Dawnbringer

Chapter Sixteen

SANCTUARY OF SHADRUN-OF-THE-SNOWS

1600 DR-THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES

Bithesi examined the cut in the dog’s side. The big mongrel cur lay on its side, panting heavily and whimpering slightly when Bithesi’s careful fingers probed the edges of the wound. It kept as still as it could, however, and never snapped at her, even when she dipped a rough rag in a bucket of warm water and washed away the clotted blood.

She muttered an apology, and the dog’s tail thumped lightly in the straw that mounded the floor of the stable. Then its gaze went over her shoulder, and its eyes narrowed. Its body tensed, and it lifted its head. Its lips drew back, exposing impressive white canines, and a liquid growl rumbled up its throat.

Bithesi laid her hand, damp with water, on the animal’s neck.

“Hush, Torq,” she said. “They’re friends.”

The dog quieted and laid its head back down, but it kept a distrustful gaze on the two figures in the doorway.

Bithesi didn’t turn around, keeping her attention on the wound in Torq’s flank.

“Come in, Lakini,” she said. “And your companion as well. It’s chilly outside.”

It was. The warmth of the autumn day had fled with the setting sun, and the mountain air now hinted of the bone-cold winter to come. The barn, occupied by a dozen-odd horses as well as their keeper, the dog Torq, and the usual contingent of cats, was warm, with the pleasant earthy smell of a well-kept farmyard.

“Bithesi,” said Lakini.

“You never said good-bye,” said Bithesi, breaking in on her.

“I don’t-” Lakini began.

“Good-bye,” Bithesi said. “It’s a thing friends say to each other when they part. A grace note, in the midst of our small business, our comings and goings, our mortal squalor. A simple thing to say. You’re not mortal, but you might try to remember.”

Lakini had no answer.

Bithesi glanced up at Kestrel, and her gaze lingered. The wounds on her face were healing, and the scars were forming pink on her hands, but her cheekbones stood out and her eyes glittered as if fevered.

“Would you like to help?” Bithesi spoke to Kestrel as she would to a small child.

Kestrel reached out a trembling hand to the dog. She paused, looking searchingly at Bithesi, her hand suspended in the air.

She touched the dog’s side. Torq jerked in response, then quieted as she gently stroked his short, coarse fur.

Bithesi waited until the dog’s breathing grew regular before raising the threaded needle with her right hand and pinching together the sides of the cut with her left. She muttered something that sounded like a short prayer or invocation before she bent to her work, stitching the animal’s skin back together with tiny knots, delicate as the embroidery on a lady’s court dress.

Torq’s eyes jerked open and he whimpered, but Kestrel placed a firm hand on his neck and kept stroking his side, and he didn’t stir.

“Good-bye, Bithesi, my friend,” said Lakini.

She would not say Ashonithi. She knew she would never see Bithesi again.

Lakini waited a long time at the barn entrance, feeling the cold air on her back and the barn warmth on her face. From one of the corners where the wall met the ceiling, a nesting dove cooed. Bithesi focused on the dog’s wound as if nothing else existed. Kestrel glanced up at the deva once, a serious look that recalled the grave manner of her daughter.

“Good-bye, Lakini,” said Bithesi, not looking at her.

Kestrel turned toward her, still keeping her hands on the dog’s side. She gave a small, tight smile.

Lakini smiled back and slipped away.

Standing in the mud outside the barn, Lakini became aware that she held within herself the small hope of staying at Shadrun, of finding for herself the idea that the mortal races called “home.” But with the realization came the knowledge that hope lay stillborn inside her. However many years she had spent at the sanctuary, even if she stayed here a century more, she would always be apart. The place would be familiar, even comfortable to her. But she would never cherish it in her heart, or long for it when she was away, as a crofter did his hovel or Bithesi her stables.

Home … Lusk had tried to find it with his adopted human family, until the chance violence that always threatened to engulf the mortal destroyed them and made him the twisted creature he had become-and was doomed to be forever. Kestrel had found it, and it had been torn from her. Bithesi wove her home around the animals she tended, finding a warm place inside the meditative task of caring for them.

