The Fire's Stone

Three

The forged steel struck the balcony railing with enough force to mark the softer iron, the noise of the blow echoing through the garden and frightening a pair of night roosting birds up into the air with a wild flurry of wings. His Royal Highness Prince Darvish Shayrif Hakem, third son of the king, slid his gaze along his scimitar's blade to where it rested some four feet above the pale throat it had been intended to hit.

He frowned and drank deeply from the large gold goblet in his right hand.

"I miss'd. I nev'r miss." Something had distracted him. He peered down at the sharp featured face. Something... Recognition danced just beyond his grasp although he knew he'd held it an instant before.

"Bugger the Nine!"

Frustration turned to anger and the anger, riding the crest of the night's wine, poured down on the body at his feet.

Eyes narrowed in concentration, he pulled the weapon back, ignoring the shriek of protest as the tip hit the marble of the balcony floor and dragged across it. The creature—The boy? The man? The thief!—had not moved since he had fallen so unexpectedly out of the night.

"Just hold still for a little... bit... longer..." His sword seemed to have gotten heavier, but he managed to heave it up into the air where it dipped through dangerous figure eights a hand's span above his bare shoulder. The thief merely continued to stare, although Darvish, drunk as he was, would have willingly bet the contents of the treasury that those strange silver eyes were not focused on what was in front of them.

Which is me. Darvish took another drink, the muscles of his sword arm bunching as he kept the weapon precariously aloft. The rude little prick; staring at me without even seeing me. The sword swung down again.

The song of steel striking stone a finger's span from his ear snapped Aaron up out of the past. He jerked, and blinked, shattering the memory that held him immobile, and the blue and black spun about until they returned to the face of the young man standing splay-legged above him. It wasn't his cousin. His cousin was dead.

"Shit!" Darvish tossed back half the remaining wine. "Miss'd ag'in! I cannot poss'bly be that drunk." At least the thief now looked aware, an improvement of sorts even if it would make him harder to hit. Scrubbing his forearm across the dribbles of ruby liquid running down his chest, Darvish yawned, swayed, and lost his grip on his anger. He waited to see what would happen next. It was only fair, after all, to offer his visitor a move.

The emerald. Through the pounding in his head, Aaron remembered. He had to get to the royal staff and steal the emerald that crowned it. He'd failed Ruth and she'd died. He wouldn't fail Faharra even though she was already dead. He would get her the emerald, her finest work, to adorn her tomb. He had to get her the emerald. Fear and pain and hunger and grief lashed his thoughts into chaos, but through it all the great green stone shone like a beacon. He clutched desperately at its light, using it as an anchor and a lifeline, allowing the darkness to take the rest. Nothing else mattered.

Rolling to his knees, away from the distorted image of his face on the curved blade of the sword, he swayed and retched, his empty stomach clenching and unclenching like an angry fist. The pattern in the marble blurred and ran an inch from his nose and he fought the seductive urge to lay his head on the cool stone and surrender. But no. Not this time. He wouldn't surrender and he wouldn't run away. Gasping for air, barely clinging to sanity, he forced himself to his feet.

"Mov'ng," Darvish observed appreciatively, draining the goblet and tossing it with drunken aplomb over the balcony railing.

The muted sound of metal bouncing on grass was lost in Aaron's labored breathing. One step, two, moving blindly, his eyes fixed on Faharra's emerald, he put out a hand to brush a barely perceived obstacle out of his way.

The icy fingers of the intruder, splayed against the prince's chest penetrated even through seven hours of steady drinking. This was not the way a thief caught by an armed man should act. Indifference caught Darvish's wandering attention the way fight or flight would not have. He was so taken by surprise that the blow, weak as it was, pushed him to one side.

"Hey!" He lunged forward, his sword clattering forgotten to the floor. The sudden movement shifted the load of wine he carried and twisted the room on its axis.

With one of the prince's arms about the younger man's waist and the other flailing for balance, the two staggered forward together in a caricature of friendship until the edge of the bed caught them just under the knees and they fell. The warm flesh struggling under him decided Darvish on a new course of action and he fumbled for the ties to his captive's trousers.

