The Forbidden City (The Dragon's Legacy Book 2) Page 20

  Jian knew he was, and it pleased him. As he rode at the front of his army, and his retainers, and their retainers, he thought it a very fine thing to find the village guard posts abandoned, its gates thrown wide as Bizhan reluctantly awaited his embrace. The cobbled streets were abandoned, houses and shops shut tight against the storm that was Jian Sen-Baradam.

  Ah, but there was one who had not fled, who stood in the middle of the village square straight-backed and bold, eyes flashing.

  “Jian!” Tiungpei cried, “my son!” and she flung her arms wide, welcoming the storm.

  Welcoming him home.

  * * *

  The village had changed, and Jian had changed, but the house of Tiungpei was as enduring as the sea. Fish stew simmered as always over the warm hearth-fire, and the sunlight through sea-glass sent colored lights to dance upon the walls. Jian served soup and bread and spiced wine to his mother and to his wife, and with every move, every mouthful of soup, every woman’s smile, his heart grew lighter and lighter till it seemed he might fly.

  They did not speak of winnowing, or Inseeings, or the rumors of Sen-Baradam uprisings. Neither did they speak of sundered lands, or stolen girls, or the lords and ladies of twilight. Rather they spoke of important things—of fish nets and found treasures, of pearls and goats and weddings.

  Tsali’gei took to his mother as she had not yet taken to Jian and the two women sat close, so close their knees and foreheads were nearly touching, as they discussed the medicinal properties of seaweed. Tsali’gei clutched a pearl his mother had gifted her, a bride-gift worthy of a young empress: a rose-colored pearl bigger than Jian’s fist, which she had kept hidden away for half a lifetime. Such a pearl might have bought Tiungpei her freedom and a life of ease. She had saved it, instead, for the wife of her son.

  “For my daughter,” she said as she pressed it into Tsali’gei’s palm, and they had both cried.

  This, Jian thought, as he settled by the fire to eat his soup, this is worth any pain, any sacrifice. In that moment he realized that he would do anything, pay any price, if only time would march on and leave in peace this little house and those he loved.

  Later that night Tsali’gei came to him, his twilight princess, his Daezhu love, and she led him down the path to the sea. These things he would remember till the end of his days, her skin smooth as a pearl, gleaming beneath the moonslight as she ran before him, shedding her clothes and laughing. The cries of the night-birds, and of the sea, and of his Tsali’gei as he caught her up from behind and spun her round in a dance as old as life. The warm waters that welcomed him home, as her warm embrace welcomed him home, for such as she and he had no need of feather beds or firelight when they had the sand, and the stars, and the wide, wise sea.

  Their necklaces—his of pearls and hers of sea-bear claws—tangled together at one point, and broke, and the sight of his treasure spilled upon Tsali’gei’s breasts drove Jian mad with desire. Long they lay together, and long they loved one another, and long would he hold her memory as a candle against the cold, cold night.

  * * *

  The moons rolled by, and the stars wheeled overhead, and Jian’s heart soared among them light as a feather—but the storm came, a roiling mass of bright shadows and dark lightning, shredding the fragile web of this illusory peace.

  He startled awake when the storm rolled over him, a shockwave of music and intent like the tide pulling back, back, back, then crashing upon the world once more in a blinding cacophony. Jian clung to the beach, fingers digging into the wet warm sand as wave upon wave of mist and magic and music laved the world, stealing him away, tossing him into the abyss like a fish tossed into the bottom of a boat. For a moment his hand met that of his wife, and she held him fast.

  “Tsali’gei!” he called, and coughed as his lungs filled with cold wet mist.

  “Jian!” Her voice was muffled, as if she were far away and under the sea. “Jian!” In the end the storm was too strong for him, too strong for them, and her fingers slid away from his, away and away, a handful of pearls scattered upon the wind.

  He struggled blind against the gale, the sand, the sea, fought through the blanket of fog to find her. His bare foot found something cold, and round, and he bent to retrieve it:

  A pearl.

