The Carnelian Throne (3 page)

“If those roars get close, wake me,” he rumbled. Chayin chuckled. Sereth’s sleep is light as an insert’s wing. The familiar smell of his leathers, as I pressed my face to them, almost masked the rank, salt-laden river odor. Almost, I could mistake the river sound for his pulse. Almost, I could quiet the whispers my mind spoke, the oddly framed thoughts that touched mine, timid, and withdrew.

I twitched and tossed beside him, sleepless, until he growled and pushed up on one elbow. Chayin, ministering to his fire, hummed softly under his breath.

“What troubles you, ci’ves?” Sereth whispered, using the lover’s name he had given me, that of a pet kept as talisman in the hills where he was born. In his tone was no annoyance that my restlessness chased sleep from him.

I thought about it, seeking proper words. I did not find them. At the river, he had sought Chayin’s counsel without words. When he sought me that way, I would give him what he asked. Now, he was not ready to hear me. So I said instead: “Hard ground, a number of itching bites, and the scratch on my thigh.”

I put my arms around his neck and pulled him down beside me, willing my body still. It would not be I who mouthed portents. They were surely as clear to Sereth as to Chayin ior myself. It would not be I who broke my word, and searched owkahen, the time-coming-to-be, accepting and rejecting and thereby conditioning what might, in these lands, occur.

Sereth sought respite from just such manipulations of time by mind, at least long enough to determine what forces were at work here. And why, by his predecessor’s will, enforced for countless generations, this land had been a shore of which nothing was known, of which none were empowered to speak. By my side lay he who might, if he wished, call himself dharen. The dharen before him had forbidden all commerce between this land and the one from which we had come. The impression had been fostered in the minds of the people of Silistra that nothing had survived the holocaust, on this farther shore. Even in the “autonomous” southlands ruled over by cahndors such as Chayin, none had disobeyed that injunction; or if any had, in silent defiance of the law, made the journey, they had not returned to speak the tale; or had, returning, kept silent.

As I have said, Sereth might have called himself dharen of Silistra. At that time he was not yet willing to do so: he did not wish to bear that burden.

I was—a number of things. Once, keepress of the premier Well on Silistra, with seven thousand people under my care. Later, with Chayin, I held a high commission and for a time served as regent in his southern principality. At still a later time, I was dhareness to Silistra’s ruler, when Khys held the title. With all else, I passed into Sereth’s hands at his predecessor’s demise—a place I had long coveted. I might have called myself dhareness yet or chosen among certain other dignities which were mine by right. My left breast hosts a spiral symbol that twinkles as if bejeweled. It eloquently bespeaks my Shaper heritage; would that it did not. I could rid myself of it, but that I will not do.

Chayin, least changed of us up until that time, sought not forgetfulness, nor was his name abrasive to his own ears. Raised from childhood to believe in his personal divinity, he alone was not compromised in spirit by the affairs of the preceding years. And yet, he had turned away from those lands over which he ruled rightfully by blood and birth and effort. He, as Sereth, for the moment sought no reign over men. He, as I, had looked upon the burdens of his heritage and shuddered. With Sereth, he shared in love as fully as I; and between Chayin and myself, first cousins, there existed a long-standing intimacy. Let no one tell you that such a relationship is easy; and likewise, let none demean it. For the three of us, upon any one commission, are as close to a surety as exists in this ever-changing universe. And that—the realization of the possibilities in our merged skills—more than even the multifaceted affection we shared, entitled us in our own sight to this reconnaissance of an unknown land. We had come, two men and a woman, each divested by their own will of all but each other and those skills we had given so much to acquire, to explore the potentials inherent in our triune nature. Or so I saw it.

But Sereth, giving scant explanation, would not allow us their use. I sighed, and burrowed closer. I would try. I understood his thought. But even Chayin chafed under Sereth’s constraint.

It was not far to my father’s house, I thought in the dream, just as the trees bowed down to make of my path a darkened tunnel, and from the tunnel’s end came light and a great roaring. I turned and ran, but my feet, after the second step, would not be raised up from the soil. Struggling, I fell to the ground. Up through wave after wave of dizziness rose my body. Sitting upright, hand to my forehead, roars louder in my ears, I made at first no sense of it.

