Shadowed By Wings (38 page)

Always while I and my guards ate such hearty fare in the privacy of my stall, my fellow apprentices slurped their tepid gruel from their cold wooden bowls. I felt their resentment build with each swallow.

That morning was no different. The dragonmaster appeared with the stamped tin boxes. I drank the charmed, marshy herbal from his gourd, then ate. The guards bolted down their food and swigged watered maska from the bladder the dragonmaster shared with them. As a group, we then started for the vebalu course as the rest of the apprentices labored about the stables.

Halfway cross the hovel courtyard, I abruptly stopped in my tracks.

There walked Dono, leading a yearling through the sandstone archway into the courtyard beyond.

My heart slammed to a halt, then pulsed in a flood-rush of emotion. On either side of me, the Cafar guards halted because I had.

The dragonmaster had been walking some ways ahead of us; oblivious to my stop, he continued on. He was muttering darkly to himself, scowling and shaking his bald head, hating that each apprentice we passed furtively made a warding sign in our wake. Whether it be inductee filling chinks in stall wall with mortar, servitor grooming scale, or veteran bolting a yearling’s wings to lead the beast out for exercise, every single apprentice flicked both earlobes a clawful of times. From the periphery of our vision, we could see it, but each time the dragonmaster turned to catch an apprentice in the act, the apprentice would scratch nose, head, or neck, feigning irritation from louse or mosquito.

It wasn’t until the dragonmaster was several stall lengths ahead of me that he noticed I no longer followed. With a dragonish bugle of frustration, he whirled about and waved clenched fists into the air.

“You can’t be tired already! Walk, sorry rishi whelp, walk!”

I pointed at the line of veterans just starting to lead their wing-pinioned dragons out for exercise.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked, my voice high. “What in the name of Re is he doing here?”

The dragonmaster followed my finger. He hunched his shoulders to his ears, stalked to my side, and opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off.

“You’ve kept him here all this time! After what he did—”

“I banished him the moment I found out he informed Temple,” the dragonmaster snarled. “Don’t question my judgment; don’t take me for the fool.”

I stared into the dragonmaster’s skull face. The mottled sage and brown skin covering his cheeks looked like ill-fitted, poorly cured leather.

“Then what’s he doing here?” I whispered.

“The Ranreeb demands it.”

I gaped.

“Did you expect much else?” the dragonmaster asked acidly. “Temple wants you dead, girl. Dead. And Dono is their assassin.”

“How long was he banished for?”

“Today is his first back.”

“So he’s not been training, either.”

The dragonmaster snorted. “Don’t look to equalize his skill with yours.”

I looked back at Dono. At that precise moment, he turned. The courtyard collapsed; it was as if we stood eye to eye. I caught my breath with the malevolence in his stare.

“He can’t enter Arena alongside me,” I said.

“The Ranreeb insists.”

I tore my eyes from Dono’s long-distance glare and stared instead at the dragonmaster. He looked me full in the eye, and it was harrowing, that look, like gazing into a chasm that held a mirror faintly visible at bottom, a mirror reflecting my own face.

“Keep away from Dono in Arena. Whatever happens, however the bull attacks, be aware of where that veteran stands.” He spat. “And for the love of your life, use your weapons the way they’re meant to be used. Forget your asinine vow.”

Fear made it impossible for me to reply.

Throughout that day, I trained hard, harder than I’d trained yet.

I sweated and ached, broke a great blister upon my palm from parrying with my poliar so vigorously. Just as dusk began to descend, for the first time since my return, I effectively applied my trademark technique with my cape against the dragonmaster.

I whipped my cape smoothly over my head, swirled it fast into a rope, and snapped it, chain end out, at the Komikon’s testicles to fend him off. With a startled cry, the dragonmaster leapt back, badly stung. I acknowledged my triumph with a grim nod at the dragonmaster, who stood slightly stooped, cheeks suffusing red from the brutal sting against his manhood. He regained his poise with the swiftness that decades of discipline and training imparted.

