Shadowed By Wings (35 page)

For yes, I had been on the cusp of understanding the memories in the viagand chambers. I was convinced of it. I’d been able to recognize certain refrains, had oft guessed which images would appear with what strains. The polyphony was not all wild sound uncivilized by time and otherworld tune; order lay within the dulcet mosaic, and I alone—I felt sure of it—stood at the brink of understanding the enigmatic score.

I had climbed the ladder closer to the Realm. Given enough time, I
would
reach the uppermost rung of that ladder. But to reach said rung, I required more venom. More and more and more of it.

Over the next clawful of days, the dragonmaster grew to loathe me for my dependency and lust. Each time he visited me in his underground stable, he railed at me to eat, stand up, begin training for Arena, but as each day passed, I sank further and further into stupor and asked only for venom.

On the morning of the eighth day, I lay down before the old destrier housed in the stall adjacent to me. Alone, emaciated, addle minded, and desperate, I spread my legs before the destrier and offered her my sex.

With the peculiar instinct possessed by those who stand on the knife’s edge of sanity, the dragonmaster guessed at the depths of my desperation that day; he appeared in the darkled stalls at noon, when I’d not expected him, to discover me on the stable floor, thighs venom tarred from the destrier’s repeated feedings.

I believe I would have died that day, had he not come and interfered.

He tethered the destrier in her stall, then scrubbed my skin free of venom and forced a purgative down my throat. Foaming about the mouth, he railed at me, sounding for all the world as mad as I.

But the dragonmaster’s grip on sanity was, I’m ashamed to admit, much stronger than mine at that dismal point in my life, for the very next morn, he brought a visitor down to the secret gloom beneath the domed pool, and that visitor announced, in baritone fury, that I was to imbibe venom no more.

“What’ve you become, blood-blood?” the giant with the waist-long, cleft beard roared as he loomed over me, stooped beneath the stable’s low ceiling. Half of his pate was bald; the other half sported tufts of knotted black hair. Tussocks sprouted above each eye like windswept, cinder-black bush, and these furrowed at me in anger.

“Bleached and gaunt with toxin!” he roared, and the cobwebbed timbers loosed a film of dust upon us. “Servant to helplessness, maggot of despair, get to your feet and let me look upon you.”

“Daronpu Gen,” I whispered, dumbfounded and sprawled upon my featon chaff bed.

He windmilled his great, shaggy arms, his tattered and soiled tunic the snapping sail of a storm-gripped trawler. “What-what? It speaks, it moves, it lives. But does it obey? Get up, get up, let me look upon you, maggot!”

“Daronpu Gen,” I repeated stupidly, and the giant ducked into my stall, enclosed my left forearm in an enormous hand, and swept me upright. I gaped at him as a gamut of emotion further befuddled my venom-addled mind.

Daronpu Gen: the eccentric Holy Warden who had disguised me in an acolyte’s tunic and scapular and hidden me in his decrepit temple in Clutch Re’s Zone of the Dead. Daronpu Gen: the first other than myself to see my mother’s haunt, the first to call me Dirwalan Babu, Skykeeper’s Daughter. Daronpu Gen: the man who had shown me the scroll that stated that one such as myself could serve a bull as a dragonmaster apprentice.

His great, calloused hands cupped my cheeks. His waist-long cleft beard pressed against my chest and belly like a mat of desiccated weeds as he studied my eyes.

“You are missing, blood-blood,” he rumbled. “Misplaced yourself in venom’s deceptively beguiling swamps.”

He released my head, turned a quarter to bellow over his shoulder, “She must be weaned off the poison, man, else we won’t retrieve her from the noxious slough! Quicksand-sure, it’ll suck her down.”

“You tell me what I already know,” the dragonmaster growled, his skeletal face scowling at me from behind the renegade daronpu. “All she cares for is the stuff. She’s given up on life itself.”

“You summon me from my secret lair, bring me to this pit of nihilism, and endanger my life only to convince me my journey is futile? She can be weaned off, I tell you! It’s only a matter of knowing how best to counteract the craving in her soul.”