  Three steps more, and he found a sea-bear’s claw, dropped from the necklace Tsali’gei always wore. Another pearl, another claw, and his heart twisted with hope. She was leaving a trail for him, so that he might find his way home in the storm. A pearl, a claw, a claw, a pearl… Jian picked them up one by one and clutched them to his breast.

  The storm waned, as storms do—even magical storms roused to anger by wicked kings in far-off lands. The fog lifted and Jian walked faster, following the trail of claws and pearls, till his hands overflowed with them and his heart overflowed with relief and joy to see, at the end of this path, a small and perfect footprint. He lifted his eyes to find a strange and pale light, peered into the waning mist and he beheld a shadowy figure.

  “Tsali’gei!” he called out, and began to run along the beach, pearls and claws threatening to spill from his grasp. “Tsali, wait—”

  The figure turned, and through the mist Jian saw that it was not her, not at all. Shoulders as wide as a bear’s he saw, as the light grew, hair wild and tangled as seaweed, eyes wide and round as…

  …as his own.

  Jian stopped running. He stopped breathing, and stood on the cold sand with his pearls and her claws and his heart all tangled together in his hands. The man smiled at him, a wide smile full of welcome and sharp white teeth, and he growled in a voice like the sea.

  “At last, at last, welcome home at last. My son.”

  * * *

  That first night they fought, tooth and fist and claw.

  The twilight drums sounded, tha-rum tha-rum tha-rumble-rumble like the beating of the heart of the dragon, asleep at the center of the world. Red flames leapt, and dancers leapt over them, and the horns blew like the wind. It was an ancient song, a memory like bones and dust, calling Jian to live and die and live again.

  His body was slick with fat and oil, blood and sweat, and he bared his teeth in a snarl. His opponent snarled back, laughing, slapping at the red dirt with his clawed forepaw, a challenge.

  Jian roared and charged, and in the sweat-thick mists of twilight they met in the middle, claws grasping, teeth snapping, vital and true and alive.

  * * *

  The second night they feasted on meat and bread, salt and water.

  He sat with his father, dining on fish and meat. No singed flesh, this, charred beyond recognition and spiced till not even the spirits of the animals themselves might have guessed which was flesh or fish or fowl. Raw meat, fresh and good, still quivering with sacrificed life. They drank spiced wine and fermented milk, thick and sour, cream and berries and honey-comb.

  Twilight lords and twilight ladies came to stare at him, to honor him with song and dance and battle, to meet this child who had returned from the lands of Men, as no child ever had. Never had Jian beheld such people. Furred and clawed, antlered and winged they came to stare at him with hands outstretched in welcome. They plied him with salt and water and bread, making him one of them, making it true.

  They were not Daechen, half-human princes honored and reviled in the same breath. These were the Dae, first-born, true-born, to whom magic was as natural as breath.

  “My son,” the lord would say, and clap him on the shoulder. “My boy.” Jian’s father was a sho’en, a high warlord, first among his peers. He was whole, gentle and good, and he was strong, besting Jian as easily in battle as a young girl catching butterflies. He plied Jian with endless questions about Tiungpei, about her health and wellbeing, her life, her loves. He made a fist and growled when Jian described his stepfather, and laughed at the story of the goats.

  “Traded him for goats,” he chuckled. “And got the better part of that bargain, I wager. Tiungpei, my girl, my pretty girl. And do you have a pretty girl o
f your own, my son?”

  “I do,” Jian answered, chest swelling with pride. “I have a wife. Her name is Tsali’gei…”

  “Tsali’gei!” A woman who had been seated halfway down the long table shouted and leapt to her feet, eyes flashing, teeth snapping, a dagger of jade in either hand. “Tsali’gei! My Tsali—she lives!” The woman threw her head back and howled, a hair-raising, bone-shattering sound, and the host howled with her.

  “Tsali’gei was born among us, Jian,” his father explained in a soft and sorrowing voice. “Such children are rare, and almost never survive. They do not easily bend to the emperor’s will, and so they… They break. We are bound by ancient treaty to cast them into your world in their sixteenth year.” His large and liquid eyes were filled with a thousand years’ worth of grief.

