Ivory Lyre (5 page)

*

The smell of boiled suppers was rising from
the city. Kiri went by back ways to the scullery, where she helped
with the vegetables for a while and picked up several interesting
tidbits of gossip. She put together a nice meal for Gram and
slipped out to tend to the old lady. It was not until the cover of
night fell that she left Gram again to take news of Prince Tebmund
and his horses where it could reach the few resistance leaders
scattered across the city, and then Papa. Papa had worked with the
resistance on Dacia for a while, before he went by barge across the
sea to Cayub and Edosta to spy there and recruit rebel troops. Kiri
guessed the dark had no idea how much a man could do even after his
voice was destroyed. Papa would be very interested in Prince
Tebmund and his fine war-horses. The rebels should have those
horses, not the dark un-men.

Gram had asked a good many questions about
the horses, her thin, angled face caught in eager lines and her
blue eyes alight with interest. Kiri knew it was hard getting old,
having to depend on someone else for exciting new experiences. Gram
would rather have seen it all for herself.

Kiri made her way down the twisting lanes,
with the stars gleaming in icy brilliance overhead. The cobbles
were still warm under her feet, but the wind in from the sea was
chill. Voices from the cottages drifted out, some raised in anger.
Deeper into the center of the city crude music had begun. She could
hear the clink of glasses and smell the sour scent of mithnon as
she passed. Here she went quickly, keeping to shadow, her hand on
the knife at her thigh. It would be worse later, toward midnight,
when gangs began to roam the streets.

It took her almost an hour to cross the
city, ever downward along the winding, dropping streets. Finally
she came to the stone ruins that stood pale in the starlight, where
once had risen a sanctuary of the old and happier civilization.
Here, once, all travelers had been welcome. Now, few came, for the
dark abhorred this place and had marked the ruins as forbidden. The
un-men could not breach the magic of a sanctuary to enter it, but
the folk of the city might have entered had not the dark laid a
heavy spell to keep them away. Few folk would cross the spell’s
sense of cold threat, even to save themselves from the dark’s
mind-rotting evil. The resistance troops crossed, those few humans
strong enough, determined enough to fight the dark’s powers. The
power of the sanctuary helped them keep their minds free.

Animals could always cross the dark’s
barrier. The speaking animals did not succumb to the wiles of the
dark as did humans. They were in perfect tune with the powers of
the sanctuary, taking of its strength and protection to help them
battle the un-men. Un-men, undead, unliving, the names of the dark
were several. Soul buzzards, Kiri thought, for they thirsted after
the carrion of men’s souls.

Kiri’s skin prickled and something cold
clutched at her heart as she slipped in among the broken, fallen
walls. But the strength of the sanctuary was there, steadying her.
She stood for a moment inside, to see that she wasn’t followed,
before she moved in to where three large stones tilted up to
shelter a black hole in the earth. Here she went down on hands and
knees.

She slipped down into a hole that had once
been part of a larger grotto. Now it was an animal cave, warm and
strong-smelling. Here she would give her report about Prince
Tebmund and his wonderful horses.

She had no idea what her meager information
would finally add up to. She wondered if she wanted to know. Yet
regardless of her own misgivings, she knew she must learn more than
this. She must seek Prince Tebmund out, perhaps become useful to
him in some way so he would talk to her. Kiri’s gift, the gift she
and her father shared, told her Prince Tebmund was important—either
as a friend or as a dangerous foe.

Chapter
5

The cave of the great cat was empty. Kiri
huddled down inside the door to wait where she could see out across
the ruin but remain hidden herself. She could see stars gleaming
above the rooftops. She supposed Elmmira was hunting. She had much
news for her, for besides the arrival of Prince Tebmund and his
horses, there was more frightening information. The dark leaders
from the north planned to attack Bukla and Edain very soon, using
Dacia as their base. King Sardira would stay in the background as
usual, furnishing the dark with troops, horses, food, and weapons
forged in his mines. Always seeming neutral, he had recently made a
state visit to Edain in the name of friendship. Soon he would
destroy Edain.

It had taken Kiri nine long sessions lying
on her stomach, pressed into a thin attic space above the king’s
private chambers, to gather information about the attack. It came
by bits and pieces as runners arrived by barge from the neighboring
continents, to stand sweating and uneasy in the purple satin room.
The king’s captains took their orders in his chambers, too, before
the blazing fire, sipping mithnon from little amethyst goblets,
their voices rising clearly up to Kiri’s hiding place.