Daronpu Gen looked back at me, hands still cupped about my head. “How shall I rid this tainted desire from your blood, hey-o? Tell me, now.”

I looked away from him.

His grip upon my temples tightened; then he leaned suddenly into my face and pressed his savage forehead against mine. Rocking my head so that our foreheads rolled one across the other, he inhaled me into his lungs.

“I can taste the Skykeeper about you,” he murmured. “A faded taste, a ghostly presence, and tangled about it, I taste your very soul.”

Of a sudden, he pressed his lips against mine. His tongue twined round mine; revulsion shot through me. An obscure vortex flashed through my mind, a dizzying, blinding starburst display of light that I knew instantly to be his psyche.

He pulled away abruptly, rearing back and thwacking his head upon a rafter.

“So that’s the way to be rid of it, blood-blood!” he cried, and he swiped the back of one rangy arm across his lips. “I’ve the answer now, Komikon! I’ll mix the potion this very eve. And no venom must she receive. Not a drop of it.”

“You think her will to live will be restored by a mere herbal?” The dragonmaster gave a vigorous tug on his chin braid. “Look at her! What magics do you know that can imbue the will to survive in one so determined to die?”

“You assume too much, man. I see no defeat in her eyes, just fear and a lost will.”

“You speak foolishness.”

“Do I, now?” Daronpu Gen patted my cheek and smiled. “What about it, Babu? Of these two ranting old men who stand before you, who do you think is correct, the Komikon or I? What choice would you make: a stab at life, or surcease found in venom?”

He’d asked me a similar question once before, upon finding me amongst the smoking ruins of the Zone of the Dead.
Life or death?
he’d demanded of me, as I’d lain paralyzed by agony from both the loss of Kiz-dan and her babe, and the terrible wound of a Cafar guard’s sword.
Pain or ease?

I’d chosen life then, spurred by the fantastical dream that one day I might kill Kratt, might have my own Clutch where a rishi babe would never be taken from its mother to serve Temple, where a rishi child would never watch her father murdered by a cruel bayen lord. A Clutch where a dragon would never be imprisoned, exploited, and abused through indifference.

My own bull dragon, my own dragon estate.

To kill Kratt.

Those, then, were what I’d once wanted. But now?

I’d come to understand that I was but a pawn in a game governed by others’ needs. Kratt desired the answer to the bull riddle in his bid to become more than just Temple’s overlord of a single Clutch. The dragonmaster sought the same answer, and was motivated by the belief that I was the prophesied Skykeeper’s Daughter who would end the apartheid of the Djimbi and wrest Temple from the Emperor’s hands. The Ranreeb wanted the answer to the bull riddle for Temple, for the wealth and power such an answer would confer, though he believed me to be no Dirwalan Babu, just a deviant who might provide him with the riddle’s answer. But unlike Kratt, the Ranreeb knew that any woman could hear dragonsong during the rite; now that I’d escaped the Ranreeb’s fortress, I was a threat that must be killed.

Yes, I may have been imprisoned in the viagand chambers, may have wanted to escape. But no freedom awaited me beyond its walls, either.

“I want surcease,” I said, my legs folding beneath me.

I curled onto my side and burrowed my head into featon chaff. “I want to be one with the dragon forever.”

“It mumbles!” Daronpu Gen bellowed. “I hear it not!”

“She’s chosen the venom; you heard her as well as I did,” the dragonmaster spat, and I could envision his eyes rolling and his shoulders convulsing.

“She’s lost, man, that’s what I heard. Bogged down in toxic quagmire. Found and liberated, she’ll choose otherwise.”

“I’ve no time for metaphor. Arena draws nigh.”

“Keep her off the venom. Give me a day or so, and I’ll give her reason to survive Abbasin Shinchiwouk and continue the fight. Hey-o? Do that for a brother, would you?”

“The emancipation of our people lies there, in that stall! How can you be so sure—” the dragonmaster heatedly began, but the daronpu cut him off.

“Two days,” he cried, and his voice echoed down the corridor as he departed. “I’ll be back. Two days!”

He kept his word. He returned within two days.

But he was not alone.

I didn’t recognize the young boy standing before him, didn’t realize I should. In my febrile chill, I barely registered the rose color of his pleated tunic, the brand upon his forehead.

