The Carnelian Throne (7 page)

I crouched in the sand, gulping great chunks of air out of the moonless night. I had brought us into time-space a trifle high, and we had fallen a short distance to land in a tangle. I was not displeased—dragging the both of them, the cahndor a deadweight, and Sereth so much heavier that it seemed as if I attempted to pull the whole congruence plane out with me onto the sand of the bayshore—I counted myself fortunate to have emerged at all. That I had brought them both through on my power alone was near miraculous. But desperation is an inspiring instructor, and a propitiously timed obviation of space had seemed our only alternative to an eventual death atop a mountain of suicidally ferocious animals.

Chayin’s voice, cursing monotonously in his native tongue, was the first sound I heard over my own pumping lungs. Then, as I struggled to my feet and brushed the sand away, I saw Sereth.

He stood at the water’s edge, facing out to sea. Chayin, hunkered down nearby, stared straight at the sand between his feet, still excoriating in Parset.

It was not until I saw the severed hand, badly chewed and bearing a ring about one swollen finger, that I understood. Then I cursed myself for a fool and joined Sereth where he stood looking out at the empty sea.

“Do you think you miscalculated? Are we at the right point in space, but the wrong one in time?” he asked, his eyes never leaving the water, voice so soft it might have been the lapping of an articulate wave against the shore.

“I am afraid,” said I, “that you overestimate me. I hardly calculate.”

“Estri...” Even softer.

“No, then. I do not think so, There is no moon. What chance there is that I might have accidentally landed us here on another moonless night during which a severed hand wearing a Parset ring exactly like Neshub’s found its way to the shore—that chance is far less than the obvious: the ship is gone, and Chayin has lost at least one of his crew.”

He did not acknowledge me, and after a time I said that perhaps the crew had mutinied, killed Neshub, and cast off for Menetph, far across the sea.

In answer, he took my arm and pointed, and I saw what nestled against the jetty’s rocks, and looked away. I had no desire to closely examine those misshapen hulks and shattered timbers.

I shook his hand off and retreated up the beach, until—I found a spot free from growths and shadows, where I could not be stealthed upon.

“Come away from there,” I cautioned Sereth, who had not moved. “The wehrs ...” And the speaking of that word reminded me of Deilcrit. I saw him as I had last seen him, prostrate, while the ptaiss ... I covered my eyes with my palms, but it did not help.

“Estri,” said Chayin in my ear, “do you think you could return us to Port Astrin?”

I nodded. “It is no harder than was returning here. There is no distance, just the procedure’s of entry and exit, and a choosing, in that cold place.” I shivered, recollecting the shriveling agony of the procession of matter through the congruences. “But give me some time. And let the sun be risen. Then I will be stronger.”

A shadow fell that was not material, and I looked up to see Sereth, all the heavens’ fury in his crossed arms and forward-jutting hips. “So, we must simply stay alive until sunrising. With one sword and two knives between us. Then we will meekly turn our backs on fifty dead men, a gutted vessel, the criminals we came to this land seeking, and slink home by the aegis of Estri’s skills, to sit and chitter and get fat and lazy ruling our various holdings, secure in the knowledge that should we ever again find ourselves in difficulties, we need but call Estri and she will remove us from the scene.”

Chayin stiffly rose up, kicking me roughly from his path. Standing opposite Sereth, he growled, “A man must know when to cut his losses.”

I scrambled to my feet and insinuated myself between them. Sereth shoved me aside.

“Do not speak to me of what men must do. You are overqualified. Both of you”—and he inclined his head at me, that there might be no mistaking my inclusion in Sereth’s “you”—“would do well to keep silent in that regard. Shapers’ blood makes for too many disparities. Flee! What of Se’keroth, and your much-vaunted ‘age of the divinity of man’? For that matter, what of your vow to that pitiful savage?”

Chayin had no answer. He merely stared at Sereth’s empty scabbard.

“Call my name and I will aid you,” mimicked Sereth savagely. “A god who can offer his followers so little might have trouble retaining them.”

“I did not realize,” said the cahndor, “that you had lost Se’keroth in the fray.”

At that, Sereth wheeled around and strode into the surf. Knee-deep in the shallows’ froth, he stripped off the chased scabbard and threw it, belt and all, out to sea. The spinning sheath flew thrice the distance of a man’s normal cast and was lost in the darkness.