The moments she had spent in Bithesi’s company were her home, Lakini realized, and the many years she had spent with Lusk. But Lusk’s madness had taken one home away from her, and Bithesi’s mortality the other.

Something stung her eye, and she halted, blinking. The sting became a mild burn, and the burn gathered into liquid within her eye, and as she shut it briefly, a drop of moisture fell to the dust at her feet. The burning was gone.

Lakini touched her cheek in wonder, feeling one more drop there. A tear. She had wept. Was that one of the consequences of denying her reincarnation? Would she become more mortal?

Was it a punishment or a reward?

Fandour was puzzled. Two of his vectors had winked out, one soon after the other, just at the point of seizing the Rhythanko.

But now the Rhythanko was close-closer than it had been in millennia, although it was … changed, somehow. It had taken refuge in a different form.

Fandour went over his connection in the Rogue Plane like knots in a fishing line, finding none broken until he tried to touch those vectors, then … nothing.

He was patient. He still had his foothold. And the Rhythanko was near.

FOOTHILLS OF THE CURNA MOUNTAINS, BEASTLANDS

1600 DR-THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES

The heat of the day still lingered, cloying and oppressive in the still air. In the tall, dry grass, a few insects chirped wearily. Now and then a birdsong sounded from the low trees that clustered in deep, stream-cut ravines that threaded the foothills.

A figure trotted through the dry grasses, casting a long, thin shadow diagonally over the ground. It was a human boy. He had the scrawny frame of a child, but his face, gaunt and anxious, hinted that he was older. He was clothed in worn leggings and a thin shirt, and his feet were bare and calloused.

The Boy-he had had a name once, but his masters had called him nothing but “Boy” for so long, he’d forgotten it-cast a worried glace at the sun, reddening low over the foothills of the Curna Mountains. If he didn’t find the runaway swarm and capture the queen by nightfall, one of Lord Mahijith’s hives would be lost.

The Boy didn’t think that Skreetchu, the raven-headed kenku overseer that supervised the lord’s outlying estates, would show mercy to a slave who lost a valuable swarm.

For one thing, busy with the extra task of changing out soiled straw in the stables, he’d been late going out to the hives. Despite the heat and his weary shoulders, he enjoyed the walk to the outer fields. A rare, refreshing breeze tumbled past him, cooling his sweat-soaked shirt, and the wheat was ripening in great golden knots on top of swaying stems. The Boy strode down the worn path between one furrowed field and the next, spreading his fingers at his sides to touch the stiff stalks on either side. Past the thick rows of grain the world fell away in gentle curves, humping and mounding in the distance until the foothills reared up and became the Curna Mountains, with their sharp, white-capped precipices and knifelike, purple-shadowed sides. He paused and breathed deeply, fancying he could feel the mountain’s icy breath in the hot air.

Sometimes he pretended he came from a cool climate and would someday return to a place where a handful of chilled snow could cool a hot face after the labor of the day. Perhaps he did. He had been sold into Lord Mahijith’s household as a child, and he remembered little before that. He didn’t know if his dim impressions of a protective father and a gentle mother were real or simply products of his imagination.

The haystack-shaped hives were arranged in two even rows. His first task was to check the perimeter to see if the wards that protected the combs and their sweet treasure still held. Only Skreetchu knew the cantrips that would keep bears and other hungry animals from scenting and tearing apart the hives, but the charmed crystal in his pocket would tell him if they needed renewal.

The Boy frowned. In the distance, a black cloud hovered over one of the farthermost hives, a cloud that flexed and compacted into a black ball and then spread out until he could see its component parts. Bees-thousands of bees, hovering over their hive, when they should be returning from their labor and settling in for the night.

Giving the quieter haystacks a wide berth, he trotted toward the cloud, keeping his breathing in check. That was one of the first things he’d learned after Skreetchu assigned him to care for the hives-it never was wise to panic around bees.

The contented buzzing of sated bees, always an undertone in this section of the fields, changed as he approached the golden speckled mass. The sound was higher, not threatening, but excited, and the hive in question was not, as he feared, smashed by some marauding animal whose craving for honey had overcome its fear of being stung. The woven straw dome on its stand was whole, and bees still crawled in and out. Some perched in rows near the entrance, cooling it with their furiously vibrating wings.

