The Ring of Five Dragons, page 5
part #1 of The Pearl Series
Soon enough, Kurgan sauntered back with a nonchalance that only Annon identified as false. It was Kurgan who took especial note of the complete attention that had come to him like a high-profit deal. The power waxed inside of him like the sun at midday. “And how would you offer such implausible proof to V’ornn satisfaction?”
“I would propose a contest of arrows.”
“A contest, eh?” There was that cunning glint of the snow-lynx in Kurgan’s night-black eyes. “I thirst for contests.”
“That is unsurprising,” Giyan said neutrally. “No V’ornn can resist one.”
“You being the expert.” He went to where she had set the longbow against the limestone wall and hefted it. He grinned, sure of himself now. “On behalf of the V’ornn, I accept.” He walked over to where Annon stood and held out the Kundalan longbow. “I will use my okum-mmon and your master-child will use this inferior—“
The words died in his throat as Giyan plucked the longbow out of his grasp. “Your contest is with me.”
“With you? You cannot be serious.”
“I am perfectly serious. You will use your aberrant V’ornn link and I will use this” She lifted the longbow over her head.
“You mock me, slave! I reject this farce!”
“But no, you cannot.” Giyan made a sweeping gesture. “In front of the entire hingatta you accepted.”
“But I—“
“She is right, Kurgan,” Annon said. “You accepted.”
Kurgan felt betrayed. Why had Annon taken the Kundalan slave’s side? Could he actually feel something for this inferior creature simply because she had suckled him, nursed him, tended to his needs? That is what Tuskugggun did with their lives. One did not take the side of the help. Perhaps Annon spoke so as a bit of mischief to humiliate him. In any event, Kurgan could see that he wasn’t going to get any.help from Annon. He looked around from face to face. It was clear to him that none of the Tuskugggun would raise a voice in protest, not even his mother. Well, what could you expect from females, he thought bitterly. They would not contradict Giyan directly; but behind her back they were oh so adept at tearing her to ribbons. And then another thought came to him: what if they were as afraid of the Kundalan sorceress as he was? This caused a sharp stab of anger to impale him. Afraid? Of a Kundalan? It was shamefull. He was eldest son of Wennn Stogggul, Prime Factor of the Bashkir! He would take on any alien sorcery and crush it beneath his boot soles. He had the okummmon; he was linked with the Gyrgon.
“I accepted, it is truth,” Kurgan said, glaring at Giyan. “The contest is sealed.”
“Sealed, then,” murmured the Tuskugggun and their offspring as one. “For good or for ill.”
Idiots! Kurgan thought as he grabbed a handful of bolts. “Outside,” he said, hoping it sounded like a command.
“Wherever you prefer,” Giyan told him. She was about to strap a square quiver full of arrows across her back, when Kurgan stayed her hand.
“A moment,” he said. He pulled the arrows out and inspected them, an offense that would have spawned a decades-long blood feud had she been a V’ornn. Though she was the regent’s mistress and had been granted certain rights above other Kundalan, she was what she was, doubtless too backward to have the V’ornn’s keenly civilized sense of honor and disgrace. Did an animal care where it shat? Of course not. And no civilized person expected it to.
Outside, the architectural order of the city was striking. Beneath a cloudless cerulean sky neat rows of two-story buildings of rose-and-blue limestone with kiln-fired green-glazed tile roofs lined cobbled streets that radiated from a central plaza like the spokes of a wheel or the rays of the sun. At the heart of this open space stood the regent’s palace, a structure of bronze-and-gold spires, red-enameled minarets, carved cinnamon-colored walls whose overall appearance was altogether too ethereal for V’ornn tastes. A wide avenue, neatly bisecting the octag- onal plaza, ran due south to Harborside with its kilometers-long Promenade where the Chuun River, which skirted the city to the west, spilled its seed into the Sea of Blood. Merchants and traders of every description filled Harborside, a rough-and-tumble neighborhood where could be found the only enclave of Sarakkon on the northern continent. The Sarakkon were a wild, piratical race inhabiting Kundala’s southern continent. The V’ornn had long ago judged them insignificant, their land so devoid of decent natural resources it was not worth occupying. Besides, it contained pockets of radiation, making it unfit for even the hardiest of Khagggun. The V’ornn appeared to tolerate Sarakkonian presence, even occasionally trading with them, for the Gyrgon were possessed of an interest in materials of their manufacture.
