The Shattered Sylph (12 page)

“Do you have any theories about what just happened?” Rashala asked.

Melorta shook her head, the hair that she wore in a plait down her back to show her slave status swaying. She shrugged. “Eighty-nine lost interest.”

“Did he?” Rashala wondered aloud. She hadn’t seen the actual attack, but had just been alerted to it by those who had. By the time she arrived, it had all been over.

Melorta shrugged again. A narrow nearby corridor shared a wall of the harem, and while these rooms were all at a level, every ten feet boasted wooden ladders with grates at the top so that handlers could peer in and observe. It was too dangerous to go into the harem on a regular basis, since the women might take it into their heads to attack, and both Rashala and Melorta were aware of that fact. Also, it was expensive to lose a good handler to a horny battle sylph, and a handler turned concubine didn’t survive nearly so long as the reverse.

Climbing the closest ladder, she looked through the grate and sighed. “I want to see into the damn alcoves.” But there were too many battlers who would be upset by
that. They seemed to need their privacy every so often, just as any other creature, and so the alcoves remained inviolate. After peering through the grate for a time, she finally regarded her mistress and amended, “She drove him off.”

Rashala nodded slowly. She hadn’t seen it, but that’s what she’d been thinking. Melorta
had
seen the attack, and from what she’d described…“She overpowered his will.”

A woman who could force her dominance onto a battle sylph and make him do what she wanted, even without orders…? That skill had brought them both out of the harem, but it didn’t always work that way. A woman with that kind of will who didn’t see the way they did could be a serious threat indeed. Melorta’s promotion had come from uncovering one such woman, after all, before she could attack with the army she’d shaped out of a hundred ignorant and unarmed women. The whole episode had been an embarrassment and the entire harem was purged as a result. Four battlers were then put down, having gone mad from the slaughter.

“Watch her,” Rashala decided. The girl hadn’t earned back the money spent on her yet, and it was silly to be wasteful. The girl wouldn’t be becoming a handler, though, not strange and foreign as she was. They could never trust her.

“Yes, ma’am,” Melorta agreed, peering back through the grate. Their vigilance had to be never ending. Both of them knew that, but they also knew things could be much worse.

Eighty-nine had come through the gate for the same reason as the others. Hatched into a hive with thousands of battlers but only one queen, only a very lucky few gained
her favor, and even fewer kept that for long. Like all of the rest, Eighty-nine had striven for her attention to no avail, and by the time he’d found the gate opening in the ether near his patrol, he was already going mad. He’d taken the bait of a fertile female without hesitation, only to see her killed and to become bonded to a man who saw him only to give orders: guard the streets, guard the walls, fight in the arena. A hundred different tasks he had, all shared with the other battle sylphs, just as it was back in the hive.

Only this time there were women, hundreds of women he could mate with as though they were queens, women with whom he could relieve his terrible tension—and it was terrible indeed, worse because he could only have their bodies. The bond with a queen was mental as well as physical, but he couldn’t find any mental link with the women he fucked. Instead he had a mental link with male masters whom he couldn’t touch, the bond a travesty that left him empty even after all these years. To forget, he turned to the women, pumping into them, searching for that elusive natural bond and getting angrier and angrier as it didn’t come, forcing himself harder upon them until the women were either dead or broken under him, and still he couldn’t find it.

Already long past insane and not recognizing it, he went for unique women, hoping that some strange new physical attribute would relinquish the mental link he desired. He found it at last in the yellow-haired girl, but to his horror, it wasn’t a link to him. Instead, she pushed him away with her bond to another. Someone else’s pattern was threaded through her mind and soul, undeniably a battler’s touch overlaying her female essence—a battler who could touch her mind as well as her body when he
made love to her, a battler who could make her into a queen if the circumstances were right. Eighty-nine wanted that, too, wanted it so badly he’d tear her to pieces and try and dig it out of her…but she only had room for one pattern. A sylph could take many patterns into them—Eighty-nine had six masters, one who gave him orders, five who had no tongues and could only feed him—but this girl could only be a master to one.