Vaguely aware of silk and softness below him, Aaron began to fight against the unseen force holding him from above. Nothing would—nothing could—stop him from getting to the emerald and placing it in Faharra's tomb where it belonged. And then the weight lay still against his back. With a desperate squirm, he was free.

As he careened off the wall, groping for the door, the body on the bed began to snore.

Light first, hot and bright; lying across him like a blanket of molten rock drawn up boiling from the volcano. Then sound, a scream that drove barbed points into his ears again and again, pieces breaking off to work their way in deeper still. Gradually, he became aware of self. His skull felt too small for what it had to contain and arms and legs refused to respond. There were lead weights on his lids and a fire had lodged below his breastbone and was eating its way out.

Darvish moaned.

The sound, quiet as it was, brought bare feet padding toward the bed.

He wet his lips with a tongue barely less dry and croaked, "Close. The. Shutters." On the second attempt, he made himself understood and seconds later sighed in relief as the burning bands across his chest and face faded away.

He wanted nothing more than to lie there forever, un-moving, but his bladder insisted otherwise. Slowly, carefully, eyes still closed, he sat up, took two shaky breaths, and spewed the contents of his stomach all over the bed. Gentle hands eased him back against the pillows and a cool cloth wiped his face clean. He felt the soiled, stinking bedding stripped away and knew what he had to do. Teeth clenched, he raised a trembling hand into the air. Those same gentle hands spread his fingers and placed a clay cup within their curve. With help, he got the cup to his lips where it clattered against his teeth, but he managed to swallow the entire contents.

As always, it tasted worse than he remembered and for a moment he was sure he was going to die. Fires ran up and down the length of his body. He arched, spasmed, and collapsed covered in sweat. He'd complained once to a Wizard of the Third that the cure was almost worse than the affliction it cured. The wizard hadn't smiled as he'd replied, "It's supposed to be."

Feeling almost human, Darvish opened his eyes.

Oham, whose large, almost painfully ugly presence had been a solid constant in the prince's life for nearly ten years, slipped the now empty cup from lax fingers and said, face and voice carefully expressionless, "Highness, your bath is prepared."

"Of course it is." Darvish held out his arms and the dresser pulled him carefully to his feet, stripping off the red silk trousers he'd slept in the moment he was standing. "But first I have to..."

The youngest dresser approached with the waste pot, his knuckles white around the curve of pale green ceramic.

Darvish smiled and with much of his weight resting on Oham's thick shoulder, thankfully relieved himself.

"You're new," he said when he finished, reaching out and lightly pinching the boy's chin.

"Yes, Highness." The boy blushed and backed respectfully away with the brimming pot.

"Have you a name?"

Thick lashes lowered over velvet brown eyes. "Fadi, if it please, your Highness."

"Whether it pleases me or not..." And it did please him. Darvish ran an appreciative look down the slim figure and sighed; it would please him more in a couple of years when the boy was bedable. Except by then he'd be gone. They always were.

"And now, Oham, the bath."

"Yes, Highness."

It amused Darvish how carefully the large dresser walked as together they made their way to the small tiled room off his bedchamber. The wizard's potion had overcome much of the damage done by too much wine, but his head still felt precariously balanced on his neck as if the slightest jar would topple it off. Oham knew that, of course, this was not the first such walk they had taken.

The water in the deep copper tub steamed invitingly, scenting the room with a faint odor of sandalwood. Darvish slid into it with a satisfied sigh and lay back, eyes half closed with pleasure.

He moved obediently to the pressure of Chain's hands, giving himself over to both their gentleness and their strength. Not until he was being dried did he remember and stiffen.

"Bugger the Nine!"

"Highness?" Oham stopped moving the combed cotton towel over the broad muscles of the prince's back and stepped away, unsure of how he had erred.

"No, not you!" An imperious hand indicated the dresser should continue. "My most exalted father has informed me I am to be married."

"I had heard, Highness." Oham offered nothing more.

"To a chit of a girl, barely sixteen, who I've never met, for the sole purpose of tying this country to hers."

"Your pardon, Highness, but is that not the reason that all princes marry?" He knelt to dry the prince's legs, his gaze fixed on the blue-green tiles in the floor.

"Yes," Darvish spat out the word and closed his teeth on the ones that tried to follow; the real reason he'd drunk himself into unconsciousness after the interview with his most exalted father.

