The Pearl Saga - Mistress of the Pearl Part 14

What is it?" Rekkk asked. "Is it that you still do not trust me?" Giyan stirred in the darkness beside him. Their scents mingled with a hint of dampness, the bitter of old stone. "How can you say that?"

"I will tell you how, my love. You are the most secretive person I have ever met."

"More secretive than Nith Sahor?"

"More secretive than he."

Giyan moved her hands over his bare flesh. "I love to feel the contours of your new body."

"You see what I mean?"

"What? I am being romantic."

"You are avoiding the subject. Again."

Giyan watched the tiny pinpoints of the lamplight as they squeezed in through the intricately carved latticework screens that afforded them absolute privacy. Now and again, as the evening breeze willed it, the pungent scents of herbs wafted in from the neatly rowed garden just beyond the screens. Something else as well, intangible. Among the remaining Ramahan there was nothing but gloom and despair over the loss of their sisters.

"Giyan?"

She pulled her knees up to her breast, wrapped her arms around them.

"You were thinking dark thoughts."

"Have you become a seer now, as well as the Nawatir?"

"They seep out of you like tears."

Giyan remained silent.

"Why won't you let me help you?" His frustration burst out of him at last. "The secrets you carry are too much of a burden for one person."

"This is my fate," she said quietly. "I cannot change it."

"Giyan-"

"Please, Rekkk." She gave a beseeching look. "Ask anything of me- anything else and I will grant it."

"But this is what I want." He rose up on one elbow. The pinpoints of light illuminated his face. Bold features, rugged contours. "Don't you see that the secrets you hold so close are a barrier between us?"

"Oh, Rekkk, that is not sol"

"But it is. If you cannot confide in me, then what is there between us?"

"Can you doubt my love for you?"

He sat up, but when she reached for him, he eluded her, moving to the latticework screens.

"Rekkk, in Miina's name, do not do this."

"Like you, I have no choice." His voice seemed to come from a great distance.

"Rekkk!"

He heard the sorrow in her voice, could sense the tears sliding down her cheeks, and his hearts constricted. "For me, love is all-consuming, it is everything. Giyan, I gave up who I was for you. Because of my love, I was transformed. Can you not have as much faith in me?"

"It is not the same."

"Of course it is. The trouble is, you won't acknowledge it."

"I-" Gasping. "Perrnodt!" Giyan was holding her aching head in her hands.

"What has happened?"

Giyan shook her head mutely.

Rekkk gathered up their clothes and, grimly, silently, they dressed together, burst out of their fragrant bower, and hurried through the abbey to the infirmary. Perrnodt lay wrapped in the Nawatir's cloak justas they had left her.

Rekkk was alarmed by the ashen color of her face.

"She is dead." Giyan's voice was leaden.

"But how? My cloak was healing her."

Giyan put a hand on his arm as he took a step toward Perrnodt.

"Do not touch her." She pointed. "Look there. Can you see the crust between her eyelids?"

He looked from the dead Druuge to Giyan. "I had best fetch Konara Inggres."

"No."

"Another of your secrets."

She was stung by the sharpness of his tone. "Ah, Rekkk, this abbey has had more than its share of evil news of late. Right now, there is nothing to be gained by adding to it."

He watched her, mutely, as she took down a basalt mortar from the apothecary cabinets that ran the length of the infirmary. She knelt at Perrnodt's side. The abbey was very still. Bells tolled, echoing through the corridors and courtyards, calling the Ramahan to prayer.

"You see," she whispered, "Konara Inggres is needed elsewhere."

Rekkk stood in uncertain light just behind her. The crust between Perrnodt's lids looked like diamond dust.

"Rekkk, may I borrow your smallest weapon?"

Without a word, he handed over a narrow-bladed dagger. He watched while she manipulated the tip, scooping up some of the crust onto the blade, depositing it into the mortar.

Rekkk leaning closer. "Is this what killed her?"

"Possibly it is the residue."

"Do you know what it is?"

"No." Giyan looked up at him. "But perhaps our resident sauromician will."

Ka.s.stna poked Marethyn in the small of the back. "Have I bound your wrists too tightly?"

Marethyn, walking in front of him, said nothing.

"I hope so," Ka.s.stna said. "I hope you lose all the feeling in your hands." He laughed. "Once you were an artist, isn't it? Yes, that is what you told Majja and Ba.s.se. You used your hands to splash pigment across canvas." He laughed again. "Now life is different. At the tribunal, if I have my way, I will beat your hands to a pulp." He poked her again, harder this time, so that she stumbled over a kuello-fir root and fell to her knees. "If you ever make it to the tribunal, that is." He kicked her. "Get up." He watched her use the bole of the kuello-fir as she struggled to her feet.

