Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) (13 page)

Apparently my pragmatism has limits after all. If Deiq has directly kept Sessin Family from being smashed like a bug, I owe him more than I thought. I wonder if that’s why he never fully explained this to me?

“Quite possibly,” Teilo said, squinting as though following that thought had been difficult for her. “I honestly don’t understand his reasoning. He’s quite literally insane from a ha’reye point of view, and seriously bizarre from a human perspective.”

Eredion sighed deeply and leaned forward to rest his head in his hands, elbows on knees, for a few moments. At last he straightened and stood, all exhaustion pushed aside and replaced by a fizzing tension that might carry him through what needed to be done now.

“I have to go see the king again, to update him on Deiq’s whereabouts,” he said. “He’s going to hate seeing me this many times in one day, even though this is good news—for him. Will you come along?”

He knew what she’d say even as he asked; she shook her head firmly.

“No. It’s better this king never sees my face.”

“But here you are at the palace,” he noted.

“Am I?” she asked, and suddenly wasn’t—quite—there; a moment later he couldn’t see her at all. He startled to his feet just as she emerged from the curtains, literally flowing out of the fabric as though she’d taken refuge in the folds themselves. “Your Hidden can’t see me either,” she noted, smiling at his astonished expression. “They’re asleep. And they’ll wake, when I leave, with no notion of my presence.”

“Good gods,” Eredion said, badly shaken. “I don’t think even Deiq could do that!”

Teilo lifted a thin, pale eyebrow and said nothing, but her mocking expression answered the question loudly.

“Why would he keep abilities like that hidden—No, you said you don’t understand his reasoning. Never mind.” Eredion drew a deep breath, held it, let it out in a loud
huoff.
“Would you mind keeping an eye on Alyea while I’m gone? I just gave her estiqi—”

Teilo turned quickly, her eyes widening. “She’s here?”

“Couldn’t you sense her?”

Teilo stood still, her expression taut, then shook her head. “No. Go see the king.”

“You couldn’t—”

“Go see the king,”
she snapped.

He stumbled for the door and through before he drew another breath.

Standing in the hallway outside his suite, panting a little, he turned and stared at the door. “Godsdamnit,” he muttered, “that wasn’t very nice.”

He rested a hand on the knob and twisted. It was like trying to turn the roots of a mountain. Clearly, Teilo had no intentions of letting him come back in right away. Arguing would be futile and a waste of valuable time.

There were more important issues at the moment than what Teilo was going to do with Alyea; but he really hoped the girl would still be alive when he returned.

Hazed, dream-caught, Deiq rolled through time and memory with no anchor in the
now;
back into a recently recalled, newly familiar memory:

Lord Arit Sessin stood at the far end of a severely plain room. Deiq stopped just inside the door, let it close behind him, and took a long, amused look around.

“Any Aerthraim would love this room,” he commented. He took a few casual steps forward, his attention on the furnishings, and ran a finger along the edge of a dark-stained oak table. “This style looks familiar. Did Jorin of Stass make this?”

“You’re not here to talk about wood-workers,” Lord Arit said thinly. “Quit wasting my time.”

Deiq hummed lightly and moved on to examine a thickly padded chair with a yellow leather covering. “Because humans have so little time to waste? But you have so much more than most humans.” He sat down in the chair and looked up at Lord Sessin. “All desert lords do. It’s part of the Agreement. You do remember the Agreement?”

“Of course I do,” Lord Sessin snapped. “What’s this about?”

“Eredion didn’t know what I am,” Deiq said bluntly.

“You took—” Lord Sessin whirled away from Deiq, his hands clenching spasmodically. “Damnit,” he said at last, turning around again. “You’ve ruined him.”

“What?” Deiq came up out of the chair and had Lord Sessin crowded up against the far wall before the man had a chance to even draw a shocked breath. “Ruined?”

Lord Sessin, eyes wide, seemed locked into immobility. He scarcely breathed as he stared into Deiq’s eyes from a hand-span away. “I...I...I....”

Disgusted by the fear steaming off the man, Deiq backed up a step, loosening his hold. “Ruined,” he repeated. “Explain.”

