Shadowed By Wings (44 page)

We descended into the web of stone tunnels. The air reeked of urine and dragon dung, of old sweat and torch smoke. It was hard to inhale.

I started shivering, could not stop. With each shudder, the chains shackling my wrists rattled, and pain flared across my broken ribs. Those about me did not look human, had been reduced to undulating silhouettes in the torchlight. I looked instead at the shadows oozing over the uneven stone walls.

Our cart stopped. Under the barked orders of the veterans, the apprentices clambered out.

One of the Auditors half lifted me down, his hands tight around my biceps. I swayed for a moment as my feet touched the cold floor, the heavy chain fettering my wrists slapping against my belly. Above and around us, the huge stones of Arena reverberated with the coliseum noise of dragon and spectator.

Within the tunnel, the apprentices pooled into niches and against the wall. All but the veterans were subdued and moved uncertainly. Some of the apprentices began chanting the komikonpu walan kolriks, their breathless whispers whisking down the tunnel like the breath of ghosts. Eidon slotted his torch into a wall sconce, and he and another veteran began feinting and lunging with poliars, warming up their muscles. Eidon moved with vicious certainty; his weapon sliced through the air like a dragon’s claw. Dono crouched on his haunches to one side, a shadow hunched over a poliar. A sliver of something gleamed against one of his thighs. It looked like a dagger.

Kratt and his retinue of fine lords continued through the labyrinth, the creak of axles and saddle leather echoing eerily down the tunnel long after they’d disappeared from sight. They would be taking one of the many tunnels leading to the underground stables, whence they’d go to a stairwell and ascend into the brilliant glare of Arena’s spectator stands.

I closed my eyes and held my elbows tucked into myself, as if by letting go, I’d lose what vestiges of courage I may have had left to me.

I felt small and impotent and exposed, and I was very, very cold.

“Mo Fa Cinai, wabaten ris balu,” I gasped between chattering teeth. Purest Dragon, become my strength.

The slap of feet and the uneven breaths of someone approaching at a run intruded upon the grim silence. The veterans practicing with poliar paused; we all looked toward the sound. A shadow appeared, then materialized under the torchlight as a scrawny rishi boy.

“Summons for the first shinchiwouk participants for Clutch Re!” he panted. “These being: Zarq-the-deviant, danku Re’s Dono, arbiyesku Re’s Kaban—”

My head turned diaphanous and filled with a roaring sound and I remembered, too late, that I needed to empty my bladder.

The two Auditors on either side of me started forward. I shuddered violently, cringed back into the shadow.

“Wait, it’s too soon,” I gasped. “We just arrived; I haven’t been assigned a vebalu weapon—”

One of my biceps was clutched in a hard grip and I was jerked forward.

Dono rose from his crouch and came toward me. In the dark, his damaged eye protruded from under his swollen, ripped eyelid like a rotting plum. Hatred spilled off him like smoke from the torches. As well as a poliar in one hand, he carried a coiled whip tied loosely to his loincloth sash, and tucked within that sash, a dirk. The ivory and gold handle clearly designated the blade as bayen.

Not a vebalu weapon, that. He’d been given it by some Clutch Re lord intent on my death.

I looked wildly about. “Where’s my vebalu cape? Where’s my weapon? I can’t go into Arena empty-handed!”

“Shut up, whore,” Dono rasped, and his voice was so warped with loathing, it was unrecognizable.

Beside me, the dragonmaster went into a fresh paroxysm of mad rage. He was still fettered about the wrist, like I was, and, too, was hobbled about the ankles. But that didn’t stop him from flailing about, jaws snapping like those of a cur. The man was clearly functioning on the might of the deranged.

“Unhand me, you Temple harlots!” he shrieked. “Unchain me; give me my whip!”

From the shadows, Egg began gathering up the four apprentices listed, alongside the names of Dono and me, on the Ashgon’s Bill. All four wept. One cowered down against a wall.

“Please, Egg, please,” he sobbed, looking up at Egg as if Egg were an older brother who had the power to free the inductee from his fate. “Don’t make me go.”

“Get on your feet!” Egg roared, and when the boy continued to cower, looking up at him imploringly, Egg clouted him over the head. “Do what I taught you an’ you’ll be a servitor when we get back. Now, get up!”

The boy covered his head and sobbed. Egg picked him up and stood him upright; the boy sagged groundward. With a curse, Egg threw him over one shoulder and stomped over to us, the boy’s vebalu cape swishing in front of his chest like a Temple scapular. The boy sobbed against the back of Egg’s neck and pleaded, over and over, to be let go.

