Shadowed By Wings (28 page)

“She’s dead,” I snapped, unnerved. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Prinrut looked back at me, the red skin about her eyes dewy. I wanted to hold her, love her, protect her. I wanted to slap her, shake her, rail against her apathy. But I did none of it. Instead I informed Greatmother that Kabdekazonvia was no more.

Upon learning of Kabdekazonvia’s demise, the plump eunuch fell into a formidable rage, hurling expletives and cushions at the rest of us, howling, beating his chest, and running circles about the central chamber like one gone mad. He fell upon Sutkabde, the poorest eater of us all now that Kabdekazonvia was dead, and rammed pastry after pastry down her throat until she turned blue about the lips and passed out. He dragged her unconscious body to the water buckets by the door and plunged her head in to rouse her. With a gurgle, she came to and vomited all he’d forced her to eat. He dragged her back to the pastry platter and with unrelenting determination, forced a clawful more pastries down her throat.

The rest of us melted into air by remaining motionless with fear. Prinrut plunged into catatonia again.

That night, I could not revive Prinrut, no matter how frequently I visited her, no matter how I pleaded with and shook her, no matter how I cursed and cried. Dawn came. Prinrut remained lock limbed and vacant eyed in her burrow. The eunuchs arrived.

“To Prelude with her,” the plump one said, flapping his hands as if shooing out a cur. The boy eunuch dropped to his knees and skittered into her cave to drag her out. He reminded me of a carrion beetle.

I staggered forward to protest. Misutvia caught my arm and shook her head imperceptibly.

“Let her go, Naji.” Her lips barely moved, her voice was hardly audible. “It’s what she wants.”

“But—”

“Let her go.”

I could not watch as the mincing eunuch and the boy hauled Prinrut from the viagand. Turning my back against the whispering rasp of her bare feet dragging across stone, I stared at a wall.

I never saw her again.

I awoke at noon from a restless, chill nap during which I’d dreamed constantly of the cocoon-encased haunt writhing in the pit of my belly. Noise had woken me, a sound of activity. I crawled from my burrow, stiffly stood, and shuffled out of the shadows just as six unfamiliar women staggered into the viagand chambers, reeking of venom.

They stood there several moments, wobbling, dazed. As if from an unseen signal, they staggered off in separate directions, seeking caves they’d clearly inhabited before. One woman approached me, blood-punched eyes locked upon my burrow. I stepped aside and watched her crawl into it.

I inhaled the rich citric trail of venom scent she left behind. Greatmother approached me.

“We’ll be taken to the bathhouse after noon feast,” she said tonelessly.

I turned cold. Bathhouse? Should I dare ask why we’d be taken there? I should not, I should not.

“Why?” I asked, tensing in anticipation of her declaring my question impudent and therefore a transgression.

But instead, Greatmother said, “To be washed.”

I left it at that, knowing that something terrible would happen shortly. Something from which I could escape only through death.

At noon feast, we were joined by the six women who had returned to the viagand. At the plump eunuch’s summons, they crawled from their caves, some dragging themselves out by their elbows, looking like belly-slithering salamanders exposed upon the brackish bottom of a drained pond. At Greatmother’s behest, we helped the six totter to the feeding cushions. The woman whose arm I held was the color of glair and her skin felt gelatinous. The smell of venom gushed from her as if she were an aquifer of dragon poison.

All of the six refused even the smallest morsel of food. I expected apoplexy from the plump eunuch, but he merely clucked indulgently.

“Good girls, you’ve worked hard; a reprieve today, then. But tomorrow, hey-o! I want those cheeks filled, those bellies plump. Yes?”

“Yes,” they breathed, staring from unblinking eyes that were surrounded by oozing creases of red skin.

The three eunuchs theatrically finished off the remainder of the meal. Afterward, they led Greatmother, me, Misutvia, and Sutkabde to the bathhouse.

At the plump eunuch’s orders, we stripped and stood with legs spraddled and arms outstretched. The mincing eunuch and the young boy washed us. Commanded to not touch ourselves while they scrubbed our skin with boar-bristle brushes, we stood immobile, save for our collective shivering.

They had a system, the mincing eunuch and the boy. The mincing eunuch washed from the waist up, while the boy slid along the blue-tiled floor on his knees, scrubbing vigorously at our ankles, poking between the folds of our vulvas, scraping little rolls of old skin and dirt from our thighs.