“That,” called Sereth, “is what care I have for Se’keroth.” Beside me, I heard Chayin’s harsh indrawn breath. “And for all of Khys’s manipulations, and your cursed attempts to follow in his stead.” A waterspout rose in the sea, born of Sereth’s rage.

Chayin put his arm around my waist and drew me close.

“I cannot believe,” I whispered through my shock, “that he is saying these things to us.” My internals felt as though someone had just removed them, and my empty carcass was only momentarily capable of sustaining the fiction of life.

“Be quiet,”. Chayin advised. “It will pass. He is distraught. This has been long coming. There
are
differences ..” And he trailed off, as Sereth approached. But I did not miss the unsteadiness in the cahndor’s voice.

We three stood facing each other, only breathing, a long time. I spent that time bewailing, in my mind, the impossibility of ever foreseeing what this man, whom I loved as much as my next breath, would have me do.

“This serves no one,” said Sereth at last, quietly, but without that deadly edge to his tone. Almost shyly he reached out his hand. I took it: It was clammy.

“Sereth, did you mean to start that turbulence?”

“No.”

His reply was almost inaudible. I longed to comfort him, but I had no comfort to give. The briding of such strengths as he had so recently acquired is an intimate undertaking, different for each. But I understood why he had, of late, so strictly controlled both his temper, which had never been placid, and those of his new skills which dealt with the direct application of mental force.

Chayin, grunting, unhanded me, squatted down, and craned his neck toward the sky.

“What is it?” Sereth, suddenly cautious, pulled me down to the sand.

“I heard something, something large flying, perhaps even circling overhead. But I cannot see it. And my sensing gives me a presence, though what kind, I do not know.”

“Estri, what are the chances of your successfully obviating space again this night?” Sereth asked, squinting into the starry evening.

I thought about it. The obviation of space is a painful, draining, and ever-uncertain undertaking. Once I was caught for three days in the congruences. I shuddered. “Not good. Especially with you both as passive companions. If you two tried, perhaps—”

“I have tried,” Chayin cut me off. “With no great success. This is something I know: a time comes when such skills will be within my reach. And this is another thing I know: that time is not yet.” He paused, rubbed his right shoulder, and continued in a ruminative growl, “You, yourself, have told me that such feats remain the most precipitous of all that you attempt. The chance of hindrance by our efforts to help is too great to ignore.” He looked at me questioningly. I kept silent.

“But you could do it,” pressed Sereth, “if you had to.”

I sighed. “I can try, if I have to, though if it is a choice between dying under the teeth and claws of ptaiss and wehrs, or dying lost between the moments in the domain of eternity, I should rather it be the ptaiss.”

“Then let us hope,” said Sereth, gently, “that you do not have to try. But we must agree: if an insurmountable attack comes, from the forest, from the sea behind, that is what we will do. My bow, quiver, and”—Sereth shifted, looking pointedly at Chayin—“Se’keroth, and Estri’s blade lie in that clearing. There also are a number of dead creatures who possibly could have been dealt with more humanely. Do either of you have any ideas ... ?” And he broke off, and half-rose, staring upward, then around him at the ground.

“What are you looking for?”

“A good-sized rock. Chayin, I think I see your winged creature.”

“What would you do?” demanded the cahndor, also suddenly searching rocks along the beach. Then he cursed, stiffened, and peered out into the sea, which was no longer still.

“Estri, watch those guerm, and be ready to get us back to camp if we need you.” Like a spring-loaded bolt, he was gone from where his words rode the air; an eyeblink later, a star-frosted shadow holding a naked blade loomed atop a jumble of rocks fallen sideward from the jetty, cutting off my view of the shore.

Above my, head I could just make out the star-shine on something large that soared in slow circles. Its shape was not as easy to define as its mind-touch, which I had felt before, ever so softly, when first we entered Benegua.

“Sereth,” I called, as the first of the guerm waddled, deceptively quick, out of the surf. Behind it rose another streamered snout, and another, and I knew we could not hack them all apart, one by one, even with three swords.

“What, ci’ves?” Sereth said from directly behind me. I jumped, then replied: “I am going to bring down the winged thing for you. If I am right, the guerm will—”

“Do not explain. Do what you can do.” And with that he left me, bearing an armful of fist-sized rocks, to join Chayin where he awaited the guerm.

