Dragons on the Sea of Night (14 page)

‘
This
is Ojime?'

‘Not anymore,' Kaijikan said. ‘Oh, parts of him still exist, I would imagine, here and there. But he has become what he dreamed of, something more.'

‘So that is what Ojime was doing hanging around Shinsei na-ke Temple. He wanted to steal the Makkon's tongue.'

‘And steal it he did,' Kaijikan said, ‘spilling the Rosh'hi's blood in the process.'

‘He murdered Qaylinn?'

‘In cold blood, I am pleased to say.' She was beaming. ‘Such a perfect host for Tokagé!'

Chiisai whirled. ‘I will kill him!'

She drove at the huge, armored figure, her blade drawn. But behind her, Kaijikan made a series of complex signs in the air, a circle of talismans, and just as the point of Chiisai's blade was about to pierce a seam in his armor, Tokagé moved.

The point glanced off metal, shrieking in protest, and a huge mailed fist chopped down, making her whole arm go numb. The blade clattered to the solarium floor, and Tokagé grabbed her in an iron grip, spun her around.

‘His soul was mine from the very moment of his violent death,' Kaijikan said. ‘I have plans for him now. Plans so sweeping you could not even imagine them. And I have no intention of allowing you, or anyone else, to interfere with them.'

SEVEN

D
UK
F
ADAT

The jailor with six eyes came crawling
out of the shadows and Moichi thought he would faint. The thing was so hideous the reaction was instinctive. It had a long, flat insectoid head. A double slit like a cross with four thin lips served as a mouth. It was surmounted on either side by black, beetle-like mandibles. Its bloated, misshapen body, blotched and mottled with patches of clotted wiry hair, wound around and around, ending in a wickedly barbed tail, segmented like that of a scorpion. It had a multitude of short legs, each ending in four powerful talons, on which it scuttled crabwise. A viscous white foam ebbed and flowed from the corners of the ghastly mouth. The eyes, however, were alive with interest.

‘You thought me ugly before you even saw me,' the creature said. ‘Now have I fulfilled your fear.' The flat shell-like head bounced up and down. ‘That is how Bjork made me. A Jailor should be hideous, yes, and I was the only creature Dujuk'kan was meant to see.'

‘Then Aufeya and I got sucked in,' Moichi said, swallowing hard. ‘How was it you didn't eat us as you did the Fe'edjinn?'

‘Came they first. Full was I when you appeared. You were sucked down in the aftermath of my great hunger. No need had I for you while I slept, while full was my belly.'

‘So we were meant to stock your larder.'

‘I understand not.'

It was hard to look at the creature but Moichi forced himself. ‘You were saving us until you were hungry again.'

‘That will be long time. I liked woman.'

‘Liked Aufeya?' Moichi cocked his head. ‘In what way?'

‘Dujuk'kan saw her. Saw I him drooling and thought I, if I keep her and he can't have her, sweet torture for him then and I am fulfilling Bjork's purpose even more.'

Moichi considered this a moment. ‘Do you understand what is happening? Something Bjork obviously did not anticipate.'

Jailor sniffed. ‘Bjork anticipated everything.'

‘Not the fact that his jailor would begin to take on the characteristics of his prisoner.'

‘Understand I not.'

‘Look. You were created to keep Dujuk'kan incarcerated, away from his own kind so he could not harm them as he had for so many years.'

‘I do so.'

‘Yes,' Moichi said. ‘And then you decided to do more. To torture him as he tortured the children he had stolen. What is the difference then between jailor and prisoner?'

It seemed as if Jailor was humming as it got down to work. Using its mandibles, it collected the viscous white liquid and rapidly began to spin out strands of shining filaments. These it strung from the walls of the low grotto which it was guarding.

‘What are you doing?' Moichi asked uneasily.

The humming continued as the web became more complex. ‘One prisoner escapes, another can do. This will prevent further escapes.'

Moichi stepped forward, slashed at the strands with the dirk. To his consternation, the strands mended themselves even as they were being sliced. He hacked and hacked at the web with the same result. There was never enough time to break free before the strands coalesced.

‘You see,' Jailor snickered, ‘told you I that Bjork thought of all.'

