Swords of Waar (7 page)

Finally I found what I hoped was the right door, and opened it. It was the right door. Tubby, our host, was asleep on his bed, snoring softly at the ceiling. His name started coming to me as I looked at him. What was it? Ryan? No. Rian? That was it. Rian-Gi. I slipped in and closed the door behind me.

“Psst! Hey, Rian. Hey, buddy.”

Have you ever seen a bulldog stuck with a cattle prod while napping? Neither have I, but now I don’t have to. Tubby levitated about three feet off the bed and did some kind of spastic ballet move before coming down half-off the bed with one hand to his chest and his eyes as round as ping-pong balls.

“Who-who-who-who—?”

“Relax.” I stepped out of the shadows. “It’s just me.”

He blinked at me for a second, then his eyes went wider than before. I was afraid they were gonna pop out onto his chest. “You! But you’re the worst person it could possibly be! Go away!”

“I need your help to find Lhan.”

He squealed. “By the Seven and the One! Go away! They may be watching the house!”

I looked toward the windows. He was making me paranoid. “Come on, dude. Nobody’s watching. I promise. They all think I went south. Now, will you help me? I need a map to some place called Toaga.”

He clapped his hands over his ears. “Do not tell me! They will ask again! They will put me to the question!”

“They questioned you? About Lhan? They…” A lump of ice slid down into my guts and grew into an iceberg. I clenched my fists. “Wait a minute. You told them. You’re the reason they knew he went with the pirates.”

Rian-Gi buried his face in his hands. “Oh, why did Lhan bring you here? The two of you have brought nothing but misery to this house. I wish they had caught you both before you ever darkened my door!”

That was too much. I grabbed him by the front of his robe and hoisted him off his feet so I could look him right in his fat little face.

“Listen, Madam Butterfly, I’m sorry we inconvenienced you. I’m sorry you’ve had storm troopers keeping you up past your bedtime, but if that’s enough for you to wish your best friend killed by those orange house-coat wearing pricks then you’re a fucking coward, and I oughta—”

He slapped me. It was like being hit with a silk glove full of tapioca, but it still brought me up short. He was red in the face. “Inconvenienced?”

He pushed away from me and tore out of his robe in a flinging frenzy, then stood there panting with his belly hanging out. There were red, half-healed whip cuts all over it.

“You see how inconvenient this has been for me?”

I stared, a hot flush rising in my face. I’d been too easy on Brother Aln. Way too easy. “The priests… The priests did that?”

He turned his head. “I—I was strong even then. Only when they threatened Wae-Fen did I—”

“Wae-Fen?”

He looked hurt. “You do not remember? He served us dinner. He ate with us.”

I thought back to that evening. Everything before me and Lhan had hooked up had kinda ended up on the cutting room floor, but now that I thought about it, I remembered. Rian-Gi had given us dinner in his bedroom—this room—and we’d been waited on by this laughing little pretty boy with slim hips and lavender hair.

“Your, uh, servant?”

“It was I who was servant to… to….”

He started blubbing and slumped on the bed again. I looked down at him, feeling guilty about pressing him, but wanting to hear him say it. “So, to save your lover, you told them where Lhan was.”

A hysterical laugh bubbled out of Rian-Gi’s lips. “To save him from the whip. Yes. I did. They… they gave him the knife instead. As soon as I had betrayed my best friend, they cut Wae-Fen’s throat from ear to ear. A corrupting influence, they said. A noble such as myself should not allow such perversion into my home. I must be a model for the morals of my inferiors.”

His dimpled fists balled up and turned white at the knuckles. He hung his head. “I should have thrown myself at them, killed as many as I could before joining my beloved in death. I am a coward. That I live is proof of it.”

I know it was shitty of me, but for a second, I was kinda inclined to agree with him. Then I felt ashamed of myself. Gay guys had it tough enough on Earth, and we were a supposedly civilized planet. Waar was still in the dark ages, and the church was the fucking Spanish Inquisition. Even a rich guy like Rian-Gi couldn’t stand up for himself here. If you fought back, you got killed. End of story. No laws, no courts, no rights organizations, nobody had your back.

I squatted down beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. But… you don’t really want Lhan to die too, do you?”

