Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (13 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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As she neared, the edge crumbed beneath her feet, demonstrating exactly how well concealed it remained. Scrambling energetically, her heart in her mouth, she threw herself backward. From below, the panther howled as the new sheet of falling earth landed. Gaultry inched forward with heightened vigilance and peered warily over the edge. All she could see of Aneitha was a dark, earth-covered shape with wild, fear-maddened eyes. Spying Gaultry, the panther snarled ferociously, newly frightened
by the apparent assault. Gaultry, drawing back from the edge, took a deep gulp of air.
The pit had been built to kill or mangle. Gaultry could not imagine how Aneitha had survived the initial fall. The “sharp sticks” of the Sharif’s description were barbed spears with murderous rusting heads, pointing skyward. A god’s luck had been with Aneitha that she had managed to drop in among them without being fatally impaled. As it was—one hind leg was wedged and trapped between a pair of closely seated spears. Gaultry swore. To release that leg, she was going to have to actually go down into the pit. The drop was not so far—little more than twice a tall man’s height. If the panther’s leg had not been wedged, it would have been well capable of gathering itself and jumping out.
“Why didn’t we leave you in Bissanty?” Gaultry’s fright intensified as she dithered at the pit’s head. “Damn you to Achavell for getting into this mess.”
The cat had calmed a little at her withdrawal. Now it was meowing, simultaneously pathetic and terrifying. “The Sharif better be telling you not to bite me,” Gaultry told it anxiously. “You’d better not bite me if I come down there.”
One side of the pit had partially fallen in when the cat had broken through the pit’s cover. Gaultry circled to that side and swung her legs over the half-collapsed lip of earth.
Then, praying to all the Great Twelve, she released the edge, and slid downward.
At the bottom, when she tried to stand, she discovered that the loose earth on the pit’s floor made it almost impossible to balance. She cut open her hand against one of the spear shafts when she stupidly used it to support herself. The cat was a body length away, its eyes unfriendly. “Aneitha,” she called raggedly. “Good cat. Just keep calm—” She touched the tawny fur with a tentative dart of magic, trying to guess how it would react when she approached. “Keep calm, good cat—” Aneitha turned wild yellow eyes toward the young woman, and snarled.
“Gentle, gentle—” Gaultry crawled a little closer. “Just keep calm, gentle, and I’ll get that leg free … .”
The cat shivered, and put its head on its front paws. Gaultry struggled not to cough as the scent of its strong musk hit her. At last, the creature was close enough to touch—or to bite. It mewled again. Its claws were sheathed, fangs covered. Gaultry cautiously buried one hand in the fur at the crest of its spine, trying to avoid its head. With the floor so treacherous,
freeing the animal would not be enough. She would have to spirit-take, subsume its strength, and then drag its comatose body out. All without giving it a chance to tear her throat out.
She didn’t want to threaten the animal, but she needed a firm grip for the spell. She drew her other arm around Aneitha’s forequarters, trembling as she felt the muscular body quiver and bunch.
Ah, Elianté, protect me!
she prayed.
Then she summoned the spirit-taking.
At the first tickle of magic, Aneitha panicked and reared. Gaultry, completely terrified, threw open a channel and brutally vacuumed the great cat’s spirit inward, abandoning any effort to soothe it in the desperate need to subdue it before it impaled either her or itself on the barbed spears. For one agonizing moment, she clung like a half-unseated rider to the great animal’s shoulders, not sure that she could take the creature’s spirit fast enough to save them both. One of the spears trapping the cat’s leg came unseated, and Aneitha, throwing her body forward, almost impaled them on another spear. Then the spell licked open, like fire consuming tinder. She wrenched the cat-spirit deeper. The great muscles slackened. As the balance of power shifted between then, Gaultry gained enough strength to push the animal’s body down into the loose earth, subduing it.
Oh quiet, Aneitha, quiet,
she told it.
Everything’s fine, everything’s right.
The panther-spirit twisted in the narrow space she opened for it in her body, too panicked for the moment to try to be clever. Gaultry, who had some familiarity with spirit-taking from house cats, stood up with the appalling realization that this animal was exponentially more clever, more powerful, more keen to break free. She was not confident that she had either the strength or the wiles to hold it, once it stopped panicking and began to scheme for freedom.