One hundred and one years ago, when the V’ornn had come, no walls encircled Axis Tyr, there were no ramparts from which sentries might espy an oncoming enemy. You could see, depending on which section of the city you were in, the sysal forest to the east, the Great Phosphorus Marsh to the west, to the north the Chuun River flowing down from the foothills of the Djenn Marre, and to the south the Sea of Blood.
“So open!” the V’ornn shuddered when they first occupied the city. “So vulnerable to attack.” It was unthinkable for them to inhabit a place thus unfortified. In consequence, thousands of Kundalan had labored for a full year to construct a V’ornn wall around the city. The wall was hewn from massive blocks of the same black basalt the Kundalan has used to build the Promenade. The V’ornn, obsessed with their safety and security, drove the workers to their tolerance level and beyond. Hundreds of Kundalan perished, an unseemly and grisly foundation, but one which the V’ornn found to be another appropriate deterrent to insurrection.
The V’ornn wall was fully thirteen meters thick at its base, tapering to just over eight meters at its apex. It rose twenty meters above street level, making of the city a prison. The whereabouts of Kundalan, including their passage in and out of the three gates at the western, northern and eastern boundaries of the wall, was monitored through the use of an okuuut, a subcutaneous identity implant embedded in the flesh of the left palm. Each okuuut was synchronized to the individual beat-rate and harmonics of the Kundalan who wore it, making identification virtually instantaneous.
Now, all the members of hingatta lüina do mori were in the courtyard that fronted a wide avenue that ran straight to the regent’s palace, a thousand meters to the north. Kurgan and Giyan stood facing one another while the others spread out in a semicircle around them. Almost immediately, as if to preempt her opponent, Giyan strode off fifty paces. With the point of one of her arrows she scored a thin vertical line in the rough bark of a sysal tree. “There,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “The target.” As she watched Kurgan fitting a bolt to his okummmon she could see that her voice had drawn the attention of those nearby. By the time she returned to stand beside the V’ornn a sizable crowd had formed. And why not? It wasn’t any day that a Kun-dalan—and the regent’s mistress, at that!—challenged a V’ornn.
Giyan lifted an arm in Kurgan’s direction. “You have the honor.”
With an almost contemptuous sneer on his face, Kurgan lifted his arm to the horizontal. It was a casual motion, no more, surely, than if he were giving directions to a traveler who had lost his way. He barely seemed to look at the tree and the bolt was loosed in a whir and a blur. In an instant, it had sunk home right in the center of the line Giyan had scored in the bark.
“Perfect!” he cried in a tone of voice that brought instant applause from every V’ornn watching. Now he turned to Giyan and, in a coarse parody of a courtly manner, said: “The honor is now yours.”
As Giyan took up her bow, he said: “It would give me pleasure to sight for you.”
“I am certain it would,” she answered amid a chorus of V’ornn laughter, a rough, raucous, beastly noise that grated on sensitive Kundalan ears. “But I do not intend to lose.” This last brought a low, melodious soughing from the sprinkling of Kundalan in the crowd. Giyan took a moment to regard them out of the corner of her eye. She did not mistake their positive reaction for love of her. She was the regent’s mistress. Perhaps they despised her an iota less than their V’ornn masters. But it was also entirely possible that they hated her even more, for surely they had marked her as a collaborator.
These were her people, and yet, when she looked at them, bedraggled and forlorn, she felt nothing—or next to nothing. Perhaps they were right about her, for the truth was that she seemed at home with the V’ornn—or at least with Eleusis and Annon. She did not long for her village of Stone Border, the chaotic furor of the packed-dirt streets, the constant tension from V’ornn raids, the terror of their random and capricious murders and beatings of innocent Kundalan.
