"Over_9780307446138_oeb_c20_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeffrey Overstreet - Cynderes Midnight)20 THROUGH THE CLAWS
Through the stench and haze of death, Jordam returned at last to the Core of House Cent Regus. But for him it was not so much a return as a revelation. House Cent Regus had flourished once, hundreds of years ago. But disease had conquered the land. He noticed this now as he compared it to the woods and the glen. Nothing ever smells like summer here. To Jordam, it seemed now that the sickness was spreading from the center of their land. Like ivy draining life from a tree. Like the poison from the arrow spreading through me. The closer he came to the Core, the more color seemed leeched from the landscape. Forgotten farms succumbed to mold, rot, and decay. The Cent Regus who were strong slunk out to hunt, seeking plunder that would gain them reward. But many still lingered here, appetites enslaved to the source of their power, their bodies too distorted to travel far. They staggered crookedly, clawed at the weeds, licked at snow, and sipped from polluted streams until they inevitably crawled back to their chieftain to plead for a visit to the Sopper Crone. Like muckmoths flapping into campfires. Jordam had never considered such comparisons before. Finding O-raya’s colors in the glen, learning that his favorite blue came from a fragile flower there—this had given him new eyes and exposed his own world for all its unfruitfulness. “Go back,” he whispered to himself. He longed to return and release the ale boy. He longed to deliver him to the Abascar survivors as he had vowed. He envisioned the Bel Amican woman waiting for him at Tilianpurth. Jorn, meanwhile, cackled and guffawed, narrating for Mordafey how he had terrified the heiress, how he had sneered Deuneroi’s name at her. Jordam’s fury flared, wondering if Bel had been there to see the heiress so shaken. He knew that he would have done the same without the influence of O-raya’s colors. And he knew the danger that he would become when the Sopper Crone served him Essence. Promises, conviction—these things would burn away. Like dry leaves. He would lose all resistance. Essence would boil in his belly, spread out through his veins, climb his spine. He would thrill with stronger sight, smell, jaws, and claws. He would pose and strut. He would need to batter something into submission. And even that would not be enough. He thought of the Bel Amican guard who had fallen on her sword, and he put his hand on the wooden grip of his blade. He wondered if he could muster that same strength to save Bel from what would come. By the power of the Essence, the Cent Regus had ruined this land. He wondered now, for the first time, what it might have been—vivid fields, blue streams bearing golden fish, bee-crazed berry patches, generous orchards. The roots of everything had been corrupted by spreading contagion. The region appeared to be ravaged by wildfires, but the fires burnt within—slow, imperceptible. Subterranean disturbances opened crevasses that filled with something like tar. Silos, stables, mills, and metalworks were tended by ghosts. No Cent Regus cared about those settlements anymore, for they despised their ancestors as puny and weak. They did not call anything home. Generations of families had disintegrated into a world of hunters, seekers, and plotters. Jordam knew a little about Cent Regus history. He had heard about farmers struggling through hard seasons and the arrival of strangers offering relief. These newcomers had established a farm near the center of the region, tapping into a resource they promised would bring abundance where rain and sunshine did not. Their livestock pulled heavier plows, laid larger eggs, gave richer milk, and ran faster. The people were curious what this concoction could do to enhance their senses. They called it “Essence,” an elixir that pleased like wine even as it made the farmers’ bodies stronger. The strangers promised it contained nourishment that would enable those who drank to surpass ordinary people in their ability to hunt, kill, and survive. Those who drank soon bragged of scaly skin that shielded them from the elements. They could see in the dark and labor without the need for sleep. Some grew forceful as fangbears, others fast as viscorcats. Some gained a brascle’s eyesight. And they strengthened themselves against the other houses, for as their capacities grew, so did their suspicion and fear that others would try to seize their advantage and turn it against them. The strangers left their reservoir in the care of the chieftain, but by then it was too late. Through him, the people continued to indulge in the Essence, unable to control what it compelled them to do. Each new wave of creatures was weaker of mind yet stronger in body, fiercer, hungrier. Many died of the distortions forced upon them by the lawless mutations. When a Cent Regus creature