One! Why couldn’t she be master to
him
? Eighty-nine howled in silence, his mind reeling at the absolute unfairness. He wanted a female master with a female’s mind, a female’s body. He wanted her to be linked to him. But he couldn’t take a master himself. It had to be done to him by priests, and none of them would ever give him a female. He could live a thousand years and fuck a million women and he’d still never have a queen. Now another battler’s master lay under him, telling him no, and he couldn’t even pretend to have her.

Eighty-nine deserted the girl and fled for the vent that would take him to the surface, broadcasting his hatred and pain as he went. She should have been his. She should have been his! He twisted up the curving tunnel, around corners and through accesses that were barely a foot wide. Fifty feet it rose, from rooms deep beneath the ground through a building to finally open onto the roof.

He emerged in hot desert air, still screaming in silence. Below him, earthbound Meridal stretched out with its marketplaces and businesses, the homes of its merchant class at the center. The slaves and lower classes lived farther out, in slums that formed the majority of the land-based buildings before the sylph-maintained fields to the north that provided all the food that the sea didn’t, but all felt the indifferent shadow of the huge island floating
above, upon which lived the noble class. Up there, air sylphs labored to keep the island afloat while water and earth sylphs grew verdant swaths of green that otherwise could not exist in the dry, hot climate.

Eighty-nine ignored such considerations, as he ignored the massive wall that cut off the seaport from the rest of the city, keeping foreigners from treading on the sacred sand of the emperor. Not that the emperor would walk on that sand himself, keeping instead to his floating island at all times, except when he dallied at the coliseum.

That was where Eighty-nine went, raging across the sky toward it, his hate sparking the anger of hundreds of other battlers guarding against infractions of Meridal’s many laws. Those who did defy the rules of the emperor were taken here, to the arena, thrown without trial into the sand to defend themselves against battlers. A good fighter might be spared at the whim of the emperor, allowed to live on as a slave—or perhaps even as a gladiator fighting other humans in the opening battles—but none had ever survived a fight against Eighty-nine, not before and certainly not today.

He swarmed down another tunnel in the roof of the building beside the arena and into the stables below. There, the stink of frightened men only fed his rage. Men like this were allowed to own him, but not women. No women except the untouched handlers were allowed in the stables for the arena, and none had ever stepped on the sand where these men might die. And die they would. Eighty-nine had finished his time in the arena for this month. He was supposed to have the freedom of the harem for a while, to calm and ready himself for more combat. He was good at it after all. He hadn’t done patrolling guard duty for years, not since he became a favorite of the emperor. Eighty-nine had been looking
forward to returning to the harem, but now he wanted to fight and kill.

He landed on the stone floor, the men who worked the pit to ready its various combatants staring in confusion as he changed shape. He didn’t become the creature he’d been in the harem. For the arena he had a unique form, as did each battler. He swelled to become that, his jaws opening in a roar that could be heard through the cheers already sounding above. He heard the cheering stop for a moment and then grow even louder. The arena was the only place Eighty-nine could make any sort of sound with his voice, and the crowd all recognized it.

Ignoring the handlers as well as the other battlers, who growled and snapped at him, Eighty-nine turned and rushed for the arena ramp, his heavy legs churning at the ground. He went up quickly, barely fitting his bulk through the wide space, but found the gates down to keep the current competitors from trying to escape and dying where the emperor couldn’t see. Eighty-nine shouldered through, the metal tearing with a shriek that sounded too much like a woman’s.

He charged into the arena, the sand kicking up around him. In the encircling stands, thousands of spectators rose to their feet, screaming, while the emperor himself leaned speculatively back in his box seat.

