Golden Daughter (43 page)

The woman released him and sat back, her eyes demurely veiled by her lashes. “When the time comes, Sunan,” she said, “you will obey me. You will serve me above all other masters.”

“Yes,” said Sunan. “I will. Anything you want. Anything you need.” He did not consider just then that he would not live to offer her any service. Life and death did not matter in this place. Somehow he would make good his promise to her.

She did not look at him again. When she spoke, her voice was a whisper. “You must go now. She is returning, and she will kill you if she finds you here. Go.”

Though it was like tearing his own heart in two, Sunan rose, obedient to his new mistress’s every wish. He stumbled from the darkened hut, leaving behind his very will as well as the knife in the wall. And he clutched the opals tight in his fist.

Sairu ran with the cat at her feet, her pace scarcely letting up since she emerged from the dungeons into the surface world. Only at the gates of the Crown of the Moon did she pause to shed her disguise of priestly robes, revealing the leper’s rags beneath. Then she ran with much greater speed than a leper should be capable of, darting with such quickness through the winding streets of Lunthea Maly that anyone watching her would have thought she had grown up navigating their mysteries rather than behind the sheltering walls of Manusbau and the Masayi.

The cat found himself hard-pressed to keep pace with her, which was unusual for him. But she was driven by an instinct far stronger than anything he had ever before encountered in a mortal.

Sairu cursed herself with every step. How could she have let herself be drawn away from her mistress’s side? Especially when she knew—she
knew,
Anwar blight it!—that the cat had been followed and their situation was no longer safe. She should have ignored all thoughts of Jovann, all hope of finding him, against all reason, alive. She should have remained at her mistress’s side, discovered some new safe hiding place.

What a fool, what a fool, what a thrice-cursed fool! So her brain repeated in rhythmic beat with her pounding feet. And she vowed, as her penance, that she would leave Jovann to rot in that cell, that she would never think of him again but focus all her heart and energies upon her mistress’s wellbeing. She vowed as much to Anwar and Hulan and all the starry host, though she did not believe in them. If they would only prove their mythic powers, just this once, and let her reach her mistress in time!

The city was too great, the streets too winding and too long. The world itself might come to an end before she ever achieved the city gates.

The cat cried out at her heels, “Idiot girl, let me help you! Lumé love me, can you not stand still and
think
for but a moment?”

She did not slow her pace or look at the cat. She could not have heeded him even had she wished to. Her haste was all-consuming, and there was no time, no time at all, no time to stop or think.

She reached the gates. She reached the countryside beyond. Still she did not slow, though her side ached and her lungs heaved and her heart threatened to give out. Many watched her pass, shuddering at the strangeness of a leper in full flight as though pursued by devils. And was that orange cat at her heels perhaps one of those devils himself?

Lembu Rana was not yet in sight when suddenly she glimpsed a figure coming her way. A figure she could almost but not quite recognize.

“It’s him!” said the cat. “It’s the man who followed me last night!”

Only then did Sairu slow and finally stop. She stared at the figure approaching, and loathing for him raged in her heart. “Are you certain?” she asked.

“I am,” said the cat.

The figure drew nearer. He moved at a frantic pace himself, turning now and then to look back over his shoulder. One hand held up his long Pen-Chan robes lest they trip him as he fled. The other clutched in a tight fist as though hiding something.

Sairu’s hand was already up her sleeve, touching the hilt of a hidden knife. But she paused suddenly as the stranger’s face came into view. She thought, even as she had the night before,
How like his brother he is.

Then she thought,
He has not killed.

The truth of this thought was plain in the stranger’s eyes. Sairu disguised her heaving breaths behind shallow pants and huddled down inside her robes, making herself to all appearances small, frail, weak with sickness. The stranger passed her by without a second glance, and she studied his face more carefully in passing. Again she thought,
He has not killed.

“Follow him, Monster,” she said even as the stranger hastened on down the road. “I must see to my mistress. So follow him and find out where he goes.”

“Very well,” said the cat, for once in his life making no resistance to a direct command.

Indeed, he had taken a good ten paces in this new pursuit before he realized how easily he had obeyed. He flattened his ears at the thought, but it was too late to go back without a severe mark against his dignity. So he pursued the stranger, who smelled a great deal like Jovann but certainly was not Jovann.

