The Silver Lake (30 page)

Across the city, dusk came slowly to the first clear night of High Spring, gifting the sky with a hint of pink and orange before settling into darkness. At Estavia-Sarayi, the new abayon saw Brax and Spar safely tucked into bed in the delon alcove off their own rooms, then withdrew as Jaq clambered up at once and stretched out .across their feet.

In their own bedchamber Yashar lit the lamp and closed the shutters while Kemal unrolled the pallet. Glancing over, the older man noted the pensive expression on his arkados’ face. With an evil grin, he checked to ensure the door was locked, then suddenly tackled the younger man and tossed him onto the pallet. After a short wrestling match which Kemal won by jabbing the older man in the ribs, he glared down at him while Yashar just laughed.

“You had your serious face on,” he explained. “I hate your serious face; it interferes with lovemaking.”

He made a grab for him, but Kemal caught his hand. “You don’t think that suddenly being given the responsibility of two delon is a reason to be serious?” he demanded.

“I do not. It’s a reason for celebration. We finally have the bed to ourselves without your great, mangy dog stealing all the covers.”

“So you’re not worried?”

Pulling free, Yashar stripped off his tunic, flexing the muscles of his arms and chest with a lewd expression. “I was never worried. I knew
my
seed was potent;
you
just never had the natural field to sow it in. If you’d gone to Oristo’s temple and petitioned the Hearth God, we might have had delon long before now.”

This set off another wrestling match, but finally both men caught each other up in a more passionate embrace.

Afterward, while Yashar poured them each a glass of dark red wine, Kemal raised himself up on one elbow.

“You could have petitioned Oristo yourself,” he noted wryly.

“I’m too hairy. I’d make a terribly ugly woman.” Handing him a glass, Yashar held his up in salute. “To our delon, sensibly grown past the age of birthing and breast feeding.”

“Yes, to the age of sulking and arguing.”

“I’ll handle the arguing, you handle the sulking.”

“No, thank you.”

Draining his glass, Yashar threw himself down beside the other man. “We’ll do fine,” he said, attempting a more serious tone. “So stop fretting. It’s not like we’ll be alone in it. We have all of Cyan Company to help us.”

“We’ll need them.”

“There you are. Besides, if they do too much sulking and arguing, we can always pack them off to Bayard. After all, he survived yours.”

“There is that.” Draining his own glass, Kemal set it down carefully beside the pallet. “Estavia knows what She’s doing,” he allowed finally. “She wouldn’t have given them to us if She hadn’t thought we could handle it.”

“It’s settled, then.” Stretching out on the rumpled blankets, Yashar placed his clasped hands behind his head. “Blow out the lamp, will you? I’m exhausted.”

Shaking his head, Kemal rose. “Old man,” he admonished over his shoulder. “You better start pacing yourself. Fade on me now and I’ll find myself a younger arkados to fill my bed and raise my delon.”

“I’d best get myself ready for your return, then.”

“I guess you had.”

Extinguishing the light, Kemal padded back to bed, finding the older man in the darkness with the ease of long familiarity. As the night breezes whispered through the shutters, they made love more slowly now, each taking comfort and gaining strength from the other.

ON THE EDGE of the Berbat-Dunya, Graize rode seated before Kursk in the middle of the Rus-Yuruk’s kazakin-host. Eyes half closed and focused on a point somewhere between his pony’s ears and half a mile away, he floated in a heavy trance—made that much easier by the hypnotic swish, swish of the kazakin’s slow gait through the grasses. It seemed to calm his thoughts. Above his head, the lights merged and flowed like an ever-changing flock of silvery birds and, reaching out, he ran his mind through their midst almost instinctively. Touching each tiny spark of consciousness, he began to idly gather them up, weaving and binding them together under the pressure of their guidance until a crude human-seeming began to emerge.

The lights bonded swiftly with this new form, moving faster and faster with each passing hour and, as their singular awareness and sense of purpose grew in strength so did his own sense of self. When the kazakin crested a low rise in a jingle of tiny bells, and the shimmer that represented their spring encampment stretched out before him, he remembered his life on the streets of Anavatan.

His gray eyes narrowed as he glared at the lights, realizing that they were responsible for this sudden return to memory.

“The past is gone,”
he told them sharply with more clarity than he’d felt since the attack on Liman-Caddesi.
“If you want to make yourselves useful then show me the future, the near future.”

With an icy breath, a hundred visions rose up around him like a cloud of crystalline butterflies; places and events yet to be, both near and far. He flipped through them impatiently, discarding each one like a gem merchant sorting through inferior goods until he sensed that he’d found the one with the appropriate amount of power and riches won quickly, the power and riches he had always dreamed he would have.

“That one,”
he demanded, pointing at the wavering image of a child of unformed potential hovering behind a dark-haired man surrounded by a host of silver swords.
“Give me that one.”

