Tides of Darkness (30 page)

Read Tides of Darkness Online

Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Tides of Darkness
12.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
All of those chosen were larger than their fellows, and stronger. The rest stayed where they were, mute and empty of thought. The chosen formed in a line and marched out of the hall. They turned, not down the corridor to their usual day's labor, but up a stair. It led to more barracks, level upon level, but then to the first of the training courts.
It was empty now of men in training, but the lord waited for them there, and with him one who might be a priest. Neither man had any glimmer of magery, but both had eyes, for whatever use they might be in this place. Daros kept his head down and his body slumped in imitation of the slaves around him.
The priest drew from his robe a thing of metal and glass that looked somewhat like the whirring sphere in the tower. This was smaller; it emitted no light. It did not whirr, but hummed softly as he held it up, balanced on his palm, spinning and spinning.
A faint sigh ran through the slaves. One by one, then all together, they stood straighter. Their faces were still blank, their eyes still gone, but somehow they seemed more awake. Still slaves, thought Daros, but slaves with a glimmer of conscious will.
His heart beat so hard that he feared the lord could hear it. The feather on his breast was still, but there was awareness in it. It might almost have been an eye, looking out upon this place with cold intensity.
The lord hissed softly. His escort sprang from behind him, scattering through the court. Steel rang as they drew swords. They struck without warning.
Not a choosing after all, Daros thought in despair, but a culling. Except that …
They were not striking to kill. The ones chosen, freed of binding on
their bodily will, whirled into defense. Some fled. Some leaped on their attackers. Some few stood with the passivity of slaves.
Those who fled and those who stood motionless were cut down. Those who fought were let be. Daros understood this in the flash of an instant, even as a long curved blade slashed at him. He darted in under it and caught the wrist of the man who held it. The speed of his attack carried him fully round, and the swordsman with him, sword and all. He braced, twisted.
Hot blood sprang over his hands. The swordsman wheezed and died. Daros recoiled.
He had never killed a man before. But he could not stand in horror, gaping at the thick wetness on his hands. He was a slave—waked to fight but not to think. With all the strength that he had, he lowered his head and his hands, and calmed the swift gasp of his breathing, and stood as the other slaves stood.
The blood dripped from his fingers, dripped and dripped. He felt rather than saw the lord halt in front of him. One of the lord's men knelt and brushed a hand over the body. “Dead,” he said.
The lord did not acknowledge the word. It was much too brief to encompass the whole of it: reek of blood and loosed bowels, sprawl of body stiffening in the lightless cold.
He gripped Daros' chin with a gloved hand. Daros struggled not to resist as the lord wrenched his head up. He turned all his furious resentment toward his shields, to conceal the eyes that he had, and the living will.
The lord could see. His eyes fixed on Daros' face. For an instant, altogether without his willing it, Daros saw into and through those eyes. They did not have sight as he knew it: sight that relied on light. This was …
He saw heat. Heat of the body, heat of the air about the body. His world was a pattern of shifting shades of darkness, and about them a deep red cast, like the embers of a dying fire.
He saw Daros in red on red on red: a tall and robust man-shape, its
heat faintly concealed by the robe it wore. It seemed he did not see eyes. His lip curled at the stink of cooling blood. “Take it,” he said to one of his men. “Clean it. Bring it to me.”
The man kicked Daros' feet from under him, then heaved him up and carried him out. He made himself as heavy as he could, a limp, lifeless weight dragging at the guard's hands. The man cursed him but did not drop him.
In the hall, the culling ended; the dead were carried away. Just before he passed out of earshot, he heard the clang of weapons, and the voice of one whom he had taken to thinking of as a sergeant: “Up weapons! On guard!”
But Daros was not to be trained to fight. He suspected that he would not live much longer, either, for the crime of killing a lord. He bided his time, gathered his power, held fear sternly at bay. Fear was the very breath and life of this place. He would not let it conquer him.
T
HIS CLEANSING WAS MORE THOROUGH THAN WHEN DAROS HAD first come to this world as a slave. He was stripped of the dark robe—but not of the things he wore about his neck, which were invisible, intangible, imperceptible—and passed through cold fire and cold water and a scalding blast of steam. Then slaves scrubbed him all but raw, and clipped his hair and shaved his beard and scraped every scrap of hair from his body.
When he was as naked as a man could be, they dressed him in a garment as tight as a skin but strangely flexible, binding him from throat to ankle. It covered him, but left nothing to the imagination. He had a brief, thoroughly unworthy thought, of radical fashions and wanton women.
The thought fled as soon as it appeared. In that strange notnakedness,
he was brought to a room in which stood four others likewise clipped and clad. None was of either world that he knew. They were all eyeless, but sharply alert. Their stance, their carriage—they were warriors, honed to a deadly edge: Olenyai of their people.
He did not know what he was doing there. He was quick on his feet and had some little talent for weapons, but he was not a warrior. If it was enough to have killed one of the lords, then the lord's kin would be disappointed. That had been blind luck. Daros could hardly expect to chance upon it again.
Once again they stood in a featureless space and faced attack. This came in the shape of great looming figures, shapes of darkness that sent off waves of icy cold, breathing forth the stench of tombs. They swarmed through more doors than Daros would have imagined such a room could have. Their claws were long and vicious, their fangs as sharp as a serpent's.