The third dresser, who stood by the door waiting to serve, the perfect ubiquitous servant, reported to the lord chancellor, who reported to the king. He was a nondescript man of indeterminate age fitting neatly between Oham and the boy, and only the latest in a series sent to keep an eye on the third son, who, having no real power of his own, might be tempted to try for someone else's. Darvish made certain they had plenty to report as he filled his life with wine and his bed with every willing body he stumbled across and he had the lord chancellor's spies beaten as often as they gave him any kind of an excuse.

With a vicious mental shove, he pushed back the words and the feelings that went with them. For the first time in twenty-three years his father had had a use for him. Except he hadn't been asked, hadn't even been allowed to regard it as a service to the country. It had been a command; with no room in it for the one commanded. You will marry this girl. Consider yourself betrothed and act accordingly. Although Darvish had no wish to be married, that hadn't driven him to the night's excesses.

"I need a drink."

"Highness." The lord chancellor's eyes and ears presented a goblet, filled and waiting.

And that was the other thing; they made sure, these dressers who owed their loyalty to another, that he stayed on the path he'd chosen when he'd been old enough to understand—had been made to understand—his position at court.

Bugger them all. He drained the goblet, his throat working against the barely watered wine, two streams of red running down from the corners of his mouth. When he finished, he belched, yawned, and smiled. Could be worse, I suppose. They could've slapped me into the priesthood.

He stretched, working the kinks out, then obediently followed Oham back to the bedroom and stepped into the blue and silver trousers held out for him. He shifted his shoulders as a white silk shirt settled over them, enjoying the touch of the smooth fabric against his skin. Then he shifted them again, and had to admit he was, as he'd suspected, losing muscle tone. While Oham wound a silver sash about his waist, he tried to work out how long it had been since he'd gone to the training yard. One week at least, maybe as much as two; it was hard to say, the days all blurred with a wine-sodden sameness. He accepted his refilled goblet, then tipped back his head to drink as the chancellor's man began to pull an ivory comb through the wet mass of his hair. The tines caught against the movement and the comb dug sharply into his skull.

Darvish jerked, swore, smiled, and said, "Ten lashes."

"I will see to it, Highness." Oham's voice almost showed satisfaction.

Still smiling, Darvish stepped into his sandals and ran his fingers absently through Fadi's hair as the boy knelt to lace them.

Out in the garden, the scream that had wakened him sounded once more.

"What the One was that?"

"Peacocks, Highness," Oham told him placidly, deftly replacing the goblet with a piece of bread. "The Most Blessed Yasimina received them as a gift and loosed them in the gardens this morning."

"Pea what?"

"Cocks, Highness."

"That's what I thought you said." He took a bite of the bread, thickly spread with chopped dates in honey, and headed for the balcony. "What the One is a peacock?"

"A bird, Highness."

"Right." Throwing back the shutters, Darvish stepped outside and squinted down into the garden just in time to see a large blue bird trailing a tail even larger disappear behind a bush. Of all the changes that had occurred since his eldest brother had married the Princess Yasimina, this looked to be the noisiest.

"Peacocks," Darvish repeated to himself. "I suppose she always had peacocks back home in Ytaili. I suppose her-brother-the-king had a hundred or so roaming about his garden." He rubbed at his temples as a high-pitched shriek bounced jagged edges off the inside of his skull. "I suppose I'm not permitted to shoot them," he sighed.

"No, Highness."

"Perhaps the city won't agree with them and we can ship them off to Ramdan..." No fair that his second brother should miss all the fun just because he'd run from court to raise his family.

"They were sent to lift the Most Blessed Yasimina's homesickness, Highness."

"Well," Darvish aimed an imaginary crossbow at a scuttling bird, "if they get her to stop wailing they can scream under my window all they like." Her homesickness had driven half the court to distraction, none more so than her husband. It amazed Darvish that the crown prince had developed such strong feelings for a bride he'd known barely a year and had wed only to prevent a war. Strong enough feelings to allow this intrusion into the previously restful gardens.

I'll bet you asked Shahin, Father. Didn't just tell him he was to be married. I'd have wed gladly if you'd only asked. Not that his wedding would carry the weight that Shahin's had. His brother had married a Princess of Ytaili, wiping out centuries of conflict between the two countries. He would marry a child with no political importance at all.

