The Sylph Hunter (8 page)

The little arrangement of hovels was a dim shape in the darkness, intermingled with the warm glow of small fires lit for warmth and to cook food. Devon gaped, not able to make out many details but appalled by the poverty of it. Leon had told him about the place, of course, but Devon hadn’t really grasped how poor it really was, nor had he expected it to still be here. The city was huge. Why couldn’t they move there?

Beside him, Zalia’s stomach rumbled loudly as the smell of food wafted to them.

“Sorry,” she apologized.

Devon stared at her. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Before work this morning.”

Devon stopped. “You haven’t eaten all day? They make you serve people food and don’t let you eat?” Guilt filled him. No wonder she was so thin. “Why didn’t you say something? I would have bought you something to eat!”

Zalia stared at him for a moment, her mouth moving as she obviously tried to think of something to say. Finally, she dropped her hands away from her stomach and shrugged. “I would have been fired. I’m there to work, not to eat. A lot of people have left this place, but there are still hundreds of women who’d like to have my job.”

Devon frowned. “Do you get any days off?”

“No. I work every day.”

He blew out a breath in exasperation. Zalia was no better than a slave and that was the sort of thing supposed to change with a queen. He had to make sure it changed.

“Things will get better,” he promised her. “I mean it.”

She shrugged, neither agreeing or disagreeing, and led him over to one of the fires where an older, gaunt man with thinning white hair stood to greet them.

“This is my father, Xehm,” Zalia told him. “Father, this is Devon Chole.”

“It’s good to meet you,” Devon told him, shaking a hand where the fingers were thin as bird bones.

Xehm grinned at him, showing a lot of missing teeth. “It’s a pleasure meeting you,” Xehm enthused. “Mr. Petrule sent you then?”

“He did, sir. Myself and my air sylph, Airi.” Airi swirled his hair, but didn’t make herself visible.

They sat around the campfire, Zalia passing her father her wages and a waterskin. A pot of what looked like porridge was bubbling over the fire and Devon kicked himself. It hadn’t occurred to him to buy food to bring with him. Stupid, he told himself. He had to stop being stupid.

You’re not stupid,
Airi told him.

The porridge was passed around. Devon tried to refuse, claiming he wasn’t hungry, but his stomach growled and Xehm gave him a hurt look. He accepted then, hating that he was taking any of their food. It wasn’t even very good and it certainly couldn’t be nutritious, but it must have been all they had. Zalia and Xehm shared it easily though and it finally occurred to him that it was part of the way they survived. They shared. Well, he’d have something to donate to the pot himself, he promised. He had a lot of money on him. It wouldn’t last forever, but surely it would feed these people for a good amount of time.

“It’s wonderful to meet you,” Xehm told him. “Mr. Petrule said that he was going to send someone.”

“Yes.” Devon looked around a little uncertainly. “I have to say, this isn’t quite what I expected.” He turned back to the old man, not sure how to phrase this. “I thought it would be different.”

The old man’s eyes turned sad. “So did we.”

Devon shot a look at Zalia and turned back to her father, feeling Airi’s presence against the back of his neck. She wasn’t playing with his hair anymore, instead listening intently. “What happened?”

Xehm shrugged, staring down at the small fire that was their only source of warmth in the now frigid night. “What happened? Suddenly there was a queen, right here. Every sylph in the city rose up and hundreds died. Literally hundreds. They tore handlers apart in the streets and swallowed up the entire arena. The island that used to float over the city was hauled out to sea and dropped. Every sylph here gathered around this place.” He looked toward one particular hovel that seemed no different than any other. “Then a few days passed, your friend left to go home, and we found that the only thing that really changed was that no one was in charge of anything anymore.”

“Didn’t the queen do anything?” Devon asked.

“I don’t know. I never spoke to her. None of us did. The sylphs wouldn’t let any of us near her and then she went away with them. Most of the people in this city don’t even know there’s a queen, though I assume she’s still alive.”

“So you don’t know where she is then.”

“No. Only the sylphs do.”

Devon looked away, shivering a bit in his clothes as he thought. He didn’t know what Eapha thought she was doing, but it obviously wasn’t any of the things Leon had told her. Solie never would have done what it seemed this woman was doing and this entire place would die if she didn’t smarten up. He thought of the blood on the
Racing Dawn
and shuddered.

“Do you know any sylphs?” he asked. “Someone who could take us to her? I really need to talk to her.”

