Feast of Souls (48 page)

It was strange, Andovan thought, that his moments of greatest strength were fueled by his moments of direst frustration. But so it was.

Gods knew, there was enough frustration to last him a while. His dreams no longer guided him clearly, which meant that every step he took might be taking him farther from his quarry, rather than toward her. He had no way to know. Some nights he had no dreams at all, and it was as if Colivar’s spells had lost all their power, leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere without guidance, without focus, without oversight. If that was the case, then he was exactly what strangers on the road perceived him to be, a wanderer without destination or purpose. A pitiful thing for a royal prince to become, for sure.

The only thing he knew for certain now was that if his quarry had left Gansang just ahead of him the night the dream-towers fell, then every day in which he failed to find her increased the likelihood she would pass beyond his reach forever, and that made him rage inside against the gods, the stars, or whatever forces of Fate seemed nearest. There were rare moments when something suffused his veins that was almost his accustomed strength, and the weakness that was the Wasting seemed to loosen its stranglehold upon his spirit. But only for a brief while. Sooner or later it returned again, a suffocating shroud of enfeeblement that sapped his hope even as it sapped his physical strength. It was all he could do to keep moving each night, and to pray that Colivar’s spells were still active, even though he no longer sensed them. If his dreams would no longer guide his steps, perhaps instinct would.

The dreams themselves had become chaotic, with strange images that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. Burning gems. Bales of wool. A beheaded infant. The images were like pieces of a puzzle—or ten different puzzles—and he could not manage to assemble them into a meaningful whole. Did that mean Colivar’s power was failing him, or was he simply going mad? Or maybe the machinations of the foreign Magister had intended that all along, to separate him from his father’s house and then play with his mind—

Don’t think like that
, he told himself.
You
will
go mad for certain if you do
.

Because she was almost certainly traveling, he traveled as well. Nameless villages provided him with fresh supplies and sometimes a bit of excitement as one local or another chose to challenge him… and then they passed into the mists behind him as though they had never existed. Dream stuff. All of his life felt like a dream now. It was a disconcerting sensation, and he feared more than anything it heralded some new and weaker stage in the progression of his illness. And so he forced himself to pay the price of a night’s room and board at various inns along the way, and listened from the shadows to the tales of other travelers, always hoping to hear some bit of news or gossip that would give him focus again. But there was none. He listened to tales with an empty heart well into the night, and left in the morning with no more sense of direction than he’d had when he arrived.

I will not die in bed
! he raged at the gods. But they were cold and silent. And the more he traveled, the less and less certain he was that he was heading toward anything other than an empty, meaningless death.

Kamala’s dreams had been bad enough that she hadn’t gotten more than an hour’s sleep the night before. Each time she put her head down on the pillow it seemed she was transported into the depths of the abyss again, and those few times when utter exhaustion took hold and she would actually slumber for a few moments, she awakened soon after with a film of cold sweat upon her skin, her heart pounding as if it might burst from her chest.

Whatever it was that was after her, it was coming closer. Or at least she feared that it was, so much so that her mind was becoming unhinged. Which possibility was more terrifying?

Two days had passed since she had spoken to Ne-tando. One more and she would be on the road again, able to lose herself among his retinue of servants and guards. But could she bring herself to wait that long? The nightmares were running her ragged. They might stop if she left this place, if she put enough miles between herself and… what? What refuge was safe enough? She didn’t even know what it was that was coming after her, much less how to avoid it.

One thing was certain, and that was that hiding in her room only made things worse. In the great room at least she could distract herself, and perhaps learn a bit about the world she was now set loose in. Kamala the whore had known nothing about the lands outside her own city, and Ethanus the hermit had been more interested in teaching her the ins and outs of sorcery than the rise and fall of morati governments. Now, in this place, for the first time, the whole world was being laid out before her, but in bits and pieces that she must fit together like fragments of a vast, confusing puzzle. Nations and wars and monarchs and treaties and political triumphs and social travesties were paraded before her in dizzying array, and she struggled to assemble some kind of mental map to give them all context. She could never ask for a real map, of course, or any kind of help in understanding the shards of knowledge that were being thrown about so freely. If her youth in Gansang had taught her one thing, it was that a show of ignorance attracted trouble like rotting meat attracted flies. In this company, so conspicuously worldly, any request for help would surely draw attention to her. And attention was what she must avoid at all costs, if someone or something were truly hunting her.

Now and then she caught a glimpse of some other customer keeping quiet in the shadows of the room, as she was, and she wondered if they were equally lost, equally struggling. The men who filled the center stage did not seem to notice their audience. Or perhaps they simply did not care. Boisterous as they were, self-absorbed and progressively drunk as the night wore on, they probably imagined they were being admired by all who saw them.

When at last it seemed to Kamala that her head had absorbed as many random facts about the world that night as it might contain without bursting, and that sheer lack of sleep would soon overcome her no matter where she was, she rose from her chair and began to move toward the stairs that led to her room. The darkness waiting for her there was uninviting, to be sure, but it was preferable to falling asleep in this public place and suffering her nightmares here. Or worse.

But as she moved through the main area of the room, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, a young girl entered who froze her in her tracks.

Maybe it was the girl’s age. Maybe it was the look in her eyes, half fear and half determination. Maybe it was the awkward way in which she approached the crowd of drunken men, as if she knew in words what she wanted from them, but had not yet convinced her body to support the mission. Ten years old, perhaps twelve at the most, but Kamala could feel the tension rising from her flesh like heat from an oven.

It was like looking in a mirror. No, more accurately: it was like looking through a distorting lens, not at the present but at the past.

