In the Claws of the Tiger (29 page)

“I understand,” Janik said, “and I’m not immune to the lure of a comfortable bunk and a warm fire. But if they find us during the night, I don’t like the idea of being locked inside a tiny cottage, no matter how secure it is.”

“You’d rather be able to run,” Dania said.

“Well, yes,” Janik said. “I guess I don’t believe that little cottage is completely impervious, or I’d be happier being trapped inside it. But if you start from the presumption that they’re going to break through its defenses eventually—when the spell ends in the morning, at the latest—then I don’t want to be surrounded in a small space when they do.”

“You’re right,” said Dania.

“And—” Janik was ready to escalate the conversation into a heated argument, but stopped abruptly. “I’m right?”

“Yes, Janik, I actually agree with you.”

“Well. So we’ll make camp—here, unless you think there’s a better spot nearby, Dania.”

“This is good. Plenty of cover, but also good vantage points for the watch.”

“No fire—we’ll need to break out the blankets. It’ll get cold here within a few hours.”

“I’ll take the first watch,” Dania said.

Mathas grumbled at Janik. “I suppose now you’re going to gloat about insisting that we’d need tents.”

“Gloat?” Janik said, feigning shock. “Why yes, I suppose I am.”

Janik and Dania quickly erected two small tents in a secluded hollow. As Auftane and Mathas settled themselves into both tents, Dania climbed the side of the hollow and selected a high point to keep watch. Janik followed her and sat down beside her on the dry ground.

“You should rest, Janik,” Dania said. “I’m not going to stay up through your watch.”

“I’ll turn in soon,” he said, but he sat there, staring toward the ruins.

“Something on your mind?” Dania asked.

Janik shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose. I just … wanted to ask you something.”

“What?”

“That couatl—was it … how … oh, Sea of Fire, I don’t know what I’m asking.”

“Wasn’t it beautiful?” Dania said, and for a moment Janik saw something on her face again.

“Dania, it’s …” Janik sighed heavily. He stared at the tiny crescent of Nymm, the largest moon, following the sun down below the western sky. “It’s been a long time since I allowed
myself to believe that anything like that could exist, in this world or any other.”

Dania nodded her understanding, but did not answer.

“I felt something, watching it,” Janik continued. “And then I saw your face, and I could see that you were—I don’t know, you were swept up in it. To me, it was like a faint memory of some childhood happiness, but it seemed you felt it vividly, immediately.”

Dania rested a hand on his knee and looked at the ground between them. “It was a very powerful experience for me, Janik.” She looked up, right into his eyes.

Janik fought the urge to look away and let the subject drop.

“Do you really want to hear about this?”

Janik hesitated a moment, then nodded.

She smiled. “Well, to me the couatl embodies everything that’s good in the world. Even more than the Silver Flame. At some level, I understand the Silver Flame in my head as a manifestation of the spirits of the couatls who bind the fiends in Khyber. But seeing a couatl—a real, live couatl flying free across the sky—struck something deeper in me. When I first heard the legend you repeated back in Stormreach, about the couatls binding the demons, I was stunned.”

She looked down, avoiding Janik’s searching gaze. “I guess it sounds sort of stupid,” she said, “but you have to understand what was happening at the time. I don’t think I ever fully realized the extent of the war’s effects on me. I left the front lines and sailed to Xen’drik with you, feeling like the worst sort of killer, like one of those madmen who hunts women in the towers of Sharn, or a lunatic who tries to build a magical device powered by souls. I killed so many people, Janik. So many.”

Janik saw an echo of the haunted look that came over her face every time Dania talked about the war, and he finally began to understand it.

“That didn’t really change when I started traveling with you and Maija,” she went on. “We were still fighting the war, just on a different scale.”

Janik nodded. “I’ve often thought that we were fighting the real war, and all the great battles were just a distraction.”

“They were more than a distraction,” Dania said, “but you’re right. We were just as caught up in the killing and madness and stupidity as the troops on the front lines, and just as blind to the futility of it.”

She got smoothly to her feet and started pacing.

“I think part of the reason I was able to hide my feelings about you for so long was that I honestly didn’t believe that I deserved any affection from you. I was convinced that even though you and Maija claimed to be my friends, you despised me as much as I loathed myself. I don’t think I ever could have put that feeling into words, but as I look back on it, I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. I was a killer! How could you truly care for me in any way? How could I care about myself?”

She stopped pacing and looked out at the setting crescent moon.

“Then I finally revealed my feelings to you, after Maija left. To my surprise, you made love to me, and for those months of travel I actually felt worthwhile.” She shrugged. “Then you dumped me in Sharn and disappeared, which left me … devastated.”

“Dania, I—”

“No, Janik,” she interrupted, dropping to her knees in front of him, grabbing his hands and looking earnestly into his face. “Please understand, I’m not trying to place blame.
Like I said back in Thrane, it’s all past. It’s forgiven. Please. I’m just trying to explain something to you that’s very … complicated.”

She took a deep breath, smiling. “To understand where I am now and what that couatl means to me, you have to understand where I was when I got to Karrnath and started working with Gered and Kophran. And that was not a happy state. I remember the night in Atur when we first witnessed the handiwork of Krael the vampire—there were bodies everywhere. And Kophran started going on about how these poor people had brought this fate on themselves by practicing the religion of the Blood of Vol.”

Janik gaped at her.

“I know—I wanted to strangle him. But I remember saying to him that I deserved death at least as much as they did, that I was far more guilty than they were.”

“What did he say?”

“The bastard agreed with me.” Dania got to her feet and resumed her pacing.