The cloud of bees over his head swooped left and right, looking for all the world like a single entity rather than a disparate swarm.

Realization struck him like a sharp blow to the belly. The hive was swarming, half its inhabitants splitting off from its mother and old queen, and this was the new queen’s mating flight.

The Boy had not expected such a thing-bees swarmed in spring and early summer. If the queen led her followers and mates into the hills now, just at the point when summer was turning into autumn, they’d be lost to Mahijith’s estates. They might even die. Bees that swarmed out of season often died.

In the spring, Skreetchu would have been prepared with new hives and tools-smoke and instruments-to capture the queen, to create a new hive and increase production, and there would be more honey for the master’s stores. Now, however, not only would they lose the nascent colony, but the honey production from the mother hive would be halved for the season.

The pitch of the swarm rose, shrilling in the autumn air, and the cloud started to move. Individuals broke apart and rejoined, but the center of the mass remained compact. The new queen was somewhere in the middle.

He kept the crystal inside a crude box he had hacked out of a chunk of wood that fell from the pile by the fireplace in the cold of winter, knowing the punishment would be dire if he lost the magical trinket. If he could track the swarm and capture the queen, he could use it to return her to one of the empty hives.

Should he follow them now, or let Skreetchu know what had happened? He risked a beating either way.

The Boy made up his mind. He drew a deep breath and ran, leaving Mahijith’s estate behind him, following the black cloud of bees into the reddening sky.

Hewn blocks carved with worn runes lay scattered, half-buried in the sandy soil. A lizard ran across the rough surface, pausing with its tail lying half in the depression made by an ancient sigil. It lowered its blue-sheen belly to the hot surface of the stone and up again.

Before it, between the rocks that were tumbled carelessly across the sand, the air began to shiver. As if someone had cast a stone into the still surface of a pond, ripples formed and spread from a turbulent center located a man’s height from the grassy sand. Like glass heated and pulled this way and that in a glassblower’s kiln, the air took transparent shape.

The only witness was the lizard, which pushed up and down a few more times, flicked a pale pink tongue, and vanished in a quick scuttle between the slabs of stone.

In the still heat, the column of air warped and flexed. There was a smoky smell like green sticks burning. Slowly the ripples took on a humanoid shape, as if a figure made of glass moved underwater, all but invisible in its transparency.

Something small and yellow-brown buzzed heavy-bodied through the air, making a lazy circle around the coalescing transparent figure. Then came another, and another, until a dozen bees were making their drowsy sound between the ruins.

The Boy stopped, catching his breath, bent with his hands on his thighs. He reached down to pull a burr from the hem of his leggings and paused. On the ground by his boot a disoriented bee crawled, falling from one thick blade of grass and crawling up another. Bigger, more elongated than a worker, it was a drone, dying after a mating flight.

They couldn’t be far. He plucked the burr away and started off again in an efficient jog-trot, instinct telling him to follow the faint breath of a breeze that freshened the unseasonable evening warmth. His foot almost turned against a half-buried stone block, too regular to be natural. There must have been buildings here once, long before Lord Mahijith and his ilk had laid claim to the Durpar lowlands. He scanned the landscape constantly for the blur of the swarm, aware he had ventured farther from Skreetchu’s domain than he ever remembered having done before. The tall grass thinned here, and the soil looked to be mixed with sand. What had stood here, and what happened to the builders? Had a town grown here once, and died over time like an out-of-season swarm? Or had a conquering race like Mahijith’s destroyed them?

There! Was that the flicker of the black cloud, vanishing behind the crest of the next hill? He hurried ahead and saw that the bosom of the hill hid a hollow, as if some giant had scooped an enormous handful of the sandy earth out of its side, leaving a gentle depression large enough to hold a manor and its grounds. The Boy could hear the consistent hum, louder and louder as he approached the lip of the hollow.