When the process was finished, we weren’t permitted to dry ourselves. This the plump eunuch did, praising or vilifying our bodies at great length.

I did not fight it. Fear and the resignation of those around me sapped me of any inclination toward defiance. Indeed, the thought never once occurred to me to refuse, to rebel. Instead, I made an effort to please, to do exactly as told. Obedience would shield me, would convert the eunuchs from jailers to friends. Or so I wanted to believe.

From the bathhouse, we were led to the Retainers’ bunks. It was there that I discovered that the demerits marked against me stood for how many Retainers I was commanded to pleasure. My mother’s haunt writhed in its venom-wrought cocoon within me, talons desperately scoring the psychic aegis in an effort to billow into my body and attack those who defiled me.

“There, there, Naji,” the plump eunuch crooned as he led my shattered body down night-darkened corridors an eternity later. “See how well the Retainers like you? When you learn their ways a little better, as Greatmother has, your skills will help you bleed less.”

The medic’s den was a cobwebbed and dank grotto. An apothecary’s chest and a three-legged table covered with steel instruments stood across from a bamboo cot. The eunuch led me to the cot. He then departed, taking his lantern with him, and I lay there shivering until at last a man swept in, gowns reeking of tobacco smoke. His many coiled braids gleamed in his lantern’s light as he stood above me, lips compressed above his neat, sharp beard.

“Could you not have washed first?” he asked in disbelief. He thumped his lantern down on the table and sutured closed my wounds.

I dreamed that night while alone and venom-deprived in the medic’s den. I dreamed of Kiz-dan and her babe. Kiz-dan, understand, was the holy sister I’d taken with me when I’d fled Convent Tieron, but after we reached Clutch Re, my dependence upon venom almost killed Kiz-dan’s babe. One day I’d returned to the home we’d made for ourselves in the Zone of the Dead to find her and her child gone.

Perhaps I dreamed of her as my violated body shivered uncontrollably in the medic’s dank grotto because, by my brutal treatment in the Retainers’ bunks, I’d had the deceptive security and sense of community in the viagand chambers wrested violently away from me. I had had, once again in my life, lost a sense of home to violence, however illusory and peculiar that feeling of home had been.

In my dream, Kiz-dan stood upon a rickety rope-and-wood bridge, suspended far above a deep chasm, and she held little Yimyam in her arms. He was playing with her chin, trying to open her mouth and toy with her teeth. He babbled merrily. I stood on the chasm’s bank, twining grass stalks into twists. I didn’t know why I did so. I was compelled. Stacks and stacks of the twists surrounded me, teeming with vermin.

Kiz-dan lifted a hand to wave at me. Little Yimyam followed her hail and gurgled with delight at the sight of me. The bridge snapped.

The sound was like the crack of a whip, magnified a hundredfold, and Kiz-dan cried out and lunged toward me, one hand clutching Yimyam to her chest, the other outstretched in my direction. Her hand was close; her fingertips brushed my leg.

But I did not reach to grab her.

No.

I turned and walled myself deeper within the vermin-infested stacks of grass twists, while mother and child plunged wailing to their deaths.

I woke sweating and sobbing, and it took me a long time afterward to fall back into sleep.

I was left alone in the impenetrable dark of the medic’s grotto for an indeterminable time. I slept, I woke, I hungered, my wounds wept. Then the plump eunuch appeared, lantern swinging. Misutvia limped in after him, her sallow cheeks caved in with pain. She held one arm to her chest.

“Sit on the floor,” the eunuch said curtly. “The medic will come shortly, hey.”

He took the lantern with him and thumped the door shut, congealing us to the dark. After a pause, I heard Misutvia slide down a wall to the floor.

My teeth clacked together from a shudder.

“We’ll be taken to the stables on the morrow. The venom will help,” Misutvia said. Her voice was hoarse, as if strong hands had recently wrapped about her throat.

“The Retainers look after the dragons here, mucking their stalls, feeding them, grooming them. They’re criminals all, serving a life sentence in Temple’s employ. They’re also superficial guards, though even they don’t take that duty seriously; we’re surrounded by jungle, hidden and unknown to all but the Ranreeb and the few deranged daronpuis that are stationed here on a rotational basis. Understand me, Naji?”