These were nightwalkers, drinkers of blood. They felled one of the warriors in that first moment, and stooped over him, rending his throat, draining the blood from his still twitching body.
Daros fought for his life and soul. Concealment be damned; he freed Estarion's knife from its cord. It was a poor enough weapon against such enemies, but it was the best that he had. He set himself with his back to the wall, though that could trap him beyond hope, and built a second wall of cold steel.
Those princes of warrior slaves trusted in their skill, but against enemies faster, stronger, and far more hungry than they, one by one they dropped and died. Only one other withstood the attack. He was quicker than sight, quicker even than the nightwalkers; he seemed to vanish, then to reappear in unexpected places.
One of the nightwalkers fell, gutted by Daros' steel. He braced against the rest, but they drew back. The other surviving warrior had captured a nightwalker from behind, and snapped its neck.
Those who remained bowed their strange elongated heads and
folded their clawed hands and retreated. Daros sagged against the wall, but kept his dagger up, trusting nothing in this ghastly place.
A lord entered through the one obvious door. As much as they all resembled one another, Daros marked him for the lord who had been in the training court. He was alone, but not unarmed.
He ignored the living men to examine the dead. Each, once he had touched it, shriveled and crumpled in upon itself, then sank into dust. He wiped his gauntleted hand on his thigh and straightened, and turned toward the ones who had done the killing. The warrior stood motionless in the middle of the room. Daros had had the wits to stand straight, but still with his back to the wall. The knife was about his neck again, hidden if never forgotten.
The lord smiled thinly. “You will come,” he said.
The warrior obeyed without hesitation. Daros judged it wise to follow suit. Slaves waited outside to dress them in robes of much better quality than they had worn before.
The lord waited with a remarkable degree of patience, but it was not infinite. As soon as they were seen to, he led them brusquely and at speed up through the levels of the citadel.
They passed the walls and wards of the lords' tower. Daros had what he had hoped for, somewhat after he needed it. In truth he would rather have remained a slave below, free to come and go, and therefore to seek out the mages. A fighting slave was taken through Gates; was a soldier in the war. That was the goal he had aimed for—not to be chosen for this, whatever it was to be.
There was no way out but death. He did not want to die yet. He went where he was led, therefore, and observed as much as he might.
They were near the top of the tower before they stopped. Daros thought that he could hear the humming and whirring of the thing that the king guarded so closely. The air had a throb to it; it pulsed just below the level of perception.
A man was waiting for them in a room full of strangeness: dark shapes that, to Daros, meant nothing. The man was a priest; his face was
tired, his expression less than delighted as the lord brought the two slaves to him. “Only two? We need more.”
“We need soldiers. Those we have in plenty. These—they'll always be rare.”The lord jabbed his chin at Daros. “That one gutted a nightwalker with his bare hands.”
“And killed one of your own clan before that,” the priest said. “Now you own his life. Would that you had brought me a dozen such.”
“Often I bring none at all,” the lord said. “Do your work, old man, and be content with what you're given. There's no time for foolishness now.”
The priest snarled to himself, but when he turned his back pointedly on the lord, it was to gather a selection of what must be ritual objects and spread them on the table between himself and the others. The warrior slave had not moved since he was brought here; therefore Daros did the same. They stood shoulder to shoulder, almost exactly of a height, though Daros was somewhat broader.
While the lord watched with a show of disdain, the priest built a spidery structure of metal and glass, clicking each part into the next. When it was done, it looked somewhat like the visor of a helmet. He performed no incantation, raised no power, but at a flick of a finger, the thing came to life. He laid it over the warrior slave's face.
The man screamed, brief and piercing. Daros came nigh to leaping out of his skin. The priest betrayed neither shock nor surprise. Even as that terrible cry died away, he lifted the visor of metal.
The warrior slave opened narrow dark eyes—in shape like Daros' own, though his face was different, rounder, smoother, and his skin was like old ivory. He seemed neither glad nor frightened to be given back his eyes. Or perhaps he had not, not exactly. There were no whites to them. They were black from edge to edge, but glistening as eyes were wont to do. They were alive; they were unmistakably present. They were like the lords' eyes; exactly like.
The priest approached Daros. Daros' mind gibbered, shrieking at him to flee. But if he moved, he was betrayed, and therefore dead.
His shields were as strong as he could make them. He steadied himself
as the visor came near to his face. It was cold, no warmth in it of the man who had made it or the one who had worn it just before him. It clasped him like icy fingers. In the last possible instant, out of pure instinct, he shut down mage-sight, and squeezed his eyes tight shut.
The pain came without warning. It was exquisite—it was agony. It was like needles thrust into his eyes. A scream ripped itself out of him, leaving a taste of blood in his throat.
The cold metal thing retreated. His eyes were open. He still had them. What he saw …
A world in shades of red and black. Patterns of heat and cold. Shapes that he could recognize, but altered immeasurably.
Mage-sight was still there. He could see with that as he had seen before. But his own eyes, the eyes of his body, were no longer as they had been.
Many things that he had done were irrevocable. But this one, somehow, seemed more than that. He should have run; should have made himself invisible, and hidden with the mages. He could have freed slaves, fomented revolt. He might even have found another way to win passage through the lords' Gates.
It was all he could do to stand as if it did not matter. When the lord said, “Follow,” he followed, because he had left himself no other choice. He must not despair. Despair was death.
 
