The Pearl Saga - Mistress of the Pearl Part 41

And the cost would be great. Miina would see to that. Jealous G.o.ddess! And vindictive. Just look what she had done to Pyphoros and his kind! And wasn't all Kundala the poorer for it? Could the taste of revenge be in the least bit sweet when so much death and suffering was its result? Truth be told, he was disgusted by the machinations of G.o.ddesses and archdaemons alike. He was convinced that Kundala would be better off without either. Unfortunately, the Cosmos did not allow for such radical negations of its fundamental Laws. Still, if he dared, he could do what he was able.

Bryn, watching Krystren, was filled with questions. He did not understand sleep, for Hagoshrin had no need periodically to shut down their physical functions. But there was one aspect of it that he envied: the ability to dream. He had heard Kundalan talk about their dreams, and it had taken him a long while to fathom the meaning of the word. Bryn wanted to dream, and he wondered now whether he could enter into Krystren's.Krystren was dreaming of Courion, of her last sight of him, his eyes red-rimmed and teary. She was running along the crowded quay, waving her arms as the ship her brother had signed on to left the port of Celiocco.

"Come back!" she cried, and held aloft the cube of red jade. "Come back!" She had meant to give it to him, to return the gift he had given to Orujo, but his shock, the misery in his face, had driven all thought of it from her mind.

She saw him staring at her, a look she had seen him throw at others but never at her. He blamed her for his beloved's death. He would never forgive her. How quickly love could turn to hatred!

In her dream, Krystren cried, and Bryn, who had managed through his own arts to insinuate himself into the deepest reaches of her mind, saw what she saw, felt what she felt, and he, too, wept. How dear the love of one sibling for another. How exquisitely close they were, their spirits existing side by side, the one occasionally overlapping the other in a kind of intimate dance. Hagoshrin were absolutely solitary; he had no good a.n.a.log for what she was feeling.

Krystren woke up, as she always did, at once fully awake. She stared up into Bryn's umber eyes. The forest was steeped in the dewy mist of dawn that swirled like steam about their treetop eyrie.

"Have you been refreshed by your sleep?" he asked.

"You were in our dream. You were in our head." She sat up sharply. Her body felt stiff and cold; her mind just felt cold.

"I took care not to disturb anything." He blinked. "I did not look at any thought or memory."

"You were in our head." She pulled away until her back was against the tree crotch. It was as far as she could go. "You know everything."

"Not true. I told you-"

"And why should we believe you?"

"I am Hagoshrin. I cannot lie."

She looked at him with those clear steady intelligent eyes. "Our dreams are private, personal. How could you do that? What you did was the worst form of violation."

"Truly I am sorry, Krystren of the Oronel. I did not mean-"

"We want nothing more to do with you. We will continue on alone."

"This forest is not safe."

"We are familiar with the enemy. We are prepared."

He believed her, for she had told him about her escape from the wrecked ship, her adventures on the island of Suspended Skull and how she had managed the voyage to the mainland. But her knowledge of the forest was severely limited. He sensed that the gabir was not far away. Even he was afraid of the gabir.

Down below, the party of sauromicians and Sintire was astir. The smoke tent was unraveling like a serpent shedding its skin. There was no time to debate with her. The party was moving out.

"Come. We must go."

"We said we would do this alone."

"Look down," he said.

The warrior-beetles were forming, their mandibles clicking furiously.

"You will never be able to keep pace with them."

Krystren hesitated but a moment. Then she nodded and came away from the crotch so that he could loop an arm around her. They set off through the mist-shrouded trees.

It took several hours for the sun to reach a height great enough to penetrate the dense Marre pines and burn off the morning's damp chill. By that time, she had eaten lightly and drunk cold water twice. But in all that time she had said not a word, and Bryn could feel the coldness emanating from her even as he felt the mental barrier she had erected with her particular skill. He had erred again. Now he would never learn the secret of her ability. He would be utterly alone again, as Hagoshrin were meant to be. As hecould not bear to be.

Much to his astonishment, her stony silence and icy looks cut him like the touch of a gabir. By entering her dream he had done far more than trespa.s.s, he had found the connection to another being for which he had been longing. To have experienced its exhilaration, to know he never would again, drove him to misery.

It was those very thoughts, fulminating unfamiliar emotions, that caused him to miss the first signs that they were being followed. By the time he did pick up on it, the gabir was very close.

