Lord of the Changing Winds (17 page)

Along one edge of the hall, with here a foot or there a wing dangling casually above the height, rested the Lord of Fire and Air and his
iskarianere
Eskainiane Escaile Sehaikiu, and the red griffin who was their mate, Esterikiu Anahaikuuanse, and a griffin of pure shining white whose name Kes did not know. They had all been studying the human man. Kes thought Opailikiita was very brave to stay by the man and shield him not merely from the forceful heat of the desert, but also from those powerful stares, which, at least from Anahaikuuanse and from the white griffin held considerable hostility.

Now the king and all three of his companions turned their heads and regarded Kairaithin for a long moment, and then as one bent that implacable regard on Kes. She resisted an almost overpowering urge to step backward and hide in Kairaithin’s shadow.

Keskainiane Raikaisipiike
, said the king.

“Lord,” Kes answered hesitantly, after she found a quick glance at Kairaithin did not yield any guidance.

What is this here?
demanded the king, the power of his voice ringing through the hot air.
Do I understand you bent the nature of fire to repair injury to this creature of earth?

Kes was too startled by what seemed a rebuke to answer at once. But then she was, to her own surprise, angry. She said, “I bent
his
nature, lord. Since it was fire that injured him in the first place, it seems only fair that fire should repair his wounds!”

The king and the red female both looked angry at this, though whether because Kes had used fire in such a way or merely because of her boldness, she could not tell. The white griffin looked savagely hostile. But Escaile Sehaikiu tipped his head back and laughed—silent, joyful griffin laughter that made Kes want to smile, though she was still angry. It occurred to her that in griffins, anger and laughter might not be so separate as they were in men, but then she did not know what to make of this realization or whether the insight might be important.

The white griffin said in a ferocious, deadly voice,
That is rightfully my prey, and nothing to give to a human woman.

Kes flinched from its hostility, but Kairaithin said in his driest tone, “If one will make a fire mage of a human, it is hardly just to be astonished when occasionally she acts according to the nature of a human. You may well give up your prey to her and to me, Tastairiane Apailika. Why not? You may surely afford the luxury.”

You claim this man, then,
said the king, in a hard tone that silenced any response the white griffin might have made.

“I do. Will anyone challenge my decision?” Kairaithin walked across the hall and stood over the man Kes had healed, looking back aggressively at the other griffins.

Opailikiita folded her protective wing and drew away from the man, coming to join Kes. But her withdrawal was somehow nothing like a retreat; from her fierce stare, it was clear she would willingly take on all four of the larger and greater griffins to protect the human man—for Kes’s sake, because Kes had left him with her. Kes buried a hand in the fine feathers of Opailikiita’s throat, trying to draw bravery of her own from the brilliant courage of the slim griffin.

“He will wake soon,” observed Kairaithin, not glancing down at the man. “And what shall we say to him when he wakes, O Lord of Fire and Air?” He returned the hot stare of the king with effortless power of his own. “Will any here declare that I was wrong to seek out this human woman and raise the fire in her blood?”

You remind us all of your prior right decision
, said the king harshly.
Shall we believe that all your decisions are right?

Kairaithin smiled, a thin, fierce smile with nothing of yielding in it.

At his feet, the man moved at last, groaned, and opened his eyes, blinking against the flooding light, powerful even under the shelter of the stone hall, staring around with a dazed, helpless expression. Without thinking, Kes stepped forward as the man pushed himself up. She knelt to touch his shoulder, that he should not find himself in this place altogether alone.

I
n the dream, Bertaud had wings… cleverly feathered wings that could feel the most subtle shift of wind. He stared into the wind and saw it layered with warmth and greater warmth, heat rising where red stone underlay it. He turned, fire limning each feather of his wings as he curved them to catch the air. Below him, the red desert spread out in all directions: rock and sand, dust and silence; nothing moved upon it but the wind. Both the desert and the wind were his, and he loved them with a fierce possessive love….

He lay upon red stone, in rich sunlight that pooled on the stone like molten gold; he stared into the hot brilliant light with eyes that were not dazzled. The heat struck up from the rock like a furnace, and he found it good. His wings were spread, turned to catch the sun. There could never be too much heat, too much light….

He rode through a storm. The wind roared through his wings. He was flung upward by the violence of the wind; a wing tip, delicately extended, was enough to send him spinning sideways into a loop that carried him, at last, above the storm into clear air. He cried aloud with exaltation. His voice struck through the air like a blade, but against the bellow of the storm he could hardly hear even his own cry; yet somehow both his cry and the roar of the storm were part of the great silence of the desert. It was a silence that encompassed all sound, just as the violence of the storm itself was encompassed by the greater stillness of the desert…

He woke slowly. He did not hurt and that seemed strange, though he did not understand why he expected pain. Trying to move, he could not understand the response of his own body. It seemed the wrong body. He could not understand why he did not have wings and talons. His… hands… yes,
his
hands… moved, flinching from unexpected grit and stone, but he did not know what he had expected. He opened his eyes, with some difficulty. The lids were gummy, sticky with… blood, he thought. Blood? There had been… there had been… an accident? A… fight?

He got his eyes open at last, scrubbed his arm across them, and looked up. Memory crashed back so hard it stopped his breath.