“But hunting the vampires—Krael and the shifter, Havoc—it changed me somehow,” Dania continued. “I came to see them as something different from all the killing of the war. To them, the people they killed weren’t adversaries, they were food. They didn’t even pretend at the sort of honor that soldiers use to cover the murders they commit. And then when Krael intruded my mind, I felt so … violated.” She shuddered.

“So my first taste of the Silver Flame came right then. Krael was controlling me, using his powers to make me watch, helpless, as he drank Gered’s blood. And as much as I dislike Kophran, I have to give him credit—he saved Gered’s life right there, and probably mine as well, by coming at just the right time and driving Krael away. We were standing in
an alley—Krael and Gered and I—and Kophran came to the entrance of the alley, behind me, and sent waves of holy power toward Krael—power that washed right through me. I had never felt anything like it before.”

She stood still and fell silent for a moment, her head bowed and her eyes closed. Janik said nothing. He looked up at her, anxious for her next words. He thought he recognized the feeling she described—it was the same holy power he had felt in Maija’s touch, both when she laid her hands on his wounds to cure him and when she caressed him in love. His heart was aching more strongly now than it had in months—as if, somehow, what he had lost in Maija was within his reach again. Not in Dania, but in what she was telling him.

Dania sighed. “You know, Janik,” she said, “I’m no priest. I don’t know whether I could express the doctrines of the Church of the Silver Flame in a way that would mean anything to you or help you at all. All I can tell you is what happened to me.”

“Please,” Janik whispered. “Please do.”

“Later that night, as we were talking about Krael and Havoc, Kophran told me about the couatls. The piece of it that leaped out at me was that the couatls sacrificed their own freedom in order to bind the demons. They had been waging war for a million years. And it seems to me that they finally realized something—victory would never come through more war. They and the dragons could never beat the demons by force. The only way to end the war was for the demons and the couatls—both of them, spirits of good and spirits of evil—to leave the battlefield. The demons would never do it willingly, of course, but the couatls were willing to make that sacrifice.”

Janik nodded but his brow was furrowed in concentration—he still wasn’t hearing what he was looking for.

“Look, Janik, I saw a lot of people lay down their lives in the war. A lot of them did it because they wanted to be heroes. They thought that their deaths would help Breland somehow. In my mind, they were just more casualties of war. But the couatls made me think of the people I saw who weren’t motivated by their own pride or their belief in the nation—people who gave up their lives to save their friends. Covering their squad’s retreat. Shielding their buddies from a magical blast. Utterly selfless, willing to die—not so their friends could go on fighting, but out of some small, tragic hope that maybe their deaths would allow their friends to live in a better world some day. Like they knew that some day the war would be over, and some people would still be around to enjoy whatever world was left. And maybe their deaths would make it possible for their friends to be there at the war’s end.”

Tears were starting in her eyes again, and she tried to brush them away.

“The vampires taught me that there is very real evil in the world, Janik. Terrible evil, willing to consume the world to feed its own hunger. To me, the couatls are the embodiment of the wonderful good that is also in the world. That good is the only thing preventing evil from devouring all life.”

Dania sat down on the ground beside Janik, looking very tired. It seemed to Janik, for a moment, that she felt the weight of that responsibility very keenly, as if the burden of saving the world from destruction rested on her shoulders alone.

She put her hand on his folded hands and looked into his face. Janik glanced down at her hand and covered it with one of his own.

“I think I know what I saw when the couatl flew by today—the pure good you’re talking about.”

Dania nodded.

“And if it’s possible for such a thing to exist, then perhaps what you’ve been saying about Krael and … and even about Maija is all true. Maybe they are utterly evil and beyond all hope. But I still don’t want to believe it.”

“I can’t pretend that I have it all figured out, Janik. The truth is that I still haven’t found the one thing I want most.”

“What’s that?”

“Peace. I want peace. I want to stop raging and fighting and killing and worrying. I wouldn’t mind a chance to stop thinking. I want to sleep without fear, without setting watches. I want to rest in the warmth I felt in the alley, and never have it fade away.”

She shook her head and stood up, trying to hide the tears that had formed in the corners of her eyes. She walked to the edge of the ridge and looked out at the setting moon again.

“I just want peace, Janik.”

As she spoke, she slowly drew her sword from its sheath. Janik sprang to his feet, afraid of what she planned to do with it. As he reached her side, she pointed the tip of her sword into the desert beyond their camp.

“They’re coming again,” she said. “They’ve found us.”

Janik and Dania raced into the hollow to rouse Mathas and Auftane. They abandoned the tents, which stung Janik bitterly but seemed to give Mathas great satisfaction, and hastily packed up the rest of their gear.

Janik chose a rocky path away from the hollow, counting on the difficulty of tracking them over such ground. He set a quick pace and steered them away from the approaching rakshasas and toward Mel-Aqat.

“Why are we going toward the ruins?” Auftane asked.

“We need to get there eventually,” Janik said. “And given the number of zakyas out looking for us, I’m hopeful that the ones remaining in the city will be caught off-guard.”

Their brisk pace staved off the chill of the desert night, and five nearly full moons lit their way across the barren land. They traveled well into the night, until the disks of the moons silhouetted the walls of Mel-Aqat in front of them. They approached the walls under a cloak of shadow. Moving slowly and as quietly as they could manage, they crept up to the ruins without hearing any sign that they had been detected.

Janik led them to the base of the wall. He ran his hand over the stone, looking up. It appeared that the rakshasas had, as Mathas described, simply rearranged the crumbling stone blocks of the ruins, forming them into a ring around the city and then stacking another layer on top of the first. From where he stood, Janik thought he could see a gap between the blocks forming the upper layer above him, allowing access to the city—if they could get over the lower block.