The Carnelian Throne (19 page)

“Yes. Yes, indeed it is, if you feel it is.” He was a splotch of shadow upon the pale carpet, wings draped around him. He spoke cautiously, as he did all else, his every movement calculated to disarm, to present as little threat as possible. “Shall I add,” said he, “that I can provide amply for your amusement, or include you herein, or whatever you—”

“Whatever I want is the freedom to travel this keep at will. It is an old and much-storied wonder, and I would explore it.”

Rage, dismay, dumbstruck hurt, understanding, paraded through my mind.

“Sereth,” I murmured, almost in tears.

He was accepting the silver armlet Eviduey unclasped from about his bicep. His thought, clear as speech, slit the shield I had long been keeping against Wehrdom as if it were a length of Galeshir silk. “You orchestrated this. Bear some of the cost. I need this reconnaissance.”

He had spoken no word. The ossasim gave no sign that he had caught the exchange. I sat very still in the aftermath of his skills, making no reply as he clasped the armlet about his left arm and wished me tasa and departed, wrapped in his wiles.

Said Eviduey to me, as Sereth pulled the door shut: “Ask me anything.”

I went and sat on the low platform, opposite him. I, too, have been long in the Parset Lands. There is something satisfyingly fit in opposing your enemy with every cell of your body.

“What are these powers of which Mahrlys boasts?”

“Open yourself to Wehrdom, as has Chayin, and see for yourself.”

“You said ask anything.”

“Who can say what power the wehr-spirit will direct us to employ?”

“Is Chayin such a prize, then, that Mahrlys courts him?”

“No more than you would be, to me.”

“To you .... Is it not the whole of Wehrdom which acts through each? Are not your actions bent toward the greatest good of the whole?”

“You see your fears. Such shallowness is unworthy of you.” He stretched out on his side, his bearing radiating a forceful composure divested of any threat.

The torch snapped and spit in its sconce. “I see what is.”

“No,” he denied. “It is the individual which serves itself. Wehrdom exists thereby; it serves all selves, and its self is complete in the weakest whelt fledgling, or in the meanest of campts.”

“I do not understand,” I said softly.

“Open yourself and seek understanding. Let me aid you.” I could not take my eyes from him, from the slowly stiffening wings, from the grayish circle on his bicep where the armlet had worn away the black fur.

“I thank you, no,” I demurred, beginning to realize the untenability of my position. “I am going to explain something to you, about how I feel, about Sereth, about what can and cannot pass between us.” And I proceeded to detail his deficiencies in regard to any possible compatibility index, and my particular xenophobic reaction to creatures whose rating on that scale fell below 7.00000, which his most certainly did. I would not have bothered if I had understood the stiffening of his wings in the context of his prostrate, waiting form. There is with ossasim a ritual of stalking which presupposes a facing off: without this decorous commencement there can be no ossasim coupling. When his wings were fully erect, he rose from the mat and began slowly and inexorably to approach me, chest rising and falling deeply, red eyes so filled with black pupil that they seemed almost manlike.

I backed away and pressed against the wall, and, shivering uncontrollably, prepared to strike him down. Once I had boasted that there was in the universe no being capable of desiring me whom I could not fulfill. I had been Well-Keepress; I had given pleasure to thrice a thousand men, given it even to those who were not quite men, those from other stars. But this apparition from a geneticist’s nightmare that backed me against the unyielding stone was anathema to my very flesh. I sought a turbulence of killing force as his taloned hand, nails protruding their entire length, sought my breast. I babbled wildly that he must let me bathe, that I could not couch anyone so begrimed. He would not hear me, and as he touched me all that would be forced awry by my application of besting skills to this moment paraded before my inner eye, and I let the turbulence, now palpably glittering behind his bent head, disperse.

There are some couchings in which one can go elsewhere, if the reality does not suit. This was not one of those. I could not dream him another, not Sereth, not any of my kind. And I could not restrain my need to bite until I tasted his blood, nor to sob epithets in my native tongue; but I did not kill him, nor drop him in flesh-lock, nor open my mind to him and Wehrdom that I might do premature battle, which was what he desired, more even than my use.

They are creatures and they couch like creatures, with a rut that dissolves self and leaves them inarticulate, a mechanism for their own reproductive urge. That mechanism used me until I panted exhausted under it, well past the point where I could struggle against the strength in those slick, pelted shoulders.

