Daughter of Ancients (42 page)

Paulo and I each shouldered a rucksack loaded with two days' supply of food and water, and we set off with Nim toward the top of the ridge. Dry wind gusts whipped through the jagged pinnacles. The moon shone swollen and misshapen through the swirling dust. Paulo's shirt flapped about his lean body.

I dismissed the upheaval in my stomach that worsened as we neared the place of my captivity, calling myself a fool, though I took every opportunity to brush my fingers against my neck, breathing in relief each time I felt flesh rather than choking iron. As we approached the top of the ridge, the wind sighed and moaned, gnawing the gritty rocks into ragged, grotesque shapes that loomed fearfully in the night. I trod lightly, as nearly soundlessly as I could, though I could not have said why.

Paulo was doing the same. When Nim held up her leathery hand and pointed, trembling, to a last steep pitch across a flat boulder, we crept up it on our bellies like snakes.

Uttermost dismay stilled my heart as I gazed down on the plains of Ce Uroth. From my companion came a single whispered curse expelled on a breath of disbelief. Stretching to the farthest horizon, the plains teemed with warriors. As numerous as maggots on a dead beast, the legions of the Zhid marched past glowing campfires, surged against each other in mock battle lines that stretched for leagues into the darkness, built earthen fortifications, waved swords, and pumped bellows that flared the monstrous orange flames of their forges. The smell of blood was on the wind, and the acrid stench of coal and molten steel, and the stink of fear. It wasn't until Paulo laid his hand on mine that I realized I was shaking.

In the center of the crawling expanse was a huge, dark mound. As we watched, Zhid warriors threw torches all around its base, setting the mound afire. The black smoke coiled and billowed in the bilious moonlight. Flesh . . . burning flesh . . . the reeking death fog of Zhev'Na rising to blot out the stars. And in the towering blackness appeared a monstrous face straight from nightmare, gross and swollen, covering half the sky. Its eyes flamed red, and its bloated tongue licked cruel lips.

But even the sight of such horror did not sicken me as did the stench of burning slaves. Too often I'd smelled it and thought of my brothers, wondering if it was they who burned, or my father, or when it would be my turn. And the cries that rose from it . . . Not all the bodies in the mounds were dead. I buried my head in my arms, laying my face against the lingering warmth of the rough stone, trying to block out the foul smoke.

Nim whimpered in terror. Paulo tugged on my arms, trying to drag me down the sloping rock face. “It's looking this way,” he whispered. “It's coming. We've got to get out of here.”

“No! Wait!” Something was very odd. In the moment I had hidden my face, the screams and wails and drum-beats had fallen silent, and I could hear only the wind, and smell only my own stink and the hard, sandy warmth of the rock. I glanced up quickly, and all was as before: the eye of flame looming above us, the gross nostrils flaring as the red demon eyes hunted us, the surging warriors, the burning . . . I buried my face again, and all was silent.

What was the truth? This time I looked more carefully at the sights on the plain. The campfires and torches burned steadily, not a flicker or a bend in the wild wind. The endless movements of the warriors had no purpose. . . .

“Look away,” I said. “Turn your back. It's not there.”

Paulo did look away . . . to stare at me as if I were a lunatic. But as he did so, a streak of wary curiosity crossed his face. I was right. He flicked his gaze back and forth from me to the monster I could no longer see or hear, then he turned his back on Ce Uroth, sat up, and grinned. “Cripes!”

Nim was sure we were driven mad by the demon, but I grabbed her hand before she could crawl away. “It's all right,” I said, pulling her to her feet and holding on firmly. “We can protect you from this particular demon. My power is quite sufficient.”

I hefted my pack and led the way down the rocky path onto the plains of Ce Uroth.

My confidence wavered as we abandoned the cliffs and gullies of the ridge and walked out under the demonic face in the sky. The foul smokes had us gagging, and the agonized screams of the captives and the hissing contempt of the Zhid curdled my blood. But, as I had guessed, neither demon nor captive nor Zhid took any note of us whatsoever.