died, the hunger in its blood survived, seeping into the grass, soaking into the roots. Remnants of this curse swirled around him, scraps, shells, and dust, a constant clatter against the decrepit structures. Coughing, Mordafey threw the reins to Jordam, then leapt down. He snarled at any who leered at them from the shadows, watching the wasted spaces that provided passage through the maze of the ruins. Jorn skulked along behind, still telling his story of hiding in the Bel Amican washtub. And Goreth, murmuring in the madness of his dreams, starved for Essence inside the carriage. The wheezing horses’ steps became stumbles. Occasionally they stopped to bite at dead weeds. This territory still teemed with life, but life in varying stages of affliction. All that rose from the earth labored in excruciating strain. Gardens became feeding grounds. Farms lost all order, monstrous alterations of one crop turning to invade the next. Ground grew and congealed, thinking it was vegetation. Vegetation crawled, thinking it was animal. Animals were infused with enough sense to be miserable and bitter with jealousy. The curse had flourished. In constant flux life swelled and sank, branched and collapsed. And still the Cent Regus embraced this parasite, convinced they were stronger than other houses, reveling in the fear they inspired. But now Jordam could see that he was not so strong as he had thought. Even if he willed otherwise, he could not turn away. When he tried, cords tightened around him. He was not powerful. He was the servant of something greater, more powerful than Mordafey. He cursed himself. He had come from this place. It was within him. It went out from him. And if he replenished his strength, then returned to the glen he so longed to see again, he would destroy it and the woman who waited for him there. As the beastmen neared their goal, Jorn grew more excitable. “Th’Claws!” he barked, attracting glares from the sullen watchers in the bushes and up in the dead pricklenut trees. “Yes,” said Mordafey. “Four brothers have reached the Claws.” Once the walls surrounding the center of Cent Regus society, and a habitation in itself, the Claws remained a multilevel ring of tunnels, chambers, and windows. It stood as a shield around the chieftain’s village of storehouses and prisons and the palace itself. A fungus like damp clay that spread in clusters, cakes, and columns, crowded and spongy, steadily consumed its structure. Devouring detail and gnawing away distinction, this mold stole from memory anything it besieged. It carved a void in the air. Creatures passed above a narrow gate on a crooked arch, anxious as if they had forgotten why they were there. Others slumped along the road, half asleep. Tilting back his birdlike head, a worrier—a guard of the dens—let his grey, fleshy throat expand, opened his gull-like beak, and emitted a long series of descending cries like a squeaking wheel. The cry was taken up by the next worrier on her perch on the avenue’s opposite side. Soon a flock of flightless worriers crawled on sharp-nailed hands and taloned feet across the Claws, lunging about on stiltlike limbs with the agility and aggression of spiders. As the brothers emerged from their passage through the Claws, they entered a neighborhood that had once housed Cent Regus counselors. The brothers could see fragments of the original structure—sections of crumbling brick, disheveled wooden planks, windows boarded up or sewn shut with silken webs. Breaks in those same walls framed the glittering eyes of watchers from secret worlds within. A musclebound giant known as “the Usher” stepped in front of them. Wire stitched his mouth shut to keep visitors from asking questions or conspiring, and he had lived so long empowered by Essence that his leather uniform had merged with, and become, his skin. The Usher led the brothers toward the great crown, a dome of decorated tiles that had long ago lost their luster. “I see,” said Mordafey. “Jordam, you see? Here is where Skell Wra now hides.” The chieftain rarely stayed in the same place for long. He moved his throne about within the border of the Claws, seeking to confuse those who sought to overthrow him. This dome sagged in one hemisphere, like a fruit with a spreading bruise. But the Usher suddenly veered off the path, and Mordafey steered the carriage into an alley between two derelict brick storehouses. There was always a surprise. These tactics were so familiar that Jordam knew what would happen next. A deranged challenger hoisted himself from the gutter, a creature rather like a man of monumental girth, growling through a flattened snout, standing on the knees of legs fused together in his mutation. He sloughed himself into their path and opened his mouth to give the usual threat in the coarse Cent Regus language: “I kill you, take your loot, get your reward. Unless you take me with you.” The worriers and the Usher gathered above