Dragon and Phoenix (65 page)

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Authors: Joanne Bertin

BOOK: Dragon and Phoenix
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“Good gods!” she exclaimed, and dropped her gaze in self-defense. The floor, she was relieved to see, was the dull red of the mother rock.
When she looked up once more, either the designs had decided to behave, or her eyes had adjusted, for the rapid swirling stopped. Still, the chamber was not a comfortable place. A quick look around told her it was empty save for a stack of fresh torches and wall brackets to hold them. She fixed her eyes on Miune and Zhantse standing together by another, much narrower, exit on the far side of the chamber.
Shima’s startled, “Hwah!” from behind her reassured her she was not the only one affected. He stumbled as he thrust the torch he carried into the nearest bracket.
“Were you not with us,” Zhantse said, gesturing with his free hand first to Miune and then himself, “you would even now be lying on the ground, certain you were going mad. And if you did not leave quickly enough, it would become so. For beyond here are things that are not for all to see.”
“That which the dragon brought?” Shima asked.
“And other things,” replied Zhantse evenly. His dark-eyed gaze snapped to his drummer like a sword coming to point.
“I understand, master,” Shima said, humbly. “No word will I speak of this.”
*Good, else I should have to thump thee.*
Miune sounded only a little disappointed that he was not to have revenge for the tugging of his feeler.
“From here I must go alone,” Zhantse said. “No one but a shaman or Miune may go beyond this point, and he’s now too large to attempt this passage.”
Maurynna watched as the shaman laid a hand on one side of the mysterious opening and chanted softly, his head bowed. In answer there came a hum like the whisper of wind through harp strings. When it died away again, Zhantse entered the passage, his voice rising and falling in the chant. She saw the light from his torch and heard him for a time; then, abruptly, both ended as if the shaman had stepped out of this world and was beyond all perception.
In this strange land, mayhap he did.
A shiver ran down Maurynna’s spine at the thought.
*He will be some time,*
Miune said as he crossed the chamber.
*There are places where he must pray and offer the sacred pollens he carries.
The waterdragon settled to the floor.
Shima joined him. Maurynna held back a sigh and sat down. This room made her twitchy; she wanted the night sky above her once more.
No one spoke. And as the silence grew, Maurynna became more and more aware of the magic imbued in the stone around her. It
itched.
But she could
no more scratch inside her head than she could walk across the sea. So she set her teeth and willed herself to endure.
 
Raven clapped in time with the drummers as he sat with Lark and her neighbors, watching the two lines of dancers weave intricate patterns around each other. Their stamping feet raised puffs of dust, shrouding the great bonfire in a haze of red, even as their song spiraled up to the stars.
Song and dance came to an end in a final, triumphant “Hyah!” The dancers halted, laughing and catching their breath. But the drummers had little mercy; with a challenge that Raven recognized by tone if not words, the lead drummer beat out a fast, complicated rhythm. The others joined in.
The rhythm put Raven in mind of one he’d learned for his role for the troupe. One thought led to another; he stood up, swaying slightly.
Surprised, he thought,
Whoa! Best take care, boy. That
mesta is
more potent than it tastes!
Lark looked up at him, eyebrows raised in question.
“There are others who’d like to dance, I’m thinking,” was all the explanation he gave her along with a grin. He turned his back on the leaping bonfire and set off into the darkness.
 
The magic thrummed in her bones now and felt like sand fleas inside her skin. She wanted to run away. Instead, Maurynna pulled her cloak a little closer and hunched into a ball. Something dug into the side of her face; her fingers went to it to see what—
Her cloak pin. Or, rather, Rani’s cloak pin. Maurynna locked her fingers around it and the little vixen pressed into her palm, solid and comforting. It brought back thoughts of Linden. She wrapped herself in that remembering; it kept the magic around her at bay—at least a little. She could endure now.
So of course at that moment, Zhantse returned. Maurynna rubbed the vixen’s nose with her thumb and raised her head.
Now she would find out what Dharm Varleran had left for her. Worse yet, now she would find out just what she would have to do.
 
“Hunh,” Raven grunted as he paused at the top of the path that led to the small patch of grassland the Llysanyins had taken as their own. Stormwind and the Two Poor Bastards stood, ears pricked, facing the sound of the drumming. From the way their tails twitched from side to side and Jhem’s hind feet shifted, Raven knew he’d guessed right.
But where—Once more his gaze swept the nook. Still only three Llysanyins, and none of them was Boreal. “Rynna’s not back
yet?”
Was something amiss? Should he go look for her? That seemed a good idea until a part of his mind, less fogged with
mesta
than the rest, asked,
Where?
He shook his head. “Damnation,” he swore again and again, all his frustration bubbling up. He stood, fists clenched and feet wide apart, as the Llysanyins came up. As Stormwind snuffled his hair, Raven made a vow deep in his heart.
Then he jumped up to Stormwind’s back. Jhem and Trissin crowded in behind.
 
