Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) (28 page)

Alyea swallowed hard several times before her throat cleared enough for speech.

“What do you want?” she demanded. “You’re not stopping me from going through!”

“Tewi va neesa,”
someone said from above her, too close. “You spit into the wind.”

Alyea startled, staring up in disbelief at the teyanin perched in the saddle.
Her
saddle, damnit, and the horse just stood there, perfectly calm and even a bit drowsy.

“How the hells did you—”

He grinned at her. She shut up, taking the expression for the warning it was, and studied him in silence. He was entirely unlike any teyanin she’d ever seen, from his ready smile and relaxed manner to the vibrantly colorful clothes he wore: bright blue, yellow, orange, green, and red, as cheery as any jester that had ever danced before the king’s throne in Bright Bay.

“Lord Alyea,” he said pleasantly after a few moments of quiet. “My name is Dinas Teyantin. You call me Teyantin. Second to Lord Evkit. These—” he swept a hand out to indicate the four athain around him. “High honor, all this. You have invite. Allow us to escort you; Lord Evkit extends hospitality.”

She stared at him, weighing options, and he waited, his smile steady.

“I’m on a hunt,” she said at last, deciding to risk it. “I’m searching—”

“We know,” he interrupted. “Hunt no good, Lord Alyea. You come talk Lord Evkit, he give answers you need.”

She took a long, slow look around at the waiting athain and knew she wouldn’t be moving another step forward without their consent.

“Very well,” she said. “I am honored to accept the invitation, Teyantin.”

“The honor is ours,” he responded. “You take deep breath now. Deep deep, hold tight.”

Puzzled and apprehensive, she filled her lungs with as much air as they could hold. Dinas Teyantin let out a strange, hooting cry; the athain immediately echoed the sound, throwing their heads back and turning the hoot into a long, hair-raising howl.

Alyea clenched her teeth to keep from breathing out. The mare stood as still as though made of stone, except for her now wildly twitching tail: and then everything flickered in a liquid, sideways shift and Alyea stood elsewhere.

Elsewhere, and considerably
higher:
out on that eagle’s aerie stone porch where she’d spoken once before with Evkit. Grey dampness surrounded her, sucking her toward that fatal edge. Hands closed around her shoulders and waist, dragging her back several steps. She stumbled, went down on one knee and heaved up what remained of her breakfast: mostly painful, acidic drool.

Without fuss or complaint, or even noticeable surprise, the teyanain around her mopped up the mess and guided her into a comfortable chair, wiped her mouth and pushed a small cup of hot tea into her hands. It all happened with such rapid precision that she’d taken a reflexive sip from the cup before she realized she sat alone on the terrace.

Steadying her breathing, she sat, eyes half-shut, and sipped the rose-scented tea with deliberate calm, willing the fine tremor in her hands to still. A few breaths later she had regained her composure and her wits.

Leaving a single sip in the teacup—a courtesy she had learned about since her last visit—she set the cup on the small table beside her and relaxed into an aqeyva trance. If Evkit had wanted her to leave the patio, he’d have had his guards take her somewhere instead of pushing her into a chair to wait. She didn’t need to look behind her to know that a guard would be standing there; she could hear the faintest hint of steady breathing.

She never knew, afterwards, how long she sat quietly in the damp greyness before the door behind her opened and two teyanain carried a man’s limp body out onto the patio. They dropped him at her feet and withdrew without a word, the door snicking shut behind them. Even her guard had left.

Somehow she knew that door wouldn’t be opening again anytime soon.

Not until after she’d dealt with the dazed man. Bound and gagged, his face, even mottled with puffy bruises and oozing blood from recent wounds, was all too familiar.

A knife sliding flat against her skin, in an obscene caress, before turning edge-to and beginning a series of delicate, slanted cuts, as though intending to skin her alive....

Alyea sat very still, blinking very slowly, and waited for the new arrival to regain his wits. While she waited, she thought about something Eredion had once said:
If it makes you feel better to order her whipped to death,
he’d said, referring to Wian, go ahead.
It doesn’t matter to anyone. All it does is define what kind of a person you are. I’m not going to stop you; I don’t give a shit.