We walked right through the chaotic war camp. Two Zhid wrestled in the dust to our left, cursing and spitting, slashing at each other with bloody knives. An entire troop marched past on the hammered roadway, their empty-eyed commander with red hair and thin lips riding a coal-black charger, and ten warriors dodged between the dusty tents answering a shouted summons. But not one of the Zhid challenged us.

The faster we walked, the more space there seemed to be between us and the vision, and when we were forced to slow down because Nim was paralyzed with terror, the specters brushed closer. I wrapped my arms about the woman and forced her to move, telling us both over and over that none of it had as much substance as the chill wind that swirled sand into my face.

Paulo slogged along beside me, his face grim, scarcely looking right nor left. But halfway across the plain he took my arm and spoke quietly in my ear as we walked. “Did you ever see stars in Zhev'Na?”

“No. Never.” The odd question made me look up, of course. The demon apparition hung in the sky overhead, his eye of flame still pointed at the ridge behind us. But everywhere else the sky had taken on a deep purple cast, and the stars that hung suspended there were green. “Especially not green stars.”

“
I've
seen green stars. In the Bounded, the young master's kingdom, we have a dark purple sky and green stars. He's here. This is his work.”

“Then he's turned . . . become one of them again.” My feet slowed. A ghostly Zhid rider barreled down the path toward us and, by reflex, I dragged Nim out of the way, forcing myself to move forward again.

“No, he cares for the Bounded. If he'd turned—and I told you already, he wouldn't ever—the Bounded wouldn't mean anything to him any more. He knows I'll come after him, and other than his parents, I'm the only one would know about the green stars. But if he's using his magic to tell me he's here, then why would he make all this other wretched business?”

The dark blight of the ruin grew larger in front of us, like a jagged hole in the night. I could see only one answer. “To frighten people away. To warn
you
away.”

He nodded and walked on. “We'd best watch our step then.”

In the moment we climbed over the cracked and crumbled slabs of black granite that had been the walls of Zhev'Na, the smoke demon and all the rest of the vision vanished. Behind us the plains lay barren and quiet. In front of us was . . . night. If darkness could be said to have bulk, then it was a thick, palpable darkness that hung over the ruin of Zhev'Na and gathered in the shadows cast by the bulbous moon.

We picked our way past the fallen walls, through burned beams and shattered paving stones, all that remained of the armories and barracks that had nestled beside the walls like evil chicks to a monstrous hen. A line of broken columns indicated the remains of a covered walkway, five years of wind-tossed thornbushes piled up in it.

“Where do we start?” Paulo stopped and surveyed the place. The piles of broken stone seemed to stretch forever.

I squeezed the quivering bundle of rags in my arms. “Nim, show us where you found the kaminar.”

Her terror-dulled eyes roamed the ruin, peering out from under her mop of tangled hair.

“We'll protect you. You said it was a vault . . . buried deep . . .” Perhaps the Lady would consider it proper revenge to put the young Lord in her own tomb. “Please. We're afraid our friend is a prisoner here. You are so brave to help us. So kind.”

Nim jerked her head and pulled me in an unexpected direction, not toward the Lords' house where one would find the deep chamber where the Great Oculus had spun out its evils, but instead through the Drudges' courtyard of workrooms and kitchens, and past the long, low barracks to the slave pens.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Just there.” Her dusty whisper was almost indistinguishable from the wind. She pointed to a tangle of bent metal rods and broken stone. Wind and sand had scoured the filth from the warped black cages where those slaves used in fighting practice had been kept. In the ruins just beyond the cages, Nim showed us a huge crack in the stone floor. Great sections of paving had buckled as if the earth had heaved up the foulness that had been done there and pushed up against the fallen roof, leaving a gaping hole in the floor and a broken stair descending into blackness.

I cast a light, and Paulo and I knelt to peer over the edge. Nim squatted beside us and pointed to a rectangular opening at the bottom of the stair. Beside it lay the broken pieces of a stone door and tarnished brass hasps and hinges. I pressed the back of my left hand to my mouth and backed away, dizzy and sweating. The Lords had buried her here under this building. So deep . . .