The lord led the two of them to yet another barracks, but much smaller than those that Daros had seen before. It could hold perhaps a hundred men, but at the moment he counted barely three dozen standing at attention beside the bed-niches. All were dressed as he was, with eyes that saw the dark as no dark at all. They were all armed: each with a sword and a knife, and a sheath of a shape that would carry the weapon that flung dark fire. Even here, it seemed, those weapons were kept locked away.
These men had volition. They looked on the newcomers as men of
any fighting company might, in a mingling of hope and doubt. If their souls were bound, it seemed their minds, to some extent, were not.
The warrior who had passed the test with Daros was coming to himself. He stumbled somewhat as he walked to the end of the ranked fighters. When he took his place there and turned to face the lord with the rest, his face twitched, then twisted in confusion.
Daros fell in beside him, but he had had enough of playing deception. He looked the lord in the face, level and expressionless. The lord seemed somehow amused. When he spoke, the words were addressed to both of them, but his eyes remained on Daros. “Be glad now, both of you. You are the best of the best, the chosen ones, the strongest of all. You serve at our right hands; when you die, the Night will take you as her own.”
Daros' fellow recruit bowed his head in submission. Daros refused.
The lord laughed and saluted him. “Good! We need the strong ones. Serve well, and more rewards may yet await you.”
He left then, still laughing, as hard and cold as everything else in this world. In his wake, the company of the chosen eased visibly. Their eyes turned toward the newcomers; some of them smiled. There was no warmth in those smiles, and nothing remotely comforting.
“New meat,” one of them said, smacking his lips. “Tender and sweet. Tell us, meat—did you taste nightwalker blood?”
Neither answered. The others closed in, smiling and smiling. Daros found himself pressed shoulder to shoulder with the other, and then back to back as the circle eased them away from the wall and out into the free space of the hall.
“Meat,” said the one who seemed to speak for the rest. He was tall and lean, a whipcord man. His skin to mage-sight was as white as new milk, his close-cropped hair pallid gold. His eyes, like the eyes of all those here, were black from rim to rim, but Daros had a fugitive thought that when he had lived in the light, they had been the color of a winter sky.
“Meat,” he said again. “Fresh meat. How many did you kill, meat? Did you eat any of them?”
“Was it required?” Daros asked. It was certainly folly, but he could not help himself. “I barely had time to work up an appetite.”
The pale man moved in close, crowding him, sniffing like a hound. His teeth were small and even, which was rather surprising; Daros would have expected a direwolf's fangs. “Pretty,” he said. “Very, very pretty. Have we destroyed your world yet? Are your women as pretty as you?”
“Almost.” Daros bared his own teeth. They were much longer and sharper than this man's; much more truly a predator's. “Did your women geld you themselves or did they trust the dark lords to do it for them?”
The pale man's attack was completely silent, not even a growl of warning. But Daros had provoked it; he was waiting for it. Even with that, the other's weight bore him back and down. He twisted in the air. He half succeeded: he came down hard, but the other toppled beside him.
For the third time in that brutal day, he fought for his life. He was tired; the other was fresh. He had a weapon, but he must keep it hidden if he could. He had his hands, and his teeth if he would use them. He had the depth of his anger at all of this, at what had been done to the two worlds he had lived in, at what had been done to him.
The pale man was as strong as a snake and lethally fast. They were all fast, these warriors of the dark. Daros defended himself blindly, striking without thought, beating clawed fingers from his eyes, locked and rolling across the hard stone floor. The pale man jabbed a knee up hard, aiming at his privates. He blocked it and thrust it aside, wrenching with all his force, ripping sinew, cracking bone. The pale man howled and lunged, clawing at his throat.
He snapped at the hands and the arms behind them. He tasted blood—rich and iron-sweet. The great vein of it pulsed in the white throat. He sank his teeth in it, his sharp white teeth. He drank deep.
He recoiled in a sudden shock of horror. His mouth was full of blood
and worse. He gagged. The pale man convulsed, locked in death-throes. Daros vomited a bellyful of blood, vomited until nothing came but bile.
Hands drew him up, held him. They were surprisingly gentle. The one closest was the warrior who had passed the testing with him, too new to the freedom of his mind, maybe, to be properly afraid.
Daros could not stop retching. If his stomach would only come up, he could die, and it would be over. But it stubbornly refused to leave its place.

Other books

Frost Moon by Anthony Francis
A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto
The Harvesting by Melanie Karsak
Home by Melissa Pearl
Coming Fury, Volume 1 by Bruce Catton