And ironically, Wian had later wound up sharing his bed. Alyea wondered if her former servant knew that Eredion thought in such cold, practical terms. What would Eredion do now, if Alyea demanded that Wian be punished for some transgression? Would he defend her, or step aside with the same indifference as he’d shown during that conversation?

All it does is define what kind of a person you are....

She sat still, thinking it over, and wished the teyanain had brought more tea along with the captive.

At last he coughed and thrashed to a kneeling position. One eye had swollen almost shut, and he seemed to have trouble focusing with the other eye, which ran with moisture. Alyea wasn’t inclined to use the word
tears;
more likely something had been thrown in his face when he’d been captured, and he hadn’t recovered yet.

She watched him peering around, fighting to make sense of his surroundings, and said nothing. At last he managed to focus on her. His good eye widened and his face went a peculiar grey color.

The gag muffled his voice, but his one-word reaction came through clearly enough: “You!”

“Hello, Kippin,” Alyea said without any emotion at all. “Fancy meeting you here.”

The passages inside the Horn seemed to have been designed by a madman. They sloped up, then abruptly down, turned back on themselves or wound through a series of spiraling turns. Long, straight passages were rare, and more than once they scrambled up or down a series of ladders. By the time they reached the patio, Deiq was panting and beaded with sweat; he was forced to admit to himself that he was weaker than he’d expected. But even at full strength he tended to have trouble keeping up with the teyanain, and here in their home environment they seemed to draw strength from the very stone around them.

The guides—guards? Likely a bit of both—led him out onto a vast patio, a large flat space on the edge of the world. The sun was setting in a melting flare of crimson-gold, lighting up the seemingly endless Goldensea below and drawing stark, hard shadows from the sparse array of furniture. A long, wide couch sat under an overhang; on the other side of the patio stood a small stone table, one large northern-style outdoor lounging chair, and three desert-style kneeling chairs. A thick-walled stone tea-pot rested on the table, a heavy-handled mug beside it.

Deiq turned to glance at the guard-guides and found them gone, the door to the inner Fortress shut—and, he guessed, barred. He wouldn’t be going back in until Evkit was ready for him.

They knew he didn’t need most human comforts. Bad weather, cold temperatures, hot days; it took massive extremes to affect him, even weakened as he was from the attack. And while he probably could have battered his way through the door, and through the crowd of teyanain who would inevitably attack him right afterwards, he wouldn’t stand up to another dose of stibik powder. And Evkit would have made sure that every guard within range of this patio was well-supplied.

Do you have ha’ra’hain bones in that pouch, seer?

Gods....

Deiq walked to the edge of the patio and looked out and down, thoughtfully. It looked like a steep enough drop to hurt him badly, and a difficult enough climbing surface to be risky. He took a few steps back and rested a hand against the nearest rock wall; it felt chill and slick under his palm, and unpleasant to touch. Pulling his hand back, he wiped it on his trouser leg with a grimace of distaste: no stepping through that. He couldn’t tell if the wall had been coated with something or lined with special inserts, and he doubted any teyanain would answer questions on the subject.

Rude,
to send him out to such a secured patio, after the hospitality Evkit had shown already. Deiq had a feeling that something was going on internally which they didn’t want him meddling in. Something important enough that they were willing to risk his taking offense over being put into, essentially, a prison.

If he’d been sent out here even a month ago, he’d have leapt, and hoped for the worst result. But now...now he had a reason to keep trying. A hope that he didn’t have to cause pain to stay alive himself. And a question to answer: How had he managed to avoid hurting Alyea?

The teyanain were probably the best ones to ask, come to that; so it seemed best to simply wait out whatever set of plots he’d gotten tangled into this time. Stay on Evkit’s good side, build up goodwill, and the teyanain lord might give him a reasonably straight answer in the end.

Deiq pulled the northern chair around to face the sunset, poured himself a mug of tea, and sat down with a heavy sigh. The quiet emptiness eased his shredded nerves, and tiny sparkles emerging in the darkening sky reassured him of his own insignificance. He leaned back in the chair, cradling the large mug in his hands, and stared up at the sky, picking out modern constellations as they came clear and searching for ancient ones.