Good cat, Aneitha
, she told it. She only had to keep control for as long as it took to crawl out of the pit.
I’m not stopping your strength, I’m just borrowing—
She tried to make the big cat feel the fur of its own body, the warmth of its own flesh, through her fingertips; tried to reassure it that its body was still there, still softly breathing.
None of which strengthened Gaultry’s hold on the creature, but at least Aneitha’s spirit, a little preoccupied, did not attempt an awkward break for freedom. Disconcertingly, her senses dropped and rose as the cat’s spirit shifted. Allowing it her eyes, she found she could see every grain of sand as it settled down the pit’s steep sides, every tiny motion,
but the colors were dulled and dreary. Her hearing had sharpened. Outside, somewhere overhead, the trio of crows had begun to caw and chatter, perhaps encouraged by the silence from the pit.
Time to move.
With the cat’s great strength and powerful balance, she set her back against the pit wall and drew the animal’s weight into her arms. Aneitha’s spirit-response was to settle. A note of interest rose above the animal’s panic. Gaultry, unsure of how much control she could assert, concentrated for a moment on reassuring thoughts rather than action.
A long moment passed. Then the panther’s spirit gave her a little nudge, helping her gain her balance in the sliding dirt. Gaultry could feel that it had cognizance that she wanted to escape the pit, and it was ready to join her.
That’s right,
she told it.
Take a look at that dawn sky overhead. That’s where we’re going.
She maneuvered the creature’s dead weight toward the fall of earth where she had slid down. She wanted to call on all her Glamour-magic to power the Huntress-born spell, wanted to own the cat, not to be bargaining with it, she was afraid … .
The legs
, she urged, fighting her own panic. She braced her feet against the earth.
I want your strength there.
At least for the climb out, the cat submitted. Feline energy pulsed through Gaultry’s spine, through her hips, through her haunches. She took hold of Aneitha’s body by its neck-scruff, as a mother cat might carry its young, as a panther might drag its kill. With one hand free she ripped deep into the crumbling earth, gaining enough of a hold to shove herself upward. She imagined great claws on each of her fingers, cutting deep into the soil. Aneitha sent her an image, perhaps to encourage her: a tall rock, a strange pale deer with short horns, the taste of blood in her mouth as she dragged it upward. Something Aneitha had known back in her homeland.
Then at last she lay sprawled on the grass, free of the pit, Aneitha’s hot, cat-rank body clutched against her own, and the image dissipated. Yet she could feel the desert warmth on her body still, in her legs; the confidence—
“You should never have come here.” The voice cut through the heat like a splash of icy water. “The taint is in you, you should not have come.”
Gaultry, arms still buried in Aneitha’s fur, opened her eyes.
Sieur Jumery Ingoleur stood not ten feet away, his thin arms folded. He wore diaphanous grey robes. A sword with an age-pitted blade was belted at his waist, held in place by a silver chain.
“This creature is not a demon,” she told him, not sure what he meant by his accusation.
Quiet, you
, she told Aneitha.
Be quiet!
“It’s just a foreign animal, like the funny monkey in the cart. We’ve been trying to keep her off the road so she won’t frighten the marketers. But she lost us after the bridge crossing yesterday. I had to come find her—”
“Your grandmother kept more secrets than she told lies,” the old man said, reproving. “Her line has fallen since.”
Gaultry sat up, wary, and cradled the big cat’s head. If this was not about Aneitha’s trespass … “Fifty years is a long time to nurse a resentment,” she said cautiously. “What did Tamsanne do to you, that you should offer me insult today?”
“You’re a fool, I see,” the old man said. Her words had increased his agitation, rather than lessened it. “Fifty years is
nothing
.” He stepped toward her, his fingers fluttering on the hilt of his sword. “Tamsanne at least knew that.”