He raised his head, haughty and hurt, but then his face crumpled. “I fear I may have already killed him.”

I was afraid of that too, but I didn’t want to think about it. “There’s still a chance. At least I hope so. But I need your help to find him, to save him.”

“But he is with the pirates. They might be anywhere.”

“They’re in a place called Toaga. At least that’s what a priest told me. I just need a map to get me there.”

He pursed his lips, then nodded and stood. “This way. To my private chamber.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE RACE!

F
rom the way he said it, I was expecting his “private chamber” to be some kind of pervy pleasure room, and it was—at least part of it was. It was behind a secret door, just like it was supposed to be, and there were paintings of beautiful purple naked boys all over the place, and books of porny drawings open to the good parts on podiums. There was also a bed and a wardrobe filled with naughty costumes, but another part of the room was more like a professor’s office. There were scrolls on the desk, and thick leather-bound books with titles like
The First Angao Dynasty
and
Heresies of the Khat Rebellion
in piles on the floor, maps on the walls, and ink quills and notebooks and scribbled-on scraps of paper everywhere, which Rian-Gi was digging through like a dog looking for a bone.

I laughed and held up a book called
History and the Nature of Divinity
. “You have to hide history books too?”

He looked up from his search and pointed to the porn. “They might shun me for owning that.” His finger swung around to the history books. “They will kill me for owning that.”

He was dead serious. I didn’t get it. “What? Why?”

“You truly are from another world, aren’t you? History is the most dangerous thing in Ora. The truth about the Seven and the One? The truth about the Wargod? The church has guarded those for centuries. Men have disappeared for only wondering aloud about their true origins. Professors, men of great learning, they all tread carefully around those subjects, choosing, for the sake of their own skin, to concentrate on the succession of kings and the wars between them. Those who do not? Gone. They fall out of windows, they die in tavern brawls, robberies, of strange sicknesses, of accidental poisonings.”

I looked around at all the books again, shaking my head. He’d had all these in his house when the priests had come asking questions. “Damn. You’re braver than I thought.”

He shrugged. “Lhan and I and… others, are part of a loose circle of truth seekers, determined to learn the real story of our past, and we spent much of our youth hunting for forbidden books and digging in old dead cities.” He smiled, and his eyes went all far away. “Those are some of the fondest memories of a sad and profligate life. Lhan and I, alone together, full of youth and curiosity and appetite.”

Alone? Together? Appetite? I blinked. “Wait a minute. You and Lhan…?”

Rian-Gi smirked. “Surely, my dear, you knew he slept on both sides of the bed?”

“Well, yeah, but… but….” I couldn’t help it, my eyes dropped to his gut.

He looked down, shrugging. “Well, I was more svelte then, and Lhan more beautiful, if you can imagine. Ah, here we are.”

He pulled a map from the bottom of a pile and laid it across a desk. “It isn’t shown as Toaga here, but it is marked nonetheless. This is a poor copy of an ancient map of the old kingdoms I made for one of our expeditions. You may have it. It shows the route from Ormolu…” He pointed to a big dot on the upper left side of the map, then trailed his finger down to a smaller dot near the bottom edge of the map. “To Udbec the Impregnable.”

“The—the what?” I was still trying wrap my head around the idea of him and Lhan being together and was only hearing every other word.

“A great tower of rock rising from the forest—well, there is no forest now, but there was then. It was so high and so inaccessible that it was thought to be unconquerable, and the King of the Udar built his castle upon it. That, of course, was before the Seven granted us the gift of levitating air. After that it fell to the first Oran Emperor in a day. It has been abandoned since then, but for the pirates.”

I squinted at the map. There wasn’t much to it. I didn’t see any lakes or oceans or roads, and it was hard to tell what the scale was. “How far is this? How long is it going to take to get there?”

Rian-Gi pursed his lips. “Hmmm. Riding a krae, four perhaps five days.”

“And a ship?”

“Two days? Perhaps less.”

I cursed to myself. Brother Aln had said the church had sent a ship after them days ago. That meant whatever they’d gone to do, they’d already done it, and I’d be getting there almost a week too late. Goddamn it! There was no way Lhan was still alive. But I couldn’t give up. I had to go and see for myself. I
had
to.