The other three inductees assigned shinchiwouk duty alongside Dono and me hefted their vebalu weapons and looked glaze-eyed with fear.

“I’ll carry him up,” Egg growled to no one in particular, and with that, the Auditors started up the tunnel, pulling the shackled and struggling dragonmaster by a chain, leading me by another.

Mo Fa Cinai wabaten ris balu, I thought, and somehow, that desperate prayer became mingled with the sobbing boy’s pleas, so that as we wound our way up the murky tunnel, I was no longer asking the Winged Infinite for strength, but to let me go, to please let me go.

Ahead: daylight.

Susurrus of two hundred thousand people gathered for bloodshed and merriment.

Fresh air, redolent with the dusty smell of sunbaked earth and the sweet pungency of fertile onahmes waiting to be bred to a bull.

We reached the rusted gates; beyond them, the dusty coliseum bowl. My eyes watered in the harsh light.

Egg tried to lift the boy down; the boy clung to Egg’s neck and wrapped his legs tight about Egg’s bulky girth. Egg reached up, grabbed a fistful of the boy’s hair, and peeled the terrified inductee headfirst off himself.

“Please, Egg, don’t make me go!”

I turned away, fought my body’s urge to retch.

The guards standing on the inside of the gate briskly went about their task of checking everyone’s vebalu weapons and capes, to make sure they were standard issue. They ignored Dono.

“He has a dirk!” I cried. “That’s illegal!”

One of the guards leaned toward me, his breath reeking of maska spirits. His sinuous facial cicatrices looked blue in the backlight of the coliseum bowl. He was missing a front tooth.

“I’d use the thing on you myself, if I had the choice,” he growled.

I fell silent.

“Unchain me, lest the wrath of the Realm descend upon you!” the dragonmaster cried. “You sluts of demons, unchain me!”

One of the guards unlatched the gate, swung it open on rusty hinges, and stepped aside. The Auditors shoved me through, then the dragonmaster. The hobbles about the dragonmaster’s ankles were not removed; neither were the shackles about his wrists, nor the shackles about mine.

We stumbled, blinded by sunlight, onto the stadium’s dusty bowl. At once, it was as if a simoom blasted through Arena; the roar of the crowd was as hot and fierce as a desert gale.

Clitter-clack, clitter-clack!
The hailstorm of thousands of finger sheaths drumming against Arena’s tiers deafened us. One of the inductees instinctively covered his head, as if the noise were a rain of rocks. I staggered away from Dono, away, away.

But not so far away that I would be picked off by the bull, should he charge in the direction of us apprentices. Which he would.

I came to a stop, breathing rapidly, unevenly, stabbed by pain from my broken ribs with each breath. Like the day previous, I felt my eyes drawn to the dazzling chandelier display of the Emperor’s Ceiling.

How can such beauty, I vaguely wondered, be created and appreciated by those who can also be incited to lust by the deaths of children?

My gaze drifted down, as light as dust, fogged by pain and fear, to the balconies of the overlords. I found Clutch Re’s balcony, the crimson pennants that flapped above its tasseled canopy emblazoned with the elegant purple hieratics of Cafar Re. Cafar Re. The Bastion of Tears.

And there, weaving between the lush-limbed ebanis upon that balcony, dressed in a gauzy bitoo of palest blue, walked a figure that riveted my blurred gaze. The feline way she moved, the wild fall of her tawny hair, the swell of her bosom and the distinctive roll of her hips …

I swear to this day that despite the distance, despite my debilitated state, despite the dazzling prisms thrown by a million faceted mirrors high above, I knew at once exactly who she was.

My sister.

Danku Re Darquel’s Waivia.

I stared, ears roaring. I did not hear the crowd fall silent as the Ashgon raised his hand. Did not hear the clank of iron gates winched open. Did not hear the bellow of Re as he came charging from his holding stall, nor the answering roar of the crowd. All I heard was the rush of blood in my ears. All I saw was that figure, no more than a distant smudge, standing beside Waikar Re Kratt, her closeness to him declaring that she was his Wai-ebani Bayen. First Pleasurer of an Aristocrat.

That had always been her ambition, see. To serve as pleasurer to Roshu-Lupini Re’s First Son.

So that was why mother’s haunt hadn’t returned to me: She’d had no need. She’d found someone I’d long believed dead. She’d found my sister.