Moichi stepped back, wiping the sweat from his face. What would it be like to spend the rest of his life in captivity? he wondered. Each day like stepping into a pool of quicksand, sucking you down into nothingness. Time would become meaningless; so too, eventually, responsibility and thought. Just a slow drifting away like a tiny boat on a vast night-time sea. He could not allow that to happen.

‘What now of Dujuk'kan?' he asked. ‘Won't you go after him? He's your real prisoner. I am only a stand-in.'

‘Go nowhere but tunnels I,' Jailor said. ‘Made me Bjork for this. Here stay I.'

‘But you
must
go after Dujuk'kan. He's a criminal. Surely Bjork could not have meant this to happen?'

The beast rose up, its mandibles clutching and opening in extreme agitation. ‘You see not. Leaving the tunnels I die. End of story.' Then the humming came again as it continued to spin its maddening web.

‘Do you know where Dujuk'kan went?'

‘Yes. But no use to you.'

Moichi had his eye on several spots where the strands were not yet woven close together.

‘I want to know where he is taking Aufeya.'

He moved as Jailor did, waiting for the angle he needed, patient until the beast was very close.

‘Ah, Aufeya it is that interests you. Like Dujuk'kan.' Its mandibles clicked in admonishment or incomprehension. ‘So much interest in one creature. Well, takes her he to depths of Mu'ad: the Mas'jahan.'

Inching forward, calculating vectors. ‘Are you sure?'

Jailor continued its clicking as it spun. ‘An evil place. Very wild. Business interests has he in the citadel. Of course go there he.'

Moichi lunged with the tip of the dirk, angling it through the space between the strands. The blade shot through the diamond-shaped opening, straight into the beast's head. A great cloud of purple dust shot upward as Jailor shrieked. It bucked upward, almost dislodging the dirk from Moichi's grip. But he had been prepared and he threw himself against the web. As he suspected, it gave, enough for him to follow Jailor's movements and shove the blade further into the carapaced skull. He twisted the blade as he buried it hilt-deep.

All Jailor's short legs began to tremble as it collapsed. Its long talons scored deep gouges in the packed sand. The purple dust continued to spew from the rent Moichi had made in its head. It writhed on the ground, in agony, jaws working spastically. Its eyes, four of them dark and ruined, stared up at Moichi.

‘So, Jailor, it comes to this. In order to catch Dujuk'kan, I must kill you.'

‘Not my wish,' the beast said, ‘but my nature.'

Moichi nodded. ‘Unfortunately, I understand.'

The mandibles, covered with purple dust, leaked white viscous fluid. ‘Understand nothing you. Pain am I. Born into misery, asked not for this I. How often wished I for death but Bjork's magic would not let me. Dujuk'kan must be guarded.'

‘But now that he has escaped you are vulnerable?' Moichi said pressing down with the blade. ‘Is that what you are saying?'

The jaws worked, but no sound came out. A moment later, they were filled with purple dust.

‘Don't die yet, Jailor,' Moichi said. He withdrew the dirk, slashed again at the strands with the same result as before. ‘Tell me how to get past this damnable web you have spun. Tell me!'

‘Want to know I,' Jailor said, his voice weak and half-strangled now, ‘what makes this woman you and Dujuk'kan think of worth saving?'

‘Chill take you, how do I get out of here?' Moichi thundered.

‘What do if not tell you I? Kill I?' Jailor tried to laugh, but there was too much of his own substance choking his throat. The body gave a great shiver and the two working eyes bulged as if a great pressure were building up. ‘That woman … you think of …' The voice was so soft Moichi had to push against the web to hear it. ‘At my release from bondage give you her I.'

‘What do you …?' The light was dying in its eyes. A musty smell filled the grotto. And then into Moichi's mind popped Aufeya. She was strapped across the back of a co'chyn that was speeding across the Mu'ad beneath Dujuk'kan's black whip. He knew it was Aufeya as one identifies people in a dream – by the feel of her. But how could this be his Aufeya? For the woman in his mind had the head and neck of a snowy ibis.

Moichi blinked and the vision was gone. He looked down at Jailor who was stone dead. He had kept his promise to Moichi – or was he playing some cruel joke? Had the vision been an image of reality? If so how had Dujuk'kan come upon a saddled co'chyn, and how had he altered Aufeya?

Moichi realized that neither of these questions would matter a whit if he could not break free of Jailor's web. How was he going to …?