Most had shifted significantly over the past thousand years; the Red Hat now rose several degrees northeast of its initial location, and the Blue Star of Grief wasn’t even visible any longer.

Deiq sipped his tea, thinking back over what Evkit had told him. A split among the teyanain was a dangerous thing, but not unprecedented, if one went back far enough in history. And Deiq had been there. He knew the story humans didn’t tell each other about the causes and effects...which brought another thought to mind:

I need to feed soon.
He turned the mug idly in his hands, considering. He disliked the notion of putting some teyanain servant through the agony, but felt no real remorse at the thought; a side effect of being so recently restored to full strength. He always leaned closer to the ha’rethe detached indifference towards human life after experiencing the joys of a proper feeding. It took years of battling the urges to wear himself down to hating the sensations again.

Deiq sipped tea and weighed hunger against caution. Evkit would certainly know of the need, and was either waiting to force him into asking or was already preparing something as a guest-offering. And that something could well involve a trap to bend him to Evkit’s purposes.

I need your help
was a gambit, not an honest plea. The day Lord Evkit asked for anyone’s help with true intention, he’d already be in the grave with a pile of rock on top. Games within games within games...Deiq breathed evenly, looked at the stars, and waited.

By the time Eredion went to Fern’s—now Basil’s, just as Allonin had said—Tanavin was long gone. He lingered after his initial questions had been answered, studying the innkeeper. The man shifted from foot to foot, clearly uncomfortable under the stare and unable to think of a polite way to excuse himself. At last the man said, “Is that all you’ll be wanting, then,
s’e?”

The accent placed him from well above the Hackerwood.

“Where are you from?” Eredion said abruptly. “Isata? Jion?”

“Eh, no—Stecatr,” the man said. He tried an uncertain smile. “You’re, ah, local to Bright Bay, I take it?”

“No,” Eredion said. “I was born south of the Horn.”

The man’s flinch wasn’t unexpected, nor was the hasty sign against evil, poorly hidden by the counter between them. “Er, is that so,” the innkeeper said, edging sideways a step, like a restive horse trying to find room to bolt.

Eredion smiled, not in the least amused by the situation, and said, “What brought you all the way south to buy this place? Must have been sight unseen. You don’t strike me as the type of man to venture out quite so blindly as that.”

“My reasons are my own,” the man said stiffly. “And I have business to tend to, if you wouldn’t mind excusing me.”

“I do mind,” Eredion said. “And I want the answer to my question.”

The man’s nervous fidgeting faded into a stern scowl. “I don’t take to your tone. I also don’t take to southern barbarians cluttering up my inn room. I’ll thank you to find your way out now.”

Eredion tilted his head and said, “I’ll thank you to answer my question,
s’e,
and in return I’ll ignore what you just said to me. I think you’ll find that a more than even trade.”

The man’s hand began to reach under the counter, likely for a weapon of some sort.

“Not a good idea,
s’e,”
Eredion said. “You don’t know nearly as much about how to tell who’s important here as you think. Tell you what, how about we take a walk up to the palace and I’ll ask you my questions in front of the king? Would that make it easier for you to talk to a southern
barbarian?”

The man’s hand fell to his side, his face paling. “No offense intended, my lord.”

Eredion tilted an eyebrow and waited, arms crossed, in pointed silence.

The man drew a long breath, hissed it out between his teeth. Finally, he said, with creditable calm, “A man came to Stecatr and offered me a goodly exchange: this inn for mine. He offered me far more than my inn was worth, and painted a warm picture of Bright Bay; and there’s less ice and snow on the ground, to be sure. And less—” He hesitated, shooting a wary glance at Eredion.

“No priests,” Eredion supplied. The innkeeper nodded.

“No
s’iopes,
as I’m hearing it,” he agreed. “I’ve a daughter coming of age, my lord, and Stecatr’s always been...a little rough on women. It’s easier here. Safer. Ah—” He cleared his throat, glancing away. “No offense, my lord, but there
is
a fair amount of business I need to tend to. If you’re done with your questions?”