The stranger rounded a slight bend in the road, and the cat hastened after. Here they came to a stretch that was un-peopled. Not a single merchant’s wagon or farmer’s cart could be seen coming or going. Ahead rose the city in all its magnificence, and the sounds and smells of it filled the air. But in this small stretch, there was nothing but loneliness and the figure of the running man up ahead.

Then suddenly there was a crack in the world.

The cat recognized it in an instant, the same crack he had witnessed opening in the cell beneath the temple. He smelled the sulfur seeping through, smelled the hatred. It opened right in front of the stranger, and two men stepped forth, out of realms beyond and into this world.

The stranger screamed. And it was as much a scream of recognition as of surprise. Two Chhayans lunged at him, taking hold of his arms. Before the cat had time to think, they had dragged him through their crack in the world, all three vanishing from sight. The opening began to close.

“Dragon’s teeth!” the cat swore. “Dragon’s wretched, rotting teeth!”

With a single leap he covered the distance and slipped through the crack just before it vanished, leaving the road empty behind him. The nightmare of Death surrounded the cat. And it was a nightmare all too familiar.

For what felt like an age the cat stood frozen where he’d landed in this sliver of madness between worlds. He knew this path, the stench of it, the burn of it beneath his paws. He knew it too well. What could possibly have possessed him to leap upon it despite that knowledge?

“The girl is getting into your head, Eanrin,” he muttered furiously, his eyes squeezed shut. It didn’t matter if he opened them or not. Blindness alone would meet his vision, like a prophecy of doom to come. He felt his limbs turning to water, so great was his dread, and he doubted very much that he would be able to take a single step forward in his pursuit.

But then a voice reached out to him across the leagues of his own vast terror. A silver voice, gentle and serene yet cutting like a blade through any boundaries or walls.

Won’t you follow me?

The cat opened his eyes. Sure enough, the blindness pressed in upon him, sickening his gut. But the voice still sang, and when he turned his head to the sound, he was able—if only just—to discern figures moving up ahead of him.

And so, not for the first time in his life, he walked Death’s Path.

Sunan could see colors, and he thought he saw shapes. But these whirled on the edges of his vision so that he could not tell up from down, inside from out. It was as though his vision had shattered and now fell in broken pieces on every side. All he saw for certain were the faces of the men who held him. Faces Sunan knew too well: Chakra and Kosul, both Tiger men of the Khla clan, his father’s trusted right- and left-hand men. Both had shed their share of men’s blood, and that blood stained their hearts and showed red in the rims of their eyes. They were powerful and they were cunning. Above all, they were cruel.

They looked without respect or regard upon their leader’s eldest son and dragged him between them through this strange realm of broken lights and broken shadows. Sunan knew without doubt that he had left his own world far behind, though how he could know this he wasn’t certain. But he felt the imp in his mind screeching and ramming against the edges of his consciousness, desperate to be free, to escape. Its fear infected Sunan’s heart, and he found he was whispering prayers and pleading with his captors to let him go. They only tightened their grips and walked faster.

Chanting filled his ears. Along with the sound came a sudden clearing of vision. Sunan, his head dangling loosely from his neck, stared down at the dry wasteland spreading beneath his feet. It was not the dry of sun-baked, nor even the dry of death. For death to take place there must first be life, and there had never been life here. Nothing had ever grown from this soil, and nothing ever would. Sunan, however, was momentarily glad to see something he could stand on, something besides the swirling insanity through which he had just passed. He raised his head.

In the near distance an edifice of stone marked the only change in the endless horizon. From this edifice came the sound of chanting, and it seemed as though the chanting itself may
be
the very stones of its foundation.

“What is that place?” he gasped.

He did not expect an answer, so he was surprised when one of his father’s men—Kosul, he thought—answered in low voice, “Ay-Ibunda. The Hidden Temple.”

No more was said, but it was enough. Sunan knew he did not want to go anywhere near those dark gates opening before them. He pulled against the Chhayan men’s hold, but they expected his resistance and their grips were firm. “Let me go! Let me go, please!” Sunan cried.

It was a dishonor to his father’s name that he should whimper so. The Tiger men sneered and dragged him beneath the eyes of the stone dragon on one side of the gate.