Eighty-nine ignored them all, roaring again. All that mattered to him were the two men cowering in the middle of the arena, staring at him in horror. There had once been six, but the other four lay broken, killed by a battler in a hulking, ogrelike shape with the number 200 showing clearly on his chest. Two-hundred looked flatly at Eighty-nine, his emotions cautious. Two-hundred’s arena shape was boring, barely twice the size of the men he was killing. Eighty-nine was as large as any battler could push
himself, and his rage was absolute. Even on an ordinary day, Two-hundred didn’t share his anger in the arena, and today, Eighty-nine felt crazy.

Eighty-nine lunged forward, his head low to the sand and jaws gaping. The humans screamed, trying to run, but only Two-hundred was fast enough to get out of the way. Eighty-nine scooped the first man up in his jaws and bit down, shaking his head. Half of the hapless criminal flew across the arena; the other was spat onto the sand. The crowd roared its approval.

The second human was running for the ramp up which Eighty-nine had come, weeping in terror. Eighty-nine swung his tail, sending him flying. Around the circular walls of the arena were free-standing walls. The prisoner crashed into one of these before hitting the ground, every bone in his body turned to shards jammed through pulp.

It wasn’t enough. Eighty-nine turned, growling low in his throat as he looked at Two-hundred. The other battler dropped into a crouch, his own growl of warning an echo through the renewed silence. To Eighty-nine’s mind, Two-hundred was laid-back and weak, but he was no fool. While neither could change their shape or hit the other with energy, Eighty-nine shielded himself. Against a simple human he wouldn’t bother, but against a battler…? It had been so long since he’d had such an opportunity.

Head low, he advanced, his feet shaking the ground, and his hiss was nearly laughter. Two-hundred crouched lower, his arms wide as he readied himself to move. The audience was nearly silent, but there were whispers now. Battlers weren’t put into the arena with other battlers. Their orders were clear: they weren’t to fight in the streets or the harems. No one had precisely said not to fight one here, though. Normally, Eighty-nine would never be put
onto the sand with one. There were battlers who fought in teams, though not against each other. There were others who only pretended to fight each other, in carefully choreographed dances. Eighty-nine had never been one of them. When he killed, it was for real.

He’d kill Two-hundred, he decided, tear him apart and watch his energy drain into the sand. Maybe he’d roll in it or see if he could drink it. Perhaps that would still this screaming inside him. He couldn’t kill the unknown battler who’d taken that blonde girl for his own, but he could kill this one. His snarl grew to a painful volume as he readied himself to lunge.

“Stop.”

Both battlers stopped. Each had a half dozen masters, only one of whom had a tongue to give an order, but their commands were clear, and the first of them was to obey the emperor.

Neither of them wanted to, but still they turned, bowing low to the ground for the man in the gilded box towering high over the arena. A dozen battlers shaded him, and a healer sylph stood there in the shape of a woman far more beautiful than any human could ever be. The emperor was garbed in silk, and he gazed down at them, his expression bored, his emotions amused.

“Our Eighty-nine looks unhappy,” he said, his voice soft but the acoustics fantastic. “We are displeased.” He raised a hand. “Bring him more toys to play with, and return Two-hundred to his stall. Let sweet Eighty-nine have his fill, if he misses us so much.”

Eighty-nine lifted his head and roared, drowning out the cheers of the crowd. Two-hundred turned and padded toward the ramp, clearly not minding being sent back to the harem. Just as Eighty-nine didn’t mind staying. There
were always prisoners to kill. Perhaps there might even be
enough.

They forced his first panicked victims into the arena even as Two-hundred disappeared down the ramp. Eighty-nine turned on them, hissing, and he didn’t wait for them to pass the inner walls before he attacked.

Ril knew they were close even before the ship docked at the deep wharfs of Meridal. He told Leon, who’d already had his suspicions from how Ril had stood on the prow of the ship, staring without pause. This was the city that Lizzy had been brought to, Ril was confident. Every night now he dreamed of her, of journeying to her side. They didn’t say much. He knew she was underground and that she was safe enough. In these dreams, which were often fleeting, they just sat or walked together. Unfortunately, the less stressed Ril was about her safety, the harder she was to reach. Disappointing as that might be, Leon finally decided it was a good sign they’d recently had less contact.

