Cordimancy (20 page)

“And the yolk-suckers,” Oji added bitterly.

The epithet only added to Malena’s bewilderment. Why was Oji cursing his own kind? And what did osipi have to do with the Royal Guard, the outlaws, and this horrendous, inexplicable kidnapping?

While Shivi brewed tea, Oji explained how he’d met Toril, what his clansmen were doing across the border, and how he’d tracked them into the wilderness after leaving Bakar. Malena helped Toril saddle the horses and lash gear, her mind struggling to absorb the implications. She kept remembering her own assertion to Toril, about the evil in Gorumim’s heart...

“I know the valley you described because I trailed the ahu there,” Oji finished. “About the time I arrived, the bandits were all slaughtered by ahu.”

"You saw the three around the fire?"

Oji nodded. "I hid and watched. They were killed later. All the air in the valley tingled from Gorumim's magic."

"Gorumim's?" Malena asked sharply. "
He
hired the wizard?"

"He
is
the wizard," Oji replied. He held up a hand to forestall Malena's protest. "I know—he's got the white hair of a sata, and he's outlived plenty of royals. But he's cheated the three-fold path, and kept his magic, somehow."

Malena didn’t waste time debating the impossibility of this idea. "Did you see the children?" she asked.

Oji shrugged. "I had to stay out of sight, and that's not so easy when osipi watch. But I got a few clean looks. There are twenty-nine. Mostly between the ages of three and six, I’d guess. A handful might be older. They all looked terrified.”

“I have a sister...” Malena began.

Oji nodded. “The stonecaster told me. She might have been there; I can’t be certain. He also told me that your parents are missing. I saw no adults other than the soldiers and the ahu.”

“What could Gorumim possibly want with children?” Malena wondered angrily.

She noticed a haunted expression on Shivi’s face, then on Paka’s, then on Toril’s.

“What are you not telling me?” she asked.

21

oreni ~ Malena

When Oji disclosed what he’d overheard in a debate between Gorumim and the ahu, it left Malena stunned and sickened. She wrestled with it as they rode, willing it not to be so.

Part of her wanted to whimper behind bags of barley again.

And part of her was so enraged that she could scarcely sit. She needed a branch like the one Toril had used to beat his fury against the hilltop, when they found the first little girl. She needed to hit something. Or someone. She needed to fling her fist at the sky, and scream, and rail.

Instead, she tried distraction. When they stopped for a brief rest in the afternoon, Malena approached Shivi with another question. “Toril promised he’d explain about Hika,” she began. “But he’s been as silent as a stone.”

Shivi looked up from the stream, where she was kneeling to refill water skins.

“Can you blame him? It’s hard enough to sneak kids away from drunken halfwits bent on mayhem and plunder. Now he’s got to outfox a whole quiver of ahu, plus Gorumim and a dozen of his hand-picked guard. He’s been piling his rocks to mark our trail—but if the priest manages to get a rescue party together, and if they catch up to us in time to do any good, they’re going to think twice before attacking the raja’s own troops. Plenty to think about. And the stakes are higher for failure.”

“Higher? Nothing’s changed, Shivi. We just understand the danger better.”

Shivi stared at Malena for a long time. Her eyes flicked toward Toril. Twice she opened her mouth, then closed it again without vocalizing anything. Finally, she shrugged. “Fine. We understand better.”

Malena looked down, embarrassed at the disagreement in Shivi’s voice, but too angry to retract anything. The children had needed rescuing before; Gorumim’s gruesome plans just validated her urgency. It was still up to them. Nobody else was going to step in. Not in time, at least.

“Anyway,” Shivi continued, “You might have been curious about Hika, and you might have been annoyed that Toril was mum, but did you want your man whispering in an ear to explain?” She rolled her shoulders, groaned a little, and put a hand on her lower back. “I thought you looked petrified with his arms wrapped around you in the saddle.”

Malena squirmed. “It would have taken my mind off... other worries.”

Shivi looked downstream. Toril and Paka were gnawing at the last of the dense, dry baati in their provisions, while Oji stretched in a patch of sunshine, taking one of his race’s lightning catnaps.

Malena matched her gaze. A week ago, she could not have anticipated this wretched foray through the wilderness with three strangers and a husband that she couldn’t talk to. Her life had seemed... manageable. Hopeful.

All the adjectives that described her life today brought pain and fear.

