
When she woke, she was cramped and stiff but her body was cooler; whatever had been on the lash tip had done its worst and was passing off. She blinked. Her eye-spot throbbed and her night-sight came back. The carpet of rats quivered and shifted about, chittering nervously. A roach whirred out of haze and settled beside her head, clinging to the stone of the wall behind her. More came, crawled over the stone, over her, roaches came and came and came, flights of them whirring about her, crawling on her head and arms. She chuckled, roaches coming to avenge their ancestor, stopped chuckling when the sound grew too shrill. “Army,” she muttered. It was hard to move her mouth properly to speak. The whip had touched her face, opening a cut at the corner of her mouth. Her cheek was swollen and her whole face felt stiff.
The dark in the passage was timeless. Only the throbs of her heart clicked off the minutes for her. She was thirsty, drank again from the wineskin. She felt cooler all over though the wine was heating her gullet. There was a small intense hot-spot on her leg where the tajicho burned hotter and hotter as time passed. She began to remember what had happened and why she was here in this stifling darkness. She sat up, dislodging roaches and rats, staggered to her feet, peeling them off her like a lumpy blanket. She swayed, slapped her hand onto the wall to keep herself from falling. It had to be time for the Norid’s rite. Close to it, anyway. The Norid was busy, the tajicho’s fire told her that. She closed her fingers end slammed her fist into the wall, angry that fear, fever and the Sleykyn’s whip-poison had held her impotent for so long until now, until the Norid’s Moongather spell gained momentum.
She let her nightsight dim and spent her strength searching out Domnor Hern. She turned her head slowly as the eyespot throbbed and the immaterial search-fingers spread out and out, wavered, finally tugged upward and to the right. With roaches whirling about her head, clinging to her tattered clothing, with rats swarming like dingy foam about her boots, she began the climb through the walls to the Domnor’s bedroom.
Up and around, up narrow stairs where the flood of rats lengthened before and behind her, up and up, then around in a squared spiral up the central tower. Up and around, wading against a wind that tried to push her back, that grew stronger and stronger until she was leaning into it as one leans into a gale, fighting for every step.
Until she stopped before an exit like the many she’d passed before. She stopped, knowing without doubt that the Domnor was there. The rats piled up around her. She could feel the whole mast trembling until she feared the building would topple; they crouched around her without a sound, ominously, unnaturally silent. The roaches whirred about her head, then settled around the exit, clinging to the stone, so close they touched, like brown scale mail covering the wall. She leaned her head against the planks of the door. It was hard to think; she had to fight against the steady pressure of the force flowing out of the bedchamber.
Lifting heavy, clumsy arms, she fumbled at the catch, locking the spyhole shut. As she turned them back, she felt her eye-spot go still. She blinked slowly, startled, then leaned to the hole, hardly daring to breathe.
The Domnor sat in a straight-backed chair, his back turned to her, his short pudgy body stripped naked, his arms and legs bound to the chair. His thick mop of straight hair-black liberally streaked with grey-was tousled, one lock standing like a lizard’s crest above the rest. His body was still but his strong blunt fingers were working patiently at the ropes, shifting them slightly, working a knot closer and closer. The ropes were cutting painfully into his flesh; every movement had to be a minor agony, but he showed no sign of that. With iron patience he kept working, all the while seeming to concentrate his attention on the Norid. Serroi caught her breath, astonished. She’d seen little of the man during her ward. In spite of her contempt for Lybor, she’d let herself be influenced by that viper’s contempt for her husband. Still, there was what Tayyan said. She closed her eyes, the pain back. Tayyan said he was a terror with a sword, said you wouldn’t believe how fast he could move when he wanted to, said he could ride a macai better than most Stenda even. She blinked again, able to believe this as she watched him coolly and stubbornly working at the ropes while the Norid stalked about the room making preparations with an arrogance that held the other two in Serroi’s field of vision reluctantly silent even when he bent double and began tracing a pentacle around them, muttering a complex chant under his breath as he drew the circled star, dragging the thick greasy crayon over the inlaid floor. The rugs had been kicked aside to lie in tangled mounds against the wall. When he finished the pentacle around Lybor and Morescad, he turned to the Domnor and drew a second pentacle around him. When that was closed he set a thick black candle at each of the points, then stepped back, frowned, black eyes searching restlessly about the room, bothered by something.