He squinted up at the sun burning yellow-white in a cloudless sky, mid-afternoon by the angle. More or less his usual time for rising. Leaning on the balcony railing, his eyes half closed against the light, he finished the bread.

"I had the strangest dream last night, Oham. I dreamed a thief fell into my room. A quite attractive..." His palm, caressing the iron rail, found a mark that shouldn't exist, cutting off both the motion and the words.

"It was no dream, Highness. The guards found this thief you speak of staggering about the halls near dawn."

"So he's real." The prince ran a finger up and down the scar his sword had left and grinned, remembering how his dream had almost ended. "Where is he now?"

"Their Royal Highnesses have him in the Chamber of the Fourth, Highness." Oham's hand rose in the sign of the Nine and One.

"What!" Darvish whirled about to face the dresser who regarded him placidly.

"It is, Highness, where thieves and such are taken."

"Not this thief, by the Nine." In memory, pale eyes devoured his face once more. His heart began to pound painfully in his chest and fury burned the morning's wine away. "This thief's mine! Not theirs, mine!" He had always found the twins' diversions repellent, but the thought of them taking pleasure from the pain of something he considered his own drew his lips back off his teeth and curved his hands into fists.

Fadi scrambled out of the way as Darvish stormed by and then looked wide-eyed to the older dresser for guidance. Oham merely shrugged. What happened outside the prince's suite was not his concern. Inside, he did what he could.

Somewhere out of sight, the peacock screamed again.

As the guards snapped to attention and the heavy door swung open, a ripple of anticipation moved through the crowd of courtiers waiting in the long gallery outside the royal apartments. Fans were set aside, silks were patted smooth, and expressions ranging from polite interest to rapt adoration were fixed firmly in place. When they saw which royal emerged, the languid posturing, suitable for the heat of the afternoon, resumed. His Royal Highness Prince Darvish, while undeniably the life of any party, was useless as a purveyor of royal favor. Either he forgot the request entirely, the wine driving it from his mind, or he did something which so enraged his most exalted father that he was not permitted to approach the throne for an indefinite period of time.

Those closest bowed as he passed and wondered where he could be off to in such a scowling hurry. Neither the hurrying nor the scowl was like the prince.

"Well, I hope he's not going all dark and brooding," sighed one elderly noble to no one in particular. "We've quite enough of that going on now."

Out in the corridors of the palace, Darvish picked up his pace. If the thief had been with the twins since early morning there might not be much left to save. He fought to keep the full extent of his fury from showing; the last thing he needed was an interrogation from one of the lord chancellor's...

"Good afternoon, Highness."

... agents. Or worse yet, the lord chancellor himself. As a member of the royal family, Darvish held the higher rank but the lord chancellor held the trust of the king. The prince would be expected to pause, to converse, to place his concerns in a position of secondary importance, to recognize the lord chancellor's power. Darvish came to a decision between one step and the next.

"Give it to the Lady," he said pleasantly, without breaking stride.

"Highness!"

The prince quickly left the plump and elderly lord chancellor behind, blowing protests into an empty corridor. Later, when his thief was safe, he'd take the time to enjoy the shocked disbelief in the old man's voice. And he'd pay for it, later, when his father heard, but that didn't matter now.

The Chamber of the Fourth was deep in the oldest section of the palace, carved out of volcanic rock and close enough to the crater so the heat of the lava and the smell of the sulfur permeated the entire area. As Darvish crossed from frescoed walls and tiled floors to chiseled stone, the marks of the tools still raw generations after they'd been made, he began to seethe, dwelling on the injustice that brought his thief down to this place. By the time he reached the chamber, he'd worked his rage up to a fever pitch and had half convinced himself that the twins had stolen a prized possession.

As his palm touched the door, someone screamed behind it. A hoarse hopeless scream, from a throat that had almost no screaming left.

It rooted Darvish to the spot as it climbed and peaked and died. Not until silence ruled again did it release him. He kicked open the door, sending it slamming back against the wall.

