Blood of the Fold (51 page)

At the end of the gangway the four sailors moved around them, sheltering them from the rain. Ulicia could feel the muscles in each of her Sisters flex as they moved up the pier. Through the link, she could feel each little ache, or pain, or pleasure they felt. In her mind, they were one. In her mind, they were of one thought, one need: to rid themselves of this leech of a man.

Soon enough, Sisters, soon enough.

And then we go after the Seeker?

Yes, Sisters, and then we go after the Seeker.

As they marched up the pier, a squad of grisly-looking soldiers trotted past in the opposite direction, their weapons clanging as they went. They ran up the slippery gangway without pause. The squad’s corporal came to a halt before the blustering ship’s captain. She couldn’t hear the soldier’s words, but she saw Captain Blake throw his arms up and she could hear him scream, “What!” The captain angrily threw down his hat and started a flurry of objections she couldn’t make out. Had she extended the link, she would be able to, but she didn’t dare risk it, yet. The soldiers drew steel. Captain Blake planted his fists on his hips and after a short pause turned to the men on the dock.

“
Make the lines fast, boys,” he yelled down at them. “We’re not leaving tonight.”

When Ulicia reached the coach, a soldier held his hand out, commanding them to enter. Ulicia let the others climb in first. She could feel the comfort of the weight coming off the legs of the two older women as they sat on the thinly padded leather seat. The soldier ordered the four sailors that had accompanied them to stand to the side and wait. As she stepped in and pulled the door closed, Ulicia saw the soldiers on the ship herding all the sailors from the
Lady Sefa
down the gangway.

Emperor Jagang probably intended to kill them to eliminate any witnesses to connect him with Sisters of the Dark. Jagang was doing her a favor. He would not get the chance to kill the ship’s crew, of course, but since the sailors were not being allowed to leave, she would. She smiled at her Sisters. Through the link, they each knew her thoughts. Each of the other five returned a satisfied smile. Their sea voyage had been miserable; the sailors would pay.

On the slow ride to the fortress, as they gained a rise, Ulicia was surprised to see, when the lightning flashed, the extent of the army Jagang had gathered. Every time the lightning thundered through the hills, she could see tents as far as there was land. They covered the rolling hills like blades of grass in spring. Their numbers made the city of Tanimura seem a village. She had not known there were this many men at arms in the whole of the Old World. Well, perhaps they, too, would be useful.

When the forks of lightning ripped under the boiling clouds and shook the ground, she could see, too, the grim fortress where Jagang waited. Through the link, she could see the fortress through their eyes, too, and could feel their fear. They all wanted to blast that hilltop into oblivion, but every one of them knew that they couldn’t, not yet.

There would be no mistaking Jagang when they saw him—none of them could fail to recognize that smirking face—but they had to see him first, to be certain.

When we see him, Sisters, and know he is there, then he will die.

Ulicia wanted to see fear in that man’s eyes, the kind of fear he had put in their hearts, but she dared not risk giving him any indication of what they were about to do. Ulicia didn’t know what he was capable of; they had, after all, never before been visited in the dream that was not a dream by any but their Master, the Keeper, and she was not about to take the slightest chance by giving him any warning, just for the satisfaction of seeing him quake.

She had deliberately waited until they were sailing into Grafan Harbor before she revealed her plan to her Sisters, just to be safe. Their Master would see to Jagang’s punishment. It was their job to simply deliver his soul to the underworld and into the Keeper’s grasp.

The Keeper would be more than pleased when they restored his power in this world, and would reward them with a view of Jagang’s torment, should they wish it. And they would wish it.

The coach lurched to a halt before the imposing maw of the fortress. The women were ordered out of the coach by a burly soldier wearing a hide mantle and enough weapons to single-handedly slaughter a good-sized army. The six of them marched silently through the rain and mud and in under the barreled roof beyond the iron portcullis. They were led into a dark entryway where they were told to stand and wait, as if any of them had any intention of sitting on the filthy, cold, stone floor.

They were, after all, wearing their finest dresses: Tovi in a dark dress slimming to her size; Cecilia, her brushed and neat gray hair complementing her deep green dress banded with lace at the collar; Nicci in a simple dress, black, as her dresses always were, laced at the bodice in a way that accented the shape of her bosom; Merissa in a red dress, a color she favored, and with good reason, the way it set off her thick mane of dark hair, to say nothing of exhibiting her exquisite form; Armina in a dark blue dress that revealed her reasonably shapely figure and went well with her sky blue eyes; and Ulicia in her own becoming attire, a shade of blue much lighter than Armina’s and trimmed with tasteful ruffles at her cleavage and wrists, and unadorned at the waist so as not to hide her well-formed hips.

They all wanted to look their best when they killed Jagang.

The block stone walls of the room were bare of everything but two hissing torches in brackets. As they waited, Ulicia could feel the anger of each of the others rising, along with hers and, too, their collective apprehension.

When the sailors, surrounded by soldiers, came through the portcullis, one of the two guards in the stone room opened the inner door into the fortress and with a rude tilt of his head, ordered the Sisters through. The corridors were as austere as the entry room had been; this was an armed fortress, not a palace, after all, and it made no pretension of comfort. As they followed their guards, Ulicia saw no more than crude wooden benches and torches set in rusty iron brackets. Doors were rough planks with iron strap hinges, and there was not so much a single oil lamp to be seen as they worked their way into the heart of the stronghold. It appeared little more than barracks for troops.