and beside to watch the clash. It lasted as long as a gasp. Mordafey moved forward, running the carriage past the blade-hewn pieces of the challenger heaped like firewood on the side of the path. And so Jordam walked with his brothers into the shadow of the Longhouse. At the Longhouse, Cent Regus counselors had once assembled the managers of every farm in the territory. The farmers had submitted their best offerings, and the council honored them with banquets prepared from that superior stock, lavished on tables so long they fit one hundred chairs to a side. The farmers so reveled in these celebrations that they sought even richer rewards the next year. These feasts inspired rumor and legend, remembered among the other houses but long forgotten here. The same bland clay that encompassed the Claws had besieged the Longhouse, breaking apart the seams and swelling like bread. It raised the roof at one end so that the structure resembled a gator’s open jaws. The brothers stepped under that shelter, but guards prevented their progress. Beside the open maw of a massive pipe, a structure of nailed-together planks passed for a stable. The stable reverberated with the impatience of horned steeds—mighty prongbulls, white as ash. They scythed the air with red horns, fire roiling in their heads and smoke gusting from their nostrils. Shaped by the chieftain’s experiments on the grand old bulls of Cent Regus farms, their bodies were not the burdensome bulk of cattle, but bundles of muscle and sinew, steeds for privileged hunters. When the chieftain’s subjects sought to escape his wrath, he sometimes let them run just for the drama of watching the guards ride the prongbulls in pursuit to trample and gore them. Mordafey offered a greedy smile. “Look.” The prongbulls’ keepers held long, barbed whips as powerful as coil-tree branches. “Maybe brothers’ treasure earns us a prongbull.” Goreth, bleary-eyed and panting, thrust his head through a flap of the wagon’s canvas. Mordafey seized his mane and dragged him into the dust. Jordam helped him up, growling, “rrDon’t speak.” Guards glowered and hunched about on long, multijointed legs. Their faces were human, but their bare chests had grown armor like the shiny shells of beetles. Their arms sprouted bunches of wriggling fingers and pincers that flexed toward the carriage as if itching to snatch the loot for themselves. Gesturing to the open passage, the Usher raised a hammer and smashed the battered bell pinned to the pipe. It rang out low and long. Blind carrion owls fluttered above the carriage, their thick wings disturbing shafts of pallid light. Then a parade of rickety wooden carts appeared, pushed from the pipe by the chieftain’s servants. These mindless drones, spindly with hunger, were animated by Essence but not enough to prove powerful or dangerous. Beneath the brims of polished helmets, the guards watched everything. To entertain them and assert his dominance, Mordafey kicked Goreth’s belly and mocked his weakness. The guards purred, pleased, and thumped the butts of their spears against the ground. Slaves lifted the wagons’ treasure and piled it into smaller wooden carts, moaning jealously over what they carried. Mordafey strode before his brothers as they pushed the prizes along through the maze of corridors in the chieftain’s new hiding place. As they left behind the din of the guards and the laments of the slaves, the brothers sank into the dark, and the crooked wooden wheels trundled up a rhythm of drums. “Be ready,” said Mordafey. “When Skell Wra is pleased, the Usher will bring Mordafey back. Then down, down, down. Brothers will go to the Sopper Crone.” “For Essence.” Goreth laughed in a manner indistinguishable from weeping. “Drink and drink and drink,” said Mordafey in what he considered a whisper. “Don’t lose a drop. Brothers need strength for the plan.” When they stopped, a dry clucking rasped from a guard’s tortoiselike beak, and he prodded Mordafey forward through a curtained archway and into the throne room. “What plan?” whispered Goreth to Jordam. Jordam shrugged, leaned close to Goreth’s ear, and muttered, “Mordafey doesn’t trust Goreth. Doesn’t trust me. rrEven after we helped him gather all these things.” His hope of turning Goreth against Mordafey was running out of time. Jorn watched them, eyes narrow as sweat dripped down his brow and spilled across his wolfen nose. “S’time,” he hissed, “I will be strongest. S’time I be strongest.” Jordam listened to the distant clatter of prizes being unloaded, displayed. He waited for Mordafey’s roar. He thought of Deuneroi’s woodscloak, shield, and sword buried in the snow, and wondered if he would ever have enough sense to take them back to Bel. As he closed his eyes, the pulse of his thirst conjured a dream of distant pounding—the ale boy kicking inside the iron stove. “W’go take Abascar prizes soon, yes?” Jorn asked. “Y’think Abascar queen is still here? Still alive?”