Xehm shook his head. “Not personally. None of the sylphs come near us lowly people. And their masters…I haven’t seen anyone who is a master to a sylph. If they aren’t also kept separate, they hide what they are. I don’t blame them. I imagine there are a lot of people who would find it easy to blame them for what’s happened.” Devon sagged in disappointment and Xehm added, “But I have heard rumors of where they like to gather.”

“Really?”

“It’s said they get together at the gate to the world they came from,” Xehm told him. “It’s supposedly an endless celebration where they call new sylphs into this world and haul people off the street to be their masters, whether they’re willing or not. Here, the sylphs have all the rights to choose who will be their master.” Beside him, Zalia looked away.

Devon noticed her reaction and noticed also his own response to the thought of her upset. His stomach flipped over and he cleared his throat, even as Airi giggled knowingly into his mind. “Do you know where this gate is?” he asked.

At that question, Xehm grinned at him with his gap-toothed smile. “Oh, yes. That I do know. We’ll go there in the morning and see what help we can find.”

Zalia guided Devon over to one of the huts, one abandoned by its previous owners when they’d joined the exodus. Well aware of her father’s eyes on them and of her own shyness, she kept her gaze locked on the sand under her feet, not aware of how Devon looked at her, though her father was.

“I’m sorry I won’t be able to go with you to the gate tomorrow,” she said.

“So am I.” There was something so wistful in his tone that she looked up at him despite herself and saw him start, turning away with an embarrassed cough. “I mean, um, that is…”

A translucent girl appeared on his other side. “He likes you,” she said.

“Airi!” Devon barked and the sylph vanished.

Zalia felt as if she had to be blushing to her toes and was glad that he couldn’t see it through the darkness. She just felt so silly, and excited at the same time.

“I like you too,” she said, really hoping he didn’t hear her and wishing he would at the same time.

He did. Even in the darkness, she saw him duck his head and smile. She’d never felt attracted to anyone like this and she found that something about Devon Chole, despite the fact that this was only the second time she’d met him, made her feel complete. That was really strange, since she hadn’t been aware that anything was missing in her life, but she liked it. She really did wish she could go with them in the morning to find the sylphs and beg them to take them to see the queen. She hoped even more that once he spoke with the queen, he’d stay, and perhaps take an interest in her. Zalia blushed and gestured at the tiny hovel. It wasn’t useful for much more than keeping the sand off, but all the hovels were like that.

“You can sleep here tonight,” she assured him. “No one will bother you.”

“Thank you,” he said. He hesitated for a moment as though he were about to say something else, and then vanished inside.

Airi’s shimmering shape appeared beside Zalia. “He really does like you,” she whispered. “He’s just shy.”

Zalia blushed even hotter, though inside she was delighted. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “Why do you want us together?”

“Isn’t it fate?” the little sylph asked reasonably and vanished again. Zalia felt a small gust of wind in the otherwise still air as Airi swept into the hovel to join her master.

Still blushing furiously, Zalia made her way to her own hovel and lay there for a long time before she was finally able to sleep.

CHAPTER FIVE

I
n the harems, the worst possible crime for a concubine was to cause a battle sylph to fall in love with her. They could play with her, or have sex with her, or even kill her if they so wanted, but they couldn’t love her. Love took their attention away from their duties, from their masters, and so it was forbidden. To have a battle sylph in love with only her was the next worst thing to a death sentence for a woman. She would be dragged from the harem the instant it was found out, her battler lover under orders not to follow, and her tongue would be cut out so that she could become a feeder for an elemental sylph instead. She would spend the rest of her life sitting in a cage like an animal, feeding a sylph, and waiting to die.

One woman had been living out that fate in the feeder cells when Eapha became queen. While the rest of the battle sylphs had been gathering around the queen or killing the men who’d once owned them, the battle sylph once known as Five-Eighty, now called Haru, had gone smashing his way into the deepest levels of the feeder cages, looking for a woman he hadn’t seen in thirty years.

Fareeda was a tiny thing, her face gaunt and heavily wrinkled, her hair gray and coarse. She’d long since lost all her beauty and hadn’t spoken once since she was carried out, her eyes glazed with madness. She didn’t seem aware of anything, but if her battle sylph tried to leave her, her scrawny little hands would grasp his arm with a strength it wouldn’t have seemed possible she still had.