The room was not large and the stench from a dozen kinds of smoke and as many kinds of pain was almost overpowering. He gagged, recovered, and sucked his next breath through his teeth. Two slim figures in unrelieved black, bracketing a table like pillars of night, looked up at the sound. Identical hair and clothing, chosen to minimize sexual characteristics, made it nearly impossible to tell them apart even in the bright light of the half dozen hanging lamps that illuminated their work. Heavy kohl, outlining eyes almost amber, distracted from minor facial differences. But Darvish had known them all their lives and knew without question who held the red coal poised at the end of long pincers and who only watched.

"Shakana!" he bellowed at his younger sister. "Drop it!"

She smiled, graciously inclined her head, and let the smoking coal fall to rest on the blistered chest bound before her on the table.

The scream pulled Darvish the length of the room and he used the momentum to throw his brother aside. With the calluses of his sword hand, he swept the coal onto the floor.

Shakana danced back, flicking the skirts of her robe away from the sparks, her sandals making sucking noises as they left the floor.

"You have no right," she began, but at Darvish's wordless growl, reconsidered and held her tongue. Eyes locked on her brother, she rounded the table to help her twin rise.

The thief's arms and legs had been manacled to lengths of chain, then pulled tight; not yet to dislocate only to hold immobile at the extreme limit of their stretch. His head had been enclosed in a steel vise, the band across his eyes grooved to hold heated iron pellets. Thankfully it was still cold and empty. Three deep gouges ran the width of each thigh; wizard marks, for flesh and blood were necessary to trace the thief's trail through the palace. His genitals were swollen but intact. On his chest...

... obscenely red against skin almost white, blisters bubbling up from the most recent burn even as Darvish watched, the marks of four live coals dropped and allowed to cool while the flesh below cooked. The two oldest had broken and split, blood and other fluids still oozing from their angry centers.

The twins had barely gotten started.

With hands that wanted to tremble, Darvish fought the bolts out of the head vise and as gently as possible eased it free. The thief began to toss his head back and forth, whimpering softly.

"Don't!" Darvish snapped, reaching for the manacles. "Stay still."

The tossing stopped. The whimpering continued.

His twin still gripping his elbow, Kasil stepped forward, hands stained from contact with the floor. "You can't do this, Darvish," he whined as the iron bands fell clear, exposing torn and abraded wrists. "He's ours."

"The One he is," the older prince snarled, struggling with the last fastener. "He came into the palace through my room, that makes him mine."

"But he's in our room now," Shakana pointed out coldly.

"Your room?" Blood had dried around the bolt, nearly welding it to the band. "I thought this was the Chamber of the Fourth..."

She glared. "We serve the Fourth."

"You serve your own perverted appetites." He twisted viciously and inch by inch forced the bolt clear. With the thief lying unbound on the table he turned and faced the twins, a crazy light having nothing to do with the lamps burning in the depths of his eyes. "I'll fight you for him," he offered.

"Don't be..." Kasil tried to take another step forward but Shakana stopped him.

"He means it, Kasil."

Darvish smiled grimly, the thief momentarily forgotten in the anticipation of beating both pointy little faces into an unrecognizable pulp. It was his turn to step forward. The twins stepped back.

"Highnesses?" Two guards stood in the doorway, a third hanging limply between them. He was conscious, but terror had quite obviously sapped the strength from his legs and made it impossible for him to stand.

The guard on the left bowed as well as he was able. "Highnesses, this is the man who let the thief past the inner gate."

Shakana's face wore the expression a farmer's might while examining a bullock in the market. "He looks strong."

"Strong," Kasil agreed.

Darvish's bark of laughter brought a moan from the new prisoner and worried frowns from the twins. He ignored both—he had the thief, but the guard would die; nothing he did changed anything, he found it bitterly amusing. Carefully, he lifted the thief from the table. "You've got something new to play with," he said as he settled the suddenly dead weight. The barely visible rise and fall of the tortured chest became the only indication he carried a living man. "I'll take what's mine and go." The copper head lolled against his shoulder and fell back, exposing the long pale line of throat.

"Darvish..."

He had to pause anyway, so the guards could move clear of the door, their burden beginning to babble incoherent prayers as they moved further into the room.

"... what are you going to do with him?"

Darvish threw a dangerous smile back at the twins, careful not to let the strain of carrying what was after all a full grown man, show. "Whatever I please," he said.