Truth to tell, Giyan’s Gift had made her feel like an outsider at the Abbey of Floating White where she and Bartta had been trained as Ramahan priestesses. Kundalan life had begun to break down, and the sporadic raids perpetrated by Khagggun packs terrorized the countryside into a state of semiparalysis. Here in Axis Tyr there was, at least, order and an overarching sense of purpose. Of course, it was V’ornn order and V’ornn purpose. But the regent, Eleusis Ashera, was unlike the majority of V’ornn, on that fact she would stake her life. He did not view Kundalan as inferior, as slaves disposable as food, animals without souls (this was the V’ornn view of the universe, not the Kundalan, who knew that every animal possessed unique knowledge as well as a unique soul). This was why he had treated her as his love, not as his property as the other V’ornn supposed. In the utter privacy of the palace, he allowed her to worship Müna, to mix the potions and poultices that healed and mended him and Annon, to practice the element-magic that was her birthright. Above all, he did not question her Kundalan heart, but rather sought to understand it. These were, among others, their secrets, each one of which, should it fall on an unfriendly or jealous ear, would doom him even—he felt—with the Gyrgon who held him in such great esteem.
And this was why he had been intent on creating the great experiment of Za Hara-at—had risked the enmity of Wennn Stogggul along with many other V’ornn of both Great and Lesser Castes—so that he could fashion the first city in which V’ornn and Kundalan traded freely, exchanged information, learned from one another.
Giyan’s reverie was abruptly terminated as she became aware that every eye in the crowd was focused on her. And what a throng it had become! She drew an arrow from her quiver, stroked her fingertips along its smooth, straight length, notched it to her bow.
“I don’t know why you bother,” Kurgan said. “You will have to split my bolt to win. Your arrow cannot scratch V’ornn alloy. Concede defeat now and avoid unnecessary humiliation.”
Giyan smiled sweetly, aimed at the tree and pulled back the bowstring to its very limit. A hush fell over the crowd. Then she raised the bow until the arrow was pointing just shy of vertical and let fly.
“Are you insane?” Kurgan said as the arrow arced into the sky. He turned to the expectant crowd. “She is insane, my friends. You can see with your own eyes. Utterly and completely insane.”
The arrow, having reached the apogee of its arc, now headed back downward. It struck her as odd—almost comical—the V’ornn’s long, shining, hairless skulls moving in concert as they monitored its descent. With a soft, musical thwang! the arrow buried itself at the foot of the tree bole.
“Aha! Not much more could be expected from a feeble Kundalan attempt,” Kurgan cried, already beginning his victory march to the sysal tree. He was brought up short by Giyan’s voice. “Do not touch the arrow,” she warned. But Kurgan, emboldened by the crowd and his triumph, ignored her. Reaching the foot of the tree, he grabbed the arrow to pull it from the ground, but immediately let out with such a cry that the spectators expelled a collective gasp.
“Yowl It’s hot!” Kurgan waved his reddened hand aloft. “The thing is burning up!”
Indeed, there appeared to be movement at the arrow’s feathered end. A haze had appeared—the kind that made the air dense and crazed with heat ripples. Were the feathers melting away? No, as they craned their necks the spellbound spectators saw that the feathers had been transformed into a vine of a green so deep it bordered on black. This vine very rapidly grew runners that sought out the bole of the sysal tree and wrapped around it. As they climbed, they grew notched leaves of a shape no one—neither Kundalan nor V’ornn—had ever seen before. In no time at all, the runners reached the cut Giyan had made in the bark. As if with a mind of their own, they twined around the V’ornn bolt. In a trice, it was completely engulfed.
“What is this?” Kurgan stood with hands on hips. “What is going on here?”
Giyan, enwreathed in a small smile, pulled at the runners. Even as they wrapped themselves around her slender wrist they began to crumble to a silvery powder until, quite as rapidly as they had appeared, they had vanished. The stunned throng crept forward, the murmuring among them rising to an incredulous babble. For there was no sign of the bolt Kurgan had shot into the tree.
Giyan plucked the arrow from the ground, but before she could replace it in her quiver Kurgan had snatched it from her. His fingers traced the arc of the feathers, the long, straight wooden shaft, the metal point which, now that he looked at it closely, had the exact shape of the vine leaves.
“What manner of magic is this?” he muttered.
“Sorcery, yes.” Giyan took possession of the arrow. “Kundalan sorcery.” Her piercing blue eyes were firmly fixed on Kurgan. “Dark sorcery… Powerful sorcery. The contest is over. I have won.”