He was lying on stone, high above the world. Pillars of twisted red stone stood all about, supporting a roof of stone so that he lay in shade—a hot shade, so hot the very air seemed like the breath of a living animal. The great hall surrounded by these pillars was floored with sand; the desert breeze wandered in and stroked the sand into patterns on the floor. It was not a human place. He did not have to be told that it was a place for griffins, which they had somehow drawn out of fire and the desert.

And there were griffins in it: one that caught his eye immediately though it was not the nearest, dark bronze eagle forequarters merging seamlessly into lion rear, relentless golden eyes staring into his. Anger poured off it, like heat against his face. The anger frightened him. Yet Bertaud did not feel as… stifled, as stunned, as when he had first met Kairaithin before the battle. He could think, now. He thought he would be able to speak, if he came up with something worth saying.

Even so, it took an effort to tear his gaze away, to get himself up on one elbow and look around. A gold-and-copper griffin was there, bright as the sun, close by the side of the first. Another griffin, dark red, her feathers heavily barred with gold, lay couchant behind those two males. That one, too, seemed angry. Angry and fierce and ready to kill for any provocation, or no provocation. And a white griffin, quite near, far more terrifying, a griffin from whom Bertaud flinched reflexively before he even remembered why.

Then he remembered. He froze, trying to deal with that memory. The white griffin did not move. Its fiery blue eyes held his, utterly inhuman.

A hand touched his shoulder, and he flinched, turning his head. A woman knelt at his side. No. A girl. Hardly more than a child.
Kes
, he thought. Of course, this would be the girl Kes, who had frightened her family and friends by vanishing into the desert with an unknown mage and had not returned.

The girl’s eyes met his with a strange openness, as though she had no secrets in all the world, and yet there was a silent reserve at the back of them that he could not see through at all. A heavy golden light moved in her eyes, a light that held fiery wings and red desert sand, so that it took him a moment to see that those eyes were actually a grayed blue, like Niambe Lake under a stormy sky; the color seemed very strange. He had expected her eyes to be the color of fire.

Then her gaze dropped. Untidy pale hair fell across her delicate face, and she drew back against the… shelter, he thought, odd though that seemed… the shelter of a slim brown griffin that curved its body behind the girl and curved a wing across her shoulder.

Behind the girl stood Kairaithin. Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin. The name slid through Bertaud’s mind with a strange familiarity. Kairaithin still wore the shape of a man, yet he did not look like anything human. He stared back at Bertaud with pitiless calm, as though the stillness of the desert had settled in his eyes. He looked… satisfied. As well he might, Bertaud thought bitterly. But the griffin mage did not, at least, seem angry.

Bertaud got to his feet, slowly. But not painfully. Recalling his battle, if one could so describe it, with the white griffin, this seemed miraculous. He looked around again, incredulously, at the stone hall, at the waiting griffins, at the girl leaning against the griffin at her back, petting it as though it were a cat… at Kairaithin.

“Man,” said Kairaithin, and waited, starkly patient.

Bertaud met his eyes with what pride he could find. The griffin mage stared back, something strange and not human in his eyes… a kind of hard, fierce humor that was not the humor of a man. Bertaud bent his head slightly before that black stare, acknowledging the griffin’s power. “Lord.”

Kairaithin tilted his head in satisfaction. “I would have brought you to this place without spilling blood out on the sand.”

“And what place is this?” Bertaud steadied his voice with an effort.

“The hall of the Lord of Fire and Air.” Kairaithin walked past Bertaud toward the bronze-and-gold griffin Bertaud had seen first. As he moved, he changed: rising, swelling, extending in all directions, the true form of the griffin emerging from the shape of the man.

He made a splendid griffin: large and heavy, with powerful shoulders and eyes blacker than the desert sky at night. His dark coloring made him yet more impressive: His wings, so heavily barred with black that little red showed through, mantled above a body the color of the dark embers at the heart of a fire. He said to Bertaud,
But here you are come, in the end, are you not, man?

His voice as a griffin was very much like the voice he had as a man. It had the same hard humor to it. It slid into Bertaud’s mind like a lion slipping through the dark.

Bertaud thought of too many things to say, and thought better of saying any of them.

The lord of the griffins stirred, hardly more than a slight ruffling of bronze feathers, an infinitesimal shift of his head. But he drew all eyes. His strength and anger beat through the hot air. He said, in a voice like the sun slamming down at noon,
Bertaud, son of Boudan. Do you serve the King of Feierabiand?

Bertaud closed his eyes for a moment. He said carefully, “Yes.” And added, “Lord.”

The griffin tipped his head to one side, unreadable eyes fixed on Bertaud’s.
Sipiike Kairaithin considers you might usefully bear a message from me to the King of Feierabiand.

“I might,” agreed Bertaud and, because he did not care to be taken lightly, “If
I
judged it useful; I am my king’s servant, and none of yours.”

The gold-and-copper griffin tossed its head back in what seemed a silent shout of intermingled laughter and anger; the red-and-gold one was merely angry. So was the griffin king, hard hot anger like a gust from a desert sandstorm.

His own pride held Bertaud still. The girl was not so proud. She drew aside, the brown griffin with her, and tucked herself down into a small space at the foot of one of the twisted pillars. Bertaud was sorry he had frightened her, and at the same time, incredulous that she should be in this place, in this company. He wanted badly to take her aside and ask her a thousand questions. He wished he was certain he would survive long enough to speak to the girl. He was not even confident he would survive the next moment.