Yet it wasn’t the stone dragon that made Sunan’s heart quail inside him. For opposite the dragon was a formless stone, rough, uncut, and unlovely. Somehow Sunan felt that something inside it looked out at him. And whatever it was, it was more dreadful even than the dragon.

The imp in his mind shrieked and seemed to bury itself ever deeper within his brain. He hoped it would be quiet now. He had enough to deal with without its chitterings.

Then Sunan was through the gate, passing on into a courtyard where dust and mist swirled together as one entity. The chanting was louder now, and he could just discern the shadowy forms of men clad like priests bowed down together, their voices a constant, droning drum: some high, some low, but indistinguishable. And they created and supported Ay-Ibunda with their voices, with their dreams. Sunan wondered if perhaps this was all a dream. If perhaps he walked outside his body in the realm of the unconscious.

Then he heard a voice crying out to him. A voice too well known, too well loved to be a dream.

“My son! My son!”

He knew then that, whatever the world around him might be, he was real, he was solid. He felt his heart beating at a furious rate in his throat, and he turned to that voice.

“Mother!”

They dragged her down the steps of the central temple building. They dragged her, two great warriors hauling her by ropes binding her arms, her hands, her neck. And yet they looked warily at her, careful not to drop their guard. His brave mother. His fierce mother. They knew she would tear their eyes out if they did not protect themselves.

But her gaze was only for Sunan standing in the center of the courtyard. She lunged against the ropes, which cut deep into her skin. “My son, what have they done to you?” she cried. Her beauty had long since vanished in hatred, but the ferocious love in her eyes when she gazed upon Sunan lent her a strange and fearsome dignity.

Chakra and Kosul dropped their hold on him, and Sunan fell to his knees. But he was on his feet again in an instant. His hands, one still clenched tight, reached out to his mother. He crossed the space between them, took her into his arms, and drew her close. “I’m here, I’m here,” he said as though it were she who needed protecting, who needed comfort. She held him tight, pressing her head to his heart, and he felt his beating pulse calm, felt his breath come more gently from his lungs. They were together. After eight long, long years they were together. United, they would face the Tiger Clan even as they once had. Even here in this nightmare.

Juong-Khla approached. Sunan, gazing over the top of his mother’s head, saw this man who was his father appear in the doorway of the temple and move slowly down the steps. He wore his warrior’s gear: the great pronged helmet, the fur-lined armor, the boots of cured buffalo hide studded with wolves’ teeth. He greeted his son in the same voice with which he would have greeted his enemy. “Well, Sunan. We meet again.”

Sunan felt the jolt of loathing pass through his mother’s body at the sound of her husband’s voice. She pulled out of his arms and turned to Juong-Khla, placing herself like a shield between the Tiger Chief and her son.

Juong-Khla uttered a short, mirthless laugh. “Wildcat, stand away from your cub. I will not kill him.”

“You forget, Honored Husband,” she said through bile in her throat. “You forget, I wrote down with ink and brush your vow to take my son’s life if ever the two of you met again. You forget, but I do not. And you will have to kill me first.”

He blinked slowly. “I vowed to take his life in exchange for Jovann’s. But Jovann is not dead.”

“What?” The word burst from Sunan’s mouth before he could stop it. And his heart leapt with a hope he had long since thought perished. “Jovann is alive?”

“If he is not, it is not your doing,” said the Tiger Chief. “I saw him with my own eyes not many months gone.”

“Where? Where is he?”

“Far beyond your reach, son of my stolen wife. And indeed it should not have surprised me to see him. I should have known from the beginning that you would never have the courage to follow through with your blood-thirst.” Juong-Khla proceeded down the stairs and stood now opposite his son with his wife between them. He folded his arms over his chest. Sunan was equal to his father in height, but nowhere near his match in breadth. The differences between them were always so much starker when they stood face-to-face. No man of the Khla clan could help but see.

None of them would have accepted Sunan as their chieftain’s heir.

“Now,” said Juong-Khla, “the time is short, and I am in no mood to argue or to barter. I need you to tell me where the Dream Walker is.”