She spoke quickly, and I realized that she was not only distracting both herself and me from what we’d been subjected to, but also using this rare opportunity to impart information without the presence of others impeding her tongue.

“How many Retainers are there?” I asked, teeth chattering.

“Seven.”

There had seemed many more of them than that. Many more.

“And daronpuis?” I asked.

“Five residing here each season. Zealots, all.”

“Will the daronpuis … ?” I choked on my question. She understood it nonetheless.

“No, they won’t touch you in that manner. But they will hurt you if your interpretations of what you hear during your union with a dragon don’t please them. They have methods.”

“How do I please them?”

“You’ve lain with a dragon before?”

I hesitated; we were forbidden to talk of our previous lives.

“You know I don’t claim transgressions against any but Greatmother,” Misutvia said impatiently. “Answer the question. We’ve little time before the medic shows up.”

“Yes. I have,” I breathed. “I’ve known a dragon.”

“So you’ve heard the so-called canticles.”

Canticles. An excellent word for what I’d heard: a dragon-chanted text, a melodic composition of dragon scripture and historical lore.

“I’ve heard snatches of them, yes.”

“Focus on the emotion those hallucinations provoke, splice them with your own experiences in life, and create an interpretation from that. Think of what Temple wants, what it needs: power. Feed them names that suggest how they might increase that.”

“I know nothing of politics. I’m a Clutch Re rishi.”

A pause. I could hear her wondering how and why a lowly invisible serf had ever ended up here, in this secret jail for women, where the imprisoned were forced, at the behest of the Ranreeb, to be intimate with dragons.

“I see. Well. It will go harder for you. The rest of us are bayen; we know Ranon ki Cinai politics, know people of influence and power. We’ve gleaned, in our lives outside these walls, a little of the alliances and conspiracies woven throughout the fabric of Malacar and the Archipelago. We use that knowledge in our interpretations.”

Alliances. Conspiracies. People of influence and power. I knew none of that.

Wait. Kratt and his dragonmaster.

In remembering them, I remembered what motivated them: They sought the answer to the mystery of why no eggs laid by domesticated dragons ever hatched a bull. Surely Temple sought the same. Of course they did. Did Misutvia guess at such? What
did
she think her purpose here was?

I asked.

“Purpose,” she said bitterly. “To glut the Ranreeb’s sick fantasies. To provide him with venom-inspired babble that might strengthen Temple. To suffer and die as a prisoner, for wanting more freedoms than a woman should want.”

She did not believe the rite to be sacred. Nor had she guessed at the Ranreeb’s true goal.

“If you are able, Naji, endure this life as long as you can,” Misutvia said, her voice quickening. “I’m from the Caranku Bri of Lireh. Surely you’ve heard of our clan? It’s the wealthiest merchant guild in Malacar, and I
know
my mother must have sent news of my disappearance to my brother by now. I’m certain he’s returning early from his expedition north, even as we speak. He’ll find me yet, Naji. I have to endure until that time.”

Her excitement was infectious, but I couldn’t share her view so facilely.

“How will he possibly find us?” I asked. “This prison and what goes on here will be a secret known only to a select few.”

“Malaban, my brother, is well connected. He owns lands and factories, and his fleet of ships is one of the finest on the coast. Surely you’ve heard of Malaban Bri of Lireh?”

“I’m rishi,” I reminded her. “Does he own dragons?”

“Temple has never granted him the right to own a Clutch, but he’s been granted license to own a clawful of dragons. He has fifteen at the moment, five of which retain their wings.”

The man was as powerful as she said, then. Perhaps she was right; perhaps her brother
could
find us here. But I was still somewhat doubtful. After all, she’d been imprisoned, despite her status.

So I asked her how that had occurred, how one of her status had ended up imprisoned in the Ranreeb’s unknown jail.

“Do you think that just because we are bayen women, our lives are ones of luxury and ease?” Misutvia replied. “Some of us are here because we wanted too much. Too much knowledge, too much equality, too much freedom. We weren’t docile and domestic enough for whoever it was that eventually applied sufficient pressure on Temple to have us imprisoned. Others of us are here because we just didn’t please. As women, we are disposable and replaceable, remember.”