  “Why send them away, at all?” Jian asked. “The emperor can hardly march into your land and wage war, can he?”

  “We must send them into the world of men because their blood, and our tears,” his father answered, “are all that bind our worlds together. It is a thin bond and weak, but we are lost without them. Without the world of men we have no sun, as you can see,” he gestured out the window to the twilit skies, “and without us, the land of men has no magic. Were the Sundering to be completed…” He slapped his hands hard onto the table, palms-down, knocking his goblet over so that the wine ran red as blood between his fingers. “Both worlds would die.”

  Tsali’gei’s mother howled and wept.

  Meat and bread, salt and water.

  * * *

  On the third day Jian was given three gifts—sea-stones, dragon-bones, and a blade of bitter tears.

  There were two stones, polished rounds of sea-gray and gold half the size of the palm of Jian’s hand. Tsali’gei’s mother gave them to him, and explained that these were symbols of sea and sunlight, female and male, and were a traditional gift to new-married couples. Jian bowed low to his second-mother and gifted her, in return, with his mother’s pearls that he had plucked from the beach.

  “For the day may come,” he told her, “when our two worlds are made whole again, and you are always welcome in my house.”

  “You are a good boy,” she told him. “I may not kill you, after all.”

  Jian smiled weakly and decided to believe she spoke in jest.

  The bones—there were three of these, given to him by a goat-horned man—were the smooth polished disks known to Jian’s people as blood pennies. Found very rarely inside the skulls of the most ancient shongwei, blood pennies were thought to have magical power, the power to grant one’s deepest and darkest desires. Just one would be worth enough to buy half a village—land, cattle, people and all. Jian stared at the three he now held in his hand, and sang softly.

  “Heart of Illindra, Soul of Eth,

  Blood of the innocent condemned to death.

  Under the moons, combine the three,

  Coin enough to set you free.”

  “Even you,” the goat-horned man agreed. “Even me.” He was blood brother to Jian’s father, rather like the dammati, Jian thought, and he favored him with an avuncular smile, bowing low. He gifted the man with the bear claws that Tsali’gei had worn. He ached to let them go, but what else could he do? He had arrived in this land with a fistful of pearls, a fistful of bear claws, and his own skin, something he was even more reluctant to relinquish.

  “You are a good lad,” the uncle said. He smiled with his wide white teeth. “I may not eat you, after all.”

  I am beginning to understand, Jian thought, where some of my mother’s dark cradle tales come from.

  The sword of bitter tears was a gift from his father, and it took his breath away. The blade was blue as the sea, with fine waves that ran the length of its blade and rippled like water before his eyes.

  Jian’s father held it to him hilt-first, as was proper, and wrapped in silk the color of a dangerous sky. Jian accepted the gift in silence and drew the sword from its plain red scabbard. The blade whispered as it slid free. Calling his name, it sang a dream of blood and glory.

  “Magic,” Jian breathed.

  “No more magic than is in my bones, or yours,” his father admonished, “nor in our blood or breath. The power of this sword is no less and no greater than the magic in your soul, son. Heed them both wisely.”

  “We gifted blades like these to the emperors of Sindan in the long ago,” his uncle added, eyes snapping yellow-sharp, “but they did not listen to the songs in their hearts and the magic became tainted. Corrupted.”

  “It is our wish,” Tsali’gei’s mother continued, as if the three of them had rehearsed this song, “that the son of our sho’en be strong enough to resist this taint, and that he may return us to the lands of Akari, that the gentle beauty of our magic might once more shine bright.” Her smile was beautiful, indeed, but it was most certainly not gentle.

  “The gentle beauty of our magic—and of our armies. This is the wish of all our hearts,” the uncle agreed. “The darkest wish.”

  “How am I supposed to do this?” Jian asked, for his heart knew now where his loyalties lay. The lords and ladies of twilight laughed at this.

  “With sea-stones,” one of them called, as the world around Jian began to fade away. It was the morning of his third day in the Twilight Lands, the longest any mortal is allowed to remain in a dream.

