Heart of Light (46 page)

She turned around, half expecting to see that the Englishman was not listening, but instead she found his blue, watery eyes staring at her. “To the ruby?” he said. “But we don't have Emily. And she's the one who imprinted the compass stone.”

Nassira didn't know any more than he did. She dropped down onto the grass beside him and looked at the distance. There were more pastures and more cows and a few low-growing trees. In the distance, something green shimmered wetly, like an improbably immense jewel lost in the rolling terrain. A river, Nassira thought, because around it the vegetation was lusher and higher. “I wonder,” she said, speaking more to herself than to him, “where we are.”

He didn't answer, and looking at him again, head to toe, Nassira thought that his friends back at the club would hardly recognize Mr. Nigel Oldhall. His pale hair stood up like dry grass at the end of the season. Smudges, as of old smoke, underlined his too-pale eyes. His face was scratched, and his feet, stretched out in front of him, displayed a mass of cuts and scrapes all over their soles. His sleeping garment had gotten torn, the pants hanging in tatters and mostly missing from the knee down. The side of his face was scratched deeply. The pocket in which the compass stone nestled, making a visible lump, was torn, too—though not quite through.

While she looked at him, she realized that for all she knew, Emily Oldhall and Kitwana were dead now. Which explained why whatever was in the forest had ordered them to go to the ruby and guard it. Guard it against Hyena Men and, presumably, the grasping hands of the British sovereign. Yet if some entity was so powerful as to create a spectral forest and move them out of Masai land, then that entity surely would understand the little problem with compass stones.

Since there was no shimmering ruby here in plain sight, Nassira assumed the entity hadn't just moved her to the ruby. Therefore . . . “Mr. Oldhall?” she said in a demanding voice.

“Yes,” he said, startled, turning to her expectantly.

“Are your angels messengers from your god?”

He frowned a little, as if the question didn't have an obvious answer, but nodded and said, “Yes. Generally.”

“Is your god a trickster who would command you to do impossible things and demand you obey?”

“N-no. Those who know . . . those who study . . . theology. They say God demands nothing impossible of his faithful.”

“And yet, the angel commanded you to go to the ruby.”

“Yes.”

“Then don't you see?” Nassira asked. “There must be a way for you to find it. Your wife woke the compass stone. No one else seems to have. Do you know how she did it?”

Nigel was looking at her with an expression that would make anyone else think him a half-wit. His eyes were wide open. His mouth sagged, not quite closed. But behind the eyes there was shrewd calculation. “No,” he said at last, stretching the syllable. “No. Emily has . . .” He paused and sighed, as though perhaps realizing that his wife might not at this moment have power or life. “She has power that cannot be unlocked. It's great power, but alien. I don't know if it's because her blood conjoins the magical inheritance of Charlemagne and whatever the natural magics of India are. I always assumed so. But whatever her power is, it cannot be used by any European disciplines. The school for ladies she attended tried to make her use it. They tried everything. It never worked. Lord Widefield . . .” A sudden red flush erupted upward on Nigel's face. “Lord Widefield believed she was holding her own power locked. He said some women did till they were married. And he believed after our marriage her power would be useable.”

“And he was wrong?” Nassira said.

Nigel shrugged. He moved his lips as though rehearsing what to answer. “Her power is still locked. Was locked even in Cairo. So she did nothing to activate the compass stone. She just . . . held it.”

“Perhaps the stone simply reacted to your wife's power, whatever it was.”

“I don't know how to wake it. I never got to the safe house, you see. Or rather, I did, but all the men within were dead. By . . .” His throat worked. “Fire. The whole house had burned.”

“Oh,” Nassira said. “The dragon got them, too.”

“Dragon?”

“There was a . . .” She realized with a start that Nigel Oldhall had not seen Farewell change. He'd been asleep and then she wakened him. “Your friend Peter Farewell is a were-dragon.”

“Peter? Impossible!” Nigel said, but even as he said it, she could see connections clicking behind his eyes as his mind linked things half heard and half perceived. “Oh. That explains . . . But—”

“The dragon attacked the Hyena Men, too.”

“How do you know?”

“It's a long story, Mr. Oldhall. I will explain in time.” Nassira had no intention right now of turning the Englishman against her. “But I do know. So the dragon attacked your English contacts, and you never learned how to activate the compass stone.” She thought for a moment. “Aren't there standard formulas?”

“Yes, but usually not for something set this long ago.”

“And yet,” Nassira said, “it should be the same principle. Are you sure there's nothing you can do?”

The Englishman sighed and put his hand on his forehead, as if trying to stimulate thought from the outside.

With shaking hands, he removed the compass stone from his tattered pocket and held it in his hand, looking at it as if in wonder—as if not quite sure what it was or where it might have come from.

Moving slowly, as if his body hurt—or perhaps as if he were scared of what he was about to do—he knelt and put the stone on the ground in front of him. “You know,” he said, “the Hyena Men have marked me. They could trace me with this magic. If they touch me two more times, I'll be their slave and mind-empty.” He spoke not so much as though this were a reason not to do it, but slowly and consideringly, enumerating the possible consequences.

Nassira's conscience stung, and she didn't like his taking the risk. Not at all. But the Moran had ordered it. And besides, if they didn't use the compass stone, what could they do but wander forever lost in Africa? She couldn't go home while the Hyena Men still pursued them.