Haru doted on her. He brushed her hair and kept her clean, held her glass to her mouth and fed her by hand with great patience. He carried her from her bed to her toilet to her couch by the windows, never leaving her and rarely saying anything either. To see them, they looked bizarre, Haru being so beautiful while Fareeda was such an ancient wreck, but Eapha had an empathic ability beyond normal compassion, forced on her by her queen status. She could feel people and whenever Haru was more than a few feet away from her, Fareeda’s emotions turned into an endless sort of screaming inside of her. However, when he was at her side, they calmed. Not quite to happiness, since Eapha had the feeling that emotion was forever gone from the woman, but certainly to something of peace, and he loved her. Absolutely loved her.

Not everyone felt comfortable around the woman though and Kiala leaned over toward Eapha, sitting beside her in the palace’s great room on a silken cushion. “Why do you let her stay here?” Kiala whispered. “She’s so creepy.”

A few of the other women there nodded, but Eapha shook her head. “That could have been any of us,” she reminded them. Fareeda wasn’t hurting anyone and she deserved to have this. Eapha hadn’t let just anyone into the palace with her. Except for Fareeda, they were all members of the Circle that had worked together to hide from the handlers the fact that they’d each taken a single battler for a lover. Without it, they all would have ended up like Fareeda.

Kiala’s lips firmed. She’d come closer than anyone else in the Circle to being a feeder. She’d been dragged out of the harem along with Lizzy Petrule, and she would have ended up in a cage with no tongue herself if Eapha hadn’t become queen that very night. She didn’t look understanding now, but then Kiala wasn’t a woman known for her compassion. A few of the other women looked contrite though.

Sorry,
one of them gestured, using the sign language that had let them form the Circle and had allowed their battlers to communicate with them despite their orders to never speak.
She is a little scary though.

We would be too,
Eapha signed back.
Just leave her be. Maybe she’ll get better.

I doubt it,
Kiala added, her gestures rough with annoyance.
She’ll die that way.

Probably, Eapha thought, though she didn’t say it aloud. Haru didn’t know sign language and he wasn’t looking at them anyway, though he had to know what they were feeling. He didn’t care though. He was with his love and her mental state meant nothing to him. Eapha sighed, missing Tooie.

She hadn’t thought Tooie would be so busy. She’d imagined he’d be more like Haru, never leaving her side. There were other sylphs around who could run things; it didn’t have to be him. Still, he seemed to enjoy it and the other sylphs appeared to expect it of him, so she didn’t say anything. Still, seeing Haru with Fareeda made her miss him again and she hoped he finished up with whatever it was he was doing and came home soon. He was supposed to be at her side; everything else would take care of itself, or at least so her friends kept assuring her.

Eapha lounged on her pillows with her friends and watched Haru feed Fareeda some porridge, patiently spooning it into her mouth and scooping up the excess from her chin. She ate mechanically, staring at nothing. Fareeda was lucky she had him, Eapha thought. How many other former feeders were out there? She shuddered at the thought, but the sylphs would be taking care of them, wouldn’t they?

While her friends started gossiping, Eapha wondered about that. What was being done about the feeders? Were they just dumped out on the street or were the sylphs taking care of them? She honestly wasn’t sure, but after a minute, and before the others could notice her introspection and start teasing her again, she pushed the thought away. It wasn’t her place to be poking her nose into anything. The sylphs in Meridal had spent centuries as slaves and the city was theirs now. They were fully capable of making all the decisions themselves and they didn’t need someone like her second-guessing them. Who was she anyway? The sylphs called her their queen, but she was really just a concubine at heart, with no education or prospects. All she was good for was sex, not running a city.

Eapha sighed and turned her mind back to her friends and their suggestion about starting a card game. That she was good at, and soon enough, her mood was back to normal, happy and content with whatever life was able to give her.

Zalia was gone by the time Devon managed to stumble his way out of the already overheated hovel and into the even worse heat outside.

“I’m never going to get used to this,” he groaned while Airi tried to cool him down, though all she really succeeded in was to move the already hot air around.

Maybe we should get you a hat,
she suggested uncertainly.

Devon put a hand to his sunburned, peeling face. “I think it’s too late for that,” he sighed and made his way over to where Xehm sat by the fire pit they’d used the night before. Devon’s feet were sweltering in his boots again and he didn’t even want to consider what he smelled like.

Xehm handed him a waterskin, beaming at him. “Good morning, young sir.”

“Morning,” Devon grumbled, barely able to stop himself from guzzling down all of the water. His lips were so dry and cracked that they were painful and his skin burned. He was undoubtedly red on every inch of exposed skin and he’d never been so filthy in his life. Xehm just continued to happily smile at him.

He thinks you might marry his daughter,
Airi told him.

