Forest Mage (20 page)

“To see Dewara,” he said curtly.

It hit me like one of Duril’s ambush rocks when I was a boy. “We can’t be. My father did everything he could to find Dewara after he dragged me home. There was no sign of him, and the Kidona said they didn’t know where he went or what became of him.”

Sergeant Duril shrugged. “They lied. Back then, Dewara was something of a hero for what he’d done to your father’s son. But petty glory is faded, and Dewara has fallen on hard times. That woman back there believed me when I said I’d give her brother’s ear back to her if she’d give us Dewara.”

I rode for a time in shocked silence. Then, “How did you know it was her brother’s ear?”

“I don’t. But it could have been. I left it up to her to decide.”

We followed the boy into a narrow, steep-sided canyon. It was a perfect site for an ambush, and I rode with a chilly spot on my back. The boy’s taldi still had a good lead on us. He started up a narrow path across a rock face and I had to rein Sirlofty back to follow Duril’s horse up the treacherous way. I was becoming more and more dubious of our mission. If the boy was leading us to another Kidona encampment, I didn’t like the odds. But Sergeant Duril appeared calm, if watchful. I tried to emulate him.

There was another switchback in the trail, very tight for our horses, and then the ground suddenly leveled out. We had reached a long, narrow ledge that jutted out from the rock face. As soon as Duril and I were out of the way, the boy turned his taldi and silently started back down the path. Before us was a patched tent set up with a neat stack of firewood beside it. A blackened kettle hung from a tripod over a small smokeless fire. I smelled simmering rabbit. Dewara stood looking at us with no trace of surprise on his face. He had seen us coming. No one could approach this aerie without his being aware of it.

He was a changed man from the tough warrior I’d known. His clothing was worn and rumpled; dust stood in the ridges of the fabric. His dingy long-sleeved robe reached just past his hips and was belted with a plain strip of leather. The brown trousers he wore beneath it were faded to white at the knees and frayed at
the cuffs. His swanneck hung at his hip, but the hair sheath looked dirty and frayed. The man himself had aged, and not well. Four years had passed since I had last seen him, but to look at him, it had been twenty. His gray eyes, once so keen, had begun to cloud with cataract. He had a stoop in his back. He had allowed his hair to grow, and it hung in a thin yellowish-white fringe to his shoulders. He licked his lips, giving us a brief glimpse of his filed teeth. No fear showed in his face as he greeted me. “Well. Soldier’s son. You come back to me. You want a new notch in your ear, maybe?” His bravado did not fool me. Even his voice had aged, and the bitterness in it surprised me.

Sergeant Duril had not dismounted, and he did not speak. I sensed he deferred to me, but I didn’t know what to say or do. The old Kidona warrior looked shriveled and small. I remembered belatedly that when I first met him, he had been shorter than I, and I had grown since then. But that was my “real-life” memory of him. In the far more vivid dream memory, he had been much taller than I, and had the head of a hawk and feathered arms. I struggled to reconcile those memories with the withered man who stood squinting up at me. I think that puzzle kept me from feeling any one emotion clearly.

I dismounted and walked up to him. Behind me, I heard Sergeant Duril do the same. He stood behind my shoulder when I halted, allowing me this battle.

Dewara had to look up at me. Good. I stared down at him and spoke sternly. “I want to know what you did to me, Dewara. Tell me now, without riddles or mockery. What happened to me that night when you said you would make me Kidona?” My Jindobe had come back to me without hesitation. I felt as if I had leapfrogged back through the years to confront the man who had abused, befriended, and then nearly killed me.

He grinned, his pointed teeth shiny with saliva. “Oh, look at you, fat man. So brave now. So big. Still knowing nothing. Still wishing you were Kidona. Eh?”

I towered over him, dwarfing him in girth as well as height. Still he did not fear me. I summoned all my disdain. “If you are Kidona, then I do not wish to be Kidona.” I drew on all my knowl
edge of his people to make my insults sting. “Look at you. You are poor! I see no women here, no taldi, no smoke rack of meat. The gods despise you.”

I saw my words hit him like flung stones. Shame tried to stir in me, that I would attack someone in his situation, but I held it down. He was not beaten. If I wanted to wring answers from him, I must first dominate him. From some depth of courage in his soul, he summoned a grin and retorted, “Yet I am still Kidona. And you, you are still
her
plaything. Look at you, all swollen up with her magic like a sore toe full of pus. The fat old woman claimed you, and made you her puppet.”

