Servants of the Sands, page 57
As he set the small cup of liquor before Teilo and returned to his seat, he went on. “The cliff face has been on the verge of collapsing for hundreds of years. That would have destroyed the bulk of the coastal communities past rebuilding, and that would have had... complicated effects throughout the entirety of the southlands.”
Again, there was no point in mentioning the multiple functions his Farms served. She wouldn’t care. She’d been in the Jungles for hundreds of years, focused only on her personal power, content to let humanity muddle through on its own; ignoring civilization’s triumphs and catastrophes alike, as long as the protective cocoon of the Jungles wasn’t troubled.
She sipped the drink cautiously, her nose wrinkling. “This is terrible,” she said, setting the cup on the table and pushing it away from her.
He sipped his own, relishing the complex swirl of flavors. “I suppose it’s an acquired taste,” he conceded.
“So you decided to stabilize the Wall, and it’s unwise to press against that binding with stepping from floor to ceiling,” she said. “Foolish of you. It must have taken a large amount of your power. No wonder you’ve been so weak—”
“I’m not the one binding it together,” he said quietly, not raising his gaze from his hands, the cup, the liquor.
“Ah,” she said. “I’d heard there was a protector at the top of the Wall. So you taught it how to—”
“No. It’s not a protector. Not in the modern sense.” He tossed back the rest of his drink, still avoiding her gaze.
She inhaled sharply. “Oh, no,” she said. “Tell me it’s not one of your children.”
Deiq shook his head. “Not one of mine. One of my brothers.’”
“What? Those were all destroyed!”
He made himself meet her shocked, furious glare directly. “It’s the last one,” he said. “The last. I couldn’t save my brothers, I couldn’t save their children—only this one. I’ve been keeping it reasonably stable, and insulated. I’ve put precautions in place, it’s almost impossible for it to communicate with or influence the outside world—”
She was still staring, her mouth open in unabashed disbelief. “You think Evkit’s insane?” she blurted. “You’re using a faereen to stabilize a cliff face! That’s like using an ocean to quench a candle!”
“It’s more complicated than that,” he said, then gestured for quiet as the server returned with their meals. The stew was, as Deiq had hoped, a strongly aromatic dish of fish chunks and alliums in a bright red broth. The rice was drenched in a pureed rosemary sauce, very nearly a soup itself. He inhaled the contrasting aromas with intense pleasure, half-closing his eyes, then offered the server a wide smile that brought an abrupt flush to the young man’s face.
“Lord,” the server said, bowing as though unsure what else to do. “Will there be anything else at the moment?” He glanced at Teilo, and appeared startled that she was looking directly at him.
“No, thank you,” Deiq said, easing back on the smile. “This is enough. I’ll call if we require more food.” The young man nodded, bowed again, and retreated, his movements considerably more fluid and confident than he had been before. “Ah, humans,” Deiq murmured, watching him go. “They do love being found attractive. Especially when their own kind has rejected them.”
Teilo’s mouth was set in a thin line. She said, “Did you think presenting this to me while on your territory, surrounded by luxury, would ease my reaction?”
“Have some of the rice,” he said urbanely, dipping his spoon into his bowl. “It really is quite good. I helped them develop this recipe, if I recall correctly.”
“I have no appetite now,” she said, not even glancing at the food. “You know what the faereen did to me before they were destroyed. And you saved one! You expect me to face it? Your cruelty hasn’t faded one bit, First Born.”
“I’m not going to make you face anything,” he said. “You’re welcome to take another path, if you like. I’m going up the Wall Stair. I’m overdue for a kin-visit.”
“The only way I’m leaving your side is if I gather the entirety of your power under my hand first,” she retorted. “It’s the only way to keep you out of trouble!”
“But then I wouldn’t be able to protect myself, would I?” He ate a spoonful of rice without taking his gaze from her furious expression. After swallowing, he added, “And faereen are dreadfully dangerous, even for me, even when dealing with one I’ve practically raised for hundreds of years.”
