Bells of the Kingdom (Children of the Desert Book 3) (38 page)

A rainy night, and a windy one, would have been bad enough without having to stand in the vicinity of a graveyard. Idisio leaned against a statue that offered minimal shelter and watched bits of debris fly by, feeling thoroughly sour.

“Couldn’t we have put this off for a night with better damn weather?” he muttered to himself. “Only something insane would even come
out
in this rain, and what does that say about me?”

Nobody stood close enough to hear him, even with the sharp hearing of a desert lord. The screaming wind and incessant rain drowned any sound beyond a shout. And what would it be doing to the stibik-laced catch-ropes? Nothing good.

“We should try this again in better weather,” he muttered. The rain had put him into a foul mood filled with recollection of slogging through flooded back streets in search of shelter. Even in this deluge, he could see at least three better spots to wait out the storm: but Eredion had been firm, if apologetic about it. Idisio needed to be visible. He tugged his hood down to shield his face and turned a bit more sideways to the gusts. His feet were already soaked and his skin clammy all over. Deiq had tried to teach him how to keep his body warm by willpower alone, but for some reason it hadn’t stuck, or maybe the weather was simply too extreme for that discipline to hold.

Would the desert lords even notice if Idisio simply snuck off to sit in a warm, dry place for a while? Peering through the curtains of rain flooding the streets, Idisio thought, glumly, that they probably would. And then they’d be ferociously annoyed with him for ruining their grand plan.
Just like a street-thief,
they’d say, and would shake their heads. They wouldn’t take him back into their company, and he’d be out on the street scrabbling for copper bits again—

He shivered under a wave of disorientation. What the hells was he doing out here?
I’m a ha’ra’ha, not a street thief. I can do whatever I want.
But Deiq seemed to see this as a necessary exercise, and wasn’t calling it humiliating: so Idisio took the cue that
he
had no right to complain over it. This was—this was—a duty. A responsibility. A worthy reason to be standing out in the cold and wet like a damn idiot, wishing himself anywhere else, tucked up into a nice dry spot and waiting for the rain to break and the marks to come back out on the street, careless in the steamy damp, purses heavy—

“My poor baby,” someone said in his ear.

Idisio yelped, spinning to face the speaker: a person cloaked and hooded against the rain, hunched like an old woman.

“You’re all over cold and wet, baby,” the woman went on, reaching toward him with a bone-thin hand. “Let’s get you in out of the rain.”

Idisio backed away a step, fear shivering along his skin, turning him even colder than the icy weather had managed.

“Uhm, I’m fine,” he said, unable to think of anything else. He shot a quick glance around: where were the desert lords? They weren’t paying much attention, if the tath-shinn could walk up to him like this—and he had no doubt that was what stood before him.

Old women didn’t randomly wander around in tearing thunderstorms and act all motherly to anyone they encountered.

The woman stayed still, swaying in place a little.

“They’ve poisoned you,” she said. Her soft voice, implausibly, cut through the howling wind to reach Idisio’s ears without any distortion. “They’ve made you fear me. I won’t harm you. Come with me, love—Come on, come on, I’ll explain as we go. We have to get out of here. Those men who hurt you are coming back. They’ll find you. They’ll hurt you again. I’ll protect you, but you have to come with me. Come on... Come with me, come, come, with me, this way....”

Her hands moved, beckoning, pulling,
drawing
at him. The rain around them faded into a vague haze of disorientation.
I should yell for help,
Idisio thought, a shiver racking up his back, and opened his mouth even as his feet began to move.

“Shhh, love, shhh, the bad men will hear you,” the woman said. She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm; at the contact, he forgot why he’d had his mouth open in the first place. “You’re safe now, love, you’re safe. I won’t let them hurt you. This way, this way....”

A blissful, warm sense of complete security descended upon him, as though he were a baby being rocked in his mother’s arms. He sighed in relief, nodded, and let her steer him away through the rain.

“My pack,” he said after a while. “I don’t have my pack.” He put a hand to his belt, relieved to find the long Scratha dagger and his belt pouch, at least. But why didn’t he have his pack? And when had it stopped raining—or had it? It seemed as though a misty haze surrounded them; he couldn’t properly focus more than arm’s-reach in any direction.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said, tugging him on without pause. “I’ll provide anything you need, love. There’s nothing in that pack of yours that’s as important as getting away right now. Getting out of this place. Going
home.”

“Oh,” Idisio said. “That’s to the south of us. South and east. This way.” He started to turn down a side street; she gripped his arm fiercely and shoved him back on a northeasterly path.

“That’s not your home,” she said. “Your home is
Arason.”

Arason. The word sparked a slow-forming connection in his mind. Arason. What did he know about—

There is a lake, a ghosty lake....

“Red,” he said aloud. “He sang about Arason.”

“What?” Her step faltered. She peered at him from under her hood. “Who?”

“A sailor. On the trip to Scratha Fortress. He sang....” Idisio tried to remember enough of the tune and words to sing it himself. It wouldn’t come clear. “I don’t know. It wasn’t a nice song. The one about Dusty Rose was funnier.”

“Who?”
Her tone held only bewildered impatience.

“You know, that king who dressed up like a woman and renamed himself after his favorite prostitute—”

“And that’s
funny
to you? The diseased maunderings of
humans
are
funny
to you?”

“Uh....” He squinted at her, his vague acceptance of everything around him fading. He looked around, drawing on a lifetime of walking through Bright Bay in every kind of weather. His vision clarified. They stood in a pouring rain, one of the worst winter storms he’d seen in a while; a vicious wind was whipping around what street trash hadn’t been soaked immobile by the rain. What they were doing walking in this mess, Idisio couldn’t understand. Perhaps they were on their way to hire a coach.