I swooned.

It was that swoon that saved me.

As I melted groundward, Dono—already running toward me with his dirk raised—struck. Instead of striking me, he struck air, though so close was his blow, so much power was there in his strike, that to the crowd it must have looked as if his blade buried deep into my neck, for the spectators rose as one to their feet with great cheers. As it was, his blade only nicked me as I fell.

Carried forward by the momentum of his strike, Dono tripped over my prone form and went sprawling. The dragonmaster leapt over me, his mottled green and brown form appearing briefly to my befuddled mind as a gazelle, though that couldn’t have been true, for he was hobbled. He fell upon Dono. While he used the chain binding his shackled wrists as a garrote around Dono’s throat, while the two rolled in the dust to the wild roars of the crowd, the ground beneath me shook as Re charged toward us.

The inductees ran in different directions, screaming. Re abruptly veered after them.

I only saw all this from the corner of one eye, understand, for I lay upon my back staring at the glittering display far above my head, my senses shredded, my body detached, thinking: My mother
did
abandon me, just as she did when I was nine. For Waivia. Again.

Why? What had I ever done as a child that had made my mother give her love so unfailingly to Waivia but not to me?

Those scintillating mirrors high above … how hypnotic they were, how beguiling. Like the flecks of quartz I’d been so entranced by on the roof of my little burrow in the viagand chambers, not all that long ago. Like the thousands of stars that had glittered in the night sky, the first time my mother openly defied Temple by hiding glazes and clays in the jungle instead of giving them away on Sa Gikiro, almost a decade ago.

I experienced a grunu-engros, then, there on my back, staring at those scintillating reflections while a great bull mauled a young boy. I had a dragon-spirit moment, that illusory feeling of having already experienced a similar situation that is a portent of one’s life yet to come.

And I remembered.

I remembered what I’d envisaged while lying in venom torpor in my burrow in the viagand chambers, staring at flecks of quartz and feldspar in stone. I remembered that I had experienced being a bull.

Not once, not twice, but thrice while under the spell of venom, while listening to dragonsong, I had fought in shinchiwouk as a dragon, until even in sleep my limbs had twitched with the remembered feints and lunges of dragon combat.

I knew then that I could survive Arena. Without the protection of my mother’s haunt, without even the certainty that I’d once been loved by my mother, I knew I could survive.

How?

Because I could think like Re, could predict each of his movements before he acted.

With this heady rush of hope, adrenaline coursed through my body, and the combination of hope and adrenaline was as momentarily powerful as venom infused direct into my muscles, my nerves, my sinews and flesh.

In stiff, jerky stages, I rose to my feet.

Breathing heavily, fingers tingling with a flood-rush of blood, I looked for Dono’s dropped poliar. I found it close by, not far from where the dragonmaster was straddled across Dono’s back, chain tight against Dono’s throat. I bent toward the poliar; pain like a bolt of lightning blasted white-hot through me. Vision blurred, I groped for the poliar, found its smooth, dust-coated shaft. I hefted the poliar’s weight in both my shackled hands and straightened with a sharp intake of breath.

Slowly, I turned about.

Half the stadium’s length away, mighty Re had quit worrying the disjointed form of one of the inductees and was just raising his head from the corpse. Our eyes met. The ground between us contracted.

I lifted my poliar into the air. Inflating my lungs, I bellowed out a challenge.

All the fury, fear, and pain I felt, from all I’d witnessed that day and all the days of my life, rushed into my bellow. The sound that came out swelled, became enormous, was hoarse and primal and puissant. It was not human, that sound; it was misery and hope incarnate, clashing and exploding with all the force of a thunder-storm. Amplified tenfold by the coliseum, the war cry boomed and echoed round tier after tier, and I swear even the pennants and tents upon the bayen platforms shuddered under its boom.

Re reared up on his hind legs and shook his head, massive dewlaps swinging, and blasted the stadium with an answering roar. He crouched. Sprang into the air, wings slightly outspread, neck and snout pointed skyward, torso exposed, hind legs braced for landing.

A vulnerable, upright position, that, belly and testes fully exposed, unfurled wings unprotected. A lifetime of captivity had turned Re guileless, had deprived him of the learned skills of shinchiwouk survival in the wild, had dulled his dragonsong memories. Bloodlust, combined with his predictable, repetitive experiences in Arena, had blinded him to the danger of unfurling his wings while in battle.