Restoration (5 page)

I had hoped that my joining with Denas would give me the ability to follow these magical pathways as Blaise did, but I'd not yet grasped the trick of it. Blaise had suggested that my failure was of my own making. “You need to let go of your physical boundaries,” he said whenever I complained of my inadequacies. “But you won't do it. It's the same with your shifting; the reason it's so hard for you to change form is that you try to hold on to too much of yourself.”

Blaise had little formal schooling, but he saw things clearly. Now that I was joined with Denas, I was capable of shapeshifting at will, transforming myself into an eagle or a chastou or a fleet-footed kayeet, the fastest runner on earth. But unlike Blaise and his fellows, I found the act excruciatingly difficult. Perhaps Blaise was right, and it was my reluctance to yield control. Or perhaps what I had done to myself—sharing body and soul with a rai-kirah who had no kinship to me—was not the right ordering of the world as I had hoped.

In the early days of my recovery, Blaise had convinced me to let down the magical barriers I'd built to isolate myself from the demon. He said I should talk with Denas, learn of him. Knowledge and understanding would surely make coexistence easier. The rai-kirah had never spoken, not once. I wondered if my coming so close to death had destroyed him, if perhaps his anger was all that was left, the fading rumbles of thunder as a storm moves out. But then I'd started attacking people, and I quickly rebuilt my barriers.

Preoccupied with my continuing dilemmas, I pushed my horse through the crowd, taking advantage of a large party forging a path toward the gates. Five warriors rode in a wedge, opening the way for a richly dressed noble. Two columns of soldiers rode behind him, protecting heavily laden pack animals. The troops were Hamrasch warriors, along with a few dark-skinned Thrid mercenaries, but the lord did not wear the gold tef-coat and wolf crest of the Hamrasch. I could not see his own heged symbol.

“Clear the road of this offal,” commanded the noble, a soft-bodied man with a sleek blond braid. “Cut them if they won't move aside.” The party had come to a standstill, the fault of several caravan outriders who were trying to use the same space to move several heavily laden sledges pulled by slaves. From a long cylinder strapped to his saddle, the Derzhi noble yanked an arm-length stick of polished wood and struck at a slave who had fallen to his knees when the sledge he was dragging caught the wheel of a cart going the opposite direction. The slave cried out and fell backward, blood blossoming on his forehead. He got tangled in the leather traces and pulled the sledge further askew, spilling its poorly lashed contents onto the roadway.

The noble's troops drew their swords and began to force other travelers to step aside. As he waited for the path to be opened, the Derzhi lord paced his horse back and forth beside the slave. Each time the bleeding man tried to rise and untangle himself from the traces, the lord, his face composed, struck him deliberately and viciously with his stick—on the face, on the elbows, on shoulders already raw from the abrasion of the leather harness.

My bones ached with each blow. My back was scarred from years of such mindless cruelty, and no matter what I told myself of necessity and danger, I could not walk away. I dropped from the saddle, tied my mount to an abandoned tinker's cart, and shoved my way through the surging crowd. Crouching low, ducking my head, and using the cover of the overturned sledge, I grabbed the tangled straps and snapped them with a word of enchantment. Grasping the fallen man's bloody hand around the corner of the sledge, I gave him leverage to get his feet under him. As soon as he was up, I backed away into the crowd.

“
Tas vyetto”
came a breathless whisper from the other side of the sledge.

You're welcome,
I thought, already too far away for him to hear me say it.
Would I could do more.
I would have left him my knife, but his overseers were too close. If caught with a weapon, he'd lose a hand or an eye.

I never saw the slave's face, but I made sure to note that of the Derzhi, who was back among his guards and riding coolly toward the gates. He was perhaps fifty-five years old, tall and straight in the saddle. Women likely called him a fine figure of a man, handsome for his age, unscarred by weather or battle. But I thought his soft face vicious: his wide brow empty, his full lips gluttonous, and the round eyes set close beside his narrow nose devoid of human sympathy. Or perhaps I saw only the habitual cruelty in his hand and the lack of expression on that fine face as he beat a man to breaking while waiting idly for his path to be cleared.

As I pushed back through the crowd to where my horse waited patiently beside the tinker's cart, I felt a light touch upon my back. I whirled about. No one. But far across the passing crowd a tall woman stood staring my way, her dark eyes so penetrating, I would have wagered she could see the scars beneath my shirt. Her gown and veil were a brilliant green. Among the sea of shabby browns and grays, she stood out like a sprig of new grass in the desert. A party of riders came between us, and I scrambled into the saddle and rode onward. I needed no one to notice me.