I left him scars he will bear evermore on his hide. I came away with fur and flesh under my nails. And with a deep acknowledgment of my kinship to ossasim that my brain and my prejudice would not, indeed still cannot, accept.

“Now, leave me. I have fulfilled your chaldra.”

“What?” growled he, not willing yet to remove his imprisoning weight.

“My apologies: a word from my own language. Get you back to your own kind. Your customs can surely demand no more of me!”

Those whiteless red eyes blinked, searched deep, withdrew into a coldness.

“No”—and he sighed and gently rose—“I can demand no more.” He rubbed his lacerated shoulder, flapping his flaccid wing impatiently to one side. Then he put his fingers to his mouth, licked the nails free of blood. “I am ... sorry ... that this”—and he gestured aimlessly—“that I was not for you what I intended. Often, these things ... succeed. There is too much lost in time between us.” The hurt in his tone metamorphosed, hardened as he spoke.

Unable to stop myself, I asked him again if he would depart. He did not move.

I could not resist it. If he had left when I asked him, what other tale might I be telling now? But he did not. My guts churned with horror long restrained, and in one flashing moment i took that precipitous leap in the abyss, knowing full well what owkahen would pay me for my moment of spite, and willing to bear all I could not dare to accept when first his taloned nails touched my breast. Then, I had not known him. Then, I had not endured his use.

I threw off that blockade that battened down my mind in the face of Wehrdorn’s storm. Into their composite will I sent greetings, and even as he backed away with stiffened wings, disbelief in his eyes, I called back the greeting I had sent, and set it spinning back upon itself with all of Wehrdom’s reply whipping in its wake.

How Wehrdom howled! The sound shook the very walls of Dey-Ceilneeth as savagely as the arm-long, spinning turbulence I wielded struck the ossasim Eviduey. He flew sideways, as if thrown, which indeed he was. I recollect standing over him while he lay dazed and helpless, my skills reaching into his sensory network and twisting, until his body doubled up at my feet and shuddered in its pain. After a while, as the howls grew louder, I regained my temper, put sleep upon him, and ran from the chamber calling Sereth’s name.

And collided with him, unseeing, in the torchlit hall. I struggled wildly until his identity seeped through my terror, by which time he had us before Mahrlys’ door.

“Stand back “ he ordered loudly, for the keening of the wehrs drew ever closer.

The door dissolved in a snowfall of splintered rushes before Sereth’s onslaught. But I had ceased to wonder at Sereth’s developing skills, and merely leaped with him through the doorway as the tread of Wehrdom became a thumping of many bodies running.

Perhaps if he had blasted the door to component atoms, or razed it with heat, we might have noticed the soft powder that drifted down on our heads as we crossed that threshold.

But Chayin lay motionless at Mahrlys’ feet, and we skidded to a stop before the cahndor’s still form and the black-silked woman who held a sword by the hilt. The blade of that sword lay across Chayin’s throat.

“I thought,” said she, “that this might be something you would understand.” There was an infinite satisfaction in her voice, one not clear to me until everything else became unclear, until between breaths all the room undulated as if seen through deep water and my knees quaked beneath my weight and I slumped forward, my hand outstretched to Sereth, a warning unspeakable on my lips. As I fell groggy to my hands and knees, I heard her further remark: “Yes, you understand steel, and it seems you understand fahrass. Go, then, to the step-sisters’ embrace.”

I went, only at the last understanding the significance of the powder that had fallen upon our heads and made its way into our lungs, unnoticed, moments before.

“Let me assure you,” grunted Laonan, swinging the sword scythelike, “that I appreciate ...” The fhrefrasil, squealing, fell, holding its entrails. Another manlike, agile combatant leaped toward Laonan, slavering jaws wide.

“... that I appreciate ...” Laonan grated again, kicking a severed arm from between his feet. “... your having freed me from Dey-Ceil ... My mother!” Another score of the shoulder-high, rust-pelted fhrefrasil dropped from the trees.

“Watch,” advised Deilcrit, and slashed behind Laonan, even as he turned, to skewer a bludgeon-wielding beast who dropped silent from an overhanging branch.

Laonan sidestepped and grimly halved another as it charged. “Like I was saying,” he rasped, paused on the balls of his feet while the howling fhrefrasil hopped up and down, brandishing staves and clubs and vine-tailed stones for throwing. “I do not mean to sound ungrateful, but how long do you think we can stand against these odds?”