The girl was clean in the way that peasants were clean when they expected to be in good company: hair washed, face scrubbed, hands pink and raw, but with telltale lines of ingrained dirt any place that water did not easily reach. Had Kamala looked like that once? A lump caught in her throat as she saw the girl’s fingernails, each with a thin line of dirt tucked down tight against the flesh, where a casual washing could not easily reach. No doubt she thought herself truly clean. Kamala had once, when she had achieved such a state.

The girl came hesitantly into the great room, like a deer might enter an unfamiliar meadow, watching on all sides for predators. Yet unlike a deer she would not run, Kamala knew that. She had come to meet the wolves.

Go back
! she thought to her. Unable to move or even speak, simply staring at her in pained empathy.
There is nothing here worth what this will cost you. Trust me
!

The girl was wearing a simple linen gown; it was probably the finest thing she owned. A line of rings had been sewn down both sides and a cord laced through them so that, by drawing it tightly, she might impose a more adult curve upon her waist. It was an unnatural illusion on so young a child, but it brought her the notice she de-sired. Several of the men turned to watch her as she threaded her way through their company, and the inn’s owner, normally so protective of his patrons, kept his distance as she approached, having not yet decided if she was a creature to be welcomed or expelled.

Finally she came to where all could see her, and in a voice that seemed surprisingly steady to Kamala (but how one struggled to sound fearless, when one was most afraid!) “I am looking for Master Beltorres, please.”

Some of the men laughed and some of the whores whispered, but a bearded man in an eastern-style doublet looked up at her words. “I am Beltorres. Who and what are you?”

The girl bit her lip as she curtseyed. Pain lanced through Kamala’s heart as she watched the motion. Had she looked this awkward herself when she had tried to impress Ethanus, aping noble mannerisms that so obviously did not come naturally to her?

“I am called Selti, sir, if it please you.” Again the awkward curtsey. “I have a message for you from Master Hurara.” She took a piece of carefully folded vellum out of her sleeve and offered it to him. With a smile he took it from her, brushing against her hand briefly but suggestively as he did so. The girl blushed but smiled, and did not back away. The lump in Kamala’s throat turned to a burning ember. She could feel the power inside her, angry and indignant, urging her to act in the girl’s defense.
This is her moment
, she told it.
Her choice to make, not mine
. The power was not convinced, and it roiled molten in her gut. She knew what the girl intended. She could smell it on her. She also knew where it would lead.

“Well then,” Beltorres grunted. “I suppose I may have to visit the harbor after all.” With a hearty laugh he threw the paper into the fire. “Business is as business does, eh?” He grinned at the girl; it was the kind of expression one might see on a hungry hyena. “Stay about a bit, I may want to send an answer back.”

Kamala drew in a sharp breath as one of the whores reached out for the girl, laughing softly as she did so. How many times had she looked back on her own life, wondering what single moment she could have changed to make it into something different? This was the girl’s moment. Clearly she knew it, too. Kamala could see it in her eyes. She could smell it in the room’s thick air, the fear of a girl not yet past the threshold of womanhood, the perfumed amusement of whores surrounding her, and the eager sweat of the men watching… it was all she could do to keep hold of the power inside her. Gods alone knew if she released it now it might do what it had done in the streets of Gansang, only ten times worse. Not because killing these men was qualitatively worse than killing a handful of ruffians, but because these men were far more likely to be avenged.

But she wanted to kill them. She really did. She wanted to kill any man that would put his hands upon a child, whether she was willing or not. And with him any woman that would draw such a girl down into a circle of whores, as these were now doing, plucking at her coarse linen dress and the body beneath with whispered laughter as one of the men reached over to feel for himself what was beneath the homespun packaging—and the girl stared at them in a daze, trembling, wanting their favor and the coin that might come of it but too young to know how to handle such attention.

“Let her go.”

The words came from behind her, shattering her mood like glass. Kamala turned about just in time to see the owner of the voice approaching. He was a young man dressed in a woodsman’s costume, simple in cut, but made of the kind of quality cloth only the richest men could afford. He was blond and fair-skinned and passably handsome, with piercing blue eyes that shone like ice as he stared at the tableau before him. They were all frozen now, looking back at him, merchants and mercenary captains and whores and serving girls and the one little girl in the center of it all, her face now leached of all color.

“Let her go,” he repeated.

The one man who had been reaching out toward the girl paused in his motion, but did not withdraw. “This is not your business.”

“It is now. Let her go.”

The man spread his hands, palms upwards, and grinned. “No one has put shackles on her. Or forced her to join us in the first place.” He looked at the girl. “You are here of your own will, yes?”

Kamala held her breath. At that age, she remembered, the only way one could deal with some things was by denying they were happening. By asking the girl to acknowledge her situation in words, to give him permission to use her as a whore, this man had just laid waste to all her defenses.

Kamala saw the girl begin to tremble. For all the accustomed hardness of her heart, it was more than she could handle. But the blond stranger moved again before she could act, crossing in front of her and spoiling her view of the group. Breath held, she watched as he waded into the midst of the painted women, reaching out to the child’s arm and pulling her out from among them. A couple of the men jumped angrily to their feet and the one that had been fondling the girl cursed loudly. But the stranger stared them down. There was fury in his eyes, and death, and in the end none of the pampered crowd had the courage to test him.

Kamala released her breath in a long, soft hiss as he passed by her again, taking the child with him. While all the eyes of the place were upon him she gathered the shadows of the room about her so that she might follow him unobserved. She also conjured a vague cloud of foreboding to gather by the door itself, and to prevent the men inside the inn from choosing to do the same. Simple spells of little substance, but sometimes those were enough.

By the time she left the inn the stranger had gone some distance from it, and had just released the girl from his grasp. She looked more angry than afraid right now, and was staring at him with angry, hollow eyes.