Heart of Light (48 page)

“In the name of Charlemagne who set you,” he whispered. “In the name of my ancestor who created you. By your nature and for what you were made, I adjure you to show me the way to the heart of the world and the jewel it guards.”

The big green-golden eye closed. The spell was asleep again. Nigel's heart contracted.

The spell didn't feel like something made by man. Its very shape, as something animal and wild, seemed to transcend humanity and its history and its beliefs.

What if—the very thought felt like heresy—Charlemagne had not spelled the compass stone but only found it? Spelled by an ancient force, long before the beginning of kings or civilization?

That was as heretical as the thought that the queen of England shouldn't get the ruby after all. And yet . . . The angel had told Nigel.

Not that he believed in angels. Most of his life, his belief in God had been a thing of duty and obedience, learned from books and ministers and kept in its place, with church services and pious utterances, but not truly felt and certainly not with him every minute of his life.

But the spirit in the forest had been so overwhelmingly real that it could not be doubted. It would be like doubting one's hand or one's foot. Or that the sun came up in the morning. And that creature of light and strength had told Nigel that the queen of England was not entitled to the ruby. And, in fact, that the ruby should not be used in magic of any sort. On pain of some catastrophe that Nigel felt hadn't been named—not to spare him, but because its magnitude was such that the words of humanity were insufficient to contain it.

If a sacrilege such as the angel had spoken could be true, then why couldn't this spell, quiescent within the compass stone, be something old and passing all of Nigel's understanding?

The compass stone chose who it wanted. It was a union of the mind and the soul, and not a mechanical process. And the stone chose one human at a time.

Discouraged, confused, Nigel started to retract his magic probes.

Suddenly, he felt as though something dark and immense had dropped on him.

He saw the spirit hyena before him, just before his arm flared in pain and a familiar voice spoke in his mind, saying, “Found you!”

Darkness closed.

INTERNAL COMPASS

Nigel woke with Nassira bending over him. He felt
pain on his arm and a fog in his mind, and he remembered the spirit hyena.

He put his hand to his wrist and looked at Nassira. She appeared tired and resigned.

“The Hyena Men,” he said.

She nodded. Unlike any woman Nigel had ever known, she seemed completely able to adapt to any situation suddenly, with no transition. Her eyes were clear and her look completely calm. “They didn't capture you. I managed to deflect it. But I am afraid they've touched the mind-bind again.”

Nigel lifted his arm and looked at the stain, which seemed to pulse and writhe with a light of its own. “The second time,” he said. In his mind, Peter's words echoed. They'd found him long enough to touch his soul, to reinforce the bind on his power. If they touched Nigel three times, his mind would be empty and he'd be enslaved to them forever. He frowned slightly.

He lay on soft grass and above him the sky was blue. He didn't know where Emily was. Nor Peter.

For some reason all that seemed very distant and unimportant, compared to the present danger of the Hyena Men.

“They might feel for me again,” he said.

Nassira shook her head slowly, as though clearing her mind. When she spoke, it was softly and in the sort of gentle voice one might use for a confused child. “I think they already know where we are.”

He sat up suddenly, in a panic. “They know where we are.” His hand closed on something—hard, round, cold. “The compass stone,” he said. “Did it show a direction? Where?”

She shook her head, looking grim. “It is truly bound to your wife,” she said slowly. “But perhaps we should go the way it showed last? The Moran and your angel seemed to think we'd know what to do. If your God truly isn't a trickster, what else can they mean us to do?”

“We continue like this, on faith?” he asked.

Nassira nodded, her limpid eyes full of confidence. “When our gods took the trouble to speak to us, how can we not have faith?” She smiled suddenly. “We can at least try. We should go south-southwest and cross that lake.”

“A lake?” He looked at where she was pointing and saw only a narrow strip of water, and for a moment was tempted to correct her, to tell her that it was a river and not a lake, that her knowledge of English must be at fault.

And then a memory of a map of Africa and of some travel journals he'd read asserted itself, and he remembered a lake, narrow as a river and deep green—the color of the water that shone in the distance. It might well be Lake Tanganyika. Only twenty to forty miles wide, yet it was one hundred and fifty miles long, and more like a river than a lake.

“I have no money,” he said, sitting up. “To pay our passage.”

She stood up and extended a hand to him. “We'll think of something.”

But Nigel thought there was nothing to do. He not only had no money, he didn't even have clothes. He wore no more than the tattered remnants of his pajamas. And he was lost with a native woman in a land that wasn't his, and that he did not understand in the slightest.

She'd killed a lion. She'd defended Nigel from hostile natives. His self-image and the stories he'd heard of what white men did in Africa were upended. He was supposed to be protecting her. He was supposed to be more competent than any female and certainly more than a benighted female born to a backward tribe in a country with no knowledge of civilization or advanced magic.

Nassira was smiling at him—an indulgent smile that made her copper-skinned face seem very attractive indeed. “Come, Mr. Oldhall,” she said. “We'll find a way.”

He took her hand and stood.

He could have performed magic. Done some service for the natives. But as the pain in his arm reminded him, if he did so, he would end up no more than a mindless thrall to the Hyena Men.