I reached the outer gates still unsettled with the incident, sure I should have done more, yet knowing that I could have used every scrap of my power and skill and changed the outcome not a whit. The slave and I would both have ended up dead.

“Hold up there! Yes, you. Get off that bag of bones. Come here and let me look at you.” The mounted Derzhi who was patrolling the throngs of beggars, travelers, and beasts at Zhagad's fortresslike outer gate waved his spear at me.

Stupid. Stupid. Distracted by the incident with the slave, I had forgotten to mask my Ezzarian features when I approached the gate. Aleksander had revoked the law that required Ezzarians to be enslaved, but Ezzarians still caught the eye of soldiers, and the slave marks burned into my face and my left shoulder would forever leave me vulnerable to suspicion. The gate guard moved closer, and people fell away, leaving a path between us.

I felt for the leather packet tucked into my shirt, and, trusting that Aleksander's paper would prove sufficient as it had in the past, I dismounted and approached the warrior.

As did all the Derzhi guards in Zhagad, he went shirtless in the heat, exposing massive, bronze-colored shoulders, one of them crossed by a dreadful scar. “Zakor! Over here,” he called to one of his fellows. “I believe I've found me a runaway.” The guard's spear point pricked my neck, forcing me to turn my head to show him the falcon and the lion burned into my cheekbone on the day I had been sold to Aleksander. The Derzhi smiled and licked his lips, no doubt anticipating the pleasure of hacking off the foot of a runaway slave and the rewards of delivering him to the royal slave master.

Controlling the fury that welled up at his bloodthirsty glee—and a gut-gnawing anxiety that had not quite vanished in the years since my release—I reached up with my right hand and grabbed the shaft of his spear, holding it away from my throat. With my left, I held out the worn parchment, making sure the imperial seal was clearly visible. My voice remained even. “Indeed you have not, your honor. I am a free man by order of the Crown Prince. Find a scribe and have this read. You'll learn the consequences of interfering with me.”

The guard squinted at the paper in the sun glare. “The Crown Prince ...” He shrugged his bare shoulders as he yanked his spear from my grasp and used it to poke at the writing. “... I Suppose he is still that. And for the moment his seal will get you off, but by tomorrow sundown, I'd advise you not rely on it. The Twenty will have something to say in the matter.” He spat onto the dusty paving stones and wheeled his mount.

In a single heartbeat the insistent frenzy of the mobbed travelers took on a more ominous cast: furtive conversations, racing troops, shouts. From inside the walls came a constant wailing that grated on the spirit like steel on glass. On the stone towers where the red banners of the Derzhi lion hung limp and heavy in the hot air, something was missing—the gold banners with the silver falcon that always hung in place beside the red, the banners of the Denischkar heged, Aleksander's family. In their place were banners of solid red. Everywhere solid red banners ... mourning banners ... Sweet Verdonne!

I bulled through a knot of beggars to follow the mounted Derzhi. “Please tell me the news, your honor. I've been deep in the desert and not heard.”

He looked over his scarred shoulder and sniggered. “You must be the only man in the Empire, then. The Emperor is dead by an assassin's blade. The Twenty are gathering to see to the succession.” The man stabbed his spear into my freedom paper, which had fluttered to the paving stones, and offered it back to me. “I've heard it was Prince Aleksander himself who did it.”

Aleksander was not dead. The tale of the streets, that the Emperor's murderer—what was left of him—hung in the marketplace, had frozen my heart. But it was a Frythian slave who had been found kneeling on the Emperor's vast bed, bathed in royal blood, and who now provided a vultures' feast in the heart of Zhagad.

Frythia was likely already in flames. Soon there would be nothing left of the dignified little mountain kingdom, no structure, no artifact, no animal, and certainly no human with any identifiable drop of Frythian blood. But all that was no matter to the people of Zhagad. Every man and woman of them was convinced that the slave but did Prince Aleksander's bidding. Certainly those who stood gaping at the grisly remnants of treachery had no doubts about whom to blame....
couldn't wait for the gods to crown him ... I heard they argued ... threats were made ... Not enough his father let him rule ... the Emperor was ready to revoke his anointing ... I was beginning to think he'd come to manhood ...
No rumor of a kanavar, no supposition drifting through the streets that perhaps Aleksander was the target and not the arrow. The finest imperial torturers had succeeded in eliciting only one word from the assassin, so observers said. “Aleksander.” After seven hours they'd had to stop, else there would have been too little of the prisoner left to do sufficient screaming when they disemboweled and dismembered him in the marketplace.