Then the shadows that danced in the low-burning firelight took form. My ears sorted sounds. The sounds became voices: Sereth’s, Chayin’s. The flamelight flickered off their blades, and out from the eyes of the thing that roared.

Its pale paw flashed out, claws extended. “Estri, stay back!”

I stopped, not recollecting how I had come there, past the fire, to where they held the wounded thing at bay.

Its huge jaws gnawed its own chest, where a dark wound gleamed wetly. It half-lay, haunches bunched, yet unable to spring. Again it struck; a sideswipe at Chayin; near-miss with that massive paw. He vaulted backward in clumsy retreat. Sereth, at the beast’s far side, darted in to divert it. His blade raised over his head, he brought the full force of that honed edge down upon the creature’s extended neck. Still reaching for Chayin was that immense, clawed forepaw as the roaring head struck the turf. The beast convulsed, rolling over, legs thrashing the air. Its final shudder, explosive, rent the air. Then, limp, it rolled to one side and came to rest, right-side-up, its dead eyes reflecting in the firelight. The fanged jaws were closed. Its tongue, half-severed, flapped weakly, then lay quiet between knife-long, gory teeth.

I backed away, staring at that head; at the great, furred body, no longer even twitching, pale like some mist-spawned apparition in the firelight.

Sereth’s hand touched my arm. “Estri, look at me.”

I tore my attention from the wedge-shaped head, from the dark-tufted ears. Our eyes met. The thing on the grass closely resembled our western hulions, but one somehow wingless and stunted. Hulions have great intelligence. I would rather kill a man than one of those beasts. Sereth knew ...

“It is dead,” I said dumbly.

“It came at us as a predator,” he said, staring into me intently, his grip tightening. When my tremors ceased, he released me, crouching to wipe his blade clean in the grass.

Chayin, limping slightly, slowly circled the corpse. When he reached us, he said: “Had Sereth not awakened when he did, it would likely be me lying there.”

“And it might have been my sudden movement that precipitated its attack.” Sereth, in his turn, examined the pale, furred form. When he had finished, he gave equal scrutiny to the stars before he spoke.

“Let us build up the fire. It may be a long night. Estri, stay in the light.”

Chayin set about his search for more fuel. I, equally obedient, walked over to the fire’s edge, my fingers worrying the thick braid of my hair, wondering if the furred beast was the largest predator in this land’s chain; and, if not, what might prey upon it.

When the flames burned high, Chayin sought the dead beast. By its tail, he dragged it into the firelight.

“What are you doing?” Sereth demanded, judiciously poking at the smoking branches.

“I thought I might skin it. Such a beast has never been seen in Nemar.”

“Think about it later,” Sereth said sharply. His countenance, grotesqued by the flame’s dance, was severe. The light poured molten down the scar that furrowed the left side of his face from cheekbone to jaw. Later I asked him, but he would admit to no foreknowledge come upon him then, though his eyes met mine and held them a long time.

He crouched amid the sedges, in the tufted reeds that banked the salt river. He wept, leaning against the root of one of the great trees where it reared up, entwining its brothers before diving deep. His clenched fist pummeled the fahrass bush which concealed him. The silvered balls of its fruit plummeted downward, plunking in rapid succession upon the pool’s surface around his calves, pelting his arms and shoulders. Stepsisters, most called them. He paid them no mind; it was not their touch, but their taste that killed. He brushed them from his hair, then again buried his head in his arms that he might not see the corpse of the sacred ptaiss glowing whitely in the firelight.

Within the comfort of his arms’ shelter, he prayed. He did not know what to do. First, seeing them, he had been consumed with fear for his mind. Then for his life. And then, when they had not detected him, he had waited. A man does not hurry to his death. He had been content to sit, then to crouch, finally to stand erect in the shore pool, watching. His spear lay close at hand, propped against the menmis tree’s white bark, forgotten. Or rather: useless. His hand, feeling for it, grasped the familiar polished wood. Without raising his head, he curled his fingers around the shaft. His terror, by this means, was somewhat eased. The spear was a trusted tool, a remnant of his well-ordered world. He blanked his mind.

“What, what, what?” he sang to himself under his breath. He had been sent to clear the Spirit Gate of the hated guerm; the lightning had done it for him.

