Shadowed By Wings (36 page)

“Nashe.”

“Hatching,” I said hoarsely, watching the boy shudder within the daronpu’s arms. “The act of a dragon hatchling breaking free from its shell.”

“It’s metaphor, Babu. Everything in the Djimbi language is metaphor. Nashe translates in the Emperor’s tongue as manumission.”

“Manumission.”

“Has maggot turned into mynah, that you parrot me so?” he roared. “Manumission, setting the enslaved free.”

“You’re Djimbi.”

He grinned wickedly. “Not possible, hey-o! Not allowed into Temple, such blood-tainted curs. I am fa-pim, pure in spirit and body.”

“Temple belongs to the Djimbi,” the dragonmaster growled from the shadows. “The glory and dominion belong to us. Long before the Emperor turned it into the parody that it is today, the Temple of the Dragon existed in the jungles, for the Djimbi. Temple belongs to
us
.”

“Yes, yes,” the daronpu said, lifting a great arm and waving aside the dragonmaster’s heated remark. “Now, Babu, you make a decision, what-what? Condemn this boy to lifelong torment, will you? Torment most useless, as he is not the prophesied one, is not the Dirwalan Babu, and therefore can never channel the Skykeeper’s power as you might. That won’t stop the frustrated Guardian from plaguing him, though, in its drive to unshackle the holy. Nashe, blood-blood! The Skykeeper demands Nashe!”

The Skykeeper demanded no such thing. The Skykeeper was my mother’s haunt, and she wanted only to find Waivia.

Daronpu Gen spun the boy about so that he faced me. He was misery incarnate, that scrawny child. Tears shone on his cheeks like beads of aloe.

“Look upon this boy who has never known a mother’s touch, look upon your brother and condemn him to a lifetime of torment, after a childhood of suffering Kratt’s pleasures! Enfold his maimed hand in yours and reject him in preference for your base cravings and an escape into death.”

“Stop,” I gasped.

“Stand up! Approach! His hand awaits—”

“Stop it!”

“Answer, then.”

Breathing heavily, I looked upon the terrified little boy.

“What’s your name?” I said at last.

“I’m called Naji,” he whispered through thin lips, and I shuddered. “One Hundred. I am the one hundredth asak-illyas to serve in the current Roshu-Lupini’s viayandor.”

Viayandor: mansion for females. The bayen equivalent of a rishi women’s barracks, where children and women resided apart from the men.

I shuddered again at how he’d been labelled: Naji. Vile coincidence that he and I, for a brief while, had shared the same name.

“Before you served Kratt’s Wai-roidan yin, what was your name?” I asked quietly.

“I am Naji,” he said tremulously, afraid of anger.

“He was fated at birth for his current post,” the daronpu said. “He has always been called Naji—”

“He was
not
fated for such,” I said hotly, throat tight with a flashflood of unshed tears. “His name at birth was danku Re Darquel’s Waikar, First Son of Clutch Re’s master potter Darquel. And your mother’s name was Kavarria. Darquel’s Kavarria. She had to be dragged from Wabe Din Temple when she learned you’d been stolen from her breast and taken there. She loved you. Understand that.”

Tears ran down the boy’s cheeks. “Did you know her?” I hesitated, then said grimly, wearily, “I know her.” “She’s alive still?”

I could find no way to answer that hope except through evasive truth. “Her bones have long been exposed to sun and soil, her flesh consumed by animals.”

He caught his breath and nodded with all the courage his difficult life had taught him to muster.

“Have you lost all your milk teeth?” I asked him. “Are you a man yet?”

His four-fingered hand drifted uncertainly to his mouth. “I don’t have all of them. Some have been knocked out.”

“You need your adult name, anyway,” I said firmly. “I give it to you now: Ingalis Hadrun Alen. Do you know what this means?”

He shook his head, eyes wide.

“The will to be responsible to yourself. Go, Ingalis. You won’t be tormented by either Kratt or night terrors anymore.”

I looked at Daronpu Gen. “You go, too. You’ve done what you came to do. I’ll start training tomorrow.”

