The Way of Things: Upper Kingdom Boxed Set: Books 1, 2 and 3 in the Tails of the Upper Kingdom (52 page)

He was breathing too quickly. The
air down here was hot, stale, thin. He couldn’t breathe and his chest felt like
bursting
. No,
he told himself,
that was the beating.
He was simply
sore, would feel worse tomorrow most likely, then better the next day.

He was going to die down here.

That’s silly. Just rest,
he told himself. Just keep breathing. Hear
the earth, listen for scraps of conversation up above to remind yourself that
there was indeed life on the surface, and that some nasty leopards had just
thrown you into a pit to scare you and then when Kirin came, he would make them
take you out and everything would be just fine.

Unless Kirin was dead, killed by bandits in those dark, dark mountains…

The earth opened its cavernous
mouth.

***

He was in a pit.

He’d been in one before. Several,
in fact, through the long miserable years that had been his youth. It seemed a
common enough treatment for mongrels at the hands of soldiers, and he always
wondered at its efficacy.
What exactly
was meant to be accomplished by throwing one in a pit?
Repentance? Not
likely. A mongrel could no more change the circumstances of his birth than a
leopard change his spots. Remorse? Possibly. Most mongrels regretted their
lives, agreed with the Pure Races that it would have been better never to have
been born.

No, he had come to understand
that throwing a mongrel in a pit had less to do with the
‘throwee’
than the ‘throw-
er’,
that
lions had the power and the
will to do whatever it was that pleased them, and all the lower castes were
grateful for this simple fact. You were what you were, and while life may never
get any better for you, at least you could be relatively certain that, as long
as you weren’t a mongrel, it wouldn’t get much worse.
It was about fear, control and the abuse of power, no more.
Certainly no less.

So he sat, bruised but unshaken,
intact and ever defiant, in the dark, reeking, filthy pit. It was perfect for
meditation, so he closed his eyes and filled his chest and emptied his mind
until he felt a terrible blackness raise her head somewhere nearby, and he
knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, where the grey coat was and what he was
battling.

He felt quite sorry for the young
man, so he closed his eyes and slipped into the earth.

***

The earth was moving in, closing in, falling in, crushing him, sucking
the air out of his chest, he was dying, he was dying he was…

… at the ocean?

He opened his eyes.

Ocean. Great blue waters, as far
as his eyes could see. White-capped waves rushing against the shores like
white-maned horses, tossing their wild heads as they reared and lunged. Gulls
danced on the horizon and he could hear them cry. He breathed deeply, smelling
the salt, smelling the fish, feeling the welcome coolness of the spray slap his
face.

It was a beach, with sand and
high rounded rocks and dark wet slicks of weed, tiny crabs and shells and
sticks. He was bootless –
however
did that happen?
— so he walked forward, wiggled his toes in the
surf, flexed his toe claws and smiled at the sensation as they dug into wet
sand. He walked in deeper and deeper still, and the water soaked his trousers
up to his hips. It felt so good, and not for the first time, he wondered why
other cats couldn’t savor this as he did. Kirin, he knew, would be running for
shore like a kitten.

Someone was watching him.

He turned around slowly for the
water was very heavy, saw the Seer sitting on the sand, his own split-toed
sandals removed, wide hakama pants rolled up to his tiger-striped knees. He
waved at him and the man smiled and quietly threw a little wave back. His brown
eyes were heavy-lidded and he looked tired.

“Say, do you want me to collect
some of these little crabs? I could build a fire and we could have a tasty
snack. Would you like that,
sidi?”

The man nodded, so Kerris
promptly sloshed back to shore and got to work, chasing scuttling orange and
red creatures across the sand.

***

She sat in the dark barracks
alone, weeping. She had heard of such things, she had read of them, but to have
witnessed what she had witnessed tonight broke her heart into a thousand
pieces. She was sure it would never grow strong again.

And things had begun to make
sense, for she had all the time in the world to stop and think.