I looked up at Rian-Gi as he started to roll up the map. “Thanks for this. I owe you, big time, but I gotta get going. I—I’d kill myself if I didn’t….”

“My dear girl, there are tears in your eyes. You love him that much?”

I don’t know why, but I snapped at him. Maybe I didn’t like him seeing me cry. “What’s it to you? You jealous?”

He looked miffed for a second, then shook his head. “No, not at all. I would not deny you your future with him. I hope you will not deny me our past.”

I shrugged, uncomfortable. “Everybody’s got a past. I got more past than most. No worries. And thanks again.” I took the map from him and turned to the window, then stopped. I was still in my bag-lady outfit, and all of a sudden I was starving. Not the best way to hit the road. I turned back to him. “Uh, I don’t suppose you can hook me up with some water and some chow? And… and if you had any old clothes, maybe a spare sword, I’d really appreciate getting out of this bed sheet.”

He smiled. “I can give you better than spares. Wait here.”

I studied the map while he left the room, trying to figure out if any of the places I’d already been were on it, and what cities and towns I was going to have to avoid on my way to Toaga or Udbec or whatever it was called. Before I’d made much sense of it, Rian was back, carrying something big and bulky and wrapped in a blanket that he had a hard time getting through the door.

He set it down with a clunk, then opened it. I almost cried. It was all the gear I’d had with me the night I was kidnapped—the heavy duty loincloth-bikini and the made-to-measure sleeve and chest armor I’d got when I was a gladiator in Doshaan, the riding boots and clothes Lhan’s servants had made for me, and best of all, my custom-made six-foot-long Aarurrh-style sword, weighted and balanced just for me. And Lhan’s clothes were there too.

“Fantastic! How do you still have these?”

He looked down, sad. “The priests left them behind on the night, so I kept them, hoping, though I had betrayed him, that Lhan would someday return, and need them. And you too, of course.” He turned toward the door. “Dress yourself. I will ask my majordomo to prepare some food for your journey.”

“Excellent. Thanks.”

He paused at the secret door. “Mistress Jae-En. I hope that if—nay—
when
you find Lhan alive, you explain to him why I—why I did what I did, and ask him to forgive me.”

I gave him a hard look. “I’ll tell him what happened, but if you think I’m gonna plead your case for you, you got another think coming.”

He turned a pinker shade of purple. “No no, of course not. It was cowardly of me to ask. I will ask him myself if—that is
when
you bring him back alive.”

He bowed himself out, and I stared down at Lhan’s clothes, looking very empty and forlorn without Lhan in them. “No, pal. I think you had it right the first time.
If
.
If
I bring him back alive.”

***

Running on Waar was better than sex, maybe even better than riding a Harley. How could I hate bounding across the landscape with big twenty-foot strides like the kind you have in dreams, like the ones you see antelopes doing on nature shows? I coulda run like that forever and never got tired of it. I felt like Wonder Woman.

Of course I coulda had a nicer landscape to run through, not that it was all that bad at the beginning. The farmland around Ormolu was the same lush and neon-colored candy-land I remembered from before, with fields full of purple plants, pastures full of six-legged orange sheep-pig things, red shrubs with blue fruit, and little villages of hexagonal houses sprinkled all around, but the next day, as I got away from the center of the country, things started to get a lot drier and dustier. The fields were nothing but bare stalks and dead plants, and the pastures were filled with dead sheep-pigs and sick-looking maku, which were Waar’s answer to buffalo—big shaggy six-legged bastards with heads like fists with eyes—only these all looked like they had the mange, and I could see their ribs through their hides. Dust devils whirled across the red dirt roads, and a whole lot of farms and villages were just plain empty. Half the time there wasn’t anybody around to be scared of me as I ran through the town square.

And the further I went, the worse it got. By the third day, the fields were full of six-legged skeletons, baking white in the sun, and the villages looked like they’d been abandoned for years. I didn’t understand it. I knew rain was rare in Ora. I knew they had to import a lot of wood from down south because there wasn’t enough rainfall up north to grow forests. Lhan and Sai had told me all about it. But why wasn’t there enough water for farming? Hadn’t I seen a whole aquarium full of water back in the Temple of Ormolu? Why weren’t they irrigating these fields? It made no sense.