Lords of Grass and Thunder (62 page)

“I’ll follow the toads,” he amended his suggestion. “Your army can follow me. When I disappear, you will know I can be no more than a step or two from where you last saw me. You ought to see me again as soon as you cross the spot where I vanished. It won’t be fast, but when the camp comes into view, the toads can go to ground, allowing the horses to run.”

Jochi clearly didn’t like the idea, but he had little choice. The prince, heir to the khanate, was on the other side of that invisible barrier. Going back without him wasn’t an option for any of them.

With a nod, the general gave his permission to continue. Bekter turned around and followed the last of the toads through the demon’s invisible shield. Behind him he heard swearing, but he held his mare to her steady pace and let her pick her way carefully among their warty guides.

Below, on the filthy carpets of the tent where Qutula held her prisoner, the shaman-princess Eluneke huddled in a heap and hid her sobs with a knobby hand held over her toady mouth. Within her breast, the shamaness Toragana wept for her pupil. Perched among the umbrella spokes of the roof, her totem form didn’t know how to cry tears. She didn’t dare to utter the bird’s cry of desolation either, for fear of bringing Qutula’s guardsmen with their bows. Toragana would be just as dead with an arrow through her feathered breast as she’d be in human form. So she hopped from one foot to another, lifting her sooty wings in distress, but kept her beak firmly closed.

She had a simple problem: find Bolghai and bring him back to free the princess from the talisman. But the demon’s spell had clouded her vision even in her totem form. She had found Eluneke’s prison only with the help of the toads and had no certainty of retracing her path on her own.

“Criii-kit!” squeaked a very small toad.

Wiping the tears from her eyes, Eluneke lifted her half-toad head to listen. “That might work,” she agreed once the toad had explained their plan to rescue her with the help of Bolghai’s sharp stoat’s teeth. “But how will he find me?”

“Cri-yi-yi!” the toad responded.

Toragana fixed the creature with a long and thoughtful stare. He was certainly small enough to ride on her back while she searched out the shaman, and he could whisper the directions in her ear when she needed to return. She had to balance that against how tasty he looked for supper.

It was, of course, an unworthy consideration, and a reminder that she had held her totem form a bit too long. Fortunately, Eluneke didn’t appear to have guessed what was going on in her raven’s mind. The look she cast on her teacher was so full of hope that Toragana had to busy herself preening a feather so that her gaze did not give her away.

It took only a moment to bring herself around to it. Toragana hopped from the spokes of the umbrella roof and lightly flitted to the ground. Bowing her head, she accepted the little toad on her back with no more than a ruffle of her feathers. Then she was off, struggling to fly through the smoke hole and then gathering speed in the free air.

“Caw!” she warned the toad. She thought that when she passed into the dream realm the creature would be drawn with her. If she was wrong, however, he would fall from where her back had been, a long way to the ground.

“Criyiyi!” The little toad assured her that he was ready.

Flap, flap, flap, like running in the air, she reached for the dream world and suddenly, there she was.

“Criyi-kit!” The toad politely informed her that he had not fallen, though she would have known it anyway by the weight on her back.

“Bolghai!” she called. “Bolghai! I’ve found Eluneke, but I can’t free her without you!”

She thought it might take a long time to find him, but he heard her call and appeared on the dream landscape that passed below her flight. When he stood on his hind legs and signaled her, she spiraled down to a landing made clumsy by the toad on her back.

“You have to come right away,” she said. “Qutula has placed Eluneke at the mercy of a demon! We need your help.”

The stoat looked for a moment as though he couldn’t decide whether to leap on the raven and snap her neck for dinner or swallow the little toad whole. With a tremble that shook his fur from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, however, he turned back into his human form and squatted on the grass. “Tell me everything,” he said. “With a little effort, we should be able to get back before you left.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

I
F THE PLAN HAD GONE perfectly, Jochi would now be descending on Qutula’s camp with three thousand of Tayy’s own horde. The attack would have drawn off Qutula’s forces, leaving his small cohort free to rescue the princess.

Tayy’s part of the plan had gone smoothly enough. Mangkut had led him to the tent where he promised they would find Eluneke. “Prepare yourself for a shock,” he had warned them with a smirk. “She is not the beauty you remember.”

Tayy wanted to hit him, but he couldn’t afford the commotion. “Bind him, and cover his mouth,” he whispered to his companions. “Then tie him to a tree for his master to find.”

Mangkut’s eyes widened in terror. For betraying him, Qutula would surely have him killed as slowly and horribly as the prince had threatened. He gathered breath for a shout to rouse the camp but Tayy was there first, clamping a leather-gauntleted hand to his mouth. “There is more to this plan than you know,” he whispered. “Be quiet and you may yet live. Make a sound and my companions will happily crack your ribs like a pigeon and draw your struggling lungs out through your backbone before they go to their own doom. Don’t think Qutula will help you to a swifter end when he finds you.”

Mangkut nodded to show that he understood. Tayy didn’t trust him, but before he could draw another breath, one of the Qubal rescuers stuffed a cleaning cloth for his sword into his mouth. Another secured a thong between Mangkut’s teeth to hold it in place while a third tied his feet. They had never released his hands; Tayy left them to complete securing their prisoner and slipped under the tent cloth.