Suddenly wary, I raised my handlight higher. Over my left shoulder stood a huge stone hearth and a broken brick chimney, blackened with centuries of use. Two broad shards of granite lay beside it, part of a single slab cracked down its middle and broken apart. Echoes of agony rang in my memory: my brothers struggling not to scream as the hot metal was dripped on the back of their necks to seal the slave collar, failing when the pain became too much to bear, and sobbing in despair as half their lives were torn from them. I had been so young I had not even tried to contain my wailing.

“It was here,” I whispered, pulling my hand down to shrink the span of the light. I didn't want to see any more.

“What was here?” said Paulo.

Arms crossed on my breast, I wrapped my hands about my neck to remind myself of freedom. “They sealed us here. My brothers and me. In this very room.”

“Oh, demonfire, I'm sorry, Jen.”

Yet the echoes of past screams bared another part of the truth. “Think of it, Paulo. D'Sanya was held captive just below this place, where prisoners were sealed into the collars. If she couldn't sleep, D'Sanya would have heard their cries. For a thousand years. You were here. You know what that sound was like.”

Paulo looked gray. “She's mad. However she's been able to hide it, she couldn't be nothing else but mad.”

Truth unraveled its knots as I explored its windings. “She made the slave collars. That's why she can't look me or my father in the eye. That's why she begged Nim and her friends not to kill her—because she thought they were slaves, and she knew what she'd done to them. She's a Metalwright, and she made the collars, and then she had to listen to them being used every day of her life.” Poor, poor D'Sanya.

“The lesser evil. That's what she told him. They'd kill five slaves whenever she would disobey. She told him she always chose the lesser evil.”

The young Lord. Paulo's friend. The handsome young man with the lifetime of guilt in his eyes. The one we'd come to find.

“He's not here,” I said, standing up. “She's put him somewhere else. This is the place of
her
guilt, not his.”

Paulo glanced up at me. “We've got to go down and look, though. Before we go. In case there's something we can't see from here.”

Conscience, ethics, kindness said I should go along to check for traps and spells and to protect Paulo. But remembered pain was palpable in the air. The stair was almost straight down, a sheer drop of almost two stories. “I can't go down there. I can't. I'm sorry.”

“Just wait here, then.” He looked at me carefully and laid a kind, very ordinary hand on my arm. “I won't be gone but a bit. Will you be all right?”

I nodded and forced my light as bright as I could, shaping it to illuminate the yawning pit as he descended the broken stairs. Then, cowardly, I looked away before I got dizzy and fell in after him.

Nim looked back and forth between me and the hole in the floor, chewing her fingers with stained teeth. “Can't stay here. Not here. Demons will come for us here. Worships will come.”

I pulled her close, hoping I would have more success comforting her than I was having with myself. “No demons live here, Nim. Only shadows of demons.”

“But some shadows are more substantial than others.” The grating voice boomed from behind us.

I whipped my head around as Nim whimpered and collapsed into my arms. A massively built Zhid wearing bloodstained leather armor stood smiling at us with pale, soulless eyes. In one hand he carried a leather whip, studded with metal barbs, and in the other a long, curved dagger that glinted sharply in the soft light from my hand.

Truth? When the whip sliced the air a finger's breadth from my left cheek and cracked into the broken stones at my feet, raising a spurt of dust, I came to the sickening conclusion that this illusion might be real.

“It is most unseemly for such a one as you to exist uncollared,” snarled the Zhid. “At least you kneel, as should Dar'Nethi vermin before their betters. Yet clearly you do not remember all your manners.”

The whip cracked to the other side of me, ripping the shoulder of my tunic and leaving a stinging warning underneath it. The next one would be on my hands. I knew what he wanted, and I was not about to do it.

I jumped to my feet and dodged the ripping slice of the whip, trying not to trip over the cringing Nim as I shifted to my right. I needed to move away from the pit—force the warrior to turn his back to the steps where Paulo would appear at any moment.

“The days of my servitude are over,” I yelled, hoping Paulo would hear. “I kneel to no one, and I spread my arms for no one, especially not a pitiful Zhid who acts as if one mindless brute can stand against a free Dar'Nethi.”