The queen. Jordam looked at his laughing brother in surprise. He had forgotten the rumors. “Abascar queen stuck in a cage. Hel hel hel.” Stories of Jaralaine, queen of House Abascar, had spread and evolved. Some said the chieftain had made her drink Essence, shaped her into some unrecognizable Cent Regus creature—a rodent, reptile, or flightless bird. Others claimed he had preserved her, uncorrupted, to better flaunt his victory over Abascar prisoners. Sudden notes from some stolen Bel Amican instrument rang out dissonant and strange, the chieftain exulting in a souvenir that no one in this realm would know how to play. The sound dissipated. Guards grew restless. Their claws looked sharp, the plating across their chests looked strong. They would not expect an attack, especially from only one of the brothers. If he struck, the defenders would turn against all four brothers, and that might be to Jordam’s advantage. But then? Alarms—bells, roars, whistles. Worriers would seal paths through the barrier. He would have to disappear, lose himself in the labyrinth, emerge elsewhere—perhaps among the slave horde. If his brothers survived the initial riot, they would join the pursuit. If he managed to escape, the glen would not offer refuge for long. Sleeptalking had spoiled his secrets. Mordafey would seek him there. He could retreat to O-raya’s caves—the brothers had never discovered them. But Mordafey would still hunt him at Tilianpurth. He would find the well. And Bel. The thud of a club on a table startled him from worry. Mordafey’s audience with the chieftain was over. The blows echoed down the long hall informing all who could hear that these hunters—yes, all four of the notorious brothers—would receive generous draughts of Essence.
Run. Run now. Before Mordafey comes back. His claws emerged. He ground his teeth. He steeled himself for the strike. Remember, he thought. “rrRemember,” he said. “Remember? Remember what, Same Brother?” But when the oldest brother returned from the throne room, the Usher escorting him wide-eyed and impressed, Mordafey did not look at Jordam. Instead he pranced and beat at his chest. “Chieftain is pleased,” groaned the guard, who could speak intelligibly. The others, disappointed they would not be skewering their visitors, surrounded the brothers. Together they followed the Usher down through the tunnels toward the Essence pit. When Jorn began to laugh hysterically, Mordafey raised him by his back leg and slammed him against the wall. “Jordam, help Goreth.” Jordam caught Goreth’s arm as he collapsed, draped it over his shoulders. Goreth whimpered, and his eyes were wide and blind. “Where are we, Same Brother?” They gathered in a circle in a hollow of black, polished stone. In the cracked, black mirror of the floor, Jordam could see another self staring up between his feet. He looked closely at his face, seeking any change that might betray his new understanding. No, he looked as monstrous as his brothers. Torchlight danced in red flares around the brothers. The walls reflected myriad images of everyone in the chamber from the front, the side, and the back. Jordam gazed into reflection upon reflection. The glinting torchflares, the huddled circles of thirsty Cent Regus—they stretched on around him infinitely, offering no hint of escape, only the same scene playing out as far as the eye could see. In the center of the floor, a hole opened, and above it a metal cage swayed on frayed ropes. Jorn scampered about the cage, squealing like a newborn hog, reaching out and touching the metal as if he might draw strength from it. “Jordam first,” said Mordafey. “Put Jordam in the cage.” Jorn complained, but Jordam did not step forward. “Goreth,” he argued. “Goreth is weak and sick. Goreth goes first.” Mordafey growled at the suggestion that he was not in charge. But Goreth could not even lift his head, moaning, “Where am I going, Same Brother?” “Essence, Goreth,” rasped Jordam, his voice heavy with despair. “Essence.” At the entryway two guards pulled a barred gate down from a slot in the ceiling—a safeguard against Essence thieves. Now. He could dive beneath it, run up the corridor, gain ground in the pause between surprise and response. A million Mordafeys bristled their golden manes, grinning and gloating. The guards latched the gate shut with a sharp clang of finality. 20 THROUGH THE CLAWS