“Don’t come any closer.” Gaultry scrambled up and stepped protectively in front of the panther’s body, her movements fluid with its borrowed feline grace. “If you have something to tell me, say it from where you stand.” She glanced skyward at the descending disc of Rios’s moon: still above the horizon, still the vengeance-moon of early summer. “You have no quarrel with me,” she added, hoping to defuse the man’s ill-suppressed rage. “I and mine have brought before you nothing but truth. We travel in service of the Prince, and it could only harm him to delay us. If you harbor unfinished business with Tamsanne it has naught to do with me.”
“It has everything to do with you.” His fingers flexed on his sword-hilt. “To keep her own unclean get safe, she robbed my sons of their blood-heritage!”
Aneitha’s spirit, not liking the man’s hostility, flooded forward like water. Gaultry, mentally catching both herself and the cat-spirit, could not follow the leaps of the old man’s accusations. “Tell me your quarrel,” she said. “By Elianté’s Spear!” She paused, again suppressing the cat. “If Tamsanne truly has wronged you, perhaps I can offer amends.”
Sieur Jumery raised his hands, his gauzy sleeves drifting back to expose his bone-thin arms. “Tell me what you see.”
Rows of scars braceleted every inch of the old man’s arm-skin. Shallow scars; evenly, ritualistically, placed. Gaultry’s mouth went dry. A holy man’s bleeder-scars, not wounds taken in battle. She glanced uneasily over to the table-stone. “It is your blood that fills that stone basin,” she
guessed. She stepped back and touched Aneitha’s body with her foot, needing the assurance that the cat’s strength remained at her command.
“Mine.” The old man’s watery blue eyes were lit from within with baneful fire. “Correct—if by mine, you mean my own, mingled with that of all the generations of my fathers before me. The Ingoleurs have been here longer than Tielmark. Longer than empire. The blood-link, father to son, was never broken in all those years. The past lives of my fathers whisper through me,” he said. “The earth has no secrets from me.”
Gaultry stared at the blood in the carved basin on the ancient stone, at last understanding what she was seeing. The first Ingoleur ancestor must have cut and filled that basin, and his sons ever afterward had maintained it with their own blood. Charged by magic or prayer, such a blood-link could offer those who shared it tremendous power, access to the land’s most arcane secrets. But—
But the man was old and tired, and his house was falling down as he waited for his sons to return home. “I don’t believe you. What you say cannot be true. If ever such sweeping powers of knowledge were in your possession, you certainly don’t hold them today.”
“Exactly.” The old man’s eyes glittered with hate. “The link has been severed, and fifty years of trying has not mended it.”
“Tamsanne broke it?” His reaction, a narrowing of his eyes and another step forward, confirmed the guess. “She must have had her reasons. Did you use your power to rifle Tamsanne’s secrets?”
The old justice unsheathed his age-pitted sword. Its tip quivered as he raised it. “The forfeit was Tamsanne’s honor, not mine,” he said. “The sacrilege was hers, but in her guilt, she broke my power.”
“Someone must have set you to rob Tamsanne’s secrets,” Gaultry said. “Why not hate them instead of Tamsanne?”
Deaf to reasoning, he leapt at her. Gaultry easily escaped his attack, feinting away from him and whirling. He was an old man, stiff with arthritis. She was young, lithe, and full of a large panther’s strength. Her bond to the great cat, her need to protect its body, was her greatest weakness against such a frail opponent—its body was too large to protect easily, and any blow the panther took, she would feel, amplified, in her own flesh—but Sieur Jumery was too overwrought to realize this. He threw himself at her—fruitlessly—and she dallied with him, up and down the barrow hill, letting him exhaust his strength in stroke after useless stroke against her. One small part of her guiltily recognized that this terrible game was Aneitha’s spirit, its animal cruelty, exercising itself through her
senses. Another part cried vengeance against this man who had exploited his ancestral powers to steal from Tamsanne—especially something she held so precious as her own secrets.
After a terrible, humiliating interval of this cat-and-mouse game, they stood, facing each other across the white altar of stone. Between them, the basin of blood looked very dark, very fresh. The old man panted for breath, miserable, at the limit of his physical strength. He could not pretend to himself he had the stamina necessary to keep after her.

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