I needed to fly into the imperial palace of Zhagad. To enter the walled inner ring of the royal city, much less the palace, one needed a Derzhi sponsor, and I doubted Aleksander was available. Despite my dislike of alien cravings and the feelings of vulnerability as the senses I had honed for thirty-eight years were altered, bird form had its distinct uses. So I crammed myself into a deserted alcove—a stifling, nasty place at the end of a beggars' alley—and considered shifting.
Settle yourself, fool, I thought. Find him, warn him, and get away before you kill him.

As always, I constructed the shape of my desire inside my head, summoned melydda from the deep center of my being, and tried to release my physical boundaries. The change should have happened easily ... an effortless merging of my limbs and torso with the image in my mind, a chilly shudder as I gave off heat, the natural result of shifting to a smaller form, a momentary adjustment of the angles and sensitivity of vision and hearing, and a breathless rippling pleasure as I touched the truest nature of my race. Thus Blaise and Farrol, and others like them, experienced shapeshifting. So I had felt it once when Denas and I had taken wing in the storm-racked demon land of Kir‘Vagonoth. But on that hot morning, I felt as though my bones were cracking, as if my eyes were being squeezed out of my head, as if my skin were being peeled away by a Derzhi torturer's knife. Three rats hurriedly buried themselves in the rotting refuse, as I sank to my knees in groaning misery and forced myself into the shape of a bird.

My silent demon lurked within me like the worm at the core of a ripe fruit.

 

The Imperial Palace was ominously quiet. Its graceful cloisters and cavernous halls should have been bustling with gold-clad chamberlains and leather-clad hunting parties, with legions of slaves and servants, with white-robed warriors newly arrived from the desert, with stewards and clerks, their shoulders hunched with the burdens of running an expansive empire, with weapons makers and tailors, musicians and priests, and everywhere beautiful women dressed in silken gowns. But on that morning, as I fluttered through the latticed courtyards and shaded arbors, perching on balcony rails, listening at windows and doorways, I glimpsed only a few fearful slaves scouring footprints from the tile floors; every one of them had bruises and bloody streaks on face or shoulders. Nervous slave masters have heavy hands.

Here and there in corners, small knots of courtiers huddled whispering, their verdict the same as in the streets. A slave could never have done such a deed alone. Someone had drawn off the Emperor's bodyguards and ever-present courtiers. Someone had left a dagger in the Emperor's bedroom, where weapons were forbidden, and had told the slave where to find it. Someone powerful had thought to profit from this death, and it was clear who looked to profit the most—the same one who had been summoned to answer charges of conspiracy not two days previous, the same one who had been the object of the Emperor's screaming rage when closeted with him before last evening's meal, the same who had refused to sit at his father's table a mere three hours before the deed was done.

The rustle of my wings quickly scattered the gossips. The falcon was the symbol of the Emperor's Denischkar house, and those who noted me cast their eyes nervously to the heavens beyond my wings, as if expecting Athos himself to follow and render judgment on the cowardly villain responsible for this most heinous of all crimes—regicide, the murder of the god's own voice on earth.

I found Aleksander in the Hall of Athos, a vast columned temple dedicated to the sun god, built in the heart of the palace gardens. The soaring dome was sheathed with gold inside and out, and pierced with slits and delicately etched windows so that on every moment of the sun's path, sunbeams fell like fine lacework upon the floor. The thick stone walls held the coolness of the night just past, and the high windows and broad doorways drew in whatever fair breeze wandered over the city. I settled in one of the slots in the gilded dome. Far below me spread a vast floor of shining white marble, inlaid with patterns of cool green malachite. On it lay two bodies, one draped in gold and one in red, both mortally still. As if Athos' own beams were insufficient to the day, the two were surrounded by a thousand burning lamps of gold and silver, some set upon the floor, some hung on the forest of columns that supported the dome and the arched vaults of the side temples, some dangling from lamp stands of wrought silver and bronze. Among the lamps were braziers, burning sweet herbs and incense, so that wafting gray-green smokes obscured the mingled light of morning and the flickering death flames. At the great arched doorways that opened onto the Emperor's gardens stood guards, their naked backs rigid and their spears crossed. The silence was absolute.