Serroi moved her foot, feeling the heat in the tajicho against her leg. His eyes had a wild look to them; his stiff black hair was tied back from his face with braided gold wire that crackled with the energies flowing around the room. Watching as he placed white candles at the points of the pentacle around Morescad and Lybor, Serroi thought, He’s Norid, not Norit at all. I was right. One of the little Nor, reaching over himself out of greed and ambition, backed, I suppose, by the Nearga-nor or he wouldn’t dare. She shivered, sick to her stomach at the sight of him. Power enough to light a match on a hot day and he terrifies me, All the time she’d watched him moving about she was trembling, sweat thick and slippery over her body. Her hair clung to her bead in ragged oily strings; her eyes blurred and cleared, the thudding of her heart seemed loud enough to wake the whole Plaz. It took a strong effort of will for her to hold her eyes at the spyhole when she wanted to run and run, to get away from the Nor…
And all the time she knew that the Norid in the bedroom was a nothing, a fool, as much a fool as Lybor and Morescad.
The Norid stepped in front of Morescad and Lybor. “The demon will materialize within the pentacle drawn about the Domnor’s chair.” He thrust his hand into a pouch dangling at his belt and drew forth a knobby stone, dull black streaked with red. “I shut the demon’s soul in this sjeme. Who holds it will control the Domnor once the demon swallows his soul and animates his flesh.”
“Give it to me.” Lybor started to step out of the pentacle.
“Don’t break the line, Doamna,” the Norid cried hastily. He thrust a hand out, pushing at the air in front of her. “Or I can’t answer for your safety.” Sweat beading his forehead, he tossed the sjeme carefully into her cupped hands.
She caught it eagerly and cuddled it against her breasts, her eyes glittering, her face drawn in harsh lines of greed. Morescad narrowed his eyes, then smiled indulgently and slid his arm around her shoulders. Lybor shuddered, smiled stiffly at first then with her practiced charm. “When do you begin, Ser Nor?”
“Soon.” He glanced at a large hourglass placed on the seat of a chair. There was about a fingerswidth of sand left in the top bubble. “Soon.”
Serroi moved her head away from the spyhole, then braced herself against the wood, her eyes closed, her body trembling. The tajicho was a fire eating into her flesh but she didn’t dare pull it out; it was shielding her. Shaking and sick from too many memories, she pulled in a deep breath and put her eyes back to the spyhole.
Lybor and Morescad were talking in low tones that held a touch of acrimony. One of Morescad’s big hands was resting over Lybor’s, the tips of his fingers touching the sjeme.
Serroi forced herself to watch the Norid and found her fear diminishing as she in a sense confronted him and it. The rats pressed closer against her. Several roaches half-fell, half-flew from the wall, landing on her head and shoulders. The touch roused her, set her wondering, but she shook off her questions and brought her attention back to the room.
The last grains of sand were trickling past the waist of the glass. The Norid circled Morescad and Lybor, flicking a finger at the white candles. One by one they flared up, then began to burn steadily, giving off a thick greasy smoke and an appalling odor. Ignoring Lybor’s exclamation of disgust, he commanded fire from the black candles around the Domnor. Their flames burned an acid green, releasing a mist that smelled of rot and death. Lybor stirred, protested. “Must you?”
“Silence, woman.” The Norid’s voice was unemphatic, but Lybor closed her mouth and snuggled closer to Morescad.
The Norid faced the Domnor. The air shivered around him as his hands moved through a complex sign and he began a guttural unpleasant chant. Inside the pentacle the air thickened and a bilious green smoke slowly changed from a mist to a billowing shape, many-armed with a great gaping mouth.
Serroi’s skin started to itch; her eye-spot throbbed with pain and power. She dropped a hand to the Sleykyn’s sheath and closed her fingers tight around the hilt of his poison knife.
The Norid groaned and swayed, sweat popping out on his face. Within the pentacle that shape was solidifying, a huge warty thing curving over the Domnor.
Serroi shivered, remembering too much, eyes blurring, mouth dry. Maiden help me, I can’t go in there. I can’t. Tayyan, help me. Ayyy, I can’t.
The Child: 13
For a year Serroi worked her way south over the plain, gaining fluency in the language, begging at times, other times working in stables and for farmers, staying in one place for a day, a week, sometimes even a month until she found enough money or other means to move farther south, following her eye-spot’s tug, hunting the Golden Valley. She kept away from people, trusting no one, making no friends, fending off questions about the green color of her skin. At times she was desperately lonely with no one to talk to; even the animals weren’t enough. She needed an outlet for her strong affections and there was no one; sometimes she felt like she was going to burst in a thousand pieces, sometimes she almost turned back to find Raiki-janja, but she never quite lost the urge to find the Valley. She slept in stables on straw, bathed out of buckets, found no way to wash her clothing, discarded it when it was soiled beyond bearing, buying new things when she could. She kept nothing she couldn’t carry easily, went across the Cimpia Plain as a small grubby boy whose wizard’s touch with animals won him a job whenever he wanted it. At times the steady attrition of small irritations wore her down until once again she considered giving up. There were no great dangers to be faced, nothing but dirt and hard work and loneliness, but they wore her down until she thought seriously of turning back. The stubborn core that made her fight the Noris, that kept her alive in the desert, kept her moving toward her goal.
