The Oathbound (36 page)

“I—”

“Fool; blind, stupid fool! Your lust for power is nearly as great as my own, yet you could accomplish
nothing
by yourself and
everything
with my aid!” the demon rose to his feet, gesticulating. “Think—for one moment, think! You are in a mage-Talented body now; one in which the currents of arcane power flow strongly. You could have me as a patron. You could have all the advantages of being my own High Prelate when I am made a god! And you wish to throw this all away? Simply because you do not care for the responses of a perfectly healthy and attractive body?”

“But it isn’t
mine!
It’s a woman!” Lastel shrank back into the corner, wailing. “I don’t
want
this body—”

“But I want you in it. I desire you, creature I have made; I want you in a form attractive to me.” The demon came closer and placed his hands on the walls to either side of Lastel, effectively rendering her immobile. “Your emotions run so high, and taste so sweetly to me that I sometimes think I shall never release you.”

“Why?” Lastel whispered. “Why me, why this? And why
here?
I thought all your kind hated this world.”

“Not I.” The demon’s eyes smoldered as his expression turned thoughtful. “Your world is beautiful in my eyes; your people have aroused more than my hunger, they have aroused my desire. I want this world, and I want the people in it! And I
will
have it! Just as I shall have you.”

“No—” Lastel whimpered.

“Then I ask in turn, why? Or why not? What have I done save rouse your own passions? You are well fed, well clothed, well housed—nor have I ever harmed you physically.”

“You’re
killing
me!” Lastel cried, his voice breaking. “You’re destroying my identity! Every time you look at me, every time you touch me, I forget what it was ever like, being a man! All I want is to be
your
shadow, your servant; I want to exist only for you! I never come back to myself until after you’ve gone, and it takes longer to remember what I was afterward—longer every time you do this to me.”

The demon smiled again with his former cruelty, and brought his lips in to brush her neck. “Then, little toy,” he murmured, “perhaps it is something best forgotten?”

 

Tarma was lost; without sight, without hearing, without senses of any kind. Held there, and drained weak past any hope of fighting back. So tired—too tired to fight. Too tired to hope, or even care. Emptied of every passion—

The thin voice in her mind was the first sign that there was any life at all in the vast emptiness where she abode, alone. She strained to hear it again, feeling ... something. Something besides the apathy that had claimed her.

It was familiar. If only she could remember, remember anything at all.

The voice was stronger, and had the feel of teeth in it. As if something large and powerful was closing fangs on her and shaking her. Teeth—

In the name of the Star-Eyed!
the voice said, frantically.
You MUST wake!

Teeth. Star-Eyed. Those things had meant something, before she had become nothing. Had meant something, when she was—

Tarma.

She was Tarma. She
was
Tarma still, Sworn One,
kyree
-friend,
she‘enedra.

Every bit of her identity that she regained brought more tiny pieces back with it, and more strength. She fought off the gray fog that threatened to steal those bits away, fought and held them, and put more and more of herself together, fighting back inch by inch. She was Shin‘a’in, of the free folk of the open plains—she would not be held and pri soned! She—would—not—be—held!

Now she felt pain, and welcomed it, for it was one more bridge to reality. Salvation lay in pain, not in the gray fog that sucked the pain and everything else away from her. She held the pain to her, cherished it, and reached for the voice in her mind.

She found that, too, and held to it, while it rejoiced fiercely that she had found it.

No—not
it. He.
The
kyree,
the mage-beast. Warrl. The friend of her soul, as Kethry was of her heart.

As if that recognition had broken the last strand of foul magic holding her in the gray place, she suddenly found herself possessed again of a body—a body that ached in a way that was only too familiar. A body stiff and chilled, and sitting—from the feel of the air on her skin—nearly naked and on a cold stone floor. She could hear nothing but the sound of someone crying softly—and cautiously cracked her eyes open the merest slit to see where she was.

She was in a cage; she could see the iron bars before her, but unless she changed position and moved, she couldn’t see much else. She closed her eyes again in an attempt to remember what could have brought her to this pass. Her memories tumbled together, confused, as she tried with an aching skull to sort them out.

But after a moment, it all came back to her, and with it, a rush of anger and hatred.

Thalhkarsh!

The demon—he’d tricked her, trapped her—then overpowered her, changed her, and done—something to her to send her into that gray place. But if Thalhkarsh had taken her, then where were Warrl and Kethry?

Tarma moved her head cautiously; her muscles all ached. There
was
someone in the cage with her, crumpled in a heap in the corner; by the shaking of her shoulders, the source of the weeping—but—

Tarma licked lips that were swollen and bruised. She’d felt this badly used once before, a time she preferred not to think about.

There was something missing; something missing—

“No,” she whispered, eyes opening wide with shock, all thought driven from her in that instant by her realization of
what
was missing. “Oh,
no!”

The stranger’s head snapped up; swollen and red-rimmed amethyst eyes turned toward her. “T-t-tarma?”

“It’s gone,” she choked, unable to comprehend her loss. “The
vysaka
—the Goddess-bond—it’s
gone!”
She could feel her sanity slipping; feel herself going over the edge. Without the Goddess-bond—

Take hold of yourself!
the voice in her mind snapped.
It’s probably all that damn demon’s fault; break his spells and it will come back! And anyway, you’re alive and I’m alive and Kethry’s alive; I want us all to STAY that way!

Warrl’s annoyance was like a slap in the face; it brought her back to a precarious sanity. And with his reminder that Kethry was still alive, she turned back toward the stranger whose tear-streaked face peered through the gloom at her.