The Seer pulled from his horse,
beaten like a criminal, offering no resistance. He had obviously been through
this before. He was a mongrel and proud of it, and that flew in the face of all
things proper and orderly and respectable, and she loved him for it and knew
that he might die because of it, just because his ancestors had loved wrongly.
It was wrong, all wrong, and it boiled her pure blood and caused her shame, but
that too was wrong, and she cursed the rigidity of the Kingdom and its proud,
unyielding ways.

But more than that, she realized
that Kerris too was affected by this singular Imperial affliction for normalcy.
It had likely shaped him from the moment of his birth as a grey lion to a
family of gold. Their name hinted at pride in the distinction, but because of
his words in the tower stable of
Pesh’thawar
, (which seemed like years ago now) she knew otherwise. How had
being so different shaped him? She could relate in some ways, as a clever girl
child in a family that did not value cleverness, pressed to think and act and
believe in ways that were simply not true for her, pressed at every turn to
betray her heart, her mind and her will. And yet, she ended up at the
University. It had not gone so badly for her.

And yet…

“You…
are not a mongrel,
sidala.
That is obvious.”
The words of Major Plantagenet-Khan echoed in her mind.
To all appearances, she was an ordinary tigress. She had never feared the
prejudices of others, only tolerated them until she could figure out a way to
escape them or turn them on their heads. She had never had someone take one
look at her face and despise her.

“No one courts grey lions,
sidala.”

She had kissed him tonight. She
hadn’t planned to, it just happened, and thankfully, he had probably not
noticed, his face had been so swollen. But as she sat in the little dark prison
of a barrack, she let her eyes fall upon her book, still bound in brown paper
and string. She had not opened it, had kept it hidden from all eyes, even her
own. It was madness.

Yes, it was madness, but she was
fighting mad.

She snatched the book from her
saddlebag, tore off the paper and stepped off the shore.

***

A tidy little fire was burning on
the beach and crabs were roasting on a makeshift spit. He turned them every few
minutes and the smell of seaflesh was making his mouth water in the most
delightful of ways.

The Seer was most quiet. In fact,
it seemed difficult for him to be here. He hadn’t spoken, had kept his jaw
clenched, his eyes focused on either the fire as though willing it to burn. But
Kerris didn’t mind. He liked the silence. The rushing of the waves was music.

He reached grey fingers for one
of the roasting crabs, extended a claw to hook one and slide it gingerly along
the spit, when suddenly, without warning, the shore dropped out from underneath
him and he found himself falling, tumbling through blackness and cold and
emptiness and he hit new hard ground with a thud.

It was dark here, wherever it was
he was now, underground from the looks of things, and as usual, that made him
feel a little panicky. It took him several moments to catch his breath, and he
blinked in the darkness, trying to focus on these most strange and unusual
surroundings.

“Holy mackerel, you people!” came
a voice, very loud in his ears. Actually, it sounded as if it had come from his
very own throat. “Night after night, “Not now Solomon”, “We can’t talk tonight,
Solomon,” “Tomorrow night, Solomon,” then, BAM, here you are! Damn, how ‘bout
giving a guy a bit of a warning?”

And Kerris realized with a
sickening lurch, that he was no longer by the ocean, nor was he even remotely
close to
Khanisthan.

He was in
Swisserland.

***

After several hours, as the first
splashes of pink began to paint the eastern sky, the torches of a battle fort
came into view.

The party jogged straight to it,
the horses not having the strength nor their riders the will, to go any faster.
They could hear the cries of the sentries, saw what was likely a central hearth
spring into life to alert all to the approach of riders and the gates were
swung open allowing a troop of mounted soldiers to pour out of the garrison
like bees swarming from a hive.

Kirin straightened his spine, nodded
at Wing who hiked the Imperial banner just a little higher, and they did not
slow down, simply rode like an arrow toward the garrison and the cavalry headed
towards them.