“I’d forgotten...how fast you can move,” Lord Sessin said after a few increasingly deep breaths. “May I...have a moment?”

Deiq raised an eyebrow and stepped back another pace, releasing his grip completely. “At least you didn’t piss yourself this time.”

Lord Sessin closed his eyes briefly. “I had hoped to forget that part of our last encounter,” he murmured.

“Ruined, Arit,” Deiq prompted without remorse. “Get to it already.”

“You’re so impatient for a creature who’s lived hundreds of years.”

“Yes, I am. Stop stalling. Why did you leave Eredion ignorant?”

Lord Arit Sessin drew another deep breath and straightened a little, as though seeking after his shredded dignity. “Desert lords change after the trials,” he said. “But it’s well known that right after the last trial we’re strongest. As time goes on we weaken. Perceptions dim, strength fails somewhat. I wondered,” his tone turned careful, “if the energy taken...when your kind feeds...takes away, bit by bit, what the trials gave us.”

Deiq stood very still, staring at the Sessin lord.

“I decided to try limiting Eredion’s instruction, and to keep him away from...your kind after the trials, to see...what would happen.” Lord Sessin swallowed hard. “It wasn’t a breach of the Agreement! It was only one attempt. I sent Jonnui and Eredion through the training together, and Jonnui...my own son, my
heir
...is fully instructed.” A faint twitch passed across the Sessin lord’s thin face. “Eredion’s lack of knowledge was simply an experiment. And now that’s ruined.”

“You’re very, very lucky that it is,” Deiq said bleakly. “The Jungles would consider even the experiment to be a breach of the Agreement. You could have had your entire fortress down in ruins around you, Lord Sessin.”

“But Sessin protector agreed to leave Eredion alone completely! If it didn’t protest—”

Deiq stopped himself from saying
Sessin protector is a lazy, immature, and ignorant fool
just in time; reworded that into: “Sessin protector was mistaken. The Jungles will not see this as acceptable, and
they
set the rules, not your protector.”

The man’s face turned an ashy grey. “You won’t—”

“No,” Deiq said, cursing himself for a fool even as he said it. But losing Sessin Family would have dreadful repercussions across the whole of the human world, and destroy much of what Deiq had spent centuries fighting for. “I won’t tell them. As long as you swear to never try anything that stupid again.”

He couldn’t go back to the Jungles or even to his kin beneath the Qisani now. They would read this day in his mind as though he’d shouted about it from the rooftops. No hiding secrets from that many full ha’reye and ha’rai’nin. It would be all he could do to block this memory from his own mind to avoid an accidental revelation in a casual encounter with another ha’ra’ha or ha’rethe. He would have to forget, completely, what he’d just discovered; a difficult but not impossible task.

He
didn’t
want to go through another Jungle-dictated retaliation sweep. The chaos just before the Split had been bad enough. And then there was the question of just
what
had happened at Scratha Fortress....

Lord Sessin’s protest broke into Deiq’s swirling thoughts. “I gave my own son—”

“That doesn’t matter, Arit,” Deiq cut in. “You could have trained ten, fifty, a hundred desert lords this year. Trying to bypass the Agreement would still piss the Jungles off beyond all hope of redemption. That Jonnui is your son means nothing to them.”

Lord Sessin sank slowly into a nearby chair and covered his face with both hands.

Deiq sighed and turned to leave the room. At a sudden thought, he stopped and looked back over his shoulder at the shaken man. “Who gave you the idea in the first place?”

Lord Sessin’s expression was shaded with caution as he lifted his head. “Nobody.”

Deiq raised an eyebrow, turned all the way around, and waited, arms crossed.

The two locked gazes for a few moments. At last, Lord Sessin dropped his head in defeat and said, in a near-whisper, “Kallaisin Aerthraim.”

Deiq sighed, not at all surprised. “I would suggest, Lord Sessin,” he started, then paused and dropped into less formal speech, deciding familiarity might get through to the man more effectively. “Arit. Don’t trust the Aerthraim. They’d only benefit from your Family’s ruin.”

“I thought of that,” Lord Sessin said, head in hands again. “But I couldn’t resist trying. It seemed so simple....”

“The Aerthraim,” Deiq said dryly, “are very, very good at
looking
simple.”