Zhantse bore a cloth-wrapped bundle in his arms as he strode across the painted chamber. His black eyes glittered with excitement.
“Come,” he said. “This is not the place for you to see your destiny, Maurynna Kyrissaean. Come away.”
Maurynna stood. Gods, but she wanted out of this place. The magic buzzed in her ears now, making it difficult to hear; vertigo snatched at her and retreated. Her only consolation was that Kyrissaean remained quiet. Had her dragon half been awake … Maurynna shuddered at the thought; then she took a deep breath, stumbling after Zhantse. The shaman lit a fresh torch from the pile and led the way into the tunnel to the outside.
This time she was second in line, with Shima behind and Miune bringing up the rear. With each step, the thrumming in her bones faded until it was but a disquieting memory, like a bad dream that one doesn’t quite remember upon waking. As she stepped out of the passage and was under the night sky, Maurynna let her head fall back, and filled her lungs with the cool, sweet air.
“It’s not a comfortable place, is it?” Shima said quietly as he stopped beside her.
“You’ve never been there before?” she asked.
“No, I’m not training to be a shaman,” he replied. One hand came up to rest gently on her shoulder, to both comfort and urge her on.
She obeyed. Shima continued, “Tefira may enter the chamber, for he is Zhantse’s apprentice. He’ll discard the used torches we left there and replace them with fresh ones.”
His sympathetic—but amused—tone said that it was just one of many boring duties his brother performed.
They went on, the dry scraping of Miune’s claws following them along the trail. Zhantse didn’t stop at the bottom as Maurynna half expected him to; instead the shaman set off briskly for the gully, his
jelah
swinging jauntily from side to side.
Ah, well; she supposed the suspense wouldn’t kill her. It would just torture her a little more.
 
Stormwind paced along the canyon floor to the dancing ground, moving in the
shallinn,
the high, slow trot that paused between each beat. When they were within sight of the celebration, the Two Poor Bastards came up on either side
and matched Stormwind. Given their size and the precision of their steps, Raven knew the Llysanyins would set jaws to dropping.
Nor was he mistaken. Already they had been spotted; as friend called to friend, more turned to see. Raven slipped from Stormwind’s back. He jogged to meet Lark, now standing.
“D’you think anyone will mind?” he asked.
“They can truly dance?” Lark said as if she hadn’t heard him. And perhaps she hadn’t; she was gaping at the Llysanyins who cantered slowly in a circle. Now and again, at some signal Raven couldn’t see, they would rise up on their hind legs and reverse direction.
Then Lark gasped, and answered her own question. “Dear gods,” she said in awe. “They
can
dance! Watch—whenever the rhythm changes … .”
She was right. There were patterns in the drumming, and whenever the pattern changed, the Llysanyins moved with it. Raven stood, as captivated as the first time he’d seen them dance. More and more people crowded around them to watch.
Someone pushed a drum into his hands. As if bewitched, he began drumming one of the Assantikkan rhythms the Llysanyins knew,
Takka nih Bahari,
“Dance of the Red Ghost.” Their impromptu dance flowed into the one they knew so well.
Trills of wonder filled the night air. Raven drummed, and as, one by one, the Tah’nesieh drummers joined in as they caught the rhythm, the Llysanyins danced in the firelight.
 
Maurynna knelt by the dying campfire. Zhantse went stiffly to one knee before her, with Miune on one side and Shima on the other. The shaman laid his burden in her lap.
“It’s for you to open it—
Dragonlord,”
Zhantse said, hesitating only slightly over the unfamiliar northern word. At his gesture, Shima laid more fuel upon the fire. The young flames stretched up like scarlet towers reaching for the heavens.
Maurynna stared down at the lumpy, cloth-wrapped bundle; she rested one hand upon it to keep it from sliding off. It was perhaps the length of her arm, slightly wider at one end than the other, and narrow. Grass string crisscrossed the length of it. It shifted under her fingers; she heard the faint scrape of metal against metal.
Feeling vaguely as if she commited some kind of sacrilege, Maurynna pulled her small belt dagger from its sheath and slid it beneath the bindings. They parted easily before the sharp blade. She ran her fingers over the rough brown cloth; then, taking a deep breath, she eased the cloth back from the wider end of the bundle.
A thick, round disk of iron appeared.
What?
she asked herself, and answered
it in the next heartbeat:
a sword pommel.
That it was still unrusted told her much about how dry this desert was.
But—a sword? She was no warrior. Morlen had chosen wrong; surely Linden was the one to wield this.
Yet the burden had been laid upon her. Pressing her lips together in determination, she wrenched the covering back, revealing the hilt with its wrappings of leather so dry it disintegrated as the coarse fabric brushed against it.
The wrapping caught on something entwined around the quillons. Maurynna freed it and found herself staring at what seemed to be a large, incomplete ring of black metal. The ends, she saw as she teased it loose of sword and cloth, were worked. A tiny glint of red winked at her.
Her breath caught in her chest and she couldn’t speak. She scrubbed at one of the ends with the cloth; she knew now what she held. Her eyes stung with tears.
Gradually a silver dragon’s head revealed itself from the tarnish of centuries. One of the ruby eyes was missing, but the other shone bravely in the leaping firelight.
The tears slid down her cheeks. From all she’d heard, the humansoul Dharm had planned to renounce his hold on life, leaving the dragonsoul Varleran to live as a truedragon. So why had Varleran carried these bits of Dharm’s life with him? Truedragons didn’t cling to possessions as humankind did. Had Dharm changed his mind? Or was the releasing of a soul for her kind not like the shutting of a door, quick and final, but instead a slow drifting away, as one might slip into dreaming?
She traced the curve of the torc with her fingers. This had been old when Linden was born more than six hundred years ago. Compared to her paltry two decades of life it seemed as ancient as the earth.
She held it up before her face and studied it. What stories would it tell her if it could speak? What hopes and dreams died so long ago? She could almost feel the echo of them.
Shima stirred, laid one slender log in the fire, then another; the flames leaped higher. Neither he nor the others asked questions, demanded answers. The vast stillness of their land echoed in them. She was grateful for it.
But
she
had a question. But not—her courage failed her—quite yet.
There was a thing that must be done now, and no way to do it, save to pass through the other side of hell. She wondered if the Tah’nehsieh would accept it. Maurynna drew herself up straighter. The warmth of the fire dried her tears.
“This was Dharm Varleran’s—” Her mind could not find the Jehangli word for “torc,” if indeed there even was one, “badge of rank.”

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