Through the stench and haze of death, Jordam returned at last to the Core of House Cent Regus. But for him it was not so much a return as a revelation. House Cent Regus had flourished once, hundreds of years ago. But disease had conquered the land. He noticed this now as he compared it to the woods and the glen. Nothing ever smells like summer here. To Jordam, it seemed now that the sickness was spreading from the center of their land. Like ivy draining life from a tree. Like the poison from the arrow spreading through me. The closer he came to the Core, the more color seemed leeched from the landscape. Forgotten farms succumbed to mold, rot, and decay. The Cent Regus who were strong slunk out to hunt, seeking plunder that would gain them reward. But many still lingered here, appetites enslaved to the source of their power, their bodies too distorted to travel far. They staggered crookedly, clawed at the weeds, licked at snow, and sipped from polluted streams until they inevitably crawled back to their chieftain to plead for a visit to the Sopper Crone. Like muckmoths flapping into campfires. Jordam had never considered such comparisons before. Finding O-raya’s colors in the glen, learning that his favorite blue came from a fragile flower there—this had given him new eyes and exposed his own world for all its unfruitfulness. “Go back,” he whispered to himself. He longed to return and release the ale boy. He longed to deliver him to the Abascar survivors as he had vowed. He envisioned the Bel Amican woman waiting for him at Tilianpurth. Jorn, meanwhile, cackled and guffawed, narrating for Mordafey how he had terrified the heiress, how he had sneered Deuneroi’s name at her. Jordam’s fury flared, wondering if Bel had been there to see the heiress so shaken. He knew that he would have done the same without the influence of O-raya’s colors. And he knew the danger that he would become when the Sopper Crone served him Essence. Promises, conviction—these things would burn away. Like dry leaves. He would lose all resistance. Essence would boil in his belly, spread out through his veins, climb his spine. He would thrill with stronger sight, smell, jaws, and claws. He would pose and strut. He would need to batter something into submission. And even that would not be enough. He thought of the Bel Amican guard who had fallen on her sword, and he put his hand on the wooden grip of his blade. He wondered if he could muster that same strength to save Bel from what would come. By the power of the Essence, the Cent Regus had ruined this land. He wondered now, for the first time, what it might have been—vivid fields, blue streams bearing golden fish, bee-crazed berry patches, generous orchards. The roots of everything had been corrupted by spreading contagion. The region appeared to be ravaged by wildfires, but the fires burnt within—slow, imperceptible. Subterranean disturbances opened crevasses that filled with something like tar. Silos, stables, mills, and metalworks were tended by ghosts. No Cent Regus cared about those settlements anymore, for they despised their ancestors as puny and weak. They did not call anything home. Generations of families had disintegrated into a world of hunters, seekers, and plotters. Jordam knew a little about Cent Regus history. He had heard about farmers struggling through hard seasons and the arrival of strangers offering relief. These newcomers had established a farm near the center of the region, tapping into a resource they promised would bring abundance where rain and sunshine did not. Their livestock pulled heavier plows, laid larger eggs, gave richer milk, and ran faster. The people were curious what this concoction could do to enhance their senses. They called it “Essence,” an elixir that pleased like wine even as it made the farmers’ bodies stronger. The strangers promised it contained nourishment that would enable those who drank to surpass ordinary people in their ability to hunt, kill, and survive. Those who drank soon bragged of scaly skin that shielded them from the elements. They could see in the dark and labor without the need for sleep. Some grew forceful as fangbears, others fast as viscorcats. Some gained a brascle’s eyesight. And they strengthened themselves against the other houses, for as their capacities grew, so did their suspicion and fear that others would try to seize their advantage and turn it against them. The strangers left their reservoir in the care of the chieftain, but by then it was too late. Through him, the people continued to indulge in the Essence, unable to control what it compelled them to do. Each new wave of creatures was weaker of mind yet stronger in body, fiercer, hungrier. Many died of the distortions forced upon them by the lawless mutations. When a Cent Regus creature died, the hunger in its blood survived, seeping into the grass, soaking into the roots. Remnants of this curse swirled around him, scraps, shells, and dust, a constant clatter against the decrepit structures. Coughing, Mordafey threw the reins to Jordam, then leapt down. He snarled at any who leered at them from the shadows, watching the wasted spaces