They were perhaps a kilometer east of the cell encampment, hiking across a heavily forested ridge.

Marethyn had no idea where this tribunal he was speaking of was located. Not that it would make a difference to her if she did. She had no illusions. She had been in trouble from the moment Gerwa refused to stand up to Ka.s.stna. Had she been too idealistic to have expected him to do so? She had done nothing but help the Resistance ever since she had met Majja and Ba.s.se. But then she had to remind herself that she had thrust herself upon them. Even Sornnn had been against her joining. But, then, Sornnn loved her. Wanted to keep her safe.

"You could very easily be killed, couldn't you, as you attempted to escape." Ka.s.stna broke in on her thoughts. He drove her onward as if she were a cor or a water b.u.t.tren. "That very well might happen. It all depends on your att.i.tude."

"What att.i.tude?"

"Ah, at last. The Tuskugggun speaks!"

Marethyn stopped and turned to face him. "What att.i.tude?"

Thickening clouds brought about a claustrophobic dusk. The air was gravid with moisture, but the wind was out of the south so at least there was no threat of more snow or sleet. A rumbling had returned across the hills to the south, where the sky was darkest. The willowy tops of the kuello-firs bent andwhipped, the friction of their needles mimicking the sound of rushing insects.

Ka.s.stna studied her for a long time. "The att.i.tude you've had all your life, Tuskugggun." He came in close to her, and she could smell his sour breath. "You know what I mean. That superiority of yours. The sureness you have that you are smarter, more clever than anyone else." He cuffed her a little. "You'll have to lose that att.i.tude, Tuskugggun, in order to make it back to the tribunal."

She kept her expression neutral as she slammed her knee into his groin. She watched him, silent, as he doubled over, gasping. She tried to kick him, but he grabbed her foot in midair and spun her off her feet.

She landed hard on her right shoulder.

Kneeling over her, his breath sawing through his open mouth, he pushed her down onto her back.

Struck her on the side of her head, which made her moan. Clambering over her, he put his cheek against hers and whispered in her ear, "I mean to break you, see? I mean to have you eating out of my hand, I mean to have you on your knees tending to my every whim." He grabbed her head in a viselike grip.

"Otherwise, I will kill you here in the forest, where no one can see, where no one can contradict my story of your attempted escape." His tongue came out, and he licked the sh.e.l.l of her ear. "Is there some V'ornn who loves you, Tuskugggun? Some V'ornn whom you love in return? Think of him now. Because if you continue in this way, you will be dead, and he will not even have your body to mourn."

A staircase, of sorts, hacked into the bedrock of the cavern. This is what Riane had seen from her spider's-eye position. The treads were old and worn, cracked, in some places missing. Nevertheless, it was her only way down, so she clambered to the mouth of the chute. It was by no means easy, but her fingers told her that she had been on more difficult descents. There she hung by tenuous handholds, seeing there was no way to get to the top of the steps. Possibly there had once been a bridge of sorts but, if so, it had sheared off long ago.

She glanced over to the basalt plinth, where Eleana was watching her. Tentacles wrapped ever higher on the column, and below was a bulk so gigantic it was slowly eclipsing the light.

Riane pulled her attention away, began to rock herself back and forth, gaining momentum. At the apex of the seventh forward arc, she launched herself through s.p.a.ce. The stairs came up very fast, and she splayed herself, striking the carved rock face. Grabbing for a handhold, finding it, losing it, dropping to find another, better, less eroded, secure. She swung one leg, then the other, levered her lower body onto a tread, felt the rock crack and give, friable, unsafe, then rolled down two stairs as the first one gave way. Rain of blue-grey shards falling into the shadows. The depth could have been eighty meters or eight hundred, a great yawning fissure for some reason built into the foundation of the palace.

Scrambling down the stairs, quickly, carefully, she kept secure handholds wherever she was able. The steps followed the natural curvature of the cavern wall, sometimes carved into the wall itself, sometimes hewn from shallow ledges that protruded out. They were scarifyingly inconstant. They provided Riane with no sense of security at all. She pa.s.sed the horizontal creva.s.se, larger than it had looked from a distance, slash of a mouth large enough for several adults to slither into on their bellies. Who knew how far back it went?