  “And dragon-bones,” a woman called. She wore red feathers in her hair and had yellow claws for hands. The land grew thin and pale as watered paint on linen.

  “And a blade of bitter tears,” his father finished. A hand squeezed Jian’s shoulder, lingered, melted away with the dawn.

  “Father!” Jian called out. He struggled against the mist, against the growing light, but the magic of his own land drew him back. “Father!”

  “Allyr,” his father said, smiling even as he disappeared before Jian’s too-human eyes. “My name is Allyr.”

  “Allyr,” the wind chided. “Allyr,” the waves scolded.

  “Allyr,” the dutiful son agreed. Bowing his head to his new-forged blade, he waded back to the shores of man, weeping a song of bitter tears.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The air in Shehannam reeked of ash and murder.

  The empty eyes of dead children, a dagger that reeked of evil, the bones of a slaughtered vash’ai… Hafsa Azeina had one hand full of questions, and no answers in the other. Were those responsible for the deaths of the ne Atu, the royal family of Atualon, also responsible for the attack which had left her sorely wounded, and Khurra’an dying? The Quarabalese, the Daemon Emperor, even the Zeeranim might wish themselves free of Ka Atu, but wishing for the bright rose and grasping the blackthorn branch were two different matters entirely.

  If the King of Atualon died before Sulema learned to wield atulfah, the backlash of magic would be powerful enough to unleash a second Sundering. It was unlikely that the world would survive this one.

  If you wake the Dragon, she asked her unknown enemy, who will sing her back to sleep? Do you hate us enough to destroy yourself?

  * * *

  A soft tap at the door interrupted her trance, bringing her back from the place of dreams.

  “Some outlander man wishes to see you, Dreamshifter,” Kailee called. The doe-eyed Ja’Akari had taken Saskia’s place as her personal guard. “He is not naked. Shall I tell him to bugger off?”

  Hafsa Azeina could not help it. She laughed, even as she opened her waking eyes.

  “Send him in.” She kept her Dreaming eyes half-lidded, wondering who might come to call at this hour, what threat he might pose, and where best to dispose of a body in the Tower of Issa Atu.

  The door opened and her visitor stepped into the room. He was a slight, stooped figure cloaked in the rags and the smell of a root-peddler. His face was concealed in a deep hood, and skinny, begrimed hands clutched a bag that reeked of onions. Hafsa Azeina came slowly to her feet, shaking the last of the dreamwebs from her fingertips.

  “Who are you?”
she asked, rocking forward so that she stood on the balls of her feet.

  “I am every man,” he said in a low growl. “I am no man. I am death.” Throwing his hood back, he revealed the leathery face of an old man, topped by a shock of red and white hair.

  “Mattu Halfmask.” She scowled. “Cut the crap.” She was not displeased that the young man had survived the Salarians’ hospitality, but neither had she wished to see him.

  He sighed theatrically, and dropped his bag of onions—at least, she hoped it was onions—with a thump.

  “What gave it away?”

  “I watched you and your sister put that play on when you were ass-high to a churra,” she reminded him, without relaxing her stance. “What are you doing, coming to my rooms dressed like this?”

  “Would you rather I had come naked?” He laughed at her from behind the snarling mask, and took a seat, without her leave. “Lovely as you are, Issa Atu, and I mean that most sincerely, I have no desire to rouse the wrath of the Dragon King. No man in Atualon has balls that heavy, I’d wager.”

  He had a point. “What do you want?”

  “A kiss or two, but not from you. A thousand white churrim. A pet wyvern. World peace, but I will settle for a horn of usca, if you have it. In my travels I seem to have acquired a taste for the stuff.”

  Hafsa Azeina smoothed the scowl from her face, though it took some effort, and poured them each a measure of usca. Then she sank into her favorite chair, feet planted firmly on the floor.

  “What do you want?” she asked again. The man was stubborn as a churra, but she had been giving stubborn lessons to churrim before he was born. Mattu lifted the mask from his face and tossed the strong drink back, ending with a grimace. Hafsa Azeina was mute with shock. She had not seen his true face since he was a boy of six or so. Younger than Daru.