EIGHTEEN

T
he next afternoon, the dragonmaster returned me by wagon to my stall in the apprentices’ courtyard.

The coarse wooden bench beneath me creaked as the wagon rumbled over the ground. Wet dust stuck in red clods to the cartwheels, making the ride bumpy. Harnessed to the cart, a destrier pulled us forward, snorting plumes of steam from her nostrils. Her vitality was manifest in the glossiness of her rufous and ivy green scales, the fullness of her opalescent dewlaps, the impatience with which she pulled against her creaking leather harness. Her lizard-slitted eyes eagerly took everything in, even though she must have walked the stable domain many times in her service to Roshu-Lupini Re.

Her vibrancy was thrilling.

Frayed banks of fog hung suspended between damp red earth and the low, clouded sky. The Inbetween was drawing to an end. I’d been imprisoned in the viagand chambers throughout the Wet, the entire monsoon season.

A breeze ruffled my hair and dappled my skin with beads of mist. I clutched my pimpled arms. My hands looked frail, were gelid.

We entered a stable courtyard noisy with action. Hooked muzzle poles sliced through the air like scythes. Pitchforks clattered against flagstone. Banter, shouted orders, curses, and Egg’s boarlike voice reverberated round the yard.

The nutlike smell of clean featon chaff wafted over me, as warm as fresh-cooked bread, mingled with the astringent pungency of crushed vines and the peppery bite of hoontip blooms, both chopped together as fodder. The leathery musk of dragon, laced by the citric tang of venom, hung over these odors like an aromatic benediction.

A surge of emotion rose like a monsoon river-flood within me at the familiarity of place and smell.

A clawful of veterans were leading nervy yearlings to the exercise field. In ragged stages, the veterans stopped and held their charges steady at our passage. I espied Eidon, flame haired and burly, standing as strong as a young bull beside his charge. My heart leapt and my throat tightened. I raised my hand in greeting.

He looked back at me, eyes hooded, face impassive. He didn’t return my wave.

It was then that I noticed that backs were turning as stiff as pitchfork shafts as eyes fell upon me. Nostrils flared. The hands that held muzzle poles clenched tighter. Voices fell silent.

Tension spread from the veterans like ocean breakers, spumy, whitecapped, the ground almost palpably resonating from the outward-spreading rumble of silence.

The servitors busy grooming wing leather and scaled back stopped their work. One by one, their heads lifted from their labors. One by one, their expressions swooped through shock, consternation, and resentment, then turned grim and closed. I recognized Ringus atop one beast; his eyes dropped from mine and he flushed mightily.

The inductees mucking stalls and mixing straw and manure together in barrels to make fuel faggots stopped their work. They didn’t even attempt to mask their astonishment, which rapidly turned into fear and dismay. A few exchanged horrified looks and hissed curt questions at each other, questions I couldn’t hear above the snort of impatient dragon and the creak of axle and wood. But I could guess at them.

“How?”

“Why?”

Something hard rose from my cramped belly and snagged in my throat. My raised hand stiffly returned to my lap. I stared straight ahead. My vision blurred. From the fog only, I told myself.

Beside me, the dragonmaster grunted.

“You’ll not eat with them, hey-o. Nor will you muck stalls or labor alongside them. I’ll bring you your food each morn and eve, and you’ll spend your every waking hour training alongside me. Understand?”

I gave a brief, stiff nod.

He pulled back on the reins. With a toss of her snout, the destrier shackled to our cart stopped before my stall. My hammock, cobwebbed and thick with dust and stray flakes of chaff, looked cold.

Two husky men stepped out of the shadows.

I reared back, shot a panicked looked at the dragonmaster.

“Cafar Re guards,” he said. A superfluous remark; I could see what the men were by their steel-studded leather plastrons, their skirts of fine mail, their heavily tooled leather dirk sheaths snug against the sides of their shins, and the ornate sword scabbards slung low on their hips. The warrior cicatrices slashed across their faces made them look like glowering dragons.

Everything about the two guards exuded quiet, confident menace.

“What are they doing here?” I gasped.