He said, hopefully, “Are we going to the caravan yards?”

“No.” The woman tugged at his arm, but Idisio set his heels and refused to move. “We’re going home.”

“This
is
home,” he said, and backed up a step, clarity seeping into his mind. “Who the hells are you? How did I get—”

“You’re in
danger
here,” she said sharply, lunging to sink her fingers into his forearm.

He dodged, jerking away, and backed up several more hasty steps. Instinct turned a step back sideways and into a full-scale sprint. Buildings blurred by with unprecedented speed; a half-dozen heartbeats later, he went sprawling and tumbling across wet ground.

The tath-shinn loomed over him, hissing like an enraged goose. Idisio bounded to his feet, ignoring aches and scrapes, and launched into another run—

—his muscles froze. Off-balance, he stood on the edge of toppling for a stretched moment of terror. Then the tath-shinn stood beside him, steadying him; she patted his arm gently.

“Time to go home, love. Come, Idisio. Come with me. This way. That’s right... Good boy.”

He shuffled into motion again, his mind turning to a blank grey fog, content in the secure and absolute knowledge that she would take care of everything.

“She ought to ride in front,” Dasin said, squinting at their horses as though he knew what he was looking at. They were big, black beasts, with fine lines; Tank would have wagered with gold that they had once lived in a nobleman’s stables. “She won’t be able to hop off and run that—”

“She’s not going to run, you godsdamned ta-neka idiot,” Tank snapped.

Dasin turned a ferocious glare on him. “Don’t you talk to me like that!”

Tank grinned unpleasantly.

“Get on your horse, Dasin,” he said. “Then tell me, if she sits in front, who’s controlling the situation?”

Dasin glanced at the looming bulk of the horses, studying the lay of stirrup and saddle horn. “All right,” he said, “fine. You didn’t need to be rude about it.”

“So fire me,” Tank said, and turned to Wian, ignoring Dasin’s simmering irritation.
“S’a,
the saddles look to be big, but you’ll still have a tight fit. Best you sit with Dasin; he’s skinnier.”

She glanced at Dasin, then shook her head, moving three steps closer to Tank.

Tank sighed, not surprised at all.

After some scrambling, she sat pressed close behind him, which wouldn’t have been entirely unpleasant except for her occasional faint hisses of pain.

“Sounds like you shouldn’t even be riding,” Tank said over his shoulder. She tucked her forehead against his back and shook her head, then pushed the palm of one hand lightly against his lower back. He understood the signals:
No, I shouldn’t, but let’s get moving anyway.

It was too much like the subtle sign language he’d grown up with for comfort, and he almost balked right then and there, unwilling to have anything to do with this increasingly distasteful matter. But Dasin scrambled into his own saddle and said, “Well, if she’s hurting, that makes her less likely to run, doesn’t it?”

“She’s not going to run,” Tank said.

“Why not? You’re the one said she doesn’t want to go back.”

Tank shook his head and nudged his horse into motion. As they clattered out onto the main road leading west, he said, “Why didn’t
you
ever run, Dasin? Why didn’t I?”

Dasin’s glare could have melted glass.
“Tank.”

Wian stirred against his back, but didn’t say anything.

“You saw those guards same as I did, Dasin,” Tank said, staring straight ahead. “What kind of
home
do you think she’s going back to?”

“Shut it,” Dasin said sharply.
“Shut it,
Tank.”

Tank turned his head a little and spoke over his shoulder. “Are you going to run? I’ll look the other way if you do.”

He could feel her sigh. She laid her head down against his shoulder without replying.

“She won’t run,” Tank said, flicking a glare of his own at Dasin. “We could toss her off the horse and kick her to get away from us, and she’d walk right on back to Bright Bay on her own.”

Dasin, white-faced and taut as a drawn bow, was the one to stare straight ahead this time. “Loon,” he said. “Fucking
loon.
Shut up already.
Shut up.”

Tank felt an agreeing prod to his left shoulder. He shrugged and let the silence settle in for a time.

The rising sun did little to take the chill from the air. Even though her cloak was a thick felted fabric, Wian shivered almost continually, her hands tucked up into her armpits, and leaned hard against Tank’s back.

He glared ahead and resisted with all his might the impulse to dismount, tuck his own cloak around Wian, and stroke her hair reassuringly. He couldn’t afford to do that. He couldn’t afford to care. His treacherous thoughts ran with that idea and looked backwards: had any of the handlers in the katha village ever wanted to offer comfort to their—? No.

Think on that too much and he’d cross the border into madness in short order.

It’s the past,
he told himself.
And she could say a word, one single word, and I’d—what? Run away with her, kill Yuer, kill the
family
waiting for her in Bright Bay?
He had no better options at the moment than to keep moving forward along this road. Captain Ash might be able to find a way out of the mess Dasin had put them into, but Tank already knew without asking that Dasin wouldn’t leave Yuer’s service.

I ought to quit, take Wian off somewhere, try to convince her it’s stupid to go back—but she wouldn’t listen.

He’d seen that look in too many eyes while growing up: the certain, blank knowledge that there was nothing else, no other road, no other option. He’d probably worn that stare himself, before his removal to Aerthraim Fortress. No. She wouldn’t listen.

“You ought to run,” he muttered over his shoulder, unable to stop himself. “I’d
help,
damnit.”

Her head moved in slow negation against his back.

“Can’t change the world,” she murmured, so softly he barely heard her.

“You can change
your
world,” he retorted.

She shook her head again and made no other reply.

They rode into Obein as dusk made the path hard to see, and booked one room at Cida’s Haven for all three of them. The innkeeper, a stocky woman, squinted at them thoughtfully.

“Didn’t I see you just pass through, the other way, with Venepe?” she asked.

Her attention lingered on Wian. A frown deepened the lines on her face.