If they had settled to rest, or to spend the night, in some foliage in the hollow, he had a chance. He probed his pocket, feeling the rough surface of the box inside. If he could find the queen in the center of the swarm, and if he could manipulate her into the box without hurting her, and without the defensive worker bees turning hostile … He muttered a quick prayer and pulled out the box. He reached the edge of the hollow, looked down, and gasped.

His first impression was that some elemental horror, a story told to frighten children around the fire in the dead of winter, had risen from the ruins of a cursed habitation. A primal bolt of fear, ice-cold, shot through his bowels. A tall humanoid stood just below him, featureless save for a vague indentation where its eyes should have been. Although the figure was still as stone, its black and tawny flesh was moving, like a goat’s carcass alive with maggots, and he felt a prickle over his own skin in response.

It stood as a supplicant, facing the setting sun with arms upraised as if in appeal. The lumps at the ends of the outstretched limbs looked like hands from which the fingers had corroded and fallen away. As he watched, a golden brown mass of the thing’s skin fell to the ground in a clump and fell apart. It disintegrated into many small bodies, some crawling over the grass that grew between the squared-off stones and some flying back to rejoin the hideously quivering mockery.

Then he heard the hum and drew in a great gulp of the warm, summer air. It was only the bees lighting on a statue. The scattered stones were the ruins of a temple where once a deity had stood, depicted in stone, arms spread to receive its worshipers. Or perhaps a great house stood here, with the image of an ancestor preserved in granite, now covered with the questing swarm.

Feeling foolish, he scrambled over the lip of the hollow and picked his way over the tumbled stones that had once made a wall. The bees’ buzzing grew louder, and he gently waved aside a few that flew around his face. He knew he was safe. It was rare for a swarm to sting an intruder, so long as one moved slowly and unthreateningly. It wasn’t until they’d found a home to defend that they’d be dangerous. In front of the bee-encrusted statue he paused, smelling the honey-scented tang of the insect mass, searching the quivering, moving surface for the long-bodied queen. The statue was a head taller than he. The Boy looked up into where its featureless face should have been.

There was a quiver as two handfuls of bees fell away. From the blunt-featured face, two eyes blinked open and looked at the horizon. They blinked again and looked down at the Boy. Round eyes with golden yellow irises and a black, black center looked down at him, reflecting two tiny images of the reddened sun. No other part of the statue moved.

The Boy opened his mouth to scream, but only a harsh whistling sound came out. He felt as if a blow of Skreetchu’s baton had struck his ribs, knocking away his air. He wanted to scramble away, but he felt as if his limbs had frozen in place.

The Boy had nightmares like this-nightmares of goblins and worse chasing him, close enough so he could see their leering faces and yellowed teeth, and him unable to move, or moving unnaturally slowly, knowing in a few seconds he’d be seized and devoured. Drenched in sweat, he’d wake, sitting bolt upright on the thin pallet he was allotted in the stables.

But this was no dream, and he wouldn’t wake. A bee-covered arm reached up before he could move, and a strong hand grasped him about the throat. He grabbed at the arm, feeling a few bees crushed beneath his fingers and the dull shock as his hand was stung. This time he managed to scream, a shrilling cry that rang in his ears. He tried to yell again, but no sound came.

As if reacting to his scream, the bees sprang away from the figure, swirling up and away like a thick mist. The Boy’s neck was still clasped in a firm grip as the statue’s head turned to watch the bees as they spread out so one could see them as individuals instead of a solid mass. They merged into a solid black column, then dissipated again, vanishing over the edge of the hollow.

I’ll never catch the queen now, thought the Boy, despite his terror. The figure turned back to look at him, and the Boy would have screamed again had the pressure on his throat not increased, choking off his cry. He felt a warm trickle against the inside of his leg as he lost control of his bladder.

Yellow eyes in a fierce face stared into his own. The figure’s head was furred, with deep black stripes across the burned orange and stark white of its cheek, chin, and muzzle. Stiff, wirelike whiskers jutted beneath the flattened, flaring nose of a predator, and the feline-split upper lip quivered in a snarl, exposing thick ivory fangs. Tufts of tawny fur framed its ears, the backs of which had jagged black stripes while the inside of each was snow-white. The ears swiveled slightly to catch every sound: the distant buzzing of the bees, the occasional chatter of a bird, his own subvocal whimpering.