He had been late. He had not hurried. It is a risky business, keeping guerm from surmounting the gate and infesting the Isanisa River. He had not been afraid, then. Slow, tears welled up in his eyes. He shook them fiercely away, averting his head from the fire, and those who fed it, and the slain ptaiss, Aama. Though he looked into darkness, he saw, with the clarity of long familiarity, all that grew on the Isanisa’s shores. As a man facing conscription might walk one last time around his holdings in silent farewell, so did the young man, in his memory, walk the twists and turns of Benegua. Benegua, Land of the Spirit Gate; of the Wall of Mnemaat, the unseen; of the sacred ptaiss; she was all the young man had ever known.

In the dark, by his leg, something glided along the pool’s still surface, the barely perceptible ripples of its passing lapping against his flesh. He waited, unmoving, for the swampsnake to pass on. Red-headed, perhaps, and deadly; or green-andblack-patterned, and holding within its fangs the most beneficent of drugs. With the back of his mind, he followed the snake’s progress, his trained ears noting the reeds’ rustle as it slithered away.

Wide-eyed, staring at nothing, housed in the emptiness that attends the shedding of tears, he waited. What would they want him to do?

Old Parpis—he would have known. The ache of throat that always accompanied his thoughts of the old man, now dead, did not dissuade him: A ptaiss was slain. A shiver of loss cooled his skin. He thought abstractly that if he did not soon quit the pool, he would catch the ague.

“Now, boy,” Parpis would have said, “fear gets you naught but frightened.” The young man swallowed, with difficulty. Parpis had taught him all he knew of ptaiss, and guerm, and Mnemaat’s service.

“Deilcrit,” Parpis used to say, before the young man had been entitled to the “iyl” before his name, “tend the ptaiss and spit the guerm, and the world will take care of itself.” It was Parpis who had taught him to dress an injured paw, to strip the white bark of the memnis and extract the healing fluids therefrom. But never had Parpis said to him, his wizened old face screwed up, his long teeth flashing: “Deilcrit, if the Spirit Gate opens, if lightning chars the guerm to ash, if three walk, fearless the risen Isanisa and set a fire upon her banks, here is what you do ... it is a simple matter.” To Parpis, even the most complex matters had been simple. But Parpis was dead of age and wisdom, and Deilcrit was iyl-Deilcrit, and upon the western shore of the Isanisa sacrilege had been heaped atop sacrilege: two quenels had been butchered and eaten; and the ptaiss Aama, heavy with child, lay lifeless by her murderers’ fire. And he had stood by, helpless, afrighted, witness.

He was no familiar of cowardice. He had not feared, sojourning alone for the first time, to attend to the guerm that dependably, at the moon’s absence, assaulted the Spirit Gate. He loosed his aching fingers from the spear’s shaft, flexed them, let them curl once more around its comforting strength. He took a deep breath, and then another, forcing his constricted chest to take in air, his head to turn, his eyes to rest upon the abomination flame-lit on the bank.

Then he picked up the spear and stepped out of the pool into the thicket. Water ran from his laced boots. As he waited for it to, drain, so he might be silent in his approach, he studied them. He had no clear idea of what he would do; only that he must do something. They were three, large and oddly dressed. For a moment he wondered wildly if they might be guerm, taken man-form, come to avenge themselves on Benegua.

He dropped to his knees. Not guermgods, surely, but perhaps gods, come to punish him, to show him unfit to bear the “iyl” before his name, to unmask him, pretender to Mnemaat’s service. He had had thoughts of the high priestess again, only the night before. Dream-thoughts, but thoughts, nevertheless, and as such evil. Retribution? He had never heard of offended deities acting so fast, or on such a scale. His fingers digging into the spongy grass, he knelt there, staring through the leaves. What he saw then, he could not believe. It stopped the prayer in his mind as if it had never been.

Hardly knowing what he did, as if it were some other hurtling through the bush, he ran, crouched, spear slippery in his sweating hands. The darkest, largest intruder looked up from the unspeakable atrocity he was committing with his knife on the ptaiss’ corpse.

Deilcrit froze in the rustling brush, suddenly conscious of the tiny stabs of jicekak brambles caught in his clothing. The dark face remained fixed in his direction; white teeth flashed as he spoke a meaningless garble of sound. The other male, a bit smaller, a trifle lighter of skin, answered the first in kind, rising. Unerring, the paler one walked toward the thicket in which Deilcrit crouched.