Toward the end of her thirteenth year she was working in the stable of a busy tavern in a small trade city on the edge of the Plain when she felt something like a blow in the stomach, though no one was near, no one touched her. She closed her eyes, felt warmth suffusing through her. The hostler led in two lanky high-bred macain and cuffed her for dreaming on the job. “Clean ‘em good, boy.” He snorted. “They belong to a couple of high-nosed meien. Old Poash is in there kissing their feet.” With a sneer he muscled the animals into two stalls. “Lick ‘em clean, brat.” He wandered off, leaving her alone to do the work.
Two meien. Excited and fizzing with a new hope, she stared after him. Going or coming? If the meien were going home, perhaps they’d take her with them. She sighed and began washing the macain, cleaning their neck fringes, scrubbing their backs, working the tiny stones and other irritants from between their toes and out of the cracks in their pads. She pushed out the claws and polished them until the white-grey horn gleamed dully. The macain whined and burbled, nosed at her until she scratched behind their ears and under their chins. Finally she fed them an extra helping of fat yellow liga seeds and left them crunching happily.
She walked through the quiet stable, checking on the other animals, stopped by the door and looked around. A lamp lit by the door, the stables swept clean. Gear hanging neatly on pegs, wiped clean. She nodded to herself, stretched, yawned. All work done. She was supposed to stay around and tend the needs of any late customers when the hostler took himself off to the battered hedge tavern outside the walls where he drank up his wages after grudgingly giving her the few coins he allowed her for doing the work. She was pleased enough by this. The hostler hadn’t the wit to see her as anything but the boy she pretended to be-and he wasn’t put off by the color of her skin, a color all too evident in the day though she tried to tone it down with smears of greasy dirt. He was too glad to have a silent, willing worker to ask her any questions.
She wandered a last time along the line of stalls then stood in the stable’s doorway looking at the busy bright tavern. She hesitated, but the temptation to see the meien was too strong. Slipping into the tavern behind a group of laughing townsmen, she squatted in a shadowed corner where few were apt to notice her.
The meien were sitting together at a table across the room, their backs to the wall, their shoulders almost touching. They were relaxed, talking quietly together, the current of affection between them waking a powerful need in Serroi, a need that twisted her stomach and blurred her eyes. She blinked, folded her arms tight across herself, and tried to focus on less disturbing aspects of the weapon-women. From their chosen table they could see most of the room, the stairs up to the sleeping rooms on the second floor and the two doors leading into the taproom. One was a broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman with a round face and a dusting of freckles over a snub nose. She wore her hair short, a shining nut-brown helmet following the lines of her skull. She was far from pretty but had a smile that shimmered with charm and dancing dark eyes that accepted and loved everything she saw. The second meie was slim and golden. Golden skin, golden eyes, hair a slightly darker gold; she wore it long, braided and wrapped about her head. Both women wore leather tunics, divided skirts made of the same leather, knee-high boots, a weapon-belt with a slender sword on the right and a grace blade on the left. Everything about them was plain, without any ornament but the pride that kept them clean and polished.
She gazed hungrily at the two women, wondering if she could ever have their quiet assurance, the bone-deep serenity that she could feel even through the noise and confusion in the taproom. Serroi stirred in her corner, knowing she should be getting back to the stables. The meien helped her resolution by finishing their meal and mounting quietly to the second floor. A drunken townsman called an obscenity after them but was forcibly silenced by his two companions. The meien ignored the incident and turned down the hallway toward their room.
Serroi slipped out and returned to the stable. She had just time to take a last look at the animals before the hostler came stumbling in, drunk and feeling mean. He snarled at her, picked up a whip. She backed away, avoiding easily his clumsy rush. He forgot what he was holding the whip for, staggered to an empty stall and fell asleep on the clean straw inside. Serroi waited until he was snoring then blew out the lantern and climbed to her own blankets spread out on sweet-smelling straw in the loft.
The meien came for their mounts at dawn. Serroi was up and dressed, but the hostler was still snoring off his drunk in the stall. She saddled the macain for the women and led the animals out, ran back inside and fetched her blanket roll, then stood leaning against the stable wall, looking cautiously around before she dared approach them. She could see the serving girls from the tavern hauling in water but there was no one within earshot. As the women swung into the saddle, she ran forward. “Meien,” she called, her voice hoarse with tension.