Kiri sighed with satisfaction, knowing she
could tell Elmmira exactly how many troops Quazelzeg expected King
Sardira to furnish and how many barges to transport them and the
horses across the inlet to Bukla and Edain. She knew where the
weapons would be hidden and where grain and fodder had been stored.
The most frightening news was that Quazelzeg himself would make his
base for the attacks in Sardira’s palace. The thought of the dark
overlord there in the palace all winter terrified her.

Some of the dark leaders were human men,
turned irredeemably to evil. Quazelzeg was not. He was soulless,
manlike in shape only, thriving on human degradation. She had
watched him twice as she lay in the alcove above the king’s
ceiling, sick with fear of him. His face had the waxy pallor of
too-tight skin drawn over heavy bones. It was a face that never
smiled or changed expression. His body was like some terrible
machine—colorless and evil. The un-men were not native to Tirror,
but had come long ago into this world through the Castle of Doors.
They were lured here by a darkness that had spread through Tirror,
slowly at first, calling to other evil to come to join it.
Quazelzeg came, and the terrors of mind slavery began.

Quazelzeg came here to Dacia sometimes with
his captains for the bloody stadium gaming and to take the favors
of the city. His consorts, like Quazelzeg, were chill succubi
sucking at the life of the city, drinking in human pain and lust
and the suffering of tortured animals.

It was harder for the speaking animals. They
had the ability to anticipate the future, like humans, and so they
could also anticipate pain and death, whereas the mute animals
could not. The speaking animals feared threats to their kin, to
their young, and to their human friends.

It was the speaking animals, the great cats
and the wolves, who, too often, were pitted against drug-frenzied
human prisoners in the stadium games for the entertainment of
Quazelzeg and his kind.

Alone in the cave, Kiri frightened herself
so much thinking of the bloodless faces of the unliving that she
crawled into Elmmira’s tangled bed of straw and refuse. She huddled
there, shaken and desolate, wishing life could be different,
wishing there were no dark invaders and that Papa was home. More
than anything, she wished no human would cleave to the darkness,
for if they would not, the dark leaders could never win.

She was half asleep when Elmmira came. She
leaped up, her knife drawn, before she saw the shape of the great
cat against the sky. Elmmira padded in looking smug, with a brace
of rabbits dangling and a muffled murmur in greeting. She dropped
the rabbits, purred, and rubbed against Kiri.

“You are tense and nervy, Kiri wren. You
have been thinking troubled thoughts.”

Kiri sheathed her knife, put her arms around
Elmmira’s silky neck, and pressed her cheek against the great cat’s
muscled shoulder. Elmmira’s warmth was strengthening. Her whiskers
scratched Kiri’s face, and her muzzle smelled of blood, from the
rabbits. Elmmira’s rumbling purr shook them both.

“There was good hunting tonight, Kiri wren.
Take two rabbits home to your Gram.”

“I will,” Kiri said gratefully. “We’ve had
no meat in days.” The palace kitchen was freer with bread and beans
and boiled vegetables than with the fresh meat that the cooks
guarded closely. Sometimes Kiri hunted with a bow among the rubble
of the city for rabbits or blackbirds, but so did many others, and
game was scarce. The great cats were the only hunters who could
generally be sure of a meal. They prowled the night-dark streets
fading into shadow away from humankind and roamed the rocky coastal
cliffs, denning there, taking seabirds. Elmmira’s own cave led by
secret ways to the sea-cliff dens some quarter mile away, and so to
the main part of the ancient sanctuary of Gardel-Cloor. The great
cats hunted inland, too, taking wheat rats and hares from the
gardens and farms. They lived on Dacia as shadows, moving at night
unseen, avoiding with care the traps Sardira sometimes set for
them.

Only Kiri and those trusted in the
underground could find the cats when they stole away to
Gardel-Cloor.

The sanctuary had once been busy with
travelers, speaking animals and humans resting together in comfort
and warmth. But that was in the old times, the times that could
never be again, the times of the singing dragons. There were no
singing dragons anymore. When Kiri thought of dragons, she felt as
if a part of herself was missing. Yet she had never known dragons,
and never would. The dragons were gone from Tirror.