The oddness of the osipi was a welcome distraction, and her mind automatically shifted to a different sort of vocabulary as she observed him.
Half-life
,
hakufu
,
almost
,
yolk-sucker
—she knew plenty of pejorative slang, and even now found that it rose easily to her lips. As a child, she’d used such language freely. She’d been well past her naming day before she realized that ugly talk didn’t fit with the manners expected of a lady with a genteel upbringing.

Although she’d met the golden before, she’d been glad to avoid them in the past, and never been around them for long. When they passed through Kelun holdings at all, they always seemed to be rushing toward the warmer lowlands.

Oji spoke in lilting, rapid-fire sentences that were accented but fluent. Sometimes he chose strange phrases; often his hands moved in intricate patterns to accompany his words. She had heard that osipi used sign language to double the information content of their speech. How much of what he’d said on the trail today had she missed?

He wore a knee-length kurta of thick felt, belted at the waist, with sturdy trousers tucked into his boots. The quality of the clothing matched or exceeded what she herself often wore. He carried himself with confidence, and there was no questioning his prowess as a fighter. Yet Toril had reported finding him destitute.

Her parents—especially her mother—had disliked the osipi. And now she owed her life to one of them.

She had noticed several smiles pass between the man and her husband. They seemed to trust one another—like one another, even. He seemed to believe he’d joined their journey as a friend and equal. He’d be lying within a few steps of her blanket every night; could she stand it?

Shivi slumped onto a log and patted the broad rock beside it. “I don’t think Hika’s story will lighten your mood all that much,” she said.

Malena sat. The sound of water cascading over the rocks had a lulling effect; she reviewed the many interruptions to her sleep the previous night and found herself envying Oji’s effortless slumber. Stifling a yawn, she leaned forward and raised her eyebrows.

Shivi sighed. “After the last wolf took off, and we’d checked on you and Paka, Toril ran to see about the dog. She’s quite a scrapper, I guess; she was bloody as can be, but it didn’t take long to get her on her feet. We all thought she’d come through okay.

“Then she started to convulse. It happened fast. One moment she was shivering a bit. She was whining, too, like she was in pain, and the sound just got higher and hoarser until it faded off into a scary sort of silence. Then she hopped a couple times, threw herself to the ground, and started flailing every which way, while she snapped her jaws and arched her back. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

“I thought maybe the dog had a concussion or something. But then she got back on her feet and went tearing down to the river like demons were on her tail. By the time Toril and Oji got to the water, she’d drowned herself.”

Malena waited for more, but Shivi seemed to be done with her story. She stoppered one water skin, added it to the pair stretched at her feet, and reached for another.

“Well, she’s not drowned now...” Malena prodded.

“No. We found a heartbeat, and after a while she vomited some water and came to her senses. Naturally, we were relieved. But Oji said something that’s been giving me the willies ever since. He asked if her eyes were bloody.”

Malena considered this non sequitur blankly.

“You didn’t look at the wolves before we left, did you?”

Malena shuddered. “I got a close enough look when they were still alive.”

Shivi nodded and sucked in her breath in a half-articulated whisper of agreement. “Well, all of their eyes were bloody. They were
wolforen
.”

Once again Malena looked nonplussed.

“Did you notice how the wolves split up, Malena? Pack hunters don’t pick multiple targets like that. And did you notice that they came after you and me, not the men?”

“They attacked Toril,” Malena pointed out.

“Yes, but only because he kept defending you. Same with Paka stepping in front of me.”

“Going after the weakest person?”

Shivi shook her head. “They were after a woman, but I think at first they didn’t know which. Once they got a clear look at my gray hair, and you whacked one with a branch, they knew who they wanted.”

The nausea that had nestled in Malena’s stomach all morning now reasserted itself with a vengeance.

“They knew who they wanted. They wanted the woman that the blood magic couldn’t kill.”

Malena felt her lips and hand begin to tremble. “Why me?” she whispered.

“Remember about Gorumim’s need for a symbol?”

It was Oji’s voice, and Malena started when she heard it. The golden man stood a few paces away, having materialized with ghostlike quiet. She felt her heart gallop wildly. Her face paled.

“I’m sorry,” Oji said immediately, his voice contrite. “I came to fetch the water skins so Shivril wouldn’t have to carry them. I did not want to startle you.”

“Well, you did!” It came out as a snarl.

“Pardon, please.”

Malena felt Shivi’s hand on her shoulder. Air slowly began to flow into her lungs. She stared at her feet, swallowed the queasiness and panic, breathed some more.