The lights complied eagerly, throwing up the names and faces of the allies he’d need to make the vision a reality. The few he knew stayed still just long enough to be recognized: Kursk, Rayne, and Ozan of the kazakin; while the names of others he was yet to meet trailed faintly across his mind like spiderwebbing made of ice crystals: Timur, their oldest wyrdin, Ayami, Rayne’s abia, Caleb, her youngest kardos, Ozan’s delon—Rayne’s kuzon—Briz, Gabrie, and Tahnan, and her oldest kardos Danjel hovering in a cloud of mist. His people, his ... he strained to understand the sudden wash of icy possessiveness that came over him—his ... generals, the ones who would lead his army against the shining city and crack open the walls of Gol-Beyaz as he’d envisioned earlier in Kursk’s tent.

But there was something subtly different about this latest vision. He frowned.

His
army?

The lights dimmed for just an instant and he knew then: not
his
army but
their
army, built to give them power and form. Folding his arms, he fixed them with a cold, unimpressed stare and the lights fluttered nervously about him, tempting and cajoling, promising him his power and riches and whatever else they could glean from his thoughts. After a long moment, he unbent enough to send them a morsel of reassurance. He didn’t need bribes to attack Anavatan, he only needed ...

The flicker of an image came and went almost before he could register it, but he knew whose face it was just the same: the dark-haired man, the one person who might upset all his plans; the one person who, in some far distant future, he might allow to upset his all plans for reasons he could sense but couldn’t yet understand. The one person who was ... key.

The lights gyrated in agitation, thrown into a panic by his train of thought and, almost absently, he sucked in a mouthful of tiny spirits and, holding the image of his beetle—cracked carapace and all—in his thoughts to focus him, he breathed a line of icy power through their midst, knowing instinctively that the spirits’ life force would feed the lights as well as they’d fed him. He would build them their army, he assured them, and unleash it upon the shining city like an avenging storm because it pleased him to do so, but after that he had other plans for his future and for theirs. The game was all that mattered, and Graize had always been very good at the game.

Reluctantly, the lights agreed.

A few moments later a pause in the steady gait of the kazakin interrupted his thoughts, and he looked up to see that the shimmer had become a sea of sheep and goats flanked by half a dozen mounted Yuruk. The same high-pitched whistle he’d heard before the kazakin had approached him sounded across the plains and, as the other riders stirred, Kursk glanced down at him with a smile.

“Almost home now.”

He turned. “Standard-bearer, answer the call.”

With a huge smile, Rayne raised herself up in the saddle, and putting two fingers into her mouth, gave a long, ululating whistle in return.

There was a moment’s silence, then a series of short whistles, and Kursk nodded.

“All’s well. Let’s ride.”

Urging his pony into a canter, he brought the kazakin down the rise.

The animals engulfed them within minutes. For a heartbeat Graize was back in Anavatan on market day, with great flocks and herds crowding the narrow streets so tightly the people could hardly move around them. He smelled the strong, lanolin scent of warm wool, tasted the dust of the city streets churned up into the air, heard the tinkle of the thousand tiny bells woven into their wool to protect them from the spirits of the wild lands, then a small figure galloped toward them and he recognized the first of his new allies.

Caleb.

Perhaps two years younger than Rayne, with Kursk’s hawk nose and a medium complexion burned brown by the sun, he had one arm tightly wrapped in thin strips of goat hide around two wooden splints, but still managed to guide his pony with ease. Staring openly at Graize, he halted his mount with a flourish just in front of them.

Kursk smiled warmly at him and Graize could see the blood tie stretch between them as it did with Rayne.

“What news, Calebask?”

“Abia’s just returned from the west,” the boy answered eagerly. “She wasn’t too pleased to find you gone, Aba,” he added with a grin.

“My arkados spent the winter with her family,” Kursk remarked to Graize. “Go and tell her I’ve returned,” he replied to Caleb. “And tell her I’ve brought her a new delos, one she didn’t have to go to the trouble of birthing herself.”

Caleb’s black, almond-shaped eyes widened, but after nodding sharply, he wheeled about and galloped for the encampment, raising a great crowd of insects in his wake.

Beside them, Rayne snickered. “He’s not too happy either, Aba,” she noted.

Graize looked at her curiously.

“If you’re Abia’s new delos,” she explained, “then you’re Caleb’s new kardos. New,
older
kardos.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Oh, no, he’s used to it. There’s four older than him already.”

“How’d he hurt his arm?”

She shrugged. “Showing off. He wanted Danjel to notice him.” She twisted in the saddle to meet his eyes. “You see, it’s not Caleb you have to worry about, Graize, it’s Danjel.”

“Danjel will welcome him as warmly as the rest, Raynziern,” Kursk interrupted in an admonishing tone, urging his pony into a trot to end further discussion.

Behind him, Rayne just shrugged as Graize cast her a curious glance.