Deilcrit grimly surveyed the thirty-two fhrefrasil, wiped his brow with a gory forearm. “I had not thought about it at all. You will doubtless outlast me. It is I who am in your debt, for leading you into this. If I were you, I would not appreciate me—”

“Death is better than bondage. Watch—they’ll come now.”

The fhrefrasil spread in a half-circle, two deep, about them. Some searched the ground and rearmed themselves. Others waited, yellow eyes blinking.

It was quite plain to both of them that they could not survive a rush by all that massed against them.

“One thing pleases,” spat Laonan in a snarl as the fhrefrasil continued to hesitate, motionless, like a single being.

“What is that?” grunted Deilcrit, easing himself sideward, shifting the jeweled hilt in hands whose blisters had already bled.

“You’re no wehr. Or wehr-pawn, either. That had me worried.”

“And I ...”

The fhrefrasil lunged forward in a wave. The green sword sang and thwacked, and blood spattered his eyes and he screamed words whose meaning he did not know as a stave caught him across the temple. Reeling into Laonan, he heard his own bellowed demand: “Stop!”

The ground rushed toward him. He grabbed Laonan’s waist, expecting momentarily the rip of demon claws, the fire of teeth biting deep, the explosion of bludgeon shattering his skull.

He staggered, released Laonan, regained his feet.

The fhrefrasil, each and all, stood poised. From their midst came a whine, slow at first and then growing.

Laonan cast him a wary, wild-eyed look that brought them shoulder to shoulder, blades at ready.

The fhrefrasil, hunched and crying, backed step by step toward the trees.

He could feel the thrill run through his companion’s flesh.

“What in the name of Fai Teraer-Moyhe?” hissed Laonan.

Deilcrit took one step, then another, in the direction of the retreating fhrefrasil. The whine changed to a hiss that susurrused among the trees.

“No! Stay still,” pleaded Laonan. An iron grip closed on Deilcrit’s shoulder. He shook it off, but he did not advance any farther toward the fhrefrasil disappearing among the trees.

He turned to Laonan, and with a voice naked and hopeless, in which rode all his tortures and his fears, said: “Tell me again that I am not a wehr.” And he threw the green sword to the forest’s floor, and knelt down, staring blankly at the inscription which slithered indecipherable along its cutting edge.

They were barely a half-day’s journey north of Mnemaat’s Wall.

He heard Laonan crouching beside, felt the rough pinch of the man’s fingers once more on his arm. “Deilcrit, man, this is no time to get superstitious. It was great fortune we had, that was all.” And, in response to Deilcrit’s negation, “And if it was not that, we will figure upon it. By a nice fire in a good brick holding with some soup in our bellies. I have friends. It grows late. We should waste no light here, but strike out. If we leave now, we could be in Northrace by night.”

“We? Have you not had enough of my troubles?”

“Boy, I would have sat in that damnable hole until my teeth fell out. I can spare you my sword arm on as hard a journey as Othdaliee. I’ve been twelve years in retirement; my own business is going to take a bit of resurrection. Come on. Nothrace awaits.”

As Laonan shook his shoulder, something occuffed to him: “I was born in Nothrace. Eviduey told me.”

“Shan’t be much of a homecoming. Those that live there now—if they still do ... it’s twelve years, remember—moved in after the wehr-rage killed the Nothrace to a man. How came you to escape it?” This was suddenly very cool, and slow, and as he spoke Laonan took his hands from Deilcrit’s shoulders and began to trace the writing on the green sword’s blade. Something flared in Deilcrit: outrage, indignity. It took great effort for him not to snatch the sword from under Laonan’s hand. But he did not, only unconcernedly stretched out his raw palm to ease it up from the sod.

“How, I do not know, except that I was dedicated to Benegua and delivered there shortly before the Nothrace tragedy. I would not recognize kin there, if they all lived yet: I do not know my mother’s name, I have no memories before Benegua. But I would still like to see it ....” Holding the sword, he felt somehow in command of more than a weapon. “No man has ever returned from Othdaliee. I am going to.” Deilcrit rose and sheathed the blade in a single motion, jostling Laonan as he did so. “And when I return from there, do you know what I will do?” Their eyes locked, and each saw truth in the other’s.