Five Odd Honors (57 page)

“Sounds like a good plan,” Shen said. “I’m here if you need me, but I want you to follow your own impulses, Brenda. I think they’re going to be sounder than anything I could advise.”

Brenda nodded, simultaneously pleased and startled by the blanket trust both men gave her.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said to Shen, a little shyly, “if I use a crib sheet. I didn’t want to get stuck because I couldn’t remember something.”

“Good thinking,” Shen reassured her.

Parnell nodded. “Remember, you have permission to draw on our local energies. Do you remember the training we did?”

“I do,” Brenda said. “I guess I’d better get started, shouldn’t I?”

“Do,” Parnell said, looking up into the blue sky as if he could read omens in the clouds. “The sooner you start, the better.”

The oddest thing about the flow of one’s own blood, Loyal Wind thought, is that it takes a moment to feel it against the skin. Perhaps this is because skin and blood are the same temperature, and the liquid motion of blood is almost frictionless. Perhaps it is because flow is the natural state for blood, and so there is no contrast of ch’i.

But when the blood cools, when the skin has been sufficiently abraded that the slightest caress of air is anguish, then the coursing of blood across that open wound is perceived. By that point, the sufferer does not feel the sensation as pain, for pain has ceased to be isolated.

Pain is what one has become.

Loyal Wind was becoming pain when he felt the first painting of a one of characters upon stone etch itself upon his soul. The shape of that simple, graceful line, and the tentative contact he felt through it brought him back into a focus he had lost.

When the whip again touched his back, Loyal Wind screamed with a new awareness of the wet leather ripping through skin into muscle.

His ears, which had long since been unable to hear beyond the rasp of his own breathing, the erratic rhythm of his heart, heard a man’s voice speak casually.

“See? He wasn’t as bad as you thought. Faking it. These warrior types have incredible stamina, and they do say this one has already been dead. There’s some question as to whether he can die.”

Loyal Wind had wondered the same thing himself. Reincarnated by the grace of Yen-lo Wang, could he die? Or could he only suffer?

The lash stroked over Loyal Wind’s shoulders, across his upper back, agony exploding through his skull as leather touched exposed bone.

Yet horrifically overwhelming as this pain might be, as pervasive, was the awareness of ideograms being shaped upon stone, upon soul. The hand that shaped them was unsteady, uncertain, but the force of ch’i that flooded through the link was as a striking bolt of lighting: sharp, jagged, incredibly focused.

In the afterglow of that strike, Loyal Wind knew whose hand shaped those ideograms: Brenda Morris.

He saw her, looking out through the ideograms she was shaping to bridge the gap between them. She knelt before a piece of stone, a pen in one hand, the other hand braced to hold her steady.

Long, straight black hair, tied back from her face. A touch of lavender ribbonjust visible when she moved her head up and down, checking her drawing against a small piece of paper. Little earrings, tiny drops of jade and onyx, shaped like flowers.

Brenda’s dark brown eyes were narrowed. In their intentness, in their shape, Loyal Wind saw Brenda’s great-grandfather, who had been his friend, his companion.

Exile Rat, who, by his cowardice, his selfishness, Loyal Wind had betrayed.

Pain ripped through Loyal Wind’s body once more, felt acutely, as he had not suffered for many whip strokes.

Loyal Wind understood through his gut. His intellect was still not fully his to command.

Unintentionally, in working this spell, a spell doubtless meant to help effect Loyal Wind’s own rescue, Brenda Morris was feeding ch’i into him. The ch’i gave him strength, but not the sort of strength that would enable him to struggle or to fight. His tortured body was long beyond anything other than hanging by the leather bonds that tied Loyal Wind to the whipping post.

Unknowing, while trying to save him, Brenda Morris was granting Loyal Wind strength enough to suffer.

Loyal Wind screamed, sensate horror giving nearly articulate meaning to sounds that had long ago deteriorated until they contained less sense than the insane snarls of a rabid dog.

Freed by suffering from the realm of thought, now once again Loyal Wind knew what was happening to him, what would happen to him. He passed back to where dread adds its spice to sensation, giving piquancy to the torturer’s art.

Another ideogram was shaped. Another thin channel of energy flowed forth to sustain an intellect that wished nothing more than to descend into the maelstrom of unconsciousness.

Loyal Wind began to throw himself from side to side, seeking to break not the bonds upon his wrists but the bindings upon his soul. He could not bear it, could not bear feeling, thinking. Could not . . .

Or could he? Could he?

Loyal Wind dropped limp once more, so limp that he was only vaguely aware of the attempts of his torturers to ascertain whether or not he lived.

One rough voice argued that he must, for the blood that flowed from his open wounds still moved with the pulsing of a heart. The other said he could not be alive. Surely that frenzy had been the brain or heart giving way beneath the demands of the whip.