His words jabbed me and I retorted without thinking, “Her puppet? Her plaything? I think not. I did what you could not do. I crossed the bridge, and with the iron magic of my people, I laid her belly open. I defeated her, old man. What you could not do, even using me as your tool, I did alone.” I struck a pose I remembered from our days together. I threw out my chest and lifted my head high, the same posture he had held whenever he wished to express how far above me he was. “I have always been stronger than you, Dewara. Even when I lay unconscious before you, you still dared not kill me.”

I watched him, trying to gauge his weakness in this battle of exchanged brags. To the west of us, the sun was dying in a welter of reds and purples. It was hard to read his features in the fading light. Perhaps a shadow of doubt brushed Dewara’s eyes, but he brazened it out. “I could have killed you if I wished,” he said disdainfully. “It would have been like crushing a hatchling in the nest. I thought of it. You were useless to me. You claim to have killed her? Well, where is your proof? You brag like a child. When I sent you against her, you fell like a child. I witnessed that! The weakness of your people made you fail, not my Kidona magic. You were not strong of heart; you did not have the will to do what you should have done. If you had not spoken to the guardian, if you had rushed forward and killed her as I commanded, then all of our lives would be better now. But no! You are so wise, soldier’s boy, you think you know more than a Kidona warrior. You look, you think,
Oh, just an old woman
, so you talk, talk, talk, and all the
while her wormy white roots sink into you. Look at you now, like a fat grub from under a rotting log. You will never be a warrior. And you will ever belong to her. She will puff you up full with her magic, and when you are full, you will do whatever her magic makes you do. Or maybe you have already done it. Has the magic turned you against your own people?” He laughed triumphantly and pointed a crooked finger at me. “Look at you! I didn’t need to kill you. Better to leave you alive. Think. Is there a better revenge on your father? Fat one! You belong to the Dappled People now. You’ll never be a soldier. Your father put iron in me to kill my magic. But I had enough magic left in me to give his son to my other enemy. I had enough magic to make my enemies become the enemies of each other. Long after I am dead, you will fight and kill one another. The corpses you make will pile up at my feet in whatever afterlife I am banished to.”

I cannot describe how his words affected me. I had expected him to profess ignorance of everything I said. I hadn’t wanted him to admit that somehow we had shared that dream, and that he recalled as clearly as I did what the Tree Woman had done to me. He had just confirmed my worst fears. A terrible cold welled up inside me. I crossed my arms on my chest and held myself tightly, afraid I would start shivering. The last walls inside me were breaking; it felt as if cold blood were leaking inside my gut. I gritted my teeth to keep them from chattering. My heart thundered in my chest. Then, out of that turmoil, a terrible black calm emerged in me. I spoke in a soft voice I scarcely recognized.

“You still lost, Kidona. You lost to her and you lost to me. I went to your Dancing Spindle. I am the one who put the iron in the Spindle’s path. I am the one who destroyed the Plains magic. You can no longer draw on its strength. I made you an old man. It is done, Kidona. Done forever. You cling to shreds and threads, but the fabric is gone. And I come here tonight to tell you,
I
am the one who tore it from your people and left you cold and shivering in the dark. I, Soldier’s Boy of the People. Look at me, Dewara. Look at the end of your magic and your folk.”

There paraded across his face such a progression of emotions that they were almost laughable. He did not comprehend what I
said, and then suddenly he did. Disbelief dawned on his face, and then I saw him admit the truth of what I’d told him. I’d killed his magic, and the knowledge of that was killing him.

His face turned a terrible color and he made a strangling noise.