The instant he felt the first touch of its chill emanations, he whirled to his left, changing course.

"What do you think you are doing?" Krystren said shortly. "We will lose sight of them in a moment."

"That is the point."

He took them even higher, into the swaying crowns of the Marre pines, so spindly that Krystren could hardly believe they would support them. She tried to squirm in his arms, but he held her all the tighter.

"Let us go," she hissed. "We knew we should have continued on my own."

"Don't be a fool. Keep still."

And he whirled, holding her close, and she felt the gorge rise into her throat. She saw the creature crouched on a tree limb. It was pale as snow. Even its eyes-huge, lidless, bone-ridged around their perimeters-were ashen. The face, as well as the body, was terrifically emaciated, so that it appeared to be made of skin stretched directly over bones, all fat, muscle, sinew and connective tissue wasted away.

"What is this thing?" she whispered.

"It is a gabir, it has been following us for some time."

"Why?"

The gabir was staring at her with a kind of hunger.

"It wants to kill us."

As she instinctively began to extend her mental barrier, he warned her to stop.

"It will use the barrier as a pathway into you."

And already she could see the gabir leaning forward expectantly, its long arms and prehensile fingers outstretched as if it could gather in the very air between them.

"Let's get out of here," she said.

"Once the gabir has found us it will not let us go."

"But you-"

"I cannot outrun a gabir" he said.

And that was when she registered the fear on his face.

"What is it?" she asked.

"The gabir-it is neither alive nor dead. The sauromicians leave them in their wake. As I told you, they need the death energy in order to maintain their power. A piece of the victim's spirit eludes the necromancy. Sometimes, it survives only an hour or so. Other times, it lasts for weeks or months. It is stuck inside the dying body and all it knows is self-preservation. So it keeps the body alive as best it can.

But since it is incomplete, since the body itself has been mutilated, it cannot be successful. It can st.i.tch up the wounds temporarily, but that is all. This is the result."

Krystren shuddered. "How horrible. Why does it happen?"

"As in many things anomalous it is the doing of a banestone."

Krystren went very still. Her heart was beating fast, and she quickly and efficiently used her training to clamp down on it, for she was terrified that Bryn would sense her agitation.

"A banestone?" she said disingenuously. "What is that?"

The gabir had shuffled forward, its head at an angle, as it studied them more closely, and Bryn moved slightly in reflex. She could sense his fear, a dark river running through the core of him.

"Why are you afraid of him, Bryn?"

"Because he is neither of this realm nor of that of the dead, his cells are in flux. Therefore, his touch is toxic to me."

She wondered what the gabir's touch would do to her. "Tell us about the banestones."

"There are nine banestones," Bryn said. "They were mined by daemons in the northern core ofKundala, all from the same rich vein. The Dragons brought them to Za Hara-at, where they were used in the foundations of the nine great temples. They are the source of the ancient city's enormous power.

Separately, their power is inconstant, mercurial, unpredictable." With his fingertip, he drew a peculiar nine-sided form. "But when the nine are brought together in this configuration the banestones extract the essential power of the Cosmos from the very elements. They become an engine of incalculable power.

So they were at the height of Za Hara-at's glory, when it was needed the most. But the temptation to misuse that power was so great that Za Hara-at was destroyed, the banestones scattered to the four corners of Kundala."

"But the existence of the gabir means that the banestones have been found."

"By the sauromicians. They have handled them and become infected with the banestones' erratic and unpredictable radiation. The gabir appeared only after the sauromicians had come into possession of the banestones. But until the archons have all nine they will not regain the power that was once theirs."

All of a sudden, the gabir leapt at them. Bryn moved to swing Krys-tren out of harm's way, but she slipped his gasp and placed herself squarely between him and the hurtling gabir. She used her training to take the momentum of the small body, swing it around, and use it to whirl the thing away from Bryn.

Unfortunately, the gabir dug its tal-onlike nails into her in a grip she could not break. Down it hurtled, and her with it, crashing through boughs and branches until they smacked against a tree trunk, fetching up there.

The gabir's jaws snapped and ground as it tried to bite her. She could feel waves of coldness sweeping off it, making her feel as if she were standing on a ship's deck in the height of a storm. Its cold, she sensed, had the capacity to flay the skin off her, to numb her through if she kept in contact with it for too long.