It was a tiger’s head, square on a thick neck and muscular body that was a man’s, save that it, too, was covered in short tawny, black-striped fur. The tiger-man pulled the Boy up by the neck until his toes barely touched the ground. The creature growled in his face. The Boy’s breath was cut off, and black dots danced before his eyes. He could feel the tips of sharp claws biting into his skin.

He thought he’d been afraid of Skreetchu, with his species’s cruelty and his baton always at the ready for an errant slave. But he’d willingly go to the kenku now and confess to losing the swarm and to a passel of other sins if only he could get free of this monstrous creature.

Just as the pressure on his neck grew intolerable, the tiger-headed creature snarled and tossed him aside. The Boy fell heavily against an inscribed slab of rock that tilted, broken, half-buried in sand. He struggled to regain his breath and wrapped his arms around his battered ribs, knowing that if the creature decided to kill him there was no defense.

He squinted up at the creature, which stood rooted in place, ignoring the Boy. The tiger-headed thing was staring at its own hands, turning them back and forth. They were strange hands, unnatural-somewhere between a human hand and a paw, elongated with claw-tipped fingers mobile enough to hold small objects, but powerful enough to wrap around the hilt of a weapon. The hand-paw was covered with fur, striped tawny and black on the back and white on the palm. As the creature turned its hand over, however, it became apparent that something was wrong: the palm faced back, and the large, clawed thumb was reversed. It was as if some clever trickster had severed the tiger-man’s hands, flipped them over, and skillfully stitched nerve, bone, sinew, and skin back into place, backward.

The Boy closed his eyes, and a small groan escaped him. He’d lived too near the Beastlands for far too long not to know what stood there; a rakshasa-a demon with the body of a humanoid and the head of a jungle cat, and most telling, those awful backward paws.

Lusk looked at his hands in baffled rage and horror.

He looked at the small human who had witnessed his rebirth, whom he had seized upon in his anger and tossed aside. A boy, he saw, grown too tall for his shabby clothing and a face too thin for his eyes. He was thirteen, perhaps; no older than sixteen, surely. The child struggled to his feet, breathing unsteadily and cradling his side as if it pained him.

Lusk’s nose twitched. His sense of smell was acute, like the predatory cat whose shape his incarnation had taken. He smelled sun-baked grass and rock, and a strangely strong, sweet musky smell.

Honey …

He remembered the bees. They were gone now, but he remembered-the blackness of the void, all his senses muffled, the only sound his own voice inside his conciousness, shrilling in terror. Then, a stab of light came through the void, tearing away his blindness, painful and unrelenting. He floated, helpless, inside that merciless light, until he felt ground under his feet and warm sun on the body that was emerging, molded like clay from the very air where nothing was before. Then came countless tiny vibrating bodies, humming insistently and covering his new, raw skin from head to foot, hurting him with their thousands of tiny clawed feet but sheltering him from that excruciating light, that too-warm sun. They cooled him with their wings until he could stand in the world without experiencing the agony of the new, raw flesh the gods had given him.

The bees had flown away and the child stood there. Lusk smelled sweat and the stables and urine, and also a trace of the dried-sugar musk of the bees. The skin of the boy’s throat was bruising where Lusk had seized him before, and there were small drops of blood where his claws had pierced. Lusk wondered if he should kill him.

He took two strides and stood in front of the boy. It would be very easy to break his neck. Or …

Lusk’s belly growled with the hunger of his new body. He could find a use for the child, skinny as he was.

The boy’s eyes widened, huge in his thin face, as the rakshasa approached him. Lusk knew the child was aware there was no use running. The boy straightened his back and faced him, looking up into Lusk’s tiger face, and steeled himself to die.

Lusk remembered a time long ago in his previous life as deva-Lusk, early in that incarnation. He remembered a farmhouse, and a family who welcomed him, however far he wandered. He remembered finding the burned-out farmhouse, and the bodies, and his soul torn away from his body.

He remembered the children of that family. He found all the bodies save one. The eldest, a girl, was about the age of this boy, and something of his height.