I never even saw him draw his swanneck. Foolish me, I had never thought it would come to blows. Aged he might be, but fury renewed his strength and speed. The curved blade swept through the air toward me, the bronze catching the red of the firelight and the sunset, as if it were already bloodied. I skipped back, feeling the wind of its passage in front of my face. As I drew my own sword, Dewara, his face purpling with effort, leapt forward. All the weight of his hatred was behind the sharpened blade. I had scarcely cleared my own sword of its scabbard before the tip of his swanneck sank into my belly. I felt the sharp bite of it, felt the ripping of my shirt as the fabric gave way to the metal and then, oddly, nothing. I grunted and my sword fell from my hands as I clutched at my gut as he pulled his weapon free of me. I stood there, my hands clutched over my wound, feeling blood seep out through my shirt and between my fingers. Shock stilled me.
What a stupid way to die
, I thought as he swept his blade back for the strike that would behead me. His lips were pulled back from his pointed teeth and his eyes bulged out of his head. I thought how disgusted my father would be with his soldier son for dying in such an ignominious fashion.

The explosion behind me jolted me with a shock of light and sound. The impact of multiple balls striking Dewara’s chest stopped him in midlunge. For an instant, he hung suspended, caught between his momentum and the stopping power of the lead. Then he fell like a puppet with his strings cut, his swanneck bouncing free of his nerveless hand as he struck the earth. I knew he was dead before his body even fell to the ground.

There was a moment that seemed to last as long as a whole day. The sulfurous stench of black powder hung in the air. The magnitude of so many things happening at once paralyzed me. I stood, clutching my belly, knowing that a gut wound could fester and kill me as surely as being beheaded. I could not comprehend
my injury, any more than I could grasp that Dewara sprawled dead at my feet. I’d never seen a man shot to death. Instantaneous death was shocking enough, but Dewara had been more than just a man to me. He’d figured in my most horrendous nightmares. He’d nearly killed me, but he had also taught me and shared food and water with me. He had been an important figure in my life, and when he died, a significant part of my experiences died with him. Of all that we had experienced together, I alone remained to recall it. And I might die. My own blood sang in my ears.

As if from the distance, I heard Sergeant Duril say, “Well, I didn’t think much of this at first, but now I’m glad I bought it. The shopkeeper called it a pepperpot. Guess I peppered him, didn’t I?”

He stepped past me to crouch over Dewara’s body. Then he stood up with a grunt and came toward me. “He’s dead. Are you all right, Nevare? He didn’t get you, did he?”

Duril still held a small, multiple-barreled gun in his hand. I’d heard of them, but I’d never seen one before. They were good only at short range, but fired several balls at once, making it more likely that even without a chance to aim, you’d hit your target somewhere. My father had spoken of them as a coward’s weapon, something that a high-priced whore or a table gambler might carry concealed in a sleeve. I was surprised that Sergeant Duril would carry such a weapon. Surprised, and very glad.

“I’m not sure,” I said. There wasn’t much pain. But I’d heard that the shock of a wound could keep a man from feeling pain at first. I turned away from Duril and staggered a few steps toward the fire, fumbling at the front of my shirt as I went. It seemed a private thing; I wanted to be alone when I discovered how bad it was. I managed to unbutton my shirt and pull it open just as he caught up with me.

“Good god, help us!” he muttered, and it was a prayer the way he said it. Before I could stop him, he leaned forward to probe the injury with his fingers. “Oh, thank all that’s holy. It’s just a jab, Nevare. You’re hardly hurt at all. A flesh wound. And there was a lot of flesh there to wound, begging your pardon. Oh,
thank the good god! What would I have said to your da before he killed me?”

His knees seemed to give out on him and he sank down to sit beside Dewara’s fire. I turned a bit away from him, strangely embarrassed that I was not hurt more severely. I wiped my bloodied hands on my shirt and then gritted my teeth as I prodded at the cut on my belly. The sergeant was right. It was scarcely bleeding now. I felt humiliated that such a minor injury could have stopped me in my tracks and made me drop my own sword. A fine soldier son I was! The first time I actually faced an enemy in combat, the old man had disarmed me with a minor poke in the gut. The thought of my own proud sword lying in the dust shamed me. I went to retrieve it.

The light was going rapidly. I found my blade by touch, sheathed it, and then stooped to pick up Dewara’s swanneck. For one boyish instant, I thought of keeping it as a trophy. In the next, I felt repulsed by such a vainglorious thought. I hadn’t even killed the man who’d wielded it. I shifted it in the firelight, and watched as it illuminated the gleaming bronze blade. Then I went queasy at what I saw. A full four fingers of the blade’s tip was bloodied. It had gone that deep. With my free hand, I groped at my injury. No. There was almost no pain.