The dragons had held, in their magic, the
ultimate powers of the natural world, that world of creatures that
knew no corruption. Now the only link between humans and those
powers was the speaking animals. Kiri studied Elmmira’s gentle
bloody paws. Elmmira did not kill for pleasure—no animal did. She
killed only for food. There was no evil in the natural world; that
was why the dark leaders hated the speaking creatures. Kiri
snuggled close to Elmmira’s warm side and began to tell her of the
invasion plans.

Kiri thought these plans seemed very
complete, as if Quazelzeg had engineered this attack more carefully
than previous ones. Earlier battles for which King Sardira had
furnished troops and supplies had seemed almost haphazard. “As if,”
Kiri said thoughtfully, “as if now, Quazelzeg is almost uncertain
of what he is about. Or uncertain of the outcome.”

Elmmira switched her tail and rumbled deep
in her throat. “Why should he be uncertain? He will use magic to
confuse the peasants of Bukla and Edain. Already he has weakened
them, for his disciples have been at work there a long time.” She
began to lick blood from her paws.

Kiri sighed. “All the same, the planning
seems very careful. Could Quazelzeg fear some new threat?”

“What new thing would the dark be afraid
of?”

Kiri shook her head. “I don’t know.” Yet a
formless sense of hope touched her. Still, maybe she was only
imagining the nervousness and caution that seemed to pervade the
dark’s messages to King Sardira. “Sometimes,” she said, stroking
Elmmira’s ears, “sometimes I wish I’d been born in ages past,
before the dark was so strong. When . . . when there were
still dragons.”

“Yes,” Elmmira said, licking her. “Yes. My
poor Kiri.”

“Papa . . .” Kiri began, then
stopped and pushed the thought away. Papa must wish the same.

“I will take the news of the attack
tonight,” Elmmira said. She pressed her head against Kiri and
placed a heavy, soft paw on her arm. “We do what we can, Kiri
wren.” She glanced toward the door, her tufted cheeks silhouetted
against the starlight. “But you bring more news than Quazelzeg’s
plans. What is it that excites you so?” She rolled onto her back in
one liquid motion and laid her head in Kiri’s lap, shaking with
purrs as Kiri tickled under her chin.

“There is a prince come to the palace,
Elmmira, to sell horses to the king. He brought four by barge from
Thedria. And
what
horses! Think of the difference between a
farmer’s stumpy plow horse and the king’s finest charger.”

“Not hard to do.”

“Now imagine another horse so much more
beautiful than the charger, that the charger appears as ugly as a
plow pony.”

Elmmira’s purr thundered louder as she
imagined. She squeezed her eyes closed in concentration, then
flashed them open. “Horses like that I would like to see.”

“Oh, you would be impressed. Fast, strong
horses— two black stallions and two white mares. So beautiful. The
price is two hundred gold pieces for each. And there are fifty more
like them, the prince says, if King Sardira desires.”

Elmmira’s purring stopped. She licked her
shoulder reflectively.

“Prince Tebmund has agreed to remain here,”
Kiri said, “to train Sardira’s troops in the special ways of war
the horses have been taught.”

“If they are skilled in war, they will help
to defeat Bukla and Edain. Does this prince know that? Does he side
with the dark?” Elmmira growled softly. “And why, then, has he not
taken his offer of such fine horses directly to Quazelzeg?” She
rose and began to pace, her tail lashing.

“I don’t know why. There’s something about
him I can’t sort out, a feeling. . . . He is
wonderful with horses, Elmmira. These horses will strike an enemy
mount and even attack enemy soldiers.”

“The question is,” Elmmira rumbled,
“who
is the enemy to this young prince of Thedria?” The
great cat rasped her tongue across Kiri’s cheek. “Be careful, Kiri
wren. This young prince upsets you.”

Kiri shrugged. Elmmira saw her feelings too
clearly, just as Gram did. This evening Gram had turned her thin,
wrinkled face to Kiri, frowning with the puzzled twist of her mouth
and that shrewd look in her eyes. Unlike Elmmira, Gram had said
nothing. Gram would bide her time until Kiri felt like talking
about it, until Kiri could sort it out in her own mind, whatever
the trouble was.