Devon managed not to spit the water out at that revelation. Marriage? He’d only met the woman twice. Marriage wasn’t something that entered into his thoughts, especially not with everything else that was going on.

Still, he thought almost without realizing it, he did miss having Zalia there, even after only a few hours. Dirty, sweaty, and hideous though he was, he wanted her there.

“Let’s get going,” was all he said.

“Of course, sir,” Xehm agreed.

They walked to the place where the gate was rumored to be. There were some men trotting along the streets and towing small carts that passengers could ride in, but Xehm didn’t pay any attention to them and Devon didn’t want to know how much they would cost.

At first, he’d had the impression that Xehm just sat at the hovels all day, leaving his daughter to work her insane hours bringing in money. In actuality, the old man went into the city every day, looking for any sort of temporary work he could find and haggling for food and other necessities with the money Zalia brought. They did some of that as they made their way along, Xehm putting the bread and porridge he bought into a sack he carried on his back, and Devon was shocked at some of the prices the staples were going for. There was no regulation of costs at all and corruption was rampant.

There were battlers in the markets they passed, watching for threats, but they did nothing for any customers being cheated. Instead they descended on anyone who became irate about it, which actually served to protect the merchants and help keep the prices high. Devon was disgusted to see it, but not too surprised. Battle sylphs generally weren’t any good at comprehending things like money. Devon knew that Leon had spent years getting Ril to grasp the intricacies of the concept—thanks to the battler’s indifference, not his intelligence—but Ril still didn’t care and the other sylphs were just as bad. Humans had to be in charge of things such as finances and infrastructure, which was why there was only one sylph on the Valley council. Devon sighed. He supposed it was two now, since Ril had taken Devon’s old position as Solie’s majordomo.

If Eapha had turned over the running of Meridal to the sylphs, and he was strongly suspecting that she had, then she was a fool.

By the time they got where they were going, the morning sun had risen high in the sky and it was witheringly hot. This time though, Devon took the opportunity while Xehm was buying his groceries to purchase an overpriced linen shirt that was much lighter than the one he had been wearing, knee-length pants, sandals that felt strange on his feet, and at Xehm’s suggestion, a thin cloth to wrap around his head and part of his face to keep the sun off. The rest of his body he covered with an exorbitantly expensive healing cream that made him sigh so deeply in relief that Airi started giggling again. His old clothes he carried in a sack, remembering how cold it got once the sun went down. His sword he left on his hip. Few men around him carried their own, seeming to prefer knives instead, but no one did more than glance at it either.

The entrance to the place where the sylphs had their gate was a small building the size of a shed in the center of an otherwise empty square, one with openings in the roof that were shaped like mouths. No one was guarding it and the door was not only open but long since ripped off its hinges.

Xehm and Devon walked up to the doorway and looked in at a dim staircase. Both men were silent for a moment, studying it.

“Perhaps we should ask the battle sylphs at the market for help?” Xehm suggested at last, a little nervously.

“No,” Devon said and went in first, Airi flowing past him to lead the way down the stairs. After a moment, Xehm followed.

The stairwell came out in the middle of a corridor that stretched to either side of the steps. To their right, they could see a shattered door leading to a chamber with broken furniture in it, and beyond that, more broken doors leading into another, seemingly larger room. To their left, it ended much closer at another broken door through which cages could be seen. The floors were already starting to become obscured with sand, the stone beneath stained black. It smelled faintly of copper.

“Which way?” Devon wondered.

“The stories say the gate is below where they keep the feeder cages.” Xehm nodded to the left. “They must be that way.” He looked to the right. “That must be the way to the concubine harem for the battlers.” His voice turned sad. “They took my wife to be a concubine.”

Devon was stunned. “What? That’s awful! Didn’t she come back when the queen rose?”

“Oh no. I suspect she died in there many years ago. She always was delicate.” He sighed. “My Zalia is much stronger than her mother.”

“Yes,” Devon murmured and led the way to the left. He didn’t want to see the harem.

Once he entered the area where the feeder pens were kept, he realized he didn’t want to see them either. There were thousands of cages, layered upward and outward in a chamber so large it boggled his mind, all connected by catwalks and stairways, each enclosure hardly big enough for a single man to move around in. All of the doors were destroyed and the cages in the center of the great chamber were torn completely away, forming a massive well. Devon walked down the black-stained catwalks, remembering Leon’s brief about Ril’s battle to get to Lizzy, and had to shudder at the thought of what all the dark stains and the faint copper smell had to be. Ril wasn’t powerful enough to have destroyed the center of the pens though. Devon could only guess that a group of battlers did that.