He didn’t see her at first. When he did, he couldn’t control the instant recoil.

Eluneke covered her distorted face and moaned softly into her hands. “Don’t look at me,” she whispered. “Leave me here—you have to go. He means to kill you.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you,” he promised, and cursed himself at the hesitation in his voice. Eluneke still had the general shape of a woman, but her face had been grotesquely transformed into the features of a frog. Thin strands, a travesty of her own thick dark hair, fell across large, protuberant eyes and partly covered the mouth stretched in a debased parody of a grin. Her hands, where they tried to hide her features, were mottled green and brown, her fingers gnarled and covered with warty yellow knobs of skin.

From the first time he had set eyes on her in Toragana’s doorway he had loved her natural beauty. He loved her spirit more, however, and had accepted her totem animal long ago, conversing with the king of the toads and carrying Eluneke herself as a toad near his heart. But in all their past encounters she had chosen the form she wore; he found it impossible to accept the shape Qutula’s demon had forced on her.

Eluneke watched him through her fingers and wept when it must have appeared to her that he could not look at her face. She flinched when he reached out to hold her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Her fear of him pierced his soul like a dagger, but he refused to be deterred. “I’m getting you out of here; Bolghai will know what to do when you’re free.”

“I can’t. The demon . . .” She bobbed her head like a toad, refusing to accompany him while she urged him to his own escape. “Go, while you can.”

“Not without you.”
Patience
, he told himself, and was rewarded with her hand, tentatively reaching for his.

“Not so fast there, toad lover!” Between them, the form of a serpent materialized, fangs dripping vaporous venom.

Instinctively, Tayy pulled his sword, but the viper swirled away in a mist when he struck at it, leaving nothing behind but the hissing bark of its laughter.

“What difference does it make whether you still want her?” the creature hissed in his ear. “You’re here, aren’t you? Soon enough you’ll be dead, and I’ll be free.”

His sword raised, Tayy whirled, tracking the sibilant voice. But the viper drew its insubstantial neck out of reach.

“Frankly, I didn’t think you’d be such a fool,” it taunted.

Tayy brought his sword down in a slicing move that should have severed the head from any material beast, but it slid right through the vaporous scales.

“That wasn’t very friendly.”

Before he could pull his hand back, the serpent found the thin bracelet of flesh exposed between the prince’s riding gauntlet and his coat. Grinning, it sank its dripping fangs into his flesh. Venom pulsed fire into the wound. When the viper withdrew, one sharp tooth remained in the wound, lodged between the bones.

“No!” Eluneke screamed.

The effect of a demon’s sting didn’t always parallel the creature whose form it embodied. This time, Tayy realized, it did. Already his arm had begun to blister and bleed. His heart beat in strange rhythms and his breathing came in short, rapid gasps. He didn’t have much time and, alerted by the sounds of struggle, Qutula’s warriors had come boiling through the door of the tent.

“Ugly, isn’t she?” Qutula stood smirking in front of him, his clothes hastily tied and his sword held carelessly in his hand.

Swaying on his feet, Tayy painfully raised his sword and charged, though he knew that the desperate action hastened his own death. It scarcely mattered now. Jochi hadn’t come, and there were too many against his handful of guardsmen. But he could defend Eluneke until he fell. He moved in, feinted left, and cut Qutula a slashing blow that left his sleeve dangling but did little more than scratch the arm beneath.

“You son of a bitch!” Qutula snarled, and struck back.

Tayy intercepted the blow. Their swords slid blade against blade until they came to rest in a clash of cross guards. The prince’s arm trembled, blood-choked from the serpent’s bite and swelling with blisters from the venom. His sword grew impossibly heavy, but damaged muscles refused his commands to disengage.

Where was Jochi? Around him, weapons rang against each other as Tayy’s small raiding party held off the tide of the opposition. Though Qutula’s forces vastly outnumbered them, they had limited their approach to the doorway, so far at least not thinking to unmake the tent around them and so come at them from all sides. They might go on like that until their arms tired; eventually the prince’s small cohort would stagger and the overwhelming numbers against them would triumph. But Tayy wouldn’t be there to see it. He fell to his knees, blind and breathless, the pain in his arm so overwhelming that he hardly knew if he still held his sword.

Qutula’s blade followed him down. “Your line is dead,” he said, “You have no place here anymore.” Then he plunged the sword into the prince’s undefended back.

Tayy fell, arms spread on the dirty carpets, his life’s blood adding to the stains that already crossed them. The last sounds he heard were Eluneke’s sobs, mingling with the keening wail of his hounds somewhere out on the grasslands and the beating of drums in the distance. Too late to save the prince’s life, Jochi had arrived. It had been too late since the serpent had struck, of course. He couldn’t breathe: couldn’t find the air to fill his lungs and his last sucking breath seemed to be leaking away with the blood flowing from the wound in his back.

His mother was frowning and he waited patiently for the scolding that didn’t come. She was dead, of course, and he was long past the age when she might correct him like a child. He would have liked to know what had displeased her so, but lacked the energy to ask. But he easily went into her arms when she offered them, and laid his head against her heart the way he had as an infant. How he had missed her. Chimbai was there too, looking thunderously angry. He said nothing, however, and might have sighed, but Tayy’s senses were fading. . . .

Chapter Forty