Deiq shook free of that memory with distaste, unwilling to think about it. He hadn’t been that genuinely angry in years, and Lord Sessin had been extremely lucky to walk out of that conversation alive. And even luckier that it had been Deiq discovering his secret plan, not one of the Jungle ha’reye.

Is that who holds me? Am I being brought to the Jungles for my crimes, for my disobedience? Or even worse, to the Qisani, to face....

Screams echoed in his memory, a horrific cacophony. He blocked it reflexively, curling deep within himself.
No. I won’t think about that. It’s not
right
to use them that way, not when all they want to do is serve....

But that
is
their service,
a petulant voice said.
Why must you always argue? This is what they are here for, little one. Why must you always argue? Why? Why?

And that whine was joined by others, like a herd of stampeding mosquitoes. The sound layered and doubled and layered and doubled until all he heard was a great howling pressure to stop fighting their will, stop arguing, stop
questioning....

He screamed, and woke from that nightmare into a worse one: bound and trussed like a freshly killed deer, his hands, knees, and ankles closed tightly around a thick metal bar. His eyes watered: all he saw were blurs of color. Disorientation wrenched his stomach. He resisted, swallowing hard, well aware that in this position he might choke on his own vomit. After what felt like hours of struggle, he conquered the roiling and went limp, shuddering.

Sound floated nearby. He blinked hard and reached for a focus, for a time-match that would allow him to hear the words. For just a moment he succeeded:

“—awake. Don’t look him in the—”

Then it blurred into incomprehension, the colors around him coalesced into complete blackness, and memory dragged him into the past once more.

“It’s Blood Bay we’re calling it these days,” a burly young man with mud-colored skin, wiry pale hair, and dark blue eyes muttered. He tipped his wrist, scattering a number of small bone chips marked with colorful glyphs across the dusty ground, then studied the patterns they made. “Yes. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Much, much worse.”

“I’d hoped for better news,” Deiq said, sitting back on his heels.

“Nah.” The seer sat back as well and squinted at Deiq thoughtfully. “I ain’t goin’ back there any time soon, me. You’re mad to try, with your blood. He’ll enjoy finding a way to kill you,
ha’inn.”

Deiq nodded, unsurprised that the man knew what he was. Any competent seer would pick that up in moments. This had been the first seer in Water’s End not to flinch away from the meeting. He handed the young man an entire gold round.

“Huh,” the seer said, with a dignified nod, then: “Wait,
ha’inn.
Toss ‘em yourself.”

Startled at the generosity, Deiq hesitated, then took the handful of proffered chips with respectful care. Most seers wouldn’t allow other humans to touch their divination tools, let alone a ha’ra’ha.

The bone chips felt oddly warm in his hand. He cast them with a smooth wrist-flick, and they rained down in a scattered semi-arc, puffs of dust clouding the air for a moment as they landed.

“Ah, that’s the way,” the seer said, nodding in approval. “You’ve done this before.”

“I’m not as good at reading them,” Deiq said, looking at the patterns. As always, he only saw darkness and death ahead, minor variations on a theme he’d been trying to escape all his life. Nothing he ever did seemed to change the results of a foretelling cast.

“Nobody can ever read their own,
ha’inn.
Didn’t you know that? Ehh, ‘scuse
me....”

The seer edged around to crouch beside Deiq, staring intently. A moment later he moved again, working his way in a wide circle, studying the pattern from different angles. At last he sat back again and looked up at Deiq, his expression sober.

“You’ve a hard road ahead,” he announced. “Lots of death walks with you. You’ve killed before, many deaths that call for an accounting in your heart and in your soul. On the road to redemption, you’ll kill at least one of your own kin and deny your elders a life they’ve claimed. I don’t see if you’ll reach the end to the left or the right side of your soul, but you’ve a long length of road before you get there, whatever efforts you make to shorten the walk.”

Deiq stared in utter astonishment. No seer had ever dared give him such a blunt reading before. The words felt as though they seared into his soul—Soul? This seer saw him as having a soul? He held back a bitter laugh. No human, no matter how friendly, had ever accused him of that before.

“That’s a hellacious reading.”