It was not until I had seen two of the six-legged amphibians disembowled that I managed to gather sufficient concentration. Then I merged with the thing in the sky. Its thoughts were soft and layered, like a million far-off voices speaking at once, and as it became aware of me it showed no fear. Only my sense of numbers diminished. As I struggled to reach a mind with which to reason, a great horde fled me, leaving only a tentative intelligence within that body whose every wing flap was now so much a part of me that my shoulders ached.

“Come down. Cease this senseless war, be—”
Then something that knew no words jumped ravening from behind the clouds of animating hosts that seemed to dwell in that single brain, and I screamed aloud and found myself flat on my back, my hands to my pulsing temples. One quick glance at the shore told me I had no more time, that by my clemency I might have lost us all our lives. Then, coldly, with no thought of anything but destruction, I constructed a turbulence of my own. Wide, I built it, and long, so that it formed a contracting sphere that showed as fire clouds in the otherwise clear night. Tighter and tighter I forced the sphere, and I could hear the thing within it scream, as the buffeting storm tongues threw it about like an autumn leaf. Screwing my eyes shut against the glare, I willed the lightning-charged ball to spin ever faster; to shrink ever smaller. A bolt shot through the clouds, then another, and I cursed, ceased struggling to bring the whirlwind to earth. Rather, I dispersed it, and as the turbulence turned to mist and the fire of the electrically charged air abated, a form plummeted downward, limbs askew, wings inert and wrapped around its body.

It fell with a thud between me and the two men, and lay still, one wing jutting into the air.

Pulling damp hair from my brow, I ran toward the shore and the streamered guerm which rode the incoming tide like a living band of froth across the bay. The main body of the school was perhaps twenty man’s lengths out to sea. The forerunners, living and dead, littered the surf. In the shallows, Sereth and Chayin were but darker shadows from which came an occasional grunt or a syllable of warning, punctuated by Chayin’s thwacking blade and the splash of rocks and the thrash of silent-dying guerm.

While I squinted past them into the moonless dark, the luminescent band of froth which was in reality uncountable surfacing guerm became a dotted line. Then that line seemed to shudder, then surge raggedly into a circle which immediately exploded into a thrashing mass of individuals who turned upon one another in the overly close waters. Moment by moment, the disintegration of the school, now denied the organizational mind of the winged thing which had deployed them, became more pronounced.

Sereth, with a satisfied grunt, threw one last missile into the midst of three guerm that were greedily gorging themselves on their dismembered fellows. Then he clapped Chayin on the back, and the cahndor’s laughter rang out over the still night as they approached.

I nodded to myself, pleased that my desperate experiment had worked. But I wondered, as I turned to the winged corpse, whether even this evidence would be adequate to support my conclusions, should I dare present them. I need not have worried on that score. On another, I was disastrously wrong.

The grayish, winged, manlike creature was no corpse. It lived, after a fall that shattered half the bones in its body; lived after the application of such force as might have sufficed to end ten men.

I knelt beside it, awestruck, and as I did so, fear rode up from the abyss to possess me. Not that small fear, a mere breeze, that whispers at the back of one’s mind and conjures specters; but that overwash of howling gale force that cripples so that all that remains is a deaf-mute, empty of thought, trapped nonvolitional in a body seeking to prepare itself for suspended animation. Looking down at that gray chest, fine-furred and slabbed with muscle, I could not believe that the chest rose and fell, though with every respiration, blood that glinted black in the evening monochrome trickled from between two crushed ribs. Its right arm was thrown back, twisted at an unlikely angle, or so I thought until Sereth, his hand on its right wing, which jutted almost straight up into the air, murmured, “Look at this.”

He spread the pinion wide. That arm and the soft-furred, membranous wing comprised one limb, inseparable. The very human-looking arm formed the main strut of the wing: six-digited hands with webbed, clawed fingers fringed by delicate wing edges tipped it; six massive fleshy vessels, each as thick.as a human wrist, ran diagonals from shoulder, elbow, mid—and forearm to wingtip, branching repeatedly. Even while Sereth held the arm high, the vessels became visibly less tumescent as blood seeped out of the creature and its strength failed. When Sereth dropped the arm, to the eye no wing rested there, but two soft drapes of gray-furred skin that hung like some doubled cloak from the creature’s arm and shoulder.