Lusk spoke, carefully shaping the words in the unfamiliar contours of his new mouth, lips, and tongue. Although catlike, his new mouth was sufficiently humanoid so he could speak.

“What is your name?” he said gruffly.

The human boy blinked rapidly. “I don’t-” he began, then faltered. He looked at the ground, at Lusk’s great clawed feet. “They always call me Boy.”

“Look at me,” growled Lusk.

The Boy drew in a breath, held it, and looked up into Lusk’s inhuman, golden eyes. Lusk looked back. The child’s eyes were muddy brown at the edge of the iris, lightening to hazel surrounding the pupil. It reminded him of something, a lake, with round, polished brown-green agates in handfuls on the shore.

“Tamack,” he said after a long pause. “I’ll call you Tamack.”

The child was mute, staring at the rakshasa with a terrified wonder.

“I won’t eat you, Tamack,” Lusk continued, “if you can find me something to eat. Soon.”

The Boy-Tamack-found his voice.

“Can you eat honey?” he said in a very small voice.

Lusk grinned, and Tamack flinched back from the rows of sharp, ivory teeth.

“For now,” he said. “I shall require something more substantial, but for now, honey will do.”

Someone had sheltered this boy, although not well. He was a laborer, and very likely a slave. Where there were slaves there were masters, and where there were masters there were estates of a sort, whether great or mean.

Insignificant as he was, the child Tamack was now his. The property of his former master would be his as well.

For good or for evil, the gods did nothing without a reason. That was something devas knew. It was part of their nature, part of the faith that kept them in service to the deities through the continually rotating wheel of their life and death.

For a long time, he had been warring with his deva nature, even as he tried to embrace it. With his understanding of the fickle nature of the gods, they had punished him by denying the peace of true death, and rebirthing him as this monstrosity.

Very well, he thought, following Tamack as he led him through the twilight over the foothills to the habitation that would soon be his. The gods do nothing without reason. He heard Lakini’s voice in his head, Lakini who had chosen promises made to mortals over his friendship, who maintained a foolish faith that her existence was anything but a cruel joke. She had betrayed him and would pay the price. In the meantime, he would acknowledge a kernel of truth in what she said, ignorant that it would destroy her.

If the gods had a purpose in condemning him to a lifetime as a rakshasa, doomed to be born a demon again and again, he would twist the curse into a gift. He would find his place and cultivate his Powers. He would serve no master but himself.

The gods would regret this poisoned gift.

NEAR THE SANCTUARY OF SHADRUN-OF-THE-SNOWS

1600 DR-THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES

When Lakini left the stables, she took the descending path that led away from Shadrun, not giving the buildings of the sanctuary a glance. She walked down the mountain and out into the world, paying no mind to where she went. Sometimes she walked alone. Sometimes she fell in with other travelers.

One evening, she came upon a group of horse traders stopped for the night and preparing their dinner. They called on her to join them, and so she turned aside, happy for the companionship this time.

She watched while one started the fire for the stew.

“Watch this,” he said.

He drew a box from inside his pocket and took out a twist of paper. He flung it onto the kindling, producing only a sad puff of smoke.

The others laughed.

“I’ll fetch my flints,” said another.

“Wait,” said the man with the box, taking another twist and flinging it in its turn. This time the paper blazed, and a good fire flared up at once.

“Always a couple duds in the bunch,” he said with satisfaction. “But they’re worth it.”

She stood watch all night, not needing to sleep. Before the sun rose, the cook woke up to start the breakfast and Lakini wandered away, through the meadows starred with yellow and purple blooms, past where flat slabs of sandstone thrust at an angle from the soil. Past these she found the soft purple of foothills at sunrise and stood, unmoving, taking it all in.

Dawnbringer, she thought.

The edge of the horizon looked like a transparent bowl filling with liquid gold. The sight warmed her before the actual rays of the sun could heat the night-chilled air. The great mechanism that made the world and all within and all without it cycled round and round, like all she had been and was going to be, born again and again like each day that dawned over village and ruin, city and sea, army and gravestone, rock and jewel.