“Protection.”

“Against whom?”

The dragonmaster’s eyes slid from mine and he spat to one side.

I swallowed. The hostile eyes of every apprentice bored into my back.

“Why?” I croaked.

“There’s been a daronpu here most evenings during your absence,” the dragonmaster said bitterly. “Preaching.”

He gestured at me to alight. I hesitated, thoughts and emotions reeling.

“Get down, girl. I’ve business to attend elsewhere,” he said impatiently. “You’d best sleep the day away, regain a little strength. I’ll be back by nightfall with the potion Gen wants you to drink. And remember: Eat nothing but what I give you. Hear?”

I swallowed, hard.

“Yes, Komikon,” I answered.

But I could not sleep, not with the shocking hostility of my fellow apprentices stabbing my spirit, not in the unnerving presence of those two Cafar guards, so reminiscent of the Retainers who’d stood day and night outside the door to the viagand chambers. I lay in my hammock, twining my fingers, thoughts whirling, and occasionally drifted into an exhausted doze, only to awaken a short time later with a heart-thundering jolt, certain that one of the guards had moved toward me with lascivious intent, regardless of their stoic immobility at the threshold of my stall.

When dusk finally came and the apprentices returned from their work, I watched many a thumbnail flick against an ear to ward off evil, watched many a mouth hack spittle on the ground while eyes flicked in my direction. Eidon strode by my stall without a sideways glance. Ringus slunk by like a whipped cur.

I stayed motionless in my stall, behind the unwanted barricade of the two Cafar guards.

The dragonmaster reappeared. Bald head damp with mist, he stalked into my stall and wordlessly shoved a tin box at me, then handed one each to the guards. From around his neck dangled a taut leather bladder and a gourd tied to a twine thong.

The tin box was warm, almost hot, upon my lap, and the savory scent of meat wafted forth. The lid had been stamped with impressions of eggs and featon sheaves. I cracked it open. Steam rushed forth from two thick slabs of paak, fresh from an oven. Beside them on a bed of twice-steamed grit nestled an aroosh, a slab of gharial meat baked in a thick, heavy, featon-flour pocket. A lime, three waxy red chilies, and a cruet of what I knew would be sesal paste filled the rest of the little tin box.

The Cafar guards began eating noisily.

I stared at the dragonmaster, unsettled by the luxury of the food before me.

“You need to build your strength as fast as possible, hey,” he growled by way of explanation.

Looks were shot my way from the apprentices sprawled about the hovel. The rich, oily smell of baked gharial meat had wafted toward them, overpowering the soaked-grain smell of their tepid gruel.

“Here, drink this first,” the dragonmaster said, uncorking the gourd that hung from his neck. He proffered it to me.

Daronpu Gen’s potion.

I took it cautiously and sniffed; an earthy, herbal odor reminiscent of rotting fungi wafted forth. I lowered the gourd with a grimace.

“What is this?” I said gruffly.

“Make haste; the charm on it lasts a short while only.”

“Charm?”

The dragonmaster glared at me and shot a look at the guards. “Lower your voice.”

“But what is
in
it?”

He uttered a strangled cry, grabbed my head with one hand and the gourd with his other, and brought the two forcibly together. The edge of the gourd butted into my lower lip and drew blood.

“Abbasin Shinchiwouk is but a clawful of weeks away,” he hissed. “Unless the Skykeeper appears the instant you step foot in Arena, you don’t have a chance of surviving against Re in your current state, and I’ll not see the emancipation of my people gored before my very eyes. Now, drink, girl, drink!”

I drank.

A starburst of luminescent blue showered down my throat, a visible taste, an effervescent color. A gamy odor tinged the potion, and I felt something within me yawn open, as if a fleshy cave had momentarily dilated wide.

I dropped the empty gourd, spluttering.

“The venom’ll drain from your blood quicker, now,” the dragonmaster said grimly, “and its retreat will be less harsh. Gen vows it.”

From outside my stall, across the courtyard where the apprentices’ hovel stood, a flash of emerald and purple silk caught my eyes. I straightened, squinting.