Arriving in Meridal, the trio of rescuers looked around, Leon and Ril to get the lay of the land, Justin because it was just so amazing. Leon didn’t really know much about the place, although he was fairly sure he knew more than almost anyone else from his homeland, since that had once been part of his job. One of the few facts he recalled was that the people here were even more classist than those in Eferem, embracing slavery, while feeling that foreigners were almost worse than slaves, unclean. Meridal didn’t allow foreigners into the heart of their city, so only the outer edges would be accessible to them. Leon already knew they’d have to go farther.

Right now they stood at the foot of
Southern Dancer
’s gangplank on a pier that was ten feet wide and bobbed up and down with the water even though it looked to be
made of stone. It also jutted from the shore for almost a mile, and was hardly the only one. The trio had seen close to a hundred piers pointing out into the water, far enough to allow even the very deepest-hulled ships to moor. These weren’t protected by any bays, so Leon expected there were air and water sylphs present to keep the ships safe. Para Dubh was famous in the northern continent of Arador for its large harbor. It had nothing on this place.

“It’s huge,” Justin gasped, looking around with wide eyes. Ahead, the piers all joined the land, upon which rose the city itself, climbing the slope to become many times the size of any city Leon had ever seen. Above that floated a huge circular plate, trees and more buildings showing on its edge. Beyond all of it, the white desert stretched.

Everything was unbelievably hot, so much so that it almost hurt to breathe. The men stripped down to their undershirts, Leon and Justin out of desperation, Ril to maintain the illusion. It wasn’t perfect by any means. Leon hoped that no one would notice the battler wasn’t sweating.

“It is huge,” Leon agreed, refusing to let that get to him. Alone, he wouldn’t have any chance of finding his daughter. But he had Ril.

The battler ignored his glance, peering ahead at the city. Barely waiting long enough for the other two to shoulder their travel bags, he started off, picking his way through the crowds along the jetty. Leon and Justin hurried in pursuit, afraid of losing him.

The pier was swarming with people and animals even here, so far out into the ocean. And they were loud. The cries of a hundred different types of beast were a constant assault, and the reek of the unwashed horrendous. Behind them,
Southern Dancer
was already being reloaded for the next leg of her journey, with more than half her
passengers disembarked. A large group had cursed being forced to walk to shore through the lower classes, but they were in for a rude awakening, Leon knew everyone who wasn’t a Meridalian was lower-class here. Or a slave.

He glanced again at the ship.
Southern Dancer
would sail in the morning, continuing her journey south before looping back. If they got Lizzy and returned in time, she could return them to Para Dubh. If not, he’d have to find another ship. He hoped there was one. They’d been very lucky with
Southern Dancer.
There was no guarantee that there would be another ship leaving anytime soon, and it might not be willing to carry a slave girl. Leon had no idea how the locals would react to what he planned, and no urge to find out. If they had to, they’d travel up the coast to the next city to find passage there, but the best solution was to go back the way they’d come.

Ril made his way along the wharf, leading them. It took twenty minutes to reach the end. From there the battler started upward through a marketplace. Though they didn’t know the city’s layout, he stayed fixated on Lizzy.

Sweating under his clothes and the heavy fabric strap of his travel bag, Leon followed, keeping only a few feet back. Justin hurried to keep up, wobbling a bit on legs that had grown used to the sea. “Does he know how far away she is?” the boy asked excitedly.

Leon shook his head. Close, was all he could guess. Clos
er
, at least. Ril was nearly sniffing the air, leading them now through narrow streets between shabby buildings. People tanned dark from the sun passed in all directions, but there were enough pale-skinned people that they didn’t stand out.

For all of Meridal’s acclaimed wealth, this city was poor, the people obviously suffering. Leon passed a half dozen beggars, several with limbs and features rotted by
disease. There was garbage everywhere, and the excrement of animals, some from humans. The island overhead cast its shadow across half the city, making temperatures more bearable but killing anything that might otherwise grow. The wealth was there, Leon saw, out of reach. Fortunately, Lizzy apparently wasn’t.