She let loose with a stream of invective drawn from three languages most humans had long ago forgotten and four that were still mostly in use. He waited, patient, uninterested in searching his memory to work out what she’d said this time. She finished her tirade in modern kaenic: “You fucking shit.”
He met her gaze, smiling, and ate another spoonful of rice before speaking again. “I promise I won’t let it hurt you, Teilo. Consider this a much-needed exercise in building trust between us.”
She shook her head and began eating the rice, eyes a hazy grey now, and refused to talk to him for the rest of the night.
Chapter 68
The light shifted and shifted again before another knock came at the door. “Thank the gods,” Fimre said. “They’re finally bringing us food.” His bruises had largely faded, but the increasing scruff of facial hair gave him an unsettlingly savage appearance.
A cold indifference moved within her. Food was trivial. Food was human. It was only a weapon to be used against them. “More likely they’re trying something new,” she said. She settled to the ground, her back against the wall furthest from the door, then unbound the door and motioned for Fimre to open it.
Fimre cast her an aggrieved glance and said, “I’d like some food and a clean chamber pot, at least.” Alyea smiled without real humor and didn’t answer. In a distant way, it did seem odd that she hadn’t felt hunger, or the need to eliminate wastes. She shrugged it off as a probable side effect of whatever change had allowed her to feed from Fimre in the first place.
The door swung open almost as soon as Fimre touched it. Fimre retreated with a speed that just barely stayed within graceful boundaries. A bulky, heavily-armored guard stood framed in the doorway, bare hands empty and splayed wide in the ubiquitous signal of non-aggression. His weight was planted solidly, indicating no intention to move forward. Alyea smiled a little, amused at the mix of stolid obedience and anxious caution flowing through the air. It wouldn’t take much to make the man turn and bolt as though all the hells were chasing after him.
“Lord Peysimun,” the guard announced, voice muffled by the dark cloth covering his face from the nose down. “You have a guest.”
“So, no food,” Fimre grumbled. “Lovely.”
Alyea studied the guard. The armor and the face mask made gender impossible to determine for certain, but he seemed a safe enough guess—and it didn’t really matter, one way or another. The guard’s grey-green eyes remained on her, steady, watchful, but not fearful. His anxiety had eased on seeing her sitting still.
She started to ask after the identity of the guest, then realized the pointlessness of that and simply focused other-vision to see who stood in the passageway behind the burly guard. “Oh,” she said. “Idisio. Please come in, ha’inn. You may go,” she added to the guard.
The guard retreated. A slender young man took his place. As they respectively cleared the doorway, Alyea swung the door shut, sealing it once more.
“So this is the one I’ve heard so much about,” Fimre said, taking a step forward and beginning to offer his hand for a northern-style greeting clasp, hand to hand; then shifted the angle slightly as though to grasp Idisio’s forearm instead. Alyea could feel his uncertainty as to the proper greeting. Deiq had been his only above-ground encounter with a ha’ra’ha, and that hadn’t exactly been an exchange of pleasantries.
She looked past him to Idisio, her amusement souring. “Fimre, stop,” Alyea said sharply. “Stay where you are.”
Idisio had changed since she’d last seen him. He was thinner, in a way that had little to do with weight—more as though his bone growth had outpaced his flesh, leaving his skin stretched uncomfortably tight. His grey eyes held a shimmer she’d never seen there before, the faintest mist of multicolored overlay. He watched her with the alert wariness of a hunter facing cornered prey.
Fimre froze, then dropped his hand to his side and backed up a cautious step. Idisio spared Fimre the briefest of glances, assessing and dismissing in that one moment. The Sessin lord bristled but stayed quiet. “Alyea,” Idisio said. “Lord Peysimun.”
Even his voice had shifted, emerging deeper and more solid than before. The new timbre was uncomfortably like Deiq’s. She found herself deeply disturbed by the comparison.
Idisio’s eyes narrowed. He took two prowling steps forward into the room. Alyea rose to her feet. Fimre scrambled to stand as far away from them as possible, muttering something about bloody ha’ra’hain.
The door closed with a quiet, definite thud. Idisio stopped moving. His eyes slid half-shut, hands loosening to hang limp at his sides. “Alyea,” he said, his voice thick now, as though speaking had become difficult. “Stop it. I’m not here to attack you.”