“Won? Won?” Kurgan howled. “How could you win? My bolt struck the tree at its heart. Your arrow never—“
“Here is my arrow.” Giyan raised it over her head for all to see. “Where is your bolt, Kurgan?”
“You know where my bolt is!” He leapt to the tree. “If you require proof, I will show you! Here is where the bolt I shot—” He was brought up short as he ran his hands down the bark in an increasing frenzy. “Where is it?” he cried. “Where is the cut?”
“What cut?” Giyan asked in a silky voice, for there was no sign of the bite the bolt had made in the tree. Save for the vertical line Giyan had scored in the bark, the tree appeared exactly as it had before the contest was called.
I ortents Secrets, ana Lies
Enter, Morcha,” the regent Eleusis Ashera said effusively. “Today we have much to celebrate!”
“Regent?” Kinnnus Morcha was a huge, hulking V’ornn with a deep scarred crease along the left side of his shining skull. The four gold suns on his purple silicon polymer uniform marked him as the commandant of the Haaar-kyut, Khagggun handpicked by Eleusis and trained by Morcha himself, loyal and answerable only to the regent.
The day’s business at an end, the two V’ornn found themselves alone in the Great Listening Hall of the regent’s palace. It was an asymmetrical space—roughly oval in shape—that the V’ornn found unsettling. A gallery ran around the perimeter one story up. This gallery was capped by a plaster ceiling held aloft by alabaster columns set on black-granite plinths. However, the entire center of the hall was open to the elements. Now, late-afternoon lights bathed the three highly polished heartwood posts set in a perfect equilateral triangle that spanned three meters on a side.
Eleusis roamed within the precincts of this imaginary triangle as his Haaar-kyut commander watched silently. He often did this, in a vain attempt to fathom its meaning. Was it religious, spiritual, practical? Even the Ramahan he had consulted, even the ones who had been interrogated by Kinnnus Morcha in the bowels of the palace, had no explanation. How old were these posts? Could they have predated even the palace?
“Line-General, do you have any idea what the Kundalan used these posts for?”
Kinnnus Morcha shrugged. “My suspicion is that they were part of a weapon.”
“Spoken like a true Khagggun.” Eleusis pursed his lips. “If so, then why was it never used against us?” He shook his head. “No, the Gyrgon assure me that the posts were never used as a weapon. What, then? Are they decoration? Part of a temple to Müna? We have been on
Kundala one hundred and one years and we still do not know.” He cocked his head to one side. “Does that not strike you as odd?”
“To be honest, regent, I give the Kundalan thought only when I have to kill one.”
Eleusis nodded, as if he fully expected that answer. “Still, it makes its point.”
The Line-General waited several moments before he said: “What point, regent?”
“That no matter how much we know, there is always more to learn.” Eleusis strode swiftly out of the triangle, raising an arm for Morcha to follow him. They passed through an open doorway into the regent’s private anteroom.
Eleusis could no longer keep the smile of satisfaction off his face. “Today’s case in point. I have just received a communique from the site of Za Hara-at. They have signed the last contract!”
“Contracts,” Kinnnus Morcha scoffed. “You should have let me take my wing of Khagggun and dealt with the Korrush tribes the way we have dealt with the local Kundalan.” The Korrush was the local name of the Great Northern Plains, 250 kilometers northeast of Axis Tyr. To its north was the Great Rift in the Djenn Marre, to its east was the beginning of the Great Voorg, the vast, trackless desert.
“And have the added expense of stationing a permanent pack of Khagggun at the site to ensure against vandalism and random attacks?” The regent shook his head. “Dealing with them this way makes far more sense, Line-General. Now they will join our work crews. At Za Hara-at goodwill is everything.”
“Pardon my bluntness, regent, but what is goodwill to a Khagggun?”
Eleusis laughed good-naturedly as he slapped the Line-General on his broad back. “Imagine it. V’ornn and Kundalan working side by side to create what is sure to become the greatest trading city on the planet. So much for Prime Factor Stogggul and his reactionary cabal.” He was grinning from ear to ear. “It seems as if allowing Kundalan businesses to flourish in the same garden as V’ornn trading houses will be a most lucrative endeavor.”