Daronpu Gen pushed the malnourished boy into my stall.

“I followed the Skykeeper’s taste, hey-o,” the daronpu said smugly. “Chased the traces of its flavor on the wind, wafting in feathered ribbons over the Clutch. Followed it to the Cafar, I did. Found this boy, outside his lady’s room. Smuggled him out under the dead of night. Speak, boy, speak. Tell of your night terrors.”

An asak-illyas, that’s what the boy was. The hieratic branded onto his forehead by hot metal, his shorn head, and the rose color of his pleated tunic marked him as such. He’d been abused in his post as an indentured Temple eunuch trained to serve a bayen lady: bruises, scars, a missing finger, a lopped-off ear, and a haunted look in his eyes bespoke of cruelty enacted upon him, not discipline.

Darting glances this way and that about the stall, he stood before me, quivering with fright. Daronpu Gen placed his hands gently upon the boy’s collarbone.

“Brave child, injured soul, you’ll be harmed no further. I’ve a safe place where you’ll grow hale and live long, away from all torment. Upon my life, I promise to take you there. But first you must speak, yes? Of the voice you hear whispering in the dark, of the unseen hands that molest your spirit. Speak.”

“It comes to me,” the boy said in a quavering voice, his whole twiggy frame shaking. “At night. I pray for Re’s protection, but the bull doesn’t hear me, and it always comes. It calls me son, but I’m no demon’s child.”

He began weeping, little ribs heaving.

“I taste it in my mouth. It invades me. I can’t see, I can’t speak, my legs try to move without me.” The boy turned to Daronpu Gen and clutched his filthy robe. “Purify me; drive it out, please!”

My heart turned into a porcelain shard, a sharp, broken, brittle thing.

No.

It couldn’t be.

I licked my lips.

“How old are you?” I croaked.

The boy didn’t give an answer; I didn’t require one. I could guess his age as well as his identity. Here stood my brother, born when I was nine, taken fresh from my mother’s womb to Temple as reparation for a crime my mother had committed in her desperation to buy Waivia back.

Since my return from the viagand chambers to Clutch Re, with my blood so saturated still with venom, the haunt had turned her obsessive need to find Waivia upon the only other person besides me who shared the same blood as my sister. This little boy.

I rammed a fist into my mouth, aghast.

Why, if she could seek out her own blood, could the haunt not find Waivia by herself?
Why?

“When did these visitations start, my boy?” Daronpu Gen murmured, patting the asak-illyas’s shorn head.

“A clawful of nights ago,” he sobbed.

Exactly the time I’d returned to Clutch Re.

“I’m no demon’s son; please, drive it away!” the boy cried out.

The daronpu clucked soothingly and impaled me with his hoary eyes. “Can you guess whom he serves in Cafar Re?”

A feeling of dread presentiment filled me.

“Waikar Re Kratt’s Wai-roidan yin. Don’t you, boy? You serve Kratt’s First Claimed Woman. And when Kratt finds you alone, if he seeks to relieve a certain itch he oft feels, he hurts you. As he hurts many rishi in Cafar Re.”

The boy’s shoulders shook. The rangy giant knelt and enfolded him in his great arms.

“You’re safe now, little flea. He’ll not touch you again. Hey-o?”

I turned to the side and retched.

“Take him away,” I gasped when the dry heaving stopped. “I don’t want to see him. Take him, go.”

“Not until you look the boy in the eye and tell him you’d rather die than alleviate his night-terror suffering. Because that’s how it stands, blood-blood. You die in Arena, and this boy becomes the Skykeeper’s channel.”

“Not possible,” I said, staring at the ground, at the flame-play of shadow cast from the daronpu’s lantern.

“No, not possible. The prophecy speaks of a via, a girl child. A babu: daughter. But this boy is blood-bonded to you, the taste of him confirms it. If you succumb without fulfilling the Skykeeper’s wish, this mite will be haunted by the Skykeeper till death.”

With a throat filled with gravel, I asked, “And what do you think the Skykeeper wants, Daronpu Gen? Tell me what this obscure prophecy says.”