that provided passage through the maze of the ruins. Jorn skulked along behind, still telling his story of hiding in the Bel Amican washtub. And Goreth, murmuring in the madness of his dreams, starved for Essence inside the carriage. The wheezing horses’ steps became stumbles. Occasionally they stopped to bite at dead weeds. This territory still teemed with life, but life in varying stages of affliction. All that rose from the earth labored in excruciating strain. Gardens became feeding grounds. Farms lost all order, monstrous alterations of one crop turning to invade the next. Ground grew and congealed, thinking it was vegetation. Vegetation crawled, thinking it was animal. Animals were infused with enough sense to be miserable and bitter with jealousy. The curse had flourished. In constant flux life swelled and sank, branched and collapsed. And still the Cent Regus embraced this parasite, convinced they were stronger than other houses, reveling in the fear they inspired. But now Jordam could see that he was not so strong as he had thought. Even if he willed otherwise, he could not turn away. When he tried, cords tightened around him. He was not powerful. He was the servant of something greater, more powerful than Mordafey. He cursed himself. He had come from this place. It was within him. It went out from him. And if he replenished his strength, then returned to the glen he so longed to see again, he would destroy it and the woman who waited for him there. As the beastmen neared their goal, Jorn grew more excitable. “Th’Claws!” he barked, attracting glares from the sullen watchers in the bushes and up in the dead pricklenut trees. “Yes,” said Mordafey. “Four brothers have reached the Claws.” Once the walls surrounding the center of Cent Regus society, and a habitation in itself, the Claws remained a multilevel ring of tunnels, chambers, and windows. It stood as a shield around the chieftain’s village of storehouses and prisons and the palace itself. A fungus like damp clay that spread in clusters, cakes, and columns, crowded and spongy, steadily consumed its structure. Devouring detail and gnawing away distinction, this mold stole from memory anything it besieged. It carved a void in the air. Creatures passed above a narrow gate on a crooked arch, anxious as if they had forgotten why they were there. Others slumped along the road, half asleep. Tilting back his birdlike head, a worrier—a guard of the dens—let his grey, fleshy throat expand, opened his gull-like beak, and emitted a long series of descending cries like a squeaking wheel. The cry was taken up by the next worrier on her perch on the avenue’s opposite side. Soon a flock of flightless worriers crawled on sharp-nailed hands and taloned feet across the Claws, lunging about on stiltlike limbs with the agility and aggression of spiders. As the brothers emerged from their passage through the Claws, they entered a neighborhood that had once housed Cent Regus counselors. The brothers could see fragments of the original structure—sections of crumbling brick, disheveled wooden planks, windows boarded up or sewn shut with silken webs. Breaks in those same walls framed the glittering eyes of watchers from secret worlds within. A musclebound giant known as “the Usher” stepped in front of them. Wire stitched his mouth shut to keep visitors from asking questions or conspiring, and he had lived so long empowered by Essence that his leather uniform had merged with, and become, his skin. The Usher led the brothers toward the great crown, a dome of decorated tiles that had long ago lost their luster. “I see,” said Mordafey. “Jordam, you see? Here is where Skell Wra now hides.” The chieftain rarely stayed in the same place for long. He moved his throne about within the border of the Claws, seeking to confuse those who sought to overthrow him. This dome sagged in one hemisphere, like a fruit with a spreading bruise. But the Usher suddenly veered off the path, and Mordafey steered the carriage into an alley between two derelict brick storehouses. There was always a surprise. These tactics were so familiar that Jordam knew what would happen next. A deranged challenger hoisted himself from the gutter, a creature rather like a man of monumental girth, growling through a flattened snout, standing on the knees of legs fused together in his mutation. He sloughed himself into their path and opened his mouth to give the usual threat in the coarse Cent Regus language: “I kill you, take your loot, get your reward. Unless you take me with you.” The worriers and the Usher gathered above and beside to watch the clash. It lasted as long as a gasp. Mordafey moved forward, running the carriage past the blade-hewn pieces of the challenger heaped like firewood on the