The guards came to a large double door and turned their backs to the stone at each side after opening the doors. One of them pompously lifted a thumb, ordering them into the greatroom beyond. Ulicia vowed to her Sisters that she would remember his face, and he would pay the price for his arrogance. Ulicia led the other five women in as the sailors came up the hall behind, accompanied by the echo of boots on stone and the clatter of the weapons of the men guarding them.

The room was huge. Windows without glass high up on the walls revealed the lightning outside, and let the rain run down the dark stone in glistening rivulets. A pit to each side of the floor held roaring fires. Their sparks and churning smoke ascended to billow out the open windows, but still left a reeking haze to hang in the air. In a ring of rusted brackets around the room, torches spit and hissed, adding the smell of pitch to the stink of sweat. Everything in the dim room flickered in the firelight.

Between the twin crackling fires they could see, in the gloom beyond, a massive plank table set with a wealth of food. Only one man sat at the table, on the opposite side, casually watching them as he sawed off a chunk of roasted suckling pig.

In the murky, flickering light, it was hard to be sure. They had to be sure.

Behind the table, against the wall, stood a row of people who were obviously not soldiers. The men wore white trousers and nothing else. The women wore baggy-legged garments running from ankle to neck to wrist and cinched at the waist with a white cord. Except for the cord, the outfits were so sheer that the barefoot women might as well have been naked.

The man raised his hand and waggled his first two fingers, ordering them forward. The six women advanced across the cavernous room, that because of its dark stone that swallowed the firelight, seemed to close in about them. On an enormous bearskin before the table sat two more of the absurdly clad slaves. The women behind the table, against the wall, stood hands at their sides, bodies stiff and unmoving. Each of the young women had a gold ring pierced through the center of her lower lip.

The fires behind them popped and snapped as the six Sisters advanced into the gloom. One of the men in white trousers poured wine into a mug for the man when he held it out to his side. None of the slaves looked at the six women. Their attention was on the man sitting alone at the table.

Ulicia and her Sisters all recognized him, now.

Jagang.

He was of average height, but stout, with massive arms and chest. His bare shoulders bulged from a fur vest opened in the middle, displaying a few dozen gold and jeweled chains lying against the hair in the deep cleft between his prodigious chest muscles. The chains and jewels looked to have once belonged to kings and queens. Silver bands encircled his arms above bulky biceps. Each of his thick fingers bore a gold or silver ring.

Each of the Sisters knew well the pain those powerful fingers could inflict.

His shaved head gleamed in the fluttering firelight. It matched his brawn. Ulicia couldn’t imagine him with hair atop his head; it could only diminish his menace. His neck looked like it belonged to a bull. A gold ring in the flare of his left nostril held a thin gold chain running to another ring at midheight in his left ear. He was clean-shaven except for a two-inch braid of mustache growing only above the corners of his smirk, and another braid in the center under his lower lip.

His eyes, though, were what riveted anyone upon whom they settled. There were no whites to them at all. They were a murky gray, clouded over with sullen, dusky shapes that shifted in a field of inky obscurity, yet there was no doubt whatsoever as to when he was looking at you.

They were twin windows into nightmare.

The smirk departed, leaving in its place a treacherous glare. “You’re late,” he said in a deep, grating voice that they each recognized as readily as his nightmare eyes.

Ulicia wasted no time with a reply, nor did she betray any indication of what she was about to do. Twisting the flow of Han, she even controlled their hatred, allowing only one facet of their feelings—fear—to touch their faces, lest they give him any warning of their confidence, and betray a reason for it.

Ulicia committed to obliterating everything from her toes outward—for the next twenty miles.

With violent and unceremonious abruptness, she yanked the restraining blocks from the furious force bottled behind it. As quick as thought, with thundering fury, the Additive and Subtractive Magic exploded outward in a murderous blast. The very air howled as it burned. The room ignited with a blinding flash of twin magics—opposites that twisted in a deafening discharge of wrath.

Even Ulicia was stunned at what she had unleased.

The fabric of reality seemed to rip.

Her last thought was that surely, she had destroyed the entire world.

Like snowflake patches of a dark dream drifting down, everything came slowly back into her vision—the twin fires first, then the torches, then the dark stone walls, and finally the people.

Her whole body was numb for a stunned moment before the feeling returned to her flesh in a million painful pinpricks. She hurt everywhere.

Jagang tore off a big bite of roast pheasant. He chewed a moment, and then wagged the leg bone at her.

“
You know your problem, Ulicia?” he asked, still chewing. “You use magic that you can unleash as quick as a thought.”

The smirk returned to his greasy lips. “I, on the other hand, am a dream walker. I use the time between fragments of thought, in that stillness when there is nothing, to do what I do. I slip in where no other can go.”

He gestured with the bone again as he swallowed. “You see, for me, in that space between thought, time is infinite, and I can do as I wish. You might as well be stone statues trying to chase me.”

Ulicia felt her Sisters through the link. It was still there.

“
Crude. Very crude,” he said. “I’ve seen others do it much better, but then they’d been practiced at it. I left the link—for now. For now, I want you all to feel each other. I’ll break it later. Just as I can break the link, I can break your minds, too.” He took a gulp of wine. “But I think that’s so unproductive. How can you teach people a lesson, really teach them a lesson, if their minds don’t understand it?”