She tried to breathe, to calm herself, bewildered by the urgent rage rattling up her spine. “Mine,” she said before she realized she’d opened her mouth.
Idisio’s eyes widened, a bloom of gold forming along the outer edges. “Yours,” he said through his teeth. “Your room. Your servant.” Fimre chuffed, obviously affronted. They both ignored him. “I make no—no—argument—damnit, Alyea, stop it!”
“Stop what?”
His words emerged just under an outright roar. “Will you please calm down before I put you through a fucking wall?”
The room blurred around her, time and space moving in nauseating gyrations. Fimre screamed, a long, wailing, shuddering cry. When the disorientation cleared, she found herself on her stomach, her arms wrenched painfully behind her, Idisio’s weight pinning her to the ground. A strange dusty smell hung in the air, and her vision blurred erratically.
“I’m not interested in a fight, godsdamnit,” he panted. “I’m here to ask you for help.”
“The hells she’s not ha’ra’hain,” Fimre muttered, somewhere to Alyea’s left.
“She’s not,” Idisio said tightly. “She’s acting like one, reacting like one, but she’s not. Alyea. Listen to me. Are you listening? I don’t know what the hells is going on with you, but you have to calm down before I really hurt you.”
She lay still, feeling the tension shivering through his hands where he held her wrists, through his thighs where he knelt over her. A watery shock spread through her. Had she just attacked Idisio? What was happening to her?
Rage skittered along her spine again: Mine, mine, mine, my territory, my servant, mine—She caught in a sharp breath and tried to release the tension throughout her entire body. It felt like attempting to soften a brick by running a damp washcloth across it.
“I need your help, Alyea,” Idisio said. “Will you please listen to me?”
“Get off me,” she said through her teeth. “Let me go. I can’t calm down while you’re twisting my arms!”
Idisio hesitated, then moved clear. Aggrieved tension slowly faded, fragmenting into a more manageable gravel-sand sensation. Alyea drew in a long breath, then another, before rolling to her feet and turning to face Idisio once more.
Actual gravel-sand crunched underfoot.
She froze, her vision clarifying at last: looked down at the ground, then up at her surroundings. Not prison walls, but rocky scree, twisted devil-trees, and gigantic slabs of rock torn free at some distant past moment from the towering cliff face behind her. A grey-blue, cloud-littered sky stretched overhead. Far below shone the unmistakable glitter of water, dotted with bright-sailed merchant ships. A rough path, barely wide enough for a single file line, wound from their plateau up the side of the cliff, disappearing around a bend in the rock long before it reached the top.
“What,” she said. “What?”
“That’s my line,” Fimre muttered. She shot him a black glare. He rolled his eyes at her, unrepentant.
“Stand still,” Idisio advised her, grinning. “That’s a nasty drop, and the footing’s bad here.”
“Where the hells are we?” Her throat rasped with the acidic anger of the demand.
“The Horn,” Idisio said, his smile fading. “I think.” He looked up at the cliff, down at the sea, and shrugged. “Well, you’re definitely not in prison any longer. I thought that moving us elsewhere might help you calm down.”
Alyea watched an eagle lofting by far overhead. In a low voice, she asked, “Are we in teyanain territory?”
“I don’t know,” Idisio said as quietly. He shrugged at the look she shot him. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I just wanted to get clear of that room so that we could talk.”
She glanced at Fimre, noting the grey strain in his face, the way his hands trembled. “I heard Fimre screaming,” she said.
Thin-lipped, the Sessin lord jerked his chin at Idisio, who met Alyea’s glare without apparent concern.
“He’ll be fine, Alyea,” Idisio said, his flat tone once more a disturbing echo of Deiq’s. “I didn’t take much. And I couldn’t very well use you, given that we were in the middle of a fight.”
“I’ve been through worse,” Fimre said harshly. “Doesn’t make it pleasant.”
Alyea stared at the chill pragmatism in Idisio’s expression and found herself at a loss for words. “What happened to you?” she blurted.