In the feline world, there are
many theories to understand the nature of power, of order and hierarchy, and it
might be said that any one of those elements — the flash of Imperial gold
on the figure of a lion, the standard of the Kingdom held high, the
unrelenting, unyielding directness with which the little party approached —
or very possibly a combination of the three, but there was something that
caused the garrison troop to split and flow around the party in precision
maneuvering. They fell obediently in behind to escort the strangers in a manner
entirely different than the one earlier that night.

This small party rode straight
through the gates and into the garrison proper. There was indeed a huge fire in
the center of the compound, and alMassay jogged right up to it. Kirin reined in
his mount and waited, for he knew that sooner rather than later, the commander
of the garrison would show up and things would be set right.

From the left, he saw a tall lion
stride down the steps of what was likely the garrison office. From the right,
he saw a slip of a woman in desert menswear race down a set of barracks steps.
There was no Kerris. There was no Seer. He could guess well enough what had
happened and how.

He dismounted.

The tall lion strode up to him,
bowed most formally, fist to palm. Kirin did not, merely spread wide his arms
to accommodate the Scholar and he held her shaking form as she wept openly on
his chest. He stroked her hair for several moments, made hushing sounds, and
finally, whilst still holding her, he turned cold blue eyes on the Commander.

“Where is my brother?”

No name, no formal address. The
threat was in the lack of such.

“Sir.” The lion bowed again. “I
am Major Alexander Plantagenet-Khan, Commander of
Sri’Daolath—“

“I ask again, Major. Where is my
brother?”

The man was caught. It was
impossible for him to deny the likeness. And with the tigress so obviously
familiar, it was impossible to claim ignorance. The weight of his failure
suddenly settled on his wide shoulders.

“There was a mistake, sir.”

“Whose?”

There was no honor in avoiding
it. “Mine, sir.”

Kirin nodded. “They are alive?”

“Yes.”

“Fetch them, please. Ready your
best rooms for our party and prepare the finest meal your kitchens are able.
See to it that the horses –
all
the
horses – have organ mash and warm bedding, for we will be staying the
night. Then assemble your men in formation in the courtyard. Is all this
understood, Commander?”

The Commander bowed a third time.
“Sir.” And turned to an aide at his side to relay the instructions that would
likely be his last.

***

“Solomon?” asked Kerris in a
baffled tone. He couldn’t
hear
his
own voice, but somehow, he felt it. Inside his head. Like the pounding of a
headache.

“Yes, of course.Who else would it
be? Do you talk to lots of people like this?”

“Ah…”

“This isn’t Captain, is it?”

“No, no, it’s Kerris. Are we
in…?”

“Switzerland
, yes.” He felt himself pull up to his feet, which were
somehow not his feet. He looked around through eyes that were not his eyes, and
it all conspired to make him feel sicker than he already did. “And here it is,
the thing that’s going to help me catch up with you folks in no time flat…”

He laid a hand (that was not his
hand) on the side of something cold and dark and metallic. It was a boxy sort
of thing, and reminded him a little of an armored palanquin, something the army
had tried to build several years ago, but it was a failure. The armor was so
heavy that the guards carrying it could never get it off the ground. The army
then wisely decided that if anyone important needed to go somewhere during any
skirmish that might require armor, then those people had best rethink their
plans.

Kerris had thought that was one
of the smartest things the army had ever decided.

It took a moment for his eyes
(not his eyes) to adjust to the darkness and the bright unnatural light that
was beaming from behind his back (not his back), for what caused him to marvel
was the sight of his hand, (not his hand) Solomon’s hand, on the side of the
palanquin-like thing.

There was no pelt.

It was pale and thin and pinkish,
and it reminded him of the palm of a
Chi’Chen,
and he realized with a sinking sort of feeling that they were crossing the
entire Upper Kingdom, and quite likely a fair bit beyond, for a monkey.

He didn’t know whether to laugh
or cry.