He walked beside Nassira, his feet bare on the soft grass, still smarting from pain inflicted by torn trees and rocks in another land, long ago, before they'd entered the magical forest.

“It's not supposed to be like this,” he said, his frustration tainting his voice.

“What is not?” she said, turning to look at him.

“This,” he said in frustration. Then, at her puzzled look, “When I was very young, I used to dream of going abroad. Of seeing exotic lands.”

He wondered if any of it made sense to a woman of her background, but she only nodded. It was as though she was a friend, someone he'd grown up with and with whom he'd shared his longing to leave behind the close and confined society in which he'd been brought up. Not an Englishwoman, who would only have asked him why he wished to penetrate uncivilized regions. “I used to want to go abroad and to . . . oh, see everything different and new. But in the books and adventures I read, it was never like this.”

She was silent awhile, and he thought she would be upset. There was the hint of a frown to her expression—vertical wrinkles above the chiseled nose and between her wide-set eyes. And her mouth was set in a firm line. But then the edges of it twitched, and Nigel realized the frown was only an effort not to laugh. “You mean that you did not expect to be chased by Hyena Men? That you did not think that you would find yourself transported through some mystical agency across a space of land that wasn't there, into another place? That you did not expect to see yourself, barefoot, ill dressed and with no means of support in Africa?” The twitching smile became a broad grin. “You astonish me.”

He opened his mouth, ready to ask if she was mocking him and to take offense at it. But her face suddenly collapsed into an expression of dispirited discouragement. “Neither did I,” she said. “Expect it to be like this.”

“You said,” Nigel added as they walked along, the now-tall grass whipping at his legs and what remained of his pajamas, “something about knowing the Hyena Men.”

Nassira took a deep breath. “I was one of them,” she said in a hollow voice. “Kitwana and I and the others joined your group so that we could follow you.”

He should have felt painful shock, but since he'd been in Africa, so many things had gone wrong that he felt dulled to all but the greatest of dangers and the more immediate problems. Instead, he heard himself laugh and saw Nassira look at him with near alarm. “The group,” Nigel said. “The group I hired because you were clean and spoke English. The group of carriers that Peter didn't want me to hire.” His laughter dried up suddenly. “And Peter is a dragon.” He heard a cackle escape his throat, without his being aware of any amusement. “I was surrounded . . .” He shook his head. That Nassira could have been one of his enemies seemed impossible. She had gone so far to try to rescue him, to attempt to keep him safe. “You said that you were one of the Hyena Men?”

“I was young,” she said. “And I believed Africa . . .” She took a deep breath and seemed to hesitate about what she could tell him and what he would accept. “You must know that most Africans feel like they are being crushed by Europeans. Oh, I know,” she said, and he knew it cost her in saying it, but she had seen enough of London and Cairo to admit it. “You brought us some technology and some innovation. You brought us some improvements, but . . . Thousands have died or been enslaved, and I was . . . Back then, I thought that surely Africa would be better off if it could free itself of Europe. The only way to do that, the Hyena Men said, was for us to become more like Europe.”

She told him of a plan to steal the other ruby, the Soul of Fire. Of how she'd intercepted his correspondence at the club. And he should have been angry, but he wasn't. Had someone asked him, he would have said that he'd gone past anger. But it was more that the vision in the forest had robbed him of his purpose and Nassira of hers, and all of a sudden Nigel wasn't even sure which purpose had been the most egregious. His in wanting the ruby for the queen, or hers in wanting it for Africa. So he shook his head and asked only what puzzled him most. “But why did you need to follow us if you had the brand on Emily and me?”

Nassira shook her head. “Kitwana didn't want to use the brand to follow you. He said its being illegal didn't matter, but that it was immoral. That he felt tainted by it.”

Nigel looked at her a long while. “He did?” His first thought was that this was a very fine feeling coming from an African. And then he immediately felt ashamed of himself. He had no reason to think that Kitwana was anything other than moral. He realized he'd been thinking of the man as inferior because of his skin color alone—something he'd never even have questioned back in England, but that now seemed churlish while he was traveling with a Masai woman who had saved his life twice.

“He did,” Nassira said. “Kitwana is . . . odd. I don't know who his people are, but he has very strict ideas of right and wrong.”

They had come, by degrees, to a hut that stood a ways apart from the others, and stopped talking at the same time, as the thin, disconsolate cry of a baby echoed through the flimsy wooden wall of the house. And from within came a feeling of need.

It was a feeling very familiar to Nigel. When he'd helped manage his father's estate, it fell to him to look after the tenants. One of those—which should have fallen to his mother, but that his mother didn't feel equal to since Carew's disappearance—was to take care of any minor illnesses and look after the health of all the inhabitants of the estate. As such, he'd gotten used to feeling need in the peasant cottages.

The need calling to him from within that hut was the same. Without thinking, barely noticing what he was doing, he veered to the low entrance of the hut, then inside. The inside didn't look much different from some of the meaner cottages of his father's estate. There was a smell of fire and soot, and a smell of illness. There was a large central fire, or the remnants of it, and around the edges, pallets of sorts to sleep upon.

And on one of the pallets lay a child. A woman knelt at the foot of the pallet. And bending over it, his back turned, was a man. He turned as he heard Nigel's footsteps.