“Keth? Is that you?”

“You’re back! Oh, Goddess bless, you’re back!” The platinum-haired beauty flung herself into Tarma’s arms, and clung there. “I thought he’d destroyed you, and it was all my fault for insisting that we do this ourselves instead of going for help like you wanted.”

“Here, now.” Tarma gulped back tears of her own, and pushed Kethry away with hands that shook. “We’re not out of this yet.”

“T-tarma—Warrl—he‘s—”

Very much alive, thank you.
The great furry shape on the table outside their cage rose slowly to its four feet, and shook itself painfully. I hurt.
If
you
hurt like I hurt, we are all in very sad condition.

Tarma sympathized with Kethry’s bewilderment. “He pulled a
kyree
trick on us all,
she‘enedra.
He told me that when the demon’s magic hit him, it sent him into little-death—a kind of trance. He figured it was better to stay that way until we were alone.” She examined the confused countenance before her. “He also said something about you trading bodies with a bandit ... and don’t I know that face?”

“Lastel Longknife,” she replied shakily. “He lived; he’s the one that had Thalhkarsh conjured up, and I guess he got more than he bargained for, because the demon turned him into a real woman. He was the one spreading the rumors to lure us in here, I’ll bet. Now he’s got
my
body—”

“I have the sinking feeling that you’re going to tell me you can’t work magic in this one.”

“Not very well,” she admitted. “Though I haven’t tried any of the power magics that need more training than Talent.”

“All right then; we can’t magic our way out of this cage, let’s see if we can think our way out.”

Tarma did her best to ignore the aching void within her and took careful stock of the situation. Their prison consisted of the back half of a stone-walled room; crude iron bars welded across the middle made their half into a cage. It had an equally crude door, padlocked shut. There was only one door to the room itself, in the front half, and there were no windows; the floor was of slate. In half of the room beyond their cage was a table on which Warri—and something else—lay.

“Fur-face, is that Need next to you?”

“Then Thalhkarsh just made one big mistake,” she said, narrowing her eyes with grim satisfaction. “Get your tail over here, and bring the blade with you.”

Warrl snorted, picked up the hilt of the blade gingerly in his mouth, and jumped down off the table with it. He dragged it across the floor, complaining mentally to Tarma the entire time.

“All right, Keth. I saw that thing shear clean through armor and more than once. Have a crack at the latch. It’ll have to be you, she won’t answer physically to me.”

“But—” Kethry looked doubtfully at the frail arms of her new body, then told herself sternly to remember that Need was a
magical
weapon, that it responded (as the runes on its blade said) to woman’s need. And they certainly needed out of this prison—

She raised the sword high over her head, and brought it down on the latch-bar with all of her strength.

With a shriek like a dying thing, the metal sheared neatly in two, and the door swung open.

 

“You are bold, priest,” the demon rumbled.

“I am curious; perhaps foolish—but never bold,” responded the plump, balding priest of Anathei. “I was curious when I first heard the rumors of your return. I was even more curious when the two who were responsible for your defeat before were missing this morning. I will confess to being quite confused to find one of them here.”

He cast a meaningful glance at the demon’s companion, curled sullenly on the velvet beside him. The sorceress did not appear to be happy, but she also did not appear coerced in any way. Come to that, there was something oddly different about her....

“I repeat, you are bold; but you amuse me. Why are you here?” Thalhkarsh settled back onto his cushions, and with a flicker of thought increased the intensity of the light coming from his crimson lanterns. The musky incense he favored wafted upward toward the ceiling from a brazier at the edge of the padded platform where he reclined. This priest had presented himself at the door and simply asked to be taken to the demon; Thalhkarsh’s followers had been so nonplussed by his quiet air of authority that they had done as he asked. Now he stood before Thalhkarsh, an unimpressive figure in a plain brown cassock, plump and aging, with his hands tucked into the sleeves of his robe. And he, in his turn, did not seem the least afraid of the demon; nor did it appear that anything, from the obscene carvings to the orgy still in progress on the platform behind the demon, was bothering him the slightest bit.

And that had the demon thoroughly puzzled.

“I am here to try to convince you that what you are doing is wrong.”

“Wrong?
Wrong?”
The demon laughed heartily. “I could break you with one finger, and you wish to tell me that I am guilty of doing wrong?”

“Since you seem to wish to live in this world, you must live by some of its rules—and one of those is that to cause harm or pain to another is wrong.”

“And who will punish me, priest?” The demon’s eyes glowed redly, his lips thinning in anger. “You?”

“You yourself will cause your own punishment,” the priest replied earnestly. “For by your actions you will drive away what even you must need—admiration, trust, friendship, love—”

He was interrupted by the sound of shouting and of clashing blades; he stared in surprise to see Tarma—a transformed Tarma—wearing an acolyte’s tunic and nothing else, charging into the room driving several guards ahead of her. And with her was the platinum-haired child he had last seen at his own temple, telling his brothers of the rumors of Thalhkarsh.

But the blade in her hands was the one he had last seen in the sorceress’ hands.

The woman at the demon’s side made a tight little sound of smothered rage as the demon’s guards moved to bar the exits or interpose themselves between the women and their target.

“Your anger is strong, little toy,” Thalhkarsh laughed, looking down at her. “Use it, then. Become the instrument of my revenge. Kill her, and this time I promise you that I shall give you your man’s body back.” He plucked a sword from the hand of the guard next to him and handed it to his amber-tressed companion.

And the priest stared in complete bewilderment.

 

Given the weapon, the bandit needed no further urging, and flung himself at Kethry’s throat.