side of the path. And so Jordam walked with his brothers into the shadow of the Longhouse. At the Longhouse, Cent Regus counselors had once assembled the managers of every farm in the territory. The farmers had submitted their best offerings, and the council honored them with banquets prepared from that superior stock, lavished on tables so long they fit one hundred chairs to a side. The farmers so reveled in these celebrations that they sought even richer rewards the next year. These feasts inspired rumor and legend, remembered among the other houses but long forgotten here. The same bland clay that encompassed the Claws had besieged the Longhouse, breaking apart the seams and swelling like bread. It raised the roof at one end so that the structure resembled a gator’s open jaws. The brothers stepped under that shelter, but guards prevented their progress. Beside the open maw of a massive pipe, a structure of nailed-together planks passed for a stable. The stable reverberated with the impatience of horned steeds—mighty prongbulls, white as ash. They scythed the air with red horns, fire roiling in their heads and smoke gusting from their nostrils. Shaped by the chieftain’s experiments on the grand old bulls of Cent Regus farms, their bodies were not the burdensome bulk of cattle, but bundles of muscle and sinew, steeds for privileged hunters. When the chieftain’s subjects sought to escape his wrath, he sometimes let them run just for the drama of watching the guards ride the prongbulls in pursuit to trample and gore them. Mordafey offered a greedy smile. “Look.” The prongbulls’ keepers held long, barbed whips as powerful as coil-tree branches. “Maybe brothers’ treasure earns us a prongbull.” Goreth, bleary-eyed and panting, thrust his head through a flap of the wagon’s canvas. Mordafey seized his mane and dragged him into the dust. Jordam helped him up, growling, “rrDon’t speak.” Guards glowered and hunched about on long, multijointed legs. Their faces were human, but their bare chests had grown armor like the shiny shells of beetles. Their arms sprouted bunches of wriggling fingers and pincers that flexed toward the carriage as if itching to snatch the loot for themselves. Gesturing to the open passage, the Usher raised a hammer and smashed the battered bell pinned to the pipe. It rang out low and long. Blind carrion owls fluttered above the carriage, their thick wings disturbing shafts of pallid light. Then a parade of rickety wooden carts appeared, pushed from the pipe by the chieftain’s servants. These mindless drones, spindly with hunger, were animated by Essence but not enough to prove powerful or dangerous. Beneath the brims of polished helmets, the guards watched everything. To entertain them and assert his dominance, Mordafey kicked Goreth’s belly and mocked his weakness. The guards purred, pleased, and thumped the butts of their spears against the ground. Slaves lifted the wagons’ treasure and piled it into smaller wooden carts, moaning jealously over what they carried. Mordafey strode before his brothers as they pushed the prizes along through the maze of corridors in the chieftain’s new hiding place. As they left behind the din of the guards and the laments of the slaves, the brothers sank into the dark, and the crooked wooden wheels trundled up a rhythm of drums. “Be ready,” said Mordafey. “When Skell Wra is pleased, the Usher will bring Mordafey back. Then down, down, down. Brothers will go to the Sopper Crone.” “For Essence.” Goreth laughed in a manner indistinguishable from weeping. “Drink and drink and drink,” said Mordafey in what he considered a whisper. “Don’t lose a drop. Brothers need strength for the plan.” When they stopped, a dry clucking rasped from a guard’s tortoiselike beak, and he prodded Mordafey forward through a curtained archway and into the throne room. “What plan?” whispered Goreth to Jordam. Jordam shrugged, leaned close to Goreth’s ear, and muttered, “Mordafey doesn’t trust Goreth. Doesn’t trust me. rrEven after we helped him gather all these things.” His hope of turning Goreth against Mordafey was running out of time. Jorn watched them, eyes narrow as sweat dripped down his brow and spilled across his wolfen nose. “S’time,” he hissed, “I will be strongest. S’time I be strongest.” Jordam listened to the distant clatter of prizes being unloaded, displayed. He waited for Mordafey’s roar. He thought of Deuneroi’s woodscloak, shield, and sword buried in the snow, and wondered if he would ever have enough sense to take them back to Bel. As he closed his eyes, the pulse of his thirst conjured a dream of distant pounding—the ale boy kicking inside the iron stove. “W’go take Abascar prizes soon, yes?” Jorn asked. “Y’think Abascar queen is still here? Still alive?”