Ril finally hesitated at one of the street corners, letting Leon catch up. “Battler,” he murmured under his breath, turning away.

Leon stared ahead. Unmoving on the corner was a tall creature wearing a breechcloth. Obviously male, the thing had olive green skin and stood on hind legs that were like a dog’s, bent backward at the knee and forward again at the hips. His hands and feet were clawed, and while his bald head was human enough in shape, he had no mouth and an absurdly long chin. The number 640 was either tattooed or burned into his chest. He was watching the crowds, and those who passed moved swiftly and obediently. There were no beggars nearby at all.

Ril clearly didn’t like the look of him. Usually, Leon knew, battle sylphs didn’t hide from each other. They made their presence obvious to foreign males as a way to protect their hives, showing their strength and numbers as a matter of course. All threatening sylphs were killed or subsumed after the death of their queen, their pattern changed by force, as Mace and Heyou had done to Ril with Solie. But Ril couldn’t do that here. Battlers obeyed their masters, and the men of Meridal had surely put in some kind of order about dealing with invaders. Leon had been warned when they boarded
Southern Dancer
that no foreign sylphs were allowed here. Only the ones who worked on the ships were allowed to set foot on the docks, and they couldn’t enter the city. Such an infraction was punishable by the death of every human involved.

And that was hardly the worst thing that could happen. Leon grimaced, thinking of Ril captured and subsumed, standing on a corner like that other battler, guarding it for the rest of eternity. But that probably wouldn’t happen. Given Ril’s damage he would likely be killed. He had very little energy to shield himself in a true fight.

If hiding bothered him, Ril didn’t show it. He passed a few feet in front of his fellow battler, forced to do so by the crowded street. The sylph glanced up but a moment later looked away. Leon made himself feel nothing of either triumph or relief, knowing the battler would read that as easily as a man could hear words, and followed. Justin hurried a few feet behind, shaking in terror—but that wasn’t odd at all. Most of the people who passed the battler felt the same.

“Was that a battle sylph?” the youth whispered in Leon’s ear once they were rounding another corner, the road heading steadily uphill, though not at such an angle as in Para Dubh.

“Yes,” Leon told him. “Hush now.”

“But didn’t he realize that Ril’s—”

Leon elbowed him hard in the ribs. “I said be quiet!”

The boy winced but held his tongue. He didn’t have much concept of intrigue, and for the first time Leon really regretted bringing him. If Justin wasn’t very careful, he could get all of them killed.

“Look,” Leon added, speaking in an undertone as they circumvented a bizarre creature with a hunched back and a face like a cow with exaggerated lips. Leon couldn’t begin to guess what kind of sylph it was, or what reason it had for being in that shape. Justin stared as if afraid that it was another battler. “When we go in to get Lizzy, I want you to stay with the gear.”

The youth gaped at him. “What? No! I want to go with you!” His voice rose, loud and shrill. “I
have
to!”

“Quiet!” Leon hissed. “Do you want to give us away?”

Justin shook his head, frightened but also desperate. “No! You can’t make me stay behind! Lizzy’s going to be my wife!”

Ahead, Ril stopped and looked back, incredulous. Usually Leon didn’t feel too much emotion from him, though as his master he could. Ril didn’t like to share, and Leon didn’t pry. Now, though, he felt shock and surprise from his battler, and over it all a terrible, confusing pain.

“You?” the battler managed. “Marry Lizzy?”

Justin was pale, but he forced his chin up. “Yes. As soon as we’re home.”

Ril stared at the boy, and suddenly his emotions were gone, all of them. Leon felt emptiness so thorough that it was like the battler was dead. “Fine.” He turned and kept walking no faster than before, even as a few seconds later he passed another battler. It never even glanced up.