“You matter enough to Gorumim,” Oji said, after a pause, “that when the bandits failed to kill you, he tried a reaper curse—and then, when that failed, he sent darker servants to finish. If the name ‘wolforen’ means nothing to you, how about Oreni, their master?”

Malena put a hand over her belly and looked away.

“Be glad that the lore has faded,” said Shivi. She took a deep breath. “Oreni was a raja who wanted to fly. The idea obsessed him. For years he tried every magic; he consulted the wise; he sent letters of embassy to every nation. He built kites. He offered rewards.

“One day a crone sought audience. Her hair was matted and filthy, crawling with lice. She had no teeth. Scars covered her body, and her clothes were rotted.

“‘I can teach you to fly,’ she cackled. ‘But it will cost you dearly.’

“Oreni swore a terrible oath then, that he would pay any price if what she said was true, or have her head for lying. The crone summoned an owl. It flew into the palace in broad daylight and perched on her head. Its eyes were bloody.

“‘To fly properly,’ said the crone, ‘you need a bird’s body. I will teach you how to take one.’”

Oji interrupted Shivi’s narrative with a grimace. “The union of body and spirit is the deepest privacy, at the core of a self. To take another being’s body by force is an awful crime.”

Suddenly Malena was trembling—violently. The dog’s panicked suicide made perfect sense. The raja trying to possess a body, the vile sensation of otherness that had assaulted her with the first wolf death, and the nightmare in the stable all blended into a single ghastly picture. She’d been possessed in one way, and then in another. She wanted to shriek at Oji, to clap her hands over her ears and run away sobbing.

She’d been pounding a drumbeat in her brain:
Rescue the children! Rescue the children!
Now the rhythm faltered, overwhelmed by a pain and terror as vast as the whole world. Her body—her very soul—had been violated! And it had happened again this morning, for an instant. The dying wolf had tried, anyway. With her. With Hika.

Only the agony of total emotional nakedness kept her from hysterics. Over Shivi’s shoulder she could see Toril approaching, and her shivering paralyzed.
Not him not him not him not him not him him him. He can’t see me like this. Not the osipi, either. He doesn’t know what happened. He will never know.
Somehow she fought back the bile, clenched her teeth against the scream demanding expression, willed the abject terror from her features.

Toril seemed to sense Malena’s mood. He hesitated, looked at Shivi and Oji.

“She wanted to know about Hika,” Shivi offered.

An expression of what—pity? irritation? worry?—flicked across his features.

“Finish the story,” Malena heard herself say, as if from a great distance.

“Let’s leave it alone,” Toril countered.

“Oreni possessed an owl. Some followers of Oreni possessed our wolves, I assume. Finish the story.”

Shivi searched Malena’s face, seemed to reach a decision. “The crone taught Oreni a secret,” she said. “A secret that nobody should know how to use. Such possession is a crime against the taker as well as the victim, and requires a special kind of malice. A spirit has an affinity for the body it belongs to. To break that bond, you must mortify the body until the spirit no longer claims it.”

“Torture,” Oji supplemented. “You must torture yourself if you want to leave the body behind.”

Shivi nodded. “The crone’s scars were not an accident. But it goes beyond simple pain. A spirit can endure agony and become truer to its form. If you really want this power, you must convince the spirit to see the body as filth, garbage. You must misuse, humiliate, make a mockery. You do unspeakable things to your body until the spirit is numb. And if you can, you choose a regular host and break its soul bond, too. Maybe you use repeated near-drowning. Maybe starvation. Maybe a dozen other forms of misery. You
dedicate
yourself, body and soul, to that cruelty, for years. That is the kind of depravity that drives the wolves who attacked us.”

“What happened to Oreni?” Malena asked.

Shivi sighed and pursed her lips, accentuating the deep creases along her cheeks. “He flew. I guess he had a talent for it; it took little time and torture to break free of the body he hated. He began possessing the owl almost every night, and spent the daylight hours recuperating in isolation. When the crone grew jealous, he killed her.

“Then his ambition broadened. Why limit himself to flying, when he could also swim or run or slither? He built a menagerie and hired hunters and keepers to help him in his experiments. He learned which species made the best hosts: wolves, bears, buffalo. He became expert in inflicting excruciating pain without damaging their bodies. He trained others in his black art and sent them out on errands of butchery and spying. He began a breeding program to enhance the qualities that were most useful to him, and he slaughtered anything useless. They say the caterwauling and the stench of blood from his castle walls was enough to make hardened warriors weep.