And then he noticed that down low one strand had been sliced in two and had remained cut. What had been able to do that? And then he saw: Jailor's own talon!

Quickly, Moichi bent down and, using his dirk, carved off a foot. He brought it back through one of the larger spaces between the strands and, reversing it, began slicing through the web with a wickedly curved talon.

He ducked through the circular hole he had made and stepped over the hideous beast's carcass. Then, he turned back, hunkered down next to it. Somehow, Jailor seemed more pitiable than ugly now. That odd animosity had passed and in its place was a kind of gratitude at being human, prey to all the joys and sorrows attendant on the condition.

‘Sleep well, Jailor,' Moichi said, rising. ‘It seems to me you've earned it.'

The warren of tunnels was riddled with the kind of vertical chimney Moichi and Dujuk'kan had used on the way down to what was supposed to have been Jailor's stasis chamber. These, Moichi worked out, were short-cuts Jailor had carved out of the Mu'ad's sandbed in order to better keep an eye on its charge.

He was near exhaustion and racked by dehydration by the time he came upon one that provided a surprising way up – and the answer to the question of how Dujuk'kan had managed to escape.

The clever Adenese had sunk chunks of the metal ore that ran in veins throughout much of the tunnels, making a series of foot-and hand-holds in the chimney. He looked up seeing, far away, a tiny oval of clear blue. Sky! As dizzy with relief as with exhaustion, Moichi began his long ascent.

He had to stop many times, as a blackness that swam at the periphery of his vision threatened to overwhelm him. Increasingly, he crouched against the side of the chimney, shivering as if with the ague, his clawed fingertips digging frantically into the packed sand to stop from toppling backward into extinction. He knew this was dangerous, that he must continue upward at even the slowest pace, that the longer he kept motionless the more difficult it would be to get going again, both physically and mentally. His muscles were cramping and he was losing strength exponentially as he ascended.

At first, the smell of the fresh air quickening all around him was enough to keep him at it, but when that proved insufficient he set small goals for himself. He thought of Aufeya, and the vision the Jailor had provided for him of her strapped to a co'chyn ridden by Dujuk'kan on the way to Mas'jahan. Then, when he had reached his goal, he turned his mind to Sanda, and the stream of dreams or, alternatively, presentiments he had had in the Mu'ad when she came to him. He recited from memory the enigmatic words she had spoken.
Seek out the bear in the stone
, she had chanted.
Not to possess but to be possessed
. He pondered the riddle for some time until the image of his ravaged sister would not be denied and he heard again her heartfelt plea:
Save me!
From what? What had the Makkon done to her soul at the moment of her death? During the Kai-feng he had heard outlandish stories about the Makkon's predilection for drinking the souls from the eyes of their victims, but he had dismissed such whispered stories as psychological propaganda sown by the forces of Chaos to dishearten their enemy.

Save me!

Was Sanda – or some part of her essence – somehow still alive?

Reaching his next goal, he turned his thoughts to the tongueless Makkon. What had happened to it? Who or what had made it mute? Who had power enough besides the Dai-San? Moichi knew of no one else. While trapped in Jailor's lair he had lost all scent of the thing, and now he wondered whether he would be able to pick it up. Didn't such things have a specific afterlife? His experience in tracking both man and beast told him that there was. But the Makkon was not of this world, and perhaps different laws applied to it.

Reaching his goal, he crouched panting, on the outcrop of metal ore. Because of Dujuk'kan's girth and weight these were quite generous by Moichi's standards so that he was able to get both feet on at once. However, he was so near total exhaustion that his muscles jumped and shuddered so that he shook almost uncontrollably. He closed his eyes for a moment, but that was a mistake as he almost toppled off his perch. To distract himself, he looked upward and was immediately cheered by the size of the oval of blue sky. He was almost there!

But, oh, it was hard to raise himself off his haunches, and when he reached up toward the next outcrop pain streaked through his left hamstring, making him pant out loud. He put his forehead against the rough sand wall and massaged the muscle until the agony was reduced to a deep ache. He continued upward, his nails torn, his fingers bloody, half-unconscious, continuing now by sheer effort of will. But when he reached the next – the penultimate chunk of ore – his left leg gave out and he slipped off his perch.