Leon stared at Ril’s back, wondering if he’d just missed something very important. There was something there, something he should recognize…something he couldn’t see or didn’t want to see, but that was close, just about—

Justin tugged on his shirt. “I’m going with you,” the youth demanded. “I don’t care what you say. I’m going to rescue Lizzy.”

“Fine,” Leon relented, echoing Ril. From the look in the boy’s face, he’d follow them even if they did try to leave him behind. Given that, it would be safer for everyone to keep him close at hand. “But don’t do anything unless I tell you.”

While Justin beamed at that news, Leon wished he himself felt a little more confident. They had barely a day to find and rescue his daughter, with no idea even of how or where she was being held. Still, they’d found the city she was in and were traveling as fast as Ril could lead them to
her. They had more advantages than he’d expected in the first few hours after learning of her kidnapping.

Ril walked ahead in the street, dodging people and garbage, his shoulders as relaxed as if he were strolling across the market square back home. But as he led them around another corner, he stopped. Ahead towered a wall, fifty feet or more in height and made of sheer stone. At the base, gates let through men and a few odd women with the dark tans and loose clothing of locals. Many of the men had tattoos over their chests and shoulders. A battler stood guard, watching all who passed.

Leon froze and swore under his breath. No one was paying attention to them now, but he had no doubt that would change the instant they tried to go through that gate. There were even signs posted that forbade entry to any nonnative, punishable by death. Obviously, Lizzy had entered, Leon thought bitterly. Apparently they had different rules for slaves.

Ril considered the gate for a long moment, and then glanced over his shoulder at Leon. Turning, he walked to the left, parallel with the wall. Leon followed silently, Justin next.

The battler led them for more than a mile, away from the bustle of the main gate and to a portcullis that was locked but unguarded. On the other side was an empty park filled with ornately arranged rocks and sands of different colors, a few strategically placed desert plants growing at the center of each design. It would have been beautiful if the plants weren’t long dead from lack of sun, and if the park weren’t strewn with garbage. Rats scurried past.

Justin put a hand on one of the bars and pulled. The portcullis was solid. “Can you break it?” he asked.

The battler gave him a scathing look. “And bring a
thousand of them down on us? Are you stupid?” Instead, as Justin flushed, Ril went up to the gate and stepped through.

His leg barely fit, and there was no way he could slip his head and shoulders through the bars—even a small child would have trouble. Nonetheless, Ril pressed his shoulder against the gap, and a moment later he changed just enough. His shoulder went first, then his hips, his clothes and body rippling as he squeezed himself through. Leon saw pain on the sylph’s face, but Ril just kept going. His head raised as though he was trying to keep himself above water, Ril pushed his face through next, gasping once it was on the other side and back to its normal shape, and then he did the same with his chest. Lastly, he lifted his other leg through and stood on the other side.

“Wow,” Justin breathed.

Ril didn’t respond. He stood there for a moment, just breathing, and then stumbled forward. Standing up against the gate, Leon could barely see the edge of his objective: a crank-driven wheel and chain designed to be turned by several men. Ril grabbed it and started to pull. The chain went taut as the sylph threw his strength into it, enwrapping the teeth of the wheel and forcing the portcullis to rise on squeaky hinges.

“Hurry,” Leon cautioned, hoping no one would hear that wretched squeal. It was terribly loud, echoing in the otherwise-quiet midafternoon.

Once the gate was high enough, Leon dropped to his belly and squirmed beneath, well aware of the sharp spikes just above his back. Once on the other side he scrambled to his feet and turned to Justin…who actually balked, staring fearfully at the gap below and the dead park beyond. Leon didn’t pause. “Come now or we leave you there,” he warned. There was no time for waiting.

The youth swallowed convulsively and scrambled
through, the gate now high enough that he could nearly crawl.

Ril reversed the wheel, letting it drop back with a further low squeal and a thud. He hurried back to them, wincing, which was a blessing in disguise—if he had been standing alone by the wheel, they might have realized he’d lifted it alone, which no human could do.