Li Szu would be angry, the torturers whispered nervously. He had not wanted his prisoners to escape him, especially into death.

Argument stilled the whip. With this small relief, Loyal Wind struggled to shape the coherent thought that he had sought to banish breaths before.

He could not bear it. Could not bear the pain.

If he broke this link—whether by forcing his death (if he could die) or by forcing unwelcome ch’i back along the silk-fine fiber that connected him to Brenda Morris’s spell—then once again Loyal Wind would have surrendered to cowardice. To betrayal.

If he could bear it, bear the pain, bear the even worse awareness, then . . .

He resolved.

Loyal Wind’s head had fallen back against his bloodied shoulders, but in imagination the Horse shook his mane and snorted challenge to his enemies.

They could ride him to the ground, rupture proud heart and lungs, break his back, and strip his sides with spur and whip, but he would never give way.

Never.

Cruel callused fingers pinched Loyal Wind’s nose, held his mouth shut, trying to see if he still breathed.

Never.

Convinced there was breath and heartbeat, rough voices shouted at him, bellowed so close to his ears that his bones felt the vibration.

Never.

Of ered Loyal Wind surrender. Surcease. Rest.

This tempted. He could feign surrender. Surely they would not call him to account immediately. Brenda would finish her spell, but . . .

Never.

The whip snapped beside his earlobe, ripping a new hole in soft flesh. Blood flooded from the wound, pooled in his ear, clogging, yet somehow failing to deafen the demands that he surrender. Give way. Confess that he’d been wrong in what he’d done all those years ago.

Never.

More threads. More clarity. More pain.

Brenda’s hand, steadier now, continued drawing the characters on the stone. The ch’i she fed into her spell was alien to Loyal Wind, a green ch’i, a bright ch’i, whereas the ch’i of the Lands was red and yellow and golden. . . .

As that green ch’i fed him, Loyal Wind experienced the input of his senses more acutely, although he grew no stronger. He wondered if any of those who were witnessing his degradation could see the alien hue that tinted his blood.

The whip fell again, this time across a patch of thigh, virgin and unspoiled until now. Fell again, across the sole of his foot. The pain was sharp, fresh. H ehowled or tried to howl, but his throat was thick from screaming, and what came out was choked and rasping.

Never.

How many ideograms had she drawn? How much more must he bear?

Loyal Wind strove to count back, touching the silken threads.

One. Five. Seven.

With the next stroke, black and red pain thundered through Loyal Wind’s entire body. He nearly lost the count.

Nine. Twelve.

Never!

Thirteen.

Fourteen.

Loyal Wind slumped as a green-gold light cut through a dimness of which he had long since ceased to be aware.

Blackness. He felt himself falling.

Never.

Rough as
the rasping caress of a cat’s tongue, Pai Hu broke into the chaotic stream of Pearl’s thoughts.

“The Ninth Gate has been crossed. Brenda Morris has vanished into the sidhe.”

Pearl listened, but there was nothing more. Well, she hadn’t exactly expected the White Tiger of the West to pause for a chat.

She’d been sitting in her favorite easy chair, listening to music and letting her thoughts wander over a long life fully lived.

She had already dressed for the confrontation to come: tailored slacks of raw silk dyed buff , paired with a coordinating top adorned with a broad center stripe in a green slightly darker than mint. Sensible—but not clunky—shoes, a clasp to hold back her hair. Emerald earrings. A selection of amulet bracelets. The sword Treaty.

Now Pearl walked briskly through the house that had been her home for so many years, checking the status of both locks and wards. All were in place. Her revised will sat on top of a stack of essential paperwork beneath a blown glass paperweight set in the precise center of the desk blotter.

Pearl had prepared a delayed e-mail to be sent to Dr. Broderick Pike of the Rosicrucians. The computer would send it if she or one of the other Orphans did not return within a week. The e-mail directed Dr. Pike to query her lawyer, who in turn held a letter. The letter explained the complex details of the situation, and suggested actions that the indigenous magical traditions might need to take.

Deborah Van Bergenstein, the Pig, would get a copy of the same letter.

Hopefully unnecessary preparations, but Pearl and Albert had both agreed that matters had escalated to the point that nothing could be left to chance.

Resisting an urge to check the wards and locks once more, Pearl returned to her easy chair. She had learned to meditate when she was very young, but, even so, sliding her mind into the familiar space from which she could touch regions not normally accessible to the waking mind was not easy.

Forcing herself to forget how very much might depend upon what she was attempting, Pearl tried again.

To the untrained, the realm of dreams is as untouchable as thought. Even the adept finds entering dreams difficult, and Pearl had never been one to live in dreams when reality offered more than enough to hold her interest.

However, what Pearl sought now was not precisely a dream, but rather something masquerading as a dream. That something did not come from without, but from within, twisted somewhere within the tangles of past experience that was the foundation upon which Pearl had built her present life.