"Get away from it!"

She heard Bryn's urgent voice, saw out of the corner of her eye that he had stripped a branch of its bark, leaving a flexible green lance whose end he had bitten into a point.

"The green wood will pinion it if I pierce it through the heart," he said. "But you are too close. You must break away."

"No!" Krystren wondered whether she knew what she was doing. "Stay where you are, Bryn."

She saw the gabir looking fearfully at the weapon Bryn had fashioned, and inexplicably her heart went out to the pathetic creature. To be killed and yet not be able to cross from one realm to another, to be a part of nothing, this was a fate more dreadful than any she could imagine.

She shook the gabir. Already, her fingers had grown numb, and she was gritting her teeth simply to hold the creature down.

"What is it?" she said. "What is it you want?"

The gabir merely rolled its eyes at her and, craning its neck, tried to sink its teeth into her shoulder.

She twisted away. She spoke to it again, but it was no use. The thing either could not or would not respond.

The cold was beginning to creep up her wrists into her forearms. She knew she would not be able to hold it down much longer.

Then she remembered how Bryn had cautioned her against using her mind against it. Concentrating mightily, she pushed out a tendril toward it, forming it into a sentence.

What do you want?

The gabir gave a little start, and she felt it turn its full concentration on her. Its pale eyes were like great moons floating in a sky full of clouds. She repeated her question, holding it out as one would hold out a sc.r.a.p of food to a starving child.

The crystal dagger, the gabir said in her mind. The sauromician Varda has it.

Krystren remembered seeing it, hung from the chain around his neck.

If you fetch it for me, the gabir said, I will tell you where to find your brother, Courion.

How do you know-?

The gabir stared at her. Your desire to find him is so strong I can hear it like a scream in my mind.You know where we can find him?

I do. The creature blinked rapidly. I have caught a glimpse of him.

Krystren nodded. All right.

It removed its talons from her upper arms and immediately she felt the flush of blood flowing back into her hands. She flexed her fingers awkwardly, getting the feeling back. Still, she could sense the gabir's fear, and she turned to Bryn.

"Put the spear aside."

"But-"

"Do as we say, Bryn. The gabir will not attack you. We have reached an agreement."

Varda never takes it off, the gabir said, save when the others pray to their deity.

Krystren repeated this to Bryn, as she had her previous conversation with the gabir. She harbored a suspicion that he possessed the ability to hear the creature as she did, but he would not allow himself to be that vulnerable. "It means the Sintire," she went on. "When they make their thrice-daily obeisance to Abrasea there must be no weapons visible or in a threatening position."

"I know that. While they pray, Varda goes off by himself to practice his necromancy," Bryn said. "But even when he takes off the chain the crystal dagger is never out of his sight. This plan is far too dangerous." "We don't say it's not," Krystren said. "But we have no choice. We have to know where we can find our brother." "What about the warrior-beetles?" "The gabir promises he will keep them occupied." Bryn watched her for some time. Eventually he concluded that he could not dissuade her and threw up his hands in exasperation.

They traveled on, the three of them plunged into the gloom of an edgy silence. An hour after dark, just as it had the evening before, the beetle craft slowed and came to a stop on a small, heavily wooded rise.

The insects spread out in a circle, and the smoke tent was conjured up. As soon as they smelled the pungent aroma of the incense wafting up to them, they moved into position. The gabir vanished as it descended to the ground. At the same time, Krystren and Bryn maneuvered themselves through the Marre pines, following Varda. Directly above the spot where he chose to sit, they crouched on stout middle branches, waiting.

Below them, Varda took off the chain, laying it and its crystal dagger aside. The gabir had told Krystren that the warrior-beetles were carrion-eaters. Since he was half-dead, they would sense his presence as food and be distracted, hopefully long enough for her to steal the crystal dagger. The thought of the gabir being eaten by the swarm of insects gave her the chills.

Cautiously, they moved down through the levels of boughs. When they were perhaps twenty-five meters above Varda's head, they stopped. Krystren had told Bryn what he needed to do, and now she settled herself to begin her part. But as she commenced to extend her mind-feeler, Bryn grabbed her arm. They could hear a low, droning chant.

Putting his lips against her ear, he whispered, "Have a care. The sauromician is conjuring up the Eye of Ajbal. It is by this means that he hopes to find you."