When she said nothing, Nigel nodded, as if she'd given an answer. He raised his hands. Nassira could feel power and rushing energy, but she couldn't tell what exactly the Englishman was doing.

Would he manage to wake the stone? Or just to attract the Hyena Men?

PURSUED

Kitwana woke with a headache and a feeling of fore
boding. For a moment he didn't know why, though he remembered the fight yesterday, the dragon. Turning his head, he saw Mrs. Oldhall sleeping to one side of him, and then, turning quickly, he saw Peter Farewell on the other side, sprawled. He should feel relieved. He did feel relieved. Mrs. Oldhall had convinced him to spare the creature, but he couldn't say he trusted or believed in the dragon. He might look like a man, but Kitwana knew he was not. So finding the dragon asleep and in human form was reassuring.

And yet, something at the back of Kitwana's mind screamed and jumped and told him that he was in mortal danger. Through his headache, which pounded dully behind his eyes, he felt a threat approaching—unavoidable, immense and lethal. This sense was so strong he had to take deep breaths to keep himself from panic.

But Farewell lay asleep. So what could be threatening them? In the moments just before wakening, he had seen . . . he had felt . . . His wrist hurt. The place where the Hyena Men's mark had been set.

Kitwana sat up suddenly. He had seen a hyena, looming spectral and power hungry over him. The dot on his wrist glowed. There were Hyena Men nearby—they were looking for him. Shenta was looking for him. Kitwana hadn't killed the dragon, and Shenta would know that. He looked again to where Peter was sleeping and chewed pensively on the side of his lip. He hadn't killed the dragon, and therefore Shenta would have reason to resent him.

Yet Peter Farewell hadn't killed them or hurt them. And Kitwana had, before this, started having doubts about Shenta's ambition. That he wanted to rule Africa, not to save it. Yet why would Shenta look for him like this? Why not simply tell Kitwana he wanted to find him? They'd mind-contacted before, so why not now?

It all felt wrong. And the back of his mind, that part that was not quite conscious and that sensed magic, was yelling at him loudly. He was in danger; he needed to defend himself or get out now.

Because he had to move and obey his instincts, or sit there and let panic envelop him, Kitwana got up. Almost without thinking, he cast a spell over his tingling wrist, to stop the Hyena mind finding him. The spell wouldn't last and it wasn't very strong—just a magic barrier between those searching for him and the magical dot. Deliberately, he got up and folded his blanket and went to collect his assegai. He followed the throbbing on his wrist as though it was a signal, as if it were the beating of drums in the night, growing louder as he approached. His wrist throbbed more intensely when he walked in a certain direction, and the pain receded as he backed up or walked in other directions. Thus he followed the signal of the pain, down from the promontory they'd occupied and back along the path they'd meant to follow, before Kitwana had hatched his plan to kill the dragon. He walked amid the trees, trying to be as stealthy as he had learned to be in his uncle's war band.

After a few minutes of walking in the green light-shadow of approaching dawn, Kitwana felt as if a dot of fire had alighted upon his wrist, burning into it with a steady flame, and his spell was barely holding, barely keeping those searching for Kitwana from finding him. He transferred his lance to that hand and with his other hand clasped the painful wrist, thinking even as he did that it was useless.

A few steps after that he heard voices—one above all ringing very clear and recognizable. Shenta. The recognition ran through Kitwana like a lightning bolt splitting the night. It truly was Shenta. And yet Shenta hadn't contacted him. Why not?

Kitwana dropped to his hands and knees. The terrain amid the trees had been covered with vegetation, but there was still enough of the thorny growth that flourished in this part of the world that crawling was impossible. Kitwana would now and then find his hand or his knee planted upon a sharp thorn, a sudden painfully sharp lip of lave. But he had been trained in the arts of war and ambush. Oh, not by his father. He allowed his lip to curl in amusement at that. Wamungunda would have told his only son that there was no need to learn such arts, because all of the world and its races of men were destined to live in peace. It never occurred to him that destiny counted for nothing or less than nothing when war and strife raged all around. Instead he stuck to his pure way and trusted in his faith in humanity to deliver him where the gods would have feared to.

But Kitwana had gone to his mother's people, and amid them learned the virtues of a man and that to which a man must hew if he intended to defend tribe and family. There he'd learned to take hurt and not to show it, and not to flinch from pain, nor cry out from surprise. This training now served him, as he crept closer, his wrist burning, his hand clenching tight on the assegai.

He no longer needed the aching of his wrist to tell him where the Hyena Men were. He could hear their voices clearly. Shenta's, and a younger man's, and then what appeared to be Nigel Oldhall's voice, only deeper and more assured.

For a moment, Kitwana stopped, while his thoughts ran riot. Nigel Oldhall here? What was he doing? Was that why he'd disappeared? Had he always been working for the Hyena Men? Was that why he and Nassira had been close? Was that why they'd vanished together?

But then the voice that sounded like Nigel's, with its well-bred British accent, said, “Well, there is nothing for it. Nigel and the woman disappeared.”

Kitwana's moment of confusion broke, and he crept closer, attentive to his footfall and the placement of his body, until he was just behind a curtain of heavy-growing trees whose green tendrils hid him from sight of the camp ahead.

As Kitwana closed in, Shenta said, “If they have some magic we don't know, perhaps the dragon has taught them. And then we'll have no luck at all with the Englishwoman and the traitor.”