“About time,” he growled. He gestured at the bamboo bull. “Now leap over that, hey.”

I flared my nostrils and stared at the bamboo bull, a hulking shadow in the oncoming dusk.

“Leap over that, I say,” the dragonmaster ordered.

“Yes,” I stiffly replied. “Komikon.”

I put down my bludgeon and checked that my vebalu cape was secure about my neck. Taking several slow, deep breaths, I rocked to and fro from the balls of my feet to my heels, poised to break into a run toward the fake bull.

I could do it.

I’d leapt upon the back of a kuneus plenty of times in Convent Tieron, using one of its closest forelegs as a springboard to launch myself atop the beast for grooming. I’d done so while debilitated from starvation, while plagued by the haunt’s will. I could certainly mount the stationary bamboo structure before me now, however much taller it was than the senile bulls I’d once served.

What remained to be seen was whether I could flip myself over it as the dragonmaster had ordered, in the manner that I’d often seen Ringus and the other servitors do.

Taking a deep breath, I started toward the hide-covered bamboo.

I approached it at an easy run. Several body lengths before the foreleg, I shortened my stride and quickened my pace. I leapt onto the leg and used the momentum of my run to spring myself upward to the dorsum.

Smack!
My hands landed on coarse hide and the structure shuddered, and I kept my arms straight as my legs swung up into the air from behind me. My feet were high above me for the briefest of moments while I did a handstand upon the dorsal ridge, and then, using the momentum of my vault, I flung myself into the air.

It was like flying, a soaring freedom of spirit and body. For an exhilarating moment, I was weightless. The air and I were one. I felt as if leathery wings would erupt from my shoulder blades.

Then I began falling.

Arms flailing.

Thud.

I landed hard upon my back, and my head slammed against the ground with stunning force. I think I blacked out for several moments, because the next thing I knew, my head was cradled in the dragonmaster’s lap.

I felt viciously nauseated. The bamboo bull towered over me, undulating dizzily in my jarred vision. My head roared.

“Clutch Re’s Calim Musadish has been scheduled for three weeks from now,” the dragonmaster intoned above me, and his words sounded elongated and warped. “Three weeks, understand?”

Calim Musadish: Vale Ascension. The Temple-chosen day when a bull departed its Clutch for Arena.

Calim Musadish was always so well attended and the packed crowd in such a religious fervor upon seeing the holy splendor of Re revealed, that each year a clawful of young and elderly were trampled by the seething horde. Mother had refused to allow Waivia and me to attend a single Calim Musadish. Indeed, her graphic descriptions of how the unfortunate died under the feet of the frenzied pious instilled fear in all the women of my birth clan, and no children from Clutch Re’s pottery guild had ever attended the spectacle during my youth.

The bitter irony was that I now would be not only attending but participating in that same ceremony.

“Tomorrow we practice on this bull some more, hey,” the dragonmaster said grimly. “I’ll have no repeat performance of today. Hear?”

I could but stare giddily at the sky and shiver at twilight’s empurpled gloom.

NINETEEN

T
hat evening, Waikar Re Kratt visited the dragonmaster and me in my stall.

He appeared suddenly, flanked by his personal guards, whose sinuous facial cicatrices were as barbarous and frightening as those of the two Cafar guards standing sentinel at my stall’s threshold. Outside the apprentices’ hovel, the nightly appearing daronpu continued his reading of a Temple scroll, his clackron-amplified voice booming over the entire courtyard and not missing a beat upon Kratt’s appearance.

The dragonmaster’s spine snapped straight as Kratt strode into my stall. I inhaled sharply and choked on the chunk of meat I’d been eating. Sputtering and wheezing, I quickly rose from where I’d been crouched on my haunches, eating from my tin food box. I stepped back several paces, deeper into my stall, pulse racing.

Kratt stopped before the dragonmaster. His magnificent indigo cape came to a swirling rest about him. He held a scroll clutched in one fist.

Kratt studied the dragonmaster for long moments, as if he were looking upon a particularly intricate work of ceramic art that he highly detested. The sweet, cloying scent of ambergris filled the air.