The queen. Jordam looked at his laughing brother in surprise. He had forgotten the rumors. “Abascar queen stuck in a cage. Hel hel hel.” Stories of Jaralaine, queen of House Abascar, had spread and evolved. Some said the chieftain had made her drink Essence, shaped her into some unrecognizable Cent Regus creature—a rodent, reptile, or flightless bird. Others claimed he had preserved her, uncorrupted, to better flaunt his victory over Abascar prisoners. Sudden notes from some stolen Bel Amican instrument rang out dissonant and strange, the chieftain exulting in a souvenir that no one in this realm would know how to play. The sound dissipated. Guards grew restless. Their claws looked sharp, the plating across their chests looked strong. They would not expect an attack, especially from only one of the brothers. If he struck, the defenders would turn against all four brothers, and that might be to Jordam’s advantage. But then? Alarms—bells, roars, whistles. Worriers would seal paths through the barrier. He would have to disappear, lose himself in the labyrinth, emerge elsewhere—perhaps among the slave horde. If his brothers survived the initial riot, they would join the pursuit. If he managed to escape, the glen would not offer refuge for long. Sleeptalking had spoiled his secrets. Mordafey would seek him there. He could retreat to O-raya’s caves—the brothers had never discovered them. But Mordafey would still hunt him at Tilianpurth. He would find the well. And Bel. The thud of a club on a table startled him from worry. Mordafey’s audience with the chieftain was over. The blows echoed down the long hall informing all who could hear that these hunters—yes, all four of the notorious brothers—would receive generous draughts of Essence.
Run. Run now. Before Mordafey comes back. His claws emerged. He ground his teeth. He steeled himself for the strike. Remember, he thought. “rrRemember,” he said. “Remember? Remember what, Same Brother?” But when the oldest brother returned from the throne room, the Usher escorting him wide-eyed and impressed, Mordafey did not look at Jordam. Instead he pranced and beat at his chest. “Chieftain is pleased,” groaned the guard, who could speak intelligibly. The others, disappointed they would not be skewering their visitors, surrounded the brothers. Together they followed the Usher down through the tunnels toward the Essence pit. When Jorn began to laugh hysterically, Mordafey raised him by his back leg and slammed him against the wall. “Jordam, help Goreth.” Jordam caught Goreth’s arm as he collapsed, draped it over his shoulders. Goreth whimpered, and his eyes were wide and blind. “Where are we, Same Brother?” They gathered in a circle in a hollow of black, polished stone. In the cracked, black mirror of the floor, Jordam could see another self staring up between his feet. He looked closely at his face, seeking any change that might betray his new understanding. No, he looked as monstrous as his brothers. Torchlight danced in red flares around the brothers. The walls reflected myriad images of everyone in the chamber from the front, the side, and the back. Jordam gazed into reflection upon reflection. The glinting torchflares, the huddled circles of thirsty Cent Regus—they stretched on around him infinitely, offering no hint of escape, only the same scene playing out as far as the eye could see. In the center of the floor, a hole opened, and above it a metal cage swayed on frayed ropes. Jorn scampered about the cage, squealing like a newborn hog, reaching out and touching the metal as if he might draw strength from it. “Jordam first,” said Mordafey. “Put Jordam in the cage.” Jorn complained, but Jordam did not step forward. “Goreth,” he argued. “Goreth is weak and sick. Goreth goes first.” Mordafey growled at the suggestion that he was not in charge. But Goreth could not even lift his head, moaning, “Where am I going, Same Brother?” “Essence, Goreth,” rasped Jordam, his voice heavy with despair. “Essence.” At the entryway two guards pulled a barred gate down from a slot in the ceiling—a safeguard against Essence thieves. Now. He could dive beneath it, run up the corridor, gain ground in the pause between surprise and response. A million Mordafeys bristled their golden manes, grinning and gloating. The guards latched the gate shut with a sharp clang of finality. |
|
|