She kept descending, concentrating on one step at a time, light step, testing, then allowing her weight to fall forward gradually, listening for the telltale crack that would presage another break. She was almost at Eleana's level, and she risked a glance at the base of the plinth.

The monster was ma.s.sive, hideous beyond description, and she was seeing only a small fraction of it.

Eleana, seeing the direction of Riane's gaze, said, "What? What is it?"

"Never mind." Gritting her teeth. "Concentrate on me."

As the stairs turned she came upon a bridge of stone spanning the nine or so meters to the plinth, so narrow and of such a hue it had been invisible until that moment.

"Eleana, look here, can you see the bridge?"

"No." Eleana moved closer to the plinth's edge. Looking out, she shook her head. "The span is incomplete." She knelt. "It is broken away where it was supposed to connect."Moving farther down, Riane could see that, indeed, the bridge had partially crumbled.

"Stay where you are," she said. "I will come to get you."

"No, it's too dangerous. I do not like the way the stones look."

Riane ignored her, stepped out on to the first block of the span. It took her weight, seemed stable enough, and she stepped out fully. Narrow, though, not any wider than the span of her hand. In her memory loomed an escarpment, sharp as a dagger, crusty with ice and last winter's snow, friable as this rock. Dangerous as they come, sinuous as a dune, falloffs of a thousand meters, more, on either side. She had picked her way across. How?

Arms up at shoulder height for optimum balance, fingers loose and cupped to warn of wind gusts, knees slightly bent, hips rolling. Keep the center of gravity low-lower meant safer, more secure. That was how Riane made her way toward Eleana on the crumbling stone bridge. Until the last step which, as she put her foot down, testing, gave way. She picked her foot up just as the stone plunged down.

Lifted foot still in midair, she took an a.s.sessment. She was as far as she could go. Still two meters between them, and the creature rising like the moon into sunset, like an eclipse into harvest night.

Into view it came. The head misshapen, looked positively hydroce-phalic. Could it be that the tentacles were growing out of either side of a grizzled snout that extended out into a trunk? They seemed able to extend and contract, thin out and thicken at the creature's will.

Dear Miina, it is the Hagoshrin] She recognized it from Giyan's description. She could not tell whether it had more hair or scales, but she could see that in addition to the tentacles it had eight legs, four on each side, which worked in unison. It seemed to need all of them to haul its bulk up the column.

"Hagoshrin, hear me!" she called. "I am the Dar Sala-at! Cease this attack at once!"

"Lying infidel!" the Hagoshrin screamed. "I know what you have come to steal! I know!"

"Riane, what are you doing? You will only inflame it."

The muscles in Riane's upper body had been so tightly bunched for so long that they had begun to cramp, and she had lost feeling in her right hand. As she shifted a little to try to loosen up, her left foot slipped, and she almost pitched headlong into the pit.

"Riane!" Eleana swung back and forth like a pendulum.

"It's all right." With difficulty, Riane regained her foothold and her balance, wedging herself more firmly in place. But searing pains were whipping up her arms, and she could feel fatigue slowing her like a gale in her face. "I'm all right."

She could see that she was running out of time. The Hagoshrin had hauled its upper torso above the level of the black-basalt altar, which meant that it was not that far below Eleana.

"Hurry!" Eleana urged. "Hurry!"

"Infidels," the beast howled. "I will suck the bones out of you. I will leave your pathetic, flaccid bodies as a warning for others against further trespa.s.s into the Holy of Holies."

Riane unwound the Veil from her waist. Leaving only enough to anchor, she threw the rest in a ball that Eleana caught. There was only enough to tie it around her right wrist; she tied it tight with a proper knot and nodded. Riane moved her left leg back on the stones, bracing herself as Eleana flung herself off the plinth. What if the bridge would not hold? Then they would both fall to their deaths. Too late to worry about that.

Down she went in a shallow arc to the end of the Veil's length, coming up then, twisting, lifting her legs as a child will on a swing, giving her natural momentum a boost. Closer she rose, closer. She reached out for the stone bridge, grasped it with her left hand, arm extended, arcing farther, then, suddenly, shockingly, she was pulled back down.

Riane heard the little cry, saw the end of a tentacle whipped around Eleana's ankle. Then it flattened itself, widening into a kind of strap, and Riane could feel it pulling back. Riane jerked harder, only to have Eleana cry out in pain.

Eleana's face twisted in agony. "Miina, it's going to break my leg!"