“She’s to enter Arena,” he finally said, voice soft and toxic.

Confusion passed over the dragonmaster’s face. “I know it.”

“Today the Ashgon issued the Bill. Her name is on it.”

The Ashgon: the titular head of the Malacarite branch of Ranon ki Cinai, and the sacred advisor to the Emperor. Every year, the Ashgon’s Bill stated which apprentices, from what Clutch, would perform Abbasin Shinchiwouk. The number of times each apprentice would be required to enter Arena, and the hour at which each Clutch bull would perform, was also included on the document. Egg had lectured us at length about the Bill, stressing that the names a Clutch dragonmaster presented in advance to the Ashgon helped the Emperor’s sacred advisor decide whom to include on his holy statement of reckoning.

The Bill, reprinted by the thousands, helped spectators lay wagers and Clutch overseers form alliances and increase their wealth and status during the eight days of Arena.

The dragonmaster now looked angry in his confusion. “So her name is on the Bill, despite my recommendations otherwise. We expected as much.”

“Ah, but the Ashgon has given the Bill teeth, Komikon. Look for yourself.” Kratt extended the hand that held the scroll.

The dragonmaster looked from the rolled parchment to Kratt, then back again. It was illegal for a Mottled Belly to know the hieratic arts, even a half-breed piebald like the Komikon.

Pursing his lips, he came to a decision, took the scroll, and moved outside a few feet, that the rising moon’s light might help him read. I’d underestimated the breadth of both his skills and his courage.

“At the bottom,” Kratt said. “Beside the Ashgon’s seal.”

The dragonmaster unrolled the scroll to its full length and with a mighty scowl read the paper.

He looked up. “It says here that a Clutch forfeits eight years of the right to perform Abbasin Shinchiwouk if a Bill-listed apprentice doesn’t show.”

“Yes, Komikon,” Kratt drawled. “It does state such.”

“Since when has this been the law?”

“Since the Ranreeb informed the Ashgon of my knowledge of a certain Temple fortress hidden in the jungle, I imagine. Since I kidnapped two of the women they’d imprisoned in that secret place.”

The dragonmaster shook the Bill angrily and a muscle below his left eye began twitching. “Apprentices fall ill, get wounded. A fifth of the names on this won’t appear at Arena because of either illness or desertion! It’s always the way.”

“And substitutes will be found for them.”

The dragonmaster stared at Kratt, then swung his gaze upon me.

“But no substitute could ever be found for her, hey-o! The Ranreeb knows what she looks like, and her eyes bespeak years of venom use. No rishi has such eyes.”

“Clever man,” Kratt said quietly, acidly.

“The Ranreeb expects his assassin to be successful. He means not only to have the Dirwalan Babu murdered here, in these stables, but he means to ruin you as well in the process.”

“For permitting the deviant to enter my stables, yes,” Kratt murmured, and his voice dropped lower and his eyes turned upon me. My heart stilled. “For knowing about the rite, and guessing what knowledge I might glean from a woman who performs such.”

“You’ll station more guards here,” the dragonmaster said. It came not as a request, but an announcement of fact.

“Yes.” Still, Kratt’s blue eyes impaled me. Sweat trickled down the insides of my arms. “More guards, to protect not only her, but every single apprentice within these walls. Eight years without entering Arena would ruin me, Komikon. No Clutch could survive such.”

The dragonmaster cursed and spat on the ground.

“But I’ve really no fear of her dying while in my stables, have I?” Kratt murmured. He looked from where he’d been studying me to the dragonmaster. Steel entered his tone. “Because she’s the Dirwalan Babu. Isn’t she, Komikon? The Skykeeper’s Daughter?”

“You know it,” the dragonmaster replied shortly. “You’ve twice seen the bird appear in her defense.”

“Yet it didn’t rescue her from that fortress.”

“She couldn’t summon it in her state! There are boundaries, limits; the otherpowers of the Realm are structured by certain laws.”