A shiver wrinkled the skin on her arms at the look that crossed Idisio’s face.
“Don’t ask.” His chin lifted, his eyes sliding half-closed; he inhaled loudly through his nose. “We’re not on teyanain land. Just barely—but we’re past their boundary.”
“How do you know?” Alyea demanded.
“There are four teyanain watching us from about a quarter mile away. If they could come closer, they would. So they can’t. So we’re not on their land.” Idisio almost preened, smug in his certainty.
“Not true,” someone said.
Alyea looked up reflexively, scanning the area, and saw nothing. Idisio shut his eyes, his head cocked slightly to one side, and seemed to be listening intently. Fimre stood as still as the stone around him, his face washing out into a mottled grey anxiety.
“Show yourself!” Alyea snapped. “Don’t play games.”
“Games are what make life fun,” the voice said, from a different spot this time. “You’re on teyanain land. Your ha’ra’hain companion is wrong about that. But he’s not entirely wrong, even though he’s distressingly ignorant. He doesn’t understand that teyanain have what you would call factions. Political parties that are currently in rather sharp disagreement.”
Alyea sucked in a breath, startled.
“Oh?” the voice said, from behind her this time. She took her cue from Idisio, shut her eyes, and forced herself not to look for the speaker. “You didn’t know either? Oh my. Your husband never told you? That’s unfortunate.”
“Your what?” Fimre choked out.
“Oh my,” the voice said. “And these two didn’t know that you bound yourself to the First Born ha’ra’ha. That’s amusing. Oh—their expressions!” The voice hiccupped into laughter, then calmed again. “My day is the brighter now. But come—open your eyes, ha’ra’ha, northern lord, southern lord—and let’s all speak properly.”
Alyea could feel Fimre and Idisio staring at her. Her face burned as though under a molten beam of sunlight. She ground her teeth together for a moment, then opened her eyes to face their horrified expressions.
“Tell me it’s not true,” Fimre said hoarsely. “Holy gods, Alyea! You didn’t! You’re—”
“I’m insane,” she said. “Yes.”
A chuckle came from behind her. She turned, carefully slow and precise in her movements.
The man was tall and light-skinned for a teyanin, with pale grey eyes and coarse, dark brown hair. He wore simple grey and dun clothing. A strap across his broad chest held a dozen thin throwing knives and an array of black-tufted blowgun darts. He allowed her to study him for a few breaths, a smile creasing his plump face, then said, “Lords northern and southern. Ha’ra’ha. My name is Grey.”
“Not a very teyanin name,” Fimre said.
Grey dipped his head in a nod, apparently unoffended. “True,” he agreed. “I am what the traditional teyanain call huerg. My father was not of pure teyanain blood, so my mother and I were sent away to live on the fringes of teyanain land. It is supposed to be a place of deep shame.”
He motioned with one hand, a sweeping gesture that took in their surroundings. “I find no shame in living with such beauty. Better here, I think, than in the stifling corridors within the mountains that the traditional teyanain favor so.”
Fimre didn’t take his stare from Grey’s face. “You said factions,” he said. “Teyanain have factions?”
“We are no less complex than the other desert Families, although we do like to be seen as monolithic,” Grey said, his smile fading. “The northern lord and the ha’ra’ha, I believe, have been guests of one faction in the past. The huerg see little to no value in following that faction. They rejected us, they sent us to live at the far edges of the land, areas that are difficult to survive in at best. What service do we owe such masters? None. So we have claimed our lands as our own, and the other factions do not cross our borders without our permission.” He paused. “Not even,” he added with a sly smile, “when we have acquired a prize they deeply desire.”
“We are not your prizes,” Alyea said tightly.
“Of course you are,” Grey said, laughing again, “and better off ours than theirs. Those teyanain watchers you sense, ha’ra’ha, would dearly love to lay hands on the northern lord again, as well as yourself. You’ve both gone through certain changes that make you—let’s say, more valuable than you were previously. Ah. That reminds me.” He produced three looped strands of greyish-blue beads. “Put these on, please. It’s for your own protection.”