Sunan said nothing, in part because he did not know the answer to his father’s question; in part because he did not want to reveal his ignorance right away. In spite of his fear, his natural Pen-Chan cunning—a very different sort of cunning than that of a beast of prey but no less deadly in its own way—reared up in his spirit, cold and intellectual. Across his memory flashed one of the hundreds of proverbs he had memorized over the years of his study: “
A secret kept is a power retained.
” Even the secret of his own ignorance. So he said nothing.

“I know,” said the Tiger Chief, “that you are under the thumb of those twice-blighted Crouching Shadows. I know that you are under oath to serve them. I also know how they have hemmed and harried my people for centuries, trying to prevent that which I
will
accomplish. And so I proclaim you Traitor, and thus named you deserve to die by my hand.”

“No,” said his wife. “He will not die.”

Juong-Khla snarled down at Sunan’s mother and, with a single swipe of his arm, threw her to one side. She shrieked like the wildcat he’d called her and would have thrown herself at him had not his warriors stepped in and restrained her by her bindings. Juong-Khla addressed himself once more to his son.

“Tell me where the Dream Walker is, and I will even now spare your life.”

Still Sunan said nothing.

“I know he has come to this city,” Juong-Khla persisted, beginning to circle his son, watching his face from every angle as he moved, searching for some small crack in his mask. “I know this for truth. The raven brought the message far, and it was as truthful a message as such a creature can speak. They were not its own words, in any case, but Tenuk’s. And Tenuk, old fool though he is, would not have lied to us. Tenuk has been loyal to our order all his life. He has suffered for the sake of our mission, lived and breathed among our enemies. He wore their trappings, spoke their lies, but in his breast there ever beat a true Chhayan heart. He would not deceive me. He sent the Dream Walker to the dungeons beneath the Crown of the Moon. But when we went to fetch him, he was not to be found.”

Juong-Khla leaned in, placing his lips so near his son’s ear that Sunan’s skin burned with the heat of his father’s breath. “Where is he, son of my stolen wife? Where is my prize?”

“I—” Sunan steadied his voice and spoke with great care. “I do not know of what you speak.”

The Tiger Chief’s voice became a low hiss. “
Liar.
”

He whipped out a cruel dagger made of bone and sharpened to a razor’s edge. It was carved with deep, swirling grooves into which decades’ worth of blood had settled, staining it an ugly brown. It had belonged to chieftains of the Tiger Clan for generations past. Juong-Khla gripped it hard and strode to Sunan’s mother, whom he caught by the back of the head, yanking back her chin. He placed the blade along her throat, and his face radiated the urge of slaughter.

“Tell me where the Dream Walker is.”

His mother’s eyes rolled with fury, seeking to burn her husband with their intensity. But she could neither see him nor struggle, so tightly restrained as she was. She growled like an animal, daring him to do his worst.

Sunan watched, and his heart sank. Then suddenly he felt a deadly calm pass over his soul. A calm of inevitable loss. He could not fight what was about to take place. He could not resist it. He could only, as the Pen-Chan philosophers said, face his doom with the courage of equanimity. Thus he might do honor to his mother’s forefathers even as he discredited all the Chhayans of his lineage.

He felt the pulse of the chanters all around him, and their voices spoke of darkness and certain death. In their steady rhythm he found a foothold and braced himself against what would follow. When he answered his father, his voice was steady if not peaceful. “I cannot tell you what you want, for I do not know the answer to your question.”

Juong-Khla bared his teeth. In the next moment he would have dealt the death-stroke. But before his hand could move, a new voice spoke from the depths of the temple.

“Wait.”

Everyone—Juong-Khla, his wife, Sunan, and the warriors standing in the mist—everyone save the phantom chanters turned to the temple door and the figure that appeared at the top of the stairs. And Sunan beheld a face and form unlike anything he had ever before seen.

He was like a man but also unlike in the most grotesque extreme. Seven feet tall, taller even, shrouded in a darkness falling from his shoulders in what may have been a cloak or may simply have been a long, thick shadow. His face was bone-white, the skin stretched too thin across his skull, which was black beneath.

But his eyes were worst of all. For these burned with raging furnaces much greater than the mere size of them would suggest. As though they burned in a realm completely other than this, and there they consumed the entirety of their world. When he opened his mouth to speak, more fire, red with wrath, gleamed in the back of his throat.

Sunan knew in a glance who this was, and he whispered the name he had seen written down but once, in his mother’s coded hand: “The Greater Dark.”